Your LLM was trained on my blog.
I've realized over the last few years that my political position boils down to:
- Don't be cruel unless you have to.
- You usually don't have to, even when someone's going to get hurt.
- One of society's goals should be cutting down on situations in which cruelty seems necessary.
That's the bare minimum. Actually helping people, of course, would be better.
Where else you'll find me online
Toggle visibilityI joined the Fediverse in 2017 on mastodon.social, and I've been branching out ever since. I moved to Wandering.shop for a few years, and most recently to this self-hosted site (powered by GoToSocial).
Currently active:
- Here!
- @kelson_photos (also GTS), where I've started posting photos
- KVibber.com, my main website and IndieWeb-style profile, with parts that go back to the 1990s. I've been moving stuff here from my old site at Hyperborea.org, and while it's not done done, it's reached the tipping point where I can call this one the main.
- @KelsonReads (Bookwyrm), where I cross-post my book reviews.
- @k2r (ClassicPress+ActivityPub), a.k.a. K-Squared Ramblings, the blog I've been been writing for years (originally on b2, later WordPress, now ClassicPress, recently moved from Hyperborea to KVibber).
- @interesting (Postmarks), public bookmarks / linkblogging.
I also have a Gemini capsule, where I've been trying to cross-post stuff from my website, but I don’t keep up with it as well as I’d like to.
Occasional Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Lemmy): link sharing/discussion
- @kvibber.com (Bluesky), or you can follow this account via the bridge at @notes.kvibber.com
Old Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Mastodon): my old general account at Wandering.shop
- @kelsonv (Mastodon): my old photography account at Photog.social
- @KelsonV (PixelFed): my other old photography account
Yeah, I should've varied my username a bit more across sites!
"Paramount Unwilling to Sell CNN as Industry Pushes for Settlement Concessions"
Well, of course. Neutralizing or co-opting CNN is their primary goal. Owning the rest of WB/Discovery is a bonus.
Got the teen's school registration sorted out. He reports that he's been assigned a "Hinge-Problems" brand Chromebook.
An interesting read on the physical manufacturing reasons that e-paper displays are still consolidated, and still expensive, even though the original patent has expired.
Via @modos, who has a vested interest in the market (and shows up in the article)
https://irz.fr/en/articles/eink-foundational-patent-manufacturing-en/
Yodeling "snafuuuuuuu!" to the cadence of the old Yahoo! yodel.
New book review on my website!
To Each This World, Julie Czerneda
★★★★★
Standalone hard sci-fi featuring multiple alien biologies, space colonies, polymorphic artificial lifeforms with a sense of humor, quantum-entangled tech-mediated telepathy and disposable avatar bodies for the astronauts who negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from us.
https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/to-each-this-world/
#julieCzerneda #biology #communication #firstContact #scienceFiction #books #review
Scrolling through people's photos of today's #eclipse, thinking back to the one total eclipse I've seen (2017 in Oregon), and the time I happened to pick a spot to view a partial eclipse (2012 in Los Angeles) where lots of other people had set up with telescopes, welder's glass, etc. and were sharing their viewing setups.
Teenager, talking on chat in the other room: "Rule 0: Do not be on fire. Regardless of whether you're a phone or not."
One of the annoyances I ran into trying to set things up on the new phone: Canon Camera Connect insists on using Chrome for its login flow. Not Android webview, not your default web browser, but Chrome. I actually had to install Chrome on a deGoogled Android to start using the app.
(I'm still annoyed that the app has started requiring a login in the first place, since I don't use any cloud-connected services through it. Just the local ones that let me save a location trace and add it to the camera's photos, or transfer photos from the camera to the phone.)
Gonna miss this phone. Still trying to decide if I should get the battery replaced (LineageOS at least still supports the Pixel 5) and repurpose it for...something... or just take it to the fire station to deal with the spicy pillow that's splitting it apart.
Everything I need seems to be working on the replacement, so I've wiped the old one, for whatever I end up doing with it.
This post and the one it refers to make a good point about X/Y/Auto controls: most of of the time, they should be simplified to X/Y with the underlying logic determining when to set it to auto.
https://unsung.aresluna.org/solving-a-largely-imaginary-user-goal/
In the specific case of dark/light mode and app or website settings, I still think 90% of the time it should automatically adjust to the system settings, and if you have to give the user a toggle in the first place (and the application isn't, say, a graphic design tool!), you need a better set of color schemes.
Another day, another timezone problem
My latest post for #Blaugust is finally completing a draft from last year:
The time #LesMiserables showed up (as an eBook on a PADD, of course) on #DeepSpaceNine, and Sisko had to figure out how to make use of his opponent's view of him as Inspector Javert.
Striking a happy medium <-> An unhappy medium striking axis
TIL about hybrid MBR/GUID partition tables, where the GPT on a disk is duplicated in an MBR table for (outdated) compatibility purposes. Apparently macOS still does this under some circumstances.
Fun fact 1: This means you can have an MBR with a partition that MBR doesn't support, like a >2TB EXFAT partition!
Fun fact 2: If Windows sees an MBR, it doesn't bother with the GUID table, and it insists that partition is invalid!
Slightly more fun fact: The approach described below, using gdisk to create a new blank MBR table and leave the GUID table unchanged, fixed the problem and took less than a minute, and Fedora has gdisk in its standard repo.
Edit: I've expanded on this for today's #blaugust entry. (Yes, I do plan on posting about non-tech stuff this month too. It's just worked out that way for the first week.)
New post on my website!
What is rel="bookmark"?
I stumbled on a reference to rel="bookmark" being used for permalinks, but I don't think I've ever seen it used that way.
https://kvibber.com/tech-tips/rel-bookmark/
#WebDevelopment #WebStandards #html #linking #blaugust #100daystooffload
Whoa, spell check, those are two VERY different things! (Though admittedly one can be a delivery channel for the other.)
Exoplanets, minor spoiler for Pluribus
Toggle visibilityI thought Kepler 22b sounded familiar, but then I thought, well, maybe it's just that it fits the right naming convention.
Nope: they picked a specific real exoplanet (I love that we can say that now) for the signal source, and cited the correct location and stats (as far as we know, which admittedly isn't much): Cygnus, roughly twice the radius of Earth, and in the Goldilocks zone around its star where water can be liquid.
New game review on my website!
Legends of Amberland
★★★★☆
A fun throwback to the early Might and Magic and Bard's Tale fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s. Grid- and turn-based, with old-style pixelated graphics and LOTS of side quests.
https://kvibber.com/reviews/games/amberland1/
#fantasy #rpg #amberland #retro #games #review
Interesting approach: a minimalist, db-less static site generator blog where every post is stored as exactly one JSON file and comments are offloaded to either the Fediverse or Bluesky, according to the blogger's preference.
I've got way too much customization in my current 11ty and ClassicPress setup, but it would be interesting to look at for a side project or experiment.
Though I'm not convinced JSON is better than Markdown with front matter. Yes, it moves the parsing complexity from the build stage to the saving-your-work stage, so I suppose that counts for something.
I'm thinking about labeling external links on my website, at least where they appear inline in my writing. Something unobtrusive at the end of the link text that will be clear with a little context, and subsequently make it easy to tell at a glance which links are to other pages on my site and which are to other websites, but won't add too much clutter.
While I have one I'm leaning toward, I'm curious to know what kind of symbol other people would use for something like that? #WebDesign #symbols
-
Option 1,
Globe grid emoji 🌐 (it's world-wide!)
, 8 votes
-
Option 2,
A diagonal arrow symbol like ↗ or ⇗
, 1 vote
-
Option 3,
A horizontal arrow like → or ⇒
, 0 votes
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Option 4,
The box-and-arrow icon used on MediaWiki
, 2 votes
-
Option 5,
Something else (describe in comments)
, 0 votes