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.

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.

PNY Card works! It’s a PNY Elite 32GB Micro SDHC

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

Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.

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}

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!