Tag Archives: video

Theatre

Who are you America? – Modern Monologues

The Internet is amazing.  We all know that.  In one of my recent meanderings, I came across a series of 50 monologues commissioned by Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland. Being a recent transplant, Kwame Kwei-Armah, along with his team, asked the question “Who are you America?”

I was happy to see that Greg Allen of the Neo-Futurists was selected as one of the 50 leading playwrights. His piece is a lovely dance through the connected, tangental consciousness of the American fabric.

I have since watched dozens of others. Some hit very well and resonate strongly, others seem to fall flat. Obviously, this project is not immune from subjectivity. Regardless, a very fascinating study in writing, directing, acting, filming, and editing.

I recommend the consumption. Here’s a link to another, titled “one evening on the #14 bus“. It was written by Christina Anderson and performed by Pascale Armand.

Who hasn’t ridden a bus and experienced a similar situation of desperation and disconnect?

Tricks

Make KDE Plasma Run Faster

So I have been trying to find various ways to speed up the performance of my new GNU/Linux system. I decided to search for KDE speed improvements and came across this YouTube video:

I tried the trick, killing Plasma and rerunning it using the Qt 4.5 rending method. I received a substantial performance increase in my graphics rendering. To do the same on your system, run the following commands first to see if this trick does speed up your performance:

kquitapp plasma-desktop
plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster

Then, do some widget resizing, use the launcher menu, etc. The easiest one to see the performance increase, like in the video, is to rotate the folder widget. Mine was jerky without this change and very smooth after the fact.

If this did speed up your system, make the following changes to your /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop file so that it runs the raster graphicssystem by default next time you restart Xorg/KDE:

sudo nano /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop

Add the -graphicssystem raster to the current Exec line so that it looks something like this:

Exec=plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster

That’s it. Now I did read some downsides (possibly more memory usage) in the More 2D in KDE article linked below, however, for my uses, it seems to help more than it hurts. Your mileage may vary.

References:

Dramatically speed up KDE Plasma
Is KDE4 Slow? (forum.kde.org)
More 2D in KDE