> 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.
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!).
I’m using an AppleTV HD with Peacock and it’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t consider NBC a niche service. After an episode ends, I need to wait for the new one to start to be sure it marks the last one as watched. When going back to the main screen, it can take upwards of 30 seconds, maybe more (it feels like an eternity), for the “watch next” to update. If I don’t wait for it to update, it will start playing an old episode the next time I try to launch it. This lag also persists over app switching. So if I stop watching a show, switch to something else for a while, then go back to Peacock and quickly go into the series I was watching, it will play old stuff.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.
Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly written.
The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
My television has a > 5 second lag on bringing up the input device selection. The buttons don’t actually respond when the menu appears, it’s about a second after that before they work
My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet.
I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
It’s a matter of time before tv manufacturers start requiring an app to sync with the TV to set it up.
That would let them glean information about you every time you use said app.
You’re still getting around this with a 3rd party device like an Apple TV for the most part but if it’s required to even turn it off or on it’ll be enough to sync any metadata that it holds
The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
The AppleTV is best in class sure but by the standards of older, pre-internet technology the lag is noticeable. The UI itself is smooth, but any time it makes a network call (which it does for damn near everything) it can take some amount of time. And once you introduce receivers and HDMI-ARC and auto switching and frame-rate differences between applications the whole thing just fucking sucks. It’s constantly turning off and on and has sound cutting out and back on.
And that’s assuming the apps are well written, which they are not.
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 tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
You can purchase commercial signage displays that are just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it connect to the internet.
I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. £300 for a 55" 4K panel. The only thing I can ding it for is that the backlight local dimming is done in columns which is extremely distracting, so I turn it off. You have to remember this thing is designed to sit in a shop window in direct sunlight.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
Dumb TVs really don’t exist anymore. You just have to buy a smart one and treat it like it’s dumb.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
You don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.
The monitor I use for work is 43” and can double as a TV. It also has 4 HDMI inputs, which can act as 4 displays. I could, in theory, watch TV via a streaming box, play a console, and still have the equivalent of 2 21” monitors going at the same time. I’d love this kind of flexibility on my primary TV in the living room.
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.
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.
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.
I do wonder how much of that is just convenience, a lot of people just don't want to bother, even if they would figure it out if they tried - they just don't. Your grandmother probably could've figured it out, but tapes were just much more convenient even if you had to rewind them (Obviously there's a learning curve, though)
Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple.
One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.
I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.
I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).
Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen broadcast stations you could choose from.
That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.
This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF.
The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
> new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition,
Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture.
With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.
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'.
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.
Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.
Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.
Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)
I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10 minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set up often you'd always have to go back and read the instructions again the next time.
I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).
who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)
I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.
In the long run shareholders care about customers though, not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market has always been about something other than fundamentals, but in the long run shareholders who care about customers tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Yoto system actively encourages you to buy 'blank' cards to fill with your own content, and the process is relatively simple. Simply remove the DRM from the borrowed media, (convert to an appropriate format if required), then upload to the card. Wipe your card whenever you borrow a new audio book from the libarary for a clear conscience. yt-dlp is also a great source of content.
This is true - we've taken advantage of it somewhat (my wife ripped Harry Potter this way, and we recorded ourselves narrating some favorites).
Mainly (shamefully) "Simply remove the DRM" is doing some work in your sentence. We just, uh, haven't gotten together the executive function to figure out how to do it with the Libby app on the iPhone. As a Hacker News poster I want to be the type of person who figures this out. But, I have not.
The make your own cards are really nice for this. We bought a bunch of them and you can add any mp3s you want onto them. We even print stickers to put on the front.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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).
My three year old would do the same thing if he was playing in his sandbox and I abruptly picked him up and carried him away from what he was doing though. In my experience managing transitions between activities is one of the most important things. If I let my him watch a video and I tell him "I'm going to turn off the TV when it ends", he just goes back to playing with his toys when it goes off.
Don't get me wrong, I think screen time can definitely be a problem. I just think it mostly comes down to whether or not the screen time is at the expense of something else more constructive.
>> started crying when we hid it after only a very short time
I'd cry too if you showed me a bright colorful shiny fun new thing and then took it away after only two minutes.
Part of what you're seeing is the novelty. There does seem to be something about screens, but it's possible to have healthy screen habits as a young child. My 3 year old enjoyed a 25-minute episode of Wild Kratts on PBS Kids on our TV while we finished packing up for a trip to the aquarium today. No problems turning it off once the episode was over and it was time to go. It's not his first time watching TV though.
My approach to these kinds of things is different: these are really important opportunities to teach moderation and to teach the social skills of learning to have fun things in moderation.
