"PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit. PDFtk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. It comes in three flavors: PDFtk Free, PDFtk Pro, and our original command-line tool PDFtk Server." In a prior blog post, the PDFTK utility was installed. Working with PDF can often produce multiple files that …

Overview Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens. The Xpra homepage provides the following overview: It gives you remote access to individual applications or full desktops. On X11, it is also known as screen for X11: it allows …

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. In the following blog post I assume you already have the Go environment setup. Previously we have created a Hello World application. The next step is to create a command line application. The example below covers the basics of …

Cloud Shell is super useful and features a lot of tools. However out of the box the general setup doesnt match my local machine. If you want to use tmux or vim in your environment, this blog post is for you. The following is a quick summary of changes made to update Cloud Shell to be a bit more like my own machine. …

An Nginx reverse proxy enables client requests to be forwarded on to a backend server. In this scenario the backend server provides responses to the client. A setup like this can be useful in a number of situations where Nginx is used to control the processing. It is also a nice security setup as the Nginx acts as a …

A REST API is super useful and can present a simple way to efficiently access information. This blog post is dedicated to the folks who want to create an API. It seems like a lot of folks are in this boat by the amount of comments over on sites like Reddit. Lets get started by building a GET/POST API in Node.js. …

Overview x2Go enables you to access a remote machine over SSH. The wiki entry provides the following overview: "X2Go enables you to access a graphical desktop of a computer over a low bandwidth (or high bandwidth) connection. X2Go is a Remote Desktop solution, which some vendors vaguely call Remote Control. This …

A quick tutorial on using Imagemagick to remove a background colour from images. The image file format needs to support transparency e.g. PNG. NOTE: JPG doesnt support transparency, so it would be necessary to convert the file. Remove background color Set the input file 1input="old-white.png" Set the output …

A quick tutorial on using Imagemagick to add a background shadow to images. For the best result, ensure the original image has a transparent background. It is also useful to observe consistent sizes for the images. Add a shadow Set the name of the input image - for example 1input="old.png" Set the name of the …

Convert JSON to CSV with JQ. jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text. Being able to move between different file format is quite a common task, so I was delighted to find a quick …