221

See these headphones?  Two of the three of these are counterfeits.

Left-to-right:  Solo $179.99 from Radio Shack, (PRODUCT) RED-edition Solo HD $149.99 from no-name store in Woodbridge Mall, Solo HD $199.99 from Best Buy

I picked up the (PRODUCT) RED Solo HD headphones first from a no-name electronics store in the Woodbridge Mall.  Figured the deal was too good to be true at $149.99.  That's a pretty heavy discount on the normal $199.99 price tag.  I took them home and went online to verify them when I realized the box didn't have a serial number nor did the headset themselves.  You can see it from the picture above.

No serial number on these fakes.  Womp, womp.

There's also no serial number near the right earphone.  Strange thing is the packaging seemed very high quality for a knock off.  The second pair, the original Solo headphones, I bought from Radio Shack.  Figured they were legit because this box actually had a serial number on the bottom.  There was also a serial number on the headphones themselves.

Serial number on these bad boys, but too bad it's completely fake.

So, again, first thing I did was go home and verify the serial number.  Check this out…

Fuck.

Yeah, that's a problem.  Never expected a counterfeit set of headphones from a big name retailer.  Strange thing is, the store shelve for the headphones was empty but an employee gladly brought me out a box from the back of the store.  I wonder if they knew they were fakes.

The third pair that I bought from Best Buy turned out to be legit.  Never had so much trouble buying a product in my life.  I'll be going back to both Radio Shack and the Woodbridge Mall tomorrow to return the fakes.  Just figured I'd write down some tips to figuring out which headphones are authentic.

Lack of serial number on the bottom of the box.  Also note that the official barcode and serial number are reflective unlike the phony set from Radio Shack.

Serial number that doesn't check out online (obviously).  This begs the question why didn't I just check on my phone when I was in the store.  Well, turns out the official Beats by Dr. Dre verification site doesn't work correctly on Mobile Safari (keyboard keeps going away).  Figures.  By the time I hit Best Buy, I figured out that Opera for iOS works well with the site.

Tarnished headphone cable.  The Radio Shack fakes had black scuffs on both sets of headphone cables.

Different texture on the inside plastic of the headset below the metal bracket.  On the fakes the lower plastic feels harder and less textured than the upper part of the headset.

Photograph of Dr. Dre on the side of the box is very dark on the fakes.  See the image below.

Left-to-right:  real Solo HD, fake Solo, fake (PRODUCT) RED-edition Solo HD

Haven't posted in a quite.  Figured I'd just give my 2¢ on the new Macbook Airs.  While I really, really like the new 11.6" model, I'm afraid that the laptop is against all that I believe in in terms of computers.  Let's start with the processor.  While I'm glad this machine doesn't have an Atom chip, I still find the 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo to be a bit paltry.  Definitely not an upgrade over my 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo-based Macbook Pro, but understandable given the computer's form factor.  Here's where things get sticky.  First off, the screen isn't covered by glass like the MBP.  Not that this is a standard feature or anything, but I definitely appreciate the glass covering my MBP's screen, allowing me to easily clean it with regular glass-cleaning products.  While I don't have any hard evidence to back this up, I assume that the glass adds another layer of protection for the underlying display.  From what I've heard, the glass was omitted due to its weight.  On to the next issue, RAM.  The RAM is soldered to the (tiny) motherboard.  Totally understandable, but totally not upgradable.  So, if you don't order your MBA with 4 GB of RAM, you'll never have 4 GB of RAM.  As usual, Apple's RAM prices are way overpriced.  The 11.6" MBA starts at a cool grand, minus the upgraded RAM.  It's also of noting that the system uses flash-based memory.  While flash-memory is all the rage now-a-days due to its raw speed and lack of movable parts, I don't fully trust any medium with limited write cycles.  I own hard drives that are literally older than me that are in pristine condition, physically and function-wise.  Not only does the system use flash memory, it uses a proprietary connector (to save space?).  No SATA here, the flash memory plugs right into the motherboard.  While it is replaceable, you're going to have to get the part from Apple.  It's also of nothing that the base model's flash size is a meager 64 GB.  If I decided to use Boot Camp, there goes another 15-20 GB.  I can't really see myself using this for anything more than casual, coffee-table or Starbucks type usage.  And for that matter, I could just use my iPad.

Yeah, that's right.  Jawz has a new home.  Poor Shamoo (yes, I know I spelt it wrong when I named him) is a little jealous that he's still stuck in the plain old dirty-water bowl.  Jawz (officially Prince Jawz III) has been around for the last 4 years and was stuck in Prince Jawz II's old crappy ass bowl.  I bought him a slightly bigger one least year when I took Shamoo home because I felt bad.  Yesterday I decided it was time for an upgrade.  I went to the pet store and bought an Aqueon 2.5 gallon tank and a couple little accessories and thew this together.

Not too shabby.  I ran the filter for 24 hours and put him in this afternoon.  Poor little guy was confused as hell and circled the filter for a good 2 hours.  He's much more calm now.

I went back to the tradition of writing all over the damn glass again, haha.

  Guess who is baaaccckkkkkkk?  Soooooooooo I bought my MacBook into work with me today because I was completely pissed off about yesterday.  I tried turning it on this morning after letting it sit overnight, still no luck.  Seemed like the screen was turning on but no backlight or images were showing up.  I tore the goddamn thing apart in the office and found a VGA adaptor.  I disconnected the internal LCD connector and turned the machine on and I see this…

Yes!  This explains why whenever I turned it on then touched the power button, it turned off immediately.  Turns out the computer was in the middle of creating a Boot Camp partition when the computer got soaked and turned off.  I booted holding down Alt on the keyboard and it detected the hard drive.  I didn't even fuck with it, I just turned it off and got back to work.

I checked out the upper left side of the keyboard where the water spilt.  Turns out the LCD inverter cable lies right there.  

It seemed pretty clean but the area around it was a little grimy.  I grabbed the office's first aid kit and took a few alcohol pads and a Q-tip.  I cleaned the area up around the inverter and reseated the cable.  Tada…

100% working.  I figured since I had this thing completely cracked open, I might as well fix all the little case cracks so I reinforced them with superglue gel.  Fast forward another half hour and the computer is all back together.

Well. This is interesting. Apparently I missed all the fun at school today.

Police are looking for a man wearing no shirt and who is in his underwear in a wooded area near Wagner College. Cops, who called a Level 1 mobilization, activated a police helicopter in the search for the 29-year-old man who's not wearing any shoes. It's not clear why police are looking for the man, who has brown hair. He was last seen near the intersection of Wetmore and Longview roads.

Ooooooookay. So while I was complaining about being soaked in my shorts and t-shirt, some asshole was running around in the woods in his tighty whities. Apparently the cops got the dogs to chase him out according to an e-mail public safety sent us.

There is a police presence on the ground walking through the woods and they are awaiting the canine unit to have the dogs flush him out. The only description we have at this time is that the man in just wearing underwear.

And my favorite part of the e-mail...

Please contact Public Safety if you see anyone on campus who looks out of place.

Out of place == some asshole in his tighty whities hiding in the woods. LOL.