Soundpeats Air5 Pro Review: Affordable Hi-Res Earbuds With Adaptive ANC
Finding true wireless earbuds that balance hi-res sound, strong noise cancellation and comfort often means paying premium prices. Brands like Sony, Bose and Apple dominate the high-end, but Soundpeats has been building a reputation for delivering excellent value. Their latest release, the Air5 Pro, aims to offer flagship-style performance at a far more accessible cost. I was so eager to try these, I actually opened them & started using them straight away. Normally, I would take photos of earphones before using them, but I live by a loud road & it’s getting harder to hear my podcasts on my daily walks, so I was desperate to test out the noise-cancelling. I’ve not been disappointed. As usual for sound peats, they come well packaged & they feel premium. The charging case is great & I’ve only needed to recharge it once since getting the Air5 Pro’s.Read More....
I’ve had so many pairs of Soundpeats headphones & earphones over the years & they have possible the best quality to price ratio of any tech I use. The Q40HD are their updated sports earbuds and I just had to give them a go. I have an older pair of these I love when I go running. For me, these are ideal because they are wireless, but also a necklace type earphone. You can remove them from your ears and connect the earphones with their magnets to create a necklace, which keeps them in place when running by a busy road or when I need to hear. Much more convenient than a standard wireless earbud or headphones.Read More....
I’ve had an issue since upgrading to Sonoma on my 2019 Intel iMac. I have power nap disabled, as every time the computer wakes under power nap, my external drives spin up. My office at home is in the next room to our bedroom, so I hear the drives spinning up & down all night. It has been driving me mad. I’m not a big fan of the new energy saver settings in Sonoma, or the entire settings layout for that matter. When looking in logs using the following in terminal:-Read More....
I first got hold of this Raspberry Pi 1 Model B back in May 2012. At the time, I bought the pi to replace an ageing Apple TV 2 which I had jail broken and was using as a kodi media centre. It worked well, but I preferred the Aluminium apple remote & IR sensor on the ATV2 so the pi was largely mothballed.
A few years later I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and this became our main Kodi media centre, replacing the Apple TV 2 and coupled with a Rii keyboard. It was much faster & more stable running Libreelec.
A couple more years passed and I realized I still had my first Pi, complete with an awesome perspex case, so I had a look for projects to complete with it. I stumbled across the PiHole project and the rest is history.
PiHole is a network ad blocker/filter and DNS server. It has a great browser interface & you can add lots of adblock/ublock blocklists to the pi, to block ads on all devices on the network at a hardware level. Unlike adblockers on a browser which use more cosmetic ways of blocking ads, the pihole blocks them at DNS level, meaning a request to the ad/blocked server never leaves the network. From a privacy standpoint this is huge. It also means I can control traffic/trackers on devices such as our Smart TV and iOS devices. It’s surprising how many requests these devices make without your knowledge.
Pi Hole Web Interface
PiHole’s web interface shows all traffic & destinations and allows you to whitelist or blacklist IP’s & domains for fine-grained control over outgoing traffic on your network.
I took my setup one step further & coupled it with DNSCrypt 2.0 to encrypt all of my outbound DNS traffic. DNSCrypt coupled with PiHole on the pi & HTTPS everywhere in my browser ensures no unencrypted traffic leaves my browser. All DNS lookups are encrypted & I use non logging DNSCrypt Servers for my DNS lookups. This adds an extra layer of protection for my network traffic & prevents eavesdropping & sniffing of my traffic.
The Pi Hole raspberry pi sits in a cupboard downstairs and filters all of our network traffic. We have around 20 Wi-Fi connected devices on the network & around 10 hard-wired devices & it copes fine. It’s running 24/7 and the blocklist contains almost 1.3 million blocked domains without a hitch. Even with DNScrypt running alongside Pi Hole (which are both Python based) and a MySQL server for Kodi, the old Pi with its modest hardware isn’t stressed, runs silently, uses very little CPU time and has a 50% memory footprint. It’s even running the original SD card which has been in use since 2012.
This is a great solution. It’s silent, uses only a few watts of power & saves thousands of extra requests per day, not to mention the amount of data which is never downloaded. Browsing is generally much quicker on my home network & an added benefit is that we don’t see advertising on catch up TV services on our Smart TV.
I’m going to do a full post on setting up the pi for this usage, so if you would like to see that, check back soon.
For those of you willing to dive in, you need a Pi running raspbian. You can install Pi Hole using the instructions on their website
