Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 44

Standard Ebooks

★★★★★

Great source of classics and other public domain material that have been formatted and edited for consistent readability, compatible with just about any eBook reader. I’ve read several books from here and they’ve all looked great.

All their eBooks are edited and proofread manually by volunteers, not just auto-converted. I edited one book for the project to see what was involved, and their contributor guidelines are very exacting.

KeePass2Android

★★★★★

Nice, clean interface to a KeePass2 database with auto-fill support for both websites and apps.

You can store the database locally, or sync it to a network server - and there are a lot of supported options ranging from your own SSH or WebDav server through NextCloud and up to the major cloud services like DropBox, OneDrive etc. This gives you control over your password storage. Even if you use a cloud service, it can only access the encrypted file.

Syncing is almost seamless, too. I’ll often add a password on my desktop (where I use KeePassXC and its browser extension), then open up my phone and it’s synced already. Or vice versa.

KeePass2Android is on Github and on the Google Play Store.

Amazon Music

★★★☆☆

Amazon and I have very different ideas of what this app is for. I see it as a way to listen to music I’ve chosen, whether I’ve purchased it from them, imported it from another source, or selected from their current Prime offerings. Amazon sees it as a way sell me more subscription services.

I mainly still use it because I can play music I’ve bought through Amazon without using my phone storage, and I can look for and listen to music from their Prime catalog. Until it gets dropped.

But I don’t want to have to tap through three ads just to get at media I’ve already paid for.

At least I can turn off auto-starting Car Mode. It’s fine for the middle of a playlist, but it’s simplified too far to do basic tasks like choosing what music I want to listen to when I start the car and haven’t left the driveway yet.

And that’s the root of its problems: It’s not optimized for my choices, it’s optimized for Amazon’s.

Codeberg

★★★★★

Non-profit git services for free/libre/open-source software projects. Familiar interface, works well, and easy to migrate from GitHub and other forges. Keep in mind that they only host FOSS projects, so you’ll want to look elsewhere to host proprietary projects.

Tusky for Mastodon

An Android client for Mastodon-compatible social networks

★★★★★

Impressed at how smoothly it works, especially with multiple accounts on Mastodon, PixelFed, GoToSocial and Snac. Sharing from another app asking which account you want to post as is a particularly nice touch - I’ve had trouble with other apps (such as Instagram) where I share a photo and discover at the last stage of editing that it’s on the wrong account.