Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 22

A fun romp through theater, mystery, soap opera, mythology, fandom and screwball comedy romance tropes. (*whew!*) Think of every wacky antic you can that might occur when a new actress joins the cast of a long-running soap produced by and for mythological creatures, with human actors. They’re all in here, and more! (Though it is sometimes a bit too cute with the puns). Took me back to my high school and college theater days, and every backstage comedy I’ve seen.

Yes, and…

Be the mango.

Tinyview has two goals: Show comics in a way that works on small screens and pay the artists. I can’t speak to the second, but they do well at the first (with a few stumbles).

They’ve got some good comics, enough that I’m happy to subscribe for a few bucks a month. (In particular I like Fowl Language, Heart & Brain and Itchy Feet.)

The Android app is basically a wrapper around the website, which is fine, but that also means it can be slow to load sometimes, even when it notifies you that one of the comics you’re following has a new episode up.

Le Guin’s first novel is a serviceable quest story that maps fantasy tropes to a science-fiction setting. It’s engaging enough, but I’d only recommend it to someone who’s already read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. You can see the beginnings of a lot of the themes she explores more thoroughly in later works: Colonial exploitation, proxy wars, breaking racial stereotypes, interactions between cultures.

Fun fact: Le Guin invented the word ansible for this book.

A powerful, versatile (and venerable!*) text editor for macOS that still manages to be fast and stay out of your way so you can just write. It’s light enough that I use it for jotting down notes instead of opening TextEdit, and it’s capable enough that I can open multi-megabyte files, filter duplicates, sort, do regex-based search and replace, run external commands, and more. On occasion I’ve opened giant CSVs to run a search-and replace, sort, and then filter in here, because I can finish the whole thing faster than I can get Excel or Numbers to even load the file.

There’s a free mode that replaces TextWrangler (which used to be the free-equivalent), but I’ve been quite happy to pay for the full version. If you’re coming from Windows and miss Notepad++, this is the app to use.

Similar to NetNewsWire on macOS, NewsFlash is a clean, stable, fast, free, no-clutter and no-nonsense RSS/Atom newsfeed reader for Linux. You can read articles in the application or open them in the web browser of your choice. It syncs new posts quickly and I haven’t had any issues with it getting stuck the way I had with Communique (before the latter stopped working entirely!)

It’s an app, not a service, so it’s not tracking you or inserting ads. That also means there’s no web version. But it can sync over several web-based newsreaders like FreshRSS, Nextcloud News (which is what I use it with), Inoreader and more. So you can keep track of your subscriptions and read/unread articles across devices. But you can only connect it to one service at a time. Note: With Nextcloud, syncing may be faster with an app-specific password.

You can set up multiple external actions including sharing to Pocket/Instapaper, Mastodon/Twitter, Reddit and Telegram, plus one custom URL-based share. I’m using it to connect to my Postmarks instance for public bookmarking.

NewsFlash is an entirely rewritten application by the author of the now-discontinued FeedReader, who describes it as the “spiritual successor” to the older application.

Built in GTK for GNOME, but I’ve got the Flatpak working just fine on KDE Plasma and LxQt too.