Tips from A Guide to the Good Life
Written by William Irvine, and summarized below. Read on 2022-06-19.
Blog
GPU Power Crashes
For a few months, while running my Windows 11 VM with a GPU passthrough-ed, I was getting random reboots/screen hangs. There was a clear pattern - the reboots/hangs occured whenever I launched a resource-intensive application on the VM, such as a game.
In an effort to trace down the problem, I looked through dmesg (truncated for brevity) for various boots:
The Biohacker Lifestyle
Recently, I met one of my friends who, I last recall, was quite invested in the processes of altering one's diet, environment and behavioral patterns, so as to improve the quality of life (think Andrew Huberman or, taken to the extreme, Brian Johnson, a billionaire spending $2M yearly to reverse aging). This refers to maintaining a Paleolithic, low stress (both biological and mental), back-to-basics type of living in current, modern, high pressure society (e.g. Singapore).
Impersonation
Recently I read 'A Head Full of Ghosts' by Paul Tremblay. It's a novel, similar to the Exorcist, but different in that the entire sequence of events has been filmed by a TV crew for a show, and one of the protagonist is actively critiquing the theatric aspect of the show, while narrating the actual creepy events.
Designing my own immutable OS
What an immutable OS is Fedora Silverblue
another user's experience with various customizations: https://wstyler.ucsd.edu/posts/silverblue_fixes.html
Ublue - customization ability with recipe.yml (startingpoint)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM5exNztbXE (Jorge's Guide to the Ultimate Silverblue Desktop)
Syncing my Kindle with calibre-web, KOReader and Syncthing
I own an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2nd generation). For the longest time, I was looking for a solution that would enable me to sync my reading progress between my phone and Kindle, as well as transfer books between all devices wirelessly.
I finally managed to accomplish this with Syncthing, KOReader and Calibre-Web.
Syncthing Topology
I use Syncthing, a peer-to-peer filesharing program for my devices (most recently on my Kindle as well). There are a few network topologies possible in such a setup.
Doctors and Bus Drivers
Are doctors more important than bus drivers?
Most people would generally agree that while all jobs are important, certain jobs are more important than others. For example, a surgeon performs operations to save lives, while a bus driver ferries people from location to location.
That being said, it is interesting to attempt to argue from the other side, and push for bus drivers being at least equal, if not more important than doctors. The focus on bus drivers here is arbitrary - bus drivers could be changed to say, train drivers.
Yjs vs Traditional Databases
Yjs is a conflict-free, replicated data type, which allows for distributed, collaborative editing and offline synchronization, with automatic conflict resolution.
It can also be used as a database backend.
Recently, I was deciding between Yjs and the Prisma + tRPC + SQLite combination. As it was a small todo-style app, I settled on Yjs.
Here are the factors I considered for this decision.
The Best Way to Cook Beans
Beans (also known as legumes) are an excellent source of protein and fibre, and are also one of the lowest GI (glycemic index) foods available. They are also relatively cheap.
However, legumes contain sugars known as galactooligosaccharides (GOS) which are non-digestible, and hence ferment in the gut. While they have benefits, such as being a prebiotic (stimulating the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut), the fermentation process can cause gassiness, bloating, flatulence and even nausea.