Sit around wondering why he spent more hours getting his smart bulbs to work than he’ll ever spend getting up and flipping a switch?
Sometimes you climb that mountain just because it’s there.
It’s so future generations will be freed of the tyranny of switch flipping and blind adjusting. They’ll look back and say: “That’s when our people became truly free”.
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Old Man Moment: I went to a football game this weekend with a college buddy and his 14 year old son. He noticed my watch and the conversation went:
Kid: “you don’t have an Apple watch?”
Me: “No, just a regular old mechanical watch.”
Kid: “So it just tells you the time?”
Me: “Well, this one tells me the date too.”
The idea of using a watch to tell the time never entered his thinking.
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This makes me think of the “when I was your age, we had to go to the tv to change the channel” type of comment.
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Well…it’s true. We did.
You had more than one channel?
We had four. I lived near a big city.
And we liked it!
Through the wind and snow
We were one of the first color TVs in the neighborhood in 1966 (I think). I was a fan of “Lost in Space” but all the other kids in the neighborhood wanted to watch “Batman”. I had to go into my parent’s bedroom to watch “Lost in Space” on the old black and white TV while the rest of the kids watched “Batman” in the living room. I was further taunted by the fact that L.i.S. had just upgraded to color!
Up hill. Both ways.
I dropped my iPhone 11 a few months back - turning the screen into a stained glass installation and disabling the charge port - and have been hanging on for the new 14 ever since. I was so happy when it arrived yesterday and I set it up. Then I was prompted to do a software update on the new phone, which I did, and this broke my smart home.
Everything is connected to the internet and can do independent things, but nothing talks to anything else. So I can’t use any scenes or automations that run through the Home app; the only things that work are scheduled tasks that are held on the individual devices.
Checking the chat rooms, I find that I am very much not alone. Jeez, I thought Apple was done with this amateur-hour shit with their software.
FWIW, this is why some EV manufacturers (notably Tesla) don’t allow CarPlay/Android Auto integration with their cars. They don’t trust Apple/Google not to fuck up the whole thing, so they don’t let them into their systems.
I know a guy that works on the hardware side of Apple. He generally operates in a state of feeling let down by the software side.
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I’m sure Apple will offer you the new iHouse, which is completely compatible with all of their proprietary software and devices. It’s only $11 million.
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Whew! A restart of the Home hub fixed it. This issue has been known for over two weeks - you’d think they’d build in an alert to the update function…
“This update is about to fuck your Smart Home back to the Stone Age…”
When you get a deep look into the hardware of an iPhone, it’s breathtaking even for someone that does tech for a living. Equalled almost as much by the reverse engineering expertise resident in most of the other smartphone brands.
The software side is hampered by a classic failing of modern business; the perceived need to constantly be shipping new capability on a set schedule to keep consumers satiated. Which breaks most of the tactical benefit of agile delivery and iterative investment into a CI/CD pipeline.
So with my Meross smart bulbs shitting the bed, I got a set of Phillips Hue bulbs and a bridge. I have heard nothing but good things about the Phillips system.
First off, they charge you an extra $20 for the bridge service, in addition to the cost of the hardware. Never saw anything about that when I bought the stuff. They jump you with it when you open the app. Fuckers.
Now, it has been a right royal pain to get this stuff working and, bottom line, it still isn’t. You have to make sure your iDevice is on the 2.4GHz wifi band, and the Xfinity app wasn’t letting me split the bands through the app. I ended up having to go into the gateway’s admin tool directly, where my only option was to disable the 5GHz band.
With that done, the bridge paired after I managed to figure out how to get it done more by luck than judgement. The paper and in app instructions are as clear as mud, and have a strong “Super Karate Death Car” vibe about them. I got it done, though, and the two lights show up in the list to connect. Then they simply would not connect.
I am now trying to get support on this. I tried physically moving the lights to within a few feet of the bridge, but this made no difference. I finds them, but it just refuses to add them to the network.
I am one stupid comment from Support away from boxing it all up and sending it back with prejudice.
Yeesh.
We have several lifx bulbs.
They’re wifi/don’t require a hub.
I don’t know how they compare directly to Phillips and I don’t know how broad their product line is.
I got the first one on a whim and chose it because it was compatible with Alexa and didn’t require a hub.
Anyway good luck.
I’ve been had. The app I got from the App Store wasn’t the official Phillips app. It’s some bullshit wannabe app that just stole $20. Going to let Apple know about that.
I downloaded the official Phillips app, and things are going much more smoothly.
Update: the real Phillips app is slick and everything was done in seconds, without need to fuck around with the wifi bands. My only concern is that it has kicked up 4 lights, not the two I have turned on. Don’t know what the other two are.
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Your neighbor is wondering who the fuck keeps turning his lights off and on.
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