Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 7

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.

A simple desktop app for Mastodon and (most) compatible Fediverse servers. I’ve used it with GoToSocial, Pixelfed, Sharkey (see note) and Akkoma, but can’t get it to log into Snac. (I can also log into a Friendica server, but I haven’t done enough with my account to get a sense of how well it works with it.) It works easily with multiple accounts on the same or different servers, and just sets up a narrow sidebar with icons for each account you’re signed into. It’s also easy to switch between timelines, notifications, lists, etc. because that’s also a narrow sidebar.

It’s better suited for following mostly text than photos, only showing thumbnails in the timeline, but it does zoom in on images when you click on them.

One nice thing: When you’re viewing a timeline, there’s a drop-down menu with toggles to turn boosts and replies on and off as needed!

The biggest downside is that it doesn’t support editing posts, at least not yet.

It’s a bit of a memory hog for what it does (it is an Electron app after all). If I’m going to load a whole web engine, I’d rather just install my instance’s website, or Elk or Phanpy, as a PWA and get more functionality. Again, on low spec hardware like the PineTab 2, it seems like it’s just a little bit faster than running either of those apps in Falkon (which is the fastest app-capable browser I’ve used on that machine).

Since it’s built on Electron, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, but doesn’t feel like a native app on any of them. It is available in the Microsoft and macOS app stores.

Tips and Tricks

Don’t use the Flatpak on Linux. It’s still available on Flathub, but it’s way out of date since Whalebird’s Flatpak maintainer had to leave. The RPM works fine on Fedora, you just have to update manually. There are also Debian and AUR packages for x86_64, and a standard tarball for both x86_64 and arm64. (I tried to build the AUR package on Arch/ARM, but couldn’t get the right Electron dependencies installed.)

Signing into Sharkey was a little tricky because the website form doesn’t show you the auth code and the browser doesn’t seem to be able to send it to the app (though it wants to). On a hunch, I copied the code from the URL after granting permissions, pasted it into Whalebird’s form, and it worked!

https://calckey.world/auth/RANDOM_LOOKING_CODE?mastodon=true&redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob

Posting photos threw me for a bit of a loop when I didn’t see a button to return to my draft after adding alt text. After clicking “Apply” on the description, you just click outside of the box containing the photo, same as when you’re viewing one that someone else has posted.

Lists work on at least Mastodon and Akkoma, but not on GoToSocial at the moment.

An extremely powerful image editor for Android. And not just the usual features like crop, adjust contrast or brightness, maybe apply a filter, but you can do batch edits, format conversion, scaling the actual pixel image, editing metadata…all the things that mobile apps tend to hide behind the curtain (because why would someone need to even know the pixel depth, never mind change it? :eyeroll:). The downside is that it’s a bit awkward to use.

So far this is the only image editing app I’ve tried on Android that I can get to keep both location and timestamp EXIF data intact when editing. Sometimes. It seems to keep all EXIF data if you start with “single edit,” but drops at least location if you start with “crop.” Within a single edit, you can make a lot of adjustments, including cropping, arbitrary rotation, saturation, etc. and it’ll preserve the metadata.

I’m still getting a sense of where things are and which controls will get me the effect I want, which is usually cropping and adjusting the contrast for iNaturalist. That’s why I really want to be able to make these edits without losing or altering the EXIF data: the location and timestamp matter for the observation.

Google Play vs. FOSS Variants

The version in the Play store uses Google’s machine learning for some features, as well as Google’s crash reports and other analytics. It can also be built as capital-F Free software, without the telemetry and Google-dependent features, making it suitable for F-Droid’s stricter requirements (though there’s a bug keeping the latest release out of F-Droid).

On Preserving Metadata

You’d think “don’t change the stuff that the user isn’t changing” would be a low bar, but most image editors I’ve used on Android handle EXIF data in one of three ways:

• Treat EXIF as junk and throw it away haphazardly, often including the time a photo was taken! (At least Fossify Gallery considers this a bug.)
• Remove some or all metadata, including location, for privacy reasons. (Scrambled EXIF is great, but it removes everything.)
• Preserve metadata, but with bugs. (For instance: Google Photos forgets the time zone if you’re not syncing with their cloud, so I ended up with photos stamped with the right location, but the time off by the difference from UTC and I’d have to use a desktop anyway to fix all the timestamps. And while Sly has an option to save metadata, it doesn’t seem to work.)

I still haven’t sorted out all the circumstances under which Image Toolbox keeps or discards it, but at least I’ve found something for the specific phone-to-iNat workflow.

Simple, friendly image editor that doesn’t need any extra permissions, it just lets you adjust your photos! It’s not elaborate, just basic adjustments like cropping, changing contrast or saturation, sharpening or noise reduction. Feels more suited for mobile, but has a Linux version as well as Android. There are only two features I miss when using it on my phone:

• It doesn’t show up as a target app yet for opening images, either on Linux or on Android.
• You can only rotate by right angles, so you can’t fix a shot that’s skewed.

One bug is, for me, a showstopper: While there’s an option to save EXIF metadata, it doesn’t seem to work. I always want to keep the original timestamp, and my main use case for an easy photo editor on my phone is to be able to quickly crop a photo to upload for iNaturalist or MapComplete, in which case I want to keep the location too.

For now I’m using Image Toolbox, which is slightly more awkward. If and when Sly implements the share target and fixes the metadata bug, it’ll a whole lot more streamlined for this flow!

Scrambled EXIF is one of those “does one thing really well” apps: It’s a filter that removes all the date, time, location, camera, and other metadata from a photo as you share it. Using it is incredibly simple: Share the photo to Scrambled Exif, and then it’ll ask you what app you want to share it to.

It’ll optionally fix EXIF-based rotations and rename your file too (in case you don’t want the filename to give anything away).

The only problem I have with it is that most of the time, I don’t want to remove everything. 99% of the time I want to keep the timestamp, and there are times (like posting observations to iNaturalist) when I want to keep the location too. So I don’t use it very often, though I do keep it on my phone for when I do.

But for its primary use case, it’s sheer elegance in its simplicity!