Broken Shure E3C headphones

I got a pair of Shure E3C in February 2006. Great sound and a nice set of headphones. Somewhat pricey, but since I listen a lot on my headphones I wanted something good. After having had them less than a year they broke (as reported by other users). I got a new pair (after first having been sent the E2C:s as a replacement) and all was well.

Until June this year when they broke again. This time they weren’t physically broken, but there’s no sound from the left speaker (again, as reported by other users). I sent four emails to the local Swedish representative over a period of two weeks until I got a reply saying that they are not a distributor for Shure and got refered to another company.

I’m now trying to contact them instead – keep tuned for updates. In the meantime I’m using the apple phones that came with the second generation iPod nano, which are actually not that bad for casual use. But I want my E3c:s back.

Hans Rosling reveals new insights on poverty

Wow. I’ve seen TED talks before, but this one blew me away. Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. And how he does it. A truly brilliant presentation. Just go see it already. I’m sure there are other gems among the TED talks, but I haven’t looked at any other videos yet. I will.

Thanks to boingboing for pointing me in the right direction.

I had played around with Trendalyzer before which might make it easier to follow along in the presentation.

Google Analytics working

Ok, I found the problem with Google Analytics. I was pointing to niklasmorberg.blogger.com, a site that does not exist. At first I felt stupid for making such a simple mistake, but having thought about it Google Analytics is to blame. The error message I got from them was that my tracker was not installed properly, but the real problem was that the URL was invalid.

I’ll try to report this to the Analytics team, mostly as an exercise to see if and how they respond. The proper response obviously being an update to their error message.

Trying to get a site meter to the blog

I wanted to get Google Analytics up and running, and since Blogger is a Google service that should be a walk in the park, right? Wrong. It seems the new blogger XML templates are incompatible with the tracking code for Google Analytics. After spending a couple of hours trying to come up with a solution I took the easy way out and went with statcounter instead. Happy so far. At least I now can track page views.

Improve Google Reader looks

Thanks to John Hicks for making a nice looking Google Reader skin. If you don’t use Stylish, kp made a Greasemonkey version. The “Trends” link is kinda hidden, but its not enough of a problem to stop me from using it.

Edit: I tried out the greasemonkey version since I didn’t want to install Stylish but there were too many glitches to make it a nice experience. Install Stylish and use the instructions on Johns site. You don’t want the greasemonkey version. Trust me.

NPR interview with Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame finally steps out of character for an interview with NPR. Thanks to Raymond Chen for his mid-year link cleaning – wouldn’t have found it otherwise and I’ve been wanting to hear/see an interview with Sacha Baron Cohen for a while now.

Interesting art projecting shadows from rubbish

Check out these sculptures made out of rubbish (at least I think most of it was) that projects shadows resembling the artists themselves.

read more | digg story

On the possessive apostrophe

Welcome to my place. Although I am Swedish, I’ve chosen to write in English in the vain hope to reach a larger audience. Audience, schmaudience – the most probable reader(s) of these musings will be myself and possibly people I know that will drop by and say hi.

What can be expected of this YAB*? Not much. I’ll post interesting stuff I find on the web and on other blogs. Perhaps there’ll even be an original thought from yours truly, but don’t count on it.

Before ending this post, here’s what I’ve learned today when researching proper usage of the possessive apostrophe following words ending with ‘s’ (to correctly name the blog): You typically only add a single apostrophe to plurals, but you add ‘s to singulars. There are a couple of exceptions to singulars: if it is difficult to pronounce you might go with the single apostrophe and if you’re talking about Jesus’ stuff you leave out the s. I toyed with the idea of going with “Niklas’ blog” for that reason – subtly hinting at delusions of grandeur, but the allusion would probably be lost on everybody (myself included had I not read up on the subject just now).

Anyway. Welcome to Niklas’s blog. More digressions in later posts.

*Yet Another Blog. But you already knew that, didn’t you?