39 Pages Tagged “100daysToOffload”
In May 2026, I started a challenge to write 100 new blog posts or pages on my website over the following year.
Reviews
- Always Coming Home
★★★★★
Ursula K. Le Guin
Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, but a fascinating, thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley. - Canon Camera Connect ★★★☆☆ As you’d expect, this app connects to Canon cameras. It still lets you send location data to the camera, pull photos to the phone, or use the phone as a remote. But it insists on a cloud login now (it didn’t before), even if you’re only using the local functions.
- 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. - Del Cerro Park
- Eulogy for the Pixel 5
- FairEmail ★★★★☆ 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.
- Forbidden Solitaire ★★★★⯪ Framed as a lost (and cursed) CD-ROM game from the 1990s, and it nails the 90s gore look for the dungeon. The playing mechanic is fun, and the framing story around it is suitably creepy.
- Hidden Swing Trail
- Insignia Refrigerator ★★★☆☆ Nothing fancy. Does its job keeping food cold or frozen. Downsides: Shelves are awkward, drawers are shallow, the freezer pops open too easily, and sometimes it makes sounds like a dying moose.
- Legends of Amberland ★★★★☆ A fun throwback to the early Might and Magic and Bard’s Tale fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s. Grid- and turn-based, with old-style pixelated graphics and LOTS of side quests.
- Murderbot Season 1 ★★★★★ A pitch-perfect adaptation of All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård is dead on as the socially-anxious security cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, their own naivete, and rival corporations willing to kill.
- PineTab2
- The Prestige ★★★★★ I remembered The Prestige was good. I’d forotten just how good a movie it is.
- Samsung Chromebook 3 ★☆☆☆☆ I bought this in the late 2010s as a spare laptop. It was terrible from the start, and even when I replaced ChromeOS with mainstream Linux, the hardware was still bad enough no one wanted to use it including me.
- Tehanu
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. - To Each This World
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.
Tech Tips
- /dev/null: Permission denied on Alpine Linux One of my Alpine Linux VMs broke during an upgrade and started throwing errors about the permissions on /dev/null. Just fixing the permissions didn’t persist across reboots, but resetting the device manager did.
- Count Upgradable Packages on Alpine Linux TLDR: doas apk update, then apk list -uq | wc. You can automate checking for new packages, and you can use this shell script to report how many updates are available when you log in.
- Hide Related Posts by Post Format Here’s how you can hide related posts on Asides or Links when using Contextual Related Posts or Jetpack on your blog.
- Removing a Hybrid MBR from a GUID-Partitioned Disk Today I learned about hybrid MBR/GUID partition tables, where the GPT on a disk is duplicated in an MBR table for (outdated) compatibility purposes. These days it can break compatibility with Windows if you have a partition MBR doesn’t support, like a multi-terabyte filesystem.
- What is rel="bookmark"? I stumbled on a reference to rel=“bookmark” being used for permalinks, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used that way.
Les Misérables
- An Unexpected Find I went to a farmer's market and brought back a hardcover of Les Mis, in a translation I haven't read.
- Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean? Les Misérables shows up in an episode of Deep Space Nine, fitting into the Maquis/Cardassian/Starfleet conflict.
Other
- Editorial Policy for KVibber.com How I handle revisions, dates and photo adjustments on here. I don't use AI. Don't contact me asking to place guest posts, paid links, or advertising on my personal site.
Blog Posts
- Regarding Empathy
Right-wingers are finally realizing that they lack empathy, but instead of trying to build some, they’ve decided it must be a bad thing. No, “Western Civilization” is not doomed by “suicidal empathy.” Seriously.
- Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
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.
- Where to Put Your Permalink
It’s been pointed out that permalinking your titles makes it easy for someone to get a link *with* text. Why have I been permalinking the timestamps instead?
- Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more.
- First the Migraine, Then the Headache
My phone’s turning into a spicy pillow. I have a spare, but because it had already been used on this network, it took two hours and three levels of escalation to put it *back* on the network.
- Blaugust, or What the Heck: I’ll Do Two Overlapping Blogging Challenges
I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. But I can’t esist the wordplay in the name Blaugust.
- Reading Goals for the Rest of the Year
I don’t need suggestions for what might be interesting to read. I *have* books. *Lots* of them, both print and digital. What I need is to prioritize!
- AI Uses Em-Dashes Because Bloggers Do
WordPress powers a huge chunk of the web, so it’s highly represented in LLMs’ training data. WordPress also auto-converts ASCII punctuation to real typography, and it has since 2003. Think about it…
- Free Shavocado is Back
A decade ago, a local Del Taco’s mis-spaced sign offering FRE SH A VOCA DO gained immortality on Vine. The restaurant even briefly changed their sign to offer FREE SHAVOCADO. Someone at the restaurant appears to be nostalgic for the meme, because it’s back on the sign.
- Pokédrones
A few years back, Niantic posted about a geospatial model they were building using Pokémon Go players’ scans of Pokéstops. This week that model is back in the news, since it’s being used for military drone navigation.
- To Vegas and Back
Las Vegas is a lot bigger than it was last time I visited (almost 20 years ago). Most of the new resorts are generic glass-and-steel, but Hard Rock is building a giant guitar. (Also: solar towers are *bright!*)
- The Road That Broke the Peninsula
I stumbled on an old map to Marineland from 1962, with Crenshaw running through the landslide zone to the coast. Wait, did it really used to connect? When? And what happened? I assumed the shifting ground took out the road, but it’s more the other way around.
- Wall! Of! Text!
A software project enforced a no-LLM-use policy by using prompt injection to delete itself. An “AI” agent-using coder filed a bug report with long-winded LLM-generated comments, as if they assumed the maintainer would use AI to summarize them.
- Instagram Targets
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 landscape, cityscapes and nature photos. Which was fine! Of course it didn’t last.
- 100 Posts?
I’m considering starting the 100 Days To Unload challenge to post 100 times to my personal website over the next year.