Books Saved My Life

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. Dani Shapiro writes … My Dear Future Friend, I will probably never know you. We may not ever walk this earth at the same moment. But listen carefully. Books saved my life....

February 10, 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....

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....

January 11, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Moving Tasks Between Org Files in Emacs

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....

August 23, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Certbot Certs

(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 *....

August 20, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Splitting an Unwieldy Emacs `init.el`

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....

August 13, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Focus on How Long You Read, Not How Much

Alternate Subtitle: The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books. via a Tom Gauld Book1 Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done. So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here. You are not me. a. I am a book worm....

August 7, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Writing as Gardening

GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into. Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process. I never quite understood why, until I realised I was a gardener. This also helped me understand, why the recent move to the Zettelkasten process is helping me write without the stress that I previously used to encounter when I attempted writing something even a teensy bit long or complex....

July 9, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Zettelkasten

Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey. While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically. Or I can, but its like pulling teeth. Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth....

June 28, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

All the Stuff I Wanted to Share in 2022

I’ve been in this rut all year, and I don’t know how to get out of it. So I’m declaring thought / newsletter bankruptcy. I don’t know how to share what I collected, so I’ll just put a set of links down here to all of them. This is all the work/tech stuff. And this is all the other, personal / life stuff! Enjoy! Hopefully, clearing my mind should get me going, get me writing, even if in a small but consistent way....

June 11, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza