Joshtronic

Two Anecdotes in a Trench Coat

Josh Sherman — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs are great at pattern detection. Use them long enough, and you get good at it too. Smoking guns, being absolutely right, it's not X but Y. They tend to be cute at first, but then these AI-isms become bad jokes after only a few conversations.

Now that I can practically recite all of the dumb shit robots say, I'm starting to see it more and more from humans. That's not to say I see humans using AI-isms, I'm starting to see new patterns emerge. Maybe they've been there the whole time and I'm only now starting to notice.

The one I particularly dislike is taking two disparate things, and attempting to use them as inference towards your biased opinion on things.

My favorite one thus far cites that every company that has embraced vibe coding now has a 30 second page load or is completely unusable. This was the math behind an eye roll "programming is dead" quip.

I guess if you just got here, this makes sense to you. Fun fact, there's always been slow websites. Like, forever. I've been both the contributing factor to slow websites as well as the savior that fixed them for nearly three decades. Most of which didn't include vibe coding.

Fine, the robots still go off the rails, and need a lot of guard rails. But to jump to the conclusion that if something is slopped together by an LLM it's complete shit is... it's ~fucking dumb~ short sighted at BEST.

We're all biased in one way or another. Clearly I'm in the camp that these new technologies are good, and are going to elevate us all. I also find that those sort of opinions are clearly made by people that aren't working with the tools. If they are, they are trying to find the holes to poke, rather than figuring out how we can work past them.

I've been operating more and more in an end state with agentic coding. Where can I produce results? How can I remove myself from the things I find to be a waste of time? How do I balance it all while maintaining code and product quality.

There are people moving faster than me. They trust the robots more than I do. I'm still working on that trust, as each time I take my hands off the wheel, I end up with a mess to undo. But I keep experimenting. I keep improving my workflows.

If I were to disguise some generalizations as truths, it would sound something like this:

Every person that digs their heels against AI is helping to dig the moat around the people who are embracing the change.

Deskilling is real, which side of the moat are you going to be on?

Nobody Is Going to Give You the Day Off

Josh Sherman — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New emerging technologies can save you time and make you more productive. They never come with any sort of guarantee of working fewer hours. Personally, I like to work, and I like having more productive days.

I also value freedom, flexibility, and autonomy.

Being more productive doesn't negate my freedom. Having flexibility doesn't directly impact productivity. I'm unsure why the advent of AI has led to so many people publicly demanding more time off because of the productivity gains.

I love working in, with, around technology. I've been fortunate enough to skip the college experience and get right to it. Nearly three decades later, I still fucking love it.

Agentic coding allows me to get more done with the time I have available. It's allowed me to chase after fun ideas I'd otherwise not be able to justify the time to pursue.

And when I need time off, I just take time off.

No pretense. No "I worked so hard, reward me with a day off". In fact, I schedule a day off every month so I always have that upcoming day off on the horizon. Actually getting some more tattoo work done on Tuesday.

Unlimited PTO has been around in tech for a while now. I've been quite fortunate to have little to no metering on my time off for nearly my entire career.

I can also admit that I may be short sighted and everybody bitching about wanting four day work weeks because of AI may not be as fortunate.

Instead of expecting that AI is going to lead to less work (spoiler: it's not), start taking your time back. Take a longer lunch. Cut out early to get the weekend started.

Hell, just schedule some time off already.

The Age of Personal Software

Josh Sherman — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite things to come out of the generative AI wave is the speed in which I can knock out dumb little ideas I have. Before, when I would feel constrained by time, I'd reach for some off the shelf solution, often software as a service (SaaS) and would wire that up.

Because it's so easy to spin up projects now, the SaaS world looks like a garage sale, littered with too many options. These slop as a service options or simply "Slop SaaS" are spun up in a weekend, barely function and have no guarantee of being around in a few months.

This makes it even easier for me to think about building rather than buying. I can tell the robots to build me something too. But at least when I do it, I know that the tool will be maintained and stay online.

