Yes, I’m posting 2 days in a row. Mostly because I’m pretty annoyed with the policy at Ultimate Ears. I spoke to someone on from customer service who was nice but reiterated their ridiculous policy.
I called them to see if they could upgrade my triple.fi 10s that are in for repair to triple.fi vi for my iPhone. I was told that unless I had bought them directly from Ultimate Ears this was not possible. Remember I bought them in the UK, so I wouldn’t want to buy them from their site to be shipped to the UK only to have to pay import tax. That would be silly.
The reason she gave was that she didn’t want to become “an iPhone wire supplier”. Since the wires only fit their earphones effectively the message is that people should buy the new models. Given that UE is a premium brand that sell high-end earphones I think this is a very poor attitude. I bought my earphones based on a recommendation of a friend on the quality of the customer service. Apparently it’s not as good as he thought.
It’s sad that I feel I have to write posts like this because their earphones are awesome.
My favourite headphone manufacturer are Ultimate Ears. They make my primary in-ear headphone the Triple.fi 10. These “in-ear monitors” contain no less than 3 driver and sound amazing.
In August it seems Logitech bought Ultimate Ears, which isn’t a bad thing in my mind. I’m sure a larger company will happily see them through the financial crisis. What does bother me though is that they have quietly reduced the lengths of all the warranties.
Right now my Triple.fis are with UE to be fixed. When trying to get a foam tip off the casing catches snapped. No problem, send them back, get a replacement pair. This is one of the reason I was willing to shell out the not inconsiderable money they cost. They came with a recommendation from a friend that UE were fantastic at dealing with customers. Mine have a 2 year warranty.
When I looked at the web site this week to see if they were going to support a model with a mic for my iPhone (they now have the triple.fi 10v, not that they will sell me the mic wire separately) I noticed that all the warranties are now 1 years only. That includes the custom moulded monitors which I think used to have a life time warranty, or at least 2 years.
I find it astonishing that Logitech expects people to shell out $400 for triple.fi headphones and $800+ for customs with such a short time to be able to get them repaired.
To contrast this all Shure headphones from the $119 SE110s to the $499 SE530 come with a 2 year warranty. I really hope Logitech renege and sort this out. I have been considering getting some customs from UE. I think I’m going to continue to consider for a while longer now.
The Arduino is an open source prototyping board. The system is powered by an ATMega128 processor and takes serial input over USB or bluetooth. It’s programmable in a subset of C and has an open source IDE for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Essentially anything that has electrical input/output can be hooked up to one of these things. For example the Ambient Orb is just bright red, green and blue LEDs under a light diffuser in a glass dome. By using the processor to alter the brightness of each LED any colour can be produced.
What I find exciting is these prototyping boards cost relatively little money (roughly £18 for the USB version) but can be used to make all kinds of DIY electronics possible. To use the ambient orb example again, rather than the $150 plus shipping from the states that the ‘real’ one costs it can be made for as little as £30 by anyone who is bright enough to follow some instructions from the internet. Not only that but the homebrew version can be used display any data, because it has been built Open Source from the ground up.
Small but significant thing that’s making my life easier. Stuart pointed me at Ensymble a Python script which uses x-platform libraries to do a number of key Symbian development related tasks.
Most importantly Ensymble can sign SIS files and create SIS files from pyS60 scripts. Since it does these with open Python libraries you can run it on Mac and Linux. This is a big step forward. I find it a bit upsetting Nokia needs a 3rd party developer to do this for them, but I’m not surprised.
So what I’ve been dying to talk about for ages is finally in the open. Yahoo is going to be an OpenID 2.0 provider. This news is big. On 30th January Yahoo will make their OpenID provider a public beta.
We, of course, have a developer page about OpenID. It’s a bit basic right now, but I’m sure that’ll improve when we go live.
One thing that really works for me is that both yahoo.com and flickr.com can be used as your ID provider, but most especially some magic at the Yahoo end means users won’t have to remember a URL, just yahoo.com or flickr.com. Sweet.
This is not the sort of thing I often blog about, however this product really struck me. Fluidform (in Austria) are selling these beautiful beech bowls shaped like a map contour. I love this idea. I was thinking I’d like to buy one centred on where I proposed to my wife. Maybe when I have some spare money for a real luxury item. It seems like the kind of thing you would keep forever.
