This Blog Is About to Get Real Chatty

Warning: Slightly ranty post, with no aim in mind, other than putting thoughts to paper, and to excise some demons from my mind. Several interviews and several rejections later, the one thing I’ve learnt, is that I’d be a good hire, if only I had a little experience. And also that ageism is a thing. While there’s nothing I can do about the age bit, I can do something about the experience. ...

January 20, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Reading Page a Day Books

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 10th, 2023. You really ought to subscribe :) I took close to a year to finish two of the books from last years reading list. That’s because I was reading them, in tiny bits, in small chunks, a day at a time I was already reading a poem a day and then some time early last year I serendiptioustly ran into this Ryan Holiday post, which spoke to the virtues and pleasures of page-a-day books and daily wisdom.1 So, along with my daily poem, I read a Robert Greene reader called The Daily Laws as well as the Ryan Holiday–Stephen Hanselman collection of Stoic meditations in The Daily Stoic. ...

January 17, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Maria Popova’s Favourite Books of 2022

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 11th, 2022. You really ought to subscribe :) Hello, hello, it me! :) With all that is going on in my life, I don’t have the will or wherewithal to compile the annual reading list this year. So I’ll keep sending you folks, the lists that I come across and find compelling enough to share. I’ve always ended my annual books-to-read list with the Marginalian. (the erstwhile Brain Pickings aka Maria Popova) And I always say, Maria saved my life. For nearly a decade, during times of deep dark despair, it was her posts that kept me going. ...

January 11, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Learning Kubernetes, Setup Notes

Ok, here’s to learning Kubernetes in earnest, to get that career pivot going. Notes as I learn, over the coming days. This one, is a lot of random thoughts on bringing up a cluster. It is both harder than you think, and easier than you think I did this, because I wanted to run my own cluster, just like the big boys do.1 It’s much easier to run alternatives like kind, if that suits your needs better. Notes to future Jason: ...

November 3, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Make KVM Use a NIC in Bridge Mode

I wanted to start learning Kubernetes. So I thought I’d spin up a Ubuntu VM to use as my sacrificial guinea pig. While the normal NAT mode works well enough for most of my networking needs, I wanted the Ubuntu VM to show up and work as a machine on my host’s network.1 I have two network cards on my desktop and wanted to allocate one of them to this VM. I wanted a passthrough, where the guest OS would see the NIC and then have exclusive access to it. When I tried doing that, KVM complained that it could not do this with PCI devices. ...

October 18, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Make SSH Ignore Key, When Logging On to a Fresh Box

Every now and then, I spin up a fresh vm. And being a creature of habit, I use the same username on my play / experimental vms as my normal login. So everytime I try to login to such a vm or pi, I get a Too many authentication failures error. So to just get in and start working, I need to tell ssh to ignore my keys and try using passwords as the authentication mechanism. Like so ...

October 18, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza