Like many others I have a set of useful alias commands.
The best eye opener (for me at least) was the discovery of the 'screen' command - especially when used in combination with a remote ssh session.
If you want to keep an eye on your local network (esp. after re-booting the router - in case the DHCP allocations for your devices have changed), the following is useful:
alias LAN='nmap -sn 192.168.0.* | grep report'
Good article but... I can't believe that VLCisn't on the list