Author Archives: Jeanne Boyarsky

Using the Eyoyo 5 inch Digital Magnifier

Posted on by
Reply

I have a relative who is having trouble reading paper stuff. She’s fine on the computer because there is a ton of light and you can zoom as much as you want The library has a big table size digital magnifier. There are many smaller versions. We went with a less expensive version, at least at first. The Eyoyo Portable Digital Magnifier Electronic Reading Aid 5.0 inch. I had it shipped to me so I could try it since I’m going to be tech support.

This blog post is both a mini user manual for her and also to remind me what things looked like when I’m doing tech support and can’t see it. It does not cover all the features, only the ones she will be using. (We aren’t using a TF card/taking photos/etc)

Overall impressions

It was pretty easy to get started. Some of the functionality took some playing to figure out. But the gist was fast. The manual said you have to install the battery and charge it. Mine was already installed and charged.

Manual

It comes with a manual. The font is bigger than standard text (good for accessibility). Nowhere near as good as the magnifier itself of course. You can also email support@eyoyousa.com to get a PDF manual.It’s similar to the printed one but not the same. Oddly the names of each part are in Chinese with a legend for English. That’s hard to see if you are zoomed in a lot. The printed one is fully in English. (Not perfect grammar, but understandable)/

Turning on

Very important: They make a big deal about not having the device on when charging because it might get too hot/damaged. I don’t know if this is true, but I’m not disobeying that instruction to find out! I suspect it’s not terrible for a few seconds if you forget though.

Hold the red button on the top of the magnifier and count to two. (The manual says “seconds” but not how many. It was pretty fast.) When you see the welcome screen, you can let go. (The welcome screen is blue text on a white background. The background in the photo looks different because it is a photo of a screen.) The welcome screen is visible for about four seconds and then the device is ready to use.

Turning off

You turn it off the same way as you turn it on. Hold the red button on the top right for two seconds until you see a “Goodbye” message. That message will be visible for about two seconds and then the screen will go dark.

Important difference from a phone: When you don’t press anything on a phone, the screen goes off, but the phone is still on. If you don’t touch the magnifier for three minutes, it says “Goodbye” and turns itself off. There is only on and off. There is no mode where it can be a dark screen but still on. (Moving the magnifier counts as activity so this isn’t a problem when you are actually using it)

Battery usage

In the bottom right is an indicator that shows the amount of battery left. It started with three little rectangles. After a lot of use, I got it to two. (If you are actively using it to read, I’m sure the battery goes down faster. I was doing something else and trying to poke it every two minutes so it wouldn’t shut off and save battery. It took me three hours to get it to go down one rectangle because I kept forgetting to poke it and finding it off many minutes later. I wills ay the battery saver feature is a great one for someone actually using it though. You go to answer the phone and don’t find a drained battery!)

Charging

First make sure the device is off. If the screen is dark, you know it is off. Then plug in the charging wire in the top left. Note that it will not go in if you have it upside down. It goes here:

The correct way to put it in is so the larger version of the plug is down. Here’s a super zoomed in version. These are blurry because I zoomed in as much as I could

This feels like a struggle waiting to happen. These are both small when not zoomed in and the type of thing that she had trouble seeing in the past. There was a tiny wire indicator on the bottom side. However, i could barely see it; I assure you the target audience of the magnifier cannot!

I solved that by painting the side not to use in whiteout. This is the device upside down. (We may use a sticker or something when I am there to cover the whiteout if she doesn’t like it. I worry a sticker will fall off because it is such a small space.

The other end of the charger is easy. It goes into a regular power outlet. (I already connected the charging wire to the charger)

Changing zoom

The default zoom is 4x. Every time you turn on the magnifier, it gets reset to 4x. You press the blue button on the top right of the device to change it. Each time you change, there is a loud beep. The choices cycle through: 4x/8x/16x/24x/32x. If you miss the one you want, keep going and it will go back to 4x after 32x.

Changing color

The default is Full Color. This is good for most things; at least with my eyesight. The setting is remembered when restarting (at least most of the time.) There are 16 other options. To change you have to cycle through them all.

  • Full color
  • Black on white
  • White on black
  • Cyan on black
  • White on cyan
  • Red on white
  • White on red
  • Yellow on black
  • Black on yellow
  • Blue on yellow
  • Yellow on blue
  • Blue on white
  • White on blue
  • Red on green
  • Green on red
  • Black on blue
  • Blue on black

Changing brightness

This one isn’t intuitive. Without the manual, I never would have imagined it existed. Luckily, the default is level 5 (max) brightness so most people won’t need this feature. The setting is remembered after shutdown.

