Commentary in the comments.
Today's flashback, March 2014. Almost-4-yr-old Eleanor keeping me company in the office. She didn't want to nap, she wasn't sleepy.
What have I done?
What did we do with our day off? Apart from sleeping in, and NOT COOKING today, thanks to all the leftovers?
Our youngest just got into LEGO Star Wars Castaways, new on Apple Arcade. It continues the long synergy of LEGO bricks and Star Wars minifigs doing all kinds of things, which is a fine combination. But... this game supports multiplayer. So A. got Jen into it, and then scope creep went on from there... 1. Setting up an old PS4 controller to work with Jen's iPad, because touch screen pseudo-joystick controls are for noobs. 2. Setting up both kids with their own iCloud accounts for both main login and Game Center, because you can't friend yourself. 3. Setting them up with their own contacts, etc.
It looks like a short list, but one of the iPads needed some fiddling, with software updates, logging out & in, reconfiguring, etc., etc. This is the sort of thing we ought to have done long ago, but 🤷♂️.
And what did I get as my reward? The kids took an hour and a half to each lunch (mmm, turkey sandwiches) because they spent the entire time sending each other goofy stickers in Messages, now that they could.
But now they're all playing together and having a raucous good time. And I'm going to go take a late shower or something.
Today I learned: my cat has no idea what to make of shadows on the wall cast by candles.
(Power is out.)
Periodic reminder: if you haven't changed your internet plan in a few years, then you can probably increase the speed and pay the same money, or get a discount for the service you already have.
In my specific case today, the WOW 1 Gbps plan is down to $65 with a 1-year contract, and I'm currently paying $70 for 500 Mbps with a 2-year contract. The contract is up in June, and I didn't feel like arguing I should be allowed to slide from one to the other, especially as I'd need to buy a new Docsys 3.1 modem to get those speeds anyhow. I can just set a reminder for later.
(I was initially calling to set up the "new" 2019 modem with them so I could get the full 500 Mbps I was paying for, instead of ~260 Mbps the old modem was capable of. Download speed clearly not an urgent issue; the upload speed of 50 Mbps I've been able to get all along was more important to me. I had tried setting up the 2019 modem myself, but it turns out you need to call them on the phone to activate it. I found that out a couple of months ago during a service call.)
From The Information, which is apparently an email newsletter I'm getting free previews for. Email also had links to Facebook/Oculus work on extracting audio of interest from a noisy background.
Virtual reality is about to get a big visual upgrade.
Tucked into a presentation Monday at Nvidia’s annual tech conference was the revelation that the company will start including technology in its graphics chip software that significantly enhances the visual quality of VR experiences.
The change centers around something known as foveated rendering, which allows users to see more detail where their eyes are actually looking, and less on the periphery. That makes VR apps and games look better while potentially boosting apps’ performance.
One reason the VR community is so excited about the news is that the new Nvidia software makes this form of foveated rendering easy to include without additional work by game and app developers.
For now, only users with high-end PC VR setups that already offer eye-tracking and use Nvidia graphics cards will be able to take advantage of the new technology. But eventually, headsets on the more affordable end of the spectrum are expected to have eye-tracking hardware, too.
Meanwhile, PC VR users with competing AMD graphics cards will be left waiting until that company offers similar foveated rendering features in its software. As for users of Facebook’s Oculus, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about bringing eye-tracking into future headsets, but it isn’t clear how soon that will happen.
Nvidia worked with Swedish eye-tracking specialist Tobii on the technology. On top of its software work, Tobii supplies the eye-tracker hardware in enterprise and research-oriented headsets such as the Vive Pro Eye and HP’s coming Omnicept headset.
Foveated rendering is something a lot of VR early adopters have been waiting for before upgrading to newer headsets. With this software breakthrough, it will be interesting to see how quickly manufacturers will start delivering eye-tracking headsets at a price that won’t break the bank.
I finished a real console game last night!
In the usual sense, Uncharted 2 was the shortest console game I've played in a long time. After playing Horizon Zero Dawn for a jillion hours over a year and a half, I wanted something more digestible - leaping straight into Persona 5 for another 100+ hours seemed like a terrible idea. I started Uncharted 2 on Feb. 6th and finished April 11th, doing a couple hours every other weekend. Really, very short! The plot moves quickly, you can only go forward, and I didn't at all try to be completionist about collecting all the hidden treasures, just grabbing the ones I happened to see.
From another perspective, this is the longest it's ever taken me to finish a game. I first started this on the PS3 (Amazon says: Game of the Year edition, Sept 2014), and then I bought the remastered collection on PS4 years later and started playing it there in Feb., and finished on the PS5. 3 console generations, 6.5 years. The only thing that could beat this is if I ever finished playing FF6 which I started on the GameBoy Advance.
This game could have been finished in fewer sessions, but I only played at night because I didn't feel comfortable with the kids around. Horizon Zero Dawn was mostly OK, you were fighting robot dinosaurs and it wasn't graphic violence. Hades, you die a billion times but it's kind of cartoony and then you're better again. But Uncharted 2... the bad guy delivers the "we are not so different" speech at the end, and it rings truer here. You kill a lot of dudes in this game. Headshots, sneak attacks where you grab someone and silently break their neck, etc. There were also chapters where I died a lot, my corpse a contorted pretzel while your companions cry out. You are not, like the villain of the piece, trying to find ancient relics so you can make an immortal army and impress the ghosts of Stalin & Pol Pot, but you still kill hundreds and hundreds of enemy grunts. Not for kids.
One funny thing: periodically the game would pop up a window comparing my progress to Skwid's, since we're Playstation friends. How many treasures collected, how many stealth kills, etc. I'm sure he played this years before - will have to ask.
On to Uncharted 3 while my fingers still know how to work the controls!
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