In the evening, from our terrace, we can see bats flying out to feed. I was trying to photograph them with flash; in this photo I accidentally underexposed and also missed focus, but I like how it turned out.
I thought I'll follow up my post about useful Windows programs with another one about browser extensions – because after all, we do everything through a browser now.
Google Chrome:
Better History: Replaces Chrome's default History page with useful features like viewing and searching by date/hour, and a better search function.
Bitwarden: Open-source, zero-knowledge password manager. It has relatively low ratings on the Chrome Web Store, but is well-reviewed just about everywhere else, and my experience with it has been good so far. That said, I don't entrust my email and bank passwords to any manager, however well-reviewed.
Convert WebP to JPEG: Does what it says on the tin. There are free websites which do this too, but I find myself needing to convert .webp files to .jpeg pretty frequently, and a browser extension saves a few clicks – in fact, a lot of clicks in the long run.
Enable Backspace: In 2016, Chrome removed backspace as a keyboard shortcut for going back to the previous page, and I immediately downloaded this extension which brings it back.
Focus for Google Docs: This extension, also mentioned in a previous post, hides Google Docs toolbars and buttons, and gives you a distraction-free full-screen writing area with a soothing light grey background.
WhatFont: A simple, one-click way to identify fonts on webpages. In the screenshot below, I'm testing it on my videography blog.
Next up: not an extension as such, but the translate feature in Google Lens, located next to the other extensions in the Chrome toolbar, is super helpful for reading unselectable text in other languages, like this Instagram post from my favourite badminton player (now retired).
And finally, I find Reader Mode (Alt+Shift+R on Chrome, F9 on Firefox), set to Dark Mode, helpful for reading longer articles.
Firefox:
Many of the extensions I mentioned earlier are also available for Firefox, and it has one additional feature which is a lifesaver: free VPN with a 50 GB monthly allowance.
I also use a couple of Firefox browser extensions on my Android phone, because Android Chrome doesn't support desktop extensions: WhatFont (which I mentioned earlier), and Mark My Word, for highlighting text on webpages.
Bonus Chrome tips
A couple more tips. If you bookmark a page but leave the bookmark name blank (or simply delete the name, leaving the URL intact), it shows up as a favicon in your bookmarks bar, which saves space while being easily identifiable.
Chrome (and most other browsers for that matter) have time-saving keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+Tab to open a new tab, and Ctrl+L to jump to address bar. I used AutoHotKey to add a few shortcuts of my own, such as Alt+T to duplicate the current tab, and Ctrl+Alt+C to search Google for selected text.
The code, if you are an AutoHotKey user, is:
; Alt+T to duplicate current tab
#HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe chrome.exe")
!t::
{
Send("^l")
Send("!{Enter}")
}
#HotIf
; Ctrl+Alt+C to search Google for selected text
#HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe chrome.exe")
^!c::
{
A_Clipboard := ""
Send("^c")
if ClipWait(0.5)
{
Send("^t")
Send("^v")
Send("{Enter}")
}
}
#HotIfLast month I wrote about a dove which nested on our balcony, and how I fortified her nest to avoid a casualty like the previous time she nested there.
The photo below is from just a day or two after her eggs hatched. Let's call it Day 2, though I'm not totally sure.
At the bottom-right corner of the photo, you can see a bit of the wire clothes-hanger which I added to support the nest. Coincidentally I just came across a video from Wild Taipei Film of a magpie which built its nest almost entirely from stolen hangers.
Also from Day 2, a few hours later:
Day 8, now the nest has only one bird:
This is a mystery to me, because at this stage I think the chicks were still too young to leave the nest. If one fell out, I'm pretty sure we would have seen it. And the nest is in a spot which is almost impossible for predators to reach.
Anyway, on Day 11, the remaining chick left the nest. For a while, it hopped around our balcony:
...then it took a few experimental leaps, and eventually flew to a nearby tree.
Now the mother dove appears to be hatching again, in the same nest.
