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
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.
Hold on, my dental implants are glitching.
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.
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.”
Pro tip; use electronics that are stable and user focused.
Good shout on patch tues tho.
Pro tip: don’t buy a fucking BBQ that connects to the Internet.
No appliances in general while we’re at it
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
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.
The same kind of grill that can be bricked remotely if you stop paying for software updates.
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.
we love Z-Wave, ZigBee and Tinkerers products with Wifi
semi related
Hacking My Smart Grill - Intercepting SSL to AWS Services via Firmware Modification ~> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tH6VU6chEc
…The sort of grill I will never buy.
Imagine a grill without the latest firewall
Thank you so much for that!😂
Not to defend this practice but my guess is that the firmware was released before Thanksgiving, but the owner didn’t turn on the grill until Thanksgiving, which is when the grill picked up the firmware.
Guy is still an idiot for buying a device that REQUIRES Internet access.
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?
Removed by mod
Ah hell yes. Fire 2.0 finally dropped.
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.
Funny, they actually call the wireless features WiFire.
Man, FireWire was such a cool name for an interface.
I will never own a grill that has to connect to wifi. In fact, I actively avoid any appliance that adds unnecessary IOT functionality.
We’re starting to add some IoT stuff (mostly sockets and leak sensors) but it had to wait until i’d built a beefier firewall and the HA server. 'Cos that shit is not leaving the house
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!”
That was me until HomeAssistant and ESPHome
Oh shit, I didn’t know about ESPhome. There goes my free time!
At least with ESPHome and other local-only devices they only update when you actually tell them to update.
I wonder how long it takes for the firmware update to take place. A few minutes? An hour?
I recognize the community I’m in rn. Just curious about how long it actually takes. I doubt it takes very long, or happens very often.
In a similar vein was the location of the charging port on the Apple mouse. Sure it seems asinine, but you only charge it like once a month, so it really isn’t an actual issue. It was just an excuse to hate on Apple products.
They could have made it possible for the user to choose when to update, for example after using it. Apple could have just stuck the port in front and let people charge while using the mouse. Both have no downsides
In regards to your apple mouse example, surely it’s relevant to know how long the charging process is. The hangups I would have are when the interruption happens, how quickly is it resolved, similar to your points about the firmware on the grill.
If it takes 30 seconds to recharge to a point of usability, fine, no real harm. But if it takes 10-20 minutes to get to a usable state, then we have an issue.
A related scenario is if the Nintendo switch drains completely of battery; even plugging it into a dock and trying to play docked, you still have to wait upwards of 20 minutes to give it enough juice to boot back up.
Having used these mice, you can get through the day with like a 2-minute charge, then leave it overnight to cover the next few months.
A quick search suggests that a 2 minute charge will provide a few hours of use, while it takes about 2 hours to charge it fully. Whether that is acceptable or not is up to the user, of course. But to me that seems pretty reasonable. Though none of this really matters for me, as I don’t use mice.
Idk I just simply wouldn’t buy the wifi grill
