Tea. Ingredients: tea. Warning: contains tea.

[reddragdiva]

Today's listening: The Complete BBC Recordings by Joy Division. Two Peel sessions, two Something Else tracks and an interview. The Peel sessions are remarkable takes of our favourite literary punk band delivering on the spot, particularly "Twenty-Four Hours", "Insight" and "Exercise One".

arkady just got sound working in Flash on her Ubuntu laptop by uninstalling and reinstalling anything Flash-related and is now hitting YouTube hard. Proving Linux is ready to compete with Windows on the desktop! Now Ubuntu just needs viruses and self-installing spyware.

I should mention: I emailed Maplin about the crappy headphones, saying they were not fit for purpose (that's the UK legal phrase for "it's crap and doesn't work" as opposed to "it's broken") and that I wanted to arrange a return. They promptly replied with a return authorisation number and Freepost address, and I sent the headphones back and the money showed up in my account a few days later. So I shall continue to buy in confidence, even dancing on the line between "cheap and cheerful" and "cheap and crappy," because they addressed a problem promptly and properly. And I should stop fucking around and just buy Etymotics.

We are very disappointed and pissed off about the house rubbish, and worried we'll be left in the lurch and have to take a crappy flat in desperation again. But redcountess and Arkady have one viewing booked tomorrow and will be pursuing more assiduously. It's a nice day and Liz and I are sitting together window-shopping for 11g access points and Arkady is baking muffins.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

The price on 'em looks good too, though the manufacturer's page dasting mention the "OFC cable" may deserve boycotting on principle. But I'm really after something noise-blocking or noise-cancelling - the Victoria Line is NOISY.

[pndc.livejournal.com]

But I'm really after something noise-blocking or noise-cancelling - the Victoria Line is NOISY.

Hah, try the Northern Line sometime. It sounds like a bag of spanners thrown into a wind turbine. From next Monday I get to listen to it twice a day, check out all the B.O. in south London, and pay a hundred quid a month for the pleasure.

Mind you, one way to deal with excess noise in the ear is a judiciously placed elbow in the kidneys of the wanker with their personal stereo turned up high. If I can hear it when I've got my iPod turned up full blast in an attempt to hear it over the noise of the train (which mainly just implies that somebody didn't get the levels right on some of the stuff I'm listening to), it's too loud.

[ajohnymous.livejournal.com]

I tried the Sennheisser PXC 250 noise reduction headphones for a couple of weeks. Sound was good, but the seperate tube for the batteries I found too inconvenient to keep the product. The not completely over the ear design also resulted in an unpleasant ear pinch feeling. Also, the noise reduction kind of drilled into your head after a while as it was sort of a low white noise buzz in the ear. That buzz was a welcome change to airplane engine noise when I flew somewhere for 5 hours, but was annoying trying to use them to cancel out home noises, like PC fans, etc.

I did try some noise cancelling over the ear headphones recently at the Apple store. They were far more comfortable, and didn't cancel out noise with a noticeable buzz. However, the way they sat over the ear at the top seemed to mess with my glasses, tilting them a bit. One other good thing about these phone is that they had a minijack rather than a cord, which I was thinking would be perfect to mate with a very short cord and a bluetooth A2DP stereo adapter clipped to the phone -- to make a high fidelity, noise cancelling, bluetooth stereo headphone combo.