HomeTech.fm - Episode 308 - HBO Stew

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

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, June 19th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, what is going on? You know, another week. How you doing? That's what everybody says now. It's like, how you doing, man? I don't know what to say anymore like yeah it's not it's not appropriate to say i'm doing great i'm loving i'm loving this work from home thing it's great right i'm an introvert i don't want to go out that's right yeah it's uh it's good we we are slowly um you know reopening here in colorado and as are most states and I have no idea if that's the right thing or the wrong thing. My wife and I are pretty much still laying low and kind of taking it easy, so we'll see.

There's a lot of talk right now about cases spiking everywhere. I'm sure people are hearing enough about that, so we won't belabor it but um obviously hard to know hard to know uh what to do right now yep yep i can tell you from a state that opened probably two or three weeks ago uh not going great but you know is what it is yeah it's stay home stay healthy and just wear a mask that's all i gotta say wear a mask florida i go out no one's wearing masks jason it's the most it's the most insane thing. It is. No one. So yeah, just wear a mask. It's not for you.

It's for me. Don't wear a mask. That's right. Seth, you're staying cool in the studio this evening while we record? Yeah, I hope you can't hear. You probably hear that on the live stream, but I'm hoping you can't hear it on the recording because last week I left it on by accident. But it's just so hot like here in Florida right now. It's like in the 90s during the day that I just kind of forgot that I had the air on the entire time.

And this thing just sits here buzzing along the entire show. Well, I put a filter on the show and it wiped it all out as much as, you know, it sounded pretty good. So I figure why not? Why not leave it on? Sounds great from here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've always admired your dedication during the summers of sitting in that hot box without the air conditioning on. So good to know you'll get some reprieve from that. Right. So some months, a couple of years back before I had the air conditioner, that was rough.

That was just like sitting here sweating, not knowing what to the air conditioner, that was rough. That was just like sitting here sweating, not knowing what to do. Yeah, that was bad. You're a stronger man than I. I would not be able to do that. Matthew in the chat room says he can't hear anything. So I think you're good. So maybe all that suffering was for not. I know. I know, right? Here I was like turning off the air. All those episodes. You'll never get those back. Just dedicated, just dedicated. And it turns out I could have just turned the air on the entire time. The lessons you learn.

Yeah, I do have the mic for it. I have like a Sennheiser stage mic that isn't like a normal mic. It has some really decent off-axis rejection. So like the sounds coming in from the sides and the back, I mean, it's a super cardioid mic. It has some really decent off-axis rejection. So like the sounds coming in from the sides and the back are, I mean, it's a, it's a super cardioid max. I it's, it doesn't look like it. It's a, it's a stage mic, but, um, it definitely will reject the sound. I, it, but I can hear it when I'm playing back and on the recording and everything, but I don't know how much of that makes it through filters and everything that I do on the editing side. So, um, I don't know. I can still

hear it, but that's just me. Hey, sounds good from here. Awesome. So we got WWDC coming up next week, Seth. We do. It's on, uh, it'll be on what Monday this show will release on Friday. So right around the corner. Well, that, uh, that brings us to our, our is it, annual discussion of what will they talk about? That's right. This is a yearly tradition on our show. Yeah, yeah. And every other tech podcast is going to talk about, are they talking about these new ARM computers or Apple Watch updates or iOS 14? I can't believe it's up to 14 already. But

we want to know, is HomeKit even going to be mentioned? Like, are we going to get some HomeKit goodies this year? 2020, it'll be the year for HomeKit or not? So are we placing our bets now, officially? Yeah, I think we should. I think we should run this down. Yeah. Okay. We're going to go on record. Okay. So here's where I'm coming down on HomeKit. I think we should. I think we should run this down, yeah. Okay, we're gonna go on record. Okay, so here's where I'm coming down on HomeKit. I think it is going to get mentioned. I've heard some rumors about some specific features coming out. So I think it'll be a subset of iOS 14.

I don't think it's gonna get like major billing. They're not gonna spend more than a minute or two tops, I would think, if that, probably less if I had to do an over under. But I do think it's going to get mentioned. They've got night shift for light. So this is kind of the color shifting feature of lights. There's some rumors going around about that as well as facial recognition for cameras. Those are the two things I've heard about. So I'm going with yes, we are going to hear a little bit about HomeKit this year, but not much. I think they'll move through it quick. All right. Well, I'm going to take the under. I think if there are these releases, so we're

going to put your under at what, two minutes or whatever? Definitely under two. All right. Well, if they talk about, they go fast in these things so it's kind of hard to predict what what the the minutes are going to be but i guess i will give it to you if they talk about uh the night shifting it for any duration uh and if they talk to the the camera the facial recognition or i think it's like even object recognition it's what the rumors are it's like it will detect if there's a car or that kind of thing. So that could be actually kind of cool. But I'll give it to you if you get those. I'm really hoping I mean, I personally I would hope that we get like a new updated home app. It doesn't you know, they updated a little bit, but like they could do better.

I would love to see some refinements like mentioned more on stage, but I not holding as much hope as you, even with these rumors that are out there. I'm not holding that much hope that they were going to spend any amount of time on HomeKit, much more than just having the icon up on stage and saying, yeah, HomeKit, we updated that. Right. All right. Interesting. So we're on record now, and the home tech community can keep us honest about this one. Seth, the big question I have for you, given all of the talk we've done recently about your home tech hall of fame or graveyard or whatever you choose to call it. What's going to happen with HomePod this time around? Well, there are rumors of HomePod mini, and I don't really know how good those rumors are. Like of a, like a low priced Amazon, a premium Amazon echo type device that would sit there and be a HomePod mini.

Like, I don't, I don't really know how good of a solution that would be considering that Apple kind of is of the opinion that like, Oh, you can just use an iPad for that. Or you can use your phone for that or your watch, you know? So I don't know, but I'm going to go on this one and say, yeah, why not? Why not? If I'm going to shoot, shoot for the, if I, basically what happens here, i'm hedging my

bets because if uh if they don't if they if they do talk about home kit i i lose that but then i always i always have the chance to make it back in this one here that they're they're going to to to do to say something about home pod enough where like they update it substantially like i would love to see home pod get more than one music service add to it. You know, like anything to make it any amount better would be great. And I'm hoping they mention, I'm hoping to see something done with it on stage on Monday. Be great. It's not happening, Seth. Thanks. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for that disappointment there.

It's just, I don't, I don't see it. I don't, I don't know. I, time will tell, but, uh, yeah, I just, I'm taking the no, I'm taking the no on that one. Nothing. HomePod's a big, a big dud this year. Well, I can tell you the, using the HomePod for Apple Music was great. Like it was it was fun to use. It worked reasonably well. It worked a whole lot better than the Apple Music app, which is a piece of garbage. So if I could get like Spotify on the HomePod, that's a win win. I would put that out here and get my speakers back sitting on desk in a heartbeat.

But for just what it did, it was kind of more annoying than it was and took up enough space on my desk where i was just like all right it's gonna go and uh if they ever update it or optimize it later i will add it back in otherwise it's gonna live in the graveyard until its day comes don't hold your breath it could be soon right yeah that's right all right cool well uh we'll be excited for that. I know Monday's, I think, a really busy day on my end. I'm not sure I'll be able to watch it live, but I'll try to keep an eye on the Hub.

We usually have some really good dialogue going on in there around the WWDC. And it'll be a different event this year, all virtual. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out as well. I'll see if we can't do something fun with the hub and do like a little watch party like we do every year. Either the, yeah, I'll try and do something in the hub because it's around 1.30 p.m.

I think it's around 1.00 Eastern, but I guess it's maybe 10. I don't know, it's 10 o'clock Pacific. So whatever that turns out to be in the actual time zone that matters, I will the math time zone yeah i'll do the math that day and figure it out well matthew in the chat room says he wants a james bond watch with a laser i think there's a better chance of that happening than there is home pod updates oh man well so it will Oh, man. Well, so that's what I'm going with. It will be interesting to see how they do this announcement and keynote to not make it boring. Usually it's like a two-hour keynote that can be boring even with a live audience there cheering them on of Apple employees.

But now they can't do that, right? So it will be interesting to see how they do this thing and make it interesting and entertaining. Yeah, I think, you know, a company like Apple and given their creative talent and marketing talent there, I will be very interested to see just how the event comes across. And if they're able to do anything sort of unique or novel or different to make it more engaging, given the fact that they won't have that live audience. And I think a lot of people would be wise to pay attention to that. Cedia Emerald expositions, for example, I'd be, I'd be taking a lot of notes if I worked there about some of the things that, that they come up with, because again, they've got a lot of smart minds there and, and I think they'll,

I suspect they'll, they'll do a pretty good job with it. Yeah. I mean, they usually do a good job with their presentations. I mean, they're, they're like those, their keynotes are, I mean, legendary, right. Um, but I, I, I don't know. I mean, how this goes, I don't know, like how this is going to be presented. Um, it will be interesting to see whether it's like an hour, hour and two hour long commercial again, that just kind of just gets bored and boring and trails off, I'll fall asleep. I don't want to do that.

I want to be excited about whatever's coming out and hang on to the end and get new updated HomePods, right? HomePods? Greg said, what about an iPhone 12? I don't know. I don't see it. I don't see it. I haven't seen anything about that. Aren't those done later in the year?

I think they're done later in the year. I think like September timeframe is usually when they come out the new iPhones. So I'm going no on that one, Greg. But yeah, I'm on the record. They're supposed to have new computers. That was the big rumor is that they'll have new ARM-based computers.

Instead of having an Intel inside, it'll have an Apple-made ARM chip stuck in there, which is very interesting because like I run a Mac for my work and I like using Mac. I like the software, but I have to run Windows for like development on control for literally control for, uh, Elan, URC, everything has to have a Windows component to it. So I'm stuck running Windows just for that. But once this gets put in, like I can't use Windows,

I can't use a Mac anymore unless they somehow figure out how to make Windows work on it. I don't know. You have to be smarter than me to figure that. I have no idea how they, it's magic. Don't look at me. You can't get it to do it anyway. So like I'm just,

click the icon and it works at that point. That's crazy talk, virtual machines and stuff. That's right. That stuff is wizardry. I agree. Exactly. Robert says, arm yourselves to be disappointed. I like that.