I think it's quite important to introduce these addictive things into their lives, in a way that teach how to enjoy them carefully and in small chunks.
Understanding of what is happening is often very limited. When I read books or talk to her, I sometimes use words that are unknown to her, she only started asking for the meaning of them recently (she just turned 3). So she will probably only understand 20%-30% even when she understands conversations quite well at home. She is still missing cultural context. She is only starting to understand the difference between a living and a stuffed animal.
In an animation movie somebody might hit somebody else, which appears funny to an adult. A child might just take this as normal behaviour and repeats it the next time she sees somebody and doesn't understand why it's not funny.
Understanding the real world is difficult enough for her.
But that's an issue with the content, not the medium, right? There will be shows geared exactly towards kid that age that teach them the right lessons.
There absolutely was. "reading addiction" was a medical diagnosis in 18th/19th century Europe. And if you read some of the essays about negative effects of reading from this time, it's pretty striking how similar it is to modern views on TV. There was even a German term of that time "Leseseuche" which literally translates as "reading plague".
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.
Hard disagree with ‘great to be bored’ - being bored is one of the worst possible feelings, that you’re wasting your time doing nothing when there is almost certainly something you would rather be doing.
As a child I used to hate the feeling of boredom, knowing that I could be doing something I wanted to do. As an adult I am hardly ever bored, and it’s a strict improvement, never have I ever found myself wishing I could just go back to being bored.
Boredom is such a negative emotion that learning to manage it effectively becomes an essential life skill. Learning to set yourself up for success / be prepared required forethought to anticipate the possibility of boredom and come prepared to deal with it. Acting out on boredom is childish, learning to keep yourself occupied so you don’t become bored is mature.
> Hard disagree with ‘great to be bored’ - being bored is one of the worst possible feelings, that you’re wasting your time doing nothing when there is almost certainly something you would rather be doing.
You <---> The point
Being bored is what inspires a kid to daydream for themselves and/or get off their arse and try something new.
Being constantly "entertained" by a TV or fondle slab is an anathema to creativity and independent thought. For children and adults.
> their vision is still developing and staring at a screen is not good for eye development.
Is that true? The American Association of Pediatrics doesn't list that as a concern on their page "Health Effects Of Young Kids Being On Screens Too Long" (which is focused on children aged 2-11). Do you have a source I could review for that claim?
(The AAP page about media recommendations for 0-2 also doesn't say anything about eye-development, but _does_ recommend entirely against screen-time for that age-group except for video conversations with people)
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.
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.
Some people really get the idea of only handling it around the edges. Lots of other people just handle them however they want and have no problems touching the media anywhere. Especially kids, which often don't have the cleanest hands at any given moment.
Lots of kids will handle them however they want. They'll pick them up with greasy, sticky hands right on the media section. They won't necessarily care about ensuring they're properly in the drive tray. They'll jam all kinds of things into the drive slots. They'll drop them on the floor and step on them, toss them in a toy box when told to clean their room, etc.
Obviously not all kids will be this way, but many will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> maybe in your social circles people have a problem with homeschooling
In general I think it's a very American thing, and considering the education problem the US suffers from, probably explains a part of that. Most other countries have very limited amount of homeschooling even allowed, because of all the drawbacks with it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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).
I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
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 ...".
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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!).
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.
I’m using an AppleTV HD with Peacock and it’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t consider NBC a niche service. After an episode ends, I need to wait for the new one to start to be sure it marks the last one as watched. When going back to the main screen, it can take upwards of 30 seconds, maybe more (it feels like an eternity), for the “watch next” to update. If I don’t wait for it to update, it will start playing an old episode the next time I try to launch it. This lag also persists over app switching. So if I stop watching a show, switch to something else for a while, then go back to Peacock and quickly go into the series I was watching, it will play old stuff.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.
Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly written.
The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
My television has a > 5 second lag on bringing up the input device selection. The buttons don’t actually respond when the menu appears, it’s about a second after that before they work
External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet.
I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Maybe a second lag
Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how people tolerate that.
It’s a matter of time before tv manufacturers start requiring an app to sync with the TV to set it up.
That would let them glean information about you every time you use said app.
You’re still getting around this with a 3rd party device like an Apple TV for the most part but if it’s required to even turn it off or on it’ll be enough to sync any metadata that it holds
My LG does just that.
The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
My samsung did this years ago. Not sure if it was truly required but I’d say this has happened.
The AppleTV is best in class sure but by the standards of older, pre-internet technology the lag is noticeable. The UI itself is smooth, but any time it makes a network call (which it does for damn near everything) it can take some amount of time. And once you introduce receivers and HDMI-ARC and auto switching and frame-rate differences between applications the whole thing just fucking sucks. It’s constantly turning off and on and has sound cutting out and back on.
