Mindfulness - Intro to ASMR

00:08

S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from August the 1st, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us wherever you're listening, perhaps through Vision Australia Radio, associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network, there is also the podcast. If you haven't caught up with that yet, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and Diana can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. 

With me: someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start with a little bit of unfinished business from last week. You were talking about the various ways people can use technology when the internet is not around. What we didn't get to talk about was the world of the computer, the desktop, the laptop, etcetera. When you can't use the Internet.

S2

No. And the really good thing about, of course, your desktop or your laptop is the fact that you can plug it into lots and lots of different things. So all the other offline stuff that I talked about, yes, you can still do it on your desktop. You can do your word processing, you can take notes, you can even offline voice dictate. If you also choose, you can listen to music, audiobooks, podcasts, etcetera. But what you can also do, of course, is plug in things like scanners, which we use in particular as blind people to do optical character recognition. 

So you can get your piece of paper out of the post box, whack it on the scanner and hey presto, you can read what's on the thing at your mailbox. And of course the other thing to do with printers is also print stuff. So if you have to print out a form or an application that somebody gave you, then you can do all that sort of stuff as well. And then all the other myriad things that you can do is when you can plug in different peripherals such as SD cards, cameras, and that's really what a desktop in a notebook's for is the fact that it's extremely expandable. 

And of course, if you're a low vision person, not only can you use the tiny screen in your notebook or laptop, you can plug in a much bigger screen. And of course, when you're on your desktop and you're really getting into things like graphics design and all that sort of cool stuff and coding, you can run even multiple screens at the same time. So again, just because the thing's not on the Internet or the superhighway doesn't mean you can't do all these other amazing things. 

And I think I mentioned this last week when you're not on the Internet and that's one way of being completely secure about what you're working on.

S1

Last week you conducted another of your Vision Australia exploring tech webinars.

S2

I did, and this was called Accessing the Printed Word. And what I was meaning by that was that, you know, you get these bits of paper in your life or you go to the shop and you want to read the print on the packaging or you want to find out what's in your pantry. Well, there are different options from a blind person's point of view to do what's called optical character recognition. So that's basically taking the printed text stuff on packaging and converting them into speech output through image processing called OCR object recognition. 

And then we've also got things like video magnifiers which magnify the print so that doesn't translate it. And that magnification stuff again of course comes up in very, very large font, high contrast and depending on what sort of colour, foreground and background draft as well. So we did a whole range. We went through it really quickly and there was a lady who reminded me at the end of it, she said, I'm new to this stuff. I lost you guys half the way through. 

So that was a good reminder to me that and that's why we explain stuff. And Stephen, you always asked me to explain stuff on this show because we know what it is, but sometimes people may not. And that was just a good reminder to me that I really have to be careful when I talk about stuff, that I start from the basics and let everybody know what we're talking about.

S1

So how can we get hold of this? And a lot of the other stuff you've done.

S2

There's two ways. So at the moment the printed word exploring tech webinar is only available on YouTube or the other web demos are, and of course on my ESI podcast feed as well, which is David would be I how it sounds.podbean.com. And when I get a hold of the audio file for the print word webinar, I'll put it up on my seed feed as well.

S1

And how do we get to them on YouTube? It's a big place.

S2

We just stick in Vision Australia YouTube channel, that will pretty much find it straight away. And in fact that's what I did over the weekend. I wanted to see if it was up on the the YouTube channel and there it was with a couple of likes already in about 80 or so downloads already. So but that's really the fastest way to do it. Stick in your favourite search engine Vision Australia YouTube channel and you'll definitely come up with the right page.

05:05

S1

Now some very different territory. Tell us about ASMR.

S2

I only discovered this over the weekend. One of my friends who uses it quite a lot and what it actually stands for is autonomic sensory meridian response, but everybody just refers to it as asMr because that's too complicated. And what it is, is it's any sort of tingling sensation on your head or through your arms or your hands in response to certain visual or audio or both stimulation in the world. So on YouTube, for example, there's about 13 million videos on ASMR. Spanning people, doing crafting. So all you're watching and listening to is just basically somebody crafting in their room. 

So you're watching them and you're hearing the sounds of the crafting and the cutting and so on through to people pretending to role play. So because of they're using a camera, of course some of the role players are the person they've been saying, you know, do you mind if I touch your face or your head to give you a massage? We're going to pretend to do a role play. So we're doing an eye test, all sorts of things. And of course you can hear them, you know, supposedly taking notes and typing on the computer and all that sort of cool stuff. Then you've also got things like which and I really can't stand this one. It makes me cringe whispering. 

So you've got people I'll try and do so now when I go today, we are talking about technology. I find that really creepy, but some people like the really spoken word and then you've got all sorts of other different things. So what it's really supposed to do is for you personally and of all those 13 million videos to find sort of the trigger that you get that physical response to from either visual stimulation or audio. 

Now for me particularly, I know there's certain songs that I listen to, particularly with ladies that reach that really high frequency when they're singing. That sometimes gives me a bit of a physical, tingly feeling at the top of my head. But besides that, I think I'm more of a white noise person rather than an official ASMR person.

S1

Then tell me about the My Noise app.

