Month: August 2024

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Ten Open Source RSS News Readers for Smartphones by The Privacy Dad (Welcome to The Privacy Dad's Blog!)
Ten open source RSS news reader apps for smartphones ranked by positive user experience.

The Privacy Dad blog published a good list of open source feed readers for Android. My current set-up is a Miniflux running as a PWA (I am running a Miniflux instance with Pikapods). But before I switched to Miniflux, I was using an open source local feed reader for Android that is not on The Privacy Dad list: Handy Reading. Handy Reading is a fork of the now-unmaintained Flym RSS and is a very nice feed reader. It can extract full text and allows the user to set how often each feed is checked. What sets it apart from similar solutions, however, is that you can save articles from outside your feeds into Handy Reading, making it a quasi read-it-later solution as well. To be sure, it is not as good a read-it-later tool as something like Omnivore, Wallabag or Shiori, but it is a nice addition to an all-around solid local open source feed reader.

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What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series? (Anime News Network)
What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series?

Anime News Network posted the following question: What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series? I like to field queries here on site. Before I answer, I must ask a question in response to the question: Can I lie? I can? Great! Now that I can lie, I will answer the question as follows: “I love Cross Game more than any[ sports anime] in the world.” If my question and answer response to the question caused you to do a head tilt, I would tell you to watch Cross Game. However, that is difficult these days thanks to licensing limbo.

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Hyperkin's "No-Drift" N64 Stick Is Available Now by Damien McFerran (Time Extension)
Accessory maker Hyperkin has just released a Hall Effect stick for the N64, a "no-drift, GameCube-style" replacement that "requires zero soldering."

A new Time Extension news report about Hyperkin’s hall effect Nintendo 64 joystick mod crossed my feed reader. When I first read the article, I thought I had previously written about this in The New Leaf Journal, but it turns out that I had written about an 8BitDo hall effect mod. I happen to be a fan both of good hall effect controllers and the original, unique, Nintendo 64 joystick. The latter point gives me some pause about the Hyperkin mod. I quote from the Time Extension report: “Mimicking the GameCube’s analogue stick, you’ll be able to ‘feel the nostalgia and comfort of the GameCube era while dominating your favourite N64 games. This stick is designed for maximum comfort and a competitive edge, making long gaming sessions a breeze.'” While I prefer the GameCube controller to the Nintendo 64 controller, the Nintendo 64 had a more interesting (albeit less durable) joystick. If we are releasing mods, I would prefer one that preserves the feel of the original instead of replacing it with a more generic GameCube-style joystick, durability aside.

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I installed the Hum link shortener on The New Leaf Journal and I like it thus far. Now I just played around with the ActivityPub WordPress plugin settings so I am trying this post to see how it looks from Mastodon. Don’t mind me. (I should also figure out why my New Leaf Journal posts stopped showing up through the AP plugin but that’s another matter.)

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I have seen more than enough anime series in 2024 thus far to be reasonably (not absolutely) confident that the second season of MF Ghost will not be a realistic contender for my annual year-end top-six ranking. With that out of the way, count me as excited to watch the Chad-faced protagonist Kanata engage in some high-octane drifting, disappearing line attacks, and late breaking. As I noted in my 2023 ranking article,while MF Ghost missed by year-end top six by 2-3 spots, I often found myself looking forward to it more than my anime of the year choice, which happened to air on the same day. With luck, maybe MF Ghost season 2 will cut down on everything that doesn’t involve racing (its romance writing is on par with its predecessor, Initial D, and I submit for the record that this is not a complement).

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I occasionally check Ahrefs’ backlinks resource (the free version) to see if my articles received any fun new backlinks. One of my favorite backlinks was when a the Russian-language Wikipedia article (archived) cited to my early review of Pixelfed. We may have a better Russian-language backlink this time. Last year, I wrote an article about Thanksgiving in Grenada. Thanks to Ahrefs, I now know that it is footnote 32 in an article about Thanksgiving on a Russian wiki site (archived) I had never heard of. While I cannot read Russian (I don’t even know the alphabet), it seems like a good cite from what I gleaned from a machine translation. I am glad to see someone found the Grenada article informative because that was one of my more time-intensive articles of 2023.

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The video game magazine Game Informer was shuttered on short notice after having been in business for 33 years. I have written about reading classic game magazines around the turn of the century including Nintendo Power, Expert Gamer, and EGM. Sure enough, I also read Game Informer back in the day (I noted in one post that I remembered the great hatred of some of its reviewers for the early Mario Party games). While I have not been a regular Game Informer reader for about two decades, I did have a specific, self-interested take on the story. I eventually plan to write an article analyzing the Ai Ebihara social link from Persona 4 (idea previewed here). One of my inspirations for the post  is an excellent 2012 Game Informer article by Kimberly Wallace (Wayback Machine link). While all of these articles can be found in the Internet Archive, it would have potentially been annoying to dig up without the URL. Fortunately, I had already saved the URL along with a Wayback archive snapshot in Zotero. (Whew.)