Time for a short consumer roundup#

Wed May 11 12:16:44 2005

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Time for a short consumer roundup.

I remain happy, so far, with my new mp3 player (Creative Zen Micro), which is now about 25% full of mp3s - almost all of them rips of albums I own already (the only exception so far being an apparently legal concert bootleg from archive.org). When using it on the Tube, though, I've realised just how noisy the Central Line is even before layering music on top, so I am now also in posession of a pair of Sony MDR-EX71 headphones, which fit right inside the ear canal and are supposed to cut external noise significantly. Also they're not white, so I'm less likely to be mugged for them (although I will probably be unable to hear the mugger behind me anyway; it all evens out). They arrived this morning, and feel ... odd. Like earplugs, which in effect they are of course. And sound muffled, which probably means I need to mess around with the different sizes of earbud. That or get my ears syringed, possibly.
My phone died. This upsets me as I've had it three years and grown to quite like it - insofar as it's possible to like any device so antisocial as a mobile phone. It did a bad job, but it did it well. The replacement is a Motorola V220, which wins points for being a USB device and compatible with gsmlib, so I managed to transfer my phonebook into it with little trouble. Other than that I haven't used it enough to form an opinion yet.
I bought new skates a couple of weeks ago: these are Crossmax 2003 (and therefore discounted). The major practical difference from my last pair (Thunder) I suspect is less to do with the higher-spec boot, extruded aluminium frame or twincam bearings, but the fact they're a size smaller and so fit so much better. My one-footed balance instantly improved a whole lot.
My laptop can no longer be described as "new", but I still like it. Only really aggravating feature is that so many of the ports you might want to plug and unplug regularly (power, usb, ethernet) are on the back behind the screen. That and the lack of a third mouse button.