Real.
As a tech worker I do have smart stuff in my home, but it’s all self-hosted and under my complete control, with no dependency on cloud.
This. Exactly this. Home assistant all the way…
How is home assistant these days? I love the smart home aspect but last time I checked a year or so ago you still needed to tinker with it a lot to keep it running. Love it or hate it but alexa integration w/ hue has just worked. Working in IT the last thing I want to do is fiddle with tech when I’m off work
Working in IT the last thing I want to do is fiddle with tech when I’m off work.
That’s where I’m at. I just buy whatever cheap product works reliably enough for the application, link it to an isolated IoT VLAN where it can’t see anything but the internet, and then forget it exists on my network. It’s mostly because I’m lazy, though, and don’t want to give up the convenience of Google Home smart lighting shortcuts on my Pixel’s lock screen.
Exactly, alexa/google or whoever is financially incentivized to make sure their product continues to work.
Bob at home labs and his integration are just passion projects. For which I respect, but I don’t want to tinker with it when a new model of light comes out that breaks everything.
Just put everything on its own vlan and let it talk to other iot and the internet and that’s it. Sure they are scalping some data but that’s a price in willing to pay for the convenience
HA is the start of the slippery self hosting slope though, be careful it’s addictive
In the grand tradition of software development personal projects, I have spent literal years of my life and hundreds of dollars on equipment to save myself a few bucks a year on subscriptions, or a few minutes of doing something manually.
As a tech worker, the only piece of technology I don’t have is a printer. Those things suck. I use the library’s if I need to print something.
I use the printer at work to print things. Fuck owning a printer lol.
Working remote means if my work had a printer, that would be me owning a printer. I definitely did that before I had this job. Or used the university’s printer when I was going to school.
You probably don’t even own the printers you buy anymore.
Printers are the sole reason I never went into IT.
I’ve only had to deal with printers once while working in IT. But, I also never worked a help desk.
I work at an MSP and I deal with printers daily. Fucking hate them
I once turned down a six figure job because they asked too many printer related questions
That’s wild. But I get it. Printers are the bane of my existence.
The only thing worse than a normal printer is a large format printer
I have to fix gigantic plotter printers like once a month and the amount of paper that gets wasted in the troubleshooting process is insane
I remember troubleshooting plotters for a while, if they were under warranty I would sometimes just ignore that I was certified and just scheduled one of their techs to come out just so I didn’t have to deal with it.
Cheap laser printers have done me good. Toner lasts forever and because of corporate B2B practices, they aren’t locked into the shit ink ecosystem.
I was going to say just print it at work, but then you’re probably wfh. I have to be onsite part of the week because of my role, but I’d been using an office supply and shipping store before that.
I grabbed a usb only Brother laser printer at the thrift store. I’ve never even changed the toner and I’ve printed hundreds of shipping labels with it. I’ve never had to mess with configuration with it. I’m more worried about the usb ‘B’ cable going bad than the printer itself.
Same here, I have a business grade laser printer and it’s worked flawlessly on Linux and windows without any extra work to set up. And the laser toner has a much longer shelf life than ink. The downside is it’s black and white and still cost more than a consumer grade color printer.
There’s this print shop that’s insanely close to my house and I go there to do resumes or whatever. If there was a library anywhere near me, I’d be giving them all my business.
I am currently working on a project that requires me to use Brother P-touch printers with NixOS on Raspberry Pi. Manufacturer does not offer ARM64 drivers. Last driver update was from 2017 for the model I am using.
I spent the entire week figuring out why CUPS does not play well with open source drivers which are maintained by some unpaid heroes who are doing their best.
Eventually, I hacked together some code that implements printer’s raster language and uses usblp printer class driver.
It saddens me to see that there is little to no interest from manufacturers to provide and, most importantly, maintain working drivers.
I would have been certainly lost without open source alternatives and implementation examples.
Once you’ve worked in the sausage factory and know exactly what goes into the sausages, you stop eating sausages.
The ones with extra anus are the best.
More hog lips for me.
Tech enthusiast who works in tech here. I haven’t owned a printer for more than a decade.
As a person who works in tech, I have a nice photo printer. It’s only printed photos, nothing else.
You can only see so many articles about a ring camera oopsie and people seeing inside others cameras to think maybe this isn’t a good idea.
Anything not locally hosted I assume is being harvested by ai, monetized in some capacity and inherently unsafe.
Explaining this to people who don’t care is another matter. Realistically it’s your personal comfort level of data privacy, they’ll get you some way.
Even if something isn’t collecting data from you, at any moment it could switch to doing so if its not hosted locally.
Any Ring device allows the local police department to access it at any time without a warrant. That’s enough for me to swear never to own one.
Safer to keep the gun out of the printer’s reach IMO
As a tech person, I do have smart things, but they are Z-Wave so they are completely isolated from the Internet.
I use zigbee myself but I’ve been thinking of moving toward z wave. Either way, it is fully possible to complete own your home automation without kowtowing to FAANG.
It is possible I would go with zigbee if I started today, but since I am already so invested in Z-Wave, it doesn’t make sense for me to switch.
Iirc z wave is the better protocol. It’s more “strict” in terms of their branding, requiring stricter controls over zigbee.
Do you have a specific brand name that I can look up? Thx
I have a lot of Zooz devices, but I haven’t run across one yet that doesn’t play nice with HomeAssistant.
Just looked into z-wave, it looks cool. Surprised I haven’t heard of it before.
I really had this moment of clarity when I realized that my smartwatch was sending data to the manufacturer who was sending it to advertisers who are then selling it to health insurance agencies, which may affect me in ways I couldn’t imagine.
Now I’m more than happy just wearing a G-Shock every day.
I read G-Shock as G-Sock and started wondering when google made smart socks
When I saw a Fitbit used to solve a murder case and how much data it vomited everywhere… good lord. I knew it was bad but not that bad.
Yeah, I realised this when I was younger with a smartwatch, because it required a phone number, email and for you to be over 18 to use it.
Honestly waiting for the new Pebble stuff to come out.
That is because a tech enthusiast dosent know jackshit about how technology actually works. They just see „Wow, insert tech monopoly made new AI Smart revolution (I’m out of buzzwords) thingy that makes no sense over me actually just doing the thing I want with a button, but instead requires a bunch of sensors and microphones that send to the manufacturer 24/7 so you can turn on your coffee machine at 6:00 exactly. Oh, what’s that? My Amazon Alexa needs thousands of underpaid Indians working under minimal living conditions so it can recognise exactly what sound I make when waking up? And those audio recordings just got leaked and now everybody knows what I say when sleeping?
Edit: Tech enthusiasts are just paid by the companies to brainwash people. They are the baby pigeons of the tech world.
As a tech worker, I don’t believe in printers anymore. I’m coming up on three years at my current job and haven’t needed to look for a printer yet. My home printer was there mostly for school projects but now that my kids are in college, I’m taking an axe to it the minute it gives me any grief
I finally had to break down and get a printer bcz amazon keeps sending me trash.
And its a a LaserJet 4P
Printers are the worst piece of tech we ever invented. I don’t care what anyone thinks, we should have stuck with the old fashioned printing press, that was where the technology peaked.
Its really just modern printers, because the companies (hp) don’t give a shit about quality. I have a deskjet from the 2000s and it works great, just plug in the cable and it prints. No fucking around with drivers, no making a hp account or dealing with a crappy app.
Every tech device I have that is more than what an average person would have is the dumbest possible device for the job. Video switcher is a 4x1 with a remote that has 4 buttons. Stereo is analog. Shit if I could rip my therostat out of the wall and install dumber temp gages I would.
I could rip my therostat out of the wall and install dumber temp gages I would.
I absolutely love the old “bottle of mercury on a coil spring” style of thermostats.
There’s an on going project at my maker space to get the smart thermostat working because people will leave the thing on overnight and waste fuel. I’m previous solution was to have two thermostats with a hand crank timer on the warmer on. It took one night to install and get working. It is idiot proof because the thermostats themselves are behind locks.
I have a lot of computers in my house but no “smart” stuff.
