Shom Bandopadhaya

Long form guides on esoteric topics like themeing, keyboard mapping, etc.

Collection of photos shot with manual film cameras.

See what had happened was, I accidentally saw my Fedi profile not in dark mode (basically how all adventures begin). Now I’ll tell you about a fairly small rabbit hole, in comparison to the other Yak-shaving chronicled here. GoToSocial allows customization through CSS at the instance and profile level. I had customized a few small aspects (borders, layout tweak) but decided to try on a new theme and got carried away with Yak-shaving. Then I was going to just throw the CSS into a gist, got carried away again and here’s a blog post. ...

I have been on a prolonged bookmarking/reading-later/digital-archiving solution journey. Here’s a quick run-down of my experience, this is not a review of these tools. ...

Emacs undo is one of those things that never clicked for me, I used vanilla undo-fu until I discovered vundo via Sacha’s post. ...

I joined the Fediverse via Mastodon five years ago and it has been a really good experience. So I guess this is a love letter to human connections on the internet in the face of bots, trackers, and ad-tech. ...

I went away this weekend to visit a friend and to experience hanami (the appreciation of the transient beauty of cherry blossoms, a cherished memory from living in Japan). A perfect scenario to bring only the PineNote on this five day trip. TL;DR: PineNote was exactly the right device for this and I have no complaints. ...

A year ago (April 3rd, 2024) I started a webring with the System Crafters Community, building the web I wanted to see instead of lamenting its absence. Craftering has motivated others to write and share more, which in itself is very rewarding, but what I didn’t anticipate is how it improved my self-hosting and FOSS contributions. ...

I was looking into how Caddy serves pre-compressed files (html/css/js), it’s pretty straightforward, I just need to generate the compressed files after Hugo builds the site. However, that is small fraction of the total payload since a lot of my posts have images. So I’m tackling that first. ...

I’ve been eye’ing the PineNote for years and recently decided to check up on it. The community has been hard at work it starting to look ready for prime now. I would LOVE an ebook reader and note taker but do not want to be tied into proprietary walled gardens (tempted most by the Remarkable 2 / Paper Pro). I didn’t find much review type information on the PineNote since it’s original developer edition release several years ago. So I decided to be the change I wanted to see and bought one. It’s Open-Hardware, Free Open Source Software (FOSS), and the main distro is purely community built, the purchase justifications just write themselves! ...

I wanted to save my barely passable Python scripting from total extinction and write something quick/useful. So what had happened was… ...

I’m not that big on marking milestones but I’m also realizing that I don’t always remember, appreciate, and am grateful for the seasons of life. So a little retrospection is in order. ...