Shom Bandopadhaya

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

Collection of photos shot with manual film cameras.

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. ...

I don’t like seeing the scrollbar until I want to see it. I want to see it when: I’m scrolling with an indication of how big the page is I want to grab the scrollbar with the mouse to move it to specific location When I want to grab the scrollbar, I want it to be a big target to hit, not something I’m chasing around trying to click accurately on a 4K monitor....

I didn’t have a good process to add film photos to my Hugo static site with consistent tags to serve as metadata for camera, film, developer, format, etc. so I cobbled together a small Bash script to collect some input and create a folder as a Hugo `page bundle` but it was a very manual process still and the tag template soon became tedious to maintain. I discovered Gum and decided to play with it to see if it would improve my post creation experience and it has been pretty good during my brief testing....

Sometimes it’s hard to get started with something new. Sure there are so many resources, almost too many resources, distilling just the essential information is difficult. Here I’m collecting the things I’ve learned over time, so if I were starting from scratch today, I could just jump in and get started. These are not blog posts fixed in time so if something changes I hope to change the information inline without clarifying edits....

I have written before about using Alacritty as my terminal and I’ve configured it using YAML. I’ve been a general fan of YAML, I like the way the syntax looks and there aren’t too many brackets of any kind, if it had a line terminator, that’d be great. The downside is that it is indent dependent. But for the most part I’m comfortable with YAML and wherever an option is provided for using YAML, I pick it over TOML....