Kelson Vibber: New Posts

Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom

2026-08-28T05:57:58+00:00

It’s been gloomy all day – the kind of August day that’s hot, humid and still, sapping all your energy because nothing *actually* cools you off except real air conditioning (or standing in front of the refrigerator), not even taking a cold shower in the afternoon. At least the nights are still cooling off, even if the days are muggy.

Close to sunset, the clouds finally started to break up, and I began to think I might get to see tonight’s lunar eclipse after all.

That’s looking west. The clouds to the east were still a bit more solid, but low to the horizon, and by the time the moon cleared the rooftops and the eclipse was well underway, the clouds had broken up enough to see!

I took the sunset clouds shot with my Fairphone, which did a lot better than I expected, though I only managed to get misshapen blobs when shooting the moon. It’s been hectic enough that I didn’t try to set up the good camera. The point-and-shoot Canon with real optics does okay with the moon, as you can see here. (The teen’s iPhone, however, was able to get at least a couple of shots where the maria are visible. Not as good as the Canon, but better than any of my phones have managed.)

We went back inside, waited a while, went back outside, took some more photos, talked with the neighbors who were also looking at the moon, went back inside, rinse, repeat. Lunar eclipses are a lot more accessible than solar ones. They’re slower, since the Earth’s shadow is around 3 times the size of the moon at that distance. They’re visible from anywhere with a view of the moon, not just a narrow track. You don’t need eye protection. And unlike solar eclipses, a partial lunar eclipse is almost as cool as a total one. A lot of the time you can just walk out into your front yard.

If you’re reading this close to when I’m posting it, the eclipse isn’t over yet. There’s still an hour or so before the moon completely passes out of Earth’s shadow. If you have clear skies and the moon is up where you are, go take a look!

The post Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Regarding Empathy

2026-08-21T02:27:57+00:00

Over the last few years, right-wingers have finally started to realize that what they’re missing is empathy. Several decades’ worth of “I didn’t realize how bad this policy was until it hurt someone I know personally!” statements had already made that clear to the rest of us. “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!” as a meme goes back a decade now. But instead of realizing they should develop some, they’ve decided empathy must be bad, much like they previously decided that being aware of systematic injustice must be bad, and turned “woke” into a pejorative.

*sigh*

No, “Western Civilization” is not doomed by “suicidal empathy.” That people like Musk and Saal think “not treating people like garbage just because they aren’t like you” is an existential threat does not make it so. As Myers says, that tells you more about them than it does about society.

And if some aspects of our culture are threatened by empathy, such as the belief that certain types of people deserve to dominate others and other types of people deserve to be abused, then we should throw out those aspects, not cling to them even harder.

There are people who exploit vulnerabilities in society. But those people act a lot more like Elon Musk and a lot less like some random non-gender-conforming person who’s just trying to use the bathroom without getting beaten by a mob for picking the “wrong” one.

If our civilization is destroying itself, it’s not the people asking for empathy and inclusion who are doing it. It’s the reactionaries who insist on “taking back” their ability to treat others like garbage without consequence. They’re the ones tearing us apart.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

The post Regarding Empathy first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

The Confidence Game (book review)

2026-08-21T01:34:16+00:00

Maria Konnikova

★★★★★

An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in order to trick people into doing what they want. It’s roughly structured around different phases of a con, from picking a target to running off with the ill-gotten goods. The author illustrates it with a number of real cases over the last century or so, some of them recent enough that she interviewed the victims and (alleged) scammers directly.

Some key takeaways:

Scam victims aren’t stupid. Humans are wired to trust (most of the time), and that’s the only way we get something as complex as modern society. Con artists hijack that trust.
The “dark triad” personality combo (subclinical psychopathy + narcissism + Machiavellianism) is common among con artists. They’re very skilled at picking up on what will motivate someone to do what they want, and don’t care who gets hurt by it.
When they’re not cold-calling or spamming, scammers zero in on who’s likely to be vulnerable to a particular ploy right now. Someone who would normally see a particular con from a mile away, but is off-balance today, maybe distraught over recent misfortune, maybe trying to impress someone new, maybe in a rush for one reason or another. Any number of circumstances that this particular con artist has practiced using as a hook.
Swindlers are also very good at keeping the mark off-balance (like high-pressure sales people, except even less ethical). If they can engage your emotions strongly enough, the logical part of your brain - the part that would spot the red flags - will stay out of the way.
People in general are very good at retroactively justifying things. Unfortunately that includes things like “I’m too savvy to get scammed. If this was a scam, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with it. Since I did get involved with it, it must be legit, so I can ignore those red flags that are popping up now.” We also like to think we’re the exceptions, as in “I’m sure the leopards won’t eat my face!”

One of these days I should go back and finish reading Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman shows up in several chapters with his research on dual-system thinking and decision-making processes.

I also found myself thinking of Stories are Weapons. There’s an overlap between psy-ops and scams in that they both make use of psychological tricks to get the target to fill in the gaps the way you want them to, think that it’s their own idea, and resist evidence to the contrary.

Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn

2026-08-19T01:43:20+00:00

Back in the 1980s or early 1990s, I remember a motel that dropped out of the “Comfort Inn” chain. They reused existing signage by picking the name “Com-on Inn,” so they only had to replace a couple of letters. Something made me think of it recently, so I went looking to see if it was still around, or if I could at least find where it was.

DuckDuckGo didn’t find anything with the name (though when I did an image search, the broader criteria came up with a number of Comfort Inn locations). The closest Google suggested was a “C’mon Inn” in Grand Forks. I knew the general area it had to be in, so I went looking on Google Street View for something that looked right.

And I found it! A few blocks from where I thought it ought to be, and the building looked slightly different than I expected. But it’s in Monterey Park, next to a 7-11 (which jogged a memory), and the 2007 street view image is just barely legible enough to prove that even if I remembered the wrong location, I was right to remember that it actually existed!

Between 2007 and 2012 it appears to have been rebranded as the Floral Inn, and sometime after 2017 it became a Motel 6.

Now I’m trying to think of other signs that have been reused like this. I know I’ve seen others! But at the moment, all I’m coming up with are entirely new signs placed in a distinctive rounded-triangle housing. I’ve seen enough of those that I seriously considered making a “Used To Be a Winchell’s” Tumblr in the previous decade!

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

The post Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

To Each This World (book review)

2026-08-13T03:45:43+00:00

Julie Czerneda

★★★★★

More like the Species Imperative trilogy or In The Company of Others than Czerneda’s more recent Night’s Edge series, To Each This World is a hard science-fiction story 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 try to negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from us.

It takes a little while to get going, but it does. And what could easily have turned into a series of plot tokens – travel to the next colony, convince them to return before the cosmic threat gets them, lather, rinse, repeat – never settles into a pattern. Each world they visit has fared very differently, and has to be handled in a different way.

Spoilers: Some of the colony worlds are well-established. Another was so inhospitable that only a handful of descendants are eking out a miserable living. One turned out not to have any land so the colonists are still in cryosleep....

More importantly, the viewpoint characters are also deeply involved in trying to figure out what’s really going on. One’s a space pilot, and the other is the Arbiter, whose job negotiating with New Earth’s alien partners has become the job of re-consolidating humanity on one world. Are the Kmeth telling the truth about the threat of a “Divider?” What is it they really want out of their partnership with humanity, and why are they so insistent on bringing all the humans here?

Meanwhile, we catch glimpses of a human explorer on another world, one divided between human-compatible ecosystems and very incompatible systems, with a clearly artificial split that keeps the two apart.

The ending is abrupt, but only because all the pieces have been slowly drifting together such that it’s not clear how they fit until just before the end. 10 pages from the end I was wondering how she was going to resolve it in that much space. Amazingly, it works!

More info at To Each This World.

Canon Camera Connect (app review)

2026-08-11T15:06:57+00:00

★★★☆☆

You won’t be surprised that this app connects to Canon cameras.

I have a PowerShot SX710HS that I like to take along on hikes and nature walks because it’s still small enough for a wrist strap or pocket, but has an actual zoom lens which makes it much better than a phone for taking photos of birds and other wildlife. As long as I remember to start a location trace before I set foot on the trail, this app will use that trace when I’m done to add location data to the photos I’ve taken. (And that makes it simpler to add them to iNaturalist.)

It used to have a really narrow scope:

Record GPS and attach it to the camera’s photos.
Transfer photos direction to the phone.
Use the phone as a remote control for the camera.

It still does those things, but Canon has added some online services, and now the app requires a cloud login to function. Worse, at least on Android, the login process requires Google Chrome specifically. Not Android WebView, not your default web browser, but Chrome. I actually had to install Chrome on my deGoogled /e/OS phone last week so I could set this up!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that you can still opt out of data collection during setup, which is nice.

I also had to completely wipe my camera’s network settings in order to pair it with that new phone. I’m not sure whether that’s a problem with the app or the camera, but it’s not the first time I’ve had to reset them.

Some cameras connect over WiFi, others over Bluetooth. Mine used to be able to trigger a connection using an NFC tap, but the app doesn’t support that anymore. I also haven’t been able to get the camera and phone talking across a common WiFi network since the previous time I reset the camera’s network config. I used to be able to connect it to my home network or even to a cafe’s WiFi and send locations to the camera or photos to the phone, but since then I’ve only managed to get it to work with the camera as a hotspot.

It’s just slow and clumsy to start the camera’s hotspot, connect the phone to the hotspot, tell the phone to stay connected to the network despite the lack of internet access, launch the app, and tap Connect…especially when compared to the old method of tapping the camera against the phone and waiting a couple of seconds.

At least it still works.

More info at Canon Camera Connect. Available from Android Play Store, Apple App Store.

Eulogy for the Pixel 5 (phone review)

2026-08-11T02:54:00+00:00

★★★★★

I’m tired of replacing devices that still work fine for my use cases. So I stuck with my Google Pixel 5 for, well, longer than was probably advisable, since Android system updates were discontinued after only 3 years. To give you an idea of how long I’ve had this phone, when I went to the carrier to activate it, we stayed outside, because COVID-19 protocols meant they couldn’t have customers inside the store.

So yeah, I used the Pixel 5 from fall 2020 all the way through summer 2026. It’s a good size for reading, holding in one hand, or putting in my pocket. The display’s bright (but not diagonally polarized like the Galaxy S4), the touchscreen’s responsive, and it still handled (almost) everything I threw at it as late as 2026.

I can’t think of anything that really slowed it down that wasn’t either network latency or an application problem, until toward the end when it started overheating more often. It didn’t start running low on storage until near the end, either.

Camera

The camera’s better than any of the phones I had in the 2010s. It has decent post-processing for low-light and night photos, seamlessly shifts between the regular and wide-angle lenses, and its machine learning is old enough that it doesn’t use today’s “AI” to hallucinate features, or paste in an image of the moon, or transform one bird into another and mess up iNaturalist observations. It might not capture everything in front of the lens, but at least it was capturing only what was in front of the lens. (iNat now has guidelines for flagging generated or misleadingly edited) photos.)

Slowing Down

After around 5 years (still more than Google was willing to support it), it got worse in ~~two~~ a few specific ways:

The battery runs out faster and runs hotter (which occasionally triggers performance throttling).
Some apps need enough memory now that I can’t just switch away and switch back.
Eventually Nextcloud stopped reliably auto-uploading photos, which I assumed was a new bug in the app or a problem with the server…but it’s working correctly on the new phone. So now I think it was another symptom of the themal throttling.
The proximity sensor that locks the screen when you lift the phone to your ear during a call stopped working reliably. It would lock the screen, but it wouldn’t always unlock it, which meant I couldn’t get back to a keypad for menus, or switch to speaker, etc. By the time the battery went, it was affecting almost every single call.

That second one got really annoying when I wanted to combine Pokémon Go, mapping for OpenStreetMap, and collecting observations for iNaturalist. I used to be able to just switch between PoGo, StreetComplete and the camera as I walked around. Sometimes with the Canon camera app or Vespucci (or both!) recording GPS traces in the background. Eventually it got to the point where I’d close everything except PoGo, switch to the camera to take a single photo, then close the camera and switch back…and it was a 50/50 chance whether it would have already unloaded the game in those 3 seconds.

The End

Toward the end of July I noticed that the phone was running even hotter than usual. I didn’t notice that the battery was swelling until last week, when it pushed against the back of the display and a bright line appeared onscreen. I turned it off and hastily pressed another phone into service. Yesterday, after ensuring that everything on the new phone was working properly, I wiped the Pixel 5.

In theory I could buy a replacement battery from iFixit or take it to a repair shop. But 6 years is a long time for a phone, and it wouldn’t fix the RAM problem. I’m not sure at this point what I’d want to use it for anyway. LineageOS still runs on it, but PostmarketOS doesn’t boot.

Or it may just be time to take the battery (still wrapped in phone hardware) to the fire station for proper disposal.

The Prestige (movie review)

2026-08-10T03:47:20+00:00

★★★★★

I remembered The Prestige was good. I’d forotten just how good a movie it is. By now we’re all used to Christopher Nolan playing with time and narrative structure, and he uses it to great effect here not just for thematic connections, but narrative twists and revelations as the two rival magicians undermine each other on multiple levels. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are both charismatic enough that you want to cheer them on, and cruel enough that you want them both to lose.

And even when you know Borden’s secret from the beginning, it’s fascinating to watch the misdirections play out.

Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?

2026-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

My wife and I recently* rewatched all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and caught all the episodes we’d each missed the first time through. I was surprised to find Les Misérables featuring prominently in a fifth-season episode, “For the Uniform.”

Captain Sisko is pursuing a defector from Starfleet who joined the Maquis (an ad-hoc militia of mostly humans from planets that had been disputed between the Federation and the Cardassians, and ceded to Cardassia as part of a treaty). He’s always one step ahead, and at one point sends Sisko a (digital) copy of Les Misérables with a note to pay particular attention to Inspector Javert.

Somehow Sisko has time to re-read it between missions. (He says he’d read it before, so maybe he was just skimming this time through?) He zeroes in on:

Jean Valjean is the hero, pursued by the authorities for a minor offense despite spending his life sacrificing himself to help people.
Javert’s inflexibility is what eventually kills him.
For Javert, this one’s personal.
Eddington sees himself as Jean Valjean, and Sisko as Inspector Javert.

Rebellion

The Maquis storyline is one of the places Star Trek gets into morally gray territory: Yes, the Federation let these people down and basically gave them to choice to leave their homes or live under Cardassian rule. But is armed rebellion the right solution, or the wrong one? Are the Maquis just protecting their homes, or are they putting a fragile peace at risk?

That makes it odd that someone would latch onto Les Misérables, because there is very little ambiguity as far as Hugo is concerned. Characters make both good and bad choices, and sometimes those choices are hard to make, but the narrative is very clear on which is which.

DS9 also treats the Maquis different from the Bajoran occupation. The disputed worlds mainly had been colonized over a few decades, and were ceded by treaty. Bajor was an established homeworld with thousands of years of culture behind them when the Cardassians invaded and brutally exploited them. Armed rebellion and outright terrorism is more or less universally accepted (on Bajor, at least) as what the Bajorans had to do. It’s the specific actions taken by the resistance, the choices made within that rebellion, that were often murky and that the survivors are still reckoning with.

