Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 5

Fluent Reader is a simple, no-nonsense, modern-looking feed reader that runs locally on your desktop, so it can’t track you the way a web application could. It works great out of the box, and offers multiple ways to view posts including a grid-based card view which sets it apart from most news readers. Preferences are simple, and the only external action is to open an article in your default web browser, but you can set up rules for each feed. Displaying a QR code of the article URL so you can open it on a phone is a nice touch.

It’s an Electron app (with all the pros and cons that entails), so it can run on Windows, macOS and Linux. Available from both the Microsoft and Apple app stores, as an installer, or as a Flatpak for Linux.

Cloud sync is supported for a single account through any of FeedBin, Inoreader, Nextcloud News or anything using the Google Reader API.

I prefer the clean UI over RSSGuard’s complexity. But sometimes I find it a bit too simplified. I think NewsFlash (Linux) and NetNewsWire (macOS) hit a bit closer to the “as simple as possible and no simpler” mark. But they’re all in the same ballpark. And NetNewsWire doesn’t support Nextcloud (yet?).

Unfortunately I’ve had intermittent sync issues with Nextcloud on all three operating systems. (That’s critical bug #2.) I haven’t been able to determine whether the problem is with my server or with some of the feeds I follow, but I did report the bug as a starting point. But because of that, I can’t really recommend it for use with Nextcloud News.

Mobile

There is a corresponding Fluent Reader Lite app for both iOS and Android, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

Their thin-crust pizzas are good, but the deep-dish pizzas are really good. I keep wanting to try something new and deciding to get the Classic Deep Dish again (spinach, roasted garlic, ricotta and mushrooms) – and normally I don’t even like mushrooms.

The newer Torrance location is basically just take-out and delivery (I think there’s one table in it), but the original Manhattan Beach location has a bit more indoor seating and shares a big outdoor area with the other restaurants in the building.

Useful for when you want to make sure the pages you’re reading will still be around in some form in the future, and to easily get at additional context.

Privacy Alert: It checks every page you view against the Wayback Machine, so turn it off when you’re not using it! There really isn’t a good way around this without downloading their entire index as part of the extension. But that’s the only way it can show you how many times the page has been archived, or automatically save a copy, or automatically check for archives when the current page isn’t found.

If you enable auto-save, be sure to add to the exclusions list so it doesn’t waste time trying to archive your webmail or control panel.

There is a private mode where it doesn’t do anything until you ask it to. But that leaves you with essentially the same features as a pair of bookmarklets to check or save the current page.

I’ve used the Firefox add-on with, well, Firefox, and the Chrome extension with both Vivaldi and Arc.

Alternative: Bookmarklets

I’ve also been using these bookmarklets from Wikipedia, which don’t need an extension and work on just about any desktop browser. (Except Arc, where I wrote a “boost” back in the early beta period to add buttons to every page.)

Load archives of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/\/$/, '')));

Save an archive of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href));

This self-hosted, web-based calendar has completely replaced Google Calendar for me. It’s private, since I can run it on my own server, so I’m in control of my data. It supports everything I need it to do. And it syncs easily (using CalDAV) in both directions with just about everything I want to use it with: Thunderbird, Vivaldi, GNOME, macOS and Android (using DAVx⁵). On Android I use Fossify Calendar. (I had been using Simple Calendar, but it’s no longer usable after the app suite changed hands.)

The only platform I’ve had trouble syncing calendars with was Windows Mail and Calendar, which has been discontinued in favor of Microsoft Outlook. I haven’t tried it with Outlook, since I’d already switched to Thunderbird on Windows.

Note: Syncing with other applications is faster with an app-specific password.

Minor Mage is firmly in the “kid goes on scary quest and comes back stronger” genre. The 12-year-old protagonist is cast out to complete a nigh-impossible quest alone (aside from his armadillo familiar), facing ghouls and starvation and bandits and ghosts and murderers. He’s a wizard, yes, but he’s barely half-trained and only knows a handful of spells (though his herbal lore is pretty strong). Similar to the young heroes of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and Illuminations, he has to learn how to make the most of his limited abilities in order to survive – only this story takes place not in a city but mostly in wilderness an abandoned farmlands.

By turns melancholy and creepy, with a dash of humor and a sarcastic armadillo. From an adult perspective, Oliver’s constant lamenting that he’s “only a minor mage” starts to grate after a while. But that’s not the perspective it’s written for: it’s a kids’ book, and operates on kids’ fantasy logic.

Speaking of the target audience: In the afterward, Kingfisher/Vernon talks about trying to convince editors that yes, this is a children’s book, and getting constant pushback that it’s “too scary.” (This is how she ended up publishing it as Kingfisher rather than Vernon) It reminded me of similar comments Neil Gaiman wrote about Coraline, remarking that it was too scary for adults but not too scary for children.

Sometimes I wonder: Do these editors remember being 12?