The Albatrossian Postcards

Occasional Black Screens in KDE on Bazzite

2025-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Occasional Black Screens in KDE on Bazzite

Running Bazzite version 42.20251002 (bazzite-dx-nvidia:stable), I would sometimes experience occasional black screen flickering in KDE, when switching applications or sometimes in the middle of full-screening an application (like a game). I fixed this by setting Adaptive Sync to Never. When I did this, some games would not show the full resolution list (since I’m at 150% scaling, it would only show up to 1440p on a 4k monitor) and letting legacy X11 applications manage their own scaling allowed me to solve this second issue.

_{^{My display settings}}

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The Courage to Act (Bernanke)

2018-12-24T14:30:00+00:00

Dear W.,

Bernanke’s memoir of his journey to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve and his handling of the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008 is brilliant. He tries to bring complex monetary policy into the language of the ‘intelligent reader’ of today’s popular-science books. I learned about subprime mortgages, the downfalls of banks, the behind-the-scenes of how banks lend to each other, the banks’ bank, who insures banks, and how important language is in telegraphing the Fed’s actions during their quarterly updates.

The Courage to Act gave me a reading list and a primer to what actually happened during the Great Recession from one of the leaders behind the (ultimately) successful recovery of the US economy. Highly recommend.

.bp

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Goleman)

2018-12-24T14:00:00+00:00

Dear W.,

A few things about focus–distilling some common (and not-so-common) knowledge and backing it with studies and anecdotes. Goleman makes the argument that attention and learning to focus that attention is the ‘hidden driver of excellence’, so to speak. While not breakthrough, it was useful seeing the thread of ‘focus’ applied to other larger topics including context, systemic failures / management issues, pattern recognition, empathy, practice, and leadership.

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The Sea Inside

2017-01-27T14:00:00+00:00

Dear W.,

The Sea Inside (P. Hoare) reminds us that we are all, in some way or another, floating; in the vastness of sky, in a tide of strangers, amongst the desolation of our connected world.

I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion–Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud–seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into darkness.

It seems that our dear friend Philip feels he is home but not home, chasing whales across our oceans. His relief at returning might be the same reason (beyond mere practicality) that ships carry anchors–that in such a vastness, holdfasts are godsent.

The nearness of the sea opens up the sky.

And a dark night reveals the sky’s limitless depths.

.bp

The Relevance of Vonnegut

2016-11-12T15:00:00+00:00

Dear W.*,

Life is going to be tough again, just as soon as this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loose again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. I have several children–seven, to be exact–too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say, “Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am–Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You’re wrong.”

We are all experiencing more or less the same lifetime now.

Kurt Vonnegut, graduation address at Fredonia College, 1978.

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*W. meaning World

Coffee Reflections

2016-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Dear L.,

It is only when you stare straight down into a cup of coffee that you can see your own reflection. The angle at which you smell the blueberries and roses rising from the cup only shows you the white curvature of the ceramic in which you have imprisoned your drink. When you sip, it’s the ceiling fan or the skylight which is reflected by the geometries of a morning ritual mutual to many. But when you set the cup down on the table and really examine it, placing your face square to its rising steam, then you can see what everyone else is missing out on. And yet, in the most mocking fashion, disturb its peace–stir it from its rest only slightly–and the coffee will only share a winking, Brownian, utterly incomprehensible reflection of the outside world.

.bp

Redwood Raven

2016-03-23T19:31:00+00:00

Dear A.,

A raven followed me when I went adventuring through the redwoods just the other day. It flitted from branch to branch above my head, a lithe shadow singing lilting takk-takk-takks as I ambled the forest floor. I could hear it babble over the brook and speak over the halfway heard conversations of other adventurers. It kept at it with resounding resolve, moving just ahead and rushing to catch up to me as it fell behind. I tried talking back, sending responding takk-takk-takks careening through the redwoods, but I doubt they made any sense to this determined bird. I wonder what it was trying to say. Was it a Norwegian raven? Did it mean to say “thank you” over and over again? Perhaps it was just more curious about the open bag of artichoke bread I had than it was about me.

.bp

Zeroeth Postcard

2016-03-23T13:00:00+00:00

What can be learned?