Huginn: the Rube Goldbergness of Updating Hugo

Click the pic to embiggen. Rube Goldberg illustration via James Vaughan Ended up too sick to even tinker, since I last wrote. Well enough now, to scratch out some prose to get my brains in gear. Let’s start with Huginn adventure #1. Buckle up! ...

March 13, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Huginn

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

March 2, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

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

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

March 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Why I Use an Online VM

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

March 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.2 I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password. The org-caldav README suggested that I save it all in an .authinfo file, like so. ...

February 28, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Learnt the Urdu Alphabet

Finally done with learning the Urdu alphabet. Inordinately proud of myself :) Now to go begin, reading slowly and building up my vocabulary. Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...

February 22, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza