How to cope with a broken HDMI port during a presentation
Last week, I was part of the BarCamp London Hackathon. It had all the usual ups and downs of a Hackathon - laptops crashing, APIs failing, and HDMI ports breaking.
We had a massive projector for participants to show off their work. The HDMI connection was… shit. Sorry, there's no better way to put it. It worked for about 30 seconds and then displayed a green screen. We replaced the HDMI cable. We swapped between a dozen dongles. We tried Linux, Mac, and Windows. In a last ditch attempt at getting it working, we even turned it off then on again.
Nothing.
This was serious. What were we going to do?
Next to the HDMI port was a visualiser. The sort where you can put your papers on to show them to the whole class.
So…

Look, if it's stupid but it works; it's not stupid!
Kai says:
If this was a modern projector, I suppose you could have done a screencast from your mobile phone's camera since virtually everybody has one these days.
@Edent I’d sure like to spend some quality time with whomever came up with that connector - with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.
@Edent Had a similar problem once, but I did not come up with that idea, like, at all. That's just brilliant 😁
I ended up just tossing my slides and use a chalkboard, like an idiot 🤪
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