Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...?

We have a 3rd-generation Kindle, which I mostly use to read the Hugo shortlist each year; I find myself thinking it might be useful for novellas and other odds and ends I'd like to read without necessarily wanting to own a dead-tree copy of.

A recent half-price offer on a Kindle Paperwhite caused me to wonder if having an e-reader each might not be such a terrible idea, which then made me think whether the Paperwhite was the right e-reader or if I should consider alternatives. 30 seconds googlingDetailed research led me instead to the Kobo range, which seem to offer larger screens & storage (and more waterproofing) for less money.

Any opinions? I like the real buttons on the existing Kindle, and the fact I can just mount it as USB mass storage and put ebooks on it thus. I don't care about the lack of light (and like the fact it doesn't give off light, IYSWIM). I dislike that page-turning is a bit slow, that it's not running Free Software, and the tie-in to Amazon (though the fact I can feed it books over USB ameliorates that).

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S II, but it is now damaged beyond economic repair[0]. So I need a new one. Desiderata:

• Not much bigger than my current phone (125.3x66.1x8.49mm) so it still fits in my pockets!
  
• Android or similar (see below)
  
• Decent camera
  
• Easy to transfer files to Linux (Kies Air works quite well; jmtpfs isn't bad in Debian squeeze)
  
• Not vastly expensive
  
• Available unlocked
  
• Will get plausible updates
  

The apps I make most use of currently are the web-browser and email clients, the Met Office app, the torch, and the camera. I also use google maps (and navfree when abroad) and the ssh client, gstrings (a tuner app), the wifi analyser, a metronome, UnTappd, and the Good Beer Guide. After an initial flurry of game-playing (I played a lot of PvZ, and some Archipelago), I seem to have largely stopped.

The things that have annoyed me about this phone are mostly the google apps that you can't remove, and then have filled up some special storage for updates so I can't download updates any more, even though I have loads of space on my SD card and have moved all the apps I can there. The lack of an Android update (it's still on 4.1.2) recently leaves me a bit concerned about security, too.

I don't want to go iOS, which I think means I'm stuck with Android if I want anything resembling enough apps? Although presumably I could install cyanogen-mod (is that plausibly safe these days?). There are Ubuntu phones, but I think they don't really have apps to cover my use cases?

The obvious replacement would be a Galaxy 6 or 7, although they are a bit larger. Any other things I should be looking at?

[0] screen is cracked, and repair is about £150, which for a 4-year-old phone is daft (I could get a new S 2 for that!)

A while back, a friend gave me some chilli plants. Sadly, they came with free aphids. I've tried moving the plants outside, bring them in with a ladybird on, and a fruit-and-veg bug-killer spray (which contains Pyrethrum). There are still aphids. They had a bit of a field day while I was away, but while spraying seems to kill most (all?) of the obvious aphids, if I wait a few days, they appear again.

I'm not quite sure what to do - should I try spraying more often even if I can't spot any aphids in the hopes that'll kill any small ones before they reproduce, or move on to other approaches? To be honest, I'm less looking for control and more for maximum deletion, as the Cybermen would say...

Is there a standard warm-up / set of warm-ups for singers? I mean more for a group than for an individual.

I know how I like to warm up, but I think I'm rather odd. When I've directed choirs in the past, I've just sort of made something up (scales, some easy music with lots of good vowel sounds, that sort of thing), but presumably someone has thought about this in a more systematic way?

I inherited our current Hoover from my late grandmother, and it's beginning to show its age - I was cleaning up last week before a house inspection, and the carpet still looked like it needed hoovering, even after I'd hoovered it! So, it is time to replace it. The obvious options would be a Henry (the cattery I worked in had these, and they seemed pretty good, although some seem to want to use bags, which is a definite minus), or a Dyson. Dyson's are considerably more expensive (but also more shiny, and if I order online they'll recycle my old Hoover too). So...

[Poll #1575327]

What's the Belgian idiom(s) for "Not known at this address, return to sender"?

(I know there is no such language, FTAOD)

Our new oven is fan-assisted, but we have no destructions for it. Food packaging always says "for fan-assisted ovens, RTFM"; is there a good rule-of-thumb we can/should use instead of TFM?

Suppose for a moment, I have a 13.5 million-point data file that I want to plot as a scatter-plot. gnuplot will happily produce a plot for me, although it takes a little while, and I need a fair bit of RAM.

The resulting .ps file is 212M, however, and makes evince thrash for absolutely ages before displaying it. Converting it to PDF just makes matters worse (up to 275M). I want to be able to include this figure in a pdfLaTeX document.

Annoyingly, runes of the form time gs -r600 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=foo-600.pdf -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dBATCH foo.ps actually make matters worse - the resulting PDF is even bigger!

Surely there must be an easy way to simplify ps or PDF files? presumably I could force gs to rasterize by outputting to PNG and then converting back to PDF (how?), but that seems a deeply ugly hack...

For a looong time (like, since about 1997), I've had one wallet. It did exactly what I wanted, and fitted in my pocket. Occasionally I'd think about replacing it, but could never find one with the same features. Sadly, a third party has managed to break it irretrievably, so I need to replace it. Ideally reasonably soon, since the current substitute has a couple of major UI bugs.

Rant first: why does no-where let you buy wallets by desired feature? I'm not interested in the branding on my wallet, I'm interested in its functionality. AFAICT, there isn't even a web-site that lets you do this, never mind a real shop - places selling wallets seem to just heap them up higgledy-piggledy, and leave you to rummage in vain.

Secondly, does anyone know where I might get a decent replacement? I'd show you pictures of the old one, but we don't own a digital camera. Its key features were:
i) bi-fold wallet (i.e it folds in half)
ii) two rear banknote sections
iii) at least 8 credit-card sleeves (the old one had a middle section, with 4 sleeves on each side, so you could pull cards out readily, as they all pulled out in the upwards direction, rather than having a flap you had to flip up, and pull cards down out of, like say this one, which I suspect would be troublesome in use)
iv) coin purse in the same orientation as the rest of the wallet (it was zipped, which I think was better than press-studded, but maybe I could cope with the latter) - this means you can faff with notes and coins at the same time without the coins falling out
v) could be poppered close (although I managed without when that functionality failed, so maybe this isn't so important)
vi) fits in my pocket
vii) black leather (though I'd take one that matched all the above if it didn't match this!)

ETA: this one is laid out similarly to how the card-holder in my old one was. I think it has only 1 notes section, though.