Kelson Vibber: New Posts

Following Up: Whales, Pandemic Gothic, S-Mart and More

2026-05-08T17:37:51+00:00

Since I started with the whole garden-and-stream thing a few years back, I’ve taken to updating existing posts instead of writing new ones when following up. That’s great for someone looking back at the old post from the future, but it doesn’t help anyone who’s following along.

So here are some pages I’ve updated recently:

The whale sculpture recovered from Marineland still hasn’t been installed at Point Vicente, a decade after it was approved, probably due to the higher-than-expected cost for restoring it. In trying to find out what happened with the sculpture, I discovered that Sea World’s midnight orca heist was actually worse than previous articles had suggested.

The camera shop with its masked American Gothic mural from the early months of Covid has since been demolished, along with a nearby bowling alley, to make way for a blocky lump of “luxury apartments.” Silvio’s still hasn’t found a new retail location, but they’ve been running an online/phone business out of a warehouse unit.

Anaheim GardenWalk is still around (even the Johnny Rocket’s!) 10 years after House of Blues moved in, though it’s still got a lot of empty spaces on its map.

I created a tiny subset font for *-and-a-half-star reviews, updating the how-to article with how I did it and updating my reviews pages to use it.

Torrance S-Mart closed a while back, and is now a Grocery Outlet.

The Spider-Man mural has been touched up at the former Dream World Comics building, though Superman changing in a phone booth has been painted over.

I finally got around to building a combined tag list for the blog and other parts of my website.

Bookshop.org’s app actually runs on my newer e-reader, though it still has trouble running offline. Which, I mean, it’s for reading books. This should be a first-class use case.

The post Following Up: Whales, Pandemic Gothic, S-Mart and More first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

The Time Ships

2026-05-08T04:25:03+00:00

Stephen Baxter

★★★½☆

A sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, written for the novel’s 100th anniversary and authorized by Wells’ estate. It picks up immediately after the end of the original, following the Time Traveler’s journeys through several different futures, Earth’s distant past, and all the way to the dawn of time. Baxter effectively mimics Wells’ style and the 1890s well-off narrator’s perspective, which (combined with the experience of multiple futures) reminds me of Moorcock’s Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy.

With the advantage of another 100 years’ worth of scientific discoveries, and knowledge of how the real 20th century turned out, Baxter drastically increases the scope of the travels. Paradoxes and causality loops weave through the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. In one timeline, the Morlocks build a Dyson sphere. In another, clusters of nanobots re-colonize a world that’s no longer hospitable to humans. Much of the middle is tied up in an alternate World War that, instead of ending in 1918, kept going for decades. And just like the war, there are chapters that drag on longer than they should.

He does get a bit bogged down in technicalities. Wells didn’t care how the time machine worked, he wanted to tell an allegory about class relations. Fortunately, Baxter is more interested in what time travel does than how the machine accomplishes it, and “Plattnerite” turns out to be more of a MacGuffin than anything else. But he’s still more interested in the implications of changing histories and long timespans than in any deeper look at society than the futility of war…and perhaps a broadening perspective of who counts as human.

The Beginning Place

2026-05-04T01:03:10+00:00

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★½☆

Maybe it’s one of those books that I would have liked when I was still in the target age range.

It’s less a beginning place and more of an in-between. The fantasy world beyond the gate and stream is always in twilight. Hugh and Irena are at that awkward stage of early adulthood where they’re sort of independent, but still caught in their parents’ orbits. The whole story feels like people caught in liminal spaces, both literally and figuratively.

The heroes from suburbia are both interesting (and contrasting) characters, but I wanted to know more about Tembreabrezi, both the world and the people on the far side of the gate. It’s kept vague, just enough to throw them into a quest together but not enough to make it clear what they’re supposed to do.

The more I think about it, the more I think that vagueness is intentional: Some portal fantasies (Oz, Wonderland) are mainly about the fantasy world, with the protagonist a stand-in for the reader. Others (Narnia) are about the fantasy world and what it means to the people who go there and come back. This novel strips away as much of the fantasy as possible, leaving only the thematic and fairy-tale logic, because what they bring back to reality is more important than what’s on the other side.

More info at The Beginning Place. Available from Bookshop.org, eBooks.com, Kobo.

Adding External S3 Storage on Nextcloud Using OCC

2026-04-27T04:21:46+00:00

Nextcloud can use external sources like S3 or SFTP (or other Nextcloud servers!) for additional storage, which you can mount as a folder for all users or for a specific user. These folders will work just like regular folders on your Nextcloud server, except the data is stored somewhere else, like a remote backup service or an object storage bucket. (Useful if you want to store large files or media libraries without filling up the server’s main drive.)

For all users, or for your own login, it’s easier to set it up through the GUI. To set up an external folder for a specific user, you can use the occ command-line tool.

OCC is run on the server, as the webserver account. Depending on your setup you may need to use sudo, su, runuser, etc. and you may need to point it to the right php location. (See the previous link for reference.)

Or if you’re using the Nextcloud Snap, it’ll just be this:

sudo nextcloud.occ

Anyway, I cobbled together this config from an example that had the wrong authentication method, and extrapolating from a working config I’d set up for my own login using the GUI (checked via occ files_external:list):

WRAPPER_TO_OCC files_external:create FOLDER_NAME \
  amazons3 \
  amazons3::accesskey \
  --user=USER_NAME \
  --config bucket="YOUR_BUCKET" \
  --config hostname="YOUR_HOST" \
  --config port="443" \
  --config use_ssl="true" \
  --config use_path_style="true" \
  --config key="YOUR_KEY" \
  --config secret="YOUR_SECRET"

It worked just fine on Linode’s object storage. And yes, it still has to say amazons3 even if you’re using a different S3 provider.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4

2026-04-21T04:49:07+00:00

★★★★☆

I just finished my second watch through Discovery season four. On balance, I liked it about as well as season three. I enjoyed seeing Burnham come into her own as captain, and continuing development among the secondary cast. Zora’s evolution toward the self-aware being seen in “Calypso.” The Stamets/Culber/Adira family. Saru and T’Rina sort of awkwardly dancing around each other.

I’d hoped to see more of them rebuilding Starfleet and the Federation, but that kind of took a back seat to the main storyline of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

On one hand, the DMA (not to be confused with Direct Memory Access or the Direct Marketing Association) was an interesting scientific disaster: What do you do about a black hole that moves around in ways you can’t predict and has been known to tear up planets? On the other hand, I’m tired of galaxy-level threats. It got old in comics, it got old in earlier seasons of this show, and wow did it get old in Picard.

Getting back to ship-scale (and even just planet-scale) stories again in Strange New Worlds was a relief.

Starting the season off with a cosmic-level fridge event kind of set things off on the wrong foot for me. And I got so frustrated with some of the characters over who they decided to trust. Though I guess that’s part of the point: grief and fear can lead to bad decisions, really bad decisions, when someone tells you they know how to fix it, or when you’ve latched onto one particular solution as what you have to do.

Spoilers re: Tarka's plan. Ruby slippers. Ruon Tarka has a spore drive, which can cross realities. And Oros powered his interdimensional transporter using a warp core and a regular generator. With dilithium plentiful again, he should be able to just overload a couple of warp cores and *boom*! (Pun not intended. But it is now.) That's not even getting into the almost casual hopping between prime and mirror universes back on Deep Space Nine, though you could handwave it as having needed less power because the two realities were "closer" at the time. But Tarka's the kind of guy who, because he's been right about a lot of things, assumes he's right about everything else. Including whatever course of action he's decided to take. And to hell with the collateral damage.

Spoilers re: Gray. I'd been wondering how they were going to follow up. The physical part was a nice callback to Picard. The psychic part seemed pulled out of nowhere when I watched it the first time, but since then I've re-watched all of Deep Space Nine...including the Trill episodes that establish the precedent for placing a former host's personality into another physical body.

As with season two, the second half of the season got bogged down in the main story, but the last few episodes felt more like Star Trek again. Some interesting xeno-archaeology, and a really fascinating first contact with an alien species that has a decidedly non-human psychology and ways of communicating.

(I also appreciated that the character who had been dealing with PTSD was able to handle the psychic trauma echoes because she knew how to handle it.)

