I hate those automated systems.
The company i work for moved to a new building about a year ago, and all the curtains and lights are automated.
Not surprisingly, the lights are too bright, and there is no way to control the light levels manually.
I asked the maintanace crew to lower the light intensity. After a full day of fiddling with the system, they managed to somewhat dim the lights, which reverted back to full on blast aftet a few minutes.
Having anticipated that, I built a "complex" system of shades using papers and masking tape, which somehow survived to this day.
The best part? The desginers of the office come to show their creation to potenial customers every few weeks and show off thier marvelous design. A classic case of "You are not the customer".
And that without even going into the "automatic shading system" which opens the curtains at the worst possible moment, and can't be changed because "we need it that way for our green certfication".
Our office is marketed as 24/7 operation. We needed our office manned 7 days a week 5am-11pm, so it seemed like a good fit, only building management turn off climate control during the weekend, causing the temperature in the office to rocket up to unbearable levels. Their explanation was that they had to turn it off at the weekend to keep their green credentials.
Funny how the person paying the electricity bill always gets so concerned with their "green certification".
Hint: there isn't any green certification that can be revoked, afaik. The big standard I often see is "LEED", but if you check them out, once a building gets LEED certified (at the design stage) you could literally build anything and there is no mechanism to remove that certification in your building.
Something about the way these anecdotes are told often seems to suggest "hah, aren't green regulations stupid" but the message I take is more "modern capitalist organisations can't even get basic things right when given incentives to do so".
Bit of a Rorschach test depending on your preconceived notions I guess, though I've always thought of myself as pro-market and these stories make me question that.
As I see it, these aren't green regulations at all.
As mabbo mentions, there is no conformance enforcement after the design stage, and the whole thing feels like it being used for self-advertisment instead of actually being "green".
The "green" is in quotes here, because the building office is basically a greenhouse (glass facade from all sides) in a hot climate where air conditioning is needed most of the year.
Another thing that sucks is that offices refuse to let in fresh air. Even in a warm climate the outside is often cooler than a closed up greenhouse with equipment running.
Same thing in our new building. They lower it for a few moments, then full blast. I wear blue blockers for more than just my screen these days.
The other issue - my boss has his own lamps in his office and keeps the room light off. But it goes on every time someone walks by his office - though it's not triggered inside the office.
> Not surprisingly, the lights are too bright, and there is no way to control the light levels manually.
That is surprising. Modern "smart" "technological" "green" buildings seem to be way too dim, as if lighting intensity is really a major contributor to energy use.
Sure, your eyes adjust, but we evolved to live outdoors on the African savannah all day.
"Any sufficiently complex home automation system is indistinguishable from being haunted"
This is just a plain digital radio one; I'm sure with the involvement of computers it could have been made much more intractable.
My own experience closest to this was an office meeting room that had dimmable lights ... with a standard "boolean" momentary switch. There were, of course, no instructions. We sort of figured out that holding the switch down would sometimes put it into a cycle of brightness from which releasing the switch would leave it at right level, but it wasn't reliable and we often sat in the dim light, defeated by the UX.
Short Thread: staying with some friends and last night after everyone went to bed I could not figure out how to turn off the large ceiling light in their living room. There is a wall controller that seemed fairly straightforward.
There is a large main light, a smaller light on top that faces up, several levels of brightness, and a fan. Each time I tried to turn off the upward facing light, something else would turn on. After ten minutes, I woke up my wife to ask her to help. It only got worse.
Each time we thought everything was off, a few seconds later something else (or everything else) would turn back on. Minute twenty, I started laughing out of sheer frustration at what felt like a Myst puzzle. Couldn’t wake our friends cause they have a small kid.
Suddenly, we solved it. Everything went off and stayed off and after waiting a full minute we realized it was gonna stay that way. This is circa 1am. I finally went to sleep.
This morning we asked about what the deal was with the light. The answer has broken me.
Our friends are in a newly built condo complex. The fan controls use a binary code to connect to the fans. Additionally the controls were only supposed to have a signal reach of 30 feet. They reach much, much further.
