I have a Traeger and saved $200 because it was the model without WiFi.
I made a delicious turkey breast on Independence Day
Jokes on you when they invent a new kind of meat your grill can’t cook
DRM Ribs. The Salmonella will not die until you pay for Traeger’s $19 a month subscription
Please eat verification Sausage.
Please chew with your mouth open.
Wow, that’s super-topical in more ways than I had expected. The more I read, the more scarily insightful it gets.
spoiler
- The main character being a refugee, with almost all that entails (can’t blame Doctorow for not anticipating it getting this bad)
- The dystopian collusion between the appliance-rentiers and the landlord, as well as the climax hinging on lack of tenant protections
- The way capitalism attempts to subsume all critique.
This is a story that’s important, that everybody needs to read.
I’m an immigrant (not a refugee to be clear) and this excerpt absolutely nails the camaraderie aspect of it and the way that living in immigrant neighborhoods/buildings feels. Turns out, Doctorow’s father was born in a refugee camp.
Skill issue. I eat my food raw. The explosive shits are just me speedrunning my bathroom breaks. Efficiency baby!
The Salmonella will not die until
Oops, RnD team accidentally created indestructible Salmonella bacteria which consumes flesh. Management was pushing RnD to create a better bacteria because hobbyist grill people were killing the bacteria and bypassing the DRM on the grill, but it escaped the lab. It has infected nearly all animals other than sea fish because of proximity. Survivors build floating cities on the sea and thus we have Waterworld!
Someone’s gonna crack that shit and release it as a spice and when you open it a cool as fuck midi techno track plays while you crack your ribs.
It can do bread and the best tasting broccoli and Brussels sprouts you’ve ever had
Are you seriously taking the risk of brussels sprouts with outdated firmware?
raw shrimp on a grill staying completely uncooked next to grilled chicken and steak because you don’t have the DRM for SeaPak©️ shrimp (photorealistic, art station, comedy, vivid)
Are you live from your backyard where you’re smoking meats?
Nah, I’ve got a Bluetooth thermometer so I can track it while I play video games
🎵. meat like a brisket. 🎶
I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
I know, right? Why send my BBQ data to the cloud when I can just cook with a handful of GPUs, locally? To start the grill you just ask the animated waifu to dance and sing a random, AI-generated song that matches your taste in music. Then the fans spin up and send scrumptious GPU heat into the grill, cooking up a delicious hallucination where your animated waifu sings, “That looks yummy! Yummy yummy yummy! Hai hai hai!”
Perform Bad Apple using the most complex geometric shapes possible.
We’re starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors for the basement brewery) but it had to wait until i’d built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house
What are the chances they shipped it on Thanksgiving vs Thanksgiving being the first time in a while the user turned it on?
This, but why does it need a firmware update and why couldn’t it be setup to update on shutdown rather then power on?
Why does it have firmware?
I’m an IT nerd but they could not pay me to buy a grill that requires software updates. What a bunch of nonsense.
Pay me? Fuck yes, I’ll rip that crap out and replace it with a couple of relays or maybe get fancy and arduino -> home assistant.
I’m betting that someone pay a LOT extra to get that garbage though.
Sending a temp updates to your phone so you don’t have to be standing near it the whole time is a nice feature.
My dad’s smoker is also able to set key frames so you can have it ramp up or down in temp at various points while cooking. And it can either be set to change temp at a time or when one of the probes reaches a certain temp. Plus he really likes being able to monitor it from his iPad, especially in the winter or if he has to run up to the store real quick.
Okay, I’m not a huge griller, but wouldn’t it be better just to build in a thermostat? Let it maintain its own temperature?
Sometimes you need cook on different temperatures at different periods. Sometimes you want to set it to cool down or heat up and instead of waiting near it, you could just set the target and let your phone ding when it’s time.
It’s better to just purchase a temperature probe with wifi. Those are handy as hell.
