This is a note of gratitude.
A tad late. But better late than never :)

I decided to get involved with the Kubernetes community on a lark about four years ago.
I wanted to learn about containers and orchestration, and I thought learning via joining the upstream community was it.

I was wrong 😂
Life got in the way and I only finally got around to learning it all last December.

But the community was interesting and helpful.
I got to learn the terms of art, by osmosis.
I got to see how a large community functions, how a large software project was run.

And in time, I got to pitch in and help a bit as well.
I pitched in with the Release Team for v1.25 to gain a sense of how a release comes about.
And a couple of years ago, I saw my good friend (and frequent collaborator) Priyanka buckling a bit under the weight of the work, in the various roles she had assumed to help out in the community. I asked her if there was anyway I could help her, that did not involve meetings or talking to people 😂¹ And she asked me if I could pitch in and help with helping folks gain membership into various Kubernetes orgs on Github.

I ayed.

She taught me the ropes. And I became a Github New Membership Coordinator for the Kubernetes project.

And all of this history to say, I’m grateful to Priyanka for this serendipitous opportunity.
I fell in love with the work.
For someone who has had to face a lot of cynicism in his real world day job, it’s been a lot of joy, welcoming folks into the project. It’s one of the happier parts of my day, when I sit at the desk to process the requests that come in.

I’m also grateful to the Kubernetes as well as the overarching CNCF communities for recognising what I do, for two successive years.
I was the recipient of the Kubernetes Contributor award in 2024 and the CNCF’s, Chop Wood Carry Water award in 2025.
I’m both, honoured and humbled.
I hope to contribute to this community, a while longer :)

My last post in this section / category was in December.
There ought to be more, because I learn so much every week.
Even in December, the massive move I did, needs documenting. (at least for me, if not for your reading)

So the new plan is to cut the doing and the learning in half (or by a third). And use that time to write about what I learned.
I know this about myself. I write real good … sometimes. But to even get to that point, I have to write a lot of drivel.

So, in essence, welcome to the drivel :)
The posts will get more frequent, so if that bothers you or I write about things that aren’t what you came to read me for, I won’t hold it against you if you choose to unsubscribe. I need to be able to write for me. And this is the only place where I can.

If you do decide to stay and read, as always, I’m grateful. I truly am.

Between getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (creating my poster) and getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (dealing with all the travel sutff), March was a busy month.
Did get quite a bit of reading done. Did not have enough time to listen to my favourite history podcasts though :)

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson

This is a pattern that I now see everywhere when I now read a trilogy (or series).
The first book sets up the world, the rest of them then just tell a very good story set in that world. Millennium (this series) is a very good example of this trope. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I read last month) sets up the bleak, colourless, cold, misogynistic world. And now Fire and Hornet’s Nest tell a single long story in that world. These should have been one book.

This time the focus is on Salander and her life. Something’s happened in the past, which leaves her broken. In the meanwhile, there are old men dying in hospitals, gang members getting beat up and stuff happening at the highest levels of government. How do all of these events tie together?
It’s immersive and wonderfully told. Lisbeth Salander is fire, like the title suggests!
I hope some other similar heroine catches my attention soon!

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré

More greedy old men trying to hang on to power.
MI6 is compromised, by the wily and smart, anti-Smiley, Karla. Who is the mole leaking British secrets to Russia?
An empathetic gangster, and an honourable schoolboy have a standoff at an island outside Hong Kong.

Le Carré was the one who saw and taught me how British influence waned on the world stage when all the while, the system still hung on to dreams of their “glory” days. He also taught me how to see in shades of grey.

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden

I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen.
Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

Here is a clearing on the border between winter and spring. Once Vasya would have said that the cusp of spring was a moment.
But now she knew that it was also a place, at the edge of the lands of winter.

I read these in two weeks in the bracing cold of Europe.
And once again, this felt like a duology rather than a set of three. The Bear and the Nightingale sets up the world while the Girl in the Tower and the Winter of the Witch feel like a long and beautiful story set in that world.
I had read a big book of Russian folk tales as a child, and they still linger in my heart and soul to this day. I don’t remember what it was called or who wrote it, save for the fact that it was a big grey hardback with a wolf head embossed on the cover. But I read about phoenixes and big grey wolves and Tsars and Baba Yaga and Vasilisa and so many wonderful characters and stories then.
Arden takes all of them (and more that I did not read about) and weaves a beautiful story through fable and history and time. She’s a lovely storyteller. The prose is lovely too! Nature comes alive. Old faith and tradtitons tangle with the new. All against the backdrop of cold wintry nights. I absolutely loved reading Vasilisa’s coming of age and finding her path through life, all the time being framed in events that were true yet beautifully enhanced by the fantastic. I hope these books entrance young folk, while also make them read and fall in love with the old tales as well.

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

¶ for Lindy books
* for the ones I love
† for most non fiction
‡ for tech / work / study / reference stuff
# for alternate media (like audio or video)
numbers are footnotes
Some book titles might be repeated (in addition to the annual Lindy reads :)
After all, we are what we re-read :)

January

February

March

April

Better late than never, so let’s begin!
This month I moved from history to historical fiction.
From modern spy novels to medieval detective fiction, I had centuries worth of fun!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390

Some non fiction first.

I finished catching up with all the episodes of the podcast and now I’ll keep listing them as soon as I finish a batch of ten (around 8+ hours of listening to something counts as book length to me. Unless it’s a four hour Dan Carlin episode. Those are dense 😂)
The new episodes hew toward philosopical discussions about how to live in a world that is slowly being infected with AI. What is true? What is art? Is AI really taking over the world? Is AI really an apt term for what we are seeing? Pretty interesting listen.

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.
— James Nicoll

Watts is one of my favourite authors. I often wonder why he did not get popular.
The Rifters trilogy is my favourite science fiction series. Nothing has come close yet. Power is now taken from geothermal vents in the oceans. The only folks who can adapt to this environment are folks with psychological disorders. They’re given iron gills and other alterations to withstand deep sea pressure. Murder and mayhem ensue. Between the crazy beasts in the dark of the ocean and the crazies themselves.
Techno lingo mixed with poetry, crazy doomsday scenarios and lots of potty mouthedness! Nobody writes quite like him. Nobody writes what he does either. Hard biological sci-fi.
If you’d read the adventures of Lenie Clarke, then nothing about today’s creeping AI world and its dumb “intelligence” would surprise you. And that is precisely why I want to go read Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth once more. To see if the books still engage.
You can too! The novels are available as ebooks in various formats for free on his website.
(If you are going to print them, then caveat printor! These are chonky beasts.)

