Shom Bandopadhaya

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

Collection of photos shot with manual film cameras.

One of the best parts of being a self-hoster is being able to host a game server for your friends, right? Well, yes but also it can go sideways and not only because you’re a system admin for more than yourself. There are many ways but Podman, docker-compose, and Syncthing can help! ...

This post alleging extortion from CloudFlare is plausible/cautionary. Market monopolies/tech mono-cultures suck so it’s tempting to just be outraged at CF. ...

Like many others, I am frustrated by corporations that have ingested immense amounts of user generated content and are using/selling it to train LLMs1. However, deleting the content now is counter productive, let’s protest more effectively by building a better web. ...

I’ve seen several posts and threads lately on the fediverse that take a rather pessimistic view of podcasts and advocate for written media instead. I guess here’s my hot take about it because no one asked! ...

I’m happy to see that a lot of people, both regular and “content creators”, are relying less solely on commercial social platforms. But discoverability is still an issue, maybe taking back the web requires using ancient tools like webrings. ...

Partial eclipse from SFO 2017 The total eclipse is tomorrow, I’ve known about it since the last one I missed in 2017, so of course I started preparing (earlier today). Here’s some handy information for myself and it might help you too. ...

Two little neighborhood kids MADE my day! I’m rolling in my small Subaru hatchback and these kids run to the edge of their yard and give me the trucker/train conductor honk fist pump hand signal! I tapped out a festive sequence of mini honks and everyone was happy. Joy is free and comes in small packages! I shared this on Mastodon but wanted to remember it, it was awesome!

Redis went from an open source license to a source available license. This is not a new pattern of trying to protect share-holder value against large cloud providers extracting value they didn’t create. Corporate finance discussion aside (since that’s a really sad can of worms), it’s interesting to see what the FOSS community did about it. ...

I created my online Avatar in the early 2000s using a Flash tool that someone made and I really wish I could remember more about it. It’s been my online presence for over 20 years and it’s almost like my real face. Fun fact: One of my co-worker’s husband recognized me at a company social event solely from having seen my avatar on caller ID. ...

I like and use the Alacritty terminal emulator, but it does not automatically follow the system theme. The issue tracker discussion made it clear this feature won’t be supported, fair enough. And after switching to TOML and discovering partial imports, I knew I could scratch my own itch. Someone wrote a rust tool which was helpful as a guide but I wanted something with low dependency. So I made a bash script and a systemd service and it was fun(?) to learn more about dbus. So, alacritty-auto-theme was born which automatically switches themes with manual override possible, repo on Github and Sourcehut. ...