Linux on Janusworx

Forgejo Workflow Action to Publish Hugo Blog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:09:16 +0530

I’d gotten this working earlier and wanted to post it up.
And then promptly forgot about it.
Until today that is, when I wanted to make changes to it.

Here it is for posterity.
The newest change is that the action now runs every six hours.

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name: Build and Deploy Janusworx website
on:
 schedule:
 - cron: '0 */6 * * *'
 workflow_dispatch:
 push:
 branches:
 - main

jobs:
 build-and-deploy:
 runs-on: intel # make sure there are runners tagged "intel" on your network or replace this with something of your own

 env:
 HUGO_VERSION: ${{ vars.HUGO_VERSION }}
 steps: 
 - name: Install wget & rsync
 run: apt-get update && apt-get install wget rsync -y

 - name: Install Hugo
 run: |
 wget -O ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${HUGO_VERSION}/hugo_extended_${HUGO_VERSION}_linux-amd64.deb \
 && dpkg -i ${{ runner.temp }}/hugo.deb
 
 - name: Checkout the website repo
 uses: actions/checkout@v4
 with:
 submodules: recursive
 fetch-depth: 0
 
 - name: Build website with Hugo
 env:
 HUGO_ENVIRONMENT: production
 TZ: Asia/Kolkata
 run: |
 hugo \
 --gc \
 --minify
 
 - name: Install SSH key
 run: |
 mkdir -p ~/.ssh
 echo "${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}" > ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
 chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
 echo "${{ secrets.SSH_KNOWN_HOSTS }}" > ~/.ssh/known_hosts
 chmod 644 ~/.ssh/known_hosts

 - name: Deploy website with rsync
 env:
 REMOTE_HOST: ${{ vars.REMOTE_HOST }}
 REMOTE_USER: ${{ vars.REMOTE_USER }}
 REMOTE_PATH: ${{ vars.REMOTE_PATH }}
 run: |
 rsync -avz --delete public/ $REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_HOST:$REMOTE_PATH

Notes:
It needs a few variables set, in the repo (repo->Settings->Actions->Variables), which are the details I need (Hugo version, Remote Host IP, Remote path to copy the built output to, and the Remote user to use for SSH) to push via rsync to the host.
Hugo version is in there, because Hugo breaks things all the time, so I upgrade cautiously.

It also needs a couple of secrets, set in the repo (repo->Settings->Actions->Secrets) to enable rsync to copy. (SSH_KNOWN_HOSTS and SSH_PRIVATE_KEY). Also best if this is a dedicated private key just for copying. Running ssh-keyscan "your-host-name-or-ip" > known_host_data.txt should dump the data you’d need for SSH_KNOWN_HOSTS

With the changes I made today, the workflow can publish

on demand
every 6 hours
every time I commit to the repo

I added time based publishing, so that I could publish future dated posts as and when the time rolls around.
With this, I think I’m done tinkering with my blog, with the exception of moving it out of my home network and out on to my VM, so that I can truly publish from anywhere. That is a big heft for me currently and a job for future Jason.

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

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Tmux Start Session Maximized With Three Panes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 09:27:25 +0530

So I got tired of starting up a dedicated tmux session to manage all the work related to my writing sessions. Over the past few months, I’ve boiled it down to three.
And it still irks me that I have to …

Launch Terminal
Launch Tmux
Split it into three windows err … panes.
Go to the top left pane and launch Hugo server
Switch to the right pane and then launch Emacs with whatever new post I want to write today.

So of course, a Rube Goldberg-esque, tiny bash-pipey monster took form. It now resides, chained to an alias, hssx¹ in my .bash_aliases file

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alias hssx='cd /path/to/my/hugo/folder && \
xdotool windowsize $(xdotool getactivewindow) 100% 100% && \
tmux new-session \; split-window -h \; select-pane -l \; split-window -v \; select-pane -U \; send-keys "hugo serve" C-m \; select-pane -R'

The first line switches to my hugo folder
The second calls xdotool and maximises the terminal window
And the last line is a series of instructions to the tmux command. I’ve split it below for readability.

tmux new-session \; #Tmux start a new session
split-window -h \; # Split the window into two vertical panes
select-pane -l \; # Switch to the left pane
split-window -v \; # Split that into two horizontal panes
select-pane -U \; # Select the upper pane
send-keys "hugo serve" C-m \; # Type in `hugo serve` followed by Enter
select-pane -R # Select the right pane

And boom!

Click pic for a larger version

hugo start session and x just because all my aliases have ended with x for years and years ↩︎

More Espanso & Emacs Shenanigans

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

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

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

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

x11_use_xdotool_backend: true

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

For now, most of my expansions work. Hurrah!

Fixing Espanso Expansions

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 17:05:19 +0530

I never had the time to deal with my Espanso¹ hijinks until today.
While it worked perfectly, when I installed it all those years ago, when I migrated over from the Mac, Espanso itself has changed and evolved over the years.
It took over my old configuration like a champ and mostly worked, with the exception of a few shortcuts; ones that I frequently used 😂

Emacs was one application of mine that never quite worked right with Espanso.
I’d frequently get timed out waiting for reply from selection owner whenever I tried expansions in there. Typing :joy to get 😂 would work in every other program, but no joy with Emacs, in additon to plenty of other expansions err … not expanding.

All my browser url expansions would not expand properly either, with mangled expansions most of the time.

So today I dove in to the docs, and realised two things.
1. My emacs needed a longer time out
2. Espanso now tries to identify the kind of text, and maybe those were causing my issues?

Emacs
#

I realised I needed a longer clipboard threshold, only for Emacs.
So I created an App specific configuration, just for Emacs to use and gave it said option. Here’s what the contents of my espanso/config/emacs.yml look like

filter_class: 'Emacs'
clipboard_threshold: 10000

Rich Text Expansions
#

That helped with a lot of expansions in Emacs, but not with my joy expansion.
And not with stuff that were links and oh … links! and html! and markdown! Could those be the culprits?²
The docs mention that Espanso now has rich text support
What that means, is that the trigger nows supports two new keywords html and markdown in addition ye ole replace So I changed most of my affected shortcuts to either of those two keywords; markdown for most everything and html for linky stuff. Here’s what my beloved joy looks like now …

matches:
 - trigger: ":joy"
 markdown: 😂

And those two things did it! Every shortcut expands everwhere! What joy 😂

Espanso lets you assign short snippets of text to longer streams of text, that you’d frequently use. I use :adhx for example, and it expands out to type my whole address. Pretty handy! ↩︎
dun! dun! dun! they were! ↩︎

anki-push-u, Creating a Tiny Pushover Addon for Anki

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 11:31:39 +0530

I want to slowly increase my French vocabulary, so I got this comprehensive frequency word deck from Shared Decks section of the Anki website.

I keep forgetting to look it up during the day, after my morning session and the only way I can get those stubborn words¹ to stick in my mind, is if I keep doing the deck 4–5 times a day.

I know! With all my newfound devops/python skills, could I figure out a way to remind myself to do it? Turns out I can! :)

I already use Pushover, to get notified of darn near anything.²
And I read enough of Anki’s add-on documentation to know I could whip something up.
So a bit of searching on the net, a bit of jiggery pokery with Claude, and some spelunking through Anki’s source code and forums later, I present to you … anki-push-u!³

As long as your Anki’s running, this little add-on will find cards due, at the interval you tell it to, and then notify you wherever you have Pushover running!
No more forgetting due cards!

Find the add-on and instructions over at Github.

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.

I’m looking at you, ailleurs ↩︎
Hugo updates on three machines, calibre updates on two machines, podcast downloads and quite a bit else ↩︎
It pushes you to do your due cards! Tada! ↩︎

Notes to Self, Compiling Qbittorrent on a Raspberry Pi 5

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

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

A compilation of letters, courtesy Cosmos

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

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

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

Install service to run for a specific user.

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

We’re done.

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

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 ↩︎

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 ↩︎

Viewing Hugo Server Output Remotely

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 15:18:13 +0530

I’ve been living a little dangerously when posting stuff on the blog.
While it’s true that I compose my posts locally on my desktop, with a locally installed Hugo, I always catch a ton of things that I miss, after I publish a post. Nearly every single time.

So the process then becomes …

Open the post on the server in Emacs (after logging in, via ssh)
Make an edit.
Build and publish.
Reload the page and re-read the post.
Find a typo. Fix it.
Repeat steps 3 & 4.
Keep the Emacs pane to keep editing and open another terminal pane, just to build and deploy.
Twenty three edits later … Be ok with what I have. (with a build and deploy, and reload and reread every couple of edits)
Do a final build and deploy

Having done this, for God knows how long now, I’m used to this workflow and decided to just lean into it.
But while I loved my edit, build, deploy, reload, reread, workflow, I felt like I was tempting the fates, everytime I did it. Besides I did not like messing with the live website like that.

So I wondered, if the way I did it locally, could be kinda sorta done remotely.
When I write posts locally, all I need to do is run hugo server in a terminal and it spins up a local server, with the all the posts, built and rendered in memory for speedy access.
Could I have that? But remote? Could I run hugo server on my server and view the results in my browser from anywhere?
About an hour of exploration later, I did have it up and running!

