Kelson Vibber: New Posts

Samsung Chromebook 3 (laptop review)

2026-07-09T02:01:12+00:00

★☆☆☆☆

I bought this laptop in the late 2010s, mainly for travel, or to have as a spare I could use when someone else was using the good laptop.

It was terrible.

A lot of computers start out great, or at least good, and then decay over time as hardware breaks down, connectors and batteries wear out, and software requirements balloon to exceed what they can handle. This was not one of those devices.

Some devices aren’t that great, but there’s some redeeming feature about them and you love them anyway, until entropy comes knocking and you reluctantly put them out to pasture. This was not one of those devices either.

Substandard Hardware

The display was the kind of LCD where you can see the grid between pixels. The backlight was too bright, and inconsistent across the surface of the screen. The keyboard was uncomfortable and unreliable, the trackpad was clunky (and also unreliable), and the chassis always felt like it was about to fall apart. And it was slow, even by the standards of its time.

System Capabilities

Even worse, it ran ChromeOS.

I mean, I’m sort of kidding there, but I’m also not. It was usable for web apps like Gmail and Google Docs, and there were Chrome apps for things like SSHing into another system. And there was some local file storage that synced with Google Drive for offline use. ChromeOS had some Android app support by then, and I was kind of surprised that Dropbox and a VPN worked, but for the most part, Android apps ran better on my phone anyway. I was briefly amused that I could get Instagram to run on the Chromebook, but why bother?

None of us really wanted to use it, even when it reached EOL and I installed a real Linux distribution. PeppermintOS was minimal enough that the environment ran okay, but that couldn’t solve the physical problems.

It was almost always better to just use an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard.

Fate

I think I eventually just took it to an e-waste collection. Though I can’t remember for sure.

If it turns up in the garage or the back of a closet, I might see if it still powers up and put PostmarketOS on it just for kicks. I don’t see it in their compatibility list, either by name or board codename (celes), but if I could install a general-purpose distro a few years ago, I should be able to install PM or upstream Alpine Linux.

It might make a decent Writer Deck, especially if set up with a UI that doesn’t use the trackpad. Then again, the keyboard might be frustrating enough to counteract the lack of distractions.

More info at Samsung Chromebook 3.

PineTab 2 (tablet review)

2026-07-08T05:29:09+00:00

★★★½☆

The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it is a hyper-mobile Linux tablet that can run desktop and command-line apps natively, with a touchscreen and an optional physical keyboard, for a budget price.

As a touchscreen tablet, it should be running Plasma Mobile (preinstalled) or Phosh, but they’re both slow enough to be frustrating. So I usually run it with LXQt, which is lightweight enough to stay out of the way even though it’s a desktop environment. Of course that limits its usefulness as a tablet.

The touchscreen is okay. There’s no fancy drawing stylus like the Surface Pen or Apple Pencil, but you can use a generic stylus. There are two USB-C ports, one for data and one for power. Three years on, I can get an average of 5 hours of use out of a full charge, and the battery is still holding onto its charge when I turn it off completely.

Writing

The keyboard case is a bit bulky, but it has a decent keyboard and trackpad. Mine has a flaky “D” key, so if you see a word on my website that’s missing a d, chances are I wrote it on here and didn’t catch the typo.

And yes, I’m writing this review on the tablet, using the keyboard case! It turns out one of the things it’s well-suited for is writing: Text editing doesn’t take that much power, and it connects natively to Nextcloud for my documents and drafts, and it’s easy to run git and 11ty when writing for my website. Featherpad’s fast, Sublime Text is snappy once it’s launched, and even LibreOffice runs well enough once it’s started up.

It’s not quite a writer deck because it can run various distractions, but those are slow enough that popping over to social media or wiki-walking is a lot less tempting. (Yay?)

Also: The PineTab can run an Eleventy test build, but it’s a lot slower than running on my desktop, or even on my VPS. I can build this Reviews site on my VPS in about 10 seconds. It takes several minutes on here. It’s slow enough that if I’ve got a network connection, I’ll run the build on the VPS instead, and mount the folder via SFTP so I can use a local editor!

System

The PineTab2 ships with Arch Linux for ARM, by way of Danctnix’s drivers for Pine64’s hardware. I’ve had surprisingly little actually break at the system level, despite the reputation rolling releases have, so I’ve stayed with Arch instead of trying any of the other distros that can run on it. This way I can at least rely on having the drivers available while they’re still not in the upstream kernel. One of these days I’ll give PostMarketOS a try.