Good one. Yep. All right, Seth. Well, no guests this week. Just you and me. What do you say? We jump into some home tech headlines. Let's do it.

Well, speaking of presentations, uh, Cedia has announced a revised schedule for its Cedia Technology and Business Summits. Eight in-person tech summits and one new virtual conference have been added to the schedule for this fall. Quote, the opportunity to gather in person, connect with manufacturers, and learn from some of the industry's best is something that is not something any of us will be taking for granted this year, said Robert Keeler, CDA Senior Director of Sales, Sponsorships, and Partnerships. And we're thrilled to be able to put together a new schedule of events that will serve as an important touchpoint for the industry as we're on the road to recovery from the pandemic. I'm sorry, I'm struggling to read this because I literally just stopped reading Cat in the Hat with my daughter. And I'm like,

this isn't rhyming. My head is just not in this. So that's not good. Context shifting there. No, no. Sorry, Robert. I butchered your quote, but yeah, no, I'm glad to see this come back. This is cool. I'm just, I'm interested because, you know, they just canceled the big CDA show. And you look at the dates, revised 2020 dates. The first one of these is in September. September 22nd in Atlanta. September 24th in Vancouver. That says new virtual event. So I'm not sure what the deal with that is. But then October, November, you know, so these are right around the corner. And granted, they're regional shows, so they're not as big as Cedia. But, yeah, I got to tell you, I don't know. I'd be nervous to attend. But they do say the health and safety of everyone attending these summits will be their primary concern. Of course, Cedia will be implementing additional social distancing and safety measures in conjunction with each venue and state and local guidelines. Story also mentions that attendees will see adjustments, including an altered registration process, various food and beverage options, and adjusted room layouts.

So clearly they're taking stuff into account and um i don't know i expect they'll get you know they'll get a turnout but it's going to probably be limited to what it's been in the past i could see this working sooner than i could see you know a big show working because this seems more manageable to do like if you you had what, 50 people in a room, maybe, I don't know how big these summits are 50 to a hundred people. Like, yeah, I mean, I think they're, they're bigger than that, but I, I, I'm not sure I've, we've had several folks from our company go to these on a regular basis. I've never been to one personally, so I'm not sure exactly how, um, how the layout is well if they

if they're if they can do the social distancing and and have all of the you know safety measures they're talking about put in place it may be successful i say 50 to 100 people because that's all i would expect to actually show up like um like if you lived in at or, you know, one of the New York, Houston, it's like I'm not going to travel to Houston to go to this. But like if I lived in Houston, I'm already kind of like in that in the mess already. Like I could see going to this. And, you know, as long as everybody was practicing, you know, correct distancing and all that good stuff. You know, it's no different than going to, to the shopping, you know, store or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things that I've heard about these regional events is that while yes, they don't attract

people from other areas, like people don't travel across the country to go to one of these for obvious reasons, they're a regional event, but on the flip side, because they're regional, they do tend to attract more people per company. So where a typical integration company may only take a couple people to Cedia, they might bring more of the team or the whole team to these regional events because it's right there in the neighborhood. So I think that kind of offsets. And you don't get tens of thousands of people. Obviously this is not anything like the big CDS show, but I do think they get a pretty good, a pretty good turnout.

Well, they also, the virtual event that they're doing in Vancouver, I don't know why they have to have a location specified with that, but you know, maybe that will be a little bit more better attended and reasonable for more people to get into and check out. All right. Well, moving on from there, Google has countersued Sonos for patent infringement following Sonos originally filing a patent

lawsuit against Google back in January. The lawsuit alleges that Sonos is infringing on five Google patents covering mesh networking, echo cancellation, DRM, content notifications, and personalized search. So the battle's sort of heating up here between Sonos and Google. You know who's going to win here? Deeper Pockets? Lawyers. Lawyers are going to win. Not the consumer, not Google or or sonos yeah well no doubt about that yeah this is uh this has been kind of a winding story so sonos lawsuit filed back in january

it was all about patents covering things like setup control synchronization multi-room network speaker systems and you know sonos claimed that Google had stolen this technology after they had worked together to integrate Google Play and had further insisted, they say further, Google had insisted on very harsh terms for Sonos to include Google Assistant on its products. Get this, Seth, including sharing the full Sonos product roadmap for six months. Wow. Even as Google was developing competing speaker products. Wow. That's crazy.

