GSoC

Our two GSoC candidates continue to make tweaks to their work. This is still only the bonding period, so they're already ahead of time. The contribution period only started this week, on the 27th.

We also had our weekly meeting where we discussed their tasks and concepts.

Trainings

I had two trainings to do this week.

The first was "Deaf Awareness: working and communicating well with Deaf people". It was very very useful. I certainly learned a lot of things that I wasn't aware of, or that I hadn't thought of before.

The other training was related to hiring. This one is a compulsory training required for all staff that are going to be on interview panels for new staff. It points out various things one should know to ensure the hiring process is carried out fairly and correctly, within the framework of the law. It was also very informative, and having an insight into the frameworks that the university implements was very useful too.

Departmental away day

We had our departmental away day on Friday. Lots of discussion about our research, our teaching, on how we fit in within the larger picture with the university. I spoke to our dean and other principal investigators (PIs) in the department and offered to help on things here and there.

There was a barbecue in the evening with drinks, and a few of us continued to the pub afterwords to keep the discussion going.

Returned Sony earbuds

I'd bought myself a set of WF-C700N ear buds some time ago. I'd seen a few reviews. They won the What Hi-Fi award in 2023, so they seemed a good buy.

They're very good sound wise for their price, but unfortunately, they turned out to be very buggy. The right ear bud would just not turn on a lot of the time. The docs suggested re-initialising them to fix the issue, and while it did fix the issue for a bit, the right earbud would go off again and not turn back on. I did this a few times, but it became increasingly annoying. Heading out on my commute only to find that the right earbud had stopped working again was really not fun. On top of that, I couldn't reliably re-initialise them each time. Sometimes the reinitialising process wouldn't work.

A search showed me that lots of users were experiencing this, with multiple folks on Reddit confirming the issue and suggesting returning the earbuds. I persevered and tried various things on my Android phone too, but in the end nothing really fixed the issue. So, I've returned them too.

I shelled out a bit more and got the top of the line WF-1000XM5 ones now. They're double the price, and have much better sound quality and a few more features. So far, so good 🤞.