[Fri Dec 30 15:25:28 CST 2016]

It's happened many time to me that, when running the grep command against a bunch of files, it returns a message explaining that "binary file X matches" but it refuses to show the actual line, as it usually does. Needless to say, this is quite annoying (and useless) when grepping through a lot of files that I know for sure are plain ASCII text. Yet, grep just thinks that they are binary files somehow. The reason? Said files contain at least one null character. And no, using dos2unix doesn't appear to help. What to do then? The following workaround appears to work fine:

$ cat [file] | tr -d '\000' | grep [whatever]

{link to this entry}

[Fri Dec 30 08:36:01 CST 2016]

For whatever reason, every now and then the media keys on my keyboard stop working correctly and I cannot use them to control the Spotify client any more. It appears to be something that: 1) it occurs very rarely, and 2) it goes away the next time I log out and log back in. So, since it is not a big issue, I haven't bothered to investigate it any further. However, since I do like the ability to control the music I play from the keyboard, I decided to search for Spotify's keyboard controls, which can be found here. If, like me, you are running Linux, simply use the ones that show up under the Windows column. They key ones are: space bar to play and pause, Ctrl-Right to play the next track, and Ctrl-Left to play the previous track. That's all I need to know. {link to this entry}

[Mon Dec 12 15:59:40 CST 2016]

Here is a link to Kinesis, a company that puts together some pretty cool ergonomic hadware (peripherals) for computer users. I learned about them today, when an old Silicon Graphics customer who used an ergonomic keyboard with some IRIX systems asked about it. {link to this entry}

[Sun Dec 11 19:46:34 CST 2016]

Whatever you think of Amazon and the way they do business, you have to admit that this is quite impressive:

It's Amazon Go, a quite innovative store concept. {link to this entry}

[Thu Dec 8 17:03:57 CST 2016]

I got a Canon PIXMA MG4200 multifunction printer (i.e., printer and scanner combo) that worked out of the box with my Debian Jessie laptop in order to print over the network. The scanning functionality, though, was a bit different. I couldn't find anything in the default GNOME interface to configure it. So, I did a quick search, and came across this short tutorial. The tutorial itself discuses both, the printing and scanning functionality. I only bothered to install the software for the scanning, since the printer was already working fine anyways. It was quite easy. Just download the Canon MG4200 series ScanGear MP software from here, and then run the following from the folder where you downloaded the tarball:

$ tar xvzf scangearmp-mg4200series-2.00-1-deb.tar.gz

$ cd scangearmp-mg4200series-2.00-1-deb

$ sudo ./install.sh

$ scangearmp &

That will launch the GUI interface to allow you to find the scanner in your network. That's it. Done. {link to this entry}