What!? It works? .... just kidding.  Glad you found it useful.

My must have's:
febe - extension backup
firebug - for html theft
lastpass - secure/insecure I don't care it makes my life easier
https everywhere - to get back some security
tab mix plus - keeps me org'd
traffic light - security

tlinsley - great list and many I was unfamiliar with.  I realized most of my links are pretty old like http://www.caliban.org/bash/#completion but still useful.  I thank you, old dog here needing new tricks and this will fill my break time for the next few weeks reading through your links.  Thank you.

One more quick one that I hardly ever see discussed (will probably be in every one of your links but ... oh well).
bash -v
running this will give you a scrollable run through of your bash environment and settings printing out your system .bashrc, aliases and user files in one rather lengthy screen.  I find it very useful for those "senior" moments when something isn't working as I expect or I can't remember a setting.

sqlpython - too true.  I do use python, ruby on occasion, never java, never C but find that in the end bash really meets most of my needs on the box (not counting heavier lifting here). I also thought when I wrote the stuff in bash that I was sure that there were more efficient ways to do things and that I was a child for using bash.  Usually I do find that those earlier scripts were inefficient (I am not really a very good scripter) and that there are better ways to do what I want.  Almost always those ways turn out to be -- wait for it --- more sophisticated ways using bash!  It's like the old story of the guy who tells his old friends good bye because he is being introduced to the "in" crowd of up and comers and then when he goes to meet the up and comers is introduced to all his old friends.

ectropy.  You sir are prolific.  I am struggling to keep up with everything.  Lots in this post I find of value, we seem to be doing similar things and pursuing a similar goal.  Regarding BB.  I did the same thing, I too saw the plugins and I think what I really meant was not so much a question of it's flexibility as reading through it saying to myself "hmm, that is not the way I would do that or I think I have a better idea or I don't want to be limited to that solution but would add or subtract this or that". In the end I think that is less a criticism of BB than it is my own personal prefs.  I would rather pull together my own "bleaching" process that is both more and less thorugh and targets the areas that are of need to me.  What I do appreciate about it is the fact that it is not a black box.  I hate when someone provides a "cleaning" solution that doesn't let me see what it is really doing.  Scares the bejeeebus out of me.   Yep, I am weird.

textarea cache add-on wooo-hooo never knew about that one but many times have wondered if there was anything like it.  Just never looked (ashamedly).  Great stuff.

Digit.  I am at my personal "new thread" limit so you better start that firefox add on thread.  I would certainly have my favs.  The bottom line is that if you just save . files you can move it all pretty much or use febe (I do both). 

I am trying to grok all of ectropy's earlier post still so will reserve comment on that.  It always leads me down a path though.

Didn't realize (or ever really thought about) what doesn't happen or does happen with a live disk.  I tend to install and go.  Thanks for raising that point.

Great valroadie, it's a wonderful journey. I have often thought that they should have called it base instead of bash because really it is a base of knowledge that is applicable in just about every area of computing.  Understand bash and you will understand most of what happens on your box. 

Don't wait until you think you are more advanced to post, one of the problems of using something daily (like bash which I use every minute I am on the box) is that you forget how much you know.  Meaning that someone starting out often "knows" more than some of us who use it all the time. 

Even worse, what has become second nature for us we have forgotten that not everyone uses all the time.  I was reminded of this today when helping a friend of mine and I started using cdargs (http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/332972-cdargs-brings-bookmarks-to-the-linux-command-line and she kept saying how did you do that, what was that.  I started explaining the process I was going through and she said no not that, she was taking about how I was jumping around in my bash environment.  So when you see something you think is really cool, or that you didn't know you could do post in here, it will undoubtedly help someone else.

One last thought.  To my mind the greatest part of bash learning is that it can be acquired on an as needed basis.  You learn a little to do what you want to and then can move on to something else that you want to do.  There is not any required order to speak of.  It is like a book that always opens to the page you need.

I have used Todo.txt https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli/wiki/The-Todo.txt-Format partly habit and partly due to the android integration.  This looks interesting thanks for the heads up.

Not to hijack this but want to make sure you are kidding.

QuoteOkay, so i should just stay out of the birthday threads and the "i know what i know" threads and the "let's all jump on the bandwagon" threads. No prob.

