Thoughts between technology, society and culture
Ah, those Buddhists! Crazy people with their asceticism! Always fighting against craving and wanting everyone to live austere boring lives, eh? You can hopefully tell that’s a stereotype, and like all of them, there’s a grain of truth here. But it’s not nearly as bad as you might think. Let’s read what the Dhammapada has to say on the topic of craving:
Continue reading “The Dhammapada exploration – part 24: Craving”
I know I’m late to this party and those of you who play their games on Linux surely already know this channel, but to me one bit is new: HexDSL has been doing hundreds of Linux gaming videos over the last two years. And that’s because he releases one Linux gaming video per day! That doesn’t mean the quality sucks, though.
I first encountered his channel when it was mostly about comics with a Linux game here and there, but nowadays it’s mostly about Linux games, which I can’t complain about. And what an array of games he’s covered! He looks at any genre, but he’s quick to tell you whether a review was sponsored and if he’d even normally buy or play this sort of game.
It also shows that he’s been playing long enough to know what to look for in a game and to spot the danger signs, always good if you’re on the fence about a title and need another solid opinion.
The level of polish in his videos has certainly increased a lot over the last few months as well, today he uses chroma keying/green screen, a proper microphone, a pop filter, I guess some encoder card — everything you could possibly ask for. Nothing to complain about in the quality department.
It may seem like he’s rambling sometimes, but I find I always get all the information I wanted about a title if I try to pay attention. And I think his voice work is entertaining, no monotone put-me-to-sleep stuff, so there’s no need for you to replace your ASMR videos with HexDSL.
He also covers bits of Linux hardware, games running through WINE and other stuff you’d figure a Linux gaming nerd might like to hear about. So it’s not all just games, but mostly, and the things that aren’t games are usually Linux-related in some way.
There doesn’t seem to be a channel trailer I could embed, so I’ll link you right to the main page. You can also support him on Patreon.
Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Some games happen not to be available natively for Linux, like… err… also Wolfenstein: The New Order. So we play them with WINE, and sometimes there are slight audio issues.
But have no fear: If you get audio crackling in such games (especially if your audio device is not running at 44.1 KHz), the following environment variable might fix it for you like it did for me:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60
You can either start WINE in a terminal with this env var prepended:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 wine Steam.exe
or if you’re using PlayOnLinux:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 playonlinux
Or you can export it in your ~/.profile file if you want it to be set for all your applications (don’t forget to completely log out and back in, since .profile is read only once per session):
export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60
Does this work for you? It works for me. I can’t remember where I found it first, but it’s a hint that’s been passed along, so pass it along I shall.
May the Flying Spaghetti Monster extend its noodly appendage to guide the hands of Lennart Poettering so that such issues become a thing of the past (if indeed Pulseaudio is to blame, but we always blame Pulseaudio, so we shall blame it one more time).
Now to enjoy the screams of expiring Nazi cyborgs in ultimate smoothness.
For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM. It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent. You may have to start the service afterwards:
apt-get install spice-vdagent systemctl start spice-vdagentd
Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system you just have to make sure you’re connecting through spice with a spice client (outdated documentation about that is here). If you use the Virt-Manager GUI, this is all set up correctly by default for Linux guests.
Free bonus: 3D acceleration and compositing seems to be working by default in Linux guests as well. This has nothing to do with spice-vdagentd, I just thought I’d mention it since this seems new. It’s a boon for testing software in multiple desktop environments, especially since many modern desktop environments profit a lot from direct rendering and compositing (or even require it to function properly).
Long time no Dhammapada, but this article is here to fix that. If you’ve played a fantasy roleplaying game before, you’re now thinking, “Wow, ‘naga’, that surely means evil snake people! We’re going to meet the snake lords!” But I gotta disappoint you there. It seems naga also means elephant. This is still an important chapter on self control, let’s see why!
Continue reading “The Dhammapada exploration – part 23: Nagavagga”
TL;DR: We’re not doing a good job of keeping the Internet and related technologies as open and egalitarian as they used to be, allowing a dangerous oligopoly to reemerge. How can we reverse the trend? And by we, I actually mean you.
I see some worrying signs that we’re going backwards in terms of freedom. Read on for some scaremongering.
Continue reading “Your freedoms are eroding as technology becomes more closed”
I recently bragged that I would be sampling many vegan cheese alternatives. So I went ahead and ordered entire boxes full of different vegan cheeses. This is the selection:
From top left to bottom right:
Read on to find out what I think about each of them.
The Swiss People’s Party (one of the most powerful parties in Switzerland) has recently launched a campaign against easier naturalization of third-generation foreigners. This is one of the billboards:
As a Swiss person, I am way more afraid of the old white men behind this campaign than I am of that hypothetical woman behind her niqab.
These men have in the past:
And they are mostly men. Only 11 of their 65 seats in the national council are under the butts of women.
As a reaction to their billboards I would love to see an interview with a third-generation foreigner who likes to wear the niqab, but I’m pretty sure you won’t find one. The only person I am aware of in Switzerland who even wears a niqab is Swiss through and through: Nora Illi. On the right in this picture as you can surely guess:
But since she’s had Swiss citizenship since birth, I guess that won’t be a problem for our geniuses at the People’s Party, eh?
It’s Dhammapada-time again! This time we talk about Nirayavagga, the Abyss, the state of woe. In your typical carrot-and-stick duality, you would call this something like hell. Also, there’s some stuff about rebirth.
Again, rebirth is not understood as physical reincarnation by all brands of Buddhism. There is significant disagreement about this. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of physical rebirth (I sure as hell am), rebirth is also be defined as the reconstruction of your illusion of self that happens from any moment to the next.
At any one time your brain holds a certain pattern and a synaptic configuration and whatnot, and that configuration makes you think you are you. But this structure is always changing. Your consciousness gets its image of itself and its surroundings from the sense organs in small snapshots, but it also stores (not like a tape recorder) a memory of many of the past configurations. That means that from moment to moment, you are reborn. The you that was a moment ago has given rise to the you that is now you in a series of interdependent events that started when your brain developed in utero. You will never be that you again. In that sense you are reborn every moment.
By your actions you can influence this rebirth. That’s also part of what all that kamma talk is about. Want some more about self as illusion? Watch Sam Harris give an explanation.
Buddhist philosophers figured that shit out millenia ago, and today’s science is also curious about some of those topics. Topics like free will is an illusion, the self is an illusion, time is an illusion, it’s all very trippy stuff and it’s no wonder that a bunch of ancient monks, bored silly by staring at walls for hours every week, dug into this first.
But now, let’s descend into hell!
Continue reading “The Dhammapada exploration – part 22: Nirayavagga”
The old masters probably had some pretty smart verses that wouldn’t fit neatly into any of the chapters they’d laid out for the Dhammapada, so in the end they thought “screw it, let’s just put them all in a chapter titled ‘Miscellaneous’ and be done with it”. You’d think this would become a boring chapter, but it contains some real gems. Let’s read!
290. If by renouncing a lesser happiness one may realize a greater happiness, let the wise man renounce the lesser, having regard for the greater.
Chasing after worldly delights, clinging to money, fame, the ego, getting extremely drunk, partying all weekend, amassing Italian luxury sports cars (that break down every time you drive them), those are examples of lesser happiness. You might think they make you happy, but the rest of the Buddhist literature explains why this is a delusion. Soon after buying that Lambo, you find out it can’t fill the hole in you. And then you want another Ferrari. But guess what? That Ferrari won’t plug what’s missing either. This type of craving for belongings is a never-ending cycle that can only be stopped by avoiding it in the first place, by recognizing what it is.
Continue reading “The Dhammapada exploration – part 21: Miscellaneous”
