I love my AirPod Pros, but I hate how unreliable charging in the case is. The AirPods will often think they are out of the case, when they are, and discharge themselves, while connected to my phone/laptop.
Then they will re-charge, emptying the battery in the case, so I will end up with a dead pair of AirPods after a couple of days in the pocket, not using them.
I guess their tolerances are too tight, hopefully something that will be fixed with AirPod Pro 2, it is a big annoyance.
Some times they will also not pick up that they are being put into my ears, so I have to put them back in the case a couple of times for them to react. Really annoying too.
This issue is very bad, and I've had it on all 3 of the sets of AirPods pros I have owned.
Another issue I have had on all three is that the noise cancelling degrades over time. When you get a new set, it's kind of night and day how good they are at first. After about 6 months I would say that they noticably suck compared to how they are when you first get them, and they just continue to degrade over time.
My guess is just wax and gunk getting to the external microphone mesh over time, but there is no way to deal with it that I can see short of buying another pair.
Apple has covered these sound issues for me, every time they have apparently diagnosed that the issue matches my complaint. But I've had to make 5 warranty claims for this in just over 2 years of ownership! I have only made 8 warranty claims ever in my life, over 60% of my lifetime warranty claims have been for one airpods pro purchase!
Something is seriously up with the design of the original pros. I hope these issues have been resolved for 2nd gen.
This might be because each were sold with the old firmware (better noise cancellation), and eventually got updated to the new firmware (better battery).
I've had this happen three times now in 2.5 years. The first symptom is that the noise cancellation gets worse. Some months after that, you start hearing a crackling sound, particularly while speaking, or if you adjust the airpod in your ear.
I believe what is happening is that earwax is building up in the grille on the top inside of the airpod which houses a microphone. As the sound from this microphone gets more distorted, the noise cancellation gradually stops working. You can also see this because after you've had the airpods a couple of months you will never get the ear tip fit test to pass.
Every time this has gotten to the crackling stage, Apple has replaced these without charge, even though I didn't have Applecare. They have some sort of machine in the back of the store that they use to test them, and if your set fails the test, they give you a new pair (sometimes just one).
Wow, thanks for sharing this. I've had mine for 9 months and just started hearing the crackling noise. I didn't know this was a widespread issue or that Apple addresses it so easily. Fingers crossed...
It's not firmware - the issue develops very gradually rather than all at once. This is part of what makes it such an insidious fault, like the boiling frog analogy.
Make no mistake, the issue is in no way resolved on new manufactured 1st gen pros. New manufactured stock are more likely to be covered by the original purchase warranty and so there is less pressure on Apple to extend support.
I recently had my pre-Oct 2020 pros replaced with new manufactured stock under this support program. Within less than a month the replacements developed the same sound issues, supported by Apple's diagnosis and another free replacement.
I don't think I use them in an unusual way - I don't even wear them during exercise. There is just something inherently flawed in the design that causes the sound quality to subtly degrade by a significant amount.
Glad to know that I’m not the only one with this issue. I’m already on my third replacement pair, but the problem keeps coming back. In my case when it fails the noise cancelling amplifies low frequency noise.
> My guess is just wax and gunk getting to the external microphone mesh
I’ve came to the same hypothesis and wiped my second replacement pair down with alcohol every other day, the problem STILL eventually manifests.
> My guess is just wax and gunk getting to the external microphone mesh over time, but there is no way to deal with it
I haven't tried this myself but someone on reddit mentioned you can use blu tack (sp?) - press it on the external mics, then pull off to clean it. I imagine it works but as I said, haven't tried it personally.
I have tried it (and done this more than once) -- it does work, but it's not quite that easy. You have to fashion the tack into various shapes to get into the crevices, and it has taken the better part of an hour to be satisfied with the result each time. Still worth it.
The fix is to clean the stems with alcohol. That will get rid of the corrosion building on the contacts.
Also, as a preventative measure, before putting them in the case, make absolutely sure they are dry.
As a runner, mine tend to get sweaty and if I put them in the case with even just a hint of salty sweat on them, the current flowing through the connector will corrode it very quickly, necessitating the cleaning next time.
They said there will now be (I assume, optional) audio cues when you put your AirPods in the case to let you know they are charging, not sure if that will help or not. I agree with you though. It seems like it would be a really easy thing for Apple to check if 1 headphone was in the case (that it knew of) and the other wasn't but also that you weren't playing music/audio so it could warn you. I added a battery widget to my home screen to see if they are both charging. Thankfully this issue is rare-ish for me but when it does happen it's maddening.
I've had this issue too, and I think the root cause is that the physical connection between the AirPods and the case can be unreliable/spotty -- likely a light film buildup on the contacts.
I've had success from "massaging" the offending AirPods in a circle pattern while they're in the case -- which I think rubs the contacts together. Anyway, I haven't had the problem for some time now.
I had similar issues but found somewhat of a workaround.
What I have to do is first put the left AirPod Pro into the case, close the lid, then wait for the light to turn orange. If it doesn't turn orange, try re-seating it and it eventually will. Only after that happens can I then put in the right AirPod Pro and everything will properly charge and pair properly.
I have this same problem, have had the right one replaced under warranty and the entire set replaced under warranty, no luck. If I periodically clean the inside of the case with rubbing alcohol it helps mitigate the charging problem. Then I just end up in a world where left ear connects, right ear nothing... unpair, re-pair... right ear connects, left ear nothing... unpair, re-pair... I used to use them mostly for trail running and it would take me 10-15 minutes to get them functional before every run. Now I just skip them, too frustrating.
FWIW I've got Samsung Galaxy Buds that also suffer from a similar case charging issue [1]. Seems to me that it is a problem with the technology itself which hopefully companies will improve in next product iterations.
Made worse in my experience with M1 Macbook Pros keeping bluetooth connected/paired while closed/asleep (and so other devices can't connect to them), and the fact that Monterey got rid of the "paired" bluetooth system menu icon (it's always just the standard icon which doesn't change depending on paired status now), so it's now a bit more annoying to work out if things are paired or not, without clicking around in the menu.
There is a light. The problem is if only 1 is charging, you'll still see the "charging" light while the other slowly loses battery.
I've dealt with this occasionally, from what I suspect is some buildup on the contacts due to sweat on my headphones from running. I find taking a cotton swap with alcohol to clean off the contacts every so often solves the problem.
I have two devices I pair my AirPods with, one a work laptop and one a personal phone, using two different iCloud accounts. I also had the problems you describe.
I started disabling Bluetooth on my phone and now the AirPods don’t seem to have any issues. Not sure if it was related, but maybe worth trying.
I have the same issue(s) on my third set of earpods and second case. It has gotten to a point where I don't want to buy another set of Apple headphones because I'm afraid this will happen again one day or another.
I had similar issues when I used them while working out and was sweaty. Sometimes, in the case, they wouldn't fully make contact and didn't charge. Cleaning them off periodically fixed that for me.
I actually have a similar issue. I gave them a good clean last week which seems to have helped a bit... Very seriously considering upgrading to the new generation sometime soon.
I'm confident that it will go 200km/h - but you will run out of battery quite fast at those speeds (in much less than an hour), as it's obviously a lot less efficient.
I saw multiple machines running RedStar OS, even took photos of me interacting with one of them, on my 2-week trip a couple of years ago.
I commented on another North Korea post here on Hacker News a while ago, where I also posted the URL to the photos, if anyone are curious. It even had IP addresses set and some sort of network (not Internet) access.
At risk of repeating other respondents, you can just go. You can find a tour organiser and simply book onto one of their tours, or you can organise your own through the DPRK state tourism companies. Going with an established tour organiser is by far the easier way to do it. I went with Koryo Tours in 2012 and it couldn't have been easier; filled in the form, emailed my details, paid a deposit and the rest at the start of the tour.
But to reiterate, you can just book on a tour. There's no problem or difficulty doing it.
Also, the government occasionally allows a radio amateur to operate. Just this month, North Korea was active on HF (last time was 2002). They'll be active again in Feb 2016:
The overall architectural goals are the same as every other FOSS project claims to follow: Simplicity, Quality, Security etc. etc. but I tend to think that we stick a little bit more closely to them.
This work is sponsored by Linux Foundation, partly in response to the HeartBleed fiasco, and after studying the 300,000+ lines of source-code in NTPD. I concluded that while it could be salvaged, it would be more economical, much faster and far more efficient to start from scratch.
The problem with all such initiatives ("we start clean") is that they typically never even reach the feature set of the previous software (implementing features takes orders of magnitude more time than some simple "proof of concept") and that they often make the same errors the older software already solved. JWZ wrote nicely somewhere about that effect (something like "it's not 'hard to read code,' those are the actual features implemented") but I can't find the link.
"Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it's just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes. ...
Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it's like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."
It doesn't convince me. There's no one answer that's correct for all situations.
Sometimes, had it been written well from the beginning, there wouldn't have been as many bugs in the first place, though.
I've seen codebases that really shouldn't be redone, just maintained and slightly patched over time - the risks are too high, the maintenance is low, patches are at least understood (mostly). I've also seen other codebases that should be scrapped and restarted. It really depends on the skills, commitment and expectations of the parties involved, and there's no one answer that fits all situations.
This time, PHK wasn't able to claim that he recognized any serious issues, but still started from scratch, leaving out even the idea to support all that NTPd already has fully implemented. And he received money to find and fix the bugs, not to make one more proof of concept.
Wasn't specifically defending the PHK decision, more just against the Spolsky article. I've seen it quoted as gospel over the past decade, and ... it just doesn't hold true in all situations.
It depends on the initial quality of the code. Spolsky happens to work with very talented people who tend not to write bad code, so if something looks weird and you don't know why it's there it's easy to give someone the benefit of the doubt.
But if you don't work with talented/skilled/experienced people and there's "weird stuff" in the codebase it might well be for no good reason at all.
You can only invoke the Spolsky "it's bug-fixes!" argument if you're not cleaning up someone's horrific mess.
Exactly, but that nuance is lost on many people. I've lost count of how many people have quoted "don't restart from scratch!" and cited that Spolsky article as some sort of irrefutable wisdom of the ages.
Is it the boy scouts that promote "leave the campground cleaner than you found it"? That's the attitude I try to bring to projects, but there are limits, both time and effort. I can leave you (client, employer) a much better system (by whatever metrics you want to establish) by rebuilding from scratch when what I'm starting with is a broken, unstable mess. not always, but the idea shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because of something Joel Spolsky wrote about Netscape in 2000.
I used to work at a company that cached international shipping rates. Those rates are BASICALLY by country because most of the fuel is burned to move the package the gross distance from one country to another.
But every once in a while we'd end up paying double for a shipment because the customer was way out in the sticks or whatever. Had we done more dynamic stuff like taking the whole address into account when quoting a price to a customer we'd never get bit by this kind of problem. But it was only a couple of times a month so I didn't worry too much about it.
My replacement found that this bothered him a lot and he figured he'd score points by fixing this problem. So he did exactly that, transitioned the entire quote system from local database lookups to remote UPS/FedEx/USPS/etc calls. 2-4 rates per shipper (Ground, Air, etc) for a total of about 10-15 every time a customer wanted a quote. And because we would repackage stuff (it was a logistics company) we often never knew the exact weight so we'd quote 3-4 prices so people could get a feel for which choice was their best bet for the best rate without delaying everything by an extra day or two in order to get a hard quote.
We cached these rates by country and weight (up to 1000lbs) so between all the service offerings and whatnot it was about 100,000 pieces of information in our actual, but occasionally incorrect database. So there were two choices:
1. Don't do any caching and just look them all up in realtime for customers. They're web APIs so there's latency associated.
2. Cache, but on a per-address basis. We had an address book for our customers so we knew the couple of addresses they would want to ship to and we could aggressively warm the cache so that all the rates would already be there. But there were about 10k unique addresses in the database * 100k total rates = 1 billion rates that needed to be cached.
When I presented this back-of-the-envelope calculation in a meeting do you know how he blew all of it off?
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Donald Knuth
I was so flabbergasted that someone could be aggressively ignorant and yet somehow twist Knuth's words to support their own position that I simply gave up. I was dealing with a powerful stupidity and it was stronger than me.
I later heard that during the transition it was touch-and-go for about a week and they had to issue a lot of credit to pissed off customers. The rate quoting page went from about 20ms to render (and maybe 300ms to load) now to about 4 seconds.
If my system requirements are that something run in 100ms, dismissing options that have a min 2s latency (however useful they are) is not "premature optimization". It's a system requirement, and options B, C and D don't make the cut. Simple as that.
"that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."
But the longer one, containing more or less the quote I first approximated, I just can't find. If I remeber he wrote about Netscape, the code for FTP and how long it took to get it right in all edge cases, and then it was thrown away.
TDD can go horribly wrong, too -- but if your tests are on high-enough-level functionality, and you maintain them, then they can encompass the lessons you learn from fucking up every time you do it. Writing & Maintaining tests isn't fun, just as fixing bugs isn't fun -- so in spirit these kinds of arguments hold just as much sway: there are fun parts of programming, and there are parts of programming that are significantly less fun, but even if you fork and start from scratch, it is feasible to have a checklist of bugs/features developed in the order that they are developed initially.
Do most open source projects do this, even the more well-maintained? Of course not. However, if people are seriously worried about this phenomenon, that's probably one of the ways developed in the decade since this essay was published to approach it.
I hardly think PHK is ADT at all. There are often good engineering reasons to rewrite software. I think Joel's point is that it is more often undertaken for wrong reasons.
There's the software that works, he gets the money to find the bugs and fix them, he decides to write from the scratch something that certainly isn't the replacement of the existing software except for some specific users. That is very ADT, exactly to JWZ's definition:
"This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version."
He got the money to look for the bugs and to fix them (hard). He instead goes to make the fully new undiscoverd bugs in fully new (his own) code (easy).
Stratum 1 support doesn't require a lot of different hardware, arguably it requires less: you need only a PPS device; which has become increasingly generic due to the kernel support needed for precise timestamping. (okay sure, you also need to initially name the second, but you can have another NTP server do that).
