HomeTech.fm - Episode 232 - Wires Matter

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

On this week’s episode of HomeTech: We wrap-up the biggest stories from Apple’s hardware event, share what’s on our current streaming watch list, ponder the oft-forgotten value of hardwired connections, discuss useless voice control capabilities, dispel some of the 5G-hype, and more… Fan of the show? Want to support our efforts? Please consider becoming a Patron!

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by listeners like you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 2nd from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, happy Halloween. Yeah, you as well, Seth. It's hard to believe it's upon us. It's one of my favorite times of year, fall. And so I'm always happy when it comes around. And I know we've been having some fun already with the kids. Halloween officially is tomorrow night. We're recording on Tuesday this week to avoid having to record in a candy coma tomorrow, presumably. And I know you have activities with the kids,

as do I, but it's always an exciting time of year. And what are your plans, Seth? I think we're going to bring the little one around the neighborhood and see what she does and how good, if we can get her to not be shy. We've had candy laying around for the last couple of days. So I know that she wants the candy because she'll go, she points to it and says, she goes, yum, yum, yum. But I don't know how badly she wants it. Like if she's going to knock on somebody's door and say trick or treat. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. It's I know her age where she's at, for us, it was kind of a... Those first couple of years were a little iffy, and our daughter tended to have a good time. And now she's a little bit older. She's turning four here pretty soon. And so she has a great time out there. And of course, Dylan, her little brother, just watches everything that she does and totally wants to imitate that. So he's got no fear and they'll have a ton of fun. We're going to head over to a friend's place here in a neighborhood nearby and have some dinner and take the kids trick-or-treating in their neighborhood this

year. And so it should be a good time. I always enjoy it. Nice. Nice. Do you get, I guess you're not going to be there this year, but do you normally get anybody in your neighborhood? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's always the trick, right? Like, my first house, we didn't get anyone. Like, of course, we're in Florida, so there's no people with kids. Right. Right. Different demographic.

Yeah, completely. But here, we actually get, I don't know, like 20 or 30 kids that kind of come through. One year, they had, like, a hayride. They pulled up out front and, like, jumped off and, went bulk yeah processing yeah yeah it's that's smart i think because it keeps efficient yeah it keeps their legs you know not worn out from walking up and down these hot florida streets so not not a bad we're hoping we're hoping for good weather we've had absolutely gorgeous weather here the last couple of weeks, you know, Indian summer type of weather where it's been in the high 60s, low 70s, gorgeous. And of course, tonight it's supposed to snow and tomorrow it looks like it's going to be

dry. So we should be okay for trick or treating, but it is going to be chilly. So we'll be a little bit bundled up, but I'm sure we'll have a great time and the kids will definitely enjoy themselves. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So in the spirit of Halloween, Seth, I've got a tip for you. All right. I'm listening. I'm listening. I know we frequently talk about streaming and sort of share tips on shows. And to be honest, I'm actually not sure at all, like if this is a new show or if it's been out forever and i'm just super late to the party and that's totally possible but uh i got a new one on hulu that i'm two episodes into and

really enjoying so far it's called castle rock have you heard of it i have my my my wife is actually watching this uh she's a she's a big stephen king fan so when this came up she was she was all over it and i think it's it's like uh he's like a producer on it or he's like a writer or something I'm not sure yeah I think um let's see I don't know on the trailer it says from the mind of Stephen King whatever that means and J.J. Abrams is one of the executive producers and uh Stephen Kinghen king and abrams are the executive producers on yeah yeah very very very well done um i i won't try to do it a lot of justice in terms of explaining the plot i'm only a couple of episodes in but um you know if you're into sort of spooky suspense it's

not really like um your typical like horror ghost movie type of thing, but definitely sort of keeps you on the edge of your seat, and I'm enjoying it. So if anyone out there is looking for a new show and you're a Hulu user, I would definitely recommend go check it out. Yeah, I don't know. I like Stephen King.

I like his stories, most of his stories. The shows that come out of his, I'm thinking of, isn't there one like The Fog, The Mist, Pet Sematary? All those have been really good, so I guess I'll give these a try. I don't know. I'm not in a spooky, I'm in that comedy mood right now. So I want to go see the comedies and that kind of thing. Yeah, totally. It's hard for me because my wife is not really into the spooky stuff, so I sort of have to sneak these episodes in in the rare time that I can.

