• Three pairs Senheisser CX400s
• Countless pairs of $12 TDKs
• TwoThree pairs Shure SE210

For running however, my current Shure’s are a bit too soundblocking and they don’t have a remote control unit. I started using the freebie one that came with my iPhone which let more sound in and have a remote, but those had a habit of falling out. A lot.

After a bit of research I wound up buying a set of Sennheiser OMX 680i headphones. These ones have an over the ear hook to hold them in place, other models in the range have a variation on the in-ear style or a neckband system.

The units are the result of work between Sennheisser and Adidas specifically for sport. They feature Kevlar reinforced cabling and the ear pieces and microphone are designed to be sweat and rain resistant.

Music-wise, the sound quality is pretty good. Well, good enough to motivate with a decent rendition of Killing in the Name anyway. The main selling points of the headphones though is their claimed water resistance and a remote control compatibility with iPhones and other newish iPods. The control unit allows you adjust volume, go forward/ back or even make and answer a call (if you can muster up enough oxygen!).

I’m always impressed how many controls you can build into something with one button and a rocker:

• One click – play/ pause
• Two clicks – go forward one track
• Three clicks – go back one track
• Push and hold – answer/ end call (or start voice control)
• Rocker switch – volume adjustment

As for the water resistance however, they definately are that. So far they have survived a few rainstorms, and perhaps more tellingly, a trip through the washing machine and a subsequent spin through the drier too!

Pros:

• Comfortable, once you have bent the units to fit
• Waterproof
• Remote control features

Cons:

• Over-the-ear design not ideal when also wearing sunglasses
• Tricky to tailor the fit with the supplied ear covers
• A bit pricy at AU$130

One of the features of Powercontroller is the ability to run scripts and following a rewatching of Iron Man I thought I fancied something like Jarvis that told me the weather in the morning before I got out of bed.

Most of the scripting was cut, pasted and modified for my own needs. Although I learned pretty fast so much of it was resequenced to better fit in with what I needed and to improve the efficiency.

There were two main hurdles in creating my messenger:

Adjusting the volume for the voice based on location.

At my apartment, my laptop is always connected to a set of speakers so I realised that if I just had a default volume I would either get blasted out of bed if the volume was set for the internal speakers, or not hear the message if I was not at my place.
Unfortunately, Applescript does not have a way of testing for a headphone jack (there is a way where you allow the computer to ‘read’ the screen but trialing this I had troubles with screensaver locks and other applications that run overnight (such as Carbon Copy Cloner) that have popup messages on completion. Eventually I settled on a method where it tests for the SSID of my router, on the assumption that if the airport is connected to my router the computer will be plugged into the speakers.
The script also captures initial volume settings so it can return to them once the message has been delivered.

Testing for an internet connection

As the script checks my mail and gathers live weather data, I realised that it would go horribly wrong if it could not do this (for reasons such as staying at a hotel with no internet or my housemate turning off the modem). It took a while but I eventually found an elegant solution that just tries to ping a website (in this case the Apple site) and then either runs or does not run relevant sections of the script.

With all that done, at the allotted time something like this happens:

1. Clock reaches desired time
2. Powercontroller starts iTunes and wake up script²
3. Appropriate amount of pause is included in the script to both give it time to complete the data gathering and to let iTunes music kinda wake me up
4. System volume level is captured, then reduced.
   

   “Good morning Ian”
   “It is 5:55 AM”
   “Today is Thursday, 14 July 2011″
   “You have 3 unread emails”
   “Now, the temperature is: 9 degrees centigrade, and it is Mostly Cloudy.”
   “Todays forecast is: Showers Late, between 12 and 19 degrees.”

5. System volume level is put back, I try and get up

It doesn’t quite have the eloquence of JARVIS and I would like to extend things to include a news headline and the like but I’m happy with things as they are at the moment.

How it works is a bit of a mystery (though I have a theory or two) – it would be nice if Apple would actually publish a user guide for new features once in a while. At least for now it is an improvement over the 1.1.4 implementation.

Unfortunately, since the iPT is wireless only (as opposed to also having EDGE like the iPhone), there is one major flaw in the plan. Namely:

You can only find out where you are when you are connected to the internet.

At least in Sydney, open networks in the CBD are few and far between², and since I know where the open ones are, i don’t really need to use the locate me function there…

The iPT has plenty of space so even a couple of hundred Mb would not really be missed, and runs a version of OS X which is well capable of managing saved data. Two additions would of course be necessary to allow offline operation:

1. Allow caching of a set area – i.e. ‘what I can see on the screen, but at max zoom³
2. Cache the corresponding entries in the wireless node location database

Maps.app already caches mapping⁴ tiles (I scroll around collecting tiles at max zoom if I need to go somewhere new), but every once in a while they disappear so it would not seem to be difficult to add this functionality⁵.

Armed with these cache files, the iPT would become a viable ‘getting unlost’ tool (I don’t think it is accurate enough to call it navigation, but from my tests it gets it right with 200 – 300m). At the moment, the locate me feature is not a whole lot of use.

At least the sun is out, which is nice after 4 inches of rain in the last few days.

I am hopeful that all the lock-down kerfuffle is down to Leopard (The ucoming OS that was delayed for the iPhone and iPod Touch) software being on the devices which Apple would rather not have people poking around in before it is time. Heres hoping for an SDK and proper access for applications¹ sometime in November².