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....

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. What I need A device that could handle nearly every format that I could throw at it....

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...

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

Huginn: Vive La Pratique Délibérée Avec Les Flux RSS

I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so. All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue. Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time....

March 15, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Huginn: On Becoming a Cal Newport Podcast Packrat

First things first, you should be listening to Cal Newport and reading his books too! His recent episode on books and reading was lovely!1 If I remember right, he started doing the podcast, a couple of months after the pandemic broke out and the world shut down. And it felt very much at the time, like one of those friendly voices across the waves in some post apocalyptic movie. It felt warm, personal and gave me something to do in those dark days....

March 14, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

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! Background I found Huginn, and am using it as my man friday.1 The “Problem” I run Hugo on two three machines. I’m tired of updating to the latest release manually....

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....

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....

March 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza