Mirror Hall: peer-to-peer screen sharing between Linux devices

Tinkering with Linux on mobile devices quite a bit, the growing pile of Linux tablets and phones on my desk often looks underutilized. I wish I could wire some of those lonely black slabs together and extend my monitor, or why not, use them as controllers for my desktop windows in a half PARC Tab, half Stream Deck fashion [0]. Yet if any reasoning adult will know that USB-C looking symmetric does not imply it is also very useful to transfer things between peer devices, I still think that using my tablet as a secondary screen through Wi-Fi would be a lifesaver e....

September 21, 2024

My $2.2k laptop can't drive two screens

I received a new MacBook Pro 14" M3 from my employer, which starts at €2.049 ($2224) in Italy. It looks like a solid machine, at least physically speaking. I wired it up to my fairly basic dual-monitor office setup, just to realize that confusingly enough I could not use the HDMI and USB-C port at the same time. I thought that was a cable issue, then a bug, but nope. It turns out the “base” M3 chip is essentially an overclocked iPad chip, and it does not have two display controllers....

May 26, 2024

Discontinuing Gestures and Workflow

As the title says, I am discontinuing Workflow (the GTK screen time tracker app) from Flathub. Gestures will still remain for download for a while, as it seems to be still quite popular in terms of user base, but will not benefit from active development any further. The reasons behind this, lack of time aside, are nothing special. The Linux user experience has thankfully evolved really fast in the last three years, and it felt to me that neither of these apps provides enough value nowadays (apart from a GTK UI, that is) for most users to make use of them any longer....

July 1, 2023

A system indicator for when my vaccine time has come

As a consequence of the relative slowness of the Italian vaccine distribution, I got bored of logging into the local health website that lists the (un)availability of vaccine shots for my age category, so I decided to build a tiny GNOME indicator that does that for me. This is not strictly an extension, but a CURL+grep wrapper using the magnificent, although abandoned Argos extension for GNOME Shell. Essentially, as long as no doses are available for my health status that “ko” status is bound to stay, but once the doses for my age category arrive… well, then the extension will let me know it quite loudly....

June 1, 2021

A Cards app for my Amazfit watch

This afternoon, in the middle of academic commitments, I got bored and made an app for my Amazfit smartwatch, which is without a doubt cooler hardware wise than in terms of available features. The result is quite basic so far, and lets one save fidelity cards in a /sdcard/cards.json file following this form: [ { "name": "Cheap Sport Store", "code": "239193832352462", "type": "ean13", "color-fg": "ffff00" }, { ... } ] and shows them as a scrollable series of bar/QRcodes through a hacky ViewPager....

May 7, 2021

nokun's personal website

This site is just as work-in-progress at it seems. Powered by Pages because I’m lazy. Nice to meet you, I guess? It feels strange to welcome guests in a construction site…

April 1, 2021