> 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.
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)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
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 agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that.
So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).
The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs as well for me.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
Oddly enough, i think one of the main benefits of piracy is you have to be intentional about what to watch. You pick something and go find it. You aren't prodded into mindlessly watching whatever is suggested to you. It helps break the "addiction" loop.
I get to visit my 90-year-old mother in law a few times a week to get her TV setup (Cable box running Android TV, connected to a TV running Android TV — FML) working again.
To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.
What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
When Logitech announced they were stopping making them, I bought 3 new Logitech Harmony remotes. I'm on my last one! I don't know what I am going to do after that one dies :-(
Kids grow up with it and know everything way before the grown ups. They can't even stand up but already know how to unlock an iPhone (back in the days when there was slide to unlock)
I argue that most kids are far better at using complicated remotes and mobile phones / apps than most adults. This has been true for a long time. Programming VCRs was a dark art reserved only for teens in the 80s, and I have no doubt the Romans had similar issues :)
This kid is only 3. I doubt that he is old enough to navigate the complex on-screen menus, while taking the delays and other puzzling behaviors into account. This is not to say that young kids are stupid. But the modern device interfaces often feel like a pile of random hacks, rather than something based on the sane and well established design principles that were formulated on the basis of experience and human psychology.
When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.
The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.
I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
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.
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.
With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.
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'.
It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.
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.
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.
It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad, apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner.
Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection.
Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".
I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.
If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).
[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).
For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
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 seems to be enough.
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.
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 Bluetooth speaker from our phones, which removes a lot of the utility of the player (he can't navigate chapters, we can't set a sleep timer, we can't use our phones for other things).
The concept is great though and the specific product, walled content garden notwithstanding, has been a net win for us.
The blank cards they sell are great. We borrow audio books from the library and I rip them to a card, you can reuse them as well so don’t need to buy too many. I also put radio streams on them, like classical stations for when my sons going to bed.
People already mentioned the blank cards, but the Yoto club subscription is actually a pretty great deal. You get a ton of credits that you can just apply to books and the value works out pretty well.
You do have to watch out for Short content, but if you were buying audiobooks on Audible, you’d have the same issue .
They have blank cards. They're a minor pain to set up in their UI, you have to get the audio files from somewhere, and you have to print a sticker so it's a bit of work but very doable.
Tonie boxes are extremely widespread in Germany, and while the media are similarly priced, there's a huge used market and public libraries have them as well. Nothing is tied to a specific account or box, so there are no restrictions on resale or lending. Almost shocking in this day and age.
Haha, as a tangent: I don't get the endurance of the pout pout fish book. It teaches a terrible lesson. It bizarrely mishandles both consent and depression. Similarly bad: the rainbow fish.
Is there anything like this but for music selection? I mean, for adults. Say I want to have a dozen "albums" on my coffee table (NFC, QR, whatever), and insert one in a box to listen to them. Like an Audio CD, but without the risk of running, leveraging Spotify, or my MP3 connection. Something like in the OP, but using something less prone to stop working than a floppy disk (I was there, I remember).
yes! PhonieBox - But you built it yourself [0]. You make your own cards with nfc/rfid stickers in them, put a nfc/rfid reader somewhere nice, and hooked up to phoniebox rpi with spotify to a nice sound system.
I -have- built something like this for the TV using NFC cards, which was a great first-electronics-project for myself. That said, the most frustrating part is not the actual hardware itself but getting whatever streamer you're using to play the content you want. For example, this project required the author to WireShark and reverse engineer how Chromecast managed things.
If you do go down this route, I found that Plex offered the best deep-linking functionality and would wrap all of your content with that... but it was still somewhat unreliable.
I wanted to create something for my daughter that could just play a particular one of a curated set of programs on demand, but there are so many apps for different services, it;s so hard to know how to begin to control them all.
We checkout tons of physical audio book CDs from the local library and rip them to m4a files, right now i have 15GB of high quality content for the yotos.
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 daughter has a yoto and it has been absolutely invaluable for self directed learning and entertainment (with boundaries). But idk floppy disk seems way cooler to me!
I second the Yoto. My son and I have had much fun making our own cards and I got pretty good at extracting audiobooks from YouTube, processing them with audacity and making cards of book series that he was into. You can fit a staggering amount onto a single card (5hrs of audio if memory serves).
Honestly that was the biggest extra feature for us, we quickly exhausted all the Yoto store content that appealed, and weren't into any of the big franchise content (except a pleasantly surprising read of Pixar's "Cars") or joining the Yoto club.
These are also easy to DIY with a raspberry pi, rfid card reader, some blank cards, and phoniebox [0] for the software. I don't have much electronics experience and had it up and running fairly easily for under $40.
My twin 2yo boys have a Tonie box and absolutely love it. I hear such good things about the Yoto, I plan to get them one once they’re old enough not to rip the cards to shreds
I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
> A remote control should be portable, and this means battery-powered.
I don't know, I would have just have the kid get off their seat in between shows and walk up to the TV with drive attached and change disks there. Very similar to how you had to change VHS tapes.
Unless, of course, the above was just an excuse to do some tinkering, then it's fine and fun.
Right? This is basically just reinventing the VHS.
The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
The real benefit (outside of being a fun project for a certain type of parent) is having a curated library of shows for kids that they can use themselves.
> The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
Well, the disks here are just for fun: they just tell the player which of the stored movies to actually play.
I mean, either way, the library of disks isn’t going to fit on the couch (or wherever) with them, so they’ll be getting up at some point.
I think the portability / battery-drivenness is really just to ensure that the drive doesn’t have a cable that could break something if it were yanked on.
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, singing to kids about trying food is move effective than a well reasoned monologue.
3. Have their partner or professional handle most aspects of child raising and have a warped understanding of dealing with a precocious and active toddler.
