Bought My Westone1 In-Ear Monitors

Got them from Stereo Electronics at Ion Orchard

Front of box

Peeping in at the left phone

Read face of box

Side of box

Box opened up

Left page of box interior

Contents of box

Semi-hard case

Ear buds supplied

Ear buds and cleaning brush

Altogether again

Westone 1s are great earphones! I was actually going for the UM1, but it went out of stock at the Headphone Gallery at Funan Digital Mall. They were selling for a good price (with a discount).

A few days after I went there, I was at the Stereo Electronics at Ion Orchard looking for the UM1 again. The sales guy gave me some good recommendations on similar products in the same performance/price range. Some of them were from Etymotic, Westones UM1 and Westone 1.

I found Etymotic to be a bit too soft and (I never thought I would say this) ... flat and smooth. This is the exact feature I was looking for .. flat frequency response. However, I found Etymotic phones to be just that, in an unpleasant way. Areas of high frequency that were supposed to be crisp were somewhat muted in intensity, and overall I had to turn up the volume higher than my normal levels (I am not a loudness fan), just to hear my test tracks properly.

I took a listen to UM1, which sounded more lively but I could hear a roll off on the highs and some muffled lows.

In the end I decided to go with the Westone1. Somehow the stereo image is better an does give nice response across the frequency, for me.

The way the phones are shaped to the ear is quite comfortable, with the connecting cables looping behind the user's ear. This minimises microphonics. I came across this term when doing my research on in-ear-monitors in general. I'll write more about this below.

Image taken from a review on the Westone1: http://www.headfoneshop.com/blog/2011/07/28/westone-1-review/

The cables are formed by smaller cables coiling around each other in a braid. This keeps the cable straight and minimises the chance of the tangling, especially useful for musicians planning to use them for gigs and on-stage performances.

The thing I find a bit of an inconvenience in the first few days of usage is the fact that there were no easily legible markings on the body of the earphones as to which is the left or right piece. This was partially caused by the fact that I took a while to familiarise with the unique way the cables have to coil around the ear lobes. However, true to what the sales staff told me, "you'll get used to it after the first week". Now I just instinctively know which piece goes left and which one to the right.

I think I have rather large ear canals, I find that I cannot easily get a proper seal with the default ones that were already attached to the phones when I opened the box. As seen in the photos above, Westone has supplied quite a few kinds of ear-tips, so I will be going through them to find the suitable size and shape for me. I'll write a bit more about seal below.

Overall I am quite happy with this pair of in-ear-monitors. It is my first set that has a balanced armature. Now I am hearing lots of detail in my mp3 recordings. I am spotting new things in recordings I thought I was quite familiar with. Most importantly, I am using the Westone1 to listen to my own compositions so I can evaluate my own mix that's done through my speakers, to find out how they sound on a very accurate pair of in-ear-monitors.

If you are new to in-ear monitors or in-ear headphones or in-ear canalphones Here is an excellent resource and quite a complete guide to the factors that will make it work for you, and those that won't: http://www.head-fi.org/a/basic-guide-to-in-ear-canalphones
The topics covered in here also include the ones I will write about below: microphonics and seal.

Microphonics is the interfering (undesirable) vibrations (turned into audible sounds in the earphones), caused by the moving/rustling of cable contacting with our skin, clothings, or other items in the path of the cables. This is especially likely for people listening to music while exercising (eg, jogging). Here is a pretty good article to read up on microphonics affecting the clarity of our earphones - http://ear-buds.org/microphonics-and-how-it-affects-your-earbuds/

The seal is another term I learnt when reading up about in-ear monitors. Seal is something provided by the earbuds. It is how completely the earbuds fit the shape of your ear and isolates surrounding noise when you use your earphones. This is very important to users of in-ear monitors. The sound-isolation factor and the perceived power and clarity of the phones is totally dependent on the seal. If there is no seal (earbuds not successfully forming an enclosed space inside the ear), then there is sound leakage. This will affect the overall sound in general, but mostly the noise isolation and the power of the bass will suffer. That is why there are many 3rd party providers of earbuds. Having different shapes and sizes to suit a huge variety of ears, some are made from memory foam, some are sponge, some are silicone and others, rubber.

Because our ears come in very different shapes and sizes, no two buds will give the same results on different individuals. Similarly, to get a good seal, there is no 'best position' for the bud to rest in the ear canal. We must use it for a while (people say a week of use) to let it find its unique rest position the ears for best seal.

Sensaphonics provide users with test tones at equal levels so the user can decide if both sides of earbuds are providing similar levels of seal. This is a pretty neat test! http://www.sensaphonics.com/?page_id=833

The State of the Music Industry

Grabbed this off http://theoatmeal.com/

Observations

In an apparel store, if you stand in front a mirror and facing away from it, you will realise a lot of people will start to stand in front of you and look at you after a while.

(They are not looking at you. They're just trying to see themselves in the mirror behind you)

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Most Expensive Bubble Tea Yet

Christina and I went to Bugis Junction today after lunch and we decided to have bubble tea. Christina had a hot honey red-tea, which cost $2.4. 

I decided to be adventurous and ordered, Hand-made Taro Milk tea.  It was only after I placed my order, that I realised that it cost $5.20 for the small sized drink. The large one cost $6.30. 

This is the most expensive bubble tea I have had to date. 

At a sweetness level of 20%, I could not really taste the milk, or the tea. There are taro bits for you to chew on as you drink, but I could not smell the fragrance of the taro, milk or tea. I just felt I was drinking bland generic syrup.

So if you are tempted to try it, and $5.20 is too steep a price for you, think twice before you make your order! 

Silence Sleeper / Snore Stopper Review

The "Silence Sleeper" is a gadget on offer at Groupon.com. Groupon calls it "Snore Stopper" bracelet, while the image shown says "Silence Sleeper".

It promises to help with snoring problems, stop the snoring person from snoring. It says the original price was SG$97, and now on sale at SG$28. There was no other description or tech specs. My wife bought it hoping it would improve my sleep and loud snoring.


So after collecting this we opened it and realise it was a China developed technology (Guangdong, China, actually). You can actually tell it is not from an English country from the grammatically incorrect product name.

The silver round outlet between the 2 rectangular paddings applies an electric pulse to the wearer's skin, thereby stopping the snoring momentarily

The product is a cheap plastic wrist device that detects snore sounds by filtering out ambient noises. After 3 snores, it sends out an electric pulse to your wrist (the user can adjust the intensity).


The instruction booklet has horrendous English translations. Being bi-lingual in Chinese and English, I had to read between the 2 translations to finally get a big picture of what the product was about, and roughly how to use it.


Basically it is applying electricity to your skin enough to irritate you to shift your body in your sleep, changing your position in bed, thus 'eliminating' the snoring. It does "stop the snorer from snoring", but in effect it is also breaking up the wearer's sleep, degrading the sleep quality of the snorer. 


Imagine after the first jolt the sleeper turns in bed, goes back to sleep and begins to snore after 30 seconds. As expected, the jolt would come again and disturb the person's sleep again. This would continue the whole night, preventing the wearer from entering a deep sleep.


After using it for one night, I stopped using it altogether. I don't think the product is even worth $30. Imagine paying $90 for it and then realising how cheap and badly constructed it is.


This is definitely not an elegant solution to snoring. We bought it thinking it may work on some principles of magnetism affecting the body or blood circulation or some such. But we were all wrong.


In a warped sort of way, some people may actually like the product because it 'transfers' the sleeplessness from the snorer's partner to the snorer himself. However, I feel that the consumer should be well informed of how the product operates and decides for himself before buying. The lack of information on the product definitely does not help.


Product quality is very cheap, and the design is bad. Battery compartment needs a tiny screw to keep it closed. Why did they not implement a simple catch system?  There is no on/off switch, so you have to remove the battery after every night's use, else the product will stay on and continue to monitor the surrounding sounds for snoring, and thus battery will continue to be drained.


So imagine every morning after the user wakes up, he has to use a tiny screw driver to remove the screw that keeps the battery compartment shut, remove the battery, before going on with his daily activities. This is simply not good design.


Also, the product is too big and clumsy. With the kind of price range it is selling at, I feel it can be much more attractive in design with more functionality. For example, it could do with a simple LCD or LED display that tells the time (since it's shaped like a watch). It could also use this timing information to activate/deactivate the snore-stopping routine, thus doing away with the laughably primitive need to remove the battery after every use. With the display, it could also come with some statistics, like a counter that keeps track of the number of times a pulse is discharged, and thus how many rounds of snoring it's stopped. Maybe thus it would be useful as a feedback mechanism to the snorer to indicate if the snoring has decreased over time.


After searching for the product on internet, I could find only two places with infomation for this product. One is Groupon.com mentioned above. The other one is Alibaba.com. 


On Alibaba.com, it's described as "European popular wrist style". Alibaba.com does not list prices on its product pages until you sign up with them and send an email with the quantity required before they will give you a quote. I understand the concept of variable discount based on quantity purchased, however I would also like to know the unit cost before any discount, before I can decide whether to buy. To me all this is quite dodgy.

Check out the glaring typo error. Snoer Stopper. And yes it even comes with the tiny screw driver for you to remove the tiny screw that holds the battery compartment close.

Thus concludes my review on the product. I hope it has helped you with your decision to purchase. In the end, you have to decide if it is suitable for you or not. If there are no discounts attached to this, I strongly advise against paying SG$97 for it. To me it is probably worth about $15 (and I am sure this is still way above the production cost).

New Tap and Water Filter

We got our plumber to install our new tap and water filter today. 

This new water filter could not be attached to the old tap, so we had to change to a new one with a correct-sized outlet. Old tap was a goose-neck type, so it'll definitely be weighed down by the filter over time. 

New tap costs S$60. Water filter (Mitsubishi) costs S$160. Installation costs S$50.

We have had this water problem since we moved in. The water coming out from our kitchen sink has been littered with flakes like flattened fruits pulp or (gulp) human skin. It is unclear as to whether the HDB pipes were unclean or our interior installation did not do a thorough flushing out of the pipes before sealing them and handing the house over to us, but we worked around this by letting the tap run at high speeds for a while, then slowly filling up our pot with the water flowing at low speeds. This would reduce most of the flakes. We would then boil all the water we were going to drink.

Even though most of the visible flakes can be reduced, but it points to very possible impurity in our water supply. Finally after 2 years staying here, we decided to install a high-performance water filter. This would enable us to drink the water direct from the tap. 

One less thing off our chests!

New tap comes in a box! Inside is a fleece draw string pouch to house the new tap!

New tap and filter installed

The water filter. Mitsubishi Cleansui MD101E-S

New and shiny water filter!

View from the bottom. Outlet on the right is unfiltered. Can switch between straight and multi-nozzled shower kind of water. Left outlet will dispense with the appropriate switch settings.

The old tap removed. Don't know what to do with this ;)

Here's the link to Cleansui's official product page.

Mistaken for being the Staff at Shops

Today after dinner with Christina at a corner Chinese coffee shop around Mustafa Centre, we went to City Square Mall to stroll around.

There was the Great Singapore Sale going on, and lots of shops were participating in the annual sale season. Cotton-On had this 2 guys' t-shirts for $20. The material was quite thin, but it was enough for me.

The t-shirts were laid out just in front of the shop, together with guys bermudas. So I was choosing, trying it out and then folding the t-shirts back. I was actually wearing another of Cotton-On's t-shirts, and a pair of bermudas myself. At that point, a man in working shirt and pants was also browsing the section.

He turned to ask me "Are these guys shorts?". I turned to him and said, "I dont know actually, but since they are put together with guys' t-shirts I suppose they are for guys." He gave me a strange look, which I understood it as him still wondering if they were guy's bermudas.

5 seconds later it danwed on me that he might have mistook me for the staff there. I was wearing something that looked like what the staff would wear, and I had my lanyard hanging from my neck from my workplace, and finally, I was folding back a few t-shirts. He probably did not see me place them on myself for size. He must also have missed the fact that I was wearing slippers so I couldnt have been a staff.

I wanted to clarify that I wasnt actually the staff, but I ended up not saying anything. Then he slowly strolled off to another section. Haha...

I would not know how Cotton On management would react if this man had gone and complain about "one of their staff" giving bad service and not knowing their products. ;)

Brings me to remember the days when I was still signed on in Film Unit. We had a black unit t-shirt (it was a polo t-shirt). Mr Soh and I were at Carrefour Suntec. We were dressed in that black polo t-shirt and back pants (that was the unit dress-code).

We were standing at the furniture section by a row of shelves and having a discussion, just the two of us. There came this mother holding her daughter's hand, going out of her way to come and ask us, where the coffee tables section was. It was quite amusing :)

This was between the year 2002 and 2004. Gosh, that's 8 years ago!

