Notes from Maine - 2023/11/05
The light has changed. This morning the clocks changed—for everyone who was enjoying EDT (Eastern Daylight Time), we’re now back to EST (Eastern Standard Time). Somehow, the weather decided to coordinate with the attack on sunlight. It’s so cloudy and gray outside that it might as well be 5pm. Time is meaningless.
Years and years ago, I decided there was too much artificial light in my house. I bought polarizing film and covered up digital clocks and LEDs. I blacked-out all the idiot lights I could find. Who decided that a TV should have a little red dot that’s only on when the TV is off? Do we need constant reminder that our TV is silently waiting, always at-the-ready? At least a lot of manufacturers ditched the habit of putting little clocks on everything. I don’t need my oven, microwave, VCR (what’s a VCR?), thermostat, and thermometer all trying to tell me the time. It just means that there are more things to adjust.
Some of these devices might need to know the time, but they don’t need to broadcast that information unless I’m setting a schedule. A while ago, I tried to automate my house enough so that I wouldn’t have to deal with time changes. In the bedrooms, I placed alarm clocks that would automatically adjust for the shift from EDT to EST, and keep themselves precise. They’re set by longwave terrestrial radio transmitters. I believe my “local” transmitter is the one in Fort Collins, Colorado. Sometimes that works.
The transmitter has a flag that’s supposed to tell the receiver if the country of origin is currently on “daylight” time. Either that’s not part of the signal I receive, or my clocks don’t know how to interpret it. Instead, the clocks came with calendar rules for when to switch to daylight time. Since I purchased them, those calendar rules have changed several times. Now the clocks change at random. A few weeks ago, my bedside clock shifted. I wandered around confused for half the morning.
In the coming years, we’re going to face an onslaught of failing devices. For the past decade, we’ve been inundated with IOT (Internet of Things) gadgets. You might have a lightbulb that is controllable with an app on your phone. Perhaps your refrigerator has a display that shows you the current weather forecast. For me, I had seven thermostats that I could set, check, and schedule from anywhere in the world.
I used to use that feature a lot. If I was writing, sitting at my computer, and it was a shade too hot, I could pull up the site and adjust the temperature. The app and the website were discontinued as of May 15, 2023. Most of these IOT devices rely on a server out in the world, and the company that was running the server went under. When I bought the thermostats, the company was 3M (which is very much still around). But the thermostat division was spun off and eventually became the “Radio Thermostat Company of America.” They still have a website, but the 90% of the links are dead and none of the functionality is there.
When I moved in, the thermostats could have been fifty years old. Those round Honeywell thermostats debuted in 1953 (designed by Henry Dreyfuss). Henry also designed the Westclox Big Ben alarm clock. Neither of those devices ever stopped working because a server was shut down. However, it’s interesting to note that the amount of mercury in one Honeywell thermostat is enough to fatally poison 15 people, or contaminate a 60-acre lake. I wonder what I did with those. I definitely meant to recycle those thermostats responsibly (because I knew about the mercury), but now I can’t remember.
What will be next to go? I’m guessing that the “Wemo Smart Home” lights in my living room will be the next casualty of IOT death. As soon as the market for “smart lights” is saturated, what motive do they have for keeping the server alive? Reputation? Is brand loyalty amongst IOT devices a thing? They’re still selling RTCoA thermostats on Amazon, despite all the reviews revealing the fact that they don’t work wirelessly anymore. One day, I’ll get an email telling me that Wemo is shutting down, or that Max is no longer supported on my TV (already happened), or that the refrigerator “requires” WiFi in order to operate. It’s like those printers that won’t print in black and white if you’re out of cyan ink. Even worse, there was an HP printer that refused to scan because it was out of ink. HP has faced class-action suits over this behavior.
This entire missive is starting to sound like an Andy Rooney rant. In 1981, he had a fun tirade about the difference between Morning People and Night People. It was a subtle tirade about Daylight Saving Time. In 1974, there was a trial period in which Daylight Saving would be year round in the US. It didn’t last.
“Shortly after the end of the Watergate scandal caused a change of administration, the act was amended in October 1974 (P.L. 93-434) to return to standard time for four months, beginning October 27, 1974, and ending February 23, 1975, when DST resumed.”
The sky is a little brighter outside now. We’re only 46 days away from the darkest day of the year. Then it all turns around.
