u/JoeS830

Just reporting some good news for a change. TL;DR: 24H2 broke WMR on my SLS2, and the Quest 3 brought it back!
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The problem:

I'd been grumbling for years over the fact that MS decided to rip Windows Mixed Reality from Windows. I had a Samsung Odyssey HMD (version 1) which ran beautifully until Windows 11 24h2, and which from that point became e-waste. And just as bad: all those VR games that I paid for were suddenly worthless.

Matthieu Bucchianeri did develop the custom OASIS driver that allowed Steam VR to connect to WMR headsets which solved this issue for many WMR users. Incredible! But.. MS in their infinite wisdom did not wire the RTX 4060 to any of the external ports, instead funneling the graphics output through the integrated graphics unit. So short of Matthieu also developing a custom graphics signal path for this exact laptop, WMR users with an SLS2 were still SOL.

The solution:

After long LLM chat sessions trying to make OASIS work (and finding out why that's impossible) I finally stumbled on the fact that a Quest 3 can run the Virtual Desktop app, and the SLS2 can stream VR output to the headset. Fantastic!

I just got a used Quest 3 512GB for under $300, and the whole setup works incredibly well for me using our Eero 6E router wired to the SLS2 and streaming to the headset. Suddenly my entire Steam VR library is ready to play again, and so far I'm not noticing any compression artifacts. If that becomes an issue Virtual Desktop now even supports a wired connection to the Quest 3.

The best part: now it's wireless, so I'm no longer getting tangled in USB and HDMI cables, the improved optics in the Quest make getting a focused image much easier than in the HMD, the controller tracking is way better than that of the HMD, and I'm pretty impressed with the overall Quest software experience. Very slick. Plus now I have a standalone VR option as well. Seeing my wife attempt Beat Saber: priceless!

Downsides: I'm out $300 just to get VR running again, I'm roped into the Meta system, and I still miss the OLED displays of the HMD because the LCD screen glow is pretty noticeable in dark scenes. But I'm thrilled all those games I bought are available again. Thanks Meta, and thanks Gemini for helping me figure all this out! :)

Maybe this is old news for people here, but I had no clue that Amazon allows rescheduling of deliveries that use Amazon shipping!

Go to your Amazon orders page (not the Vine orders list) > track package, and if it's shipped by Amazon the Reschedule option will be shown there.

I just rescheduled two deliveries that would have arrived during my weekend trip. Love it, I could have used this many times in the past.

This morning me and several other people found they were banned. The common denominator seems to be that in the account page source there's a flag "banned_by_community_trust".

Turns out there's more info. I went to account > review your purchases, and I see a message stating that Amazon has "noticed some unusual reviewing activity", and that I can't contribute anything to Amazon.

The main takeaway seems to be that some of us are getting booted from Vine not because we violated Vine terms, but because we're not able to review which in turn means you can't be in Vine. So: it's probably not Vine booting us but some Amazon fraud detection algorithm that we get caught up in.

That also means that if you are blanket banned from Amazon reviewing, then Vine customer service cannot help with this. We need to contact community-help@amazon.com or jeff@amazon.com and briefly and politely explain that you do everything by the book and you think you got banned by mistake, and ask them to investigate whether the ban was in error.

Looks like I was reported / flagged by other users? Why? 😭

"voiceMemberShipStatus":"BANNED_BY_COMMUNITY_TRUST"

FWIW, I'm up to date on reviews (91% reviewed), account has been set to hidden for maybe 9 months, and my user name is something generic, and I have never ordered a mystery item.

Edit: going to my account > review your purchases I see a message that there was "unusual reviewing activity" on my account, and I'm banned from reviewing anything on Amazon. That's probably the thing that got me kicked from Vine, so Vine itself is likely not even involved in the banning.

Edit2: If you are in the same situation and you are removed from Vine simply because you got banned from Amazon reviewing, Vine customer service cannot help. We need to contact community-help@amazon.com or jeff@amazon.com and briefly and politely explain that you do everything by the book and you think you got banned by mistake, and ask them to investigate whether the ban was in error.

If anyone has better tips please let me know and I'll update this post.

We're having a bit of trouble picking the right size for my wife 😂