oogabooga

Happy Birthday JEW!

Been a while since I've been here so I don't know if this is a repeat:

Asr, if it helps you make the switch, getting a SATA SSD gave a giant speed boost to my computer in terms of the UI's responsiveness, although I readily concede the price for large sizes isn't quite there yet (160GB for $600). However (and this is the enabler in me talking here), if you buy a new laptop now (with a sizeable 7200rpm drive) you'll be all set to pop in an SSD when you have the urge to upgrade in a year or two and SSD prices have settled down. A $20 enclosure then makes your 7200rpm drive an external one. Another, more frugal option - does your laptop have a PCMCIA slot? You could get a PCMCIA USB or Firewire card (probably cheaply on eBay), thereby placing your hard drive on different bus, should you encounter any USB-related problems.

A Pico DAC, which I'll promptly use to piss away a day this weekend to compare to the Parasound 1500.

I have a lot of USB devices connected to my Macbook Pro, which has two USB ports. One port is dedicated to a USB display adapter (running at 1680x1050 - i.e. it chews a lot of bandwidth). The second port is split into a hub containing my backup hard drive, Pico DAC/Amp, wireless kb/mouse dongle, and another hub connected to my label maker. I don't hear any latency issues or any noise, hiss, whatever (not that I would expect to on a digital connection) with my SE530s on the Pico. However, one problem I do have is that every other day the Pico just cuts out for a second or two, then starts back up again. I'm pretty convinced this is the USB connection crapping out for a second then restarting. The only item that cuts out is the Pico, the HD and kb/mouse stay connected. I have a pretty stressed USB setup, so I don't really think twice about trying to 'fix' it, although I could be wrong and it could be a problem with iTunes/Mac OSX or even the Pico. Edit: Also worth mentioning is that all my music is on that backup HD, so when I'm listening to iTunes I'm passing data over that USB port (not to mention hourly time machine backups).

How much did it kill the battery? I used to use Proximity (reduxcomputing-proximity - Project Hosting on Google Code) but found that it killed my 2G's battery more than I liked (i.e. 10% at the end of the day compared to 50% without Proximity)

Finally set up push notifications for all my e-mail accounts today! Set up Apple Mail on my mac server at work, when e-mail comes in the GrowlMail notice is pushed to Prowl, which pushes it to my iPhone! Best part - Prowl can have 'quiet hours' like the Blackberry, unlike the "new mail sound" option in the iPhone prefs that will ding away when I get spam-a-lot at 3AM.

Thanks Darth and Looser101 - I wanted to stay away from crappy tire brand stuff for this purchase - ended up getting the WES51 after speaking with the people at Active123.

Good luck Jinp - mine broke twice within the first three months (where the metal-coloured part meets the plastic housing for the tips) - the only advantage of paying retail was that the first time they broke the store just gave me a new one off the shelf, and the second time they broke they just gave me SE530s off the shelf...

Hey Larry, the only ones I could find there were $119 and up (The Earcandy Lite right angle iPod Dock is flexible, durable, and beautifully musical.) - do you have a link for the one you mention? Thanks, Sameer

Hi all, I'm looking for advice on an upcoming soldering iron purchase, and I'm somewhat limited by my desire to buy from a Canadian store due to cross-border issues. I use the soldering iron a couple times a year, either for DIY cables or to repair a circuit board. Based on the recommendations I've read here, I'm deciding between (prices are CAD): Weller WLC100 - $60 Weller WES51 - $110 Hakko 936 - $115 For light work, is the WLC100 good enough? From what I can tell the WLC100 and WES51 use different tips, and the WLC100 has some rudimentary temperature control (I think) while the WES51 and Hakko have much better T-control. Reading specs on the net can only get me so far - I'd really like to hear any 'hands-on' comments before I make a purchase. Thanks, Sam

I really enjoy listening to my HD600s (I'm using an HD650 cable with them, because it was cheap and long) - I listen to them for hours quite comfortably, both because the headband is comfortable and the sound is pleasant. They don't sound boomy to me. I'll watch TV/movies and listen to music with them - they do a good job all around. Granted, I don't have many other high-end cans to compare them to - but I can say that compared to my SE530s (which I really like, and also listen to for 8 hours a day in the lab), the HD600s just sound moar better (one example is that in a lot of techno I listen to there are beats and synths that sound more spine-tingling on HD600s than the SE530s). Other headphones that I've heard (K601s, Grado SR-80) don't lend themselves to longer listening sessions for my tastes.

Firewire is daisy-chainable... some enclosures come with two FW400 ports, so could you not do Mac --> FW HD --> Duet? I daisy chain FW HD's at work all the time. Also, USB 1.1 is 1.5 MB/s, correct? Would that not be enough for FLAC files, which are usually ~900 kilobits/s? (yes, I know data transfer would suck...)

Congrats. That looks like a nice kit - my friend uses the 18-200 and she loves it. I've got an SB-600 with my D300 and it's perfect - the "remote commander" is nice for off-camera flash. I'm a bit late to this thread, but I'm a Nikon user who would have recommended you get "whichever camera system you friends use the most often, so you can share lenses, etc". Tamrac makes a nice *backpack* that will fit all that along with a laptop, if you want to travel with all of it. The Official Tamrac Homepage - The leading manufacturer and distributor of camera, photography and camcorder bags I'd recommend a backpack or something with space to hold your lunch, etc, for day-long shooting trips. You can kinda holster a tripod on the side, shoving the legs into the water bottle pouch. It was about $90 CAD, for me. Not cheap, but not as much as the Lowepro Computrekker that I had to upgrade to when I got more glass.

In Canada, SPACE is showing all the eps after Sine Qua Non starting at 8AM on Friday. A bunch of fellow nerds at my uni are getting together at 7PM to watch the Frakkin Special, then a repeat of last week, then the finale, then a one-hour live fan forum. Nate - when they found Earth to be a nuclear wasteland that pretty much shat on any chance of an ending I'd truly enjoy, I think.

IIRC, Safari is built on webkit, except that Safari is a version behind, usually. The new Safari 4 beta is much faster than Safari 3, mostly due to the improved javascript implementation in later versions of webkit (check out the sunspider java benchmark, if you're OCD like me: SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark)

Agreed with deepak. Also, my two shots in the dark about the upcoming eps: I think Anders is going to take the Galactica for one or two more jumps before we're done. Also, I have a feeling RDM is going to do another one of his "time jumps" (were the show advances a few months, etc in the span of a few seconds, like on New Caprica) to help close up the story. Finally - the TV station Space (they air BSG in Canada) is hosting a party/fine ep viewing next Friday at 10 in downtown Toronto - how cool is that!

Pure awesome. You wouldn't happen to know if that's from a t-shirt I could buy? EDIT:nevermind, found it. awesome.

Yeah, I thought about that after watching the latest ep, but here's what we (I watch with a group of nerds) were thinking about:

Here's what I want to know: Daniel = Starbuck?

A Parasound 1500 D/AC. Holy smokes, is this thing even an upgrade from my DAPs! I thought the hum in my CKKIII was due to the amp - but when I plug in the Parasound the noise floor drops! I'm almost don't want to go on holiday this weekend so I can listen more

Ugh. Sadly, I go to U of T. Thankfully, it's the Mississauga campus and not downtown where apparently all the nutters are...

Nice HBC Point Blanket! That's a piece of Canadian history right there

The flip-flop mod makes them almost parallel. I spent 25 minutes on the elliptical at the gym today and they stayed in just fine, blocking out the crappy music at the gym and replacing it with Foo Fighters. No idea about the Shures - I've only heard e2c...

I was going to suggest DIY (much cheaper), but stack-ability is nice. OTHT, you could always get a two-drive enclosure - Mediasonic makes one with FW800 that I use with my MBP