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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

#41

Post by walthamstow »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #39
andrewblossom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#42

Post by commandlinefan »

bananaowl wrote: post #6
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. ;)

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by wafflemaker »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #39
andrewblossom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#44

Post by arscan »

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…

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.

1. https://us.yotoplay.com/products/the-pout-pout-fish

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

#45

Post by Lalabadie »

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!

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)

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

#46

Post by mikestew »

wafflemaker wrote: post #43
arrozconcosas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by catlikesshrimp »

andrewblossom wrote: post #37
tantalor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Keep in mind: "Is your android TV streaming box part of a botnet?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037556

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

#48

Post by brk »

tantalor wrote: post #24
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. ;)

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.

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.

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

#49

Post by robinsonb5 »

bananaowl wrote: post #6
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. ;)

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.

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.

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

#50

Post by c22 »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #39
andrewblossom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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