Kelson Reviews Stuff

Samsung Chromebook 3 (laptop review)

2026-07-09T02:01:12Z

★☆☆☆☆

I bought this laptop in the late 2010s, mainly for travel, or to have as a spare I could use when someone else was using the good laptop.

It was terrible.

A lot of computers start out great, or at least good, and then decay over time as hardware breaks down, connectors and batteries wear out, and software requirements balloon to exceed what they can handle. This was not one of those devices.

Some devices aren’t that great, but there’s some redeeming feature about them and you love them anyway, until entropy comes knocking and you reluctantly put them out to pasture. This was not one of those devices either.

Substandard Hardware

The display was the kind of LCD where you can see the grid between pixels. The backlight was too bright, and inconsistent across the surface of the screen. The keyboard was uncomfortable and unreliable, the trackpad was clunky (and also unreliable), and the chassis always felt like it was about to fall apart. And it was slow, even by the standards of its time.

System Capabilities

Even worse, it ran ChromeOS.

I mean, I’m sort of kidding there, but I’m also not. It was usable for web apps like Gmail and Google Docs, and there were Chrome apps for things like SSHing into another system. And there was some local file storage that synced with Google Drive for offline use. ChromeOS had some Android app support by then, and I was kind of surprised that Dropbox and a VPN worked, but for the most part, Android apps ran better on my phone anyway. I was briefly amused that I could get Instagram to run on the Chromebook, but why bother?

None of us really wanted to use it, even when it reached EOL and I installed a real Linux distribution. PeppermintOS was minimal enough that the environment ran okay, but that couldn’t solve the physical problems.

It was almost always better to just use an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard.

Fate

I think I eventually just took it to an e-waste collection. Though I can’t remember for sure.

If it turns up in the garage or the back of a closet, I might see if it still powers up and put PostmarketOS on it just for kicks. I don’t see it in their compatibility list, either by name or board codename (celes), but if I could install a general-purpose distro a few years ago, I should be able to install PM or upstream Alpine Linux.

It might make a decent Writer Deck, especially if set up with a UI that doesn’t use the trackpad. Then again, the keyboard might be frustrating enough to counteract the lack of distractions.

More info at Samsung Chromebook 3.

PineTab 2 (tablet review)

2026-07-08T05:29:09Z

★★★½☆

The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it is a hyper-mobile Linux tablet that can run desktop and command-line apps natively, with a touchscreen and an optional physical keyboard, for a budget price.

As a touchscreen tablet, it should be running Plasma Mobile (preinstalled) or Phosh, but they’re both slow enough to be frustrating. So I usually run it with LXQt, which is lightweight enough to stay out of the way even though it’s a desktop environment. Of course that limits its usefulness as a tablet.

The touchscreen is okay. There’s no fancy drawing stylus like the Surface Pen or Apple Pencil (“adding a digitiser for pen inputs would make the price too high”), but you can use a generic stylus. There are two USB-C ports, one for data and one for power. Three years on, I can get an average of 5 hours of use out of a full charge, and the battery is still holding onto its charge when I turn it off completely.

Edit: I forgot to mention there are still no camera drivers. The tablet shipped before WiFi, Bluetooth or camera drivers were ready, and Danctnix has since gotten first WiFi, then Bluetooth working. (The right priority, IMO). But none of the camera driver projects I’ve seen on the forums have posted updates in a long time. So while the hardware should probably support video calls, it’s not possible to do so yet. (There’s a back camera too, which always seemed weird to me on tablets. It’s not usable yet either.)

Writing

The keyboard case is a bit bulky, but it has a decent keyboard and trackpad. Mine has a flaky “D” key, so if you see a word on my website that’s missing a d, chances are I wrote it on here and didn’t catch the typo.

And yes, I’m writing this review on the tablet, using the keyboard case! It turns out one of the things it’s well-suited for is writing: Text editing doesn’t take that much power, and it connects natively to Nextcloud for my documents and drafts, and it’s easy to run git and 11ty when writing for my website. Featherpad’s fast, Sublime Text is snappy once it’s launched, and even LibreOffice runs well enough once it’s started up.

It’s not quite a writer deck because it can run various distractions, but those are slow enough that popping over to social media or wiki-walking is a lot less tempting. (Yay?)

Also: The PineTab can run an Eleventy test build, but it’s a lot slower than running on my desktop, or even on my VPS. I can build this Reviews site on my VPS in about 10 seconds. It takes several minutes on here. It’s slow enough that if I’ve got a network connection, I’ll run the build on the VPS instead, and mount the folder via SFTP so I can use a local editor!

System

The PineTab2 ships with Arch Linux for ARM, by way of Danctnix’s drivers for Pine64’s hardware. I’ve had surprisingly little actually break at the system level, despite the reputation rolling releases have, so I’ve stayed with Arch instead of trying any of the other distros that can run on it. This way I can at least rely on having the drivers available while they’re still not in the upstream kernel. One of these days I’ll give PostMarketOS a try.

It did take a lot of adjustments to get things working.

Some of that is because I was an early adopter. WiFi and Bluetooth drivers weren’t ready yet. LXQt didn’t run on Wayland yet. (They are, and it does, now.)

Compatibility and Performance

And some of it was just figuring out what does and doesn’t run usably on this hardware:

Plasma Mobile is really nice, but LXQt is a lot faster.
Web browsers: Falkon is light enough to use, as is Angelfish, while Firefox and Chromium run painfully slow. Dillo runs just fine, of course!
Thunderbird’s reliable for email, if a bit sluggish and lacking in touchscreen support. Geary’s a lot lighter. (I tried KMail again, but as usual it had trouble accessing my account.)
Word processing’s usable, and plaintext editors run well.
Wayland is noticeably faster than Xorg, though LXQt on X is still faster than Plasma on Wayland.
Nextcloud sync has a native Arch package, making it super-easy to set up.
Dropbox doesn’t offer an ARM-compatible Linux client at all.
3D gaming just isn’t going to work. I think I got Minecraft crawling once and it had a framerate around 2.
You can install a programming toolchain and compile software, but as with the Eleventy build, it’s going take a while.

Most Linux software runs on aarch64 these days, but sometimes commercial apps (ex. Dropbox) and third-party packages like Flatpak or AUR don’t bother, especially if they’re targeted at an x86_64-first distro like Arch or Ubuntu.

Comparisons

So, how does it stack up against other devices I’ve used?

Windows Convertible

My Surface Go 2 is faster, lighter, has a nice stylus, and has the best mobile keyboard I’ve ever used. It’s not a gaming powerhouse, but most general apps run just fine on it. The model is three years older (2020) but it runs Windows 10 faster than the PineTab2 runs Linux. (Windows 11 eliminates the gap, so, um, yay?)

Despite that, I still use the PineTab2 more often. Partly because the Surface is a shared family device, partly because I trust Linux more than Windows to actually be “my” computer, and partly because after years of running Linux as my primary OS, I just like it better than Windows. When the extra year of Windows 10 support runs out, I’ll probably put Linux on the Surface too, and won’t that be interesting to compare?

Android Tablets

I still use an older Galaxy Tab S4 (2018) from time to time. It’s really good for reading digital comics, and it’s also faster than the PineTab2 at everyday tasks like web browsing. (Sadly, Samsung has sacrificed its system updates at the altar of planned obsolescence.)

The PineTab2 is, however, a lot faster than the old Nexus 7 (much as I loved it at the time).

iPad

Not even in the same league.

Chromebook

The PineTab2 is better in every way than the Samsung Chromebook 3 I picked up in the late 2010s. That laptop was terrible.

Timeline

More info at PineTab 2.

