Well so much for me posting daily! Been a crazy week at work so it has slowed down other things. But today I want to talk about something I discovered which is going to be the source of some fun for me. By fun I think I mean a challenge. The other day I was thinking to myself that I hadn’t had a real solid technical problem to overcome for some time. I remember many years ago I would run into these all the time as a tech. How do I get software A to talk to software B? Those kinds of struggles. With the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service) these challenges happen much less in my every day life (But there is a doozy on the horizon). The challenge was this, bring data from an older version to the newer version. No big deal you say. What if the older version was made by software that only runs on PowerPC, yup. That is the challenge.

So this sent me into the rabbit of of emulation. I’ve always been intrigued by emulation. Especially being on an Apple ecosystem my entire life, it was something that was always in the background. So I looked at the commercial versions of emulation. VMWARE, Parallels, VirtualBox, No joy. Then I moved to the open source community and found QEMU. Oh what a great tool. Allows emulation of all different sorts of platforms. As long as you can find the ISO for the operating system. So my google-fu got a great workout working on scripts and the like. But as I was searching and trying different things I found references to something called UTM. What the heck is this I asked. Started reading and low and behold, someone had created a GUI for QEMU that is live on the App Store of all things. Only $15 and away you go, all the power of QEMU and an easier UI to boot.

So now I am working and learning with this great tool that looks to be well supported and has it’s own discord server for support! Amazing! If you are in need of emulation, have a look.