Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 31

Similar to A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, but a tighter story, with better-defined secondary characters and internal story logic.

Again there’s a young apprentice with small, oddly specific magical abilities, who gets drawn into a caper, blamed for it, and finds herself as the only person who can resolve it, and has to both stretch her magic and convince the adults around to help her (and let her help them).

This time the magic is art. Paintings and drawings, if done the right way with the right details by by someone with the right ability, can become magical objects. Rosa was born into a family of Illuminators. A very eccentric family. Each with their own eccentricity. And that’s before she encounters the magical talking crow (who is very taken with shiny objects) and the malicious creature he was guarding.

The stakes are more personal: the Scarling has it specifically out for the Mandolini family. But there’s a clear potential for it to spiral out of control. Like Mona, Rosa makes mistakes, but again they’re believable mistakes. And in this book the adults have character reasons for finally believing her, not just plot reasons.

There’s a lot of mischief and magic, though only one mandrake as I recall. And because Rosa doesn’t need to leave home on her hero’s journey like Oliver (Minor Mage) or Mona, everyone in her family takes part in the story instead of just being window dressing for the framing sequence.

It’s aimed at kids, yes: kids who appreciate not being talked down to. And it’s written so that adults will have fun with it too.

More of T. Kingfisher’s kids’ books at her official website.

Fluent Reader is a simple, no-nonsense, modern-looking feed reader that runs locally on your desktop, so it can’t track you the way a web application could. It works great out of the box, and offers multiple ways to view posts including a grid-based card view which sets it apart from most news readers. Preferences are simple, and the only external action is to open an article in your default web browser, but you can set up rules for each feed. Displaying a QR code of the article URL so you can open it on a phone is a nice touch.

It’s an Electron app (with all the pros and cons that entails), so it can run on Windows, macOS and Linux. Available from both the Microsoft and Apple app stores, as an installer, or as a Flatpak for Linux.

Cloud sync is supported for a single account through any of FeedBin, Inoreader, Nextcloud News or anything using the Google Reader API.

I prefer the clean UI over RSSGuard’s complexity. But sometimes I find it a bit too simplified. I think NewsFlash (Linux) and NetNewsWire (macOS) hit a bit closer to the “as simple as possible and no simpler” mark. But they’re all in the same ballpark. And NetNewsWire doesn’t support Nextcloud (yet?).

Unfortunately I’ve had intermittent sync issues with Nextcloud on all three operating systems. (That’s critical bug #2.) I haven’t been able to determine whether the problem is with my server or with some of the feeds I follow, but I did report the bug as a starting point. But because of that, I can’t really recommend it for use with Nextcloud News.

Mobile

There is a corresponding Fluent Reader Lite app for both iOS and Android, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

Their thin-crust pizzas are good, but the deep-dish pizzas are really good. I keep wanting to try something new and deciding to get the Classic Deep Dish again (spinach, roasted garlic, ricotta and mushrooms) – and normally I don’t even like mushrooms.

Some indoor seating, plus it shares a big outdoor area with neighboring restaurants.

The main location in Manhattan Beach has been there for ages. They had a smaller, second location in Torrance off of Artesia for a couple of years, but it switched over to “Curry & Pizza” in May 2025.

Useful for when you want to make sure the pages you’re reading will still be around in some form in the future, and to easily get at additional context.

Privacy Alert: It checks every page you view against the Wayback Machine, so turn it off when you’re not using it! There really isn’t a good way around this without downloading their entire index as part of the extension. But that’s the only way it can show you how many times the page has been archived, or automatically save a copy, or automatically check for archives when the current page isn’t found.

If you enable auto-save, be sure to add to the exclusions list so it doesn’t waste time trying to archive your webmail or control panel.

There is a private mode where it doesn’t do anything until you ask it to. But that leaves you with essentially the same features as a pair of bookmarklets to check or save the current page.

I’ve used the Firefox add-on, the Chrome extension (with Chromium, Vivaldi and Arc) and the Safari extension.

Alternative: Bookmarklets

I’ve also been using these bookmarklets from Wikipedia, which don’t need an extension and work on just about any desktop browser. (Except Arc, where I wrote a “boost” back in the early beta period to add buttons to every page.)

Load archives of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/\/$/, '')));

Save an archive of the current page:

javascript:void(window.open('https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href));

This self-hosted, web-based calendar has completely replaced Google Calendar for me. It’s private, since I can run it on my own server, so I’m in control of my data. It supports everything I need it to do. And it syncs easily (using CalDAV) in both directions with just about everything I want to use it with: Thunderbird, Vivaldi, GNOME, macOS and Android (using DAVx⁵). On Android I use Fossify Calendar. (I had been using Simple Calendar, but it’s no longer usable after the app suite changed hands.)

The only platform I’ve had trouble syncing calendars with was Windows Mail and Calendar, which has been discontinued in favor of Microsoft Outlook. I haven’t tried it with Outlook, since I’d already switched to Thunderbird on Windows.

Note: Syncing with other applications is faster with an app-specific password.