Mauro's thoughts and ramblings
With a complete and very unexpected 180 degrees turnaround from my previous blog post , I've become an avid Emacs user. I've literally replaced any type of writing software with it. Except for actual development. I don't do much dev work lately but for it I'm still reliant on my Neovim setup as an IDE. I could just use Emacs for that as well honestly, I just haven't gone that far yet. As I wrote…
Last weekend I started learning a new keyboard layout. Just because. I've been using colemak-dh for over a year now, probably a year an a half, and it's been definitely an improvement over qwerty in terms of ergonomics, that's for sure. But I'm curious about more modern layouts, how they feel, how I perform with them. Looking at r/KeyboardLayouts there are a few contenders, but the most agreed…
I've been (yet once again) trying Doom Emacs these days; in fact I'm still watching a great series of video tutorials on it. But there are several factors that won't make me stick with it: (Doom) Emacs is slow as hell. Org-mode is very cool but I don't need yet another syntax for notes, markdown is good enough. Org-mode is great but I don't feel the need to manage my life and tasks in such great…
Link to the project's source code . Progress It's been over a week since my last post here, as I was feeling like I didn't make enough progress to report. I'm not sure how my brain works 99% of the time, because I indeed made progress. Possibly slower than what I feel it should have taken me, but still progress. Let's move on. CSS layout I finally put my hands in the front-end and made some…
Link to the project's source code . JWT based authentication system I know, this is overkill. But again, I'm treating this project as an opportunity to learn and apply best practices at industry standard levels. I've been digging into security concepts and systems and I realised that one of the best models for a secure authorization system of a web application is a JSON Web Token based system. In…
Good progress in the last couple of days! Now the back-end is in a good state and I can move on my focus to the front-end. Link to the project's source code . Models, routes, and scraping functions Now that I've understood the workflow I have to say it's pretty easy to add and customise endpoints with DRF. I wrote all the models I need (at least for now), with generics classes, and created the…
A journey through time and space I'm back out of the Django Rest Framework rabbit hole, with some new knowledge and some progress. I thought it was going to be a simple matter of learning a couple of libraries and classes, but it turned out to be much more than what I expected. There are so many layers of abstraction here that I needed to take my time to wrap my mind around them. Link to the…
Intro As I'm building my web development portfolio I decided to blog about what I'm doing while I'm doing it, also known as building in public. What My Capstone project for Harvard's CS50w was a bookmarks saving web application built with Django and vanilla JavaScript. It was very labour intensive, especially the front-end, which, against all odds and internet memes, made me really appreciate the…
My almost 8 years old Gigabyte Aero 15x left me last week, and I found myself suddenly in need of getting another laptop. Since my finances are a bit tight nowadays, I went looking for some used Thinkpads on eBay. I've never really used eBay before, but there are so many Thinkpads for sale, and those are sturdy machines that can get a beating. Also I've always wanted to get a Thinkpad. And so…
I'm confused about how people I see on the internet use Telescope or Fzf-lua inside Neovim to navigate their codebases. I think my method is pretty straightforward so I wanted to document it here: Toggle between two files I've bound the TAB key to "CTRL + ^" (command: bprevious ) which moves me to the previous buffer, so that I can basically toggle between two files instantly. In general I work…
I just added a /uses page to my website. It's a list of most of the software, services, and devices that I'm currently using on a daily basis. I try to be as much as privacy-conscious as possible (without throwing my smartphone from the window, that is) so if you're interested in alternative services to the Big Corps offer you may find something useful in here. Feel free to reach me either via…
During the Christmas break I finally managed to put my hands on the Raspberry Pi 5 that I received as a birthday present about six months ago. I always wanted to learn to self host some useful apps and services, and what better use of a mini computer like the Raspberry Pi? Some would called it the start of my own homelab, which I would agree with. After installing the OS on the pi and configuring…
You're officially reading this blog post on my brand new personal website! I need to thank my partner Flavia for helping me with the design, which is inspired by the work of Dieter Rams , mostly for the colour palette and the minimalism. I really tried to choose some good fonts for readability, since a blog at the end of the day is meant to be read, and I hope you like my choices. It's using Inter…
Yesterday was a sunny end of May Saturday, and we walked for about 20 Km. From Blackfriars Station we followed the river Thames, and the river of tourists, towards East on the South bank. We arrived at Borough Market, which was extremely crowded. It reminded me of my first covid vaccine (which for some reason I ended up getting very close to that area) when the market's stalls were all closed and…
Update from May 23rd, 2024 💻 Work/Study Currently focused on building my new skills as a web developer. I'm finishing Harvard's CS50w , gathering ideas for the "capstone" final project. Learning React and Astro , while planning to rebuild this website from scracth. As a brilliant procrastination strategy in the last couple of months I've retrained myself to touch type with a different keyboard…
Another interesting week on the Cybernetic WEB™ of our futuristic age! (Writing this for posterity, so they'll think we were living the Sci-fi dream. Alas.). Music 🎵 Bleachers - Modern Girl Julian Lage - Speak To Me A Kind of Timeless Jazz Masterpiece // A nice piece about Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue". Nadine Shah - Topless Mother Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther Olof Dreijer - Coral Milkweed -…
I want to start publishing links to articles, music, videos, games, etc. that I find of interest during the week. It could be a weekly blog post, or maybe not. We'll see. Let's get started with some fresh new music. Music 🎵 Marcus King - Mood Swings Nora Jones - Staring at the Wall Khruangbin - May Ninth Squarepusher - Wendorlan The Black Keys - I Forgot To Be Your Lover Visual 🖼️ Esoteric Forms…
