Week: 08

Tried – an online Arduino simulator – and ditched it again after fiddling with it for 5 minutes.

Looks good on first glance, admitted.

Raised my first eyebrow after not finding a diode. Ah well, used a 0-resistor instead as placeholder. I don’t see how I can demo a button matrix like that though.

Checked the download as ZIP function. Hm, there is no upload function, guess I have to register for saving online. Guess I can also just import the project text files via copy and paste again. Not comfortable but I can live with that. Found open tickets for both btw.

Made a little power distribution strip on a mini breadboard. Annoying, I have to adjust the colour of each connecting wire. Nice: The text editor allows mass selection just like vscode, so I can easily update a bunch of colours after making all connections. That’s something at least.

Added and wired up two Neopixels. That was annoying, they default to a perfect rectangle wich results in overlapping connection wires on the auto grid. Always. Tried to add a rotate property of 45 deg on a hunch – that worked! Why is there no option for this like with the resistors?

Eventually I tried to upload the Adafruit NeoPixel lib to get some blinken lights going… please subscribe to upload a library with a monthly fee of (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I get it, we all want to earn money. I added whopping _5_ objects and run into the first brick wall. Not like this!

Guess that was a futile exercise.

On my last replacement pads for my headphones. Wrote about this at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/03/19/1708554/ before. The last replacement pads promised to “not tear” within 6 months. What a promise of quality eh 😒

Anyway, this is how they do look half a year later. Totally tattered. I knew the parts are EOL for a while so I purchased several sets. That’s my last one however.

Used the chance to vacuum the insides a little and this may have done the trick to fix some annoying crackling of the ANC function. Mebbe a fine hair was tickling it’s mic. Mebbe it’s just my imagination and the new ones simply manage to create a proper seal again.

I already checked for replacements of the whole headset. The situation looks dire. Apparently it’s either with built in “voice assistant” – what I totally do NOT want – or they bury features, like LDAC, behind a freakin app, that introduces a privacy nightmare (and another EOL deadline). I do take recommendations here:

* ANC enabled over-ear headphones that just work™ with BT
* without app
* without voice assist
* a full day of service
* jacks for powerless usage
* dedicated ANC button to enable/disable the feature
* AAC, LDAP and|or aptX
* Multipoint would be nice
* availability of quality replacement pads

I do not need built-in microphone support. They suck anyway.

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Okay, I did some recording of SpaceBourne 2 and added a voice over and even subtitles… and I conclude that is way too much work but in case you’re interested into a sneak peak of this early access go ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz4uK2Irofo / https://tube.tchncs.de/w/5h9VoeHs5vTAu3bgptc7bN

Video: Dipping into SpaceBourne 2 – Rebuilding A Friend
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This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Looks like children can fritter a ton of sand from a single sandbox within 5 years.

Possible that the cats help. The jury is still out on that. Nobody wants to touch the evidence 🤡

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SpaceBourne 2 by DBK GamesDBK Games (SpaceBourne 2)
The official website of indie game studio DBK Games, the developer of SpaceBourne series and Mesel.

So this was recommended to me by Patola and while I usually do not buy into an early access game I made an exception. I’ve only seen one hour of the game so far but this promises a lot of fun. It’s still very rough, that I can tell – and often inputs do not register or register double. Nonetheless I felt right at home and after a lot of fiddling with the inputs I was happy enough to give it a spin with my X52 Pro (that was indeed detected just fine after the initial tutorial).

So after learning the basic ship navigation and shooting up some drones during the first quest I got ordered to investigate some asteroids.

There were of course some pirates hanging around and the shoot-out did take more time than I’d like to admit. For some reasons I could not for my life get any target lock so all the shooting had to be done with the good old Mk 1 eyeball without having an idea about reach (or even arcs?) of the weapons. Probably a bug. Or user error. The jury is still out on that.

Next was a surprise. After parking the ship in stealth I was ordered to exit and do a little space walk to clear a hidden platform of hostiles. Space diving was not on the things I expected 🤯

Anyway, after some more shooting, and some more explosions, I was back with the contractor and the reward was for reasons yet unknown a freakin robot head. That kicks off a quest to reassemble that poor thing. For some reasons this unfolded into an epic space battle where two different fractions slugged it out in the middle of an old battlefield with me, the contractor helping with the parts and the robot head in the middle – also somehow attacked by scavengers as a 4th faction. What a chaos!

After surviving this I got recommended to someone else to get the robot assembled again. The person that would be able to do this resides on a station in another system though, which means travelling through a… stargate. Awesome! After filing a flight plan and requesting passage I had to line up my entry and found myself in another system – surrounded by illuminated advertisement of all things, of course.

An in-system jump later I docked at a station and found the contact that would help me with the robot. For a price, of course.

This was where I decided to stop for today. So much stuff happened during the first 60 minutes of this and judging by the in-game menus there is a lot more to come. There are skill trees, load-outs, factions and many systems to explore. Yes, it’s not as beautiful as StarCitizens but it’s perfectly playable already and I’m getting Wing Commander vibes from that and this feels rather good.

Played around with on the weekend. Mostly to debug my VAAPI issue and testing what runs well. It’s still a pain in the neck and some games I can only get to stream with tweaks but after all I’m kinda impressed. Not that it makes sense do play most of my library on a mobile phone but what works here does also work on the 55" in the living room 🤪

Hm… spring is near so we’re removing the LED strings we usually put up in Dec for the darkest season. Think that’s the last year for this one. Not too shabby for the cheapest of the line for 10 years of usage.