Alternatives to Mac OS

Since Apple seems to be working very hard on alienating their Mac user base by introducing poorly designed “innovative” products with incredibly bad and unreliable keyboards, very breakable display cables, keyboards that rub on the display and abrade coating, and ports that would be excellent if everybody already used them for everything, which is not the case, I think I’m not alone in trying to figure out a plan B in case they just refuse to listen and keep releasing increasingly overpriced unreliable garbage.

Linux would be great on desktop if someone actually worked for real money on making it usable. So far, everybody just spawns distros that aren’t actually fixing the real issues, and I really tried making several of them work for me, but the list of issues is too profound for me to even get into. It’s a steaming pile of garbage designed to look good on screenshots and presentations, but which breaks apart when you try to actually use it. Also, Linux managed to alienate commercial software developers to the point where things don’t seem to have much hope of getting better.

Windows, on the other hand, has another set of flaws: updates are intrusive, frequent and tend to break the system ih a high percentage of cases. Also, it installs stupid games and other software without asking anyone, wasting space and bandwidth and annoying me in the process. Privacy concerns are significant. However, unlike Linux it actually runs all the software I need, and the hardware actually runs much faster under Windows than it does under Linux, no matter what the penguin geeks tell you. Windows 10 actually has the quickest boot out of all 3 desktop OSes, it has greatest hardware compatibility and the only thing it actually misses is the ability to run Unix console and software natively.

Or at least it used to be the case. Enter the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It’s basically something you turn on in Windows by running the following command in PowerShell (as admin):

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux 

Then you reboot the system when prompted, and then go to the Windows store and install one of the WSL “distros”, such as Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, Kali, Arch, Fedora, or whatever. I’m using Ubuntu because I’m familiar with where stuff is. You install this “package”, open it and follow instructions. When it’s done creating your user account, you can install the service packages, for instance mysql-server, apache2, php, python and the like. Every shell application I tried works, except for nmap.

WSL, despite the name, doesn’t have much to do with Linux, since it doesn’t contain the Linux kernel; instead, it uses a translation matrix which translates Linux system calls to something Windows kernel can understand. It actually reports Windows kernel:

Linux DANIJEL-KANTA 4.4.0-17763-Microsoft #379-Microsoft Wed Mar 06 19:16:00 PST 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Considering how it does its thing, it’s a lesser miracle that it works as well as it does, and it does work well.

All host partitions are mounted in /mnt and are presented as letters, in the usual DOS/Windows fashion.

danijel@DANIJEL-KANTA:~$ ls /mnt 
c d e

You can symlink the host directories into your WSL home folder; for instance, Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Dropbox etc., and when you modify them from WSL, the modifications are of course visible from Windows.

danijel@DANIJEL-KANTA:~$ ln -s /mnt/c/Users/danij/Dropbox/ .

Just don’t try to access the WSL directories from Windows because that won’t end well. There are other issues: the terminal in which the WSL runs doesn’t support tabs and has the PowerShell clipboard behavior, which is “standard” only in Windows, and incredibly confusing. Also, the Linux GUI applications don’t run by default. Both those issues can be resolved.

In order to run Linux GUI apps, you need an X11 server. This needs to be installed in Windows. People usually recommend XMing, but I advise against it because of the unreliable clipboard behavior. There is a version of XMing compiled in Visual C++ called VcXsrv, which solves this problem, however LibreOffice hangs when attempting to run in it, so I ended up purchasing X410 app from Microsoft store; it’s commercial and seems to work the best (edit: I had stability issues with it, it just seems to hang for no reason). Also, once you are able to run Linux GUI apps, you can install and run your Linux terminal emulator of choice, such as gnome-terminal, mate-terminal, or whatever. This solves the lack of a multi-tab terminal and gives you the expected Linux keyboard shortcuts.

sudo apt-get install gnome-terminal gedit galculator geeqie

Another problem is that the processes you start don’t detach from the terminal, which would be the preferred behavior. This can be fixed by writing the following /usr/local/bin/run script:

#!/bin/bash 
$1 $2 $3 </dev/null &>/dev/null &

Make it executable with

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/run

and you’re set. Of course, in order for Linux to know where to send the GUI apps, you will need to append the ~/.bashrc file with the following lines:

DISPLAY=:0.0 
export DISPLAY

Also, you will need to apply the dbus fix in order for things to work properly:

sudo apt-get install dbus-x11

You should also cat /etc/machine-id to verify that it’s a valid UUID with no dashes, and if it is, you can now run your Linux GUI apps:

You start them by invoking the “run” script we wrote before:

run gnome-terminal

This works great for almost everything, but I did write a few scripts that make things quicker, such as “edit”:

danijel@DANIJEL-KANTA:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/edit 
#!/bin/bash
run gedit $1

Essentially, such scripts invoke the “run” command with pre-defined parameters: gnome editor and filename in this case. You can make similar scripts for terminal, or LibreOffice writer:

danijel@DANIJEL-KANTA:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/writer  
#!/bin/bash
run libreoffice --writer $1

The way to open documents is with xdg-open, but of course it doesn’t detach from terminal so you would need to write a /usr/local/bin/open script invoking run:

#!/bin/bash 
run xdg-open $1 $2

As an example, this will open a PDF:

open price_list.pdf

It’s actually awesome that the application you run from WSL doesn’t have to be a Linux app, it can also be a native Windows one, and you can design your run-scripts accordingly. For instance, this version of /usr/local/bin/edit runs the Notepad++ which is Windows-native:

#!/bin/bash 
/mnt/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe $1

Unfortunately, you would actually need to write such run-scripts unless you want to manually add every Windows application to PATH, because manually typing this shit every time you want to edit something is not an option.

Good news which might eliminate the need for most of these hacks is that Microsoft seems to be working on a new and improved terminal for both WSL and PowerShell, and also on WSL2 which will actually include a Linux kernel.

So, with all those hacks included, is Windows 10 a good replacement for Mac OS? I guess it depends. First of all, Mac is not really a hack-free solution if you want a usable terminal environment. It’s missing almost all useful GNU shell tools out of the box, and those need to be installed via Homebrew or Macports. Also, its terminal needs a bit of tweaking in order to look good and work well. And I still have a Linux virtual machine on my Macbook pro, just in case. And there’s occasionally that odd piece of software that happens to run only on Windows. So, whichever way you decide to go you are unlikely to avoid workarounds and tweaks. Also, Time Machine on a Mac is a lifesaver: if your Mac happens to die without a warning, you can buy a new one and simply restore it from backup, and in a few hours you’ll have a carbon copy of your old machine, fully working. With Windows, 3rd party solutions exist and work well, but the built-in backup system was trash the last time I was unfortunate enough to attempt it, and it failed to do anything useful, forcing me to do a full system rebuild from ground up, taking days to get everything right. This sounds like a little thing, but I assure you it isn’t, especially when you have work to do and your main machine is FUBARed. It’s such a big deal I’d gladly pay a bit more money for a Mac, but if a Mac is built like shit and also overpriced, I might just get annoyed enough to look for alternatives, even if they require 3rd party solutions and hacks. I do use Windows on my desktop machine, and WSL with the aforementioned tweaks works really well, but the real question is what I would do if my Macbook pro suddenly died. I guess I would still wait for Apple to fix their present SNAFU, but I’m preparing just in case they don’t.

Would you recognize God?

There’s an interesting question I’ve been asking myself lately: would people be able to recognize an incarnation of God, if this incarnation failed to conform to their expectations?

I always find it funny how people just assume they have an infallible sense for detecting God, assuming you just can’t go wrong with something as big, and yet Jesus was crucified for “pretending to be God”, Milarepa was poisoned for “pretending to be enlightened”, Buddha had a sworn enemy, Devadatta, who tried to discredit him in all possible ways and tried to kill him, and Krishna was routinely maligned and insulted by his enemies, who tried to kill him almost on a daily basis. So, you will forgive me if I don’t just accept it as a fact that people will automatically and trivially detect an incarnation of God, and, even if they did, that they would react positively to one.

The implicit assumption is, of course, that an incarnation of God will have lightning bolts coming from his arse and there would be so much obvious power and omniscience demonstrated that all doubt would be automatically removed. That is basically the argument under which Jesus was crucified: he didn’t have lightning bolts coming out of his arse and claimed to be God. Let’s kill him.

