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I came across Jim Gill’s amazing finger play song One From The Left and got hooked. He’s got a huge catalog of catchy, fun kids songs. Check him out!

I use Zoom on Windows a lot lately. I wanted cordless earbuds to decrease the number of wires at my desk so I went exploring. Here’s my recommendation:

All of them have “ok”-ish microphones. When at my desk, I use the mic built into my laptop but sometimes switch to the built-in mike when walking around.

MPOW Flame Solo is the best bluetooth earbud for me
– $40 on Amazon
– They “just work”. It has taken a little effort to figure out how to switch between my now multiple audio-out options on my computer, that isn’t the fault of the earbuds. Syncing is easy, turning on and of is easy.
– audio quality for music is nearly as good as my wired earbuds, I use them for music
– The over-the-ear design means they stay on my head and I don’t have to rely on squeezing the earpiece into my ear to stay on (like the Tozo T12)
– The volume and sound response (highs vs lows etc) is sometimes a little bit less than my wired earbuds. But look ma! no cords!

Tozo T12 is my second choice
– $40 on Amazon
– Also “just work.”
– They work as well as the MPOW Flame Solo but the in-the-ear-canal design bothers me since there is something shoved in my ear canal! And they sometimes fall out when I make a big facial expression like a wide smile.

Jabra Evolve 65T was TERRIBLE
I thought these would be the best due to the company’s reputation and their price tag but I was wrong!
– $220 on Amazon. What?? Yes!
— They occasionally make a very loud click in my ears. Once it happened when I walked away from my desk, maybe it lost bluetooth connection? Once it happened while I was trying to configure it. Earbuds should NEVER blast my ears with a loud click!
— The audio balance for music is often 90% to the left and can’t be fixed. I googled around and found several forums filled with people saying “yeah, that’s a problem. I called Jabra and they couldn’t fix it.” One fix seemed to work for some people: sticking a needle in the microphone port below the “R” on the right earbud and wiggling it around. I gently tried this (on my brand new earbuds) and it didn’t work.
— I had a bit of trouble configuring them to work. Making the sound path from Zoom/Spotify/default computer audio to the speakers wasn’t intuitive and the manual consisted of just 4 pictograms. I muddled through but a little more help from Jabra would have been nice. Here are some hints (that Jabra doesn’t mention!): The Jabra “Sound+” app for Android can help you configure the earbuds… but some forums say it is responsible for the left-balance problem. You should get the Jabra Direct Windows program to set up the Jabra USB Link 370 USB Adapter.

Anker Soundcore Spirit X no good for Zoom on Windows
– $30 on Amazon
– They work great on my Android phone
– They sound about as good as the others. The two over-the-ear earbuds are tethered to one another. I had heard people say that a tethered design would make it so you don’t lose one earbud; to that I say “Meh, just don’t lose them!” I find the tether bothers my neck. When I turn my head, it catches on my hair a little and pulls at the earbud a little. I solved that by putting the cord over the top of my head, which makes me feel rather dorky!
– HOWEVER, they are no good for connecting to a Windows computer! They disconnect randomly. Many people online have said similarly that they don’t maintain a connection. And there’s no fix.

Old school wired earbuds
I still keep them near my desk because they sounds a little better than the bluetooth earbuds and they don’t run out of battery. But the wires are a hassle.

PS. Luke, you were right all along!!

PPS. I should try Aftershokz bone conduction headphones. They have a boom mike and a good visual profile (I want to look normal-ish to my clients and not wear giant headphones)… thoughts?

Update 6-26-24: Shokz Bone Conduction headphones are awesome!

My favorite food storage containers AKA “Tuppers” are the rectangular “Ikea 365+” line. Here’s why:

• The same top is used by ALL of the different sizes (34 ounce to 142 ounce) and materials (plastic and glass). No more rummaging for the right size lid!!!
• Having consistent dimensions, they stack well in the fridge and nest well on the storage shelf.
• Being rectangular, they use space more efficiently than a cylindrical or bowl shaped container.
• They are inexpensive and I can buy more of the exact same size, unlike the stupid “premium limited edition” food containers I’ve had in the past.
• Available in light & break-resistant plastic, and oven safe & stain-proof glass, I use them daily!

Here are the exact sizes I have, all with the same beautiful lids:

• 34 ounce plastic
• 34 ounce glass
• 68 ounce plastic
• 61 ounce glass (the mate for the 68 oz. glass)

I’ve had them now for a few years and they’ve stood up well. The plastic appear to be polypropylene, as they read “P.P.”

The 142 ounce containers use the same lids but I don’t have any yet.

The only downside I’ve found so far is that the 34 ounce size is too big for what you’d consider “small” leftovers. If it doesn’t make a mess, I will sometimes put two different small leftovers in the same container. They make a sectioning system that I should try out!

(I previously wrote about food storage)

I need to use earphones to hear my clients on Zoom. I tried the premium “Jabra Evolve 65T” bluetooth earbuds but they didn’t work for me at all (see my review below). I’ll pay a premium price. Any suggestions?

————————————————–
My review of the Evolve 65T True Wireless Professional UC Headset, posted to Amazon 1-14-21

Several insurmountable problems led to a return

I was hoping to use these to do video Zoom chats on my Windows computer. Using them for listening to music and podcasts too. A couple issues forced me to return them:

– They occasionally make a very loud click in my ears. Once it happened when I walked away from my desk, maybe it lost bluetooth connection? Once it happened while I was trying to configure it. Earbuds should NEVER blast my ears with a loud click!

– The audio balance for music is often 90% to the left and can’t be fixed. I googled around and found several forums filled with people saying “yeah, that’s a problem. I called Jabra and they couldn’t fix it.” One fix seemed to work for some people: sticking a needle in the microphone port below the “R” on the right earbud and wiggling it around. I gently tried this (on my brand new earbuds) and it didn’t work.

– I had a bit of trouble configuring them to work. Making the sound path from Zoom/Spotify/default computer audio to the speakers wasn’t intuitive and the manual consisted of just 4 pictograms. I muddled through but a little more help from Jabra would have been nice. Here are some hints (that Jabra doesn’t mention!): The Jabra “Sound+” app for Android can help you configure the earbuds… but some forums say it is responsible for the left-balance problem. You should get the Jabra Direct Windows program to set up the Jabra USB Link 370 USB Adapter.

– I tried a few other earbuds, the MPOW Flame Solo and the TOZO T12 and both offered better features and sound quality for way less money!

I welcome comments saying which earbuds will work well for Zoom on Windows! These were premium priced, I’d be happy to spend premium money to make it work!

Update 6-26-24: Shokz Bone Conduction headphones are awesome!

It’s getting cold. You’re working from home. Your toes are cold but turning up the thermostat costs the monies. You wanna treat yo self? You Wanna? This is what you want! I got this 2 years ago and… oooooooooo! It’s like having your own personal foot-elves tending to your toezies. When I went over to my wife a few seconds ago to find out the brand name, Megan said some very “Don’t you touch that!”-like words at me. :-)

Cozy Products CT Cozy Toes Carpeted Foot Warming Heater for Under Desks and More. About $50 on Amazon. Here’s Cozy Products full line of foot warmers.

If the space under your desk is chilly, use this and you’ll be able to lower your house thermostat several degrees and keep your toes happy for about 50 watts.

I recently bought some MERV 13 furnace filters from filterbuy.com and was very happy. They mailed 3 filters for about $14 each delivered in about a week. They work well to keep the occasional wildfire smoke out of our house. An acquaintance on Nextdoor.com recommended them to me.

I’ve been using a CPAP since 2015 to stop my snoring and sleep apnea. It’s great! Lemme tell you some things about my experience. I can’t believe I haven’t written more about this!

With a CPAP, I need 1 hr less sleep per night AND I wake up more rested AND my throat doesn’t hurt every day AND my wife tolerates the sound way better than hearing me snore, snoore, snooore, snoooooooore, SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE [oh god is Lee going to die????] SILENCE SILENCE gaaaaaasp! [phew!] snoore [damnit]

If you’re thinking that maybe you want to look into this stuff, here’s what I suggest. Figure out for yourself what your sleep experience is and whether it could be better. What matters is YOUR impression, not mine, and not some doctor’s! That said, it’s hard for you to know what things “should” be like because you are the only one with your sleep condition. I strongly support that you measure what is going on in your sleep-life. Start with the easiest measurements!

• Keep a sleep log for a few weeks (just write down your daily impressions of sleep every night)
• Ask your sleep partner what their impression of your sleep is. Ask them a few times over a few weeks.
• Get a free app like Snoreclock to listen to you sleeping. If you hear your snoring and/or sleep apnea for yourself, you’ll have a better idea as to what’s going on!
• I tried pointing a webcam at me while sleeping a few times but it kinda weirded me out watching myself sleep!

