Can't put files on my tablet anymore
I've got an old Android tablet that I'm using just for reading. Well, was using. It doesn't seem to work anymore.
I've got a bunch of PDFs on it that I can read wherever I am. I haven't used it much lately, but a couple of years ago I put a ton of Shadowrun PDFs on it to prepare for a Shadowrun campaign, for example. I just bought a bunch of Delta Green PDFs that I'd like to read from it, but I cannot for the life of my get those PDFs onto the tablet.
I'd like to download them from Drivethrurpg.com, but Chrome refuses to load that site. It still loads other sites.
I do get a lot of certificate errors, though. How do I update my certificates? No idea, but let's try a system update. Doesn't work. It claims a network error. Could it be certificates? How do you update those if you can't do a system update?
Make more space by deleting a bunch of files and trying again. Storage isn't big, but I've got 500MB available now (the file is 25MB). Retry everything above.
Try downloading a new browser, like Opera or something. Play Store crashes when I try that.
Try installing F-droid, so I can install a more open browser from there. Fails to do anything. Nothing happens.
Back to just transferring the PDF. Bluetooth? Tablet and PC can't find each other, no matter how much I set them to discoverable and have them search each other.
USB? Neither tablet nor PC recognize the USB connection. It is charging, though.
Email? The email arrives. Can't download from GMail at all, and from my other mailbox (xs4all), I only get an empty file.
Is there anything I haven't tried? Why is it so stubbornly refusing to download this file? I'm at a complete loss. Maybe it's time for a new one. This one is over 10 years old now. But still, the tablet itself seems to work fine. I can read the existing PDFs. Only the home button doesn't work (and hasn't for at least 8 years). 3 years ago it could download stuff jut fine.
Doc Edward Morbius mag das.
This Wired overview of historic dictatorships and modern day Trumpism and Putinism is impressively well written.
I learned a number of things I did not know, and I highly recommend it:
youtu.be/vK6fALsenmw?si=3MfbST…
History Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
Professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people suppo...YouTube
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I am loving that things are finally moving to make European countries less dependent on US software (especially cloud providers), but I am disappointed that there isn't more of a focus on open source software.
There are several government programs within EU counties to fund the development of open source software. We need WAY more of that, coordinated at the EU level.
The best way to avoid being beholden to big tech is to fund viable open source alternatives.
Martijn Vos mag das.
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Géén defensieverdrag met Israël!
Ondanks het Israëlische geweld tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking in Gaza staat Nederland op het punt een verdrag over militaire samenwerking met Israël te tekenen. Dat is onaanvaardbaar.campagnes.degoedezaak.org
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Accurate representation of some recent events. (Dutch, but subtitled in English.)
Isaac Kuo mag das.
Conversation this week:
Them: "How did you learn about regex? Javascript? Python?"
Me: "sed"
Them: "Oh I've not heard of that. Is that new?"
Me: <laughed in greybeard>
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@Andre Geißler @Preston von Gabbleduck
Perl regexes aren't true regexes, though. They're more powerful than that.
I forgot the details of how they're different 20 years ago and I have no idea whether any other regexe systems aren't really regexes.
I learned mine in vi, which are regular as far as I know.
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@mcv
sounds a bit like Ubuntu isn't real Linux, Debian is ;)
At least, for me that's close enough 😀
However, I really love all kind of regex
@Andre Geißler @Preston von Gabbleduck
A regular expression is the first level in the Chomsky hierarchy of formal grammars, below context free and context sensitive languages.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsk…
I think Perl was the first to make its regexes more powerful than that, but according to en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regula… it's not the only one anymore, which makes sense. Who doesn't want more power?
Andre Geißler mag das.
The revolution starts now with Andor S2 teaser
“We’re in a war. You wanna fight? Or you wanna win?”…Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica)
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A great video on political philosophy and the broligarchs' misinterpretation of SciFi.
