The Linux terminal is well-known for its productivity tools for savvy users, but it also offers ways to be unproductive. You can do fun things as well as programming and shell scripting. You can play games in the terminal. One collection of games, BSD games, is borrowed from games that were popular on one of Linux's ancestors, BSD. These text-based games were originally developed in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Would you like a quick, distraction-free way to solve your math problems the way scientists and engineers do? Many tools let you do math right in the Linux terminal. You can tackle easy problems and make hard ones possible with these programs.

You might think that Linux scripting might only be for wizards. It can save you a lot of time, even if you don't consider yourself a programmer. Taking a little time to learn some basic scripting could save you lots of it in the long run by automating boring repetitive tasks.

If you're a music fan, you probably have shelves of records or CDs. How do you keep track of them? You could use a database, but aren't they complicated to set up? SQLite is a powerful tool that lets you set up SQL databases without a server. It's surprisingly easy to set up. Here's how I did it, despite having a vague knowledge of SQL.

While Steam is the place to buy PC games, especially with the frequent discounts, in the '80s and '90s, if you wanted a cheap way to play games, you'd need to turn to shareware. This method of distribution combined physical disk swapping and mail order, at a time when the internet was in its infancy and computer games were taking off in a big way.

Recently, I wanted to find out how phone and tablet screen time was affecting battery drain. You might not think to go to Python for that, but its basic statistics tools can actually provide the answer.