Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

A front-end manager for Linux’s built-in virtualization/emulation (QEMU and KVM, using libvirt). More customizable than Boxes, but missing a few convenience features.

Good

It’s easy to set up a basic guest system.

It’s also easy to set up a basic emulated system running a different architecture: as long as you have the backend libraries installed for running ARM or RISC-V or whatever, they’ll show up in a drop-down when creating a new VM.

You can tweak the settings on a virtual machine in great detail.

You can hand off a virtual machine from Virt-Manager to Boxes and back more or less seamlessly, since the actual guest is being managed by the libvirt backend in both cases. Even while it’s running! (If you haven’t set a VM to run in the background, you can still pause it in one front-end and resume it in the other.)

Cloning and snapshots seem to work smoothly when I’ve used them, and I’ve on occasion reverted to a snapshot created in Boxes while running the machine in Virt-Manager.

Bad

Virt-Manager doesn’t support shared folders over SPICE, which is a weird choice. Workaround: set up network shares on the host and connect to them from the guest (or the other way around, depending on how you’ve set up your network).

Ugly

Clipboard sharing via SPICE works, but as with Boxes you have to install the guest tools yourself. On Linux guests you can usually just use the package manager (spice-vdagent). For Windows guests, you do need to download and install SPICE manually.

In theory it supports hardware accelerated graphics using VirGL, but I haven’t managed to get it to work.

Same as any other VM app, running emulated hardware will always be slower than using the same architecture and hardware virtualization. That’s not specific to Virt-Manager, it’s just the basic fact that software is slower than hardware.

A versatile on-screen keyboard for Android with local-only autosuggest and autocorrect dictionary for multiple languages, and optional gestures.

HeliBoard is extremely configurable, including autocorrect sources (you can give it access to your contact list or installed apps, but you don’t have to), and doesn’t “phone home” (as we used to say), so it’s a better choice than GBoard for privacy.

And it supports a whole boatload of writing systems! Not just Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek, but Hindi, Arabic and a bunch more alphabets. Even Korean (a syllabary, so it’s easily composed), though it doesn’t handle Chinese or Japanese, not even the kana. Emoji and accented characters are easy to get to.

Auto complete/correct mitigates the problem of my clumsy thumbs hitting letters instead of the space bar. Even after a month and a half, I’m still doing it at about the same rate as on GBoard. But the autocorrect rate (both overall and good/bad) seems to be comparable too, so it’s still an improvement over Fossify Keyboard. As with GBoard, backspace will undo a bad autocorrection.

There are cursor keys on the “functional” row that slides out to replace suggestions, which really helps with editing, and it’ll use the system speech recognition for voice “typing.” And you can customize the individual keyboard layouts to an almost ridiculous degree.

My typing is a bit worse with the number row always visible, but having to show/hide it is so inconvenient that I turned it back on. I tried adjusting the keyboard height (I did mention it’s super-configurable), but it didn’t make much difference.

Of course, it’s a different experience on a tablet-sized screen, where it’s almost (but not quite) possible to touch type.

Gestures

Built-in gesture support is in the works. For now it’s possible to install a compatible gesture library for swiping. That library isn’t open source, and it’s basically a binary blob extracted from GBoard, both factors in why I wanted to give the app a fair shake without gestures first. It’s a bit of a pain to download a file from GitHub onto your phone, but once you’ve loaded it, swiping works just like you’re used to.

Bottom line: Even without enabling gestures, it works about as well as Android’s default keyboard (unless you need to write Chinese or Japanese), but respects your privacy. With gestures, it’s a drop-in replacement. And it still isn’t sending your word choices to Google for whatever they’re doing with it now.

Heliboard isn’t available on the Play Store yet, though there’s some work being done on prerequesites now. But it is available on third-party app store likes F-Droid or Izzy.

The original Jurassic Park film is still great, more than 30 years later. The dinosaurs are still impressive, it’s well-paced and dramatic, and despite contemporary reviews accusing the actors of being less lifelike than their digital co-stars, the characters are engaging. The premise of the pre-opening tour (with grandkids!) is set up well enough (investors are spooked by a fatality, and Hammond is determined prove to the lawyers beyond any reasonable doubt that it’s safe).

And there are so many great moments.

“And then the attack comes, not from the front, but from the sides…”

“Just like a flock of birds evading a predator.” “They’re, uh, flocking this way.”

“Clever girl.”

It’s not perfect. Several actors’ talents are wasted in smaller roles, and it shamelessly glosses over Dr. Sattler’s expertise in paleobotany. (On the plus side, it was refreshing to see Muldoon recognize her as capable.)

And “chaos theory” was basically a buzzword for “things break” rather than the important part, which is that things break in ways that you can’t predict. The scene in the book where they use the camera to count all of the dinosaurs and it’s programmed to stop counting when it gets to the number they expect would have gotten the point across better (along with the fact that the people involved, however brilliant, have their blind spots), and wouldn’t have taken up too much time. As a result, Malcolm comes off as a lot more one-note than I remember.

Looking back, I was surprised at how much screen time is spent on selling the bird connection to the audience. Especially compared to the one line spent justifying the plot twist of these dinosaurs changing sex. I think it was a turning point in how the general public sees dinosaurs and birds, to the point where you can call a chicken a dinosaur and people will think it’s silly…but not entirely wrong!

Weirdly, I’ve never been particularly interested in watching the sequels. I mean, I did see The Lost World when it was new, and it was sorely disappointing (except that they filmed that T-Rex waterfall scene that was cut from the first movie). That might explain it!

