efaardvark

Thank you for putting that tune in my head for the rest of the day. I've never heard that naming a boat can bring good fortune. I've heard that RE-naming one can bring bad luck however, as can naming one after a woman. So I guess make sure you like the name you pick, and don't use the name of the mistress. edit: a quick google brought this blog post up. Maybe some ideas there (or in the comments).

"Testing" Kerbal Space Program after updating both my OS (to 19.04) and the game (to 1.7). Just to make sure it all still works of course. I also got the "Breaking Ground" DLC, mostly for the robotics. There's a mod called Infernal Robotics that does pretty much the same thing, but I've tried it and it .. has issues. Assuming Breaking Ground works as advertised it will be nice to have that functionality in stock. Unfortunately I didn't get everything else done this weekend so I haven't installed it yet. Pole position for next weekend though.

Finally getting around to Love is War..

I finally had a chance to listen to and (somewhat) digest AMD's and Intel's computex announcements. Pretty impressive lineup on the AMD side, if they can deliver. I'm already thinking that something like a 3700X CPU, RX5700 GPU, and 1TB, 5GB/s m.2 SSD on an x570 chipset (PCIe4.0) motherboard would make for a really nice home system at a ~$1,000 price point. To be sure, I saw nothing that gives me any immediate inclination to upgrade from my current 2700X system right away. But in a year?? Maybe. By then I'll at least be "needing" a new GPU to replace my "old" RX480 (already do to a certain extent), and might be considering embarking on a 2700X->3700X->X570 motherboard upgrade/migration journey. Thanks to AMD's consumer-friendly AM4 socket a piece-by-piece migration like this is reasonable to contemplate. Upgrading to a comparable Intel system will probably need well over $2k, and require at least the CPU, motherboard, and memory to all be upgraded at once. That's quite the hurdle to overcome, and I'm not the kind that's comfortable carrying that kind of a balance on my CC. To be sure, Intel's i7s (and i9s, if you can afford them) are great at single-core performance and are best for the currently mostly single-threaded games out there. Besides being expensive, they're often too hot with all their cores running to be practical in most home systems however. Especially once the 3d gfx/gaming engines out there become fully thread-aware, multi-core CPUs will likely become "necessary", even for gaming. I'm thinking in a year or so AMD's chips will prove to be a better gaming option. They're not nearly so quick to thermally throttle or memory-bottleneck in multithreaded situations, and even the high-end "Ryzen 9" 3900X is going to be priced at less than half the price of comparable i9s. With just the icy lake announcements and some vague 9900KS mentions to go on I'm guessing Intel's going to have a rough couple years ahead, especially if Epyx's "Rome" starts eating into Intel's Xeon sales on the server side as well. Curious too what role (if any) Google will play. If Stadia takes off that's going to mean a LOT of new CPU (and GPU) cores in the datacenter(s), but gamers probably aren't going to be able to pay xeon and nvidia prices.

I'm going to have to get "Breaking Ground", if only for the hinges. Sounds like existing save games don't get the surface features though, which kind of sucks. If that's the case then I'll have to start my career game over. Probably for the best, all things considered since the new parts give you a lot more options when designing missions/ships, but I'm not looking forward to (re)building my communications relay network. I just got a nice station built too.

The Magic Leap folks look like they're having fun...

Oculus Quest. Not top end specs-wise, but it can certainly give something like the PSVR some competition in the broader market. Looks pretty easy to set up if you happen to be one of those people who are interested in the experience but don't happen to have a degree in computer science and/or EE, and though still expensive it isn't priced completely out of reach for the general consumer. PSVR still probably has the better software library behind it though.

Even so, I'd do the bike thing if I were younger and/or the bike had a battery to help with the hills around here. Even when I was younger the geography was tough. These days I'd probably have a heart attack. I don't like the all-electric bikes though. Where's the fun in that? If I were going to let the bike do all the work I'd get a regular motorcycle or a moped. (Or just stick to a car.) If I were to go for a bike it'd have to be one of those kind where you have to pedal and the battery/motor gives you a boost proportional to your effort. Around here the licensing is easier for that sort of thing anyway. The other thing besides heart attacks and sweat is the traffic. For some reason some car drivers are downright homicidal when it comes to bikes of any kind, not to mention all those people that pay more attention to their cellphone than to their driving. And bikes are always the loser in any sort of altercation with a car or truck just because of physics.

I've had a brand new 2018 Toyota Prius Prime hybrid since October when one of our Santa Ana winds dropped a tree on my old car. (Also a Prius.) Only had it for a few months but so far it's been great. The electric bits give it a bit of pep off the line, and 140MPG around town if I remember to plug it in. On a recent trip to Las Vegas from Los Angeles it got 69 and used less than a tank for the whole trip. Nice cruise control behavior too.

Same, I'd heard everyone talking about them and decided it was finally time to see what I thought! Violet Evergarden wasn't what I was expecting but it got my attention straight away!  Your Lie in April was good. Kind of a hatsukoi drama/romance/tragedy with a bit of mystery. I may actually buy the DVD for that one. Violet Evergarden I've started and added to my "to watch list", but I haven't finished yet.

I speak Standard Hollywood English. I was born in Santa Monica* and have lived in S. California pretty much my whole life. (The exception would be about a year in deep-south Alabama when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and was exposed to colloquialisms like "y'all", "ain't", and dropping the final "g" in words ending in "-ing", as well as things like shrimp-and-grits and fried dill pickles.) If you've watched any Hollyweird productions then you basically know what I sound like. That lady sounds exactly like I remember my elementary school teacher sounding. *I totally don't like, speak val or anything. However, I do know a couple people who do.

The specs are (kind of) out on the new Valve Index VR headset, including the system specs needed to keep the thing well fed. (Not an easy thing to do considering you're driving 2 HD displays running at between 90 and 144FPS.) Fortunately my "old" Radeon RX480 gfx card squeaks in at the low end of the "required" specs. (YES!) I'd upgraded the rest of my system a while back, but I've been reluctant to upgrade my GPU since that's one of the fastest-depreciating parts of a PC these days and I'd yet to see solid gfx performance requirements from any of the headset makers. Unless you have a real *need* to upgrade your GPU it is usually better to wait. Prices will come down and/or performance will increase over time. Looks like I can test out the VR waters with my existing system as is, without having to spend another $300 on a new gfx card. That's good since the $1k price of a full set of Index gadgetry (headset, 2 hand controllers, and 2 base stations) is already giving me a mild case of sticker-shock. Interesting that DisplayPort is required, as HDMI is "not supported".

ty.. I'll try not to let it go to my head. Too much.

I resemble that remark.

I was just reading up on the latest rumors a couple days ago. We'll see. That's the draw of VR.

I've tried the Sony VR. It is .. marginal, IMHO. Resolution and FOV are limited, tracking is sometimes questionable, and the controllers are cheap. In fact, the whole thing is cheap-feeling. Not that cheap is a bad thing, all else being equal, but this is clearly a low-end device. For a first attempt at a broadly-deployed consumer VR device it is a good try, but frankly, the biggest thing the Sony device has going for it is the software available.

