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’ve heard his segments get rebroadcast on Russian TV fairly often.

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?

Reminds me of Javert.

https://i.imgur.com/H4sq6h8.gif

You know that the other two words also exist though, right? Like, you can effect change in an organization, and there can be something strange in the affect of a psychopath. So there’s a verb “to effect” and a noun “affect” (although here the pronunciation is different–the accent is on the first syllable). It’s true that the most common usages follow the rules you’re laying out, but it genuinely is an oversimplification.

putting the “ad” in “advent calendar”

https://youtu.be/Reruwp_Fs3Y?si=YM9HhBiwGh3G2zFT

I wouldn’t really call it a favorite, but I definitely ended up liking Nier: Automata pretty well after bouncing off it really hard when trying it at a friend’s house. That’s because we were trying from the start, and it starts with a section that’s about half an hour long, with only two checkpoints, vastly harder than anything else in the game, and in which the first half isn’t even the same genre as the rest of the game. It’s seriously one of the worst intros I can think of in a video game. The rest of the game is, y’know, a pretty good third-person action RPG.

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

Certainly! Here’s how this might be phrased in a more casual manner if it appeared as a comment on a web forum: “lol git gud noob jk”

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?

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.

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.

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.

I liked it well enough to keep watching it while I had a service that showed it, but MacFarlane never stopped grating on me.

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.)