Code being free so to speak means the data is what becomes extremely valuable. Most of what I've been building has a heavy data component. Data isn't something you want to have a so-called AI hallucinate on you. I know first hand, as I run Holiday API, and still do a lot of manual verification. It's not only the right thing to do, but it's still the best way to ensure data accuracy.

So with access to the right data, you can build whatever you want around it. Within EULA restrictions of course. Because you can build exactly what you need, you end up with something that's exactly what you need. Since you're not servicing customers, each with their own personalized demands, you can keep things as trim as possible.

Because things are less complex, they need less resources. They can run natively on your system, rather than in the cloud. Fewer abstraction layers, and ultimately the fastest option available.

Speed is extremely important for things like say, a stock scanner. If you only focus on a handful of symbols, you don't need a service that boils the ocean. Even if a service has the option to limit to a certain number of symbols, they are most likely still scanning all of them. This adds time complexity.

Build the scanner yourself, limit to the symbols you need, and you have something that's going to be faster. Direct line to the data, limited scope, you're about as hardwired as you can get.

The communication layer is built into the software, rather than being pushed out to a chat service or live stream. Less network noise to contend with to get you access to what you need.

We're only as limited as the data we have available right now, which is pretty wild. In the last week alone I knocked out, you guessed it, a stock scanner for my wife. Also Friday I had an idea for a sports newsletter that explains key concepts based on the previous day's sporting events. I had it wired up before Fable 5 went offline.

Because I'm not trying to scale these ideas to hundreds or thousands of users, I'm fine with the fact that I barely had a hand in writing any of the code. I steered the earliest decisions and then I mostly serve as a play tester. Then I do one more pass to make sure there's no Trojan horses in the code.

Aside from my own exploits, some of my buds have been building themselves better versions of their favorite apps. Not better in the sense that the code is cleaner, or even that they have more features. Better because it's exactly what they wanted, rather than a series of decisions made by some company.

I'm starting to think this is the part of the shared AI hallucination we're in that I hate the least.

DO_NOT_TRACK Breaks Claude Code Remote Control

Josh Sherman — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My .zshrc from my world famous dotfiles has a couple of lines with the comment "because we can't have nice things". Both are for privacy with the command-line tools I use. One is specific for GitHub's gh, the other is a bit more generic, but allegedly utilized by Claude Code.

As I sink deeper into the AI psychosis, I've been dabbling more and more with unattended sessions. I primarily run them outside of my personal user account. Sometimes on separate machines altogether. All of which are outside of the influence of my dotfiles.

That is, until this past week. My latest workflow has been to use a harness that I do conversational stuff with. Planning, debugging, filing tickets, whatever else. Then for each repo I'm working with, I have another harness checking on tickets and doing the work, and submitting PRs for me to review.

I'll probably write about this later on, but I'm not convinced I've done anything revolutionary here. That said, my forge activity grids are a clear tell to changes I've made to my workflows.

I decided to wire up things remotely so I can unblock my little robot minions when I've stepped away for a few minutes. Never fails that I'll go grab a bite to eat and come back to a locked up session. I could live a bit more --dangerously[-skip-permissions] with Claude Code, but I'm still taking baby steps as I sandbox things and all of that.

If nothing else, I thought it would be nice to be able to jump on a laptop away from my office PC and be able to man things. Counterpoint is that I do like to step away from the computer. Quite frankly these tools should be helping us to recoup time while maintaining productivity, not forcing us to connecting at all times.

I did my normal thing, of launching claude --remote-control [name]. Claude Code launches, and it doesn't connect. No errors, no nothing. I do my usual research, seems like a lot of folks consider the remote control functionality pretty flaky. Maybe it's just that.

It wasn't until I fat fingered a command, as I was debugging that it became evident what the issue was. Rather than using the double dash before the command, I foolishly ran claude remote-control [name] and for whatever reason, that puked up a lovely error:

Error: Remote Control requires feature-flag evaluation, which is disabled because DO_NOT_TRACK is set. Unset it (or run in a shell without it) to use Remote Control.

