Testing - BlogFlock

Image Toolbox - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-29T03:32:59.000Z

★★★★☆

An extremely powerful image editor for Android. And not just the usual features like crop, adjust contrast or brightness, maybe apply a filter, but you can do batch edits, format conversion, scaling the actual pixel image, editing metadata…all the things that mobile apps tend to hide behind the curtain (because why would someone need to even know the pixel depth, never mind change it? :eyeroll:). The downside is that it’s a bit awkward to use.

So far this is the only image editing app I’ve tried on Android that I can get to keep both location and timestamp EXIF data intact when editing. Sometimes. It seems to keep all EXIF data if you start with “single edit,” but drops at least location if you start with “crop.” Within a single edit, you can make a lot of adjustments, including cropping, arbitrary rotation, saturation, etc. and it’ll preserve the metadata.

I’m still getting a sense of where things are and which controls will get me the effect I want, which is usually cropping and adjusting the contrast for iNaturalist. That’s why I really want to be able to make these edits without losing or altering the EXIF data: the location and timestamp matter for the observation.

Google Play vs. FOSS Variants

The version in the Play store uses Google’s machine learning for some features, as well as Google’s crash reports and other analytics. It can also be built as capital-F Free software, without the telemetry and Google-dependent features, making it suitable for F-Droid’s stricter requirements (though there’s a bug keeping the latest release out of F-Droid).

On Preserving Metadata

You’d think “don’t change the stuff that the user isn’t changing” would be a low bar, but most image editors I’ve used on Android handle EXIF data in one of three ways:

Treat EXIF as junk and throw it away haphazardly, often including the time a photo was taken! (At least Fossify Gallery considers this a bug.)
Remove some or all metadata, including location, for privacy reasons. (Scrambled EXIF is great, but it removes everything.)
Preserve metadata, but with bugs. (For instance: Google Photos forgets the time zone if you’re not syncing with their cloud, so I ended up with photos stamped with the right location, but the time off by the difference from UTC and I’d have to use a desktop anyway to fix all the timestamps. And while Sly has an option to save metadata, it doesn’t seem to work.)

I still haven’t sorted out all the circumstances under which Image Toolbox keeps or discards it, but at least I’ve found something for the specific phone-to-iNat workflow.

More info at Image Toolbox. Available from Play Store, F-Droid.

Sly (Image Editor) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-26T05:14:20.000Z

★★★☆☆

Simple, friendly image editor that doesn’t need any extra permissions, it just lets you adjust your photos! It’s not elaborate, just basic adjustments like cropping, changing contrast or saturation, sharpening or noise reduction. Feels more suited for mobile, but has a Linux version as well as Android. There are only two features I miss when using it on my phone:

It doesn’t show up as a target app yet for opening images, either on Linux or on Android.
You can only rotate by right angles, so you can’t fix a shot that’s skewed.

One bug is, for me, a showstopper: While there’s an option to save EXIF metadata, it doesn’t seem to work. I always want to keep the original timestamp, and my main use case for an easy photo editor on my phone is to be able to quickly crop a photo to upload for iNaturalist or MapComplete, in which case I want to keep the location too.

For now I’m using Image Toolbox, which is slightly more awkward. If and when Sly implements the share target and fixes the metadata bug, it’ll a whole lot more streamlined for this flow!

More info at Sly (Image Editor). Available from Play Store (Android), Flathub (Linux), Source.

Scrambled EXIF - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-26T00:07:31.000Z

★★★★☆

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!

More info at Scrambled EXIF. Available from Play Store, F-Droid.

Calculating God - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-23T03:35:44.000Z

Robert J. Sawyer

★★★★☆

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.

GNOME/Wayland Fails to Log In (Solved) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-21T04:12:42.000Z

OK, this has got to be the most ridiculous Linux bug I’ve encountered in a long time.

Installing XFCE/X11 on my Fedora system made it impossible to log into GNOME/Wayland. I finally tracked down what was causing it through an Arch forum thread pointing to a Debian bug report.

And the problem was that XFCE set the GNOME mouse cursor size to zero.

