take one line notes easily in linux with touch (of evil)

You're reading some comics or watching some serie and you want to take note of the last book/episode you read/watched so, few days later, you can continue from where you have left. One of the most practical ways of doing that is to put a reminder in the comic/serie directory. No need to create a text file named "tome-11" or "scrubs-s05-e11", you can create an empty file with the desired name in a single second. We can do it by using touch (of evil) command. Usually, touch command is used for changing access and modification time of files but also it is an easy way to create an empty file. Just open the terminal and write

 touch yourNote

in the comic/serie directory.

find the process id of an application in linux

In one of my previous posts, I talked about killing unresponsive processes in Linux. It is pretty straightforward to find the process ids of applications if you're the only user, but if that's not the case you have to find a clever way. Assume that we want to find the process id of bash. We write

ps -A

to the terminal for seeing all active processes but we don't have 1 hour to inspect all processes. We just want to see the process id of bash. We will use the pgrep command which's basically a grep variant for processes.

pgrep bash

will give us the process id (PID) of bash.

italics! everywhere!

Today, I saw that Google's font is in italics and another website's font is in italics and some application's font is in italics; what a lovely coincidence! I had no idea how this happened, but fonts switched to italic mode without asking my opinion. The odd thing's that Firefox doesn't have this problem. For fixing this, I downloaded arial font and installed it. I was planning to download and install all vista fonts, but installing the arial font fixed the problem.

distros with xfce

As I wrote previously, Xfce is the best choice as desktop environment for older PCs. Planete Beranger reviews several distros that comes with Xfce. It's rather thorough. Check this distro review.

igoogle's language switching proglem

I'm using iGoogle because I like the idea of having a personalized homepage with my e-mails, todo list, current weather information and aggregated news from different sources in it. But although I'm using a Windows Vista in English, iGoogle keeps on turning the language to Turkish (probably due to the regional settings of my Windows) and lots of its content are changing (which annoys me very much). So I'll present you the tip to change the language of your iGoogle into English: add "?hl=en" to http://www.google.com/ig and use http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en.