Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
blog.smartere.dk560 points by mchro 18 hours ago
560 points by mchro 18 hours ago
> 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. ;)
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.
Turn on TV: 3 seconds
Roku boots: 10 seconds
Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds
Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)
Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds
Select profile: 3 seconds
Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in
Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It really is. I cancelled my subscription recently because streaming in the app rarely worked. The only way to watch anything is either download it first if I'm watching on my tablet or use Chromecast to cast via the app on my phone. It was the same bad experience across Google TV, Android and iOS devices.
I recall it playing the same ad repeatedly during commercial breaks. I think i once watched the same ad 5 times in a row.
Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.
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.
What gets me is the "play/pause" button behavior on a firestick remote. How many presses of play/pause would you think it takes to pause then resume playing? 2? Oh, no. Its 4! Pressing play/pause on the remote brings up the UI, like a mouse-over on some crappy web-player. You have to hit pause twice to actually pause the video. Then play again brings up the UI, then you have to hit it again to play again.
And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.
Another big issue with the fire tv is that it just refuses to work when there's no internet access. It just shows an error page you can't get out of. So I can't even play local content through VLC or Jellyfin.
My favorite is the "sorry, we can't play this" just randomly out of nowhere in the middle of an episode. You were playing it just fine, what happened?
And, of course, the crashes. I don't think I've ever seen an app crash this much. It makes me very worried for the codebase.
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.
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.
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.
External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
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.
Maybe a second lag
Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how people tolerate that.
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.
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
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...
Lots of good generic remotes out there (still using a Logitech harmony personally)
My samsung did this years ago. Not sure if it was truly required but I’d say this has happened.
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
Part of it is the displays themselves. Some have unbelievably bad response times. I've seen 2 seconds multiple times. Makes gaming impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. £300 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.
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.
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.
This is what I do, I'm a little confused by the issue. If you have a device that outputs HDMI just never connect the TV to your wifi. It's not like you need or want firmware updates if there's no internet connection.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
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.
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.
Or one could just, you know, not connect it to the Internet rather than ripping apart your new TV.
I'm sure sooner or later TVs will demand to connect to an "activation server" before they start working. And soon after that continuous internet access.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
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.
True, but when you want to change any of the TV settings you have to deal with the sluggish UI. I have memorized the key presses to toggle between two different brightness presets, including the amount of time I have to pause between each keypress. If I press the buttons without waiting sufficiently long, it goes sideways.
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).
> 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.
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.
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!).
"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.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
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.
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.
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.
I have two LG oleds. I turned off a bunch off settings and blocked the LG update url in pihole, set pihole as dns. I just use the tv, without any connected devices. It is pretty responsive, I get 0 ads. The only inconvenient part is going fully through their god awful settings menu and turning off a bunch of them once.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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?
No, I have plenty of other devices that update and remain useable. So do you.
I would describe your attitude that way though.
> No, I have plenty of other devices that update and remain useable. So do you.
Sure, but your TV doesn’t behave like that and it won’t behave like that so why does it make sense to treat it as though it will?
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.
Hey, trying to change the source of my monitor from HDMI-1 to DisplayPort takes 30 seconds.
When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem, I called and threatened to cancel.
And they immediately fixed the lag?
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.
I'm seeing that again in some of their UI, where you have to specifically click More Info to get to the details page vs playing immediately.
Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure out the rest, thank you.
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.
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.
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...
Being able to multiplex seems like an obvious feature to someone like me, but most people would probably just prefer picture-in-picture. I can see why it wasn't a feature that lived very long. Sounds like a great idea in design/feature meetings until the users tell you they don't care about it.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?
The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.
They read it but vice versa.
they read it, understood it and then applied every way possible to game our attention span
I argue that most kids are far better at using complicated remotes and mobile phones / apps than most adults. This has been true for a long time. Programming VCRs was a dark art reserved only for teens in the 80s, and I have no doubt the Romans had similar issues :)
I get to visit my 90-year-old mother in law a few times a week to get her TV setup (Cable box running Android TV, connected to a TV running Android TV — FML) working again.
To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.
What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
When Logitech announced they were stopping making them, I bought 3 new Logitech Harmony remotes. I'm on my last one! I don't know what I am going to do after that one dies :-(
Oddly enough, i think one of the main benefits of piracy is you have to be intentional about what to watch. You pick something and go find it. You aren't prodded into mindlessly watching whatever is suggested to you. It helps break the "addiction" loop.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
On that note, compare early iOS and current iOS and the difference is night and day when it comes to even knowing what on the screen is actually a UI element. I'm pretty sure the only reason I even know how to operate my phone is that I've lived through the transitions that took away more and more and more of the actual visible UI from it.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.)
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_code
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.
