HomeTech.fm - Episode 314 - Moose Pi

Episode Date: August 7, 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, August 7th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Wow, the voice is gone. It's it. Yeah, you sound terrible. Hit stop. I feel like the tables have turned the last we've had a couple of these episodes where you're sounding um extra sultry sultry is not the word for it hey my voice is i i just talk too much i uh i had a like a trip where i i drove down to help someone pick up their

boat and uh drove like two out four hours that day and then uh talked the whole way there and back and then uh sat down and had some business phone calls at the end of the day so yeah my voice was shot yesterday or yesterday and it hasn't come back so yeah i sound like i've been to cdia though this is that's right you got the cd voice yeah yeah that's what i used to sound like in my drinking days after three hard nights at Cedia and three hard days on the show floor. Yep. Yep. I'm there.

I feel your pain. Wishing you a quick recovery. I, in brighter news, Seth, was very pleased by a minor surprise in Slack that I don't know if this got anyone else excited. I didn't even see them really announce it. This is the ability to mark threaded replies as unread. Yes, I'm that nerdy. Threaded replies as unread. So here's my beef with Slack.

I love Slack generally. Generally, I find that as far as an asynchronous tool, like Slack is really feels like it's built for quick replies. In the moment you see a message, you reply to it. The problem is often I'm not able to do that. I'm in meetings very often. And so Slack messages are just piling up. Well, and Rashid is responding, yep, in the chat room. So he, all right, I'm not alone. I'm not totally crazy being excited by this.

So thank you for validating that. The problem I have is that I often will use, if I see a Slack message that I can't respond to in the moment, I'll mark it as unread because I want that little red dot so that I can come back to it. We use Slack extensively at work. So it's our own, we don't use email.

So I've got a ton of volume in Slack going on. And I've always had this gripe because threads, you'll have like a red dot with seven unread messages. The problem with threads is that you, you couldn't mark them as unread before. So it literally created an environment where I'd see these unread threads piling up, but I would be scared to click on threads because it was like all or nothing. If you clicked on it, your notification would go away. And if there were any messages in there that I needed to respond to later, I would have to use Slack's reminder system, which that could be a whole nother conversation. Not a big fan of that. So anyways, they quietly, I think quietly, I didn't see an announcement,

but they added the ability now to mark a thread as unread. And this is such a small little change that has made a massive difference. So everyone at work was giving me a hard time for celebrating this one. I don't, Jason, do you think you're using Slack wrong? No, not possible. So if some Slack is like, not for this, it's for like, in this, in the, in the moment messaging,

right. And, and like, you're using as like, oh, I need to hold onto this information. Like, but that's no, no, no. That's, but that's the problem. And, and Rashid says upside to covet i think what he's alluding to is more and more people now working from home i i think slack is great i think that being able to respond to messages more in real time is awesome when you can do it but but i can't all the time yeah yeah so it's, it seems like it's a missing feature from Slack.

It's like, I don't, it's either a missing feature or it's being used inappropriate. Do you ever use mark on red, like in your email inbox or anything? I, I, I have this theory where there's like some people who use it and some who would have never even like, they don't consider that even a thing. I, I have, I have a mail program that may do that for me like under the hood so um spark can basically like i can just say hold on to this till later and remind me and it goes into like some kind of pinned area if i wanted to so yeah i'm not sure maybe maybe i've done that yeah i'll tell you, you're not alone. Everyone

at work is like, why, why are you trying to turn Slack into email? Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't get it, but I have very strong opinions about this. And ultimately I think that where Slack's big opportunity to improve is to look at people who work more asynchronously and opportunities to make Slack feel a little bit less like this domineering force where you have to reply to things the moment you see them and give you better tools for managing, coming back to things later. I personally would like to see them add the ability

to tag messages and do like custom tags on messages. That's where everybody gives me a really hard time because they're like, oh my gosh, you're trying to turn it into email. You are at this point. But yeah, I'd like to see him do more, but this was a big step in the right direction in my mind. Yeah, Rashid, I think you're adding fuel to the fire over here. I don't think you're helping this. You guys are holding it wrong in the immortal words of Steve Jobs. Slack is an email though.