There are almost 40 units within reach. Based on the binary code limitation there’s only 16 possible code options. So everyone in this building controls the main light and fan of at least one other person; maybe more.
From 12:30 to 1am last night, I was engaged in a proxy war with up to three other apartments, as they in turn, set my fan to high and my lights to the brightest setting, until everyone gave up.
Our hosts have been here for six months and have found a way to live with it by imagining who in their building they might be interacting with. This one guy who they think particularly might be an asshole and they have suspicions about when he’s running the show.
I am staying here again tonight. I look forward to wrestling control of the lights from what is essentially angry ghosts in my own personal AITA post.
My inclination is to go Full Lawful Good and turn off everyone’s lights tonight at 10pm to make sure we all get a good night of sleep and wake up rested and ready for a productive Saturday.
I would love to do some sort of homeAssistant type automation, but I've been dithering for ages because everything I read up on all the various light and appliance control protocols make me feel my entire home would become a massive UI/UX nightmare for myself and visitors.
I want smarts, but I also never want to have to reboot a lightswitch.
My rule for home automation at my house: a stranger walking in the front door should be able to intuitively use my house without instruction.
Extra features are fine, but if they cannot turn on the light without 6 steps, then it's wrong.
eg: my kitchen lights are all on Z-Wave dimmers. Each is still a normal wall switch to the average person and can be fully controlled from there. I probably use the switches 20% of the time and voice control about 75%(other automations account for maybe 5%). Anyone who enters my kitchen will be able to have light, I just get the conveniences.
Another example: my living room has no ceiling lights, just floor lamps. These are not setup with automation because I have not found a way to control them that makes sense to non-trained users. Therefore we keep the traditional lights.
Every smart device I have with the exception of 1 lamp in my office and 2 bedside tables in my bedroom are on z-wave switches. Eventually I might add zigbee buttons or a panel by the fan switch that controls the bedside table lights but honestly I see no real need. They have pull-strings you can use (and break automation but I'm the only one using those so I don't care as much).
The z-wave switches I use is the Leviton DZ15S-1BZ [0], they run about $45 a pop but work flawlessly. I think I've had one lose connection less than 10 times total across all switches in the past year if that. My only complaint is their size. They are chunky and if you have a tight electrical box you might have issues. That said I've installed 6 or so of these and they are easy to install (other than the shoving, pushing, cursing, crying, and begging them to fit part lol), I can install one in less than 30min easily. I just keep buying a new switch every few months, I'm a little over halfway there till I have full coverage (already have full coverage in rooms I care about, so what's left is the guest room, some bathrooms/closets, and 1 3-way that I can't bring myself to replace right now as it will "burn" 2 switches).
My top tips to people looking at getting into home automation would be:
* Go with SmartThings, Wink is dying if not dead and ST works with Alexa/Google voice assistants. It also has a nice API/SmartApp ecosystem.
* Z-wave > Zigbee and NEVER use a Wifi device, they are a security nightmare IMHO
* Make SmartThings your single point of truth, don't buy stuff that "Works with Alexa" unless it's zigbee or z-wave.
* Make everything fallback to switches (real preferably but virtual if needed) on the wall, anyone should be able to walk in and use your lights without a crash course.
TL;DR: he stayed over at a friend's place in a densely packed condo unit. Condo building has a home automation system with binary codes that has a limit of 16 combinations. With 40 units nearby, each unit controls at least 1 other automation system in a neighbor's apt, so one of his neighbors was accidentally toggling his light.
Even better are the replies from other Twitter users on the same thread on what they experienced with their home automation systems. Here's one that tickled me: "We had an Airbnb guest once who (probably accidentally) connected his Spotify Connect to my living room sound system. Months after he was gone, death metal would start without a warning, volume went up, silence after 5 seconds. It took weeks before I figured it out"
It's crazy how sometimes these automation systems that are supposed to make our lives easier, make it more complicated instead. I wonder when the issues that we see today with smart houses and smart TVs will show up in the upcoming generation of "smart" cars.
I think when things get bad enough we will return to simplicity. (keeping some of the good stuff)
This week I see 2 coffee machines to complicated for me to make coffee. 1 kitchen light I couldn't switch on and a dishwasher I couldn't get to work. Every time a group of people gathered around the automation then gave up.
I just had a message exchange where I explained (to the owner) how to get music out of a laptop, bluetooth dongle, amplifier setup. Windos really wants you to switch on bluetooth from the configuration screen every time. The dongle needs a reset periodically (or just vanishes) and the amplifier likes to change its input channel. Between bluetooth and mp3 the quality is complete shit by 1980 standards.
Some modern coffee machines are so bewildering, it makes me feel like Arthur Dent trying to explain to an alien computer how to make tea. It really makes H2G2 seem remarkably prescient.
"So first you have to turn it on, because it offs itself every chance it gets. Then you have to wait for it to do a cleaning cycle as indicated by this unnoticeable red dot, and god forbid you don't have a cup under there. Once finished, you empty the junk water into this plant..."
Microwave ovens have similarly obtuse interfaces. To the point that I've been known to go out of my way to buy one with an old fashioned mechanical timer to avoid the whole shit show.
I found almost every one of them has "express" buttons, basically just smashing start adds one or half a minute.
I so far found one microwave oven that required the whole ritual each and every time. It was so bad I forgot to set it to max time, so we can just pause it and resume it (like cheap kitchens that abuse consumer-grade microwaves do) - though maybe it was so bad there wasn't resume. So if you opened the door before it thought it was time, you had to set it up again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The '+30' button is all that I ever use, which makes me think dials are probably better. A dial would be simpler, one quick turn instead of several button presses. I can't say I was previously annoyed with my microwave, but now I don't think I'll look at it the same again.
I thought that too. Dials were more irritating because you had to move it juuuuusst right to get the time you wanted. It didn't help that it had acceleration, and that as you got higher it used bigger increments.
The best UX I've ever experienced on microwaves are restaurant microwaves and Danby microwaves.
Restaurant microwaves have programmable buttons and a space beside them to write what time is programmed in (or what recipe it is for). If you want a different time than the preprogrammed ones, then you press a time button and then punch in your time.
Danby's work similarly, you press a digit and you get that many minutes and it starts immediately. You press the +30sec and it adds 30 seconds. Simple, efficient, discoverable. Admittedly anything beyond the basics is a bit of a train wreck, but I'm okay pressing 1 instead of punching in 50 or 55 and then start when I want a bit less than one minute.
My current microwave only starts when you press start. The +30sec button will save you at MOST 1 button press ever, unless you want to add 30s to an already running microwave, which is more than I can say for my last rotary, where +1min would only work if you used it to start the microwave. If you used the dial, it didn't work.
Appliances have TERRIBLE UX, and I could go on about the good and bad things I have seen and been frustrated by.
I had a microwave that upon finishing would show the message "GOOD". I guess it was a bad translation of "done". It also always had to beep three times at ear piercing volume, even if you opened the door after the first beep.
Oddly, I think that's a regional thing. Here in Belgium, every microwave I ever used had a dial (digital or mechanical) and most models in the stores are dial based
Similar to the related story, in our office the speakers of a meeting room are "smart speakers", so anyone who is on the same LAN can join and play Spotify on these speakers. I have to admit we had done some little pranks with that :)
I do not use home automation, and I do not use smart houses and smart TVs. But if I did want to have an automation system for some things, I would prefer to wire everything (rather than making it wireless) so that it doesn't have the problems you mentioned. Too many thing now they do wireless, even though I want it to be wired instead.
That ups the cost by a LOT though, so people don't. I have no desire for a "smart home", smart tv is about it, I have some external wireless cameras. No camera in my home except on my phone. You can't hack it if its not there.
> My inclination is to go Full Lawful Good and turn off everyone’s lights tonight at 10pm to make sure we all get a good night of sleep and wake up rested and ready for a productive Saturday.
There are too many twitter threads that go absolutely nowhere and yet build a fraction of a story into multiple tweets.
I have only enough attention in a day for so many things structured as a story. I’d rather save that attention for things I know I’ll enjoy rather than the episodic retelling of a battle over a light switch.
