Biting Elbows – ‘Bad Motherfucker’ (Insane Office Escape 2)
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Cosmic Trip – Physical Video gaming – Throw it like a frisbee
Physical Video Gaming
Physical video gaming is coming of age thanks to the HTC Vive and related Games. Cosmic Trip is one of these games. You can use both controllers to prepare machines that will prepare robots for mining and defence. These two sets of robots are autonomous. The more resources you mine and the more robots you have. These robots are attacked on a regular basis so defence is important. The laser robots provide some assistance. You can attack the enemy bots by throwing disks at them as if you were throwing frisbees. Most people should find this instinctive.
In the last 17 hours more than half a million people watched the video on how to play this game. The game is still in development and building up hype for when it is released properly. The creator of the video above now has eleven million subscribers on youtube. When he produces a video eleven million people are notified that there is a new video to watch.
Out of those 11 million subscribers on youtube only 1.6 million follow on twitter and a quarter of a million on Facebook. Within the next year or two I would like to see social networks such as Youtube and others expand and become niche communities where people can find content of interest without using Facebook or Twitter. I found Jack Septiceye content when I was searching for VR demos. I use youtube rather than Twitter and Facebook because I don’t want content creators and sharers to tell me how to feel or why the content is of value. I want to make that decision for myself. Youtube and social networks that allow us to browse and discover content based on niche interests are going to become increasingly important.
The creators of the game have just two thousand eight hundred followers on Twitter and approaching one thousand on Facebook. When youtube personalities make videos about products they provide companies with a lot of extra visibility. You reach game players, people who want to see what new technology such as the HTC Vive can do and people who like to watch gameplay videos without necessarily being game players themselves.
Niche Audiences
Twitter and Facebook have focused on broadcasting rather than niche audiences. As a result of this strategy they have lost their stickiness. This leads to people spending less and less time on their social networks. This opens up opportunities for Youtube and other content aggregation sites. The more content you watch on Youtube the more recommendations you will get based on your taste. This cuts out the middle man, in this case Facebook and Twitter. We reduce the signal to noise ratio. We increase the user’s Return on Investment.
Experimenting with Linux
This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.
There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake. With an exteranl disk in target drive mode you can experiment to your heart’s content with an SSD that you can wipe, and reformat, and start again, if something messes up badly.
It also gives you a chance to check that wifi, the keyboard, and other things are still working well. In my case I found that wifi is not working with my mac book pro so I need to trouble shoot this. The advantage is that once I finish experimenting I can switch back to the internal HD via the option key, at boot, and I’m back in Mac land. There is the advantage that if you boot into Linux it will keep booting into linux until you tell it not to, and then your Linux box becomes a Mac once again.
WSL
With Windows you have WSL to play with, if you want to practice with using the command line. It offers a good oppportunity but it’s limited in that you can’t experiment as easily with a GUI.
Raspberry Pi
I find that Pi are great for experimenting. What makes them great is that they’re cheap, especially if you want to use them with Ubuntu Server rather than various GUIs. The advantage of using Pi is that you can experiment with single app setups like PhotoPrismPi, NextCloudPi, HomeAssistantPi and more
You can also experiment with installing ubuntu server, snap installing Nextcloud, adding docker, and then adding Immich, PhotoPrism and Audiobookshelf.
If you come from the windows or Mac world you think “but that’s easy, just install app one, then app two and then app three and you’re done. You’re not. When you install apps they install what they require. If you install nextcloud via snap it becomes the default localhost site, and photoprism sticks to :2342, audiobookshelf to :13378, pi-hole to /admin and so on.
The advantage of having Nextcloud on the locahost route is that you can then add “external websites” that point to the other services that are running in paralel. This allows people to navigate, without having to remember port numbers.
Linux is Stable
The key difference between Linux and MacOS and Windows is that Linux requires you to install the OS, rather than buying it pre-installed in most cases. This is the barrier to entry. If Linux machines were as common as Macs and Windows machines people would use them more often. Linux is stable. Once it is configured correctly it runs for weeks, months or even years without crashing, and without needing to reboot.
Linux is Flexible
The point of using WSL, Pi devices and target drives is that it gives you great flexibility to experiment and fix things, if they break, and restart from scratch if you can’t fix them. If approach A doesn’t work, you try approach B, and then C, until you get something that works.
By taking notes, along the process you develop a work flow to install servers with services as you want them to run. Initially I needed one Pi per service. With trial and error I can get one Pi to do everything, so I should consolidate all the services onto one device.
KDEnlive
The advantage of having the Mac Book Pro running Ubuntu is that I can then install KDEnlive and experiment with this open source video editor. As the Mac Book Pro is made obsolete so the opportunity to experiment with an open source version is all the more interesting. I wanted to build a video editing system on Linux and soon that is what I will have.
And Finally
Originally I was using a one terabyte SSD as a Time machine backup drive. Recently as I spent time freeing space on disks and moving things around I decided in install Linux on that SSD. Now I have a mac that can run either macOS or Linux, depending on which option I choose at boot. The advantage of using an SSD, rather than a spinning drive, is that it can be moved, while on, whereas a spining disk should only be moved, once it stops spinning.
I have been using Ubuntu on a Pi5 and it works well for almost everything, but if I can use a Mac Book pro then I have more power and flexibility, and it becomes portable. I can then switch the Pi 5 to Ubuntu Server and it will be stable enough to run for weeks or months between crashes or reboots.
WSL is good for command line experience and practice. Pis are good for simple apps, but a mac book pro running KDendlive is a good opportunity to finally reach my desire of editing video on an open source solution.