Blog Moved to KVibber.com

2026-04-18T03:53:16+00:00

Way back in the year 2000, I bought a domain name to move my personal website from the school web server to someplace I could keep it visible after graduating. I picked Hyperborea.org from an adventure movie I’d seen years earlier, wanting something that sounded fantastic but wasn’t Atlantis, which had already been done to death (and besides, it was taken). In 2002, I set up the first version of this blog, running on b2/cafelog. At the time, Katie and I both posted here. She later moved to LiveJournal, then stopped blogging, then set up again at Feral Tomatoes.

Somewhere along the line I bought KVibber.com and set it up to redirect to my main site. Then in 2022 I rebuilt it as a simple Indieweb-style profile, figuring that while Hyperborea was a digital home, it really wasn’t a digital identity. I’ve been using that in various online profiles ever since, but kept most of the actual stuff on the existing site while I dithered over what to keep where.

Eventually I decided I wanted to move over to the newer domain.

The Eleventy parts were easy: I just needed to change some parameters and rebuild. The hand-crafted parts were relatively easy: global search and replace.

And of course redirecting each section to the new site as I moved it.

Search indexes are slowly shifting over. Google so far has decided to keep pointing to some of the older pages even though those pages redirect to the new ones.

The blog…is complicated. WordPress and ClassicPress use a database for some things and files for others. Plus I’m using the ActivityPub Plugin to make the blog visible on the Fediverse, which brings its own set of complications. I was relieved to see that copies of posts previously federated at the old site do in fact show up correctly on the new site’s Fediverse view.

One thing I decided on early on: I was going to use a subdomain this time instead of a folder, because too many things (some plugins, .well-known files, etc) assume your blog is running at the top level of the site.

I did a first pass Wednesday night to copy the files and database, set up the new config, run all those search-and-replace actions, and kick the metaphorical tires. Since then I’ve been spot-checking things here and there, and the new site seems fine so far.

I tried running the ActivityPub migration, but it doesn’t seem to have sent any followers over. And when I look at the old @kelson profile in Mastodon, it says it’s moving to…@kelson, instead of to @k2r. Most likely it’s either an incompatibility with ClassicPress or another problem with running in a subfolder. Update: I gave it another stab the next day, but it failed again. There were only about 5 followers, so I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. I issued a self-destruct on the old ActivityPub view, waited for it to run, and set up the old site to redirect to the new one.

Better Late Than Never

I’m kicking myself for taking so long. I should’ve just moved wholesale over to KVibber.com back in 2022. By waiting until 2026, I’ve left the new location without proof of having existed before the slop era. (I’m still writing articles myself, not using an “AI,” so all the mistakes in this post are my own.) Unless someone looks up the old hyperborea.org version of a page on the Wayback Machine, but they shouldn’t have to know to do that.

But the old name is awkward and hard to spell, and apparently some of the creepy groups that have weird obsessions with the myths it came from are more substantial than the historical footnotes I thought they were back in the day.

The post Blog Moved to KVibber.com first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

RSS Parrot

2026-04-15T04:10:53+00:00

★★★★★

RSS Parrot is a simple Fediverse service that does one thing and does it well: Follows an RSS/Atom feed of your choice, and relays it as a Fediverse account you can follow from Mastodon, Akkoma, GoToSocial or any other ActivityPub-compatible service. For example, you can follow my website’s updates at @kvibber.com@rss-parrot.net

Basically it lets you use Mastodon as a feed reader.

If the feed items have summaries it’ll use those instead of the full articles, so it won’t overwhelm Mastodon timelines that aren’t prepared for long-form text. It doesn’t try to send replies back or anything fancy like that, but you can read, follow, boost and bookmark (and like or reply if you really want to, even if it’s just going out into the void).

To find (or create) the parrot account for a feed, you can mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the URL of the feed you want to follow, and it’ll reply with the name of the relayed account.

More info at RSS Parrot.

MapComplete

2026-04-14T19:17:26+00:00

★★★★☆

Similar to StreetComplete in that it lets you pick a theme and edit OpenStreetMap using a set of guided questions. It has a different set of features that it looks for and a different set of properties it’ll guide you through, so it can be worth using both. I prefer using MapComplete to tag things like electric vehicle chargers, for instance, because it includes all the connector types. Or tagging whether a cafe has WiFi and what the network name is. Or whether a restroom has paper towels, air dryers or something else. StreetComplete works better for tagging which streets have sidewalks, parking and bike lanes, or marking building types, levels and addresses.

