Today I wanted to retrieve some bookmarks that I made the other day on my home computer, from far away. Thankfully I can access my pooter over SSH, allowing me to poke around inside it on the command line.

Older versions of firefox stored bookmarks in XML files, which made it easy to rifle through them on the shell. Newfangled firefox uses sqlite files however, which makes accessing this data a bit harder.

Here’s some quick commands you can run to extract your precious URLs from firefox’s places.sqlite file.

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Here’s a neat one-liner I just came up with for those times that you’re stuck at the unix/linux console and really need to peek at an image file but cannot use X11.

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Even though it’s now the distant future, my university still insists on serving all web traffic through a single, archaic, annoying proxy server. So, when it explodes, like it has this evening, no-one on campus can surf the web. That includes the thousands of residents who live in university managed properties. There are no 24 hour technicians, so we will all have to wait until tomorrow until we can do any study that involves the internet (which is most of it, these days).

But! I’m posting this journal entry! Which means I can access the web. But how? The answer is not that I’m paying $0.002, nor even 0.002¢ per KB for mobile phone internet access. No; my saviour this evening is a combination of SDF public access unix system and SSH pretending to be a web proxy server.

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convert input.png -fill "#3171b5" -opaque none output.jpg

Where #3171b5 is a colour.

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At last, somewhere to collect useful unix one-liners.

Unix/linux is great. It’ll do anything for you. You just need to know how to ask it.

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So anyway, the thing that prompted me to set up this online journal was my recurring desire to share things that I create with the world. In this instance; the thing that pushed me to actually do something about it, was a perl script I had just written which creates a wall of videos. I created it to optimise my porn viewing, and because I couldn’t find anything to play multiple video files side by side, in a grid.

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