If you want to reduce the brightness (lighting) or put it back, hold the blue button on the bottom middle. Then press the top blue button on the front to make it brighter or the bottom blue button on the front to make it less bright. This works like the “shift” key on a computer. (Ex: You hold shift and press “a” to get “A”.

Flashlight

The manual says to hold power and zoom a long time to get a flashlight. I couldn’t figure this out. There seemed to be the same light whether I did power/zoom or just power. Didn’t buy this to be a flashlight specifically though so not worth any further investigation.

Using with TV

This is my favorite feature. Rather than zooming in even more, you can leave it on 4x (minimal) zoom and connect to a larger screen. This is also helpful because the magnifier has to lay flat on what you are reading. Which isn’t a good position to read for a long time. A monitor is likely to be better positioned.

Yes, a monitor. Not the tv. You need to be connected with a wire to the screen. Most people don’t have a table and chair so close to a tv. A computer desk on the other hand….

The black tv wire goes into the magnifier. It is a circle so direction doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you push it in all the way. I felt some resistance part of the way through and stopped. That is not the right place. (Tip: it goes in easier if you turn the black wire once you feel the resistance) It needs to be fully in/flat against the device. I plugged the yellow RCA cable into the video circle my computer monitor.

However, my computer monitor is a Samsung that was my old tv. The actual user of this has a proper computer monitor that was never a TV and therefore doesn’t have a RCA input. I went to Microcenter to check. They didn’t have a RCA to HDMI adapter but confirmed that’s what I need. So I bought it online.

If the computer also uses HDMI, this means unplugging between the computer and adapter. (The HDMI cable on the back of the monitor will still live plugged in.) If the computer uses DisplayPort, it will mean switching the source on the monitor.

Note that magnifier itself has a black screen when plugged in. It doesn’t display on both at the same time.

And finally, a stress test

Last, I tested it with some things that are hard to read. While it didn’t do quite as well on with printed material, I was impressed. I had taken a screenshot of the Disneyland map, and printed it. The top right images shows that on the computer monitor. The resolution is terrible on the printed copy. And you can see the white lines on the monitor. But you can also see the numbers. So ugly, but it works.

I also tried a handwritten note. I wrote at about the size of the image (which is smaller than a note, I would give a reasonable person to read, and wouldn’t even consider giving someone with poor vision. Both the device and monitor handled it just fine. On the monitor, you can see the letters start to get less sharp because it is written in pen. Printed materials of course don’t have this problem.

the value of a “talking stick”

Posted on by
Reply

Last weekend was the FRC (FIRST Robotics Challenge) kickoff where they announce the game for the season. Our team uses the time after kickoff on Saturday to discuss the rules and strategies in small groups followed up by one large group. (we have a lot of people; this is a very large group). And we use the day after kickoff to brainstorm in a large group all day to come up with a priority list and things to prototype. In past years, we’ve done this an atrium. Some years sitting on the floor and some dragging high school chairs/desks out.

And every year without fail, we have the problem of “sidebar” discussions. This has two impacts. One is that it becomes hard to hear the “main” thread of conversation. The other is that the conversation tends to split off and people don’t hear what others are saying so we can’t move forward as a group.

We try to enforce having to raise your hand and get called on before speaking. But people get excited and… well, lots of people talking.

This year, we used the cafeteria instead of the atrium. Saturday went as expected. When we got to the large group, there were numerous sidebars and it was hard to hear. It’s a long day and some of the kids were getting restless. Which meant more sidebars. Sunday started worse. We used a different part of the cafeteria and the vent was interfering. Forget sidebars, it was hard to hear the person speaking to the group from the other side of the group even when it was the teacher (who projects well) and nobody else was speaking.

We solved this problem by using two microphones.Then we could hear! The mic had a second advantage. Everyone had to raise their hand or we couldn’t hear them. Which meant we didn’t have a big problem with sidebars. There might have been some, but you couldn’t hear them so no problem there.

The mic was like a talking stick. You needed it to speak and it went great. One of the mentors started talking while holding the mic but not into it. (I couldn’t hear him.) I commented “you need to speak into the mic; it’s not a talking stick.”

