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Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
- amelius 5y agoEven easier (from the user's perspective) solution: 1. Make a photo of her own radio. 2. Put that photo on a tablet device. 3. Allow her to click on the photo where the buttons are. 4. Adjust stations/volume accordingly. Next step: physically operate her own radio remotely :) Or: let her bring her own radio, and use internet and an FM transmitter to relay the signals.
- x86ARMsRace 5y ago> operate her own radio remotely I can't tell if this is suggesting OP gaslight his mother-in-law
- AgoRapide 5y agoI do not agree with the tablet thing. Too many things can go wrong, and tablets are touch only, no tactile feedback. But your last idea was actually an excellent suggestion :) An ideal hacker project!
- fnord77 5y agoolder non-pc literal people seem to take to tablets very naturally though. at least from what I've seen
- _joel 5y agoIndeed, my 80+ year grandmother uses a tablet everyday
- spoonjim 5y agoI’ve seen an 80 year old with partial dementia learn how to use an iPad from cold start in about 15 minutes.
- tga 5y agoGiven an Android phone or tablet, you can get sticky NFC tags and make the device play the corresponding stream when it touches one. Stick them to photos with the radio station logo, and you’ve got a record player / Toniebox. The tablet never unlocks, so you don’t have to worry about UI quirks.
- tootie 5y agoAnother option is cut out a template in vinyl or even just some card stock (or 3d print if you can). Position each stream source icon behind the open spots. That being said, tablets aren't likely to cheaper than the device he's using.
- rakoo 5y agoEven even easier: hack an existing radio, have its buttons interact with a raspberry pi and use mopidy on that raspi: https://mopidy.com/ https://mopidy.com/
- tinus_hn 5y agoThat sounds like skeuomorphism which is a big no-no with the HackerNews crowd
- mattowen_uk 5y agoSlightly off-topic, but as much as I like all these low-tech websites (and I really do!) - I think I need some sort of extension that does this: body { max-width:900px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; } Because trying to read full width text on modern resolutions is way too wide, and I don't even run my browser full screen - I have no idea how people that do, can read it.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoI typically read either on mobile, where reader view is a single tap. On Desktop if it’s too wide (and it rarely is since I browse at 150% zoom) then popping the window to one side is generally sufficient (two taps: Cmd-Right), and if that’s not enough, follow up with Cmd-+. To be honest I never notice this particular problem because it’s easy to mitigate. The one I do notice is when someone creates an unnecessary minimum width so all the text doesn’t fit. I’m not a huge fan of max width either but it usually is a pretty minor annoyance.
- AgoRapide 5y agoAuthor here. I agree :) What I do myself on sites like this is to use CTRL+ until the text is so large that I can read multiple lines in parallell (that is the secret behind speed reading, but the lines can not be too long of course).
- faitswulff 5y agoReader mode, when it works, is a godsend for these sites.
- thejohnconway 5y agoI don’t think you’ll need an extension, most browsers still support a custom CSS file, I think.
- PowerfulWizard 5y agoI grew up reading the newspaper every day and I prefer quite a narrow margin, here is my bookmarklet for narrowing pages (and it changes font).: javascript:!function(){var e,t;e='body {margin: auto;margin-left: 100px;max-width: 540px;font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;}',t=document.createElement("style"),t.type="text/css",t.appendChild(document.createTextNode(e)),document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(t)}(); You could change the "540" to "900" for your needs. I prefer this to narrowing the window because I prefer the whole screen to have a uniform background color. Edit I don't think it is infaillible, it didn't work on this page, but it works well on pages with no markup. For more complicated site you may try this: https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/ https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/
- raesene9 5y agoStream decks are really nice, I got one recently and have been playing around with various uses. So far I've hooked it up to auto-post things to a Slack (using IFTTT) and done bindings for a MMORPG (DDO) as well as it's intended use (scene switching in OBS) All works fine and it's pretty easy to setup.
- tootie 5y agoI'm confused on what the stream deck actually is. And the elgato site is overloaded with motion graphics. Is it basically just a grid of buttons with LCDs backing them? So you can attach a dynamic icon to each button and pressing it will run some macro on the host PC?
- AgoRapide 5y agoYes
- raesene9 5y agoPretty much that. In addition to raw macros it has integrations for all the main streaming apps (e.g. OBS) which simplify the process of adding actions for them. So for example I can easily select scenes from OBS within the stream deck application to add them. In addition there's various add-ons that can be enabled, so for there are buttons that'll show your CPU usage or Internet speeds.
- seba_dos1 5y agoFYI - access to the site via HTTPS is broken, which makes it hard to access on browsers with https-only mode enabled.
- AgoRapide 5y agoThanks for the information, I will considering getting myself a SSL certificate. I did not knew this to be a problem until now.
- toast0 5y agoFYI - browsers with https-only mode enabled are broken, which makes it hard to access HTTP only sites.
- seba_dos1 5y agoFYI - "https-only" mode does not work the way you think it does ;) The site is hard to access on such browsers only because it actually does serve something over HTTPS - however, it's just an error page there.
- q3k 5y agoJust because there is something on this domain listening on :443 and serving HTTPS, doesn't mean it has to serve the same content as the HTTP on :80, or even work at all. Always-redirect-to-HTTPs plugins _are_ broken by assuming otherwise.
- seba_dos1 5y ago> doesn't mean it has to serve the same content as the HTTP Of course, that's the exact reason I wrote the original comment.
- AgoRapide 5y agoAuthor here. I took a look in IIS Admin and is unable to see WHERE did I ask it to serve https. I thought I was http only. The bindings only say http, both for the bef.no site and for the 'Default Web Site'.
- Havoc 5y agoVery wholesome :) Good way of staying in your MIL good graces too lol
- gesman 5y agoBig kudos to you for supporting mother-in-law!
- stonesweep 5y agoIf the author is reading this, you've hit/stumbled on "HTTP Live Streaming" radios which are sort of the next evolution of classic Shoutcast/Icecast generated streams. There are better clients for it out there than Chrome which could probably enhance the experience (proper audio controls, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients
- AgoRapide 5y agoI am reading this, just been busy with some errands last hour :) Thanks for the tip, a dedicated application in combination with Stream Deck sounds even better.
- paulmd 5y agothere are some audio clients with http interfaces - I know VLC does, for one. So depending on how fancy you want to get, there's quite a lot of buttons a dedicated app could push on an audio client to get it to do exactly what you want, just by sending some HTTP requests (although just plain command line may be fine).
- walrus01 5y agoYou can do an http based live stream of any video or audio using ffmpeg as a server, and VLC as a client. With the right scripting VLC can be launched in a non interactive mode and begin playing immediately.
- stonesweep 5y agoThe author is using random online radios so they don't get to choose the server end - as a client, VLC is powerful but I prefer Audacious for the user interface. (random user survey :) ) - I have the same problem with VLC on my Android, it works but I much prefer other streaming clients for the better (subjective) UI.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThat's clever as hell. The StreamDeck is really just programmable buttons that can be used for anything.
- Tarsul 5y agothe solution involves buying a 100 euro product with 6 customizable buttons (cool product but expensive). Anyone know of cheaper alternatives for a keyboard buttonset (between 4 and 20 keys)? Probably standalone numpad (with customizable keys) comes closest but maybe someone knows better.
- zachruss92 5y agoYou could do it with like an Arduino and any kind of button. There are tons of examples of using an Arduino to run a keyboard's firmware. Another project i've done was with a Rasberry pi. A benefit of that would be that the system is self contained. Their Python GPIO library is one of the easiest i've ever worked with and you could have it easily launch Chrome or Firefox programmatically and play audio without a monitor.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 5y agoI've looked but they don't seem to exist. Closest I found was MIDI pad controllers (around £40) but I'm not sure about the ergonomics of using a pad as a button. I gave up and went with an Mbed board instead. It has the advantage that you can program key sequences without writing any host software. I use it with Audacity.
