HomeTech.fm - Episode 354 - Siri on Device

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Apple shows off a few new Home features at WWDC 2021, CEDIA opens up registration for EXPO 2021, HBO Max was broken and now fixed, and Sidewalk takes a hit in the press. All that and a great listner question in this weeks mailbag.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 11th. That's right, yeah. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. A podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week we have a couple of home tech headlines. Not very many. It's been slow. It's been a slow, slow summer.

Of course, we had Apple's WWDC Developers Conference this week. And they, of course, announced the new software updates and what toys developers are going to get to play with for the next couple of months until iOS 15 gets launched with the new iPhone later this year, which all looked actually pretty cool. We're going to go into that a little bit later on in the show. Of course, I don't have a pick of the week this year, but I do have a good question that came in over Twitter,

so I'm going to kind of talk about that a little bit and see if we can get a conversation started on that. We may bring that up in our Home Tech Talks tomorrow. I think it's a pretty good idea. Maybe we can talk about this a little bit further. But Home Tech Talks, if you don't know, if you're a supporter of the show, you get invited to those Home Tech Talks. It should be right off the bat. We've got a number of them posted up on the Patreon feed. I know I need to get back and upload a couple more videos that we have. I've got to do some slight editing on those to get them appropriate.

No, no, nothing bad happened. Just got to edit out a couple of things. And all that can be seen. If you are a supporter of the show, you have access over to the patron feed. And if you don't know how to do that, head over to home tech.fm support and learn how to support the show here. With that, let's go ahead and jump into some HomeTech headlines. All right. All right. So this week is a big week. Registration is now open for the Cedia Expo 2021.

It begins on August 31st with pre-show conference sessions and show floor programming running sometime between, let's see, September 1st through 3rd at the Indianapolis Convention Center in Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm not going to be there this year. I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't know. The Expo is expected to attract over 10,000 home integration professionals, 300 exhibitors, including Crestron, Elan, Harman, Legrand, LG, Lutron, Samsung, Savant, SnapAV, Control4, URC, and Yamaha, among many others. So I'm really hoping, I've seen,

been kind of keeping an eye on that show for a map and kind of watching it start out here and then kind of get smaller and smaller. The boosts that are, the cheap boosts that are on the perimeter have worked their way in doesn't look like it's going to be a huge show i mean 10 000 is i think i think normal cd time like in the normal times in the before times normal cd show is double that maybe a little bit more maybe 25 um but uh 10 000 still sounds like a healthy show and it might be actually pretty good because you might get some one-on-one time there. If you're, if you're there to chat with people, uh, and whatnot, um, you might get some one-on-one time with the manufacturer. Uh, if, if you can, if you had the opportunity to

go, um, I've talked to a lot of people who are not located here in the States and it's a little bit more difficult sometimes to get in international travel is just tough right now. So, um, they're going to have, they, they've already said, you know, they're really not, you know, they, they can get here, no problem, but getting back home is a bit of a, you know, a challenge. And, um, you know, it's the time we're in right now and it's a weird year and, um, you know, we'll have to see what happens. I think next year, everybody's going to be really raring back to, to go back to the show. Hopefully they're going to make something of it this year um and i really wish they'd lean um i really i'm really curious to see what the exhibitors are going to do this year like what is control for snap av uh i say in there

backwards it should be snap av control for i have no idea it could be a whole new different company by the time cd rolls around after they go public could just have a new name. I don't know. URC, what are these big companies going to do at the show to present both to the dealers and integrators that show up there, but also to the people who stayed home? So it will be kind of interesting to see what happens there. Let's move on to the next one. This is kind of funny. After being broke for around a week, HBO Max has finally released an update to their Apple TV app that addresses a few technical glitches,

just small ones, like not having the ability to rewind fast-forward content. I mean, who needs that? Using HDR. I mean, who would want that either on their nice 4K HDR TV? Having problems.

