2025 Week 11
Google announced an Android 15 update for the Pixel contains a feature that allows you run a Debian OS in a VM and a Terminal app that connects to it.
Immediately I saw this, I was eager to see what this actually meant. I know Android is Linux anyway and wanted to see how this was different or special.
In the past, long before I switched to using iPhones, I would install custom ROMs on my Android phones. Since these custom ROMs do have the ability to root the phone, I would root them and get a Busybox shell running.
With Busybox, I can do minimal scripting and even SSH. Those times were fun.
Now when I heard about this update, I thought it would be more interesting to run a full fledged Linux VM on the phone where you can do even more. For a phone that’s as powerful as some PCs, this can go pretty far. So I set out to see how this can go.
At first, I installed docker and then run Nginx which went pretty smoothly. I even got port forwarded as I would in a standard setup. At this point I thought, if anything can run in Docker then I can run it here.
I wanted to take this further and decided to see if I can SSH into the VM remotely since the default Terminal experience isn’t that great. Besides, it would be nice if I can access the VM directly from my computer and not in a 6” phone screen. Also, with SSH, I can connect something like VSCode for remote development.
The VM doesn’t have SSH running by default so I installed OpenSSH. While I was able to test the SSH connection locally, I couldn't access it over my local network. So, I brought Tailscale to the rescue and was eventually able to connect from my desktop.
With this, the VSCode connection was now straight forward. With that, the goal of coding on my phone using VSCode is achieved.
While this test has been very limited, I still look forward to most of the things I will be able to do on it.
There are things one sometimes engage in that brings out that competitiveness within. At least for me, I could say the older I got, the less competitive I got. I could say the there’s a part of it that’s due to the fact that I don’t engage in competitive activities as I did when younger.
This week was a bit different in that I got into a competition and not only did I won, I won by a big margin - +2000XP. This was even after I was already almost 3000XP behind the person who became my runner up.
A great part of this experience was Mercy also supporting when I told her the battle I was in 🤣. It was as if there was money in it for her and it was great to see.
During the last hours, we had to stay up till 4AM (the close of the competition) to make sure that the gap isn’t closing just in case my runner up waited for me to go sleep.
You might be wondering what this competition was, but I’ll leave that for another time.
If you have been on X for a while in the last couple of weeks, especially the tech side, you would have easily stumbled on some “vibe coding” discussions.
For me, I wondered how that was and decided to try it. I’ve been using Copilot for a long time now and my usage of it have slowly descended into only completions while writing code. I rarely use the chat or even the chat from somewhere else. So, I wanted to see if this would be better anyway.
I have a couple of ideas I wanted to scratch out and what a better time for that than now. In the end, I was able to get some significant progress for the two projects.
The good feeling about this was the fact that I am now closer to getting these ideas done than ever. This reinforces the idea that if these LLMs are done right, the productivity boost will surely be massive.
Till next time,
Bosun.