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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

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Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#231

Post by theshrike79 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #140
h2odragon wrote: post #2

In that same time period, my "plant light" timer, a $15 mechanical item of a design unmodified since the 1970s, has worked flawlessly, requiring attention only when the clocks change or my schedule does. It has not informed Google, Amazon, or anyone else about its job or anything else in my home. It has generated no royalties nor invoked any support or ongoing maintenance costs. It has never needed a software upgrade…

You know those "strip of LEDs on a gooseneck" plant lights? Even these, low-end as they are, have similar issues. They have buttons instead of physical switches. If the power goes out, I have to remember what sequence of button-presses gets me a twelve-hour timer. And you can't even set it to "always on" and control with a mechanical timer. Maddening.

This is why engineers invented the screwdriver and soldering iron :)

It's not hard to just wire shit directly and use an external plug to control the light.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#232

Post by theshrike79 »

markbnj wrote: post #86

Yeah over the last few weeks Alexa has grown annoyingly chatty. Pretty much every ask, like "Alexa, what's the outside temperature?" is followed by the answer and then "Did you know..." which is itself followed by me saying "Alexa stop" in an irritated voice. "Computer, lay in a course to intercept the Romulan cruiser." "Intercept course calculated. Did you know, I can automatically reorder toilet paper for the bridg…

The "did you know..." crap sounds like someone's bonuses are tied to Alexa engagement.

And people just triggering their half-dozen routines they made 3 years ago isn't enough engagement. Thus: a ham-fisted attempt to get people to use it more.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#233

Post by stavros »

pkulak wrote: post #205
Filligree wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hardware do you use? And how were you able to get hold of something that doesn't talk to the cloud? There's nothing like that in the shops here.

Most of my stuff is ZWave which is 100% local (big Zooz fan, and I hear that Inovelli is just as good). I have a bunch of Lutron switches too, and a couple Hue bulbs. Both of those will technically phone home, but you can cut off their WAN access and they still work just fine. I control everything with an old Mac Mini running Home Assistant. The trick is, before you buy anything, look it up on Home Assistant. If its…

I have the same experience as you, but I use Zigbee stuff (a bit more future-proof and open, ZWave is proprietary). I also love the Sonoff line of devices with Espurna or Tasmota. Everything has been rock solid.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#234

Post by MisterTea »

todd8 wrote: post #151

I have an EE degree and a CS degree. I waste an incomprehensible portion of my life fussing with the technology that runs in my home. Why is it so hard to configure VLANs for my security cameras using the fancy Unifi switches I have? Why isn't there just some documented JSON file somewhere that I can edit? (The key word in the previous sentence is documented -- I'm sure there is an XML or JSON file somewhere they jus…

Just keep away from unifi. I asked a similar question and was told "Buy Cisco." as you can configure most of their gear via ssh. You get what you pay for.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#235

Post by cmsj »

doteka wrote: post #190
cmsj wrote: post #186

I always find it curious that these systems are very much event driven and not state driven. If you set the lights to have an On state between those hours, the system could periodically check them and assert the right state if it's wrong. (although that drives you right into the scenario where you want to change the state, but some supervising entity keeps overriding you)

The scenario you describe gives me nasty flashbacks of fighting with broken Ansible configs. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone who’s just trying to dim the lights.

I am also not an enormous fan of declarative programming, but it does have its benefits :)

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#236

Post by Havoc »

This is why I stick to the /r/selfhosted flavour of smart homes.

I'm OK with some challenges, but I want to be able to troubleshoot it myself and understand what is happening. DIY also helps me learn (esp32 etc).

Alexa & friends are mystery boxes of black magic. That doesn't tick any of my boxes

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#237

Post by pimeys »

milkytron wrote: post #154
vultour wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other Google products. It makes me sad that the people who should be pushing against the death of the free internet don't give a shit. At this point I've accepted that Firefox will be going away at some point in the not-so-distant future, but somebody will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

> Same, most of the tech people I know have no aversion to these things, plus Chrome, Facebook, stock Android or other Google products. I have an aversion to all of the above. But when it comes to Android, it feels like the options are very limited. Either use iOS and only be able to use the device the way they want you to (for a steep price), or use Android and be tracked like crazy. As for Google products, YouTube…

With Android you can also get much better privacy by trumping most of the Google services, using Firefox with Ublock Origin and a system such as Blokada for system level adblocker.

With Android if you know what you are doing, you can stop a lot of it much better compared to iOS. With Apple the defaults are better than Android but many of the options for blocking trackers are not available.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#238

Post by dkarl »

I have a Homepod (short story, I needed a new speaker for the kitchen, and I was shopping for security camera at the same time) and it has been much more annoying than the simple bluetooth speaker that it replaced. The other day I was hearing strange sounds from it, rustling and crackling and murmuring, and I couldn't transfer the podcast on my phone to the Homepod like I normally do. I was convinced that either something was electrically malfunctioning, or one of our neighbors had inadvertently hacked it and were trying to watch an ASMR video, or worse, I was inadvertently listening in on somebody's open mic. I restarted the Homepod, started playing the podcast, and then my phone momentarily disconnected and the rustling and cracking started again!

Eventually I figured out that the Homepod was playing a track from some experimental percussion album that I bought years ago and haven't listened to since. Killing the Home app on my phone stopped it. So the Home app plays music??? Why is this separate from the Music app on my phone that is for playing music? Why does the Home app not show when I check my phone to see what it's playing? Maybe the app that plays music is running on the Homepod, but it plays music from my iTunes purchases? In that case, why is killing the Home app the only way I can see to control it?

I don't @#$%ing know. I don't care. I never asked it to play music that way. I don't remember being consulted. I didn't even know the functionality existed. I couldn't immediately see how to control what was playing, so I still don't know what the functionality is, and I don't care. All I know is that in the future when this happens I can stop it by killing the Home app on my phone.

I can only imagine that the Home app and the Music app are developed by Battlin' Business Units who are fighting over engagement. The focus on engagement is turning technology into the equivalent of those squeegee guys who soap up your car at an intersection and hope you mistake it for a sincere attempt to be helpful. Except those guys at least care about the yield from their engagement, and if you look angry enough they won't ignore your attempts to wave them off. On some quarterly report somewhere, every shitty experience where a feature gets shoved in your face is celebrated as evidence of a successful feature launch.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#239

Post by deepspace »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #173
jeroenhd wrote: post #157

I firmly believe that at this moment, Home Assistant is the best smart home system out there. No cloud, no vendor lock-in, no data, no profiling, no lock-in with licenses and companies needing to make deals. And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to wo…

Home Assistant is much better than the big alternatives. But, yeah, it does suck as a consumer product.

It is absolutely the best home control system available, and it simultaneously sucks so much that it is nowhere near ready for use by non-enthusiasts.

I used to have a meticulously managed 'smart home' with HA, but after the system spontaneously self-destructed the fourth time, I ran out of motivation to spend ANOTHER weekend redoing everything.

Re: The unbearable fussiness of the smart home

#240

Post by est31 »

Spivak wrote: post #225
mrandish wrote: post #222

I just built a vacation home from the ground up and specced the "smart" features myself and did so very carefully. I've learned the hard way because I was already "orphaned" when I bought my current primary residence which had a high-end 'state-of-the-art' home automation system that was designed into the walls by the original owner. Unfortunately, it was cutting-edge tech for 2001. The original manufacturer of the s…

I think your solution is good but paranoid in the wrong areas. You’re probably gonna get bit by 25 years from now is the dependency on current gen Wi-Fi. The thing you have to own is the transport layer and all the devices that directly interface with it. Then all you will ever need to replace is the bridge to your “control plane” — apps, HomeAssistant. The golden solution (for me) is RF. 100 years from now you will…

I put wi-fi, at least the earlier generations, up there are the list of consumer technology that will always be supported somehow, simply due to its extreme popularity. I can still buy floppy drives even though they became outdated decades ago, just as I can buy serial ports. USB-A will be up there as well, as will wi-fi and bluetooth, as long as governments don't ban wi-fi/bluetooth devices.

Wi-Fi runs in unregulated spectrum, which means that no operator has to pay lots of money to governments in order to use the spectrum. Contrast this to 2G and 3G which network operators over the world turn off so that they can deploy the more efficient 5G, which one day too will likely be deprecated in favour of something even better.

Multiple wi-fi networks can coexist. In fact, wi-fi already shares its spectrum with bluetooth and probably a whole range of other applications. Even if a company from say cupertino thinks that Wi-Fi is outdated, the spectrum will remain unregulated, and you will likely have some way to bridge from whatever technology the cupertino devices use to that technology (or well maybe I'm a bit too optimist, that cupertino company has figured out tons of ways to lock you in lol).

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