Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 9

Why use a dedicated app for Pixelfed when I can use any Mastodon-compatible app? Because sharing and viewing photos is just different enough from sharing and following random bits of everything that it’s worth using an app that’s optimized for it.

PixelDroid works smoothly, offers both grid and stream views, integrates well with other apps’ share intents and features a posting workflow that not only focuses (pun not intended) on images but makes it easy to add a description (alt text) for each photo in a post as you’re adding images.

It’s free and open source, and doesn’t vacuum up your personal data like certain other photo sharing apps I might name.

Reading People of the Crater I had to remind myself that if I’d been reading it when I was, say, 12, in 1950, I might have devoured it. It’s a fairly standard fantasy adventure that drops a random guy into a fish-out-of-water quest to rescue a lost princess and fight off an army. There are vague sci-fi trappings with nods to Hollow Earth, hidden ancient cities in Antarctica, the various species living there being from another planet. The Ancient Ones and unfortunately named Black Ones are conveniently humanoid enough that the hero and villain both lust after the princess. And the hero fights his way through weird challenges and weirder people, and the villain might as well be twirling his mustache, and it’s all very Post-WW2 Tough American Manly Man Doing Manly Hero Things™.

But I’m not 12, it’s not the 1950s, and while I still like a good adventure story, I’d rather read one with more interesting concepts or compelling characters (or both).

Great selection of both meat and veggie fillings, plus desserts (the chocolate one is intense). Mainly takeout. Figure on 2-3 empanadas per person if you want to make a meal of it. Walk in, or order ahead online so you know what they still have later in the day. Cashless. Street parking only.

Not a bad email client. Snappy, works with multiple accounts. Comparable to Apple Mail on a Mac. I did have trouble getting it to sync my contacts and calendars with Nextcloud*, but the core email features work well. So of course it’s being discontinued.

Rather than switching to “The New Outlook” (even if it is supposed to be more like the Mac and web versions than the Office 2019 version for Windows), I’m switching to Thunderbird. I already know it works with my setup, and I know it’s not going to constantly try to upsell me on Microsoft 365.

Tech Notes

* Windows 10 doesn’t have a good way to sync with a Nextcloud instance directly, but you can work around it by starting to create a bogus iCloud account as a placeholder, then go into the advanced settings and paste in the CardDAV or CalDAV URL for your server. This is actually Nextcloud’s documented solution!

Also, for troubleshooting purposes: Windows Mail re-encodes messages when you export them. I had to troubleshoot a 7bit vs quoted-printable issue and had to use Thunderbird to see the actual code being sent.

Wine* has been around forever, and is the major compatibility layer for when you want to run a Windows program on your Linux, Unix or Mac desktop. It’s not perfect, but consider that Valve built their Proton layer on it to be able to run Windows games on the Steam Deck, their Linux-powered flagship console.

It’s a translation layer, not a virtual machine, so you don’t have to boot up an entire Windows VM inside your host system (or dual-boot) just to run one application, and you don’t have an entire emulated system taking up memory and processor power.

For Steam games it’s usually better to run the native Steam client and let it run the game through Proton.

CrossOver is a commercial packaging of Wine by CodeWeavers. I’ve found it worth paying for for two main reasons:

• Install tools. In addition to Linux, they have installers for Mac and ChromeOS. And they have tools to make it easier to install and manage the applications.
• They work on the upstream Wine project, so it’s one way to pay for Wine development.

Apps I’ve Used

• NotePad++. I usually use Linux-native editors, but sometimes it’s easier to fire up N++ and use one feature it has instead of chaining together several features in another editor.
• EditPad Pro. Another text editor with some nice features that weren’t in any of the Linux-native editors I was using at the time.
• Internet Explorer, back in the day, to test website compatibility. The browser itself was kinda flaky, but all I needed was to test against the engine.
• Probably more Steam games than I can remember!

App compatibility databases:

• WineHQ AppDB
• CodeWeavers’ compatibility DB
• ProtonDB (focused on Steam games)