Personal on Janusworx

Happy Birthday Abbygail

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530

Abby, at her second favourite place in the world.

Love knows no difference between life and death.
The one who gives you a reason to live is also the one who takes your breath away.

جینے مرنے میں کچھ فرق نہیں فرق نہیں
اُسی کو دیکھ کر جیتے ہیں جس کافر پہ دم نکلے

(jeene marne mein kuchh farq nahi farq nahi
usi ko dekh kar jeete hain jis kafir pe dam nikle)

— Ghalib

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Change!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:28:30 +0530

Distill a whole year down into a day
Act like we all start over with a pristine slate

To get yourself a new life you’ve got to give the other one away

And I’m starting to believe, in the power of a name
Cause it can’t be a mistake,

if I just call it change!

— Sara Bareilles, December

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14 (All is Possible!)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0530

How it started & How it’s going!

Picture credits, Walter Pinto & Priyanka Saggu
Click the pic, to make big!

In love, as in dreams,
all is possible!

I love you for completing me, in every possible way. I cannot imagine life without you! 😘

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Books I Read in the First Quarter of 2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 May 2025 05:45:00 +0530

This newsletter went out to the mailing list on April 21st.
If you want to read them as soon as they come out, Subscribe!

I’m tired of making excuses for my tardiness 😂
So, like Don Cheadle says in Iron Man 2, “Look, it’s me. I’m here. Deal with it. Let’s move on.”

While I tell you about the books I loved, you can also click each month to find the complete list of titles I loved.

January
#

I think this year continues my fascination with Agatha Christie.
January was mostly spent in the world of Marple. I think I’ll be back doing Christie runs in the coming months. I don’t know what it is about her worlds, but I keep coming back to them ove and over again.
(even more than Doyle and Holmes, though I love the new fresh takes in the Holmesian world. While David Suchet and his run will always remain the canonical Poirot to me, I have no such qualms with anyone else doing Holmes)

So I spent January with Ms. Marple. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was my favourite. The sudden, heart-stopping realisation of what must have happened, by one of the main characters, the immense grief that must have rolled down on them all over again, summed up in the lines from Tennyson’s poem that give the book its title.

She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.

I also love following these pretty webs, authors lay for me. Thanks to Agatha Christie penning these words in 1962, I went looking for a poem from 1832 and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Honourable mention to the Sherlock & Co. podcast.
I began listening to it, just for curiosity’s sake and have now been looking forward to each new adventure of our intrepid heroes. My favourite parts are when other hosts from the Goalhanger universe come in to do cameos, like Will Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Empire) did in one of my recent favorites, The Sign of Four (Season 22 on iTunes) or when Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest is History) played a crazy, stressed lawyer in The Norwood Builder (season 27 on iTunes). It’s really fun!

February
#

February started me on the road of my (hidden) goal of reading at least one technical book a month. Learning Go, by Jon Bodner taught me the language. One thing I’ve learnt though, is that I almost nearly always need 2-3 authors / books before I understand whatever it is I need to learn. I’ve realised that I have been spoiled with authors in other domains when it comes to explaining things lucidly. (plus any topic in tech is vast and no single author can fill in all the gaps of my ignorance.) My solution to this is to be a syntopical reader and figure out whatever it is I need from multiple texts.

I learnt well enough from Bodner, and Ricardo Gerardi’s Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go to go write a tool I sorely needed in Go lang. A small tool to generate RSS feeds for my audiobooks, I call Rederb. It’s still raw and unpolished, but it got my audiobook ducks in row, so I could listen to whatever struck my fancy on the recent break.

I also discovered Grant Snider this month. While full of whimsy, they are also really thought provoking. I devoured The Art of Living, and The Shape of Ideas. Highly recommended! The one that started it all for me and was specifically written for me, was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf.

Honourable mention to Anita Anand and William Dalrymple for doing the Three Kings (Empire Podcast, episodes 212-214), explaining the confluence of Byzantine and Persian cultures, myths and history.

March
#

was spent mostly in the company of the aforementioned Anand & Dalrymple charting the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (Empire Podcast, episodes 205-211, and 215-222). This engaging series filled in so many gaps in my head and what the landscape of our country was like. I need to now go see what my land was like, before the Mughals.

More history was in the offing with part two of The Rest is History’s continuing history of the French Revolution. I listened to Parts Two and Three this month. (Episodes 503-507 and 544-547). Part one was last year (Episodes 475-482).
A really refreshing change of pace by Holland and Sandbrook, considering they have covered the Revolution once before in two twenty minute episodes! I love the slow, measured march this time. The more I listen, the more I wonder how much of history hinges on chance events! I also love their slightly irreverent and self deprecating tone. We’re still not done, and I look forward to revisiting France during the revolution, soon.

Honourable mention to the Acquired Podcast’s coverage of Rolex. This was one of the few I really enjoyed, besides their story on Hermès. I think I just like old company stories. Hopefully someday we’ll get Nintendo and Yamaha.

And that’s it for now. I hope you folks find something in here, that interests you too :)

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][3].

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:21:57 +0530

Ben Orlin, the modern Maths apologist, brings to us what I’d call his Magnum Opus, the modern Mathematician’s Lament.
Everytime, I read an Orlin book, I always wish, I had teachers like him when I was young, so that I would not have had such crippling math-phobia for so much of my life.
It should actually be called, Maths for the Rest of Us.
It’s great! So great!

My highlights, from the book
#

A mathematician is hardly a reasonable person. More like a feral philosopher or a logician gone rogue.

It’s a bit peculiar to say that I add 4 and 3 to create 7; 4 and 3 simply are 7, irrespective of my efforts. When I multiply or divide or take a logarithm, the result equals whatever it equals, regardless of my labors. I do not, in a strict sense, change the numbers, but merely discover or reveal them. Operations act not upon the quantities themselves, but only upon our understandings of them.

In my childhood, back when money was made of metal and paper instead of software and lies, I learned that two quarters add up to 50 cents: 25 + 25 = 50. I loved knowing this

… the beauty of mathematical language lies in its unreality. Math lets us escape this world of crumbs and mud for a realm of rigorous abstractions. The purer the logic—that is, the further from physical reality—the deeper the truth. “As far as laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,” said Einstein, “and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

I sometimes envision mathematics as a tower. It leads from the earthy crust of everyday experience (piles of cookies; buckets of water; half-dollar coins) up to the thin atmosphere of abstract concepts (Lie groups, whatever those are). There’s pleasure and power in climbing to the upper floors. But there’s an equal pleasure—and a different kind of power—in descending to the bottom. Down there, you can touch the foundations, poke at the joints where math attaches to the world, and fill your half-gallon bucket with a new kind of insight

Consider 2 + 3. If + is a verb, then who is the subject carrying out the addition? Neither 2 nor 3 performs any action; those nouns just sit there being nouns. You’re the one who adds, but you’re not a part of mathematical speech

Such confusion is not limited to the youth. Adult textbook authors have been known to include gratuitous fighter jets and non sequitur cheetahs, as if the secret to math is picturing something, anything. But the hard part of math isn’t remembering what cats look like. It’s making sense of abstract ideas.

The challenge of algebra is to visualize the invisible

“The point of doing algebra,” writes math teacher Paul Lockhart, “is… to move back and forth between several equivalent representations,depending on the situation at hand and depending on our taste. In this sense, all algebraic manipulation is psychological.”

