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To start off and give an idea of my usage, below is a panorama of my Tab Ultra’s home screen with all the apps and widgets. Having access to all Android applications is amazing, but I try to minimize their number on this device to avoid distractions. Therefore, there are no email clients, messaging apps and other goodies that I already have on my Android phone. However, I still have apps for podcasts (Podcast Republic), YouTube (NewPipe), and even Reddit (Infinity) to get a dose of monochromatic entertainment from time to time.
Termux is an Android terminal emulator that allows you to run a full Linux system on your device. My primary use of Termux is for SSH (remotely access a terminal instance of another system), but it can be used for so much more if you are brave enough (e.g. generate the Mandelbrot screensaver at the end of this post)! Unless I need to see some graphical application, I use SSH via Termux to access my workstation/HPC and connect a wireless keyboard to do anything I need.
Weylus can turn your BOOX device into a wireless graphic (wacom) tablet with a live video feed while supporting all the pressure sensitivity levels of the stylus. I’ve used it for drawing inside Krita (example shown below) and also sculpting inside Blender (Krita and Blender running on my laptop). I think it is very simple to set up - I just start Weylus on my laptop and then connect my Tab Ultra via a web browser. The input latency on the laptop screen is low, but the live video feed from a laptop on the tablet is quite a bit worse because of the screen technology, but it is still usable in one of the fast modes (and the laptop screen is right next to me, so lower quality of video feed is not a big deal). It is possible to disable this live feed and just use it with a black background like most graphic tablets - but I quite like to see the same canvas also on my tablet.
You can synchronize much more than your Obsidian notes among all your devices using the open source Syncthing. Furthermore, Syncthing is very simple to set up and configure on all your devices via their intuitive web graphical interface (check Getting Started or any of the video tutorials on YouTube, and I am sure you can set it up without much effort). The best thing is that it is fully automatic, which makes it very easy to pick up where I left off, regardless of the device I use.
Ever wanted to remotely access your desktop from anywhere, then tried software like TeamViewer, but it eventually stopped working? Try open source RustDesk that is simple to set up, and you can even self-host your own rendezvous/relay server (or use the free public server). RustDesk allows you to access your desktop computer from your BOOX device. I often use it to see what is going on when I am running some simulations remotely (below is a screenshot of my Tab Ultra accessing my laptop). Because I use a dark theme on all my LCD/OLED devices, I invert the display colors of my laptop to get a better-looking video feed on my Tab Ultra (I believe light themes look much better on e-ink).
Furthermore, you can also flip this approach and use RustDesk vice-versa to access your BOOX device from your computer. In this way, you can display and control your BOOX device from your computer to achieve a behavior that is pretty much identical to scrcpy (I find RustDesk faster for wireless usage, but scrcpy is better over USB). RustDesk also supports file transfer, but I think there are better alternatives for that.
The second is a random portion of the Mandelbrot set generated on BOOX Tab Ultra via Termux using this Rust-base implementation. I later edited the image in GIMP to make the gradient less noticeable (the original had very noticeable stepping due to the bit depth of the display while in screensaver mode).
Ever wanted to remotely access your desktop from anywhere, then tried software like TeamViewer, but it eventually stopped working? Try open source RustDesk that is simple to set up, and you can even self-host your own rendezvous/relay server (or use the free public server). RustDesk allows you to access your desktop computer from your BOOX device. I often use it to see what is going on when I am running some simulations remotely (below is a screenshot of my Tab Ultra accessing my laptop). Because I use a dark theme on all my LCD/OLED devices, I invert the display colors of my laptop to get a better-looking video feed on my Tab Ultra (I believe light themes look much better on e-ink).
Obsidian: Note-taking
To start off and give an idea of my usage, below is a panorama of my Tab Ultra’s home screen with all the apps and widgets. Having access to all Android applications is amazing, but I try to minimize their number on this device to avoid distractions. Therefore, there are no email clients, messaging apps and other goodies that I already have on my Android phone. However, I still have apps for podcasts (Podcast Republic), YouTube (NewPipe), and even Reddit (Infinity) to get a dose of monochromatic entertainment from time to time.
Finally, ZeroTier allows you to build custom virtual networks. It is similar to a virtual private network (VPN), but simpler, and it has other advantages. Many of the above applications (e.g. KDE Connect, Weylus) have one huge limitation; they only work on local networks (e.g. devices must be connected to the same WiFi). Furthermore, most enterprise networks (e.g. Eduroam at academic institutions) limit the communication among local devices connected to the network, which in turn prevents some of these applications from working. Using ZeroTier can circumvent that by routing the communication over a virtual network that you can create and customize yourself, and even assign each device a fixed IP address so you don’t have to worry about the device moving around. Moreover, if you want to host your own server that is behind multiple routers without a unique public IPv4, ZeroTier is a miracle, and nothing comes even close to easy of use in this case (not even routing all communication via VPN with a unique fixed public IPv4 - which is not that affordable). In this way, I use my old Raspberry Pi to host the RustDesk server and other services after wasting days on other alternatives (everything is deployed via balena in a single Docker Compose, but I won’t get carried away). If you want to try ZeroTier, check their Getting Started (it is free for the first 25 devices, and there is also an open source edition).
As for community plugins, I currently have only the Excalidraw enabled on my Tab Ultra, but I haven't used it much so far.