Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

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.

There are many paths through the Nebula, and many ways to reach a destination. The novels based on Heaven’s Vault, by the same writer as the game’s narrative, tell the story of one such path, and what comes after (and before).

The first two books, The Loop and The Vault, follow archaeologist Aliya and her robot Six through a story close to, but not quite the same as a play-through of the game. Side quests are left out, some incidents are rearranged, and flashbacks tell the story of El and Oroi exploring the decaying buildings of Elboreth as orphan children, and how Aliya found the Nightingale. You get to meet a couple of her older robots, including the very talkative Three, and a (thematically appropriate) seventh robot from before Iox.

They’re different enough from an actual playthrough that it still feels like you’re experiencing something new if you’ve played the game, and tell a solid enough narrative that you don’t need to have played the game to read them (though I imagine the target audience is mainly people who have).

The second book diverges further from the game in details. In part it’s because a linear story can only have one path, so I think the author was trying to combine elements of different paths through the game that block each other out. (This is one reason the game is so replayable: you want to see what would have happened if you’d made a different choice.)

Sailing the rivers is much more physical than the calm, flow-state experience in the game, more like actually sailing a small boat. Aliya strains muscles, the boat crashes into the occasional rock (and moon), she gets injured, the boat needs to be repaired.

Translating Ancient

Ancient writing is woven throughout the books. Fragments introduce some chapters, along with the numerals. Scene breaks use the glyph for separation.

The experience of actively translating is, well, translated to prose by showing Aliya and Six puzzling out the meaning based on how the glyphs combine. Some bits are translated completely, others partially, some left as extras for the reader. At one point in book three Aliya spends several pages trying to work out whether it’s even possible to translate names from written Ancient to modern Ioxian or Elborethian, aside from the one name, Mazwai, that has survived the ages with context intact.

Occasionally a chapter is introduced with passages from Mazai’s writings, credited here as being translated by Huang or Aliya.

Before and After

The third book, The Flood, gets weird.

It picks up in the aftermath of one of the endgame choices (you can probably guess which one from the title), as the moons are cut off from each other, and Aliya and the people of Elboreth attempt to deal with their new reality of too much water instead of too little.

A secondary story thread follows Mazwai herself in another age. It gets into some of the bigger questions about the Loop: Is it real? If so, is time a literal loop in which the future becomes the past, or is it linear, but with similar events recurring? Are people really reborn time and time again in different ages? And just what does a robot’s Ethical Core mean, anyway?

Book four is coming later this year. I’m looking forward to reading it. For now, I’m playing through the game for the third time.

As password managers go, I like Bitwarden better than LastPass. It’s got a better track record certainly, and it’s encrypted in a way that makes it really difficult for someone to break into your vault, but it’s still a cloud service, which carries some risks.

It’s got a web app, mobile app and browser extensions, of course, and the browser extension (Chromium-based, Firefox-based and Safari) has a convenient keyboard shortcut to auto-fill on demand. There’s also a desktop app, which is useful when logging into desktop or command-line applications. I haven’t used the mobile app, but the others run more smoothly than LastPass.

As well as passwords, it’ll store SSH keys and payment cards, and it can act as a TOTP authenticator. That’s certainly convenient, but it kind of defeats the purpose of having two-factor authentication, if you’re using the same vault for a password and its 2FA codes.

It does share the same problem I’ve found with LastPass and KeePassXC-Browser, which is when you generate a new password for a site that’s already in your vault, it doesn’t always get updated automatically. I’ve taken to copying the generated password to the clipboard just in case I need to paste it back into the login record.

Personal accounts have a free tier, and the current pricing is reasonable ($20/year individual, or $48/year for a family of up to 6). In addition to shared vaults, organizations can self-host their vaults, which provides more control and keeps the vault inside your network.