Error Handling in Baby Toys(brainbaking.com) |
Error Handling in Baby Toys(brainbaking.com) |
Sorry to be a spoilsport! :)
If you were the guy coding one of those, and you saw that, I could easily imagine putting in a special case, just for fun. The aha, I could fix that we often feel.
However, there was also a race condition/out of bounds memory read issue that caused it to stop reading the text you typed in, and instead start reading words directly from the swear list.
I don't get why all the children's toys need to be so loud. These things are held inches away by a child with presumably good hearing, yet they can be heard rooms away.
Clearly iOS has bugs where this can happen, but it requires a combination of actions that would be very bizarre for anyone older than a few years to be able to do consciously.
1. Attempt to unlock phone 2. Tap "Emergency" 3. Tap "Medical ID" 4. Tap the emergency contact to call
She's also subscribed us to Amazon channels multiple times playing with the Fire TV remote.
So are cats.
I did not know this existed. That's a great feature, hopefully I'll remember it when it matters.
But my favorite were the toys that require the kids to twist or push buttons in a sequence. It had no batteries so it was all mechanical, and it was fun trying to reverse engineer the mechanics so that it only opened the door when the right combo was used, but also didn't seize up when the wrong combo was used, and you didn't have to "reset" it to start over.
This one: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Play... (the old 1978 one was just an actual "record" player).
I've been meaning to figure out how to spec out an appropriate torsion spring to replace the one in mine, as all of the songs sound a bit slow these days. I'd also love to write a program to convert some songs from midi into a 3d-printable file to make my own records for it.
I had no idea its from 1978, although that tracks with how old my siblings would've been when they got it.
It seems like they then went out of fashion in favour of paper rolls, presumably due to the increased playing time that could fit on a roll. Then of course the gramophone record was invented, so back to discs... Enter audio cassette tapes: miniature rolls. CDs. Are we in fact stuck in an eternal cycle? Where are my optical tapes?!
I actually have a half-dead one, but I'm probably never going to actually fix it.
https://aaron.axvigs.com/content/leapfrog-fridge-phonics-dec...
Toy software and error handling is fascinating and often fun to find the bugs.
Now the engineer within me wonders if the DTMF tones it played were actually accurate.
> Bit rotation can be implemented using a combination of bit shifting and or operations, and on a hardware level, with different locical XOR ports. That’s of course just one way, and you still need a way to identify the number without confusing it with another figure. Although I don’t think that last was implemented: if you select your starting bits in a smart way, there won’t be any overlap. The identification system here uses 14 bits, and all of the figures have either 6 or 7 1s, making it even possible to completely ignore bit rotation and just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits to do the identification. I’m of course merely guessing at this point.
Not sure what it means to "completely ignore bit rotation" and "just rely on the relative position of the enabled bits", those sound like the same thing to me.
To throw my speculation out there, I wonder if this is just done with a lookup table. If we use a byte (generous) to identify each figure, then a table indexed by all 2^14 bit patterns will take less than 17kb. No need to do anything more clever.
I was never bothered by that. The real trial by fire for a parent are wooden toys - really loud when they hit the floor, can actually hurt and don't have any batteries to pull out.
Anyway my daughter has the most recent generation of Furby given by a friend of mine working for Hasbro, whose annual bonus is apparently paid in kind.
The toy is pretty sophisticated with actual, though rudimentary, voice recognition and the ability to detect and record speech, which it repeats to you with different effects, but outside from that follows a pretty strict script and I was unable to produce any errors.
The keyboard had 2 key rollover and was a bit bistable which one persisted. I think the keypress reader algorithm was possibly on a slow timer?
When the noise stops, you know they're up to something they shouldn't :) Nothing more worrying as a parent of young kids than silence!
When she did so, my brother-in-law exclaimed, "Hey! That's not loud like the one we have!"
It seemed that it was so loud, that it was the subject of complaints, and a modification, so at least for some toys, noise reduction does happen.
It serves as a baby-retrieval device (BRD in the lingo).
If you hear toy noises from the other room, you know where the baby is and what the baby is doing (and if the toy goes silent you go investigate).
Then again, grown up music is not immune to loudness wars - it shouldn’t be surprising to see the same attention grabbing mechanism in kids toys.
Unfortunately electronics are so cheap that it can be a challenge to find the one similar toy out of ten on the shelf that isn’t a torture device.
If you need to create a rift in the family, a drum set.
I must've been 12 or so before my parents would let me even touch the record player on their stereo. Not without reason, to be sure: the stereo's 8-track player had been irretrievably broken before I was born when one of my siblings decided that it looked hungry and fed it a peanut butter sandwich.
And the most common issue can be solved by bending it back down so it rides the groove again.
No dialogs, nothing. Just immediate black screen and clean boot afterwards.
When Windows 2000 came out I started using it at home, and quickly got a lot worse at helping others with their issues, as I simply didn't get much practice at home anymore.
Windows 9x would open a primitive task manager on Ctrl+Alt+Del
GPO could set different conditions, including replacing fast user switching (the "new" login screen in XP) with Win2k style including enforcing use of System Attention Key (Ctrl-Alt-Delete on PC) to login.