Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

When I was first experimenting with the Gemini Protocol, Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop. It’s visually clean, it’s fast, it runs well (and stable) on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the UI works the way you’d expect it to coming from using a web browser, down to details like middle-clicking to open a link in a new background tab.

Lagrange registers itself on all three platforms as a handler for gemini: URLs and will send http: and https: URLs to the desktop’s default handler, so it’s possible to seamlessly follow links between Geminispace and the web, switching between Lagrange and Firefox/Vivaldi/etc.

You might still need an extra step to open links from Firefox.

The author has also been fast to implement useful conventions like the subscription scheme, conveniences like opening linked images inline and giving each capsule its own color scheme, and related small-internet (or “smol internet” if you prefer) protocols like Titan (used for uploading files, which was deliberately left out of Gemini itself), Spartan and Nex (even more minimalist!), and Misfin (for sending messages). And yes, it also works with older protocols like Finger and Gopher.

Off the Desktop

The mobile version is allegedly still in beta, but works surprisingly well on my Android phone! It has all the same features, except it’s a single screen instead of tabs and windows.

There’s also a terminal-based interface that looks as much as possible like the desktop app as you can get with text characters, colors and (optionally) emoji. I’ve only played with it a little bit since I couldn’t get the AppImage to run and kept putting off compiling it myself. I finally did and it feels a lot more natural to use than amfora (the classic monochrome terminal-based client). The key commands for following links seemed weird at first glance, but I got used to them in a matter of seconds, whereas I still get tripped up in amfora.

Notes

On Linux, the Flatpak has worked more consistently for me than the AppImage has. Fedora offers a package as well, but it tends to lag behind a bit.

Agate is a simple Gemini Protocol server. It’s a single binary, needs only minimal configuration, and sets up TLS certs for you. It only serves static files, but you can also enable multiple hostnames, directory listings and custom headers if you want to, so you can redirect pages that have moved or use it as a download server.

It’s fast. It’s stable. I’ve been running my Gemini capsule on it for three years* and I don’t think it’s ever crashed. Updates are a matter of downloading the latest release from GitHub, killing the old process, and launching the new one. No need to mess with Docker or anything like that unless you want to.

If you’re reading the Gemini version of this review, it’s serving the page right now!

Since I don’t have root on the VPS I’m running it on, I can’t set up a proper system service, but I can add cron jobs, so it’s easy enough to schedule one for @reboot pointing to my launch script.

Running a Gemini Server on a VPS Without Root

The Gemini Protocol as a whole does support dynamically-generated pages and simple interactions, and there are other servers that can handle both.

A perfect balance of powerful and lightweight, Notepad++ is far more capable than Notepad, but doesn’t complicate things like a full IDE.

This Windows text editor launches fast enough I don’t even bother using Notepad anymore. It works great for editing large files, using custom syntax highlighting, multifile / regex / multiline search and replace, sorting, dealing with duplicates, and all kinds of advanced things you might want to do on a text file or group of them. I’ve opened multi-megabyte CSV files, sorted or filtered, and re-saved in the time it would take Excel to parse them.

Free Software, in both senses of the word.

Notepad++ is my main text editor on Windows, just as BBEdit is on MacOS. As for Linux, Notepad++ works great on Wine. There’s a little more overhead though, so when I don’t need its advanced features I still use Featherpad for speed.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main web browser lately, after several years using it as an alternate when something wouldn’t work in Firefox.

Why Not Another Chromium Browser?

Mainly because I trust Vivaldi more than Chrome, Opera, Brave or Edge. Chrome has slowly been becoming more and more of a funnel for Google accounts, with the advertising side of the company calling more of the shots. IMO Opera lost its soul when it was bought out by a conglomerate. Brave has some interesting tech, but it’s also wrapped up in the cryptocurrency/venture capitalist investor world. And of course Edge is from Microsoft. (Though I find it hilarious that you can install Edge on Linux these days.)

