simon

simon, 2 days ago to random

The latest version of Nova Launcher seems to have made the process of placing the app drawer icon inaccessible. I've always put it in the middle of my dock, and have configured it this way on every new phone out of habit, even extending to other people's devices. I found it was harder to make the swipe gesture work as expected, and much easier to just have an icon for it.
However, when this process of placing the icon became inaccessible, I started looking into other ways of opening the app drawer, and found there are many. On a blank stretch of home screen, it's possible to swipe down to an "Apps" action and double-tap.
If that isn't simple enough, I found I could configure Nova Launcher to open the app drawer upon a second press of the home button. So now, if I'm on the home screen and I press the home button, my apps list appears.
Nova Launcher 8 seems to show the keyboard by default when opening the apps list, but that can be changed from the app drawer section of Nova Settings.
Now I have room for an extra icon on my dock.

simon, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago) to random

Does anyone know a way to get the URL of an image that is part of a link? Normally you can right-click the image and choose "copy image link", but when the image is part of a link, the right-click options all pertain to the link instead. i'm trying to use GPT to describe product images and I'm having to go into the dev console and dig around at level 20 to find the src. Surely there is a better way. I'm usually using Firefox, but any browser will do, really.

simon, 3 days ago to random

My SIM ejector broke on Monday and all my other ones have gone missing, so I stupidly ordered the first thing I found on Amazon, which was a 10-pack for $8. I remember thinking that was quite expensive, but I guess I wasn't in the headspace to translate that into looking further. I did buy two of them, because I never want to not have another SIM tool.
Today I found a 200-pack for $13. That's 12.3 times cheaper per-tool.
There's definitely a lesson to be learned here. $13 is also cheap enough that I'm going to get them so I can find out whether there is in fact a difference between 80-cent SIM tools and 6.5-cent SIM tools. Now I'll really never run out.

simon, 4 days ago to random

I canceled YouTube premium because I can't stomach paying for a platform that seems to have forgotten how to communicate with its accessibility team, and I'm not sorry I did that. The interface is just as frustrating as any of the non-premium restrictions. That said, anyone have experience with alternative interfaces to YouTube, or conversion / downloader web interfaces that work well on mobile? Has anyone used Revanced or any of the Android apps designed to make YouTube less terrible? The interface is still not amazing on Android, but it is less cluttered and broken than iOS. In terms of keeping up with subscriptions, I'm going to be using Podsync to turn them into podcast feeds and listening in Overcast; but I wouldn't mind having a quick and easy way to play arbitrary YouTube links. I kind of want to make one of those websites that accepts YouTube syntax and downloads the audio of videos.

simon, 4 days ago to random

If we made a training dataset of millions of badly encoded MP3 files and their wave counterparts, I wonder if we could train a model that can restore bad MP3 files. Seems kinda similar to what Demucs is doing, but I don't know much about much where it concerns this type of training.

simon, 5 days ago to random

#AudioMo: Years ago, I got a GE microcassette answering machine just for fun. More recently, I got an AT&T digital answering machine and discovered it had some unusual but cool features, including a built-in talking caller ID. Inspired by a long thread about old phones and phone equipment, I recorded a demo of both answering machines, including leaving myself a message on the tape and playing back the famous "Answering Machine Song".

simon, 5 days ago to random

What exactly is it about main dropdown/hamburger menus that leads so many web developers to use custom controls for them? I swear I find a new one every week. It's always just a blank clickable. You have to know it does something, and then you have to look for the navigation menu. if you're lucky, it'll be right after the button instead of at the bottom of the page. (Yes, I do know why that happens.)

Sorry for anyone who got this more than once, I deleted instead of editing.

simon, 5 days ago to random

@jaybird110127 @cordova5029 @BorrisInABox @bryansmart @celrock @bmoore123 @munchkinbear Okay, here you go. Two answering machines for the price of one, though the first only takes up 4 minutes of the file. It's interesting in its own way, IMO. I don't know how many people who care about this stuff will be awake at midnight PDT, or exist in general, but I might repost it tomorrow morning.

simon, 6 days ago to random

On Apple's own Apple ID management website, when the email text field is displayed, the only autocomplete option is "Hide My Email." Which is ... worse than useless in this scenario, and should never be the only available option.
Sometimes my phone actually suggests my home and work emails from my contact card, so clearly it's possible, but I can't work out when and why it works. More often, I have to hand-type it.
I'm not saying Apple should suck up all the data I enter on every website and suggest it for similarly-named fields in future, but maybe iOS could be a little more intelligent about suggesting the e-mail I'm signed in with, which is also part of my contact card. If AIOS (as I've dubbed iOS 18) comes out with page summaries and my phone still will not autofill my email, I'm really going to wonder about Apple's priorities.

simon, 7 days ago to random

I added the Tank Mini to my lineup of Unihertz phones. It's a 4.3-inch rugged phone with a 5800 MAH battery. Feels downright pleasant to use. The Jelly Star is very noticeable in its smallness, but the Tank Mini feels like using a normal Android phone. It has 33 watt charging which, hilariously, is the fastest charging speed of any phone I've ever owned by quite a wide margin. It's not much more expensive than the Jelly Star, and might appeal to more people because of its larger screen and massive battery. It also has two multifunction buttons, and like the Jelly Star, it supports a second SIM or a micro SD card, and has a headphone jack and fingerprint reader. It also has a whopping 12 GB RAM, compared to the Jelly Star's 8 GB, and 256 GB of internal storage. Pretty sure it uses the same MediocreTech chip as the Jelly Star, but it feels responsive enough ... except when I scroll, of course.

singingnala, 7 days ago to random

Neurodivergent pout moment here. I wish I had a way to set an alarm for later in the week. I have a doctor's appointment that I've already missed once because of brain fog. Had I remembered to set an alarm the night before, this might not have been an issue. I'm normally pretty timely when it comes to my appointments. I'm just, struggling medically and sometimes I wish I had tech that filled in the gaps for me. I'm working through these brain hiccups with my partner, and that's great. I think I'm just having a human vs. tech moment right now. Happy Tuesday, all.

NightDrake, 11 days ago to random

Oh! I'm so excited! They've made it so that M4B's extract properly in VoiceDream Reader! This has made my day all that much better than it already was. And now I'm off to sleep!

spaciath, 11 days ago to random

Pondering installing dropbox on the VPS. Has anyone done this before? Is it stupidly complicated?

jmd2000, 11 days ago to random

Does anyone have the latest h1Essential firmware? I can't find a link to it on their site. Like, the text is there, but the link doesn't seem to be there.

jscholes, 23 days ago to random

There are many "classic" (in intentional quotes) works of Harry Potter fanfiction I've never read. This weekend, it's the turn of the Sacrifices series by Lightning on the Wave. 80 thousand words down, only a cool almost three million to go.