I made this list useful of Windows programs for my own reference, but I thought I'll add a bit more description and share it online in case it helps anyone else. I didn't include programs which everyone knows about (e.g. Microsoft Word, Spotify, various messaging apps...), nor programs for specific things which, if you are into that thing, you most likely know about (e.g. Affinity for photo editing, DaVinci Resolve for video, VS Code for coding).
Every program on this list is free, some are open-source, and they all work on Windows. Some of them have Mac or Linux versions too, just check their websites to be sure.
Utilities
Flow Launcher: Multifunctional but minimalist search window – this is what the Windows Start Menu could have been. It stays hidden and out of your way, but you can press Alt+Space (or other hotkey of your choice) to launch it and instantly search for installed apps, files and folders. You can also use it as a calculator (it automatically copies the result to your clipboard), for terminal commands (e.g. > regedit launches the Registry Editor), and to directly search bookmarks, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and various other sources. This page lists some of its most useful features, but there are many more. It also has themes, like the translucent theme shown here.
TeraCopy: The native Windows Explorer copy-paste function is good enough for most purposes, but when I need to copy large volumes of data, such as backing up my hard drive to an external SSD, I use TeraCopy. It has some handy features like the ability to pause a transfer, set up a transfer queue, and automatically shut down my PC when the transfer completes. At other times, I deactivate or uninstall it; otherwise each time I paste a file, Windows asks if I want to use TeraCopy or Explorer.
FreeFileSync: Speaking of backing up, FreeFileSync is what I use, every few months, to sync my hard drive to an external SSD. It can be set up to scan and sync only files which have changed, which is faster and cleaner than wholesale copy-pasting or overwriting.
LocalSend: I use this to transfer files from my PC to Android phone, and vice versa. You can open LocalSend and drag-drop files or folders into it. But usually it's even faster to simply right-click on an item, and LocalSend comes up as one of the sharing options.
WinDirStat: I haven't actually used this program, but if I ever need to free up space on my hard drive or external drives, I think it will be useful. It can scan your drive and display files and folders as proportional blocks (larger blocks mean bigger files). It can even scan for duplicates, though I believe there are other dedicated apps which are more efficient at this particular task.
Docs and media
Foxit PDF Reader: My default PDF reader. It has some basic features like highlighting and comments, but when I want to do more, e.g. merging, deleting or rearranging pages, I use PDF24. There's also a browser-based version, but I prefer the app for privacy.
ExcireFoto 2022 Light: Photo organization and searching. Later versions are paid, but I'm happy with the 2022 free version for now. It lets you create collections, rate and tag photos, search across folders – many of the things that people use a Lightroom catalog for, but at 0% of the price.
HandBrake: Video transcoder for converting video from or to nearly any format. It's also good at compression; I use it to get my DaVinci Resolve exports down to a manageable size before sharing them online.
Snipping Tool: Print Screen on steroids. This comes pre-installed with windows, but I include it here because it does a lot more than just take screenshots. For example, it has a timer if you want to take a screenshot after a few seconds, a text extractor for OCR, and a colour picker which can display the hex value of any on-screen pixels.
Bandicam: Screen recording software. Snipping Tool can capture video too, but Bandicam has some additional features which are good for demos and tutorials. For example, you can customize how the cursor looks, add sound effects for mouse clicks, and display keystrokes.
Plex: Turns your computer into a streaming hub for other devices on the same wi-fi network. I have movie or video files on my computer which I sometimes want to watch on a smart TV. I used to do this via native Windows screen-mirroring, but I recently discovered Plex (thanks, Google AI) and it has been an absolute game-changer. Once you add your media files to the Plex library, it displays them in a Netflix-like interface, and even includes posters, synopses, cast and subtitles. The TV remote can be used to play, pause, skip – basically the experience is just like using Netflix or any other streaming service, but with locally-stored files.
If you have any more recommendations, let me know!
I have a new lock-screen background for my PC which is from the cover of a Tintin book, Red Rackham's Treasure. (My active wallpaper is a painting of Guanyin, which you can see in this post.)
