I bought the Fairphone Fairbuds XL with my own money at a recent sale for 186.75 EUR, plus 15 EUR for shipping to Estonia. The normal price for these headphones is 239 EUR. This post is not sponsored. I admire what Fairphone wants to achieve, even going as far as getting the Fairphone 5 as a replacement for my iPhone X. Failing to repair my current headphones, I went ahead and decided to get the Fairphone Fairbuds XL as they also advertise the active noise-cancelling feature, and I like the Fairphone brand. Disclaimer: this review is going to be entirely subjective and based on my opinions and experiences with other audio products in the past. I also have tinnitus.1 I consulted rtings.com review before purchasing the product to get an idea about what to expect as a consumer. The comparison headphones The main point of comparison for this review is going to be the Sony WH-1000XM3, which are premium high-end wireless Bluetooth headphones, with active noise-cancelling (before that feature broke). These headphones retailed at a higher price during 2020 (about 300-400 EUR) so they are technically a tier above the Fairbuds XL, but given that its successsor, the WH-1000XM4, can be bought for 239 EUR new (and often about 200-ish EUR on sale!), then it is a fair comparison in my view. After I replaced the ear cushions on my Sony WH-1000XM3 headset, the active noise-cancelling feature started being flaky (popping and loud noises occurring with NC on). No amount of cleaning or calibrating fixed it, and even the authorized repair shop could not do anything about it. I diagnosed the issue to be with the internal noise-cancelling microphones and found that these failing is a very common issue for these headsets, even for newer versions of it. I am unable to compare the active noise-cancelling performance side-by-side, but I can say that the NC performance on the Sony WH-1000XM3 was simply excellent when it did work, no doubt about it. The Fairphone shop experience The first issue I had with the product was actually buying it. For some reason, the form would not accept my legal name which has letter “Õ” in it, a common vowel in Estonia. Knowing how poorly Javascript-based client-side validation can be built, I pulled a pro gamer move and copy-pasted my name into the form, which bypassed the faulty check altogether. Similar issue occurred with the address field, as we also have the letter “Ä” ( and “Ö”, “Ü”, for that matter). The name I can understand why Fairphone went with the name “Fairbuds XL”, it kind of made sense in their audio product line, and Apple set a precedent with AirPods Max. However, there is such a big missed opportunity here: they could’ve called the product… Fairphones. Yes, it would cause some confusion about their other product line, which is the Fairphone, but at least I would find the name more amusing. Packaging The packaging for the headphones is quite similar to what you’d get with the Fairphone 5: lots of cardboard and seemingly no plastic or otherwise problematic materials. Aside from the headphones themselves, you also get a nice egg bag, meant to protect your headphones when travelling with them. It’s okay, but nothing special, and it won’t protect your headphones from physical damage should they fall or get thrown around in a backpack. The Sony headphones come with a solid hardcase, which have done a fantastic job of protecting the headphones over the last 4 years. Longevity of a device depends both on repairability and durability, which is why a hard case would benefit the Fairbuds XL a lot. Factory defect My experience with the Fairbuds XL were off to a rocky start. I noticed that the USB-C cable that connects both sides of the headphones was inserted incorrectly. The headphones worked fine, but you could feel the flat USB-C cable being twisted inside the headband. The fix to this was to carefully push the headband back, disconnect the USB-C cable from the headphones, flip the cable around and reconnect it. Not a good first impression, but at least the fix was simple enough. Fit and feel The Fairbuds XL are not as comfortable as the reference headphones. The ear cushions and headrest are quite hard and not as soft as on the Sony WH-1000XM3. If you get the fit just right, then you probably won’t have issues with wearing these for a few hours at the time, but I found myself adjusting these often to stop them from hurting my ears and head even during a short test. The ear cups lack any kind of swiveling, which is likely contributing to the comparatively poor fit. Our ears are angled ever-so-slightly forwards, and the Sony WH-1000XM3 feels so much better on the ears as a result of its swiveling aspect. I also noticed that you can hear some components inside the headphones rattling when moving your head. This noise is very noticeable even during music playback and you don’t need to move your head a lot to hear that rattling. In my view, this is a serious defect in the product. When the headphones are folded in, the USB-C cable gets bent in the process and gets forced against one of the ear cushions. I suspect that within months or years of use, either the cable will fail or the ear cushion gets a permanent imprint of the USB-C cable position. The sound I’m not impressed with the sound that the Fairbuds XL produce. They are not in the same class as the Sony WH-1000XM3, with the default equalizer sounding incredibly bland. Most instruments and sounds are bland and not as clear. That’s the best I can describe it as. The Fairbuds app can be used to tune the sound via the equalizer, and out of all the presets I’ve found “Boston” to be the most pleasant one to use. Unfortunately the UI does not show how the presets customize the values in the equalizer, which makes tweaking a preset all that much harder. Compared to the Sony WH-1000XM3, I miss the cripsy sound and the all-encompassing bass, it can really bring all the satisfying details out. Given that I had used the Sony headphones for almost 5 years at this point may also just mean that I had gotten used to how it sounds. Active noise-cancelling The active noise-cancelling performance is nowhere near the Sony WH-1000XM3-s. The effect is very minor, and you’ll be hearing most of the surrounding sounds. Touching the active noise-cancelling microphones on the sides of the headphones will also make a loud sound inside the speaker, and walking around in a room will result in the headphones making wind noises. Because of this, I consider the active noise-cancelling functionality to be functionally broken. Microphone quality I used the Fairbuds XL in a work call, and based on feedback from other attendees, the microphone quality over Bluetooth can be categorized as barely passable, getting a solid 2 points out of 5. To be fair, Bluetooth microphone quality is also not great on the Sony WH-1000XM3-s, but compared to the Fairphone Fairbuds XL, they are still subjectively better. Fairbuds app The Fairbuds app is very simple, and you’d mainly want to use it for setting the equalizer settings and upgrading the firmware. The rest of the functionality seems to be a bunch of links to Fairphone articles and guides. The first time I installed the app, it told me that a firmware upgrade version V90 is available. During the first attempt, the progress bar stopped. Second attempt: it almost reached the end and did not complain about a firmware upgrade being available after that. Third attempt came after I had reinstalled the app. And there it was, the version V90 update, again. This time it got stuck at 1%. I’m probably still on the older version of the firmware, but I honestly can’t tell. Bluetooth multi-device connecting This is a feature that I didn’t know I needed in my life. With the reference Sony WH-1000XM3-s, whenever I wanted to switch where I listen to music from, I had to disconnect from my phone and then reconnect on the desktop, which was an annoying and manual process. With the Fairbuds XL, I can connect the headphones to both my laptop and phone and play media wherever, the headphones will switch to whichever device I’m actually using! This, too, has its quirks, and there might be a small delay when playing media on the other device, but I’ve grown so accustomed to using this feature now and can’t imagine myself going back to using anything else. This feature is not unique to the Fairbuds XL as other modern wireless headphones are also likely to boast this feature, but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to try this out myself. It’s a tremendous quality of life improvement for me. However, this, too, is not perfect. If I have the headphones connected to my phone and laptop, and I change to headset mode on the laptop for a meeting, then the playback on the phone will be butchered until I completely disconnect the headphones from the laptop. This seems like a firmware issue to me. The controls The Fairbuds XL has one button and one joystick. The button controls the active noise-cancelling settings (NC on, Ambient sound, NC off), plus the Bluetooth pairing mode. The joystick is used to turn the device on, switch songs and control the volume, and likely some other settings that relate to accepting calls and the like. Coming from the Sony WH-1000XM3, I have to say that I absolutely LOVE having physical buttons again! It’s so much easier to change the volume level, skip songs and start/stop playback with a physical button compared to the asinine touch surface solution that Sony has going on. The joystick is not perfect, skipping a song can be a little bit tricky due to how the joystick is positioned, you can’t always get a good handle due to your fingers hitting the rest of the headphone assembly. That’s the only concern I have with it. If the joystick was a little bit concave and larger, then that may make some of these actions easier for those of us with modest/large thumbs. The audio cue for skipping songs is a bit annoying and cannot seemingly be disabled. The sound effect resembles someone hitting a golf ball with a very poor driver. The ANC settings button is alright, but it’s not possible to quickly cycle between the three modes, you will have to