100WordHabit on Janusworx

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.

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

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

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? ↩︎

Need Day of Month Reminders in Org Mode? Emacs Sexp Diary Entries to the Rescue

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:08:40 +0530

This is how I imagine diary float entries in Emacs.
Photo courtesy, noah eleazar on Unsplash

I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Going back, a bit.
I make heavy use of Org Mode’s deadline and scheduling features.
I put schedules and deadlines in lots of tasks across my ten or so org files, so that I can look at them every week, to decide what I’ll be doing this week as well as to review at the beginning of every month.
To wit, there are plenty of tasks that repeat on a weekly and monthly cadence, and Org’s repeaters.

But¹, there’s one kind of event I have, that Org doesn’t support quite well.
If I want something on, let’s say the second Friday of every month, there’s no easy way to describe / do that with Org.
Org defers to Emacs’ native Diary Mode to do something like this.. Ok, not defers, but it supports Diary expression entries with a few caveats.
Now those were scary when I first saw them, which is why I kicked the can down the road, and decided to just live with manually making entries for the second Friday of every month.
A year of doing this, and I’ve finally had enough. So I finally went ahead and read about what Emacs Diary S-expressions were.

Click the pic to see a larger version of the chicken scratch

Only to realise, that they were not as scary as I feared, after close to a year of messing around with my Emacs config files. They look² just like Emacs functions with arguments.

I scribbled one out the way, Org needs them written, by referring to the Emacs help.

<%%(diary-float t 5 2)>

I marked the sections out in the scrawly figure above.

diary-float seems to be the function that does all the magic and then I have three arguments
The first one, refers to the month by number. 8 will mean August. t will make things repeat every month.
The second argument is day of week. 0 being Sunday, and 6, Saturday.
The third one refers to which week of the month. 2 in my case, means the second week of the month.

So …

* My super important task
 DEADLINE: <%%(diary-float t 3 2)>

shows up in my agenda as a task for the second Wednesday of every month!

There are a couple of caveats to this approach.

This is not as task, even though I write it as one. It behaves more like a calendar entry. It more or less, just shows up in the agenda and I have to look at it.
I can’t mark it as done and expect it to repeat, like a normal Org repeater. If I do that, the task is, uh done and then that’s that.

Neither of these things bother me, because of the idiosyncratic way I drive my day.
I normally review my daily agenda, and create a day plan for myself.
Which means that I copy the repeater task into my daily agenda as a single task and mark the repeater as done. So with the weird way I work, writing it out as a diary sexp, actually saves me a step ❤️
And my cranky brain can now heave a sigh of relief.³

old folks know by now, there’s always a “but” or “however” coming ↩︎
and probably are ↩︎
until next time ↩︎

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 :)

Note to Self, Linking to a Headline in an Org File

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 17:31:37 +0530

I did one of those periodic, empty your mind sessions today.
Everything is now in a brain dump org file.
And now, like a every good productivity system preaches, I want to review the dump periodically.
There is a task for my miscellenea for e.g. Could I convert it to a link and have it open the file at that precise location?
Turns out Org Mode links let me do just that.
All I need to do, is first “store a link” in Org parlance. I do that by going to my target file that has the dump (the bottom file in the screenshot), go to the section that I need linking to (in my case, Misc Brain Dump), and hit C-c l

After which I go to the file which needs to contain my link, and select my text that I’ll want converted into a link (“inserting a link” in org speak. In my case, the top file in the screenshot below).
I select the Misc Brain Dump part of the “Look at the Misc Brain Dump” task and hit
C-c C-l
It then switches me to a buffer that shows the links that Org currently has stored, with the minibuffer prompting me to choose one

I use the arrow keys to choose the one I want, hit return and it creates the link for me.

Here, I’ve switched away from my brain dump. (I’ve closed the file in fact)

I click the link in my tasks file and …

It opens right up, at the exact location I want. Woohoo!

And just like everything else with Org, it’s plain, simple, elegant, text functionality.
I examined the link and it was a borg standard Org link, with the link having the header tacked on the end, like so …
file:brain-dump.org::*Misc Brain Dump¹

which should have been evident when I chose the link to insert, but I only saw it and went Aha! much later 😂 ↩︎

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.

Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts to Nemo Actions

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 17:08:35 +0530

Everytime I download a Humble Bundle, I’m left with a ton of books, in various formats on my desktop.
I normally like all the formats for a single title to be in a single folder, so that Calibre can then treat them as a single book¹, when adding them.

I’ve been using Pedro Santana’s, nifty little Nemo action to help me do just this.
Once installed, all I need to do is select my files, right click on them and then create a new folder, like so …

The one remaining wrinkle, being that when you’re completely keyboard driven, you still need to come down a couple of steps with the arrow keys or switch to the mouse.
When doing this with close to 250+ files, this quickly gets tedious.
Stack Overflow to the rescue.

Turns out that all I needed to do was add an _ in front of the letter, I wanted to use to activate my little action from the context menu.
My original action went …

[Nemo Action]

Active=true

Name=Create new folder with selection 
...

I decided to use the n in selection. N for new folder. Easy to remember! So with this tiny change …

Name=Create new folder with selectio_n 

I get to do this!

I can select, get the context menu, hit n, type in the folder name and done!
It’s still a lot of work when there’s lots of files, but there’s a seamless flow to the entire process.

point two, in this section of the documentation ↩︎

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 ↩︎

Using Hugo Variables to Help With Mailto Links in Hugo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:17:35 +0530

The feedback email address seems to be getting traction and I’m getting more mail every week.

I wanted to make it easier on myself and for the kind folks who write in, by including the title of the post in the subject of the email.
Right now, every one tells me what post they are talking about, which as I said in exceedingly kind of the folks who write in. My posts seem to be reaching really considerate people :)

So a teensy bit of head-scratching later, I remembered I use shortcodes to inject custom HTML into my pages. I remembered Hugo has variables I could access. And I remembered mailto links let me add a subject parameter to the link.

So, 1+2+3=Sucess! (Or so I hoped)

The How
#

I looked up the variable, I needed to get at the post’s title. It’s called .Page.Title
I created a hpt.html in my Hugo’s layouts/shortcodes directory to hold the little snippet that’d get typed in the email’s subject field. This is all it contains:
Feedback on post: {{ .Page.Title }}
Hugo will grab this snippet whenever it runs and put in the post’s title in place of the placeholder.
And then I can use that in a mailto link like so, [feedback at this domain](dummyemail@dummydomain.local?subject="{{< hpt >}}")¹

And tada! 1+2+3 does indeed equal success! You can see in action, by clicking on the link below to send me feedback 🙂

This is a markdown formatted link. You can ofcourse use HTML ↩︎

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 😂 ↩︎

Ignoring Syncthing Conflict Files in the Org Agenda Folder

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 26 May 2024 16:03:01 +0530

Now that I have the power of large language models, in the palm of my hand …

You just had to be there, to really appreciate this 😂
Image, courtesy user straiven on makeagif

I decided to see, if it could help me solve one of my real pain points with Org Mode.
I had asked for help over on the fediverse, after months of trial and error, on just how to fix this.
The issue being, I needed a way to tell my Org Agenda, to ignore files with a certain pattern.

I have a folder (called syncbox) full of files, that Org Mode looks at to generate the agenda for me.
Now these files are also synced via Syncthing over to my phone, where another program called Beorg looks at them too and shows them as entries in my calendar, so that I don’t miss the really important things I need to do.