Here’s what I did, after delving into Hugo’s server command options

Created a subdomain (drpr.janusworx.com) and pointed it to my server. (this is where I’ll see my temporary, work-in-progress, results whenever I run hugo server on my server)
Used Nginx as a proxy to point to it. (Also serves as my SSL termination point, freeing Hugo from the burdens of HTTPS/SSL drama)
Spun up Hugo with hugo serve -D -b https://drpr.janusworx.com --appendPort=false --liveReloadPort=443 where …
a. -D builds posts marked with drafts
b. -b tells Hugo the hostname and path to the root of the blog (in my case, https://drpr.janusworx.com)
c. --appendPort is set to false, which stops appending the port number to the url (happens by default, http://localhost:1313)
d. --liveReloadPort is set to my SSL/TLS port, so that I can watch changes live with every edit.

And everything worked!
Except for the live reloading. That bit just refused to work. I could make changes and then go manually reload the web page and it would update. Grr! So near, yet so far!
Some more exploration led to Pothi Kalimuthu’s extremely helpful comment on Github …

Where I realised that Hugo’s LiveReload script (that reflects changes) needs a location in my Nginx config.
So a bit of copying and pasting and adapting and tada! 🎉

This blog post was written entirely on the server, with me watching the changes live as they happened …

And once this was done, I could just do a single, final, build and deploy to publish.

Note to Self, Switch to Manjaro “Unstable”

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:01:31 +0530

I kept wondering why Syncthing releases on one of my Pis would lag behind my other one.¹ The big difference between the two is that one runs Raspbian and the other, Manjaro²³. This wouldn’t happen earlier when they ran Arch and Manjaro.
And today, I head-slappingly remembered, that it did lag and I had to do stuff to get at the latest software stuff.

What I had to do, was to switch Manjaro’s software branch to unstable (as opposed to the default stable. Read more here.)
The only reason I use Manjaro, instead of Arch⁴, is that the Arch kernel does not boot on this Pi and I want the latest Arch stuff, which is what the unstable Manjaro software branch offers.

So a …

sudo pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch unstable

switches me to the unstable branch and …

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5 && sudo pacman -Syu 

will resync all the software with what’s available on that branch.

Tada, I have syncthing v1.27.2 "Gold Grasshopper" on all my machines :)

as well as other software in general ↩︎
because, reasons. and a long chain of upgrade and experimentation and moves from Pis 3 to 4 to 5 ↩︎
It’s the Manjaro Pi that lags. And yes, I know you can already guess why ↩︎
with apologies to Manjaro ↩︎

Updated to Emacs 29.2

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 07:52:20 +0530

Updated to Emacs 29.2, just now.
Took me and my four core workhorse about fifteen minutes tops, from start to finish.

Emacs 29.0 was the first version I compiled from source, because I wanted the latest release as soon as it was out and I no longer had the patience for the kindly distribution folk (or third party packagers) to give me a binary.
The first time was a nightmare.
I didn’t have various bits and bobs that were needed. Stuff that the guides say should work a certain way wouldn’t.
But it did happen eventually and I learnt a lot along the way about what I wanted compiled in, in my Emacs.
I also appreciated just how much easier it is now to compile stuff and recover from errors. I tried this last in the late 90s¹ and it scared me off.

But like I was saying … now that I have it all set up, 29.1 and 29.2 have been a breeze.
I’d never have guessed, updating software, by compiling from source, would be so painless.²

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

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.

I compiled the linux kernel. Bold first step. I know 😂 ↩︎
I know, there will be hiccoughs. But even so, this is so much better than what I imagined in my head. ↩︎

Emacs, Three and a Half Years On

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:16:07 +0530

If someone had told me three and a half years ago, that I would:

Use Emacs as my primary editor nearly everywhere.
Not just as an editor. In fact, I would stop thinking of it as an editor and come to see it for what it really is. A whole computer with an editor bolted on.
Use Emacs not just for writing, but also have it serve as the cornerstone for two other extremely important activities in my life, organising my life (with Org Mode) and tending to my commonplace book (with Org Roam)
Come so far as to scrape a web page, set it up as a connected node in my Zettelkasten, strip close to fifty superfluous lines, edit the rest to my liking, change the title to title case, and then file it way within minutes, and learn do all this by osmosis and research over the years, just by using it daily and being curious¹
Have a kind community support all my crazy attempts to bend Emacs to my will

I would have told you, you were off your rocker.
But I do, do these things (which, I’m ridiculously pleased with) and have this wonderful community (which, I am earnestly grateful for).
Here’s to three and a half decades!

and being a bit stubborn and refusing to accept the status quo ↩︎

Weirdly Placed Emacs Org Branches Are Only Cosmetic

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:26:19 +0530

Every evening, after my shutdown ritual, I move my current day’s branch to the bottom of my Org Mode file, so I begin the next day at the same fixed place, at line 36.¹

The day is done; moving it to the bottom of the pile

Every time I move though, it goes there and sits, right next to the last branch, instead of under it. So I would grumble a bit, and then go hit the return key as required, to get it all right and proper. And I’m tired, so at least one time out of three, I mess the older day too, and then I grumble even more and fix that too.

Where it sits awkwardly

Until today morning, when I realised I had not done my fix the day dance, yesterday…
And the day was correctly positioned at the bottom!
So, was this was just a purely cosmetic issue?!
I tried it with a couple of test days.
I saved, closed, and opened up my file. Fixed!
Then I tried some more tests days and I expanded all my tasks Shift-Tab and and closed them. Fixed! 🙂

Yay! The Org Mode elves fixed it!

I guess, I have to go find something else to be grumpy about now 😂

Update: 2023-11-27
#

A friend on the fediverse, encouraged me to try filing a bug report with the Org folk.
To which I retort, this is more a PEBKAC problem, than an Org Mode problem.
Most likely I am doing something dumb or I have something misconfigured, or some of my Org helper packages (Org-contrib, Org-ql, Org-Web-Tools, Org Superstar) are trampling over one another.

As I grow older, habits, routines and static places are growing ever more important, so I can function well. ↩︎

Getting Emacs Windows to Not Be Shy

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:37:35 +0530

Figuring out my webapps problem yesterday made me ask myself if I could somehow repurpose that little xdotool script to solve another niche itch that I had.

Spoiler alert: It did.

I run Emacs as a daemon, and use EmacsClient to connect to the Emacs process.
Makes it really ease to launch, work on, sling around and close lots of Emacs windows.¹

Which brings me to the hiccough. I launch EmacsClient and a window (frame) does indeed launch, but it just … stays there in the background.

Repeated attempts to launch EmacsClient are to no avail.
The pesky little windows just pile up in their corner.

Ergo, this little bit of Bash/xdotool shenanigans …

#!/usr/bin/env bash 

export EMACSWINID=$(xdotool search "\*scratch\*" | tail -n1)

if [ $EMACSWINID ]; then
 xdotool windowactivate $EMACSWINID
else
 sh -c 'emacsclient --create-frame --no-wait --alternate-editor="" && export EMACSWINID=$(xdotool search "\*scratch\*" | tail -n1) && xdotool windowactivate $EMACSWINID'
fi

Check to see if an Emacs scratch buffer is open. If it is, switch to it.
Otherwise, just launch EmacsClient, get the id of the scratch buffer window (frame) and raise it, so that I can work on it. In peace.

Cue: sounds of relief, in the background

Frames, in Emacs parlance ↩︎

On How Emacs Adapts

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 06:30:27 +0530

I love it whenever the Roger Ebert of the Emacs world aka Jon Snader aka irreal, gets his hands on one of my posts and uses it for his insightful annotations.
His conclusion is something I totally relate to, because that is exactly what has kept me using Emacs ever since I began using it. It bends to my will. Or as Jon puts it …

It’s yet another way that Emacs adapts itself to its users rather than insisting those users adapt themselves to Emacs.

Read irreal’s entire post here.

P.S. I also managed to power my workflow with elisp, like Jon’s first impulse told him to. And that was because of Emacs’ second (or rather biggest) strength.
The kindness and warmth of the Emacs community at large.
@laotang from the fediverse, reached out and gave me the gift of an elisp function, that did what I needed :)

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

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

Getting Around Linux Mint Web App Manager Window Errors

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 19:09:46 +0530

One of best parts of using Linux Mint is its Web Apps Manager.

I can use most of my websites as dedicated applications now.
Case in point, I use a dedicated web app to run Elk, the web client for Mastodon.
Social stuff like this, or banking stuff or my webmail for that matter, stays away from the rest of my browsing and lets me keep these activities cognitively separate.

So far, so good.
The issue arises, when I try to launch one of these dedicated apps and it is already running.
Due to the way these little web containers are created, it cannot run another instance and I run into this error.

“Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.”¹

And I’m like, I know this you git! I am running a different profile. Can’t you just switch to it? Apparently it cannot. So I’d have to go looking for my app and then Alt-Tab through dozens of windows or look in my dock² and then get it back.

The problem wasn’t the error per se, the problem was the slightly longish delay between me calling the app and the error popping up. And also all that crazy hunting and pecking to find the right window, once I see the error. It gets maddening when I need to do this dance and all I want to do is get to my email window to go look for something important.

So I began casting around for a way to somehow switch to the actually running window. Was it possible?
That’s when I found xdotool
It lets you do all sorts of crazy things with windows and keyboard and mouse input, but most importantly for me, it let me search for my running app window and it let me raise and bring it back up. Awesome!

So instead of telling Ulauncher to directly launch the app, I told it to run this script instead.

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#!/usr/bin/env bash 

export ELKWINID=$(xdotool search WebApp-ElkforToots1234 | tail -n1)

if [ $ELKWINID ]; then
 xdotool windowactivate $ELKWINID
else
 sh -c ' firefox --class WebApp-ElkforToots1234 --profile /home/user/.local/share/ice/firefox/ElkforToots1234 --no-remote "https://elk.zone/"'
fi

In a nutshell, I’m looking to see if Elk is already running (using the xdotool search option in line 3).
If it is, I tell xdotool to get that window to the forefront of the display; and if it isn’t, then to just go ahead and launch the app anew.