fully listen to the nice lady speaking and then you can move on to the next setting. I wish that clicking the button in rapid succession would skip through the modes faster. USB-C port functionality I was curious to see if the Fairbuds XL worked as normal headphones if I just connected them up to my PC using a USB-C cable. To my surprise, they did! The audio quality was not as good as with Bluetooth, and the volume controls depended on which virtual device you select in your operating system. The Sony WH-1000XM3 do not work like this, the USB-C port is for charging only as far as I’ve tested, but it does have an actual 3.5mm port for wired use. When connected over Bluetooth and you connect a charging cable, the Fairbuds XL will pause momentarily and then continue playback while charging the battery. This is incredibly handy for a wireless device, especially in situations where you have an important meeting coming up and you’re just about to run out of battery. The Sony WH-1000XM3 will simply power off when you connect a charger cable, rendering them unusable while charging. Annoying issues For some reason, whenever I charge my Fairbuds XL, they magically turn on again and I have to shut them off a second time. I’m never quite sure if I’ve managed to shut the headphones off. It does the jingle that indicates that it’s powered off, but then I come back to it later and I find that they’re powered on again. Customer care experience I was so unhappy with the product that I tried out the refunding process for the Fairphone Fairbuds XL. I ordered the Fairbuds XL on 2025-02-10 and I received them on 2025-02-14, shipped to Estonia. According to Fairphone’s own materials, I can return the headphones without any questions asked, assuming that my use of them matches what can be done at a physical store. For Fairphone Products, including gift cards, you purchased on the Fairphone Webshop, you have a legal right to change your mind within 14 days and receive a refund amounting to the purchase price of the products and the costs of delivery and return. You are entitled to cancel your purchase within fourteen (14) days from the day the products were delivered to you, without explanation and without any penalties. In the case of a Cool-off, Fairphone may reduce the refund of the purchase price (including delivery costs) to reflect any reduction in the value of the Products, if this has been caused by your handling them in a way which would not normally be permitted in a shop. This means You are entitled to turn on and inspect Your purchased device to familiarise yourself with its properties and ensure that it is working correctly – comparable to the conditions that are permitted within a shop. I followed their instructions and filed a support ticket on 2025-02-16. On 2025-02-25, I had not yet received any contact from Fairphone and I asked them again under the same ticket. On 2025-03-07, I received an automated message that apologized for the delay and asked me to not make any additional tickets on the matter. I’m still waiting for an update for the support ticket over a month later, while the headphones sit in the original packaging. Based on the experiences by others in the Fairphone community forum, it seems that unacceptably large delays in customer service are the norm for Fairphone. Fairphone, if you want to succeed as a company, you need to make sure that the one part of your company that’s directly interfacing with your actual paying customers needs to be appropriately staffed and resourced. A bad customer support experience can turn off a brand evangelist overnight. Closing thoughts I want Fairphone to succeed in their mission, but products like these do not further the cause. The feature set of the Fairbuds XL seems competent, and I’m willing to give a pass on a few minor issues if the overall experience is good, but the unimpressive sound profile, broken active noise-cancelling mode, multiple quality issues and poor customer service mean that I can’t in good conscience recommend the Fairphone Fairbuds XL, not even on sale. Perhaps less resources should be spent on rebranding and more on engineering good products. Remember dubstep being a thing? Yeah, so do I. That, plus a little bit of mandatory military service can do a lot of damage to hearing. ↩︎

I’ve changed my home server setup a lot over the past decade, mainly because I keep changing the goals all the time. I’ve now realized why that keeps happening. I want the perfect home server. What is the perfect home server? I’d phrase it like this: The perfect home server uses very little power, offers plenty of affordable storage and provides a lot of performance when it’s actually being relied upon. In my case, low power means less than 5 W while idling, 10+ TB of redundant storage for data resilience and integrity concerns, and performance means about 4 modern CPU cores’ worth (low-to-midrange desktop CPU performance). I seem to only ever get one or two at most. Low power usage? Your performance will likely suffer, and you can’t run too many storage drives. You can