It's great that some folks have kids that like books and keep themselves busy. It's not so great that their parents think that is the reality most parents enjoy.
Daniel Tiger was a godsend when my kids were younger. They loved it, and the little jingles helped us get through some of those tricky parenting situations. They're easy to remember, and the kids immediately understood.
I'm not going to praise Paw Patrol as something on the level of Daniel Tiger or Bluey, but it's not completely mindless. It shows problem solving, teamwork, and encourages being helpful.
PBS Kids has an app available for various devices including Apple TV, iPad, etc. Their website is also great. Strongly recommend for folks looking for a little light screen time for young kids.
I'm still in the "it depends" denial, but I grew up in a different era, where there was only something on TV for a few hours a day. Half an hour or 45 minutes of stuff aimed at kids at 3 age cohorts, toddler stuff, Sesame Street, "youth news", and an educational / entertainment / sketch show called Klokhuis (apple core / clock house).
But that was once a day, during weekdays, and no re-runs. Watching and re-watching Sesame Street clips back to back is IMO just as brainrotty to kids as the other brainrot going on at the moment.
She was so focussed on it and started crying when we hid it after only a very short time. This is not normal a behaviour. This only happens with things that are very addictive (also for example sugar). I do understand that not everybody can do it like that, but if you can create such an environment it's much better for them (in my opinion).
I won't argue that it is a universal truth but it has played out the same for my kids and my friends groups kids.
They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation. I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general. Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.
On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be worth it.
The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting. Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.
On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.
In some European countries like Germany, there are recommendations by institutions like the Federal Center for the "Protection of Children and Young People from Harmful Media (BzKJ)" about TV time or screen time in general [0]:
- 0 to 3 years: Ideally, no screen time at all. If media is used, then only in very short intervals and not every day.
- 4 to 5 years: Up to half an hour of screen time per day.
- 6 to 9 years: Up to one hour of screen time per day.
- For older children aged 10 and above, it is advisable to agree on a weekly time allowance.
I would watch up to two hours of tv a day right after school. TV time was up to 5 o clock. Earlier ages had school close at 3:30. Later ages had school close at 2:30. It was a good stress buster. And after that it was homework. Sometimes we would go out and play instead.
I agree with the 6-9 years old tv time. It is about what we did. But the 4-5 years? I know all my friends learned the most from tv this way. I did not because we didn’t have cable. We watched pbs.
Oh, I like this a lot. My kids are quite physically active, but they do love to binge video games, too. I like the idea of letting them "buy" more leisure time at their own discretion through self-disciplined work.
similar observation here, with a 2.33-year old. In small doses we've exposed him to videos[1], never unsupervised, never as a parental substitute, but there are a class of them (which happen to be the lowest-effort, highest-contrast, most insipidly soundtracked CGI dreck I can possibly imagine) which are absolute baby crack. He watched some a few months ago and now he can't get them out of his head. It has gotten to the point where we are simply at a hard "no" about any videos because it always devolves into an inconsolable tantrum tearfully begging for more video crack.
[1] kid loves trucks and garbage trucks and trains, and so for a while it was fun to pull up a video of real life trucks and trains and watch them and talk about them. We'd read a book about trucks. He'd point and say, "what's that do," and I'd explain, then say, "wait! I can show you." Which was fun, until it became triggering.
we had generally the same experience but with disney princesses
was sort of a crutch for a sick kid or when things were slammed (e.g. kid 2 or 3 was also sick or we were otherwise busy) but we had to limit them heavily.
we also made the mistake of playing her the soundtracks, which ended up with listening to Aladdin or Frozen on repeat. All told not bad music compared to the drek they're putting out on YT now...
I'm very impressed by the range of shows available on DR (Danish broadcasting). Shows about emotion, social etiquette, animals, machines and other intrigue. We do limit time, use it to reward good behaviour, and use it to recuperate after a day at nursery.
Each night the kids get a book, and we usually play music as we prepare and eat dinner.
I believe a balance of all mediums is healthy. I look forward to introducing video games to them.
I find the type of show makes a big difference, finding something thoughtful is important (and hard). We also like to set a time limit, usually 1-2 episodes to make the transition easy. Also, no tablets, just commercial-free TV so we can watch with them.
They re-enact fun/positive stuff from shows and don't get locked in or desperate for TV. Seems to work for us.
I 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 them ideal for this purpose.
QR codes on cards would work as well, if I'm understanding what this project is. The floppy disk approach has some nostalgia maybe but seems quite fragile. I quickly learned to never let my kids handle CDs/DVDs (one of the worst physical media designs ever; they are totally unprotected) as they would quickly become damaged and unplayable. Floppy disks are at least sort of protected but the same idea applies.
I still have a large number of working CDs from when I, myself, was a kid. DVDs too but they were later and more durable.
I’ve always wondered what people are doing to them? Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I was just careful with them. Maybe I don’t remember the ones that failed.
I don’t think kids are less careful now, although being screamed at for making the CD or record skip was probably a deterrent.
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.
Looks like fun and educational toy, interesting find. But why the mention of it being popular in homeschooling circles? Mentioning that in the same context makes it seem like you're not recommending the product because of that :P
"I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he could understand and use independently"
As a father I can't imagine ever leaving a 3-year-old alone with media so they can be 'independent'. If for no other reason, that's an age and developmental stage where media should be almost nonexistent in their lives.
The way i read the article, was not that the kid is unsupervised, more to give some agency.
The same way you might say to a kid, "pick out the book you want me to read to you off the shelf" this is something like, pick the video we are going to watch together.
Next time you're around children in a library look at those that are glued to their screens versus those reading picture books. Equating them as the same is so hilariously expected from a tech forum tho.
