I was staying at a… mature hotel this week. Look at those comfy stairs! Don’t you want to take a nap on them right there and now?
As a bonus, the room had a TV that was not built into the wall or otherwise obstructed. The HDMI port was accessible, and I could connect my mini PC to the TV. All of a sudden, a magic moment emerged:
Together with the retro furniture, and feeling clever for bringing the cable, and seeing my stuff appear on the hotel’s TV screen that was showing a soap opera moments before – I felt like I was eight again: We were visiting grandma and granddad; my brother and I had brought our exciting new Commodore Plus/4 so we could hook it up to the black-and-white TV in the tiny playroom upstairs. The feeling of accomplishment we had after all the fiddling to get it to display the computer’s picture – our picture, the one that we controlled! Back then it was figuring out how to adjust the channel frequencies on the TV, scanning through endless static until the BASIC prompt began to form; now, it was finding a picture mode that doesn’t chop off the borders and doesn’t apply a horrible sharpening filter.
Sadly, the image above cannot fully capture that emotion. Was it because “hijacking” the TV programme felt similar? Or because the mini PC doesn’t have its own display and needs the TV, just like the old Plus/4 did? That it only needs to work at all, and the resolution or colors don’t matter?
Or maybe the smell is just missing. :)
