When Your Screen Breaks in the Himalayas | Hacker News Reader

When Your Screen Breaks in the Himalayas

tombh.co.uk

229 pointstombh55 comments

Pretty ingenious workaround. Just a note to skip some of the first 'blind' section (installing openssh server through the desktop environment with no screen visible):

Ctrl+Alt+F1 still works in many distros to switch VTs to a text-mode terminal tty1, and likely also works without logging into the desktop. Ctrl-Alt-F7 to switch back.

From here, you should be able to login blind, then sudo apt install openssh-server (assuming Internet connectivity,) or kill whatever misbehaving process, or even restart the whole DE or computer.

Absolutely! Should have thought of that myself. Added to the blog post now. Thanks.

The Z shell's and Bourne Again shell's Control-L key binding would have helped with operating using only the top of the screen, too.

Switching to TTY2 is probably a better idea. I haven't used Linux in a while, but IIRC modern distributions use TTY1 for the graphical session due to some sort of limitation with systemd.

I don't think that's true. Under my NixOS distribution the display manager tty is configurable and defaults to Ctrl+Alt+F7 (with systemd).

Arch defaults to tty1 on my machine at least

For a bit of context: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/141604/why-x-server-...

Not so on my Bunsenlabs installation, which is just plain Debian, systemd included, with a minimalist OpenBox theme. Ctrl+Alt+F1 from the desktop gives me a text login session, and Alt+F7 returns to the desktop. Alt+F(1-6) switches between six text sessions.

AFAIK:

Not a limitation, but the notion that the graphical console should replace the text console on the same TTY.

Kind of makes sense, but very consistency/tradition-breaking. One of those decisions that should have been implemented a while back in order to be elegant.

Actually, it dates from a couple of years before systemd existed, and started with the idea of minimizing monitor flicker during the system bootstrap in Fedora. The idea was to make the display not switch between text and graphics modes, as it did when successively switching from graphical splash screen to textual virtual terminal to graphical X display. Starting the X server on the default virtual terminal eliminated the middle part.

By the time that systemd came along, this was already established Fedora behaviour with upstart. The systemd people had to work to replicate existing semantics.

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterStartup

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue150#Moving_X_from_VT7...

* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=614454#c6

* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=619889#c12

And now systemd is spreading this behavior to other distros that has adopted systemd?

Weird how this is not know by more people, apparently

"Kids these days" don't even know what it is to spend days having to make their X11/Xorg work * coff * coff

There is no mention of what altitude he was at, but it's worth noting that LCDs are often rated to no higher than 10k-12kft, because tiny pockets of air at trapped during manufacturing (at sea level) may expand and cause damage.
http://www.dfrsolutions.com/pdfs/2004_HighAltitude_Hillman-B...

Leh (in Ladakh) is at 10000 ft.

When the content of your website only fills 60 percent of your mobile viewport and you can't zoom.

Iirc, Android has a setting in the disability/accessibility section to override zoom-blocking.

Dunno about android in general, but all the major browsers there should have a such an override option.

I just removed "maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no", is that better? TBH I would have just copied that from somewhere assuming it was best practice :/

On line 402 in css/style.css, change `.wrapper` to
.wrapper { width: 100%; padding: 10px 0; }

Yes, perfect, thank you. Deployed.

You could probably also change
@media (max-width: 550px) .content { padding: 0 5px; }
but at that point it's more of a style preference.
(also, I just signed up for a HN account for this haha)

Well I agree with your style preference, deployed.

Thanks! Worst practice, actually. Now I'll finishing reading the article, looks exciting! :)

That is what Apple used to recommend but the general approach these days is to allow the user to scale however they want as long as it doesn't break your UI, and for accessibility reasons.

Cool work around. Just adding another cool way to get laptops IP without ifconfig. AVAHI. install avahi daemon (comes pre installed with most distros) and your laptop can be referred with a domain name(generally LAPTOPNAME.local, "local" domain). By using this you won't have to worry about the changing IPs, you always refer to the laptop with that name. Very handy.

Excellent suggestion, especially because it's cross-platform. Thanks, added and acknowledged on the post.

Cool, thanks. But there is no need for acknowledgements in open source community, don't you think.. Anyway, thanks for the post :)

Great stuff! For the record: Avahi is an implementation of Zeroconf. Bonjour is another implementation from Apple. Bonjour is built into macOS. Bonjour is available for Windows too, for example it can be downloaded somewhere on apple.com. (Personally I just install Cyberduck on all Windows machines I touch - it's an open-source SFTP/FTP/block-storage client and includes Bonjour for Windows.)

I'm reminded of the section in Cryptonomicon where the protagonist is imprisoned with his laptop and needs to hack with the screen turned off, for security reasons

The screen was on, just not private due to tempest snooping. Private strings were output using Morse flashes from HD activity LED. :)

I haven't reread it since about 2000 so you are now likely to be right. I was sure there's another bit where he's doing things blind, but memory serves me badly! I do recall he needed to make sure anyone reading his screen remotely couldn't read his code. Time to dip in for another look

Huge amount of useful information for anybody with a laptop - screens break anytime, anywhere, and of you are in maker-mode at 0300 you wont be getting it fixed for a day! VNC definitely a great tool to have on and running all the time in case this happens. The other tools very useful to know about.

Thank you :) So pleased you appreciate it, there's a surprising amount of time and energy spent in all that. And yes that was exactly my thought, the hacks could be useful for any number of reasons, not just broken screens in the Himalayas.

I usually never comment like this, but admire your passion for ingenuity and glad you shared it.

Thank very much :)

Nice hacks. Just wanted to comment that the free version of JuiceSSH is crippled. I forget in what way but I tried it out a while back because I wanted to test out mosh support and ended up deleting it because of the crippling.
Now I'm happily back with ConnectBot (I didn't really need mosh support anyway), although I do see that screen status bar update screen scrolling thing happen from time to time, never worked out why or how to fix it, but it goes away if I start a new session.

Cool hack, though I really doubt it's needed.
I broke the screen on my Dell Mini 9, bought one on eBay for $20 and it arrived in Guatemala 4 days later. It was easy enough to swap out myself [1]
I'm in West Africa now, and just hard some parts shipped to me - arrived in 4 days from the USA.
Shipping is global, fast, and easy.
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/laptop-repaired

I definitely considered this, it was just the look on local faces, they said that stuff does arrive but sometimes goes missing too. My screen is more like $300 so considering I have a functional setup I decided I was happy enough. Besides the hackery was worth it in itself :) And I'll be in Delhi next week now anyway.

When you're a blind web user.

It certainly makes me appreciate my eyes.

What's the mtr command you're using for that pretty color ping?

After starting mtr, press "d" twice.

> The gist of my hack is to use my phone as a ‘monitor’, by which I don’t mean directly streaming video output as in VNC or X-forwarding
Wouldn't that be more simple?

I did try for a bit, but the screen update FPS was annoyingly slow. Also the resolution difference required a lot of pinch zooming. I think it'd be worth experimenting with reducing the desktop resolution to match my phone cos it would likely alos increase the FPS. However, I'm productive enough now with mosh and tmux.

Ah, htop.

Ha, blurry, but still recognisable.

Leh is capital of province in which this happened, it has 30K people. I think it should be possible to just buy new crappy laptop, which is standard procedure for DNs.
> There are no easy ways to get crashed computers or laptops repaired in Leh. There is a large samsung dealer shop in the Leh Main Market.
http://wikitravel.org/en/Leh

I did think of that, also getting a crappy external monitor too. But I didn't want to reinstall everything again and my laptop is pretty powerful, so I didn't want to lose out on that. Also, I just like the challenge of a hack.

How's the internet speed in Leh?

Well half the time there's no Internet at all. Then the rest of the time it's mostly high latency and Internet at ~5kbps. Perhaps once a week we get a few hours of 3G, hitting speeds of 200kbps tops.

Have you heard of AirJaldi? - they're a not for profit that have been setting up long haul 802.11 links throughout the Indian Himalayas.
Not sure if they've reached Leh though.

No I hadn't. I just checked and the nearest network is Manali, so they're on their way :) [1]. I'd heard about such networks before, but wasn't aware they were so actuvely and successfully implemented, very inspiring. 1. https://airjaldi.com/networks/manali-network/

if i were in the mountains writing a book and my laptop broke i would just get a pencil and paper!

In actual fact, I have to use pen and paper more than usual because vanilla Android can't display 2 apps at once. So for example, one time I wanted to read something from Wikipedia into a Whatsapp audio message, so I had to write the salient points down on paper first.

Time to buy another phone. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com