The Eye of Pizza is No Longer Upon You

Yet another casualty of last week's PG&E antics: the projector in the pizza eyeball no longer lights up. Honestly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did: it's been on 24/7 for nine years.

Sadly, the Gakken World Eye is now going for almost a grand on eBay.

So I bought the cheapest desktop video projector I could find ($30) just to see if I could aim that at the inside of the dome. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no. That projector needs to be about 2½ feet behind the dome to fill it and be in focus, which is less of an eyeball and more of an eye sausage.

I took both apart and they have very different projectors and optics, so just swapping lenses isn't an option.

I suspect that in principle I could put some extra lenses in front of this thing to make it go but I have no idea how to do that.

So. Got a Gakken World Eye that you'd like to donate to the cause of "weird DNA Pizza decor"? Or, do you know of a desktop video projector that can throw an in focus 10" tall image from a distance of 10" to 20"?

Update: Fixed!

Previously, previously.