Raspberry Pi 4 for sale or for a donation, anyone?

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 03:01

I’m awaiting my Pi. Fortunately I had spotted something about the overheating problem and got a big heat sink but one thing I was toying with was combining it with a Tv server and having a go at recording some stuff, like the old TiVo, as my trivial use would be to record some commercial TV and fast forward through the adverts like we used to do on the few commercial programs would occasionally watch. Sounds like making it work smoothly with a future 4k TV might be a mite ambitious. But then I don’t really watch TV much at all, and some of the history and science stuff I do sometimes keep up with run through a HDMI and audio cable from an old Linux laptop fast enough to render 1080p smoothly.

In fact as of yesterday evening the old 32”? Samsung smart tv has taken to failing to run any apps like iPlayer from BBC etc at all and now only way to stream is to *have* to run it via the laptop.

I don’t know how ambitious Colin’s electronics repair is and whether he’s interested in finding out why a smart tv should suddenly refuse to play smart anymore. I’ll try resetting to default a couple or more times just in case but does look like time for a new BIG tv! I am a bit frustrated by Green Planet on the old one.

But there never seems to be a good time to buy a 50-60” tv ( max size to fit the space) and just heard that the very latest step-change in 4k screen tek ( name of which has literally slipped my tongue as went to write it down) has just started shipping from Samsung. But costs a lot to be an early adopter!

Perhaps for an interim we should just find a good quality but older big screen second hand TV, possibly not even smart, and run that for a while through a laptop until the market competition starts bringing down real term prices in a year or two.

Might even be able to get an old laptop with 4k like my partners HP laptop that does 4k display on a big monitor for her huge spreadsheets! 

I have something of an obsession with avoiding buying new stuff, and most of the time just ambling along a couple of paces behind the leading edge gets one quite nice kit at a fraction of the monetary costs and delays by ages the scrapping of quite functional stuff. I’ve been acquiring microcomputer and hifi stuff for 40 years and have only bought 4 laptops and one hifi system new since the early 80s. Perhaps I’m obsessively over zealous!