episiarch

Great photos, Peter, and a lucky man you are to live near such beauty. Today: received Along with a portrait of my daughter, and pancakes (English ones - more like cr

I have a MacBook Pro in this same category - only 4GB officially supported, but supposedly can go up to 6 with aftermarket help. I can attest that even with 4GB you can get into heavy memory swapping situations all too readily. (I do use Activity Monitor to see where all my memory and CPU cycles are going, etc.) But for me there's a big difference between the really heavy swapping situations where a program halts for seconds at a time and you get the spinning beachball cursor, and just general slowness. I still get the beachballs more often than I'd like, but I was able to cure a lot of the general slowness without adding more memory. Here's what helped: - iDefrag, an aftermarket defragmenter for OS X. The first run made a huge speed difference for me. Previously the free space on my drive was fragmented as hell, and iDefrag did a great job coalescing that as well as defragmenting fragmented files.* - NoScript, a Firefox add-on that keeps scripts from running on web pages unless you say it's okay. This took CPU use way down, because I tend to keep a bunch of tabs open and virtually all of them are running scripts, most of which I don't care about but which burn lots of cycles. - BarTab, a different Firefox add-on that quietly unloads browser tabs you haven't visited in a while. The tab's still there, still ready for you to click on it, it'll just take a second to reload its content when you do. This saves some memory, and also some CPU when BarTab unloads pages whose scripts you've whitelisted with NoScript. - BashFlash sits in my menu bar and lets me know if the Flash process has gone insane and needs to be put out of my misery. Between these measures I've gotten my Mac back to feeling fast and new again, and while going up to 6GB might be tempting some day, it's not tempting for me now. (What I'd probably do first is try moving virtual memory onto an ExpressCard/34 SSD, but we'll see when the time comes.) *Note: for maximum effectiveness you really want to boot off a separate drive rather than forcing iDefrag into its more limited "defragging a drive while you're using it" mode. This was easy for me since I use Super Duper to keep a nightly-updated bootable clone of my main drive that I could work off of while my internal drive was being defragged, but if you don't have this, be prepared for some downtime. A total defrag of my 320GB 7200RPM internal laptop drive took something like 12 hours.

I would certainly come to a London meet. Other European cities, maybe 50% (family responsibilities etc etc), but I would try. London Heathrow is a pretty good jumping-off point for a European trip, of course. London itself is rather a pricey city of course, but a fun one. If we're thinking of "airport hotels" then we could look at Slough, which is a) a very short and affordable taxi ride from Heathrow and http://www.head-case.org/forums/uploads/emoticons/default_cool.png' alt='B)'> the first stop on the express trains westward out of Paddington (so there are direct Slough<->Paddington trains all the time). Also convenient to Windsor Castle and to Legoland, for those who (or whose families) would take advantage of those outings. As Slough is not itself any sort of tourism magnet, I'm going to guess hotel rooms go for less than in London proper, though I've not verified this. Finally I live a short distance from Slough, so I can provide some boots-on-the-ground services, checking out potential venues etc., though I don't think I'm the right person to be one of the prime organisers. Anyway: +1 vote for London (or London-ish).

Works great. After mucking around with a variety of keyboards I installed one of these on my last work PC and liked it a lot. I found some freeware thingy to swap the locations of a couple of the modifier keys to better suit my tastes, but other than that it was a great keyboard right out of the box and for as long as I was on that computer.

I don't like the bokeh in the lower picture. The cloth is smeary in a way that's hard for me to look at. But in the lower picture I like the contrast better, the quality of the gleam on the metal especially.

And O2 in the UK still doesn't even have its act together. Kinda annoying.

Refurbs are now in the Apple store starting at $499. $849 for refurb server model.

Registered to go see the World Barista Championship next week. May wind up working as a volunteer as well, if they are desperate enough to want me.

Really impressive, Nate. Thanks for the encouragement, Al. Yep, it should be fine. Rachel the Wonder Nanny has also secured a room at the Art Centre in case of rain, this in the midst of also buying gifts for Chiara's playmate who just acquired a new sister yesterday, and for the new sister herself. She's sure going to be missed when she disappears to NYC for a week in a few days.

