So I’ve been working on building my own Alexa device, which will eventually make its way to a wall in our home. I made great progress with the SDK (Software Development Kit) today. She’s talking in over my earbuds and responding to commands through a cheap $10 USB microphone plugged into the back of this Raspberry Pi 4.
My next step is to build a custom control screen. I am loving this challenge.
Years ago I picked up a couple of LED smart bulbs from Home Depot. As I recall, these particular bulbs were very affordable, adequate for what I had planned for them (I believe they were going in a guest bedroom), and they were branded GE. While we were using Philips Hue lights for out automation at the time (and still are today), there were notes online around the flexibility of these GE bulbs: they would be compatible with the Philips Hue hub or you could get a hub made by Wink and go with that. Home Depot had a special where they were practically giving the Wink hub away so I paid the minimal amount of cash they wanted for the hub and tried to integrate it into our smart home setup.
I was never satisfied with the Wink Hub. It became unresponsive too often and we were still moving in the Philips Hue direction. I abandoned the hub and basically forgot about it until it was recycled, along with the GE bulbs, when we moved to Chicago.
I received an email advising me my Wink Hub would no longer be functional after 5/13/20 unless I joined their subscription plan to provide continued service. The plan is $4.99 a month. There’s probably taxes too. There’s always taxes.
Looking at the calendar, the 13th of May is only a few days away. If I had invested more into the Wink Home Automation system I would be a very unhappy customer right now.
Now, in the grand scheme of things $4.99 per month doesn’t seem like a lot of money. But what doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me may seem like a lot of money to other people. Plus, I distinctly remember the Wink Hub box mentioning “No Subscription Fees!”.
It would appear that Wink has changed their mind.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I am becoming very subscription fatigued. All of these consumption and membership and automation based subscriptions can be very taxing on the household budget. The kicker is, Wink provides a luxury, a convenience. Why pay $60 per year just to be able to turn lights on and off with my smartphone? Yes, changing colors, automating on/off times, etc. is nice, but it’s not a necessity. I can still flip a switch.
I feel bad for the folks that have gone all in on the Wink ecosystem. I’ve been reading about consumers that have built Wink into their new construction; wall switches that rely on Wink, relays that fire off sprinklers and what not, relying on Wink. Unless they pay the subscription fee, all of these devices will become INOP in just a few days.
Sorry Wink, but that’s not the way to get people to love your ecosystem.
Companies like Wink are trying to move us to a subscription dependent future. That’s not a future I want to be part of. Intrigued by these developments, I may spend some of my geek time researching open source alternatives to share on the various home automation forums I’m part of to see how folks can continue to control their devices on their terms. There’s almost always an open source solution.
Four days notice of a support paradigm shift is not the way to flip a switch.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking during these pandemic times. It looked like a gorgeous day today but it was very cold for this time of year. I don’t think it got above 40ºF today. We are under a freeze warning for tonight.
I’ve been admiring these tulips across the street for past couple of days. They bring a smile to my face. I’m thankful our neighbor has taken the time to cultivate them.
I hope the tulips survive the freeze. I hope I do as well.
People here in the 21st century like to make fun of the screeching noises our modems made in the late 20th century. My husband and I were the outliers when we made our home in a our small apartment in 1996; we had two phone lines, enabling us to both be online at the same time. We finished our time with America Online in that apartment; by the time we had moved to our first house in 1997 we had moved to a local Internet Service Provider and again we had two phones lines to accommodate our two 56K baud modems.
Good times.
I vividly remember the Internet of the late 20th century. Heck, I vividly remember going online before the “Information Superhighway” was touted as a thing; I was dialing into local Bulletin Board Services and text based online services with my Commodore 64 in 1986. It was not much later that I was working for then the second largest computer company in the world where everyone had a computer on their desk. All of our computers were connected and if we knew the right path to get to another company, we could send email from our desk to a friend’s desk at another company hundreds of miles away.
