HomeTech.fm - Episode 312 - Goodbye, Amazon Wand

Episode Date: July 17, 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, July 17th. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how are you feeling? I'm good. How are you feeling? You sound terrible. Yeah, I was a little like a head cold over the weekend that kind of put me down. But like the drainage and everything just kind of gets in your throat and like wants to hang out there. And then you have all these like phone calls you're supposed to make by Wednesday. And like, I have no voice left at all.

It's fun for a podcast. Yeah, that's always like the telltale sign for me when i get sick as listeners to the show may recall my voice just goes and well no covid concerns i presume just a head cold no no the no temperature nothing good like i mean we call doctors and stuff and they're like yeah don't don't bother coming in something there's something going around. And so, okay. I'm not worried about it. There's no way. I mean, no real way, I guess, we would have been exposed to it other than, like, I don't know, at a grocery store or something.

But I don't know. We're pretty careful about this stuff. Well, if you're anything like me, though, like every little tickle in your throat or feeling a little warm or whatever these days is kind of like your mind instantly starts playing tricks on you a little bit. You have to, you have to, I mean, yeah, you just, you go straight to the area and you're like, you cough slightly and you're like, am I dying? I know I laugh, but it's, it's scary. It is. Yeah, it is. It is for sure. Well, on a lighter note, I'm lighter note, I'm still limping through. Behind the scenes, we've been having lots of conversations about my Mac Mini that I'm recording on here. All right. Let's lay out a couple of definitions here. Behind the scenes,

we've been having a couple of conversations. That's true, but we should put a time frame to this, Jason. This won't shock anyone. No, no, it will not at all. I think it's probably going on a year and a half, maybe. Maybe two years. Yeah, I won't argue with that. All right. Competing priorities, Seth. Everything you say yes to is something else you're saying no to, right?

That's a great, that's a great, that's a great saying right there. Anyways, I've got a solid state hard drive here and I'm, I'm almost ready to make the leap into installing it, but it is, you know, anything that involves like physically disassembling a computer generally not in my wheelhouse. So I, um, Seth has been helping me along the way. I'm bugging him every five minutes with questions that are rooted in my deep seated, um, trepidation for pulling apart this Mac mini and replacing the hard drive. But I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. My goal is to have it done

before next week's episode. Wow. So keep me accountable. Yeah, no, we're definitely going to keep you accountable. We'll try and get you hopefully set up and brought into the modern world. I mean, let's just put it this way.

Jason, it's 2020 and you're running a spinning disk hard drive. I don't't know man well when you say it like that sounds awful does yeah this mac mini has served me really well but it's time it it like if i have to reboot it it's like a 20 minute process yeah and we've had to do that a couple times right like yeah miraculously we we haven't had any like major issues with guests and being on time but i feel like it's only a matter of time yeah no i i it'll be a good thing i think you're going to i just did this um not too long ago with one of my wife's old like laptops that she had and it it was like a spinning disk hard drive and to be fair with her it was just like a Windows laptop.

She would she'd basically take out of the closet, print something on it and then put it back in the closet. Like it's not like a daily driver for her. And we've had it longer than I even I don't even know when we bought it. Like it's it's just an old Windows computer. I'm like, oh, I can put a new hard drive into that. I have an SSD laying here on my desk. Let me slap that thing in and see if I can get it up. And now it's like a new computer.

It's like a new lease on life. Yeah, yeah. So we were thinking, oh, we need to get you a new computer. Pop an SSD in that thing. And now it's day and night, day and night. There you go. Well, I'm on the record now. So I've got you and the rest of the home tech community to give me a hard time if I don't get it done.

Yep, yep, yep. Well, yeah, exactly. This is one of those things you said yes to now. That's right. That's right. Something's got to give. Something's got to give, yeah. Well, speaking of getting things done, Seth, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines?

Let's do it. Cedia is set to resume offering a select number of in-person training opportunities at Cedia headquarters in the next coming months. The decision comes after extensive consideration and mindful planning through a series of comprehensive safety-focused measures. Cedia will host the courses at, in person, live, the training facility at the Cedia Global Headquarters in Fishers, Indiana. So yeah, opening up the schools is what they say. Open them up. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, the first one looks like it's going to be a cabling and infrastructure technician's CIT program, August 17th through the 19th. And the story that we're reading from here from AV Nation cites extensively, of course, is the safety measures and everything they're doing to try to keep people protected while they're there. It says while on site, safety measures will include required mask wearing by both learners and instructors and daily temperature checks, as well as reduced class sizes. So I think like everything right now, it's hard to know. Everyone's kind of got to make their own decisions about what's worth the risk and what's not. But I think generally, probably not one I'd be going to, but I'll be curious to see if they're able to get a decent turnout for these. Right. I think, quite frankly,

I think you'd probably be more protected at the Cedia class than you would be if you were on a job site, right? That's very true. Or at the grocery store. Or at the grocery store, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if they're requiring masks and they're doing all these safety measures. That's a good point. Yeah. It's probably a safe thing. I think the most risky thing you probably have in between, like here in Fishers, Indiana, would be the airplane you'd have to get on the airport.

I just would feel icky about that altogether. Probably drive myself to Fishers before I would hop on the plane right now. That's right. There you go. Moving on here. Google sent out images of its new Google Home Nest speaker a few hours after the contents of its FCC filing leaked online, confirming rumors that the company has redesigned its flagship Google Assistant-enabled speaker under the Nest brand. So some of the details of this story here. An FCC filing was published Wednesday night of this week,

and not long after, 9to5Google discovered a series of images on Twitter via at AndroidTV underscore rumor showing off a fabric swathed speaker matching that model number. With the cat out of the bag, Google distributed a lifestyle shot to members of the media teasing the new speaker in a cloud blue finish looks it looks interesting it looks like if you you know the the google mini it looks like that but if you had like a square mold and the google mini was like putty and you just pressed down on it till it expanded into a bigger square mold it looks like that i was going to go with a simpler description. I think it looks, to me, it looks like a giant, like, AirPod case. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I can see that. Like the shape of it. It's kind of got that rectangular with the rounded corners. Corners, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess it looks nice. I'm not super particular about that sort of thing. Yeah, not bad looking. Yeah, yeah, it'll...

Now we know what all those Sonos lawsuits were about, right? That's right. particular about that sort of thing. Not bad looking. Yeah. Yeah. It'll now, now we know what all those Sonos lawsuits were about, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah. It says it comes, it was codenamed Prince.

So they refer to it as Prince several times here covered in chalk colored fabric. Whether or not it has a prowess to compete with a $200 Sonos One or the $99 Amazon Echo. Third generation obviously remains to be seen. So yeah, I think that's really what this seems to be based on everything we know about it so far is Google's answer to the Sonos One. Right, right. Yeah, they've been giving away the minis. So I don't know what the price of this is going to go for. So it should be interesting to see how it fares against these and how it sounds. I'm not sure if the sound quality is what

people are looking for when they're using this kind of thing. I don't know. Maybe they are, but we'll have to see how it sounds too, I guess. Certain people, painting with broad strokes here. Obviously, I think the market has overall as a whole has certainly shifted to more focused on convenience over the last five to 10

years than, than audio quality. But, um, maybe more than that. I mean, MP3s, I remember I'm old enough to remember when the MP3s were coming on the scene and people were like, I'm not giving up my CDs for MP3s. It's true. And then like, that's been a super convenient. Yeah. Yeah. They made it super convenient to like put on an MP3 player called an iPod and they're like, oh yeah, I'm putting all my music on this. Quality schmality.

Yeah, exactly. It is definitely a convenience over quality argument. So, well, we'll see how that particular aspect of it fares.

I'm sure the rest of it will be up to Google's quality. Yeah. Well, roughly one year after Logitech launched its Harmony Express Universal Remote, the company is up to Google's quality. Well, roughly one year after Logitech launched

its Harmony Express universal remote, the company is discontinuing the device and ending support. Not only are they doing that, they're going to break it. Harmony Express was meant to be a sleek Amazon Alexa-enabled alternative to the universal remotes with touchscreens

and cluttered programmable buttons. Jason, you remember this? I do. This little thing? Yeah, yeah. Here's a quote from Logitech. Unfortunately, our expectations were not met for this kind of Harmony remote,

and as a result, we've decided to focus our efforts on our core user experience, powerful universal remote control in a world with many devices connected to the TV. So voice control no longer for the Harmony Express. And September 30th, they're shutting down the services for this thing. They're just like, anything out in the field that anyone that has one of these, it's just not going to work.

What's cool, though, is they're offering, it appears they're offering customers who purchased it a replacement Harmony Elite free of charge. Yeah. What's cool, though, is it appears they're offering customers who purchased it a replacement Harmony Elite free of charge. Yeah. And, you know, we've had a lot of conversations on the show over the last, I don't know, six to 12 months about products going away. And these things feel like they're happening at an increased pace these days. And a lot of companies don't handle this very well. So hats off to them for at least handling that aspect of it with grace. And this is a hard thing. Companies have to make these decisions sometimes.

And when a product isn't working out and isn't serving the interests of the company, I'm sure this wasn't an easy decision for them. I'm sure a lot of people worked really hard to get this remote to market. But these things don't always pan out. So at least they're they appear to be taking care of customers. And they're also taking care of themselves. So if it's if they're if it's costing them money to support this thing, that's right. And it's not working out great. Like it's time to cut it. It's smart. It's a good decision to cut. So it will hurt somebody who likes using this. But, you know, at the end of the day, you do want Logitech around to support the rest of the Harmony remote. They can't be like throwing good money after bad.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, it also says here, I should mention, customers can also request a full refund. So if you're not interested in the Harmony Elite, then you can get your money back. Right, right. So that's cool. Good options. Some silver linings there. All right, moving on here, getting everyone together to watch new Netflix shows during a pandemic can be tough or near impossible, but the team over at Kavo, who we've talked to before,

has created an easy-to-use app just for that. This is called Watch With Friends. It's an app available on Roku and Apple TV devices that allows anyone to create a virtual watch party with their friends and families. The app syncs up the playback of the start of the show for everyone in the watch party, making sure everyone starts on the same page. So this is pretty cool. This is genius. I love this. I really do. This is great. This is a great idea. You can have a nice little it's got like a little chat app inside of it. You can like send you can schedule a watch party. Everybody sits down at the same time, hits play and everything stays in sync.

And this will make sure that everybody starts at the same time and you can kind of chat back and forth and watch a movie, you know, like you used to, you know, when you could go to like a theater or something like that with a group of people. Yeah, it's cool. I think it's one of those developments that's coming out of this pandemic that I think is actually a neat thing, even if the pandemic wasn't here, right? Like the ability to do this is kind of cool. I was just looking back because I seem to recall, and I verified here, about two weeks or so, I don't think we touched this one on the show. I think we had a full slate that week of other stories, but Prime Video lets you virtually co-watch shows with up to 100 friends. So that was about two weeks ago that they put this out. So I do wonder, you know, Kavo is going to be doing this and then other providers may be doing this sort of natively. Um, and how does that play out for Kavo? But, uh, either way, it's cool. It says unlimited guests only available in the U S uh, binge compatible. It says here, as long as, as long as a party is active and the host continues to watch additional episodes, guests can watch multiple episodes along with the host. So you can't just watch one can binge out uh if you want yep and this is supported on apple tv roku ios android and chrome browsers with a plugin and it's free it's free yeah yeah that's that's really cool

and i just i downloaded it's on my it's actually on my phone which is really cool uh so far it works with ios 14 i'm running a little beta on this thing. So of course you are. Yeah. Well, I mean, it looks, it looks so pretty and Jason, it like getting sidetracked, but I only have like one page of icons rather than 300. So like I'm, well, that's, that is, uh, that is attractive. I'm organized now. I'm organized. That looks good. I like that. So yeah, the free aspect is a great idea. I hope this goes well for Kaava. I'm not sure what they're getting out of it. Maybe it's nothing.

Maybe they're just like, this is a cool app. We know how to do this. It doesn't take much for us to do. Let's do it kind of development. And it's a really cool app. I think, Jason, what we should do is we should have a home tech watch party. You beat me to it. Yeah, let's do that.

Home tech watch party. What we'll do is we'll figure out something to watch. We'll have a home tech watch party. And then post the little link, I guess, on the hub and Twitter. And everybody can come in and watch whatever. Now, we've got to be careful with this because you and i we have we have kids and uh whatever we pick is probably going to last about 15 minutes before we have to build that's right that's right make it back towards the end no no full-length uh feature films

what i would recommend right right something quick and nice and easy but like does this work on Quibi. Oh my gosh. Oh, poor Quibi. It's going to die, I'm pretty sure. But I think we'll get this together. I like it. We'll put a link somewhere. We'll get this going. Home Tech Watch Party. And we'll get this going for the team over at Kavo

and see what we can do to help them out with this app. Awesome. Well, all the links and topics that we discussed here on this episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 312. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you weekly 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 312.

