Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

A search engine with related services and apps offering better privacy than the other big names. Search is currently serving less slop than Google. Disposable email aliases are convenient. The browser extension and standalone browser block known trackers, and the mobile app (at least on Android) can block trackers in other apps too.

Search

★★★★☆

It’s been a few years since I mostly switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for search. It used to be slightly worse in terms of search result quality, but it was a trade-off: Google tracked you and personalized your results, while DuckDuckGo was missing context because it wasn’t tracking you. Since then, search quality has gotten worse across the board as clickbait, content farms, and finally AI slop cluttered up the net. But Google’s results have dropped more: first they put the advertising execs in charge of search, sacrificing quality to keep people on their services, and now they’re going full chatbot.

At least for now, DuckDuckGo is returning slightly better results than Google.

DDG has been rolling out AI summaries, but not on everything, and at least its summaries cite their sources (unlike Google’s). Just as with Wikipedia, citations are critical to evaluating whether the summary is accurate or not!

Like most search engines not called Google, Bing or Yandex, DuckDuckGo remixes results from bigger general sites and smaller, more specific search sites. For the most part, since you’re not contacting Bing or TripAdvisor or wherever directly, it insulates you from tracking by the data sources they use.

Email Protection

★★★★☆

Duck.com is a free email forwarding service that filters known trackers out of your email before sending it on to your real mailbox. It also has a feature to randomly generate disposable aliases, which is useful for when you need to give a site an email address, but don’t know whether you can trust the site not to spam you or share your address with more spammers.

I’m still ambivalent about anything that alters incoming messages (other than stripping out malware), but the disposable addresses are nice:

• You can deactivate them individually, unlike a catch-all.
• Unlike plus-addressing, they can’t just be cleaned up to get your real address.
• Creating them is instant.

On the downside, you do need to watch out for duplicates when you’re already subscribed to something at your real address.

Browser Extensions

★★★☆☆

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is an add-on for Chromium/Firefox browsers. It’s kind of like Privacy Badger in that it blocks trackers, adds don’t-sell-my-info flags, and blocks some social media embeds. But while it’s happy to tell you what it has blocked, it’s hard to find out what it will block. The main advantage it has over Privacy Badger and newer browser settings is that it detects email address fields and offers to generate a disposable alias right there.

Mobile App

★★★★☆

A few years ago DuckDuckGo launched a mobile browser for Android. I just changed the search engine on Firefox and Vivaldi, but my wife’s been using the app for quite a while, largely because it also cuts down on tracking by third-party sites.

I finally decided to give it a shot after trying out Ecosia, and my first impression is that it really wants me to know how much it’s doing to make things less annoying for me. Fortunately those notifications trickle off and stop fairly quickly.

The browser itself is fairly bare-bones, and it’s important to remember that it blocks tracking, not ads. It’s also missing things like reader mode. But at least it lets you move the nav bar to the bottom.

But it does add some other features you won’t find in Ecosia or other apps (or are harder to get at):

• A burn button that closes all your tabs and wipes your history and its saved data (except for sites you “fireproof”)
• Auto-generating disposable email aliases if you use a Duck address.
• Duck Player, which opens YouTube videos without your Google account, and without targeted ads, and without adding them to your YouTube recommendations.

And then there’s “App Tracking Protection,” an option to filter outbound traffic to trackers from other apps (their example is a fitness app contacting Facebook). It runs as a local VPN on your phone, so it doesn’t need root. The downside to that approach: it interferes with trying to connect to an actual VPN if you need to. It’s interesting to see just how much some apps try to phone home, even when they’re supposed to be sleeping.

Desktop Browser

★★★☆☆

Somehow I didn’t notice until recently that they’ve released a DuckDuckGo desktop browser for macOS and Windows. It’s a custom application built around the system rendering engines, so it uses Chromium on Windows and WebKit on macOS. All the features of the browser extension are included, from tracker blocking to email alias generation.

Otherwise it’s pretty sparse, though it does include the burn button and Duck Player. There’s no extensions support, which means I can’t integrate it with KeePassXC or Floccus (for syncing with other browsers). Bookmarks sync only with other installs of the DDG browser, using a recovery key instead of an account, similar to Brave.

Controversy

I know there have been other controversies, but most of the commentary I’ve been able to find while looking for it stems from one of the following:

1. The mobile browser used to allow Microsoft trackers until they renegotiated their contract with Bing. The question here is whether you believe it’s more likely that they’ve pulled their act together or that there are more problems waiting to be discovered.

2. They down-ranked Russian propaganda outlets early in the Ukraine invasion, and certain very vocal people decided it must be political censorship and not just, y’know, downranking the low-quality results.

3. It’s not a perfect privacy solution. Well, of course not! If you need more serious privacy, use Tor. Most people’s threat model can get by with something that’s at least more private than Chrome+Google or Edge+Bing.

