Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

To call The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport a cyberpunk version of Aladdin would be a disservice. It takes that as a starting point and gleefully launches into a tale of political upheaval, prize-fighting robots, kaiju and mechs, unwanted legacies, family secrets, betrayal, loyalty, a Not-Prince, oppression, opulence, AI rights, pervasive surveillance, masking who you are, and of course sufficiently advanced technology that can grant wishes (only three for the trial period, but unlimited wishes can be unlocked for…well, you get the idea), all set in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet where everyone’s sure the world is ending soon, but no one’s sure how or why, and it hardly matters because no one can afford to leave anyway.

It’s a glorious mishmash of all this and more, wrapped around the human Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador, filtered through a storytelling bot who has just woken up from being factory-reset and is trying to make sense of the totally illogical humans and bots, not to mention the city itself.

Great fun, highly recommended.

Basic calendar app that works with your phone’s local calendars. You can schedule events, set reminders, view monthly, weekly, daily, etc., handle multiple event types, all the usual things you want to use a calendar for on your phone.

It doesn’t clutter up your schedule with ads, and it doesn’t vacuum up your personal data and send it to some online service.

If you do want to sync your calendars with other devices, you can use an app like DAVx⁵, which is how I sync with my own Nextcloud server. (Or you can leave the Google Calendar app installed, and it’ll sync your Google account’s calendars in the background while you interact with them through this app.)

The only real frustration I have is that the homescreen widget for events can’t fit much in the 2x2 space I have available for it. But that’s partly because I bumped the system font size up a notch or two.

A delightful parody of every English countryside murder mystery trope, presented as a guidebook to a village that has them all. Written wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, illustrated like something out of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. A short, quick read. Funny if you’re slightly familiar with the genre, moreso if you’ve seen every trope in the book.

Basic, privacy-respecting contacts app for Android that works with all contacts accounts on your phone. Connects with whatever dialer and email apps you’re using. Will merge your view of contacts that appear in more than one account. Doesn’t send data anywhere else, which is more than I can be sure of with Google’s default Contacts app.

I use it with my Nextcloud contacts (synced through DAVx⁵) in addition to the handful I still have on my Google account.

The only problem I have with it is that when creating a new contact from another app “Add to existing” option doesn’t always work.

I’ve stayed here several times. It’s nothing fancy, but there’s nothing wrong with it either. Staff is friendly, and the rooms are clean and in good condition. The complementary breakfast is decent, and has better coffee than the coffee pods provided in the rooms. (The coffee and breakfast at Rival Coffee Co., which shares the same parking lot, are better, but of course they’re not free!)

It’s a bit out of the way despite being right next to the freeway (it’s between two exits), but that mostly means if you’re on the side aimed away from the freeway, it’s not particularly noisy unless there’s a football game at the high school across the street. And those don’t run into the middle of the night, unlike the freeway traffic, but at least the nighttime freeway traffic is mostly just the collective “whoosh” of cars actually moving, so it’s easier to tune out than it would be on a busy street with starting and stopping and honking and so forth.

WiFi is free and the room TVs are compatible with Chromecast. There are several car chargers available for EVs, all run by ChargePoint: six type 1 and two each type 1 combo and CHAdeMO (as of early 2024).

One caveat: If you want to sleep, I would recommend against the room on the first floor across from the conference rooms, next to the laundry room and fitness room, with the pool outside. You’ll be kept awake by the “thump, thump, thump” of people using the fitness equipment* late at night, the washers and driers, and any parties that might be going on across the hall or out by the pool.