Oladance Pro: The Perfect headphones for work

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I have been an extremely long-time headphone user. I was very very lucky to get one of the very first Walkman’s when they were a gigantic thing that ate batteries, and I’ve worn headphones ever since.

Everything from audio books through concentration music through to terrible, terrible choices in music, I am very, very audio-based.

However, it has only been fairly recently that headphones have been allowed in the majority of office workplaces. Before that, you had to be working in certain areas or with a certain type of person, and even then, if you failed to communicate normally, it would be frowned on and headphones would be blamed.

Now the world has moved on, and most people use them at work to help with concentration and for the never-ending video calls. and they come in lots of different styles and feature sets, but none seem to be totally perfect for the work environment.

But with the Oladance Pro, I think there is a set that actually match and deal with all of the problems of an office environment.

Problem 1: You can’t hear what’s going on in an office with a pair of headphones on.

Any decent pair of headphones will block out your hearing. Recently, there have been bone-conducting headphones, but their audio quality has always been dreadful when I’ve tried them. These ones don’t do that. They seemingly fire the audio in using part of the top of your ear rather than blocking the ear canal. Which means that your actual ear canals are open. Not only does this mean that you can hear everything around you, But it’s obvious that your ears are not plugged or covered, so your work colleagues know they can talk to you and stuff like that.

Problem 2: Small ear buds never have a proper full day of battery {{ and I mean a proper full day, 8-10 hours plus 2-4 hours commute, don’t give me that “30 hours if you keep charging them with a case” rubbish }}

These have a true full-day battery life; they last for 16 hours, and they do mean 16 hours. So you can put them on in the morning. Go to work with them. Have them on all day. Go home, take them out, and you won’t have any problems. They also have a nice slim battery case, which makes them easy to carry around and charge.

Problem 3: Bluetooth range and behaviour is very dependent on the chipset in the headphones; poor range and poor connectivity issues still plague headphones after all these years.

These ones have solved the main issues that drive me wild:

  • Range – The range away from audio sources for these are solid, as good as any of the big over-ear headphones, although at extreme range they can get a tiny bit out of sync with each other till you come back closer.
  • Multi Source and Connectivity – being able to connect to 2 sources at once is mandatory in my opinion, especially in a work environment. As well as the ability to swap and recover said connectivity, the Oladance Pro have been improved over the Oladance 2 as they can connect to 2 sources at once, and handle switching between them simply and automatically {{they do it fast and without loud beeps and notifications}}, lastly, they auto-reconnect to the sources when you go fully out of range, which is nice.

Downsides

  • No serious noise isolation: You can’t really use them on a subway, they are much better than any other open headphones and they have a noise cancelling “Zone” mode which does help {{Heaven knows how}} but it gets overloaded in massively loud places {{This downside is a bit unfair as it is part and parcel of their positive side}}.
  • You lose your “Do Not Disturb” mode: because they’re so obviously not in your ears. at work you cannot use them to pretend you can’t hear or are deeply engrossed in something; you have to interact with more humans than you are used too.

And finally, a bit of a big one

  • Don’t throw away the box. This first release is suffering from some serious hardware failure issues. I’m on my 4th pair, with the previous 3 being returned for a variety of reasons, from refusing to charge to a bright red light that means one side won’t talk to another. The company refunded and replaced them with no problem so it’s not a huge issue but I hope they fix it on the second production run.

None work Upside

This one has little to do with work but was too important to not include. A female friend started using the version 2 earphones and pointed out that it meant she could now listen to music when walking her dog at night; normally she can’t as she can’t take the risk of not hearing an attacker approaching, but headphones like these don’t suffer from that problem, a valuable feature.

Conclusion

All of this together means that other than the very occasional use where I need to block out all external noise, these are now my main and only headphones and rarely leave my ears {{ I have even forgotten to take them off for a couple of showers and am very grateful they are splash proof}} , its an overused phrase and only applies to this latest version but they really are a game changer, if only they can get the reliability up to the same level as the version 2 headphones.

Function keys in a corporate environment

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One of the necessary evils of doing work for corporate clients is that you often have to have in addition to all your own equipment a client’s laptop or PC. This is for obvious security reasons and is just how corporations work, but that does mean that often what is bought out of convenience for the corporation is not best of breed, and in fact, sometimes awful or missing entirely, headsets and decent keyboards are two of the most obvious examples.

Thankfully, while most corporations obviously ban you from installing your own software on their laptops, they have no objection to USB keyboards or the like. This is where programmable media keyboards come in.

Dedicated media keyboards are very useful. Particularly functions like “mic. toggle” and “camera toggle”. but I would not advise you use ones that have dedicated buttons that don’t need drivers, I’ve never had any luck with them as they are either very generic in the functions they trigger or don’t cater to the many different types of conference kit you might use {{,Microsoft teams, Slack etc etc}}.

