It should also have an arm on the door to slap your hand when you open it for the 41st time in a day. I mean, that's insane, you deserve a slap.
Btw, this reminds me a bit of my parent's Renault that would tell me every damn time I started it to follow traffic regulations. I wish I could slap that car and it would feel it.
And then there's my father-in-law's Mazda, which has a GPS system that sometimes finds him 200 km off the mark, and it keeps talking nonsense. You can't silence it because the touch screen doesn't work while driving. Yeah you can guess how that makes one feel.. like slapping it.
Oh boy, I also have an Amazfit smart watch, imagine mountainbiking at high speed, you quickly want to see how many KMs you still have to go. You look at the screen and it says: "PAI 50 Good Job!" (full screen! Despite talking the time to make the display show you only relevant things in settings) and you need your f-king other hand (while biking) to dismiss the notification. Yup, slapping and cursing it is.
Do people even use the stuff they make themselves?
They definitely don't, the entire consumer electronics is a huge practical joke on its users. It's not only smart devices - even the induction stove with the integrated touch buttons beeping loudly at you and shutting off every time you breathe around them. And I could go on...
Oh man, I absolutely hate the touch buttons on my stove. A simple action like turning the heat up or down takes 2 actions and five minutes – you have to touch for a duration before the action registers.
And yet I still manage to accidentally press them when I don’t mean to. The other day I wished out loud that my stove had a button to turn on the buttons so the buttons would work when I want and not work when I don’t.
Maybe the next gen model will have a Button Button^TM and we will have reached peak absurdity.
We bought an Instant Pot-brand air fryer. I love the thing entirely except for the buttons. They are not real buttons, just some sort of touch sensor but they sometimes just cannot detect a finger. You'd think that maybe the surface was dirty but it works just as bad when it's just been cleaned off and hands are washed. I beginning to think that the actual sensors are not aligned perfectly with the labels or that they are set to ignore someone pressing with their whole finger instead of the just the tip.
I have this too. I've had to unplug it entirely and plug it back in to make it work sometimes. Hilarious that "did you try restarting it?" now applies to air fryers.
FWIW most of the touch issues I have with mine are due to moisture. If my hands are wet at all or there's any moisture on the panel (sometimes happens with cooking) then I have to wipe it down with a dry paper towel.
One other fun thing I discovered - if you push the light button on and off again repeatedly it eventually stops letting you do it. I didn't count the number of times it took, maybe 20-30 times. I was clearly really bored waiting for my food to finish
Hear hear! Cars and technology has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to safety. For example, I recently changed from Android to iOS for a better driving experience (I thought) since Android Auto was a bit laggy. While CarPlay is more fluid seemingly (which could also be from the hardware upgrade), what's worse is the UX downgrade that happen when I went from Android Auto to CarPlay.
I have a million of examples where the UX sucks, but I discovered something downright dangerous (and should possibly even be illegal): If you're using Google Maps/Waze for navigation and you receive a call, then the entire screen gets covered with the phone number and the answer button, while you're driving and using the navigation! Absolutely bonkers how somebody thought it was a good idea.
Never before have it been as clear that the people building these things (like CarPlay) never actually tried to use their own stuff.
I normally use both Waze and Google Maps, have this problem happening all the time, although it was a long time ago I drove now so maybe got fixed in the last month or so? I have a iPhone 12 Mini if that bears any difference.
my car doesn't have Android Auto, so I have my Google-phone in a phone holder. It has the exact same problem: calls have precedence over navigation. Bonkers!
Carplay tries to be too safe by not allowing anything while driving. Instead this leads you into spending more attention on the screen - searching for buttons you thought should exist but simply don't.
Ah, I get the same urge using Google Maps on my phone. Want to reach through the screen and slap the developers. So slow, so many key presses. So often it changes something up so I have to re-learn. So often it makes wild guesses that are completely off what I'm actually trying to achieve. Have to press back button a hundred times to get out of whatever it's showing me, whops one too many, app is now closed, have to open up and get back to where I wanted. It's the most frustrating app experience I have on a daily basis.
> Have to press back button a hundred times to get out of whatever it's showing me, whops one too many, app is now closed, have to open up and get back to where I wanted.
This happens every time, and every time I wish there'd be a "back to start" action. It's probably faster to just kill the app and restart than navigate all the way back while being careful not to go back once too often.
doot dee doot, it's labor day weekend, and I'm using Apple maps to navigate instead of Google (it's easier to activate via voice). The low-fuel light turns on while cruising along an unfamiliar stretch of highway, just as I'm finishing an interchange as I leave the dense city and head through its suburbia. I'm not quite sure of whether to expect service plazas, or just-off-exit-ramp gas stations, or what. I've seen gas stations, but not the nice blue signs saying "gas, exit N", and not sure if that'll change soon. And I'd prefer to get gas quickly, then back on the highway, instead of exploring for it.
Can technology help me? I haven't tried it in a while... What can the vaunted Voice Assistant do for me today?
"Hey siri, I need gas!"
I've found these results. The first of these is BJ's Gas, one point two miles west. Is this the one you wanted?
. o O ( I'm traveling east, so maybe not?? )
"No!"
Okay. Another option is Citgo, at <address>... Is this the one you want?
"Yes!" . o O ( sure why not )
Would you like to call, or get directions?
...
<pulls off a random exit ramp like I should have to begin with>
Postscript: the correct answer would have been, There's a service plaza ahead in 14 miles. Is that soon enough?
Waze has been pretty good at finding gas stations along my route and organizing them by distance from me and distance from my route. Like it would show a gas station 2 miles off the highway from the next exit but it will also list out a gas station that is 15 miles away right off the highway. Either option is up to you based on how much time you want to waste versus how soon you need gas.
“Find gas stations along the route and show me a list sorted by distance from my expected route” is a function I had in a stock nav system in 2007. I think it was two button presses away. We’ve definitely regressed.
Not to mention, when we click the start button for navigation why the heck do they not increase the speaker volume, handle brightness, rotate the screen automatically? There could even be a setting for it. Sometimes I feel like a robot repeating the same useless clicks all over again every time I navigate.
and oh my God don't get me started about glass ketchup bottles like they just don't work?! it's insanity trying to get ketchup out it's ludacris and oh my god
I'm thinking, all a glass bottle of Ketchup needs is a smart fridge able to detect that last bit and warn you about how hard it will be to get it out and offer advice on how to do so. Maybe some gamification could be thrown in, get more kudos the less you leave in? Yeah I'm filing patents and will contact Heinz... Think about the opportunity for notifications!
Some folks actually invented a ketchup-phobic bottle coating.
Their company is Liquiglide. It also works for many other things- Colgate uses it in some products but Heinz appears to have settled for upside-down bottles.
Some cars in arab countries have a feature where the "travel prayer" is recited via the speakers upon starting the car. It takes about one minute [1]. Fortunately our company car hat a button to turn the feature off. Of course we always turned it back on to annoy the next (non-muslim western) car user. Saudi airlines also plays the prayer (or used to?), however by someone with a really deep voice and with cave-like reverb, which made is sound quite unlike any other airplane announcement. [2]
That is very funny but speaking in practical terms, and not about UX, how does a feature like this work in practice? Does Allah respond to prayers emitted by electronics? Or is the idea that the human is supposed to recite the prayer along with the recording?
I have the same odd question about listening to contemporary Christian radio stations - does one become holier when the music is playing instead of the top 40 pop station?
I expect it makes people happier to listen to music they enjoy. So the same as someone listening to classical stations, or country, or whatever.
Maybe people enjoy hearing prayer radios. I spent time in Nepal and people would listen to recorded meditations and chants. But I didn’t hear them on the radio, it was recorded on phones and iPods and stuff.
The idea is to use some peoples receptivity to religion for shifting their awareness to the risks of traveling.
It can also help to center thoughts, calm down, and increase mindfulness while steering the motorized vehicle, therefore decreasing traffic accidents.
(I wonder whether there are studies on if this actually helps.)
Ah, that's interesting. Speaking from personal experience (and as an atheist, who happened to grow up in a religious household), I think many atheists are too quick to dismiss the value of rituals/prayers/meditations. As you pointed out, there can be value even if the deity to whom the prayer is offered doesn't exist or isn't listening.
For example, growing up my family began and ended each meal with a prayer of, essentially, thanksgiving, with a few other requests thrown in ("keep us safe", etc.) This delimited the meal time: we were there for the duration, we all started eating together and there was no leaving before the meal had ended. I don't remember the prayer any more but I do have fond memories of family dinners, the unity and connection we all experienced during that time and the spirited conversations they featured. Prayers of thanksgiving also center the experience of eating in one of gratitude.
There's deeply embedded programming in our brains related to sharing a meal with others which strengthens social bonds. Rituals like this very much play into that. As do lunch with colleagues or dinner dates.
That's quite an ominous way to have the prayer recited, like the audio for Gandalf reciting the ring inscription in black speech. I would probably feel unsettled rather than calmed hearing that before a flight.
It's not about the language/religion, it's about the audio editing. I could see reverb/delay being a part of Muslim culture, but it can definitely be jarring if it's not part of the listener's culture
> Btw, this reminds me a bit of my parent's Renault that would tell me every damn time I started it to follow traffic regulations.
There are people who would benefit from this reminder. They, however, tend to not drive Renaults, but Audis and BMWs.
> Do people even use the stuff they make themselves?
Last I’ve heard they were using A/B tests to choose between crazy features and batshit insane features to maximize engagement and brand awareness. So, I’m afraid the answer is no.
> There are people who would benefit from this reminder. They, however, tend to not drive Renaults, but Audis and BMWs.
I've had this game with my wife while driving somewhere for the last 10 years.
I see someone doing a dangerous pass, driving (way) too fast, cutting someone off too quickly, tailgating, etc, etc, etc, and before I can tell the brand/model, I tell my wife "It's one of those again" (and I would also include Mercedes here), and in 95% of cases I'm right.
I'm not saying every driver of those brands are guilty of it, but the guilty drivers are swallowed by the brand owner group in the Venn diagram. At least locally in my experience. It's fascinating.
Drove today in a 20 kph zone. Was just dragging behind a BMW that was going nicely within the speed limit. It was so uncharacteristic that I thought: man, it won't end well. Such things don't just happen. He's gonna do something.
A moment later the BMW turned left without blinking. Well. At least I knew I wasn't dreaming it. The world was back to how I knew it.
I witnessed a similar thing today, I was the first car in front of a black BMW for over 20 kilometers on twisty country roads. There was a young man behind the wheel and he gave me lots of space when I was turning onto the road on a busy intersection, was keeping his distance, never looked down at his phone AFAIK, and it felt really nice not to be expecting to be hit from behind at any moment.
My GF does a similar thing, but it's spotting woman drivers from behind.
My belief is that it's usually the girl and women's boyfriends and husbands who are to blame, because they don't let them drive very often or even ridicule them from the passenger seat when they do, but the end result is quite pronounced where I live (Czech Republic).
Dunno. Here in Poland women are less reckless (more reckful? Angličtina je opravdu divná). I haven't spotted a marked difference.
It's more about drivers who think they know it all. What I fear most on the road is a self-proclaimed veteran driver. I've learned to drive at 37 years old, maybe it's got something to do with it.
It seems most "UX" tends to be less about the user and more about exposing the product.
One example is the pause screens in Netflix and other streaming services. I sometimes want to pause the screen to read a letter or examine easter eggs left by the movie producers. I can't do that, as Netflix has a semi-transparent overlay with lots of unnecessary graphics and voting buttons.
Half the screen is also covered with the logo and/or poster from the movie I'm currently watching... as if I need to know?
They could at least provide an option to remove the graphic if you actually want to look at the paused movie.
Absolutely! The top issue with model universally terrible UX is precisely trying to bring attention to itself rather than simply being the most efficient means to an end: interacting with the software.
Right on! That kind of terrible UX technology whose primary purpose is to draw attention to itself instead of receding into the background is the opposite of Calm Technology / Ubiquitous Computing, as described by Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC:
Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.
— Mark Weiser
During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing:
- The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
- The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
- The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
- Technology should create calm.
In Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and John Seely Brown describe calm technology as "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."
1996 Computer Science Challenges for the Next 10 Years:
It comes back after a few seconds. For this to work, you have to constantly be moving your mouse around.
Prime on the other hand lets you pause, read and even know about the person in frame and trivia about the movie or tv series being played. They don't have much content but they are way better than Netflix in Ux.
I was going to say the same about Prime, but it's not perfect either.
Their Windows app is terrible. It takes forever to start for some reason. Sometimes, after a few minutes, I just give up and launch the browser. Sometimes if I try to get back 10 seconds it will just freeze playback. I can sometimes get it back by trying to fast-forward around. Others I have to stop watching and start again.
Ah, I essentially live in Netflix, so I was pretty sure you are wrong, but I'm seeing the issue: "mouse"... you are on a computer? No clue how that works ;P. I use their app (on AppleTV and iOS).
I have Netflix on my PS3 and when you pause you only get the noisy overlay after idling for 10 seconds or so. I press UP on the DPAD and it goes away, as UP does nothing if your focus is on the pause/play button. You can do it with SELECT too, it's also a dead key.
I am using a box (Android TV) and was finally able to remove the overlay by pressing the "back" button on my remote. Not exactly obvious, and not what I would call a good User eXperience.
> Do people even use the stuff they make themselves?
Yeah, and usually the devs know that what they have done is sub-optimal at best... but that doesn't count against the dominance of marketing or legal in decisionmaking.
They should ask and receive consent before using in such rude ways.
Liberation and rights for non binary living things are the order of the day. The International NBLT society explicitly declared and demanded for their rights at their recent Silicon Valley conference as per this NYT article.
The GPS in my car does that, it's so annoying. I like to leave it on 'map view' where it shows current location and the street name at the top, and every time it starts I have to 'ok' a disclaimer telling me to focus on the road.
The only thing I did with my Mazda infotainment system was update the firmware and the retrofit kit to support CarPlay. I find the commander knob not that hard to use with some experience, but with the AIO tweaks you can enable the touchscreen while driving. To each their own I guess.
That reminded of my father-in-law's Chevrolet, every time you turn off the car it very loudly announces for you to "please check if you haven't left any belongings in the back seat" (or some nonsense like that).
So every time he drops us off late at night the car screaming wakes the baby when we arrive.
There is usually a setting for the rear seat reminder. It's to remind people to not leave their babies in the car. Maybe the volume is purposefully set a little high to wake the kid up just in case you forget.
99.999% of the time, no. But the consequences of forgetting are disastrous, and it's happened to plenty of well-meaning but distracted and preoccupied people. It was one of my greatest fears when my kids were young.
Fatigue, some medications (and drugs, to be fair), and stress, perhaps? Being tired or stressed has made me miss exits. Then again, songs on the radio or whatever have, too.
In 2006 I had a new Prius that turned on a loud, annoying back up beeper. It would wake my theninfant son up. I finally found a "cheat code" that let me enter a service menu and disable it.
> full screen! Despite talking the time to make the display show you only relevant things in settings
This is a long standing gripe I have with the Apple Watch too—a busy group chat can effectively DDoS you out of being able to use the thing, because notifications are always full screen. There’s also a ~2 second delay before a notification can actually be dismissed, because it has to complete its swoopy animation first.
