Daily Movement

This totally describe my situation and can be related to more than just music or digital photos:

I’m finding that the “digital photo effect” is starting to make its way into my music and video experiences as well. What’s the DPE? My ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped my ability to consume. Produce from my own digital camera. Acquire from friends, family, Flickr, etc. This has a couple of ramifications:

1. I feel behind all the time.
2. Because there is so much to consume, I don’t enjoy each individual photo as much as I did when they were physical prints. I click through fast.
3. Because of 1 and 2, sometimes I don’t even bother.

— “Too much of a good thing?”

If you pay little or nothing, you value what you have that much, i.e. not much.

There is this interesting use of camera phones to get around the trouble of typing URLs. From http://www.admpartners.com/blog/2004/05/mobilizeyourb.html:

“What is it? It’s a barcode that encodes a URL. If you have a wireless or
mobile internet device, you just scan the barcode into your URL field, and
voila! you load the website it links to. “

However, that such a solution is appealing shows the limitation of cellphones — the difficulty in typing more than a few characters of text.

A Japanese company Reudo makes an external full size keyboard that will accept a cellphone

— similar to the keyboards stands that accept PDAs. I found the keyboards for PDAs useful, but only to a point. For entering or editing text which is hard to do with a stylus (or a cellphone keypad for that matter), the keyboard works. However, the kinds of text applications you’d want to do on a small screen are limited. For example, these work:

• shopping lists
• short journal entries
• email

On the other hand, the following wouldn’t work well unless you have a good visual memory to be able to deal with a small visual portal (e.g. 300×200 pixels) on a larger document. While such a skill could be developed, it may not be a generally useful one.

• spreadsheets
• paging through lots of text for revision
• web browsing
• most multiwindowed applications

I have started using the sennheiser pxc250 on the BART train. You
can still hear the train noise — it’s reduced, but not as much as
earplugs you might buy for a couple of dollars. Also, some of the
BART noise is the metal wheels against metal tracks which is high
pitched and is not cancelled by the circuitry that is designed for
lower pitched noise. I haven’t tried adding music yet which is what
the headphones were designed for. Probably an in-the-ear design (such
as etymotics) would provide better noise isolation than open-air with
cancellation circuitry.
15db reduction.

I tried it in a machine room with lots of equipment fans. You can hear
noise, outside of headphones, but it does indeed reduce the intensity.
It would be better if the phones fit the ears tighter.