Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 16

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.

Wine* has been around forever, and is the major compatibility layer for when you want to run a Windows program on your Linux, Unix or Mac desktop. It’s not perfect, but consider that Valve built their Proton layer on it to be able to run Windows games on the Steam Deck, their Linux-powered flagship console.

It’s a translation layer, not a virtual machine, so you don’t have to boot up an entire Windows VM inside your host system (or dual-boot) just to run one application, and you don’t have an entire emulated system taking up memory and processor power.

For Steam games it’s usually better to run the native Steam client and let it run the game through Proton.

CrossOver is a commercial packaging of Wine by CodeWeavers. I’ve found it worth paying for for two main reasons:

• Install tools. In addition to Linux, they have installers for Mac and ChromeOS. And they have tools to make it easier to install and manage the applications.
• They work on the upstream Wine project, so it’s one way to pay for Wine development.

Apps I’ve Used

• Notepad++. I usually use Linux-native editors, but sometimes it’s easier to fire up N++ and use one feature it has instead of chaining together several features in another editor.
• EditPad Pro. Another text editor with some nice features that weren’t in any of the Linux-native editors I was using at the time.
• Internet Explorer, back in the day, to test website compatibility. The browser itself was kinda flaky, but all I needed was to test against the engine.
• Probably more Steam games than I can remember!

App compatibility databases:

• WineHQ AppDB
• CodeWeavers’ compatibility DB
• ProtonDB (focused on Steam games)

No-nonsense but full-featured email application for macOS that works well with multiple IMAP accounts and Gmail. Features an “All Inboxes” view as well as showing each account individually. Setup can be a bit weird since parts of account config are in System Settings. Uses the system Contacts application. You can add and remove server folders on your accounts. Better than Windows 10 Mail or Geary, not as good as Thunderbird, but lighter and snappier.

One of my favorite places to go walking (and photographing) in the South Bay. (SCBG is the other.) It’s the last remnant of the seasonal marshes that once covered the western part of the LA basin. (Basically a large city block that was set aside as a nature preserve.) It’s carefully maintained to assist the natural environment. Ponds form naturally during the winter and spring rains and dry out over summer. All kinds of waterfowl visit the pools during the wet season. There is a broad path suitable for strollers (and possibly wheelchairs?) that runs around the edges and through the center, and depending on the time of year and how much rain there’s been lately, smaller footpaths run between the ponds and through the wooded area. Very flat, mostly open, shade in the wooded corner where the ponds tend to last longest.

Great for spotting birds and small animals in all seasons, butterflies and dragonflies in spring/summer, and for hearing tiny frogs that hide very effectively in the grass and stop croaking when you try to locate them. Worth visiting in multiple seasons, too.

You can see some of the many photos I’ve taken there on Flickr and on my blog. Blog highlights include hawkspotting, winter birds and seasons of the marsh.

There’s a visitor center (with restrooms!) and a garden of local native plants across the street, and the gates shut at 5 pm.