I’m a robotics researcher. My interests include cybersecurity, repeatable & reproducible research, as well as open source robotics and rust programing.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’m using a recent 42" LG OLED TV as a large affordable PC monitor in order to support 4K@120Hz+HDR@10bit, which is great for gaming or content creation that can appreciate the screen real estate. Anything in the proper PC Monitor market similarly sized or even slightly smaller costs way more per screen area and feature parity.

    Unfortunately such TVs rarely include anything other than HDMI for digital video input, regardless of the growing trend connecting gaming PCs in the living room, like with fiber optic HDMI cables. I actually went with a GPU with more than one HDMI output so I could display to both TVs in the house simultaneously.

    Also, having an API as well as a remote to control my monitor is kind of nice. Enough folks are using LG TVs as monitors for this midsize range that there even open source projects to entirely mimic conventional display behaviors:

    I also kind of like using the TV as simple KVMs with less cables. For example with audio, I can independently control volume and mux output to either speakers or multiple Bluetooth devices from the TV, without having fiddle around with repairing Bluetooth peripherals to each PC or gaming console. That’s particularly nice when swapping from playing games on the PC to watching movies on a Chromecast with a friend over two pairs of headphones, while still keeping the house quite for the family. That kind of KVM functionality and connectivity is still kind of a premium feature for modest priced PC monitors. Of course others find their own use cases for hacking the TV remote APIs:






  • Looks like Moonlight does have their app up on the Apple store or iOS, and Sunlight has binaries for most operating systems. Personally, instead of Sunlight’s server, I still use Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software to stream games, as it takes less effort to configure. Of course, Nvidia may not be applicable if you’re using integrated or AMD graphics instead.

    Although, with Nvidia recently deprecating support for it’s shield device, Sunlight provides support for the same protocol that Moonlight was originally developed against, but it’s also open source. I’ve not used multi monitor streaming with GeForce Experience, something Sunlight would be much more flexible in configuring.

    As for connectivity, I’m unsure if iOS supports the same USB network feature that Android has. I’d imagine at least the iPhone would, as that’s a core feature/option for mobile hotspot connectivity, but maybe that’s nixed from iPad iOS? Alternatively you could get yourself a USB C hub or dock with an ethernet adapter and pass through power delivery, so you can connect your iPad with a wired network and charge simultaneously.

    Or you could just use Wi-Fi, but with wireless networks dropping and retrying packets, that’ll impact latency or bitrate quality when casting displays. Although for something mostly static like discord windows, that’s probably less of an issue. Windows 11, and maybe 10, also have a hotspot mode, where you could share your wired network via your PCs wireless radio via and ad hoc Wi-Fi SSID. That could reduce latency and improve signal reception, but you’d have to start the hotspot setting every session or whenever the device disconnects from windows’ hotspot for more than 15 minutes or something.

    You could try other remote display streaming software as well, like Parsec. However they have a online account login requirement with the freemium model, so I prefer the open source client Moonlight instead. However parsecs a lot easier too use when streaming from outside your home, or when remotely single screen co-oping with friends, without having to configure firewalls or domain names.


  • If you already have a similarly sized tablet, you could just buy a dummy HDMI plug, a few dollars, to add a second virtual desktop and then simply cast that screen to the mobile device.

    There are pretty nice Android tablets now with 2.5k 120 hz HDR OLD screens. You can just connect it directly to the computer via USB, enable USB network tethering, then use something like the Moonlight client app with Sunshine screen casting server. With the wired connection, and a high bit rate such as 150 Mbps, you can get single digit millisecond latency and hardly tell the difference from an native HDMI display.

    Tablets like those might be on the high end, but at least you’d have nice secondary display that’s a bit more multifunctional. Or just go with a cheaper LCD based tablet or old iPad, if color accuracy, refresh rate, or resolution isn’t a priority.
















  • What about a semi transparent terminal window? When I started out learning linux command line interfaces, it helped having the docs just behind my shell session for reference when all I had was a tiny old laptop. But now I don’t bother ricing up my DE anymore. I just want some default window tilling keybindings that work out of the box, and I’m good to go.


  • Can you imagine the eye strain one would get programming on a translucent screen every day? One where your always having to keep your eyes focused on semi transparent text and graphical interfaces in the foreground, and not the distracting and ever changing background, continuously shifting in parallax as you adjust your head and viewing angle. Not having my display buttressed up against a wall, or having to deal with glare and screen reflections, or even low contrast monitors in general are all things I find infuriating already.

    But I guess the Sci-Fi future of ergonomics is holograms. *You must have your migraines, and you must enjoy them.








  • Image Transcription: Meme


    A photo of an opened semi-trailer unloading a cargo van, with the cargo van rear door open revealing an even smaller blue smart car inside, with each vehicle captioned as “macOS”, “Linux VM” and “Docker” respectively in decreasing font size. Onlookers in the foreground of the photo gawk as a worker opens each vehicle door, revealing a scene like that of russian dolls.


    I’m a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too!