I recently visited my local audiophile shop as I was in the market for two new surround speakers. Naturally, to hook speakers up to your amplifier you need speaker wires. And that is when the can of worms appeared.

See, there is this long standing war going on in the audiophile world about speaker cables. Some people treat it like it were pixie dust or unicorn horns or religion. Some say spending up to 20% the cost of your system on interconnects are justifiable. A mid range system can easily cost $3000 for the receiver, $3500 for the TV, $500 for the Blu-Ray player and about $4000 for the speakers. That totals $11000. 20% of that is $2200 - for cables... To hook that up you will need two cat2 HDMI cables, one RCA cable (subwoofer) and 5 speaker cables assuming a 5.1 setup. It is possible to spend $30 on two HDMI cables, $40 for a fancy subwoofer cable and $70 for 100ft of AWG14 speaker wires for a total of $140. That is a far cry from $2200. The question is - do these audiophiles have a point? Does it make a difference dropping that much money on interconnects?

This all started when my hi-fi shop sales rep reminded me that the speaker wire I am purchasing is directional and has to be installed the right way round. Now I must first state that the only reason I buy from this shop is because of this guy. He is really incredibly good - never tries to be the sales guy and push expensive stuff on you when you do not need it. But mentioning wire directionality made warning signs go off in my head. As electrical engineer I know a thing or two about electricity. I mean, as engineer you start out learning about magnetic flux, Bessel functions, the difference between face centered and body centered cubic crystals, that holes can flow just like electrons in semiconductors and so on. So mentioning directionality in a wire that will be carrying alternating current exclusively made me concerned.

On Mac OS X, in 2016, we still have this option - I ask thou, but why? We have USB sticks and Cloud storage. No mac has a CD/DVD burner built in any longer. This option consumes valuable space. It is pointless. What happened to paying attention to chamfer radii?

See this awesome article / video

Why do journalists insist on doing this:

World’s largest aircraft crash lands its second flight

Take a look at the video and tell me if that is what you would consider a crash landing:

You are in heaven as you just signed up for your 1 month free porn subscription, and want to stream and save as much smut your internet link can handle, because you are a lonely looser nerd that needs to stock up on material for the long winter ahead. You run as fast as your legs can carry you to your favourite shop in the whole wide world - Best Buy. But alas - so many options to choose from when trying to buy that huge external hard disk drive.

So you google some products you see and find this:

LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Drive