And don't forget, you could join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. dot fm slash 312 and don't forget you could join us in the chat room live wednesday starting sometime between 7 and 7 30 p.m eastern you can find out more about how to do that at home tech dot fm slash live all right seth we haven't uh we haven't done this in a while but we're going to jump into the mailbag oh boy this week we got a good one this week i think this actually in fairness might have come in uh the week before um we've been a little slow to get to it because of other things. But anyways, I want to jump into this. So this comes from Andy in Freeport, Maine.

He says, hi, guys. I'd love to get your perspective on the huge developments announced at SmartThings. This was discussed on Stacey Higginbotham's IoT podcast as well. Good show. If you haven't listened to it. Specifically, he is referring to the elimination of what's called DTH and the current integrated development environment, IDE, to be replaced with an API. He says, to me as a home tech hobbyist with the SmartThings as my primary hub, this feels

like the end of SmartThings as an open platform because all the groovy code, which is groovy for those who don't know is the Groovy IDE was the previous development environment. And DTH is written and could be written for unique, but most important use cases are gone. So a bunch of those use cases are not going to be supported anymore. He goes on to say, this feels like they are abandoning the hobbyists in favor of the more limited platform for normal people, i.e. people with fewer than, say, 50 devices in their home. My feeling here is bolstered by the horrible performance of the new app. It doesn't embrace custom DTH attributes,

unique icons, pings every device when you tried to load the app, and all of this wasn't the case with the old app. So, you know, he goes on to explain how this is, it feels like they're sort of migrating away from the hobbyists. And he says, it seems like my only option is going to be to go switch over to something like Hubitat or possibly bite the bullet and upgrade to something like Control 4. Wondering if you guys agree with my take here or if you have another perspective. Thanks and keep up the great work. So Seth, I want to throw this one over to you, get your perspective on it. Yeah.

I mean, unfortunately, I don't know too much about smart things and how they were putting all this. I mean, I know, I know, I know these words that they've put in front of us here. But like, that's a start. Yeah. But I mean, here's, here's the thing. Like, I know this story, right? This is a story that we've covered in the past five years many times this is a story that we've seen in our

industry like with product that and i'm not i'm just like put a call i don't want to put a number on this but like products that that people put in their homes that that systems that were like in the tens of thousands of dollars like we we've seen this story before and i i i don't want to say this is something we should expect, but when SmartThings came out, it was definitely one of those early adopter systems. Even Apple HomeKit, even Google, these are all first runs of what these big companies... Google's kind of shifted, right? Google had the Google Home thing, then they're like, oh, we're going to call this Google Nest.

And they're breaking everybody's integrations now. Like, so like they're all like rewriting their drafts and trying to change their integrations for their company's priorities at the time. And I think if you're with a larger company like that, like you run the risk of having, of this exact situation happening, like there's a new leadership, the focus becomes privacy.

All of a sudden, your APIs all get cut off like that. That's happened. We've watched that happen twice now. And this may be a third time. If now on the on the on the other hand, on the flip side of that, you go with a small company, then you, then you're running a completely different risk. You're running like, well, what happens if this company goes out of business? Like, um, wink. Uh, if like what happens if they, yeah, well, what happens if they just disappear or they're bought by, you know, uh, uh, hip hop

music artists and like, don't update their platform. And then all of a sudden start requiring subscriptions. There's no good answer right now. I really, I mean, you, in my opinion, you have to put your, your, your, your money, I guess is I'm trying to find an analogy here. Like you have to put all of your apples in the cart that you want to believe in. And then like, it's going to have to roll down the hill. And you're just going to have to trust that some of those apples don't fall out based on what you

know. And what we know right now is not really much like I could say, yeah, move to control for it's a great product. It's backed by a great company. Like the Snap AV just bought them, which makes it, you know, even more interesting that they went from being a privately held company to, you know, a privately held again. And, like, they're owned by, like, a large, basically Amazon-style. Yep. I forget what they were bragging about the other day. It was, like, $800 million company now.

