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.

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!

this little thing, combined with a drawing tool like 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:

#!/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

enjoy! :)