Are you having trouble opening .rar files on you Ubuntu distro?
Well, it's very easy to fix that in the next 30 seconds. Just type on the terminal:
sudo apt-get install unrar-free
Another good app I found recently was Calibre. I have just recently bought an eReader for my wife and after picking up a few books I wanted to find a way to read some of these books (ePub format books) on my laptop. In order to do that I am now using this nice little application called Calibre, which not only allows me to read books in eReader formats, but it also works as a manager for eReaders. Very handy if you are looking for something like that on Linux.
Buying the eReader was actually quite a process, which I may post about at a later date. I ended up buying the Kobo for a few good reasons:
1- It seems much more flexible in terms of format than the Kindle
2- Cheaper than the Sony eReader
3- Has a much bigger library of books for Canadian customers
4- It's a Canadian product and I like to support our industry where I can
Friday, December 9, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Know thyself (pt. 1) - responsibility over emotions
I think I've been asking myself some fundamental questions about being for almost ten years. I'm not terribly sure what got me started, but I think it was part of the whole teen phase. Well, for me it was mostly at the end of that part of my life, when I was 18 years old, or close to it. That is when it all started, but I think that was an important set of questions that have yielded some answers, but created another larger set of questions. A lot of these questions have been sitting inside my head for many years, but they were there out of pure curiosity and the pursuit of further understanding myself.
Last year was a bit of a rough one for me, with a lot of changes happening in my life and a lot of things I had to deal with. I firmly believe that one's true identity isn't fully explored until he/she is forced to do that, which was certainly the case for me then. My personal struggles forced me to think about how I felt about my life, about my religion and about what I was about. That's when I started to learn more about an area of philosophy that has always fascinated me, existentialism. My two favorite existentialist philosophers are Sartre and Kierkegaard.
Just today I was reading about some of Sartre's views on emotions and responsibility. Most people, see emotions as types of reactions to conditions in the environment. They see it somewhat similarly to feelings (these words are even interchangeable sometimes), where something happens and that leads the person to feel a certain way. The way these words work in English it almost leads one to believe that, after all you FEEL an emotion.
Sartre, on the other hand, has a very different view on emotions. He says emotions are always about something. You don't just love, you love someone. You don't just hate, you hate someone, or something. So all emotion is intentional, because they are always about something (unless you are talking about some psychiatric situation, but this is philosophy not psychology). He uses examples to show how emotions are intentional responses to certain conditions. One particular example that comes from Aesop, a story about a fox and grapes, which gives origin to the common notion of "sour grapes". In short, the fox sees a set of delicious grapes, and craves them, but he can't reach them. This causes the fox to turn away and say, "they are probably sour anyway". Sartre calls that type of scenario as a "magical" transformation of the world. Which is a way to indicate that what changes about the grapes has nothing to do with the chemistry of the fruit, but everything to do with the attitude of the fox and how it see the grapes. This idea ties in with the concepts of phenomenology and ontology, which is seen throughout the works of Sartre and Heidegger. This is the idea that the way in which we experience things, and the way the world is, are firmly tied together. Often, what we do is this kind of magical transformation, where instead of actually doing something to change the world, we transform it in our minds. In this story, one can see that the fox refuses to see itself as a failure, instead the fox sees itself as wise fox, not willing to spend energy on a wasted project.
This idea of escaping from a difficulty, is the heart of Sartre's ideas. He says emotions are essentially a mode of escape behaviour. We have our emotions, not because they are "caused in us", but rather because they are a way to deal with the world in which we come to see ourselves as better off than we would otherwise. He says emotions act as choices, ways to transform our world and to make difficulties disappear.
Last year was a bit of a rough one for me, with a lot of changes happening in my life and a lot of things I had to deal with. I firmly believe that one's true identity isn't fully explored until he/she is forced to do that, which was certainly the case for me then. My personal struggles forced me to think about how I felt about my life, about my religion and about what I was about. That's when I started to learn more about an area of philosophy that has always fascinated me, existentialism. My two favorite existentialist philosophers are Sartre and Kierkegaard.
Just today I was reading about some of Sartre's views on emotions and responsibility. Most people, see emotions as types of reactions to conditions in the environment. They see it somewhat similarly to feelings (these words are even interchangeable sometimes), where something happens and that leads the person to feel a certain way. The way these words work in English it almost leads one to believe that, after all you FEEL an emotion.
Sartre, on the other hand, has a very different view on emotions. He says emotions are always about something. You don't just love, you love someone. You don't just hate, you hate someone, or something. So all emotion is intentional, because they are always about something (unless you are talking about some psychiatric situation, but this is philosophy not psychology). He uses examples to show how emotions are intentional responses to certain conditions. One particular example that comes from Aesop, a story about a fox and grapes, which gives origin to the common notion of "sour grapes". In short, the fox sees a set of delicious grapes, and craves them, but he can't reach them. This causes the fox to turn away and say, "they are probably sour anyway". Sartre calls that type of scenario as a "magical" transformation of the world. Which is a way to indicate that what changes about the grapes has nothing to do with the chemistry of the fruit, but everything to do with the attitude of the fox and how it see the grapes. This idea ties in with the concepts of phenomenology and ontology, which is seen throughout the works of Sartre and Heidegger. This is the idea that the way in which we experience things, and the way the world is, are firmly tied together. Often, what we do is this kind of magical transformation, where instead of actually doing something to change the world, we transform it in our minds. In this story, one can see that the fox refuses to see itself as a failure, instead the fox sees itself as wise fox, not willing to spend energy on a wasted project.
This idea of escaping from a difficulty, is the heart of Sartre's ideas. He says emotions are essentially a mode of escape behaviour. We have our emotions, not because they are "caused in us", but rather because they are a way to deal with the world in which we come to see ourselves as better off than we would otherwise. He says emotions act as choices, ways to transform our world and to make difficulties disappear.
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