A cartoon picture of a white guy in a Starfleet uniform.

notes.kvibber.com

Profile for kelson

Header for kelson: Patchy clouds and snow-covered mountains in the distance, houses and green trees in the foreground.
Avatar for kelson: A cartoon drawing of a white guy with light brown hair in a red command-division Starfleet uniform, all in the style of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
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").

Stats

Joined
Posts
6926
Followed by
453
Following
290

Pinned public and unlisted posts

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I've realized over the last few years that my political position boils down to:

  1. Don't be cruel unless you have to.
  2. You usually don't have to, even when someone's going to get hurt.
  3. 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
Toggle visibility

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!

Recent public and unlisted posts

When you make fun of something by writing it in Title Case as if it's some Official Document or Brand Name, those are Ironic Capitals.

Does anyone remember how old versions of Netscape, IE and Opera used to render a <menu> list vs. <ul> in the days before CSS?

I stumbled across <menu> on mozdev, and I have vague memories of having used it on a website in the 90s, but I can't remember what (if anything) actually distinguished it from <ul> at the time.

These days it has a meaning as a menu of controls, and you can style it differently from <ul> without adding classes to the markup. Without styling, current browsers render <menu> the same as <ul>. Exactly the same on Gecko, Blink and WebKit, and with slight differences on Netsurf and Dillo, both of which render it mostly the same, but indent the items less than they do for <ul>

#WebDev #HTML #InternetHistory

Three years on, I still use my PineTab2 on a weekly basis. Don't get me wrong, it's not a great computer, and a lot of things just need more power than it can provide. 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, even now.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/products/pinetab2/

#Linux #PineTab2 #Tablet #ARM64 #review

Speaking of #GoToSocial: It's a great Fediverse server for small or single-user instances. Setup and config are simple, maintenance is minimal, and it uses a lot less in the way of memory, computing power, and storage than Mastodon. Plus they've been prioritizing user safety features as they work through the beta.

I've been running GTS as my main Fediverse presence on a 1GB Linode for the last 2 years. My review of the software is a little out of date compared to the latest version, but you can get the idea.

Aha! I set up #GoToSocial to pull from the rel.re relay earlier today. It's active now, and the Federated timeline is a firehose for the first time since I launched this server 2 years ago!

Now that I know it's working, time to put some keyword matchers on there so it'll be a much smaller firehose.

I've also confirmed that pulling specific hashtags from relay.fedi.buzz works, so it's actually worth following hashtags from a single-user instance now!

#relays

I don't understand contrarians.

I mean, I understand disagreeing with popular opinions. Even disagreeing with a lot of popular opinions.

What I don't understand is building your whole personality around disagreeing with Popular Opinion(tm), to the point that when the prevailing winds change, you reverse course yourself. It doesn't magically make you any better than the people who go along. If they're wrong and you're right, it's incidental, and if you're wrong and they're right, you aren't scoring some moral victory by resisting peer pressure. You're still outsourcing your own thought processes to the crowd, just like they are, only flipping the outputs.

"ABC is a bad solution to problem XYZ and will make other things even worse" is not the same as "siding with" XYZ.

A current example: Age verification and predatory social networks.

You can probably find past examples going back to antiquity.

Outlook not so good
Toggle visibility

Whoa...on 20 years' worth of Outlook versions, if you set it to use POP3 with SSL/TLS but left it on port 110 (the old clear text port for POP3), it would prioritize the port setting over the security setting and just send passwords and pull messages in the clear. Without telling you.

Fedora found this out when they upgraded their servers to the latest release, which includes a new version of the Dovecot email server that no longer accepts plain text passwords over clear connections. (I assume port 110 is still usable on Dovecot with alternate authentication methods or with STARTTLS.) And then they started getting support calls from Outlook users who couldn't get their mail.

https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-43-upgrade-revealed-20-years-old-outlook-security-bug/

#outlook

New  book review on my website!

Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★

A character-driven look at the lives of ordinary people in a world of magic, especially the women and children (and not a few men) caught underfoot when wizards, heroes and villains fight. And (of course) dragons.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/tehanu/
#UrsulaKLeGuin #fantasy #Earthsea #magic #trauma #books #review #Tehanu

PHP and open-source licensing
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Wow...PHP has managed to get all the stakeholders in the old PHP and Zend licenses to sign off on consolidating everything under the 3-term BSD license.

https://www.php.net/license/
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_license_update
https://ben.ramsey.dev/blog/2026/05/the-php-license-simplified

Both were functionally BSD-3 plus trademark and update clauses, with PHP and Zend specifically mentioned instead of just "the copyright holder." So they updated the licenses to remove the extra clauses, leaving them functionally equivalent to BSD-3-clause, and then reworded the remaining clauses to make the new versions literally the BSD-3-clause license.

So the codebase is no longer split between two licenses, OSI agrees that it's definitely open source, and it's compatible to use in GPL-licensed projects.

#PHP #FLOSS #licensing