I’ve had noise cancelling headphones for years now, mainly for use when flying [1]. I don’t particularly like in-ear buds though, as I have what are called ‘convoluted’ ear canals; in-ear buds tend to be painful after a while. And I also like to be able to hear a car about to run me down while I’m standing the crosswalk cutout “because the car is too low and they scrape otherwise”.
However, a friend of mine talked up the new AirPods Pro, and noise cancelling and transparency mode, so I got a pair when they were on sale.
And they are growing on me! Yes, I can still feel them in my ears hours after I take them out, but being able to walk down a busy street and not hear the Dodge Challengers blatting by, or the leaf blowers, is great! The former will probably kill me though.
The real use case for me though is the gym. I don’t have to listen to the loud crappy music and I don’t have to jack my music up to damaging levels to block it. They aren’t quite good enough to negate it without playing music, but it’s close. I didn’t have to listen to the woman next to me on the treadmill have an hour-long conversation [5].
They were a fucking lifesaver at the SFO airport during a three hour layover [6]. I’d still rather have the over-ear NC for the plane, as it’s more comfortable sitting there, but for trucking around the airport trying to find the unmarked Polaris lounge, the AirPods Pro 2 were amazing. Sanity-preserving.
This brings up the bigger question though. Now, instead of the world being quiet, and trying to make it that way, I’m just blocking out more of it. Judging from what I see, it’s not just me. People shouldn’t be talking on the phone in the gym [7]. It’s rude. The gym shouldn’t be blasting music, what’s the point if 85% of the customers are listening to their own music? Everyone in the gym has NC headphones on, or in. Challengers, Mustangs, and motorcycles shouldn’t be so loud.
NC headphones just normalize the rudeness by letting rich people opt out. And so the world, or rather, the USA [8], becomes a bit worse place to live.
In summary, get off my lawn. I am not a crank.
[1] Another in a long list of things that was a PITA to get work to buy for you when they first came out [2] and are now standard items in the catalog jacked up by 25% over regular price don’t even ask about trying to save the government money by buying things on Black Friday
[2] Razor, iPhone, AirPods, iPad, MacBook Pro, ergonomic keyboard. I still can’t get them to buy me an Aeron [3], the only ergo office chair I’ve ever been able to sit in for any length of time – so I bought two and took one to work. And I still can’t get them to buy the Bose NC headphones, even though those work way better than the Sony [4]
[3] there are about three different ergo chairs that I bought with project funds floating around that killed my back, but no returns, and you don’t get to try them before you buy.
[4] Which auto-power off every time you disconnect the cable to get up to go to the toilet on the plane, but don’t auto-power off when you take them off and put them in the case, and which 50% of the time require an update to work at all on the plane even though you powered them up the day before to make sure they didn’t need an update, and which drain their battery even when not in use, so don’t forget to plug them back in the day before a trip.
[5] I could see her lips move. Also who’s up at 5am and wants to talk to you? And why bother being on the treadmill if you have enough spare breathe left over to carry on a conversation?
[6] Really SFO, and United? Why do you think we need loud crappy gym music in the airport and on the plane at 11pm? Five other airports and planes on that trip were just… quiet. No music anyway.
[7] or on the plane. Thanks EU for making that happen next year.
[8] Not that Europe or Britain is better, but the biggest thing that makes me want to put in NC ear buds there is the fucking church bells, and the birds. Maybe something to do with not letting their cats run wild? There is way more of a dawn chorus. Not Oz levels, but still, in urban Munich?
it has taken the rest of the world decades to catch up to bugs bunny’s approach of being whatever gender is the funniest at any given moment
–dj gun pussy @TheWeightOfUwU
[1] OTOH, nazis and genocide
After a week of driving and sleeping in Europe, I noticed that I only heard one super-loud obnoxious car [1] or motorcyle, and I never once was blinded by too-bright headlights, not even coming up over a rise and catching the lower part of their beam. And of course didn’t get bright-lighted even once [2].
So it can be done. We just choose not to, because free-dumb isn’t free.
[1] An American Mustang GT of course
[2] Don’t even get me started on pickups and the possibility of rolling-coal
I don’t believe that personal morality and character should be grounded on hope. …
We need people who are grounded in the belief that there is a single humanity, and that battles are fought whether or not you can calculate that they’ll be successes. The struggle must be our very existence and we must never accept the limitations of the political realistic; we must act on what is necessary in the most basic sense for the survival of ordinary people.
It doesn’t look like we’re gonna survive it, but we still fight like hell. In fact, we become better fighters, knowing that it’s the fight itself is the most important thing. Maybe these are strange or antiquated values. I still believe in character. That people produce themselves through the moral choices and actions that they take, irregardless of calculations of success or wealth or anything like that. Actions that are rooted in solidarity and love for other people and the common condition.
— Mike Davis, 2 October 2020 (TrueAnon podcast)
Tagged QotDApple’s idea of human interface design c. 2022:
8 point gray text on a white background, apple-plus doesn’t increase the size, and Music is still a POS app that screws up all my smart playlists by not distinguishing between the rating I give a song, and the unchangeable automatic album rating that gives every song on the album five stars if I give one song five stars. No one at Apple eats their own dog food. Or it’s all streaming to them now, and the terabytes of ripped CDs, many of which are completely unavailable anywhere, just don’t matter.
Don’t get me started on album artwork, either the complete inability of them to get the right album artwork, or even worse, that they overwrite or lose the album artwork that I curated carefully onto those terabytes of music.
Surely someone makes an independent iTunes Music replacement that’s actually good… But I haven’t found it.
I still can’t change the volume on airpods without reaching into my pocket for the phone, which isn’t possible at 20 mph on a bike, and not that convenient all the rest of the time. It’s gonna be a sad day when my two iPod shuffles give up the ghost. I already have to save an old MBP with OS X 10.9 to update those, as they are completely unsupported with newer versions of Music (the name of which by the way makes any solution to any of these problems completely unsearchable).
Tagged apple, musicSince EVs became more common, the proportion of loud cars, both from the factory and modified [1], have increased about equally. This leads to the conclusion that as all Harley goes out of business, and all the old loud cars disappear, the boys will have to find a way to make EVs loud. Will they go with the Tesla fart sound approach, and do illicit firmware upgrades to make superloud Star Trek noises?
[1] I mean seriously, when did putting straight pipes and headers on a mid-90s F-150 become a thing? That disappeared for a while. How do they pass emissions?
Least likely book to be taken from Little Free Library ever
Bike mechs
Sometime in the distant past, I upgraded from the best bike I could afford when I was in college (Suntour, downtube shifters, Reynolds aluminum, etc.) to a pretty modern CF with 9 gears and brifters! [1] [2] I thought that was pretty sweet, and didn’t ever really see the point in upgrading.
Until, after probably 100k miles, the only place I could get chainrings and cassettes new was on eBay from some dude in the Ukraine for more than $300. See, that bike had the 9-speed mechs that Shimano used for about four years. You couldn’t just upgrade to 10 because the cassette was too wide, and that meant buying new wheels. Not that that’s the worst thing, but when you add up the costs, the parts start looking like more than the cost of an equivalent new bike [3] and why start upgrading an old frame when there’s 11 speed Ultegra, power meters, and disk brakes available on much more aero and forgiving frames?
So after a couple of G&Ts one night, and far too many hours spent on bike forums and eBay, trying to decide whether that Ukrainian dude was really going to send me a new set of chainrings (and after wasting money on a knock-off set that never worked properly), I surfed over to the devil’s website, and found a custom-shop endurance bike in the proper upper-mid range [4] on sale, and sank the cc underwater a bit more.
And that’s been a great bike! Fat frame, moderately adjustable road bike suspension for the increasingly worse roads around here, disk brakes, 11 speed Ultegra, built in mounts for lights and computers and such. No power meter, and no electronic shifting, but that would have been $3k more, as that bike wasn’t on sale. I’ve probably got more than 40k on this bike and it’s fine.
Then the recent events. Bikes hard to find, less travel, gyms closed — bike exercise went up. I started looking at what it would take to get a power meter and electronic shifting on the newer bike. See [3]. Then I lucked into the last upper mid range climbing bike of this years model available in the US, it seems (gathering dust in a store in Texas where people run over bikes, they don’t ride bikes). After shipping here, I had a new modern climbing bike with a power meter, and electronic shifting. Pretty sweet!
Of course, once you have a power meter and electronic shifting, you’re not going to be happy without it, so it’s either sell the other bikes or start upgrading.
Long story short, bike parts started becoming available again, new stuff came out, and the not-so-old bike now has a power meter and electronic shifting! [5] Pretty sweet!
The old bike has been gathering dust except for the occasional commute to work. It still fits me better than the other bikes, though that is probably because after 100k miles, my body is warped to fit it. Some dude did win a number of TdFs on this particular frame, basically unchanged over a number of years [6].
I could have sold it during the recent bike shortage, after getting the new bike, but frankly it’s not worth that much so hardly seemed worth the bother. Sentimental value.
But now I have a complete set of Ultegra 11 speed in a box. The bike tech tells me that the modern 11 speed are much more compact than the old 10 speed, and will fit on the old bike wheel no problem. One new freewheel, new cassette, and new brifters later (and it turns out Ultegra rim brakes are on sale for next to nothing cause nobody wants them anymore), so for less than $1k (including installation), the old bike now has new mechanics [7], better brakes, and a much cleaner cockpit than the old mess. I even got a discount on a power meter, so it’s rocking that too.
Even though in that era, they thought only bozos and groms would use anything bigger than 23mm tires [8], turns out there’s clearance for 30mm tires [9] so now it’s rocking fat[ter] tires and 70 psi instead of 100.
I still think the old bike is a better fit, I like the shaped handlebars better (even if they’re smaller diameter and a PITA to wrap), and I think it’s still faster up hills, even though all three bikes weigh basically the same. It’s clearly the slowest on descents though. The new bike is downright frightening.
[1] does anyone still say that?
Tagged bicycle, bike, old bike[2] c. Yamaha A-970II, Beogram 3404, Klipsch Heresy 704, which I kept using much longer than the bike
[3] funny how that works. Still true today.
[4] Not the top end $10k bike, but with most of the good stuff
[5] Review of relative merits of SRAM and Shimano some time in the future
[6] or so the story goes. That was another time, history has been erased, and none shall speak of it again
[7] that parts should be available for until I’m done, though I wonder if I ought to buy some spare chainrings, a cassette, and brake pads, as it looks like mechanical shifting and rim brakes are about done.
[8] my bike coach, who’s won a WC and Olympic medal, still says he would never ride on anything bigger than 23s, not interested in any evidence otherwise
[9] now I’m wondering about those cheap Chinese CF wheels and tubeless… these KSLs aren’t going to last forever
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