The kid has been watching a zillion teardown/repair/dismantling videos of various devices on YouTube, and wants to learn to repair phones.

So I took the old phones and tablet that I’d set aside for e-waste collection, and the tools I used to do battery replacements on a couple of devices a while back, and let him at them.

He disassembled and reassembled the dead Nexus 5x that got stuck bootlooping two years ago. Plugged it in. Waited.

It actually powered on enough for us to get it into recovery mode!

Unfortunately I should have left it in fastboot mode, because now that I’ve downloaded an image to install, I can’t get it to power up again at all.

Took Minecraft Earth for a spin around the block. Most of the demos I’d seen showed either the build-on-a-plate mode or the AR adventure mode, so I wasn’t sure how the map mode was going to work.

You see a Minecraft-ified version of your local area. Real-world buildings appear as raised ground instead of buildings, so that you can see where they are, but there’s no risk of mismatches between real doors and virtual ones. Clusters of resources appear on the map: trees, boulders, mounds of dirt and such, along with sheep, cows and other mobs wandering around. You can tap on them repeatedly like you’re mining in the original game, and after a few seconds you get the mob, or the logs, stone blocks, dirt, flowers, etc.

You can use these resources to craft items with familiar recipes, but each item takes time (like smelting) instead of a shape. It might take 30 seconds to turn a log into planks, or three minutes to make a sword. There are three slots for the crafting table and three for the furnace, with one each unlocked at the beginning of gameplay. I’m guessing you unlock the others as you level up.

Resources seem to regenerate quickly – I saw them pop into existence a couple of times on my walk around the block, and there was already a new tree when I got back where I started.

You can also see a circle (I know, a circle! In Minecraft!) on the map showing what’s close enough to interact with, and whenever something crosses that circle, the phone will vibrate briefly to let you know.

A nice touch: If you’re moving faster than walking speed (or if it thinks you are due to GPS drift), it shows your avatar rolling in a mine cart!

Speaking of avatars, if you’ve used the new character creator in recent releases of Bedrock edition, that skin automatically transfers to this game.

Actually playing “adventures” is a bit weird. This is the gameplay they showed during Minecon. At certain spots, you can jump into an augmented-reality instance (the one I tried was roughly a 5 block by 5 block column) with items you’ve crafted or collected. You can fight zombies, find treasure chests, etc. It’s cool, but because you can’t physically move up or down, just around, it’s sort of like walking around a hole in the ground and trying to interact with stuff that’s way below you.

Anyway, I’ve spent longer writing about it than playing so far. I’ll have to take some time to really explore it and get a better sense of the gameplay. And try out the build plates.

But even at first glance, it’s a distinct experience compared to Pokemon Go, and not just a rehash with a different theme!

Update: A key difference I’ve noticed between Pokemon Go and a couple of short sessions in Minecraft Earth is that the world of Minecraft Earth is a lot denser than Pokemon Go.

With Pokemon Go, you have fixed locations for supplies and combat. It’s all about getting you out to walk that distance and find Pokemon along the way. There are even multiple rewards solely for distance walked (candy, hatching eggs, evolving certain Pokemon).

With Minecraft Earth, everything is randomly placed, closer together, and visible from farther away: resources, mobs, adventures. (And you can use a build plate anywhere.) It looks more like a Minecraft world than a map, and it feels like you could play it in a smaller space if you wanted to.

To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up:

  • Will I need to act on it? (Likes/favorites are nice, but I don’t need to respond.)
  • How time-sensitive is it? (“Your ride is here” is more time sensitive than planning a get together for next weekend.)
  • How important? (“Server down” is more important than a project update. A conversation is more important than a newsletter.)
  • Is it actually for me, or is it an ad for the app service?

Then I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.

So I hear when a text or instant message comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.

It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.

I’ve been using Firefox for Android as my main mobile browser for a few weeks now. There are a lot of things I like about it. It works well overall. Unlike Chrome, it supports extensions, so I can install (for instance) Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. The share menu option includes the two most recent apps instead of just one. Things like that.

But there are a few things that I find incredibly frustrating:

  • PWAs aren’t as stable as Chrome.
  • Auto-fill is inconsistent and interacts badly with scrolling.
  • It’s slower than Chrome, though I’ve found that turning off web fonts helps a lot.
  • Private mode UI differs only by the color of the search bar, so whenever I use it, I have to double-check whether I’m actually in private mode or not.

Plus I miss a few Chrome UI features that just streamline common actions:

  • When clicking on the search bar, if you have a URL in the clipboard, Chrome offers to load that URL. (This is particularly helpful for opening email links in private mode.) (Firefox does this too now.)
  • Auto-fill an entire address form at once
  • Clear the last X minutes of history

On the PWA front: These are packaged web applications that can be “installed” locally and used offline, powered by whichever web browser you used to install them. When I switched browsers, I also reinstalled the PWAs I was using on my phone and tablet, switching them from Chrome-powered to Firefox-powered. These amount to a couple of Mastodon instances and Twitter. (I don’t want to install the full Twitter app on my phone so I’ll be less tempted to get caught in infinite scroll.)

On Firefox, Mastodon’s PWA frequently logs me out. Every other day at least. Sometimes it stops being able to load any new statuses, and I have to close the app entirely and re-open it to get back to normal. (Fortunately that’s fast.) Twitter…well, it worked for a couple of days, then it got into a redirect loop where it kept switching between the regular UI and the login screen. I considered reinstalling it through Chrome, but finally decided I was better off without Twitter on my phone anyway.

Despite these issues, I’m going to stick with mobile Firefox for now. We’re entering another period of near-monopoly in web browser engines, and it’s important to keep a viable alternative going to ensure that the future of the web isn’t built on a single stakeholder’s goals.

This post I rescued from my Google+ archive in August 2011 really speaks to how quickly expectations for mobile computing were derailed by the social media feedback loop.

Years ago, I wanted a smartphone so I could write down all the blog posts I compose in my head when I’m away from a computer. Now that I have one, I end up reading Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus instead, and I compose blog posts in my head when I’m away from both my computer AND my phone. Maybe I just need a pencil and notepad.

That’s just me, and just one niche that I wanted to fill with a mobile computer. I also wanted SSH access, control panels, the ability to look up information easily, and photo uploads. But those things weren’t pushed out of the way like actual creative output was when I installed a bunch of dopamine generators on the device.

OK, blogging was fading anyway, and typing on a phone was tiresome. But neither of those made as much of a difference as the fact that it’s so, so easy to check Twitter for “just a minute” and find yourself still scrolling twenty minutes later.

It didn’t slow down photography. That was something that the social media cycle could latch onto. (Follow me on Flickr, Instagram, Photog.Social and Pixelfed!) And when I used a better camera, well, most cameras don’t have Facebook on them.

I think my use of social media is healthier now than it used to be. I still find myself staring at the train wreck of Twitter longer than intended, but I confine most of my activity to one session a day (or less) except for Mastodon, and that’s just different enough that it’s less likely to trigger a vortex to begin with. I do miss out on a lot with friends and family on Facebook by only checking once every couple of weeks, but I’m also happier the less time I spend there.

Still, I haven’t returned to the volume of long-form writing I used to do. And I know there’s so much more I could be doing with an always-connected computer in my pocket.