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[personal profile] kaberett

For lo these many years (i.e. basically since I got a smartphone) I've been using Swype as an onscreen keyboard. Some time ago it was announced that it had reached end-of-life-and-support, but it wasn't until I went looking earlier today that I realised that happened in 2018, that being when I posted asking for suggestions for replacements.

And then I didn't think about it again for, apparently, approximately eight years, through several new phones and quite a lot of new major versions of Android... and then a few-ish weeks ago Fairphone rolled out Android 15 to the Fairphone 4 and alas That Was The End Of That.

Recommendations back in 2018 were for Gboard and Swiftkey; a question posted to reddit in 2022 garnered similar responses.

Since the Abrupt Keyboard Failure I've swapped to Gboard more or less by default. I don't hate the bit where language switching is now automatic (for the purposes of language learning apps, at any rate), but good grief I am missing the ability to e.g. type < or | without needing to go like three clicks deep in menus. Yes, when I have "Touch and hold keys for symbols" enabled -- as far as I can tell that only gives me one symbol per key, not "now select from a variety of them" as with the much-lamented Swype. I'm also missing the gestures I know for "yes, that word, but change the capitalisation", and still grumpily adjusting to the shift key mode cycle being in a different order to what I'm used to.

I've experimented briefly with AnySoftKey but rapidly got annoyed by the total lack of any Irish language pack (and how difficult it is to navigate the app listings to establish this fact). I'm trying to persuade myself that it's worth giving SwiftKey a try even though it (1) is now Microsoft, (2) has gone all-in on Bundling With Copilot, and (3) apparently "contains ads".

Eheu, alas, etc; all is woe; ... unless anyone knows of any other Android keyboards that provide ready access to All the punctuation...?

Invoking the Kurt Vonnegut rule

Dec. 3rd, 2025 10:14 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

You know you had a bad day when the next day [personal profile] angelofthenorth brings you coffee as soon as she gets home, saying "well your blog post from yesterday made me think you'd need it!"

I actually had a much better day at work today: no meetings to speak of and I even started messing around with the slides for the presentation I have to give on Tuesday. Plus, Tuesday turns out to be the London staff's Christmas lunch and I can go to Wahaca (yes, that's how they spell it) with them, they're all excited about Taco Tuesday.

I was able to slip away from work early enough to walk Teddy before D and I went to see Pillion, which was well-acted and horny (even in the audio description!) and had some genuine funny moments but is a little too Fifty Shades of Gay in that its basic message that being a dom makes you a dickhead who is incapable of healthy relationships. But I had fun and I'm glad we had time for a pint in the twinkly outdoors before coming home to delicious homemade stew and dumplings.

And before I'd finished eating, [personal profile] angelofthenorth offered wanted cinnamon tea and when I made interested noises brought me some in the clear glass mug with the flower petals between its two walls which V bought in the Hebridean Tea Store, and then D asked if anyone wants a mince pie, so I had my first mince pie of the season with the perfect tea pairing for it.

Before bed I emptied the food waste bin, locked the doors, turned off the little plant lights, and changed my bedding. How nice to be in such a functional house, doing my little bit to reset, maintain, upkeep.

All this made me think of Kurt Vonnegut saying:

My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well, we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

thewayne: (Default)
[personal profile] thewayne
to focus entirely on commercial manufacturing, i.e. data centers and AI requirements.

I can't fault them, they're going where the money is, and they are required to pursue maximum shareholder value, as sick as that may be.

To illustrate the state of weirdness going on in the memory market, a "typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases." People are being told that if you need a new computer or upgrade right now, forget it. Wait a year or two. Russet is getting a new MacBook Pro from work, but Apple is a bit insulated from this kerfuffle, plus work is paying for it.

The weird bit is that high-end graphics cards spiked as AI stocks started soaring, and now graphics cards are coming down in price. But memory and solid-state drives are soaring. One thing becomes reasonable, and everything else gets priced out of reach.

Micron will continue shipping Crucial memory through February 2026 and will be honoring consumer warrantees as needed. After that, they will only be selling Micron memory to commercial customers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

Dec. 3rd, 2025 04:25 pm
pauraque: butterfly trailing a rainbow through the sky from the Reading Rainbow TV show opening (butterfly in the sky)
[personal profile] pauraque posting in [community profile] booknook
It's Wednesday! What are you reading?

Resource: Domestic Medicine.

Dec. 3rd, 2025 03:36 pm
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[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] little_details
https://domestic-medicine.com/

This website is an unromanticized purview of historical health care, with an emphasis on household and community practices shared and recorded by women and the overlaps of medicine and cookery.

Author Stephany Hoffelt’s credentials: Continue. )

(Content note: Hoffelt, with her lived experience, research into historical context, and insistence upon practical results, has a whole catacomb apiece to pick with both the patriarchal medical establishment and the proponents of a Magical Pagan Witch Sisterhood who got burned by the millions for providing safe and reliable herbal abortifacients.)
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

Finished O Shepherd, Speak! - as ever, Lanny manages to find himself at major historical events. A particularly fascinating thing considering that news story about Hitler's DNA - he is admitted to the bunker and takes a slice of bloodstained sofa-cover.... In the aftermath of WW2, he has been left money to work for World Peace and he and friends are working for this. One thing I do find a bit curious about Lanny's generally progressive line is that the civil rights question (was it being called that in the 30s/40s?) doesn't seem to feature: maybe because he was brought up in Europe and mostly lived there? His focus on the World Stage???

