Imagine if you will...
A screensaver that randomly displays familiar faces (I prefer the early Sesame St. characters and the way they did the alphabet letter by letter) and when any key is pressed by your inquisitive toddler, the name of the key is presented along with the image and a description. If pressed again, more detail will be introduced and or more words starting with that letter, number, whatever.
To unlock and return to your unscathed work, an adult-sized key combination would be used.
i.e. Alt-1-F11-- subflower, Aug 07 2005 Cat-like typing detector http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/ [Dub, Aug 03 2010] Baby Smash! http://www.hanselman.com/babysmash/This guy made an app for his toddler, check it out. [neuromancer, Aug 04 2010] Random toddler keypresses on my Dell turned on a function whereby the Dell states aloud each character pressed. We were all very impressed.-- bungston, Aug 08 2005 + , and [bungston] If I understand correctly, that required the mouse and many, many levels of dialog boxes.
An annoying pop up reminder window of recent major programs put in the trash bin would be great, also.-- Zimmy, Aug 09 2005 Pick keys bigger than the toddlers hands
Ctrl-F1 left hand M-Pause|Break right hand
simultaneously
Idea was for audiovisual representation A-la Grover and friends.-- subflower, Aug 09 2005 having a toddler that likes to bang on the computer, I love this idea. I like the idea of a interactive learning screensaver. so..bun for you, sub.-- babyhawk, Aug 10 2005 Who can help me?-- subflower, Aug 29 2005 [subflower]I've just written a buggy and rubbish one...It doesn't conform to the spec much (it puts up messages such as "A is for Apple Turnover", "B is for Bun", "C is for Cake", "D is for Doughnut", "E is for Ecclescake",...), and stops when you type "Halfbakery". It's buggy and crashes, but it's baked! Probably fixable, probably easy to display images too fairly easily.-- Dub, Aug 29 2005 How about something that doesn't encourage the toddler to be banging on the keyboard at all?-- Noexit, Aug 29 2005 [Noexit]The screen-saver can be displaying (sic) a big ugly monster to scare them away... and if that fails... it displays nice pictures of Big Bird.-- Dub, Aug 30 2005 Still working it but my coding sux. I need a lot of work and after three software co's didn't reply, I'm stuck with the buggy version.
sheesh, so close...-- subflower, Nov 28 2005 \\Ctrl-F1 left hand M-Pause|Break right hand\\
I can't reach from M to Pause|Break, and my hands are reasonably average size. Some ladies have very small hands almost like a child. How would they cope?-- Minimal, Nov 28 2005 Small handed peeps and anyone else could use the common 'screensaver password' function to return to the desktop.
I suggested widespread key combinations to prevent the random unlocking and for quick return to the desktop.
Password works just as well.-- subflower, Dec 07 2005 Even a fairly simple two handed combination is unlikely to be pressed at random. ctrl+alt+\ or something would be fairly safe.-- MechE, Aug 03 2010 random, halfbakery