Like, it's a massive company. Like, they should be good to go. But you never know. Like, something could happen in that, you know, nevermind that like control four is less hobbyist oriented. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. My, my concern, uh, based just on this email, uh, from Andy, my, my concern, what I can infer pretty easily from his,

he seems very technically savvy and is probably very much a hardcore hobbyist. Control 4, maybe not a great fit for him unless he's able to somehow wrangle his way into having a copy of the software that he can get in and tinker with himself, which wouldn't be impossible to do. And I think Control 4 has like a composer, what do they call it?

Like it's like a light version edition or something like that for end users. I know they used to have that. I'm pretty sure they still do. So, um, I don't know, control four, something like that may be an option for Andy, but it's a, it's going to be a significant jump up in terms of the type of system it is. I mean, they've got some relatively inexpensive options now, so it's not like an astronomical leap in price, but it's going to be significantly more expensive than sticking into that more prosumer space. So yeah, I don't know. I'm wondering if for Andy, maybe go back and listen. It sounds like Andy's a fairly regular listener. So he's probably heard this episode, but episode 302, we had home assistant, um, home assistant on, and that seems like it might be an attractive option for somebody like Andy because it's,

it's open source. So you don't have quite the same concerns about, you know, being beholden to the whims ofims of an individual company. And it seems to have that nice mix of, if you're somebody who really wants to jump in and roll up your sleeves and get under the hood, that's where they started. So it's got all of that, but they're also moving in the direction of making it simpler and easier. So if you're not quite at the full end of the spectrum where you really want to spend all your time in there tinkering and you want something that's a little bit more plug and play, that seems to be the direction they're moving in. So you might get a nice mix

there. Right. Right. I mean, even those guys got a little flack for kind of like moving in a direction of making uh their things a little more easier we we discussed that in the episode as well like yeah they moved away from uh yaml i think was well yeah yeah like doing full python integrations too i think i i'm not i'm not quite remembering i it's definitely a product that i so so if i was like moving in that direction if i was if i was moving away from like smart things and i had all these smart things compatible products. See, that's that's where this whole integration gets to me. Like what I like to do when I'm buying product is I look for quality type products that that integrate with everything.

Right. Like so I've got an Ecobee thermostat. It does Alexa and it does HomeKit, right? So I know that I have, and it has its own app. Like, its app is okay. It looks just like the thermostat. It's just, it's fine. And I've got, you know, for lighting control, we went through this on the show. Like, I looked at four different options,

four great companies. I think I ended up with between Insteon and Control 4. I ended up going to Control 4 for a number of reasons, mostly because I, you know, had access to the product at the time. And, and it's, I think if I had gone with Insteon, I think I would have been just as satisfied for what I use lighting control for in my house. I don't think that would have been a problem. So like that, if you get set up with these types of products that like just standalone can work well enough for you, I think like having like the super, um, you know, God app type thing over the top of it. I mean, that's just, to me, it's almost like, I don't use control. I don't

use that at all with control for, I use actually, I use home kit for like the the app that kind of overlays roughly overlays over the top of most everything in the house and I can control just about everything with that and I don't have to like have any special hacks or special software or anything like that like if there's there's actually one little device that I'll get to as a pick of the week one you know later on that I installed here in the garage that doesn't have HomeKit integration. But the app is basically a toggle switch for me and I don't really need HomeKit integration with it. So like I just I let it go. It is what it is. I don't know. It all starts with the devices with me.

Like I'm going to go for the most, most you know the basic devices that work the best but also have that give me options like have an api api is great if the device has an api that means it may work with control 4 it may work with smart things it may work with google it may work with alarm.com who knows like if it has an api that means it there is a possibility someday that it might be integrated with some system that I want to use. So I don't have a great answer for this. Because at this point, for me, all of this is still early adoption. Every bit of it is still early adoption.

Whether you go with Control 4, which has been around for, what, 10 plus years. Whether you go with SmartThings, which has been around for less than five. Whether you go with HomeKit, whether you go with smart things which has been around for less than five whether you go with home kit whether you go with google or you know anything it's all early adoption and this stuff you know like the harmony remote we talked about earlier is it could just become the whim of a company someday to be like we can't afford to do this anymore we got to shut it down and then you know where do you look know, do you look towards the open source world? I mean, that comes with its own, like, to be fair, it comes with its own issues as well. Like, you go to their website, not until this stuff reaches mass, mass, mass adoption. And it's just like built into the fabric of the home. Will we have like a great answer? It was like, oh yeah, you just use the, um, you know, whatever the standard is in 20 years time