But all this is besides the point. Beyond the rift, is a lot of short stories in the world of the Rifters. It clears up, follows through or talks about other things in that setting. I loved it.

Pspsps, some short stories are available on the link I shared above as well!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

Daddy gave me a even more battered copy of the book, than the pic above.
I don’t know what possesed him to do that. I don’t know what his fascination with Le Carré (& Forsyth) was. For a man who would normally be pretty optimistic and generaly full of hope, to be suggesting I read a book with such a cold, inhospitable view of the world was quite out of character. But I loved reading all about Smiley and the circus. And I spent most of my boyhood, learning about WWII and the cold war world via Smiley and gang.

The book is a modern classic, though I don’t know why. Probably just a luck of the draw? I’m not complaining though. It’s a wonderful piece of spy drama.
On teensy flimsy actions, on such tiny wings does the world turn. What if Liz and Leamas didn’t get together? Would Smiley’s plan have worked then? A cynical yet bemused Le Carré would say yes and invent some other small thing that would have things just as bleak as they turned out to be.

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality

These came before Spy did, and read more like dark Christie novels. More detective than spy. Good fun!

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis

Medieval detective fiction is no longer enough. I’m now going to ancient Rome for some crime!
I found Lindsey Davis’ Falco who is a soldier turned detective in ancient Rome. (with some Britain thrown in.)
This book is a non fiction companion to the series and the world ala GRRM’s, A World of Ice and Fire. These are Davis’ thoughts and recollections on how she created Falco, the history (actual and imagined) of the world at the time, the impetus behind why he behaves the he does and all sorts of other bits and bobs. She shares her day, her writing process and lots of intersting tidbits from here there and everywhere. This was tonnes of fun. I’m going into the series, really pumped!

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer

I turned away from Frazer’s group of players in her Joliffe series (which I began last month) and went a few decades earlier to meet Dame Frevisse.
She is a hosteller when I meet her in the Novice’s tale, which solves the problem of how a nun in a convent, is able to meet and talk to people. She’s also Chaucer’s niece which gives her a wee bit of influence.
She reads like a more wonderfully written Sexton Blake. The way they solve crimes is not a coming together of what you may have observed, but something that is happens or is shown at the very end. I hope it gets better with the solution and the foreshadowing as I go deeper into the series. What makes me want to read though is the journey, Frazer takes us on and the conversations these people have and the expositon of the lives they lead. All that is wonderfully done!

In Novice, a crazy rich woman, comes to get her niece back from the convent where Frevisse is and then gets murdered.
Servant, brings in Joliffe who I read last month into this world when his band of players come to the convent, bearing the dead body of a villager who they claim they found on the way. One of the players is blamed, and accusations fly across the three engaged parties. Who killed that loathsome villager?
Outlaw, seems like an episode of a serious K drama, where the main cast takes off to Jeju island for a holiday and something happens there. Dame Frevisse is accompanying her fellow nun to her home for a baptism, when they are kidnapped! The kidnapper is Frevisse’s cousin! And then he’s murdered!

Frazer writes good page turners!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Modern detective fiction! A journalist plays detective in this one.
Take a girl on the autistic spectrum, give her a really bad childhood, and have still be as normal as possible.
An old man, keeps getting flowers on his dead grand-daughter’s birthday for close to thirty years after she dies.
A self absorbed yet talented journalist who loses darn near everything and now has such a stain on his integrity that no one will believe him.
Bring them all together, add in a pile of dead bodies in the freezing countryside of Sweden and you have a thriller!
I read it when it was first published and I turned to it again. It still holds up. It’s a fun read.
Larsson supports women and is a feminist, yet does not quite know how to write women. He still makes the book work though.

Lisbeth Salander is a woman who hates men who hate women. And she really is badass!

More next month! À bientôt!

This was a good reading month. I think I have become a history geek, thanks to podcasts and books and those are going to be what I read heavily for quite a while now. Some books intentionally read, some comfort reads.
All recommended.

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

A mystery whodunit. I am finally in my Noir phase. And enjoying it.
Drunk retired detective, socialite wife, multiple red herrings, 30s America, what’s not to like?!

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV

Every year, the company of Holland and Sandbrook, walk through the events (slowly) of World Wars One and Two, in order to make up for the travesty of the coverage that they started the show with! Then entire French Revolution in 20 minutes if I remember correctly. 😂 This time, they covered the events of Nazi Germany’s march on and upto the fallo of France. The duo are lovely when they are in flow and these episodes are worth a listen.

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV

More from the podcast, this time covering the ghastly killings of the Whitechapel Murderer. Between reading about the events with morbid fascination as a child and then growing up and reading different versions of the events (I liked Alan Moore’s, From Hell if you are a comics person or the ITV miniseries featuring Michael Caine), I thought I had heard all and seen all. The duo surprised me by telling the story from distinct and different perspectives. One was how the media influenced the events, drawing parallels to today, and the other, more importantly, was the lives of the victims, and the events from their perspective leading to their sad demise. The series leaned heavily on a Hallie Rubenhold book, The Five to do that. I bought it and it is now on the pile. This probably is the least I felt I could to to erase young Jason’s fevered fascination with killers.

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39

This is the other boyhood fascination that still remains. Sleuths and detectives and whodunits.
This series has several lovely takes on the original Doyle stories and are worth your time, if you want to be entertained! When they began, I felt their voices were too akin to the modern BBC series featuring Cumberbatch & Freeman, but now they’ve grown on me and the reverse feels true. Some stories are fun and relaxed and some taut all through. All of them are lovely.

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73

This is Alexander as never told before. In true Carlin style, you wait eight months to a year between episodes, but when they come, oh boy, do they deliver. We are at the third episode in the series and Alexander has just about started his journey to conquering the world as he knew it. If you want deeply researched history, Dan Carlin’s your man. The amount of books and time and work that goes into each episode is incredible. My only nitpick, is if he could be more humane. The man comes from the other end, a wargamer who loves what-if scenarios (like young Jason with his fascination for murderers and sociopaths). He’s come a long way from his earlier episodes, but I wish for just a little more humanity. The stories have enough pathos though and he always does them justice.

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder

I thoroughly disliked this one. This feels like someone read the Book of Revelations¹ when high and then based a sci-fi novella on it. Deliciously unhinged, reads a review. It’s unhinged, alright.

