Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

One of my favorite spots to go walking in something resembling nature near the South Bay. (The other is Madrona Marsh.) Up in the hills, big enough to feel like you could get lost, but not big enough to actually get lost.

The areas near the entrance and the ring road – the rose garden, living wall, butterfly exhibits etc. – are sunny and wheelchair accessible. The interior is less structured, shadier, and cris-crossed with footpaths. Sometimes narrow, sometimes rocky, sometimes hilly, they’re never more than a mild grade. Fun to explore.

A good place to spot small, relatively tame wildlife like rabbits, squirrels, lizards, etc., plus of course birds of all sorts from hummingbirds to hawks. In the right season you can see lots of butterflies.

Several permanent sculptures form a scattered art exhibit, and they often host short-term or seasonal exhibits. There’s usually an informal scavenger hunt for kids who want to comb the botanical gardens looking for the hidden garden gnomes or fairies or whatever the theme is that season.

Sometimes during wet winters and springs there’s a shallow lake in the middle, emptying into a stream. More often it’s dry or, at most, muddy.

You do need to buy tickets ahead of time now. Before COVID you could buy admission at the door, but they started doing timed reservations to keep it from getting too crowded (they never completely closed!) and have kept that going. I haven’t had trouble finding a timeslot since everything opened up, though. These days it’s only really a problem if someone’s holding an event on the day I want to go.

I need to narrow down a handful of representative photos to add here, but in the meantime, you can check out my extensive photo album on Flickr from many visits over the last few years!

Why use a dedicated app for Pixelfed when I can use any Mastodon-compatible app? Because sharing and viewing photos is just different enough from sharing and following random bits of everything that it’s worth using an app that’s optimized for it.

PixelDroid works smoothly, offers both grid and stream views, integrates well with other apps’ share intents and features a posting workflow that not only focuses (pun not intended) on images but makes it easy to add a description (alt text) for each photo in a post as you’re adding images.

It’s free and open source, and doesn’t vacuum up your personal data like certain other photo sharing apps I might name.

Reading People of the Crater I had to remind myself that if I’d been reading it when I was, say, 12, in 1950, I might have devoured it. It’s a fairly standard fantasy adventure that drops a random guy into a fish-out-of-water quest to rescue a lost princess and fight off an army. There are vague sci-fi trappings with nods to Hollow Earth, hidden ancient cities in Antarctica, the various species living there being from another planet. The Ancient Ones and unfortunately named Black Ones are conveniently humanoid enough that the hero and villain both lust after the princess. And the hero fights his way through weird challenges and weirder people, and the villain might as well be twirling his mustache, and it’s all very Post-WW2 Tough American Manly Man Doing Manly Hero Things™.

But I’m not 12, it’s not the 1950s, and while I still like a good adventure story, I’d rather read one with more interesting concepts or compelling characters (or both).

Great selection of both meat and veggie fillings, plus desserts (the chocolate one is intense). Mainly takeout. Figure on 2-3 empanadas per person if you want to make a meal of it. Walk in, or order ahead online so you know what they still have later in the day. Cashless. Street parking only.

Not a bad email client. Snappy, works with multiple accounts. Comparable to Apple Mail on a Mac. I did have trouble getting it to sync my contacts and calendars with Nextcloud*, but the core email features work well. So of course it’s being discontinued.

Rather than switching to “The New Outlook” (even if it is supposed to be more like the Mac and web versions than the Office 2019 version for Windows), I’m switching to Thunderbird. I already know it works with my setup, and I know it’s not going to constantly try to upsell me on Microsoft 365.

Tech Notes

* Windows 10 doesn’t have a good way to sync with a Nextcloud instance directly, but you can work around it by starting to create a bogus iCloud account as a placeholder, then go into the advanced settings and paste in the CardDAV or CalDAV URL for your server. This is actually Nextcloud’s documented solution!

Also, for troubleshooting purposes: Windows Mail re-encodes messages when you export them. I had to troubleshoot a 7bit vs quoted-printable issue and had to use Thunderbird to see the actual code being sent.