Electronics store clerk: "Can I help you?"

Me: "Good afternoon sir. I'm a developer and lifelong PC gamer. I received a second hand PS4, and might buy a next gen console at the end of the year. People tell me that in front of this soft wide desk chair people call a "couch", you need some sort of large computer monitor to enjoy console gaming"

Clerk: "Yeah, we sell TVs. What TV do you have now?"

Me: "I don't own a TV. I just want a huge 4K computer display with a good response time, excellent refresh rate, and great contrast"

Clerk: "OK so this is an entry level 55" smart TV. It's 120hz, QLED, has full array local dimming. It's great for gaming. It's €1000. We also have this LG OLED smart TV for €1200, which is a step up in terms of contrast and response time..."

Me: "Wait... Smart TV? No, I don't want a TV with an operating system. I want a computer display."

Clerk: "There aren't a lot of big computer displays. We have this ASUS ROG 55" computer monitor. It's also 120hz. Very similar response time, but the brightness and contrast aren't as great, it's edge-lit"

Me, trying really hard to make out the contrast differences under ugly fluorescent lights of the store: "So it's a worse big couch display, without smart OS. How much is it?"

Clerk: "€3500"

Me: "So what you're saying is that while the displays are similar or even better, the operating system on all these TVs is so incredibly bad, you have to give €2500 discount for people to even buy it?"

Decided to work several days at home. Made my home working place comfy with TV as second monitor.

When you have an unused tv, turn it into a monitor.

Moved out a few months ago. Love my setup. Dual monitor at desk and a big ass TV + laptop for when I want the couch. Coffee to top it off.

So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.

So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and

.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..

Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.

Nothing.

So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!

I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,

3.. 2.. 1..

and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.

Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it

P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.

So yesterday evening I was going to play some games. Checked NVIDIA and saw new update (no beta). So I went to install it and it literally fucked up my graphics card.

One monitor stopped working instantly and the other one got this old tv effect like when you had no signal.

Took me two hours to downgrade to my old drivers because I couldn't fucking see shit.

PLS NVIDIA DONT PUSH NEW DRIVERS IF YOU FUCKIN NOT TESTED THEM

Just in case nobody has mentioned this yet:

Yes Microsoft I do have a dualhead setup.
Yes Microsoft I do want to watch video on my left screen while having window focus on something on the right monitor.
No Microsoft this doesn't mean that I *lost* focus on the left window.
No Microsoft this doesn't mean that I want your Movies and TV application to suddenly minimize (and continue playing anyway) while I focus on some server monitoring window on my right display.

Microsoft, there exist people that use more than your average user with a single C: drive that play Candy Crush on Facebook all day. And the limitations that you currently impose might very well be what keeps the Microsoft UWP applications from getting adopted. Because you know what? SMPlayer, a default application in any of my Linux workstation machines, it does handle such window transitions just fine!

Microsoft, I love how you at least gave us the option to enable Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V in WSL and conhost in general over that abomination that is Right-click and Return (those are so random!) that are relics from CP/M. But seriously? At this rate, I'd definitely not call it usable for anyone but those with a single monitor yet.

So please _/\_

I learnt something from every single project I made, but this one... it was really different, new language, new library, new hardware.

Problem:
there's an infopoint in a place, that was really hard to use (ball mouse over a monitor)

Solution:
make the screen be touch.

Developing the solution:
- after a bit of research I find out there's a library/project called OpenCV
- there are example programs that detect hands written in C++ (which I know) and Python (which I don't know)
- the whole infopoint works on a raspberry PI, with raspbian (I'm not new to linux, but it's somehow different, plus tons of customization)

So I spend like 3 weeks trying to understand how to make it work, at first, the webcam was on the TV and you could move the mouse just by shaking your hand, but it didn't work too well, so we tried making the webcam look at the screen and then calculate the differences between "no-hands" and "user-hand", but should have been calibrated, wasn't too precise... dropped solution.

put the webcam 30cm above the screen, let it just analyse a few centimeters of sight from the screen and it worked flawlessly, BUT it could just recognise the horizontal axis => had to rework the infopoint UI to make it dumb-easy

It all finally worked, I learnt python, openCV, a bit of photography

Then hated it all and decided to never do that again

At a previous job I bumped heads with the IT person a lot because he would spread misinformation about technology so the owners would never replace him. This was conversation with the VP:

VP: Hey I just got a new security setup at my house and I can monitor everything with my phone.
Me: That's cool.
VP: I'm rethinking it because [IT guy] said it was very dangerous to have, what do you think?
Me: ....? What did he say was dangerous about it?
VP: He said hackers could then gain access to cameras and plan the perfect time to rob me since it's in the cloud.
Me: I seriously doubt anyone is planning an Ocean's 11 heist to steal your TV.
VP: Yea I thought it sounded weird when he told me.

Realized i slack too much because of third monitor that i use for "background" youtube,tv shows, movies. Removed it also forced my self to working by just playing music with headphones and dimmed light.

Settings some goals for each day.
And when i feel i got too distracted do 20 pushups.

Would you guys use a LED TV as a monitor? Don't want to buy a monitor and want to use that one instead until it dies. But I am not sure how long it will last tho

Should I spend my money on a monitor? Sitting 30cm from a TV for so long isn't healthy, but monitors are soooooooo expensive?
I don't want to use my secondary monitor as primary because it's relatively small. What do we think?

My desk/room setup
An Asus A555LF connected to an Acer LCD Monitor and a Samsung Smart TV connected wirelessly(Intel Wi-di) dual boots to Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 8.1.
@localhost

!Rant

Just spent almost an hour trying to figure out why my computer won't display on my tv monitor (because the best smart TV is a PC). I tried everything, unplugging the graphics card and using the motherboard, tried another tv, tried different sockets. Tried another graphics card etc.

Eventually, without notice, after plugging it to a regular PC monitor, it started working. No clue why. But it works now so I'm happy.

Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.

Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.

I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.

Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.

The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..

with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire

tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either

P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount

I'm going to talk about ancient history. When I was getting started with computers, my dad got me a Radio Shack Tandy computer (yes, the ones you had to use a TV as a monitor). The damn thing was broken from the start, I'm not from the US, so returning it and getting a new one wasn't easy.

He managed to find some place to get it fixed, got me started with Basic, and here I am.

I currently have a single monitor setup.

I want to upgrade. Which one is better?

1. Buying another monitor (same as I have)
2. Buying a big 40" TV and code on that

I wanted to buy a 50 inch LCD 4K TV for my room to wall mount it in my room as third display for coding and monitoring.

I went to a TV store and already saw 4 people in a Queue waiting to buy a OLED TV for 3000 $.
Currently I dont understand, why a lot of people are hiped for OLED TV's.

For me a OLED on anything with a batterie is the better option, but not on a stationary monitor.

Sure OLED got the deeper black, but on a stationary Monitor you want the best colors and for that there's LCD.

But OLED TV's are selling triple the price of a LCD and people buy it like it's the best shit ever. WTF!

Kinda rant somehow.

So French TV recently filmed a monitor from one of their employees for one of their reportages.
But the thing is

Passwords were written on etiquettes glued to monitor.

Don't do that television please omg

Why is it that every monitor i buy/use is subpar compared to an almost 10 year old lg "monitor tv" that my mom bought back then and was used almost non stop for 5 years?

Just spent 600$ on a samsung something something, its curved and freesync and whatever and then i put it next to the old lg and the samsung is so washed out and flickery.

Flipping SMPlayer - I opened a video on other monitor (TV) and was trying to lower default volume (by keys) to not wake up family. But the SMPlayer decided to show some window about donations which blocked all hotkeys for a player. Good job, now that I probably woke my family I am sure I won't donate you.