I normally don’t mention or list books that I hate or do not finish or do not agree with. This is not that. This is a prime example of a “this is not for me” book. And this probably is the first book I read, that I felt this about. The writing is competent, but it did nothing for me. So no. Not for me. A pandemic rages through the world, and people get affected differently, in different manners. All gruesome.

I think only one person does horror, the way I want and love. And I remain grateful to the stories and work of Guillermo del Toro.

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel

I loved the old timey self help folks. Carnegie, Ziglar et al. Simple truths told with lovely stories.
Housel is the modern form of that persona. Observations on how you think about money, what is wrong with it and suggestions on how one ought to actually think. All interspersed between engaging stories. I wrote a post about the book, if you want to know more.

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple

This soothed an itch, that’s been there since my childhood. Raised as I was, in the last remnants of empire and with a father and grandfather—who sometimes were sad about what was lost—I was always fascinated with British India. To learn about the length and breadth of the British Indian Empire, was both novel and yet unsurprising. More thoughts in a post I wrote when I finished the book. If you love reading Indian History, this is a must get, must read book.

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud

This one felt like I already had so many disparate pieces of some whole and Stroud made them all fit, to form a beautiful tapestry.
I’m following his History of English podcast², and I bought the History of the Alphabet to try and support him, not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Weaving through times and peoples, from Egypt to the Levant to Greece to Italy with the Eruscans and later the Romans, to France and beyond. It’s a lovely tale!

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer

This is a lovely piece of historical detective fiction. Set in Oxford in the middle 15th century, it follows a company of players who are staging Abraham and Isaac for a local lord and someone dies at their doorstep.

More than this specific book itself, I want to write a bit about this class of author, whose writings I have really come to enjoy. I have no name for the kind of writing they do. But I love the prose to bits. Gail Lynn Brown (writing as Margaret Frazer), is the latest. The other two I found so far were Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and Rosemary Kirstein.
I found Edith first, with her monumental Cadfael series of books. By the time I was in book two, I was amazed by this man who could do nuance so perfectly (Of course, it turned out to be a woman 😂). But yes, it is the nuance, the way they do turns of phrase, the way they write their characters … I don’t know what binds them togther, what the likeness is. It can’t be genre, because while Pargeter and Brown write historical detective fiction, Kirstein does not.(She seems to have created a unique genre/niche of her own.)
So like I said, while I don’t know what unites them, I will continue to ravenously read everything they write. The writing is letter perfect to my mind and heart. I enjoy them, with emphasis on joy.

These are all for now. I hope you found something in the list above that tickled your fancy.
À demain!

I heard Morgan Housel on the latest episode of the Shane Parrish podcast recently as well as a while ago on Vishal Khandelwal’s podcast, and most of what he said resonated with what I learned and found out on my own independently over the years.
So I went and got his book.

Take the best of Taleb, Danny Kahneman, and your grandma, put them into story form with an earnest tone, and you get this book. It’s lovely.

1. Realise that you’re unique. You have your scars. Realise that colours everything that you see and do.
2. Stop idolising individuals. The patterns lie in large numbers. Not in a single individual’s story, no matter how inspiring you think it is. You have no clue of which butterfly flapped its wings to create Bill Gates’ wealth.
3. The aim ought to be enough. Which you get to decide. But there has to be a point where you say enough.
4. The gains from compounding occur at the end. The only reason Buffett has the money he has now (~90 billion dollars), is because he started investing at 10. Had he started at 30, he’d only be worth ~20 million. Like Housel says,

Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years.

His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.

5. Making money is one thing. It’s the keeping of the money that’s harder. How does one do this? Stay in the margins. Survive. And use Taleb’s Barbell.
6. Have options. You never know which one might pan out. Also realise that options are another way of saying that one of your individual bets could die for the sake of your bigger aim, and you’ll still be ok. An individual stock might not work, but the index has always inched upwards for decades.
7. The best freedom, to paraphrase Taleb, is the ability to say, “Fuck this!” to things you don’t want to do. Or to actually quote him …

This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “fuck you money” —a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. […] Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.

Housel puts it much more eloquently …

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

8. Stop playing the Keeping up with the Kumars¹.
9. Save money.
10. Being reasonable is greater than being rational.

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.

11. You cannot spend your time and energy watching the world and waiting for the “best” time to make a investment. Save money. Invest it. Let it compound.
12. Margin of Safety. That ought to be one of the main weapons in your mental arsenal. Always have room for error. Always have slack.
13. You will change over time. Learn to be kind to your future self. Make sure you’re not wedded to past decisions. Make your circumstances adapt to you.
14. Nothing’s free. What are you willing to pay to get what you want?
15. Note to self: Learn Statistics. Learn probabilities. They’ll teach you more than stories that folks weave. And yet paradoxically, when you want to convince folks? Use stories. They are always more powerful!
16. Manage and invest your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
17. The best “shortcut” to do better with your investments? Increase your time horizon and let compounding work for you.
18. What works for others will not work for you. They are not you. Make your own mistakes. And your own decisions. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.

I came across this little paradox of history when I read, “The Race for Paradise” in 2018.

Bashir saw the strange spectacle of the Frankish¹ lord of Antioch marching alongside Muslim troops from the lord of Aleppo, arrayed in battle against the Sultan’s representative, the Muslim lord of Mosul, who marched with his own Frankish¹ allies from Edessa.

Close to eight hundred years later, history rhymed. From Sam Dalrymple’s, Shattered Lands …

Communities divided between India and Burma like the Mizos and Chakma thus found themselves pulled into the war over Pakistan. Later India would send a battalion of Tibetan refugees against them, so that on the eastern front the battle over the future of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ironically involved two rival Buddhist militias – neither of them Bengali.

That’s always the zeitgeist apparently.
People are dorks.
Showing grace to folks “not like us” is hard.

Let me get the one nitpick out of the way first. It’s a bit rich for Sam to play doomsayer for modern Asia or roleplay a stern parent by expecting us to behave “propah”. He thinks its an irony that

in the twenty-first century it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself.

The fact remains that Britain abandoned its Empire. They just upped sticks and left. With nothing left for us.
Yes it is sad that there are divisions. But leave the healing to us.
I don’t want the man² who stabbed me in the back, in the dark, and looted and raped everything of mine, to come and preach to me of forgiveness or how division is bad for us..

Sam says,

The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold.

