Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

This is my rant about Outlook. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I won’t say I’ve never liked Outlook, because the macOS version has been pretty decent for a while, and the Android version is at least okay.

But the Windows version has been a series of train wrecks since Microsoft grafted email capabilities onto its Schedule+ calendar software back in the late 1990s so they could bundle it as part of Office. Windows’ built-in mail clients, from Outlook Express back in Windows 98 through Windows 10 Mail, have consistently been better at email than Microsoft’s flagship mail client.

Outlook has always been awkward and cluttered, and it was notorious for security problems back in the 2000s. (To be fair, so was Outlook Express.) And it was terribly unstable. It would just stop working without telling you. Or it would keep running after you closed it (again, without telling you). There was an Inbox Repair Tool, which was good because you were pretty much guaranteed to need it at some point, but you’d have to find it first. I worked for a small internet service provider, and I dreaded the calls from Outlook users because there was so much less to go on than there was with other email applications. Even Outlook Express would usually give you a error message when something went wrong. I stuck with Eudora for my own work email, then Thunderbird until everything was consolidated onto Exchange and I had to use Outlook myself. At least I had plenty of experience troubleshooting it by then.

In the mid-2010s I was working at another company when they switched the software development team from Windows to Mac. I started noticing that Outlook seemed to be more stable (if still a bit of a resource hog) than it used to be, and figured after ~15 years Microsoft had finally managed to make it usable! It’s still not my preferred mail program, but I don’t mind using the Mac version for work most of the time, except when I have to work on email itself, or vet something that looks suspicious but might just be misdirected, which has happened. Thunderbird is better for getting at the raw headers or message body if you can get at the relevant messages from it.

But the Windows version has continued to have bizarre quirks, like using Microsoft Word to render HTML-formatted messages instead of IE or Edge. (Why? My best guess is it was a shortcut to make it stop executing JavaScript in email back in 2007 or something.) I discovered this when, in 2023, I had to figure out why a business email template looked great on every modern email app except Outlook on Windows…where the message was completely blank. The “New Outlook” that launched in 2023 finally switched to the system web engine on Windows (like the macOS version had been doing for years), but business software always gets used longer than you’d expect, and I’m sure there are still Outlook 365 and Outlook 2019 installations out there today.

I should also note: Outlook is still strongly geared toward office (and Office) use, and tying into other Microsoft services. You can connect it to other email providers like Gmail or any random IMAP host, but it would rather route that through Microsoft’s own mail sync if possible. Which does have the advantage that you can see the same mail and accounts on the web version as on the desktop version, but also means you’re routing all your mail through Microsoft anyway (and can introduce more complications).

Overall

Mac: 3 stars for personal use, 4 stars for business use.
Web: 3.5 stars for business use, still too cluttered for personal use.
Windows: 2 stars. Maybe 3 if you’re using the latest version. For business.

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. I picked it as a sort of palate cleanser to the darkness of Overgrowth, though it turns out both involve strange transformations and potential planet-wide disasters.

It’s not really about the moon turning into cheese overnight so much as it’s about how people react to the moon turning into cheese overnight. Some people deal with it better than others.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft. (He really doesn’t take it well.)

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around, or continuing with the other stories in her head.

OK, there’s one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.

And I appreciate how well Scalzi describes a total solar eclipse. (He mentions in the acknowledgments that the moon was kind enough to pass directly between the sun and his house last year, which helped quite a bit with that scene.)

And then there’s the epilogue. Or epilogues, rather.

SPOILER WARNING!

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Partway through, the story changes from one about people dealing with a massively weird but mostly harmless event to people dealing with imminent doom…but not yet, not until a few years from now, though it’s not hard to calculate the exact date. And it became strikingly clear that the COVID lockdowns of 2020 strongly influenced the psychology and sociology of the story…as well as the epilogues where people try to explain it away as a hoax, eventually succeeding in replacing the real story with a “realistic” version that we, as readers, know didn’t happen, because we got to follow along with the people who experienced it directly.

Anyway, it’s not high art, not even among Scalzi’s best (I think Lock In and Head On are my favorites of his so far, though I still have a lot on my to-read list), but it’s worth reading.

Connections

When The Moon Hits Your Eye forms sort of a thematic trilogy along with Starter Villain (which was a bit more fun) and The Kaiju Preservation society (which is the most interesting of the three).

And somehow I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: This and The Downloaded both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. The Downloaded and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances.

I was very quickly impressed by how easy it was to switch from Google Authenticator, and how even if I wasn’t trying to cut down on my dependence on Google, it’s still better.

You can organize accounts into groups. That alone would make it worth switching, and now I don’t need to set up two non-Google apps to split work and personal two-factor authentication codes. You can also choose to hide codes until you tap on one (with double-tap to copy), and to protect the app behind its own password or a fingerprint scan. It’s also free, open-source, and works offline.

Aegis imports from several authenticator apps’ exported file formats. Rooted phones can import directly from another app. And it can import Google Authenticator’s QR codes in batches of 10. Yes, you can take a screenshot of the code to migrate on the same device. (Though you should try not to let that screenshot sync to the cloud!)

If you do set up a password to encrypt your 2FA vault, it will also offer to back up your vault locally or to a cloud account. This was you can restore from a bricked phone or move to another device. It doesn’t seem to recognize Dropbox, but does recognize Nextcloud. And you can optionally choose a different password to encrypt the backups.

Tuta recommend it in their latest Degoogling round-up of alternative apps and services, which is where I noticed it.

Extremely bare-bones two-factor authentication app for iOS and Android, sponsored by Red Hat. It’s secure, works offline, and doesn’t depend on Google. Free and open source. You can add, rename, rearrange or remove accounts (ARRR!), but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a good way to import codes from another app, on the same device or another. And it doesn’t seem to recognize the multi-account QR codes Google Authenticator can export. (It does have its own encrypted backup/restore feature, at least.) If you already have a lot of 2FA codes, switching them one by one will be tedious.

Tuta recommended it in their latest Degoogling round-up, along with Aegis Authenticator, which made a much better impression with its solid import/export and the ability to organize accounts into groups.

I haven’t decided whether Dia is an AI chatbot masquerading as a web browser or the other way around.

For now it’s in closed beta (and only on M-series Macs), but they’ve released it to anyone with an Arc Browser account. Not wanting to run it on my primary OS or log into any important accounts (Dia will look through your logged-in accounts for answers), I installed it on a virtual machine.

First impression: it really wants you to personalize it. And it really wants you to interact by chatting. Once it gets past the onboarding, the main window is a 50/50 split with the web view in one column and chat in the other. And they’ve finally implemented the UI change that big tech has been trying to do for the last 15 years: Hide the URLs. I spent several seconds looking for a place to type in the name of a website before I decided to type it in the “Ask anything” box, and was relieved that it works like Arc and I could pick the actual site from a drop-down.

But Why, Though?

The problem is that I don’t want to interact with the web through an AI chat bot.

I’ve tried. I really liked Arc Search, but I never warmed to its AI features either.

I just don’t want a generated answer that won’t tell me where to find more details, and won’t cite its sources. (I asked it why it doesn’t cite its sources, and it said it will if it has to do a web search, but not if it’s just using its training data.) And I don’t want a folksy-sounding “well, I can’t find an exact answer, but I can tell you sort of where to look for it,” I want to go to that place where I can find it.

I also don’t trust the technology yet: I don’t trust its accuracy. I don’t trust the people running it. I don’t trust the way summaries will entrench a single interpretation (just like classifying AI tends to reinforce the biases in its training data). And so much of it still relies on cloud services, meaning that your questions and answers are routed through another layer of remote computers, which need more energy and provide a nice central spot for surveillance. (This is also why I’ve avoided voice assistants for so long.) If I go directly to EFF.org, that’s between me and the EFF, but if I use Dia’s AI chat to get answers from EFF, Dia’s and OpenAI’s servers need access too. And while Dia assures you that your query is deleted immediately afterward, you have to trust them on it. And trust anyone who might eventually buy them.

And that’s not even getting into AI’s rapidly expanding energy requirements coming just at the point when the world was getting a handle on renewables, or the ethics of sourcing its training data.

Bottom (Command) Line

AI integration is the whole point of Dia. Without those features, it’s just a stripped-down Chromium browser, and not a very compelling one, either. (I’d go back to Arc or Ecosia in a heartbeat, or DuckDuckGo, and those are the comparatively bland ones. And Ecosia at least tries to work for the environment.) With the AI, it’s another panopticon funnel.

Maybe it’s just not my thing, or I’m just being a digital curmudgeon. (Maybe.) Though it is kind of funny that people are interacting with computers by typing text commands to get responses again. Of course, terminal applications are (usually) more deterministic about what you get back from them!

Update (September 2025): Atlassian is buying The Browser Company, which means it’s following the typical startup-to-acquisition path. Maybe the pivot to AI was sincere, but it certainly looks like it was an attempt to raise their profile among potential buyers.