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
- 7234
- Followed by
- 455
- Following
- 295
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!
uspol
Rubio: "There will be no refuge for violent extremists who wage war on our civilization and plot to undermine law and order, destroy critical infrastructure, assault political opponents, or conspire to conceal their crimes from authorities"
https://reason.com/2026/08/27/rubio-uses-terrorism-law-to-ban-secure-email-service/
Weirdly, that's a perfect description of the Trump administration.
Nice! #LibreWolf is now shipping with a code signature on macOS and it's been un-deprecated on HomeBrew just in time for the cask to stay available!
So I did manage to catch the lunar eclipse, despite the clouds!
https://notes.kvibber.com/@kelson_photos/statuses/01M13AX2WB3231V9HQYHNKGVD3
Edit: Expanded on my blog. https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/08/eclipse-vs-gloom/
Great, so our government is going after communications infrastructure now with their bullshit claim that opposing fascism or disagreeing with an economic system is somehow terrorism.
"You Are Not An Idiot for Believing Things Can Get Better," says the headline on a login-walled article on Substack, the publishing platform that publicizes the racists and transphobes who use it and has been known to push literal nazi content to people's phones.
I agree with the headline, but I don't think this was a good place to put the article, and I'm not signing back up with Substack just to read it, so I have no idea whether the article is actually helpful or not. As it is, it's a lead generator.
New book review on my website!
The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova
★★★★☆
An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in the rest of us. Roughly structured around different phases of a con, and illustrated with real cases, some historical and others based on direct interviews.
https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/confidence-game/
#psychology #psychopathy #crime #scam #fraud #books #review
Questions for other old-timers who might remember the heyday of #Gopher better than I do.
Were there any common/popular naming conventions? Like, were they 90% gopher.example.com, like every website was (and so many still are) www.example.com?
What dedicated gopher clients were around at the time? I know I used something that wasn't also a web browser, but I can't remember what.
"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.
