monotremata

In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

I had a similar issue on my Pixel 6, where I’m using Nova launcher. (I know they changed hands and are not great now, but it’s still more usable than the Pixel Launcher.) There the solution was to go into the Apps settings, find Pixel Launcher, and choose force stop, then clear cache, then clear settings. Apparently there was some bug in Android 14 causing both launchers to try to intercept the “recent apps” press, and it caused it to hang like that.

Obviously that’s not going to be exactly the same issue on your phone, since presumably Pixel Launcher isn’t on there, but maybe doing the “force stop, clear cache, clear storage” on the default launcher on your phone would help?

putting the “ad” in “advent calendar”

I dunno, I prefer swipe typing and this doesn’t seem like it would work with that.

To me the biggest barriers to long-form typing on the phone are that so many websites screw up form handling for long-form content, and that the cursor maneuvering is still pretty broken.

Websites do weird things when you’re typing. Sometimes the input field won’t scroll, so you can’t see what you’re typing. Other times it’ll force-scroll to put the current line you’re working on at the very top of the screen, so you can’t see anything you wrote previously. At least they finally fixed the weird behavior where if you deleted more than a few characters it would start jumping around in the text and duplicating huge sections of it–I think it was around Android 9 that they finally fixed that.

As for moving the cursor, the “swipe on the space bar to move the cursor left and right” works, but trying to go back further, like going up a few lines, is very, very difficult. The cursor will scroll the text box if you move to the edge, but there’s no delay in the scrolling, so instead of scrolling a couple of lines and then pausing briefly to give you a chance to stop there, it just immediately scrolls again on the next frame of rendering, so effectively your choices are “scroll within the few lines of text still visible” or “jump all the way to the beginning of your text.” Anything else you need to scrub through character by character using the space bar control, which is very slow.

Basically, I don’t think the issue is the keyboard itself. I think the issue is that Android has never prioritized long-form text entry, and so it’s just very buggy.

Honestly, Google killing this will probably be the best outcome for it, because otherwise they’ll try to monetize it, and that could be a nightmare. Just a straight-up conversation partner that tries to wheedle personal information out of you for their advertising profiles. Even their example question about what you like to do for fun is a little uncomfortable in that context.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

Specifically, the 8 pro has a 5x telephoto 48mp sensor that the base model lacks, a 48MP wide angle sensor compared to 12MP on the base model, a thermometer the base model lacks, 12GB of ram vs 8 on the base model, and a slightly larger and brighter display and slightly larger battery (though the gain in battery is probably roughly offset by the increased power draw of the screen). I believe those are the only hardware difference.

Source: https://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Google-Pixel-8-Pro-vs-Pixel-8-Google-is-about-to-reap-the-harvest_id5921

I mean TVs have volume buttons but also a mute. It’s nice to be able to use volume to set a specific level but then also quickly toggle between that perfect level and silent.

It’s not something you strictly need a physical button for, but the way they implemented it on old iPhones was nice. It was a physical switch rather than a button, and it looked different in the two positions–the slider under the switch was red on one side and black on the other. (or maybe silver, i forget, but it didn’t stand out the way the red did.) So you could tell at a glance if it was muted as well without turning on the screen.

The new button seems like a step back from that to me, but if you don’t use the silencing feature then a reprogrammable button is maybe more useful to you.

Even with wired headphones, the volume setting didn’t directly correspond to a decibel level. High quality headphones often have a higher impedance than cheaper ones, which makes them much quieter (unless you use an external amp). The automatic volume reducer thing was just always pretty frustrating in the past.

Does the software have an option for closing the session? Some burning software lets you leave the session open so that you can burn additional files to the disc later if it’s not completely full yet, but many dedicated DVD players will only actually play the disc if the session is closed.

(This knowledge pulled from the dim recesses of my memory, which, like DVD, isn’t what it used to be, so bear with me if I’m mistaken.)

NVidia Shield K1 was pretty great too. It was also $200, about the same size (8"), 1920x1200 screen, fairly stock android, and had a pretty speedy chipset. It even had decent speakers. Came out 2014. I really liked that thing. I got it to replace my first Nexus 7 (2012), whose storage had decayed really fast, to the point it wasn’t really usable anymore.

If you’ve got a 3d printer, an old phone is often a great octoprint host. It’s got a built-in camera and everything.

I use this along with ublock origin in Firefox, but DNS66 doesn’t seem to be updated anymore, so I think it’s contributing less than it once did.

If you’re using Chrome, that’s why. Chrome bypasses your DNS settings and uses Google’s DNS because they found using the system settings was affecting their ad revenue. Using Firefox fixes this, although in Firefox you can just use ublock origin anyway, which works even better.