Solution:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

Wait, What Is All This?

X11 is an older display system designed for old-style computer lab scenarios, that’s been tweaked and layered and otherwise finagled into mostly working on personal desktops.
Xorg is the project that most Linux systems use for their X11 layer.
Wayland is a newer display system designed for personal computers, but it’s taken years to add back some of the features people relied on. Older programs that are designed only for X11 can run through a compatibility layer called XWayland.
GNOME, XFCE, and LXQt are desktop environments that handle windowing, docks, menus and a set of standard tools for things like file management.

Why Wayland? Why X11?

At of mid-2025, anything that runs directly on Wayland works better on my desktop than it does on an X session, and most programs that use the XWayland compatibility layer work fine. But there are a few games that still have trouble. No Man’s Sky, for instance, usually starts out OK but slows to an unplayable crawl after a few minutes when I run it on Wayland, but not when I run it on X11. (I assume it’s a lingering Wayland/NVidia bug.)

So I run GNOME/Wayland most of the time, but switch over to GNOME/X11 for some games. Which would be fine except that GNOME is dropping X11 support soon.

OK, So What Happened?

I installed XFCE, which is keeping their X11 support. I logged in. I ran Steam. I logged back out and tried to log into GNOME/Wayland again…

…and got sent back to the login screen with an “authentication error” and a password field that wouldn’t accept input. I had to switch to a text console and restart GDM (the program that handles the login screen).

systemctl restart gdm

I could log into GNOME/X11. I could log into XFCE. I reinstalled LXQt (which I use on a low-spec portable and on VMs) and was able to log into it with both Wayland or X11, but GNOME applications wouldn’t run on the Wayland session. But even after a reboot, any attempt to log into GNOME/Wayland locked up the login screen the same way.

A couple of hours and a literal migraine later, I found the Arch thread where someone had exactly the same experience: They installed XFCE, after which launching GNOME/Wayland would always lock up the login screen. And it was eventually traced to that bug with the cursor size.

I had to look up the syntax for gsettings (which I found on a Mint forum thread), and confirmed that yes, it was set to zero:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

0

and reset it to the default:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size

And, surprise, GNOME/Wayland worked again!

Unanswered Questions

Why is XFCE changing the mouse cursor size for GNOME?
Why is it setting it to zero???
Why does it crash GNOME under Wayland, but not under X11?

Amusement

I had to teach the spell checker some new words. Some of the suggestions it had:

Wayland -> Waylaid
XFCE -> FACE
systemctl -> systemic

Moshidon (Mastodon app) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-20T00:47:50.000Z

★★★★☆

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.

More info at Moshidon (Mastodon app). Available from Google Play Store, F-Droid, Source (GitHub).

Microsoft Outlook (Desktop) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-10T05:53:11.000Z

★★★☆☆

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.

Eclipses and World Building - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-09T04:18:35.000Z

I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended)

But please, please get the basic mechanics right!

The moon’s phase is caused by the current angle from the planet to the moon to the sun. Remember: the moon is a giant ball, and the side that’s facing the sun is the side that’s lit. The closer they are (visually), the narrower the crescent. The farther they are, the more of the moon is illuminated, until they’re opposite each other and the moon is full.
The points of a crescent always point away from the sun.
A solar eclipse can only happen during a new moon, because that’s the only time the moon can block the sun.
A lunar eclipse can only happen during a full moon, because that’s the only time the Earth can block sunlight from reaching the moon.
A lunar eclipse looks roughly (but not exactly) the same across the half of the planet that can see it, but keep time zones in mind: local daylight and distance from the horizon will vary.
A solar eclipse is only visible from a small area, and that area moves during the eclipse, along with the moon’s movement and the earth’s surface rotating.
If the moon gets farther away from Earth, its silhouette gets smaller and can’t cover the whole sun. This is how you get an annular (aka “ring of fire”) eclipse. Move it even farther out, and it’ll eventually get to the point where it just looks like a sunspot.
If the moon gets closer, it will increase the area affected by the solar eclipse…but only up to a point. Imagine you’re trying to eclipse a streetlight using a golf ball as viewed on a grapefruit, and you’ll see there’s no way to make the shadow cover the entire surface of the grapefruit.
In a realistic/science-fiction setting, moving the moon closer or increasing its mass also makes tides stronger. Too close and you end up with massive earthquakes and the the moon breaking apart!
Even in a fantasy setting where you don’t worry about tides destabilizing the planet, there’s still a geometric limit to how close you can get that golf ball to the grapefruit.
All of the above still apply if your fictional planet has more than one moon! If the second moon is 90 degrees away from the sun on the day of the solar eclipse, that second moon is going to be first or third quarter. If the second and third moons are slightly ahead and behind the one causing the eclipse, they’ll be crescents. And with a lunar eclipse, it’s only going to affect one of the moons unless two or more of them are full at the same time and close enough in the sky to fall within the planet’s shadow at the same time. (In the case of real-world Earth, its shadow at the moon’s distance is about 3 times as wide as the moon, so a fictional second moon would have to pass that close to it visually.)