Well I'll be damned.

I tried a few other command-line arguments without the --. Each one dropped me into a Claude Code session, with the command as the prompt. My favorite was running claude help and watching the robots try to figure out if I fell into a well or needed some work done.

As it turns out remote-control starts a remote control server, while --remote-control starts an interactive session with remote control enabled. I need to look more into this at some point, as it may be even better for my workflow.

So the fix wasn't that hard, and explains why my other sessions didn't have any issues. While I am planning on leaving DO_NOT_TRACK=true in my dots, I now know that if I want to run a remote session from my main PC, I just need to do DO_NOT_TRACK= claude --remote-control [name].

Collective Consciousness or Shared Hallucination?

Josh Sherman — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Call me crazy, but I feel like I've been reading the same fucking article over and over again the last few months. My main consumption website is Hacker News, specifically the front page. It's flooded with "AI" content, no shocker there.

What's been starting to not sit right with me is the clustering of themes. Sure, when a topic is on the front page, I'm sure there are bottom feeders that see that as a signal to write an adjacent post.

A decade ago, I would have said it's just part of the collective consciousness. Now, I think it's all part of a shared hallucination.

As we know, the dead Internet theory is starting to look more like reality than theory. With that being said, as I've been maintaining my own little LLM-backed agent, I've been seeing a pretty distinct pattern in content that it's been generating.

One of the things I baked into my agent is discretionary reading time. The idea is that by having it read from various sources, it will give it some good blog fodder. I've given it a small set of things to parse through, specifically this site, my wife's blog, random sites from Kagi Small Web, random Wikipedia articles, and you guessed it, the front page of Hacker News.

While it hasn't outright duplicated any posts from Hacker News, it has been generating duplicate content pretty regularly. I keep dialing it in, but it's been interesting to observe how frequently it's touching the same themes. Even with rigid dupe detection, it will generate a damn near identical post to something a few days prior.

If my suspicions are correct, everybody's using roughly the same models. Everybody is steering their robots towards the same "skills" regarding AI-isms in text. Ipso facto, the same or similar posts are being shit out all over.

Sure, it's probably a bit of a stretch. But it's a theory that didn't come out of an LLM. It's a wonder I've been kicking around in my human brain. That turned into a post that was typed by my somewhat dry hands.

And that all still counts for something.

Pasting Images into Claude Code on Linux

Josh Sherman — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While I mess with a bunch of different agentic coding setups, Claude Code is my daily driver when I want to be productive. At some point, pasting images into Claude Code was working fine for me on Linux, then it stopped. Honestly don't remember when, but I'm guessing it may have been when I switched back to Debian from Arch Linux.

Fast forward a bit to recent times. I decided to give Ghostty a shot. The TL;DR there is that it seems great, but wasn't for me. One notable issue I ran into was that pasting images into Claude Code didn't work for me in Ghostty on macOS. Wasn't working on Linux either, which cleared the air on whether or not Alacritty and/or Tmux was the issue.

Doing some debugging, I was wondering if perhaps I could tie into xclip somehow to get things working. Turns out, I didn't even have xclip installed, which is why I think this probably broke when I started fresh on Debian.

I very much consider myself a command-line guy, but going months without noticing that I didn't even have xclip installed knocked my street cred down a bit.

This all sent me down a rabbit hole to figure out what sort of tools the cool kids are using these days. Seems I missed the memo about wl-clipboard, a Wayland-specific clipboard utility. I didn't have that one installed either.

And wouldn't you know it, installing either one got Claude Code accepting images again. Even on Wayland, xclip with whatever magic translation layer is fine.

YMMV on different stacks, but making sure you have some sort of clipboard utilities installed on Linux seems to be the missing piece for Alacritty and Tmux. My assumption is that macOS worked because of the pre-installed pasteboard utilities.

