Reviews Tagged “100daysToOffload”

In May 2026, I started a challenge to write 100 new blog posts or pages on my website over the following year.

• Always Coming Home ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, but a fascinating, thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley.
• Canon Camera Connect ★★★☆☆ As you’d expect, this app connects to Canon cameras. It still lets you send location data to the camera, pull photos to the phone, or use the phone as a remote. But it insists on a cloud login now (it didn’t before), even if you’re only using the local functions.
• The Confidence Game ★★★★★ Maria Konnikova
  An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in the rest of us. Roughly structured around different phases of a con, and illustrated with real cases, some historical and others based on direct interviews.
• Del Cerro Park ★★★★☆ Incredible views of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, and the coastal hills and canyons from the top of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Calm and quiet, usually breezy.
• Eulogy for the Pixel 5 ★★★★★ Conveniently sized, responsive, and fast, with a good camera unencumbered by modern LLM hallucinations, it lasted twice as long as Google’s support for it.
• FairEmail ★★★★☆ Extremely capable, privacy-respecting, no-frills email app for Android. Works with any email service that supports IMAP/POP and SMTP (including Gmail and Outlook, but not Exchange). Works well with multiple accounts and a unified inbox.
• Forbidden Solitaire ★★★★⯪ Framed as a lost (and cursed) CD-ROM game from the 1990s, and it nails the 90s gore look for the dungeon. The playing mechanic is fun, and the framing story around it is suitably creepy.
• Hidden Swing Trail ★★★★☆ A hike along the coastal hillside, with views of Bluff Cove, intermittent trees, and yes, a homemade swing. Some steep parts, eroded, tree roots. Upper end in the hills, lower end at PV Drive. Bring water, and watch for the fork.
• Insignia Refrigerator ★★★☆☆ Nothing fancy. Does its job keeping food cold or frozen. Downsides: Shelves are awkward, drawers are shallow, the freezer pops open too easily, and sometimes it makes sounds like a dying moose.
• Legends of Amberland ★★★★☆ A fun throwback to the early Might and Magic and Bard’s Tale fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s. Grid- and turn-based, with old-style pixelated graphics and LOTS of side quests.
• Murderbot Season 1 ★★★★★ A pitch-perfect adaptation of All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård is dead on as the socially-anxious security cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, their own naivete, and rival corporations willing to kill.
• PineTab2 ★★★⯪☆ The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it’s 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.
• The Prestige ★★★★★ I remembered The Prestige was good. I’d forotten just how good a movie it is.
• Samsung Chromebook 3 ★☆☆☆☆ I bought this in the late 2010s as a spare laptop. It was terrible from the start, and even when I replaced ChromeOS with mainstream Linux, the hardware was still bad enough no one wanted to use it including me.
• Tehanu ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A character-driven look at the lives of ordinary people in a world of magic, especially the women and children (and not a few men) caught underfoot when wizards, heroes and villains fight. And (of course) dragons.
• To Each This World ★★★★★ Julie Czerneda
  Standalone hard sci-fi featuring multiple alien biologies, space colonies, polymorphic artificial lifeforms with a sense of humor, quantum-entangled tech-mediated telepathy and disposable avatar bodies for the astronauts who negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from us.

»All pages site-wide with this tag