I found the Tintin image online, but the quality was not very good. So I asked ChatGPT to improve the resolution, make the lines crisper and get rid of the jpeg artefacts, but without changing the content.
ChatGPT's first attempt (Edit 1) was too cartoonish – flat and oversaturated.
I then requested a do-over, specifically asking it to preserve the hand-painted look of the original, and its delicate, less saturated colours.
Here's a comparison of a magnified detail in the three versions:
If you look closely, Snowy's left year is not quite right, and the black reflection lines on the glass have white segments in between which were not there in the original. But these are things which I could have fixed manually, or through another round of prompts. Overall, I was really impressed with how well the AI managed to clean up the image while preserving the organic look of the original.
I was invited to someone's house which had a room with various Hindu deities. Among them, I spotted a little kite (it's at the bottom left of the photo below):
The kite had Pokémon characters, which I thought was a pleasing cultural reversal of Lakshmi Amidst Pindou.
Last month I wrote about habit stacking, which has helped me stick to a daily home-workout regimen.
Two years ago I tried maintaining a wall chart for daily exercise, which worked for a while but eventually failed. This was partly because I sometimes did my workout elsewhere, e.g. at work, while my chart was at home, and as the chart became a less accurate reflection of my habits, I began to backslide on updating the chart and eventually on the exercise itself.
I then tried a phone app called Loop Habit Tracker. I really like the app. It has a clean interface, all the features I need, and (almost) nothing more. But of late, habit stacking has been working well for me, to the point where I feel I don't need the app at all. Still, I like the app so much that I want to try and find some other use for it.
The Guardian has a reader-submitted series called The One Change that Worked. When it comes to daily workouts, habit stacking, for me, has been the one change that worked.
* * *
Speaking of reader-submitted content, this is rather belated, but I was quoted in the Guardian liveblog for the Argentina vs Switzerland Football World Cup game. Screenshot below (the first post is for context; I omitted a few posts in between).
* * *
Another 'change that worked' is an app called ScreenZen, which has helped cut down the time I spend on social media.
I only use one social media app – Instagram – but I was spending more time on it than I wanted to. Android phones have a native app called Digital Wellbeing, but it only allows you to set a daily limit. In practice, I found that I was often hitting my limit with several hours left in the day. This meant I had to either stay off Instagram for the rest of the day, or override the app which defeats its purpose.
ScreenZen allows you to set a per session limit (mine is 3 minutes). Each time I try to open Instagram, it shows me this screen, which makes me pause and consider if I really want to.
Then, after 3 minutes of use, the same screen pops up again, at which point I generally close the app and get on with my day.
While scrolling through social media, it's unfortunately all too easy to get absorbed and lose track of time. ScreenZen's reminder periodically snaps me out of that stupor and prevents me from binge-scrolling. Ever since I installed it, I have been staying comfortably within my Digital Wellbeing-imposed daily limit.
Earlier this year, a pair of spotted doves nested in a corner of our balcony. The location was precarious, and their nest was rickety. Still, they somehow managed to lay eggs, which even hatched.
Unfortunately, that was while I was away; otherwise I would have tried to somehow reinforce the nest. One day there was a storm, and both chicks fell out of the nest and died.
Now the doves have nested again, in a different corner of the balcony. The new nest was equally precarious, but one day while the doves were away, I put a piece of cardboard under the nest, and further reinforced it with rope and a metal clothes-hanger. I hope they have better luck this time.
Edit: It seems dove nests are flimsy by design. There is even a subreddit called r/stupiddovenests.
Two years ago I wrote about mechanical keyboards which I use with my PC. But the OG mechanical keyboard is a typewriter, like my Japanese-made Royal 202 (previously featured here).
Wikipedia has several examples of English pangrams, as well as pangrams in other languages. Here are my four favourite pangrams and why I like them, in decreasing order of "perfectness":
Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.
