Sony Z3 Top Speaker Noise

[Solved]Sony Z3 Top Speaker Noise Problem

I have recently purchased a Sony Xperia Z3. There seems to be a strange problem with the Sony Z3 top speaker. Most of the time it produces a static background noise when I run any applications that has sound. The noise can still be heard even if I have muted the media volume. But there are occasions where the noise does not occur.

I searched online and found out this a common problem for Sony Z3, the solutions they suggested on the forums(tuning the equalizer settings) did not help me. I have also contacted Sony customer service and they responded that “It happens when you use applications that access Internet.” That seems logical enough first but I soon realized that sometimes the noise does not occur even when I am using the applications that access Internet.

When I tracked down the cases where the noise did not occur, I found out the root cause of it: The Alarm Volume. 

sony z3 sound setting

Alarm volume setting in Sony Z3 sound and notification setting

This is totally strange but it is indeed the cause of the noise. Whenever I lower the alarm volume to below about 60% and reopen the applications, the noise disappears. The alarm volume is not supposed to be related to the sound inside the applications but it seems that Sony Z3 has a software bug that caused them to be linked.

Also note that the global alarm volume in the sound settings will be overwritten by individual alarm volumes that you set in the alarm application.

sony z3 alarm setting

Alarm volume setting in Sony Z3 Alarm app

So in order to make sure the noise does not come back, you need to set both the global alarm volume and individual alarm volumes to below about 60%.

staying neutral on same-sex marriage

Staying neutral on Same-Sex Marriage

The news of Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide in the U.S. has taken over the Internet.

While the two sides supporting and against it are arguing back and forth, what if I have no opinions on this and I just want to stay “neutral”?

Is there a true “neutral” position that one can adopt?

I begin by understanding the issue, marriage. By enumeration (which I will discuss further later), we have two options for marriage:

  1. Marriage between the same sex
  2. Marriage between the opposite sex

As we can see, with two options, there are no middle ground.

So to be neutral, we either allow both options, or allow neither of them:

  1. Allowing both options, we have the exact same stand as a same-sex marriage supporter, that is “the sexuality does not matter in marriage”.
  2. Allowing neither of them, we have no marriage and we lose the continuation of the human species, which is not what we want.

So now it looks like the same-sex marriage supporters’ stand is indeed the neutral stand, so what is the catch here?

We risk “going down the slope”. I have mentioned above that “by enumeration, we have two options for marriage”, but there was a hidden assumption there:

When we talk about marriage, we talk about humans.

What if we broaden the scope of discussion, and talk about same and different species, just like what we did to the same and opposite sex? There we have two options as well:

  1. Marriage between the same species
  2. Marriage between different species

I think at this point, it becomes pretty clear that in order to maintain neutral, we have to allow marriage between both same and different species.

So why not take this stand? The obvious answer is that this is insane. It crosses some (most) people’s limit. And that is exactly the problem here in the same-sex marriage. The idea of same-sex marriage crosses some people’s limit, just like the idea of marriage between different species. The neutral position differs from person to person due to their different limits.

For me, I can have my neutral position as “allowing marriage between both same and different species.” But this may sound crazy to many people so it might not be the best position.

So know your limit, and set the neutral position. Alternatively, you can push (or be pushed) beyond your limit and adopt a new neutral position.

 

 

Singapore SM1 scholarship

SM1 Scholarship – 初三毕业赴新加坡留学奖学金 (Migrated from Baidu)

This post is an overview the SM1 Scholarship for my juniors and the general public.

Background:

Unfortunately, Baidu Space (百度空间), where I hosted my old blog in Chinese, has been shut down. All my posts are now stored in Baidu Yun and are NOT publicly available. So I decided to moved them here into my self-hosted site, and hopefully this will be the last time that I am moving my posts.

 

Continue reading →

go lang gopher

Working with Go lang

During my internship at IBM Singapore, I am using go lang to develop the back-end of the software. It is a nice new language, with a lot of features that I found really useful. Previously I have mostly used Java and JavaScript in programming, and go lang has the best of both.

First-Class Functions

I have always liked the flexibility with functions in JavaScript, the fact that you can treat functions like any other normal objects and pass them around. This advantage made me hate Java where methods are just methods.

In go lang, functions are surprising quite flexible, they can be used as values and passed around, and anonymous functions with closure are supported. All of these are still on top of statically-typed nature of the language.

Multiple Named return values

This is a great feature in my opinion. For Java and JavaScript, functions can only return one value, causing a lot of troubles when you want to do error checking or simply need to return multiple values. In go lang, the ability to return multiple values makes all of these very easy. On top of that, the return values can be named as variables in the function signature and saves the trouble of declaring them in the function’s body.

And more

Go lang also has great packaging system, allowing reusable components to be packaged and easily integrated into other projects. It has OOP-styled types like struct and interface. It also supports encoding and decoding of JSON internally.

I have not had a chance to use the multi-threading and concurrency components of the language, and I shall wait to be delighted.