Why voice and apps sometimes don't beat an old-fashioned knob I recently gave the Internet of Things (IoT) a good look. I talked about geofencing and the communications technologies of the IoT, but now I think it's time to talk about nightmares. Specifically, I want to talk about my wife's "you need Lastpass for your smart house" IoT nightmare. It's the reason I'm not allowed to buy a …
One small but signficant - to me - detail is that sometimes I need to be able to adjust the heating in my house even when the internet connection is not working.
In fact, nobody is allowed to have internet connectivity for the first two weeks in a new house ( as far as I can tell ) ( or make that six to nine weeks if you somehow sign up with BT ) so presumably no IoT home furnishings can work in that period either.
It just doesn't seem to add much convenience.
I once lived, briefly, in Belgium. Don't know if it's still the case, but you couldn't get electricity until you had proof of residence - which meant you had to register with the local Commune and then wait several days for the police to drop by your cold and dark house to confirm you were living where you claimed and then give you a piece of paper you could take to the electricity company. Apparently, Belgians thought it was quite normal that there lives were micro-controlled by an army of bureaucrats to whom whey should be grateful for any concession.
As far as I can tell, "Internet of Things" is basically a synonym for "Belgium Everywhere" -
The same here when I first moved to Antwerp. I waited for the appointed hour for the police to come by and, more or less on time two of them did.
They sat down, got out a folder from a briefcase and started to ask me questions. It was pleasant enough but it didn't take me long to think that, really, in front of me weren't too policemen but two clerical workers just taking notes. They were clearly in a department which did this day in and day out and all that they did was to turn up at people's apartments and ask them questions.
I then considered the fact that they were armed. I have no idea what they would expect in their day to day duties and what hazards they were likely to face other than the occasional paper cut or a stabbing from a paperclip that warranted them to be tooled up.
Futuristic Home Owner's Diary from about 20 years ago, doesn't seem too far from today's futuristic home predictions just without wifi, and replace the Usenet reference with Facebook & Bittorrent.
Also, beware of plugging your computer into all your appliances for fear of it becomming sentient. Cases in point: Electric Dreams (1984) & Demon Seed (1977)
I’d also love smart heating, as long as I’m in control.
Sometimes it feels like I’m surrounded by idiots. Earlier this week, some people came in earlier than they normally do, and they felt cold, so they turned on the heater. By the time I came in, it was toasty, and I had to turn the heat off. They had set the thermostat to 26°C. No, you morons, you don’t really want the temperature to be 26°C.
Other days, they’ll feel hot, so they set the thermostat to 16°. No! Stop wasting electricity! Why does the thermostat even go this low?
The problem is that this building has an irregular schedule that changes without notice, so I can’t just program the thermostats and lock them up. I think an ideal non-connected thermostat would have just 4 buttons: Go hotter, go colder, run the fan, turn off. Pressing Hotter or Colder would set it to change the temperature by like 2°, and it would turn off automatically after 2 hours. Then I wouldn’t have to fix moronic mistakes like trying to heat the building to 26°C.
"Other days, they’ll feel hot, so they set the thermostat to 16°"
People treat thermostats as a "volume" knob and reason that the further they turn it, the faster the temperature will change. No amount of telling them otherwise will convince 'em.
Under "normal" circumstances it would be a good idea to only allow a 1 degree change per minute, but if it's a knob people will break it and if it's a button they'll smash it.
On the other hand, when my "smart" thermostat is set to 5C (daytime, noone's home normally so the heating's effectively off) and I want to set it to 17C, I don't want to wait 10 minutes to achieve that setting.
"People treat thermostats as a "volume" knob and reason that the further they turn it, the faster the temperature will change. No amount of telling them otherwise will convince 'em."
"my "smart" thermostat"
*My* smart thermostat (a readily available £50 non-networked battery powered plugin replacement for a conventional one) *is* designed to do exactly what you describe. It will run the boiler less if the temperature difference between requested and actual is small. In other words, "the further they turn it the faster the temperature will change" (after a fashion).
It's a standard technique in the control business when something a bit more sensible than "is the house hot enough? No? Then run the boiler till it is." (aka "bang bang control") is needed.
