Open source. Works about as good as AirDrop when that isn’t available.
never underestimate the data transfer speed of a truckload of hard drives
Or just use a USB cable.
Wait, what feature? You can’t access the phone’s storage? I’m pretty sure I can access my phone’s storage.
Old android phones used to emulate a USB mass storage device when you would connect them. To the computer, the phone would appear as a usb stick. Modern android phones, on the other hand, use a protocol called MTP (Mobile Transfer Protocol), which is completely its own thing.
The reason they switched to MTP is that the old approach gave the computer complete control over the phone’s storage; the phone would become completely unusable while connected in this way, and would just display a “connected via usb” splash screen. With MTP, the phone continues to be usable while connected via USB. But it has the downside that MTP is a much less widespread protocol than USB mass storage. On personal computers it should “just work”, but on stuff like printers it might not.
Personally, I think they should bring back USB mass storage emulation as an optional feature. Heck, it can still be done, but you need to compile your own android ROM with usb mass storage drivers, which I’m not nearly skilled enough to do.
Old USB implementation used to be a finicky nightmare, though. You make it sound like it wasn’t changed for a reason, MTP connectivity on Android as it is now is so much more functional, as well as safer.
In any case, that solves the misunderstanding. I thought you meant you couldn’t directly access phone storage anymore, which isn’t the case.
The printer scenario seems like an edge case to me. I mean, MTP has been the default for what? Over a decade? If you have a recent printer you’re probably fine (also, it probably has wifi and a dedicated mobile app or at least enough third party support to be used from your phone regardless). If your printer is older than that you’re probably better served by going through your PC first anyway. Sure, you don’t get direct USB access to printing photos, but now we’re talking about a very specific feature that was in use for a very specific sliver of time, and it requires you to be tethered to a device anyway. I don’t think that’s enough to justify legacy storage support on phones.
Sure, you don’t get direct USB access to printing photos, but now we’re talking about a very specific feature that was in use for a very specific sliver of time, and it requires you to be tethered to a device anyway. I don’t think that’s enough to justify legacy storage support on phones.
Yeah, fair enough.
I just add the printer on my phone and print over the network
So many people on here always talking about printing stuff in 2024. Is everyone a lawyer?
No, I just live in Germany
Some banks and other places like that still require physical documents for stuff like proof of address, affidavits etc.
Even though they’re going to fucking scan it into pdf anyway
I use my printer to print silly stickers, because I am a manchild, but I don’t think I am using the correct ink or paper, because they fade very quickly and smudge sometimes.
Also use it to print graph paper to doodle on.
What type of printer/paper do you use? I find cheap photo paper works well for high res on my inkjet, although it can fade if you leave it in the sun. I’ve been using vinyl sticker sheets for customising my bike and it seems to be holding well, but I did laminate them with sticky back plastic first.
There’s also the sellotape trick, but that only works for laser printers and you obviously can’t print white.
The printer is the cheapest canon inkjet printer I could find new in 2021. I don’t have access to the exact model name rn
I think I have glossy photo paper. I also had a few sheets of postcard size sticker paper that was not glossy and didn’t fade, but I recall it being stupid expensive, or that specific brand at least. I cannot remember the name. Would not survive the elements though.
I thought about laminating it but I wasn’t sure if the heat would fuck the adhesive
When I say laminate, I just mean the rolls of sticky back plastic. I don’t know if it’s called something else in your part of the world.
It’s the stuff we used to use to protect our exercise books at school. You can buy special laminating vinyl but this stuff is cheaper.
Acid free sticky tape (scotch tape in the US?) will also work for smaller stickers, just make sure the sort you use doesn’t yellow. In my experience, glossy photo paper scratches easily and has to have a layer over it to seal it, plastic is the easiest option (also remembering when I made over 200 trading cards on photo paper and had to design, cut and laminate them all by hand lol).
I did test the brand of vinyl paper I used with water and it did hold up. I’ve only had it on my bike for a few months, but so far it doesn’t seem to have yellowed or faded. I probably should have cut out the sticky back plastic to be bigger than the sticker though.
I can’t post my memes on the much room bulletin board for everyone to see unless I print them :/
I transfer data by printing it and then scanning it when I get to the location.
