For me, the interesting part is using hidclient and BlueZ. Tablet(s) and a Bluetooth equipped Intel Galileo, among other uses.
Chap turns busted laptop into phone keyboard, in Himalayan book-rescue mission
We all know that sinking feeling when you realise your laptop screen is broken and you need to use it sooner than you can get it fixed. So has Thomas Buckley-Houston, who's written a MacGyver-esque how-to for getting to his phone from the laptop's keyboard (going the other way via VNC is easier) – when he couldn't see the …
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Monday 24th October 2016 09:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not quite as hardcore but...
... I do recall back in the 90's being asked to install Windows 95 Japanese (*) on a laptop. It took me several goes to get it right (I think I had to install regular 95 first then install the Japanese version on top) so I had to ask the user to draw out all the kanji characters for the install wizard questions/answers.
(*) not just a "language pack add on" kind of thing, but a complete "everything is translated" version where the only English text was for trademarks/names/etc.
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Monday 24th October 2016 10:49 GMT Lee D
Re: Not quite as hardcore but...
I once tried to fix a Spanish au pair's laptop. Most stuff in Windows you can guess the equivalent of, but we were uninstalling and reinstalling an AV and trying to clean up the computer generally.
At one point, we resorted to Google Translate which did enough of a job to get things done.
Until we hit one dialog on the AV installation.
It translated as "Send a second piano". I wasn't sure that was going to help at all, to be honest, so I didn't dare press it.
(It was obviously a button to "try again", but it was quite hilarious at the time)
Other joys include trying to use monitors that have had their display settings flipped sideways, Chinese keyboards (a work of art even if you speak Chinese, apparently), and one machine that would only give the top-right 640x480 pixels of the screen even though it was drawing to a full HD framebuffer.
Fortunately, I work in schools, so the keyboard shortcuts to activate the old "control-button menu" on the top-left of every window, and then slide the windows back into view and resize them using the keyboard are in my long-term memory.
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Tuesday 25th October 2016 23:45 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Not quite as hardcore but...
"It translated as "Send a second piano". I wasn't sure that was going to help at all, to be honest, so I didn't dare press it."
That sounds like someone finally got around to sending the three and fourpence so they could go to the dance, but when they got there the piano was broken.
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Monday 24th October 2016 11:07 GMT Steve Graham
Why didn't he start the laptop in console mode? He'd still have been working blind, but would miss out the step of opening a terminal window.
(I'd have installed telnetd to being with. You could then log in from the phone using existing username/password and wouldn't have to set up SSH blind. Sure, there's a window of vulnerability until you get the secure connection going, but maybe the risk is low up a Himalaya?)
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Monday 24th October 2016 20:11 GMT mjflory
Illuminating a dark screen
Thomas Buckley-Houston's blog post is a very helpful guide to using a display-challenged laptop. I've found my way around a couple of MacBook Airs with dead backlighting by shining a 1000 lumen LED flashlight (or "torch," if you like; "Rayz" brand) at the screen at an oblique angle. It's hard to find the cursor, but sometimes shining the light through the translucent Apple logo on the back helps with that. It doesn't sound like the backlight was the problem with his Dell XPS 15, though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
