car
This is a lovely comment, thanks!
Terrible mid 20xx introduction of full on touchscreen tablets to motor vehicles would like to know your location.
And your phone number and your address and your contact list and permission to read-write access to your files and your social security number and your blood type and your date of birth and your mother’s maiden name and the location and shape of any birthmarks or scars and your fingerprints and your genealogy and your deepest darkest secret and what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday and if you’ve made any pacts with yogsathoth and if your soul is still available for sale and your dental records and your porn preferences and your favorite color and your BMI and the name you gave to your favorite stuffed animal when you were six years old
Shit either has no buttons, with an capacitive touch surface, or if it has buttons, it’s never immediate response, you have to press it for an extended amount of time.
it’s fucking infuriating.
Yes long press needs to be relegated to the most obscure functions of a device, not the main uses.
You just described my Chevy Volt so accurately. All the buttons are touch surface except the parking brake switch, and I usually have to pull that twice.
Try plugging in a fork. Those still do what they are supposed to do
I’ve got some bad news
Ahhhhh! Nothing is sacred anymoooooore
Obviously you just forgot to lick the tines!
Yup.
Comcast “updated” their network yesterday and broke every fucking smart plug in my house. None of them will work anymore.
Did they disable the 2.4ghz band on your router?
Thought of that too, but yup it’s still active. A couple other devices are connected via 2.4 but none of my plugs or bulbs will connect. They worked just fine yesterday and now they’re all bricks.
I helped my dad install a new dumb thermostat last winter. We just had to drill a couple of new holes to mount it, and moved the wires over. Boom,there was heat again. I thought about how much of a pain in the ass it was to get my Ecobee working, and how refreshing it was to just have something work immediately.
It’s a very similar feeling to playing my GameBoy Color again after messing around with retro gaming linux handhelds. You just turn it on and play, then just turn it off. No boot sequences, no emulator settings to tweak. No SD card corruption that ruins your game library. Just on and off.
it’s the reason why the original Odroid Go it’s so special to me… it’s all built around an ESP32 microcontroller and it does emulate only NES, GB, GBC and a couple more, while honestly not even being perfect at it, but goddamn… it boots in like 1 second, even directly to the last game you were playing, it has no settings whatsoever, the battery lasts for like 7 hours it’s such a neat little device.
and it’s funny because in my head that it’s the device that kickstarted this whole retro handheld emulation craze, but it is the only one to take such a minimalistic approach
No boot sequences
(being annoyingly pedantic) technically there is a boot sequence: the Gameboy logo. on the DMG there’s a little blob of code from 0x0000 to 0x00ff that clears some memory, sets up the screen, reads the logo from cartridge memory and scrolls it. the loader only jumps to the game if the logo is byte-identical (the idea being that unlicensed games could be sued for trademark infringement.)
on the GBC the loader is a little beefier but mostly the same.
t. made a horribly broken FPGA core for the DMG that got just far enough to load the Tetris intro
Yes, but that’s pretty miniscule compared to booting any of the linux based retro handhelds. An Bernice, Powkiddy, R36S, they all have like a 30-40 second boot time.
Just booted my R36S. 21 seconds to be on the title screen of a game, Gameboy is apx 4 seconds. I was just curious so I thought I’d share.
It’s not comparable. Nintendo must have spent millions on developing the Game Boy, meanwhile retro handheld is a hobby project someone did over the quarter. Ever try to port and run an RTOS on those ARM chips? And port a mainstream Game Boy emulator to it? “What do you mean you have to have MMU support?Just work, damnit?”
It doesn’t work like that.
It’s completely comparable in this circumstance. They are performing similar functions, playing handheld games. My R36S is a pretty impressive little device, and it performs excellently at playing games. But using it is much more complicated and longer than popping a game in a gameboy.
Gameboy: insert game, turn on, play, turn off. R36S: turn on, 30-40 second boot time, locate game, play, exit emulator, shut down, 10 second shutdown time.
Sir, I sincerely think you missed the point. Somebody, that nobody who only knows just enough programming, spent three months (at most) in his basement, putting together a embedded Linux and integrated emulators in a portable computer, cannot be compared with a video game company’s officially released commercial product. The money, the time, the effort, the equipment, the testing, not one is in the same magnitude.
Sponsor a group of enthusiasts who have the right skill to live for a year, they can replicate Game Boy with modern hardware too, 100% identical or even better. Consumers like us who only paid $20 for the retro handheld emulator? We don’t have a right to complain about the performance and quality.
The internet has become more and more complex. I miss the early 2000s when I was a kid and everything was open and easy to use. No need to register ,no need to download this or that app. Everything was easy, even the laws.
The laws have always been a quagmire.
I mean shit, you can’t even handle salmon suspiciously anymore
https://www.tastingtable.com/1913810/weird-uk-law-salmon-crime/
This is why I like hardware synthesizers
everything is still a problem, it’s just a self-inflicted problem! 😁
Everything being my fault means I’m still in control!
(This is actually not always true and is instead a rather toxic delusion of someone who has lost all control of their life blaming themselves for everything for the aesthetic of feeling like they still have agency and responsibility)
Hello fellow old person. I too miss things that just work.
I have this smart lightbulb that I got for halloween last year because I thought it’d be cool to make the porch glow purple for trick or treaters. Now I have to replace it because the app that controls it has decided to try and blackmail me for camera and location access and the bulbs default state without the app is to flash on and off in a way seemingly deliberately designed to cause headaches.
My sister bought me a smart desk light that insists on using an app and ‘doesn’t work’ without it.
Thing is, it will work as a normal desk light…if you’re willing to sit through 10 minutes of intense blinking while it tries to connect before finally giving up.
Phillip k dick (i think) wrote a story about this.
What kind of bulb is it? There’s a chance that homebridge or something could control it through an API without needing the app.
What fantasy world are you living in? How could my glass hold water if I didn’t sign up for a service that sends me spam? How could my table hold a book if I didn’t sign up for the monthly subscription that prevents it from ejecting books into the air? Even my cat came with a ToS that said that by petting her, I give her access to my bank account and first born child. Hasn’t it always been this way?
I’m half on one side, half on the other.
The line I draw is between safety and convenience. On the safety side, I want things to be very manual. I don’t want some app or external system managing whether or not the lights stay on, or whatever, on the convenience side, I 1000% want a way to manage things like the lighting from an app.
So anywhere that safety is a concern, like the kitchen, bathroom, a handful of other places… There’s zero “smart” anything. Everywhere else, yeah, I can turn off my lights from an app.
When I’m in my office/living room, where safety isn’t really a concern, I don’t have to get up to turn on the lights, I can yell at my Google home to do it for me, or use an app. If I want the lights to be some shade of turquoise, I use the app…
In the kitchen, as an example, no such control exists. You have to push the light switch, and you get basic bitch white light. You don’t get an option. You want the light off? Take your fingers and do the thing that makes the light switch go click and turn off the lights.
The decision to make anything smart relies on whether or not I’m going to be in danger if the lights go out and there’s no way to turn them on again because the Internet is down.
I agree completely. But now I can’t get the image out of my head, of the maniac that has done the complete opposite of this. Like putting the sink disposal unit, door locks, and flush toilets, all on a publicly accessible “smart” network.
Chaos.
I want everything as dumb as possible. I will register whatever I buy with the manufacturer for warranty purposes, but other than that: dumb toaster, dumb fridge, dumb washing machine, dumb robot vacuum cleaner, dumb doorbell, dumb locks, etc…
If it doesn’t need internet to function, it’s not getting any.
And if it does need internet to function…I’m going to try to not buy it.
Last time I registered was for my dishwasher, all it did was get me on the mailing list to buy another dishwasher.
How many fuckin dishwashers do you think I need, mate?
I just stopped registering anything. I’m entitled to my warranty either way.
That’s why I use mail relays.
I’ve seen some neat features included, but it’s never worth all the added bullshit they add in. Being able to tell if your oven is still on, or garage door is still open is great, but the app is never just that. It always comes with a truck load of bullshit noone asked for.
I want quality buttons and knobs that let me control all necessary functions manually from the device. Smart features are for convenience and tracking stats. Never should the device talk to any party but me.
I love some connected devices, and own a LOT of them, but some things are just stupid. I don’t need my blender to be connected. Washer, dryer? Unless it’s going to move my laundry from one to the other, nope. Stove, wtf? I have to go stir anyway so who gives a crap.
I like my washer and dryer being connected. I can load it in the evening a set my Home Assistant to start it when the price on power is low.
The other things I agree with
how often is your electricity provider changing rate timing?
this could easily be done on the device itself with a timer/schedule
I have dynamic pricing so it changes by the hour depending on the market.
I can see the pricing ahead of time so I could do it manually, but I don’t want to.
Probably every hour with dynamic pricing.
I would like em too, but only if they allowed local only without any accounts beforehand.
My poor tv is like, “connect to the internet? I need to call home! Help, i’ve been abducted by a luddite!”
Tv, you are never getting my wifi password.
Piece of shit genocider
Lmao
Through absolute chance (the TV i wanted was sold out on clearance so I got a different one on clearance) I ended up with an Android TV-powered sony bravia. It lets you go into the app permissions and disable the optical recognition whateverthefuck they call it software. The rest of the analytics can be blocked by some regex firewall/DNS rules. It’s the only smart TV OS that I would recommend.
you can still have this, you just have to not buy the shit things
the only thing i’m aware of that has no non-shit option anymore is TVs, but then who the fuck watches TV anymore?
I use a 40" for a PC monitor and dual-monitor setup to watch movies on the 55".
But you’re right. My wife and I keep talking about putting spare TVs in the kid’s rooms, but they wouldn’t watch them anyway.
After trying to get my new automated kitty litter box working with a POS app that can’t sync with the poop machine and the PM can’t connect to my 5 GHz wireless network (only 2.4 GHz) nor does it have any way to enter the password for said network I have resorted to deleting the app and just pushing two physical buttons in sequence on the PM twice daily to clean the litter area.
The 5 ghz vs 2.4 is such a pain in the ass. As far as I can tell Android won’t let you pick which to use so you can’t be on the same network as the device, even with the same ssid.
You can have your router split the different frequencies into different named networks to make it work. But you shouldn’t have to
The next thing I’m going to try is temporarily turn off my router, make a hotspot with my Android phone, in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, with no password security and try that. I don’t care about tracking the cat’s weight or being reminded that the app thinks I need to buy more litter or deodorizer, I just want to set some settings (like how long to wait to rotate the poop into the hopper after a cat walks away from the poop machine) and that would make the machine “better.”
Using them in the same name isn’t that great either. These days you shouldn’t ever need to connect to 2.4 is markedly slower
Slower but up to spec for most people unless you need high data transfer speeds, and it also provides wider range than 5ghz.
2.4ghz is faster than my max bandwidth so I keep using it for range
Me too, I gave up on the app. It’s easier to just push the button on the machine. Hate things that need an app. Also hate having an account to use everything.
I literally refuse to use ANY app. None. If your service needs one, I don’t need your service. End.
