I do, actually. It’s just a projector, really, but it’s really neat. It’s analog so it has no pixels. It can rotate the starfield but the motor is noisy enough to disturb me when going to sleep, so I don’t use the motor.
Do we have to buy all the cool discs one by one? Looks like a neat product, such a shame the motor is noisy because a little motion, just barely perceptible, would go a long way.
I would think people would throw good money for the same but better. I know I would.
I have one of the original models and the motor noise is probably dependent on whether or not you're the sort of person who needs a perfectly quiet room or if you can sleep with a fan. If you have a ceiling fan (or any other noise maker, like a blowing AC system), you're almost certainly not going to hear the motor. IIRC, EEV blog tore one down and the whole rotating assembly is belt driven so that you don't have gear noise. The only thing I ever hear is a very slight hobby motor hum when everything is dead silent.
When you order it I think it comes with 2 discs, but yeah, all the others are individual orders, unless you want to order the 17 pack of third party discs for $300.
Other things to be aware of:
1) It looks really good, like good enough to feel like you really are out under the stars in a properly blacked out room. but getting the focus just right is fiddly and very easy to knock out of focus again
2) Like any projector it works best projecting straight on. I doubt you have space in the exact center of your room to project straight up, so be prepared to accept this will be a distorted projection. You get used to it and it doesn't really ruin the effect that much, but it's disappointing at first.
3) The 3 hour timer is built in and impossible to disable to the best of my knowledge. If you want it running all night, you'll want a smart plug or a programmable timer plug that can turn off for a few minutes intermittently. I found ~5 minutes every 2.5 hours to work well. Too short and the timer doesn't seem to reset.
4) There are some really nice 3rd party discs out there too, but their sharpness and overall realism varies greatly so be cautious when ordering.
>> While your then-PDA may have supported 3G and came with many other capabilities the first iPhone lacked, there were certain things in regard to build, design, usability and intuitiveness that were unparalleled in the products at the time. Comparing an iPhone and an iPAQ Pocket PC made the latter seem ancient, even though it could do a lot the iPhone couldn't. Compare a Vision Pro to a Quest 3, I am saddened to say I don't see the same.>>
I too was hoping for the sum of the parts to be something special.
I’m picking my AVP up on Saturday. I’ll give it an honest go but expect to return it within a week. I’ve owned most VR headsets and they sit in a drawer, rarely used. For a few hundred dollars I’m ok with that. For a few thousand I am not.
What makes you continue to try all the VR headsets if they keep sitting in a drawer at the end of the day (honest question)?
When I see comments like this, and there seem to be many, I can’t help but think VR is a technology in search of a problem. With every platform Apple has launched they show the problem it will solve for customers and I just don’t see that here, and really haven’t seen it with any VR headset, at least not enough to overcome the downsides.
I can’t help but think of this video of Steve Jobs… “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it.”
I got a Hololens 1 that turned out to be a white elephant and I read a lot of stories about people buying VR headsets and abandoning them so when I got an MQ3 I was quite deliberate about getting a variety of games and apps and spending enough time with VR to succeed at it.
I need to get back on this. I ran PiHole for years which worked really well. Something broke with my network which messed up IP provisioning and the PiHole got permanently disabled.
Is there a particular guide you followed or did you put this strategy together over time?
Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.
I put things together over time. I also started w/ PiHole before moving to OPNSense (on a box i got from protectli)
If you're looking to get into it I'd recommend that path. OPNSense works pretty nice out of the box, the documentation is great and there's a million switches for you to experiment with. There's even a tool to link your configuration to a git repo so that if anything ever breaks you can always go back.
Not the OP but I use a Walkolution MTD700R WANDERLUST [1]. It's expensive as all hell but I've tried motorized variants from several other companies and they all have the same fundamental problem: they will try to throw you away from the desk if you forget to turn it off and suddenly come to a complete stop.
The self-powered ones allow you to suddenly stop when you need to talk during a meeting or if something urgent surprises you on screen.
I’ve been curious about the walkolution but am struggling with the price. How do you like it overall? Do you feel like your gait is much different from a powered treadmill? Is it much quieter than powered treadmills?
I like it a lot but I don't know how much of that is buyer's Stockholm Syndrome given the price tag. The gait feels significantly different. My understanding is the lack of motorization means that you spend an extra around 30% more energy and the slight curve means your feet meet the treadmill at different points.
It is much quieter but you have to keep up with maintenance.
Im in the midst of reading Pinkers the Language Instinct and the basic thesis is that language is innate. Preventing language would be like preventing eating.
The sing-song thing is cultural but powerful. It’s hard (for me) to not default to it with my one year old.
Edit: LOL I clearly commented before reading the article.
On top of that, at least 900 people had their identities stolen and attached to forged pro-fracking letters that were used by the commission to justify allowing fracking.
According to the article, the commission knows, and will delete the forged letters from the public record, but apparently won't take use complaints as a reason to reconsider their decision.
> A Cleveland.com investigation in September found that over a hundred Ohio residents said their names were attached to form letters sent to the commission in a public comment period without their knowledge — all of them urging state parks allow fracking.
> Those names included a 9-year-old girl and a blind woman. The form letter, which appears over 1,000 times in the public comment database, urges Ohio to “responsibly” lease rights to minerals under Salt Fork State Park, among other areas.
> The 9-year-old’s mother, Brittany Keep, told Cleveland.com that her daughter knows nothing about oil and gas exploration and neither of them have visited Salt Fork State Park.
Politicians enabling fraud. The members of the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission are public record, journalists should dig deep. All available evidence points to bad faith actions and sidestepping the will of local citizens for oil and gas interests attempting to ram this through.
Cleveland.com's editors tend to be tools [0] for the same right wing that supports this stuff, and it forced out all its unionized journalists a few years ago, [1] so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "deep" reporting on this. I guess we can hope a small, underfunded, more independent paper in the state might do something with it.
It can be difficult and in some cases impossible to vote out bad politicians under first-past-the-post elections. Too many people run against them, splitting the votes such that the bad incumbent wins. This is why I advocate for electoral reform, as not much will get better without it.
Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
We bought a few when we started to transition to solids but never used them. Our one year old eats the protein we are eating (and has since about six months) and then has her own vegetables, cheese, chickpea pasta, etc.
Pouches aren’t a reality for her and thus she won’t ask for one. Same with gold fish, fruit juice and a ton of other metabolic disasters. Granted this is easy right now and, to your point, is going to get harder when she enters the school system. I’ll need a strategy for that next.
There is no strategy. You're up against the best devils Madison Avenue has to offer and peer pressure. Even if you win on this front you're going to lose on others. That's the fact of raising a kid in the 21st century in an advertising-saturated culture.
> Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
TBH this does sound like a real jerk comment (especially given the lack of any ability to travel backwards in time), but it is nonetheless correct. IME, the less they have of that stuff the less the less they'll want it.
Still, different kids are different. When dealing with a kid who's lost their mind due to hunger (and for those who doubt, that's a real thing, not an exaggeration), having to choose between offering healthy food or no food can be a no-win situation.
I wish you the best of luck - not cynically. Especially when your kid can buy their own lunch at school (even if you packed one).
In my school district, they will NOT stop a kid from eating what they want to eat. Personally, I don't argue with that. They need to consume something so better it be something that they'll actually eat than nothing (which happens, trust me)
I only have one kid but our experience matched yours: we didn't change our own eating habits once we had a kid (well, fewer restaurants) and kid got what we got (not solid food when baby of course, and milder curries) so there wasn't really much to argue about. We didn't care what he ate when visiting friends, or at school, and didn't make a big deal about it. Two parents from two countries, both immigrants: our food was just what it was. Now he's grown up and eats better than I do.
And that was my own experience too: 60 years ago we brought "weird" lunches compared to the other kids at school. We all traded a bit of course and I don't remember it being a big deal, though my sister complained so maybe I was just an oblivious nerd.
That's a great plan, until you're exhausted at the grocery store and your kid sees another kid eating one and starts screaming that they want one.
Source: parent who swore up and down that they were going to make their own purees, and immediately caved when they realized just how much gddmn*d food a 9 month old goes through in a week. I was sure I was going to be a hyper-organic, make everything fresh type parent, and now we give him frozen pancakes and squeeze pouches. It turns out that getting kids calories is hard enough without having to make it all yourself.
And them getting any calories is usually more important than me being super choosy about the composition of those calories. I was very proactive about all of this for quite a while but have relaxed somewhat as things evolve at home.
Also, many things fall into the not-ideal bucket. That doesn’t just mean the quality of the ingredients but also the specific food. Someone else mentioned chickpea pasta - and it’s great. But it’s also still partially processed. But because it’s not pure generic pasta, it’s ok? I don’t know.
I really prioritize the quality of things as much as possible rather than worrying in detail about whether they are metabolic superpowers or the opposite.
