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Comment by zizzer | Hacker News Reader

I wondered when this might happen. You can't really rely on any of these devices with a 'cloud' based backend to work a couple of years after you've bought them (As anyone with a Nabaztag gathering dust in a corner will tell you).

I made my own version of the little printer based on the open source plans here: https://github.com/exciting-io/printer/wiki/Making-your-own-...

It's really easy to get up and running and interfacing with it is simple. I have mine print out reminders for when to plant seeds for the garden and it also notifies me when automated downloads via FlexGet have finished.

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Beyond the issues of relinquishing control over a service to a third party, I think another disturbing aspect is all the waste this causes: perfectly good electronics get thrown out just because some company goes out of business. The fact that these "cloud connected" devices are often proprietary and locked-down (for "security reasons") makes it worse.

Except the email I just got says if they can't find a way to keep the service running, they will open source it and open source the firmware on the cloud device.

This is possible, but rare. If your GPS navigator requires "cloud maps", it will be useless the moment its provider goes out of business or turns off the v1 servers in favour of v2 servers. This as already been discussed in the Ars Technica's article about Android and the problem of old phones with "broken" apps.

(Well, the reality is that it will be useless for 3 years, after which somebody will finally crack the DRM and put a OSM-based replacement on it that has 90% of the features of the previous software, but it nowhere as polished as it.)

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/building-android-a-40...

> This is possible, but rare. If your GPS navigator requires "cloud maps", it will be useless the moment its provider goes out of business or turns off the v1 servers in favour of v2 servers.

I have a 10 year old GPS receiver in a box, with no way to update with maps from Garmin, not because Garmin went out of business but because they just choose not to support the device anymore.

Do I want to spend hours trying to figure out how to update a 10 year old device? Or would I rather spend $100-$200 on a brand new one with the latest maps?

Obsolescence isn't a bad thing, its how we move forward. We just need a clean process to recycle the waste that process generates.

The issue is that a GPS navigator is basically a solved problem, and the only part that requires updating are the maps.

Do I want to spend hours trying to figure out how to update a 10 year old device? Or would I rather spend $100-$200 on a brand new one with the latest maps?

The ideal situation would be a device that you buy once, but it's also one you could use with whatever map data sources you want (OSM, commercial, etc.) - based on an open format.

(I know GPS is also dependent on the satellites being available, but since it's government-owned and critical to many parts of the infrastructure, it's likely to stay around for the forseeable future.)

> The ideal situation would be a device that you buy once, but it's also one you could use with whatever map data sources you want (OSM, commercial, etc.) - based on an open format.

Like an iPhone/iPad/Android phone/Android tablet? Tomorrow's tech will be available to me soon, and much cheaper than today's tech. Support = people's time = expensive.

Genuinely curious, but why print reminders like that when you can use a calendar? Or using something like Pushover for notifications when a download has finished.

Seems wasteful.

The reminders are only printed once a week on Saturday mornings and use maybe 5-10cm of paper. It's just nice to have a physical reminder to do things sometimes, something you can't ignore. Plus I get enough alerts on my phone already.

Like people have said about the Berg printer, it's really a solution looking for a problem. I just wanted to make a little networked printer and build a nice case for it (I'm doing it in the style of a piece of equipment from one of the Alien films). There's no real reason to have it, but I do, so I'm making use of it.

Great point. I think if you're launching a product like this you need to have a fallback strategy established from the beginning, or maybe just go open fromt he start so that the ecosystem isn't dependent on a single piece of locked-down infrastructure.

Chumbys still work (probably because bunnie seems benevolent). Even when its servers were turned off for a while, they still worked; you just couldn't choose a different clock face.

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