edit: my doorbell resets if you hold it down for 10 seconds then it takes wifi credentials with a QR code and thinks you are it's new owner.
I sit firmly in the "only smart device is my printer and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a weird noise" camp.
You can put it on a separate VLAN with no internet access and watch it via your own app eg Home Assistant, Frigate, Zoneminder or whatever.
Making automations and scripts is getting easier every update, but it has a small learning curve as the logic can get complex and you sometimes need to know details like entity IDs or raw states. And there are some simple missing features that some people are very used to. Home Assistant is improving that sort of thing constantly, but sometimes the device APIs do not allow all functionality without the OEM apps.
For example, the two biggest camera-related things that are missing in my opinion is that the camera viewer does not allow zoom or two way talk. It uses the native browser media player, and on both a Samsung tablet and all iOS devices, this means that you cannot zoom and pan around the image. This is obviously not an issue if you embed a dashboard such as Frigate into the HA UI, which IIRC supports both two way talk and zoom. But YMMV.
Home Assistant is quite a beast but start off simple and work on. It will repay you every step of the way. The first hurdle is to get it on the internet and usable via the app. Get that sorted and you are well on your way.
Make use of dynamic DNS to register a name to IP address and Lets Encrypt to sort out a SSL cert. There are add ins for both of those.
You can also subscribe to Nabu Casa and external access and a few other things will be taken care for you. 31 day trial and https://www.nabucasa.com/pricing/
• <https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/aloi5v/pro...>
I regret it now but a few years back someone had moved into a home, dumped their Ring doorbell that came with the house, and we shoved it on our house. When we went to set it up Ring blocked the setup attempt because it was account bound.
... Apparently if you call Ring to release it (they can), frontline CS can see the entire log of when the doorbell was online, when it was last rung, and used that information to go "oh, it hasn't been rang in like eight months" to decide that I wasn't some criminal and that I can set up the doorbell myself.
But the printer comment was actually a reference to a meme about how different groups of people relate to technology.
Nobody on the Internet can ring my doorbell because it's a dumb button that connects to a dumb, literal bell.
Now do 40 pages, front-and-back, with your smartphone.
I have not once in my entire life had to scan 40 pages at once. I bet I've never done more than 15 at once.
For the once in a blue moon that I need to scan 40 double-sided pages I'd just go to my local print shop.
There's a lot in there, rental contracts, policy documents, w2 forms, that I might actually benefit from having scanned and digitally available on my computer. I feel that being able to search through these documents would have saved me some amount of trouble over the years.
Hell, if it were easy enough, I might actually scan all those receipts I bring home and then throw away.
Plus living in a village, closest printing shop is maybe 10 minutes by drive. Scanner and good printer is a basic need in 2026.
They're all e-signature.
- Banking/Investment documents (I actually sent a fax to a bank last year because $REASONS)
- Foster-care related stuff
- Sending tax documents to my accountant
CTRL+T, doordash.com, McDonalds, "ring doorbell please", pay, done.
I know this isn't what you mean, but, humans are buttons (or button pressers?)
... but I think that was a fax machine.
Do people just prefer knocking nowadays? Have Ring type doorbells become so common that people don't realize that a simple pushbutton beside the door with no camera can be a doorbell?
If you are a bad actor, that is also probably a very easy way to find new ways to enroll devices in your botnet.
So the question is, what is the vendors benefit from running these servers.
One can argue that a particular manufacturer is relatively more secure than other, however as long as the software is changing/evolving, eventually it will opens up the possibility/window to hack it
Would it cheer me that people were reaching out and ringing my doorbell?
Or would it make me sad because I would be reminded that there was not a friend ringing at the door?
I say that as someone who uses LLMs daily too, and isn't a hater of them. Nothing wrong with using an LLM to help come up with content wording or to proof-read your writing etc etc, but just copy-pasting LLM output directly into a blog is lazy and instantly signals that it's not worth my time to read it.
> $12 on the front. Whole-network compromise on the back.
Too bad since the topic on its own seems very interesting.
These are exactly the kinds of sentences that would have gotten us outstanding grades as students of the language.
I used to be proud of sentences like the latter in the above quote. I can't fathom how learning languages will change in the coming years.
You're abusing "us" here. There are billions of ESL learners, and the group you're part of who receive outstanding grades for that kind of sentence makes up a tiny percentage. The overwhelming majority would not.
Not at all? They are not even full sentences...
I get that you might like the style, but there is no need for hyperbole.
They annoy me just as much.
Edit: except for prescriptivists who hate sentence fragments
But I didn't do that yesterday, I don't think I'll do it today, and it's not looking good for tomorrow either.
Then one day i watched my neighbour trying to get into his own house, because his smart lock and doorbell system failed horribly. This took several hours. It started raining. I learned a lot of new swear words from my neighbours wife which were directed to her husband.
Once again, my wife was totally right :)
There is no control against this, and it shouldn't be something you rely on to prevent break-ins or burglaries (if you were thinking of such threats).
If anything, I’d say that’s a bigger give away than someone not answering a traditional door bell given people used to not hear them even when home, all the time (particularly in bigger houses).
I could understand peoples misconception back when such door bells weren’t known about so the default assumption people might have is that it was an intercom.
My home office is in the other end of the house, it takes ~20-30 seconds for me to get to the door. That is more time than UPS grants you.