Google is getting as bad as Microsoft with unusable old hardware. I mean fine stop supporting the older hardware but release the code/api to allow them to still function with people who know how to do it. Or at the very least allow the old hardware to be unlocked for third party firmware.
Unfortunately from a business perspective it’s very hard to argue for this stuff since goodwill doesn’t have a definable dollar amount but the engineering time to extract this and getting it working extremely definitely has a cost.
The back end of this smart crap is very likely inextricably intertwined with Google’s internal services.
Remember Google exists to harvest data which means the important part of this thermostat is not being a thermostat but recording when you’re home, what temperature it is, if you’re awake etc etc.
100%. This needs to be a law or it can’t be expected to happen.
I will say, MS make a decent mouse.
Yeah no doubt. I’ve got 20 year old MS mice that still work.
Does MS make a decent mouse or did all of their competitors like Logitech just jump off a cliff with a drop in quality? I suppose “decent” could be a relative term.
I can only really speak for the intellimouse I have, it’s a little over 5 years old, cost £25, 4 buttons and a clicky scroll wheel, comfortable to use. Works as well today as the day I bought it, gets maybe 8-10 hours of use 5-6 days a week. Only complaint is the rubberised coating near the side buttons has scuffed up a bit.
I’m not claiming it’s the world’s greatest mouse or anything, but it’s fine, decent.
I’m so mad. I bought and installed the thing in my wall before it was owned by Google, then they bought it and shut it down while it’s still working fine. It would cost them almost nothing to leave it working. It just does t collect quite as much creepy stalking information as the newer models, so now it has to go in a trash can.
I have learned from this experience to literally never buy anything that relies on an external server ever again in my lifetime.
Actually, it costs them a lot of money, my pihole is blocking 2000 requests per day from my nest thermostat. Multiply that for the millions of units they sold and you have a small scale “Perpetual DDoS Attack” to their servers. I don’t know why a thermostat needs to call home that often, if it’s to checking the outside temperature it could do it just twice a day, or just avoid it altogether when it’s off (8 months per year in my case)
But yes, I will never buy this shit again from them, and the next must have the option to be controlled without internet. It doesn’t make sense to send a message to a server in another continent to activate a device that’s located in the same room I’m sitting in
Even internet connected could be fine if they allow hooking into via something like home assistant 🤷♂️
Fuck google. They don’t even index shit anymore. They index nothing. It’s not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. Everyone is stuck with Gmail now.
Resist! Host your own email!
As someone who hosts a lot of things: Fuck email hosting. Just get your own domain for a few bucks a year, and use an established provider to host it.
Honestly - it’s not impossible. Not as simple as spinning up a webserver, but definitely doable. I should probably write something up at some point.
I can help.
—- START —-
Hello! Are you thinking about hosting your own email? Do you enjoy having a life? Do you want to deal with spf and dkim records? Having to add more storage space? Backing up said emails following the 3-2-1 guide? Finding out your residential ISP blocks port 25?
I didn’t think so, and neither do I. Go pay to have someone else host your email.
—- END —-
Edit:
Yea, I should definitely write something up so bollocks like this does not proliferate.
Please do.
Be sure to also put how much time people can realistically expect to spend on each step (including offsite backup and recovery).
if it’s more than 10min I’ll just continue to pay tuta mail
Been running my own server for 15 years. I need to put about 20 hours maintenance a year in for updates. I have the whole thing automated as a helm chart using PVCs with cert-manager for auto-renewal and the node just runs k3s as a single node.
That’s a lot of extra layers, but the layer of seperation between the host and the services makes it very easy to automate all the pain away.
So what you’re telling me is that…
I have to use DNS for email to work?
And if I ever need more storage, I have to plug in a disk?
And If I want to keep my data I actually have to back it up somehow?
And I need to forward a port or if that’s not possible directly though my ISP, use another service that offers it?
Sorry, none of that is much of a revelation.
Sarcasm aside, while hosting your own email is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be, it is definitely not as hard as you are describing either.
If anything the hardest part is not even in your list, it would probably be getting enough people to mark your domain as not spam to get yourself lifted out of automated spam filtering systems.
My main issue was getting mailgun to work (it didn’t) and the imap server kept breaking
Been there… Done that… mailbox.org’ed it…
Or at least get your own domain and use it with a different provider.
I keep my Gmail for spam
Being an ad-driven company annihilated old google. Instead of developing precise and efficient tools (like they used to) all effort goes to convincing users to care about random crap, because the crapmaker is paying up.
As a programmer who enjoys a beautiful solution to a hard problem, this irks me every time I’m forced to interface with google.
All ux must be sloppified.
The sloppification will be televised (during increasingly regular ad intervals) !
Google was always an ad driven company. Google Adsense was kind of a big deal there for a while.
Once they started letting money affect their search results, especially with promoted / sponsored results, everything started going downhill.
It used to be that nobody went to the second page of google search (because the first page almost always had the result you needed), but now, the first page is almost entirely ads and paid content.
It’s not the advertising part of Google that ruined it, because that part has always been there. It’s the greedy executives that shoehorned ads into every other product and service possible, and are now cramming “AI” down everyone’s throat, trying to make us all dependent on it, so they can rugpull it and charge us for access.
for no particular reason last night, I pulled my 2009 windows 7 laptop out of the grave and fired it on, and after I got through the wave of Smart errors and CMOS messages, When I opened up Chrome, not connected to internet, the cached version of google was still using its late 2000s early 2010s appearance. and it made me very sad.
Welcome to the Google graveyard
Wow. A lot of these things look pretty niche. -like AngularJS
/s
Wait, Chromecast was killed?
I’m out of the loop.
It’s a “box” instead of a dongle now. Called TV Streamer. Essentially the same thing.
It’s also absolutely terrible. I got one after my Chromecast broke and hate it so much
It’s honestly grown on me. It’s a way better smart TV experience than what the TV offers. And it lets me ban the TV from the WIFI so it can’t update and show random ads.
Yes and no, old model is obsolete, new model has a different name and is supported for now
Fwiw, I have four generations of Chromecast and they all still work. The only real difference between “Chromecast with Google TV” and the new “Streamer” is that it doesn’t have the attached HDMI cable, but has an Ethernet port on it, so I consider it a push. It’s about twice as big but still pretty small.
The megacorp can have a little evil, as a treat :3
So they are Vampires
I’m 90% sure vampires are less evil.
Regardless, I can’t say I’ve ever seen Sundar Pichai in direct sunlight 🤷♂️
Agree, killing to survive is evil, but it’s something that humans have done for centuries. In the case of vampires they have to to survive. No one wants to die. Still bad though.
Megacorps kill people to make their shareholders more wealthy. They could just not and still be wealthy, but they want more. That’s just pure unnecessary greed and way more evil
google openly says why they’re such a shit company now. They made their search results worse, so people will click on more and more pages so they see more ads. They’re a shitstain company. Stop using google.
Don’t you want an AI summary that doesn’t make sense? But first, click on this annoying popup and select how many cookies you want…
When Nest thermostats came out, they seemed interesting, then I saw that they required an outside connection and I immediately forgot about their existence. I’m not surprised about this latest development.
It was extremely predictable.
My Nest thermostats are the last Google thing and the last I’ll ever buy. I’ve completely degoogled my life except for the Nests, because they still work fine in HomeKit via my Starling. Once they kill the Nest thermostat E (and I doubt that’s very far off), I will be completely free of that shitty evil company. I’m almost looking forward to it.
What do you do for maps? Specifically directions while driving?
I’ve tried apps based on OSM but they get too unreliable outside of heavily populated areas.
Not who you’re replying to, but I got an older Garmin GPS on ebay for like $30 (the nuvi 2589). Get one with LMT (lifetime maps and traffic) and a traffic receiver cable. I had to buy my traffic receiver separately, cost me $12 on ebay, but you could get a current one for $70 and it may work better.
I just use Apple Maps. I know, “Apple bad” and all that, but in a duopoly I will choose the lesser of evils. No, I will not mess with custom ROMs on a Google-produced phone. I need my banking apps, and Google is now kneecapping most apps.
Most newer cars also have “good enough” navigation these days.
They’re is no lesser evil between Apple and Google.
Disagree, but to each their own. I will always consider an advertising company to be worse than a products company. Mind you, they can both get fucked.
…and there’s the purity test downvote. It is completely unrealistic to expect people to exist without one of the big vendors. I have no Google apps on my phone; also, no Meta products either. I use tracking blockers and a pi-hole at home. The only company gathering data on me is Apple, and it’s in their best interest not to sell it considering their whole “privacy” stance. Not that it means much, but it’s sure as fuck better than Google.
completely degoogled
What do you use for email?
I registered my own domain and use purelymail.com. Super cheap, not difficult to set up if you’re mildly technically inclined. Plenty of instructions on how. Beauty of using your own domain is you can take it and use it anywhere without having to change your address again.
+1
purelymail is great
You ever have issues with sites not accepting your email? I tried to claim some free games on epic, made an account with my email provider (not Gmail), but I would keep getting errors saying some shit like please enter a real address or something. I don’t have issues with every site but it’s a pain when it doesn’t work.
