The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I've been running keen home smart vents for a few years.  Initial setup on the vents wasn't bad, but they have a few problems. 

First, the vents go through batteries like crazy.  This doesn't seem to be entirely based by distance from the repeater or bridge either.  The worst one in my home was actually very close to the bridge.  Sometimes the batteries leak and it's difficult to clean the battery compartment at the bottom due to the design.  I found that I had to take the smart vent apart and then had to clean it with a cotton swab and even gently scrape them a few times to clean up the contacts. 

Second, the integrations with thermostats original advertised are no longer valid.  Granted Google pulled the original nest integration, but many companies have since fixed their integrations or added them.  Samsung smartthings has nest support now for example.   The intelligence of the system, even with temp sensors isn't as good as one would hope either. 

One has to tweak settings on each vent for winter and summer configurations.  

The vents would get things stuck in them sometimes, debris, cat litter in one room.  

The height of the vent cover on top was tall enough that you could hit your toe on it and it would also cause problems for robot vacuums. It wasn't quite high enough to avoid it, so they would often try to go over it and get stuck.  This happened with neato, samsung and roomba models.  With roomba, the virtual wall was a good solution in one room where the couch was near the vent and the vacuum would wedge. 

They did regulate temperature in some rooms well.  It worked great on the first floor.  The second floor had uneven heating and we were trying to help with some of the bedrooms. It just didn't have enough flow even with the vents to keep it regulated.  We would have been better off to spend the money on a in duct fan/blower. 

The vents did work with smartthings, but they lost a lot of functionality.  We could open or close them.  We could try to manually make rules to do that for each vent based on temp sensors. It wasn't clear if they would open under pressure with smartthings.  it was much worse on batteries and not as adaptive during one cycle as their own hub.  With smartthings, we'd replace batteries every few weeks.  Some vents could go a few months with their own hub.  A few rooms even longer. 

The last straw though was the lack of new vents. During the last year, they've been sold out.  We had two eventually fail due to battery issues and connectivity issues.  I was able to replace one from a third party seller but the company effectively has had no stock for some time. It started to concern me they would close up because they just don't have vents.  They don't have revenue with no vents. 

Some of the other brands look more promising now like flair but the downside is the puck cost and the lack of integrations with other smart home products.  In the end, we decided to go back to traditional vents because the hassle of maintaining them far outweighed the benefits.

I've just rewatched the first season of the series for 3rd time. Some of the jokes don't work on that many rewatches anymore but there are a few episodes that are still quite funny.  I'm rather excited about the new season.

I gave up using macOS this year after 21 years of use. I was really into apple computers for a long time. There have been many negative changes to the OS and the products in the last decade since Tim Cook took over. I just finally took the hint I'm not their customer.  

Some folks think it's weird with M1 macs.. thing is I went through a CPU transition once with PPC->Intel.  I knew what they were going to do to intel users. When no viable macs showed up on the market for me this far into the transition, I just gave up on the whole thing.  I don't want a throw away computer that isn't repairable. I like to hand-me-down macs to my mom as she can't afford computers on her own.  The way I use a computer, I need to replace the SSD before giving it to her.  I just do too much disk IO and hit the wear level on SSDs. 

macOS also has some problems. For instance, it's now quite locked down for security purposes which also means it's getting harder and harder to install third party software, compile apps, use macports or similar tools, use X11, etc.  Apple killed OpenGL, OpenCL.  They killed my game library.  They made big sur painfully slow on fusion drives.  It was never fixed. 

My transition plan was to setup an ubuntu box for day to day stuff.  I'm hoping to switch this to a BSD box next year.  Working on some missing software and figuring out what i need to virtualize to pull it off.  The system also boots MidnightBSD on another SSD for testing.  It's so much faster than the mac.  It's like going from a 486 to a p4.  I mostly blame macOS disk I/O for this and the upgrade to a m.2 drive from a fusion drive.   Granted the CPU is faster (i7-10700 vs i5-7600). 

I'm finding that without a mac, a lot of the apple ecosystem is no longer appealing though. At this point, it might be easier to go to android for example.  There's still no decent replacement for the apple watch though.