I’m ill in new and interesting ways! TechteamGB Channel Update

Well hello there! Welcome to the rambling Andrew-centric episode of TechteamGB. Every now and again I like to give you all an update on me, my ever-failing health, and what’s on the way with the channel, and unfortunately for me, this time I’ve got even more news to share… Some of it is, well, bad. Pretty bad. And some of it is neutral – even verging on positive! So let’s dive straight in with the worst part. I have ulcerative colitis.

For those of you who are regulars of my weekly livestreams, this won’t be much of a surprise to you, but not everyone is free to join us at 8PM UK time on a Thursday night, so yeah long story short I started passing blood with my stool in like mid-April I think. That got worse over the course of about two months as I was passed around various doctors, then I got basically permanent diarrhoea too which was great. I kinda stopped functioning for a bit – unsurprising since I was losing blood AND water at an impressive rate. So anyway I finally had a flexible sigmoidoscopy – a camera up the wazoo – and they found my entire large intestine was inflamed to the point of making itself bleed. Not ideal. So I was put on a course of steroids – no not that kind – which was just wonderful because being anti-inflammatory steroids, all of my pain went away too. My back pain, my joint pain, hell even my eye pain when it falls apart, all of that went away. I didn’t miss it. Sadly I can’t stay on the steroids long term, one because they sap the calcium from your bones, and two because a high dose almost always drives people insane after long enough. As of writing this I’m actually going in for another camera test – this time the full colonoscopy – so they can see the extent of the inflammation to know what to do long term, because the drug the give me, mesalazine which are these sachets of granules I have to swallow every morning – isn’t working well enough. So we’ll see what the long term plan ends up being, but there’s a very good chance they’ll be putting me on immunosuppressants. That’s pretty scary, because while it isn’t quite the “if I get a cold I die” type of deal, I still need to be really careful, and if something like COVID comes along again, well that will just kill me. That’s a scary concept, but I can’t live like I am now long term so it’s not realllllyyyyyy a choice. So yeah, that’s point one. It’s a lot to deal with – on top of my already numerous daily life challenges, but y’know I had to be nerfed. I’m too powerful. 

Part of that power likely comes from the next point – I’m now officially Autistic! I’ve been on a waiting list to be assessed for three years, as I applied not long after being diagnosed with ADHD too, so it’s pretty nice to have it finally confirmed and official. It frankly explains a lot about why I hate going to events, hate emailing people, really hate phone calls, and just generally am a bit weird. It’s fun because ADHD and Autism kind of play off each other, so I’m super interested in tech – enough to make my own testing tools – but I get bored ridiculously quickly and so have to keep moving and keep things interesting. That’s why I can’t stick to reviewing just one set of products – like I can’t only review monitors because I’ll get bored, but I can still be interested enough to make my own now kinda industry standard tools for testing them. That’s fun. Also, as a general rule, if you genuinely enjoy watching my videos, I don’t want to play armchair psychiatrist here but.. Erm.. you’re probably what the kids call “neuro-spicy”. Just saying. We tend to group together often without knowing it. 

The last health related point is a quick one as I’m not quite ready to share this with the world, but over the next year or so you’re likely to see some… changes… to me. For the better, though. I’ll let you infer from there.

Another interesting development for the better is that by the time this video goes live, myself and my wonderful wife will own this house! Well, 40 percent of it anyway. That means, once I’ve got the structural issues fixed, I’ll be able to do stuff properly, like proper smart lighting, heating and air conditioning too. I’m really excited to actually own my house. 

Anyway, on the tech side of things, I think the biggest two things coming from me are the new latency tool which I’m hoping to have a launch video on pretty soon, and the new expert response time tool. As a brief description, the new version of the latency tool has some major improvements to the microphone amplifier – the noise level dropped dramatically, meaning you can increase the gain more too. And, speaking of gain increases, that’s new too. It has an auto-gain switcher for the mic, so for audio testing it is more sensitive, but for click testing it’s less. The big difference by far though, besides no longer needing the accident-prone Seeed microcontroller board by designing my own setup for the actual microcontroller chip, a SAMD21, is the three pin input. Two of the three pins are the same, but the extra one is new. Basically, instead of needing to supply a voltage in, this has voltage out, so along with some aluminium foil tape, you can use the banana plug to tap your mouse or keyboard buttons and the board knows when you’ve pressed it, rather than when the tool ‘hears’ you tap it. It’s a fair bit more accurate. Anyway, that should be available soon, I’m just waiting on some parts being delivered.

As for the response time tool, this one is a fair bit further away. My aim with this is to make a more professional, close to lab-grade tool. I’m using an external analogue to digital converter for more data and much better accuracy. I’m using a massive and real fancy photodiode from Thor Labs, and I’m putting a lot of effort into getting it right. When this is ready I’ll of course have a full video on it, but the aim for this is more companies, so while I will make the tool available to anyone who wants one, it will be a fair bit more expensive than the current tools, and if companies want one, that’ll be included as part of a service contract for custom software to go along with it. That’s the plan anyway.