Heroes and Villains

Sisko concedes that perhaps he has let it get too personal. Eddington didn’t just betray Starfleet, he betrayed his captain. But what else can he take from this?

He realizes he needs to look not at what Les Misérables meant to Victor Hugo or to himself, but what it meant to Eddington. Eddington sees the current conflict in simple terms: he’s the hero, and Sisko’s the villain. Sisko decides he needs to act like a villain in order to get Eddington to make a heroic sacrifice.

It’s an unsettling step on the path that leads to (and through) “In the Pale Moonlight.” Sisko takes a drastic action, and even Worf is taken aback. It’s not something Javert would have done, because Javert always follows the rules. But it’s no worse than what Eddington has been doing, convinced he’s the hero, and it does convince him to turn himself in.

Legacy

There is apparently at least one more Les Misérables reference in Star Trek canon: According to Memory Alpha, a later episode of Voyager shows the name of Chakotay’s Maquis ship as…the Val Jean.

Removing a Hybrid MBR from a GUID-Partitioned Disk

2026-08-07T19:49:20+00:00

Today I learned about hybrid MBR/GUID partition tables, where the GPT (not that kind) on a disk is duplicated in an MBR table for compatibility purposes. Those reasons are probably outdated, unless you’re running a really old operating system, because GUID partitions have been around a very long time now.

Fun fact 1: This means a disk can have an MBR pointing to a partition that MBR doesn’t support, like a multi-terabyte filesystem!

Fun fact 2: If Windows sees an MBR, it doesn’t bother with the GUID table, and it insists that partition is invalid! (Yes, even if you specifically formatted it with exFAT so Windows could read it.)

macOS at least used to automatically create these when adding FAT filesystems, and if it still does, that probably explains how this external drive ended up with the hybrid MBR on it. Though if it does so when creating a >2TB system, I’d consider that a bug.

Repair by Removing the Extra MBR

Fortunately, it turned out to be easy to fix using the directions in this SuperUser post from 2012, because we don’t need the duplicate MBR for anything here in 2026.

We used gdisk to create a new protective MBR table, leaving the GUID table unchanged. It fixed the problem and took less than a minute. We didn’t even have to jump through hoops to install it since we had a Fedora box handy and installing was just a matter of dnf install gdisk.

Here’s what gdisk’s author suggested for converting the hybrid MBR disk to a standard GPT disk:

Download GPT fdisk from its Sourceforge page and install it. (Versions are available for Linux, OS X, and Windows. I’ll assume you’ll do this from OS X.) Alternatively, you could run it from a Linux emergency disc like Parted Magic. [KV Note: If you have a Linux system already, check whether gdisk or gptdisk is available directly from your distro’s package manager.]

Launch gdisk on your disk by typing sudo gdisk /dev/disk1 in a Terminal window. (Change the device identifier if it’s not as you presented earlier or if you use another OS for the job.)

Type p to view the partition table to verify you’re working on the correct disk. If not, type q to quit without saving your changes and try again with another device.

Type x to enter the experts’ menu.

Type n to create a fresh protective MBR. Note that gdisk won’t confirm a change; it’ll just show you a new experts’ prompt.

Type w to save your changes. You’ll be asked to confirm this action. Do so.

With any luck this will fix the problem. If it doesn’t, though, you can use gdisk’s v option (on any menu) to have gdisk look for partition table problems. It can fix some minor problems automatically, but other times you’ll need to make explicit changes. See the GPT fdisk documentation on GPT repairs for details.

I also looked up what a protective MBR is: On a regular GUID-partitioned disk, a protective MBR covers the whole disk to prevent older tools that don’t know about GPTs from clobbering the real partition table.