product in your house. And it just works. Um, but there's, I don't, I don't have a great answer for this. I really hope Andy can figure out, you know, what, which direction he wants to go. Um, how the tat seem like, I mean, we've had those guys on the show too. It seemed like a great company. They seem like they understood, uh, some of the things smart, some of the limitations that smart things type devices had. And, uh, we're trying to, to go in a particular direction, but you, you've got to believe and trust in that company as well. So, um,

right now it's just kind of like it, it just kind of is what it is. You got to, you got to put, place your bets on your horse that you want to win and just hope that they can finish the race. That's, that's really where we are right now. Yeah. Yeah. Good, good summary. I think to distill it down, I, um, again, just based off of this email, I would say something like, Andy, if you're willing to maybe give up a little bit of the control and you want something that's professionally managed, certainly Control 4 is going to be a fantastic option. If you're able to find your way into some of that software and do it yourself, great as well. But something like Home Assistant,

maybe open source, based on your sort of disposition here and concerns about companies sort of moving in diverging from what you're looking for. Maybe something open source is, is a good way, a good place to look. Well, thanks Andy for reaching out. Let's move on here. Seth, you got a pick of the week. I do. I do. And this comes from special friend of the show, Robert Spivak. And he, he contacted me a couple of weeks ago and said, hey, I've got this thing called an Amazon wand.

You want to put it in the museum? And I was like, not the Amazon wand. It still works. But oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Amazon has announced that the Amazon wand will cease to work sometime middle of next week as this show records. So I think on the 21st, they're going to cut off their services to it, just like the old, remember those dash buttons you could get? There was like a little button you press, it would order something.

And then they're like, let's discontinue those and just make a virtual representation of it on the website. People will love that. I think those it out of my memory or who knows what. I totally forgot this was a thing. But that's what the museum is good for, right? Seth, we have to honor its memory. Yeah, exactly. We want to make sure that we can remember the products that have been and make sure they're not has been products, right? Gone but not forgotten. Not forgotten. So it comes in a beautiful little box presentation box that that robert i feel like we need some sad music this in post here this is like um this is this is a nice this is a nice find this is uh it's never been used it comes with the uh

the duracell batteries in here too wow okay i may keep those i may pull those out mint condition condition yeah so i I mean, this is beautiful. It's got the little, you know, Amazon. It's got the Alexa button on it. It's got this kind of like, I went back and read like a story that was talking about it. And they were like, oh, it comes with like this black plastic thing. And it's, I don't know, it's kind of like a rubbery grip that you can hold onto it. And you can walk around your house and control, you know, things and say, push the button and say, Alexa, instead of yelling out into the air, you can walk around with this wand.

And I think if you wanted to like scan something, you could just aim it and scan like a barcode and it would add it to your cart. So I think that was the idea. Like I'm fast forwarding in my mind like 20 years from now and seeing you as a curator of this huge museum talking about these antiquated pieces. Can you believe this? They thought this was a good idea? This is what they thought the future would be. That's awesome. Robert's a great friend of the show. You've got a picture here of the letter.

Here's the wand to add to the museum. That's great. So we're still, you know, the museum is alive and well. And if you're out there listening and you have a piece that you want to add to the museum, let us know. It's a growing collection. The world's finest. He also sent along a Wemo switch, because I guess he's not a fan. And I was saying, well, I've used them and they're fine with me. And so he was like, well, you can have this one. Cause I don't, he doesn't like them. So, uh, thanks Robert.

Appreciate that. Feel free to use it for Christmas. He says, yeah, well, that's what I use them for. I use them for like the Christmas rice and the Christmas tree. Yeah. So good deal. Thank you. You're raking it in over there.

I know. I've got, you can't, you can't see it from here, but let's see, we can turn the camera a little bit, but like basically all of that top shelf is the museum. All of that mess right there, that'll be neat. And I have, like, all right, so let's give you a tour of the garage. That wall over there is usually where I sit, and I'm thinking that will be a good place to basically put the... The build-out is underway.

Yeah, the build-out. Exactly. Put a nice built-in shelving system with LED lights or something and have dramatic music and stuff playing. I have all this envisioned out. People can come in and see it. I'll charge admission or something. I don't know.

