Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

Magic is failing, and a young prince sails the islands with Ged, now older and the Archmage of Earthsea, to seek the cause and resolve the crisis…if it can be resolved.

The Farthest Shore is my least favorite of the original Earthsea trilogy. Part of it is that Arren isn’t as interesting a main character as Ged (in book one) or Tenar (in book two). Part of it is that I was already tired of the return-of-the-king trope when I first read it. And part of it is that the problem is so vaguely defined.

But it’s still quite good (I rated it four stars, after all!), and this time through I appreciated it a lot more than on previous reads. Maybe it’s that I’m more familiar with depression than I was at twelve. Maybe it’s that I’m closer to Sparrowhawk’s age. Or maybe I’m just seeing more connections, now that I’ve read more of Le Guin’s work.

And there’s so much in this one! The people who live on huge rafts, following the ocean currents. Speaking with dragons. Journeying through the land of the dead. Ged being literally the most appropriate person to undo the damage that has been done, not because of the strength of his magic (which is necessary, but not sufficient), but because of what he did and learned in the first novel: The willingness to temper his ambition with full acceptance of who he is.

And this exchange, which has stuck in my head for years:

“The first lesson on Roke, and the last, is: Do what is needful. And no more!”

“The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”

“They do.”

In the first book, we see Ged’s thirst for knowledge and power lead him astray. By this time he’s gained real wisdom, and it’s that wisdom that can save the archipelago.

It’s a fitting capstone on the trilogy, and the heroic phase of Ged’s life. And I can see why some readers would want to stop there. But I think it benefits from the perspective gained in the later books.

Back when I used it, Simplenote was a solid alternative to Google Keep (cross-platform, but complicated) and iCloud Notes (simple, but only Apple platforms). It supports the basics (notes and tagging), syncs across multiple platforms (including mobile and desktop), and it’s run by a medium-tech platform rather than a big-tech platform. That said, you’re still trusting a cloud platform to not read your data. (It’s not encrypted at rest, only in transit.) I moved from Simplenote to Nextcloud Notes back in 2020 (where does the time go?) as part of my shift toward self-hosting as much as I can.

Simplenote’s future is cloudy, though. Automattic stopped developing new features last year, and they haven’t made any statement on how long they plan to continue maintaining the software or the sync service. On the plus side, the design goals were mostly met, although end-to-end encryption would have been nice.

I’m impressed: Hex Fiend instantly opened an 8.5 gigabyte file I needed to extract some data from. No trouble searching for the starting bytes, no slowdown selecting or deleting multi-gigabyte section, no problem saving the multi-gigabyte result. Yes, this is on a machine with lots of RAM, but even here I’m used to apps choking on files this size. Even BBEdit gets slow when you hand it something that big.

Good

Reliable, fast virtualization that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris(!) hosts, and can run lots of different guest operating systems. You can adjust the virtual hardware in a lot more detail than you can with Boxes.

It supports 3D hardware acceleration, and runs Windows 10/11 VMs on Linux hosts much faster than the native KVM system (Boxes, Virt Manager, etc) can. (I can’t even get a Windows 11 guest to run on KVM.) It’s still not as fast at running Windows games as Steam/Proton, but Minecraft (Bedrock Edition) is actually playable in a Windows 11 VM on my Linux host!

I’ve mainly used the RPMFusion packages on Fedora, and it’s been solid. And unlike VMWare, I can actually find it.

Bad

It’s Oracle. That’s another whole post, but thankfully the core application started out as Free Software under the GPL. That makes it easy to package for Linux, hard for Oracle to completely enclose, and legal to use without giving money one of my least favorite tech companies.

Also, it can’t emulate different hardware architectures, and from what I can tell, it’s x86_64 only except on macOS, where it’ll run on either Apple Silicon or Intel (for now).

Ugly

The user interface.

Mouse integration works perfectly until it doesn’t (I had to turn it off for Minecraft, for instance), and then you have to look up the host key (Right-Ctrl by default) to get out of it again.

Some features, like virtual USB devices and disk encryption, require an extension pack, which is licensed separately, either as a paid add-on for commercial use or free for personal use.

Weird, but OK

“Seamless Mode” is supposed to display the guest’s apps as windows directly on your main desktop, instead of putting the entire guest desktop in a window. (Similar to Parallels’ Coherence or VMWare’s Unity.) It doesn’t work that way on my system, probably because I’m running Wayland, and instead it works as an almost full-screen view, but with the GNOME top bar still visible. It makes it a lot easier to switch between guest and host than running it full screen.

My first impression of Oracle, back in the 1990s, came when the web and Java were new. They were already talking up the idea of replacing the general-purpose personal computer with a thin client and setting up what we now call software as a service. As I got more involved in actually working with computers and client-server applications, I became aware of their flagship database software, which always struck me as overcomplicated.

And they keep buying things I like or use, and messing them up.

You can imagine how thrilled I wasn’t when they bought Sun in order to take over MySQL. That same acquisition brought them OpenOffice, Solaris, and Java. They squandered OpenOffice so badly that by the time they handed it off to Apache, most Linux distributions had already switched to the brand-new fork LibreOffice…and to MariaDB, an equally new fork of MySQL. (MySQL still has the name recognition, but it’s not what gets bundled with Linux distros anymore.) They also squandered Solaris, but it’s technically still around, and it’s not as if AIX or HP-UX or any of the other commercial Unixes have done better.

Don’t even get me started on Java licensing, or their copyright lawsuit against Google over programming APIs. (On the plus side, a decade later we finally got a Supreme Court ruling that programming to match an API is fair use, because that’s what APIs are for.)

There’s the poor usability of their website. The security alerts that consist of essentially “there’s a security alert, now go log into your account so you can find out if you’re using anything affected.” It’s one of those B2B companies that does some consumer business as almost an afterthought, like Broadcom. Their cloud service has multiple complaints of them arbitrarily canceling accounts in their free tier.

And then there’s Larry Ellison, who bought an entire Hawaiian island to be his personal resort. (OK, technically he “only” bought 98% of Lānaʻi, but I couldn’t help think of it when reading Invasive.) And who bought CBS/Paramount (and now Warner Bros/Discovery) to give his son something to do and, judging by its editorial interference, to suppress news coverage critical of the Trump administration.

Sure, they’re hardly the only tech company that’s on board with undermining democracy if it helps them turn a bigger profit, but even Google and Microsoft have some redeeming qualities.