Etymotics ER6i earphones
I was born with the wrong-shaped ears for most earbud-style earphones - they just fall out. So earbuds that are designed to sit in the ear canal work far better for me, with the added bonus of getting better sound quality by blocking ambient noise, and sparing my neighbours the leakage.
I’ve used various pairs of Sennheisers and Sonys for a fair while - but while they’re reasonably in-ear, the design of their rubber seals still allows a fair amount of ambient noise in. That’s not too much of a problem in a relatively quiet environment, but not so good in places like the Tube - it’s tempting to crank up the volume to drown out the surroundings, and that way lies tinnitus and hearing loss.
Having used various types of earplugs for noisy DIY jobs, I was quite intrigued by the type of earbuds that use soft rubber flanges - and when the plug on my previous pair of Sennheisers meeting with an unfortunate accident coincided with a eBuyer voucher, I figured it was time to give something else a try.
Etymotics specialist in high-end earphones, and have a range of models that use both foam and rubber-flanged sleeves. The ER6 and ER6i are their mid-tier models, physically identical apart from the ER6is having a boosted frequency response, supposedly to work better with iPods and the like. Frankly, my hearing is shot to bits so these sorts of claims don’t make a lot of difference - but I do like more bass than a flat response can provide, so the 6is looked like a better option.
Physically, they’re about 1cm long by 0.5 wide in a slightly-hexagonal shape, and are clear so that you can see the innards. The cable emerges from the unit at a right-angle, so they hang down when you’ve got them in your ears - and because they sit so deep in the ear canal, they’re practically invisible. The rubber flanges are food-grade Band Aid blue and have a Towers-of-Hanoi shape to them. The cables are symmetrical, about 1m long and terminate in a right-angled 3.5mm stereo jack plug.
Inserting them for the first time is somewhat strange. They claim to manage around 36bB of sound isolation, which seems credible - the rubber flanges make a more-or-less completely airtight seal in your ear canal. That makes them quite tricky to insert - I’ve found the best way is to moisten the tips, pull my ear up with my opposite hand and insert them pointing upwards. That way they slide in and sit properly, although it is a bit of a public performance.
Once they’re in, you realise just how much sound reaches you through bone conduction. You’re very aware of breathing and swallowing - you wouldn’t want to chew gum while listening to music, for example. This is something that you get used to, along with the somewhat strange “plugged” sensation - for the first week, I was a bit worried about sneezing in case my eyeballs popped out of their sockets. Taking them out is just a case of pulling gently - too hard a tag and they come out with a “pop” that makes your ears ring. Personally I think the isolation works far better than “active” headphones, without needing gigantic ear cups and batteries.
The good
- The sound isolation is superb - they’re ideal for use in noisy situations such as the Tube when the temptation with leakier models would be to crank the volume up.
- The sound quality is good - although they’re not overly bass-heavy, there’s a decent “thump factor”. The midrange doesn’t overwhelm, and the high-end response is more than equal to my hearing capabilities. While audiophiles might find something to mutter about, I’ve been more than satisfied with their performance for a range of music genres and speech
- Because they fit so deeply inside the ear canal, these are ideal for use when you’re moving around - they’re not going to fall out if you’re running etc.
- The build quality (aside from a slight reservation about the cable below) is good - they feel solid and robust enough to stand up to repeated use.
- The complete package includes a zip-up storage pouch, foam eartips for if the rubber ones don’t suit, some replacement wax filters and a filter tool
The bad
- The sound isolation is so good that this could be a hazard in some situations - and it’s difficult to hear PA announcements. This is trade-off to one of the benefits, so it comes down to what sort of situations you’re going to be using them in.
- The cable doesn’t look overly robust - although there is strain relief at the earphone end, I’d be careful about yanking them out by the cables
- The cable is a bit too long for use with iPods - I personally prefer the Sony approach of a shorter cable from the earphones and an extension cable. But YMMV.
- The rubber eartips are something of an earwax squeegie - as you haul them one, the flanges do have a tendency to collect gunk. But you could see that as a benefit - not only will other people think twice before pinching them if they’re encrusted with your earwax, they’ll also keep your ear canals nice and clean if you use them on a regular basis…
The ugly
- There aren’t really any show-stopping problems, unless you’re not keen on the idea of in-ear models. Something to be aware of is that these do sit right in your ears, so if you’re not comfortable with that, these aren’t for you.
Overall, I’d say these were a good replacement for my previous Sennheisers, if slightly on the pricey side for what they are. Having said that, I noticed a huge variation in actual street prices, so it’s worth shopping around.
Filed under General | Comment (1)links for 2008-04-08
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“Twitter exposes some of its functionality via an Application Programming Interface (API). This document is a reference for that functionality, and aims to serve as a reference for developers building tools that talk to Twitter.”
Plans for satellite tags shelved
From the Tell-Me-That-It-Wasn’t-Bleeding-Obvious-That-It-Wouldn’t-Work-The-First-Time-Around department:
Plans to use satellite tracking to monitor sex offenders have been shelved by the government.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said the project had been suspended pending further “developments in technology”.
A two-year pilot scheme found that the equipment could be blocked or distorted by high rise buildings or even trees.
However, just in case your faith in the ability of government to deal with the bleedin’ obvious was beginning to recover a little, fear not. Woo and technological pixie dust still have a part to play in government:
Ministers are now believed to be planning to use lie detectors as a new technique to deal with paedophiles.
Legislation was passed last year to expand the programmes of polygraph or lie detector tests.
It’s discredited technology, so it’s no great suprise that the MoJ are about to order a gazillion pounds-worth. Probably from EDS.
However, they are at least being honest about the reasons for this:
Napo’s spokesman said: “The polygraph is likely to be of limited value because sex offenders can manipulate the outcomes.
“It remains the case, however, that sufficient controls should be in place for each individual case to maximise public perception, ” he said.
Which translated from PR-speak means, “We know that they’re fucking useless, but this looks good in a Daily Mail headline so we’re going to do it anyway.”
Filed under General | Comment (0)Have you got my fingers?
Biometrics as the *sole guarantor* of someone’s identity is a daft and broken idea, despite what our nodding dog of a Home Secretary has to say on the subject. As if further proof were needed, the German Interior Minister lost his fingerprints to the Chaos Computer Club, and now No2ID are offering a £1,000 reward for the fingerprints of Gordon Brown or Nodding Dog.
Herr Schauble now has a somewhat plausible defence if his fingerprints turn up at the scene of a crime somewhere, and no doubt Brown and Smith’s Special Branch bodyguards will now have crockery collection added to their list of tasks when protecting our Glorious Leaders.
Which got me wondering - if enough people were to put their fingerprints into the public domain (or at least the information needed to create artificial fingerprints, as per the Chaos Computer Club procedure), would this poison the value of fingerprints as a biometric identifier? If I could point to an online and freely-accessible database that contained my fingerprint data, could I then turn around and claim that while *you* think that those are my fingers, they might equally belong to somebody’s who’s made themselves their own pair?
Filed under General | Comment (1)Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Children?
Yesterday the Daily Mail ran a “please won’t somebody think of the children” article exposing at length and in graphic detail how “Millions of girls using Facebook, Bebo and Myspace are ‘at risk’ from paedophiles and bullies” - complete with pictures cribbed from profiles showing teenage cleavages and pixellated faces, and just enough salacious detail to get their middle-aged readership semi-erect.
This morning, plans to “ban paedophiles from social network sites” are splashed across the papers - apparently convicted child sex offenders will be forced to disclose their email addresses to police, who will then pass the details to websites to block access.
Which is probably the most laughable and unenforceable idea since, oh, the last one.
The first problem is that someone somewhere in the Justice Department’s Division For Thinking Up Daily Heil-Friendly Announcements doesn’t realise that an email address is a bit different to a phone number, and it’s possible for anyone to have any number of them. That’s probably because the person dreaming up these ideas only has one email address themselves, and the thought of having another has never crossed their minds.
[Slight sidetrack for a moment - am I the only person to think that we're missing a Ministry of Truth to go alongside our shiny new Ministry of Justice?]
The second problem is that none of the sites that are being mentioned are UK-based, so any proposals, however draconian, are completely unenforceable. This will be down to the idea dreamer not actually knowing how the internet actually works.
Of course, now that child abuse is the new witchcraft, the moral panic could come in quite handy. In order to Protect The Children, we’ll pay EDS a squillion pounds a year to erect and maintain the Great Firewall Of Britain to block access to any site that doesn’t agree to abide by our national code of child protection. Then each adult will be issued with a personal email address - based on say, the serial number of their ID card - and it will become a criminal offence to access an email system other than the EDS-run one.
The other possibility is that the person who dreamt up this idea knows *exactly* how the internet works, but also knows *exactly* how to craft a proposal to catch the maximum number of column inches without the tedious and potentially expensive detail of actually, say, having to *do* anything.
Filed under General | Comment (1)Twittering the Shipping Forecast
Although the main use of Twitter is for real people to say what they’re up to “right now“, it was quickly apparent to your average hacker that it’s just as useful for any service or device that changes state on a regular basis. Hence Tom and Tom making Tower Bridge Twitter, so that the bridge announces every time it raises and lowers.
Talking with Russell Davies a few weeks ago, he mentioned the Shipping Forecast - which immediately struck me as something that would be fun (although not necessarily useful) to get Twittering.
The Shipping Forecast is one of those uniquely British institutions - four times a day, the Met Office produces a forecast for the seas around the British Isles which is then broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Being brought up on the coast of the Irish Sea by Radio 4-listening parents, it was part of my life from an early age - and because it’s issued in a standard format, it’s almost poetic. Entire generations of Brits have grown up with phrases like “Southwest, backing southeast for a time, 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8″ becoming earworms. Hearing or reading it still brings back memories of a Roberts radio first thing in the morning, after Farming Today but before the Today programme.
Getting it to Twitter, though, presents one or two challenges. The first is getting hold of the source data - the Met Office being one of a number of British institutions that are forced by the grasping UK Government to be profit-generating, they want about £600 a year for the privilege of accessing a clean XML feed of the data. And although the forecast is published online by both the BBC and the Met Office, the quality of the HTML leaves a lot to be desired, at least from the point of view of scraping it.
In the case of the BBC, that’s because it’s presented primarily to be human-readable - in the case of the Met Office, it’s because they’re one of many brain-dead British public bodies that are Microsoft monocultures, and know or care nothing about standards and being good online citizens. Nor for that matter would they know good online design if they tripped over it. But that’s a rant for another day.
Back to Twittering. It’s a Ruby script that gets kicked off by a cron job four times a day, and uses the marvelous Hpricot gem to grab the appropriate page from the Met Office. Then the extraneous junk HTML is thrown away to leave just the table cell containing the forecast itself, which gets chopped up into a number of array elements by splitting it at the emboldened headings.
At this point the second problem arises - because the Forecast is intended to be read aloud, it’s fairly verbose. Fitting it into 140 characters is something of a problem. To get round this, the individual array elements get the snot parsed out of them, chopping down the character count by searching-and-replacing the content with abbreviations. It doesn’t make for pleasant-looking tweets, although if you’re familiar with the overall syntax and cadences of the verbal Forecast it’s actually surprisingly readable. Once squished down, each element is then tweeted out with the Twitter4R gem.
Originally I was going to set up a Twitter account for each forecast area, but that was a pain to set up (there’s lots of them) and awkward because area names like “Viking” had already been taken. So in the end I’ve compromised by pushing all the area forecasts out to the one Shippingcast account.
There’s room for improvement - cleaning up the abbreviations by using regular expressions would be one, or replacing obscure abbreviations with Unicode symbols being another. (There’s a key for the abbreviations I’ve used here) And it’s clearly not a particularly useful thing to be Twittering in the first place.
However, it’s made me realise just how useful it could be for public bodies to make their data available in structured, machine-readable form - and not to charge ridiculous amounts of money for it. The chances of the Met Office coming up with the idea of Twittering the Shipping forecast internally is next to nil - so this kind of “innovation” takes place externally. (I’m using innovation loosely here, but there are far more interesting and useful things that can be done with public data - anything that MySociety have done, for example). Making the information available would be trivial, if only there was the will to do it - and the potential benefits could be huge.
Filed under General | Comment (1)links for 2008-03-13
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I’m calling it “tonal selections,” since it’s based on a curve’s ability to discriminate between lighter and darker tones.
Twitter Updates for 2008-01-29
- Need to replace my scanner for 6×6 negatives. Looking to the Twittersphere for Mac-friendly recommendations… #
- @peterjlambert : are we talking Oh. My. Word. Good. or Oh. My. Word. Bad? #
- Deployed, pub, erm - back in the office. Shome mishtake, shurely? #
- LIFT dilemma - do I take a digital camera (portable) or a MF film camera (cooler, but heavier) ? #
- £1.50 postage for a lens cap off ebay? You’re ‘avin a larf?!? #
- kewl - I made it onto Valleywag (well, a photo, at least) - http://tinyurl.com/27jkq9 #
- @peterjlambert: just as well it wasn’t Fleshbot :-O #
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Filed under General | Comment (0)I Ain’t Dead
This site has been quiet and sporadically updated for a while. It’s partly down to sheer damn busyness work-wise, and partly down to the strange blogging hiatus that seems to strike most my fellow inmates at Headshift - there’s something about working with social software professionally that seems to suppress the blogging urge personally. Which is strange, because it’s not like I’m any shorter on opinions than I’ve ever been before. Maybe a 21st century manifestation of the old saw about cobblers’ children.
Originally a lot of the content here came from various “professional” incarnations of the blog, and my original “personal” blog was kept separate. Then that personal blog disappeared when I rationalised my domain names. I came across a SQL backup at the weekend and found myself thinking “why not put that lot back online?” - not that it will be of any interest to anyone other than me, but the last few years have been quite busy to put it mildly, and it’s kind of interesting to plough back through my archives and see what I was up to. Plus I’ve been browsing through the bios of fellow LIFT ‘08 participants and feeling very inadequate on the blog front.
The downside is that things are now messy - the archives are all over the place, some of the content is personal and some of the content is written from a “we” point of view as it was talking about company-related stuff. Not that this means it makes a lot more sense than usual, but it’s probably even less likely to be stumbled across than it ever was before.
The template has changed, too - I’ve lost the frog for a while and I’m back to a stock template which will get tweaked a bit over time. But only when inspiration strikes, so it might be a while.
Filed under General | Comment (0)Ming the clam is ‘oldest animal’
I can’t help thinking that there’s a certain irony here:
Scientists said the mollusc, an ocean quahog clam, was aged between 405 and 410 years and could offer insights into the secrets of longevity.
Researchers from Bangor University in north Wales said they calculated its age by counting rings on its shell.
Of course we only know this because the clam’s been dredged up and, er, killed.
Filed under General | Comment (0)