HomeTech.fm - Episode 238 - To Inifi-K and Beyond!

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 21st. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. And from not-so-sunny Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. How you doing, Seth? Good, good. Got some rain today, finally. All right. This is what we call a white winter, white Christmas, right? Closest you get.

What are you going to do? Closest you get. What are you up to these days? Well, just back in Denver here for a few days and getting ready to head down to Arizona to spend some time with my parents for Christmas. So that'll be a nice trip. And we've had quite a bit of travel this holiday season so it's all fun i really enjoy it but definitely ready to get back to uh to a more normal schedule it's definitely takes its toll on you but i can't complain you know holiday season's in in full swing and and

we're having a good time yeah excellent well when you when you're visiting you're visiting the parents down there um there's one thing you got to do. You got to go to their TVs and you got to turn off Auto Motion Plus, right? Oh, that's already done. I did that like five trips ago. Just make sure it doesn't get reset because somehow, sometimes, you never know. The feature that keeps on giving. Yeah, yeah.

So you, and then you can just say, your house is Tom Cruise approved. Indeed. Once you do that. So I don't know if you saw this thing, but a couple weeks ago, we haven't done a show in a while, but a couple weeks ago, I saved this. And Tom Cruise was going around telling everybody to turn off motion smoothing on their TVs. And they made like this official looking video, right? Like it's the most crazy odd. Well, I would say it's almost the second most crazy odd thing tom cruise has ever done that's saying something for tom on twitter

it's got like 24 000 retweets and it's sort of like a a psa and it's him and i forget the guy's name on his on his left there it's a director or producer forgive me for not knowing that but they're very very serious and they're talking about the endemic problem that is auto motion plus or whatever the other manufacturers call it and i gotta i gotta kick out of this it's good to see some some hollywood people using their their platform for such an important cause right yes make sure you do sure you do. And I was in a hotel room and it had this stupid thing turned on. And it was like,

if I'm staying at a hotel, like, you know, the lights, if they're 5K, I'm out. But if there's auto motion turned on on the TV, I'll figure that out and turn it off because I'm not living with that. Yeah, you're not changing light bulbs though? No, I'm not changing light bulbs.

But the TV, I do uh my duty uh as a home technologist i will turn off that stupid auto motion plus every time so uh if you if you stay in the room after me you're welcome yeah it's sort of like like if you go to a coffee shop and you buy a stranger a cup of coffee as a random act of kindness yeah that's basically what you're doing pass it on. Pass it on. Pay it forward. Pay it forward.

That's what it is. I couldn't remember the name of that movie. Yeah, pay it forward. Well, what do you say we jump into a few home tech headlines here? Let's do it. Smart home camera maker Lighthouse AI is calling it a day. Turning off the lights. The news first reported by the information has since been confirmed by CEO Alex Teichman.

He's quoted, I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking work that the Lighthouse team accomplished. Unfortunately, we did not achieve the commercial success we were looking for and will be shutting down operations in the near future. Teichman, that's a nice name, Jason, thanks. You get a hard one this week. Promises the company will provide refund details to those customers who have already bought into the product. Unfortunate. Unfortunate. Like last week was kind of the first time I'd heard of this company.

We were talking on our, our, our fireside chat. Rose Thibodeau brought it up and I went and checked out their website. I'm like, oh, this is a cool product. And it's gone. That's how it works man you gotta move quick you gotta move fast speaking of products disappearing lows the giant home improvement retailer is giving up on the smart home market the company which has more than 2 000 locations recently announced plans to exit the home automation market and is seeking a buyer for its iris smart home business as part of a quote strategic reassessment so kind of a

bummer to see that we hadn't heard a lot from them in recent times but i know when they first came out they actually looked like they might have a fairly compelling offering but it looks like they are not pursuing that anymore and it will be interesting to see if somebody moves in and picks up that technology i think i think so that's right for purchase because it's like there's a decent ecosystem there yep um but it's just not for lows is kind of what they were saying it's like we're just going to let this go off and do its own thing and we're going to it's not going to be part of our initiative anymore which is which is interesting hopefully somebody will pick them up and keep moving them forward. Maybe, maybe the next company we'll talk about,

Office Depot, is the latest to enter the smart home fray after announcing that it is now a certified installation partner for Google and Nest through its new Workonomy Tech Services division. As a Nest Pro partner, the company can install a single device or integrate several smart devices creating a secure integrated smart home or office google will provide office depot's tech experts with quote exclusive training tools and live vip support ensuring that every

office depot customer gets their smart home or office service from the best trained professionals interesting yeah yeah that that one is interesting i had to look up that workonomy group it's sort of like their version of of geek squad i guess yeah geek squad yeah also on a on a side note greg in the chat room mentioned that lowes here where greg's up in canada just started offering smart home installation services so everybody getting in on the game. Interesting. They're exiting the hardware business, but still appear to have some interest in the space.

So we'll have to keep an eye on that. Thanks for the heads up on that, Greg. Moving on, Apple Music subscribers will have a new way to listen to music soon. Amazon has announced that Apple Music will be available on Echo devices next month, beginning the week of December 17th. So it's actually a couple of weeks old. And as we're recording here, this should be available now. Once the feature rolls out, users will be able to ask Alexa on Echo devices to play

songs, artists and albums from Apple Music. After pairing their account to the Alexa mobile app. Subscribers can also ask Alexa to play curated playlists and radio stations, including Apple beats one station. This is a, this is, I think this is a super important story that kind of gets lost in the details, but Apple putting this, their music service on Amazon and actually admitting that the echo exists and

that Alexa is a thing like that's not something Apple has done for the past couple of years, right? Yeah. This is really, really a strange time. So, I mean, they've been talking about being a service company moving forward. I think this is what it's going to look like. And maybe the Apple TV, I mean, that was one of my things we were talking about on the show, on the Fireside Chat, was that, you know, maybe we'll see Apple TV on Alexa device, or not Alexa, but the Fire TVs and that kind of thing.

It would be interesting. We'll see what happens. Indeed. Speaking of video, as scheduled, at 10 a.m. local time, December 1st, Japanese TV networks began publicly broadcasting 8K channels over satellite. Even after a couple of years testing, began publicly broadcasting 8K channels over satellite. Even after a couple of years testing, NHK is currently the only one pushing content at 8K with 22.2 channel surround sound.

Wow, 22.2. Maybe gone for the whole 24, guys. Let's see. The first movie listed in its TV guide is 2001, A Space Odyssey. And the BBC reports that Warner Brothers rescan the film's original 70 millimeter negative specifically for this broadcast. That's that's actually pretty cool. I think that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy story. So won't be too much longer. And we'll be seeing 8K and all of us 4K TV owners will feel behind the times again.

Wonderful. Going to need an 8K TV. 16K is next. Yeah. Moving on here. Story near and dear to my heart. I, as you know, love these tactile control stories. Still think it's an underexplored space. Scenic, spelled S-E-N-I-C, announced via their Twitter feed that their Numneumo control now works with Sonos. The Pneumo is an

intuitive tactile control product that looks like a small aluminum disc and can be placed on just about any surface, including a wall. The control surface supports click, touch, swipe, and rotation gestures, has a nine by nine LED matrix display, and is priced at $299 bundled with a hub. And I know I had a chance to stop by their booth at Cedia, and I have to say the build quality on this device felt really impressive. Definitely a heavy device. I think $299 is going to be a tough price point for a lot of people, and I'll be curious to see if they're able to get penetration at that price point. But really neat product nonetheless.

Definitely worth checking out. Yeah. I was on their website earlier, and I'm like, I want one of these, and I clicked on buy now, and it was like, it's going to have to wait. Going to wait. Wait until they drop the price.

Yeah, yeah. Last week, Philips announced they would be fixing one of the most annoying features of the Hue product line. You know, the one where all of your stinking lights would turn on after a power outage. It's ridiculous. Oh, my.

Regardless of whatever state they were in when you turned, you know, the power went off. So in the middle of the night, the power goes on, all of your Hue lights come back on. Insane. Version 3.1 of, sorry, version 3.11 of the Hue app now allows you to configure the lights to turn to the previous state when the power is interrupted.

I think this is huge and probably about six years overdue for the Hue line. Thanks, Philips. You did it. You did it. Wow. I had no idea that was a problem. Oh, yeah. Thankfully, don't have a lot of power outages here,

but I know in a lot of areas that's not an uncommon occurrence. So I can see how that would get really annoying. And the reason it is annoying is because most people who install install phillips light bulbs and then their lights or their ceiling or whatever they're they're having you know they're they're they're they're not changing out the light switch so they're leaving the light switch on all the time to keep the phillips u powered so they can use some other method of controlling of course for those guys yeah that's that's a major issue and putting like duct tape over the switch so their spouse or partner or housekeeper doesn't, yeah, totally. Stepping backwards just for a moment here, Eric in the chat room, I think just coined a new term, Infinike.

You don't have to worry about 4 or 8 or 16 or whatever comes after that. I like that. To Infinike and beyond. I just got back from watching movies. Yeah, that's great. We got a show title there um cool moving on here this story i gotta i gotta tee this up is ridiculous a class action lawsuit canary filed against canary they are accused of pulling a bait and switch in court documents a group of consumers claim they purchased canary devices that promise no additional fees other than the cost of buying the device. A change came in October of 2017 when several formerly free features required a monthly payment to access.

That included the ability to watch previously recorded videos. Now, my question is, they say they were promised no additional fees. I don't know of any company that's ever promised me anything. So I'd be curious to see that if indeed that is true, then that kind of changes the dynamic. But I got to believe that this is just a group of consumers that, you know, bought these devices, and they don't realize like, all of these companies are trying to figure it out and establish strategies that keep them in business. And, uh, this class action suit to me is, it just totally ridiculous. Yeah. It's bonkers. I mean, they still offer,

like you can still have 30 second video clips after motion being detected, like one day video history, 24 live, 24 seven check-ins. Like it's still mostly works and i think i think you can get 30 days of like your saved uh like footage like things that have been in there so um but you have to pay ten dollars a month for some of those i i have a canary i used it for believe it or not my garage um but like i find actually if anybody wants this canary reach out to me uh feedback at hometTech.fm. See how fast we can get rid of this.

Like I will just send it to you. Like I'll hit the reset button on it and send it over to you because I don't use it anymore. And, you know, my canary needs a home. But I didn't mind using the product. Like it worked really well every single time I went to it. And I saw some of this stuff when it went on like i think i mean would you rather them take some of these features away and and say okay this is how we have to figure we figure out how we're going to stay alive or at the top of the show we talked

about uh lighthouse like the other option is like these companies go out of business like yeah they have to figure out how to and then. And then you have nobody to sue. Right, exactly. And your product doesn't work. Exactly. I don't know. Crazy. I'm with you, Jason.

This is absolutely asinine. Well, anyway, let's move on. Peak TV update. Let's see. There is no end in sight for the so-called peak TV surge in scripted originals, according to the research provided by FX Networks. FX on Thursday released its annual study on the state of scripted television, revealing that the number of originals,

like Game of Thrones, Narcos, Narcos and Pose? I don't know what that is. Is that like... Yeah, I'm not sure of that third one. I know the other two, obviously. Hit a record of 495. 495 originals in 2018.

Wow. As expected, online services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the new rival of Apple led the charge, representing a 32% increase of all originals up from 25 last year and topping both basic cable and broadcast TV for the first time since fx began tracking growth in 2014 um man i i gotta say i'm i'm loving the originals uh patriot if you haven't seen it go see it patriot you're still on patriot i love it yeah it's so good i um i want to check out narcos i know that one's my wife and i just reactivated Netflix. So we hadn't, hadn't had it for a while.

