this guy should check out c/selfhosted
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?
It was originally a joke I found online, after reading through the list it honestly just feels like I want a simpler life one day. The site isn’t mine but it came up when I searched for a couple items from the list (like “Goats security is checking the fence, not sitting in a room listening to someone for hours.”)
So that you can become an enthusiast again right? Right?
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…
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.
That’s pretty good.
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.
Even if I wanted to smartify my home using open source and local servers. I wouldn’t even know what to make smart.
Lights only ever need to be on when I am in the room, but every door has a switch that only requires my arm to lift a bit. So what is the point in powering electronics for that? Just wastes energy.
Anything with a lock is a no-go anyway.
I rarely close my curtains, and don’t see why they should do so automatically in the off chance of it happening.
I don’t need to touch my thermostat when I am not at home.
Can anyone tell me actual useful applications that aren’t just a gimmick?
Most rooms in my house each have at least a handful of different, indirect lighting solutions. I could pay an electrician to wire them all to a single mains switch, but then I would need them to come back whenever I want it changing. It would also be more complicated to have dimmers and set programs for different times of the day to to adjust the lighting to a number of presets.
I could just have the one or two overhead lights that these rooms came with, but that’s just an unpleasant to look at experience to my eyes all of the overhead lights got replaced with ceiling fans that have no lighting that come on when the room is occupied and over a certain temp.
You walk in the room, a bunch of lights and may be a fan come on at the right lighting for that time of the day, then they go off at a suitable period of time. I even have all my garden lighting coming on via motion despite some of it being a separate 12v system that’s battery and solar powered via a 12v zigabee multi channel relay.
The only thing I’d need to make smart is my box fan, because once I fall asleep it would be better to turn it off, but I like falling asleep with it on, and I can’t turn it off if I’m already asleep.
So I could make that a smart device.
But I got those outlet power adaptors with a mechanical switch timer that just turns the power off when the timer dial rotates. It’s got a 24 hour dial and multiple pins, so I could put my fan on a schedule if I wanted.
Cost like $5, I’ve been using them since 1995. Easy to repair and replace.
If it ain’t broke.
If you have solar panels you can turn on appliances or compute intensive tasks if they produce power.
If you have humidity problems, an alarm can remind you if aerating makes sense. If you additionally have a bad landlord you can prove you aerated three times per day and still mold did grow, so he has to fix something!
If you have a home theatre one button can dim the lights, turn on the TV, and close the blinds.
You can have your motion controlled floor lights only turn on red in the night.
Small things which are in total useful.
With HomeAssistant its easy to do without any cloud connection.
By a curious turn of life, I have enough technical expertise in the right areas to be able to design the software and most of the hardware turn a lot of my home smart like that in a safe way were I’m fully in control of it all (no 3rd party involved) … and I can’t be arsed, for very much those reasons.
I mean at one point when I was playing around with microcontrollers I was looking for ideas of things to do with some neat microcontrollers which are cheap and have built-in WiFi support and I just couldn’t find anything worth the trouble, for pretty much the kind of reasons you list.
Sure, lots of things can be done which are “cool ideas”, just not stuff were the whole “remote controlled from my tablet” actually significantly reduces the effort in doing something without introducing new problems (i.e. it would be a whole lot of work to get my apartment door to automatically open when my face is detected outside and then the thing has a non-zero rate of failure even I I train the AI really well, so when it fails I would be stuck outside hence I would still need to carry a key around, so in the end it’s really just less hassle not do it and to keep opening the door with my key), plus often the problem is that once you add “remote control” to a device’s design you just make it consume a lot more power, so now it has to run from mains power rather than run from some batteries that will last for a year or so.
The maximum home automation I ended up doing it is automated plant watering and that stuff has been designed without remote access exactly because it can run from 3xAAA batteries for a year even though it actually has to power a water pump which when it’s running does consume a fair bit of power (but it only runs when the soil on the vase is not humid enough, which is so seldom it averages out to very little power). Sure, it would be “cool” to read the humidity sensor from my tablet and activate watering remotely, but that doesn’t actually achieve the point of of automated plant watering - making sure my plants don’t die of thirst because I forgot to water them - whilst overall making the design worse because now it needs a lot more power and I don’t have a design anymore where I can just replace the batteries once a year or so.
I have a similar background, and I actually am automating my home. However, what Google/Alexa tote as automation isn’t actually automation; I still would have to say something/press a button.
I have a pretty healthy home assistant setup, with stuff like electrochromic film on my windows that will dim the windows if someone is sitting near them and the sun is at the right angle to be in their eyes because I hate when I have to hold my head in a position to keep the sun out of my eyes.
I picked an extreme example, but I’ve also got things like reminders when my laundry or dishes are done (running off of a metered plug, so it just detects power spikes from the machines), presence detectors in rooms to automate lights on/off, and a whole slough of things that will happen when I click the play button on Plex (lights go out, curtains close, windows dim). I’ve got humidity sensors in the bathroom for starting/stopping the vent fan, I’ve got particulate/heat/humidity sensors for starting and stopping the hood vent in the kitchen.
Obviously these things save a few seconds here and there but it is nice to not have to think about these things anymore.
doorbell cam is just about the only thing i can think of
I just have my doorbell wired up to a taser. Anyone that actually wants into my house either has the doorcode or is going to break a window by default, so the only people that ring the damn thing are mormons that have ignored the “no soliciting” sign.
I have soil moisture sensors to auto-water my…uhhh…garden seedlings.
It’s the internet, nobody cares about your backyard camas root grow op.
