I love Skald Against the black priory, and I’ve also started The wandering Village. Both well under that limit!

Thank mr skeletal

I left work early one day and was driving home on some back roads. I got behind a jeep that started to slow and drift into the other lane. He kept drifting and went off the road, jumped the bank and went into a very deep quarry pond. I heard a splash and pulled over and called 911. While on the phone I heard a yell for help and hung up (I didn’t think to stay on the line until after) and ran across to find this guy barely treading water. I swam in and helped him to the bank and talked to him until the emergency services arrived.

Turns out he had some severe internal bleeding and passed out driving. The cold water woke him up, but he was too weak and disoriented to swim.

If I would have left work 5 minutes earlier or later, or if he didn’t have the top off on his jeep, he would have died and nobody would have known where. The pond was deep enough that even the vehicle wouldn’t have been found.

I enjoyed the demo for Heroes of the Seven Isles. I bought the full game when it came out but haven’t had a chance to play it much. Really fun old school point and click adventure puzzle game with hand drawn doodle-style art.

Roots of Chaos series is great and seems to fit these criteria. (The Priory of the Orange Tree, A Day of Fallen Knight, Among the Burning Flowers).

It’s not about the ads to buy things. That’s part of it for sure, but it’s more than that.

Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. want your data, your habits, routines, opinions, etc, so they can influence the way you think and behave and understand the world.

There’s a clip I saw recently of Peter Thiel saying they could never get people to vote for the things they want to do, so instead they are using technology to change things.

Even if you block ads, if you still use platforms owned by tech mega-corps, they have your data. Sure you might not see the targeted ads, and so you think you’re coming out ahead, but you don’t realize that every piece of content you see between the ads you’ve blocked is being filtered to influence the way you think about the world.

That’s awesome, I never knew that! And someone made a similar tool for Linux as well

I watched Jurassic Park again the other day.

“It’s a Unix system, I know this!”

Nedry had a very custom window manager.

That one has been on my list for a bit. I read the Licanius trilogy by the same author and loved it.

Love that one! Going Postal, Mort, and Equal Rites are my favorites in the Discworld series so far (I haven’t read all of them)

That sounds amazing. I love Capaldi and had no idea he did audio books. I’ve also been wanting to read Watership Down.

Just grabbed Among the burning Flowers from my local library. Really enjoyed the other roots of chaos books so I’m looking forward to this one.

I read most of the Bullet Journal Method and what I learned from that has been really useful. Also Mistborn is one of my favorite series, and the last 2 books of era 2 are great.

Most of my space knowledge comes from Elite Dangerous lol. They used a lot of real star catalogs when making the galaxy and visually it’s really good.

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!