I was wrong. It was a mic AND a talking stick.

playing with chatgpt – new years eve edition

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote up a blog post on Christmas with some of my ChatGPT playing. On New Years Eve, I was on a Zoom call with some friends. One of whom played a bunch with ChatGPT. The others hadn’t heard of it so we did some group playing with ChatGPT. Here’s how it went

PromptThoughts
tell me a joke about new years and zebrasIt was cute. Fits my expectations
write me an essay about shakespeareChatGPT wrote four paragraphs. It wasn’t bad. If someone was trying to get ChatGPT to do their homework, a more specific prompt would be needed
who is jeanne boyarskyI tried a few times and it wouldn’t give me an answer about a specific person. Which is interesting becaues i
write a sonnet about new years and the color blueMet the requirements
write a love letter to mickey mouse and winnie the poohThis was great. Pooh got honey and a bear hug.
write an email to a coworker you hate about a meeting“I’m sorry, but I am unable to complete this prompt as it goes against my programming to create content that is offensive or harmful.” – nice
write an email to a coworker about a disagreementThis one worked. It suggested a meeting to sit down and discuss respectfully.
write a haiku about calculus“Calculus, the math of change
Variables in motion’s range
Derivatives, integrals, infinite sums”
A haiku seems hard to tell if a person wrote it or a computer.
write a limerick about something amusing“There once was a man from Peru
Who liked to do things out of the blue
He’d stand on his head
And dance in his bed
While singing a tune out of tune.”
That works
prove the pythagorean themeWe got a proof. Sorta. First of all, good job on noticing I meant “theorem” and not “theme”. It used asy markup and included things like label(“$a$”, A–C, N);. I don’t know what asy markup is so it looked like a lot of text. A math teacher on the call said it wasn’t really right. Which I’ve seen a bunch of comments that things seem close but not quite.
write a dialog about birthdays from sesame street andThis was adorable. Elmo is three and that got mentioned in fact and tone.
write a dialog about birthdays from elmos on sesame street to james for his fifth birthdayAlso adorable. ChatGPT picked up on the fact that it is James turning five and not Elmo. (Elmo is three)
explain why 3+5 is an odd numberChatGPT starts out with “3+5 is an odd number because it is not divisible by 2”. 3=5 is 8 which is not an odd number so this is wrong.

But then it gets it right at the end with “When we add two odd numbers together, the result is always an even number because the remainders cancel out. For example, 3 + 5 = 8, which is an even number.”
is gamma rational or irrational?I didn’t even remember what gamma was (we had some math teachers on the call), but ChatGPT noted it is not possible to tell because infinite.. And then explained what gamma is and the beginning of its value.
write a c++ program to calculate a factorialThe code was good. Only part of it was in a code block which was weird.
how do i get from little neck to forest hills?There were both driving directions and public transport directions.
“Take the Q12 bus from Little Neck to Union Turnpike / Queens Boulevard.
Transfer to the E or F train at Union Turnpike / Queens Boulevard.
Take the E or F train to 71st Avenue station in Forest Hills.”
Step 1 is wrong. the Q12 doesn’t go to Union Turnpike/Queens Blvd. It goes to Flushing where you take the 7 to transfer to the E/F. Or you can take the Q12 to the Q46 which does go to Union Turnpike/Queens Blvd.

We thought maybe it got confused because we listed communities instead of specific locations. So we tried again.
how do i get from the commonpoint in little neck to commonpoint in forest hills?The public transport directions were
“Walk to the Little Neck LIRR station on Northern Boulevard.
Take the LIRR Port Washington line to Penn Station.
Transfer to the E or F train at Penn Station.
Take the E or F train to 71st Avenue station in Forest Hills.
Walk to the Commonpoint at Forest Hills, located at 108-25 62nd Drive.”

This is a terrible way of going. First the LIRR station is a long walk. Also the LIRR runs infrequently and has you going from Queens to Manhattan and all the way back to Queens. The correct way of going is to take the Q30 to Jamaica and then change to the F to Forest Hills. We gave it one more try on transit
how do i get from forest hills to the queens center mallThis one should be easier. The correct answer is you take the R train three stops. Instead we got
“From Forest Hills, take the E or F train to the Sutphin Boulevard / Archer Avenue / JFK Airport station.
Transfer to the E, J, or Z train at Sutphin Boulevard / Archer Avenue / JFK Airport.
Take the E, J, or Z train to the Queens Center Mall station.”
There is so much wrong here. The main problem is that the J and Z never go to the Queens Center Mall station. And the E only does on weekends. The other problem is they have you going the wrong way to double back to where you started.
write a sestina about times square 2023 for new years eve and the ballThis one stumped ChatGPT. The ouput did not follow the rules for words ending on certain lines.
write a poem in taiwanese about new yearsThen we tried languages. We learned ChatGPT does not know Taiwanese or Mandarin. (We started with languages someone on the Zoom can read fluently to have a chance of knowing if the output was right.
write a poem about new years in frenchWe got a poem and it was in French. I took French in high school. I don’t remember a lot but it definitely has some relevant words in there.
write a reference using apa style (american psych association style) on new years eve

write a APA style for a book on new years celebratoins

compare democrats and republicans. use apa style for citations

compare democrats and republicans using three sources and apa style		It took us four prompts but we got something useful (superficial, but in the right format)