Category: Geek Stuff

Back again with the list for all the family CTOs out there. I’ve been putting this list together every year so when I get tech questions from the family over Thanksgiving I can just send them this link. Hopefully it helps you too, feel free to send me any suggestions!

Easy Gifts

I’ve been doing more and more with MagSafe, this is the iPhone feature where magnets can attach to the phone allowing you to wirelessly charge, mount in the car with no work, or add a popsocket.

I’ve also switched to using my phone as my alarm clock so that opens up chargers as gift ideas.

I use this popsocket at events, the QR code is my Trust Insights business card so no more wasted paper or running out.

If you have anyone that needs glasses there are two interesting things: I like Maui Jim sunglasses for the beach/running and they are great for boating/fishing. They now come in readers. The other thing is being able to make ski goggles (or any other glasses) bifocals for less than $25. I have just refused to pay the $400+ for prescription goggles because that would just guarantee they would get lost/stolen/broken, nevermind the fact that they get used maybe 20 times a year. Add the lens in the reading zone and boom, I can see my phone again when trying to find my kids.

Organization

Trello is a great tool for managing your holiday tasks. Create a card for each person or task that you have to take care of, and I have three columns: Parking Lot which is where the cards stay and during the year as I get gift ideas I can add them to the checklist for that person, In Progress for the items that I am currently working on completing, and finally they rest in Done.

TV and Home Theater

Everyone here is still in love with the projector setup built during Covid lockdown, that full story is here.

It’s interesting, maybe it’s the current chip shortage but the original projector I installed has not dropped in price since last year. It’s 1080p and as of today is $229.

I have a savings account that receives the cash when I sell stuff on eBay and this year for my birthday I decided I was going to try a 4k Projector. I got a good deal on a BenQ TK850 and quickly learned that you should not be looking at anything with an old school light bulb in it. It was nowhere near as bright as my $229 1080p projector but the good news was I was able to flip it on eBay, breaking even after shipping and fees.

Nebula was recently acquired by Anker and I was able to get this Nebula Cosmos Max for under $1,000. My jaw just dropped when I saw that it’s gone up to $1,395. One thing, the first one I got was defective and I had to return it so I was very glad that I bought it from Nebula directly. I also added a subwoofer to the setup, that was a crazy McGuyver job that I won’t go into here but will update my home theater post, or feel free to ask me about it on Threads if you want to nerd out.

The end result is that the picture is much sharper at 4k, it’s worth doing. It’s still not as bright as the 1080p, in mid light scenes but anything outdoor or with special effects looks amazing.

Video Games

The Nintendo Switch still rules the house here, my previous post on that hasn’t changed. H Bomb has been using an old PS4 and playing Spiderman Miles Morales and Star Wars Fallen order, both of which are a ton of gaming for around $20. Sorry, but I’ve got no Xbox or PS5 tips. When I don’t know where to look I start at GameSpot.

If you play Fortnite check in with me, PhilDunphey247

Computers

Last year I took the gutpunch of laptop upgrades, this year, thankfully, there will be no hardware under the tree. Just the standard opinion here: Macs are great for people that don’t know what they are doing, I’m so excited not to be Anti-Virus police for my family. But if you have any gamers or people who want to venture outside the controlled garden, you may be PC shopping.

Marketing Over Coffee fan Jennifer N. said she’s getting an Elgato Teleprompter. This reminded me that I’ve played with a couple of them and finally settled on a Plexicam. It’s not a true teleprompter, it’s a clear bracket that lets you hang your webcam on the center of your monitor. It’s less expensive than a teleprompter, and is a lot less stuff to be moving around and have on your desk. If you do a lot of web meetings I can heartily recommend it.

Audio Gear

Beats Fit Pro are still the earbud champions but one interesting note – I have been able to find some Jabra 75T earbuds for less than $30 and I was finally able to side by side test. The Beats are better for sports, better bluetooth connection, better for calls, better noise cancellation BUT even though the Jabra loses in most categories… the music is just a little bit better, and it has an EQ.

Bluetooth Speaker: Bose has killed the Soundlink Mini a couple of times and it just keeps coming back. I drag mine nearly everywhere except for construction sites, where I have an old Jambox that I don’t care if it gets destroyed.

For podcasting I love my RodecasterProII, but you can now get the Duo which is smaller and has all the features I need so I may do the eBay downgrade at some point to get some desk space back. For microphones I still love the VModa boom best, but with wired headphones slowly vanishing for everyone except hardcore audiophiles, I’ve stopped making Sony 7506 mods and use Beats Fit Pro for day to day, and recommend Shure SM7B for the office/studio.

Music

With all of the family building music libraries and having their own playlists I finally buckled and went all in on Spotify – please add me, I’ve got a bunch of holiday and other playlists, feel free to send me your info. The unintended consequence is that it I didn’t realize how bad Amazon Music in CarPlay was until we switched. The lovely Carin is thrilled that she can easily fire up playlists in the car now.

If you are into DJing or setting up online listening Turntable is back after being gone for nearly a decade. If you want to throw a virtual holiday party this would add the music.

I am thinking about upgrading the PC speakers I use in the kitchen with an Amazon Echo Studio with Subwoofer, I’ll report back if Santa agrees.

Car

I’m messing around with adding CarPlay to our older vehicles. It’s entered the under $200 category and I’m reaching the point where I refuse to have any vehicles without backup cameras. This requires some wiring though so it’s not for the faint of heart. I’ll post more after experiments have run.

Happy Holidays!

I’ll update this as things change, and I hope you have a restful holiday!

Updated: Of course 3 minutes after hitting publish I realize the better headline is “Audiophile Ski Helmet.”

It’s so funny that I have a post today, almost exactly one year from my last one! Of course the last one was that I had finished the book project so that’s a pretty decent excuse to stop writing but that’s not the case, it’s just that the blogging I’ve done has been over at my work site – Trust Insights. For martech folks check out this series on lead scoring, attribution, and machine learning for attribution!

Longtime readers know that I’m a huge fan of the Sony 7506 headphones, and I mod them for podcasting and webinars with a removable mic – the ubergeek special Johnny Headphones.

This winter I decided that I wanted to upgrade from my Bose Sport Headphones and started looking into other options. Taking sport headphones in and out is a hassle and I wanted to see if I could get both better sound and less isolation (being able to hear what was going on around me better) as I’m chaperoning my kids and a couple others after lesson time is over and I need to know who is yelling, and more importantly why.

I was new to helmets when I came back to skiing 4 years ago after only going out a handful of times over the past 15 years. At first I thought I would hate them as it’s a lot like motorcycle riding, although it’s moronic in terms of risk management there’s nothing like the wind coming at you high speed to feel like you’re truly free.

What I was not expecting is that the helmet is the perfect combination of super warm, and yet still with enough ventilation to stay comfortable. I was not expecting a helmet to be warmer and more comfortable than any ski hat I’ve ever had. I’ve had a ton of hats and the very best, I would charitably rate as half comfortable. And projecting my skull from impact is a wonderful side benefit.

After a bit of researching I learned that many ski helmets, like the Boeri I got a great deal on at the local ski sale, are made with velcro pockets over each ear so that you can drop in a speaker solution like these Alta Wireless Bluetooth Helmet Drop in Speaker Chips:

As you can see it’s pretty simple, just drop them in and go.

But, in the process of learning how to mod the 7506 I had a bunch of parts lying around and decided to build my own. There were three benefits to this: first I prefer wired, while bluetooth no wires is a wonderful thing, the freedom is offset by even one day of arriving at the mountain and realizing I forgot to charge my helmet. Second I was pretty sure I could do better sound wise than anything else out there, and so far I haven’t tried anything better (although there is a helmet that has a perfect cutaway so that it includes a real full set of over ears with headband, but I wasn’t about to go that route because of reason three – I already had the parts so this was “free.” It as pretty straightforward:

• Take apart the 7506s with Phillips head screwdriver
• Cut all wires, leaving enough for me to see which color goes where (note that the left side that has the jack has 3 points to solder to while the right only has two)
• Use the Dremel cutter to cut around the plastic plate that holds the driver, and then the Dremel grinder to take off all the rough edges
• I had an old patch cord that I soldered to both to connect the left to the right driver. The cord fits between the styrofoam and the outer plastic shell of the headphone so it’s completely out of sight running around the back of my head.
• Plastic twist ties are perfect for securing the cables to the plastic driver plates after soldering, cut the plate leaving pairs of holes that you can run the plastic twist ties through to bind down the cables so they don’t move (cable 1 connecting left to right, cable 2 long enough to run down to my jacket pocket and terminating with a 3.5mm tip which plugs into my iPhone 6 (until next week when my iPhone X arrives!!!)
• Note that many ski jackets have a loop along side the zipper for cord management and may also have a button hole so you can run the cord into the pocket from the inside. I have both so even though I went all fancy with a Neon Lime cord, you can’t see it at all if I have my jacket zipped all the way up so that it covers the bottom of the helmet ear pads.
• This bullet and the next two are critical for sound quality – I used another twist tie to connect the driver plate to the ear cushion that attaches to the ear flap. I tried just having it float in the pocket but sound quality can vary dramatically if it moves too high, anchoring it with the twist tie solves this (and be sure the driver is facing into your ear, not out, that was a moronic mistake I made once.
• Because the 7506 are closed back headphones I found out that by adding a Beyerdynamic driver cover (a piece of foam with velour on one side that normally covers the driver to protect it from your greasy ears) not over the driver but behind it to reduce the amount that bleeds outside the ear flap dramatically increased the sound quality. At this point in the testing I started smiling as the sound quality was fantastic.
• The third improvement was learned by testing – having the chin strap connected and tight is critical, the better the seal on the ear flaps the better the bass, so much so that if it’s snug the whole helmet will bounce a bit when you his some big bass.

I also covered the solder points with electric tape to reduce the risk of shorting out in case it gets wet, or catching fire against the foam. With that said, if you are going to try this at all let me be clear:

You are violating your warranty, odds are it will light on fire, short out and destroy the headphones and probably kill you. I’m straight up telling you that in no way should you try this, if you are crazy enough to still try remember that I told you it would never work and best case scenario is you dying quickly.

With the disclaimer done here’s some photos:

One last thing, using your phone or the normal buttons on the average headphone cable is mostly impossible. While searching I came across Chubby Buttons – a bluetooth controller for your music (and the watch battery lasts a season, no recharging.) It’s not cheap, around $60 but it is fantastic, I highly recommend:

Ok, start building some playlists!

Update:

After field testing I thought the sound was only ok. Then this year I added the EarStudio ES100. It’s a Bluetooth Adapter, you can plug in any wired headphone and now it’s Bluetooth. The big win here is that it also has a full EQ app. So while the sound used to be pretty thin (unsurprising make a closed back headphone open back) as soon as I switch the EQ to the setting I use to make earbuds sound better it was fantastic. I can now recommend this rig whole heartedly.

Also one other update, Chubby Buttons 2 have been released. Same link, same thing but you can now access smart assistants so no more pulling out the phone to read text messages. I’ll update when it gets here!

About four months ago a friend forwarded a link to Lumoid.com who now rents high end headphones (sadly, Lumoid is no more). It had just been covered in Lifehacker or one of the other high profile blogs so it took until last month for my order to come up. For $75 I had two weeks with three top shelf headphones:

• Audeze LCD-3 ($1,945)
• Sennheiser HD 800 ($1,599)
• Sony MDR-Z7 ($699)

Of course for the majority of the time they were hidden in my closet so that my kids wouldn’t look at them

or breathe on them. I also waited on writing this up until they were safely back in the Bay Area in case anyone considered doing an Ocean’s 11 heist with me actually having something of value in my home.

If you’re in a hurry, the punchline is: I don’t think spending this much money on headphones is worth it. Yes, 2 of the 3 sounded amazing, but maybe 5% better than my Sony MDR-V6 headphones that cost under $200. For those still wondering what $4,243 (+tax, +shipping & handling) gets you…

As you’d expect from headphones this expensive, the boxes were impressive. The Sony and Sennheiser were similar, opening like a trophy case. The Audeze come in a plastic travel case, like the kind you’d use to transport a monitor to a trade show. Basically about half a piece of luggage, leading to the first lesson – this is not stuff you travel with.

Note that the Audeze and Sennheisers are open back headphones, the ear cup is vented so air flows in and sound flows out. These give them a much more natural sound, as if you are in a concert hall, but it means that on a noisy subway you’ll hear the train, and the passengers will hear your music, so probably not a wise choice.

All three of them have proprietary cables with unique connections to the headphones. The Audeze and Sony’s plug in and then are screwed down to prevent them being pulled out. The Senn’s have some crazy mount with a pin that makes them only insertable in one position. The Audeze come with an XLR cable so you can have a balanced connection, which is supported on some high end gear. A balanced connection means that the signal is sent down two wires, inverted on one of them. It’s ingenious, when the inverted one is restored any interference picked up along the line cancels itself out. Of course I’ve never personally seen someone using a balanced connection to listen to music, but you could say that’s just because I hang with a low rent crowd.

Over the past couple of years I’ve come up with a number of theories on headphones, one of them being that fit and comfort are more important than any specs or technical analysis. It doesn’t matter that the Audeze sound better than anything I’ve ever listened to, I don’t want to wear anything that heavy so I wouldn’t buy them even if I was sitting on a pile of cash I had no use for. The Sennheisers also sound amazing, and are very light and comfortable. But I’ve also been impressed with the Sennheiser HD 558 which you can currently get a used set on Amazon for $64. Yes I would say that the HD 800 is two or three times better considering the sound, fit, weight, and quality. Paying 25 times the price for it? Personally, the value is not there. Factor in losing or breaking a pair now and then and the economics get uglier quick.

I did not like the sound of the Sony headphones compared to other Sonys I’ve heard. Usually they have a very clear mid range and high end, and this pair did not. This comes to another point about my review, the case could be made that listening to uncompressed digital files via a Dragonfly DSP and a Meridian Explorer 2 is not the same as spending $10,000 on an amp to drive these headphones to the extreme. I admit that this could be true, but that throwing down another $10,000 is not going to tilt the odds in the headphones favor in my value equation.

In closing, I won’t be dropping a boatload of money on headphones, but I would not hesitate to rent from Lumoid again. They also rent photography gear, and fitness wearables, two areas where you definitely want to try before you buy.

For past writing on audio start here.

So a good friend of mine told me he just switched to an iPhone and that he wasn’t happy with the earbuds. Since I was going to get a bunch of links for him anyway, it’s a perfect excuse for a new sound roundup (see previous post here)! There are some new entries, and better yet new resources to check things out yourself. Between running, having an addiction to buying music, and producing Marketing Over Coffee I spend (waste) a lot of time worrying about audio.

There are two hard rules I can guarantee you – one, there is no substitute for testing. There’s no universal fit, and only you can decide what sound quality/price trade off you can stomach. Two, yes, the stock earbuds stink.

First is the fit category, I’ve cut into 4 options:

1. Over the ear – These cover your ear completely and because they are so big this means you’ll get more bass than anything smaller
2. On the ear – Slightly smaller, but personally I’ve found them more likely to hurt after prolonged use. Overall I ignore this category, if you have any you like in this segment I’d love to hear about them.
3. In the ear – These are your standard earbud style. The key here is that they go in your ear but do not seal it shut like an earplug (that would be #4)
4. In the ear canal – These have an airtight seal which has a tradeoff – they can sound much better than #3, but you can’t hear what’s going on around you as well. Some people don’t like cutting off the outside world, for example I prefer #3 for running so I still have some idea what’s going on around me. On the other hand, when on a plane or subway you may prefer this style to block out the noise around you

Other things to keep in mind:

1. Bluetooth – If you want to go cordless then you might consider this. It’s a big trade off though – this means they’ll need a battery of some sort, one that requires charging or replacement. Audiophiles also write off Bluetooth as the sound quality is not as good as wired. However, see #4 for more on sound quality
2. In-line controls – Having the ability to change volume or tracks, and having a microphone on the cable makes life easier in a number of situations. It’s a lot easier to hear calls through your earphones/headphones. It’s much easier to control while excercising rather than pulling out your phone.
3. Celebrity Headphones – If a celebrity is getting paid, that’s money that didn’t go to sound quality. The Wirecutter article below goes in depth here, they’ve never had a celebrity headphone win its price class.
4. Apple sucks, Bose doesn’t – The bottom line is that you make a lot of trade offs on a phone so that your battery lasts more than 2 hours. It takes energy to process a digital signal, and to drive headphones. Since the sound quality is not audiophile grade you don’t notice that the stock headphones are quite crummy (although this latest generation is much better than the last). This is also why you can get by with Bluetooth, unless you’re really listening it’s not going to make much difference on an average or less MP3 file. On the other side of the spectrum I’ll mention hometown team Bose. Yes, they are more expensive than gear that’s considered the same quality and yes, audiophiles tend to take issue with them. Until recently I’ve said “Do a little homework and you can get better for the same money, or get as good and save some money”. In the past couple of years though they’ve been crushing it – The QC15 (over ear), QC20 (in ear canal),SIE2i (sport headphones) and the Soundlink Mini (portable speaker like a Jambox) all are category leaders to my ear. So if you want good sound, you’ll have to pay. Bottom line is, although their stuff is expensive they don’t make any mid-grade or entry level junk. Anybody that buys Bose is usually happy with their purchase. Brands like Sony and Sennheiser make so many different models that you’ll have a hard time figuring out what’s best for you.
5. Noise Reduction – there’s passive noise reduction, blocking outside noise by airtight seal and insulation, and active noise reduction where microphones measure the noise and cancelling sound waves are created. Many reviewers say Bose leads the pack here by a significant margin, and my testing agrees with that.

Resources: Headphone.com is still fantasic for a broad range of headphones, great advice and test results if you are hardcore. A new one to me, thanks to @gadgetboy is The Wirecutter. You can check out their buying guide and they are great for reviews on what’s the best in a number of tech categories. In fact, I’d start there first before going to my list below.

The stuff I like:

Over the ear: I still love my Bose QC15s. The sound is good, the noise reduction great. Hard to beat this for watching your own movies on a plane. If you’re not into that price range a great choice is the Sony MDR7506. At $85 these get rated higher than cans going up as high as $250.

On ear: Never like any enough to buy.

In the ear: For running the Bose SIE2i are the best sounding sport headphones I’ve ever had. Fair warning though, they are expensive and I’ve had to replace them once after a year and a half. Amazon reviews say that the microphone is a weak point if sweat gets in there. On my list to try are the Jaybird Bluebuds X which are guaranteed sweatproof.

In the ear canal: My Shure 530s are still going strong. I’ve had custom earmolds made so I can wear these all day with no problem and they block out a lot of noise. They no longer make these, the latest model is the 535 and it’s much better because you can replace the cable when they wear out. However, they are no longer the king of the hill, if you happen to have $1,000 just lying around the SE-846 has 4 drivers in each ear (not sure how they squeeze that all in there) which are supposed to sound better than Morgan Freeman telling your life story. On my wishlist here: Bose QC20. The noise reduction on these is much better than even the QC15 plus it’s a lot less to carry when traveling.

That’s where it’s at today, if you have any gear you love please tell me about it!