Riding the Flow

Now that I finally have standard 3.5 mm TRS jack on my new and shiny Motorola Milestone , I can finally upgrade to high quality headset without resorting to additional cables/cumbersome adapters. I go with in-ear headphones. Supra aural ones are not really that accurate and hard to wear in all settings (i.e. on the street). Ear buds are generally bad, because they don’t isolate at all. Currently I am comparing two headsets: Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5vi Etymotic Research hf2 Doing extensive listening tests on both. Up to now, wavy opinion – Ultimate Ears have more perceivable bass, but sound more “mushy”. While Etymotics are crystal clear, you can hear so much detail of music its overwhelming, but they may seem to sound a bit “dry” and bass-less because of high accuracy. Guess will play with both for a while to see if opinion stabilizes ;)

I think majority of modern laptops use Synaptic touchpad in them. These are capacitive input panels, so naturally they can detect multiple finger presses at once. Recent Synaptics drivers have a lot of multi-touch gesture functionality in them. However, you will find most of it disabled on many notebooks – I think for marketing reasons (or maybe to avoid aggravating Apple too much ;) ). However, all multi-touch functionality is present on standard driver, and just artificially “hidden” using registry keys (which are even named like “HideTwoFingerScrolling”, how honest of them ;) ). So, to re-enable missing features just: Download this .reg file , save it somewhere – on your desktop for example. Do not choose “Open” in browser, choose “Save To…”! Click on it to open in Explorer ( important! open from Windows Explorer/Desktop only, not directly from your web browser, not from third-party file managers like Total Commander – to make sure it will use correct registry on 64...

Personally I think pocket multi-tools (as a superset of more well-known Swiss Army knives) are very useful. You never know when during the course of day you’ll need to cut a package or envelope open, snip a loose thread, open a bottle or unscrew/screw down something. It’s bad when you don’t have proper tools nearby (but even when you do, it’s often a hassle to fetch/put them back). That’s why it’s extremely good to always have multi-tool in your pocket, especially when it’s small and light enough to be unnoticeable. Obviously compactness comes at the price of less features, it’s always a compromise.