run SSD-s, but they are not affordable if you need higher capacities. Lots of storage? Well, there goes the low power consumption goal, especially if you run 3.5" hard drives. Lots of performance? Lots of power consumed! There’s just something that annoys me whenever I do things on my home server and I have to wait longer than I should, and yet I’m bothered when my monitoring tells me that my home server is using 50+ watts.1 I keep an eye out for developments in the self-hosting and home server spaces with the hopes that I’ll one day stumble upon the holy grail, that one server that fits all my needs. I’ve gotten close, but no matter what setup I have, there’s always something that keeps bothering me. I’ve seen a few attempts at the perfect home server, covered by various tech reviewers, but they always have at least one critical flaw. Sometimes the whole package is actually great, the functionality rocks, and then you find that the hardware contains prototype-level solutions that result in the power consumption ballooning to over 30 W. Or the price is over 1000 USD/EUR, not including the drives. Or it’s only available in certain markets and the shipping and import duties destroy its value proposition. There is no affordable platform out there that provides great performance, flexibility and storage space, all while being quiet and using very little power.2 Desktop PC-s repurposed as home servers can provide room for a lot of storage, and they are by design very flexible, but the trade-off is the higher power consumption of the setup. Single board computers use very little power, but they can’t provide a lot of performance and connecting storage to them gets tricky and is overall limited. They can also get surprisingly expensive. NAS boxes provide a lot of storage space and are generally low power if you exclude the power consumption of hard drives, but the cheaper ones are not that performant, and the performant ones cost almost as much as a high-end PC. Laptops can be used as home servers, they are quite efficient and performant, but they lack the flexibility and storage options of desktop PC-s and NAS boxes. You can slap a USB-based DAS to it to add storage, but I’ve had poor experiences with these under high load, meaning that these approaches can’t be relied on if you care about your data and server stability. Then there’s the option of buying used versions of all of the above. Great bang for buck, but you’re likely taking a hit on the power efficiency part due to the simple fact that technology keeps evolving and getting more efficient. I’m still hopeful that one day a device exists that ticks all the boxes while also being priced affordably, but I’m afraid that it’s just a pipe dream. There are builds out there that fill in almost every need, but the parts list is very specific and the bulk of the power consumption wins come from using SSD-s instead of hard drives, which makes it less affordable. In the meantime I guess I’ll keep rocking my ThinkPad-as-a-server approach and praying that the USB-attached storage does not cause major issues. perhaps it’s an undiagnosed medical condition. Homeserveritis? ↩︎ if there is one, then let me know, you can find the contact details below! ↩︎

Yes, you read that right. I’m a prolific open-source influencer now. Some years ago I set up a Google Alert with my name, for fun. Who knows what it might show one day? On 7th of February, it fired an alert. Turns out that my thoughts on Ubuntu were somewhat popular, and it ended up being ingested by an AI slop generator over at Fudzilla, with no links back to the source or anything.1 Not only that, but their choice of spicy autocomplete confabulation bot a large language model completely butchered the article, leaving out critical information, which lead to one reader gloating about Windows. Not linking back to the original source? Not a good start. Misrepresenting my work? Insulting. Giving a Windows user the opportunity to boast about how happy they are with using it? Absolutely unacceptable. Here’s the full article in case they ever delete their poor excuse of a “news” “article”. two can play at that game. ↩︎

I’ve written about abusing USB storage devices in the past, with a passing mention that I’m too cheap to buy an IODD device. Then I bought one. I’ve always liked the promise of tools like Ventoy: you only need to carry the one storage device that boots anything you want. Unfortunately I still can’t trust Ventoy, so I’m forced to look elsewhere. The hardware I decided to get the IODD ST400 for 122 EUR (about 124 USD) off of Amazon Germany, since it was for some reason cheaper than getting it from iodd.shop directly. SATA SSD-s are cheap and plentiful, so the ST400 made the most sense to me. The device came with one USB cable, with type A and type C ends. The device itself has a USB type C port, which I like a lot. The buttons are functional and clicky, but incredibly loud. Setting it up Before you get started with this device, I highly recommend glancing over the official documentation. The text is poorly translated in