Choosing a good pair of headphones/in-ear headphones

So, you want to buy headphones huh?

I think headphones these days are actually becoming more of a fashion statement than a device that helps you listen to audio. Being a commuter on the TTC (also known as "The Rocket") for the past 7 years, I have observed a marked increase in the use of headphones, ear phones and a bunch of other things. One thing that strikes me though is the large amount of people wearing those "beats" by (dr.) Dre headphones. Those may be great for the bass, but for people who wish to buy some "quality" headphones, here are some of my thoughts regarding a few technical aspects you can look at before purchasing a pair of headphones. While nothing beats trying out the headphones, this guide may be of help for people who wish to buy things online.

You can generally find the specs I've described below on the manufacturer's website or by simply by doing a quick search for it on google. Headphones.com is also a great resource for looking up some specs.

Headphone Impedance

One of the things you have to keep in mind about a headphone is that, effectively, it's just like a resistor (something that burns up energy). It takes the energy from the device that powers it and causes some membrane to vibrate in order to produce sound. The lower the resistance, the louder the sound produced by the headphones for the same amount of power. This is a key factor that you have to consider when buying headphones because if you plan to use a handheld device like an iPhone or a mp3 player to listen to music, you're generally going to want a lower resistance, somewhere between 8Ω - 16Ω (Ω = Ohms, a theoretical measure of the resistance). If the resistance is any higher, you'll likely have to resort to using a headphone amplifier that use batteries to get higher noise levels from your headphones. Not that there's anything wrong with using an amplifier, but it's just an extra inconvenience you may have to deal with in order to listen to some music.

Frequency Response

Here's were things start to get a little subjective, but I'm only going to mention the tech details.

So you probably know that headphones work by vibrating a little membrane like thing (called the "driver"), back and forth. However, the ability of that membrane to vibrate really fast or slow depends on what kind. A whistle sound for example, has a high frequency. A drum beat, however, has a low frequency. While listening to music though you want your headphones to produce both sounds equally well. However, that is not always possible to do. Some headphones can produce lower frequency sounds better, while others can produce higher frequency sounds better. The best types are good at both. As such, each headphone type has it's own "frequency response curve". The "flatter" the curve is, generally means that the headphone can produce more frequencies at the same sound level, and therefore produce more sounds.

X-axis is frequency (how fast the speaker is vibrating), Y-axis is gain (how much potential sound the speaker can produce at that frequency)

In the pictures above, the graph at the top is of a headphone that costs $19.99. To the bottom is a headphone that costs $1,945! (yeah, two thousand bucks!). The main difference is that the cheaper headphones can't produce the lower frequencies as well (like drum beats and such), hence the dip in the curve on the left hand side (which means you can barely hear those sounds). The really expensive ones can handle the bass very easily so it's like a "flat line", hence the price!

This spec of the headphone is what allows the headphone to handle the "lows", "mids" and "highs" that audiophiles often talk about. If you're into base, you want the left hand side of the frequency graph to be flat, and above 0 for the y-axis.

Active Noise Cancelling Headphones

Another type of headphones that are catching on these days are ones that work by playing "antisound" (1/2 wavelength out of phase sound waves, if that means anything to you...) so that it cancels out sound from the outside. These are especially handy if you plan to travel on planes or trains, since it's really easy to generate antisound for the low hum of airplane or subway engines. However a couple of caveats you'll need to keep in mind:

• Not all sounds are actually cancelled. It won't cancel out the sound of babies crying beside you, or people talking loudly, since it's very difficult to generate antisound for these sounds
• They'll often require batteries, and some may not even work without batteries. Buying new batteries every week/recharging them may become a hassle really fast
• These headphones are usually very expensive!

Some things you can check for such headphones are their "noise isolation"/elimination curves.

For example, if you are considering the Bose QC15 headphones, you can google for the noise isolation graph for the headphones, and it'll show something like this:

In this case, you want the frequency curve to be as low as possible for all frequencies, as opposed to the frequency response graphs in the previous two pictures above because want to cancel out/block the noise. Noise from airplane engines are somewhere around 70-100 Hz frequency, and the Bose QC15 do a nice job of cancelling it out by dropping the sound level of the engine noise by ~20dB. That's about the same reduction as reducing the sound of car traffic to the level of sound of an average conversation with a friend (yeah, it's hard to picture sound...).

