Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

At first glance Fread looks like OpenVibe, because you can log into Bluesky and Mastodon-compatible services, plus follow RSS/Atom feeds. But it doesn’t try to merge them into a single timeline (yet?), and lets you add as many of any type as you want instead of limiting you to one of each type. It acts just like any other Fediverse app that lets you sign into multiple accounts. And it has the open-this-post-in-another-account feature I first saw in Tusky.

You can also assemble custom timelines, not tied to an account, made up of public feeds of all types, which is pretty cool! It’ll search by username, full feed URL or homepage URLs, though it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds. If you have an account on the same server as the one you’re following, it’ll use that one for replies, likes, and boosts.

Another advantage over OpenVibe is that its RSS/Feed support uses the feed content when you tap on the summary, so you can still read a post on a full-text feed if you’ve gone offline. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to auto-detect feeds, at least not if the site you’re trying to add also matches a Bluesky account.

Cross-posting is easy, but it has the same problems as OpenVibe: it’s limited by the account with the shortest text limit, and once the cross-post has been made, there’s no way to follow up on both posts together.

I like the overall look it applies to posts, but it strips out existing formatting (like Mastodon itself used to do), including bold/italic, block quotes, lists, etc. That’s frustrating.

It doesn’t seem to support any features beyond what’s in mainstream Mastodon/Bluesky, and it doesn’t offer features like direct messages (yet) or scheduled posts, but so far it seems to work with GoToSocial, PixelFed, Snac and Sharkey. (It can log into Akkoma, but can’t display the post timeline.)

When I read that Annalee Newitz’ next book was going to involve a group of robots opening up their own noodle shop in a future post-war San Francisco, I knew I had to read it. And it does not disappoint! It’s a short, joyful tale of creating the future you want out of the present you’ve been stuck with.

The main robots are all well-drawn, individual characters: The octopus-like search-and-rescue bot whose chemical sensors were perfect for analyzing taste and smell, who has fond memories of the falafel truck they worked at after the war (and is seriously into speculating cryptocurrency on the side). The bot with articulated arms and hands, who wants to make something worthwhile with them. The former bank teller, partly humaniform, who becomes more comfortable expressing her inner robot-ness as she explores logistics and supply chains. And the former combat robot, who finds himself tired of working in management and wants to get back into protecting people (both human and robot) and the restaurant, and discovers there are more ways to do that than just muscle (or rather servos) and ammo. The sentient car doing delivery gigs who has a thing for old media and will tell you exactly what’s wrong with the offensive robot stereotypes in, say, Transformers.

Great flavor, real substance to chew on. Portions sized to satisfy hunger, even if you’d cheerfully go for a second helping.

Retro Web

I love the concept that robots would be fascinated with early web design…and that the book’s official website was built using the aesthetic!

Last time I visited, I hadn’t noticed the merch. You can buy several varieties of “torso cover” (including the “formal torso cover” and a "cold weather torso cover with bonus head cover), a tote bag “perfect for takeout boxes, replacement limbs, and more,” or a hat that “goes mainly on human heads, but will also go hansdomely on many robot appendages. We’re not the bucket hat police. You do you.”

I may pick up one of those stickers, though I don’t know any sentient cars to give one to…

Reality Intrudes

The idea of an embattled California trying to provide civil rights for people (while still exploiting their tenuous legal status), while the rest of the US wants to treat them as objects, hits a bit harder than it would have last summer, but it’s not like we didn’t all see it coming.

I wasn’t expecting this to fit in with the cluster of oddly-related books I read this summer, but it opens with the robots waking up some time after a disaster has struck, and they have to both get themselves back online and figure out what happened…a lot like the opening chapters of The Downloaded, which I’d just read a couple of weeks earlier.

A couple of years ago I needed an ultra-portable computer, and bought a refurbished Surface Go 2. It’s a 10" tablet with optional stylus and keyboard/trackpad cover, and can be used as a pure tablet or as a tiny laptop. At the time, I could choose between Windows 10 and Windows 11, and decided to stick with Windows 10. (This turned out to be a good decision.)

It’s been surprisingly good! The detachable keyboard is not just the best tablet keyboard I’ve used, it’s actually a good keyboard. It’s way less annoying than the mid-2010s MacBook keyboards, and it’s a lot more reliable than the Samsung Chromebook I’ve used. The trackpad’s still reliable after getting carried around in backpacks a lot (which makes it more reliable than the Chromebook’s trackpads started out). The stylus draws great, and the touchscreen’s responsive too!

There’s not a whole lot of storage or RAM, and it’s not exactly fast, but it served well as a really portable Windows machine for office-type apps, web surfing with a desktop browser, videos, some light coding and…well, a little light gaming, if nothing that needs serious graphics.

