Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

The Opera web browser, as it exists today, just doesn’t appeal to me. It’s one of many Chromium-based browsers, and there isn’t a whole lot to distinguish it from the crowd. The things that set it apart most are things that I don’t want or need:

• I don’t need my browser to be tied into cryptocurrencies.
• I don’t need it to be tied into messenger apps that I don’t use.
• I don’t need a VPN built into my browser as an afterthought when most websites use HTTPS these days and I’d rather use something where privacy is their whole deal (and besides, if I really need privacy, I’d be better off with something like Tor anyway).
• I don’t need a special browser “for gamers” (Opera GX) instead of having, you know, settings.
• I don’t need the browser to provide its own calming sounds and meditation guides (Opera Air).
• I do want a browser that will run on ARM Linux, but Opera still doesn’t have aarch64 packages as of February 2025.

About the only feature they’ve added since 2013 that I want that isn’t available in Vivaldi or Firefox is built-in IPFS support, and even that’s tied into the whole cryptocurrency thing. (And I can use an add-on with those browsers when I want to mess around with IPFS.)

The company is also just one part of an international conglomerate, which can go one of two ways: either the parent company sees you’re making money and leaves you alone until they don’t, or they want to squeeze out every last drop of money they can without regard to what makes your particular business niche work (or not). In my opinion Opera had already reached that point by the time they were bought in 2016 – and long before they got involved in things like predatory loan apps in Africa that will spam all your contacts (including your boss and your in-laws) to embarrass you if you don’t pay back on time. And that wasn’t even the parent company: it was subsidiaries of Opera.

Opera wasn’t always like that.

It Used To Be Good

These would be my ratings for Opera at different times since I first used it:

The original Norwegian company has been around since the early days of the web. I bought (yes, bought) my first copy for $18 with a student discount – it fit on a floppy disk, back when that mattered – after a classmate showed me how fast it was compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer. It got really cluttered and slow in the early 2000s, but by 2005 it was streamlined and fast again.

Innovation

Opera was the scrappy underdog in the “browser wars,” pioneering innovations that caught on – like Speed Dial (2007), or bookmark syncing (not sure when), or using JavaScript to patch high-profile websites that don’t quite work (2005) – and others that didn’t, but were fascinating experiments.

My favorite of those was Opera Unite (2009), which built peer-to-peer features so you could set up a simple website or photo gallery, share files with your friends, have your own chat room or collaborate real-time, etc. without having to get into the technical details or hosting, and without relying on a central server.

That’s right: Opera tried to decentralize the web before it was cool!

Unfortunately, because it wasn’t cool yet, Opera Unite was removed just a couple of major versions later in 2012.

Mobility

They also got into the mobile web early on, with both a version for what passed for smartphones at the time, and a Java version, Opera Mini, that could run on higher-end “regular” cell phones. Seriously, I used it on a flip phone with actual buttons.

sigh Yes, it was a Motorola RAZR, thank you for asking.

At a time when sites were making alternate, stripped down mobile versions of their websites that might have a chance of actually loading over an edge cellular network (2G if you were lucky) at speeds so slow you’d otherwise throw your hands up in frustration trying to access today’s typical websites, then realize you’d accidentally thrown your phone away and decide to leave it and go live in a cabin in the woods instead, Opera was promoting the idea that there should only be one web, and sites should adapt to the device and browser you use.

Opera Mobile and Opera Mini used a proxy to compress the sites you visited. Downside: your browsing passed through the proxy. Upside: you could actually get the page to download onto your phone. They later (2009) adapted this proxy into an optional Turbo mode that did the same for the desktop.

Bucking Trends

Opera kept the email and news (and later calendar) components in the application long past the point when other “browser suites” had separated them out, which was nice, but not a huge deal for me.

They kept a paid (with free trial) business model for years – the one where you’re the customer, not the ad network or whoever – until it became clear that you just couldn’t get people to buy a web browser anymore.

Before going totally free/gratis, they tried free-with-ads / paid-without-ads for a while, which was annoying, but not as annoying as the ones on the websites themselves.

Blocking Monoculture

Going into techie/nerd mode for this section. I was really into promoting web standards and interoperability for a while, and I still see the software landscape through that lens.

Because Opera also developed their own web rendering engine, it served as a critical check against a monoculture in which one primary rendering engine, controlled by one company, could have outsized influence on the future of web technology. And outsized influence on the bugs in web technology.