The post Eclipses and World Building first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

When The Moon Hits Your Eye - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-08T05:39:02.000Z

John Scalzi

★★★★☆

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. I picked it as a sort of palate cleanser to the darkness of Overgrowth, though it turns out both involve strange transformations and potential planet-wide disasters.

It’s not really about the moon turning into cheese overnight so much as it’s about how people react to the moon turning into cheese overnight. Some people deal with it better than others.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft. (He really doesn’t take it well.)

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around.

OK, there’s one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.

And I appreciate how well Scalzi describes a total solar eclipse. (He mentions in the acknowledgments that the moon was kind enough to pass directly between the sun and his house last year, which helped quite a bit with that scene.)

And then there’s the epilogue. Or epilogues, rather.

SPOILER WARNING!

Partway through, the story changes from one about people dealing with a massively weird but mostly harmless event to people dealing with imminent doom…but not yet, not until a few years from now, though it’s not hard to calculate the exact date. And it became strikingly clear that the COVID lockdowns of 2020 strongly influenced the psychology and sociology of the story…as well as the epilogues where people try to explain it away as a hoax, eventually succeeding in replacing the real story with a “realistic” version that we, as readers, know didn’t happen, because we got to follow along with the people who experienced it directly.

Anyway, it’s not high art, not even among Scalzi’s best (I think Lock In and Head On are my favorites of his so far, though I still have a lot on my to-read list), but it’s worth reading at least once, and it goes along with Starter Villain (which was a bit more fun) and The Kaiju Preservation society (which is the most interesting of the three.)

Aegis Authenticator - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-02T02:44:28.000Z

★★★★★

I was very quickly impressed by how easy it was to switch from Google Authenticator, and how even if I wasn’t trying to cut down on my dependence on Google, it’s still better.

You can organize accounts into groups. That alone would make it worth switching, and now I don’t need to set up two non-Google apps to split work and personal two-factor authentication codes. You can also choose to hide codes until you tap on one (with double-tap to copy), and to protect the app behind its own password or a fingerprint scan. It’s also free, open-source, and works offline.

Aegis imports from several authenticator apps’ exported file formats. Rooted phones can import directly from another app. And it can import Google Authenticator’s QR codes in batches of 10. Yes, you can take a screenshot of the code to migrate on the same device. (Though you should try not to let that screenshot sync to the cloud!)

If you do set up a password to encrypt your 2FA vault, it will also offer to back up your vault locally or to a cloud account. This was you can restore from a bricked phone or move to another device. It doesn’t seem to recognize Dropbox, but does recognize Nextcloud. And you can optionally choose a different password to encrypt the backups.

Tuta recommend it in their latest Degoogling round-up of alternative apps and services, which is where I noticed it.

More info at Aegis Authenticator. Available from Play Store, F-Droid.