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The shadowrunners got what they were looking for, and are now trying to get out of an office tower after the alarms have gone off. Instead of going out the front door, where most of the security is (but also a protest turning into a riot that could cover their escape), they instead decided to take the stairs from the 10th floor all the way back up to the 55th floor to access the roof where where the stealthy ultralight Nightwings they used for insertion, are still waiting for them.
Security teams tried to intercept them, with little success, until a couple of security teams band together and wait for them on the top floor, joined by 4 spirits from the corporate security mages. Generous use of grenades and monowire whips clear the way to the roof, where their Nightwings are indeed waiting for them. But as they prepare to take to the sky again, they spot a dragon in the distance, approaching the building.
At this point, I could discern roughly 3 options: leave by Nightwing and hope to outrun the dragon; get back inside and find a different exit, because any amount of security is preferable to a dragon; or hack the building's air defense turret and actually try to defeat it (no idea what the odds are, but it's not a Great Dragon, so it's not impossible).
They opt for the first choice: fly, dive down, and hope to land as quickly as possible in a street before the dragon catches up, and hide. The decker rolls very well and dives down to street level in a smooth maneuver. The first street samurai carrying the mage as passenger doesn't roll so well, but the mage has an air spirit that helps them descend more quickly.
The other street samurai is not so lucky. Terrible roll, lags behind. The dragon, looking to toy with its prey, doesn't kill him outright but casts Confusion, crippling his questionable control over the Nightwing even further. The mage's air spirit tries to help him descend, but the dragon quickly banishes the spirit. The mage tells the street sam to just jump out. The dragon turns to roast the ultralight and its occupant, who in desperation jumps out. The dragon crumples the plane and then dives after the falling street samurai.
The mage tries to catch the street sam with the Levitation spell, but wants to time it so the dragon flies past the falling runner. I make this an opposed roll. The mage uses Edge to push the limit, the dragon uses Edge to reroll his failures. The mage wins, and snatches the falling street samurai away in levitation just as the dragon was about to catch her. The dragon has to steer hard to avoid crashing into the street below, and that's where we're ending today's session.
Digital Luddite mag das.
libraryogre hat dies geteilt.
The last couple of years I've been wondering what happened to all the protest songs. In my parents' time, there were Dylan and Donovan and all the other '60s protest songs, in my time we went from punk to Public Enemy to RatM. But I haven't seen a lot of protest songs these past two decades. What happened?
I don't know, but some recent event seems to have woken people up and brought them back:
Fix it in hardware
3D printing is fun, but there's some snags. Had a couple of misprints yesterday because of new filament getting entangled. Turns out I'm not the only one with that problem, and the community has designed several fixes for the problem.
People with a new printer always end up first printing a couple of accessories for their printer. Would the printer have been better if this wasn't necessary? Of course. But the fact that you can customise your own printer is really cool.
It reminds me of the ideals behind free/open source software: you can customise it, fix issues in software. It rarely works out that way in practice, because often the software is too complicated to fix it quickly like that, but it's really cool that with 3D printers, you can fix issues in hardware.
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That's definitely true. But people don't modify the high temperature printing nozzle of their 3D printers either, and other household equipment has plenty of parts that aren't in contact with high voltage, heavy rotating parts or scalding hot water. (Although washing machines aren't all that hot anymore these days.)
I've been trying to find a model for a broken clip of an but otherwise excellent Bose speaker so I can print a replacement, but I can't find anything. This is exactly the kind of thing for which home printing would be perfect, but I can't find dimensions for what I need to print.
SMS app enshittification
SMS is the most basic and ancient of mobile phone technologies. SMS apps were always freely included. It just sends text messages, and that's it. Can't be simpler, right? Somehow today, all SMS apps seem to be thoroughly enshittified.
The SMS app that came standard on my Fairphone 5 worked fine for a while, until it suddenly wanted to connect with my Google account. Why does SMS need my Google account? And it refused to show me my messages without it. So I delete it and install Chomp SMS. Can't get more basic than that, right? But today, Chomp suddenly asked for my permission to share cookies with a couple of hundred of their "partners". And there was no option to refuse. So I google for ad-free open source SMS apps, and find Pulse. I want to install it, and despite the web listing it as ad-free, Google app store says it contains ads.
