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Happy Junely
(30 Jun 2020 at 23:59) |
Oops, July really snuck up on me! Even at the age of 40 I confuse the two adjacent four-letter Ju months and so, I guess especially, the border between them. This post was backdated an hour, which is cheating, but less cheating if I admit it!!
In my hacking time this month I mostly worked on my household distributed temperature/humidity thing, and most of the hacking was fairly boring linux things to keep the things running even if internet connectivity is lost (this is surprisingly hard to do??). This is essential for my garage one, which is right on the edge of wifi and so loses connectivity if anyone so much as walks through the ether wrong. I fixed the attic fan and did a good job that's basically up to code, especially if you compare it to the existing wiring up there. All of a sudden I remembered about the existence of heat shrink tubing, and got a heat gun and all sorts of heat shrink tubing and now everything is heat shrink tubed. Like I fixed the fraying ends of my running shorts string (what is that called anyway, string?) with heat shrink tubing. The raspberry pi in the garage is shrunk into a large heat shrink tube to seal it against the elements and to make sure the wifi has one final struggle.
On the care and feeding theme, just last weekend I picked back up on the Destroy FX plugins, which I hadn't touched for at least a decade. These are weird audio effects that I made with my friend and bandmate Sophia when we were in college or so. They still have solid usage, but I haven't been able to compile them for ages and although I've had some audio processing ideas in the interim, they just have gone in the ideas file. Sophia has been modernizing them for Mac (64-bit, etc.) and last week my coffee and I ground through DLL hell and deprecated headers hell and so on to get the basics working again. Next up is making the GUIs work, which sounds painful, but if I get past that then we can delete all that Visual Studio crap and also maybe build some of the ideas from the ideas file. :)
On the painful theme, I've been running around 50 miles a week pretty consistently (still, not going anywhere near anyone). There's probably no hope of doing an organized race safely, which is a shame because I think I could put up some good times. Did my regular hilly 10k route at a 6m57s pace earlier this week when it was 85°F out, which is not bad given my all-time PR was a 6m22s pace, net downhill, when I was 29!
In video game news, I got the Valve Index, which is their first-party VR system. It is indeed an upgrade to the HTC Vive (highlights are the frame rate and field of view). I'm still struggling a bit to get my eyes to clearly focus in there (some prescription lenses are on the way) but the biggest annoyance is that the tracking base stations make this infuriating high-pitched whining sound. Some other people have been complaining about it but I'm not sure if it's just sensitive hearing or mine are defective (since both seem to do it). I don't think I can recommend the system with this problem, to be honest. So far I've been playing Half-Life: Alyx, which is very good for a VR game and "not bad" for a Half-Life game. |  |
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| I don't know what running shorts string is officially called, but I'd refer to the heat shrink tubing end as an 'aglet'. |
> I confuse the two adjacent four-letter Ju months
I don't confuse those, but I still confuse whether August is the eighth or ninth month, and whether the ninth month is August or September. I blame calendars, because they display either only month numbers or month names, so I never see the associations between them in print. I should make my own calendar to fix this problem. |
Tadbot: excellent vocab word!
jonas: I would probably make this mistake too except that my birthday is in September, so month 9 is among the only ones that I can dead reckon. |
| have you ever played baba is you?, it's about words and baba and you |
| I still use Skidder regularly!! |
Awesome to hear that you're working on DFX plugins again! They do seemingly work in 64-bit hosts via jbridge (even Geometer, which I had a lot of issues with back in the day) but it would be great to have native 64-bit versions. I'm also down to help test any new stuff you might come up with.
Good to know about the Index too. I'm still very tempted by VR but I don't really want to give Facebook any more data or money on the Oculus route, and a $1000 investment (really $1300+ if you include a new video card, which I probably need) plus months of wait for an Index that might have issues is also not great. Maybe one day... |
bobs22: Not yet! I understand it is kinda similar to my ludum dare game "T in Y World" which might be why I haven't played it yet (envy, I mean) but I've heard it's quite good. I liked Environmental Station Alpha a lot.
Adhesion: Cool, it would be great to get some bug reports! :) Thank you!
FWIW the Vive and Index work pretty well on my aging 1080, even at high refresh rates. Although with VR it's really bad if your card can't keep up; for me it's nauseating enough that I can't even play. |
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