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Net Work Alan Winstanley This month, Google is ousted by Amazon (at home, anyway) and we try some typical smart light bulbs, testing out Alexa’s ‘skill’ in controlling them. The latest energy labelling bands for LED bulbs are also explained. T he search engine giant Google has attracted its fair share of criticism and ire over the years, morphing from a search index with the motto ‘Don’t be evil’ into an advertising broker that tries to monetise every corner of our online lives. Armed with your valuable profile data, advertisers can target web visitors with ‘relevant’ commercials. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) pre-dates Google and is the self-help trade body that helps online media to comply with the EU’s fearsome General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Many big brand names are IAB members, and Internet marketing is big business: in the early days of online advertising, UK commerce spent a mere £8m in the whole of 1997, compared with £12.5bn (yes, billion) in the first six months of 2022 alone, says the IAB. Some very sophisticated techniques are used to profile a web user when they hop from one web page or social media post to another. Cookies are central to this, and some benign cookies are necessary anyway to enable a website or shopping cart to function properly. We tend to shrug off such creepy and silent monitoring when we visit, say, a furniture website, only to then see banner ads for the same furniture popping up after we jump to another website. Tellingly, Google’s legacy ‘Urchin Web Analytics Software support’ page admitted that, ‘In attempting to identify and track unique visitors and sessions [this way], we are basically going against the nature of the web, which is anonymous interaction.’ (If ever you see ‘?UTM_blah=...’ in a lengthy URL, it stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Module’ – it’s Google’s tracking system hard at work.) Duck! With online privacy concerns in mind, British TV viewers recently saw an ad campaign by DuckDuckGo (see: https://youtu.be/QWpPyYlZXNI), an alternative privacy app that claims to offer snoop-free web browsing and email protection. DuckDuckGo is at pains to remind web users how Google is ‘watching them’ and so their desktop 10 browser extension uses a private search engine to eliminate a user’s web surfing trails, or you can search the web directly at: www.duckduckgo.com However, Google Search reigns supreme, with Microsoft’s Bing still a distant runner up, at least as far as breadth and accuracy of search results are concerned. There are some Google functions that users would probably struggle to live without: Google Street View gives an insight into the contemporary street scene, and it can wind the clock back over a decade or more, so we can see our landscape changing over the years. Google Maps is the author’s desktop go-to guide for finding addresses and planning journeys, and many use the free app for in-car navigation. Looking at Planet Earth translate foreign text such as instruction manuals or packaging, or read text out loud. I can use the mobile app to translate foreign signs that appear onscreen, and desktop Google Chrome can search by image as well. Despite bringing us these positive benefits, Google can be a source of irritation and it increasingly seems like it’s grown too big to care. Google Maps, for example, does not recognise the common English habit of giving a house a name as well as a number, or sometimes just a name. There are countless British homes called Dunroamin or Yew Tree Cottage for example. In my case, one day a map pin suddenly appeared on Google Maps over someone else’s location in town, wrongly labelled with my house name! It was nearly impossible to change Google Maps’ error as their mindless ‘Suggest an Edit’ form did not accommodate English house names. Suspecting a case of identity theft, I seriously considered engaging a solicitor. After drawing a blank, eventually I logged into my Gmail account for a change, before going over to Google Maps and using the ‘Suggest an Edit’ link yet again. This time I got an automated email acknowledging receipt and promising a follow-up, but that never happened. However, the erroneous map pin silently disappeared a few days later, though an online login still shows my complaint as ‘pending’ – many months later. More than 98% of the planet has now been mapped by Google, including (surprisingly) Russia though, (unsurprisingly), not China. Germany all but banned Street View outside Berlin and regional capitals on privacy grounds (see the blog at: https://tinyurl.com/ 2j2275he). Surfing around on Street View can be quite engrossing and it offers a taste of different worlds and cultures, whether in Britain or Bangkok. There is also no disputing the educational and informative value of Google Earth, which offers a 3D satellite-eye view of our place in the world: https://earth.google.com Another handy app is Google Lens (see June 2022, Net Work), which will try to match images on a phone or tablet camera, or a photo gallery. Once the mobile app is installed, a Google Lens icon appears in the Google search bar for easy access, and it’s great for identifying flowers, plants, bugs, artwork and more. It can also DuckDuckGo offers private web searching without any snooping. Practical Electronics | January | 2023 Service discontinued Google’s idea of handling complaints follows an established pattern. Regular readers might recall problems with my Google Home Hub (now, Nest Hub), an LCD smart speaker that for no reason suddenly stopped responding. Others blamed Google for a software or system update that had ‘bricked’ their Home Hub. It looks like Google forum staffers were feeding complaints through to the support team who raised a ticket number before going silent on the matter. I received several such support ticket IDs but never got an answer. My perfectly satisfactory 2–3-year-old LCD smart speaker was nearly worthless by then, and eventually I had no choice but to scrap the device. Google’s press office failed to answer when I raised this with them, and more persistent tech writers than me also tried and failed. Other Google services that are falling by the wayside include their Stadia cloud gaming platform, which never found traction and is closing in January 2023, with users receiving refunds. The ‘Killed by Google’ website (https://killedbygoogle.com) has 275 entries listing the history of every discontinued Google project. Some useful services such as Google Cloud Print, which was embedded into some Wi-Fi printers, are sorely missed, but others were clearly never going anywhere, including the instant messaging service Google Hangouts which is being dropped this month. I then went further by dumping my Google smart speakers in favour of 5-inch and 8-inch Amazon LCD Echo Show displays that were being heavily discounted in price. These cheaper first-generation devices work perfectly well, and will prove ideal for many everyday users, especially if they are used by Amazon Prime subscribers. While Google states that Google Home services are ‘subject to change without notice or obligation’, Amazon promises to deliver updates for at least four years after the devices are removed from sale. I now enjoy seeing my gallery of thousands of Amazon Photos streaming to my Echo Show LCD screens: the 5-inch model is ideal for bedside or desktop use. Amazon Photo storage is unlimited for Prime users, but I bought extra storage at 100GB for $19.99 a year to carry more video files, making 105GB available in total. It’s not all good news for Amazon customers: Amazon Prime is now pushing Amazon Music subscriptions for an extra £8.99 a month after hobbling this enjoyable and rewarding Practical Electronics | January | 2023 First-generation Amazon Echo Show smart displays have a lower-spec camera but will be perfectly fine for everyday users. Check Amazon for special offers. streaming music service. Otherwise, song choices are now ‘shuffled’ with ‘similar music’ and you can only skip so many ‘duff’ songs per hour. Amazon’s Alexa isn’t entirely a match for Google Search either, but even though some users dislike the idea of smart speakers eavesdropping on us, I’m happy to try Amazon ‘skills’ to control some smart devices by voice, as I describe next. LED to believe Last month, I introduced TP-Link’s Tapo smart devices, which is an entry-level range of smart Wi-Fi sockets, bulbs and a few handy-looking peripherals. They are easy enough to configure using the Tapo app on a tablet or phone, and would be an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to harness smart devices without spending a fortune. Note that they are not interchangeable with TP-Link’s Kasa smart device range, which needs the Kasa app instead. As well as the Tapo P110 energy-saving smart socket featured last month, I’ve been trying out some Tapo smart LED bulbs. The Tapo L510B has a UKstyle bayonet cap (B22) base and is The Tapo L510B smart light bulb is dimmable and equivalent to a 60W light bulb. 11 a YouTube video at: https://youtu.be/ DgIsn0Zac3o – try not to laugh, or cry! Additionally, the Tapo smart socket (see last month) is working well, powering up a smart TV, but I wouldn’t use it to switch a heavy mains load like an electric