I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly multitools, knives, flashlights, and pens.
Circles are the worst possible shape in terms of making efficient use of the limited screen space available on a phone. The screen is rectangular and nearly everything we display falls into rectangular arrangements. Using circles just means there is less room on each key to show useful information, like the long-hold functions.
I’m not opposed to change, but change entirely for the sake of change usually produces bad results.
I periodically try FUTO. It’s a great keyboard, except for its swiping support. That seems to be gradually improving, but it isn’t quite there yet. Unfortunately that is how I do all my typing, so I keep going back to GBoard. I look forward to leaving it for good.
Every time I think GoDaddy has hit bottom they find a way to dig deeper.
I think you’re right that some kind of “menu” button that presents additional options would be best. Eventually there will be other options and it will be necessary…
I think most people will adjust the volume once, but may want to change the octave while playing. If my assumptions are right, the octave change feature should be the most accessible one, replacing the current volume buttons. The volume, and any other features could be handled through the menu button.
My ideal solution would be to provide a menu button and two function buttons. Then have a menu option to configure whether the functions buttons acted as octave up/down, volume up/down, or controls for whatever additional features get added.
I’d also like to put in a pitch to add support for the “scrolling” feature that some watches now have. It could control the opposite feature of whatever is assigned to the function buttons, making it possible to adjust both octave and volume on the fly. It does seem like it should be a lower level priority, since not all watches support that feature.
This looks great! I have a pitch pipe app for my watch, but I like this better.
I do have the inevitable feature request… :-)
I’d love to have some way to change the octave up and down.
I suggest that you spend the up-front money to consult with a lawyer. A lot of them will do an initial meeting for relatively little. They will be able to give you some idea of what risk, if any is involved in this. Then you can make a better informed decision about whether to ignore this, fight, or conceded and change the name.
I find out a few years ago that there are whole law firms out there who basically just send threatening letters for low fixed fees. They don’t litigate or even provide real legal advice. It’s one step above selling pages of their letterhead.
You won’t know how serious these people are, or how serious their complaint is, without consulting a lawyer.
Best of luck!
I have a small UPS to keep my fiber and router working for a while and I have a larger UPS for my server. Even the larger UPS will only keep the server going for maybe half-an-hour, but most outages here are short. For me, the most important benefit is that my UPS will tell my server to shutdown when it begins to get short of power. Graceful shutdowns remove the risk of corruption and data loss.
If you need to add more than one drive you should look at external enclosures. There are 4-drive models just over $100 and 8-drive models just over $200. You connect them with eSata, USB 3, or USB C, depending on the enclosure.
It’s the only “no cost” option I know of that provides an off-site backup. And once it occurred to me, it was really easy to set up.
Yeah, that was where I finally came out too. I still own the discs. My only worry is that some of my collection is beginning to age. I’ve had a few DVDs that were no longer readable.
My server runs Plex and has almost 50 TB of video on it. After looking at all the commercial backup options I gave up on backing up that part of the data. :-(
I do backup my personal data, which is less than a terrabyte at this point. I worked out an arrangement with a friend who also runs a server. We each have a drive in the other’s server that we use for backup. Every night cron runs a simple rsync script to do an incremental backup of everything new to the other machine.
This approach cost nothing beyond getting the drives. And we will still have our data even if one of the servers is physically destroyed and unrecoverable.
I have added the swipe library to FUTO. It works, but not well enough for me. (That may be my clumsy swiping, but the issue remains.) I estimate that it gets about one word in four wrong. GBoard is still wrong about one time in ten, but at that rate, swiping and correcting is still much faster for me than traditional typing.