But I talked her into watching episode two last night, and I think she might have fallen asleep about 10 minutes in. But that's progress for me. 10 minutes is 10 minutes, man. That's all you can ask at least i got permission it's no general hospital jason but little victory that's right that's right all right well what do you say should we get into uh some home tech headlines yep let's do it the sonos one is now available in several limited edition colors thanks to a

partnership with designer group hey i guess it guess that's H-A-Y. The new colors include yellow, green, red, pink, and gray. And all of them will be available on November 5th at a slight markup of only $229 versus the $199 for the standard models. Sonos will be offering its new limited edition model of the One Speaker at its Sonos flagship store in Manhattan,

along with the MoMA design store and Sonos Direct Online. You won't find these latest models available at places such as like Amazon, Best Buy or Target. So I also saw there's a there's one. Let's put the show notes as a Beastie Boys one that looks kind of. Yeah. Yeah. They just wasn't the one earlier this week. Yeah, you're right. It was the three. It was the just uh they wasn't the one earlier this week yeah you're right it was the three it was the three it wasn't the one but yeah it was the three was was it the three or the five i have i can't remember it was it was one of those it wasn't the one um you know i don't know i'm looking at these these are cool i guess if you're into

fire engine red for your sono speaker like now you've got an option. I personally can't see myself ever buying that, but, um, I had a kitchen that was that color. Wow. Well, this one, it would have fit right in. It would have blended right in. Yeah. Yeah. Where have you been Sonos? Right. Right. I guess, yeah, like this would work if you had, um, the need for them to blend in a little bit more. Although I think that the little, the grays and the whites that they have do a pretty good job of that. Those are certainly the ones that most people are going to pick. Right. But I get it.

These aren't for everyone, but they're a limited edition. And certainly some people will find a good home for these. Moving on, Amazon has added support for hands-free voice navigation for several third-party apps so that much more can be achieved with the Fire TV Cube without needing to use the remote. What Amazon has essentially done is add voice commands that mimic the remote's directional buttons. So, for instance, by saying, Alexa, go right or Alexa, go left, you can navigate around the app as if you were using the remote. You may also use the command move in place of the word go, if you prefer. Once the item is selected, you can then say Alexa select to mimic the press of a remote's circular center

button. And Seth, I got to tell you, I read this story and started actually like i sort of like closed my eyes and pictured myself doing this to navigate around uh you know user interface and i i cannot imagine something more painful from a user experience perspective i mean it's not like it was painful enough before the siri you know siri remote free apple tv to go up up left left left right right down down select yeah let's type in a password right or down oh my god this is this is like even worse but i the only only way i could see this you know i always like to bring this up is like if you're disabled uh this would probably be pretty awesome that you can get in there and actually do something like this.

Yes, certainly. I can imagine. There are use cases. Going over to somebody's house and having them say, Alexa, go right. Alexa, go right. Alexa, go right. Oh. I think about 80 to 90% of the time that I'm using my i use apple tv but right you know whatever same

thing um you know kids my kids are at that age where they're standing in front of the tv and they're like i want to watch that no wait i want to watch that no wait never mind i want to watch that and so i just picture myself alexa go right left up down up, down, up, left. And it's just, so I don't know. I have a really, really hard time imagining that this is going to be a useful feature for most people. But like you said, there are going to be edge use cases. And who knows, if you need to go cursor right and hit select and the remote is 15 feet across the room and that's all you need to do, sure, it may be useful.

But thankfully, this is sort of a stopgap. Most apps these days are integrating more, I guess, natively with these voice interfaces so that you're not actually using the navigation on the screen, but rather you're saying, play this show or play this episode, and you're tapping directly into the content. So this is sort of a band-aid to help you move around in apps that don't have that sort of integration, which over time will become less and less. Still kind of funny, and I can't imagine that our show, now that we're not editing, is not going to cause some problems. Yeah.