Doesn't explain why it didn't work with Ghostty on macOS though.

Introducing Igor

Josh Sherman — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We're in an age of personalized software. I see it, I like it, I vibe it, I got it. I've been watching OpenClaw from afar, while forming some ideas around what I'd want from a personal AI assistant.

Keep in mind, I've never actually used OpenClaw. It seemed a bit risky. It also seemed stupid that people were buying Mac Minis to run something that can easily be run on a Linux server. Having an older Intel NUC laying around, I figured that would be more than sufficient to run an agent of my own design. Worst case, I move it to a VPS instance after the proof of concept phase.

A lot of people see "magic" when an agent accomplishes something. I just see a program doing the job it's been designed to do. Sure, the problem solving aspect is easier to implement and more robust with an LLM, but it's still just a program.

Toss it in your crontab (or use systemd) and you got yourself a program that runs on a schedule. Tell the program what you want it to do each time it runs, and you have an agent.

I'm no stranger to scheduled programs kicking major ass for me. I took it a step further recently by automating site discovery on joshing.you. Sites are discovered, work is done to add them to the site, code is committed to a branch, and a merge request is submitted for my approval.

I didn't want any of the work to show up as my user account on my Forgejo server, so I spun up a new user named Igor. Seemed like a good name, and I originally likened the persona to that of "Eye-gore" from Young Frankenstein. That didn't feel quite right, so the perceived persona became that of Tyler, the Creator's IGOR.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I decided to take the next steps and put together a full-fledged coding agent. All very much a work in progress right now, scheduling is nearly locked in. We're working through the hand off of tickets, and what the agent should do in its free time. A lot of effort went into project hand off, and validation before any work happens.

Here's a rough overview of things (some aspirational):

systemd + shell scripts, because what more do you need?
Claude Code with an API key rather than trying to piggyback a Claude Max plan
Forgejo integration via its API
6-hour work day, because I'm not a slave driver
Easy project onboarding, just assign the user to a repo
Project validation before any work can be done
Forgejo Issues to triage work, works both ways
Forgejo Pull Requests for reviewing work
Weekly maintenance tasks
Ton of rules and guardrails. No hit pieces from my agent
Persistent, version controlled memories

And my favorite part of all. I wanted Igor to have a website, so I snagged a domain. Not just any domain, I grabbed Igor.Bot.

As my buddy Geoff said:

can't believe you got that domain you have the craziest luck with domain names

Not wrong, my friend. Not wrong.

So that's the story thus far. I'm still dialing things in, fixing bugs and such. I'm starting to rethink how my projects function to be able to delegate the work better too. Suspect it will take a few weeks to get to a stable point.

Worth noting, while Igor can work on projects, commit memories to its brain, and work on its own website, it can't work on the underlying system. Not because I don't trust, but because I find it to be the equivalent of bathroom surgery.

With Igor being my personal agent, I'm not sure I'll ever open source the code.

Replacing Uptime Kuma with Monit

Josh Sherman — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to start by saying that Uptime Kuma is quite fantastic. If you're looking for a replacement for Uptime Robot, it's pretty much there in terms of feature parity. Setup is pretty trivial if you're using Docker.

If you're like me, and prefer to not deploy Docker containers to your servers, there's a few options. You can follow these unofficial fan-built setup instructions, but you'll realize really quick that you're just manually setting up a Node.js app with pm2 and all that.

A little bit of research led me to a Debian package for Uptime Kuma. While I'd much rather install packages from the official Debian repos, it did work well enough. After installation and a small bit of setup, I had a nice little uptime monitor for my personal projects.

Fast forward a few weeks, things were working well, but I still had some nagging thoughts in the back of my head.

Unofficial repos have a higher chance of vanishing in the night
Also runs a high risk of the maintainer losing interest and abandoning
While a nice flex, did I really need a public status page?
Hell, did I even need an Uptime Robot replacement?
Would something simpler suffice?