The last short lived generation of VCR we owned had an on screen menu/UI driven by the remote control for setting time and programming a scheduled recording rather than arcane and tedious sequences of button presses.
I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.
In theory, HDMI CEC should solve a lot of those problems. Unfortunately it only introduced another buggy layer.
UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space:
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.
Is there anything like this but for music selection? I mean, for adults. Say I want to have a dozen "albums" on my coffee table (NFC, QR, whatever), and insert one in a box to listen to them. Like an Audio CD, but without the risk of running, leveraging Spotify, or my MP3 connection. Something like in the OP, but using something less prone to stop working than a floppy disk (I was there, I remember).
yes! PhonieBox - But you built it yourself [0]. You make your own cards with nfc/rfid stickers in them, put a nfc/rfid reader somewhere nice, and hooked up to phoniebox rpi with spotify to a nice sound system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
TIL about the blank cards! Really glad I bothered to post about my experience with the Yoto.
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.
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
Like some others, I built my own too: https://rdeaton.space/posts/screenless-digital-jukebox/
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.
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.
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 .
I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
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.
Is this available to replicate? I've been thinking about this for some time, for music albums, specifically.
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!
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.
Is the data stored on the card, or on the player? My guess is that each card just holds an id?
It's just an id. But the audio is stored on the yoto itself for offline play.
And second the blank/customizable cards, that's what 80% of our cards are and my daughter loves helping track down and extract content. Biggest hits for her have been Roald Dahl and random science stuff.
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.
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.
I have a DIY one, which took two evenings, but it's limitation is that it isn't portable.
I expect there are big benefits to portability, but I'm okay with not having them.
Is there anything else I'm missing?
Anyone remember the Sega Pico? These remind me of that. Such an awesome product!
> A remote control should be portable, and this means battery-powered.
I don't know, I would have just have the kid get off their seat in between shows and walk up to the TV with drive attached and change disks there. Very similar to how you had to change VHS tapes.
Unless, of course, the above was just an excuse to do some tinkering, then it's fine and fun.
Right? This is basically just reinventing the VHS.
The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
The real benefit (outside of being a fun project for a certain type of parent) is having a curated library of shows for kids that they can use themselves.
> The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
Well, the disks here are just for fun: they just tell the player which of the stored movies to actually play.
I mean, either way, the library of disks isn’t going to fit on the couch (or wherever) with them, so they’ll be getting up at some point.
I think the portability / battery-drivenness is really just to ensure that the drive doesn’t have a cable that could break something if it were yanked on.
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.
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.
Some commenters either:
1. Do not have children.
2. Have a strong support network.
3. Have their partner or professional handle most aspects of child raising and have a warped understanding of dealing with a precocious and active toddler.
It's great that some folks have kids that like books and keep themselves busy. It's not so great that their parents think that is the reality most parents enjoy.
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.
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.
It's not entirely devoid of value, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Junk food contains healthy ingredients, too.
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.
Don't overthink it. Some of us were raised on Looney Tunes and MTV and somehow still figure out normal social interactions and do quite well in life.
40 years ago my parents had a close friend with a young and irresponsible wife who raised their child in front of a TV. At 4 years old the child could barely speak. My parents began babysitting and helping socialize her. Now she's a successful businessperson herself and is doing quite well in life.
Studies on the impact of media on children are informative but don't lose sight of the fact that kids are adaptable and will overcome most kinds of sub-optimal upbringing.
After watching some looney tune episodes recently... maybe the world would be a better place if we weren't raised on it.
Hah, that's a fair point. Same energy as "My parents hit me all the time and I turned out just fine!"
Agreed. There's a tier list that probably goes something like Bluey, Daniel Tiger, MLP, Paw Patrol, Pepa Pig,,,, Caillou.
I'm far from being a Caillou apologist, but putting it below, much less way below, Pepa Pig is rather harsh.
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?
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).
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
Interesting, thanks for elaborating.
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.
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.
I allow her to watch me work (mostly text documents), and we often search for images of an animal or object that she wants printed (today we searched for stars). Also, she can video-phone the grandparents, which is not that addictive from my experience.
My screensaver (animated colours) is problematic. Watching a video of herself or the grandparents on the smartphone can be problematic as well, but at least they are typically only a few seconds.
So yes, it's a thing of the medium. But most media for kids are colourful, highly animated, childlike characters and voices. Optimized to catch their attention for a long time.
Also, the media for kids are barely matching the level of the kids state of knowledge. I use words she understands describing things she asks me about, a TV show never does that.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There was a time people used think the same about books.
Books can also be harmful if abused. They can be used excessively as escapism. They can contain dangerous harmful messages and manipulation. They can be addictive just like anything else can. Content matters a lot, and anything that makes delivering content easy comes with the risk that it will deliver something harmful. Books, TV, and social media have all been used intentionally to spread harm and encourage addiction. Most adults have at least some chance of protecting themselves, but children don't have those defenses developed.
It's a good idea to be aware of every form of media children consume.
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.
I don't think there was. But even if so, there was a time people used to think the same about drinking antifreeze, too.
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".
- 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...
you ought to read some of the early attacks on the printing press. It sounds like your grandpa complaining about TikTok
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.
> 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...
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...
It’s bro-science all the way down. What if your environment is a boring room?
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is fantastic! I feel like it's right at the sweet spot where "comically overengineered fun project" and "actually a great idea" overlap.
"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.
The way i read the article, was not that the kid is unsupervised, more to give some agency.
The same way you might say to a kid, "pick out the book you want me to read to you off the shelf" this is something like, pick the video we are going to watch together.
This sort of blanket judgement on media puts quite a lot of pressure on parents that require an electronic babysitter to function. Sure, it's great when you have a support network and a child who can keep themselves busy, but some of us just need Mrs. Rachel, Caillou, Daniel Tiger, etc to sedate/educate our children while we cook/clean/work/etc.
Besides, non-interactive, low-stimulation media with a plot line and simple dialog is not on the same level as giving your child a tablet and letting them have at it.
My real concern with this project is the amount of time the builder spent away from his children. Now I get it that some folks(dads on the spectrum?) might feel their best contribution to their child's development stems from something they build in the lab but your children are only young for such a short period and taking time away from them to build a custom electronic solution seems narrowminded and selfish.
Aren‘t (picture) books also media?
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.
This is a fun setup, I have a child due in March and have been thinking through all the things to help make things not instant for learning patience as well. While I may still to DVDs for viewing, as I kept my collection building. I do have a floppy drive available and like this idea.
For those talking about not using TV much, or that the UI is slow, my setup is a cheap projector hooked into my sound system and hooking up a laptop when streaming as necessary. Really dislike the smart anything that can be used in other ways for the reasons I already saw mentioned, but it is hard to lag something that has no Internet by looking for ads and updates for sure.
Generally it is better not to show kids those cartoons. I have 3 kids already and trust me: Stick and some piece of thread is much better. 3 hours of watching anything for the entire week is more than enough.
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
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
I didn't read that connotation into it, but maybe in your social circles people have a problem with homeschooling?
> 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.
> But why the mention of it being popular in homeschooling circles?
Good point, it was superfluous info. It's how I found out about it
Recently bought a Yoto Mini and quite happy with it. Remember to buy the blank cards.
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.
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.
> It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
As far as I can tell, they are not.
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!
It wouldn't be making fun floppy disk noises then though!
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.
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.
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.
i quite like you idea. floppies are pretty easy to destroy, especially by kids. i wouldn’t trust that to last that long.
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.
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.
> There is a pin 34 “Disk Change” that is supposed to give this information, but this is basically a lie. None of the drives in my possession had that pin connected to anything, and the internet mostly concurs. In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch, that would engage when a disk was inserted.
I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?
Reading the drive is a mechanical process so it would be constantly making noise and wear out components
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.
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.
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?
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
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!
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)
> rename the MP3
Depending on the SD card formatting, perhaps a nice big folder of symlinks.
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.
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.
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...
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.
DVDs are significantly more fragile
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).
This reminds me of a card swiping video game system I made years ago.
We have a similar product in Italy: https://www.myfaba.it/
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/
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
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.
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!
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
I have never heard that term (for disks). Are you possibly from the UK or Australia?
> I have never heard that term
Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this sub-thread?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
i feel like you're onto something here...
a marketing campaign for middle-aged men perhaps
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.
Website seems to be getting the HN Hug right now. Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112142332/https://blog.smar...
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 ...".
I though my laptop monitor is broken for a second due to the dirty css background on this page.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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)
> 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
I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
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.
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!
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.
Wow, I think this is the first one of these "floppies for kids" things I've seen that actually stores something on the disk.
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.
This is a great idea. If it was on Etsy I would get one for my friends that have toddlers.
Testing
If the kids ever come across a traditional Save icon, they will be confused. ;)
I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
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
Probably closer to 30 years. Were floppies still prominent in 2005-2006 (legitimate question)?
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.
06 HS grad here, every student had a mandatory floppy disk to save files to all the way up to my graduation.
That only works if the kid has not seen it working normally before.
A few rfid stickers would have been easier :)
Does it play exactly one video?
But RFID stickers don't have that satisfying ka-chunk and brr-brr whirr-whirr chunka noises.
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.
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.
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.
What a great idea, good job.
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.
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.
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...
Also, have the TV display an image like this before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Kickstar...
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.
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Nice idea but at that age any screen content is fundamentally bad for your children.
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.
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.
