One of those apps you install only because theyâre required for something else. It handles most account management actions, but it really wants to upsell new devices or services when you just want to check your bill or change something about your line. And it will repeatedly spam you with offers on âT-Mobile Tuesdaysâ unless you turn notifications off again after using it.
There are some things you can only do on the website, and some you can only do in the app, and no clear reason for whatâs in each category. And some things still donât work, such as activating an e-sim for a phone that the app doesnât know can accept e-sims. (Once I got ahold of a real person, I could give them the IMEI and EID numbers and they could email me an activation code.)
There are also phones that work just fine on T-Mobileâs network, but canât run the app. Which is fine 99% of the time, but when you do need to do something that canât be done on the website, you need another phone on your plan that can run it, or else you need to just call them and deal with the phone menus until you convince it to connect you with a real person.
Most of Le Guinâs Hainish stories are about imagining different ways for human societies to live. These in particular are mostly about different ways for men and women to relate. Theyâre all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if youâve already read The Left Hand of Darkness.
Coming of Age in Karhide
Left Hand⊠explored what an androgynous society might be like. This story answers any lingering questions you might have about sex among humans who only experience gender once a month (and never know for sure which theyâre going to be ahead of time).
The Matter of Seggri
In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to âprotectâ them. On Seggri, the situation is reversed: Most people are women, and the few men are kept apart and guarded to make sure that there are enough around for procreation. They donât really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still canât decide whether the stereotyping is a weak link or a deliberate counterpoint to the way women get stereotyped in reality), and occasionally help someone get pregnant.
Itâs told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left HandâŠ. Some of the stories are dry, while others get into forbidden romance territory.
Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways
Two stories set on the planet O, where marriages consist of four people: two men, two women, one each from two different divisions of society. As youâd imagine, setting one up isâŠcomplicated.
âUnchosen Loveâ is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesnât do it justice, and itâs the more satisfying of the two.
In âMountain Ways,â the partners in a torrid affair try to pass one of the women off as a man so they can fill in the missing role, bending a strict tradition in one way in order to uphold it in another. ItâŠsort of worksâŠfor a while. (This oneâs available to read online at Clarkesworld.)
Solitude
A society of introverts, where people stick to the absolute bare minimum connection needed to continue humanity. An Ekumen observer embeds herself and her children in one of the loose villages in order to understand it. This is one that sticks with you, and Iâve written about it in more detail.
Old Music and the Slave Women
The most brutal of the stories in what is now Five Ways to Forgiveness, in which a Hainish observer (Old Music is his name) is held captive for an extended period by the slave-owning side in a civil war.
Stand-Alone Stories
The Birthday of the World
Itâs a good title, but itâs far from the best story in the collection. Mainly what sticks in my head is the low-tech interpretation of prophecies involving high-tech events. (A house falls in fire but still stands, for instance.)
Paradises Lost
A standalone novella about the middle generations of a multi-generation starship, and what happens when some of them come to believe that nothing outside of the ship actually exists. Well worth the read, and Iâve reviewed it in more detail already.
The people of Eleven-Soro live alone, isolated as much as possible. Women and children live in loose villages called âaunt-rings.â Men live as hermits. And no adult sets foot in anotherâs house.
Le Guin describes âSolitudeâ as a story about introverts.
An Ekumen observer, unable to get the adults to tell her anything, raises her children in one of the aunt-rings so they can learn how the culture functions and explain it to her. What she didnât count on was that her daughter would want to stay, and not return with her to a noisy, overwhelming, crowded society that she barely remembers. (Too many people. She wants to stay where she can be a person and occasionally see another person.) The researcher sees this as a tragedy. Her daughter sees it as the only way she can stand living.
As someone who likes quiet and doing my own thing, and isnât too fond of crowds, my sympathies are with the daughter. Thereâs a difference between solitude and loneliness, after all. Though Sorovian culture (such as it is) certainly goes a lot farther than Iâd want to live in.
Through this story, Le Guin seems to be attempting to figure out what the bare minimum for human connection isâŠand what it would mean for those who try to limit themselves to it.
Avoid Magic
In a recent column at Reactor, Kristen Patterson describes it as the complete breakdown of human connection. Sheâs more viscerally repulsed by the way Sorovians live, and zeroes in on why the culture is so disconnected: Theyâve attempted to remove every last remnant of obligation or control from human relationships. And while theyâve succeeded in removing power dynamics in most cases, theyâve also removed the mutual obligation that makes communities actually function.
A front-end manager for Linuxâs built-in virtualization/emulation (QEMU and KVM, using libvirt). More customizable than Boxes, but missing a few convenience features.
Good
Itâs easy to set up a basic guest system.
Itâs 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, theyâll 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 itâs running! (If you havenât 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 Iâve used them, and Iâve on occasion reverted to a snapshot created in Boxes while running the machine in Virt-Manager.
Bad
Virt-Manager doesnât 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 youâve 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.
Same as any other VM app, running emulated hardware will always be slower than using the same architecture and hardware virtualization. Thatâs not specific to Virt-Manager, itâs 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 donât have to), and doesnât âphone homeâ (as we used to say), so itâs 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 itâs easily composed), though it doesnât 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, Iâm 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 itâs still an improvement over Fossify Keyboard. As with GBoard, backspace will undo a bad autocorrection.
There are cursor keys on the âfunctionalâ row that slides out to replace suggestions, which really helps with editing, and itâll use the system speech recognition for voice âtyping.â 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 itâs super-configurable), but it didnât make much difference.
Of course, itâs a different experience on a tablet-sized screen, where itâs almost (but not quite) possible to touch type.
Gestures
Built-in gesture support is in the works. For now itâs possible to install a compatible gesture library for swiping. That library isnât open source, and itâs basically a binary blob extracted from GBoard, both factors in why I wanted to give the app a fair shake without gestures first. Itâs a bit of a pain to download a file from GitHub onto your phone, but once youâve loaded it, swiping works just like youâre used to.
Bottom line: Even without enabling gestures, it works about as well as Androidâs default keyboard (unless you need to write Chinese or Japanese), but respects your privacy. With gestures, itâs a drop-in replacement. And it still isnât sending your word choices to Google for whatever theyâre doing with it now.
Heliboard isnât available on the Play Store yet, though thereâs some work being done on prerequesites now. But it is available on third-party app store likes F-Droid or Izzy.