I sincerely hope this is a message to the nations of the “first world” to stop ravaging our lands and not for folks in Africa and Asia. Be really hypocritical if it wasn’t.

And now to the rest of the book.
It’s a real tour de force of history.
Beginning in the late 1920s and ending in the mid 70s, the book traces the breakup of the British Indian Empire.
So many pieces of jumbled childhood memories, now make sense. The reason why so many Goans and Mangaloreans rushed to do labour in the erstwhile Trucial States in the mid 80s (modern UAE and other neighbouring countries). I have seen old Indian currency used in Aden (my relatives), as well as Indian currency that could be used in Saudi Arabia when folks went on the Haj (via friends). Why when I went to work in the Eastern part of my state (Maharashtra) in my younger years, the dialect and culture felt different (Because Dakhani. Because erstwhile Hyderabad). Why there used to be so many State Banks.

While I was fairly well informed about how Pakistan and Bangladesh came about, I wanted to learn more about of the Easternmost (Burma) and Westermost (Arabian States) flanks of the British Indian Empire. The book delivered in spades.
It’s extremely well researched, and Sam has the blood of his ranconteur papa when relating this (hi)story.
The history I loved and related to the most, was Angami Zapu Phizo’s lifelong struggle (and failure) to build a Naga nation. Phizo keeps appearing in nearly every Partition story, trying his hardest. The Nagas were the best part of the book.

I have friends, who still reel from the partitions, who have left family on the other side, who have lost lands and property and freedom.
My father (born in 1942) as well as several other older friends (born in the 1930s) used to lament of all that was lost, without being able to articulate what and how.
This book made me realise how and just how much.

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

Note to self, for this year: Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Update 2025-12-19: All done!

I just finished a move from one Hetzner VM to another.
The type of VMs are the same, in fact.
It’s just that the new VM and all the software on it are entirely software driven. I kept logging my progress in my notes, copy pasting the plan from day to day and ticking things off.
Now that it’s done and I still want to refer to it regularly, as the rest of the services come over, I wanted a place to keep it. And so this post, it is.

List of services that absolutely need to come over. Miscellaneous stuff later.

• the main domain
• french version of the website
• the mastodon archive
• the email distribution list
• miniflux for rss feeds
• joplin
• baikal
• discourse (no more discourse!)
• markdown editor (hedgedoc)
• anki
• huginn
• syncthing
• IRC: theLounge + znc (see if we can make do with a single service now (2025-12-15: we could!))
• kanboard
• Certs, Move them over, or figure out a way to generate and renew them via Ansible

The Big Point of The Big Plan

• Save time and energy. Managing all the disparate services I use is taking more and more of my time. I need to claim that back, while being able to use said services.
• Be gitops driven. Managing stuff gets easier. Tearing down things and rebuilding them gets easier
• Have most everything I use, be in a Kubernetes cluster.
• Be pragmatic enough to know that everything cannot be in a Kubernetes cluster and will have to live in the root VM
• Have Flux CD manage everything in the cluster
• Have Ansible Pull manage everything in the VM, acting as my single node. The point of doing this is not idempotency, rather to have everything in code; something that I can comment and uncomment and manipulate at will, something I can update at will and something that is documented. Never again will Future Jason have to scratch his head about, just how to go about doing something. (Long term note to self: Have the discipline to write tasks and drive everything with Ansible, despite the ease of “just doing it at the command line”)

The Big Plan (Done! 🎉🎉🎉)

• The plan is to redo the cluster again and do my own instance of
  • K3s
  • Sealed Secrets
  • Flux CD
  • Certmanager (Not using it)
  • Letsencrypt (using pre existing Letsencrypt certs)
  • Get Traefik Ingress to work
  • Figure out a way to get certs automatically into the cluster
• And once that is done, figure out an app to move (Miniflux or Hedgedoc?); 2025-12-03: Kanboard it is!
• Begin by moving (lifting and shifting in popular parlance) Kanboard to the cluster
  • Cert will probably be needed (Wildcard cert works now, just like it does without the cluster)
  • Convert a docker-compose to kubernetes manifests
  • Learn how to configure an app with code
  • Learn how to store data and back it up
  • Figure out secrets, if there are any (for now sealed secrets ok, figure out vault and vault injection later)
  • Learn how to tunnel through and reverse proxy
  • Make Kubernetes manifests work with flux
  • Figure out how to automate deployment of manual manifests
  • Figure out how to migrate there if there is any in an old app
  • Figue out how to automate updation of images in manual manifests
  • Get another app (Miniflux) deployed
  • Figure out what needs to happen as part of the lifecycle. What you want in the cluster, what stays out, do they intersect, how do updates of cluster happen? VM (node) updates as well?
  • Then begin to think along the lines of Live Deploys. Prototype locally and once it works, migrate to production immediately
  • Convert Kubernetes manifests to Helm Charts (optional, based on energy)
• Go live! Git is source of truth. Two repos.
  • One for the Main node and its update
    • Terraform will provision node and install package, setup firewall
    • Figure out how to get Terraform to get the node talking to the git forge
    • Structure repo, copy every thing node related there, and make sure stuff gets updated periodically and if possible, idempotantly, via ansible pull and a systemd timer
  • The other one for k3s and flux
    • Convert everything I have done locally to run on prod. Add more steps as you do them below

Unrelated. Long term. Optional. Just here so that I remember

• Get Moi publish script running
• Redo Huginn Scenarios

It no longer serves that need for me.
For a long time, the way the app worked aligned with the way I want to read. Earlier this year though, the developer decided to take the app in a different direction, with a different reading experience. The older app is still available as Reeder Classic, but only a few months of use have shown me that the app is basically abandoned. The attention to detail is obviously now being applied to the new app.

Enter ReadKit.
I had used it briefly during the Google Reader apocalypse when every feed reader was scrambling to find new backends to sync to. Reeder similarly had switched to local only mode and was taking a while before it supported other services.
ReadKit in the meanwhile already had support for Feedwrangler, and so I switched to it until Reeder came back to speed.

And I’ve switched to it for the foreseeable future.
It looks beautiful!
It does everything I want, shows everything the way and want and behaves just the way I want it to. The only knock I have against it, is that it does not feel as fluid as Reeder does. But that’s nothing compared to the constant launch and relauch dance, I have to do with Reeder nowadays. Consistency and stability matter a lot to me.
Even better, it syncs natively with Miniflux, the service I use to actually fetch and read RSS feeds on my Linux desktop. No more Google Reader API!

This is a list of all my categories (with one of them expanded, click for a larger view)

and this is a list of unread articles in a feed, alongside one that is open (once again, click to enlarge if you want to see details)

That gnawing feeling has now gone away from the back of my brain.
The experience of reading and catching up with the world is once again a glorious experience thanks to ReadKit.

Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.

One thing that bit me when I was trying to expose my apps to the world when working on the home cluster, is that Kubernetes on bare metal—I was using Kind at the time—expects to talk to a load balancer service, which then talk to an actual load balancer. Which if you are using bare metal, you won’t usually have.
I had to then go expose a “NodePort” to gain access from outside.

So to expose my stuff in as “real world” a way as possible, we need to:

1. Either install a load balancer implementation like MetalLB. OR
2. Use a Kubernetes distribution that has a load balancer implementation built-in, like K3s.

I chose option 2 and used K3s, because I am, as they say in popular parlance, using Kubernetes at the edge.¹
In which case, I prefer to have as many batteries built-in as possible.

Problem

My main SSD is too small to hold all my kubernetes and K3s shenanigans. (It’s only about 512gb) So I need a way to move my K3s data folder out to my big HDD.

Solution

K3s supports having a custom data directory, by letting me specify a data-dir.
I decided to specify it in the K3s config file at /etc/rancher/k3s/config.
If it isn’t there (as it wasn’t in my case), just create one. You’ll need to do this as the root user.
This is what I now have in there.

data-dir: /BIGHDD/rancher/k3s

And then, I …

1. Created a rancher directory in my big hard disk. (root owns it)
2. Ran rsync as the root user: rsync -a /var/lib/rancher/k3s/ /BIGHDD/rancher/k3s/
3. Started up my cluster again with a sudo systemctl start k3s

I have a post in one section of my site, say notes and miscellanea
That is my canonical post.
But I also need it to show up in the work section of my site, possibly with a another name.
A Hugo alias in the yaml front matter does not work, since both sections exist and Hugo gets confused.

Solution

1. Make sure layouts/redirect/single.html exists within your Hugo folder structure and it contains just this line …

{{- template "alias.html" (dict "Permalink" .Params.target) -}}

2. Create your orginal post as usual
3. Then go create a post in your other¹ section with the following metadata:

---
title: <Your title here>
#date autogenerated by my archetype. if missing, add date
date: 2025-11-06T08:30:54+05:30 
type: redirect
target: <url-to-redirect-to>
summary: <Optional text, that will appear in the sectiones listing page>
---

4. The date field is critical. The post might not appear where you expect it, if it’s absent.
   If not date, then you might need to use weight. One of the two is needed.
5. In my case, the metadata looked like this:

---
title: "The Plan for My New Hetzner VM"
date: 2025-11-06T08:30:54+05:30
type: redirect
target: /nm/2025-11-06/
summary: Alone and helpless, like you've lost your fight 
---

6. Done! You can see an entry for “The Plan for My New Hetzner VM” in my work section as you see in the pic below. Clicking that will redirect to the actual post in my Notes and Miscellanea section!

7. Tada 🎉

I had started this series, to catalogue my journey learning Rust whilst doing David Beazley’s, Ruckus course.
And just like that, it’s over! 😂 The course is done, and I am already missing Dave and my fellow journey folk, Rodica, Yadu, Marko, Upul, Gabriela, and Eugene!
I never thought the end would be so bittersweet.

Worth it financially?

Yes! Oh, dear God, yes!
To begin with, I never thought that Dave’s courses were expensive. Yes, they cost money, but he’s given so much away for free, that I was willing to save up and put my money where my mouth was.
I also think, I’ve figured out Dave’s schtick with the idea of what he teaches.
Take something, something hard, (Write a compiler? Figure out distributed consensus in networked systems? The big ideas and paradigms in computing?); something that would take an average Joe, 4-6 months (or a college semester) to learn, and then compress it down to anything from a couple of days to a work week. Compress the time that is … not the knowledge.
Having that much knowledge dowloaded into your head in that short a time frame, is what (to use a Dave-ism) makes your brain explode.
And now having actually done it, I’m now swinging around to the price is just right or “He actually undercharges a bit” camp.
This is bloody addicting. I’m just going to save up and do them all as and when I can over time. Like Neo answering Tank’s, “How about some more?”, with a Hell yes!

Worth it for the knowledge I gained?

Have I already said, Oh, dear God, Yes?! Doubly so, here!
Learning it myself, I realised that Rust had paradigms, teasing me at the edge of my vision, which I couldn’t quite see, frustrating my attempts to learn the language.
Python (C/OOP) is my ur-language. Having that, made it easy to learn Go. Rust turned out to be a different beast altogether. Having the big ideas of Rust laid bare and then explained thoroughly was therefore, such an eye opening experience. And I learned it while doing something else, that is inherently hard. Dave makes it easy though, like I describe below.

I just wanted to learn Rust. I didn’t really want to write a small programming language.
But doing that, made me learn Rust without even realising it. He’s that good. The pedagogical method is that good.
Most big ideas were in there. Ownership and borrowing, check. Compare and contrast how things are done in other languages, double check. Macro magic, check and triple check.
The course was more focussed on the why of Rust, more than the more easily discoverable, how.
A fascinating mental model was looking at Rust like Earth. An inner strict core, surrounded by a more relaxed, friendlier outer shell.

Daily work was tremendously, mentally taxing. In a good way.
Dave keeps saying that minds explode due to the material. But no good Sir, that is not true!
To Dave I say, “’Tis thou, Dave, who dost cause the explosions of brains!”
He starts with an innocent problem, something seemingly innocuous, and then lays his trap.
Simple solutions are shown not to work, teensy yet ghastly exceptions show up to trip you, dreadful scenarios that you’d never imagine, lie beneath the surface. And your mind gets wound up so tight, that when Dave finally has had his fun, takes pity on us and shows us the solution, it naturally goes, Boom!

I cannot wait, to have my brains exploded once again :)

Am I done with this series?

No.
I jumped into the deep end of the pool, by attempting to learn Rust with a hard project at the same time.
So while I’ve learned a lot, there’s plenty of work to do.
While the others could do their programming exercises quickly, I have seriously lagged behind.
With the notes I’ve made and the resources that I have access to, I will attempt to redo this week myself over the coming months and write about it, and ponder, struggle, work through it here.

