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Our youngest is developmentally delayed and will absolutely ignore any guidelines and follow the path of least resistance / most enticement, so their bedroom connection runs through a proxy running Squid [1] where I've whitelisted school and certain entertainment (that took a bit of time running Telerik Fiddler[2] to gather the many domains necessary for the whitelist)

Spotify was a bit of a problem, again with our youngest who went straight for the podcasts with the most adult content, which Spotify gleefully recommended the first moment we turned the service on. Could never find a way to turn podcasts off - never wanted them.

We run our own Emby[3] server that everyone has access to with curated music tv and movies (and also have the usual streaming video services, but those are reserved for common areas).

Looked at other options like walled garden family services (e.g. Amazon Kindle Fires with subscription), but there seems to only be content ranging up to ~12 year old tastes.

[0] https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/articles/228006487-Fami... [1] http://www.squid-cache.org/ [2] https://www.telerik.com/fiddler [3] https://emby.media/

Comment · 4 years ago

What a great post to start off a weekend - thanks. For anyone excited about this, you may want to check out the amazing collections at Rijksmuseum [0] as well.

[0] https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

Comment · 4 years ago

I checked out the site and leadership out of curiosity. Mostly I'm thinking gritty => tenacious.

Comment · 4 years ago

This is remarkable stuff.

Suggestion: A hotkey (in or out of the virtual computer) that allows you to reset to the default orientation without having to reload the page. On a laptop with only a touchpad, I'm fighting with the controls a bit.

Comment · 4 years ago

Call me crazy, but I think it's only a matter of time before windows in our living spaces will be monitors with overlaid ads. The in-app purchase will be "allowing us" to remove the ads so we can look at the view in peace.

In the meantime, all my TVs never see the light of WiFi and have ROKU sticks.

Comment · 5 years ago

I'd love to see a "Can-I-use" browser extension when looking at articles like this.

Occasionally a project requires IE 10/11 support (state government work) and it's such a shame to get excited about an impossible CSS approach.

Comment · 5 years ago

I wonder if this explains the occasional "Ghosts in the machine" behavior I've seen in Fiddler. Hoo boy.

Comment · 5 years ago

It was Clubhouse, and it was down for a while yesterday (I stopped checking after an hour or so)

Comment · 5 years ago

I tried clubhouse.io after seeing your note, and a few minutes into the demo (which was impressive) the site died (which was less impressive).

And now "Unable to log in. We were unable to parse the server response. This could be a networking issue, so please try again later."

Trying Kitemaker now and hoping the HN hug of death isn't approaching. First impressions: I appreciate the keyboard-shortcut-first UI.

Comment · 5 years ago

I'm happy to hear about the new file format. The prior "piles of files" were a problem when saving to folders watched by Dropbox / OneDrive.

Thanks Audacity, for an excellent tool!

Comment · 5 years ago

On a longer timeframe, PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) / PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) models[0] are common, and I run into them frequently in non-profit social/community work. The "Do" part of the cycle is frequently misunderstood, it's more of a test.

I've found PDSA to be challenging with developers, with a tendency to want to short-circuit the process and leap intuitively to the "solution" at the end of the cycle. Talented, experienced, and ignorant all end up looking like P-A-P-A (or just AAAA with a spectacular thud at the end when things finally hit the fan).

The author "recommended a process of “deductive destruction”: paying attention to your own assumptions and biases, then finding fundamental mental models to replace them." -- going to borrow a few ideas from the article and try a different approach for a few of our Mavericks...

[0] https://asq.org/quality-resources/pdca-cycle

Comment · 5 years ago

Maybe I'm the outlier here, but with the pandemic came a significant cultural shift, reducing office politics, and it's been something of a productivity renaissance for my organization.

Communication has downshifted to a few mandatory team and all-staff gatherings, one on ones with direct reports, and that's about it. We handle things through email and Teams for urgent matters. Overall, management has been light touch, trust but verify, and staff are given flexibility to set "project hours" to avoid interruptions.

Frank communication about what works, what doesn't, and setting realistic agendas (from the meeting level up to the epic projects) has been very helpful.