My week with Plan9/9front

THIS IS A INCOMPLETE POST, IT MAY BE UPDATED

i gave myself a challenge to use plan9, specifically 9front, on hardware, for a week. i've known about plan9 and 9front for a few years but never made the leap to look at it closer until SDF.org did the SDF Plan9 Boot Camp Summer 2022 i'm glad i did as i have met so many amazing people from the bootcamp, thank you SDF and the SDF community for hosting the bootcamp and enabling people to learn more about Plan9, it's been amazing

My Setup

Samsung Q40 laptop * 512MiB RAM * Intel U1400 @ 1.20GHz * 60GB HDD

my rio layout varies a lot but usually ended up like this
 
there is a native ssh client and virtual terminal but i use a modified version (vt.green) considering most of my workflow is over ssh on remote machines normally, i never had to change much of it.

Verdict

i absolutely loved using plan9, can't use it as a daily driver all the time but if i could, i definitely would especially for productivity reasons,

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cope

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A Talk about going on walks!

so it only recently this year (around April) it occurred to me that i have legs
yeah cool as fuck right?
anyway i've been going on daily walks between 7500-25000 steps and i have never felt so alive, especially since i've never really done any endurance exercises in my life until this point other than sit-ups…

Goals and Plans

you may be wondering, what could you be planning?
glad nobody asked, long story short, i've been binge watching lots of walking/camping channels and have decided to train myself up for a long hike some day, maybe to Snowdonia, somewhere scenic, i'll most likely take many photos and upload them someplace for the world to see

anyway, thank you for reading this post, love you all

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Reverse Proxy? CGI? Static Pages? Dynamic Pages? All can be done!

for the past few years (since 2017) i've been using Caddy for my static websites and as a proxy various other web services instead of nginx

Caddy v1

i started with what is now known as Caddy v1 with quite a basic caddyfile:

[domain expired] {
root /var/www/[domain name]
header / {
    Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"
}
}

its really useful as it has auto SSL cert creation, no fumbling about with certbot, worked right out of the box and i instantly fell in love and started using it as a proxy server for various other things.

Caddy v2

It's now daemonized with caddy start, for foreground you can do caddy run
i have upgraded to Caddy v2 for all my sites in early 2022 as i was holding off upgrading but eventually caved in and learnt the new syntax, its almost plug and play for most cases though for some things I like to have auto https disabled (for older device compatibility) so i personally have this at the top of my caddyfile: (isn't the best way to do it, i'll eventually fix it)

{
        auto_https disable_redirects
}

but now some of my sites won't automatically redirect to https! here is a silly little workaround, adding another site block for port 80:

utsuho.rocks:80 {
        redir https://utsuho.rocks{uri}
}

Building, Plugins and Templates

writing plugins is entirely optional as there is a plethora of available plugins to install into your build, all entirely optional. if what you want isn't there writing your own middleware/plugins is ~relatively~ actually easy especially using xcaddy to build caddy, even with the prebuilt binaries you can still do some very cool things with templates including base64 encoding/decoding and dynamic middleware file directories.

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we all know that keybase went to shit after being aquired by Zoom, can you tell when? while i still use the service for online identity verification, i avoid using it for actual chatting.

How well do you trust the servers?

this isn't a matter of security, its a matter of longevity of the service, while the client is open source, the server components are not, it's hosted on piss AWS, stability of Amazon is high so we are at the mercy of Zoom to not kill off the keybase servers which they could do at any moment. as for security there is Lockdown Mode that disables web features without “2fa”

Crypto Blockchains

all signatures are pushed to the Stellar blockchain, prevents tampering, personally I like this feature. https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/stellar

Keybase Pages

the main reason for this post, going forth, i will no longer be using Keybase Pages for my static websites (utsuho.rocks) as it is unreliable and goes down often, I shall be migrating my pages to elsewhere.

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Time, Dr. Freeman? Is it really that time again? It seems as if you only just arrived. You've done a great deal in a small time span. You've done so well, in fact, that I've received some interesting offers for your services.

Anyway, now that I have your attention, as for crashing, bugs and various other issues I had with the Quest 2, haven't had those with the Index as most were caused by Oculus/Meta software. I'll keep the format of this review similar to my closing review of the Quest 2.

