If you're in Wellington on Monday, 28 February, bowl along to Nerdnite. I'll be one of the presenters.

What's Nerdnite? Well the unofficial tagline is "It's like the Discovery Channel ... with beer!", but according to the mother site it's "an informal gathering at which nerds get together for nerdery of all sorts (well, mostly presentations and drinking). Nerds and non-nerds alike gather to meet, drink and learn something new. Born in Boston and fostered in New York, Nerd Nite has spread to Austin, TX, Munich, Germany, Washington DC and has just reached Chicago, Wellington, and San Francisco!"

Actually, it'll be Wellington's fourth Nerdnite. It's become so popular that organisers Brian Calhoun and aimee whitcroft (sic) have had to find a bigger venue. This year they hope to take it bi-monthly.

Entrance is free and you'll find full details on the Wellington Nerdnite site. So, as they say, be there and be square!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

cat (short for 'catalogue') is the traditional command for displaying a file on the Linux console. If the file's large and races away from you, less will keep it in check, displaying the contents page by page and allowing you to scroll forward and back with the arrow keys or PgUp and PgDn. (Hit 'q' to quit.)

But what if you want to display the file backwards?

What ...?

Log files' latest additons -- the ones you're most likely to be interested in -- are added to the end, so tac (that's 'cat' backwards) will take you there. In actual fact tac will most likely run away with you like cat so you'll need to pipe it through more:

tac filename | more

How about  displaying a file's contents at random? shuf does just that. It's not particularly useful for log files, I grant you, or any other type of file for that matter. But remember, Linux commands work with any standard input so

ls directoryname | shuf

will list the contents of directoryname in random order.

Now imagine directoryname contains a batch of music files. The command

ls | shuf | mplayer -playlist -

will play them at random!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

If you've not yet seen a TED talk, you're missing out on a treat. Their byline -- "Riveting talks by remarkable people" -- is true, with subject matter as diverse as their speakers. Whether it's Naomi Klein talking about our addiction to risky enterprises, Thomas Thwaites trying to build a toaster from scratch or the late Denis Dutton describing his Darwinian theory of beauty, I've yet to find one that doesn't measure up.

Talks typically last 10-20 minutes making them ideal bite-size info updates, but there's one catch: you can't download them.

Actually that's not quite true. Here's a quick how-to:

Getting the lot

metaTED is a tool that creates metalinks (links to links) of TED talks, grouping them by encoding quality (high or low), and by theme, author and year. You'll need a download client that supports metalinks (list here). I used the Firefox extension DownloadThemAll.

1. After installation it's simply a clicking on the desired metaTED link and choosing to use DownloadThemAll.





2. You'll be asked where you want to save the files...





3. Then you'll be presented with a selection list...





4. Clicking Start at this point will begin downloading the lot in groups of four.



Note! There are hundreds of talks in the full list, so you may want to be selective. You do so either at Step 3 or Step 4. The latter is easier as you can use Shift + click and Ctrl + click on whole blocks of files.

Getting individual talks

More often than not however, you just want to download an individual talk. Again, you can use metaTED.

Let's say we're looking for Christopher McDougall's talk entitled "Are we born to run?".

1. Go to the metaTED page and click the desired link, but this time choose to save the actual file.



This will download a .metalink file -- an XML file that can be examimed in any text editor.



2. Open it in your favourite editor and search for either the presenter or title.

<file name="Christopher McDougall - Are we born to run.mp4">   <resources>     <url type="http">http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/10719/talk/1067</url>   </resources> </file>

You can see the actual  download link there, sandwiched between the <url type="http"> and the </url>.



3. Here Linux users have it easy as wget is installed by default. Windows users will have to download it.

In a console, type the command wget followed by the link name:

wget http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/10719/talk/1067



Once the download's finished, you'll find a file named (in this case) "1067". You may want to rename it something more meaningful and give it a valid extension -- all TED files are .mp4  format -- but it'll play just as it is in VLC
.


What great TED Talks have I missed? Add your favourites in a comment!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )