This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My pets got fed through the entire outage. I did not care to get a 100% reliable solution, as it is just a convenience for us. Not something we rely on. Actually relying on 100% on this is a bad idea.
At this point the most annoying part for me has been the wild amount of emails and info about this outage.
Again, why do we need to unnecessarily complicate stuff with multiple IoT options?? Why can't it have a fallback offline like idk...a SIMPLE TIMER? Or is it another case of "AI integration" into yet another thing which doesn't need AI!
There won't be an outage next time. Next time just pay for the all new subscription, 99.99% uptime!
/s
I fucking hate the current state of technology.
WTF does it need to be on the cloud to operate? More why is it on the cloud in the first place?
And all these spyware apps, enough is enough.
When I bought my house there were a bunch of smart gadgets - lightbulbs, thermostat, fridge - and after a couple of months I'd gradually disabled all the smart features because they were causing more problems than they were fixing. The cold December day when we didn't have any heating because a fucking server was down was the worst.
There's no reason these need to be "smart". I had a pet feeder with a timer over a decade ago. It just needed batteries.
We have some and in our case it isn't about the timer function but the RFID tags on the cat collars because one will steal from the other two.
I can't speak for anyone else but they kept working for us. Only possible difference I can think of is that we did make sure to put in the optional D cell batteries.
That's the kind of limitation I have on mine, but that's because I have a wifi plug instead of a real timer, but it's because I can better change schedules. It's reliable like 95% of the time, which is good enough for normal use, but I'd be pissed if I paid for an AIO unit that required an active connection to work. At least mine is all on my own network, so it's (usually) my own fault when something goes sideways
