Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader’s interest.

Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone wants to believe. There are plenty of established tropes in science-fiction and among serious space enthusiasts, but a lot of them have major gaps in them when you start pressing for details. What happens to a fetus in microgravity? Can you scrape together enough soil nutrients to supply agriculture for a whole Mars city, or do you need to constantly import fertilizer from Earth? How do you make sure you have enough medical supplies on-hand?

The authors wanted to write about what we know about space settlement. But it turns out it’s a really good primer for what we don’t know and need to research before we can get serious.

It’s also an interesting companion to Under Alien Skies, which takes the approach of “assuming we’re able to work out the details, this is what it would be like there.” And, well, we have a lot more details to work out.

I’ve been using the Poke3 as my main ebook reader for a couple of years now. It’s the same 6-7-inch form factor as the Kindle Paperwhite or the Kobo Clara, which makes it easy to carry around whether you’re reading on the go, in bed, or anywhere in between. It’s an e-ink display, which means its battery lasts longer and you can read it easily in bright sunlight. The display is sharp enough to minimize eyestrain.

What makes it different is that it’s not a single-purpose device. It’s an Android tablet. That means I’m not limited to the built-in software for reading side-loaded DRM-free books. I can hook it up to Google Play or F-Droid and install other ebook apps like KOReader or Librera…and the Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and eBooks.com readers and read books from any eBook store. (It occurs to me I’ve never used the Onyx store/cloud connectivity.) I’ve built up extensive libraries on Kindle and Kobo over the past decade-plus, along with books direct from publishers, in Humble Bundles, from public domain sources and so on. It’s nice to be able to find them all on one device. And of course it’s not limited to just ebooks: RSS readers, Pocket, viewing websites or Gemini capsules, email, you name it!

The built-in e-reader app, Neo Reader, is optimized well, and a lot more responsive than anything else except KOReader (which is also designed for e-ink displays), so I end up using one of those when possible. The built-in Chromium-based web browser, Neo Reader, works well enough.

• Kindle, Kobo, Libby, Nook and eBooks.com reader apps all work, with display tweaks. (Nook’s video splash screen looks terrible, but book pages are fine.)
• Hoopla works, though you have to enable background activity in the system’s Optimize dialog to download books. (The Android app setting for background battery use doesn’t do anything when you try to change it directly.)
• Lagrange works really well for Gemini capsules.
• Firefox and Vivaldi both work, but are slower than Neo Browser.

Battery life is surprisingly good, especially with it set to freeze apps when they’re not in the foreground, and auto-shutdown after a period of inactivity. (The downside is that it doesn’t put you right back where you left off if it’s powered down all the way.) And it charges and syncs via USB-C, which means I don’t have to go hunting for a micro-USB cable!

Display

The pre-installed apps are all well-optimized for e-ink displays. The resolution is high enough to minimize eyestrain. And there’s a frontlight with adjustable brightness and color temperature, which is nice!

Now, e-ink displays update slowly to begin with. But the touchscreen responsiveness on the Poke3 is way too slow for anything highly interactive. The on-screen keyboard can be painfully slow. Even tapping on an app icon or flipping through pages can be hit-or-miss sometimes.

The bigger problem is that most Android apps aren’t designed for e-ink. They’re designed for full-color displays where gradients look good and you can choose off-white or off-black for your background to reduce eyestrain…when what works best on this kind of display is mostly solid black and white, with the occasional grayscale for photos. The built-in apps are designed with this in mind. There is a tool for tuning the refresh rate, contrast, fonts and so forth per-app, which helps a lot, but there’s only so much it can do with an app or website that’s designed with dark gray on light gray or colors that contrast each other just fine, but work out to nearly the same shade of gray.

I wouldn’t use it for games, and I don’t do much web browsing on it. My son managed to get YouTube running once, mostly to see what it would look like on the display, but of course the refresh rate was abysmal! But for reading, the display issues are minimal, and the versatility outweighs it.

Newer Models

The Poke3 is old. At this time, BOOX is selling the Poke5, but the specs on the website aren’t detailed enough to tell how much they’ve improved the touch response and app performance. And now they have a more expensive reader in this size, aptly named the Page which adds back physical page-flipping buttons. If third-party apps can use the buttons, that would bypass the worst of the responsiveness issues!

Updates

Is it better than stopping by the bank every other week for more rolls of quarters? Maaaaaybe. It was during the 2020 covid-lockdown coin shortage, but now?

It means doing my laundry depends not just on the washer and dryer working, but on the control box working, the control box’s internet connection working, my phone being charged, my phone’s internet connection working, and the CSC online servers working.

I can’t remember the last time the washer or dryer broke down. But there’ve been plenty of times when the app couldn’t find them, or couldn’t find my account.

On the plus side, it is nice to be able to check whether a machine is available before going to the laundry room. And sometimes it alerts me when a cycle is done. (It’s supposed to always, but it doesn’t.)

But that’s a lot of extra points of failure for not much improvement.

It works. More stable than the desktop version. Handles mail, calendar and contacts, offers the focused/other inbox view.

Outlook tries to keep you using Microsoft’s apps as much as possible. It tries to get you to install Edge for opening links. It keeps its calendar and contacts to itself instead of sharing with the system. And of course it wants you to add your other email accounts and use Outlook for them instead of something else.

On the other hand, if you’re using Outlook to access your work email on your otherwise personal phone, that’s actually kind of convenient for keeping them separate.

I’m still amused that this place is still going strong 15 years after Starbucks closed an “underperforming” location.

Back in the day, this was an early location of Diedrich Coffee, a small local chain that grew to a regional chain. It was always busy. Great coffee, and a great place to hang out.

Fast forward a couple of decades: Martin Diedrich stepped back from the company to run a single indie coffee house (the original Kéan) instead of corporate management, and corporate sold the chain to Starbucks. Once this location was converted, it wasn’t worth going to. It was just another Starbucks. And I never saw it full. Never. It closed after only a couple of years.

And then Diedrich picked up the empty storefront and made it a second location for Kéan Coffee…and not only is it really good, it’s worth hanging out at again…and it’s been busy every time I’ve been there since then. And they still roast their own coffee. Whenever I’m in the area, I try to hit either Kéan or Lost Bean. Even if I’m coffee’d out for the day, I’ll grab a bag of coffee beans to take home.

I recommend the Mayan Mocha and the Turkish Latte.