I refuse to buy products for my home that require an app. No, I am not signing your fucking privacy policy to use my lightbulbs.
When I had my bathroom done, they put some speakers in the ceiling I could connect to with bluetooth, but in order to activate that I need to use a crappy app to swap them to speaker mode and turn them on.
When I got a new phone, guess which app no longer works on versions of Android that Noah himself didn't use to track his fucking animals?
Bonus: Every power cut causes it to enter "detuned radio mode", requiring me to find my old phone, charge it up enough to power on, connect to the speakers and switch them off.
Never buy anything from EISSound.
Really need to get around to figuring out the spec of the speakers so I can replace the controller...
See, this guy is not a programmer, you should have known to create a ubiquitous interface to use your speakers, some audio cable that you could connect to any device to implement the music playing capabilities, instead you jammed the implementation into a blackbox that now can't be easily changed.
Personally I love the idea of a smart home only if its self hosted and running on fully open source software, also never put a gun near an unattended printer :3
And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it's called Home Assistant.
I really need to get back into troubleshooting why it won’t work in my instance. Got into a habit of it but I got distracted by a crazy lady
Zwave and ZigBee baby!!! It's been Awesome so far.
Zwave is superior for not clogging up the 2.4GHz airspace, both are darling to use with hass. Wifi is a close third for usability but suffers from bogging local wifi/airspace without interoperability without a controller of some kind being online. Zigbee/Zwave both can function somewhat even with the local server offline
Never connect an unattended printer.
Home assistant, as a central system (it basically let's you wire anything into anything!). The smart switches etc should be esp8266 or esp32 based. You can then flash either tasmota or esphome to them.
Since your server will likely be Linux based, it's open source all the way to the bare metal, (or at elast as close as possible).
My current system almost doesn't notice if the Internet dies. Also, if you nuke critical components, in the worst case, it still defaults to dumb control behaviour (physical switches still work etc).
I still know where the kill switches are however. I've also made sure it doesn't have control of anything mobile, other than the robo vacs, and I'm fairly sure I could take them in a fight.
As a tech worker, it's stunning how many of my colleagues have smart Amazon or Apple surveillance home
Because being a tech worker doesn't mean you have privacy concerns, after all someone made those privacy intruding devices
As a tech worker, I'd rather have a panicked skunk in my home than a printer.
Your entire house is ~~smart~~ hackable and tracks your every step for advertising revenue of big companies.
My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It's fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api's and my thermostat (ecobee).
I mean yeah, it's possible to set it up privacy-respecting and that's great. But the average tech enthusiast doesn't set up his own server beyound a NAS.
How many hours per week do you tinker with it though?
THIS
I work with tech; other than in my home office; there is no tech in my house.
The voice activated things.....just no. I looked into Mycroft, which looks interesting, but is till a solution looking for a problem.
My printer is on a separate network and traffic to and from it is controlled via pfSense. There isn't a single "smart" device in my network.
this guy should check out c/selfhosted
My buddy is a tech worker with his entire house wired up. But it's also all probably tied into his own personal server and whatnot, with nothing on any clouds.
I'm horrified when I see someone with an Alexa in their home
Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don't want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I'll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don't want it anywhere near my home network.
You should have destroyed it.
Reckon an Echo Dot would fit in a clay pigeon flinger?
You should definitely try it.
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13€ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It's quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
This is part of the reason I have no intention of having anything to do with IT once I retire.
I have one plan for retirement, goat farming. I go over that old list of reasons every few years just to remind myself there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Nice! What makes you want to get into that?
So that you can become an enthusiast again right? Right?
Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. But who knows?
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it's all controlled by a local server.
Cybersecurity tech worker here, and same. Even with the local server though, the one smart thing that I absolutely don’t fucks with is exterior door locks. I got one that does PIN entry, but absolutely no wireless or Bluetooth or anything. Other than that let’s fucking go it’s 2024 I can’t be bothered to open my window shades with my hands like I’m living in the 1800s on a farm in the fucking prairie or some shit. They open on a schedule, synced at a slightly earlier offset to my wake up alarm.
Dream: I will slowly wake up to gently increasing morning sun
Reality: my alarm clock sound is now just the buzzing and whirring of a motor that is starting to open my blinds. Just as I fall back asleep the whirring noise starts again to increase the light level.
Yo do you write for Black Mirror?
Eh if they are savvy enough to unlock my door they are smart enough to break my window. Also if they can unlock my door I still have zwave open/close sensors that will trigger the alarm so I will take the convince of smart locks over non smart any day. I can keep the wandering bums out but remotely let family members in without having to give out my code or keys.
That’s fair. I can store like 20 codes or something, so I just keep one extra in there then rotate it after whoever I had to give it to is done with needing it.
I live on a really busy street in a city, so I’m really not worried about someone breaking a window to get inside. Sure there’s a nonzero chance a methie might smash a window, but around here it’s mostly just testing car door handles and maybe smashing the car window if there’s a visible wallet or pill bottle or something.
Walking up to my door and doing a replay attack, or sending a master password to the lock takes seconds and doesn’t look any more suspicious than a resident entering the house. This talk is from 2016, but I doubt things have gotten significantly better, and I don’t want to be replacing my door lock, or even worrying about updating firmware, whenever something like this is found (Picking BLE Locks - Anthony Rose & Ben Ramsey).
But yeah, I’m not saying anyone’s an idiot for using a smart lock or anything, odds are it will never matter either way.
I'm starting to get old.
I can smart my house in a fully closed network and automate so much shit. But then I have to stay on top of it. I'm already at the point where it's becoming a chore to catch up on the industry for new hardware for my rigs and I've done it so many times; it's not fun anymore, it's a job... I'm tired.
Solace is found in my headphones and a fire pit. The day Steam becomes fuckery, I'm retiring from technology and fully absolving myself into disconnection.
Hell of a time to be born, but fatigue.
Edit: Ah, who amI kidding? I'm a career data analyst. I'll be chasing digital dragons until I die
Dont you fucking say that about steam. They will forever be a beacon of hope.
I don't have to be in tech to not want my lightbulbs connected to the internet, my car collecting data and any decice listening to me.
I really just want a not technology smart life and its getting harder and harder.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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