What a load off my mind, this one was!

I don’t know if this would happen if I use Chrome as the browser engine. I don’t even use it as a browser, much. And for things like these, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. ↩︎
and still some how miss it ↩︎

Having My Emacs Tasks and Notes Ready

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 18:56:38 +0530

Updated: 2023-11-17. Read more below

Nearly everything I write is in Emacs.¹
It’s been slightly more than two years, since I made the move to using it as my everyday text editor.
I have a spartan Emacs config, with only a few customisations, that I found by watching David Wilson aka System Crafters’ Emacs From Scratch #1 video and the rest by searching on the web and asking around on the fediverse.

I’ve touched my config only about three times; basically every time I’ve found a new use for emacs.

When I started editing text
When I start using it as my Organiser (Org Mode) and
When I began using it as my Zettelkasten (Org Roam)

Which is to say, I know only the bare bones of how Emacs configuration and Elisp work.

And yet … and yet …
I have this itch that rankles.
You see, every morning I sit at the computer with my cup of coffee, and pull up my tasks and notes and the agenda for the day.
Now I don’t use the agenda much, but the tasks and notes are a must.
So I open the tasks file and maximize my window and then I split my frame and I open the notes file, and then I go back to my tasks and I have it all ready just the way I like it.
Thing is, I’m grumpy in the morning and doing all that grates on me.

There’s gotta be a better way!

So I tried looking around, and came to the conclusion that creating a function, that did all this for me, would be the best thing.
But I know no Elisp.
And right now, I have no time to put into learning it. I did spend close to a day looking at what I could whip up, to no avail.²

So the next best idea I came up with, was recording my actions, doing the file opening, window arranging dance, as a macro and then assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.
That turned out to be iffy.
It’d work fine when I created it, but when I restarted my Emacs daemon (or my system) and then call it again, Emacs would freeze.

My intuition told me that it could be the fact, that a recorded macro³ could not handle opening files and switching buffers.⁴
Then I realised that I could outsource that part to the command line or my application launcher⁵ and leave the rest of it to the macro.

So I did just that. I created a Ulauncher shortcut.
It binds the keyword etn to the command:
emacsclient -c --no-wait ~/path/to/tasks.org ~/path/to/my/notes.org
so that Emacs opens both my tasks and notes files as it fires up.

A Ulauncher window, with name, keyword and the actual command to launch emacs

And in Emacs I bound a keyboard macro, to the rest of the recorded macro code that would

Maximise the frame
Split the frame into two windows, with my tasks on top and the notes in the bottom
Have the cursor be ready at the place I needed it to be.

(defalias 'mjbtn
 (kmacro "M-x t o g g l e - f r a m e - m a x i m i z e d <return> 
 C-x 2 C-x o C-x b n o t e s . o r g <return> C-x o M-g g 3 6 <return>"))

;; Assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro above: C-c z
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c z") 'mjbtn)

Et voilà! I have everything, just the way I want it.
And while it might not be fancy, it works without a fuss!

Update: 2023-11-17
#

One advantage of writing about what you do and putting it out there, is that really kind souls come along and teach you new things!
One of them is @laotang, over on the Fediverse.
Remember when I said, the best solution would be to write an Emacs function that would do what I wanted?
Well, laotang loved my tinkering and then went on to give me just that!
I raise my cup of coffee to you, Sir! You made my day! Thank you, so much!

Here’s the code he suggested.Worked like a charm!

(defun getting-ready ()
 "Getting ready for work."
 (interactive)
 (toggle-frame-maximized)
 (split-window-below)
 (find-file "~/path/to/notes/notes.org")
 (find-file-other-window "~/path/to/tasks/tasks.org"))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c r") 'getting-ready)

Oh, and if you liked how Org-Roam worked in the past? When it was all just text files?
Well, if you want something like that, check out laotang’s feature-complete⁶ replica, ORGRR

with the exception of code. ↩︎
Not much. there are lots of primitives and I cannot separate the language from Emacs specific stuff yet ↩︎
rather, my recorded macro ↩︎
Don’t know if this is true or not. This is just me scratching my head. I’m assuming a function that can call buffers and handle switching between them is the ticket. ↩︎
Ulauncher ↩︎
almost ↩︎

My Custom CSS for Miniflux

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:10:13 +0530

Various bits and bobs, I gradually accumulated over the past couple of years, to make my self hosted Miniflux look just the way I want it.

Width and Size
#

Changed the width to 850 pixels wide, because even on my vertical monitor, there was quite a bit of wasted horizontal space. Changed the body to use a slightly smaller size.

body {
 max-width: 850px; !important;
 font-size: 90%;
}

Italic Blockquotes
#

Changed blockquotes to be italic, so that they’re better set off against normal body text.
Also made them a wee bit tinier than the body.

article > blockquote {
 font-size: 87.5%;
 font-style: italic
}

Smaller title size
#

If you follow Tumblr blogs as I do¹, you know they have Tumblr Asks.
The asks themselves become the title of an RSS entry, when the author responds to one.
And long asks lead to long titles.
So here’s a bit of CSS to make the font smaller than the default H1 size.

.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1em !important;
}

Even at this size, the titles get a bit unwieldy at times (below), but this much I can live with.

Disable Tag Visibility
#

Miniflux displays tags, if it detects them on certain posts.
I don’t read them. I don’t need them. It breaks my next-next-clicky-next chain of continuity by pushing the next post link below, making me move my mouse². So I killed them!

.entry-tags {
 display: none;
}

In Summary
#

So, all the flotsam and jetsam above, go into a box that says “Custom CSS” at the very bottom of the Settings page. Putting it all together we have …

body {
 /*set width*/
 max-width: 850px; !important;
 font-size: 90%;
}


article > blockquote {
 font-size: 87.5%;
 font-style: italic
}


.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1em !important;
}


.entry-tags {
 display: none;
}

Hello, Ursula Vernon, Diane Duane, Peter Morwood & Neil Gaiman! ↩︎
Oh, the troubles I face, I tell you! ↩︎

derb; Script to Create podcast RSS feeds

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 17:38:03 +0530

I wrote a tiny script that creates an RSS feed for all the audio files it finds in a folder.
I call it derb.

My mother gets devotional songs and sermons on cds, which I rip to MP3 files and then dump on her phone for her.¹
She listens to them all the time, and now three of her friends want to do the same too.
I thought of just sticking them in my self hosted Jellyfin instance,² but then I realised, all of them have erratic, slow internet. So the idea of self hosting a podcast feed really appealed to me.

So I quickly used Feedgenerator in conjunction with Tinytag, to whip up a script that’d help me do just that. The code’s up on Github, if you want to go install and play with it yourselves.

Here’s a quick walk through derb.py.³

Setting up house
#

We set up a place to accept a path containing the files. The feed will ultimately be placed as a feed.xml in the same folder as well We then walk through the folder (after a really basic sanity check) and gather all the files into a list.
The base_url is where the feeds (along with the audio) will be served from.

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base_url = "https://ab.janusworx.com"

book_folder = input("Paste path to audiobook folder here: ")
book_out_path = base_url + (book_folder.split("/")[-1])
file_list = os.walk(book_folder)

# Do a basic check on the validity of the path we get, 
# before we build the audio file list.
try:
 all_files = (list(file_list)[0][2])
except IndexError as e:
 print(f"\n\n"
 f"---\n"
 f"ERROR!: {e}\n"
 f"Have you typed in the right path?\n"
 f"---\n")
 sys.exit("Quitting script!")
audio_files = []
for each_file in all_files:
 each_file = Path(each_file)
 if each_file.suffix in ['.mp3', '.m4a', '.m4b']:
 audio_files.append(str(each_file))
audio_files = sorted(audio_files)

Creating a feed
#

We now go about the business of setting up the feed proper.
To begin with, we grab the first file we can get our grubby paws on, and create a TinyTag object that’ll give us a lot of metadata. (If there isn’t any, we quit.)
Oh, and by the way, how do I know what data I’d need to create a feed? I just cribbed everything from the Feedgenerator’s excellent documentation. I also looked at the widely linked to, RSS reference page for clarification if I got confused.

We then, instantiate create a feedgenerator object along with the podcast extension.
Following which, we supply the feed a title, an id⁴, feed author details, a language, podcast category and description.

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# Setup a feed
## Grab feed metadata from the first audio file
feed_metadata_file = TinyTag.get(Path(book_folder, audio_files[0]))

## Grab title from metadata file.
## At the same time, break out if there isn’t any.
if not feed_metadata_file.album:
 sys.exit("\n---\nStopping feed creation.\n
		Setup audio file metadata with a tag editor")
feed_title = feed_metadata_file.album

## Creating feed instance
audio_book_feed = FeedGenerator()
audio_book_feed.load_extension("podcast")

## Setting up more stuff on the feed proper
audio_book_feed.id(base_url)
audio_book_feed.title(feed_title)
audio_book_feed.author({"name": "Jason Braganza", "email": "feedback@janusworx.com"})
audio_book_feed.link(href=f'{book_out_path}', rel='self')
audio_book_feed.language('en')
audio_book_feed.podcast.itunes_category('Private')
audio_book_feed.description(feed_title)

Adding episodes and writing out the file
#

After which it’s then a matter of looping through that audio file list we created and adding them as entries to the feed object we created.
Once again we grab the metadata from each file, using Tinytag, and then set each feed entry’s details (title, id and enclosure).
I’ve hardcoded the mime types, since I know I only have two basic type of audio files. If you don’t know what kind of audio, you might be serving, the mimetypes-magic package should help.
Finally we write it all out to a file.

