I find myself needing this often on different servers, you may find it useful too. This script creates a timestamped dump of a mysql database to the current directory. Assumes it runs as a user who can connect to the database. You can set those credentials using the -u and -p command line switches for mysqldump

I ran into SSL timeouts on in local development setup when I was re-factoring some integration code with facebook and using their SDK. It was tricky to diagnose, I was sure that my changes couldn't be the cause, and I finally confirmed it by running our production codebase. Since it was having the same timeout error, I knew the bug had to be in an underlying layer.

For the record, I'm running this version of curl on my Archlinux box:

At home, we were missing the ability to print from our iPad or iPhones. While I'm not an OS zealot (anymore), I did upgrade to an iPhone last month, and have had an iPad for a while now. They're very useful for casual computing, checking email, browsing. But if we needed to print something, it was a hassle to fire up a laptop or desktop computer to use our networked printer.

I came across this link about a Virginia Tech professor that wrote a program to reduce energy wasted by computers. On the face of it, it sounds a bit smarter than the usual power management techniques that shut off parts or all of a computer when its not being used. It claims up to 30% reduction in power, which I expect translates into noticeably longer times between batter charges, if you use it on a laptop.

When my 3 year old son pressed the sleep button on my keyboard, we discovered that it actually sends my Archlinux desktop to sleep. Who would have thunk it? What was more annoying is that when the machine woke up, the network connection did not come back.

Poking around in the log files, I saw lines like the following lines which lead me to believe it was a NetworkManager problem.

Linux Mint, an ubuntu derivative, posted a preview of what's included in there next release, Linux Mint 11. It sounds like they are positioning themselves as a nice alternative for users who don't like Unity or the new Gnome interface, and users who can't run the newfangled UIs.

Printing in linux has always been a particular headache for me, and probably many users.There is a myriad of systems that have to talk to each other to get it to work. You have CUPS which takes care of making your computer talk to the printer, various packages like foomatic and ghostscript that you may or may not need so that CUPS can talk to the printer itself. Then you have the printer configuration frontends under GNOME, KDE, or whatever desktop environment you might be running that, in theory, hook the applications you use up with CUPS.

Dropbox is a handy service to automatically synchronize files between different computers.  Each computer requires a client that connects to the service and monitors the dropbox folder for changes.  It's free for up to 2GB of storage and works well.

This is a good overview of common configurations comparing nginx's syntax to apache's.  Once you get used to it, I think nginx syntax is easier to understand, and it reads more like an actual script or program.  I've been using nginx to host SoccerBlogs.net for 3 months now and its been very solid.  In fact, it coupled with moving mysql to its own slice, forced me to focus some attention on SQL query bottlenecks.