Tech worker here. My house is largely smart, but it's all controlled by a local server.
Cybersecurity tech worker here, and same. Even with the local server though, the one smart thing that I absolutely don’t fucks with is exterior door locks. I got one that does PIN entry, but absolutely no wireless or Bluetooth or anything. Other than that let’s fucking go it’s 2024 I can’t be bothered to open my window shades with my hands like I’m living in the 1800s on a farm in the fucking prairie or some shit. They open on a schedule, synced at a slightly earlier offset to my wake up alarm.
Eh if they are savvy enough to unlock my door they are smart enough to break my window. Also if they can unlock my door I still have zwave open/close sensors that will trigger the alarm so I will take the convince of smart locks over non smart any day. I can keep the wandering bums out but remotely let family members in without having to give out my code or keys.
Yep fully agree on the exterior door locks. That is the one thing that should never be connected to anything even local servers. Also have to be careful with electronic locks in general. Some brands are terribly designed and can be bypassed in a stupidly easy way.
I'm more of a middle-ground person myself. I have Home Assistant fully self-hosted and using a secure cloudflare tunnel for external access. A few other self-hosted containers running other various things. Anything exposed to the internet requires a login. I always try to find stuff that integrates with HA, but I don't go to the full length of finding stuff that doesn't require the brand app to setup. I like the local control stuff if I can get it, because it usually works a lot better, but I won't actively avoid every brand that connects to a cloud somewhere because that's too much effort to avoid for me.
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.
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.
I'm horrified when I see someone with an Alexa in their home
Yup, my parents have Google Home and Alexa, and my brother has Alexa. And here I am, the only one in the family who works in tech with neither. In fact, I got a free Google Home and gave it away because I don't want it anywhere near my home network.
One of these days I'll figure out how to DIY it, but until then, I just use my phone (GrapheneOS, so some protections there) to play music and look stuff up.
There is www.home-assistant.io but that might be too much for your needs.
With a bit of work homeassistant can be a quite good voice assistant.
You can either revive some old android device and use that, or get an ECHO M5 for ~13€ and hook that one up.
You can even run some local Ollama AI and use that for the voice assistant nowadays. It's quite useful and home assistant can be integrated into music / audiobooks aswell with something like Music Assistant 2.0
Oh yeah what kind of phone do you have?
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
I refuse to buy products for my home that require an app. No, I am not signing your fucking privacy policy to use my lightbulbs.
When I had my bathroom done, they put some speakers in the ceiling I could connect to with bluetooth, but in order to activate that I need to use a crappy app to swap them to speaker mode and turn them on.
When I got a new phone, guess which app no longer works on versions of Android that Noah himself didn't use to track his fucking animals?
Bonus: Every power cut causes it to enter "detuned radio mode", requiring me to find my old phone, charge it up enough to power on, connect to the speakers and switch them off.
Never buy anything from EISSound.
Really need to get around to figuring out the spec of the speakers so I can replace the controller...
Putting speakers in speaker mode speaks volumes of where we are as a people today.
See, this guy is not a programmer, you should have known to create a ubiquitous interface to use your speakers, some audio cable that you could connect to any device to implement the music playing capabilities, instead you jammed the implementation into a blackbox that now can't be easily changed.
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.
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.
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).
A firejail doesn't hurt either ;)
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
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
Dont you fucking say that about steam. They will forever be a beacon of hope.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
If the sun is up past 8pm && person home close the blinds could be a reasonable example. If water is flowing to the bathroom run fan for 30 minutes could also be reasonable. If motion near front door take photo of door and email/text it to you could be a rudimentary form of security or knowing a package arrived.
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.
This gives a new meaning to trouble shooting. 🤔
I program for a living.
I can't stand all the smart shit people talk about. I hate installing software updates. I hate having to download an app just to use some shitty hardware. I hate needing an internet connection to use something. I hate having to charge yet another device.
I really hate software. I try to avoid it as much as possible.
There's an offshoot of smart device enthusiasts that insist everything is local and reproducible. But if you don't like software, it only makes it worse to try to keep things self-hosted, not to mention the learning curve is much, much steeper.
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
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.
As a tech worker, it's stunning how many of my colleagues have smart Amazon or Apple surveillance home
Because being a tech worker doesn't mean you have privacy concerns, after all someone made those privacy intruding devices
I'm not being flippant but how else would or should I control my smart plugs and lights? Or set a timer with a voice command? Get my devices set up for "movie time" or control music ?
I paid for the Mycroft and that was a flop and they are now out of business.
Using an app is kind of a shitty interface for that type of thing. Even if I managed to do the rain dance to get home assistant up and running with my stuff...
It's always risk vs convenience.
Personally I respect folks keen on privacy. But I'm old, I don't have kids, and don't give a fuck. Give me my voice commands and no hassle set up/use...
Smart switches are programmable, and can easily configure smart switches and lights. You can get a touch screen interface to home assistant, and do all of that on it, embed it on the wall. It doesn't need to be an app on your phone.
Voice is definitely easier and more convenient, with HA being more configurable and difficult.