Uh, but as you know, we cut the cord recently. And so we added Netflix and I got to say that apps come a long ways. I mean, I wasn't shocked because I follow the space pretty closely, but man, the amount of scripted originals and original content in general on there is pretty, pretty staggering to me. And so we're really, we're really enjoying it. We're getting into Ozark right now. Not sure if you've watched that one yep i've seen it uh i think i'm kind of it's kind of

puttered out for me on the second or third season that they were in but um it's a it's a good show i really enjoyed the first definitely the first season or season first one and a half seasons or so is there multiple seasons of that we're on season one i i wasn't sure the first season is definitely good so yeah jason bateman uh I think he's directing some of those. He does a really good job. And I definitely enjoyed it. I definitely enjoyed it. It's a character-driven kind of like crime thing.

I don't know. Yeah, great show. Great season one, at least. Like I said, we haven't gotten to season two or three yet. I've still heard good things. I just think it kind of like puttered it. As they often do. It's hard.

Yeah. I mean, how far can you take it you get into well i'm going to say this and then recommend uh patriot but uh like you you get into like so many situations where like he's never going to get out of this and it's like yeah he probably will because you know he's the main character of the show and yeah because i'm watching season two and there's still a whole another season and a half or whatever yeah right right yeah it's it's still a good show and there's some surprising things that do happen in it that you just don't see coming but um yeah i i will put a stamp on that ozark really good one cool but definitely if you if you like ozark jason you'll like patriot so yeah check that out all

right you're you're very bullish on patriot so we'll uh we'll have to add that to the queue i think i would like it watching the trailer i'm not sure if my wife would be into it. That's the only challenge. Yeah, dark comedy. It's a dark, dark comedy. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, that's it for our news this week.

We do not have a guest lined up. All of the links and topics that we've discussed here can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter on the right-hand side of the website there. We'll send you weekly show reminders and occasional updates about all of the wonderful things going on here in the world of Hometech. Once again, that link is HOMETECH.FM.238. You can also join us in the chat room live each Wednesday, maybe, starting 7 to 7.30, somewhere around there, Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live.

And you can watch our Twitter at Hometech Podcast. Usually, I will tweet out, you know, a little thing that says, we're going live. If you want to catch the show live and kind of interact with us in the chat room, you can do it there. Yeah, absolutely. Seth, we're going to skip the mailbag this week, although there was some residual, I guess, a gentleman catching up on the backlog and reminding you in case you've forgotten that the Alexa buzzer was not a popular choice. choice yeah well it isn't and uh i i fully agree with him at this point like uh the and i think some of that may be in my head yeah my editing like i may have left some of those a little loud in there um i think it was really good for um shock therapy on the live but i don't think it translated well to the uh to the podcast portion so yeah if anyone else is listening and didn't

like that like we're done with it. I think you know that by now. 2018, end of the bell. We're done. There we go. We do, however, have a couple of gems here for pick of the week. And this first one is, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this one, Seth. This comes from hiddenwires.co.uk. So a UK site. Financier sues architect over quote ugly

floating cinema and there's a glorious picture of this thing that looks like a giant uh i don't know glass box like frosted glass though like you can't see through it i i don't know it's ugly i'll give him that i mean i don't think anybody's going to disagree with that it's that it's are there any pictures of the i'm just curious what's on the inside i don't think there's any pictures of of what's on the inside but it mr freeborn was supposedly inspired by the architect's vision and authorized a quote sleek modernist cube to house a home cinema built in the roof space of his pool room you got to go look at this thing it's amazing it's uh he's not too

happy with the results um he doesn't say too much about like the performance so i really don't know what a glass theater sounds like inside jason i'm hoping that there's some kind of sound treatment in there. It's not just a glass box with speakers inside of it. But you never know. You never know. This story is definitely missing pictures of the inside. I am very curious. If anybody has pictures of the inside of this theater, please send them to us.

We want to see these. Because, I don't know, this showed up in the Hub maybe a week or two ago. I'm not sure. But man, I forgot who posted it at this point. I didn't write it down in our show notes. But this thing, we talked about this and made a couple of jokes about it quite a bit. Like one of my favorite ones was thinking about where the speakers are installed. And maybe they cut holes in glass to put the speakers in.

Uh, man, this, this is so ugly. So ugly. The quote here is the, uh, that, that kind of, uh, Philip Freeborn, senior financier, uh, let's see, suing for damages 1 million in the high court for a floating home cinema. Philipip freeborn head of global banking at tory global claims the project on his seven million pound pound home yeah seven million pound home went wrong badly wrong leaving an expensive white elephant quote unquote that only demolition and a complete rebuild can fix holy Holy cow. I'm not going to argue that point. I'm not going to argue any of... I don't think it's fixable, Jason. I've seen a lot of work in my time. How did it get this far, though, without... I don't know. I mean, if he couldn't be on site,

did nobody send him a picture or something? Or a drawing, like a concept or i don't know that baffles my mind what's baffling is like the it's it's got like an a-frame pitched roof and then like the theater like there's holes cut in the drywall for the theater glass to fit into the roof space because it's too wide for the for the for the room is that what it looks like to you that's what it kind of looks like to me it's like they cut holes for it to fit into the space. Yeah, up at the top. It's so weird. Yeah. There's so many questions that are over this.

And I really hope this lawsuit goes forward and we get some. I don't know if, like it's here in the U.S. where you can read things, you know, from court stenographers and that kind of thing. We have to know more. If you know anything about this, you know, let us know. We've got good listenership in the uk and if somebody can run this down we'd appreciate it last thing here the quote architectural jewel end quote was designed and built by architect daniel marcal who argues that at every stage of the project this was approved by the couple from design to creation arguing that he followed the brief while working on an, quote, ad hoc basis.

So this is a weird one. There's got to be more to the story, but it is a gem. Definitely go check out that picture once again. It'll be at hometech.fm slash 238. Yep. And so a gem, but here's a better pick of the week for you. Richard Gunther, a friend of the show, he was on the Fireside Chat last week, came out with this a couple weeks ago.

And, man, we haven't had time to plug it on the show yet. So I want to plug this thing. He has figured out a way, a very, like, ingenious way of using Lutron Pico remotes with HomeKit. And I've got to say, it's pretty smart. So what he's done is kind of a thing that I used to use in Lutron all the time. And I think it's other lighting systems have this concept of having like fake keypads that you can kind of put into a system and you can program buttons on those fake keypads to trigger scenes kind of put into a system uh and you can program buttons on those fake keypads to trigger scenes and whatnot and you're from from another control system

he's kind of flips that on his head and goes the other way around where you put in some fake products maybe inside of your uh your um your lutron setup i think what they used is a dimmer like a dimmer module and what they do they, what he's doing is he's setting that up to go to a particular level. So say if, say if the device is like 10%, this is what I'm reading out of it. If I'm wrong, let me know. But what it looks like he's doing, he's saying if it goes to 10%, then you're going to trigger this particular scene or something based on that button. Like, so basically you're taking the five buttons that are on the pico and basically mapping them over to like percentage values it looks like

he says you can't do this in the the home kit home kit app like the native home kit app you'll have to have something better he recommends the elgato one which is i think this is like speaks to what home kit can do like they give you a pretty basic app that is decent, but if you want to take command and to go in deeper, you can use other apps that expose more of the API. And Elgato evidently has scenes and rules that have these advanced things in them. So he's got a really good walkthrough.

