I’m doing a little shopping for new headphones to listen to at work. I’ve been using a pair of Sony 7505s that I hate for the past 4 years and I’ve reached the breaking point. The most likely reason for this is that I’ve been using my favorite pair of cans at home a lot more lately and that makes listening to the Sony phones sort of unbearable. My home pair are Grado SR125s. They put me in such a happy place. They distract me from reading. They kept me up the last two hours sitting in the dark listening to music. That seems to happen all the time. The sad: I can’t use them at work since they’re open and would drive my coworkers insane, they’re also pretty uncomfortable.

A friend pointed me at this head-fi thread which has tons of recommendations for different kinds of phones in various makes and price ranges. It’s pretty solid. Given my current tastes in sound and known dislikes, I’m leaning towards a pair of Audio-Technicas. I don’t belabor the technical specifications, I’m picky about what I like, and I’ll know it when I hear it. I’m going to go listen to some soon. Here’s the list of songs that I’m going to use.

♫ Boards of Canada - RoyGBiv

♫ Blue Sky Black Death - Stillness
I don’t know much about these guys but I’ve loved this song since I first heard it. It’s very trip-hop, kinda hard to go wrong with that. There’s also something weird about the mix that makes this track hard to listen to on my Grado’s but acceptable on my Sony and Shure phones.

♫ Ladytron - Beautyx2
Favoritest ladytron track? Yup! So pretty.

♫ Lil Wayne - BM Jr.
♫ Lil Wayne - Money on my Mind
BM Jr was the first track I heard off of Carter I back in 2004. This album came out of nowhere. Before this, Wayne had released three pretty forgettable records (yeah yeah yeah, Tha Block is Hot). The track is typical-to-pretty good Mannie Fresh production — too much snare and high hats but a great bass line and driving melody. And Wayne just killed this track. In a jaw-dropping, “whoa, who is this guy” sort of way. His flow and breath control on this are just incredible. Personal classic.
Money on my Mind is from Carter II and is responsible for unleashing The Runners‘ brand of production on the world. Have you heard Hustlin’? Same fucking formula.

♫ Crookers ft Kid CuDi - Embrace the Martian
I catch myself bobbing my head to this on the subway all the damn time. Oops.

♫ Jay-Z ft Beanie Sigel - Ignorant Shit
Jay’s flow and lyrics. The Isley Brothers sample. Just Blaze is amazing for this. Did you think I wasn’t going to have a Jay track on this list?

♫ M83 - My Own Strange Path
The first time I heard M83 was on the Night<space>Watch trailer. I’ve been sort of obsessed since. This track is from Digital Shades Vol 1, an ambient side project. By itself, it’s a great track. As part of the album it’s the height of a progression, and sort of amazing.

♫ Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You
Speechless, just speechless. This is going on three times.

♫ Brian Eno - St Elmo’s Fire
The synths, the crazy lyrics, I love this track.

♫ Black Milk ft Royce 5′9” - Losing Out
♫ Black Milk ft Pharoahe Monch Sean Price - The Matrix
Black was easily my favorite producer in 2008. Easily. The Caltroit album, Elzhi’s albums, and Tronic. All just ridiculous, and he manages to hold his own against all these incredibly talented guest rappers… somewhat. His rhyme structure can be a bit forced, but all in all a huge improvement from his first album. The production is the star here though.

and it happened during Casino Royale. The Daniel Craig Bond movie, not that other disaster. Specifically, during the first action sequence after the credits where Bond chases Sébastien Foucan through a construction site. I’m a fan of that parkour, those guys and gals are incredible! There are lots of good YouTube videos out there, and there’s always District B13. B13 is little more than an excuse for Raffaelli and Belle to run through streets and rooftops, but it’s all crazy enjoyable.