S2

This app which I got recommended to me. So because when I posted the fact that I'd come across as people say, Oh yeah, but that's fantastic. But for audio people, why don't you try out this thing called bi noise or one word? And what it does is let's say you're listening to a track that's got bird sounds in it. It's got water sounds, it's got the sound of a boat up against a wharf and it's got people talking. Now, each one of those sounds in that overall track has their own way or own slider of adjusting that sound. 

So if you want the bird sounds to be louder and you want the boat against the dock to be softer, you want the people talking to be softer and you want some other things louder or softer as well. You can do all that so you can really get the noise of the track where you want it. And I remember there was a back in the the mid 2010 20s that, you know, last decade basically there was a really good app called Sleep Machine, which did a similar thing. And apparently this has over 200 sounds really amazing and you can get it for both iOS and Android. 

And of course, if you want to get more sound, there's in-app purchases, but you've certainly got a lot to choose from. So that's my noise or one word in the app or the Google Play store. And of course I'll have the link in the show notes for both play stores.

S1

We used to know them as aftershocks, now just shocks. Tell us about the latest product that you've been looking at.

S2

The new company name is Now Shocks, and they've brought out this new pair of earbuds. So remember, shocks are very famous for bone conduction. So that's where you'd have the little pods on your cheekbones and the sound would go through your cheekbones into your inner ear. Well, now they've invented this new system called air conduction. So what it really is, is and these are on my Bose frames, by the way. 

So what they do is they put the speaker near your ear hole. So on the glasses, it's basically on the back of the glasses near the front of your ear on these ones. They've got a little, little rectangular bit that fits just above your ear hole and that has two little speakers in at one pointing down to your ear hole, one pointing above you to cancel out a bit more noise. Then if you can imagine coming up and around the front of you and coming over the back of it, there's a hook. Now, of course, they don't call it the hook. They call it the dolphin hook because it looks like a dolphin jumping out of water and it's got a tiny little white behind it, which is all part of sort of the plastic silicone membrane type stuff. So that's supposed to hold them in place. 

Now, I've been using them quite a lot over the whole weekend, and here's what I found out about them. It's very sluggish with voiceover. So I Stephen I can actually flick left or right with voiceover with the speech screen reader on iOS and I can count up to just below one second before it actually moves the focus onto the next item. Number two is when I tap on that little rectangular thing above my ear hole to play pause or go to the previous and next track, that takes about another second to respond. And this skip forward and skip back. You have to hold your finger down on the little thing left and right for about three seconds for it to activate, which is part of its design. 

But I find when I'm moving around and walking and I've got my guide dog or my cane, I don't want to have to hold my finger on something for that length of time. So it's a little bit annoying. And I guess the final. Because I'm such an airpod user. I don't like the fact that when you take these off your ears, the audio is still going out to your Bluetooth headphones. I prefer to have the audio stop because I've taken them off and I just want to use my my phone, whether it's my iPhone or Android phone is as usual. 

So look, sound wise, they're pretty good phone call wise. They're also excellent. But if I was going to sort of have an opinion, I'd say I'd always recommend the bone conduction version of Shox versus these air conduction version of shocks. And we're also not particularly cheap. I think they're round about, I want to say about 200 and something dollars or a bit more. So, you know, not cheap shocks.

S1

That's shock. Still a little bit of work to be done to get it right, particularly for people who are voiceover users.

11:35

S2

I think so, yeah.

S1

We've got to talk about this. Twitter is now X indeed.

S2

So what you're find out now is when you run the app, particularly if you've updated the app in the last week or so, when you go through your home screens, whether on Android or the iPhone, it'll now be called X. Now your screen is not going to say X because it's a capital X, it'll say cap X. But the weird thing about it is you can still say with your favorite personal assistant on your smartphone or your iPhone, open Twitter or open X before work quite nicely. 

And then just to add more confusion, when you go into the app, when you see your items, you'll still see your quote tweets. And when you post something, you'll still be posting a tweet. So I guess what they're sort of done there, they've updated the outer shell, if you like, with the X logo and that sort of stuff. And I'm assuming one day we'll be able to read our X feed list and we'll be able to post our X posts as well.

S1

Samsung have announced some new products.

S2

That's right. So this is the yearly unboxed or whatever they call it, event for Samsung, new phones, watches and tablets. So with the the phones they've updated the new Z flip. So that's the flip phone remember like the old Nokia phones that you could open up from the bottom to the top. So it was a flip phone. Then we've got the new version of the fold. And the best way to remember the fold is that it opens up like a book. So you're going from a smartphone, if you like, to it pretty much a tablet type size screen. 

There was an updated the Galaxy Watch and they've brought back the famous bezel. So the bezel on the watch is where you can turn it to mechanically switch between different things on the the watch, which I absolutely love. And then finally, the S9 tablet, which is the new version of Samsung's tablet, and that's got a faster processor, a better looking screen and so on. So overall, they're updated tweaks. I wouldn't get too excited about it if you've had versions of these things in the last year or so.

S1

Now just before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what you've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check our show notes on my blog site, which is David would be a dot podbean podbean.com.

S1

David would it be accurate been podbean to write to the program?

S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge, how it sounds at Vision Australia-dot-org.

14:13

S1

David-dot-Woodbridge at Vision Australia-dot-org This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.