Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 14

Le Guin’s first novel is a serviceable quest story that maps fantasy tropes to a science-fiction setting. It’s engaging enough, but I’d only recommend it to someone who’s already read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. You can see the beginnings of a lot of the themes she explores more thoroughly in later works: Colonial exploitation, proxy wars, breaking racial stereotypes, interactions between cultures.

Fun fact: Le Guin invented the word ansible for this book.

A powerful, versatile (and venerable!*) text editor for macOS that still manages to be fast and stay out of your way so you can just write. It’s light enough that I use it for jotting down notes instead of opening TextEdit, and it’s capable enough that I can open multi-megabyte files, filter duplicates, sort, do regex-based search and replace, run external commands, and more. On occasion I’ve opened giant CSVs to run a search-and replace, sort, and then filter in here, because I can finish the whole thing faster than I can get Excel or Numbers to even load the file.

There’s a free mode that replaces TextWrangler (which used to be the free-equivalent), but I’ve been quite happy to pay for the full version. If you’re coming from Windows and miss Notepad++, this is the app to use.

Similar to NetNewsWire on macOS, NewsFlash is a clean, stable, fast, free, no-clutter and no-nonsense RSS/Atom newsfeed reader for Linux. You can read articles in the application or open them in the web browser of your choice. It syncs new posts quickly and I haven’t had any issues with it getting stuck the way I had with Communique (before the latter stopped working entirely!)

It’s an app, not a service, so it’s not tracking you or inserting ads. That also means there’s no web version. But it can sync over several web-based newsreaders like FreshRSS, Nextcloud News (which is what I use it with), Inoreader and more. So you can keep track of your subscriptions and read/unread articles across devices. But you can only connect it to one service at a time. Note: With Nextcloud, syncing may be faster with an app-specific password.

You can set up multiple external actions including sharing to Pocket/Instapaper, Mastodon/Twitter, Reddit and Telegram, plus one custom URL-based share. I’m using it to connect to my Postmarks instance for public bookmarking.

NewsFlash is an entirely rewritten application by the author of the now-discontinued FeedReader, who describes it as the “spiritual successor” to the older application.

Built in GTK for GNOME, but I’ve got the Flatpak working just fine on KDE Plasma and LxQt too.

These days, Instagram is like checking out your friends’ vacation photos, but every other photo is an advertisement, and half of your friends’ pics are full of product placement.

It used to be a good place for sharing photos with friends and family, then for keeping up with photos by photographers who do work you like, then keeping up with photos by people who became famous for being on Instagram (I never really got the appeal of “influencer” culture), and now for keeping up with advertisements. Every once in a while I check in and it feels like I see more ads than photos from people I’m following. And it desperately wants to keep my attention - all of it.

Even without worrying about Meta vacuuming up as much personal data as it can, it’s just not enjoyable anymore.

As for alternatives: I’m still happy with Flickr (which is all about the photos!). Pixelfed is similar to Instagram but without the surveillance advertising, plus it’s part of the Fediverse. (I use PixelDroid for it on my phone.) And sometimes I just post on my blog or on Mastodon.

A nice, lightweight feed reader for Linux that does the basics: lets you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds and read the new posts when you feel like it. Does its job, doesn’t hog resources, and stays out of the way.

Downsides: Doesn’t sync your subscriptions and read/unread status with anything. If you need that, I recommend NewsFlash.