Posts

So I have a bone to pick with how some games approach their world design. The concept of an open world is not new and often provides gamers with an immersive experience where you can go where you want and do as you please (within the game’s boundaries of course). There are so many great examples for this of which I have played only a small subset but the Assassin’s Creed franchise comes to mind here. I love the experience of a historic settings of real-world places to some of which I’ve been personally. Especially part two and Syndicate stood out to me in that department because both Renaissance Italy and Victorian London are beautiful environments on screen. ...

The Origin launcher is a blight upon the galaxy. Period. It just sucks. Unfortunately the company making it and forcing it on people happens to be the publisher of some of my favorite game franchises, namely all of the current Star Wars games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’m not willing to refrain from playing any of them because of ideological reasons. An added difficulty is that Origin doesn’t play too nicely with Linux. I have difficulty entering my passwords and having them recognized properly, it’s fairly slow to load, it starts multiple Origin instances of processes when I start a game for some reason and it tries to force yet another overlay on me that results in stutter, window minimization and sometimes even crashes. I’m not a fan of overlays in general, they break my immersion, but Steam lets me disable theirs easily enough at least. ...

A few years back I made the full switch to Linux for all of my personal machines for a couple of reasons (which you can read about here). For the most part this was a painless transition which came with many more upsides than downsides for me and I was quite happy about it. However, one big deterrent for many people is the gaming situation on Linux. Since I am a non-professional gamer myself and this is one of my primary hobbies this was a potential issue for me and I want to write about the experience a bit. ...

This is a short story about performance, profiling and optimization. First, some backstory. For my current job I’m doing quantum chemical calculations on proteins. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry, it’s not important for this article. However, this means that I’m working with data files that contain the structure of proteins a lot. The most popular file format is called PDB and the part of it that is interesting to me is the information about atoms, atom names, atom types, atom positions and so on. ...

Nowadays, I get the impression that most people realize how dependent we all are on the tech giants. Those few companies that are worth more than some countries and which shaped the internet of today to the point that, without them, most of it would simply break down. Most people also seem to know, at least to some degree, that companies like Google, Amazon and especially Facebook are not totally benign and do some pretty shady stuff with people’s data (to put it mildly). ...