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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2528 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 30, 2022

Welcome to the final regular thread of 2022!

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I used to be into gadgets and cool tech stuff growing up. I collected ipods and mp3 players and game systems and stuff like that but I kinda fell off around the time that the PSP came out. Now I have the budget to invest in cool stuff but all I have is a macbook pro and an iphone so I feel pretty boring. What are you guys into these days? I haven't been impressed or wowed by anything new in a long time. It just seems like electronics companies are putting out slight improvements to existing products and there's nothing cool coming out anymore. Are any of you into electronics? What have you seen lately that you're into or looking forward to coming out soon? Are there any good blogs or news sites to follow interesting tech? (especially stuff like indie development, I own Apple products but they're really rather boring and I see them more as nicely functional things than anything that excites me and mainstream Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo gaming has been pretty disappointing all around post-PS2 era imo)

Just want the excitement I used to feel when I would look at a new mp3 player back in 2003 again, haha.

I'm waiting for a proper horizontally folding foldable phone at around a ~$800 price point.

There are great foldables around now, but they're well north of 1200 USD atm.

When I can get one with a stylus, flagship specs and a great camera for less, I'll probably jump over.

And a Steam Deck with a processor and GPU upgrade would be highly appealing, the next gen will prioritize battery life, so I might sit it out.

FPV r/c planes would be my pick for a gadget-centric hobby to pick up. I've been contemplating trying to get into it for some time.

Is it possible to get a bandwith for good stereoscopic vision streaming from a drone ?

I think so, yeah. Try this guy's channel.

3D printers are really a mature consumer tech now, there's a wide variety available, using a wide variety of materials, and you can do both cool/entertaining and useful things with them.

Ditto for quadcopter drones. Adolescent me would have been giddy with joy if I had these things available back then.

I haven't been impressed or wowed by anything new in a long time. It just seems like electronics companies are putting out slight improvements to existing products and there's nothing cool coming out anymore.

I think you're used to having larger paradigm shifts all at once (VHS => DVD => Blu-Ray => 4k streaming) every few years, so after you've already upgraded to a smartphone, having to occasionally buy a new one that still uses the same form factor may feel underwhelming in spite of all the tech wizardry they are currently cramming into them.

I myself only upgrade my phone approximately every three years and I never buy the top of the line model but it's enough that I'm usually impressed with the improvements in the new one, since from my perspective It's a large jump all at once (see above) rather than gradual iteration where I can see all the intermediate steps.

Are any of you into electronics? What have you seen lately that you're into or looking forward to coming out soon?

People have mentioned VR, but I'm more interested in AR, where graphical overlays over the real world will enhance your daily experience. Google glass 5.0, one hopes.

The current crop of image generation AI's are already amazing, and we're still in the early stages of exploring their applications.

I'm optimistic about where electric vehicles are going.

And I'm REALLY excited as to where the space/rocket industry will be in a year, although that's not something the average consumer can participate in directly. If/When Starship is finally operational I think we're going to see a new 'space race' to commercialize Low Earth Orbit and beyond.

Also, 3D printed rockets are a thing. Which is cool as FUCK.

Just want the excitement I used to feel when I would look at a new mp3 player back in 2003 again, haha.

Look at the current state of Machine Learning/AI and the swath of early-stage products available to consumers and you might feel this way. The amount of power this gives to an individual to create things without having to pay outsiders/experts and with relatively minimal funding is as-yet underappreciated.

All that said, I'm becoming a bit numb to the newest wave of consumer electronics since I've got a long enough experience with them to know that most of it isn't going to drastically improve your life and it's really not worth the money to be constantly keeping up with the bleeding edge. So I'm more than content to let certain trends or new devices pass by and not get too excited over new promised capabilities.

VR is one obvious "cool" thing to get into, if your eyesight is compatible.

How would it not be? My wife's Quest 2 fits over my glasses with room to spare. I think she might have gotten an aftermarket face pad for more comfort, though; maybe that also gave me more clearance?

I'm not sure what's worth playing on it, though. There are a few great exercise games, and a handful of great 360 videos, but the good VR game games seem to be on PC and the process of linking Steam VR to a Quest 2 is a PITA; when I only find 20 or 30 minutes to play at a stretch, I don't want to spend 5 of those minutes getting everything set up.

Really? The Quest 2 can stream from a PC over wifi, which ought to be quite painless.

