Last Updated on December 31, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org
Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org
is a big fan of privacy phones. To have a private office, he invested a lot of time installing LibreOffice on the Pinephone:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16614
without using it for a single day. LibreOffice is not adapted to the Pinephone screen very good. Softmaker for Android is better adapted for touuch and phone screens. Peter started to use Softmaker for Android with files stored on an external SD card for privacy reasons. The SD card can easily be encrypted with Veracrypt. And your private data are on your encrypted SD card and nowhere else. The SD card can be used with your Android phone and your PC:
https://petergamma.org/category/mobile-office
Peter never found a good solution for remote deskop for Android for a long time. Until he found SCRCPY:
But if Peter plugs in an SD card reader into the usb plug of his phone, he can t use SCRCPY over usb as described in the above video.
Do you remember the struggle with Pinephone usb adapers? The cheaper ones to not work with the Pinephone. The best is the docking station from Pine64 for the Pinephone. And now Peter tested a 10 USD usb Adapter he bought on Aliexpress with ethernet, card reader and charging option with an Android phone. He bought the adapter originally for the Pinephone, but the adapter did not work. And how great, all of these options worked straight away with his Android phone. The adapter is 10 USD, and has about the options of the Pinephone docking station, and also about it s size.
To plug and unplug an usb SD card with a card reader from an Android phone and then plug it into a PC is not very comfortable for everyday use. So Peter was looking for alternatives. SCRPI works also over WIFI. Here we have an instruction how to activate this:
This instruction is a bit low-level with many steps. But Peter went through it. And he was asking himself, can he use this instruction also with my 10 USD Aliexpress usb adaper over ethernet? And how great, it worked. Peter had to try it several times over several days, but finally was successful. And what is this to his period compared to one month it took him to install LibreOffice on the Pinephone? And the above instruction can eventually be simplified by writing a script. The expectations the Pinephone did not full-fill are now full-filled with an Android phone for Peter. His phone can now be a professional writing machine, which can also be controlled from his PC. And Softmaker for Android implements the whole desktop functionality, and is free. So we need no further Softmaker for Windows or Linux if we can do everything we need with Softmaker for Android, which can be controlled from a PC over a wired ethernet connection.
One of the great features of the Pinephone was his docking station with a wired ethernet connection. For privacy reasons, Peter avoids WIFI as much as possible. And now Peter is happy to have such a dock also for his Android phone, and can plug it over an ethernet cable to a router and control it over SCRCPY. SCRCPY is a great solution. After some tests, it runs very stable. And the PC keyboard and mouse work great to remotely control his Android phone.