Pupdate

The first half of October continued the fine weather we enjoyed through September, so there were more chances for long walks through the local fields and woods.

NYC

My trip report for a visit to New York got a little too long for this post, so check out the standalone post if you’re interested in airlines flying to/from Gatwick and a bag that’s designed specifically to fit within silly new carry on limits.

Home lab upgrade

I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff with OpenWRT lately, which has meant lots of waiting around for builds to finish. I thought maybe it was time for some faster (and more energy efficient) hardware underneath the VMs in my home lab, and it wasn’t long before I was down the rabbit hole of TinyMiniMicro. When I emerged I found myself a Lenovo M720q[1] on eBay with a decent spec and a decent price[2].

ESXi 8.0u2 installed without any snags, and when I moved the VMware datastore SSD over from the old server it was trivial to get my existing VMs running :) The only small sticking point was finding somewhere to host the 3.5″ SATA drives I had in the old server, which has been taken care of by an ORICO 5 Bay Enclosure. I’ve had to put some tape over the power switch so it starts up after a power cut[3], but apart from that it’s working, and seems like a sweet piece of kit.

Solar Diary

It might have been warm at the start of the month, but overall it was less sunny than last year.

I’m starting to keep track of my iBoost readings so that I have a clear idea of electricity that’s being used generally versus what’s being used to offset gas for hot water. Hopefully that will help me identify the savings from the new home lab gear.

Beating Beat Saber – Quest 3

Having stuck with the original Oculus Quest it was time for an upgrade. I skipped the Quest 2, as when it launched it required a Facebook account. Thankfully they’ve rolled back on that one, so I ordered a Quest 3 straight after launch, and it arrived ahead of schedule.

Sadly first impressions weren’t good:

• It takes different corrective lenses, so I’ve had to order new ones, and wait weeks for them to arrive[4].
• The headband is far less comfortable than the original (and I can now feel why I maybe should have taken a look at the premium ones offered at checkout).
• Hand controller tracking fails with alarming regularity, which can really mess up a good run in the game when one of your swords suddenly drifts off.
• I can’t really tell that there are more pixels and a faster CPU. I expected things to be sharper and more fluid, and they’re just not.

Hopefully things will pick up as the platform matures. But usually it’s the v3 where companies really get it right, and Meta seems to have not been paying close enough attention to quality and user experience.

It almost goes without saying that I’ve not full combo’ed any new levels :/

Notes

[1] If I’d been really thorough in my research I’d have got an M920q, as that’s the variety that comes with Intel vPro, which provides remote keyboard/video/mouse capabilities.
[2] £225 got me an i5-8400, 16GB of RAM (now upgraded to 64GB), 1TB NVMe SSD and 256GB SATA SSD (now earmarked for my Raspberry Pi 5 when it arrives). I may upgrade the CPU to an i9-9900 if I’m ever doing stuff that stretches the existing CPU, as they seem to be readily available on Ali Express.
[3] There shouldn’t be any power cuts, as I have a UPS. But the UPS batteries had failed, and just like every other UPS I’ve ever encountered there was no indication of a problem until it just didn’t work. For now it’s on my spare UPS whilst I fix the (larger) original one.
[4] They did arrive before the end of the month, but then the battery was flat on the headset, so I’ve not been able to test them yet.