Portable Mirror

[Kayos]

There is a bit of a story here.

A friend was given about 10 of these Surface Pro 4s from work, we determined 8 worked and he had 8 working chargers, so we spent an evening with a few beers and installed Windows 10 on all 8. He gave me 2 of them, one with “some” battery and one that would only work plugged in.

I used the one with battery for a while but it didn’t last long so had limited usefulness, I looked up changing the battery and decided it wasn’t worth spending £40 on a battery, if changing it could ruin the device

Then I randomly saw a video about installing Linux on one of these, due to Microsoft end of life notice, out of the drawer it came and Ubuntu installed with the Surface kernel, a fun process but once again held back by the battery life.

My intended MM project is a 65" boardroom screen in the new office, displaying MM when the screen is otherwise not in use, but the office move is delayed due to issues with the refurb, so my office mirror is currently on a 27" monitor, wedged vertical on my desk

While looking for another project I found the Surface and thought it would make a good mirror, initially I just used a full screen browser then decided a native install would make this “portable” with a wifi connection and likely needing to be plugged in, but I can set it up where I am working, It has touch screen access to the calendar and the displays are truly stunning

So there you have it, why I am using a Surface Pro, running Linux as a mirror.

First page uses Calendar EXT3 and Agender EXT3 plus I wrote my own news module with short and long headlines because I have a lot of news sources

Second page (other than clock and weather) are all modules I wrote, making API calls to my PV array and various bits of info from the UK grid

The screens are not easy to photograph, but they are not reflective in real use