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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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?








  • 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.


  • 3blue1brown is a great call.

    I would add Applied Science and NileRed (who does chemistry experiments) as possibilities if OP likes their voices. Their content is very methodical and uniform. My cat likes their videos, which seems like a pretty good metric for this use case.

    I also love vihart, who does math videos, but her stuff is a little more varied, including some music, so OP might want to evaluate her during the day before trusting her channel for sleep.

    Jeremy Fielding has a great voice if you want videos about engineering and how to salvage motors out of washing machines and treadmills.

    I’ll consult my subscription list and add more if I find any.

    Edited to add:
    Carl Bugeja (electronics)
    CGP Grey (mostly history)
    DIY Perks (various projects)
    Henry Segerman (math art)
    OskarPuzzle (designs for 3d printed puzzles)
    Razbuten (video games)
    Sabine Hossenfelder (physics)
    Stand-up Maths (math)
    Steve Mould (explanations of unusual everyday things, I guess? kinda hard to summarize)
    Technology Connections (as others have mentioned)
    Tim Hunkin (makes weird mechanical art and explains machines)
    Tom Scott (videos about unusual places and bits of history)
    Two Minute Papers (advances in AI and computer graphics)

    Edited again to add: Breaking Taps. This one is mostly microscopic fabrication stuff, so, various kinds of microscopes, vapor deposition, etching, etc.







  • The tech behind the s-pen is made by Wacom, and they’re in the USI, so I don’t think it’s totally impossible. Pens are just pretty niche right now, partly because the android tablet market is so lousy. I think the tech has improved a bit–supposedly they’re down to a 0.7mm tip now, which is in the range where handwriting on a phone starts to make sense again. So maybe we’ll see more uptake of these, especially if the foldables market grows.

    The use cases I really want to see for this tech are things like an advanced calculator that lets you handwrite an integral and then gives you the closed form solution if it exists, or a graph, etc. if it doesn’t; and a nice pen-driven CAD program. Those would be amazing things to have in your pocket all the time, but they’re a little too intricate to work well with fat fingers on a phone.

    But for now I don’t think the tech is really quite good enough for phones. It’s good enough for my brother-in-law, who is an animator, to use it to doodle all the time, but that’s kinda it. On the iPad Pro he can do a lot more with the Apple Pencil, but that has more to do with the Apple tablet software ecosystem than with the pen itself, and Google has neglected that aspect of Android. On phones the pens just seem pretty limited.



  • To emphasize this discrepancy, based on these numbers, if one tenth of one percent of reddit’s monthly active users switched to lemmy, that would represent more than 600% growth in the lemmy userbase. So yeah. Sharp growth here isn’t necessarily a sharp decline there.

    But if the tiny minority that leaves is the same group that’s willing to spend dozens of hours a week for free keeping the site free of spam and hate and keeping forums on topic, that has a pretty outsized impact on the quality of the site moving forward. So the small number isn’t to say that reddit wasn’t hurt by the exodus. It’s just to say that lemmy growth numbers aren’t a good indicator of that impact.