That is exactly what PHK plans to do with ntimed: split it up into separate packages for clients, time distribution servers and authoritative time transmitters.
Do we actually know much about the North Korean "intranet"?
I spent two weeks traveling around in North Korea in August 2012. One of our visits were in a military museum that had computers available (actually running RedStar OS!), containing some CD/DVD with MOV files (as far as I remember) and some other things.
I remember the machine having a 10.x IP address but it was definitely not able to access any internet, but I wonder if it was connected to their actual intranet, or if they simply had some local network there.
I'm certain that part was sincere. There is a certain level of naive honesty among most of the North Koreans (similar to that of sheltered fundamentalist Christians). I could clearly detect this by seeing that some of them naively did or said the "wrong" thing a few too many times whereas others were clearly much more canny. The canny ones lied all the fucking time and probably knew they were lying. The naive ones let slip a few gems.
The 'dating' website is probably more like a website for arranging arranged marriages, incidentally. Just in case you were wondering.
>I haven't been, but from what I've read/seen the tours are almost like an orchestrated front aimed at changing foreigners' perspectives.
The tour is orchestrated and it is clearly partly aimed at changing foreigners' perspectives, but the parts which are just for show and the kernels of honest truth are actually pretty easy to distinguish.
Sometimes propaganda is embarrassingly terrible (e.g. just taking the number of actual US casualties in the Korean war and doubling it. facepalm).
I'm sure the years before I went were even more blatant and terrible, actually. I didn't see any fake shops like in the interview but I suspect they may have existed in the years prior to my visit. I think they probably figured out that that was an abysmal idea.
The North Koreans have very unsophisticated domestic propaganda compared to western domestic propaganda. They are NOT good at it. Getting better, but still terrible.
Interestingly, western propaganda about North Korea is equally facile. The isolation makes it easy for outright lies to be believed on both sides I guess. Provided you haven't experienced both.
Also there are certain things both sides refuse to talk about that the other side talks a lot about - propaganda that serves a purpose that is based in truth. North Korea doesn't talk about prison camps but every American knows about them. America doesn't talk about atrocities committed by GIs in the Korean war, but North Koreans schooled on them much like we are schooled on Nazi atrocities.
Weirdly, North Korea was pretty open about the famine in the 90s. I expected them to gloss over it. Western media glosses over the fact that it actually ended, of course.
I think this was a pretty dumb experiment, and the outcome was to be expected.
There will always be some sort of noise, pixels aligned differently etc., in a production like a tv series, and expecting the encoded output to be identical/matching on a blocklevel is pretty naive to say the least.
I did some experimenting using ZFS deduplication on MPEG2 files, where I encoded hundreds of MPEG2 dvd-sized videos, where 90% of the material was identical (the last 10% was affected by applying different watermarking techniques to the footage), and got some decent deduplication ratio (x1.2:1 or so).. But ZFS deduplication is expensive in memory/SSD, and it was definitely not worth it.
It may be a "dumb experiment" if you already understand how the underlying systems (both the file system, and video encoding) work - but the author did not, and now having done the experiment, they understand more about them.
I mounted my iPhone 5 on my bike this morning, and took a Hyperlapse recording on the bikeride from home to the office (15 minutes).
When I reached the office and stopped the recording, the app would just hang with the text "Processing".. I left it processing for about 4 hours, with no progressbar or anything like it. I ended up giving up, closing the application and rebooting the iPhone. When I launched the program again, it had an error similar to "something bad happened" with a couple of options..
I don't think I'll try be using this program again.
That seems like a pretty extreme response. I know most apps only get one chance to fail before people uninstall them, but giving up on the whole app seems a bit much. It's new technology, and not trivial either. Why not give them a little more chance to improve before entirely shooting it down?
I have to say that I am quite impressed by their work. I spent 30 minutes earlier, walking around in the neighborhood where I grew up, and it was extremely easy to navigate and recognize roads, houses, and large buildings.
Even the train tracks through the city were there as rails in Minecraft (although not fully connected and working).
Very cool, the guys at GST did some amazing work here.. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to download the full 1TB world?
Tarsnap won't be able to shrink your photos by using deduplication and/or compression. I guess users paying 10$/mo with terabytes of data stored, have massive advantages of both, but it all depends on your usage.
If you are going to store 100GB of photos with Tarsnap, I'd guess it would be close to 25$ as you said. If you just want your photo collection for disaster recovery, you could check out Glacier instead, which is a lot cheaper.
Then they will re-charge, emptying the battery in the case, so I will end up with a dead pair of AirPods after a couple of days in the pocket, not using them.
I guess their tolerances are too tight, hopefully something that will be fixed with AirPod Pro 2, it is a big annoyance.
Some times they will also not pick up that they are being put into my ears, so I have to put them back in the case a couple of times for them to react. Really annoying too.