Edward Snowden wrote about this in his book, “Permanent Record”: the Internet (and its precursors) was a much friendlier place back in the day. In the circles where I traveled, and I traveled in many online circles back then, our focus was on communication and information exchange. It would be literally decades before people aspired to be “influencers”. Honestly, getting online, navigating the systems, and actually staying connected was difficult for the average joe and because of this, there wasn’t a lot of flooding of misinformation, deception, and propaganda. Sure, we had bulletin boards where we talked about conspiracy theories and I kept up with the few folks I knew associated with ACT-UP, but it seemed to be very rare where there was so much spin and deception running rampantly across our screens.
I can’t get through one screen of Facebook without rolling my eyes at the stupidity of some of the people I have on my “friends” list. The list is growing shorter by the day.
I firmly believe our society was not prepared for the freedom offered with all information being instantly available. I don’t know that humans are truly equipped to handle this much information, especially when so many bad actors are easily getting onto the “Information Superhighway” to purposely disrupt, deceive, and destroy.
The Internet was suppose to bring us together, not rip us apart. But that’s exactly what it’s doing and unfortunately this destruction is making too many people rich, so it will never stop.
The idiocy of the Internet will outlive American society. I am convinced of that.
I miss the days when one had to be tech savvy to use a computer and get online. Now we can bark into our refrigerator to tweet.
I am so confused. I thought the pandemic was planned so we’d all be with our families when NASA got the maths wrong and the asteroid slammed into the planet, reigniting fossil fuels into living dinosaurs, which would then cause Shell Oil to appear on all calculators held upside down before women went boobless.
Inspired by watching “Upload” on Amazon Prime (no spoilers please, we are on episode three), I’ve been searching YouTube for some indy sci-fi shorts. One I found particularly interesting is “The Replacement”, starring Mike McNamara from here in Chicago.
One of the things I love about these near-future series and film shorts is the way folks are imaging (and subsequently society) will progress in the next decade or so. It’s interesting to contrast with CBS’s “Century City” back in 2004, where everyone was using fancy PDAs.
Speaking of which, I noticed on “Upload” that Oprah Winfrey was president in the late 2020s. In that CBS series “Century City”, Oprah was also president in that timeline, in 2030.
Apple really wants you to subscribe to things. Want to read a magazine in a new, technologically savvy way? Subscribe to Apple News+. Want to enjoy the full, rich musical experience of owning an Apple HomePod? You have to use Apple Music to do that. Hearing great things about that show starring Chris Evans? Shell out to Apple TV+, please.
Of course, Apple is not the only company doing this. There are way too many TV and movie subscription services out there; if you want to back up the photos of your cherished memories taken with your mobile device, you’ll need to pay one of the cloud services (iCloud, Google Drive, whatever) money on a monthly basis. When we live in a country no longer focused on manufacturing things. We must subscribe to the idea of a service based economy. Because after all, the American economy is more important than anything else. Its value even surpasses that of human life.
Photo grabbed from a website somewhere.
I’m digressing.
The kicker of these subscription storage and consumption services is lock-in, and no one is really better at lock-in than Apple. The thing is, it’s not really practical to live in one ecosystem anymore. How long before we get to a point where I can’t call my family back East unless they’re using an iPhone? What if she didn’t have an iDevice? We’d have to move to another service. Another subscription please, thank you.
This week I’ve been reevaluating all of our digital subscriptions and ways we access the connected world. I’ve finally admitted that Apple’s HomeKit (for home automation) is a mess. And if I were to admit to buyer’s remorse over an Apple product, it would be the Apple HomePod. While I know Apple is focused on security with HomeKit, I’m not a fan of the walled garden built around HomePod. We are a Spotify family (another monthly subscription). I also pay for an Apple Music subscription so I have full functionality of the HomePods. Except Siri goes brain dead WAY too often on the HomePods, so I have an Amazon Echo Dot with Alexa sitting in the same room as the HomePod. So when Siri doesn’t know the temperature outside or has forgotten what room she is in, I can ask Alexa the same thing and she’ll respond in a saner fashion 95% of the time.
I’m slowly unsubscribing (again) from the idea that one technology company can provide everything we need for any enjoyable computing experience.
In the meanwhile, I have a HomePod listed for sale on Swappa.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
