Month: September 2024

Apple AirPods Pro as hearing aids

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Screenshot from Apple showing the AirPods Pro hearing aid features

I don’t tend to follow Apple’s new product announcements very closely anymore, but yesterday’s announcement that Apple AirPods Pro 2 will be able to act as medical-grade hearing aids interested me.

I’ve been a hearing aid user for almost two years. My hearing aids are really basic, standard issue NHS over-the-ear models. They work, and are loaded with an audio profile that amplifies the frequencies where I need the most assistance, but they’re basic. There’s no Bluetooth, and I have to take them out to use a headset. They don’t even have rechargeable batteries – my local NHS hospital has to send me packs of little button batteries every few months.

Hearing aid costs

Whilst I get them free on the NHS, were I to lose one, I would need to pay £75 for a replacement (so £150 for a pair). And that’s pretty cheap as far as hearing aids go. For context, basic hearing aids from Specsavers start at £499 a pair if bought privately. Top-of-the-range hearing aids cost closer to £3000 a pair. I guess the high prices are partly to do with the cost of being certified as medical devices and limited number of customers.

With this in mind, the £230 cost of a pair of rechargeable AirPods Pro 2 is fantastic value for money for hearing aids. Especially as they will work well with an iPhone and support Bluetooth – which is something that would otherwise cost four times as much. And, it’s a lot more accessible – it took me several months following my hearing test to get a referral via my GP to audiology, whereas these will be available to buy on the high street without any gatekeepers.

Replacing regular hearing aids

Before we get too excited, Apple’s press release notes that the hearing aid functionality will be for mild to moderate hearing loss only. That includes me at the moderate end of the hearing loss spectrum, but for people with significant or profound hearing loss, regular hearing aids will still be necessary. There will be a ‘hearing test’ feature included in iOS 18 to tune the hearing aid functionality of the AirPods Pro. However, I doubt it’ll be as accurate as an audiogram that has been produced by a qualified audiologist in a sound-proof room using professional equipment.

I also think that others will find it confusing if you’re talking to them whilst wearing AirPods. Most hearing aids are designed to be relatively discreet – the visible bits of mine are clear plastic with the electronics hidden behind my ear. Whereas it’s pretty obvious that someone is wearing AirPods.

But on the whole, I think this is a massive game changer for people with hearing loss. Having hearing aids so easily and cheaply available could help so many people. I might have to consider getting myself a pair.

Mr Fitzpatrick’s Temperance Bar

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A photo of the outside of Mr Fitzpatrick's Temperance Bar in Rawtenstall, Lancashire

At one time in northern Britain, there were hundreds of ‘temperance bars’ – essentially pubs that didn’t serve alcohol. Nowadays, just one of the original temperance bars survives: Mr Fitzpatrick’s in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. We called in on the August Bank Holiday Monday, on our way to Gawthorpe Hall.

The Temperance Movement

The Temperance Movement came about during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, as a way of steering workers away from the perils of drink. In England, the movement started in Preston in 1835 and spread across the newly-industrialised northern towns and cities. Followers of the temperance movement took a pledge to stay away from all alcohol, whether that be spirits, beer or cider. Therefore, temperance bars offered alcohol-free social spaces for the movement’s followers.

Temperance bars would offer a variety of flavoured non-alchohlic drinks, such as Sarsaparilla, Blood Tonic and Dandelion and Burdock. In our household, we’re heavy consumers of Vimto, and this fruity blend also came out of the Temperance Movement. Back in 2013, we went to an exhibition all about the Temperance movement at the People’s History Museum.

Mr Fitzpatrick’s

Nowadays, Mr Fitzpatrick’s is better known as a brand of cordials, which are on sale at many independent shops across the north of England and include the aforementioned flavours. They’ve hung on to this one remaining temperance bar, in the Lancashire town of Rawtenstall, where you can try their full range of cordials mixed with still or sparkling water. They also do milkshakes, and a decent food menu – we called in for lunch and our eight-year-old thought it was amazing. Upstairs, there’s a model railway suspended from the ceiling.

Whilst Mr Fitzpatrick’s is the last surviving of the original temperance bars, it’s an idea that seems to be coming back around. There’s a BBC piece about the ‘rise of the sober bar’ from 2019, and I’d argue that the various dessert bars that have popped up in majority Muslim areas in the UK are a response to the need for non-alcoholic social spaces. Many young Generation Z adults don’t drink, regardless of religious affiliation, and it’s nice to have bars that offer a wide range of interesting soft drinks. Even if you’re not teetotal, it’s a bit depressing when you’re not drinking and all there is on offer is cola or lemonade.

Accessibility

Being a very small and old building, accessibility isn’t great – the toilet is up a narrow, steep staircase although accessible facilities may be available at the nearby Rawtenstall Bus Station. Free parking for up to three hours is available nearby but you’ll need a Parking Disc (Sundays and Bank Holidays are free all day). Regular X43 Witch Way buses run towards Burnley and Manchester.

Rawtenstall is the northern terminus of the heritage East Lancashire Railway, which runs from Bury.

HACS – community components for Home Assistant

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A screenshot of the HACS web site

Whilst Home Assistant is already the most flexible smart home platform, with hundreds of built-in integrations, HACS is an optional additional tool to add even more integrations.

HACS stands for ‘Home Assistant Community Store’, and it allows you to download and install custom components from the wider Home Assistant community. It’ll also keep them updated for you. Home Assistant has long supported so-called ‘custom components’, which allows functionality beyond the standard built-in integrations, but HACS makes finding, installing and updating these much easier.

A couple of weeks ago, version 2.0 of HACS was released. This includes a new addon for those using Home Assistant Operating System or Supervised mode, which makes it easier to install. Updates are now handled via Cloudflare for improved performance.

As well as additional integrations, HACS also allows you to install different cards for your dashboards, and different themes. For example, Mushroom is a set of replacement cards which some prefer the look of.

Compared to the built-in integrations, which are maintained by the Home Assistant project, those in HACS are maintained by the community. This means that they may not be tested as rigorously as the official integrations, and so it’s important that you have regular backups in case things go wrong. Also, expect more bugs.

As for why integrations are only in HACS and not Home Assistant itself, there are a few reasons:

  1. It’s a niche service that may only apply to one country, or is of limited wider use.
  2. It uses scraping – this is where there isn’t a publicly available API for the service and so it scrapes the contents of web pages to work. These aren’t permitted in core Home Assistant integrations.
  3. It’s still in active development and not ready to be merged into the main Home Assistant release.
  4. It duplicates the functionality of a core Home Assistant integration but does so in a different way.

I’m currently using eight custom integrations through HACS, and I’ll discuss these in a later blog post. If you’re a Home Assistant user and haven’t already checked out HACS, have a look to see if you can extend its features even further.

A visit to Gawthorpe Hall

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A photo of Gawthorpe Hall, a National Trust property in Padiham near Burnley in Lancashire.

Burnley is known for many things, including its football team, its history as a mill town, and the birthplace of Sir Ian McKellan. But it’s also home to Gawthorpe Hall, a stately home connected with the mill trade, which is now in the care of the National Trust. We went to visit it last week on the August Bank Holiday Monday.

Technically, Gawthorpe Hall is in the neighbouring town of Padiham, although the two pretty much flow into each other. There has been a building on the site since the 14th century, although much of the hall dates from the 16th century. It was then extensively rebuilt in the 19th century, and passed into National Trust ownership in 1970. Prior to the National Trust taking it on, it had been in the Shuttleworth (later Kay-Shuttleworth) family throughout its history. Over the years, the Shuttleworths hosted a number of famous historical guests at Gawthorpe, including Charlotte Brontë and King George VI.

Inside Gawthorpe Hall

Inside, there are three floors to explore. Downstairs there’s the dining room, with a balcony, and the drawing room which has some very detailed plasterwork on the ceiling. There’s also the usual shop in the entrance hall.

Upstairs is home to the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, run by an independent charity that was founded by Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth, the last of the Kay-Shuttleworths to live at Gawthorpe. Rachel was a keen collector of textiles from around the world, and some samples from the collection are on display across the middle floor.

Up to the top floor, and there’s a family room, which is home to some toys for visitors to play with. There’s currently an exhibition about Gawthorpe Hall in the 1600s, including its links with the infamous Pendle Witch Trials. There’s also the Long Room, which spans the whole of one side of the house, and the Huntroyde Room; a bedroom with a four-poster bed.

The gardens and parkland

Outside, there are some formal gardens, although they’re not very extensive and situated around three sides of the hall. The grounds beyond are more extensive, although much of these were closed off due to damage from Storm Lilian. The gardens and grounds are normally open from 8am until 7pm at this time of year. There currently isn’t a café; I gather that there used to be one in one of the outbuildings but it looks like it’s been closed for some time.

Accessibility

The gardens and grounds should be accessible to all, and there are disabled toilets (but no Changing Places toilet). There are steps up to the hall, although once inside a wheelchair can access the ground floor, and an interactive computer workstation to view images of the upper floors. There is no lift.

The nearest railway station is Rose Grove, which is a 35 minute walk; Burnley Barracks and Burnley Manchester Road stations are a little further away. There are apparently frequent buses to the end of the drive from Burnley bus station, and then it’s around 10 minutes walk up the drive.

Although the National Trust own Gawthorpe Hall, it’s operated by Lancashire County Council and so it doesn’t take part in any free entry promotions. However, National Trust members do still get in for free, as do holders of a National Art Pass.

Heritage Open Days

Over the next couple of weeks, various historic places will be open for free for Heritage Open Days, and this includes Gawthorpe Hall on Saturday 14th September. Normally, entry is £7 each for adults (under-18s are free), so if you’re not a National Trust or National Art Pass member, this is an opportunity to explore the hall for free. However, maybe consider arriving by public transport; the car park on site is small, and we struggled to find a parking space when we visited.

Joining all the Brits and Brazilians on Bluesky

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The tl;dr version of this post is that I’m now considering Bluesky to be my primary public social media presence, with Mastodon a close second and Threads a distant third, and here are the links to my profiles:

Last month, Elon Musk basically tried to incite civil war in the UK on Twitter (which he calls ‘X’). This seems to have been the last straw for many Brits who were still active over there and who don’t consider themselves to be right-wing, and so there’s been another exodus. This time, Bluesky seems to have been the main destination, and so I’m now reconnecting with lots of people that I used to follow on Twitter before I basically quit almost two years ago in November 2022. Since then I’ve been mostly hanging out on Mastodon.

Now, I like Mastodon; especially its decentralised nature and that many servers are run by the community with donations. It’s also got some good and mature third-party clients like Ivory, which I use. But it still feels like a niche social network that attracts a more technical audience. And it’s notable that, given the choice between Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, most Brits leaving Twitter haven’t chosen Mastodon.

The Brazilian Twitter exodus

Over the past couple of days, there’s been another mass exodus from Twitter, this time in Brazil. However, this is because Twitter is now blocked in Brazil. In a nutshell: Brazil’s previous right-wing president, Jair Balsonaro, was ousted in an election; there was an attempted coup by his supporters, and then a Brazilian Supreme Court judge demanded that Twitter suspend the accounts of those suspected of being involved in the coup whilst they were under investigation. Instead of complying, or even challenging the court order, Elon Musk closed Twitter’s office in Brazil and sacked its staff. So, the supreme court judge gave Twitter an ultimatum to appoint a representative in Brazil; Twitter refused, and so it’s now blocked. As in, the whole web site is inaccessible from within Brazil.

Consequently, Twitter users in Brazil have been looking for a new home, and most seem to have landed on Bluesky (although some have gone to Mastodon too).

If these statistics from Statista are right, then Brazil made up the sixth biggest audience on Twitter, just behind the UK. Which means that Elon has alienated two of his top ten biggest markets in the space of a month.

Oh, and it gets worse. It turns out that Brazil was home to many large fan accounts on Twitter; many of these posted in English and so it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were based there. So they’re gone from Twitter too. At this rate, Twitter is going to become like the alt-right social network Gab, just with some brands wondering where all their engagement has gone.

Galaxy brain

Before his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk had a reputation for being a forward-thinking successful entrepreneur. Tesla was a pioneer in all-electric cars, SpaceX has contracts with NASA, and his Starlink network allowed people living in remote areas to access satellite broadband internet.

But he’s completely ruined Twitter. I’m not sure whether it’s some kind of galaxy-brained scheme that mere mortals like myself are unable to comprehend, or whether he’s actually not that intelligent but has lots of money to throw around to see what sticks. Or somewhere in the middle. Either way, he seems to keep making unforced errors that seems to make no kind of sense business-wise. It’s worth noting that, despite being probably one of the world’s richest people, he took on a lot of debt to buy Twitter, and those loans will be accruing interest. It can’t be long before Twitter goes bankrupt, can it?

As for my Twitter profile? It still exists, mainly so that I don’t lose my username. But my profile is private, and I’ve deleted my avatar and background. I haven’t had the Twitter app on my phone for over 18 months now.

Business models

My only worry about Bluesky is its business model. In the long term, how is it going to make money? Are we going to start to see adverts, like on most other social media? Will there be a premium tier?

On Mastodon, I pay small monthly contributions via Patreon and Ko-Fi to the overall project and server owner respectively, and that suits me well. And Threads is part of Meta. I’m assuming Blueksy is backed by venture capital money, but at some point it’s got to be able to make money on its own terms. I just hope it’s done in a way that won’t massively alienate its user base.