Having a permanent next episode pop-up at the end of a stream. You just can't get rid of it. It's there. You can't get rid of it. And broken subtitles and Siri commands. Most of the bugs were found on the Apple TV version of their app. And it was as a result of HBO's decision to ditch the native tvOS player in favor of its own player. It was an update that they released somewhere on June 2nd. The new update reverts

back to using the native player, so everyone is reporting that everything's back to normal. It sucks when that happens. It really does. And HBO, I don't remember. I mean, HBO actually, I can't complain too much. I actually didn't mind HBO's player when, when they were there, when they were using it. Um, I don't know about this update. I haven't had HBO max hooked up in a while. I think we're about to turn it back on for a couple of shows we want to watch, but, um, my, my, the bane of my existence is that Disney, Disney app and their player in there. Now I only paid like $75 for like 10 years of this thing. Uh, so like, I can't complain too much. Cause I think my daughter would be like five or six by the time we have to pay for this again.

Um, but that said, um, I'd really like to, to rewind, fast forward, stop a show, have it picked back up reliably. I think Disney, I think, I think, I think really like to rewind, fast forward, stop a show, have it pick back up reliably. I think Disney, I think you can handle that. I really wish you would. Hey, hey, looking in the show, looking over there in the chat, Bruno. Looks like Bruno is joining us. I see TJ and I see Greg. Thanks, guys, for dropping in.

Really appreciate seeing you tonight. Let's go ahead and move on. So a big week here. i i i turned on the on the on the tv uh this week and and started watching the apple's wwdc 2021 uh watch the keynote on monday yeah it was monday um it was pretty good um some boring parts where i just kind of like oh this this isn't what I'm really here for. But big updates coming to iOS 15 and Mac OS later on the road. I forget what the was it. What is the it's not I forget the name. Montanaro. Is that it? Mac OS Montanaro. That sounds right. Yeah, that's coming on later this year. And actually sounds like some pretty cool updates. They had

some really cool like demos that they were doing around the software and everything. And if there's AI that'll scan through all your photos and find texts in there, you can copy and paste texts out of there. Um, one, one really cool thing I saw was having the ability to give States and, uh, locales like, um, the ability for you to put your state ID on your phone or your driver's license on your phone or like a TSA pass or something. And I mean, I would love not to leave. I would love to leave the house without my wallet, kind of like kind of like I normally do and not have to worry about it because I always leave my wallet anyway. But with Apple Pay and Tap to Pay and all this stuff being fairly ubiquitous in my area, I don't have to worry about paying for much anymore. But

if I ever get pulled over or ever need to show an ID, I typically can't. So I would love to see a digital ID come in. Really cool, like I said, really cool drag and drop demo. If you haven't checked that out, I'll try and drop demo. If you haven't checked that out, I'll try and find a link to that particular demo in the show where they had a computer set up and an iPad set up next to it. And everybody knows that you can use the screen sidecar, I think is what they call it. And you can basically use your Apple, your iPad as a second monitor if you're on the go or whatever. But this is actually different. They used the mouse on the computer and just they were dragging files back

and forth between devices. It was pretty wild. So Apple's really flexing their the muscles that they have there on being able to integrate all their products together. So pretty cool to see that. And one big thing I thought was really cool is the new features to help you find AirPods when you lose them. It would have really been helpful about a year ago. I still got two in my house that I lost. I lost three pair. I found one, but I lost three pair during quarantine. I don't know how that happened. One of them I found in a backpack, which doesn't make any sense because I didn't use the backpack.

I didn't go anywhere. So in my house, there's two nice, one of them's a nice one. One of them has a little rechargeable case to it. I gave up on buying that one, buying that one again. But I've got a couple of the version one. I got a version two or three or whatever.

And I've got the AirPods Pro. It's my latest one to lose. So can't wait of the version one. I got a version two or three or whatever. And I've got the AirPods Pro. It's my latest one to lose. So can't wait to lose that one. Really cool features come into home, like the home side of things, home technology side of things. One of the things they kind of showed off, but they didn't really say too much about what it was going to be, was something called Home Keys. And the idea behind this is kind of like tap to pay. It's tap to unlock your door, right? So you walk up to your door and you can use your Apple Watch or your

phone to unlock a door. They said they were going to work with a ton of manufacturers. I saw many brands that I recognized from the lock world, you know, Assa Albloy, that kind of thing, Schlage, all those manufacturers were up on the screen and, um, you could, you, they were also talking about integrating with, uh, like maybe, well, maybe it was Hilton or something like that, uh, where you could check into a hotel and you could use your phone for a key. So all, all that's really cool. Um, as long as you don't, you know, lock yourself out of your hotel room without your phone.

It's pretty good. Um, use a Siri to now, uh, voice control the TV, which is pretty cool. Uh, you can share one of these, this is a really cool feature. Um, they were using FaceTime to kind of, um, kind of look through things. And Eddie's kind of giving me some real time followup here. It was Hyatt. Thanks, Eddie. Appreciate that. Uh, thanks. Hi, Eddie. Also in the show, uh, in the show over there in the live chat. Appreciate you coming by and helping me out there. This is really cool.

You have the ability to use FaceTime and you could and they were talking about you can be talking to a group of people and share music through FaceTime. And that was really cool. But then they upped the game and said, oh, and you can also share video, which led to the next logical conclusion is that you'll be able to, in the next future releases of their software, share video and have kind of watch parties along with your friends. So that could be pretty cool. I've thought a couple of times about having like a home tech watch party. That'd be cool. We can all pick a movie. We'll probably use Plex for it.

But I thought it was a pretty cool idea. Maybe one day. Maybe one day we'll get around to having a Home Tech movie club where we can watch a couple movies. Another feature that they touted and talked about quite a bit, and I kind of scratched my head as to why this is even a feature that you would talk about. But you can use the HomePod Mini as your TV speakers soon. I don't know how that would sound great or any better. Actually, I use the HomePods as my TV speakers in the garage here. I've got a little projector over there. And of course, it has a speaker on it.

But I just airplay over to the HomePods. One of the most frustrating things that I have, because every single time, every day that we want to actually play something on, I have to reconnect the Apple TV to the HomePods. And I don't, I don't think there's any way to permanently connect them. I think it's just every day I have to go in and reconnect them. And once I do, it works perfectly fine for hours and hours and hours. But for whatever reason, every day they need to be reconnected. And if that's the experience that they're bringing to the HomePod mini, good luck with that, guys. That's not very good. They're introducing some more personalized voice commands. So if you have a bunch of HomePods

around the house or HomePod minis around the house, they'll be able to tell who is telling that device what to do. If you say add something to my calendar, it'll add it to your calendar and not your wife's. So that's very nice. I love it when these types of features that are, that are, you know, that makes sense for one person in one house are, you know, brought out and added to the rest of the family where you don't have to have like, you can have one device that everybody can talk to. That's really cool. Matter was actually on stage. They talked about iOS 15 supporting Matter, which is the standard previously known as connected home over IP chip. And I always want to say chip. And this is a

project that a lot of the major manufacturers are working on, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Apple. They're all part of this project matter now. It's going to get hard to say that, but they're all working on that now. And that's going to be the new home automation standard all these major companies are going to use. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays into things. And kind of some other small side things

that they mentioned in the home thing. Multiple cameras. You can display multiple cameras at one time on Apple TV. And they showed like a quad screen setup with four cameras on it shown on Apple TV. I think that's pretty cool. It's always nice to, it seems like low-hanging fruit and kind of what a lot of apps that you can buy right now

can already do with HomeKit. And also the Home app of apps that you can buy right now can already do, uh, with, uh, with HomeKit and also the home app. I guess you can bring that up and see a couple of like snapshots, but not live video. So I guess it's nice to have live video of all those cameras on the screen. Um, and Apple watch gets a couple of little updates. Uh, it brings in intercom support. So you can intercom between the home pods and an Apple Watch. This is a neat little feature. It gives you a picture of who's at your front door. So if you've got a HomeKit-compatible doorbell, it sends a picture over to it. And they're introducing package detection.

