HomeTech.fm - Episode 316 - CueCat

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 21st from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how are you doing? I am doing well, Seth. You don't look quite as beady with the sweat in the Florida summer there. I think you got an upgrade. I did. I got a huge upgrade. So as listeners of the show may know, I do record here in the garage. Studio, I guess.

It's not really a studio. It's a garage with a desk in it. And I've been for the past, I don't know, year or two, I guess, I've been using this little floor-mounted, in i guess they call them air conditioner they don't they don't work jason don't buy one don't waste your money don't do it duly noted yeah a window unit if you can get away with it works a lot better like but i my window was not conductive to a window unit we went through this whole process trying to figure out what to do in here and uh so i finally got a broke down and bought a mini split which is one of those nice fancy air conditioners um they're evidently hard to get these days because they couldn't find any of like the one ton which is all i needed so i got a one and a half ton

i said give me the bigger one it's a garage i. I'm always hot. So, um. Well, good. Yeah. I've always been a little, I've always been a little bit worried about you. I don't know if you can see that. Oh, nice. What is that? 75. There you go.

There you go. You see the number below that though? That's, that's key. No, that one's too blurry. The number below, oh, I guess it's not that great. 65% humidity, which I guess, you know, it's probably close to a hundred outside right now. So it's nice and dry and cool in here. I really like it. Okay. Well, this is good news for listeners. Cause I've always had a low level concern that, uh, you know, Seth is gonna die of

heat stroke one of these days in the Florida summer. Not anymore. So I'm happy for you. Good. That's an upgrade. It's interesting that you had a hard time finding it. I know like COVID there's been this sort of ripple effect with COVID where things you don't think about. My wife was looking for desks and chairs to do homeschooling with the kids because they're going to be on a of time but it was really hard to find and of course it makes sense in hindsight like everybody's looking for desks and chairs to do homeschooling now um so it's just funny kind of these these ripple effects i guess but uh yeah who knows air conditionings maybe that's just a supply chain issue yeah i think it is they're made overseas they're made in this one particular i guess is made in japan mitsubishi so um or there's a lot of people working in hot garages that are just over it yeah it could be that i mean it's it it could be that like they were there was none to be found

evidently and um i i i started thinking about i'm like wait a minute we were talking about the little model like what if there's a bigger one you know like why not put a bigger one in um so we did and i don't think i, this thing's running over here. You probably can't, it's whisper quiet. I am, I'm blown away. The other thing was like, uh, like running a generator inside the garage here. So I'd always have to turn it off and on between talking. Right. It's a skill I developed and now I don't have to use that as skill anymore. Sure. Yeah. Well, multitasking, uh, not, not a bad thing. Well, Seth, what do you say we, uh, we jump into some home tech headlines. Let's do it. Netflix

is testing a new shuffle play feature that could help you find something to watch. If you're feeling overwhelmed with all of your streaming options, uh, based on photos users have posted, the button is located right on the profile screen. You simply click it and hope it will play something you'd like. Say if you're tired of spending a little more time choosing what to watch than actually watching something, or in case you're feeling bold enough to wade through the random Netflix contents and find a hidden gem. Jason, this is a great idea. I like this.

This is the I'm feeling lucky button on Netflix. That's right. That's right. We've talked about this a lot on the show, and I think it's such a real struggle. I know it is for me when I sit down and open up Netflix or really pretty much any streaming app for that matter. want to watch, then it can very quickly deteriorate into a never ending cycle of watching trailers. And pretty soon my hour that I was going to spend watching TV is up and I haven't watched anything. So I think sometimes this, this kind of thing is nice, especially if maybe if you just, we've talked also about like, sometimes you just want something on in the background, right? You just

want, just play some TV and give me the ambient noise and i could see going on netflix and and maybe using it for that it does sound like they're they're testing a few things like this says they started testing this feature last month but only in tv apps also only for select members around the world said last year they experimented with a random episode button and just last month, the streaming giant put an experimental place, something option in its TVs app sidebar navigation menu. So it does seem like Netflix is working to try and figure some of this out.

