State of the Ward

5/21/2012

Pocket Artillery mini cannon

Miniature cannon that fires BBs with surprisingly strong force.

Watch the videos. This may be the most awesome thing I’ve seen all month.

(Source: coolmaterial.com)

5/7/2012

Marco on minutiae

Lovely post from Marco Arment on the additive value of improving your life in small ways.

5/6/2012

AudioStream: "Are SDXC cards the future of music storage?"

My take: Mr. Lavorgna (and AudioStream¹) has missed the point here.

The future of music storage isn’t physical media; it’s abstraction.

To think that we’re going to continue sticking pieces of removable digital media into players for much longer is naïve. Everything has to be stored somewhere, but it’s going to be abstracted, cloud-based storage, and users will neither know, nor care what sort of physical media is being used (although it will be hard drives for the foreseeable future, as flash storage prices haven’t fallen low enough yet). Odds are it sure as hell won’t be SDXC cards.

With iTunes Match, I’m most of the way there. I still maintain lossless, local copies of my music for home use, where quality matters more than in my car or when I’m otherwise travelling, but even that’s striped across four hard drives resting in a Drobo storage enclosure. I rarely think about it. It’s redundant, it’s backed up to another set of hard drives, and if I run out of room, I pull out a hard drive and replace it with a bigger one, with no further intervention required. It’s about as close to a local cloud as you can come.

AudioStream is a new sister site of Stereophile (a la InnerFidelity, which of course focuses on headphones and “personal listening”) focused on computer-based audio—mostly DACs, streaming music players, and music servers. My approach is to use the computer for audio playback and then either output a digital signal from the computer locally (i.e. optical digital, or you could do USB) or over a network to an AirPort Express (which itself has an optical digital out), and then passing the digital signal through a DAC and onto my stereo. I’ve played CDs fewer than a dozen times over the past few years, and likewise I haven’t played files off of a USB flash drive, flash memory card, or other physical media that’s not a hard drive or other primary storage device. So I think these streaming players and music servers are a waste. ↩

5/2/2012

Pebble + Apple, or Pebble versus Apple?

When I first saw the Kickstarter campaign for the Pebble smartphone companion watch, my first thought was, “it’s about damned time”.

Ever since people started putting iPod nanos in watch bands, I realized that I wanted one—except I didn’t want a music player on my wrist, I wanted an auxiliary display for my iPhone. Figuring out exactly what shape the UI would take has been an interesting thought exercise since then, and I’ve about decided that I’d be pretty happy just have the iOS notification center sent to my smart watch: just tell me if I have new e-mail, or who just texted me, and I’ll get my phone out if I need to know more (this has the nice benefit of letting me obsessively check e-mail and other things I obsessively check without looking quite so rude).

Pebble looks like it’s covered that, and more¹. Looks. I almost jumped onboard and preordered through Kickstarter, but I realized that if the product in question happens to suck, it’s a) a lot of money, and b) potentially not worth wearing (although I’d probably still wear it as a watch, if only because an e-ink watch would look awesome).

So I resolved to wait for reviews. But, as Mr. Batelle points out in the linked article, there’s high suckage potential because Apple could pull the rug out from under Pebble at any moment², either through App Store policy (Mr. Batelle’s suggestion) or by releasing a competitor (as John Gruber states in the source link)—or, possible, doing the former to decrease competition for the latter (although that hardly seems necessary on Apple’s part). This, of course, reinforces that what I really want is smart watch hardware from Apple, but if the Pebble is reviewed well, it probably gets me 90% of the way to what I want.

So, I’ll wait and see. But clearly, the idea has legs, what with Pebble now having orders of magnitude more money than they were looking for. Hopefully that means that my long-wished-for smart watch will be here sooner rather than later, from Pebble or elsewhere.

Except, for some reason, neglecting to use the low-power Bluetooth 4 standard. And neglecting to include bluetooth headset and audio functionality—being able to use the watch to answer phone calls Dick Tracy-style seems like a no-brainer, and you might as well let me plug headphones into the watch to listen to music from the iPhone while you’re at it. ↩
One limitation that’s already apparent—for iOS, Pebble can’t alert you to new text messages, because third-party apps (which is what the Pebble uses to pull data from your iPhone) don’t have access to your texts. It’s not a deal killer, but inconveniences like this add up fast. ↩

(Source: daringfireball.net)

4/30/2012

Statistical analysis of the Hunger Games from "The Hunger Games"

Biostatistics was not one of my better moments… but this is a nice analysis. Presumably.

4/1/2012

Inner Fidelity's "Wall of Fame"

Tyll’s got a great new feature at Inner Fidelity—essentially a buying guide. He’s broken everything down into different price points and types of headphones, too.

So, how’s the list? Pretty good, I think. A few observations:

Sennheiser comes up pretty often, maybe too often… and I’m not convinced the HD 650 is the best pick at the $500 price point, although it’s a lovely set of headphones.
While the Grado SR60i is an ear pad, open headphone, it’s a big one—despite fitting on the ears rather than over them, I think it competes more with the full-size over ear models due to its size. The most compelling reason to go on-ear rather than over-ear is to keep earpiece size down, but the SR60i’s earpieces are pretty big.
The Koss Porta Pro is a certified classic, but I can’t help but wonder if there are better on-ear, open options at the $50 price point.
I’m not sure it makes sense to include the Sennheiser HD 25-1 II ($199) when Tyll also includes the V-moda M-80 ($230), and the Sennheiser’s new sibling the Amperior ($350) tops off the list.
The list for in-ear monitors is a little scattershot. The sub-$100 market is absolutely packed, and there’s lots of good stuff to be had there. The Spider RealVoice is great (review coming soon!) but the Etymotic mc3/mc5 and a number of other models are just as good but offer different sets of compromises. I think some $50-or-less options would have been good, too. Similarly, although the Etymotic ER4PT is another classic, I suspect there are other ~$300 models that give it a run for its money, particularly in the bass area.
I’m not too proud to admit it; I’m surprised to see the Bose Quiet Comfort 15 on the list… but Tyll certainly knows his stuff, so perhaps they’re the best noise canceling option out there.

Anyway, this is a great resource (alongside this other buying guide), and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.