I work in information technology, and I have worked with computers for some time now. Over time, there are certain things that I have come across that just blew my mind. By which I mean, I thought to myself "why didn't I know about this years ago?" after I found out about them. I hope that others do not suffer the same fate, so this page is a short list of some of those things along with some links to find out more about them.
I will never understand why it took me so long to decide to start understanding TCP/IP and the general workings of the Internet. Better late than never though, right? This video series served as a great introduction for me. The boredom in the guy's voice makes the videos all the more interesting.
Seriously, where was this thing? I know for a fact that I skipped over this Unix utility in at least one book. Still, the ability to open ports on the fly for whatever you want is pretty awesome. Great utility for giving intro lessons on networking.
There was a time when processing a large amount of text made me sad and disappointed. With this simple trick, I grew to love text processing! Click here! to find out more! (I specify this book because that is how I learned, but there are plenty of good online tutorials.
This is one of those, "It's obvious if you think about it." sort of things. Magic signatures were a pretty cool thing to learn about though. I recommend poking through the list on wikipedia, but then I totally recommend looking through the hex of files just for fun. (See xxd)
This one is a little bit more of an outlier since its application is more specific, but I wanted to note it since it makes things so much easier. Do a thing with IPs seperated by newlines?
| xargs -t -L 1 host 2>&1 | less
The only weird part about this is that bit of redirecting stderr to stdout since '-t' goes to stderr, but I personally like to know what was run. The above is something I do just for curiousity about the reverse resolution of a set of IPs, but I also use it for 'whois' or for geolocation lookups. Pretty fun way to use up cycles and watch the screen scroll.