Charging Issues

It's been a while since my last post but I was out of town for quite some time and did not take my laptop with me. On return however, I noticed that charging cable for my beloved MacBook Pro 2013 was playing up again. After the original, I've replaced the 60W charger twice and the current one is proving troublesome with the little green light not always lighting up unless it's tweaked.

I've ordered and received a new one which I'll keep in reserve as the current one is not too annoying just yet. It will fail eventually of course. It's worth forking out for new chargers as my laptop with Mint LInux installed is running just fine and doing everything that I want it to do. Likewise my Raspberry Pi is fully operational. The advantages of USB C charging are obvious but of course my old laptop does not have such a port and so I'm stuck. The quality of the chargers I'm buying is clearly suspect but they're cheap and work for a while at least. 

Speaking of my Raspberry Pi, I've discovered that I can listen to music via headphone jack to a USB C and then to USB 3.1 as shown in Figure 1. It's a necessary workaround because I can't get Bluetooth to function and there is no headphone jack, for some mysterious reason. Previously I'd been using the headphone jack on a USB C hub but I've given that to my granddaughter so I had to come up with a workaround.

Figure 1

I still can't get WINE to run and that's something that I'll have to keep working on if I ever want to get my astrology program, Astrolog, to work again.

Sound Problems Solved for Raspberry Pi 4000

After some hours trying a variety of suggested solutions to the Raspberry Pi 400's Bluetooth woes, I finally managed to achieve audio output from the device. Unlike the traditional Raspberry Pi, the 400 does not have an audio jack for reasons known only to the manufacturer of the device. This presented a problem for me because my monitor had no speakers so the HDMI cable had nowhere to send the audio output. 

I had a hub with a variety of ports, including a headphone jack. It could only be connected to a computer or other device via USB C. My 2013 MacBook Pro did not have a USB C port but I recently bought a USB 3 to USB C converter. My Mac had a headphone jack and so I had been using that. However, I tested out the jack on the hub and it worked fine. I then plugged the hub into the 400 via the USB C port but there was no audio out. However, using the USB 3 to USB C converter and plugging to hub into that (as I'd done on my laptop), I finally had audio out.

The Bluetooth problem was never solved and probably never will be but I'm happy to finally have sound on my Raspberry Pi 400, even if it require a converter and hub which I fortunately had at hand.