Yeah. That's like very strong arm tactics there. So anyways, there was a lot to that Sonos lawsuit, and and Google's not just, um, sitting on their heels and taking it. They're in fact, counter suing with their own, with their own lawsuit, which is again, not, not great for none of this is good for consumers. No, it will be interesting. I'm sure this will, well, it's basically, it's basically going to come down to like how long this can go on with the person with the deeper pockets google um but like i i you know this will end up being settled at some point when the uh tempers flare down i i do see i do remember that uh ceo patrick spence of sonos

was testifying he testified before the house antitrust committee and he said that google had blocked the company from enabling both amazon a and the Google Assistant from being active at the same time. That's why that feature set doesn't work at the same time. It's very interesting that that came from Google. I would have kind of like expected that to be like an Amazon rule. Like Amazon won't let you have more than one virtual assistant if you have Alexa built in. But it came from Google. So the do no evil company, uh, is, uh, doesn't care about consumer choice, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. It's, um, it's interesting. Spence also told Congress, according to this

story, that Google was intentionally using patented technology in a practice called quote, efficient infringement. I had never heard that term before. It was basically the idea that Google would look at it and say, yes, we're going to infringe on this patent because we know that the profits we'll derive from doing so are going to dwarf any sort of legal downside to doing this. And then, you know, Sonos also accuses them of really subsidizing their products and saturating the market. And it's like, well, Google's got plenty incentive to do that

without Sonos given their advertising revenues. But yeah, it's all just kind of tangled up. And like you said, this will take a long time to play out and eventually things will settle down. But hopefully it won't have too big of a consequences for consumers in the process. It's, uh, it's still heated. I see this in response, uh, CEO Patrick Smith's told the verge instead of simply addressing the merits of our case and paying us what we're owed comma, Google has chosen, uh, to use the size and breadth, uh, use their size and breadth to try and find areas in which they can retaliate. So still some emotional words being put into this, and it's going to take some time for that kind of stuff to settle down and go away.

So hopefully, like you said, it'll be sooner rather than later, and we'll see somebody win out of it. I don't even know if I want to see anybody win out of this. I mean, if Sonos wins, that would be huge for them, but I don't know. I don't think there's any winning in this kind of game. No. So we'll keep an eye on it. Well, speaking of Google, Google Wi-Fi routers should now handle overloaded internet providers more gracefully.

It's delivering an update to Nest Wi-Fi and Google Wi-Fi routers that improves overall performance with slow internet connections. You should have a better chance of maintaining that video call or gaming session, especially if others in your home are online. Very interesting, very interesting. We have some features like this in traffic priority routing and that kind of thing in some of the higher-end routers, and it's neat to see those come into consumer hands. Yeah, definitely. All this stuff is for

the network, for the pros out there who do higher-end networks or even mid-grade professional networks, this is pretty standard fare. But the fact that it is getting consumerized and easier for people to do on their own is a good thing generally. There was an additional Google blog post that we'll share in the show notes where pulled out one quote from there. It said, quote, our priority device feature is also getting smarter so you can rest assured Wi-Fi traffic will be prioritized to the device you choose. This means you can make sure your work laptop is getting the strongest Wi-Fi available as opposed to the kids' YouTube sessions. Nice. So I got kind of a kick out of that one.

And I'm sure with as many people working from home as are right now and then kids home from school and all of that going on, I suspect this has become a more acute pain point for quite a few people. And I think this will be a welcome new feature. And Robert's pointing out in the chat that everyone else, I guess, in the consumer space already had something like this. Eero, Orbi, Linksys, Netgear, they all had something that you could turn on, which is great. I think it's nice that things get updated and you'd be able to use this type of, I guess Rashid said it's QoS. I think it's quality of service feature. Yeah, see, I don't even, as a consumer,

I don't even want to know what it's called. Like just a switch that says make it better and it just makes it better. That's all you need. Yeah, I think making it simple and intuitive for people to just say, hey, prioritize this device over that device or this service over that service ultimately is where the power is. And yeah, like Robert's saying, none of this is novel or new, but the launch of HBO Max, the streaming service, which resulted in confusion between that app, HBO Go, and HBO Now. Who could have possibly seen that coming, Seth?

Warner Media, the parent company of HBO, said that it will be shutting down HBO Go in the United States with a plan to remove the app from primary platforms on July 31st. Meanwhile, HBO Now, which was rolled out in 2015 as a streaming service for viewers without cable or satellite, will be rebranded as simply HBO. So it's not confusing at all. Shoot me now. Oh my gosh. Yes, this is, I mean mean this is like classic at&t right it's like if i if i look at like what at&t has been named over the years and there's at&t wireless and like all the conglomerations that kind of got pulled into at&t and then out of it and actually i think at&t was

like the original ma bell like that's what they had to break up uh to make all like the the bell telephones or something like that like it's all been sucked up under one thing now like there's there's funny graphics online to like see how everything is kind of like flown gone into like 30 different companies and then all of it's been like gone gone back into one or two uh with at&t being one of them uh but yeah this is this is classic at&t rebranding like just confuse people to no end and um yeah hbo is now the h now h what was hbo now yeah it it's really it is it's very confusing that we'll link to uh i've got a link here as well to an article from digital trends that says hbo hbo's insistence on making a mess of its apps is irreparably hurting its brand.

And this is a pretty scathing article. I think, you know, look, first world problems here, right? Let's preface all of this with that. But ultimately, some valid points in here. You know, the very first line of the article, I feel like I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion. It's like, why do you even need to do this? Like, you own the brand HBO. Like, you want to have HBO Max as like the overarching pay service, which is great, by the way.