All proceeds donated to affected users. Right. Of the discontinued products. Right, right, right. Matthew in the chat room says we need a museum website. Details, backstories. I can totally see this taking shape. This is one of those things that if I say yes to,

I, you know, it's... I'm going to not be able to say no to something else. Oh, it's fun. Yeah. I love it. Awesome. Well, thanks Robert for sending that over. Um, again, contributing to a growing collection here. If you've got any feedback, questions, comments, pieces of antiquated hardware for the museum, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic. Give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you.

Feedback at hometech.fm is the email address, or you can head over to the website at 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 Hometech for as little

as $1 a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an automatic invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about all things, home tech, all things, home technology. That's right. If you're looking for other ways to support the show, we would really appreciate a positive review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you value what we do here at the Home Tech Podcast, please take a minute to go leave a review. It's tremendously appreciated. All right, Jason. Well, this is, oh man, this week has been crazy for me. I started to get a new roof on my house and luckily they have finished their day.

I mean, it's like 6.30, right? It's moving into eight. It is eight o'clock now. So they're not here banging on the roof. But generally my day at work involves me being on the phone or trying to program with thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, you know, just going on above my head. And it's been like that all week. And then the air conditioner went out today or last night. And so, yeah, it's been a fun day in Florida. Been a fun week in Florida.

Sounds like it. Yeah, I'm ready for this year to be over. I'm done with 2020. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. It has not been a great year. That is for sure.

Well, I'll have a new roof. I'll have a new air conditioning Monday. And I'll, I don't know. I'll be sleeping well at that point. But one thing I did find interesting that they do on roofs now, like, you know, remember those like things you would see people put on the roof? There was like a vent. It would like whirl around.

Yep. Well, I guess those kind of like they're not very good, but I guess they make them now with solar on them and you get like a solar fan put up on your roof. And when the sun like I've got plenty of sun, believe it or not. Um, when the sun hits the things is like turns on and it's like vacuums all the hot air out of your attic. So, um, I'm, I'm, I'm actually looking forward to what my attic, uh, feels like maybe in the winter, not, not right now, but maybe in the winter. Yeah. Yeah. I, when we first bought this house, it was over the summer and I was, um, I think I was installing a ceiling fan or something.

I needed to get up in the attic for a minute. Yep. And yeah, that lasted about 30 seconds. Yeah. And I ended up finding another way to do what I needed to do. But yeah, I've heard of those. I've heard of those systems. I forget.

There was a company that put a flyer on our door last year. I think it was different than a— I've heard of swamp coolers before. I don't think that's what you're referring to though. Although I may be, I may be wrong. You guys may have something completely different out there. But yeah, it was a system where basically like you open up all your windows and then you run this giant fan and it pulls all the hot air up through your house and blows it out. And I talked to a friend of mine who had that and said it worked really well. And it's supposed to be a lot more cost effective than, um,

than an air conditioning system. So I thought, Hey, that'd be cool. And then, you know, it went on my list of things to do and you know how that goes. Yeah. We, you don't see the, I know what you're talking about. You don't see those down here very often. Um, because we have this um well see the idea here is that you don't want the air outside coming in at all like so like so it where you are it's fine like if it's a nice cool day um you can turn open up the windows and turn that fan on and it sucks everything up this these these devices just basically suck the hot air out of the attic which we have all the time um so they keep your attic from turning into like a thousand degree inferno. Which like pushes down into the house, but also like turns out kills the roof.

Like if you have a hot attic, it does. Oh, sure. Yeah, it goes the other way. So I'm happy about that. Like, I feel like I'm modern now. Like I have a solar thing on my roof. It's not generating electricity for my house, but you know, it's 2020. It's got a solar panel on it.

It counts for something. Exactly. Exactly. It's generating like five watts of electricity for this tiny fan motor, but it's doing something. All right. Cool. All right. Well, we have a guest lined up next week from Brilliant, Brilliant Smart Home Company there.

If you're not familiar, brilliant.tech. Go check them out. Should be a fun conversation. So we'll get back into the swing of things with guests here. We've got a couple of weeks, just you and me, Seth, which is always kind of fun as well. But hope you have a great weekend. And we'll look forward to connecting with you again next week. Yep. You too, Jason. Thanks, Greg and Matt for tuning in in the chat room. And we'll see everybody next week. Yep, you too, Jason. Thanks, Greg and Matt for tuning in in the chat room and we'll see everybody next week. All right, take care.