Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 4

Surprisingly, I like the mobile Arc browser better than its desktop counterpart. And it is a browser, despite the name…and despite an intro that makes you try out an AI-powered “Browse For Me” search-to-summary feature. (It’s kind of weird, but it’s probably better than the ones showing up at the front of a Google search these days.)

Arc has a much simpler visual design than Firefox, Chrome, and their major derivatives. It does the main things you want to use a mobile browser for and mostly stays out of your way. There’s an ad blocker built in. Like the desktop Arc, it can automatically close tabs you’ve left open for a while.

I particularly like the open tab list: it’s built like the system’s open app list, and there’s just something satisfying about flinging a page away when you’re done with it!

Limited Sync

Sync only sends open tabs, and only one way: the mobile browser can pull tabs from your desktop browser, but there’s currently no built-in way to send a page from your phone to your desktop. Or even to another mobile device.

You can share it to any other app on your phone, of course. I’ve used KDE Connect to send a page to my desktop, and saving to Pocket or Wallabag to re-open a page on my tablet.

Problems (or lack thereof)

So far the only problem I’ve run into with it (aside from the one-way sync) is oddly specific: The Pixelfed app can’t log in when Arc is the default browser. Just that one. Other apps with OAuth logins are able to use it just fine. Well, that and the one video conferencing site I have to use on a semi-regular basis that doesn’t work in anything other than brand-name Google Chrome.

I haven’t even had any issues with filling passwords from KeePass2Droid, which Vivaldi sometimes blocks with its own autofill.

The AI Question

I look at anything marketed as “AI” with suspicion. At least Arc’s approach is to look for something it might be useful for instead of just grafting a chatbot onto a web browser like Opera, Brave, and sigh now Firefox. But using “Browse For Me” still sends your search queries to OpenAI for processing.

A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath. (Originally collected as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and then she wrote a fifth story.)

It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.

It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.

And of course, the depressingly familiar reminders of how often authoritarians work from a common playbook:

But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?

(From context, I gather that “neareals” are “near real” virtual reality experiences.)

The Hainish Perspective

Most of Le Guin’s stories in this setting at least mention the planet Hain, the world that colonized all the various human worlds (including Earth) in the distant past. But it’s usually just background. One story here is set partly on Hain, and two viewpoint characters come from there.

It’s a world with an odd perspective, because their history is so long that everything has been tried at some point by every society on the planet. “Historians” are no longer interested in classifying and cataloging the past, but are more like anthropologists figuring out how current societies work. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining their relatively hands-off approach, especially with Werel and Yeowe.

A nice, easy loop trail. Hilly, with plenty of shade in the wooded areas along the intermittent streams, but not much up on top of the ridge. Sandwiched between suburbs and a golf course. Great views of the hills and valleys, with occasional glimpses of the ocean. The top of the ridge looks like it had a fire sometime in the last few years, or else the trees up there are really dormant even as late as April.

The trails are clearly visible, but there are so many of them crossing the area that it can be hard to tell which one will get you back to where you started. And they connect with private trails and neighborhood trails, so it’s easy to find yourself away from the main loop without realizing it. That said, it’s also not super-huge, and with the hillsides to orient yourself, it would be difficult to actually get lost. The dirt is very sandy in the valleys, so you need to watch your step.

Suitable for kids, dogs, and mountain biking.

I went there this weekend and one of the streams was flowing. I heard a bunch of frogs, but as usual I couldn’t see any. There were families with kids playing in the stream, and several groups of hikers I ran into more than once as we took the same loop in opposite directions.

One hillside trail connecting the valley to the hilltop loop has been badly eroded and is too steep to walk. (Though judging by the footprints, people have been climbing it.) There’s a switchback nearby which has also been eroded, but not as much.

Overall I was reminded of the better parts of Linden H. Chandler Preserve across the hill (which I hiked a couple of weeks ago), Toulon Loop in Murrieta, and Peters Canyon in Tustin. I’d definitely like to come back again, check it out in different seasons, and follow some of the other public trails.

More photos on Flickr.

Getting There

AllTrails sent me to a trailhead right off of Palos Verdes Drive that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I ended up heading a little ways down Paseo del Campo, where the trail crosses the road, and then looked for a spot by the side of the road that I could park without scraping the bottom of the car on the rather high curb.

Fun, absurd, and absurdly fun.

Yes, you play as a squirrel. And yes, you carry a gun. Or rather, you can find and use a variety of guns as you escape a secret research facility hidden below an ordinary suburb, climbing telephone poles, outrunning (and outgunning!) agents, charming residents – and occasionally holding them up to steal their acorns or cell phones. It’s a totally ridiculous platformer/shooter combo, which is what makes it work.

I was surprised to discover that iCab (“The Internet Taxi For Your Mac”) is still around! Way back when, it was an indie browser for macOS. These days the engine is WebKit, and it has a bunch of little usability tools, like pop-out windows that will show an outline of a page based on the headings, or a list of all the links on a page, etc.

It doesn’t support Chromium or Firefox extensions, but it has its own “modules” that can modify the page, or send it to a web application, or help you debug, or download the page as a PDF, etc. There are a few obsolete items in there like Google+ and StumbleUpon, which does make me wonder how current the rest are. I haven’t been able to get the save-to-Pocket module to work, for instance. But it does let you set up bookmarklets, which puts it ahead of NetSurf.

I’ve found that I like the idea of iCab better than I like actually using it. It’s not bad, it’s just OK. Then again, with so many other browsers trying to grab your attention and data, sometimes “just OK” is what you want!

Retro-computing enthusiasts, take note: Old versions for Macintosh System 7.5-9 and earlier versions of OSX are still available for download, though they’re no longer updated or supported.