On Arpanet, Passwords and Moving Codebases

This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 20th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe Welcome to August’s work letter :) As usual, click the headings to wander off to the original articles A couple of my own posts I wrote about my thoughts on my Kindle Oasis … I got it. I used it. And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever. I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device. ...

August 27, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Multiline Regex Search in VS Code

This is a picture of my notes, when I import them in from the Kindle. And every time I have to corral them into some sort of structure or write a blog post, I needed to laboriously get rid of all the Kindle metadata with multiple searches (and replaces.) ...

August 16, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Joining Two Images Using ImageMagick

Sometimes, I want to share snippets of what I am reading with my friends. Kindles make it easy, with screenshots. The only issue being I want to share the full length of two pages, like I’d do if I was reading a book. And I need it often enough, that I felt I needed to go figure out some way to do it. It was an easy-ish hack on the mac with printing with Preview. But now, that I use Linux, I wondered if I could do better. ...

August 6, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On the Difference Between Coding, Programming, Engineering, and Computer Science

My homepage lists my new career shift as “This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)” I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different. Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programs though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly. Here’s his take … ...

August 3, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Reset Confirmations in Calibre

I have been deleting too many books by mistake, now a days. Past Jason might have been pretty sure about what he wanted, but I sure as heck am not. So I had to do a bit of spelunking to figure out how to get the delete book option to confirm first. All I needed to do was Preferences -> Behaviour -> Reset all disabled confirmation dialogs Et voilà, Calibre now asks me if I am sure about deleting my books :) ...

August 2, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Cheap Programmable Quantum Computers, Hardware Homomorphic Encryption Support, and Ethical Use of Technology

This post was first sent to my newsletter on July 23rd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) New month, new work letter. Before I begin though, please hit reply to these letters and let me know what you think, whether you like them or not and if there is anything you’d want me to write / hunt & research about! Like I wrote in the introduction to April’s letter, both the letter and the website have zero tracking. So I have no way of knowing, whether you like stuff or not, whether it resonates or not, whether I am preaching to throngs or shouting into the void, unless you tell me! Let’s dig into it. As usual, click the headers, to wander off to the orginal articles :) ...

July 30, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza