30 Days of Geek #5: Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Today’s post is in a very similar vein to yesterday’s post, so I’ll keep it short and sweet:

  • The very short C program that I wrote to remove all the spaces out of one of my teacher’s spreadsheets and turn them into tabs. I think I probably saved her hours of tedium.
  • The script I wrote that stored all my Microsoft product keys within itself. The bash script would accept a search pattern for a product name, and spit out a product key. Much easier than going looking for a physical box.
  • The numerous abuses of iproute2 I’ve made in the last few months, in the quest to make computer networking make sense. My favourite networking hack is this one (in /etc/network/interfaces):

    iface lo:0 inet static
    address 172.24.16.1
    netmask 255.255.255.255

    What it does is add in a second loopback address, not within the 127.0.0.0/8 block. Not original perhaps, but very useful for BGP routing.

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