Online Grep – Extract Strings from Text

When you want to search a file and extract all lines or regular expression matches, the Unix program, grep, is very handy. However, if you’re on a Windows machine or you have the contents of the text file you want to run grep on, you can easily run grep online using an online grep utility like the one at

http://www.online-utility.org/text/grep.jsp

It has many useful options like

  • Invert Match (Display Non-Matching Lines)
  • Ignore Case
  • Line Number (as Output Prefix of Each Line)
  • Only Matching (Print only the part of matching lines that actually matches PATTERN)
  • Whole Line (Select only those matches that exactly match the whole line)

online-grep

Inexpensive Home Improvement

If you’re looking to do some home improvement and make your home look new again, here are things to do and items to buy based on my experience.

Paint

  • Doors
    • Ultra Pure White (semigloss or glossy)
  • Kitchen and Bathrooms
    • Walls: Cream in My Coffee (semigloss)
    • Ceiling: Swiss Coffee (semigloss)
  • Baseboards
    • Ultra Pure White (semigloss)
  • Everywhere Else
    • Walls: Cream in My Coffee (flat)
    • Ceiling: Swiss Coffee (flat)
  • Home Depot has both of these colors premade on shelves so you don’t have to wait for them to make them.

Door Knobs / Handles

  • Oil-Rubbed Bronze Hinges
    • $23 for a pack of 12 (Dynasty Brand) on Amazon
  • Oil-Rubbed Bronze Door Handles
    • Bathroom Privacy Set (Dynasty Brand) – $20 on Amazon
    • Keyed Entry Set (Dynasty Brand) – $23 on Amazon
    • Passage Set (Dynasty Brand) – $24 on Amazon
  • Door Stops
    • Gatehouse 1-3/4-in x 3-in Universal Kick-Down Stop – $5.98 at Lowes

Continue reading Inexpensive Home Improvement

Easily Create Panoramic Pictures from a Series of Photos

Recently I wanted to take a picture of one of my bathrooms. Unfortunately, the half bathroom is a bit small and my phone’s camera couldn’t take a shot that could show most of the bathroom. Even though my phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, has a pretty impressive panoramic picture feature, it only creates horizontal panoramas. Fortunately, though, there is a free program called Panorama Plus which can take a series of photos and stitch them all together. Below are the individual pictures I took of the bathroom from different angles and below them is the panorama of all of those pictures stitched together. Not bad!

individual-pics Continue reading Easily Create Panoramic Pictures from a Series of Photos

Google Chrome: Preserve Network Log Across Multiple Pages

Google Chrome Inspector’s Network tab allows you to see HTTP requests and responses when a page is loaded. However, by default, if you click on a link and go to another page, the network log is cleared and HTTP requests and responses for the new page is shown. If you’d like to preserver the network log across multiple pages / page loads, click the Preserve Log checkbox. This is especially handy if you are filling out a form which posts to a page that causes a page reload and you want to see the request form data sent.

preserve-log

Kraken.io: Reduce Image File Size More Than Photoshop Save-for-Web

We all know that images are the heaviest assets of websites by file size and should be optimized first more than anything else. Pretty much everyone uses Photoshop’s Save-for-Web to optimize images for web use. But, it’s possible to easily get even smaller file sizes without any noticeable different in image quality. I recently tested a service called Kraken (https://kraken.io/) and it reduced a banner background image by 44% (126 KB).

Without Kraken: 282KB
With Kraken:     157KB

The two images are below. Can you tell any difference between the two? Click on the image to see a larger version.

code-background3-compare

 

Update: Actually, Compressor (https://compressor.io/compress) was able to compress the image by even more (70%)!

Some other image optimization sites are:

  • https://tinypng.com/
  • http://pnggauntlet.com/
  • http://optimizilla.com/
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