I don’t think it’s better. It’s a different way to achieve that, but there is nothing inherently bad with whatever appliance that can do more than one thing. We shouldn’t expect the makers to be satisfied with the shitty job at programming damn things however.
I do want all my appliances to have wireless connection, I do want to talk to my kettle and set my oven temp on my phone.
I agree, but that should be a separate device. One that I can use in any grill or oven. There’s no reason for the grill itself to have that feature, especially if it can potentially brick the whole thing.
Sometimes I just need a device that can do what I want it to do. Obviously I don’t want a device that can be bricked, but that’s just a shitty programming, not a condemnation of the whole concept. I have a whole host of devices that never brick themselves, and I intend to get more.
Iirc, you can also control the temp, presumably by interacting with the pellet hopper or fan. This will be specific enough for a BBQ that an integrated component makes sense.
I can see the appeal. I’ve just had bad experiences with devices that use digital controls, and you necessarily need digital controls if you’re going to automate these things. Everything breaks eventually, but simpler devices can usually be easily fixed whereas anything that relies on specialized circuit boards are outside of my wheelhouse. I would be much more comfortable with owning one of these if they released information on how these circuits worked so that replacements can be made even if the company disappears.
That’s reasonable. I, too, like to keep things low tech as much as possible. But I also recognize that there is a legitimate place in the world for wifi enabled BBQs.
I will never need a wifi connected kitchen appliance. A grill fits that category. My grill is a disposable item I buy one every four or five years.
None of my go to devices are internet connected. Not my TV screens. Not my toothbrush. My daily driver is a 2009 Toyota. Its great. No screens and easy to fix.
Just out of curiosity… What are you doing to your grill that you need a new one every few years? Mine is prob. 10 years old and still no reason in sight to replace it.
They shoot at it when the food is subpar.
I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It’s a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.
No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I’ve had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.
Gets up to 700 degs
That’s a furnace. Aluminium melts at 700 degrees. Gold at 1000.
I think they are using facism units
Yes, stupid empire units. You had me excited for a minute but I should have known that was absurd.
which minecraft mod is that?
I’m an IT guy, if my printer made a noise I don’t recognise I’d shoot it.
Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.
Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)
As an IT nerd I got one of these and put it on a different subnet and it’s not able to reach out to anything external but my phone can hit it from a different subnet. Thing works great.
It’s a smoker with wireless controls
Instead of having to keep checking on it for several hours, an app on your phone will show the temperature and allow temperature adjustments online
ok but why aren’t you outside with a beer…pretty sure that’s a part of the meat smokers law
Some people also think the point of fishing is to catch fish and not to chill out by the bay with some light beers.
!ping
Fish in the area!ping
Fish on hook
Tap REEL to begin reeling!ping
Fish escaped
Tap CAST to try againIt can be both, but at least if i don’t catch any fish I’ll catch a good buzz
Fair enough
Funny enough that’s what I’m doing now, then my cousin leans over with his phone to show me his brisket is sitting right at 225
Because I live in Texas and being outside in the summer for extended periods is dangerous.
Seems like we shouldn’t encourage people to live in locations where being outside for 6 months of the year is hazardous
That’s pretty much everywhere
Not everyone can live in California wine country.
Most people live where it gets either dangerously hot or dangerously cold for large portions of the year.
It’s dangerously cold for maybe 10 days during the 3 months of winter where i live (temperaturs below 20F). Far from the 3 months of temperatures that never drop below 95 degrees in Texas. The Midwest, the Rockies, Pacific Northwest, and mid to north Atlantic of the US are all well within normal human habitation ranges.
Not for a brisket though. I’m too old to stay up that long.
I mean that’s what I do when it’s something small, but when it’s something that takes 10+ hours, that’s a lot of beer and standing.
Though right now I just have an alarm to check it every half hour. Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I have a non digital charcoal kettle, and I found good options for blowers and temp control in China.
