View on GitHub

Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Articles on impending recession

quorten

2019-03-18

Categories: personal-finance  
Tags: personal-finance  

More information on the impending recession that we are anticipating?

So, these articles have rather different commentary. On one hand is simple advice on how to develop your personal finances when a future recession is in anticipation. On another hand, one article points out that today’s recessions are more determined by the credit cycle of federal policies than by business cycles of expansion and contraction. Finally, the last article comments on 10 signs to look for that a recession is coming or has arrived.

20190318/DuckDuckGo new york times booming economy signs of future recession
20190318/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/business/trump-recession-forecast.html
20190318/https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2018/08/03/is-the-next-recession-on-its-way/#2516f4a34837
20190318/https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2018/05/15/the-credit-cycle-signals-that-recession-is-around-the-corner/#7174e4617519
20190318/https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/04/23/get-ready-for-the-next-recession-10-signs-to-watch/?slreturn=20190218172339

Trial notes on trying to solve slow VNC problem

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

I have been using VNC recently but suffering from slow performance. What is the cause of this? Purportedly it could be reliance on GPU communications that end up turning slow, or just some configuration gone wrong on my particular GNU/Linux distribution.

So, here I put my notes from my search, but a solution to my particular problem is still inconclusive.

How to use VNC and avoid slowness.

20190315/DuckDuckGo vino vnc running slow
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre running slow
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre vnc running slow
20190315/https://help.realvnc.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002450292-Slow-performance
20190315/https://askubuntu.com/questions/673968/regarding-graphical-issues-and-performance-in-ubuntu-14-04-lts-server-with-gui/674656#674656
20190315/DuckDuckGo vnc without monitor
20190315/https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/430465-VNC-without-monitor-connected
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre slow performance
20190315/DuckDuckGo ubuntu good vnc client
20190315/https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC/Clients

Looking for causes of slow VNC performance

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

So, I was recently using VNC on some local computers, but suffering from unusually slow performance not due to the network. So, what was the cause of this? Looking around, it appears to be related to screen graphics drivers, some drivers will result in slow fetching of the screen to send to VNC.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a real solution to my problem, so for now, I’ll just leave some pointers to some useful information that I’ve found. Note that vino/vinagre were the particular VNC software I was using.

20190315/DuckDuckGo vino vnc running slow
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre running slow
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre vnc running slow
20190315/https://help.realvnc.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002450292-Slow-performance
20190315/https://askubuntu.com/questions/673968/regarding-graphical-issues-and-performance-in-ubuntu-14-04-lts-server-with-gui/674656#674656
20190315/DuckDuckGo vnc without monitor
20190315/https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/430465-VNC-without-monitor-connected
20190315/DuckDuckGo vinagre slow performance
20190315/DuckDuckGo ubuntu good vnc client
20190315/https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC/Clients

Troubleshooting Linux webcam issues

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: media-prog  
Tags: media-prog  

Trouble using a webcam on Linux with Cheese webcam booth? Make sure you set the resolution to something that is supported by the webcam, i.e. its native resolution. Then you should be able to get a picture fine.

Try using the webcam in luvcvideeo or guvcvideo. It will probably work there, even if it doesn’t work in Cheese. Take note of the resolution it operates at.

Trouble using a webcam on Linux with Cheese webcam booth?

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: media-prog  
Tags: media-prog  

Trouble using a webcam on Linux with Cheese webcam booth? Make sure you set the resolution to something that is supported by the webcam, i.e. its native resolution. Then you should be able to get a picture fine.

Try using the webcam in luvcvideeo or guvcvideo. It will probably work there, even if it doesn’t work in Cheese. Take note of the resolution it operates at.

Young versus old in modern American politics

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Very interesting article on politics here. The modern American political divide is not Democrat versus Republican. Rather, it is the young versus the old. The old tend to own a lot of real estate and live out in more rural areas, whereas the young tend to live in the cities. And so on and so forth.

20190314/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/america-baby-boomer-old-generation_n_5c82db8de4b0ed0a00136b0c

Trouble with Google ReCAPTCHA

quorten

2019-03-15

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

So, recent brands of Google ReCAPTCHA sometimes deliberately feed you humanly impossible challenges to solve. Yes, indeed the complaints on the Internet are widespread, but today I tried an experiment to see if I could file any reasonable feedback with Google on the issue. My attempt has turned out in failure.

What did I do to try? Well, first, ReCAPTCHA has some feedback link you can click on. I clicked on that, and I got brought to a marketing website advertising the new ReCAPTCHA service to web developers. Not helpful from an end-user standpoint. But, anyways, I continued to play along with their game. Okay, if I can’t get end-user support, I can get developer support on their Google group for developers, right? Okay, treading further, I pretty quickly realize that the Google group for developers was setup by Google as an attempt to not have to do any work answering developer questions. Oh, come on, we’ve set up this community where all users can chat together, hopefully some more experienced users will already know the answer to the question, answer it for us, and we won’t have to do any work.

Treading further into that forum, I found some interesting evidence that I was not the only one. On the forum, there were some recent posts by clear end-users, rather than developers, asking about their difficulty in using ReCAPTCHA.

So, my summary of the experience:

  • Google has virtually zero customer support. I can affirm that.

Read on →

American politics: Not black versus white, young versus old

quorten

2019-03-14

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

Politics. Now, this is a very interesting article about the political divide in the United States. Is it really of race, black versus white, as many people think? Nope, that is not the real political divide. The real political divide is young versus old, where the opposing political parties are united by a a generational divide.

20190314/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/america-baby-boomer-old-generation_n_5c82db8de4b0ed0a00136b0c

Reflection on my bad experience with Google customer support

quorten

2019-03-14

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

My bad experience with Google ReCAPTCHA customer support, I can affirm this would very well apply with anyone whose used Google Cloud Platform and got a nasty automated E-mail threatening to close their account if they don’t reply in a short period of time.

  • Google has virtually zero customer support. I can affirm that.

  • Google sells their services to web developers and advertisers. Unfortunately, the other customer-facing services did not evolve.

  • If you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you are the product being sold.