I recently discovered KDE Connect. It is a mobile app with a desktop companion to connect the machines.

It's not only for connecting your mobile to your desktop, or laptop PC. It also connects these machines among each other. This means you can use it for convenient file sharing between machines, and not only for sharing between mobile and desktop.

This actually proves more convenient than file sharing via a common SMB share.

It has various other features:

• automatically pause music playback on your machines when a phone call comes in
• display incoming text messages on other machines
• launch custom commands on the desktop from the phone
• presentation remote

These features sound all convenient but except for the auto-pausing of sound playback, I have not used them.

It's available on Android, Apple, Windows, Linux and many other OSes.

Again the browser APIs disappoint me, especially their (non)implementation for mobile phones.

To display images from my mobile or to share my phone screen on a random TV (or other computer) I'd like a simple photo projection website. Very much like ShareDrop , except that the images are not saved on the other machine(s) but simply displayed there.

Making a directory full of images accessible to the browser does not work, as the File System Access API is not implemented on mobile browsers.

Screen sharing could work via WebRTC and images stay locally as far as possible. But the WebRTC screen sharing API is not implemented on mobile browsers.

This is disappointing.

Google-free!

I'm now completely Google-free, using Lineage OS 17. The only stuff I need from the Google Play store is the Steam mobile app for two factor authentication with Steam.

Most software now comes from the F-droid store.

These are my uses for the phone:

Continue reading What's on my Phone in 2020...