I have a Traeger and saved $200 because it was the model without WiFi.
I made a delicious turkey breast on Independence Day
Jokes on you when they invent a new kind of meat your grill can’t cook
DRM Ribs. The Salmonella will not die until you pay for Traeger’s $19 a month subscription
Please eat verification Sausage.
Please chew with your mouth open.
Wow, that’s super-topical in more ways than I had expected. The more I read, the more scarily insightful it gets.
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.
I’m an immigrant (not a refugee to be clear) and this excerpt absolutely nails the camaraderie aspect of it and the way that living in immigrant neighborhoods/buildings feels. Turns out, Doctorow’s father was born in a refugee camp.
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.
Skill issue. I eat my food raw. The explosive shits are just me speedrunning my bathroom breaks. Efficiency baby!
It can do bread and the best tasting broccoli and Brussels sprouts you’ve ever had
Are you seriously taking the risk of brussels sprouts with outdated firmware?
raw shrimp on a grill staying completely uncooked next to grilled chicken and steak because you don’t have the DRM for SeaPak©️ shrimp (photorealistic, art station, comedy, vivid)
Are you live from your backyard where you’re smoking meats?
Nah, I’ve got a Bluetooth thermometer so I can track it while I play video games
🎵. meat like a brisket. 🎶
I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
Oh shit, I didn’t know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
Haha have fun xD
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.
We’re starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors for the basement brewery) but it had to wait until i’d built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house
What are the chances they shipped it on Thanksgiving vs Thanksgiving being the first time in a while the user turned it on?
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?
It’s a smoker with wireless controls
Instead of having to keep checking on it for several hours, an app on your phone will show the temperature and allow temperature adjustments online
ok but why aren’t you outside with a beer…pretty sure that’s a part of the meat smokers law
Some people also think the point of fishing is to catch fish and not to chill out by the bay with some light beers.
!ping
Fish in the area!ping
Fish on hook
Tap REEL to begin reeling!ping
Fish escaped
Tap CAST to try againIt can be both, but at least if i don’t catch any fish I’ll catch a good buzz
Fair enough
Funny enough that’s what I’m doing now, then my cousin leans over with his phone to show me his brisket is sitting right at 225
Because I live in Texas and being outside in the summer for extended periods is dangerous.
Seems like we shouldn’t encourage people to live in locations where being outside for 6 months of the year is hazardous
The problem is that this keeps changing
That’s pretty much everywhere
Not for a brisket though. I’m too old to stay up that long.
I mean that’s what I do when it’s something small, but when it’s something that takes 10+ hours, that’s a lot of beer and standing.
Though right now I just have an alarm to check it every half hour. Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I have a non digital charcoal kettle, and I found good options for blowers and temp control in China.
It’s a simple fitting that I only use doing very long cooks. Saves all the mucking around with the official stuff
Considering wiring up something with an arduino and appifying my meat without any proprietary tech.
I had the same thought and went with a HeaterMeter, although I haven’t finished building it yet.
You can also just get a normal smoker and a wireless thermometer that works with RF, which has a range of like 700-1000ft, and while it has some theoretical security flaws it results in a situation that is infinitely more secure than a WiFi/app situation. Even if someone bothered to sniff the rf traffic what are they going to do, see the temperature of your brisket? Oh no
Additionally this way the smoker is basically invincible because it’s not digital and as long as you don’t let it rust out it will last forever. If you somehow break the thermometer it’s like $30 to replace but I guarantee you can find models that are somewhat repairable and have user replaceable batteries, which guarantee this thing doesn’t
Just waiting for the day an evil hacker leaks someone’s smoker data to the neighborhood, exposing they cranked the smoker to 375° when they bragged about their brisket cooking 225° the whole time.
That sounds like the plot to an American Dad episode.
The perfect brisket heist.
You make some good points.
I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.
Expensive options: thermoworks smoke-x
1-200 depending on 2 or 4 channel version, legally can only be used in the us and Canada because they use a custom rf protocol. As a result the range is 1.24 miles. Thermoworks is pricey shit but it lasts long, can be calibrated, and generally is one of the most accurate cooking thermometers you can buy
(albeit much much much more expensive than a $10-30 k type thermocouple and a used reader for $50 that is way more precise and usually will do data logging) also granted for most people a $20-40 thermometer would be fine with like 300-500ft range
My issue with “smart” anything is not the inherent concept, it’s the execution 99% of the time. I have plenty of smart stuff in my house but it’s almost never convergence devices. I’ve learned that these types of devices are more than anything designed to be disposable trash. Designed as cheap as possible, cut as many corners, introduce as many security holes as possible, etc. we have 0 consumer rights so even if it’s strong they’ll change the tos after the fact when their profits fall and they need to make the line go up.
So it comes to this. I’m not opposed to “smart” devices. They just have to occur in a dumb, roundabout way. They have to work without being connected to the internet, or in some rare cases by being bridged to the internet via home assistant from an isolated vlan. If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades. If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents? If I would then check open source and if nothing exists make it. It sucks but this where our garbage profit driven society led us, to shitty products that fill landfills and waste resources
My parents old farmer house had a smoke cabinet (wood chips heating). You put meat in, let it smoke and take smoked meat out, done. Though it makes a mess.
My point is, what do you need to monitor that for?
BS. They update that expensive crap because it’s full of security holes.
OK, that seems smart. But why would it need updates? Been in IT 30-years, I get updates, but something that simple should have been hammered out before it left the factory.
It’s because of the reliance on hundreds of thousands of third party web dependencies that are constantly updating and constantly getting security patches (and introducing vulnerabilities)
For that and fear the company getting bored and pulling the plug on servers, leaving me with a paperweight, is why I didn’t get much into the IoT stuff.
One time I bought some under armor shoes with bluetooth. They would connect to my phone and an app would take measurements on my stride and angle of my foot in my runs. At some point they decided to make the app a subscription. They wanted a whole $15/mo! I decided to just run like a caveman instead.
I see it this way: If there are enough dumbasses willing to pay, go for it. I choose not to participate. OTOH, idiots paying subscriptions can hurt us all through enshittification.
On Nextdoor.com I brought it up that Trump’s admin was trashing NOAA and the NWS, which we literally live and die by in Florida. One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app. “And where do you think they get their data?”
One woman was quite proud to pay $15 for her Accuweather app
Damn these smart capitalists figured out how to get a weather satellite into space for that cheap? No wonder socialism failed/s
For real tho it reminds me of that joke about libertarians being like cats. Also $15/mo feels way to high for weather updates
Knew someone who had to rush a family pet to emergency vet and they were able to keep an eye on the brisket cooking.
Keep it Low & Slow!
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.
pro tip
I get it. I hate it, but I get it.
another pro tip from someone else in IT: see that appliance with the digital screen? fuck it. don’t get it. get the old shitty one that’s $800 less that doesn’t have WiFi or non-tactile buttons. you know what doesn’t need firmware updates? a charcoal Weber grill.
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…
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.
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.
As someone in IT, the answer is in the comment.
City Hall is closed by 7:30
So nobody was ever in the office and nobody on the team wanted to stay (I’m guessing here) 2.5 hrs after work to actually do any troubleshooting and because it was never a problem during office hours then who cares
Pro tip: don’t buy a fucking BBQ that connects to the Internet.
No appliances in general while we’re at it
Seriously. “Start it a day early” My brother in Christ why does your grill need wifi? Do you get updates when the steak is ready? Can it flip your burger?!
Have tons of devices that can connect to the Internet. Apparently I’m the only one here resourceful enough to not connect them
I rip the wifi card out and if that’s not available all things can be solved with the proper application of an angle grinder.
Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.
Good shout on patch tues tho.
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.
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.
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
I’m an IT nerd but they could not pay me to buy a grill that requires software updates. What a bunch of nonsense.
Sending a temp updates to your phone so you don’t have to be standing near it the whole time is a nice feature.
My dad’s smoker is also able to set key frames so you can have it ramp up or down in temp at various points while cooking. And it can either be set to change temp at a time or when one of the probes reaches a certain temp. Plus he really likes being able to monitor it from his iPad, especially in the winter or if he has to run up to the store real quick.
I will never need a wifi connected kitchen appliance. A grill fits that category. My grill is a disposable item I buy one every four or five years.
None of my go to devices are internet connected. Not my TV screens. Not my toothbrush. My daily driver is a 2009 Toyota. Its great. No screens and easy to fix.
Just out of curiosity… What are you doing to your grill that you need a new one every few years? Mine is prob. 10 years old and still no reason in sight to replace it.
They shoot at it when the food is subpar.
As someone in the PNW, there is not much you can do if you don’t bring the dang thing indoors that won’t leave the thing a pile of rust in 5 years.
I am trying with a specific form of stainless to see if it makes a difference.
I see, yes i also have a stainless steel one, which is outdoors all year. Good luck, i suspect you might have just solved your “grill consumption” :)
Nah, just give it the rattle can and paint it every now and then. “Once dor dust, twice for rust.”
Have you tried ceramic? I don’t know if it makes sense but just a doubt
Someone will knock it over at some point within five years turning it into a sad jigsaw puzzle.
Pay me? Fuck yes, I’ll rip that crap out and replace it with a couple of relays or maybe get fancy and arduino -> home assistant.
I’m betting that someone pay a LOT extra to get that garbage though.
