[HN Gopher] Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote f...
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Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
Author : mchro
Score : 460 points
Date : 2026-01-12 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.smartere.dk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.smartere.dk)
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| I love this! I really wanted to go down this road when my kids
| were younger, but the paucity of floppys and the low storage
| space made me go down the Avery business card print outs with
| RFID stickers on the back and a raspberry pi with an RFID reader
| inside. Of course, the author is using the floppys as hooks
| instead of as storage media...what a great idea. The tactile
| response and the art you can stick to them makes them ideal for
| this purpose.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Did you build an enclosure for this?
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| https://thepihut.com/products/highpi-raspberry-pi-b-
| plus2-ca...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I don't think I can get my hands on a floppy drive, but I still
| have an ancient computer somewhere with a DVD player in it.
| While not as cool, I had been considering turning into a simple
| media station for the specific purpose of letting my kid pick
| what music to play or video to watch by herself, without
| needing a screen to navigate it.
|
| Like you, it never occurred to me that I can also just use
| specific DVDs or CDs as hooks for videos to be streamed, or
| media downloaded on a hard drive. So that suddenly makes the
| whole project a lot more interesting, and possibly easier too.
|
| Buying a large pack of burnable DVDs is a lot cheaper and
| sustainable than using SD-cards like other commenters
| suggested.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| QR codes on cards would work as well, if I'm understanding what
| this project is. The floppy disk approach has some nostalgia
| maybe but seems quite fragile. I quickly learned to never let
| my kids handle CDs/DVDs (one of the worst physical media
| designs ever; they are totally unprotected) as they would
| quickly become damaged and unplayable. Floppy disks are at
| least sort of protected but the same idea applies.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I still have a large number of working CDs from when I,
| myself, was a kid. DVDs too but they were later and more
| durable.
|
| I've always wondered what people are doing to them? Maybe I
| just got lucky. Maybe I was just careful with them. Maybe I
| don't remember the ones that failed.
|
| I don't think kids are less careful now, although being
| screamed at for making the CD or record skip was probably a
| deterrent.
| vel0city wrote:
| Some people really get the idea of only handling it around
| the edges. Lots of other people just handle them however
| they want and have no problems touching the media anywhere.
| Especially kids, which often don't have the cleanest hands
| at any given moment.
|
| Lots of kids will handle them however they want. They'll
| pick them up with greasy, sticky hands right on the media
| section. They won't necessarily care about ensuring they're
| properly in the drive tray. They'll jam all kinds of things
| into the drive slots. They'll drop them on the floor and
| step on them, toss them in a toy box when told to clean
| their room, etc.
|
| Obviously not all kids will be this way, but many will.
| tete wrote:
| > Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using
| complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that
| continually try to lure you into watching something else than you
| intended to.
|
| I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
| bananaowl wrote:
| I witnessed my great aunt of 85 trying to watch TV. It was sad
| and painful. How ux is forgetting this entire generation is
| just terrible.
| the_snooze wrote:
| UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the long run shareholders care about customers though,
| not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market
| has always been about something other than fundamentals,
| but in the long run shareholders who care about customers
| tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the
| long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to
| regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow
| changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly
| read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for
| one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The
| simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32"
| Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a
| Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.
| aquova wrote:
| To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the
| mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had
| set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one
| but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a
| few generations by now.
| lou1306 wrote:
| But that was the niche, "elite" experience. Today, a "smart
| TV" is the norm.
| mrighele wrote:
| Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?
| c22 wrote:
| Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just
| don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had
| a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to
| automatically record shows while I was at work.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other
| digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio,
| and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just
| don't bother to reset them every time there is a power
| glitch.
| Tanoc wrote:
| It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I
| remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation
| running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card
| to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder
| '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and
| make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because
| the power flickers off and back on at least once a week.
| This, with much more power efficient devices than that
| old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.
| vel0city wrote:
| This can vary greatly across locations, even within the
| same city and the same power distribution organization.
|
| Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being
| on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can
| make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.
|
| I've lived in places where the power practically _never_
| went out, _never_ experienced undervolt situations, etc.
| I 've then lived less than a mile away from the same
| place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the
| clocks being reset at random times when I come home.
| Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations,
| emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best
| indication of power reliability, at least from my
| personal experiences.
| mrighele wrote:
| I remember having trouble with mine, often mixing up the
| various hours (clock time, start time, end time,
| recording duration). Yes it was not rocket science, but
| it was used not enough to remember how to do it, and the
| manual was never ad hand when needed.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but
| a bit annoying.
|
| But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from
| RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it
| was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I
| felt like I was living in the future.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down
| with the manual for several hours one night and figured
| it out. He was probably the only person in the entire
| town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it
| would mean spending several hours of study and most
| people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then
| - see all the tropes about homework...)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10
| minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not
| very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set
| up often you'd always have to go back and read the
| instructions again the next time.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no
| wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a
| truck driver not someone used to reading technical
| documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might
| have been easier than his, or your program simpler).
|
| who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their
| own judgement.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her
| favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once
| and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part
| forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it
| taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel.
| (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that
| shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough
| to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a
| brief period of having a cable box passed through the
| VCR.)
| vel0city wrote:
| I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid
| simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the
| TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_c
| ode
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE
|
| The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time
| setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking
| interval from our local PBS station.
| criddell wrote:
| In theory, HDMI CEC should solve a lot of those problems.
| Unfortunately it only introduced another buggy layer.
| cheschire wrote:
| When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure
| out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well
| beyond the point others had let it go.
|
| The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied.
| Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose
| their mental faculties much, much earlier.
|
| I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly
| different in needs from the core audience that it would
| require an entirely different solution, and likely an
| entirely different company model.
| nar001 wrote:
| I do wonder how much of that is just convenience, a lot of
| people just don't want to bother, even if they would figure
| it out if they tried - they just don't. Your grandmother
| probably could've figured it out, but tapes were just much
| more convenient even if you had to rewind them (Obviously
| there's a learning curve, though)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the
| stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often
| bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple.
|
| One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if
| they don't want to deal with something they can feign
| helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for
| them.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm sure you didn't intend to be arrogant and dismissive
| of my efforts to try to keep her current as time went on.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it
| physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He
| was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android
| tablet but could only really try to learn for a few
| minutes every few hours.
| brabel wrote:
| I think it's not that they lose their mental faculties...
| it's that they lived most of their lives in a world without
| computers (at least home computers - which only became a
| common occurrence in the 90's, when today's older people
| were already in their 50's. So they just never learned to
| use computers and smart phones and are completely unused to
| their modern UIs. Even I find it hard to use many apps on
| my phone! Like, how am I supposed to know that wiping
| carefully up and to the left is the only way to do
| something!!!??? So, older people may try a few things, and
| if it's too frustrating they just find something else to do
| and give up. At least that's my experience with my mom and
| auntie. Both of them managed only to learn how to open
| WhatsApp and call family, but it's always an agony when
| they accidentally touch something and the video disappears,
| or pauses, or flips so they can see only themselves or some
| other nonsense. And that's all they use their "smart"
| phones for! They just wanted an old fashion phone with a
| big dial buttons, plus a screen to see the person on the
| other side.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't
| do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how
| impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just
| bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the
| plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays).
| I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and
| channel down a damned TV any more.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| This, 100%.
|
| I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision,
| next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to
| build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or
| actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the
| digital TV switchover).
|
| Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite
| simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content
| available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen
| broadcast stations you could choose from.
| mook wrote:
| That's only if you want to watch specific things; some
| people just turn it on for entertainment, and change
| channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for
| something better.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+
| channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them
| and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons.
