1. httpie: Modern, user-friendly command-line HTTP client
  2. artem: Convert images from multiple formats to ASCII art

Article of the week: Base64 encoding

Using Base64 encoding may seem esoteric, but there are many common scenarios where you will encounter Base64 in systems administration. Knowing how to recognize, encode, and decode Base64 is valuable due to its prevalence as an encoding approach.

Tip of the week: The classic sorting and counting:

# we use 11 elements because bash indexing starts at 0, but zsh indexing starts at 1
% declare -a data=(alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta theta iota kappa lamdba)

# generate some random data:
% for _ in {1..1000}; do i=$(( RANDOM % 10 + 1 )); echo "${data[$i]}" >> /tmp/data; done

# count the number of instances of each line:
% sort /tmp/data | uniq -c
     96 alpha
     96 beta
    105 delta
     96 epsilon
     88 eta
    106 gamma
    111 iota
    103 kappa
    103 theta
     96 zeta

# re-sort by the number of instances found:
% sort /tmp/data | uniq -c | sort -nr
    111 iota
    106 gamma
    105 delta
    103 theta
    103 kappa
     96 zeta
     96 epsilon
     96 beta
     96 alpha
     88 eta