To pick a recent example: an Ars Technica article on a 2023 security vulnerability in libwebp, a software library widely used to display WebP images, noted that “The number of affected software packages is too large to check all of them.” (emphasis added)

Back then we were worried about Microsoft and Internet Explorer. IE had stagnated as soon as it won the “Browser Wars” and only started catching up again when enough people were using Firefox to make them worry. For a while there we had Microsoft/IE (Trident, later Edge), Mozilla/Firefox (Gecko), Apple/Safari (WebKit) Google/Chrome (also WebKit) and Opera (Presto) all with a seat at the table.

In 2013, Opera switched to WebKit. At the time I wrote:

Remember the bad old days when people just wrote for Internet Explorer, and there was basically no innovation in web browser capabilities? It took Firefox’s success to turn the tide, but Opera was there, needling the industry with things like the “Bork edition” which turned the tables on browser-sniffing websites. Opera was a constant reminder that no, the web isn’t just Internet Explorer and Firefox, or just Internet Explorer and Webkit, or just two flavors of WebKit. That it was worth building technologies to leverage cross-browser web standards instead of picking the current 800-pound gorilla and feeding it even more.

Within a year Opera shut down the user community site. Within three, the company was split up, most of it sold to an international conglomerate.

By 2018, Microsoft threw in the towel too, and now almost everything runs on WebKit (iOS & macOS) or Chromium (everywhere else). Firefox is still around, but its user share is drastically low, and Mozilla seems to be flailing around trying to find any way to make money except improving the browser. Google can dominate the direction of web tech, and it’s clearly not the browser team at Google that’s in charge.

Finally: Vivaldi

Vivaldi.net was created by one of Opera’s co-founders (who had already left the company) as a new online home for the people who had come to rely on the My Opera community forums, blogs, and other services. Around the time Opera broke up, Vivaldi launched a browser focusing on power users and customizability. Both browsers are still around, but I trust Vivaldi more, which is why I picked it to replace Chrome…and currently use it as my main browser.

“You’ve played for 985 hours. Would you recommend this game to other players?”

Um, yeah, I guess so?

Seriously, Though

I picked up No Man’s Sky in spring 2021, long after the disastrous launch, and with several years of improvements to the game. By the time I got around to it, it was really good! (It also overheated my CPU the first time I played. I eventually discovered the heat sink was completely clogged with dust.)

The graphics are amazing. Gameplay switches smoothly between spaceflight, walking and ground vehicles, and between solo and multi-player scenarios. The story is…kinda loose. It’s not so much “story” as it is a collection of lore, which you uncover through the main missions and random exploration.

I soon realized that what I like about No Man’s Sky is that it combines aspects of Minecraft (which I played a lot of during the late 2010s and into 2020) and Wing Commander: Privateer (which I played a LOT of back in the 1990s). Both open-ended, self-directed sandboxes. Like Minecraft, you seek out resources and build equipment and bases. Like Privateer, you fly through space and do different types of missions depending on what you feel like that day.

And the many references to classic works of science-fiction certainly don’t hurt!

Updates and Expeditions

They’ve continued adding to the game, and several times a year they’ll release a major update and run a time-limited expedition focusing on the new/updated elements. Expeditions often force different styles of gameplay, and then convert to a normal game when you finish it (or when the event ends).

• In one, you couldn’t travel between systems using your ship, but had to rely on portals instead.
• In another, you couldn’t set up planet-side bases until the end of the expedition, but you could buy a freighter.
• For a horror-themed one this past Halloween, you had to actively maintain your character’s sanity, while occasionally letting yourself slip out of reality enough to interact with the cosmic horrors, but not enough for them to kill you. It was really interesting, but hard to keep up with.

So I’ve got my original game save that’s been continually updated (with the occasional glitch and one really painful bug), that I’ve been playing on and off for almost 4 years, and other saves that started out with various expeditions.

Cosmic Similarity

The universe of No Man’s Sky is practically infinite, with planets, space stations, system economies, plants, animals and minerals, and of course Sentinels – lots and lots of Sentinels – generated procedurally as players visit them. But each planet is a single biome (like Star Wars), space stations all have the same floorplan per type, same for crashed freighters, and so forth.

After a while you stop noticing the differences between two cold planets, or two radioactive planets. So the maps are different and the plants and animals look different – they’re both cold, and the both have frost crystals. A high-toxin world and a high-temperature world don’t really differ except in which resource you use to recharge your shielding and which resources you find. It’s no longer as fun to fully explore star systems you pass through.

A lot of the gameplay is the same thing you’ve done before, just dressed up differently and with better equipment or more inventory slots.

And yet here I am almost four years later, still firing up the game several times a month, salvaging derelicts, upgrading my ships and freighter, fighting pirates, smuggling, trading, building bases, mining, farming…and yes, exploring.

El Tarasco is a small local Mexican fast food chain in the South Bay area. Their newest location, on Artesia in Redondo Beach, has turned out to be a great spot for takeout, almost on par with El Amigo. (And they’re open later!) I usually get one of their enchiladas. Last time I picked up from there I noticed they have a chile relleno burrito*, which I’m going to have to try next time! (Though I’ll have to ask whether they use peanuts in their mole or something else. I’m sure I can substitute another kind of sauce, though.)

One of these days I’ll actually eat at the restaurant: they built a patio as big as the indoor space, and the entire front wall rolls up when the weather’s good, so even if you’re inside, you might as well be outside. (I pay a lot more attention to ventilation these days than I did before 2020.)

I’ve been to a couple of their other locations. The downtown El Segundo one used to be a go-to spot for work lunches, but I’m rarely in the area these days. The original is a takeout window on the front of a tiny building on Rosecrans in Manhattan Beach that looks like the kind of Minecraft shelter you build the first day in a new world. They also have locations in Hermosa Beach (on Pier, also with a good-sized patio), south Redondo (on PCH), Westchester (on Sepulveda) and Hawthorne (on Imperial Highway somewhere). I thought they had one in Lawndale too, but on looking it up, that restaurant appears to be completely unrelated.

Not so much a thematic collection as the three stories that have both entered into the public domain and already been transcribed at Project Gutenberg.

All three are solidly in the “here’s a weird idea” vein of science-fiction. Plot and characterization are just enough to explore, or at least express, the concept.

War No. 81-Q

Short, bird’s eye view of a “war” fought entirely using remote controlled drones…on a designated battlefield with a time limit, like a tournament, with spectators. So you want to settle your international disputes with violence. Why harm actual people?

Scanners Live In Vain

This came up in Analee Newitz’ recent book, Stories are Weapons, in part because Smith, under his real name of Paul Linebarger, literally wrote the book on Psychological Warfare. (Yes, Gutenberg has that one too!) Newitz draws a direct connection between the way a science-fiction story shows you the key elements of an alternate world, letting you connect the dots so the ideas feel more natural, and the way psy-ops do the same thing.

The story itself is very much worth reading. The main character is a “scanner,” a man who has had all his senses and emotional centers surgically cut off so that he can endure the “pain of space,” a neurological effect that prevents normal people from traveling across deep space except in suspended animation. Between missions, they can use a wire to literally reconnect to their humanity for short periods of time. He’s called up for an emergency meeting while “cranched,” a meeting that calls the scanners’ whole purpose into question. And he’s the only one there who’s in a state to understand how disastrously people would react to the course of action they choose.

I still think “cranch” sounds like an unholy combination of cranberry and ranch dressing, though.

The Game of Rat and Dragon

Not as serious a story as “Scanners…” but fun and still thought-provoking.

There’s something malevolent out in interstellar space preying on our starships. Something disrupted by bright flashes of light, but only detectable by telepaths – and it’s faster than human reflexes. Fortunately, not all telepaths are human.

This one starts off being very coy about the “Partners,” but manages to avoid “tomato surprise” territory by making the big reveal in the middle of the story, at the point where exposition gives way to plot. Let’s just say that Smith was a cat person.

The show/exhibit is back this winter, which reminds me I meant to write a review after I went last year!

The South Coast Botanic Garden is already one of my favorite places to go walking in the South Bay/Palos Verdes Peninsula area. For Astra Lumina, they map out a nighttime path through the gardens with a series of different types of light shows that you walk through. Each is set to music and runs in a short loop, and you can stay as long as you like before moving onto the next. There’s a loose story about stars coming down to meet us.

It’s a cool, immersive experience, and I’d definitely recommend seeing it!

Apparently the studio that runs it, Moment Factory, runs the same event in several other US cities as well.