It did take a lot of adjustments to get things working.

Some of that is because I was an early adopter. WiFi and Bluetooth drivers weren’t ready yet. LXQt didn’t run on Wayland yet. (They are, and it does, now.)

Compatibility and Performance

And some of it was just figuring out what does and doesn’t run usably on this hardware:

Plasma Mobile is really nice, but LXQt is a lot faster.
Web browsers: Falkon is light enough to use, as is Angelfish, while Firefox and Chromium run painfully slow. Dillo runs just fine, of course!
Thunderbird’s reliable for email, if a bit sluggish and lacking in touchscreen support. Geary’s a lot lighter. (I tried KMail again, but as usual it had trouble accessing my account.)
Word processing’s usable, and plaintext editors run well.
Wayland is noticeably faster than Xorg, though LXQt on X is still faster than Plasma on Wayland.
Nextcloud sync has a native Arch package, making it super-easy to set up.
Dropbox doesn’t offer an ARM-compatible Linux client at all.
3D gaming just isn’t going to work. I think I got Minecraft crawling once and it had a framerate around 2.
You can install a programming toolchain and compile software, but as with the Eleventy build, it’s going take a while.

Most Linux software runs on aarch64 these days, but sometimes commercial apps (ex. Dropbox) and third-party packages like Flatpak or AUR don’t bother, especially if they’re targeted at an x86_64-first distro like Arch or Ubuntu.

Comparisons

So, how does it stack up against other devices I’ve used?

Windows Convertible

My Surface Go 2 is faster, lighter, has a nice stylus, and has the best mobile keyboard I’ve ever used. It’s not a gaming powerhouse, but most general apps run just fine on it. The model is three years older (2020) but it runs Windows 10 faster than the PineTab2 runs Linux. (Windows 11 eliminates the gap, so, um, yay?)

Despite that, I still use the PineTab2 more often. Partly because the Surface is a shared family device, partly because I trust Linux more than Windows to actually be “my” computer, and partly because after years of running Linux as my primary OS, I just like it better than Windows. When the extra year of Windows 10 support runs out, I’ll probably put Linux on the Surface too, and won’t that be interesting to compare?

Android Tablets

I still use an older Galaxy Tab S4 (2018) from time to time. It’s really good for reading digital comics, and it’s also faster than the PineTab2 at everyday tasks like web browsing. (Sadly, Samsung has sacrificed its system updates at the altar of planned obsolescence.)

The PineTab2 is, however, a lot faster than the old Nexus 7 (much as I loved it at the time).

iPad

Not even in the same league.

Chromebook

The PineTab2 is better in every way than the Samsung Chromebook 3 I picked up in the late 2010s. That laptop was terrible.

More info at PineTab 2.

Hidden Swing Trail (hiking review)

2026-06-26T14:54:45+00:00

★★★★☆

An unsigned hike along the coastal side of the hills on the west side of the Palos Verdes peninsula. A lot of it is just on the edge between trees and chaparral. In the morning there’s shade along most of the upper part of the trail. There isn’t much shade along the lower part, and probably not along the upper part in the afternoon. Nice views of the ocean and Bluff Cove. In a few spots, it cuts across narrow gullies that look like there might be narrow streams/waterfalls during the rainy season.

And yes, there is a swing someone made from an old skateboard.

There are stretches that have eroded, so step carefully, and there are steep sections (mostly close to the upper end) and tree roots. It’s very much not suitable for wheelchairs or anyone with limited mobility. Though I did see some kids on mountain bikes.

The upper end of the trail is in a very expensive-looking residential neighborhood, but there’s street parking. The lower end is at Palos Verdes Drive West, a bit south of the Bluff Cove parking area, though it’s less well-marked. If you start at the lower end, you’ll be coming back downhill. If you start at the upper end, you’ll be coming back uphill and finishing with the steepest part.

Start at the lower end. And bring water.

It’s part of a network of trails around the peninsula. There’s a 3-way fork with two paths going upward (one east, turning northward, and one south) and one going downward (west, turning southward). If you’ve started from the top, you’ll want to turn right/down/west at that fork to get to the swing. Left/up/south will eventually come back down to the same spot at PV Drive where the swing trail ends, and you can come back up that path. If you start at the bottom, you’ll want to go left/up/east to get to the upper end of the trail, or right/up/south to loop back to where you started.

More info at Hidden Swing Trail.

Tehanu (book review)

2026-06-18T02:47:51+00:00

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

There’s a sharp break between the first three Earthsea books and the later ones. The original trilogy had been a classic of young-adult high fantasy for almost 20 years before Le Guin returned to the world with a more grown-up perspective. The first three books can be read as heroic adventures. This one’s about the ordinary people, the ones caught underfoot when wizards and heroes and villains fight against each other.

And while there are still big fantastic questions like the connection between humans and dragons, it delves into weightier but more personal issues like child abuse, disability, misogyny and cruelty.

A Life More Ordinary

Tehanu picks up Tenar’s story 25 years after she left Atuan with Ged. She’s since walked away from the life of priestesses, mages and kings, and lived an ordinary woman’s life as a farmer on Gont, marrying, raising children, widowed, and as the story begins, adopting an abused, scarred child.

And it picks up Ged’s story a few hours after he left Roke on the back of a dragon, his magic spent closing the hole in the world, as he has to learn how to carry on as an ordinary man.

What follows is a character-driven drama that interplays with philosophical conversations. What is a woman’s magic vs. a man’s magic? Why are witches considered weaker (and more wicked) than their more-respected sorceror counterparts? And what is a man’s magic compared to the man himself? Ged has lost his magic, yes, but he still tends to find himself in the right place at the right time to do what is needful, though he has fewer options than he did before. And while he grew up surrounded by men, and still sees power as a male thing, he hasn’t absorbed the casual sexism of the villagers or the utter disdain of wizards like Aspen of Re Albi.

The sexism among mages in particular is something the author comes back to more thoroughly in “Dragonfly,” ultimately tracing its origins in “The Finder” (both stories in Tales of Earthsea).

From Burned to Burning

And then there’s Therru. Tenar is the one to adopt her precisely because she doesn’t believe in the just-world fallacy. She’s lived next to actual evil powers, and she knows better than anyone on Gont that who you are and what happens to you are not the same thing. Everyone around them sees Therru’s scars, or frets about what kind of magic potential she has, but Tenar is just trying to raise a traumatized child as best as she can.

Watching Therru come out of her shell is a joy, and seeing her close up again when her abusive former family catches up to her hurts. One of the best moments of the book is when we finally see through her point of view: how she sees her adoptive family, how she sees magic and other wizards…and of course how she sees dragons.

The end is a bit abrupt, but that’s a consequence of the perspective: As a middle-aged couple with no title and no magic, Ged and Tenar can deal with mundane issues like burglars and thieves on the road, but they’re utterly defenseless against a malicious wizard who still has his power.

Then again, Aspen is not a dragonlord.

Duality

By this time Le Guin was much more focused on duality than when she wrote the earlier books, and considering that the first one is about someone coming to terms with his shadow, that says something. There are a lot of dualities in this story: Human/dragon, male/female, reputable people who are horrible in private and disreputable people with good hearts…

The Break

It probably hit differently for people who read the trilogy in the early 1970s and eagerly picked up Tehanu, only to find it wasn’t what they were expecting. I read it the first time when it was new, but I’d only read the trilogy a year or two earlier. To me, Earthsea was still alive and changeable, not something that had solidified when I was younger, and it was just the next chapter.

I can sort of understand readers who didn’t want Tenar to walk away from the world of heroes, though that choice is hinted at as early as within the second book. And I can sort of understand readers who didn’t want to read about Ged trying to carry on as a goatherd after using up all his magic.

Sort of.

But I wonder how much overlap there is with the readers who thought The Tombs of Atuan was Ged’s story and not Tenar’s, and thought it odd that “the main character” didn’t show up for half the book.

Reading Prerequisites?

Responding to a question about whether you need to read the earlier books first:

I don’t think it would have the same impact read entirely on its own. There’s a lot about Tenar’s past especially that’s unstated or understated (being at home in the dark, for instance), and if you haven’t read at least The Tombs of Atuan, it’s hard to pick up some of it from context.

Knowing A Wizard of Earthsea also adds depth to the connection between Sparrowhawk and Ogion, and the danger he unleashed in Ogion’s house as a reckless apprentice, though it’s probably easier to infer since it aligns with more standard fantasy tropes.

You don’t need to have read The Farthest Shore for this one. It’s an epic quest going on at the same time as the first few chapters of Tehanu, and the outcome of that quest drives a lot of the second half of this book, but because it’s still recent for the characters, the key points are brought up explicitly and you can treat it as backstory.

The original trilogy (1968-1972) also takes the culture’s misogyny at face value. Looking back at that is a large part of what prompted Le Guin to return to the world so she could unpack and interrogate it here (1990).

