OK, one last part of the saga in Hive Home forcing me to buy a new hub, and hiding behind data privacy as a reason for not allowing me to use the perfectly functional one I have already. I sent them this e-mail last week:
Hi there,
I was told by a member of your technical support team today that I would not be able to use the Hive hub installed in the house I recently bought. Apparently this is because Hive does not allow a hub to be resold or passed on, but effectively locks it to one consumer for life, requiring me to buy a whole new hub. How would I go about recycling or having you reuse (and potentially resell) the existing locked hub? I'm hopeful that you have a better solution than taking it to a household recycling site, as I noticed on the Hive website that the Hub conforms to the WEEE Directive: https://www.hivehome.com/img/attachments/Declaration_of_Conformity_Hive_Nanohub_2.pdf
Today I got this response:
I hope this finds you well and my sincerest apologies for the length of time it has taken us to get back in touch.
I am really sorry but the adviser you spoke with on the phone was correct. We wouldn't be able to remove this from the current owners account as it holds their personal data. They should take this with them when they leave the property and they are the only people who would be able to get use out of the hub.
If the previous owners have not contacted you to look for this hub, then I would advise you take this to a household recycling site. My apologies that I could not be of any further assistance
Many thanks.
Sigh. If I'm reading the WEEE Directive correctly, it's Hive's responsibility to provide a free recycling service and not pass the burden on to the local council. Even better would be to wipe the data from the hub and re-use/re-sell it, given the environmental cost of the device. And let's be honest: Who would design and sell a hub that cannot be factory reset?
OK, I promise I've stopped ranting about how Hive is forcing me to buy a hub that I already have. I now bought a new hub and two light bulbs for less than list price on Amazon. Trying to then have the existing Hive devices in the house recognise the new hub was another exercise in patience.
First you have to plug in the hub and wait five minutes. Then you have to switch the boiler off and on. Then you have to hold a button on the Hive receiver for 10 seconds. Then you have to release it and hold it again for 10 seconds. Then you have to hold two buttons on the thermostat for twenty seconds to reset it. Then you try to re-pair everything and wonder why it's not working. Then it suddenly starts working without you changing anything.
Of course Hive doesn't work with Apple's HomeKit, which I already use with an Eve plug. And there's no way I'm buying an Alexa. Open-source to the rescue: There's a project called homebridge which allows you to link other smart home systems, like Hive, to HomeKit. I set it up on a CHIP, the now discontinued $9 single board computer I had lying around in a drawer, and it works pretty well. At least I can now use HomeKit's automation functions, for example turning off the heating automatically when we all leave the house.
Which part is the most fun? Using Siri or my watch to turn the lights on and off of course!
After my blog post from two days ago, I left a one-star review of Hive on TrustPilot, just to finish venting my frustration at their bone-headed decision to not allow hubs to be re-used. I was a bit surprised to discover today that they left a response to my review, basically confirming what I said and adding another lie on their part:
Which part are they lying about? The part where they say the previous owner's details and history are all contained within their hub. Anyone with a little knowledge of how IoT systems works knows that everything is stored on their servers, and that it's just the serial number that links the hub to the owner's account. I checked: The hub does have a factory reset button. Unfortunately (or is it fortunately) Trustpilot does not allow you to respond to replies from the company.
I do find it amusing that they say “the previous owner should have taken the Hub with them”, confirming what I said about how people just “forget” to take their hubs with them, and then tell me it's a deal to buy the hub I already have. Sigh.
If you haven't yet read the Bloomberg article on how Chinese spies managed to infiltrate US companies by installing their own chips on server motherboards, go read it now. It's a lengthy read, but has all the elements of a spy thriller, and will probably be made into a movie one day.
It does make me wonder if the only way to build truly safe and secure systems is to have everything open-source from the ground up? This could mean using open-source microprocessors like the ones based on the RISC-V instruction set. It may also mean building the hardware yourself. This is not as hard to do for assembling circuit boards as it used to be, but is fabricating your own chips a step too far? Turns out you can fabricate chips in your garage.
