Transcript
Discussion (0)
The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support.
This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 24th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin.
And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, what's going on?
Episode 300.
The big 300.
Yeah, it's exciting. And we've got quite a special show. Definitely a big step out
of our normal routine this week. We've got a whole panel here with us of brave volunteers to help us
with a grand experiment here on Home Tech. We wanted to do something special for episode 300,
and I'm looking forward to this one. Yeah, this should be fun. This should be a lot of fun. Well,
since we're teasing the panel, let's go ahead and introduce everybody here that we've got in here.
And I guess it's not huge.
I know Richard was here, but his computer rebooted because that's what they do at the most inopportune times.
In fact, that's what I was dealing with before we started.
Mine decided it was going to crash.
And, well, it's freshly rebooted now, so nothing to worry about. But I know we've got some longtime listeners of the show here, so
let's run down and start with you, Anthony. Just introduce yourself real quick.
Anthony Rayner. I'm actually a physician assistant in hospital medicine, but technology is what I
like. Excellent. Awesome. Yeah. Looks like next up, Robert. Hi, Robert Spivak. I'm with
do it for me dot solutions. We're a systems integrator, smart home company in Gilroy,
California, Northern Cal. Right. And next up, Brendan. Sure. Brendan Davis, software engineer,
totally not doing home tech also in a professional way at all we work on a online video kind of zoom
clone type stuff but really big into home assistant and just bought our first house a year ago and
i've been trying to trick it out so thanks uh guillermo hey guillermo padilla from wayne new
jersey i'm a full-time global xd director for a pharma company and also part-time small business owner of a custom integration company.
Cool, cool.
Rashid, Rashid's in the chat most of the time, so now we get to see his face.
Yes, Rashid, I'm a small business owner.
I'm an AV integrator in Chicago.
Currently on location in Nashville on a job site.
Very cool.
Very cool.
And Jay, I think Jay is going to win for the best location award here.
So, Jay?
Hey, I am in Georgia and I am in automation or IT as well, working construction company.
But I'm just a hobbyist.
I enjoy HomeKit and smart things and playing around with both of them.
And you are on a golf course.
I am on a golf course.
And you are on a real golf course.
And it's not a virtual Zoom background golf course.
There's no fake background yet.
So it's a real thing i forgot
this popped up on my reminders and i thought i'd try to connect and see if it was possible i didn't
even think i'd be interacting with you guys i thought i'd be listening yep surprise thanks
thanks for joining us jay we appreciate it and then richard popped in here right at the uh the
last second richard uh we're doing introductions right now. That's how far we got. Perfect timing then. How are you doing? Uh, Richard Gunther and a longtime friend of the show
and a occasional guest. I, uh, am a writer at the digital media zone and I help run that site
and, uh, host a couple couple podcasts about smart home stuff myself.
Well, this is super exciting. That rounds out our panel of brave volunteers again for episode 300.
We appreciate you all being here. We're going to come back and do some more round robin stuff
later in the show. But for now, we're going to welcome again, you guys chiming in here,
Seth and I are going to jump into some headlines here shortly. Seth, before we did, I know everyone is, presumably not everybody
on the call here has young kids at home, but I think it's safe to assume maybe we have some
parents. I see a lot of heads nodding no, so maybe this one will only connect for you and me, Seth. But got a really interesting
email. And I think, you know, with COVID right now, everybody's sort of struggling to
figure out ways to keep the kids busy. And Seth, you know, I'm kind of getting more interested in
STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math activities for the kids. And a gentleman named
Dave, yourcub.com, happened to reach out because he saw a mention of STEM on one of our previous
shows. Got some pretty fun activities here. For anyone in the audience listening who does have
kids and you're looking for ways to keep them occupied, we'll include a link to this in our
show notes. Again, hometech.fm slash 300. Some pretty cool stuff in here.
Seth, my personal favorite.
He's got one set up.
Exploding Lego targets with a Nerf gun.
I like that idea.
That sounds fun.
I mean, that's the one that got my attention.
Yeah, that's...
If you're going to share...
Yeah, exactly.
If you're going to have any kind of setup, that's the way to go.
That's one of those viral headlines.
Exploding?
Yeah, exactly.
Let's do that.
Lego erupting volcano.
Bridge building challenge he's got here.
A marble maze.
Frozen Lego figures.
Anyways, lots of fun stuff here.
We won't stay on this one for too long.
I know we've got, it sounds like, not a lot of parents, Seth, in our panel here tonight. But anyways, I thought this was a too long. I know we've got, it sounds like not a lot of parents, Seth, in our
panel here tonight. But anyways, I thought this was a fun story and actually really well done
site. So if you're looking for some cool stuff to kind of keep the kids busy, definitely go check
that one out. Yeah, it is a challenge to keep, that's been the biggest challenge with me, right, right now with,
with, is, is, is adjusting the schedule where I'm, I'm parenting during the day, and then, like,
okay, now I've got to have a time where I'm going to have to start doing work,
and then doing work until late at night, like, it's just been one of the strangest adjustments,
and then, like, now we're doing this.
We're doing this virtual podcast here. Right. Even my daughter is doing like a virtual like preschool type thing.
So it's just kind of a that's right. It's kind of a strange time.
But like keeping them busy is big. I didn't kids. Jason, get this. Kids have energy. In breaking news, that's right.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, like a mile a minute.
She could keep going and going and going.
And then she crashes and gets to take a nap.
So there we go.
Keep them busy.
And these STEM things are pretty cool.
I'd like to see more of this stuff.
So, yeah.
Well, Seth, speaking of energy,
I've been trying to wrap my brain around the new Slack interface. I'm assuming Richard's going to have some opinions here. I'm not sure. Richard, how much have you used new Slack? This was a pretty big update for them. First of all, do you use Slack regularly in your work?
Yeah, it looks like I have about 11 Slack groups, actually. So yeah,
I use Slack. Got it. What's your take on the latest update? I know this was a big update for
them. It's got some cool new features. I personally haven't found a ton of use for some of these new
things, the new sidebar, the new compose function, you know, some of these things I know a bunch of
people that I work with are pretty excited about.
Really, I hit show less instantly, like show less.
Don't want to see, get it out of my way.
I didn't want to see this.
Well, yeah, I did that too.
I absolutely did that.
I think they improved search a little bit.
They made it easier to search and define search.
I think they've been gradually incorporating
the inline editing features,
which makes that really nice.
Now they're everywhere.
The biggest thing that I had hoped they would fix
is their awful implementation of threaded conversations,
and they haven't.
It's no better than it was before.
In fact, I'd argue it's worse
because the threaded panel now
takes over half of your screen yeah yeah and i've never been a fan of the threads section i try not
to participate to uh in those things but um i i do like i do not like sorry the the the formatting
thing like i i like my markdown and i know there's a way that you can go turn that on and i've done
it on at least one of my installs, but it doesn't evidently sync your settings
between all of the like mobile devices and things I have signed into Slack. So I'm not,
I'm, I'm not a fan of this. I want, I want my simple Slack that was for, uh, nerds back.