This sort of overwhelm that you get when you go into streaming apps, I think is a pretty, pretty common first world problem granted, but a pretty common problem nonetheless. Yeah. I just thought of a great idea that they should implement that probably could have done this before this, is to have like a just trailers button

that would just randomly go through the trailers that are on the screen. Just play one right after another. May as well, right? That's all I was doing anyway. That's what half of us end up doing. That's right. Matthew says, it sounds silly saying too many options, but it's a thing.

It's true. It's the paradox of choice. There's a term for that, and it's overwhelming. So I like this. I'll have to take a look on our Netflix here and see if this crops up and take it for a spin. I haven't seen it on mine. I can't seem to find it on mine, but I will be keeping an eye out for it

because I definitely need to do it. I like like finding new things and sometimes you you know there is a gem in there like it said uh so like sometimes you find something fun to watch and uh just hitting random so yeah like something you might never have chose to watch otherwise could come on and be really good moving on here an an FCC filing submitted yesterday by Ring suggests that a new smart home hub may be on the way. Ring has made no announcements or statements yet, but information gathered from the filing points toward a low power communications device.

This filing is not surprising as Ring is overdue for a proper hub, even though the company's Ring alarm base station can act as a hub for all of the ring devices in your home so this is kind of interesting and it's got more than that in there too i mean it's a proper hub in and of itself it's the the alarm hub right now it's got a ton of radios in it a ton of horsepower and features i just don't know why they've never like done more with it it's just kind of stayed the same since they have announced it yeah this story does this story is from digital trends stayed the same since they've announced it. Yeah, this story does, this story is from Digital Trends, by the way, and they do point out that

it doesn't have, according to the filing, it doesn't seem likely that it's an upgrade of the Ring Alarm base station because it does not have a built-in siren or any other features that that base station includes. So, you know, maybe the opportunity exists for Ring to take that base station and make it into a hub through some sort of a software upgrade. But perhaps they're also looking at other options, maybe to do something at a lower cost. Maybe if people don't need the alarm features, something along those lines might be where they're headed with this. Kind of interesting to think about, but all we can do is speculate at this point. An inconvenient truth many cord cutters have learned is that not only can streaming services end up costing as much more than traditional ones they've ever placed. Yep,

that's kind of where I'm getting to now. But they're not as easy to use as just flipping the channel. The situations open up a crack in the American TV market to a newcomer called Orbi TV. It looks and feels like an old-school satellite service, but the pricing and structure and hybrid reception technology that has been formulated to appeal to cord cutters. Co-founded by Star's former chief revenue officer, Michael Thornton, and former Disney executive, Tress Izzard, Orbi TV is a prepaid satellite TV company

that services the 48 contiguous United States. I thought this was interesting. This one flew under my radar. This is another one that we picked from Digital Trends, and they mentioned as well it sort of flew under their radar. It was launched back in August. It says to remarkably little less heavy, I'll say, than a traditional TV or satellite package. I like that you can buy your own hardware here, flat monthly rate for a standard channel lineup. They're trying to keep costs low, it looks like, so their channel selection says 46 channel package for $40 per month. So that's kind

of a compelling price point. And one thing that I thought was interesting here is they have a built-in OTA antenna, over-the-air antenna, in the box, and they use that. You have the option to use that to pick up your local channels. And that's another way that I guess they're keeping costs down is that you use that OTA antenna to pick up your local broadcasts, and then you pick up all of your other channels via satellite. So they're doing some interesting things here in the model. I have no idea what sort of traction they're getting, but I thought it was an interesting service to at least be aware of if you're looking for options that kind of almost seem

like it would fit somewhere in between like a complete cord cutting and then a traditional satellite or pay TV package. Yeah, but I mean, this is more along the lines of almost like a direct TV or just network because they're getting their services through satellite. So they're pulling that down. They don't need internet access.

