Writing - Page 3 of 111 - Neil Turner's Blog

New Bluetooth hearing aids

June 7, 2026 by Neil Turner

Back in autumn 2022, following a decline in my hearing, I started wearing hearing aids. Almost four years on, and following a new hearing test, I’ve got new, upgraded hearing aids – and these ones have Bluetooth.

Bluetooth hearing aids have been around for some time now, but were normally only available if you paid to have them fitted privately. And privately paid-for hearing aids are not cheap – Specsavers charge a minimum of £500 for a pair, and up to £3000 for top-of-the-range models. So I’ve gone with standard issue NHS hearing aids, which don’t cost me anything as long as I don’t lose them.

It’s only been recently that hearing aid manufacturers have started offering Bluetooth functionality in the cheapest models that they sell to the NHS. It offers some advantages to them – my old hearing aids had metal contacts on the bottom so that my hearing profile could be uploaded to them, but now this can be done wirelessly by Bluetooth. That, in turn, allows for a more streamlined casing for the hearing aids.

Phone connectivity

For me, the major advantage of Bluetooth is that I can connect my hearing aids to my phone. They support Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) standard, and so they work a bit like Bluetooth earbuds. Once paired, then you can route your phone’s audio to your hearing aids. However, unlike most Bluetooth audio devices, you can opt to not route system sounds and ringtones to your hearing aids, which is good. You also get to see the battery status of your hearing aids if you have the battery widget enabled on your home screen, and can use your phone to control the volume.

Another feature on iPhones is Live Listen. This allows you to use your phone’s microphone to route sound to your hearing aids. It’s useful for noisy environments, where people can talk into your phone’s microphone to help you hearing them better. Whilst you can buy microphones that also do this, it’s handy to be able to use a phone that you already own.

Other Apple devices linked to the same Apple account should be able to interact with your hearing aids when in Bluetooth range, even if not paired. I say should because my iPad says it can see my hearing aids, but I haven’t yet worked out how to route audio from my iPad to my hearing aids via my iPhone. I assume that if I buy a Mac in future, this will also work.

I’m sure Android phones also support these features, but I haven’t had any experience with them.

iPhone App

My hearing aids are manufactured by Oticon, and they also offer a companion app for your phone. This also allows you to control the volume (for both hearing aids together or individually), switch modes to enable Telecoil, and also mute the microphones. This latter option is useful for listening to music or podcasts over Bluetooth; by default, the hearing aids still listen for sound in your environment (albeit a slightly reduced volume) when Bluetooth audio is playing. If you just want to listen to audio and not your environment (essentially using your hearing aids as headphones), then the mute function is useful.

You can also enable a ‘SpeechBooster’ mode that amplifies speech in noisy environments. Being as I am mostly stuck at home at present, I haven’t tried this yet.

Not rechargeable

Whilst most paid-for hearing aids now come in a charger box, like Apple’s AirPods, these basic ones that I have still use disposable batteries. I don’t have to pay for these either – I get a supply of free batteries from the NHS. And thankfully they’re the same type as my previous models, so I can still use the spare ones I had left over. I expected the Bluetooth support to affect battery life, but they seem to last 8-10 days, which isn’t a major difference.

I’m really happy with my new hearing aids, as they negate the need to take them out to use earbuds or headphones to listen to music and podcasts. Whilst the sound quality isn’t as good as some earbuds, they’re a lot more convenient – especially when you can mute the microphones. Most of all, I’m glad Bluetooth hearing aids are now available on the NHS and that I haven’t needed to pay for them.

Letterboxd, the social film review site

June 5, 2026 by Neil Turner

Seeing as how I have had a lot of time on my own recently whilst recovering, I decided to sign up for Letterboxd. It’s a site where you can log which films you have watched and when, review them, and see what your friends have watched and reviewed.

Letterboxd has been around for some time, and I have been aware of it, but as I don’t watch lots of films I hadn’t bothered signing up. In any case, when I have watched films and wanted to review them, I’ve usually done so on here. Still, I decided it would be useful to have a definitive log of every film I’ve watched, and when, and so here’s my profile.

Previously, I’ve used Flixster to log which films I have and haven’t seen, but it seems that Flixster is no more. I’ve also built out some lists on JustWatch, but it doesn’t have the social features of Letterboxd. Those films that I have seen at the cinema have also been logged on Swarm over the years, and so when building out my list of watched films on Letterboxd, I was able to add dates to these.

Importing

Whilst I built out my profile manually (did I mention I’ve had a lot of time on my own?), if you have built up lists already elsewhere, there are various import tools available. These include sites like iMDB, JustWatch, Rotten Tomatoes and Trakt, as well as apps like Plex.

