New toy: FiiO Earphone amplifier

I am not getting any younger, and too many years of really bad heavy metal and too many years around loud industrial air conditioning units are really taking a toll on my hearing. Add to that a TV that for some really fucking stupid reason doesn’t have a legitimate earphone port (forcing me to use RCA line out to plug earphones into it) and decided it was time to look for some of that crap that old people use when their hearing stops working.

The solution is this really cool gadget made by FiiO. It’s built almost identically to an iPod shuffle. It has a rechargeable battery and the charger uses USB, which means I can charge it off my Xbox 360. The rear of the device has a spring-loaded clip you can use to secure it to your shirt/belt/whatever. Operation is extremely simple: one power button, rocker button for volume, and a slider to turn on or off the bass boost. The only LED in the device tells you if it is turned on and if it is charging.

As for the sound, it works extremely well for a $23 gadget, the only question is how well will the battery survive the recharge cycles. I am not even worried about the physical integrity of the device, it is a tiny metal box with plastic caps screwed at either end, I imagine it will be OK as long as I don’t run a car over it. Or PJ dunks it into the toilet, that kind of thing.

Comments

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

Software Entropy and the Strangler Fig: Surviving a 20-Year-Old Codebase

Right now, I find myself fighting a three-front war. Front one is keeping a 20-year-old behemoth of a B2B application alive. We are talking about decades of legacy ASP.NET and VB.NET where two decades of tweaks, patches, and "temporary fixes" have become permanent, load-bearing pillars of the architecture. Every time I touch it, it feels like playing Operation with oven mitts on—spending 90% of my week untangling logic just so a simple bug fix doesn’t cause a ripple effect that crashes a critical service. Front two is modernizing the architecture. I am actively trying to implement a rudimentary Strangler Fig pattern—slowly carving out legacy functionality and pushing it into a clean, testable shared library project so we can actually run proper unit tests and stop the bleeding. Front three is modernizing the team. While keeping the lights on and quietly rebuilding the engine, I am also pushing a retraining effort to get my peers up to current framework versions and embracing ...

The Insomniac Coder

Search This Blog