Arhiva completă: engleză

Not me, don’t worry about it!

But there is someone blogging from the South Pole base where they stayed over the long winter.

Here’s the first post in a series about actually leaving the South Pole.

During the winter, many departments, IT included, are subject to a more casual daily task schedule. Our goal over the winter is to stay on top of day-to-day upkeep, to execute on long-running projects, to respond to incidents, and to tackle any larger maintenance items that can’t be done when the station is “full” over the summer.

There’s more to read there, so stop by and say hi!

Kuno Lechner; cropped by H Debussy-Jones (talk) 08:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I wanted to order an Apple Vision Pro today. And it was sold out! I mean, I can still order it, but it will come in 5-6 weeks, at least.

Yeah, I know, first world problems, but still. I expected the device to sell at the most 100,000 devices this year, see how expensive it is. What do you know, though, 180,000 Vision Pros might have been pre-ordered!

This is really good news for the Mixed Reality/Augmented Reality space, after Meta Quest 3 selling more than 1 million devices for the holiday season of 2023.

Not me, unfortunately. I would’ve loved to test it and buy it, but, you know… 6 weeks of wait time.

Anyway, Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal spent (almost) 24 hours testing it. I would’ve loved to see some games in there, as well, but nevertheless, the video is worth watching.

I’ve recently got into Mixed Reality gaming, when I bought a Meta Quest 3. Once I did that, I noticed there aren’t any good newsletters for the people that play these kind of games, so I made one! :D

If you want to subscribe, the newsletter’s name is XR Gamer Digest and you can find it here. Where you can find the previous (5 by now) editions.

We publish it every Friday, so hop on!

I think I use Apple’s Notes app more than any other app on my devices. And I didn’t know most of these things:

Write This Down: 17 Things You Didn’t Realize Apple’s Notes App Could Do

If you loved Andy Weir’s The Martian, let me tell you it’s 10 years since publication.

Even better, Andy Weir wrote a “lost chapter” for the book that you can read here.

Via Kottke

I find it interesting that the CEO of Meta/Facebook is reviewing the device of the competition in a public way. I mean, would you ever see Tim Cook reviewing the Meta Quest 3?

And the video is quite good.

The final conclusion is that Meta Quest 3 is on par with the Vision Pro if you take the price and intended purpose into consideration. I didn’t yet test the Apple Vision Pro, but I can imagine based on the reviews I’ve seen that Zuck is not that far off course.

Anyway, here it is, on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

In 2012 I started a gaming company called MavenHut. It was making Facebook canvas games. About 2 years after we started we needed to change platforms to mobile because Facebook games were dying.

Well, there’s a chance mobile gaming will similarly die as well:

I believe that mobile games could be facing the same deliberate death-by-a-platform as games Facebook suffered a decade ago. We’re like frogs being slowly boiled alive. The temperature is gradually increasing due to all the privacy changes. But the changes are happening relatively slowly. So, we’re not jumping out of the water to save ourselves from impending death.

This is a really good article at Deconstructor of Fun.

I feel that crossplay mobile/MR will be the way to monetize free-to-play games and increase distribution on the Mixed Reality platforms.

Niantic and Meta partnered to fund three multiplayer mixed reality demo games that run in the browser and support both Quest 3 and mobile.

The demos were built over a ten week period using Niantic’s 8th Wall web-based AR engine, which has a fully in-browser editor and offers cloud hosting for built projects. Niantic is the company behind smartphone AR games like Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

The condition of the funding for the three teams was that their projects use 8th Wall’s multiplayer module, which can enable cross-play between headsets and traditional mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

More here.

I recently found out that if you use Cloudflare, you can do a domain redirect with them, rather than needing to create a blank website with a 301 rule in Apache or something similar.

So here it is (as much for anyone that needs as for me when I surely will forget about it):

The documentation is here with more examples.

Here’s the rule I used to redirect the old “.ro” domain to this one: