Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

Summary

Posted on mandag, januar 12, 2026 in Hal9k, Planet Ubuntu-DK, Planets 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. The usual scenario ends up with the kid feeling disempowered and asking an adult to put something on. That something ends up on auto-play because then the adult is free to do other things and the kid ends up stranded powerless and comatose in front of the TV. Instead I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he could understand and use independently. It should empower him to make his own choices. It should be physical and tangible, i.e. it should be something he could touch and feel. It should also have some illusion that the actual media content was stored physically and not un-understandably in “the cloud”, meaning it should e.g. be destroyable — if you break the media there should be consequences. And there should be no auto-play: interact once and get one video. Floppy disks are awesome! And then I remembered the sound of a floppy disk. The mechanical click as you insert it, the whirr of the disk spinning, and the sound of the read-head moving. Floppy disks are the best storage media ever invented! Why else would the “save-icon” still be a floppy disk? Who hasn’t turned in a paper on a broken floppy disk, with the excuse ready that the floppy must have broken when the teacher asks a few days later? But kids these days have never used nor even seen a floppy disk, and I believe they deserve this experience! Building on the experience from the Big Red Fantus-Button, I already had a framework for controlling a Chromecast, and because of the netcat | bash shenanigans it was easily extendable. My first idea for datastorage was to use the shell of a floppy disk and floppy drive, and put in an RFID tag; this has been done a couple of times on the internet, such as RFIDisk or this Raspber...