Where to Put Your Permalink

2026-08-07T04:51:07+00:00

On the Blaugust Discord, UltrViolet suggested that bloggers link their post titles to the permalinks so that it’s easy to just right-click, “Copy Link as Markdown,” and get a formatted link with the correct title. (I’ve noticed Orion includes this in its context menu, and there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that add it.)

I’ve been using the publication date in the post footer as the permalink on all the 11ty-generated parts of my site since I first converted the Les Mis blog back in 2021. But I can’t remember why I made that decision. I’m 99% certain every WordPress theme I’ve used has linked the title (even this one, which links from the timestamp too). It wasn’t an example in eleventy-base-blog either.

My best guess is that I was just implementing the Fediverse’s convention of linking the timestamp to the permalink. But that’s almost certainly because all the Twitterlike services don’t have titles.

But in looking up linking conventions, I went down an interesting rabbit hole about rel="bookmark".

Anyway, it’s an obvious change for better usability, and I’ll be updating my templates ASAP. (Edit: it’s done!)

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

The post Where to Put Your Permalink first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

What is rel="bookmark"?

2026-08-07T04:50:09+00:00

While looking for linking conventions regarding permalink locations, I found a reference on Wikipedia to <a rel="bookmark" href="..."> being used for permalinks. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed or used that. I didn’t find any mentions of people actually using it that way.

Mostly I found secondhand references to other references to the HTML spec (yes, it’s official!), which has this clear as mud description:

The bookmark keyword may be used with a and area elements. This keyword creates a hyperlink.

The bookmark keyword gives a permalink for the nearest ancestor article element of the linking element in question, or of the section the linking element is most closely associated with, if there are no ancestor article elements.

So, should I use this on the permalink, well, link on my post, or not? Should I use it only on multi-post pages like tag/category archives? Or in a table of contents?

The best reference I found, rel="bookmark" also does not mean what you think it means is more clear: It should go anywhere you would link to a permalink from the same material. So:

Single blog post on a page, linking to itself? Yes!
Time or category archive pages, with complete posts or significant chunks of them, linking to each individual post’s page? Yes!
Table of contents listing just titles and summaries? NO!
Long page with multiple posts, where the permanent versions of those posts are on that same page, each with a permalink pointing to that section on that page? Yes!

The same article also points out that it’s effectively obsolete, since just about everyone uses permalinks now, but hardly anyone puts rel="bookmark".

I decided to add it when I updated my templates, because why not?

Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence

2026-08-06T04:51:07+00:00

Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more.

It’s one thing when the newer model really is that much better. “All About the Pentiums” exaggerated it, but computer hardware in the 1990s really was improving by leaps and bounds. (And the software was devouring those performance gains, both in demanding more resources, and being less efficient as programmers were told to optimize for their own time, not for disk space or RAM.) That eventually settled out around the time smartphones and cloud computing started taking off, which is why I was able to run a 2012 model CPU all the way through 2024. A faster PC would have been nice, but I didn’t need one yet.

As I recall the tech industry freaked out when demand for new PCs dropped. There was probably a rash of “Millennials are killing computers!” articles.

But smartphones were going through the same kind of rapid improvement. You could easily justify buying a new phone after only two years: it was a lot faster, had a better display, had a better camera and more storage, and so on. And the carriers were happy to hand you a “free” new device to keep you on their service. Heck, if you really wanted (and could afford) to buy a new phone every year, you could make a case for it.

In that environment, you could kind of accept a company only offering 2-3 years of support for their phones.

Eventually that settled out too, and it takes longer for new phones to really be worth the upgrade. Of course the industry has tried to keep the pace going. If the hardware still works, and it’s still able to run the apps people want to use, there’s no good reason for the company to stop supporting it after only three. Especially with something whose main purpose is to be constantly connected to the Internet.

