> It's great if you like 'shake and bake' style open source projects that barely work and have a lot of time to tinker with them.
I think this is a cool way to relate to technology. Is there a word for technology that people enjoy because it's broken all the time?
I have a good friend who has been in management for twenty years, and he maintains a complicated home network like he was head of IT for a circa-2000 small business. Mail server, printer server, FTP, etc., mostly bare metal with a couple of VMs for things like a Windows domain controller. The most modern thing he has is a media server so he can buy music and movies on physical media.
It takes a moderate amount of tending, and once a year or so, something major breaks and he has to spend a weekend or two tinkering and fixing things, solving a complicated puzzle of software and hardware compatibility. I think it's a therapeutic outlet for him. If you talk to him, he'll give you complicated reasons why the whole thing is extremely practical, but nothing that would justify the dozens of hours per year he puts into it. I've probed for how he feels about it ("I bet it's nice to get hands-on every once in a while, eh?") and from his answers I'm pretty sure he has no awareness of it serving any emotional purpose for him. I bet it drives his wife crazy when she wants to watch a movie and he has to run into his office to tweak some configuration, but from my distance, I think it's pretty cool.
What I can't stand is the subset of people who keep trying to trick the rest of us into using their tinkerware, the "install Linux for your parents in 1999" crowd. When I bought a house seven years ago, I was really excited to set up some home automation, but after a couple of weekends of research I realized it was going to be a full-time hobby. I remember in particular being on Reddit and looking at the comment history of someone who had a pattern of saying "once you get it set up it's relatively pain-free." It was obvious from his history that it had been basically a second job for him for over a year. I decided to live in an unautomated home and invest my energy into other things, and I'm very glad I did. What drives people to lie about things like that to people who won't enjoy it?
I have a pretty decent home automation setup going for the last 5 years at this place with no issues using the hue ecosystem till my hue bridge died last month. Motion battery free buttons and timers for lights and outlets.
Have now made the jump to HA so we will see how long it can go post setup without falling over (and adding some things) but 5 years before the first issue (and so far I have some hue bulbs going on 10 years) is solid enough imho
I strongly disagree with anyone saying home assistant is support he’ll.
I enjoy automating and doing sysadmin things for fun, but I have a life and young children. I don’t have time to tinker as much.
Home Assistant has come a long way and has been extremely reliable the last few years. I mostly use it for automating camera detections and motion/contact sensors for security.
You can be as hands on or hands off as you want to be.
In general I’ve found if you want to do any sort of automation whether store bought or tinker-level, you’re going to be wasting some time.
as i said in my experience with the hue ecosystem it ran for years, 5 years, with no issues. it literally was set and forget and just worked. until it died and i moved to HA i hadn't added or changed anything for at least 2 years to the point i had to install the app to my phone when the bridge died lol
After a reasonable period of things working I just had an issue where some lights wouldn’t respond. At first I thought it was the saturated 2.4G wifi, then it got distracting enough to take up an early morning and it turned out that “for security reasons” HA made a choice to block my MQTT server until it was updated.
Not my favourite discovery and required a whole migration plan. Now I’m seriously reading the above article and thinking after (4?) years it’s time to leave HA.
it sounds like HA is far more polished now so i'm hoping it goes well. but hue over the last half decade has been 100% solid and reliable for me till the bridge died
I think this is a cool way to relate to technology. Is there a word for technology that people enjoy because it's broken all the time?
I have a good friend who has been in management for twenty years, and he maintains a complicated home network like he was head of IT for a circa-2000 small business. Mail server, printer server, FTP, etc., mostly bare metal with a couple of VMs for things like a Windows domain controller. The most modern thing he has is a media server so he can buy music and movies on physical media.
It takes a moderate amount of tending, and once a year or so, something major breaks and he has to spend a weekend or two tinkering and fixing things, solving a complicated puzzle of software and hardware compatibility. I think it's a therapeutic outlet for him. If you talk to him, he'll give you complicated reasons why the whole thing is extremely practical, but nothing that would justify the dozens of hours per year he puts into it. I've probed for how he feels about it ("I bet it's nice to get hands-on every once in a while, eh?") and from his answers I'm pretty sure he has no awareness of it serving any emotional purpose for him. I bet it drives his wife crazy when she wants to watch a movie and he has to run into his office to tweak some configuration, but from my distance, I think it's pretty cool.
What I can't stand is the subset of people who keep trying to trick the rest of us into using their tinkerware, the "install Linux for your parents in 1999" crowd. When I bought a house seven years ago, I was really excited to set up some home automation, but after a couple of weekends of research I realized it was going to be a full-time hobby. I remember in particular being on Reddit and looking at the comment history of someone who had a pattern of saying "once you get it set up it's relatively pain-free." It was obvious from his history that it had been basically a second job for him for over a year. I decided to live in an unautomated home and invest my energy into other things, and I'm very glad I did. What drives people to lie about things like that to people who won't enjoy it?