Excellent point.
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The firmware development guys thought it would be fun to troll the customers who bought these.
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There probably is a patent for this.
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OMG, for a second I thought that was Catherine O’Hara, and this came from SCTV or something.
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You’re not the only one that has noticed and hates this fad. With text, I can skim-read to find what I’m looking for a hell of a lot faster than slogging through a video.
In any case, this ridiculous reset procedure is just one more reason (aside from the lack of cloud clown dependence) that I’m glad I went with Ikea for my few smart bulbs and plugs. Their reset procedure is on-off six times.
My main use case is to provide timers for my porch lights and some decorative lights.
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So… they actually filmed the entire process? They could have accomplished the same thing with a yellow and a black background displayed for the proper amount of time. Wow.
Also… it is me, or did they not change the bulb between processes? Does that mean the older process will work for either firmware?
There were so many “turn off for two second, turn on for two seconds, turn on for two seconds, etc” in that second process that I know I would lose track of which step I was on if I wasn’t following along to the video. The nonexistent “I” that would have bought these bulbs in the first place, that is.
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It’s called the off switch. Instant black (at night in a room with blackout curtains). 
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Video is like tape storage - serial access only. Text is like disk storage - instant access anywhere. There’s a reason we don’t have tape drives in running our PCs, and tape is used for backup not actually running them. (Unless your ‘PC’ is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum or similar!)
(Edited to head off people wanting to tell me how they have tape drives in their PCs. It’s an analogy, that’s all.)
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well, you might not
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Fair point. But I bet you have disk, too! 
Observations and musings:
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I love how the video is “updated”.
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I’m guessing GE had to go through several voice actors until they found one w/ zero sense of humor, that wouldn’t bust out laughing until crying while reading the script.
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I love how the background music is just so fucking cheery. C’mon guys and gals, let’s do this!!
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On the plus side, it beats “consult your authorized GE dealer, VAR; or systems integrator” as tech support advice.
Cough Crestron cough
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I did actually laugh out loud. It’s totally an unintentional parody.
To be fair, you probably paid a lot less for them, too.
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But can you pair your phone with them so you can uhm…share them on Facebook I guess…?
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I am SO glad to see that I’m not the only one who thought of this while watching that video!
I get reference.
So the bulb is drawing power even when it’s off (so it can time how long it’s off)?
If you’re using this technology, it’s likely you have several in your home or office. How damn annoying to have to do this for every single bulb.
Why not have a reset function in the App? Or a tiny recessed reset button in the stem of the bulb?
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There are tape drives for modern PCs and they are awesome for backups. Currently a single tape can hold 12 TB of data. Future versions will hold 192 TB per tape:
I’d buy one if it weren’t so expensive.
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The bulb must have a big enough capacitor in the logic power supply to keep the CPU alive for several seconds after the power to the device is disconnected. That’s pretty common for modern electronics. It’s why the IT mob makes you wait a minute after unplugging it, before plugging it back in.
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Indeed. Perhaps I should have made it clearer by saying “There’s a reaon we don’t have tape drives in our PCs instead of disks”. The point I was making is that video is as unsuited for random access compared to text as tape is compared to disk, and in the context of that simple analogy it didn’t occur to me that such qualification was necessary.
Though as one who can easily take an analogy and extend it as far as it will go, one of my favourite sounds is that of an analogy breaking.
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