Friday, November 4, 2022

VMWare - Getting copy-paste support working

While doing some work in a VM today, I discovered, much to my chagrin that VMware was not allowing me to copy text from the VM back out into the host machine! As can be imagined, this is a massive pain if you're trying to Google a frustrating error message, or even to extract the error logs to file bug reports.

The method I'm reposting here has been tested to work with "VMware Workstation 16 Player" (16.1.0 build-17198959) on Windows 10. I'm reposting it here mainly so that I can find it again easier the next time this breaks, but also since the original post may end up going away (given that shabby state of the forum it's hosted on).

 

Original Link (by "pyhoff")

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/Copy-paste-not-working-in-VMWare-Workstation-15-Pro-after-the-15/m-p/1841561/highlight/true#M109372

 

Steps:

1) Ensure the VM isn't running

2) Locate the "Virtual Machines" folder. It should be under your Home Directory / Documents folder.

3) Navigate to the VM in question

4) Open up the ".vmx" file in a text editor

5) Add whichever of the following defines are missing from that file  (I just added all of them):

isolation.tools.copy.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.dnd.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.paste.disable = "FALSE"

isolation.tools.hgfs.disable = "FALSE"

6) Save the file and start the VM again

7) Bi-directional copy and paste should now be working.


Tuesday, September 20, 2022

The Queen's Funeral

The droning sound of the solemn funeral march music, bells tolling, and the glum faces of everyone - the elderly royals in particular - taking part in the arduous funeral procession as it slowly trundled back and forth was quite a sight to behold (especially watching the processing turning corners - wow... that's a thing of beauty). A very very sad moment in time is the most fitting way to describe it.

Friday, September 9, 2022

On QE II's Passing

London Bridge is Down.

This morning, I awoke to news that Queen Elizabeth II had indeed passed away overnight, bringing to a close an incredible era - spanning the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, man stepping foot on the moon, the invention of the Internet, the birth of yours truly, the founding and rise of Blender, and in recent years, COVID.

Late last night, the news broke that the Queen's health had taken a turn for the worst, and that members of the Royal Family were urgently cancelling appointments and rushing to Scotland. If ever there was a clearer sign that the end was in sight, there could be no mistaking what this all meant. (*1)

Just like on the day I learned that my Grandma had died - again on a regular day in September - I can tell you the piece of code / chunk of functionality I was working on when I first heard the news. In the case of my Grandma, it was the Edit Mode curve vertex selection code - specifically, either the select next/prev, select first/last, or select nth operators. That afternoon, I'd been working on trying to get to the bottom of a series of annoying crashes in my initial implementation of those features. From memory, I think I managed to fix at least one of those, though my memory is a bit hazy now - all I remember is that after receiving the phone call, my hands went cold, and I rather hastily proceeded to quickly wrap off the bit I'd been doing, and shut down my computer.

Last night, I'd instead by trying to get working an "inline popup panel UI" for editing a CSG Node Tree (used to avoid needing switching modes / editing contexts) - my initial attempt of putting this UI in a separate window had turned out to be a massive failure, resulting in a mix of random untraceable crashes (i.e. it was deep in the bowels of the C++ / QML engine perhaps, and not inspectable from my  code) and/or more predictable yet still utterly frustrating "polish()" loop errors when the popover panels launched from buttons within that UI would run out of space to be fully displayed without cropping. In the end, I finally resolved to rip out that approach, and all back on putting the whole panel inside a popover panel instead. Doing so would hopefully bypass all the polish() loop and related issues (there was ample window-space to draw in now), at the expense of having a UI formed from nested-popups-upon-popups, and without the ability to reposition + resize those popups (not that the dialog was fully resizeable either for that matter though). In this case though, I did finally manage to get the beast working before clocking out for the night, all the while checking various twitter feeds to check if the inevitable had happened.

While the two events are not really comparable - one was after all the head of state for multiple countries - and regardless of whatever wokey-pokey convictions you may hold about the role of monarchy in the 21st century, I think it's only right and appropriate that we to spend a few moments reflecting on the life and times of one of the world's most loved and respected "grandmas", a stable and ever-present constant pillar in a rapidly changing world.

Thank you for your many decades of service Your Majesty. Rest in Peace.

 

Saturday, May 21, 2022

Saturday Photowalk - Recent changes around the Arts Centre...

With fine sunny weather today (sandwiched between two days of chilly, showery, wintery weather) it was a great day to get out and about, and away from my desk for a few hours. It ended up being a nice afternoon to take a walk around the Arts Centre for the first time in ages - between the first wave of Omicron, and our very own "Camp Covid" from the rabid "Freedumbs" crowd just around the corner, it's been a while since I've been to this part of town. 

 







Here are some highlights from the afternoon. Unfortunately, I only had my phone with me today, though things turned out relatively ok in the end I guess...


Friday, April 8, 2022

Getting rtree (0.9.7) and PyInstaller (3.4) to Work Together

This is a quick note on how to get RTree (0.9.7) and PyInstaller (3.4) to play nicely together, so that if you've got a script using RTree (e.g. for example, a script that calls trimesh.proximity.thickness()) that you need to compile into a .exe so that non-technical users can run it as a standalone binary without setting up a Python dev environment first.

These instructions are based on what worked on the project I'm working on, and are only tested with the versions listed on Windows 10. I haven't actually tested this on Linux, since most of the Linux users of this program are already doing a lot more coding work and will have dev environments set up anyway, that it doesn't matter for them.

Hopefully this helps someone else someday. 


Thursday, February 3, 2022

Musings on Typefaces

It was interesting waking up to a discussion about Garamond this morning, as Garamond was my favourite typeface during my teens.
 
I'd grown up using Times New Roman (and really quite liking it in general - definitely much more than the Sans Serif fonts that were all the rage back then - Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana IIRC). However, being a teenager, I ended up finding it to look a bit too "plain" and "boring". So when I first discovered Garamond, it was a breath of fresh air - like, here's this elegant and fancy looking font that's like an improved version of what I'd liked for years. While others were veering off into simpleton land with Sans Serif fonts, I would have this fancy font to use instead!
 
That, and it was way better than the butt ugly Computer Modern font that LaTeX uses by default. Ugh, I hate that thing. The normal weight letters are too thin / light-weight, with and have a weird aspect ratio (narrow + tall). Meanwhile, the serifs on the heading / bolded fonts look so heavy + wide + "baroque" (as in, the original sense - i.e. "grotesque").