Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 28

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.)

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 uploading to Nextcloud for now, and I still want to try Immich when I can set aside some time to set up an Immich server.

Bugs

Gallery used to have a bug where it would lose EXIF data when editing, but that’s been fixed, so now I can use it to crop photos for iNaturalist without sending them to a desktop first. (You’d think this would be a low bar, and yet…)

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

When I was first experimenting with the Gemini Protocol, Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop. It’s visually clean, it’s fast, it runs well (and stable) on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the UI works the way you’d expect it to coming from using a web browser, down to details like middle-clicking to open a link in a new background tab.

Lagrange registers itself on all three platforms as a handler for gemini: URLs and will send http: and https: URLs to the desktop’s default handler, so it’s possible to seamlessly follow links between Geminispace and the web, switching between Lagrange and Firefox/Vivaldi/etc.

You might still need an extra step to open links from Firefox.

The author has also been fast to implement useful conventions like the subscription scheme, conveniences like opening linked images inline and giving each capsule its own color scheme, and related small-internet (or “smol internet” if you prefer) protocols like Titan (used for uploading files, which was deliberately left out of Gemini itself), Spartan and Nex (even more minimalist!), and Misfin (for sending messages). And yes, it also works with older protocols like Finger and Gopher.

Off the Desktop

The mobile version is allegedly still in beta, but works surprisingly well on my Android phone! It has all the same features, except it’s a single screen instead of tabs and windows.

There’s also a terminal-based interface that looks as much as possible like the desktop app as you can get with text characters, colors and (optionally) emoji. I’ve only played with it a little bit since I couldn’t get the AppImage to run and kept putting off compiling it myself. I finally did and it feels a lot more natural to use than amfora (the classic monochrome terminal-based client). The key commands for following links seemed weird at first glance, but I got used to them in a matter of seconds, whereas I still get tripped up in amfora.

Notes

On Linux, the Flatpak has worked more consistently for me than the AppImage has. Fedora offers a package as well, but it tends to lag behind a bit.

Agate is a simple Gemini Protocol server. It’s a single binary, needs only minimal configuration, and sets up TLS certs for you. It only serves static files, but you can also enable multiple hostnames, directory listings and custom headers if you want to, so you can redirect pages that have moved or use it as a download server.

It’s fast. It’s stable. I’ve been running my Gemini capsule on it for three years (that’s right: it’s been Agate All Along!) and I don’t think it’s ever crashed. Updates are a matter of downloading the latest release from GitHub, killing the old process, and launching the new one. No need to mess with Docker or anything like that unless you want to.

If you’re reading the Gemini version of this review, it’s serving the page right now!

Since I don’t have root on the VPS I’m running it on, I can’t set up a proper system service, but I can add cron jobs, so it’s easy enough to schedule one for @reboot pointing to my launch script.

Running a Gemini Server on a VPS Without Root

The Gemini Protocol as a whole does support dynamically-generated pages and simple interactions, and there are other servers that can handle both.