JSTN
I live in New York and work at Tumblr.
justinouellette.com
-
Headphone update:
I’m fully committed to those Denons, I love them and I’m more convinced than ever they’re the best sealed headphones under $500 (to my ears, at least). I even made the relationship official by throwing the box away.
However, after reading all your “favorite headphone” answers I noticed a couple names kept coming up and I couldn’t resist trying just two more pairs.
Beats Pro by Dr. Dre
These have gotten incredibly popular over the last couple years. I’ve always written them off because it seemed like a marketing gimmick (which it is—a brilliant one) but I wanted to be absolutely sure they weren’t secretly amazing.By the way, all you kids telling me I should try them, do you realize how old you’ve made me feel? I’m surprised you even know who Dr. Dre is; judging by your profiles none of you were even alive when The Chronic came out.
Anyway, the “Pro” model actually wasn’t bad. As you’d expect, they’re heavily tilted towards the low end and sound best for beat-heavy music. For quieter stuff and almost anything not-electronic they’re just okay, if there’s any definition in the mids or highs it’s being drowned in bass. Of the ones I tried a couple days ago they were closest in experience to the Sony MDR-Z1000, but without the crystal detail. If you only listen to hip hop you’ll probably love them. Lots of punch. Ridiculously good build quality.
Sennheiser HD 650
Oh my god. These are the best headphones I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how else to say it. Everything sounds amazing. Essentially perfect. The only problem is that they’re open-backed, so they’re basically speakers strapped to your head and everyone around you will hate you. Zero sealing. When I fired them up here in the office earlier I got icy glares from all the way across the room.I never listen to headphones at home so if I can’t use them at work I can’t use them all, which is a goddamned tragedy. I can’t imagine headphones sounding much better. If you’re in the market and you’ll be using them somewhere where you won’t bother anyone (or just don’t care) these are definitely the ones to get. The build quality wasn’t quite as amazing as the Beats, but it couldn’t be a more different set of headphones.
Even my beloved Denons, which sound downright airy compared to other sealed-backs, seemed like slogging through mud after trying the Sennheisers for a while.
Conclusions
Headphones are extremely subjective, if you’re spending more than $100 I highly recommend trying several pairs before you decide on one (by the way, if you’re in New York, J&R has an excellent selection and unusually lenient return policy.) Also, just because one brand has an amazing model doesn’t mean their other models are necessarily any good. I’ve yawned at other Sennheisers in the past, but the 650 is out of this world.If you’re spending less than $100: Sony MDR-V6, hands down. They sound three times as expensive and the design has gone unchanged for almost 30 years. Classic, excellent headphones.
Closed back: Denon AH-D2000 or B&W P5, depending on your preference. The Denons sound more like standing in a room with great speakers, the B&Ws sound a lot “closer” with a slightly flatter response. Both excellent.
Open back: Sennheiser HD 650. They’ll change your perception of what’s possible with headphones (and sound reproduction in general). I still have yet to hear the high end Grados, but it’s hard to imagine they’d be much better than this. From here on up it’s diminishing returns.
-
The Canon EOS-1D X looks awesome, and has something I’ve wanted/predicted for a long time: less resolution (18 megapixels versus the 1Ds Mk III’s 21.)
There’s a couple of things that we consider when we think about [image quality]: number one on this sensor is noise. It’s clear the noise level is better than in the 1D Mk IV or the 1DS III. The pixel size is larger than in the 1DS III or 5D Mark II (6.95 microns, versus 6.4) and the difference is even more striking compared to the 5.7 micron pixels in the 1D Mark IV. That helps us in terms of light capturing ability and increases the signal to noise ratio. In turn, that does nothing but help the dynamic range of the camera.
The bigger the pixel, the more surface area it has to soak up light, which literally makes everything better. I’m glad Canon has bowed out of the megapixel race and shifted their marketing towards individual pixel size.
Other cool features: gigabit ethernet port, dual card slots, intraframe (editor-friendly) video compression, standard ISO up to 51,200 (!)
-
This is a VT220 serial console (circa 1983) set up as a terminal for my Mac Pro (circa 2010), a nerdy dream I’ve had for a long time that I finally made a reality yesterday.
Some quick history: in the early days of office computers, it was rare that you would actually have one on your desk. Instead there might be a central mainframe (running Unix) and everyone would have a terminal that connected to it over a long serial cable or modem connection. One computer, many users.
The terminal has a keyboard and monitor, but it’s not a full computer and worthless without the mainframe. It’s more like a teletype machine, all it can do is display the text sent to it (like a paperless printer) and send text back. It doesn’t have any knowledge of pixels or colors or graphics of any kind.
In modern times we don’t have mainframes in the average office, but Unix is more prevalent than ever. It runs on the servers delivering this page and the iPhone in your pocket. For developers and power users the command line has never gone away, but instead of a dedicated hardware serial console we have Terminal.app, which runs in a convenient window alongside all our other windows. The software is just emulating the old hardware, though; the protocols haven’t changed much in 30 years. The Unix underpinnings of OS X still have all the stuff required to use a real serial terminal.
I’ve always thought those old terminals were beautiful, and I’m not the only one—there’s a Mac app called Cathode that does a convincingly wonderful job simulating vintage terminals, using OpenGL to degrade things into a nice analog haze. But it’s not quite the real thing.
Hardware terminals regularly crop up on eBay for around $100. They’re actually still used in a lot of places (old warehouse systems, supermarkets, banks) and there are still companies that support and refurbish them. Back at Vimeo we discovered one abandoned in a server closet when we moved into the office. Finding one isn’t a problem, the main challenge is stringing together the right adapters to use an ancient serial port with modern USB.
My biggest source of information getting this going was Paul Weinstein’s post about setting up an Apple IIc as a terminal for his Mac mini (which is similar, but not quite the same since the IIc still has to emulate the terminal in software). I got the same USB-to-serial adapter, a Keyspan USA-19HS ($27), which has Mac drivers that I can happily confirm work well with 10.7 Lion. I also needed a null modem cable ($7) and 25-pin female/female gender changer ($4).
At first I used the same method as Paul to get it working, gluing together the terminal and OS with a utility called screen. As Paul notes, this is less than desirable. It still requires you to open a software terminal to make the connection, and you’re still operating through a layer of emulation. On most Unixes you can simply add a line to /etc/ttys and everything just works via getty, but apparently this has been disabled in OS X since 10.5.
Eventually I found this page, which explains the problem and how to fix it. After adding a line in /etc/gettytab to manually set the terminal type to vt220 everything works perfectly! A real hardware terminal directly connected the old fashioned way, with no emulation. Awesome.
If this is something you want to attempt yourself please drop me a line; I learned a lot about how terminals work over the last couple weeks and the final result is quite satisfying, a soft amber glow and one less window on my desktop. It’s also a nice reminder that we didn’t get to where we are overnight, user interfaces and software development have been evolving in an unbroken chain for a long time and some of the old ideas are so solid that they persist 30 years later. Why not use the proper hardware?
loading…
