By Roy Mathur, on 2021-01-03, at 17:53:36--18:18:49, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love sent to me,
Ten lords a-leaping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five gold rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.
You know what? I hope that if I do actually get a true love, they actually get me all this stuff. Or is this gender specific. I bet it bloody well is. Seriously, where am I supposed to get all this stuff?
Wait! I'm Hindu, which means it's traditionally the other way around. I'm saved! Bring on yesterday's dancing girls and maybe leave out today's leaping lords who sound a bit naff. (Seriously though, stand by for yet another dating update this year. Remember how many apps I tried?!)
My phone is no longer in danger of swimming with the fishes, though there are water stains spidering up from all the ports and SIM slots of my Honor 9 Lite, to join the previous small screen scratch.
I sat my phone on a stool between a radiator and a desk fan for days to dry it and, since everything works, I'm not in any rush to blow wodge on a new... er... blower right now.
I did, however, take the opportunity, just in case it decides to pop it's clogs---poor thing's had a rough old time---to back it up; which is also something you should all do right this minute.
My mention mention of this app yesterday did have a purpose other than simply interesting tech news.
Hearing has been on the forefront of my mind. My father is seriously deaf without his newly acquired NHS hearing aid. My mother has normal, but very mild age-related hearing loss, and I myself have suffered from the cocktail party effect for at least twenty years. Like others with the condition, I find it difficult to differentiate one voice in a crowd; say at the pub. Frankly, sometimes this is a relief as some conversations bore my comatose, but other times, when I want to participate, I feel excluded.
To re-cap, the non medical Google app works by placing your phone at the source, then receiving noise cancelled audio at a level suited to each ear via earphones or headphones.
As I don't have wireless earbuds, I tried it out with wired headphones today and found it works, albeit with lag from the processing required of my budget phone and at a rudimentary level. I found that didn't work well for listening to TV, but when testing the app in a conversation with my parents, it's actually not that bad at isolating human speech. However, I also found that the noise cancellation did not remove the sound of my central heating, so it's not a replacement for Bose.
Despite the teething problems, this seems like a good solution, until you begin to wonder how people will respond to slapping down a listening device, then trying to convince them it's for hearing. In my case there's the additional problem of people knowing full well that I'm a journalist and podcaster. And then there's big tech's reputation of hoovering up data too. I read Google's privacy policy for this app and it is not reassuring. No, those things are not suspicious or creepy at all.
Still, even with the social, hardware, software, and privacy issues, it's better than nothing and this tech will improve over time. I suppose there will come a point one day when, hopefully, some of us with milder hearing loss may no longer need a separately sourced and expensive medical grade hearing aid. At this stage, however, the jokey analogy I made yesterday, that we're still looking at something not much better than Ronald Weasley's gag ear from Harry Potter, seems apt.
If you want to find it in the Android App Store (where user reviews of it are mixed), it is called Google Sound Amplifier, not Google Amplifier as I said yesterday.
Note also that this is not a new tech story, the app was announced at least a year ago, but it is new to me and this is a very personal geek show. Giving you the personal take, sometimes to a painful degree, is how my work has always differed from other geek content, even back when I had a regular newspaper tech column. That's my USP and this is the end of my not so subtle plug.
At her request, I helped Mum go from being a part-time Live Ubuntu user, to putting a full installation on her laptop. I'm calling this phenomenon #fullbuntu. Let's see if it trends.
Despite spilling my Red Bull almost immediately, the installation mostly went well. I also uninstalled Thunderbird and Shotwell, and added VLC and Gimp.
Minor criticisms: the Ubuntu App Store doesn't display all apps without a search: that even confused me. The Gimp install required a reboot to work, but didn't prompt me to do that. Installing some Linux dists can still be problematic for new users, but I was surprised to see that you could still fall afoul even in a sophisticated dist like Ubuntu.
On the positive side, Linux is certainly a viable alternative to Windows or MacOS, but getting it done OEM (as is starting to happen with Dell, HP, and Lenovo), so that machines are consumer ready is be a better bet. No ordinary end-user wants to faff through an install.
Mum's getting used to running Ubuntu Linux as her only OS now, but even if it's a bust and she goes back to MacOS, at least she'll retain her UNIX skills, because years ago, on my recommendation, she worked through Clifford Mould's green book---Unix Training Guide---get this book, it's great. I told her it would help her with Mac OS X, so even when tropical lightning later killed her iMac, a UNIX-ish-based system is probably a better match for her. And she's beating me to using Linux full-time, as I'm still sadly stuck on Windows for a variety of annoying legacy reasons.