I was thinking about slapping together a quick project that makes use of the Raycaster class to create a simple yet effective menu system in threejs. If you are not familiar with the raycaster constructor in threejs yet, it is something that you will want to look into at some point sooner or layer as it is a very usful tool when it comes to figuring out how to click a mesh object sort of speak. The Raycaster constructor is what can be used to find out if a 2d pointer click of one kind or another has resulted in a mesh object being clicked or not. This raycaster class can be used to find one or more objects from any point in space to another also actually, but for todays threejs project example a raycster instance will help a whole lot if the aim is to make some kind of menu system using threejs.

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The Linux tar command is great for creating archive files from the command line, and the tool can also be used to decompress them also of course. There are a number of options when it comes to the various kinds of compressed files such as gun zip, and bz2. There is also maybe a thing or two to write about when it comes to all kinds of other various options of the tar command, as well as other commands that might be closely related to the use of the tar command also.

In this post I will be going over a few examples of the Linux tar command along with a number of other commands and bash features to confirm how this command is useful for compressing things down so they take up less space.

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The Linux tree command is a way to go about listing the contents of a folder in a tree like format. So then the tree command is an alternative command to that of the Linux ls command that is another way to go about listing folder contents. By default it would seem like the Linux tree command will list contents of folders recursively when it comes to nested folders and the contents of such folders, which is one reason why one of the first options that one should be familiar with when using the Linux tree command would be the -L option which can be used to set a depth for this recursive listing of contents. Another major thing that comes to mind is the subject of short and hard links that can be created with the Linux ln command, and what happens when the tree command follows one that links to the folder itself. So then there are are few things to cover in this post when it comes to the Linux tree command as well as a number of things that will come up when using such a command.

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When starring to get familiar with the various commands that there are to work with in a typical Linux environment one such command is the Linux cat command. What is great about this command is that it can be used to quickly read a file and dump that text to the standard output. With that said the text from the file can also be piped to other various useful commands such as the Linux grep command just to name one such option. In addition to being able to read a file, text can also be piped into the cat command rather an a file. For these reasons the Linux cat command is often used when working out all kinds of various things in bash directly in a terminal window, and also when writing bash scripts.

So then at some point a thought might occur that is along the lines of “Say this cat command is great, but if only there was a command that did more or less the same thing, only it dumped HEX to the standard output, or whatever I am piping to, rather than plain text”. For example I want to know what the hex values are for some byte values, and this text might include all kids of command characters that I do not want to dump to a console as text. Well it would seem that such a command does often exist in Linux systems and it would seem that this command is the Linux xxd command.

So then in this post I will be taking a quick look at this Liunx xxd command, and also while I am at it I will be also demonstrating a few quick simple examples of other Linux and bash related features in the process of doing so.

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As of late I have been looking into the various folders off of a root file system when it comes to typical Linux systems. One of these folders is the Linux \/dev folder that contains device files. You see it would seem that in Linux file systems everything is treated as a file event hardware. What is nice about this is that it make the process of reading data from a device, as well as writing to it very easy. On top of device files that are ways of interacting with things like a USB mouse there are also a number of pseudo devices also. These pseudo devices are great ways to go about just getting some random data, filling something with zeros, or writing some error output from a command to a void rather than the standard error.

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