So if Amazon drops off a package or UPS swings by and drops off a package, their devices will be able to tell that there's a package there and let you know through your watch. Kind of cool. The big one, though, there is one big feature, I think, that I think is really going to be key to what we have, what we see in for home technology. There may be two. There's actually maybe two. I'm going to go ahead and say two. Siri is finally coming to third party devices. So HomeKit accessory makers will now be able to integrate Siri products directly into their devices. So like this Siri will be,

Amazon's been doing this for a long time. You can get like an Ecobee right now. And Ecobee is actually, I got a picture of it there. Ecobee is the one they showed off on stage. And you can see right at the top, you can see it in the picture. This is a podcast, but in the picture that they provide, you can see in the picture, this is a podcast, but in the

picture that they provide, you can see that the Siri thing is on there and there's a little volume slider and everything. So this is really cool. This is, I think, a checkbox that they really needed to tick off. And I'm glad that they're finally doing it and finally found a way to do it and put engineering resources behind it. Because having Siri only live on iOS devices and HomePods and that kind of thing, while not exactly a bad thing, like if you're an Apple customer and you have an iPhone, you have Siri. But this, this, like if you have an Ecobee thermostat already installed in your house or a compatible one, I have no idea if this is going to be something they'll upgrade to or whatever. You're going to get Siri, not in a can anymore, but it'll be in a thermostat, I guess.

So that'll be really cool. This is supposed to come out later this year. And so are the products. And I'm really curious as if something that can be done with a software update, especially with Ecobee. Like they seem to have added on that Ecobee thermostat, especially with Ecobee. Like they seem to have added on that Ecobee thermostat, like Ecobee 3s, they've seemed to have been able to add quite a bit to them over time. So I'm hoping we'll be able to see like a checkbox, you know, as you're

setting up your Ecobee to integrate Siri with it. So let's see what happens there. What's neat about this feature is the Siri really doesn't live inside those devices. Everything gets routed through a HomePod or probably a home hub somewhere that's elsewhere on the network, whether that be like an Apple TV or something. And then everything's processed there and, you know, triggered out, triggered all basically through the HomeKit API. So it's kind of nice. You can yell at your thermostat to change its temperature directly now. And I mean, I suppose it will do that. What's nice about it processing on the HomePod

is it processes locally. So you should notice snappier interactions with Siri if that's the case. I don't know. We'll have to see what happens here. There's not like a comprehensive list of devices that will support this Siri thing, but we'll have to, let's see. There's not like a comprehensive list of devices that will support this Siri thing, but we'll have to, let's see,

they actually demoed Ecobee Thermostat during that presentation there. So I'll try and link directly to that video in the show notes as well. So we can check that out. And then one thing kind of like I kind of glossed over because it really wasn't really important, but it kind of reminded me of this conversation

is that Apple is going to be processing Siri now on device. Uh, so it doesn't, it doesn't, I don't think any of the home pods are going to have the chip that's needed, um, for that. So let me see, this is, I think it's a, uh, it's part of the neural engine in the A12 Bionic chip. So I'm pretty sure it's only going to be some of the faster, like the newer phones, not your Apple Watch, but it's going to be fairly newer phones. And what that's going to do is speed up interaction with Siri on device. So as soon as you say something in a command, it's going to figure out what you're saying and shoot out the command. So pretty cool. I'm looking forward to all that. We'll have to see when the software is released,

how well it works in the future. But you know, that's, that's, that's it for this weekend in home tech headlines. I think there was one other story. I'm kind of, kind of want to kind of brush on and talk about a little bit. There was a couple of hit pieces that came out this week, namely in Ars Technica that talked about Amazon Sidewalk. And we talked about on the show Amazon Sidewalk quite a bit in the past. And it's basically a low latency, a low frequency network. I think they're using low pan or whatever it is. And like Bluetooth standard that Amazon has come up with that they built into some of their devices, like ring devices and that kind of thing. And it this

this network is not like you can't stream video over it. It's a, it's, it's simply for like device signal. It's signaling. That's all it is like, um, door open, door closed, that kind of thing. Um, but with this lower frequency stuff, um, they can actually send those signals miles. Uh, in It's such a low frequency and what's it called? Low frequency, I think it's like 900 megahertz. It's really low. I read a story not too long ago that Amazon had handed out a couple of ring devices, some of their employees in Seattle,