And I think you mentioned asynchronous. That's exactly the type of work that doesn't work with Slack very well. Like if you're, you're all in the same channel and chatting about the same thing at the same time, I think Slack works extremely well for that, but like using it for stuff that you don't have the ability to go back and get to, like, it seems like another tool is needed or another tool in Slack is needed on top of that to make that work. I think a lot of it has to do with the way we're using Slack.

And I don't know how many companies use Slack exclusively. We don't use any email at all. So all of our company communications, 100% of it goes through Slack. So maybe that's where the rub is. It could be. It could be. And maybe you just need another piece or another tool in that tool chain like a to-do list or something

that's company-wide you probably already have that i just need to mark threads as unread i've been asking for this for like ever and i got it i'm happy now i'm good for a while all right anyways sounds like i'm not totally alone. There's two of you. There's two of you. Dozens, dozens at least. That's right. Small sample size.

All right, Seth. Well, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Well, big news this week in the custom installation, on the custom installation side, multiple sources are confirming to Strategy, that's where we get the story from, that Nortec Security and Control is planning on shutting down two of their big brands, Sunfire and the once iconic Niles. The move is said to be the result of relative underperformance

as the company shifts its focus to the apparently more successful brands such as Elan. So end of the era, Jason. These are Niles. Niles goes way back, way, way, way back. Yeah. This, this really does feel like the end, end of an era. I remember back when I was just getting into the business, it would have been about 2006 was when I got my first integration job and Niles was our main brand. We did a ton of Niles at that first company that I worked for up in the Vail Valley here in Colorado. And I remember at the time thinking it was so cool. And it was.

I mean, this was 2006. And Niles was a big deal back then. And, yeah, this feels a little sad. Sad to see it go i remember in 19 1983 no 1979 is when they first started with a the industry's first speaker selector switch so there you go going way back yeah 1983 had a volume control that uh wall mount volume control so this is this these were all kind of like basic um well i now it's kind of got fancy they i remember those like intelli control systems they had i would always be pulling those out somebody in town installed a ton of those uh through the 90s and early 2000s i pulled a ton

of those things out but um man it's it's unfortunate i i remember working at circuit city and seeing the niles brand name come through and like maybe a speaker selector switch and thought, who the heck is that? You know, that's a weird name. And one of the guys said, no, no, they've been around for a long time in home audio. So this is truly the end of an era. It is. And some colorful language here from our friend Ted at Strategy. Under the more industrially centric Nortec over the years, the innovative blood flowing through the veins of these top CI brands

slowly began to drain, almost as though in slow motion, we watched the business level and the market impact of these brands and their respective entity value wither away. I always enjoy Ted's writing. Got a flair for the dramatic. By the way, nice facelift on strategy.com. I don't know if you noticed that, but that site was super dated

and looking fresh now. So if you're listening, Ted, nice work. Yeah, good job. Yeah, I will say the rock speakers over at Niles, they suck. Don't buy those. Don't buy those. There's your PSA.

So many of those things go bad. Yeah. But they warranty them. So you just call them up and they ship you new ones and they say, send us a picture of the old one after you put a sledgehammer through it. Okay. There you go. There you go. All right.

Moving on here. The Consumer Technology Association has announced its decision that CES 2021 will be an all-digital experience. The Las Vegas-based show, planned for January 6th through the 9th, has been a global stage for innovation in the tech community for more than 50 years. CES 2021 will continue to be a platform to launch products, engage with global brands, and define the future of the tech industry, says the association. So nothing shocking here. The one comment I had was, it wasn't that long ago, Seth. I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was recently. I remember talking on a show and CES was still in

the press saying they were moving forward. They were telling a confident story and I don't fault them for that. I'm sure they were trying to keep things moving i don't fault them for that i'm i'm sure they were trying to keep things moving and hoping that they could but i'm not surprised by this yeah i'm not surprised at all i i mean and on the good on the there's there's a lot of downsides to this it's a show that brought a ton of money into the vegas area 200 000 attendees uh normally came in or 182 i guess is what they say here in this story. But on the positive side, this will be the first CES that I attend. Can you cue in, what's the drum sound effect there after a bad joke?