Hidden Swing Trail (hiking review)

2026-06-26T14:54:45Z

★★★★☆

An unsigned hike along the coastal side of the hills on the west side of the Palos Verdes peninsula. A lot of it is just on the edge between trees and chaparral. In the morning there’s shade along most of the upper part of the trail. There isn’t much shade along the lower part, and probably not along the upper part in the afternoon. Nice views of the ocean and Bluff Cove. In a few spots, it cuts across narrow gullies that look like there might be narrow streams/waterfalls during the rainy season.

And yes, there is a swing someone made from an old skateboard.

There are stretches that have eroded, so step carefully, and there are steep sections (mostly close to the upper end) and tree roots. It’s very much not suitable for wheelchairs or anyone with limited mobility. Though I did see some kids on mountain bikes.

The upper end of the trail is in a very expensive-looking residential neighborhood, but there’s street parking. The lower end is at Palos Verdes Drive West, a bit south of the Bluff Cove parking area, though it’s less well-marked. If you start at the lower end, you’ll be coming back downhill. If you start at the upper end, you’ll be coming back uphill and finishing with the steepest part.

Start at the lower end. And bring water.

It’s part of a network of trails around the peninsula. There’s a 3-way fork with two paths going upward (one east, turning northward, and one south) and one going downward (west, turning southward). If you’ve started from the top, you’ll want to turn right/down/west at that fork to get to the swing. Left/up/south will eventually come back down to the same spot at PV Drive where the swing trail ends, and you can come back up that path. If you start at the bottom, you’ll want to go left/up/east to get to the upper end of the trail, or right/up/south to loop back to where you started.

More info at Hidden Swing Trail.

Tehanu (book review)

2026-06-18T02:47:51Z

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

There’s a sharp break between the first three Earthsea books and the later ones. The original trilogy had been a classic of young-adult high fantasy for almost 20 years before Le Guin returned to the world with a more grown-up perspective. The first three books can be read as heroic adventures. This one’s about the ordinary people, the ones caught underfoot when wizards and heroes and villains fight against each other.

And while there are still big fantastic questions like the connection between humans and dragons, it delves into weightier but more personal issues like child abuse, disability, misogyny and cruelty.

A Life More Ordinary

Tehanu picks up Tenar’s story 25 years after she left Atuan with Ged. She’s since walked away from the life of priestesses, mages and kings, and lived an ordinary woman’s life as a farmer on Gont, marrying, raising children, widowed, and as the story begins, adopting an abused, scarred child.

And it picks up Ged’s story a few hours after he left Roke on the back of a dragon, his magic spent closing the hole in the world, as he has to learn how to carry on as an ordinary man.

What follows is a character-driven drama that interplays with philosophical conversations. What is a woman’s magic vs. a man’s magic? Why are witches considered weaker (and more wicked) than their more-respected sorceror counterparts? And what is a man’s magic compared to the man himself? Ged has lost his magic, yes, but he still tends to find himself in the right place at the right time to do what is needful, though he has fewer options than he did before. And while he grew up surrounded by men, and still sees power as a male thing, he hasn’t absorbed the casual sexism of the villagers or the utter disdain of wizards like Aspen of Re Albi.

The sexism among mages in particular is something the author comes back to more thoroughly in “Dragonfly,” ultimately tracing its origins in “The Finder” (both stories in Tales of Earthsea).

From Burned to Burning

And then there’s Therru. Tenar is the one to adopt her precisely because she doesn’t believe in the just-world fallacy. She’s lived next to actual evil powers, and she knows better than anyone on Gont that who you are and what happens to you are not the same thing. Everyone around them sees Therru’s scars, or frets about what kind of magic potential she has, but Tenar is just trying to raise a traumatized child as best as she can.

Watching Therru come out of her shell is a joy, and seeing her close up again when her abusive former family catches up to her hurts. One of the best moments of the book is when we finally see through her point of view: how she sees her adoptive family, how she sees magic and other wizards…and of course how she sees dragons.

The end is a bit abrupt, but that’s a consequence of the perspective: As a middle-aged couple with no title and no magic, Ged and Tenar can deal with mundane issues like burglars and thieves on the road, but they’re utterly defenseless against a malicious wizard who still has his power.