FreeOTP (Authenticator) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-07-02T02:43:28.000Z

★★★☆☆

Extremely bare-bones two-factor authentication app for iOS and Android, sponsored by Red Hat. It’s secure, works offline, and doesn’t depend on Google. Free and open source. You can add, rename, rearrange or remove accounts (ARRR!), but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a good way to import codes from another app, on the same device or another. And it doesn’t seem to recognize the multi-account QR codes Google Authenticator can export. (It does have its own encrypted backup/restore feature, at least.) If you already have a lot of 2FA codes, switching them one by one will be tedious.

Tuta recommended it in their latest Degoogling round-up, along with Aegis Authenticator, which made a much better impression with its solid import/export and the ability to organize accounts into groups.

More info at FreeOTP (Authenticator). Available from Play Store, F-Droid, App Store.

Dia (Browser) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-06-25T00:51:16.000Z

★★☆☆☆

I haven’t decided whether Dia is an AI chatbot masquerading as a web browser or the other way around.

For now it’s in closed beta (and only on M-series Macs), but they’ve released it to anyone with an Arc Browser account. Not wanting to run it on my primary OS or log into any important accounts (Dia will look through your logged-in accounts for answers), I installed it on a virtual machine.

First impression: it really wants you to personalize it. And it really wants you to interact by chatting. Once it gets past the onboarding, the main window is a 50/50 split with the web view in one column and chat in the other. And they’ve finally implemented the UI change that big tech has been trying to do for the last 15 years: Hide the URLs. I spent several seconds looking for a place to type in the name of a website before I decided to type it in the “Ask anything” box, and was relieved that it works like Arc and I could pick the actual site from a drop-down.

But Why, Though?

The problem is that I don’t want to interact with the web through an AI chat bot.

I’ve tried. I really liked Arc Search, but I never warmed to its AI features either.

I just don’t want a generated answer that won’t tell me where to find more details, and won’t cite its sources. (I asked it why it doesn’t cite its sources, and it said it will if it has to do a web search, but not if it’s just using its training data.) And I don’t want a folksy-sounding “well, I can’t find an exact answer, but I can tell you sort of where to look for it,” I want to go to that place where I can find it.

I also don’t trust the technology yet: I don’t trust its accuracy. I don’t trust the people running it. I don’t trust the way summaries will entrench a single interpretation (just like classifying AI tends to reinforce the biases in its training data). And so much of it still relies on cloud services, meaning that your questions and answers are routed through another layer of remote computers, which need more energy and provide a nice central spot for surveillance. (This is also why I’ve avoided voice assistants for so long.) If I go directly to EFF.org, that’s between me and the EFF, but if I use Dia’s AI chat to get answers from EFF, Dia’s and OpenAI’s servers need access too. And while Dia assures you that your query is deleted immediately afterward, you have to trust them on it. And trust anyone who might eventually buy them.

And that’s not even getting into AI’s rapidly expanding energy requirements coming just at the point when the world was getting a handle on renewables, or the ethics of sourcing its training data.

Bottom (Command) Line

AI integration is the whole point of Dia. Without those features, it’s just a stripped-down Chromium browser, and not a very compelling one, either. (I’d go back to Arc or Ecosia in a heartbeat, or DuckDuckGo, and those are the comparatively bland ones. And Ecosia at least tries to work for the environment.) With the AI, it’s another panopticon funnel.

Maybe it’s just not my thing, or I’m just being a digital curmudgeon. (Maybe.) Though it is kind of funny that people are interacting with computers by typing text commands to get responses again. Of course, terminal applications are (usually) more deterministic about what you get back from them!

More info at Dia (Browser).

DuckDuckGo - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-06-04T03:01:16.000Z

★★★★☆

A search engine with related services and apps offering better privacy than the other big names. Search is currently serving less slop than Google. Disposable email aliases are convenient. The browser extension and standalone browser block known trackers, and the mobile app (at least on Android) can block trackers in other apps too.

Search

It’s been a few years since I mostly switched from Google. DuckDuckGo used to be slightly worse in terms of search result quality, but it was a trade-off: Google tracked you and personalized your results, while DuckDuckGo was missing context because it wasn’t tracking you. Since then, search quality has gotten worse across the board as clickbait, content farms, and finally AI slop cluttered up the net. But Google’s results have dropped more: first they put the advertising execs in charge of search, sacrificing quality to keep people on their services, and now they’re going full chatbot.