More info at Tehanu.

Free Shavocado is Back

2026-06-13T02:54:25+00:00

Back in 2016, a Vine (remember those?) by “Gasoleen” immortalized the “FR E SH A VOCA DO” sign at a Torrance Del Taco as “Free sha-VA-ca-doo.” I hadn’t seen the video, but I had watched the sign’s letters drift apart over a few months. They even updated the logo without fixing the spacing…until they changed it to say “FREE SHAVOCADO” ASK INSIDE for the summer. That’s when I took a photo of it myself, and discovered that the Free Shavocado tag already existed on Tumblr.

I guess someone’s nostalgic for the meme, because today, roughly 10 years later, the sign once again says “FRE SH A VOCA DO.”

They put it on the opposite side this time. On the side visible in both the meme and my own older photo, they’ve put a new variation: “FRE SH A GUACA MOLE.”

Looking back at the original post, I realize I should’ve crossed the street to match the original angle (and get a clearer shot) on this one. At least I got a clear photo of the returning classic!

The post Free Shavocado is Back first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Pokédrones

2026-06-12T19:40:32+00:00

Back in December 2024, Niantic posted about a large geospacial model they were building using data from Pokémon Go.

That led to a lot of online talk, with takes ranging from:

Well yeah, that’s what we figured they were doing with the “Scan a Pokéstop to build better AR models” feature.
to
Watch out! Niantic is building a global AR model using every image that passes in front of your phone’s camera!

I was in the “of course that’s what it’s for” camp. When the game rolled out the Pokéstop scanning feature a few years earlier, it seemed obvious that it was training 3D machine vision, like how all the “pick the squares with bicycles” CAPTCHAs are obviously training for self-driving cars. I figured there was a good chance someone would use it for some harmful purpose or another, probably surveillance, so I skipped those tasks.

Anyway, after a week or so, Niantic updated the article to clarify* that it was using the deliberate Pokéstop scans in public places for Pokémon Playground, not any of the other AR features like taking a photo of your buddy in the kitchen.

This made sense, because if they were using that data, it would have eventually gotten better at placing a Pokémon in my kitchen. (The floor’s a grid. You’d think that would help, but noooo….)

Drones (And not just Beedrils or Combees)

Those scans are back in the news, because as DroneXL reports, that geospatial model is being used for camera-based drone navigation.

Including military drones.

Because of course everything has to be weaponized. Allegedly even Pixar’s RenderMan.

Admittedly, GPS itself started as a military technology long before it became civilian infrastructure. Military and civilian tech really do just have a revolving door between them, don’t they?

Training Data

Among other sources, DroneXL cites a Dutch-language article at Trouw, who asked the defense contractor (Vantor) directly whether it uses Pokémon Go data: Vantor initially said no, but later walked back any guarantee. Niantic Spatial, however, has stated that the Pokéstop scans were used to train an “early version” of their model. That means the data (or weights produced from it) is still in there, just blended so much by training process that it can’t be identified anymore.

Kind of like you probably couldn’t confirm my old blog posts are in the training data for an LLM by looking at the LLM weights, but you can find pages from hyperborea.org in Common Crawl data, and assume any model trained on Common Crawl still has it in there somewhere.

Maybe scans made since Scopely (US-based, Saudi owned) bought Niantic’s gaming division last year haven’t gone into the map built by Niantic Spatial (still independent), so Vantor technically isn’t using current player data. Or maybe Niantic Games continued passing scans along to Niantic Spatial for a while, under the separate TOS, and Vantor’s spokesperson just hadn’t made the connection.

Quietly Dropped

Curiously, the Pokéstop scanning task I’d left in my list for years just disappeared a few days ago.

At first I deleted the tasks as I got them, but every time I scanned an eligible stop it would add a new one if I didn’t have one in my list. So after a while I just left one there and ignored it like an ad banner.

It turns out Pokémon Go discontinued the features on June 2, just three days before the Trouw article was published. (New tasks stopped appearing that day, and it took a few days for old tasks to disappear.)

Coincidence? Maybe. But the timing’s certainly suspicious.

