Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

As password managers go, I like Bitwarden better than LastPass. It’s got a better track record certainly, and it’s encrypted in a way that makes it really difficult for someone to break into your vault, but it’s still a cloud service, which carries some risks.

It’s got a web app, mobile app and browser extensions, of course, and the browser extension (Chromium-based, Firefox-based and Safari) has a convenient keyboard shortcut to auto-fill on demand. There’s also a desktop app, which is useful when logging into desktop or command-line applications. I haven’t used the mobile app, but the others run more smoothly than LastPass.

As well as passwords, it’ll store SSH keys and payment cards, and it can act as a TOTP authenticator. That’s certainly convenient, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having two-factor authentication, if you’re using the same vault for a password and its 2FA codes.

It does share the same problem I’ve found with LastPass and KeePassXC-Browser, which is when you generate a new password for a site that’s already in your vault, it doesn’t always get updated automatically. I’ve taken to copying the generated password to the clipboard just in case I need to paste it back into the login record.

Personal accounts have a free tier, and the current pricing is reasonable ($20/year individual, or $48/year for a family of up to 6). In addition to shared vaults, organizations can self-host their vaults, which provides more control and keeps the vault inside your network.

Nice, simple app for handling the local files on your phone or tablet. It doesn’t get fancy or connect to cloud storage. It doesn’t even try to use network access, just local storage.

It does show you thumbnails and file properties, and you can move, copy, rename, delete, or compress (as a .zip) files one at a time or in batches. Searching by filename is included, though it’s slower than Google’s Files app.

I switched to this as my main file manager on my phone ages ago, and disabled “Files by Google.” This way if I save something locally, I know it’s staying local.

One of those apps you install only because they’re required for something else. It handles most account management actions, but it really wants to upsell new devices or services when you just want to check your bill or change something about your line. And it will repeatedly spam you with offers on “T-Mobile Tuesdays” unless you turn notifications off again after using it.

There are some things you can only do on the website, and some you can only do in the app, and no clear reason for what’s in each category. And some things still don’t work, such as activating an e-sim for a phone that the app doesn’t know can accept e-sims. (Once I got ahold of a real person, I could give them the IMEI and EID numbers and they could email me an activation code.)

There are also phones that work just fine on T-Mobile’s network, but can’t run the app. Which is fine 99% of the time, but when you do need to do something that can’t be done on the website, you need another phone on your plan that can run it, or else you need to just call them and deal with the phone menus until you convince it to connect you with a real person.

Hainish Stories

Most of Le Guin’s Hainish stories are about imagining different ways for human societies to live. These in particular are mostly about different ways for men and women to relate. They’re all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if you’ve already read The Left Hand of Darkness.

Coming of Age in Karhide

Left Hand… explored what an androgynous society might be like. This story answers any lingering questions you might have about sex among humans who only experience gender once a month (and never know for sure which they’re going to be ahead of time).

The Matter of Seggri

In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to “protect” them. On Seggri, the situation is reversed: Most people are women, and the few men are kept apart and guarded to make sure that there are enough around for procreation. They don’t really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still can’t decide whether the stereotyping is a weak link or a deliberate counterpoint to the way women get stereotyped in reality), and occasionally help someone get pregnant.

It’s told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left Hand…. Some of the stories are dry, while others get into forbidden romance territory.

Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways

Two stories set on the planet O, where marriages consist of four people: two men, two women, one each from two different divisions of society. As you’d imagine, setting one up is…complicated.

“Unchosen Love” is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the more satisfying of the two.

In “Mountain Ways,” the partners in a torrid affair try to pass one of the women off as a man so they can fill in the missing role, bending a strict tradition in one way in order to uphold it in another. It…sort of works…for a while. (This one’s available to read online at Clarkesworld.)

Solitude

A society of introverts, where people stick to the absolute bare minimum connection needed to continue humanity. An Ekumen observer embeds herself and her children in one of the loose villages in order to understand it. This is one that sticks with you, and I’ve written about it in more detail.

Old Music and the Slave Women

The most brutal of the stories in what is now Five Ways to Forgiveness, in which a Hainish observer (Old Music is his name) is held captive for an extended period by the slave-owning side in a civil war.

Stand-Alone Stories

The Birthday of the World

It’s a good title, but it’s far from the best story in the collection. Mainly what sticks in my head is the low-tech interpretation of prophecies involving high-tech events. (A house falls in fire but still stands, for instance.)

Paradises Lost

A standalone novella about the middle generations of a multi-generation starship, and what happens when some of them come to believe that nothing outside of the ship actually exists. Well worth the read, and I’ve reviewed it in more detail already.

The people of Eleven-Soro live alone, isolated as much as possible. Women and children live in loose villages called “aunt-rings.” Men live as hermits. And no adult sets foot in another’s house.

Le Guin describes “Solitude” as a story about introverts.

An Ekumen observer, unable to get the adults to tell her anything, raises her children in one of the aunt-rings so they can learn how the culture functions and explain it to her. What she didn’t count on was that her daughter would want to stay, and not return with her to a noisy, overwhelming, crowded society that she barely remembers. (Too many people. She wants to stay where she can be a person and occasionally see another person.) The researcher sees this as a tragedy. Her daughter sees it as the only way she can stand living.

As someone who likes quiet and doing my own thing, and isn’t too fond of crowds, my sympathies are with the daughter. There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness, after all. Though Sorovian culture (such as it is) certainly goes a lot farther than I’d want to live in.

Through this story, Le Guin seems to be attempting to figure out what the bare minimum for human connection is…and what it would mean for those who try to limit themselves to it.

Avoid Magic

In a recent column at Reactor, Kristen Patterson describes it as the complete breakdown of human connection. She’s more viscerally repulsed by the way Sorovians live, and zeroes in on why the culture is so disconnected: They’ve attempted to remove every last remnant of obligation or control from human relationships. And while they’ve succeeded in removing power dynamics in most cases, they’ve also removed the mutual obligation that makes communities actually function.

“Solitude” is included in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories). It’s among the better stories in the collection, and one that sticks with you.