Tag: android apps

Posted on
by

I have a rough three-day work-stretch ahead of me, but the weekday Pook-Emu Bee links streak must continue (I will however compromise on feature images today).

1. Brainless TikTok trend causes $2,000 in damage to SoCal home (Daniel Farr for the New York Post. August 26, 2026.)
States and localities should consider sentence enhancement provisions for crimes committed for social media consumption.

2. EXCLUSIVE: US Investigators Have Proof That UNRWA ‘Social Worker’ Caught on Tape Dragging an Israeli Body Into an SUV on Oct 7 Was an Active Hamas Operative (Adam Kredo for The Washington Free Beacon. August 25, 2026.)
It’s always who you least expect… except for those times when it’s the most obvious suspect.

3. $3 Specialty Coffee Is Back In Brooklyn (Ainsley Martinez for Patch Carroll Gardens-Cobble Hill, NY. August 25, 2026.)
I seldom buy coffee when I’m out (firmly in the DIY coffee camp) but $3 for a cup of any size is cheap around these parts. Maybe I’ll find a reason when out with a friend to give it a try.

4. I switched from Android’s default keyboard to an open source alternative to eliminate my constant typos (Oluwaniyi Raji for Android Police. August 25, 2026.)
I also use Heliboard. It’s good. I turn autocorrect off because autocorrect is a war crime. The predictive suggestions are solid but I tend to forget about them. I need to make myself remember because typing on touchscreens is not a strong area for me.

5. Roblox applies restrictions to games featuring “reward-driven media feeds” available in Roblox Kids and Select (Sophie McEvoy for Games Industry.biz. August 26, 2026.)
The fundamental problem with Roblox is that its ostensible target demographic should not be playing social online games, period.

6. NYC’s borough-based jail boondoggle is nearly $8B over budget and years behind schedule (Matthew Fischetti for the New York Post. August 24, 2026.)
It’s already casting a long shadow.

7. NYers say Citi Bike has gotten too expensive, can a new advocate-led campaign make it cheaper? (Ethan Stark-Miller for amNY. August 18, 2026.)
Hear me out. Instead of stealing my tax money to subsidize City Bike rides for my betters who will then violate traffic laws and threaten to run me over, what if we at least banned the electric City Bikes and made everything more expensive?

8. Smithsonian affiliate AANM gets federal funds, criticized 9/11 response (Robert Schmad for Fox News. August 25, 2026.)
Score another one for team taxation is theft.

9. Taliban facing constant challenge to authority in provinces bordering Central Asian states (Eurasianet. August 25, 2026.)
Economic ties aside, I’ll note that Uzbek and Tajik police don’t take kindly to men having beards, so the Taliban would probably be well-advised (granting I don’t think they’re much into taking advice) to keep their various militants from causing cross-border problems.

Posted on
by

Pook-Emu Bee links are back today as we start the new work-week.

Yellow flower in Brooklyn. It glows because of the camera flash.
I took this photo on July 2, 2026. I “believe” it is in Columbia Street Waterfront District.

1 – Persona 30th Anniversary Paper Fragrances Feature Designs Announced (Orpheus Joshua for Noisy Pixel. August 9, 2026.)
I have been a Persona fan since I first played FES more than 16 years ago. I have been seeing one 30-year anniversary note after another. I am respectfully asking Sega’s marketing team to calm down. The shark has been jumped.

2 – Someone built a browser that generates every website from scratch, and it impressed me more than it should (Mahmoor Faisal for XDA Developers. August 8, 2026.)
I wouldn’t advertise being impressed by what Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony accurately described as being a “slop machine.” With that being said, I have no doubt that many more people will read about his mind being blown by a slop machine than my daily links, so what do I know?

3 – The Current Status of American Schools (Larry Sand for American Greatness. August 4, 2026.)
Could be better. But the administrators in New York City are doing great.

4 – NYC Council pushes slate of measures to address dangerous e-bikes (Craig McCarthy, Matthew Fischerri, Hannah Fierick, and Matt Troutman for the New York Post. August 4, 2026.)
It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Unfortunately, the start will have to contend with the anarcho-bikists and a Mayor who enables and encourages them, so count me on the “not optimistic” side.