So with noise cancelling/isolating (noise isolating headphones just block out the noise by covering your ears...) headphones, you'll want to check out these curves and try to find the ones that block out the most noise.

One thing you have to remember is that a side effect of this antisound business is that the actual sound that you want to hear will get a little distorted, changing the frequency response curve of the headphones. As such, it's always a trade off, and it's up to you to decide if noise cancellation is more important than you being able to hear a particular part of a song.

Fit and Finish

One final thing that's pretty obvious is how the headphones fit on you. This is something that you'll likely just have to experience on your own by visiting a store or something, and is highly subjective. As well, you probably want it to look cool.

I, however, don't really mind how it looks as long as it sounds good!

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5 Internet Radio services outside the US

To be honest I'm not much of a music junkie. If I feel like listening to something, well, I don't really have a collection of 50,000 songs that can just "turn on". Instead, I depend on online radio stations to feed me with the latest music there is. Of course, it's even better when I can choose the type of music that I want to listen to, instead of just listening to whatever my local radio station is playing.

So, without further ado, here's a list of radio websites that I've started liking. Please feel free to share you own. Also, you may probably notice that there's no mention of Pandora here, because Pandora (and Spotify for that matter) doesn't quite work outside the US yet.

Jango

A cool radio station that allows you to choose the artist that you'd like to listen to, and suggests similar songs from quite a large list of popular songs. What I also like about Jango is their app for Android (and iPhone, Blackberry as well) because, unlike the next service I've mentioned (Grooveshark), they seem to be giving it away for free. And, you don't even nee to sign up! What puzzles me is that these people don't even have ads on their radio station (yet, but seems like they're working on it, judging by their advertising page). One thing that does bug me though is that the website will constantly nag you if you don't sign up for a Jango account if you're listening to music online. This sort of makes skipping a song a bit harder. But I suppose it does make sense to sign up though, because that's how the service keeps track of what songs you like and what songs you don't. Another great thing about Jango is it's ability to choose between a wide variety of songs, vs sticking to one artist only - which is a nice touch, although I really don't mind either setting.

Grooveshark

I must admit that Grooveshark does look quite a bit fancier than Jango (and doesn't nag you to sign up as much), and it great if you're only listening to stuff on your computer. It has the features that are similar to Jango, but it doesn't really allow you to chose your "variety" settings. Nevertheless, it also seems to have a huge repertoire of songs that you can listen to. One thing about Grooveshark is that their smartphone service is not free, so if you plan to create your play lists on Grooveshark, you will have to pay a small fee to listen to it on your phone.

Live365
Feels like the usual internet radio station where you choose a Genre to listen to, and tune into a channel. It does have quite a few ads here and there though. Also seems like they make you sign up for an account...

Shoutcast
Comes with WinAmp too, so if you happen to have it on your computer then simply open it up and browse to your desired radio channel.

iTunes
Simply switch to the Radio tab on the left hand sidebar to check out a wide selection of radio channels. This is great if you don't want to open a bunch of websites and just need to listen to some music. I usually don't like installing iTunes on Windows computers due to its tardiness, however, it is definitely my choice of music player on OS X.

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A Brief Review of Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 is probably one of the coolest smartphone OS's you've never used. It's nothing like Windows, and very different from iOS as well as Android. I really like the smooth transition effects, and the general snappyness of the phone.

Some reasons why you'll actually like a Windows Phone:

1. Simple and easy to use (for the most part). Don't quite agree with this commercial though, some things are a little more difficult actually (see my WP7 wishlist below!)
2. Excellent Facebook, Linked in and Twitter Integration. In particular I like the integration of Facebook and Windows Live chat with text messaging so you can quickly switch back and forth
3. Fancy transition effects. 
4. You can edit Microsoft Office documents!
5. In built music recognition feature (like Shazam) that works quite well

One bad thing about Windows Phone, however, is that the hardware is not standardized. This means that using one phone may not give you the same experiences as using another, since one design may be more prone to accidental clicks than another. Or, one design may have a larger screen resulting in lower battery life but better ability to type. Not being able to really try out the phone at a store and it's cool transition effects is also a downside.

Some things in WP7 I'd like to see worked out in future versions (dear Microsoft, I hope you are reading this wishlist) that you may not like about WP as well:
1. They actually made some things a little more difficult while trying to make things easier. A good example of this is making and receiving calls. In order to make a call, you click on the "Phone" live-tile on the live tiles screen. This actually takes you to a list that shows the history of calls... instead of taking you to the dial pad. Unless may be you just had a missed call, in which case going to the missed calls list directly would be more convenient, there's no reason to tuck away the dialpad under some menu. Another problem is answering calls. To answer calls you actually need to perform two steps! First you need to "Swipe Down", and then click the "answer" button again to take the call! I personally think that this is just silly. Swiping down should automatically trigger the answer call response. I've missed a few calls thinking that swiping down would answer the call. Also, I think that Microsoft should do something to allow people to access their messages and emails right from the lockscreen.

2.5 Basic apps: While the lack of apps for the platform is no big surprise since most developers seem to be developing for other more prominent and potentially lucrative platforms, Microsoft really needs to do some thinking about default apps. A fresh windows phone ships actually without a stopwatch and timer app (it does have Microsoft Office though...). Even my 8 year old flip phone has that (and a flashlight app)! Sure, you can download a few apps, most of which don't work all too well, but this is something that any new phone should come with. In-built music recognition and QR code readers are great, but please stick to providing some basic apps that every other platform out there has.

2. Internet Explorer: Any smartphone in today's market needs to have great web browsing capabilities. IE, for some reason, has a lot of difficulty handling large divs, and handling iframes properly. A good example is visiting xda-developers.com. If you scroll left or right, the text in the div gets cut off! Apart from the browser's incapability to support web-kit like styling elements and divs it also has very poor "tabbing" capabilities. If you need to switch to a tab, you need to drag out the menu from the bottom, tap tabs, and then tap the tab of interest.

4. Adding contacts/searching: Too much jumping around to do. To add someone to my contacts list, I first need to click name, add their name, click save, then click phone, add their phone and click back. Why not put all of these fields on one page like every other mobile OS out there? Also, searching for contacts is kinda  tough even though you can click on a letter and it shows you contacts with a particular letter, you can't go one level further and sort by Letter-Vowel combinations like iPhone and Android (just a thought).

5. Live-tile and app screen: While having live-tiles is great, having only 6 of them visible in one viewing is not all that great. I really wish there was some way to make some tiles 1/4th the size of the current ones, so 4 tiles could be squeezed in the same place to avoid scrolling. Also, scrolling up and down the app screen is somewhat of a pain if you happen to have a lot of apps.

6. Scrolling: The only way to get to the bottom of a very long page is to keep scrolling for a day and a half! May be they could allow people to move the scroll bar?

7. No tethering! Yes, my carrier actually allows me to tether, and I've done so successfully (and rather easily) on my android. Not sure why Microsoft doesn't want to bother adding this.

While Windows Phone 7 may not be as fully featured as other systems, I'd say that it's definitely getting there.

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Giving your Windows Computer a Tune-up

Has your Windows 7 computer been running slower lately?  Do you think that it's not running as fast as it was when you just got it?  Here are some tips to make it run a little faster, and to help you tweak your system so that you can get the best performance out of it.

