Category: mini-blog

I have a strange permanent problem with video playback, only happening on Netflix and Amazon Prime. (But not on Hulu or YouTube)

I have a multi monitor setup – 4 monitors, 3 of them 1080p, plugged to a NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti. Whenever I stream a video from Netflix or Amazon Prime in one of the two main screens on Chrome, the screen starts alternating between flickering, going green, etc, until going completely black or green. When I close the browser (I can’t see the screen, so I press Alt F4), screen goes back to normal. I had this problem previously on a R280X setup, and i3770 & i6700

A general Google search didn’t bring up anything specific.

For now I’m skirting the problem by plugging one of the monitors to a Windows tablet and connecting to the desktop speakers via Bluetooth. (So I don’t have to do so much recabling each time I watch)

One dissipating point of Crash Course Big History: The Deep Future is how, despite being assured that it’s very, very, very, unvisualizably far away, trilliion trillion trillion…. trliion years doesn’t sound like THAT much of time – especially when you write it as “10 to the power of 100”. Like, if a consciousness was immortal, it would just sit around for a long time, and wait patiently, and poof we would be there, like at the end of a long road trip, say from Arica to Punta Arenas. It probably speaks to how efficient the logarithmic notation is at zooming out quasi-infinite amounts into a speck of information. (The notation). I’m surprised that amount of time can even be represented in earth years, as opposed to, were it to exist, the time dimension’s equivalent of “light years” for space.

I’ve seen those videos that represent the 7,000 years of known history into a moving map’s representation of territories controlled by various human polities. It’s interesting, but 7,000 years represented in this way is not that long. It would be helpful if the 10^100 year thing was represented visually as a very fast spinning of the earth, where in each frame we can see a portion of the earth (a sixth of the sphere added to the sight in each frame maybe?), and we stare into the thing for.. i don’t know, 500 hours? 50,000 hours? split into videos of 10 hours each (YouTube’s length limit) to better represent the idea of “the amount of time after which some scientists predict matter will start slowly decaying.. headed to a heat death of the universe”

i remember when my digital program coach asked what inspires me to continue to do the work. what i described was 100% field organizing, which was throwing us off the curve because we thought we would find language that described my current focus, data and automation. well, there’s inspiring, then there’s fun. if for some reason inspiring and fun became a dichotomy, i’d always choose fun.

i had some light fever yesterday, and was given oscillococcinum (anas barbariae) by a colleague. It was unusual looking (dust in a tube), so I googled it, and found the above wikipedia entry. I said thanks but no thanks. Instead of ingesting some sugar and hoping it acts on the virus, I’ll get plain old traditional western medicine.