Old information, new formation

I like this rule because it’s rarely even taught. Mathematicians apply it automatically, the way fluent English speakers always say “a big ugly bath toy” and not “a bath ugly big toy.” In fact, as Mark Forsyth points out in The Elements of Eloquence, English adjectives are typically placed in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. Hence, “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

Likewise, in math, numbers are typically multiplied in a certain order: numeral, radical, constant, variable. Hence, we write 3πxy²z, and never (unless we’re trying to provoke someone) zy²πx3

Toward the end of a sixth-grade lesson, a chipper young fellow named Kieran raised his hand. “I don’t really understand anything you’re saying,” he informed me. “But I can still get the right answer.” He beamed a patient smile.

I stifled a sigh. “Which part can I help you with?”

“Oh, I don’t need help,” he said. “It’s just that you were talking about this extra stuff. Like, the ideas behind it. I don’t, you know, do that.”

I blinked. He blinked. A great silence passed between us.

“Is that okay?” he concluded. “I mean, as long as I can get the right answer?”

There it was, out in the open: the subtext of almost every lesson I had taught that year. Day after day, I tried to illuminate the logic behind the symbols. Day after day, my students politely ignored my prattle to focus on the symbols themselves. What made that afternoon stand out was that Kieran broke the fourth wall. He uttered the title of the film we were acting in.

To do math, must you think about the ideas, or can you just focus on the symbols?

As David Hilbert quipped, “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.” That’s symbol pushing in a nutshell. Language divorced from meaning

But a few weeks after Kieran’s query, I learned that not all mathematicians share my dim view of symbol pushing. I mentioned to my dad (a mathematician himself) that I had started writing an essay titled ”How to Avoid Thinking in Math Class.” Before I could say any more, he gave the project his stamp of approval. “Great,” he said. “I’ve always said that the point of math education is to help you not to think.”

I was taken aback. No, I explained, the title was ironic. On the question of “Should we think?” I was firmly in favor.

“Oh, yes, thinking is good,” he generously conceded. “But it’s too hard to do all the time.”

He (and, indeed, Kieran) had a point. For example, it is an algebraic truth that (x + 1)(x − 1) is the same as x2 − 1. This fact boils down to a repeated application of the distributive property; as such, you can explain it entirely in terms of pile rearrangement. But trying to do so is like ascending a sheer cliff face.

Quite a climb! Invigorating as an occasional workout, but unthinkable as a morning commute. This was exactly my dad’s point: Thinking is good. But it’s too hard to do all the time.

“Operations of thought,” wrote the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, “are like cavalry charges in battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made in decisive moments.”

In this case, there is no need to send in the cavalry. The symbol pusher, thinking only about letters and parentheses, reaches the same summit in a few effortless strides

Can you imagine if English worked this way? An object’s name would indicate its physical size, so that a chihuahua (nine letters) would be three times the size of a cow (three letters). A food’s name would encode its recipe, so that a pizza would be a “DoughSauceCheeseBake.” Chemistry would be a tediously safe area of study, because we could run experiments simply by smushing together the names of various chemicals and seeing which ones spell “explosion.”

Symbol pushing boils the laws of logic down to laws of grammar. The language becomes a scale model of reality. We can wrangle ideas simply by wrangling ink.

So who was right, me or Kieran? The answer, of course, is both. To speak mathematics is to slip back and forth between two worlds, to inhabit two distinct frames of mind: the hard joy of thinking and the mindless trance of symbol pushing. Without the ink, the ideas are befuddling; but without the ideas, the ink means nothing. Learn the logic, learn it well, and then turn off your brain and let the symbols on the page dance to the silent music of the mind.

… notations often gain popularity precisely because they lend themselves to simple mechanical rules. You could say we choose the symbols for the express purpose of pushing them around. We can then generate right answers with no insight, no inspiration, no input other than elbow grease. Just turn the crank, and new knowledge pops out

When someone is too focused on details, we say they’re missing the forest for the trees. Mathematicians, if anything, are guilty of the opposite: missing the trees for the forest. Their habit is to inspect not objects themselves, but the objects’ properties. (Not the trees, but the number of them.) Then, having distilled these properties, they look at the properties’ properties. (Not the number, but its evenness or oddness.) And so on: the properties of the properties of the properties of the things. “Matter does not engage their attention,” Henri Poincaré once said of mathematicians. “They are interested in form alone.”

Blog Questions Challenge 2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:10:17 +0530

Ava started this, Kev modified this, and Saptak egged me on to write this. So here goes …

What the home page looks like in 2025

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?
#

I write for me mostly. Because writing helps me think. My thoughts are too scattered otherwise. I can’t not write. I’ve always written. Privately, publicly, there’s always been some place where I’ve jotted things down.

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
#

I use Hugo to generate the site, which I host on my own Hetzner VM. I use it because I outgrew my previous tool, Nikola, which still holds a dear place in my heart. While Hugo is enormously complex, it is also deceptively simple enough to get started with. And it’s fast. That’s what I love about it. It lets me write. It does not get in my way. It lets me preview what I’m doing with its live server. And it’s unbelievably fast.

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
#

I’ve been writing in some form or other since the late 90s. So … yea :)
Livejournal, Blogger, self hosted Wordpress, wordpress.com, Posterous, Tumblr, self hosted Wordpress, self hosted Ghost, Nikola and now Hugo. It’s been quite a ride!

4. How do you write your posts?
#

I write them in Emacs (in Markdown, using Markdown Mode) on my desktop, with Hugo Server running alongside giving me a preview of what things will look like. Once I commit it to my self hosted Forgejo instance, an action publishes the site automatically

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
#

I never do. I write because it helps me function. And yet, it always feels like a chore.

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
#

I always publish it immediately. I almost never write something that is deeply thought out, that needs to stand the test of time. It’s the process, the writing, the putting words out of my mind, through my fingers down to paper, that leads to the result, the thought, the opinion, the aha, the insight. So I’m never quite done. Which means if I ever wait for finished, the post will never get published. The moment I publish something, is invariably the moment something needs changing. So I just go back and edit it. I never notify folks about updating things on the first day. If I ever edit something much later than a day or two, then I do.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?
#

None. All. They’re my thoughts, so depending on my mood, they’re either worthless or priceless gems!

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
#

Not really. For all my wandering, I’ve only ever moved when my tools outgrew me¹, or I outgrew my tools. For now, Hugo does all I ask of it, without getting in the way. The day that changes, will be the day I move.

I’ll ask Priyanka, Sreeram, Sandeep, Pradhvan, Rahul, Bhavin, Elia, Mandar, Saptak, Farhaan, Robin and Kushal to share more, if they have the time, energy and the inclination.

Folks, who’ve answered my call to arms! Go read their answers too!

Robin
Elia

Wordpress.com too restrictive, Ghost stopped serving my specific needs etc. ↩︎

On Neil Gaiman

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:48:39 +0530

Considering how much I’ve quoted Neil Gaiman (here, here, here, here, here and many other places on the blog) and how much his stories have influenced me, I feel a bit obligated to put this personal statement out.

What he did was really, really wrong! Horrifyingly wrong!
The girls, the women, were wronged. Grossly so. Often violently so.

Never meet your heroes and idols with feet of clay and all that.

So I’ve given away (or deleted) all my Gaiman books, save two. My collected editions of Sandman. And my signed copy of What you Need to Be Warm.
While it is true that Gaiman shot to stardom with Sandman, that was not the reason I bought this collected edition. I bought it for the young boy, who would scramble the lanes of Matunga and Fort, looking for more erudite comics after reading Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Sandman was something I discovered on my own and enjoyed so much.
Besides it was never about the writing at that stage. It was the stories. From all over the world and across cultures. That he’d reimagine for Sandman. (Ramadan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thermidor, The Dream Hunters … ) And even more importantly it was the pictures, the drawings, the gorgeous art. (Yoshitaka Amano, Dave McKean, Todd Klein, and all the others) So Sandman stays. And with What You Need to Be Warm, the money went to a smol shop and to a good cause both. So I don’t feel bad owning it.

“Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken” — Terry Pratchett

And so this is the last, I speak your name. You’re dead to me.

View Only the Day, With Org Agenda

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:50:40 +0530

Org Mode, by default, shows me the whole week, when I pull up my agenda. That’s not how I work though. I normally look at the week on Monday mornings (or Sunday evenings) to plan out the week and then work everyday by just looking at what I ought to get done that particular day.

Like Dale Carnegie says,

Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past.

The future is today. There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is now.

Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of day-tight compartments.

So I want then, my Org Mode to do show me, only the things, I have on my plate today.

And Org is nothing if not adaptable. org-agenda-span is the variable that controls what the Agends shows me. According to the docs,

This variable can be set to any number of days you want to see by default in the agenda, or to a span name, such a day, week, month or year.

So that’s what I did. This little snippet went into my init file

;; Set Agenda to show a day as the default timespan, instead of a week
(setq org-agenda-span 'day)

Et voilà!

More Espanso & Emacs Shenanigans

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:45:09 +0530

Now that I use my local machine to draft all my posts, desktop Emacs makes everything easier … with one exception. It swallows up a lot of my Espanso expansions.

My current bugbear is that it will not render a = when expanding.
I know this is entirely something that I brought on myself, and neither Emacs or Espanso in isolation will have issues.

My workaround after rummaging through Espanso’s documentation was to set the backend to use xdotool, in my config. (~/.config/espanso/config/default.yml)

x11_use_xdotool_backend: true

One downside now is that it no longer jumps back to a predefined location in the snippets where I’ve defined such a thing. No matter. I use them rarely and I’ll figure something out later. (Alongside why desktop emacs won’t render markdown expansions sometimes as well)

For now, most of my expansions work. Hurrah!

This Is What I Want to Do the Rest of My Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 12:33:12 +0530

This image has been floating around the web, once again, so I’ve snatched a copy to post here¹ and keep reminding myself of what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Susan Sontag’s annotations in her copy of Finnegans Wake. Click to slightly enlarge

I am a reader.
In the Mortimer Adler sense of the word.
This is my dream :)
To be surrounded by books.
And to be able to savour them, a line … a page at a time.

I found it this time, courtesy a Diane Duane Tumblr repost ↩︎

Forgejo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:39:12 +0530

Setup a new instance of Forgejo for myself today.
The first thing I felt, was … instant relief.
I didn’t realise just how much cognitive discomfort I was feeling, because Github was the only place I had all my code. As well as mirrors/forks of all the stuff I loved.
I’m going to slowly move over to my little Forgejo instance as I learn more.

Right now I’ve set up pull mirrors for all the projects I love.

Next step is to figure out how to automate my Hugo blog deployment and more importantly; having all my posts in source control.

Some Site Housekeeping (New Sections and RSS Feeds)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 11:36:16 +0530

Hard at work, on the site
Click the image, to embiggen

If you look at the site today, you’ll see that ye olde blog section has disappeared.
I’ve replaced it with three sections, Work, Personal and Reading.
I’ve done this primarily for me.

While I want all my writing in one place, I want them organised in piles that correspond with the three major modes of my brain.
Work to hold everything I consider work.
Reading for the bookworm in me.
And finally personal for everything else.

The problem (my problem, in my mind) with the old blog was too much mental whiplash when I read the blog. I would go from poetry to docker to antifragility to photos with every turn of the page.
I didn’t like it.
Ergo, the reorganisation.

Every one in their own pretty place now.
Click the image, to embiggen

So now, whenever I am browsing my posts in the work section, I see only tech, and computers and docker and programming and all that good stuff.
Same with the personal stuff and the reading.

How does this affect you, my kind and gentle reader?
#

If you are a subscriber to the email list, nothing changes. I know I’ve been lax with updates, but hopefully this reorg should break up the log jam and help me write more.
If you just come here to the site, once in a while to read through, hopefully, you’ll find it easy just like me, to read posts without too much cognitive whipsawing.
And finally, if you subscribe via RSS, you my friend are probably affected.
The main feed, with all articles, still remains the same, so if you drink from the firehose, nothing changes.
If you’re subscribed to a tag specific feed, like Emacs or DGPLUG, nothing changes.
The only change is that the blog feed has disappeared. In its place are three spanking new feeds, representing my new sections.
And that about does it. Happy Reading!

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback at this domain

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

13 (Grow Old With Me)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Abby and me, sittin in a tree, c-l-o-w-nin-g!

Picture credit, Priyanka Saggu
Click the pic, to make big!

Grow old with me, the best is yet to be …

Notes to Self, Compiling Qbittorrent on a Raspberry Pi 5

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 14:13:31 +0530

Update, 2024-08-20:
Added a missing step, to install the qBittorrent files to their relevant places
Also, it had to happen. No releases for close to three months and then just as I learn to compile, a new version has to release the very next day 😂
It gave me a chance to test my notes. It hardly took me a few minutes to get the new release in place. So all is good!

A compilation of letters, courtesy Cosmos

I wanted to always have the lastest stable version of qBittorent on my Pi.
So today, I sat down and followed the project’s excellent instructions and got it running.
I did however stray off the beaten path a teensy bit¹.
I didn’t want a gui and I wanted to be able to control it with systemd.

So here’s my checklist for next release. I’m currently running Bookworm on my Pi 5

In case you run into problems, compile instructions are here: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki/Compilation-Debian,-Ubuntu,-and-derivatives
Do all off this after switching to root. (or sudo)
Install build tools
sudo apt install build-essential cmake git ninja-build pkg-config libboost-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
Install Qt dependencies (qtbase5-private-dev is not part of the instructions, but compile will fail if you don’t include it)²
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends qtbase5-dev qtbase5-private-dev qttools5-dev libqt5svg5-dev
Qt requires Python at runtime, so: sudo apt install python3
Install the libtorrent library. I compiled from source. Check page for fresh instructions, if stuff here doesn’t work
```
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git
cd libtorrent
git checkout RC_2_0 # or a 2.0.x tag
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
cmake --build build -j4 # the -j4 is to do on four cores at once. my addition.
sudo cmake --install build
```
If you ever want to uninstall libtorrent, then don’t delete this main folder. The build process would have created a install_manifest.txt in the build folder. So you can then uninstall with: sudo xargs rm < install_manifest.txt
Get qb source: https://www.qbittorrent.org/download.
Unzip: tar xzvf qbittorrent-4.6.5.tar.gz and then cd qbittorrent-4.6.5/
Create Build configuration (disabled GUI and enabled systemd. Those aren’t part of the defaults)
cmake -G "Ninja" -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DGUI=OFF -DSYSTEMD=ON
Build cmake --build build
Install all the files to their relevant locations cmake --install build

Install service to run for a specific user.

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable qbittorrent-nox@<some-user>.service
systemctl start qbittorrent-nox@<some-user>.service

We’re done.

which the project does make provisions for. ↩︎
Target "qbt_base" links to: Qt::CorePrivate but the target was not found. or words to that effect ↩︎

Happy Birthday Abbygail

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0530

You haven’t changed a bit in all the ways that matter!
And so …

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

— The Bard (as rendered by the Dench)

Bread and Roses

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:59:42 +0530

Click the image to see the much larger, original

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers,
for bread is food for the body,
but flowers are food for the mind.

— Galen of Pergamon

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

— James Oppenheim

Reading this beautiful conversation on Tumblr, led to this lovely page on Wikipedia.

Several Corroborative Thoughts on Pacing Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:28:43 +0530

That is what I should have called, yesterday’s post.

Pace yourself!

Be disciplined.
Show up.
Do the work.
And know when to quit.

And in more serendipitious bathing and reading hijinks I came across several folks who resonated with that thought. Slowly pacing yourself and doing the work, leads to big things.

Here’s Ryan Holiday, in 37 (Or So) Lessons From A 37 Year Old.

I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there—especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control—is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.

And Cory Doctorow in his very, popular Memex Method

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

And then there’s Cal Newport with his Slow Productivity.
I don’t even need his words to describe what he does. I have followed him and his output long enough to know his modus operandi.
The only thing I don’t know is how he latches on to some topic.
But once that happens, he starts blogging about it. (and now talking about it on the pocdast).
His very popular Deep Work was published around 2016. A cursory search for the word “deep” in his blog archive will show you what I’m talking about. You can see him writing, thinking, refining and coming to the core of what he wants to convey.
Further refinement happens over on his New Yorker column.
And then finally, after all that slow, steady drumbeat of work comes the book.
Small wonder, they then turn out to be evergreen titles.

So there! Like Cal espouses,
1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:43:28 +0530

Rain lilies, from Abby’s tiny window garden.
They bloom only around this time of the year, on the onset of the monsoon.
Click the pic, for a bigger image

I love to write.
Correction, I need to write.
Writing helps me think, to be deliberate about things, to slow down.

At the same time, writing is also a slow, plodding process for me. Every post seems to take forever. So many years of doing it and it does not get any easier.
I agonise over what I want to say, the picture or quotes I want to include, the overall arc of my thoughts, the structure, everything has to be just so.¹
I’ve lowered the bar, to build consistency, with my #100WordHabit and now I have a new problem. First, I could not get started, and now I cannot stop once I get started.
I just have to finish my thoughts, my post, and that sometimes takes hours.
Which brings me back to me not wanting to start, for the fear that nothing else (that are in fact, more important) will get done.

This in turn, brings me to the brainwave I had a couple of days ago, in the bath.²
The pressure comes from wanting to publish what I write, the day I write.
What if, I didn’t?

Nothing has to change. With the exception of a hard stop.
One hour.
One hour to write and publish.
Or one hour to write and then put my pencil down.
And then I can come back to it the next day.
Yesterday’s post was the result of this approach.
I wrote it over two days, in two one hour sessions.
Very like Abby’s rain lillies up up above. They are prepping through the year, to bloom at this time, every time. Just because I cannot see it, does not mean nothing’s happening

One downside, that I potentially see, is that I will use this as an excuse to slack.
I hope I don’t.
But then on the other hand, without a pressure control valve like this, I can very easily see myself burning out again.

So let’s see how this goes.
I’m betting on me being a rain lily.

The end result might not be any good, but my mind needs to be satisfied, that all is to its liking and that I did the best I could ↩︎
Don’t we all? ↩︎

Bird on a Wire

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 16:01:45 +0530

Photo courtesy, Abbygail Braganza, at the Seawoods Flamingo Point, part of the Navi Mumbai Mudflat Wetlands
Click the pic to see a larger one

Like a bird on a wire …

Like a fish on a hook …

I have tried in my way to be free

— Aaron Neville, singing Leon Cohen’s, Bird On A Wire

The Rest Is Memory

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 17:01:54 +0530

Priyanka, hoping Hedwig will carry her to Hogwarts.
Click the pic for a bigger image

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück, Nostos. (via @ashstfu on Tumblr)

How to Stop Time

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 17:36:44 +0530

Click the pic to see a larger version

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive (via, @melodybookshaven on tumblr)

Be Nobody but Yourself

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 20:22:04 +0530

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— E.E. Cummings, via The Marginalian

I Read Like Grandma Does

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 05:45:00 +0530

1943!

Folks who been reading the blog, for a while know about the reading lists.
I began writing down what I read, just to keep track, ever since I started this incarnation of the blog.

And then just a few days ago, serendipity led me to that pic above, on Twitter.
User, Ben Myers’ grandmother has been doing exactly what I have been doing, for the past eight decades! (rather, I have been doing what she has 😂)

This makes me so giddily happy!

Cursive Is Fun

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 14:42:15 +0530

I love it, meaning, I love writing cursive, not someone’s suffering

Some poor soul on Tumblr, seems to’ve been traumatised by cursive as a kid.

While my chicken scrawl is legible only to me mostly, I love the doing of it. The actual writing. (I do write legibly if someone else has to read it, mostly Abby, Mom or Priyanka¹)

Peter Morwood, in his beautiful post, makes a lovely point as well …

Also, learning to write cursive meant learning to read cursive (it would have been hard to separate one from the other!) which is a useful skill when looking at historical stuff, and which might prove a problem for future Professional Historians who weren’t taught cursive, so will have to learn it from scratch.

The thought that I’ve stumbled into some niche skill by attrition and accident, makes me smile :)

Three presentations together and I still insist on mostly outlining on paper and she’s stuck trying to decipher it 😂 ↩︎

Doing Devops, Dropping Rust

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:37:50 +0530

Been struggling to do it all over the past few months.
But no! Life says no :)

So I’m building some margin into my life.
And the only thing I can talk about work wise, is the familiarity I am trying to gain as part of the career pivot.
The Devops Stuff.
The only thing that is career adjacent to all the stuff I did as a sysadmin and then consultant. So hopefully lots of boring stuff about exciting tech as I try to build new mental models, to fit over old ones.

Problem though, is what do I write?
I don’t have a good spin on most computer devops stuff. I don’t know what to say.
So for now, they probably will be, just like I point above, boring progress logs.
Mostly consistent, to give me accountability.
And hopefully, I’ll find a voice.

On the personal front, books, reading, art, language, poetry, photography and other posts will continue. Those are what make my soul sing :)

What I’d Do for You

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:08:36 +0530

Click for a larger pic

this morning
i told the flowers
what i’d do for you
and they blossomed

— Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

Moved My Music Library From Jellyfin to Emby Today

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 10:47:23 +0530

I had moved off Plex, close to two years ago, because … reasons.
Unable to decide between Emby and Jellyfin and having just learned containers at the time, I deployed both on my Pi.
Emby handled video duties while Jellyfin did music.

And now after close to two years, I’m moving off Jellyfin to Emby.
The only reason being its iOS client.
It still has a lot of growing up to do, and I’ve reached the end of my tether trying to adjust to its foibles.
I cannot turn the phone off, else the music goes off.
I cannot switch away from the Jellyfin app, else the music goes off.
If I get a call, then the app sorta-kinda loses its mind and I have to kill it and relaunch it.

All I want from my music player is to be a good audio citizen on iOS. Connect to the server, read my songs, play my music. And do it in the background.

While I am sympathetic to the priorities of the open source Jellyfin team, I am not getting any younger and my hour long walks are the only time I get to enjoy my music.

So … I moved.

Setting the stage
#

There had to be two instances of Emby running. I don’t want my video online and so I don’t want it exposed
Video is secondary anyway. So that had to be the second container. The main one is Music.
Music needs to be accessible from anywhere on the web.

