Article is kind of light, but there is a surprising amount of work that comes with smart technology. Now, when I visit my parents, instead of getting asked to help fix something physical, I get asked to help diagnose smart light bulbs that for some reason have a single bulb that works but won't connect.

For me, pretty much none of the "smart home" stuff with rare exceptions (e.g. my bedroom was never updated with a light switch) actually does anything that saves me any real effort. There are a ton of things I'd like to just wish away but they require manipulation of the physical world.

Been thinking about this recently and how best to pass on/handover these digital responsibilities onto my spouse/eventually my children.

I'm going through a home reno and walk to document everything but dunno where how to start. [1]

It's only getting worse in terms of volume of 'smart' items, planned obsolescence of these items, trying to reduce reliance on BigTech.

[1] Related HN discussion -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444577

I haven't really gotten into "smart home" stuff, but I can definitely relate to the idea that the modern tech landscape can often create a ton of busy work.

Just look at my TV, for example. The way TV used to work was that you turned it on and the TV was on. Now, even though I've got a relatively friendly setup with an Nvidia Shield, a "user" still has to navigate through some menus to get what they want to watch on the TV.

And of course, every so often, one of the various streaming services will log out, which will take some manual intervention to get back up and running. There are three TVs in my home, so between them all I'm playing tech support on a TV at least once or twice a month.

And don't even get me started on the rigamarole involved with getting my kids set up with Minecraft. Servers, Realms subs, linking Nintendo and Microsoft accounts... I don't know how anyone without some tech in their background can even navigate that mess.

Just a couple days ago I tweeted that I was surprised how good home assistant is and how far smart home stuff went. It is so reliable that I only had one cheap bulb failing, which I could prevent just by googling and finding out it's an unreliable model.

I have a lot of smart devices. What's more important is that I have way more automations you'd expect from that number of devices. I even have smart tv switch to and autoplay a youtube playlist with new movie trailers that it makes automatically for me. I just click on the movie that I want to watch as usual, but it shows trailers and then plays the movie. This is magic and it is reliable. The only problem is to set this up of course, but it became so much easier with home assistant, I can't express how much I am amazed by an opensource software.