And then, yeah, Seth was not a big fan when they went to the uh the whizzy wig editor no i agree uh threads
are probably my biggest uh area of contention and um just generally like slack feels very
weighted towards kind of an instantaneous response uh environment my my current day-to-day is very
uh i'm in a lot of meetings and i'm constantly feel like i'm playing catch-up
with slack and i think in any sort of asynchronous and I'm constantly feel like I'm playing catch up with Slack.
And I think in any sort of asynchronous environment where you're not able to respond to things and stay on top of them and you start to get inundated with a lot of leaving things marked as unread, setting reminders,
you know, things of that nature, because I can't always get to everything that I need to get to in the 30 minutes I have between meetings. So I was hoping they'd do more to kind of address
some of that, improve the reminder system for one area is where I see some room for
improvement. But I don't know, I see the direction they're going and I generally like it. It sounds like, um, Brendan and Rashid, you guys were saying what's changed. Um,
have you guys seen the updated interface? Cause I know they were rolling this out, uh, slowly,
but so, so post update, my big, my big thing that got me is actually URLs. Uh, if you paste in a URL,
the markdown formatter will be nice and try to format it for you.
It always did that.
But they broke it.
Now when I paste URLs, our URLs can be very long and complicated and query strings and
hashes and all these crazy things in there.
You can't click them anymore.
Oh, wow.
It truncates halfway through and just breaks it into three or four links.
Oh,
wow.
So we,
yeah,
we're,
we're struggling over here.
Even if you put it in a code block,
same thing.
So,
Oh yeah, we're,
we're struggling over here.
I wonder if you can't use the,
the,
uh,
they're like they're in the API side.
You can use a little like,
uh,
open bracket.
I think you,
the URL is first and then you pipe the pipe symbol and then the text.
And it's kind of like a pseudo HTML markdown thing that they have.
Can you use that?
So that's the kind of stuff we have to resort to now is that or trying to use regular markdown.
But yeah, otherwise it's slick.
I'm also curious when Discord, that app launched, very similar to Slack, probably a competitor.
It looked identical.
I thought it was Slack.
I thought someone ripped them off.
And they also had a really big update last week.
And I'm like, wait a minute, hold on.
Are these guys, is Slack just running a shadow of Discord?
Interesting.
Here I thought Discord was, I don't know, like IRC 2.0.
Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of bigger companies start to use,
not companies, but groups, I guess, start to use Discord
because it was, I guess, primarily gaming focused board.
But I've been starting to see like Adobe has creative challenges
that they'll run through Discord.
And I guess they can manage, you know, how that,
how that can work in there and better manage, I guess,
more so than Slack, like what gets posted inside
of a channel. So I don't know. They're all good tools. You just got to find the right one for
your group and run with it. We found Slack pretty early on for Home Tech and started up the hub
channel thing as kind of like, I guess that was part of our first Patreon push. And it's been good and bad for that.
Like, I wish it had more features that we had access to, but then we have to start paying for it.
And if we pay for it, like, we have to pay for per member.
And it's like, what, $25 a member or something.
So it just kind of like gets pretty bad to do that.
It gets pretty pricey pretty quickly to do anything like that.
Right. Well, we got a heads up from Jay. Jay said if he drops off, it's because his battery's
running low. I think it's because he's got to go play some golf.
He's got to play it through.
But all right. Well, cool. Anyways, I thought it would be interesting to jump into that because
that's been a big topic around work. We're so immersed in Slack in my day to day that
this update has definitely led to some
conversations there. But Seth, what do you say we jump in here to some home tech headlines?
Let's do it. Due in part to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak Samsung has announced,
it's 2018, 2019, and 2020, smart TVs will have access to six new health and wellness apps in partnership with leading fitness brands, bar three,
calm,
echelon,
fit path,
Jillian Michaels,
fitness,
and Oh,
great.
OB fitness.
I don't know.
Uh,
you can tell,
I do not know about any of these,
uh,
I'd say,
okay.
Okay.
Well,
uh,
later this year,
these apps will be part of Samsung health, a comprehensive fitness platform for Samsung smart TVs that was originally announced at this ES show back in January.
Over 250 instructive videos are available now from Bari.
So the Bari thing, that's like a yoga slash.
Yeah, bar three.
I think I've seen these classes.
Yeah.
Yeah, my wife's gone to a few of those here.
There's a bunch of those around.
Some of these I'm not familiar with.
But these are a lot of,
it sounds like just fitness chains
that they're going to be integrating with.
I don't know, like a couple of months ago,
I might've sort of ho-hum on this story,
but I got to tell you with,
you know, the current state of
affairs and not being able to go to gyms, everybody's looking for ways. Well, everybody
who exercises, I should say is, is, uh, is looking for ways to, to do that at home and, and try to
stay in shape, uh, and not put on the so-called COVID-19, uh, during this, uh, quarantine, uh,
as we all, well, if you're like me, turning to food,
eating through the stress, definitely a thing. So I don't know, maybe the timing's good for
Samsung here as Robert changes his backdrop. The timing may be good. I think generally, generally the whole, uh, home wellness thing is, um,
I don't know. It's one of those areas that feels like there could be, um, uh, opportunities, but,
uh, people still got to figure out the really compelling, like specific use cases,
I think. So like, is this just a good timing thing or does this actually have,
um, sort of the, the legs legs to to stand on after uh things get
back to normal i think it's great timing i mean you can't deny that i i've had some uh some people
that i'm acquainted with like oh they're doing yoga classes through zoom now like it's this is
not like i i think this would have been like an esoteric type thing maybe two months ago three
months ago and then that now like i think announcing this type of thing and having the apps available on the TV, I think
they're going to get a pretty decent amount of use out of them. Like I don't, I don't see how it
could be a bad thing for them. Right. I just want to mention that today, Samsung, speaking of
coronavirus mentioned or put out that they'll offer free phone repairs to healthcare providers and first responders
through a company called YouBreakiFix. That didn't really help me when about a month after I bought
this phone, I dropped it and destroyed the screen. But needless to say, good for them for offering
that service at no charge. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great thing.
Yeah. We're seeing a lot of companies come out with goodwill measures these, you know, these days around, I mean, it's one thing, this, this, this pandemic that has
affected literally everyone has done has been like, it's made people a lot more understanding.
It's like, oh, well I can't do that because of blah, blah, blah, or COVID did this. And like,
it's like, okay, yeah. All right. I get it. There's nothing we can do. Like there's,
there's no fault. Like it seems like that little edge of, of people freaking out about something seems to be gone.
So, um, right. Oh no, that, that edge is there. It's coming back. They're just,
they're just standing on the steps of the Wisconsin and Michigan.
All 10 of them. I know it's crazy.. They announced here in Colorado today that I think at the end of this month, they're going to go to like a, it's not a shelter in place anymore.
