Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

The show/exhibit is back this winter, which reminds me I meant to write a review after I went last year!

The South Coast Botanic Garden is already one of my favorite places to go walking in the South Bay/Palos Verdes Peninsula area. For Astra Lumina, they map out a nighttime path through the gardens with a series of different types of light shows that you walk through. Each is set to music and runs in a short loop, and you can stay as long as you like before moving onto the next. There’s a loose story about stars coming down to meet us.

It’s a cool, immersive experience, and I’d definitely recommend seeing it!

Apparently the studio that runs it, Moment Factory, runs the same event in several other US cities as well.

The first time through “Subspace Rhapsody” my reaction was: OK, that was fun. Better than “Immortimas” but not on the level of “Once More With Feeling” or even some of the Magicians musical episodes.

I watched it again after seeing the behind-the-scenes feature, and appreciated it a lot more. Enough that I immediately tracked down and bought the soundtrack.

They did a good job of focusing on the cast members who could sing well. Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh) and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) are the standouts, pouring their hearts into their solos. At the other end they found something more talky for Anson Mount (Pike), and let Babs Olusanmokun (M’Benga) stick with just a couple of lines. “…and I do not sing.”

Every song meant something to the people singing it, too. The classic way to do a musical, if it’s not sung-through, is to have the songs burst from the characters when their emotions are so high that they can’t contain them – when just speaking, or stewing in silence, isn’t enough. And I appreciated that the characters were genre-savvy enough to recognize and harness it!

I find it highly appropriate that Spock, of all people, would be the first one to sing. Because he’s normally the most emotionally self-controlled person on the ship, and he starts singing? Something weird is definitely going on! And the contrast between Chapel’s big song-and-dance number “I’m Ready” and his buttoned-down solo “I’m the X” (using the same melody) makes both songs better. I found myself thinking of what Russell Crowe tried to do as Javert. He and Spock are both very tightly-controlled characters, but Ethan Peck managed to convey Spock’s inner turmoil through the outer layer of control, while I think Crowe was just out of his depth musically.

The finale gets a bit glurge-y in places, but the only song that I thought fell flat was Number One’s song about “Keeping Secrets.” It should have worked better than it did.

“Connect To Your Truth,” OTOH, was absolutely dead-on Rogers and Hammerstein, and the Klingons’ brief pop verse about how they’ll “make your blood scream!” cracks me up every time I hear it.

And Paul Wesley (Kirk) is certainly a better singer than William Shatner. Though I have to admit, Shatner’s cover of “Common People,” is a trip!

VMWare Fusion worked great on my Intel-based MacBook for work for years. I ran Windows and Linux virtual machines, sometimes several at a time. It more or less seamlessly integrated the Windows environment into macOS, and the Linux VMs I ran were stable. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it did the job. I’d give it 4 stars for that period of time.

Unobtainable

After Broadcom bought VMWare, though, I can’t seem to find it. Not an individual license for work. Not a free license for home. The website still lists it and Workstation (the Windows counterpart), though I haven’t found any links to that page on the website – only external search results. And it doesn’t help.

• The download links there just go to the Broadcom customer login.
• The customer site won’t let me see anything unless I fill in corporate purchasing info that only makes sense in an enterprise business-to-business context.
• The only way I can get it to show download links is to back to the old blog post and click on the links there.
• Those download links won’t work without me answering more screening questions.
• The site won’t acknowledge that I already answered those questions.

On top of that, while Broadcom’s website let me register an email address with a + in it, it uses one of those multi-step login forms where you enter just the username/email first, click a button, and then enter the password…but it keeps trying to decode the + as a space, so I have to reload the login form in a way that it’ll keep the correct username when I enter my password.

I suppose it could be a browser compatibility thing, but I spent at least an hour at a time on three different occasions across two and half months on two different computers (one macOS, one Linux) with both Firefox and Vivaldi.

Meanwhile I missed the November announcement that it’s now free for everyone, which, OK, great…but it still won’t show me the products in my account unless I go back to May’s blog post, and it still won’t let me download without answering the screening questions, and it still won’t acknowledge that I’ve answered those screening questions, so I still can’t download it.

Technically Available

It’s almost like Broadcom didn’t notice that VMWare had a consumer software division when they bought the company, and they don’t know how to deal with that. So they’ve made it available…in the sense that the plans for demolishing Arthur Dent’s house were “on display.”

So I have no idea how well it runs on Apple Silicon. And it doesn’t matter whether I like the product or not, because I can’t use it.

Alternatives

I was able to download and install Parallels for my new ARM work MacBook in a matter of minutes. I didn’t even have to wait for IT to purchase the license, just install the trial edition and add the license afterward.

As for home, I think I’ll experiment with UTM a bit. I prefer one-time purchases over subscriptions (and of course free is nice!), but the home edition of Parallels is at least a reasonable price for what it does.

Full-featured text editor for Android. Good in a pinch on my phone, better on my tablet with either the onscreen or a Bluetooth keyboard.

Storage

Support for the major cloud storage providers, plus local, WebDAV and SFTP means that I can edit a file direct from my Nextcloud instance, or off of my desktop in the next room, or off of a server.

Also connects to GitHub and to GitLab servers. It would be nice if I could connect directly to any Git repository, because then I could connect straight to Codeberg, but to be fair, I wouldn’t have thought of that if it didn’t offer the specific forges.

Local files and cloud credentials are only stored on the device.

Usage

QuickEdit remembers your session, so I always have a couple of files available (including the migraine log I’ve kept since 2008, which can take a while to scroll through on a touch screen, but opens where I left off and doesn’t slow the editor down at all.) right when I need them, and it’ll pull down the latest version when I open it.

Finally started tracking system dark/light mode with the most recent update.

There’s a free version with ads that you can try out, but it’s easily worth the ~$4 one-time price for the paid version.

A basic on-device gallery app that lets you view, browse, organize and delete your photos entirely on your own phone, and open them in other apps for sharing. No tracking, no ads. Works as a file picker too, when you’re already in another app and want to load a photo. Mostly replaces the offline use cases for Google Photos.

There’s a simple editor for cropping, rotating, markup and a few pre-defined filters. (IIRC the Simple Gallery app it was forked from had a few more adjustments it could do, but the Fossify project had some concerns about the license.) I’d like to use it to crop photos for iNaturalist, but there’s currently a bug where it loses EXIF data when editing. Even when I want to remove GPS coordinates, I don’t want to remove the time the photo was taken!

Update: There’s a similar bug where it discards location when used as a file picker, which has tripped me up a few times. Sharing from the gallery app keeps the metadata intact, though.

Anyway, if you do want to sync your photos with a cloud service, you can use another app for syncing while still using this one locally. I’m currently uploading to Nextcloud, and planning to try Immich when I can set aside some time to set up an Immich server.