What's going on?
My solution so far: install F-Droid, install Fossify Messages. That seems to do exactly what I want.
Does the Google Play Store now require all apps to be enshittified or something? Maybe I should be getting more apps from F-Droid.
Read @pluralistic 's short story 'Radicalized'. Seriously, take some time out of your day, sit with this one. It's worth it.
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When I heard about Brian Thomspon's murder, my first thought was "The Ministry of the Future", which discussed using violence to change immovable government policy. I didn't realize that @pluralistic had already predicted this 5 years earlier. Prescient.
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"Radicalized" is a dark, dark story, and I say that as a regular consumer of #dystopias. Such a convincing rhythm to the narrative, and such a diagnostic of contemporary ills. I'm glad I took the time for it; thanks for sharing!
A: 1 AU.
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Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood is a real-time tactics (RTT) game where Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men stick it to the Sherriff of Nottingham and foil Prince John’s nasty plans.
But wait – what the hell is an RTT? Glad you asked! Think of it as the stealthier cousin of the more battle-hungry RTS. While RTS games are all about overwhelming your enemies with an army, the RTT is all about scouting, evading, and hitting only when it counts. Well-known examples include Commandos, Myth, and Desperados.
In a practical sense, it means Robin Hood isn’t much of a killer – he’s more into knocking folks out, throwing coins to distract them, and generally being a lovably, sneaky rogue. Sure, you can kill people, but the game doesn’t love that, and neither do potential recruits for your Merry Men. (Apparently word travels fast in Medieval England.)
The gameplay is mission-based and hardcore. No open world frolicking here. Instead, you’re thrown into tightly designed levels where guards are everywhere, and civilians can snitch on you faster than a Twitter fight. The A.I. is relentless – blink, and they’ll spot you, sound the alarm, and bring their friends.
One time, I had to knock out a chatty woman just to avoid a full-scale riot. Do I feel bad? Kind of, but either she falls asleep or I lose my life. At least I can take comfort in knowing she’s made of pixels.
The art style here is fantastic. As much as people argue about rhe merits of 2D vs. 3D, what about isometric? Because I bloody love the details of the environments. And while the pixels become more noticeable when you zoom in, from a distance, it’s lush and vivid. I mean, the resolution here is 1024x768 – life was good on Windows 98 PCs.
Sound is excellent. We got medieval music to accompany us on our adventures. The voice acting is suitably over-the-top – as all games of this era were – but at least it’s charming and not annoying. As for the sound effects, vivid and sharp – perfect for hearing guards freak out when they realize you outsmarted them again.
Spellbound Entertainment developed Robin Hood. And though they no longer exist, what a legacy they have. Well-known games they’ve made are Airline Tycoon, Helldorado, and Giana Sisters DS.
Do I recommend Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive? Absolutely. But more than that, I recommend the whole stealth RTT genre. It’s a beautiful style I’d love to see more in modern gaming. Go ahead, put on your tights and ready your arrows – it’s time to sneak around medieval England.
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002) - MobyGames
Lead the men in green pants through the Sherwood Forrest and fight the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is a teambased realtime-strategy game from the developers of Desperados.MobyGames
Martijn Vos hat dies geteilt.
Would it be too far a stretch to say that Thief and Hitman fit into the genre as well, albeit 3D?
Yeah, if it's a solo action game, it's just part of the wider "stealth game" genre.
This was popularized by Metal Gear in 1987, but there were various earlier "forgotten" stealth games like Infiltrator and Castle Wolfenstein.
Who remembers "Wolfenstein"? Weird obscure name forgotten by gaming history.
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MEMO:
A reminder to employees that all the projects you are working on must be completed by the end of the year, despite that date being entirely arbitrary and in many cases impractical.
When it comes to enjoying the festive season or sacrificing your time and health for the good of Q4, Mr. Lofwyr expects you to make the right call.
It’s Q4. There are no more Qs.
Martijn Vos hat dies geteilt.
A sort of participation trophy, I suppose.
Do they still publish that book which contains DIY instructions for everything from batteries to transistors?
Might be a good idea to stock up, before that also turns into AI-generated garbage.
Oh god, LLMs are the grey goop.
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No, but now that you mention it, he twice got a concussion during gym last year. I don't know why he keeps injuring himself like that.
Reign
I finally managed to acquire @Greg Stolze 's Reign. (It's surprisingly hard to get in Europe, and shipping from the US costs a whopping €75. But a German webshop had it.)
I may talk about questionable book organization later, but first I want to talk about how frigging awesome character creation is. Of course there's boring point buy, but there's also Random, and true to its One Roll Engine, random takes only one roll. And that one roll got me:
A lowly beggar who first became a street entertainer, then joined the army as a foot soldier, but soon was promoted to leader of his squad. There, on some mission, presumably against a magical cult, he had a profound mystic experience that awoke some magical abilities in him, and also bestowed some unlikely education on him, making him a student of the occult. But the trip also left him with some unexpected windfall in the form of a really nice sword.
That's quite a lot from a single roll, isn't it? Not every roll produces results that are easy to work with, though. I'm still struggling to figure out how a noble byblow (I gather that means "bastard") became both a squad leader and a master sage.
My son gave it a try, and he had a champion in the army, press ganged into the navy, where due to some mistaken identity shenanigans he was recognized as the long lost son of a prominent noble. (We originally thought he was both a front line fighter and a gladiator, but that turns out to be impossible; he's a champion instead.)
It's a weird an glorious system. Most stats end up rather average, though. I think the tables can be improved upon, so you don't get multiple royal cobblers in the same group, and the rules recommend you customize these tables for your own campaign, so that's awesome and I will.
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Nice to see MathJax used, but on mobile, those two formulae get squished together. Separating them might help.
But to be honest, the treatment of exact chances of certain combinations of sets is less interesting to me than issues like blows to the head being harder to parry, and therefore easier to make, than blows to the hands and feet.
My brief stint practicing HEMA taught me the exact opposite: hands and feet are vulnerable (or at least the sword hand and the forward placed foot), whereas head and torso tend to be surrounded by shield and sword to parry them, not to mention having eyes well positioned to see the blow coming.
Making a result of 10 hit the head sounds logical at first, because rolling 10 sounds harder than rolling 1, but that's only true when you need to roll higher. For exact matches, 1 or 10 makes no difference, except that the 10 is harder to parry. So my guess would be that Reign combat tends to see more head hits than leg hits, especially between skilled opponents who know how to parry.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that sounds like something I've been considering. Maybe let the attacker even choose which waste die determines the hit location, because it's something you often do have some control over. Maybe you don't want to hit them in the head, for example.
Or skip hit locations entirely.
Brainstorming my new RPG campaign
Enough politics. Time to talk about something else! And for today's topic, I'd like to brainstorm a bit about a new RPG campaign. My old Shadowrun campaign is coming to a close, and I'd like to do something a bit more character-driven, with a bit more player agency, a bit more actual roleplaying, and a bit more freedom and a bit more personal stakes, because Shadowrun is pretty mission-based.
Years ago we made a false start with the Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign, and while I loved the concept (wilderness exploration followed by kingdom building and politics), I did not like the execution much. I'm not a fan of Pathfinder-style build-centric systems or the mechanics-first style of play they encourage, and while Paizo's adventure paths are certainly an easy way to get a big campaign, they're kinda linear and never quite seem to fulfill their promise. So let's reinvent that thing.
And instead of a long form post, I'm going to cut this up into bits.
#rpg #ttrpg #httkingmaker
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I agree that a hashtag would work best. That way, you can have multiple parent posts over time, each of which has related commentary below it.
