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.
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?
A cross-platform feed reader that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Extremely customizable. It can be installed with either a full or a simplified web engine for reading articles in the application. You can choose a specific web browser to open posts externally, and can set up other applications on the system as tools that can open article urls. Sync the list of feeds separately from the articles in them. Even change the database backend. But all that comes at the cost of clutter.
It’s a local application, so it’s not tracking you or inserting ads or anything like a web-based application might. But you can sync it with various cloud accounts including Nextcloud News, Feedly, Tiny Tiny RSS, and anything using the Google Reader API (FreshRSS, Inoreader, etc.). So you can keep track of your subscriptions and read/unread articles across devices. You can set up multiple cloud accounts, too. They just show up as more top-level folders.
Update: The trouble I had syncing with Nextcloud was resolved by, of all things, generating an app-specific password to use with RSS Guard instead of just logging into my Nextcloud account normally. (Thanks to the author for reaching out and reminding me to file a bug report – even though it turned out the bug wasn’t in his program!*)
Since fixing the sync issue, I’ve found RSS Guard to be solid on all three OSes. (Yeah, I’m one of those weirdos who runs all three on a regular basis.) If you’re the kind of person who likes to set things up just right rather than stick with the basics, this is the one to go with.
Rock solid, flexible, inexpensive cloud hosting with a variety of Linux options. I’ve been using them for the last couple of years for everything from tinkering up to running my own NextCloud instance and I’ve had zero problems.
Even migrating servers between datacenters has gone seamlessly.
Their object storage is S3 compatible, and supports both lifecycle policies and per-bucket access keys (the latter is why I haven’t done as much as I might at DigitalOcean). I’ve hooked it up to Nextcloud and it more or less “just works” (with the exception of a bug in Nextcloud 27 that’s easy to work around until Nextcloud fixes it.)
This collection of three early novels in Le Guin’s Hainish series initially looks haphazard, as if they were only collected because of writing order and not being as well-known as her later works.
Rocannon’s World is a serviceable fantasy quest wrapped in sci-fi trappings.
Planet of Exile is a tighter story of isolation and people forced together by an invasion.
City of Illusions involves a stranger seeking his identity in a post-apocalyptic Earth controlled by unseen alien masters.
But common threads tie them together. Not just her frequent themes like culture clashes, critiquing colonization, challenging racial stereotypes (both in-world and real), and just getting people to communicate. The second and third novels form a thematic duology:
A single city of Earth colonists struggles to survive and adapt to a primitive world.
A single city of alien colonists controls a primitive Earth they’ve adapted to their own desires.
And you can watch her craft growing stronger over the course of the three novels.
I wouldn’t recommend someone start reading Le Guin here, but I would recommend it to someone who’s familiar with her work.