Silly, cool, oddities; continued

Yesterday I posted a few of my finds from Christmas shopping for my geeky friends. I've noticed a few interesting things on some of the wireless setup steps of those devices. I noticed that when you configure the WiFi device with your phone that the phone seems to be right on top of the WiFi device. Weird, this doesn't give me a warm fuzzy on the distances these devices can cover. Also I'm guessing that the WiFi settings are being imported from the phone to the device. The device probably has a default SSID or uses ad-hoc. This would make it easy to setup for the average user.

I'm also left wondering if these wonderful finds use a cloud service with these devices. A few systems I can hack around a cloud service but that's not the point. The average user can't. Cloud services make me nervous as the second the business or service is no longer profitable, it's shutdown (and it will eventually shut down). Leaving you with a power sucking brick (hmm, guess my eggs will go bad, that sucks ;-) ). I'm still using my X10 modules from the early 80's. Doubt we'll see a web service live that long. Yet cloud services are becoming a fact of life (everything is in the cloud). Also what happens when there is an internet outage? Ignoring the withdrawal symptoms ;-) some HA won't work as the control logic is in the cloud. While this saves money the latency and loss of control can deliver a SAF of minus 1!

Finally, a great many businesses are now mining data to make money. I get very nervous about what I think vs. what they think is a 'morale' use of my data. I just read where one HA company's actual business is something to the effect of bringing more data about the consumer to their customer (meaning the HA customer isn't their main focus). I've noticed that I've gone from being the customer to being the product.

PS: I looked up the Philips Hue bulbs and I'm hoping that I've made a mistake but I think the Hue replacement bulbs cost $60, ouch!!!! Hope that bulb lasts a long time.