Blog entries, tech tips, reviews and more by Kelson Vibber.
★★★★★ - 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.
★★★☆☆ - As you'd expect, this app connects to Canon cameras. It still lets you send location data to the camera, pull photos to the phone, or use the phone as a remote. But it insists on a cloud login now (it didn't before), even if you're only using the local functions.
★★★★★ - Conveniently sized, responsive, and fast, with a good camera unencumbered by modern LLM hallucinations, it lasted twice as long as Google's support for it.
★★★★★ - I remembered The Prestige was good. I'd forotten just *how* good a movie it is.
Les Misérables shows up in an episode of Deep Space Nine, fitting into the Maquis/Cardassian/Starfleet conflict.
Today I learned about hybrid MBR/GUID partition tables, where the GPT on a disk is duplicated in an MBR table for (outdated) compatibility purposes. These days it can break compatibility with Windows if you have a partition MBR doesn't support, like a multi-terabyte filesystem.
It's been pointed out that permalinking your titles makes it easy for someone to get a link *with* text. Why have I been permalinking the timestamps instead? The post Where to Put Your Permalink first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings
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.
Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more. The post Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings
★★★★☆ - Extremely capable, privacy-respecting, no-frills email app for Android. Works with any email service that supports IMAP/POP and SMTP (including Gmail and Outlook, but not Exchange). Works well with multiple accounts and a unified inbox.
My phone's turning into a spicy pillow. I have a spare, but because it had already been used on this network, it took two hours and three levels of escalation to put it *back* on the network. The post First the Migraine, Then the Headache first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings
★★★★☆ - 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.
I know, I'm already doing 100 Days To Offload. But I can't esist the wordplay in the name Blaugust. The post Blaugust, or What the Heck: I ll Do Two Overlapping Blogging Challenges first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings
I don't need suggestions for what might be interesting to read. I *have* books. *Lots* of them, both print and digital. What I need is to prioritize! The post Reading Goals for the Rest of the Year first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings
★★★★★ - Ursula K. Le Guin: Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, but a fascinating, thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley.