Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 2

Nice, simple app for handling the local files on your phone or tablet. It doesn’t get fancy or connect to cloud storage. It doesn’t even try to use network access, just local storage.

It does show you thumbnails and file properties, and you can move, copy, rename, delete, or compress (as a .zip) files one at a time or in batches. Searching by filename is included, though it’s slower than Google’s Files app.

I switched to this as my main file manager on my phone ages ago, and disabled “Files by Google.” This way if I save something locally, I know it’s staying local.

One of those apps you install only because they’re 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 “T-Mobile Tuesdays” 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 what’s in each category. And some things still don’t work, such as activating an e-sim for a phone that the app doesn’t 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-Mobile’s network, but can’t run the app. Which is fine 99% of the time, but when you do need to do something that can’t 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.

Hainish Stories

Most of Le Guin’s 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. They’re all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if you’ve 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 they’re going to be ahead of time).

The Matter of Seggri

In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to “protect” 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 don’t really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still can’t 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.

It’s told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left Hand…. 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 you’d imagine, setting one up is…complicated.

“Unchosen Love” is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the more satisfying of the two.

In “Mountain Ways,” 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. It…sort of works…for a while. (This one’s 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 I’ve 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

It’s a good title, but it’s 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 I’ve 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 “aunt-rings.” Men live as hermits. And no adult sets foot in another’s house.

Le Guin describes “Solitude” 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 didn’t 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 isn’t too fond of crowds, my sympathies are with the daughter. There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness, after all. Though Sorovian culture (such as it is) certainly goes a lot farther than I’d want to live in.

Through this story, Le Guin seems to be attempting to figure out what the bare minimum for human connection is…and 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. She’s more viscerally repulsed by the way Sorovians live, and zeroes in on why the culture is so disconnected: They’ve attempted to remove every last remnant of obligation or control from human relationships. And while they’ve succeeded in removing power dynamics in most cases, they’ve also removed the mutual obligation that makes communities actually function.

“Solitude” is included in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories). It’s among the better stories in the collection, and one that sticks with you.

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.