A fascinating game of exploration. You play an archaeologist sailing between “moons” in a habitable nebula linked by rivers, exploring ruins, interacting with townspeople, and translating ancient inscriptions. What starts as a simple quest to find a missing person ultimately reveals surprising truths about the history of the nebula and its people.

Aliya (the main character) is determined, snarky (to a lesser or greater extent depending on your dialog choices), and has complicated relationships with the people of the poor moon she came from and the wealthy moon where she now lives. She’s accompanied by a robot she calls Six, who manages to hold its own conversationally. When you’re out exploring or sailing, you can guide conversations between the two of them that can not only reveal lore to the player, but open different options for character actions as well.

The graphics are a mix of 3D environments and paper cut-out characters, the designs influenced by Middle Eastern architecture and clothing.

Translating Ancient

The Ancient script is hieroglyphic, with words that look like they’re made up of flowing letters. After a while you start recognizing the symbols that indicate concepts like all, place, water, person, or movement, as they appear in words meaning things like emperor, garden, or river. It helps that some of the glyphs have a connection between how they look and what they mean.

Translating is a fun challenge. When you find an inscription, you get a string of symbols and a set of words that the character knows or suspects, and try to fit the words to the symbols. As you translate more inscriptions, and she becomes more certain of words’ meanings, you also get more options.

Sailing and Exploring

Sailing between moons on the rivers is kind of a zen experience. You don’t need to dodge obstacles, though you do need to choose which fork to take to get to your destination. But they all loop back on each other in a complex web, so even if you didn’t have the option to back up when you take the wrong fork, it wouldn’t be a major problem.

The ruins contain puzzles (how to get through this locked gate?) and clues (what does this device do?), as do the towns (how do I convince this person to give me the information I need?) Sometimes it can be really tricky to steer a conversation the way you want it to go, and you don’t always get another chance.

Replayable

I’ve played through the game twice so far, and I’ve made different choices and different discoveries each time. There were things I learned the first time through that never even came up the second time around, and vice versa. For “new game plus” you also get to keep (some of?) the vocabulary you’ve built up, and you get longer phrases to translate.

While in most cases the choices you make have only subtle repercussions, there are some that can close off whole moons, or permanently block…or unlock…your ability to interact with certain characters.

There’s more than one way to reach the endgame, though, so you’re never completely locked out of progressing.

Loop Connections

The actual gameplay and story are completely different, but there are some conceptual similarities to Outer Wilds: Both involve traveling through space in a wooden ship within a small inhabited system, exploring ruins (and inscriptions!), and piecing together a history. Most people of the Nebula believe time is a Loop (and Aliya’s study of the past is either a waste of effort or actually a study of the future), while Outer Wilds takes place entirely within an actual time loop. And, well, there’s a bit more, but that would spoil the mysteries of both games.

It’s a little weird to start your book dedicated to the small community that took you in when you were exiled with several chapters about how superstitious and distrustful of outsiders the people here are. But this is Victor Hugo, and he doesn’t take the easy way out. (He does insist that he’s talking only about the Guernesey of several decades before his time, not his neighbors.)

It’s an interesting read, though, and a tighter structure than Les Misérables (unless the 1877 translation I read is seriously abridged, which it doesn’t indicate). The first half of the book builds up to a storm at sea and a shipwreck, and the rest is mostly one really determined man’s attempt to salvage the steamship’s engine, alone, out on the rocks in the middle of the channel. It takes him months, using only a handful of tools he brought and what parts he could salvage from the wreck, even building a makeshift forge in a hollow in the rocks.

Other characters include the steamship owner and his daughter, a former partner who ran off with half the money, and the captain who replaced him (and ultimately wrecks the ship). The build-up to the wreck is a bit of a slog until you start putting together the pieces that are deliberately left unsaid or appear contradictory, so that by the time the wreck happens you have a pretty good idea of why it happens.

It’s mostly man vs. nature, but this being Hugo, there’s social commentary too. Trusting or distrusting people for the wrong reasons, religious intolerance and superstitions, the hazards of overconfidence, misplaced righteousness, paying attention to what’s actually going on rather than what you expect to be going on, and so forth.

One bit that stuck in my head was the ruined steamship owner repeatedly rejecting advice from an old clergyman on where he can invest his remaining funds for a large return: selling weapons to Russia, where the Czar wants to put down a Polish peasant rebellion, or investing in these new plantations spreading into Texas (worked by slaves of course). The old clergyman just doesn’t understand why the guy won’t take his advice, while his younger colleague, newly arrived to the island, tries to explain that he’s listening to his conscience.

Over and Under

I remembered the novel being mentioned on the Les Misérables Reading Companion a few years back, and grabbed a copy when Standard Ebooks released their version. Then I forgot about it like a discounted Steam game for a couple of years, until I got to the point in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where the narrator admits he couldn’t even begin to describe what he saw, as it would need a poet like Victor Hugo to write something like Toilers of the Sea.

OK, sometimes I can take a hint!

Reading them back to back really brings out the difference in writing styles between Hugo and Verne. Verne wants to tell you what happened, maybe what the main character is thinking of (even if it’s a long list of fish), and what’s salient about the setting. Hugo wants to paint you a complete picture. Verne would write about a man clinging to a piece of wreckage floating in the middle of the ocean. Hugo would describe the expanse of the ocean, the color of the sky, how much cloud cover (and what kind of clouds), how strong the wind is, any birds or islands visible in the distance, are the waves slow and calm or choppy…then zoom in on the bit of wreckage…and only when the scene is fully painted zoom in on the figure clinging desperately to it.

I think Hugo spends more time describing how creepy an octopus can be before one seizes Gilliat than Verne spends on the whole battle between the Nautilus and the giant squid!