Functionally, all is well with this setup, except for one teensy thing.
Every once in a while, when certain files are in use on both, my desktop and my phone, Syncthing will create conflicting copies of said files in use.
This happens most often, with my tasks.org file.
Once it conflicts, my syncbox gets full with files like,
tasks.sync-conflict-20240408-041556-2TQWENY.org and
tasks.sync-conflict-20240516-101335-2TQWENY.org and
tasks.sync-conflict-20240520-053451-2TQWENY.org

What happens then, is that Org Agenda happily reads those files too, and I end up with lots of duplicated tasks.¹

As usual, tackling it by writing lisp, was an idea fraught with terror for me. I tried quite a bit and failed.
My next plan of attack was that Org Agenda had a regex², that it would process. My regex is better than my lisp, but even that was to no avail.
Emacs regex does not support lookaheads / lookbehinds and I did not want to have some complicated pattern, that even I would not recognise, a few months down the line.
In the meanwhile, Ihor told me to stop faffing about and just write a function³

So I asked Claude to go do the work for me and I ended up with …

(defun mjb/set-org-agenda-files-from-syncbox-directory ()
 "Set `org-agenda-files' to all Org files in the 'syncbox' directory, excluding files with '.sync-conflict' in the name."
 (let ((syncbox-dir (expand-file-name "syncbox" my-org-directory)))
 (when (file-directory-p syncbox-dir)
 (setq org-agenda-files
 (mapcar
 (lambda (file) (expand-file-name file syncbox-dir))
 (seq-filter
 (lambda (file) (not (string-match-p "\\.sync-conflict" file)))
 (directory-files syncbox-dir t "\.org$")))))))

(mjb/set-org-agenda-files-from-syncbox-directory)

which I dutifully dumped into my init file.
And that did the trick!

What did strike me, is that now that I am using this approach, my chicken and egg struggle is finally at an end. I don’t have to struggle to learn lisp to hack emacs which needs me to learn lisp.
I realise it takes only a short time of dedicated effort. But right now, it is time I don’t have, and don’t know when I’ll get.
So the new fangled LLM AIs can help me sort my Emacs pain points and I can learn Lisp at leisure.
And I’ll use, friend on the fediverse, Vincent Dardel’s excellent course to do just that.

It drove me nuts in the beginning, when I did not know what was happening. I was like, I /just/ finished this task. And it’s popping up again?! Is my computer haunted? ↩︎
defined in org-agenda-file-regexp with a default value of "\\`[^.].*\\.org\\'" ↩︎
He did not quite put it that way. He was much kinder, obviously :) ↩︎

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.

Org Mode Clocking in and Out of Tasks on Task State Changes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 23 May 2024 19:03:13 +0530

Logo courtesy, the Org Mode Website

Lisp is on the list of things to learn someday.¹
And in the meanwhile, I need to be able to hack Emacs to do the stuff I want.
But also, there are a ton of other things, that are currently much, much higher on my list of priorities.²
And while the community is extremely kind and generous, the expectation is that you need to put in the time and the work.
Which I currently don’t have and can’t do.

And so, it finally happened.
I signed up for a Claude account and told it to write me some lisp.

I am heavily Org Mode task driven, these days and I have a manual workflow that I need a teensy bit of help with.

I start work on a task
I mark it as WORKING (and clock in manually)
I want to switch to another task
I mark my original task as WAITING (and clock out manually)
I then mark my new task as WORKING (and clock in manually)
After a while I switch to the original task, and clock in manually (after marking the current task as WAITING and clocking out there manually)

What bugs me, is the clocking in and out, because …

I tend to forget it, messing up all my clock times and …
because it is now becoming painful on my middle aged fingers³,

So, like I said, I prompted Claude to give me code that would clock me in automatically, whenever I changed state to WORKING and clock me out when I switched to WAITING⁴
It spat out some code.
I tried to reasonably guess and verify what it did.
It looked ok.
I tried it.
It worked!
And that’s that.

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(defun mjb/org-clock-in-when-task-state-changes-to-working ()
 "Clock in an Org mode task when the status is changed to 'WORKING'."
 (when (and (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
 (member (downcase (or (org-get-todo-state) "")) '("working")))
 (org-clock-in)))


(defun mjb/org-clock-out-when-task-state-changes-to-waiting ()
 "Clock out an Org mode task when the status is changed to 'WAITING'."
 (when (and (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
 (member (downcase (or (org-get-todo-state) "")) '("waiting")))
 (org-clock-out)))

;; These lines make the functions above, hook to Org’s state change mechanism.
;; So that everytime a task’s state changes, these functions are called
(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook #'mjb/org-clock-in-when-task-state-changes-to-working)
(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook #'mjb/org-clock-out-when-task-state-changes-to-waiting)

