Glitch Walker
Gaming - Modding - Technology - Environment - Politics - Psychiatry
Friday, 13 December 2019
Redemption: The Bizarre Changes In My Political Views The Morning After
Exasperation.
Saturday, 12 October 2019
Ubuntu Studio Review: My Favourite DM, Compositor, Workflow, Latency… Part 1
- Performance: How does it run? Are there many slowdowns? Am I still able to do what I need from the software?
- Ease-of-Use: This will be rated based on how much setup is required after booting up. Potentially, I may include how hard it was to get the system into the state I wanted to as well.
- Graphics: This overlaps with the previous two a little bit. Does the interface look nice and consistent, across GTK and QT/KDE apps? Even if it requires some extra initial setup. Also, does it just look… nice? Here, I compare with MacOS… Or at least, how people describe it. I have only owned one Mac in my life, and I’ve never liked the Apple fetishism. Really, here, I want to be able to show that Linux/Ubuntu can be a decent alternative to a Mac.
Tuesday, 13 August 2019
Energy Drinks, Cigarettes and Health and Safety
There appears to be a bizarre trend with the British, of which I’m a member of. It seems to be the flow of logic that is best summarised as “actively pointing out the splinter in other people’s eyes, whilst having a log in their own”.
And what better example to think of than energy drinks. Personally, I drink energy drinks as an alternative to coffee. I don’t generally like hot drinks, as I don’t deal well with heat or warm weather full stop. As an energy drink is the equivalent of a few cups of coffee, it seems a sensible drink to have in moderation.
And yet, people go to great lengths to tell you they are bad for you, that they can kill you, that they can cause all manner of side effects. I kid you not, I have even had smokers tell me these drinks are bad for me. To which I feel like saying, statistically, they are far more likely to die of a whole range of illnesses than I am. Even with non-smokers, people are quite happy to get paralytic every weekend without people raising as much as an eyelid. Indeed, alcohol intake is generally seen as probably not good for you, but a social norm, so worth it.
And yet, as a country, we regularly like to moan about “health and safety gone mad”, despite this being an accurate description of my fellow Brit. “Those are bad for you, you know”, “your shoelaces are undone, you will trip” (for the record, in my 30-odd years on this earth, I have never once tripped on the incredibly rare occasion my shoelaces have been untied).
This really does become madness when you consider most of the “EU health and safety madness” comes from laws originally drawn up by us Brits; British lawmakers, politicians and civil servants.
Or, in plain English, its OK to point out other people’s flaws, but not our own.
It all seems a little narcissistic, don’t you think?
Wednesday, 3 January 2018
Moving Forward; EdX; TypingClub dislikes British Keyboards
So now I am finished with the move. And it seemed appropriate to start typing a post again.
I do have some ideas for apps in the works, with lots of diagrams and labels to show how I want them to look. My aim is, having a precise specification of what I want to create, I will then be able to abstract from that the skills and tools I need to (finally!!) start feeling like I can develop something (as opposed to wasting oxygen).
I am also enrolled on an edX.org course. This was always my aim once I had moved. The course in particular is the Introduction To Computer Science And Programming Using Python Course, and I'm really hoping I can keep up with it. So far I have watched the first video and read through the first set of materials. Maybe with an App in mind, I'll actually be able to see it through to the end!
I have also gone back to using TypingClub to improve my touch-typing ability now I finally have an actual desk with full-size keyboard again. I have hit a stumbling block, however... In the fact it doesn't support British Keyboards. Meaning, from a particular point, I will never be able to progress further as it will always be expecting a hash key (rather than the £ sign, which takes its place on the British Keyboard). This seems a bit odd to not have fixed, as all it would have taken is to swap the keys around on their end. I'm not bothered about the US spellings, as I'm not using the site to learn how to spell but rather I am there to learn how to type. But oh well... I shall try to contact them to see when/if they will fix it, and in the meantime keep following the previous exercises until I can't improve anymore. The previous exercises included many actual typing experiences anyway, so it should keep me entertained for a while!!
Saturday, 28 October 2017
At The End Of Basic Front-End Dev Projects: My Current Issues w/FreeCodeCamp
However, I have come to the end of the "Basic Front-End Development" block... And I've reached a sudden roadblock. Technically, yes, we should know everything we have been taught up to that point. I have a reasonable idea of how to use <div>'s and <div class>'s in order to group elements together. I even figured out, through my own research, the one thing I had always wondered... How to create a neat menu along the top, that also follows you as you scroll the page (it turns out it's just an unordered list, with some extra CSS!).
However, the biggest stumbling block was creating my own portfolio page. The "Tribute" project was much easier, as it was easy enough to create an "Ironic" page that incorporated the lyrics of Tenacious D's tribute. I found I completed a rudimentary page pretty quickly on my first attempt, without looking anything up.
Then I got to the Portfolio project. And, I put my hands up (as I increasingly regularly do): the biggest obstacle to my learning is that I am a top-tier perfectionist. If I know exactly what I want, I'll end up creating ridiculous amounts of work for myself to incorporate even the smallest, unimportant element... Even if it means I make no progress with the actual page.
This can be a helpful and important skill; as I mentioned, I have now learned something about creating navigation bars which, even weeks after first learning it, hasn't left me. The problem came when I really wanted that bar to contain a "now playing" section, displaying my currently playing Last.FM track.