It’s a simple fitting that I only use doing very long cooks. Saves all the mucking around with the official stuff
Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I had the same thought and went with a HeaterMeter, although I haven’t finished building it yet.
OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.
It’s because of the reliance on hundreds of thousands of third party web dependencies that are constantly updating and constantly getting security patches (and introducing vulnerabilities)
For that and fear the company getting bored and pulling the plug on servers, leaving me with a paperweight, is why I didn’t get much into the IoT stuff.
One time I bought some under armor shoes with bluetooth. They would connect to my phone and an app would take measurements on my stride and angle of my foot in my runs. At some point they decided to make the app a subscription. They wanted a whole $15/mo! I decided to just run like a caveman instead.
I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.
On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump’s admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. “And where do you think they get their data?”
One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app
Damn these smart capitalists figured out how to get a weather satellite into space for that cheap? No wonder socialism failed/s
For real tho it reminds me of that joke about libertarians being like cats. Also $15/mo feels way to high for weather updates
BS. They update that expensive crap because it’s full of security holes.
Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.
Keep it Low & Slow!
I guarantee this update didn’t drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn’t turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.
Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.
Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. “Patching Tuesday” is an unofficial but well recognized “holiday” for IT folks. It’s not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don’t have to work through the weekend.
Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it’ll pop up on Tuesdays.
pro tip
I get it. I hate it, but I get it.
another pro tip from someone else in IT: see that appliance with the digital screen? fuck it. don’t get it. get the old shitty one that’s $800 less that doesn’t have WiFi or non-tactile buttons. you know what doesn’t need firmware updates? a charcoal Weber grill.
Pro tip: don’t buy a fucking BBQ that connects to the Internet.
No appliances in general while we’re at it
Have tons of devices that can connect to the Internet. Apparently I’m the only one here resourceful enough to not connect them
I rip the wifi card out and if that’s not available all things can be solved with the proper application of an angle grinder.
Careful, the last person with a modicum of common fucking sense almost got flamethrowered by Beef Supreme.
“Hey, I just thought of something crazy, maybe DON’T kick yourself in the balls?”
one-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-usone-of-us^one-of-us
I’d rather not reward manufacturers that include that just to raise the price and track and sell your data with my money.
I think you missed the bus.
I’d rather not reward manufacturers that include that just to raise the price
Cool cool, you do you homie
and track and sell your data with my money.
If you didn’t connect the device to the internet… Then… There is no “data”
This isn’t a difficult concept. The device didn’t ship with your WiFi broadcast ID and password preset in the firmware. Are you saying that the product has a sim card that will just relay info back regardless of whether or not you connect it? And the manufacturer is cool just paying for this connection? What “data”???
Yet again, don’t willingly and intentionally connect it to anything that has access to the internet. JFC, is it really that abstract of a concept that confounds all others? I don’t think I needed to be told this. It’s the very definition of self-evident.
What the absolute fuck is happening? Did everyone eat brain tumors for breakfast?
Whether it actually happened or not, that was their intent. If you’re happy to reward that behavior, well, “you do you.”
Thanks, but i prefer most utilities without wifi and need of patching. Each wifi device is running a full blown OS, for which the (cheapest possible) hardware will start to fail after 5 to 10 years. Experience from a wifi capable HP printer; wifi was the first that failed. Not to talk about never patched security holes.
Tuesday is the perfect day for it. Finish up the update on Friday, review it Monday and fix where you probably fucked up something and didn’t notice, push it the next day.
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
A grill should run on charcoal. It needs to get very hot and that’s literally it.
There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.
A grill should run on charcoal.
Someone insert the KOTH reference, I’m too tired, I tell you hwat
Hank is wrong. If all you care about is the “heat,” you might as well go inside and cook on your stove!
deleted by creator
wifi grill - okay
cloud grill - not okay
Uses a PID controller too.
There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.
I really ought to finish putting together my HeaterMeter.
While I agree that real charcoal is superior in every way, a good grill and the person running it needs to be able to control the temperature while cooking. It might be just fine to burn those hot dogs or hamburger patties, but if I want to roast a potato or an onion, I need to be able to control the heat to something less than the surface of the sun.
If you don’t know how to control the temp on a cheap charcoal grill, that’s fine, but don’t pretend it can’t be done.
I do. I almost always cook over indirect heat. But many people don’t. That’s why they prefer gas over charcoal. And when they try, they make the mistake of using briquets instead of real wood charcoal. The sand has never added any flavor to the cooking.
To be truthful, I do have an LP smoker that’s setup for cold smoking. It’s much easier to to control over the 2 or 3 days it might take to cold smoke bacon or ham. And a LOT less work.
You’re describing the gravity fed charcoal grills from masterbuilt and I love mine. Especially when I toss in a cast iron pan full of bacon and run it at 450 for half an hour.
I like my home automation tech but it needs to serve a purpose. Just being connected to wifi is not a selling point for me. Lights that turn on in the morning when I need to wake up are great. A thermostat that can reduce energy usage when nobody is home is also great. But a grill….what the fuck does Internet access do to improve the grilling experience?
And if it requires the cloud to work, I don’t consider it a functional product.
Serious answer?
I have an app on my phone that allows me to control my pellet grill as long as it and my phone have an internet connection.
Doing a 12 hr smoke, I can leave the house and monitor it while I go shopping, change the temps if its not acting right. I can set temperature alerts and then go around the house and my phone goes off when the meat hits a certain internal temp. Its really really handy.
Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
Matter is fine too. It’s off the cloud. MQTT is great but generally not exposed directly to the consumer.
Grill, Dehumidifier, Air con, Fridge, Dishwasher, Washing Machine, Lightbulbs, Ovens, Doorknob…
None of that should be smarter than “press button, get action”.
I once wondered why the fuck an oven should need WiFi.
Then last week I was stuck in a traffic jam coming home from work, and took 2 hrs to do what should’ve been a 1 hr drive. (45km distance)
Then I had to make dinner, and I had such little time to have dinner, clean up from dinner, shower, walk the dog, and settle down for bed for work in the morning, I was angrily wishing I could preheat the oven while I was on my way home from work. That’s when I realized the reason for a WiFi oven.
Also, being able to say “hey Google lights out” when I’m tired as fuck about to go to bed and the light switch is on the other side of the room opposite direction from the bedroom, is nice too.
Actually, as someone who has little free time when not stuck at work or in traffic, I’m probably more likely than the average person to appreciate things having wifi.
Doorknobs though, I’ll draw the line there so we can both at least agree on something together
Or we could just have better wages and shorter work weeks.
A lot harder to buy that at the store unfortunately.
I’m worried about anything that can be controlled through a third-party online service. The amazon doorbell thing is a prime example of what can go wrong, but it can be more subtle, too. And I’m not even talking about obsolescence. Frankly, I’d still be worried if it was a self-hosted, properly configured system where I’m the only one with a legit access.
I understand the convenience of all this. I also have to deal with the risk balance of security vs convenience, which causes me to not tolerate that “too tired to go across the room” justifies “a third party have full control over my doors, lights, heating, ovens, etc.” (not shooting fire at you, see this as a generic example).
The bare minimum would be a fully self-hosted solution, which is possible, although difficult because hardware manufacturers don’t always play nice. And even then, proper, secure setup and maintenance is not for everyone. In the meantime, yeah, I’ll have to move myself when I want to turn on my dishwasher.
Though I’ll admit, I have some lights that are controlled wirelessly… my old phone have an IR port, and they have IR remotes… Technically, an attacker could probably turn them on/off/change colors from behind a window :D
Yeah, like Idek how I would self host any of my gear, beside running it through my NAS, which also runs with its own software, which is no different than running stuff through the apps they came with. If I knew how to program stuff myself, and had the fuck around time to do it, I would.