- nguyenkien 5y agoI think simple website (with all your favorite channel as big black button) and pin it to taskbar would solve your problems
- chacha2 5y agoIcons on desktop
- opan 5y agoMacropads are a whole big thing in the mechanical keyboard community. You can get one that runs QMK, you can put encoders on them, have many layers, etc. https://mechwild.com/product/murphpad/ https://mechwild.com/product/murphpad/ https://knob-goblin.com/ https://knob-goblin.com/ https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad https://www.gboards.ca/product/faunchpad https://www.gboards.ca/product/faunchpad It's also worth looking into small ortholinear boards where you can do the same things, but the form factor is more horizontal or has more keys. https://mechwild.com/product/big-dill-extended-bde/ https://mechwild.com/product/big-dill-extended-bde/ https://www.gboards.ca/product/butter-stick-limited-edition https://www.gboards.ca/product/butter-stick-limited-edition https://github.com/nicinabox/lets-split-guide https://github.com/nicinabox/lets-split-guide
- kingsuper20 5y agoThat's a really good idea. For reasons I won't trouble anyone with, I've been educating myself with accessibility features on computers/phones/tablets, smart speakers, appliances, etc. It's funny how much shittier it all is than it could be. It certainly hasn't helped that the button-per-function thinking in consumer product design has been largely replaced with low cost small displays. Maybe I'll design a piano that uses sub-menus to play each note.
- kingsuper20 5y agoI was just thinking about how I'd like to redesign an internet radio. . Break apart the programming/setup from the physical interface. . Use a phone or pc for all setup, perhaps like a Google wifi router, a lot of the time this is done by a different person than the end user. . make it look like a Tivoli Model One, except with an 8 (or so) pole switch or button set. off/am/fm/aux/internet preset 1-5
- timidiceball 5y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Urbanears-Multi-Room-Bluetooth-Connected-04091774/dp/B073WBB3Z5 https://www.amazon.com/Urbanears-Multi-Room-Bluetooth-Connec... These came quite close to this (but have since been discontinued by Urbanears). Physical knob presets to internet radio stations (or turn it to “airplay/Bluetooth mode”)
- kingsuper20 5y agoThat does look pretty darn close. The other thing I worry about with internet radios is to keep the price low. It's just too easy to have the underlying webstrate (is that a word?) up and disappear. Think of Frontier or the death of the early Grace Digital radios (Reciva?)
- benhurmarcel 5y agoBut there's a big gap between the cost of producing such a device, and what the target market would ever accept to pay just to listen to the radio.
- keyrat 5y agoI have a standalone internet radio device because I also wanted buttons. To find streams I usually use Radio Garden: http://radio.garden http://radio.garden Use the network inspector while browsing stations and you'll find a working URL to the stream you can use anywhere.
- Our_Dream 5y ago>It can not be made simpler than this. Pole please…
- DonHopkins 5y agoDoes anybody sell Bluetooth Bakelite Button Boxes? http://www.johnwolff.id.au/calculators/BellPunch/PLUSBakelite-625-IMG_1539-5.jpg http://www.johnwolff.id.au/calculators/BellPunch/PLUSBakelit...
- adrianmonk 5y agoAnother retro approach: a knob that you turn that generates static when you're between stations. For extra authenticity, there should be hiss (or a station) when the knob is sitting still and crackling when it is turning.
- DonHopkins 5y agoIdeally recordings of old school retro static from the 1950's, instead the kind of modern high-tech static you get with cell phones and bluetooth and wifi and 5G networks polluting the spectrum.
- atleta 5y agoWell, he could have bought an actual wifi capable radio for around half the price of a Stream Deck. (Unless, of course, he already had the latter device.) It's an existing product.
- AgoRapide 5y agoYes, I could. It would not have been so fun. And all Internet radios I have seen so far have some features that irritate me. For instance volume is push-buttons instead of turning knobs. Actually, the only interface I would have on a radio is two turning knobs, one for volume and one for channel. Thats all. The rest could be some phone or PC setup like 'kingsuper20' suggested. Too sad Apple never gave us a radio. I might have been an Apple customer if they had.
- fooblat 5y agoI love internet radio projects. Did you consider making a DIY internet radio from a raspberry pi? That's actually what I was expecting to see based on the title. I used a rpi to make an internet radio for our living room our of a 1950s wooden console radio I picked up at a thrift store for 20 euros. Works great and keeps the illusion that the room is free of computers.
- AgoRapide 5y agoI was very limited with regard to time available. With one baby, one toddler and three more kids around there is not much free time :) I would love to put a Raspberry Pi inside an old radio myself.
