Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Making a Tablet Run Only One Application?
An anonymous reader asks "I'm working for a medical centre who want to make a tablet with various videos and webpages about smoking cessation available in their waiting room. The tablet can't access the Internet because of security policies. I'm planning to use a local server with copies of the (Creative Commons) videos and pages accessed through local webpages using the tablet's browser. How can I make only the browser be available to the tablet users? Ideas? Suggestions?"
I do not have a solution to your problem. I am curious about the situation though. Is there a reason your organization wants this to be easy-to-steal-and-expensive tablets? Especially when there's the security policy. And you'll have to keep them charged too. Why not just a cheap laptop. Or a pamphlet and TV?
I realize it's difficult to get people to stop smoking, but fancy technology isn't always the solution.
The solution that you want may fully well exist without having to reinvent the wheel.
Is there any reason you can not use a LCD picture frame?
I don't know how well they deal with video but I suspect that you can put a good a presentation using stills on one of those.
That sounds just like a job long ago for a restauranteur.
.MP3 requests for a DOS MP3 player, but the owner had other vendors in mind.
He wanted one of those hi-tech looking displays showing his food, menus, and prices. He had the "high tech display": his projection TV.
What he ended up with was his old PC-AT home computer yanked from a pile in his garage and loaded with a bunch of GIF's and JPG's he created to his heart's content on his nicer home computer. Loaded all the images he wanted to display in a subdirectory, along with a DOS slideshow program. A little edit of Autoexec.bat and config.sys, and every time the computer was turned on, all it knew to do was start the slideshow and run it until power was turned off at the end of the day.
It was a no-brainer being he plugged the whole shebang into his beer-sign lighting circuit. There was no change to the routine for his help in opening shop for business. When they turned on the beer-sign circuit as usual, his "high tech display" would start up and run until they turned off the beersign lights at the end of the day.
He was aware of the limitations of the system, so he made his images with that in mind. He could create anything he wanted for it to display, with no more intervention from me.
He seemed happy enough. He was ready to toss it all anyway, and all it cost him was a dinner for me and my buddy.
I wanted so bad to do something for a '50s style diner in my area to retrofit those table-controlled jukeboxes as a serial terminal so I could queue up
That would have been fun, as I wanted to keep all the old vacuum tube amplifiers running, and even the record selector, but what would actually go through the system would be a MP3, not what was coming off the tone arm... the spinning record being "played" would be just for show. It would not make any difference at all what 45rpm record was in the slot... its just there for people to reminisce seeing things behave and hearing that 120Hz hum in it, just like it did when they, like I, was a kid.
I could rip all the MP3's I needed because he already had licenses from all the copyright people to play copyrighted music in his place. So I could load up the machine with anything. I thought it would be a nice touch if he kept his customer's favorites on the machine, as well as honoring requests. I even have an old mechanical typewriter so I could make more of those tags for the table units so they still looked like they came from the '50s.
Boy, did I ever date myself with this post.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]