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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

141–150 of 353 posts

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#141
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

Never experienced those problems with Tizen but sometimes it lags like hell. After it warms up it's pretty fast; Unfortunately there's no Crunchyroll app yet.

I have a Tizen Samsung TV. It is super laggy. Like 3+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote. I found some anti-virus options (?!) deep in the TV settings. Turning real-time anti-virus scanning off made that TV almost usable again.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#142

I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser. Virtually universally, videos are embedded in webpages, and occasionally a link is provided that downloads rather than plays a video. So I think this is just a use-case issue: the average user is exceedingly unlikely to ever want to watch a raw video file specified by…

Before Youtube this was a thing, just as streaming radio was a thing before Pandora. You'd get a URL and the URL would stream radio or video instead of being a website.

Obviously the protocol descriptor would be different from HTTP/HTTPS.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#143

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it. But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, her…

As much as HN wants to whine about it, the truth is that Javascript is a primitive, basic, use case of the internet.

I mean, if you're going to wax lyrical about how what your making should support that basics, you should at least first make sure you're doing the same thing.

Otherwise, you're just demonstrating exactly why Roku doesn't have a way to input a URL to play media.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.... Note for OP: The reason this breaks without Javascript is because it's rendering the Markdown clientside. That could be moved to part of the build process without increasing your hosting requirements at all. I can see that you already have https://github.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net/blob/master... started, so I'm assuming you know this already and t…

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Even without adding a build step, would you be willing to add a tag to your index.html that just linked to the Github repo in general? It wouldn't even need to be specific to each individual post.

While admittedly some readers here are purely focusing on the irony of supporting "the primitive, simple case", for the most part non-JS users are willing to meet sites halfway on this. I'm totally fine manually navigating a Github repo to get at posts, I wouldn't be irritated at all in that situation, I wouldn't have even commented. Right now, your site offers nothing.

Even just the below markup would have been sufficient -- it wouldn't need to be customized per-page.

  
    This site requires Javascript to function. You can view the raw text of posts on Github.
  
Just give users something, literally anything they can use to recover when your expected use-case fails.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#145
post #92
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are set top boxes But can any of them be trusted? Serious question...

Trusted with your viewing history? With a trivially regeneratable netflix password? I like keeping privacy private, but I'm having a hard time imagining what sorts of private data you are concerned with that would be going over a set top box. Or were you more worried about the STB being an attack vector into your home and other machines?

Reporting back information on your home network?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just remove the smart TV's internet access (no wifi pw, no Ethernet) and treat it as dumb? Then attach a Chromecast or whatever "smart" dongle you think has the best UI.

Depends, but generally yes, for now. In the near future though you're likely to see smart TV's and similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

> similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

All such radios can be disabled, if not by removing the antenna, then by enclosing it in a faraday cage. It is chilling, though, that these things may become necessary for basic things like appliances.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#147
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

Yeah I just link one of those Intel NUC boxes to my TV and do everything through a real OS

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#148

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it. But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, her…

As much as HN wants to whine about it, the truth is that Javascript is a primitive, basic, use case of the internet.

JS can be a highly supported tool, but it isn't itself a primitive use-case. It is an enabler of use-cases and, to OP's point, JS for the sake of loading JS isn't useful if the content of the site really didn't need it.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#149
post #119
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and I honestly don't know how I've overlooked this for so many years. It's a DLNA/UPNP client so I can cast anything I want from my media server on my computer to it (Bubble UPNP is a great app to control all this from my phone) and even though it doesn't have "ca…

Sounds cool. How easy is it to do what I talk about in the blog post and send it a URL from my phone?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#150
post #74
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

I hate them too. So I just have a large monitor. > You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things ... Huh? My media server is in a ventilated closet, so I'm using ~15 meter HDMI, USB and audio cables. It was admittedly an expensive HDMI cable, but it seems to work well enough.

I believe they're referring to a 10 ft UI, meaning optimized for viewing from 10 feet away (bigger text, not requiring precise mouse clicks, etc).
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