Sorry. Hey, the people have spoken, Seth. No more buzzer. No more buzzers. No more A word. I'm just committed. It's coming out. We got to inform you on how to operate your voice control system,

and the wake word is the wake word. Can't help it. All right. So today Apple announced a bunch of new hardware things uh a new macbook air which which hasn't been updated since 2015 and uh a new ipad pro which looks pretty compelling to me like i i they a lot of people said they were bored by the photoshop demo and i thought that was pretty amazing like what you could do with just an ipad these days like a little tiny sheet of metal and glass like it's a computer yeah it's a real computer uh uh and then they they also updated the mac mini uh which is the first time since 2014 and it came out with all new uh intel processors and uh memory like an ungodly amount of memory that you can do up to 64 gigabytes of RAM, which I think back in 2014 or the 2012 that I have is only 16 gigabytes of memory.

So that's that's pretty awesome. And all this is finally available on November 7, it looks like. Yeah, I know people can't see me right now because we're an audio show, but I've got my hands up in the air. And I'm celebrating a new Mac Mini. I'm excited for that. It's been a really long time, 2014. So four years since they updated this device. I've got one sitting right here on my desk.

It's what I use for my personal computing uh record on that computer every week i've had it it's a workhorse and and i think it is um you know the thing with with with apple and their computers they they fetch a premium they're not cheap machines and when you start especially when you start looking at the you know the all-in-one computers that have the monitor and everything. I'm drawing a blank on the name right now. It's the iMac. Yeah, the iMacs. They get very, very expensive in a hurry, and I've got a great monitor here.

I've got a couple of monitors around my house. I don't need to spend the extra money to have that premium Apple logo on my monitor. And so, you know, the Mac minis have always been very appealing to me. Mine's still working great right now, but eventually I'm going to be in the market for a new computer and was really hoping, I was getting a little worried there. It had been so long since they updated it that I actually wasn't sure if they were like maybe planning to discontinue it or what was going on with the Mac mini, like what, what their plans were there. So excited to see this, you know, the base model starts at $799, but of course the specs

on that are probably not something that most people are going to buy. You know, if you're going to, if you're going to go out and buy a Mac mini, you're probably going to end up spending more than that. And the options go, there's a second article, Seth, that we'll link to in the show notes at hometech.fm slash 232 that talks about, you know, all of the different options, right? And the things that you could put into the Mac mini goes up to $4,200. So that's a crazy range. When you think about it, it can be anywhere from 800 to $4,200, depending on the options that you select. So several tiers in between there, but, um, yeah, these things can definitely get expensive, but you're going to get a lot of horsepower for that as well. I'm looking at the one under my, under my kind of my desk here. It's not really, it's on the desk, but it's under something that I have. Uh, and it, it looks like the form factor is the same. There's a, there's a couple of different ports on the back, uh, um, that are, that are, they have the USB-C stuff on

there, which is kind of cool. Um, but I think the, the overall, the general design looks the same. I don't know. You have, I think you have a newer Mac mini than I do. I think overall the general design looks the same. I don't know. I think you have a newer Mac Mini than I do. I think you have like a 2014 or something in that range. And I have the older 2012. I still have a little black dot on the front of mine for IR. I don't know if yours has that. Yeah, no, mine does.

It does. Okay, so this one does not. I think the ir is gone uh which remember you could actually take an apple tv remote back in the day and launch this uh i forget what they called it but it was like a media player built into the mac and you could just like use the apple tv remote and go uptown left and right uh or you could just yell at it i guess turn left turn left and it would do it no it wouldn't do that at all um well that's only alexa uh but yeah you could you could actually turn it into a little media center and whatnot

mine runs blacks right now so i guess that's that is the same thing but it's not like i'm not using an apple remote to control it or anything it's it's just like a standalone app that runs on my apple tv um and the server runs actually on this computer. So I don't know. This seems pretty good to me. If I had some, I don't know, I'm really torn. I've never really been an iPad person because I've always been like, they've always felt like not ready yet devices.

Like they've always looked really cool. But this one is actually the first one that actually looks like, okay, this is the future computing Apple. I see what you're doing. I'm on board. I am actually excited about this one, and I've not been excited about iPads before in the past. Got it.