Been loving using HBO Max. Why not just say, okay, as of this date, maybe it has to do with like legal agreements and like, like things that there's, you know, movies like, oh, we'll have your movie on HBO now until wink, wink, uh, you know, for six months. And like the six months is over. It's like, well, we can't rename it because it was called HBO now. And I don't really like, it seems like this would be a pretty easy thing to do just to like rename something to where it's easy for people to understand.

I don't know. Like this doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah. I can kind of see why they did it. It's just like they got into a situation where they had three different apps and it doesn't make sense for them to have three different apps.

They just needed two. They just needed two. Right. They needed one for the HBO shows. They needed one for the HBO plus all the Warner media stuff. And like to get there, they went through this convoluted like jigsaw puzzle type thing just to make it confusing for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was looking for this while you were talking and I found it it's in that other digital trend story that I just mentioned a second ago, and I'll just read from that. It says, as part of HBO's public statement today,

it mentions that customers who struggle to access HBO Max due to outstanding and unresolved conflicts with distribution rights, so there is some content licensing issues at play here, those customers will be able to continue to authenticate into HBO.com through August 31st. Its fix is to technically allow access to its content, but through the least convenient outlet it offers and only for a limited time. Then the author goes on to state that

his guess is that HBO is hoping or expecting to have all of its licensing deals straightened out by then. And if it doesn't, it plans probably to lose that that customer base. So anyways, it's messy. Well, there he goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is messy. All these contract negotiations, everything. I kind of figured that was a little bit of it. But as Robert is probably pointing out, he's probably right a little bit turf wars inside the company. Each group wants their own branding slash marketing to win i i bet there's a little bit of that too like i bet it's a little bit of both um and here you are hbo max hbo and hbo that's it that's all you get hbo max and hbo that's there you go i don't really understand yeah whatever thanks hbo for confusing me well and everyone else it segues right into our

next card and i'll just go ahead and next story here just tee this one up because it's all kind of part of the same things and i'm curious for your perspective on this seth as somebody who's dabbling and with hbo max and using it um this this story is headline hbo max is playing bait and switch with dc comics movies it says in the lead-up to the launch of hbo max warner media put its library of movies movies featuring DC Comics superheroes front and center as one of the main selling points of the new streaming service. Now, just a few weeks after the service made its debut, HBO Max has confirmed it will remove most of those movies at the end of the month and rotate movies in and out each month. As far as opening gambits go, it's a risky one and it's already leading to some well-deserved criticism from subscribers. So I don't know if you're a, if you're into these DC comics movies, is this a big deal to you as a, as a subscriber? What's your take? Not really. The DC comic, the DC universe was pretty like those. I mean, I guess if you're a

comic fan, you like them. Like I, those were you're a comic fan you like them like i those were the serious ones where they tried to be like too serious and to where it was like just comical and i i never really liked them um and then like the the mark the the the marvel side i guess was just like it's a joke like we're just gonna joke like we're gonna have a like guardians of the galaxy and have a talking raccoon and make him really funny, like really, really funny. They did a good job of it. Like they nailed that. So like, I don't know, like Aquaman. Did you watch Aquaman?

Have you ever seen that? I have not. No, I haven't seen that one. I made the mistake of watching it. And it was probably one of the worst movies I've ever seen. And they probably spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on this thing. And it's like, it was horrible. Like absolutely horrible.

The special effects were great, but that was like, if you're just there for the special effects, they nailed that part. But like, I don't know. That's, that's what I get from the DC special effects. Great. Rest of the movie, not so much a movie. Yeah. Uh, so no, I'm not going to miss them to, to answer your question. Um, but I, I, I'm not a big fan. Like what if I did want to watch them? Uh, I'm not a big fan like what if i did want to watch them uh i'm not a big fan of like being told that you know hey you're going to get those for a month and then they're all going to go away it's kind of kind of yeah that's always annoying i can't

remember how that happened to me recently and i can't remember which movie it was but i i had seen it on netflix and i had added it to my list and wanted to watch it and then i sat down one night to finally watch it and it was, and it was gone. So this isn't unique to HBO max. These things happen on, on streaming services. You know, I think fairly regularly, but yeah,

it says while early, early speculation suggested the films were disappearing from HBO max due to prior licensing deals. It appears now that the move is an intentional one. And then there's a quote here. We have a collection of DC films that will rotate on the platform. A spokesperson from HBO told comicbook.com, we have a new batch coming in July and another batch coming in August.

So there you go. Yeah. I'm not missing much from this. What I do find annoying is they taking things away. Like, you know, this is why people download movies illegally. Like, this is precisely why. If you're going to offer a service that has all of these movies available for just a few clicks away, why not just leave those movies up?

Like, I'm not going to want to watch Aquaman and and shazam which shazam was actually kind of okay it was okay um all all the time like i i'm gonna want to watch other dc movies if i'm into this so like this is this is why people download and uh back up this stuff and uh you know if you don't want that to happen then offer the service you said you were going to offer. Seems seems reasonable enough. It does. But, you know. All right. The National Science Foundation, the NSF, is kicking off a nationwide project designed to boost Internet of Things security.

