Rui Carmo
November 21^st 2020, in the evening · 6 min read

The Oculus Quest 2

This week’s installment is brought to you by a combination of exhaustion, boredom and technology-fueled experiences that, for a change, helped lift my spirits. In short, I had a YOLO moment, went all out on escapism and got myself an Oculus Quest 2 for my birthday. Nearly a month in advance, too, so I’ve actually been tinkering with it for quite some time now.

The VR Spiral

I had tried a couple of VR headsets in the past, but the Quest was the one I had my eye on because it was the first moderately decent standalone device, with the combined genius of John Carmack and Michael Abrash behind it (which immediately put it head and shoulders above the competition in my book).

Add to that an Android-based platform that I could target without any fuss from Unity (or, as of now, Godot), pretty decent WebXR support and arguably the single largest community in the space, and it was pretty much already at the top of my list as a nice gadget to buy by this time last year.

In fact, it has been the kind of device I have had in mind ever since I considered my options for hobbies back in 2018¹, almost a year before the very first Quest came about.

So I’ve actually been tracking this field for a good while, and when the Quest 2 was announced I was pretty excited, but all the reviews pointed out that it now required a Facebook login.

Which, to be honest, was (and still is) a major put-off.

Diving In

But being stuck at home since January has taken a toll. The pandemic has a way of changing people’s priorities, and in my case it has exacerbated the need to do something fun every now and then, either as a reaction to the overbearing feeling of impending doom or to hours upon hours of work, stuck at home and without much in terms of (creative) outlets and inspiration.

And for the past few months I have increasingly (and uncharacteristically) told myself “I want to experience this, dammit” every time I glimpsed Beat Saber or Superhot, and after this summer’s gaming escapade and the obvious realization that we were going to be stuck at home for quite a few months yet, I started thinking that, all things considered, this might actually be a good opportunity to dip my toes in VR.

I still have a Facebook account (that I hardly ever use, since I moved away from Facebook login on everything, including Instagram²) so… One evening the week after it launched I took a deep breath, sold some of my MSFT stock and ordered one.

For science, you know.

The Good Bits

The thing is lighter, sturdier and much less of a hassle than previous headsets I’ve tried before, and a comfortable fit for me. I tried (and failed) to get the Elite Strap with a battery, but (so far at least) I’ve been able to use it for satisfactory lengths of time.

Which isn’t saying much seeing that the longest may have been a whole hour on my actual birthday (and only then because I took the day off), but both comfort and battery life seem adequate so far.

And there have been other niceties:

I had much less trouble with inter-pupillary distance than I expected (one of the presets worked perfectly for me).
Wearing glasses (even given my high myopia prescription) wasn’t a problem (for me or my kids), other than my glasses’ lenses fogging in colder evenings, especially when I moved around a lot–and believe me, VR can turn out to mean a lot of exercise you weren’t expecting to have (which, in our present circumstances, turns out to be an interesting side benefit).
The visual and auditory experience is quite good, considering the kind of hardware involved (especially with the recent upgrade, which bumps the refresh rate to 90Hz). Hardcore gamers are going to rant on about PC VR being far superior, etc., but to be honest I don’t care–in terms of bang for the buck, graphics quality is pretty good, and I think I can safely say that it will only be worth upgrading when we get twice the resolution on a standalone device.
The games turned out to be a lot of fun. Besides Beat Saber and Superhot I stumbled upon Mission: ISS (which doesn’t have stellar graphics but is pretty amazing), Echo VR (clearly influenced by Ender’s Game) and Rez Infinite (based on the only game that I would love to go back and play on a PlayStation 2, and the reason I never sold the console), and with those five titles I’m set for months.
Live streaming to a Chromecast (or a desktop browser, as of this week) works great, albeit at the expense of battery life.
Although I haven’t written anything of my own yet, there are plenty of WebXR and Godot samples out there, as well as cubic acres of 3D video content for that extra bit of escapism (besides the usual vertigo-inducing silliness, there is a fair amount of sightseeing to be done here).

What Isn’t Quite There Yet

However, it’s still far from perfect, and I’ve already compiled a list of annoyances:

VR Video is still unaccountably blurry, even on recent productions (of which there is a steady stream inside the Oculus content browser). At the stated hardware resolution, you’d expect that 5K video playback wasn’t so fuzzy or with so many artifacts, and I don’t know it it is a matter of software tuning or content encoding (it certainly isn’t a bandwidth issue, since you can save and playback videos to the device and I’ve tried some that way). In contrast, playing regular video from Plex via the browser (there’s no app for the Quest, alas) is plenty good enough and somewhat convincing as an extra-large TV screen, so I’m curious as to why VR videos are so crappy.
There are too many different apps promoting either the dumbest possible thing (watching videos while “sitting” in different settings) or the most overwrought social ones (like shared live events and “experiences”). Both emphasize inviting along your Facebook friends, which I most definitely have no interest in (funnily enough, only one of my friends has a Quest).
The social features are pretty much useless, and most of the traditional Android sharing functionality was completely kneecapped in favor of half-baked Facebook integration (it’s the only social network you can share snapshots and recordings to).
The most fundamental social experience (sharing the device with your family) is just not there, because it has no multi-user support whatsoever. And when it does, it’s likely to require a Facebook account, which is not going to happen as far as my kids are concerned. So be prepared to have hassles with game scores, progress, saves, etc. in a family context.
You get a lot of “junk” notifications, both on the companion app and inside the headset. The usual attempts to upsell apps and content, possible “friends” you may have come across while exploring shared spaces (i.e., “randos” that Facebook thinks you “met”), occasional (actual) friend activity, etc. I’ve been meaning to switch all of those off, but there seem to be some built-in limitations around that.

And this is, for me, the only real issue with the Quest–its Facebook-centricity.

I would get a lot more mileage from, say, being able to share things directly on Twitter (which I probably can now, indirectly, thanks to the latest browser update this week), or from having better third-party integration.

I don’t want to share photos or recordings solely on Facebook. And the emphasis on “shared experiences” with Facebook “friends” is a constant put-off, that, to be honest, is crippling the thing’s potential, and a possible harbinger of things to come: I just want (preferably single-player) games, they want me as a content generator for their “shared” experiences.

You can work around it the hard way and do moderately stupid things like running Slack in the Oculus browser, if you really want to–I did it to check notifications and share a couple of videos, and it seems to work fine, but is completely over the top.

SideQuest

Given my interest in tinkering with the device, of course I went and installed SideQuest as soon as I could (actually, just this week, which was the first time I plugged it in to anything other than the charger), and made a beeline for the (very well done) Quake and Quake 2 ports, which became fully functional after I dug out the original PAK files:

the bad place — Felt like home, and was roomier than I remembered.

These work very well indeed, and I have been making my way through the Quake 2 single-player campaign (which I never actually played, given that most of the time I spent playing any sort of id game was on online servers) and tinkering with various demos–including the stock Godot sample for the Quest, which I hope to have time (someday) to start hacking into.

That demo in particular is quite feature complete and seems to cover everything the headset can do, even to the point of including a minimal Beat Saber clone written in GDScript.

So, given time, I think I have something to entertain me (and the kids) over the next few months. If peering into these other worlds can help take our minds off the pandemic for a few hours a week, I think it will be enough return on investment.

Yes, it takes me a long time to follow up on some things. But at the time I started considering my options the only game in town were hideously overpriced PC-tethered headsets. ↩︎
I don’t even have the Facebook app installed on most of my devices, although I have a reminder to log in every quarter to keep the account alive. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
November 19^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

M1-optimized TensorFlow ※

Considering that before my work laptop got an upgrade I had been thinking about building a PC solely for the sake of going back to doing some ML, these figures look pretty compelling (some folk on Twitter compare the results favorably with a NVIDIA 1080ti, at least).

Rui Carmo
November 17^th 2020, at night · 1 min read

Anandtech benchmarks the M1 Mac Mini ※

These figures are nothing short of spectacular considering there’s a couple of top-of-the-line Intel and AMD chips in the comparisons. I can’t wait to see what these chips can do with a little more die size and some more fine tweaking.

Rui Carmo
November 15^th 2020, in the afternoon · 3 min read

Inconsequential Updates

This weekend I upgraded to Big Sur and nothing whatsoever broke unexpectedly¹ (yet), so I did a round through the various places I take notes and realized there was a fair bit I hadn’t managed to write about and hadn’t been worth writing standalone posts for as yet.

Rui Carmo
November 12^th 2020, at dinnertime · 1 min read

Guido Van Rossum joins Microsoft ※

The Benevolent Dictator For Life of Python (in case you have no clue who Guido is), and responsible for creating my favorite programming language (and my kids’) just joined Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer.

And explicitly mentions the company stance on Open Source, which I wish was the industry norm.

Let this sink in (I’m having a moment here, for not completely unrelated reasons).

Rui Carmo
November 10^th 2020, in the evening · 1 min read

The M1 Mac mini ※

Everyone expected laptops, and the DTK was a sort of mini, but seeing a new model of what is my all-time favorite desktop machine always brings a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Now all I “need” to do is decide between upgrading from my i5 iMac (and getting a decent monitor to go with it), or waiting for an iMac refresh (which seems more likely).

Update: Anandtech has a nice piece on the M1. I can’t wait until we start getting user benchmarks.

Rui Carmo
November 8^th 2020, at late afternoon · 4 min read

250-ish Days Later

Now that we can worry substantially less about the US, let’s get back to the real word for a bit and follow-up on my last cursory update on the pandemic. As of tomorrow, 121 councils in Portugal will be under strict lockdown from 23:00–05:00 on weekdays and after 13:00 on the next couple of weekends.

Rui Carmo
November 7^th 2020, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Biden Wins ※

At long last, our long, shared international nightmare of having a crass, vain, unreliable person running one of the most powerful nations on Earth starts to come to an end.

I just hope it’s a peaceful transition, because the US is going to struggle to climb back from the pits of disrespect and lack of worldwide credibility it sunk down to.

Rui Carmo
November 7^th 2020, in the morning · 3 min read

Re-Linking

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been teeter-tottering between the need to clean up some things in this site, the notion of re-writing the engine completely (again, for the third time) or just going “static” and use something like Hugo or my little sample data pipeline to push the whole thing to a storage bucket of some kind.

Rui Carmo
November 2^nd 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Raspberry Pi 400 ※

I love it. There were previous hacks that stuffed a Pi into the official keyboard, but this is much better and harkens to the days of early personal computers, when you’d just plug in your all-in-one ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 to your TV.

As an education device or a kid’s first computer, I think it’s perfect ($70 for a 4GB Pi 4 is a great price), especially as specs and software continue to improve (it’s now fully supported by Ubuntu, which is sure to appeal to more experienced users).

And I’m betting it’s going to sell remarkably well over Christmas, even outside the UK (there are already non-UK versions of the keyboard itself, so I expect they’ll carry over to this).

Update: Jeff Geerling has a nice teardown and review of it already, and there’s this great post on the design journey. Also, a number of folk have been pointing out that it lacks an audio jack and a power button. The latter seems to be the F10 key, and the former might not be much of a concern in educational settings.

Rui Carmo
November 2^nd 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

The Way I See It ※

This one is for my US readership:

I’m not into politics, but I do understand people, and common decency, and dignity–in short, how a leader should conduct himself. And that, I think, is the entire point of this documentary, which I found amazing on so many ways (including, obviously, the photography).

So vote. And make it count, for humanity–for all our sakes.

Rui Carmo
October 31^st 2020, at late afternoon · 4 min read

Still Standing

My office has been a mess over the past few weeks, so I took the time this weekend to clean it up a bit, and thought it would be interesting to post an update on my standing desk setup, which now looks like this:

Rui Carmo
October 30^th 2020, in the evening · 1 min read

Clarity ※

I used to love playing around with web analytics (after all, my team built an entire Google Analytics equivalent at Sapo), but I hardly ever look at web site stats anymore.

