What I like to call “glide texting” is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then “guess” what word could be represented by “what you just drew” and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).

There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.

First is where several words can be represented by one “glide text”. I feel (can’t prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.

The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the “intelligent population”. If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone “learns” that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for “hello”, instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the “Hello” entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.

Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.

ZoomIt - Sysinternals at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/zoomit

That small free application will notably allow you to press a key combination to “zoom in and out” on your screen and “draw” on your screen with your mouse. When presenting something using an external monitor, you can use that tool to draw attention to specific things or zoom in on tiny details when people are having issues seeing something. The link also show a small preview of what the application does.

If you want to see what various license plates look like from all of North America (as well as what they looked like in the past), there is a website that with a short URL. Strangely enough, the website never gone to https. The link is http://www.15q.net/

MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/

A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn’t seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn’t the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.

Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.

Here is a hopefully minor thing…

Reddit has multireddits where you can have a few that follows a certain selection of subreddits under a label. You can have multiple ones defined as well. Therefore, you can have a view for all things news (following multiple news things) without having to view those things on your main home feed (as well as any other defined topics that you can think of).

It would be nifty if such a thing could exist inside of Lemmy as well.

Can I comment on Beehaw (or lemmyNSFW, but I’m at work so not going there right now) using this account I have at lemmy.world?

Beehaw, no. They defederated from Lemmy.world. More information is at https://lemmy.world/post/145337 (iffy formatting) and https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (easier to read). A bit more information is also at https://lemmy.world/post/149743

LemmyNSFW, yes. The answer is yes for most instances.

Is there a way to easily see which instances are defederated from others (or conversely which instances are connected)?

To add to what others are saying, there is a list that may be helpful. Let me explain it a bit though.

The list below shows various Lemmy instances in a table. An instance can block another instances (this is what they control). The instance can be blocked by someone else (which they can’t control). Either way, a block is in place so the two cannot communicate.

The column header BL specifies how many instances they are blocking. The column header BB says how many instances are blocking them.

If they have a high BL, they likely do not want to federate with many other instances which can be a drawback. If they have a high BB, that instance is likely acting in such a poor manner that nobody wants to interact with them. Basically, you may want to reconsider instances which have an excessively high BL or BB.

Note that there are pretty bad places out there so having a BL of 0 can be an issue as well. A BB of 0 may indicate that an instance is very new so nobody really knows about them yet.

The list is sorted by how many users are at an instance. If the instance has a high amount of users, the service is likely a higher quality service that can grow over time. Small services aren’t bad per say but they may eventually disappear or overload if too many people join them.

Like most things, this is just more information to help guide you in your decision making. The best decision is one that you make on your own after you do your own research.

Anyway, the list is below.

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/blob/main/README.md#all-lemmy-instances

I’m on the Samsung A54 right now. I had one too many times using Google devices which decided to suddenly die on me (Nexus 5x, Google Pixel 4a) and Internet mummers seem to hint that newer Pixel devices seem to be continuing that same lack reliability. I have an older Samsung tablet that is still working (better described as something that just won’t die) so I decided to try the Samsung world of things to see if I can get the reliability I desire. So far, so good.

Curious about the Google device issues? The Nexus 5x worked great until it just died for good one night. The Pixel 4a worked great until it “turned off” at night making me miss all my alarms and requiring me to turn it back on. Now it is a coin toss if it will stay on overnight or just turn off for no reason making me miss all alarms. Apparently it can turn off when you are not using it which is a bit concerning for a device that should receive phone calls and sound alarms…

With AI comes the potential for systems to detect AI generated content as well. Any system tends to have a counter system made against it but for a while things are a bit unbalanced.

A search engine company making their own AI system turns that system towards analyzing all of their search results. The AI is to determine if the content is genuine human based content and useful for other humans while filtering out SEO generated nonsense, AI generated fluff, and other low tier results. In other words, search results improve because of in depth analysis of the site content (of a sort that only AI requires).

While I’m sure that system wouldn’t hold out the garbage websites forever, it should improve search result quality for some duration of time. Since AI is a rather new topic, it isn’t obvious how one would “game” that system so that should keep the search results better for longer. Hopefully such AI classification systems can also categorize styles of sites allowing you to select what style results you want for your search query (such categories as a site is more scientific research, written more for children, better for people with short attention spans, etc.)

AI search categorization could have some pretty significant drawbacks but the overall result has a good chance of being better than what we have now…