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. ...
My homepage lists my new career shift as “This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)” I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different. Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programs though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly. Here’s his take … ...
I have been deleting too many books by mistake, now a days. Past Jason might have been pretty sure about what he wanted, but I sure as heck am not. So I had to do a bit of spelunking to figure out how to get the delete book option to confirm first. All I needed to do was Preferences -> Behaviour -> Reset all disabled confirmation dialogs Et voilà, Calibre now asks me if I am sure about deleting my books :) ...
If I could distill everything that I have learnt about love and attraction and lust and life and persistence and bravery and marriage and children and facing your fears and growing up? If I could do that, it would be this slim book. I stumbled across Cheryl Strayed, in (as usual) a Farnam Street post. And then promptly bought all her books and forgot about reading them. Better late than never though. ...
This was the best collection of short stories, I’ve read since O’Henry. No O’Henriesque twists, but fate and life and love deal the characters and us readers, enough drama that none are needed. A couple of lines, that struck me … Raymond didn’t like to talk back to his sister, but this time he thought she was wrong to say what she did. ...
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 :) ...