@ctietze I am 28 and I already find many appliances (especially those coming with an LED panel with only some clueless icons), and most software (especially Microsoft's) impossible to use 💀Sadly some people actively make this world worse for their own success
@ctietze it's kind of the same problem as with little kids. Can't read, they press random parts of a touch screen, etc. That's why Tonyboxes are a thing, and despite a lot of problems with them (expensive for example), they solve a lot of usability problems.
I bought a very old school cassette/radio/CD Player for mine. You can get a big box of old cassettes for very little. The player has a bunch of nice advances too, eg it will remember the last played position of CDs.
@cfbolz TIL that a community of enthusiasts noticed the same so they created a self-made Toniebox alternative. I have almost all the parts, only RFID cards and reader is missing, so I'll assemble everything this week and see.
Benefit over the real Toniebox: you can use the RFID chips/cards to tell the device to load music from a USB stick or other type of storage. Tonies apparently require internet to get the audio you put into the cloud
@ctietze there are several of these projects (phoniebox.de is one of them) but it's hardly a solution for everyone to build one of them. I totally agree with the advantages of not needing internet though.
@ctietze This is a really cool idea! I can imagine the high pitched effect of fast-forwarding through MP3s on a hard disk. Similarly, recording from analog source should create files on that external storage. Optimally that cassette would connect to your iPhone over Bluetooth and do its magic wirelessly.
@pasi You can get all kinds of multi purpose devices targeted at blind people to get through their day, like EUR 400 audio recorders, dictation, playback, and text-to-speech devices.
But not a simple playback device for elderly people who just want to listen to some stories. :/
@jouni 'C-cassette' as in 'compact'? Yeah I do consider grabbing a pack of 90minute tapes. I've no clue how to transfer audio books to them, yet, though. There's a couple of days worth of books waiting on a drive.
(tbh I'm afraid that she'll perish before I've found enough cassettes for this, a way to transfer digital audio to them, and then getting everything into the hospital)
@ctietze We had one with an iPod 30-pin dock connector that actually sent control signals to the iPod based on the movement of the spindles. It worked pretty well.
@tuomas_h That sounds crazy. Any idea which brand or shop this was in? Can't quite find anything; maybe I'm using the wrong terms, maybe they haven't survived :)
@ctietze Pretty sure we bought it from Apple’s online store. It was a long time ago, in 2006 or so. If that’s the case I might be able to find it in the GDPR data dump, their online order history only goes back 18 months.
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