Reminds me of the old adages about humans and bicycles being the fastest and humans and chess programs⁵, being the best players.⁶
All of it is good, if it aids me, and hopefully does not get in my way.

soon ↩︎
getting up to speed with the current devops/cloud landscape, for instance ↩︎
Yes, I could reassign them to easier keys, but just having it done automatically is better ↩︎
the task state switches are second nature and don’t bother me much ↩︎
Centaurs, I think, the combination is called ↩︎
and of course, the pilots and giant mechas in Pacific Rim ↩︎

Rust

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 22 May 2024 16:32:40 +0530

Alright!
Trying to get back to writing. (attempt no. 87,245)

And trying to learn Rust and document the journey at the same time.

Why?
#

I want to learn a language that can give me free standing executables to distribute.¹
I want a fast language. (rather a language that generates fast programs.)
The little that I’ve learnt of C (which fascinates me), has convinced me that I am one of those folks, who will definitely shoot myself in the foot with it. And most stuff is manual. I’m willing to do the work, but not all the work. Lazy and all that :)
That boils it down to C++ & Rust.
To my mind, it’s an easier path from Python to Rust. The shapes of things are similar. Like Fred Ross would put it, it’s not an ur-language for me.²
And at this point, it was just looking at a Rust error message that did it for me. Short. Sane. Sensible.³

The Plan
#

There’s no grand plan here, unlike Python where I just had to know everything
Just do a tiny bit daily and write about it. That’s it.

It’s hard with Python. ↩︎
Lisp is! :) ↩︎
I hope the documentation is as good. I haven’t read much. The little that I have befuddled me. But that is just because of the new, new thing. ↩︎

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 :) ↩︎

Books! Do What You Will, With Them

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 05:45:00 +0530

My bookshelf. Click for a larger pic.

You are allowed
#

nay, encouraged to …

buy books you’ll never read
abandon books halfway through
read your favorites over and over again
read ‘easy’ books
read books you don’t totally understand
just look at the pictures
start in the middle
take notes
break spines
read the book after you saw the movie
skip the boring parts
keep books out of sentiment
bring a book everywhere
read comics
return books to the library unread

The point, my dear reader, is joy.

— stolen verbatim from Lady Grey’s Library on Tumblr

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 Footnotes Using Littlefoot.js

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 08:10:36 +0530

Courtesy dothegreenthing, CC BY-NC 2.0, on Flickr

I have this amazing urge never to leave well enough alone.¹
The blog uses an amazing theme, called PaperMod.
And ofcourse, like I said, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I’ve customised it heavily.²
The fonts are different, there are various kinds of slight colour changes, I bullied Aditya into showing me how to build a Menu, there are lots of custom Hugo shortcodes and there were footnotes powered by a nifty little Javascript library called littlefoot.js.

Now everything was fine and dandy.
There are folks who do leave well enough alone. Their blogs stay up and running for years on end, held together with nothing more than spit and baling wire.
Those folks aren’t me, sadly. Aditya keeps improving the theme and I really wanted the new shiny. So I went and got it.
And everything broke!
I got weird artifacts. RSS broke. Fonts broke. Footnotes broke.³

I’ve managed to put everything back together, over the past week, and I just got footnotes working again yesterday.
So a few notes to myself, on what to do, when I break it again.⁴
Footnotes today, and the rest later …

So here goes,

The litlefoot.js repo has excellent documentation. That’s where you pulled everything from (for when you wonder, just how you figured all the CSS out)
You download a static copy with a npm install --save littlefoot and then stick it into Hugo’s static folder
Copy the extend_head.html from the theme’s layout/partials into your own. You should already have an extend_footer.html since you put in PaperMod’s hamburger stuff in there.
Adapt the Usage from a CDN step to directly access it from /littlefoot/dist/… instead of UNPKG. Put the CSS link into your extend_head.html and the JS into extend_footer.html
We want the footnotes to be numbers, rather than floating ellipses. So modify the default (blank) script call in extend_footer.html, to the stuff below. This is verbatim from the docs.

