Category Archives: Uncategorized

Microphone BOYA BY-M1

If you are looking for a cheap lavalier microphone to have better sound at video conferences or to get started with YouTube I can recommend the BOYA BY-M1. It provides really good value for money and can usually be found for around 20 Euros (25 US Dollars) online. I got mine from Amazon (affiliate link to amazon.com / amazon.de) for about 18 Euros.

One differentiator compared to other similar microphones that are often advertised specifically for use with smartphones, is that the BY-M1 can also be used with devices that do not provide power. Smartphones and modern laptops usually do this, but professional audio equipment (e.g. dedicated audio recorders) only provides 48 V phantom power and will therefore not work with a typical smartphone microphone. For those cases the BY-M1 comes with a small battery (LR44) and also a 1/4″ TRS adapter.

If you use a different microphone I would be interested to hear about your experience in the comments.

Cause and Effect

As per “Google Cloud Application Modernization Program: Get to the future faster” (citing DevOps Research and Assessment) “teams that ship code numerous times per day are 1.53 times more likely to achieve or exceed their commercial goals, including profitability, and market share.” What many people will make out of this is that it should be  sufficient to increase the release rate to be successful.

A similar study (I cannot remember the source right now) shows that people who use Firefox as their web browser have a better career. And I guess there are many more comparable “findings” that you can come across. Unfortunately they are somewhere between misleading and completely wrong.

The problem is that such statements often present two things as cause and effect. But in reality those two things are “only” correlated. So both the high deployment rate and commercial success are effects of the same cause. And that cause is that these teams have experienced people who really know what they are doing.

Transfer of Website Finished

After a bit more than a week the transfer of my web pages to a new hosting provider is finished. The timing was, thanks to Murphy, not optimal since I got the notifications for most domains while waiting in a plane. The latter took almost five hours, thanks to difficulties when landing on La Palma. So instead of 4.5 hours, the flight took almost 12 hours. More details on how the airline really screwed up, may come in another post.

Changing the Web Hosting Company

After many years I have decided to move my web sites to a different web hosting company. While I am happy with the service provided in the past, the commercial side of things was not so bright. And even when I canceled the automatic renewal of a domain registration, the special offer I immediately got was not exciting.

Which is why I finally started the move this weekend. I have a plan to make the cut-over as smooth as possible, but there is a small chance of temporary interruption.