Notes

* Before Niantic published their update, I e-mailed them asking for clarification. It took them over a month, but they did eventually reply:

Hi Trainer, we appreciate your patience. Thanks for your questions about AR Mode and our Privacy Policy. I’ve shared some additional information below:

For Pokémon GO, only AR scans from the PokéStop Scanning feature will contribute to the development of the Large Geospatial Model. As noted in the PokéStop Scanning Help Article (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/2519-scanning-a-pokestop/): information gathered during PokéStop Scanning allows Niantic to generate accurate, dynamic 3-D maps of real-world objects and their relative locations, and help devices understand the surroundings in AR real-time. As noted in the Editor’s note to the blog post, merely playing the game does not train an AI model.

When using AR or AR+ mode, we do not store your photos on our servers. For PokéStop Scanning, once a PokéStop scan is voluntarily uploaded, the video recording and associated camera data is retained on our servers in accordance with our data retention policies. For more information please see our Privacy Policy (https://nianticlabs.com/privacy).

The post Pokédrones first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

/dev/null: Permission denied on Alpine Linux

2026-06-10T19:34:35+00:00

I upgraded two virtual machines to Alpine Linux 3.24 last night. One worked perfectly. The other came back up after reboot, but the services it runs didn’t start up (reminder to self: this is why you don’t run upgrades late at night), and when I logged in (fortunately SSH was still working!) I saw that some of the scripts were throwing errors like this:

 -ash: can't create /dev/null: Permission denied

Wait, what?

Sure enough:

ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw----    1 root     root        1,   3 Jun 10 10:52 /dev/null

The obvious solution was to fix the permissions on /dev/null:

doas chmod a+rw /dev/null

But that didn’t persist when I rebooted, because devtmpfs isn’t on disk, it’s in memory. Besides, I needed to check for other devices that might have broken permissions. I re-ran the upgrade, followed by repair…

doas apk upgrade --available
doas apk fix --directory-permissions
doas apk fix -x

But that didn’t work either. Because /dev isn’t built from packages, it’s built by a device manager. I found a bunch of forum and Stack Exchange posts on how to fix the problem in udev on distros like Arch or Gentoo, but Alpine doesn’t use udev, so none of those suggestions were even relevant.

The Fix

What did fix the problem was just resetting Alpine’s device manager, in this case mdev:

doas setup-devd mdev

Permissions stayed fixed when I rebooted it again, and everything started up correctly!

I assume doing the same with mdevd or eudev would have worked if a system using one of those broke the same way.

Possible Cause

I’m not sure why one of them broke and the other was fine.

It’s an older VM, and I started it on an older version of Alpine, so it may have been something left over that didn’t break on 3.23, but broke on 3.24.

I also forgot to add --available to the apk upgrade command the first time through, and I don’t remember if I re-ran it before rebooting the first time or after. It may have broken during the reboot with the partial upgrade.

It could be either of those, or something else entirely.

To Vegas and Back

2026-06-10T01:30:19+00:00

The last time I went to Las Vegas was almost 20 years ago, after the last of the big themed resorts were finished and the city was moving onto more generic (but still glitzy) casinos and hotels. (We still have a pair of shot glasses from “Paris.”)

It’s bigger now.

We were only in town for one night last month, to catch a concert by a band that we’d missed when their tour stopped in LA. So we didn’t see much down on the ground, just the views from the taxis that went out to the freeway and back to avoid the traffic along Las Vegas Boulevard. It’s a sprawl of glass and steel now, and the main street was jammed solid.

I think my family drove through Las Vegas, sightseeing along the Strip, on one of our road trips back in the 80s or early 90s. Possibly the one where we stopped for a picnic at Valley of Fire. I wouldn’t try it today. (The picnic, sure, but not driving along the whole Strip. That way lies madness. And possibly road rage.)

There is one exception to the generic skyscrapers of the last couple of decades: The Hard Rock Hotel has taken over the former Mirage and is building a giant guitar-shaped tower in front. I took this photo from across the street, out in front of the Venetian. I hope they put the elevators on the outside where the strings would be.

The Venetian Theater is beautiful inside, but either the acoustics are terrible or the sound designer for this show had no idea what they were doing. Or just didn’t care about those of us up in the (comparatively) cheap seats.

We stayed waaaay off the Strip near the airport (though as it turns out, not as far as South Point) at a plain hotel (Tru by Hilton). No casino, not even a slot machine in the lobby. I was surprised, since the first time we stayed in town even the Holiday Inn (long since demolished) had a casino level. I guess they’ve found there’s a market for travelers who don’t want bells and clinking coins and flashing lights keeping them awake all night. (That’s what the air conditioner was for. Judging by the noise, it had been running continuously since the hotel opened a decade ago. Earplugs helped, even if the ones we picked up looked disturbingly like candy corn.)

