[Technology] "I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network"

[A mex eyecan]

talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

 

[beorhthelm]

it does annoy the hell out of me that almost everything needs an account these days, and so much security-even my bloody hearing aids needs a super safe password to log in to the app so I can adjust the bloody things. Is someone really likely to hack my hearing aids and turn them up or down? why the f*** do i need a password with one uppercase, one lowercase letter, one number and one special character?

you dont and this irks me no end. you need long passwords, sites will happily let you have 8 char with these rules, rather than 12 char just upper/lower case. the difference to brute force is literally a million times harder. and even then, if they have half good security their end, the chance of brute force is next to zero. it leads to poor password practice, like re-using or storing in browser so they're all exposed in one action.

 

[beorhthelm]

talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

Libre office.

 

[Jeep]

my washing machine has about 20 different programmes, short wash, long wash, daily wash, coloureds, whites, baby, heavy soil, light soiling, delicate etc etc i use one. it also has a facility that means i can download washing programs from the internet-why?

The dishwasher app is full of useful statistics about our energy and water use when we use different cycles. It is hugely useful to have this actual data when deciding which cycle to use next.

 

[GT49er]

The password things makes no sense. It’s broken.
Originally we all had one. DognameDOB or similar.
Then we realised we needed to be a bit smarter so we changed our passwords.
Then companies data was breached so we needed to change our passwords.
Fine. I can deal with that.

But this shit now just doesn’t work. Think of a password with only 4 vowels, two characters, no odd numbers, one capital letter but not at the beginning, no numbers in any kind of order that could suggest a date or year, no words you’ve previously used.
For EVERY SINGLE app and website.
It’s ludicrous.

And don’t get me started on captchas.

Yep - and at the end of the day the password should be yours, whatever you say it is, with or without capital letters, numbers or symbols - and not what they want it to be or look like. If the password's strong or weak, that's my business, not their's.
And if I want my password to be "Password" (I don't, by the way) I should bloody well be allowed to have it!

 

[SkirlieWirlie]

Just had a new dishwasher installed with WiFi capability. As per a previous poster, once it's full I can switch it on, so why would I wait and do it remotely. For the life of me I couldn't see the value.

It's all for the manufacturer. Gathering your data at the very least to cross sell, upsell and if I were being really cynical, the potential to "affect" the machine remotely if profits were down and they really needed to boost revenue for the shareholders.

Needless to say, it's not been connected.

 

[Since1982]

talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

I heard this was coming. I'll happily change to free software but I think the huge amount of storage on OneDrive shared across the family might still be worth it?

 

[GT49er]

The dishwasher app is full of useful statistics about our energy and water use when we use different cycles. It is hugely useful to have this actual data when deciding which cycle to use next.

I'm afraid I would have to question your use of the word 'useful'!

 

[Gwylan]

I thought this would resonate with a few folk on here...

(You need to read the whole thing)

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more

 

[SkirlieWirlie]

talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

Google Sheets will do the job.

 

[PTC Gull]

it does annoy the hell out of me that almost everything needs an account these days, and so much security-even my bloody hearing aids needs a super safe password to log in to the app so I can adjust the bloody things. Is someone really likely to hack my hearing aids and turn them up or down? why the f*** do i need a password with one uppercase, one lowercase letter, one number and one special character?

Pardon...

 

[BBassic]

I don't mind the onerous password thing.

I'd rather faff about with it than run the risk of someone getting into something they shouldn't.

Though with a lot of sensitive apps, banking for example, also now requiring MFA and/or biometrics to log in one could argue the password could be something simpler.

 

[Curious Orange]

Talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

I've been using Office 2007 since I bought it (you can guess when), it is licensed for three machines, and can be installed happily on Windows 11.

 

[beorhthelm]

The dishwasher app is full of useful statistics about our energy and water use when we use different cycles. It is hugely useful to have this actual data when deciding which cycle to use next.

you are the dishwasher app developer and i claim my £5.

 

[A mex eyecan]

Libre office.

thank you

 

[happypig]

I've got power monitoring plugs on my dishwasher, washing machine, tumble drier and dehumidifier. They all report back to a computer running Home Assistant which can do stuff like send me notifications when the programme has finished or the dehumidifier is full to remind us to empty it.

 

[pasty]

The password things makes no sense. It’s broken.
Originally we all had one. DognameDOB or similar.
Then we realised we needed to be a bit smarter so we changed our passwords.
Then companies data was breached so we needed to change our passwords.
Fine. I can deal with that.

But this shit now just doesn’t work. Think of a password with only 4 vowels, two characters, no odd numbers, one capital letter but not at the beginning, no numbers in any kind of order that could suggest a date or year, no words you’ve previously used.
For EVERY SINGLE app and website.
It’s ludicrous.

And don’t get me started on captchas.

I have to change my work password every 30 days. It needs to be minimum 14 characters, include upper & lower case, numbers & special characters, and not 1 single character can be in the same place as any of last 6 passwords!

 

[Cheshire Cat]

But I only ever use three of the programmes on my washing machine - the general mix, the quicker one, and and the even quicker one. Some of the programmes go on for THREE hours ffs - what the hell is it doing in that time?

 

[trueblue]

There’s a lot of technology I like but the touchscreen in my car really does make a meal of things. I shouldn’t need a ‘User Profile’ to use the radio in my own car. Frequently have to reboot the bloody thing because it’s got its knickers in a twist. Weirdly, the one I had in a 2016 vehicle did pretty much all the same stuff as this 2023 screen but far more reliably.

 

[BNthree]

talking Big greedy tech, i had an email today from Microsoft saying my charge for Office is going up by 40%! over £10 a month now.

i use a spreadsheet that does no more than add up and subtract on very rudimentary personal accounts and I may type one letter every six months. That’s it. £120 a year for that. Makes note ‘I must try and find a safe and simple free alternative’.

If you just want a local install and no cloud etc

https://www.cjs-cdkeys.com/products/Microsoft-Office-Professional-Plus-2021-CD-Key-%28Digital-Download%29.html

Fully legit