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)
Once upon a time I was installing Linux on a tiny little laptop, whose brand name I’ve forgotten. It was probably a Lenovo. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to install anything on it, and they went to great lengths to make sure no one would be able to install Linux on it. I spent an entire day messing around with the grub terminal, and began to suspect that it had a built-in cut off for the USB port during boot. I think I saw some log output to that effect, but I couldn’t find any way to disable it. After some thought, I got back in grub, unplugged the USB stick that I was installing Linux from, and plugged it back in. The laptop detected and mounted the external drive and I tried to install again.
Worked perfectly.
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.
That this worked when I did it in 2006:
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ III/Frozen\ Throne.exe -openglYet in 2025 w3c is a pain in the ass
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).
Moving from old to new Laptop by piping /dev/sda3’s content through netcat and into /dev/nvme0n1p3
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?
mdadm
scp
I’m never using a flash drive again.
especially nice when you get path completion on the target server :D
The first time I learned about PDFGrep, I was able to track down a purchase order that would have taken hours otherwise.
Installing Linux on the Nintendo DS (https://www.dslinux.org/) was pretty impressive for me.
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.
I used to do this to migrate user profiles on Macs at my previous employer. I’d ssh in and copy everything across the network and then have the user log in on the other computer like magic. Network copy is a beautiful thing.
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.
Random one recently:
Turned my gaming box into an impromptu audio mixer by connecting my PS5 audio into the line in and routing it with pipewire to the speaker output so I could game while watching endurance racing on the same speakers.
Later found it was easier to do visually with qpwgraph.
Disabling CPUs by writing a zero to some file under
/sysProbably installing a different kernel and adding it to systemd boot manually a while back.
Oh and the very first was most likely installing Arch manually.