Vivaldi comes from the small-tech side of things (the company is employee-owned, with no outside investors) and was co-founded by Jon von Tetzchner, one of Opera’s co-founders. It’s basically what Opera would have been today if they’d kept their focus on making a good browser that works for the person using it instead of working to squeeze out more profit for the conglomerate that owns the company.

What About the Software?

It’s a power-user ultra-customizable internet suite including web, mail and news, built on the same “Blink” engine as Chrome and other Chromium browsers.

Downsides:

• The engine still depends on the Google-defined monoculture.
• Vivaldi’s own code isn’t capital-F Free Software.

Upsides:

• You’re a lot less likely to run into a page that doesn’t work than you are with Firefox.
• You can use any Chrome extension.
• Vivaldi isn’t dropping support for older extensions (which Chrome is doing in favor of an API that makes it a lot harder to run ad blockers).
• Vivaldi isn’t including Google’s “Topics”, in which Chrome tracks your activity for advertising purposes so websites don’t “have” to.

“Topics” was actually the last straw for me, and I uninstalled Chrome everywhere I could. (Sadly, I still have one site that I have to use semi-regularly that won’t work in Vivaldi or Firefox, only in Chrome.)

Vivaldi is available on every platform I use regularly between work and home, including macOS, Linux, Windows and Android (plus iOS), and runs natively on both x86_64 and ARM. Yes, on Windows and Linux too. For Linux they provide DEB, RPM, Flatpak, and Snap packages for both architectures.

Mobile

The Android app is noticeably faster than Firefox on my phone, and has most of the features of the desktop version. It also supports more capabilities for PWAs (installable web applications). The main thing I miss from Firefox is that Vivaldi’s mobile app doesn’t support extensions.

The only real problem I’ve run into is that the browser’s autofill sometimes crowds out the autofill from KeePass2Android (and possibly other password managers). I worked around it once by switching to KP2A’s keyboard, then deleted the one password I had saved in Vivaldi, but it does the same thing with saved addresses.

Sync

Every browser has a sync service these days. I only recently started using Vivaldi Link, and I turned off bookmark syncing because I’m using Floccus to sync bookmarks across Vivaldi and Firefox. The nice thing about Vivaldi’s is that you set a second password on your local devices for encrypting your data before it even gets sent to their servers, so Vivaldi couldn’t sell your sync data or use it to train AI even if they wanted to!

Beyond Web Pages

Vivaldi has continued to maintain an actual internet suite, including mail, calendar, and newsfeeds (RSS/Atom). I haven’t used these as much as I have used the web part, but I can add a few notes.

Feeds: Even if you don’t have the full suite enabled, it’ll show a human-readable version of feeds you might click on. If you do, you get a familiar feed reader app similar to NetNewsWire or Liferea.

Mail: Works with any IMAP or POP server, including Gmail. Handles multiple accounts, lets you work with combined inboxes…and combined folders, which can get confusing sometimes. I still feel more comfortable with Thunderbird, though.

Calendars/Tasks: Syncs with Vivaldi, Google, Apple, and standard CalDAV servers so it works with Nextcloud.

Contacts: Only syncs with a Vivaldi account, so it’s a non-starter as far as my Nextcloud setup goes.

Vivaldi.social: Mastodon-powered social network site, easy to set up and access in the sidebar, interacts with the rest of the Fediverse. A good way to check out Mastodon if you’re curious.

If I wanted to boil The Telling down to just one word, I’d choose “thoughtful.”

Reading it was a different experience from reading Le Guin’s other science fiction. Most of what I’d read up to this point was written in the 1960s and 1970s. This was published in 2000 – and the era it comments on is one I lived through.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it’s not the technology that’s the problem. It’s the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs, sequels and formulaic feel-good Hallmark specials…

We see it first in Sutty’s* memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she’s trying to understand, one that’s undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the technology of the one she left, as thoroughly and insistently as China transformed itself during and after the Cultural Revolution.**

She’s frustrated and depressed, and when she starts finding hints of the world banished in the name of modernity, she’s confused trying to piece together all the disparate and contradictory pieces.***

It’s largely a story of discovery: Sutty trying to figure out what the heck “The Telling” actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he’s trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there’s also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

Notes