We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But man, I think this is really slick. You can actually use Lutron Pico remotes to trigger event scenes, whatever you want, through HomeKit, which I think is awesome. Yeah, I'm just kind of skimming through the article as you were talking there. And definitely an in-depth guide. He's got a lot of pictures and visuals walking you through how to do this and definitely agree. You know, he starts the article out explaining that Pico is one of the greatest sort of unsung products in the smart home. And I agree, it's a very inexpensive device. They're sturdy, they're well built, the battery battery lasts a long time,

they're very flexible in terms of how you can install them and easy to use, right? So you can put these around your house, you don't have to really know your way around a smart home in order to learn how to use these they work very much like a a light switch only you've got a few more buttons so four maybe six button keypad um great way to get them working with home kit i i think they work on their what is it their clear connect protocol is how they work by default he He talks about how Staples Connect Hub, way back when that was still around, did work natively with them. But not a lot of other products do. And so if you want to get this, if you've got a HomeKit home and you want a great way to add some physical control, definitely go check out this article. We'll have a link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, definitely. So if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And as we always do here at the close of the show, Seth, we want to give a big thank you to everybody who supports the Hometech podcast, but especially those of you who are able to financially support our efforts through our Patreon page. If you are not familiar with Patreon, head on over to hometech.fm slash support, where you can learn how you can support our efforts here for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 a month, we'll give you a big shout out on air. But every single pledge, even at $1, we'll give you an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub,

where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology. So great community there, and we'd love to have you. Yep, and if you want to support our show but can't support financially, we definitely appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. Anything you can do to help promote the show, tell your friends and family when you're over for the holiday this year. You just tell them, hey, have you heard of Home Tech? Because it's a cool podcast and has two really cool guys on it, right?

That's right. And one told me to watch Patriot, and I really like it. He's got great taste in TV shows. Right, right? That's right. And one told me to watch Patriot, and I really like it. He's got great taste in TV shows. Right, right. Right, right, yeah. Cool. Well, what are your big, you got big plans for Christmas, Seth? No, not, I mean, it's the first Christmas where I think my daughter is kind of like almost grasping what's going on.

So I'm excited about that. Yeah, two years old. She has been saying ho-ho every time she sees Santa. So she knows that's a thing. She knows like what he does, it seems, that she may be getting a blah-blah, which is her word for bicycle, which, you know, Santa's got to bring a blah-blah now.

Yeah, it works. You know, you start to learn to interpret. Yeah, well, there's definitely a different language that's being spoken in this house. Oh, yeah. I frequently, my wife is with the kids all day, and I frequently have to be like, babe, I need you to come over here and translate. Oh, he's asking for his water bottle. Oh, duh.

Like, why did I know that? It sounded just like alligator. I don't know why. I don't know why I didn't know. Yeah, I have that problem too. Just kind of sit there and stare at her until she points into the right direction. I can figure out what she wants. Eventually you figure it out.

Yep. Cool. Well, enjoy that. Yeah, I know that my kids are four and two, and I get it. It's a really fun time of year for them, and they're really looking forward to it. So we'll have a great time and definitely want to thank everybody for listening. And by the way, quick plug, if you didn't tune in last week, be sure you do. It was a great show. We had our annual fireside special with Mike Wolfe and Richard

Gunther. And we had Rose Thibodeau on for the first time. She's got a great YouTube channel called It's Rose where she does really, really good smart home product reviews. If you haven't checked that out, definitely go take a look. And she joined us for the first time this year on our Fireside Chat. Again, that was last week. So go check that out. That'd be hometech.fm slash 237. Yep.

Had a good time. Good time recording that show and even more fun time editing. Editing, I'm sure. Five people is tough. Five people. You did a good job. It gets into the realm of head scratching. Yeah.

Ice cream headaches. Well, yeah. Ice cream headaches. Yeah, exactly. Well, beer. Is it beer headaches? Can I have those? I guess I can.

All right. Cool, Seth. Well, great time chatting with you tonight. We'll look forward to reconnecting again soon. Absolutely. I'll talk to you. If I don't talk to you next week, Jason, I'll see you next year. All right.

Sounds good. Take care, Seth.