| There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations
| in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at
| least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of
| local and small stations in UHF.
|
| The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure
| why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV
| transition, and invasive OS smart features after that.
| Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels
| within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the
| + or - button and recognize whether something was worth
| watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed
| of human cognition. I think young people must be
| astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where
| people flip through the channels at that speed
| habitually.
| pwg wrote:
| > new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a
| channel after the DTV transition,
|
| Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to
| the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync
| pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing
| the picture.
|
| With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct
| frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the
| transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly
| small) then it has to start watching for a key frame
| (because without a keyframe the decoded images would
| appear to be static) and depending upon the compression
| settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be
| transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second
| wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display
| can start drawing the pictures.
| bregma wrote:
| I still watch OTA DTV. Tuning is instant. Maybe it's
| slower if you are on cable and there's a few round-trip
| handshakes to authenticate your subscriber account.
|
| I'm pretty sure there's a lot of round-tripping going on
| with the streaming services I use through my dongle.
| They're always slow to both start the app and to start
| any actual streaming.
| c22 wrote:
| When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly
| grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she
| was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause',
| and 'stop'.
| rconti wrote:
| Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable
| subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but
| still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-
| CEC) you can control everything with one remote.
| mock-possum wrote:
| It's also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to
| forget UX. That is to say, most people don't want to keep
| learning new things, they don't want to continue to engage
| with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they "just
| want it to work" because "the old thing was working just
| fine." They claim not to see the value in the new thing,
| while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they
| fixate on the old thing.
| tantalor wrote:
| My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a
| TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be
| upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
| andrewblossom wrote:
| This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming
| devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...
|
| I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than
| one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
| mjparrott wrote:
| I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a
| setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally
| dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or
| whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the
| screen, nothing else.
| walthamstow wrote:
| If you never connect it to the internet, all TVs are
| dumb. I have an airgapped Panasonic powered by Nvidia
| Shield for years.
|
| The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the
| front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by
| using a different launcher.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate
| antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render
| the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.
|
| I have no experience with it, it just might be less work
| to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in
| 2026.
| mikestew wrote:
| Or one could just, you know, not connect it to the
| Internet rather than ripping apart your new TV.
| c22 wrote:
| You can purchase commercial signage displays that are
| just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier
| to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it
| connect to the internet.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _but the markup is quite high_
|
| Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last
| year, and the prices were just about the same.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. PS300 for a
| 55" 4K panel. The only thing I can ding it for is that
| the backlight local dimming is done in columns which is
| extremely distracting, so I turn it off. You have to
| remember this thing is designed to sit in a shop window
| in direct sunlight.
|
| Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my
| finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input
| switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its
| completely braindead, just how I like it.
|
| Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer
| installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it
| has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
| ustad wrote:
| Whats the model?
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| Its a NEC MultiSync M551
| cc81 wrote:
| You don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the
| built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your
| box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch
| that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a
| single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the
| the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
|
| That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote.
| In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the
| surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to
| the simpler, dumber remote.
|
| It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's
| terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the
| TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points
| out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the
| network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to
| "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads
| to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a
| lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things
| like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other],
| which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and
| get away from the TV's own UI.)
| al_borland wrote:
| Dumb TVs really don't exist anymore. You just have to buy
| a smart one and treat it like it's dumb.
|
| Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I
| found a setting to have it start up with the last used
| input, which meant no more dealing with the smart
| interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I
| wasn't able to find the same setting available,
| unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to
| work decently well when I turn on a device.
|
| I have an old Samsung from 2017 that's dumb. I mainly
| bought it because it was the size I needed (~40"),
| smaller than most people these days want.
| exhumet wrote:
| got a Sony last year that gave me the option on startup
| to enable or disable the smart TV os, picked the disabled
| option, TV isnt connected to the internet and the thing
| works beautifully.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Keep in mind: "Is your android TV streaming box part of a
| botnet?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037556
| mbreese wrote:
| Which is generally easier to fix (replace) than a TV.
| brk wrote:
| That sounds like you have an overly shitty 'smart' TV. Plenty
| of external devices (I'm partial to AppleTV) have no
| significant lag.
|
| Or it could be you're using some niche service that has its
| own issues.
| no_wizard wrote:
| It's a matter of time before tv manufacturers start
| requiring an app to sync with the TV to set it up.
|
| That would let them glean information about you every time
| you use said app.
|
| You're still getting around this with a 3rd party device
| like an Apple TV for the most part but if it's required to
| even turn it off or on it'll be enough to sync any metadata
| that it holds
| pletnes wrote:
| My samsung did this years ago. Not sure if it was truly
| required but I'd say this has happened.
| ggus wrote:
| My LG does just that.
|
| The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again
| after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by
| the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to
| Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone,
| Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
| Melatonic wrote:
| Lots of good generic remotes out there (still using a
| Logitech harmony personally)
| kenjackson wrote:
| External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are
| responsive. It's the actual TV UI that tends to be very
| slow and laggy.
| akagr wrote:
| My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a
| second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to
| give it time to "warm up" when I start it, though. I use
| it so rarely it's generally turned off from wall outlet.
|
| I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though,
| responsiveness being one of them.
| ori_b wrote:
| _Maybe a second lag_
|
| Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how
| people tolerate that.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Sony TVs are some of the most sane options in the TV
| market right now. Generally decent, and they don't fight
| you if you want to use them without connecting them to
| the internet. Still not perfect and they'll cost you
| more, but it's a worthwhile trade to me.
| al_borland wrote:
| I'm using an AppleTV HD with Peacock and it's pretty bad. I
| wouldn't consider NBC a niche service. After an episode
| ends, I need to wait for the new one to start to be sure it
| marks the last one as watched. When going back to the main
| screen, it can take upwards of 30 seconds, maybe more (it
| feels like an eternity), for the "watch next" to update. If
| I don't wait for it to update, it will start playing an old
| episode the next time I try to launch it. This lag also
| persists over app switching. So if I stop watching a show,
| switch to something else for a while, then go back to
| Peacock and quickly go into the series I was watching, it
| will play old stuff.
|
| Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching
| list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to
| switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like
| I'm back on 56K.
|
| The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still
| supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as
| well, which I've been meaning to migrate to, to see if it's
| any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much
| everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an
| extreme amount of lag.
| llimllib wrote:
| Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV
| apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly
| written.
|
| The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV
| provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very
| difficult to figure out what's the active selection,
| which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
| Reason077 wrote:
| The issue here is that the app developers design & test
| for the latest Apple TV 4K models, which have about 10X
| the performance (and 2-4X the RAM) compared to the old HD
| models.
|
| Apple left a large generational gap because they kept
| selling the HD for many years (until 2022) as an entry-
| level device alongside much more capable 4K models.
|
| > _"it 's very difficult to figure out what's the active
| selection"_
|
| Yes, based on my observation this seems to be one of the
| biggest challenges people face with the AppleTV
| interface, along with accidentally changing the selection
| when they try to select it (because of the sensitive
| touch controls on the remote).
| al_borland wrote:
| > it's very difficult to figure out what's the active
| selection
|
| I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple
| seemed to start this and other devs followed their
| example.
|
| I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center
| of the select button, or just slightly move it back and
| forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with
| me.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If you think Peackock is bad, try Paramount+, it's an
| impressively bad app that, along with being very laggy,
| will crash fairly regularly too.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| When there's a Star Trek running, I subscribe to
| Paramount+ via the Apple TV+ channel instead of directly,
| despite it costing a touch more, just to avoid having to
| use Paramount's official app (instead, one uses the Apple
| TV app and plays media with the stock tvOS player). It's
| absurd how much that improves the experience.
