Mobile Phone as a Control Surface

The setup itself took longer than I expected, but not for the reasons I assumed. OpenClue is built for desktop workflows. The configuration files expect a certain screen size. The interface assumes a mouse. None of these things are deal breakers. They just require a different kind of patience.

What I found surprised me. The phone became a constraint that forced clarity. No room for extra tabs. No space for unnecessary panels. Just the core operations and nothing else.

Setting up OpenClue on a mobile device is not a straightforward install. There is no mobile app. The approach I landed on uses a remote connection to a configured instance running elsewhere. That instance can be on a home server, a cloud machine, or even an old desktop left on.

The configuration itself happens through SSH. This is where the screen size matters. Using a terminal app on a phone feels cramped at first. I used Termius for this part. It handles key authentication cleanly and keeps sessions alive when switching between apps.

OpenClue’s config files are standard YAML. Editing them on a phone is manageable if you know what you are looking for. I kept a local copy of the default config on my phone and referenced it often. The main changes involved setting up webhook endpoints that play nicely with mobile triggers.

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I tried a handful of apps before settling on a combination that felt sustainable. Working Copy for Git operations. Working Copy gave me a way to pull config changes, edit files locally on the phone, and push them back up. The editor inside it is basic but sufficient for YAML.

For monitoring OpenClue’s job queues, I used a combination of the web dashboard and a simple bot that sends notifications to Telegram. The bot was a small script that hooks into OpenClue’s webhook system. Every completed job sends a short summary. Every failed job sends a longer one with enough detail to debug.

The notification setup changed how I thought about logs. On a laptop I would tail logs in a terminal. On a phone that is impractical. So I built summaries instead. The same approach could work for anyone running operations remotely.

The most reliable workflows turned out to be the simplest ones. I set up a few standard job templates in OpenClue that accept parameters through URL query strings. That way I could trigger a job by opening a bookmark in Safari. No app switching. No typing. Just a bookmark with a pre filled parameter.

For example, one job exports a recent dataset and uploads it to a storage location. The bookmark URL includes the date range and output format. Opening it fires the job. I can see it start in the dashboard or wait for the Telegram notification.

Another pattern involved using Shortcuts on iOS. Shortcuts can make HTTP requests. I built a few that send POST requests to OpenClue’s API with JSON payloads. Those live in the share sheet or on the home screen. They feel like native actions even though they are just wrappers around API calls.

The combination of bookmarks for simple triggers and shortcuts for more complex ones covered most of what I needed.

Some operations remained stubborn. Anything requiring extensive log reading was hard. The web dashboard’s log viewer is not built for phone screens. I ended up using a workflow where failed jobs would send the relevant log snippet through the Telegram bot, and for deeper investigation I would SSH in and use grep with careful filters.

File uploads through the web interface were also inconsistent. The interface expects desktop browser behavior. Uploading a file from the phone’s file system sometimes worked and sometimes did not. I stopped relying on that and moved to a model where all files are referenced by URL instead of uploaded directly.

Database migrations were the one thing I refused to run from a phone. Too much risk. Those I queued up in OpenClue to run during off hours, and I would verify them the next morning on a proper screen.

I came back to a laptop eventually. But the mobile setup is still there. The bookmarks, the shortcuts, the summarised logs. They stayed because they turned out to be better than what I had before, not just a workaround.

The next issue will look at what happens when you stop using separate tools for notes, tasks, and code. How one plain text folder changed the way I keep track of everything.

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