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This entry will cover a number of things, including some thing I have referred to recently as “the Internet of Things.” If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s a very brief summary:
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet. These devices range from ordinary household objects to sophisticated industrial tools. With more than 7 billion connected IoT devices today, experts are expecting this number to grow to 10 billion by 2020 and 22 billion by 2025.
On one level, it seems like a smart idea: as long as you’re using computer technology, to one extent or neither, to operate your car or your major appliance or your television, why not include the ability to let that device communicate with computers and phones and even other devices on your home network? The answer to that “why not” question is even lengthier than the question itself. There are all kinds of concerns about privacy, access to your personal information, bad-guy ability to hack into the “smart“ device and others through it, and the added repair cost when that (or any) component of a smart device breaks down.
To give one (not particularly recent) example in our own appliance world, a few years ago we acquired our first “smart television.” This was when we initially got rid of our cable box and relied on streaming to get the entertainment programming formerly provided by Time Warner. It is basically a specialty computer unit with a menu, at the bottom of the screen, of all the various services and devices you choose from- including all the usual suspects like Netflix and Hulu, our DVD player, and even a setting that receives over the air broadcast channel signals when we connect a fancy modern set of rabbit ears. But there is also shit on that menu that we never use- for services and events that somebody is paying Samsung to put down there. Some of them you can remove, but others are baked in to the operating system and you’re going to see the displays for them whether you want to or not. These are called “bloatware,” and they are just part of the price of Samsung keeping the price of the television down in the first place. There are also settings that “phone home” back to the manufacturer, about the channels you’re watching or the devices you’re using. You can turn these off, but an advanced degree in engineering really helps with that.
At least such interactivity makes sense on a television to be connected to your home Internet so you can watch programs you are paying services to stream from. The range of other devices you can connect to is approaching the level of ridiculous. It is what is led to our frequent joke about either avoiding or disabling such technology on any new appliance we purchase so “we won’t catch it sexting with the toaster.” We've seen blinking lights on our furnace (circa 2021), and an option on our just-purchased washer, indicating that they are, or can be, connected via wifi or Bluetooth to other devices. The question this begs is, why? Yes, I suppose it's convenient to be able to adjust your thermostat, or turn off your spin cycle, if you're not in the building to do it, but is that remote (heh) possible convenience worth the extra cost you will incur when something breaks, or, worse, when some naughty hacker gets hold of one of them? Want some horror stories? Have some. Not just washers and toasters having happy sex talk, but pacemakers and baby monitors, many with preset 1-2-3-4-5 "passwords" that can turn you into somebody's personal voodoo doll or your video baby device into a voyeur's wet dream.
One thing we might have thought it a good idea on? The full-size freezer out in the garage. We had to buy a new one a few years ago, and almost lost this one a year or so back, due to overwork from one of us or the other (probably this one of us) not completely closing the door and letting it get all toasty in there. I've gotten much better at remembering to give the door a good slammo when shutting it, but two nights ago, a power cord on a fan we'd stored on top of the freezer got wedged into the freezer's rubber gasket, and I awoke to a fast-growing puddle on the floor. We do have a self-contained Bluetooth system that monitors temperature and humidity in three remote locations, reporting to a base station in the living room. One's on the outdoor patio (it's hot out there), one in the cellar in Eleanor's growing area (lettuce, not hippie lettuce), and the third's inside that freezer. It had only gotten up to 41F by the time I caught it and shut the door, so nothing got beyond safety limits. Our biggest worry was the motor would then overwork to get back to its usual 0-10F range (see "it's hot out there," above), but it was back down 16F this morning so I think we dodged one there, the worst being the rather soupy ice cream bars we slurped last night. An Internet of Things might have had a feature to sound an alarm if that sensor went above 20 or 30F, but how much else of a "network" would we have to set up to do that?
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Because these add-ons make it more expensive to fix things when they break, and harder to fix them yourself without voiding a warranty or electrocuting yourself, just about everything we buy these days comes with an "extended warranty" option. I've been asked at Office Depot if I wanted to pay an extra three bucks for "purchase protection" on a ten dollar lightning cable. The new washer went $150 up in price so we could rest assured that a breakdown in the next five years will be fixed, or the unit replaced, at no cost to us. Because the days of a Sears Kenmore lasting 35 years are long gone; hell, Sears itself is all but long gone now. You're lucky if anything goes beyond the five year mark, and the one-year warranties on typical major-ish purchases other than cars aren't even foolproof. We do have a fairly reliable appliance repair company in our contacts, but increasingly they won't touch anything if it's too old or too new: the washer/dryer repair guys can't work on anything from Samsung or LG because of how complex their internal non-mechanical workings have become.
These companies also rely on most of their "extended warranty" or "purchase protection" customers never using the service they've paid for even if something does break. Eleanor spent a good chunk of Labor Day morning on the phone with the company Home Depot farms out the warranty work to, trying to get the product registered. Since I ordered it online, I didn't have a traditional store receipt for it, and that flummoxed them majorly. Finally, they told her that online orders are registered automatically. We're keeping the online paperwork, and the contact information for that conversation, with the manual and the troubleshooting stuff delivered with the machine itself. Last year, I had to give up on making a warranty claim on this very laptop when its monitor went bad: no receipt, no coverage. Even if I had the receipt, I would have had to ship it out to some remote repair facility and be without any use of it for days if not weeks. That led me to a place then called UBreakIFix, now a wholly owned part of the Asurion protectionracket plan. At least with them, I can have them diagnose the problem, keep using the machine until the part is in or the repair is scheduled, and then only be out of commission for a day or two.
One of those "days or two" will be coming up next week. Everything is fine with this machine under the hood, and the monitor has been fine since IBrokeTheyFixed, but this is what my keyboard now looks like:
Not so pretty, is it? I don't need the names of the letters on the keys, but they're gradually starting to get wonky under the tiles. The E in particular often doeesn't respond, or does what it did six words back and double-types itself. I've gotten under them with canned air and a rubbing-alcoholic Q-tip to try cleaning under it (peeling it off is beyond my ability to put it back), but it's finally reached the point where I want them to put a new one on. Unlike my horrific "remove screws" incident with a Lenovo laptop a few years ago, this keyboard is not welded to the motherboard and can be replaced. Office Despot wanted 300 bucks to unweld and replace that one back in the spring of 2021. Asurion would do this one for the same price, or,....
For just over half that, they'd fix this one IF I signed up for their Whole House Protection Plan.
For $25 a month plus tax, we can bring any electronic device to them that isn't a phone. After 31 days, even pre-existing conditions can be covered. So we'll be covered on the smart TV that Best Buy didn't even offer breakage protection on, the DVD/CD/Blu-Ray player, our smoke and CO detectors, various headphones, tablets (pity Moses didn't have this;) and other things. Some have deductibles, but none is more than 100 bucks.
There's a similar program going on where we get the dog groomed. They've also just hit us for a $25 monthly recurring charge, but right off that saved 22 bucks on last Saturday's groom, 15 a month to use on Pepper product, and either exams for free at their clinic (where vaxes are cheaper than the vet) or a $20 rebate if we continue to use her current docs. Again, they depend on not everyone reading the fine print and using the services. We do; we will.
----
So those are All The Things for today. Good night, and don't forget to wipe off your bagel when it comes out of the toaster, because you don't know what it's been up to;)
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet. These devices range from ordinary household objects to sophisticated industrial tools. With more than 7 billion connected IoT devices today, experts are expecting this number to grow to 10 billion by 2020 and 22 billion by 2025.
On one level, it seems like a smart idea: as long as you’re using computer technology, to one extent or neither, to operate your car or your major appliance or your television, why not include the ability to let that device communicate with computers and phones and even other devices on your home network? The answer to that “why not” question is even lengthier than the question itself. There are all kinds of concerns about privacy, access to your personal information, bad-guy ability to hack into the “smart“ device and others through it, and the added repair cost when that (or any) component of a smart device breaks down.
To give one (not particularly recent) example in our own appliance world, a few years ago we acquired our first “smart television.” This was when we initially got rid of our cable box and relied on streaming to get the entertainment programming formerly provided by Time Warner. It is basically a specialty computer unit with a menu, at the bottom of the screen, of all the various services and devices you choose from- including all the usual suspects like Netflix and Hulu, our DVD player, and even a setting that receives over the air broadcast channel signals when we connect a fancy modern set of rabbit ears. But there is also shit on that menu that we never use- for services and events that somebody is paying Samsung to put down there. Some of them you can remove, but others are baked in to the operating system and you’re going to see the displays for them whether you want to or not. These are called “bloatware,” and they are just part of the price of Samsung keeping the price of the television down in the first place. There are also settings that “phone home” back to the manufacturer, about the channels you’re watching or the devices you’re using. You can turn these off, but an advanced degree in engineering really helps with that.
At least such interactivity makes sense on a television to be connected to your home Internet so you can watch programs you are paying services to stream from. The range of other devices you can connect to is approaching the level of ridiculous. It is what is led to our frequent joke about either avoiding or disabling such technology on any new appliance we purchase so “we won’t catch it sexting with the toaster.” We've seen blinking lights on our furnace (circa 2021), and an option on our just-purchased washer, indicating that they are, or can be, connected via wifi or Bluetooth to other devices. The question this begs is, why? Yes, I suppose it's convenient to be able to adjust your thermostat, or turn off your spin cycle, if you're not in the building to do it, but is that remote (heh) possible convenience worth the extra cost you will incur when something breaks, or, worse, when some naughty hacker gets hold of one of them? Want some horror stories? Have some. Not just washers and toasters having happy sex talk, but pacemakers and baby monitors, many with preset 1-2-3-4-5 "passwords" that can turn you into somebody's personal voodoo doll or your video baby device into a voyeur's wet dream.