And like you said, they're pulling that down they don't need internet access and they they're like you said they're using the local channels uh they're using that for with the terrestrial antenna so interesting interesting setup here but for for a price point that is in line with what most people end up paying cord cutting and you can add on i guess it does have you can add on like hbo packages and all that good stuff too. So interesting. Yeah. Thought it was worth a mention. Better than the, like they have the, how does Orbi TV compare to cable? $40 a month versus 107 per month. It's like, yeah, yeah. That's compelling. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. Moving on here in times like this changes inevitable businesses, including home systems, firms, need to quickly realign and adjust to thrive to help home systems professionals effectively develop and implement stuff we're doing at One Vision on the show typically, but did want to mention this one. We're excited about jumping into this topic of change management in the industry of home technology. businesses, lots of small and medium-sized business owners who are really struggling to

get their arms around the rapid change, pace of change in the industry. And we spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff at One Vision, and we'll be hosting this webinar again on August 27th. And I know we have a lot of home technology professionals in the audience, and we'll include a link in the show notes to where you can register for that. If you're working on any sort of change, whether it's implementing new software, moving into new product categories, anything like that, we're going to jump into some tried and true principles based on behavioral science and really talk about how you can leverage those principles to make that change stick in your company. This is change within the organization, not external changes of how the world is working, and you have to wear masks everywhere now?

Yeah. This is internal change. Yeah, no mask talk. Yeah, exactly. Change management, again, is an area, for reasons I won't belabor here, that at One Vision, we think about a lot. We work with integrators to adjust their service departments and how they're approaching that whole part of the business. And that's a really fundamentally large change. But these principles apply equally well to changes of all types.

And we've done this webinar a couple of times before and gotten some great feedback on it. So, again, if you're in the business, home technology, and you're trying to work your way through any sorts of these changes in your company, we'd love to have you come join us. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes. You can go sign up for that thing. We could. Absolutely. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in our show notes, hometech.fm slash 316. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for a weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis, as well as other industry news that may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 316. Absolutely.

And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live on Wednesdays starting around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. Jason, got a couple things going on this week. You've got a slick pick of the week, and i'm gonna i'm gonna turn the the show over to you and you you're gonna drive you're gonna you're gonna give i'm gonna get a personal jason griffin webinar is what i'm gonna get i have a feeling yeah i we've been on this kick lately a little bit seth where we're jumping into productivity types of of topics and this is an area that I am a total nerd for. I love this stuff. And I geek out on new apps and things like that. And there's one area that I felt like there hasn't

been a lot of choices or options to really help out lately. And that is the lowly calendar. It is such a common tool that many of us live and die out of, including myself in that for sure. But we don't tend to think of it a whole lot in terms of getting a better grip on our productivity and focusing on the things that matters and moving through that part of our day-to-day work efficiently. So I came across this, and I think, Seth, that you had actually originally posted a card on our Trello board that we use for organizing the show. I don't know where you found it, but it's a tool called VimCal. And you had stumbled across it somewhere, and I went and looked at their webpage, and the page is a little bit sparse. V-I-M-C-A-L is the page. They're a pretty early stage company, but they are actively bringing on, I think they're still

really calling it beta users, but you can go on the website and sign up. And I just had, they do like a demo for you when you sign up. And I just had my demo today and instantly on the spot, I was basically like, where do I sign? I just loved it so much. So I wanted to talk about it for just a minute for anyone out there who, similar to me, is struggling with calendar management on a regular basis. It can be pretty tough. So there's a lot of stuff involved here with this tool that I think makes it really neat. I know we're an audio-only show, so I'll do my best to not get too much into the visuals. Seth and I got a screen share up here, but ultimately number one, a ton of keyboard shortcuts.

