Posts by Karl H
156 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd October 2007 10:27 GMT
All I need to say is "Grado"
My teenage daughter who is marketting fodder kept on going on about "Beats" audio and one bored saturday afternoon I was "showrooming" in Currys and they had a display that let you test their heaphones. Some of them were "Beats", and I thought they were all generally shit, especially for the massively over inflated prices.
Fast forward to another bored saturday morning where I ended up in Richers Sounds near a Glass Shop where I was waiting for someone to cut some glass. "Come back in a hour" the Glass Cutting Chap said. Hence I had an hour to burn.
So I was browsing Richer sounds and thought I'd try my crap MP3 sounds from my Android phone , doesn't matter which one, they're all just sorta okay, and I tried out Richer Sounds range of heaphones.
There was some set of AKG ones for around 30 to 40 quid and they weren't bad. No Beats in sight , thank flip, the ones that really grabbed my attentiion were some Grado SR80i's , open backed admittedly, so bound to pee off everyone else, and not that good in noisy enviroments, but the clarity blew me away, so much so I bought a set , and then found on the net lots of other people thought they were flippin' good too.
Bottom line , AKG , Sennheiser , Grado and probably a few others generally make pretty good headphones. I've had some Sennheiser's I've liked too. The open backed and closed back is also an important question to answer, i.e. where are you going to be using the headphones.
My summary on Beats is well' they're just well beaten by all of the above on price and performance, if not marketting.
So I guess my teenage daughter will still be fodder for the rubbish the bullshit department of Beats puts out . hey ho, maybe she'll learn one day.
conversation at NASA
"Who let that Limey idiot Clarkson in control of OUR rover ? "
and this is why I only run Ubuntu on my desktop
and say I haven't used Windows in years,
so they probably know more than i do about the operating
system.
Which is true.
"What windows, aren't they what you look through ?" I ask.
Anyone who knows what I'm talking about when I say "ubuntu" doesn't need my help, (they're probably cleverer than me ) and anyone who does not know, now knows I'm not interested
and generally know very little about Windows.
I guess Windows is okay, I couldn't really comment post XP variants because that is the most recent version of Windows I've really used, for any significant amount of time.
I prefer Ubuntu especially since it is free, does all what I want, and keeps me away from all the people sold on Windows.
Job done.
Maybe he read Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion"
and saw the light
Re: Is there anybody there?
damn! you beat me to this comment . top man ! (and carry of farting ;) )
I reckon Dell could invest
in software simulating a Big Blue Robot smoking woodbines, proving that woodbines don't give Robots lung cancer.
I reckon they could even get a government grant for such useful research .
Cat-5e is SO MUCH BETTER
and it doesn't create wide-band RF interference.
We used to have standards against idiots inflicting RFI , along with a general dumbing down and idiocy we get from Central Govt now , RFI standards seem to have gone to pot too.
Re: 3-2-1.... Eadon.
re "using Excel as a Database" . I completely agree . It is a crime against computanity , that I must confess I was once guilty of , with VBA macros to glue sheets together coz 65K lines wasn't enough. Please forgive, but also please down vote this post so that I can truly atone for my sins. I have sinned , but I have seen the light ! (beyond Excel Databases, which I don't suppose really counts for much, but it is a start )
Thinking Monty Python here ....
so every tweet is sacred ?
Re: It leaves the definition of "grossly offensive" up to police officers (and judges)
too late "crisp" , you're screwed now. The Mary Whitehouse thought police will be banging on your door soon . oh shit so am I !!!
Re: if you want to lose weight
re "says something bad on youtube" . Yeah generally they're idiots, and most stuff (99%) is complete and utter drivel. Occassionally there are a few gems, by people who know what they're talking about, and have spent a good part of there career on it. Robert Lustig seems to be one of them to me. No diet pills needed.
John Yudkin isn't on youtube coz he's dead. He researched sucrose's deleterious effects for years, and now you can get his book again "pure white and deadly" . It is well worth a read. Tate and Lyle etc .. probably don't want you to read it.
Re: if you want to lose weight
I'm eating carbs, mainly complex ones in say porridge oats, whole vegetable, and occasionally whole fruit.
(along with meat , protein and fat )
I'm just not consuming added sucrose, fructose, fruit juices, corn syrups.
works for me. I don't feel that hungry.
Some carbs good. Some carbs fructing bad.
just see Robert Lustig / John Yudkin.
Re: if you want to lose weight
and I forgot : fructose too . Just have a look at what Robert Lustig says about fructose on youtube.
if you want to lose weight
just stop consuming fruct-ing sucrose.
Re: EastEnders
could we have a negative amount of Eastenders ? A sort of anti-matter Eastenders, which when it meets the Eastenders we all know and hate , vaporises , and with it anhilates the collective conciousness that such drivel ever existed ?
now that WOULD be good.
Re: LED lighting instead of fluorescent 'haz mat'
I've got 10 of 5W LED "warmwhite" GU10 spotlights in my kitchen. The colour temperature seems fine to me, and it is fair bit brighter than the 10 of 20W halogen spotlights they replaced. ( I vaguely remember the 5W LEDs I bought being rated at something like the light output of 35W Halogens )
LEDs are pretty much "instant-on" unlike the Compact Fluorescent Tube energy saving lights which seem to take a minute or so to warm up ( this is especially noticeable in cold conditions ).
Everyone seems to talk about the energy saving angle of LEDs ( and compact fluorescents ) the extra plus side to this as far as lighting is concerned is the extra lack of heat cooking cables and fittings and therefore a lowering of fire risk. Admittedly if the sparky has picked the correct heat resistant cable, and used nice fire-retardent fittings this shouldn't be a problem. The point is with low-energy-lighting the cables and fittings being "slow-cooked" ( and leading to electrical faults) becomes almost non-existant. As an ex-sparky I've seen plenty of fittings and cables cooked by incandescent lighting.
In the year or so I've had the LED kitchen lighting none have "blown". I was forever replacing the halogen spot lights.
The only downside of the LEDs is their initial cost, however they'll hopefully last quite a few years ( how do they manage to specifiy the high brightness LEDs as having a 10 year lifespan , surely they haven't been around long enough to properly test ? )
Other than LED lighting is brilliant and a bit of a no-brainer, my only advice is that I've found the ones claiming to be "warmwhite" to give off an acceptable colour light, whereas the "daylight" ones were too blue for my liking.
re "I don't want a gnome tablet"
and since gnome3 , I dunno if I want a gnome desktop on Linux.
gnome2 was pretty good with ubuntu's 10.04 implementation
and then it all went wrong . Oh why did they break it so badly ? Even forgetting about Unity the classic gnome on Ubuntu 11.xx onwards is pretty broken to me.
At work I'm now on Ubuntu 12.04 but with XFCE , which is okay , but in my opinion not as nice as Ubuntu 10.04 and gnome. At home I've left Ubuntu 10.04 with gnome on my desktop.
I couldn't stand Windows 7 on my daughter's ex-laptop ( which is now mine, she gets the upgrades in my house, sumin going WRONG there ! ), and it is about to be Ubuntu 10.04-ed.
Re: we've got murderous nutters in the UK too
evilGav1 , I agree , I'm glad to say 99.9999% of people with guns "don't go off on one". ( as you put it ) , and banning guns is a form of censorship. It is also censoring something that can be deadly, unlike the films and magazines that Mary Whitehouse used to campaign about. I also wouldn't censor the video games this article was originally about either.
What do you propose we do about incidents like Hungerford,Dunblane, Sandyhook ? Nothing ? Are these the price we have to pay ? Or do we have gun control ? I don't see trying to identify these nutters before hand as ever likely to work. You aren't ever going to stop the lone nutcase going off on one, and easy access to guns is always going to make their rampage worse for more people.
For me it is a simple choice, personal freedom to have guns or the freedom for people not to live in fear of nutters with guns, and I support gun control.
Yes that limits my freedom to have a gun , and I have used someone else's gun over a firing range some years ago (before Dunblane got them banned) , and it was fun firing a Magnum .44 and saying go ahead make my day to the bottle of water I shot. I also inherited an air rifle which I haven't used in years. If you want to shoot some paper targets at 20 yards a .22 air rifle with max energy of 12 ft lbs that is only really deadly to very small animals seems fine to me. I don't see how you need high velocity percussion cap .3 of an inch shells designed to cause maximum damage and kill for hitting some paper targets, not over a short range at least, and I personally wouldn't want to kill animals for sport, not unless you're going to eat them. (by the way I am not a vegetarian )
It isn't just due to incidents like Hungerford, Dunblane, Sandybrook that I like gun control, I also like gun control because therefore most of our Police can be unarmed. If there is free and easy access to guns and everyone has one, then the Police are all going to have them, otherwise it would be unfair on them. Then the bad guys and the Police would all probably get a lot more trigger happy, there would be an escalation of risk, and a lot more collateral damage would ensue, more dead people and heartache for the people involved.
The system we have in the UK where you have to have a good reason, and limiting the type of weapon to only those that can be justified seems reasonably fair to me. I don't want just anyone to be able to get a gun, especially an easily concealable handgun ( that is a completely pointless weapon for hunting animals at any sort of distance ) like they seem to be able to do in the US.
As I say , I like gun control, and to be able to walk around realising that the chances I'm going to meet a nutter with a gun are much less, although they might have a knife, which are and always will be easy to get hold of.
Re: You never know - There may be an issue
I agree and I also never did understand Mary Whitehouse lumping sex and violence altogether.
As far as I could see consential procreative sex lead to more people and was more often the cause of joy and happiness .
Violence can lead to less living people, and not a lot of happiness.
So from my point of view Mary Whitehouse was only half right.
we've got murderous nutters in the UK too
and *most* of the time in the UK they can only get hold of hammers , sticks , knives and swords.
Maybe the nutter might use a car to try and run someone over .
These methods are all pretty deadly for the 1 or 2 poor victims the nutter manages to kill .
But most of the rest of the people can run or get out of the way.
It is really hard to run far enough away or get out of the way of a nutter with a gun, so the nutter with a gun will always be able to kill a *much* larger amount of people, and is much more difficult for the police to handle.
I never heard of someone killing someone with a video game, I suppose if you angle the attack right and hit the victim in the temple with the video game box or maybe disk, you could get lucky (or should that be unlucky?) .
As far as I can see guns have just one use and that is for killing. Target practice is just practicing how to hit and kill stuff (admittedly this maybe hunting non-human animals) . Knives , hammers and cars, which whilst they can kill, are useful tools with other purposes. They are also fortunately no where as efficient at mass intentional killing as guns.
You will never completely stop nutters from existing, all you can control is the nutters access to deadly weapons.
I personally much prefer living in a place where nutters have a much harder time getting hold of a gun.
Re: Ah... valve radios...
ahh valve equipment , and CRT's , that selected only the fittest electronics engineers to carry on working on them by frying the ones too stupid and not biologically resistant enough to survive a few KV across the old ticker. (heart)
Re: "...ask where all the Netbooks have gone."
singing with my Granddaddy Dragon 32 , Spectrum , IBM 360 , all in digital harmony.
and Chicken Licken is running to see the king
to tell him that the Sky is falling in.
We're all DOOMED, we're alll GOING TO DIE ! You name it Anthropogenic Global Warming , Mayan calendar 21 Dec 2012 , 2038 bug , impending meteorite , Yellow stone park and other super volcanos going pop, Global Nuclear War ...... etc ......
How can I sleep at night ?
Easy , and that is to realise that a lot of what is dressed up as science is in fact educated guess work, and generally the "guess" bit of it is much larger than the usually well meaning scientist(s) either knowing or unknowingly admits to . I suppose they need to ensure their funding stream and have to be certain about some things to convince others to carry on funding them. I can understand that, and I also understand that there is a large range of "guess" in their analysis of chaotic systems.
and yes , we are all going to die sometime, although hopefully not all at the sametime :-D .
( In fact Global Nuclear War is probably the only one humankind is in any real control of )
and on the first day God created Apple
who created, copyrighted and patented the rest of the world.
Fortunately Adam came along and ate all the [f|w]**kers.
3 cheers for Adam.
(ps In reality I'm actually a raving atheist )
Posted in Are you ready for the 40-zettabyte year?
1.44 MB .. you lucky thing!
180 K single sided floppies !!!!
( rapidly deteriorating into the 4 yorkshiremen sketch )
Re: Fully automated?
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"
I just had a thought , is George Osbourne actually HAL 9000? and PM Cameron says "Make the economy better" to which he replies ...........
the same level of technical assistence to the officials at all levels argument ...
REALLY PISSES ME OFF.
I was never any good at football , and was almost as bad at my chosen sport of tennis.
I played in a few tennis clubs, and they never had people watching every line on all matches. Only would the club final have a few line judges, and certainly not as many as an average match at Wimbledon. Most of the judgements relied on honesty of the players . Whereas if I'd played at Wimbledon, I'd have had lots of line judges.
The idea that a game with a few dozen people watching will ever be as important as one with millions of spectators has got to be a really stupid assessment of importance, and the sooner the stupid old codgers Platini and Blatter retire , the better it will be.
Give us the technology ! Replay refs , hawk-eye , you name it. The LOT please.
Then the bad refereeing decisions in the more WATCHED and more IMPORTANT matches would be much rarer. At the bottom level , it'll still be a pile of shite, but the truth is the standard of play is even shite-ier .
and I hope one of them takes a model of a B52 bomber
and leaves it on there .
just so the Sunday Sport's headline can at last be true.
Miss .......
I called my first daughter "take 1" , and my second daughter "take 2" ......
Re: @Obviously!
re "If a clean house is a sign of a clean mine, what is an empty house a sign of?"
I can think of :-
1) repossession
2) moving out
3) psychiatric wife
(the thought of MY psychiatric wife has just stopped me in my tracks of thinking of anything more on this subject)
Re: Agility requires robustness @Alan Brown
yep , unsurprisingly Accountants LOVE Excel, and when you show them what VBA can do they wet themselves with excitement, and rapidly every data collection , database type of system can be reduced to an Excel spreadsheet . Screw the fact that only one person at a time can view it , and that on the versions I used at least ( Excel 97 and 2001 ) there was a 65,536 line limit . All you need to do is get someone suitably skilled to "glue" several spreadsheets together with VBA , and not minding emailing around spreadsheets. Job DONE .
Oh did I say , also forget Access , that's way TOO sensible to use. Who'd want to have something that can easily handle more than 65536 rows ? And why on earth would you want to use MySQL etc..... blah blah ...
EXCEL is the KING !
oh happy days being the said idiot that glued together sheets with VBA , I suppose at least I was younger , slimmer and better looking then, even if I was idiotic for listenning to the accountant who thought it was a good idea, and then implementing it. (Robbie Williams was right , youth is wasted on the young) Please will the God-of-IT-and-systems-development please forgive of my sins of idiocy, I have learnt my lord, and haven't touched Excel VBA in many years, and don't even boot into windoze that often, I now worship Perl , Linux , Mysql , Postgres and opensource ... amen ....
( by the way I am really a fundamental atheist )
Posted in Assault on battery
small phone , shame about the batteries
To keep my HTC Desire running , I've now acquired an external 7AH battery pack. It seems to do the trick , although it is about twice the size of the phone. So I suppose I'm reverting to the decade when I was young slim and good looking , i.e the 80s. All I need is a Motorola DynaTAC case to mount it all in, and shout down the phone "BUY BUY , SELL SELL "
on the subject of AA alkaline battery powered wireless keyboards, my logitech-something lasts for frickin' ages.
Posted in 20 years of GSM digital mobile phones
Re: Battery life
I don't know what you're all moaning about . I find with a ruck sack full of about 30 lithium-ion external battery packs , rated 7000mAH each, and a charging lead, I can get my Android phone to at least last the same amount of time as my Nokia 6310i used too :-D .
(okay maybe I'm exageratting , the 30 battery packs on my Android phone almost lasts as long as my Nokia 6310i )
Posted in We don’t talk any more... on the commute
blah blah blah
here's to listenning to Cliff Richard singing "Its not funny why we don't talk anymore" and "Wired for sound" back in the mid 80's on a Sony Walkman on the slow train out of Liverpool Street Station , when I first worked out that talking to strangers on a train had you marked down as a complete nutter, and hence no one talked. Especially not then coz mobile phones were brick sized and only affordable by a few yuppies.
Yes I probably am nuts, but no , I don't listen to Cliff . HONEST !
and to think I moved accounts from Nat West to Nationwide
because of the cock up at Nat West this summer.
If (when ?) this goes mammary glands skywards I might just be going back to Nat West
I wonder
I wonder when the prostitutes will offer payment via NFC credit / debit cards.
A bonk for a bonk so to speak .
Re: Mobile phones don't cause cancer?
damn ! how am I going to commit my slow form of suicide now then ?
I suppose I'll have to take up smoking and binge drinking again.
Re: Expecting to be Tango'd
flatter than a deflated tyre on a flat bed truck that is parked outside a block of flats in the flattest part of Essex .
I think I'll now go back to sleep.
Re: Progress?
re "orgasmatron" . Haven't you heard of vibrate alert ? Apparently some ladies have already been using this feature ;)
Aussie Judges talk sense
Thank god the Australians are eminently sensible, In the UK the judge would have probably said the thief was brave to break in house and steal stuff , oh I forgot , that is WHAT a UK judge said.
Can we send our useless Judges over the Australia for retraining ?
Need MORE acronyms...( and silliness )
we've got AGW for supporters of the Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming .
I think we need a few more acronyms :-
NAGW for non-anthropogenic global warming
CCHATT for climate change happens all the time
FMIIC for Frick Me it is cold (for use when we have another ice age)
FMIIH for Frick Me it is Hot (for the IMPENDING frying session that the true believers keep telling is going to happen)
HTITSIS for Hot Thing in the sky is shining . Also known as "The Sun".
( Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how ALL global warming is caused by that hot nuclear reaction happening at the centre of our solar system ? )
CLNC for Complex life needs carbon. Just to remind us that WITHOUT carbon with its four electron bonds all the interesting organic chemistry probably wouldn't happen. Okay , Complex Life Probably Needs Carbon, there are a few other atoms that might be able to replace it somewhere else in the universe.
AIAIC for Another Ice Age is coming . At sometime there's going to be another ice age. That's what my teacher told me in 1978, so it MUST be so.
WAD for We're All Doomed ! Pick your scenario :- Global Warming, Global Cooling, Famine, Super Bug / Virus , Meteorite, Super Volcano, World War III, The Sun going Red Giant, Little Green Men from Mars, The Alien out of the Ridley Scott films, Terminator Robots from the future ... I could go on..
Enjoy and have a nice day, just remember (as the Monty Python team liked to remind us) it might be your last chance, give us a grin, cheer up you old bugger :-D
Re: Climate-change sceptics
"At least we wont have to worry about East Anglia for much longer. The middle of Essex must be worth investing in as the future new coastline with a mediterranean climate...."
EXCELLENT. That'll make my house worth shit loads, and I can have long boring conversation how I only paid a couple of hundred thousand for it , when it is worth several million, and all the super rich yachts are berthed a about 10 miles away in Chelmsford. Of course I've got to make it to 2050 , by which time I will either be dead (most likely) or some seriously old codger .
Re: Climate-change sceptics
Re "In this respect their logic is identical to that of holocaust deniers and every bit as disreputable. So the little shits can whine all they like about the comparison; they chose this method"
I don't see the comparison. The holocaust is a historical fact , that happened , we have LOTS of records. Only the wilfully ignorant, and idiotic choose to deny historical facts that are backed up by a wealth of evidence.
Climate change on the other hand almost certainly happens, planet Earth has been warmer in the past than it is now , it has also been a lot cooler.
No one is denying the climate can and will change.
What some people do deny is that human kind burning lots of fossil fuels is going to create a lot of atmospheric CO2 that is in someway going to lead to runaway global warming. As a species we haven't fully run a test case on planet earth on this yet.
The logic of denying historical fact , and being sceptical about every chicken-licken-the-sky-is-falling-in-guesstimate-science are quite different.
am I a luddite ?
coz I really don't get on with Unity.
Posted in Freesat eyes YouView USP for next-gen UI
Re: Price?
I remember paying over 500 quid for a Mitsubishi VCR around 1990. ouch.
mind you I remember paying 50p / litre of petrol in the early to mid 90s.
So now I can watch TV nice and cheap but can't afford to drive anywhere.
I need to get out more.
everything other than nuclear is SAFE !!!!!
and people don't die of lung disease due to the particulates that come of of diesil fumes,
and the vehicles full of petrol , kerosene never burst into flames and burn their occupants.
crossing the road is safe, no one ever dies crossing the road.
and aeroplanes never drop out of the sky, killing all their occupants..
but nuclear power , well that has killed MILLIONS .
okay , I might just be a little bit sarcastic above .
Now seriously from what I can tell the general populace is really crap about measuring risk.
Otherwise why would you have people who will not get into an aeroplane, yet will still happily cross the road ?
Last time I looked, a lot of people die getting run over , or in car crashes. Way more than ever die in plane crashes.
What is my point. well nuclear power has some downsides, but it also if it is done properly it has a lot of upsides, and anything with controllable risks that gets our dependence off very finite oil and gas supplies and doesn't leave us in energy poverty like wind power will is quite probably a good idea.
Also , all the people who live near granite rock , well you better move coz you're getting lungfuls of radon gas EVERY day.
Re: Where do they get the idea that PLT isn't a radio transmitter
PLT puts out high frequencies onto copper cables. Funnily enough copper cables are great antennas. PLT hence transmits when the copper cable it is running on is unscreened ( the vast majority of mains electric cables).
whether or not it has a licence to transmit doesn't make any difference to the fact it is still transmitting, and more importantly interfering.
Re: "Where can I find samples of shielded domestic mains power cable?"
with the price of copper , can anyone other than the super rich now afford to install Mineral Insulated copper clad (aka pyro) cable ?
