# Journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 8: Zero Tolerance

Sometime between buying the T430 and the Bolt, I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero to build a low-power terminal.  The goal was to make it the primary interface for an ambitious home automation project I was working on at the time, but this would be terminated before it got to the hardware testing phase. Being a v1.3 board meant no network access, so I got the Zero W in the hopes of building a low-power laptop with a battery runtime of nearly 24 hours, another ambitious idea which never became reality.  The furthest I got was a Pi Zero W with the Ethernet hat running Void, with no case and no WiFi support. Just a bare board laying out in the open, gathering dust.  The Pimoroni 8" IPS display was purchased for the above terminal project and sat in a box unused, having no idea how to mount it properly.  Eventually I got the Eyoyo 8" monitor and would use this for the Pi, along with the official Raspberry Pi keyboard. I would play with this setup on and off for a while, trying to write code for a weather station and t
esting some Go programs I was working on.  Then in 2021, a series of thunder storms came through and knocked over a bunch of trees, tore the power line off the side of the house and caused a bit of flooding. Early one morning, lightning struck too close to the house and destroyed some electronics which included a smart TV, a signal converter and...  the T430.

Dumb-ass that I am at times, the machine was still plugged in to a plain old extension cord despite knowing the weather was turning bad again. The 2.5" 1TB SSD had either been killed by the surge or by me dropping the dead laptop in an attempt to harvest the insides.  Not the first time I've lost data wholesale; the old XP machine taught me how important it is to have backups of the backup when both of its HDDs failed in the same week, taking out years of music, photos, archived websites and countless other files in the blink of an eye. The 256GB SSD with Void installed was still intact, as was the 1TB mSATA which contained a full copy of everything that was on the dead drive, so I carefully put this inside one of the anti-static bags the Pi boards were shipped in, treating it like a holy relic while I waited for an adapter to arrive and only plugging it in when it was absolutely necessary.

This left me in the awkward position of having just two computers and a 15" FHD display which I hated to use from the Linux console because the resolution was too high and I didn't want to keep an X session running full-time. By then I'd quit playing Minetest and moved on from the Blender projects, so the Bolt was hardly used at all.  The Pi Zero W with its 8" 1024x768 monitor became the daily driver for nearly two years while the Bolt would collect dust and take up space.  Surprisingly, it wasn't that bad unless I needed to compile some Go code, but this was uncommon since I'd pretty much quit programming after the home automation project spawned a downward spiral and a triplet of essays explaining why my code sucks and how I'm an A-hole... In a way it feels like the universe was pushing me towards this comically under-powered configuration with the death of the T430, but I would come to prefer this over the other setups.  Something just felt right about having only enough display to show a single 80x30 con
sole session, while tmux would allow quickly switching between sessions so I wouldn't go insane.  The Pi was never set up with X because it seemed superfluous for such a low-powered machine.

Then in January 2023 the desire to write code would come back, so I fired up the dusty old Bolt while plugged into the 8" display, only to end up with a console font so small it was almost completely unreadable.  Laziness got the best of me and I decided to just SSH into the Bolt like I should have done from the very start.  I plugged the Pi back into the 8" monitor but... The display wasn't working...  Somehow I'd killed yet another monitor without even trying, so I plugged the Pi into the 15" display to find that the keyboard wasn't working!  What the hell?  Is the universe punishing me for leaving the confines of the Pi with its single-core CPU and 512MB RAM? Stuck with having just the Bolt and the 15" display with a wireless keyboard I took a shortcut and resorted to an X session with awesome-wm and a custom build of the st terminal to get my CLI fix.  This felt like moving from a computer to a typewrite since the Logitech keys were quite stiff and actually made my fingers sore for the first few days, ha
ving gotten used to teh minimal key travel and weak springs of the RPi keyboard.

Not even a day had passed before I got sick of this setup, so a quick search on Amazon turned up the JaiHo 12" 800x600 IPS monitor for less than $100, which I bought without much consideration to just how large this thing would actually turn out to be.  It had been years since I'd seen a 12" 4:3 display and it still surprise me how the memory failed to resurface until the unit arrived. Oddly enough my lack of patience would once again make an appearance but for the better.  On the day the new monitor was due for delivery, I'd get curious and see if the 8" unit was actually dead. I dug out the power cord and plugged it in without any idea what to expect. Sure enough, the screen came to life with the blazing blue default image, leaving me feeling like an ass for having spent money that could have paid for a second SSD for the Bolt.  When the new monitor arrived I was delighted to find that it came with the wall-mounting plate, VGA and BNC cables and an HDMI right-angle adapter already plugged in. How thoughtfu
l!  That old 8" monitor didn't include any of these accessories, nor did it even have a proper base to mount it to.

Once more the Bolt would be plugged in only to find the console font was still too small, but this time I wasn't messing around.  I quickly found a page that details how to set the resolution by modifying some grub files and set it to 800x600.  This gave me a console with 100x37 output, probably the maximum comfortable setting for a display this size.  Since I'd also ordered a 1TB NVMe SSD for the Bolt, the time came to see if some other operating systems could finally be installed.

=> index.gmi Index
=> 9.gmi Next - Beyond the Void
=> ../../index.gmi Home