Starting Emacs From the Command Line, and Getting Back to the Prompt

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...

October 27, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Teddy Bears in Cars, Font Obsessions and Home Password’s Pwnd Password Kerfuffle

This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 17th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) via Michelle Scott on Pixabay Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety You’re adapting my what? When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness. ...

September 24, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

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