JRaccoon

I’ve been wanting to replace my Oculus Quest 2 for quite some time but there hasn’t really been viable options for PCVR in the recent years if you didn’t want to break the bank or support Meta/Facebook. Not saying Frame is cheap by any means but it’s cheaper than Bigscreen Beyond, for example. I think that explains some of the fomo.

But if you have 2k disposable, then there are so many better options available than throwing it at a scalper. That’s what doesn’t make sense to me.

That’s the thing, Valve made it so there’s no way to guarantee you’ll get it before anyone else. A spot in the reservation queue only guarantees that you’ll get a Frame from the first production batch, but the order within the queue is randomized and not known. The first orders will start shipping next week, but personally I predict it’ll take weeks at minimum before everyone in the queue even gets the option to pay, let alone actually have their orders shipped. So you could pay a scalper 2k and still be the last person in the reservation queue to get the device (or don’t get it at all, if the seller turns out to be a scammer…)

It makes a bit more sense if you didn’t make it into the reservation queue in the initial lottery and were waitlisted instead. That probably means you won’t be getting a Frame from Valve within this year. But I still wouldn’t pay double the price just to move from one queue to another.

I understand wanting to get your hands on a Frame as soon as possible, but who in their right mind would pay double the price, especially considering that Valve’s own price isn’t exactly cheap? And it’s even worse that these listings are just for spots in the reservation queue. It could still take weeks or months until the spot turns into a chance to purchase, and there’s no way of knowing how long it will take beforehand. So you would be paying 1k extra for nothing basically.

The water meter and the subsequent bill seriously limits my mmmmm warmth time

I don’t have any real advice for you but I just wanted to say I have huge respect for firefighters. You are literally risking your life to save others. So, from the outside it looks like you’re doing the exact opposite of wasting your life.

EDIT: Reading the other responses, I thought might as well add my own experience. I used to write. Both fiction and nonfiction, opinion pieces, short stories, fanfic, and sometimes even some spicier NSFW stuff. I’m not good at expressing myself verbally and writing is/was my way of expressing myself.

It was huge for me when I got a couple of my articles published in a printed tech/PC magazine (albeit a very small one) that I had been an avid reader of, and they even paid me a little something for them. Then I had some guy online commission a short story from me. I was so excited about it and the amount I charged for it didn’t even come close to covering the time I spent obsessing over the story to make it perfect, but I still really enjoyed doing it.

Then, during covid I lost my day job and was seriously considering whether I should try freelance writing. But then AI and LLMs came along. At first, I thought it was a positive thing. Publishing online requires English, and English is not my native language, and even the very first public AI models were great for fixing grammar, typos and improving the flow of a text you give to it. But very soon I found that it also destroyed my motivation to write anything at all. Why should I spend time writing something myself when I can just describe the idea to an AI and it will write something almost as good in seconds that I would have spent the whole evening on? I got okay-ish results by taking the AI output and refactoring it to fit my style but I don’t feel comfortable ever publishing anything where a major portion of the work was done by a machine rather than me.

Venting over haha. And really, I enjoy my current job in software development and it pays the bills, so it’s not all bad for me. But I can definitely sympathize with you.

It works great when you log in as a user like you normally would on a Windows pc. But on a server you want it to run as a service, starting automatically in the background and/or being managed by the failover cluster without requiring a user to log in.

The solution back then was to use netplwiz autologon. Obviously a hack and bad for security, but fine for a homelab. After googling it now, it looks like some other “solutions” are documented in the GitHub issue about this.

Asking out of curiosity: is there a specific reason you’re running Windows on your server? I used to do the same on my home servers because that’s what we used to have at work, and I wanted to learn and test some stuff. But it was a difficult road, to put it mildly. Simple things, like getting Docker autostart on boot seemed almost impossible. At some point I just gave up and switched to Linux.

One of the most famous Canadian aviation accidents (“Gimli Glider”), was partly caused by confusion between pounds and kilograms.