Seven academic institutions will research technology designed to reduce the security burden on users and help fix smart home privacy flaws eroding consumer trust. This is led by Dartmouth College. Splice. Here we go. You ready for this? The security and privacy in the lifestyle of IoT for consumer environments. That's Splice. Kind of have a good acronym.

Connector, right? They nailed it, I think. So there's a lot of extra letters in there but you know we'll give it to them um we'll conduct research in a number of fields related to home devices and security those include privacy sociology interface design mobile computing embedded systems network uh sorry wireless networks and radio engineering pretty interesting research program will kick off on October 1st, 2020, so a few months away. It says Splice intends to develop a toolkit designed to identify so-called non-cooperative smart devices to help users understand how their home tech works. It also plans to shift away from a privacy model that forces unsophisticated consumers to figure out how and why to secure specific devices. And then lastly, they mentioned that they're going to identify

privacy issues that must be addressed to advance consumer trust. I don't know, I'm split down the middle on this one. I love the intent. I love seeing serious institutions get behind really digging into the IoT. The IoT, I'll use air quotes on that. And I think nothing bad can come of this. But then on the other hand, I just wonder if this turns into a research project that doesn't go anywhere after that, right? Like some really good research, but does it actually result in any meaningful change from the consumer's perspective? That remains a big question to me.

Right, right. But I love the fact that they're doing it. Yeah, I agree. And a lot of this stuff doesn't even make it to consumers unless there's some kind of like regulation. We saw a massive amount of movement in security, security on IOT and security on devices in general. When, when California passed that law that basically said you can't have default passwords, it's like, well, magically every device out there suddenly came up with, you know, a way to make a good password or include a QR code

on the front of it where you scan and can reset your password. Like they made it really easy to do things using existing technologies. So I don't know, it would be nice if something like this had a little more teeth to it, where they said, you know, just do the bare minimum. And maybe we'd get a little bit better security out of our devices out of it. But without without having, unfortunately, some government interference and and, you know, regulation put on top of these types of things, it's it's going to be really hard for anyone to care if you here we go. If your device is splice compliant, like no one's going to go out of their way to buy a splice compliant camera versus one that was, you know, $10 cheaper. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think

the most potential for power or impact out of this initiative probably comes from, it talks about they're going to create an advisory council to provide guidance on best practices and potential problems. And an advisory council to who? To whom? That's my question. Who are they going to be advising? And I think if they're advising private companies, I don't know that that really goes anywhere. I think it's more, this has to sort of feed into better governmental regulatory. You know, if they're advising on a regulatory level, I think that's probably where this has the biggest opportunity to make an impact. I agree as far as like a direct consumer benefit or like seeing a Splice logo on devices in the future? Unlikely, I think. But perhaps they can be involved in advising and sort of helping form better regulatory policy around

privacy and sort of the next generation of connected devices. So it's interesting. Again, I'm a big fan that they're doing it. I just think, I just wonder, I should say, if this turns into nothing more than an academic exercise and doesn't ultimately translate to anything meaningful for consumers. Right. Nope, that makes sense. All right, well, that'll do it for our headlines. All of the links and topics that we've discussed on this week's episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 308. 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. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 308 and don't forget you could join us in the chat room live wednesday starting somewhere between 7 and 7 30 p.m eastern a little bit later tonight than we planned on starting but you can find out more about that at home tech dot fm slash live all right seth well i got a pick of the week this week a big one a big one we've got to talk about this i do i like it now this is um

this has been around for quite a while i'm pretty pretty sure, but I'm sort of new to it. It's a piece of software called TextExpander. Seth, you're familiar? I am familiar with TextExpander only by the way of other podcasts and people that have used it. I generally get the idea, but I'll let you go ahead and explain what it can do. Yeah. So it's pretty simple. It allows you to just sort of custom make your own key shortcuts that will then expand out into longer bits of text. And I've dabbled with tools like this in the past, and I was trying to use them more from, I would say, bigger snippets, like pre-written emails and things like that. And in that use case, I found them useful, but it didn't quite stick. But I got to say, with TextExpander, I've found that it's really

taken for me now with even just little things. Like at work, for instance, we have one vision resources.com is our domain name. And so it's a rather long email to type out. And how often do you have to type your email, right? Jason dot Griffin at blah, blah, blah. And so now I just type, um, I forget, I'm still memorizing these. This is one of the other things that you got to like, you have to make your shortcuts. You have to be kind of thoughtful about them because they have to be this combination of it's it's got to be a combination of keys that you wouldn't accidentally type but it also has to be easily memorable so i think like for my work email i have like z o v e m so you start it with a z and then it's like O-V for One Vision,

E-M for email. Okay. Right, that's how I remember it. So you have to come up with like clever ways of doing that. And that's a little bit of a challenge is memorizing them at first. But I've now got these set up for people's Slack handles,

for email address, street address, you know, all sorts of things that I'm finding just very useful. So it's nothing earth-shaking, but it's definitely a really kind of a, just one of those little delightful experiences when you've got to go through and fill out all your information on a website

that you're ordering a product. Like I can blast through all that street address and everything very quickly now. I've got all of those set up as little shortcuts. So if you're into just little hacks that you can put together to save a few seconds here, a few seconds there, I've found it really useful. So where I use this is very much in the same way that you use it. And I use the thing that's built into Mac OS. Like there's a way that you can go into your system preferences and under keyboard, I want to say. Yeah, under keyboard.

