Monica

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

I'm posting this to both LJ and G+.

When I joined LJ there were three levels of publicity for posts: public, friends-only, and private. Years later they introduced filters, so you could group your friends into buckets for both reading and access. Either you could not at the time put a post in multiple filters or I did not know that you could, so I ended up creating some hierarchical security filters. For example, some posts would be restricted to the "best buddies" filter, others to the "know pretty well" filter, and others to the "know" filter. A "best buddy" was therefore in all three groups. This is a royal pain to administer on LJ (you can't put a group in a group), and I've been moving to another model now that I can. I may never get around to correcting the older entries, though.

I would like to not have such a mess with G+. I note that G+ (unlike LJ) tells you right there on a person's page what group (er, circle) you've put that person in. I haven't put anybody in multiples, but I assume that if I did they would all show up.

So I'm thinking that what I want to do is to put everybody in exactly one security filter, and then make posts visible to all applicable filters. Instead of having a person in multiple filters, I would have a post in multiple filters. Does this seem right to y'all? Are there other factors I should be thinking about?

On LJ I post almost everything publicly, but it looks like G+, with its ability to make posts to specific individuals, is likely to involve more non-public posting. I can't tell yet. By the time I know, it will be too late to go back and fix my circles if I get this wrong. So I'd like to hear people's thoughts now, while everybody is in one big "acqaintances" bucket awaiting sorting.

Note that I am not talking about reading filters here, and I don't intend to mingle them. I might trust somebody deeply but not want to give his 20 posts per day high priority, y'know? Reading filters can help manage that.

Edit: To clarify, my current thinking is to put each person in exactly one security filter and in one or more reading filters.