Using a Raspberry Pi as a media server

Just got a Raspberry Pi. Pretty sweet. So far I like it.

I've had this post as a draft for quite a while, planning to make some great interesting post, but I've run into quite a bit of trouble trying to find a reliable setup that I liked, and that worked.

Here's what I've got that works ok so far:

First off. I don't have that big of an sd card(which is like the hard drive) for my pi. and all of my music is on my desktop computer. First thing I do is use sshfs to gain access to my music.
$sshfs desktop:Music/ Music/
I use public/private rsa keys to connect so I don't need a password. I also have the desktop computer's ip defined in my /etc/hosts file. For any help check here.

Now that I have access to my music, my most used tool is cmus. It is a music player that supports a music library, has vi like commands, and runs inside a terminal. There are others out there, the first I tried was MOC, but after trying cmus I switched.

After logging into my pi via ssh. I run tmux.(more info about tmux here.), then run cmus, find the music I want to listen to, start playing, then detach tmux, and I can then exit ssh.

Another option. If you wanted to control your music from say... your phone. Then I would use:
$vlc -I http ~/Music/
This will run vlc as an http service, the the Music/ folder as the main library. I was using this but I have a large music library, and it was hard to navigate very well. If you specified the folder with all the music you would like to listen to I think this would probably work better.

Currently working on running the nuvola music player, then using nuvolaplayer-client to control it from another computer. If I get it working I will definitely update.
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UPDATE: I just installed OpenELEC on my raspberry pi (It runs xbmc). It's easy to set up. I would recommend this method if you are going to be using it for different types of media.

Shell history search

Found at http://lifehacker.com/supercharge-your-command-lines-history-search-with-fou-478683529
I have found this to be very useful. 
create file ~/.inputrc and add these lines:

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on

This will make it so that when you use the up arrow to go through your search history, if you have anything already typed, it will only search anything with that term. e.g. if you want to run a sudo command from before you can type sudo, then use the up arrow to search commands that were run with sudo.

Using your ssh config file to connect to a computer through a gateway.

At my school I have some public IP addresses and virtual machines for them to use for class projects. I enjoy connecting from home but I have to go through the school's ssh server to connect to a vm(virtual maching). Having to hop through the school's server every single time I want to connect can be cumbersome, and also makes it more difficult to send files to my vm, since I have to send the file to the ssh server, then connect to it and send it again to the vm.
The other day I started looking for a way to modify my ~/.ssh/config file to have it automatically go to the vm. I tried a few different things. Some didn't work and some weren't working because of a  mistake of my own. Finally I found how to make it work. My config file is set up like so:
Host school
HostName domain.name.of.school.ssh.server
User my_school_username

Host ns1
HostName <ip of my master nameserver>
ProxyCommand ssh school -W %h:%p

Host ns2
HostName <ip of slave nameserver>
ProxyCommand ssh school -W %h:%p

The computers ns1 and ns2 are the ones that are behind the school's ssh server, and school I set as the ssh server. the ProxyCommand lines let ssh know that every time I want to connect to ns1 or ns2 that I need to go through 'school'.
One problem I ran into was that I tried to use the HostName ns1 or ns2(since they are designated as such in the ssh config on the school server). That doesn't work. You have to put in the ip of the machine.

Enabling the right click on an hp pavilion dm4 with ubuntu 12.04

I have a 14" HP Pavilion dm4 laptop and like most of my laptops, the mousepad always seems to have some type of problem at the beginning. On the dm4 my problem was that the right click didn't work. after finding an askubuntu.com question about it I found that I needed to run these three commands.
synclient RightButtonAreaRight=1
synclient RightButtonAreaBottom=1
synclient AreaBottomEdge=3500

Sadly, I can not expound really on what the synclient command does, I just know that I needed to run all three before it would work and I have to run them each time I reboot (I'll try and figure out how have it stick even after rebooting and edit this post when I do.)

Send a message to another computer via ssh

I don't know if everyone else has the same problem as me, but I have two computers in different rooms, and sometimes my wife and I are on each computer. Sometimes I want to tell my wife something or send her a message, but I'm just too lazy to get up and go into the other room to talk to her. One thing I do have is ssh access to all of my computers. After searching a little (there's references to this just about everywhere), I found how to send a message to my wife via ssh.
ssh
export DISPLAY=:0
notify-send "Message"
Now I had a computer before that for some reason or another, the default monitor/display wasn't 0 and it took some searching to find out which was the right one. Although the easiest way would probably be to increment the display number until you find the right one.
notify-send will send a notification to the screen which will time out and can easily be missed if the person on the other computer is not watching. You can also put a message in a text file, then open it up with something like gvim textfile.txt which will open a new window with the text file (gvim can also be replaced with the more common gedit)
Once you export the display in fact, you can open up any graphical program, and it will open up on that computer.
If you open up a program and then want to close after, you can run
killall <program_name>
to close it.