Category: Personal

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Projector used as ONLY video display on a Windows desktop/mini PC says “INVALID FORMAT”

This problem is solved, but since I couldn’t find ANY mention of this specific problem or any solution to it online, I thought I’d share my solution in case it’s useful to anyone else who runs into it in the future. Everything I could find in a search was related to projectors on laptops, which negates the “projector as the only display” option since laptops by definition have a built-in display, and solutions always involved using that built-in display to fix it.

I have a mini PC hooked up to a projector for my home theater, which once upon a time ran Kodi (it’s still there but doesn’t get used much anymore) and nowadays mostly runs Firefox to view sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. It boots into Ubuntu Linux by default, but it came with Windows 11 Pro on it, which basically got left there on another partition to rot after repartitioning most of the space to be used by Linux.

Well, until my son found a game on Steam he wanted to play that required Windows but performed like crap in an emulator (his laptop is a MacBook Pro). I thought “this little media PC should handle games really well, it was designed for that actually, so let’s reboot it into Windows and try it there.”

Except I couldn’t (apparently) get it to boot into Windows. After I picked Windows off the GRUB menu, the projector would switch to a message saying “INVALID FORMAT” and that was that. I hooked up an additional monitor to the media PC and tried it (the monitor I had hooked up when I initially loaded Linux on it before connecting it to the projector), and discovered it boots into Windows just fine with that monitor hooked up, and it fact, it would even run the projector fine with that monitor hooked up, too. If I did any of 1) unplugging the second monitor, or 2) telling the Displays settings to display only to the projector, then it would immediately go back to “INVALID FORMAT”.

Everything I could find online about that message seemed to indicate that the PC was trying to transmit to the projector on a resolution that it didn’t support. But in the Displays settings, it was set to one that it did support and it worked fine as long as the other monitor was connected. I was pulling my hair out for a bit.

Then as I was talking through it with a friend online, I started to wonder if maybe it was ignoring the existing settings I had for that display (which were set with another monitor present) and going back to the defaults and/or auto-detecting it wrong when the projector was by itself, and maybe those defaults/auto-detected settings were wrong. But how would I even check this if I can’t see the display to fix it?

SOLUTION: What I ended up doing was installing TightVNC Server, and then connecting to it from another computer over VNC. Then I opened the Displays settings window and watched it while I unplugged the external monitor. As expected, it switched to 480p resolution, which this projector doesn’t support (it only does 720p and 1080p). So, over VNC, I switched it back to 1080p, and the projector screen lit up with my desktop. And it survived reboot. Yay.

I did initially try to enable RDP and connect over that, since it’s built into Windows 11 Pro, but connecting over RDP would log out the console user, and wouldn’t let the remote user touch the display settings (the settings the remote user could see applied to the virtual desktop over RDP rather than the one physically connected to the computer), so VNC was the fallback, and worked fine because it mirrored the existing user’s screen instead of creating a separate login session. I just had to remember to turn them both back off afterwards.

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Ubuntu is 10

I saw “Happy 10th Birthday, Ubuntu” go by in my feed today…

Today is the 10th anniversary of Ubuntu‘s first release.  This is slightly nostalgic as I was employed by them at the time.  I was actually the very first employee of MRS Virtual Development (the legal name of the entity at the time), Robert Collins (mentioned in the above-linked article) being the second. The first two things Mark wanted in his company were a good bug tracker and a good source control system.  My involvement with Mozilla as a volunteer at the time is actually how I came to be involved with it, as I’d been heavily involved with the Bugzilla bug tracking system at that point. Robert had been heavily involved with GNU Arch, an up-and-coming source code management system which was eventually forked by Canonical to become Bazaar.

The biggest thing I remember about my time working for Canonical (as the corporate entity eventually became known) was that I spent 2 weeks at a time in London approximately every 2 months.  I spent almost a quarter of that year in London.  This, of course, was pretty hard on me since it was hard being away from my family so much.

Although I thought the Ubuntu OS was a fantastic idea, and loved the way it was being built (and I still use it to this day on most of my computers), in the end, I didn’t really fit in well with the other people working on it.  Almost everyone else Mark had hired to work on it came from a Debian background, which I had had almost zero involvement with prior to this experience, and the culture was very different from anything I’d ever dealt with before.  I much preferred the culture among the volunteer community at Mozilla.  Fortunately, Firefox was released about 3 weeks later, and the Mozilla Foundation suddenly had money as a result.  I left Canonical and was hired by Mozilla the day before Firefox 1.0 released, and I am still at Mozilla today.  This means I will also be celebrating my 10th anniversary working at Mozilla in just a few weeks.

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The Rainbow Bridge

Reebock: May 1994 - May 26, 2011 (17 years)

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable. All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together.

Author Unknown

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Seven Things

So yeah, I got tagged for this by both Eric Shepherd and Sean Alamares.

