The hearing aid has certainly given me back most of what I loss, but it took some time to come to terms with losing my hearing on that side.

In terms of hearing quality, for me, it's been solid, with the caveat that it took a while to get the fitting right. I think my audiologist was a bit old school, and was sticking to settings he'd known to be good in the past rather than fitting for what the aid is capable of. I've recently had its prescription type updated to the native Oticon one, and it's been a revelation in terms of clarity.

My hearing loss is relatively recent (About four years now) so I will caveat this that I've only used Oticons, so can't really compare to anything else.

WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.

That and developing in Vista4GL. I'd kill to get hold of some manuals for that to remind myself what my first professional language was like.

It'd be nice to be able to run it in a VM and see how much I've forgotten. I've got an old workstation in my loft, but haven't really got the room to have it setup.

The Society of Authors (https://societyofauthors.org/) do some excellent work on this front. Basically, to make money writing you have to either be a _machine_ and put out a lot of content, or get lucky and build a fan base that is willing to wait for infrequent releases but buy all the copies.

Then realise my skills have atrophied to the point I can barely remember how to use edit.

So when the service is shut down my expectation is that I won't be able to change any of my device settings. Not to mention that the room data and sleep data will be unavailable.

I'm with you on hoping that they open it up to allow for a private server. If that happened then I'd be tempted to write a new iPhone app for it, it won't be long before the existing app will need updating to work with new iOS versions (Although it seems to work fine with 11). That being said, I'm not incredibly optimistic of a release of either a rooted firmware or protocol spec. It's a shame, it had real potential, it makes me wonder if it failed due to poor marketing or just too shallow a customer pool for this sort of device.

The sheer drag of maintaining a network of repairers, keeping them stocked with (Sometimes huge) spare parts, managing repair times etc is astonishing. I can see why Google and Apple would want to lean on established players instead of going it alone.

I also think it's the ability to understand that the business and the technical elements may not always work in lockstep, and being able to translate the needs of one to the other.

Trouble is, it does not pay the bills. I'm currently working very hard to pay off all my debt and once that's done I'll be taking up writing full time and leaving the tech industry behind.