Release 0.3.2 - Don't Sit Too Close to the VR TV

 

Do you remember when you were young and your mom yelled at you for sitting too close to the TV?!

Well, I do too. It was annoying to say the least. I can't blame her though it was a bad habit that was part of most of my childhood, especially when playing my PS1 and PS2, the good ol' days. 

So why doesn't she yell at me whenever I use my Oculus Quest VR? It probably has something to do with the fact that I am 25 years old now and it looks sort of silly for a grown man to get yelled at by his mommy... 

Anyways...

So, as mentioned in my last blog Release 0.3 has two parts, or rather 2 PRs to be submitted.
I wrote about how I contributed to Telescope in my last blog. That was fun.

However, I needed a new repository to contribute to this week. Since I am a big VR enthusiast as I have said multiple times in previous blogs. I chose to do something related to VR.

I started searching and came out empty on specific things that I wanted to do. I then realized that one of the most used programs that I personally use almost on a daily basis is the ALVR application.

ALVR:
ALVR is an open source remote VR display for Oculus Quest. With it, you can play SteamVR games in your standalone headset.

I went on the github repo and found an interesting issue that I felt would benefit not only me, but a lot of people.
I found an issue to translate the WHOLE application, since my native tongue is Bulgarian I decided to submit a PR for the Bulgarian language.

Eh, a translation PR who cares, that is easy. 
You would think so but... well it was relatively easy but it was a lot of work, especially since my Bulgarian has been degrading over the past 18 years since I came to Canada.

Anyways,
I began to look through the files on what needed to be translated.
Thankfully for me, the structure of the project was really well organized and finding the language support files was not that hard.

The first thing I did was to copy the "default" English files into a new folder with the language code "bg" to use them as the base for my translation files.
I then linked those files with the default ones to change when the user selects a language from the drop down menu.

All that was left was to translate. OH SO MUCH TRANSLATION!

I literally spent over 7 hours alone just for translation of values and text. It was tedious work but my PR got merged after about a day ,and a review from the maintainer, later. I was excited because I had contributed to something used all around the world.

After my PR got merged I immediately sent the latest version to two of my friends (who are also Bulgarian) for them to test the translation. They commended me on a job well done.

 I showed all my relatives because this is one contribution that I was extremely passionate and proud of.

Here is a meme, just for fun (because I had it laying around and wanted to post it).

Welp, that was all from me for 0.3. whoever has a VR headset go checkout ALVR and star it. It needs more recognition.

Now, I am going to bury my head in Amazon and Canada Computers because I am building myself a brand new PC for gaming... writing code O.o

Till next time, 
XOXO,
Gossip Plamen

Season 1 - Hacktoberfest Recap

 

WHAT A RUSH!

A race against time and other open source devs to qualify for open issues on repositories you are interested in.

What a great past time activity that is also accredited for school. 

Hacktoberfest! What a great idea. Especially in these interesting and difficult times.

It has finally ended. The busiest month I have ever lived through. It was not that bad to be honest. I have gotten through a lot worse (I think). 

Welp, this blog will serve as a recap to the most interesting event I have participated in, Hacktoberfest. The point of Release 0.2 was to contribute to at least 3 different repos and make 4 different PRs. 

What a great experience to gain knowledge in different projects and languages... UGH Python. 

Without further adu, Season 1 Recap of my Hacktoberfest journey.

Release 0.2.1 - Entry into Open Source

To get into the swing of Open Source contributions, I wanted to start off with something small. The first repository I chose was of a website that I had used on occasion to keep up with VR news when I first bought my Oculus Quest HMD. Unfortunately, I found a more intriguing website that contained more up-to-date information and game release/news. My first PR was to locate a script that was returning a status code 404. This was not that hard, like at all (thanks chrome dev tools). I made an issue on the repo and created a PR that had simply commented out the script returning a 404, which was doing nothing anyways. I think the maintainer does not check his github often since the issue and PR still remain open, Oh well.

Release 0.2.2 - Entering Another (Virtual) Reality

This was by far the most exciting repo I worked on throughout the whole month. I love virtual reality and I am really glad I got to contribute to this repo because the whole idea behind it is very neat. Oculus Quest is a standalone headset and has no connection to your PC. This owner of the project created a link to your HMD and PC through your LAN so that the Quest can communicate with discord and update your "discord presence", or simply put what game you are playing at the moment. I felt really accomplished with this PR because, I was finally doing something I have a passion for. I made a PR to update his JSON file which contained all sorts of applications and games. I even chatted with "MadMagic" on discord and we are now friends and talk regularly.