And then there's like a place where you can adjust what text. Yeah, keyboard. And there's a text tab. And you can type in like replace something with something. So like I have one that's real fun that I, now I use this, this is, this is my problem. I have always had an issue like with coming up with these creative things that I would never type. So, like, I'm fairly limited on what I can remember. Like, you were just talking about your D-Z-O-M-3-5. You know, like, that's already hard for me to remember.

So, like, what I have in here, I used two semicolons together. So, like, if I type two semicolons and then sn well it didn't work let's see two semicolons sn for some reason my keyboard got it well it's supposed to go show notes and it'll say show notes at home tech dot fm slash and then i type the name of thing uh and then i've got a couple of other these in here but the problem with these is these don't actually work all the time like for whatever like it's supposed to sync across your phone like i could in theory i could type that on my phone and get uh that in there as well but i it it doesn't quite work at time i know text expander uh does a lot better job of kind of being

in the forefront and you know as soon as you type that bloop, you know, pace, whatever you have set for that command stroke, command keys, whatever you want to call it. So that's what I've been using. And I've just been like less than happy, but I can't think like I've got a couple of funny ones in here that I use for like WT, W U T. Let me slow down and say that, uh, that does like the, uh, the, let's see if I can get this to work in our Slack channel. I'll put this in the Slack channel. It's these, what eyes like, like that thing. And then like, I use them for those, like, that's an important one. Well, and I also have the, uh, this table, the table flip one where you like do that. So like if I type in table flip, it does that. And then I have one in here.

Evidently, when I typed in new number with no space, it says, this is Seth. I've got a new number, blah, blah, blah. Here's what it is. And then also also in there. I don't know if you can do this with Texas, but like with one vision. Let's see. Is it one word or two with One Vision? How do you guys write that? One word. And is the V capitalized? Yeah. So this is what we do with Blackwire since

the B and the W are capitalized. I always just typed it as, you know, type it as Blackwire, but then it automatically kind of adjusts it because I can use that to basically replace the uncapitalized W that I missed. And then I've got this classic colon, colon USA will do this for me. Boom. There you go. Yeah. So lots of ways to do this. Robert in the chat room saying text, text expander is awesome. Makes a couple of good points. Number one, the pop-up and fill-ins is a really powerful feature. So you can actually set up snippets. I haven't used this a ton, so I'll do my best to describe it succinctly and accurately.

But basically, you can have it set up to where you could have pre-scripted parts, but then also little fields that you fill out. So I don't know, maybe a simple example would be if you have a kind of a scripted email that you send often, but you need to replace somebody's name and maybe company name in the email. Well, you can set it up so that you type your little shortcut and then a little pop-up comes up on the window and it just says, gives you the fields the that are variable to fill out first name and company name you fill those out hit enter and boom it it pastes those in dynamically yeah uh so that's pretty cool as well yeah that's that's much much better um it kind of reminds me and i'll i'm not going to take over your pick of the week on this but like

if you don't have we'll do this another week we'll talk about clipboard managers uh another week because i think that's a game changer for you if you if you're not i finally uh got one of those as well but yeah we'll we'll save that for a different one i looked at a couple um those make a huge difference as well uh absolutely and then robert says also you can use command i don't know if that's command slash. It looks like is what he's saying to search for snippets instead of memorizing them. Um, I'll have to dig into that a little bit. Um, my snippet library isn't huge yet, so that hasn't been a major problem for me, but, uh, I can sense already that that's going to get, uh, more difficult as time goes on. So anyways, a really cool tool. Again, not new. This has been around for a while, but I've just gotten into it and have really enjoyed using it. It does have a cost.

It's about, I think, $3 a month or so if you pay annually. Oh, that's nothing. Yeah. And then a little bit more than that if you pay monthly, I think like $4 a month if you pay monthly. And I think they have like a 30-day free trial trial as well yeah that that's i i might actually sign up for this because i i'm looking through my snippets that don't actually work and uh i have like now does this work on your phone too have you have you tried to do that it does they do have an app um candidly i haven't installed that yet but supposedly it syncs across all of your apps. So on iOS, you get your same snippet library. So I'm definitely planning to test that out because, gosh, filling out those forms and things like that on a phone is even more difficult.

These days, being so stationary and at home, I really am not using my phone for a ton of stuff like that. Like typically if I'm doing anything that requires any sort of heavy typing at all, I'm on my computer more often than not. But yeah, they do have an iOS app and supposedly it syncs across all of your devices. Very nice. Well, that's TextExpander.com. Go check it out. Now, there is another one, Keyboard Maestro, I've heard of. And I don't know.

I think that's a little more automation heavy, but I don't know. TextExpander, I might. Yeah, I looked at, I even installed Keyboard Expander briefly, and I, candidly, I did not stick with it for very long. So take this with a grain of salt, because I'm sure I could have figured it out if I was really committed to it. But it struck me as far less intuitive. And most importantly, it was more than I needed. Keyboard Text Expander is just that.

