Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Thank you both. I have used Sennheiser CX for years now and was pretty happy with them, but sadly the right-side speaker (or the cable) is giving up so it's nearly quiet on that side.
But given the price difference (€30 to €80), I might just go for the Kalenjis. Or not. The Sennheisers are much more discreet-looking.

@Eye-Q - the site says 4 hours of battery life. How long to charge it again (might be relevant for day-long tours in the future to charge it during lunch break)?
 
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To be honest I have no idea since I don't use them for that long and charge them at home so I never timed the recharging process.
 
So next week thursday-friday. I am doing a training course for a contractor of ours. We'll have 6 guys in the office (don't want it, but.... *sigh*). The other trainer we have from the Canadian office normally comes down but is not this time so we're doing at least one presentation over MS Teams.

Should the guys have questions for him I am planning to take my USB audio interface, hook up 2 microphones to aim them vaugely at the space apart people to at least give them a fighting chance to be heard. Last time a video training happened, we did for some guys in British Columbia. They had a laptop at the front of the room with guys set back, so you could hardly hear them. I'm hoping this works a little better.

The plan is, I have 2 Sennheiser E838 I bought used in 2011, and set them on desktop mic stands and run cables to the interface, take the audio out and send it to the amplifier in the cabinet for the in-ceiling speakers which uses RCA. I normally use 1x of those for gaming chat as it is and know it works fine for that. The reason to use this set up is because it's what I have and want to try this before I tell my boss which way to go. The plan in the future is to have more remote training sessions done, not just have a 1 off. At some point a camera will be needed of course, something that can be mounted on a tripod but interface with Windows as a web camera.

Overkill?
 
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I need some Bluetooth in-ear headphones for cycling as my old, cabled ones are giving up and I want to take the opportunity to change to wireless. I prefer the type that has a cable around the neck connecting the two speakers because those are not as easy to lose as the "true wireless" type.
Noise cancelling not needed, microphone optional.

Any recommendations?

All i can say is that for riding, for safety, I would want to make sure whatever ones I got had some sort of audio pass-through feature, either active or passive. I reeeally hate not being able to hear my surroundings.
 
Point taken, however I've been riding with earphones for years now. I just adjust the volume so that I can still hear things.
 
@93Flareside - if your company wants to do remote sessions with multiple people in one room, get them to buy a decent device for that. We have very good experience with the Jabra Speak series.
The savings in travel cost are more than compensating for that investment.
 
@93Flareside - if your company wants to do remote sessions with multiple people in one room, get them to buy a decent device for that. We have very good experience with the Jabra Speak series.
The savings in travel cost are more than compensating for that investment.

I will look into that. I’m trying what I have to see what works, not trying to compensate for what we don’t have on a permanent basis.
 
Thank you both. I have used Sennheiser CX for years now and was pretty happy with them, but sadly the right-side speaker (or the cable) is giving up so it's nearly quiet on that side.
But given the price difference (€30 to €80), I might just go for the Kalenjis. Or not. The Sennheisers are much more discreet-looking.

I had to warranty replace my CX 6.00BT's for that reason once. With the 2nd pair I never take them out of the house and I can't tell whether it's happening again or if my ear is shaped wrong - if i'll pull it out and put it in just right the sound comes back normal.
 
I've made an impulse buy on the cheap ones from Decathlon that @Eye-Q recommended and already used them last night when cycling to visit friends. They seem like a good choice, especially for the price (€30).
Decent audio quality (at least for speech, I mostly listen to podcasts, not music), comfortable to wear, and they actually let through more environment noise than my old Sennheiser CX-300.
Can't judge the battery life yet of course.

Thank you all :)
 
I've been toying with the idea of getting a used workstation PC for quite a while now, but now I found what seems to me a good opportunity on eBay: a Dell Precision T3610 workstation for 189€ with 32€ shipping, but the seller takes offers, so it could end up costing me around 200€ total. That's Dell Optiplex/HP Elite territory of cheap.

It has a Xeon E5-1620 v2, 16GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD and a 500GB HDD, and an Nvidia Quadro NVS 295 GPU. Nothing particularly impressive, but unlike an Optiplex or an Elite, this has great potential for upgrades. I'd chuck in a second 500GB HDD I have lying around straight away, and upgrade the GPU as soon as possible.

I'd use it for uni-related purposes and maybe, just maybe, for some light gaming. As time progresses, I'd upgrade it to desired specs. Those uni-related tasks would be 3D modeling, basic video editing, Photoshop and some web design. Nothing too demanding, so it might be a bit overkill to get something with a 675W power supply, but then, the rig should still be loads better going into the future than an Optiplex, for example.

As for why I'm not building something myself, I want to do it on a budget. Also, this gives me an opportunity to have something semi-decent in the first place and then gradually upgrade it as my demands for a more powerful rig rise. Not to mention I have limited experience building PCs.

How bad of an idea is it for 200-ish Euros? Is there something I should be aware of? Am I crazy for considering a 7-year old platform? I know there are still people buying 8-11 year old Mac Pros for more money, and those don't even have SATA 3 or USB 3.0 as standard. It's not an apples to apples comparison exactly (pun intended), but can you get a much better computer for 200€?
 
I've been toying with the idea of getting a used workstation PC for quite a while now, but now I found what seems to me a good opportunity on eBay: a Dell Precision T3610 workstation for 189€ with 32€ shipping, but the seller takes offers, so it could end up costing me around 200€ total. That's Dell Optiplex/HP Elite territory of cheap.

It has a Xeon E5-1620 v2, 16GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD and a 500GB HDD, and an Nvidia Quadro NVS 295 GPU. Nothing particularly impressive, but unlike an Optiplex or an Elite, this has great potential for upgrades. I'd chuck in a second 500GB HDD I have lying around straight away, and upgrade the GPU as soon as possible.

I'd use it for uni-related purposes and maybe, just maybe, for some light gaming. As time progresses, I'd upgrade it to desired specs. Those uni-related tasks would be 3D modeling, basic video editing, Photoshop and some web design. Nothing too demanding, so it might be a bit overkill to get something with a 675W power supply, but then, the rig should still be loads better going into the future than an Optiplex, for example.

As for why I'm not building something myself, I want to do it on a budget. Also, this gives me an opportunity to have something semi-decent in the first place and then gradually upgrade it as my demands for a more powerful rig rise. Not to mention I have limited experience building PCs.

How bad of an idea is it for 200-ish Euros? Is there something I should be aware of? Am I crazy for considering a 7-year old platform? I know there are still people buying 8-11 year old Mac Pros for more money, and those don't even have SATA 3 or USB 3.0 as standard. It's not an apples to apples comparison exactly (pun intended), but can you get a much better computer for 200€?

No, that seems pretty decent for the price. I’m seeing those in the mid 300-400 (freedom dollars) so €200 looks pretty good. Like you said, upgrading the power supply is probably a good thing, especially if you want to change graphics cards.

That’s something Linus Tech Tips has been saying to do for a while if you want gaming on a budget. Find an old office desktop, maybe update the power supply and add a newer graphics card. Much cheaper than building your own if budget is a concern.
 
Thanks, guys! I placed an order, so hopefully, in a week or two, it should be here.

The benchmark list says the CPU is pretty much on-par with processors such as the i7-3770K, and i5-7600, which is what I expected. However, if I got things right, Xeons offer an excellent bang-per-buck ratio (as the chart says as well), and it's the Xeon-supporting motherboards that are expensive, so I could upgrade the CPU relatively inexpensively. Especially if you take into account that I paid 182€ for the whole thing, including shipping. However, I think the first thing I'll want to upgrade is the GPU, so I'll see what are my best options there. I was thinking RX 580 8GB, but then, from what I hear, Photoshop prefers Nvidia, which are more expensive on the used market, so... We'll see.
 
It's a pretty good purchase already. With the small IPC improvements previous to Ryzen and the ensuing war, you're still in a pretty good position barring power consumption. If you want to do the minimum effort upgrade for GPU power, pick up a used 1650 (not super or Ti), that one won't need any additional power beyond what can be provided by the PCIe rail, and to say that the performance is vastly superior for the quadro would be an understatement.
 
Thanks for the info! I'll see, as minimal effort as that'd be, I double-checked the listing pics, and one of them is a shot of the back that clearly shows a "685W" sticker where the power supply is. That being said, the prices of used 1650s are as high as the prices of used RX 580 4GB models, and can even get into the RX 580 8GB territory. Considering the power supply should be beefy enough, and that it should have two 6-pin connectors, I guess I'd rather go for such GPU as the RX 580, even if I'm not sure I wanna go Radeon. Oh, and I haven't checked eBay prices yet, just local classifieds.

Anyway, I'll put down on paper what needs to be upgraded and when, and save money for those parts.
 
I was logging in to a new streaming service on the Apple TV today. I haven’t realized before that the ATV remote app on iPhone knows when you’re entering a password and offers to autofill from your password manager. LastPass even knew what TV service I was trying to sign in to and autofilled the right password.

I’m actually impressed.
 
Thanks for the info! I'll see, as minimal effort as that'd be, I double-checked the listing pics, and one of them is a shot of the back that clearly shows a "685W" sticker where the power supply is. That being said, the prices of used 1650s are as high as the prices of used RX 580 4GB models, and can even get into the RX 580 8GB territory. Considering the power supply should be beefy enough, and that it should have two 6-pin connectors, I guess I'd rather go for such GPU as the RX 580, even if I'm not sure I wanna go Radeon. Oh, and I haven't checked eBay prices yet, just local classifieds.

Anyway, I'll put down on paper what needs to be upgraded and when, and save money for those parts.

If you are unlucky, then the psu is connected to power-distribution board so you'd need to take that out aswell.
Can't remember anymore, but check the cables of the motherboard before replacing the psu, there could be some proprietary connectors for power.

ex-dell technician here mumbling....
 
ex-dell technician here mumbling....

I wish you could've been our Dell technician. We just had a bloke we nicknamed Jesus who didn't wear socks. The speed that they can tear a laptop apart at is impressive though.
 
I wish you could've been our Dell technician. We just had a bloke we nicknamed Jesus who didn't wear socks. The speed that they can tear a laptop apart at is impressive though.

15-20mins to replace a motherboard on a laptop, ~30mins on those gigantic precisions, i am not the fastest one.
 
15-20mins to replace a motherboard on a laptop, ~30mins on those gigantic precisions, i am not the fastest one.

With enough espresso, you can do anything.
 
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