J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 television series (meh) and the notable comic book series Rising Stars (alright) and Midnight Nation (most excellent), is slated to direct a sequal of Wilcox’s 1956 cult classic film Forbidden Planet.
Keep your eye out for this one, it could be AMAZING!
Earlier this year, after much deliberation, I decided to upgrade my headphone audio system with the hope of pushing it into the audiophile realm. At the time, I had a pair of Ultrasone PROline 750 headphones that I had had for about six month, and I was driving these directly from my computer, a MacBook Pro.
When I started researching about headphone systems, it became clear I would need to augment my existing system with two main components: an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a headphone amplifier. I decided on a headphone amplifier first: HeadAmp’s Gilmore Lite headphone amp with a dedicated power supply. From reading a bunch of detailed reviews [one, two, three, four] on this amp, it looked like this was the one for me. I placed my order and in mere three weeks, I would be set!
A respectable DAC was next. Working within my budget, I looked around to see what the audiophile community over at Head-Fi would suggest. By far the DAC that was most offent suggested was the EMU 0202 USB. Based on the reviews, it looked pretty good. I was decided on a 0202, but when I went down to Long & McQuade and I held one in my hands, I wasn’t impressed. The 0202 has a cheap, plastic case that says everything but high-end audio–which is to be expected, as EMU’s parent company is Creative. Cough, cough. Long & McQuade has a score of other possibilities, and in the end I picked up M-Audio’s FireWire Solo.
I was almost there! The next item to sort out was how to connect the FireWire Solo to the Gilmore Lite. WIth a little help, I determined that to connect the DAC to the amp, I would need a dual 1/4″ TS to dual RCA interconnect. (The FireWire Solo has TSR outputs on the back, but it turns out when you plug in a unbalanced 1/4″ TS to the FireWire Solo’s TRS, the balanced TRS jack will run in unbalanced mode. This was confirmed by M-Audio.) In the audiophile world, interconnects are a big deal. People spend a huge proportion of their system budget on cabling, well beyond the point of absurdity (e.g. $500 headphones, $222 headphone cable upgrade). I wasn’t prepared to do that, so I picked up my 1/4″ TS to RCA cable from the fine folks at Blue Jean Cable, which arrived at my door in no time.
The new audio system was almost there, I had a DAC and interconnects, but I was still waiting for the amp. A few months passed, and I hadn’t heard anything from HeapAmp regarding the status of my order. Now I’m a patient individual, so I waited. And waited. And waited. I started poking around on the forums, to see if long order delivery times was typical when dealing with HeadAmp. Turn out it is and people have been complaining about it for a while. There was a strange sense of solace in this information, as long as I wasn’t the exception, I could wait.
As the months rolled by, I started doing some more research about what kind of headphones would nicely match with the infamous Gilmore Lite. There was a lot of different suggestions from Gilmore Lite owners, but the two that stuck out were Grado SR225 and, the big daddy, Sennheiser HD 650. I had heard a pair of Sennheiser 600’s a few years ago (needless-to-say, I thought they were amazing) and I always wondered how my Ultrasone PROline 750’s would hold up against Sennheiser. You can probably see where this is going, but I picked up a pair of 650’s. The Sennheiser HD 650’s are by far, the best headphone I have ever heard (even driven by the under-powered FireWire Solo). They have such a rich sound, it is absolutely delicious. And to think what they will sound like with an amp…
In the mean time, I was still waiting for my amp. I finally got HeadAmp on the phone, and asked what was going on. HeadAmp, or Justin (who runs the whole company, from sales to amp construction), said there was a hold up on the DSP enclosure and assured me that they would have my order shipped out in a few weeks. Well, a few weeks came and went, and still no amp.
This morning I received an email from HeadAmp saying my order has shipped. It has been 231 days since I placed my order, exactly 33 weeks ago.
While it is mildly disappointing to have to wait for so long, looking at it now, I really didn’t mind the wait. After all this time, I’m never more excited to hear this amp, and I know I’ll appreciate it every more.
A jetpack t-shirt. Enough said.
When I heard about the new MacBook Pro a few Tuesdays ago, with dual GPUs, I was pretty pumped. A fancy new discrete graphics chip running along side an integrated graphics clip, married with hybrid SLI. It’s pretty impressive for a notebook computer. But it turns out it’s not so much of a marriage, but rather a messy divorce: little Billy has to a decide who he’s going to spend the weekend with, Mommy or Daddy, but not both. In the end, you save on power consumption, but it isn’t the nuclear family it first appeared to be.
Twistori: “an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.” Included in the Art Exhibit at InfoVis ‘08.
Working computer in a multitasking, time restricted setting offen means to you need to be very aware of when it’s time to switch tasks. Maybe you need to catch the bus in fifteen minutes, or got to a meeting in an hour. Keeping close tabs on the time can often be very distracting from the task at hand, but at the same time you can’t afford to miss the bus or that meeting. A very simple tool which can really help in these situations, are timers. While there are a bunch of fancy (and complex) timers out there, I often find that the best timer for a I-need-to-catch-the-bus-in-fifteen-minutes situation is the simpliest one. After trying out a few, the best timer that I could find is Minutes. It’s elegantly simple and just the thing to remind you about catching that bus. Check it.
I’ve been quietly adding some more photographs to my 
account, so it was about time I made note of it on the blog.
Public Notice: New photographs are now online. And this one is my favourite:
I’ve been scratching the last few days over a GCC error that’s been popping up in a project which I have been porting from Visual Studio 2008 to Xcode 3.0. The cryptic error message from GCC (version: i686-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1 ) is:
error: expected unqualified-id before ‘OTHER’ token
After debugging it for a while, I figured it might of been caused by some incorrectly set extended attributes on the source files, as these errors were coming from files with extended attributes. I cleaned out all the extended attributes (thanks to Diego Zamboni’s script), but the error still remained. In the end the only thing that worked was to delete the erroneous files, create a new file, and paste the code back in. This solution suggests that the files were corrupted and therefore needed to be re-created.
Just yesterday, the Calgary Zoo lost 34 stingray’s due to currently unknown causes.