I find it’s a real sign of growth that a company is using an openly available web service to create physical products. Not only does this product rely on the availability of the service, it also gives them access to vast amounts of data that would be prohibitive for them to buy themselves. This means they can make bowls which are meaningful to people without needing to know why. I look forward to seeing more mashups like this. via TreeHugger
The trains were essentially exactly the same as the GNER service, except they have uglier branding. However the Wifi is free to everyone, not just first class. Given that it cost my wife and I only £20 more to travel by train than the cheapest of the cheap (Megabus) I am very pleased. Half the time and with near flawless internet for the trip. Well done National Express!
And, yes, I know National Express also run Megabus.
Christmas time at my parent’s showed very well the reasons behind the success of Nintendo’s Wii and I also believe several other modern products like the iPod, iPhone and Tivo.
In our family Christmas is held at my Grandfather’s. He sits in his armchair and presides over the goings on of the younger folks, being 94 that seems pretty sensible. Not that he isn’t lively enough, with conversation and games of dominoes to be had. However, the new DVD/VCR was causing problems. It took the combined might of myself, my father, my wife and my brother-in-law to get the thing to record a show and then it was only my wife’s quick thinking that got it to do that. Even with large print instructions my grandfather hates the thing. The unit in question is some off brand I can’t even remember the name of.
The Wii, on the other, quickly became something everyone felt they could use. After my wife and I played a little tennis, we quickly progressed into bowling with the brother-in-law. Gradually more people wanted to play, even my Grandfather. He still found it a little daunting and the some of the timing on bowling always throws new people (no pun intended), but he enjoyed it nonetheless.
Thanks to Michael Gilbert for this Flickr photo of his father playing Wii.
This brings me to my point. All of the technologies I mentioned at the start of the post have made themselves undaunting to non-technical people. While my Grandfather had to be shown how to use a Wii he would never have considered using an Xbox or a Playstation.
The same applies to the Tivo (or Sky+, etc) while a regular VCR has numerous obtuse options and buttons, selecting the program you want to record from a TV listings is something anyone can do. Once you replace the newspaper listings with the onscreen ones it becomes even more natural.
My mother has been talking about getting a new phone.She hates the buttons on her current one. She finds them too small. She can’t text, she can’t even read texts. I think she will like the iPhone. It has a ‘proper’ keyboard albeit onscreen. You drag the address book to move it, no scrollbar or ‘down key’.
What’s the similarity in these cases? The metaphors are from the everyday life. They aren’t metaphors from computing nomenclature that only technologists are intimate with. If you think about it it makes sense. To bowl you swing your arm not press a button. To pick a program you, well, pick a program not type in some a series of numbers in steps. Sometimes I think we’ve been immersed in technology too long when we simply accept that “some people won’t get it“. Some companies are redefining the business to make technology work for people. You should make sure your company is one of them.
Wow. I haven’t posted anything for over a month which is a big break for me. But I just had to write a quick note about this. A post from August on the Pipes blog just arrived in my feedreader talking about the ability to extend Pipes using Web Services. I can’t express just how awesome this is.
When I first got access to the Google Mashup Editor I immediately disliked it. What the world really doesn’t need is another company pushing their own XML based web markup language. More than that it really doesn’t need one that includes mixing presentation code with content, and using table layouts.
The reason this new feature of Pipes has me so buzzed is that Pipes already gives me the lazy way to rework data with drag and drop slicing and sorting, etc. Now I can extend that to do anything with any programming language I want. More than that, I can easily make the web service available to people who wouldn’t be able to code it themselves, but are perfectly happy with the GUI interface of Pipes.
Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.
I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of thousands of characters to learn, however once each is known the brain can easily scan and read it. However with English there seems to be much more decoding happening. Words are formed from letters which means that the brain has to recognise each letter in turn. Or at least enough to make a sensible guess.
It occurred to me this is somewhat like Regular Expressions. Regex is notoriously difficult to master, and yet once it is offers a powerful, concise way to express what could take many lines of conventional code.
I don’t think there is a lesson here, but I do find it interesting that there are a couple of approaches to both reading and programming with different advantages. One offers a low barrier to entry but repeatedly extracts a cost in efficiency, the other offers more prohibitive learning curve, but yields high gains once the threshold is reached.
I really love Regex, maybe I should learn Chinese so I can read more quickly.