This sort of blanket judgement on media puts quite a lot of pressure on parents that require an electronic babysitter to function. Sure, it's great when you have a support network and a child who can keep themselves busy, but some of us just need Mrs. Rachel, Caillou, Daniel Tiger, etc to sedate/educate our children while we cook/clean/work/etc.
Besides, non-interactive, low-stimulation media with a plot line and simple dialog is not on the same level as giving your child a tablet and letting them have at it.
My real concern with this project is the amount of time the builder spent away from his children. Now I get it that some folks(dads on the spectrum?) might feel their best contribution to their child's development stems from something they build in the lab but your children are only young for such a short period and taking time away from them to build a custom electronic solution seems narrowminded and selfish.
Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too expensive.
A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
Someone else posting to HN used cheap flash cartridges for a "music player" like this. There is something to be said about having a ROM or ROM-like media that can store even a few megabytes of data rather than QR codes being relatively bandwidth limited and so often needing a URL to data or more URLs.
The article points out there is a useful lesson in accidentally destroying/losing a physical object in the way that floppies or VHS tapes were easy to accidentally destroy and taught young childhood lessons. QR codes are a bit harder to destroy, which can be a benefit, but also loses this tiny lesson.
They are currently $1 per disk, are reusable, and last a very long time.
It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.
You could wire in one of those small phone vibration motors and get similar noises out of it. Experimenting with different ways of mounting the motor so that it makes metallic or mechanical noises would be fun. If you really wanted to get the full audio experience you could also add another motor that spins a small, disk shaped load that you could ramp up and down for the steady whirring noises.
It is fascinating to think that after we moved everything online, we keep finding uses for physical media that needs to be read by a player.
Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible, countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less embodied by the day.
I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with, unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)! Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.
An easy at home setup is Raspberry Pi running Batocera and Zaparoo with NFC cards. If you buy a three ring binder you can neatly organize the NFC cards.
Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers for the cards.
I love these ideas. Another great implementation I've seen on here is someone using NFC/RFID chips to do something similar.
For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a python library to control the stream deck.
I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is play fart noises.
Physical media and/or interactions are a great way to help kids understand storage as a physical media and putting into and out of things.
One thing I notice with kids is they think everything is already in a device, which is not true at all, same for the internet always being available.
I see DVDs etc coming back into popularity for kids now too, because they can control and make it play, instead of fighting a youtube algorithm that is obesses with getting them to play the next video. Streaming platforms are the same and they will be leaving my life if I can't manage how they are to be used.
That combined with Youtube not allowing me to add youtube kids videos to a playlist however I wish (premium account or not) has me looking elsewhere.
An 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.
But that would teach children to expect the same deterministic output for a given input. Surely we can’t have that in the age of artificially reseeded LLMs?
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's the problem or some configuration in my computer that isn't working
I love these physical mechanisms for controlling the software that surrounds us. Not enough physical UX out there; all the industrial designers seem to be in love with single button controls or touchscreens or capacitive panels. I presume they're cheaper than switches with a nice thunk or dials with a nice clicky feel.
Unfortunately, it takes a fair bit of time and skill with microelectronics and fabrication to build these things.
My 7 year old has figured out the Roku app pretty well and can play stuff on PBS Kids or turn on the Nintendo Switch without any guidance. His 3 year old brother, not so much.
In particular what brought it to mind was a scene in one episode with a bunch of kids being shown how it works, same episode as the page's title image.
> There is a pin 34 “Disk Change” that is supposed to give this information, but this is basically a lie. None of the drives in my possession had that pin connected to anything, and the internet mostly concurs. In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch, that would engage when a disk was inserted.
I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?
Why not just burn DVDs with whatever content one wants to fetch and re-encode to SD MPEG2? It's not like kids are super critical about picture quality anyway.
Which can be a useful lesson sometimes (as the article mentions teaching that lesson with accidentally destroyed floppies). With burning one's own DVDs you potentially balance that fragility with easy replacement (just burn another copy).
A much simpler remedy is to plug a computer into the TV, then program the computer to show the desired / appropriate content. This would be much simpler than trying to design a remote control meant to circumvent a TV manufacturer's extreme dedication to removing a consumer's control over their TV.
This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also, disconnect the TV from the Internet.
This is a fun setup, I have a child due in March and have been thinking through all the things to help make things not instant for learning patience as well. While I may still to DVDs for viewing, as I kept my collection building. I do have a floppy drive available and like this idea.
For those talking about not using TV much, or that the UI is slow, my setup is a cheap projector hooked into my sound system and hooking up a laptop when streaming as necessary. Really dislike the smart anything that can be used in other ways for the reasons I already saw mentioned, but it is hard to lag something that has no Internet by looking for ads and updates for sure.
Generally it is better not to show kids those cartoons. I have 3 kids already and trust me: Stick and some piece of thread is much better. 3 hours of watching anything for the entire week is more than enough.
I find it quite a nice feeling to put a CD into CD player. That's something my kids were deprived of, but I'm trying to re-teach them.
I would say that feeling that we have everything at the tip of our fingers does not make our brains value it for some reason, but I'm not sure if it's true, and can't support it with any arguments others than anecdotical.
Reminds me of a project on here a while ago where the author had used NFC tags and home assistant to give his kids a digital library with little tap cards.
This seems a great idea conceptually, but in practice, from mine one sample data, its ways to limiting and simple for a toddler.
My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.
The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still didn’t have to put parental restrictions. But she can already choose them from the favorites list.
For nogstalgia's sake you can also a really old HDD and do some seeks (without doing anything of course) and make the HDD Led (installed on old drives) blink and make old school coffee machine sounds. This would make waiting even more "something is going to happen! ... I know it! ... just waiting to load ...".
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
Tangible, persistent interfaces are great. XR interfaces usually only scratch the surface.
