Seems like a good opportunity for me to pick up one of his physical books. I also love Return of the Lazy GM but just have the PDF. It helped me a ton with prep.

PNY Card works with my GB X7! It’s a PNY Elite 32GB Micro SDHC

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!

Just ordered an X7 and a PNY SD Card. I’ll post here as well when it comes in if they are working.

I almost ordered the SanDisk Ultra pictured, going to kick myself if the PNY doesn’t work and I have to order that one anyway :D

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.

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

That reminds me that I actually have the pdf of his book return of the lazy dm, I just haven’t finished it 😅

The parts I did read were extremely helpful and I am definitely going to finish it and incorporate that into my prep. Thank you!

Good points! There are definitely limits to this.

Foreshadowing is something I have tried to do and would like to do more of. My current campaign and the only long running one I have experience with is all homebrew, and we did start at a place where I had the world itself pretty well fleshed out, but a lot of the character and faction stuff changed quite a bit over the first couple of months. The big changes were early enough that it didn’t really cause problems for our table, but I have experienced what you say, where some of the foreshadowing that I tried to do in the first couple of sessions kind of became irrelevant. This was mainly because I realized the thing I was originally intending to foreshadow wasn’t that interesting and needed to change as the players began living in the world. We are at a place now where the players have mostly uncovered all of the key lore, and I believe they will confront the BBEG soon.

I have learned a lot running this game and it makes me excited to build and run more!

I love this idea. Would have been perfect for my current game, though I have enjoyed the flexibility to adjust things the players don’t know yet.

That could still work with this approach but you’d have to be intentional about keeping changes within the same scope / size