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# Loop the file list and create entries in the feed

for each_file in audio_files:
 each_file_metadata = TinyTag.get(Path(book_folder, each_file))
 episode_file_path = Path(each_file)
 episode_suffix = episode_file_path.suffix
 episode_mime_type = 'audio/mpeg' if episode_suffix == '.mp3' else 'audio/x-m4a'
 episode_title = each_file_metadata.title
 episode_size = str(each_file_metadata.filesize)
 episode_link = f"{book_out_path}/{each_file}"
 
	audio_episode = audio_book_feed.add_entry()
 audio_episode.title(episode_title)
 audio_episode.id(episode_link)
 audio_episode.enclosure(episode_link, episode_size, episode_mime_type)

# Write the rss feed to the same folder as the source audio files
audio_book_feed.rss_file(f"{book_folder}/feed.xml")

Serving
#

Once done, I moved it all to my trusty Pi, which runs barebones Nginx with a single bare page, protected by basic auth.

I decided not to publish the feeds publicly.
Rather I’m going to just set it up in their podcast players, when I meet them, or pass it over to their kids over Signal.⁵
It’s already worked with three of them, so everyone’s happy and here’s me hoping, fingers crossed, it’ll be easy to support in the long run.

Update (2023-09-15): Guess I’m using it for myself too, now 😂

Yes, while it’s slowly moving to Youtube, that world still mostly depends on CDs and USB sticks. ↩︎
the audio files, not my mother’s friends. ↩︎
Large parts are elided. Please look at Github for the actual file. ↩︎
normally, the site it’ll be served from ↩︎
Why should I be the only one doing family tech support? ↩︎

htpasswd Notes to Self

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 15:16:26 +0530

To create the htpasswd file along with its first user, I just:

htpasswd -c /path/to/htpasswdfile/htpasswd some-user

It’ll ask you for the password for that user, encrypt it and store it in that location.

Add these lines to get Nginx to use the file for basic auth:

auth_basic	"Login to Proceed: "; #(or whatever message you want)
auth_basic_user_file /path/to/htpasswdfile/htpasswd;

To append another user to the htpasswd file do:

htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd/htpasswd second-user

That ought to do it.

P.S. Install apache-utils on Debian or use Paru/Yay to install nginx_passwd on Arch.

Quick Fix: Go Mod File Not Found in Current Directory

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 19:11:11 +0530

As I have begun learning Go (or golang as I needed to use for searching on the web), I’ve been running into some sort of chasm that the Go language seems to have crossed¹ that my old textbook obviously could not have foreseen when it was published.²

The book asks me to do a go run . to get my file to compile and run.
Go seems to having none of it.

go: go.mod file not found in current directory or any parent directory; see 'go help modules'

Some searching on the web, and I found setting the GO111MODULE environment variable to auto or off will do the trick. So …

export GO111MODULE='auto'

did indeed do the trick.

I’m not putting this in my .bashrc to make it persistent though. The Go folks must have had some reason to make this change, which I’m (currently) not aware of. Was it architectural? Security related? That is a web search for another day.

Right now the code compiles and I must be off to my next exercise.

I’m using v1.20.1 ↩︎
I’m learning from Packt’s, The Go Workshop (Delio D’Anna et al), 2019 ↩︎

Huginn: Vive La Pratique Délibérée Avec Les Flux RSS

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:32:05 +0530

I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so.
All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue.

Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time.

One way I practice is to take something in French and read it slowly, looking up words and phrases and slowly building up the missing pieces.
And to do that, I need something in French. I stumbled across the France Pittoresque site and fell in love with it. French and History! Just my kind of site.

Being the lazy bum, that I am, I went looking for an RSS feed, so that I could read their daily article in Reeder.
And hit my first stumbling block.
The good folk at France Pittoresque, don’t provide a feed. Or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Even after looking and looking. And then looking some more.¹

You know where I’m going with this. This is a job for Huginn!

This is how the site looks today

click to embiggen.

And this little item is what I want to get, on a daily basis.

click to embiggen. Actually click any of them to embiggen!

So I whipped up this scenario.

It scrapes that little section I mentioned above and gets me the title, the url and the description of the article

And generates an RSS feed that I can then use in my feed reader!
The feed is normally at:
http://your-huginn-instance/users/[your-user-id-int]/web_requests/[agent-id-int]/some-'secret'-string.xml

It looks more complicated than it is. It’ll get generated the moment you create your agent. One advantage of using a vm is that my feed is accessible from any device.

You can find the scenario code here, if you want to play with it.

Huginn has proven invaluable when it comes to doing all the little things, that I’d rather not do :)
Merci beaucoup, Huginn!

You’re talking to a lazy bum here. So quite possible I overlooked something. ↩︎

Huginn: On Becoming a Cal Newport Podcast Packrat

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 17:55:01 +0530

First things first, you should be listening to Cal Newport and reading his books too!
His recent episode on books and reading was lovely!¹

If I remember right, he started doing the podcast, a couple of months after the pandemic broke out and the world shut down. And it felt very much at the time, like one of those friendly voices across the waves in some post apocalyptic movie.
It felt warm, personal and gave me something to do in those dark days.
Ergo, I have a strong connection to it and I began saving every episode, at around episode 10 or so.

Oh, and speaking of slow productivity, it’s amazing to see what Cal has fashioned the podcast into. A slow steady drumbeat of episodic growth has led to what he call the Cal Newport Empire, with media galore.

So, like I was saying, I’ve been downloading them ever since the beginning, because I’ve some sort of unnatural attachment to them. They’re the thing I want to listen to if I’m marooned on a desert island.²

And now that I have Huginn, the computer downloads it for me, in the folder I want, with the naming convention, I want.

Here’s the scenario that does it.

It scrapes the website, once every twelve hours to check for a new episode, and grabs the url and title.
It uses the url to download the episode to a folder.
And at the same time, sends me a notification. The title tells me what’s new :)

I probably could use Huginn to rename and copy the file to where I want, but it runs from a Docker container and does not have access to the parent filesystem.
So this little Python script³ does it for me.

from pathlib import Path
import shutil


downloads_folder = Path('/path/to/downloaded/episode/directory/')
destination_folder = Path('/path/to/destination/directory/')

for audio_file in downloads_folder.iterdir():
 if audio_file.suffix == '.mp3':
 original_name = audio_file.stem
 original_name = original_name.split('-')[2:]
 episode_number, raw_file_name = f'CNPE{original_name[0]}', (' '.join(original_name[1:])).title()

 new_file_name = episode_number+ ' - ' +raw_file_name +audio_file.suffix

 shutil.move(downloads_folder/audio_file, destination_folder/new_file_name)

It looks for any mp3 files in the specified folder, renames them the way I want them named and then moves them to my packrat archive. Et voilà!

The scenario and scripts are here, if you want them.

What else, do you expect a bookworm to tell ya? 😂 ↩︎
with a stock of mp3 players and rechargable batteries ↩︎
scheduled via crontab ↩︎

Huginn: the Rube Goldbergness of Updating Hugo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 19:35:06 +0530

Click the pic to embiggen.
Rube Goldberg illustration via James Vaughan

Ended up too sick to even tinker, since I last wrote.
Well enough now, to scratch out some prose to get my brains in gear.
Let’s start with Huginn adventure #1.
Buckle up!

Background
#

I found Huginn, and am using it as my man friday.¹

The “Problem”
#

I run Hugo on ~~two~~ three machines.
I’m tired of updating to the latest release manually.
The computer can do it for me!

Why this way? Why? Why?!
#

It’s fun!
Yes, there are other (most likely simpler) ways to do it, but Huginn is my new shiny hammer … and well you know!
Did I tell you it’s fun? :)

How now brown cow?
#

Some more background:

I could just apt install, but I’m too posh for that 😂 I want the latest version of Hugo. And the extended version at that.
I depend on two more helpers.
a. Syncthing syncs the folder that the Hugo deb package downloads to, across all my machines
b. Pushover sends me push notifications. Huginn integrates with it.

Having said that, here’s a pic of my four step scenario, followed by the output of each step.

Scrape the Hugo github releases page to get the title.²

Get the latest release title³ and fashion a url out of it.

Download Hugo to a folder.

Send myself a push notification.⁴

And tada!

So we done? No, you silly goose!

We’re done downloading the installer. Said installer now needs installing.
So my very imaginatively titled install-hugo.sh script⁵, which runs once a day via a crontab entry …

takes the file,
checks to see if it’s downloaded in the last day
and if so, installs it.

Mind you, it needs root privileges. And then it also …
4. deletes any stray debs more than a few days old.⁶

#! /usr/bin/env bash

cd /path/to/hugo/deb/file

# Install deb from the last 24 hours
find *.deb -maxdepth 1 -mmin -1440 | xargs -d '\n' dpkg -i

# Remove debs more than 2 days old
find *.deb -maxdepth 1 -mtime +2 | xargs -d '\n' rm -rf 

And now we’re done :)

Holy shiny hammer, Batgirl! It worked!

The scenario, should you install Huginn and want to import and play with, as well as the shell script are here, on Github.

