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)
exiting out of vim
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.
NixOS in a VM for a few weeks and made it how I liked, copied that VM to server to VNC in (laptop battery was suffering), kept customising until i had it nice… and then when it came to wipe my laptop for the nixos setup, I was bit scared.
But low and behold,
nixos-build switchand then it was all there, just like the VM. Fucking amazing.Ubuntu like 10 years ago, drop to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5 or something),
vlc video.mp4Aand it started playing it with ASCII graphics. MagicThat this worked when I did it in 2006:
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ III/Frozen\ Throne.exe -openglWine still feels like magic in 2025
Yes! It used to be so hit or miss with Wine, but I played WoW in it around the same time and it was crazy that it worked (at least most of the time).
Yet in 2025 w3c is a pain in the ass
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.
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 miss it so much
Moving from old to new Laptop by piping /dev/sda3’s content through netcat and into /dev/nvme0n1p3
Using dd to move-resize a partition by writing down the cylinder numbers and moving it piece by piece like some Tower of Hanoi. Wanted to add more space to my root after deleting the Windows partition, which happened to be first. There is apparently no built-in command to do that.
Booted up fingers crossed and everything worked.
I always liveboot debian and just use Gparted, faster than figuring out the commands manually, and much less risky
How did you do it? Did you run a live distro on the new laptop to receive and overwrite the SSD ?
Livebooted (Arch) on both, I think you can even remove the install media after it copied itself to RAM, though I’m not sure (especially with Ventoy in between).
Piped 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
scp
I’m never using a flash drive again.
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especially nice when you get path completion on the target server :D
Note: to do this you have to have your public key on the remote server
Next step: rsync, because it lets you resume.
When the network printer suddenly started printing the picture my kid had drawn in tux paint without me having configured the printer on their PC.
You might actually be a wizard lmao
The real wizards are the folks who made KDE’s printer integration. Or maybe CUPS.
I’ve you ever looked at CUPS code? Forget wizardry, it’s straight up Eldritch lore in typed form.
The first time I learned about PDFGrep, I was able to track down a purchase order that would have taken hours otherwise.
Maybe a little specific, but the first time i used autorandr, I was wow it does exactly what it sounds like it does.
Oh! I just thought of a better one. The first time you run
vim scp://user@server//home/user/.Oh so many fun adventures, too much to count… But a few nice ones:
- HDD died, so ran a desktop system over network from a NAS (nfs) without HDD… for months.
- Rebuilding a corrupted system (any bit advanced tools wouldn’t start anymore, like apt).
- Custom bootable live cd based on Linux From Scratch (around 2002).
- Anything related to Kerberos and NFS4.
- Replacing syscalls to run software from a ramdrive that would otherwise not work.
- Recently using debootstrap to install Kubuntu with a ZFS root, which went surprisingly smooth and pretty easy.
I love Linux for all these insane possibilities.
Recovered a legacy COBOL 911 dispatch system after the hard drive containing the root filesystem died, which wasn’t RAID protected at all and had no complete backups except for a few days prior when I started running daily rsync backups out of paranoia because the idiot dipshit sysadmin who set it all up left the company to work directly for one of our customers.
Thankfully the data volume was RAID protected and didn’t die so the critical data was pretty much all there ready to go again after some rebuilding of shit.
Still, took 15 hours to recover. Was a RHEL 4 system when RHEL 6 was current, and we had no way of obtaining the install media or licensing, so I dug up an archived CentOS 4 iso and installed from that, and got stuff working mostly just by copying various files from backup.
Fucking nightmare come true. Drive crashed at noon and we didn’t go home until about 4am.
Installing Linux on the Nintendo DS (https://www.dslinux.org/) was pretty impressive for me.
