i use TeamViewer to log remotely into my working laptop from an Android device
Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
31–40 of 147 posts
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#32> I have a couple old kindle fire tablets lying around. One of them has a battery that lasts about ten minutes. You might want to check if the battery is going "spicy pillow".
Yeah for this reason I replace the battery of old tablets that I use as control panels, with a DC-DC converter.
Simply removing the battery isn't enough because most tablets refuse to run on usb power alone.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#33I don't know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32" monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming.
I've been rocking a single 27" screen for years. Even that's too big. I prefer 24" screens but it's difficult to get a good one.
I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick.
I guess this is in the same camp as "I don't understand people who leave 75,000 tabs open."
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#34When I had to work on my desktop but had to watch some educational videos on the side I just used https://remotedesktop.google.com/
Since the videos were web based it worked quite well.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#35I don't know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32" monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming. I've been rocking a single 27" screen for years. Even that's too big. I prefer 24" screens but it's difficult to get a good one. I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick. I guess this is in the same camp as "I don't understan…
I'm more of the 75,000 tabs faction, which is probably why I use 3 monitors. I prefer to have all the windows I'm actively working in open in parallel. With one monitor, the handling is too fiddly for me and the windows are much too small. If only one thing is in the foreground, I sometimes lose the context or the constant jumping back and forth annoys me.
Edit: Just looked it up, there were like 30 tabs ;) But also more browsers, because it gets too much in only one.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#36I don't know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32" monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming. I've been rocking a single 27" screen for years. Even that's too big. I prefer 24" screens but it's difficult to get a good one. I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick. I guess this is in the same camp as "I don't understan…
Same, one 5k 27” screen and I’m completely happy. I might consider 6k screen, but definitely not multiple screens.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#37Tablets should have a HDMI/Displayport in so that you can directly use them as displays.
I'd even go one step further: we should have had a standard communications protocol like TCP for all devices. So a display would show up as just another device that we could use to read/write bytes. All devices would have a standard queryable HTTP/HATEOAS self-documenting interface. And HDMI/DisplayPort or USB A/B/C/.../Z would all use the same protocol as gigabit ethernet or Thunderbolt or anything else, so the bandwidth would determine maximum frame rate at an arbitrary resolution. We could query a device's interface metadata and get/send an array of bytes to a display or a printer or a storage device, the only difference would be the header's front matter. And we could download image and video files directly from cameras and scanners as if they were a folder of documents on a web server, no vendor drivers needed.
There was never a technical reason why we couldn't have this. Mostly Microsoft and Apple blocked this sort of generalization at every turn. And web standards fell to design-by-committee so there was never any hope of unifying these things.
Is it a conspiracy theory when we live under these unfortunate eventualities? I don't know, but I see it everywhere. Nearly every device in existence irks the engineer in me. Smartphones and tablets are just the ultimate expression of commodified proprietary consumerist thinking.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#38I don't know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32" monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming. I've been rocking a single 27" screen for years. Even that's too big. I prefer 24" screens but it's difficult to get a good one. I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick. I guess this is in the same camp as "I don't understan…
Same, one 5k 27” screen and I’m completely happy. I might consider 6k screen, but definitely not multiple screens.
If it's the Studio Display that you got, I got that same monitor a month ago and I absolutely love it.
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#39I don't know how folks can use a ton of screens like this. I had four 32" monitors at one place and it was incredibly overwhelming. I've been rocking a single 27" screen for years. Even that's too big. I prefer 24" screens but it's difficult to get a good one. I can hold context in multiple virtual spaces, and key bindings make switching between them super quick. I guess this is in the same camp as "I don't understan…
I rarely feel a need for even two monitors unless I'm doing GUI development. Much of the time I just work off my laptop directly, not plugged in to anything (probably should knock it off for ergonomics reasons, though....)
Re: Show HN: Use an old tablet as an extra monitor
#40Got to mention that you can use your tablet on Linux GNOME DE not only for terminal: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/06/use-ipad-as-second-monit... . Still waiting for even better solution, like streaming games to such second tablet "monitor".
does this work in KDE too or is there a similar solution?
Here's what I found for KDE, but did not test it myself: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454645#c5