Note: I had originally used the RSS agent in step one, instead of the Website agent I use now, and that was much easier. But it would detect the new feed entry and then just sit there hatching eggs, not doing anything. I wish I had a snapshot (of the missed events, not hatched eggs) but I digress. The website agent, for all its hacky xpath quackery works.

it could have been girl friday too, but I call mine Bertuccio, after Edmond Dantes’ man friday ↩︎
I cannot believe, I go scrape a website and learn all that xpath voodoo, just to get a measly text string. ↩︎
And here’s where Huginn helps. It remembers the last title. And only proceeds if something has changed. ↩︎
the push notification is just like that. something whimsical for me. It’s independent of the download. I should probably have called it Step 3a. or 2b. Never mind now. ↩︎
which is also synced and available across all three machines ↩︎
I let them be for a couple of days, in case a machine is not online that day. ↩︎

Huginn

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 05:00:00 +0530

Let’s get the, “What the heck is Huginn?” out of the way.
If you’ve heard of Zapier or IFTTT, that’s what this is. Only better. You host it. You control it. You program it. And everything’s in your control.
If you’ve used Yahoo Pipes, then I tip my hat to you my dear friend and tell the rest of you folk, that I believe all of these new fangled pieces of zaps and agents are the spiritual successor to that pioneering web app. IBM has a similar open source alternative, with all the new fangled hotness called Node-RED

Just like piping and transforming text with Unix utilities locally, Huginn lets us do that with web data. RSS feeds, webhooks, JSON data and the like. Take ’em, ingest ’em, chew on ’em, transform ’em and do what the heck you want with ’em!

Why Huginn?
#

So why did I settle on Huginn? And what do I use it for?
Well, I liked the name. And I wanted something Yahoo-pipesque for myself :)
I used it originally on my desktop, to push my blog posts to twitter and my mastodon account. And then I lost it in a system crash¹ and I didn’t get to putting it up again.

Until a recent bout of sickness, and the urge to tinker led me to put it up on my vm.
I realised that I don’t want to use my programming hammer to tackle every computing hammer that I face. There’s too much to learn and too little life.
So if Huginn lets me do interesting things with json and liquid and duct tape, why ever not?

I still have to do the autopost to my social accounts², but I’ve already set it up to scratch several itches I had.

It scrapes a couple of art websites, that don’t have feeds and then creates RSS feeds so that I can read them peacefully in my RSS Reeder.
I check my Calibre release feed, update my local install of Calibre to the latest hotness, and then get notified via a push notification, using a Rube Goldberg pastiche of Bash, cURL and Pushover.
I love archiving episodes of my favourite podcast (the Cal Newport podcast³), so Huginn and Python and Syncthing and cron all pull together to get it in the right place, with the naming convention I want.⁴

I hope to write a bit more about each of these in the coming days, but needless to say, I’m having more fun playing with Huginn, than I imagined I ever would!

it did work like the little engine that could, without a hitch until then ↩︎
I’ve forgotten how I did it! ↩︎
I think it’s called Deep Questions, but to me it’ll always be the Cal Newport Podcast ↩︎
If you lose all your audio files in a fire Cal, you know who to call! ↩︎

TIL: The Difference Between a CLI Tool and a Freeze Tool

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 11:35:47 +0530

I keep writing these tiny utilities for myself in Python and while I love writing in Python, I definitely don’t enjoy the little war dance I have to do everytime I want to run it on a new machine. Keeping track of virtual environments, and then installing packages in them, quickly gets tiresome. I want to just run the program once I’m done with it. Like a C program. Or Rust. Or Go.

I could go learn one of those languages. Sure. That’s an option.
And I see no problem doing it for other needs (like if I’m working with a group that uses said language) or for my career’s sake or just for being a polyglot.

But when I write for myself, I’d rather stick to Python.
Its mental model fits my brain. I find writing Python joyful.

So what’s a boy to do?
Since I was writing CLI applications, I went and looked for how to write Python CLIs and I found argparse and Typer and Click and I was confused. They didn’t seem to give me my executable. They had all sorts of other powerful features, but the one I wanted.
And I went looking some more. And the penny dropped.

What I wanted, wasn’t a way to build a CLI, (although that is what I was writing).
What I wanted, was a way to bundle my environment into an executable.
What I wanted, I learned, was a way to freeze my code.

More searching led to Nuitka, PyOxidizer, PyInstaller and their ilk.
I went with Nuitka, because that is what I found first and what I found was dead simple

python -m nuitka --static-libpython=no mastodon-to-moi.py

and boom!
I got myself an executable mastodon-to-moi.bin!
And then I got greedy and did a mastodon-to-moi.bin --help and figured, that’s where the cli/tui frameworks like Typer and Textualize, come in handy. To scaffold and help these interfaces.

But when I ran it on my laptop, which has nothing other than system Python, it hiccoughed. I tried Pyinstaller next, and that too, did not do the trick. It choked on a loop, that worked when I ran it as with Python normally. PyOxidizer scared me off.

This needs looking further looking into, but atleast I know what I need to do now

Afterthought: The one con I do see, is losing platform independence. My binaries will be Linux on Intel only.¹ I could just take my Python source anywhere, set up my environment and go. Well, I still have that option if I need it and in the meanwhile, having binaries affords me a lot of convenience.

until I learn to cross compile that is. ↩︎

Why I Use an Online VM

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 05:00:00 +0530

I am fortunate enough, to run most of my life between my local computer and another VM in a cloud. In this day and age of cloud native and serverless, why would anyone choose to run their life off a virtual server aka VM?
This post is me, thinking this through. I’ll return to this every now and then, and see if things have changed enough out there, for me to evaluate and make a change.
For now, I am happy using my dinky little box in the cloud.

Reasons I use a VM.
#

Because I cannot have a cloud connected desktop.
If I could I would. But commercial forces, at least in India don’t bode well for an always on, always connected desktop. The VM is a good compromise
Because I can. Being an old sysadmin lets me do this. But don’t let that scare you off. If you can afford one, I’d venture to say you should. If you put in the time to learn Linux fundamentals, most hosting providers now have excellent guides that will let you have a box that is pretty secure.
The amount of control it affords me. Most cloud services will handicap you, some way or the other. When you’re using a VM on the other hand, you have the power of the whole machine¹ in the palm of your hand. You can do what you want with it. Install programming languages to your hearts content, access all the storage that you have, run containers if you wish. Your VM is your oyster :)
I can host what I want to. Without paying per service. Or without letting outsiders slurp my data and attention to serve me ads. Right now I host — (goes and looks) —
1. This website
2. ZNC, an IRC bouncer, so I can stay connected always to my favourite IRC channels along with
3. The Lounge, so I can then access IRC from anywhere
4. an instance of Miniflux, to read my RSS feeds, to keep my self update with all my interests
5. Sendy, to send emails to my mailing list.
6. Baikal, for my contacts and calendars and finally…
7. Huginn, to let me do all sorts of wizardry with stuff on the net. Think of it as a self hosted Zapier / IFTTT
My data is not held hostage!

Reasons I wouldn’t use a VM
#

If I am sharing something with the world at large.
Something that might have the potential of being abused, even if I made or shared out of the goodness of my heart. No concrete example of this, comes to mind right now.
Serving or hosting something that my VM cannot handle. I wouldn’t serve video from my little box, for e.g.
Storing data. As in long lived collections. I doubt I’d store, my audio or photo library on here. Too large. It’d probably run too expensive and too risky.
Tradeoff between control and life. I outsource email and my fediverse, because for me, maintaining them, was too much of a time suck. (No matter how much I loved doing it)

Conclusion: Control
#

The more I think about it, the more I think it’s about control more than cost.
I want as much of my data and digital life, out of the control of the software giants and/or other third parties to extent, I can control.
As much as possible, I want to express myself without constraint. Most SAAS options in this day and age, don’t come close to the power and options that old desktop software gave us.
Having a VM lets me be creative, expressive and grab some semblance of control back for myself.

well, as much as you’re paying for 😂 ↩︎

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:43:56 +0530

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop.
Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.¹ Will keep at it.

What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.²
I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password.
The org-caldav README suggested that I save it all in an .authinfo file, like so.

machine www.google.com:443 port https login username password secret

which for me translated as

machine my-caldav-server:443 port https login <my-username> password <my-password>

And the connection worked! Without me putting my password in every two seconds.

I was still a bit leery about putting my password into a plaintext file, so I looked it up and it told me to specifically use an authinfo.gpg not the plaintext version. The magic still didn’t strike me, until I tried to save the file. Emacs called up my gpg agent, which popped up a box asking me to unlock my key, and then Emacs went ahead and encrypted my file. Just like that! I tried opening it and the same thing happened in reverse. No mussing around with the command line.

If I save a file with a .gpg extension, Emacs will automatically encrypt it!
If you want to learn more, the great Mickey Petersen knows all!³

Probably because I’m running Baikal ↩︎
via the EasyPG package ↩︎
And ofcourse, I had to find this lovely article, after all my stumbling about! ↩︎

Miniflux Now Supports Custom CSS?

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:23:57 +0530

I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits.
It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way.

Well, almost.
I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds.
And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page.

Like so,

Except for when there is no next under my pointer.

It’d happen quite frequently and I’d have to keep moving my mouse to find the link. The whole thing was driving me batty!¹
And then it hit me. Sometimes the headlines would be too long and stretch across two lines, causing rest of the page to shift down to accomodate them.