It’s Intel-based, so it uses more power than an ARM system, but that also means there are fewer compatibility hurdles. Admittedly, that was more of a concern in 2023 than it is today. I keep losing the proprietary charger (which has a nice, trip-safe magnetic connector), but it can also charge by USB-C.

Planned Obsolescence

This year I made the mistake of upgrading it to Windows 11, figuring I’d get ahead of the forced upgrade in October. It’s so much slower now. The device optionally shipped with this OS – it should be able to handle it. But I guess Windows 11 of two years ago isn’t the Windows 11 of today.

Update: I got the go-ahead from the rest of the household to wipe it and reinstall Windows 10. I used a recovery image specific to the tablet, which wanted the device serial number. Fortunately that’s still legible in the right lighting. Now that it’s done installing the Windows 10 updates, it’s fast again! And while I was planning to spend $30 for the extra year of security updates, it turns out I don’t have to: The fact that app settings had previously been backed up to the cloud means it qualifies for free.

I may still put Linux on it eventually. Apparently most of the hardware is well-supported except for the camera, which is still a work in progress. (Thanks to @intrepidhero for pointing me to that link!) A lightweight distro is going to run faster than Windows 10, and will keep this out of e-waste even longer.

An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.

In the centuries since the human colonists left for Pax, Earth’s civilization collapsed and a fascist patriarchy took control and has rebuilt things to the point that they can check in on some of those outer-space colonies from before the fall.

Like the first book, each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view (including Stevland, of course!), though this time around it’s all focused on the arrival of the new expedition and the events leading up to it. The psychology of the bamboo’s and the Glassmakers’ perspectives is notably different from the humans’, and of course each species has its factions, and each faction has its priorities, and each person has what they do and don’t know and assume. (The chapter in which the Earth expedition arrives at the colony has the narrator repeatedly making and revising assumptions.)

And there are more factions in a war fought on plant timescale.

Despite it being more tightly compressed in time, it feels less focused than the first book. There’s a side expedition late in the story that’s both necessary thematically and narratively awkward. I’m not sure how I feel about the epilogue as an epilogue, but as I put the finishing touches on this review I’ve just discovered that Burke wrote some related short stories set during Semiosis…and a third book that picks up on those threads and was published just last year.

Connections

Interference has been on my to-read list ever since I finished Semiosis, but it was reading another book about sentient plants from outer space that finally bumped it to the top. Weirdly, both also involve minicry, invasions and shifting alliances. And I caught echoes of this book in The Downloaded, which also involves reconnecting with lost space expeditions.

Earth’s “NVA” setup of constantly tormenting one person for the supposed benefit of society brings to mind Omelas, but several things make it worse:

• It’s clearly a deliberate choice, not a “necessary” evil.
• They’ve trained the populace to enjoy NVA’s torment, unlike Omelas where it’s a secret shame. It’s more like the daily two minutes of hate.
• They keep swapping in new clones of the same person, using the threat of “She might be you!” as part of keeping women down.
• The society isn’t even that great anyway. At least with Omelas you can understand why people would want to rationalize their complicity in the system. That’s the point of the story, after all. Here? it’s explicitly fascist, though the characters from Earth noticeably don’t say so until they’re light-years away from it.

Before I discovered Elk and Phanpy, I used Pinafore as an alternate app for my Mastodon account, and later as a front-end when I was first testing GoToSocial. Like those, it’s a single-page web app (SPA) that runs entirely in your browser, talking to your server directly.

It’s fast and reliable, with a focus on privacy and accessibility, and an even more minimalist look than Phanpy. Lists are still kind of second-class UI, but you can pin one to your main toolbar replacing the Local timeline, which can be convenient.

Disco’ed

I kept using it off and on after the author discontinued it due to burnout, mainly because it doesn’t have Elk’s issues with Markdown on GoToSocial.

Semaphore picked up the project where the original author left off, but seems to have been abandoned somewhere along the line.

Current

I recently discovered Enafore, another fork that’s still being updated. Apparently it has “better support for Akkoma, glitch-soc, and Iceshrimp,” though I haven’t found a comparison yet. The main thing I’ve noticed is that it lets you choose a format type (plain, HTML, Markdown, BBCode etc.) per-post when writing on GoToSocial or Akkoma.

There are still a couple of baseline features I miss from other Mastodon web apps:

• Enafore only shows ALT text on hover (making it inaccessible on touch screens).
• Posts in the same thread show up separately in the main timeline.
• Filtered posts are straight-out removed, not just collapsed. Including my own.
• You can only log into one account per instance.

But simple is good for self-hosting, and the risk of hosting a few extra static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files is, like the cost Lawson mentions, basically zero. Of the three Mastodon-compatible web apps I’ve used, this the the only one I’ve seriously considered hosting myself as a dedicated front-end for my GTS site. That’ll be interesting, if I ever get around to it!