There you go. Google has invested $450 million for a 6.6% stake in security company ADT. The company's announced this week the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of the year. We'll see ADT's technicians selling and installing Google's Nest, smart homes, devices such as cameras, smart displays. As early as this year, homes and small businesses are said to be two target markets. Pretty interesting development there. ADT, I could have written off, but Google seems to, well, I mean, they've got a pretty large install base. So, I mean, kind of lines up with what Google wants to do. Yeah, this was not a totally surprising partnership, but it is interesting. It says eventually Google says its Nest devices will become the cornerstone

of ADT's smart home offering. And there's some background on this, if people don't recall. Back in 2017, ADT teamed up with Samsung to offer smart things powered home security system. We're going to talk about smart things a little bit later in our mailbag section. Also earlier this year, the brand launched a range of security cameras under the blue by ADT brand. So according to a spokesperson cited in the story, ADT does plan to continue selling its Blue by ADT devices as a standalone system. However, it does appear that Google devices, Nest devices, will become their mainstay in the smart home. I want to say that, wasn't Monotronics one of Google's, like,

security companies that they picked? Like, I guess they called them, they rebranded to moni monia i vaguely recall that if i remember yeah i'm trying to search it but i'm not coming up with anything but i i thought they launched their google security system with that so it's interesting i guess in that respect that um google is kind of investing with a different company different monitoring company completely yeah yeah it is interesting to see. So keep an eye on that one as it develops. Moving on here,

smart home and lighting control provider Brilliant, who we just had on the show on our last episode, episode 313, if you're interested in learning more about them, has launched a new smart infrastructure management platform designed specifically for multifamily communities. The offering includes a new smart infrastructure management platform designed specifically for multifamily communities. The offering includes a new enterprise software and automation tool suite compatible with a wide variety of first and third party smart home products and property

management systems. Quick quote here from Aaron Amy, who we had on the show says, our mission is to make smart home living accessible, affordable, and effortless for as many people as possible. With this launch, we're bringing cost savings and ease of management to property developers, owners, and managers while offering tenants an unparalleled smart apartment experience. So I wanted to mention this one quickly. I enjoyed learning more about Brilliant when we had them on a couple of weeks ago, and they struck me as being very focused on this mission of theirs to bring, I'll say, infrastructural smart home. I think I just made that word up. But again, eschewing sort of that app-first approach and really getting the smart home into the infrastructure

of the building, trying to bring that to the masses. And obviously, the mdu play makes a lot of sense for them so this is a an interesting release that i think the the meat of this that i'm intrigued by is the tools that they're giving property managers and and owners of these larger buildings to integrate smart home in an intelligent way into their offerings yeah we've we've talked to a couple of like property management type brand or developed companies. I want to say, well, Point Central was one of them. I remember we spoke to recently. And then I think Properly was another one. I'm not sure where these companies are. But it seems like the rental and like MDO markets are just like untapped for smart home technology for, for the most part, like this stuff could kind of like go directly into it. So it will be interesting to see. Yeah. I think there's a lot of greenfield there. I agree. It says CA Ventures looks like a real estate investment company with 13

billion in assets plans to begin, including this new system in their apartment communities starting later this year cool well the market for integrators installing more home theaters may have just gotten a big boost with a recent deal announced by universal film entertainment group and amc entertainment holdings the multi-year agreement will allow for universal films to be available for home premium video on demand uh within 17 days as long as that time frame includes three weekends so interesting uh we saw this big like kerfuffle uh between amc and universal over trolls world tour believe it or not uh when when when that movie was expected to basically land during the pandemic, Universal decided they would just go ahead and release it through all the streaming methods.

And AMC got kind of mad about that and said, no more Universal films in our theater. And now it seems like they've done some kissing and making up. Yeah, no kidding. To get back together and for, for, for the, for great for us. Cause we get these, these movies in our home 17 days after, um, they should be in the theater. Yeah. That's, that's a big change. And you really, you do have to wonder what the movie theater business is going to look like coming out of COVID because this doesn't show any signs of letting up anytime soon. And that has to be one

of the worst businesses to be in. I would imagine they're really struggling. So hopefully they'll stick around. We've talked about it on the show before. I enjoy going out to the theater. I rarely do it these days, but I would hate to see movie theaters as a whole disappear. I hope they maintain a place in our culture because I do think there is something special about going to a dedicated theater and the experience that comes with that. So I hope they're able to maintain a position in that ecosystem. But I agree with you, this is a net win for consumers. 17 days is nothing. That goes by really quickly. Especially now.

Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. We're totally stuck at home. But yeah, as you mentioned, days is nothing that goes by really quickly especially now yeah yeah no kidding we're totally stuck at home um but yeah as you mentioned this does have to include three weekends so however the mat you know however that works out and yeah this this could be a nice little push i don't know ce pros saying this could bolster the home theater business. Mentioned day and date services such as red carpet cinema. Anyways, I think that ultimately the broader point here, of course, is that more and more people are going to be looking for great entertainment options at home without having to go out. And that will spell some more business,

some more incremental business for integrators. Well, all the links and topics we talked about tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 314. Hey, it's a pie show. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis as well as other industry news that may or may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 314. Absolutely. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live on Wednesdays, typically starting around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. We've got a few folks hanging out in the chat room with us this week, and we always appreciate that.

Jason, got a nice long letter in the mailbag here. Let's open that up. Yeah, We did. You want me to take this one, save your voice? Could you please? I'd appreciate it. I'm happy to. I'm happy to here. So this one came in from Scott Remick,

and this was sent a couple of weeks ago, actually, but we're just getting around to it as we were off last week. He says, I have to say that the message from Andy from Freeport struck a chord with me as well. This is going back a few episodes, you may recall, to a message Andy sent in regarding smart things and their move away from their current integration system and how that was alienating him as a user of the system. So this struck a chord with Scott.

He said, I too listened to that interview on Stacy's podcast in dismay, and it harkens back to a letter I sent you here at Home Tech not long ago. He goes on to say, Seth, I have to disagree with your position that everything is still early adopter and that we have to just wait until this all shakes out. The point I had made in my own letter to you was the issue that things aren't heading in a direction of ever settling, or he doesn't feel like they are. SmartThings has actually been around for seven years now, not five. You know what else came out in 2013, 4K TVs, and are 4Ks still early adopter products now? There's an interesting thread we could pick up there. He says, no, but we're past the early adopter stage. The problem isn't just the tech, but the company's lack of commitment.

One would hope that after investing in a seven-year-old IoT platform owned by a company as big as Samsung, that it would be a safe bet at this point. But nope, they're upending the whole table and screwing over their 45 million plus users. He goes on to describe he's got a lot of smart things devices in his home and how this is affecting him and goes on to talk about Apple and some of the qualms he has with them as a company. So I think he makes some interesting points here. And it's a worthy discussion, I think, to jump into. The point of are we still in the early adopter phase in particular, I think is a really salient one. And I don't want this to sound like a cop-out, but I do think that it depends which lens you're using. I think certainly as a user of the smart home to say

that things are still early adopter can feel off-putting. He makes some valid points about smart things has been around for a while. He should be able to work with that company and have, as a user, feel like that company is committed to him and looking out for his interest. But I think from the macro perspective is where, Seth, I know you were coming from, and you've made this point a bunch of times on the show, that it is still early from a macro perspective. So it's an interesting dichotomy of experiences, And it really depends on which angle you're looking at the market from. Yeah. And I I'd have to agree a hundred percent with him one window open and investing in a seven-year-old IOT platform owned by a company as big as Samsung would be a safe bet. I I'd have to agree with him there, but I mean, the same thing happened with, uh, with Google, right. And, and Google Nest, like they decided to basically in their works with Nest

program, screwing over millions of customers as well that relied on those integrations. Now they provided an integrated path, but there were a lot of like stories on our end were like, will, you know, Control 4 have a driver for it? Will Savant be able to integrate? Will Josh AI be able to? Like there were a lot of traditional integration companies that had a big question mark over the top because Google announced it in such a way where they didn't work with those Nest partners to make that decision.

They just did it. So in the end, I think they came around and made that right in so much that you still have to go to those systems and upgrade whatever device or service was working with it. I know at least with Control 4, the integration is different. But again, if you look at the macro side, like you're saying, it is super early for this.

I mean, if you look at electricity, we've had lights in our house since 100 plus years. If you look at plumbing, we go back to the ancient Roman times, right? If you look at roofing, you're going back to, you know, guys within the stone age, right? Like putting mud on top of a hut or something, you know, like roofing there's these things have all played out over time. And I'm not saying you need, you have to wait, you know, 10,000 years to get a good smart home. Like this stuff is progressing faster, but you know, the Edison light bulb company doesn't exist anymore. You know, they, they got bought out and rebranded and, you know,