I have an Android phone from 2020 and a tablet from 2019. The tablet still works fine. (It’s great for digital comics, or PDFs that are pre-formatted for 8.5×11″ pages.) The phone worked until two days ago. (Technically it still does, but I don’t want to overload the already-swollen battery.) But they’re both unsupported. Not because the hardware has failed (up until Monday). Not, like the Poke3, because they can’t handle today’s apps. Simply because Google and Samsung don’t want to provide updates anymore. Not even bugfixes. Not even security fixes.

It’s maddening.

Especially with prices on new electronics skyrocketing due to the AI datacenter-driven RAMpocalypse.

There are many things I dislike about Microsoft, but I appreciate that they finally realized that a large chunk of their customer base can’t or won’t upgrade their hardware just to install Windows 11, no matter how they try to convince us, and has extended Windows 10 support twice with minimal hoops to jump through.

The Fairphone 4 (2021) that I pressed into service to replace the dying Pixel 5 (2020) is more or less comparable in terms of speed. I still need to experiment with the camera. But it’s still supported through 2028, meaning it’s safer to use online. Which, again, is what cell phones are for.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

The post Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

FairEmail (app review)

2026-08-05T05:24:47+00:00

★★★★☆

An 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.

It’s also got cool features like telling you whether it can confirm a message actually came from its purported source (using SPF, DKIM, DMARC). And it can do encrypted messages with OpenPGP or S/MIME, though I haven’t tried it.

The main downside is that it’s cluttered: the folder view, and especially the settings and options. It’s kind of like the old days of Linux applications where you could configure just about everything, but you had to go through 25 pages of settings to find it. Fortunately you don’t have to change settings very often!

I ran it in parallel with K-9 Mail for a while, and ultimately decided to stick with K-9 for my main accounts. If I’d had more use for the additional features in FairEmail, I might have switched. Though I did keep some of my less-used alts on FairEmail. And, when I had to switch phones in a hurry yesterday I seriously considered switching email apps while I was at it, before deciding not to.

More info at FairEmail. Available from Google Play, F-Droid.

First the Migraine, Then the Headache

2026-08-04T05:29:40+00:00

I had a migraine this morning that really threw me for a loop. Then I spent the afternoon and evening dealing with a different kind of headache: getting my phone number transferred to a new(ish) phone.

We picked up a Fairphone 4 a few years ago as sort of a hedge in case the electronics industry and/or tariffs and/or international trade went bonkers and one of our phones died. (We weren’t expecting all three.) The teenager used it for a bit before we bought him a phone that was closer to what he actually wanted to use. So the Fairphone returned to the back bench, so to speak.

Today, a bright vertical magenta line appeared on my Pixel 5’s screen. I’d noticed it was running hot lately, and when I pulled it out of the case, sure enough it had started bulging.

I know it’s old. I’ve been trying to get as much use out of it as I can, which, well, I guess I have.

(Edit: added photo)

I do not like spicy pillows, Sam I Am.

So I reset the Fairphone and started setting up the most important apps: authenticator, password manager, stuff like that. And I set about unlocking the SIM protection on my phone number and got ready to call customer service.

I knew from experience that the Fairphone 4 works fine on T-Mobile’s US network, but their apps don’t know how to activate the e-sim. So I was prepared to talk someone through.

But because we’d been swapping back and forth between phones, the sim was still registered as attached to the teen’s number, even though the number is actually pointing to his current phone. It took over two hours (at least 45 minutes of that on hold) and three levels of escalation to first figure out that’s what the problem was, and then find someone with the access to fix it.

They did finally get it all sorted out, but it was not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.

(And when I let the old phone cool off, the screen went back to normal, though it’s still bulging.)

And to top it off, Nextcloud’s photo uploading has stopped working reliably, so I have to go through the last couple months of photos and make sure I have everything copied over. I went through some of them tonight, and need to get the rest…soon.

For now, I’ve turned the old phone off completely overnight.

Once I’ve got the photos transferred, I should figure out whether it’s worth repurposing the device with a new battery or just running it without one. And then dispose of the fire hazard.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

The post First the Migraine, Then the Headache first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings