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Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

Resolve the "all display buffers are busy, please try later" error on a Foundry

Download full FLAC albums from archive.org
The only zipped version of an album available for download is the lossy mp3 version. To download lossless files, because of their size, you must download them individually. This command scrapes the page for all the FLAC (or also SHN) files.

Have your sound card call out elapsed time.
Useful contexts : You are doing yoga or some other physical training in which you are holding a position. Or you practice the pomodoro productivity technique. Or your girlfriend said "We're leaving in 40 minutes". Design details: sleep executes before espeak to give you a 5 seconds head start. espeak is run in the background so it doesn't mess up the timing.

Monitor RAID IO Usage
Shows the IO of the raid sync

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Rename files in batch

print/scan lines starting at record ###
Useful for finding newly added lines to a file, tail + can be used to show only the lines starting at some offset. A syslog scanner would look at the file for the first time, then record the end_of_file record number using wc -l. Later (hours, days), scan only at the lines that were added since the last scan.

launch bash without using any letters
I don't know why anyone would use this, I was just messing around tonight and managed to start bash without using any letters and thought I would share. It's pretty simple, first it tries to execute "-" redirecting stderr to stdout which prints the error "bash: -: command not found" to standard output, then I try to execute "bash: -: command not found" which produces the output "bash: bash: -: command not found: command not found". lastly, (on the other side of the semicolon) I use the underscore environment variable which refers to the last command run ("bash: -: command not found") and take out everything after the first ":" character using brace expressions and your left with "bash"

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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