Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT

Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT

I just received my new gadget today. It's Sennheiser PXC360BT headphones. I bought it for its active noise canceling. I want to know if it's effective on a plane. I will field test it on my way back to Canton.

The box is not big, and you can see the headphones inside with a paper box underneath. The headphones come with a removable battery, a Micro-USB connector, audio cable, and all kinds of adapters. They are put in the traveler's bag inside that paper box.

The battery was empty, so I charged it with my MacBook Pro over the Micro-USB connector. I didn't finished the charging within an hour long lunch, so I need to measure the charge time in the future. I tested it via Bluetooth with my iPhone and also via audio cable with my MacBook Pro. The sound quality is good to me and it feels comfortable to wear.

Pairing the headphones with iPhone is simple and straightforward. Press and hold the Bluetooth button and you can connect it on the iPhone. The iPod app treats it like an AirPlay device so you can easily switch between internal speaker and Bluetooth headphones.

After lunch, I've tested it on the subway. Wearing the headphones will reduce the noise. Enabling active noise canceling will further reduce low frequency noise. With both Noise Guard and Talk Through enabled, you will hear people on the train shouting to each other in front of you. In their perspective, it's just talking. With low frequency noise canceled, it sounds like shouting.

So far, I've noticed two small problems with Sennheiser PXC360BT. One is that when charging and listening over the cables at the same time, static is noticeable. The other is that when Bluetooth is interfered sound will jump. If it's interfered for several seconds, iPhone treats it as AirPlay device disconnected and then pauses the music.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Merging Two English Blogs

I have two English blogs now. One on Blogger and another on Posterous. I wanted to post different things on different blogs. Posterous should be more light-weight and photo driven. However, I don't post often so I can't differentiate two blogs.

I just (eventually) started my Cantonese blog. For Cantonese input convenience, I type on my iPhone and then post it to Blogger via Posterous. That means I have the same Cantonese content on both Blogger and Posterous. (I will hide one in the future to avoid duplicated content.) so I think using the same method for my English blog should be feasible.

After merging two blogs, I don't have to worry about differentiation any more. I don't have to think about which blog to post depending on the type of content. I can focus on writing instead of tools. If I'm with my Mac, I will use MarsEdit; If only my iPhone is available, I will use Posterous. No matter what I use, all content merges to my Blogger's stream.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Monday, August 08, 2011

Moving Blogs to New Domain

I bought catchen.me last year and point it to my old domain catchen.biz. Now I want to use catchen.me as my main entrance. That means I need to migrate all sub-domains under catchen.biz to catchen.me.

Why did I use catchen.biz at the first place? I wanted to register a domain from Google Apps in order to make sure that my domain is associated with Google Apps. Neither catchen.com nor catchen.net is available so I picked catchen.biz. However, I found out that people don't respond well to .biz domains. When I say "you can find me on catchen dot biz", they will ask "catchen dot what?" Then I understood that I needed to get a easily recognizable domain. That's why I bought catchen.me.

I let catchen.me point to catchen.biz for several months and it works well, but the content stays on catchen.biz. Now I want to move the content to catchen.me and make catchen.biz a simple redirection. I wanted to do this long ago but I'm too lazy to set up an Apache for the redirection. I don't want to touch all those configurations so I kept postponing this task.  Recently I found out that I can do this with pure JavaScript and that's a language I'm comfortable with, so I decided to give it a try.

I wrote a less than 30 lines JavaScript file and push it to Heroku. Then it's done. And it's free! I don't need to maintain my own server. Heroku's free plan should be enough to handle a few request to my old domain. I don't need to know anything about Apache configuration.  All I need to learn is Node.js, but I want to learn it for fun anyway.

So far, I've migrated three sub-domains: english, cantonese, and dotnet. If the solution is stable, I will move chinese, which is the sub-domain with most content.