it's GE and GE has sold all their light bulbs over to Savant now. So like it's's this stuff always changes it's always moving um it it it it is early in the respect that like this stuff isn't mature it doesn't do what you want it to do but it you know it isn't it isn't early for you know to expect something like savant or something like so samsung to keep a product that has been around seven years working. But at the same time, I mean, Scott is framing this as a lack of commitment. Really, Samsung was taking this angle as an angle of, we've got to improve our product. We've got to be moving forward with it for what is attractive to the most amount of people. And while I understand that means that a lot or all of the older integrations aren't going

to be working, these are sometimes necessary steps that have to be taken to guarantee that next year, when everybody's clamoring over whatever Google Nest is doing, that tons of smart thing customers aren't leaving for another platform. I guess that would be my counter argument to that. You have to protect your product. And right now, it's so early on that people can move between smart things, Google, Amazon, Apple fairly easily. You know, if you're buying a smart device these days, we've talked about this before.

It's almost expected that it work with those platforms. If it doesn't, then you may go look at something else. Yeah. So it's still early, in my opinion. It's tough to say that because I wish, you know, I want to go back to that Bane. Remember Bane on Batman was like, you weren't born in the darkness. I was born in the darkness. You just found it.

And I sound like Bane now, but like. You do. That was great. But like we were we've been around in this industry for 15 plus years we have history with product like niles we just talked about niles has been around since the late 70s they're disappearing like there's no guarantees on any of this stuff right now and i it's tough and until there's like a ubiquitous standard until there's a light switch, you know, how, how easy it, you buy a Leviton light switch, you buy a Lutron light switch,

they both click on and off the same way, right? They may be have different patented pending, you know, mechanisms inside, but it's still known how that works. And we're not there yet. We're just not there yet. When you go to the store and you buy PVC pipe to do plumbing, you have your choices of sizes from one quarter inch, one quarter inch, but one half inch, three quarter, one inch. And all of those pipes have specific things that they do within your home. And like, we don't have that with a smart home right now. We just don't. And so until we're at that point or closer to that point, we're just still, to me, we're still in an early adopting phase. Yeah. Yeah, I think that you make a lot of great points.

To come back to Scott's perspective, super frustrating. I can only imagine the frustration that would come from having, and he describes his setup, and it soundsThings, but I've been a part of a couple of product changes and some sunsetting of certain things. And anytime you have to make these changes that are in the interest of your business, it's a hard decision. only speculate as to how serious SmartThings took this decision, how rigorously they looked at options to make it smooth or potentially even provide continued support for people like Scott, and what sort of criteria they had to use to evaluate those options, and again, how rigorously they looked at those. We can only speculate about that. So that's number one. It's tough for companies. And companies do unfortunately find themselves in positions where they have to make a decision between what they perceive as being best for the viability and long-term future of the company and upsetting some users. And that's a really unfortunate reality in any industry.

That's not unique to the smart home. I think it's also interesting to ask the question, you know, smart things is part of Samsung, but I don't have any sense for how... Are you going to ask where the Galaxy Home is? Like, is that what you're going to ask? Because I'm really... Well, there's that, certainly. But, you know, how big a part of Samsung, how much organizational energy do they actually get relative to the company Samsung? Perhaps there might even be a dynamic, you know, when you say they're part of a company as big as Samsung. Interestingly, it might actually work in the opposite sense where Samsung being such a big company is looking at the bottom line and is looking at smart things as one small piece of a much, much bigger puzzle. And maybe there's organizational pressure to make some changes too.

Absolutely. You saw this play out with Google and how Google acquired Nest and Nest just languished while the Chromecast team was knocking it out of the park with like these really cool devices. You could almost do better things than the Google Nest brand could do. And until they woke up and put all of those part, all those siloed organizations together and made them work together and put a leader on top, nothing really happened. And what happened was they put, you know, they put somebody on top and they put all the pieces together and they said we've got to in this old api for nest it doesn't work with all this other

stuff and you know they had the same situation happen so yeah yeah it's really really tough i mean at at this level at when you're talking millions of affected people when you do you know push out an update it's really tough to make these decisions. I am not envious of anybody who has to run this kind of thing. Yeah. So in closing, it certainly doesn't excuse anything. And I know a lot of smart things users are feeling pretty roughly handled right now. And I would never discount that.

