geek

  • 2 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 11th, 2025

help-circle

  • Lingering thought (and their outage is now over after an embarrassingly long time)…

    Belkin has such short-term thinking with this. They can either burn enthusiast customers, or they could invest in loyalty. If they would provide documentation and work with some open source entity (like Canonical), who could write a self-hosting server and possibly spin up one to assist us. Then they should release a final firmware update that talks to these servers and also provides a feature for installing third-party firmware in hopes that the open source community will step up and create it.

    Although they are dropping support, that way we wouldn’t feel totally abandoned and insulted.




  • At the time, these seemed good because Belkin has been around forever. They’re not top-of-the-line, but they’re ubiquitous.

    I do have iOS devices in my home, so having it work with either their cloud or HomeKit seemed like a good backup in case something like this happens.

    Devices configured with Apple HomeKit before this date will continue to function via HomeKit local control without requiring Wemo cloud services or app.

    This worries me though. What if my light switch needs to be reset after that date? Will it connect again?

    I’m savvy enough that I have these on their own firewalled VLAN, and I can get to them via Wireguard when I’m out (though I mostly use the app when at home). If they really are garbage now, I’ll try to be optimistic about it since devices don’t last forever, and I would have wanted to upgrade/replace these eventually. It’s just terrible that it is so soon.

    Since my friends and family do come to me for technology questions, I’ll help them steer clear of Belkin in the future. It’s a harder sell to get them to use non-proprietary tech. They are willing to pay more and replace sooner just to have everything in one app with no setup.





  • Thanks for the reply.

    I think your first option can give a false positive if the file is started to exist but hasn’t been completely written to. (Except if Out-File already implies that it’s done being written, so the next part isn’t really needed.)

    The second one is good, but I don’t need console output. Just logging.

    I’m looking for confirmation that both Out-Null and Out-File have the same (side) effect of making sure the file is done being copied before continuing to the next line of the script. If so, I’ll stick with Out-File