Episode: 1658
Title: HPR1658: Cool Stuff Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1658/hpr1658.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:29:07

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It's Wednesday 10th of December 2014.
This is HPR Episode 1658 entitled Cool Stuff Part 2.
It is hosted by Curtis Edkins Kuprompt and is about 20 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Kurt Edkins at mail.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, Kuprompt talks about some more cool stuff that he has discovered.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hey everyone, this is CPrompt North Carolina.
I just wanted to pop back in and do a quick episode on some more cool stuff that I found.
The first is a website and it is called Today I Found Out.com.
This is something that I just love, these little tidbits, information and stuff.
How things came about, why we do certain things, where this topic came up.
This website is just nothing but that.
A couple of little examples, just on their featured listing that they have on their front page right now.
They have a lot of people start smoking tobacco, might be interested in that, don't know.
Mailboxes and Postmaster General, kind of a little history about that kind of thing.
How were Kamikaze Palace chosen, who was Humpty Dumpty, and that was actually kind of interesting, who was Humpty Dumpty?
Why don't birds, legs freeze?
I think about ping-ones getting their feet pretty chilly out there, walking around on that snow.
So the website is nothing but little tidbits that.
It's a one page article for that topic.
Very interesting, lots of links.
And follow up some of that kind of little tidbits of information.
And following up with that, the second thing would be the podcast companion to that website.
They put out a weekly podcast.
It's about maybe 15 minutes long.
Sometimes maybe a little less, a little bit more, but it's on a topic just like that.
For the Thanksgiving in the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving, so there was an episode.
The mini-miss surrounding the pilgrims and Thanksgiving.
Very interesting, some things that I didn't know about.
That we often think of the pilgrims and what happened during Thanksgiving didn't really happen.
A couple of more episodes that just popped up.
The police officers and the color blue.
Police officers mostly wear blue.
Kind of a little podcast on how that came about and why that is.
That kind of thing.
Another episode that just came out that was really interesting.
The moon on the horizon.
Very interesting.
So it was a lot of nice science kind of history on how we thought the moon was a show to be a different size.
However, it was on the horizon that it would be at nighttime.
During night, it looks like it's a little bit smaller.
It's higher up in the cloud.
It looks smaller.
When it's down the horizon, it looks like a big, huge moon.
People always look at the big moon coming to find out.
They're actually the same size.
So our brain is just praying a little trick on us.
A little spoiler there, but whatever.
If you listen to it anyway, it's awesome.
So those are two great things.
It's a lightness, a nice companion.
They get a website with lots of different tidbits, information, and kind of, and the podcast that goes along with it.
Narrator has a great voice.
It's very well produced and everything.
It's not real long, 15 minutes.
So it's nice to, you know, on my drive to work.
It's the first thing I pop into the playlist on the pod catcher.
It's the first thing I listen to in the mornings.
And it's great.
It makes a great conversation.
You never know when this little tidbits are going to pop up that you need to say, hey, you know what?
Something about that.
The moon isn't necessarily a further way at night time than it is during the daytime because of this.
And you can sound all intellectuals and smart and stuff.
The third thing is I got a few little command line tips that I found out.
And this, this first one was it with huge time saver.
And I really wish I would have known this long time ago.
Maybe I should have, but, you know, whatever.
It's, you know, when you learn, you learn, right?
So let's just say that you're in the command line as most people in running Linux would be in.
So you're in the command line, you're typing out a long command.
Maybe you're a CD and into a directory.
Maybe you're running a Python command.
I don't know.
You're typing out a long command of some sort.
Maybe you're your grip and something out.
Maybe you're awking or whatever you might want to do.
And you need to make an adjustment to it.
And you need to make an adjustment way at the beginning of the command.
Instead of backspacing through all of it and retyping it or hitting the arrow button
and going through each single character,
you can actually hold down the control button and then hit the arrows.
And it will go through each word by word instead of moving through each letter.
And it just makes the adjustment of making the, you know, adjustment to the command
that you may have typed in incorrectly or just maybe need to make an adjustment to it for some reason.
It makes that so much quicker.
I could have used that a long time ago.
And I'm glad I found out about it now.
There you go.
So control, then arrow makes going through the command a whole lot easier if you need to make adjustments to it.
Another command line tip is the CD space and then the dash or hyphen or whatever you want to call it,
the little hyphen.
That will take you back to the previous directory that you were just in.
So let's say that I CD into var slash log to look at something log or something,
sometimes system log or something, and I need to go back to,
and then I CD into my home directory to find a text file or something.