I just like the artefacts it leaves behind.
If it is anything other than text or a photo, I compile the file into a QR code and print that.
A Windows 10 installation iso is about 1499639 QR codes
Couldn’t you, theoretically, create one massive QR code containing all that data? You’d need a massive camera sensor to get the resolution required to actually decode it though.
https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg?si=2eHJdNFMSYmUImV0
This guy wrote a game that can fit in a QR code
Yeah, double sided boi looks like a great way to ruin your phone charging port if you don’t have a usb slot pointing straight up
I dont think you’re supposed to connect to both devices at the same time.
Oh, it’s a USB stick. I thought it worked like a cable.
Cable with a really big delay but a REALLY big buffer
Localsend!
Syncthing is amazing though.
It’s pretty good. Definitely better then self-hosted stuff like nextcloud, because you don’t need to maintain your own server. But sometimes it takes a while for two hosts to discover each other on the same local area network.
I’ve never noticed any delay after first discovery. But i only use 3 devices so 🤷
I think they’re both good for different use-cases. I use nextcloud myself on a truenas system. I sync things like my pictures to nextcloud, and delete them from my phone after I’ve sorted them into the correct folders.
This way my data isn’t clogging up my phone and other things, is still available from anywhere (as long as my home internet doesn’t go down), and it’s still safely stored on redundant storage.
This does take a bit more setting up than something like syncthing, though it wasn’t very difficult at all. Basically install the docker image, tell it where my data goes, and set up a new dns record if you want it publicly accessible. I personally run it through a zerotier network so I don’t have to do that.
I like Nextcloud on my TrueNAS scale setup, but for photos I’ve started using Immich. It works extremely well, and does automatic backups of specific folders from your phone. The interface looks nice too.
LocalSend does it best
Send via Bluetooth…
sad iPhone noises
Send via Airdrop…
No one mentioned wormhole yet, so I’m gonna.
Bluetooth
I think Bluetooth is only around 2Mbps. For a lot of people (at least in developed countries) it’d even be quicker to upload the file somewhere then download it on the other device.
Pretty slow for a big file.
Quicker than using your zune to squirt a song over IR
I feel a bit like a bit of a fossil here, but why not drop the file into a network file share and grab it from there on your phone? No physical item required
Cx Expolorer on Android can access network shares and Samba shares like a desktop OS. It really isn’t a particularly outdated option, it’s so much less fiddly than direct drive access from a PC and it effectively works just like a USB stick, interface-wise, without having to do the whole “where did I put my thumbdrive” dance each time.
Not a single network file transfer protocol in the list.
Imagine not knowing about stuff like SCP/SFTP or SMB.
Pfft I’ve bet you’ve never even tried cross-pollinating a syncmap blockchain to your distributed SM-IP 42G node
Noob
I’m pretty sure the average user doesn’t even know what a “server” really is, let alone know how to set up an FTP server.
Bluetooth file transfer my beloved
My PC does not have bluetooth
:(
That only works if the target is near. You may as well have said semaphore or signal fire.
It’s also pretty slow
Also a lot of desktops don’t have bluetooth
And even the Desktops with Bluetooth can often have in incompatible version for file transfers. Bluetooth is a mess.
In Android just selectively enable wireless ADB debugging and then use ADB Explorer. Easier than plugging the phone in, wireless, and allows access to all folders on the device (including /Android/data/* which is blocked from being accessed using on-device file explorers). Turn it off when you’re done. Boom, wireless data transfer to and from an Android device at way faster than cabled SMB speeds.
That would work great for me if it had a linux version. Theoretically someone could just use fuse for it
ADB Explorer is really just a wrapper for adb-pull, you can use that manually on Linux but without the GUI it’s true it’s not quite as seamless.
Faster than a cable, unless your device has usb 3.xx
you joke, but I’ve got my most recent salvo of audio books sitting in a double sided flash drive on my desk, right now
The one thing Apple did right. AirDrop is nice, and I wish PairDrop worked for Bluetooth aswell.
I mean, we already have Nearby Share/Quickshare on Samsung, but it is still kind of finnicky.
Quick share works on all phones now. Google’s nearby share was renamed to quick share. And there’s also a windows client now