For some reason I resonate with this blog post by Winnie Lim so much. I don't know if it's our age or just a sign of times, but I had a similar realisation in the last couple of years, and an eventual breakthrough. As in, I found myself too attached to some ideas of myself that were crippling me. And also, these ideas of myself were attached to some concepts that were inherently biased or…
To Logseq or not to Logseq In recent years I've been trying many different solutions for my note taking needs. The app that I've been using the most has been Logseq , which I still use and like, but has some kinks and pain points that are not being actively addressed by the developing team recently: Logseq is an Electron app and it's becoming quite slow. There are still occasions where I lose some…
After a few first months into my journey to become a developer and change my career, I stumbled upon a blog post and a YouTube video about this course called CS50. CS50's Introduction to Computer Science , more specifically, is one of Harvard University's courses with the most students' enrolled. Apparently, in the actual physical world of Harvard, a lot of students take it as one of their first…
As all good things must come to an end I decided to stop posting my album charts here, it's been a nice ride though! <br> <br> Updates on my monthly plays from Lastfm. August 2023 A month of hot weather, lots of programming, yelling at the screen and classic hard bop jazz. What a ride. Glad the Autumn is coming, my favourite season. 1. Miles Davis - Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud <br> 2. Mort Garson -…
In the last few months I've switched over to many online tech/developers communities of various kind. From Reddit to YouTube, Discord, HackerNews, etc, I'm now following a bunch of new channels since I'm changing my career. What I've found is that usually people are quite open and welcoming. If you demonstrate a good attitude as a learner, veterans will gladly help you (probably as in any other…
Update from April 1st, 2023 It's been a while! (again...) Oh well, so much has happened since the last time I wrote here. Changing career At the end of October 2022, I've decided to change career completely. At the young age of 42, that is. I've been working on myself a lot, and that helped me understanding that really, I need a change and I need to do what I feel it's more relevant to me. And…
An infinite roll of some nice new bands/musicians and album releases while I discover them. April 1st 2023 James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities A transcendental electronic journey beyond any genre classification. A freak lucid dream of positive only vibes. Gorgeous. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 400px; height: 472px;"…
Without any doubt 2022 for me has been the year of electronic music. I found myself exploring so many new genres and artists and labels, it's been very refreshing and rewarding. I dived into IDM, ambient, house and techno like I had never done before, and I believe it shows in my top 10 here. Although I've been listening also to a lot of classic jazz as well this year, in terms of new releases,…
Update from September 24th, 2022 All good and dandy on this side of the pond. I've got covid in May and had a couple of rough weeks but I've been fine since then. I'm currently in the process of refreshing my showreel with some of my latest work and a few personal projects - my goal is to apply for a permanent position somewhere as soon as possible. A bit tired of freelancing, especially from…
I've been using Deezer as my music streaming platform of choice for the last year. I moved from Spotify mostly because after I've tried Deezer HiFi FLAC streaming I could noticeably hear the difference in sound quality with my equipment (and ears) so I had to move to a better quality streaming service. At the time I've tried a few and decided to go with Deezer mostly because it felt as the best…
About a year ago I took the leap and bought myself a Schiit stack (Modi 3+, Magni Heresy, Mani) to listen to music from my PC (I have a growing library of FLAC files and a subscription to Deezer HiFi) and to my LP collection through an AT-LP120XUSB with an upgraded shibata cartridge (AT-VMN95SH). As I live with my partner and we're both working from home, I need to use headphones 90% of the day…
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 400px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=222624053/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://iliantape.bandcamp.com/album/itlp09-pool">ITLP09 - Pool by Skee Mask</a></iframe> An experiment in music "review". I typed down my impressions of the songs while listening to them in a very…
I have been aware of the blockchain technology for a few years now, reading about it in the book Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield mostly and I found it definitely fascinating and with quite an undisputable potential. What I wasn't aware of was the rising of this thing called NFT . Blockchain and NFTs Non Fungible Tokens are basically whatever piece of digital artwork or information…
Update from February 17th, 2022 Still living in SE London with my partner Flavia and our cat Jessy. <figcaption>The traditional Christmas photo with lasagna.</figcaption> Still freelancing from home since March 21st 2020. I'm not actually actively looking for new clients though, I'm just working for my regulars when they need me - in the meantime I'm studying various things to improve my career.…
About a year ago, the second year into the covid-19 pandemic, I decided (and frankly needed) to get back into actively listening to music. What I mean by that is not only using music as a background for other activities but actually spend the whole focus of my attention for sometime everyday to the act of listening to music. Something that I used to do regularly while growing up, especially in the…
10. Dos Santos - City of Mirrors I love the surf rock hints mixed within the overall Latin sounds of this record. Catchy songs, melancholically South American. I just love the dreamy atmosphere this album creates. Favourite track: A Tu Lado <iframe style="border: 0; width: 600px; height: 120px;"…
This is a quick reference guide for brand new Mastodon (and Fediverse) users who may be feel like they're screaming into the void when they first join mograph.social (or any other instance for that matters). Mograph.social is a Mastodon server that is part of a much more vast network of other servers called "The Fediverse" . You have chosen to subscribe to this server because, most probably,…