I only wish it weren't named Yaya, as I hate promoting the idea that old women are the pinnacle of technological ineptness. I know that wasn't the intent, but still. It's unfortunately a common expression to say "This product is so easy, even your grandmother can use it!" As if the only group more incompetent than old people, is old women (or, if you prefer, the only group more incompetent than women are old women).…
Agreed. The "even a mom can do it" is broken on so many levels. There's a documentary about the developers of Mozilla, and one of them makes a comment while golfing (I think) in response to this cliche. He says, "My mother writes optimizing compilers." Can't remember the film or the person, but they were wearing launch t-shirts that read "zaro boogs" (zero bugs) still sticks in my head. EDIT: Pretty sure it was "Code…
Yayagram
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Re: Yayagram
#92Re: Yayagram
#93I only wish it weren't named Yaya, as I hate promoting the idea that old women are the pinnacle of technological ineptness. I know that wasn't the intent, but still. It's unfortunately a common expression to say "This product is so easy, even your grandmother can use it!" As if the only group more incompetent than old people, is old women (or, if you prefer, the only group more incompetent than women are old women).…
Re: Yayagram
#94I built out a simple "technology access" solution for my late grandma about five years ago. It was just some simple scripts running on a raspberry pi. The scripts would fetch emails from a gmail account, extract the attachments, and display them on loop. The subject line of the email, sender and the date were overlayed on the image. The advantage over those IoT picture frame products was that I could use any display…
Re: Yayagram
#95I think it's amusing to imagine what the fifty-years-from-now equivalent of this might look like. "I built a fake 'cell phone' that lets my grandpa 'text' me, it translates the words into thoughts and beams them directly to my neural implant."
Probably be a web service that does that for you. Like those old fax webservices.
Re: Yayagram
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally get that. My point is that "Even your grandmother can use it" is still a common saying, combining both sexism and agism, and we should stop promoting that notion. To illustrate this, if it was this guy's uncle who was techno-challenged and he named it "Unclegram", probably most people would be scratching their heads. But we see Yayagram and it "makes sense"... because of course grandmothers struggle with tech…
Absolutely. I'm very sensitive to that kind of thing because I have a 90-year-old mother who I hate people writing off like that. But unless I missed it he doesn't say "Even your grandmother can use it" in his thread does he? I just feel like you're picking the wrong item to hang this argument from.
Re: Yayagram
#97I built out a simple "technology access" solution for my late grandma about five years ago. It was just some simple scripts running on a raspberry pi. The scripts would fetch emails from a gmail account, extract the attachments, and display them on loop. The subject line of the email, sender and the date were overlayed on the image. The advantage over those IoT picture frame products was that I could use any display…
I wish I could buy and ship this to my mom. Don’t have the time to set it up and she lives far away.
Re: Yayagram
#98This is brilliant. A single device that does one thing, and does it (hopefully) really well. It is a much needed antidote to the "all in one" apps we are seeing more and more of. Touchscreens really embody the "all in one" design pattern, and lend themselves to those types of apps. That's after all what they're intended for: interchangeable interfaces. Nice to see a modern service being used with an analog interface.
This is why I really enjoy the Kindle I just bought. A single use: reading books.
Re: Yayagram
#99Is there a way to create something like this for video calls? An always-on device that can make calls through Skype or similar? Or are the protocols too closed and apps too unavailable to make it possible.
Re: Yayagram
#100The use of an XLR cord is a stroke of genius. Having the state of the machine clearly visible and manipulatable by people with fine motor problems solves 90% of the problems I encounter when volunteering with the elderly.
It appears to be using an 1/4" patch cord, not an XLR cable! XLR is the cable (and connector) with 3 pins as is used with microphones and carries a balanced signal - 1 leg is ground, then the other two are inverted signals to minimize noise.
The way it works is so simple yet genius. Say the main signal is +x. Then one of the pins will carry -x. At the end, the receiving end will invert -x and add the two signals together. This gives x + -(-x) = 2x. So it gives twice the power. Great. So what?
Well, if you introduce noise into the chain, it gets canceled out! Pin 1: X + noise Pin 2: -X + noise
Final = pin1-pin2 = X+noise + X-noise = 2X
Brilliant.