26 letters
My favourite perfect pangram. Wikipedia explains it thus:
cwm is a loan word from Welsh meaning an amphitheatre-like glaciated depression, vext is an uncommon way to spell vexed, and quiz is used in an archaic sense to mean a puzzling or eccentric person. Taken together, it means "Symbols in the bowl-like depression on the edge of a long steep sea inlet confused an eccentric person".
Although it uses obscure words and contrived grammar, I prefer it over other perfect pangrams which rely on abbreviations, contractions or proper nouns. And of course, it has the word cwm. One time I wrote a post about a cirque lake (as I called it), and Tommy commented, "I couldn't imagine posting a pic not just of a cwm, but of a cwm in Wales, and not using the word cwm in the accompanying text."
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
29 letters
This is the shortest pangram I know of which, to me, still sounds sort of natural – like it could be worked into, say, a fantasy novel, without seeming obviously forced or out-of-place. And it scores high on eldritch quality (if that were a criterion), nicely captured by u/joabaldwin in this digital drawing.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
32 letters
Perhaps the most natural-sounding pangram on the Wikipedia list. At first glance it can even pass for a sentence that might occur in the wild, although if you stop to think about it, "five dozen" is an odd phrase. Unless the jugs come in packs of twelve, which is possible.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
35 letters
Longer than the other examples, but it's the first pangram I ever learned. It's popular for a reason – rolls nicely off the tongue, and scores high on whimsy.
My Chinese friend Muzi recently became interested in Hinduism. She says her favourite goddess is Lakshmi because she is "nonchalant" (Gen Z turns of phrase can be so amusing).
I gave Muzi a little terracotta figure of Lakshmi, and she put it on her dresser alongside various pindou characters. Pindou (拼豆) or Perler-bead craft is apparently trending among young people in China.
Coincidentally, while I was procrastinating over this post, my friend Beverley also posted an arrangement of a female figurine amidst (mostly) Chinese objects. I thought it pairs well with Lakshmi Amidst Pindou, so I asked Bev's permission to share it. A cute detail: the song playing on the iPod is Blink-182's All the Small Things.
Earlier this year I wrote that my weight, for the first time in my life, had crept north of 60 kg, and that I was trying to get it back down. I then neglected to post any updates, no doubt keeping my readers on tenterhooks.
Well, long story short, I got it down to the 59 kg range, then went on a long holiday to Malaysia where I ate out a lot (they have amazing food), and ended up at over 61 kg.
Now it's back under 60 kg, and I plan to keep it that way.
It seems that for me, the most reliable way to reduce weight is to cut down on rice. Just a few days of eating bread, chicken soup and boiled veg for lunch, instead of my usual generous portion of rice, helped me lose around 2 kg. Unfortunately, humans just need rice – or at least, I do.
But that's if I'm trying to lose weight. If I'm just trying to maintain my current weight, it seems I can keep eating rice, as long as I do some light exercise – which I should be doing anyway.
I like sports, but I've never been one for going to a gym or working out for the sake of it. Lately, to help me stick to a light daily exercise routine, habit stacking has been a very useful strategy.
My electric toothbrush has a two-minute cycle with short pauses after every 30 seconds, which is super helpful as an exercise timer. While brushing, I do squats for the first minute, and calf raises for the next minute. This way I'm doing some lower-body exercise at least twice a day.
I shower twice a day, and before each shower, I try to do ten pushups. While boiling water for my coffee, I do some toe-touches. While watching movies or YouTube videos on my computer, I do a few minutes of skipping or light jogging on the spot. And before going to sleep, I do some reclining hip stretches, though I haven't settled on a specific routine yet.
A pretty light regimen, all things considered – but it's better than nothing!
Instagram reels have proved to be an interesting and unexpected channel for discovering new music.
Last year I did a dance shoot with my friend Jieying. She edited together some of the footage and shared it, set to Blueprint Supreme (大展鸿图) by Chinese rapper Skai Isyourgod.
If you're on Instagram, you can see the dance video here. The music video for Blueprint Supreme is pretty cool too. The song was going viral in China right around this time, but Jieying's reel was my introduction to it.
