I have taken the precaution of self-hosting everything, cutting off these smarty pants devices from calling home to Borg Central out there in the Cloud-iverse.
My little Raspberry Pi home automation server is a modest device and is in no danger of getting ideas about procreating with unsuspecting ladies.
You air gapped your Arduino ?
Well, aren’t you the very model of a modern Major-General.
I stand duly impressed !
Have you been listening to Act 2 of Joe’s Garage again?
Oh, Man, does that take me back. Good call !
ETA: “Alexa: play ‘Sy Borg’ by Frank Zappa”
Oh believe me, I understand the trend towards home automation. My litterbox has wifi for Og’s sake. I’m sure that there is a use case for connected washers and dryers, I’m just having trouble making it. Once told, I’m sure I’d have to rush out a buy a new pair.
Nokia cell phones have a reputation of being almost indestructible. Smartphones are pretty much everything Nokia phones are not; they’re fragile and require frequent charging, but unfortunately for Nokia they’re the phones everyone in the developed world wants.
Off the top of my head, it can send you a notification on your phone when the cycle is finished, rather than you having to listen for the buzzer or just having to go and check.
Great. Now I’m going to have to rush out a buy a set.
With an energy crisis about to hit, it would be nice if smart devices would at least report how much power they are using. If they could also be scheduled to do their work at times of day when electricity is cheapest) assuming you buy from a utility with attractive off-peak rates) that would help.
I am facing a doubling of my gas and electricity bills. It would be so nice to have a report every month that tells me where it all went. Smart devices that provide a simple web page or API over Wifi would be a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately the smart home with connected devices is a battleground between major corporations that all want your data and subscriptions.
They are pimples on the backside of progress.
These people make a device that is supposed to be able to monitor your electricity usage and supposedly can tell which device is using what but I don’t know if it works as well as they claim it does.
Never seen that before. It detects the signature of the current & voltage waveforms for each device, and then measures its energy usage.
Not sure how well it works.
Another one I thought of… All-Clad cookware.
We’ve had our set of original Stainless (these days it’s called “D3 Stainless”) for 14 years now, and it gets heavy use and cleaned in the dishwasher. So far, none is any the worse for wear, save one of the saucepans that has a tiny dent.
I suspect that in all likelihood, it will outlast me, and my children will negotiate over it.
We just got rid of all our Revereware - the newest of it was from the early 1990s and some definitely dated back to the 1970s. It all worked just fine - but we got an induction cooktop, and Revereware doesn’t work with that. My daughter is still using some of it, though - we passed most of it on to her.
I have hopes that our AllClad pans will become heirlooms. I’d been gradually getting a piece at a time when I spotted it on sale somewhere. I’d love to get one of their stockpots next but really can’t rationalize the price, when a 35 dollar version from Costco is filling the niche acceptably. To be fair, I strongly doubt that Costco pot will last nearly as long.
The real stars of the All-Clad lineups seem to be the saucepans, skillets, and saute pans. They’re all fully-clad. We’ve got an All-Clad multi-pot (estate sale, IIRC) and an All-Clad turkey roaster, and both of those are more conventional- the pasta pot has one of those thick metal disk bottoms, and the roaster is just stainless steel.
Put a load in the machine before you go to work (or just load it gradually), then set it to go off the right amount of time before you get home, so that the washing is freshly dry when you want to hang it out rather than sitting there for a few hours. Delay timers help, but not as much, especially if you keep irregular hours. Or set it to start at 4am, so everything’s ready (either for hanging up, or dry and ready to wear) when you get up.
Could even mean you could put a load in there, leave it while you’re on vacation, then set it to go while you’re on the way back from the airport so you come home to a load of totally fresh washed and dried clothes.
I use the delay timer frequently although there have been times that it wouldn’t delay as much as I’d like.
I definitely wouldn’t consider it an important enough feature to upgrade a washer or dryer that worked perfectly well, and I don’t really shop in the higher-budget range where smart-enabled machines are common at the moment anyway, but if I did, I’d probably go for it TBH. I often stay over at my GF’s so come home and fairly random times and it would definitely made organising laundry a little easier if I could start the machine up remotely.
We used to make jokes that those old HP lasers "you could feed them gravel and they will crush the gravel and press it into paper then print on it.
I think the Brother Laser printers are also pretty durable for home use.