Yesterday: dinner at the pub with friends, with the game on. We have pretty much exactly the same level of interest in the World Cup that Craig does, but it was a neighbourhood place with a convivial atmosphere and a terrific garden out back for the kids (our one and the several others of other patrons) to run around and play in. Pub owners are a couple and she's from New York, so it was a safe place for Americans even during the game Today: daughter's second birthday. Presents, playing, cupcake-making, and videochats with grandparents. Tomorrow: daughter's second birthday party. I am currently picturing all the things that can go wrong. Fortunately our nanny will be on the job and is the kind of person who has no trouble keeping track of, for example, which child has which dietary restriction and can't be allow to reach into which other child's snack bag, etc., etc. Without her we'd be lost.

What great pics, and what a great party I missed. Are those B&W shots actual film, or a digital effect? They're really excellent.

^ Now that my eyes have been burned out, I'm going to need my headphone rig more than ever. Please make sure the next CJ is white-cane accessible.

Actually, yeah, just for the sake of completeness, see if you can scare up a different 1/4" adaptor and try it out. It was a long time ago, but I can remember at least once I've had some kind of dimension mismatch in one of those things that resulted in badly borked-up signals.

If your rig is driving a K702 nicely but your JH13 badly and that same JH13 sounds good out of a phone, then I am out of ideas unless something unbelievably funky has happened to your 1/4" adaptor. Hopefully somebody else will have a clue.

Good to know you, Steve, though we haven't met in person. I'm glad to be part of a community where you felt safe and accepted.

Welcome, hpz. What you're describing doesn't sound like any GS-1 I've ever heard. Lack of mid and high end definition is absolutely, positively not something I would associate with this amp, nor is bloated bass. Something is badly off somewhere, and I would tend to put the GS-1 really low on the list of possible suspects. How does the JH13 sound plugged straight into the headphone-out of the DAC1? What are you using to cable the DAC to the GS-1? You don't need a crazily expensive cable here, but you're not using something horrendously bad, are you?

Very possible I might be there June 30 or thereabouts. I'll keep you in the loop.

Doctor Who. "Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly. In the right order."

*writes self a note never to let postjack see his music library*

Thanks for those impressions, Shahrose. I've been wondering where to slot the HA-006(++, etc) into my mental map of the amp landscape, and this is very helpful.

That's great. Then hopefully with a fit adjustment you'll be getting all you hoped for out of your JHs.

Ruh-roh.

I totally missed that subtext.

Heard from a family friend (his daughter and ours are the same age, yada yada) who was in London, turned out he had time for a visit on his way back to the airport (we're just a few miles west of Heathrow). Great to see him, and in addition a rare treat to make an espresso for another straight-espresso drinker like me who makes his own and knows the attention that goes into making a good one. He had three, which I take as an endorsement. We all went out to the farmer's market, which is just around the corner from us on the first Saturday of every month. Came back with a good selection of breakfasty baked goodies plus a kilo or something of amazing-looking fresh strawberries. There was headphone talk too. He travels with HD25-SP and ER-6i and was open to suggestions. I made some. Went to the gym after our friend left, then the bookstore. They didn't have what I was looking for but I wound up talking with the author who was doing a signing, and came home with one of his books. Stopped and chatted with our friendly local wine merchant on the way home, picked up a bottle of chilled prosecco to go with the strawberries. Missed you guys and CanJam.

I think something must not be right. It should be much, much better than just OK. Could it be something else in your audio chain? Also FWIW I felt like my jh13 needed a few hours of play to come up from the "this sounds fine but I don't see what the fuss is about" level to "ohhh, okay, now I see" level. You're past that by now, right? If all else fails, I don't know what to say except maybe they're just not for you and should be returned. That would be a pity, but it could be that's the way it is. That's about the level of isolation I have, with dry ears. With moist ears (lube or wet from the shower) isolation improves. But my experience with custom earpieces is that unless they are made of a slightly sticky/tacky substance or else are slightly oversized, outside sounds are muted only so much.