People seem to concentrate on the “God” part, and not the “incarnation” part. They expect God to simply break the world by manifesting in it, because He’s so powerful He’ll simply crush every obstacle in His path. But that’s not how the “incarnation” part works. The incarnation thing means you are human, with human properties and constraints. If you’re God, it only means your soul is bigger and made of higher substance. However, unless someone can verifiably demonstrate his ability to detect the type and size of a soul incarnate in any specific body, I will reserve the right to doubt his ability to recognize an incarnate God.

People can’t even reliably discern between authentic and fake gurus, if evidence is to be believed. It’s quite a subjective thing. People expect some help in form of a manifestation of some superpower which will remove all doubt, but, again, that’s not how this works. Even if someone manifests some spiritual power, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t also fondle little boys’ genitals in the back room. Also, people have rules for detecting a disciplined, diligent monk by listing behavioural traits, and expect a spiritual master to be an obviously stronger signal on the radar, and from this they expect God to be recognizable beyond a shadow of doubt.  However, that’s not how things work.

Hindus are much more experienced than Westerners in this regard. They know that Gods, gurus and sadhus can be incredibly hard to detect, and if you fail you can get seriously burned. There is ample scriptural and anecdotal evidence of people being rude to saints and gods because they mistook them for some ordinary person, and were punished. As a result, they prefer treating a fake sadhu with respect, because treating a genuine sadhu with disrespect can be karmically very expensive. It’s much safer to treat everybody as if they are God or a saintly person, than to risk treating God or a saint as an impostor, or with disrespect. It’s essentially a variation of the Pascal matrix: something can be God or not, and I can either identify it correctly or not. The only solution in which I really get burned is if something is God and I treat it poorly.

So, again, incarnate God has the “incarnate” part in common with every other human. This is a given. He can manifest some properties and abilities that are out of the ordinary, but those are not in the order of magnitude that would immediately remove all doubt. In fact, I would say that the only thing I would expect an incarnate God to do better than an incarnation of an average soul-type, if there is such a thing at all, is the desire to seek God and the ability to detect Him when present. Yes, this means it takes one to know one, and that’s why an incarnation of God is positively identified by saints and negatively identified by the worst people living at the time. He has all the incarnate angels as followers and all the incarnate demons as enemies. The Bhagavata-purana is all about this. This fact is reiterated again and again, and that is something the Hindus are quite familiar with, at least in theory.

Also, people expect an incarnation of God to manifest super-saintly behaviour, and I see no reason why that would be so, or, at least, why true holiness of an incarnate God’s behaviour would be recognized as such. People are trained to recognize holiness in its apollonic form – for instance, practicing a religion and praying devoutly, but is that really what you would do if you were God, trapped in flesh, separated from your true form, unable to think clearly, with memory wiped, unable to use your powers, surrounded by, well, mostly demons? If you were God born as a human, and if you saw religious people, would they look like someone who practices something that leads to what you instinctively perceive as your true being, your “home”? No, they would look deluded and empty and their actions obviously worthless. You would appear to be more crazy than normal, in your wild attempts to figure things out, to break free, to go back to somewhere you forgot but know that it exists. You wouldn’t know what it is, just that it is great, awesome, that it is in the direction of knowledge and blissful power and peace and knowing your true nature and being safe and invulnerable and separate from all evil, ignorance and filth. You would perhaps try sex, drugs, alcohol, music, books, movies, calm peace of the sunset, breath control, hypnosis, study of science, fast driving… you get the picture, you would try all sorts of things that feel extreme, trying out things because it is not obvious what will bring you closer to that feeling that you can’t explain, but which is everything.

You would not look like a stereotypical saint, or a spiritual person, let alone God. Most likely, people would think you’re a weird person that experiments with all sorts of weird things, doesn’t mix nicely with normal people and is best left alone. The very idea that someone like that is a super-soul (a much more correct and appropriate term than God) is something that would never cross people’s minds, because they would expect a super-soul to be someone super-successful in the ordinary things. However, a super-soul is not likely to be interested in the ordinary things. One like that is likely to be in super amounts of pain from simply existing in this limited form, because the most “super” part of his existence is the ability to feel the loss of what he or she can no longer access, but can feel that it existed. It’s a clear case of missing what you appear never to have had, and this feeling of loss is something so strong and painful, it will motivate one to try with incredible persistency to get it back, or, if it doesn’t seem possible, it will cause such devastating feeling of loss, one would be inclined to drown it in quite extreme and desperate ways. So, yes, if an incarnate God finds the Ariadne’s thread that seems to lead him or her back home, you will occasionally get a great saint, an expert in meditation and sophisticated spiritual practices. However, if one doesn’t manage to find it, you will get a struggling person in incredible spiritual pain, lashing out, acting strangely, and being everything but what you would expect.

I find it funny when some people think they “recognized me”. I would like to show them what I looked like before I got my shit together and practiced very advanced forms of yogi energetics for years. They would most likely look at me with pity or scorn, and I am absolutely certain they would not recognize a tulku in the process of self-organization. What they “recognized” is that I used my spiritual power to focus their mind, open their vertical, enhance the “Kundalini” flow through their system, essentially smash their body and soul together by sheer force, and then create a way for their awakened form towards what I myself strive towards. Essentially, I spiritually fist-fucked them, and the fact that they “recognized me” isn’t some great feat. Recognizing me doesn’t make you a saint, it’s more like not-recognizing me makes you a complete fuckwit, because I used such overpowering force you can’t fucking miss that. Even Romana didn’t recognize worth a damn. She mailed me about some stupid bullshit, I recognized that she might be “something”, and when we met I “recognized” her as the mother of my children, and she told me she doesn’t hug strangers. Sure, half an hour later when I had pushed her energetic system to its maximum limits it turned out that it responds to the highest energies that I could invoke, which is quite rare since most people usually have minimal response and only on the anahata spectrum, then she “recognized” me, but what did she really do? “Oh, this guy here has immense spiritual superpowers, he must be God or something”? No shit, Einstein. Had you figured that out half an hour before, that is something I would have found impressive, but now, it only means you’re not a complete fucking retard.

I’ll tell you what’s impressive. Biljana went into a library, and in a pile of returned books she found one of mine, and she saw my picture on the back. It hit her so hard, her whole life reassembled around it. She found a contact e-mail address and messaged me with something inconspicuous, and when I read it she was in my fucking mind, like, her presence was in my inner space. I immediately invited her to come and meet me, and you know what I did then? Nothing. I didn’t ram her system with force, not then, not ever, because I felt it was not only unnecessary but actually counterproductive. She did every single fucking thing herself, her system completely awoke and reassembled just because I was there and she felt me, not the energies I directed, but me. She was the only person besides me who could feel on the soul level, not on the energy level. And you know what my “students” perceived of her, and of what just happened? Two things: “jack” and “shit”. I felt they wouldn’t even believe me if I told them, because there wasn’t an energy exchange, which is the only thing they could feel. To them, she was just a very beautiful young girl who was freaked out to the point of not being able to talk. To me, she was my true wife, the one person in the world who could recognize me with my power off, because she actually saw me.

So yeah, I went to India and saw Sai Baba who was supposedly an avatar, and whom Sanat Kumar even presented to me as my guru, using super sophisticated trickery, and I saw everything he is and does, and he wasn’t able to detect me when I shut my power down. I once went to an “Esoterica Croatica” New Age meeting of all kinds of charlatans, and not only that nobody detected me when I had my power down, I actually did an experiment and turned it to “full on” at one moment, and only a single person saw it, who obviously was the only true psychic there and not a charlatan. Her name was Neda Bolić, I think. She looked right at me, but I intentionally avoided eye contact and since I looked very understated, she thought she must have made a mistake. I saw Makaja in person once and I put so much power through the entire room that my two students there started doing kriyas to release the overload, and he detected nought but my two friends, Jack and Shit. I saw a “prophet” Vera Čudina with one of my students, I did a passive scan of everything in her context, and she didn’t figure out who she was dealing with. So yes, some people “recognize me” when I fry their brains with spiritual power, and some don’t even have the spiritual receptors for that; no response for spiritual power whatsoever, and some of those people pose as gurus and psychics. Only one person was able to have a complete spiritual experience with me in the passive mode, and later on all those “students” who “recognized me” and had “deep spiritual connection” with me basically conspired to ruin her life and keep her away from me, which was one of the worst fucking nightmares I endured in this less-than-fluffy life, and was karmically devastating for those involved.

