Loved the article, thank you for sharing. How happy are the grandparents with the hearing aid functionality? Is it working well for them and how is the battery life?
It's all too early to tell, but we'll know after a week or so. The battery life thing is not seeming like a big problem, since the existing device needs batteries changed every few days or charged every night.
As for the sound quality, a few of our grandparents have tried it, and while they say it sounds 'different', it's not necessarily bad. Grandma was actually quite content even with just the old EQ settings that shipped pre iOS 18 for folks with hearing issues.
The hearing test on one of the images shows a ‘profound loss’. Does the hearing aid feature work for such a significant loss, or does it disable for any result beyond moderate loss?
The feature only works when hearing loss is mild (26–40 dBHL) or moderate (41–60 dBHL). We had to repeat the test a few times to get it in the range and enable it.
I don't need the TTS part, but love how they create the text as a dialog between two non-expert humans. Any idea what a prompt for that would look like?
I remember working in Taiwan in the late nineties and noticed that the PE2 editor for MSDOS was incredibly popular, because you could easily define macros that mapped to multi-character sequences, which combined with a BIOS that had character tables for simplified Chinese meant you could generate Chinese text without too much difficulty. To this day my vimrc has some of those PE2 macros :-)
I find my tolerance for subscription software is proportional to how often I use it. A tool I use daily as my core work, no problem - I want to support them to ensure they stick around. But occasional tools I’d prefer to buy upgrades only if there are new feature I care about.
I’m not a creative, so I’m not paying Adobe subscription (they’re icky in so many ways). But if I were I’d have no issue.
But there is a 3rd category - something like an editor I couldn’t bear if it was tied to a company to ensure it’s survival so that’s got to be open source - even though ironically I’m willing to pay more in that scenario.
I'd say there is a fourth category too - things that would be perfectly fine as a simple, local program purchased once that grow over-complicated cloud features to justify a subscription model.
Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
100% agree with this. And I’d put most of the software into this category.
Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.
Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?
Really, just a bit of “planning around charging”? The less predictable your life is the less this is an option. The most extreme example of this is Hertz having to walk away from billions invested in 100,000 Teslas. Short term renters simply don’t tolerate the uncertainties that EVs bring.
I remember my Valentine V1 fondly. It was so clearly and immediately better than all the other radar detectors. Knowing where the signal was coming from was a game changer.
I’m not saying speeding is good, but when you’re on the road a lot and are a responsible driver there are definitely places where you can safely exceed the speed limit and where it feels like the police see enforcement as a fundraising opportunity rather than a safety issue.
I purchased my first one in the early 00s, and while I don't use it anymore, I have kept it because I love the engineering that went into it. I also had the opportunity once to talk to Michael on the phone, but did not know it was him at the time. I was inquiring how to get data off the ext port to correlate with GPS data, before Waze reporting was a thing (I was trying to create a historical speed trap map in my locality). He was knowledgable, but also patient and kind with my unsophisticated questions.
A good engineer has left, that's the story, and that is sad.
reply