What if I could reduce the size of the title headlines? That’d help keep it to one line and give me my next button consistently in place.
I didn’t want to go wrangle with custom stylesheets.² I grumbled a bit about Miniflux not letting me do this, before I thought, I ought to go give the settings a look see. I found a Google Reader API in one of the recent releases.³ Maybe it’d let me do something with CSS too.
And lo and behold!
Miniflux does in fact have support for custom CSS. It has in fact, had it since 2020!⁴

A tiny bit of twiddling to make my headlines smaller.

.entry-header>h1 {
 font-size: 1.2em !important;
}

I put this in the Custom CSS box in the main Settings section.

And the next link stays put under my mouse pointer, letting me rapidly skim my feeds :)

Yes, I can (and do) use the keyboard shortcuts. But my RSI ridden wrists need constant entertainment and movement. So I switch it up frequently. ↩︎
I did try. And failed miserably. ↩︎
Helped Reeder, my iOS feed reader talk much better to Miniflux ↩︎
I’ve been a blind bat, as usual ↩︎

Learning Kubernetes, Setup Notes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 13:12:50 +0530

Ok, here’s to learning Kubernetes in earnest, to get that career pivot going.
Notes as I learn, over the coming days.

This one, is a lot of random thoughts on bringing up a cluster.

It is both harder than you think, and easier than you think
I did this, because I wanted to run my own cluster, just like the big boys do.¹
It’s much easier to run alternatives like kind, if that suits your needs better.

Notes to future Jason:

I made a gigantic Ubuntu KVM vm, for my playground
Then four small vms in that big one
Because of life, I goofed up and used Ubuntu LTS on the big vm and a non-LTS version on the small ones. Next time just use the same os everywhere.
If learning is your aim, make sure the vms use a beefy, full fat os install. The skinny ones might be helpful online when actually building stuff, but when it comes to learning, you’ll be installing a lot of things manually.²
To that end, make sure the virtual machines have lots of disk space available. I had to learn how to resize qcow files, because I nearly ran out of space.
The control-plane node will need two cpus. the others can get by with one.
Same with ram. Helps if the control-plane node has 4gb.
The documentation is the best resource. It is comprehensive but not well structured. No hand holding here.
I used containerd and runc rather than Docker, manually installing them using the documentation links³
Pair with a how to install guide, off the web. Kubernetes releases come fast and furious. Make sure you aren’t following something woefully out of date.
Once again, the documentation is the go to. Make sure you read them for notes and pitfalls. My cluster keeled and fell over after my first reboot, because I did not configure the cgroups driver right, to work with systemd
It takes time. It’s ok. It’s supposed to take that long.
If your system is old and creaky like mine, don’t bring up all the vms at once. That’s another surefire way of making sure the cluster goes splat. Bring up the control node, wait a while⁴, wait some more just to make sure, and then slowly bring up the worker nodes one by one.
Then keep the darned thing on all day.
If stuff works, and you like me, need to get on with life because you are doing all this in the middle of a house move, make sure to take lots of vm snapshots.
What else? Hmm … oh yea! Stop stressing. You got this. Show up. It’ll come to you.

Like Scott says, You got to do the real thing, if you want to learn well. ↩︎
I had to manually install apt-utils, whiptail, ping, devel tools and Dog knows, what else ↩︎
I honestly don’t why I did this. No objective reason. Just that the recent Docker emails give me the creeps. Reminds me of the old Microsoft emails. So, Via Negativa! ↩︎
Waiting time? Enough to brew me a coffee. Measure yours. ↩︎

Make KVM Use a NIC in Bridge Mode

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 17:48:35 +0530

I wanted to start learning Kubernetes.
So I thought I’d spin up a Ubuntu VM to use as my sacrificial guinea pig.

While the normal NAT mode works well enough for most of my networking needs, I wanted the Ubuntu VM to show up and work as a machine on my host’s network.¹
I have two network cards on my desktop and wanted to allocate one of them to this VM.
I wanted a passthrough, where the guest OS would see the NIC and then have exclusive access to it.
When I tried doing that, KVM complained that it could not do this with PCI devices.

Hmm, that had me stumped a bit.
And then I learnt about attaching my VM’s NIC directly to a physical interface.
What I needed to do was use Macvtap as my network source in the VM’s settings.
It then prompted me for my NIC’s device name, which I gave it, courtesy a little spelunking through ifconfig’s output.

And then once I began my Ubuntu VM install, it detected my NIC and then let me assign an ip that I use on my local network.
For all intents and purposes the VM now appears as just another machine on my network ala my Pis.

To my mind, that’d be one less layer of networking I’d need to deal with. ↩︎

Make SSH Ignore Key, When Logging On to a Fresh Box

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 17:38:28 +0530

Every now and then, I spin up a fresh vm.
And being a creature of habit, I use the same username on my play / experimental vms as my normal login.
So everytime I try to login to such a vm or pi, I get a Too many authentication failures error.

So to just get in and start working, I need to tell ssh to ignore my keys and try using passwords as the authentication mechanism.
Like so

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password -o PubkeyAuthentication=no jason@ip-address-on-my-network

And then I can login and begin the process of locking everything down.

Notes to Self, on Self Hosting Fonts on My Hugo Blog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 14:32:28 +0530

Writing this down, so that I will not struggle the next time¹, I have to do this.

I use Valkyrie for everything on the blog in various weights, except for code and preformatted stuff, which uses Source Code Pro Medium. Both are WOFF2 fonts.
Anything in Hugo’s assets/css/extended folder will be picked up by Hugo and bundled into a single CSS file.
The fonts are in subdirectories in the static/fonts/font-name folder. Anything in the static folder shows up at the root of the site. ~/mjb/blog/static/images/test.jpg will become /images/test.jpg
I’ve created an embed-font-name.css file in the css folder above, with embed instructions generously provided by Matthew Butterick in his font documentation for Valkyrie. I adapted the same for Source Code Pro as well. Here’s a sample of my embed-source-code-pro.css

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@font-face {
 font-family: 'Source Code Pro Medium';
 font-style: normal;
 font-weight: medium;
 font-stretch: normal;
 font-display: auto;
 src: url('/fonts/source-code-pro/SourceCodePro-Medium.woff2') format('woff2');
}

Finally, I created a zz-include-css.css file, which I use to overide the default CSS, so I can use my custom fonts. Since it starts with a zz it comes after the files above, that start with embed, in the final munged and minified CSS file.
These are my instructions to have most text rendered with Valkyrie and code as Source Code Pro Medium²

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#top {
 font-family: valkyrie;
 font-variant: oldstyle-nums;
}

.post-content pre, code {
 font-family: 'Source Code Pro Medium';
 font-style: medium;
 font-weight: 500;
}

Look! So pretty :)

hopefully, never! ↩︎
I figured out what to target by inspecting the final web page in Firefox ↩︎

Exclude Files and Folders From an Rsync Copy

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 19:43:24 +0530

I’ve been sticking to plain old rsync -az to sling files around using Rsync.
Until I ran into a hiccough today, where I filled up my teensy remote storage on the Pi, because a couple of subdirectories that were part of the run, were hundreds of megabytes large.¹

So I did the usual, did hunt around the web thing, and learnt about --exclude

So now the new Rsync command is …

rsync -az src dest --exclude={'excluded_dir_1','excluded_dir_2'}

And my poor Pi no longer has disk full nightmares.

I’d expected the normal run to be a few hundred kilobytes in size. ↩︎

Rename a File as You Work on It in Emacs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 19:23:18 +0530

I often fat fingered the file name / buffer name / Org Roam link name when launching something new.
And then when I am busy and knee deep in work, I glance up to see the error glaring at me.

I ~~figured out~~, looked up how to fix it

Hit C-x d to flip into a dired buffer
Find my filename in the list. (C-s can help search and narrow stuff)
Then C-x C-q to go into Wdired mode
Change the file name to whatever I want it to
C-c C-c to be done with it.

Et voilà!
(If you are editing an Org Roam node, M-x org-roam-db-sync to keep everything shipshape)¹

Update, 2022-09-17: Antón responded to my post on Linkedin to suggest that step 3 could also be done alternatively by just hitting R at the filename, which would let me rename the file (using dired-do-rename)

I know, I know, the db eventually catches up. But if you’ve been reading me long enough, you know I’m enough of a control freak to be doing this 😂 ↩︎

Moving Tasks Between Org Files in Emacs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:13:08 +0530

More diving into Org Mode and Emacs.

I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc.

And all this while, I have been moving tasks into my daily-tasks.org as and when I tackle them. This meant I needed to open both files, and then cut said task out of one and paste it into the other. And as usual, I am now doing this often enough, that it’s become bothersome. Because there are a couple more files as well, that serve as inboxes.

And the same question arises, as usual. Can Emacs help with this?
The answer as it almost always is, is a big, resounding, Yes!

I know it had to do something with what Org calls a refile, since I keep using C-c C-w to move items between different headings in my daily tasks file.
So after a bit of reading the manual, reading blog posts, spelunking through the emacs stackexchange, stalking the Org Mode reddit and an hour of head scratching, I roughed up something that does what I want :)

In a nutshell, what I am doing is what Org calls, a Refile and Copy. The manual page let me know that I could do this across files too. This was exactly what I wanted. It also told me that I needed to configure org-refile-targets variable to tell Org a list of locations, that it would then let me refile my tasks to.

Having split my emacs init.el file into a set of logical files, I opened up the file that held my org settings (very imaginatively called emacs-org-mode-settings.el) and then thought a bit about what files I would want Org to pop up when I wanted to file tasks to.
Would just my daily tasks file do? What if I wanted to file something out of my daily tasks file? Or what if I wanted crisscross transfers between all my task inboxes and daily task file?

I then realised that I was already telling Org Agenda to scan my tasks folder (which holds all my productivity system files) for tasks and dates and schedules and deadlines. I decided to use the same set of files as my targets for refiling. And this turned out to be easier to do than expected. I just had to tell Org to use org-agenda-files as the value for org-refile-targets

It looks a little bit like this.

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(setq org-refile-targets
 '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	 (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))

I’m telling org-refile-targets on line 1, to look for targets in two locations.
Line 3, is what we were talking about above. Org will look to the same location that org-agenda-files points to, for its refile targets.
Line 2, is where I tell Org to include my current file, the one I am working on, as a target. It helps me move stuff in my daily tasks file from one day to another.
The maxlevel bit is to tell Org the level of headlines to show as targets. Org has headlines and sub-headlines and sub-sub-headlines.¹ I just need the first level, which is why it’s set to 1.
It seemed to work, until I ran into a small stumbling block. Org would not let me refile my task at level 0, i.e. the root of the file as a level 1 headline. It could only nest under an existing headline. So, line 4 below, fixes that for me.

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(setq org-refile-targets
 '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	 (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))
(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)

And tada! It works! You can see it in action below.
Click any of the images below to view them, larger.

The waiting task on the right (writing this post), needs to come in to my daily tasks file on the left

So I hit C-c C-w and Org Mode helpfully pops up what target it thinks I want to move my task to.²
I can hit the tab key to get a list of other files and targets.

Once I do that, the task hops over to the right place!

It’s an outliner after all :) ↩︎
The daily tasks file, under today’s date ↩︎

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Certbot Certs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 11:45:54 +0530

(Update, 2024-03-15: I now use lego. will update this post later.)

After struggling to renew my certs for the third time in a row, hopefully these pointers should keep me on track for the next time.

Namecheap does not yet support automatic wildcard renewal for the Letsencrypt/Certbot combo. Check next year.
Have your Namecheap control panel open and ready.
Switch to root or run the command below with sudo
Command to renew: certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 -d *.domain.com -d domain.com
certbot will then, print a couple of lines that you need to add as a TXT record in the Namecheap DNS control panel.
When you do that, make sure you set the TTL of the record, to a minute, so that you can redo stuff quicker, if you mess up.
certbot might ask you to do multiple records. Read the instructions carefully.
When you check to see if the TXT record is set, search for the whole domain name. For e.g. _acme-challenge.domain.blah instead of just domain.blah
If you’ve done all of the above, hopefully things should go smoothly and the certificate should renew.
Restart Nginx and you’re done.
If you have multiple machines, figure out a way to securely transfer the certs there too.

Tomorrow is Another Date

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:17:11 +0530

Org mode is ~~slowly spreading its tentacles~~ increasingly becoming something, I cannot live without, to manage my day.
And I’m getting pretty consistent with it too!

Like you see above, I use dates as my headlines, below which I list the various tasks for the day.¹
And that’s where I run into my current itch to scratch.

I don’t want to keep typing out the date daily.
The computer can do that for me.
But how? Of the millions of ways possible, what do I want to do?
My first thought was to figure out some way to insert a date into Emacs.
And then I thought, why only emacs? I want it systemwide, across all my programs.
So I checked if Espanso, my friendly text expansion program, would do that for me.
Turns out, Espanso does!
I could just type :dtx wherever I wanted and Espanso would happily insert the date in there. And so I did that for a few days.
Problem solved? Well, that’s when the itch got stronger.

See my evening tasks above?
I use Cal Newport’s idea of a shutdown ritual, to empty my mind and plan the next day, every evening.
Which, for the past couple of weeks meant using my little expansion snippet to put in today’s date for the next day’s headline, as I began planning it. And I’d just manually change the date part to the next day’s date.²

Until today.

I typed in :dtx and I got 2022-07-31.
And then the lazy bum inside me groaned. What? I need to the change the month too?
The computer can do that for me!

So I went back to Espanso to see if it did support date expansions for tomorrow.
Turns out it does!
Only for some reason, it just wouldn’t play ball with the way I want my dates expressed, (YYYY-MM-DD). It would throw weird yaml errors.
And then I recalled Emacs just called the shell to do it.
So I went looking to see, if Espanso could call the operating system shell³ to do expansions ala Emacs.
Turns out, it can!

Finally, I looked up how the date command worked with past and future dates, and jigged up a small expansion snippet and put that into Espanso’s match/base.yaml

 - trigger: ":dttx"
 replace: "{{output}}"
 vars:
 - name: output
 type: shell
 params:
 cmd: "date --date='tomorrow' +'%Y-%m-%d'"

Et voilà!
No more backspacing and struggling with Espanso undos and date calculations.
:dttx turns into tomorrow’s date:2022-08-01!
And the monkey brain is happy again :)

Subtasks not shown. ↩︎
like yesterday evening, I typed in :dtx to get 2022-07-30 for e.g. and then changed the 30 to a 31. ↩︎
in my case, bash ↩︎

Emacsclient Does Not Recognise Compose Key Sequences

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +0530

Originally published 2021/10/27. Updated to include the .xssessionsrc point

I run pretty often into this issue, so this is a checklist for me.
Issue being, that I cannot use Compose key sequences to type out the characters I need.

Case in point being, the apostrophe ’ and the quote marks “” , ‘’ that I use, all the live long day.

Make sure that emacs is running as a service. It runs in your user, so check status with systemctl --user status emacs.service
- Do the normal computer user thing. Restart the service.systemctl --user restart emacs.service.¹

Make sure the system is UTF-8 everywhere. (en_IN.UTF-8 does not work for me. Make sure it’s en_US.UTF-8)

One place that Emacs looks is the .xsessionrc file in the home folder.

These are the contents of mine. My Emacs refuses to let the compose key sequences work, unless it’s present

LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
PAPERSIZE=a4
LANGUAGE=en_US
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

if [ $DISPLAY != ":0" ]
then
	export XAUTHORITY=${HOME}/.Xauthority
fi

This should do the trick 99% of the time.

Have done it close to 4–5 times now. It works! ↩︎

Installing PyCLD3 on an Apple M1 Mac

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:33:39 +0530

While building my work product on the fancy-schmancy M1 work Mac, I kept running into clang errors, when I did a pip install
Turns out, PyCLD3 would not build.
So I did it manually. This tip on Github did the trick
We need brew installed.
And then we run the following commands in a terminal …

 
brew install protobuf #install protobuf

# set various compiler flags
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1
export CFLAGS='-I /opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/include'
export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/lib

# install pycld3
python3 -m pip install pycld3

And we’re set!

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Raspberry Pi 4 Not Accessible After a Reboot

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0530

Update: 28/12/2021
The solution? Move off the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS and install Ubuntu. Everything below is now just for history and context :)

Every time I update my Pi, whether it be an kernel update or due to something goofy I do, it refuses to be accessible via ssh after it boots back up.
And everytime I bring it back to my desk, it just works.
And when I put it back into its niche, by the door, it continues to work.
But inevitably, sooner or later, comes a reboot, and we’re back to being inaccessible.
No ssh, no plex, no network.

The other Pi, my old 3 series, keeps chugging along like a champ in the meanwhile.
This was driving me up the wall.
So I got to thinking, and I realised, I was running the 64 bit edition of the Raspberry Pi OS.
And then I got to thinking some more, hmm, this is not a mature os. What if, it might be buggy? Or what if, something I do, is tripping it up the wrong way?
Logically then, that meant the network stack, or the network interface, or the port itself.
Because everytime I brought the Pi in, to where my desktop is, I connect it to a switch (that connects to my upstream router).
And then when I take it back, it changes back to connecting to the router directly.

So the next time it borked, I put the Pi off, then turned the router off and on and then finally, put the Pi back on.
And that did the trick.
I tried it again this morning, when the Pi went offline, after another update. The heuristic still holds!
I’m sure, I could go digging further to find the root cause, (dhcp release renew not happening correctly?), this just lets me get on with my life and I’m happy :)

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Basic Docker Image Management Pointers

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 18:09:20 +0530

Stuff for future Jason to take note, when he tries to redo his Huginn instance …
I wanted a quick and easy way to install it, without messing up my base system much, so I chose the Docker route.
Now, I don’t know the A or D of Docker, so these quick notes for me to remember in the future.

I need to install Docker rootless, and bring it up as a systemd service.

If I want persistent data, I should create a Docker volume.
Create an env file to hold all the secrets that I want to pass to the container
I need to run and create my huggins instance first, give it a name, pass the env file and also remembering to mount the volume at the place I need
I can then start and stop the image with the name I assigned it.
I need to then tag the image with a policy to restart automatically
So everytime Docker comes up, it will start the container automatically.

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Using Regex to Prepend to Titles in Calibre

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 12:04:27 +0530

So I do this peculiar thing, where I prepend the author’s initials to the title of every book I add to Calibre.¹ ²

And all these years, I’ve just been manually editing the metadata, everytime I added a book, and changing the titles to what I want.
It’s not a problem if it’s just one book, but I normally tend to go hogwild with authors, normally buying out / downloading all their work.
And now that I’ve learnt the basics of the hammer called regex, I wanted to see, you guessed it, if there was a way to quickly do this using regular expressions in Caliber, which has inbuilt support for regexes.

