Profile for kelson
- Display name
- Kelson
- Username
- @kelson@notes.kvibber.com
- Role
- admin
About kelson
Fields
- Website
- https://kvibber.com
- Blog
- @k2r
- Photos
- @kelson_photos
- Coffee or Tea?
- Yes
- Old Website
- https://hyperborea.org
Bio
Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy & comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him, pronounced KELL-son (rhymes with "Nelson").
- Joined
- Posts
- 7587
- Followed by
- 454
- Following
- 296
Stats
Pinned public and unlisted posts
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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
I 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!
We used to call residential proxies (software that runs unexpectedly on a random person's device and relays someone else's internet traffic to hide its origin or get around network-based restrictions) "malware," and an application which appeared to be legit but did something like this behind the scenes was called a "Trojan horse"...until someone realized they could bury it in an app's terms of service and do it "legally."
optical illusions and wildlife spotting
On my afternoon commute today, I saw what at first looked like a squirrel bounding across the road.
As I got closer I realized it was a dried piece of palm frond, roughly the same color brown as the tree squirrels we have around here, roughly as long as one of those squirrels when stretched out, roughly as wide as one of those squirrels, curved in such a way that as the wind blew it across the road and it spun around, the changing shape looked remarkably similar to the undulating curves made by a squirrel as it bounds across a flat surface.
Then I remembered that I'd seen an actual squirrel running across the road at roughly the same spot this morning, which may have primed me to misinterpret the decoy "squirrel" this afternoon.
WTF...so with "Amazon Family" you can share books with your under-12 children or with the other adult in your family, but you can't share books with your teen. On what planet does this make any sense?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GEX2D6QN8PKQJAJ2
(If we end up having to get a new copy of this book so he can read it on his tablet, it's not gonna be from Kindle, that's for sure. I don't have a problem with logging him into, say, the Kobo app because the "worst" thing he can do with it is buy more books. Gosh, what a horror.)
Pokémon Y <-> Pokémon Wynaut axis
Remember to get out and vote if you're eligible. Even if you don't believe things can get better if someone other than the worst candidate wins, it should be pretty damn obvious by now that they can and will get worse if the worst candidate wins.
I hope you'll excuse me for saying that "The Secret of the Candlesticks" is a bit of an odd duck. It starts out as a comedic adaptation of Les Misérables with Uncle Scrooge as Jean McJean, Daisette, Donaldius Duckmercy and the rest. Then it takes a swerve and turns into a treasure hunt.
Beagle Boys are involved. As are the street urchins Huvroche, Dewvroche and Louvroche....
"The People Holding Up The Internet"
Real examples of the people behind critical projects thanklessly maintained by one random person in Nebraska since 2003, underlying all modern infrastructure. (Well, not Nebraska or 2003 specifically, but you know the XKCD.)
Had to call back someone I thought was a scammer impersonating a car insurance agent. Unfamiliar number, asking about about a collision involving a family member who doesn't drive, driving a car model we don't have, on a day we didn't go anywhere.
Then I logged into the website and found the claim, along with the agent's name and callback number.
So the call was legit, and either someone's scamming them, or the incident involved someone who only gave their name and it got cross-referenced to our policy based on that.
Has it been long enough for hipster jokes to be retro now? 'Cause I'm irrationally annoyed by the border-radius discourse, since I was using capsule-shaped buttons before it was uncool.
/me stalks off, mumbling about CSS and I guess my site could use a new design anyway
In your mind, does the #SmallWeb include...
(related tags: #GeminiProtocol #Gopher #SmallNet #SmallInternet )
This reminds me:I really need to get on tagging which sidewalk sections are too narrow for wheelchairs, or would be wide enough except for the telephone poles stuck in them, as I continue filling in #OpenStreetMap. Curb ramps at either end only tell part of the story.
wheelchair=no on a separately mapped sidewalk is obvious.
A while back I tagged a particularly bad downhill section on a street where the sidewalk had been mapped as part of the road, and I hadn't gotten on my "map ALL the sidewalks!" kick yet. IIRC I asked on one of the forums and we came up with sidewalk:left:wheelchair=no (I've since remapped that one separately).
New post on my website!
Gopher Apps on Android
I did find several Gopher clients for Android! But they're all incomplete, awkward, or rapidly losing compatibility. So I've gone back to Lagrange, which handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser.
https://kvibber.com/reviews/apps/gopher-android/
#android #gopher #smallInternet
New post on my website!
Enable Gemini (and other Small Internet) Links in WordPress
You can write a Gemini link in a WordPress post, but WP won't accept one anywhere it validates URLs. Here's how to add a filter to allow more protocols.
https://kvibber.com/tech-tips/smallnet-links-wordpress/ #classicpress #wordpress #geminiProtocol #smallInternet
It's always amusing when the weather widget shows red with an extreme heat warning for the expected temperatures, but it's still showing the "current" temperature from 2 hours ago just around sunrise, which was only 66F.
Subtoot
looks like I'm going to have to mute someone who's getting into "and yet you participate in society" territory for a bit
I like how we've had this XKCD cartoon for decades, yet "sending files" is something early adopters are still figuring out how to do.
(It's been one of those mornings...)
I think about this panel a lot, since the kid tends to prefer Rube Goldberg approaches to just about everything.
It's either that, or trying to remember the lyrics to that Avril Lavigne song.
(For context, and why Daisy is calling him McJean: this is an adaptation of Les Misérables, featuring Daisette and Jean McJean)
Well, that's a relief, at least:
KDE e.V. has taken money from Framework, but only after verifying that Framework had severed their (already very limited) ties with DHH and Omarchy. Also, all of this happened a year ago, before Omarchy received a ludicrous amount of money from a veritable rogues gallery of villains.
https://pointieststick.com/2026/09/23/kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/
I had noticed that Omarchy no longer appears on Framework's list of sponsorships after the debacle last fall.
Processing Romulan shaders (71%)
#Westercon is shutting down after 2028. Next year's combined with Baycon, and the last one - Westercon 80 - will be combined with Loscon.
https://www.westercon.org/2026/07/westercon-bylaws-repealed-westercon-to-retire-at-end-of-2028/
I've only been to a handful of them myself, most recently in 2010, but it's still sad to see it go.
https://journal.kvibber.com/2010/07/westercon63/
