62 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. - DeBurrow ★★⯪☆☆ A really basic Gopher client for Android. Supports bookmarks and history, but not much else, and has some usability issues.
- Del Cerro Park
- DiggieDog ★★⯪☆☆ Another basic gopher client for Android, with key functions (bookmarks and downloads), but different usability quirks from DeBurrow. The only Gopher app I can still find in the Play Store.
- 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.
- Gopher Apps on Android I did find several Gopher clients for Android! But they’re all incomplete, awkward, or rapidly losing compatibility. So I’ve gone back to Lagrange, which handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser.
- Gophercle ★★☆☆☆ Extremely minimalist Gopher app for Android with a retro feel to it, but missing some key features like being able to link out to the web and back from other apps. No longer available except in F-Droid’s archives.
- The Greek Theatre
- 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.
- A Month With /e/OS ★★★★☆ A fork of the open-source parts of Android, with the Google parts left out and new apps and services to take their places. More user-friendly than LineageOS (which it’s based on). Handles paid apps, but not Google-based in-app purchases.
- A Month With the Fairphone 4
- The Moon Pool
★★★☆☆
A. Merritt
A moody horror tale set among megalithic ruins in the South Pacific segues into a hollow-earth adventure that, while influential in its time, is very much of that time. - 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.
- Murine Launcher for Android ★★★★★ A fork of the stock Android launcher that lets you do things like remove that always-on search bar (or point it somewhere else). Stable and fast.
- Overbite Gopher Clients ★★☆☆☆ A project to bring gopher to modern devices, which unfortunately seems to have been passed by again.
- PineTab2
- Pocket Gopher (Android) ★★⯪☆☆ Even simpler than DiggieDog or DeBurrow, with a more usable interface, but hard to find and no longer installs on modern Android.
- 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.
- Severance - Season 1 ★★★★★ Wow! Not a bad episode in the bunch. The slow burn from Helly waking up in the first scene to the revelations of the season finale is gripping, and some of the curveballs hurt.
- 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. - Widow’s Bay Season 1 ★★★★☆ A cursed New England island town whose new mayor insists on making it a tourist destination. What could go wrong? The season as a whole was hit and miss. But there were some really good hits.
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.
- Customize Icons for Syndication Links (WP) The Syndication Links plugin offers a filter you can use to add icons for specific websites, or even for whole protocols. Here’s how you build it.
- Enable Gemini (and other Small Internet) Links in WordPress You can write a Gemini link in a WordPress post, but WP won’t accept one anywhere it validates URLs. Here’s how to add a filter to allow more protocols.
- 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.
- Running Gophernicus on Alpine Linux I’m experimenting with Gopher again. The Gophernicus server works well on Alpine, but it takes a little extra work to get the prerequisites right.
- 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
- Why Gemini?
One of the recurring questions when people familiar with HTML discover Gemini is: Why? Why not just write really simple HTML? I think it makes the most sense to look at it in terms of the Gopher revival it came out of.
- Return to Worldcon: LA 2026
This year’s Worldcon, LAcon V in Los Angeles (well, Anaheim), felt small, like the convention was too big for the people. But we had fun.
- Sleep Study (no Android, no Electric Sheep)
I finally went in for a sleep study. These days they start with a night of at-home monitoring. Not only is it simpler, but you’re sleeping somewhere familiar, so the results are going to be more representative. This place at least uses a medical-grade monitoring ring and a phone app to collect and report the […]
- Rediscovering Gopher
I mostly missed Gopher’s heyday (such as it was), but after getting into Gemini, a couple of recent blog posts relating to the Gopher revival got me interested in digging into it again.
- October Daye Cosplay (with Rose Goblin!)
We finally got out to a convention last weekend, and Katie finally got to build a rose goblin and do the October Daye cosplay she’s been meaning to do for years.
- Sometimes Reality is Unrealistic…
Tracking down a stock image to figure out why it looks like AI slop even though the photo had been online for at least a decade, and why it matters.
- Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom
It’s been gloomy all day – the kind of August day that’s hot, humid and still, sapping all your energy because nothing *actually* cools you off except real air conditioning (or standing in front of the refrigerator), not even taking a cold shower in the afternoon. At least the nights are still cooling off, even […]
- 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.