Up until now I just used Application Insights to keep track of errors, but this gave me the nudge I needed to remove Google Analytics and all the extant ad code I still kept around mostly for curiosity.

Let’s see how it goes.

Rui Carmo
October 29^th 2020, at night · 9 min read

A Day In The Pandemic Life

This may sound somewhat fatalistic, but I am in fact hopeful that the pandemic will go away “soon”. But in the same way I can barely remember what a “regular” day was like “in the before times”, I thought I’d describe what it’s like now, at least where the typical weekday is concerned.

Rui Carmo
October 29^th 2020, at dawn · 1 min read

Equinix's ARM offering ※

I think we’re well on track for every IaaS provider to have an ARM flavored offering by mid-2021 (or something along those lines). What I am really curious about is how well each of them will benchmark given that there will be muliple chipsets out there for a while, each with its own server architecture.

Rui Carmo
October 27^th 2020, at night · 1 min read

AMD Acquires Xilinx For $35 Billion ※

Interesting to see how the hardware industry seems to be consolidating. FPGA use has been climbing steeply as performance requirements escalate, and I’m curious to see what AMD has in mind here (although to be fair the IP portfolio alone would be enough of a treasure trove for the lawyerly minded).

Rui Carmo
October 27^th 2020, at night · 1 min read

United States v. Google ※

If, like me, you’ve been caught up in work and real life, this is a pretty decent summary of where things are at, including a bunch of ancillary topics.

I’m a bit curious if the EU is going to do anything at all, but the cynic in me believes they’ll ride in on whatever precedent is established.

Rui Carmo
October 24^th 2020, in the evening · 5 min read

Data For The Ages, Take Two

A long while ago, I wrote a few notes on how to preserve your data for the ages, and, guess what, now that 14 years have gone by, I decided to revisit the topic–but with data from the 90s.

Rui Carmo
October 21^st 2020, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Keith Jarrett Confronts a Future Without the Piano ※

This is the saddest news. I own many of his albums, which I play regularly for the sheer brilliance of his live performances.

Rui Carmo
October 20^th 2020, at dinnertime · 1 min read

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly ※

Not completely unexpected, and likely to take a long time to sort out, but definitely a landmark. Search and advertising have been the lifeblood of the modern Internet, and this touches on both at once.

Rui Carmo
October 20^th 2020, at dawn · 1 min read

Turing Pi 2 mini ITX cluster ※

The logical next step to yesterday’s announcement. Should be fairly pricey to fill with top-tier compute modules, as they can reach $90 a pop when maxed out with RAM and storage.

But I kind of like the daughter card plus heatsink design–it’s the simplest thing that could possibly work.

My Raspberry Pi 2 cluster is showing its age, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this, especially as I would like to move to ARM64 for most things.

Rui Carmo
October 19^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 ※

This is sweet. I can’t make much use of it as is, though, but I hope it inspires the next revision of the Zero or A series, because it would be perfect with 8GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage and a couple of USB-C ports on the side.

As it is, getting the base board just to bootstrap them might be an option, just not a very practical one.

Rui Carmo
October 18^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

MacStories Reviews iOS and iPadOS 14 ※

As usual, Federico Viticci packs in a lot of detail into over 20 pages of tight, thoughtful prose, and highlights both some new features you may have not noticed yes and how they improve on the previous release.

Also great for weekend reading, although I suspect it’ll take a bit longer than that to reach the end.

Rui Carmo
October 18^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

So you want to build an embedded Linux system? ※

This is so cool, and makes for excellent weekend reading (plus the rest of the site is crammed with interesting little nuggets).

Rui Carmo
October 17^th 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Google Coral Dev Board mini SBC ※

I like both the form factor and the specs. $99 is a tad pricey when compared to my current favorite (the Raspberry Pi 3A+), but it has USB-C, 2GB RAM and 8GB eMMC flash (all of which I’d like to see on the next smaller Pi) besides a Google Edge TPU.