K² Ramblings

Posts from a personal blog covering tech, entertainment and (sometimes) day to day life.

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Last Notes

2026-04-17 15:45:23 UTC

I'm moving this blog from https://hyperborea.org/journal to https://journal.kvibber.com
The old site is still active at the moment, but will soon start redirecting to the new one.

2026-03-14 04:25:43 UTC

"Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters."
-- Rom, before deciding he'd rather stop the exploitation

2026-03-13 04:55:11 UTC

In retrospect, it's *wild* that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft's dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing ("never underestimate Microsoft on marketing") than technical merits...fell for the idea that a "marketplace of ideas" would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the *loudest* ones.

2024-11-24 01:00:37 UTC

Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting Literary Arts, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing...
I've read the Earthsea series (great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I've got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I'm totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories! (I'm going to have a lot of reading material next year.)
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/wizard-earthsea-and-more-ursula-k-le-guin-books
https://literary-arts.org
*As ebooks through Kobo
#books #UrsulaKLeGuin #Earthsea #HumbleBundle
Blog post: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/11/ursula-le-guin-bundle/
My reviews of her books: https://hyperborea.org/reviews/tag/ursula-k-le-guin/

2024-11-19 16:47:32 UTC

https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/trash-bin-5-ton-limit.jpg
Okay, okay, I won’t toss this speck of neutron star material here! I guess I’ll just have to pack it out. (Spotted at the Hermosa Beach Pier over the weekend.)
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/11/upper-limit/

2024-11-02 16:25:32 UTC

Migrating this 22-year-old 3000+ post behemoth of a blog from WordPress to ClassicPress turned out to be a lot faster and easier than I expected.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/10/migrated-to-classicpress/

2024-06-14 04:12:38 UTC

The Essentials
https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/coffee-espresso-wifi.jpg
When I took this photo back in 2016, it was a combination coffee/Chinese restaurant: they sold coffee in the mornings and Chinese food for lunch and dinner. The owner had previously run a separate coffee shop in the same shopping center, then combined the two businesses to save on rent. The old coffee location sat vacant for a few years until a bakery (with a side of coffee) moved in.
The location was later bought by a Hawaiian fast food place, which itself has since been bought by a larger Hawaiian fast food chain.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/05/the-essentials/
#coffee #wifi #photos

2024-06-14 03:52:29 UTC

It’s interesting how well earth, water, air and fire map to solid, liquid, gas and plasma. People recognized the four states of matter, but for ages they interpreted them as ingredients instead of structure.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/06/elemental-states-of-matter/

2024-05-09 03:12:32 UTC

Dillo has released a new version for the first time in almost a decade!
Now there’s a blast from the past!
Dillo (as in armadillo) is a super-minimalist web browser for Linux and related systems that’s especially useful on low-end hardware. I used it for a while back in the early 2000s, and even built RPMs for it for a few years. It was great for...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/05/dillo-resurrected/

2024-04-20 01:45:34 UTC

Photo: The Mutant Three-Eyed Fish of San Pedro
On the side of the road between Angel’s Gate Park and Point Fermin Park. A little ways downhill there was a one-eyed octopus.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2013/06/mutant-fish/

2024-04-09 01:04:39 UTC

I didn’t arrange another road trip to see today’s total eclipse like we did in 2017 (which was amazing, by the way!). But we had clear skies, so we broke out the eclipse glasses from 2017 again. And it turns out that yes, a colander *does* make a fun instrument for observing a solar eclipse! (Photo in blog post)
Also: some thoughts on just how common eclipses are, planetwide, though they're rare in any specific location - and how that fits with historical takes on how they happen and what they mean.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/04/plural-of-eclipse/

2024-03-29 01:23:14 UTC

The year is 2006. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks.
The year is 2011. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks.
The year is 2022. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks.
Corporations haven’t learned. Unfortunately, their customers *have* learned from all this training. And so has the fraud industry. Even if you’re usually savvy about this sort of thing, you can get caught up if the circumstances put you *just* off-balance enough to line up the holes in each overlapping layer of security...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2024/02/phish-training-2/

2023-11-20 23:11:02 UTC

Looks like IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s “IEEE SustainTech Expo.” Not only is it a bit clearer than the old name, but ever since Among Us came out, “SusTech” always made me giggle a bit. I doubt I was the only one.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/11/sustech/

2023-11-09 18:14:51 UTC

It turns out having a wide angle lens on your phone is really helpful for catching sun halos! (photo)
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2020/11/halo-over-bike-path/

2023-11-09 05:22:11 UTC

Somehow I don’t think he’s taking this quite as seriously as Faire folk might prefer… (photo)
https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sir-reynolds-of-the-wrap-640.jpg
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2009/11/sir-reynolds-of-the-wrap/

2023-10-15 16:30:28 UTC

Solar eclipse pics! It was hazy, and the weather forecast was partly cloudy, but the sun stayed visible and the eclipse glasses haven’t cracked!
We didn’t do anything complicated this time: just took the glasses with us as we went about our morning, looking through the glasses every 15-20 minutes to see how much was covered until it reached its maximum coverage of 78% of the sun’s apparent diameter. And at projections. (Leaves are nature’s original pinhole camera.)
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/10/solar-eclipse-pics/

2023-10-10 16:20:10 UTC

Found the eclipse glasses from 2017. Checked for scratches. Looks like they’ll be usable for Saturday’s solar eclipse! It’ll be partial here in California, covering ~78% of the sun’s diameter. The annular shadow passes from Oregon diagonally to Texas, crosses the gulf to Yucatan, then follows Central America and crosses Brazil from west to east at its widest part.
Eclipse info and map: https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2023/where-when/
Time/date calculator: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/
Blog: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/10/eclipse-on-saturday/

2023-09-20 17:44:24 UTC

Imagine a small village near a valley, so isolated that they just call themselves “the people.” One day they find out about another village on the other side of the valley, and they start calling them “the people across the valley.” They can keep talking about “the people,” but sometimes they need to make a distinction: right now, we’re talking about the people on *this* side of the valley, not the people on both sides. Not incidentally, the Latin prefixes for “this side of” and “the other side of” are cis- and trans-...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/06/cis/

2023-09-20 17:39:51 UTC

"Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters."
— Rom, before deciding he’d rather stop the exploitation
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/07/ferengi-strike/

2023-09-20 17:39:09 UTC

This is fascinating: Researchers looked at variations in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes of people who had confirmed cases of Covid before the vaccine rollout and also had genetic records on file. Those with a particular variation were twice as likely to have been asymptomatic. Having that same variation from both parents made them 8.5 times as likely to have been asymptomatic! They looked at two more cohorts and found the same results. And then they looked at T-cells collected before the pandemic...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/07/asymptomatic-covid-and-genetics/

2023-07-31 18:54:17 UTC

This sea otter likes long swims along the coast, kelp forests…and stealing surfboards.
LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-12/a-renegade-sea-otter-is-terrorizing-california-surfers
“At first, we were like, ‘Look how cute?’ But then it bit down on the board and chewed off a piece, and we were like. ‘What’s going on?’”
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/07/odder/

2023-07-27 21:11:06 UTC

I rescued an August 2011 post from my Google+ archive that really speaks to how quickly expectations for mobile computing were derailed by the social media feedback loop.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2019/02/smartphone-paradox/

2023-07-13 01:00:50 UTC

I think there’s been a lot of talking past each other on privacy lately because there are so many layers to it. Google or Dropbox keeping your cloud files from showing up on someone else’s drive or a public share is one layer. Protecting it from misuse *by* Google is another!
Blog post:
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/07/privacy-trust/

2023-05-20 00:32:12 UTC

New blog post: Lost Cities and Alien Skies
You wouldn’t think that #books about #astronomy and #archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities (Annalee Newitz) and Under Alien Skies (Phil Plait) pack some odd similarities...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/05/lost-cities-and-alien-skies/

2023-05-19 20:00:30 UTC

Once more, for those in the back: Introducing students to multiple points of view is NOT “indoctrination.” Insisting that they can only be exposed to YOUR point of view IS.
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/05/perspective-2/

2023-04-29 00:09:41 UTC

At first I thought this was a followup to another story about an anaphylactic reaction during an airplane flight last week. No, it’s a totally separate incident.
https://snacksafely.com/2023/04/physician-urges-faa-to-change-epinephrine-auto-injector-policy-after-mid-flight-anaphylactic-reaction/
One patient had an expired epi-pen. The other had never had anaphylaxis before.
Both planes had bottles of epinephrine and a syringe, not an auto-injector. Fortunately there were doctors on both flights who knew how to figure out the dosage, properly fill and deliver a shot.
In the second incident, the patient who was experiencing anaphylaxis for the first time is a doctor, but…have you ever tried loading a syringe and injecting yourself while your throat’s rapidly closing up until you can’t breathe? There’s a reason they make auto-injectors!
It could be worse: the same site has an article about another in-flight reaction a month ago, where staff couldn’t get the emergency kit open for 10 minutes! This time it was a pair of nurses who measured and administered the shot.
https://snacksafely.com/2023/03/delta-crew-couldnt-open-emergency-kit-or-administer-epinephrine-for-woman-with-anaphylaxis/
This…seems to be more common than I thought it was.
And putting an emergency kit on the plane without training your flight crew how to use it is just ridiculous.
(Reminders to self: 1. Check epi-pen expiration date. 2. Make sure it’s easy to find in my carry-on next time I travel.)
#allergies #FoodAllergy #health #airplanes #flying #travel
Original post: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/04/airplane-anaphylaxis/

2023-04-28 23:37:39 UTC

Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t have sesame so they can “comply” with new labeling requirements by always labeling “contains sesame” instead of instead of adding it to their existing cross-contamination protocols. Meaning people with sesame allergy are suddenly finding that foods they used to be able to eat are now...
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/04/contaminated/
#allergy #foodallergy #food #health

2023-04-28 21:27:56 UTC

Ok, that mostly worked. If I hadn't copied the html for the second paragraph onward, anyway.

2023-04-28 21:25:33 UTC

One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies, is that Martian sunsets are blue!
https://underalienskies.com
with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you're looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or sunset), most of the blue light is scattered into the next timezone and you see red and orange.
On Mars, tiny dust particles of iron oxides (rusty dust?) reflect yellow-orange light, making the daytime sky mostly a butterscotch color...but the particles that can stay aloft in the thin atmosphere are about the size of the wavelength of blue light, so they scatter blue light <strong>forward</strong> instead of randomly. So at the shallow angles of sunset and sunrise, the sky in the direction of the sun has more blue light than the yellows that are scattered in other directions.
Essentially the same process, but reversed because of the different content of the atmosphere!
https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/04/blue-sunsets-on-mars/