Then again, Aspen is not a dragonlord.

Duality

By this time Le Guin was much more focused on duality than when she wrote the earlier books, and considering that the first one is about someone coming to terms with his shadow, that says something. There are a lot of dualities in this story: Human/dragon, male/female, reputable people who are horrible in private and disreputable people with good hearts…

The Break

It probably hit differently for people who read the trilogy in the early 1970s and eagerly picked up Tehanu, only to find it wasn’t what they were expecting. I read it the first time when it was new, but I’d only read the trilogy a year or two earlier. To me, Earthsea was still alive and changeable, not something that had solidified when I was younger, and it was just the next chapter.

I can sort of understand readers who didn’t want Tenar to walk away from the world of heroes, though that choice is hinted at as early as within the second book. And I can sort of understand readers who didn’t want to read about Ged trying to carry on as a goatherd after using up all his magic.

Sort of.

But I wonder how much overlap there is with the readers who thought The Tombs of Atuan was Ged’s story and not Tenar’s, and thought it odd that “the main character” didn’t show up for half the book.

Reading Prerequisites?

Responding to a question about whether you need to read the earlier books first:

I don’t think it would have the same impact read entirely on its own. There’s a lot about Tenar’s past especially that’s unstated or understated (being at home in the dark, for instance), and if you haven’t read at least The Tombs of Atuan, it’s hard to pick up some of it from context.

Knowing A Wizard of Earthsea also adds depth to the connection between Sparrowhawk and Ogion, and the danger he unleashed in Ogion’s house as a reckless apprentice, though it’s probably easier to infer since it aligns with more standard fantasy tropes.

You don’t need to have read The Farthest Shore for this one. It’s an epic quest going on at the same time as the first few chapters of Tehanu, and the outcome of that quest drives a lot of the second half of this book, but because it’s still recent for the characters, the key points are brought up explicitly and you can treat it as backstory.

The original trilogy (1968-1972) also takes the culture’s misogyny at face value. Looking back at that is a large part of what prompted Le Guin to return to the world so she could unpack and interrogate it here (1990).

More info at Tehanu.

Murderbot Season 1 (TV review)

2026-06-01T22:40:26Z

★★★★★

I finally cashed in a trial subscription offer for Apple TV and watched the first season of Murderbot. It’s absolutely pitch-perfect.

Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian are the stand-outs as Murderbot, Dr. Mensah and Dr. Gurathin (in part because they have more to do than the others), and Skarsgård absolutely nails the balance between domain competence and utter terror of anything resembling social interaction. The fragments of Sanctuary Moon (starring John Cho!) are hilariously over the top while still fitting thematically.

In case you're not familiar with the premise.

Large swaths of an interstellar human civilization are dominated by massive corporations. SecUnits are cyborgs designed for maintaining security, and they normally have a module that limits their actions and requires them to obey direct orders from their human clients. This one hacked its governor module, but is stuck doing the same job because anything else would reveal that it has free will and get it a one-way trip to an acid bath for recycling.

It copes with its social anxiety by downloading thousands of hours of futuristic soap operas and watching them whenever it's upset or bored. Murderbot just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, combat malware, their own naivete, and corporate malfeasence.

The first season adapts the first novella, All Systems Red, in which Murderbot is outed as a rogue SecUnit to the PreservationAux planetary survey crew that’s been forced to bring it along for insurance reasons. It’s been long enough since I read it that I don’t have a clear sense of how much they changed for the screen, but it rings true. (I think they exaggerated the “hippie”-ness of the crew, though it’s still mostly in contrast to the hyper-capitalist hellscape of the Corporate Rim.)

A minor spoiler about coping mechanisms.

There's a great moment about halfway through the season when Murderbot tries to help Mensah through a panic attack by showing her a scene from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, because that's something that always helps it. SecUnits aren't programmed to deal with psychological danger, only physical, but this one has experience.

The tone is slightly more comedic than the books, but then there’s always been a wry sense of humor running through them even when they’re being serious. Just the contrast between outside events and Murderbot’s inner monologue ensures that. And the satire of corporatism is a constant thread. The last episode is dead serious, though, and it’s emotionally brutal even as it works toward a satisfying, if bittersweet conclusion.

I’ve read all the books (in fact, I was in the middle of the latest one when we started watching), but my wife and teenage son haven’t, and they were both hooked from the first episode. Actually that’s not quite true. When we sat down to watch the second episode, the teenager decided he wasn’t interested after all, but he caught part of either that or the next one, and proceeded to insist on binge-watching the rest in three-episode blocks. (This is the kid who gets distracted halfway through a standard-length TV show even when he wants to watch it.)

I gather they’re still planning out Season 2, and I’m definitely looking forward to it!

Forbidden Solitaire (game review)

2026-05-28T14:43:03Z

★★★★½

Forbidden Solitaire presents itself as an over-the-top gory horror dungeon crawl from the 1990s where the mechanic is playing card games to fight monsters. But it’s framed as a flashback: you’ve found an old CD-ROM of a forgotten (and rumored to be cursed) video game. As you play through it, your sister sends you messages about how she’s found old news articles, video clips, and more revealing a rash of creepy deaths (all with missing eyes) connected to the game, including its lead developer’s suicide.

It nails the aesthetic of 1990s pixelated gore, fitting right in with the Catacomb Abyss-to-Doom look with a side of The 7th Guest. (That reminds me, I need to dig out that soundtrack again.)

The playing mechanic is fairly simple: each encounter is a new solitaire layout, monsters can lock or alter cards for the worse, and you can use joker cards for various effects like healing, clearing extra cards, reshuffling and so on. It’s easy to pick up the house rules, and fun to play through.

The framing story is suitably creepy, building tension as you learn more of the backstory and piece together what’s really going on with some of the apparent glitches in the dungeon game. Your sister’s texts start out amused (hey, check out this weird thing about the game), but get more and more freaked out as she uncovers more of the lore and you aren’t replying…until you reach the end of the dungeon game and face the real boss battle.

It took about 6 hours to play through over the course of a week.

And I made it out with my eyes intact.

Tru by Hilton Las Vegas Airport (hotel review)

2026-05-20T04:01:58Z

★★★★☆

Just a hotel, nothing fancy. Clean rooms (if a bit small), comfortable beds, free WiFi and plenty of sockets for charging your devices, decent breakfast, friendly staff, free parking. Again, just a hotel - not a casino, not a resort, no theater, no bar, not even a pool. Just a place to park your luggage for the day, stay overnight and have breakfast in the morning. Which is exactly what we wanted on this trip.

Waaaay off the Strip (OK, not as far as South Point, but out there) near the airport and the 215 freeway on a corner with two other Hilton hotels (a Spark and a Homewood Suites). It appears to have opened late in 2017, which fits the 5-to-10-year guess I made based on its design, decor and condition.

There isn’t much to do within walking distance (unless a 35-minute walk past an empty lot in 100-degree heat sounds good to you), but it’s easy enough to drive a few blocks to the usual suburban fast food places. There’s also an airport shuttle, and a bus stop across the street. You’ll probably want a taxi or equivalent to get to the Strip (You aren’t planning on driving on the Strip, right?), but keep the hotel address handy in case your driver doesn’t recognize it by name.

Downsides: Air conditioner in the room sounded like it had been running continuously for the past decade. Earplugs helped. Extremely minimal desk/table space, no closet or drawers to speak of. No EV charging stations. Water’s too soft to rinse off the soap (though I think that’s just Las Vegas’ water supply).

More info at Tru by Hilton Las Vegas Airport.

