Boasting as many pages as most technical books, this month’s issue of Linux Journal comes in at a hefty 181—that’s 23 articles exploring topics near and dear to everyone from home automation hobbyists to Free Software advocates to hard-core hackers to high-level systems architects.

Sure, you can open up a graphics program like GIMP and resize an image, but what if you want to resize 10, 50 or 200 images? ImageMagick's convert program is just what you need.

In my last article, I started a series called Command-Line Cloud. The intent of the series is to discuss how to use the cloud services we are faced with these days without resorting to a Web browser. I spend most of my time on the command line, so that's where I'd most like to interface with cloud services.

If you follow my columns in Linux Journal, you probably are aware that I'm a big fan of the command line. When it comes to getting things done efficiently, most of the time the command line can't be beat.

Most people with Internet access in their houses have visited a speed-test Web site to make sure they're getting somewhere close to the speed they're overpaying for. I'm paying more than $100 a month for my business-class connection from Charter, so on a regular basis, I make sure I'm getting the advertised speed.

pax is one of the lesser known utilities in a typical Linux installation. That's too bad, because pax has a very good feature set, and its command-line options are easy to understand and remember. pax is an archiver, like tar(1), but it's also a better version of cp(1) in some ways, not least because you can use pax with SSH to copy sets of files over a network.

I remember the first time a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and showed me how I didn't need to type commands and path names fully—I could just start typing and use the Tab key to complete the rest. That was so cool. I think everybody loves Tab completion because it's something you use pretty much every minute you spend in the shell.

One of the things I dislike about using Irssi in a terminal window on OS X is that I often miss the screen flash when someone mentions my name in IRC. With some fancy SSH tunneling (maybe more on that some other issue) and a really cool pop-up notification tool, if someone mentions my name, I can't miss it.

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him!

Although it's difficult for me to look at this piece's title and not think of mutant felines, it doesn't make the statement any less true. If you've ever used the tail command on log files, you'll instantly appreciate multitail. My friend (and LJ reader) Nick Danger introduced me to multitail, and I can't believe how useful it is.

Many of the cool things in Linux Journal require the use of the command line. For us Linux users, that's generally not a big deal, because we have a terminal window readily available. Some of the time, however, it's helpful to have a shell account on an Internet host somewhere.

More people than ever are using wireless networks as their primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11 that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great functionality.