Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it’s all controlled by a local server.
Yep.
I love tech, as long as it’s tech that I have full control over.
Home Assistant is the antithesis to this meme
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.
Personally I love the idea of a smart home only if its self hosted and running on fully open source software, also never put a gun near an unattended printer :3
And if anybody is wondering if that exists, it’s called Home Assistant.
I really need to get back into troubleshooting why it won’t work in my instance. Got into a habit of it but I got distracted by a crazy lady
Never connect an unattended printer.
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Zwave is superior for not clogging up the 2.4GHz airspace, both are darling to use with hass. Wifi is a close third for usability but suffers from bogging local wifi/airspace without interoperability without a controller of some kind being online. Zigbee/Zwave both can function somewhat even with the local server offline
Home assistant, as a central system (it basically let’s you wire anything into anything!). The smart switches etc should be esp8266 or esp32 based. You can then flash either tasmota or esphome to them.
Since your server will likely be Linux based, it’s open source all the way to the bare metal, (or at elast as close as possible).
My current system almost doesn’t notice if the Internet dies. Also, if you nuke critical components, in the worst case, it still defaults to dumb control behaviour (physical switches still work etc).
I still know where the kill switches are however. I’ve also made sure it doesn’t have control of anything mobile, other than the robo vacs, and I’m fairly sure I could take them in a fight.
as close as possible [to fully open source to the metal]
Last I checked the only fully open stuff is one manufacturer’s IBM power 9 workstation and several Chromebooks
Is it better in embedded stuff? Last openWRT device I ran needed a closed binary for network
There’s still some various binaries. E.g. the expressif sdk generated code. However, it’s far harder to sneak something nasty into it.
Codespace is at an extreme premium on microcontrollers. Kb, and even bytes matter. A big, complex bit of malware would take significant space, likely enough to be noticed quickly.
As for smaller, simpler malware, this is a possibility. However, due to their nature, microcontrollers get a lot more scrutiny of their outputs. Random data dumps to an unexpected external address would be caught VERY quickly.
This is compounded by the fact that it’s not uncommon, at least in larger installs, to segregate IoT devices from the main network. It stops them cluttering it up, and slowing it down. This makes it easy to firewall off the network from the Internet. They can talk to each other, and the central coordinator, but only the coordinator can see the internet, unless explicitly allowed.
If my network were compromised via my smarthome setup, my first suspects would be the debian PC running home assistant, or my ubiquiti router. I’ve at least reduced my target area to business grade networking kit and a single Linux server. I’m not an impossible target, but far from a soft one.
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.
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…
I live in an elevated house, straight out the window it shall sail
As a tech worker, I’d rather have a panicked skunk in my home than a printer.
But people keep insisting that I print, sign and scan documents like we are living in the stone age of computing. I literally recently got a brand new in a box printer from 2008 just so I could do exactly that.
Places don’t accept pdf files that have signature touchscreen signed signatures?
I sold and bought a house without signing anything except the final papers at the notary. The mortgage, the realtor papers, the inspection all were signed on either a DocuSign page or on my phone with a stylus.
I just got onboarded to a fortune 500 company as a consultant and that was the process.
I got a Lexmark business laser printer from a place that was going out of business for like $50. Best investment I ever made. It just sits there quietly, not doing anything, until I print something like twice a year. Five years in and it still works fine, I haven’t even replaced the toner.
Best investment I ever made
My brother in Christ, you’ve paid $5 per print.
When you think of how much of a pain it is to go to a print shop, that’s not bad at all.
Alright, best is an exaggeration. But $5/print assumes it breaks before I print anymore. The actual value is still unknown.
Your entire house is
smarthackable and tracks your every step for advertising revenue of big companies.My smart home is Home Assistant hosted on a server in my house. It’s fully open source and has gone through multiple paid audits to show its security is good too. The only non-local-only integrations are the weather api’s and my thermostat (ecobee).
I mean yeah, it’s possible to set it up privacy-respecting and that’s great. But the average tech enthusiast doesn’t set up his own server beyound a NAS.
A NAS is the perfect device to host it on though. Docker or VM.
