Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you've got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.

If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.

Each command has several parameters that aren't immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.

For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I'd use the command:

$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC

Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart's content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)

What I'd love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here's the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It's pretty much a no-brainer.

While I've mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron'ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron'ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don't see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it's neat that you can.

How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.

Namebench is a Google "20% project" and is a free download for Windows, Mac, and the command line. The benchmark tests take several minutes to run, depending on how much data you throw at it, so be prepared to go make yourself a sandwich after you press the "Start Benchmark" button. When I ran Namebench, I didn't get full results because the alternate services timed out, but I'm pretty sure that's because of restrictions on my network. What about you? Does OpenDNS or Google Public DNS beat out your ISP's DNS servers? Thanks, Vince!
Namebench [Google Code]

FlickrTouchr doesn't support video uploads or grab any metadata about your photos (like tags, comments, favorites, etc). But it does arrange your backups by set name. In one command, you authorize FlickrTouchr to access our Flickr account, and it gets busy downloading your files. You'll need Python to run this and a folder to save your images. (Python comes in OS X, install it on Windows from here.) Here's what FlickrTouchr looks like in action.

Download FlickrTouchr and as per the README, invoke it using the commands:

FlickrTouchr will launch your browser and open a page asking you to authorize it to access your Flickr account.

When it starts going you'll see it grabbing your images. Wherever you get the error "Failed to get original", FlickrTouchr is trying to get a video. Currently the script does not back up video files.

Once the script gets running, you can see it create folders of images on your hard drive based on your Flickr set names as it goes. If a photo isn't in any set, it gets saved in a folder called "No Set."

If you schedule this script to run on a weekly basis as Dan suggests, it will simply update the photos that don't already exist in your backup. Just the other day I was complaining about how non Flickr Pro users lose access to photos beyond the latest 200; this is a good way to ensure the full-size image files don't get lost in the ether once they're past that number.

Backing up Flickr [Hivelogic]

Install MinTTY either in Cygwin's setup (find it under Shells) or get the standalone download from MinTTY's homepage. The downside to MinTTY? It doesn't include a tabbed interface and the developer doesn't plan to add tabs, either. Still, MinTTY's a big upgrade for anyone who spends time with Cygwin. After MinTTY's installed, choose its shortcut instead of Cygwin's from your Start menu. MinTTY is a free download that works with Cygwin for Windows only.

If beginners are interested in learning a bit about Unix through Cygwin, check out my three-part series of tutorials published over at Lifehacker:

• Introduction to Cygwin, part I
• Introduction to Cygwin, part II - More useful commands
• Introduction to Cygwin, Part III - Scripts, packages and more

Today I released the newest version of my three-year-old todo.txt command line interface--a 600-line bash script that lets me add to, check off, and slice and dice my todo.txt file without a full-on editor.

To download it and try it out, or just see a screencast of it in action, check out my full writeup at Lifehacker this morning: Todo.txt CLI Manages Your Tasks from the Command Line.