Plenty of folks out there that don't have the re$ources for any computer, (let alone a new one).
Considered donating old equipment?

Is "weather" a binary or data file vs text file? The "-a" flag is to process such files as if they were text files. If it is already a text file you shouldn't need the "-a" flag.

I wonder if you have grep aliased to "grep -a" on your Mint install and maybe that is why it works both ways there?

I have a graveyard of old machines at my house that have seen less activity lately with my increasing usage of cloud technology, but I'm pretty certain that the majority of them would boot up (pxe ftw) to the OpenBSD installer and be able to contribute to my network in some way. Just a few days ago, in fact, I booted up an old Dell laptop (Celeron, I believe) and installed OpenBSD on it so it could serve as a smokeping latency tracker. Works like a charm.

That is pretty slick, very motivating. Though not as old, I am thinking of putting a stripped down installation of Slackware on my old Asus EEE PC 2g Surf netbook and running that as a Mozilla sync server server. After that I will put Slackware ARM on my raspberry pi and set up a samba server. Just have to get a self powered external enclosure for a few of these 2TB SATA drives I have laying around.

Merry Christmas Back At You rocket357 and peonuser.

Eggnog season is my favorite time of the year for this 6 foot 7 inch frame.

Isn't it the most absolutely wonderful thing to see an old machine, long since "forgotten" by mainstream OS vendors, brought back to life with a bang by an OS like Slackware or one of the BSD's? I really love seeing my 400 MHz UltraSPARC serving network requests on my home network.

And Happy Holidays to you and yours as well.

I misread the title. I thought it said, "martini."

Glad you are better.

Sounds like a fun holidays indeed :D

aalib
cacalib

aaxine

lots of other programs based on those.

I did something like this for WordWhomp on pogo.com. If you aren't familiar, the game is simple: you get 6 random letters and you have to come up with as many real words as possible in a (short) amount of time. I wrote an AutoIt script to automate playing the game (lame, I know haha) by reading a word list (sort of like what you're doing) and entering those keystrokes automatically. Once it had a good list of words for a set of letters, it wrote out a temp file of those words and used it in the future.

That was a fun little project...you're absolutely right, the only limitation is the imagination.