About year and half ago Covid started to appear in just about every country. Living in Japan I felt, and still feel, safe. The people here are cautious and often wear mask without it anyways. I was working remotely already, so it has affected me little in that sense. Still, the home-time has increased and so has online-time. Here is some kind of list of what has changed for me..

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This was first written in summer 2018. There is section for feelings after 1 year at the end of article

I first installed Linux on my home PC around 2001 New Year’s. At first I used it command line mostly, but then desktop also, and I used Linux as my main OS for 7-8 years (often side-by-side with Windows). Then I switched to Apple products at end of 2008.

In 2000-2010, Linux desktop experience was a mixed bag: lost of hardware issues, inconsistent UI/UX, but if you can tolerate a little, it was usable. Many things are often best done in terminal and development experience on Linux has always been good.

Now, I have been using Apple for 10 years. Last year I bought a Windows PC for 3D/VR/heavier operations. Still, for most of my development work I use my MacBook Pro 15″ (late 2013). It is going to be 5 years old soon, still usable, although it’s battery has expanded, fans are loud, especially in summer it gets too hot and is unusable with 4k monitor.

When new MacBooks came out in July, especially with 32GB memory, I was almost ready to get one. However, then I got idea of trying to work on Linux by installing it to my desktop PC.

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Some time ago, Firefox released Facebook container add-on, and seems that after quite a lot of fans, since it has been downloaded over 250,000 times!

I’ve been testing how it works in reality, and I have been impressed. The containers have been existing as an extension for almost a year now, lately entering the main branch. Finally, there’s no need to use multiple browsers (work, personal, other projects).

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Last year, I switched to DuckDuckGo for my primary search engine, in all browsers (Mac, iOS, Windows). I have tried to do it before, but the results were not quite there.

After using it for a almost a year now, I do think it is ready for being primary search engine.

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I recently returned to work after three months of paternity leave. Since I am living in Japan, I got lots of surprised looks when I mentioned having so long one.

In Japan less than 5% of males take paternity leave. Some get congratulatory leave of one week by the company, and go back working 60-80 hours a week. However, in reality Japan has quite supportive system by country, that allows both mother and father take up to 1 year leave with supported pay (capping around 300k JPY). It’s just usually not socially acceptable to take over 1 week holidays.

I want to share some personal experiences from paternity leave that started quite suddenly with almost zero knowledge and big expectations.

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I have wanted to experiment with VR for sometime now, so during Golden Week I decided to take the leap and get HTC Vive. I choose Vive over Oculus Rift because it seemed to have better integrated experience, more interesting looking controllers and looked to be easier to setup (Plus maybe I’m not too enthusiastic about the Facebook Oculus aspect either).

While I do not have the space for full room-scale, my office room is still enough for basic room scale experience (abt 2.1m x 1.9m without obstacles). It works surprisingly well for teleporting movement, although occasionally you’ll hit a wall.

The initial setup was easy by using some camera tripod equipment and a bookshelf. Two sensors is all that was needed to setup, then the mapping of the play area, and everything was working in 30 minutes.

First experiences were really wow! Playing VR games is extremely immersive. It works much better than I was expecting. I think it’s something that people do need to experience. And I don’t mean the smartphone experience but really room-scale experience.

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