Robert in the chat room makes a good point. We're talking about the pricing on the Mac Mini here, and he says, the Mac Mini, remember, can eliminate buying a lot of third-party stuff like Synology NAS drives, et cetera. So the, you know, quote, total system costs can be less daunting when you calculate it that way.

So, you know, I'm with you. I've always been a big fan of the Mac Mini. This, I think, is the second one that I've owned. And, well, like I said, I think, is the second one that I've owned. And well, like I said, I'm going to be in the market for another computer at some point in the, probably the near future. And the Mac Mini, I'd be surprised if I go any other direction. So on a personal note, I was super happy to see that this device got updated. I was, again, starting to worry that they were just going to do away with it. So this was good news for me.

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the options here, and Jason, I've never heard of this. We were kind of playing around with the configurator. I don't know if it's on the, let me select the smaller $799 price point. Let's see. Yes. Okay. So on both of the Mac minis with processor types that they offer, it looks like you can get what is called 10 gigabit ethernet in base T in as in Nancy base T. And it's a hundred dollar option. I'd never even heard of that.

Yeah. I mean, wifi is built into these things. They will get on a Wi-Fi network, no problem. But this is a new one for me. And I mean, I guess we cover Wi-Fi a lot. You know, there's Wi-Fi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 now. But in all those 802 numbers, nobody cares about anymore. But we don't really talk about how wired Ethernet is sitting back in the background, just kind of plugging away and getting faster and faster. And this is pretty cool. This supports, according to Apple here and according to Wikipedia,

it supports 1 gigabit a second, 2.5 gigabit, 5 gigabit, and 10 gigabit Ethernet. And that uses the standard RJ45 with a Cat5e or a Cat6 or Cat 6A kind of hanging off the back of it. So that's, if you need to move some data around inside of a building or inside of a house, that's pretty awesome. It's built right onto the motherboard. Yeah. Yeah, it is crazy because even as somebody who really follows the home technology space and pays a lot of attention. I have to admit that I've been totally oblivious to the developments in terms of like wired speed and wired connections. And gosh, we spend so much time talking about wireless and all of the developments that are going on on that front that I felt a little bit silly when I read this and realized, like, yeah, of course. You know, of course the technology in terms of Ethernet is evolving.

Robert here in the chat room is pointing out again 10 gig E is what he's referring to it. And so I'm struggling with terminology a little bit. I'm assuming we're talking about the same thing. But it says, is the next generation data center Ethernet used by video production and other high data moving applications. Also views Mac mini as a storage server for virtual machines running on other systems, 10 gig E can be very useful. So, you know, for me, I think the takeaway here is pretty clear, like, don't forget about hard wires, right? We wireless seems to be

all of the rage for obvious reasons. It's super convenient and nobody, nobody likes a bunch of cabling running around their desk and stuff like that. But ultimately, um, having the appropriate infrastructure in your home, if you've got it, then you may as well use it. And hardwired is always preferable. I mean, I tell people that all the time. It's it's, if you've got it, then you may as well use it. And hardwired is always preferable. I mean, I tell people that all the time. If you've got the option, hardwire it without a question. Yeah, even the podcast you're listening to right now would not be possible without a hardware internet connection because Jason and I have pretty nice networks inside the house.

But I can tell you, as soon as somebody gets online and starts using my Wi-Fi, I can tell. And so like having the hardware built into the computer and I plug it right in, I don't even worry about, you know, any interference or anything like that. It's going to come through the Wi-Fi system. It's all taken care of and plugged directly in. So, yeah, wires matter. Yeah. It's like a bumper sticker slogan there there wires matter there you go show title exactly what uh what i see here is on wikipedia it's interesting um it looks like you can get the 5g

5 gig base t uh which out of using cat6 cable two and a half or one you can get off of Cat 5e and if you want the 10g base tee you're gonna use probably use some fancy switching equipment but you're also gonna have to use cat 6a and it looks like it works up to 55 meters or less so some pretty fast speeds they're using copper wire we're not we're not talking fiber optic here was This is a regular copper cable. They have really turned the screws on locking down some ways to get some speed out of this thing. And, yeah, it looks like I'm looking through this. It was kind of one of those standards they've been working on for a while, and it was approved September of 2016. So not too long ago, just two years back. And, you know, about about that time we were probably

talking about ero and all the new mesh wi-fi stuff and skipped right over this right yeah there's kind of a cool graphic on a wikipedia article that again we'll link to in the in the show notes hometech.fm slash 232 and it it's got this sort of 3d like visual drawing, uh, representing bandwidth, right. And it talks about 10 G base T versus five G base T, and then going all the way down to like 10 base T. And so you can sort of get a visual representation of how this technology has evolved. And then it also cross-references it with the different types of you know of cabling that you would need in order to leverage those speeds so pretty interesting stuff and um you know copper is going to hang around for a while right we've been hearing

conversations in the in the pro channel for i feel like a long time about copper reaching its, its, um, like shelf life and fiber is, is going to be the thing. And to me, it's ultimately, uh, you know, like we, we've still got a ways to go with, with copper and, and for what the vast majority of us do in our homes in terms of data consumption i'm not super concerned about about fiber if i were if i even if i were building a big house uh tomorrow you know i i wouldn't personally be worried about about fiber unless you've got some crazy you know applications for it yeah the only applications i've ever really come across that i've kind of kind of needed it on but not not had it where we're like doing uh video hd over ip video distribution uh you can actually stack

switches in those in those systems and you can you can put switches like the same switches out in outbuildings and have fiber run in between them and actually all of the source equipment being one in the central building and then pipe out to other TVs and the other outbuildings. So I've done that before. It was kind of a really cool application and use case that I didn't wire the house for initially, but was able to retrofit in and able actually to get it working over copper, which I was kind of surprised about. But, you know, 1080p, I didn't really need 4k or anything like that. And it worked. So it's been working for years out there. And they've been happy. So can't complain. But that's the only time I've ever been like, man, I really wish I had

copper in between these buildings. Yeah, yep, definitely use cases out there for it. But like I said, I think it's this, this was a good find. It totally was something that I didn't realize was going on in the world of Ethernet and makes perfect sense. So go check that out, read up on it. Pretty interesting stuff. Speaking of network speed, Seth, one of the other things that we wanted to touch on this week was 5G. So we've had a couple of stories, I think one last week and one the week before where, you know, we're talking about 5G and you're starting to see it pop up in the headlines. And if you're not, you know, if you haven't caught those, like it definitely is starting to pop up more regularly, right? We're starting to see more and more 5G and

certainly you've heard the buzz about it. But there are some drawbacks. And there was a really great piece this week in Digital Trends that we'll include in our show notes that talked about why we might not need 5G at all. And while I think that 5G is... The writing's on the wall, like we're going to have 5G whether we need it or not. It's a bigger number. Of course we're going to have it, right? It's going to happen. So that's certainly not why I bring the story up. But there's some great stuff in here that I didn't really realize or appreciate before about some of the drawbacks of 5G. And so I thought it was an interesting article that we could at least discuss here for a few minutes. And certainly the obvious things are 5G promises really fast speeds, and we all want that, but there are a number of drawbacks in terms

of the primarily revolving around the ability of a 5G signal because of the millimeter wave bandwidth that it uses, it is very, very bad at penetrating through materials. So this article literally talks about a stop sign. A stop sign could prevent the 5G signal, could completely block that signal theoretically from reaching your phone. And so there's quite a bit to pick apart in this story but yeah yeah it's it's pretty much yeah exactly it's it's it almost almost requires line of sight with you know very very few exceptions so it's it's an interesting read what one of the you know stop signs aside uh one of the most interesting things i i saw in here of course it's more drawbacks it's like of course the carriers are doing different things

right so verizon's rolling out a non-standard we've talked about this in the past they're rolling out a 28 and 39 gigahertz uh spectrum and then everybody else is is running something else 30 to 300 gigahertz and then i think sprint i in this article, is kind of rolling out 5G on their same spectrum that they run 4G on. So it's all going to be mixed and mashed up. And then you're going to have to basically install some type of antenna device. They're calling them small cells in this article. But you'll have to get some kind of repeater basically installed for your house to get 5G internet put into your house, right?

So there'll be an antenna outside that can pick up the 5G signal and pipe whatever internet that is into your house in however way that manifests. I suspect that 5G will be kind of like the pipe to the house and then you'll have Wi-Fi inside because it makes no sense to repeat a 5G signal through a wall that's just going to be blocked by a bedroom wall inside.

Just use technology that works inside like Wi-Fi and stop trying to go crazy with 5G. But man, there's a lot more roadblocks and hurdles that this this technology that man if we haven't heard anything about in base t uh i have heard nothing but fanfare on 5g like that it's gonna be so cool when it gets here it's so awesome and and like everything i'm reading about it is like no this is this is gonna be be messy and ugly. And I'm not going to get near this until maybe 6G will be awesome, but 5G does not look very tempting. More Gs, just give me more Gs, right? Yeah, one of the other interesting things about this article is it talks about advances in 4G and 4G LTE, apparently, according to this article, is approaching 400 megs per second

already. Like that's happening today. So 400 megs per second versus a gig per second. Sure. That's a theoretical, like there, I think 5G is only 300 at this point. Like that's what they're offering in their plans. Right. That, That was, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say is like 5G, a lot of people think about is this gigabit per second technology, but that's theoretical. That's like what they can do in a lab, like a very controlled environment, right? 4G LTE is approaching 400 already. They have plans to boost this even faster. So they've got, according to this article, technologies called carrier aggregation. And I always forget how to, the proper way to pronounce this MIMO or M-I-M-O, multiple in, multiple out. That's a common Wi-Fi thing that you hear about.

It's just more sophisticated antenna technology. But, you know, with these plans that they're working on, like 4G is going to begin pushing closer to those same theoretical speeds. So the article asks the question, like, is 5G even needed? Right? Again, I think 5G is a foregone conclusion. I think it's going to happen. There's a lot of big money invested in it. And it's this sort of sexy, like appealing technology that a lot of people are excited about, but really good read. Like I would highly encourage you if you're listening to this episode and you've been hearing a lot about 5g but you're not exactly sure what's going on like this is a quick read

it's not a super long article uh go check it out because i think it does a really good job of it's it's not all down on 5g like it talks about what some of the good things about 5g are but there are plenty of hurdles that this technology still needs to clear yeah and for something that i mean it needs to clear but it's also like they're rolling it out now they're rolling it out verizon's rolling out their version in a couple cities and then what we i forget who we said was the next one at&t i guess is yep it's starting up theirs as well um but yeah i i've i've gotta gotta wonder if it's even i i don't know the the rendering it unnecessary is probably not the right thing we we always want faster things and if 5g can get us to one gigabit per second data limits i mean 400 is not going to be acceptable to many people very much longer.

So but given like that said, like we're always going to want faster things. I just I wonder how how that's going to manifest, because some of some of the some of the things that they they're saying in this article that this is this is going to require is that carriers are going to need to put out these small cells on every, this is kind of hyperbolic, I think, but every flag and telephone pole, street sign, building, whatever, finding places to put all those antennas will be a preposterous challenge in and of itself. And yeah, I mean, that could be what they have, like some kind of repeater technology, but I don't know, like 5G could be just the backbone to whatever that little black box is that sits on your telephone pole or sits on your house. And then maybe that can serve both your house and other houses in the area. So I don't know. I think we're pretty crafty with technology. This tool will upgrade and surpass itself in no time.

Like we'll be talking about 6G in two years anyway, so I don't know why they're worried about 5G so much. 6G will be right around the corner. Yeah, there's just a lot of misconception. Greg in the chat room says he has a client who claims 5G is going to put Cisco out of business for selling switches. Greg goes on to say, not quite sure how that computes, but he's the finance investment guy worth millions, right? I don't know. I'm with

you. Personally, I don't profess to be an expert, but I'm with you in the sense that I think 5G, to me, makes more sense as a backbone out there moving data around on a broader scale. And once it gets to that last mile to the home, like, I think there's still going to be a need for, like, a wife for the foreseeable future. There's going to be a need for Wi-Fi and a router. And like, I mean, I don't personally want every device in my home connected straight up to 5G through, you know, straight up to the cloud through 5G. Like I'd rather have a router and a firewall and a little bit of control over, you know, how my, how my stuff is protected on my personal network. And maybe that's going to be an old fashioned view someday. Like maybe literally everything at some point will be 5G or 6G or 10G or whatever at that time that we're at. And it goes

straight up to the cloud and all the magic happens up there. But for the foreseeable future, I think 5G is it, you know, we talk about it on the show because it's relevant. It's largely talked about as a mobile technology. So most of the stories you're going to read about 5G, if you go start poking around, they're going to be related to cell phones. And that's really where a lot of the focus is right now. But how does 5G impact data delivery to and from the home and what does that actually equate to for a for an everyday user i think is still something that that we're all trying to figure out yeah i mean you're gonna have to think about and you're gonna have to wire for it like if you're if you're pulling wire in a house uh i don't even know which i guess you need to bring some maybe some cat5 or

cat6 cable out to the soffit somewhere. Who knows which direction the, the, the antenna is going to be that you need to point in like that. It's, it's going to be a mess I think for a while. So I'm, I'm not really, I'm not really encouraged by what I, what I've been reading on 5g. It'll give us plenty to talk about. Yeah. exactly. Well, I mean, I can't... I got to stop playing with this. I can't... Like, I can only get... My house is kind of situated on an island.

It's not... It's just an island. It's surrounded by water. But Comcast is the only people that service this island. I can look across the little tiny ditch we call a creek, and I can see a house and i know that house has both comcast and it can have verizon files like everybody has or i think they call it frontier now but they have fiber optic i could get fiber to the house but i can't get it

at my house because they didn't bring it over a bridge and put it on my my street and they won't they're never going to because they will not yeah exactly i have a moat greg yeah that's exact um so yeah they're not going to bring it over my moat and and and bring me fiber so but so i'm never going to have anything better than what comcast can deliver over their cable lines which isn't isn't all that great but if i had fiber i could i mean you get much faster speeds at a much lower price with fiber and I would have done that, but I can't, but this, uh, this, uh, 5g, I mean, could be something I could see myself moving to in the future. Right. Cause I could, I could get up to a gigabit, uh, internet capacity over a wireless signal that goes out to some cell tower somewhere. So that could be good for me, but I'm not at all thinking that's going to happen anytime soon either.

Just because of the challenges of getting maybe a line of sight or relaying off to some other relay junction box or something like that. It's going to be a while before this gets rolled out and is actually practical for most people, I think. Yep. Well, it's certainly going to be an evolving landscape for the foreseeable future. And it is an exciting technology, but I think always great to rein things in a little bit and make sure you've got a real perspective on the drawbacks and the challenges in front of any technology. And 5G is no exception. So again, go check out that story if you're not familiar with what's going on with 5g and it's certainly a topic that we will be talking about on future episodes moving on here all of the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found

in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 232 while you're there don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter we'll send you weekly show reminders and occasional updates about all of the great things happening here in the world of home tech one last time that link is home tech dot fm slash 232 and don't forget you can join us in in live uh chat room usually wednesdays bar barring Halloween holidays. We do our best. Yeah, we're trying. We really are. Like, you know, today's Tuesday, but we'll get started between, you know, 7, 730 Eastern Time, the one true time zone.

And you can find out more by going to hometech.fm slash live and following the hashtag hometech live hashtag or following us on Twitter at hometech podcast. Yep. I'll usually put something on there and say, we're going live. And today it was kind of funny because I did that and it was a surprise for most people. Yeah, we're definitely off our normal night here. So we appreciate having a couple of you guys in the chat room hanging out. That always makes it a lot of fun. So we appreciate that. We have got a gem of a pick of

the week. I, I don't know if we need to move away from using the term pick of the week because we've been doing more and more, uh, video these days, which come up occasionally in this one picture strung together. This one is a classic. I got to say. Yeah. So I this one is this one is a classic i gotta say yeah so i i think i think this is uh this is a youtube link we'll put in the show notes uh but this is uh basically what's happened uh is this this guy has a beach or a beach front community and it gets a lot of extra foot traffic during the during the summertime of course and uh i guess he lives near bars and uh the patrons feel that it's okay to just kind of like pop in underneath his house there and relieve themselves.

