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

Draft No. 4

Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. ...

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 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