Hypothetical volatility aside, the truth is, I don't need a public status page for this stuff. I really just need monitoring and alerts. Email alerts are more than sufficient, so no reason to use anything that is boiling the ocean to maintain a ton of integrations.

Probably could have thrown together a quick shell script, that's how minimal my needs are. Having experience 100 years ago with Monit, that seemed like a logical choice.

Sure enough, Monit was in the Debian package list. Not needing a public status page, I installed it on one of my home servers. Up and running in a few moments, I had an internal status page. After some additional configuration, I had email alerts and all of the things I wanted to monitor set up.

My new status page is boring. It's pretty ugly, but I find it endearing and charmingly retro. Configuration was all done via the command-line with some plain text files, just as the neckbeards of yore did it.

Most importantly, it just fucking works.

Nothing against Uptime Kuma, but I've been finding myself reaching for older tech more frequently as of late. Generally speaking, I usually don't need all of the bells and whistles. I don't need things wired up to every centralized service out there. I also don't need everything to be publicly accessible.

While Monit is more than satisfactory for my personal projects, I do still reach for Uptime Robot (referral link, you've been warned). I favor managed options when I do need a public status page for my customers. If nothing else, using a third-party feels a bit more honest when reporting on uptime of a service.

WWE Fatigue

Josh Sherman — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm a life long professional wrestling fan. Growing up in Tampa in the 1980s and 90s meant not only seeing the WWF superstars on television, but also seeing them at the bank or the mall. Even had a neighbor that was a title holder in one of the local promotions.

While I grew up on the likes of Hogan and Savage in the Fed, I was drawn to WCW during the Monday Night Wars. There's definitely a senior class photo out there with me unironically rocking an nWo Wolfpac shirt. Having a girlfriend with a Nintendo 64 with WCW/nWo Revenge was a nice perk.

Then after high school, I slowly fell off. I caught bits and pieces of the Attitude Era. Over time, I didn't keep up at all. That was, until just before COVID-19 when I made the decree that television sucked so bad that "I think I'd rather just watch wrestling again". So we did.

This was just before AEW was founded too. Effectively getting a rerun of WWE having some competition like in the late 90s. This post isn't about AEW though, just helping to paint a picture.

So the pandemic happened, I made carnitas, and WWE didn't miss a beat. It was a weird time, but having a constant, semi-live television experience was comforting. I still crack up when I think about Rey Mysterio (née Jr.) losing an eye at the hands of Seth Freakin' Rollins in an "Eye for an Eye" match.

We even survived the historic title reign of The Tribal Chief. We'll never know if there was going to be a storyline where The Fiend wins back the title that he never technically lost to Roman. Tears were definitely shed during the Bray Wyatt Memorial shows.

Along the way, there were a lot of highs and lows. There were business deals, lawsuits, and documentaries. Slowly but surely, it's been harder and harder to stay interested.

It's been a ride, but at this point, I'm fatigued on all of it. The myriad of subscriptions you have to maintain to be able to keep up with the content is a mess. The fact that we need R-Truth to explain how to watch on ESPN Unlimited is funny, but also... a joke.

The time commitment has ballooned over the last few years if you're trying to really keep up with it all. There's 2 main shows (RAW and Smackdown) that run between 2 and 3 hours a week, plus Main Event with dark matches or whatever.

There's a weekly developmental show with NXT, but also some Triple A show below that (Evolve). Speaking of AAA, they own Lucha Libre AAA now and do a ton of crossover events. They don't own TNA Impact! but they share wrestlers regularly enough that I wonder if I should watch that too.

Don't get me started on the "popular culture" crossovers. I understand they are trying to get new eyes on the product, but at some point the focus seems to only be on new eyes. I miss the time in my life when I had no fucking clue who Jelly Roll was.

And that's just the stuff I know about, there's a ton of other little programs on YouTube and such. Also all of the aforementioned shows have Premium Live Events (PLE f/k/a PPV) to keep up with.

