401–410 of 422 posts
great way to teach your kids about choice and how to make decisions for themselves. enjoyed the author's detail on how he did it. bet his son will never forget this :)
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Plug a new chromecast into one of the HDMI ports and use that and only that and weld the setting shut so that you never have to deal with the TV’s default UI ever again.
I advocate for AppleTV but the principle is similar. Which of the two devices/companies is getting enshittified quicker? The chromecast is much cheaper, so that’s a straight win.
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…
The audio quality itself is top notch, often talented and well known voice actors, and its all free, except the cost of the blank yoto card.
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.
Generally agreed. Though, Daniel Tiger and Paw Patrol should be judged differently. Paw Patrol is mindless and addictive. If you desperately need a distraction, PBS shows are less bad. A few moments of pacification may be worth not disturbing the other airline travelers. Daniel Tiger may be helpful to parents too. Interacting with children is not intuitive. Techniques from PBS shows have helped me. For example, singi…
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The AppleTV is best in class sure but by the standards of older, pre-internet technology the lag is noticeable. The UI itself is smooth, but any time it makes a network call (which it does for damn near everything) it can take some amount of time. And once you introduce receivers and HDMI-ARC and auto switching and frame-rate differences between applications the whole thing just fucking sucks. It’s constantly turning…
> sound cutting out and back on. Absolutely kills me. No one else in the house notices when sound is from the shitbox tv speakers rather than the soundbar. It’s a high end Sony, and it’s sound quality is shameful. Can we sacrifice a few cm of thinness and have some sound?
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Torrenting is easy, but what are you goung to do with the torrented files then? Without additional external hardware you probably won't be able to play your downloaded files on your large TV, and most people prefer a laggy simple route over having to do more work. I do torrent from time to time, but the hassle associated with the whole process really highlights why streaming apps took over.
What additional hardware? If you're torrenting you have a PC or laptop, plug said device into your TV and you're good to go
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Turn on TV: 3 seconds Roku boots: 10 seconds Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries) Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds Select profile: 3 seconds Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)…
Everybody complains about performance. Slow software feels like poison. Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objecti…
also word, excel, ...
(which might actually be a large javascript framework on azure nowadays)
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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.
I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway. What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agon…
lol, it's not money. It's like windows 7 vs 11. each new generation of TVs have more intrusive bloated UIs.
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We have a Yoto here as well, for our six-year-old. The concept is great - RFID as a replacement for cassette audiobooks (with fewer storage limitations!). I do wish it integrated better with sources of free audiobooks. The Libby app gets us access to a lot of audiobooks through the public library, many of which are not even available for purchase through the Yoto player. We can only use it to play them for him as a B…
The Yoto system actively encourages you to buy 'blank' cards to fill with your own content, and the process is relatively simple. Simply remove the DRM from the borrowed media, (convert to an appropriate format if required), then upload to the card. Wipe your card whenever you borrow a new audio book from the libarary for a clear conscience. yt-dlp is also a great source of content.
For Christmas, we got several members of our extended family to read their favourite story book into a voice memo on our phone(s). We set up a blank Yoto card with all those stories, and with custom icons.
It was a great stocking stuffer for our toddler, and very cute to hear him call out who is reading :)
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If you think Peackock is bad, try Paramount+, it's an impressively bad app that, along with being very laggy, will crash fairly regularly too.
If you have a pihole or something that blocks ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from crashing daily to no crashes in many months. Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be…