This is just a quick update to my setting up Photon OS as a docker host post. I use VS Code to both (try to) write code and edit configuration files, such as YAML files for Docker Compose. So to make configuring containers faster and easier, I’d like to be able to edit the files directly on the Photon VM using VS Code with the Remote Development pack on my desktop.

To do this, VS Code wants to deploy a small component on the destination server, and that doesn’t run entirely smoothly on Photon OS minimal out of the box due to its small footprint. So here’s what I need to adjust.

First, it needs tar to untar the addon, so

tdnf -y install tar

Next, the sshd demon needs to allow TCP forwarding, which it doesn’t out of the box.

sed -i "s/AllowTcpForwarding no/AllowTcpForwarding yes/g" /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Then restart the sshd, and we’re good to go!

systemctl restart sshd

And then VS Code is ready to connect straight to the Photon OS VM! If you remembered to install the extensions, obviously…

Until ACDSee came around.

It wasn’t the first. And it wasn’t free. But it was small, comprehensive and it was FAST.

There’s been many updates to ACDSee, and unfortunately most of them have not been for the better according to many of us long time users. But for a while ACD Systems also developed some interesting smaller utilities to make images more accessible in Windows, such as Image Fox (which would tag a preview box beside any standard Windows Save or Open dialog), mPowerTools, etc. But my favorite companion to ACDSee was always PicaView, an Explorer shell extension that would let you right click any image in explorer and get a preview right in the context drop down menu with quick access to essential image data and functions. Unfortunately most of these utilities were discontinued long ago, some naturally because of improvements in Windows or in competing products, but when PicaView went away it always felt like there was an unfilled space.

I’ve kept my ACDSee licenses reasonably updated through all these 20 years, skipping a version now and then. I even ran the big brother ACDSee Pro for a few years. But for the last few years I’ve felt that they’ve released new versions every autumn just to boost sales, with little or no benefit to us fans of the core functionality. If anything the “image browser” functionality kept getting slower and slower.

So when a friend pinged me and said he thought the latest version 18 was faster with our 36 megapixel raw files, I was still back at version 15 and had stopped paying attention to what they were up to. I decided to give it a try. And while it does seem faster, the big surprise was the return of an old friend; PicaView is back as a feature of ACDSee 18! And there was much rejoicing.

So what’s all the fuss about? Here’s a folder of raw files from my trip last year to Kenya. Normally I’d find my way around my raw files from within Lightroom, but sometimes I need to browse through them just quick on the road before they’re imported, or I’m accessing my drive from another PC. In these cases both ACDSee and Picaview comes in handy. PicaView lets me see a more detailed preview of the image and the essential shooting data without leaving the Explorer interface.

PicaView previewing a RAW file from a Nikon D810