Infuriating good headphones.

No, this is not another rant on my Windows eXPerience. This time I'll share you my thoughts on the iPod ear buds that came with the iPod 5.5G and what I did about them.

I've been an iPod user since March 2002. My first iPod had a 5GB hard-drive and a physical scroll-wheel. Sometimes when I feel nostalgic I long for the feel of control that was communicated by that wheel. This one I replaced because I had way more music on my PowerBook than would fit on my iPod. My second iPod I bought in August 2004. It was the 40GB that preceded the iPod Photo. I replaced that one in September 2006 because the hard-drive broke down. In its turn I got a 5.5G 80GB black iPod.

All my iPod-using time I've been using the standard issue ear buds that came with the iPods. I even managed to keep hold of that piece of foam to put over the speaker end that goes into your ear. I never got a knot in my cable and I never had ear phone wires break down on me. And before the iPod I had a variety of Discmen and Walkmen, whose standard issue ear buds or phones I used without problems over the past twenty-odd years.

And then, without warning, in the winter of 2007, the ear buds of my new iPod 5.5G failed me. There was a bad connection in one of the wires. So off I went to my local store to get me a nice new pair. Somehow the sales-guy convinced me to spend &eur; 100,- on a set of ear buds that I could not even test. I got the Bose In-Ear Headphones, and the first thing I did when I turned them on was to go to the equalizer settings and reach for the bass reducer setting. I've since then turned off all equalizer settings and now I enjoy my .mp3's in a clarity and nuance that I never could have imagined. This is way better an improvement than to encode all your CD's at twice the bitrate. There is so much detail exposed to me that was previously not presented to me with the default iPod head phones that the difference is almost unbelievably big. I've since then tried the Sennheiser CX300 but for me they didn't even come close to the music I get from my Bose headphones.

However, these headphones from Bose are also very awkward, infuriatingly so. First of all, the cord is very stiff, almost impossibly stiff when compared to the Sennheiser, Sony and Apple headphones I've used in the past. But more importantly, the in ear part of the ear bud is a silicon tip which separates much to easily from the ear bud. They get dislodge in the most awkward places, and they tend to blend-in with their surroundings much to well. And because I can't order a spare set, I have to search very well to be able to get my music in high quality with my Bose ear buds. I've lost them on the street while cycling, lost them under my desk three times at work, lost them in the car, lost them on the street while walking, lost them at the beach, lost them at home several times, lost them to the vacuum cleaner, and the list goes on and on. There is not a week going by where I do not have to search for my ear bud tips. And if the sound wasn't as good as it is I would have switched head phones a long time ago. In fact, the main reason for me to buy the Sennheiser CX300's was because of the dislodging issue.

So, until I stumble upon a good pair of headphones, I'll just search and listen to my good but infuriating headphones,

Zaaf

Why Won't Windows Do What It's Told?

My eight-year-old has a friend over for the weekend. He couldn't make it to my son's birthday so since he's here, he brought a gift. It is a PC-CDrom of a Harry Potter game. My son was very disappointed because it said PC and not Mac, so he was sure that it would not run.
Last night it was my task to make it work on my Mac Pro. And since I have Parallels Desktop I surmised that it wouldn't be a problem. However, the game ran so slow that it almost did not work at all. And it lacked sound. This was a big bummer, because it contains lots of spoken clues. So I finally broke down and installed Boot Camp and Windows XP Pro.

What a horrible eXPerience that install was. It reminded me of the MS-DOS 5.0 install. A blue, character-based user interface with a yellow progress bar telling me almost nothing. Then I had to choose the partition. All partitions, even those of my Time Machine RAID drive where presented as options. The only thing distinguishing them was their size, measured in mega bytes. And since all partitions are in gigabytes, it was hard to find. I picked the right one, but during the whole install-process I was haunted by that horrible feeling that I had wiped out my precious Mac partition.