It's a text expander with some really nice features around that. Keyboard Maestro has a text expansion function, but it's got a lot more. It's more of an automation engine for your computer. Oh, my gosh, yeah. And so the videos I watched struck me as, you know, it was more of a tool that was really used for people who really wanted to kind of get in and nerd out on that stuff. I don't have time for that. I didn't. I had a very specific sort of pain point I was trying to solve. Um, so I went with text expander, but yeah, keyboard maestro is another option if you're looking for something that has perhaps a little bit more horsepower. Yeah. It definitely looks like you

can do, you can trigger all sorts of things, uh, on your, on your computer. But yeah, I don't have, this is the problem with automations. Like I know that they'll save me time over time, like, but the amount of time it takes you to set them up is less than the time it takes you to do it every single time over and over again. But I rarely, unless it's something repetitive, like I will rarely go in and do something

and set up this kind of crazy automation for myself. Yeah, I'm the same way. Most of the time because I can't get it to work anyway. So when I just find like you end up endlessly tweaking that stuff where you spend more time like building the automations than you would just doing the thing you need to do. Yep. So I've never had great results with stuff like that, personally. I will say, if you find yourself doing something

repetitively over and over and over and over again, find a way to automate that. That's what computers were made for. And like, yeah. That's right. Because there's all sorts of things I run into in my day job, like spreadsheets and stuff, where I'll just like break out some break out some, some good old formulas

inside the spreadsheet and basically automate a spreadsheet to do what I want it to do. Um, that, that is like, you know, the basics of automation and you can do that. Well, you know, you can do some basic programming, uh, you know, and, and, and, and automate a lot of that stuff for yourself. So, um, I have a couple of things like set up on my computer, mostly for like re transcoding movies where like the command prompt is like a real long thing that has to go in. And I'll have like a little automator script set up, which is a thing you can do easily on a Mac, uh, to, to take care of that. But that doing that automator script like took longer than I think just typing

the command or memorizing the command. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So anyways, go check that out. Hope it helps. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or ideas for a show topic or guest, please drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month

gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and ready for this. Jason, this is the big debate. Lutron shades, the wooden shades.

They, Robert pointed out that they only like tilt up and down like this. That's their automation. And they don't raise up and down. And the question was like, Oh, interesting. Do you, have you you ever raised do you raise your shades up do you use like that big heavy the heavy pull one or do you just like crack them open well i raise my wood blinds only when i'm trying when i'm opening the window ah is that something people do outside of Florida? We open our windows here, uh, rarely in this, you know, in the, in the spring before it gets

too hot and then in the fall before it gets too cold, but it's glorious when we can. And I certainly, cause otherwise I feel like you're just, you're trying to put your hand in between the, in, in between the wood and slide the window open, but that's the only time I pull it up. And I usually literally, I, I pull the string. So it goes up, I open the wood and slide the window open. But that's the only time I pull it up. And I usually literally, I pull the string so it goes up. I open the window and then I drop it back down. Interesting. Okay. So that could be a manual thing.

Anyways, that's my use case. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, interesting to know. I was thinking about this in the past six years that I've owned these blinds and been in the house. I have not done that once or maybe a couple of times, but maybe to clean the window, but that's it.

Yeah. I mean, I've got them down here in my basement and I never do that. So there's only certain windows. But yeah, that's interesting. I didn't even think about that, but it's good to know. Buyer beware. All right, cool. Well, if you're looking for other ways to support the show, but don't want to do so financially, we would definitely appreciate, or even if you want to do financially, do both. Leave us a positive review in iTunes or in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you find value or entertainment in the podcast here, we would really appreciate if you took a few minutes to go leave us a review. Yep. Well, that wraps up the show this week.

Jason, you're heading out of town next week. So I've got to figure out what to do for a show next week. I'm going to do something. I am. Yeah. My wife and I and taking our kids up to a little sort of cottage up in a place here in Colorado called Grand Lake. We've never been before, but it's recommended by a friend.

And we're just, we just need to get out of the house. Yes. So we're really excited about that. Yeah, it'll be a really nice trip. And we're going to lay low. We're not going to be doing a lot. Like we're not going to be going out to restaurants or anything like that. But, you know, it's right on a lake.

Got the kids some fishing poles. We're going to take their bikes and stuff up there. And so we'll just, we'll just have a low key, uh, relaxing week and, and enjoy a change of scenery. That sounds absolutely amazing. And I am, I'm jealous where, yeah, we need to get out of the house too. And, uh, going to going to a cabin in the woods by a lake, uh, you a lake and disconnecting for a little bit even would be a great thing. Yeah, it's going to be great. Good job.

I'm really excited for it. So appreciate you holding the fort down while I'm gone and thanks everybody for listening. I'll be off next week, but I'll look forward to getting back in action the following week. With that, let's wrap up the show. Thanks everybody for tuning in.

Thanks for the lively chat room tonight. We really appreciate it, guys. And Jason, I'll talk to you not next week, but the week after. All right. Sounds good. Take care, Seth.