some parts, but overall it gets the job done. Inserting the SSD was reasonably simple, it slotted in well and would not move around after assembling it. Getting the back cover off was tricky, but I’d rather have that than have to deal with a loose back cover that comes off when it shouldn’t. The most important step is the filesystem choice. You can choose between NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT. Due to the maximum file size limitation of 4GB on FAT32, you will probably want to go with either NTFS or exFAT. Once you have a filesystem on the SSD, you can start copying various installers and tools on it and mount them! The interface is unintuitive. I had to keep the manual close when testing mine, but eventually I figured out what I can and cannot do. Device emulation Whenever you connect the IODD device to a powered on PC, it will present itself as multiple devices: normal hard drive: the whole IODD filesystem is visible here, and you can also store other files and backups as well if you want to optical media drive: this is where your installation media (ISO files) will end up, read only virtual drives (up to 3 at a time): VHD files that represent virtual hard drives, but are seen as actual storage devices on the PC This combination of devices is incredibly handy. For example, you can boot an actual Fedora Linux installation as one of the virtual drives, and make a backup of the files on the PC right to the IODD storage itself. S.M.A.R.T information also seems to be passed through properly for the disk that’s inside. Tech tip: to automatically mount your current selection of virtual drives and ISO file at boot, hold down the “9” button for about 3 seconds. The button also has an exit logo on it. Without this step, booting an ISO or virtual drive becomes tricky as you’ll have to both spam the “select boot drive” key on the PC while navigating the menus on the IODD device to mount the ISO. The performance is okay. The drive speeds are limited to SATA II speeds, which means that your read/write speeds cap out at about 250 MB/s. Latency will depend a lot on the drive, but it stays mostly in the sub-millisecond range on my SSD. The GNOME Disks benchmark does show a notable chunk of reads having a 5 millisecond latency. The drive does not seem to exhibit any throttling under sustained loads, so at least it’s better than a normal USB stick. The speeds seem to be the same for all emulated devices, with latencies and speeds being within spitting distance. The firmware sucks, actually The IODD ST400 is a great idea that’s been turned into a good product, but the firmware is terrible enough to almost make me regret the purchase. The choice of filesystems available (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT) is very Windows-centric, but at least it comes with the upside of being supported on most popular platforms, including Linux and Mac. Not great, not terrible. The folder structure has some odd limitations. For example, you can only have 32 items within a folder. If you have more of that, you have to use nested folders. This sounds like a hard cap written somewhere within the device firmware itself. I’m unlikely to hit such limits myself and it doesn’t seem to affect the actual storage, just the device itself isn’t able to handle that many files within a directory listing. The most annoying issue has turned out to be defragmentation. In 2025! It’s a known limitation that’s handily documented on the IODD documentation. On Windows, you can fix it by using a disk defragmentation tool, which is really not recommended on an SSD. On Linux, I have not yet found a way to do that, so I’ve resorted to simply making a backup of the contents of the drive, formatting the disk, and copying it all back again. This is a frustrating issue that only comes up when you try to use a virtual hard drive. It would absolutely suck to hit this error while in the field. The way virtual drives are handled is also less than ideal. You can only use fixed VHD files that are not sparse, which seems to again be a limitation of the firmware. Tech tip: if you’re on Linux and want to convert a raw disk image (such as a disk copied with dd) to a VHD file, you can use a command like this one: qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc -o subformat=fixed,force_size source.img target.vhd The firmware really is the worst part of this device. What I would love to see is a device like IODD but with free and open source firmware. Ventoy has proven that there is a market for a solution that makes juggling installation media easy, but it can’t emulate hardware devices. An IODD-like device can. Encryption and other features I didn’t test those because I don’t really need those features myself, I really don’t need to protect my Linux installers from prying eyes. Conclusion The IODD ST400 is a good device with a proven market, but the firmware makes me refrain from outright recommending it to everyone, at least not at this price. If it were to cost something like 30-50 EUR/USD, I would not mind the firmware issues at all.

When you’re dealing with a particularly large service with a slow deployment pipeline (15-30 minutes), and a rollback delay of up to 10 minutes, you’re going to need feature toggles (some also call them feature flags) to turn those half-an-hour nerve-wrecking major incidents into a small whoopsie-daisy that you can fix in a few seconds. Make a change, gate it behind a feature toggle, release, enable the feature toggle and monitor the impact. If there is an issue, you can immediately roll it back with one HTTP request (or database query 1). If everything looks good, you can remove the usage of the feature toggle from your code and move on with other work. Need to roll out the new feature gradually? Implement the feature toggle as a percentage and increase it as you go. It’s really that simple, and you don’t have to pay 500 USD a month to get similar functionality from a service provider and make critical paths in your application depend on them.2 As my teammate once said, our service is perfectly capable of breaking down on its own. All you really need is one database table containing the keys and values for the feature toggles, and two HTTP endpoints, one to GET the current value of the feature toggle, and one to POST a new value for an existing one. New feature toggles will be introduced using tools like Flyway or Liquibase, and the same method can be used for also deleting them later on. You can also add convenience columns containing timestamps, such as created and modified, to track when these were introduced and when the last change was. However, there are a few considerations to take into account when setting up such a system. Feature toggles implemented as database table rows can work fantastically, but you should also monitor how often these get used. If you implement a feature toggle on a hot path in your service, then you can easily generate thousands of queries per second. A properly set up feature toggles system can sustain it without any issues on any competent database engine, but you should still try to monitor the impact and remove unused feature toggles as soon as possible. For hot code paths (1000+ requests/second) you might be better off implementing feature toggles as application properties. There’s no call to the database and reading a static property is darn fast, but you lose out on the ability to update it while the application is running. Alternatively, you can rely on the same database-based feature toggles system and keep a cached copy in-memory, while also refreshing it from time to time. Toggling won’t be as responsive as it will depend on the cache expiry time, but the reduced load on the database is often worth it. If your service receives contributions from multiple teams, or you have very anxious product managers that fill your backlog faster than you can say “story points”, then it’s a good idea to also introduce expiration dates for your feature toggles, with ample warning time to properly remove them. Using this method, you can make sure that old feature toggles get properly removed as there is no better prioritization reason than a looming major incident. You don’t want them to stick around for years on end, that’s just wasteful and clutters up your codebase. If your feature toggling needs are a bit more complicated, then you may need to invest more time in your DIY solution, or you can use one of the SaaS options if you really want to, just account for the added expense and reliance on yet another third party service. At work, I help manage a business-critical monolith that handles thousands of requests per second during peak hours, and the simple approach has served us very well. All it took was one motivated developer and about a day to implement, document and communicate the solution to our stakeholders. Skip the latter two steps, and you can be done within two hours, tops. letting inexperienced developers touch the production database is a fantastic way to take down your service, and a very expensive way to learn about database locks. ↩︎ I hate to refer to specific Hacker News comments like this, but there’s just something about paying 6000 USD a year for such a service that I just can’t understand. Has the Silicon Valley mindset gone too far? Or are US-based developers just way too expensive, resulting in these types of services sounding reasonable? You can hire a senior developer in Estonia for that amount of money for 2-3 weeks (including all taxes), and they can pop in and implement a feature toggles system in a few hours at most. The response comment with the status page link that’s highlighting multiple outages for LaunchDarkly is the cherry on top. ↩︎