And then I want to quickly go back to the var slash log file or the var log directory.
All I had to do is CD space hyphen, and I actually changed directories back into the previous directory that I was in the first time.
Does that make sense?
So if you're kind of bumping around back and forth between directories and you want to go back and forth between the directories quickly,
a CD space dash goes a long way.
So you don't have to type in CD slash home slash user slash then tab button or whatever you need to do the auto population.
Don't have to worry about that.
CD space dash right back into it.
The third command line tip, this is actually a script that I found.
A lot of people have two or maybe even more monitors that they use for the daily use.
And I like to move windows around and I hate using them else.
So I needed to find a script or some way keyboard shortcut that would move the current window that had to focus,
you know, the current window that I had that I was working with, that I could click on that and then quickly move it to the other window or the other monitor right there.
I'm sorry, we have the monitor.
And I found the script and I want to link in the show notes for the script.
It is for XFCE and it uses the XD tool library to move the window from one monitor to the next.
And it keeps the windows ratio.
So if you don't have it full sized or you're maxed out or whatever, if you just have it small like maybe a terminal window or what not,
take that and it moves it over to the other monitor, the same XY coordinates and aspect ratio and everything as it was on the first monitor.
So if I have a little terminal window and I need to move it over to the next window, next monitor back and forth, then all I had to do is it runs this script.
And I'll take a little caveat when you go to this link.
It actually shows you the installation, you install XD tools, then you get this script.
It's this bash script and pop it into a directory, chmoded to make it executable.
And I actually put all these into a script folder that I use to put all my little scripts in to do little bits and bobs.
And I associated a key stroke with that script.
And a little note to this.
I read all this article and it's real short. It's just a few lines here and there.
So I was reading through this and I was like, great, this sounds exactly what I want.
But where is it?
But if you scroll down toward the bottom of the page, there's a little button that has a paper clip and it says move dash to dash next dash monitor.
Click that. That will download the bash file.
Took me probably 10 minutes to figure that out. Maybe that's just me, but whatever.
So we don't have to go hunting for it. So download the script, take a look at it, see what it does.
It's pretty simple and there's not really too many lines to it.
Like I said, it's great to just, I use it all the time.
And I really miss it when I have to go to work and I had to use my Windows computer.
I'm keeping it and I got associated with F9.
So when I hit F9, it moved my current focused window back and forth.
And I'm at work and I found myself, you know, hitting F9 on my laptop and nothing's happening.
So, but so check it out.
And it's actually a great time saver. At least it was for me.
The last little thing that I look whole thing that I found was a game controller.
I wanted to play some old video games like Super Nintendo and Atari, old Atari, the old old school pixel art games.
So you can get the emulator and you can try to use a keyboard, but it just doesn't work very well.
It's really meant to be played with a controller.
And I fought around trying to figure out how to get this and that and get my old PS2 game controller working with my USB into whatever.
So I went looking for an old game controller that was already USB.
And I found this one. It is a Hyperkin Hyperkin Hyperkin.
I don't know how to pronounce that properly, but the link will be in the show notes.
I purchased this controller, not actually from the website, from the manufacturer's website, although you can, and I'll put that link in the show notes.
You can purchase it from the manufacturer website, but there's actually a retro game.
Shop, not far from the office where I work.
So I just drove down there and purchased it. It was the same price. It was $20 USD.
But it works fantastic. I plugged it up to my computer, USB.
And fired up the Super Nintendo emulator, started the game, and I didn't have to do anything.
It just recognized all of it.
Recognized the controllers, the A, B, Y, X, all the start, stop, pause, whatever.
It recognized all of it. So that was fantastic.
And actually I started using it with my Raspberry Pi.
I installed Retro Pi on a spare SD card the other day, and plugged it up to the Raspberry Pi running Retro Pi for games.
And it works like a champ on that as well.
Had to do a little bit of configuration and stuff to get that to work, but it does work very well for that.
And speaking of the Retro Pi, the Retro game emulator for the Raspberry Pi, I'll do a show on that in the future.
As soon as I get time to break away from all of the crazy stuff during the day life.
So there you got it.
A few little things, check out website today I found out.com.
The Daily Knowledge Podcast.
The Podcast is the companion to the today I found out website.
A few command line tips. Check out the moving window to the monitor script.
If you run an XFCE, it works great. It's such a huge time saver.
And if you're into retro gaming, check out the Hyperkin Pixel Art Controller.
It works great. And it's not too expensive.
So there you have it. Hope all is well.
And thank you for listening thus far.
And take care and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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