Tunes - Tuneflow

On Linux and Mac systems, the top terminal command gives you a great bird's eye view of what your system is doing. A few helpful keyboard shortcuts make top an even more useful system command tool.

If you're not planning on getting into 3D gaming on your G1 or MyTouch 3G, and you've rooted your phone with the CyanogenMod ROM, you can get more memory performance from your Android handset with one hacker's custom firmware.

Windows: You can do a lot more with the free cross-platform utility Dropbox than sync files. In fact, with the free command line tool Akira, you can administer, and grab non-Dropbox files, from any computer linked to your Dropbox account.

Windows: Cygwin, the utility that opens Windows up to Linux/Unix/Mac-style command line powers, has updated to support Windows 7, accept more filenames with special characters, and do a whole lot more nitty-gritty terminal stuff a whole lot better. Photo by WikiMedia Commons.

Ubuntu's ambient notification system, styled after the Mac Growl interface and first arriving in April's 9.04 release, can be very helpful. They can also be very annoying in their default position. This config editing work-around moves them elsewhere.

National Geographic offers some stunning, professional-quality wallpaper photos, but only as individual downloads. If you're a frequent wallpaper switcher, or like background variety, a simple command line script makes it easy to grab them all.

If you've installed Windows 7 (or Vista) but still don't have a product key, you'll eventually end up with an activation nag screen and "reduced functionality" until you get a proper key. Still not ready to buy? Temporarily bypass the problem instead.

There's a handy battery-preserving, energy-saving tool in Windows 7, but it's nowhere near the shiny graphics or slick taskbar. Online Tech Tips shows us how to audit our computers' energy efficiency using a simple command line tool.

When you spend as much time at the terminal as I do, having a calculator at your fingertips can be a really useful feature, and the Command-Line Fu web site tells us how to create one easily. To create the calculator, you can just enter this function on the command line to test out how it works, or add it into your ~/.bashrc file to make sure that it's always available after restarting the terminal. calc(){ awk "BEGIN{ print $* }" ;}