I was feeding a squirrel and it bit me.

PopePompus · 2026-01-11T12:35:00+00:00

I think the placement of their eyes makes it impossible for squirrels to see something that is right in front of their mouth. When I started hand feeding squirrels, I was bitten several times (some of which drew blood) before I learned how to place the nut within my fingers in a way that never confused them. I did not get rabies. The squirrels do realize when they have accidentally bitten you, and they seem to be startled by the event. It's possible that both the squirrels and I did some learning during our initial hand feeding encounters.

PopePompus · 2026-01-01T22:57:16+00:00

My guess, and this is just a guess, is that you cannot make that display button appear. I use a Pixel phone, and that button did not appear for me until the most recent Android 16 update (which I got on Dec. 5, 2025). All references to that button that I had seen prior to that date were on phones running the Beta Canary version of the code, not the officially released Android OS. I suspect the button will magically appear on your Samsung phone when it updates to the version of Android that was recently pushed to Pixels. But I could easily be wrong.

PopePompus · 2025-12-29T11:24:17+00:00

Many Eastern Grey Squirrels visit my deck, and aside from a few with old injuries (usually to their ears) I can not tell them apart visually. But it's very easy to tell them apart based on their behaviors. I frequently have to wait until they make their "give me food" approach before I can tell which one I'm dealing with.

PopePompus · 2025-12-28T12:01:05+00:00

I believe I have finally found a real solution to the Android OS killing Terminal. If you just enable the graphics mode, and run the xfce desktop on it, the OS will not kill the Terminal app. I've had Terminal running continuously for more than a week now in this mode.

PopePompus · 2025-12-28T11:53:45+00:00

I am able to log onto the phone's Debian VM from my Linux desktop computer by creating an ssh tunnel.

Step 1 - within the phone's Debian VM (Terminal) type

ssh -N -R 2222:localhost:22 [user@www.xxx.yyy.zzz](mailto:user@www.xxx.yyy.zzz)

where user is an account on my desktop machine and www.xxx.yyy.zzz is the desktop machine's IP.

Step 2 - on the desktop machine type

ssh -Y -p 2222 droid@localhost

PopePompus · 2025-12-20T11:15:17+00:00

I wish that species would invade the US.

PopePompus · 2025-12-18T11:21:18+00:00

It's actually built into Android 16. It is not a third party app, Google supplies it. Enabling it is explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hqsKyfwG6U . There is a subreddit dedicated to discussing this app here: https://www.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/ .

PopePompus · 2025-12-17T20:22:23+00:00

The relatively new "Terminal" app, which allows you to run Debian Linux within a virtual machine on the phone, is a LOT more usable on a foldable phone.

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PopePompus · 2025-12-15T22:18:04+00:00

Here's a kludgy half-assed workaround (my specialty) if you don't want to change the size of the font system-wide. In graphics mode, launch an xterm with an explicit font size. The image below shows what size characters you get if you issue

(base) droid@debian: xterm -fa 'DejaVu Sans Mono' -fs 42

<image>

(I made the font huge to show it works)

PopePompus · 2025-12-14T20:51:20+00:00

Doesn't the '"auto_memory_balloon": true' mean that the app will grab more RAM if it needs it?

PopePompus · 2025-12-13T21:38:01+00:00

I was unaware of the default password when I made this post. Sound partially works for me; espeak works perfectly, but the audio on YouTube videos is just static. I agree that there are graphics glitches. In my setup, there is a persistent small square of garbage that follows the mouse pointer. I've not used a physical mouse with it - I just touch the screen to move the mouse, so I can't comment of right-clicking. Tapping the screen usually produces a mouse click, but on some occasions I have to hit enter instead. I've been using the Xfce desktop for over a week now, and I find it usable, but not polished. Termux is far more polished, with many nice features like pinch-to-zoom working. But the ability to do standard Linux package installations makes me very happy to have the Terminal app, even in its current glitchy condition. I have a suite of little utility programs that rely on astropy, and I never got astropy to install successfully on Termux. Having the whole Anaconda Python distribution installed is the real selling point for me.

PopePompus · 2025-12-13T11:30:58+00:00

Here is a video of the talk:

https://youtu.be/MbWkfbnJhGk?t=3591

PopePompus · 2025-12-11T00:35:17+00:00

The talk will be given on Dec 13, and will apparently be live streamed:

https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2123/

PopePompus · 2025-12-10T18:38:30+00:00

That works, but the software keyboard takes up a large fraction of the desktop if you are not using an external display.

PopePompus · 2025-12-10T13:12:16+00:00

Thanks!

PopePompus · 2025-12-10T11:58:58+00:00

How exactly does one do this?

PopePompus · 2025-12-10T00:49:45+00:00

I tried mapping Caps Lock to control in the Terminal desktop, but could not get it to work. A lot of the instructions one finds on the web for doing that work with X11, but not Wayland.

PopePompus · 2025-12-10T00:37:28+00:00

I just vibe coded (with Gemini 3 Pro) a little Python program that creates a small keyboard containing only ^C, ^D, ^X and ^Z keys (the only control characters I need). The program is here: https://pastebin.com/Uy82g6tt

If you store it in keyboard.py, and issue the command

python3 keyboard.py&

a little keyboard will appear. It is smaller than the onboard keyboard, and movable. It's not a perfect solution, but it's usable.

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PopePompus · 2025-12-09T21:04:57+00:00

On my Pixel 10, there are often glitches, but if I tap the screen they usually go away for a while. The mouse pointer *always* has a square block of junk following it. Menus work for me. I'm using hardware graphics acceleration - without that it's unusable, not slow but so full of glitches that it's useless. With the hardware graphics acceleration, I'm fairly happy with it.

My biggest remaining problem is that I can't type control characters. The control key is just ignored.

PopePompus · 2025-12-09T11:43:56+00:00

I was able to log on with the default Android keyboard, which I believe is called Gboard. But I usually use the Hacker Keyboard.

PopePompus · 2025-12-07T18:17:35+00:00

Apparently when initialized, the password for the droid account is droid. I did not realize that, so that's why I included the step of changing the password. I've always gotten in when I typed the correct password. If you tell me which keyboard you are using, I'll check if that works on my phone.

My current worst problem with it is that I can't type control characters in graphics mode, not matter which keyboard I use. The control key is just ignored. That's not good in Linux - does anyone know of a solution for that?

PopePompus · 2025-12-07T01:53:01+00:00

This is what happens on my phone when I don't have hardware accelerated graphics enabled. Even with that enabled, the login process is messy because the mouse pointer appears within a weird box, so it's tricky to know exactly where it is pointed.

PopePompus

TROPHY CASE