All i could get from the link was that the person was having some trouble with a fan, I guess, and that twitter threads must be readable for someone, but they don't usually work for me (Chrome on Android, no plugins). I especially like how tapping 'show this thread' doesn't actually do anything; but it is a welcome change from getting the usual 'you've loaded too many pages' error I usually get when clicking a twitter link. So, I was happy to get the tldr.
To nitpick the story a bit, using time for any kind of cooking is a fire waiting to happen. Use a thermostat, work with temperature. (Same for coffee machines, measure throughput, not time, unless you want your coffees to progressively get smaller as the machine clogs up)
I had a similar experience with a wireless boiler thermostat in our rented terraced house in London. It was one of the more common modules; a cheap one from Wickes or a similar DIY store, so every other house on the street had the same unit. The problem was, they had 3 channels, and (at least) one of our neighbours was using the same, default channel. So his unit would send bogus on/off signals to our boiler, and our boiler unit would turn on and off totally out of sync with what the thermometer reading was.
It took me a few weeks to work out this theory (mainly due to the fact that the wires from the old unit were still there, and after giving up on waiting for the landlord to fix it, I tore the unit off the wall only to find that the wires were not connected, only then did I realize it was wireless). I tried changing to a different channel and it all started behaving normally after that.
Edit: did I mention that this was costing me well over a hundred pounds a month in excess gas bills? I'm sure someone could come up with a real-world DOS attack with this sort of shit...
Maybe you could make it work by carefully setting the IDs so there are no two units within range of each other that are sharing the same ID. Essentially turn it into an extended graph coloring problem.
Seriously. This is not just a "minor annoyance" to live with. I'd replace the entire fan with something with good ol' pull cords, and then send an invoice to the condo complex. Assuming they'd refuse, I'd likely even consider taking it to small claims court.
I stayed in an AirBnB that was like this recently, most frustrating experience I've had in a while. Thought i was losing my sanity when the lights turned on and fan spun up to high speed at 2:30 after I'd been out drinking... Left them a note in the private review. I don't know how I'd be able to interact with my neighbors if I was constantly in battle with them like this.
It turns out the circuit breakers are mixed with other apartments as well. For 5 bonus points on your digital logic final, construct the apartment complex's truth table.
Well it depends if the circuit breakers are accessible and correctly labeled to cut just the ceiling fan/light. But yeah, that's a good last resort measure.
Twitter was conceived as a 'micro-blogging' platform. Each Tweet being an independent semantic entity on itself with a 140 - expanded to 280 - character limit. The entire point was to post succinct status updates.
Naturally, people tend to use tools in ways that go beyond the original intended design purpose. Creating entire threads using @ mentions is one of those behaviors.
Proper UX, readability and findability are opportunity costs happily paid in return for tapping directly into a large audience in real time.
Since Twitter is an ad company, it won't fix this because there's zero incentive to do so. On the contrary. If more people are willing to use Twitter and stay on Twitter, the better.
Arguably, Twitter offers the least number of affordances to accommodate long form writing and reading. But here we are.
Medium valiantly tried to offer an answer - proper UX combined with the directness of Twitter - but failed since they were fighting an uphill battle from the get go because their business model consisted of competing with an incumbent using the same tactic: building another content silo as a private venture.
Twitter wasn't meant for the way the author is using it, thus it sucks for what he's doing. it's good enough for him and since you can't bring your audience to a new platform with you twitterers just live with it.
I have had that happening to me recently as well. The link that's supposed to expand the thread doesn't work for me either. But weirdly, reloading the page did.
Sometimes when reloading doesn't work, I select the URL in the bar and hit enter, which does a... hard reload, I guess? And that works. At any rate, yeah, it's so broken.
I asked the maintanace crew to lower the light intensity. After a full day of fiddling with the system, they managed to somewhat dim the lights, which reverted back to full on blast aftet a few minutes.
Having anticipated that, I built a "complex" system of shades using papers and masking tape, which somehow survived to this day.
The best part? The desginers of the office come to show their creation to potenial customers every few weeks and show off thier marvelous design. A classic case of "You are not the customer".
And that without even going into the "automatic shading system" which opens the curtains at the worst possible moment, and can't be changed because "we need it that way for our green certfication".
Sorry, had to vent off...