I have a Masterbuilt that has optional firmware updates sometimes, nothing mandatory and certainly nothing automatic. It’s a gravity fed charcoal grill that works like a computer controlled forced air rocket stove. Gets up to 700 degs from cold in 10 mins if I want or hold 225 for the rest of time as long as I keep feeding charcoal into the hopper and emptying the ash bin. The computer is adding actual value.
No soggy pellets, no weird feeding issues, the biggest problem I’ve had with it was the hatch sensors all going out over time, but once I jumped the circuit past them it worked fine again to this very day, going on six years now.
Yesterday my WIFI air purifier crashed after changing the speed with the app and turned itself off and even caused the Ethernet switch to crash and hang.
Actually the smoker is probably the only one thing I want software on and wifi (but yeah we could do without the updates unless there is some sort of bugs that turn it into a killing machine)
when you buy a wifi-grill you kind of missed the point of grilling.
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.
To get the temperature probe data on your phone so that you don’t have to repeatedly get up to check it. It’s particularly useful for turkey, where the difference between moist and horribly dry white meat is only 5-10 degrees.
I’ve got a Bluetooth temp probe set. They work a treat. And I totally forgot to even use them when I got smoked a salmon and chicken wings for Canada Day.
I’ve got a bluetooth temp probe set too. I use it in my smoker. I’m not trusting that expensive piece of meat to the whims of the gods. I need to know what the temperature of the meat is and when it hit’s the target temps.
TBF, I absolutely should have used them, but I was cooking for 25 people, and honestly totally forgot about them. I was rushing about with the BBQ, into the kitchen switching out cooked pizza for uncooked and trying to catch a sip of beer in between all that… As a result the salmon came out amazing, slow smoked at 60° for 3 hours because I totally forgot about it until the wife would occasionally say: the smoker’s not smoking!
Why not just buy a wifi probe instead of an entire grill? I’d rather a tiny thing stop working than being unable to use my grill at all because it’s jammed with too much tech.
Truly do they do anything else worth it? I’m a plain charcoal grill person, so never wanted or looked into anything beyond that.
All I can think of is reminders to fill the pellet bin. On balance I don’t think that’s worth it
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.
A grill should run on charcoal.
Someone insert the KOTH reference, I’m too tired, I tell you hwat
Hank is wrong. If all you care about is the “heat,” you might as well go inside and cook on your stove!
I just recently watched the episode where Bobby and Peggy get hooked on charcoal
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
Uses a PID controller too.
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.
I really ought to finish putting together my HeaterMeter.
While I agree that real charcoal is superior in every way, a good grill and the person running it needs to be able to control the temperature while cooking. It might be just fine to burn those hot dogs or hamburger patties, but if I want to roast a potato or an onion, I need to be able to control the heat to something less than the surface of the sun.
You’re describing the gravity fed charcoal grills from masterbuilt and I love mine. Especially when I toss in a cast iron pan full of bacon and run it at 450 for half an hour.
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.
Serious answer?
I have an app on my phone that allows me to control my pellet grill as long as it and my phone have an internet connection.
Doing a 12 hr smoke, I can leave the house and monitor it while I go shopping, change the temps if its not acting right. I can set temperature alerts and then go around the house and my phone goes off when the meat hits a certain internal temp. Its really really handy.
Less grilling, more smoking. Temperature monitoring for long cooking times without having to leave an air conditioned environment.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
Imagine a grill without the latest firewall
Thank you so much for that!😂
Ah hell yes. Fire 2.0 finally dropped.
Funny, they actually call the wireless features WiFire.
Man, FireWire was such a cool name for an interface.
You would think after ditching a bunch of rich fuckers on an island they wouldn’t get another chance to try that again.
This is just Fire. There will be no festivities. Just burning, man.
It is of the utmost importance that you understand I see what you did there.
“Le Firmware? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
Can we go back to dumb tech?
I’m a casino slot tech. Don’t even get me started on the electronic table games that still use a dealer! Like Scotty said, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”.
To not connect it to the Internet would probably help and turn it into a normal grill.
There was a silly little movie in the 80’s called “Maximum Overdrive”, written and directed by Stephen King.
In it Aliens somehow cause machines to ‘turn’ on human beings and attack us.
They could remake that movie now but instead of Aliens causing the machines to attack people, it could be malicious ‘hackers’ that do it, and it would be more believable that the original film.
I feel like hackers would always have been more believable than aliens.
You can’t really (remotely) hack a machine that doesn’t have wireless capabilities or computer chips in them.
In the movie it was just regular, non electronic machines like (pre-computerized) diesel trucks and lawnmowers etc.
The original story was written before the Internet and so before hackers even existed. One of Stephen King’s cocaine fever dreams iirc.
You could hack a futuristic firmware upgradable power knife, but how do you hack it to hack off fingers?
Aliens had the supernatural power to be the machines
A self driving tesla trapping people in a gas station is 100% more believable than the semi.
Something is there…
*Brought to you by Samsung.