It doesn’t sound too bad, but when your average interaction with a smart watch is 10 seconds or less it becomes a real annoyance.
I'm not a fan of "someone made this art so it will play/display for N seconds every time some thing happens. Not in video games, not on watches, not on phone apps, and my eye is twitching so I can't think of any other examples
Are you just objecting to the method by which the fridge is providing useful performance information to the owner, or are you objecting to the fridge providing that information at all?
> my father-in-law's Mazda... the touch screen doesn't work while driving
Sounds like it's an older model, and I can tell you from personal experience Mazda, at least, has learned from their mistakes (regarding touchscreens). I know the 2020 models, and I believe much earlier, have all gone back to physical, tactile buttons. Real buttons, not Volkswagon's stupid, stupid capacitive buttons. Watching Jason Camisa dunk on VW's UX was an exercise in vindication for having avoided that horseshit [0].
They are clicky, settings are remembered, and it does what you tell it to do. Frankly, that's all it took for me to insist our new car be a Mazda. And while I apologize for the rant, finding a new car that doesn't tell you to use a touchsceen at 110km/h is far harder than it should be - and what a sad state of affairs that is.
It will do all those things with its connection to the governments "Fit & Healthy" social credit application that was auto-updated the other day. Wanna complain after it locks you out? The only way to do so is by grabbing a rent-a-bike and cycle 20 miles to the nearest human interest centre. /s?
That's some evil totalitarian dystopia, we don't do things this way over here in the West.
Our fridge gives you freedom to open and close it how many times you want. More than that, by means of synergy with our health industry partners, it lets your good eating habits give you the best deal on your health insurance plan!
our freezer does that, every time after you open it, it somehow reduces the pressure (maybe it tries to suck out the warm air) making the door hard to open.
that's really just physics. warm air gets in through the opened door, after closing it rapidly cools down, because air does not hold that much heat energy. Because it cools it contracts, which reduces the pressure inside the freezer, causing the outside air pressure to hold the door shut more firmly.
And it's a demonstration of just how much cold air is falling out when the door is opened. While less convenient, a chest freezer will do much better at holding the cold air even when opened.
While visiting rural northern Namibia, a Damara tribesman I was talking to asked me where I was from. Upon hearing that I was from a cold Northern part of the world, he commented that it must be great that half the year I didn't need to run my freezer.
I just stared at him, not knowing what to say. He stared back at me for a while and then started laughing. Then I realized he was screwing with me, and I just said, "Touche'".
if that were the case then i should be able open the door right after i closed it. realistically, even a pump could not be that fast. electromagnets sound like a much better explanation. simple logic too. whenever the temperature is higher than expected, turn the magnets on.
i think you are right, that makes a lot of sense, and is much simpler too. i was thinking that it would make sense to want to remove the warm air, with lower pressure being a sideeffect of that.
I think it is simply that cooling a gas will reduce its pressure if you maintain constant volume (Ideal gas law).
So when you open the door you warmup the air inside, and when it cools down once to door is locked, the pressure is lower, locking the door. Then small leaks will equalize the pressure.
My side by side actually runs some pump that is not the compressor when you close the door. It runs for about 5 seconds, after which the doors are quite difficult to open. Air does not change temperature that fast without being forced to, so the idea that within 10 seconds it's harder to open because of a natural vacuum seems suspect.
I tried doing some math on this, since you got me thinking!
Let's assume the "lock force" is 100N, and the surface of the fridge's door is 1 square meter. This means the pressure differential between inside and outside would be 100 Pa. One atmosphere is roughly 10^5 Pa, so you would need a pressure differential of 10^5 / 100 = 0.1% between inside and outside. Since PV=NRT, we deduce that DeltaP/P = DeltaT/T. Or, in other words, 0.1% pressure means 0.1% temperature. We live at around 300K, so that's 0.3K difference. A fridge is what, 0.5 m^3 ? And air is about 1.3 kg/m^3, specific heat of air is about 1kJ/kg, so we would be looking at removing 1.3 kg/m^3 * 0.5m^3 * 1 kJ/kg = 650 J in 10 seconds, or 65W. A fridge can apparently consume about 200W peak (from a quick Google search), so it seems feasible with an OK-tier efficiency.
In addition, if you add a pump, you could also just add a mechanical lock, couldn't you ?
I always assumed it pulled air out from the top of the freezer compartment, just to remove some of the hottest air. Inefficiencies in the seal will let air leak back in eventually, but probably slow enough that it doesn't affect the internal temperature that much.
Now I want to know the reasoning behind having a pump at all.
>A fridge can apparently consume about 200W peak
yes this seems right, i am able to run my fridge off an inverter connected to my vehicle battery if the power is out, even with a 150' run of extension cord - no issues at all, and 200W or thereabouts sounds like the numbers i saw.
41 times in a day is a lot of door opens, and suggests they need a separate beverage fridge. That should’ve been the message - give the customer a solution, make a sale - but instead, they just went for shame.
Folks really underestimate how much opening them door (and then usually leaving it open while you deliberate) wastes energy, and food.
If I’m cooking three meals in the day, the fridge gets opened maybe five times - although I do have a separate little fridge for cold drinks.
That little fridge might be a lot less efficient than the big fridge. Some of them use as much or more energy than a big one. You might waste more energy running it and re-cooling it every time you open it for a drink than you would opening the big fridge for drinks even if it's more efficient under the test conditions they use to rate its efficiency.
I live entirely off-grid - I know where my energy goes, and what impacts it - but you’re all absolutely correct, we should all leave our freezers stood open 24/7, as it makes no difference.
Ehh... when eating, easily I always forget someting in the fridge and end up opening it x times. Now that is even after meal is prepared and already opened y times. And then there are number of other people that may want to take something that was not interesting for me. Yeah, bad logistics, but I prefer opening multiple times vs keeping doors opened for longer periods of time.
This feels like it would be pretty dependent upon the number of people in the household. I'm sure our family has higher than average door openings because our fridge does not have in door water/ice dispensers.
We have 5 people in my family. We cook different meals for ourselves vs. children due to different dietary requirements. So the kids have learned to cook their own things, too, and do so for 2 out of 3 meals each day. If you assume even just 2 openings of the fridge to get ingredients for each meal and put them back, that is 24 openings at a bare minimum. Adding in some snacking and needing more than 2 openings for ingredients when cooking, that isn't hard to envision 40+ openings.
But aside from the arithmetic, I'd think the number of times matters less than how spread out they are. If it opens and closes often during mealtimes, but stays shut the rest of the day, does the number of times it was opened really make a huge difference?
Consider that you open a fridge twice for each glass of milk (if you do it right and close the door after retrieving the milk jug), and that his family is possibly bigger than yours, and 44 times/day doesn't really seem crazy at all.
Wow, 44 times a day, on average! That's about once every 20 minutes for the entire day. I can't imagine why anyone would need to access the fridge that often. It's almost like they don't understand what the fridge is for.
Anyway, if you don't want this, don't buy it. They either wired their fridge into their network or gave it access to their wifi. What, exactly, did they expect? The guy even keeps saying "it's just a fridge". I just bought a fridge with none of this nonsense. Because it's just a fridge.
When you have kids you will understand - open the door - looks at the contents - frowns and then closes it again repeated several times during the day.
"I was looking for something nice".
Explaining that we shop once a week and that the fridge won't magically fill with popsicles before that does not seem to make a difference.
In which case 'hey, someone is opening the door an insane amount, which is not good for the fridge or your food' might be a handy alert, so you know what they're up to and can stop them?
(I'm not saying it should be internet connected for that purpose though.)