There are always going to be trade-offs in life, but you're definitely getting convenience in exchange for privacy here
Damn, I also paid Mycroft ai, it's a shame what happened to them. But this is the kind of convenience that is not worth giving away my entire life to a corporation.
Home assistant is making great strides and will get there eventually but it's probably still several years and two or three hardware revisions away from replacing Alexa for anyone that isn't a total geek about these things. They just don't have the money to produce loss leaders like Amazon can.
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?
Other tech workers: My house is dumb because I use all money for either a new server or fursuits.
I'm just curious how the person is using the printer, or why they have it. I haven't had a printer in over a decade since I left college. I need to print something maybe once every other year, I go to the library.
I know its a joke clearly, but what good is a printer if you don't have anything to send a print job to it.
I have this old & tiny b&w laser printer that someone gave me that is actually perfect for the 2 prints a year I need to do, by my calculation the toner it came with should last me roughly another 250 years.
I bought a laser printer 7 years ago. It's still plugged into my network and I use it about once every 6 months on average. My GF prints out papers for the kid to color on and whatnot.
A proper printer isn't bad. Even in the work place. Just don't make a public printer out of a shared usb printer and shut off the computer...
They meant 3D Printer. I'm not elaborating. No I'm not saying I actually know they meant that, but that is the case in my home.
It’s an Okidata ribbon printer.
They'll probably be no more ribbons before the machine itself gives up the ghost (provided proper maintenance)
I don't have to be in tech to not want my lightbulbs connected to the internet, my car collecting data and any decice listening to me.
I really just want a not technology smart life and its getting harder and harder.
Me too, although robot vacuums, I like those.
I like having smart lights. I think having smart locks would also be kinda cool. There isn't really anything else in my home that would benefit from smartness, though. I mean, other than me.
Zwave. Keep your control local. There's some decent smart locks out there with zwave.
I have a smart lock and the only good thing about it is I have an automation that locks the door at midnight in case I forgot. That's about it.
Tech worker here and my whole house is smart. Using Home Assistant, zwave, zigbee and EspHome, tasmota devices. So it's all offline, local, and homemade. Only have a few devices that are too complex or expensive to home make. For example radon detector, Bond bridge, ShieldTV.
My printer is on a separate network and traffic to and from it is controlled via pfSense. There isn't a single "smart" device in my network.
always heard printers were the most insecure tech to have, but that was decades ago, we got all sorts of devices nowadays that could be worse
You'd be insecure too if everyone loudly hated you with a burning passion
Honestly they’re still pretty vulnerable. Maybe firmware is a bit better, but it’s a configuration thing that often gets overlooked in corporate networks. The amount of open SMTP relays I’ve run across in printers is a bit ridiculous, but it’s always fun to start phishing people with internal emails.
Not really a concern for home use if it's not networked. If it is networked, make sure you at least have it behind your firewall, disable any remote access/remote printing features, and ideally update the firmware as well.
I know a tech enthusiast, his house scares me
god damn right.
Just attempted adding the mqtt addon to hass since migrating to a raspberry pi. Will only bootloop without ever providing a gui. observer shows all green when it is alive. Logs are unhelpful. I just wana sleep man.
Nuke and pave and restore from a backup. Should take an hour or so. You did make regular backups, right?
You'll never gues what I put off for a month because it locked up the device every time it performed one. Some karmic god is being a real Bitch today. Imaging a new sd card while I spin up rtl_433 on another pi to keep my dopamine levels up
Seriously fuck mqtt. I avoid it like the plague
Judging by the amount of random noises my inkjet makes, this dude must go through a lot of printers.
I usually keep a stuffed animal near my Brother printer
In case it makes a sound that's too cute to handle.
Man, I remember reading about all this home automation stuff in Compute's Gazette for the Commodore 64. It's been around forever and a day.
My buddy is a tech worker with his entire house wired up. But it's also all probably tied into his own personal server and whatnot, with nothing on any clouds.
Tech worker here. I am this 🤏 fucking close to dragging every god damn thing designed to pass an electron out to the driveway and fucking hack it to bits with an axe (that I use for hewing and preparing lumber, so I can live in the wilderness when technology wins).
Haha, "hack to bits" haha. No pun intended.
I've found most tech folks have some home tech but it's usually the simple stuff.
As someone into the Home Assistant community, this post is always annoying and wrong.
Care to elaborate?
I struggled for years trying to find a way to set up door cameras that were secure enough that I can check in remotely. Around 2015, I finally had a solution.
I ended up spending a couple hundred dollars on a wired camera Setup from 2000s that streams to a old desktop. Then spend a couple hundred dollars on a network and software that I can dial in to view the desktop remotely. I also bought a VPN to dial in. Probably about $2k, which is chump change compared to corporation setups.
After three years and constant maintenance at roughly 10 hours a week, I gave up.
Then around 2020, i bought a Eufycam and setup, plugged it in and was up and running without any maintenance for like $200. They got a major security leak a year or two ago. Kinda sucked.
But damn, the tradeoff is so painful. Either strong secure network that costs a lot (time and money), or a insecure off-the-shelf solution that just works.
All this for the convenience of being able to see the mailman walk up to my door.
