Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

I started buying eBooks from Kobo back in the early 2010s, when they were partnered with IndieBound to send a cut to local indie bookshops and I linked it with Mysterious Galaxy. (These days, Bookshop.org is IndieBound’s preferred choice for that.)

It took a bit to get the Android app configured nicely, and even now the service can still be pushy. Unlike Amazon, Kobo still offers in-app purchases, and it wants you to buy more books before you read the ones you have.

Which, I mean, ok, fair enough.

I turned off a lot of “features” early on - I don’t want recommended books to pop up in my notifications, and I certainly don’t need achievements like a Steam game to encourage me to read more. (I think they’ve since gotten rid of that one.) You know what encourages me to read more? Having time to read.

Anyway, once I got that settled, I’ve been reasonably happy with the app on a decade’s worth of phones, a tablet and a Boox Poke3 e-reader.

Reading Choices

The Kobo Clara e-reader is the best dedicated, single-bookstore e-reader I’ve used, but of course it doesn’t handle books bought from other stores unless they’re DRM-free. (Probably. It might be possible to side-load books from other sources that also use Adobe DRM. I should try that.) That’s the main reason I bought, and still use, the Boox tablet: I can install almost anything on it.

The Clara does, however, have advantages over a Kindle device:

• To side-load books that are unlocked, you just plug it into your computer and copy the files over.
• You can connect to Pocket for articles you’ve saved on other devices
• It has built-in support for Libby/Overdrive for library books.
• There’s apparently quite a bit of hacking and modifying that can be done to Kobo devices.

In addition to the mobile app and dedicated devices, you can read most purchases directly on the website now. Any books that are DRM-free, you can just download as standard .ePub files and read on whatever device you want. Of course most of the books they sell are locked with DRM, and you can only “download” a link to Adobe Digital Editions.

While writing this up, I discovered there’s a desktop app for Windows and macOS. The Windows app you download from the website feels like a wrapper around the website. But there’s also a bare-bones app on the Microsoft Store that seems to have been built for the resounding flop that was the Windows 8 let’s-try-to-make-a-tablet-OS era.

Reviewing

Kobo encourages you to rate and review books as you finish them, even if you don’t have a decent keyboard on-hand. The way they’re displayed is also geared toward short reviews. This is another reason I usually cross-post only a summary there, rather than the full review.

Similar to Arc, Zen has a non-cluttered interface that mostly stays out of your way and is built around a sidebar that encourages you to keep things simple and organized. I’m not sure if the design is specifically inspired by the aspects of Arc that people have liked most, or if they’re just chasing the same goals.

Unlike Arc, Zen is Free-as-in-Libre Software, built on Firefox instead of on Chromium, runs on more platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux), and doesn’t require you to sign into a cloud account just to use the browser. And it actually has bookmarks! (It also doesn’t have AI features like Arc’s summaries and so on.)

Like Waterfox it removes Mozilla’s existing data collection. It doesn’t go as far on privacy as LibreWolf, but it’s notable that Zen’s privacy policy starts out with “Information We Do Not Collect.”

Connections and Compatibility

It can connect to Firefox Sync (which is encrypted) and is compatible with Firefox add-ons. There are the usual hoops to jump through when you first install it to get native messaging to connect to KeePassXC, unless you’re using running it through Flatpak on Linux, in which case the hoops don’t work either (see below).

Zen can’t play media locked by Widevine DRM, because the small team can’t justify spending the money on the license when there are other things they want to build. (For comparison, LibreWolf rejects DRM support on principle.) If you want to watch Netflix or whatever on your desktop, you can use another browser like Waterfox for it.

As with LibreWolf and Waterfox, not all of the documentation has been copied and updated to be Zen-specific yet, and in some cases it just links straight to the Firefox docs. I do appreciate that the About box tells you both what Zen version you’re using and what Firefox version it’s built on.

Flatpak, AppImage & Linux

When installed using Flatpak, web browsers can’t connect over native messaging to KeePassXC. And Zen doesn’t actually open the first page when opening a link from another app unless it’s already running. These are both fixed by using the AppImage, but now I need to manually add a zen.desktop file and icon so it’ll show up in the system menu. Then I have to either update the AppImage manually or install another tool to update the AppImage automatically, plus it turns out there’s another bug where the AppImage Zen opens a new copy of Thunderbird on the rare occasions I click on an email address, which launches a blank profile to avoid conflicting with the already running one…

I finally ended up just downloading the tarball and pointing zen.desktop to it. It’s old-school, but it all works properly!

Availability

Regular installers with updaters for Windows and Mac. Flatpak, AppImage and tarballs for Linux. Both Intel/AMD and ARM on all platforms.

No mobile version. I think the closest comparison would still be Arc Search, but as with the desktop version, Arc isn’t Free (just free) or Gecko-based.

A decent minimalist SMS/MMS app that doesn’t sync your messages to Google or any other online services. Can archive or delete conversations and block numbers, and handle custom alert sounds per conversation. Pull-down notifications include action buttons for reply-stop, opening links, and copying confirmation codes to the clipboard.

It doesn’t support RCS, and it doesn’t support swipe actions (which is really too bad - it’s so convenient to delete-or-archive that way). You can block a number, but you can’t report it as spam.

MMS support seems a bit flaky - I can receive images, and I can send them to actual phones, but I can’t send images to Google Voice.

Still, it works well enough. Especially if you want to use something like Signal for all your actual conversations and leave texting for automated notices.

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.

Update: Dia, the Browser Company’s follow-up to Arc, leans even more heavily into AI.

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.