О “железе” и программах
As I’ve proven many times, despite owning a bunch of high-end audio equipment, I don’t understand anything in music.
But there’s one test where open-backed headphones clearly superior to the closed ones:
Yes, it’s a crappy video. But when I watch it with Sundara on, I constantly turn my head over my shoulder to understand where the little girl came from. The presence they provide is sometimes scary.
The irony of life. I wanted open-backed headphones for years now, since I tried Shure 1840 on. But I wasn’t buying them, because my PC was in the main room. But for the last 2 years, it’s in my bedroom. But I still didn’t buy them. Until now.
Basically everyone recommends Sundara. So I finally got them.
The pack is not just minimalistic, it’s dingy. Brown cardboard with some tape, just the headphones and cable inside.
Sennheiser is known to have proprietary double-side connections. HiFiMan just uses double 3.5mm jacks.
My Shure 1540 aren’t low-end by any means. But there’s just some benefits for open-backed headphones, I guess. Water in the background of “Bad Liar” is like someone actually left a tap in the kitchen open.
Something I started noticing while playing Diablo 4 on my QN94A TV is that the colours are messed up when I enter a new location, but then they slowly fix themselves.
At first I thought it’s the dynamic contrast feature. But after some experimentation, it turned out to be the Local Dimming.
Luckily, the TV stores separate configurations for different inputs, so I just turned Local Dimming off for PS4.
I didn’t expect it, but the dive into the economics behind picking the right headphone driver was fascinating.
The smaller companies don’t produce planar drivers because they’re hip. They produce them because those are cheaper to prototype, and cheaper to produce in small quantities.
The larger companies don’t produce dynamic drivers because History. They produce them because it’s cheaper at scale.
Razer Kitsune seems like a joke.
For years I was saying that it’s fine to play fightings on a keyboard. And now they started producing fighting keyboards 🤦♂️
Still, it’s an interesting one. Notice how “up” is under the thumb, as a spacebar would be on a keyboard, and “down” is for the middle finger. That’s so you could do QCB/QCF easier.
Would be nice to try it, but considering it’s 300$, and something like a Hori Mini costs 40$, I probably wouldn’t.
Today I was suddenly bitten by a hardware bug, and decided to install two additional Noctua coolers I had stashed for a year or two on the sidepanel of my BeQuiet case
After all, it’s a full tower, should have plenty of space for that. Took me an hour, and ended in a failure.
First, I installed the coolers on the sidepanel where the motherboard is. But there’s clearly no space for them to fit. And when I tried to install them on the opposite side, first the cables to the motherboard make opening the case very precarious, and then I also discovered I have to move some of the HDD cages up to free that space, and maybe that will stretch the cables too much 🤦♂️
Also, since the panel is so heavy, it almost tore one of the fan power supplies out of the motherboard and bend it badly when the panel fell out.
So I ended up just opening the ventilation windows a bit, and returned everything else to where it was 🤷♂️
Got a bit tired of my SanDisk flash drive drops writes to 0 after a couple of minutes, and got myself Kingston DataTraveler Max this time.
It’s huge, 3 times bigger than any other flash drive. But I hope that it means that there’s more cooling for the chips.
Writes are nowhere near 900MB/s, of course. Closer to 100MB/s, though, starting with 300MB/s, then dropping.
Garmin disappointed me with the fact they can’t connect to two phones simultaneously.
For me it’s important, because I have messengers on one phone, and work emails and Slack on the other. And I asked for a work phone so I wouldn’t need to mess with an Android work profile, which I knew wouldn’t allow me to receive both simultaneously.
What Garmin means by saying that you can connect two devices, is that you can pair both, then disable Bluetooth in the one you don’t want to sync at that time 🤡
Was delighted to find out that iPhone SE supports wireless charging out of the box. Now I don’t need to mess with clunky Lightning cable, or whatever it’s called.
Generally I like fabric and foam mouse mats. And for years I’ve been using Razer Goliathus mouse mat. But I decided it’s finally time to replace it. The problem is, though, that the fashion has moved on, and now all mouse mats are huge. My Goliathus was 26×21. The Gigantus Medium is 36×28. And the Pro Type mat is the same, just in different color, as far as I can understand. It’s twice the size I need.
I don’t want RGB, I don’t want a mat that covers my entire desk, I just want a small mouse mat. How hard can it be?!
Although I’m not sure I’m gonna try it, I think that Keychron Q0 may be a better solution than Razer OrbWeaver/Tartarus.
https://www.keychron.com/pages/keychron-q0-customizable-mechanical-number-pad
Tartarus has 4 rows of keys, while I think that 6 rows, as the regular keyboard, is the most comfortable.
The most intersting bit in this video is that Atari Jaguar was marketed as a 64bit system, because it had 2 32bit processors.
32+32=64 🤦♂️
It also had a third CPU, Motorola 68000, same as Sega Genesis. Some developers didn’t care much about learning a new architecture, so the entire game was running on the CPU, which explains why many games on Jaguar looked like they were running on Genesis.
Some random notes:
You can have both English version of Metal Slug and red blood. Just need to enable blood using Soft DIP Switches. To access them, press B+C+D
161-in-1 cartridge is weird. There’s Shock Troopers 2, but not Shock Troopers 1. There’s Sengoku and Sengoku 3, but not Sengoku 2.
Aero Fighters 3 is buggy. Not sure if it’s the ROM that was put on the cartridge or the game itself, but sometimes both you and the enemies become invincible.
For years I’ve beet trying to hear the difference between lossy and lossless audio using one of the ABX tests.
I thought that I can’t tell the difference because even the SoundBlaster AE-9 is not “professional” enough.
So I got USBPre 2 for a time. And guess what? I still don’t hear the difference 🤷♂️
For two weeks I was bothered by my RTX 2070 fans starting and stopping.
At first I was blaming driver updates.
But then I ended up opening the case and noticing that just one of the three fans does that.
A little vacuuming helped. And I also bought a bottle of air duster though, just in case.
A couple of weeks ago we replaced our rather simple Russel Hobbs filter machine with a more sophisticated Sage Precision Brewer.
And boy, does it make a difference.
It doesn’t just pour boiling water, as some other brewers do. It controls water temperature using PID, like the higher-end espresso machines. The quality of coffee I get is comparable to filter coffee from Black Sheep. And it’s also easier to clean.
Potentially, it doesn’t even require paper filters. There’s a plastic basket that comes with it as well. But I got a stock of those paper filters during COVID, so I’m not sure if it’s worth to test the basket.
The downsides are that it’s huge. The tank is 1.7L, and it’s 1.7L of coffee. While we drink around 0.5L in the morning. So the pitcher always feels almost empty. I wish they had a smaller model for such cases.
Must admit that until few months ago, I was worried about switching my keyboard and mouse to wireless. But it’s actually not a big deal. I get to charge the keyboard maybe every month, and it’s just for an hour, while it still works. Same for the mouse. And I don’t feel any delays, at least when the mouse is connected to the dedicated receiver. So overall, positive experience, not only for work, but also for gaming.
Can’t make this stuff up. A day after I put together my SuperGun Neo Geo setup, my consolized Neo Geo lost by Royal Mail arrives back. It was in transit since 29th of July, almost 2 months, and the Royal Mail itself admitted it was simply lost. At least that resolves my issue of not having a proper shell for my board.
Just for the fun of it, I decided to see if it boots. The reason I sent it back was that it wasn’t even showing the boot screen. And it does!
Look what 5 months in Spanish Inquisition does to you. Anyway, it shows the 00D00000x555 error:
I managed to get the malfunctioning motherboard out of the shell, and put the working motherboard inside. So now I have a fully working consolized MVS, it seems.
Attempt to get a shell for the motherboard turned out to be a fail. Bought MV1-B shell for MV1-A board, because there were no MV1-A shells available, and those look very similar with their parallel card slot. But MV1-B shell is slightly narrower, so MV1-A board doesn’t fit in.
But other than that: it’s alive!
The board, the card, SuperGun, PSU, gamepad – everything put together and working.
And the graphic issues are gone. This is beyond awesome.
Got myself a new mouse. Wanted something that could be connected wired as well as wirelessly, so I could control multiple devices using the same mouse. I like DeathAdder shape, and I dislike the separate buttons on V3. So, I went for DeathAdder V2 Pro.
After DeathAdder Chroma I owned for years, Razer DeathAdder V2 Pro feels surprisingly cheap: it’s lighter and the plastic is not soft-touch. Funny how 10 years ago you had customizable weights you could put in your mouse to make it heavier, while now every mouse makes competes how light they can make their mouse.