A Gift for Dell IT

Sunday, June 5, 2022

I'm leaving my job at Dell and I need to return the laptop they gave me. Time for some fun! This is what their IT department will see when they switch that laptop back on:

I can only imagine an IT person helplessly trying to stop it while it plays on full volume.

This is powered by mpv and Sway on Arch Linux. All key bindings have been disabled in the Sway config. mpv's keyboard controls are disabled, the video will loop forever, and the UI controls won't ever show. This will be UNSTOPPABLE!*

Moar Details

Essentially, this is the sway config:

exec /bin/mpv /home/dell/video.mp4 --hwdec=auto --vo=gpu --volume=130 --loop --no-input-default-bindings --script--opts=osc-visibility=never --fullscreen

agetty(8) is configured to automatically log into a non-root user and starts bash which executes the commands in ~/.bash_profile.

sleep 5

if [ -z $DISPLAY ] && [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then
  exec sway
fi

sleep 5 is necessary otherwise mpv would start playing the video without sound. I did try to wait for sound.target and for /dev/snd/ to be populated but that didn't help. I did not want to spend a lot of time on this so I used the best tool to solve concurrency issues, sleep.