BlogFlockUrsula K. Le Guin
★★★★★
The people of Eleven-Soro live alone, isolated as much as possible. Women and children live in loose villages called “aunt-rings.” Men live as hermits. And no adult sets foot in another’s house.
Le Guin describes “Solitude” as a story about introverts.
An Ekumen observer, unable…
I recently added some custom navigation to the tag and category pages on my blog. I could have tweaked the tag template on the theme I’m using, or I could have created a child theme (which seems overkill for something this small). Since I already use a functionality plugin…
I’ve been using the excellent ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress to connect this blog to the Fediverse for several years now, and it keeps getting better. The plugin makes any WordPress blog also work like a Mastodon server, so you can follow and interact from any site running Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed…
Jules Verne (F.P. Walter Translation)
★★★★☆
Even though marine science and geology have passed it by, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still a gripping episodic adventure through a strange, hidden world of marvels.
Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at…
We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great…
★★★★☆
I’ve been using LibreOffice, specifically the Writer and Calc parts of it, for years. It does everything I need a word processor or spreadsheet to do, and it doesn’t get in my way with nagware, or making sure I have enough licenses for all the family’s computers, or…
★★★☆☆
Google Workspace includes a fast, cloud-based office suite. It runs in most web browsers, the collaboration features are dead simple, and the mobile apps are decent. It auto-saves as you go and keeps a record of changes, so you can easily go back to an older version. Docs, Sheets…
★★★★☆
An absurd, character-focused, darkly humorous, psychological take on people with the super-power/body horror combo.
The title sequence sets the tone perfectly with Dave McKean-style imagery and music that sounds like the His Dark Materials theme as played by Garbage.
They start out playing up some of the X-Men similarities…
Charles Dickens
★★★★★
It’s been ages since I last read the original, and two days before Christmas I wanted a break from Toilers of the Sea, so I figured I’d pick it up again yesterday. And yeah, the story holds up. The emphasis on kindness and charity and human…
The Boox Page, Palma and Go 7 e-ink tablet models feature the return of physical buttons for page flipping, which is a huge improvement in usability over the touchscreen-only devices like the Poke3. The buttons are on the right in the default display orientation, but if you enable rotating…
Blog entries, tech tips, reviews and more by Kelson Vibber.