Part 2 of an occasional series.
Almost everything I've wanted for the new LineageOS shiny phone
has been downloadable via F-Droid. There are a few exceptions, though;
I've ended up loading them via ADB. (If I just copy them to the phone
there doesn't appear to be an "install" action available. I assume
this is a Security Feature. Apparently if you download them from the
right phone browser you can install from the download notification,
but not simply from the file.)
F-Droid itself, which is a bit
obvious I suppose. (Copperhead OS apparently has this preinstalled.)
Signal; there's no technical reason
for this, just a preference by the F-Droid maintainer. (Why aren't
more people using this? Text, voice and video calls; encryption
approved by Bruce; no huge corporate
owner that can be forced to install back-doors; open source. It's
ideal.)
The VLC video
player, because the build process is a nightmare and the F-Droid
people haven't been able to get it automated yet. I've been using it
mostly to play streams off the audio server, but the video and
particularly subtitle support are pretty decent.
Other handy programs that are on F-Droid:
OneTwo: boardgame
utilities. The built-in dice roller is a bit rubbish, but the random
first player chooser, chess clock (which even allows for more than two
players), and score trackers are quite useful. (I'd like the score
tracker to allow one to add specific arbitrary numbers rather than
just being an accumulator, though. Might be something to try writing.)
Barcode Scanner:
reads and decodes various sorts of bar code, even including Data
Matrix, and sends the result to the clipboard. It's a bit prone to
fire things at Google if you use any of the search buttons, but this
can be controlled; and it deals well with wireless network QRcodes.
M.A.L.P.: a
better mpd client than MPDroid, although it's a bit too prone to fill
the screen with album art; but this is one that I sometimes choose to
use instead of my own web-based system, which MPDroid wasn't.
Suntimes:
sun and moon rise and set times, as well as twilight, phases,
equinoctes, and so on. You can set an alarm for sunset with three
keystrokes! ("Why would you want to?" That's not the point.)
Markor:
general-purpose text editor, with special features for markdown and
todo.txt but usable for plain text too.
Unicode Map
lists Unicode characters and translates between codes and names - and
displays most of them (I gather that font support is rather better on
LineageOS than on standard Android). It's six years old, though, and
only incorporates the 6.1 standard. I might see about updating it.
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