Malaga Creek (hiking review)

2026-05-12T04:21:58Z

★★★★★

West of Palos Verdes Drive and downstream from Valmonte and Frog Creek Loop, Malaga Creek carves a canyon (not to be confused with Malaga Canyon up in the hills) through the coastal bluffs down to a narrow, pebbly beach. The canyon is too choked with trees to follow in most places, but an informal trail runs around the top of the canyon, climbing down to the creek in a few spots. A steep service road winds down from the bluffs on the southwest side down to Rat Beach (or rather RAT Beach, as in Right After Torrance) near the spot where the creek runs into the ocean.

You can park on the street across from Malaga Cove Plaza, or along Via Almar. But it’s simplest to park at the former Malaga Cove School, now used as district offices.

There are several spots where you can walk out to the edge of the cliffs and look across the bay, including a gazebo. Past the turnoff for the road down to the beach, another road continues past the soccer field and basketball courts to a dirt path which connects to the trail along the canyon rim.

The octagonal bell tower at the southwest corner of the school building is nicely scenic, and worth checking out.

The trail is often overgrown, and while there’s shade on parts of the south side, the north side is mostly open. A smaller stream runs down the hill and joins the trail as it drops down to cross Malaga Creek itself, just above where the culvert below the road opens out. Locals have placed wooden boards along that stretch to make it easier to walk along it. The crossing itself can be muddy.

There are also a couple of connecting trails: One along the south rim connects to Via Corta near the triangular mini-park. Another just north of where it crosses connects to the much smoother walking/bike path that parallels the shoreward curve of Palos Verdes Drive from Malaga Cove Plaza to the church.

More info at Malaga Creek.

The Time Ships (book review)

2026-05-08T04:25:03Z

Stephen Baxter

★★★½☆

A sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, written for the novel’s 100th anniversary and authorized by Wells’ estate. It picks up immediately after the end of the original, following the Time Traveler’s journeys through several different futures, Earth’s distant past, and all the way to the dawn of time. Baxter effectively mimics Wells’ style and the 1890s well-off narrator’s perspective, which (combined with the experience of multiple futures) reminds me of Moorcock’s Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy.

With the advantage of another 100 years’ worth of scientific discoveries, and knowledge of how the real 20th century turned out, Baxter drastically increases the scope of the travels. Paradoxes and causality loops weave through the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. In one timeline, the Morlocks build a Dyson sphere. In another, clusters of nanobots re-colonize a world that’s no longer hospitable to humans. Much of the middle is tied up in an alternate World War that, instead of ending in 1918, kept going for decades. And just like the war, there are chapters that drag on longer than they should.

He does get a bit bogged down in technicalities. Wells didn’t care how the time machine worked, he wanted to tell an allegory about class relations. Fortunately, Baxter is more interested in what time travel does than how the machine accomplishes it, and “Plattnerite” turns out to be more of a MacGuffin than anything else. But he’s still more interested in the implications of changing histories and long timespans than in any deeper look at society than the futility of war…and perhaps a broadening perspective of who counts as human.

The Beginning Place (book review)

2026-05-04T01:03:10Z

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★½☆

Maybe it’s one of those books that I would have liked when I was still in the target age range.

It’s less a beginning place and more of an in-between. The fantasy world beyond the gate and stream is always in twilight. Hugh and Irena are at that awkward stage of early adulthood where they’re sort of independent, but still caught in their parents’ orbits. The whole story feels like people caught in liminal spaces, both literally and figuratively.

The heroes from suburbia are both interesting (and contrasting) characters, but I wanted to know more about Tembreabrezi, both the world and the people on the far side of the gate. It’s kept vague, just enough to throw them into a quest together but not enough to make it clear what they’re supposed to do.

The more I think about it, the more I think that vagueness is intentional: Some portal fantasies (Oz, Wonderland) are mainly about the fantasy world, with the protagonist a stand-in for the reader. Others (Narnia) are about the fantasy world and what it means to the people who go there and come back. This novel strips away as much of the fantasy as possible, leaving only the thematic and fairy-tale logic, because what they bring back to reality is more important than what’s on the other side.

More info at The Beginning Place. Available from Bookshop.org, eBooks.com, Kobo.