Keeping a sleep-log for few weeks was useful for me. I noticed that I was more groggy in the morning when I had been snoring (and apnea-ing), even when I’d sleep for 9-10 hours. Actually, sleeping longer was WORSE for me, which makes sense because of having less oxygen going to my brain for longer. Getting input from my wife was somewhat helpful, “Did I snore last night?” “I don’t know but you kept me up all night.” “What?”

You might be tempted to wait to investigate this sleep thing. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll wait until you’ve lost weight. Yes, weight loss usually helps sleep and sleep apnea. But why wait for to lose weight when you can approach the solution from multiple directions? Similarly, meditation helps get rid of headaches, but ibuprofen is in your medicine cabinet! Use it!

I have seen 4 sleep doctors and my impression is to not trust them but instead trust your own experience and research. Every sleep specialist told me “Oh yeah, you need a CPAP” but they couldn’t help me get it working well without me putting in all the work myself to get it working. “You’ve ben using it 4 hours per night, that’s great.” “It doesn’t feel great.” “Well, some people don’t tolerate it any longer.” “Really? You’ve got nothing?” My friend went to a surgeon for his sleep troubles and the surgeon recommended (I’ll let you guess…..) surgery! He never even recommended a sleep study. He wrote me last week “Yeah, that was the weird thing, the doctor who took out the uvula / tonsils / turbinets didn’t even bother getting a sleep study, and I never had one as a followup. So I’m sure it made things better the issue would be if it made them better enough. I’m only now considering that it might not have been sufficient.” Caveat emptor!

My experience is that when I don’t use the CPAP, my throat and tongue relax, blocking my airway. So I snore loudly and have apnea. Apnea means that maybe 20 times an hour while sleeping, I stop breathing for about 30 seconds until my brain says “Hey, wake up and breathe or you’ll die!” This whole unfortunate process means that oxygen saturation goes down, I wake up a little hundreds of times a night, and I just don’t sleep well! But when I’m wearing my CPAP, the air pushes all the wiggly bits out of the way, I don’t snore, don’t apnea and wake up refreshed!

At first I had a lot of issues with using it. I struggled for almost a year every night trying to get it to fit well and increase my compliance (ie. how long I would wear it before ripping it off in frustration every night). At first, I wore it 2-3 hours per night, which simply isn’t enough. Now I almost always wake up in the morening wearing it, which is awesome!

Here’s all that I did to wear my mask all night:

Fit – I tried a lot of things to get a better fit. What did it for me was getting a Large full-face mask. I’m using a Resmed Airfit F20. I had been to 4 clinics and… I’ll tell you what, none of them wanted to take the frigging mask out of the package to let me try it on because if it didn’t fit, they’d have to expense it. I finally got a sleep tech at Kaiser Richmond to let me try on some masks. I was the one to ask, strongly, for a Large mask and he opened the package. I wore it for 30 seconds in the clinic and I could immediately tell it felt better than the Mediums that was “supposed” to be the right fit for me.

The right mask got me 80% of the way there. I also shave before bed, it’s no bother with an electric razor. And I wash the mask in hot soapy water every week; if I don’t, I have to keep tightening it to keep it from leaking which eventually doesn’t work well. I also sometimes clean the mask with isopropyl alcohol. With soap and alcohol my masks last a long time! I had tried a mess of other techniques with moderate success.

Maybe you can use a nose-only mask but when I tried one in the sleep clinic, as I fell asleep, the air would go in my nose and right out my mouth which is wei-eerd!

Other issues I’ve tackled….

Appearance – At the very beginning, I was very concerned about it looking dorky or blocking my view or… blah blah blah. Screw that. No one sees you in bed except people that will ALWAYS want you to wear it since it stops you from snoring. I tried a couple sleep appliances and they all sucked. CPAP is the first line treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea (definitely get a free Medscape account and check out that link!). I had tried a tongue suction thing, a chin strap, and a mouthguard and they were silly. The second-line treatment for apnea is ALSO CPAP: a fancy CPAP machine called a BiPAP. Surgery is the distant-third option.

Every sleep specialist I visited knew about the same about sleep and CPAP usage that I did. There’s really not that much to know. If you think your CPAP problems can be resolved by going to yet another specialist, you may be overvaluing their lab-coats. I am still pissed at how much each specialist charged my medical insurance for what I got. My sleep evaluation was ten THOUSAND dollars and the result was them saying, “Yup, you stop breathing because of your snoring. A CPAP will probably help. Here, maybe this one will fit. Good luck. Good bye.” The mask fitting session was terrible, their bedside manner was terrible, their billing was terrible, administrative help terrible.

