Ruben van der Leun

covalichou.github.io/second-reali...

Bit of a blast from the past - The 1993 Second Reality demo ported to the web. Looks pretty much the same as I remembered

This is absolutely amazing. It was a big buggy on my Quest 3(bit of lag and sometimes enemies not properly rendering), but I could see myself reliving old days with this. Do you have any plans for being able to aim with the controllers?

cc @uploadvr.com @ben.roadtovr.com

tl;dr: Ease of use and debugging.

As a personal test, I did rewrite the backend of my personal AI assistant to n8n, just to see how it pans out. It has been significantly easier to quickly plugin and test new features.

Especially with the integrations it already has, and the community nodes.

I am hesitant to say if I'd use this for production. What I've been doing now with adding endpoints and cron jobs feels wrong, and I could see that myself losing track if you're using numerous workflows.

It might be easier for with a paid account, the self-hosted edition is missing some features.

I have also been using it to explain how certain pipelines(like audio generation or using AI to search through email) work to non-developers or those with little experience with AI.

It also saves the results from previous executions, both from test and production.

If something goes wrong during production, I can not only look up where it went wrong, I can copy its values into the editor and start debugging to see if I can fix the issue.

Second would be that debugging is excellent.

It stores the results from previous runs. So if I'm working on step 7, I just have to run steps 1-6 once. Then I can edit and execute step 7 over and over again without having to run the entire workflow over again.

I'd recommend it for the following:

First is that it gives a platform to quickly tinker ideas. I don't have to worry about setting up a framework, databases, think out how I'm going to run the workflow etc. Everything is there, and it just works.

Also web-based, so easily accessible.

I'm likely doing stuff here that I shouldn't be doing, but hey, I'm having fun

Ugh, @n8n.io is a bit too addictive for quickly getting some prototypes done.

Was experimenting with just getting a pipeline working, and ended up adding simple endpoints for CRUD actions and a scheduled task as well.

Finished Arkham Shadow last week. Easily slid it's way into my top 3 VR games. What an amazing translation of the Arkham games to VR.

I sent a video of it to a mate and he instantly recognized it as Arkham combat.

Have some catching up to do. Any other must-plays out there? (Aside from Alyx)

@edzitron.com cool episode on vibe coding (which I enjoy calling "vile coding") but as a professional prototypist : no, it's ALSO bad for prototyping!

People often think of prototypes as low effort run once piece of code (as Charlie Meyer said) ... but that's the "easy" part of prototyping.

The...

Tried out expo.dev today for a little hacking project. Really digging the Expo Go app, that's pretty neat.

Here's a little WebXR/LLM experiment, inspired by two talks at @frontmania.bsky.social about "Built-in AI" (by @rowdy.codes) and "A11y and AI" (by Elga de Klerk).

The concept is a narrator that can explain what the user is seeing, using Gemini Nano on the device itself.

#WebXR #accessibility

The Unholy Union of Star Wars X-Wing Alliance and VOTL VR

Oh man, just discovered that the madmen who are still modding X-Wing Alliance have added support for an active cockpit that you control via VR Controllers, similar to VTOL VR.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX4q...

I gave a talk last week involving RSS Feeds and was genuinely surprised to learn that no one in the audience was using a RSS reader daily.

In general, I dislike "Am I the only one-" questions, but: who else goes through RSS feeds every day?

I started building a LLM experiment with Python, to see how development would differ from JS.

So far, Gradio and Jupyter notebooks are winning me over. Excellent tools to test features during development and I haven't found any Node equivalents yet.

Backlog.MD is easily my favorite new tool to use for my personal projects. I've tried using self-hosted services like Planka, but having all the tasks stored inside the repo as markdown files makes it so much easier to manage.

I dug up my old Samsung 360 Gear camera for an upcoming wedding. To my surprise, it still works, albeit with some custom apps. I kinda forgot how neat 360 Photography can be in just capturing an entire moment.

... that's it. lost all faith in AI. Was a fun little hype thing, but ready to move on now.

A sign saying Rotterdam Centraal

And back in the Netherlands. Have to give another shout-out to @cityjsconf.bsky.social for giving me a good excuse to take the train to London, explore the city for a day, and getting so inspired that I'm now sleep deprived from hacking away last night.

Hoping to do it again next year.

🙏

@thisisjofrank.bsky.social Just wanted to quickly message that I really enjoyed your talk. I've been wanting to have a code editor in a self-hosted environment and your talk gave me inspiration on the steps I should take next.

I may have missed the link, but is the slide deck available?

developer.picoxr.com/document/web...

I just checked the docs. It looks like it is a Pico-only feature right now.

Is there also an option to instantly start in VR mode? I think I remember the Pico having an option for that

So the main thing I'm getting from #CityJSLondon so far, LLM-wise, is that I've been doing way too much manually, whereas I could've used LangChainJS and MCP.

Much to experiment with in the coming days.

@kentcdodds.com While it would require additional hardware, I'd wager we can do the holographic stuff with XR hardware

And off we go at London @cityjsconf.bsky.social. Had a great day walking through the city yesterday, now onto Javascript