I wish Nest did more than thermostats - Jorge's Stompbox

There is nothing more awesome in life than to watch technology fail people. Here’s the UI to my sprinkler system to my lawn:

Here’s what a 45 node deployment on OpenStack on Ubuntu looks like:

So at some point running a Linux cloud became easier than managing water coming out of tubes in the ground.

For some reason my sprinkler is running at 6pm instead of 6am. I don’t know how to fix it because:

The UI is so terrible I want to punch someone in the neck. The clock is wrong. I don’t know how to set the clock manually without having to go through point #1. Why I’m setting a clock manually in 2013? No clue.

If Nest made a lawn sprinkler system it would show a brown patch in the UI. If I turned the knob to the right it would turn greener and greener until it matched my cheapness-to-green ratio. It would check the weather so it wouldn’t water my lawn when it’s raining like this thing does. It’s raining, why are you on? Because some sprinkler company bolted on the world’s worst UI to what amounts to a … cron job.

For bonus points it would also check Google Maps and compare how green my lawn is to my neighbors, so I can keep up with the Joneses without spending too much. It would know when there’s a water shortage and talk to my neighbor’s sprinklers and the water company to Do The Right Thing for the neighborhood.

I love that my Nest is so smart that people think it’s just a dumb knob. What it’s doing in the background is the real brains, and I love that I don’t have to think about it. I hope they move on from thermostats and bring this kind of stuff to other household appliances. You should see the buttons on my dishwasher.