Over on Mastodon, Steve Barnes wrote some excellent comments related to my post yesterday.

He made me realize there is something very central to my post that I completely failed to make clear:

Why do I make it sound like Meta created the Quest when it was Oculus who did so much of the essential technical work before Meta bought them?

The answer is that I do not think a headset like the Quest 2 I own would be here on the sofa with me had there not been a Meta to buy Oculus and push the technology out to people.

Oculus was definitely much more essential for the the VR tech we have today than Meta is, but without spreading it wide, getting devices made, and plugging away at polishing the software it would not have become a neat wireless package I could pick up in a store, set up in minutes (modulo Meta accounts), and buy games for without being technical.

I wonder if the ability to push things along for a while is not a bit under-rated in tech today? Many things do not need radical changes every year (or every six minutes), they just need to settle, gradually spread, and get polished and well maintained.

Google or Microsoft - to just pick some major companies out of thin air - have released and dropped more products than I can count in the time the Quest line has been around, several of them VR adjacent. They could have scaled and manufactured and distributed for a while, but they and their mindset could not have brought the Quest 2 to me and kept it updated.

The one company I could think of as a possible alternative would be Valve. They can definitely do things over long periods of time. Hey, they even make hardware, some of which is for VR! And they are well known enough to me that I could concievably have bought a wireless headset from them had it existed.

Somehow, I feel like Valve would have been a bit too leisurly to get it done though. Would they have pushed enough? Is their share of the current VR market a sign that they are not hungry enough to build a Quest-sized presence?

Perhaps. But on the other hand I would never in a million years have guessed Meta would be this good to VR had it not happened.

Kudos to everyone who is pushing something along even though it is not the hype of the moment. Almost everything is not.

I dislike so many things about Meta and the people who run it. If they and everything they created disappeared tomorrow, I think there is exactly one product I would actually miss.

Yes, those darn VR headsets.

Without them, I am pretty sure I would not just have spent a blissful half hour or so on my sofa playing the most immersive version of Tetris there is.

(I also noticed or rediscovered only today that you can re-map the controls in Tetris effect, meaning I will now stop dropping pieces by accidentally pressing up when trying to move left and right. A fantastic improvement.)

I also would not have filled my rings playing Beat saber in the hall.

All that is great, but it also keeps impressing me how they keep improving things in large and small ways. Even this far after the VR hype blew over for this time. Even for my headset which is a generation (or two, depending on how you count) behind their latest and greatest. Putting it on and getting to the activity I want has only got faster and more reliable in the past year.

I do not know how or why - except I have noticed the system updates being installed every now and then - but I like it. The same goes for the remote desktop experience, it too feels somther and better, mainly in ways I can not put my finger on.

I wonder how many people are working on Quest stuff over there. I wonder if they have something great coming up.

I hope they keep at it.

I feel like VR was the last sane science fiction technology from when I was small to arrive in real life. You know, those things which you could read about and find magical and cool while at the same time seeing clear and meaningfully different ways of doing things with them. It still feels magical to me to have VR available and this good, and I want to use it more and see it get even better. The technology does not need to do anything magical to do so either, it just has to keep improving. Lighter, faster, higher resolution, probably a million sensor improvements. It can all come in stages, every gradual improvement will be nice.

The point is that it works and delivers things, the useful version is not perpetually being pushed off into the future, at a point where a unclear miracle needs to have happened to make the pieces fall into place.

(So no: AI as it was in science fiction has very much not arrived if you ask me. And I doubt it will, which might be best for everyone.)

No, of course I am not seriously offline. But something of that calm from the end of October has stuck around, helped by the intense being in the present of Øredev.

I am spending a little less time with podcasts reflexively in my ears.

I sometimes go for music instead(!)

I have spent a bit more time during the weekends watching longer-form moving images, instead of flipping between small things.

I have watched these things without also watching another thing for distraction on a smaller screen.

And I try to less often reflexively check various sources for little updates. I at least seem to have broken my Mastodon completionist urge. Now, I read up on, at most, the batch of 30-odd messages my Mastodon app seems to load as a default, and

I do not click to load more to fill in the whole gap.

Little things. Perhaps not even much difference at all in total device time. But it feels ever so slightly calmer, and I want all of that I can get.

Especially when it is not dramatic to do so.

Small note-taking joys

Realizing it is a good time to make a separate note for something, creating that note, then immediately recalling more things you want to write down in it. The act of capturing a thought making me think more thoughts worth capturing. Such a nice little feeling.

Wow, that went by fast.

Again.

On Tuesday, I once again (I need to go through and actually figure out how many times it has been) got on the train to Malmö and this year's Øredev conference. Writing this, it is Friday evening and I am once again back on my own couch, dog snuggled up next to me, only just beginning to process the highly compressed injection of information that was three days and at the same time the blink of an eye.

Last year, I somewhat by accident filled almost all my time with podcast recordings. This year, I actually learned from the past (for a change) and actually left space in my schedule to both breathe and attend some talks. I have plenty more I want to catch once the videos are released, but it was great to actually be in the room for a change.

Otherwise, things went much like previous years. Above all, there were of course lots of great people - I think I ran into more people I knew to some degree than ever before, and talked to more listeners of Kodsnack as well. Plus I got to be someone else's spotting of a Hypercritical t-shirt in the wild, which is just great fun to be.

The coffee from Sandby kafferosteri was as great as always, and three bags of beans came along home with me.

My hotel room was on a higher floor than I recall having before, and this was mainly noticeable in serious waiting times during any type of rush moment. I and many other conference goers headed for the stairs when we happened to arrive at or leave the hotel in a large group, and even with nine stairs to climb I think I saved time. But I did feel it in my legs as I finally reached my floor.

I kept my morning routine of hitting the hotel gym's treadmill for a 20 minute run, followed by climbing all those stairs and then spending at least as long trying to cool down before showering and having breakfast. It is probably great that my body is this good at regulating its temperature, but it is a little annoying when you realize you hit the shower slightly too early for the third day in a row … Beside that annoyance, I find that routine to be great for me - starting each conference day feeling fresh and with a bit of circulation already going. (Plus breakfast tastes even better.) A strange detail is that I enjoy this despite never running first thing in the morning under any other circumstances. It helps that there is not really any other time of day that would reilably work during the conference, but it could still just as well have felt miserable the whole way through.

I brought plenty of Kodsnack stickers and a bunch of slop goblin ones too, and whenever I spread some out on tables they quickly disappeared. Printing and giving out stickers: I highly recommend it!

As for talks and interviews and stuff, there will be Kodsnack episodes. And I do not think I can get much more coherent thinking out of my brain today in any case.

Good night!

I spent last weekend in a cabin in the woods near the sea, hanging out with friends, having great coffee, playing games, taking long walks in the sun, and seeing my first northern lights. Among other things.

It was just as good as it sounds. All the regular shoulds and coulds were completely gone, and my Airpods spent the entire stay in their case, on the charger.

I think I have managed to retain a bit of that calm during the week and this weekend as well. The week was a bit more crammed than I would have liked, including the catching of a cold of some sort which currently seems to be slowly ebbing out. But I have managed to not feel overwhelmed, and to not feel like I should be doing a hundred different things at once. I have done what is actually needed and felt completely fine not doing anything else. (The cold thing helps a bit here. I admit.) I have read a bit, napped a bit, watched some long-ish stuff without second screens, and done my fair share of work as a dog resting spot.

Can I keep this nice feeling going?

Probably not, but I can at least enjoy it while it lasts.

Very much on the same topic, we officially wrapped up the Björeman // Melin // Åhs podcast last week. Ten years felt like a nice spot for a break, and I think we did a very nice final episode without getting bogged down in sudden nostalgia or anything.

I will try not to immediately fill the space left open with other scheduled things.

I might at least be able to finish a book or two before something comes up …

Øredev is shockingly close as well, which in turn means it will pretty much be next year before I blink, catch my breath and realize what is going on. Any sense of calm I can retain going into that whirlwind will be most useful. And perhaps early december will end up being calm?

It could happen.

Anyway: good times!