At least for now, DuckDuckGo is returning slightly better results than Google.

DDG has been rolling out AI summaries, but not on everything, and at least its summaries cite their sources (unlike Google’s). Just as with Wikipedia, citations are critical to evaluating whether the summary is accurate or not!

Like most search engines not called Google, Bing or Yandex, DuckDuckGo remixes results from bigger general sites and smaller, more specific search sites. For the most part, since you’re not contacting Bing or TripAdvisor or wherever directly, it insulates you from tracking by the data sources they use.

Email Protection

Duck.com is a free email forwarding service that filters known trackers out of your email before sending it on to your real mailbox. It also has a feature to randomly generate disposable aliases, which is useful for when you need to give a site an email address, but don’t know whether you can trust the site not to spam you or share your address with more spammers.

I’m still ambivalent about anything that alters incoming messages (other than stripping out malware), but the disposable addresses are nice:

You can deactivate them individually, unlike a catch-all.
Unlike plus-addressing, they can’t just be cleaned up to get your real address.
Creating them is instant.

On the downside, you do need to watch out for duplicates when you’re already subscribed to something at your real address.

Browser Extensions

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is an add-on for Chromium/Firefox browsers. It’s kind of like Privacy Badger in that it blocks trackers, adds don’t-sell-my-info flags, and blocks some social media embeds. But while it’s happy to tell you what it has blocked, it’s hard to find out what it will block. The main advantage it has over Privacy Badger and newer browser settings is that it detects email address fields and offers to generate a disposable alias right there.

Mobile App

A few years ago DuckDuckGo launched a mobile browser for Android. I just changed the search engine on Firefox and Vivaldi, but my wife’s been using the app for quite a while, largely because it also cuts down on tracking by third-party sites.

I finally decided to give it a shot after trying out Ecosia, and my first impression is that it really wants me to know how much it’s doing to make things less annoying for me. Fortunately those notifications trickle off and stop fairly quickly.

The browser itself is fairly bare-bones, and it’s important to remember that it blocks tracking, not ads. It’s also missing things like reader mode. But at least it lets you move the nav bar to the bottom.

But it does add some other features you won’t find in Ecosia or other apps (or are harder to get at):

A burn button that closes all your tabs and wipes your history and its saved data (except for sites you “fireproof”)
Auto-generating disposable email aliases if you use a duck.com address.
Duck Player, which opens YouTube videos without your Google account, and without targeted ads, and without adding them to your YouTube recommendations.

And then there’s “App Tracking Protection,” an option to filter outbound traffic to trackers from other apps (their example is a fitness app contacting Facebook). It runs as a local VPN on your phone, so it doesn’t need root. The downside to that approach: it interferes with trying to connect to an actual VPN if you need to. It’s interesting to see just how much some apps try to phone home, even when they’re supposed to be sleeping.

Desktop Browser

Somehow I didn’t notice until recently that they’ve released a DuckDuckGo desktop browser for macOS and Windows. It’s a custom application built around the system rendering engines, so it uses Chromium on Windows and WebKit on macOS. All the features of the browser extension are included, from tracker blocking to email alias generation.

Otherwise it’s pretty sparse, though it does include the burn button and Duck Player. There’s no extensions support, which means I can’t integrate it with KeePassXC or Floccus (for syncing with other browsers). Bookmarks sync only with other installs of the DDG browser, using a recovery key instead of an account, similar to Brave.

Controversy

I know there have been other controversies, but most of the commentary I’ve been able to find while looking for it stems from one of the following:

The mobile browser used to allow Microsoft trackers until they renegotiated their contract with Bing. The question here is whether you believe it’s more likely that they’ve pulled their act together or that there are more problems waiting to be discovered.
They down-ranked Russian propaganda outlets early in the Ukraine invasion, and certain very vocal people decided it must be political censorship and not just, y’know, downranking the low-quality results.
It’s not a perfect privacy solution. Well, of course not! If you need more serious privacy, use Tor. Most people’s threat model can get by with something that’s at least more private than Chrome+Google or Edge+Bing.

