The light is off. War is over
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I asked the maintanace crew to lower the light intensity. After a full day of fiddling with the system, they managed to somewhat dim the lights, which reverted back to full on blast aftet a few minutes.
Having anticipated that, I built a "complex" system of shades using papers and masking tape, which somehow survived to this day.
The best part? The desginers of the office come to show their creation to potenial customers every few weeks and show off thier marvelous design. A classic case of "You are not the customer".
And that without even going into the "automatic shading system" which opens the curtains at the worst possible moment, and can't be changed because "we need it that way for our green certfication".
Sorry, had to vent off...
Hint: there isn't any green certification that can be revoked, afaik. The big standard I often see is "LEED", but if you check them out, once a building gets LEED certified (at the design stage) you could literally build anything and there is no mechanism to remove that certification in your building.
Bit of a Rorschach test depending on your preconceived notions I guess, though I've always thought of myself as pro-market and these stories make me question that.
That is surprising. Modern "smart" "technological" "green" buildings seem to be way too dim, as if lighting intensity is really a major contributor to energy use.
Sure, your eyes adjust, but we evolved to live outdoors on the African savannah all day.
The other issue - my boss has his own lamps in his office and keeps the room light off. But it goes on every time someone walks by his office - though it's not triggered inside the office.
This is just a plain digital radio one; I'm sure with the involvement of computers it could have been made much more intractable.
My own experience closest to this was an office meeting room that had dimmable lights ... with a standard "boolean" momentary switch. There were, of course, no instructions. We sort of figured out that holding the switch down would sometimes put it into a cycle of brightness from which releasing the switch would leave it at right level, but it wasn't reliable and we often sat in the dim light, defeated by the UX.
Short Thread: staying with some friends and last night after everyone went to bed I could not figure out how to turn off the large ceiling light in their living room. There is a wall controller that seemed fairly straightforward.
There is a large main light, a smaller light on top that faces up, several levels of brightness, and a fan. Each time I tried to turn off the upward facing light, something else would turn on. After ten minutes, I woke up my wife to ask her to help. It only got worse.
Each time we thought everything was off, a few seconds later something else (or everything else) would turn back on. Minute twenty, I started laughing out of sheer frustration at what felt like a Myst puzzle. Couldn’t wake our friends cause they have a small kid.
Suddenly, we solved it. Everything went off and stayed off and after waiting a full minute we realized it was gonna stay that way. This is circa 1am. I finally went to sleep.
This morning we asked about what the deal was with the light. The answer has broken me.
Our friends are in a newly built condo complex. The fan controls use a binary code to connect to the fans. Additionally the controls were only supposed to have a signal reach of 30 feet. They reach much, much further.
There are almost 40 units within reach. Based on the binary code limitation there’s only 16 possible code options. So everyone in this building controls the main light and fan of at least one other person; maybe more.
From 12:30 to 1am last night, I was engaged in a proxy war with up to three other apartments, as they in turn, set my fan to high and my lights to the brightest setting, until everyone gave up.
Our hosts have been here for six months and have found a way to live with it by imagining who in their building they might be interacting with. This one guy who they think particularly might be an asshole and they have suspicions about when he’s running the show.
I am staying here again tonight. I look forward to wrestling control of the lights from what is essentially angry ghosts in my own personal AITA post.
My inclination is to go Full Lawful Good and turn off everyone’s lights tonight at 10pm to make sure we all get a good night of sleep and wake up rested and ready for a productive Saturday.
The light is off. War is over.
Flip them how you like, try and pick a combo that has the least neighbours : )
Extra features are fine, but if they cannot turn on the light without 6 steps, then it's wrong.
eg: my kitchen lights are all on Z-Wave dimmers. Each is still a normal wall switch to the average person and can be fully controlled from there. I probably use the switches 20% of the time and voice control about 75%(other automations account for maybe 5%). Anyone who enters my kitchen will be able to have light, I just get the conveniences.
Another example: my living room has no ceiling lights, just floor lamps. These are not setup with automation because I have not found a way to control them that makes sense to non-trained users. Therefore we keep the traditional lights.
Every smart device I have with the exception of 1 lamp in my office and 2 bedside tables in my bedroom are on z-wave switches. Eventually I might add zigbee buttons or a panel by the fan switch that controls the bedside table lights but honestly I see no real need. They have pull-strings you can use (and break automation but I'm the only one using those so I don't care as much).
The z-wave switches I use is the Leviton DZ15S-1BZ [0], they run about $45 a pop but work flawlessly. I think I've had one lose connection less than 10 times total across all switches in the past year if that. My only complaint is their size. They are chunky and if you have a tight electrical box you might have issues. That said I've installed 6 or so of these and they are easy to install (other than the shoving, pushing, cursing, crying, and begging them to fit part lol), I can install one in less than 30min easily. I just keep buying a new switch every few months, I'm a little over halfway there till I have full coverage (already have full coverage in rooms I care about, so what's left is the guest room, some bathrooms/closets, and 1 3-way that I can't bring myself to replace right now as it will "burn" 2 switches).