Another, much older Chinese song – Ye Lai Xiang by Yoshiko Yamaguchi – was also an Instagram discovery, but I can no longer find the reel in question.
My next example is not a discovery but a rediscovery. Like most Bengali kids, I grew up listening to Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, but it's only after watching a reel about Kolkata at night that I truly came to love Olir Kotha Shune (অলির কথা শুনে) – a heartbreakingly lovely evocation of lovers drifting apart. "The bokul flower laughs to hear the bumblebee's song / How come you no longer laugh at the things I say?"
In my last few examples, the songs in question were just background music. But there are some Instagram posts which specifically recommend certain music, and one such post – by a record store in Copenhagen, of all places – is how I discovered Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh. This Guardian interview from 2011, four years before Singh's death, is a fun read.
Nouvelle Vague (2025), directed by Richard Linklater, is a movie about a movie, reenacting the making of Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 film, Breathless (French: À bout de souffle, literally: 'out of breath').
Frank Cicurel plays Raymond Cauchetier, who was set photographer for Breathless and many other French New Wave films. You can see some of Cauchetier's original photos here, shot with a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex (TLR) camera.
As this Guardian interview relates:
Later when Henri Cartier-Bresson suggested he work for Magnum, [Cauchetier] refused to buy the required Leica, sticking with his trusty Rollieflex [sic] that had so often survived being dropped in the Mekong river, thus forfeiting his chance to work for the agency.
Linklater's movie is obsessively attentive to period detail, and of course, Cauchetier is shown using a Rolleiflex (the still below – and all others in this post – are from Nouvelle Vague).
We then see the scene he is photographing:
...and also the image through the Rolleiflex's waist-level finder:
But wait! A TLR finder is laterally inverted, and this image is not. Aubry Dullin, playing lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, is on the left – both in the actual scene and in the finder.
Funnily enough, a subsequent scene doesn't have this error.
Here, Belmondo, in the white shirt, is on the right in the scene:
...and on the left in the finder, as it should be.
I'm guessing the TLR finder image was composited in post, but I have no explanation for why it would be correctly oriented in one scene but not in the other. Maybe they left it in just so that pedants like me could discover it and feel smug.
Years ago, Sujaan (my younger brother) and I directed a school play – a dramatization of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
Towards the end of the play, we had a dance sequence in the court of the arch-villain, Khattam-Shud. The scene was meant to be dark, scary and chaotic, and for background music, we chose Hans Zimmer's Why So Serious? (Joker's Theme) from The Dark Knight OST.
At the same time, we wanted an Indian or pan-Asian (as opposed to purely western) sound, so Sujaan had the idea of layering classical vocals and tabla over the Zimmer composition.
Among our high-school cast, we had a girl named Titas who was a very talented classically-trained singer. We played the Zimmer track for her and asked her to come up with a taan (a Hindustani classical music term for vocal improvisation of rapid melodic passages).
Usually for such a recording, the singer would be wearing headphones and listening to the backing track while improvising into a mic. But that day, it turned out that we had some problem with our barebones audio equipment – we could either play music or record it, but not both at once.
Sujaan and I assumed it was a no-go; we would just have to try another day with working equipment. But Titas, in her unassuming way, said "Let me try, maybe I can sing it without playback."
"Uh, okay. Do you want to listen to the track again?"
"I think I got it."
Sujaan and I were still skeptical. If she improvised with headphone playback as planned, we were pretty sure she would do a good job. But without it, maybe her key or tempo would be off. Or maybe her taan just wouldn't fit with the track.
Still, we figured there was no harm in letting her try.
Titas recorded two takes, improvising to music she could hear only in her memory. Both takes were spot on.
I still remember going home and importing the tracks in our mixing software, and the moment we realised we had a perfect fit.
Shown below are the waveforms for the isolated vocals track, takes 1 and 2. You can see how well they line up – just for take 2, she cut it slightly shorter.
Here are takes 1 and 2 of the vocals:
And here's the final track, slightly shortened for this blogpost – an excerpt from the Zimmer composition, with tabla and vocals (take 1) layered on top.
