Pogue's headphone alternatives to Bose

I rather like my Bose QC-2 headphones, but now, Pogue says, there are very good alternatives: 

Headphones to Shut Out the World - New York Times

PANASONIC RP-HC500 The pleasantly smushy-edged earcups on this new model do an excellent job of isolating your ears. That may be one reason the noise cancellation works so well; all but the highest frequencies are subtracted. Better still, the music reproduction is stellar, especially in the crisp, clean higher registers.

I waited to look up the prices for these products until after I’d tested them. So I was astonished to discover that you can find these online for $100. You get quality that’s nearly indistinguishable from the Boses — for a third the price.

AUDIO-TECHNICA ATH-ANC7 Here is another winner, with another surprising price: $132 for these comfy, solidly built, absolutely great-sounding headphones. The circuitry cuts out a huge swath of engine, road or train noise, and the music is crystal clear, sweet and finely textured.

David doesn't say which are truly around the ear vs. on the ear. This is an important distinction for eyeglass wearing Luddites. On the ear phones painfully compress my the ears against eyeglass frames, I can really only wear over the ear phones. If I were shopping today I'd consider the above two -- assuming they're "over the ear".

Credit to Pogue as well for pointing out that the Bose QC-3 phones require one to carry a LiOn charger! Grrrr. They should, at the very least, have included a mini-B charging port. That would rule them out for me.

In defense of Bose's high price, the quality of everything in the QC-2 kit is impressive, and Bose customer services is peerless. When a manufacturing defect caused cracks to appear in the arms of my 3 yo phones the discussion with customer service took about a minute. The replacements were a completely new set, not a refurb. I wouldn't mind seeing Bose's price drop to, say, $275 however.

Dan's Data: Laptops for all, and for all a laptop

Dan's Data, one of the world's best geek blogs, reviews the state of the ultra-cheap Linux laptop. No, the Foleo does not quality. DD covers a lot of territory, including the PalmOS running Dana (huh!?) and the famed Newton eMate, but what he really wants is the untouchable $175 OLPC device (one laptop per child). In the meantime, though, the $199 Eee PC is supposed to be coming our way in August.

$200 is indeed interesting.

Fifteen years ago I almost sold our rural school district (Delta County, MI) on a program of distributing eMates to elementary school kids (a lease-to-buy program with an insurance component). Mercifully saner heads (not mine) prevailed. The Eee PC, if it truly appears, is going to resurrect schemes like that ...

Update 1/2/09: The eMate was formally introduced in 1997. My school district presentation would have been @1994. So there's either something fishy with my memory, or there was a long prelude to the eMate's formal launch. I think in those days, when Jobs was gone, Apple used to leak product ideas -- so I'm tending to favor the latter. I'll have to see if I can dredge up the presentation from my archives.

Screen fonts in OS X vs. XP/Vista: Round to Microsoft

Alas, even those who prefer OS X must admit that sometimes Microsoft wins one. Safari/Windows has allowed side-by-side comparison of Apple and Microsoft's approach to font rendering. Both are defensible, but today Microsoft's is better. I suspect Apple's approach is a descendant of NextStep's Postscript display technology, which became OS X's PDF based display technology. Ideal for a very high resolution output, like 300 dpi printing. Not so good for 100 dpi screens.

Google Docs acting up today

Google Docs & Spreadsheets has been acting strangely today. One spreadsheet reverted to a prior version -- I only noticed the change after printing it. On a recheck the document was up to date again, but service is slower and I've gotten some '404s'.

Looks like a bad night at the Googleplex.

Safari 3.0: Apple's beta is Google's alpha

I'm playing with Safari 3.0 on Mac and Windows. On Windows it has problems with dual monitors [1], some font configurations, BlogThis! bookmarklet didn't work, and it's crashy. On OS X we get full support from Gmail, Gcal, Google Documents and blogger/BlogThis (!). Google spreadsheets don't work on either platform.

On a minor footnote Safari finally renders renders nested bullets correctly. That's been a long time coming.

So now there's competition for Camino 1.5 on OS X. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! (BTW, Safari does inline spellchecking as nicely as Camino.)

A word of warning, however. Those who do not know Apple will need this translation table:

• Google pre-alpha 1.0 = Apple beta
• Google alpha 1.0 = Apple 1.0
• Google beta 1.0 = Apple 2.0
• Google production 1.0 = Apple 3.0

Apple treats early adopters as alpha testers. You have been warned.

Update: Even though it seems to work on blogger, it really doesn't. Many post actions fail.

Update 6/17: The developers made this classic windows programming error.

Twin Cities now hi res on Google Maps

The Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MSP) have graduated to highest-resolution on Google Maps. We get a lot more detail now ...

OS X Leopard: All is forgiven

Ok, so an out-of-cycle release of Safari is impressive, and a Windows version is astounding. Integrated GGears-style iPhone development -- perfect and wonderful. New Finder - at last, long needed. 64 bit - fine. A viewer architecture -- very good if it lets us finally view PowerPoint files [1] on OS X. Spotlight with Boolean operators? Duh, yes. Remote file access and/or synchronization via .mac - nice.

All more than sufficient to make me very happy to fork over $130 to Apple and some larger amount for family .Mac services. Heck, one or two of 'em would suffice. I wasn't expecting Jobs to address my longstanding whine anyway. I shed a few tears and turned to my work.

Then Andrew burst into my office and ripped the keyboard from my hands. His eagle eyes had spotted a small button in the Finder demo that nobody had commented on, a button that led him to this fragment on Apple's new Leopard page:

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Finder

... With shared computers automatically displayed in the sidebar, it’s far easier to find or access files on any computer in your house, whether Mac or PC. All it takes is a click. But here’s where things get really interesting. By clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorized, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it. You can even search all the computers in the house to find what you're looking for...

So the very biggest "one more thing" is so big it didn't even merit a mention. This is what will allow Apple to sell the next, much more ambitious, version of Apple TV.

I'm a happy man today.

[1] Listening to the video there's no PPT support - just word and excel. Shame. Maybe later.