Note that in Mastodon, there is no way to "subscribe" to a thread, but you can follow a hashtag (and you can also follow a hashtag in Diaspora).
Alright, then I need to come up with a working title. I'll go with #httkingmaker and add that to all my posts about this.
Does this work?
Isaac Kuo mag das.
The 2024 DMG dropped in select stores last week. I share cartography credits with Mike Schley & Francesca Baerald in this tome.
But flip to Appendix B, and that is ALL ME. A full appendix of my work.
I'm kinda stoked.
Martijn Vos mag das.
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That was scary for a couple of days. The Friendica server I'm on was suddenly gone. This happened before when Nerdica died. I was afraid friendica.opensocial.space had done the same.
So I'm glad it's back. But I'm also thinking the only way to guarantee continuity is to run my own server,
Susan ✶✶✶✶ mag das.
Hello 😀
We had a technical malfunction in the data center - our domain was unavailable for about 1.5 days. But now everything should work as usual again.
A separate instance is always a good solution, as it supports the decentralized approach of the Fediverse.
Ralph Reist mag das.
The most maddening tech discourse these days is that we need AI to figure out how to solve climate change.
We've known how to completely solve climate change for more than a decade, thanks. We just don't want to.
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And now, a message from the Marsh Family in England to all American voters.
(Tap or click the link, not the image)
youtu.be/YY_8WzcHqMQ
"Bohemian Trumpsody" - Marsh Family adaptation of "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen about Donald J. Trump
Well, with the polls so tight a week out, we decided to revisit US Election politics one last time, and ambitiously to have a stab at building a parody aroun...YouTube
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The cryptofascists are out in force today. The number of dishonest arguments trying to paint antifascism as fascist and fascism as antifascist is off the charts all of a sudden.
Just saw someone argue that supporting an independent Ukraine is fascist while Putin is left-wing. But that's hardly the only weird mirror-universe conversation I've had these past two days. What's going on?
Out first game of 18Ardennes
We played 18Ardennes for the first time yesterday. Although my dad claims we've played it once before, but I have no recollection of that.
The game was fun, and in many ways an improved version of 18EU (from the same designer, David Hecht). Much more going on on th board, and it feels more balanced and dynamic.
The main downside is that maybe there's a bit too much going on, and everything has its own custom rules. You can get bonus income from mines, from ferries, from collecting fort tokens and from east-west and north-south runs, and everything works slightly differently, so it's easy to mix up and forget something.
I'm not sure why Hecht loves using so many minors; 1861 works great with far less minors. 1861 is by a different desiger (Ian Wilson), but feels similar to 18EU and 18Ardennes in scope, starting with minors and later turning them into majors.
I like that 18Ardennes keeps minors viable until the end; you don't have to merge them into majors. And they first turn into 5-share companies before you can convert to 10-shares, which makes the switch from minor to major more attractive, and that conversion is really just about issuing more shares to attract more money, which feels realistic and appropriate, giving the game a smooth progression. Downside is that it took a while before we started buying each other's shares. I think the game could have used more stock rounds; one after each operating round, instead of two.
Oh yeah, my son won. This is starting to become a regular occurrence. Once upon a time I used to be the most common winner of these games in our family, but those days increasingly seem to be behind us.
hey, yeah sorry, my bad. My client didn't show it but it popped up in my #18xx subscription, so I should have realized you're using it.
22 is named after 1822, which spawned a lot of successors, like 1822MX, 1822CA, 1822PNW etc. They all start with lots of minors which you can later merge. Another big McGuffin is that tons of privates are auctioned with different powers, like Pullman and you try to build combinations of Minors/Majors with the best fitting Private Powers.
Sounds great. I'll look into it.
Although... 1822? I thought 1825 already predated the first actual railroad. What train milestone happened in 1822
My contract is ending in a bit over a week, so I'm looking for new projects (software dev). Now, I don't know what's going on, but I'm suddenly receiving offers from the likes of booking.com and Uber. Are those really the kind of companies I want to be working for?
