Mastodawn

Google has partially walked back their decision to remove Android's ability to install independently published software. Their new stance is that it will still be possible, but it will be more difficult. I assume their plans are still subject to change.

I don't like the FUD that Google is pushing, and I still have a lot of unanswered questions, but I figured that it would be best to link the original source:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

Android developer verification: Balancing openness and choice with safety

News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.

Android Developers Blog

abstractsun 4d ago

Nicole Sharp 4d ago

Thunderstorms Make Trees Glow

Scientists have long hypothesized that the high electrical charge of thunderstorms could produce an opposite charge in the ground that would discharge from the forest canopy. But this phenomenon, known as a corona, had never been observed on actual trees. A new study, however, has observed this ghostly ultraviolet (UV) glow from the tips of sweetgum leaves and loblolly pine needles during thunderstorms.

Catching these coronae in action required a new kind of UV detector that was ultra-sensitive to the particular band of UV-light emitted by coronas, hot fires, or mercury lamps. Since the latter two weren’t present during the team’s field observations, they were able to conclude that the light they detected came from coronae.

The group observed that corona discharges were transient, jumping from leaf to leaf and branch to branch across the forest canopy. For any creature capable of detecting that glow by eye, it must be incredible to watch the treetops lit by their own ever-shifting auroras during every thunderstorm. (Image credit: W. Brune; research credit: P. McFarland et al.; via SciAm)

#biology #corona #electrohydrodynamics #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #physics #plasma #science #thunderstorms

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abstractsun 5d ago

@ferriera_trevi I am likewise somewhat lukewarm on Obsidian. It has nice tooling, but I came at it with the expectation of it being like a general purpose text editor, and it isn't designed for that. Some people really like it, though.

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abstractsun 6d ago

@ferriera_trevi I'm using a bash script which calls vim as a child process in the terminal. Most text editors support invocation from the command line to open a file at a given line number. Graphical text editors are trickier to automate because their lifetime is generally independent from the terminal process and/or they log a lot of junk you don't care about to the terminal by default, but it can be done.

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abstractsun Mar 17

@ferriera_trevi YMMV depending on your file formats. My notes are mostly plaintext. For reviewing random notes in different files whose contents are not super urgent, I have a script that iterates over all the files in a folder, opening files one at a time for review, skipping files that have a special phrase on the last line. If the phrase is in the middle of the file, that means the file was reviewed up to that point.

abstractsun Mar 13

Alice: "The barista think you're a hacker."

Bob: "Impossible! I was using light theme!"

abstractsun Mar 5

eclexic Mar 4

#Heliboard is gathering gesture typing data, so that we can implement a #FOSS alternative to the closed gesture typing library Heliboard currently relies on. The data we collect will be released under the CC BY-SA 4.0

I also made a video including details & instructions.

Boosts Please! The greater the diversity of people & languages in the data, the better we can test for correctness.

PT: https://makertube.net/w/cQECfDkuLGR9eUQquUEo4K

YT: https://youtu.be/CyjumVTWtJA

Text (instructions only):
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to-Contribute-Gesture-Data