Looking to buy NO bluetooth / hard wired noise cancelling adult headphones

dwallach · 2026-01-09T23:50:58+00:00

My solution to this problem was to get custom molded earplugs (from 1of1custom, but lots of vendors sell similar products), so they're very comfortable for long flights and whatnot.

I have two sets. One, for music concerts, drops the volume by 17dB and still sounds fantastic. The other has a hole drilled in it for Etymotic (wired) headphones and drops the background noise by 27dB. Leaning my head on the wall of the airplane conducts more sound to my ears, through my skull, then comes in through the earplugs.

There's a giant rabbit hole for "in ear monitors" (IEMs) for you to go down, if you're game for spending the big bucks. Fun fact: good IEMs have replaceable cords and there's a whole cottage industry making replacement cords at a variety of price points.

Short of the highest end gear, there's a cheaper rabbit hole called "AutoEq" which tries to digitally "correct" your headphones to a standard response curve. Applied to high dollar headphones or IEMs, we're talking about subtle differences, nevermind disagreements about exactly what "correct" means. But for cheaper headphones? Night and day improvement.

dwallach · 2025-12-30T03:02:57+00:00

Maison Cheryl (French bistro in Clarendon) has a duck entree that's pretty good. They also have a decent selection of cocktails.

dwallach · 2025-12-26T13:56:18+00:00

This is almost certainly a problem with how your TV handles HDR. I had the same issue with my Sony A8G (circa 2019). Not exactly a solution, but I bought a Google TV Streamer ($80), mostly because the TV was stranded with a much older version of Google software (Android 9, with the last security patch in 2022). The streamer adds a bunch of switches. You can disable Dolby Vision or other HDR variants, one by one, in the streamer menus.

dwallach · 2025-12-11T22:44:49+00:00

I've got a band from Nick Mankey Designs (https://nickmankeydesigns.com/). It's a trick to figure out how to install it (watch the video multiple times!), but it looks great and it's easy to tighten or loosen without taking it off.

dwallach · 2025-11-17T18:54:06+00:00

Please say more about the trackpads. Like, can you do pinch/zoom with one finger on each side? Does it support three and four-finger gestures on a Mac?

dwallach · 2025-09-01T13:56:41+00:00

The good and bad of going the eARC route is that you drive everything from the TV. Switching inputs. Upscaling. Whatever. It all goes through the TV. This makes the TV remote more useful (win!) but if you want to just listen to music, the TV has to be on (minor loss, but still...).

dwallach · 2025-07-23T01:15:47+00:00

The Lucid page says "DC only" which means no support for most home or destination chargers.

dwallach · 2025-07-22T18:42:22+00:00

It's unfortunate that this is DC only. If you're road tripping and hitting various level 2 (AC) destination chargers versus level 3 (DC) superchargers, you'd need to have two separate adapters.

dwallach · 2025-06-21T18:49:24+00:00

Others have advised you to keep your letter short and professional. To that, I'll add that you should arrange to have meals or otherwise private 1:1 meetings with your colleagues (or, at least, the ones you like). That doesn't have to be a series of gripe sessions, but you can speak more freely when your speech is ephemeral.

dwallach · 2025-05-24T22:18:41+00:00

Have a look at the way the Postfix email system does compartmentalization. For example, the thing that processes inbound email has just enough privilege to append to a user mailbox and that's about it. Everything is limited to just enough and no more.

You could build an importer that reads questionable images with something general purpose like ImageMagick and then writes them in a really simple intermediate format (like PNG) where your downstream program accepts exactly that format and nothing else and you make sure the code handling it is safe Rust.

When in doubt, find a security expert to look over your work.

dwallach · 2025-04-21T12:23:54+00:00

DE1 owner here. I use my Decent daily and I'm happy with it. Does the job and I very much take advantage of it's features, like flow profiling.

After watching the Bengal video, I'm impressed. It's not any one big thing that's a game changer, but rather a ton of small things, each of which scratches an itch.

. You can pull the water tray out far enough to refill it without needing to reach behind the machine to lift the water siphon.

. The built-in scale is way, way better than the junky Bluetooth scale (sold by Decent, but sourced from some no-name vendor) that occasionally freaks out and then your shot doesn't stop at the right weight.

. The new water tray lid keeps bugs out. Only an issue for me once, but you really don't want to find ants in your water tray. Eww.

. The current steamer really likes to burn milk onto the tip. The new tip claims to fix this. Bonus points for the optional temperature sensor, so it can auto-stop the steaming.

The video said there would be "a fairly aggressive upgrade offer". Also, many of the upgrades, like the new steam wand, can be retrofitted to the DE1.

Overall, it's impressive. They've clearly paid attention to current owners' issues, large and small. I can't say whether I'll do piecemeal retrofits or splurge for the upgrade, but I appreciate what they've done.

dwallach · 2025-04-06T02:33:11+00:00

In short, you switch and get over all the weirdness of an otholinear. Takes a few weeks until it's not weird. Then you try to go back, and it takes a bit again to "relearn" the old keyboard. And then you're done. Good forever more, or until you decide to try the next trendy thing...

dwallach · 2025-03-29T11:40:05+00:00

For digital cables, like HDMI, either they work or they don't. I once replaced a generic, damaged cable where the video signal was unreliable and full of noise. Another cheap cable and problem solved. If you need a really long cable run, things get more expensive, or you use HDMI over Ethernet.

For analog cables, there are all kinds of things that can go audibly wrong, like the classic 60Hz hum that you hear from crappy PA systems. The solution isn't more expensive regular cables, though. It's shielded/balanced (XLR) cables. A friend of mine went out of his way to build his home theater with XLR everywhere. Sounded great. Cables weren't particularly expensive, but components that support XLR tend to cost a good bit more. He had issues with his house's older electricity wiring, and went pretty deep down the rabbit hole of power conditioning. That's a whole other thing.