Ground rules:
1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

On to the seven things you may or may not have known about me:

1. I grew up as the son of a United Methodist pastor.  So yeah, that makes me a PK.  Somehow I managed to avoid falling into either stereotype of that situation (I knew several people who fit one or the other of them though).  United Methodist pastors typically get moved around between churches every few years.  Most of the time, my dad managed to stay put longer than most, so I only ever moved twice with my family before moving out on my own, once in the middle of Kindergarden, and the other time in the middle of 8th grade.  I would never recommend to anyone ever to move their kids in the middle of a school year.  Just don’t.  But I survived. 🙂

2. With the exception of two exchange programs that I participated in, I’ve never lived outside of the state of Michigan.  It’s a great place to live, when the economy doesn’t suck.  Michigan is currently the only state in the U.S. with a two-digit unemployment rate (10.6% for December 2008).  We can thank the failing auto industry for that.  I count myself very fortunate right now that I work for a company that’s still doing well despite the recession.

3. One of the above-mentioned exchange programs was a pastoral exchange when I was 12 years old.  My dad traded churches (and parsonages) with a pastor in Fleetwood, Lancashire, in the UK, for 6 weeks. We went and lived in his house, and he came and lived in ours. It was a pretty fun experience, and the first (and last) time I’ve ever been to a salt water beach.  The tide pools and miles of sand when the tide was out were quite fascinating.

4. The other of the above-mentioned exchange programs was a student exchange just after I graduated from high school.  I went and stayed with a host family in Concepción, Chile, for 2 months.  Yes, that was also on the ocean.  No, I never went to the beach while I was there.  It was the middle of the winter and too cold. :)  I had a tremendous amount of fun while I was there, and I didn’t want to come back.  The exchange organization that I had gone through for the exchange also had 6-month and 1-year programs in addition to the 2-month program, and I almost managed to get it extended to 6 months.  The only thing that stopped it from happening is my parents had already paid my tuition for the fall semester at college.  I was tremendously shy as a kid, and never had very many friends, mostly because I was too shy to make them.  I wholeheartedly credit this trip with bringing me out of my shell. 🙂

5. I met my wife while hiding in a dormitory basement with 80 other people during a tornado warning 3 weeks into that fall semester my freshman year at college.  I guess it’s a good thing I did come back from Chile when I did. ;)  It was about a year later before we were seriously dating though, and several months after that before we decided to get married.  We held off until after she graduated to get married.  A few months from now we’ll have been married for 15 years, and I love her now more than ever.  We have 2 children, who are now in 1st and 4th grades, and are absolute joys to be parents of… most of the time. 🙂

6. I never graduated from college.  I was working toward a Computer Science degree, and the computer area at Adrian College was pretty much falling apart around my Junior year, for both a lack of qualified faculty and limited number of participating students.  All of the computer classes there were considered part of the Math department at the time.  This wasn’t exactly a good fit.  They had three professors there who actually knew what they were doing with computers.  One of them was the chairman of the Political Science department (and thus only taught one or two computer classes).  One of them was the chairman of the Chemistry department (and thus only taught one or two computer classes).  The third was actually full time in the computer department, but was a native of India, and didn’t have a very good command of the English language, so you couldn’t understand anything he lectured about.  The remaining professors were all math teachers, and didn’t really understand computers well.  I understand that they split computers off to its own department and had a huge push on modernizing it with equipment and qualified faculty not long after I left, but it was already too late for me.  Also adding to the mix, I had gone in with a friend on an off-campus apartment, hoping to get cheaper housing.  My roommate ended up backing out on it after the lease had been signed, so I got stuck with the apartment by myself (which was no longer cheaper as a result).  This meant I had to go get a real job (rather than just a student job on campus) to pay for the rent, and homework of course suffered, and eventually there was no point in continuing school.  After we got married, Lori moved into that apartment with me.  But as strange as it seems, that lowly job working in the hardware deparment at the local Meijer store did actually lead to a career working with computers.  It took seven years to get there, working a little way up and down the chain within Meijer, but it did.  There’s enough meat there for a whole other blog post (or you can just go read my bio on the About page linked at the top, most of it’s in there 🙂 )

7. I’m a huge fan of Asian media, mostly anime.  My taste is mostly in high school dramas, fantasy, scifi, magical girls, and slice-of-life stuff.  I tend to avoid mecha (which is what most people think of when they think of anime for some reason) and Naruto-style stuff.  My current favorites (minus a few) are listed over on the right on my blog.  You can find more (and some of the older stuff) if you dig around in the Anime category on my blog.  The Anime industry is in the middle of a huge upheaval right now, with many of the publishers starting to catch on to online distribution.  Personally I think it’s a great time to be a fan…  having more and more places to go to get good shows right from the publishers.

Tag, you’re it!

Actually, after looking around a little, I can’t find anyone with a blog who hasn’t already been tagged for this, so I guess it’s time to let it die.  It tends to get out-of-hand if you let it grow loosely anyway.  I’ve seen this mème going around Facebook listing both 16 and 25 as the number of things and people to list.  Consider yourself fortunate that the Mozilla community managed to keep it at 7. 🙂