TIL: The Difference Between a CLI Tool and a Freeze Tool

I keep writing these tiny utilities for myself in Python and while I love writing in Python, I definitely don’t enjoy the little war dance I have to do everytime I want to run it on a new machine. Keeping track of virtual environments, and then installing packages in them, quickly gets tiresome. I want to just run the program once I’m done with it. Like a C program. Or Rust. Or Go. ...

March 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Why I Use an Online VM

I am fortunate enough, to run most of my life between my local computer and another VM in a cloud. In this day and age of cloud native and serverless, why would anyone choose to run their life off a virtual server aka VM? This post is me, thinking this through. I’ll return to this every now and then, and see if things have changed enough out there, for me to evaluate and make a change. For now, I am happy using my dinky little box in the cloud. ...

March 1, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.2 I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password. The org-caldav README suggested that I save it all in an .authinfo file, like so. ...

February 28, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Miniflux Now Supports Custom CSS?

I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits. It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way. Well, almost. I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds. And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page. Like so, Except for when there is no next under my pointer. ...

January 27, 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