Random Thoughts

I’ve been trying to get more walking in lately, but walking is boring. To keep parts of the brain entertained, I thought it might be nice to listen to radio theatre stuff, and it is.  Nice, that is.

The great thing about plays instead of music is that it’s fine just listening with one ear (literally), so I’ve been trying to find bluetooth ear plugs that are hassle free and work without the other one of the pair nearby.

After trying a number of different plugs, I finally found this one: It’s a Rowkin Mini Plus+. (Gotta love that name.) While you can buy two of them and use them in a more normal stereo configuration, you can also buy just one.

Hm, that picture doesn’t really show how small these are…

There, that’s better.

Not only is this earbud small, it’s also hassle free.

It comes with this “charging tube”, which uses a magnet…

… so you just slip it near the top of the tube, and smack, no worries, it’s charging. Very nicely designed physically.

As for daily use, it’s also just about perfect. You pick it up, press the one button on the end for four seconds, it says “on” and then “beep” (which means that it’s connected to the phone), and then you can play and pause by hitting the button again: It’ll continue playing from where you let off (if your player supports that, but I guess they all do).

I’ve only tried it with an Android phone, but it’s glitch-free there: I don’t have to pick up the phone, ever, except to change the volume. Or choose another radio play, which doesn’t happen very often, since they’re looong.

So: Perfect. Perfect? Nope. Bluetooth. As with any bluetooth device I’ve used, there are dropouts. These have way fewer dropouts than I’ve experienced before, though, and if I have the phone in my left pocket and the ear bud in my left ear, I’ve yet to experience a dropout. Anything else, whenever I turn my head quickly I’ll get a dropout.

Which reminds me that I meant to write a long rant about how st00pid it is using bluetooth for audio playback: Bluetooth audio has a very small buffer, because it’s meant for realtime communication. That’s a fine thing for talking on the phone, but most of the time devices like these are used, they’re used to stream a continuous audio stream.

So why not use something meant for streaming? Like… just get chunks of mp3 or ogg or whatever compressed audio format is most convenient, and then you can have the antenna take a mini-sleep while playing the hunk, and then request the next hunk?

Requiring an almost-perfect radio connection between the player and the earbuds is insane: There will always be situations where you’ll get dropouts depending on the angle, reflection and distance.

I’m happy with these for now, and I guess I’ll just have to wait until the industry realises that I’m smart and they’re stupid and then they’ll start streaming audio the smart way.

So there.

Rating for my use case:

As I’m sure everybody remembers from this post just … six years ago, I have a cat 5 based music distribution thing going on in my apt.

It works fine.

This weekend I realised that the only thing I wanted to tweak here was having music near my workstation in the hall. I usually sit here doing stuff (scanning LPs and ripping CDs and the like) in the middle of the night. If I’m to listen to music while I’m doing that, I have to pump up the volume in the living room way too much, and that’s bad for the neighbours. So I don’t do that.

And I don’t really want to lay down even more cat5. And besides, the mixing box is maxed out on the outputs. So what to do?

Yes! I could just insert a Y cable into the proceedings, cut the cat 5 cable going to the bedroom (which passes through the closet near the hall table), and then… things should work.

It’s been a few years since I’ve terminated cat5, so I had to reacquaint myself with how that all worked. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any connection boxes left from the last time I did this, so I had to buy a new one, and it’s really confusing. The colours here seem to imply that to achieve T568A cabling (that I vaguely remember using in 2011) is blue, wh/blue, brown, wh/brown, orange, wh/orange, green, wh/green. Right?

That doesn’t seem right at all, but the numbering also seems to imply that the PCB is doing some kind of re-routing to the plug, so… I just went with that theory.

You can see where this is going.

That’s one of the old ones I’m going to connect to, and as you can clearly see, it has the more traditional “A” ordering.

As you can see from this expertly put in wiring, all this is luckily taking place inside a closet, so things can be as messy as they want to be, and they are, since I have to do the installation standing on a stepladder. On my toes, since the stepladder is five centimetres too short.

Kachunk kachunk kachunk, and by just plugging the input to the output, I see that the connection works. Because there’s still sound in the bedroom.

*gasp*

That’s the mixer box… At this sight I’m envisioning trial and error for fifteen minutes to find the right balun…

But what is this?!? My 2011 self actually marked stuff!? Thank you, 2011 self!

So I put a Y cable in. I only had a male to female/female while I need male to male/male, so I ended up with a lot of extra wiring, but that can be fixed later… when I find somebody that sells all-male Ys.

And on the other side, the opposite balun, which then goes to another balun to the bedroom…

And nothing worked. Which means I misinterpreted the mysterious T568A markings and contemplated buying a cat 5 testing kit. But then I found another cat 5 thingamabob in a cupboard of the same type as the old ones!

Kachunk kachunk kachunk!

It works!

So I got a couple of Micropods…

And a NAD D3020 amplifier to drive these huge speakers! Sound! Yes!

The horror of having to rip CDs at night without sufficient music is finally over! It’s OVER!

Phew!

In conclusion: Cat 5 is hard. When the equipment is new and modern and confusing. Otherwise it’s really easy.