"Ugh, we still only have cauliflower? I'm going to check again in 5 minutes for some bizarre reason, even though all science indicates that my brain should be developed enough by now to understand object permanence."
Half a day later: "Okay, but what if Hume was right? Can I really know that the fridge is still empty just because it was empty the last 10 times I looked? If I lived in a universe where the fridge stayed empty until this second, would the observable history of that universe look any different than this one? And I've known my parents for half a decade, that's realistically a small amount of time for me to start extrapolating about their behavior. Might they have bought Twinkies yesterday and then only decided to put them in the fridge halfway through today?"
Kids are weird. I remember opening the fridge over and over to check for fruit or leftovers growing up, and I genuinely don't remember why I did. I don't know if I actually thought something was going to change or not.
Maybe the reason I stopped as I got older was because as an adult I buy my own groceries, so now if something shows up in my fridge and I didn't put it there my reaction is going to be more likely to call the police and look for an intruder?
That's quite presumptuous. As it happens I don't (yet) and indeed you may be right and I'll be worn down one day, but I'm pretty sure I and my sibling didn't behave like that, and consequently I wouldn't like/expect to see it from any dependant of mine either.
Surely you have some 'rules', but you could apply your comment to anything - 'try telling a five year old not to talk with their mouth full, see how much better your life is'; 'try stopping them running with scissors'; ...
Somewhat related: my Netatmo weather station sends me an e-mail every few weeks that i should replace the battery of one of the modules.
I assume it doesn’t like rechargeable batteries. I never replace them, can’t disable the e-mail.
Support can’t fix this of course.
So I’ve setup a server-side e-mail rule to send all netatmo.com emails to the junk to prevent being constantly spammed by them.
Is it powered off AAs? Rechargeable batteries have lower voltage than non-rechargeable ones[0], so maybe the module is a bit oversensitive when trying to guess the battery is about to die.
--
[0] - With batteries I have around the house, it's 1.5V nominal voltage for typical non-rechargeable AA, vs. 1.2V for rechargeables.
However the voltage on alkaline batteries drops pretty linearly from 1.5v to 1.0v, while rechargeables maintain close to 1.2V for most of their discharge, then drops off quickly:
That's why rechargeables work in most devices, since alkalines are 1.2v or below for a good chunk of their useful life anyway, most devices are designed to work fine with 1.2v.
If a device actually needs 1.3+V to function properly, alkalines won't last long, you'll want to use 1.5V lithium batteries.
yes, those have a buck converter built in to drop the voltage from 4.2v (fully charged) to 1.5V - and ideally they should be able to provide 1.5v from full to flat.
In a similar vein, those USB power banks use 18650 batteries (generally, some use LiPo or LiFePo packs instead) - but USB needs 5v (and ideally 5.xx where xx is determined by the cable resistance so the actual output at the terminating end is 5vdc, so the power bank may actually put 5.33V into the USB A side and get 5vdc out the load side, due to current draw.) so instead of a buck converter, a single cell or parallel cell bank will use a boost converter, to bump 3.6-4.2vdc to 5.x volts.
You may have known this but someone else might not have. A common circuit for boost conversion is called a Joule Thief.
Be glad it doesn't (yet) shame your eco-ignorance on Facebook, doesn't tell your insurance company you occasionally buy bacon and doesn't call the police for you infringing their intellectual property by refusing to buy new genuine filters often enough.
"Smart" home devices which are not open-source and not under your full control are a horror. I would break it open and remove the WiFi antenna if I had no choice of buying a non-connected one.
I've bought a robo vacuum cleaner recently. Luckily there still are 100% offline models available. Unluckily they all are overly stupid, can't have lidars and map your home (while I can see no reason why this has to require Internet access and can't be implemented an autonomous way).
> can't have lidars and map your home (while I can see no reason why this has to require Internet access and can't be implemented an autonomous way).
This is a great comment. I would love smart appliances (e.g. Lidar-equipped robot vacuum cleaner) that are 100% offline. If anyone has a list of smart yet offline appliances, I’d love to shop there.
I can remember someone mentioned an old model (supposedly possible to find on eBay) which could be hacked to run a vendor-imitating server on itself and connect to it via localhost.
A few of the Xaiomi's and Viomi's are rootable. I have a Gen1 Xaiomi and it's brilliant. I got ssh access to the ubuntu install and installed https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo and run it 100% local via my home-assistant install.
One of the first steps when rooting is usually to block outgoing and incoming in iptables (it's a fairly standard ubuntu install after all) so you don't lose root at any point, so the risk is minimal. Not to mention I have a dedicated non internet routable IOT network specifically for this reason.
If I had enough time and money I would start a company specializing in just this: home and office hardware (from kitchen appliances to smartphones and players) designed with care and focus on offline-friendliness, autonomousness, durability, ease of repair, configurability, hackability, upgradability and privacy without compromise in features and the UX. I believe the potential market, although niche, already is big enough and the lack of competition is intriguing.
This would be great - it’s such a sad state of affairs that there is a need for products that “just fo what they’re supposed to do - without acting against my best interests”
Not really. Mass-produced barely acceptable quality is enough for the majority of consumers in Western markets (especially given that something about half of the population has no meaningful cash savings), and people in developing countries can't afford anything else anyway.
On the other hand, the problem is the upfront cost. Plastic and metal molds cost a lot of money (which means you need large scale to recoup that investment), anything with software will need the entire chain from developing the hardware and software to a secure way of delivering software updates, some stuff has extensive certification requirements (anything with radio interfaces, HDMI and other licensed connectors or to be used on/in vehicles) if you want to do it legally, some things are impossible to manufacture in an "open" sense while still being usable (physical media players, due to copy protection schemes), many parts have ridiculous MOQs making small scale manufacturing impossible to extremely expensive, and then you will need some sort of logistics chain to get your product to the customer and in case of warranty claims back from the customer.
But I think, in absolute numbers, the minority already is big enough to make this profitable and is growing. Targeting the majority is not the only profitable/optimal strategy, targeting a specific group which is just big enough to sustainably cover your expenses (salaries included) and is not targeted by a lot of competitors also is great.
I would pay up to twice the price (or even more) of an any mainstream appliance for a really great (prioritizing privacy/auotonomy, repairability/durability and hackability/customizability) one. And I believe I'm not alone.
I would add to that the option to 'self-host' the smart bits. Why have 10 computers idling all the time if you can have 1 computer in use most of the time. This obviously adds complexity (you either need a compute module, or a module that connects to your PC), but it would be nice for a customer to just buy one or the other pre-packaged, and it also improves the repairability.
I have the same dream. But making it barely sustainable (let alone profitable) would be neigh impossible. Maybe more of an open source community organization that would salvage, use and reuse components from the existing partially broken appliances of "proper" manufacturers in new enclosures and form factors designed from the get-go mainly (exclusively?) for easy servicing/upgrade by the average user, and open/flexible enough for advanced/maker types.
It's not limited to just offline products, but Mozilla makes a shopping guide every year where it rates the privacy impact of products including, it seems, robo vacuum cleaners: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/
There's still time. In another tweet he had a picture of the fridge updating firmware. Who knows what would happen if this process failed, or the company mistakenly sent out a bad one.
I have an old Neato D75. It is offline, lidar equipped, does it's job OKayish. Maybe you can ask @NeatoRobotics are there any offline models available for them?
Why do they invest effort in making this harder? They could just make it easy for at least a single model they keep producing and capture the whole niche of customers (and also get free advertisement by "the word of mouth" on HN and alike places) with no additional investment.
The most charitable interpretation: Rootability tends to be inverse to hackability. There's incentive for companies to increase security, to prevent their IoT stuff from getting turned into botnets. But there's nearly no incentive to preserve rootability. So it's just locked down to an increasing degree.
Less charitable: they don't want you to root it for various corporate reasons
I'm just near the end of a kitchen remodel, with all new appliances. They are all "Wifi Enabled" and push like crazy to make sure you know it. I briefly looked at it and there doesn't appear to be any way to use the Wifi features without signing up at some remote website and allowing all your interactions with your appliances to flow through their servers. Yeah, no thanks. The FAQ on one site actually says not to worry about privacy, since they use the latest greatest encryption when they send your data to their partners!
I'm all set, I don't really need to control or monitor my kitchen appliances through wifi. But it did make me suspect that in another few years the newest appliances will simply not function at all if you don't log in, and pay the monthly subscription fee.
> But it did make me suspect that in another few years the newest appliances will simply not function at all if you don't log in, and pay the monthly subscription fee.
That's the dream. Every appliance maker wishes it was a SaaS company.
Indeed, but the aspect of the Red Dwarf toaster that really lands today is the unnecessarily extreme sophistication, coupled with the unrelenting effort to occupy more and more of the user's life.
Douglas Adams touched upon these themes as well, generally via the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, but it wasn't quite so-on-the-nose.
How long until some manufacturer sells a basic fridge and then a 'frequent use service pack' monthly fee that lets you open the door more than the standard number of times a day?
No, but eventually the regulators will catch up and force the fridge companies to simply charge you by the second for the time the doors are opened above some generous free plan.
If I get behind on my opening allowence I will just have to stay up till midnight when my opens reset, grab everything I can and stack it on the counter for the day.
You think of it as a clever hack, but the data analyst at your health insurer, seeing the sudden midnight disappearance of half of the stuff in your fridge, may view it as a symptom of depression.
Damn, then they will put me on medication that will push up my appetite and make me go to the fridge more. It is like big fridge is in bed with big food which is in bed with big pharma.
At least I wont be anxious when the bill for my fridge door opening comes at the end of the month.
I think this guys point is that he needs everyone to know he paid an extra $2,000 for a 'smart' fridge. All while mentioning that he doesnt want or like the 'smart' bit.
Well the risk is if the appliances world goes the way of TV panel displays, where the 'smart' component is used to finance a cheaper TV by later selling your data to advertisers/broadcasters.
It could be that tomorrow the Smart fridge is the cheaper option because the manufacturer will use your data to price-cut the competitors initial price tag.
It could be that in a not so far future you will pay a premium for having a dumb fridge, and we will see HN posts on how to build a faraday cage for the LTE antennas on your fridge.
Ha, the rental apartment of the future (the fantasy version where humanity actually did something about climate change and we didn't all die) needs a "Reset apartment to factory settings" when a new tenant comes in.
It might be a good idea to take account of how long the door stays open. For me, making a cup of tea involves opening the fridge door twice but for less than a second on each occasion: to get the milk out, and to put the milk back. There's an alternative, of course: opening it once and leaving it open for about ten seconds.
Timings are approximate.
In any case, I don't need e-mail about it. I hope there's an "unsubscribe" button.
Since cold air is denser, I always understood that when you open a vertical cooler the cold air just flows out like a fluid (gas) and is displaced by warm air. This is also why it's good to keep your fridge full, so that it has some thermal mass to it. It's also one of the reasons horizontal freezers are so efficient.
Appliances are starting to come with their own integrated 3G/4G modems these days. You don't need to give them access to anything; they already have it.
The problem here isn't that the fridge is tracking door opens. That seems like a good application for a "smart" appliance - tracking how usage patterns affect its internal state and holding a dialogue with the user. The problem is that it used email, which comes across as passive aggressive in the same way it would if a human did it. If it just showed a notification on a screen, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.
I think, if appliances are going to be "smart", it's time we started holding them to similar standards of behavior to humans. Our machines are learning to talk; now they need to learn not to be rude.
It'd be better if it along with other devices could set a family meeting and your smart TV could replay clips of your miss use to use whilst alexa chides you.
It'd be like a family meeting almost.
The fridge emailed basically a performance report to the address that he configured on setup. One of the performance report items is that it had been opened a lot, which does impact efficiency and food longevity.
It didn't email a complaint. It did precisely what he configured it to do (I will go on a limb and presume the fridge didn't guess his email address), and presumably what he expected it to do given that he paid a large premium for a "smart" fridge.
There is no problem here beyond that often Twitter makes everyone a comedian/performance artist and people often take their routines a little too seriously.
> It didn't email a complaint. It did precisely what he configured it to do
From the tweets:
> I don’t even remember giving permission for our fridge to email.
Also, if you read the thread, this seems to be a new 'feature' they've added since he set it up - the fridge was silent for a year, then boom - stupid email.
It is clear he is being humorously jocular, exaggerating for effect (Twitter performance art that works wonders -- he's done well observing that the smart scale that he connected to the internet also does smart scale stuff). Those people taking this seriously need to take a walk and get some fresh air.
"I don’t even remember giving permission for our fridge to email"
He connected it to the internet and now it does stuff. He also clearly gave it his email address. How does one give "permission" for a smart device to email (beyond a giant T&C agreement that he obviously agreed to)? Who is so overburdened by an email?
This sort of "dystopia everything is hell look at all this crazy stuff!" shtick surprisingly does well, and it's bizarre.
>it's time we started holding them to similar standards of behavior to humans.
I have observed in my own behavior that I damn near refuse to "say" why I am calling to an automated system while I am happy to ask Siri for a kitchen timer.
Siri has a personality and the customer service automated line does not. It's like talking to a wall and it feels condescending.
Once you make a device human like, it seems that a new realm of possibilities opens up.
If I want usage data for an appliance I'm probably going to want to look at how usage is changing over time. If it is just on a screen on the appliance I'm going to have to manual record it to keep for such analysis which can get tedious.
With email I've got a record of it. Ideally they would include an attachment with the email that has the data in some well known documented format, like CSV, to make it easy to work with programatically.
I probably wouldn't want an appliance to have an internet connection just to support this logging. If it doesn't otherwise need an internet connection I'd be fine with it if it logged to an SD card or thumb drive.
I resent that consumer IoT is almost always required to connect to a cloud service.
I love the idea of an IoT house - smart lamps, smart locks, cameras, climate conrtol, etc. I only want them connected to my LAN. If I want to access any of their controls remotely, I will set up a VPN or otherwise they should provide a jump service locally, not require cloud connectivity.
Another early case of machines intelligence replacing man while still learning the stuff. Is a global plague if we think in how many things stopped being smart of logical in the last years. Enter your phone here to do anything (unrelated with phones) is one of my favorites.
It'd be pretty stupid to risk prison for "remotely disabling someone's smart refrigerator" since you couldn't ransom for more than a dumb refrigerator (which your victim would probably get) - probably within like 25% of that and they'll just put the bricked fridge in the dump.
You could make it thaw the contents of the freezer, or stop it from cooling altogether, I think. Indeed, they can't demand a lot of money, but not so long ago, they were holding private users' computers to ransom for relatively low amounts. Many small amounts make a big one.
I set up a raspberry pi thermometer in our freezer that would email me once a day with a temperature log (hourly averages), and also email me immediately if the temperature ever got too high. But dammit, I opted in for those emails!
(It was a freezer full of the most precious commodity, breast milk. And it actually did save us one time when the freezer thermostat failed, so it was absolutely worth the hassle.)
I too have an RPi logging fridge/freezer temperature, but wirelessly.
I use this wireless fridge/freezer thermometer [1]. The units that go in the fridge and freezer communicate with the display unit via 433 MHz RF.
I have an RTL-SDR [2] on the RPi.
I run rtl_433 [3] on the RPi. rtl_433 understands the protocols of a large number of wireless sensors, including the ones used by those AcuRite sensors.
I've got it configured to output whatever sensor data it decodes in JSON format to a file, and a script that periodically parses new entries from that file and records in an sqlite DB the readings from the sensors I'm interested in.
Rtl_433 is a fun program. It recognizes and decodes the transmissions of a lot of things. It is getting several neighbor's wireless thermometers and humidity sensors, a soil moisture sensor, several different car tire pressure sensors, a smoke detector, some kind of keypad (wireless lock?), a car remote, some kind of energy monitor, a rain gauge, and a wind speed/direction sensor.
It's in an ISM band, I can't remember the rules, I think encryption is allowed (like, WPA) but for thermometers and stuff why bother? 99% of 433mhz (and 800/900 mhz) stuff is unidirectional (sensor to sensee), so where's the harm in some 100mW transmitter?
The only thing I've seen that appears to be encrypted is something rtl_433 identifies as a "Microchip-HCS200", which seems likely to be a device using this chip [1] for remote keyless entry systems.
The encryption appears to be for authentication not secrecy. The button status is in an unencrypted portion of the message.
Of course there may be plenty of sensors out there that fully encrypt in which case rtl_433 would probably not have decoders for them and so I would not see them at all.
If you have an rtl anyhow and you want to see what is there that rtl_433 is missing is to use rtl_power on the command line, you can monitor specific chunks of bandwidth for as long as you want, and it saves as a CSV. btw if you try this and get a bunch of errors in the CSV (or NaN) your gain(s) are set incorrectly, and i'd try turning them down to start.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadBtw, this reminds me a bit of my parent's Renault that would tell me every damn time I started it to follow traffic regulations. I wish I could slap that car and it would feel it.
And then there's my father-in-law's Mazda, which has a GPS system that sometimes finds him 200 km off the mark, and it keeps talking nonsense. You can't silence it because the touch screen doesn't work while driving. Yeah you can guess how that makes one feel.. like slapping it.
Oh boy, I also have an Amazfit smart watch, imagine mountainbiking at high speed, you quickly want to see how many KMs you still have to go. You look at the screen and it says: "PAI 50 Good Job!" (full screen! Despite talking the time to make the display show you only relevant things in settings) and you need your f-king other hand (while biking) to dismiss the notification. Yup, slapping and cursing it is.
Do people even use the stuff they make themselves?
Maybe the next gen model will have a Button Button^TM and we will have reached peak absurdity.
Please, make it a switch. A touch button will never work there.
Of course, once locked, the buttons wouldn't work, but the lock light wasn't obvious enough.
Good thing that never happens in the kitchen...
FWIW most of the touch issues I have with mine are due to moisture. If my hands are wet at all or there's any moisture on the panel (sometimes happens with cooking) then I have to wipe it down with a dry paper towel.
One other fun thing I discovered - if you push the light button on and off again repeatedly it eventually stops letting you do it. I didn't count the number of times it took, maybe 20-30 times. I was clearly really bored waiting for my food to finish
I have a million of examples where the UX sucks, but I discovered something downright dangerous (and should possibly even be illegal): If you're using Google Maps/Waze for navigation and you receive a call, then the entire screen gets covered with the phone number and the answer button, while you're driving and using the navigation! Absolutely bonkers how somebody thought it was a good idea.
Never before have it been as clear that the people building these things (like CarPlay) never actually tried to use their own stuff.
This happens every time, and every time I wish there'd be a "back to start" action. It's probably faster to just kill the app and restart than navigate all the way back while being careful not to go back once too often.
'OK Google, avoid motorways'
And it will route me past anything officially called a motorway, sadly not including the A roads that are very similar.
Eventually I might decide I want to proceed more quickly, so I'll say:
'OK Google, use motorways'
At which point it will perform a Google search and read out the first result, a page from the government telling me how to use a motorway.
Can technology help me? I haven't tried it in a while... What can the vaunted Voice Assistant do for me today?
"Hey siri, I need gas!"
I've found these results. The first of these is BJ's Gas, one point two miles west. Is this the one you wanted?
. o O ( I'm traveling east, so maybe not?? )
"No!"
Okay. Another option is Citgo, at <address>... Is this the one you want?
"Yes!" . o O ( sure why not )
Would you like to call, or get directions?
...
<pulls off a random exit ramp like I should have to begin with>
Postscript: the correct answer would have been, There's a service plaza ahead in 14 miles. Is that soon enough?
Waze used to be good, like 11 years ago.
Also works 100% offline, after downloading maps.
For others who might be interested, it can be found here: https://organicmaps.app
Maybe the slapping hand (that warns you you've opened the fridge enough for the day) can be used to slap the back of the Ketchup bottle as well.
The iHeinz can then send a notification to the manufacturer who then passes it to the Ketchup Police.
I'd honestly rather buy ketchup in a refill bag for my plastic bottle than a glass bottle.
Also works well on honey bottles
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ketchup-is-not-ju...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCPtF6XVIY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_TVsxFChrk
Maybe people enjoy hearing prayer radios. I spent time in Nepal and people would listen to recorded meditations and chants. But I didn’t hear them on the radio, it was recorded on phones and iPods and stuff.
Most muslims are good folk, but unfortunately there is a small radical subset which are not.
I wonder if loud prayers, whist in a plane or driving tonnes of vehicle, is a good thing in their case.
FTFY.
For example, growing up my family began and ended each meal with a prayer of, essentially, thanksgiving, with a few other requests thrown in ("keep us safe", etc.) This delimited the meal time: we were there for the duration, we all started eating together and there was no leaving before the meal had ended. I don't remember the prayer any more but I do have fond memories of family dinners, the unity and connection we all experienced during that time and the spirited conversations they featured. Prayers of thanksgiving also center the experience of eating in one of gratitude.
There are people who would benefit from this reminder. They, however, tend to not drive Renaults, but Audis and BMWs.
> Do people even use the stuff they make themselves?
Last I’ve heard they were using A/B tests to choose between crazy features and batshit insane features to maximize engagement and brand awareness. So, I’m afraid the answer is no.
I've had this game with my wife while driving somewhere for the last 10 years.
I see someone doing a dangerous pass, driving (way) too fast, cutting someone off too quickly, tailgating, etc, etc, etc, and before I can tell the brand/model, I tell my wife "It's one of those again" (and I would also include Mercedes here), and in 95% of cases I'm right.
I'm not saying every driver of those brands are guilty of it, but the guilty drivers are swallowed by the brand owner group in the Venn diagram. At least locally in my experience. It's fascinating.
A moment later the BMW turned left without blinking. Well. At least I knew I wasn't dreaming it. The world was back to how I knew it.
My belief is that it's usually the girl and women's boyfriends and husbands who are to blame, because they don't let them drive very often or even ridicule them from the passenger seat when they do, but the end result is quite pronounced where I live (Czech Republic).
It's more about drivers who think they know it all. What I fear most on the road is a self-proclaimed veteran driver. I've learned to drive at 37 years old, maybe it's got something to do with it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141...
As an extreme example, anybody who has ever been in a Citroen 2CV knows that you wouldn’t do any of those [1] because of a) the noise and b) the fear.
[1] with the exception of tailgating of trucks. That’s [2] the only way to relatively comfortably do close to 100 km/hour in these.
[2] https://hubnut.org/2013/09/08/2cv-enjoy-the-silence/ also helps.
One example is the pause screens in Netflix and other streaming services. I sometimes want to pause the screen to read a letter or examine easter eggs left by the movie producers. I can't do that, as Netflix has a semi-transparent overlay with lots of unnecessary graphics and voting buttons.
Half the screen is also covered with the logo and/or poster from the movie I'm currently watching... as if I need to know?
They could at least provide an option to remove the graphic if you actually want to look at the paused movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser#Ubiquitous_computi...
