My poor tv is like, “connect to the internet? I need to call home! Help, i’ve been abducted by a luddite!”
Tv, you are never getting my wifi password.
Try plugging in a fork. Those still do what they are supposed to do
I’ve got some bad news
Ahhhhh! Nothing is sacred anymoooooore
I recently renovated and said fuck no to all the smart home shit. Just the idea of having to troubleshoot the WiFi because my kitchen light won’t turn on drives me into a rage.
Good call.
I took over for a previous manager who installed all smart lights controlled via Alexa. Every week…every fucking week…there would be a section not working, lights with disco colors, Alexa was offline so we could give the command to turn on lights…
When I took over, 1st task was to rip out all the smart shit and I put in regular LED bulbs controlled with the light switch. Works every time
I have this smart lightbulb that I got for halloween last year because I thought it’d be cool to make the porch glow purple for trick or treaters. Now I have to replace it because the app that controls it has decided to try and blackmail me for camera and location access and the bulbs default state without the app is to flash on and off in a way seemingly deliberately designed to cause headaches.
My sister bought me a smart desk light that insists on using an app and ‘doesn’t work’ without it.
Thing is, it will work as a normal desk light…if you’re willing to sit through 10 minutes of intense blinking while it tries to connect before finally giving up.
Phillip k dick (i think) wrote a story about this.
The internet has become more and more complex. I miss the early 2000s when I was a kid and everything was open and easy to use. No need to register ,no need to download this or that app. Everything was easy, even the laws.
This is absolutely a problem, but credit where credit’s due, I’m really happy that the specification for Matter requires local control without calling out to the internet. Though Matter devices can still call out to the internet for additional features. I know Matter has it’s issues, but I believe it is slowly improving the smart home. But I fully understand people that want to reject the smart home altogether.
My whole home automation is using Zigbee devices, they don’t even know what internet is, and it doesnt matter which brand it is as longs it is supported by Zigbee2MQTT. Matter is great, so is Thread.
Yeah! Where I can, I use matter over thread. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that should provide the same benefits as zigbee? From what I remember, thread evolved from zigbee.
Unfortunately matter over thread simple doesn’t exist for some categories of devices. For light bulbs, only Nanoleaf offers matter over thread, and the quality is pretty terrible. Do they even make matter over thread air conditioners?
This isn’t a shit post IMO.
I helped my dad install a new dumb thermostat last winter. We just had to drill a couple of new holes to mount it, and moved the wires over. Boom,there was heat again. I thought about how much of a pain in the ass it was to get my Ecobee working, and how refreshing it was to just have something work immediately.
It’s a very similar feeling to playing my GameBoy Color again after messing around with retro gaming linux handhelds. You just turn it on and play, then just turn it off. No boot sequences, no emulator settings to tweak. No SD card corruption that ruins your game library. Just on and off.
No boot sequences
(being annoyingly pedantic) technically there is a boot sequence: the Gameboy logo. on the DMG there’s a little blob of code from 0x0000 to 0x00ff that clears some memory, sets up the screen, reads the logo from cartridge memory and scrolls it. the loader only jumps to the game if the logo is byte-identical (the idea being that unlicensed games could be sued for trademark infringement.)
on the GBC the loader is a little beefier but mostly the same.
t. made a horribly broken FPGA core for the DMG that got just far enough to load the Tetris intro
Yes, but that’s pretty miniscule compared to booting any of the linux based retro handhelds. An Bernice, Powkiddy, R36S, they all have like a 30-40 second boot time.
it’s the reason why the original Odroid Go it’s so special to me… it’s all built around an ESP32 microcontroller and it does emulate only NES, GB, GBC and a couple more, while honestly not even being perfect at it, but goddamn… it boots in like 1 second, even directly to the last game you were playing, it has no settings whatsoever, the battery lasts for like 7 hours it’s such a neat little device.
and it’s funny because in my head that it’s the device that kickstarted this whole retro handheld emulation craze, but it is the only one to take such a minimalistic approach
It’s not comparable. Nintendo must have spent millions on developing the Game Boy, meanwhile retro handheld is a hobby project someone did over the quarter. Ever try to port and run an RTOS on those ARM chips? And port a mainstream Game Boy emulator to it? “What do you mean you have to have MMU support?Just work, damnit?”
It doesn’t work like that.
It’s completely comparable in this circumstance. They are performing similar functions, playing handheld games. My R36S is a pretty impressive little device, and it performs excellently at playing games. But using it is much more complicated and longer than popping a game in a gameboy.
Gameboy: insert game, turn on, play, turn off. R36S: turn on, 30-40 second boot time, locate game, play, exit emulator, shut down, 10 second shutdown time.
Sir, I sincerely think you missed the point. Somebody, that nobody who only knows just enough programming, spent three months (at most) in his basement, putting together a embedded Linux and integrated emulators in a portable computer, cannot be compared with a video game company’s officially released commercial product. The money, the time, the effort, the equipment, the testing, not one is in the same magnitude.
Sponsor a group of enthusiasts who have the right skill to live for a year, they can replicate Game Boy with modern hardware too, 100% identical or even better. Consumers like us who only paid $20 for the retro handheld emulator? We don’t have a right to complain about the performance and quality.
Hello fellow old person. I too miss things that just work.
Shit either has no buttons, with an capacitive touch surface, or if it has buttons, it’s never immediate response, you have to press it for an extended amount of time.
it’s fucking infuriating.
Yes long press needs to be relegated to the most obscure functions of a device, not the main uses.
I love some connected devices, and own a LOT of them, but some things are just stupid. I don’t need my blender to be connected. Washer, dryer? Unless it’s going to move my laundry from one to the other, nope. Stove, wtf? I have to go stir anyway so who gives a crap.
I like my washer and dryer being connected. I can load it in the evening a set my Home Assistant to start it when the price on power is low.
The other things I agree with
I would like em too, but only if they allowed local only without any accounts beforehand.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (a bit ironic when you consider this quote comes from Apple).
Steam is fun and all, minecraft is a great game, but goddamn, i have a 10kbps at home, and network is unstable where i live, why can’t i play my fcking
game“licence” which is not even online based, because the network decided to stop??I prefer from far a simple folder with assets and a .exe that i will put on my desktop with a shortcut.
What an application is supposed to be anyways.
Simplicity is easy to pirate though.
If the product is a program that executes 100% of its functionality on your computer, it is impossible to make it pirate-proof. Even if all the functionality is client-side and the server is used only for authentication, it can be pirated.
The only way to make a program pirate-proof is if it runs on the server with a thin client.
That being said, some products execute on the client. Therefore if they want to prevent piracy, the only thing they can do is security through obscurity. That is, make it as complex as possible so the pirates take as much time as possible to reverse-engineer it.
Steam works fine for me offline, though I can’t speak to all the games - what are you running into with it?
I hear you on Minecraft, though…
I don’t think it’s ironic, it just doesn’t say the quiet part out loud. Everything just works if they control the entire ecosystem, so if you want ‘sophisticated’ let us control everything and it will all just work.
car
Terrible mid 20xx introduction of full on touchscreen tablets to motor vehicles would like to know your location.
After trying to get my new automated kitty litter box working with a POS app that can’t sync with the poop machine and the PM can’t connect to my 5 GHz wireless network (only 2.4 GHz) nor does it have any way to enter the password for said network I have resorted to deleting the app and just pushing two physical buttons in sequence on the PM twice daily to clean the litter area.
Me too, I gave up on the app. It’s easier to just push the button on the machine. Hate things that need an app. Also hate having an account to use everything.
I literally refuse to use ANY app. None. If your service needs one, I don’t need your service. End.
The 5 ghz vs 2.4 is such a pain in the ass. As far as I can tell Android won’t let you pick which to use so you can’t be on the same network as the device, even with the same ssid.
You can have your router split the different frequencies into different named networks to make it work. But you shouldn’t have to
The next thing I’m going to try is temporarily turn off my router, make a hotspot with my Android phone, in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, with no password security and try that. I don’t care about tracking the cat’s weight or being reminded that the app thinks I need to buy more litter or deodorizer, I just want to set some settings (like how long to wait to rotate the poop into the hopper after a cat walks away from the poop machine) and that would make the machine “better.”
Using them in the same name isn’t that great either. These days you shouldn’t ever need to connect to 2.4 is markedly slower
Slower but up to spec for most people unless you need high data transfer speeds, and it also provides wider range than 5ghz.
2.4ghz is faster than my max bandwidth so I keep using it for range
Yup.
Comcast “updated” their network yesterday and broke every fucking smart plug in my house. None of them will work anymore.
Did they disable the 2.4ghz band on your router?
Thought of that too, but yup it’s still active. A couple other devices are connected via 2.4 but none of my plugs or bulbs will connect. They worked just fine yesterday and now they’re all bricks.
