This is the first paid-for game that I've played on the Oculus Quest 2. I've mostly stuck to demos - because I get bored easily. Or free games - because I'm a cheapskate. But Meta gave me £30 in credit for helping people fix their broken Quests. So I bought this much hyped puzzle game. And… It's excellent! Much better than I expected. As puzzler, it works really well. Lots of different types of puzzles, some of which make effective use of the VR environment. Items which need careful ma…
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When a freak technological failure halts traffic to and from the planet Gora, three strangers are thrown together unexpectedly, with seemingly nothing to do but wait. Under the care of Ouloo, an enterprising alien, and Tupo, her occasionally helpful child, the trio are compelled to confront where they've been, where they might go, and what they might be to one another. And so we come to the end of the remarkable Wayfarers series. It is a lovely conclusion - full of alien weirdness and…
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Another in an occasional series bemoaning the shitty user experience of Zuck's Metaverse. I have an Oculus Quest 2 and wanted to pay money for an in-app purchase. This seems like a normal thing to do. There's no way to add a credit card while your head is strapped to an overheating Android device. So I emerged into meatspace opened the Oculus app on my phone and typed in my credit card details. I went through the usual dance of getting a 2FA code from my card provider and was successfully…
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The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. I grew up with a BBC micro. My earliest memories are of playing games a…
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Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol is, by some measure, the most popular way for computers to talk to each other on the Internet. Generally speaking, clients (like browsers) talk to servers using a set number of HTTP "verbs". This tells the server what sort of thing the client is trying to do. The two most popular verbs are probably POST - which lets you send data to a server - and GET - which lets you get data back from a server. There are other HTTP verbs like DELETE to delete data, and PATCH…
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How do you fairly split a country into electoral subdivisions? This is a difficult problem. Whatever you choose, you'll piss off someone. A politician will be annoyed that their loyal voters are no longer in their district. And voters will be annoyed that they're now lumped in with people from the wrong side of the tracks. This is a very human problem. So let's ignore all the human aspects and run an impartial and unbiased algorithm on the issue! The Splitline Algorithm is, conceptually,…
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I'm concerned about the longevity of the domains I register. I want my domains to be available for as long as possible. But it seems that every year prices rise - and the discount often provided for a new domain rarely continues into subsequent years. So I recently started renewing them for as long as possible. It turns out that most domains can be registered for a maximum of 10 years. A typical .uk domain will set you back the thick end of a hundred quid if you want it for a decade! Can I…
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I'm just getting started with the Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook Meta. It is amazing. OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch. What Government services could / should be run in the Metaverse? Obviously, the answer is "none". Sure, you could create a virtual job centre, housing office, or DMV - but would you want to sit in a virtual waiting room for a couple of hours waiting for your name to …
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Skip to instructions I bought a Meta Quest 2 second hand from a child who was bored of it. The Quest was in excellent condition but, after a few days use, it became clear that the physical volume up key was broken. There are lots of tips and trips for fixing this. One of which is factory resetting. I turned off the Quest, held volume down and power, and got into the factory reset screen. In order to confirm the reset, you need to press... Volume up! The Oculus chat team were very helpful.…
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11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But apps were the hip "new" thing, apparently. And there were a lot of people who were passionately invested in the idea the Steve Jobs™️ would save us all. And, some of us, thought th…
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Welcome to my shop! We have everything that you want to buy. We accept cash, cards, and any discount coupons or vouchers from any other shop! Got a 10% off with Amazon? We'll take it! Buy 1 get 3 free from CostCo? Roll right up! Free TV with every HDMI cable purchased from Fred's Electronics Warehouse? Give it here! Does that sound likely? Stores normally accept manufacturer discounts quite happily, but don't take vouchers from their rivals. It happens, occasionally, I'll grant you. But it…
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my final assignment! It's from the PP2 module - where I take some CPD related to my profession. I picked Blockchain. Because I hate myself. I've blogged about the course itself. The middle two parts of this paper are about that - why I chose it and how I put it into practice. The first and fourth parts are, as far as I can tell, unrelated. We have to write…
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