That sounds very promising, I’ll look into it!

Thank you! Once I can figure out the margins I’m going to get a custom btop preset configured. Right now I can’t configure it in a way that important info isn’t cut off on the edges.

The TV does have dials to adjust, but only slightly, and if I adjust too much, it messes up the scan lines and the signal doesn’t come through clearly. I feel like the answer is just a little further down the rabbit hole of kernel params :)

Thank you! I’m very happy with it, and I learned a lot. If I can figure out the margin thing I will definitely try to set up a fancier looking monitor, but right now htop is the most legible because of how it is displayed. Mainly just menu labels get cut off

This was really helpful - It got me pointed down the right track to figure out the video= settings in the grub config. I was able to disable the laptop monitor and enable the CRT by adding this to /etc/default/grub

# Disable laptop monitor (LVDS-1) and only output to CRT (HDMI-A-1)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video=LVDS-1:d video=HDMI-A-1:1024x768"

I initially set it to 640x480, but display was better with higher res and large font size, which I scales up with sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

I created a service account for this, and set up a systemd service to start getty on that account based on those docs

[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --skip-login --noreset --noclear --autologin axies - ${TERM}![](https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/cf0ab3f3-9674-4578-a230-c8f3df7a7bdc.webp)

Then I added htop to the ~/.bash_profile for that user and… done!

Only thing is there is some overscan on the display and initially about 3 rows / cols were cut off on each side. I was able to adjust the CRT display itself to mostly mitigate this, so now only a bit is cut off and it’s usable, but it’s not perfect. I tried setting the margin in the video options in grub with margin_top, margin_left etc., as per these docs but that didn’t work, even though I verified the resolution was applying correctly. But it is functional!

You mean like using a separate computer to display? I thought about that. Actually this old thing has a battery compartment with enough space to fit a raspberry pi inside so I may try and make it a self contained PC at some point. Would be cool to have it monitor multiple servers and display a status dashboard when they’re up. That sounds like a fun future project :)

I was trying to start the monitoring program as part of the systemd service. Idk why I didn’t think to use the bash profile on a service account. That should work perfect! Thanks

This is great info, thanks! I did some messing around yesterday and got it opening a tty on boot, and disabled the startx so it stays there. I will look into the monitor power stuff too. Thanks!

I do get a tty and that works fine if I start it manually. I can also ssh into it while on my local network.

I think what I need to configure is to have it automatically start a tty at boot with specific credentials and auto start whatever monitoring I want. That should work I think. The only downside of that is I don’t want it to run on the laptop screen at all, only the hdmi output, so that is where I want to learn more about how all of those display interfaces work on linux so I can configure the service accordingly (I think)

That definitely looks like it is in the direction I want to go. I’ll read those docs. I do have getty on mint so I’ll do some testing

From what I know, headless means different things depending on context - in this instance I’m using it in the sense that my server does not require any user session, or any user input devices, it just powers on and all of the services start up at the system level. I can SSH into it to configure things, but it doesn’t require any user session or input to run the services. A video output probably falls outside of this in some sense, but I would like it to be automatic without requiring an active user session.

The monitor I have is an old Panasonic tv / radio combo, so the display can be flipped on with a physical switch when I’m at my desk, so shouldn’t be any wasted power usage. It won’t be on all the time.

I’m using Linux Mint, which is probably not optimal, but I had a USB ready and I’m just using terminal stuff so it didn’t seem like it mattered too much. It does have systemd, which made it pretty easy to set up the docker stuff

Thanks for the input!

I miss the old tts voices and now everything is ai generated garbage :( Bring back the robot voices!

That’s why we use JavaScript on the front end, JavaScript on the back end, and you can streamline it even more by using JavaScript for the db layer too. After all, if you have too much data to be reasonably parsed in a single .json file, you are probably just architecting wrong.

Do you use vim motions in your JetBrains IDE? We use Webstorm at work and I installed the vim motions plugin because I want to get more fluent with using Vim but I haven’t really given it a fair shot yet.

You are correct that it doesn’t change my stance, and I wouldn’t use animal products (e.g. eggs or wool are two big ones people bring up a lot) even if I know for a fact that the animal is treated well and isn’t suffering at all.

But also - I agree with you. Buying cheap wool from Amazon vs getting wool from your buddy that has some alpacas as pets is extremely different. Same for Walmart eggs (even free range ones - I have seen free range chicken farms, knew someone who treated their chickens “well” by industry standards and it was… not great) vs getting them from the local guy down the street who has a hens that their kids play in the yard with.

I personally will never eat even those animal products because for me being consistent in every scenario is a lot easier, and I don’t feel the need to justify why eating animal products is ok in certain circumstances - I just don’t do it. And I feel like this is a better stance than still finding ways to still consume, but I would be much, much happier if everyone who consumed animal products only did so through such means. That would require that we as a society produce orders of magnitude less animal products, though. It’s not normal or healthy for humans to consume pounds of meat every day, and we produce even more than we consume, leading to excess waste. Basically the whole system is garbage and switching to “kind” animal products would be just as, if not more, difficult than just going vegan as a society.

But yes, I would accept any ally in trying to reduce “Big Ag” or whatever people call it these days. We can argue about the most optimal way to sustain a society when we have fixed the things we can pretty much all agree are problems.

Nah, we’ll just SELECT * from both tables and loop through the arrays in JavaScript to associate the records.

Bees: mix of the top 3