And 2 years later, if some words in your account username or description age badly, your house will go dark forever.
oh do share those choice words
That would require knowing the future?
Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
281–290 of 338 posts
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#282For any app that does this, go to the App Store and give them a one-star rating and a comment on why you’re doing this. In this case, they have a canned copy/paste answer saying that it’s for “security”, so feel free to try to debunk that in your initial comment.
Just left my first ever review just to voice my annoyance at this forced and pointless change.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#283Fortunately I can relink my lights to a zigbee adapter and remove the hub entirely, but it's significant pointless effort I'd rather not have to do. Thanks Philips or whatever third party subsidiary now makes Hue! I'll now never trust or buy anything from you ever again.
If anyone has a setup like mine (a Hue Hub, but also using HomeAssistant) I would suggest firewalling off the Hue Hub from accessing the internet. While the Hue App will stop working your lights shouldn't... for now.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#284I'm surprised they didn't already require this, but I think it's probably safe to say it was a likely and foreseeable outcome in any case. That, combined with a dearth of use cases that made sense (for my life) is what's kept me from using these products. About the only reason I could think of to buy smart lightbulbs would be to suddenly turn all the lights in the house red, and yell "torpedoes in the water, brace fo…
Oh wow, that is unbelievably close to one of my HomeKit scenes I have setup. If I ask Siri to “rig for silent running”, all my RGB bulbs go to all Red, all my other ones turn off, and my HomePods play a clip of the robot voice of the submarine from the game “Subnautica” saying “rigged for silent running”. All done via a Shortcut.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers, as we all arbitrarily doing things like blocking streaming of audio from your phone. Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
> Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products. I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Man, it's a speaker.
Get Bose or something similar - they'll just keep working without strings attached/tracking/on-the-road/etc forever.
ps. I'm happily using 10y+ old iMac 27" with popOS - works great.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#286The older I get the more I de-value "smart" things. I love dumb things. Lightbulb must be dumb. Incandescent lightbulbs were a direct evolution of candles and gas lamps leveraging on simple physical laws and principles. They were not very effective turning most of the energy into heat and LED light bulbs must have been great. But they bring electronics and multiply complexity. I already cannot just simply get a light…
If I want some sort of remote control or automation, I use products that rely on an IR remote. This way a Raspberry Pi with an IR LED can do anything I want without depending on vendor software.
I rigged up the lights in my room to be controlled over Bluetooth and strictly no wifi. Stuffed a rpi pico into the wall to run it.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#287We need a no-tether law. If you buy a product you should be able to use it even if you completely break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.
Aren't services exempt from sales tax? Passing that law might be a challenge.
Not where I live. Can you be more specific? I have never seen a jurisdiction where a sales tax (eg GST or VAT) exempts services. That would be an administrative and enforcement nightmare.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#288I'm surprised they didn't already require this, but I think it's probably safe to say it was a likely and foreseeable outcome in any case. That, combined with a dearth of use cases that made sense (for my life) is what's kept me from using these products. About the only reason I could think of to buy smart lightbulbs would be to suddenly turn all the lights in the house red, and yell "torpedoes in the water, brace fo…
Smart lights are incredibly useful with infants/pre-verbal toddlers in the house. E.g. a quick "hey Google, set kids room lights to 20%" whilst trying to convince an energetic 2 year old to get ready for bedtime. They become rapidly less useful when the toddler learns to say "hey Google" and decides to make all lights green all the time.
Gosh no one ever raised a toddler before 2014.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you can have dynamic lighting that slowly changes the color of the lights with just the Home app.
You can, Homekit call it "Adaptive Lighting". It's not as flexible though, you just turn it on and Apple does what it wants - there's no variables you can fiddle with if you don't like what its doing.
I believe "Adaptive Lighting" is the light changing throughout the day. Dynamic lighting from Hue changes color slowly over seconds.
Re: Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, I have a wired Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub but it does seem to just change on a whim from time to time - there's about 15 candidate hubs in the house!
> Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub How? I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one? I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
It's a royal pain in the arse, but it involves unplugging every candidate hub and plugging them back in again in the preferred order. Can't say for sure, but I think the points where my preferred order has changed without me doing anything were down to very short power cuts during the night, when that happens, you get whichever device boots back up first as your primary hub.