My 3 most used pairs of headphones

September 15, 2011 – 8:06 pm
  1. Sony MDR-V600 I bought back around 1999. I used these constantly until the hinge on the headband failed after 5 or 6 years. The earpads were significantly trashed at that point.
  2. Some unidentifiable earbuds that came with a cheap Sandisk MP3 player I bought on Woot. I’ve used them fairly regularly for the past 4 years, they sound okay for little earbuds, they don’t cause me discomfort, and they are useful when it’s too warm to have closed-ear cans over my ears without getting annoyingly sweaty. Strangely durable too.
  3. Sennheiser HD 280 pro (64 Ω). I’ve had these for 4 years or so, they’ve been my replacement for the MDR-V600, and they’re what I tell anyone to buy who wants a decent pair of headphones for about a hundred bucks. The only downside is that if I’m having a little bit of sinus trouble, I find I like to be sure to adjust them so most of the ample tension is on the cranium, not on the soft tissues. I’ve replaced the ear pads once on them, but the rest is still in great condition.

I think that if you’re going to spend more than $10 on headphones, they might as well make music sound really good. Those headphones with the band that goes behind the head are just for folks that are afraid to mess up their hair.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Dependence on the “cloud”

September 5, 2011 – 2:33 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about “cloud” services I’m at least partially dependent on. And they fall into three general categories:

  1. Services I use to make my own personal computing easier (Evernote, Dropbox, Newsblur, Google calendar).
  2. Services I use to share things publicly or with a set of contacts (Flickr)
  3. Services I use generally for communication (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, various IM services.)
  4. A possible fourth category: virtualized linux hosts that I pay for.

If you know me, it wouldn’t surprise you that this bothers me. It bothers me a bit to not own my own tools — it bothers me a little to use the ones where I have a clearly defined business relationship with the service provider where I pay for what I’m getting; but it bothers even more when I’m getting something for “free”, because they’re typically getting something of even greater value out of me than a few bucks a month: marketing data, patterns of who I associate with, etc. In some sense, the users of these social networking services are merely a means of crowdsourcing content to be used by the provider.

I prefer the old vision of personal computing: once you’ve bought the hardware and software, you can do things indefinitely with it, no one has the power to take it away from you, you are independent of outside interests. With that perspective in mind, I’m attempting to untangle myself from some of these services. For the moment, short of devoting a lot of time to trying to get distributed social networking off the ground, I’m not even going to try to seriously touch #3. Also, #4 is mostly unoffensive to me, though it’s not clear that even today that virtual hosts offer the same legal rights (fourth Amendment) as hardware which you own.

So some plans: Flickr is slowly dying, I’d like to go back to some kind of self-hosted photo gallery software. I don’t really like a lot of the options out there, I may roll my own. Dynamically-generated content is dumb for everything but commenting, everything else should be static HTML, thumbnails.

I only use Google calendar because it’s an easy way to sync my iPhone to a calendar server, and it is an easy way to share my calendar with Tien. On the first part, I think I could solve my problems by running a CalDAV server. Not sure about whether it would accomplish the sharing too.

Dropbox, while I just use the free 2GB account, is darned convenient — I use it for 1password syncing, and I use it as a place to put low-security documents so I can easily share them between computers. It is amazing how long it took to give people what they want in a network filesystem — even though it would have cost more years ago, none of it was impossible (though the market was probably much smaller.) Most of the self-hosted open source alternatives to this are pretty fiddly.

Evernote is the one I’m least likely to want to give up. It’s been so useful, and this is why I’m more dependent on it than almost anything else I listed. I frequently shoot photos of small pieces of text with my iPhone and add them to my Evernote account. I use it to remind me of food or drink I enjoyed. I use the desktop version to replace my former use of things like Eaglefiler (and before that, a directory full of text files.)

For the photo gallery (and an eventual move away from WordPress), I want to cook up my own open-source, self-hosted equivalent of Disqus. I just need to find a little more free time…

By Michael Magin | Posted in Programming, social networking, Uncategorized, Web | Comments (0)

Fixing sagging wood fence gates

May 28, 2011 – 12:43 pm

In my opinion, fixing poorly designed wood fence gates (no diagonal cross-brace) with those cable and turnbuckle kits just delays the problem slightly. It just slowly bows the gate, if it doesn’t have a lot of rigidity to start with. Jack it up somehow until it’s square and install a 2×4 diagonally across it, screwed with good screws into as much good wood as you can.

As an aside, I think it’s marginally better with a weak worn-out gate to make the diagonal cross-piece from the high corner of the hinge side to the low corner of the free side, but it really depends on the condition of the gate.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Macbook Air notes and bittorrent clients

May 8, 2011 – 1:13 pm

I finally took a look at the two Macbook Air models at a local Apple store. While I definitely like the 11″ size over the 13″ size, it seems like the main compromises are: A 16:10 aspect ratio screen instead of 16:9. Even more squashed F-keys and the Escape key. That could possibly be annoying for vi usage. Everything else about it I could live with, only 2 USB ports, no internal (wired) ethernet interface, not a terribly fast processor, etc. Probably won’t consider getting one for several months anyway — the Lenovo Ideapad S12 is sufficient.

Also, I’m somewhat frustrated that bandwidth limits in Transmission 2.22 (on Mac) don’t seem to work anymore. Given that the alternatives are either don’t do enough or do too much (Vuze), I’m tempted to finally learn enough about Mac programming to debug the issue myself. Another item for the always-growing queue of personal programming projects. Or perhaps I’ll just switch back to rtorrent, it always did what I wanted.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

The annoyances of laptops

April 16, 2011 – 2:44 pm

On a mailing list I’m on, someone recently asked for a recommendation for a new laptop, based on some requirements. I didn’t have any good input to give, but it made me realize that there are a number of things about laptops that annoy me:

  • Vents on the bottom. And getting hot on the bottom in general. Perhaps this is why they market them as “notebooks,” so they don’t need to answer for this stupidity, even though most people use them a part of the time on their lap. As far as having to dissipate lots of heat, I don’t buy a laptop for gaming or anything particularly resource-intensive. (Possibly this is why I don’t mind integrated GPUs.)
  • Trackpads that don’t work like Apple ones do — having to move your finger over to the side of it for the “mouse wheel” action.
  • 16:9 displays. 4:3 is better for anything but watching movies.
  • Numeric keypads seem pretty dumb, mostly because you have to place it off-center with respect to your body as a result. I’d probably find a good USB numeric keypad if I were a traveling spreadsheet wizard.

What I currently use as a personal laptop is a Lenovo S12 — it fails most of this critera, but at least it’s about as small as they go with a full-sized keyboard. For work I have the 13″ Macbook Pro. When I buy a laptop again, I’ll probably buy the 11″ Macbook Air with the maximum CPU/RAM/Disk config. It’s the sort of laptop I always wanted from Apple, but which they didn’t make until recently (I’ve had a 2006 Macbook and 2002 iBook in the past, I am quite an Apple fan.)

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)