I've had an interest in Zen Buddhism since my college years. Initially this was a rather silly and superficial thing: samurai were cool, and they practiced Zen. I think the first Zen-inspired book I read was The Unfettered Mind: Writings from the Zen Master to the Swordsman. Over the years …

If you just want the VirtualBox VM for this article without the philosophising, skip to the appendix.

We live in a world full of distractions. In the modern "attention economy" it's more of a challenge to avoid content and advertising than it is to find it.

Nowhere is this more …