Stuff like Dennou Coil is why I like "hard" SF. It gives you a glimpse into where we are, or at least could be, going. Sometimes it is a warning. Sometimes it is a wonderful vision. It is always interesting, IMHO. Unfortunately "hard" SF is hard to get right. You re constrained by the known, and very limited in what you can extrapolate and make into a story. Stuff like Star Trek and Summer Wars is more entertaining for most, gets a wider audience, and is ultimately more profitable. STEM education being what it is these days quite a lot of people can't tell the difference anyway. Not that I'm knocking the "soft" stuff. I can appreciate that too. I enjoyed Summer Wars. But to really get my brain engaged I need the hard stuff. Current best-tech for AR/VR is anything but simple or cheap. The hololens is $3000 last I checked, and is bulky and balky. The stuff from Magic Leap is cutting edge and cheaper, but still not anything like the almost-not-there I/O glasses/devices in Dennou Coil. That said, once a prototype of a device like this is built, no matter how bulky and impractical, if there's enough perceived demand then the electronics of things like the cameras that do the "inside out" positioning can be merged and miniaturized. The software that runs on a general-purpose CPU to do those "background" tasks can be hard-coded for a dedicated, massively parallel processing chip that does that one thing far faster and cheaper and use less power besides. We've seen this effect already in 3D gaming with GPUs, which themselves evolved from FPGAs. GPUs could be used in machine learning, but now nvidia and Intel are making even more specialized chips for that. Tesla's also done their custom "FSD" - Full Self Driving - chip for their cars which consolidated, "simplified" (from an outside perspective), and made more reliable and cheaper a bunch of stuff that had been done the hard way with off-the-shelf general purpose components. The HoloLens/Magic Leap AR gear (and some consumer VR gear as well) are already mounting outward-facing cameras that the system's software uses to position and orient the headset in the user's existing, ambient environment. In some cases it also positions associated "peripheral" devices like hand controllers in 3d space. This is what I meant when I used the term "inside out" positioning, above. The position and orientation information originates from the device itself. As opposed to "outside in", which relies on separate outside sensors pre-positioned in an environment and connected to a computer to feed the headset's position and orientation data to the VR engine. Clearly "inside out" is what you want in an ultra mobile device. That's pretty hard. The outside in method is currently the cheapest, most accurate, and most easily do-able with existing off-the-shelf components. Unfortunately it kind of ties you down by limiting you to a predefined operational area defined by the outside sensors. There's nothing tech-wise which is impossible in the Dennou Coil world however. Cameras can be made almost as small as you like, and their inputs fed into massively parallel, special purpose silicon built into the frames, which in turns outputs position and orientation info to the upper layers of software. Virtual retinal displays are already a thing.. actually kind of a solution in search of a problem like lasers were back in the day. Smarphones can already play 3D games, and connect wirelessly to periperals and the 'Net. Support a VRD with a phone-sized "compute brick" that uses an inside-out headset as its user interface and there you go. Probably won't happen any time real soon, but I see no intrinsic problems with implementation. And yes, there would no doubt be hazards with the new technology. There's already been people running out into traffic chasing pocket monsters. 4 billion years of evolution are wasted on some people. SMH.

If you haven't already, go watch Dennou Coil, aka Cyber Coil. It is kind of a fun sci fi about a bunch of kids and the fun they get into while wearing augmented reality glasses. In the real world we're not quite there, yet. Augmented reality in the real world is bounded by things like Pokemon Go and StarChart on smartphones, and Microsoft's HoloLens is still pretty bulky and expensive. Nowhere near the nearly-invisible glasses they wear in Dennou Coil. If you've never seen MSFT's 2015 E3 Hololens minecraft demo you should. Microsoft obviously wants us to go there. They've just announced their Minecraft Earth app (below), which to me looks like a portal, both in a marketing sense and a gaming sense. Clearly - to me anyway - the plan is to get people using the app to build content and attach it to the real world so that when things like Hololens get cheap enough there will already be a rich environment to work with. [mal type=anime id=2164] and Minecraft Earth,

I'm concerned about the weight of the VR headset and etc. as well. I'd really like to see a light headset that works wirelessly. Making the headset light but cabled to a small backpack or fannypack that actually holds the battery and most of the electronics would be acceptable, as long as the cable is well-managed. It is being worked on and it'll happen, but it isn't here yet. The other thing I'd really like to see is a simple glove type device for hand positioning and gesture sensing. (Simple for the user.. it can be PFM inside, as long as it is easy to use.)

I nicknamed this guy "Rusty".