Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

Post by pwg » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #128

tete wrote: post #3

> 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. ;)

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 sourc…

Post by criddell » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

aquova wrote: post #28

bananaowl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Post by criddell » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #140

elzbardico wrote: post #91

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.

Post by pwg » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #135

SoftTalker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 su…

Post by loandbehold » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #146

loandbehold wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time people used think the same about books.

I don't think there was. But even if so, there was a time people used to think the same about drinking antifreeze, too.