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
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)
DRM Ribs. The Salmonella will not die until you pay for Traeger’s $19 a month subscription
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.
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.
Please eat verification Sausage.
Please chew with your mouth open.
Skill issue. I eat my food raw. The explosive shits are just me speedrunning my bathroom breaks. Efficiency baby!
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Are you seriously taking the risk of brussels sprouts with outdated firmware?
Are you live from your backyard where you’re smoking meats?
🎵. meat like a brisket. 🎶
Nah, I’ve got a Bluetooth thermometer so I can track it while I play video games
I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
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
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.
That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
Oh shit, I didn’t know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
Haha have fun xD
At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
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.
It can be both, but at least if i don’t catch any fish I’ll catch a good buzz
!ping
Fish in the area!ping
Fish on hook
Tap REEL to begin reeling!ping
Fish escaped
Tap CAST to try again
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
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.
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.
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
Not for a brisket though. I’m too old to stay up that long.
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
The problem is that this keeps changing
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.
BS. They update that expensive crap because it’s full of security holes.
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
The perfect brisket heist.
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.
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.
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!
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
“Le Firmware? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
the hazards of living in the burbclaves
Idk I just simply wouldn’t buy the wifi grill
quick, hit the manual override before it’s too late 🖲️
I don’t understand how we’ve become so dumb that we simply can’t turn a knob for gas and strike a match for a flame. Or, well atleast dumb enough to accept these kinds of shitty products on the “free market.” I understand having convenience in your life, but at the cost of this? AND a higher price all for some “super smoke” and “timer” option.
Is this the technofeudalist dream? If the next big thing in smart tech is to add ai to grills to “get the perfect sear” or whatever, just kill me.
PLEASE tell me you sent this message via smoke signals.
Why does a grill need a screen and buttons? Maybe I’m living in the stone age, but what I call grilling involves putting charcoal to a flame.
It’s a smoker add on. I’d assume so you can adjust the temperature without actually opening it.
It’s a smoker, with a port for a temp probe in the meat.
When you smoke something for 10-12 hours it’s nice to get temp readings from wherever. It might also have automatic control for temperature management.
Why that needs to be connected to the internet is an entirely different matter though.
So you can get updates while you are at work.
That’s a pretty basic program with simple software needs.
If the programming is such shit there is a chance they need connectivity to update it or patch the code once it’s gone into production, it might be best to look into another product.
When you want to intergrate your smoker into homeassitant so you can adjust it from the office.
I wonder how long it takes for the firmware update to take place. A few minutes? An hour?
I recognize the community I’m in rn. Just curious about how long it actually takes. I doubt it takes very long, or happens very often.
In a similar vein was the location of the charging port on the Apple mouse. Sure it seems asinine, but you only charge it like once a month, so it really isn’t an actual issue. It was just an excuse to hate on Apple products.
They could have made it possible for the user to choose when to update, for example after using it. Apple could have just stuck the port in front and let people charge while using the mouse. Both have no downsides
I’m not disagreeing, just pointing out that it is likely not as big of an issue as people make it.
In regards to your apple mouse example, surely it’s relevant to know how long the charging process is. The hangups I would have are when the interruption happens, how quickly is it resolved, similar to your points about the firmware on the grill.
If it takes 30 seconds to recharge to a point of usability, fine, no real harm. But if it takes 10-20 minutes to get to a usable state, then we have an issue.
A related scenario is if the Nintendo switch drains completely of battery; even plugging it into a dock and trying to play docked, you still have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to give it enough juice to boot back up.
A quick search suggests that a 2 minute charge will provide a few hours of use, while it takes about 2 hours to charge it fully. Whether that is acceptable or not is up to the user, of course. But to me that seems pretty reasonable. Though none of this really matters for me, as I don’t use mice.
Having used these mice, you can get through the day with like a 2-minute charge, then leave it overnight to cover the next few months.
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.
Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.
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.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
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.
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.
Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.
Good shout on patch tues tho.
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.”
And in those four months, did no-one think of firing up WireShark to see what was floating across that network during that time period?
Seems like someone dropped the debug/analysis ball…
what can you expect, they’re probably getting paid 40-50% of what they should be getting paid.
pay less get less.
my pride as an IT worker wouldn’t have allowed me to let it fester for 18 weeks though.
As someone in IT, the answer is in the comment.
City Hall is closed by 7:30
So nobody was ever in the office and nobody on the team wanted to stay (I’m guessing here) 2.5 hrs after work to actually do any troubleshooting and because it was never a problem during office hours then who cares
Read the comment more carefully… while IT was most certainly not at their posts, this implementation team was actively monitoring the rollout and witnessing the carnage.
I wasn’t in IT, so my hands were tied. If I tried running a network scan, I’d have been able to hear the screeching all the way from city hall.
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.
Pro tip: don’t buy a fucking BBQ that connects to the Internet.
No appliances in general while we’re at it
Seriously. “Start it a day early” My brother in Christ why does your grill need wifi? Do you get updates when the steak is ready? Can it flip your burger?!
Have tons of devices that can connect to the Internet. Apparently I’m the only one here resourceful enough to not connect them
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?
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
semi related
Hacking My Smart Grill - Intercepting SSL to AWS Services via Firmware Modification ~> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tH6VU6chEc
poor baby. who grills out on thanksgiving? also my charcoal grill never does this
It’s very possible, dare I say preferred, to have a traditional Thanksgiving spread getting made in the kitchen while someone grills up some veggies.