While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s going on with the tram line.
The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing. I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get framerates in the teens. By contrast I haven't actually bothered to measure the framerate in CS2 because it's perfectly smooth for me.
I'm all for holding developers accountable for flawed games, but the level of negative hyperbole around CS2 has been a real stain on the community.
The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole - it is literally how badly this game performs (or at least performed on launch) on top-tier gaming hardware (namely RTX 4090). I linked a source with the quote.
Except it was hyperbole how Cyberpunk was criticised. Or it wasn't, but it was no worse than most other AAA game, but somehow not all publishers/developers are criticised equally. I completed Cyberpunk and had to reload once because of a bug. That is already much better than Starfield (and every other Bethesda game) and the performance was just fine on my old PC. Something about Cyberpunks massive criticism smells funny.
I just got CP2077 along with a new system, where I experience frame rates regularly north of 150 - almost always north of 100 with PBR, everything maxed out. It runs incredibly smooth 100% of the time, and looks completely stunning on my 32" 2560x1440x144 monitor. Specs are 4090/7800x3d, 64gb 6000c30, 990 pro nvme, bought mostly for being able to run DCS World (and iRacing) on triple screens plus Star Citizen. The 4090 is beast, and absolutely worth it.
I haven't had time or perhaps motivation to load up CS2 much, with that superb Cyberpunk story to be explored (and planes to fly), but on the initial tutorial I noticed a weirdly low fps for what was not a super impressive image.
I installed Skylines 2 through my gamepass; my initial thoughts were to come back after some post release patch cycles.
It took the CP2077 team a lot of time but they completely turned a trainwreck into something rather magic, so I'm hoping Skylines 2 will experience the same. I did enjoy the original release years ago. (Edit: Gamers Nexus' video led me to City Planner Plays, which shows just what can be made - the scope of Skylines 2 looks amazing, given my hardware I could probably get into it sooner rather than later!)
Finally a kudos to the author for this in depth, well written article! I really enjoyed it.
FWIW I put a few hours into building a starting city, and no real issues with performance now in that a game like this clearly doesn't depend on smooth frames quite like a flight simulator does. I think there was at least one major patch since when I first tried it, which might have helped. There's lots of detail and modelling, this could be a bit of a dangerous time sink. :-)
I could certainly see why my old system (5800x3d / 3070 / 64) doesn't play it quite as nicely for my son's bigger 3440x1440x60hz monitor though; it certainly made the 4090 busy.
I’m also loving the game. There are a few issues, and performance could be better, but all in all it feels like a really nice entry with solid bones that should lead towards most of these issues being resolved with far less effort than—say—Cyberpunk.
I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.
If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it
I've played a lot of CS1 (and recently, lots of CS2), here are the biggest improvements for me:
- The simulation is much deeper than before, not basically just statistics on a page
- The game plays slightly harder, more management needed in order to have a proper budget. But like in the first, that disappears once you have 100/200K citizens, as it's hard to fuck up the budget at that stage.
- The control of roads is a lot better, compared to vanilla CS1. Nowhere near modded CS1, but it'll easily get there with some time, the foundation of CS2 is a lot stronger and easier to extend
- Able to build bigger cities will less lag compared to CS1. I'm sure this will improve even more in the future. Going ECS I'm sure made a huge difference in simulation performance.
The roads/transportation networks are better (baked into the engine more deeply now, such for roundabouts and multi-modal transportation) and the map is much bigger. But honestly CS:1 mods did a "good enough" job at addressing those shortcomings anyway, and CS:2 is missing a lot of the DLC stuff that the first one added. It's got a pretty minimal selection of buildings at this point.
I'd wait a few months/years if I were you. Personally I feel like CS:2 was more of an architectural rewrite (as in the simulation engine) was awesome future potential, but gameplay-wise, modded and DLCed CS:1 just has a lot more actual content.
I still enjoyed CS:2 a lot though, if only because it's been a hot minute since the first game, and I forgot how much I loved this genre.
Got my second bout of COVID two weeks ago and my resting heart rate has been about 10BMP higher ever since (normal 55, now 65+). I only missed two days of workouts, but had much lower volume for over a week.
A quick google search shows this isn't that uncommon and it's one of those 'wait and see' situations. Frustrating and I wonder if there's a longterm consequence. Strangely, the first time I got COVID it had no impact on RHR. Second time I was hit much harder and couldn't leave bed for a full day, something that has never happened to me.