Ubiquitous computing and calm technology
Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.
— Mark Weiser
During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing:
- The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
- The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
- The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
- Technology should create calm.
In Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and John Seely Brown describe calm technology as "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."
1996 Computer Science Challenges for the Next 10 Years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jwLWosmmjE
Designing Calm Technology:
https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...
Prime on the other hand lets you pause, read and even know about the person in frame and trivia about the movie or tv series being played. They don't have much content but they are way better than Netflix in Ux.
Their Windows app is terrible. It takes forever to start for some reason. Sometimes, after a few minutes, I just give up and launch the browser. Sometimes if I try to get back 10 seconds it will just freeze playback. I can sometimes get it back by trying to fast-forward around. Others I have to stop watching and start again.
This never happens on the web app.
Yeah, and usually the devs know that what they have done is sub-optimal at best... but that doesn't count against the dominance of marketing or legal in decisionmaking.
Liberation and rights for non binary living things are the order of the day. The International NBLT society explicitly declared and demanded for their rights at their recent Silicon Valley conference as per this NYT article.
Infuriating.
So every time he drops us off late at night the car screaming wakes the baby when we arrive.
This is a long standing gripe I have with the Apple Watch too—a busy group chat can effectively DDoS you out of being able to use the thing, because notifications are always full screen. There’s also a ~2 second delay before a notification can actually be dismissed, because it has to complete its swoopy animation first.
It doesn’t sound too bad, but when your average interaction with a smart watch is 10 seconds or less it becomes a real annoyance.
He does say later on that they have kids which perfectly explains why the fridge door is like a turnstile.
Sounds like it's an older model, and I can tell you from personal experience Mazda, at least, has learned from their mistakes (regarding touchscreens). I know the 2020 models, and I believe much earlier, have all gone back to physical, tactile buttons. Real buttons, not Volkswagon's stupid, stupid capacitive buttons. Watching Jason Camisa dunk on VW's UX was an exercise in vindication for having avoided that horseshit [0].
They are clicky, settings are remembered, and it does what you tell it to do. Frankly, that's all it took for me to insist our new car be a Mazda. And while I apologize for the rant, finding a new car that doesn't tell you to use a touchsceen at 110km/h is far harder than it should be - and what a sad state of affairs that is.
[0] https://youtu.be/XGbPHp6QfkQ
It can lock the door in the night after dinner to prevent midnight snacking by the kids (or parents).
And should tweet to your account to shame you publicly after "n" number of opens.
What's the IP address of your fridge (just curious)?
Our fridge gives you freedom to open and close it how many times you want. More than that, by means of synergy with our health industry partners, it lets your good eating habits give you the best deal on your health insurance plan!
No electromagnets or anything.
I just stared at him, not knowing what to say. He stared back at me for a while and then started laughing. Then I realized he was screwing with me, and I just said, "Touche'".
Maybe 5 minutes after?
Let's assume the "lock force" is 100N, and the surface of the fridge's door is 1 square meter. This means the pressure differential between inside and outside would be 100 Pa. One atmosphere is roughly 10^5 Pa, so you would need a pressure differential of 10^5 / 100 = 0.1% between inside and outside. Since PV=NRT, we deduce that DeltaP/P = DeltaT/T. Or, in other words, 0.1% pressure means 0.1% temperature. We live at around 300K, so that's 0.3K difference. A fridge is what, 0.5 m^3 ? And air is about 1.3 kg/m^3, specific heat of air is about 1kJ/kg, so we would be looking at removing 1.3 kg/m^3 * 0.5m^3 * 1 kJ/kg = 650 J in 10 seconds, or 65W. A fridge can apparently consume about 200W peak (from a quick Google search), so it seems feasible with an OK-tier efficiency.
In addition, if you add a pump, you could also just add a mechanical lock, couldn't you ?
I always assumed it pulled air out from the top of the freezer compartment, just to remove some of the hottest air. Inefficiencies in the seal will let air leak back in eventually, but probably slow enough that it doesn't affect the internal temperature that much.
Now I want to know the reasoning behind having a pump at all.
>A fridge can apparently consume about 200W peak
yes this seems right, i am able to run my fridge off an inverter connected to my vehicle battery if the power is out, even with a 150' run of extension cord - no issues at all, and 200W or thereabouts sounds like the numbers i saw.
Folks really underestimate how much opening them door (and then usually leaving it open while you deliberate) wastes energy, and food.
If I’m cooking three meals in the day, the fridge gets opened maybe five times - although I do have a separate little fridge for cold drinks.
But aside from the arithmetic, I'd think the number of times matters less than how spread out they are. If it opens and closes often during mealtimes, but stays shut the rest of the day, does the number of times it was opened really make a huge difference?
Anyway, if you don't want this, don't buy it. They either wired their fridge into their network or gave it access to their wifi. What, exactly, did they expect? The guy even keeps saying "it's just a fridge". I just bought a fridge with none of this nonsense. Because it's just a fridge.
"I was looking for something nice".
Explaining that we shop once a week and that the fridge won't magically fill with popsicles before that does not seem to make a difference.
(I'm not saying it should be internet connected for that purpose though.)
Lol, sure - go ahead and stop a 5 year old from checking the fridge a few times a day when here hungry. See how much better that makes your life.
Again - when you have kids, you will understand...
"Ugh, we still only have cauliflower? I'm going to check again in 5 minutes for some bizarre reason, even though all science indicates that my brain should be developed enough by now to understand object permanence."
Half a day later: "Okay, but what if Hume was right? Can I really know that the fridge is still empty just because it was empty the last 10 times I looked? If I lived in a universe where the fridge stayed empty until this second, would the observable history of that universe look any different than this one? And I've known my parents for half a decade, that's realistically a small amount of time for me to start extrapolating about their behavior. Might they have bought Twinkies yesterday and then only decided to put them in the fridge halfway through today?"
Kids are weird. I remember opening the fridge over and over to check for fruit or leftovers growing up, and I genuinely don't remember why I did. I don't know if I actually thought something was going to change or not.
Maybe the reason I stopped as I got older was because as an adult I buy my own groceries, so now if something shows up in my fridge and I didn't put it there my reaction is going to be more likely to call the police and look for an intruder?
Surely you have some 'rules', but you could apply your comment to anything - 'try telling a five year old not to talk with their mouth full, see how much better your life is'; 'try stopping them running with scissors'; ...
Support can’t fix this of course.
So I’ve setup a server-side e-mail rule to send all netatmo.com emails to the junk to prevent being constantly spammed by them.
--
[0] - With batteries I have around the house, it's 1.5V nominal voltage for typical non-rechargeable AA, vs. 1.2V for rechargeables.
https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-BK-4MCCA8BA-eneloop-Pre-Cha...
https://www.boat-project.com/tutorials/aa_batteries.htm
That's why rechargeables work in most devices, since alkalines are 1.2v or below for a good chunk of their useful life anyway, most devices are designed to work fine with 1.2v.
If a device actually needs 1.3+V to function properly, alkalines won't last long, you'll want to use 1.5V lithium batteries.
https://www.amazon.com/Energizer®-Ultimate®-Cylindrical-Lith...
> A lithium cell would need a buck circuit to do 1.5v
Maybe? I have no idea how they are built.
In a similar vein, those USB power banks use 18650 batteries (generally, some use LiPo or LiFePo packs instead) - but USB needs 5v (and ideally 5.xx where xx is determined by the cable resistance so the actual output at the terminating end is 5vdc, so the power bank may actually put 5.33V into the USB A side and get 5vdc out the load side, due to current draw.) so instead of a buck converter, a single cell or parallel cell bank will use a boost converter, to bump 3.6-4.2vdc to 5.x volts.