OK, time for a quick rant in today's “big companies being assholes” news: Our new house came with Hive smart heating preinstalled – it was even listed as one of the features in the sales brochure. It turns out that Hive doesn't want to re-assign the network hub to a different user, and forces you into buying a whole new hub. If you buy it from them it's £80, but it seems like you can get it cheaper on Amazon through a reseller.
Tech support even had the audacity to tell me that the previous owners “forgot” to take the hub with, as a hub “can only be assigned to one account during its lifetime”. This is both bad for the environment, as I now have to throw the existing hub away, but also bad in terms of customer service. When will these companies learn?
At Tidepool we develop open-source software, but we also use a lot of open-source software to make everything work. It makes sense to give back, and we have done so in the past. For example, we gave a donation to electron-builder, as we use it to manage our build and auto-update process for the Tidepool Uploader.
One recent option to make it easier to support open-source efforts is Tidelift, which pays open-source contributors to maintain their software, notify users of vulnerabilities and assist with licensing issues. To be honest, I think NPM v6 already does a good job handling security vulnerabilities using the npm audit tool . GitHub now also notifies you of critical vulnerabilities. Licensing is complex and time will tell how Tidelift does there. That leaves paying contributors to maintain their software.
Another option that I tried in the past is npx thanks. It scans your package.json and tells you if there is a donations page, Patreon or something similar available for the maintainer of any packages you use. I think it's a great idea, but it does mean that you'll have to contribute to each maintainer individually, which is more time-consuming than just paying for a Tidelift subscription.
My parents are visiting at the moment, and I wanted to print them some useful things that they could use. My dad needed a shoe horn, so I found this one that fits the bill, and it printed very nicely. The weight feels good and it's just the right width.
My mom wanted a picture frame that could go on the fridge using magnets. I found this OpenSCAD design that is easily customisable, so I was able to create exactly the size and frame width that I wanted. Printing large flat things can be tricky on a 3D printer, but the i3 MK3 handled it quite well – I just had to use the optimal settings instead of the fast settings.
Why is it that airlines always have these weird pricing scheme that make no sense? For example, the last time I checked a single ticket (instead of a return) costs the same price as a business ticket, while you can get a single ticket using air miles at a reasonable price.
Today I bought a ticket and noticed the following:
To be able to cancel the flight, you have to pay almost twice the price! A ticket you can cancel costs £1107, and you still pay £150 to cancel it. A regular ticket costs £687, so you still pay £570 if you cancel your flight on the £1107 ticket.
I'm also a bit annoyed that you now pay extra for check-in baggage on international flights, but since the last time my baggage was delayed/missing, I usually travel with hand baggage only when possible.
I previously wrote about how I'm always running out of space on my 16GB iPhone 6S. I decided to reset my phone to factory settings and then install everything manually, instead of restoring from a backup. Surprisingly, iTunes and iCloud makes this very easy. If you click “Restore iPhone..” in iTunes, it erases everything from the phone and automatically installs the latest release of iOS.
If you then sign in using iCloud, it automatically restores most of your settings from iCloud. You still have to install every app manually, but if you go to “Purchases” in the iTunes store it's easy to see what you had installed before. The most tedious part was signing into each app again.
The only issue I had is that I turned off Whatsapp iCloud backups in June, so my chat history from June to September is missing. Apart from that all photos, messages, contacts and so on restored from iCloud without any problems. It seems iCloud finally matured into a usable technology.
The best part is that I have 5GB of free space on the phone after installing all my apps again. This means there was probably some cruft that accumulated over the past eight or so years since I got my first iPhone, where I always just restored from a backup when upgrading to a new phone.
Tl,DR: It's good to start with a fresh install of iOS every now and again, and iCloud makes it easy nowadays.
It has a user interface dating from two decades ago, but Freecycle remains one of the best ways to get to the reuse part of reduce-reuse-recycle. We had an extra bookcase that we wanted to get rid of, and it was reasonably easy to list it on the site. Within a day I had two takers, one who dismissed it after hearing the dimensions. The other picked it up in a van this morning.
There have been various attempts at building better alternatives to Freecycle, but it's hard to recreate the same network that FreeCycle has been building since 2003, with more than 9 million members. That said, this feels like the kind of thing that would work really well as a decentralised app.