Johnson and Weiping's Wedding Worship Recording

Listen to this at SoundCloud.com

I've just uploaded this, so it may take a while to get converted and show up.

This is the description that accompanied the upload:

This is the recorded worship segment of Johnson and Weiping's wedding. This took place in Singapore at the Grace Assembly of God at Tanglin Road.

The first song "Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone)", was sung live.
The following 2 songs "So You Would Come" and "Zan Mei Zhi Quan" were sung with my backing tracks, which I've also uploaded on soundcloud.com.
Singers were Peter Lim, Christina (my wife) and myself (the softer and muffled male voice).

Recording equipment used, Samsung Galaxy S2.

Recording has a break in the middle. Front part was recorded as a video (mp4) and the back part I switched to the default audio recorder and recorded only audio (3ga).

That is because the video was recorded with the phone pointing at the ground all the time while I had to play the keyboard with both hands.

Recording quality is not ideal because Peter and Christina were stage front, and my keyboard was positioned a bit behind. The phone was recording off the monitor speakers from stage front. (Yes it means I was barely hearing my own singing and playing, so please forgive my poor pitching)

For your amusement, you can watch (listen to) the video here:

There is a part in the middle where I raised my phone to take a quick look around at the congregation. ;)

My Paper Shredder: Removing Stuck Plastics Sheets

Note to self: Never put thin plastics wrappers through paper shredder.

Just now in the evening, I was at home. Thinking of clearing up some stuff that have been left lying around the house, I picked up a pile of flyers and promotional booklets that managed to find their way into our weekly mail.

Two of those booklets came wrapped up in clear wrappers with a piece of sticker with our names and address printed on it. Not wanting people to find out our address and our names, I removed those plastics wrappers and fed one of the pieces to the paper shredder. Since the shredder claimed it could even shred credit cards, I expected it to be able to work on thin plastics wrappers.

To my horror the plastics wrapper became entangled in the shredding mechanism! The motor ground to a halt and refused to advance any more.  After a few more attempts at stopping and starting the motor a few more times without getting the film out, I stopped the motor and peered into the mechanism from below.

Being able to stretch and wrap itself around, the strips of plastics clung to the mechanism. I think this happened due to the fact that unlike regular pieces of paper, and credit cards, the plastics film is stretchable, even though it may be thinner. The motors heated up after my repeated attempts to get the gears to turn after they were stuck. That did not help the situation when it further softened the plastics and make them stretch and wrap around the gears even more.

The plastics sheet that caused all the trouble! 

The clear plastics film wrapped itself around the shredding gears inside in clumps of mashed up strands. 

I spent the next hour trying to sort out this mess, untangling the stretched plastics strands wrapping itself around the shredding gears. Here's what to do if you ever find yourself in the same situation. 

Note: The following steps helped me resolve my problem. Here's the brand and model of my paper shredder. Brand: GBC, model: Alpha Confetti Cut. If you are unsure it will work for your model and make, please consult the service and support for  your respective product. 

The following steps also involve using a pair of scissors to cut and pry the plastics free from the shredding mechanism. Please do not cut yourself on the scissor blades. Also, do not apply force with the blades on the mechanism. This may dislodge them from their current alignment. It may also bend or dent them. All this may affect the proper functioning of your shredder after you've remove the offending plastics wrapper.

1) First, engage the  reverse gear to make the motor go in the opposite direction, to let the machine attempt to spew out the plastics wrapper in the reverse direction. (if your machine does not have the reverse button, find some way to make the motors advance even if in the forward direction a bit, so it exposes more of the mess that is stuck inside the unreachable areas of the gears)

2) Take a pair of scissors, open up and insert a single blade in from the loading end (on the top for me). Aim for the mess of tangled plastics and try and cut them loose with the sharp end of the blade. 

Using the blade to cut lose bits that are stuck and tightly stretched. I also usde the blade to fish out loose ends so I can pull on them to see if they could be removed. 

3) Turn the motor to expose the mechanism from the bottom. Use your fingers to try to pull on the tangled mess. (Caution: Beware of sharp protruding edges). Pull at different areas where the plastics go into the gears. In doing so, we are testing which parts of the gears are gripping harder on the plastics wrapper. Depending on how your mechanism was designed to shred, you will realise bits of your wrapper come off easily. For me, the middle part grips the plastic the tightest. There is no way to pull the plastics out for even an extra inch. The sides (for my machine) did not exert any pull on the plastics so it gave me a lot of freedom to remove bits of the plastics that stick out from there. 

