I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, “That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!”
Perform Bad Apple using the most complex geometric shapes possible.
We’re starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors for the basement brewery) but it had to wait until i’d built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house
But supposed they invented a whole new kind of meat and your grill wasn’t ready to deal with it? How would you feel then? Pretty darn silly, that’s how!
I guarantee this update didn’t drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn’t turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.
Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.
Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. “Patching Tuesday” is an unofficial but well recognized “holiday” for IT folks. It’s not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don’t have to work through the weekend.
Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it’ll pop up on Tuesdays.
Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.
I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!
So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.
Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.
Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.
Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.
Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.
After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”
And in those four months, did no-one think of firing up WireShark to see what was floating across that network during that time period?
Seems like someone dropped the debug/analysis ball…
I wasn’t in IT, so my hands were tied. If I tried running a network scan, I’d have been able to hear the screeching all the way from city hall.
Never said it had to be you.
But a threat to do exactly that would have likely called IT’s bluff long before the four-month mark.
what can you expect, they’re probably getting paid 40-50% of what they should be getting paid.
pay less get less.
my pride as an IT worker wouldn’t have allowed me to let it fester for 18 weeks though.
As someone in IT, the answer is in the comment.
City Hall is closed by 7:30
So nobody was ever in the office and nobody on the team wanted to stay (I’m guessing here) 2.5 hrs after work to actually do any troubleshooting and because it was never a problem during office hours then who cares
Read the comment more carefully… while IT was most certainly not at their posts, this implementation team was actively monitoring the rollout and witnessing the carnage.
Yes, I you agree with me. They absolutely were not at their posts 2.5 hrs after end of day on a Friday, which is likely why they responded to the tickets Monday morning.
And I am also agreeing with you that there should have been someone(s) who stayed late to actually watch this. But it’s not gonna be me haha
And of course, this is all speculation from a random unsourced comment on social media. It’s not that deep ❤️
Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.
Good shout on patch tues tho.
pro tip
I get it. I hate it, but I get it.
another pro tip from someone else in IT: see that appliance with the digital screen? fuck it. don’t get it. get the old shitty one that’s $800 less that doesn’t have WiFi or non-tactile buttons. you know what doesn’t need firmware updates? a charcoal Weber grill.
Tuesday is the perfect day for it. Finish up the update on Friday, review it Monday and fix where you probably fucked up something and didn’t notice, push it the next day.
Thanks, but i prefer most utilities without wifi and need of patching. Each wifi device is running a full blown OS, for which the (cheapest possible) hardware will start to fail after 5 to 10 years. Experience from a wifi capable HP printer; wifi was the first that failed. Not to talk about never patched security holes.
A grill should run on charcoal. It needs to get very hot and that’s literally it.
There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.
There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.
I really ought to finish putting together my HeaterMeter.
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Uses a PID controller too.
wifi grill - okay
cloud grill - not okay
While I agree that real charcoal is superior in every way, a good grill and the person running it needs to be able to control the temperature while cooking. It might be just fine to burn those hot dogs or hamburger patties, but if I want to roast a potato or an onion, I need to be able to control the heat to something less than the surface of the sun.
If you don’t know how to control the temp on a cheap charcoal grill, that’s fine, but don’t pretend it can’t be done.
I do. I almost always cook over indirect heat. But many people don’t. That’s why they prefer gas over charcoal. And when they try, they make the mistake of using briquets instead of real wood charcoal. The sand has never added any flavor to the cooking.
To be truthful, I do have an LP smoker that’s setup for cold smoking. It’s much easier to to control over the 2 or 3 days it might take to cold smoke bacon or ham. And a LOT less work.
A grill should run on charcoal.
Someone insert the KOTH reference, I’m too tired, I tell you hwat
Hank is wrong. If all you care about is the “heat,” you might as well go inside and cook on your stove!
You’re describing the gravity fed charcoal grills from masterbuilt and I love mine. Especially when I toss in a cast iron pan full of bacon and run it at 450 for half an hour.
Realistically they probably didn’t use the traeger until the 4th, so they were about a year behind on “updates”
Unless you’re my dad, then he finds any excuses he can to use his traeger. The thing can smoke a damn good brisket, software updates be damned!
Right? Guy buys a $2000 grill to use is once a year. There’s gonna be software updates. The app probably tells you too so you can go and turn it on to get the update at minimum throughout the year.
Now it can run Crysis
Looks like it is a crysis already.
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
I have a Christmas tree with built-in LED lights where I can change their colors and make patterns and animations. Every year I get it out I have to do a firmware update on my Christmas tree before I can use it 😂
If they are WiFi controlled that’s actually a good thing, as it sounds like the manufacturer is still supporting it & hopefully updating it to prevent security issues & hacks!
But this is also why I personally try not to buy WiFi enabled gadgets unless it really needs to be remotely accessible.
Can we go back to dumb tech?
To not connect it to the Internet would probably help and turn it into a normal grill.
I’m a casino slot tech. Don’t even get me started on the electronic table games that still use a dealer! Like Scotty said, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”.
Yet more reasons that charcoal/firewood is superior.
If you want to spend all day watching it. I set the Traeger and forget it until I get a notification that the food is at temperature.
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I wouldn’t use it, but if you want one with software then there’s nothing wrong with it updating.
I have a friend who’s really big in to smoking meats for hours and hours and days at a time. He loves this kind of thing because he can monitor the smoker without physically being in front of it.
I think he’s crazy af for involving the damned internet in it but I guess it is what it is when you’re “cooking” something for 9 hours.
Remember to update your grill and turn it off before Thanksgiving!
poor baby. who grills out on thanksgiving? also my charcoal grill never does this
My dad’s gas grill doesn’t do this either. Sometimes the boomer inability to understand technology is a blessing. Now if only he’d stop downloading sketchy slots games and getting viruses…
It’s very possible, dare I say preferred, to have a traditional Thanksgiving spread getting made in the kitchen while someone grills up some veggies.
