NoteToSelf on Janusworx

Hugo Redirect From Post in One Section to Another

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:34:36 +0530

Problem
#

I have a post in one section of my site, say notes and miscellanea
That is my canonical post.
But I also need it to show up in the work section of my site, possibly with a another name.
A Hugo alias in the yaml front matter does not work, since both sections exist and Hugo gets confused.

Solution
#

Make sure layouts/redirect/single.html exists within your Hugo folder structure and it contains just this line …

{{- template "alias.html" (dict "Permalink" .Params.target) -}}

Create your original post as usual
Then go create a post in your other¹ section with the following metadata:

---
title: <Your title here>
#date autogenerated by my archetype. if missing, add date
date: 2025-11-06T08:30:54+05:30 
type: redirect
target: <url-to-redirect-to>
summary: <Optional text, that will appear in the sectiones listing page>
---

The date field is critical. The post might not appear where you expect it, if it’s absent.
If not date, then you might need to use weight. One of the two is needed.
In my case, the metadata looked like this:

---
title: "The Plan for My New Hetzner VM"
date: 2025-11-06T08:30:54+05:30
type: redirect
target: /nm/2025-11-06/
summary: Alone and helpless, like you've lost your fight 
---

Done! You can see an entry for “The Plan for My New Hetzner VM” in my work section as you see in the pic below. Clicking that will redirect to the actual post in my Notes and Miscellanea section!

Tada 🎉

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][2].

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in my case, work ↩︎

The Plan for My New Hetzner VM

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:30:54 +0530

Update: 2025-12-11
#

I got it done!

Preamble
#

If this post is weird and stream of consciousness like, that’s by design.
You are seeing a notes and miscellanea post, in the work category.
I want to be able to think through what I am doing. Mostly to clarify, document and explicitly state what I want. To avoid shifting goalposts (or rather to shift them intentionally, if need be.)
I’ll be updating and revising this post as I think and learn and experience things

Goals
#

Think about and write what I want to get done with my hetzner
For now, the how does not matter

What I want
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A VM running K3s, that I can deploy my Hugo website to, as well all the apps that I choose to run on Janusworx
My main need with a cluster is the GitOps aspect. Not the scaling or redundancy. I want infrastructure as code and automated updates, as much as possible.
Everything goes through my Forgejo instance at home
I write a post and it should deploy to the website somehow
Apps that I put in there, either just my config files of already published images/deployments, or my own custom things, ought to be pushed to or pulled by the cluster and deployed. Upgrades should be a matter of manipulating code
Secrets should be self hosted, via environment variables or some self hosted solution. Never at a third party service

2025-11-06 09:35
#

Got tangled with Hugo in the morning.
I think I got the basics down, the VM comes up. K3s in installed, but in what order do I move my apps over?
Think I’ll the root domail last. And try beginning with the “simpler” apps first
Begin with familiarising myself with Helm
2025-11-06 10:06: Tea break
2025-11-06 13:06: Lunch break

2025-11-06 16:00
#

Back. Trying to port my dev terraform setup to production. It should just work. But it does not.
2025-11-06 16:59: Solved. I had somehow borked my Terraform state. Nuked it. And then things started working again
Show stopper now. My GPG key has expired. Need to figure out how to sign my git commits with SSH now
2025-11-06 18:26: I think I’ve licked it. Both Github and Forgejo don’t seem to be complaining. Let’s see what else I’ve broken over the coming days
2025-11-06 20:00: Done! My production cluster is up! And I can tear it down and build it up consistently. Now to work with it tomorrow.

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

Emacs Package Updation Checklist

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:36:44 +0530

I’ve never updated my Emacs packages until recently, because Emacs is where all my writing happens, and so I’m justifiably paranoid.
But then some packages stopped working, due to various circumstances¹ and an update solved it.

So I’ve decided to update my packages once a quarter, so that I don’t lose days yak shaving when something goes wrong and I handle breakage on my terms and not the machine’s.

As far as package management goes, I want to keep things simple.
In fact, I still haven’t graduated to use-package or straight.el because my package needs are few and conservative². And so, while there are automatic update options out there, I’ll just stick to updating them manually, every quarter.

Ergo, this is the checklist I’ll use next time onwards …

Stop emacs user service, systemctl --user stop emacs
Backup emacs folder in ~/.config
Start emacs manually (not the service).
M-x package-refresh-contents
M-x package-upgrade-all
Problems? Quit emacs. Revert backup folder.
In the end, start emacs user sevice, systemctl --user start emacs

There’s an Org mode task, scheduled quarterly, so that I won’t forget.