High Desert

The desert between Barstow and Vegas, on the other hand, seems emptier. There are only two rest stops, one of which is currently closed for…well, the sign said remodeling, but I suspect they razed everything to the ground and started from scratch. Every so often you’ll pass an abandoned building covered in graffiti, slowly falling apart.

Primm looks OK at first glance as you drive past it, but then you notice how empty the parking lots are, and some of the signs that have fallen into disrepair. Reportedly the mall is down to a single store, and the last hotel/casino was set to shut down until it got a last-minute reprieve in the form of a partnership with Terrible’s. Today.

Even Baker is a shell of its former self (not that it was much to begin with). The giant thermometer is still there (for now), and the Mad Greek restaurant. Alien Fresh Jerky has actually expanded (though we didn’t stop there this time, for various reasons). There’s a new food court attached to a gas station at one end of town, and a Tesla supercharger at the other. The Bun Boy is long gone, along with all three motels. Empty lots and a few vacant buildings dot the frontage road.

Towers of Power

There’s a solar farm just on the California side of the border, visible from the freeway and from Primm. It has one field of photovoltaic panels and three thermal towers, the kind where a bunch of mirrors surrounding the tower track the sun and focus sunlight on a boiler to drive steam turbines and generate electricity.

Those things are bright! Seriously! Light beams from the mirrors converge visibly, and the tower reflects so much sunlight (despite using a bunch of thermal energy) it looks like an ultra-bright beacon. Photos can’t do it justice because, print or video display, they can’t shine enough light directly at your eyes to get the point across. This photo by Aioannides at Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA) is better than anything we could get by pointing a camera out the car window from the freeway, and it still looks flat.

The post To Vegas and Back first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

The Road That Broke the Peninsula

2026-06-03T01:00:52+00:00

Between Google trying to bury its search under an “AI” chat and me moving most most of my website over to a new domain, I’ve been checking to see how well-indexed the old and new pages are at various search engines.

“Marineland of the Pacific” seemed to be a good phrase to test. Marginalia Search still has the old location for my Remembering Marineland (or not) post, but that search also turned up a page with scans of a Marineland ad flyer from 1962.

As someone who’s spent a lot more time hiking the Palos Verdes Peninsula than visiting an ocean theme park that closed when I was a child (not to mention way too much time updating OpenStreetMap), I was immediately drawn to the map…which strangely enough, shows Crenshaw Boulevard running over the hill, down through the Portuguese Bend landslide and connecting to Palos Verdes Drive South along the coast, just east of Wayfarer’s Chapel.

Wait, did Crenshaw actually connect sometime in the past? If so, how?

Today, Crenshaw runs up to the top of the hill and stops just past Crest Road, at Del Cerro Park. A dirt road continues past a locked gate, narrowing to a switchbacked path through the Portuguese Bend Nature Reserve. A landslide below it has been moving slowly for decades, preventing much in the way of construction on the land. Some people bought land and built houses on adjustable stilts so they could level the house every few months.

The first time I checked out the view from Del Cerro back in 2011, I took this photo of the area to the east, where Crenshaw appears on that map.

Over the last few years the land has been sliding faster, and a lot of the area has been closed for safety. Wayfarer’s Chapel has been dismantled to prevent it from flat out collapsing.

It’s no longer possible to connect Crenshaw to the coast.

But had it connected in the past, and been wiped out by the landslide? I went looking for the history, and found some articles that answered my question. I must have read this 2023 LA Times article when it was published, which means I’d forgotten a key detail about Crenshaw Boulevard’s relation to the landslide:

It caused it.

Crenshaw never connected to the coast. An extension was planned, and initial construction reactivated an ancient landslide in 1956, as crews moved enough dirt around to shift the underlying structure out of balance. At the time, the Portuguese Bend section hadn’t moved in roughly 4,800 years. In the 70 years since, it hasn’t really stopped.

If the map was drawn when the park was new, it would have been reasonable to assume that the road would be completed soon enough, and draw it in early. (“It’s finished on the map!”) But the scan shows a 1962 copyright date at the bottom. That’s six years into the landslide, more than enough time to realize the road was never going to be completed and paint over it for the latest printing. That makes me wonder why they hadn’t fixed it by then.

The post The Road That Broke the Peninsula first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Murderbot Season 1 (TV review)

2026-06-01T22:40:26+00:00

★★★★★

I finally cashed in a trial subscription offer for Apple TV and watched the first season of Murderbot. It’s absolutely pitch-perfect.

Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian are the stand-outs as Murderbot, Dr. Mensah and Dr. Gurathin (in part because they have more to do than the others), and Skarsgård absolutely nails the balance between domain competence and utter terror of anything resembling social interaction. The fragments of Sanctuary Moon (starring John Cho!) are hilariously over the top while still fitting thematically.

In case you're not familiar with the premise.

Large swaths of an interstellar human civilization are dominated by massive corporations. SecUnits are cyborgs designed for maintaining security, and they normally have a module that limits their actions and requires them to obey direct orders from their human clients. This one hacked its governor module, but is stuck doing the same job because anything else would reveal that it has free will and get it a one-way trip to an acid bath for recycling.

It copes with its social anxiety by downloading thousands of hours of futuristic soap operas and watching them whenever it's upset or bored. Murderbot just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, combat malware, their own naivete, and corporate malfeasence.

The first season adapts the first novella, All Systems Red, in which Murderbot is outed as a rogue SecUnit to the PreservationAux planetary survey crew that’s been forced to bring it along for insurance reasons. It’s been long enough since I read it that I don’t have a clear sense of how much they changed for the screen, but it rings true. (I think they exaggerated the “hippie”-ness of the crew, though it’s still mostly in contrast to the hyper-capitalist hellscape of the Corporate Rim.)

A minor spoiler about coping mechanisms.

There's a great moment about halfway through the season when Murderbot tries to help Mensah through a panic attack by showing her a scene from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, because that's something that always helps it. SecUnits aren't programmed to deal with psychological danger, only physical, but this one has experience.

The tone is slightly more comedic than the books, but then there’s always been a wry sense of humor running through them even when they’re being serious. Just the contrast between outside events and Murderbot’s inner monologue ensures that. And the satire of corporatism is a constant thread. The last episode is dead serious, though, and it’s emotionally brutal even as it works toward a satisfying, if bittersweet conclusion.

I’ve read all the books (in fact, I was in the middle of the latest one when we started watching), but my wife and teenage son haven’t, and they were both hooked from the first episode. Actually that’s not quite true. When we sat down to watch the second episode, the teenager decided he wasn’t interested after all, but he caught part of either that or the next one, and proceeded to insist on binge-watching the rest in three-episode blocks. (This is the kid who gets distracted halfway through a standard-length TV show even when he wants to watch it.)

I gather they’re still planning out Season 2, and I’m definitely looking forward to it!

Wall! Of! Text!

2026-05-28T19:51:05+00:00

A story’s been making the rounds about a software project that enforced a no-LLM-use policy by using prompt injection to delete itself. An “AI” agent-using coder filed a bug report (understandable), but filled it with a bunch of long-winded, clearly LLM-generated comments.

I looked at those comments. I can’t say I read them, because my eyes started glazing over a couple of paragraphs in. The contrast with the posts by the maintainer and other commenters is…stark.

Though I did notice the bit about how nobody reads the docs, which seems rather telling.

One of the problems with letting an “AI” write for you: If you aren’t reading it, and you assume the person at the other end is just going to summarize it anyway, there’s no motivation to make it readable. And no motivation to think about it and narrow down what’s important. And if you’re rewriting the prompt to focus on what matters most, consider that the prompt would get the idea across more effectively.

The post Wall! Of! Text! first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Forbidden Solitaire (game review)

2026-05-28T14:43:03+00:00

★★★★½

Forbidden Solitaire presents itself as an over-the-top gory horror dungeon crawl from the 1990s where the mechanic is playing card games to fight monsters. But it’s framed as a flashback: you’ve found an old CD-ROM of a forgotten (and rumored to be cursed) video game. As you play through it, your sister sends you messages about how she’s found old news articles, video clips, and more revealing a rash of creepy deaths (all with missing eyes) connected to the game, including its lead developer’s suicide.

It nails the aesthetic of 1990s pixelated gore, fitting right in with the Catacomb Abyss-to-Doom look with a side of The 7th Guest. (That reminds me, I need to dig out that soundtrack again.)

The playing mechanic is fairly simple: each encounter is a new solitaire layout, monsters can lock or alter cards for the worse, and you can use joker cards for various effects like healing, clearing extra cards, reshuffling and so on. It’s easy to pick up the house rules, and fun to play through.

The framing story is suitably creepy, building tension as you learn more of the backstory and piece together what’s really going on with some of the apparent glitches in the dungeon game. Your sister’s texts start out amused (hey, check out this weird thing about the game), but get more and more freaked out as she uncovers more of the lore and you aren’t replying…until you reach the end of the dungeon game and face the real boss battle.

