Posts

All the earphones/headphones/megaphones yada yada

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Current ones - Sennheiser HD439, Marshall Monitor II, Sony WI-C100 Past Ones from latest to oldest: Realme buds, Philips Wired Earbuds, Klipsch Image S3, Panasonic Headset, Generic Blues headset, Sony Wired earbuds, Generic earbuds. In last 20 years I have been through a bunch of earphones and headphones/headsets. I started with FM Radios and generic earbuds in my college days. This is around 2007-08, seems like an eternity away. We did not have mobiles back then. And the FM radios would take pencil cells. And would need new cells every fortnight. Anyway the music was good to ears. The first major upgrade was when I got my first Sony Mobile and it had inbuilt FM. I bought a decent pair of Sony earbuds at 600 bucks back then. That was $10 in 2008 I think. Those sound astronomically better than my earlier generic earphones. They did not last all that long I remember. Then thanks too recommendation from one of my gamer friends, I bought a Blues headset which was locally ...
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Data Managment Ep 2

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So I'm in the middle of another HDD death. This time it's my WD 1TB. And by the name of this post I'm referring to my original post which talked about my earlier WD 320GB external HDD which died. And somehow I never made a post about it. And in fact I have never made a post about the tens of headphones which I tried and they died. Maybe I should make a catalogue of them. I don't really know what value such a thing to be for anyone except for a story. Anyway I don't listen to much music anymore. I just watch soaps most of the time like an old man. Anyway the thing is I observed that this drive was acting up for some photos when I copied them to the drive. It would hang up. So I'm thinking maybe it's about to die. Ideally I should buy another drive but as usual money is tight and so I just moved data here and there and then left non-critical data on the drive. Got some time today to dig into and found a very good program called Victoria that anal...
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Playing with AI - Pt. 2 and some Beaglebone Black fun

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So I did continue playing with AI and got local GPT4All installation on my new lenovo ideapad 3. Before that I did one thing I had been dreading. I got rid of partition 2. Emptied it and deleted it, and then expanded Partition 1 into that area. This was needed because my WSL installation has been swelling up and up and I really needed more space in C: drive. And managing junk in 100GB had become a chore. Anyway after doing this, now I'm seeing regular hangups and issues with volume-mgr. So there's some negative effect, but screw it. I played around with GTP4All and found it to be a good enough solution for local offline AI. Unfortunately I don't have any use case for such a thing. I tried to configure it as an agent in Visual Studio Code and things just would not work. There were errors, documentation said one thing and another happened at runtime, and there were issues. So I gave up after some time. So yeah tools like Cursor which give you an amazingly well-...
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Playing with AI

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So we have gone on an AI bandwagon. Turns out AI in agent mode can be tremendous help in generating code and documentation. Prompt AI is good only for handling small problems but agent can integrate with IDEs and increase productivity by a few times. The next frontier is locally running AI and so this way one is free from AI provider plans and the only cost is for electricity and hardware. Now a good AI system needing a bunch of AI chips is still costly. But the control could be worth it. For an experiment I started on my now 10 year old Blue Lenovo laptop with Pentium B950. This processor is so old that it does not support AVX2 and so can not really do anything. I can still use this for coding. Actually the bootup was way slow at about 2 mins. But with generous help from chatgpt I was able to bring it down to a minute which is quite good. I also removed a bunch of unneeded things thus making it quite faster to work too. So my goal is to use my new laptop with windows to...
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Realme 3 firmware back to Android 10

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It was a pain to find latest Android 10 firmware for Realme 3. The official website did not have anything for these old devices. One tool I found was a paid service. And unlocking bootloader also stopped working officially. The unofficial process was too complex. And what baffled me was I was just unable to find stock update files anywhere. After a lot of searching, finally found stock Android 10 update at below website. It contains lot more updates besides Realme 3. https://realmefirmware.com/realme-update/ So now I'm back to Android 10. The phone camera is probably as useless as earlier and I think maybe it's damaged by lasers or something else. Anyway I have a DSLR or iPhone to take photos anyway. So quest failed, but I think this phone should run for couple more years at current 66% SOH. It's not perfect, like the GPS conks off once in a while which I think has to do with loose connections due to cracked frame. Anyway let it run for as much as possibl...
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Windows Script to convert heic iphone files to jpg

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So iPhone provides it's own over-engineered challenges. One of that is jpg files are compressed to heic to save about 30% space. But grabbing the files to computer is a pain. And then again you end up with these heic files. There's no inbuilt support for these in windows and no real benefit where storage is cheap. So I decided to save myself the pain and just convert them to jpg using image-magic. Of course, I did not have to code anything, found one ready-made script on the internet. ---------------------------------------------------- @echo off for %%a in (*.HEIC) do ( magick "%%a" "%%~na.jpg" ) echo Conversion complete. pause -----------------------------------------------------
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Marshall Monitor II ANC - New addition to the gadgets

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I was originally against bluetooth speakers and headphones. But then I ended up with an IPhone. I tried dongle-life with a USB-C to 3.5mm jack dongle. Then one day I was talking about bluetooth headphones with my friend and found out that with black-friday there are a lots of deals going on. Looked around for a Sony WH-1000XM5 but it was still going out of budget. Then found out Marshall Monitor II ANC was going to be around 12K INR. So asked friend to buy it and finally friend was in India last month. Got the headphones and found them to be good quality and good value for money at the same time. Anyway now here's specs: PLAY TIME 30 hours with Bluetooth and ANC 45 hours with Bluetooth only WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth 5.0 There's nothing else to add. It's a closed-cup style design with foam-fake leather earcups that do good seal on their own. The ANC is good enough with very good suppression of noise. One problem I'm facing right now is a b...
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