I use mine fully tethered, but i can't imagine it's much of an ask.

It works great over Wifi6 once linked, but the startup for SteamVR and the Oculus program and the Quest2 itself is a pain. Every time I take the Quest2 off (which is frequent since the order of startup seems to matter for some reason so I end up having to see my laptop screen again unexpectedly...) it gets confused and wants to redraw a boundary when put back on ... which is especially weird since it seems to remember boundaries for days when I only use its internal apps.

Oh, and no Linux support, so before I even start setting up I have to make sure everything on my laptop is saved and then reboot.

Using the internal apps isnt always painless either. Some apps make some upgrades mandatory before they'll start again, like I'm going to use a 0-day to hack my exercise high score otherwise or something, and it sucks when I have 15 minutes to play but an update takes 8 of them. But delays there are the exception, not the rule.

Are any of you into electronics? What have you seen lately that you're into or looking forward to coming out soon?

I wouldn't say that I'm "into electronics", but I can say that I am impressed with the maturation of lidar surveying.

By firing your lasers out of the right equipment, you can create an astonishingly detailed survey with a tiny fraction of the time and effort that a traditional survey would require. In my job as a civil engineer, I have worked with lidar "point clouds", generated by putting the equipment on a truck and driving down the side of a road at low speed, that have one observation in every four inches (ten centimeters), extending over entire miles (kilometers) of six-lane freeway, including the trees and slopes in the roadside. And there are point clouds at resolution of around 1 dot per 1 meter (3 feet) covering most of my entire state—thousands of square miles (square kilometers)—that were obtained by sticking lidar equipment on an airplane.

Of course, traditional surveying is not quite dead. A UAV can't check the elevation of a pipe inside an inlet, or clear away debris to see where the true edge of pavement is, or use a metal detector and a shovel to uncover a monument that was installed three generations ago. And processing dozens of 300-megabyte 3D point clouds into 2D topographic features takes a powerful computer and a competent drafter many hours of work. But the technology still is very impressive, and a lot more accurate than redrawing topographic features from bad scans of as-built construction plans that were surveyed two generations ago—and it's accessible to amateurs. There are zillions of YouTubers touting aerial (drone-mounted) lidar surveying as a small business to get into. A lidar drone is in the low five figures to purchase.

I've been very loosely intrigued by the advent of phone-based lidar systems like the one that's apparently now included in modern iPhones. Do you (or anyone else) have experience using these lower-end lidar systems? How big is the gap between that system and the next highest price tier of specialized lidar equipment for a casual user who is not surveying professionally?

We have a small (2-3 acre) rural property that's very non-uniform in shape, elevation, orientation of structures, etc ... is it within the realm of possibility that I could use one of the lower-end iPhone systems, paired with e.g. a smaller DJI flight-programmable quad drone, and wind up with a scan that, if not inch-accurate, would be broadly useful for planning or visualizing new constructions or modifications to existing ones? (I have the 3D/CAD experience to get the rest of the way once I have a point cloud.)

I have the impression that even the low-end lidar might be more dimensionally accurate than doing a traditional, camera-based photogrammetry session with, say, the same iPhone + drone setup. Is this correct?

A reasonably-accurate scan of our property and the ability to do it for others would be helpful and fascinating, but not five-figures helpful or fascinating. Maybe four figures if the first figure is a 1 and if it's also equipment I can do aerial photography with. Depending on how usable the scans are at what scales, I could see myself getting into scanning for all types of projects of smaller scope once I've got the equipment.

For something as large as a scan of the property, though, would I be better off trying to find someone locally who I could hire to do it once with very good equipment?

I have not personally used any phone-based systems (or point clouds from such systems). However, based on some YouTube videos that I've watched (1 2), it's my understanding that phone-based lidar systems work only at short range, and therefore are not suitable for scanning large swaths of terrain.*

For your purposes, photogrammetry may be more convenient. The OpenDroneMap software (1 2 3) can digest aerial photos and spit out a point cloud. (Disclaimer: I do not have a UAV and have not used this software.)

*Phone-based systems can be useful, though. I recall attending one presentation at work (several years ago) where our resident tech guru gushed over his test of a phone-based system (I don't remember whether it was lidar or photogrammetry) in surveying the corner of an intersection, which would be very convenient for designing ADA-compliant curb ramps.

No new information to add here, just thanking you for the helpful response. I think I'm going to dive a little deeper into the world of photogrammetry.

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