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The Tertill is a perfect case study of the Internet of Trash and e-waste.

Marketed as a solar-powered robot gardener, it promised to automate one of the most tedious jobs in the home garden. Today it’s discontinued, unsupported, and headed toward the growing pile of e-waste created by abandoned tech products.

The Kickstarter crowdfunding project backers raised more than $300,000 and ultimately failed to deliver a product that could function more than a few years. Whether you call it mismanagement, over promising, incompetence, or something worse, the result for many backers was the same: money gone, promises unfulfilled, and a little more for the landfill.

LOL so much for “smart” products.

A garden hoe from 1950 still works.
A rake from 1920 still works.
IoT gadgets are one failure away from becoming electronic landfill.

REMINDER DON’T BUY INTO SYSTEMS YOU DON’T OWN.

The Tertill wasn’t just a weeding robot. It was a reminder that when companies sell convenience, cloud services, apps, subscriptions, and proprietary ecosystems, they’re often selling a product with an expiration date. The weeds in my garden are still here.

The company isn’t.

G00gle goes one step further in making the internet a worse place.

The company has gone out of its way to hide this – like actually not telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note saying “Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail.” With NO notice to actual e-mail customers. This is like the post office just up and stopping delivering postal mail from anyone but Amazon one day. When you go to the post office there is a post-it note on the wall stating they no longer deliver letters to your home.

Gmailify aka what you thought email was, but they now call a crappy name to hide the fact you are the product. If you want to get rid of the Google do like me. I recently moved e-mail on my personal domains from Gmail to Fastmail for a variety of reasons. If you are tired of the G fucking you over I suggest you find a new solution for your email.

Flashforge is violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) by distributing modified versions of open-source software without providing the corresponding source code, as the GPL requires. Many of their 3D printers run firmware and software based on projects like Klipper and Orca Slicer, which are licensed under the GPL. Under this license, anyone who distributes modified versions must also make their source code publicly available. However, Flashforge provides only the binary firmware and software, effectively restricting users from studying, modifying, or redistributing the software, which directly conflicts with the principles and legal requirements of the GPL. This practice limits user freedom and undermines the open-source community that created the software.

Please file a complaint, the more complaints they get on the matter the faster and more aggressively they might pursue it. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html

Orca Slicer and Klipper are community-driven projects developed and maintained by volunteers who dedicate their time and expertise to advancing open-source 3D printing software. Unlike large corporations, these projects do not have the legal resources to enforce their GPL license or pursue formal legal action against companies that violate it. By publicly calling out Flashforge for distributing modified software without releasing the source code, we aim to raise awareness of the violation, highlight the importance of respecting open-source licenses, and support the small teams whose work benefits the entire 3D printing community. This call to action is about protecting user rights and promoting transparency, not just enforcing legal obligations.

If you have a Nest thermostat first or second generation they recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning them into dumb thermostats. A bounty on fulu inspired codykociemba on github to start the NoLongerEvil-Thermostat project.

If you want to smarten up your thermostat again or you never had one because of privacy, you can now use Linux to self host and make the nest work for you and not you being a product for Google. The thermostat has a DFU-enabled OMAP loader. To access it, you have to plug it into USB and then reboot it. There is a narrow window for the loader to grab it, so you have to be running the software before you reboot or you’ll miss it.

After that, the flash is relatively fast, but the Nest will look dead for a brief time. Then the No Longer Evil logo will show. Now it redirects all the network traffic to a custom URL. If you don’t want to run your own server you can control your thermostat from the nolongerevil.com. The project is open source, but all the important bits are in a binary U-Boot image file, so it would take some work to validate it. To get you started, the command to dump the content is probably: dumpimage -T kernel -p 0 -o kernel uImage. Or, you could watch it with Wireshark for a bit.

https://www.stopflock.com