Work in progress, as always…
A quick (one evening) port of my old Duck Hunt VR game to the Oculus (a.k.a. Meta) Quest 2. Mainly to check what kind of performance I can expect from this device.
The build is still a little rough especially on the light and shading side. Also the mapping of the Zapper (gun) to the Quest 2 controllers needs some polishing, as the trigger is off-center on the physical controllers.
I needed a quick (DIY) solution to create a hot plate (a.k.a. Screen Repair Separator Machine Heating Plate) for repairing the screen of my wifes mobile phone. It is a cheap phone so I needed a cheap solution to create hot plate alternative.
After staring at the kitchen oven (too hot, even on the lowest setting), I got this brief mental lapse… What about a take-out (Dutch Chinees food) container filled to the top with hot water.
It is easy to control the temperature, by mixing 100 degrees kettle water with tap water (assumed to be ambient temperature):1 part 100 degrees + 1 parts 20 degrees: (100+20) / 2 = 60 degrees 2 parts 100 degrees + 1 part 20 degrees: (100+100+20) / 3 = 73 degrees
I finally pulled the trigger… I have been considering if I should upgrade my HTC Vive set to a new and shiny Valve Index set. My play (and development) time is very limited with two young kids in the house.
In the end I decided that running a Valve Index HMD on my current GPU (Geforce GTX 1080) would be limiting it severely. And upgrading my GPU is not a fun thing to do at this moment (way more expensive than the full Valve Index set).
So I decided to only buy the Valve Index controllers, and keep on using the original HTC Vive HMD for now.
Now I can finally play Half-Life: Alyx 😍 I was holding out until I had the right gear to experience it “The Way its Meant to be Played”.
I have to say, I needed a little adjusting time (after all the VR hours with the old HTC Vive controllers). But in Half-Life: Alyx these Valve Index controllers really rock! The game is also awesome. It is really cool to be back in the Half-Life universe after all these years 😎
My sister is still rocking a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 for all her graphical design activities. This beast of a CPU has been working hard since 2007 (bundled with 4GB of DDR2). But lately it is struggling a little with modern life… And by extension so is my sister…
Knowing my sister, I had to make sure it would be a clean and pretty system. But on a budget. (Keep in mind that GPU’s are crazy expensive at this moment!)
My sister does not like cables, so I put some extra effort in my cable management 😎
It’s final destination, really showing off my cable management skills to the world 😋
Shucking a hard drive is the practice of removing a hard drive from it’s (external) USB exclose. This may sound like a stupid thing to do, but this can save you some money (150 euro vs 220 euro) 🤑
The scary side of shucking is that you never really know what you will get, it is a little like a surprise egg for nerds. This time we got lucky, the WD80EMAZ is actually a helium filled HGST Ultrastar, modified to run at 5400 RPM (instead of 7200 RPM).
The shucked drive ( WD80EMAZ ) runs 5-6 degrees cooler than my original 8TB WD Red drives (WD80EFAX) 😎
Update: I have multiple shucked drives in use WD80EMAZ (WD Elements with the blue text on the box) and WD80EDAZ (WD Elements with the orange text on the box). All drives have 256MB cache and are running without issues in a Synology NAS. The WD80EDAZ drives will run a lot hotter 😐
We are the proud parents of a healthy little boy called Marcus!
Today I introduced my 2-year-old son to Virtual Reality, exploring the ocean life in “theBlu“.
The HTC Vive is now called the “visjes bril” (a.k.a. fish glasses). The big blue whale seems to be a little intimidating for 2-year-old virtual boys 😉 But they really love the jellyfish 😍
One of my disk in my RAID6 array of my Linux server dropped from the disk array, so it was time to decide the future of my old and trusty server. I have been running a Linux server as my home storage for +15 years. But the family life is limiting my tinker time… So I decided to try an off-the-shelf storage solution (Synolog DiskStation DS918+), to see if this can serve my server needs, without the additional hassle of building and maintaining a Linux server.
Update: Currently I’m running the NAS with 2x8TB WD80EMAZ (WD Red) drives and 1x8TB WD80EMAZ ( shucked WD Elements) drive, with 2x250GB WD Black NVMe SSD’s as (read/write) cache.
Toying (some more) with an industrial robot at the office 😉
Merry Christmas and a Happy 2019 from the Allseas R&D Eindhoven (a.k.a. Inspection & Robotics) office.
R&D Eindhoven is part of the Innovation Department of Allseas Engineering B.V.
Website was down for a few hours, deu to a glasfiber modem upgrade. Server seems happy after his first reboot in 2.5 years 🙂
KPN routers force their users to use 192.168.2.xxx IP range (with a 255.255.255.0 subnet mask). So it took me some time to get all my 192.168.0.xxx devices to the new enforced 192.168.2.xxx range.