heater or any current-hungry white goods. Alexa, good night The Tapo smart bulb can be controlled via the Tapo app or by using Alexa or Google Assistant. dimmable, with a rating of 9W. The smart bulb is self-contained so, unlike some systems, it does not need a separate hub. A colour-changing LED bulb is also available (Tapo L530B). In my test set-up, several Tapo smart bulbs are used in light fittings between a duo of whole-home mesh hubs, so Wi-Fi coverage should not be a problem. After a short delay the Tapo app found the new bulbs without too much fuss. The app allows these bulbs to be dimmed on demand, and there is a useful 7-day time switch and ‘Away’ mode, to give a burglar-deterrent effect during allotted hours. A timer switches the bulb on or off after a delay of up to 24 hours. I named each bulb – eg, ‘standard lamp’ and ‘reading lamp’ – in the app and they were then grouped together to unify their control. It all looked promising – on paper anyway. Early on, I hit one or two frustrating setbacks, with either or both bulbs sometimes becoming ‘unreachable’ and not responding. Occasionally, they fell off the network and rebooting them didn’t always work either, so once or twice they were re-installed or factory-reset (a process of turning them on and off repeatedly). This is nothing like as bad as the totally crazy factory-reset routines for ‘C by GE Bulbs’ shown in 12 Then it occurred to me that the Amazon Echo Show devices could also voice-control the Tapo devices by installing the Tapo ‘skill’. This is easily achieved by telling Alexa to install it, or I could set it up via the Alexa app instead. In theory, automated routines (so far untested by me) can be set up such as ‘Good night,’ which could turn everything off, and the Tapo app offers ‘Sunrise’ routines that use a smart bulb to simulate sunrise. Testing this new regime over the last few weeks revealed some practical limitations though, highlighting that all is not ideal in the smart-device world. Sometimes a Tapo bulb responds immediately, but occasionally there’s a disconcerting delay before a lamp finally switches on a few tens of seconds later, if at all. The Tapo app may also flag up an ‘Unreachable’ warning symbol on either one of the bulbs. The app and the smart bulbs seem to get out of sync, at least for a short time, leaving me with no idea whether the smart device is actually on or off until the system catches up with itself again. There are so many variables at play that it’s been impossible to fine-tune the system to improve reliability any further. The Tapo range has some handy smart devices, including 1-gang and 2-gang light switches (S210/ S220) to control room lighting, but only a practical test at home would prove how well they worked for you. A stick-on smart contact sensor (T110, £15) monitors doors, windows, fridge doors, filing or medicine cabinets or even the mailbox. It can push messages or activate a smart bulb (see: https://bit.ly/pe-jan23-tapo). It also requires the separate Tapo Hub H100 (approx £30), a small plug-in chime unit with the form factor of a wireless doorbell. Their smart PIR sensor (T100, £28) detects movement, and a handy, multipurpose stick-on smart button (S200B, £15) might make a doorbell, lighting controller or an alarm-call for the elderly, for example. These peripherals also need the Tapo Hub H100. Tapo Wi-Fi cameras and LED lighting strips are also sold. In summary, I guess budget-price systems like these are alright as far as they go. My own domestic set-up works well An ‘F’ rating for a 9W LED lamp isn’t as bad as it looks. Higher-efficiency light sources are under development. Users scan the QR codes for more data. enough most of the time, and the benefits largely outweigh any drawbacks. Hopefully it will settle down in due course, but I sometimes find Alexa stubbornly disobedient when the system isn’t responding as expected. Before taking the plunge, the best port of call is the Tapo website which details all these devices and how they work together. So to learn more, visit: www.tapo.com EPREL Showers As every European consumer knows, many electrical products carry an EU energy label indicating its energy efficiency, based on a 25-year-old system that was intended to inform/influence our buying habits. Appliances were originally rated A to G, then A+++ to G to accommodate more energy-efficient units, but so many products ended up jostling in those top ‘A’ tiers that makers had no incentive to evolve any further: they couldn’t improve on A+++. The system therefore reverted in 2021 to show ratings of A-G again, with energy bands ‘telescoped out’ to allow consumers to distinguish between different