====== 2024-01-07 - whiteboard talks vs. remote work ======

for quite a few years i work remotely. while i generally prefer to have it this way, there are some advantages of being in the office. one of the missing bits are discussions over a whiteboard -- 2 ppl, 1 whiteboard, and a pen. that's much harder to reproduce remotely. there are however some good approximations.

my take was a high-quality, yet very affordable (~50 EUR?) drawing tabled ''Wacom One S''.

{{:blog:2024:01:07:wacom_one_s_with_box.jpg?400|}}

it's very nice to use, works under linux out of the box (kernel support), plugs into USB... and is pressure-sensitive! this means that you can just press harder or softer to get thicket and thinner line -- just like with a real paintbrush!

{{:blog:2024:01:07:tablet_drawing.png?300|drawing tablet under linux}}

this little thing, combined with a drawing tool like [[wp>MyPaint]] made a huge difference on my remote working experience, whenever there's anything that'd require drawing / conceptual discussion over a video conference.

one thing that you might want to customize is to have good, multi-screen support. i use multiple screens at work, but when drawing it's actually better to focus on one monitor. in my case this is the "primary" monitor, thus a helper script ''tablet2primary'' arose:

<code bash>
#!/bin/bash
set -eu -o pipefail
app=$(basename "$0")
screen=$(xrandr | grep 'connected' | grep 'primary' | awk '{ print $1 }')
tablets=$(xinput | grep '\<Wacom\>' | sed 's/.*\<id=\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/')

for tab in $tablets
do
  echo "$app: mapping $tab to screen $screen"
  xinput map-to-output "$tab" "$screen"
done
</code>

enjoy! :)