So I think you can only hope that they took this decision seriously and that they truly looked at all their other options. And I don't know, I'm not technical enough to know what sort of implications would have been involved for them to, say, continue supporting some of these mechanisms or find a middle ground or, you know, you go out to the far extreme of like, was there something, some way they could have open sourced some of this so that their more hardcore users could continue down that road? I don't know.

Again, all of those things are very complex when you start to unpack them. But feel your pain, Scott. And definitely, I think it's something that all these companies struggle with. Interestingly, as you were talking, Seth, I was thinking about companies like Control4 and now owned by SnapAV, but prior to them being rolled up into SnapAV, I got an opportunity to know some of the very top

people at Control4 and had similar conversations about these issues of long-term compatibility and backwards compatibility when you do updates. And I know for Control 4, again, going to the very highest levels, this was a core part of what they saw as part of their culture and value prop was we never want to leave people abandoned. We never want to do anything that's going to leave any of our users totally out in the cold. So I think there's something to be said for working and looking at companies like Control 4 that have been in the business for a long time, and that this is the thing that they do, versus Samsung, where, again, SmartThings is one tiny piece of this massive puzzle. I think you get a different experience at the corporate level,

and that plays out in changes like this. I mean, it still happens with Control 4 too. I mean, they updated OS 3 and an entire range of product line had to drop off. It just couldn't run the interface on it. So you actually had to remove controllers that were less than seven years old. I can tell you that. Fairly modern. You had to remove them out of your project seven years old. I can tell you that fairly modern. Interesting. You had to remove them out of your project completely and then put either,

put the new EA version in, you know, and we're not talking for a controller. We're not talking, you know, 50 bucks. I mean, we're talking a few hundred dollars.

I don't know how much is an EA one, like six or $700. I don't know. Throw in the number out there. If you had three of them in your project, I mean, that, that adds up pretty quick. Yeah. And so even a company like control four that is really trying to, has to make those tough decisions sometimes is, is kind of the takeaway there. And then ultimately, you know, I, I think one other thing that I would respond to that with is there's either situation sucks to just speak frankly. Oh, yeah.

But there's a difference between saying, okay, if you go buy this new hardware, then you're going to be up to speed and all your stuff is still going to work versus my understanding of the smart things change is that literally the way these integrations are built is going away. Exactly, exactly. So those are two related but different things. It's interesting to compare those. Yeah. It is not, it's not, that's why I kind of like took that position last week.

It's just, there's no good answer here. There really isn't. And I'm still kind of in that position. I don't really have a great answer for any of this, you know, when it comes to long-term decision-making it's put your, you know, uh, cart behind whichever horse that you got to place your bets. Yeah, exactly. Put your bets on the horse and watch it.

You, you got to watch it race around the track. And if it doesn't make it, it doesn't make it. I mean, it comes in last, it comes in last. that for a user like Scott, looking to a solution like Home Assistant that's open source is attractive because it solves, assuming the system can do what Scott wants it to do. And of course, putting aside the tremendous amount of time and energy and money that would have to go in to migrating all of the stuff over, which is all very real, but zooming out and just looking at where do you go where you don't have to worry about this sort of thing happening to you? Open source seems like an attractive answer to that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's, it's frustrating. And I, I, I can absolutely feel the frustration in this, this email or email letter that he sent us. I mean, it, it is very frustrating and I'm not, I'm not saying that like it is what it is. You have to live with these decisions. Um, it, it just, I, there's no good decision. There's no good answer right now. And I, and I'm not trying, I'm not saying that lightly. Like I wish there was a good answer. I wish that there was this magical API or magical standard that everything worked with.

And when you put a device in your house, it just worked. But we're just not there. We're just not there yet. Right. So, Scott, thank you for reaching out. And hopefully that conversation shared some of our perspectives and would love to hear a follow-up email from you if you have anything additional to add. Maybe we can even get you on the show at some point to discuss what your plan is as somebody who's been directly affected by this. Love to find out what he ends up doing.

Yeah, absolutely. Shifting gears here, Seth, we got a pick of the week on your side. Yeah, so I've got this noisy little air conditioning in the garage here. A little floor air conditioner that i picked up for a few hundred dollars at costco and it's an it's got an ir remote with it and sometimes you can see me reach over and like turn it on and off if it gets particularly hot in the garage here um well i i've always wanted to be able to like automate that somehow and since it's ir i was like, I'll just bring a control four controller out here.

And I never did that. I never wrote a driver for it or anything. I'm not that adventurous, but what I did find on Amazon, believe it or not, is this device called Sensible. And it makes your dumb IR controlled air conditioner smart. As smart as an IR air conditioner can be right little qualifier there yeah this looks cool i think super useful for a lot of people in your situation using like a standalone air conditioning these are extremely calming like not this standalone like but the

mini split systems which are all ir controlled extremely common throughout the world that's what i was thinking yeah exactly yeah so this is kind of neat and it's 120 which is pretty reasonable i think says compatible in every country any voltage power outlet takes less than a minute. Got a bunch of the big brands listed on here. So go check this one out. And Seth, I'm glad to hear that, you know, hopefully this will help you from keep you from not dying of, of keep you from dying of heat exhaustion in your garage in Florida in August as we record. Well, what it, what it does do is do is you know this little unit will just run 24 7 if i let it like it's not very smart it's got it's got some kind of temperature thing on it but i've never seen it actually turn off but what this will do is is it will take it's got a humidity sensor and

it's got a temperature sensor so it can actually calculate the feels like temperature and you can adjust the room based on that so like if it feels more than 79 turn on this little unit and you hear it beep and crank up and turns on and then it'll turn it off so i'm it's not like i'm running it 24 7 it's just like it'll turn off and for a few hours and turn back on at night uh just to kind of like get the humidity right in the room so it's it's kind of nice in that respect um yeah makes sense it's it's well worth it for 100 bucks just to toss in i will also say uh has alexa has google has siri shortcut support but it also has a full api behind it i think alan chow has written a control four driver for it so yeah it's a really i mean it's full open api uh it's got all these

graphs and stuff. If you want to go look at it and kind of entertain yourself looking at graphs, I guess it's got that too. Go geek out on some data. Yep, yep, yep. Cool. Well, good little point solution. Nice pick. All right.

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Well, Jason, this week we had a couple of surprises. Niles, Sunfire shutting down. We had CES going digital. You had your own surprise. I was watching you on Twitter and, uh, you went out fishing one morning and ran across a friend. Oh, yes. Yeah, I did. I, I had a moose encounter and that's not a, not a super common occurrence and kind of a scary one. I, we were, as listeners know, we were off last week. My wife and I took our kids up to the mountains here, Grand Lake, a really beautiful area in Colorado.

As anyone with young kids knows, vacation with young kids isn't really like vacation when you think of without kids. We're constantly moving. We're going a million miles an hour. I did sneak out early in the mornings while we were up there to go fishing. And the one spot that I had some luck in one day where I did succeed in catching a fish, it was our last day there. And I was walking to go back there. And as I'm walking down the road, just kind of looking around and minding my own business, I look up and there's a big moose standing right in the right, literally where the footpath was that goes down to the river, like 20 feet from where he was standing was where I was hoping to go fishing.

And it, the whole encounter lasted maybe five seconds, just enough time for me to quickly snap a couple of pictures. He took one look at me and meandered off, thankfully, because they can be kind of aggressive animals. I was about to say they're massive and it seems like one of those, like either a bear or a moose i i don't think i know what to do because i just yeah yeah i was it made my heart stop for sure and i started walking backwards right away and kind of looking around to figure out what i was going to do if he came at me so thankfully he didn't yeah and i stood there for about five minutes debating if if i might be able to go fish down there if I waited long enough. And then I decided that was a really bad idea.

Well, it would have been funny if you just, yeah, well, it's worth the risk. I had. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I went and fished elsewhere and didn't have any luck, but it was cool to see, uh, kind of a unique experience and I'm here to, and I'm here to tell you about it. So that's a good thing. You have photographic evidence. That's right. That's right. Cool. All right, Seth. Well, we'll, uh, we'll wrap it up here. Hope you have a great weekend and that your voice gets to feeling better soon. Can I drink some more tea? See if that helps. It seemed to help for the first, first part of the show and then just nosedived after that.

So, Oh, yeah, well you hung in there. We, we appreciate the, uh, the fighting spirit.

Yep. No, this, this is my CD, a voice for this year. I'll try not to do this again. Get it out of the way now. Yep.

Yep. All right. That's right. All right. Well have a great weekend. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll, uh, we'll talk to you next week. Take Yep. Yep. All right. That's right. All right. Well, have a great weekend. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll, uh, we'll talk to you next week. Take care of Seth. All right. Have a good one.