Val McDermid, The Skeleton Road (Inspector Karen Pirie #3) (2014): not sure this was really doing it for me - there was a point where it just seemed to be going on and on.

Have plunged into a re-read of Barbara Hambly's Silver Screen mysteries (getting myself back up to speed on the series with a new volume forthcoming): so far Scandal in Babylon (2021) and One Extra Corpse (2023). Possibly one reads for the evocation of Hollywood at that era rather than the actual mystery plots, but good, anyway.

On the go

Saving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen #3) (2024)

Still dipping into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.

Up next

I am feeling the siren call of The Return of Lanny Budd.

I also realise that I have managed to sign myself up for 3 bookgroups meeting in January, 2 online (Pilgrimage, first meeting, Dance to the Music of Time, concluding volume) and 1 in person (fairly) locally - have managed to fight off suggestion that we read the Mybuggery wot won the Booker, but am now committed to the extremely LOOOOONG new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

***

Further to yesterday's mysterious email from Academic Publisher, have received a further and more official-looking email today:

You may recently have received a message from us with the subject line "Welcome to [redacted] GCOP".
This email was caused by a system error. You can therefore ignore it and do not need to take any action.
Apologies for any confusion the message may have caused.

***

holiday love meme 2025
my thread here

[syndicated profile] languagehat_feed

Posted by languagehat

Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:

Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.

Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.

And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.

The first is Put your language in italics (“We don’t think in italics”); the section closest to my heart is:

2. Don’t hire a proofreader
3. Don’t check your translations with a fluent speaker

I recently read an othertwise very good anthology of Scottish nature writing in which many contributors were proud to talk about (italicised) Gaelic words and for which no-one had hired a Gaelic proofreader. Many words were misspelled, and more were mistranslated. Here, in a nature writing context, Gaelic stood in for ecological authenticity, for a connection to land, but the lack of care with which the language was treated belied the project. It was sufficient for the project of the book that Gaelic be present but not necessary that it be Gaelic.

I also liked the end:

19. Call any thorough use of the language fake, unnecessary or purist

Once a review complained about the way I spelled arkaeolojist. But in English we don’t spell it archéologue, arqueóloga or αρχαιολόγος.

20. Be a purist

The only thing more dispiriting than your language being ignored by everyone else is arguing amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re using our language right. What matters is using it.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing; rozele says “a lot of it’s very familiar to me from yidishland; it’s all connected to many Hattic conversations,” which it certainly is.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


This new Worlds Without Number Bundle presents Worlds Without Number, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of far-future sword-and-sorcery adventure from acclaimed designer Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing.

Bundle of Holding: Worlds Without Number

Wednesday Reading Meme

Dec. 3rd, 2025 01:01 pm
osprey_archer: (Default)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Forever Christmas, an account of Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Cottage, with absolutely luscious pictures of Tudor making the yearly Advent wreath (hung from the ceiling with crimson satin ribbons from her parents’ wedding!), decorating gingerbread cookies for the tree (cut fresh from the forest and lit with candles), dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh…

Just gorgeous. Two of my life dreams are to ride in a sleigh and see a Christmas tree actually lit with candles.

And I popped back to the archives for Katherine Milhous’s The First Christmas Crib, which is not (as I expected) an account of Jesus’s birth, but rather a recounting of the first Christmas creche, created by Saint Francis of Assisi. Older Christmas picture books tend to be more religious than the newer ones, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does slightly, just because overall the older Newbery books were not particularly religious. Christmas books were the last outpost for a rearguard action, perhaps.

What I’m Reading Now

Ruth Sawyer’s holiday story collection The Long Christmas, illustrated by our friend Valenti Angelo of Newbery fame. The book was first published in 1941, and although Sawyer doesn’t directly reference the war in the introduction, she is very conscious of the need for a light in the darkness, a repetition of the message “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then the first story is about Satan rising in the fields of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth, intent on storming the stable and killing the baby messiah, but his evil plan is thwarted when the archangel Michael descends from heaven and vanquishes him in pitched battle.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got my eyes on Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year.

Fancake Theme for December: Amnesty

Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:34 am
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[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Photograph of the aurora borealis taken in Norway, text: Amnesty, at Fancake. The northern lights are a bright green scribble that stretches over the horizon, along a snowy mountain ridge, and up into the starry night sky.
[community profile] fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!
lb_lee: A magazine on a table with the title Nubile Maidens and a pretty girl on it. (nubile)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Okay. Our health has been kinda rough and the fan poll and Patreon perks are a bit delayed, but hell or high water, we will be dragging our carcass through a couple shifts at the Boston Comics Roundtable (BCR) table at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) this weekend:
  • Saturday, Dec. 6, from 10:30-2
  • Sunday, Dec. 7, from 11-2
MICE is at the Fuller Building at Boston University (808 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA), off the Green Line.

If all goes well, we will be debuting Coming In or Staying Out, the color edition, at MICE! (As in, we will be frantically stapling and folding it as you arrive, having picked it up from another tabler at opening.) Here's the sneak peek pics the printer sent us that we've been sitting on for a week due to computer breakage!

CAKE THAT BEEF! CAKE THAT BEEF! EDIT: now with EVEN MORE spicy beef! )

It's being printed in violet and bubblegum pink on ivory paper. Exciting!

EDIT: also, I discovered that apparently all this time, the paperback of Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting had been set to international shipping rates. Eesh. We have reset the shipping to proper rates. I don't know how we fumbled it so badly, but at least it's fixed now. (And the person who ordered a copy even at that nosebleeding sum has gotten a partial refund to bring the shipping down to domestic rates.)

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