If the sun is up past 8pm && person home close the blinds could be a reasonable example. If water is flowing to the bathroom run fan for 30 minutes could also be reasonable. If motion near front door take photo of door and email/text it to you could be a rudimentary form of security or knowing a package arrived.
We turn on our vacuum robot after we leave because the kids are scared of the sound :0) but they eagerly help press the button on the phone to turn it on
We only have two "smart* things: when we get up to pee at night, a motion sensor turns on a light in the living room. Much dimmer than those premade motion activated lights, so we don’t wake each other. Returning to bed and triggering the sensor again turns it off.
And when it has been raining more than a certain threshold in the past 24h, the outlet into which the pump that feeds our drip irrigation is plugged turns off, and on again when it hasn’t been raining for a while. Saves lots of water, especially when we are on vacation. (The rest of that system is " dumb", though.)
I could give you a bunch, but it would be missing the point: you should automate to fulfill a need. You don’t need automation so there’s no argument to make for it
So how do you send documents to the printer?
USB Cable
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…
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.
This is just a standard Type B usb cable. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--1v4a0pOwn0/X1n6TVbQElI/AAAAAAAAAKk/u0DMnzHqZnIAWMwhhKK4iGwabwQ2XGz8ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/usb%2Btype%2Bb%2Bgeekyviews.png
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought mine with cord only just a few years ago. Staying that way too
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!
cocking my gun
Nice try, Printer, but this is your last warning.
Say print again, motherfucker!
always heard printers were the most insecure tech to have, but the was decades ago, we got all sorts of devices nowadays
Not really a concern for home use if it’s not networked. If it is networked, make sure you at least have it behind your firewall, disable any remote access/remote printing features, and ideally update the firmware as well.
You’d be insecure too if everyone loudly hated you with a burning passion
Honestly they’re still pretty vulnerable. Maybe firmware is a bit better, but it’s a configuration thing that often gets overlooked in corporate networks. The amount of open SMTP relays I’ve run across in printers is a bit ridiculous, but it’s always fun to start phishing people with internal emails.
That’s bullshit. No one really does keep a gun next to their printer to shoot it in an emergency, the notion is just ridicolus.
What if the printer grabs the gun first? You need to keep it out of reach of the printer.
I live in an elevated house, straight out the window it shall sail
My printer sits on an activated trapdoor above a shark tank. I’ve spent so much on printers trying to learn all the normal noises. Also sharks, turns out ink in the tank is not great for them.
Really, you should upgrade to laser sharks. Toner is so much cheaper than bullshit price gouging inkjet ink, and I hear brother makes some great sharklasers that take generic toner…
god damn right.
I like having smart lights. I think having smart locks would also be kinda cool. There isn’t really anything else in my home that would benefit from smartness, though. I mean, other than me.
Zwave. Keep your control local. There’s some decent smart locks out there with zwave.
Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it’s all controlled by a local server.
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.
Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There are Somfry blind controllers with small solar panels that face outwards on the motor housing. No plug required.
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.
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
I would assume those would be zigbee or z-wave or something. What does it use?
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.
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.
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).
Shades? A real tech enthusiast uses PDLC Film!
(Seriously, I wish I could afford some for all my windows.)
Shit. I am a fossil.
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.
@pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.
Just attempted adding the mqtt addon to hass since migrating to a raspberry pi. Will only bootloop without ever providing a gui. observer shows all green when it is alive. Logs are unhelpful. I just wana sleep man.
Nuke and pave and restore from a backup. Should take an hour or so. You did make regular backups, right?
Seriously fuck mqtt. I avoid it like the plague
I’m a tech worker, and I’ve got tons of smart things. They’re just all local. (Except my garage door opener. Man, fuck LiftMaster. Oh and my thermostat. Ecobee is ok, but I wish they would offer a local only option.)
Check out to GDOBlaq from konnected. I have the alarm panels and they’re great.
Hopefully with Matter becoming more popular, it’ll make it easier to standardize local IoT devices.
RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.
I second that. Chamberlain’s/Liftmaster’s MyQ app grows more ad-infested by the day and the RatGDO gives you local control (no cloud required)
I tried myq for about 5 minutes before dumping it in the trash and getting a RatGDO. it’s been great.
Oh really? I’ll check that out. Thank you. :)
This is awesome, as a small garage door business owner, I may start bringing these up. Though, I may be one of the few people that cares about this.
I may get one, I’ve kept dumb motors for a long time to avoid any bs subscription to open my efing door.
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. 🤔
As a tech worker, it’s stunning how many of my colleagues have smart Amazon or Apple surveillance home
I’m not being flippant but how else would or should I control my smart plugs and lights? Or set a timer with a voice command? Get my devices set up for “movie time” or control music ?
I paid for the Mycroft and that was a flop and they are now out of business.
Using an app is kind of a shitty interface for that type of thing. Even if I managed to do the rain dance to get home assistant up and running with my stuff…
It’s always risk vs convenience.
Personally I respect folks keen on privacy. But I’m old, I don’t have kids, and don’t give a fuck. Give me my voice commands and no hassle set up/use…
Smart switches are programmable, and can easily configure smart switches and lights. You can get a touch screen interface to home assistant, and do all of that on it, embed it on the wall. It doesn’t need to be an app on your phone.
Voice is definitely easier and more convenient, with HA being more configurable and difficult.
There are always going to be trade-offs in life, but you’re definitely getting convenience in exchange for privacy here
Because being a tech worker doesn’t mean you have privacy concerns, after all someone made those privacy intruding devices