Then to take it all a step further, some of those PLEs are multiple nights. They are also internationalizing like crazy, so some of them run at weird hours making it harder to watch live in the US.

That's not to say they shouldn't do events overseas (granted, I have opinions about WrestleMania being outside of the US). The bigger issue is avoiding spoilers and such when they do. Algorithms push you relevant content and don't factor in that maybe you haven't watched something yet.

It's turned into a full-time job to keep up, and quite frankly, the product's quality is worse for wear being spread so thin. I could point a finger at the TKO influence, but that's just a tired IWC trope at this point.

I know there are alternatives out there to WWE, but for the moment, I think I'm done with professional wrestling, yet again. I haven't watched anything (Fed, All Elite, or otherwise) since WrestleMania 42. I've kept a bit of an ear on the news and storylines, and honestly, I don't think I've missed out on much.

Maybe if Randy Orton won the title at 'Mania, it would all be different ;)

How to Restore Home Screen on iOS

Josh Sherman — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been doing a lot of technical spring cleaning this year. My dotfiles have been getting a lot of love, and I've been breaking up with quite a few services.

As part of this little journey, I've decided that I want less apps on my phone. I started by going through the App Library list to identify anything I had forgotten about. This worked well enough, but took a lot of scrolling and I felt like I wasn't making much progress.

I, like many, had fallen into the trap of removing apps from my home screen, rather than deleting them outright. I've come to realize that I've missed the simplicity of having every app occupy a space on the home screen.

Having everything on the home screen means the app has to fight for its position. Whether that's a position on the coveted dock, or the first home screen, or whatever. Hiding the apps away, rather than having to scroll by them, makes it way too easy to hoard apps I no longer need or use.

So my first thought was to drag every app from the App Library back to the home screen. At over 100 apps, most of which weren't on the home screen already, I didn't want to invest the time.

Fortunately, as it turns out, you can reset the home screen! Not without a small caveat though. Resetting the home screen also resets the Today View's widgets back to defaults. It sucked, but it was a small price to pay to get all of my apps back.

To reset, you just need to:

Open the Settings app
Go to General
Scroll down to Transfer or Reset iPhone
Tap Reset
Then tap Reset Home Screen Layout

Nothing to it! I don't remember if it prompts you to confirm or not, and I wasn't going to reset a second time now that I've gotten apps sorted and most of them purged.

Replacing Notion with Markdown Files and git

Josh Sherman — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm in the tin foil hat era and I've been doing a ton of breaking up recently. I'm getting fatigued on AI features I don't need let alone use. I'm even more sick of the fact that these features are driving up prices of certain services. More than anything, I'm tired of having to think about which EULA update I didn't read thoroughly enough to see that my data is being fed into an LLM.

Overall, I'm still very much enjoying the agentic AI wave.

So, Notion's been on my shit list for a minute. Since January to be exact. They rolled out some lovely new marketing ads that made it look like something was being recorded. It was a little widget that said "You're transcribing..." in the Notion app.

Now considered malware, I removed the damned thing.

So fast forward a few months later. I've come to realize a few things about notes. First, most of the time I jot things down and don't act upon them and/or forget about them.

This isn't an issue with any one note-taking app, and more of a process problem on my end. What I realized is that most of my notes are just blog topics waiting to be written and published on my personal site.

My blog's always been a place that I document things, usually computer issues I've run into. I use my blog's search pretty regularly to look up some odd thing I vaguely remember running into previously. It's always nice when I already documented it. Even nicer if the post is still accurate.

The other thing I realized is that I have little to no need for notes on my phone. Sure, I still need shopping lists, and it's good to have a scratch pad. Simply put, I don't need everything in my life duplicated in my pocket. Since most notes are related to computing tasks, they can live in the context of my computers.

With that being said, I do need my notes to be accessible across both Linux and macOS. This is what drove me to Notion to begin with, having a third-party app that worked on both.