Successor to the late Sequel Pro, it still manages to be an unapologetically macOS application and a powerful database manager. Easy to use, responsive, stable. All the frequent stuff you need to do is in the UI, plus of course you can write your own queries when you need to. It can connect directly to a MySQL/MariaDB database or set up its own SSH tunnel.

Sequel Ace and its predecessor are the only database GUIs I’ve actually liked rather than merely tolerated. If it ran on Linux, or if it could talk to Microsoft SQL Server, it’s the only one I would use. It’s that good.

Ecosia is a non-profit search provider that uses renewable energy to power their servers and partners with local environmental organizations, most visibly (but not only) to plant trees. Ethical Consumer rates it 11, but notes that it depends on the lower-rated Google and Microsoft.

Search Engine

★★★★☆

The quality of Ecosia’s search results seems comparable to DuckDuckGo. Which is to say: at least it’s better than Google Search since Google started prioritizing keeping you on its site over sending you where you want. Both add a layer on top of Bing, Google, and specialized site results (ex: pulling travel info from TripAdvisor), remixing them with their own priorities. Not surprisingly, for Ecosia this includes things like climate assessment and ecology. They don’t track your search history unless you actively opt into personalized results.

Also like DDG, they’re working on their own search index to reduce dependence on the big two. It’s still more private than searching Google or Bing directly, but it’s not their focus: Ecosia is more interested in minimizing and counteracting the environmental costs of the internet.

Using Ecosia by Default

Some web browsers already have Ecosia in their list of search engines, so you just have to choose it. For those that don’t, there’s a Chromium/Firefox extension to add it, or you can add it manually using this URL in your search settings:

https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=%s

Desktop Web Browser

★★★☆☆

Another Chromium skin. It doesn’t seem to add much else compared to the basic browser, and there doesn’t seem to be any sync functionality (though Floccus works for bookmarks). But at least it doesn’t add a bunch of stuff I don’t want like Opera, Brave or Edge, and it’s ahead of Ungoogled Chromium in completeness and installing/updating.

I do appreciate that I can turn off embeds like the “Log in with Google” prompts that plague websites these days. (OK, I can log in with Google, but if I don’t want to – especially if I already have a login on this site – the pop-up is useless and annoying.)

It’s only on Windows and macOS, and has the usual KeePassXC hoops to jump through.

Mobile App

★★★☆☆

Stripped-down Chromium with an ad blocker. No option to move the toolbar down to the bottom where I can actually reach it with my thumb, but then I can’t do that in Chrome either. I’d rather use Vivaldi or Firefox (or one of its derivatives) with Ecosia as the default search engine.

A simple mono recording app where the audio stays on your phone. No ads, no subscriptions, no remotely-generated transcripts, just basic recording.

I’ve found it useful for making quick voice notes I can come back to later, and for recording audio observations for iNaturalist when I can hear, but can’t see noisy animals. It should work for longer recordings too: there’s no time limit as far as I can tell.

There’s a setting to start recording as soon as you launch the app, and a widget in case you want one-click recording sometimes, and some simple options for choosing a bitrate and file format (M4A, MP3, or Ogg).

Wallabag is a service for saving articles you find on the web to read later. It’s built on open-source software that you can run yourself if you want (but you don’t have to). Not as polished as Pocket, but you know it’s not using your saved bookmarks to train a recommendation engine.

And now that Pocket is shutting down, it’s worth taking a look at switching.

Setup is a bit clunky, even using the hosted service at wallabag.it, and it’s not quite as good as Pocket at extracting the content of an article. This varies according to site, of course. Sites like this one that just show you the article will work better than sites that break into the middle with a 12-image carousel and a “sign up to read more…” dialog or a redirect through CloudFlare.

You can also export articles to various formats ranging from plain text to PDF or ePub. So if you have a super-long article you want to read on an e-reader later on – or a group of articles? Easy!

At first, the web app ran quickly, but it’s been a lot slower lately. Two things happened around the same time: Mozilla announced it was closing Pocket, and I imported 15 years of Pocket archives (without cleaning the export first). I don’t know if they’re getting substantially more usage, or if it’s just that my account ballooned from a couple hundred items to over 25,000.

Feeds and Automation

Both incoming and outgoing feeds are supported. You can set it up to follow RSS/Atom feeds to add posts to your reading list. And in the website config, you can enable full-text feeds for unread, archived, starred, or all articles so you can read them in any feed reader. Outgoing feeds include any tags you’ve added, but not annotations.

This also means you can use feeds for automation: You can use another service to aggregate keyword searches, and as long as the results are readable as a feed, you can pipe that into Wallabag. Or pull from a blog, or a Fediverse account, or anything else that generates a feed. For example, I’ve got it automatically adding anything tagged ToRead on my Postmarks by following the /tagged/toread.xml feed. Wallabag doesn’t use the tags from the source, unfortunately.