5 – ReactOS Implements First Windows NT6 System Call In Step Toward Vista Compatibility (Michael Larabel for Phoronix. July 2, 2026.)
I had a decent experience with Vista so I think I’ll take my talents to ReactOS once they reach full Vista compatibility.

6 – BasicSync and Synctrain: solid apps for bringing Syncthing to phones (Rodrigo Ghedin. May 8, 2026.)
I don’t use iOS but I am glad to see that there is now a plausible, free, and open source Synthing option there (even granting the iOS-imposed limitations).

7 – Magic Magikarp Makes Moves (Ian Boss for Hackaday. December 5, 2025.)
Nintendo should be ashamed of itself for not coming up with this idea on its own.

Posted on
by
Replied to Getting serious with /e/OS - Hurdles and obstacles by Igor Ljubuncic (Dedoimedo)
After lots of searches and reading, I finally managed to get an okay understanding of how App Lounge works. The app UI is opaque, and it does not tell you what the actual sources for your Android packages are. Or rather, it does, but not in a very clear, distinct way. You have Apps, Open Source and Web Apps. But what this effectively means: Play Store, F-Droid, and then, something else?

I used an /e/ OS-powered Teracube 2e as my daily driver phone from September 2021 to November 2022. It worked well enough for my purposes initially, as I explained in a very early review I published in November 2021, but I would eventually switch to a LineageOS-powered Google Pixel 3a XL (which, coincidentally, is my current daily driver as of publication time) due to call reception issues (which may have been the hardware rather than the software), the fact that the 3a XL is a better phone, and my not needing anything Murena offers on top of LineageOS. For example, one of /e/ OS’s standout features is that it comes with its own app store called App Lounge, which pulls from Google Play Store, F-Droid, and a Progressive Web App store (the latter led to a small game review). I largely ignored App Lounge in favor of F-Droid. I noted one thing I did not like about App Lounge all the way back in November 2021:

One issue I noted is that it is not always entirely clear what the source is for an app on first glance. This issue is sometimes relevant for apps that have distinct Google Play and F-Droid versions. For example, the popular Bitwarden password manager application has two versions. The Google Play version uses Google Firebase, which gives it notification support, whereas the F-Droid version lacks Firebase. The /e/ store includes the Google Play Store version, but not the F-Droid version. Those who are concerned about which version of an app that they may be downloading should check the app’s source in the /e/ store, which is listed with each app.

According to Igor Ljubuncic at Dedoimedo, the App Lounge’s opacity seems much the same today as it was almost five years ago.

Posted on
by

I have a busy day ahead of me, but not too busy for Pook-Emu Bee links. Before getting to links from around the web, I note that I just published the sixth and final part of my New Leaf Journal sixth birthday project, Be the Blogger You Want to Be (Or Read). Now watch me follow my own advice.

Photograph of the East River and Manhattan Skyline from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with Brooklyn Bridge Park in the foreground. The sky is foggy. Off in the distance, you can vaguely see a Portuguese Flag attached to a ship docked at the South Street Seaport.
I took this photo from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade on the morning of May 27, 2026. If you squint, you can see a Portuguese Flag attached to a ship by the seaport across the river.

1. Government says 5.7 trillion yen of Japanese media was pirated last year, thinks AI could help (Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. May 26, 2026.)

I assumed by “AI could help” that the Japanese government was thinking that AI could help track down copyright infringement. Not so: “However, one of the ideas being floated by the researchers is to promote the use of AI in production to lower costs and secure profits.” Well… depending on the uptake, I suppose that could also reduce piracy.

2. Magnifica Humanitas (Peter’s Path. May 26, 2026.)

It’s on my reading list, and perhaps my future article list.

3. Zubac remembers the shock of his first NBA paycheck being cut in half (Bruno Feliks for Basketball Network. February 9, 2026.)

A star NBA center on how he learned about California tax rates.

4. Freedom 250 Announces Free FIFA World Cup Fan Zone on National Mall (Jasmyn Jordan for Breitbart. May 20, 2026.)

This isn’t what General Washington fought for.

