Last Updated on November 5, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Which physiologists want physiological data or office files which contains privacy data on Google drive?
Since we had a QTEK 9000 we used this device for mobile office and where very happy with it. All our office file where stored on an SD card and we could use it also with our Windows PC and card reader.
Later on we used Android phones for that purpose with Softmaker Office for Android. Some Android phones allowed to plug in the usb cable to a Windows PC and the external SD card of the phone could be used as a usb drive which was a a great solution.
The last device which we used for privacy mobile office was a Samsung Galaxy S5 with Android 4.4. We stayed with this device and this Android version since it was the last who allowed to write office files to the external SD card. And there was a costum boot loader available which allowed to access the external SD card as a usb drive after a reboot. But then Google killed these features in Android 5.1 and after our last Galaxy S5 died we did not find a good replacement among the new devices.
Then Linux phones catched our attention. Are these not perfect devices for physiologists and writers? Phones which can do anything and are as easy to handle as a PC with Ubuntu? This is what we espected. But then we gave this idea up for the time being. Here is one of our last post about this topic:
So let s take a Raspberry Pi instead of a Linux phone that was our next hope. Why not a Raspberry Pi zero w2 with long battery life and 5 inch screen? But we where not able to install Pi apps on it at our first attempts, and the 5 inch screen draws a lot of power.
So let us choose a Raspberry Pi 4 instead. It uses a big battery but if the device is great that is the price we have to pay. But we have given up this project as well. The problem was to find a screen which does not draw a lot of power, Android phones are our preferred choice with a HDMI to usb capture card to solve this problem:
https://petergamma.org/category/singe-board-computer-displays/
But these capture cards take a lot of time to get to run without issues, so we gave them up for the time being as well. And we gave up also to use an Android phone as a Pi screen. Which phone size to choose was our problem. Newer Xiaomi phones have a screen size which is near to 7 inch and have a battery life of more than 24 hours. 7 inch inch is usually sufficient for Raspberry Pi OS and also for LibreOffice. But everything needs to be tested and evaluated and this takes a lot of time, since nobody has tested these components for this purpose before. And we let this be for the time being as well. Would this not be a great topic for a YouTube video maker to take over?
We then started doing some experiments with scrpy as remote desktop for an Android phones. But do we really need an Android phone remote desktop application? And where are our original files? On a Raspberry Pi which runs a Nextcloud sever? And do we need to carry around a router for our application 24 * 7? We want to get back what Google has taken away from us. And that is our privacy data on our smartphone and our PC and our home network and nowhere else.
An Android phone for the year 2023 which can do what a Galaxy S5 could do, and that was write to the external SD card. Or use the phone as an external usb drive from a PC. Nexcloud and scrpy can replace some of these features.
Why did Google make our lives so difficult after Android 4.4? We will not buy a Google drive subscription and sync our data to Google drive since this is not the right place for privacy data. We rather use our old Xiaomi Redmi 7 with with scrpy, a Raspberry Pi Nextcloud sever which is connected to our router, and a big suitcase where everything fits in for mobile applications. This is a solution which is a bit complicated but it is the easiest we could find after Google google killed features after Android 4.4. with which we where very happy and did not find a replacment to this date.
With an Android phone and a laptop and a Raspberry Pi running a next cloud sever and a wired ethernet router and a big suitcase we have a “mobile setup” which has the privacy of our home network. Unfortunately it draws a lot of power but we can additionally take a large lead acid battery with us to solve this problem. What else can we do? This is a solution but we still miss the comfort we had in the good old times when we had the same privacy with a QTEK 9000 a laptop and an encrypted SD card.