Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 3

It’s a cool idea! Combine all your social networking feeds into a single app. Respond to posts and let the app choose the appropriate account. Cross-post easily. And I really like the typeface)!

My key takeaway is that to use it, you have to either be following a small enough number of people across services, or you need to be OK with not catching everything. (You kind of do anyway, but this takes all your sources and mixes them into the same firehose.)

Currently, it supports one each of Mastodon (and compatible servers including GoToSocial), Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads, plus RSS/Atom feeds and plans to add Tumblr. You can also set up multiple profiles, but each can only have one account of each type. That means if you have two Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account, you can’t set them all up on the same profile. (Update: Fread also supports both Bluesky and Mastodon, and can handle more than one of each type of account.)

Feeding Issues

RSS support finally launched last week, which is why I picked up the app again. Again, I do like the idea of being able to just follow websites instead of following a social media account that follows the website! It auto-detects feeds correctly, so you only need to enter the main website to subscribe to its feed. On your timeline it’ll show the title and summary, and tapping on it opens the article in a reader mode without all the extra clutter. The article view also has a button to just show the actual web page.

Downsides: If you’re following an site in a social context, you can’t comment, and if you’re following one in a news context, it gets lost in the shuffle.

Also, it doesn’t seem to do use the content of a full-text feed. It always loads the web page and then strips out what it thinks is unneeded. I can use Nextcloud News seamlessly in airplane mode. That’s not the case with OpenVibe, which will just sit there with a blank screen, trying to download.

And it’s been sending me snarky “reminders” to just add an RSS feed, already, even though I already have. I am not a fan of communication apps that send me promotional notifications.

Context Troubles

Unfortunately, it’s a whole new layer of context collapse, with the added bonus that the contexts get pulled apart too. Making a single cross-post is easy, but you’re stuck with the shorter size limit, and it doesn’t remember that the Bluesky and Mastodon versions are the same post. You still have to do followups manually, once per network. (Sure, you have to do that when you’re using separate apps too, but at least you expect to be able to do that, because the context you’re using it in is different.)

The biggest problem for me is that I’m already following too many people on the Fediverse to keep track without using lists. Bluesky accounts just get lost in the shuffle. What I’d really like to be able to do with this kind of combined app would be to combine custom timelines across accounts. Make a list for Science Talk and include people on both Bluesky and the Fediverse, that sort of thing. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of app they’re trying to build, at least not so far.

Well, that and the fact that the “Following” tab keeps getting stuck, but that seems to only be a problem with GoToSocial, not Mastodon. Either that or I really am following too many people!

A short, fast read built on the idea that while you can preserve people cryogenically, you have to actively keep their consciousness running in a virtual environment so it doesn’t dissipate before they’re thawed out. There’s not a lot of story, mostly just character studies, looking at how people with different VR experiences might react to waking up centuries after the fall of civilization. The astronauts who were supposed to be on their way to another star system basically experienced virtual heaven, while the convicted murderers served virtual prison time.

Structure

The Downloaded started as a full-cast audiobook, with the Covid-imposed constraint that [each scene feature only one actor]. (I don’t know why they did it that way instead of just mixing different recording sessions.) And it shows. It’s not a problem that each scene is an interview. That’s a time-honored narrative structure. But once you get to the middle and you find out who’s interviewing them, you start getting half-conversations with awkward “so, you’re saying ____?” to pass the information to the audience.

Maybe the voice actors sell it better than the plain text of the novel. Apparently Brendan Fraser voices Roscoe, which sounds like absolutely perfect casting. (I still haven’t seen The Whale, but I watched four seasons of Doom Patrol in which he delivers a surprisingly moving and nuanced portrayal of Cliff Steele.) I’ll have to see if the audio version is still exclusive to Audible or not.

Connections

Weirdly, I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: The Downloaded and When the Moon Hits Your Eye both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. This and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances. Even Automatic Noodle opens with the main characters waking up long after a disaster (though it’s only months, and only a local disaster.)

Mostly flat, with hills along the west and north. Views of the ocean and (on a clear day) Catalina Island. Not much shade except for one stand of trees at the foot of the hills, the garden around the visitor center, and the bunkers.

It’s not as geologically interesting as [Forrestal Reserve], and when I went there in August it was mostly dry grass and dry bushes, but there’s wildlife, and there’s a native plants garden around the visitor center that’s watered and maintained, and there’s the ruins if you’re interested in that.

Wait, Bunkers? Ruins?

During World War II, the land was seized from Japanese-American farmers. The farmers were sent to internment camps, and the land was turned into a military site for coastal defense. During the cold war it became an anti-aircraft missile site. The base was decommissioned in the 1970s, but you can still find concrete foundations and a handful of buildings…and up in the hills, two large concrete bunkers built into a ridge that you can walk right through. Internal doors look like they’ve been sealed, though. (I didn’t think to ask at the visitor center whether it was one of the remaining buildings from the base or whether it had been built later.)

Information boards scattered at points along the trails tell the story, along with the earlier history of the site back to the native Tongva villages and the Spanish ranchos.

Nearby

Across the road there’s a regular park that goes right up to the edge of the bluffs. You can look over the railing and see rocky tide pools and Royal Palms State Beach below. The park also has a playground, picnic tables, bathrooms and drinking water.

If you want to make a day of it, you could hike the preserve in the morning, have a picnic lunch at the park, and hit the beach in the afternoon.

Getting there

Follow Western all the way to the coast and then turn left. The road runs past the entrance to the beach parking and a park to the right, and there’s a gate on the left just at the end of the road that leads to a gravel parking lot for the nature preserve. You can also park along the street once you get past the park, or you can pay for beach parking.

Technically, macOS has built-in virtualization and emulation using QEMU (and Apple’s own virtualization on newer macOS releases). Realistically, it’s a pain to set up and run.

UTM provides a GUI wrapper to create, run and manage virtual machines using both the QEMU and Apple backends, similar to Boxes on Linux.

Good

Stable. Emulates multiple hardware types, so you can run an x86_64 or i386 VM on an M1 Mac. (And probably run ARM Linux on an Intel Mac, now that I think about it.) Runs Windows, macOS and Linux guests of course, but also other operating systems. I’ve run Haiku (x86_64 only) on an ARM MacBook, and successfully installed an OpenBSD guest, something I just could not get working on Parallels.

Also, UTM is free, with the option of paying $10 once for the App store version as a way of supporting the devs, with the bonus that the app store manage upgrades automatically.

Bad

Slower than Parallels or VMWare Fusion, doesn’t support hardware graphics acceleration. Less in the way of integration: you can set up shared copy/paste and files, but you can’t tell one OS to open files in another, or display guest windows directly on the desktop.

Ugly

UTM is still a bit clunky to use, if infinitely better than memorizing or scripting QEMU command line options. You also need install the SPICE and VirtFS tools yourself to do things like copy/paste between guest and host. (Most Linux distros should have them available as long as you’ve got network set up, but Windows guests need manual installation.)

There’s a gallery of pre-built machines including several Linux distros (Intel and ARM), Solaris (SPARC) and ReactOS (Intel), plus pre-configured Wintel machines going back to XP. (You need to obtain an official Windows install image to actually set it up, which explains why they haven’t been sued for offering a Windows download. They don’t.)

They have an iOS version too, but the full version needs to be sideloaded on a jailbroken device. UTM SE is a stripped-down version that complies with Apple’s app store requirements, but runs enough slower that they actually bill it as a “Retro PC emulator.” I don’t have an iPhone or iPad to try it on, so I can’t speak from experience on it.

Keep in Mind

Emulating hardware is always slower than running a virtualized system on the actual processor. But depending on what you’re using it for, it can still be usable. For comparison, I installed both aarch64 and x86_64 versions of Alpine Linux with LXQt on the same ARM MacBook. The x86_64 version is noticeably slower, but it’s not much slower than running Arch+LXQt natively on the PineTab2. (That said, the PineTab is a lot slower than the MacBook I was running it on!)

Also: MacOS VMs can only log into some iCloud services (and then only on macOS 15 and later), and the App store isn’t one of them, so anything you want to run on a Mac VM has to be available from another source. This is true for any virtualization framework, not just UTM.

A virtual machine application for macOS that makes it easy to install a Windows, Linux or macOS guest.

Good

Stable and fast. Automatically installs and updates Parallels Tools on supported guests for interaction between the VM and host system. (Shared folders, copy/paste, stuff like that.) That includes major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian (but not immutable distros). Virtual networks work right out of the box.

Plus I can actually find the downloads, unlike VMWare.

It’ll automatically download and install Windows 11, the macOS version you’re running, and a handful of major Linux distros with the necessary hardware configs, or you can install from an ISO you’ve downloaded.

Provides snapshot backups and varying levels of isolation and integration. Pause and resume work just fine. You can tell a Windows guest to open links in your host system’s web browser, or tell the host system to open some file types in a Windows application. Displaying a Windows VM’s apps and menus directly in the macOS environment (what VMWare calls Unity and Parallels calls Coherence) is surprisingly smooth.

Bad

Requires a paid subscription to run it on my own hardware. Frequently tries to upsell me the confusingly-named Parallels Toolbox. (Not often, but enough to be annoying.)

Ugly

Installing an unsupported OS (like a *BSD, for instance) can be dicey. Emulating Intel hardware on ARM is possible, but limited and slow (and requires terminal commands to create a new guest machine). UTM is more likely to work in both cases.

Keep in Mind

MacOS VMs can only log into some iCloud services (and then only on macOS 15 and later), and the App store isn’t one of them, so anything you want to run on a Mac VM has to be available from another source. This is true for any virtualization framework, not just Parallels. And it’s super-annoying if you just want to test something from the app store in a virtual machine.