Maybe we'll eventually get an AR os where you get to lean spatial reasoning instead of just floating screens. (Along side all the power tools, of course)
I do this but for music with Home Assistant. I haven't dug around much to see if it's possible to cast video from Jellyfin the same way. From what I read (and it's been a while) the Jellyfin API was more limited, but maybe that's changed by now.
The floppy disk insertion detection could take a cue from AmigaOS and try to read a track to see if it gets anything. But not sure if that would work without changing the floppy driver...
I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
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.
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!
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.
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 :)
My 3 year old learned how to use the remote and watched by himself. We just instructed him not to watch silly stuff and he learned which show teaches him something and discovered numberblocks and alphablocks by himself on youtubekids. My other son just can't comprehend how to use the remote and learned it when he's already 4.5 years old. The main method they use for discovery is the speech search.
I am estimating when this particular package of disks was purchased based on additional information I am not sharing, not how long floppy disks in general have remained available for purchase
I disagree. I limit the screen time of my kids to 20 min per day. I only allow them also to view certain content that is not too stimulating, just educational stuff. The kids do want to talk about the stuff they see and play out what they see afterwards. I see it as positive. Unlimited youtube kids, with weird slop content, absolutely harmful.
yep, my 3 year old gets a very limited amount of screen time and he only watches educational programs (not whatever cartoons his peers watch). There's is no way I want to make it _easier_ for him to watch TV, especially as he has very little interest in it already.
Looking back in time, the only benefit of watching anything on a screen as a kid is learning a foreign language. The content is always some form of a brain rot, or political, cultural, or religious propaganda.
> 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.
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)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
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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 agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that. So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).
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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.
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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.
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The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
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And not always anything to do with the TV.
I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
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I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
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When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs as well for me.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
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.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
Do you remember analog TVs? Switching channels was a sub second affair.
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Hey, trying to change the source of my monitor from HDMI-1 to DisplayPort takes 30 seconds.
10-20 seconds? What TV are you using?
I uninstalled google launcher and shitty Xiaomi apps in my Mi TV stick using ADB and switched to F-Launcher. Can't be happier with the performance.
Modern TV, yeah. TVs from 15 years ago were waaaay faster than smart TVs. Ridiculous.
When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem, I called and threatened to cancel.
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Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure out the rest, thank you.
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Our Samsung running Tizen has the obnoxious need to check if antenna-based broadcasting is available, every single time you open the settings menu.
It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.
Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
It is time for a new TV!
People are replying that OP must own an old TV, but that's missing the point: with very old non-smart TVs, menu commands were always instantaneous!
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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.
Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?
The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.
They read it but vice versa.
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Oddly enough, i think one of the main benefits of piracy is you have to be intentional about what to watch. You pick something and go find it. You aren't prodded into mindlessly watching whatever is suggested to you. It helps break the "addiction" loop.
I get to visit my 90-year-old mother in law a few times a week to get her TV setup (Cable box running Android TV, connected to a TV running Android TV — FML) working again.
To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.
What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
When Logitech announced they were stopping making them, I bought 3 new Logitech Harmony remotes. I'm on my last one! I don't know what I am going to do after that one dies :-(
Kids grow up with it and know everything way before the grown ups. They can't even stand up but already know how to unlock an iPhone (back in the days when there was slide to unlock)
I always find it amusing when I see a toddler knows to press skip ad on YouTube.
> I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
Plus kids have a special motivation, much more urgent, in getting to know how to work that little plastic box full of buttons.
I argue that most kids are far better at using complicated remotes and mobile phones / apps than most adults. This has been true for a long time. Programming VCRs was a dark art reserved only for teens in the 80s, and I have no doubt the Romans had similar issues :)
This kid is only 3. I doubt that he is old enough to navigate the complex on-screen menus, while taking the delays and other puzzling behaviors into account. This is not to say that young kids are stupid. But the modern device interfaces often feel like a pile of random hacks, rather than something based on the sane and well established design principles that were formulated on the basis of experience and human psychology.
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 my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.
The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.
I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
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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.
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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.
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With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.
UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
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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'.
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It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.
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.
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.
It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad, apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner.
Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection.
Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".
I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.
If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).
[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).
For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
> you need their box.
This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
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> I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
The ‘tv remote as a cursor’ is rage inducing.
The AppleTV remote (current, not previous gen) is the least bad system I’ve come across.
Especially seniors...
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 seems to be enough.
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
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 Bluetooth speaker from our phones, which removes a lot of the utility of the player (he can't navigate chapters, we can't set a sleep timer, we can't use our phones for other things).
The concept is great though and the specific product, walled content garden notwithstanding, has been a net win for us.
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The blank cards they sell are great. We borrow audio books from the library and I rip them to a card, you can reuse them as well so don’t need to buy too many. I also put radio streams on them, like classical stations for when my sons going to bed.
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People already mentioned the blank cards, but the Yoto club subscription is actually a pretty great deal. You get a ton of credits that you can just apply to books and the value works out pretty well.
You do have to watch out for Short content, but if you were buying audiobooks on Audible, you’d have the same issue .
They have blank cards. They're a minor pain to set up in their UI, you have to get the audio files from somewhere, and you have to print a sticker so it's a bit of work but very doable.
Tonie boxes are extremely widespread in Germany, and while the media are similarly priced, there's a huge used market and public libraries have them as well. Nothing is tied to a specific account or box, so there are no restrictions on resale or lending. Almost shocking in this day and age.
Haha, as a tangent: I don't get the endurance of the pout pout fish book. It teaches a terrible lesson. It bizarrely mishandles both consent and depression. Similarly bad: the rainbow fish.