and it wasn't like but a week later that like the entire city was covered with this network. And there was like, no, there was not no unopened space. I'm going to kind of go into like what you could do with this. Like if this is kind of something that like tile would be able to use, I think they did sign a partner agreement to be able to use this network. So tile are little square tracker things. And like, if you lose a device, supposedly the tile could talk to this network and you'd be able to triangulate about where that device was. Amazon specifically used like finding your pet, finding your lost pet. And you think about it, if you have all these little signaling devices built in around your neighborhood and all the ring doorbells and everything that will be able to pick up that signal and tell you where your dog, where your lost dog is.

So Amazon, when they released this, put out a white paper that said exactly what this new standard was going to do and how it worked. More importantly, how it worked. And it's probably the most secure standard you'll ever see in your life. So that's really what made some of these hit pieces and clickbaity things that popped up this week. I'm going to point squarely at Ars Technica. I'm not even going to link the story because it was so clickbaity. It was really pathetic, but I will link to Stacey Higginbotham's article on it. And you can go in and read her article and decide what you want, but I want to do with, with, with sidewalk. But I saw a number of integrators referencing some of the clickbaitier things, uh, over the last week and talking about, you know, how you need to get your clients to opt out of this. Or you,

when you're setting up devices, opt out of it. And I think it's just, it's as integrators and as people who like technology, we need to be aware of what this stuff is actually doing and how it actually works and not listen to these clickbaity things. Because I think the social benefits of having this low frequency network that is extremely secure. It's so secure that Amazon has no idea what bits are passing through its servers. So say a third party device made a dog tracker or whatever, some kind of device, and that dog tracker had a signal in it, it goes through your device, and those little bits and bytes that you're worried about increasing your data, which they don't, your device can't see those bits, it's encrypted from end to end all the way to whatever servers that that company is using to tell you where your dog is. There's no way that Amazon can read that data. It is a completely secure system. And it's very

discouraging to see some of that, especially in Ars Technica. I expect a lot higher out of them. This is a great protocol. It is a great setup. I know it's like Amazon's network. And believe me when I say I am not like an Amazon shill here. I'm not like even a huge fan of the ring doorbells. I've got a dead one outside. I'm going to replace it with one of these Unify things. I've got one of those Unify doorbells. So I like some of their products. I like some of their services. And I like to use them to buy stuff online. but like the company, eh, it's not that great. But what they've done here is they've done like a, they've done the best job that they could technically. Uh, and I think that needs some defending, at least in some media and especially by integrators. When the media goes out and does these stories to have this, I'm not putting quotes,

proprietary network because yes, you have to have Amazon devices and it has to integrate through Amazon Sidewalk. But there's really going to be some social benefits. I'm saying lost dog, but here in Florida, here in Sarasota, we always have the helicopters flying around. The neighborhoods are, why are the helicopters flying around? I can tell you why they're flying around. Nine times out of 10 here,

some older person has walked out the door and they can't find them. I know this for a fact because one of my neighbors did it and we couldn't find him. And they brought the helicopter out and found him down the street behind a building. So like that would, if you think about saving someone's life

because they walked out the door and you've got a sensor attached to one of their clothes or something like that, and you can find them that easily. There's some huge social benefits to a network like this. And really, integrators, read up on this. And don't fall into this FUD stuff and being scared of technology. This network really could be cool. And there really could be some good benefits out of it. I'll link over to Stacey's article. I think she, as always, does a great job of kind of dissecting things down and talking about it in plain language. So check out what she has to say. I'm on the pro side of this. You can kind of tell,

I really like what they've done technically. And I think that's the most important thing. Technically, this thing is solid, as solid as we can make a network. Encrypted end-to-end, encrypted so many times Amazon can't see what's going over the line. And that's huge. I think we need to recognize when technology is good, even though, yeah, Wi-Fi standards, the whole point of the Ars Technica article is they glazed over that part and said, but sometimes there's flaws found in Wi-Fi. Sometimes there's flaws found in your iPhone,

in Windows, in Mac. You patch those flaws and you move on. And I think the efforts that Amazon's done here to make a standard as good and solid and secure as they have and to have this kind of stuff come out, I don't know. It just rubs me the wrong way. I think as integrators, we should know what the technology means and know what it does behind the scenes and not be taking this FUD, fear, uncertainty, doubt stuff offline for clicks. I mean, it just kind of rubs me the wrong way. So read up on this stuff. Check it out. I'll put a couple of links about Amazon Sidewalk, including a link to that white paper where if you want to really get into the weeds and understand what they've done with encryption there, check that out.