So it’s much better to have your own programmable one that you can adjust to any need, but most of the time you are limited by the inability to load the driver software. However, good makes such as Vaydeer get around this. You actually flash the keyboard with the functions you want to use using your own computer, they’re stored permanently on the keyboard and then you can plug them in elsewhere driver free. This means that you can build up exactly what you want the keyboard to do. configure it and set it up on your laptop. Then, disconnect it, plug it straight in to your clients laptop simply as a standard keyboard which works on 99% of them.

As you can see on the above screen shot I have flashed the 2 left buttons on this keyboard with macros that work for Microsoft teams, and they work perfectly, you can also just swap keycaps for media ones, the two on this keyboard were stolen from a cheap dedicated one that didn’t work before I figured this solution out. Obviously, you can do sticky labels or what have you, for any kind of keycaps.

Printing PDF’s for RPG’s

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I have to own to being a little bit old fashioned when it comes to gaming books, I do love a good physical book and in particular a good physical rulebook for RPGs.

And while I do appreciate it when small third party producers make small adventure packs or supplements to their gaming systems, its really sad that they can’t sit with the main books. So I’ve long looked at getting these things printed out, and while I have bitten the bullet a few times its never been very satisfactory either in terms of quality, usability or cost and none of them look like they go with the main published books.

But I’m pleased to say I found a really good company that ticks all the boxes and gives me exactly what I want at a sane price point, that company is https://doxzoo.com/ . Let me run through the settings, purchase, and results.

So my source materials are the 2 amazing RPG’s I am currently obsessed with:

  1. The perfect Warhammer 40K RPG by Cubical Seven.
  2. The excellent Dune RPG by Modiphius.

Both of these companies produce a ton of material and do very high-quality printed versions of their main stuff {{,the Artwork used by Cubical Seven and the hard cover character sheets by Modiphius are both stand out features}}. but they also do lots of smaller supplements that never seem to make it into a printed form.

Both companies supplements come in the form of well laid out PDFs, that have print-bleed areas, so are ideal for getting physically printed.

DoxZoo provide a huge variety of settings on their website that you can apply to any uploaded PDF and then previewed, the settings I have found work the best are:

  • Binding Form: Booklet
  • Orientation: Portrait
  • Paper size: Letter
  • Printed sides: Double sided
  • Print in: Colour
  • Paper colour: White
  • Paper finish: Matt (ultra smooth)
  • Paper weight: 100 gsm
  • Binding position: Left long edge
  • Card cover: None
  • Scale artwork: Scale to best fit
  • Corners: Square

This gives me an end result that is nearly impossible to tell from the main books.

Obviously price depends on the number of pages you want printing, but with 21 pages coming out at £4 including postage and packaging, its amazing value

Other than some scaling to cope with the hard back nature of the main books you can’t tell them apart.
The booklet format copes very well with the small number of pages. It’s basically just a magazine that uses staples rather than glue. This works out exceptionally well and folds out flat without damage for reference.
The quality is utterly perfect, it just is a professional print job
The format works well from just a few pages well into 50+
The only issue I’ve had at all is that sometimes if your cutoff is a little bit tight, then you might lose a couple of millimetres, but this is rare and has not ruined anything.

There you go, a good value service to solve an old problem.

 

Corporate term: “Pathfinder Project Manager”

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Definition:

A project manager who can deliver complex and unusual projects without subject matter expertise by looking for individual shapes and gaps in deliveries rather than running a project by generic rote.

Explanation:

A lot of what can be both good and bad about project managers is their understanding of the subject matter.
 
Technical project managers understand the details of the subject matter intimately, they know all the nooks, crannies and potential issues, they are subject matter experts for the deliverable in their own right, be that technical or business.
 
Standard PM’s do not have this and rely on being good at organisation to cover this. They are they often classed as leaders and can take on broad roles. They don’t need to know the subject matter and are reliant on other people for the subject matter expertise.
 
Pathfinder PM’s however hold more information than standard PM’s but are not subject matter experts and more importantly they know their weaknesses. A Pathfinder PM might not know the detailed implications of a business problem, but they know enough to identify the shape of something when it’s wrong. They are often very detail orientated in the structure and the organisation of the project. Their Sprint’s are often exceptionally well organised and the end deliverable is planned to the last detail, and this detail orientation enables them to see the shape of things that are wrong or do not make sense.
 
They are exceptionally good generalist PM’s and unless you have a technical PM, they are the only way of really dealing with a difficult project where a general PM does not cut the mustard. They can see the path ahead of them and they can see the shape of the problems. Even if they do not know the contents of the problem.
 
An easier way to think of this is in terms of treasure hunting. You do not need to know that there are gold and jewels inside the treasure chest. But if you can follow the map, you know what a treasure chest looks like, and you can identify when people have gone off course rather than just following the map blindly, then you can still get the treasure.  
 
 
 
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.

Podcast interview with one of my favourite bosses.

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Paul Brotzel is one of the few high-level directors that I have ever truly trusted. {{There have been 2 in total}}. and it’s fascinating listening to his history outside of a pub.
He and I are working together on some side bits, but I look forward to hopefully working with him again the next place he takes by storm.