I think your comments have been very well received.  I don't think anyone is hammering you or has the intention of belittling your opinions.  You do have strong/diverse opinions though and that by it's nature will stir comment.  This is a good thing, having people of varying ideas generates discourse, discourse requires thought, thought stimulates and educates. Agreement generates ... [crickets].

I have a limited amount of time.  If I was looking for a payment model and saw 10% was the vig I too would stop reading at that point.  It would be a killer for me.  That said, if I wanted to use something and they used flattr it would not offend me nor would I hesitate to donate through a flattr link. 

All of this ends with I appreciate your comments and insights ectropy as I do digit, sqlpython, etc. There are certain people who's posts I jump to as valuable immediately.  I am not though, required to agree with you afaik. Doesn't mean I don't respect it and appreciate it.

All of this reminds me that it is time to donate to the Vsido project.

I hold bash in the highest regard.  I more than love it I luuuurrrrvvvee it.  I was thinking that with all bash can do we should probably have a little go to of places to get more on bash.  There really is so much there I don't think anyone could know it all.  I have one page in particular that I refer to fairly often and thought I would post it and perhaps others will find it useful or can add to the list.

http://samrowe.com/wordpress/advancing-in-the-bash-shell/

If you are interested in doing more with bash.  I highly recommend this short read.  Tons of good stuff in there I frequently forget.

I have been meaning to get back to this for some time.  I am triple posting here I guess which is dubious but hope to stir some contributions here.  The following script is something I threw together some time ago to see if I could.  Then as I was doing it wondered more if I should. Anyway, I like it as an example because it embraces quite a broad brush of what you can do with zen and uses various (although not close to all) of what zenity can do.  I realized that I really don't have a thread where I got all this or learned zenity.  I have just done all this hit and miss and I am sure that probably shows.

See Attachment later in thread

What is happening here?  Well the script will assume you have put a thumb in the drive but if not you can bail.  It will first check to see what you have mounted, then offer a short list of those mounts for you to grab the /dev location.  Then ask you to enter it.  It will then ask you to select your iso, confirm that you really want to do it.  Burn the thumb and offer you the opp to boot and see what you have done.

One of the things this thread and my self-posting is reminding me is that with zenity I usually use it for little routine things that I want a quick and dirty for.  I write them and then forget them (as in never edit or fix little gotcha's)  I think it psychologically makes it seem finished even if it isn't.  I hope that makes sense.  Anyway, I really need to add to my todo to go through all my zenity scripts and clean them up.  So even if no one else gets anything out of my assorted crap I guess I win. 

Not to step on Digit's toes here but ...

Quoteyoubetcha, I love foss, but I see that the foss (and shareware) ideals aren't working well.

What exactly isn't working?  Foss? Shareware? User-contributed open-source? I am a little unclear what you are saying here and before.  Perhaps if it was a little more exacting I might agree with you (I could say the same about "working well".  Really can see how they could be working better, for their own ends, but I think it is working as well as any anarchic, obtuse, chaotic system could be expected to work. 

As an analogy to that I would suggest looking at the problem Jefferson Davis had as president of the south.  He needed rules to enforce state compliance but he could not make them since his government was based on states rights and independence.  It's really the same catch 22.  I have seen pages of arguments of what foss really is and what makes something foss and even seen the suggestion that if you have to defend something as foss it isn't.  Likewise you really can't have someone defining foss since you are then setting limits on what is or isn't but in the absence of barriers how can you define the barriers of something that has no barriers.

Without getting too philosophical, nothing - ever - is totally free nor does anyone have real freedom.  It doesn't exist.  In any choice there are costs whether they are the cost of your time, your money or your nose to spite your face.  Forgetting that for a moment I am somewhat Kantian (that real piss-ant) in my outlook - "sapare aude" in it's original form - and why I love gnu has more to do with philosophy than freedom.  Proprietary and commercial software too often means that you can't look under the hood and either understand or see what is going on and why.  Since more and more software has become open-source and more and more "commercial" developers have embraced the concept of user contributions/hacks/development I would argue that this is possibly the more important development of the "Stallman" concept.  Without RMS this would not be happening.

RMS other true gift has been to show that trust in your fellow man for contributions and support works for the most part and though it has been bastardized to be almost unrecognizable the open-source/free concepts are I believe doing better than ever.  I could cite thousands of little items you use everyday that may not show up in vrms but that were developed under the foss conceptual umbrella.  I can also say that more trickles back already than most realize and can cite a personal example.

A long, long time ago, on a planet far away I stumbled into the development of a method to package and transport data very securely and reliably.  The details don't matter but it was feasible and paradigm shifting.  I used it to develop a package that I was working on when the "accident" happened and then released it into the wild (my original client was po'd).  I wrote it from scratch, it relied on a very obscure library but was extremely portable.  People ported it, used it in everything from commercial to free as in beer to etc. I never ever wanted anything for it and never expected anything for it and it still lives to this day.  On occasion I have received  emails offering donations (I accepted ) and not once did I ever ask for a dime, post a link, etc. only the comments in the original code.  I am perfectly happy with this but suspect that it probably goes on more than anyone realizes. 

I believe that despite my numbers being lower than I would like, my acceptance of the vrms concept or of being a stallmanite by proxy, I feel that I have embraced it philosophically at the least.  When I say I feel I need to do more, what I really mean is that I need to find time to learn more, to experiment more, to create more and to push the barriers more.  Gnu is a great concept, it pushes the envelope, it's existence and future are secure because it is just that a concept or ideal not a measurable goal.  Not everything that works is quantifiable nor should it be.  My lone objection to the vrms package is that I don't think it really gets to the crux of what makes gnu great as I have stated.  I apologize for not having digit's eloquence.

Besides my love for gnu, I also love dissent.  Without it there is no freedom or any hope of it. 

We all see things differently but I think we would all agree that a world without gnu/RMS would be a much duller and more limited one. And since I have already ranted incoherently using more time than I really have to add to the sturm and drang without contributing one iota I will add something of value.  I know it is of value because I never said it, Rosa Luxemburg did:

QuoteFreedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter. Not because of the fanaticism of "justice", but rather because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effects cease to work when "freedom" becomes a privilege.

OK, good to hear.  Above I mentioned that you can essentially drag and drop to make new scripts and here is an example.  Pretty simple but still relatively useful.  By essentially slightly altering the initial zenity call we can change the back up script from file selection to yes/no and make our little script adjust our monitor warmth (this is just a bastardization of redeye btw).
#!/bin/bash
#==========================================================================
# TITLE: redeye type adjustment
# AUTHOR:Statmonkey
#
# USAGE: redeye $1 as in redeye night or redeye day
# DESCRIPTION:  Automatically adjusts the screen to night mode for reduced eye strain
# Requires redeye             
# DATE: LAST UPDATED 4/30/13 to change the settings to greater variance
#==========================================================================
###############################################
# Define Variables:
###############################################
zenity --question --title="Redeye" --text="Set screen for ..." --ok-label="Night" --cancel-label="Day"

redeye=$?
if [ "$redeye" -eq "0" ] ; then
   xrandr | sed -n 's/ connected.*//p' | xargs -n1 -tri xrandr --output {} --brightness 0.7 --gamma 2:3:4
else
   xrandr | sed -n 's/ connected.*//p' | xargs -n1 -tri xrandr --output {} --brightness 1 --gamma 1:1:1
fi

I actually do use this frequently as I tend to sit at the box a little too much every day/night/week/month/year

Not on that sys at this moment but will boot into it as soon as I finish uploading some customer stuff I want to get rid of before I muck anything up.  Good call VastOne that is a single monitor and had not added the nvidia drivers yet. It does have pulse not sure about geany didn't look.

FWIW New version - Never forget I am an idiot (193MB) on first boot
FWIW on the old Vsido with lxpanel on first boot (518MB)

Wow that is monstrous! Gee, if you do it right it's impressive - sorry about that

My first impressions:
1. initial install borked - couldn't log in as user.  Discovered that /home/ had no user - none/nada.  Not sure what caused that.
2. reinstall worked with no issues and took no more than 10 minutes to get to where I wanted.  Nice!
3. I was sitting at about 1 GB of mem in old version now sitting at 560MB without FF running.  Which forced me to pop open my old version and check again.  Wow, most of that seems to be from tint2 was it really adding that much?
4. Booted/rebooted several times with no issues and ran a few goofy scripts and seems solid.  Will leave it running for a few hours and see what the mem use does.
5. OMG "___________" is not there anymore (this space reserved for later)

Giddily downloading now.