If you are not aware yet, every Facebook account has a privacy option to block users based on their name or e-mail address. Once you block someone, you cut all ties with them, including friendship, comments, etc. They will not be able to interact with you nor be able to search for you on Facebook.

I have recently discovered a new Windows command line tool, called 'clip' that can be used to redirect the output of CLI tools to the Windows Clipboard.

I have a dual-boot computer that boots Ubuntu and Windows 7. Whenever I boot into Ubuntu, the BIOS clock is automatically set to UTC time, even though my current timezone is UTC+8.

Google has launched a new Group Chat feature in Google Talk. Even though Google Talk uses the open XML based XMPP protocol for it’s IM service, Pidgin, the open source multi-platform instant messaging client, has yet to support this useful feature.

A couple of readers, upon reading this article to calculate yesterday’s date in a shell script, have requested for a similar script that can be used to calculate tomorrow’s date.

Are you going on a holiday and need to find out exchange rate of your holiday destination? You will no longer need to search for a site that does currency conversions. Google is able to perform the currency conversion using a simple search query.

If you need to administer your home network remotely from office, you will either need to know the public IP address assigned by your ISP or use a service called dynamic DNS, that will map a DNS hostname to your IP address. Dynamic DNS is required as the public IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider is never fixed for consumer broadband connections.

In modern UNIX and Linux systems, user passwords are encrypted and stored in the /etc/shadow file. On BSD systems, the passwords are kept in the /etc/master.passwd file. The encrypted password field in the file contains more than just the encrypted password, it contains additional information.

Linux is a very customisable UNIX like operating system. To date, there are more than a couple of dozen Linux distributions available, based on this Wikipedia list.

There are times when you will need to calculate yesterday’s date in a UNIX shell script to run some date sensitive cron jobs. There are currently no standard command line tools in UNIX to perform such date arithmetic.