Just sayin.
Well if you could set the temp to 19c and it actually lowered the temperature to 19c it would be great..
I can't remember the amount of times I've stayed in a hotel and turned the thermostat down to 19c, which is usually as low as they go, yet the room is still so hot I can't get to sleep...
And so many companies I've worked at with air con that chills one person yet another roasts...
Others with 'central' air that is so useless i've seen employees opening the ducts to let more air flow out! (quite funny walking down an isle and all the floor vents are removed so its full of large holes....)
As I've said many times, it'll be a cold day in hell before I let my fridge order my milk.
Or for that matter WASTE my money on preheating my house. What soft, pampered 1st world people we are that we couldn't possibly be even slighttly chilly for the few minutes it takes the house to heat up once we get home and up the thermostat.
Or actually set fire to the turf.
The Thermostat only adds the upstairs radiators to the solid fuel stove. But the system still heats one one room and the water if there is no electricity.
What does all this IoT stuff do in a power cut. Or a digger where the broadband cables are. Or a small disaster.
If we're really going to be pedantic here, before electric pumps, auto-ignition, and ion flame flame sensors, GFCH would run from a manual, piezo lit pilot and a thermocouple, and heated the house through convection. (see gravity feed heating).
That said, even though I know they were made, I've never come across a boiler with a mechanical gas valve, so there goes my argument...
Mine's the one with the flux stains...
"As I've said many times, it'll be a cold day in hell before I let my fridge order my milk."
Ditto. A couple of things I've never understood about this 'your fridge will re-order for you' tripe. A) do people really eat/drink the same things week in, week out? And b) if you're going on holiday you wouldn't want it to re-order until the day before you get back, so presumably there'd be some 'I'm going on holiday from [date] to [date]' setting - which your friendly neighbourhood hacker/burglar will detect and store for later use.
If anyone hasn't yet read the winning entry in the BBC's recent kiddie short story competition, I'd highly recommend you do so - it's an even better take on a potential IoT future than this Reg. article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32927550
"Apparently, this is a cellphone that has no physical button to allow you to return to the home screen. And, of course, all Android app designers will remember to put a digital version of the home button in every app, won't they? (Hint: no.)"
Umm, hint - they don't have to. The bar with the soft home button is always visible, unless you fullscreen an app e.g. while watching video, in which case a simple touch on the screen makes it visible again. At least that's definitively the case on my Nexus 5. App designers don't have to do anything to achieve that, it's part of the OS, so I'm confused about your complaint.
Makes me wonder about the rest of your points, I have to say.
That doesn’t always work. Android has serious UI problems.
For reference, the official way to get out of full-screen is to swipe down from the top. This makes both the status bar and the navigation buttons reappear. It also sends a downward motion into whatever app is on the screen, so your e-book ends up scrolled in some new position, or worse.
Trevor,
good to hear from you boyo...
I think it is called "progress", it never ceases to amaze me about:
- How much 'airplay' ideas can get that are pretty much fundamentally shit, pointless and useless for most people for most of the time
- How some (clearly) very clever folks can convince other (not so clever), but cash-rich to fund their whizzy doo-dah ideas...
/Rant
J.
Ah yes, my favourite occupation. Every time (this applies to everywhere I've worked) a new marketing manager/CEO/receptionist/etc comes in, it's ooh, we need to change the website. Even better, it's then - ooh, we need to change our application UI to reflect the new branding. Then of course, one customer will ask for a new feature, to which Sales will say, "Oh, that's not a problem". Cue another change to the UI. Then of course, every release will have new features (whether useful or not) and the UI design will be changed (whether necessary or not).
Of course, now everyone is all cloudy, the changes are pushed out to the unsuspecting users and they'll find their familiar UI has changed literally overnight, whether they want it or not. On the upside, I've got a job for eternity (well, it sure as hell seems like it).
Hear bloody hear.
I have a Logitech Harmony Touch controller.
