STG's

The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin, is the third book in the Broken Earth series, where the Earth was destroyed by a cataclysm tens of thousands of years ago. In this one, mostly everything in the series is "explained" (it is a bit vague, but reasonable). Including what messed up the surface, the Stone Eaters, the Orogenes, and that it was magic based tech that did it. Overall, a very satisfying end.

Got a GearVR (2016, free as a bundle gift, with the S8). It is interesting. The movement tracking is pretty good. Setting up felt harder than necessary. I had to look up a couple of things online as their instructions were very unclear. After the first time, it is pretty easy to use. I'm using the Samsung screen protector. It works fine with the GearVR, but distort the image somewhat, specially in the corners. One thing that I think really hurts the platform is the fact that it comes without a controller, just the little touchpad in the side. This means that this is all most games can count in. Which really seems to limit things a lot, interface-wise (I mean, even my Intellivision console in 83 had a controller with plenty of buttons...). One click and swiping is all you get, in addition to looking around. I tried a couple of the games, and they looked good (Sunken and Rush so far). Not super exciting, though. They do feel much more immersive than they wou...

I recently had a problem where cross-platform templates were missing in Visual Studio 2017. Everything that should have been installed with Xamarin was not. This was solved simply by noticing that Bonjour had trouble installing. From the error log I imagined it was just it, and since I didn't plan to use the iOS part it wouldn't make a difference. This was pretty easy to fix - I just started the Bonjour service, and set it to automatic. Then I un-installed Xamarin in the Visual Studio Installer, and installed it again. This time all templates are in place.