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My impressions of the Facebook’s metaverse presentation
My impressions of the #Facebook #Metaverse keynote: I have a #OculusQuest2, as a non-gamer I find the software & apps have potential but are not there yet, and I hardly wear it. Only the 360 videos are usable! Convenience & Ease of use has been missing in all VR & AR systems till now. Facebook has managed to deflect temporarily the focus from the leak of “Facebook Papers” by pre-announcing Meta by decades. As a futuristic trend what they showed are exciting but the underlying #VirtualReality #AugmentedReality tech needed is far far away. I felt the important item is the promise around #NFT & Digital Assets in the Metaverse. If…
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The future for Software Engineers by 2040
How latest trends will impact software engineering by 2040 and how developers can thrive. For the next three days, Azure Community Conference is happening online. With over 200+ talks across ten tracks, speakers from around the world, this is one of the largest technology conferences organized by Microsoft community enthusiasts. I was invited to deliver a talk on the future trends that are under way in the software industry. Titled “The future for Software Developers by 2040” I presented on four topics: First, the current job market, immediate changes expected post pandemic and long-term trends. Second, the changes that have in the last eighteen months around the practice “Work from…
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Apple AirPods Pro
For two years I have been using an iPad Pro 11″, and for the last year I have had an iPhone 12 Pro (I should write about it soon), but I had not bought any AirPods so far. I considered AirPods to be priced exorbitantly (which they still are) for no obvious benefits over competition other than the fruit logo that’s on top of them. Over the last few years, I have bought a ton of low to mid-priced Bluetooth headsets from manufacturers including Sony, Jabra, Soundcore, OnePlus and others (The good and the bad of the 10 Bluetooth headsets I bought). My thought was to spend Rs 2000 (USD…
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Apple M1Pro and M1Max are a bigger deal than M1
With M1Pro and M1max Apple has made it clear they are the top dogs when it comes to professional computer chips too. I find these chips to be more impressive than M1 which came out last year, that I called to be momentous, an assessment that still stands. Apple has shown they have a plan to keep up the pace, and a long runaway ahead. It will be lazy to see M1Max as a threat only to #Intel & #Microsoft, which sure is. It is #Samsung & #NVIDIA who are more paranoid with the technology (they know how to compete with Apple) powering M1 SoCs. They know complacency will destroy…
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WSLg in Windows 11
Though I had seen demos of this online, using in real a #Linux GUI app (like GIMP) running on Debian on #Windows11 using WSLg feels sublime. Microsoft (with NVIDIA, Linux Community, and partners) have done a phenomenal job in getting all the pieces integrating well. See GIMP running in Windows 11 in the screenshot above. When I posted the above in Facebook, there was a comment on “Why not just run Linux natively and cut out Windows altogether?”. In my case, the answer is simple. I have been using Windows from Windows 3.1 & Windows NT days, and I feel comfortable. I have built muscle memory, acquired deep skills to…
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Blank compact discs
What to do with all these? I used to buy blank discs& cases from Singapore & the USA whenever I travelled, as in those decades they were expensive in India. There used to be many variants over the years: Write-once CD, Re-Writeable CD, Write-Once DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, Double-Layer DVD and so on; many required newer drives and latest OS support to work. These are now sitting on my shelf for more than a decade. I don’t want to throw them – Marie Kondo to forgive – they may come to be needed, as data written on optical discs are supposed to last for a century. Though it is unlikely we…
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Windows 11 – I am loving it!
Couple of months back, when Microsoft announced their new OS, Windows 11 I tried it on a Virtual Machine and wrote a brief review. Today (5th October 2021), Microsoft had released Windows 11 and made it available widely. Get the ISO for Windows 11 If you have a compatible PC, you can go to Windows Update and check (seek) for the availability of Windows 11 for your PC. In my case it didn’t show up, so I downloaded the ISO from the Visual Studio subscriber download page, burned it to a USB drive using RUFUS utility. You may also use the Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool to get the ISO. Irrespective…
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Broken images in new WordPress blog posts in Windows
Been years since I fiddled a lot with IIS & Windows Server. But when you had to do it, you do get a thrill by dirtying your hands when debugging a problem in production and solving it. Today, it started for me when I upgraded the server I run #Wordpress from PHP7.4 to 8.0, new posts were not showing uploaded images. I was getting a 500.50 HTTP error. After hours of debugging which involved: Disabling and enabling every single plugin in WordPress, Enabling Debugging in PHP & IIS, Eliminate any file format issues with the ImageMagick CLI utilities that I use to resize the images and add my blog logo;…
