Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons (opens in new tab)

I 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/

I send the page to Reader View in Firefox when I can. otherwise, Pocket and Outline are great for that.

Author 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).

Reader mode, when it works, is a godsend for these sites.

I almost always have 2 vertical side by side windows (meta+left and meta+right shortcuts), that's useful about wide high resolutions

I don’t think you’ll need an extension, most browsers still support a custom CSS file, I think.

Might also try resizing the browser window. It's kind of a waste to have a single app fill the entire screen, just to put blank bars on the sides.

here is the more versatile way:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

By the way, while we are discussing readability, important message to all hipsters: We boomers prefer high contrast, that is black text on white background.

Sites with grey text on grey background I usually skip.

Once Firefox was my web browser because it has a very easy setting for forcing exactly this (black on white).

Firefox has a reading mode that is quite handy.

I 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.

Hi, I made an account so I could show you what I've been working on. Maybe it will give you some ideas and hopefully you won't have to reinvent the wheel. I "restored" an old Sears radio by gutting it and adding a pi Zero W, a DAC, and some rotary encoders. [1][2] It basically works like a radio (streaming NPR in the images), but it also has local storage. My goal was to have it working pretty much the way the stock radio did (with the notable exception of the screen). It is running MPD, which means that it can be controlled by a phone app or external hardware as well as the dials on the front.

I have also rigged up a bluetooth "keyset" [3][4] after reading a how-to article about those.[5] I am currently using it to control zoom meetings, but it would be trivial to set it up so that the big clicky buttons switch the radio stations. If anyone indicates interest, I'll elaborate on the hardware and software details.

[1] https://c_return.u.blinkenshell.org/hn/1.jpg [2] https://c_return.u.blinkenshell.org/hn/2.jpg [3] https://c_return.u.blinkenshell.org/hn/3.jpg [4] https://c_return.u.blinkenshell.org/hn/4.jpg [5] https://learn.adafruit.com/ble-hid-keyboard-buttons-with-cir...

I think there's a business opportunity around people who aren't tech literate and want what tech they have to stay the same, but every time I think about what an ecosystem that could handle everything from photo sharing to email to even the TV, it seems like a fool's errand because the market seems small, it keeps shifting to people to are comfortable with somewhat newer things, and I don't think enough people would actually pay for it.

A 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://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR/wiki/PythonSupport

Even even easier: hack an existing radio, have its buttons interact with a raspberry pi and use mopidy on that raspi: https://mopidy.com/

Given 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.

I 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!

Another 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.

> operate her own radio remotely

I can't tell if this is suggesting OP gaslight his mother-in-law

That sounds like skeuomorphism which is a big no-no with the HackerNews crowd

Macropads 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://knob-goblin.com/

https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad

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://www.gboards.ca/product/butter-stick-limited-edition

https://github.com/nicinabox/lets-split-guide

You 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.

MAX Falcon-8. $50 assembled, $40 DIY (some soldering, but easy). Add a few dollars more for switches and you provide the keycaps. 8 programmable keys. I wouldn't call it cheap but it's definitely cheaper than the author's option. I got one somewhere; it is nice but I don't really use it much nowadays.

I'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.

Simplest solution would be to just remap keys you don't use with something like Autohotkey.

If you want a separate keypad a cheap solution would be to use any old keyboard and then remap that one specifically with a tool like http://www.hidmacros.eu/whatisit.php (optionally you can paint or add labels to the keys to make it easier to use).

I think simple website (with all your favorite channel as big black button) and pin it to taskbar would solve your problems

Icons on desktop

I 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

Could you trouble me with reasons? I for one just looked around what accessibility APIs are where and am thinking about a custom widget toolkit that would go from accessibility first down to typical graphical stuff. So if that's not a trouble for you, could you expand?

Yes, 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.

or, you know, just a radio, a device that's cheap, reliable, fast, responsive, low power, potentially small/portable, fault-tolerant, and private and secure by default.

it's a neat project, but if the goal is simply to listen to nearby radio stations (rather than streams), the simple radio is peerless.

Thanks for the information, I will considering getting myself a SSL certificate. I did not knew this to be a problem until now.

FYI - browsers with https-only mode enabled are broken, which makes it hard to access HTTP only sites.

I 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.

You 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.

there 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).

> 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

Keep in mind that the OECD survey is administered via computer. The results may be conservative in representing a lack of computer proficiency.

I 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?

I'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?

Sounds like a great idea for a blog post :)

Another 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.

Never took the effort to reduce it to standard Internet size. But I will if I get 10 000 hits on the page tomorrow too. Amazon wants its dues.

Yes, it looks really cool, expensive but cool.

Good 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...)