Weekly Update: Piping wires

Not many productive things have happened this week. Or anything at all. I don't know if it's because I forgot what happened or because nothing did happen. The point of these weekly updates is that I want to notice when I get stuck, maybe this is already happening? Anyway, here is what I do remember of the last week.

Gaming

As mentioned last time, I began playing Fatal Frame on PCSX2. I wanted to let my brother watch as I play (definitely not because it would be scary to play alone), and thought it would be super easy. At first I set up an owncast instance to have my personal Twitch, like a professional. Setting it up was not a problem, but then I realized something I never knew... when streaming, there is a delay of about 20 seconds. And apparently this is normal, every livestream on Twitch and such have a similar delay. I always thought it was completely live! This would not do, because I wanted to chat with my brother while playing. A delay is unaccaptable.

Then I thought okay, let's try a simpler solution. I can just share my screen right? Element can do this. But I quickly realized that wait, the game audio is obviously not shared, just my microphone... so we switched to Discord, thinking surely this software made specifically for gaming would have a feature that somehow also captures a streamed applications audio. Nope. It seems that they developed such a thing on Windows, but not on Linux.

That's where we gave up. But the next day I tried looking for a solution again, because I couldn't accept it's not doable. And I figured it out! It seems pipewire was designed to handle such use cases (which I had not known). With the use of "Helvum" [1] I coud reconnect some nodes and boom, Fatal Frame's audio stream was wired to Element's input stream in addition to my microphone. Maybe this is obvious for people with audio engineering experience, but it was not for me. Anyway, the important thing is that it works flawlessly now, and that I don't have to face jumpscares alone.

Physics

I made virtually no progress on my work. Whenever I sit down to write I get paralysed, and eventually find an excuse to postpone it. No idea how to break out of this. I wish I could "just" suck it up and write but that's easier said than done. Maybe it's similar to an art block that artists sometimes have?

Actually, I did do something: I wrote the first part of my planned series on the black hole information paradox [2]. This is basically what I am supposed to be writing, but for a broader audience. But I should finish my actual assignment first, so while writing that gemlog was fun and I hope to publish part II soon, it will probably have to wait until February!

Exercise

I have continued my daily walks but they have become shorter for now because it is very cold. It's not fun to walk for hours when I have to blow my nose every three minutes and my ears freeze off... None of the ear warming technology I have is doing its job sufficiently!

References

[1] Helvum

[2] The Information Paradox - Part I: Introduction

Posted 2022-01-23

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2022-01-29 | I really like reading your Capsule, keep It up. P. s. Are you going to continue with this science fiction story in Tibetan desert?

2022-01-29 | Hi, thank your the kind comment! Yes, I still plan to finish the story someday, but I don't know when inspiration will strike me again. To be honest I kind of forgot where I was going with it haha. But one day I'll post the final part 3 for sure. - Rie