Dave as teacher and all round good egg

The man puts in tremendous amounts of work.
Every bit of the course, is planned and structured meticulously and then he just riffs off of the ideas.
There was a collaborative Github repo ready and waiting, there were video recordings ready as soon as the day was done.
Dave never pretends to have all the answers. 99% of the time, he does and hides it well, so we do the thinking, but the few times he didn’t, he let us know and then came back to us with answers and thoughts either in the next session or the next day.
Unfailingly polite, kind and generous to a fault, he fostered an extremely collaborative environment, in which, even when there were other folks much more learned and experienced than I; I never felt like a dunce. I never felt spoken down to.
All my kooky ideas were evaluated, and then Dave would point out why doing something like what I suggested wouldn’t quite work or why stuff would crash and burn or why what I suggested doing eeny, meeny, miny, moe was in fact, pretty good.
I learned not just what, not just how, but also why.
And I learned it all in a place that was nice, and friendly, and warm, and kind.

Dave, thank you for all you do! I’m very grateful!

I signed up for the latest cohort of David Beazley’s, Ruckus.
The basic idea, behind Ruckus is to write a small interpreter in Rust!

Why?

From the Ruckus page:

This course tackles Rust by stepping back and thinking about it from the standpoint of a “programming languages” project. If Rust is really so different, how would you go about finding out how? Suffice to say, building a programming language will cut right to the heart of the matter.

This is exactly how I learned Python. Only it took me an inordinately long time. And I didn’t even realise that I was doing it that way. While most of my friends were happy just using Python, I could not quite do it right, because I had no fundamentals¹, and since my background has been tech support, hardware and people management, I needed to unlearn a ton of stuff.

I’m cautiously hoping Ruckus will help me do the same with Rust, only in a turbo charged manner.

Rust fascinates me. And I quite like my journey to its doorstep.
I learned writing for myself with Python. But when it came time to sharing my tiny projects with friends and family, I was a bit stumped.
I learned Go, just so I could give them a binary and then instruct them with a “just run this.”
And while that solved my distribution problem, Go’s type system made me realise, just how well suited a typed language is for collaboration.
Which brings me to Rust. Long term, this is the language², I would love to write for performant code, because Rust’s big picture features (safe, performant, easy to distribute) are exactly what I want for all my tiny bits and bobs.

Which in turn brings me back to Ruckus.
Getting a teensy peek at how everything works underneath, while at the same time, getting a firm handle on the language seems like a fun challenge.
I also wanted to try what Cal Newport, calls a grand gesture in Deep Work:

The concept is simple: By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.
[…] The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

Make no mistake, my current state is that of an enthusiastic, ignorant newbie. How hard can it be? I’m woefully unprepared for what might come. The only thing I know, is that I don’t know. I fully expect to be like the wolf above, losing my mind, howling at the moon and generally creating a ruckus.

I love you for completing me, in every possible way. I cannot imagine life without you! 😘

The book now dives into the Four Levels of Reading.

We tackle notes from the First Level of Reading, Elementary Reading, today

Stages of Learning to Read

1. First Stage of Learning to read (Reading Readiness)
This begins, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven. Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read.
Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it.
Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order.
Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skillful at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read.

2. Second Stage: Simple Material Reading Children learn to read very simple materials.
They usually begin, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words.

The Miracle of Reading
It is incidentally worth observing that something quite mysterious, almost magical, occurs during this stage.
At one moment in the course of her development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later—perhaps only two or three weeks later—she has discovered meaning in them; she knows that they say “The cat sat on the hat.”
How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and a half millennia to study the phenomenon. Where does meaning come from? How is it that a French child would find the same meaning in the symbols “Le chat s’asseyait sur le chapeau”?
Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs—and most humans perform it before they are seven years old!

3.Third Stage: Vocabulary Acquisition
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in “unlocking” the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.

4. Fourth Stage: Assimilation
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences—that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.

Stages and Levels

It is of paramount importance to recognize that the four stages outlined here are all stages of the first level of reading

The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.

The second stage—word mastery—corresponds to the first grade experience of the typical child (although many quite normal children are not “typical” in this sense), with the result that the child attains what we can call second-stage reading skills, or first grade ability in reading or first grade literacy.

The third stage of elementary reading—vocabulary growth and the utilization of context—is typically (but not universally, even for normal children) acquired at about the end of the fourth grade of elementary school and results in what is variously called fourth grade, or functional, literacy—the ability, according to one common definition, to read traffic signs or picture captions fairly easily, to fill out the simpler government forms, and the like.

The fourth and final stage of elementary reading is attained at about the time the pupil leaves or graduates from elementary school or junior high school. It is sometimes called eighth grade, ninth grade, or tenth grade literacy. The child is a “mature” reader in the sense that he is now capable of reading almost anything, but still in a relatively unsophisticated manner. In the simplest terms, he is mature enough to do high school work.

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case.
To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
[…] you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

It is true, of course, that you should be able to remember what the author said as well as know what he meant. Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed.

Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.”
The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all.
The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books.
They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

Art of Reading

The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …

1. When you already know things

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us.
Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth—that is, if we were both alert and honest

2. When you understand new things

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand.
Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

On Reading as Discovery

The distinction between being informed vs being enlightened is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

To avoid error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing—we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning.

In the history of education, people have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.

Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction “aided discovery.”

The difference between learning by instruction and learning by discovery—or, as we would prefer to say, between aided and unaided discovery—is primarily a difference in the materials on which the learner works. When he is being instructed—discovering with the help of a teacher—the learner acts on something communicated to her. She performs operations on discourse, written or oral. She learns by acts of reading or listening.
When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word “reading” loosely, we can say that discovery—strictly, unaided discovery—is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction (being taught, or aided discovery) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one’s senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. For example, many people assume that though a poet must use his imagination in writing a poem, they do not have to use their imagination in reading it.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too—although with help instead of without it.

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)

We have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it.
Yet there is good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning from a teacher who is present—a living teacher—while reading is learning from one who is absent.

If you ask a living teacher a question, she will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what she says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking her what he means.
If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

This does not mean, of course, that if the living teacher answers your question, you have no further work. That is so only if the question is simply one of fact. But if you are seeking an explanation, you have to understand it or nothing has been explained to you. Nevertheless, with the living teacher available to you, you are given a lift in the direction of understanding her, as you are not when the teacher’s words in a book are all you have to go by.

[…] (for us readers though) our continuing education depends mainly on books alone, read without a teacher’s help. Therefore if we are disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books teach us well. Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher.

Paraphrased and excerpted as usual …

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …

One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance).
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, (the “consumer” of modern internet streams —mjb) is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for one to “make up one’s own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort.
But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up their own mind at all. Instead, they inserts a packaged opinion into their mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. They then push a button and “play back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. They have performed acceptably without having had to think.

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s

Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is impossible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better.

Reading and listening are commonly thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court.
On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.
If anything is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process.

We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch—fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers.
Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

There is one respect in which the analogy breaks down. The ball is a simple unit. It is either completely caught or not.
A piece of writing, however, is a complex object. It can be received more or less completely, all the way from very little of what the writer intended to the whole of it. The amount the reader “catches” will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process, as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved.

What does active reading entail?
Given the same thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully. These two things are related.
Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is.
It consists of a large number of separate acts, all of which must be performed in a good reading. The person who can perform more of them is better able to read.

I’ve always been precious about the physical books, I have.
Partly because the books I read when I was a child, didn’t belong to me.
And so, I wrote notes. Gentle pencil marks as I read (to be erased, before I returned them), and then writing them all out into a notebook (and later typed in to a computer when I could afford one.)

I’ve longed to write in the damned books themselves, but old habits die hard. Until I read Adler, that is.

And then the clouds parted.

Marking a book, making it your own, highlighting it, questioning it, raging at it, whispering to it, completing the conversation, the author wishes to have with you … all of it, is such a sheer, physical, visceral experience.
I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Better late than never though. I’ve been marking every physical book and highlighting and annotating every electronic book, ever since I got back into reading, ten years ago.

Here’s Adler on why one needs to physically manhandle a book.¹

Merely asking questions [of a book] is not enough. You have to try to answer them. And although that could be done, theoretically, in your mind only, it is much easier to do it with a pencil in your hand. The pencil then becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.

It is an old saying that you have to “read between the lines” to get the most out of anything. The rules of reading are a formal way of saying this. But we want to persuade you to “write between the lines,” too. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it²
But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it?
First, it keeps you awake—not merely conscious, but wide awake.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says they knows what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.

The Art of Reading, according to Adler, is that we take part in a great conversation.
I am talking to the author, but they have learnt from other masters elsewhere and are passing on their thoughts and knowledge, thus taking part in a single great conversation of humankind through the ages.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably she knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with her book.
But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question themselves and question the teacher. They even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once they understand what the teacher is saying.
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay them

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own

I’m not particularly religious about using them all, because I’ve already been using something similar (a subset) all my life

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here are some devices that can be used:

1. UNDERLINING—of major points; of important or forceful statements.

2. VERTICAL LINES AT THE MARGIN—to emphasize a statement already underlined or to point to a passage too long to be underlined.

3. STAR, ASTERISK, OR OTHER DOODAD AT THE MARGIN—to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You may want to fold a corner of each page on which you make such marks or place a slip of paper between the pages. In either case, you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the indicated page, refresh your recollection.

4. NUMBERS IN THE MARGIN—to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument.

5. NUMBERS OF OTHER PAGES IN THE MARGIN—to indicate where else in the book the author makes the same points, or points relevant to or in contradiction of those here marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Many readers use the symbol “Cf ” to indicate the other page numbers; it means “compare” or “refer to.”

6. CIRCLING OF KEY WORDS OR PHRASES—This serves much the same function as underlining.

7. WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF THE PAGE—to record questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in your mind; to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; to record the sequence of major points right through the book. The endpapers at the back of the book can be used to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

To inveterate book-markers, the front endpapers are often the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. But that expresses only their financial ownership of the book. The front endpapers are better reserved for a record of your thinking. After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (you have already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; unlike a bookplate, it will express your intellectual ownership of the book.

But, wait! There’s more!

Marking up a book is all fine and dandy, but what about recording your thoughts? And questions?

Adler to the rescue again with The Three Kinds of Note-making.
Which kind you make depends upon the level at which you are reading.

1. Notes during Inspectional Reading
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?
You should make notes concerning your answers to these questions, especially if you know that it may be days or months before you will be able to return to the book to give it an analytical reading. (These kind of notes have served me really well, since I tend to keep the book down and then come back to it after a while)
Notes at this stage, primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance—at least not in detail.
The best place to make such notes is on the contents page, or perhaps on the title page, which are otherwise unused in the scheme we have outlined above.

2. Notes during Analytical Reading
In the course of an inspectional reading, especially of a long and difficult book, you may attain some insights into the author’s ideas about his subject matter. Often, however, you will not; and certainly you should put off making any judgment of the accuracy or truth of the statements until you have read the book more carefully.
Then, during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book. The notes you make at this level of reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual. They concern the author’s concepts, and also your own, as they have been deepened or broadened by your reading of the book.

3. Notes during Syntopical Reading
There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion—the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. We prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet (or sheets) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied—an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter.

It took me five times as long to transfer and organise the file, as it took me to read the book. This was very painful!
I am writing this down, so that my future self remembers!
Very, very, painful!

So I need to be intentional about books that I need to analytically read and change my reading habits.

1. Have a one to one ratio for notes vs reading.
   This means for every ten minutes I want to read, I need to allocate at least the same amount of time for bringing my notes in.
2. All of the above, has to be a single session.
   So reading, followed by a bit of reflection, followed by transferring my notes and annotations out to Org Roam. So my old hour of reading is now 30m of reading, followed by 30m of thinking and jotting my thoughts down.
3. Cross my fingers, and hope that it’ll all work out. Hope that something sane, something intelligible emerges in the end.

I’ve never updated my Emacs packages until recently, because Emacs is where all my writing happens, and so I’m justifiably paranoid.
But then some packages stopped working, due to various circumstances¹ and an update solved it.

So I’ve decided to update my packages once a quarter, so that I don’t lose days yak shaving when something goes wrong and I handle breakage on my terms and not the machine’s.

As far as package management goes, I want to keep things simple.
In fact, I still haven’t graduated to use-package or straight.el because my package needs are few and conservative². And so, while there are automatic update options out there, I’ll just stick to updating them manually, every quarter.

Ergo, this is the checklist I’ll use next time onwards …

1. Stop emacs user service, systemctl --user stop emacs
2. Backup emacs folder in ~/.config
3. Start emacs manually (not the service).
4. M-x package-refresh-contents
5. M-x package-upgrade-all
6. Problems? Quit emacs. Revert backup folder.
7. In the end, start emacs user sevice, systemctl --user start emacs

There’s an Org mode task, scheduled quarterly, so that I won’t forget.