Earlier this month in my music system "upgrades" post, I talked about equalizers and visualizers. Equalizers then got a separate follow-up post, so it's only fair that visualizers get one too.
I started out, as I said in my first post, with a Rainmeter skin called Monstercat Visualizer. It looks cool, especially with the album art, but since it plays on my desktop, it gets covered up by any active windows. What good is a visualizer if I hardly ever see it?
I often listen to music while doing other things on my computer, so I thought it would be nice to have a visualizer which is always visible, perhaps floating on top of other windows. After a good deal of searching and trying out different programs, I've landed on BeatHUD.
BeatHUD has a variety of visualizations – my favourite is pixel, shown below – with customizable colours and backgrounds. In HUD mode, it does exactly what I want – float wherever I want to place it, while also letting me adjust its size or minimize it if it's in the way. In the pic below, BeatHUD at bottom right is responding to Spotify, while I edit photos in Affinity.
I really like BeatHUD. It's surprisingly well-designed and full-featured for a free app – or by any standards, really.
I use Spotify for streaming audio, but for music that lives on my hard drive, I like to use Winamp. Mainly for nostalgic reasons: Winamp – and Winamp skins – were a big part of my teenage years. So while I was at it, I also downloaded Classic Spectrum Analyzer for Winamp:
Having sorted out the visualizer situation on my computer, I wanted something similar for our living-room system – a custom-built amplifier by Pradip Deb (which supports Bluetooth as well as wired inputs for turntables and such) plus two passive speakers.
Maybe someday I'll get a streamer with a display, like the WiiM Ultra, but until then, I'm just using my phone screen as it streams to the amp via Bluetooth:
On my phone, I use Spectrum Analyzer & Visualizer, which can display various customizable visualizations as well as Spotify album art (in the pic, I'm playing ฟื้น / Athithan by Yellow Fang).
This is a free app, but I like it so much that I'm going to buy it just to support the developer.
If you let the app access your phone mic, it can also respond to external audio, e.g. from a record-player. But when playing records, I like to simply display the record sleeve itself – the ultimate "Now playing" visualization.
Incidentally, I added a new track to my Speaker Test playlist which I mentioned in an earlier post. I thought I should have a track which uses obvious stereo panning, so the playlist now includes Pink Floyd's Money. The cash-register sounds in the intro pan between left and right before transitioning into the bass groove which is in the middle.
We have a toy – no one seems to remember how we acquired it – which is a wooden box with a lid. When you slide it open, a snake pops out.
I don't have a pic of how it originally looked, but here are a couple of product photos from Amazon:
I recently painted our box. It now has a coiled snake on one side:
...and a mini snakes-and-ladders board on the other:
I used my recently-acquired set of acrylic markers which, despite being super cheap, are a delight to paint with.
I also painted another box and sent it to Tommy. It's a good gift for him because he's working on the snake-in-the-box problem in higher dimensions. His box has a coiled snake like mine, plus another snake traversing the edges of the box in a manner that respects the constraints of the problem.
When I went to the post office to mail it, they asked me what the box contains. I said it's a wooden toy, but in their customs form, they only had an "electronic toy" category – no "wooden toy" or even just "toy". A sign of the times! In the end, they filed it under "handicrafts".
Speaking of snakes, the other day at the Dhakuria Lakes, we saw an Oriental rat snake's unsuccessful attempt to hunt a rat. The snake climbed halfway up a tree and crept into a hollow in which the rat was hiding. But the rat jumped out just in time and scurried away, seemingly unharmed.
My previous post was about trying to optimize my low-budget music system – Creative A250 speakers plugged directly into my PC – without buying any new gear. This post is a follow-up, specifically about equalizer settings. (Don't worry, I don't intend to write a new post each time I update my EQ profile.)
I started out using an EQ profile recommended by Google's AI mode. But after a bit of tweaking – guided by my own ears and with no AI input – I find that the following EQ profile works best:
It's just a slight cut to the bass, and an even slighter boost to the mids.
On forums, people routinely suggest setting the pre-amp (top left) to a negative value that matches or exceeds the highest slider gain (–1.5 dB in my case, since my highest gain is 1.5 dB). But even with the pre-amp set to zero, the Peak value meter shows no clipping on Spotify – which is what I use for listening to music on my PC – as long as Spotify's "Normalize volume" is enabled. When disabled, it does clip at times – not audibly, but I can see it on the meter.
Normalize volume, introduced to mitigate the worst excesses of the loudness wars, is a controversial setting. Some say it merely reduces the volume if needed, while others say it also compresses and thereby impacts sound quality, and so recommend turning it off. Based on this test shared on Reddit, I am inclined to side with the former faction, and I keep it on.
Spotify also says:
We normalize an entire album at the same time, so gain compensation doesn’t change between tracks. This means the softer tracks are as soft as you intend them to be.
So if you're listening to something like the Interstellar OST, which has some quiet tracks and some loud ones, normalization should in theory preserve that dynamic range.
Equalizer APO has a quirk which I'll document here, in case it helps anyone. At some point, while trying different settings, I found that even with a flat preset – all sliders set to 0 dB – turning Equalizer APO on and off (power button at top right) was inexplicably affecting the sound.
This Reddit thread finally solved the mystery for me. Turns out, if you accidentally right-click one of the EQ presets (bottom left), it becomes "Always active", i.e. applied on top of whatever other presets or settings you might be using. You have to click on the green-headed man (bottom left, next to the presets box) and turn off the "Always active" feature.
In the course of tweaking my equalizer settings, I ended up making a Spotify playlist called Speaker Test. There are many such playlists online, but this is mine :)
What It Sounds Like, from the KPop Demon Hunters OST, has a thumping beat and soaring soprano vocals. I also like how the lyrics – This is what it sounds like – feel fitting for testing speakers and EQ settings.
Last year I was selling my soundbar, and the buyer – a lady probably around my age – came to my condo to pick it up. I played What It Sounds Like as a demo, and she asked, "Do you have kids? Because my kids listen to this all the time." I said "No, I listen to it myself," which amused her greatly.
The live version of Hotel California is a universally popular test track, but I also included it for sentimental reasons. Years ago, when my brother and I were in school, we went to an electronics trade fair where we heard a hi-fi system, possibly for the first time in our lives. My parents now have a pretty good music system, but back then, such a thing was a distant dream. Anyway, the speakers at the trade fair were playing Hotel California, and ever since, when my brother and I buy new speakers or headphones, this is the first track we play.
Anti-Hero features deep bass, densely-layered synth-pop instrumentation and considerable emotional range in the vocals. The version of Here Comes the Sun that I included in my playlist was mixed by Giles Martin – son of George Martin who produced the original stereo mix – sourced directly from the original eight-track session tapes. On my Creatives, with no equalizer settings dialed in, McCartney's bass occasionally overpowers the melody and flirts with distortion, e.g. at 0:33 (just before and after "Little darling"). The EQ profile that I chose takes care of this problem, dialing down the bass just enough.
Yoshiko Yamaguchi's Ye Lai Xiang is in the mix because after all these meticulously produced and mastered tracks, I enjoy the vintage crackle and lo-fi charm of this 1940s recording. Finally, I included Chaiyya Chaiyya simply because I like it, but then I found that it's featured on What Hi-Fi's 9 test tracks you've probably never heard of. Apparently its "infectiously rhythmic, upbeat elements are a true test of a system’s musicality."
Let me know if you have any favourite tracks for testing speakers. It's always nice to get reader recommendations, and potentially discover new music.
I recently went down a hi-fi audio rabbit-hole, frequenting r/BudgetAudiophile and Audio Science Review, and watching videos like this fascinating lecture by Floyd Toole.