MapComplete also includes the ability to upload images to Panoramax and post reviews to Mangrove. And it runs as a website in a regular desktop (or mobile) web browser or as an Android app. (Before they released the Android app, I installed the website to my phone’s home screen and it worked pretty well, if slightly less stable when interacting with the system.)

The main drawback is that it doesn’t highlight features that are missing information the way StreetComplete does. Sometimes I try to add info and find that it already exists. (Sometimes I’m also the one who added it however many months ago.) I also disables the setting to show questions one-by-one, because with more fields available, it’s more likely that the first one in the queue is something that doesn’t apply or isn’t easily discernable, while StreetComplete has a smaller set that’s well-sorted by visibility.

In short, MapComplete is often better for updating a destination, while StreetComplete is better for updating the paths along the way.

More info at MapComplete.

Minimal User Setup for Debian Cloud

2026-04-12T16:28:00+00:00

Debian offers cloud images that you can plug into a hosting provider and run instead of spending time going through the installer. Most of them assume you’re going to use the host’s system to set up the your login credentials.

There’s also a “nocloud” image intended to run on a local setup, so you can toss a qcow2 image onto Qemu (directly or with or your favorite GUI wrapper like UTM or Boxes). It ships with a passwordless root user to get you started quickly.

You don’t want to keep running it as root. Especially without a password!

So here’s a set of quick steps to set up a regular user for admin and put a password on root. (Why am I writing this down? Because I always forget which Linux distributions use useradd and which use adduser.)

Optional: Set a Hostname

Debian 11 ships with the name set to “debian,” but it’s not set in the hosts file. Sudo will complain that it can’t find this “debian” machine when you run it, though it will run.

So if you’re setting up a new oldoldstable for some reason, you probably want to start by setting a hostname and adding it to /etc/hosts (on the same line as localhost).

hostname HOSTNAME
nano /etc/hostname
nano /etc/hosts

You can of course use vi instead, or install another text editor like emacs using apt, assuming the image connected to the network.

Debian 12 doesn’t set a hostname in the cloud images, so it doesn’t have this problem, though of course you’ll probably want to set one anyway if you plan on keeping the machine around!

Set Up The User

Next, create the user, add them to the sudoers group, and set their password.

useradd -m -s /bin/bash USERNAME
usermod -aG sudo        USERNAME
passwd                  USERNAME

Some notes on the options used here:

You can of course choose a different shell than bash here.
useradd -m will also create the home directory.
usermod -aG will add a group to the user’s list of groups, rather than moving them entirely.
Debian pre-configures a “sudo” group and gives its members permission to run sudo with their own password, which is exactly what I want here.

Other distros vary in whether they set up a group and what they call it (ex. Red Hat/Fedora call it “wheel”), or whether you need to set up access manually using visudo or putting something in /etc/sudoers.d

Now you can set a password for root.

passwd

Congratulations! You should be able to log out of root now, log in with your regular user, and use sudo when needed.

Bonus: Lock Out Root

Once you’ve logged in with your regular user and verified that it can sudo, lock the root account so no one can log into it in the first place. It’ll still be there running things behind the scenes, but it won’t be open.

sudo passwd -l root

Reviews have moved to KVibber.com

2026-04-09T15:01:21+00:00

Administrative note: I’ve moved these reviews from my old site at Hyperborea.org to KVibber.com.

I up the newer site as an IndieWeb-style profile a while back, and this year I decided to move past the name I picked for a mythical location in a half-remembered 50-year-old movie 25 years ago. (The full move is still in progress, but this section’s done.)

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/reviews/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!

Mrs. Davis

2026-04-02T01:59:37+00:00

★★★★★

Mrs. Davis arrived at the perfect time: just as the Chat-GPT-fueled “AI” hype machine was shifting into high gear, here was a story of a surly nun battling a world-dominating AI with a folksy name.

Except…that’s not the story.

Considering the number of times it swerves to reveal that what you thought was going on is actually part of something completely different than you assumed? That’s appropriate!