<script type="application/javascript">
 littlefoot.littlefoot(
 {
 buttonTemplate: `
 <button
 aria-label="Footnote <% number %>"
 class="littlefoot__button"
 id="<% reference %>"
 title="See Footnote <% number %>"
 />
 <% number %>
 </button>
 `
 }
 )
</script>

We want to style it a teensy bit, so those styles go into extend_head.html. For some reason, it does not pick the footnote styling correctly when you put stuff into your normal assets/css/extended/ folder.

<!--Custom littlefoot styles-->
<style>
 .littlefoot {
		/*the --attributes come from the littlefoot.js docs*/
		/*Change button background to something that works in both modes*/
 --button-background-color: #666; 
		/*Change padding to make the button rounder*/
 --button-padding: 0 0.35rem;
		/*The footnote ought to be italicised*/
 --popover-font-style: italic;
		/*Make the popover work with my theme’s colour scheme*/
 --popover-background-color: var(--theme);
 --popover-text-color: var(--primary);
 /*the oldstyle numerals used everywhere else, don’t look good here
		Neither do they align properly in the box.
		So switch them to normal*/
		font-variant-numeric: normal;
		/*Italic numerals for the footnotes*/
 font-style: italic;
 }

 .littlefoot__button {
		/*very subjective. 
		try to get the numerals centred as much as I can.*/
 line-height: 1;
 vertical-align: middle!important;
 }
</style>

Et voilà! Footnotes galore!

It looks a little weird, a little like a billie goat walked across my post, pooping pellets across the page.⁵
But it is my kind of weird now.
And I love it :)

what we in the Mumbaiyya vulgar, would call, “Gaand mein keeda”.
Please for the love of God, don’t look that up. Very not safe. ↩︎
Heavily, as in heavily for a guy who doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. ↩︎
All my fault obviously, with all the custom stuff. Nothing to do with the theme proper. ↩︎
in the far, far, far, future; future Jason! Not any time soon, you hear! ↩︎
“Pooping pellets on the posted page”, Now there’s a tongue twister 😂 ↩︎

Moving Audio Library to Flac & MP3 Formats

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:47:52 +0530

A piece of metal being converted into something useful.
Image courtesy, Jonny Gios, Unsplash License, on Unsplash

I thought I was set with my audio jukebox when I finally finished collecting and digitising all my tapes, records¹ and cds and then tagging, sorting and organising my files in or around the late noughties.
When I began doing all that in the mid noughties, I was comfortably ensconced in the Apple/iTunes ecosystem, so all my files were in various MPEG-4 formats.²

And the one big thing I missed, was letting a track have multiples genres or multiple artists. I wanted to be able to search for a song in each artist’s name i.e. the song ought to be listed as an entry under each singer’s name (Shibani Dandekar and Zoya Akhtar and Ankur Tewari and SEL) in the jukebox and also have it listed / searchable under multiple genres (remove Bollywood, but be able to add IndiPop and Oldies). I always thought that wasn’t possible. A decade passed since. I’ve moved homes to Mint and the .deb ecosystem in the meanwhile. And it still never occured to me to re-evaluate my choice of audio formats, despite this being a constant thorn in my side. I still thought it wasn’t possible. Look at what happens when I try to add a genre to a song in Quod Libet …

Click to enlarge

Until, when I read that message more closely, recently. It wasn’t telling me that it wasn’t possible, just that I was a dummkopf³ with my choice of audio formats all those years ago. These files did not support multiple values for genre, but was it possible that other formats did? Spoiler, of course, they did!
A quick search revealed both mp3 as well as flac supported this.

I decided to try this with one of my recent songs.
I use ffmpeg to convert Plum Pudding.
ffmpeg -i "05 Plum Pudding.m4a" -c:a flac "05 Plum Pudding.flac"
And tada! A quick metadata edit in Quod Libet and I had multiple artist and genre entries! 🎉🎉🎉

Click to enlarge

Sigh! I’m both happy and a bit chagrined.
I can haz music the way I want it organised and tagged, but I’m looking at weeks/months of work now 😂

Thank you daddy ↩︎
lossless and lossy m4a files. ↩︎
a dummkopf with the benefit of hindsight that is ↩︎

Org Mode Narrowing and Widening Buffers

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:40:17 +0530

tldr: C-x n s to narrow, C-x n w to widen

Now that life’s getting busier and busier, with lots more things on my plate, ye olde system of writing the day’s tasks down on paper does not work any more. Specially since, I’ve begun logging clock times¹. Writing them down by hand is a giant pain.
This is what the plan’s begun to look like.

An unwieldy plan.
Click this image or any below, for larger versions

I wanted to see, if Org would let me replicate what I did my hand, natively.
Which in a nutshell was to look at the day sheet (on paper) for the nitty gritty and my organiser (currently my tasks.org file) for the big picture view.
I bounce between the two often. And discrete focus is something I wanted to keep.

The focus from wide …

to narrow. And back …

A bit of searching and this is the result! Woohoo!

Like I mentioned above, I hit C-x n s next to my day’s headline to narrow the scope to just today. And a C-x n w gets me back to the thirty thousand foot view.
I think of them as, s for slim and w for wide, to keep them straight in my head.
I’m intuiting this is Org’s Sparse Tree Magic at play here. But learning that wizardry is a thing for another day.

The important bit for me, is that I can focus when I working, without getting distracted.
And then when I need to, zoom out to review what progress looks like and make changes, if I need to.

I feel a bit sad though. I’ve given up book notes on paper. I’m giving up planning my day on paper. It feels like I’m losing something tangible. I miss paper.

I hope to use these, to objectively measure where my time is really going ↩︎

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 ↩︎

The Kobo Elipsa 2e, Six Months Later

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:28:55 +0530

My beloved, battered, Elipsa 2e. Click the image for a larger image.

It’s been close to ~~six~~ seven months, since I moved over from the Oasis to the Elipsa.

Here’s my list of things / experiences with the Elipsa 2e, positive and negative, in no order whatsever. Also this is not representative of a typical ebook reader¹. I, umm … have a lot of books, and the Elipsa carries most of them. So every action that it does, it does with that number of books (either physically or with its database) …

I love it!
It’s very light for its size. I don’t feel the weight of this 10″ device as much as I felt the old 7″ Oasis.
It’s very fast.
I use it just like a book. It lends itself to such use as well. Part of it is the weight, part of it, is its responsiveness.
This is also how I broke it. I threw it on the bed and then it slipped right over the edge, and cracked the screen 😂 You can see the big chonky part that is permanantly dead, as well as the thin, dead, vertical and horizontal lines. Since I read with fat margins, the chonky part does not get in my way² and the lines are mostly invisible.
~~I cannot enlarge images in a book. I tap, I double tap, I pinch to zoom … nothing. This is the one thing I miss from the Oasis.~~ A few hours later: Of course, now it works! 😂 Double tapping an image, opens up the image where I can zoom and pan around! My fault for not noticing this earlier.
I love it!
It hangs loading complicated books or large pdfs, but it recovers quickly. This does not happen that often.
It randomly hangs and/or crashes. This happens quite often. But I’ve learnt to reboot it with the power button, and it comes right back up, quickly. It reminds me of the Am386 machines, I’d assemble for use as Netware thin clients in my youth. They would run hot and crash ofen, but we didn’t mind, because they rebooted right back so darned fast 😂
Not that the Elipsa runs hot. It just runs fast and crashes. And then comes back on and carries on as if nothing ever happened.
Did I tell you, I love it?
On paper, the screen specs look inferior to the Oasis. In practice, it made no difference to these old eyes.
The user experience is not as good is it could be, but it’s miles better than anything else I’ve used. I figured out most of it intuitively. I love just running my finger along the left edge to adjust the brightness. Helps a lot when I’m reading in bed, so that the better half does not get disturbed (or grumble at me much.)
Books on the Kobo store are a bit more expensive than the Amazon store. (New releases tend to cost the same.)
The database that it uses, gets corrupted quite often, which then leads to it no longer being able to talk to my PC or not showing the books in the device³. I doubt, I’d love the Elipsa as much as I do, if the Calibre ecosystem didn’t support it so well.⁴
- I can backup and restore the database at will, thanks to the awesome Kobo Utilities plugin.
- I’m getting old and impatient and want to read a lot more. So I’ve given up on taking notes by hand and moved over to highlighting and making notes in the Elipsa. I wouldn’t do this if not for the lovely Annotations plugin, which lets me get all my notes and highlights out of the Elipsa and into Calibre. (pic below, click to embiggen) The jury’s still out on this one.
I love it so much, that when I heard a friend was going to the USA, I bullied them into buying me another one to replace this one when it dies.

