Man, I remember reading about all this home automation stuff in Compute’s Gazette for the Commodore 64. It’s been around forever and a day.
I program for a living.
I can’t stand all the smart shit people talk about. I hate installing software updates. I hate having to download an app just to use some shitty hardware. I hate needing an internet connection to use something. I hate having to charge yet another device.
I really hate software. I try to avoid it as much as possible.
There’s an offshoot of smart device enthusiasts that insist everything is local and reproducible. But if you don’t like software, it only makes it worse to try to keep things self-hosted, not to mention the learning curve is much, much steeper.
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.
That’s pretty good.
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…
Putting speakers in speaker mode speaks volumes of where we are as a people today.
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.
Tech worker here. I am this 🤏 fucking close to dragging every god damn thing designed to pass an electron out to the driveway and fucking hack it to bits with an axe (that I use for hewing and preparing lumber, so I can live in the wilderness when technology wins).
Haha, “hack to bits” haha. No pun intended.
I’m paranoid at work because that’s my job.
At home, I’m off the clock and my digital hygiene and organization is atrocious.
It’s also the opposite! I do a lot of self hosting at home.
But at work… Hell yeah bro wire that shit through AWS with a Google login and Microsoft platform, I don’t GAF.
The shoemaker’s children oft go barefoot.
So how do you send documents to the printer?
USB Cable
At this point i would feel safer having the printer on the network with my devices’ network stacks between it and the OS than I would granting a printer direct access like that.
And what’s on the other end of the USB cable?
A pot of Bitcoin!
I bought a cheap printer from walmart last year and was absolutely miffed that it didnt come with a cord. No, I am not connecting you to my wifi and installing your software on my computer! Had to buy a printer cord on amazon that ended up costing as much as the printer itself…
I don’t think I’ve had a printer come with a cord in like 20 years.
I sold printers (and other tech stuff) 20 years ago and can confirm, they have never come with USB cables, even before they were wireless.
I bought mine with cord only just a few years ago. Staying that way too
Well to be fair this was literally the first printer I’ve ever bought, at 31. It advertised on the box that it could connect by wifi or by cord, so I expected it to come with all accessories needed for that.
Sounds like the real problem here was spending way too much money on a USB cable that you could have gotten for less than a buck from literally any other place.
It wasn’t just a generic usb type-b? Or was the printer only $3?
Nope, turns out printers still come with a unique connector type.
Interesting. I haven’t seen a printer without a type-b port since like the 90’s or early 00’s? And those were pretty consistently the parallel printer ports from what I remember.
This is just a standard Type B usb cable. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--1v4a0pOwn0/X1n6TVbQElI/AAAAAAAAAKk/u0DMnzHqZnIAWMwhhKK4iGwabwQ2XGz8ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/usb%2Btype%2Bb%2Bgeekyviews.png
cocking my gun
Nice try, Printer, but this is your last warning.
Say print again, motherfucker!
I wish it was more common for printers to have or be supported by open source firmware. Maybe then I might start to trust them enough to buy one.
Funnily enough, not being able to modify a printer’s firmware is what turned Richard Stallman into the free software advocate.
(Well, it was more the drop that made an already very full glass overflow, but still, “the printer story” has de facto come to be known as the point where free software started.)
BRB, attaching a pen to my GRBL-based CNC and looking for a PostScript to G-Code converter…
This is actually a really easy conversion for popular 3d printers like the ender3, there are so many plotter mods.
It’s an Okidata ribbon printer.
They’ll probably be no more ribbons before the machine itself gives up the ghost (provided proper maintenance)
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
To an enemy, I hope! Otherwise, you should’ve just thrown it out, or stripped it for parts or something.
I think it was to my parents, who already had a Google Home and an Alexa. I figured it was safe to add it to the rest of the dumpster fire…
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.
I like having something in the garage. It’s in a place where I only stay when I’m working on something and my hands are super dirty. It can be isolated to a vlan by itself.
But if my hands are covered in oil. I like being able to yell at it to play music and not get one more thing dirty.
Makes sense. I’m also interested in getting something like it, I just don’t want anything by Google or Amazon, and I’ve been too lazy to go the DIY route.
When I’m working in my garage, I’m usually listening to an audiobook, and all I need to do to pause is bump a button on the side with the back of my hand or something. Or sometimes I’ll listen to a playlist. But if I’m working on something in the garage, it’s usually not for very long (e.g. maybe an oil change, brake job, or headlights), so I’m usually in and out in 30 min to an hour. Some people love working in their garage though, I personally see it as a chore that I do to save some time and money.
Mine was a hacked Google home mini (physical hack, not software) where I took the speaker out to an aux jack to have it loud enough.
I was in there for hours for all sorts of projects like engine and trans rebuilds.
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
Yup, just need to get around to doing it…
One of these weekends I’ll have the right ratio of time:motivation. Anyyyy weekend now…
I’ve been meaning to set up a voice assistant with Google’s old AIY voice kit and Mycroft for a long time now (so long, in fact, that at the time I started thinking about it those things hadn’t been discontinued yet) and then trying to integrate that with Home Assistant. (See also: Picroft, Mycroft Home Assistant integration)
If I still wanted to use that voice kit hardware, what would be the best software to put on it these days?
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
Oh yeah what kind of phone do you have?
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it’s all controlled by a local server.
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.
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.
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.
There are a lot of zwave s2 locks out there. No Bluetooth at all.
128-bit AES isn’t amazing, but it’s more solid than bluetooth and most hardware locks.
Most locks, including deadbolts, can be picked or bumped in seconds. The physical lock is the weakest point. You can get zwave s2 smart locks with just pin pads, no physical key. That’s probably the most secure option.
Lock picking takes skill. I’ve defeated a deadbolt and doorknob with a cordless drill in ~15 seconds. And it’s not even all that loud.
Silicon Labs Z-Wave chipsets contain multiple vulnerabilities
CVE-2020-9060 Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 series chipsets using S2 are susceptible to denial of service and resource exhaustion via malformed SECURITY NONCE GET, SECURITY NONCE GET 2, NO OPERATION, or NIF REQUEST messages.
Oof. Could you imagine having a vindictive neighbor who is mad at you over some dumb shit you have no idea about, then then DoS’ing your lock that has no physical key?
Again probably as close to zero as a non zero chance can be of actually happening, but idk just give me a key and some buttons for when I have bags and shit.
Also, if i decided to go in to home invasions I’d rather just carry around a phone or a raspberry pi or something and pop smart locks than carry around a snap gun.
Everything you’re saying is right though, there’s always a trade off when it comes to security.
Always have a backup trigger. A open/close sensor is hard to beat. They would have to know where it is and have access to it to bypass it. And for good measure a shock sensor to know if someone is trying to break it down.
Yep fully agree on the exterior door locks. That is the one thing that should never be connected to anything even local servers. Also have to be careful with electronic locks in general. Some brands are terribly designed and can be bypassed in a stupidly easy way.
I’m more of a middle-ground person myself. I have Home Assistant fully self-hosted and using a secure cloudflare tunnel for external access. A few other self-hosted containers running other various things. Anything exposed to the internet requires a login. I always try to find stuff that integrates with HA, but I don’t go to the full length of finding stuff that doesn’t require the brand app to setup. I like the local control stuff if I can get it, because it usually works a lot better, but I won’t actively avoid every brand that connects to a cloud somewhere because that’s too much effort to avoid for me.
Shades? A real tech enthusiast uses PDLC Film!
(Seriously, I wish I could afford some for all my windows.)
Build your own! All you need is an esp32 or pi pico, stepper motor, and driver.
That’s next on my list of projects after I finish my smart microchip keyed pet feeding stalls.
I’m not sure the build-it-yourself route is the cheaper one compared to just buying a ZigBee smart opener
I think they’re saying they wish they could afford PDLC film for all their windows. If you can DIY PDLC film you probably have a 3D printer the size of a tractor trailer and are 3D printing yourself a new house or something just for for the fuck of it in the backyard of your estate.
@[email protected] was talking about stepper motors and microcontrollers, those are for motorizing a shade
Unless my client is fucking up and putting their post as a reply to the wrong comment (which is a real possibility), they replied to Telorand who was talking about PDLC film.
Shit. I am a fossil.
I wish someone made a smart door lock status indicator. I don’t want my doors to unlock for me; I just want to know if I remembered to lock them.
Like you want to have a dumb lock but a smart sensor that tells you if the deadbolt is locked or open?
I remember reading some blog somewhere about a person who rigged up a sensor to alert them if their mailbox had been opened or not, you could probably design something to do similar. Idk maybe a magnetic thing to detect the bolt itself, or something to detect on the position of the latch on the interior of the door?
Found this after a quick search, sorry for it being Reddit and the video of the working solution being uploaded to gfycat.
It wouldn’t be hard to do if I got a hall sensor, I just didn’t want to have to mess with 3D modeling and printing a housing for it.
I wonder if contact strips could be glued to the sides of the thing the deadbolt goes into?
That’s definitely one way to approach it. You wouldn’t have to attach something to the door that way, but you’d have to mess with wires external to the device.
HomeAssistant can do this. Set an automation when you leave your home zone, if door is unlocked notify you.
If you have a smart lock, you can even close it. You should get cameras and an alarm system first, though.
if door is unlocked notify you.
How do you detect this condition without a motorized smart lock?
Hall sensor or a switch that gets pressed when the lock is locked.
How did you integrate this into your door reliably without interfering with the regular lock mechanism?
You could position the sensor/switch on one of the cardinal directions so it wouldn’t be in the way of the mechanism.
The ones I saw from Cisa, aside from reporting the status, could automatically lock every time you closed them
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?
I really hate that the automated shades I needed (must be plug in because they’re 18’ off the floor) are so proprietary that it’s not even wifi.
Here in Italy shutter covers are common, I have those and awnings, both can be connected to any sort of smart 2-way switch. I use BTicino for the shutters and Shelly 2PMs for the awnings
Damn that sucks. I lived in an apartment and wound up rigging up an arduino to pull the chain on these three massive window shades in my apartment, they were seriously like 20 foot tall windows. This was back in 2015 or so, so I didn’t even bother trying to find anything off the shelf.
I love your username btw.
There are Somfry blind controllers with small solar panels that face outwards on the motor housing. No plug required.
I would assume those would be zigbee or z-wave or something. What does it use?
In the US, 95% of “smart” tech wants WiFi connection to a proprietary cloud and they will make breaking API changes and/or ban users for using 3rd party clients. Only phone apps with permission to see your contacts allowed!
That being said, you can usually find products that will work locally but it’s really difficult, and big-box stores almost never have anything Zigbee/Z-wave or even Matter enabled. It’s bleak.
Ikea sells ZigBee blinds that connect right up to any home automation hub. Pretty cheap too, in the $100-200 range for most windows.
I’m using several. Batteries are solid. I get a good 3 months with daily opening/closing. I only wish they had solar modules you could add in, but the battery tray design makes that unlikely.
Ew. Blinds really should be line of sight IMO. I don’t want anything related to my physical privacy living in the cloud (and that goes double for you, Ring).
It’s not zigbee or anything anyone else uses. Someone spent a little time with a software defined radio to decode some of the signal.
Ew, that’s awful.
Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme
There’s a difference between recognizing the risks of “smart” tech and knowing the futility of avoiding it -or- even better having the skill to mitigate as much risk as possible.
I know a tech enthusiast, his house scares me
Tech worker here and my whole house is smart. Using Home Assistant, zwave, zigbee and EspHome, tasmota devices. So it’s all offline, local, and homemade. Only have a few devices that are too complex or expensive to home make. For example radon detector, Bond bridge, ShieldTV.
Other tech workers: My house is dumb because I use all money for either a new server or fursuits.
I’m just curious how the person is using the printer, or why they have it. I haven’t had a printer in over a decade since I left college. I need to print something maybe once every other year, I go to the library.
I know its a joke clearly, but what good is a printer if you don’t have anything to send a print job to it.
I have this old & tiny b&w laser printer that someone gave me that is actually perfect for the 2 prints a year I need to do, by my calculation the toner it came with should last me roughly another 250 years.
They meant 3D Printer. I’m not elaborating. No I’m not saying I actually know they meant that, but that is the case in my home.
I bought a laser printer 7 years ago. It’s still plugged into my network and I use it about once every 6 months on average. My GF prints out papers for the kid to color on and whatnot.
A proper printer isn’t bad. Even in the work place. Just don’t make a public printer out of a shared usb printer and shut off the computer…
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.