And you know that I am big into that. The hotkeys are a big thing for me. So you've got like a command K option where you can jump in and see all your different options there will come up in a control panel. And you can book meetings right from within there. You can do a lot of things just without taking your hands off the keyboard, which I love. You can also move through events using like the arrows on your calendar. So that's super slick. It gives you this side panel here that shows you a lot of information at a glance. But where it gets really cool, Seth is this feature called availability. So you have, there are tools out there like Seth, are you familiar with Calendly or any of these other, you've probably seen them where you receive like a link from somebody and it'll be like,

check for available time. Yeah. And there's like three 30, four o'clock and five o'clock or something like that. And you click one and it sends you, sends you a link to kind of, or it sends an email saying, or with a calendar invite on it. Yeah. And it'll automatically book. And I love those tools, but one of the problems I've had with them is that it's kind of one size fits all. So you send that link out and really the person receiving that link can book on your calendar anytime that it's open. There are instances where sometimes I may just want to give them a link that would tie to only certain times that are open in my calendar, right? If I'm booking a particular meeting that I'd rather take in the afternoon versus the morning, for instance. And what this tool does is gives you the ability to quickly select your availability and you can dynamically just drag on your calendar.

Oh, wow. You just draw it out where you're free or where you want to be free. You draw the blocks where you want to be free. And then there's two ways you can do it. It generates some text that you can just copy and paste in your email and say, hey, respond and let me know if any of these work. Or you can toggle it on where it'll actually give you a link and you can send them a link where they can actually just go ahead and book the meeting. So one is just a more open-ended like,

hey, reply and let me know if these work. The other one is actually giving them a link. But either way, you can just dynamically select the times that you want to make yourself available for that meeting. That is really slick. What a headache. I love the emails from like the third or fourth email from people that are like, yeah, just let me know what works for you next week. And I'm like, just tell me. I'll make it work. Yeah, that whole back and forth game that you get into with scheduling can be a real nightmare. So that's one really cool thing. There's two other things I wanted to mention here that I think are really neat.

So if you book, if you do a lot of meetings across multiple time zones, they have this feature called, and Seth, I know how great you are with time zones. There's only one. I don't know what the problem is. So you're going to like this one. It's called time travel. Oh, boy. And what you do is you select the time travel feature, and then you can type in, like at One Vision, we have partners in Hawaii, and this is where I typically struggle with it. So you can select Hawaii here, and you'll notice that it changes all my events to now appear in Hawaii time. So my whole calendar appears in Hawaii time. Also, if I go to availability now,

I can send this link out and it'll do it all in Hawaii time. Very nice. Right. So that's really cool. And then the final thing I wanted to show you, which is really neat, is it has natural language processing. So if I hit C for create, and then I can say, meet regarding proposal with Ian at 9.30 a.m. tomorrow. And it just picked up who,

like it picked up Ian from your contacts and. Yep. Yeah. And it named the meeting, it picked up Ian and it, and it got the time and everything. And I, if I just click create event, I'm done. Yeah. Yeah. So those are a few features. There's, there's a lot more to it. And I would recommend that if you're in a lot of meetings and you, you struggle with efficiently moving through your calendar and managing all of that, go give these guys a look. I would encourage you to go through their website. And I ended up on a call with a guy named John, who I think is one of the co-founders and gives a really compelling demo. There's a lot more to it, but I won't go too much deeper

into it. I just think it's a really slick tool. It's $15 a month. So there is, there is a cost associated with it. But for me, given how much I live out of my calendar, that that's going to be, I think money well spent. So I'm going to use it for a couple of months and we'll see how it goes. I mean, there's, this has a bunch of tools that are in calendar applications that like the calendly thing, think costs as well like so there's there's different bonus to this i i will say i have uh rarely seen anybody live the way you live in your calendar like but you're getting a look at the uh at the madness right now on our screen i am and now i understand why you're writing your books it's just there's a crazy wall right here and you probably got a crazy wall there at the house yeah this is that's it this is wild but you know oh here's another one seth that's really cool

if i hover over a meeting that has a zoom link in it and i just hit the letter v for video it opens up the zoom link very nice and it works he told me that works with hotkeys a bunch of the different video conferencing solutions so instead of having to click into the meeting and then navigate to the link, you just hover over it and click V. And it's even smart enough where it knows the next meeting that's coming up. So you don't even have to hover over it. You could just go into your calendar and hit V

and it'll automatically open the video link for your next upcoming meeting. So anyways, a lot of these things are just small efficiency gains. But those things aggregate over time. And I'm a big fan of anything I can do to shave seconds off of tasks that I'm doing over and over and over again. Right. My biggest problem right now is kind of what it looks like that is solving for you a little bit. It's like maybe having, you have multiple calendars because I saw Home Tech's calendar was on there clearly yeah clearly you're not doing all that

work for home tech during the day so that's all one vision work that was on there so yeah you're you're juggling different business type calendars and then you also have probably family events that go on there and that kind of thing i saw there was something on the weekend i couldn't read what it was but yeah there's something there on the weekend. Like it, it, that, that's what I have problems with. That's what I struggle with. And, and my, my biggest thing right now is not everyone agrees with, with me on like what in, in my family, like you can have shared calendars in your family. But we have different ideas about what a calendar should be. So some of us use calendars as a, uh, maybe a list of things to do. And some of us actually put the times down, you know, that you're supposed to be

somewhere. And that, that's, that's tough. That's a tough, uh, tough one to figure out how to get around. So I, yeah, I've just given up on that one. Like I've just got today, I have like 10 events on my calendar and just like, I don't even want to look at it. I don't want to look at it. I don't know what it is. That's tough. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The inter-family calendar sharing thing is not one that I've had a lot of success with either, if it makes you feel any better. But yeah, this does have the ability to, I mean, it's, I think it, I should mention,

I think Google Suite, G Suite is required. I think it's a Google it's, it's a Google thing exclusively. So if you're not like, if you're like an outlook calendar user or something, this may not be applicable, but it does have the ability just like in any using Google calendar in the browser, like you can have other calendars show up so you can see those and toggle those on and off. Right. Right. But it, But it also has the ability to toggle between accounts. So within the one instance, you can jump back and forth between different calendars

if you want to use the interface for controlling and doing scheduling and things like that. They also have a standalone app for Mac OS, which I really like so far. That's kind of nice to get it out of the browser. I know a lot of us have so many tabs open all the time that sometimes it's nice just to have a nice stick sandbox app that you can toggle over to and, and have that be kind of its own thing. So I like that as well.

I was going to ask you, they have like mobile, mobile apps yet. Yeah. I don't know if they have mobile. Uh, actually he didn't mention that on the call and I haven't looked. I do so little of my actual scheduling from mobile. Right. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not seeing anything come up on the App Store. And I know there's still a pretty early stage company.

But the product feels solid. It feels pretty mature. He said they've been at it for a while. So again, I highly recommend it so far. I haven't used it for long. But from the demo I saw and from what I've seen so far, it's going to be a nice tool in my tool belt. Absolutely. Like you said, if you're doing a lot of meetings,

you're doing a lot of phone calls, if you're doing little phone calls, like even I, I mean, I have a couple of things that pop up from time to time. And we're all trying to figure out what we're going to do for Cedia these times of year. So there's phone calls and marketing stuff that comes up all the time.

And I just, I don't know, it's, there's phone calls and stuff, marketing stuff that comes up all the time. And I just, I don't know, like it's, it gets overwhelming. So something like that can really, really help out anybody, I think. So we'll be interested to see what you do with it. Yeah, I'll let you know. Well, Jason, I got another pick of the week here. You see what my, my, my little message there. A box from Richard Gunther arrived today at my house. Ooh.

And very intriguing. So I opened it up, and there are many different things related to home technology to be deposited into the museum vault behind me. Some of these things I have. Wonderful. The collection grows. Some of these things I have no idea what are, and I'm going to have to research them.

There is an older device called a QCAT here, and I recognize this thing. Oh, wow. I remember those, but I can't remember what it is. What is that? If I remember correctly, there was a barcode that you would get, and you would scan this. You would plug this into your computer, and you would scan this barcode,

and it would bring you to a website. It would bring you to a URL, I guess, if I'm remembering correctly. Radio Shack Scanner. Radio Shack. I don't know. I don't know i don't know i will have to figure go back and and and review what this thing is but uh it's it's very this is this is a piece of internet folklore here so yeah it is holy cow there's they're chiming in inside the chat. So he also had another barcode thing here,

which is conveniently enough labeled barcode scanner. So I kind of figured out what that was. But it also comes with the instruction manual, which was this nice little barcode programming sheet, which is nice. Vintage. But it comes with the operating instructions for a panasonic pv2812 video recorder if you remember what these are vhs it's uh it's it's one of the ancient things from

the before times um now now this from what i gather from the operating instructions, Jason, do you remember having problems recording, like setting up a recording on a VHS? We always had this in my house, like in my early days. Oh, yeah. You'd set something up, and it would be for AM or PM or whatever, and you'd never be able to record it. So it was a dark art. This device, from what I have gathered here, is a barcode scanner.

And you see all these barcodes, like this massive amount of barcodes, like it's got the start time that you can AM and PM, you can scan in here. It's got the date, like each individual barcode for the date and the time and each individual hour. And then all this over here, these are all your TV channels. So I guess you scan all this together. There's a way to do this one at a time. And then you point the end of this over to your Panasonic VCR and it programs in the recording.

How funny. So nice. That is great. i love that i know that i'd never heard of before so you're sort of like you've got this grid of like selections you can make that are that are like commands and you're sort of storing these in that device and then pushing them presumably via infrared it's got to be infrared, over to the VCR. That is funny. We've got pictures coming into the chat room of the QCAT.

And in case you're listening and not sure, C-U-E-C-A-T. And to make this even better, it is shaped like a cat. It's shaped like a cat, like a sitting down cat or something says the q cat is a cat shaped barcode scanner which enables users to scan a special barcode q which would then shepherd them effortlessly to the relevant web page so this was like qr codes version 0.1 and you had to have this special cat thing um he also sent along a home pro wireless controller this is a z-wave controller i guess which is interesting yeah i'm not maybe it looks like it does lights i guess maybe a couple scenes maybe it's programmable there's an lcd screen i will have to research this one i'm not familiar with it at all and then we've got now this is this is a beauty jason this is a microsoft

harman kardon remote oh that yes that's like a collector's item right there with the synthes serial cable just in case i wanted to get adventurous oh beautiful and i've got the instruction manual and the cd in here so if i if i spin up my Windows Vista, this works on Windows 98. So maybe my Windows Vista VM, I'll be able to connect to this, program this bad boy up, and see what it can do. This is a beautiful remote, though. I'll have to take a picture and put this on the show notes. Only four AA's.

Remember those days where you could replace your batteries? I'll tell you, Seth, you're curating quite the collection over there for your museum. And thanks all to our donors, by the way. No museum would be complete without generous donations. And he has graciously submitted what I hope to be the first and last smart light bulb to the museum. I deliberately made the conscious effort to avoid putting any lighting-type devices in there because there were so many of them, and I feel like if I start down that road,

it's like collecting Legos. Like, you're going to have to have all of those little, all of them. And I just don't want to be that guy. Like, it's bad enough already. I don't want to have 30 or 40 different light bulbs with speakers. One thing I do want, though, and it hasn't come out yet, but one thing I will be actively trying to acquire is the Smalt shaker, the smart Smalt salt shaker.

I will definitely try to be able to get one of those whenever those things come out. But smart light bulbs, this is it. I'm cutting it off at the TCP. TCP A19. No more donations are being accepted. Richard says, but it's six low pan. Which will be, the six low pan will have its own in memorial list. I mean, this is a TCPcp light bulb i think these were

like home depot and stuff like they were they were around for a little bit for a hot second and then uh gone gone with the wind as they say i have to retire it to the museum well richard coming through those are great donations and in pristine condition this remote really has me intrigued seth i wanted to win the know when the shelving with all the lighting and everything is going up, where are we at with that? Well, I had to install an air conditioner first. Where are your priorities at? Unbelievable. And as Matthew points out, we need a website. I think the website's probably going to be a lot easier to do than the shelving in the interim. So I'll see what I can do.