Anyway, I held off on getting a Blu-ray player for one main reason. It’s a little silly. For a long time, the most practical (supports BD-Live, upgradable, not too pricy, etc) player on the market was the Playstation 3. And the thing’s not stackable. I don’t play videogames enough to own something that demands that much vertical space. Now the DMP-BD35 from Panasonic is out, and I recently purchased one. It’s magic in a box. Technically I ended up with a BD55 due to a Circuit City mishap, but that’s another story. It’s even more magic in a box. It’s just so unreasonably high definition. I think this means I’d rather have physical media that’s gorgeous than blurry video on demand.

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna where the Lennie Small character is trying to devise a communication system with the little boy they’ve rescued in war-torn Italy. The little boy only speaks Italian (and maybe German, it’s not clear), and “Lennie” only speaks English, so Lennie’s trying to teach him to communicate by tapping on his shoulder. 1 tap for ‘yes’. 2 taps for ‘no’. 3 taps for ‘I’m sleepy’. And he keeps going. And this is funny, haha, because this is never going to work in practice.

What does this have to do with anything? The iPhone 2.1 OS update came out last week. It’s great, it fixes a bunch of bugs, it’s the second coming. My favorite feature on paper is triple-click on the mic/remote to rewind. 1 click for play/pause. 2 clicks for fast forward. 3 clicks for rewind. I was so excited when I read about this. I get obsessed with tracks and need to hear them over and over again.

For example,

The track Money on The Game’s new album. Lyrically, it’s typical Game dreck. Unnecessary name dropping, metaphors that make no sense, and pretending that the west coast is still relevant. I mean, the track starts with the lyrics

Kanye told me that Jesus walks in 0-4
but I grew up around impalas and drug lords
Welcome to Los Angeles, palm trees and drug stores
All we know is rocks and presidents like Mount Rushmore

and it goes on like that for 5 minutes. But one does not listen to Game for lyrical content, one listens to Game because he has a great ear for beats and flows really well. The production… it’s got this catchy loop of Betty Wright singing “money… over money.” There’s an overlapping guitar sample. This is one of the better Cool and Dre productions in recent memory. The Game manages to sort of stay on topic and weaves the chorus around the Betty Wright sample. I love it. I wish I could the say the same about you tracks 7, 8, and 9.

My dexterity sucks. Here’s what happens when I try to rewind using the iPhone remote.

1. Clicked too slowly - oops, pause then play.
2. Clicked too slowly - oops, skip track, pause.
3. Clicked perfectly - rewinds to the beginning of the current track. But I wanted to listen to the previous track

Smash! I’m never going to be able to pull off the sometimes 6 clicks it takes to get this to work correctly. I’m not upset, I love this feature. Combining the microphone and the remote was genius, and this makes it even easier to use the iPhone as an iPod while it’s in your pocket. I just wish I could pull off rewind more successfully. I swear I don’t have the rum fits!

For some reason /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is no longer present on leopard installs. X11.app changes? I don’t have copy/paste working correctly either. The missing font path breaks fontconfig things though using the conf file from Tiger seems to work. What else?

They replaced the mp3 preview in the info window with the quick look widget which seems to lack a volume control. Great.

Things that I’m downright okay with: The reflective dock, the glowing blue dots, the semi-transparent menu bar, spaces, safari+gmail working correctly.

The missing iPhone feature I whine about the most is the lack of MMS. The girlfriend and I have gotten used to sending pictures back and forth (get those dirty thoughts out of your head!) and I was a little sad that this would have to stop.

Anyway, email on the iPhone works well so it’s a handy - and equally convenient - substitute. It works especially well with, dare I say it, a yahoo email address.

Step 1 - have your partner send MMS messages to your yahoo email address. The iPhone supports push email with yahoo. Better stated: yahoo supports push email, so unlike gmail it’s actually usable from third party clients.

Step 2 - (and this is at&t only) email pictures to your partner at number@mms.att.net.

Step 3 - Joy!

Small clarification - Yahoo supports IMAP and more importantly Push-IMAP. There’s a lack of good information on this but many claim that it’s not perfect. Specifically, the story goes that this requires a client-initiated connection that (of course) the server can’t initiate so it’s not perfect, but it’s orders of magnitude better than POP.

Update - This iLounge thread has all the email addresses for the various providers.

Since I’ve had my samsung a707 for two days now, I think I’m qualified enough to slap together a list of likes and dislikes.

Annoyances

• The default browser doesn’t save cookies between sessions. I’ve had to cut back on my reader mobile usage recently since it forces me to log in every time. Yes, yes, I know about opera mobile but I really like the phone integration that built in browsers provide.
• The gmail mobile application does not work on this phone. Long story short, Samsung didn’t include one of the required verisign certificates. There is no known way to add new certificates.
• No syncml support. onsync doesn’t even work. Address book does, but it inserts spurious ” ” characters before and after each field in the contact¹.
• I have to navigate through a million menus to get to the camera. For whatever reason you can’t set this as a main menu shortcut. C’mon CingularAT&T, is “Cingular Video” really more important than the camera?
• It takes a noticeable amount of time to open text messages. I’m not sure what it’s doing, but it’s annoying. I appreciate that it “auto-links” phone numbers and URLs, but I’d be willing to give that stuff up for some speed.
• For some silly reason it sets the wrong timestamp in the EXIF data for photos. See this image for example.

Awesome stuff

• HSDPA - It’s so fast, especially coming from an EDGE phone. Did I mention how fast this is? It’s sooo fast.
• Bluetooth tethering. Easy to set up, decently fast surfing speeds on my macbook. Just don’t try to use any AJAX apps. I’m probably going to pick up a USB cable since bluetooth is a limiting factor.
• The phone uses a really pretty font aliasing scheme. Text is a lot easier to read compared to my old D820 though they have the same screen resolution.
• HSDPA - It’s sooooo fast. Which, sadly, probably means I’m going with the combo of a phone and a Nano instead of the iPhone.

Other phones I considered and why I didn’t get them were jotted down in this notebook.

1. I wish I could have those 30 minutes of my life back - the ones that I spent deleting those damn spaces from 82 contacts.

Six months or so ago my primary hard drive crashed. Wounds still fresh I enacted a rigorous reliability policy - Mirrored RAID for all drives and “offsite backups” for my media. My old school offsite backup policy is to bring an external drive to work and leave it there for a month. I suppose I could use S3 or something but I’m not that l33t. Given that I never remember to refresh this backup monthly I have to figure out all the commands again, so let’s document them here for future use. I suppose I could use google notebook or something but that would make kushal too happy (also I can never remember the damn URL).

1. rsync from one drive to the other. rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors /Volumes/Salvation/ /Volumes/TI\ Pimpin. --delete and --ignore-errors are important so that files I’ve deleted locally get cleaned up and there’s space for new files. Yes, I have a drive named ‘TI Pimpin’.
2. Copy the iTunes Library over. cp -r ~/Music/iTunes /Volumes/TI\ Pimpin/

At the “destination site” it’s easy enough to use this iTunes library. Convenient for having backups as well as replicated music at work.

1. Replace references from old path to new path. sed s/Salvation/TI%20Pimpin/g iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml > new_lib.xml
2. Copy that over. mv new_lib.xml iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml
3. Because iTunes likes to use the binary iTunes library when possible, corrupt the file. cat /dev/null > iTunes\ Library
4. Startup iTunes and point it at the library by holding down the option key when starting iTunes. It’ll recreate the binary file from the xml file.

sleep 30d and repeat.

SED televisions were out and affordable.

Ultimate AV on LCD v Plasma - one of the better lcd v plasma articles I’ve read in a while.

Revised IE7 Naming in Windows Vista: “Specifically, here are the official full names:

For Windows XP: ‘Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP’
For Windows Vista: ‘Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista’”

(Via IEBlog.)

There are so many funny things about this. How many times does Windows need to appear in the product name? Thankfully there aren’t more Vista versions given the “plethora” of versions.