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…

Laptop rotated 90 degrees so the screen is on the visualiser and the keyboard is pointing in the air. I'm giving the thumbs up.

Look, if it's stupid but it works; it's not stupid!


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3 thoughts on “How to cope with a broken HDMI port during a presentation”

  1. 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.

    Reply

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