The other side of the moon

Assuming you have a curl compiled with IPv6, if you wanted to hit a page using its IPv6 address rather than its hostname, you have to do it as follows:

curl "http://\[2600:xxx:yyy::zzz\]/page.html"

The square brackets are required to tell curl that it's an IPv6 address and not a host:port pair. The quotes are required to stop the shell from treating the square brackets as a glob. The backslash is required to stop curl from treating the square brackets as a range specification. The http:// is optional, but good form. This isn't required if you use a hostname or an IPv4 address.

Yesterday I had to convert a few mp3 files to wavs. I also needed to crop them a bit on both ends. This is how I did it:

mplayer -ss 0.5 -endpos 1:14 -ao pcm:file="newfile.wav" oldfile.mp3

This is how it works: -ss says how many seconds of the file to skip at the start. If you don't know the time, but the number of bytes instead, use -sb instead. Note that -ss only works with seconds, but accepts fractional seconds. -endpos says at what point to stop playing. This accepts time as hh:mm:ss.ms or in bytes. If you specify only one number, it's seconds. -ao is a special instruction that specifies a plugin, and everything following the plugin are plugin specific options. pcm is the format for wave files. You could use any format you like. mplayer -ao help will tell you which codecs are supported. I haven't figured out all the suboptions for pcm yet.