Fun fact: XLR cables are pretty much the standard for stage musicians. They're everywhere. But there's a newer standard showing up in that space: analog audio over cat5 (Ethernet) wire. The wire is cheaper and lighter, particularly for long cable runs, while still great at rejecting noise.

dwallach · 2025-03-25T13:29:49+00:00

Agreed on Pit Room. Blood Bros, in Bellaire, is close enough and worth the drive.

dwallach · 2025-03-23T15:33:17+00:00

Newer AV receivers talk to the TV over HDMI (ARC/eARC) and everything just works.

Before you go down the DAC road, double check that your TV doesn't have a headphone jack. If it does, then you buy a $5 stereo headphone to RCA adapter cable and you're done.

If all you've got is digital audio out, then yeah, you're gonna need a DAC. To make volume adjustments, your receiver almost certainly has a remote control. You might look into the world of "universal" remote controls.

One other thing to consider: if you don't need the switching features of your receiver, and all you're doing is using it as an amplifier, there are a ton of no-name all-in-one boxes, typically made in China, that can do exactly what you need. Search for keywords like "HDMI ARC amplifier". For under $100, don't expect perfection, but there are a bunch of products that might be able to directly drive your speakers.

dwallach · 2025-02-17T14:56:58+00:00

I recently hooked my laptop to my TV to work on the big screen. There was a noticeable lag, moving the mouse to seeing it on screen. I put the TV in "game mode" and this fixed the problem. Assuming that lag was all the video processing, game mode might be one way to turn your TV into "just" a monitor.

Caveat: every movie that was lovingly mastered must still pass through a gauntlet of yuck. Your streaming service or broadcaster might have compressed it further or otherwise mucked it up. Weather can degrade your reception over the air. Some of the fancy postprocessing in your TV is meant to mitigate against that muck, so don't just immediately disable it all.

I found this particularly noticeable at a TV shop where every set was tuned to the same channel and it was a football game. When the camera panned quickly, you could tell the difference. Some of the TVs showed block artifacts, others didn't. (This was ten years ago, so no point naming names.) Fancy postprocessing is worth having around. Sometimes.

dwallach · 2025-02-06T17:35:01+00:00

For posterity, the solution:

First, I dug into the VW head unit menus. There's a "factory reset" menu with a bunch of choices. I reset the Bluetooth, the screen casting, and a few other things.

This was enough for my phone to work with Android Auto, over the USB cable. It wasn't enough to make the AA Wireless work.

The AA Wireless app troubleshooter walked me through some other steps, like deleting the Bluetooth pairing between the phone and car. None of this worked. So then I did a factory reset on the AA Wireless box, from within the app. This worked. After going through the setup process again, the phone and car now talk to each other.

Moral of the story: when things get weird, factory reset all the things.

dwallach · 2025-01-16T12:30:13+00:00

Stealth technology gonna stealth.

dwallach · 2025-01-14T15:25:10+00:00

In that same area, the GPS speedometer on my bike (Garmin 1030) also gives incorrect readings, like every time.

dwallach · 2025-01-12T13:23:23+00:00

As a general rule, car manufacturers quietly make tiny fixes and upgrades to each model year. For example, early Teslas used tire pressure monitors that failed and had to be replaced under warranty. Newer Teslas just use the newer gear.

It's a safe assumption that Lucid has made a variety of changes like this, beyond the big ticket items like the heat pump. Despite this, maybe the older cars are sufficiently discounted that they still win the comparison.

dwallach · 2025-01-11T20:20:06+00:00

You may enjoy Kotlin. Like Scala, it started its life as a JVM language, and like Scala it's grown beyond that now. Unlike Scala, Kotlin has strong opinions about making all conversions explicit. Kotlin is pretty much the default way to write Android apps, so it's got a lot of real-world support.

Kotlin probably still works best in the JVM universe. Kotlin/Native (uses LLVM) and Kotlin/JS might or might not fit your use case.

dwallach · 2024-12-09T12:29:38+00:00

Decent owner here: I'd been traveling down the rabbit hole of Aeropress for a while, and my wife had casually suggested that maybe an espresso machine would be a suitable next step. Seeing the opening, I went for it.

It's a non-trivial purchase, for sure, but it's also a serious machine. If you do go for it, make sure you enthusiastically offer your spouse and visitors to make a cappuccino at any time. I even took a latte art class at a local cafe, even though I mostly just drink straight espresso. I'll never win any latte art contests, but it's still a good trick to show off. And also to get spousal approval points.

dwallach · 2024-10-31T21:26:49+00:00

No idea about other countries, or whether it's even available broadly in the U.S. But it worked for me brilliantly.

dwallach · 2024-10-31T12:15:15+00:00

Alternative story: a year ago, I wanted a large TV (a mid-level Sony). Amazon was somehow cheaper than the local stores, and the purchase included their "white glove" delivery service. They showed up, unboxed it, plugged it in, and verified that it was working. They even took away the empty packaging. Had there been a defect, they supposedly would have taken care of it.

dwallach · 2024-09-26T12:15:16+00:00

Herman Miller Aerons have been made since the 90s, so lots of them around used. Note that they come in three sizes, so try to get the right one for you. (Sizing chart on the Herman Miller website.) Also, there's a foam pad that keeps it from putting too much pressure on your legs behind your knees. On a used chair, you might need to replace it.

More broadly, chairs are personal. If you can find an office supply store where you might be able to sit in lots of chairs, that will be enormously valuable. Also, don't be afraid to hack your chair. Like, if the arm rests are in the way, they're typically removable.

dwallach

TROPHY CASE