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Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

businessinsider.com

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Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#101

Post by [deleted] »

choo-t wrote: post #99
light_hue_1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution. What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the alrea…

> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?

[deleted]

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#102

Post by philips »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #92
Tepix wrote: post #84

This seems to be begging for a DIY project, doesn't it? A 3d printed case, a little SoC, perhaps a Raspberry Pi Zero, as the brains with asterisk and some additional open source software providing a web interface running on it.

Would i require some public server side component to handle the call routing etc? (or could you just use something like Google Voice?)

I went the DIY route (you can find the details as a parent comment). But, I had good luck with voip.ms as a SIP provider. It is inexpensive at $1.10/month for the phone number and $0.008/min for calling. And it has a pretty good history of user forums, wiki, etc for debugging hints with various hardware.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#103

Post by qmr »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #71
bit_logic wrote: post #68

Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: - allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app - effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except f…

Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution. What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the alrea…

Nightmare? Maybe you need to work on telling your children no.

Instead of being bitter for 7 years perhaps you should not have purchased such an absurd thing.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#104

Post by qmr »

greesil wrote: post #16

I was thinking of doing something like this for text with LoRa. But, having kids I don't have time to do that. This seems really great! I read the previous discussion, oof: S04dKHzrKT wrote Make note of the privacy policy[1]. Some users may not like the data they collect. > Information Collected from Children: As detailed in Section 3.C, we collect voice audio during calls, call log information, and utilize the Paren…

My six year old is a big Meshtastic fan.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#105

Post by qmr »

shykes wrote: post #58

I'm a happy Tin Can customer. For young children (5 and 7 in my case) it's especially delightful to give them a measure of autonomy, at an age where they don't yet have a mobile phone. They get to call their friends and family on their own terms, without any safety or "screen time" concerns. It's especially fun to watch them discover the very concept of a landline: the keypad (they thought it was a pin code); the dia…

Another comment claims they record calls.

Big yikes.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#106

Post by aaronharnly »

I have a Tin Can for my 8 year old – it is terrific and he loves it. He can call friends, grandparents, and his cousins; it is more reliable than the DIY version I was cobbling together with a Pi and some Legos; and my spouse or parents can supervise or update it too.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#107

Post by dTal »

greesil wrote: post #54
NegativeLatency wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen some of the Meshtastic hardware with built-in keyboards? https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/lilygo/tdeck/

I was thinking something like an esp32 + mesthastic / LoRa + REST API on the LAN, discoverable via multi cast. The "landline" is a tablet or phone with an app that talks to the esp32. Separately, a parent with the app does the Diffie-Hellman key exchange over SMS, NFC, or some other channel with the friends who also have the app, and you know their identity. The phone app updates the device with the friend's keys, th…

You just reinvented the IM-ME, a device famous for being used aftermarket to hack garage doors (in the days before Flipper Zero).

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#108

Post by philips »

aaronharnly wrote: post #106

I have a Tin Can for my 8 year old – it is terrific and he loves it. He can call friends, grandparents, and his cousins; it is more reliable than the DIY version I was cobbling together with a Pi and some Legos; and my spouse or parents can supervise or update it too.

What tech stack did you use before? It is interesting so many comments mention Pi when there are so many boring VOIP phones.

I wrote an app that some friends use right now. So, always interested to hear what people cobbled together!

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#109

Post by choo-t »

M95D wrote: post #100
choo-t wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?

It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).

Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted. It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#110

Post by locao »

janfoeh wrote: post #96
bit_logic wrote: post #68

Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: - allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app - effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except f…

For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice. About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limi…

Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
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