My top tips to people looking at getting into home automation would be:
* Go with SmartThings, Wink is dying if not dead and ST works with Alexa/Google voice assistants. It also has a nice API/SmartApp ecosystem.
* Z-wave > Zigbee and NEVER use a Wifi device, they are a security nightmare IMHO
* Make SmartThings your single point of truth, don't buy stuff that "Works with Alexa" unless it's zigbee or z-wave.
* Make everything fallback to switches (real preferably but virtual if needed) on the wall, anyone should be able to walk in and use your lights without a crash course.
Even better are the replies from other Twitter users on the same thread on what they experienced with their home automation systems. Here's one that tickled me: "We had an Airbnb guest once who (probably accidentally) connected his Spotify Connect to my living room sound system. Months after he was gone, death metal would start without a warning, volume went up, silence after 5 seconds. It took weeks before I figured it out"
It's crazy how sometimes these automation systems that are supposed to make our lives easier, make it more complicated instead. I wonder when the issues that we see today with smart houses and smart TVs will show up in the upcoming generation of "smart" cars.
This week I see 2 coffee machines to complicated for me to make coffee. 1 kitchen light I couldn't switch on and a dishwasher I couldn't get to work. Every time a group of people gathered around the automation then gave up.
I just had a message exchange where I explained (to the owner) how to get music out of a laptop, bluetooth dongle, amplifier setup. Windos really wants you to switch on bluetooth from the configuration screen every time. The dongle needs a reset periodically (or just vanishes) and the amplifier likes to change its input channel. Between bluetooth and mp3 the quality is complete shit by 1980 standards.
I so far found one microwave oven that required the whole ritual each and every time. It was so bad I forgot to set it to max time, so we can just pause it and resume it (like cheap kitchens that abuse consumer-grade microwaves do) - though maybe it was so bad there wasn't resume. So if you opened the door before it thought it was time, you had to set it up again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The best UX I've ever experienced on microwaves are restaurant microwaves and Danby microwaves.
Restaurant microwaves have programmable buttons and a space beside them to write what time is programmed in (or what recipe it is for). If you want a different time than the preprogrammed ones, then you press a time button and then punch in your time.
Danby's work similarly, you press a digit and you get that many minutes and it starts immediately. You press the +30sec and it adds 30 seconds. Simple, efficient, discoverable. Admittedly anything beyond the basics is a bit of a train wreck, but I'm okay pressing 1 instead of punching in 50 or 55 and then start when I want a bit less than one minute.
My current microwave only starts when you press start. The +30sec button will save you at MOST 1 button press ever, unless you want to add 30s to an already running microwave, which is more than I can say for my last rotary, where +1min would only work if you used it to start the microwave. If you used the dial, it didn't work.
Appliances have TERRIBLE UX, and I could go on about the good and bad things I have seen and been frustrated by.
Best thing ever, because for those years I lived with flatmates and everyone wanted to heat shit when the others were asleep or hungover.
There should be a silent option/switch.
But it's pretty true to life. Ovens and toasters get a bit wonky as they get old.
It took me a few weeks to work out this theory (mainly due to the fact that the wires from the old unit were still there, and after giving up on waiting for the landlord to fix it, I tore the unit off the wall only to find that the wires were not connected, only then did I realize it was wireless). I tried changing to a different channel and it all started behaving normally after that.
Edit: did I mention that this was costing me well over a hundred pounds a month in excess gas bills? I'm sure someone could come up with a real-world DOS attack with this sort of shit...
Fans were set to the same receivers channel from.the factory. So I'd get in at 1am, turn my light off, which would turn theirs on.
Took a few days to figure out what was going on.
Same here. Reloading is of no help, though logging out helps. Twitter has become near unusable.
Yup, that worked. :/
Naturally, people tend to use tools in ways that go beyond the original intended design purpose. Creating entire threads using @ mentions is one of those behaviors.
Proper UX, readability and findability are opportunity costs happily paid in return for tapping directly into a large audience in real time.
Since Twitter is an ad company, it won't fix this because there's zero incentive to do so. On the contrary. If more people are willing to use Twitter and stay on Twitter, the better.
Arguably, Twitter offers the least number of affordances to accommodate long form writing and reading. But here we are.
Medium valiantly tried to offer an answer - proper UX combined with the directness of Twitter - but failed since they were fighting an uphill battle from the get go because their business model consisted of competing with an incumbent using the same tactic: building another content silo as a private venture.