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.
• DeBurrow ★★⯪☆☆ A really basic Gopher client for Android. Supports bookmarks and history, but not much else, and has some usability issues.
• 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.
• DiggieDog ★★⯪☆☆ Another basic gopher client for Android, with key functions (bookmarks and downloads), but different usability quirks from DeBurrow. The only Gopher app I can still find in the Play Store.
• 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.
• Gopher Apps on Android I did find several Gopher clients for Android! But they’re all incomplete, awkward, or rapidly losing compatibility. So I’ve gone back to Lagrange, which handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser.
• Gophercle ★★☆☆☆ Extremely minimalist Gopher app for Android with a retro feel to it, but missing some key features like being able to link out to the web and back from other apps. No longer available except in F-Droid’s archives.
• The Greek Theatre ★★★★★ A beautiful outdoor concert venue in the hills above Los Angeles with perfect sound engineering. Just allow more time than you think you need to for parking.
• 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.
• A Month With /e/OS ★★★★☆ A fork of the open-source parts of Android, with the Google parts left out and new apps and services to take their places. More user-friendly than LineageOS (which it’s based on). Handles paid apps, but not Google-based in-app purchases.
• A Month With the Fairphone 4 ★★★⯪☆ Clunkier than most phones, but you can buy spare parts and repair it yourself. Decent hardware, if a tad slow by today’s standards (it shipped in 2021). Runs Android, LineageOS or /e/OS.
• The Moon Pool ★★★☆☆ A. Merritt
  A moody horror tale set among megalithic ruins in the South Pacific segues into a hollow-earth adventure that, while influential in its time, is very much of that time.
• 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.
• Murine Launcher for Android ★★★★★ A fork of the stock Android launcher that lets you do things like remove that always-on search bar (or point it somewhere else). Stable and fast.
• Overbite Gopher Clients ★★☆☆☆ A project to bring gopher to modern devices, which unfortunately seems to have been passed by again.
• 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.
• Pocket Gopher (Android) ★★⯪☆☆ Even simpler than DiggieDog or DeBurrow, with a more usable interface, but hard to find and no longer installs on modern Android.
• 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.
• Severance - Season 1 ★★★★★ Wow! Not a bad episode in the bunch. The slow burn from Helly waking up in the first scene to the revelations of the season finale is gripping, and some of the curveballs hurt.
• 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.
• Widow’s Bay Season 1 ★★★★☆ A cursed New England island town whose new mayor insists on making it a tourist destination. What could go wrong? The season as a whole was hit and miss. But there were some really good hits.

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