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How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

dillan.org

201–210 of 254 posts

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#201

With climate change and our general impact on environment worsening each year, our relationship with technology is starting to be like a big elephant in the room. Do people really think a sustainable and equitable society is possible while having microprocessors and telecommunication devices in beds ? This kind of luxury will always be reserved to the wealthiest in society, and its availability dependent on the relen…

> Do people really think a sustainable and equitable society is possible while having microprocessors and telecommunication devices in beds ? You realize the cost of the chips in the bed are a lot less than the cost to even ship a mattress right?

Puritan morality is so deeply embedded in our culture people don't even realise they're repeating it.

If I told them they couldn't have a coal-fired home blacksmithing setup "for the environment" then this would seem unfair.

But a 10c microchip? Suddenly this must be evidence of excess! (Even though the price represents that fact that it's a staggeringly efficient use of resources that also has supply-swappable carbon impact).

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#203
post #2

Why does a bed need to run Linux? Why? Of all the possible timelines, we live in the dumbest. What was wrong with a plain old bed without 1GB of RAM and a full OS running on it?! It is the same everywhere. Finding a washing machine that was not WiFi-connected was a chore and I dread doing it again in ten years. As a person who's broken into O(1000) "smart" devices (for fun and for profit both), I do not want them in…

https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."

And this is another lame "insightful" meme. I work with plenty of cybersecurity people and they have plenty of smart devices. They're the ones with Home Assistant setups and ESPHome flashable hardware on they're own internet isolated wifi.

Which is in fact a standard feature on many consumer routers now.

What we're missing is a "local only" directive from the EU to get manufacturers to play ball for the common man.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#204
post #169

Pretty wild. I used to have one of these beds, but it was before everything got "smart". It had two corded controller's hooked up to the pump. The controller displays the number and had up/down arrow buttons to adjust. No internet required. No Linux powered microcontroller required. My bed couldn't get hacked. I slept in comfort.

What I’m trying to teach myself to do whenever I think “this is ridiculous overcomplexity” is to imagine whose life it might make simpler. Let’s assume I have some sort of motor disability: it could be anything from Parkinsons to quadraplegia. Having a bridge out to a common controller that maybe works on speech or some other standardised input method that works for your disability is a massive benefit. And avoids ha…

You certainly don't need a cloud defaulted device in order to do what you describe. There are plenty of assistants, Google and Alexa being two, that can talk to things on your local network with a REST API. That controller also has a gig of memory, plenty enough to run a little API.

What manufacturers like about cloud enabled devices is that they can automatically upgrade the firmware and they can get semi-accurate counts for usage.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#205

With climate change and our general impact on environment worsening each year, our relationship with technology is starting to be like a big elephant in the room. Do people really think a sustainable and equitable society is possible while having microprocessors and telecommunication devices in beds ? This kind of luxury will always be reserved to the wealthiest in society, and its availability dependent on the relen…

It's an overpriced bed with a tiny computer in it. It uses the same resources as a cheap bed + a tiny computer and lots of people have those. There's no extra exploitation going on here, these beds are just expensive because they're paying a bunch of engineers to do questionably necessary things.

The problem with activists is so many of them are foolish and just like complaining about things. Go find an actual problem to solve.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#206
post #2

Why does a bed need to run Linux? Why? Of all the possible timelines, we live in the dumbest. What was wrong with a plain old bed without 1GB of RAM and a full OS running on it?! It is the same everywhere. Finding a washing machine that was not WiFi-connected was a chore and I dread doing it again in ten years. As a person who's broken into O(1000) "smart" devices (for fun and for profit both), I do not want them in…

>Why does a bed need to run Linux? Why?

We're in the era of measuring yourself for better outcomes. A century ago we figured out antibiotics. Big gains. Then we figured out a lot of other pretty obvious diseases with pretty obvious cures.

Now we're down to the complicated subtle things. This bed is running Linux so it can tell you how you slept. If you're sleeping poorly it has all sorts of mostly mild negative effects. If you know about them you can do things to fix them. It's doing a low-grade sleep study on you every night. That can be valuable information.

>avoiding them is getting harder due to insanity like this linux-running bed

Sleep Number beds cost several thousand dollars, I think you'll be able to avoid them just fine.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem are you trying to solve if you don’t mind sharing. It sounds like you’re paying for sleep tracking but couldn’t you just do that with something else like an Apple Watch?

They run cooled/heated water through them, the idea being that temperature can trigger / lengthen certain phases of sleep. Think getting into a warm bed that gets colder as you go into deep sleep, and then when the night is done warms up again for wakeup. In my case, it seems to work really well, but I have the same resistance/frustration with the ongoing subscription.

It shouldn't be too complicated for a motivated hobbyist/hacker to retrofit it to run it with some custom DIY hardware eschewing the subscription need completely.

After all, it is just a couple of pumps, a heat pump and/or a resistance and some sensors.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#208
post #151
post #2

Why does a bed need to run Linux? Why? Of all the possible timelines, we live in the dumbest. What was wrong with a plain old bed without 1GB of RAM and a full OS running on it?! It is the same everywhere. Finding a washing machine that was not WiFi-connected was a chore and I dread doing it again in ten years. As a person who's broken into O(1000) "smart" devices (for fun and for profit both), I do not want them in…

A bed doesn't have to be complicated. Why in my day, we got shit done on beds with only a Z80 and 32K of RAM. I remember when I bought my first bed with cooperative multitasking - a red letter day! And double density duvets were a game changer. But I don't miss traipsing down to the public library with a blank vinyl record to get the soft wear updates - and if you forgot, you got bed bugs!

Me and my wife manufactured our kids in a bed that only had relays as logical devices.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#209

Funny part to me is that I fully assumed that this was a post about hacking Eight Sleep beds by someone who didn't want to explicitly name the company, presumably for vague legal reasons. Then I got to a picture of an apparently real "Number Sleep Hub" and my mind was blown. WTF are we in a timeline so weird that there are two companies making water cooled beds, one is called Eight Sleep and the other is Sleep Number…

I had never heard of either so thought the title was a metaphor for "how to get root access to your brain to improve sleep quality" I sure hope these beds have tactile controls you can feel and use in the dark, and don't require pulling out a smartphone in front of your face while trying to sleep to adjust them, because bed/matress manufacturers for sure must know what is good and bad for sleep quality

I agree the interface should be simple to operate in the dark without being blinding, but I’m left wondering how common late-night adjustments are. I imagine it tends to be pretty “set it and forget it” for most people.

Re: How to get root access to your Sleep Number bed

#210
post #169

Pretty wild. I used to have one of these beds, but it was before everything got "smart". It had two corded controller's hooked up to the pump. The controller displays the number and had up/down arrow buttons to adjust. No internet required. No Linux powered microcontroller required. My bed couldn't get hacked. I slept in comfort.

What I’m trying to teach myself to do whenever I think “this is ridiculous overcomplexity” is to imagine whose life it might make simpler. Let’s assume I have some sort of motor disability: it could be anything from Parkinsons to quadraplegia. Having a bridge out to a common controller that maybe works on speech or some other standardised input method that works for your disability is a massive benefit. And avoids ha…

This is a nice point that is often missed in the cacophony of complaints about complexity. If companies are not simply leveraging complexity for the sake of profit, restricted use or repair, etc. then these complaints, as feedback, should still be worthwhile in order to employ complexity.

Extending this idea to how devices operate or are maintained it seems like we're still in a nascent stage. I benefit from a few smart devices but even in a very simple setup, things fail sometimes and then I have to fix it. My mom might benefit from some of these things but she feels better off foregoing the benefits because resolving any issue would be far more costly or impractical.

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