Since the swerves are part of the fun, I’ll try not to reveal too much when I say it’s:

A…let’s say unique take on the Holy Grail mythology. (To put it mildly.)
A poignant tale about our modern dependence on technology.
The lengths people will go to feel appreciated.
The interplay between religion and spirituality.
The magic of misdirection (and vise-versa).
The difference between asserting your free will and just rebelling.
Ridiculously wacky, but in a way that makes sense.
Seriously absurd, and sometimes absurdly serious.

To give you an idea of what to expect, it opens with a castaway named Schrödinger and his cat being rescued from a deserted island, during which time no one knew if they were alive or not.

Betty Gilpin is riveting as Simone. Her co-stars and the ensemble cast rise to the challenge of an absurdity that takes itself seriously enough that it comes right back around to ridiculous again.

At the time, I thought Mrs. Davis “herself” was less an AI than a souped-up voice assistant/chatbot…but of course, that’s exactly what the “AI” industry has rolled out over the last three years in the form of various LLM services. She’s further advanced in that she’s actually self-aware and has her own motivations (unlike today’s chatbots), but she doesn’t control the world, just responds to questions.

People just assume Mrs. Davis has the right answer and go with it. Like following Google Maps, even when it sends you off onto a dirt road that ends in a collapsed bridge that was never updated on the map. Or a bunch of people going along with a prompt for a flash mob out of FOMO. Or a vibe coder assuming that the generated code is actually running and passing the tests, not just reporting that it did because that’s what logs should look like.

You never see a UI, never hear her voice directly. It’s always a conversation with a real person with a cell phone and earbuds who’s agreed to relay her words as a proxy for a minute or two. It makes her seem slightly more human, and the humans slightly more robotic.

Ultimately the question isn’t whether the technology is dangerous. (Unlike, say, Discovery Season 2.) It’s about finding the line between using technology and just offloading our thinking to it.

And I’ll never look at a coupon for “free wings” the same way again.

More info at Mrs. Davis.

Fun With Copper! (And System Clocks)

2026-04-01T20:01:23+00:00

Last night the whole family got into a multiplayer Minecraft game for the first time in a while. Weirdly enough, *one* system was showing way to many materials as copper. Even stuff like snow. WTF?

Well, we realized it was after 7 PM local time, which meant on UTC time it was already April 1, so it must be this year’s April Fool’s joke for Minecraft. (Or in this case, one of the mods.) But why only on one computer?

Then it hit me: The host was a Windows machine, which means the hardware clock is set to local time (instead of being set to UTC and just displaying local time). I was connecting from a Linux box that dual-boots, so I’d long since set the hardware clock to local time so Windows wouldn’t fight with it. The one showing all copper, all the time, was a Mac, which doesn’t dual boot, and uses Unix under the hood, so its hardware was set to UTC, and it was the only computer of the three that was already running in April 1.

The post Fun With Copper! (And System Clocks) first appeared on K-Squared Ramblings

Proverbs

2026-03-31T02:44:04+00:00

★★★★★

Proverbs is like a giant board of Minesweeper, only instead of marking explosives (and tiggering sudden death when you make a mistake), you slowly uncover a giant pixellated painting adapted from Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). And when I say giant, I mean giant. I’ve logged almost 15 hours since I first picked it up, and I’ve cleared less than half of the painting.

Calming, and weirdly addictive. It’s divided into sections based on the image, and as you complete each section the details will fill in, unlocking the specific proverb being illustrated. It auto-saves your progress at the pixel level, so you can fire it up for 5 minutes at a time, a half hour, or find yourself in the zone for longer than you intended and stop when you realize you haven’t actually refilled the glass of water on your desk even though you meant to 20 minutes ago…

The Wind that Sweeps the Stars

2026-03-17T03:55:35+00:00

Greg Keyes

★★★★☆

One of the things I like about Greg Keyes’ books is that he doesn’t stick to the ISO Standard European Medieval Fantasy setting. (In fact, the first time I read The Briar King I was disappointed that it was so clearly Renaissance Europe.) The Wind that Sweeps the Stars is high fantasy, but the setting, cultures and mythology are inspired by a mix of southwest indigenous American mythology and a vaguely Aztec-like empire.

Yash and Chej are an appealing pair of viewpoint characters: She’s matter-of-fact, a highly trained assassin sent to secure an alliance through marriage if the empire honors it, or take revenge if not. (The betrayal takes all of about five minutes: The empire is invading her country by page one.) He’s a hapless, but well-meaning prince who discovers just how little regard the rest of the aristocracy has for him.

