Tony is a Geek

As mentioned in a previous post, I wanted an off-grid smart plug in the UK that did not connect out to the external internet, did not connect up to some AWS service in Germany (and other locations), just for me to be able to turn a switch ON and OFF again.  It still baffles me.  (a bit like the sheeple-mindset of fitting a "smart meter" in your house - there is ABSOLUTELY no need or value for doing this - it is purely for the electricity companies to gain full control of your environment, there is zer0 benefit to you... you don't know or even care what a KwH value means, or whether it costs 30p to boil your kettle over a day, you're not going to stop doing it, you just now have too much information - however, at the flip of a remote switch, your electricity provider has the power to switch your tariff, restrict the input/feed of the amount of power you have, switch you from a monthly payment over to a pay-as-you-go and I'm sure all sorts more - you have sleep-wal...

Those people that have known me for quite some time, know that I don't just do work-work.  I used to.  Oh, yes....I used to do that a lot.  I'm probably from the generation of IT guys that screwed it all up for the newer generation.  Why's that? Well, IT was fascinating in the late 80s and all the way through the 90s....the possibilities, the basic-ness of it all.  Yes, you as a single person "could" do it all.  you could be the person that knew about hardware, knew about infrastructure, could make your own 10-base-2 (or was it 10?) cables (the one's that used TV aerial cable), before cat5 cables took over - but hey, you still did that too.  You knew how to network PCs together, different network cards, token networks connecting to the 10-base-2/10/T (whatever), how to configure Windows or even Novell Netware (wow, there's a blast from the past for you) to use that networking....and you even knew how to write code, so you could write the application...