#Appliance connections

[plumbingservicetucson]

Full Service Plumbing Repairs Tucson

[rosalesbeausderholle]

I keep seeing videos of Americans having a full on cooking set in their car they use to film mukbangs in... someone from that savage land explain this to me

[deramin2]

My perfect toaster

I own a Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster, and this is one of those days I wake up and think about how perfect it is. In this case because I have homemade bread and it toasted significantly faster than expected so if I had to use a timer I'd have burned it and it would have taken half the loaf to figure out.

This toaster is perfect because you set the darkness level, which correlated to bread temperature. Instead of using a timer, it toasts until the bread is the correct temperature.

It doesn't matter how hot or cold the toaster started at.

It doesn't matter what temperature the bread is. A frozen slice will come out the same doneness as a room temperature slice without changing the controls at all.

It doesn't matter if the breads are different densities, they will come out the same unless there's huge variance without changing the controls.

Which means that if you're in a household like me with a roommate who eats different bread that might be fresh or frozen (but conveniently you like your toast about the same doneness), you set it once and can just put in whatever you want and get the perfect toast out every single time.

The only downside is that the tension needs to be adjusted periodically and it seems increasingly broken and annoying when it's loose (which is how it passed to me), but it's one well-labeled screw on the bottom and then it's like new. Even the ones from the 1940s basically run like new today. So it takes a little periodic maintenance but is otherwise nearly indestructible. There's almost nothing that can break.

First overview mainly focused on the automatic lowering and rising leaver.

Update review focusing on the thermostat (this is what makes it the best toaster ever made)

[netscapenavigator-official]

I just unboxed and installed a new microwave for my mother… and it doesn’t have time controls. There’s no T-9 style keypad. There’s three buttons:

Add 5 Minutes

Add 1 Minute

Add 10 Seconds

Nothing else. If you need to microwave something for 3 minutes, 30 seconds you have to press “Add 1 Minute” three times, and then do the same for the “Add 10 Seconds.” Need to warm something in a non-10 second time interval? Too bad! Fuck you!!

I’m so mad. I’m almost ready to create my own Technology Connections -style video essay about what a dogshit design this is.

But don’t worry! There are least 20 other buttons for the various popcorn mode and smart cook options, though. 😐

[moodycarcass]

Uncovered a playlist of the peak style amvs and started lamenting that it's a seemingly lost genre of art before realizing the more honest answer as to why it died out is that they simply do not make shit like touhou anymore and nothing else is and never will be again worth the effort to do something like bad apple in every conceivable medium for

[kweza]

my parents bought a new fridge and it connects to the wifi. that's creepy [and unnecessary].

[abyssaldyke]

The new influx of posts that are like "I don't want ai to do this with my data, I want it to do something else with my data!!" Like OK i don't want it to access my data at all is that an option

[sonic-wildfire]

Our old oven broke last week and Mom decided to replace it with. A fucking smart oven. That apparently uses wifi.

[crowcryptid]

Hey guys did you know that pretty much every device is vulnerable just by having Bluetooth on 😀

Isn’t that nice

You probably don’t have to worry about it but hey now you have something to keep u up at night

[sniperct]

Why do people want their oven/emergency generator/air compressor to be controlled by an ap?

Trading convenience for the technological equivalent of an eldritch horror

[shadowofmoths]

pack bonding w my rice cooker rn

[barstoolblues]

like yeah no shit shes been cooking for decades but my mind is still blown by the value of my moms cookware. like im coming up on a year in food service and ive learned so much from the chefs at work and stuff and i come home and look at her shelves like 2 dutch ovens, a mauviel roasting pan.... like if you bought that today that would be over a thousand dollars easy... ok just saved this to drafts and surveyed the kitchen...this woman has at least $4000 dollars in cookware alone and paid for almost none of it... slay

[treasurypreserve]

Appliance Connection Credit Card-Exploring

In today's modern world where each and every individual needs convenience in each and everything especially when it comes to the household appliances. The most effective ways of purchasing appliances is through a credit card that provides flexibility and ease. Moreover it saves time and money both of the customers and the vendors.

In this article we will explore about ythe benefits of Appliance Connection Credit Card and ways to improve the credit card expeerience of the customers that satisfy their needs.

[trench-picks]

Smart Home Devices: Simplify Your Life Today

Did you know nearly 40% of American homes now have a smart speaker like Amazon Echo or Google Home? Smart home devices are changing how we live and work. They make our lives easier with voice-controlled assistants and connected appliances. This article will dive into the world of smart home devices. We’ll see how they can change your daily life. Whether you want to make chores easier, save…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[techdriveplay]

Revolutionizing Home Convenience: Samsung Unveils AI-Enhanced Family Hub Refrigerator in Australia

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has recently unveiled its highly anticipated AI Family Hub French Door Refrigerator, now available across Australia. This advanced appliance represents a significant leap forward in the integration of artificial intelligence within home devices, offering unprecedented connectivity and smart capabilities. Launched just two days ago, the AI Family Hub is designed to…