u/ByEthanFox

My current daily driver phone (a Nothing 2) is starting to die, and I'm considering moving on.

I really like the look of these new clamshell folding phones, like the 70 Ultra, mainly because of the small pocket size.

But I see people online saying things about the dust resistance.

I'm one of those people who takes my phone everywhere. I'm not sure I could cope with a phone that I can't, for example, take to the beach.

Is that a really big problem for these foldables? Does sand easily get into the mechanism?

I'm UK-based and have a unique situation, in that I live at the coast and have a pretty uninterrupted route to my workplace (basically I can walk to the sea-front, then skate along the coastal path, then walk the short distance to work at the other end, and vice-versa). Presently I often get the bus, but with the prices going up, I was considering getting an electric skateboard instead. Distance is approx 4 miles.

However, the path isn't super-smooth, and I like the look of these off-road longboards, as I used to snowboard many years ago and think they would be fun. Though I've never skateboarded all that much I assume, for this kinda thing, I'd be able to get the hang of it quickly?

But I'm an adult, about 110kgs, so I want to get a good quality, branded board, probs a carbon fibre deck, and speed etc. isn't a big deal for me, I just want practicality to get consistently from one end the route to the other.

I see a bunch on Amazon for a few hundred quid, but I assume these are all Temu crap.

I saw that "Evolve" have a model called the "Diablo Carbon All Terrain", which seems to get good reviews, but it's £2100. Ideally though I want a branded model from a retailer where I can expect some customer service.

The ideal for me would be one I could get from Amazon, because I have their instalments thing set-up and I could pay for it monthly over 12 months.

Anyone got any suggestions?

My Quest 3 updated (automatically, despite having updates disabled). I use SteamLink to connect to SteamVR on my PC, which has always worked fine.

As of this update, in the headset, it has a weird, sickness-inducing, flickery double-vision. Visible in both eyes. It's almost like the headset is rendering each alternating frame in the wrong eye (so left eye is seeing left eye/right eye/left eye/right eye/left eye/right eye at 60fps, and the other eye is doing the opposite.

The problem appears worst when the headset is set to 120fps. It is less severe at lower framerates, however, it still shows up whenever the framerate dips below half the target (I think it's related somehow to some sort of motion smoothing or spacewarp or something like that). This means it's not visible in the SteamVR "grid" frontend, as that runs at a rock solid 120, but can be seen in everything else.

Happens in both VRChat and NoMansSky.

This was not the case before the latest Quest 3 "update".

Unfortunately, videos recorded through the Quest don't seem to show the problem, those look fine?! But it's REALLY distracting, totally unplayable (and I don't mean that in the jovial/meme sense, I mean it's absolutely unplayable).

List of things that do NOT fix it:

• Rebooting PC & headset
• Updating Quest 3 again
• Updating graphics card drivers
• Turning off VSync
• Disabling all my SteamVR addons (e.g. fpsvr, XSOverlay...)
• Another reboot
• Ensuring motion smoothing isn't on in nVidia drivers (it wasn't on)

It's also not bandwidth or connection quality; I use a PrismXR S1 which runs a dedicated wireless connection to the headset.

I really don't want to use Virtual Desktop, because I just got a new computer and I'm trying to keep it as lean as possible, and until yesterday SteamLink worked perfectly fine.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Hardware run-down - Quest 3 connecting to PC via PrismXR S1, nVidia/intel/Win11, always worked fine before the latest Quest update so I'm inclined to think it's not my computer

People today keep talking about "price leaks", and a certain tech website (which I won't give traffic) has irresponsibly ran an article that suggests the "leaks" are credible.

There are no leaks.

One streamer, who has been wrong about Steam Frame stuff numerous times before now, has given an idea of price, with a source of "trust me bro".

There are no leaks. No-one knows the price yet.

I have a Quest 3 headset. I connect this to my PC wirelessly using a Prism XR USB WiFi adapter, which creates a WiFi network which only connects the PC and the headset. I use SteamLink to do this (pls don't recommend using other link methods for now, I don't want to do that unless absolutely unavoidable).

The PC itself has a WiFi card which connects to my router.

Recently I had to replace my PC with another of basically the same spec, though different mobo/CPU/RAM, but essentially the same, Intel, mobo manufacturer, but my prior mobo had onboard WiFi and this new one uses a card.

Using the new PC, I get a problem where, while I'm playing in VR, every few minutes (not consistent intervals) I get a "hiccup" of about 10 seconds, where the Steam Link logo appears and I believe I've briefly disconnected. Gameplay always comes back and the duration of the hiccup is pretty consistent.

This did not happen on the older PC.

Obviously though this is annoying and I want to fix it.

I use FPSVR for logging and I can see on the graphs after the hiccup the GPU and CPU utilisation flatlines, but I think that's normal.

Anyone got any ideas?

My wife & I live in a pretty expensive part of the country, and of modest means, so we're struggling to find a place we like. We really wanted an actual house, freehold, but all the ones we see are either tiny (with bedrooms where you can reach to touch each wall from the middle of the room) or near our absolute max and run-down, leaving us little money to fix the problems (given how expensive kitchens/bathrooms/glazing jobs are these days). We're in our 40s, meaning it's difficult to consider a "starter home" that we expect to move on from at this stage of life (we've both both saved for our entire adult life, working full-time - we had no monetary parental help so essentially started off in our early 20s with £0).

