Nostr notes by K² Ramblings

New book review on my website: The Confidence Game, Maria ...

2026-08-23T05:29:16+02:00

New book review on my website:
The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova (5 stars)

An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in order to trick people into doing what they want. It's roughly structured around different phases of a con, from picking a target to running off with the ill-gotten goods. The author illustrates it with a number of real cases over the last century or so, some of them recent enough that she interviewed the victims and (alleged) scammers directly.

It's worth remembering that scam victims aren't necessarily stupid. Con artists hijack the trust that's needed to build a society, and they're very good at figuring out who's likely to fall for a tactic *today*, keeping their marks off balance, and engaging our emotions to keep the logical parts of our brain from stopping to look at the red flags. And once we're involved, the brain is very good at retroactively justifying things. "I'm too savvy to get conned, so the fact that I got into this implies it *must* have been legit"...right up until the point the scammer runs off with everything we "invested" in their scheme.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/confidence-game/

#books #scams #review #psychology

Book review! To Each This World, Julie Czerneda ★★★★★ ...

2026-08-13T16:23:23+02:00

Book review!

To Each This World, Julie Czerneda
★★★★★

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.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/to-each-this-world/

#JulieCzerneda #biology #communication #firstContact #scienceFiction #books #review

One of the annoyances I ran into trying to set things up on the ...

2026-08-11T19:00:34+02:00

One of the annoyances I ran into trying to set things up on the new phone: Canon Camera Connect insists on using Chrome for its login flow. Not Android webview, not your default web browser, but Chrome. I actually had to install Chrome on a deGoogled Android to start using the app.

(I'm still annoyed that the app has started requiring a login in the first place, since I don't use any cloud-connected services through it. Just the local ones that let me save a location trace and add it to the camera's photos, or transfer photos from the camera to the phone.)

https://kvibber.com/reviews/apps/canon-camera-connect/

I wasn't planning to write so much about tech this month, but ...

2026-08-11T06:05:45+02:00

I wasn't planning to write so much about tech this month, but then my phone started dying, and it turns out I have things to say about the old phone and planned obsolescence.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/products/pixel5/
https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/08/planned-obsolescence/

#blaugust #pixel5 #PlannedObsolescence #android

Latest for #Blaugust: That time #LesMiserables showed up (as an ...

2026-08-09T18:20:59+02:00

Latest for #Blaugust:

That time #LesMiserables showed up (as an eBook on a PADD, of course) on Deep Space Nine, and Sisko had to figure out how be Inspector Javert to his opponent's Jean Valjean.

https://kvibber.com/les-mis/other/ds9/

#LesMis #StarTrek #DS9

Book review: Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin ...

2026-07-30T06:16:10+02:00

Book review: Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★

Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, Always Coming Home is a thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley.

https://kvibber.com/reviews/books/always-coming-home/

#ScienceFiction #SolarPunk #Books #LeGuin

#AI uses em-dashes because blogs do. Think about it: WordPress ...

2026-07-30T05:52:12+02:00

#AI uses em-dashes because blogs do. Think about it: WordPress powers a huge chunk of the web, so it's highly represented in #LLMs' training data. And WordPress has auto-converted ASCII punctuation to real typography since 2003.

https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/07/em-dashes-and-wordpress/

I haven't noticed any problems with heat, but I can't ...

2026-07-30T05:50:33+02:00

In reply to nevent1q…ageu
_________________________

I haven't *noticed* any problems with heat, but I can't remember whether I've really pushed it in hotter weather. Where I live now it rarely gets past around 29C. It gets warmer nearby -- the hills, mountains, and coastline make for a lot of microclimates, and I've been out on days that hit 40C, but I just don't remember whether I've used it outdoors when I've been in that kind of heat.

Now I'm curious, though. I think I'll make a point of bringing it with me more often, at least on hot days.

Three years on, I still use my PineTab2 on a weekly basis. ...

2026-07-10T07:07:11+02:00

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.

#Linux #PineTab2 #Tablet #ARM64 #review

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

Book review: Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★★★ A ...

2026-06-18T05:49:41+02:00

Book review: 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 #Earthsea #Tehanu #books #fantasy

I stumbled on an old map to Marineland from 1962, with Crenshaw ...

2026-06-13T06:21:22+02:00

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.

https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/06/road-broke-peninsula/

A few years back, Niantic posted about a geospatial model they ...

2026-06-13T06:18:36+02:00

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.

https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/06/pokedrones/

#PokemonGo #drones #surveillance #computerVision

10 years ago, a local Del Taco's mis-spaced sign offering FRE ...

2026-06-13T06:12:52+02:00

10 years ago, a local Del Taco's mis-spaced sign offering FRE SH A VOCA DO gained immortality as "Free sha-VA-ca-doo" on Vine (remember those?).

Someone at the restaurant appears to be nostalgic for the meme, because it's back on the sign today.

https://journal.kvibber.com/2026/06/free-shavocado-is-back/

#FreeShavocado #signs

I'm moving this blog from https://hyperborea.org/journal to ...

2026-04-17T17:45:23+02:00

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.

"Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We ...

2026-03-14T05:25:43+01:00

"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

In retrospect, it's wild that so many tech people who were ...

2026-03-13T05:55:11+01:00

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.

Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin ...

2024-11-24T02:00:37+01:00

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/

Nostr event nevent1qqs960ksjjelf4yn2j8a2s7ca8d9z6qznwuwnfwtm80c0pc52gftddczyr0tctfhqdqmmadkc9m3nwpfnw3hmdmwte8fgxprdrku83ws06crsqcxgc7

2024-11-19T17:47:32+01:00

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/

The Essentials ...

2024-06-14T06:12:38+02:00

The Essentials

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

Dillo has released a new version for the first time in almost a ...

2024-05-09T05:12:32+02:00

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/

Photo: The Mutant Three-Eyed Fish of San Pedro On the side of the ...

2024-04-20T03:45:34+02:00

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/

Somehow I don’t think he’s taking this quite as seriously as ...

2023-11-09T06:22:11+01:00

Somehow I don’t think he’s taking this quite as seriously as Faire folk might prefer… (photo)

https://hyperborea.org/journal/2009/11/sir-reynolds-of-the-wrap/

Imagine a small village near a valley, so isolated that they just ...

2023-09-20T19:44:24+02:00

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/

This is fascinating: Researchers looked at variations in the ...

2023-09-20T19:39:09+02:00

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/

Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t ...

2023-04-29T01:37:39+02:00

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