Doing it
#

I already had docker running and installed, along with Nginx
Jellyfin has better documentation. So I used their guide to reverse proxy Nginx to the Emby service that would come up. All I had to do, was put in my SSL cert paths correctly and change the variable jellyfin to embymusicserver (along with the rest of the require settings.)
I created a folder to hold Emby’s docker compose file. I modified the container name to embymusicserver and gave the path to mount for its config and another one that pointed to my music folder. Pretty straightforward. (I had already changed the ports earlier on the video emby instance to 8097 & 8921 to avoid conflicts with Jellyfin, so I did not have to touch that.)
Assigned ownership recursively to the user that would run the container.
Did a docker compose up to see if everything came up ok. And then tore it down
And finally, once again, adapted my old Jellyfin systemd script to ensure I could have it start and stop with the system

In hindsight, there was no way to pull all of this off in an hour, if it wasn’t for Docker and Emby’s image. Now I realise why containers are taking over the world.

And thank you for all you do, Jellyfin. I shall return as soon as the app gets more useful.

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Letsencrypt Certs Manually With Lego

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 31 May 2024 11:12:17 +0530

image courtesy, the Lego Github page

I want to someday, automate all my domain certificate renewals.
Namecheap doesn’t support it, ergo my move to Porkbun.
And certbot doesn’t support Porkbun, so I’ve moved to Lego.

I still need to someday figure out how to do this automatically, but for now, since all is in place, this is the new manual process.

You’ll need to generate a Porkbun API key along with its associated secret, and store it somewhere safe and secure. (This is a one time thing, the Generating API keys section here describes how)
Another one time step is to get Lego installed and have it generate your certs, and then have your applications, point to where they are.
Command to renew: PORKBUN_SECRET_API_KEY="your-api-*secret*" PORKBUN_API_KEY="your-porkbun-api-key" ./lego --domains your-domain.tld --domains *.domain.tld --email your-email@domain --dns porkbun renew
And the renewal’s done!
Restart yer engines … err your applications¹ et voilà!
If you have multiple machines, figure out a way to securely transfer the certs there too.

in my case Nginx ↩︎

My Experience With the Kinesis Advantage 360 After a Day of Use

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 29 May 2024 20:02:51 +0530

Updates : I’ll update this post periodically as I get more familiar with the keyboard

I find the curvy, ungainly shape really beautiful. Click to enlarge

If you follow me on the fediverse, you’ve already read most of this.

Long story short, my wrists (and now, my elbows and arms) are killing me.
So, I saved up and got me a new, split, ergonomic keyboard: The Kinesis Advantage 360
It’s available in the US at around 500USD. I paid close to twice that to import it home, to India (via a seller on the Amazon India site)
Lots of bullet points after a day of use.

All of its ergonomic and software power is QWERTY first and Windows/Mac first. A Dvorak, Linux user like me, will need to adjust quite a bit¹
Everything’s slowed to a crawl as I get used to the new key placements.
The Dvorak layout seems to work better on this than on my old keyboard
The key layout and spacing is throwing everything off
Realised some of my keyboard shortcuts were that way, because of the old keyboard layout. They are terrible on the new keyboard. Need to find new shortcuts for ulauncher, minimising windows, and the gpaste clipboard manager
My caps lock is the compose key and i need to see if the new position will help or hinder me
totally gotten used to the new space, return and backspace keys
totally not used to the placement of esc. will try a week to see if i can get used to it.
new ways of chording keys in emacs. seem to be easier on the wrists. (because of the new place for the ctrl and alt keys)
my wrists feel much better. no idea how much of this is placebo. will know for sure only after a while
bottom row keys are tough right now
got used to the compose key
the question mark and slash has moved below and to the right (dvorak), so will need to see if i adjust
i miss my numpad so much!
learned how to mount the onboard flash storage and eject it properly
updated firmware to the latest version.
also note to self, switch to querty before you do this. status reports are typed out wonky other wise
I have brown switches

The one thing I confidently say, even after a single day of use, is that this is a lovely keyboard.
I will get used to all its quirks, because the scalloped, split design suits me really well.
Most of it, is just changing muscle memory, not learning new painful maneuvers.
And the design also ensures, every single key is in reach of my fingers. This is the magical part for me.
If it lasts me five years, I’ll consider it money well spent.

Updates
#

2024-07-02
#

Gotten used to the layout for the most part. The arrow keys are still very troublesome and trip me up all the time. Realise how deep muscle memory actually is.
The only reason I don’t want to change them, is that they (the new keys) are easy on my fingers and when I’m intentional about them, are easy to use.
The Compose key and the : keys will still take a while getting used to.
Have gotten the hang of /, ?, = and + though.
Have gotten back to my old speed. My error rate is still really high. Most of my friends have now gotten used to my typos 😂

for e.g., the [ key finds itself at the top right, while the ] key finds itself top left 😂 ↩︎

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 25 May 2024 10:19:21 +0530

So I bought myself comics. And I was naively trying to count how many I got.
And I went aha! I’ll paste the lines into Emacs and the lines numbers will tell me :) So I just selected stuff off the web and put it in and …

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
185.4 MB
EPUB
105.4 MB
PDF
439.9 MB
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
17.7 MB
EPUB
16.6 MB
PDF
137.2 MB
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
229.3 MB
EPUB
135.9 MB
PDF
438.6 MB
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
132.9 MB
EPUB
50.2 MB
PDF
376.8 MB
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
106.4 MB
EPUB
118.7 MB
PDF
351.7 MB
… really long list elided

And I go, Ugh! It’s Saturday! I’m too lazy to go selecting and deleting that cruft between my titles. Isn’t there something in Emacs that can help?
Spoiler Alert: Of course there is! Meet flush-lines

M-x flush-lines asks me for a regex pattern.
I gave it \ MB¹ et voilà! Every line that had a space followed by MB disappeared!

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01
Dynamite Entertainment
CBZ
EPUB
PDF
… long list elided

And so a few, rapid commands to excise lines with Dynamite Entertainment, CBZ, EPUB and PDF later …

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vol. 2
Queen Sonja - Issue. #2
Vampirella: Throne of Skulls Vol 03
Red Sonja and the Ballad of the Red Goddess
Vampirella Strikes Vol 01

… still a long list, but exactly what I wanted :)

I love you, Emacs!

the \ followed by a space is just to demonstrate here that I put in a space. I just naively typed a space followed by MB, actually ↩︎

Why I Write

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 24 May 2024 20:53:48 +0530

Click to see a larger version, just as illegible

As I struggle to write, sometimes I wonder why I even do it.
And when I don’t, I then get this strange uncontrollable urge to write something, anything.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And now in addition to that crazy struggle, I’ve caught myself getting upset of late. All because nobody “shares” the posts I put out.
And I worry if anyone even reads my stuff?
And do they like it?
And if they do, why would they not share it?
Not good enough?
Should I be doing more?
Write better?

All of which came to a head today.
And after a bit of laughing at my silliness, I decided to write down what I tell myself every year.

Because I do write.
Whether anyone reads it. Or not.
Which is why I wonder why I get trapped in this weird neurotic spider web every year.
I’m done comparing, in the words of Lamott, my insides to their outsides.

So a few thoughts to myself on why I do it. A non exhaustive list …

I love to read.
I love to write.
I write primarily for myself. First and foremost.
I write because I cannot help it.
I write because I cannot not write.
I write to document things and thingamajigs and doodads and small things and big things. Because I forget. And writing helps me remember. And then it helps other people learn. And then they teach me new things. And I learn more. And I write more. And the whole virtuous cycle repeats.
I write because everything in me, has got to come out on the page, so that there is space within me, to then function.
I write because then everything slows down to the pace of my fingers rather than the crazy light speed dizziness within my brain.
I write because I can then think.
I write because it sharpens my focus.
I write because it makes it easy to forget.
I write because I read what I write. Even if no one else does. Even if no one else wants to. Even if no one else can. And I love my past selves, who’ve scribbled their thoughts and feelings to protect me, shield me, guide me and give me comfort, solace and love.
I write because then, my heart then aches a little bit less.
I write because it’s brought me back from the edge of the void. Twice.
I write because it helps me be resilient. Persistent. To quote Taleb, Antifragile. And to quote Angelou, “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I rise.”
I write because I have scars. And writing lessens the hurt. To quote Bareilles, it helps me hold on, till there’s something else to hold on to.
I write because …
I write because today I realise, that’s who I am.
I am a writer, because that’s what I do. I write.

