Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

Scrambled EXIF is one of those “does one thing really well” apps: It’s a filter that removes all the date, time, location, camera, and other metadata from a photo as you share it. Using it is incredibly simple: Share the photo to Scrambled Exif, and then it’ll ask you what app you want to share it to.

It’ll optionally fix EXIF-based rotations and rename your file too (in case you don’t want the filename to give anything away).

The only problem I have with it is that most of the time, I don’t want to remove everything. 99% of the time I want to keep the timestamp, and there are times (like posting observations to iNaturalist) when I want to keep the location too. So I don’t use it very often, though I do keep it on my phone for when I do.

But for its primary use case, it’s sheer elegance in its simplicity!

It’s been a while, but Calculating God sticks in my head as an interesting exploration: What if there is scientific evidence out there for a supreme being, but to find it you have to correlate knowledge from multiple inhabited worlds across the galaxy?

The specific situation is a pattern of mass extinctions that’s common on all known inhabited worlds, and a multispecies expedition has come to Earth to cross-check our fossil record and see if it matches too. (It does, of course, which is what sets the rest of the book in motion.)

Like a lot of Sawyer’s more philosophical science-fiction, it’s mostly talking and thinking and figuring things out. There’s not a whole lot of action, and I remember thinking the young-earth-creationist vandals were too much of a caricature to take seriously. (I suspect if I read it again now, they’d seem subtle compared to the pundits and politicians making noise today.)

The main (human) character is a paleontologist, and most of the story takes place in and around a natural history museum. He and the aliens spend a lot of time checking for mismatches, trying to find other explanations for the matches, and looking at planets that didn’t make it one way or another.

I think this may have been the first place I saw the “great filter” concept named (the idea that somewhere between a planet having the conditions for life and a spacefaring civilization there’s at least one step that’s extremely unlikely or difficult). They’d found worlds that had nuked themselves into oblivion and others that were simply abandoned (though the human dying of cancer comes up with a compelling theory as to what happened to them), but only three that were still alive.

There’s a deus ex machina close to the end, but it’s sort of the point of the book, and an epilogue that pulls together several of the “why is this aspect of life universal???” questions the characters had been trying to figure out.

Overall: big questions, with interesting possible answers, that will make you think of science and religion.

Moshidon is a modified version of the Mastodon app for Android phones that adds a bit more functionality. Some that was just left out of the official app, like the local and federated timelines. Some that vanilla Mastodon doesn’t support, like writing formatted posts or local-only posts. And a lot of quality-of-life features like filling in missing parts of remote profiles, making bookmarks easier to get to, switching a specific post view between accounts, etc. Otherwise it’s pretty similar to using the official app.

The only thing that keeps tripping me up is the tap-to-cycle on the “Home” button. It’s a quick way to cycle through lists, and you can remove the local/federated timelines (per account!) and just switch between your custom lists, but after using the app for a few weeks it’s still not the way my brain expects it to work. I much prefer the way Tusky lets you choose the toolbar buttons instead.

Overall, it’s more capable than the Mastodon app, but not quite on the level of Tusky/Husky/Pachli or Fedilab.

GNOME Web is one of the few WebKit-based browsers built for a non-Apple system. It handles the basics: displaying websites, autofill, multiple tabs, bookmarks, and reading mode, plus you can install portable web applications to your desktop.

It’s only really designed to run under GNOME, and while it can run under other desktops, I’ve found Falkon to be more flexible. And more stable. “Web” has crashed a lot in the weeks I’ve been trying to use it as my main browser.

There’s some built-in ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, but they’re just on/off switches. There’s no way to see how it’s deciding what to block, whether it has a list that needs to be updated, etc.

There’s no extension support. It can’t even manage GNOME Shell Extensions, which means you need to keep a Chromium– or Firefox-based browser around even on GNOME. This also means it can’t connect directly to external password managers (so I’m using autotype as a workaround, same as on Falkon), though it looks like KeePassXC can act as the “secret” service, replacing gnome-keyring. That’s not something I’d considered.

Bookmarks management is only through a sidebar, and it’s the kind of thing that works fine if you only have a few bookmarks, but if you have too many, it’s a pain to deal with. And there’s only limited bookmarklet support. On-page changes seem to work, but anything that loads a new page doesn’t so far. And while you can import and export, there’s no sync capability.

Font smoothing goes too far on my old 1x monitor and text looks blurry.

Installing Web Applications

You can install progressive web applications (PWAs) to the desktop, which will show up in GNOME’s application list. Since PWAs don’t need all the missing features for navigating around the web, and since Epiphany is lighter than, say, Vivaldi and will open external links in whatever your default browser is, I’ve been using it for stuff like Phanpy.

Tip: If you sign into an app using a different website (ex: social networking front-ends like Phanpy), go into the web app preferences and add that other website to the Additional URLs section (at least temporarily). Otherwise it’ll open the login form in a regular Web window that’s not connected to the webapp session.

GNOME Naming Notes

The browser was originally called Epiphany, until the GNOME practice of simplifying names got to it and called it Web…but the packages are still called epiphany. I remembered it had originally been built on Gecko, and that there was some connection to Galeon. (It’s long since been discontinued, but I used it as my main browser on Linux in the early 2000s because it was so much faster than Firefox, which at the time was still drawing all its own buttons and toolbars and such with the web engine). Apparently, Epiphany was started by the original Galeon developer after a split over whether to simplify the UI or not.

It is kind of amusing that it’s running on an engine (WebKit) based on one (KHTML) originally written for KDE, though!

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.