This is such a cool idea. I will definitely build one for my daughter, and then I can finally get rid of the old floppy disks and use them in a useful way.
Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
81–90 of 422 posts
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#82An easy way to do this is to get an inexpensive DVD / BluRay player and disks. My (expensive) BluRay player will turn the TV on and select itself via HDMI.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#83> 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.
Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-CEC) you can control everything with one remote.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#84My 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.
How can you tell? What's the thing that made you say "this is bad for her", and why is it not the same for you?
their vision is still developing and staring at a screen is not good for eye development.
it removes stimulation and interaction with the environment and replaces it with sedentary and no physical interactions.
While the exact reasons are not common knowledge, knowing TV is bad for toddlers is.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#85I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day They must be _over_ 20 years old
Probably closer to 30 years. Were floppies still prominent in 2005-2006 (legitimate question)?
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#86I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#87My 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.
How can you tell? What's the thing that made you say "this is bad for her", and why is it not the same for you?
There was a time people used think the same about books.
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#89Earlier 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.
My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
Re: Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.