In LA

Edit 9/21/2010: This deal now dead. They’re now selling on Amazon for $74.99.

Because I’ve bought or browsed similar items in the past, Amazon.com just sent me an email to let me know that the “Deal of the Day” is the Ultimate Ears SuperFi 4 Noise Isolating Earphones, which they’re selling today for $39.99. The email says this is 69% off the list price. I don’t know what Amazon’s regular price for these is as they’ve already changed their price for today’s deal, but I do know that these same earbuds go for $121.10 at buy.com, and they have sold for around $80 new on eBay¹. So this really is a significant price drop for what is normally an expensive item.²

The market has gotten pretty crowded since I first started using high-quality earbuds, and this particular pair is one of many I’ve never tried, but the reviews for the SuperFi 4’s look to be promising. For half price or less they may be a good choice if you’ve been considering a set of better earbuds than those which come with the iPod/iPhone/Zune/etc.

I like and recommend using earbuds over headphones when monitoring audio recording in a noisy environment, when watching or listening to a media player on a plane or train, or when listening to media in bed³. I’ve had very good experiences with Shure earbuds and with the Future Sonics Atrios. My Shure e2c’s I bought very cheaply on an earlier deal, and I use them for running⁴. The Atrios are part of my production kit, and I also use them when traveling. The fact that earbuds block a lot of surrounding noise, just as do earplugs, allows me to concentrate on listening at lower volume and without distraction. If you’ve got the need, these might be worth looking into while they’re discounted.⁵

1. My favorite way to determine the going price for an item is to do a search on eBay for completed auctions. [↩]
2. The last sale a search turns up for this item was back in July for $59.99. [↩]
3. I’ve slept with earbuds in and iPhone alarm on before when traveling or when sharing a room to avoid waking others. [↩]
4. Which I really need to get back to doing on a regular basis. [↩]
5. Or as Amazon says, “…while supplies last.” [↩]

The stereo in my friend’s 2010 Prius¹ has a very useful feature: bluetooth audio input. As soon as he steps inside his car, his iPhone connects to the stereo wirelessly, and he can then play music from its library or using Pandora without connecting any cables.

I noticed that DealExtreme sells a bluetooth stereo music receiver for $12.99². This tiny, battery-operated device looks like an ugly cousin of an old iPod shuffle, sporting a big bluetooth symbol in the middle of its control pad. It’s designed to accept wireless transmissions from your iPhone, computer, or other device that supports bluetooth audio streaming, and then play that received audio out headphones connected to its jack. $12.99 falls well within my speculative hacking budget.

So I bought the device and have tested it out. When I plugged a cable between its headphone jack and my car’s audio input jack and streamed audio to it from my iPhone, it worked a treat. It shows up in the iPhone’s bluetooth menu as a device named,”BCK-08″.

There are a few problems. The device’s built-in battery is pathetic, and within an hour or two of use it begins to beep every few minutes to indicate that the battery needs a charge. I also think the audio quality decreases in direct proportion to the battery’s charge, but am not positive about that.

My goal is to take apart this device, wire it to be powered directly from my car, and leave it permanently connected to the car stereo’s auxiliary input jack.

I’ve found a few resources on the net that may be of help:

• The data sheet for the chip used in this device, the ISSC IS1621N. I wish this PDF file were available to simply download. To have to view it in a flash-based viewer feels archaic, and overprotective for information the manufacturer should want to widely disseminate. I do see a button labeled “download” (in Chinese), but to download requires an account on the website and I don’t feel like jumping through account creation hoops in Chinese right now³.
• A page about the chip at its manufacturer’s website.
• The page of someone who has already taken apart the BCK-08 and is planning to do a similar project. He mentions a desire to get line-level output from the device. I think that’d be nice, though I notice no mention of a line out in the chip’s pinout, only an amplified headphone out.
• Wikipedia’s writeup of the LM317 adjustable voltage regulator, which is probably the part I’ll need to use to take my car’s 12V as input and supply 3.7V DC to the BCK-08.
• Or perhaps I could use this constant current-regulated LED driver⁴ to bring my car’s 12V down to 3.7V. It’s designed for high-power Cree LEDs, which take 3.7V input, so I’d guess it might be about right. Would save me some time designing my own circuit with the LM317, and it only costs $2.39.

1. I’m sure many other cars also have this feature. [↩]
2. The device’s full name on DealExtreme’s site is “Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP AVRCP Stereo Music Receiver and Handsfree (Black)” [↩]
3. I’ve been out of China for 3 years now and don’t feel like spending an hour fighting my way through the website with a dictionary in hand [↩]
4. Also from DealExtreme –how about that? [↩]

Looong Steadicam Merlin + Canon T2i shot from ZachFine on Vimeo.

This is not the most exciting shot in the world to watch, but it was for me the most successful of my increasingly steady pairing of a Steadicam Merlin with Canon EOS Rebel T2i and Rode VideoMic .

In order to stop down the kit lens’s aperture enough to achieve anything approaching deep focus in the relatively dark location, I had to shoot at the camera’s 6400 ISO setting. My next big purchase will probably be a fast superwide zoom, maybe the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 . My Canon 20mm f2.8 is just not wide enough –it’s the equivalent of a 36mm field of view on these APS-C sized sensors.

The steadicam was balanced so that it was just barely bottom heavy. About a 4-5 second drop (when the contraption is swiveled so that the camera and the counterweight are both level in front of me, it takes the camera about 5 seconds to float back upright). I enjoyed working with it so balanced.

The terrain was a little tricky. I had to weave around furniture, adults, and running little kids. It’s not the smoothest path I could have carved through the space, but I’m pleased with the improvisation. Around 45 seconds the camera tilted a bit, probably after I ran into something. I tried to tip it back.

The Rode Videomic is just directional enough to isolate bits of conversation in front of the camera. I can clearly hear my cousin Bruce explaining the intricacies of the game “Risk” and my Uncle Bob talking about a play he’d seen called “The Whipping Man ” as the camera passes each of them.

I applied a very temporary color correction with Final Cut Pro’s 3-way color corrector filter, and applied very sophisticated titles and transitions, and exported to 1080p H264 using Compressor before uploading. Yay.

If it looks stuttery, try toggling “HD” to “off”.

The other day I unexpectedly received a CD in the mail, from a sender whose name I didn’t recognize. The band: “Letters vs. Numbers”, album: “Bone Tired”. The back of the sleeve was a handwritten list of other recipients along with a printed request that the recipient rip the album to their computer, add their name and location to the list, and send it to someone else.

Always one to obediently follow directions, I ripped, signed, and sent. I also listened, and damned if it isn’t a great little album. Here’s the first track, “Forget Everything”, for your streaming or downloading pleasure¹ :

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download mp3

I’d highly recommend that you receive this album by mail from a friend or an anonymous source. Failing that, the mysterious band² has a website, a myspace page³, and the album is available at both the iTunes music store and the Amazon MP3 store.

1. Hit the triangle button to play the track in your browser, or the download link to download the mp3 file [↩]
2. Their myspace page doesn’t list the names of band members, their number, or even a location. [↩]
3. The album can be listened to on the page in that icky myspace music player widget. [↩]

Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t¹ ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond².

1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]

What I see when I power-up my iPhone. Below this should hopefully be an embedded QuickTime player set to play my Apple ][ disk drive ringtone.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with my friend Ben and we transferred a bunch of old apple II disks across a serial cable into a Linux box and saved them as disk images. Now I can once again run the programs I wrote in 3rd grade, in an emulator. While we transferred the disks, I was struck by the sound of the apple floppy drives and by the fantastic graphic design on the disk sleeves.

I snapped a photo of the disk sleeve and recorded the sounds of the disk drives with my iPhone. I took the disk drive noises and edited them into a ringtone, and set the disk sleeve image as my iPhone home screen background image.

The ringtone begins with the Apple II's boot sequence and then transitions to a repeating sequence of disk head recalibration sounds. If you ever had an Apple II, you'll recognize all of these noises. I installed the ringtone by double-clicking it (which loaded it into iTunes) and then syncing my iPhone to install the ringtone. It was then available in General Preferences > Sounds.

In case anyone else would also like to use this ringtone, I've added it to this post as an attachment. I have also attached the disk sleeve background image.

Download Apple ][ ringtone

Download Apple ][ disk sleeve image

“Shure I2C-MP Stereo Earphones / Headset (iPhone Compatible)” $19.99 at Amazon.com

Additional Note: These may be now be out of stock at Amazon. If so, the link will take you to the same item but likely at a different price, provided by a vendor other than Amazon. The different and likely higher price, and the lack of free shipping if your order hits $25, may be less enticing.

