More Laughable Future Smart Homes

You may have noticed before I don't take current smart home technologies very seriously mainly due to their pointlessness (5 Things All Future Smart Appliances Should Do, 3 Pointless Smart Appliances). Well here's another reason for me to continue to not take them seriously. This is not smart! You can get this future right now by attaching bells to things and listening for the bell ringing.

Watch this BBC video ad see what you think:

Top 7 Fictional Geeks

I like to think of geeks as clever people, people with skills who are a bit too obsessed with their skills to be normal. Perhaps border on their skills taking over their life. Rather than nerds who are just wanna-be geeks. No real skills just obsessed.

With that in mind here's my top fictional TV geeks:

Top 10 Command Line Shortcuts

Here's the top 10 shortcuts I use on the command line. THese should speed up your productivity quite nicely. If you're using the Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu (possibly other distro's too) you might need to enable ALT+f and ALT+b in the preferences.

• ESC + .
  Escape key and the period/full stop at the same time will insert the last argument from the previous command. For example if your previous command is:

Top Command Line Tips: Apache Access Log

I said I should do some top command line tips. So I thought I'd start with some useful Apache access log monitoring and analysis commands.
These can come in useful if odd things are happening on your websever and maybe you think there are dodgy spiders or your need to only see requests from your IP, that kind of thing.

Assumptions
I'm assuming the path to your access log is /var/log/apache/access.log. So adjust if it's different.
Also assuming your access file's LogFormat is 'combined' and that you actually have permission to view the logs.

Commands Overview
Commands and options we'll be using are:

Top 5 Command Line Tip Posts

Linux CLI cheat sheet from Pixel Beat

I'm a big fan of 'Top X Command Line Tips' type posts and I keep meaning to get around to doing my own I've now done my first couple on Apache Access log tips and Top 10 Shortcuts. In the meantime I thought I'd share 5 of my favourite. Numbered but not really in any order.

Actually my favourite of these is 9 ways to recover your screen. that has come in useful countless times.