I recently replaced my amplifier, so I had to reprogram it. Not a problem - except that it decided it would also change the user interface to the latest greatest version. It's now somewhat worse to use that it used to be - and the first few times we used it, it was a serious pain in the arse until we found out where everything was.
Kids love things changing all the time - they are used to it. We old farts like to be able to pick something up and it works the same today as it did yesterday. Is that so much to ask?
I was on hospital visiting duty this week. The doctor wanted to insert a canula in my extremely ill relative's arm - using an ultrasound scanner to find the otherwise invisible large vein, "Done it lots of times" he said "you can stay and watch if you wish". He had a trainee doctor with him who was getting his first introduction the to the procedure.
So they start off with the trainee unwrapping various sterile bits on the doctor's instructions. They finally reached the point where the ultrasound probe was to be sheathed in what can only be described as a very long sterile condom.
At this point the doctor started to look a bit puzzled. After failing to get the sheath to go over over the probe's hammer-shaped head - he started to read the instruction sheet that came with it. He tried again with some optimism that it was only a matter of familiarity. As it became obvious there was a basic incompatibility he decided that the risk was too great and aborted the whole procedure.
It was clear that someone had supplied a different sheath than the doctor had used previously - and it was incompatible with the hospital's ultrasound probe - or at least the ones that appeared to be the ward's standard equipment.
To his trainee he said "That's why we unwrap the sterile things only as we use them - we haven't wasted the really expensive one". He apologised to my relative - and to me. I assured him - "experience is knowing when to stop when somebody has unexpectedly changed something you thought you knew".
I can see it now. You arrive home and wish to turn on the oven, crank up the heating, switch on the TV.
Except your Internet Equipped House tells you that first of all you must do a non-negotiable upgrade to "House (TM) Software". 10 minutes later it finally finishes downloading, and then leads you through a convoluted installation process, asking you a series of questions to install a new piece of bloatware that you didn't ask for, and won't understand unless you spend half an hour reading the read-me. Meanwhile your meal is still uncooked, the house is freezing, and you're missing a TV show you wanted to see and can't tell it to record.
Once the new POS is installed, you will never ever need to use its new functionality, ever. Also, some git has redesigned the menu system to include a fancy transition effect that your 2 year-old hardware crawls to a halt attempting, and moved all the menu functions around. The oven controls have vanished from "Kitchen" to who-knows-where, and the "Heating" has a new set of snazzy, but incomprehensible, icons. It currently says "Puzzled Happy Face with Eye Twitch."
Your TV isn't compatible with the new software, it's stuck on "The One Show" and you can't change channel. You're still hungry and cold.
just to nitpick a bit, you don't absolutely need a hard button to return home,
but you need something handled by the underlying OS and not by the overlying apps.
for example on a Jolla phone (SailfishOS), a swip from left will always return you to the main interface, whatever the app you were using.
"UI experience" made ergonomics a forgotten discipline. Because buttons and knobs are more expensive than an icon on a display, more and more companies try to remove them as far as they can. And most naive users attracted like moths by fancy coloured icons, believe they are better than plain old black knobs and buttons.
Just, we are still physical beings living in a physical world, and we have other senses than just sight - once I could answer a damned phone without looking at it, now you can't, usually you have to swipe, look for the answer "button" on the screen (which usually change color, position and size with every OS release...) - that's why I prefer an earphone with a physical button...
The same is happening, for example, with cameras - companies are trying to replace buttons, dials and knobs with a cheaper touch interface, which unluckily 1) requires to look at it while I can find and use physical buttons and dials without looking at them (especially, because they don't move when a firmware update is installed...) 2) Gets in the way because they are shown over the image I'm trying to capture... and I hope I'll never see a voice commanded camera "set 1/200s, f/8!" - "Are you sure?
'Children playing in a summer day at sea with some clouds in the sky' automatically selected program suggests a different setting - I identified two children in the image, the clock says it's a summer day, and image analysis suggests there are a sea and some clouds" - "Ignore your program, set 1/200 f8!" - "May I suggest you a different program for images analysis? New ones are available for download' - "No, set 1/200 f8!" - "Are you sure?" - "Yes! Yes!" - "Settings applied" (photo lost....)
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