Reworking Blog/Newsletter Subscription Options

I’ve had a rash of folk1, unsubscribing from the newsletter after last few I’ve sent. I guess a few of you signed on, for techy posts and because of life, most of my recent newsletters have mostly been photography, or writing or other stuff.2 So, I went ahead, reworked the subscribe page on the blog and segmented the rest of you folk. Hopefully, you see only the emails you are interested in. I’ve sent out emails to each list, asking if they’re interested in the other (or all) list, so if you’d like alternatives, mail me and tell me so :) For new folk, the page now asks for the kind of emails, you would like to receive and automatically puts you in said bucket. Yes, there’s a bit more friction, but I cannot help it. Better to err on the side of safety. ...

September 21, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

derb; Script to Create podcast RSS feeds

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

September 14, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

A New Hole Hawg, the Kobo Elipsa 2e

Update, 2024-02-16: Six months later … A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis. I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one. And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful. ...

July 10, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

htpasswd Notes to Self

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. ...

June 24, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long. Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out. All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is she has a doggie called Furiosa she thinks about books the way I do she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also: ...

June 15, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Quick Fix: Go Mod File Not Found in Current Directory

As I have begun learning Go (or golang as I needed to use for searching on the web), I’ve been running into some sort of chasm that the Go language seems to have crossed1 that my old textbook obviously could not have foreseen when it was published.2 The book asks me to do a go run . to get my file to compile and run. Go seems to having none of it. ...

March 15, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza