(Power flashes for a fraction of a fraction of a second)
Appliances:
Its 12:00
Always has been!
(Also the universe was created last thursday. Have fun!)
Elevators in the office building where I work have screens that run ads, but also have time and date in the corner. It resets every couple of days, so basically every day is in January 1970
Casual ads inside an elevator in an office building? This is the true dystopian future
I’d rather take the stairs (for up to ~10 floors)
I always unplug my microwave because it’s old and makes a soft humming noise. Obviously I don’t bother to set the clock every time, so when it is plugged it usually shows --:–. However occasionally it indicates 12:00 instead, and I have no idea why it is sometimes different…
My guess is that there’s a capacitor in there somewhere. The capacitor stores enough charge to keep the time for short periods (like a power flicker). But it’s unreliable for longer periods of time (beyond a few minutes) and will cause clock drift.
So, when the power goes out for a medium length of time, the microwave resets to 12:00 to indicate that you need to set the time again
However, if the microwave is left unplugged for an extended period of time (a few days to weeks), the capacitor is fully drained. My guess is that this causes the time to be set to --:–
Why it would be designed like that? No idea
We have a constellation of satellites constantly broadcasting the most accurate time humans can measure and it’s crazy every device doesn’t have an antenna to pick this up and set the time.
nope, but they do have WiFi to send analytics to the factory (and so that they can get hacked and be used for DDOS attacks)
A DDOS attack on my toaster would be quite dangerous actually, what’s the cybersecurity framework to secure my toaster
appliences that connect to your internet are supposed to be secured, but cheap Chinese ones usually arent. this means they can easily get hacked and added to a botnet thats used for DDoS attacks. I once saw a screenshot of someone whose washing machine uploaded ~30GB of data per month.
the best thing to do against this is to just not connect them to the internet.
-
Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.
-
GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.
You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.
-
it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.
Hope I’m not alone in this - Appliances should only have relative timers.
It only needs to know how to run a program for 30 min, or activate with a delayed start in 5h. Clock time is meaningless for an oven.
Appliance companies, are you listening? Hint: they’re not, circuitry design and manufacture has been outsourced so much they probably don’t even know where they get it from.
@flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz , time to fight @yesman@lemmy.world
Yeah — stop making me reset the god damn oven, microwave, and coffee maker every time the power flickers. At the very least my coffee maker has a small battery in it that seems to endure shorter outages, but if manufacturers aren’t willing to have a back up battery for this, then they should take out the god damn clock altogether. It’s mostly pointless— especially these days. My microwave is so tedious too — it asks the day, month, and year. Why does my microwave need to know the fucking date? It actually serves no purpose.
Does anybody really know what time it is?
