Good headphones to go with MP3 players and computers

I didn't spend money and time on headphones for me to listen to music on MP3 players and computers at the beginning since I thought the sound from computers were too lousy to justify expensive headphones. However, after listening to music many hours daily for a while, I got frustrated with poor sound quality my Sony ear buds offered and started to do some research online. I found this Koss Portapro had pretty good reputation and Amazon had it for about $34, so I purchased a pair to try. To my surprise, the music sounded much better than I expected suddenly when I switched to Portapro. It was then I got hooked. I started to do more research and started to build my own DAC and Headphone Amplifiers (I am an Electrical Engineer with extensive design experience in test instruments and communication equipments). Following the recommendations on GoodCans (I found the author shares a lot of tastes in sound with me) I upgraded to Grado SR60 (now discontinued and replaced by SR60i). SR60 costs about $70, which offers great performance that not many competitors can offer. Amazingly, these 2 models were designed many years ago, and they still have about the best performance/cost ratio. They are also easy for computers/MP3 players to drive without an extra amplifier. I also use Koss KSC75 when I am traveling. I purchased these under $5 from RadioShack on sale. The sound is almost identical to Portapro with slightly stronger treble and weaker bass (because it does not sit on the ears as tight as Portapro with pressure from the headband).

Lately I've been using JVC HA-RX700 at work, which provides some sound isolation so I do not hear too many phone conversations around me. These have deeper bass than Portapro and SR60. These can be found at $35 online. This model is more sensitive, i.e., outputs higher volume than Koss and Grado products.

For listening inside flights, I use JVC HA-FX66A or Sennheiser CX300. These do not provide super isolation as more expensive models do, but they are good trade-offs between sound/isolation and cost.

If anyone asks for recommendation, I will not hesitate recommending any of the 4 bigger models I mentioned here. However, they are not very pretty or fashionable, so it may not be something suitable if you care more about look than sound and music.

It is important to note that these headphones give you best sound when your music is near CD quality. If you listen to a lot of music ripped at low rate or with noticeable distortions, these headphones will show these flaws with no mercy. I do have a recommendation for these situations - Sennheiser HD-555. I found one under $70 after mail in rebate. HD-555 is reasonable balanced, i.e., flat response over frequency, but lacks details that is revealed by the other headphones I recommended above. This is the reason the music sounds smoother, but it is also the reason the it is not on my favorite list, because I hardly listen to any music ripped at low rates.

Make prints from your digi-cam at photo finishers

Digi-cams (not DSLRs) usually takes pictures in an aspect ratio of 4:3, however, most popular size for photo prints in North America is 4x6 inches, which has an aspect ratio of 3:2. Therefore, pictures from digi-cams cannot fit the paper perfectly, one either have to crop the pictures to 3:2 ratio or leave the 2 sides of the prints blank (you can trim them off when you get the prints in your hands) and only use a portion of the paper for the pictures.

For some reason, almost all photo finishers choose to crop the pictures, some do the cropping automatically. Maybe this was coming from film days, most cameras did not have a 100% view of the scenes, so people left plenty of spaces around, which allowed cropping. This is very annoying for digi-cam users because they can easily see that some part (sometimes are important parts such as a head, an arm, etc.) being cropped out in prints. To avoid this nuisance, I always resize my pictures to fit only the width of the prints, and leave the 2 sides along longer direction blank. At the beginning, I was using photo editing software to do this as I also needed to adjust color balance, sharpness, etc. for the prints. As my pictures need less tweaking recently, this method gets cumbersome. So I moved back to a command-line tool ImageMagick to do this. You can do this resizing in just one line of command:

convert original.jpg -resize 1800x1200 -background white -gravity center -extent 1800x1200 -quality 100 print.jpg

In this example, the original picture from digi-cam is original.jpg, and the output file is print.jpg. I resized the picture to 1800x1200 because photo finishers almost universally recommend 300 DPI resolution as optimum. The blank area is set to white in this example, you can change to other colors you prefer, such as skyblue, etc. As far as I know, this tool is available both for Linux/BSD and Windows. This is a very convenient tool, and in fact the quality of resizing is also pretty good. I highly recommend those who have the same problem with prints give this great tool a try.

