Hey! Welcome to Stuff Worth Sharing (SWS) No. 1, a collection of stuff from across the internet that I thought was so good I should share it.
There are three reasons I have decided to write this, hopefully, weekly newsletter (we will see how that goes with university and life). The first is Installer by David Pierce which is by far my favourite newsletter, This Week in Self-Hosted which is very similar to Installer however focuses on open source self-hostable software, and finally my never ending collection of bookmarks that grows every day, but I never seem to revisit any of them, which I hope this newsletter will change.
This week, I’ve been reading and watching stuff on AI, spending far too much time setting up hyprland on both NixOS and Debian in a VM using UTM on my Mac, and playing a great new MOBA/FPS game from Valve. I also have for you a few albums that I’ve had on repeat all week.
How Ai will destroy the world and make billionaires at the same time Great article on how Microsoft is failing to hit its carbon emission goals because it is selling AI systems to fossil-fuel companies. The best part is you can listen to this article narrated by eleven labs AI generated voice (which sounds great btw).
AI can’t cross this lined and we don’t know why and The moment we stopped understanding AI Are two great YouTube videos by Welch Labs, about the inner workings of AI. I have to say that I have probably watched and read a good 100+ hours on the workings of AI and these are by far the best explanations, their easy to follow while not dumbing it down too much, to the point where the information is no longer useful. I will definitely be binge-watching the rest of their videos.
FIFTEEN ELEVEN 914 — FIFTEEN ELEVEN DESIGN LTD This has to be one of the nicest looking modern Porsche mods I’ve seen, it somehow manages to look futuristic and retro and I will be buying one when I have the funds.
Now for something a little more boring but definitely important, if you ever want to be able to afford a Porsche. An Amortization Calculator. Jokes aside, it’s actually quite interesting to just play around with and see how much money you will give away to a multi-billion dollar organisation, just so that have somewhere to live.
If you have ever made the switch from Windows or Linux to macOS like I did back in March, you will know how awful the window management is on Mac. Thankfully apple has finally decided to do something about it in macOS Sequoia. Until Sequoia, I and many other Mac users have been using apps like Magnet that essentially replicates windows implementation. However, over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out Amethyst which is in my opinion the best tilling window manager for mac. If you haven’t tried or don’t know what a tilling window manager is, I recommend you try one. It essentially organises your windows automatically based on your preference which you specify in the settings. I currently have Amethyst setup in the Tall setting, which splits the first two windows into horizontal columns and any subsequent windows get stacked vertically on the right half of the screen. With the help of WhichSpace, a little app to track which virtual desktops you have open and are currently viewing, I have completely solved my problem of loosing track of open windows.
I promised myself that after my uni semester break I would buckle down and focus solely on uni work however Valve had other plan, on August 23rd, 2024 Valve announced Deadlock a Third-Person Shooter / MOBA game, and I’m addicted. It’s a bit of a steep learning curve if you’re coming from other shooter games as it’s essentially a MOBA but once you get the hang of it It’s just so polished. The movement feels amazing comparable to Overwatch and Apex, and the community builds feature is a great way to ease new players into the MOBA aspects. If your anything like me and love to go fast in games you really enjoy the hero pocket so here is a guide by one of the best pocket players to get you started.
Throughout my many hours playing Deadlock I have been using a Windows 10 VM I set up on Proxmox with GPU pass through, which has been great. I intend to write a guide on how to get GPU pass through working as it was a lot more simple than many guides make it out to be. However, the one issue that still persisted was a lack of audio. I could have quite easily solved this problem by passing through a USB DAC and I did eventually, however, I had other requirements that I had set for this project that made my life 100x harder. That requirement was to be able to plug my headphones into one AMP and get audio from both my Mac and pc at the same time. This would have been a very simple solution if my amp supported having two inputs at once. Unfortunately, that was not the case, so I initially set out to find a digital solution to my problem. The first solution I came across was using moonlight/sunshine a self hosted remote desktop tool that is built for low latency gaming and it worked perfectly. However, it had one massive issue, it would send both video and audio and needed to encode it before sending, which would use about 50% of my GPU at all times and this would tank my fps in game. The next few solutions I tried were purpose build audio over LAN apps. I tried VB-Audio Network, Mumble, and SonuBus which all worked really well until you tried to reduce latency by lowering the samples/buffer size as it would result in packet loss causing the audio to stutter. Finally, the solution I settled on was a good old hardware solution. I passed through a spare DAC I had lying around which ran audio into an audio interface that was plugged into my Mac. To be able to actually hear the audio that the mac was receiving from the audio interface I’m now using two programs from Rouge Amoeba. The first is Loopback which lets you monitor audio inputs on a Mac and SoundSource, a tool that does many things, but most importantly lets you add a VST to the audio chain. I needed this as I was getting noise interference from the cheap USB controller used on my server motherboard. To remedy this I’m using a VST called FKFX Noise Bleach that removes the noise. I’m starting to think that it would have just been easier to install discord on the Windows vm… but my solution works.
I Made The Ultimate Cheating Device If you have ever seen those videos of people playing doom on a TI-84 calculator this video by ChromaLock on YT is that, but turned up to 11, and I’m sure it’s going to be a real pain for schools, university’s/collages all over the world.
If you didn’t already know Travis Scott is currently on his Circus Maximus tour and is coming to Melbourne on October 22nd. I have been preparing by playing DAYS BEFORE RODEO on repeat which in my opinion is his best album. It truly is Travis’s sound distilled, It’s crazy to think that not only was this his first album, but he was only 19 when it released it.
The other two albums I have had on repeat all week have been Easier Said Than Done by SamRecks, Sega is such a catchy song. The other is FEELS by Snoh Aalegra, which is perfect for falling asleep too, as it has such a warm and cosy vibe.
This is the first instalment of this series, so I’m bound to make some changes as I work out how I would like to format everything. If you have any suggestions or any stuff that you think is worth sharing pls send me a msg at [email protected]