Release 0.2.3 - Avoiding Boring People with Chat Automation

My third PR was actually two smaller PRs. Why two? Well, because I didn't think it was enough for the fixes I made on the first one. I found this really neat repository that was basically a chat automation bot for the whatsapp web-based platform. The chatbot did everything you could imagine a chatbot doing. The maintainer was looking for a small refactor on his code by including a different style of CSS selectors from calling his constant selector class file. I replaced the selectors the way he wanted and got acquainted a little more with python, my arch nemesis. For the second PR of my third PR I had to basically copy the basic logic of his whatsapp bot, but make slight modifications so that a facebook session is made (click link above for more details).

Release 0.2.4 - More Pythonic Automation

This was yet another contribution towards automation bots. However this was tailored only to scraping elements from the whatsapp web-based platform. The maintainer (Navpreet) wanted me to write a function to scrape and return a phone number of a specific person that the user has an existing chat with. Really neat and as it turns out not that easy. It was interesting seeing how code varies from machine to machine. A problem I encountered was that the code ran fine on my machine and did the intended task, but once Navpreet ran it on his end it gave him an error (see blog for more details).

That was it for the month. Overall the experience was amazing and I will definately participate in next years Hacktoberfest. I really enjoyed getting involved in various projects and most importantly I made friends and (Hopefully) connections by interacting with the project maintainers. There are a lot of people that are like minded and have the same cores and interests as I do, no matter where in the world they are. a big thank you to my professor for picking something so interesting to get us involved. 

Oh and I made my 4 + 1 Hacktoberfest accepted PRs even though 2 of the PRs I made for Release 0.2 were not in hacktoberfest repos.

Now, all that is left is to wait for the PRs to mature and for me to get a sweet T-shirt. 

That was everything that happened during Season 1, stay tuned for Season 2 of my hacktoberfest journey next year around the same time... obviously for hacktoberfest.

Till next time, 

XOXO, 

Gossip Plamen

Release 0.2.2 - Entering Another (Virtual) Reality

 

Hello my fellow gamers.

Today's blog will be a continuation on the festivities of Hacktoberfest.

As I mentioned on my last hacktoberfest blog, I am a big VR enthusiast. I absolutely love escaping reality and jumping into the virtual world where I can be whoever or... erhm... whatever I want to be without any judgements. 

So as you all know I bought an Oculus Quest roughly a year ago and have been dabbling into VR open source lately. There are a lot of cool apps/games that are made specifically for the Oculus Quest.

Anyways,
for my second PR I wanted to contribute to something I recently found and have been using ever since I found it. The discord rich presence application for the Quest. It is basically an app that runs on your computer and updates your discord status based on the packets sent from the quest to your local network. The Quest sends packets based on event driven tasks, so every time you open an application a packet is sent. The PC application picks it up and updates your discord status to whatever the packet was.

The creator of this application mentioned that he is looking for contributions to their games/apps json list. 
I got into contact with him and chatted for quite a bit. He told me how to properly test the updates and how the application itself works (see above).

My chat with him went something like this.

Extremely cool dude.

Awesome, I got the OK from the owner to go ahead and contribute to his repo.

The first thing I did was open up his json file to find that there were already over 100 games/apps that were being picked up by discord... That did not make my job easier.

I opened up a third party store (SideQuest) tailored for Oculus Quest developers and got to searching for games that were not in his list.

I found content that I can update his json file with and got to work.

I added about 20 games to the list. Might not seem a lot but it definitely is for the amount of time I spent searching.

Everything was working as expected I fed the package name, the state and the description for each app.

I then pushed it to my fork on github and opened an issue on his repo. I made a PR and linked it with the issue.
To my satisfaction he merged my PR. I felt so good about contributing to an actual VR project. It was awesome. 

I will contribute something more in the future to this repo as it is very useful for Quest owners.

Well... that was it from me for this week. Stay tuned for my next contribution in the VR scene.

Till next time, 

XOXO, 

Gossip Plamen