…Mile High Piece o’ Pie in the Sky!
That’s one of those weird Moorhead-isms. 24 hours in a car with your family will do that to you. After the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn audiotapes grew stale and we started commenting on roadside advertisements, embellishments quickly arose and road delirium took its toll.
Anyway, my sister bought me a Raspberry Pi a couple years ago. At the time, I think she intended it to be a low cost computer introduction for my daughter. But by the time the kid was old enough to understand basic computer inputs, she had a tablet, so the Pi sat unused. Then I made a dashboard, similar to my recent Xbox project, but this quickly fell into disuse as the Pi would timeout and I’d have to hunt down a keyboard and mouse to refresh the browser again (I discussed this recently). Then I simply plugged it into the network as a Linux experimentation device to self-teach the command line interface. Sudo apt-get upgrade! cd /etc/…uhhhh ls… sudo nano /boot/config.txt… You get the idea. I figured if I really screwed something up, it was a low-risk device I could wipe clean.
The old laptop had been reassigned. Sitting in the basement on the shelf with the network equipment, devoid of battery and working WiFi card, it served as a simple OS to run a web browser. With an external monitor, it ran two windows–my Google calendar, and my weather radar. Then Windows’ on-board SMART monitor detected an imminent hard drive failure. I repeatedly ignored the warning, since I didn’t really care about its longevity and all its data had since been backed up. Then one day the computer installed updates and failed to find the drive upon reboot. Maybe one day I’ll swap the drive and install a Linux distro.
But I missed the omnipresent calendar, so I decided it was time to revive the Pi and once again give it purpose. After all, all I needed was a basic machine that could run a browser (and Windows had been overkill, and a big security hole). So I ordered a cheap keyboard and mouse from Amazon, which I received 2 days later (I love Prime’s free 2-day shipping). I also needed an HDMI to VGA adapter, which Amazon was happy to provide as well. I hooked up that 18-year old Apple LCD display (which retailed for $1,999 at the time; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Studio_Display#15-inch_flat_panel_.281998.E2.80.932003.29, https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA473/en_US/StudioDisplay_15inchLCDSetup.PDF) plugged in the peripherals, and…everything worked instantly, because it isn’t Windows.
After some quick updating, I had the calendar up and running in kiosk mode. All things considered, this was pretty benign, and was almost too easy to feel like a bona fide project. Still, it got me the hour nerd fix I needed.
–Simon