Indeed, if you have your own list that you keep in your notes app, for example, you can simply convert this to a CSV file to import it.

Letterboxd Diary and Lists

One thing I particularly like about Letterboxd is the ‘diary’ view. I mentioned that you can log when you saw a film, as well as that you have watched it, and those dates all go into a calendar. You can therefore see month-by-month which films you have seen. That should mean that I can list how many films I’ve watched this year when I do my end-of-year quantified review.

You can also recruit films onto lists. These were really useful when first setting up – for example, I could search for ‘Marvel’ to get a list of all the Marvel films and be able to mark which of those I had already seen.

Social features

Letterboxd is designed to be a social network, so you can see what your friends think of films or what they have been watching recently. That being said, it’s a little difficult to find people you already know – it’s not possible to import your contacts, for example. I understand that Letterboxd has allowed you to import connections from Facebook and Twitter in the past, but changes to the APIs of these networks prevents this now. As it stands, Kevin is my only follower there, but you are welcome to follow me as well.

It’s worth noting that the range of ‘films’ is pretty wide. As well as the sort of productions you would see at a cinema, you’ll also find various direct to TV productions in there. Indeed, you may notice from the screenshot that this includes many of the recent Doctor Who specials – whilst the usual episodes aren’t there, the slightly longer specials which are not officially in a series are. By including all of these, I have apparently seen 378 films as I write this.

Once you have logged and marked some films as having liked them, Letterboxd can start recommending films to you, and you can then add these to a watchlist.

Premium accounts

Letterboxd is free to use, and free accounts can do most things. However, I decided to pay for a Pro account, as this hides all of the adverts for only around £16 per year. You also get integration with JustWatch, a way of marking whether you own a copy of the film, and additional stats.

There’s another paid-for level where you can be a Patron, which includes all of the Pro features and some more.

On the whole, I like Letterboxd and plan to carry on logging the films I have watched there. If you are also a member, please feel free to follow me.

diyHue – Philips Hue Bridge Emulator

June 3, 2026 by Neil Turner

Almost exactly a year ago, I reviewed Bifrost, which emulates a Philips Hue Bridge in software. I’ve recently replaced Bifrost with diyHue, which does the same thing, but with support for more devices.

Note: I was part-way through writing this when I had my fall, so consider it to be moderately cursed.

Comparing Bifrost with diyHue

There’s a useful comparison table between Bifrost and diyHue here, from Bifrost’s developer. Indeed, Bifrost was developed because of the developer’s shortcomings with diyHue, but the two work differently. Bifrost only works with Zigbee2MQTT, and so can only support Zigbee devices. By contrast, diyHue can work with a much wider range of devices, including any that connect via MQTT and Home Assistant. That opens up support for Govee, WLED and Matter/Thread based lights as well.

diyHue is also easier to set up – there’s no YAML file to configure. Instead, it can run as Home Assistant app, and offers its own web-based interface. This allows you to control which lights are exposed to the Hue app, should you not wish all of them to show up. This is especially useful if you have set up both its Home Assistant and MQTT links, as otherwise you’ll end up with duplicates.

You can also easily configure how each light appears to the Hue app, by selecting a model number to emulate. In my experience, diyHue gets this right most of the time, so that light controls in the Hue app match the features of the bulb, but you can tweak it if needed.

Benefits of using the Hue app

I touched on the main benefits of the Philips Hue app in my review of Bifrost, in that you can use its scene gallery to set multiple lights in the same room to complementary colours. At the moment, I only have one room with more than one colour changing light in it, so this isn’t so useful to me, but I’m planning to fit colour changing lightbulbs when we refurbish our bathroom later this year.

The other key benefit of having diyHue is that I can use the Hue app on my Fitbit Versa 3 smartwatch to control the lights. There are some situations where I want to turn lights on and off without using my voice, or having to reach for my phone in the dark. There isn’t really a good Home Assistant app for Fitbit devices (and Google is phasing out the Versa range anyway), so the Hue app is the next best thing.

Juxtaposed into June

June 1, 2026 by Neil Turner

As I mentioned yesterday, we didn’t manage to do many of the things we’d expected to do last month. And, unlike last June when I went to Greece, I’m not expecting to do any long distance travelling.

Continuing recovery

I start this month still in my recovery period; today, I have an X-ray booked to see how my fractures are healing. My sick note for work has another week to run, and in some respects, me blogging again is part of me seeing if I’m able to start working from home again next week. I suspect it’ll be a few more weeks before I can go back into the office, not least because I’m not able to drive at the moment, or carry a backpack on the train.

