Gear Diary » Raymond Yu

Audio-File: Earphone specifications explained

Raymond Yu — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:00:57 +0000

Many people buy some sort of portable hearing device. By this I am referring to earbuds (like the iPods have bundled), in-ear earphones (like Apple’s In-Ear), over-the-ear headphones (like Sennheiser’s PX series) or large cans (something like the Sennheiser HD series). For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just refer to these as “earpieces.” When you’re buying a new one, whether you’ve lost your iPod earbuds or you’ve frayed your last pair, you will almost always see, technical specifications. Most of you will gloss over these, ignore them, or -- at best -- glance at them and shrug your shoulders because few people really know what all those numbers mean. I'm here today to help explain all of those seemingly random figures, and hopefully help you along the next time you set out to buy a new earpiece.

Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Macally BookShell Pro2 Review

Raymond Yu — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:59:26 +0000

I've always been interested in protecting my baby MacBook Pro, but I didn't like the look of the plastic hard cases, and I used an elastic neoprene sleeve for a while. I then searched the internet again, in the hopes of finding a cover for my MacBook Pro that was protective, and at the same time stylish. However, all I could find were really variants of the plastic case model. Until I stumbled across Macally. Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Control your iTunes library, Minority Report style

Raymond Yu — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:25:19 +0000

A friend of mine pointed out an interesting piece of software called FluidTunes, which allows you to control your iTunes library (in CoverFlow view) by use of gestures, picked up by your iSight camera on your Mac. Now upon testing it myself, it's quite obvious that the product hasn't quite left beta stage yet, as even moving my elbow to move my hand in front of my camera causes it to control something. Usability factor, at this point, is almost ZERO. But does it have a high Geek factor? Hell yeah.

Credit: IMDB

I believe that right now it is in a Mac OS-only implementation, but hopefully they'll port it over to Windows soon. Link: Fluid Tunes Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Gaming in the clouds…

Raymond Yu — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:33:25 +0000

If you knew me, then you'd probably know that I'm a proponent of the cloud and cloud computing. I have replaced native, client-side apps when I could. An example of this is the icon of Google Docs, which always stays in the Dock on my MacBook Pro, as I use it in place of Word for Mac or Pages. For spreadsheeting, I use Google Sheets. Except for presentations, which I still feel more at ease editing in my copy of Keynote '09.

The reason I simply love cloud computing, is simple. Everyone only needs relatively weak connections, and a broadband connection. Heck, sometimes even something weaker can be utilized. But the point is, you could run something like Google Docs almost as well on a 5-year old computer as you could run it on a Mac Pro. Continue reading on Gear Diary ...