Jason Sherman's home page on the web.

Blog entry 20250319-2212

It was windy here, today. I went out on my bike and argued with it for a while... Then turned around and chased it. If my GPS tracker on my phone is to be trusted, I violated a 25mph speed limit on one leg of the downhill switchback, with the wind to my back. ^_^' Glad I've got quite good breaks on that bike.

Then I came home and hunted down the minuscule puncture that's been slowly deflating my other bike's tire for the last week. Busy evening.

Blog entry 20250131-2056

It's been a minute since I wrote anything here, huh? Shameful.

I watched a video on the YouTube where TalkingHead105498315 was ranting about why he's left Windows, and how some of his stuff is on Mac (and evidently some people give him crap about it) and some of his stuff is on Linux (particularly gaming).

I switched my gaming rig over to Linux-only about 9 months ago, now, and I thought maybe I'd share some of my experiences.

To begin with, my system has been set up to dual-boot Windows and Linux for years. Debian Unstable, to have very recent kernels and drivers available. It's had its hiccups - you do get the bugs in your teeth sometimes when you ride the bleeding edge - but I've had a lot of success running various games over the years: WoW, Descent Freespace, Fallout 3, Fable 1 and 3, SupCom:FA, Minecraft...

Switching full time meant...

• updating Linux
• copying out my user profile (save games, Firefox profile, and various files)
• destroying my Windows partition and expanding my Linux partition into that space
• adding a drive big enough to save me redownloading most of my Steam library
• moving everything from the old NTFS partition to the new drive w/ ext4
• mkfsing the old NTFS partition into ext4
• rearranging various games to put the longer load times on the faster drive
• putting the Firefox profile where it belongs on Linux
• I'm still sorting out savegames as I pick various games back up - they wind up in the nightmare of different places Steam stuffs the different proton-wine base directories for the different games. That is most definitely a prime opportunity for improvement.

I've done the lion's share of my gaming since conversion in Steam. Though I kinda hate the DRM component of it, the convenience of it is super enticing. I've logged a lot of hours in Return to Moria, Orcs Must Die 2 and 3, The Planet Crafter, Satisfactory, Halo (Master Chief Collection, which wouldn't even launch on Win7), SW:TOR, WoW, Doom Eternal, Octopath Traveler II, No Man's Sky, NieR:Automata, SupCom:FA, Turing Complete, Valheim, and others...

It's not a flawless experience. I'm still trying to get Steam to give up rendering fonts w/ the assumption of sub-pixel rendering (which I loathe and disable on my system). Occasionally I'll have a game that mysteriously won't launch (I had to delete the intro movie for OMD3 so it'd skip straight to the main menu).

On the flip, WoW went from ~70 FPS to ~150 FPS. I decide when I update my OS (it won't ever disrupt my gaming). My >10 year old 4-core CPU is playing any game I've a mind for it to play. No TPM, no UEFI boot, no gigantic sucking noise in the vicinity of my storage as Windows keeps every version of every file it ever updates.

In the last 15 years, Linux has progressed from not an option for gaming, to almost ready, to actually viable. It may still not be for beginners, but for those who are familiar with Linux, it's absolutely a good choice.

Blog entry 20181222-1209

I figured out my headset was broke, so I got a new one. And, after briefly testing out the new one, I decided to tinker with Audacity some, and this thing happened.

That's the first such that I've made... probably not the last.

Blog entry 20180921-2201

CGP Grey made this little video that I found insightful:

Thinking About Attention -- Walk with Me

I don't feel like I'm in the space he's concerned about falling into, but I am aware that I have made some conscious choices about not engaging with certain attention draining things. I have a handful of podcasts that I enjoy, but I'm not scooping up more hand over fist. I occasionally find my way to a reddit post, but only when I've hit a search result from there. I've elected not to engage with SnapTwitBookstaGram (or similar) at all. I watch very few movies or TV shows. I do follow a select set of YouTube channels, which I consume mostly with the Subscription page (thank goodness they haven't corrupted that horribly, yet)...

But all that said, I think Grey's on to something here.

My choices do have consequences, but I feel like I have an ability to focus my attention that many others appear not to have. I work with a group of people who have made similar choices about engaging with much of the Social Media world, and I feel like we all benefit from that limitation.

Anyway, probably Grey won't ever see my blog post, but I do thank him for sharing his comments, and I hope you enjoy them, and maybe have a think about what you do with your attention, too.