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December 7, 2008

Etymotic hf2: finally, headphones that don’t suck.

There’s no doubt about it: the default headphones that ship with all iPhones and iPods today really, really suck. They are just far too big to be able to fit into my earlobes, and the quality is pretty shocking; way too much bass for me.

When I got my first iPhone, I decided the buds simply wouldn’t do and so the search was on for a replacement pair. They had to have:

Good sound quality.
Hands-free capability, preferably like the default Apple buds.
Noise-isolation.

Up until recently there really wasn’t much choice at all. You essentially got a good pair of headphones and used an adapter for the hands-free, or you don’t bother at all.

There’s a nice product on eBay which was my first replacement pair. They use the same driver unit as the Sennheiser CX300 (which is an awesome bud), but have a clicker unit attached. The cable is really rubbery and crap, but for £25 I think they were a pretty good buy. Unfortunately, they died after about 5 months of reasonably heavy usage because the connector edges are sharp and don’t have rubber grommets to prevent the cable being cut.

November 23, 2008

Why I love Amazon

Occasionally, I have free time, and and like any other bloke it is a good idea to spend this time play whichever video game you’re addicted to at the moment.

My drug is Guitar Hero. It’s great. I don’t know why.

In any case, I got addicted when I was lent a copy of Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock. It has an awesome set list, and learning to play the guitar parts on expert takes a long, long time. But I have completed that whole game on expert minus three songs - Raining Blood (which is crap); some French song (which is crap); and Through the Fire and Flames (which is completely insane).

So naturally, when Guitar Hero: World Tour was announced, I had to buy it. The fact that it is prohibitively expensive was neither here nor there, furthering my hypothesis that this is in fact some sort of narcotic.

12:35 am | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

November 9, 2008

If you’ve got nothing to hide…

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of posts on the NO2ID forums. For those that have been living under a rock for the last few years, the lovely Labour government is trying to push through a massive, centralised database that contains a number of personal information items; DNA, fingerprints and other biometric information; passport information; drivers license and insurance details; journey details using ANPR, and a number of other things.

I’m going to skim over the fact that implementing a system like this is completely ridiculous, and focus more on the one phrase that makes my blood boil.

If you’ve got nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?

I have two responses for this. They run something like:

The issue of whether I have ’something to hide’ is completely irrelevant. The government has no place in my private business, period. If you cannot comprehend the possible scope for misuse of power of a database such as this, then you need to get yourself down to a hospital, pronto.
Now go away before I beat you.

Seriously people, contact your local MP right now, before this gets completely out of control. Canada is looking like a damn good option right now.

October 17, 2008

SFN Domain Issues

Just a quick note for those who are trying to access SFN and happen to stumble across my blog - it looks like the domain has expired and so it’s not resolving for anybody.

Hopefully this will be resolved ASAP!

11:03 am | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

September 7, 2008

Alive

I’m not dead yet.

I’ve been really busy recently preparing for a conference talk in Manchester, so this blog and my photography has had to take a back seat.

For those waiting for Reflection 1.1, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it should be out by the end of the month. That’s not a promise, but it is coming!

5:13 pm | Posted in PhD | No Comments »

August 1, 2008

Boooored.

I’m bored.

At the same time though I don’t want to do anything.

Damn it.

July 16, 2008

iPhone 3G: A Review

It took me a lot of deliberation, but finally I decided that the upgrade was definitely worth it. I now have, in my hands, a shiny new iPhone 3G.

But man, what a hassle. I was one of the lucky ones that managed to get one on launch day. I queued from about 7:45am with about 10 people in front of me and ate my McDonalds breakfast in line. There was the odd comment from miscellaneous chavs passing by, but I was totally happy to stand in line all day if necessary.

Unfortunately, O2’s service was quite disappointing in some respects:

The server crashes slowed everything down so much it was ridiculous. I think it took about 90-120 minutes for me to get through in the end.
The store staff wouldn’t tell us how many 16GB phones they had in stock. As it turns out, that number was about 4. Which is small, and irritatingly fewer than the number of people in front.

So all this being said, I had to settle for an 8GB, which isn’t really a big issue for me as there’s only about 5GB in use, and there’s plenty of songs to keep me happy on there. However, I think the larger storage would have been nice.

10:43 pm | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

June 23, 2008

iPhone 3G

As you’ve all probably heard, a couple of weeks ago at the WWDC Conference, Apple has announced the iPhone 3G. Back when the first generation was released here in the UK, I got one for £269, unlocked it and have been running it ever since, principally because I was currently in-contract with Orange and didn’t want to buy-out of the remaining contract.

However, with all the subsidies now available and the much cheaper price of £159 on the £35/month contract, I took the leap of faith a couple days ago and listed my iPhone on eBay. Final price: £220. Not bad, considering it’s 9 months old and the back doesn’t quite fit on snugly due to the hardware unlock I used.

Anyway, this being the first thing of interest in quite some time, on opening day my intention is to liveblog the event as it happens on July 11th. So, depending on precisely where I go to buy the thing, I may see you there!

7:54 am | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

May 21, 2008

Reflection News

Thanks to Johannes, Reflection (the theme that I use for my photoblog) has become very popular over the last couple of weeks. Apologies again for those who tried in vein to download it whilst I had server issues - that should hopefully all be sorted out now.

This post is just to let you know that development is still very much alive and well and I have a bit of free time to do some work on it over the next few days. Here’s a preliminary list of improvements:

Create a simple admin interface for easier modification of header image and little features that I’ve hard-coded in.
Add support for tags - really, I don’t see the point in adding category support at this point in time.
General code improvements to make the animations a bit faster, and port everything over to the latest version of mootools.
Clean up CSS - much simpler ways of making the drop-down menus work.
Fix rendering support in IE6 since it’s currently all broken.

Please let me know if you want anything in particular, either in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Backups…

I’d been meaning to write about this little story for a while but totally forgot about it up until now. With this long simulation running in the background, it looks like I have an ideal opportunity.

Anyway. Was back home a couple of weeks ago to do some task that I can’t remember, and went to turn on the PC to the lovely sound of click click click hum *pause* click click…

Now, I’ve worked on enough machines to know that any kind of clicking sound is a very bad thing — usually indicative of imminent, unrecoverable hard-drive failure. At this point, I had a major heart attack since that drive had about 40GB of tagged, organized, irreplaceable and unfortuntely, not-backed-up photos.

5:56 pm | Posted in Computing, Linux | No Comments »

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