1. Delete or move any unused large files and applications, particularly if you're running out of disk space: You can also use Disk Cleanup or CCleaner to help with deleting old temporary files, and remove old applications by searching for Uninstall a Program in the start menu. One thing that happens when you use your computer a lot is that you tend to load more and more files on it, particularly if you like taking videos and listen to a lot of music. It's good practice to store such files on a hard drive that is not your main 'C:' system hard drive so that the operating system has enough room for system files like the page file which is used by your system to store temporary information while your computer is running.
2. Defragment your hard drive (skip this if you have a SSD, since it probably won't make much of a difference: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Improve-performance-by-defragmenting-your-hard-disk. You can also use third party programs like Degraggler that accomplish the same thing.
3. Run the Windows Troubleshooter to check if all is well with your computer. Simply search for Troubleshoot in the start menu
4. Keep your computer up to date. Run Windows Update from the start menu once in a while at least to make sure that you have the latest performance fixes. Performance updates for application suites like the Windows Live Suite (messenger, live mail and so on) and Microsoft Office are also often pushed through Windows Updates
5. Make sure that your computer is not infected with malware. Reducing your computer's speed is one of the features of most viruses and worms out there, so it would be a good idea to run Malwarebytes, Spybot or even just Microsoft's Security Essentials suite if you don't already have any anti-virus installed or use one of those antivirus programs from your ISP. This step is especially necessary if you happen to use some of those nasty file sharing programs, or may be even happen to plug in a USB from some who uses such programs.


Doing the above steps (mostly steps 1 - 4) every month end or so should make sure that your computer is fast enough.

Bonus: If you'd like to add a little more speed to your computer, you can try plugging a USB drive and setting a ready boost volume on it. Simply right click the USB drive on My Computer, click properties, and browse to the ReadyBoost tab to use the device for ready boost.

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How to make OS X Snow Leopard look and feel like Lion

To be honest, I don't intend on upgrading to Lion until it works seamlessly with my current setup. From what I can tell for now, with a visit to roaringapps.com, it seems like there quite a few kinks to iron out with third party apps. I'm sure many things work, but why take the chance when most of the 250 new things seem to be UI elements and other "frivolous things". Don't get me wrong, I think Lion is cool, but there's nothing exceptional it has to offer when I compare it with Snow Leopard, which is probably why Apple decided on the $29.99 price tag (although I reckon that they could have priced it at $99.99, and I'm sure people would have still bought it...). So, I figured, why not make my Snow Leopard install look a little like Lion, while I wait for things to get a little more stable. As it turns out, it's not too hard to put some lion skin on a leopard for some temporary coolness.



Step 1: Skin the UI and Grab the Wallpapers

To make the the Leopard's skin look like a Lion, all you need to do is grab a copy of ThemePark, and install a Lion theme (like this one) from deviant art. This will change the default widgets (buttons, progress bars, dropdown menus etc. to make it more lion like). One thing you'll notice though is that the scrollbars may look a little out of place, since they can't really be "hidden".

Also, you can find a ton of OS X lion wallpapers on the net. Grab one that you like, and set it as your wallpaper, if you really want to copy the default look of Lion.

Step 2: Tweak the apps

Apple Mail
One of the newly touted features in Apple Mail is the (dare I say "Outlook" like) column on the left hand side. You can somewhat emulate this using Dane Harnett's Widemail plugin.

Also, you can turn on message threading (View > Organize by thread) which also groups together messages that have the same subject lines, although not quite as elegantly as the new mail.

Finally, if you want something that looks a little more like the new mail and you tend to mainly use IMAP, you may want to give Sparrow a try.


Step 3: Mouse/Multitouch and Keyboard Settings
Who says Snow Leopard can't have the Multitouch pizzazz of Lion? Just grab BetterTouchTool and you'll find that it's powerful enough to emulate quite a few features like going back and forth in Safari, activating Expose or Spaces and much more (you can even do things like Play/Pause!). Yes, there is quite a bit of configuration to do, but just follow Apple's footsteps on the actions they've mapped to certain gestures and I'm sure you'll have most of the multitouch features down in no time. As an added bonus, you can also turn on Windows Snap like features, which is quite awesome IMHO.

Also, one of the "new" (if not cool) things about Lion is that up is down, and down is up, when it comes to scrolling, when you compare it to the usual way of scrolling anyway. You can emulate this using Scroll Reverser.  While this works great with the iPhone and iPad because there is a "direct relationship" between the content and your finger, I don't think it works all too well when you're using a mouse/trackpad mainly because most people have associated scrolling with scrollbars. When you scroll down, the content goes up. But since Apple has hidden the scrollbars in Lion, it's probably easier to switch your normal ways. I haven't figured out how to make them disappear on Snow Leopard though, so you can only switch scroll directions for now. However, by the looks of it Google Chrome does seem to have this trick up it's sleeve, because when I try to use the new blogger UI, it show me scroll bars that look much like Lion's. Interesting.

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3 things to give your Mac a Tune-up

One of the great things I like about having Macs is the fact that you rarely have to worry as much about system slowdowns as long as you have adequate RAM and enough processing power to do what you need.  But sometimes it does help to reclaim some hard drive space, delete some system files and tweak you system settings to make you Mac feel like new.  Here are somethings you can do to give your Mac a quick tune-up.

Note: While many people will probably be switching to OS X Lion right now, I for one am not going to be switching for at least a few more months, mainly because I'm absolutely positive that a lot of application makers are still scrambling to make their apps compatible with lion. And of course, if you do an upgrade, you'll still be left with some cruft from the older system, so these tips may still be helpful (provided the apps below are compatible with Lion ;)

Delete Unused Apps with AppCleaner

While you can easily delete unused apps by dragging the apps from your applications folder to the trash, the apps often leave behind preference files and other system files all around your system. To get rid of these files, you're better off using an app called AppCleaner, which seems to be a free version of AppZapper that does the job quite well. Especially if you tend to install a lot of apps, this should help you reclaim some valuable disk space.

Delete Unused Logs and Change System Preferences To Your Liking with Onyx

While your Mac does its job, it often stores a lot of files and logs that may be helpful for reporting and so on. Such logs may take up valuable space. Furthermore, the cached information on your mac's system cache as well as the permissions for the files on your mac may be out of date, so it may be helpful to run a tool called Onyx to sort things out. Finally, I think that it's a good idea to make sure that the permissions and such are all fine on your hard drive so the necessary files can be accessed by your system.

Organize Your Files with the terminal

One of the great things about a new computer that it's not as cluttered. It's sort of like the "tabula rasa", if you will. If you're anything like me, then chances are that within a few days of use, you'll have files all over the place, but also will have customized a ton of settings. If you reinstall from scratch, you'll be losing all these settings, so it's best to just reorganize your files instead.

While you could just drag and drop things, I find that the terminal is a much more powerful tool (located in Applications > Terminal) that allows you to do things like wildcard moves and other fun stuff.

For example, let's say that I have to move all the PDF's from my download folder that are work related to my documents folder. I could command click each of these PDF's individually, and drag and drop them. Except, with the terminal, there's an easier command:

mv Downloads/WORK*.pdf Documents/Work/

Which essentially says move (that's the mv) anything from the downloads folder that starts with WORK has whatever (that's the *), and ends with a pdf to the documents/Work folder. You'll need to do some more reading on how to use these commands if you're not sure about them, but once you master these, you'll find that dragging and dropping is just a big pain. Here's a cool command line tutorial to get you started.

You may also find it rather helpful to search for those large files on your hard drive and delete them to reclaim some hard drive space.


And this is all I usually use on a regular basis. I don't every defrag my mac, because I've never found the need to (and also because I'm on a SSD...), and, of course, I don't use any fancy registry cleaners because macs don't have a registry.

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Make your caps lock key do something useful

I think that I use the the capslock key about 3 times a year - accidently that is. Having it on my keyboard all the time is just taking up valuable home-row space that can be used for something else. I'm certainly not the first to propose the idea of repurposing the key for a better use, but after seeing Google's chromebook notebook without a caps lock key (well, without a capslock key by default it seems) really motivated me to do something similar.

Here's how you can remap that key to something more useful on a Mac:

1. Click the Apple icon on the menubar at the top left hand side of your screen
2. System Preferences
3. Click the Keyboard icon
4. Modifier Keys...
5. Map the capslock key to something more useful using the dropdown menu!

On Windows, follow the instructions here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/map-any-key-to-any-key-on-windows-xp-vista/

If you're using GNU/Linux, your best bet would probably be: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/08/02/remapping-the-caps-lock-key/

Now that you've remapped that key to something else, you have no excuse to "accidentally use it" anymore!

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