Might be this dude; it is not free, just very affordable in their market. It turns out making it affordable also brings in a lot of revenue.

https://youtu.be/44Do5x5abRY

against your bias and narrative

If being a regular person who just wants to enjoy the things they pay for in peace is bias, and being fed up with this crap is narrative, what does that make you?

Stop trying to normalize exploitation by greed, and stop normalizing the acceptance of it.

Just because Sony can manufacture a bait and switch with some boilerplate doesn’t mean they should. Regular people should not be blamed for being exploited when purchasing in good faith. The developers made a game that works, clearly, and Steam delivered it, so they are culpable, but if Sony can stop their horseshit, and this all goes away, it is clear who really is to blame.

Did the CEO of Sony write this? A bait and switch scam is fine apparently, as long as there’s some legalese to protect the company in there.

It seems Steam should have some limitation in place on their end, and the Dev picks sales on Steam, not the publisher.

Then what is the job of the publisher? To perpetrate scams it seems, because seemingly the devs published the game just fine all by themselves to Steam. If they didn’t do that right, the publisher suddenly has no responsibility to make sure that was distributed correctly? Whose job is it to ensure the product is published in line with their inevitable goals, we wonder.

so why would they list it for sale in those countries?

Because they botched the bait and switch. And now Valve is cleaning up Sony’s mess. Too bad they couldn’t clean up Sony’s mess of leaked customer data. I guess they can’t fix it but prevent the next one by making publishers agree up front that they can’t require data from players, in order to publish a game, but I digress.

no one seems to want to accept personal responsibility

No one should have to expect to be subject to a bait and switch scam in the first place. Which is what this clearly is, because if they were truly up front, they would have required the account on day one and had the appropriate region filters in place, so consumers could never be in this position.

Stop blaming the victims of corporate greed and scams; people should be able to reasonably enjoy things they paid for without being molested and exploited. Personal responsibility my ass when there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing in the first place.

Interesting. I wonder how that compares to a similar Li-ion cell. Also it’s a shame there wasn’t a close-up on the markings of the battery in that video to know what it is exactly. I don’t imagine all cells are equal.

The battery packs from the article, for instance, are not constructed from cylindrical cells, but from large thin and flat square cells. The cathode material appears to be unique as well, as far as I can tell; who knows what’s in those blue cylindrical cells.

explosive hazard

Can you elaborate on that? I was just reading the data sheet for these batteries, and these are tested with a ballistic penetration test, resulting in no fire.

I’m presuming this concern is from watching videos of elemental sodium reacting with water, which stands to reason, but I’ve not heard of exploding batteries

Look up JSON Web Tokens, they work how this would need to work.

Those samples were cool as hell.

Awwww, but I really wanted an [object Object]!

I’d count on Apple making the RCS bubbles green too, just to sow further confusion.

I guess now they are virtual assholes too.

Thank you for that info, now that I know that, I’m gonna switch to web only.

I feel like in the future this is going to get more intense. They will have facial+ear+gait recognition combined with AI so they can detect and combine literally every instance of shoplifting, intentional or not (to say nothing of footage that only coincidentally has the appearance of shoplifting but they retain it as “proof” anyway), over decades of visits to any of their locations, and once you’ve accumulated over $1000 combined in unpaid merchandise, hit you with a felony charge.

Or they just ban you after the first incident straight up, and electronically recognize you and kick you out for the rest of your life afterward.

And you would have no affordable recourse because they have all the footage and lawyer money to oppose fighting it.

No prob! I was curious how far I could get with a low-effort decoupling from Meta, and I’m sad it turns out that that’s not very far.

I updated my post a little with some more thoughts about the situation.

I think it would be cool to root it, but the hassle then to update it would be too much for me at least. And you would want the updates too because they are still adding improvements to things like controller motion tracking and whatnot.

I’m excited for what this quest version of Steam link can do for getting more VR content on Linux. Without the need for Linux drivers for the headset, it can just be streamed and the hardware work is done. Valve is clearly talented enough to get the software side working. It would be cool as hell to have a mode that turns the Steam Deck into a WAP (easy on Linux as you undoubtedly know) and you just connect your headset and start VR gaming from it.

Thank you for the discussion by the way. You’ve inspired me to drop my unit into its own SSID now, and log what it’s doing to keep an eye on it.

Okay, so I factory reset the thing, and to use the headset at all, the setup requires that you have to log in with at least a Meta account (only an email address needed, no Facebook), and you have to pair it with an app on your phone that controls things like developer mode. There’s no way around it, the first thing you are greeted with in the headset is a pairing code for the app, and you need the app to make the headset work afaict. I didn’t investigate if there’s a desktop app or web app.

Side note, apparently developer mode now requires a phone number or credit card attached to the account. Maybe a vanilla visa could work, not sure. I’ve already bought stuff through the quest store, so enabling developer mode was just a click for me. I used developer mode to install sidequest just now to see what it’s about, but neither it nor developer mode are needed for Steam link.

Mayyybe you could make a Meta account with an email address made just for the headset, maybe run the Android app in an emulator, but that would be a bit of a hassle imo. I suppose you could isolate the headset into a subnet, or it’s own SSID if you’ve got the gear for that, and keep it quarantined most of the time and just let it reach out here and there for updates, but who knows if it blurts out any collected telemetry while it gets the update. You may not have to let it out for updates at all however; when I booted into factory reset there was a “sideload updates” option, so maybe you could update it manually offline.

Honestly, as good as this headset is for the price, if I were concerned with absolute privacy, I would just cough up the dough for a competitors OLED unit. I could spend all of the hours I was frigging around with the headset doing OT at work instead, and just use that money to get something better without the pain and hassle. I get that’s not an option for everyone though.

Perhaps as an affordable compromise, if you don’t mind temporarily leaking a little data to Meta one time, you could do the normal setup but with an email just for the unit, install the app for 5 minutes on an old phone or tablet without a SIM for the setup, get Steam link on the headset, uninstall the app on the phone, and drop the headset into whatever Wi-Fi isolation you can conjure up. Maybe an isolated SSID or even easier, an affordable 5g router dedicated just to VR.

I don’t trust Meta either, but I gotta admit, it actually feels kinda neat to experience their $30 billion dollar metaverse disaster first hand while it’s still around to look at. For the record, the only protection I did was make a Meta account. I don’t use Facebook.

I’ll try it out tonight for you. I’ll see if I can sign out and go from there.

There is some kind of side loading store called sidequest that I’ve been meaning to try. Maybe I can use that somehow.

I will also try to load it on with ADB maybe.

I have a Quest 3 and tried the Steam link app out last night. It works excellently. It is amazing to not have to run Meta’s horrible and janky desktop app that uses up 2gb of video RAM just at idle.

Someone complained about the hit decals from a 25 year old game being unrealistic? I don’t blame him for the “attitude”; this was among the first games to have such a thing. That shit was cutting edge for the time and it blew our minds. Not even Quake 2 had hit decals, IIRC.

Half-life was hella immersive for the time. People take everything for granted nowadays.