When all was installed, I immediately removed all network access by disabling my active ethernet interface. This seems to work because IE could not connect to Microsoft's home-page. However, when installing the game and after several reboots, it came up with the announcement bubble that it had found new updates and if I would like to reboot now or later. Since I was busy trying out the game, I told it to not bother me and remind me later. When playing the game it went back to my desktop and bug me about the update. The bad thing about it was that I could not get back to the game afterwards. I had to restart the game every five minutes. Who at microsoft thought it to be a good idea that later is 5 minutes and not after I am ready with whatever it is I'm doing at the moment. And who thought that you could connect to the internet even when the ethernet to use is disabled. How safe am I from infection when I cannot disable my network?

Oh, and Apple provides drivers for everything and they work just fine. I have the Apple bluetooth mouse and after pairing it it worked. But after every reboot I have to pair it again. Why won't it remember that this is my mouse?

Let's hope that Vista is better, because Windows is bugging me on all kinds of levels.

Zaaf

MacBook Air, is it here to stay?

The MacBook Air by Apple is a nice piece of engineering. In the Macworld 2008 Keynote, Steve Jobs went into detail on what was needed to make it so thin. Leave out an optical drive, flatten the battery, use an iPod hard-drive and shrink the connector-board of the cpu. This last bit concerns me a bit. The CEO and Chairman of Intel, Paul Otellini came on stage telling that it was a big headache for them to make it so small, that it took them over half a year, but that they're pleased with the outcome. If it took them so long to make it, will they put in that same effort when the MacBook Air is due for a cpu upgrade? Or, given the worse than expected results of Intel in 2007, will Intel forgo on the needed R&D?

My prediction is that the MacBook Air will receive fewer cpu upgrades than the other Apple computers. And that it will be taken out of production within two years.

Zaaf

Let's a go!

Just arrived. Mario gokart

Strange Tracks

Just walked along the beach today and I came across these tracks. As Mr. Vimes would say: "it's probably a wading bird."

The Mob Stories (2)

Back in July 2007, I posted a short blurb on The Mob Stories. Now they've got a few new songs out, which rock. Although they don't, because they funk. Only that's not a real verb, so they rock funk. My favorite is Big Dick which is quite catchy and almost incomprehensible.

Give 'm a listen,

Zaaf

Another Proud Parenting Moment

I just had proud parenting moment, this time it was with my four year old girl. She was playing with k*nex when I decided to play some music. On a whim I selected Strawinsky's Firebird. After the first few bars she asked if that was that "red bird". Because she heard it before, but that was two months earlier. So she recognized the music and had the association to bird correct; "Fire" had become "Red", but still an impressive feat of recognition. She makes me so proud :-)

Zaaf

Webkit benchmark follow-up

Just a small follow-up of the webkit benchmark results. I ran it in Webkit 28949 on my Powerbook G4 667MHz Gigabit Ethernet and it appears to be 10 times as slow as webkit on my Mac Pro. The amazing thing is however, that those 10 times still not make it unusable. So I'm still not convinced I should buy a new laptop.

Zaaf

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em

Webkit.org, the open-source rendering engine behind Apple's Safari browser and KDE's Konquerer Browser release a javascript benchmark the other day. It's called SunSpider and you can try it out yourself here. Naturally, I could not resist to try it on the few browsers I have lying around here. And to my surprise the fastest one was the webkit version running under Parallels.
Here are the details:



So IE7 is horribly slow, mainly due to their text handling. Firefox is faster than IE, but consistently slower than Safari. But it really surprised me to se that IE was so much slower (27x) than webkit. Granted, it is a webkit benchmark so they should do very good in there. I only hope that they cover all javascript areas and did not leave out any where they perform poorly. Not because that it skews these results, but mainly because when left out of this benchmark, the webkit javascript team won't notice that they need to improve this area.

But all in all Webkit looks like it has IE beat.

Zaaf

It's childplay

The nintendo ds is so easy to use that even four-year olds can win at Mario cart.

Work setup

This is what I look at for roughly 36 hours a week. It's a good thing I have to tidy my desk every night before I leave, because otherwise I would be swamped in papers.