Sequel Ace - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-30T03:14:48.000Z

★★★★★

Successor to the late Sequel Pro, it still manages to be an unapologetically macOS application and a powerful database manager. Easy to use, responsive, stable. All the frequent stuff you need to do is in the UI, plus of course you can write your own queries when you need to. It can connect directly to a MySQL/MariaDB database or set up its own SSH tunnel.

Sequel Ace and its predecessor are the only database GUIs I’ve actually liked rather than merely tolerated. If it ran on Linux, or if it could talk to Microsoft SQL Server, it’s the only one I would use. It’s that good.

More info at Sequel Ace.

Fossify Voice Recorder - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-29T03:43:12.000Z

★★★★☆

A simple mono recording app where the audio stays on your phone. No ads, no subscriptions, no remotely-generated transcripts, just basic recording.

I’ve found it useful for making quick voice notes I can come back to later, and for recording audio observations for iNaturalist when I can hear, but can’t see noisy animals. It should work for longer recordings too: there’s no time limit as far as I can tell.

There’s a setting to start recording as soon as you launch the app, and a widget in case you want one-click recording sometimes, and some simple options for choosing a bitrate and file format (M4A, MP3, or Ogg).

More info at Fossify Voice Recorder. Available from F-Droid, Google Play.

Pocket (discontinued) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-22T18:17:29.000Z

★★★☆☆

May 2025: It took me 11 years to update this review. Less than a month later, Mozilla announced they’re shutting Pocket down this summer. Fortunately I’d already tried out Wallabag, which is a good replacement for the read-it-later aspect.

I’ve been using Pocket for ages to offload “Hey, this looks interesting” articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time. And when I say “ages,” I mean it: I was using it back when it was still called Read It Later, long before Mozilla bought it.

It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
Feedly talks to it easily. Back when I used Feedly, I even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping “Save for Later” on the tablet will add an article to Pocket. This also helped make up a bit for Feedly’s lack of offline access.
Speaking of IFTTT and online services I don’t use anymore, for a while I had it set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also added it to Delicious.
The Android app will accept shares even if there’s no network connection, then sync up when it’s online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at home…or the next time I’m out somewhere, after it’s synced.
Kobo eReaders can connect to Pocket and you can read your saved articles on something that’s actually designed for reading.

You can save pages to Pocket using a browser extension for all the major desktop browser types, including Chromium, Firefox and Safari. For others, you can get a bookmarklet from getPocket.com/add while logged in. And just share a URL or page to the mobile app.

Mission Creep

Over the years, Mozilla turned it into a recommendation engine. A lot of people only know Pocket as “that annoying thing that shows me sponsored articles when I launch Firefox.” These days I’m never sure how much they’re using my bookmarking to train that engine.

And while self-reinforcing algorithms geared toward engagement may be good for the dopamine hits (and a convienient channel to add sponsored articles), it’s not too helpful in the long run.

I finally gave Wallabag a try. It’s not as polished, but I feel more confident about what it’s doing with my data, and if I really want to, I can host my own server. Plus Wallabag still works on my Poke3 e-reader. I haven’t been able to get Pocket to log in on it since it stopped syncing and I reinstalled the app.

Speech Oddities

For a while I used the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. Even in the mid-2010s the voice was fairly decent, despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms.

There were a few oddities, though:

# is always read as “hash.” This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. “Batman Hash 123” just sounds wrong.
Italics are…always…emphasis, and presented by…pausing…rather than changing tone. This makes it…awkward…for anything involving lots of titles.
It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and can’t always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like “tah-kay-down notice,” (takedown) “link-uh-din” (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or “pohs terminal” (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out “I-triple-E,” so I imagine it’s got a dictionary for special cases.

They’ve probably been fixed by now. Probably.

Review History

Parable of the Sower - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-22T03:41:38.000Z

Octavia Butler

★★★★★

Parable of the Sower is hard to put down. And it’s hard to pick up again. It’s certainly not a fun book, but it’s extremely engaging, despite the bleakness of the slow-apocalypse setting and story.

Octavia Butler presents it as a teenager’s diary entries, starting in what was then the somewhat distant future of 2024, ravaged by climate change and socioeconomic collapse. It follows the next few years as the gated neighborhood she lives in gradually breaks down – both the infrastructure and the community – until the desperately violent people of the streets outside, and the fires they set, tear down and consume what’s left.

The second half of the book follows Lauren and a handful of survivors as they travel north, walking the old freeways, hoping to find a place where they can settle and rebuild.

Through it all, Lauren has been developing a religion she calls “Earthseed,” built on the central idea that “God is change,” and that while that change influences you, you can – and should – also influence what that change is going to be.

Voice

What makes this apocalypse so horrifying, and the story so engaging, is how matter-of-fact Lauren is in describing everything. It’s the world she grew up in, so it’s normal to her, though she can see clearly even at 14 that it’s unsustainable. There’s a sharp generational divide between those who remember what things were like back when water wasn’t prohibitively expensive, when more people had homes than not, when traveling outside your neighborhood wasn’t risking your life, grocery stores didn’t have snipers watching you shop, and police might actually investigate a crime rather than just charge you a fee for looking at the scene. When selling yourself and your family into indentured servitude in a company town didn’t seem like a path to a better future.

But all that is just history to her.

(Thinking about this, it’s markedly different from George in Mira Grant’s Feed, where she seems to be constantly comparing the historical and post-Rising society. Maybe it’s just the character’s journalist voice, but I remember it came off as a bit too well-tailored toward the present-day audience. Whereas Lauren, even when she does talk about the past, is focused on the present and future.)

Lauren’s present is hopeless and brutal, but her diary doesn’t linger on the ever-present brutality like a horror novel would. She acknowledges it, of course, but she’s focused on how to survive it so she can build something better.

Past Futures

Putting on my literary analysis hat for a moment: Dystopias and apocalyptic fiction tend to reflect the societal concerns of the time they were written.

The Reagan/Bush years stoked fears of crime, drug addiction, homelessness, more crime, racism, economic recession, foreign investment, and more crime, with a dash of arguing over whether immigration was good or bad. People were starting to actually think about climate change, despite fossil fuel companies trying to muddy the waters. Gated communities were either a good way to protect yourself from crime or a callous way to isolate yourself from those in greater need. And of course anyone who has lived in California for a while is well acquainted with drought.

Of course so many of those issues were (and still are) tied up in racism. Foreign investment was played up as more of a threat when it was coming from Japan. Inner cities were portrayed as a hotbed of drugs and crime, and white people with means had been fleeing them for those gated neighborhoods in the suburbs, leaving Black and brown people stuck both dealing with the problems and getting blamed for them.

Butler extrapolates these fears to a nightmare level, then turns the racial assumptions on their head. She centers her story on a young Black woman in a multiracial enclave. Everyone’s on the inside. Until they aren’t. Complicating matters is Lauren’s clinically acute hyper-empathy, which makes the struggle between compassion and safety something she has to navigate constantly, especially when their oasis collapses and she’s forced to live outside.

One reason the setting resonates so well today is that our present political climate is largely built by scaremongering over the same fears that defined the 80s (plus transphobia). Republican rhetoric about crime sounds like they never left the 1980s, and the way they talk about cities sounds like they got it from watching 1970s cop films. In reality, crime rates peaked in the 1990s and have dropped dramatically over the last ~30 years (with occasional blips upward, notably during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic).

And of course we’re dealing with an authoritarian President and major fires wiping out entire neighborhoods on Los Angeles, which seems a bit on the nose.

Strangely Familiar

That’s what finally pushed me to start reading it. The book and its sequel have been on my to-read list for years. (A lot of people made the same decision. I’ve read several articles on its sudden popularity, and it’s been a best-seller on several online bookstores.) The Olamina family lives in a fictional city near Los Angeles, and it’s hard not to think of it as a stand-in for Altadena, especially now.

