I Should Write Down and Summarize What I Did

I did a lot of research the other day about what I’d need to build a contact form for my website. I bookmarked lots of pages. And today, I come and look at this mountain of videos and sites and pages and woneder what exactly it is, that I am supposed to tackle. Nothing makes sense. I know I ruled out Sendy as an option. Or did I? Do I need Javascript?...

January 23, 2023 · Mario Jason Braganza

Noah’s in Emacs!

I wrote the other day, about switching to Noah Webster’s dictionary everywhere, I possibly could. Now I did that after reading this lovely James Somers post. And that post seems to be resounding through the web, with folks integrating it into their workflows in different ways. So I was really happy when I read Jon Snader’s post telling me I could have my beloved Webster’s dictionary in Emacs! This sounded too good to be true!...

October 6, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Thank God for Noah

This James Somers post, made me realise why my dictionary word lookups were so much less engaging than when I was a kid. From the post … […] go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”)...

September 16, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

Setting Canonical URLs in Hugo

I steal quite a bit from other folk, to put on my blog.1 Case in point, is my last post where I stole the image from Tom Gauld. Or a few Seth Godin posts, somewhere on the blog, that I have posted in their entirety. While I do credit them in the post, I wished there was a way, I could programmatically tell the search engines and the bots of the world that I did in fact, steal from someplace and that they should actually be looking over there and leading people there....

July 17, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

What Is a Real Book

Stolen from Tom Gauld’s Tumblr. click pic to embiggen …

July 17, 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

Begin Again

Moved over from Nikola, to Hugo today. In two minds about what to do with all the old posts. Do I just shed them all, like I’ve done in the past? Or work to move them over? Maybe, tomorrow’ll bring clarity. In the meanwhile, this is a house under construction, y’all! Stuff does not work, stuff looks wonky, and stuff both, looks wonky and doesn’t work. I’ll be at it, on and off, over the next few weeks, trying to make this home....

May 6, 2022 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Woman Computers, Long Tails & Reasons to Write

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 20th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Ok, I’m a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short1 :) This work letter is going out to all of you my friends, because there’s not much technical stuff in here. And because I have a spot of good news to share. I got a jobby job! I’ve been trying the past few years, to switch my career to something that wasn’t as taxing, as consulting on hardware and networks and integrating systems....

November 26, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Reading News, Remembering, and Why We Write

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A few days late, but Happy Diwali, folks! :) A small ask of you, to begin with. Like I wrote in the past, I don’t have any sort of tracking in these mails. There are no ads, nothing to push. Just a labour of love. So I have no idea whether these posts resonate or I’m just howling into the storm that is your inbox....

November 14, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

The Science of Interstellar

This was so much fun! If I had teachers or mentors like Kip Thorne in my youth, I’d have never had such a crippling fear of mathematics or the hard sciences. I’d have never plagued by doubt and fear, that I was not smart enough or good enough. I have just one note to share. This is Kip as he closes the book … Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain....

August 30, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza