My daughter wanted a colour changing lightbulb in her bedroom, so I bought a Homekit-enabled one. I'll call her for dinner a couple of times, but of she still hasn't responded after that (headphones on, usually). "Hey Siri Red Alert" will start pulsing her light red.
At which point there is much grumbling and stomping. Black Mirror? Maybe, but hey, I have to get my enjoyment where I can.
Black mirror or not, I like this, and can see the enjoyment in this too :D
When I was a kid, when I didn't show up within 5 minutes of being called for dinner, I wasn't allowed to sit down at the table anymore. I then had to wait until everybody else was done, and enjoy a usually cold meal afterwards, and any dessert was usually gone by that time too. And I had to do the cleanup. Suffice it to say, we kids weren't late a lot of times.
And if you wanted to make the ceiling light flash, you had to manually and laboriously flick the switch until a parent yelled at you that it was bad for light bulbs.
yeah. When it was summer and I was like 6 or 7, my parents bought me a cheap digital wrist watch with alarm function, otherwise I would have never made it back to dinner in time when I was outside on the playground, biking around with buddies or playing football (soccer). That was the most "tech" parenting I ever experienced while subject to said parenting :P
I later learned from mom that other parents too kinda relied on that thing going off, so their own kids would go home too when they heard my alarm.
What would be full Black Mirror would have that voice message sent to the device the headphones are being used so that the actual message is heard as well. Maybe with the klaxon sound effect preceding the message. Oh, having the red light pulse as well still. No need to not use it when available. Maybe even combine movie universes and have an animated envelope read the message a la Harry Potter.
Anyone remember home intercoms? They seemed to be incredibly popular in new home construction for awhile in the late 80s and early 90s where I live. They were very useful. They seemed to disappear without really being replaced by anything.
I’m considering getting a bunch of HomePod Minis to try out the intercom function.
My mother had one installed in the moid-seventies, it was a nine-days wonder in the village (well, Toronto’s Little Italy pre-gentrification).
She also had the hard-wired phone handsets rewired to use big, clunky four-prong plugs, so she could install a RadioShack-branded answering machine that was the size of a small suitcase. They hadn’t invented controllers that could rewind the outgoing message cassette, so you had to use a special cassette with an infinite loop.
You’d think that back then we had to walk uphill to AND from school, in a blizzard, in June, but actually, the weather wasn’t much worse than today and yes, hang out on my lawn all you like.
> a RadioShack-branded answering machine that was the size of a small suitcase.
Huh, interesting.
As a bit of vaguely-relevant trivia, I found this fascinating recording someone made of some phone systems from the early-mid 70s: http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/VRHQ.mp3 (~30min) (from http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/, "Two Early Voice Recognition Systems"). Not quite answering machines, but if the same technical acumen were applied to recording messages I expect the result would have been very impressive.
I look at this as an interesting way to get an idea of the bounds of the status quo of where technology was generally at around the ~70s. This is really cool, but also within the bounds of what was reasonably conceivable and maintainable for the period. The recording notes that system/technology was observed finding its way into a few different use cases.
Back when mobiles had become more accessible. My friend would phone his sister downstairs to get us some snack and drinks. She wasn't impressed, to say the least
I think that's basically just a notification. Where it gets creepy is when parents install 24/7 surveillance cameras in their childrens bedrooms.
I can kinda understand it when it's about being able to quickly check if your baby is okay, but I doubt every parent has the decency to disable it eventually to give their child some privacy.
There's no way there aren't lots of children growing up with zero privacy right now.
My wife and I have three children and we don’t allow any cameras in the house. We believe some level of privacy is needed for normal human development and a healthy overall sense of well being.
Nah. We have Nest Mini's in our kids rooms, and I will routinely cast my phone audio to those speakers, turn the volume to max, type my message into the Google Translate webpage and then press the "Read Aloud" button. It's funny and it works.
Hehe, if that were the only modus of communication, yeah :). Thankfully it isn't, we are also known for leaving messages in the snow, ads in the local newspaper under pseudonyms, anon leetspeaks on the dark webs, and occasionally speaking with one another :).
At which point there is much grumbling and stomping. Black Mirror? Maybe, but hey, I have to get my enjoyment where I can.