For the past five years I’ve been using Etymotic ER6i Isolator earphones. I’ve used them with my original 2nd gen iPod, my iPod nano, and now my iPhone 3G. Unlike the standard Apple earbuds, the Etys are in-ear earphones, which means that they also act as earplugs, isolating outside noise (like terrible coffee shop music). In fact, the tighter the outside noise isolation, the better the fidelity and bass response of the Etys. I love these things.
Etymotic has a long history of making high-end earphones as well as superior hearing protection. I bring a pair of Etymotic ER-20 earplugs with me to every concert, and I end up using them about half the time. They do an outstanding job of lowering volumes by about 15db without any of the muffling effect you get from regular foam earplugs. Wearing them is a great way to enjoy a concert and avoid damaging your hearing or aggravating evil tinnitus.
Both the earplugs and ER6i earphones use a triple flanged eartip to isolate noise. However, ear canal shapes vary widely among people, so Etymotic offers several eartip options. In my case, I found that the beige foam eartips did the best job of isolating sound by expanding to the shape of my ear canal. Compared to the flange eartip, I hear much deeper bass with the foam eartips installed.
I hope my Etys last another five years. And if they don’t, I’ll buy another set in an instant.
Almost every high-tech startup in the Bay Area outfits their office with Herman Miller Aeron chairs. And as some of the startups inevitably go out of business, the Aeron chairs hit the surplus office supply market, where people like me pick them up at a big discount.
After bringing home my discounted Aeron chair, I noticed that the center post tended to drag against the carpet. The standard casters on Aeron chairs are designed for office carpets and solid floors, and don’t lift the chair high enough to allow the center post to clear a normal home carpet.
You can buy a larger set of Aeron casters from various sources, but they usually sell for at least $50 or more ![[B001H96YRG]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
. To me, that’s pretty expensive for a simple set of casters.
After sleuthing around the ‘net a bit, I was able to find the dimensions of the large-size OEM casters. A specialty store called “Great Lake Casters” sells casters of the exact dimensions for a mere $1.64 each. I ordered five.
Installation was simple. I turned the chair over, popped off the old casters and popped on the new large ones. The new casters raise the chair by about 3/4 inch, which is plenty of clearance for the center post over the carpet.
I used a Boss BF-2 flanger pedal for years. It’s a great pedal, especially if you can find one of the older Japanese-made models. But it could never really do that over-the-top sound from Van Halen’s Unchained. Eddie used an older MXR flanger pedal on that classic riff, and Dunlop/MXR now have an “EVH”-branded flanger that can do that sound at the push of a button: EVH Flanger Pedal
This is one heck of a flanger pedal. It’s rock solid, heavy, and has a heavy duty full bypass footswitch. It also requires a lot of power, either using two 9-volt batteries or the included 18v wall wart.
If you want the Van Halen Unchained sound, you can press a special EVH button to bypass the settings and go straight to the classic TIE-fighter swoosh effect. For the best results, you’ll want this pedal near the front of your signal chain, with a high-output humbucker on the guitar and distortion cranked on the amp.
But the pedal can do a lot more than just the Van Halen effect. The four tuning knobs let this pedal make tons of great sounds. In fact, I was in search of a good Leslie or Rotoverb pedal to get that early Charlie Hunter guitar/organ sound, when I realized that I could get an excellent version of that effect just by tuning the EVH flanger. Set the following knobs to get a decent H&K Rotosphere sound:
The EVH Flanger Pedal is a bit pricey at around $190 , but it is easily the most versatile flanger I’ve owned. It’s one of my favorite pedals.
LinkStash [linkstashbuttonsforoperawin764bit, linkstash] is still my favorite bookmark management tool. And Opera is still my favorite web browser. I’ve previously provided LinkStash buttons for Opera in Windows XP. They also work fine in the 32-bit version of Windows 7. But if you are using LinkStash and Opera in the 64-bit version of Windows 7, you’ll need new buttons.
Here they are:
Note that these assume you installed LinkStash in the default location.
I have a server at home that handles a variety of tasks, such as DNS hosting/caching, media serving, home automation, printer/scanner sharing, and security camera control. I’ve been running everything on an old P3-733 Linux Box [spockpowerusage, spockserverspecs] for over 8 years. This summer, in the interest of making a major upgrade as well as preparing for an eventual hardware failure, I decided to upgrade the hardware. Instead of building a new Linux box, I replaced the server with a Mac mini .
The Mac mini is incredibly powerful, small, quiet, and energy efficient. Check out the size difference between the mini and my old Linux server. These pictures barely do justice to the monstrous size of the Linux rack.
I bought the “low end” Mac mini and replaced the hard drive and added more RAM. The process was simple. There’s even a handy video on YouTube that illustrates each step.
Thanks to macports.org and Apple’s inclusion of the GNU tools, getting my server daemons up and running on the Mac was only a minor pain. I also installed the latest version of VMWare Fusion , where I’m running a Linux server on the Mac in a virtual machine. The mini is a great host for VMs. In retrospect, I wish I had set up the Linux VM first and kept my server daemons on Linux instead of going through the hassle of getting them to run native, but in the end, I like the resulting flexibility.
Some tips:
. It’s the only one that really works. Believe me, I tried a bunch of them. It’s hard to imagine a better piece of hardware for a home server than a Mac mini.