The book’s a series of fights, some mostly physical (and very bloody), some mostly magical. Yash sets out to kill as many of her captors as she can before she’s discovered. (One of the back-cover blurbs compares it to Die-Hard with wizards. I’d also compare it to a dungeon crawl game.) Chej struggles to reconcile his loyalties to an empire that never really had much use for him and his new wife, who does.

Between fights we get brief conversations in which Yash and Chej attempt to catch their breath, some personal flashbacks, and fragments of mythological history. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of other people in the empire who, despite being thoroughly enmeshed in the imperial war machine, might have different priorities if circumstances were different.

It quickly becomes clear that the origin myths are true in the context of the book, as Yash has a second mission in addition to straight-forward vengeance. Her people’s land is in danger, and would still be even if the empire had honored their alliance. To save her future, she needs to take out the captive spirits the empire has used to secure its magical superiority. Not only does that need a different approach than simply killing as many magicians as possible, it turns out to be much bigger than anyone expected.

Spoilers

Mythological

Early on there's a reference to fossils in the context of the world's mythology. That comes back rather spectacularly near the end. It's also adds another layer (pun not intended) to the fact that the empire's power is derived by stealing the essense of others' land.

Gender

The empire's strict patriarchy and rigid gender roles are contrasted more and more strongly over the course of the book against Zeltah's more open sense of identity.

Chej thinks he's still alive because he's kept his secret, but they all know: they just don't want the scandal of admitting one of the royal family is gay, and they've been waiting for an excuse to kill him in a way that will turn his death to political advantage.

Yash, meanwhile, takes advantage of their dismissal of women as potentially dangerous, and is able to stay under the radar longer than she might otherwise. She also turns out to be gender-fluid (her body actually shifts physically, though the book continues referring to her as "she" when it does), but there's never any suggestion that her masculine aspect has anything to do with her ability to deal out violence. In fact, it's only as a man that she's captured at one point.

Among Yash's people, women and men can be leaders or warriors as they choose, and her changing is seen as just how she is. She's utterly baffled as to how Chej has absorbed so much self-loathing from his own culture.

By the end of the night the empire's rigidity is revealed as a weakness, and Chej has started to accept himself a bit more. Not much, but a start.

Connect macOS Calendar, Contacts and Reminders to NextCloud

2026-03-13T00:39:43+00:00

Nextcloud Calendar and Contacts are solid cross-platform alternatives to iCloud’s equivalents, and Tasks is good enough I’ve been using it for several years.

On macOS, System Settings > Internet Accounts manages logins for all the built-in applications like Apple Mail, Calendar, Reminders and Contacts. Setting these up with Nextcloud is easy, but it’s not intuitive, because Apple has been optimizing the setup process for all-in-one services like iCloud, Google or Microsoft.

Option 1: Download a Device Profile

On your Nextcloud server’s website, open your account settings, then go to the Mobile & Desktop section. Below the app store links, look for “Download macOS/iOS configuration profile.” That link will download a config with all the info except your password. (You should generate an app-specific one, but it’s not necessary.)

On your Mac, open System Settings, go to General > Device Management and approve the Nextcloud profile. It’ll ask for the password twice because you’re still technically logging into two services, one for calendar and one for contacts.

Option 2: Add the Accounts Manually

If you don’t want to use Device Management, or run into trouble getting it to work, you can still set up the accounts in System Settings > Internet Accounts. The process is simple, if a little misleading.

First: Starting with macOS 26 (Tahoe), it only asks you for an email address when you press Add Account. To add a contacts/calendar account:

Click on “choose from a list.”
Scroll down and click on “Add other account…”
Now you can add a CalDAV (Calendar/Reminders) or CardDAV (Contacts) account.

Alternatively: go through the Apple Calendar or Contacts apps’ settings and add the account there. It’ll still get added to the central set of accounts.

Second: It still asks you for an email address when you tell it to add one of those account types!

You can switch from Automatic to Manual in the dropdown, and it’ll ask for a username and server… or you can just enter the equivalent of username@server.example.com (even if it isn’t a real email address) and your (preferably app-specific) password, and it’ll find the right details for your server.

Easy, but not obvious!