It took about 6 hours to play through over the course of a week.

And I made it out with my eyes intact.

Instagram Targets

2026-05-27T21:07:21+00:00

I remember a brief period shortly after Instagram introduced in-feed advertisements when I was getting mostly travel ads that consisted of well-composed scenic landscapes and cityscapes and sponsored nature photos. Which…well, was fine! They blended in with all the scenic and nature photographers I was following! I almost hit “like” on a few!

Back in 2017, I wasn’t sure whether to be disturbed, or to look at it in terms of XKCD’s idea of constructive spambots. (Mission accomplished? Maybe, but looking back from today, that’s basically what “generative AI” does, and it turns out it’s still disturbing.)

It’s probably the only time I’ve come close to appreciating targeted advertising. It was possible to use just context and not full behavioral surveillance, and it actually surfaced something worth seeing.

That said, I never clicked through to arrange a trip through any of the posts. Apparently, it was ineffective across the board, because as I mentioned, that period was brief. (Targeted advertising doesn’t work as well as its proponents claim, and oh how I wish it hadn’t become the standard method of paying for online services.)

By 2019 I was seeing big box stores and fast food, crackers and cold medicine, movie posters, brand logos and slogans. They weren’t even trying. It was fully Facebook-ified, they were mining as much of my data as they possibly could, and this was the best they could do? Plus, by then they’d also tweaked the feed algorithm to push more ads, more sponsored posts, more allegedly-popular posts instead of the pictures from friends and photographers I wanted to see. In short, it no longer sparked joy.

Instagram had the chance to be like a magazine, with ads that at least align with the content, but the more Facebook tried to monetize it, the more jarring and blatant the ads became, and the more they were based on what Facebook thinks it knows about you instead of trying to fit with your actual interests based on what’s posted by the people you’re following.

That’s around the time I mostly shifted to Pixelfed for casual photo sharing. I cross-posted for a while, but eventually deleted my account after leaving it unused for several years. Since then I’ve moved from Pixelfed to a compatible self-hosted site.

From what I’ve read, Instagram has continued to double-down on shoveling ads/sponsored content/influencers (now with more AI!) since then. I haven’t felt like dipping my toe back in. Though I have on occasion tried to visit some local business’ online presence only to discover that all they have is an Instagram account…which I can’t see because Instagram hates the open web (and always has, even before Facebook bought them).

And yet I’m still on Flickr. As much as it lost its way during the Yahoo years, it never stopped being about the photos.

The post Instagram Targets first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

100 Posts?

2026-05-23T16:01:35+00:00

I’m considering starting the 100 Days To Offload challenge to post 100 times to my personal blog over the next year. I’m going to include any new posts I make on my personal website, including the tech tips and reviews sections (which is where I’ve mostly been writing these days). I could mirror those posts over here, but that seems kind of silly, since they all show up in my main site’s feed anyway. (They’ll also get combined in the sitewide 100daysToOffload tag list.)

It’s been a while since I did one of these challenges. A long while: The last one was probably when I tried to do NaBloPoMo in 2018 (blog daily during November, sort of a companion challenge to NaNoWriMo) and dropped it after a few days. This one’s longer, but it’s a lot more flexible.

Though I am curious: across my whole website, how many posts have I made over the past year? Only nine on K2R (counting the update round-up, but not counting the individual posts I’ve updated), but it turns out I’ve written 96 reviews since May 23 last year (which is a lot more than I realized!) and 14 troubleshooting articles. So I guess I’ve got a decent shot at hitting 100 again!

The post 100 Posts? first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Tech Tips have moved to KVibber.com

2026-05-23T15:00:00+00:00

Last month I moved all the tech tips from my old site at Hyperborea.org to KVibber.com. Along with the move, it needed a new name since it’s not at Hyperborea anymore. I went with “KV Tech Tips” because it’s both my initials and a common abbreviation for Key-Value, programming terms for a data structure that has a bunch of names (“keys”) each pointing to the real data (“values”).

I chose the old name from a mythical location in a half-remembered movie from the 1970s, back in 2000. The newer site has been an IndieWeb-style profile for a few years, and I finally decided to move things over.

Old links will keep redirecting to the new one as long as I hang onto the domain name.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you may want to update it to https://kvibber.com/tech-tips/feed.xml
If you have a site that links here, I’d appreciate it if you update your links to point to the new location.

Thanks for reading!