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Any sci-fi with aliens where humans are not the less advanced race?
  • I'm glad I got to enjoy Ender's Game before I learned about the author. I remember enjoying it, but teeth-grinding rage at the aims the author supports is going to prevent me from enjoying rereading it, or recommending it to anyone.

  • Google just made it a lot easier for people to begin automating their smart home
  • I regard "smart" as an epithet I want to avoid in appliances. Light switches, thermostats, refrigerators, and all the rest seem to work great without adding internet connectivity, security breaches, corporate surveillance, and vendors removing functionality, or ending support to turn the appliance into e-waste.

  • Some favorite nonfiction books from your childhood?
  • Would "Carry On. Mr Bowditch" count?

    As an entertaining biography written for kids, it's not a reference book, but it's not purely fiction, either.

    Closer to reference would be another favourite, "The Ashley Book of Knots, which I devoured.

  • [DISCUSS] Pros/cons of videos for technical documentation?
  • I really hate video, prefer reading. But by reading the material to a camera, people get paid by youtube, and then set up a patreon for buying access to the material they read. Everybody loses, hooray:-(

  • Best free and open source keyboard alternatives to google gboard
  • For me, the key is FOSS. I was a keen fan of swiftkey, its word predictions worked great. Then it was bought by a company that I distrust, and when I was forced to choose another, I decided to try to ensure I'd never have to switch again.

    A little while after I bailed on swiftkey, the news reports came that it was auto-filling random strangers' credit card numbers; I felt vindicated.

  • Best free and open source keyboard alternatives to google gboard
  • I've got three soft keyboards enabled on my phone, to choose between as needed.

    Unexpected Keyboard is my default; it's a perfectly cromulent basic keyboard, that makes all the punctuation, ctrl/fn/esc available for comfy shell work.

    When I need to type in non-ascii characters like accented letters, I have AnySoft available. And pwsafe has a soft keyboard in it to let me avoid passing my (exceedingly hard to type, long random) passwords through the clipboard.

    I used to have Hacker's Keyboard in the mix, but Unexpected Keyboard has made it unnecessary.

  • Text editor with sort functionality
  • With "Unexpected Keyboard" (from f-droid) it's ok. I've come to expect that there's a basic choice between easy, with GUI, and powerful (like "sort a region of lines"), which is only GUI if you've got a powerful GUI, like plan 9. Otherwise, powerful means keyboard-driven.

    When I've got a long, complex edit, I've got a nice, pocket-size, battery-powered folding bluetooth keyboard; combined with the kickstands on my phone cases, it is pretty good.

  • How does everyone here feel about foldable phones?
  • I'd love one. Preferably the opens-like-a-book style, not the vertical ribbon.

    But I don't want to carry around something that costs that much. They're currently priced for someone with way more money.

  • Do you run a Custom ROM?
  • I run LineageOS on my Nexus 6, to get ongoing security updates. I also keep one other sacrificial phone running stock android with bootloader locked, so no more security updates, but I don't run anything on it but my banking app, since it's too insecure.

  • Kindle and piracy suggestions
  • If you skip updates long enough, someone might find a security hole, and if you've skipped the update that fixes it, you'll be able to jailbreak it, install koreader, read epubs without conversion, use the filesystem for ebook organization.

    Also, you'll avoid advertisements, which Amazon is now pushing to the homescreens even of kindles that were bought with the extra-cost no-ads option.

  • Sponsorblock for Podcasts
  • since podcasts are I think just RSS feeds of audio files (mp3 for those I've checked) the ads aren't in any way marked in the stream. The only thing I've found is adjusting the skip buttons in antennapod so that skip fwd does 10 seconds, and back does 5; that seems to let me avoid listening to most of the ad; tap fwd until it's back in material, then back once.

    But I listen to a lot less podcasts; if I want hands- and eyes-free material I'm more likely to use TTS in my (text) RSS feed reader of choice, currently Feeder.

  • Best Way to Sync a Folder to my Phone from PC
  • I don't do Windows, but I happily sync directories between my Android phones and my Linux PCs (especially a cloud server I lease) with rsync over ssh within Termux.

    If you can set up an rsync server on Windows that should work. Besides actually implementing robust and efficient sync, rsync is also smart about platform differences.

    For the specific case of Windows to Android, I've heard of people scripting up tools to shove all the contents of a directory over adb push.