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
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.
That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
Oh shit, I didn’t know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
Haha have fun xD
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?
Commercial grills do exactly that. There’s just a thermostat built into the gas valve which uses a sensing bulb to modulate the gas flow based on actual temp and set temp. They don’t even need electricity let alone wifi.
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.
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.
which minecraft mod is that?
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.
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.
Removed by mod
Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users.
I used to work at a theater owned by a city. So we used the city’s IT department, and their network. During COVID, live-streaming took off. The city wanted us to install a streaming video package. After a month or two of installing a full video system, we finally get around to testing the stream. Boot up AWS, and it runs fine. We’re streaming in full 4K. Great!
So the show rolls around. It’s Saturday, 7:30pm start time. We start the show… And the stream instantly shits the bed. Like we go from full gigabit upload speed, to less than a single megabit. We’re lucky to get 56kbps speeds. We’re getting one or two frames per second if we’re lucky.
Sunday, we test the stream ahead of time, and it works flawlessly. Show starts, and the upload speed drops to fucking dial up.
Monday morning rolls around, and IT strolls in to check their tickets. Sees a hundred from us, and gives us a call. They run a test on their end. No issues. They run a test on AWS. No issues. They run a test on the fiber backbone between the theater and city hall. No issues. They call the ISP. ISP said they didn’t have any issues over the weekend. IT shrugs, and marks the tickets as solved.
Next weekend, same thing. We’re wondering if IT is automatically throttling us, or if we have a malicious user on the network. We’re asking about QoS, or maybe automatic port control kicking in when the stream starts. Monday rolls around, and IT marks it as solved again.
Third weekend, same thing. This time, the city manager’s office is getting calls from angry patrons who paid for streaming and can’t watch their streams. Monday morning, IT rolls up. They run some more tests, and still can’t find anything wrong. They swear up and down that it’s nothing on their end, and it must be something on ours.
After four months of this back and forth, IT finally admits that they have all of their maintenance tasks to run at 7:30 over the weekend. Every single computer, server, and fucking toaster connected to the city network begins their updates at exactly 7:30. Thousands of city devices, all singularly focused on devouring our upload speeds. Servers run off-site backups. Those backups consume all of the upload speeds for the entire city network. IT refuses to change the time, because “this is what works for us. It’s after city hall closes, so we don’t have any users who are affected. It hasn’t been a problem in the past.”
Removed by mod
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.
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
You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no
Additionally this way the smoker is basically invincible because it’s not digital and as long as you don’t let it rust out it will last forever. If you somehow break the thermometer it’s like $30 to replace but I guarantee you can find models that are somewhat repairable and have user replaceable batteries, which guarantee this thing doesn’t
Just waiting for the day an evil hacker leaks someone’s smoker data to the neighborhood, exposing they cranked the smoker to 375° when they bragged about their brisket cooking 225° the whole time.
That sounds like the plot to an American Dad episode.
The perfect brisket heist.
You make some good points.
I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
Expensive options: thermoworks smoke-x
1-200 depending on 2 or 4 channel version, legally can only be used in the us and Canada because they use a custom rf protocol. As a result the range is 1.24 miles. Thermoworks is pricey shit but it lasts long, can be calibrated, and generally is one of the most accurate cooking thermometers you can buy
(albeit much much much more expensive than a $10-30 k type thermocouple and a used reader for $50 that is way more precise and usually will do data logging) also granted for most people a $20-40 thermometer would be fine with like 300-500ft range
My issue with “smart” anything is not the inherent concept, it’s the execution 99% of the time. I have plenty of smart stuff in my house but it’s almost never convergence devices. I’ve learned that these types of devices are more than anything designed to be disposable trash. Designed as cheap as possible, cut as many corners, introduce as many security holes as possible, etc. we have 0 consumer rights so even if it’s strong they’ll change the tos after the fact when their profits fall and they need to make the line go up.
So it comes to this. I’m not opposed to “smart” devices. They just have to occur in a dumb, roundabout way. They have to work without being connected to the internet, or in some rare cases by being bridged to the internet via home assistant from an isolated vlan. If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades. If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents? If I would then check open source and if nothing exists make it. It sucks but this where our garbage profit driven society led us, to shitty products that fill landfills and waste resources
Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.
If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades.
When I’m not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I’ll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don’t know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit’s traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.
Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.
I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.
I’m not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I’ve opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.
If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents?
Yes. I’m primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I’ve cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.
Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I’ve done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.
My parents old farmer house had a smoke cabinet (wood chips heating). You put meat in, let it smoke and take smoked meat out, done. Though it makes a mess.
My point is, what do you need to monitor that for?
Depending on the internal temperature curve I may need to change cook temps in the pit, which I can do remotely. I also monitor the curve to determine when to spray and wrap, and other activities, depending on what is smoking.
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!
when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.
deleted by creator
Why do you need wifi? You turn a knob and fill it with pellets every couple hours.
deleted by creator
Why not just buy a wifi probe instead of an entire grill? I’d rather a tiny thing stop working than being unable to use my grill at all because it’s jammed with too much tech.
Truly do they do anything else worth it? I’m a plain charcoal grill person, so never wanted or looked into anything beyond that.
All I can think of is reminders to fill the pellet bin. On balance I don’t think that’s worth it
I’ve got a Bluetooth temp probe set. They work a treat. And I totally forgot to even use them when I got smoked a salmon and chicken wings for Canada Day.
I’ve got a bluetooth temp probe set too. I use it in my smoker. I’m not trusting that expensive piece of meat to the whims of the gods. I need to know what the temperature of the meat is and when it hit’s the target temps.
TBF, I absolutely should have used them, but I was cooking for 25 people, and honestly totally forgot about them. I was rushing about with the BBQ, into the kitchen switching out cooked pizza for uncooked and trying to catch a sip of beer in between all that… As a result the salmon came out amazing, slow smoked at 60° for 3 hours because I totally forgot about it until the wife would occasionally say: the smoker’s not smoking!
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
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”.
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.
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.
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
Yes, and doors should be as simple as this
oh, wait…
Imagine a grill without the latest firewall
Thank you so much for that!😂
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.
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).
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.