I bought a pair of these earbuds when they were marked down to $40 and have been using them for running. They’re very high-quality earbuds that are cheap enough that I don’t worry about destroying them with sweat or excessive wear and tear. These produce better audio than any earbud or headphone sold for under $50, probably better than any under $90 but I may have lost track of the market a little and am being conservative in my superlatives.

I wrote a little review of the i2c’s the last time they were on sale, gushing over what a great deal they were at double the current price. $19.99 is ridiculously low, I wonder if these have been discontinued? The previous review is worth a read if you’re considering this purchase.

If you do purchase these earbuds, I’d also recommend getting foam sleeves for them as it makes a huge difference in audio quality. The earbuds don’t ship with foam sleeves, but thin silicon sleeves that just hold the earbuds in the ear and provide negligible isolation from ambient sound. There’s also markedly more¹ bass when listening with foam sleeves.

Here are links to a few options for replacement foam sleeves:

• The Shure Black Olive sleeves work well, though it takes a little work to fit them onto the earbuds.².
• A slightly better sounding, but uglier and quicker to wear out set of foams are the Shure orange foam sleeves. They’d probably suck for running as they’d get saturated with sweat and are not easily washable.
• The fancy ‘comply’ viscoelastic foam tips might be the most expensive and highest quality option, I’ve never tried them.

I’ve linked only to the large sizes of all of these foam sleeve options, as I figure the larger they attempt to expand the better seal they’ll make in the ear canal, leading to more sound isolation and better sound. But if you’re not sure you’ll find the large foams comfortable, they’re all also available in medium and small sizes if you poke around those web sites.

1. but not excessive or muddy [↩]
2. The tubes in the black olive sleeves are slightly too narrow to fit, but can be momentarily stretched with a set of mini needlenose pliers just before installation on the earbuds. The tubes then shrink and hold the sleeves very tightly in place, which I think is a positive thing [↩]

Watch or download at higher resolution (1280×720) on the Vimeo website.

My cousin’s band, Saint Motel, performed at Spaceland a couple of nights ago, and at the venue he asked if I wouldn’t mind shooting some of the show. It so happens that I had some equipment with me. I’ve shot many a rock show with a 35mm still camera, but never video. I figured it’d be fun to get some footage, even as a purely educational endeavor.

From this experience, I’ve learned a few important things:

• Bring earplugs, the club won’t always have them.
• The nearby 7-11 probably won’t sell them either, despite being located across the street from a loud music venue.
• Torn napkins kind of function like foam earplugs, without ease-of-use, comfort, or discretion.
• Saint Motel is very good. OK, I already knew this.
• Guitars sound good. I need to learn guitar already. I’m actually looking forward to installing the new iLife ‘09 suite and playing with the learning sessions built into GarageBand.
• The Canon HV20’s lens isn’t really wide enough to get a good shot at a reasonably close distance that includes the whole band.
• Clubs are dark! Life is easier when you can add just a little light by bouncing a flash off the walls or ceiling.
• A Steadicam Merlin if a fun and extremely well designed tool. It is also a bitch to balance, and it was necessary to rebalance it every few minutes –this perhaps because the movement of the tape shifts the balance or because of temperature changes in the camera during use. The HV20 only weighs 1.2lbs, maybe that stabilizer is less fiddly when used with a larger camera. When balanced, the Merlin did a much better job preventing camera shake and vibration than the camera’s built-in optical image stabilization could possibly have done. It didn’t keep me from being jostled around, but it isolated the camera a little.
• Perhaps because the curtains at the back of the stage were brighter than the performers, the HV20 kept focusing on that backdrop. I sometimes switched to manual focus in order to have a level of control, but it’s pretty difficult to dial images in sharply with the tiny servo-linked focus control and small LCD screen. The camera has a helpful ‘focus assist’ mode that zooms into an area of the image and enhances the contrast, but it can only be engaged when not recording.
• The HV20 does not set its audio levels sanely when presented with truly loud noise. I should have set the levels manually. Most of the audio is “burnt”, lots of clipping and distortion.
• Next time I’ll be a little more assertive about moving to exactly where I want to go within the crowd. A shot from stage left would have been nice.

I hope you enjoy the video. Please note that it’s not really edited. It’s just a few highlight clips that represent the energy of the show, jammed together, separated by a deliberately-rough interstitial shot of a mounted deer head with the glowing name of the band tracked in. Fun.