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Comment: Re:In a cochlear implant users own words: (Score 1) 510

by compwizrd (#46749531) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

Sounds like the same problem people had going from analog to digital hearing aids.. their brain reprograms for the aid, and then won't easily accept the new units.

I'm finally starting to pickup voices without lipreading, took almost a month from activation for that to work for me.


by compwizrd (#46738003) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

I easily hear the same, as long as I'm using the telecoil or direct audio input. I'm also only a month into this, so hopefully on a regular set of speakers I'll hear it better soon.

Music sounded the same or better to me as with the hearing aids on the drive home after activation... louder on the higher frequency notes, but I could trivially pick out each note.

If you're on the original processor, it's likely the newer ones will do a lot more for you.. Nucleus 22 back then, wasn't it? And that's a remarkable lifespan for the processor!


by compwizrd (#46711191) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

They're serial number locked, so that won't work. The processor queries the implant when the processor is linked and if it's the wrong number, it won't send a signal. People with two implants could mix up the processors otherwise, so it's a safety thing to prevent sending the wrong levels to the implant.

Same type of implant. :)


by compwizrd (#46711079) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

Born with it, which is actually worse for results generally. Kids implanted early do best, followed by adults who went deaf, with those deaf all their life doing about the worst since the brain never developed those parts.

My hearing loss was about 25db in the low freq's until I was about 20something, where it dropped 35db in about 6 months.. always had the high frequency loss.

Comment: Re:In a cochlear implant users own words: (Score 4, Informative) 510

by compwizrd (#46710177) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

I am deaf myself, with a loss of 60+ db up to about 500-600 Hz and about 110db after that. Though I know ASL to a passable degree, I don't generally consider myself Deaf. I wore very high power hearing aids up till this year, when I had a cochlear implant put in.

I'm now at week 3 after having my Med-El cochlear implant activated.

I had basic speech understanding with lipreading about five minutes after being activated, and could easily follow the melody of music on the car ride home. Music sounded about the same as it does with hearing aids, or with it cranked way up on speakers/headphones... In other words, the sound quality of the implant was nowhere near AM radio quality... a bit off from CD quality, but not hugely.

After three weeks, I'm starting to be to understand speech without lipreading for some people, and lyrics in music are starting to come in for me, and music has smoothed out in the upper frequencies that i couldn't hear properly in before.

I now hear with around a 15db loss, and that is still being adjusted and programmed as my ears adjust.

As an example of the difference in hearing, I tried dropping a raisin on the ground a few weeks ago, and clearly heard it hit the tile.. before I'd have to drop the whole bag of them. I can clearly hear the claws of the dog walking across the floor.. from another room. Could never hear the turn signal or headlight warning in the car before, now they're louder than the car to me.

Everyones experience varies with the implants, but it's not always as bad as Rush's has turned out.

My wife has the same cochlear implant as me, and has had it for about three years. The most clear sign that they can do almost miracles was about a year or two ago when we went to a friends wedding.. about 150-200 people in a very large and noisy room. My hearing aids were doing nothing for me in the noise, even telling that someone was talking was impossible. She was able to listen from across the room with her implant and interpret into ASL for me.

Comment: RT-N16 will be secured automatically when it dies. (Score 2) 148

by compwizrd (#46274585) Attached to: Dear Asus Router User: All Your Cloud Are Belong To Us

Haven't checked into other routers, but the RT-N16 has a "warranty cap". There is a capacitor on the far right of the unit, roughly centered. It's clearly designed to fail after a period of time. The rest of the capacitors are a different brand that isn't generally known to fail, the warranty cap is known to be a defective make.

Normally it takes a bit longer than the actual warranty length to fail.

Comment: Other companies have had this happen, even in IT (Score 1) 46

Lenovo Canada had the same problem last year or so. I fired off an email to the right people, we emailed back and forth a few times, they didn't think there was a problem and couldn't reproduce, I finally setup a test case step by step to pull up someone's invoice, and they fixed it after.

They offered me a free case or battery or laptop accessory as thanks, I never bothered taking them up on it.

I was actually trying to lookup my own invoice from a laptop order I had made... their invoicing system is an utter mess as each component you buy gets separately invoiced as it ships, and I had bought a laptop as a guest or similar.. I knew my invoice number, just not the specific details.. I noticed the url given in the order email had the invoice number in it, and changing the invoice number to the other order gave my invoice.. and then tried a different number and learned that so-and-so had a mouse shipped to their address, etc.

They haven't fixed the invoicing system yet.. I'd much rather be billed for everything at once when it goes to manufacturing, or when it all ships.. Right now you have to go through each line on the order and match it up to the invoice they've sent... calculating the tax and shipping costs for each one.

Comment: Re:Keyboards no, $750 RAID cards yes (Score 2) 338

by compwizrd (#42212193) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New?

Well, for something that will convert any KVM into an IP KVM, look into the Lantronix SpiderDuo... though you can only iso mount to one drive at a time... one version even supports pass through, so you can leave the original monitor and keyboard connected.

For an actual ip kvm that works through a browser, the Avocent DSR4020 will at least easily and cheaply give you a bunch of ports via your browser.. the ps2 dongles are about 5-10 each, the USB around 40-50, so I'm just using ps2 to usb dongles.. once in awhile it needs the ctrl key tapped because it thinks it stuck... mostly when switching windows.

Avocent of that erea requires licensing their software to get ISO support, though the hardware supports it.

Comment: Wait till you see the taxes on the taxes! (Score 1) 330

by compwizrd (#41876887) Attached to: Amazon Charges Sales Tax On "Shipping and Handling"

Cross border shopping is worse... if i bring my purchases home into Canada, and the border guy is bored enough, I pay 13% taxes on the cost of the item, the state taxes, and shipping and handling costs.

Usually they don't bother now until it's around $200. If I stay in the US, after 24 hours i have a $200 exemption (but $201 makes the whole thing fair game). After 48 hours I have an exemption on the first $800.
