Use Your Scars

Your life, your experience, your scars make you who you are!

February 14, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

Courtesy, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, Public Domain, via Wikipedia I just finished Tamsyn Muir’s Nona, last month. And of course, I’m now stuck along with the rest of the world waiting for Alecto to come along.1 In the meanwhile I’m having fun with the rest of the world, dissecting the old books to pieces with various pieces of headcanon and wild theories, one of the popular ones being trying to find analogies between the houses of the books and our solar system ...

February 12, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza

100 Word Writing Habit

I want to write better. And the best way to do that, is to write more. Thinking about which, immediately kills the urge to write, because I take really long to write anything. And the actual writing, is very arduous to me. So what to do? I guess I need to just lower the bar. Do less. More consistently. And then serendipitiously, as they say, when the student is ready, the master appears. David Kadavy’s conducting a 100 Word Writing Habit Online Course, this month. He seemed to be in the same rut as I am now. ...

February 11, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza

Note to Self, Switch to Manjaro “Unstable”

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. ...

February 6, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla

Short Booklet. Very Taleb–esque writing. Very entertaining. Tells us there are lots of stupid people, with a really precise definition of stupid; those folks that would cut their nose to spite their face, or like the book would say, stupid folks are they who would cause losses to other folks, even when they stand to gain nothing or possibly, ever incur losses! It reads like an erudite rant. But unlike Taleb, ends with no advice or suggestion. ...

January 22, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza

Updated to Emacs 29.2

Updated to Emacs 29.2, just now. Took me and my four core workhorse about fifteen minutes tops, from start to finish. Emacs 29.0 was the first version I compiled from source, because I wanted the latest release as soon as it was out and I no longer had the patience for the kindly distribution folk (or third party packagers) to give me a binary. The first time was a nightmare. I didn’t have various bits and bobs that were needed. Stuff that the guides say should work a certain way wouldn’t. But it did happen eventually and I learnt a lot along the way about what I wanted compiled in, in my Emacs. I also appreciated just how much easier it is now to compile stuff and recover from errors. I tried this last in the late 90s1 and it scared me off. ...

January 19, 2024 · Mario Jason Braganza