Racket Fury for Oculus Quest plays a mean game of Table Tennis

I’ve no idea why a table tennis game should be called “Racket Fury”. But the game is great. I had a go at the Sports Scramble game on the Quest (a demo version is supplied with the device) and found that to be a bit “meh”. They seem to think that changing your tennis racket into a golf club in mid rally is a good thing.

I beg to differ.

But the Racket Fury: table tennis game is another thing entirely. I’ve played enough “proper” table tennis to be able to tell when a shot I’ve made is going to go out. I get this “sinking feeling” as the ball leaves the bat. The Eleven: Table Tennis game I play on the HTC Vive is good enough to give me that “sinking feeling” and so is Racket Fury. The frame rate seems a bit lower, but the fun of playing the game is still there.

It’s also rather satisfying to be able to play this game better than number one son, thanks to many years spent bouncing off real tables.

The tracking of the bat is very good, two pro tips:

• investigate the menu that lets you rotate the bat in your hand, this means that you can have a more natural bat holding experience

• changes from arcade to “physics” mode. This makes the game harder, but more satisfying.

If you have an Oculus Quest you should get this game.

Microbes at Ferens Art Gallery

I really love Ferens Art Gallery in the middle of Hull. They have some pictures that are a bit like old friends to me, in that I just like dropping in and seeing them every now and then. At the moment they have a microbes exhibition that is well worth a look, particularly if you have kids.

The Oculus Quest is the future of VR

I’ve played with Virtual Reality enough to know that it is the future. I was never sure about 3D TV, but I think that the experience you get from a good VR system is something that everyone will want. The problem has been that until now a good system has involved external lighthouses for tracking, trailing wires and a hefty PC.

The Oculus Quest changes that. It gives a good experience that you can get just by putting on the headset and picking up the controllers. There’s a simple room calibration that you need to perform and then it will transport you into a whole bunch of engaging virtual experiences.

Number one son turned up with his device yesterday and after around 10 minutes playing with it I decided to get one too. It really is that good. The graphics are not as detailed as those from my HTC Vive system, but it is just so much easier to put the headset on and get started. And the lower resolution images still manage to conjure up a very real environment.

The controller and headset tracking is first rate and the device manages the boundaries of your virtual environment very well. We only seemed to have problems with bright sunlight from one side of the room upsetting tracking every now and then, but not enough to get in the way of a good time.

If you’ve not played with VR before this is a great way to get started.

Reviving a Dragino LoRa Gateway

I’m a sucker for “upgrades”. Maybe it’s because I like watching progress bars. I find them rather relaxing, and a great way to avoid doing work.

But upgrades are not always your friend. Take my little LoRa gateway for example. It’s not a “proper” gateway, in that it only has a single channel, but it is fine for testing devices (as long as you are happy for only one in eight packets to get through).

Anyhoo, a while back it broke. So today I tried to fix it. It turns out that I’d actually broken it by upgrading it. The first time it failed I’d done what I thought was a sensible thing and upgraded the firmware, thinking that this might fix it.

Actually, it broke it even more.

Turns out that if you upgrade the gateway to version 1.4 this breaks all the stored settings. There’s a useful description of the problem and how to solve it here.

Now I’m back on the map, which is rather nice.

Lamp post sensor mountings

I’m not sure how many of my readers really want to know a good place to get plate to mount air quality sensors on a lamp post, but if you do I can recommend these. They seem pretty strong and two of the fixing holes line up neatly with this box.

If you’re prepared to shop around and wait for delivery from China you can get both these items much more cheaply than the Amazon prices.

Collapsing Regions in Visual Studio

I like using regions in Visual Studio. They make it much easier to move around code. I’m writing C++ at the moment and functions and code blocks are automatically tuned into regions, which is nice.

If you want to collapse and open them quickly there are a couple of control sequences that you might find useful.

CTRL+M CTRL+O

This collapses all the regions. You can hold down the control key and press M followed by O.

CTRL+M CTRL+L

This collapses all the regions recursively. So if you have regions inside regions you might end up with just one line in the editor if you use this..

These sequences are toggles, so pressing them again will open all the regions. I find them especially useful when copying or moving code, in that you can select the collapsed region and it will select all the code in the region.

Travelling Man

Bought three train tickets today. That’s 300 pounds gone…..

Snaps and Visual Studio 2019

It turned out that the hardest part of installing Visual Studio 2019 was freeing up the 18 GB or so of space that was required. If you are installing it for use with Snaps from my wonderful Begin To Code with C# book you can do a very ordinary installation, but you do need to select to two options that I’ve marked in red above.

If you do this you should find that the Snaps you can download from GitHub here should just work.

If it doesn’t work please let me know. It might work just for me because I have some libraries already on my machine. I’m going to try with an “empty” machine, but I need to set it up.