Or you can use Wallabag as a source, using IFTTT to send your starred items to another bookmarks service, or build a linkblog out of articles you’ve given a particular tag, or create a draft post. You won’t want to just give out your starred feed URL, because all of your outgoing feeds have the same access token.

Another cool feature for automation is tag rules: Like custom email filters, you can create rules to automatically tag articles based on the title, estimated reading length, content, and various other elements. This is especially useful when following feeds.

Browser Integration

Chromium/Firefox Browser Add-Ons

Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers that support WebExtensions (and Orion!) can use the Wallabagger extension to save an article from the toolbar. (Here it is at the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-Ons. And Edge Add-Ons if that’s your thing.) It also lets you add tags if you want, and it can (usually) extract the content from the view you’re looking at, which helps with paywalls and login walls. (Otherwise the Wallabag service doesn’t necessarily have access to your logged-in view.)

Setting it up needs API keys, and the UI doesn’t make it clear when it’s actually ready to use. Once you’ve got it working, though, you can save it to a file and load that config in the extension on another device or browser. Mostly.

Safari Extension

Safari can use the Wallabag QuickSave extension (App Store), which is similar but just silently adds the page. You can always add tags later on.

Though I did have trouble setting it up on my old home MacBook: the setup window was twice as high as the screen, with all the fields way down at the bottom. I had to use the overview to see what field was selected, return to the window, type or paste, hit tab, repeat until I could validate my credentials.

Bookmarklet

Other browsers like Falkon can use the bookmarklet, which you can find on the web app in the “Howto” section under your account menu. (Here it is on Wallabag.it.) Though I find myself missing that drop-down option for adding a link directly instead of browsing to it first.

Mobile

The Wallabag Android app handles offline sync well once you enable the right settings. I have it set to run a “fast” auto-sync every 12 hours and on start, with the separate auto-sync for local changes, and the “deleted article sweep” after fast sync. One problem reared its head after I imported around 25,000 articles: That sweep can take minutes now, and local actions have to wait for it to finish before they’ll upload.

Not only can I read articles while offline, I can share a link from my email app to Wallabag while offline, and as with Pocket, it’ll add the article once the device is connected again. I’m still trying to determine under what circumstances it actually caches images, since I’m still seeing placeholders after enabling “Put article images in cache.” It also has a theme specifically designed for e-ink displays, which is a big help on the Boox Poke3 I use as an eReader.

The mobile app doesn’t seem to have a way to manually tell it to try re-fetching the content of an article.

Text to speech is at least OK for listening in the car. I haven’t used it enough recently to know whether it has the same kinds of oddities in Pocket’s speech back in the day!

I assume the iOS app is similar at least, but I’ve never had the opportunity to use it.

I recently read a review of Frigoligo, another Android app, that has me thinking I should give it a try also. (TODO)

Other Apps

The website view works well installed to a desktop as a progressive web app (PWA) using browsers that support it. Links open in the app, which isn’t necessarily what I want all the time.

Linux Desktop / GNOME: Read it Later (on Flatpak) is fairly basic: It lists your unread, starred or archived articles and you can read them in the app. You can also add an article, or move articles between these lists. Links in articles open in your default web browser. Other than that, there’s no support for tagging, search, or any other features that would help you find a specific article if you’re using Wallabag for more than just “read this thing I saw yesterday.” On the plus side, it does seem to keep articles cached when you go offline, which would make it useful for Linux laptops, tablets, or your desktop if you live somewhere with unreliable internet access.

Some others that I want to try out, but haven’t yet:

KOReader: unofficial plugin (TODO)

Kobo eReaders: wallabako (TODO)

And lots more for various other platforms.

Import

Wallabag is able to import from bookmarks, Pinboard, Instapaper, Pocket and a few other backup formats. You can even import your Delicious archives if you still have them!

Tip: Clean up the list before importing it if you can! Especially if you’ve been using the other service as long as I’ve been using Pocket (more than a decade). I now have thousands of “saved” articles that Wallabag can’t retrieve because of new paywalls or site deaths. And quite a few that I only really cared about short term. HTML and CSV exports are usually one line per item, which makes it easy. But don’t try messing with a JSON file unless you really know what you’re doing.

Pocket Imports

You can import from an exported Pocket CSV to wallabag.it now, and it should be in the next self-hostable release. There’s also a wallabag_pocket_csv_import script you can use if you host it yourself and don’t want to wait or merge the code yourself.

It used to be possible to import directly from Pocket’s servers, but that stopped working sometime during 2024.

For a while, the workaround was to rearrange Pocket’s CSV export to match Instapaper’s column order. This had the downside that it wouldn’t import fields that Instapaper wouldn’t give you, like the unread/archive status or the date you added an item. That’s how I ended up with 25,000 “unread” articles, all “new” on the day I imported them!

To Wallabag’s credit, it was able to do an import of that size, and even the mobile app still runs smoothly between syncs!

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