International visitor

Christine has extended family in the USA, and we’re expecting to host one of her relatives later this month. The plan is for them to stay in our spare room, and, up until I injured myself, we had been making good progress at turning our spare room from a dumping ground for our junk, into a usable bedroom. To the extent that we’d taken two car loads of stuff to the local recycling centre, and another two car loads were donated to a local charity. I’m hoping we’ve done enough to make it usable, but it’s not quite where we had hoped it would be.

Their visit is mostly to sort out some family property and inheritance issues, so nothing too exciting.

A photo of the Arteck multi device Bluetooth wireless mouse

New mouse

The multi-device mouse I bought in September 2022 is starting to become faulty – not all of my left clicks are registering any more, which is as frustrating as you would expect it to be.

Considering that previous two mice that I had (both Tecknet mice from Amazon) each lasted about a year, I’m somewhat pleased that this has managed almost four years, although I’m sure I’ve had Logitech mice that have lasted far longer in the past. So, I’ll be spending this week looking for a suitable replacement – ideally, it’ll be another multi-device mouse.

Car insurance renewal

June is also our car insurance renewal month. Well, our policy would actually start in July, but quotes tend to be cheapest around 21-26 days before renewal. Once we have our renewal quote from our current provider, I’ll be spending time perusing the various price comparison web sites to see if we can get it cheaper. I’ve written in more detail about saving money before, and my record is saving £300 by haggling with my existing provider.

A quick glance at one price comparison site is showing prices around £100 more expensive than last year’s premium, but I’ll see if those prices come down nearer the time.

Unblogged May

May 31, 2026 by Neil Turner

Just a short one this month – as mentioned yesterday, I’m still in my recovery, and my typing is slow and not particularly accurate.

What we didn’t do in May

I did my usual look ahead to the start of the month on the 1st, listing the things we expected to do. Alas, my injuries meant that I never made it to the Everything Electric show in Harrogate, or the gig that I mentioned. That was a Professor Elemental gig in Leeds, being supported by fellow ‘chap hop’ artists Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer and Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq. Ironically, this is the second Professor Elemental gig we’ve missed this year, as we were supposed to see him at Sci-Fi Weekender in March before that got cancelled.

Christine also never made it to London, as she stayed back to help me, and we’re not at UKGE this weekend. Oh well.

Does bad luck come in threes?

There’s a saying that bad luck comes in threes. If we take my injuries as one, then number two would be that we had a gas leak at home last week, and number three would be that we got a flat tyre on our car on Friday.

The gas leak was easily solved – we rang the National Gas Leak Emergency Number, and an engineer from our local gas distribution network was over within the hour. It was a minor leak – the pipe connecting our meter to the inlet pipe had come very slightly loose. Once tightened, it was fine. And as the leak was on the network side of the meter, we would not have been charged for the excess gas. It’s probably a good thing we no longer have a gas cooker, as that would have ignited the leaking gas and could have caused a major explosion. As it is, we only need gas for our central heating and hot water, and in the long term, we’ll replace our boiler with an electric heat pump so that we can come off the gas grid all together.

As for the flat tyre, we used our breakdown cover to get a recovery truck to bring the car home (seeing as it was after 7pm on a Friday and we weren’t too far from home), and we have a technician coming to us to replace it today. Like the gas leak, easily fixed, but a bit annoying. Let’s hope that I don’t have any more bad luck, eh?

The Wolverhampton Taxi Problem

Back in 2015, I wrote a (comparatively) lengthy blog post about taxis registered in the borough of Rossendale in Lancashire, but operating elsewhere, and the issues this causes. A decade on, and it seems like the issue has shifted to Wolverhampton: there’s a lengthy piece on Mobility Matters about it. Almost 30,000 private hire vehicles are registered in Wolverhampton, which would mean one taxi for every ten residents, against a national average of 3 to every 1000. Of course, they’re not all operating there, and it’s reckoned that around a third of those operate in Greater Manchester. A hat tip to London Reconnections for the link.

Playlist of the month: Ouch

May 30, 2026 by Neil Turner

I’m still in my recovery period – I’m not allowed to lift anything for another three weeks – but I am going to post a few, short blog posts again to get myself used to typing again. So, here’s this month’s playlist, which should give you an idea about how my recovery is going. Here’s the link to Spotify.

“Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
“Broken Bones” by Love Inc
“The Drugs Don’t Work” by The Verve
“Give Me Novacaine” by Green Day
“I Need A Painkiller” by Armand van Helden
“Wonderful Life” by Hurts
“Insomnia” by Faithless
“Can’t Sleep” by Above and Beyond

No extra analysis this month, I’m afraid. I can’t type at my normal speed, and my accuracy is lower than usual. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next month.

Turning 42 on Towel Day

May 25, 2026 by Neil Turner

It’s my birthday today. I’m still recovering, and not yet able to spend a long time typing, so this is coming from my phone again. However, I have re-gained some movement in my arms compared to a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been out of hospital for almost two weeks now.

The 25th May is also Towel Day, marking the life of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Those of you familiar with the book, radio series, TV series or film will know the significance of the number 42. Well, today is my 42nd birthday.

As I’m still recovering, today will be a quiet day with possibly a nice meal out somewhere at lunchtime. Once I’m fit enough to start using a proper keyboard again, I’ll be able to resume blogging more regularly.

Hiatus

May 13, 2026 by Neil Turner

This is a short blog post that I am tapping out on my phone. Since Thursday last week, I have been in hospital, having had a fall at home which resulted in me fracturing bones in both my shoulders (specifically necks of humerus).

I’ve now exhausted the scheduled posts that I’d written before the fall, and both arms need to be non-load baring for another five weeks or so to allow them to heal, so I’m going to have to take a blogging hiatus for now. Which is a shame; I was working on my views of this year’s Eurovision entries when the fall happened.

See you all soon, hopefully when I no longer have T-rex arms.

Controlling multi-colour lights with WLED

May 11, 2026 by Neil Turner

WLED is custom firmware for controlling multi-colour LED lights. It’s designed for string lights, with lots of individual LEDs that can be controlled independently. I’ve recently given it a try for the first time.

ESP devices

WLED runs on Espressif’s ESP32 and ESP8266 chips (although the latter isn’t recommended for new installs). That means it’s like ESPHome, Tasmota and ESPurna, in that it is also open source and customisable. However, whereas these alternatives can be used on a wide variety of devices, WLED is designed just for controlling LED lights. Sure, you can probably configure ESPHome to do the same, but you would end up with a huge and unwieldy YAML file to be able to recreate WLED’s functionality.

You can build your own controllers with an ESP chip like those from Seeed Studio and m5stack, and there are wiring diagrams to help you. It’s recommended that you include some capacitors, fuses and level shifters, along with the MCU chip, and you’ll need to be good at soldering.

Or, you could do what I did, and buy a pre-built controller box with the WLED firmware pre-installed. Amazon will sell you one from Gledopto for £25 (sponsored link), however, I purchased mine from AliExpress for £10.79, which is less than half price. Whilst buying the individual components may be cheaper, a pre-built box doesn’t require any soldering. Gledopto offer a range of different units, and some more expensive models include a built-in microphone to allow the lights to synchronise with music.

My new WLED controller (below) and the old Tuya controller (above)

Replacing Tuya with WLED

The lights that I wanted to use originally came with a Tuya Wi-Fi controller. I try to avoid Tuya Wi-Fi devices, as they require access to Tuya’s servers to work. WLED can work entirely locally, with no need to connect to cloud servers (apart from for firmware updates). I also found that, whilst the Tuya app offered lots of effects, these weren’t available on other smart home platforms.

The MCU in the Tuya controller looks like a Beken BK7231 chip, and so I may have been able to install OpenBeken or ESPHome on it, but not WLED as WLED is ESP-only. As mentioned above, WLED is designed to control LED lights, whereas OpenBeken and ESPHome would have needed a lot of configuration. Besides, I couldn’t seem to use the Tuya-Cloudcutter exploit, and couldn’t find the pins I would have needed to upload new firmware via UART.

So instead, I bought a replacement WLED controller, and then cut the wires from the old circuit board. Thankfully, the terminals where the wires connected were labelled, and so I could easily match these with the new WLED controller. Like I said, there was no soldering required – on the new controller, I just lifted the plastic pins to open the ports, fed the wires in, and then locked the pins. The controller needs a minimum of 5 volts, which is what you get from USB and so I just wired in the existing USB cable from the Tuya controller. It can accept higher, going up to 24 volts DC.

Once power was provided, the LEDs all light up with a bright orange glow. I then used my phone to connect to the WLED-AP hotspot that appeared, and used the hotspot login screen to give WLED my Wi-Fi network details. And that was it – after that, I could use the controller’s IP address to open a web page to control the lights.

