End of Carl.BurksBrand.com

After years of paying for a private domain name I realized I wasn't getting much value for my investment.  For several years searching for Carl Burks would take you to my site at carl.burksbrand.com. It will probably take me a few months to get back to the number one spot, but I am sure that I will. Carl Burks isn't that common of a name and there are other pages which utilize the keywords. For example IMDB also lists two different "Carl Burks" and actors seem to be serious about optimization. Have you ever noticed how rappers will drop their own name in a song? It is a serious marketing strategy.  It also reminds me of the Seinfeld episode "The Chicken Roaster" not to spoil it, but if you haven't seen it by now George does a leave behind to keep in touch. Getting to number one is pretty much about brand recognition.

Shellshock

After upgrading all my VM's and computers which are *nix based they release some more updates. I guess I'll have to start over. It is great they are able to patch the problem so quickly after it became a known issue.

Lenovo Fail

Since I stopped using Apple products a while back I've been a Lenovo consumer. Today they lost me. The wireless card supplied with the laptop doesn't work well with 64 bit OS's. After researching this issue I wanted to change the card. I opened up one of my old Thinkpads and removed the mini PCI wirelesscard and plugged it in. Guess what happened next? The machine refused to boot "Unauthorized Network card". Lenovo uses whitelists. I didn't unauthorize this. I will no longer recommend any lenovo products. 

Ability Scores in Bash

#!/bin/bash

for run in {1..6};do for run in {1..5};do shuf -i 1-6 -n 1; done | sort -r | head -n 3 | paste -s -d + | bc; done;

Image Management

Depending on your camera most of the file names do not add value the real information is in the exif tags on the pictures.

Sometimes you just want to name the pictures by taken date:

exiv2 -r '%Y%m%d-%H%M%S' rename *.JPG

Counting calories with a few commands

Lets say you like to use the Linux shell for totaling up your calories. Maybe you've got a file something like this:

590<tab>soft beef tacos
290<tab>fish sandwich
380<tab>fries

You could manually calculate these or... you could use some nifty Linux programs. First lets get those numbers away from the rest of the file.

cat 20140211.calories | cut -f 1

gives you:

590
290
380

cut uses <tab> as the default delimiter and we want the first field.

Now you've got the numbers but they are not in a usable math expression so you can use "paste"

cat 20140211.calories | cut -f 1 | paste -s -d+

gives you:

590+290+380

now you just need to total it all up with "bc"


ExplainShell.com can give a complete break down:

cut -f 1 | paste -s -d+ | bc

Xmonad - Random Background at Interval

Make a file randombackgroundatinterval:

#!/bin/bash
while x=0;do find $1 | grep 'jpg\|png' | shuf | head -n 1 | xargs -i xloadimage -border black -onroot -fullscreen '{}'; sleep $2; done

run it with the top directory for images and how often you want them to change.

example:
./randombackgroundatinterval /home/<YOUR USER NAME>/Pictures 3

Would pick a random jpg or png from the /home/<YOUR USER NAME>/Pictures directory, and its subs and display a new one every three seconds.