5. Linux On Android Provides Inexpensive, Powerful Computing (Aaron Beckendorf for Hackaday. May 26, 2026.)

I should really mess around with Termux at some point.

6. Beloved NYC bakery faced stomach-churning issue before suddenly closing (Nicole Rosenthal for the New York Post. May 24, 2026.)

I’m glad I didn’t buy anything from there before it closed (it was right by my favorite spot for buying coffee beans).

7. DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search (Rebecca Bellan for TechCrunch. May 26, 2026.)

Google’s AI search push is working very well for me so far. I have not seen a dip in Google traffic to NLJ, but I have seen a big uptick in the last week and a half in DuckDuckGo traffic. While Google is my biggest referrer by a good margin, DuckDuckGo has always been second and clearly sends much more traffic relative to the size of its user-base.

Posted on
by

I read about the Fire Toolbox utility for “debloating” and customizing Amazon Fire Tablets. That inspired me to buy a cheap ($35-40) Fiire 11 tablet from 2021 on Woot back in April or May. I finally got around to using it. Unfortunately, because of updates, some of the Toolbox’s utilities like setting a custom launcher do not work reliably. But I managed to remove a decent amount of Amazon bloat and telemetry. My goal is to set it up as a device for reading articles from my Miniflux instance as an alternative to my phone. Here are my initial key steps:

  • Used Fire Toolbox to sideload F-Droid Basic
  • Installed Iron Fox (web browser), Markor (markdown editor), Frigolio (Wallabag client), KDE Connect, and Syncthing
  • I configured Iron Fox to my liking and imported the uBlock Origin rules I use on my phone
  • I logged into Miniflux on Iron Fox (synced my clipboard with KDE Connect to get my passwords
  • I synced my Markor directory from my phone to my Fire so I could save links from my browser for my newsletter workflow
  • Connected Frigolio to my Wallabag server by sharing clipboard with API key and login information from my computer via KDE Connect

I gave everything a test run in the morning and it worked well. Fire tablets have low-end specs, but Iron Fox felt about as snappy on the tablet as it does on my phone (Google Pixel 6a running GrapheneOS). One potential annoyance is that when I woke my tablet up (I had set it up last night), I was presented with a screen trying to get me to log into an Amazon account. I was prompted to finally set this up because I was being tempted by a $250 sale on Google Pixel Tablets (which are supported by GrapheneOS), but if the Fire works well for my limited Miniflux purpose, I think I will opt to save the $250.

Posted on
by

Brad Linder of Liliputing published an article titled How to use laptop or tablet as a touchpad (and keyboard) for a Windows PC. He turned an Amazon Fire Max 11 tablet into a touchpad and keyboard using a proprietary app called Unified Remote (which also required setting up Google Play Store on the Fire tablet). I was surprised he did not mention my preferred solution. KDE Connect is free, open source, and can allow Android devices to function as touchpads and keyboards (I previously covered some of my favorite open source Android apps). I seldom use it for that purpose (my main KDE Connect use-case is sending and receiving SMS messages from my computer), but it works well. Moreover, people with Fire tablets can install KDE Connect without needing to mess around with Google Play Store.

I will note in a small aside that I have only used KDE Connect on Linux PCs. While I understand that it is available for Windows, I am not certain that it works exactly the same as on Linux.

Posted on
by

My go-to weather app on my GrapheneOS-powered Google Pixel 6a phone (GrapheneOS is a free and open source security-focused fork of Android Open Source Project) is Breezy Weather. Breezy Weather is open source and available on GitHub, Google Play Store, and F-Droid. I use F-Droid Basic as my app store. There are two flavors of Breezy Weather: Standard and Libre. The difference between them is that the standard version supports non-free weather providers. In most standard vs libre app cases, I opt for libre. However, in the case of Breezy Weather, I want standard because Accuweather is the best weather provider for my area. F-Droid itself has the libre version. Does this mean that there is no hope for me but to obtain the standard APK from GitHub or to use the Google Play Store? Not so! The IzzyOnDroid F-Droid repository has the standard version of Breezy Weather. Thus, all I need to do is enable IzzyOnDroid in F-Droid Basic and then select it instead of F-Droid as my preferred source for Breezy Weather.