This has never been a bugbear for me. A lifetime of reading has led me to read at a fairly fast clip. But Adler puts into specific words, what it is that I actually, subconsciously do. This will help me advise my younger friends, when I used to struggle earlier, with a “Just keep at it”

Below followeth Adler’s advice …

1. Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this:
   Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. In any event, the speed at which they read, be it fast or slow, is but a fractional part of most people’s problem with reading
2. The ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds — and to know when the different speeds are appropriate.

So if that is the ideal, how do we go about increasing our speed if we are slow / irregular? Adles has an observation and a suggestion, that’ll take us most of the way there.

1. The eyes of young or untrained readers “fixate” as many as five or six times in the course of each line that is read. (The eye is blind while it moves; it can only see when it stops.) Thus single words or at the most two-word or three-word phrases are being read at a time, in jumps across the line. Even worse than that, the eyes of incompetent readers regress as often as once every two or three lines—that is, they return to phrases or sentences previously read.
2. Place your thumb and first two fingers together. Sweep this “pointer” across a line of type, a little faster than it is comfortable for your eyes to move. Force yourself to keep up with your hand. You will very soon be able to read the words as you follow your hand. Keep practicing this, and keep increasing the speed at which your hand moves, and before you know it you will have doubled or trebled your reading speed.

With a caveat however …

• What exactly have you gained if you increase your reading speed significantly? It is true that you have saved time—but what about comprehension? Has that also increased, or has it suffered in the process?
  It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).

Been listening to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness in the little cracks of time in the day¹ and as always being led to the sad and inevitable conclusion that we always fail to learn from what came before.

It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Aaron Swartz had to give his life for his beliefs, yet when the robber barons thieve everything is suddenly alright.
Greed, like love, never dies!

As I go through How to Read a Book, I’ve realised that I need to digest a book in a manner of speaking, specially on my subsequent reads.

My ideal is to pick up a book, and read through it at the speed it ought to take; highlighting, annotating and writing down my thoughts as I go.
And while I do that, also write things down here on the blog, as I’ve been attempting to do with Adler.

Rather, I thought I would do that with Adler.
But through force of habit, I’ve gone and done the same thing I’ve always done.
Read through the entire book, highlighting as I go.
So now I have a book full of notes, and a few thoughts, but all the “brilliant”¹ insights that struck me as I read the book have vanished from my mind, as has any tentative mental model of the structure of the book.
And I’m frustrated with this state of affairs.
What happens then, is me having just a page full of notes without any of my thoughts in there, or trying to recapture lighting in a bottle over months of agonising effort.
Neither appeals to me.

The only things I can think of doing right now are:

1. Keep a notebook beside me and write my thoughts down. The flyleaves are barely enough for me to keep track of running highlights across pages.
2. Intentionally slow down, even more. I don’t know what this will do to my flow.
3. Read in chunks. And then stop and write about them. I’ll probably miss the big picture. But I’ll arrive at it slowly, eventually. And the writing will reflect that. Is that good or bad? I don’t really know.

So I think I’m going to buckle down and finish getting my notes from Adler into posts in the coming weeks and try the above on my next book.

This is another post, that is near verbatim¹ from the book.
Because, once again, this is reference material, that I need to come back to over and over.

The Four Levels of Reading

They are called so, because they are cumulative.
The first level is not lost in the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the others. It simply goes beyond them.

Level 1: Elementary Reading

Everyboy can read at this level!
This is the most common level there is.

The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school.

The child’s first encounter with reading is at this level. His problem then (and ours when we began to read) is to recognize the individual words on the page. He is merely concerned with language as it is employed by the writer. At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is “What does the sentence say?” That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense.

Level 2: Inspectional Reading

This level I do very well, because of the anti-library.
Figuring out whether the book is worth reading or not, is a critical skill for me.
Too many books, far too little time, after all :)

The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading.

One way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time—usually a relatively short time, and always (by definition) too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.

Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. That is often a good deal.

Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is “What does the sentence say?” the question typically asked at this level is “What is the book about?” That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are “What is the structure of the book?” or “What are its parts?” Upon completing an inspectional reading of a book, no matter how short the time you had to do it in, you should also be able to answer the question, “What kind of book is it—a novel, a history, a scientific treatise?”

Level 3: Analytical Reading

This is the level at what I want to read regularly.
What I want to do, everytime I pick up a book to learn from and understand deeply.
This is what I have set out to learn from this book.
Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
I want to be able to digest the books I read!

The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.

The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading. […] analytical reading is always intensely active. On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book—the metaphor is apt—and works at it until the book becomes his own.

We also want to stress that analytical reading is hardly ever necessary if your goal in reading is simply information or entertainment. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

Level 4: Syntopical Reading

This level is one, I really doubt I’ll ever do outside of work or research or learning.
That is where I use it the most. And this level of learning is something I figured out on my own, while consulting. Tackling a specific problem in a niche domain, meant that I needed to figure out all the angles beforehand. Figuring what that world was like, and how did what I want fit into that world. Syntopical Reading is very very similar. And like Adler notes, very demanding.

The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.

Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated.

My primary reading device is my Kobo.
For the simple reason, that I will need to buy a whole new home, for my books otherwise. The anti-library is just too large.

But as I was reading, How to Read a Book, I realise I’ll probably need a copy on the Kobo as well as a physical copy in hand, for any book that I want to read in depth.
If reading is effort, as the book suggests, then I might as well have the right tools for the right kind of effort.
Rapidly scanning through, marking things up, jotting thoughts down, and all other assorted marginalia is very easy with a physical book. Looking words up in a dictionary, copying notes in and out, and searching are very easy with the Kobo.
When it comes to writing my thoughts elsewhere or doing research, it is easy to scan through a physical book, find the relevant page, and then I am back in that mental space I was, that triggered the thought. This realisation; that books are spatial memory, is new to me (I might have been using it subconsciously all along). An e-reader cannot give me that.

So I’m going to make the best of both worlds and use both!

The Four Basic Questions:

This is the basic idea, that permeates the entire book down to its bones and colours every piece of advice Adler offers.

I’m quoting this verbatim, without any paraphrasing, because these questions are what I will be returning to time and again, in the coming days (and weeks and months and years.)

The one simple prescription for active reading.
It is: Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

1. What is the book about as a whole?
   You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.

2. What is being said in detail, and how?
   You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?
   You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.

4. What of it?
   If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.