Man, this really smacks of OG Star Trek when Mr. Spock would pop in one of his little plastic data cards to run an application or load data ... I love it!
Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
51–60 of 422 posts
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#52Earlier 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.
Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#53> 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. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things This book - or its later editions, should be required reading for ALL engineers and designers. Actually for their managers as well.
They read it but vice versa.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#54> 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.
This is definitely due to the age/quality/model of the TV. I have 4 LG TVs across the house and the newest/biggest is 100x faster than the oldest.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#55> 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. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things This book - or its later editions, should be required reading for ALL engineers and designers. Actually for their managers as well.
The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#56I love this! I really wanted to go down this road when my kids were younger, but the paucity of floppys and the low storage space made me go down the Avery business card print outs with RFID stickers on the back and a raspberry pi with an RFID reader inside. Of course, the author is using the floppys as hooks instead of as storage media...what a great idea. The tactile response and the art you can stick to them makes…
I don't think I can get my hands on a floppy drive, but I still have an ancient computer somewhere with a DVD player in it. While not as cool, I had been considering turning into a simple media station for the specific purpose of letting my kid pick what music to play or video to watch by herself, without needing a screen to navigate it.
Like you, it never occurred to me that I can also just use specific DVDs or CDs as hooks for videos to be streamed, or media downloaded on a hard drive. So that suddenly makes the whole project a lot more interesting, and possibly easier too.
Buying a large pack of burnable DVDs is a lot cheaper and sustainable than using SD-cards like other commenters suggested.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#57> 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.
When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#58Man, this really smacks of OG Star Trek when Mr. Spock would pop in one of his little plastic data cards to run an application or load data ... I love it!
Like an SD or CompactFlash card? They even used to "run an application" as you inserted them, courtesy of the whole autorun.inf support - right up until that became a serious security concern.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#59I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#60Earlier 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 don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.