Using WLED to control lights

WLED is very powerful. With LED lights like the ones I used, it can control the colour and brightness of each individual LED. That means each one can be a different colour, and you can have patterns as each one fades on and off and to different colours. It comes with lots of built-in effects, and you can save these as presets that come on as soon as the lights are turned on. Multiple presets can be combined into a playlist.

Whilst the main way to use WLED is using the web interface, there are official apps for iPhone and Android, that will detect your lights using mDNS. That being said, the iPhone app is mostly just a wrapper around the web interface. Third-party apps seem to exist which offer a more native interface, but I haven’t tried these myself yet.

Screenshot of the WLED integration in Home Assistant

Smart home integration

If you’re a Home Assistant user, then WLED has a built-in integration. New WLED devices should be detected automatically by Home Assistant, and you can control almost all of the features within Home Assistant. This includes setting presets and playlists, amending the speed of effects and the intensity.

Getting your WLED devices into other smart home ecosystems is a little more difficult. There is a Matter bridge, which needs to run on another device that has Docker installed. I tried this, but couldn’t get it to work; I gather from one of the bug reports on Github that it’s not compatible with newer versions of WLED.

With a bit of trial and error, I managed to get it working with Matterbridge. I had to hide some of the sub-entities as otherwise it wouldn’t show and caused errors in the logs. This allowed me to control it with Google Home and Apple Home. However, this control was limited to selecting a single colour and brightness for all LEDs, or switching on and off. Better than nothing, but not as granular as Home Assistant.

WLED isn’t for everyone – I found it easy enough to set up, and I like the high level of control it offers. But it is very much a DIY solution, that requires you to buy (or build) the controller and lights separately, so it’s not for everyone.

I’m planning another WLED project; this time to replace the non-smart controller for my ring light. I’ve seen a guide for replacing the controller; that guide involves building your own controller and 3D-printing a box for it. I think I’ll just buy another Gledopto box.

Midlife iPhone overhaul

May 9, 2026 by Neil Turner

A photo of an iPhone 13 Mini with iOS 15 showing the home screen

Last month marked three years since I bought my iPhone 13 Mini. Unfortunately, it was starting to show its age a little – the battery was not holding charge very well, and the charger port was being awkward, which exacerbated the charging issue.

I quite like the size of the iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m disappointed that Apple has stopped making iPhones this small. As I write this, the smallest iPhone is the iPhone 17E, which is 15mm taller and 7mm wider, as well as weighing 30 grams more. And compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, my phone is 2/3rds of the weight, 30mm shorter and 12mm narrower. I resisted moving from the iPhone 5/5S form factor to the iPhone 6/7/8 partly because I felt that was too big – the iPhone 13 Mini has turned out to be an almost perfect size.

So, I have a good reason for sticking with my current iPhone. Plus, sorting out the issues with my phone would prove to be much cheaper than buying a new one.

New iPhone battery

I had previously had the battery on my iPhone 8 replaced, which helped it last for five years. So, doing the same with my current phone made sense. I was able to get a local phone repair shop to do the job in about half an hour, so that I didn’t have to be without my phone for too long. The ‘new’ battery isn’t actually brand new; it’s been recovered from another iPhone 13 Mini that had been disassembled. As such, it didn’t have its full 100% battery capacity as new from the factory. Instead, it offered 94%, which is better than the 80% that my current battery offered. 80% doesn’t sound too bad, but I was having to charge it multiple times per day – especially when we were in London. At 94%, it can do some whole days without needing a top-up charge.

As the new battery is a genuine Apple battery, the phone doesn’t complain about it. Indeed, the engineer who fitted the new battery walked me through how newer iPhones are able to authenticate genuine Apple batteries fitted outside of the factory. Once the new battery is fitted, it reboots into a cut-down version of iOS where it authenticates over Wi-Fi, and then reboots again when done.

Cleaning the charger port

The phone repair shop also cleaned out the charger port for me. I’ve tried blasting it with a can of compressed air, which helped, but it could still be awkward with some cables. Instead, the shop used tweezers to pull out stray dust that was insulating the contacts in the charger port. It now charges much better.

I wouldn’t go far as to say that my iPhone is like new again. Arguably it now acts like a one year old phone, rather than a three year old phone, but that’s a big improvement. It would be great to get this one to five years old, like its predecessor, before needing replacement. By then, maybe Apple will have started offering a smaller form factor iPhone again?

As for the cost? For the new battery, installation and charger port cleaning, I paid £60 at the local repair shop. Had I opted for a third-party, non-genuine battery, it would have been cheaper. By contrast, Apple charges £85, and I would have also had to factor in getting to the nearest Apple Store in Leeds. £60 for what I hope will be another two years of use isn’t bad.