Long story short, I didn't buy anything in the end, and decided, at least for now, to just stick with my current low-budget setup. And by low-budget I mean truly low-budget: S$20, to be precise – a Creative A250 set which I bought secondhand a few years ago. It consists of a subwoofer and two satellite speakers, and is plugged into my computer's headphone jack.
Someday if I'm settled somewhere – or at least know I'm going to be in the same city for the foreseeable future – I might invest in a pair of nice bookshelf speakers, and an integrated DAC and amplifier. For now, I'm happy with the Creative, not least because I suspect I'm not a very discerning or demanding listener to begin with. For example, my parents have a nice set of speakers and amplifier. I can tell that the sound quality is superior to my Creative, but I'm not sure I would want to pay a significant amount for the upgrade.
If anything, all my research made me appreciate my Creative even more. By audiophile standards, it may not be up to scratch, but lay reviewers rate it highly in its class. It really was amazing value for money.
I then started wondering if there were any upgrades I could make to my setup that didn't involve buying gear.
DAC
The first thing I experimented with was a DAC – a device which converts digital data (e.g. from a computer or phone) to an analogue signal that speakers can play. DAC prices start at just a few dollars, and go up to the thousands. I read online that a DAC should improve sound quality – that is, plugging speakers into the DAC which is in turn plugged into the computer's USB-C port (as opposed to plugging speakers directly into the headphone jack).
As it happens, I already had a DAC – from the 'just a few dollars' end of the spectrum – which I had bought to connect wired headphones to my phone. When I tried this out with my Creatives, I couldn't hear any noticeable improvement. It could be because my DAC is too basic. Or perhaps the limiting factor is my speakers, or Spotify sound quality, or... who knows!
Equalizer APO and Peace GUI
Next, I thought about equalizer settings.
Much as I like my Creatives, I had long suspected that they are a bit bass-heavy. Certain things, like thunder or explosions in movies, sound impressive, but music can feel a bit muddy. My brother, who plays music and probably has a better ear than me, confirmed my suspicions.
The Creatives don't have a bass knob, so I downloaded the highly-regarded Equalizer APO with Peace GUI. Google AI gave me an impressively thorough set of recommendations tailored to my speakers and the kind of music I listen to. It even explained and justified each individual setting. One bit which I found interesting:
Budget 2.1 multimedia systems are inherently "scooped" by default – meaning the small satellite speakers struggle with lower-mid frequencies, and the down-firing subwoofer can quickly become muddy and overpowering.
This video explains subwoofer crossover; the AI response seems to be saying that the Creatives' frequency response likely has a dip, as shown at 4:19 of the video.
The AI-recommended EQ profile, designed to compensate for this shortcoming, does improve the sound. The speakers sound less muffled, more clear and airy – while the bass still packs a punch.
Monstercat Visualizer
The final "upgrade" was cosmetic, in the sense that it has no inherent impact on sound quality. But it looks nice, and thus improves the listening experience, however slightly.
Monstercat Visualizer is a Rainmeter skin – a kind of widget which shows dancing frequency bars on my desktop when I play music, and also fetches album art and track info from Spotify.
You can customize the number of bars, plus various other parameters like their height, width, colour, sensitivity and so on. I made a little demo here.
If you want to install the visualizer on your PC (this is Windows specific; I don't know how it works on other operating systems), the process is a bit complicated.
First off, I recommend using older versions of Rainmeter and Monstercat (I use 4.5.0 and 2.1.0 respectively), because the latest versions apparently cause Rainmeter to crash.
If you want not just the bars but also album art and track info from Spotify, you need to install two more tools – WebNowPlaying and spicetify-cli – as described here and here. Again, you need an older version of WebNowPlaying (I use 1.2.0), because the latest version doesn't work as documented here.
I don't want Rainmeter to launch on startup, so I disabled that option. Instead, using AutoHotKey, I configured my keyboard so that Win+S launches Spotify and Rainmeter simultaneously.
Clearly, Rainmeter and Monstercat are third-party tools, and their functionality is sometimes affected by Windows and Spotify updates. I am not sure how long the visualizer will continue to work, but hey, at least it works for now.