Hollywood Boulevard

Having lived in Los Angeles and Orange County for 10 years, I've been to Hollywood only twice. Both in this year 2009, and both time I was the driver for family visitors. The recent visit was on August 29th. It was very hot to walk around under the Sun in Southern California at this time of the year. Still there were a lot of people there. Never understand why this place is attractive to tourists. It's untidy and crowded. Those who left their names there don't even come here unless for the Oscar Awards (used to be held at The Shrine next to University of Southern California). For someone like me who needs to go to USC campus from time to time to visit my mentor, this is a good change. Oscar Awards are held at Kodak Theatre these days, so no traffic jam around USC anymore!

Many tour buses run from Hollywood Boulevard to show tourists the homes of those stars. You can also purchase maps to show those houses on Sunset Boulevard. I find it amusing that so many people like to peep into other peoples' houses, while they want their own privacy. This also reminds me of some countries' double standards on freedom and human rights.

You can see all kind of people on Hollywood Boulevard, some are in costume to make money having tourists taking photos with them. Here are some that I found interesting.

Trip to Hawaii

Just came back from vacation. This time it was Honolulu, Hawaii. Most people go to Honolulu for their first visit to Hawaii, but this is not the case for me. This is my first trip to Honolulu but the fifth trip to Hawaii. My impression of Honolulu is "unexpected". Waikiki is far more crowded than any other island in Hawaii I'd been before, yet Waikiki beach is pretty neat and clean. Ocean looks gorgeous despite the high volume of visitors. On the other hand, traffic by car is not as convenient, hotel rooms are smaller, and there is a charge for parking in the hotel!

A photo of the hotel we stayed is shown here. It is Marriott Spa & Resort at Waikiki. It is pretty nice and reasonably priced (well, comparing to similar hotels in Hawaii). Internet access is not free in most resort hotels in Hawaii, but thanks to over crowded Waikiki, I found a Starbucks nearby that I can access internet for free using my ATT account.



For Japanese speaking visitors, Honolulu (especially Waikiki) is almost like a part of Japan. You can easily find staffs who speak Japanese (some with some accent, but still understandable).

I did not get up early enough to see sun rise, but I can say sun set is beautiful at Waikiki beach.



Perl Harbor is about 20 minute drive from Waikiki. It can be tricky to get there because of the poorly designed traffic signs. In fact, Honolulu has the worst signs I've ever experienced.



The North side of the island (North Shore) is less crowded and looks even better. You can drop by Dole Plantation if you are a big fan of pineapples and ice cream.





More pictures can be seen at my flickr page or my personal page (more photos here).

My favorate photography blogs and websites

I used to be a big fan of photo.net, but I visit it less these days. I learned out strobist on a forum, and WOW that's a great site/blog to learn photography. The creator Mr. Hobby does a very good job explaining confusing lighting schemes and initiating interesting discussions. I feel the enthusiasm from his posts and those comments left by visitors. He definitely is one of the best teachers in lighting. If you are not familiar with lighting, definite give his Lighting 101 a read.

Amazingly, there is such a huge group of followers such that whenever there is a tool (e.g., Vivitar 285HV) discussed, you see supply shortage.

I also found some other great blogs from strobist such as Joe McNally's blog, The f-Stops here, Confessions of a Photographer, and Chase Jarvis.

Embed fonts in PDF files for press

I was contacted by the publishing house, saying that they needed fonts to be embedded in the PDF file for my thesis to be published. It had been a while since I generated that file and I was busy, so I asked them to use the alternative solution at the time.

Since it is commonly required for press, I think it is better that I get things done right when I need to generate any PDF file for that purpose next time. So I did some research on the web. It turned out to be very easy with modern free tools - ghostscript and LaTex.

I use LaTex mainly, but I believe it is similar if you can generate a postscript file from other tools. To convert .ps file to .pdf file, simply type

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress yourfile.ps

This will generate yourfile.pdf. Open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader (8 or later), and select File->Properties, click on the font tab, you will see what fonts are embedded. If everything goes well, all fonts listed there should be listed as embedded. Kpdf included in KDE 3.5 or later can also show fonts.

Sometimes I use pdfLaTex to generate PDF files directly. Luckily recent versions (3.1415926-1.40.x) of pdfTex already have fonts embedded by default.

So the problem is solved, this is way too easy!

Although some are a little bit outdated, these sites provided me very good information:
A guide to generate PDF files with all fonts embedded using pdflatex and Creating PDF files with ps2pdf and ps2pdf: PostScript-to-PDF converter