That’s entirely up to the mail provider to maintain. Purelymail has been really good about keeping a good reputation among major mail players, and that takes a long time to build. I’ve never had a problem with deliverability with them.
There are a few checks that are up to the domain holder to complete when configuring a mail service. You’ll want to complete things like SFP, DKIM, and DMARC records on your domain which are systems that work with your mail provider to prove that you are really who you say you are and not a spoofed email which physically cannot do this. If a site like EPIC checks for DKIM records on setting up an account, then this is in fact something you can configure and is generally free to do.
The most common issue I have is due to my TLD. There are some poorly coded sites that require a .com, .org, or .net TLD before you can click the Submit/Next button…
Proton, disroot, mailbox.org, tutanota, riseup (anyone have an invite? No? Ok maybe not riseup).
I use Tuta.
Looks like there’s an open source PCB hardware mod for nest thermostats:
- Sett Open-Source Home Thermostat
That looks dope as hell. Unfortunately the one I took out of service is a 3rd Gen, but I have no qualms about tearing it apart to see what’s inside
I was given a GSA! Flashed with non-Google firmware and maxed out in RAM (154GB?)
I have no idea what to do with it.
Oh man that would be awesome to have just the hardware alone is worth decent money.
Really? I assumed they’re old and huge and heavy and not worth anything hahaha. He was gonna recycle it but asked if I wanted to have it. I bought a bunch of 2.5” SAS drives, but I honestly don’t know what I’m doing with it. I should have a friend over to help me get it set up.
At the very least, keep it and in a few decades that will be an impressive piece of history that you will own!
No I’m not 100% sure exactly what OS they’re running or the specs on them but 154 gigs of RAM itself on a blade server itself is worth something. If you can I would throw a couple of instances of Linux on it you could use it as possibly a Plex server or something else like that.
Looks like a standard pizza box server. Blades are something else.
Yea, looking it up it’s a power edge r710, which is the exact model in running my Plex on.
No OS on it right now! It has a USB drive to boot from and maybe ten or twelve SAS slides. Two quad-core Xeon processors of some sort, and two PSUs.
Enshitification working as promised, as valued a few years later on the stock market (2004, even tho they didn’t have much revenue).
Wait, when did they start saying they were gonna EOL Nest thermostats?
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/16233096 1st and 2nd gen learning thermostats are going EOL by October 25th without any option to control locally (other than, yknow, the thermostat itself)
But don’t worry! They’ll let you purchase the 4th gen for only $149.99 if you’re one of these owners!! Yippee!!!
On totally unrelated news, I’m finding the my new ecobee to be pretty sweet. Supposedly it can be two stepped into homeassistant via Apple’s webkit?
I had heard good things for Ecobee, but at some point last year they shut down their developer registrations. Still 100% accessible through the HomeKit integration, but it didn’t feel like a good move for them.
I ended up going with a Meross MTS300 to replace my Nest. It feels like the local-only smart thermostat market is pretty dry, so I gave them a shot. There’s some 3rd party Home Assistant integration for it, which I actually saw a Meross dev offering up some internal docs in an issue so they could build better support. I thought was pretty chill of them. A much better attitude than “oh we don’t support this platform officially, cease building for it”. Supposedly it can operate entirely separately from their infra with some tweaks, but I’ve unfortunately ran out of weekend. Even without those tweaks it can operate without internet over Matter
Wouldn’t recommend it personally yet until I have more time to find the quirks about it. In any case it’s been significantly more reliable than my Nest ever was
That’s mostly the reason I went for them, trying as some back burner thing to get whatever appliances, lights cameras, etc all figured how I could do them fully in house. Not a huge priority, switches work just fine, but if I do set such things up the idea of it failing because of an Internet outage is a no-go
You’re given the opportunity to pay us money to get the same functionality you currently enjoy!
You should be thankful for the privilege
I’m going to go give my dumb thermostat a li’l pat on the head. It does everything I need all by itself.
Shite. At least my Nest 3rd is safe…for now
Also super cool of them to disable the thermostat just when heating starts to become safety critical.
It still functions as a thermostat. You simply can’t access the smart features like presence sensing (to automatically turn your system off when you’re not home) or cloud control, (so you can’t adjust the temperature from your phone anymore). But it’ll still continue to function as a dumb thermostat. You set the temperature at the unit, and it holds said temperature until you change it.
Even the dumbest thermostats have a schedule feature. This one won’t.
We welcomed skynet when it first came