Update: If you are finding the image hard to read, make sure that you select Universal Windows Platform Development and Windows 10 SDK 10.0.18632

Watch Umbrella Academy

You might have spent the evening watching the Eurovision Song Contest. I spent it watching three episodes of Umbrella Academy. I think I got the better deal. Worth a look if you like well produced superhero nonsense. And who doesn’t.

Mowing blind

Every now and again I do a good turn for someone. At least once a year.

Earlier this week I was out cutting grass for a neighbour, navigating a mower and strimmer around his lovely garden. When I’d finished I looked across the road at our house and I noticed that it seemed a bit blurred around the edges. Turns out that I’d done the entire job wearing my “close up” glasses (the ones that I only ever use with the computer). These turn everything more than two feet away into a mildly pleasing blur.

I’d been replying to an urgent email (yes I still get the occasional urgent email) before I left the house and forgotten to change back to my proper spectacles.

I think I'll leave it a while before I go back and look at the damage….

Pokémon Detective Pikachu is not a bad film

I’m not a huge fan of Pokémon. But I am a fan of nights out and popcorn. So last night we went to see Pokémon Detective Pikachu. It’s fair to say that films of video games don’t have a great history. My favourite ever video game film has got to be the original “Tomb Raider” movie. Mainly because it contains this line.

“The letter’s from my father. He must have written it before he died.”

Anyhoo, expectations appropriately managed we set out to the cinema last night. And we were both pleasantly surprised. The story is a bit wonky, as are some of the special effects and the dialog. Bill Nighy was along for the ride and probably to pay off a sizeable chunk of his mortgage. Ryan Reynolds does a fantastic job of voicing the title character and things burble along in an amiable manner to a satisfying (if not terribly well explained) end.

Worth a trip. Particularly if there is popcorn.

Day tripper

If you want to get a good response when you are on the phone to an electrician, mention the smell of burning. It wasn’t very pronounced, but it was definitely there….

It all started when the charge for the car failed half way through. The earth drip on the charge box had triggered. I reset it and tried again. And that’s when it tripped again and I smelled the fateful smell.

I think this is a known fault with the charge box that I bought. Anyhoo, they are coming in a week or so to replace the faulty unit. And I’ve turned everything off.

Always put a hole in the bottom

Note that this is not our air quality sensor. This is a nuclear warhead. Almost as complicated….

Had a great meeting with John today about the Air Quality sensors that we are going to fit on lampposts around the city. He had a couple of pieces of very sensible advice.

• don’t make holes in the top where the water can get in

• make a hole in the bottom where water that gets in can drain out

Buying Domains

I bought some more domain names today. The way I see it, buying domains is the nerd version of getting a tattoo. Except that it’s cheaper and less painful. And if you don’t like the result you just stop paying for it.

I’ve bought csharpyellowbook.com and cplusplusgreenbook.com. Around seven pounds each from Namecheap.

How to break a Heltec

You probably don’t want to know this. But I know how to break the LoRa functionality of Heltec LoRa device.

It’s simple. Just fire it up without the aerial plugged in. This seems to destroy the radio output stage. I’ve done it several times now, just to make absolutely sure….

Play Cockroach Salad

Turns out I’m a big fan of games involving cockroaches. Cockroach Poker is great fun. But Cockroach Salad is even better. It has a fiendishly simple gameplay that will make your brain come out of your ears. Best played with a large bunch of raucous friends.

Surfing memory lane

Making a meme in 2006….

Someone is interested in publishing an eBook based on a text that I wrote over twenty years ago. This is scary. Particularly if you’ve lost the original file.

For many years my backup approach was always to copy the files from the old desktop into a folder on the drive of the new one. This worked until I stopped using desktops and started using laptops. Laptop drives are much smaller and so I was forced to suspend this practice.

My backup policy changed to “put an external hard drive in the loft and forget about it”.

This turned out not to be a good ploy. But today, after a couple of hours treading nervously around the loft looking in boxes (we have a lot of boxes) I managed to find a drive that had all my missing files on.

The word documents are there along with lots of other stuff that has completely brought all work to a standstill while I spend some time marvelling at how much better I was at every kind of thing twenty years ago….

AI Frenzy with Chatbots and Added Pizza

The lucky audience

I did my chatbot talk today. It went very well, which means that all the demos worked and the audience laughed in all the right places. Thanks for being a lovely bunch of people to talk to

I’ve put the slides here if anyone wants to take a look.

Writing about Chatbots

One of the things on my list of things to do is “Write the presentation for the Barclays AI Frenzy event”. Which is tomorrow…..

I reckon that it can take up to a day to write a good one-hour presentation. So it’s a good thing I’m starting now.

I’m talking about chatbots, which I’m quite familiar with. But pesky Microsoft keep making the bot framework different and better. This means that while the fundamentals stay broadly the same, but way you use them is different. Which means that all the slides and demos need to be reworked.

The good news is that I’m becoming rather inspired by just what you can do with this technology now.

Busy List

Back to work today. It seems I have lots of things to do. I wrote an enormous list of them and then cheered myself up by crossing one of them off. Well, it was the work item “Write a list of things to do”.