First Love

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 May 2024 14:45:37 +0530

Moss Roses, in my window.
Click to enlarge

Petals unfurl
    from a delicate flower,
    closer to picked
    with each
    passing hour,
    losing the I
    and gaining
    an our.

— Michael Faudet, First Love, Dirty Pretty Things

Make Bad Things

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:54:10 +0530

Art by Amanda Domagala, on Tumblr

Amanda says,

“Make bad things, instead of making nothing”

Something similar that’s been drummed into my head innumerable times over the years, by many mentors:

“If you cannot do it well, do it badly.” :)

If you love doing something, if you want to do something … do it.
Does not matter how poorly or badly its done.
You’re going to love it nonetheless.

No Love Is Wasted

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:51:17 +0530

via Diane Duane

I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far:
every strange thing you’ve ever been into,
every failed hobby or forgotten instrument,
everything you have ever learned will come back to you,
will serve you when you need it.

No love, however brief, is wasted.

(I’d add every act of kindness,random or otherwise, to that list.)

My Reading Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 11:30:48 +0530

from somewhere on Tumblr. I lost the source. Apologies, original poster!

The Art of Losing

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 20:39:16 +0530

A path, somewhere in the palace gardens at Versailles.
Click to enlarge

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Notes to Self, How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:01:16 +0530

“Liberty & equality forever, or Death!”
Written on the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France
(Click for a larger image)

I recently read Scott H. Young’s article on How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language and realised it would be a handy guide for me, as I go about increasing my French & Urdu vocabulary.

This is what I took away:

The first 2000 words will cover 80-90% of a language’s vocabulary. 3000 will cover 95%. That should be your goal.
Use a frequency dictionary, then according to frequency do 1000/2000/3000 words
10000 will lead to almost being fluent. Hard to do that quickly with French, sitting in India. But, aspirational goals :)
Do:
- Flash cards, knowing that this will not teach you the nuance and flavour and texture of French
- Graded reading, Like the article states
To successfully guess the meaning of a new word from its context, we need to understand between 95% and 98% of the surrounding words. This is difficult to achieve with native-level materials. Graded readers, which deliberately limit vocabulary, can be beneficial here.
- If you’re doing the slow and steady way, because you lack the time, then growth will be slow. Assume 400 new word families a year
- Use the four pillars of learning. Paraphrasing & Quoting the article:
  1. Meaning-focused input.
    Input provides the raw data for learning new words and enriches the contextual associations of words studied deliberately elsewhere. This includes conversations, books, films, television and other media that you attend to primarily for their meaning.
  2. Meaning-focused output. (Note: I am focussed on reading and writing)
    Speaking and writing are more difficult than simply understanding particular words from input, as using words correctly requires a more precise knowledge of each word and its meaning.
  3. Language-focused learning.
    This is the deliberate act of memorizing words, studying flashcards, or receiving explanations about word meanings. Webb and Nation argue that this should account for ~25% of the time spent learning a language.
  4. Fluency development. (I don’t know how I’ll do this. Re read stuff? Watch TV again.)
    Finally, attention should be paid to activities that speed up the understanding and production of words already known. Familiar materials that enable quick reading or conversations on familiar topics may not be needed to build new vocabulary, but they reinforce what was learned previously.

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:50:35 +0530

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task,
you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task.
Go get takeout.
Or beer, bread, and onions.
Eat cheese and some dates.
Relax.

— Ursula Vernon via, Diane Duane

I stumbled across Ursula from her art.

Art courtesy, Ursula Vernon

And then I realised she is an accomplished children’s author

And she does not stop there, she writes Hugo award winning books for adults across genres; horror, fantasy and romance.¹

And talk about making art from pain, she fucked cancer right in the eye!

Read all about her long journey here!
And if it does not inspire you, and make you shed a tear, I’ll eat my hat.

I’d say she’s a female Neil Gaiman. But let’s face it. She’s far more talented and kicks ass. Gaiman is the male T Kingfisher! ↩︎

Beautiful Arunachal!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 05:45:00 +0530

Memories of a trip, from a few years ago.
This was the second best vacation¹ I’ve had!

When you finally see the Aurora Borealis thiry four years, after you first learned about them, nothing else will ever come close :) ↩︎

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

Iron Widow

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:22:44 +0530

courtesy, Xiran Jay Zhao

What happens when you take all the pulpy goodness from Indian soaps and K-dramas, mash it up with Pacific Rim and Robotech, infuse it with a lot of authentic Chinese history, and aim it at teens (err, young adults)?

You get Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, that’s what!

I wish someone takes Indian history and creates such awesome fictional worlds from them.
This was such a crazy, rollicking ride! I cannot wait for their next.

My highlights, from the book
#

In hindsight, I was such a fool to have assumed Qieluo would stand by me just because she’s also female.
It was my grandmother who crushed my feet in half.
It was my mother who encouraged me and Big Sister to offer ourselves up as concubines so our brother could afford a future bride.
It was always the village aunties who’d sit around gossiping about which girl hadn’t been married off yet, despite complaining nonstop about their own husbands. And then they’d congratulate new mothers for being “blessed” to have a boy, despite being female themselves.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey.
You tell them over and over, until it’s the only truth they’re capable of living.

Babel

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:12:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Reading Babel, constantly gave me strong déjà vu as I leafed through its pages.¹
Until I realised what I was experiencing was an author enjoying their words, their lines, their exquisite craft. Where words themselves crawl into your mind, and say yes, we are. We will tell you this story. You need not make any effort here.
Richard Powers’, The Overstory was that way. So was Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things. And Tamysyn Muir, with her Locked Tomb books.

This is alternate history Empire. The British still rule the world, but here they do so, on the strength of magic, silver-work and words and language.
Kuang then uses all that heft to bash our brains in.²
There’s Robin and Ramy and Victoire and Letty and it’s them against the world³

This was one of those rare books⁴ where I wanted very little to do with the story and just wanted to lose myself in the world. I wanted to study languages the way they did, and do magic the way they did. The way some of them come to choose violence reminded me of Bhagat and Azad.

The history’s wonderful.
The way she uses language and words, even more so!

My highlights, from the book
#

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time.
‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’
‘Then are you—?’
‘No.’ Ramy snorted. ‘Well. Perhaps once. That’s the family story, anyhow; my father says we were aristocrats in the Mughal court, or something like that. But not anymore.’
‘What happened?’
Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’
‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’
‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’
‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.
‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’
Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’
‘No, give me something bigger.’
‘Táifēng?’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’
‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’
‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’
‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’
‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’⁵

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
— FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

ok, I swiped on my Elipsa. But you get the idea! ↩︎
in a good way ↩︎
a lot like Bardugo’s, Six of Crows ↩︎
the only other one for me, was The Lord of the Rings. I suspect Kuang, just like Tolkien, had the words and the language and the world ready. And then she just when and wrote a book to show some of it. ↩︎
reminds me of Steve Jobs, and his dent in the universe. ↩︎

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work, Coda

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:24:45 +0530

courtesy Liniers, Comics Kingdom
click to enlarge

With all the hullabaloo yesterday, on how you’d go about organising your day, and things to let go of, and marking your place, I forgot the overarching Note To Self.
Please remember. Never lose sight of what’s important.
Never forget why you’re doing all of this.

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 08:34:05 +0530

This started with a note to self on leaving breadcrumbs, and ended with a stream of consciousness journey on how I reached this conclusion. So what I’m trying to say, in a slightly rambling manner, is that this is a slightly incoherent, rambling post.

Courtesy, Delgrosso, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, on Flickr

I’m running my days now to slow, daily, consistent tiny amounts of progress.
And I am seeing results. When there are so many demands on my time, prioritising them and then doing them slowly yet consistently is yielding fruit.
While I certainly enjoy the deep dive, full of focus, lost in work sessions a lot more, I have too much life happening to allocate that kind of time and attention to everything.
The first thing I did, when I kinda-sorta revamped the way I went about my days¹, was to drop as many hot potatoes as I could, and then d-d-d-ed all the small yet important things in my life.
And then came to the sobering realisation that the rest of life just had to be done and dealt with. Even things I don’t like.

A couple of pieces then had to fall into place, before I gained some semblance of sanity and progress.

I can’t do it all. Some things, important things even, will fall through the cracks. Somethings that I really want to do, will get pushed to someday/maybe and some will just never get done. I have to make my peace with it.
Knowing what I am giving up, the things that I am doing? They better be worth it.
Making the time to think this through, and having mental muscle to do the thinking² helped.
Everything does not have to be good and perfect. Good enough, is good enough.
Yes, stuff is hard and unpleasant, but then you have a blessed life. There are so many people with hard lives. Suck it up. And go do something about it. Deal with it. Leaving stuff unattended in the recesses of your mind, is a sure way to rust and ruin.³. At the same time, while you are hard and focussed on the work, be kind to yourself. Find that balance.
Alright, mentally set. Now how do I go about the doing?
By doing as much or as little as you can, depending on how you prioritise it.
By doing it consistently. Set a schedule. Hit it.
If you think you don’t want to do it, do 10m regardless.⁴ And then move on.⁵
If interrupted, deal with the interruption. Come back. And continue.
Dealing with interruptions does not mean giving in to it. It means figuring out just what it is, and figuring out what to do about it. Most stuff can be jotted down and scheduled for later. Make sure the significant folk in your life know what you are up to, so that they know when they can expect you to be present and when you are off doing your own thing.⁶
Doing stuff this way is slow. And that’s ok. If your life permitted focussed deep work, you’d be doing it. But that’s not how it is. So find islands of focus. And do the best you can.
Do the best you can, does not mean going all out. Slow, sure, steady. That is your drumbeat. Slow, sure, steady. Unflustered. Calm. Measured.

So what happens once you do this? And what hiccoughs did you run into? And what do you do about it?

Stuff gets done! It doesn’t look like this ought to work, but it does.
Leaving stuff undone, putting things down for the day, causes lots of mental turmoil.
Also whenever you go back to stuff, there’s a lot of going back before your minds grasps where it was at, and only then does it go forth.
And that brings me to the crux of why I began writing this dastardly note in the first place.
Log. Summarise. Review!
1. Log how long you take for your tasks. Don’t judge yourself. Just dispassionately do it.
2. Every time you think you’re done with something for the time being and are putting it down? Spend the time to write down what you did and what future you needs to be doing. Create bookmarks. Give directions. Do this no matter how tired you are. No matter how shitty the note.
3. Review. This is the most important bit. Review at regular intervals and at various depths.⁷ And only then make your plans accordingly. Daily time logging & summarising leads to daily review leads to a better sense of what is done, how far you’ve come, what to change, where to swerve, what to do next, and where to go. Review, gosh darn it. Review!

It’s been working well the past three months. It’s reduced a lot of friction, and quite a bit of time. It makes it easy to get into the swing of things.
I’ll come back in six months and write about how it went.

it was a slow, gradual process. ↩︎
Thank you, meditation practice! ↩︎
oft used phrase in the Cosmere ↩︎
be as foul minded and potty mouthed and grumpy as you want. But do it. ↩︎
unless you get into the groove. ↩︎
if you are busy doing work all day, then that’s a sign. You need to get your life back into some semblance of balance. It’s ok doing this shit for a measure of time. This cannot be your whole life ↩︎
I’m good at the nitty gritty and the big picture (daily / quarterly reviews). I struggle with the medium term (weekly) ↩︎

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:27:18 +0530

courtesy, R.F. Kuang & Carlton Gibson

I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching Carlton Gibson’s talk on surviving open source¹ a few days ago.
They both touch upon ingrained privilege in their book/talk.
The popular proverb urges us to engage with the world as it is, not as we would have it be.²
But sometimes, we are so caught up that we need other, wiser eyes to see. That’s what Rebecca & Carlton have done for me :)

Here’s Carlton. I paraphrased the relevant bits from his talk. It begins at around the 10m, 10s mark. (all emphases mine.)

We’re not getting paid. But we don’t always act like we know that.
We give far more than is reasonable given the fact that it’s a volunteer thing that we are doing

It has a consequence.
Open Source skews overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
The bottom line is that contributing to open source is a privilege that only a few can afford.
We like to think it’s meritocracy. Well, you do the time, you do the hard yards, you work on your project, you get the rewards, but well Sorry! Meritocracy, my arse!

What’s really going on is that pre-existing economic relations are being reinforced by contributors leveraging the inequality of opportunity that those economic relations provide.
Sorry!
In English.
If you let it, Open Source extracts such a cost; physical, financial, and emotional, that the only folks who can do it are the global rich and of those, only the ones that are either directly supported by, or can make their way around the patriarchy. English speaking, white, men.

And these series of quotes from Babel.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Watch the talk.
Read Babel.
You’ll be better off, having done both.

not at the same time. I know I’m cuckoo, just not that cuckoo. ↩︎
I love this one from Saul Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals:
“I start from where the world is, as it as, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.” ↩︎

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:56:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Here I was, trying to laze away my day by getting lost in a book, when the book kicks my behind and tells me to go work 😂

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week.
‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”.
Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

— R.F. Kuang, Babel

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:12:18 +0530

Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The only reason we know that both, an emperor as well as a slave, both practiced the same philosophy that inspires people even now in this day and age, is because the former’s personal notes and the latter’s words compiled by a student, have come down to us through the ages.

The only reason that Leonardo Da Vinci has such a legacy, is that the few pieces of his work that were created and displayed, have somehow, miraculously lasted the ravages of the past half century. But so much of his work was unpublished, stowed away in private journals, never to be seen for centuries. How much more would we have known, or learnt if only? If only.

Decades of stunning art, never released. No one knew the genius of Vivian Maier, when she was alive.

From John Maloof’s, Vivian Maier, Maloof Collection

Like David Kadavy writes,¹

Finishing what you start is overrated.
[…]
Contrast this with many other things Leonardo never finished. The observations that lie hidden in his notes would have advanced humanity by centuries in the fields of medicine, flight, geology, and more. These sketches and notes weren’t finished – but, most tragically, they weren’t published.
You don’t have to finish to have an impact. You do have to publish.

Honoré De Balzac had it right,

“For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed”

On which Austin Kleon expounds²

If you just focus on getting really good, Martin says, people will come to you. I happen to agree: You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an easy way of putting your work out there and making it discoverable while you’re focused on getting really good at what you do.

Imagine if your next boss didn’t have to read your résumé because he already reads your blog. Imagine being a student and getting your first gig based on a school project you posted online. Imagine losing your job but having a social network of people familiar with your work and ready to help you find a new one. Imagine turning a side project or a hobby into your profession because you had a following that could support you.

Or imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests.

All you have to do is, Show Your Work.

From Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work

all emphases mine ↩︎
in his book Show Your Work ↩︎

Create New Scars (or Calluses)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:37:55 +0530

I wrote about creating with your experience, your scars, the other day.
And the best way to do that is to develop your calluses, your own scars in the first place.

Herbert Lui writes …

On either fence of, “Write what you know,” I tend to lean towards writing about what I don’t know; “Write What Obsesses You,” as Meg Wolitzer describes it.
[…] Some people say in order to write a book, you need to live it. While I lived aspects of Creative Doing, the more accurate way to say it would be, the writing process changed me, and that I live the book now. I wrote the book I needed to read, not just in the past, but also in the future.

Indeed, you become what you write about, (or what you do)!

This is what I’m trying to do with this slow writing thing.
Which also drives home, what Kushal is still nagging me about and what I am still procrastinating at. That I do the same with my work. With the stuff that I want to learn.
This is my stake in the ground, Kushal. I’ll do this.
I don’t know how good I’ll get. But I will begin the practice.

The best role model, I have, for a craftsman.
He spent a life at his art and had the calluses and the scars to show for it.
I know this, because I felt them everytime he caressed my cheek as child.
Daddy was the best, there ever was.

There’s No Dearth of Things to Write About

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:27:36 +0530

Only a short note today.
I dreaded starting up this challenge, because I thought I’d run out of things to say.
What would I write about? Will I dread coming up with topics?
Turns out I needn’t have worried.

Writing seems to be like a muscle to be worked on and flexed.
The more I do it, the more I want to do it.
It is making me more observant.
Everything seems like cannon fodder for the page now 😂
This makes me very happy!

Note to Self: Less Research, Less Rabbit Holes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:56:11 +0530

Alice’s Rabbit Hole, Sandra Strait / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Click on the image for the larger original.

Big realisation, I am procrastinating on my other, bigger priorities, with the 100WordHabit project.
Bigger realisation, if not this, I’d find something else.
Biggest revelation, even if life sucks donkey balls, I need to focus, be disciplined and do what needs doing.

So here’s a few stream-of-consciousness observations & suggestions, to future Jason, when doing the project.

The writing almost never takes you that long. You write at a fairly decent clip.
What does take you a lot of time, is that while you do know what to say, you take an inordinately long time, trying to figure out just the right way to say it, to present it.
It’s the rabbit holes that you get into.
a. You take too long researching, finding just the right image and the right words.
b. You just spent half an hour trying to figure out the right way, to attribute an image.
c. You spent another trying to find out how to jump to a specific column in Emacs (M-g followed by tab followed by the column number and return)
d. You started curating and tagging some mp3s that have being lying around for years now.
e. then you went and forked the music jukebox library you used on Github
You hate doing the hard stuff.
a. It makes you really uncomfortable
b. It makes you want to take breaks
c. You keep switching to obssessively checking all your feeds.¹
d. You then find something that you just have to learn more about and that leads you into another rabbit hole.
e. Besides you’re a completionist. All those tabs and notes to self, just have to be read and squirreled away
All of this is taking time away from stuff you really have to do considering your age.
a. You hardly get time to exercise. Yes life is busy, but you don’t have to make it worse.
b. The career pivot is going slower due to this.
c. You don’t have time to execute your diet.

Here’s a few things you could do …

Remember, this is only during your deep work hours. We need to make the most of them. Go nuts when you aren’t working.²
Figure out what your process is. I realise you’re a pantser, but a little bit of outlining will do you no harm. You already have a running list of topics to prevent writer’s block and time waste. You’ve already lowered the bar, to become more consistent. So see what else, you do in your writing process that takes the longest. In fact, what do you do? Will recording yourself help?
(Added, 2024-02-18,) Don’t check your feeds in the mornings. This one’s a huge timesink. You find issues that interest you. Then you go to find someone who speaks with a nuanced voice. Nuanced voices are rare. They’re hard to find! And if you decide to listen to Munger, and go do the work to have an opinion, by trying to find an opposing nuanced voice? That’ll take you even longer. Just STOP! Now is not the time to get better informed. Do it later.
Start clocking times with Org. You want to get a better idea of where the time goes.
Don’t spend too long reading the manual. Just figure out how to clock in, clock out, get a summary
Set a time block? Posts just have to be published once you hit a hundred words or a hour, whichever is longer? If you still want to continue, do it the next day. The posts could be part one / two / three / blah?
IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT! Be ok with “mediocre”, unstructured posts. This phase will not last long.
Don’t let this take over your life. You already have one vice.

The most important thing though? Kudos to you!
The meditation practice is really paying off in spades. You notice things. And you try and do something about it. You don’t let it bother your present. Most importantly, you don’t let it devolve into self loathing. You’re a lot less stressed, a lot more peaceful and a lot more resilient than you used to be.

courtesy Liniers / Comics Kingdom

There’s nothing new there, since the last time you checked, you twit! ↩︎
The point is also to make the time ↩︎

Personal on Janusworx

Happy Birthday Abbygail

Change!

14 (All is Possible!)

Books I Read in the First Quarter of 2025

January #

February #

March #

Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin

My highlights, from the book #

Blog Questions Challenge 2025

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place? #

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? #

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before? #

4. How do you write your posts? #

5. When do you feel most inspired to write? #

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? #

7. Your favorite post on your blog? #

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.? #

On Neil Gaiman

View Only the Day, With Org Agenda

More Espanso & Emacs Shenanigans

This Is What I Want to Do the Rest of My Life

Forgejo

Some Site Housekeeping (New Sections and RSS Feeds)

How does this affect you, my kind and gentle reader? #

13 (Grow Old With Me)

Notes to Self, Compiling Qbittorrent on a Raspberry Pi 5

Happy Birthday Abbygail

Bread and Roses

Several Corroborative Thoughts on Pacing Yourself

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

Bird on a Wire

The Rest Is Memory

How to Stop Time

Be Nobody but Yourself

I Read Like Grandma Does

Cursive Is Fun

Doing Devops, Dropping Rust

What I’d Do for You

Moved My Music Library From Jellyfin to Emby Today

Setting the stage #

Doing it #

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Letsencrypt Certs Manually With Lego

My Experience With the Kinesis Advantage 360 After a Day of Use

Updates #

2024-07-02 #

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

Why I Write

First Love

Make Bad Things

No Love Is Wasted

My Reading Life

The Art of Losing

Notes to Self, How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

Beautiful Arunachal!

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

Why? #

Minimal Friction #

Outsource your brain? No! #

The System #

For Books (the Corner Marking Method) #

Projects (Professional and Personal) #

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life #

Iron Widow

My highlights, from the book #

Babel

My highlights, from the book #

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work, Coda

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

Publish! Show Your Work! You Don’t Have Leonardo’s Genius or Luck

Create New Scars (or Calluses)

There’s No Dearth of Things to Write About

Note to Self: Less Research, Less Rabbit Holes

January
#

February
#

March
#

My highlights, from the book
#

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?
#

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
#

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
#

4. How do you write your posts?
#

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
#

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
#

7. Your favorite post on your blog?
#

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
#

How does this affect you, my kind and gentle reader?
#

Setting the stage
#

Doing it
#

Updates
#

2024-07-02
#

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

Outsource your brain? No!
#

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

My highlights, from the book
#

My highlights, from the book
#