A quick look through the documentation led me to the search and replace page, which explains really pretty well … well, how search and replace works :)

So what did I need to do?
I needed to take the initial character of the title of any book.
And then replace it with author initials + that character

So here’s the Calibre search and replace box when I choose to edit the metadata for multiple books.
I choose Regular expression as my MO and I choose the title field to work with.
You can see the titles of the books, I chose below³

Then, in the “Search for:” box, I go looking for a single character at the beginning of the title.
With regex I express that as a ^.
I’ve surrounded that pattern with () brackets to tell regex to remember what it matched.
You’ll see that I’ve matched the character succcesfully and the “A” from A Journey … and the “T” from Twenty Thousand … are missing in the Test results in the bottom right.

Now in the “Replace with:” box, I tell the regex engine what to match it with.
Which in my case are the author initials “JV” followed by a “ - ” seperator followed by a \1 which tells it to put the match that I found earlier back in.
You can see, now that the titles match the crazy way, I want them.

We do an ok, and Tada!
The books are renamed in the library :)

All hail the power of regex!

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Why? ↩︎
Calibre is a rock solid, does not get in your way, marvellously multifunctional way of categorising ebooks and comics. And that is just scratching the tip of everything Calibre can do ↩︎
Click the images for a larger version ↩︎

Regular Expressions (Regex) Resources

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 07:04:51 +0530

Will update this page whenever I come across something regex, that I love.

Damian Conway’s 5 hour, Understanding Regular Expressions series. This one is the bestestest regex resource ever. If you know the basics of programming and then want to pick up Regular Expressions, this is it.¹
And Damian is one of the finest, bestestestest teachers around.

Damian Conway’s hour long youtube talk and the accompanying slides
RegexTip, one of John D Cook’s many twitter accounts. This one specialises in, you guessed it, regex tips
Regex cheatsheets? This one, by Damian Conway and this one by Dave Child.
Want to keep regex top of mind? Use Anki? This is the deck I love
Unnecessary, ars gratia artis like Deep Dive? The Friedl book is it.

Also don’t be like me and try to learn Regex first. You’re just making it harder on yourself. It is indeed possible, but nearly every regex resource presumes basic programming knowledge. It does not have to be much. Loops and variables and such, Automate the Boring Stuff is good for that, but I don’t want to digress into Python resources 😂 ↩︎

Rough Notes on Swap File/Partition in Linux

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 09:31:43 +0530

Am using my rickety old laptop as my daily driver these days, because … reasons.
And now, that I run PyCharm alongside Emacs, alongside Chrome in its various incarnations, the poor old thing crashes, freezes and stutters a lot.
A cursory inspection told me that while I had plenty of CPU firepower, I was constantly running out of ram (8gb) and swap (1 gb partition).

Too broke to add more ram to the system right now (don’t even know if this thing will support 8 gb modules to push it up to 16).
So the only way to go, was to somehow increase the swap on my system.
This is the checklist for curious / researching Jason in the future.

Make sure system is backed up

Check if there is a swap file or partition
If there’s a file then we’re in luck. If it’s a partition then,
Just make sure we have a live usb disk. I used my Mint installer
Then we need to turn swap off (swapoff command)
If there’s a partition / file entry in fstab remove it
Now, if it’s a file skip down to step 13
If it’s a partition boot off the live usb disk
Install some gui partition tool off the net, depending on the kind of partition we have. (for e.g. GParted for raw ext4 partitions and blivet-gui for lvm stuff)
Best way forward (to my mind) is to get rid of the partition and then create a swapfile
So delete the swap partition, and resize the main one to take in the free space left behind (this could take a while)
Once done boot back into the system
Create a bigger swapfile and activate it. (mkswap,swapon) (I made mine 3gb. (while having 8gb of ram))
Create entry in fstab
Reboot

Linuxize, has a pretty good guide on the commands and permissions involved.

Pycharm Does Not Recognise Compose Key Sequences

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 15:56:04 +0530

Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs?
I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me.
Considering that I need both, Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life, it behooved me, that I go solve this too.

And … drumroll … the answer turned out to be the same as Emacs.
Set the locale to be en_US.utf8 systemwide.

Which confused me a bit for a second.
I had done it for Emacs. So why was Pycharm behaving oddly?
And then, another second later, I realised, that this was a different machine.
This was my laptop, which I now use as my daily driver and the locale was set to India, as per my original preferences.

A quick, sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8 and a reboot later, both Pycharm and Emacs were humming along to the Compose key dance :)

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Starting Emacs From the Command Line, and Getting Back to the Prompt

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:00:00 +0530

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul.

Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code.
And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is.

While they are old and crufty, there is a benefit to using editors like Emacs.
One that matters to me. Emacs (and Vim) are Lindy.
So I’ve decided to split my needs for now.
Programming code goes to Jetbrains and everything else goes to Emacs.¹

The one thing I immediately missed was doing code . in my terminal to open up a folder full of files in VS Code.
Emacsclient would launch alright, but I would have to close the Emacs window to regain control of my terminal to process other commands.
Yes, I could bg it, but I want to be able to quit the terminal as well.
Spelunking through the Emacs documentation led me to the no-wait switch.
So I updated my ec alias to
alias ec='emacsclient -create-frame --no-wait --alternate-editor=""'

Now an ec . in a folder opens up Emacs with gorgeous folder listing of files for me.

One more step towards an all Emacs future :)

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Even programming eventually will go to Emacs ↩︎

Joining Two Images Using ImageMagick

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 07:25:47 +0530

Sometimes, I want to share snippets of what I am reading with my friends.
Kindles make it easy, with screenshots.
The only issue being I want to share the full length of two pages, like I’d do if I was reading a book.
And I need it often enough, that I felt I needed to go figure out some way to do it.

It was an easy-ish hack on the mac with printing with Preview.
But now, that I use Linux, I wondered if I could do better.

A little bit of spelunking and I figured out how to let ImageMagick do the hard work for me.
The suite comes with a utility called Convert, that does exactly what I need.

The basic command structure is,

some-imagemagick-utility -options input-file-1 input-file-2 … output-file

So to join my screenshots all I needed to do was,

convert +append dff1.png dff2.png combined-kindle-screenshot.png

and boom!

While this is what I want, the convert utility also lets me stack them one below the other by using -append like so …

convert -append dff1.png dff2.png combined-kindle-screenshot.png

Yes, I know ImageMagick is the bees knees when it comes to images, but I guess this will be the most I’ll ever use it :) ¹

Famous last words! 😂 ↩︎

Linux on Janusworx

Forgejo Workflow Action to Publish Hugo Blog

Tmux Start Session Maximized With Three Panes

More Espanso & Emacs Shenanigans

Fixing Espanso Expansions

Emacs #

Rich Text Expansions #

anki-push-u, Creating a Tiny Pushover Addon for Anki

Notes to Self, Compiling Qbittorrent on a Raspberry Pi 5

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

Moving Audio Library to Flac & MP3 Formats

Viewing Hugo Server Output Remotely

Note to Self, Switch to Manjaro “Unstable”

Updated to Emacs 29.2

Emacs, Three and a Half Years On

Weirdly Placed Emacs Org Branches Are Only Cosmetic

Update: 2023-11-27 #

Getting Emacs Windows to Not Be Shy

On How Emacs Adapts

Getting Around Linux Mint Web App Manager Window Errors

Having My Emacs Tasks and Notes Ready

Update: 2023-11-17 #

My Custom CSS for Miniflux

Width and Size #

Italic Blockquotes #

Smaller title size #

Disable Tag Visibility #

In Summary #

derb; Script to Create podcast RSS feeds

Setting up house #

Creating a feed #

Adding episodes and writing out the file #

Serving #

htpasswd Notes to Self

Quick Fix: Go Mod File Not Found in Current Directory

Huginn: Vive La Pratique Délibérée Avec Les Flux RSS

Huginn: On Becoming a Cal Newport Podcast Packrat

Huginn: the Rube Goldbergness of Updating Hugo

Background #

The “Problem” #

Why this way? Why? Why?! #

How now brown cow? #

Huginn

Why Huginn? #

TIL: The Difference Between a CLI Tool and a Freeze Tool

Why I Use an Online VM

Reasons I use a VM. #

Reasons I wouldn’t use a VM #

Conclusion: Control #

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

Miniflux Now Supports Custom CSS?

Learning Kubernetes, Setup Notes

Make KVM Use a NIC in Bridge Mode

Make SSH Ignore Key, When Logging On to a Fresh Box

Notes to Self, on Self Hosting Fonts on My Hugo Blog

Exclude Files and Folders From an Rsync Copy

Rename a File as You Work on It in Emacs

Moving Tasks Between Org Files in Emacs

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Certbot Certs

Tomorrow is Another Date

Emacsclient Does Not Recognise Compose Key Sequences

Installing PyCLD3 on an Apple M1 Mac

Raspberry Pi 4 Not Accessible After a Reboot

Basic Docker Image Management Pointers

Using Regex to Prepend to Titles in Calibre

Regular Expressions (Regex) Resources

Rough Notes on Swap File/Partition in Linux

Pycharm Does Not Recognise Compose Key Sequences

Starting Emacs From the Command Line, and Getting Back to the Prompt

Joining Two Images Using ImageMagick

Emacs
#

Rich Text Expansions
#

Setting the stage
#

Doing it
#

Update: 2023-11-27
#

Update: 2023-11-17
#

Width and Size
#

Italic Blockquotes
#

Smaller title size
#

Disable Tag Visibility
#

In Summary
#

Setting up house
#

Creating a feed
#

Adding episodes and writing out the file
#

Serving
#

Background
#

The “Problem”
#

Why this way? Why? Why?!
#

How now brown cow?
#

Why Huginn?
#

Reasons I use a VM.
#

Reasons I wouldn’t use a VM
#

Conclusion: Control
#