On top of that, though, I’ve traveled a lot of the same route Lauren takes as her group makes its way north. I’ve been to Ventura, Santa Barbara, Salinas, even the route inland along the 156 around San Luis Reservoir…Mendocino is about the only place in the novel I don’t have a clear mental picture of. Sure, that’s mostly just having grown up in California and traveled the state, but anytime you recognize the place in a book as somewhere you’ve been, it makes it feel a bit more personal.

Fossify Calculator - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-14T23:59:10.000Z

★★★☆☆

Basic calculator with one-variable memory, like the cheap 16-key models you might find at the dollar store. Plus square roots and unit conversions. No trigonometry, no scientific notation, nothing fancy. But also no ads, no data mining, and no need to pay for a subscription. Probably not suitable for writing a lab report, but convenient for when you just need to split a bill or calculate a tip.

More info at Fossify Calculator. Available from F-Droid, Google Play.

Safari (web browser) - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-09T19:56:37.000Z

★★★★☆

Dependable web browser built into macOS. (I can’t speak to the iOS version since I don’t use an iPhone or iPad.) Not much in the way of bells and whistles, but it does offer the usual bookmarks, autofill, reading mode, private windows, etc. And it’ll install PWAs on a desktop (until the App Store side of the company convinces them not to again).

Safari is built in-house by Apple, and Apple is the main contributor to WebKit, so it integrates extremely well with the macOS desktop.

Apple talks a lot about privacy, but aside from blocking (some) trackers and offering the suspiciously-named “private click measurement”, it’s not clear how far that privacy really goes.

Compatibility note: WebKit and Blink have diverged a bit over the years, but “I only test in Chrome” sites are more likely to break in Gecko browsers in my experience.

Extensions and Syncing

It doesn’t support extensions built for Firefox or Chromium. It does have its own set of extensions available through the App Store (at least on macOS), where I was able to find extensions for Pocket, Wallabag, BitWarden, Consent-O-Matic and so on.

Notably missing: Floccus bookmarks sync, KeePassXC, and Privacy Badger, though Floccus does have an iOS app.

BitWarden’s extension works just like it does in other browsers. As for KeePassXC, Safari does work with the password manager’s auto-type feature, at least!

Sync seems to be primarily bookmarks and the reading list, and only over iCloud.

Bottom Line

You could do a lot worse than Safari, but [Orion] has more features (and can use most Chrome/Firefox extensions too) if you want to stick with similar tech under the hood.

Windows on MacBook Boot Camp Stops Connecting to External Displays - Kelson Vibber: New Posts

2025-05-07T19:21:04.000Z

We recently repurposed an older MacBook to be the teenager’s main computer. I say “older” but it’s one of the later Intel-based models, and it’s still pretty fast for most everyday uses. He put a Windows partition on it with Boot Camp so he could dual-boot and play PC games that don’t run on macOS.

Somewhere along the line, Windows stopped connecting to external displays. MacOS had no problem with it, so it was clearly software and not hardware. (Always check the cables.)

Uninstalling and reinstalling the GPU driver didn’t work…in part because it couldn’t reinstall, throwing an error every time we tried.

What Fixed It

In Device Manager, we turned on Show Hidden Devices (in the View menu), which revealed another display adapter that was installed, but not active. Once we uninstalled that device (and rebooted just to be sure), the valid driver could actually install itself, and after another reboot, Windows was able to use an external monitor again!

What Broke It to Begin With?

VMWare on macOS can run a virtual machine from a Boot Camp partition, which sounds useful at first. But of course, it needs to install drivers for its virtual hardware. When you boot directly into Windows again, the drivers and device configuration are still there, but the virtual hardware isn’t.

The VMWare “display” was interfering with the driver for the real hardware, so Windows was falling back to a generic driver. That generic driver could run the built-in display on the laptop, but no more. But since the virtual hardware wasn’t present, Windows wasn’t saying anything about it. 🤦