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

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While I don’t want updated packages, I do want updated Emacs and that broke stuff 😂 ↩︎
The biggest change I forsee, is if Jetbrains ever turn evil and I have to move off their editors and subsequently need to use Emacs as an IDE ↩︎

Hack Hugo Post Metadata With Python

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:33:37 +0530

A while back, I rejigged the sections on my site to better reflect how I think and write.
Which meant, all the urls, on all my posts changed, since they now used the new category as a slug, instead of ye old /blog.

For e.g. https://janusworx.com/blog/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo/ …
was now at, https://janusworx.com/work/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo/

After searching a bit, I found that Hugo supported aliases. For me, it would redirect the original /blog path url to its new location
Ass I had to do, was add an aliases: ["/blog/old-post-slug"] line to each post’s metadata.¹
Line 4 in the snippet below shows, what I added to fix the post above.

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---
title: "Using Hugo Variables to Help With Mailto Links in Hugo"
date: 2024-05-30T18:17:35+05:30
aliases: ["/blog/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo"]
categories: ["work"]
tags: [100WordHabit, Dgplug, Hugo]
summary: Shortcodes! Hugo Variables in Shortcodes!
---

I did not want to do this by hand for 800+ posts.
One stroke of luck for me, was that I let Hugo use its default behaviour of generating url slugs from the file names. So even if the category slugs had changed (from /blog to /work or from /blog to /personal), the url slugs would stay the same. Which meant, I could whip up a script to run through all my markdown posts and add the alias line.
So I did.

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from pathlib import Path

INPUT_FOLDER = Path("old-posts-folder")
OUTPUT_FOLDER = Path("modified-posts-folder")

for each_file in INPUT_FOLDER.iterdir():
 with open(each_file, 'r') as file_to_read:
 alias_derived_from_file = each_file.stem
 contents_as_list = file_to_read.readlines()
 contents_as_list.insert(3, f"aliases: [\"/blog/{alias_derived_from_file}\"]\n")
 with open(Path(OUTPUT_FOLDER, each_file.name), 'w+') as file_to_write:
 file_to_write.writelines(contents_as_list)

It takes all the posts from my old folder, inserts the alias line and puts them into a new folder.² In essence, take each file, figure out the url slug from the file name, read in the contents as a list, insert my alias at position 3 (fourth actually. zero based indexing) of the list (below the title and date) and then write it all out to a new file.

I ran it, published the site and then went to check on the old urls with bated breath.
Hurrah, it all worked :)

it’s a list, so I can add more aliases if I want to ↩︎
no sense in botching up my originals :) ↩︎

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 ↩︎

View Only the Day, With Org Agenda

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

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

Like Dale Carnegie says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Et voilà!

More Espanso & Emacs Shenanigans

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

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

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

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

x11_use_xdotool_backend: true

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

For now, most of my expansions work. Hurrah!

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! ↩︎

Smol Note to Self, on Deploying Stuff

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 14:34:47 +0530

Anything I want folks to see and/or interact with, goes on the public VM
Anything I want to host for myself, goes on the Pi.

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

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

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 ↩︎

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I marked the sections out in the scrawly figure above.

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

So …

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

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

There are a couple of caveats to this approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I click the link in my tasks file and …

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

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

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

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 ↩︎

Ignoring Syncthing Conflict Files in the Org Agenda Folder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search for Something! Kill the Line! In Emacs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you, Emacs!

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

Why I Write

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

Click to see a larger version, just as illegible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logo courtesy, the Org Mode Website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Make Bad Things

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

Art by Amanda Domagala, on Tumblr

Amanda says,

“Make bad things, instead of making nothing”

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

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

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

No Love Is Wasted

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

via Diane Duane

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

No love, however brief, is wasted.

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

Notes to Self, How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language

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

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

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

This is what I took away:

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

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

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

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

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

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

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

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

Outsource your brain? No!
#

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

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

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

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

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

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

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

Note to Self Footnotes Using Littlefoot.js

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

Courtesy dothegreenthing, CC BY-NC 2.0, on Flickr

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

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

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

So here goes,

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

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

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

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

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

Et voilà! Footnotes galore!

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

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

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work, Coda

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

courtesy Liniers, Comics Kingdom
click to enlarge

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

Note to Self, Bookmark Your Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

From John Maloof’s, Vivian Maier, Maloof Collection

Like David Kadavy writes,¹

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

Honoré De Balzac had it right,

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

On which Austin Kleon expounds²

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

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

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

All you have to do is, Show Your Work.

From Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work

all emphases mine ↩︎
in his book Show Your Work ↩︎

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 ↩︎

I Found Rainbows in Emacs!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 07:41:00 +0530

I must admit to stealing … quite a lot … from a bot at that!
Zoetrope’s, “random color contrasts” gets colours from Adam Morse and John Otander’s Randoma11ly and posts them a few times a day.
I’ve been writing down the ones I love and find interesting, in an Org note, in the hopes I’ll use them someday.
(I know I’m just hoarding colours 😂. But hey, I used one¹ out of the thirty-odd colours, I’ve jotted down so far)

The bot page has a nice preview of what the colours look like (like this), while my little note just had bland hex RGB values.
So I was wondering if I could somehow see what they looked like. Preview the values themselves in the colours they represent.
I didn’t have to dig too deep. Ofcourse Emacs does this. With Rainbow Mode.

All I had to do was install it. Activate it in the buffer. And tada! Look! How Pretty!

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background and foreground for one of my Org Mode workflow states 😛 ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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! ↩︎

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.

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Org Mode Subtree Expansion With the Mouse

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 08:04:19 +0530

When I wrote about, ticking off checkboxes in Org Mode, I’d linked to line 101 of org-mouse.el. While I’d read the main summary, I somehow missed line 30 …

;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button

Which I accidentally triggered today …

After an (accidental) click opens up to …

Org Mode continues to delight! Hurrah!

I Should Write Down and Summarize What I Did

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 10:37:17 +0530

I did a lot of research the other day about what I’d need to build a contact form for my website.
I bookmarked lots of pages.

And today, I come and look at this mountain of videos and sites and pages and woneder what exactly it is, that I am supposed to tackle.
Nothing makes sense.
I know I ruled out Sendy as an option. Or did I?
Do I need Javascript? How much? Can I get snippets to copy paste? Do I need to go learn Javascript?
What is spam protection? Do I need spam protection? How do I do it?
I’ll have to go look at it all again now.¹

Note To Self:

As you wind down your day, summarize what it is that you were working on in the eve.. (in however shitty a manner. does not matter.) Which also means, you need to keep some time in hand to do that. Or stop working a bit earlier
As you being your day, look over your calendar first², agenda next³, and as you begin each task review your summary from wheneve you worked on it last⁴.

I do this when I work all the time for clients.
Wonder why I never do it for my learning.
Time to treat myself as my most important client, and not assume that I will remember the important bits.
Time to make it easy for myself to pick up the threads again.

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.

Or god forbid, research it all over again. ↩︎
Which I normally do ↩︎
Which I also normally do ↩︎
Which I never do ↩︎

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

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8


@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

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10


#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 ↩︎

Ticking Off Checkboxes With the Mouse in Org Mode

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 19:48:29 +0530

While I mostly use the keyboard when doing everything Org related, there are a few times in the day, when I cannot. These are mostly mornings and evenings when I bustle about home, doing this thing and that. Things that are part of my routine. Things that are checkboxes in my routine.org file.
It helps me get through the day without thinking of whether, I gave the better half her meds or whether I remembered to call my mum or if I drank enough water by the end of the day or whether my stretches for the day are done or if the plan for the next day is made.

Little things. Everyday things. Important things.

And at those times, the keyboard gets in the way.
I don’t want to arrow to get to some task and C-c C-c to tick it off.
Besides my hands are nearly always messy with something or the other and I don’t want to get gunk into my keyboard.¹
Easier to just mosey the cursor to said task and click to done!
But click to done, would not done! What?! Org Mode would not let me click to complete my checkboxes?

So, off to the documentation I went and did a search for mouse, and stumbled across this line.

Piotr Zielinski wrote org-mouse.el, proposed agenda blocks and contributed various ideas and code snippets.

Well, Piotr understands my pain!
Some more spelunking led me to org-mouse.el, which seems to be really well documented. Its commentary begins with …

;; Org-mouse provides mouse support for org-mode.
;;
;; http://orgmode.org
;;
;; Org-mouse implements the following features:
;; * following links with the left mouse button (in Emacs 22)
;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button
;; * several context menus on the right mouse button:
;; + general text
;; + headlines
;; + timestamps
;; + priorities
;; + links
;; + tags
;; * promoting/demoting/moving subtrees with mouse-3
;; + if the drag starts and ends in the same line then promote/demote
;; + otherwise move the subtree

Line 101, was what put a smile on my face though.

