Archive for March, 2008
Insanely expensive speaker cable isn’t any better than a coat hanger
There’s a nice post on Consumerist about those expensive high-end speaker cables that will apparently transform your stereo’s sound:
Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which was the coat hanger. The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.
As one of the commenters notes, the only time you really need heavy duty audio cables is when you’re jumping around on stage playing an instrument. Then, ultra-cheap cables are a false economy.
Blogs and suicide
An excellent post by MetaFilter user Miko on the story that an ad executive was driven to suicide by blogs:
There’s no ‘brain condom’ you can put on when you use the internet — (or take a job, or walk into the world) — that will protect you from nasty words. Fortunately for most of us, there is more to people’s lives than the internet, and perspective can return when we step away and offset random communications from near-strangers with concrete, longstanding, and meaningful relationships and activities. Parents can counsel wise use, and can cut the connection if need be. Adults can spend time with friends, exercise, engage in hobbies, limit their own exposure to stressful information. Perhaps in this age where online communication is new to many people and they aren’t sure how to handle it, teaching interpersonal relationship building, communication skills which apply on and off-line, and better physical and mental self-care will become increasingly necessary.
The war on cheese
A report commissioned by the Food Standards Agency suggests that cigarette-style warnings on dairy products could prevent all kinds of horrible deaths. The FSA says that reports are “overblown”, but doesn’t actually rule the idea out. So it’s going to happen, then.
Ronnie strikes again
The gorgeous, talented (he says) Ronnie Brown is revamping the blog design, and I reckon it’s great - but right this second there’s a positioning issue that means the design is perfect on Windows and a wee bit off on the Mac. It’ll be sorted asap.
Vacuum cleaners suck, but some suck more than others
Not strictly a technology post, I know, but hey! The world needs more vacuum cleaner buying advice!
I’ve got a thing about vacuum cleaners - not in a Nicky Wire “Hoover obsession” kind of way, but in a “I’ve got a black dog, light carpets, doing the stairs is my job and it makes me swear like a bastard” way. As I’ve mentioned before, a single labrador can shed 400Kg of black hair in a single day, and most of it then welds itself to furniture, carpets and anything else nearby.
Because of this, I’ve gone through a whole bunch of vacuum cleaners. Bagged cleaners tried and failed to stem the tide of dog fluff; the bagless Vax sounded like World War Three and blew birthday cards off window sills from 20 feet away; the Panasonic exploded. The bagless Hoover seemed promising when accessorised with a £20 turbo tool, but its dust container is so small you need to empty it every three seconds.
And then I borrowed a Dyson.
*angelic choir*
Now, when a vacuum cleaner costs roughly the same as a BMW M5 it needs to be pretty special. And it is. But it’s not that, compared to rival bagless cleaners, it’s whisper-quiet. It’s not that the ball it’s mounted on makes it a doddle to clean under furniture. It’s not the easy emptying mechanism. And it’s not that the suction is so good, you could stand in your back garden and suck pigeons out of the sky. All of these things are true, but they’re the reasons you give your partner for buying one. The real reason the Dyson is brilliant is this.
The hose attachment looks like a laser gun.
It really does. In fact, if you were to strap the cylinder to your back and adopt an unfeasibly gravelly American accent, you’d easily pass for the hero of any recent sci-fi action game. Although I suspect that a game where you were tasked with removing dog hair from the stairs of a suburban semi wouldn’t be particularly brilliant.
Still, it’d probably be more exciting than F.E.A.R. Files.