- atleta 5y agoA turning knob is not the best UI for channel selection. It is a traditional one, but even my grandmother's large box radio, that must have been manufactured something like 70 years ago (not a transistor one, mind you!) had push buttons for remembering the stations. (Besides the tuning knob.) Or maybe those were 'pre-programmed', not sure. But again, if you didn't like them and had this gadget (or wanted an excuse to buy one ;) ), then it's the better solution. I was mainly reacting because it seemed like a lot of people thought that this is a generally practical solution.
- tyingq 5y agoThe photo is much higher resolution than it appears to be: http://bef.no/radio/Photo3.jpg http://bef.no/radio/Photo3.jpg Those buttons look great, and this is a very thoughtful idea.
- marsven_422 5y agoPattern recognition is NOT AI!
- ilamont 5y agoI am the family tech support person and I have learned that the things that work best are wired, tactile, and easy interfaces. After COVID hit I set up my father's home office, but recently replaced his bluetooth keyboard with a wired one which eliminates downtime and frustration. My mom likes her iPhone 5S with a real button, and I've enabled accessibility options on her large monitor to show a gigantic mouse pointer. My MIL has trouble using social media and other phone apps, but at least can answer FaceTime calls because the answering interface is so easy to use. Worth mentioning the 2016 OECD tech skills survey, which found 2/3 of people are not skilled technology users. In the U.S., <6% are level 3 (highest) while 20% can't use computers. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_9789264258051-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...
- randoramax 5y ago> at least can answer FaceTime calls because the answering interface is so easy to use. This! I can't believe how shitty every single other video call apps are! Who invented swipe-to-answe? How did they test that? It's the most anti-intuitive move I've ever experienced and it took me months of frustrations to teach my 80+ old parent when he has an Android tablet... I ended up giving him an iPad just to use FaceTime
- noisy_boy 5y agoI am probably at the opposite end of comfort with technology and still get confused on whether swiping up or swiping down will accept the call - one of the dumbest interfaces. Why, two buttons to accept and reject calls that we used to have everywhere was too complicated?!
- Too 5y agoOmg 100x yes, the answering UI on modern phones is the pinnacle example of why flat-ui needs to die. It should be the easiest UI to create with only two freaking buttons but still everyone fails so miserably bad. Shape of buttons are identical, colors are very faded and the icons to indicate phone up or down have been flattened so much you can hardly even recognize any of them is a phone. Or even worse are those you need to pick up the button and drag it either left or right to answer, without indication which direction means what until you touch. Not even Apple gets it right, half of the time the answer button is white and placed on the left side of the screen and half of the time it's green and placed on the right! How fucked up is that??! I thought i was going crazy by constantly imagining the button being on the other side last time i answered but it turned out it actually was! https://6abc.com/technology/why-your-iphone-can-accept-or-decline-some-calls-but-only-slide-to-answer-others/540404/ https://6abc.com/technology/why-your-iphone-can-accept-or-de...
- justinboogaard 5y ago+1 for tactile buttons! Through our work at GoGoGrandparent.com (a service that helps older adults and people living with disabilities use Uber/Lyft, grocery services, meal services and pharmacy services reliably without smartphones) we’ve interviewed dozens of folks living with visual impairments. The feedback that stands out the most was from a gentlemen in his 30s or 40s living with blindness since birth. Paraphrasing: “owning a smartphone was like living in a house where every time I entered a room, it was as if someone had just rearranged the furniture. Tactile buttons give me a literal feeling of control. If I get lost I can find my way.” I thought it was really powerful. Disclaimer: Our current landing page gets accessibility wrong in a lot of places and we’re in the middle of a site redesign to make it more accessible.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kingsuper20 5y agoI spent an hour or so messing with Siri on a Mac Mini I have lying around from an old contract gig. Wondering how I would use it without much (or any) vision. It's directly hooked to a fairly fast lump of hardware and communicating with a potentially huge back-end. Utterly maddening, barely useful, overly tied to Apple products, and it's a design problem I had never considered before. Kind of disappointing after watching some video of Tesla auto pilot do it's thing, perhaps natural language processing is harder. Other people have gone down this road, but it would be interesting to think about how a purely audio and button based internet and phone system would act. It's a wonderful thought problem. It could well be that the solution is not in website redesign, but in the parsing and analysis of the website. How would you describe a banking site to a sightless person?
