WiFi System Reset

This Saturday morning finds me back in my beloved Chapel Hill, joining other alumni brothers to support the initiation of new members into our fraternity. I’ve gotten behind on composing entries for recent happenings here, but I had a draft set aside from September that I knew I’d need at some point to upload, simply because this is the record of life and management of the Roediger House. And the governing compulsion is to have something to toss up every single day.

I really do enjoy how much of the household is integrated into a smart network, with voice control and routines and automation galore. When I got an updated cable modem, I thought it might also be a good time to refresh the WiFi network password and create a guest network, which ought to have been part of my original configuration, frankly. I did not anticipate what an enormous amount of time would be required to reconnect everything to the network: individual light switches, plugs, smart light bulbs, two security system homebases and a couple of the cameras (get the ladder, take them down, resync them, put them back up), the outdoor WiFi extender, the Nest thermostat, the Tempest weather station, irrigation controller, the Sonos devices, the Alexa devices, three printers, and who knows what else. For different smart device manufacturers, there’s a different app, which means different passwords and different tactics. As if it’s not time-consuming enough, quite a few resets failed and had to be re-initiated. For every device that had to be reset, it had to be rediscovered by Alexa and re-added into any of the understandably brilliant routines I’ve built. These are things we do to ourselves in intense bursts of frustration and time-suck because of how clever all these gimmicks seem. When it all works, it’s awesome. When it doesn’t, somewhere an angel’s wings probably burst into flames.