It's a safer at home measures and it's kind of a half measure to slowly start opening things back up again.
And I got to tell you, it just, I mean, I understand the challenges that shelter in place is creating for people, but the whole thing just feels premature and really scary to me.
I think that's the biggest, you know, the thing that people ask me is when this all clears and they say it's green light, you're good to go.
Like, are you going to go back out?
You know, I kept seeing heads shake already.
Like, no, no, I'm not going to go back out? You know, like I've seen heads shake already. Like, no, no,
I'm not going to go out to the restaurant immediately. And, and, and, and like the,
the takeout where you can get takeout and, and, uh, they're actually, I don't know if they're
doing this like where you are, but they're, I don't know how they're doing this here,
but you can actually take out like mixed drinks now. Yeah. It's pretty. Yeah. Colorado's letting
you do that. Pretty handy.
I showed up at our, I could get used to this. I mean, I showed up at our favorite Mexican place and I'm like, they had the sign out in the front door and I'm like, margaritas to go done. Like
let's, let's get a drink carrier. Give you a party hat afterwards.
That's right. They need to go to my house right around the corner. So
I mean, I think a lot of companies are going to change the way,
I mean, everything it's just because both from one, you know,
you realize that people are able to work from home. Right.
And that's one thing people,
companies that pay X amount of dollars for office space, we work, I mean,
all these other companies they're going to realize that, Hey, why,
why do we need this?
When people can work from home and do their jobs effectively. these other companies uh they're going to realize that hey why why do we need this uh when people
can work from home and do their jobs uh effectively so that's one thing that i'm primarily dealing
with so um yeah and how that affects uh us as integrators could be an interesting topic like
because you're you're going to see i i definitely think you're going to see um a lot of people want
to work from home or prefer to work from home now.
And, you know, having stable video conferencing platforms, you know, technology in the home,
a home network that can hold up to that kind of thing is probably going to be high on the list
of, you know, how do we get that done for our C-level executives, you know, like how do we
make them look good on every video call they're going to be on, even if they are in their home
office with, you know, bad lighting and all that good stuff. So I think it's a decent opportunity there that could be had
once this thing kind of like goes away to the point that it goes away. We're still going to have,
we're still going to have this. Like you said, it's going to be a change that people are going
to prefer to work from home. So I think that's definitely on the horizon. And as bringing it
back to the story that we just talked about, work out from home.
Definitely.
All right, well, let's keep moving here.
The wait is over and the secret is out.
Movie ticketing company Fandango has agreed to buy Walmart's on-demand video streaming service Vudu for an undisclosed sum.
The video service today reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S., including smart TVs, Blu-ray players.
Never heard of it.
Blu-ray players.
Game consoles and other over-the-top streaming devices, as well as Windows 10 and Mac computers, and iOS and Android mobile devices.
As part of the agreement, Vudu will continue to power Walmart's digital movie and TV store on Walmart.com.
This is big news.
Uh,
Fandango,
uh,
being able to add to their Fandango now streaming service,
which I had no idea it existed.
Neither did I.
I use Fandango all the time when movie theaters existed back a couple months
ago.
Like I,
that's the only way I would purchase tickets.
And if it didn't deliver to my phone
and show up in the Apple Wallet thing,
I was like, there's no way I'm doing that.
I hated going up to the movie theater thing
and standing in line and everything.
And as soon as they offered it online purchases,
I was all in on that.
But I had no idea Fandango now existed.
And now they own Vudu,
which is Walmart's big brand of streaming digital movies.
Yeah.
Robert, you had a comment in the chat.
I agree.
Jump in there.
Yeah, I think we're, there we go.
I think we're getting to share wallet saturation with everything, even a few dollars here, a few dollars there. How many
subscriptions can the average consumer keep getting with software subscriptions, movie
subscriptions, streaming? There's a point where it's just saturated. I think we're reaching that.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, go ahead, Richard. I agree completely. The good news on this is that this is not going to add to your subscriptions.
So if you're not familiar with Fandango now, it is not a subscription service. It is a movie service that is just like Vudu and iTunes and all these other things where you can buy or rent
movies to watch. And that's pretty much it. And TV shows and stuff.
So they're really just going to be consolidating them in the longterm.
The good news is that Voodoo isn't changing.
Like everything that you have in Voodoo is going to stay in Voodoo.
Like they are committed to keeping Voodoo what it is and keeping all the
features there. Jeez.
I hope they improve the user experience at some point.
But overall, I feel like they have the best store features
and playback capabilities of anyone.
Yeah, they started off as a hardware product
exclusively for our industry way back in the day.
I remember getting super excited about them.
We signed up as like one of their first dealers
and they had this, I remember getting super excited about them. We signed up as like one of their first dealers and they had this,
I want to say four to $600 box that you could buy. Uh,
and it would basically, uh, they would,
they would download the movies that they had to it.
So you could watch them at a later time or something like that.
I'm trying to remember exactly what their, their stick was. Um,
but basically they were competing with, with, uh, with, uh, Kaleidos But basically, they were competing with Kaleidoscape.
Kaleidoscape?
Yeah.
So tens of thousands or thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands of dollars, but thousands
of dollars on like a rate array to store all of your DVD collections versus this like $600
or $700 box.
It was a no-brainer for a lot of my clients, and they liked it.
They didn't last in that hardware space very long,
but then they moved.
They were, eventually you went to all software
and then sold out to Walmart.
So, and they've been running their digital services
for a long time.
So it's kind of an end of an era for the Voodoo thing.
Yeah.
It's been a winding road for them.
And they're also the only service that I'm aware of
that still offers just to digital.
So if you have Blu-ray discs or DVD titles that you want to convert to
digital format, you can do that for two bucks or $5 if you're upgrading your resolution.
Right. It's good service. Interesting. Rashid, you had a comment in the chat. I think it's
interesting, even if it doesn't materialize, interesting thought exercise. Chime in here.
Didn't think you were going to want to hear my voice.
But yeah, I laugh about it a lot with my friends saying that we're going to go full circle.
Someone's going to come up with an agreement to put all of these on different channels,
if you will, for you to get to different services.
And then it will be Comcast and DirecTV all over again.
That's in the next video.
How we can bundle.
It is, yeah.
It is interesting to think about.
Like, does somebody start to come up with some sort of model
that consolidates these things?
I don't know.
It is a very interesting landscape,
one we've certainly talked about quite a bit on the show. And, um, yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of interesting
angles to that idea of at what point do we start to reach full saturation and, and the average
consumer just can't plunk down their card for another service, even if it is only, you know,
five or $10. Well, speaking of, uh, being, uh, overs oversaturated and and bled dry uh warner media
finally confirmed that hbo max will launch on may 27th for months the company has promised the
streaming service would be ready this may but hadn't revealed the specific date and when it
arrives hbo max will deliver 10 000 hours of content including a handful of launch day premieres
hbo max will cost $14.99 per month
and it's free it's a free upgrade from hbo now subscribers and at&t customers will also get
free access so i don't know i'm in i'm already on the hbo now train so i'm i'm in on this one
for sure you're ready ready to plunk down your car 10 000 hours of content that i probably won't
be able to sift through like we have Disney plus now
and I just sit there and I we're like we're gonna watch no we're not gonna watch that we're not
gonna watch like you're just like going through like the entire catalog of Disney and and Marvel
films it's like oh this is yeah well it's really good maybe you should watch that and like just
haven't we can't commit to anything you just surf the lineup until you yeah you spend the whole time
that you were
going to spend watching a show trying to decide what show to watch now. I think we've all
experienced that for sure. I have to decouple these things. Literally, if I tell my wife,
I want to watch a movie tonight after the kids go to bed, I will literally try to pick the movie
in the afternoon so that by the time we sit down to watch,
like there's none of that, you know, browsing through 175 different titles and,
and then giving up because we can't agree on something.
No, you got it backwards.
Yeah.
When my wife says, don't work, do some work, come watch a movie with me.
I said, okay, you pick a movie.
And when you've got one picked, let me know.
And then I'm back in three hours later.
And you got a lot of work done.
Yeah.
I like that.
Picking movies, you spend more time trying to pick something than actually watching anything
anymore.
That's great.
Jason, I've got a great idea.
So you've been talking about making your own streaming service for a long time, right?
That's right.
I'm ready.
Yeah.
Cause you're ready for it.
You're going to do it.
So here's the deal.
What you need, and this is, this is very forward thinking concept.
What you should do is just get a, get a, a bunch of movies. And, uh, and, and what you'll do is
you'll pick those movies for people to watch and, uh, put them on say different, I don't know,
we'll call them channels, uh, and put them in a linear fashion where, you know,
you'll have to show up at seven o'clock to watch this movie, or you're just not going to. I don't
know, maybe we can put little advertisements in there in between things just to make money.
That's right.
What do you think?
I like it. I think there's some nostalgia there, right? Like people just miss that experience.
With the right branding.
This is interesting, Rash uh hbo is the only
service that doesn't cache any of the video i didn't know that yeah if you uh if you're playing
on the app and you go to even just scan over to jump to a different part of a show or movie
it pretty much just buffers again in real time.
It doesn't, nothing's cashed like on Netflix or YouTube, anything else.
Interesting.
That's kind of insane because, I mean, HBO is notoriously built on BamTech,
which was one of the pioneers in the streaming space.
I guess they haven't upgraded?
Right.
If anyone in here used the app,
it is the most archaic one out of all of them.
Yeah, the HBO app is pretty horrible.
I don't know.
I wonder if that has to do with your bandwidth
because I know that you get served different files
at different resolutions
if you have higher bandwidth, right?
So like, I wonder if it's just not caching
the higher bandwidth stuff.
No, it doesn't matter if I'm on LTE out and about
or on fiber at home with gigabit service.
And I didn't notice it right away
until my buddy pointed it out
because he travels a lot and uses it.
And then I started traveling more and using it.
And, yeah, it sucks.
Wow.
Well, I do know that I do not like the HBO Now app.
It's not very good.
And the experience of, like, starting to watch a show and then, like, oh, I didn't really mean to start watching this.
Like, maybe, like, you can't, like, clear it off.
Like, I don't know it's
it's there's no like roles like in netflix you can assign you can have different accounts within
your account if that makes any sense profiles um well at least there is an app with apple tv plus
service that drives me crazy that they don't actually have an app so you never know what
shows are apple tv plus or regular or part of their curation.
It's try to find one thing you're looking for.
It's very hard.
Yeah, I've discovered you have to go looking for the little Apple TV channel within the Apple TV app.
And then once you're there, you can kind of dig through their stuff.
It's not very intuitive either.
But I do enjoy both HBO's programming and Apple, Apple's
programming as well. So I've been happy with those, but, um, especially the Apple one, since I didn't
pay anything for it, it just kind of came along with the phone. Um, we'll, we'll, I, I, I will
definitely pick up a new, the extra $5 a year or whatever, $ dollars a month it costs when it comes out for the uh the the the space when uh space movie space tv show i forget what it's called now for all mankind
or something like that um oh yeah i just got back to that actually yeah so we were doing this thought
exercise um let me do the podcast publishing math yeah on the episode of entertainment 20 that came out yesterday and we were just trying
to kind of think does hbo now and hbo go do they still exist in this future i don't see how i mean
they do but i don't see how they do if that makes any sense like i think they're going to just abuse
the customers of those until they give up and switch over to HBO Max, right? I think that's the idea. Yeah, I don't know. I've
always been a little confused by the difference between, I mean, I understand like HBO Now,
HBO Go is the one that's tied to a cable subscription. So that's basically if you
have cable and then you want to also be able to watch HBO on streaming devices, that's HBO Go. Then they launched HBO Now, which was just the standalone
thing. To me, HBO Go, because it's tied to that cable subscription, I could see a world where that
still exists. HBO Now and HBO Max, those two two i'm super confused as to how they they would coexist
um that's kind of my take on it but it'll be interesting to see i was on the fence about hbo
max until i saw this seth new looney tunes cartoons oh i mean who didn't love looney tunes
growing up right i've seen a few of those and they're actually um they're actually well done
they're funny like the the new they they have new artists drawing them which is it it looks all new
it's really cool yeah that'll be interesting would recommend just like uh private rock and uh apple
uh that's right tv plus that's right yeah again some nostalgia there all right well let's uh move
on here to our last uh headline and then we're going to have some fun.
We're going to get into a lightning round here that we're looking forward to.
Final headline, Sonos launched their own streaming radio service, aptly named Sonos Radio.
Sonos Radio is a new free-to-use streaming service that's being introduced as part of a software update rolling out this week worldwide.
Moving forward, the service will come pre-loaded
in the sonos app so it's fair to think sonos radio is a starting point that customers can sample
before adding other services like spotify apple music amazon music or pandora this was totally
well i think this was needed 10 years ago i would have loved for this to have existed 10 years ago
because then i like the worst part about selling a Sonos system was actually like, all right, you've got your Sonos system.
Now what do you, let's, let's put some music in there. Like, I don't have any account with
anything. Like I, I don't have a Pandora Spotify account. What, what do you want from me? And then
you're like, well, we have like, uh, let's, let's just use your email and we'll get you signed up
for a Pandora account. And then they, they then they'd fall in love with it at that point
because Pandora was kind of cool, you know, back then.
But I can see how that would have like prevented Sonos
from starting up, like getting more and more
of the services that they're famous for on board
if they had their own like competing service.
Like I'm thinking of you HomePod
with your Apple Music only interface. on board if they had their own like competing service. Like I'm thinking of you HomePod with
your Apple Music only interface. Like I don't see Spotify clamoring to get on the Apple HomePod
anytime soon because of the way they've kind of like introduced their own service to run on it.
Yeah. Robert, I know you shared this story over in the hub earlier this week when it broke and
had some thoughts about it. Jump in there.
Yeah, I think that the potential here is really longer term. Right now, it's not that exciting,
but Sonos is really making a move possibly to be a services provider like Apple and everyone else
looking to build revenue streams in the future. So I think they're starting off slowly. The other aspect is they are rumored
to be working on their own voice assistant, not to replace Siri or Google, but to kind of have
something that can call their own. So it would be convenient when they do that to have a basic music
service that, as Seth says, gives you a full solution with just Sonos. So I think it's right that they needed to get everyone else on board
before they were a competitor because they've been neutral.
The thing is now the first time they're competing with some of their partners.
So there's a can of worms there in the short term.
Yeah, I'd agree.
And one of the things I did pick up on as well is that
they're starting off with 100 plus radio channels, essentially.
But those could easily be like relicensed and repurposed for commercial licensing.
Like so you don't have you can install a Sonos system inside of like your your what they used to call sports bar or hair salon and have music in there that is, you know, fully licensed and pay Sonos directly for that, for that service. Um,
it's all in one box, you know, an entire music thing in one box. So, uh, I could easily see them
doing something like that. Um, and doing like a premium music service like Spotify or something.
I mean, like, I guess, why not? It seems if Jason can have his own streaming service, why can't Sonos? Yeah, I'm just, I'm so
excited by this. I, you know, initially I thought, oh,
this would be cool. They'll be doing something that'll take advantage of all the features.
You know, they're going to do like a reference model on
how radio could work on Sonos, but
it is, it is access to linear programming, period. There's no skipping.
There's no disliking. You go into a station and you listen to it and you get out. And it's
interrupted every 15 minutes or so for station identification on their stations.
And then everything else, you know, they have maybe, I don't know, like 30 stations or something like that.
And then the other couple thousand are just all of the locals that you can get anywhere around the world
that are also on TuneIn and iHeart and everywhere else.
So I just don't understand what they're doing here that's interesting yet.
I will say it is a good starting point.
Like if you buy the Sonos system, this is a good, like if it, because it's going to be on there when you buy it.
It's going to say Sonos Radio and you click that.
And there, I mean, my clients around here, if you told them that they can listen to their radio station back in new jersey
they were all over that that was the end game they were done that's what they wanted yeah so
yeah that i think is key i think it is actually i think they're licensing tuning in iheart
so they're bundling they're really bundling it up but seth you raised a good point about the commercial.
I mean, does the Muzak service still exist?
I think last I saw it, it was a satellite system.
But does anybody actually pay for licensed music?
Or are they all paying Sonos in the background of their barbershops?
Muzak went bankrupt a number of years ago, but they sold off everything to a company called Mood Music, which does exist now. So yes, the answer is yes, you have to pay ASCAP and BMI for your licensing and the other
one, SC, whatever it is. So yeah, you will need to pay for that. You have to pay for that if you're
in kind of public performance areas. Yeah. If you're a retail or hospitality chain,
you are absolutely paying for your music. Yeah. There was one other thread that
Robert touched on earlier that I want to pick back up before we move on, and Brendan mentioned it.
Sonos and the voice assistant talk about snips. This is a story that I think probably many people flew under the radar or even forgot about. Brendan, share a little bit about that acquisition.
Sonos acquired the company Snips AI. Snips AI was a local processing. It launched as an open source-ish project. You'd run it on a Raspberry Pi pi and then you would have a no cloud voice assistant
um they did use a cloud service i believe to configure it and get it set up and just do like
ssl certs or something between the nodes um but it looked like a really promising local control
something they could embed even directly on the Sonos if they do go their own route.
So yeah, current speculation, they're going to take that tech, jam it into the Sonos boxes.
And you know what I mean? That's going to be the voice assistant. And then from there, it can just go out to Alexa, Siri, wherever you need. It can do its own thing.
Yeah, it's interesting. November of 2019, I'm seeing a story here from The Verge is when that happened, in case anyone's curious.
Well, just a few months ago, Savant at their national dealer meeting, I did not attend, but I saw the feed from it.
They are coming out with their own voice assistant also again.
So there's a lot of activity of niche or specialty attempts trying to do it again.
Yeah. I think there's at least theoretically a compelling case to be made for more privacy
focused local processing and things of that nature. But I know Savant kind of... It would
just be interesting to see because on one hand, you can make a case for it. And on the other
hand, it feels like reinventing the wheel a little bit. So we'll be interested to see how that plays
out. But what do you say we move on? I think that'll do it for our headlines here. To wrap
that up, as a quick reminder, all the links and topics we've discussed on this week's episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 300.
While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great stuff going on here in the world of home tech.
And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room starting Wednesdays, typically 7 o'clock, 7.30 p.m. Eastern.
You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live.
And Jason, I have fixed Google Chrome.
Oh, good.
This was a running mystery.
Well, I didn't fix it.
You got to fix it.
Google Chrome evidently messed something up.
Yeah, well, there's steps to fix it.
Evidently, it's a security thing that they did in Chrome 80, I guess.
So that's why we saw this kind of like sporadically happen over time.
There is basically our server that serves the audio is not secure,
but our website is secure.
So if there is an unsecure thing on your website, Google Chrome
will ignore that. And you can go into your settings per site and change that setting. So
there's a little link to the discussion forum and a link on how to do that
on the website now that says right underneath the streaming thing says Google Home or Google Chrome,
no audio, you know, do these instructions and you'll be able to work around it.
So now you can listen live when you're on Google Chrome.
That was fun having some additional voices there on our, on our news segment. So we appreciate that.
And, uh, with that, we're going to go ahead and jump in, uh, to our lightning round. Um,
I know we're an audio only show, but we're having some fun with backgrounds here too.
Uh, apparently Richard's doing the, it's like the aquarium thing now.
Robert's on a beach.
And we did lose a couple of our panelists
in case anyone's wondering.
We had Jay again, had to jump off and Guillermo.
So we've got five here
and we're going to jump in to our lightning round
and again, have a little bit of fun with this. So
we'll try to move through these questions quick. We got five questions and we'll go around the horn
with each of these. And the first question is, you can only have one type of smart home product
in your home forever. Now, when I say type, that could be a category. It doesn't have to be an
individual product, right? It could be smart lighting or home audio, for example. You can only have one type
of smart home product in your home forever. What would it be? We will start with Robert.
Oh, that's easy. Lutron lighting. Lutron lighting. Good and solid choice.
Super reliable and easy automation. Just set it and forget it. Just never had a problem.
And super functional. Yeah, definitely.
Anthony.
Google compatible smart displays.
All right. Very nice. Rashid.
Lighting. I kept it general. I'll say lighting, but Lutron is my main use.
Got it. Brendan? I'm going to get a little more specific and say smart central air,
because that would mean my house has central air. We're locking that right now.
Good try. You killed two birds with one stone there. All right, cool. And Richard?
Yeah, I didn't know what you meant by type, so I went very specific. I said Lutron Maestro motion sensor switches.
Super specific. I like it. Very good. Those are actually really nice.
Yeah. I'm not super surprised by the sort of consensus here. I'm not going to even try to
be original. I'm with you guys, smart lighting. If I could only have one, that would be my choice.
We finally got some into our home, uh, not that long
ago. And, uh, I just, just love it. Super functional. Uh, we got Lutron Caseta, easy to set
up. Um, and we use it all the time. Well, I'm going to be contrary, I guess, because like,
if it was one product forever, I can live with flipping my light switches, but I got to say
having a Sonos system, having an audio system in general,
but having a Sonos system specifically, I can't live without. We listen to music literally every
single day in this house. So I think that's going to be my pick. There you go. Good choice.
So this one, biggest home tech, lowercase, H-O-M-E, tech, or Home Tech, capital H, meaning the podcast, biggest home tech pet peeve.
You didn't ask this right. You have to say, Alexa, what is your biggest home tech pet peeve?
And, you know, we had a particular panelist in mind for this one, and we'll start there. Richard.
My answer is going to surprise you. And I had a snarky response that I wasn't going to say.
And then Seth blew it for me and I brought it back. Podcasts that discuss streaming services
they've never heard of. Oh, good. Very good. All right. We'll go next to Anthony.
Oh, that is so easy. So we know that I was on low Zyrus and it of course died,
but it's actually the pairing process when you add devices, you know, to a hub or whatever,
but it's just terrible. The only product I've had that was actually reliable was simply safe.
Got it. Rashid.
In general, I was confused on this and I should have asked before we started.
I thought that was something related to the show that I had to be annoyed with.
And I was like, no, that can't be it.
That was for Richard. I mean, if you have anything by all means.
I would say in general, my biggest pet peeve with the home tech world is just lack of interoperability,
the seamlessness, I don't know how to put it, but like just everyone seems to hide or not want to work together right away.
So just integration as a whole. Yeah, definitely. or not want to work together right away.
So just integration as a whole.
Yeah, definitely.
All right, Robert, you're up.
Oh, I have to say that my biggest pet peeve
is the disappointment with Apple HomeKit
because I wanna love it, I wanna use it.
It's just so far removed
from normal Apple quality and capability. It's got the potential to slay everyone out there, but they're just not there yet.
Huh. Interesting.
Yeah, I haven't used it extensively, but my experiences have generally been good.
But I certainly haven't tried to do too much with it.
And I know it's been a slow burn with HomeKit for sure.
We'll come to you next, Brendan.
For me, piggybacking a little bit on Rashid, yeah, interoperability, but specifically too
many clouds. I work in SaaS. There is nothing reliable up there. Stuff fails all the time,
but especially when you have to jump between one cloud to another, to another, to another,
just to trigger one thing.
I see these posts online integrating, you know,
if this than that and five other services just to turn on a light switch.
And I'm like, okay, but when one of those goes away, so yeah,
too many clouds. Uh, I think it rains so hard.
It puts it underwater.
Your Rube Goldberg automation system. Seth, what you got?
I'm going to have to stick with integration as well.
I mean, I deal in my day-to-day job of like,
my day-to-day is actually programming directly to devices
as best I can.
So most of the time,
I'm working with a no latency connection with a piece of gear.
But every now and then, I have to work up in the cloud.
And it's not quite as fun as it is.
But yeah, it's a very tough road to convince companies to do integrations.
And I don't know why.
You would think in 2020, here we are, that you'd be able to say, oh, yeah, we need an API.
And they'd be like, yeah, we're not doing that.
So it's a weird thing for 2020.
Yeah, integration is a big one.
You know, a few years ago, this one would have been hands down for me, HDMI.
That was like the bane of my existence when I was still an integrator.
I feel like that's stabilized a little bit,
but we're probably in for another rough ride as, and Robert's shaking his head no. So he's still
grappling with a lot of that. The missed handshakes, all the issues with HDMI used to just
give me fits. So that's a big one. But I think, you know, I don't deal with that one as much
anymore. Probably the biggest one for me is still just the state of voice and how, especially as an Echo user, that one was for you, Richard know, have to get your syntax a hundred percent correct or nothing works. Um, and it really feels like that a lot of times
with, with echo and other platforms, even Siri. Um, so I I'm excited for that to get better,
like natural language processing, uh, I think will be a really big deal. Looking forward to that.
Cool. Well, uh, let's get one more here. Uh more here. The hardest home tech project you've ever done.
Anthony, I think I know your answer.
Actually, it might surprise you a little bit.
When our neighborhood actually had AT&T Gigabit Fiber placed in the neighborhood,
and I called them and said, hey, I want it.
They said, you can't get it.
But it's right out there in the front of the yard with these big cones.
And so the problem I found out is you have to have their required modem,
I guess, to identify on the network and to get any other router to work with that mesh system,
whatever, is just a terrible, terrible pain.
And right now, like say, want to get Eo working so i know to work so then to kind of
upgrade to ubiquity it's just not solid enough to use secondary firewalls um you know just looking
at pf sense and untangle it's just a terrible terrible experience because without a good network
nothing else matters yep yeah so networking is is continues to play you. Robert, what's your hardest home tech project you've ever done?
Oh, that's tough.
Probably, well, the most recent one is trying to get a stupid Chamberlain MyQ garage door system working.
Just took way too much effort.
And bottom line with tech support, as I said, the circuit board in the actual garage opener has to be upgraded. So I kicked it to the curb and bought a $25 gadget solution on Amazon.
And it looks like that's going to work out just fine.
Yep.
Yeah.
I'll ditto the garage door opener problem too.
None.
MyQ, Iris, Hubitat, none reliable.
They all want you to go through the cloud to integrate with their garage door openers, which doesn't make any sense.
Here's a quick tip for you guys.
If you go and buy one of the little garage door opener things and then take out the button and then solder on the leads where the button is and hook that up to a relay, you have integration now.
It's a little old school way of doing it, but you definitely have to with those new types of garage door systems.
Rashid, you're up next hardest home tech project uh garage doors used to be until i learned that that same exact
button trick um i i was struggling with this one because i've had so many different little issues
but i i remember hating doing light touch.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It drove me up the wall.
You're revealing your age, I think.
I actually didn't install the system.
I was having to work with it after the client bought a house in Aspen and we had to integrate it with control four.
Yep. Yep. Yep Control 4. Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
I love light touch.
One of my biggest prospects is to replace it for them with Lutron.
For something that works.
All right.
Lead gen.
Richard, what's your hardest project?
Yeah, mine was installing a Dolby Atmos system because I had to dig through more fiberglass than I've ever been exposed to to make that happen.
But I wanted to have the true down firing ceiling speakers instead of the reflecting ones I had originally bought and concluded were insufficient.
So fun with retrofit.
Yeah. And at most is not easy to do. Like there's a lot of research and reading you have to do on
that to get it set up just right. So yeah. And a lot of new product you have to buy to make that
work. That too. Yeah. And Brendan, coming to you finally.
Sure. For me, it's actually still a work in progress,
but we actually built a server that runs in the basement
and does license plate detection as cars come in the driveway.
Again, so anti-cloud, we ended up buying our own server,
throwing it down with the Google Coral so it can do the AI processing,
and it's doing all the TensorFlow,
detecting if people are walking down your driveway
so it can send you smart alerts versus just doing motion.
So we'll actually get alerted.
Funny blip on that though,
those work off a confidence score.
So at nighttime, all it could see was the license plate.
So it didn't know that it was a car.
It thought it was a television.
It's like, there's a TV marching down your driveway.
I'm like, oh no, I better get out there. Unintended consequences. Well, that's pretty good. We've
got two more. We're going to blow through these really quick. Oh wait, Jason, we forgot you
hardest project. Yeah. I just keep it quick. We, when I was still an integrator, we were the first,
one of the very first companies to do a 64 by 64 fiber optic Crestron DM system. This is when it had just
very first come out and we did it in a palatial estate in Bel Air in California. And the deployment
on that, they ended up having some really deep issue down in the firmware of the networking,
the rapid spanning tree protocol,
RSTP for the network geeks. There was a problem with the RSTP that it took weeks of painstaking
effort, re-terminating fiber, the biggest game of whack-a-mole I had ever played and still
to this day. That was the closest I ever got, uh, to like going back to school and studying
finance. Very nice. Very nice. Yeah. Those are install stories. I, I try to think the hardest
project I ever did was a, one of those 103 inch Panasonic plasma TVs. Um, and you think, Oh,
it's a TV. It's like an 800 pound TV. Okay. It's a, it's a gorilla. Uh, and, and it was sold with, with really no
idea that you need what it, what it needed, but it required to hang on the wall.
And it was basically, you know, me cutting, cutting my teeth on that, trying to get it,
uh, installed on the second floor. Um, trial by fire. Yeah. Like there was really no good way to
finish house, you know, cause what we should have done is just bought the TV early and put it on the construction site and then built the house around it.
Because it would have been a lot easier than what we ended up having to do.
Two cranes.
Two cranes.
Wow.
So, yeah.
Oh, the good old days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So moving on to the next question.
And if you could have any person narrate your voice on your voice assistant, who would it be?
Let's go real quick.
Anthony.
Oh, there's the answer I want to say.
But since I'm married, I'll stick with Liam Neeson.
Good choice.
Robert.
Oh, definitely James Earl Jones.
I loved his voiceovers in those Verizon or Bell Atlantic spots years ago.
Yep.
Rasheed.
I just realized I've not been muted the entire time, just muted myself.
I couldn't choose between the two, but it's Scarlett Johansson or Morgan Freeman.
Those are going to be probably the most popular ones, I think.
That's where I would go to.
Richard.
No debate here. Majel Barrett, the voice of the computer on the enterprise.
Ah, very good. Very good. Yeah. Nice. Uh, and Brendan.
You know, Alexa already beat me to it. Samuel Jackson.
Yeah. That's a good one. Uh, Jason, who'd you have in mind?
I'm going Sean Connery.
Sean Connery. Yeah.
It sounds like he's got a mouth full of something.
That's right.
He can barely understand a Scottish accent.
There's just something there.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to stick with Scarlett Johansson.
That one's pretty good.
I mean, the movie Her, I think she kind of did that one really well.
And it's kind of like, yeah, when you think of voice assistants,
that's kind of like one of the first things you think of.
Nobody picks Siri.
All right.
Paul Bettany was my third choice.
Who was that?
Oh, Jarvis.
Oh, no, you just broke up.
What was the name?
Oh, Paul Bettany.
Oh, okay, got it. Yeah, from the Avengers there. All, no, it's just you broke up. What was the name? Oh, Paul Bettany. Oh, okay, got it.
Yeah, from the Avengers there.
All right, so let's see.
Last question here, real quick.
Yes or no questions on this.
And I've got a follow-up to this as well.
Will Cedia happen this year, yes or no?
And then my follow-up is, if it does, will you go?
And so, Anthony, let's start with you.
Oh, this is not an over-under?
We should probably just put a bet side up.
Well, I say no, and I wouldn't anyway.
Robert?
I say it probably will be held, but I probably won't go. I'd rather put the funds toward Barcelona.
No, interesting. ISE. Rasheed?
I am agreeing with Robert. I'm going to say no, it's not. And if it does, I'm not going
to go. I'd go to Barcelona.
Nicole Richard?
No, sadly, I don't think it's going to happen. And I would not be going anyway.
Brendan?
What's CDR again?
It's a big giant trade show where you get sick.
But no, I think it will happen, but later than normal.
Somehow.
Good.
Yeah. Jason, what do you think? Yeah, I later than later than normal. Somehow. Good. Yeah.
Jason, what do you think?
Yeah, I don't I don't see it happening this year.
I think they'll try to they'll do something.
I'm hoping some sort of virtual at a minimum, the training.
I'm hoping that they'll figure something out for that.
I know we're slated to do some workshops and hopefully they'll they'll get something in place.
My money's on no, and if it was held, I'm probably a no at this point,
barring some sort of miraculous progress on the medical front with treatments and whatnot.
Yeah.
I mean, so that would be like the best thing to happen, right?
So if something miracle happened, but I'm with most everyone here saying no,
I don't think it's going to happen.
If it did, I don't think I'd go.
Honestly, not this year i just i don't think i've ever gone to cdia once and come home without at
least some sort of cold right or something right like it just feels like it always happens to me
and um i i just yeah it's just you know the thought of being in a building with 18,000, 20,000 other people right now is just so far removed from anything I can wrap my head around come September.
And Richard, you were at CES this year, right?
Like you went to CES Vegas, right?
I was, and I was supposed to be at South by Southwest.
Yeah, that's right.
Right when this all broke.
And, you know, they didn't cancel that until the last possible minute.
Yeah, I just don't.
Frankly, I don't see these things going off as we've seen them until we have a vaccine.
Which means I'm also predicting
CES is not going to happen.
I would, yeah.
I agree on that.
And I agree that we're still,
so the vaccine could be four years out
because we've only ever produced one in four years.
That's as fast as we've ever done a vaccine.
And if that's the case,
then you're looking at these event shows
and these types of things
not being around in four years because companies are going to figure out how to spend a million dollars on a booth online a lot quicker than they will for a show.
Yeah.
I mean, that said, I also know that this is hard on companies who rely on these to make announcements. Smaller companies that look to these to be their splash because they themselves
don't have a big enough following that really need these types of events. So as soon as someone
figures out how to do it well virtually, I think that's going to be really important. And I'm
curious to see what sort of tools and technology evolves to make that happen. Yeah.
