Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

Mostly flat, with hills along the west and north. Views of the ocean and (on a clear day) Catalina Island. Not much shade except for one stand of trees at the foot of the hills, the garden around the visitor center, and the bunkers.

It’s not as geologically interesting as [Forrestal Reserve], and when I went there in August it was mostly dry grass and dry bushes, but there’s wildlife, and there’s a native plants garden around the visitor center that’s watered and maintained, and there’s the ruins if you’re interested in that.

Wait, Bunkers? Ruins?

During World War II, the land was seized from Japanese-American farmers. The farmers were sent to internment camps, and the land was turned into a military site for coastal defense. During the cold war it became an anti-aircraft missile site. The base was decommissioned in the 1970s, but you can still find concrete foundations and a handful of buildings…and up in the hills, two large concrete bunkers built into a ridge that you can walk right through. Internal doors look like they’ve been sealed, though. (I didn’t think to ask at the visitor center whether it was one of the remaining buildings from the base or whether it had been built later.)

Information boards scattered at points along the trails tell the story, along with the earlier history of the site back to the native Tongva villages and the Spanish ranchos.

Nearby

Across the road there’s a regular park that goes right up to the edge of the bluffs. You can look over the railing and see rocky tide pools and Royal Palms State Beach below. The park also has a playground, picnic tables, bathrooms and drinking water.

If you want to make a day of it, you could hike the preserve in the morning, have a picnic lunch at the park, and hit the beach in the afternoon.

Getting there

Follow Western all the way to the coast and then turn left. The road runs past the entrance to the beach parking and a park to the right, and there’s a gate on the left just at the end of the road that leads to a gravel parking lot for the nature preserve. You can also park along the street once you get past the park, or you can pay for beach parking.

Technically, macOS has built-in virtualization and emulation using QEMU (and Apple’s own virtualization on newer macOS releases). Realistically, it’s a pain to set up and run.

UTM provides a GUI wrapper to create, run and manage virtual machines using both the QEMU and Apple backends.

Good

Stable. Emulates multiple hardware types, so you can run an x86_64 or i386 VM on an M1 Mac. (And probably run ARM Linux on an Intel Mac, now that I think about it.) Runs Windows, macOS and Linux guests of course, but also other operating systems. I’ve run Haiku (x86_64 only) on an ARM Macbook, and successfully installed an OpenBSD guest, something I just could not get working on Parallels.

Also, UTM is free, with the option of paying $10 once for the App store version as a way of supporting the devs, with the bonus that the app store manage upgrades automatically.

Bad

Slower than Parallels or VMWare Fusion, doesn’t support hardware graphics accelleration. Less in the way of integration: you can set up shared copy/paste and files, but you can’t tell one OS to open files in another, or display guest windows directly on the desktop.

Ugly

UTM is still a bit clunky to use, if infinitely better than memorizing or scripting QEMU command line options. You also need install the SPICE and VirtFS tools yourself to do things like copy/paste between guest and host. (Most Linux distros should have them available as long as you’ve got network set up, but Windows guests need manual installation.)

There’s a gallery of pre-built machines including several Linux distros (Intel and ARM), Solaris (SPARC) and ReactOS (Intel), plus pre-configured Wintel machines going back to XP. (You need to obtain an official Windows install image to actually set it up, which explains why they haven’t been sued for offering a Windows download. They don’t.)

They have an iOS version too, but the full version needs to be sideloaded on a jailbroken device. UTM SE is a stripped-down version that complies with Apple’s app store requirements, but runs enough slower that they actually bill it as a “Retro PC emulator.” I don’t have an iPhone or iPad to try it on, so I can’t speak from experience on it.

Keep in Mind

Emulating hardware is always slower than running a virtualized system on the actual processor. But depending on what you’re using it for, it can still be usable. For comparison, I installed both aarch64 and x86_64 versions of Alpine Linux with LXQt on the same ARM Macbook. The x86_64 version is noticeably slower, but it’s not much slower than running Arch+LXQt natively on the PineTab2. (That said, the PineTab is a lot slower than the MacBook I was running it on!)

Also: MacOS VMs can only log into some iCloud services (and then only on macOS 15 and later), and the App store isn’t one of them, so anything you want to run on a Mac VM has to be available from another source. This is true for any virtualization framework, not just UTM.

A virtual machine application for macOS that makes it easy to install a Windows, Linux or macOS guest.

Good

Stable and fast. Automatically installs and updates Parallels Tools on supported guests for interaction between the VM and host system. (Shared folders, copy/paste, stuff like that.) That includes major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian (but not immutable distros). Virtual networks work right out of the box.

Plus I can actually find the downloads, unlike VMWare.

It’ll automatically download and install Windows 11, the macOS version you’re running, and a handful of major Linux distros with the necessary hardware configs, or you can install from an ISO you’ve downloaded.

Provides snapshot backups and varying levels of isolation and integration. Pause and resume work just fine. You can tell a Windows guest to open links in your host system’s web browser, or tell the host system to open some file types in a Windows application. Displaying a Windows VM’s apps and menus directly in the macOS environment (what VMWare calls Unity and Parallels calls Coherence) is surprisingly smooth.

Bad

Requires a paid subscription to run it on my own hardware. Frequently tries to upsell me the confusingly-named Parallels Toolbox. (Not often, but enough to be annoying.)

Ugly

Installing an unsupported OS (like a *BSD, for instance) can be dicey. Emulating Intel hardware on ARM is possible, but limited and slow (and requires terminal commands to create a new guest machine). UTM is more likely to work in both cases.

Keep in Mind

MacOS VMs can only log into some iCloud services (and then only on macOS 15 and later), and the App store isn’t one of them, so anything you want to run on a Mac VM has to be available from another source. This is true for any virtualization framework, not just Parallels. And it’s super-annoying if you just want to test something from the app store in a virtual machine.

A simple desktop app for Mastodon and (most) compatible Fediverse servers. I’ve used it with GoToSocial, Pixelfed, Sharkey (see note) and Akkoma, but can’t get it to log into Snac. (I can also log into a Friendica server, but I haven’t done enough with my account to get a sense of how well it works with it.) It works easily with multiple accounts, and just sets up a narrow sidebar with icons for each account you’re signed into. It’s also easy to switch between timelines, notifications, lists, etc. because that’s also a narrow sidebar.

It’s better suited for following mostly text than photos, only showing thumbnails in the timeline, but it does zoom in on images when you click on them.

One nice thing: When you’re viewing a timeline, there’s a drop-down menu with toggles to turn boosts and replies on and off as needed!

The biggest downside is that it doesn’t support editing posts, at least not yet.

It’s a bit of a memory hog for what it does (it is an Electron app after all). If I’m going to load a whole web engine, I’d rather just install my instance’s website, or Elk or Phanpy, as a PWA and get more functionality. Again, on low spec hardware like the PineTab 2, it seems like it’s just a little bit faster than running either of those apps in Falkon (which is the fastest app-capable browser I’ve used on that machine).

Since it’s built on Electron, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, but doesn’t feel like a native app on any of them. It is available in the Microsoft and macOS app stores.

Tips and Tricks

Don’t use the Flatpak on Linux. It’s still available on Flathub, but it’s way out of date since Whalebird’s Flatpak maintainer had to leave. The RPM works fine on Fedora, you just have to update manually. There are also Debian and AUR packages for x86_64, and a standard tarball for both x86_64 and arm64. (I tried to build the AUR package on Arch/ARM, but couldn’t get the right Electron dependencies installed.)

Signing into Sharkey was a little tricky because the website form doesn’t show you the auth code and the browser doesn’t seem to be able to send it to the app (though it wants to). On a hunch, I copied the code from the URL after granting permissions, pasted it into Whalebird’s form, and it worked!

https://calckey.world/auth/RANDOM_LOOKING_CODE?mastodon=true&redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob

Posting photos threw me for a bit of a loop when I didn’t see a button to return to my draft after adding alt text. After clicking “Apply” on the description, you just click outside of the box containing the photo, same as when you’re viewing one that someone else has posted.

Lists work on at least Mastodon and Akkoma, but not on GoToSocial at the moment.

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.