So for now I’m just living with the easy option of using my roomba, and my cameras with the apps they came with
I was angrily wishing I could preheat the oven while I was on my way home from work. That’s when I realized the reason for a WiFi oven.
Maybe a better oven is better than wifi. It only takes my oven a few minutes to get up to temp.
I come home, turn it on, fiddle with “getting home shit”, and by the time I’m done it’s ready to go. No wifi needed.
Rental. I’ve got no choice than to use the shitty Samsung crap they put in these apartments, which you have to set 25 degrees higher than all the cooking instructions in the world say to, and it still takes 50% longer to cook than it says.
Besides, electric ovens always take FOR EVER to preheat no matter what
Connected HVAC can be pretty damn great depending on your house. It’s changed my energy usage a lot, and I like being able to adjust temps without walking downstairs in the middle of the night. Although having your thermostat lose cloud support ever 10-15 years is pretty shitty.
Connected doors are also great for handing out virtual keys and ensuring that stuff is shut and locked when you’re away.
The Honeywell thermostats support z-wave. So no cloud shenanigans.
I ended up going down the matter, home assistant, HomeKit route so I have some options for local network control.
That’s primarily what I seek out, but my rental has the Honeywell.
Have you found a decent matter thermostat? I’d love to get one when I get a house
If you are into that: then tplink kasa switches and plugs can be reconfigured via hs100 app on git hub, so that they only look local and don’t try to reach out to a remote server. You can use the app to connect them to your local WiFi. Then you can control them via home assistant locally (or remotely) and not rely on a corporate server and android app for use
I actually have a few of the Matter supported Kasa smart switches.
They work incredibly well, but they still haven’t been updated to Matter 1.3 so no power consumption statistics in Home Assistant.
I’m warry of electronic, wireless, and sometimes third-party cloud dependent services, having a say in how I lock my doors or control heating.
I’m a bit old fashioned, but also have to work with solutions where considering the consequences of a compromised entry point is vital. I’d be ok with a way to check that the door is locked, but something that can lock (and, so, unlock) my door remotely? Not a chance. At least, not for a place a value.
Re the locks - my general thought is that if you really want to get into my house, you’re going to get into my house. A rock or brick is very effective.
Locks just lower the potential for easy crimes of opportunity.
Iirc, these grills are wifi connected so you can remotely monitor and control temperature. Makes sense if you are bbqing something that is gonna be in there for 12 hours. But then, you kind of lose one of the benefits of bbqing - sitting next to a grill and drinking beer with your friends for 12 hours.
For this you could have a timer on the thing you set when you start it up and can then walk away from. You don’t need the damn net to have a clock in the appliance.
I mean, I personally am not going to buy one. But if someone was adamant that this would measurably improve their life, who am I to contradict them?
Yes, and doors should be as simple as this
oh, wait…
Ah hell yes. Fire 2.0 finally dropped.
Funny, they actually call the wireless features WiFire.
Man, FireWire was such a cool name for an interface.
You would think after ditching a bunch of rich fuckers on an island they wouldn’t get another chance to try that again.
This is just Fire. There will be no festivities. Just burning, man.
It is of the utmost importance that you understand I see what you did there.
Can we go back to dumb tech?
I’m a casino slot tech. Don’t even get me started on the electronic table games that still use a dealer! Like Scotty said, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”.
To not connect it to the Internet would probably help and turn it into a normal grill.
I have a friend who’s really big in to smoking meats for hours and hours and days at a time. He loves this kind of thing because he can monitor the smoker without physically being in front of it.
I think he’s crazy af for involving the damned internet in it but I guess it is what it is when you’re “cooking” something for 9 hours.
Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe? What would work better though is never connecting it to a network or even better, just don’t make it smart for no dam reason, lol.
Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe?
Then we’re back to the same question. At what point a grill have anything that could be part of a botnet :D
Anything with a network connection (unfortunately).
