Sideloading Oculus Go with Firefox Reality

Basic steps & troubleshooting information given below, I will update the post with more details soon and tweet about it. Few of the steps mentioned below are described in detail at Firefox Reality’s Sideload github wiki.

 

Prerequisites:

  1. ADB setup on laptop
  2. Oculus app on mobile
  3. Account setup on https://dashboard.oculus.com
  4. Firefox Reality APK – it can be downloaded using instructions given below –
    • Go to https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality, click on  ‘Build results’ at the bottom of README.md
    • Click on ‘Firefox Reality for Android – Build – Master update’
    • Click on ‘Run Artifacts’ tabs
    • Click on ‘public/FirefoxReality-oculusvr-release-signed-aligned.apk’ to download APK

 

Steps for sideloading:

  1. Start Oculus Go
  2. Connect Oculus App on mobile with Oculus Go
  3. Turn on Developer Mode from Oculus App
  4. Connect Oculus Go with laptop via USB cable & make sure its appearing in list of devices shows for ‘adb devices’
  5. ‘adb install /path/to/your.apk’
  6. Look into ‘Oculus Go’, go to Libary -> Unkown Sources -> Click on firefox-reality & boom! You are done!:-D

 

Troubleshooting:

  1. Your oculus go is connected to someone else’s account? – If you want to connect it with your account now, then you will have to factory reset this device by following these steps –
    1. Turn off the Oculus go by pressing the power key (look in the display where it shows you the confirmation for shutting it down)
    2. Turn on by pressing Power button & Volume – button together & follow steps to factory reset.
  2. The oculus go is not able to recognise the controller? – You can go to Settings tab of Oculus app on mobile & find currently linked controller with your connected Oculus Go’s information. Just Unpair it and use ‘+ Pair New Controller’ option.
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Investment tips for beginners

Its good to start investing as early as possible, even with very small amount. You can plan your investments for one(more) of these goals:

Tax Saving:

ELSS Fund or Tax Saving Mutual Fund is best option to save tax under 80C. Also this amount is usually locked for 3 years and more and can be used as medium/long term investment. Other options to utilize 80C are PPF / EPF / Tax Saving FD etc. You can choose from ‘Top Rated Tax Planning Funds’ on value research website. E.g. ABSL Tax Relief 96.

Park short term liquid money:

  • Debt-liquid category funds are safest for this, transfer money above a threshold from bank account to this fund. You can take out this money whenever you need easily. E.g. Reliance Liquid Fund.
  • Arbitrage fund is also good option, specially tax efficient for higher tax bracket people. E.g. Axis Enhanced Arbitrage Fund.
  • At least convert you bank account to sweep account for better returns. E.g. Saving plus account in SBI.

Index funds:

One of safest options, these funds are very good in other countries and getting better in India. For long term planning, these are being considered as good option. E.g. ICICI Prudential Nifty Next 50 Index Fund & UTI Nifty Index Fund.

Different ways to invest:

  1. Direct investment: Go to individual fund house and invest, with added benefit of lesser expense fee. You can track investments from different fund houses at KTrack & myCAMS apps.
  2. Regular investment: You can go to your bank’s mutual fund portal & go for regular (indirect) investment. It has benefit of ability to track all investments in a single screen, but the downside of having higher expense fee.

Other suggestion: Go for a term insurance as early as possible in life.

5 easy to adopt food habits which worked for healthier me

Following is the list of things I follow to keep myself nutrition rich. Note, I am pure vegetarian and hence chose the list accordingly.