So yeah, will people recognize God. It’s been tried, and the results are in.

Incels and cat ladies

I’ve seen women online scornfully refer to men who criticize them as “incel”, which is an abbreviation for “involuntary celibate”, essentially someone who wants to have sex but nobody wants him. And it always looks like this: “I’m a super hot feminist progressive slut in my 20s and I can have all the sex I want, and the guys who call me a slut are incels living in their mom’s basement”. The moment I read this my mental time lapse video fast-forwards ten years into the future, when the slut in question says something in the order of “I’m a woman in my 30s and I just can’t find a right man to settle. Where have all the good men gone? Also, I have a problem with my cats, they are peeing in my bed, does anyone know how to train them not to?”

Yeah. Apparently there was some survey indicating that women think 80% of men to be below average, which essentially means that 100% of women will compete for 20% of men. I would actually say it’s worse: 80% of women will compete for the top 1% of men, and those most attractive men will essentially go through women taking their pick, and changing them for a newer model every few months or years like they do cars, and it will be very easy for women to have sex, but almost impossible to form a long-term relationship with the men they target. Of course they won’t even think about marrying someone whom they consider “beneath them”, and so you have the stereotypical situation from the paragraph above, with girls in their 20s thinking they are on top of the world because everybody wants to fuck them and they think it gives them a sense of power, and in their 30s they start understanding that reality doesn’t really conform to their understanding thereof. They had their feminist educators fill their heads with nonsense and now they think they have the “progressive” version of everything, and it’s quite easy to stimulate the young people’s natural narcissism. If someone told them to never have sex outside a meaningful relationship, marry in their 20s, and make their husband their top priority in life, they’d call him an old backward conservative. However, when things go south, they’ll blame men, blame society, blame everything except their progressive feminism, because they think they got everything nailed just right, it’s just that this reality thing is a bitch and doesn’t conform to their ideology, so they need to go change the world a bit more, perfect and wonderful as they are.

If anything, cats find them quite useful.

Land of confusion

I am apparently now old enough to start my writing with “you young people might not remember this, … “, and there is indeed something I want to bring up to your attention. There was a music video in the 1980’s, a leftist progressive political commentary of the day, where Ronald Reagan was seen as a senile unhinged old man who is out of touch with the realities of the world as the young generation perceives it, and they are worried the crazy old guy is going to destroy their world, either deliberately or, more likely, by accident.

Watch it carefully. Observe how the same pattern repeats today with Trump. The leftists think they are so smart. They think they understand things. They think they are the ones who will take care of the world the best, so we would all be wise to leave it up to them. The right-wing, anti-communist, rabidly pro-American conservative in power will ruin everything. They are concerned. They are scared. Something needs to be done. And it wasn’t just this video, this was the zeitgeist.

Next scene, in real life, this same Ronald Reagan, who was portrayed in this video as a bumbling senile old man completely out of touch with the realities of the world (notice the similarity?) ended the cold war and came to an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev.

The right-wing politicians who were the targets of the “spitting image” mockery, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, actually saved the world, and the “progressive” leftists were the ones completely out of touch with the realities of the world.

I am old enough to have followed all this in the newspapers and on TV as it was happening. That’s why I recognized the pattern with Trump so immediately.

The difference is that nobody in the 1980’s even thought of accusing Reagan of being a stooge of the Kremlin, Andropov’s man in the White House. This is what gave Reagan the option of extending a friendly hand to Kremlin and negotiating a peace. This is the thing that actually saved the world.

What we have now is the situation where this option is denied to the President by virtually all political forces. If he attempts to broker a peace, accusations of treachery will be rekindled with increased force. Only conflict is acceptable. Only war is a patriotic option.

Which means America is firmly on the collision course. Everything else is in a state of flux.