To conclude, the Elipsa 2e is wonderful.
It has flaws that I can live with.
It serves me well.
I love it!

the person, not the device ↩︎
much ↩︎
This point I think, is more a me problem, than a device problem ↩︎
Note to the Kobo folk, please care about your device software a smidgen. Please! At least at as much, if not more than these lovely open source folk do! ↩︎

Note to Self, Emacs Help Stuff

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 08:03:24 +0530

Collection of various little things I find handy when I am lost in Emacs

Truly lost and need help about help itself? C-h C-h or C-h ?
C-h m should bring up a list of all the shortcuts available to that mode.
Want to find out what the docs mean when they refer to something? C-h o and then type in that name.
For e.g. when the Org Mode docs refer to org-hide-leading-stars, a C-h o => Return => org-hide-leading-stars will give me details about what it is. (According to the docs: org-hide-leading-stars is a variable defined in ‘org.el’. Its value is nil.) Alternatively if you know the type of object, you’re looking at, C-h f will give you help on a function and C-h v will do the same with a variable.
If you want to know what function is behind this crazy shortcut you’re typing, a C-h k followed by giving it the shortcut your typing will lead you to the ~~culprit~~ command that powers it.
For e.g. I blanked out on how to toggle multiple checkboxes in Org Mode today and I was hitting C-c C-x b to on avail. Running C-h k told me that it was bound to org-tree-to-indirect-buffer. So I was madly mashing the wrong keys. A little digging (with C-h m) revealed that what I needed was C-c C-x C-b which ran org-toggle-checkbox which indeed did what I wanted! :)

Use Your Scars

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 07:39:40 +0530

I was catching up with my Cal Newport episodes this morning, when I heard this little clip above, at around the 44m mark It reminded me that the things in life, that you can talk most easily about (with authority), are the things that you have the most experience with; the things that you carry the scars of.

Like Mandy Brown or Taleb do.
Like Cheryl Strayed does.
Like Roosevelt’s, Man in the Area.
Like Rachel.

The best things happen the easiest, when you use your scars.
Write that fucking book, indeed.

100WordHabit on Janusworx

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

Need Day of Month Reminders in Org Mode? Emacs Sexp Diary Entries to the Rescue

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

Note to Self, Linking to a Headline in an Org File

What I’d Do for You

Moved My Music Library From Jellyfin to Emby Today

Setting the stage #

Doing it #

Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts to Nemo Actions

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Letsencrypt Certs Manually With Lego

Using Hugo Variables to Help With Mailto Links in Hugo

The How #

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

Updates #

2024-07-02 #

Ignoring Syncthing Conflict Files in the Org Agenda Folder

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

Why I Write

Org Mode Clocking in and Out of Tasks on Task State Changes

Rust

Why? #

The Plan #

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!

Books! Do What You Will, With Them

You are allowed #

Iron Widow

My highlights, from the book #

Babel

My highlights, from the book #

Note to Self Footnotes Using Littlefoot.js

Moving Audio Library to Flac & MP3 Formats

Org Mode Narrowing and Widening Buffers

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

The Kobo Elipsa 2e, Six Months Later

Note to Self, Emacs Help Stuff

Use Your Scars

Setting the stage
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Doing it
#

The How
#

Updates
#

2024-07-02
#

Why?
#

The Plan
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You are allowed
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My highlights, from the book
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My highlights, from the book
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