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.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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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.
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Thankfully I got one of the older models with zero IoT functionality. Works very well
Same here, I think we've had it close to ten years now. After seeing how the cats respond to it we started calling it The Food God.
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.
Why can’t Petlibro make money the old fashioned way, through planned obsolescence!
What’s wrong with a ficking bowl?
Some cats are fucked in the head. Don't ever get a Bengal.
I have three cats. A chonk, an old lady with kidney issues, and the other guy. When there was no restriction on who got what chonk was very chonky and the other guy was pretty skinny. Everyone but chonk are grazers so it's not even a matter of separating him from them during meal time, unless I'm banishing him for like three hours. Also both the chonk and the other guy would love to eat old lady's prescription $30/lb food.
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"smart" device
Its not hard to just put some food in a bowl. Not every damn thing needs automation.
Some cats are psycho about food. Mine definitely, and screams at me for hours a day even though he knows when feeding time is and he still has food from breakfast. People recommend an automatic feeder because the cat stops associating the person with feeding time and bothers the feeder instead. I haven't tried it yet, but it makes sense to me and would probably work on the fat cunt
i don't have one yet, but we're planning to get one so we can go on overnight or even maybe 2-3 day trips without having to rely on someone coming around to feed the pets
The cheaper non smart ones work all by themselves, no cloud needed. They don't have an app to control it unfortunately though.
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If you work long shifts or overnights, maybe your cats need food more often, so what do you do. Free feed, but many experts advise against that. Well, there are various options.
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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 is always a switchbot.
It literally presses or releases a button at given times. You program it with BT and no wifi needed.
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.
Stupid