And so he has automated some sprinklers to hilarity, hilarious effect. Like this is probably one of the funniest videos I've seen for automation in a long time. It's great. It's great. Motion activated sprinklers. He's got a bucket booby trap as well. A couple of them. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, so these sort of younger adults who are presumably on vacation, enjoying this beachfront community and coming out of a bar and it's like this area small area between two homes and you know i i lived in southern california for a while and totally like these are everywhere i'm sure these are probably right along the water and

there's these these little areas between the homes and these people are mostly men by the way actually all men probably there's some women that try and sneak back oh yeah yeah a couple i was surprised actually i have to watch it again yeah but anyways they all get a rude surprise one of my favorites was a guy about halfway into the video um like floodlights turn on there's a sprinkler blasting him in the chest and you can tell he's like so caught off guard he doesn't know what to do that he literally puts his hands up in the air like it's the cops or something like like it's a cop or like somebody's got him under arrest and he just is like i give up like i don't know what's happening uh so anyways this is this is a classic and not

really home automation in the sense that we typically think of it here on the show but uh but pretty funny definitely go check this out it it here on the show, but pretty funny. Definitely go check this out. It checks all the boxes for me. I mean, it's a picture, so it's a pic. And then, yeah, it's automated. So automated, done. And it's home technology.

It's around the home. So done. That's right. No, it's great. This is a good one. So definitely go check that out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for a show, definitely give us a shout. We would love to hear from you. Our

email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that's feedback at hometech.fm, or you can head over to the website at hometech.fm slash feedback. And there's an online form there that you can fill out. And we'd love to hear hear from you we read all of those messages and really enjoy the ideas and suggestions that we get there so we would uh love if you would take a couple of minutes time and reach out and we'll look forward to that yep and we want to give a big thank you to everyone who is uh supporting the show but especially those for who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a shout-out on the show, but every single pledge gets you an automatic, automated picture. No,

it doesn't get you any pictures, but it gets you an automated invite to our private Slack channel, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about the inside baseball conversations of all aspects of home technology. Some pretty good conversations have been going on there around different products and stuff. I've been popping in. I've been really busy with work lately, but I've been trying to pop in when I can. And yeah, it's always an interesting time there to see what's going on with guys who are working throughout the world. Like it's not just the US, it's guys over in the UK and they'll get on early in the morning here

and I'll wake up and there'll be like 20 messages from them going back and forth about something they're doing today. Yeah, no, it's a great community. I completely agree and have a lot of fun. I don't check in there as much as I should, but every time I do, I enjoy the conversations. And it's, like we said, a great community.

So go check that out. If you do want to help out the show, but can't contribute financially, we totally get that. We would also really appreciate a review on iTunes, five-star review on iTunes or your podcast app of choice. Five stars, definitely what we're shooting for, but any review is appreciated. Let us know what we're doing well.

Let us know what we could do better. We would absolutely love to hear from you. Absolutely. Well, Jason, I think that wraps up this week. I need to go start taking, what is it, insulin? What do you have to take for uh for too much candy get get started on that now exactly because uh it's happening tomorrow i'm i i we already have too much candy in the house and it's on i'm right there with you no more keto diet so

no this is not a good week to to try and keto that's for sure not at all i have a i have a funny picture i'll have to dig it up and put it in the show notes but it's it's like got a picture of the rock like it's like me after a year of three years of keto it's like you know how he's huge guy he's ripped and everything's like flexing his muscles and then he's got a picture of maui it's like one donut later i gotta find that that. That's great. Try and put it in the show notes. All right. Well, enjoy your Halloween, Seth. Uh, great chatting with you this week and I'll look forward to reconnecting with you again very soon. All right, Jason. Well, thanks everybody, uh, for tuning in tonight. Thanks for the guys over there hanging out in

the chat room unexpectedly, but thanks. Thanks for showing up. Yep, we appreciate it. We'll talk with you guys next week. All right. Sounds good. Take care. you you Thank you. Thank you.