who only by moving can balance

I have for many years now used the Swype keyboard for text input on my auxiliary internet device. Languages I have installed are English (UK), French, German, Irish, and Turkish.

One of these languages is not like the other, not merely in that it's not Indo-European but in specific that it's an agglutinative language.

The way this is handled in predictive text (1) makes a lot of sense and (2) is brilliant.

For four of these languages, if a word isn't in the dictionary (whether because it came pre-entered or because I saved it myself later), predictive text won't ever suggest it. "Stork" can be in the dictionary, but if it's only there in the singular I can swipe that shape + "s" and I'll never get "storks" suggested.

By way of contrast, have a word I used as demonstration to A the other night: duşmanlarımdan. "Duşman" (enemy) is in the pre-loaded dictionary; even duşman+lar (enemy + plural: enemies) might be. But duşman+lar+ım (enemy + plural + first person singular possessive: my enemies) isn't, and duşman+lar+ım+dan (enemy + plural + first person singular possessive + ablative: from my enemies) definitely isn't. The fundamental nature of the language, though, is that you do just Build Words like this, so rather than try (and fail) to preload All Possible Words or even a reasonable subset of them, the Turkish keyboard layout has instead been written to make predictions based on what set of base word plus standard morphemes you've swiped over. It's lovely.

(The target sentence in question is "duşmanlarımdan kaçabilirdin", "you could have escaped from my enemies". "kaçabilirdin" breaks down to kaç-a-bilir-din: "kaçmak" is to flee or escape, and gives "kaç"; "a" is a buffer vowel, which follows vowel harmony; "bilir" is to be able; "din" is the second person singular past tense indicator.)

Backstory: I use my AIDe (see what I did there) for a bunch of health-management crap, and also for a bunch of Pokémon Go (for the last year). I am also, as I believe is well-established, Rather Tough On Hardware, and was Impressed yesterday with some of it, so here is another round-up of what all I am doing and routinely using at the moment.

( Hardware )

( Software )

Aaaaany questions? I imagine not, but I am very happy to natter about this stuff!

This is relevant because my current auxiliary internet device was running Cyanogen. I was annoyed about this for a variety of reasons, including "unrooted device means I can't transfer data between handsets for one of the apps I use" and also "unrooted app means I can't run f.lux but am instead stuck with Twilight". I was well aware that rebraining the device was likely to lead to sharks (official plaintext transcript, containing comic titles, URLs, post dates, transcripts (when available), and other metadata).

Here are some of the details of the implosion. Here's another report. tl;dr: if you are running CyanogenMod you probably want to turn off automatic updates; if you are running CyanogenOS you may wish to reconsider this plan.

The upside is that CM is in the process of being forked to LineageOS, with updating from CM to Lineage planned to be as seamless as possible -- if you want to build your own you can do so, at this point, but if you'd like flashable build packages you'll have to wait while infrastructure gets put in place.

So. Under the circumstances, having been planning to rebrain to CM this holiday anyway, I bumped that up the priority list (with hand-holding from silver_adept and me_and; many thanks). Herewith details of all of the sodding sharks involved, from the perspective of someone who had done some of this once previously under less frustrating circumstances. A lot of it might read as stating the obvious! I'm completely okay with that because I would like to have the reference material for my future use.

( Read more... )