Dgplug

What do I do, when I don’t understand the vagaries of tech? Why? I ask my friends to drum some sense into me. As I write more code, I wanted to get some sense of the cultural norms about how to use git. So I asked my young friends, Nabarun and Sayan all sorts of dumbass questions. Here it is, warts and all for posterity (but lightly edited). If you’d love to come teach me or be part of the conversation, head on over to the IRC #learnandteach channel on the freenode server. ...

Since I am a little out of sorts today, I decided to clean up the subscriptions options on the site. Both the mail and the rss feeds are on one page now. For easy findability1. The feeds are also categorised into work and personal, if that’s your jam. Here ya go! Subscribe! Yes, that is the technical term for it. Yes, of course I made it up. This is my domain. I get to make up everything around here! ↩︎ ...

I lost my Mai today. Until my mid 30s, I rued the gulf that stood between Mai and me. While my parents insistence on teaching us English, as our primary language has benefited me immensely, in most everything I do, the one thing that I feel sad about is that I speak my mother tongue (Konkani) in a slow halting manner. 1 Which meant that I never could talk well with my grandmother. I am one of her oldest grandchildren, and I never got to have heart to heart conversations with her, the way my other cousins did. And yet … ...

Yes, I preordered Cal Newport’s, A World without Email. https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/02/10/announcing-the-email-academy/ India folk, go here - https://www.amazon.in/World-Without-Email-Reimagining-Overload/dp/0241341418/ Having read 5 of his books, I know this will make a big difference to my life. What I have actually done though, is tried to repay Cal in a small manner for his podcast at https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/ ...

Listening to me bitch and moan about the new direction CentOS, CentOS Stream, is now going in, someone sent me this post to tell me why this was a good thing. It’s a lovely post and I agree with most everything the author says. But I do believe, he talks past the main reason folks like me use CentOS. (and the main reason, Rocky Linux now exists.) CentOS came into existence because sci/tech folk wanted a base to build on and became popular, because old harried sysadmins like me wanted to support small shops, who did not have the budget to run servers and wanted to get out of the ever tightening thumb of Microsoft. ...

*Image, courtesy [Tom Gauld][tgt]* This post was first sent to my newsletter on February 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Welcome to the first, “serious” newsletter of 2021. This was supposed to be my year end post, but life, as usual got in the way. Now that I’ve jammed both the blogs together, most of the personal stuff is going to stay focussed on stuff about books and reading and writing and a few photos thrown in once in a while for good measure. Seems like that is what I was doing most of last year, anyway. ...