Archive for March, 2009
How to turn off your computer, later!
James is 15 and he’s having his first experiences with Linux. He’s just started to download a new distro from BitTorrent bit hey, it’s 8.13 am and he is supposed to be at school by 8.30… Has he to turn off the computer before going to school? Try to ask his mother! But he wants to try the new distro as he come back, what can he do in order to finish his download AND turn the computer off as it finish? Suppose his client doesn’t allow him to.
sleep 30m && poweroff -n
How cool is that? You tell “sleep 30 minutes then just poweroff!”
It isn’t the only way, try to do “man shutdown” to see more info.
For who is concerned about
Remember that:
nigma@nigma-desktop:~$ sudo whoami && sleep 1 && whoami
[sudo] password for nigma:
root
nigma
nigma@nigma-desktop:~$
so you need to be root before doing these things, but this time for real:
nigma@nigma-desktop:~$ sudo su
root@nigma-desktop:/home/nigma# whoami
root
It’s a nice way to make your computer do something after a little bit, and it’s quick to type.
return `whoami`
Tags: commandline, linux
A geeky toy, for a geeky boy.
I’m sure all of you know what the rubik’s cube is, if you don’t… I mean, really? man what was you thinking until now? Well If you REALLY don’t know it then you should at least google for it. Wikipedia will work as well.
I always thought it was a logic puzzle, and after some unsuccessful tries I decided to cheat, googled for “rubik’s cube solution” and I found out a beautiful site, which explains everything you need to solve the cube in a very simple and fast way, it is of course the Lars Petrus method.
Once learnt a solution method there is no more “logic” in it. Where is the fun part? What’s the challenge?
I was terribly wrong. It is not a logic-puzzle, it is a memory-puzzle, and a hand-dexterity-puzzle.
You need to remember the moves of your solving methods, they are almost always the same (in the petrus method there are 4 basic moves), but the most challenging part is how fast can you solve the cube?
Hey “how-fast” sounds damn challenging, how can you measure that? You’ll need a stopwatch. If you are at least half geeky as I am you’d be already on google at the moment and starting to type something like “online stopwatch” or “online timer”.
There are tons of them, but all have a very annoying interface that make you use the mouse. Given that you are a very good speedcuber you don’t want to loose 0.3s to start to solve and an other 0.3s to stop the timer, do you?
Well I wouldn’t care as I need 1′30”+ to solve the cube, but I found fun to code a stopwatch designed to work with Miss Spacebar instead of your loveable mice.
the simple nigma timer is written in simple html/css/js and as a very simple interface, I hope you’ll enjoy it.
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