;; Version 0.17
;; + toggle checkboxes with a single click

All it took, to get it working was to put (require 'org-mouse) into my init.el et voilà. I can clicky-clicky-to-done to my heart’s content.

well, more gunk than is necessary. ↩︎

Blocks in Org Mode

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 14:07:32 +0530

I remember, when I first learned it, the Org Manual mentioning I could have code, quotes, poetry and sundry self structured blocks of text, where the text in that block would flow like I wanted it to. I could have indentation or line breaks as I pleased.
And then I promptly forgot about it.

The only thing I did remember were code blocks.
And that I needed to do a #+begin_src and then a #+end_src and put my code in the middle. And all this while, I would keep typing it in, by hand.

Until I tired of keeping on doing that shit, because there are more and more notes that are now going into my zettelkasten and decided well, the computer can do that for me.
So, I went back to the Org Mode documentation and discovered Structure Templates.
And now, I am at peace!

Turns out, all I needed was (org-insert-structure-template) aka C-c C-,
Here’s some code I’ve selected in a document

Now I hit C-c C-,, which brings up a whole host of options, with a prompt!
Do I want this block of text to be a quote? Or some verse?
Well, this is just boring code, so I choose source with the s key

And tada! The block is surrounded by the begin and end tags, and is now a source block! I could add the programming language after #+begin_src to get highlighting as well, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m practicing this, so that I get C-c C-, into my muscle memory, because be it verse, quote, code, example or exports, I know I will be making heavy use of Structure Templates.

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. ↩︎

Line Numbers in Hugo Codeblocks

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 15:16:19 +0530

I want my code blocks on the blog to sometimes have line numbers.
Looking at the Hugo docs here and here led me to the linenos argument.

While we’d start our code blocks like (```python)¹, all I need more is to add the line number argument like so.

Vanilla code block …

print(f"""
	“It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. 
	They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.”
	— Marcus Aurelius
	""")

print(f"""
	“Just that you do the right thing. 
	The rest doesn’t matter.” 
	– Marcus Aurelius
	""")

Now, using the linenos option, I can be all fancy to show …

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11


print(f"""
	“It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. 
	They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.”
	— Marcus Aurelius
	""")

print(f"""
	“Just that you do the right thing. 
	The rest doesn’t matter.” 
	– Marcus Aurelius
	""")

All I did was, start my code block with a ( ```python {linenos=true} )²

Hurrah!

don’t type the round brackets, they’re just there, so I can see/show what I am doing. ↩︎
once again, ignore the round brackets ↩︎

Drafts App Needs Escaping if I Am to Use Hugo Shortcodes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:35:09 +0530

When I finally figured out how to get line breaks working on my microblog, I ran into another sort of hiccough, when I tried doing that from my phone.
I use the Drafts app on my phone and tablet to slice and dice all manner of text and to send it to various locations as I please.

One of those is a workflow, that lets me shoot text to a folder on my server which is then published (via a script) on the microblog.
And everytime I typed my {{< hbr >}} Hugo shortcode to let me have a line break in that post¹, it would just publish gibberish² instead of giving me said break.

A bit of twiddling and experimenting led me to the solution.
If I escaped the leading { character with a \, so that I typed \{{< hbr >}}, it then worked just fine!

P.P.P.S. I need to escape my Hugo shortcodes with /* */ if I want to display them in my posts. Like so, {{/* some-shortcode */}}

when it gets published on the blog, that is. ↩︎
rather, ascii representations of said characters, but gibberish is the correct technical term ↩︎

Line Breaks on My Microblog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 21:20:14 +0530

I use a (not quite) hidden blog to collect all sorts of bits and bobs and to (selectively and automatically) publish them to my fediverse or twitter accounts.

The one thing that constantly bugged me, was that it would not accept line breaks to differentiate between paragraphs.
Like this post, here.

I don’t know if it’s my theme or a Hugo thing.
And try as I might, I couldn’t quite figure it out.
Since I don’t quite have the time to dig into the code, I just decided to add a couple of <br> tags. And that did the trick! ¹

And now it all looks as it should!

I rolled it into a shortcode, which has a <br> followed by a couple of spaces, but that is absolutely not necessary ↩︎

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.

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! ↩︎