I'll see what I can do to take note and put all these together. I love it. Should be fun. Thanks for that, Richard. Good stuff there. If you've got any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, ideas for a show topic or guest or donations to the Smart Home Technology Museum, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is

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I forgot what we were talking about. We talked about a bunch of stuff this last week. QCATS. QCATS, yeah, we're going to talk about QCATS moving forward for sure. And if you're looking for other ways to support the show we would really appreciate if you would leave a positive review on itunes or in your podcast app of choice those positive reviews definitely help more people find the show so if you find entertainment and or value in what we're doing here at the home tech podcast please take a minute to go leave us a review. Is this called a man? I used

to know this is a PS2, I guess, interface that the little old keyboard thing that if you unplugged accidentally from your computer would freeze your computer up because they didn't know how to do interrupts properly back then. Those remind me of the I don't remember what they're called either, but they remind me of the gateway when gateway gateway computers were big i remember getting my gateway when i went off to college and all the they were all color-coded color-coded when i when i i decided that computers weren't for me i said it's all getting color-coded people are getting too people are going to wise up they're going to be able to plug a keyboard into their computer i need to get out of this business so i thought it was getting that was that was your son yeah i was like anybody could

plug a a purple keyboard thing into the keyboard and so i was like i gotta get out of this and so i i made a change to let me check my notes uh music education huh so and here we are here we are yeah yeah indeed all right good stuff well a little bit of a shorter show this week we did have a guest lined up but we had a last minute they had a last minute thing come up so we'll be looking to reschedule that we're gonna have have lutron on melissa andresco from lutron to talk about their new smart wood blinds and we were looking forward to diving into that this week. But again, we had a reschedule.

So no big deal. We'll look to get that on soon. And we'll look to wrap this show up here, Seth. I hope you have a great weekend. You got any big plans? Well, no, there's one big disruption this week. I came out Monday and my computer was not acting right. So I was like, it's time, it's time. I need to send

this onto the farm. So I did what we said was impossible. I cloned the drive, plugged it into a Mac mini and shipped the other computer off to Apple to have the battery repaired. And right now, this whole time, Jason, we've been talking on a Mac Mini from 2012 with an external drive plugged into it. Hey, that sounds like a vote of confidence for Robert's proposed course of action. Is that what you're telling me here? Well, I mean, if you have the option, I would do the internal drive. The external is a little bit, I think it's a little bit slower than it would would be if it was inside but um because you're going through usb3 at that point so you know you have to you're kind of stuck with what the whatever the adapter and the usb can do yeah so but i would still recommend doing the internal drive but this can be done

it can be done every every license every product on my computer is all freaking out because it was just a clone of the other computer. And I just plugged it in just and ran with it. And, uh, every, everything's freaking out right now. It's I, I didn't know if we're going to be able to record, but luckily we made it, made it. Yeah. So, well, I can tell you one thing that I'll be doing this weekend. I'm going to give you my solemn word right now. Seth, are you ready? Oh boy. I am going to go online. I'm going to order the PC solemn word right now. Seth, are you ready? Oh boy. I am going to go online. I'm going to order the PCI solid state drive. Yes. It's going to happen.

You have my word. Nice. Nice. It's going to happen. I'm excited because, well, we actually haven't had problems recently, knock on wood. Don't jinx us. No, this one seems to run fine. But if I ever get in a situation where I have

to reboot it, that's like a 20 minute process. And you'll be surprised when you, when you get the, the SSD, you know, you'll fire it up and it'll just be like, hi, I'm a Mac. And yes, you won't have to worry about that. I'm very much looking forward to that. Yeah. So I will get it done. Mark my words.

I'm going on record. I will get that purchased. And when it arrives, I will get it put in promptly and cross my fingers that nothing goes catastrophically wrong. No pressure, no pressure. We've only talked about it in the show for, you know, I know, I know exactly. All right, cool. Well, I hope you have a good weekend. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We'll see you next week and Seth, take care. We'll talk soon. Have a good weekend. All right. You too.