Urbanears Plattan headphones (initial impressions)

Urbanears

This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.

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Oh noes! My regular expressions are deprecated!

Regular Expressions

I recently upgraded my web server to PHP 5.3 and learned, much to my shock and horror, that many of the regular expression functions I had been using for years are now deprecated. Specifically, the POSIX regular expressions are deprecated in favor of the PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression) library.

Here is the link to the PHP page explaining the differences. It will involve a fair amount of work, but the updates should be mostly straightforward.

In the future, it should make life easier, actually, because I now no longer have to remember different syntaxes for different expressions (delimited vs. undelimited, for example).

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The iPhone is not a phone

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

android_125.jpgRobert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

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Hammer Dulcimer

Our family attended the Scottish Renaissance Fair at the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds in Watsonville, CA, yesterday. Here’s a short video I shot of a hammer dulcimer player, using my iPhone 3GS and an external mic (which dramatically improves the sound quality):

I’m also trying WordPress’s new embedded video feature—to embed a video, all you need to do is to put the link to the video in the post, and WordPress will automatically create the player code for you.

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The iPad’s Killer Feature

4309948848_5547f3dde2.jpgDo you remember dial-up Internet access? It was terrible, especially if you were on a laptop: connect the phone card, start the dialer, wait, enter your ID and password, wait some more, and then, finally, you’re on.

Broadband did away with all that. While ISPs insist on selling broadband as if the only important factor is the speed, the real killer feature is the fact that it’s always available. Especially in these days of ubiquitous WiFi and 3G internet access, all you have to do is open the lid of your laptop, pick up your phone, or start a web browser to be instantly connected to the rest of the world via the Internet. Having foolproof (relatively), immediate, “always on” access to the Internet is what really fostered the information revolution.

Tablet computers have been around for at least a decade, and arguably somewhat longer. Yet the Apple iPad managed to come on the scene and sell a million or more units in its first month of availability, launching it immediately into the stellar heights of technology fame. Why is that?

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I haz a ukulele

318dznKdFvL._SL500_AA300_.jpgOn Saturday, an online friend of mine opened an online ukulele shop. He had impressed me very much with his uke-playing skills, and I had always wanted a small stringed instrument to travel with (a guitar is much too big and bulky) so, when he told me that some “anonymous benefactor on FriendFeed” wanted to buy me one, I was, to say the least, thrilled.

Not knowing any better, I selected a Lanikai LU-21, mainly on the basis of the Amazon reviews.

It arrived last night, and I was hooked.

I spent about fifteen minutes learning some basic chord fingerings, and then I recorded this travesty of a cover of “Alice’s Restaurant”:

It was a hit! I played with it a bit more, learned a few more chords, and then had to get to sleep.

Today after work, I came home and immediately started working on it some more. My fingers are sore, but I’m having a grand old time!

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Extending the conversation

twitter_facebook.jpgAt the suggestion of many, I’ve setup a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page to help promote the On Garner Road podcast as well as to engage better with listeners and participants. Right now, both accounts are being fed (via TwitterFeed to get all the latest posts as soon as they become available. In addition, the Twitter account is following all of the podcast’s guests; that will hopefully push some engagement there way.

So far, it’s all been done on a shoestring (i.e., non-existent) budget. I’m not taking out ads, I’m not paying for promotion; I’m just trying to build a listenable podcast and an engaging website for people to interact with.

Much to my surprise, the podcast has actually garnered a respectable amount of attention—the site, for example, is getting much more traffic than this one, for example. I’m filled with ideas for growing it and getting some more people to tell their stories on the podcast.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to make them via @OnGarnerRoad or the Facebook fan page.

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