noughtnaut

My sincere apologies, Mexico is definitely on the good list.

Leave me be, I’m agnostic. Bother me with religious nonsense and see the atheist come out and ruin your day.

…and simply agrees to never, ever, set foot in North America.

I’m in.

Not sure, though, how this ploy would work out for our fine fellows in South America, Mexico, and Canada, the ones currently belabored with being the closest neighbours to The Wastelands.

Honestly, great teachers would have given you extra credit for that work (and possibly used it for future semesters, but let’s not get carried away here).

It can be made significantly more pleasant by bringing a couple of, uh, >!hunting dogs!< (is redacting called for?).

Rustle in the bush? >!Dogs!< run off. Snarls, rending noises. Piece and quiet. 😅

I haven’t even explored all the biomes but I’m quite content in my little homestead by the lake.

Eh, 80% of what this Dan fellow provides can’t be all that much…

Adams family doorbell.

Precrime wioll haven be here.

Perhaps this is all just highly refined British humour?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

It would be hilarious to see random civilians being casually followed by a policeman (policeperson?), overtly and cheerfully “nah mate, you haven’t done a thing. I’m just here to watch. For now. Carry on.”

Really, you’ll get proficient in no time. The trick is to go all in with touch typing, no hint and peck!

When I was in my late 20s I spent one low-activity work week transitioning to Dvorak. I have used it for 20+ years now (although it’s a bitch to get working on subpar OS’es).

You can maintain both skills, but I chose to let my qwerty skills fade - now I only use it on mobile (because, I loathe typing on glass and so swipe whenever I can - and swiping is hilariously useless with Dvorak because it’s so well laid out).

I’m not sure if I posted this, but I figured out they have seeing 50k users, and 1:10 gender ratio - although that doesn’t say how many are real people.

Your airport analogy is hitting on the nose. I’m going to steal borrow that.

My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was once approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.

This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.

The trouble is that with this sort of thing you really do need some form of moderation or quality control (of the users, not (only) the platform) because it will be inundated by fake profiles and nasty content.

As much as I’m cheering for Alovoa I don’t see how this is solveable. 🥲

Thank you for this (repeated) question! I will try some of these and collate my experiences.

• SwiftKey

Long-time fan, in spite of privacy concerns. My bar for comparing everything below.

• FUTO

First install, looks promising.

Indeed very customisable. What I don’t like is the (imho) far inferior swipe typing and the need to explicitly switch languages for the keyboard to use the appropriate dictionary. Also, I miss directional buttons for those single-character position adjustments (Futo only offers space-key swiping). Voice typing seems highlighted but I find it to be unbearably slow.

Verdict: will most likely uninstall again.

• OpenBoard

Installation somehow defaulted to “English (Australia)”, but no biggie.

Seems very customisable also, but lacks swipe typing (a deal beaker for me). Relies on the OS language (actually, keyboard) switcher and curiously lacks a shortcut to its settings (requiring the user to go so the rest through the Settings app (which, best-case, is a whopping 5 taps).

Verdict: privacy aside, cannot compete with SwiftKey for features and usability.

• Florisboard

Strainghtforward installation. Seems extremely customisable. No swiping nor autocomplete but both festures are clearly promised for a future release.

Verdict: apart from features promised in the future, thus seems an excellent keyboard.

• Heliboard

Straightforward installation. Language selection included a github redirect to manually download dictionary, which was semi nice.

Proper big-keyed numerical keyboard. Also extremely customisable. Space-key swiping even supports vertical movement.

Verdict: apart from lack of swipe typing, probably the best contender!

• Graffiti

Included because I friggin’ loved it back in the day. The (to my knowledge) only app offering graffiti input is badly broken and crashes immediately on modern Android versions. I remember it working quite well on earlier versions, but that was years ago.