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This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 27, 2023. You really ought to subscribe :) From A Velocity of Being. Art by Yara Kono An extract from the page I read today from A Velocity of Being. ...

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. ...

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. ...

More diving into Org Mode and Emacs. I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc. ...

(Update, 2024-03-15: I now use lego. will update this post later.) After struggling to renew my certs for the third time in a row, hopefully these pointers should keep me on track for the next time. Namecheap does not yet support automatic wildcard renewal for the Letsencrypt/Certbot combo. Check next year. Have your Namecheap control panel open and ready. Switch to root or run the command below with sudo Command to renew: certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 -d *.domain.com -d domain.com certbot will then, print a couple of lines that you need to add as a TXT record in the Namecheap DNS control panel. When you do that, make sure you set the TTL of the record, to a minute, so that you can redo stuff quicker, if you mess up. certbot might ask you to do multiple records. Read the instructions carefully. When you check to see if the TXT record is set, search for the whole domain name. For e.g. _acme-challenge.domain.blah instead of just domain.blah If you’ve done all of the above, hopefully things should go smoothly and the certificate should renew. Restart Nginx and you’re done. If you have multiple machines, figure out a way to securely transfer the certs there too. P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

I started with a very simple init.el when I started using Emacs. Rather than learning it in a structured manner, I just decided to jump in at whatever end of the pool and figure it out as I go. I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor. And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my eternal gratitude, is flexible to do all I want, thanks to the last forty six years worth of hard work and ideas of people from all over. ...