I recently moved, and the infra provider of the non-profit ISP I use imposes them a two month delay to set up a new fiber line.
During this delay, I met neighbors who accepted to share their WiFi with me. They live a bit far, across the way. The best way I found to get a stable connection with decent speeds was to hang my phone at the top of a window using a salad bag, and share the phone connection to a computer via USB.
I didn't find a way to automatically enable the USB connection sharing before plugging in the USB cable (didn't look for a solution neither, admittedly), so I had to plug the cable, enable the sharing and then put the phone in the bag and adjust the position, all that making sure the cable doesn't disconnect or everything needs to be redone from the start.
I discovered far too late that my distro now has a scrcpy package, which makes enabling the sharing conveniently from the computer.
Yes, I could have tried to ask immediate neighbors instead, probably. I should get my own line this morning, as it happens.
scrcpy is fantastic. I used to write longer texts with it, and now that I can use it again, I'll probably start doing it again.
In recent version of Android, it appears one needs to unlock blindly as the screen is black at this time, I suppose for security reasons.
scrcpy is amazing software something other people might not have realised you could possibly get Dex on some unsupported devices. I got it working on my Galaxy Z Flip 5 using
scrcpy --new-display=1920x1080/284
Amazing tool, but I had to stop using it. On my Samsung phone, I gesture based navigation. And every time I use scrcpy, the navigation stops working, and I have to restart the phone to get it working again. There's a ticket open but the developer has been unable to replicate the issue. Sadly until that is fixed, it is impossible to continue using it. The inconvenience (at least for me) is too real.
Did you manage to get it to work without a functioning screen on the phone?
I believe that unless your phone already has debugging enabled and the machine was already added a trusted machine for debugging, you're out of luck for controlling a phone with a dead screen?
I once dropped my phone like 40cm the 100th time and my screen went completely black. However, the touch still worked! After loads of time and comparing to another android phone, i managed to blindly navigate to that blind mode setting and enable it!
I have immense respect for those that are blind and need to interact this way. In the few days I used my phone this way I noticed multiple apps, especially my bank app with a keypad, had completely broken navigation and iirc not even numbered the actual buttons?! So it was a 'swipe right 9 times, double tap, swipe left 6 times' while the TTS was yelling nonsense!
This would have saved me a lot of mental anguish about 2 years ago, my phone screen died and I needed about 5 authenticators that were on it just to clock in at my (remote) job and get to what I needed to do the job.
Eventually I solved the issue by blind navigating to screen brightness and turning it all the way up, this made the screen act normal until I could replace it.
The lesson here is to not have a single point of such large failure, like I did.
Neat. I went the other way and started writing an RDP server for Android, just so that I can use _one_ client for everything. It’s been tough going, but it’s passably usable now.
Another gem to avoid using a tiny phone screen even more. Worked with my old LG V20 (Android 8.0). Perfectly smooth over USB 2.0. Reasonably smooth over Wi-Fi (adb tcpip 5555 while USB is connected, then scrcpy --tcpip=192.168.1.xxx_ wirelessly).
[TIL/xkcd#1053] scrcpy ("pronounced 'screen copy'") is "Display and control your Android device"
> mirrors Android devices (video and audio) connected via USB or TCP/IP and allows control using the computer's keyboard and mouse. It does not require root access or an app installed on the device. It works on Linux, Windows, and macOS
Coincidentally enough (or not) just yesterday while skimming through the Google laptop "Googlebook" announcement and thinking "Meh... none of that is new" and wondering if I could genuinely do all that with my current Linux/GrapheneOS setup I thought "Ok... maybe the Android windows is new" and I checked more scrcpy virtual display and display id which I use for mirroring Quest headsets. I thought "OK ok Google I give you that tiny feature" only to wake up this morning, nope, not even that.
Similarly, the other features for the Googlebook are just normal features from Google's Android builds. The announcement is really that there will be a Chromebook Plus class of devices running the new Android-based ChromeOS, so everything in Android now comes to these devices for free, and apparently, most of the features from the current CheomeOS will be ported too. I just hope this means that Linux app support in Android will match Crostini by the end of the year.
During this delay, I met neighbors who accepted to share their WiFi with me. They live a bit far, across the way. The best way I found to get a stable connection with decent speeds was to hang my phone at the top of a window using a salad bag, and share the phone connection to a computer via USB.
I didn't find a way to automatically enable the USB connection sharing before plugging in the USB cable (didn't look for a solution neither, admittedly), so I had to plug the cable, enable the sharing and then put the phone in the bag and adjust the position, all that making sure the cable doesn't disconnect or everything needs to be redone from the start.
I discovered far too late that my distro now has a scrcpy package, which makes enabling the sharing conveniently from the computer.
Yes, I could have tried to ask immediate neighbors instead, probably. I should get my own line this morning, as it happens.
scrcpy is fantastic. I used to write longer texts with it, and now that I can use it again, I'll probably start doing it again.
In recent version of Android, it appears one needs to unlock blindly as the screen is black at this time, I suppose for security reasons.
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