UNIX workstation on a phone

Web based file sharing was a disaster, but at least it led to a somewhat useful utility for transferring photos to the phone.

https://hackaday.io/project/138050-silly-software-wishlist/log/179072-web-based-file-manager-for-android

There is kdeconnect, but still limited by the wifi speed, many dependencies, & a lot of extra stuff for controlling the phone volume.

An ADB  overlay  has become the next ideal way of sharing files between a phone & a LAN.  No getting around having to carry around a USB cable & clean the connector.

For a workstation display, a random idea was making the user wear telescopic glasses for enlarging the phone screen from far away.

Every VR startup must have tried that when VR was the future, 5 years ago.

NFSD & HTTPD are key requirements in making a phone useful.  Of course, if a phone has NFSD, it doesn't need HTTPD.

Using a phone's wifi for network services is theoretically ideal, but after 8 years of using a web server on a phone's wifi, the experience has been pretty bad.  The mane problems are the phone's wifi constantly going down, the phone constantly restarting the server, & the phone server sometimes being very slow.  IOS won't even allow a server to run in the background.  Phones turn their wifi off based on inactivity & tethering, despite the icon showing it on.  A typical lion commute involves enabling tethering twice a day, then switching between 2 access points, so servers on phone wifi have constantly changing addresses & require a lot of fenegling to connect to.

A practical phone based server needs to be accessed through ADB.  ADB itself supports a network device, but not on crippled phones.  PPP over ADB, ADB over TCP are all disabled, too.

Its only option is redirecting the stdio of ADB to a kernel driver on the host & running a user space network program on the phone.  The user space network program would forward packets to the phone's kernel.  The host would look like a local application on the phone.   It would not want to run the NFS server & web server itself because that loses the standard socket interface for connecting programs.

There's still a user space NFSD, https://github.com/unfs3/unfs3

Then, an ordinary text editor, compiler, or media player on the host could access files on the phone like a normal disk.

ADB allows automatically running a program & reading stdout, but not writing stdin.  It would take some magic to run adb shell with stdio redirected to a program on the host.

After investing in a mechanical keyboard & reading Elon Musk's observations about the speed of human I/O, it became clear there's no way around having to just learn an alternative input method besides QUERTY.  It can be done, just like playing an instrument.  The solution isn't custom handwriting.  It might require pressing multiple buttons at the same time to get a single character.  

An idea that came up was a 2 pass interface.  Most keyboard input nowadays relies on autocorrection.  Autocorrection for programming continues to be useless for anything but increasing Apple's valuation.  A similar thing could involve something faster than a keyboard for the 1st pass, maybe an alternative alphabet with fewer letters.  The 2nd pass would always be required & either autocorrect or use a different alphabet with the missing letters.  

Where would the 1st pass end & the 2nd pass begin?  Large function names wouldn't allow word based passes.  Would each letter require 2 taps instead of 1?  It would almost be morse code.  Perhaps a keypad could be shown on a screen with all the current inputs of the current level of a paw interface.  Some inputs would be for descending or ascending a level.  The 5 fingers of a lion paw can actually encode 31 possible characters, but you'd want something more geographically like a querty.

Instead of a full replacement of a UNIX box, what you really need is better replacements of key functionality than what exists.  File management, text editing, NFS server are the core functions.  A userspace program exposing an NFS server over wifi is the holy grail of phones, in general.  Fortunately, progress has continued & now there is something for PC.

https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki