For me, my high bar that I have yet to beat, was the time I pivoted the running OS (ubuntu) into RAM over SSH so I could unmount and image the boot drive without rebooting and loading a live USB (Which would have required a ticket with my provider to enable IPMI)
When I actually get an awk/sed command to work.
I’ve had the 1980’s awk book seemingly “forever”, but use awk so infrequently I always need to look things up.
In the early 2ks, computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case. I wanted to build a silent computer to watch Divx movies from my bed, but as a broke teen, I just had access to disposed hardwares I could find there and there.
I dismantled a power supply, stuck mosfets to big mother fucking dissipator, and I had a silent power supply. I put another huge industrial dissipator on CPU (think it was an AMD k6 500Mhz) and had fanless cooling. Remained the hard drive.
Live CD/USB weren’t common at that time. I’ve discovered a live CD distrib (I think it was Knoppix) that could run entirely from RAM.
I removed hard drive, boot on live distrib, then replace CD by my Divx and voila.
Having a fanless-harddriveless computer was pure science fiction for me and my friends at that time.
Ubuntu like 10 years ago, drop to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5 or something),
vlc video.mp4Aand it started playing it with ASCII graphics. MagicPiped the ps2 usb camera /dev/video0 to nc. Reverse port fwd’d to my router 200 miles away, and got vlc 200 miles to connect to that port and it worked. No rtsp or server required
And now we have a new streaming service 🤔 Really nice.
I was thinking that by now, we should have enough bandwidth to stream webcams straight to each other without HLS or WebRTP or whatever. Just make the device available over a port or, as you did, cat it to another PC and voilà. Actually, why don’t we stream raw camera feeds?
Most devices will give you the latest frame on a read essentially. VLC accepts a tcp:// address and interpreted it correctly somehow. The raw bandwidth on the potato 320x240 or whatever was peanuts, but even if you didn’t get all the frames per second the device will discard old frames and you got the latest frame anyway. So pretty cool indeed. Doesn’t really multicast though. For that I suppose you could netcat to local multicast address and then connected to that same address, but I’ve never tried it. VLC may not receive the headers that a read may open with would be my suspicion
Honestly, im suprised everytime I blindly follow an online tutorial, copying and pasting like a madman, and my hard drive isn’t wiped.
When the whole shebang of piping/redirection landed, thinking of all the possibilities!
Not quite as impressive, but I somehow fucked up something with my bootloader lately and couldn’t boot anymore into my main drive. Loaded up a live usb stick and made a new ESP partition, arch-chroot and grub-install/grub-makecfg and it worked again.
Yes, I just followed a guide, but I am still fascinated this just worked on the first try.
scp
I’m never using a flash drive again.
If you have binary that is hardcoded to look for some files/libs in a certain path, you can overwrite that path with
seddirectly lol. You just need to make sure to keep the string length the same.sed -i s|/usr|././|gwill change/usrfor the current working dir for example.Would you believe me if I told you this is how conda works? :P
2 that stand out to me:
When I successfully got virtualbox to boot my windows xp partition inside Linux because I needed to run some software for school.
When I figured out how to use qemu-nbd to mount a qcow2 image backed by a physical block device in order to run non-destructive filesystem repair and file recovery with test disk. Did that for a while for my university IT help desk to quickly save files off failing disks.
Installing Linux on the Nintendo DS (https://www.dslinux.org/) was pretty impressive for me.
The first time I learned about PDFGrep, I was able to track down a purchase order that would have taken hours otherwise.
Migrated a server to a new drive by copying all the files with rsync and chrooting into it. Nothing too impressive from a linux standpoint, but I had no idea that was possible until I tried it.
mdadm
I tripped over a cord once and broke the screen on my laptop. I salvaged the disk for another purpuse. But I got some prime hardware here, it’s got video output, it’s got ram, and a cpu! I used it for my lectures; liveusb with some persistent storage on, put my slides on there and fire it up. Did not have to unplug the normal laptop from my office. Nothing magic really, but some students were puzzled.