In a nutshell, the biggest problem in creating a portfolio for myself is my own ridiculous set of standards. The task was significantly easier when I forced myself into the easier task of emulating my brother's stylish website... But even then, I came up with problems like trying to get a navigation bar centred, and the problems that developed with page colouring when I attempted that.
More than that, I feel as if FreeCodeCamp went from being a course that was very easy to follow, with gamification seemingly ingrained into its soul, to a task where I was suddenly thrown at the deep end. Again, technically this is stuff I have just been taught. But I feel the course could have benefited from another guided example for creating an entire web page within its learning environment (maybe with fewer hints and cues) before asking us to create our own site.
The thing is... I do have a rudimentary Portfolio page created from this as well. And I have made the decision just to submit it; as I know doing so will get me out of this rut, and looking at the continuing course, it goes back to the format of small, achievable tasks. I intend to go back and improve it as I become more knowledgeable, as well as e-mail/submit this in some way to help improve the course (hell, I would even be willing to help create the learning materials for it).
Anyway, here I present https://glitchwalker.github.io (oh, yeah, I used GitHub instead of the site they suggested; as I already have it set up to update game mod projects, and I preferred the workflow of having the entire site working and editable on my own computer already).
Free Code Camp is free to use and is available at https://www.freecodecamp.org. The learning materials are also open source, and free to use within any setting.
Friday, 27 October 2017
Thank you for being my voice. #RIPCHESTER
In terms of celebrity, no death has hit me quite as hard as that of Chester Bennington. For so many reasons... some of which I will try to get down here.
It is such an odd feeling, as I haven't really followed them for a long time... More than that, they are so deeply ingrained in the 00s nu-metal scene... I can't be the only person that loved them as a teen, then "grew out" of them... Thinking they were the heaviest metal I ever heard in my youth, whilst thinking of those songs more like pop music really as an adult. This isn't me trying to slate the band, I'm trying to explain my honest thoughts before Chester's death... And what I would probably think still were he still with us.
The honest truth is, despite these thoughts... I fucking love Linkin Park. It's so easy, with hindsight, to see them as that poppy, teeny band with baggy trousers pretending to be rockers. But the reality is they were a huge influence... There is no one quite like them. And I'd argue, without Linkin Park, there would be fewer fans of rock music in the world.
Up to the moment that they came onto the scene, even nu-metal had that feeling of sweary, screaming, sex-obsessed rocky stoners. Linkin Park crossed that divide with more melodic vocals, more personal emotions and a unique innocence that is incredibly rare in any form of popular music these days (highlighted by the fact their first two albums, as far as I'm aware, had no swearing). Few of those listening would even realise these lyrics were written by a guy who suffered child abuse; they spoke to anyone and everyone going through school and feeling their voice wasn't being. They spoke to anyone that ever felt they weren't being listened to (which, really, at some points is all of us). And they literally crossed genres, between hip-hop and metal, between rapping, screaming and singing. I remember the "Numb/Encore" mash-up being on the charts forever, and it's easy to see why... It could appeal to such a massive audience.
The band used this to grow into other genres... To a certain extent, trying to disown their previous work. I can understand why. There are some that could describe Hybrid Theory and Meteora as a smear on their career... There are others that probably felt like me, feeling a bit too old to enjoy their older work, but not really being a huge fan of their newer work. The reality is every album they released had sales most artists could only dream of. And, arguably, they had earned the right to put out whatever they wanted to create.
Despite some reports to the contrary, I had never, ever, gotten the impression they were "sell-outs", or that they were just trying to gain sales. In fact, the only time I had ever considered this was when Meteora was released (sounding like a continuation of Hybrid Theory). I still loved that album, however.
I'm realising I'm actually spending very little time on the man himself, but rather the band he was the lead singer of. All of my emotions seem tied to the work of the band itself... It was through this band that Chester spoke to me in tracks like In The End and Numb when I was suicidal, depressed, lonely. Part of me feels it's an exaggeration to put them on par with The Beetles, Michael Jackson, or David Bowie. But My honest opinion is that they had the same worldwide impact all these other artists had. And as a listener, you felt a certain, anonymous, intimacy with Chester. Without knowing his situation, you felt and empathised with the fact he was drowning in his skin... That, in the end, it didn't even matter.
This isn't more obvious than the recent music video to the track One More Light. It's a song I may never have listened to were it not for recent events. As the video went on, it was like watching a montage of my youth. With one event, that song now has such a powerful meaning for me... Like the band's own epitaph. You listen and, along with its music video, feel like maybe he is talking about himself, or suicide in general... when in actuality it was written in memory of a friend who died of cancer.
The reality is he seemed to have a tortured youth, which led to substance misuse, self-loathing. Despite that (maybe because of his experience?) he became the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the world. He always felt like a beacon of hope; an example of how you can't choose the hand you are dealt, but you can still follow your dreams. To hear of his death breaks down that construct in my head. I had the same experience with one of my closest friends... Another person who had been through the worst of life and seemed to pull through and find success/happiness... But ended up ending his own life. The meaning of their songs feels, in some ways, forever changed... Maybe even more intimate, and sincere, than we had ever imagined cranking up the volume after a day at school.