models more easily. The European Commission explains that the new scale has been designed so that very few products will initially be able to achieve the top ‘A’ and ‘B’ ratings at all. This will allow room for waves of more efficient products to arrive and work their way up the scale. Currently, the most energy efficient products will typically be labelled as ‘C’ or ‘D’, but simple market forces should encourage progressive makers to reach ‘A’ and ‘B’ in due course. Some new elements have also appeared on the revised energy labels, including a QR code that links to an EU product database called EPREL Practical Electronics | January | 2023 (European Product Registry for Energy Labelling) where consumers can find out more details. Many more products, including car tyres, water heaters and solid fuel boilers are indexed there too. The public face of the database is still in Beta, but the go-to address for future reference is: https://eprel.ec.europa.eu Of the two QR codes printed on my Tapo smart bulb energy label, one clicks through to TP-Link’s website while the EU label jumps to the EPREL database showing full technical data (and you’ll feel sorry you asked). I noticed how a stock 42W halogen bulb was rated ‘D’ on the old scale, yet my Tapo LED bulbs were rated ‘F’. The market for what the EU now calls ‘light sources’ (bulbs, LEDs, modules and so on) has changed due to the urgent need to raise efficiency and conserve energy. Since the A-G thresholds were revised, the current generation of LED bulbs have been demoted down the scale. The Tapo consumes 9kWh/1000 hours (9W in old money) and, as LED bulb energy ratings are based on lumens/ watt (lm/W), it outputs 806lm at 9W (ie, 90lm/W): hence its paltry ‘F’ energy rating which sounds a lot worse than it actually is. For interest, a tungsten filament bulb emits about 12-14 lm/W and wastes over 95% of energy consumed as heat, so my halogen bulb would now be ‘G’ rated. Future LED bulbs will need to be two or three-times more efficient than today’s models if they to reach the new ‘A’ rating (210 lm/W) – Philips has already nearly achieved this with prototype ‘TLED’ light tubes. Readers can expect the energy efficiency of LED bulbs to climb steadily in coming years as they aim for that ‘A’ rating. And finally The ITER nuclear fusion plant under construction in France (see last month) has received the first of six ‘poloidal field coils’ destined for the tokomak. The ITER nuclear fusion site in France continues to take shape. – this view looks inside the 30m-deep tokomak pit (Photo: © ITER Organization) The 200-tonne ‘pancakes’ have taken ten years to develop and are manufactured in Russia. One of three magnetic systems, the coils will be positioned horizontally outside of the ITER vacuum vessel to shape the plasma and contribute to its stability by ‘pinching’ it away from the walls, says ITER. Many more components and coils made for ITER by international manufacturers have already been safely delivered to the massive site, which continues to come together ready for ‘first plasma’ in 2025. There’s more at www.ITER.org and readers might enjoy ITER’s new video at: https://youtu.be/f9nW01PBOOQ Recently, my Samsung Smart TV suddenly refused to connect to the Internet, citing ‘No network connection’. I ripped everything apart, including changing Ethernet cables and swapping Ethernet ports on a nearby access point, but it made no difference and the stubborn problem dragged on for weeks. I feared that the Ethernet port on my TV must have failed, but the TV still connected to the network-attached storage on my LAN, so some parts of the network were working properly. It looked like a DNS look-up problem, perhaps with my ISP, so after much hair pulling, I eventually found a solution: I changed the DNS address nailed into the TV’s network settings by choosing ‘Manual’ instead of ‘Automatic’ and entering 8.8.8.8 instead. The TV immediately sprang into life! This DNS IP is a Google public DNS address (see https://bit.ly/pe-jan23-dns for an explanation); others worth trying include 8.8.4.4. or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1. The latter one is suggested by my own ISP, so I configured those in my router, and now all is well. If you suspect DNS problems, try those IP addresses instead. That’s all for this month – I’ll sign off by wishing all readers a Happy Christmas and look forward to you joining me next month for more Net Work. The author can be reached at: alan<at>epemag.net ! w e Learn more: hammfg.com/1557 n 1557 IP68 sealed enclosures Contact us to request a free evaluation sample. uksales<at>hammfg.com • 01256 812812 Practical Electronics | January | 2023 13