  1. Meals Timings: Heavy breakfast (never miss breakfast), lunch & light dinner along with at least 3 other small meals in the day (like pre-workout meal, snacks, fruit/salad bowl) with a golden rule of having a big/small meal every 2-3 hours.
    • You can choose timing from Early Morning / Breakfast / Mid-morning / Lunch & Evening Snack / Dinner / Bed time, based on having pre-workout and post-workout, fit in these according to your schedule. Sometimes, one can have 2 evening snacks and skip bedtime snack, depending on the kind of routine you have.
  2. Workout meals: Usually to be taken within half an hour before & after workout – if your workout is close to one of the major meals, then you can have a light workout snack before and after 5 minutes.
    • Options for Pre-workout meal (filled with carbs which will fuel your body and will help losing fat instead of muscle wasting):
      • [light] 8-10 Soaked peeled almond (also drink the water)
      • [light] Banana & Honey (5 to 10 minutes before workout)
      • Oatmeal with milk
      • Carb rich Protein bar
    • Options for Post-workout meal (protein rich meal to repair your muscle tissues and to help in recover from pain and internal swelling, also to build muscle mass):
      • [light] Sprouts
      • [light] Protein rich Protein bar
      • [light] Dry fruits & seeds mixture (Seeds – Flax seeds, Chia seeds, Pumpkin seeds, Magaz seeds, Watermelon seeds, Muskmelon seeds, Dry fruits – Almond, Cashew, Raisin, Walnuts, Peanuts)
      • Boiled chana / Boiled Rajma / Grilled paneer
      • Coconut water
  3. Tips for lazy weekends: Don’t stay hungry, if you feel little hungry and eating food might take some time, better to consume something for quick energy. You can keep following things at home for a meal, or for quick energy while your food is on the way or cooking (most of these can be taken with milk/curd):
    • Muesli (like Kelloggs Muesli Nuts Delight)
    • Dalia (like Patanjali Instant Wheat Dalia)
    • Jowar/Bajra Poha (like HealthSutra Jowar poha, Tasty Sorghum Flakes)
    • Cereal (like Kelloggs Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey cereal)
    • Oats (like Quaker Oats Kesar flavour with Kishmish)
    • Cornflakes
    • Liquid snacks like smoothies, fresh fruit juices, plain milk, greek yogurt, fruit and curd.
    • Some evening snacks which don’t take too much time in cooking and planning.
    • Seeds & Dry Fruits mixture is also very helpful on weekends for quickly eating.
    • Roasted Diet (like Patanjali RoastedDiet Oats Mix Wasabi/Flaxseeds Black Salt)
    • If you want to prepare something quickly:
      • Sandwich
      • Poha
  4. Preference: Few comparatively healthier option
    • Prefer Brown/Multigrain bread over white bread
    • Prefer peanut butter instead of plain butter
    • Prefer brown rice over white rice
    • Prefer to each different types of Roti, like Jowar Roti, Bajra Roti etc
    • Prefer whole fruits or fruit smoothies over Fruit juices.
    • Prefer Jaggery, Jaggery sugar or Honey instead of Sugar
  5. Generic tips for healthier you:
    • Very Important: Make sure you drink at least 3-4 liters of water everyday, at least 600ml – 1 liter right after you get up in morning.
    • Always eat salad with food
    • Drink Yakult at bedtime
    • Take a lot of milk, milk products (specially curd & paneer). Also Dal, Rajmah, Chhole etc for Protein.
    • Buy some protein bars (both carb rich, protein rich & mix) & keep handy (specially for pre & post workout, if you don’t find anything else).
    • Always keep some eatables (Millet biscuits, Ragi biscuits etc) & water bottle in your bag when you go out of home.

 

Highlights from Netherlands HackerCamp – SHA2017!

SHA, aka Still Hacking Anyways, is part of international non profit outdoor hacker camp series organized once in 4 years in The Netherlands. This year it was organized in Zeewolde on August 4th to 8th and I was honored to be one of speakers at SHA for my WebVR talk. Read my blogpost ‘SHA Hacker Camp: Learning a byte about Virtual Reality on the Web’ on Mozilla VR’s official blog.

Here are more highlights, cool hacks/hacks, from the camp –

  • My WebVR session ‘Building Virtual Reality Website using A-Frame’:

  • SHA2017 field view:

  • Couch Hack:

  • The Stay – Cardboard Tents:

  • Tesla coil show:

  • Kartent Ride Hack:
  • TESLA Car Hack:

VR Camp – An event for building community around WebVR in India

My journey to Virtual Reality started when I first jumped into WebVR for the Explorer program of my company Arcesium. As part of this program explored WebVR for building VR content on the web and developed a sample VR experience and a VR tour of my office  using A-Frame (read here my experience to get started with A-Frame). I joined the A-Frame community and started contributing to the project. I was also mentioned on A-Frame’s blog various time like on this A Week of A-Frame blogpost. I also got a chance to introduce WebVR to Mozilla India community in a community event.

With this I also jumped into building VR community in India, and our next goal was to conduct various event in India to broaden the community. As part of this goal, we conducted first event, VR Camp Hyderabad, under MozActivate campaign of Mozilla.

 

Here is the summary of the event :

  • 50 [curated] participants attended the event along with 10 volunteers.
  • This was an 14 hour long overnight, fun-filled event 😀
  • Most of the sessions from the event were live streamed.
  • 3 talks by guest speakers over video conferencing (videos & slides links) –
    • ‘6 Things I Learned in One Year of A-Frame’ – By Yoni Binstock (UI developer & VR content creator)
    • ‘VR development techniques and best practices’ – By Patrick Catanzariti (DevDiner.com founder)
    • ‘Key features & upcoming attractions in A-Frame’ – By Kevin Ngo (VR Developer at Mozilla)
  • Participants teams created VR scenes using the event’s learning, find their links on the event discourse.
  • Amazing social reach on twitter with #WebVRCamp & #WebVRIndia. 160+ tweets, reach to 20K+ and 70K+ impressions and still counting.
  • Photos on flickr & Mozillagram.
  • Few tweet mentions –

Have you joined the community yet? Here are the links to our Telegram and Slack channels. See you there and #HappyContributing 🙂 Thanks for reading!