Sixty-four has always seemed to me to be the precise threshold to old age thanks to the Beatles, so since my birthday this year, I’ve decided I might as well embrace it. This new website will be specifically focused on the needs of birders dealing with the issues we often associate with aging, such as vision and hearing problems, circulation, skin cancer, accessibility problems, lugging and controlling heavy optics and camera equipment, etc. In reality, every one of these issues affects young people, too, and many birders of very advanced years only deal with one or two of them, but I’m not going to shy away from identifying myself as old enough to join AARP—heck, I’ve been old enough to meet AARP’s membership threshold for 14 years now.
I’m also embracing the old stereotype of the “little old lady in tennis shoes,” since I am, indeed, a 64-year-old woman who does, indeed, wear tennis shoes or today’s equivalent. The shocking thing to me is that no one else had snapped up the website littleoldladyintennisshoes.com before this, but now it’s mine, and it’s where I’m going to be posting information about these issues.
Please make detailed comments on posts when you've had experience with the issue under discussion. If you can recommend products that are especially useful, feel free to do so, but the more details of your personal experience, the better. I will try my best to delete all commercial and self-promoting comments.
I am a retired software engineer with a SongFinder. The "math" for the device is complex but not difficult to acquire. I have a Raspberry Pi 4B that I have used to implement an alpha version of the hardware device using a USB audio device to get a mono microphone. My SongFinder headset and mics don't work because of the lack of gain, but that is another hurdle to overcome real-soon-now. I currently have my Python program doing folding of all frequencies from 1000 to 16000 to 1000 to 3000 (configurable). My hardware costs for a device would be less than $100 (not including headset/mics). I plan to try alternate algorithms than folding such as compressing 1000 to 16000 to 1000 to 3000, etc. I can put my project into GitHub and share with other developers. Building turn-key devices might be possible, too.
ReplyDelete