Maybe only if they pay significantly more than others? Or maybe just no. How strong are my convictions in the face of the need to have an income? Why is that suddenly a thing I need to be thinking about?
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Been playing around with my new 3d printer, making tile holders for 18xx games. It's always annoying having to sort those and keep them from getting all over the place, and it turns out there's a neat .scad project that lets you specify exactly how big you want these to be. My A1 mini isn't very big, so mine are pretty small.
#3Dprinting #18xx #bambu
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My impression is that YouTube is completely and utterly broken now. I thought it was just Google being obnoxious about ad blockers, but even without ad blockers YouTube doesn't work anymore.
Does anyone know a good proxy that might fix YouTube? I just tried to install Invidious, but that seems to require Docker, and installing Docker on Arch doesn't seem to work.
The difference between Trump's and Vance's lies
I didn't watch the US VP debate, but something about the run up to it and analysis afterwards gave me this little piece of insight into the fundamental difference between the personalities of Donald Trump and JD Vance, especially regarding to how they lie:
Donald Trump simply has no concept of truth. He lives in his own reality, and facts are what he wants them to be. He will lie about the absolutely stupidest and non-consequential things. Like crows sizes. Nobody cares about crowd sizes, but he does, and his ego demands that he believes he draws the biggest crowds. And since he went into politics, he's been projecting his personal alternate reality on everybody else.
JD Vance knows very well what's real and what's not. He knows right from wrong. He knows truth from lies. And he lies because he has accepted it as their strategy. He consciously chooses to do wrong because that's his ticket to power, whereas Trump lacks the very concept.
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cy mag das.
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But imagine the supermarket was so close you could easily walk there every day. Mine is. I've got two supermarkets within a few hundred meters, and 5 within 2 km.
And I could drive there (it has underground parking), but I don't because what's the point?
How is anyone still undecided?
ELECTION 2024: HOW IS ANYONE STILL UNDECIDED???
How in the ever-loving hell is ANYONE undecided at this point??For Christopher Titus tour dates, specials, and merch visit: https://www.christophertitus.com/...YouTube
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chef's kissFrom Russia with Lev | Official Trailer youtube.com/watch?v=LIbKyujShR…
yewtu.be/watch?v=LIbKyujShRY&s…
From Russia with Lev | Official Trailer
Friday, September 20th, MSNBC Films presents “From Russia with Lev,” executive produced by Rachel Maddow and directed by Billy Corben. Featuring former Trump...YouTube
Will (old account) mag das.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • •Nevermind. Bluetooth from my laptop worked.
Still, weird that bluetooth from my Linux PC didn't work, or that all of the other methods failed so hard.
My problem is solved for now, but the mystery remains.
Doc Edward Morbius
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •My preferred option: install Termux and use its SSH client.
You can also use various direct SSH clients (Android apps), or maybe the Android native userland (though that's exceedingly anemic).
The Android debugger and a USB cable connection can also be used, though I've had limited success with that.
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Doc Edward Morbius • •@Doc Edward Morbius
Both great ideas, except I can't seem to install anything anymore; play store keeps crashing, and trying to install f-droid from the website doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe I can send the apk over bluetooth?
Also, it doesn't seem to recognize the usb connection, so I doubt that will work.
Doc Edward Morbius
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •@Martijn Vos ADB (Android Debugger) then. Physical cable is most reliable.
"How to Transfer Files to Android with ADB or Fastboot"
teamandroid.com/transfer-files…
Often simply plugging in the cable to a booted device, or invoking the debugger (on device) at boot (try holding down various combinations of hard buttons, e.g., volume, power, and/or home button if present) should invoke file-transfer mode.
The device presents as USB storage with a filesystem, you can hunt down what you want to copy from the Android device, or transfer files to it. Generally you're going to want the system Download directory on the Android device in order to access files copied to it from system utilities or other apps.