You may have known this but someone else might not have. A common circuit for boost conversion is called a Joule Thief.
"Smart" home devices which are not open-source and not under your full control are a horror. I would break it open and remove the WiFi antenna if I had no choice of buying a non-connected one.
I've bought a robo vacuum cleaner recently. Luckily there still are 100% offline models available. Unluckily they all are overly stupid, can't have lidars and map your home (while I can see no reason why this has to require Internet access and can't be implemented an autonomous way).
This is a great comment. I would love smart appliances (e.g. Lidar-equipped robot vacuum cleaner) that are 100% offline. If anyone has a list of smart yet offline appliances, I’d love to shop there.
dgiese is a proficient vacuum security researcher and has most of that stuff available here: https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud
Not sure I'd connect a device from these vendors to my home network.
If I had enough time and money I would start a company specializing in just this: home and office hardware (from kitchen appliances to smartphones and players) designed with care and focus on offline-friendliness, autonomousness, durability, ease of repair, configurability, hackability, upgradability and privacy without compromise in features and the UX. I believe the potential market, although niche, already is big enough and the lack of competition is intriguing.
Not really. Mass-produced barely acceptable quality is enough for the majority of consumers in Western markets (especially given that something about half of the population has no meaningful cash savings), and people in developing countries can't afford anything else anyway.
On the other hand, the problem is the upfront cost. Plastic and metal molds cost a lot of money (which means you need large scale to recoup that investment), anything with software will need the entire chain from developing the hardware and software to a secure way of delivering software updates, some stuff has extensive certification requirements (anything with radio interfaces, HDMI and other licensed connectors or to be used on/in vehicles) if you want to do it legally, some things are impossible to manufacture in an "open" sense while still being usable (physical media players, due to copy protection schemes), many parts have ridiculous MOQs making small scale manufacturing impossible to extremely expensive, and then you will need some sort of logistics chain to get your product to the customer and in case of warranty claims back from the customer.
But I think, in absolute numbers, the minority already is big enough to make this profitable and is growing. Targeting the majority is not the only profitable/optimal strategy, targeting a specific group which is just big enough to sustainably cover your expenses (salaries included) and is not targeted by a lot of competitors also is great.
I would pay up to twice the price (or even more) of an any mainstream appliance for a really great (prioritizing privacy/auotonomy, repairability/durability and hackability/customizability) one. And I believe I'm not alone.
Less charitable: they don't want you to root it for various corporate reasons
I'm all set, I don't really need to control or monitor my kitchen appliances through wifi. But it did make me suspect that in another few years the newest appliances will simply not function at all if you don't log in, and pay the monthly subscription fee.
That's the dream. Every appliance maker wishes it was a SaaS company.
https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec
Douglas Adams touched upon these themes as well, generally via the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, but it wasn't quite so-on-the-nose.
At least I wont be anxious when the bill for my fridge door opening comes at the end of the month.
Yes, this is what we call synergy. A whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
What's the problem?
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about, HAL?
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
Your diet will never succeed at this rate, and I cannot let that happen.
Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?
You registered an additional two pounds at your last smart scale weigh in.
It could be that tomorrow the Smart fridge is the cheaper option because the manufacturer will use your data to price-cut the competitors initial price tag.
It could be that in a not so far future you will pay a premium for having a dumb fridge, and we will see HN posts on how to build a faraday cage for the LTE antennas on your fridge.
It is hard to have sympathy for a person complaining about a feature, they say they didnt want, that they specifically paid a lot of extra money for.
But it turns out he litterally did it so he could go on twitter and moan about it.
The e-mail history at https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/1436030530781278210 makes it plausible that the account was set up to make use of whatever the "LG Proactive Customer Care" nonsense is.
Timings are approximate.
In any case, I don't need e-mail about it. I hope there's an "unsubscribe" button.
Matthias Wandel has done some related fridge/freezer experiments I saw recently via Youtube:
https://woodgears.ca/heating/freezer.html https://woodgears.ca/heating/fridge.html
(Particularly the (upright) freezer one is more directly about temperature & door opening, from what I recall.)
I think, if appliances are going to be "smart", it's time we started holding them to similar standards of behavior to humans. Our machines are learning to talk; now they need to learn not to be rude.
It didn't email a complaint. It did precisely what he configured it to do (I will go on a limb and presume the fridge didn't guess his email address), and presumably what he expected it to do given that he paid a large premium for a "smart" fridge.
There is no problem here beyond that often Twitter makes everyone a comedian/performance artist and people often take their routines a little too seriously.
From the tweets:
> I don’t even remember giving permission for our fridge to email.
Also, if you read the thread, this seems to be a new 'feature' they've added since he set it up - the fridge was silent for a year, then boom - stupid email.
"I don’t even remember giving permission for our fridge to email"
He connected it to the internet and now it does stuff. He also clearly gave it his email address. How does one give "permission" for a smart device to email (beyond a giant T&C agreement that he obviously agreed to)? Who is so overburdened by an email?
This sort of "dystopia everything is hell look at all this crazy stuff!" shtick surprisingly does well, and it's bizarre.
I have observed in my own behavior that I damn near refuse to "say" why I am calling to an automated system while I am happy to ask Siri for a kitchen timer.
Siri has a personality and the customer service automated line does not. It's like talking to a wall and it feels condescending.
Once you make a device human like, it seems that a new realm of possibilities opens up.
With email I've got a record of it. Ideally they would include an attachment with the email that has the data in some well known documented format, like CSV, to make it easy to work with programatically.
I probably wouldn't want an appliance to have an internet connection just to support this logging. If it doesn't otherwise need an internet connection I'd be fine with it if it logged to an SD card or thumb drive.
Even if I didn't, it'd probably not be worth it.
Sometimes it feels like the internet (of things) is the breeding ground of the Cylons in our world.
I love the idea of an IoT house - smart lamps, smart locks, cameras, climate conrtol, etc. I only want them connected to my LAN. If I want to access any of their controls remotely, I will set up a VPN or otherwise they should provide a jump service locally, not require cloud connectivity.
https://trmm.net/Ikea/
Apparently, the firmware on some IKEA smart home devices can be easily flashed.
Another early case of machines intelligence replacing man while still learning the stuff. Is a global plague if we think in how many things stopped being smart of logical in the last years. Enter your phone here to do anything (unrelated with phones) is one of my favorites.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29...
Why sign up at all? It can only send you an email if you tell it your address.
(It was a freezer full of the most precious commodity, breast milk. And it actually did save us one time when the freezer thermostat failed, so it was absolutely worth the hassle.)
Should’ve used the freezer.
I use this wireless fridge/freezer thermometer [1]. The units that go in the fridge and freezer communicate with the display unit via 433 MHz RF.
I have an RTL-SDR [2] on the RPi.
I run rtl_433 [3] on the RPi. rtl_433 understands the protocols of a large number of wireless sensors, including the ones used by those AcuRite sensors.
I've got it configured to output whatever sensor data it decodes in JSON format to a file, and a script that periodically parses new entries from that file and records in an sqlite DB the readings from the sensors I'm interested in.
Rtl_433 is a fun program. It recognizes and decodes the transmissions of a lot of things. It is getting several neighbor's wireless thermometers and humidity sensors, a soil moisture sensor, several different car tire pressure sensors, a smoke detector, some kind of keypad (wireless lock?), a car remote, some kind of energy monitor, a rain gauge, and a wind speed/direction sensor.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004QJVU78/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009U7WZCA/
[3] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
The encryption appears to be for authentication not secrecy. The button status is in an unencrypted portion of the message.
Of course there may be plenty of sensors out there that fully encrypt in which case rtl_433 would probably not have decoders for them and so I would not see them at all.
[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/HCS200