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

blog.smartere.dk

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

#231

Post by herodoturtle »

lobf wrote: post #224
herodoturtle wrote: post #216

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!

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?

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

#232

Post by fourneau »

palmotea wrote: post #32

There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space: https://us.yotoplay.com/ https://us.tonies.com/ I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seem…

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.

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

#233

Post by amiga-workbench »

ustad wrote: post #171
amiga-workbench wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whats the model?

Its a NEC MultiSync M551

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

#234

Post by tzs »

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…

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.

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

#235

Post by pvab3 »

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.

you ought to read some of the early attacks on the printing press. It sounds like your grandpa complaining about TikTok

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

#236

Post by scelerat »

rspoerri wrote: post #72

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.

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.

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

#237

Post by lifestyleguru »

taegee wrote: post #202

Nice idea but at that age any screen content is fundamentally bad for your children.

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.

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

#238

Post by Terr_ »

afandian wrote: post #13
voidUpdate wrote: post #10

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…

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!

> rename the MP3

Depending on the SD card formatting, perhaps a nice big folder of symlinks.

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

#239

Post by cush »

palmotea wrote: post #32

There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space: https://us.yotoplay.com/ https://us.tonies.com/ I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seem…

Anyone remember the Sega Pico? These remind me of that. Such an awesome product!

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

#240

Post by vel0city »

Tanoc wrote: post #198
SoftTalker wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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.

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