With summer officially over, it’s back to business (or school) for many people, which can mean more time writing longer things, especially on the go. The smartphone has replaced the laptop for many tasks, but when it comes to text input, tapping away on tiny onscreen keys might make you wish you had hauled along the computer just for its keyboard. Thankfully, your phone includes several features to make text entry much easier. Here are a few suggestions.

Visit your settings

Thanks to predictive text prompts, automatic punctuation and other shortcuts (like pressing vowel keys to see the pop-up menu of accent marks), typing on small glass rectangles isn’t as awkward as it used to be. To find out what features are available for your phone, start with its Settings app.

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TWAIN HARTE, Calif. -This is the tinderbox of the Sierra Nevada. It’s early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the air shimmers over dead trees choked in brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, past 20-foot-tall burn piles — tons of scrap wood not worth bringing to a sawmill. They’ve been assembled by workers on the front line of the fight against forest fires: a timber crew thinning these woods for the Forest Service and a tech startup that’s trying to automate the enormous machines the crew relies on.

They are called skidders: 10-foot-tall vehicles on four massive wheels, with a bulldozerlike blade on the front and a tree-size grapple dangling from the back. They are the worker bees, hauling downed logs from the forest to landing sites, where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks bound for the sawmill. Usually, a single driver operates them for a 12-hour shift, grabbing logs from behind and then driving forward.

Engineers at the Sonora, California, startup Kodama Systems, a forest management company, have hacked into a skidder built by Caterpillar, studded it with cameras and radar, and plugged it into the internet. The result is a remote-controlled machine that does scut work for a timber crew and teaches itself to operate semiautonomously, using lidar — or light detection and ranging — to map the forest.

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The Jefferson County Planning Commission has recommended against the approval of a proposed chairlift-access mountain bike park in Conifer — taking a unanimous vote that is a bad sign for the first-of-its-kind attraction in Colorado.

Jeffco’s county commissioners, who have final say over the future of the 250-acre Shadow Mountain Bike Park and a special use permit the project is seeking, are scheduled to take up the proposal on Oct. 1.

The planning commission voted 7-0 against the bike park on Monday night. The park would feature a dedicated chairlift to ferry riders uphill and 16 miles of trails winding down an 830-foot vertical drop for the payoff ride.

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