The Pi Lives… With Caveats

As you know, Mrs. Curmudgeon bought an iSlab like a normal American. She loves it. She’s happily twitterbooking or facechatting or whatever it is people do these days.

I chose the path less traveled… then wandered around in the woods and got lost. My Linux laptop was insufficiently weird so I “built” a Raspberry Pi. I endeavor to run it with a smart phone accessory (lapdock). A man who talks to trees is the sort of fellow who would desire an “improvised” laptop. (Call me “adaptive”.) I have no regrets. Incidentally I have my “real” laptop stashed in the truck’s tool box but refuse to use it. (Call me “curmudgeon”.)

Like all things in life, and most that I inflict on myself, the devil is in the details. I’ve hit a snag on the lapdock boot process. The Pi (actually a Pi2) works flawlessly. A chimp could assemble one and I’m apparenlty just the chimp for the job. The lapdock accessory also worked flawlessly during a few test runs. Then I hit the road and it refused to boot to the Pi. Works during testing and craps out at “go time”? That’s why we prepare in advance for the zombies.

I think it’s no big deal but I haven’t yet figured it out. Maybe the lapdock has performance anxiety? I’ll give it a gentle supportive pep talk and then blister it’s paint with a string of profanity. One of the two will do the trick. (Plus there are more logical approaches like tweaking the Pi’s configuration… I’ll report on that later.)

So you’re reading a post that was typed on a $35 toy the size of a cigarette pack but viewed through one of those huge oversized TVs I like to mock.I’m using the computational brains of a peanut to display my pointless text on what looks like a billboard. Could I be a better representation of the election process?

Posting may be light because it’s Christmas and I’m lazy. Also the hotel TV has cable and cable means cartoons and I’m only human. I think I saw Pinky and the Brain on a different channel. I’m about to tune out. Bye.

A.C.

P.S. If you took my word for it that the lapdock worked flawlessly and are now being ridiculed by your loved ones and their iDevices take heart. I’m pulling for ya’ and this is just a hiccup. All I can say for sure is that it worked before and adding hdmi_force_hotplug=1 to /boot/config.txt wasn’t the silver bullet I hoped but it sounds way impressively technical and who wouldn’t want to sound way impressive? (Actually I suspect all of this is somehow the duck’s fault.)