Like some others, I built my own too: https://rdeaton.space/posts/screenless-digital-jukebox/
Is there anything like this but for music selection? I mean, for adults. Say I want to have a dozen "albums" on my coffee table (NFC, QR, whatever), and insert one in a box to listen to them. Like an Audio CD, but without the risk of running, leveraging Spotify, or my MP3 connection. Something like in the OP, but using something less prone to stop working than a floppy disk (I was there, I remember).
yes! PhonieBox - But you built it yourself [0]. You make your own cards with nfc/rfid stickers in them, put a nfc/rfid reader somewhere nice, and hooked up to phoniebox rpi with spotify to a nice sound system.
https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
You can also buy ready-made PhonieBoxes on some marketplace sites.
I -have- built something like this for the TV using NFC cards, which was a great first-electronics-project for myself. That said, the most frustrating part is not the actual hardware itself but getting whatever streamer you're using to play the content you want. For example, this project required the author to WireShark and reverse engineer how Chromecast managed things.
If you do go down this route, I found that Plex offered the best deep-linking functionality and would wrap all of your content with that... but it was still somewhat unreliable.
I wanted to create something for my daughter that could just play a particular one of a curated set of programs on demand, but there are so many apps for different services, it;s so hard to know how to begin to control them all.
Is this available to replicate? I've been thinking about this for some time, for music albums, specifically.
A friend of mine built an open-source version of this! Check it out at https://github.com/tommyblue/favolotto
We checkout tons of physical audio book CDs from the local library and rip them to m4a files, right now i have 15GB of high quality content for the yotos.
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 daughter has a yoto and it has been absolutely invaluable for self directed learning and entertainment (with boundaries). But idk floppy disk seems way cooler to me!
I second the Yoto. My son and I have had much fun making our own cards and I got pretty good at extracting audiobooks from YouTube, processing them with audacity and making cards of book series that he was into. You can fit a staggering amount onto a single card (5hrs of audio if memory serves).
Honestly that was the biggest extra feature for us, we quickly exhausted all the Yoto store content that appealed, and weren't into any of the big franchise content (except a pleasantly surprising read of Pixar's "Cars") or joining the Yoto club.
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These are also easy to DIY with a raspberry pi, rfid card reader, some blank cards, and phoniebox [0] for the software. I don't have much electronics experience and had it up and running fairly easily for under $40.
[0] https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
I thought the same before we actually got a Yoto. This is one of those "I could easily DIY that" things that you really couldn't.
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The toni boxes are also quite hackable https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/
At least the older model. Don't know about their latest model with gaming and everything.
My twin 2yo boys have a Tonie box and absolutely love it. I hear such good things about the Yoto, I plan to get them one once they’re old enough not to rip the cards to shreds
Yoto is quite amazing, well thought-out product, for both parents and kids.
I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
Anyone remember the Sega Pico? These remind me of that. Such an awesome product!
> A remote control should be portable, and this means battery-powered.
I don't know, I would have just have the kid get off their seat in between shows and walk up to the TV with drive attached and change disks there. Very similar to how you had to change VHS tapes.
Unless, of course, the above was just an excuse to do some tinkering, then it's fine and fun.
Right? This is basically just reinventing the VHS.
The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
The real benefit (outside of being a fun project for a certain type of parent) is having a curated library of shows for kids that they can use themselves.
> The plus is that you get higher quality video and don't have to press the play and rewind button, but the disks are easier to lose/break (outside of the player).
Well, the disks here are just for fun: they just tell the player which of the stored movies to actually play.
I mean, either way, the library of disks isn’t going to fit on the couch (or wherever) with them, so they’ll be getting up at some point.
I think the portability / battery-drivenness is really just to ensure that the drive doesn’t have a cable that could break something if it were yanked on.
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, singing to kids about trying food is move effective than a well reasoned monologue.
Some commenters either:
1. Do not have children.
2. Have a strong support network.
3. Have their partner or professional handle most aspects of child raising and have a warped understanding of dealing with a precocious and active toddler.
It's great that some folks have kids that like books and keep themselves busy. It's not so great that their parents think that is the reality most parents enjoy.
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Daniel Tiger was a godsend when my kids were younger. They loved it, and the little jingles helped us get through some of those tricky parenting situations. They're easy to remember, and the kids immediately understood.
I'm not going to praise Paw Patrol as something on the level of Daniel Tiger or Bluey, but it's not completely mindless. It shows problem solving, teamwork, and encourages being helpful.
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PBS Kids has an app available for various devices including Apple TV, iPad, etc. Their website is also great. Strongly recommend for folks looking for a little light screen time for young kids.
The sentence that TV is generally bad for kids at that age is generally true independent of the content. It's the medium itself.
I'm still in the "it depends" denial, but I grew up in a different era, where there was only something on TV for a few hours a day. Half an hour or 45 minutes of stuff aimed at kids at 3 age cohorts, toddler stuff, Sesame Street, "youth news", and an educational / entertainment / sketch show called Klokhuis (apple core / clock house).
But that was once a day, during weekdays, and no re-runs. Watching and re-watching Sesame Street clips back to back is IMO just as brainrotty to kids as the other brainrot going on at the moment.
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?
She was so focussed on it and started crying when we hid it after only a very short time. This is not normal a behaviour. This only happens with things that are very addictive (also for example sugar). I do understand that not everybody can do it like that, but if you can create such an environment it's much better for them (in my opinion).
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I won't argue that it is a universal truth but it has played out the same for my kids and my friends groups kids.
They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation. I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general. Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.
On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be worth it.
The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting. Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.
On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.
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There was a time people used think the same about books.
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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.
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not that guy, but it would cause our kids to completely emotionally deregulate, and become fixated on the TV for a while.
and most TV is not great for people. there is a reason depression and anxiety correlate with TV time
In some European countries like Germany, there are recommendations by institutions like the Federal Center for the "Protection of Children and Young People from Harmful Media (BzKJ)" about TV time or screen time in general [0]:
0 - https://familienportal.de/familienportal/lebenslagen/kinder-...
