Shom Bandopadhaya

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

Collection of photos shot with manual film cameras.

In an EPIC bout of yak-shaving I have reduced the build time for this static site infrastructure running on a puny VPS by a factor of 5. Come along on this undiagnosed journey. ...

Phanpy is an excellent front-end client for Mastodon compatible Fediverse instances that I use with GoToSocial. Here’s how I build the Progressive Web App (PWA). ...

I have a blog post titled “Photos meta data: the disjointed state of EXIF, XMP, IPTC in tools” that’s been a draft with talking points since June. The whole landscape is maddeningly inconsistent and eventually I’ll sort out my thoughts and harmonize my little part of the world and rant blog about it. But until then I finally have a workable solution. ...

From the very get go, this site has been written in markup and then built and deployed via CI/CD. As of today, through several iterations, the exact same thing is happening but all of it is happening on my own infrastructure via Forgejo. ...

I wrote about my bookmark management journey and ended up writing a glowing mini-review of Readeck. Well, it’s been almost a couple months and not only am I still using it (more than any of the previous solutions) but also still delighted despite the hedonic adaptation. ...

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. ...