| al_borland wrote:
| It plays inside the AppleTV app?
|
| I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows
| my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app
| just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather
| pointless.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| You have to subscribe with the Apple TV+ channel
| specifically for it to play in the Apple TV app
| (confusing, I know). Not all services offer a TV+
| channel, unfortunately.
| al_borland wrote:
| Hmm... I guess I'll check into that next time and pay
| more attention. I subscribed to Peacock+ through a bundle
| offer with Apple TV+, and went through Apple to trigger
| the purchase. It forced me over to Peacock to make an
| account there and other than billing it seemed totally
| separate.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Paramount plus is one of the worst apps I've ever used.
| It's so bad that I can only assume they tried as hard as
| possible to be is unusable. Unstable, slow, and lots of
| things just don't work right.
| joshtynjala wrote:
| If you have a pihole or something that blocks
| ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it
| to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from
| crashing daily to no crashes in many months.
|
| Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow
| the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to
| access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and
| they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying
| to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.
| wrs wrote:
| Pretty much every streaming app I use (not just on
| AppleTV) has a hard time remembering where I left off. I
| now have the habit of skipping through the credits and
| letting the app play the last 8 seconds and close the
| episode itself, in the perhaps misguided hope that then
| it will remember I've played the episode.
| al_borland wrote:
| Exactly. The issue of marking as played is not unique to
| Peacock, but Peacock's lag makes it take even longer to
| get confirmation that some of the other apps I've used.
| Netflix has the same issue and some lag to it, but it's
| less lag.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Sounds just like a poorly written app. I'm surprised
| Apple doesn't enforce stricter performance guidelines.
|
| On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not
| nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported
| over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple
| TV performance.
|
| Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be
| very fast
| brewdad wrote:
| It sounds like an older version of the app. I used to see
| all kinds of similar issues with Peacock on my Apple 4k
| device. NBC has put work in to make the app better over
| the years unlike say, Paramount+. I would check to see if
| you can manually update the app or try the 4k device and
| see if it works better. It could be the older chip and
| more limited memory of the HD device are hitting up
| against their limits too.
| naravara wrote:
| The AppleTV is best in class sure but by the standards of
| older, pre-internet technology the lag is noticeable. The
| UI itself is smooth, but any time it makes a network call
| (which it does for damn near everything) it can take some
| amount of time. And once you introduce receivers and HDMI-
| ARC and auto switching and frame-rate differences between
| applications the whole thing just fucking sucks. It's
| constantly turning off and on and has sound cutting out and
| back on.
|
| And that's assuming the apps are well written, which they
| are not.
| maccard wrote:
| My television has a > 5 second lag on bringing up the input
| device selection. The buttons don't actually respond when
| the menu appears, it's about a second after that before
| they work
| array_key_first wrote:
| Part of it is the displays themselves. Some have
| unbelievably bad response times. I've seen 2 seconds
| multiple times. Makes gaming impossible.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| This is definitely due to the age/quality/model of the TV. I
| have 4 LG TVs across the house and the newest/biggest is 100x
| faster than the oldest.
| alexfoo wrote:
| And not always anything to do with the TV.
|
| I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-
| tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response
| to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly
| slow.
|
| Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive
| (probably Sky Stream).
|
| I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed
| you to switch back and forth between two channels with a
| single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is
| almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it
| any more).
| GJim wrote:
| > Perfect for skipping advert breaks
|
| The mute button is the next best thing.
|
| Advertisements become much less irritating when silenced.
| I'm surprised so few people appear to mute advert breaks.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Yeah, that's the next best. I taught my kid to mute
| adverts from an early age.
|
| It really winds up one family member who works in TV
| advertising, so that's a bonus.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem,
| I called and threatened to cancel.
| SamBam wrote:
| And they immediately fixed the lag?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Within a few days it appeared that the update was
| recalled.
|
| It was the _bad_ update that made videos start playing as
| soon as you selected them, instead of going to the
| information page. I get the impression I wasn 't the only
| person who complained; I suspect that any manager who sat
| down to watch TV that night probably twisted a few arms.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure
| out the rest, thank you.
| al_borland wrote:
| The monitor I use for work is 43" and can double as a TV.
| It also has 4 HDMI inputs, which can act as 4 displays. I
| could, in theory, watch TV via a streaming box, play a
| console, and still have the equivalent of 2 21" monitors
| going at the same time. I'd love this kind of flexibility
| on my primary TV in the living room.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is this something you're actually able to do with this
| monitor, or that you think it should be able to do it? If
| it can actually display all 4 inputs at the same time,
| I'd be interested in knowing the model and price of that
| monitor. That's a feature that tends to require special
| equipment that's not cheap.
| al_borland wrote:
| This is something it is actually able to do. I would like
| it to be more of a standard feature on monitors and TVs.
| When it came out it seemed like a unicorn, it still kind
| of does.
|
| It's an LG 43UD79-B. According to LG's site[0], it's
| discontinued. I got it from Costco in 2017 for $550, but
| it was sold many places at the time.
|
| Doing a quick glance at LG's current lineup, there isn't
| an obvious successor.
|
| It looks like Amazon has 1 person selling it used[1], but
| in 6/10 condition and no remote, for double the price of
| new... While it looks the remote is also being sold
| places, it's pretty useless without the remote. The
| seller has sketchy ratings as well, I'd stay away.
|
| [0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-43UD79-B-4k-uhd-
| led-monito...
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-LED-lit-
| Monitor-43UD79...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| 10-20 seconds? What TV are you using?
| elAhmo wrote:
| It is time for a new TV!
| rubslopes wrote:
| People are replying that OP must own an old TV, but that's
| missing the point: with very old non-smart TVs, menu commands
| were always instantaneous!
| H3X_K1TT3N wrote:
| Yeah, I don't understand why everyone is trying to
| invalidate their experience or suggest workarounds
| (implying that they are the problem); this isn't
| stackoverflow.
|
| Every TV I have interacted with in recent years is slow and
| terrible, except for really old ones. The TVs are the
| problem, and we shouldn't be making excuses for that.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This was my experience with the switch from analog cable
| boxes to digital boxes. The whole experience became
| sluggish as channel changes were forced to wait for
| I-frames which depended on the GOP size.
| hadlock wrote:
| The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast
| thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has
| never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even
| accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and
| since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain
| lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I
| will plug in a new device via HDMI.
|
| I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the
| living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable
| the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but
| the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or
| two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the
| "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app
| on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am
| hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before
| the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung
| also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3
| years after we started buying it (from korean car makers,
| really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current
| TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight."_
|
| Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48
| years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but
| with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote
| control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has
| never needed maintenance).
|
| Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used
| monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN
| some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers
| booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only
| monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.
|
| My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's
| something terribly wrong with domestic electronic
| appliances.
| Melatonic wrote:
| This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you
| want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast
| adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking
| and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs
| as well for me.
|
| Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was
| insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to
| begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few
| larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a
| lot once it had some cache to work with.
| bartread wrote:
| I don't run into this because I never allow the TV to connect
| to the internet.
|
| I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers
| and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles,
| etc.
|
| As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually
| change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the
| TV's UI remains responsive.
|
| I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth
| connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou,
| but haven't run into that issue with LG or, in more recent
| years, Hisense.
| hamdingers wrote:
| This is always the top reply and it's not particularly
| useful. I want the ease and convenience of having a single
| device both play and display content, there's no reason
| that should be so hard. Of course I know I could Buy More
| Things but that sucks as a suggestion.
|
| This is how most people use their TVs these days (despite
| the issues with it). It's reasonable and fair to ask for a
| better experience.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I tried the smart tv, but then the app devs stopped
| updating the apps for that model or version of the OS.
| there's nothing wrong with the picture, but to be able to
| keep using apps would require a new tv. That's when I
| switched to devices connected to the TV, and stopped
| using the TV's apps. Devs will always update for devices
| like Roku, AppleTV, etc as there's enough users. I can
| only imagine the number of users for specific model of
| tv's OS will get smaller and no longer worth effort on
| the dev's time.
| exhumet wrote:
| its a double edged sword, better hardware and experience
| = more expensive (see Sonys higher end stuff) 90% of
| would much rather drop the money on the less expensive
| BIG TV with a cpu that cant even transcode properly and
| harvests your data to offset the price. ive got a lot of
| family and friends that use my plex server and i pretty
| much force them to get a dedicated streaming device for
| it or warn them that unfortunately i cant help them if
| the content doesnt want to play.
| bartread wrote:
| Well, you say it's not particularly useful, but do you
| want a TV that runs like a bag of spanners _or not_?
|
| Because if the answer is "not" then complaining about how
| your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to
| download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly
| refusing to buy _one_ additional device (like an Apple TV
| or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don 't
| you think? Ornery even?
|
| I agree that it is reasonable and fair to ask for a
| better experience but TV manufacturers have already made
| it abundantly clear, over the last decade and a half of
| smart TVs, that they don't give a damn what people like
| you and I think about how our TVs work, or that we get
| pissed off when they slow them down with bloatware and
| ads.
|
| So the logical choice is to Not. Bloody. Let Them.
|
| Literally, buy one other device - whatever suits your
| needs best (and they're all compact little things, not
| like the big ugly set top boxes of years gone by) - and
| your TV experience will immediately be significantly
| better.
|
| Once you've set it up you won't even need two remotes:
| your Apple TV, or whatever, will turn the TV on and off
| for you, and control the volume, so you'll only need the
| remote for your it (or whatever device you've chosen).
|
| The only time you'd need a second remote is if you have a
| cable or satellite box, or you're the kind of person who
| also has 7 games consoles of varying vintages and a
| bluray player plugged into your TV as well (which it
| doesn't sound like you have). We only watch on demand
| services so, if I weren't a fan of retrogames, we could
| get away with just the Apple TV and one remote. (The
| Bluray player barely sees any use, but I keep it around
| because we do still have some Blurays and DVDs for stuff
| that we really like and don't want to be beholden to
| streaming services for.)
|
| (I should say, another alternative is to set up something
| like Pihole to filter the ads out, but that still doesn't
| help with crappy updates that slow your TV down. And if
| you use apps on your TV and don't keep them up to date,
| eventually they'll stop working, which isn't ideal
| either. Hence, again, back to the idea of a device to
| "drive" the TV, which runs the apps you want.)
| brabel wrote:
| I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and
| the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally
| and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I
| barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same
| size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway.
| What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse,
| barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is
| agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts
| showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several
| seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid
| UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The
| higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that. So now, I
| know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000
| instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper
| computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using
| some heavy JS framework, I suppose).
| jliptzin wrote:
| Plug a new chromecast into one of the HDMI ports and use
| that and only that and weld the setting shut so that you
| never have to deal with the TV's default UI ever again.
| port11 wrote:
| Our Samsung running Tizen has the obnoxious need to check if
| antenna-based broadcasting is available, every single time
| you open the settings menu.
|
| It never is, it won't ever again be in Europe. But it checks.
| And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what
| it selected.
|
| Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
| zafka wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
| This book - or its later editions, should be required reading
| for ALL engineers and designers. Actually for their managers as
| well.
| eimrine wrote:
| They read it but vice versa.
| jahller wrote:
| they read it, understood it and then applied every way
| possible to game our attention span
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because
| the designers didn't know about design.
| criddell wrote:
| Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a
| great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?
| qwertox wrote:
| > I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
|
| Plus kids have a special motivation, much more urgent, in
| getting to know how to work that little plastic box full of
| buttons.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad,
| apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her
| 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable
| providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you
| need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's
| way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner.
|
| Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source
| button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to
| navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you
| want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their
| horribly busy UI.
| pwg wrote:
| > you need their box.
|
| This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now,
| lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable
| companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required
| because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
| tzs wrote:
| From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a
| settings button on the remote long pressing that is a
| shortcut directly to the input selection.
|
| Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use
| that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung
| (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g.,
| "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I
| say "channel 4".
|
| I don't know how well this works on the newest models because
| I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called
| Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically
| for TV voice control.
|
| If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable
| HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a
| device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn
| the TV on if it is not on).
|
| [1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the
| voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports
| were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing
| voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you
| said was in Russian too).
|
| For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn
| how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by
| listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no
| matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to
| say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let
| the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem
| was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not
| translating correctly.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Especially seniors...
| INTPenis wrote:
| What a great idea, good job.
| HipstaJules wrote:
| We have a similar product in Italy: https://www.myfaba.it/
| wffurr wrote:
| In the US there's Yoto Players that use RFID cards and onboard
| flash memory: https://us.yotoplay.com/
|
| And Tonies with little figures and games and such:
| https://us.tonies.com/
| consp wrote:
| For nogstalgia's sake you can also a really old HDD and do some
| seeks (without doing anything of course) and make the HDD Led
| (installed on old drives) blink and make old school coffee
| machine sounds. This would make waiting even more "something is
| going to happen! ... I know it! ... just waiting to load ...".
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I've been thinking of making something similar for my kodi setup
| for a while, possibly with NFC "disks", or SD card "cartridges",
| similar to this https://youtu.be/END_PVp3Eds, but I didn't think
| about using floppies. If I can get my hands on some, that could
| make a nice "physical library" too. Also a good tip about the
| arduino floppy drive library, I'll probably make use of that to
| debug my floppy drive to see if it's the problem or some
| configuration in my computer that isn't working
| afandian wrote:
| I did this for my child with an ESP32, RFID cards off ebay, and
| MP3s on a SD card. A fun project.
|
| Tip: it's much quicker to read the serial number of the RFID
| card and rename the MP3 than it is to program the MP3 name to
| the card!
| Lalabadie wrote:
| For people looking at OSS, Phoniebox seems to be the
| popular/mature project: https://phoniebox.de/index-en.html
|
| (My partner and I are building one for our daughter)
| Terr_ wrote:
| > rename the MP3
|
| Depending on the SD card formatting, perhaps a nice big
| folder of symlinks.
| auslegung wrote:
| There's a product with a similar UX for audio books called a Yoto
| Box https://us.yotoplay.com/ It's very popular in Charlotte Mason
| homeschool circles
| setopt wrote:
| Recently bought a Yoto Mini and quite happy with it. Remember
| to buy the blank cards.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| And coincidentally it started off as a Raspberry Pi project.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Looks like fun and educational toy, interesting find. But why
| the mention of it being popular in homeschooling circles?
| Mentioning that in the same context makes it seem like you're
| not recommending the product because of that :P
| eigencoder wrote:
| I didn't read that connotation into it, but maybe in your
| social circles people have a problem with homeschooling?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > maybe in your social circles people have a problem with
| homeschooling
|
| In general I think it's a very American thing, and
| considering the education problem the US suffers from,
| probably explains a part of that. Most other countries have
| very limited amount of homeschooling even allowed, because
| of all the drawbacks with it.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The floppy disk insertion detection could take a cue from AmigaOS
| and try to read a track to see if it gets anything. But not sure
| if that would work without changing the floppy driver...
| layer8 wrote:
| Also, have the TV display an image like this before:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Kickstar...
| layer8 wrote:
| If the kids ever come across a traditional _Save_ icon, they will
| be confused. ;)
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Wow, I think this is the first one of these "floppies for kids"
| things I've seen that actually stores something on the disk.
| wffurr wrote:
| I love these physical mechanisms for controlling the software
| that surrounds us. Not enough physical UX out there; all the
| industrial designers seem to be in love with single button
| controls or touchscreens or capacitive panels. I presume they're
| cheaper than switches with a nice thunk or dials with a nice
| clicky feel.
|
| Unfortunately, it takes a fair bit of time and skill with
| microelectronics and fabrication to build these things.
|
| My 7 year old has figured out the Roku app pretty well and can
| play stuff on PBS Kids or turn on the Nintendo Switch without any
| guidance. His 3 year old brother, not so much.
| thebetatester wrote:
| Website seems to be getting the HN Hug right now. Alt link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260112142332/https://blog.smar...
| aquova wrote:
| Reminds me of HitClips from the early 2000s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips
|
| I remember being quite entranced with one that a neighbor had. It
| feels like a bit of a silly format now, but perhaps it's time for
| a resurgence.
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| I am not sure physical component will help that much. Not after I
| once saw a kid swap between 4 different Minions DVDs every 5-10
| minutes.
| anotheryou wrote:
| A few rfid stickers would have been easier :)
|
| Does it play exactly one video?
| wffurr wrote:
| But RFID stickers don't have that satisfying ka-chunk and brr-
| brr whirr-whirr chunka noises.
| anotheryou wrote:
| hehe yes, but you can have both I thought. Let the drive do
| its thing but don't rely on it for the actual ID.
|
| It's of course not the nice way to do it, but the easy one I
| thiiink.
| didacusc wrote:
| Why not just burn DVDs with whatever content one wants to fetch
| and re-encode to SD MPEG2? It's not like kids are super critical
| about picture quality anyway.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| DVDs are significantly more fragile
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Which can be a useful lesson sometimes (as the article
| mentions teaching that lesson with accidentally destroyed
| floppies). With burning one's own DVDs you potentially
| balance that fragility with easy replacement (just burn
| another copy).
| postalcoder wrote:
| I love these ideas. Another great implementation I've seen on
| here is someone using NFC/RFID chips to do something similar.
|
| For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with
| a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a
| python library to control the stream deck.
|
| I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with
| jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite
| shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is
| play fart noises.
| borner791 wrote:
| It almost feels like a Yoto player: https://us.yotoplay.com/
| palmotea wrote:
| There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the
| audio space:
|
| https://us.yotoplay.com/
|
| https://us.tonies.com/
|
| I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids
| means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have
| been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was
| able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young
| (and pause more recently), which seems to be enough.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| My daughter has a yoto and it has been absolutely invaluable
| for self directed learning and entertainment (with boundaries).
| But idk floppy disk seems way cooler to me!
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I second the Yoto. My son and I have had much fun making our
| own cards and I got pretty good at extracting audiobooks from
| YouTube, processing them with audacity and making cards of
| book series that he was into. You can fit a staggering amount
| onto a single card (5hrs of audio if memory serves).
|
| Honestly that was the biggest extra feature for us, we
| quickly exhausted all the Yoto store content that appealed,
| and weren't into any of the big franchise content (except a
| pleasantly surprising read of Pixar's "Cars") or joining the
| Yoto club.
| arscan wrote:
| We have a yoto for our son, and its a great experience, but be
| prepared for pricing of content to match what we used to page
| for cds/tapes. e.g., the pout-pout fish card is $8 USD for 10
| minutes of content [1].
|
| I think that's ok, as he actually would get a lot more than 10
| minutes of use out of it, and its great to pay the creators
| while not having to worry about ads manipulating my kid. But it
| highlights how expectations for the pricing of audio/video
| content has changed (probably for the worse)... for me at
| least.
|
| 1. https://us.yotoplay.com/products/the-pout-pout-fish
| neutronicus wrote:
| We have a Yoto here as well, for our six-year-old.
|
| The concept is great - RFID as a replacement for cassette
| audiobooks (with fewer storage limitations!).
|
| I do wish it integrated better with sources of free
| audiobooks. The Libby app gets us access to a lot of
| audiobooks through the public library, many of which are not
| even available for purchase through the Yoto player. We can
| only use it to play them for him as a Bluetooth speaker from
| our phones, which removes a lot of the utility of the player
| (he can't navigate chapters, we can't set a sleep timer, we
| can't use our phones for other things).
|
| The concept is great though and the specific product, walled
| content garden notwithstanding, has been a net win for us.
| fredley wrote:
| The Yoto system actively encourages you to buy 'blank'
| cards to fill with your own content, and the process is
| relatively simple. Simply remove the DRM from the borrowed
| media, (convert to an appropriate format if required), then
| upload to the card. Wipe your card whenever you borrow a
| new audio book from the libarary for a clear conscience.
| yt-dlp is also a great source of content.
| neutronicus wrote:
| This is true - we've taken advantage of it somewhat (my
| wife ripped Harry Potter this way, and we recorded
| ourselves narrating some favorites).
|
| Mainly (shamefully) "Simply remove the DRM" is doing some
| work in your sentence. We just, uh, haven't gotten
| together the executive function to figure out how to do
| it with the Libby app on the iPhone. As a Hacker News
| poster I want to be the type of person who figures this
| out. But, I have not.
| fredley wrote:
| That's fair, library systems can be very variable, where
| we are we can access audiobooks on a desktop, so there's
| access to the raw files, I can see how if you're doing it
| with an iPhone app it's considerably harder!
| eigencoder wrote:
| The make your own cards are really nice for this. We bought
| a bunch of them and you can add any mp3s you want onto
| them. We even print stickers to put on the front.
| jimbobjim wrote:
| The blank cards they sell are great. We borrow audio books
| from the library and I rip them to a card, you can reuse them
| as well so don't need to buy too many. I also put radio
| streams on them, like classical stations for when my sons
| going to bed.
| crazybonkersai wrote:
| You can use third party cards which are sold for a fraction
| of a price too. There are a bit of hassle to setup (you
| need to link an original card and then clone it to a cheap
| card), but when done they work flawlessly
| dtech wrote:
| They have blank cards. They're a minor pain to set up in
| their UI, you have to get the audio files from somewhere, and
| you have to print a sticker so it's a bit of work but very
| doable.
| conception wrote:
| People already mentioned the blank cards, but the Yoto club
| subscription is actually a pretty great deal. You get a ton
| of credits that you can just apply to books and the value
| works out pretty well.
|
| You do have to watch out for Short content, but if you were
| buying audiobooks on Audible, you'd have the same issue .
| morsch wrote:
| Tonie boxes are extremely widespread in Germany, and while
| the media are similarly priced, there's a huge used market
| and public libraries have them as well. Nothing is tied to a
| specific account or box, so there are no restrictions on
| resale or lending. Almost shocking in this day and age.
| k2enemy wrote:
| These are also easy to DIY with a raspberry pi, rfid card
| reader, some blank cards, and phoniebox [0] for the software. I
| don't have much electronics experience and had it up and
| running fairly easily for under $40.
|
| [0] https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
| IshKebab wrote:
| I thought the same before we actually got a Yoto. This is one
| of those "I could easily DIY that" things that you really
| couldn't.
| fourneau wrote:
| I -have- built something like this for the TV using NFC cards,
| which was a great first-electronics-project for myself. That
| said, the most frustrating part is not the actual hardware
| itself but getting whatever streamer you're using to play the
| content you want. For example, this project required the author
| to WireShark and reverse engineer how Chromecast managed
| things.
|
| If you do go down this route, I found that Plex offered the
| best deep-linking functionality and would wrap all of your
| content with that... but it was still somewhat unreliable.
| cush wrote:
| Anyone remember the Sega Pico? These remind me of that. Such an
| awesome product!
| johnyzee wrote:
| I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from
| the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the
| spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with,
| unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture
| (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)!
| Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.
| ezconnect wrote:
| My 3 year old learned how to use the remote and watched by
| himself. We just instructed him not to watch silly stuff and he
| learned which show teaches him something and discovered
| numberblocks and alphablocks by himself on youtubekids. My other
| son just can't comprehend how to use the remote and learned it
| when he's already 4.5 years old. The main method they use for
| discovery is the speech search.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Man, this really smacks of OG Star Trek when Mr. Spock would pop
| in one of his little plastic data cards to run an application or
| load data ... I love it!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Like an SD or CompactFlash card? They even used to "run an
| application" as you inserted them, courtesy of the whole
| autorun.inf support - right up until that became a serious
| security concern.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
|
| They must be _over_ 20 years old
| mttjj wrote:
| Probably closer to 30 years. Were floppies still prominent in
| 2005-2006 (legitimate question)?
| Symbiote wrote:
| In 2004 I think I would have a floppy disk in my schoolbag.
|
| Actually buying a new pack would probably have been a few
| years prior to that, they last a long time with only
| occasional use.
| nosrepa wrote:
| 06 HS grad here, every student had a mandatory floppy disk to
| save files to all the way up to my graduation.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I am estimating when this particular package of disks was
| purchased based on additional information I am not sharing, not
| how long floppy disks in general have remained available for
| purchase
| Izkata wrote:
| Responding to the title: Made me think of Star Trek TOS food
| synthesizers (the precursor to replicators). They used floppy-
| disk-like cards as their main interface: https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Food_synthesizer?file=F...
|
| In particular what brought it to mind was a scene in one episode
| with a bunch of kids being shown how it works, same episode as
| the page's title image.
| rspoerri wrote:
| My 3 year old watched TV for the first time for 2 minutes in her
| life (it was hard hiding it from her in an airplane on an
| overhead screen) and I can tell that TV is generally bad for kids
| at that age.
| stavros wrote:
| How can you tell? What's the thing that made you say "this is
| bad for her", and why is it not the same for you?
| sigmonsays wrote:
| their vision is still developing and staring at a screen is
| not good for eye development.
|
| it removes stimulation and interaction with the environment
| and replaces it with sedentary and no physical interactions.
|
| While the exact reasons are not common knowledge, knowing TV
| is bad for toddlers is.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > their vision is still developing and staring at a screen
| is not good for eye development.
|
| Is that true? The American Association of Pediatrics
| doesn't list that as a concern on their page "Health
| Effects Of Young Kids Being On Screens Too Long" (which is
| focused on children aged 2-11). Do you have a source I
| could review for that claim?
|
| https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-
| children/cente...
|
| ---
|
| (The AAP page about media recommendations for 0-2 also
| doesn't say anything about eye-development, but _does_
| recommend entirely against screen-time for that age-group
| except for video conversations with people)
|
| https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-
| children/cente...
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| It's bro-science all the way down. What if your environment
| is a boring room?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| to clarify, too much "near work" for the eyes is a risk for
| myopia. That includes reading books all day.
|
| My point is, watching an educational tv program like PBS
| for 30 minutes in the evening will not be the cause for
| your child wearing glasses.
|
| The biggest predictor of good vision from the scientific
| studies is lots of outdoor time. This is most important
| from ages 6 to 11.
|
| https://www.myopiaprofile.com/articles/how-outdoor-time-
| infl...
| loandbehold wrote:
| There was a time people used think the same about books.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think there was. But even if so, there was a time
| people used to think the same about drinking antifreeze,
| too.
| loandbehold wrote:
| There absolutely was. "reading addiction" was a medical
| diagnosis in 18th/19th century Europe. And if you read
| some of the essays about negative effects of reading from
| this time, it's pretty striking how similar it is to
| modern views on TV. There was even a German term of that
| time "Leseseuche" which literally translates as "reading
| plague".
| pvab3 wrote:
| you ought to read some of the early attacks on the
| printing press. It sounds like your grandpa complaining
| about TikTok
| Jblx2 wrote:
| - Propylene Glycol -- Antifreeze that is also used as a
| food additive.
|
| - Ethylene Glycol -- Antifreeze that is toxic.
|
| https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/propylene-
| glycol#TOC_TI...
| efskap wrote:
| That's still consumption of images rather than
| participation in reality. Kids can absolutely read in
| excess as a form of escapism. Books are easier than dealing
| with real life when someone else does the thinking and
| problem solving for you. Certainly great for learning in
| moderation but you won't learn interpersonal skills or how
| to ride a bike just by reading about them.
| rspoerri wrote:
| She was so focussed on it and started crying when we hid it
| after only a very short time. This is not normal a behaviour.
| This only happens with things that are very addictive (also
| for example sugar). I do understand that not everybody can do
| it like that, but if you can create such an environment it's
| much better for them (in my opinion).
| stavros wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for elaborating.
| rspoerri wrote:
| Understanding of what is happening is often very limited.
| When I read books or talk to her, I sometimes use words
| that are unknown to her, she only started asking for the
| meaning of them recently (she just turned 3). So she will
| probably only understand 20%-30% even when she
| understands conversations quite well at home. She is
| still missing cultural context. She is only starting to
| understand the difference between a living and a stuffed
| animal.
|
| In an animation movie somebody might hit somebody else,
| which appears funny to an adult. A child might just take
| this as normal behaviour and repeats it the next time she
| sees somebody and doesn't understand why it's not funny.
|
| Understanding the real world is difficult enough for her.
| stavros wrote:
| But that's an issue with the content, not the medium,
| right? There will be shows geared exactly towards kid
| that age that teach them the right lessons.
| Hovertruck wrote:
| My three year old would do the same thing if he was playing
| in his sandbox and I abruptly picked him up and carried him
| away from what he was doing though. In my experience
| managing transitions between activities is one of the most
| important things. If I let my him watch a video and I tell
| him "I'm going to turn off the TV when it ends", he just
| goes back to playing with his toys when it goes off.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think screen time can definitely be a
| problem. I just think it mostly comes down to whether or
| not the screen time is at the expense of something else
| more constructive.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Absolutely this. I think a problem arises when parents
| install their kid in front of the TV and use it as a
| childminder.
|
| Mine just turned 3. She watches YouTube kids - navigates
| the TV just fine and makes her own choices. She's also a
| dab hand at platformer games - I didn't think I'd have
| someone to play Mario with just her.
|
| But - and it's a big but - she spends 95% of her time
| doing something else, be it exploring outdoors, playing
| with duplo/lego, art, looking at books, telling stories
| with her toys, whatever.
|
| For her, TV and games are just another thing to do, and
| she picks them up and puts them down like anything else.
|
| The other problem arises at the other end of the
| spectrum. For me, TV was verboten until I was at least 8
| or 9 years old - and when I was finally allowed that
| forbidden fruit I gorged myself.
| wffurr wrote:
| >> started crying when we hid it after only a very short
| time
|
| I'd cry too if you showed me a bright colorful shiny fun
| new thing and then took it away after only two minutes.
|
| Part of what you're seeing is the novelty. There does seem
| to be something about screens, but it's possible to have
| healthy screen habits as a young child. My 3 year old
| enjoyed a 25-minute episode of Wild Kratts on PBS Kids on
| our TV while we finished packing up for a trip to the
| aquarium today. No problems turning it off once the episode
| was over and it was time to go. It's not his first time
| watching TV though.
| ncallaway wrote:
| My approach to these kinds of things is different: these
| are really important opportunities to teach moderation and
| to teach the social skills of learning to have fun things
| in moderation.
|
| I think it's quite important to introduce these addictive
| things into their lives, in a way that teach how to enjoy
| them carefully and in small chunks.
| asielen wrote:
| I won't argue that it is a universal truth but it has played
| out the same for my kids and my friends groups kids.
|
| They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation.
| I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something
| you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and
| younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general.
| Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of
| the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is
| okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.
|
| On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your
| sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it
| helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be
| worth it.
|
| The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting.
| Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.
|
| On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and
| all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Hard disagree with 'great to be bored' - being bored is one
| of the worst possible feelings, that you're wasting your
| time doing _nothing_ when there is almost certainly
| _something_ you would rather be doing.
|
| As a child I used to _hate_ the feeling of boredom, knowing
| that I could be doing something I wanted to do. As an adult
| I am hardly ever bored, and it's a strict improvement,
| never have I ever found myself wishing I could just go back
| to being bored.
|
| Boredom is such a negative emotion that learning to manage
| it effectively becomes an essential life skill. Learning to
| set yourself up for success / be prepared required
| forethought to anticipate the possibility of boredom and
| come prepared to deal with it. Acting out on boredom is
| childish, learning to keep yourself occupied so you don't
| become bored is mature.
| GJim wrote:
| > Hard disagree with 'great to be bored' - being bored is
| one of the worst possible feelings, that you're wasting
| your time doing nothing when there is almost certainly
| something you would rather be doing.
|
| You <---> The point
|
| Being bored is what inspires a kid to daydream for
| themselves and/or get off their arse and try something
| new.
|
| Being constantly "entertained" by a TV or fondle slab is
| an anathema to creativity and independent thought. For
| children and adults.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| So really, boredom itself isn't what's good, it's
| actually used as something _uncomfortable_ that
| encourages kids (or adults) to go find something
| interesting to alleviate the discomfort.
|
| For the record, I've also told my daughter that "boredom
| is good for her", but this is clarifying my thinking on
| it.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| not that guy, but it would cause our kids to completely
| emotionally deregulate, and become fixated on the TV for a
| while.
|
| and most TV is not great for people. there is a reason
| depression and anxiety correlate with TV time
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| My kids never had tablets or individual access to screens and
| yet we have tv and movies and now video games as the children
| age.
|
| The current rule is video games require 1 minute of exercise
| for one minute of usage. This is a self regulating time limit
| that has worked well.
| cheald wrote:
| Oh, I like this a lot. My kids are quite physically active,
| but they do love to binge video games, too. I like the idea
| of letting them "buy" more leisure time at their own
| discretion through self-disciplined work.
| peteey wrote:
| Generally agreed. Though, Daniel Tiger and Paw Patrol should be
| judged differently. Paw Patrol is mindless and addictive.
|
| If you desperately need a distraction, PBS shows are less bad.
| A few moments of pacification may be worth not disturbing the
| other airline travelers.
|
| Daniel Tiger may be helpful to parents too. Interacting with
| children is not intuitive. Techniques from PBS shows have
| helped me. For example, singing to kids about trying food is
| move effective than a well reasoned monologue.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I'm not going to praise Paw Patrol as something on the level
| of Daniel Tiger or Bluey, but it's not completely mindless.
| It shows problem solving, teamwork, and encourages being
| helpful.
| cheald wrote:
| It's not entirely devoid of value, but that doesn't make it
| a good idea. Junk food contains healthy ingredients, too.
| gffrd wrote:
| My gripe with Paw Patrol is that everything is met with a
| cheery "sir, yes sir!" and then the show stops short of
| ever showing real challenge, friction, risk, failure, or
| loss.
|
| It's a missed opportunity.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Daniel Tiger was a godsend when my kids were younger. They
| loved it, and the little jingles helped us get through some
| of those tricky parenting situations. They're easy to
| remember, and the kids immediately understood.
| scelerat wrote:
| similar observation here, with a 2.33-year old. In small doses
| we've exposed him to videos[1], never unsupervised, never as a
| parental substitute, but there are a class of them (which
| happen to be the lowest-effort, highest-contrast, most
| insipidly soundtracked CGI dreck I can possibly imagine) which
| are absolute baby crack. He watched some a few months ago and
| now he can't get them out of his head. It has gotten to the
| point where we are simply at a hard "no" about any videos
| because it always devolves into an inconsolable tantrum
| tearfully begging for more video crack.
|
| [1] kid loves trucks and garbage trucks and trains, and so for
| a while it was fun to pull up a video of real life trucks and
| trains and watch them and talk about them. We'd read a book
| about trucks. He'd point and say, "what's that do," and I'd
| explain, then say, "wait! I can show you." Which was fun, until
| it became triggering.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| we had generally the same experience but with disney
| princesses
|
| was sort of a crutch for a sick kid or when things were
| slammed (e.g. kid 2 or 3 was also sick or we were otherwise
| busy) but we had to limit them heavily.
|
| we also made the mistake of playing her the soundtracks,
| which ended up with listening to Aladdin or Frozen on repeat.
| All told not bad music compared to the drek they're putting
| out on YT now...
| mherkender wrote:
| I find the type of show makes a big difference, finding
| something thoughtful is important (and hard). We also like to
| set a time limit, usually 1-2 episodes to make the transition
| easy. Also, no tablets, just commercial-free TV so we can watch
| with them.
|
| They re-enact fun/positive stuff from shows and don't get
| locked in or desperate for TV. Seems to work for us.
| 0xcb0 wrote:
| This is such a cool idea. I will definitely build one for my
| daughter, and then I can finally get rid of the old floppy disks
| and use them in a useful way.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| An easy way to do this is to get an inexpensive DVD / BluRay
| player and disks. My (expensive) BluRay player will turn the TV
| on and select itself via HDMI.
| euchn wrote:
| But that would teach children to expect the same deterministic
| output for a given input. Surely we can't have that in the age
| of artificially reseeded LLMs?
| btbuildem wrote:
| I love the idea of associating certain programs / games /
| whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream
| behavioural levers and consequences.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too
| expensive.
|
| A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes
| in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be
| inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
| nar001 wrote:
| It wouldn't be making fun floppy disk noises then though!
| pigpop wrote:
| You could wire in one of those small phone vibration motors
| and get similar noises out of it. Experimenting with
| different ways of mounting the motor so that it makes
| metallic or mechanical noises would be fun. If you really
| wanted to get the full audio experience you could also add
| another motor that spins a small, disk shaped load that you
| could ramp up and down for the steady whirring noises.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Someone else posting to HN used cheap flash cartridges for a
| "music player" like this. There is something to be said about
| having a ROM or ROM-like media that can store even a few
| megabytes of data rather than QR codes being relatively
| bandwidth limited and so often needing a URL to data or more
| URLs.
|
| The article points out there is a useful lesson in accidentally
| destroying/losing a physical object in the way that floppies or
| VHS tapes were easy to accidentally destroy and taught young
| childhood lessons. QR codes are a bit harder to destroy, which
| can be a benefit, but also loses this tiny lesson.
| margalabargala wrote:
| They are currently $1 per disk, are reusable, and last a very
| long time.
|
| It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
|
| Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with
| the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that
| the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.
| criddell wrote:
| > It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
|
| As far as I can tell, they are not.
| graypegg wrote:
| I think so! As far as I can google, it seems like
| everything available is new-old-stock or recovered discs.
|
| https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-
| person-s...
|
| Interesting little read I fell into while looking this up!
| elzbardico wrote:
| It is fascinating to think that after we moved everything
| online, we keep finding uses for physical media that needs to
| be read by a player.
|
| Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it
| kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow
| hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible,
| countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less
| embodied by the day.
| zuppy wrote:
| i quite like you idea. floppies are pretty easy to destroy,
| especially by kids. i wouldn't trust that to last that long.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Tangible, persistent interfaces are great. XR interfaces usually
| only scratch the surface.
|
| Maybe we'll eventually get an AR os where you get to lean spatial
| reasoning instead of just floating screens. (Along side all the
| power tools, of course)
| lutusp wrote:
| A much simpler remedy is to plug a computer into the TV, then
| program the computer to show the desired / appropriate content.
| This would be much simpler than trying to design a remote control
| meant to circumvent a TV manufacturer's extreme dedication to
| removing a consumer's control over their TV.
|
| This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also,
| disconnect the TV from the Internet.
| bambax wrote:
| Cool project! There was something quite similar but with RFID
| cards showed on HN a few months ago:
|
| https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
| retsibsi wrote:
| This is fantastic! I feel like it's right at the sweet spot where
| "comically overengineered fun project" and "actually a great
| idea" overlap.
| oniony wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814934.
| lacoolj wrote:
| This is a great idea. If it was on Etsy I would get one for my
| friends that have toddlers.
| madduci wrote:
| I made a similar Project, where i embed a NFC Tag Label and use a
| NFC Reader to trigger the launch of Games on Batocera, using
| Zaparoo as Daemon.
|
| The kids love it and it's easy to use
| jesprenj wrote:
| I though my laptop monitor is broken for a second due to the
| dirty css background on this page.
| richardlblair wrote:
| Reminds me of a project on here a while ago where the author had
| used NFC tags and home assistant to give his kids a digital
| library with little tap cards.
| daveac wrote:
| I was reading this and thinking about StarTrek the original
| series, computer disks were just solid blocks or the 1970s
| FisherPrice record player.
|
| Both really tactile and if you don't look after them then there
| is a cost/consequence
| dosinga wrote:
| > Who hasn't turned in a paper on a broken floppy disk, with the
| excuse ready that the floppy must have broken when the teacher
| asks a few days later?
|
| I feel seen
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Kinda cool, I was thinking about building a similar system, but
| based on NFC tags to load specific movies from my Plex server.
|
| At least those are easier to acquire, and they can't get
| demagnetized :)
| sekh60 wrote:
| I do this but for music with Home Assistant. I haven't dug
| around much to see if it's possible to cast video from Jellyfin
| the same way. From what I read (and it's been a while) the
| Jellyfin API was more limited, but maybe that's changed by now.
| tidwall wrote:
| This reminds me of a card swiping video game system I made years
| ago.
|
| https://youtu.be/Z2xq3ns5Hsk
|
| https://github.com/tidwall/RetroSwiper
| taegee wrote:
| Nice idea but at that age any screen content is fundamentally bad
| for your children.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| yep, my 3 year old gets a very limited amount of screen time
| and he only watches educational programs (not whatever cartoons
| his peers watch). There's is no way I want to make it _easier_
| for him to watch TV, especially as he has very little interest
| in it already.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Looking back in time, the only benefit of watching anything on
| a screen as a kid is learning a foreign language. The content
| is always some form of a brain rot, or political, cultural, or
| religious propaganda.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Cool idea!
|
| Is the terminology correct though?
|
| Looking at the showcased disks, in my youth we called these
| "stiffy disks" - owing to their stiff plastic casing.
|
| We also had "floppy disks" - but these were larger (in size,
| albeit with less storage capacity) and floppier (the plastic case
| would bend easily).
|
| I treasured my burgundy Dysan stiffy disk boxes!
| bryceacc wrote:
| as a 31 year old, I only _just_ last year learned that what I
| have thought were floppy disks and everyone calls a floppy disk
| are indeed a stiffy...
| herodoturtle wrote:
| i feel like you're onto something here...
|
| a marketing campaign for middle-aged men perhaps
| lobf wrote:
| At least in the US, the "floppy" terminology carried over when
| the disks went from the actual floppy 5.5" disks to the hard-
| case 3.5" disks.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| thanks, that's an insightful comment.
|
| so defs not a globally consistent usage of the term then?
|
| judging by the article's authorship, i'm guessing denmark and
| US the same
|
| so perhaps US and EU but not elsewhere?
| lobf wrote:
| I only became aware of the use of a different term than
| "floppy" for the hard 3.5" disks when I opened this thread-
| you'd have to ask the person I was replying to where
| they're from.
| krupan wrote:
| I have never heard that term (for disks). Are you possibly from
| the UK or Australia?
| herodoturtle wrote:
| > I have never heard that term
|
| Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this
| sub-thread?
| mrighele wrote:
| Italian here, and I never heard of the term either.
| Everybody always used the term floppy also for the 3.5
| disks
|
| I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical
| connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was
| just the disk that your computer used.
| j45 wrote:
| Physical media and/or interactions are a great way to help kids
| understand storage as a physical media and putting into and out
| of things.
|
| One thing I notice with kids is they think everything is already
| in a device, which is not true at all, same for the internet
| always being available.
|
| I see DVDs etc coming back into popularity for kids now too,
| because they can control and make it play, instead of fighting a
| youtube algorithm that is obesses with getting them to play the
| next video. Streaming platforms are the same and they will be
| leaving my life if I can't manage how they are to be used.
|
| That combined with Youtube not allowing me to add youtube kids
| videos to a playlist however I wish (premium account or not) has
| me looking elsewhere.
| philips wrote:
| An easy at home setup is Raspberry Pi running Batocera and
| Zaparoo with NFC cards. If you buy a three ring binder you can
| neatly organize the NFC cards.
|
| Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers
| for the cards.
|
| https://batocera.org
|
| https://zaparoo.org/docs/platforms/batocera/
| myko wrote:
| That's super cool!
|
| I built an app for managing a similar project based on something
| else linked here previously:
| https://github.com/Chuntttttt/TapeDeck/
|
| I self-host it and it isn't exposed outside of my network, not
| sure if it'll work for anyone else.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| My man just built a Yoto from scratch
|
| works fine, though my kids tended to toss it around.
|
| fairly easy to get blanks and record an mp3 on there. got a few
| of grandma reading favorite books, which my daughter loved.
| jamesgill wrote:
| " _I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he
| could understand and use independently_ "
|
| As a father I can't imagine _ever_ leaving a 3-year-old alone
| with media so they can be 'independent'. If for no other reason,
| that's an age and developmental stage where media should be
| almost nonexistent in their lives.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Aren't (picture) books also media?
| andsoitis wrote:
| Books (incl. picture books) engage your brain in ways that
| video does not.
| shimman wrote:
| Next time you're around children in a library look at those
| that are glued to their screens versus those reading picture
| books. Equating them as the same is so hilariously expected
| from a tech forum tho.
| wtcactus wrote:
| This seems a great idea conceptually, but in practice, from mine
| one sample data, its ways to limiting and simple for a toddler.
|
| My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA
| Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.
|
| The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still
| didn't have to put parental restrictions. But she can already
| choose them from the favorites list.
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