Tag: gaming

Do you play in your daily life?

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
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I do some football with the kids in warm months. I also play some bullet chess. I used to play more but kind of gave up my favorite 5-minute blitz games after my second kid was born in 2018. Don’t miss it, TBH. 1-minute chess is sufficiently good and the game ends before it becomes boring. I have no defined time but I sometimes alternate chess with reading after everyone is in bed.

I avoid playing addictive video games. I’ve been addicted to mobile or computer games several times in my life and do not enjoy it. For example, I got addicted to the Bulgarian MMORPG Imperia Online around 2005. Woke up at 4am every night to manage my armies. This pissed off my wife so much that she gave me the talk. I stopped immediately and it was empowering, gave me the tools to interrupt emerging game addictions on demand, which I used a couple of times in the later years.

In 2011, at a company meetup, I met two of the authors of Triple Town, a highly addictive mobile game. They explained how gamification works and how the drops are optimized for producing small amounts of dopamine in your brain to hook you up. I didn’t believe at first and tried their game. Surprise, surprise. I got addicted to it and had to use my painful tooling to stop it. So, whenever I feel the need to play a new game, I try to find puzzle-like games rather than games where you collect items, merge groups of items, or raise stats.

The last game I tried to play was Puzzle Star Battle. It is very difficult, though, I couldn’t solve a single 10x10x2 puzzle.

Headphones for calls – JBL Quantum 200 vs JBL Quantum 400.

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I do many calls and my environment is often noisy – coffee shops, kids around, and ninja turtles on TV. I’ve tried finding headphones that have a good microphone and are comfortable for my ears. I believe the headphones need to be wired so I don’t charge them. I like retractable microphones. Over the last months, I used JBL Quantum 200 with a good success. Unfortunately, they broke so I bought a replacement. The local electronics shop only had Quantum 100 and 400, and here we are.

JBL Quantum 100 doesn’t have a retractable microphone but otherwise looks like my old headphones.

JBL Quantum 200 has a retractable mic with no cover and a roller for volume control. When folded, the mic is muted. That roller was a bit inconvenient until I got used to it because it would roll while the headphones were in my backpack. They broke soon-ish but come with a 2-year warranty.

Quantum 400 has a retractable mic with some cover, volume control, some other roller with unclear purpose, and a mute button. They also mute when the mic is folded.

Here are some mic samples from Starbucks, the speakers are right over my head and quite loud:

Quantum 200

Quantum 400

My backup Devia headphones for reference

Here is how they look.

The patch is not the broken old headphones, it’s the new ones. The reason is that the mute button is loose and makes a clicking noise that annoys me. So here I fixed it. I’ll upgrade myself with a fancier patch at some point.

Out of those three, my old JBL Quantum 200 headphones were the top pick. Sure, the 400s come with buttons, rollers, extra cables, and flashy LED lights packed in a fancy box. But, the loose mute button and the extra roller with no clear purpose actually made them worse. The microphone quality is sufficient in both.

Matt Mullenweg wrote a much more detailed post on the same subject – his recommendation was for a Sennheiser, which I followed 5-6 headphones back. The locally available set didn’t have a retractable microphone and couldn’t use it for calls from coffee shops. I moved on quickly.

UPDATE 2025-03-10

The JBL Quantum 400 also broke down. It’s a very minimal problem but nevertheless I’m going to look for a replacement in the following weeks. Overall, I think the Quantum 400 are significantly better than the 200 because of the better cable that can be replaced.

I think they’re better overall than the other headphones I used over the last 10 years but the build quality is not fantastic.

Disappointed by the second roller on my Quantum 400, I bought a pair of Quantum 100 as well. These are not up to the bar needed for my daily work needs. They’re less comfortable, the mic is located on a piece of wire, which is much less convenient than the Quantum 200/400 mic. I didn’t use them much and actually kept doing calls with the slightly broken Quantum 200s.