That’s essentially what Tonie boxes do. They have internal storage and NFC stickers on the figurines. The box is then caching on the SD card and playing from their based on the ID on the NFC chip. If you take the box offline, it can still play the stuff on the box because of that.
With the very big difference that in my case it never needs to (or can, really) be connected to a network and someone else's service [0]. Only to the "parents' service", which was a more convoluted experience for them. They had to manually transfer the file to the internal memory, link it to the NFC label, and print an appropriate cover art label.
It was also interesting to see that when all the kids were gathering around with their toys they were all gravitating towards the one none of them had. But that was an unintended side effect.
[0] When I first heard of Tonies my mind jumped at the idea that the content is stored on the figurine and somehow wirelessly transmitted to the box. The child, parent, and engineer inside me were all thoroughly disappointed this is not the case, and even more so at the perspective of the service being stopped one day or who knows, monetized more aggressively.
There is one advantage of this though, via the tonie app you can change to separate episodes from the same series without buying additional figures. I'm a network security guy, somehow, and I'm sort of OK with the tonie box. Alexa etc, no way, but it seems not entirely bad.
We have a Yoto player, which works ina similarly (NFC chip as a “pointer into their web service, content cached on the device). I was pleasantly surprised to see that they promise that it’ll will work for at least five years after they stop selling the current version.
> I was pleasantly surprised to see that they promise that it’ll will work for at least five years after they stop selling the current version.
That disclaimer makes me even more uneasy. It implicitly says the toy might stop working after. You bought a toy, you didn't rent it or buy toy-as-a-service. There's no reason the device shouldn't work forever or for as long as it's in good enough condition to operate. And there's no reason you shouldn't own the content on that toy or be free to supply your own forever.
If you buy an audio cassette and a player they work until they fall apart. Here you need to rely on the goodwill of the seller to allow you to keep using them as long as they don't compete with their newer product too much.
I strongly believe that the better option for anyone who can opt for it is something that relies on no online components even if it's more elbow grease for the parents.
To me, a Yoto is a toy-as-a-service. And for what it does, I don't mind. The tradeoffs for what I'm buying are OK to me in this situation.
I'm fully aware the content on these cards will one day go dark. For content I really care about, I'll make sure I purchase that content another way. Often by buying the actual physical book.
But my family doesn't need every children's story book to last forever, we don't need every kids toy to become generational artifacts.
The device has a lot of online "radio" content as well. Those change on a regular basis and once they're gone, they're gone. That's OK to us in the end. We use the app to mess with these boxes as well and listen to the content we bought on cards through the app in the car as well.
If Yoto disappears tomorrow and the boxes fall silent, sure I'll be disappointed. And yes, potentially they could have made them another way. But nobody on the market today makes something as durable, easy to use for a child, and have such a good content library while also making that content 100% offline. The kids are too young to realistically be handling CDs or vinyls. Eventually the kids will age up into handling CDs for listening to content they own, and they already do have some CDs and vinyls but that's currently a "mom and dad handle loading it" situation.
I totally get things like Tonies and Yotos are the embodiment of DRM hellscape. But assuming you go into it eyes open, its an ok trade in my book. Its not like that's the only way to consume media. And in the end, with the license for the media attached to physical cards, its easy to trade/sell/buy the content second hand from friends and other families around. And since its so durable, even though a toddler handled it for a year or two it's still in perfectly fine shape. Have a two year old handle a CD on their own for a year and see how well it holds up.
This has the same vibes as BP talking about the co2 footprint and personal responsibility.
Like… why are you defending the companies that took the hobby of millions of people (video games) and turned it into the equivalent of selling drugs to little kids in the school yard using every dirty trick in the book you make them purchase something in their games.
That’s exactly the problem. The discounts are there to make you buy larger packs and the process of items are designed to not fit neatly into the pack sizes.
Guild Wars 2 doesn’t do that. 5$ is always 400 gems and items cost multiples of 100 gems usually. You can also convert gems into gold (the ingame non store currency) and vice versa.
It’s basically an abstraction over the real life currency to decouple the real money aspect from the actual store. Nothing more.
In comparison, most mobile games try to make this as obfuscated as possible to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible. Basically following the patterns that I was warned in school about regarding drugs. First hit is cheap or even free but once you’re a regular things get more expensive.
Paris is especially bad though. They have good public transport but the traffic is insane and makes the city so much worse. Partially attributed to the Parisian driving style though. Or just French people in cities. Highways in France are very chill compared to their neighbors. But in the cities it’s a fight to the death.
The admin. I prefer the non Django stuff for everything. Pedantic alembic sqlalchemy and so on.
But if you run something large, getting an admin panel literally for free is difficult to beat. You literally don’t need any admin functionality in your application. Django does it all for virtually free.
It’s much easier to deploy and has a much older high availability story that has been battle tested for a decade or two. It also has a more linear regression. The query optimizer doesn’t try to be clever. It only works with the query and the schema. So if your query is bad, it will get worse with data size. Double the data in prod compared to your test instance? Double the bad query. Postgres tries to get clever with data size so it might switch to a different plan with more data resulting in your one customer with a lot of data all of a sudden getting really bad query times but nobody can reproduce it locally. So now you as the admin have to go into the database and pull a dump that for once actually trigger the same query plan as it did in production but your devs might not be allowed to see all the data or have it locally. This is one annoying thing at least you don’t have to do with MySQL.
Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.
Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.
But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.
Just decided to do it one day. Had done some utility sewing (bags, pillows, odds and ends) since I was little so knew how to at least thread a machine and straight stitch. As mentioned in a previous comment, shirts mostly have the same basic construction, so I just got a pattern, some fabric, and started trying.
Instructions on patterns are obtusely written, with a lot of extraneous steps about basting and other nonsense that can usually be skipped, but everyone here is an engineer of some sort and should be able to figure it out. You cut out shapes, pin them together so they don't slide around relative to each other, and then sew in a line a fixed distance from the edge (seam allowance, usually 5/8"). Most machines have guide lines that help you maintain that.
There are a few trickier bits, like sewing along curves where fabric is bending two different ways at once (like sleeve/body joints) and using the "burrito technique" to topologically invert the yoke of a shirt for easy sewing, but youtube has plenty of videos to help.
With handmade wallets, if you can replace the stitching, they will outlive you. It’s really lining and stitching that gives up usually. That’s why hobbyists rarely line and the stitches are usually in a groove and people use waxed synthetic thread.
I truely believe there is none. There is literally nothing people would pay for. We got ourselves into a situation where browsers have become so complex that they need an incredible amount of resources to get developed but the only way to get any money with them is to either sell the data of your users or have partners that do that (Google paying Mozilla for being the Firefox default search engine).
I literally don’t see a way out of this mess. In fact if Chrome needs to be split off from google, google has no need to keep Firefox alive anymore. If they just stop paying for the search engine default, Mozilla loses 75% of their revenue.
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