Here’s the review I wrote for Sleep Diagnostics of Fremont.

I thank them for my sleep apnea diagnosis but my experience could have gone much better. A thousand cuts: they could have warned me about the goop they were going to put in my hair for the polysomnography and not lied about that being in the written materials they gave me. The admin people on the phone were weird and unhelpful in many ways. They didn’t help AT ALL with me getting a mask, which resulted in me spending another YEAR trying to find one that fit better. They asked me to sign paperwork that they hadn’t read themselves “Oh, its standard stuff” they said but it wasn’t. And all this terrible service for charging my insurance $10k. Hurumph.

I adjust the settings on the CPAP myself. My max pressure is set to 13.8, min pressure is 8.8. Last week, for the first time in maybe two years, I adjusted the pressure: I changed the max pressure from 13.6 to 13.8 because Megan was saying I was having multiple apneas in a night. My chest felt a little stretched for a night by the additional pressure but it solved the problem immediately. If you change the settings yourself, do it slowly! If you push the pressure too high, you may get central sleep apnea which means that you never exhale, which could be, you know, bad. If you set it too low, you’ll feel like you’re not getting enough air and you’ll rip the mask off at night. Initially, I changed the settings a moderate amount over a few weeks and it helped. At the very beginning, I kept going back for doctor’s appointments for them to change the settings and it was a big hassle. In a few nights of fiddling, I had it dialed in much better than their settings.

I tried using software to look at my CPAP usage patterns. I used Sleepyhead and ResScan from Resmed, None really helped dial in the reason for me not wearing except to help me focus on the problem. Using the free Snoreclock Android app was helpful. I never paid for it and it worked great. The use-case: It would record audio the whole evening and the next morning it would display red areas on a chart when I was snoring. I’d zoom in and look at the volume chart to see if I may have stopped breathing at any time. Then I’d listen to the zoomed-in audio. One hint: It displays different screens when you rotate your phone.

Here’s another tidbit: the manual says I’m supposed to buy a new mask, mask holder, air hose, and humidifier tray every 3 months or so. At first I was buying the stuff like I was supposed to. I’d buy it through my insurance with a co-pay. But then I figured two things: first, most of the items are much less expensive on Amazon than through insurance ($25 mask instead of $50 COPAY for the same item?!) Second, the only regular maintenance I’ve needed is to replace the air filter every 6 months, wash the mask weekly, and replace the mask and mask holder yearly or so. If I was using a humidifier, I could understand a need to keep things cleaner.

Definitely check out my post from 2017 about CPAP.

When you need to watch a website for changes, VisualPing.io it my go-to. You get enough free credits to watch one page daily, and watching more pages is inexpensive. I’ve been watching my daughter’s after-school program’s website for updates during the pandemic and VisualPing has been helpful.

I’ve been using a Chrome extension called Video Speed Controller to speed up boring videos and TV shows. It works great, I’d definitely recommend it. I use it on Netflix and Youtube, often bumping the speed to 1.2x. Sometimes to 2.5x on slow lectures.

If you’re concerned about giving it permissions to view all of your content on all of your sites (I was!), you can go into your Chrome Extensions menu, and give the extension limited “site access”. I gave mine access only to sites when I click on the icon in the Chrome toolbar.

I use the hotkeys “S” and “D” to change the speed of the video dynamically. It’s weird when I slowly crank the speed up. Like the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pot, I hardly notice the gradually building heat!

I got a Chargie device for my phone. I’m sorry but I can’t recommend it.

The promise is “Chargie is an app+hardware phone charge limiting solution that makes your battery last for much longer than if you had charged it regularly to 100% all night, every night.” It limits charging by unplugging the USB cord when your phone is charged enough.

Here’s the review I emailed to the developer and posted on Google Play. I’m sad that after a month, there’s been no response.  

Two Stars out of Five: I got my Chargie April 2, 2020 for my Pixel 2. This review is on Jun 3. It’s a good idea, the app is well written and the device works (with a few tiny glitches) but I’m concerned that it won’t save my battery. Now instead of staying at 100% in the overnight, my battery goes between 80 and 85% charge several times per night. If it’s the act of discharging that is bad for a battery, then Chargie won’t solve the battery-wear problem. :-( I want it to work but I uninstalled it. Maybe it would help if it automatically turned on Battery Saving mode while on the Chargie device.