recursivesive
The camera is on all the time
That’s what I meant: I don’t know (as in I have zero clue) the camera is designed to operate that way. Is a naive assumption on my side and I’d be glad to learn this is not the case.
PIR sensor
No, I didn’t expect a sensor, that’s what I tried to say: the hardware is not there, so (on my mind) a constant image analysis/monitoring would be necessary in order to perceive movement and start recording, as in writing video to storage.
I’m not aware of software to achieve this, but I assume it wouldn’t be possible to activate the camera based on motion detection, as the phones do not have hardware for this. Sure, it could be possible to have the camera working 24/7 and only record when there’s movement in front of it (e.g. watching for pixel changes in the image being captured) but I doubt these cameras can sustain that kind of uninterrupted use, meaning at some point they will just fail. Just my thoughts, as I find the idea interesting but would love to have that same kind of solution.
Looks very nice. Kudos.
Not sure if it’s possible to make calls, but sounds like a KDE Connect feature.
The same has happened to me few times and sadly I’ve never been able to find a good replacement.
I saw an eBay listing for a pool/billiard ball claiming to be compatible, but that’s not apealling to me, and the price was something ridiculous like 40-50€, so I learned to live with the pain of just rotating the ball upside-down when I hit the dent.
I guess it would be possible to do a tiny patch on the dent with epoxy, but I don’t want to take the risk of making things even worse.
The best way to start is reading the documentation of the project. For example, the docs of i3 (a tiling window manager) are pretty good.
You could do a live USB of Manjaro i3 to test it before installing, that specific disto even comes with basic instructions on how to use i3 written in the default wallpaper. Then start hacking away the config file, and when comfortable, replace the i3 status bar with polybar, which also has great docs and lots of examples.
Trial and error is a good way to learn, and in a live USB you don’t have risks*, except losing everything after rebooting, in which case you could try to run the OS in VirtualBox.
Luke Smith in YT has some pretty good videos explaining stuff.
*as long as you don’t do something very silly, like mounting your drive and formatting/repartitioning it, or trying to install the distro where your actual OS lives.