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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

What happened to Logitech Z623 speakers


Remember that I had the Logitech Z623 speaker set when I was in Japan. Do you want to know what happened to them? Its fate was decided the same way I decided the fate of a lot of hardware, whenever I wanted to upgrade: Auction!

Bringing them along with me to Sri Lanka was not feasible for the following reasons.
  • It was huge and heavy. There was no way I could have brought it back with me without using sea cargo. We decided not to use sea cargo, because it was cheaper to replace everything with new items than to ship used parts, especially considering the complexities that would arise early this year, which you will learn in the near future I suppose.
  • The speakers only supported 100V power from the mains. I could have used a step down transformer, but it is not an elegant solution. It adds more cost.
  • It has that issue with the power button. The culprit appears to be the inconsistent contact between the leads in the power switch. Sadly, access to the power switch is difficult, but I am sure I would be able to fix it with the help of my dad. Still, there was a little doubt that it would completely resolve the issue.
  • This was I get to try out something new in the coming months. I hate rotting with the same gear for too long. This was that opportunity to upgrade.

I had it listed up on
Rakuten Auction for a while, but nobody wanted to buy it.Perhaps, Japanese people are more interested in smaller, Japanese made speakers. So I had to drop the price all the way down to JPY 2,500 but I made the buyer pay for shipping. Finally someone placed a bit. I had made up my mind to give it away to a friend, if nobody wanted to bid for it. Luckily, I didn't have to go there.

The sad thing is though, the speakers are very good and strong. And it would cost a fortune to own those speakers in Sri Lanka. In fact, the prices of it in Japan has also gone up by 50% or so since I bought it. It could be due to the drop of value of Japanese currency, but it is quite an old product. I had it for 3 years too.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Luckily, the SoundPEATS QY7 was not a Humpty Dumpty



On last Friday, when I was about to leave the house for work, a tragic accident occurred. I had my SoundPEATS QY7 earbuds in one hand and they got entangled with my right shoe when I bent down to tie my shoes, and the right earbud got snapped. It broke into several pieces. I picked up what I could see and put them in my backpack and left the house because it was getting too late. (Gah, I forgot to take photos again!!!)

In the bus, I got a seat and I assessed the situation. Luckily the wire connections were intact; however, there were some pieces missing. And I wasn't sure if I would be able to put it back together. To make things even worse, a woman in her middle age demanded my seat and since I know how ugly their mouths can get, I gave it away reluctantly. I had to stand the whole way for 90 minutes.

It was a horrible day. I had nothing to do while commuting. That's about 4 hrs total without nothing to do, thanks to our super road system. I could have surfed the Internet on my phone, but looking at the screen makes me nauseous, this time due to the ride being so rough: braking and switching tracks frequently.

I actually found out that I could play Real Racing 3, which I installed to check how good the work of devs of Fire Monkeys Studios was, but it didn't go well again due to the rough ride - I cannot how a steady line on the track, not to mention sticking to the racing line. So I just looked outside the shutters thinking about various things.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Trying out a PS/2 keyboard after decades


When my wife spilled water on my G15 keyboard, I bought a cheap keyboard to replace it. Despite wanting to buy a mechanical keyboard, knowing that I would have to carry it with be back to Sri Lanka and knowing that it would wake my kid up if I used the PC after he went to bed, I had to postpone it. It really was a cheap keyboard, that some of the keys had already become too stiff to press, which made my decision to throw it out before leaving Japan so much easier.

I was thinking of buying a Rs. 250 keyboard (do they sell them anymore?) when I arrived at home. But luckily, my dad had two PS/2 keyboards lying around in addition to the USB keyboard that he had hooked up to his PC. I have no clue as to how they PS/2 keyboards happen to be there.

Dad's PC doesn't have a PS/2 port, but ironically my PC has. And it is not rocking a gaming motherboard that come with a PS/2 port for increased compatibility with legacy gaming gear some people are reluctant to replace. Despite not being plug and play, PS/2 port doesn't use polling thus are more responsive than USB keyboards, which can also be beneficial for gamers.

But the first of the two keyboards I plugged in, acted erroneously. It would lock up some keys and never release. It was not usable.

Thankfully, the second keyboard worked. It is made by Logitech, so it should be well designed.


Sadly I am busy these days, so I cannot play games to see if a PS/2 keyboard works better than a USB keyboard when gaming. I'll probably never know, because the mechanical keyboard than I am planning to buy in the near future will come with a USB cable. (Some niche products supports both,
USB and PSU with a converter)

Saturday, January 2, 2016

My desk during the last week before leaving Japan

 

I have already left Japan, but while I was going through the photos that were backed up to Dropbox from my phone, I came across this photo of my work desk during the last week. 

I had to disconnect the desktop PC because I had to pack it in the suitcases and I didn't want to wait till the very end. This is because there was the risk of the display not fitting inside the suitcase. But it fit just fine, luckily. I had to leave the original cardboard boxes because they added significant weight and ate up a lot of space inside the suitcases.

While I don't like to use a laptop as my main PC, it sure does make things very clean, doesn't it?
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