monotremata

Bud Clark for the win.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Expose_Yourself_to_Art.jpeg

I’m not sure it’s just on Reddit…

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?

Frustratingly, these lists keep going out of date, because apps are marked as incompatible with new devices unless they’re constantly updated. So I have a limited number of recommendations. E.g. the game Trainyard was terrific, but it looks like you can’t get it anymore. Auro and Glyder 2 were also excellent. And Trap! was great on the original G1.

Some of these games also do have in-app purchases, but they’ll be strictly “you pay X money for Y more levels” deals, which is basically fine in my book. No currencies, no gatchapon, no “pay or wait” mechanics.

10000000 and You Must Build A Boat are fun match-3 games. No in-app purchases.

The Room 1, 2, and 3 are all escape-room games.

If you liked doing constructions in geometry, the games Euclidea and Pythagorea are both good.

Puzzle Retreat by The Voxel Agents is, well, a puzzle game. Pretty fun, good slow difficulty ramp.

The Quell games (Quell, Quell Reflect) are a bit like Puzzle Retreat, but I didn’t find they had as much variety. I got a little bored with them. They’re quite polished though.

Star Realms is a two-player card game with deck drafting mechanics, sort of like a cross between Dominion and Magic. It’s available as an actual physical deck game, but also as a decent android game with both multiplayer and a single-player campaign. Since it’s a drafting game (i.e. you both recruit from the same deck), buying card expansions just changes what mechanics are available to both players, so it’s never pay-to-win. I’m very fond of it.

Freitag is a single-player deck-drafting game. The android app isn’t the best thing ever but it works. It’s based on Robinson Crusoe.

Spaceplan is an increment game, a bit like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, but it’s got a plot and an ending and is over in a couple of days. Plus it’s really silly. Recommended.

Super Hexagon is a very brief action game. Only uses the edge of the screen as its two buttons, so it basically works despite the touch screen. It’s only got…I think it’s twelve levels total? I forget. I think I’ve gotten to level four. It’s better with the sound on, though.

Slay the Spire is another great deck building game. Touch controls aren’t perfect and the UI is kinda small on a phone, but the underlying game is good enough that it’s worth playing.

Ridiculous Fishing is a very simple game, but very well made.

Pinball Arcade is pretty good, though you have to pay for each individual table you want. There are always some free ones on any given day though. It was easier to recommend before they lost their Williams and Bally licenses, since then they had all the classics like Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars; now it’s all Stern tables unless you already own the old ones. The simulation quality is pretty good, though. It’s all a bit more forgiving than the real thing, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.

Bart Bonte’s games, which are all named after colors (black, blue, green, etc.) are pretty amusing. Not very difficult but kinda diverting for a bit. Kind of like an escape room game crossed with warioware? Each screen has unique touch-screen mechanics, and you have to figure them out to advance.

SetMania is a decent implementation of the card game Set. Make sure to turn off the (frankly bizarre) setting that randomizes your settings constantly.

Nonograms Katana is a pretty good nonogram (picross) game. Gotta buy levels though.

Monument Valley and 2 are kinda fun. Easy puzzles but diverting, with nice graphics.

If you find it fun to make fine distinctions between colors, I Love Hue is interesting. But I can also see other folks thinking that’s a circle of hell.

Oh, and I’m enjoying Cryptic Crossword by Teazel Inc. They’re not very difficult ones, and it would be nice if it had some kind of “explain” option for when you really can’t grok a clue even after seeing the answer. But you usually get an “aha” from most clues and the packs of puzzles aren’t too pricey.

There are a few more games I enjoyed, but that was at least partly because I got them from a Humble Bundle, and those versions had the in-app purchases turned into things you could earn in the game, which was way better. E.g. the Kingdom Rush games. I can’t really recommend the versions you can get now, because they’re all microtransactioned up. I think the same is true of some of the games I used to enjoy like Cut The Rope as well.

Emulation is also a good option, but if you don’t want to bother with that there are a few purchasable apps that will basically do it for you, like Sega’s Shining Force games.

Hope this helps someone. I wrote it up partly to get myself to organize the things in my own brain.

putting the “ad” in “advent calendar”

Yeah, you’re right. This is something I was taught at one point, and I guess I never questioned it because it sounded plausible. Sorry! I have updated my comment to reflect this.

It’s also because the bacterium in question is anaerobic, so it dies in an oxygen environment; rusting consumes oxygen, so it helps preserve the bacterium longer out of soil.

Edit: I had always been told this, but evidently it isn’t true. The rust does not seem to have any effect on the bacterium that causes tetanus. Apologies for spreading misinformation.

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.

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.

Note that it also breaks our privacy if we view the link. Caution is advised.

It’s not FOSS, and it’s been a few years since I used it, but I used to rely on Jota text editor. It was a very straightforward one, no bells and whistles, but that was kinda what I wanted from it. It didn’t get unmanageable when using very large files, and if I recall correctly I think it also handled both Unix and Windows line endings, which mattered to me.

Not sure if it’s still good, though. I don’t do nearly as much weird stuff with my phone as I used to.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

I just use swipe typing, but my dad absolutely loves MessagEase, which is basically a 9-key keyboard. The gimmick is that every letter is a gesture; nine letters are just taps, and everything else (including some punctuation) you start on one of those nine keys and swipe in one of eight directions (up, left, upper left, etc.). I think there are a couple of other large keys, like a space bar at the bottom and delete and “switch to numbers and extra punctuation” on the right, but you mainly use the nine for words. It’s not terrible, and he’s gotten moderately fast at it. Might be worth a look.

Edit: Oh, I’ve just seen that MessagEase is now unmaintained, and the “thumbkey” mentioned in another comment is basically a replacement. So I guess this is just another recommendation for that keyboard! Oops.

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

That’s wild! Sorry that’s happening to you.

I don’t think we should be too surprised by this. If a company isn’t all that good before a conglomerate buys it, then it’s unlikely to be widely known. Conversely, if a small company is widely known, it’s likely to be exceptionally good. So, even if acquisition usually just results in regression to the mean, we’ll still mostly have heard of ones that degraded the company.

For me it’s under Settings, Privacy and Security, Device Lock, Fingerprint Unlock. I removed my fingerprints from it the other day, though, because it was so inconsistent at unlocking my phone that it seemed faster to just use a numeric code.

Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”

So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.

I dunno. Is it gluten-free?