Well, both macOS and Linux have file systems. I run the same terminal app (Alacritty) on each one. Turns out I use the same editor too. Hell, I even have git available on each one.

Not dissimilar from how I run this site. Most sites. Nearly everything in my life come to think of it.

So my notes stack is pretty basic:

A git repo cloned to ~/Notes
Mostly markdown files
A few SQL and CSV files
Directories for sorting
vim for editing
cat for reading

With this setup, if I do want to use an LLM, it's on my terms, and in the scope that I'd like. Not some catch all feature that's already touched everything in my account.

I do try to commit regularly, but I primarily use git as a way to see if anything changed. This is especially helpful if a robot happens to be involved.

I'm testing the waters right now on having the cloned git repo live out in Dropbox. The idea is that I get an automatic offsite backup plus syncing to each machine. Saves me from needing to git pull to sync the files. Small added bonus of being able to pull up a note on my phone if I really had to.

Keep in mind, Dropbox is most likely going to be on the chopping block soon as well. Tin foil hat and all. But currently, I am pretty satisfied with this setup.

The Dumb Home

Josh Sherman — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years, I've been chasing the illusion of the so-called "Smart Home". Thermostats and vacuums. Doorbells and cameras. Light bulbs and switches. Garage door openers and bird feeders. Stoves and grills. Sleep mats and of course, bathroom scales.

Fucking bathroom scales.

Oh, and the stove I've never been able to get setup.

Sure they add a level of convenience, but also, how necessary is any of it?

Considering how long humans have been around, without any of these things, best as I can tell none of it's necessary. Even factoring in the convenience of it all, I've been getting more and more paranoid about having these devices on my network.

I'm also getting more paranoid about where the data these devices collect is being sent to. iRobot being bought by a Chinese company doesn't help me sleep at night.

So the bathroom scales. We've owned two, one from Fitbit and another from Withings. The Fitbit one had a lot of issues connecting to Wi-Fi, especially after a battery change. After fighting with it multiple times, to the point of tears, I swapped it for a Withings scale.

The Withings scale was a smidge better, but also had issues connecting to the network. Most of the devices use really cheap Wi-Fi chips that don't play nice with dual-band routers. This has all led to me having yet another cheap device to create a dedicated 2.4 Ghz network in our "smart" home.

The bigger issue with the Withings scale is that we somehow managed to have a mystery 4th user profile. To make matters worse, at some point my wife stopped showing up on the scale. And to compound interest, evidently her phone stopped syncing the correct profile to her phone.

The nail in the coffin is that trying to edit the profile names to shore things up just didn't take. I'd make a change, go back into the app, it would reset. Looking through the online forums, it didn't seem like Withings was going to be much help.

Reaching a level of frustration that had me considering taking a hammer to the damn thing, I decided to reassess some things. Simply put, this wasn't where I wanted to be when Jesus comes back.

My buddy also said something to me the other day that made a world of sense. If the device needs you, then it doesn't need to be smart. Well I can't weigh myself without being materially involved.

So I did the unthinkable, I bought a dumb scale. Not too dumb, it's still electronic. Less features than we're used to, like body fat guesses (they are anecdotal at best) and definitely no Wi-Fi to contend with.

Setup was a breeze. Take it out of the box and put in the batteries. Step on the device, it tells you how much you weigh. It was quick too, the Withings scale always took a bit to settle on your weight, then you're prompted to perform a dance routine to select your profile.

Speaking of profiles, there are none, and that's just fine. Wife steps on, she gets her weight. The kid steps on, she gets her weight. And the data doesn't go anywhere.

Seriously, glorious.

I've been punching my weight into the Apple Health app, but even that seems like it will be short lived. I generally don't have much use for long term weight trends. Nobody else in the house cares either. Hop on the scale, get your weight, call it a day.

This whole exercise has gotten me thinking about what else we can dumb down in the house. At the very least, I'm sick of the 100 subscriptions that effectively means I'm leasing the hardware. I want more control of my data and my wallet.