- jodrellblank 5y agoMy understanding is that blind or visually impaired people tend to use Windows because that's where the two(?) big screenreader programs run; JAWS is one[1], I forget the other but it might be NVDA[2]. Microsoft have traditionally had some focus on accessibility, e.g. there's a video from a few years back of a blind programmer demonstrating how they program in Visual Studio[3]. Outside that, Emacspeak[4] is an eyes-free Emacs, I think it can boot into that environment; it was developed by a blind person and claims: > Emacspeak introduces several improvements and innovations when compared with screenreaders designed to allow blind users to interact with personal computers. Unlike screenreaders that speak the contents of a visual display, Emacspeak speaks the underlying information. As an example, using a calendar application with a screenreader results in the blind user hearing a sequence of meaningless numbers; In contrast, Emacspeak speaks the relevant date in an easy to comprehend manner. > The system deploys the innovative technique of audio formatting to increase the band-width of aural communication; changes in voice characteristic and inflection combined with appropriate use of non-speech auditory icons are used throughout the user interface to create the equivalent of spatial layout, fonts, and graphical icons so important in the visual interface. This provides rich contextual feedback and shifts some of the burden of listening from the cognitive to the perceptual domain. [1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ [2] https://www.nvaccess.org/download/ https://www.nvaccess.org/download/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc [4] http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/
- don-code 5y agoThis is amazing - and incidentally has given me a solution to a very real problem. My grandmother is suffering from dementia, and within the last few months has forgotten how to tune a radio. She's an avid radio listener, so I worked around this by buying her a few radios, tuning them, and labelling them - so she only has to hit the power button on the one she wants. Unfortunately, she's not thrilled by how much space the set of radios takes up, and she's also at the edge of the coverage area for her favorite FM station. Within the next few weeks, I'll definitely give this a shot with a Pi Zero W, and hopefully write something up on how workable of a solution this is for her.
- itsyaboi 5y agoA SDR + some sort of "stream deck" from the parent article could be a potential "offline" solution. You could even wire a couple mechanical keyboard switches to Rpi's GPIO pins for selecting preset channels and avoid the stream-thingy all together. RTL-SDR: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0129EBDS2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0129EBDS2 https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR/wiki/PythonSupport https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR/wiki/PythonSupport
- ThatPlayer 5y agoI also like the idea of this more because it means you do not have to worry about URLs changing. FM channels changing are much more rare.
- m463 5y agoThere are linux libraries for the elgato streamdeck shown here
- voltagex_ 5y agoI have never ever been able to get a good FM signal out of the RTLSDR. I even have one of the expensive ones where they improved the shielding. Luckily this is less of a problem where I am as all of the stations I'm interested in are also broadcast via DVB-T.
- dehrmann 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sangnoir 5y agoInstead of mucking about to get Chrome to play various streaming formats - author could have launched VLC instead. VLC will play any URL you throw at it. I have completed the software of a Raspberry Pi radio project, I've been procrastinating on the hardware for months now (buttons, DAC/amp speaker and maybe tiny OLED screen?)
- AgoRapide 5y agoGood point, even more so because I use VLC myself because of the exact same reason, it plays anything. I just never thought of giving it URLs, only local files. (But the user interface in VLC sucks though...)
- Koenvh 5y agoI like this, because it's beautifully simple. I have been collecting radio stations since 2016 now, and something I have noticed is that streaming URLs tend to break rather often. It might be worth putting them behind a simple redirect so you can change the streaming URL remotely.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fhgui 5y agohttp://www.q2radio.co.UK http://www.q2radio.co.UK make a cube shaped internet radio - you assign 4 stations to 4 of the sides of the cube, whichever side is facing up is played
- sen 5y agoI did something similar for my kids, but I used Raspberry Pi’s running MusicBox, which can do internet radio, Spotify, local MP3s, or in my case load a folder of MP3s from a share drive on my network. I threw on a $10 USB DAC and some cheap Logitech Z120 speakers, and I hardwired some big arcade buttons from Adafruit to it. I wrote a little Python script so each button plays an MP3 playlist (Eg one for sleep, one for daytime, and one to stop everything). The same buttons could quite easily play an internet radio station. I think the entire thing cost me ~AUD80 total. Next I want to integrate it all into a 3D printed housing and add some LEDs as night lights.