And that’s assuming the apps are well written, which they are not.
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).
> Perfect for skipping advert breaks
The mute button is the next best thing.
Advertisements become much less irritating when silenced. I'm surprised so few people appear to mute advert breaks.
Yeah, that's the next best. I taught my kid to mute adverts from an early age.
It really winds up one family member who works in TV advertising, so that's a bonus.
This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
You can purchase commercial signage displays that are just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it connect to the internet.
but the markup is quite high
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
I got mine 2nd hand on eBay as new old stock. £300 for a 55" 4K panel. The only thing I can ding it for is that the backlight local dimming is done in columns which is extremely distracting, so I turn it off. You have to remember this thing is designed to sit in a shop window in direct sunlight.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
Whats the model?
Dumb TVs really don’t exist anymore. You just have to buy a smart one and treat it like it’s dumb.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
Or one could just, you know, not connect it to the Internet rather than ripping apart your new TV.
You don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.
If you never connect it to the internet, all TVs are dumb. I have an airgapped Panasonic powered by Nvidia Shield for years.
The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
Keep in mind: "Is your android TV streaming box part of a botnet?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037556
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!
10-20 seconds? What TV are you using?
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.
It is time for a new TV!
When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem, I called and threatened to cancel.
And they immediately fixed the lag?
Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure out the rest, thank you.
The monitor I use for work is 43” and can double as a TV. It also has 4 HDMI inputs, which can act as 4 displays. I could, in theory, watch TV via a streaming box, play a console, and still have the equivalent of 2 21” monitors going at the same time. I’d love this kind of flexibility on my primary TV in the living room.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things This book - or its later editions, should be required reading for ALL engineers and designers. Actually for their managers as well.
The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.
Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?
They read it but vice versa.
they read it, understood it and then applied every way possible to game our attention span
Especially seniors...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I do wonder how much of that is just convenience, a lot of people just don't want to bother, even if they would figure it out if they tried - they just don't. Your grandmother probably could've figured it out, but tapes were just much more convenient even if you had to rewind them (Obviously there's a learning curve, though)
I'm sure you didn't intend to be arrogant and dismissive of my efforts to try to keep her current as time went on.
Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple.
One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.
I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.
This, 100%.
I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).
Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen broadcast stations you could choose from.
That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.
This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF.
The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
> new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition,
Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture.
With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.
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'.
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.
In theory, HDMI CEC should solve a lot of those problems. Unfortunately it only introduced another buggy layer.
Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?
Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ
Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.
Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.
Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)
I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10 minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set up often you'd always have to go back and read the instructions again the next time.
I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).
who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)
I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE
The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.
But that was the niche, "elite" experience. Today, a "smart TV" is the norm.
UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
In the long run shareholders care about customers though, not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market has always been about something other than fundamentals, but in the long run shareholders who care about customers tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 Yoto system actively encourages you to buy 'blank' cards to fill with your own content, and the process is relatively simple. Simply remove the DRM from the borrowed media, (convert to an appropriate format if required), then upload to the card. Wipe your card whenever you borrow a new audio book from the libarary for a clear conscience. yt-dlp is also a great source of content.
This is true - we've taken advantage of it somewhat (my wife ripped Harry Potter this way, and we recorded ourselves narrating some favorites).
Mainly (shamefully) "Simply remove the DRM" is doing some work in your sentence. We just, uh, haven't gotten together the executive function to figure out how to do it with the Libby app on the iPhone. As a Hacker News poster I want to be the type of person who figures this out. But, I have not.
The make your own cards are really nice for this. We bought a bunch of them and you can add any mp3s you want onto them. We even print stickers to put on the front.
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.
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
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!
This is fantastic! I feel like it's right at the sweet spot where "comically overengineered fun project" and "actually a great idea" overlap.
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.
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.
It's not entirely devoid of value, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Junk food contains healthy ingredients, too.
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).
My three year old would do the same thing if he was playing in his sandbox and I abruptly picked him up and carried him away from what he was doing though. In my experience managing transitions between activities is one of the most important things. If I let my him watch a video and I tell him "I'm going to turn off the TV when it ends", he just goes back to playing with his toys when it goes off.
Don't get me wrong, I think screen time can definitely be a problem. I just think it mostly comes down to whether or not the screen time is at the expense of something else more constructive.
>> started crying when we hid it after only a very short time
I'd cry too if you showed me a bright colorful shiny fun new thing and then took it away after only two minutes.
Part of what you're seeing is the novelty. There does seem to be something about screens, but it's possible to have healthy screen habits as a young child. My 3 year old enjoyed a 25-minute episode of Wild Kratts on PBS Kids on our TV while we finished packing up for a trip to the aquarium today. No problems turning it off once the episode was over and it was time to go. It's not his first time watching TV though.
My approach to these kinds of things is different: these are really important opportunities to teach moderation and to teach the social skills of learning to have fun things in moderation.
I think it's quite important to introduce these addictive things into their lives, in a way that teach how to enjoy them carefully and in small chunks.
Interesting, thanks for elaborating.
Understanding of what is happening is often very limited. When I read books or talk to her, I sometimes use words that are unknown to her, she only started asking for the meaning of them recently (she just turned 3). So she will probably only understand 20%-30% even when she understands conversations quite well at home. She is still missing cultural context. She is only starting to understand the difference between a living and a stuffed animal.
In an animation movie somebody might hit somebody else, which appears funny to an adult. A child might just take this as normal behaviour and repeats it the next time she sees somebody and doesn't understand why it's not funny.
Understanding the real world is difficult enough for her.
But that's an issue with the content, not the medium, right? There will be shows geared exactly towards kid that age that teach them the right lessons.
There was a time people used think the same about books.
I don't think there was. But even if so, there was a time people used to think the same about drinking antifreeze, too.
There absolutely was. "reading addiction" was a medical diagnosis in 18th/19th century Europe. And if you read some of the essays about negative effects of reading from this time, it's pretty striking how similar it is to modern views on TV. There was even a German term of that time "Leseseuche" which literally translates as "reading plague".
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.
Hard disagree with ‘great to be bored’ - being bored is one of the worst possible feelings, that you’re wasting your time doing nothing when there is almost certainly something you would rather be doing.
As a child I used to hate the feeling of boredom, knowing that I could be doing something I wanted to do. As an adult I am hardly ever bored, and it’s a strict improvement, never have I ever found myself wishing I could just go back to being bored.
Boredom is such a negative emotion that learning to manage it effectively becomes an essential life skill. Learning to set yourself up for success / be prepared required forethought to anticipate the possibility of boredom and come prepared to deal with it. Acting out on boredom is childish, learning to keep yourself occupied so you don’t become bored is mature.
> Hard disagree with ‘great to be bored’ - being bored is one of the worst possible feelings, that you’re wasting your time doing nothing when there is almost certainly something you would rather be doing.
You <---> The point
Being bored is what inspires a kid to daydream for themselves and/or get off their arse and try something new.
Being constantly "entertained" by a TV or fondle slab is an anathema to creativity and independent thought. For children and adults.
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.
> their vision is still developing and staring at a screen is not good for eye development.
Is that true? The American Association of Pediatrics doesn't list that as a concern on their page "Health Effects Of Young Kids Being On Screens Too Long" (which is focused on children aged 2-11). Do you have a source I could review for that claim?
https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/cente...
---
(The AAP page about media recommendations for 0-2 also doesn't say anything about eye-development, but _does_ recommend entirely against screen-time for that age-group except for video conversations with people)
https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/cente...
It’s bro-science all the way down. What if your environment is a boring room?
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.
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.
Some people really get the idea of only handling it around the edges. Lots of other people just handle them however they want and have no problems touching the media anywhere. Especially kids, which often don't have the cleanest hands at any given moment.
Lots of kids will handle them however they want. They'll pick them up with greasy, sticky hands right on the media section. They won't necessarily care about ensuring they're properly in the drive tray. They'll jam all kinds of things into the drive slots. They'll drop them on the floor and step on them, toss them in a toy box when told to clean their room, etc.
Obviously not all kids will be this way, but many will.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I think so! As far as I can google, it seems like everything available is new-old-stock or recovered discs.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
Interesting little read I fell into while looking this up!
It wouldn't be making fun floppy disk noises then though!
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.
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.
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?
> maybe in your social circles people have a problem with homeschooling
In general I think it's a very American thing, and considering the education problem the US suffers from, probably explains a part of that. Most other countries have very limited amount of homeschooling even allowed, because of all the drawbacks with 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.
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.
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.
I though my laptop monitor is broken for a second due to the dirty css background on this page.
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)
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.
Cool project! There was something quite similar but with RFID cards showed on HN a few months ago:
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
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/
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
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.
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)
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).
Website seems to be getting the HN Hug right now. Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112142332/https://blog.smar...
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 a great idea. If it was on Etsy I would get one for my friends that have toddlers.
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.
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 ...".
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/
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.
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 found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
Probably closer to 30 years. Were floppies still prominent in 2005-2006 (legitimate question)?
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.
If the kids ever come across a traditional Save icon, they will be confused. ;)
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.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814934.
What a great idea, good job.
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.
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...
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.