Oh, and I need a bigger monitor. The left one is used to access a developer environment which runs our production environment (don't ask). The right one is for office and e-mail. Applications on the right can span to the left. But those on the left cannot spill-over to the right. And as always with software, there is so much anger and hate going round. To minimize this, I dutifully follow http://we.hates.software and Worse Than Failure.

Zaaf

My old phone

I just received a new camera phone. It allows of to post straight to my blog. So here is a picture of my old phone, taken with my new one. 

The only thing I wanted from T-Mobile was to lower my monthly subscription fee to €5,-. But no, they had to sent me the Sony Ericsson K800i for free, including a bluetooth headset. Well who am I to say no to that.

Zaaf

Hear who swims there, kids

Someone past me this link of the Saint Nicolas welcoming parade in the town where we live: Piet Overboard.

Zaaf

Chess master

Last week my seven-year-old participated in the school chess championships for primary schools in our town. This was a cross primary school event where 24 teams of eight different schools bested their chess playing skills against each other. Each team consisted of four persons. My son's team was the on average youngest team with an average age of 7. And although they ended 23th of the 24, I still think he did a remarkable job: 4.5 of the team's 9 points where his. Of his 7 games, he won 4 and drew only one.

But the most remarkable feature was that he only played 10, 11 and 12 year olds. Giving away only 2.5 out of 7 points to kids that are at least 50% older than you is reason enough to make me proud. And the first time ever he came in contact with a chess board was two months ago.

Yes, I'm a proud parent,

Zaaf

Double counting kid

Last weekend, on Sunday morning, the 7-year old crawled into our bed and told me what he had been up to that morning. Turned out he was just playing with figures and doing some "double counting" as he called it. He basically calculated the powers of 2 up till 256. So he went 1 + 1 = 2; 2 + 2 = 4; 4 + 4 = 8, et cetera. But the interesting part of this was that instead of starting from 1 he started from a quarter.

He must be destined for a life as a programmer (or an accountant)

Zaaf

Robin Trower

A few months ago Fake Steve Jobs posted a blog about todays music. Here he waxed lyrically about listening to an album of Robin Trower called Robin Trower Live. I immediately searched for it on the iTunes Store, but it was not available there. Luckily, after a few weeks I found a similar album called Bridge Of Sighs it on bol.com.
After it arrived, I immediately popped it in the CD player. The moment I heard the first beat, I was sold. This is a classic guitar power trio from the early seventies, reminiscent of Jimy Hendrix and Fatal Flowers. The music is raw and pure and somehow strikes a nerve that most modern music misses.

Give it a try,

Zaaf

AVRO quits podcasting due to rights issues.

Since long I've been enjoying the podcast delivery of the radio show Andermans Veren. However, they decided to stop this due to rights issues. In short, they need to pay BUMA/STEMRA (Dutch ASCAP/BMI) a license fee, but they don't know how much.

This is the letter I sent them (in dutch)

Re: Podcasts stoppen.

Naar aanleiding van uw bericht over het stoppen met podcastweergaves van ondermeer Andermans Veren, zou ik u het volgende willen meegeven.
De afgelopen twee jaar heb ik met heel veel plezier gebruik gemaakt van de podcastservice van de AVRO om uw programma Andermans Veren te beluisteren op een tijd die mij wel schikt (namelijk 's middags in de trein naar huis). Mede hierdoor ben ik in aanraking gekomen met een keur aan kleinkunstartiesten die ik anders nooit zou hebben gekend, of waarvoor mijn waardering veel lager zou zijn dan nu het geval is. Hiervoor mijn hartelijk dank.
Dankzij uw podcast heb ik ondermeer CD's aangeschaft van Mylou Frencken, Alex Rouka en Boudewijn de Groot. Tevens heb ik door het enthousiasme meerdere theatershows bezocht van artiesten waar ik anders nooit naar toe zou zijn geweest.