Heh, I’d argue the average tech enthusiast is exactly the person that would set this up. If not them, then who is homeassistant for? I think modern tech enthusiasts are privacy conscious and will put in the small effort to enjoy that privacy. Its non-techies who wouldnt bother and just use the app it comes with.
A firejail doesn’t hurt either ;)
How many hours per week do you tinker with it though?
At first, a lot. Not so much recently though. It’s definitely more work though I’ll admit. Sometimes that’s the price to pay for privacy. Also, I learn a lot of skills that could help me get a good paying job by doing it.
THIS
I work with tech; other than in my home office; there is no tech in my house.
The voice activated things…just no. I looked into Mycroft, which looks interesting, but is till a solution looking for a problem.
I wish it was more common for printers to have or be supported by open source firmware. Maybe then I might start to trust them enough to buy one.
BRB, attaching a pen to my GRBL-based CNC and looking for a PostScript to G-Code converter…
This is actually a really easy conversion for popular 3d printers like the ender3, there are so many plotter mods.
Funnily enough, not being able to modify a printer’s firmware is what turned Richard Stallman into the free software advocate.
(Well, it was more the drop that made an already very full glass overflow, but still, “the printer story” has de facto come to be known as the point where free software started.)
this guy should check out c/selfhosted
In more civilized countries, we keep a sledgehammer read to bash the printer with, rather than a gun.
Real techies know that the only way to be sure is to use an EMP device.
I’m starting to get old.
I can smart my house in a fully closed network and automate so much shit. But then I have to stay on top of it. I’m already at the point where it’s becoming a chore to catch up on the industry for new hardware for my rigs and I’ve done it so many times; it’s not fun anymore, it’s a job… I’m tired.
Solace is found in my headphones and a fire pit. The day Steam becomes fuckery, I’m retiring from technology and fully absolving myself into disconnection.
Hell of a time to be born, but fatigue.
Edit: Ah, who amI kidding? I’m a career data analyst. I’ll be chasing digital dragons until I die
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?
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It’s the internet, nobody cares about your backyard camas root grow op.
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.
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.)
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 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
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.
My living room has no hard wired lights, and only one plug is on a switch. Only one standing lamp makes the place gloomy, but the second can’t be on a switch. Rather than turning them on and off separately, I smartified them so I can do it via voice or app. Also if I’m cooking and my hands are a mess, I can ask Google/alexa/whoever to set a timer, add something to a shopping list, or tell me what temperature something needs to be. My favorite use is casting computer audio to multiple speakers so I essentially have a home sound system. Makes cleaning more fun. Also not having to get up to turn the bedroom light off at night is transcendent.
Nothing I use smart stuff for is particularly revolutionary, but it’s handy enough that I like having it.
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
One thing I want is for my washing machine and dishwasher to coordinate with my water softener to be sure there’s enough soft water left so that no hard water will go through them and to immediately initiate a regeneration if there isn’t while the appliance waits for the regeneration to finish before starting.
I’m paranoid at work because that’s my job.
At home, I’m off the clock and my digital hygiene and organization is atrocious.
It’s also the opposite! I do a lot of self hosting at home.
But at work… Hell yeah bro wire that shit through AWS with a Google login and Microsoft platform, I don’t GAF.
The shoemaker’s children oft go barefoot.
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.)
RatGDO is a local ESP device you can hook into a LiftMaster to connect it to WiFi in a better way. Highly recommend.
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.
Oh really? I’ll check that out. Thank you. :)
I tried myq for about 5 minutes before dumping it in the trash and getting a RatGDO. it’s been great.
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)
Hopefully with Matter becoming more popular, it’ll make it easier to standardize local IoT devices.
Check out to GDOBlaq from konnected. I have the alarm panels and they’re great.
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. 🤔
This is part of the reason I have no intention of having anything to do with IT once I retire.
So that you can become an enthusiast again right? Right?
Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. But who knows?
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 how do you send documents to the printer?
cocking my gun
Nice try, Printer, but this is your last warning.
Say print again, motherfucker!
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.
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.
This is just a standard Type B usb cable. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--1v4a0pOwn0/X1n6TVbQElI/AAAAAAAAAKk/u0DMnzHqZnIAWMwhhKK4iGwabwQ2XGz8ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1280/usb%2Btype%2Bb%2Bgeekyviews.png
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
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.
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!