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.
What kind of bulb is it? There’s a chance that homebridge or something could control it through an API without needing the app.
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.
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.
Try plugging in a fork. Those still do what they are supposed to do
I’ve got some bad news
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.
Through absolute chance (the TV i wanted was sold out on clearance so I got a different one on clearance) I ended up with an Android TV-powered sony bravia. It lets you go into the app permissions and disable the optical recognition whateverthefuck they call it software. The rest of the analytics can be blocked by some regex firewall/DNS rules. It’s the only smart TV OS that I would recommend.
Omg yes preach !!! I feel it’s everything these days, coffee maker…app Vacuum…app Scale…app Electric shower nozzle…fucking app Everything needs a password and an account and my mind is crumbling because of it.
You know you can dumb shit, right?
It’s rarely a secret these days whether something has wifi, or Bluetooth.
TVs seem to have been pretty much taken over by ‘smart’ features.
I don’t mean this as a dare or a gotcha, but genuinely asking if you know of a decently priced modern TV that’s ‘dumb’ please let me know so I can buy it.
Yeah when I brought a TV a few years ago I could not find a good one that wasnt ‘Smart’ except for commercial variants that were an extra couple of thousand.
That’s because the TVs are subsidized by selling your stolen info.
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.
The laws have always been a quagmire.
I mean shit, you can’t even handle salmon suspiciously anymore
https://www.tastingtable.com/1913810/weird-uk-law-salmon-crime/
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
The closest thing I have to “the world of tomorrow” are regular degular hand operated dimmer switches. They’re great. I have one in every room.
No idea why everyone thinks you need the Internet to dim a light.
I remember when games asked you to register and it was optional… and people joked that they never did because there was no benefit to them whatsoever.
Now it is obligatory. No wonder I prefer retrogaming.
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I totally agree! I’m trying to avoid logins and download this and that, as possible as I can.
I’m half on one side, half on the other.
The line I draw is between safety and convenience. On the safety side, I want things to be very manual. I don’t want some app or external system managing whether or not the lights stay on, or whatever, on the convenience side, I 1000% want a way to manage things like the lighting from an app.
So anywhere that safety is a concern, like the kitchen, bathroom, a handful of other places… There’s zero “smart” anything. Everywhere else, yeah, I can turn off my lights from an app.
When I’m in my office/living room, where safety isn’t really a concern, I don’t have to get up to turn on the lights, I can yell at my Google home to do it for me, or use an app. If I want the lights to be some shade of turquoise, I use the app…
In the kitchen, as an example, no such control exists. You have to push the light switch, and you get basic bitch white light. You don’t get an option. You want the light off? Take your fingers and do the thing that makes the light switch go click and turn off the lights.
The decision to make anything smart relies on whether or not I’m going to be in danger if the lights go out and there’s no way to turn them on again because the Internet is down.
I’ve seen some neat features included, but it’s never worth all the added bullshit they add in. Being able to tell if your oven is still on, or garage door is still open is great, but the app is never just that. It always comes with a truck load of bullshit noone asked for.
I want everything as dumb as possible. I will register whatever I buy with the manufacturer for warranty purposes, but other than that: dumb toaster, dumb fridge, dumb washing machine, dumb robot vacuum cleaner, dumb doorbell, dumb locks, etc…
If it doesn’t need internet to function, it’s not getting any.
Last time I registered was for my dishwasher, all it did was get me on the mailing list to buy another dishwasher.
How many fuckin dishwashers do you think I need, mate?
I just stopped registering anything. I’m entitled to my warranty either way.
That’s why I use mail relays.
And if it does need internet to function…I’m going to try to not buy it.
I want quality buttons and knobs that let me control all necessary functions manually from the device. Smart features are for convenience and tracking stats. Never should the device talk to any party but me.
I agree completely. But now I can’t get the image out of my head, of the maniac that has done the complete opposite of this. Like putting the sink disposal unit, door locks, and flush toilets, all on a publicly accessible “smart” network.
Chaos.
No waiting for firmware updates
Wait, I just have to reboot my watch
Buy old stuff
Use open source
Downdate
etc
It is incredibly difficult for me to describe just how powerful a Linux desktop experience can be. You can buy a cheap computer that suports emulation and put QubesOS on it. Bonus points to putting a GPU in it and playing on either Windows or Linux with that GPU.
I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.
As bad as Windows is, and it is it getting worse by the minute, it honestly does just work. I dual boot my computer, mostly into Linux everyday and even now I occasionally come across problems that don’t exist on the Windows side. The community need give up with this idea that Linux doesn’t have major usability issues.
My experience is pretty limited and I might just be lucky in that everything worked for me, but installing linux was exactly as hard as installing windows. If anything, I found it less annoying because with Windows I tend to decline a lot of their services (no cloud, no office, etc) and I profoundly resent being nagged by MS to use services that don’t interest me.
If I bought my laptop with linux preinstalled, I wouldn’t say that it has been less usable than a windows machine. there is some missing support, but I had similar issues with switching from mac to windows and back.
I am not a power user, but I’m ok. I got sick of Windows BS, so when I got my Framework 13, I installed PopOS. I haven’t had to do anything to get things to work. It’s been fantastic.
I don’t think Linux people entirely understand just how uninviting the prospect of messing around with an operating system is for the vast majority of the public.
The point is that you can, not that you have to. My system is very customized. A few years ago when I had to work with Windows I used it with ConsoleZ (middle click paste!!!11), Kate (KDE4Win) & Dolphin (KDE4Win; explorer didn’t support tabs), that also wasn’t the most stable experience one could wish for. I would’ve used a tiling manager if such a thing would’ve existed, but there are some things you just can’t have on Windows. Everything works fine and stable when you use the standard stuff (for Windows that would be Explorer, MS Office, Outlook, Edge, Visual Studio, etc), but I’d expect the same from stuff like Ubuntu without third-party repos and no manually installed stuff. And even more if you just use GNOME/KDE with their standard software.
I may be in the minority here, but I absolutely know how to rock every corner of a modern Linux setup and I avoid OS-tinkering at home like the plague. I have better things to spend my time on, so the bar for user-friendly computerized things in my home is incredibly high. In fact, to circle back to OP’s point, such things have to “just work”, be secure by default, and require minimal hacking and tinkering to function reliably.
The fuck are you doing, that you need to mess with the OS?
So Linux is just going to magically appear on your computer is it?
Not to mention all the dependencies for everything, I’ve gone multiple layers deep trying to install dependencies for the dependencies just to use a single module. Tbf I’ve mostly used Linux for bioinformatics so perhaps the problem for me is biologists creating software for other biologists and none are truly computer scientists (including myself)
It very much depends on the build of Linux you’re getting but there’s definitely quite a lot of builds out there that were designed for enthusiasts, where after you’ve installed it you have to spend the next several hours configuring everything. Your average computer user has very limited patience for this assuming they’re prepared to even do it at all.
I bet that 99% of people don’t even really know how you would go about installing a new operating system. It’s not exactly intuitive.
Yeah it’s funny. Post about stuff just working out of the box.
First reply: Open source. Downgrade. So… Do exactly what the post is raging about.
There are many advantages to open source software and a lot of it does actually just work. Linux isn’t one of them though.
To be fair that’s because an operating system is far more complicated than most open source projects which tend to be applications.
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.
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…
Steam has a “Go Offline…” options for pretty much that. Indeed it sucks that you have to do that before you go offline, but it sounds like a good idea with your setup and just switch to online occasionally to update.
Furthermore it depends heavily on the games, not on steam. Some steam games work without the steam client, though for some of those you have to fiddle around or execute different binary.
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.
Luanti is a credible replacement option for Minecraft single-player
You don’t need a network connection for Minecraft single player. I’m not actually sure what they’re on about.
On Java edition at least, it wants you to be signed in with a Microsoft account. I haven’t dug too far into it, but I know our custom launchers break without a network connection. Once launched they work fine.
Had many a car trip trying to get the kids’ Minecraft session restarted off of a gas station’s WiFi connection…
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.
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.
Just booted my R36S. 21 seconds to be on the title screen of a game, Gameboy is apx 4 seconds. I was just curious so I thought I’d share.
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.
I really wanna ditch the smart TV I have and just get a display that only displays the picture of the devices I have plugged into its inputs and doesn’t get online, doesn’t receive updates or “improvements” and has inputs for everything:
3.5mm AUX audio
Composite
S-video
RGB
Hdmi
That optical audio jack made by (IIRC) Sony I can’t remember the name of right now. It’s what my stereo uses and it’s amazing. Used to be super common on TVs.
I mean I have that. It’s called a smart TV that I never use the smart functions of, connected to the HDMI output of a PC. It’s great for watching stream content and I don’t have to worry about ads and stuff.
In actual fairness to the TV it isn’t too bad in that respect but the interface is just god awful and I hate having to type with a TV remote so I still use the PC.
I recently got really tired of my TV constantly nagging me to update the firmware for all the newest features. I just disconnected it from wifi instead. I do not use my TV for smart features, I use it as a display. I update the things plugged into it, because that’s their job. If i need to stream something, I will use a box. A box that can be replaced or easily updated or changed out.
A display has one job, to display whatever.
I’d do that except that every few seconds, a big pop up that takes up 1/4 of the screen from top down tells me that the network is disconnected. 😬
what brand is your television? I wanna avoid it at all costs
Mine is LG. I really really hate the privacy invasion software, but no internet for the tv and it shuts up. No ‘no internet’ popups at least.
Samsung.
The standard optical audio jack was developed by Toshiba.
TOSLINK might be what you’re thinking of. And yes, it rules! I have a surround system that uses it and it sounds amazing
…TOSLINK can’t handle atmos bandwidth; you need eARC for uncompressed multichannel digital audio…
If only eARC worked well. It’s support seems garbage.
I had nothing but problems with eARC. DRM errors. Sound cutting out constantly. Device detection not working so the TV swaps back to internal speakers.
Not one problem since swapping to optical.
I had fun with eARC a while ago, my TV definitely supports it because it was on the box but what it doesn’t say is the fact that only one of the HDMI port supports it and it doesn’t tell you which one. I had to go online into a random forum to find out, It’s port 3 by the way, because that makes perfect sense.
