We are teh geeks

[barakta]

Someone on my hearing aid yahoogroup asked if the hearings aids draw current from the battery when switched off as it were.

Cue kimble and I getting the multimeter and my hearing aid out for a play

Comments

[ippola]

Despite my lack of geekiness of this kind, I was fascinated by this piece of information :-)

[morti]

Oh, nice. I like your style.

[englishdude]

LOL

You're more likely to be using Zinc Air batteries, so when even off, the batteries will drain internally and if you leave it off for 2 or so weeks, the batteries will go completely flat. I know this becuase I don't wear my CI very often nowadays as you know, and every time I put it on after a couple weeks, the batteries are always flat. Which is why they have those sticky tabs covering the small holes at the back - to stop air going in and reacting with the chemicals inside.

[barakta]

Bugger. I forgot to write the Zinc Air bit on the LJ comment, I wrote it on the BAHA_PPL comment tho so that's okay.

And yes! You are absolutely right.

I have also notcied a number of flwas in our experiment and one of these days we'll repeat it to eliminate as many of these error points as possible.

Natalya

[mattp]

Ah, I had wondered why they had labels on them. That explains it, thanks.

[mattp]

Whilst I'm occasionally in favour of soft-switching (e.g. for portable devices where state-saving is needed), it has reminded me of my general dislike of ATX power supplies. They're always drawing power when connected. I've not yet worked out the benefit. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious. Any ideas?

[kimble]

Wake-on-LAN, and not having to see the "It is now safe to switch off your computer" screen seem to be the main advantages. So far the only real use I've found for wake-on-LAN is for automatically restarting a server box with a BIOS that lacked a "boot on power on" option after a power failure. Something which wouldn't have been a problem with an AT power supply in the first place.

Oh, and I suppose it lets you do sinister mac-ish things like power on/off from the keyboard...

Judging by the number of times I end up shouting "You're off, act like it!" at things, I think I agree with you.

[kangaroo]

I just had to go and get my audiogram to compare with yours. :)

But the frequency for mine runs along the bottom, not the top. *head hurts*

[kangaroo]

I'm not a maths person, when faced with graphs my head goes to pieces - but having looked at it I see it makes no difference whether the frequency is along the bottom or top. Aagh.

Mine goes the other way. Yours goes up, mine goes down.
(Without hearing aids, I start hearing about 55 decibels at a frequency of 250, and go down quite steeply to more than 110 decibels at a frequency of 4000 - does that make sense?).

[barakta]

Hi,

Yeah that makes sense... so you have reasonable hearing in the base frequencies and not so good hearing in the higher ranges. I am guessing therefore you might find men easier to hear than women? I find I often struggle to understand men, cos they are too deep and for me too quiet...

Can I ask what the cause of your hearing loss is? Apparently audiologists can tell by the shape of the audiogram in many cases cos some types of deafness are classic. Mine is mostly conductive with some sensori neural loss due to a immaturely formed cochlea at a guess.

Natalya

[kangaroo]

Yes, men are easier to hear. Funny, I forget that other people would be different, I always think that lower sounds would be easier to hear for everybody!

For a long time nobody knew what caused my hearing loss, but last year after looking at everything else, they found that it's a (fairly rare I think) genetic type thing. Which might or might not lead to hearing loss in later years, but when twinned with certain antibiotics causes your hearing to deterioate massively. I just happened to have two doses of these antibiotics when I was a baby - once because I was 3 months early, and once because I scalded myself very badly.

It explains why my mum is going a bit deaf now, and why we didn't have a history of deafness in my family (apart from very slight hearing losses).

I think it's mostly sensori neural. They never really mention it, I'll have to ask at the end of October when I go to the hospital!

How's the job search going? I might have to add you again :)

Katie