Door te stoppen met uw podcastservice, verliest u mij als luisteraar. Dit zal voor u als organisatie waarschijnlijk niet een heel groot verlies zijn. Voor mijzelf is het ook geen groot verlies daar er genoeg podcasts zijn om het Andermans Veren-gat op te vullen. Degene die wel verliezen bij het stopzetten zijn de artiesten, daar ik nu niet meer blootgesteld word aan nederlandstalige kleinkunst.
Om Kasper van Kooten te citeren:
"De artiesten verliezen en dat moet jullie een rotzorg zijn." (uit "De Ziekte van Download").

Ik hoop dat u een en ander in overweging neemt bij het besluit om weer door te gaan met podcasting. Wellicht is het goed om te bedenken dat podcasting, net als radio, bijdraagt aan de populariteit van een artiest.

Hoogachtend,

Zaaf

So does anyone know about a good replacement for the loss of this podcast? Should I start to listen to Soccergirl Inc.?

Zaaf

iPhoto All Events shortcut key

I just discovered a shortcut for getting back to the All Events view in iPhoto when you're in a specific event view. Just press Escape and you're back! It's that simple. Now you don't need this specific hint to do it.

Zaaf

5 September Apple Announcements

Well, Apple suprised me again. The did refresh the iPod Nano and the iPod Classic to something much more visually appealing. I did not expect that. Nor did I expect the inclusion of WiFi and Safari in the iPod Touch. And neither did I expect the iPhone price to be cut so drastically. $200 of from $600, that's 33% price cut.
But what about the total cost of iPhone ownership? The AT&T subscription? Did that come down too? I just checked, but I could not find any information about it. The cheapest rate is still $59.99 per month for a two year contract. So that's $1439.76 for two years. Add the $599 iPhone to it and you get $2038.76 which is now down to 1838.76, which is slightly more than 10%.

You might argue that all iPhone buyers already have a mobile telephone that would cost them something similar, but I disagree. I'm currently paying €10 per month for my mobile telephone contract and I still have minutes left after each month. So the price of the iPhone has not come down significantly enough for me to buy it. The iPod Touch on the other hand, that's a different story. There are a few things about it that I need to further investigate before I will invest in it.
First of all, it's only 16 GB in capacity, minus the storage for OS X. Currently I've used 53 GB of the 80 GB available on my iPod. And given my preference for album shuffle, I'll only buy one when I'm sure that it will pick out whole albums at random for me to listen to. Although I'm very tempted with the built in browser.

So in the end, the Steve's Reality Distortion Field, which I alluded to in the previous post, did not prove strong enough to wipe out my credit card and buy an iPod Touch.

Zaaf

September 5th speculation

September 5th 2007, what will Apple show the world? And will the rdf prove strong enough for me to buy it?
I've seen speculation on Apple bringing out a new iPod, or even an new iPod line, based on OS X. Some even speculate that Apple brings out an iPhone without the phone part and the main reason given is that such would both be cool and technically feasible. However, Apple has a tradition of focusing on its customers, instead of focusing on the Apple Geeks that want everything. Just compare the features of an iPhone to a Nokia N95 and see that the N95 is a much better phone feature wise. However, having played briefly with both phones, it's clear that the iPhone is way more attractive than the N95.
Or look at the video iPod. It does pictures really well, but you cannot store them directly onto your iPod. It does video very well, but it only supports one video format. And it does audio very well, but you cannot record on it. And the same goes for the AppleTV. All lack things that to a geek would seem basic functionality, but that most Apple customers don't care about.

So far this year, Apple had special events for both the iPhone and the iMac. Neither the MacBook, the MacBook Pro, nor the iPod were the centre of attention this year. And since the MacBook was refreshed in May and the MacBook Pro in June, it is time for Apple to focus on its iPod business.

Keeping the above in mind, I predict here that Apple will announce

1. New iPods
2. Based on OSX
3. Without WiFi
4. possibly prepackaged with Beatles music
5. New colour on the iPod Shuffle
6. Price drop on the Shuffle

Of course, it's always possible that Apple will astonish us with a very thin 12" sub note book based on flash, but somehow I doubt that.

Zaaf