Reposting this from here from 2023, after I stumbled across it tonight and it hits hard.
The text in the image:
I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it’s trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it’s downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it’s being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my usage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology
I’m surprised I’ve yet to hear of a homebrew industry of completely cutting out the microcontrollers and soldering in a Pi or something to drive the raw display. I don’t predict it to be easy, but it doesn’t seem completely unobtainable?
Flashing a custom bootloader would be even better, but I assume that hasn’t been done because they got that shit cryptographically locked down at the chip level.
There’s definitely custom ROMs; I run one on my current phone. You should too, if your model makes it possible - they tend to be OSS Android forks and can do whatever the stock one can, but better. (DivestOS being my personal choice, for the Google-freeness)I suppose I could have cut out the SoC and replaced it with the same SoC but not locked already. I didn’t think of that, lol! Maybe I still could - it’s still relatively new, but selling the thing feels like letting a great evil back into the world. I have no idea how hard the particular one is to pull apart in a controlled manner.Using a different chip would be pretty hard. You said microcontroller, but a phone is closer in function to a desktop PC than a dishwasher. There’s high-bandwidth things going on and you’re going to need a lot of bespoke circuitry and software to kludge it. Forget about the end product having the same form factor, too.What?
This is a discussion about televisions.
Fuck, wrong thread.
Somewhere else I was talking about a phone I bought expecting I could flash it, but that I couldn’t. I read this as a reply to that.
Yeah, it seems like it should be doable. Actually, it’s weird that big monitors cost so much considering it’s the same size of display.