📼 If all humans died, when would the last light go out?
Randall Munroe, from XKCD, has a new video for the What if series, exploring how long would it take for artificial lights to go out if all humans suddenly disappeared.
📝 My sleep quality is getting poorer by the day
I don't know what the fuck is going on, but my sleep quality, which was already bad, has decreased dramatically over the last weeks. I can sleep, but I have a very light sleep and wake up much more tired than I used to. Somedays, I feel so exhausted and dizzy that it takes me over an hour to get out of bed, and even then, I stumble on everything during the first hour or two after getting up. I can't even go down the stairs without grabbing the railing to avoid falling.
🔗 “9 Best Free and Open Source Terminal-Based Internet Radio Apps”
If you listen to online radio and prefer a client for the terminal, check this article on LinuxLinks.
💻 Goodbye, Neofetch, and thanks for all the fish
Neofetch is no more. The git repository for the venerable tool to show off the users' window manager configurations on /r/unixporn was archived and will no longer be maintained. Granted, it hadn't received a commit for around 3 years, so this is not unexpected.
🎮 Grand Utopia
Image from the Grand Utopia website. All rights reserved to the project
I uninstalled Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2) a few weeks ago. I needed the space to install another game and try it out. That game was cool but not as good as ETS2, so I replaced it with the truck driving simulator. However, after watching a streamer use it, I added the Grand Utopia mod.
Grand Utopia is a map mod of a fictional island, partially inspired by the game's French map. The best thing about it is it uses a 1:1 scale, unlike the official game maps, which means a trip takes around the same time as it would in real life for its distance. The scenery is also well made but uses more graphic elements, so expect it to utilize more resources.
I've been playing with this mod for over a week and enjoy it very much. The new places to unlock, the beautiful sceneries, and the 1:1 scale add to a pleasant gaming experience. I cannot recommend it enough.
If you want to try Grand Utopia, there's one thing you need to do: create a new profile. It won't work with your current profiles and will even crash the game if you try to force it on an existing one.
📝 Research on fibromyalgia seems to have stalled
I have fibromyalgia, a hell that began almost four years ago. During the first two years, more or less, I read a lot of studies. Still, none got me genuinely excited. That is until a team in Sweden decided to see if the syndrome has an autoimmune origin. The first part of their investigation points to that, and there was subsequent Research from another team that also showed solid evidence of this hypothesis being correct. The second part of the Swede's is still pending.
As far as I know, that's it for Research. A team or even two might be doing work around fibromyalgia, but publishing it will probably take a while. Even after that, assuming the identification of the syndrome's origin and the development of an effective treatment, it will take even more time to adjust the current shitty therapies available that fail miserably at keeping the pain at bay or at least at non-hellish levels.
Every day, the hope of getting access to an effective treatment for fibromyalgia during my lifetime fades away, little by little.
💻 Toggle screen blanking and screensaver on X11 from the terminal
I've been having an issue on i3wm that's been bugging me: the screen blanking doesn't get disabled with software like caffeine or stimulator. Both used to work but suddenly stopped, and I have no idea why.
Fortunately, there's xset to manage the screen blanking and screensaver from the terminal.
I wrote a function for my shell (zsh) to make it more interactive and easier to use. On a window manager, I can attribute keybindings to specific options to toggle the screen blanking and the screensaver or query their statuses, then get a notification about the change or the query.
📼 A brief history of how we got hooked on coffee
💻 Plasma 6 minimal session
Image from the KDE website. All rights reserved to the project
Plasma 6.0.0 was released recently and two minor releases, 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 are already out, too. If you're on Arch Linux and you want to try this desktop environment but prefer to have a minimal set of packages, I have a metapackage you can use as is or to build your own. You can get it at Codeberg or Github.
💉 How to manage stress with high blood pressure?
I recently found out I have stage two high blood pressure, the level just below a hypertensive crisis. My blood pressure is between 160 and 165 (systolic) and 100 and 108 (diastolic).
I should've known. For a few months, I felt a few chest pains occasionally, but I attributed them to fibromyalgia and the stress it has brought into my life. I was wrong, so very wrong. If you feel your chest hurts, see a doctor ASAP. Don't be a dumbass like me.