What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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Oh shit, I didn't know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
Haha have fun xD
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when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
Wow, that's super-topical in more ways than I had expected. The more I read, the more scarily insightful it gets.
::: spoiler 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.
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Yet more reasons that charcoal/firewood is superior.
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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?
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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.
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when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's great for smoking though. I've done it the old fashioned way of staying up all night to feed wood into the smoker and I'll gladly take a wifi-enabled pellet smoker with a temperature probe over it.
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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.
Traeger makes pellet smokers. They have a hopper full of wood pellets and a micro controller that feeds in pellets to maintain a set temperature. You can get ones with a temperature probe to stick in the meat and let you know when it's done, which is what the Wi-Fi is for.
There's a legit use case for them because they save a ton of time and effort over smoking the traditional way.
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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…
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.
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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.
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It's great for smoking though. I've done it the old fashioned way of staying up all night to feed wood into the smoker and I'll gladly take a wifi-enabled pellet smoker with a temperature probe over it.
Why do you need wifi? You turn a knob and fill it with pellets every couple hours.
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Traeger makes pellet smokers. They have a hopper full of wood pellets and a micro controller that feeds in pellets to maintain a set temperature. You can get ones with a temperature probe to stick in the meat and let you know when it's done, which is what the Wi-Fi is for.
There's a legit use case for them because they save a ton of time and effort over smoking the traditional way.
Uses a PID controller too.
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Traeger makes pellet smokers. They have a hopper full of wood pellets and a micro controller that feeds in pellets to maintain a set temperature. You can get ones with a temperature probe to stick in the meat and let you know when it's done, which is what the Wi-Fi is for.
There's a legit use case for them because they save a ton of time and effort over smoking the traditional way.
wifi grill - okay
cloud grill - not okay
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Can we go back to dumb tech?
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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What happens if the grill resets anyway? You get back to the default wallpaper?