I would watch up to two hours of tv a day right after school. TV time was up to 5 o clock. Earlier ages had school close at 3:30. Later ages had school close at 2:30. It was a good stress buster. And after that it was homework. Sometimes we would go out and play instead.
I agree with the 6-9 years old tv time. It is about what we did. But the 4-5 years? I know all my friends learned the most from tv this way. I did not because we didn’t have cable. We watched pbs.
My kids never had tablets or individual access to screens and yet we have tv and movies and now video games as the children age.
The current rule is video games require 1 minute of exercise for one minute of usage. This is a self regulating time limit that has worked well.
Oh, I like this a lot. My kids are quite physically active, but they do love to binge video games, too. I like the idea of letting them "buy" more leisure time at their own discretion through self-disciplined work.
similar observation here, with a 2.33-year old. In small doses we've exposed him to videos[1], never unsupervised, never as a parental substitute, but there are a class of them (which happen to be the lowest-effort, highest-contrast, most insipidly soundtracked CGI dreck I can possibly imagine) which are absolute baby crack. He watched some a few months ago and now he can't get them out of his head. It has gotten to the point where we are simply at a hard "no" about any videos because it always devolves into an inconsolable tantrum tearfully begging for more video crack.
[1] kid loves trucks and garbage trucks and trains, and so for a while it was fun to pull up a video of real life trucks and trains and watch them and talk about them. We'd read a book about trucks. He'd point and say, "what's that do," and I'd explain, then say, "wait! I can show you." Which was fun, until it became triggering.
we had generally the same experience but with disney princesses
was sort of a crutch for a sick kid or when things were slammed (e.g. kid 2 or 3 was also sick or we were otherwise busy) but we had to limit them heavily.
we also made the mistake of playing her the soundtracks, which ended up with listening to Aladdin or Frozen on repeat. All told not bad music compared to the drek they're putting out on YT now...
I'm very impressed by the range of shows available on DR (Danish broadcasting). Shows about emotion, social etiquette, animals, machines and other intrigue. We do limit time, use it to reward good behaviour, and use it to recuperate after a day at nursery. Each night the kids get a book, and we usually play music as we prepare and eat dinner.
I believe a balance of all mediums is healthy. I look forward to introducing video games to them.
I find the type of show makes a big difference, finding something thoughtful is important (and hard). We also like to set a time limit, usually 1-2 episodes to make the transition easy. Also, no tablets, just commercial-free TV so we can watch with them.
They re-enact fun/positive stuff from shows and don't get locked in or desperate for TV. Seems to work for us.
I 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 them ideal for this purpose.
QR codes on cards would work as well, if I'm understanding what this project is. The floppy disk approach has some nostalgia maybe but seems quite fragile. I quickly learned to never let my kids handle CDs/DVDs (one of the worst physical media designs ever; they are totally unprotected) as they would quickly become damaged and unplayable. Floppy disks are at least sort of protected but the same idea applies.
I still have a large number of working CDs from when I, myself, was a kid. DVDs too but they were later and more durable.
I’ve always wondered what people are doing to them? Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I was just careful with them. Maybe I don’t remember the ones that failed.
I don’t think kids are less careful now, although being screamed at for making the CD or record skip was probably a deterrent.
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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.
Did you build an enclosure for this?
https://thepihut.com/products/highpi-raspberry-pi-b-plus2-ca...
This is fantastic! I feel like it's right at the sweet spot where "comically overengineered fun project" and "actually a great idea" overlap.
There’s a product with a similar UX for audio books called a Yoto Box https://us.yotoplay.com/ It’s very popular in Charlotte Mason homeschool circles
Looks like fun and educational toy, interesting find. But why the mention of it being popular in homeschooling circles? Mentioning that in the same context makes it seem like you're not recommending the product because of that :P
I didn't read that connotation into it, but maybe in your social circles people have a problem with homeschooling?
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> But why the mention of it being popular in homeschooling circles?
Good point, it was superfluous info. It's how I found out about it
Recently bought a Yoto Mini and quite happy with it. Remember to buy the blank cards.
And coincidentally it started off as a Raspberry Pi project.
"I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he could understand and use independently"
As a father I can't imagine ever leaving a 3-year-old alone with media so they can be 'independent'. If for no other reason, that's an age and developmental stage where media should be almost nonexistent in their lives.
The way i read the article, was not that the kid is unsupervised, more to give some agency.
The same way you might say to a kid, "pick out the book you want me to read to you off the shelf" this is something like, pick the video we are going to watch together.
Aren‘t (picture) books also media?
Next time you're around children in a library look at those that are glued to their screens versus those reading picture books. Equating them as the same is so hilariously expected from a tech forum tho.
Books (incl. picture books) engage your brain in ways that video does not.
This sort of blanket judgement on media puts quite a lot of pressure on parents that require an electronic babysitter to function. Sure, it's great when you have a support network and a child who can keep themselves busy, but some of us just need Mrs. Rachel, Caillou, Daniel Tiger, etc to sedate/educate our children while we cook/clean/work/etc.
Besides, non-interactive, low-stimulation media with a plot line and simple dialog is not on the same level as giving your child a tablet and letting them have at it.
My real concern with this project is the amount of time the builder spent away from his children. Now I get it that some folks(dads on the spectrum?) might feel their best contribution to their child's development stems from something they build in the lab but your children are only young for such a short period and taking time away from them to build a custom electronic solution seems narrowminded and selfish.
Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too expensive.
A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
Someone else posting to HN used cheap flash cartridges for a "music player" like this. There is something to be said about having a ROM or ROM-like media that can store even a few megabytes of data rather than QR codes being relatively bandwidth limited and so often needing a URL to data or more URLs.
The article points out there is a useful lesson in accidentally destroying/losing a physical object in the way that floppies or VHS tapes were easy to accidentally destroy and taught young childhood lessons. QR codes are a bit harder to destroy, which can be a benefit, but also loses this tiny lesson.
They are currently $1 per disk, are reusable, and last a very long time.
It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.
> It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
As far as I can tell, they are not.
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It wouldn't be making fun floppy disk noises then though!
You could wire in one of those small phone vibration motors and get similar noises out of it. Experimenting with different ways of mounting the motor so that it makes metallic or mechanical noises would be fun. If you really wanted to get the full audio experience you could also add another motor that spins a small, disk shaped load that you could ramp up and down for the steady whirring noises.
It is fascinating to think that after we moved everything online, we keep finding uses for physical media that needs to be read by a player.
Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible, countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less embodied by the day.
An 125 kHz RFID reader would be a way simpler and cheaper solution. Could still have a 3D-printed box/slot.
i quite like you idea. floppies are pretty easy to destroy, especially by kids. i wouldn’t trust that to last that long.
I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with, unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)! Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.
An easy at home setup is Raspberry Pi running Batocera and Zaparoo with NFC cards. If you buy a three ring binder you can neatly organize the NFC cards.
Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers for the cards.
https://batocera.org
https://zaparoo.org/docs/platforms/batocera/
I love these ideas. Another great implementation I've seen on here is someone using NFC/RFID chips to do something similar.
For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a python library to control the stream deck.
I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is play fart noises.
Physical media and/or interactions are a great way to help kids understand storage as a physical media and putting into and out of things.
One thing I notice with kids is they think everything is already in a device, which is not true at all, same for the internet always being available.
I see DVDs etc coming back into popularity for kids now too, because they can control and make it play, instead of fighting a youtube algorithm that is obesses with getting them to play the next video. Streaming platforms are the same and they will be leaving my life if I can't manage how they are to be used.
That combined with Youtube not allowing me to add youtube kids videos to a playlist however I wish (premium account or not) has me looking elsewhere.
An 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.
But that would teach children to expect the same deterministic output for a given input. Surely we can’t have that in the age of artificially reseeded LLMs?
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's the problem or some configuration in my computer that isn't working
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)
> rename the MP3
Depending on the SD card formatting, perhaps a nice big folder of symlinks.
I love these physical mechanisms for controlling the software that surrounds us. Not enough physical UX out there; all the industrial designers seem to be in love with single button controls or touchscreens or capacitive panels. I presume they're cheaper than switches with a nice thunk or dials with a nice clicky feel.
Unfortunately, it takes a fair bit of time and skill with microelectronics and fabrication to build these things.
My 7 year old has figured out the Roku app pretty well and can play stuff on PBS Kids or turn on the Nintendo Switch without any guidance. His 3 year old brother, not so much.
Responding to the title: Made me think of Star Trek TOS food synthesizers (the precursor to replicators). They used floppy-disk-like cards as their main interface: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Food_synthesizer?file=F...
In particular what brought it to mind was a scene in one episode with a bunch of kids being shown how it works, same episode as the page's title image.
> There is a pin 34 “Disk Change” that is supposed to give this information, but this is basically a lie. None of the drives in my possession had that pin connected to anything, and the internet mostly concurs. In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch, that would engage when a disk was inserted.
I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?
Reading the drive is a mechanical process so it would be constantly making noise and wear out components
Ok, makes sense.
Why not just burn DVDs with whatever content one wants to fetch and re-encode to SD MPEG2? It's not like kids are super critical about picture quality anyway.
DVDs are significantly more fragile
Which can be a useful lesson sometimes (as the article mentions teaching that lesson with accidentally destroyed floppies). With burning one's own DVDs you potentially balance that fragility with easy replacement (just burn another copy).
Cool project! There was something quite similar but with RFID cards showed on HN a few months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
A much simpler remedy is to plug a computer into the TV, then program the computer to show the desired / appropriate content. This would be much simpler than trying to design a remote control meant to circumvent a TV manufacturer's extreme dedication to removing a consumer's control over their TV.
This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also, disconnect the TV from the Internet.
We have a similar product in Italy: https://www.myfaba.it/
In the US there's Yoto Players that use RFID cards and onboard flash memory: https://us.yotoplay.com/
And Tonies with little figures and games and such: https://us.tonies.com/
This is a fun setup, I have a child due in March and have been thinking through all the things to help make things not instant for learning patience as well. While I may still to DVDs for viewing, as I kept my collection building. I do have a floppy drive available and like this idea.
For those talking about not using TV much, or that the UI is slow, my setup is a cheap projector hooked into my sound system and hooking up a laptop when streaming as necessary. Really dislike the smart anything that can be used in other ways for the reasons I already saw mentioned, but it is hard to lag something that has no Internet by looking for ads and updates for sure.
Generally it is better not to show kids those cartoons. I have 3 kids already and trust me: Stick and some piece of thread is much better. 3 hours of watching anything for the entire week is more than enough.
This reminds me of a card swiping video game system I made years ago.
https://youtu.be/Z2xq3ns5Hsk
https://github.com/tidwall/RetroSwiper
Reminds me of HitClips from the early 2000s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips
I remember being quite entranced with one that a neighbor had. It feels like a bit of a silly format now, but perhaps it's time for a resurgence.
I find it quite a nice feeling to put a CD into CD player. That's something my kids were deprived of, but I'm trying to re-teach them.
I would say that feeling that we have everything at the tip of our fingers does not make our brains value it for some reason, but I'm not sure if it's true, and can't support it with any arguments others than anecdotical.
I made a similar Project, where i embed a NFC Tag Label and use a NFC Reader to trigger the launch of Games on Batocera, using Zaparoo as Daemon.
The kids love it and it's easy to use
Reminds me of a project on here a while ago where the author had used NFC tags and home assistant to give his kids a digital library with little tap cards.
This seems a great idea conceptually, but in practice, from mine one sample data, its ways to limiting and simple for a toddler.
My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.
The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still didn’t have to put parental restrictions. But she can already choose them from the favorites list.
That's super cool!
I built an app for managing a similar project based on something else linked here previously: https://github.com/Chuntttttt/TapeDeck/
I self-host it and it isn't exposed outside of my network, not sure if it'll work for anyone else.
Website seems to be getting the HN Hug right now. Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112142332/https://blog.smar...
For nogstalgia's sake you can also a really old HDD and do some seeks (without doing anything of course) and make the HDD Led (installed on old drives) blink and make old school coffee machine sounds. This would make waiting even more "something is going to happen! ... I know it! ... just waiting to load ...".
Cool idea!
Is the terminology correct though?
Looking at the showcased disks, in my youth we called these “stiffy disks” - owing to their stiff plastic casing.
We also had “floppy disks” - but these were larger (in size, albeit with less storage capacity) and floppier (the plastic case would bend easily).
I treasured my burgundy Dysan stiffy disk boxes!
At least in the US, the "floppy" terminology carried over when the disks went from the actual floppy 5.5" disks to the hard-case 3.5" disks.
thanks, that's an insightful comment.
so defs not a globally consistent usage of the term then?
judging by the article's authorship, i'm guessing denmark and US the same
so perhaps US and EU but not elsewhere?
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I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
I have never heard that term (for disks). Are you possibly from the UK or Australia?
> I have never heard that term
Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this sub-thread?
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as a 31 year old, I only just last year learned that what I have thought were floppy disks and everyone calls a floppy disk are indeed a stiffy...
i feel like you're onto something here...
a marketing campaign for middle-aged men perhaps
Tangible, persistent interfaces are great. XR interfaces usually only scratch the surface.
Maybe we'll eventually get an AR os where you get to lean spatial reasoning instead of just floating screens. (Along side all the power tools, of course)
I was reading this and thinking about StarTrek the original series, computer disks were just solid blocks or the 1970s FisherPrice record player.
Both really tactile and if you don’t look after them then there is a cost/consequence
My man just built a Yoto from scratch
works fine, though my kids tended to toss it around.
fairly easy to get blanks and record an mp3 on there. got a few of grandma reading favorite books, which my daughter loved.
Kinda cool, I was thinking about building a similar system, but based on NFC tags to load specific movies from my Plex server.
At least those are easier to acquire, and they can't get demagnetized :)
I do this but for music with Home Assistant. I haven't dug around much to see if it's possible to cast video from Jellyfin the same way. From what I read (and it's been a while) the Jellyfin API was more limited, but maybe that's changed by now.
The 'break it and it's gone' constraint seems weirdly empowering compared to cloud magic :/
The floppy disk insertion detection could take a cue from AmigaOS and try to read a track to see if it gets anything. But not sure if that would work without changing the floppy driver...
Also, have the TV display an image like this before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Kickstar...
I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
> Who hasn’t turned in a paper on a broken floppy disk, with the excuse ready that the floppy must have broken when the teacher asks a few days later?
I feel seen
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.
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!
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.
It almost feels like a Yoto player: https://us.yotoplay.com/
Wow, I think this is the first one of these "floppies for kids" things I've seen that actually stores something on the disk.
I am not sure physical component will help that much. Not after I once saw a kid swap between 4 different Minions DVDs every 5-10 minutes.
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 :)
While I agree with the sentiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia likely leads to them forgetting it (unless they continue to use it well beyond that age range).
My 3 year old learned how to use the remote and watched by himself. We just instructed him not to watch silly stuff and he learned which show teaches him something and discovered numberblocks and alphablocks by himself on youtubekids. My other son just can't comprehend how to use the remote and learned it when he's already 4.5 years old. The main method they use for discovery is the speech search.
I though my laptop monitor is broken for a second due to the dirty css background on this page.
This is a great idea. If it was on Etsy I would get one for my friends that have toddlers.
That only works if the kid has not seen it working normally before.
If the kids ever come across a traditional Save icon, they will be confused. ;)
I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
I am estimating when this particular package of disks was purchased based on additional information I am not sharing, not how long floppy disks in general have remained available for purchase
Probably closer to 30 years. Were floppies still prominent in 2005-2006 (legitimate question)?
In 2004 I think I would have a floppy disk in my schoolbag.
Actually buying a new pack would probably have been a few years prior to that, they last a long time with only occasional use.
06 HS grad here, every student had a mandatory floppy disk to save files to all the way up to my graduation.
A few rfid stickers would have been easier :)
Does it play exactly one video?
But RFID stickers don't have that satisfying ka-chunk and brr-brr whirr-whirr chunka noises.
hehe yes, but you can have both I thought. Let the drive do its thing but don't rely on it for the actual ID.
It's of course not the nice way to do it, but the easy one I thiiink.
What a great idea, good job.
TV=cancer
Testing
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814934.
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Nice idea but at that age any screen content is fundamentally bad for your children.
P. S. Some people do not seem to get it: It is the medium itself that is unsuitable for children in general and completely independent of the content.
I disagree. I limit the screen time of my kids to 20 min per day. I only allow them also to view certain content that is not too stimulating, just educational stuff. The kids do want to talk about the stuff they see and play out what they see afterwards. I see it as positive. Unlimited youtube kids, with weird slop content, absolutely harmful.
yep, my 3 year old gets a very limited amount of screen time and he only watches educational programs (not whatever cartoons his peers watch). There's is no way I want to make it _easier_ for him to watch TV, especially as he has very little interest in it already.
Looking back in time, the only benefit of watching anything on a screen as a kid is learning a foreign language. The content is always some form of a brain rot, or political, cultural, or religious propaganda.
Yeah man, Fantus is just recruiting for Stalin.
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