It's a phrase that's been around for years to mean "poor quality" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/recorded-with-a-potato). One theory behind the term is that the recording device was so bad/low-tech, it could be powered by a potato battery.
FWIW, it is also possible to get standalone induction receivers that you can plug headphones into, which can be useful for "is this working" checks (for example https://www.ampetronic.com/products/ilr3-audio-induction-loo...). However you really need someone with hearing aids to tell if it's useful or not.
I visit the theatre a lot: ~50 West End visits in 2025, plus several regional venues. It's amazing how many times I've had to abandon the hearing assistance system because it doesn't work well... too quiet, distorted, delayed, poor balance between voices and instruments. Sometimes it just isn't functional at all, and nobody's noticed.
While I'm on the subject: saying "it's a loud show, you'll be able to hear fine" is a bit like telling someone who's short-sighted but has no glasses that "it's a bright show, you'll be able to see". It's not just about volume, but clarity and understanding.
For the lecture theatre and classrooms at work, we've gone over to IR transmitters and a neckworn loop, which is apparently better for everyone. You can also just use it with IR headphones, which suits certain flavours of neurospicy.
Not a bad option for a lecture theatre, but it's worth noting that IR is line-of-sight and can be easily interrupted by people moving or the receiver twisting as you shift position. Multiple emitters can help with some of this, but there are still challenges.
Hearing aids are at a frustrating crossroads at the moment, IMO. In my experience, a lot of the recent hearing aids don't seem to support induction loops. It often seems to be a choice between that or Bluetooth... and Auracast isn't ready yet.
I've had Phonak bilateral hearing aids for 5 years, and Starkey unilateral for ~5 years before that. None of those have supported induction loops.
Also because everyone now carries a computer in thier pocket with a very intelligent microphone and Bluetooth card. Anyone looking at hearing aids afresh today would start with that tech as the backbone.
There are wifi-based systems (like Sennheiser MobileConnect or Williams WAVECast), and my experience has been universally awful. The latency is so high that if you have any ambient hearing you get an echo that makes sound impossible to understand.
If you're ever considering installing one of these systems, please think again. Or at least trial it with a real situation, so you know what the experience will be like for the users.
At the same time, those that have hearing aids often complain that T-coils aren't properly set up or turned on, even in public building where they are required to (at least in Norway).
"Yes, we have T-coils, but the person responsible for it isn't here right now, and no one here knows how to use it."
So, still quite a few limited factors to their actual usefulness in society unfortunately.
> ... those that have hearing aids often complain ...
When I do sound at church, I always wish they would complain more. I assumed it was working, but one day found that the power cable for the loop system was not connected. I plugged it back in, and spoke to a hearing aid user about it and they said it hadn't been working for weeks. Why they (or all the other hearing aid users) hadn't mentioned it before I don't know...
A friend who installs loops complains they are largely pointless, because in practice nobody with a hearing aid ever wants to use them. Apparently the quality of a good hearing aid magnifying the audio in the room is substantially better than an induction loop.
No hearing aid magnification comes close if the induction loop is properly installed and integrated with the PA system. With an induction loop it's as if the microphone is directly connected to the hearing aid.
Yes, it's amazing how often hearing assistance systems are either unusable (due to bad sound, e.g. hiss or distortion or volume issues) or just flat-out don't work here in the UK.
I just got my first pair of HAs in November and I opted for the T-coil enabled model. It also (already) has working Auracast (not just "available in a future firmware update" like the other mfgrs). The T-coil model was not much bigger than the one without, and it also had two buttons on each unit rather than one on the T-coil-less model.
411, "Loop systems" are hard-coded in the US's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) so they are not going away anytime soon. When Auracast does proliferate it'll be alongside loop systems; not a direct replacement. (Not at least until the law is amended and we all know how long that takes.)
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My HA model is the Starkey Omega 24 RIC-RT (the `mRIC` is the smaller version of the same, sans T-coil).
A quick search suggests that most headphones and hearing aids don't support it yet. This will be your greatest problem - nobody can use it. This seems like the future though so you should probably install it in your venue and get a few headphones that do support it to test it and to borrow to those who need help.
That few support it implies that there are likely going to be implementation/interoperability bugs for a few more years at least - nobody knows how bad these will be. Maybe things will just work, but growing pains should not be a surprise.
They claim latencies as low as 40ms - this is unacceptably long for a lot of music applications. For listening to the sermon at church good enough, but people may noticed if you are singing along. I'm not sure if this will be an issue, but it is something to consider. You might need a different system though.
It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Not many devices have it, so not many venues install it. Not many venues have it (perhaps because they've invested in other systems), and there's no pressure to change until there are many people wanting to use it.
> If all you want to send is an array of integers, why should you have to put it into a struct first?
If you're sure that's all you'll ever have to do, then sure. But unless you're 100% certain that the protocol will never evolve further, having a more complex structure allows it to change in a gradual way.
It was clear, from the post, that they were saying, "If all I need is a simple array, why should I be required to wrap it in a struct?" The whole point (from the post) being that protobuf required structs but gob allowed simpler types _in addition_ to structs.
Nobody knows the future, and preparing for the future is a huge part of software engineering. Sending top-level arrays instead of sending them inside a struct is never the right way.
Depending on if the format you use is self-describing or not, it’s possible “sending a plain array” and “sending a struct with 1 field that is an array” could have the same format on the wire.
If it is self describing, the overhead could be very very minimal.
So, why would you want to send a plain array without wrapping it in a struct?
dmi knows that. dmi was saying that even if the encoding scheme allows encoding simpler types, it's often not smart to use that functionality, because you won't be able to evolve the format in the future. If you encode a message instead of a simple type, you'll be able to evolve it later as you add more features to your program.
Note that even protobufs, which doesn't allow encoding simple types at the top level, still has this debate when deciding whether to encode an array of simple types (inside a struct) or an array of structs (inside a struct). And Google's guidance is to use an array of structs if more data might be needed in the future:
>However, if additional data is likely to be needed in the future, repeated fields should use a message instead of a scalar proactively, to avoid parallel repeated fields.
I've been using Ctrl-[ instead of Esc for so long that I forget that a lot of people don't know about it. This may not be convenient on non-English keyboard layouts.
small fun fact:
I switched to this when the escape key was taken from me (thanks again NOT apple)
After switching to a newer MacBook that has the escape key I did not start using that again, but stuck to the Ctrl-[ as it just works.
Is anyone aware of similar resources for learning BSL (British Sign Language)?
I've done a couple of in-person courses, but I'd really like to learn more vocabulary at my own pace. So far I haven't found much other than a couple of dictionaries (e.g. https://www.signbsl.com/ and https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/dictionary/), but it's not been hugely helpful in learning which signs are common in my region. I also find that just looking up examples of signs I don't know never really helps me learn.
There's a bunch of signed (and dedicated sign language) programming on FreeView, but usually late at night. It's worth looking them up on iPlayer/4oD etc and watching them if you're not around at the right times.
They're obviously pitched at the level of fluent signers who use these as their primary way to use the TV, but I do find that between the audio, subs and thematic information, a lot can be picked up from the signer. English-with-subs is known to work well for foreigners learning English, and I expect English-and-signed might be good for BSL.
Where about are you based? I joined the bsl soc at uni and later did a level 1 course, so my level is rudimentary, but if you're in the west mids it might be good to practice.
To add to this — I suffer from Ménière's disease, which manifests for me as variable hearing loss. Some days are bad, and I can hardly hear/understand speech even when someone is right in front of me and I can lip-read. Some days are good, and my hearing aids are uncomfortably loud or make things sound "weird". But most days, my hearing aids do exactly what I need them to :-)
I've had audiograms taken on moderate and bad days, and the difference in frequency response was significant (up to 30dBA difference across only the lower frequency bands).
The app for my hearing aids allows my audiologist to make remote adjustments, so I don't even need to visit their office for straightforward changes. I really want to reverse-engineer it so that I can modify some of the details of the profiles myself.
My (Phonak) hearing aids had a multi-week ramp-up to full power, in order to give my brain time to slowly adjust. Dealing with things like the occlusion effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occlusion_effect) just takes time, and getting used to something being in your ear for a large number of hours per day.
Interesting; I learned a slightly different set of associations with mnemonics for the sounds as well. 0, 2, and 3 were the same as this system:
0 = the word zero has an s/z sound
1 = a single line, like lower-case "L"
2 = two lines, like lower-case "N"
3 = three lines, like lower-case "M"
4 = the word "four" ends in an "R" sound
5 = the word "five" contains "F" and "V"
6 = the digit looks like a lower-case "B", and lower-case "D" is its mirror image
7 = the digit looks like a badly-written upper-case "T"
8 = the "gh" in the word is weird, and reminiscent of "CH"/"SH" (and "J" is similar)
9 = the digit looks like a lower-case "G", which is similar to lower-case "Q", and lower-case "P" is its mirror image
I had no idea that there was a standard, but I use it a lot to remember what page I've reached in a book (without a bookmark handy), or for short strings of numbers like IP addresses. I find it much easier to remember "Latin insults suns lamely" than "172.217.20.131", though I'd probably try and find a better mnemonic than "insults" for 217, as that technically maps to 20170...
It's kind of like the "correct horse battery staple" thing (https://xkcd.com/936/); words are easier to memorise, especially if you can create a narrative, however tiny.
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