The Review!

and for lazy readers, the TL;DR

Valve Index is good, Controllers are nice, Tracking is nice, Tinkering is fun and I'm very happy with my purchase.

The Warranty

I didn't have RMA anything luckily, So I'll skip over this section. :D

The HMD

The headset itself is very comfy and the face gasket doesn't irritate my face as much as the Quest 2 face pad did, I also didn't have to buy a silicone cover and use the stock gasket (i don't sweat much, even during long sessions), I had to use the backpad because my head is small,

As for the display, glare is very noticable but easy to ignore, also basically no latency for PCVR.

The Controllers, Tracking and Movement

The controllers are so comfy and fit nicely for my small hands, I'll start with the downside, Batteries aren't replaceable and you have to wait for them to charge, which honestly isn't as bad as you'd expect as they charge pretty quickly

Fingers, Thumbs and Grabbing! The finger tracking works really well (expect for the right pinky but that's just a me issue),

Obviously the controller and room tracking has much better FOV range due to outside-in lighthouse tracking, in turn you can put arms behind you (if in lighthouse range) and best of all, play in the darkness.

It's also safe to use with Kinect V1 (Xbox 360) Tracking, It isn't the same story with the Kinect V2 (Xbox One) as it interferes HEAVILY with lighthouse tracking.

Tinkering with the Frunk and haptic feedback

Here's the fun part, I have jerryrigged a 4x Port USB2.0 hub to the top that connects to the Frunk USB, Currently 3 of the ports are taken up by – Bluetooth adapter – leapmotion controller – low energy motors!

Bluetooth adapter spends all of the time connected, leap motion and motors can be connected and removed at any time,

For haptic feedback in various games is controlled by either mods, GHR (Game Haptics Router) or native game support

3rd Party Accessories

Something I would recommend for the glasses wearers is lenses, Wearing glasses under the Index is very uncomfy for me, has a chance of damaging the lenses and drastically affects FOV, 1 day after my Index arrived I ordered prescript lenses from VR Optician and they delivered in about a 1½ weeks, their support was very helpful and the lenses were perfect.

Another accessory is magnetic charging cables for the controllers, Self explanatory.

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My first actual post on my blog, I'm not the best at writing things so please be kind.

A Brief History

Let me start the story, on July 7th 2021 I came across my old broken WMR headset and wanted to test out more modern PCVR solutions, at the time I was slightly out of bank to buy an Index and heard good things about the (Oculus) Quest 2 and decided to buy one.

Oculus (Air) Link

I started off using a link cable but had a horrible experience using it, lots of screen-tearing and “ghosting”, after trying AirLink, it had a lot of disconnecting/crashing issues and eventually settled on buying Virtual Desktop to use for PCVR.

The Warranty

It is such a pain to RMA the products, email after email waiting for a response, The right controller had a thumbstick drift from the first moment it was used which was not a good experience and I eventually RMA'ed the headset and controllers around a month after getting it due to a cluster of stuck/dead blue pixels.

Virtual Desktop

I had a good experience with VD after setting everything to basically the lowest it can be, It was a chore to setup properly due to having subnets on my network but I eventually got it working, This is the option I stuck with for the 6 months of using the headset.

The Downfall

My downfall was the Oculus driver being a pain to work with, it would crash if either, the net/wifi drops, Virtual Desktop crashes or the whole headset crashes and I would have to restart my entire system to fix it, which is not ideal. Worst of all if the headset crashes I have to login to Facebook over and over again like salt in the wounds, All the technical issues, latency and resolution really ruined my experience.

Now and “The Future”

As I am writing this post, somewhere in a distribution center there is a Valve Index with my name on it arriving soon, I've heard better stories and experiences from Index users and I am hoping it gives me a better experience into the PCVR world.

Other neat VR related stuff

The Game Library

I spend a fair bit of my time playing VRChat, I have tried other VR games and enjoyed them, this includes ಠ_ಠ those kinds of games.

Full Body Tracking

Personally I use a Xbox 360 Kinect for full body tracking in VRChat using KinectToVR for leg tracking and owoTrack for hip tracking (Samsung A5)

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