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And another pile of junk has been created in the endless "Buy-this-cool-shit -> Sorry-this-cool-shit-is-obsolete -> … " cycle. Poor environment.
My home is dumb as fuck. My light bulbs only obey the flick of old fashioned light switches. My fridge doesn’t try to engage in conversation. I have to close my curtains by hand. I monitor my health by figuring out how I feel. This old fashioned life of manual drudgery still leaves me sufficient time to laugh about the fools who buy this kind of stuff.
Every bit of tech you buy these days is just conspiring to make you buy more tech. The best option for your financial and mental health is to avoid everything marketed as “smart and innovative must-have” like the plague.
There’s an open source movement basically solving this sort of problem. I’ve had various smart home things working flawlessly for a decade or more.
The key is twofold. To make sure that support won’t be dropped. Offline functionality is a key indicator of this. Open source firmware is even better.
The 2nd is WAF. Wife acceptance factor. How transparent is it for normal functioning, and does it fail gracefully. E.g. my light switches all work normally. If the network goes down, they fall back to dumb switches. The wife never has to deal with “the lights are broken” while I’m away with work.
It’s nice you found a way to have your smart home working with open source solutions.
Sorry for having to bring this up, but I really wish you didn’t have to include the ‘wife stupid with tech’ trope in your post and that awful phrase ‘the wife’ that seems to be so popular with some guys these days. It seems so disrespectful to talk in this way about the person you share your life with.
Around here most folks don’t seem to imply their partners are not good with tech, just that they aren’t excited about a reduced reliability of their home. Maybe this is more of a trope in other online spades. This commenter seems to respect that most people expect the basic functions of their house to work reliably.
“family acceptance factor” “spouse acceptance factor” “I will consider how others feel and how I might affect them”
I think it’s important to be careful around how you refer to your partner, especially if they are of a marginalized group. I just don’t think this commenter was being disrespectful.
Yeah that’s how I read it too.
It’s our normal language for referencing each other. “The wife”, “the husband”. I’m sorry if it offended you.
As for the WAF comment, it doesn’t mean she can’t fix it, just that she has no interest in the nitty gritty of how it works. This seems to be a common occurrence with smart homes. It’s FAR more likely the male partner is interested in building it. The female partner tends to only care that it works. (And that their partner is enjoying themselves).
So far this gender stereotype holds up strongly (90%+)
Keep posting these articles. We have enough tech companies out there creating piles of useless electronics in peoples’ home. I’m sure there are some who will just blindly go buy the next thing, but there are growing numbers of folks who are starting to refuse to buy into these ecosystems because we know they’ll be artificially obsoleted. Eventually, this will turn into a money issue for these companies who invest heavily in proprietary or semi-proprietary stacks.
“Hey, thanks for buying all of our products. We just found out that running servers costs US money, so screw that. We’re turning them off. Good luck guys!”
My first smart home purchase was a set of four Wemo light switches to be able to turn on all four of my backyard lights without walking around the house (wraparound backyard with a light switch in my bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen). They’re still working nine years later, and as long as they still function locally with Home Assistant and don’t make a fuss, I’ll keep them in service. If they stop working or give me angry red lights, I’ll throw in some Z Wave switches.