One thing we might have thought it a good idea on? The full-size freezer out in the garage. We had to buy a new one a few years ago, and almost lost this one a year or so back, due to overwork from one of us or the other (probably this one of us) not completely closing the door and letting it get all toasty in there. I've gotten much better at remembering to give the door a good slammo when shutting it, but two nights ago, a power cord on a fan we'd stored on top of the freezer got wedged into the freezer's rubber gasket, and I awoke to a fast-growing puddle on the floor. We do have a self-contained Bluetooth system that monitors temperature and humidity in three remote locations, reporting to a base station in the living room. One's on the outdoor patio (it's hot out there), one in the cellar in Eleanor's growing area (lettuce, not hippie lettuce), and the third's inside that freezer. It had only gotten up to 41F by the time I caught it and shut the door, so nothing got beyond safety limits. Our biggest worry was the motor would then overwork to get back to its usual 0-10F range (see "it's hot out there," above), but it was back down 16F this morning so I think we dodged one there, the worst being the rather soupy ice cream bars we slurped last night. An Internet of Things might have had a feature to sound an alarm if that sensor went above 20 or 30F, but how much else of a "network" would we have to set up to do that?
----
Because these add-ons make it more expensive to fix things when they break, and harder to fix them yourself without voiding a warranty or electrocuting yourself, just about everything we buy these days comes with an "extended warranty" option. I've been asked at Office Depot if I wanted to pay an extra three bucks for "purchase protection" on a ten dollar lightning cable. The new washer went $150 up in price so we could rest assured that a breakdown in the next five years will be fixed, or the unit replaced, at no cost to us. Because the days of a Sears Kenmore lasting 35 years are long gone; hell, Sears itself is all but long gone now. You're lucky if anything goes beyond the five year mark, and the one-year warranties on typical major-ish purchases other than cars aren't even foolproof. We do have a fairly reliable appliance repair company in our contacts, but increasingly they won't touch anything if it's too old or too new: the washer/dryer repair guys can't work on anything from Samsung or LG because of how complex their internal non-mechanical workings have become.
These companies also rely on most of their "extended warranty" or "purchase protection" customers never using the service they've paid for even if something does break. Eleanor spent a good chunk of Labor Day morning on the phone with the company Home Depot farms out the warranty work to, trying to get the product registered. Since I ordered it online, I didn't have a traditional store receipt for it, and that flummoxed them majorly. Finally, they told her that online orders are registered automatically. We're keeping the online paperwork, and the contact information for that conversation, with the manual and the troubleshooting stuff delivered with the machine itself. Last year, I had to give up on making a warranty claim on this very laptop when its monitor went bad: no receipt, no coverage. Even if I had the receipt, I would have had to ship it out to some remote repair facility and be without any use of it for days if not weeks. That led me to a place then called UBreakIFix, now a wholly owned part of the Asurion protection
One of those "days or two" will be coming up next week. Everything is fine with this machine under the hood, and the monitor has been fine since IBrokeTheyFixed, but this is what my keyboard now looks like:
Not so pretty, is it? I don't need the names of the letters on the keys, but they're gradually starting to get wonky under the tiles. The E in particular often doeesn't respond, or does what it did six words back and double-types itself. I've gotten under them with canned air and a rubbing-alcoholic Q-tip to try cleaning under it (peeling it off is beyond my ability to put it back), but it's finally reached the point where I want them to put a new one on. Unlike my horrific "remove screws" incident with a Lenovo laptop a few years ago, this keyboard is not welded to the motherboard and can be replaced. Office Despot wanted 300 bucks to unweld and replace that one back in the spring of 2021. Asurion would do this one for the same price, or,....
For just over half that, they'd fix this one IF I signed up for their Whole House Protection Plan.
For $25 a month plus tax, we can bring any electronic device to them that isn't a phone. After 31 days, even pre-existing conditions can be covered. So we'll be covered on the smart TV that Best Buy didn't even offer breakage protection on, the DVD/CD/Blu-Ray player, our smoke and CO detectors, various headphones, tablets (pity Moses didn't have this;) and other things. Some have deductibles, but none is more than 100 bucks.
There's a similar program going on where we get the dog groomed. They've also just hit us for a $25 monthly recurring charge, but right off that saved 22 bucks on last Saturday's groom, 15 a month to use on Pepper product, and either exams for free at their clinic (where vaxes are cheaper than the vet) or a $20 rebate if we continue to use her current docs. Again, they depend on not everyone reading the fine print and using the services. We do; we will.
----
So those are All The Things for today. Good night, and don't forget to wipe off your bagel when it comes out of the toaster, because you don't know what it's been up to;)