We finally found one earlier this year, but it's a leasehold flat. It's really nice, a good size, in a good location, relatively new (<20yrs), great balcony with a view, etc., etc...

There was a problem earlier in the year where it needed remediation work for Grenfell legislation reasons, and we were worried if we bought it then we might end up somehow getting charged for the work.

We walked away at the time, but the EA got back in touch a few months later and said the freeholder has finalised plans to get all the work done, and will sign an affidavit (or something to that effect) stating that they are liable for that work and will pay for it.

The lease is longish (>100yrs) but obviously it's still a leasehold property. Collective fees are about £250 a month.

I want to ask, as someone pretty new to home-buying, how do people reconcile buying a leasehold?

I'm not asking what one is, or how one works. I get the general idea. But it just seems like every day, I see news where people bought a flat in 2004, and now they're paying £600 a month or something and they've "paid off" their mortgage, but are now paying what would basically be the cost of rent in many places; their flat is nigh-unsellable and it feels like they've fell to a life-long scam.

The first solo place I ever rented in my adult life was £475 a month (inc. bills), and while rents have certainly gone up, I can't imagine how I'd feel if I was in a situation where I'd paid off a property, but was still paying that kind of money in an unsellable flat. It'd feel like I'd worked decades for nothing.

Like okay, the freeholder is going to fix the fire issues, but how do I know they're not gonna raise the fees 10% a year, every year, for the next 10 years, and before you know it I'm paying £480 a month and wondering when it got so expensive?

Yet despite that, freehold properties are really common. Millions of people must be using them across the country. So what gives?

If you're already "age verified" in VRChat in the UK, when the change to "age assurance" happens, do you just automatically get verfiied as "age assured"? As it seems pointless to ask you to do it again.

This is a weird question, but I want to ask something about Space Marine Chainswords.

Recently I painted a Space Marine. I've recently got back into miniature painting after some time away (over a decade), but I was never a big or talented painter, it's just something I do for a bit of fun. Despite that, I've never painted a Marine before, but I got an unpainted marine from a charity shop (I think it was one of those ones that was on the cover of a magazine?) and decided to paint up an Ultramarine.

The mini is holding a bolt pistol and a chainsword, and I started to paint it up.

And when I painted the sword, I painted a yellow-and-black "hazard" pattern along the outside of the blade.

What's weird is that I thought this was the norm for chainswords, like, if I close my eyes and imagine the platonic ideal of a Space Marine holding a chainsword, this is how it looks. But when a friend saw it (who paints a lot more 40k), he was surprised at this, and wanted to know why I made that particular choice. Then I googled it and found that he's right, this is not the norm at all!

Can I ask, does anyone know why I thought/did this? Is there maybe a very prominent illustration of a chainsword with that design? Or maybe it showed up in a prominent videogame while looking like that?

... Can you tell them to fuck off?

I'm seeing a lot of woe from all angles, but many of these people have either positive or ambivalent opinions on AI.

Take the time to tell them that they're part of this problem and they should be okay with this if they're not a hypocrite.

Just saw this on Audible, and I'm curious about it.

What's it like?

I ask because I know that the Solo movie had a weird production, where tons of it was re-filmed. I heard the original plan was for it to be more comedic, but when Disney retooled it and changed the director, they made it more dramatic. That's why the tone of the final movie feels so uneven.

But I also know that some of the movie-books of Star Wars have elements that are closer to the original script/earlier revisions of the story that were pruned before the movies were finished.

Is the Solo book kinda like that? Is it a bit closer to "what might have been" had the movie continued its original course?

With reasonable regularity we get "looking for a job" posts in this subreddit so I just thought I'd mention - I passed Canham & Sons earlier; that's the butcher in Hove near Caffe Nero and The Blind Busker, and they had a sign out for a full-time position, asking people to call them for more info, 01273731021.

A few things have happened in quick succession.

• Qualcomm added the Frame to their site that lists the hardware for which they make components
• Valve made the guidelines public for verifying games on the Frame (broadly similar to the process for Steam Deck)
• Unreal 5.8 went public with greater native support for the Frame
• Numerous VR games went on sale this week at the same time; e.g. Vox Machinae, Into the Black
• The Steam Controller released, when it originally felt like Valve planned simultaneous release of the three hardware items
• We're approaching mid-May, which is kinda the end point for anything you could phrase as "early 2026"; sure, technically halfway through the year is ~June 30th but it would be unusual to call mid-June as "early" in the year

Do we think this was maybe the original proposed date? It feels like a bunch of ducks were put into a row.

Question - we've seen a few mixed reality games recently pop up using the new tech for the Q3 that use the continuous real-time mapping with the depth sensor.

Can people suggest some of the better ones?

Minor thing, I don't buy games that use gen-AI, so ideally I want titles that don't use that as part of their development.

Question - on my old Charge 5, it used to buzz both on 22 AZM in a day, and 10,000 steps in a day.

This was good because I used to try to always do one-or-the-other, whichever came first.

But my new Sense 2 seems to only support 1 goal, which I've set to AZM. I passed 10k steps earlier and despite that being my goal in the app, it didn't buzz.

Anyone know what's wrong here?

Just given the controller release this week.

My Q3's head strap is wearing out and I was going to buy a replacement, but I'm hesitant for obvious reasons.