We're going to get a preview.
We're going to get a preview when Apple does WWDC.
If anyone can figure out how to do a virtual conference well,
I would look to Apple.
I would agree.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think Richard identified the key part of all this.
Zoom is great.
This is as good as I think we can get right now.
Hold on.
You click a link, you end up in here.
That's easy.
But the thing is, what Richard said is key.
The tools to have an event with 20, 30, 40,000 people on video conferencing don't exist right now, much less like how to take questions, how to take Q and a, how to break
off into sessions for, for large events. They don't exist. There's just, there's nothing exists
for that. And I don't know that like, it's appropriate to have like the same idea. Like
let's have a group of 30,000 people gather online. Um, and maybe,
maybe this turns into like a more long drawn out, you know, show essentially. Right. So like you
just, you, you, you feed and feed and feed and feed. And it's, it's instead of like a rush to
get everything done for this one show in September, you have 12 months that are yours as a company
to do. So I'm very curious to see how this goes. Um, it, when, when, what Richard said,
when the tools get developed, I think they are absolutely getting developed right now because
all, I mean, I, I talked to somebody who puts a $1.5 million booth on the Cedia floor. I'm not
going to say whether they're going or not, but that $1.5 million might not be going to Cedia this year. And that's a huge number to think about.
If they take that money and put it towards something else, those types of tools get
developed pretty quickly if you put that kind of money behind it. All right. Well, that'll do it
for our lightning round. Thanks
for playing along, everyone. That was a lot of fun. We appreciate you, again, being part of
this experiment. So some good answers there. Seth, let's go ahead and move into the backstretch of
the show here. I think we might have had arguably the best mailbag of all time in home tech history. Seth, I don't know if you saw this one,
if you've responded yet. This came from John in Austin. He says, Seth, can I send you a SmartLink
house link interface for your museum? And thanks for recommending the show counterpart.
You mentioned the show a few weeks ago. I totally got into it. Watched some episodes twice.
I've got this old X10 IR interface i can send you to add to your collection and all he wants is your shipping information seth it's it's coming it's it's going to join the museum
so yeah i've got actually two of these things coming not not two of these but somebody else
reaches out on twitter uh and i'll share that when i get that in, but yeah, the museum is starting to get some stuff.
Um, I, I spent today on the other side of my computer, the floor is covered with garbage.
So I'm, I'm throwing things out to get ready to make way for more space for the museum.
I think this is going to take up a lot more space than I originally thought.
Yeah.
It's, it's, uh, it's starting to catch on.
You know, the word is out that you're the curator of all things Home Tech Graveyard.
So I hope you're ready for that responsibility.
Oh, boy.
Does Homelink count?
I mean, technically, doesn't Homelink still work?
I guess it does.
I guess X10 is what I was thinking doesn't still work, right?
Right.
It does still work.
It absolutely does.
There's a whole interesting philosophical debate we could have here.
Maybe what I'll use in this part, as I envision this,
is one of those exhibits that you walk through that you kind of like get primed.
This is kind of like where we started and it's interactive
and you can use that home link and see the IR bud flashing. So yeah, I, I think,
I think that's the idea. What's that?
Do you have a pronto?
I do. Oh my God.
I had one.
I still have one.
It's like a right of passage. Do you still use it? That's the question.
Just save a space for Logitech Harmony on that museum shelf somewhere.
Hey, now.
We can only dream.
We can only dream.
Fighting words, fighting words.
Yeah, I mean, if the Pronto, I mean, sorry, if the, this is a Freudian slip there.
If the Harmony doesn't go away because it's like a completely unprofitable branch of their company, what replaces it?
Something has to replace it because there's really not a great acceptable DIY solution for IR.
Neo until Control 4.
Oh, yeah. Neo is gone.
And even then, like, was it a direct run inline replacement for Harmony?
I wouldn't say.
I wouldn't say it was.
Technically, no, I guess.
Well, didn't it work with those global caches?
No, they had their own little brain hub thing that they used.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
So it wasn't a direct one-to-one replacement.
Even the form factor wasn't, right?
In Harmony, you can go from having lots of buttons to just basically a screen.
So there's something, I don't know what to say,
but there's something that's got to come in there
and replace it.
Or maybe it is the infamous input zero
that replaces it, right?
We just use a TV remote,
and somehow all the HDMIdmi control stuff actually
works i'm probably not but we'll see what one can dream yep all right well i got a kick out of that
i literally laughed out loud when i read that mailbag uh you know the word is out seth so i
suppose that's a good thing all right uh pick of the week this week seth i'll kick it over to you
pick of the week listeners like you patrons thank you very much you guys have kept us going for 300 episodes now so you
officially like the cover to the time magazine or something we'll do it that way um you officially
are the pick of the week thank you very much for supporting us for all of these years and all of
these episodes and making us want to get on every week and sit down and chat
about home technology. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Get a little bit
sentimental here and echo what you're saying, Seth. We definitely really appreciate everybody
who's tuned into the show over the years. It's really cool. Big milestone to be at 300 episodes
now and really appreciate everybody being part of the community,
especially to our panel here tonight that jumped on to join us for this new episode.
Doing more sort of interactive things like this and bringing others onto the show
to chime in in some capacity is definitely something we want to start experimenting with
over the next 100 episodes.
And so we appreciate you guys being a part of this episode. Had a lot of fun. So thanks again.
Absolutely. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. Absolutely. And as we do every week, we want to, again,
echo our big thank you
to everybody who supports the show,
especially those of you
who support the show financially
through our Patreon page.
If you're not familiar with Patreon,
head on over to
hometech.fm
slash support
where you can learn
about ways to support the show
for as little as $1 a month.
Any pledge over $5
will give you a big shout out on air,
but every single pledge
will get you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show
can gather every day for all sorts of fun conversations about home technology, and much
more. So we really appreciate everybody who has done that over the years. Yep. And if you'd like
to help out, but can't support the show financially, we totally understand that. And we appreciate if
you can give a five star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice.
Those five stars help other people find the show.
Yeah, that wraps up episode 300.
Again, lots of fun putting this together.
Thanks, guys, for joining us.
Seth, I hope you have a great weekend.
I hope all of you guys have a great weekend.
Hope you're all staying safe and staying well. And we really look forward to, like I said, the next hundred episodes.
Yep. Thanks guys. Thank you guys for being loyal to the podcast. Been listening. It's just number
one. Awesome. That's right. And we appreciate that. The amount of 300 backgrounds that are
popping up. That's right. This is great. Very creative, very creative crowd. But yeah,
thanks.
Thanks for coming in and helping us out with all this.
Uh,
everybody here,
everybody listening live and,
uh,
everybody listening to the podcast.
We,
uh,
thanks very much.
And,
uh,
Jason with that and everybody else here.
Well,
have a great weekend.
All right.
You too.
Take care of Seth.