4) For the bits that are stuck in the centre of the gears, they are stuck and cannot be moved. However there will be areas where you see the plastics material being stretched and pulled and strained. Again, use the single blade from our scissors to disentangle as them and cut them loose as much as possible, leaving no lose ends to feed back into the gears. As we are cutting them loose we can again pull on those loose ends to test the grip on the gears on those strips to see if any of the bits we cut have become loose in the process.  

Using the blade of the scissors to cut lose exposed bits that are tightly stuck and stretched

5) Now put the motor portion back upright, fixed properly in its proper position, and try to advance the motors again (try and engage the reverse gear if its avaiable to you). If you want to advance forward and the motor does not run, it may be that it is not detecting any paper to shred. so you may want to feed smaller pieces of paper for it to detect and thus trigger the motors to attempt to advance. 

Keep repeating these steps and you will gradually find that even after you've removed lots of bits of plastics from the mechanism after 1 round, more bits of plastics will appear and come around to the exposed parts of the gears next time you advance (or reverse) the mechanism and take a look again. 

More plastics being exposed after advancing the motor

Keep repeating these steps and you will find that while the motor was stuck in the beginning, it will now advance better. Soon you will find that when you advance the motor, there will be no more plastics bits churned out. That would mean that you have successfully removed all the stuck bits.

For my case, there are still a few very short bits of plastics wrapper I could not remove. They are still sticking out from one or two corners, but it is not impeding the shredder from functioning normally, so I am leaving them there. :)

Passion and Interest

Sean and I were talking about passion, interest and tenacity. He says a CG artist (or vfx artist) are one of those jobs that especially need tenacity to stay long in the industry.

Many jobs only requires you to work hard during the working hours, and you will have gained the required experience to move up and excel in your career. Not for CG. Many times we need to keep practising our craft. Especially when working in a huge pipeline, you may not always necessarily be doing the full spectrum of work you would like yourself to be doing. In many instances we are just doing a very small part, or something else entirely.

To keep ourselves relevant in the specialisation, in the capacity we want our career to move towards, we need to keep "sharpening our blades", and keep doing the things we eventually want to be doing. That is quite a tedious and joyless work if we have no passion, or if we do not have enough determination to do it till we actually get to where we want to go.

This definitely requires perseverance and tenacity.

"Interest makes you work till 8pm", says Sean in these exact words, "but fire makes you work till 4am in the morning."

Incidentally I was working on a piece of music till 5am last night. ;)

Make Magazine Website

Dominic Drane my co-worker introduced me to this website. This is the home to the magazine with the same name: Make:.

This is a very geeky magazine talking about creating your own gadgets. This can be as simple as inventions made from every-day parts found at home, to very elaborate and high-tech robotics made from programmable micro-controllers connected to a myriad of sensors.

There are different sections like the magazine sections with articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, a forum, a community projects (see the next section), and their very own store called the Maker Shed.

At the Maker Shed, they sell everything from micro controllers, craft supplies, construction kits, robotics parts, wearables, to of course, books and magazines.

This is an excellent section where the magazine hosts a huge library of user-initiated projects, documenting, instructing, updating, refining, and sharing what they've learnt from their own personal projects. It is truly putting people's brains together, and making things better. There are projects that make things that has no apparent use at this point, and there are projects that create ingenious things that simplifies our daily activities.



All in all, this website is really a paradise for inventors wannabe, product designers, creative tech geeks, people who love hands-on crafts, and those who want be inspired by the creativity of the modern human race!



This website is definitely worth checking out!

Playing for Service, Saturday and Sunday

Worship leading with Freda's team. Saturday night at Grace Assembly of God, Tanglin Road, Level 3 hall. Johan was leading the worship.

Service closing, people praying.

Sunday morning at the main chapel. Pastor was leading and playing accoustic guitar. Charles on electric guitar, Freda on 1st keys, myself on 2nd keys, Jeremy on Bass and Jonathan on Drums.

Pre-service, when people were slowly filling up...

Service starting, people standing up...

Closing, when Pastor Calvin Lee was praying

Its been almost a year since I last played in church. Last one was a live worship recording serviec for Grace Assembly's very own original worship album, More Like You (I think).