So all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found in the show notes at hometech.fm slash 354. That's right, 354. Also, don't forget you can join us live in the chat room starting Wednesday, sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live.

And no pick of the week this week, but as I said, I've got a discussion topic. If the sidewalk thing rant wasn't long enough, I've got a discussion that was actually brought up by a listener on Twitter, Ty Benton, at TYenton. He asked the question, should we be asking the companies to have an exit plan for their tech products, end of life or sales, such as the seven hugs or Logitech remotes to become an open source product? It's a very interesting thought. And at first I was like, that's a really good question. I should think about this some more, but there's a couple of things that hold it back, I think. One, like right off the bat, I think like, okay, well, what if I made like seven hugs,

right? What if I was the guy behind that? There's a ton of like intellectual property that my company came up with that may be valuable, right? It may be that another company would like to buy it. And it may not necessarily be like remote technology, but it may be technology that is integral to that remote working. not, and it may not necessarily be like remote technology, but it may be technology that is integral to that remote working. There are, I know there are like companies who use escrow. Like

if you build a product and you have some kind of third party integration and you don't want that to stop working, you can, with working with the company that you work with, you can take their IP and put it in escrow. So if they ever go out of business, you still have access to that source code and you might be able to at least update your product or their source code to the point where you don't go out of business because they went out of business. Neither of those are the case, I think, here with Harmony and 7Hugs. I think Harmony is kind of an example. I think you can license a lot of their technology already. Maybe their IR codes and seven hugs. Uh, I think like harmony, harmony is kind of an example. I think you can, you can license a lot of their technology already. Maybe their IR codes and control database, um, as a developer, uh, they'll probably continue to license and sell that off to

other people. Uh, but this, this was a really good question. And I, I, I titled this little card IOT living will and, and put the little little 700 remotes under there, it would be nice to get to the point where these types of companies and devices that are building these things, if they do go out of business, what happens? Like where there are some of them that, you know, you set them up with a with an iPhone app, and you set the product up and you can do everything from that iPhone app. But as we've just seen and talked about, these features on iPhones roll out every year. And if you get a hold of an iPhone app that was made five years ago, it's a completely different experience, completely different look and feel. And sometimes features stop working. I mean, just this last year, iPhone turned on a feature that kind of tripped up a bunch of people, integrators included, where you had to turn on your trusted network. Like when you turn home, you can say trust this network, and it allows devices to see you on the network and identify the iPhone that you have.

Those things are an ever moving target. And if the company is out of business and Apple introduces some new security feature that disables a part of their setup, it's going to be tough to catch back up. You're not going to be able to like rewrite that and deploy it into the app store into millions of phones. So it's, it's really, this is really tough. And I don't know, I really don't know what to say, to say other than like, I think this is a great idea, but I have no idea how to get from where we are to this. And then, and I wonder if it takes a long, a long enough time to get to this kind of like living will for IoT devices that IoT devices are just ever present and everywhere. Like how long, how long on our time scale are we talking to get to the point where we can get all this legally stuff worked out to the point where IoT devices are just IOE, I think is the new thing they're saying, Internet of Everything.

And it's just expected that your light switches have Matter built into them, right? Like the Matters, the new protocol we just talked about. If that's where we're going, how important will it be for one of these companies that is supporting their own private device to keep updating and doing everything along the way? I don't know. I don't know. I think these standards like Matter are probably going to go a long way to solving some of these problems, but not all of them. Definitely not all of them. So great question, Ty. I think we probably could talk about this a little bit in our Home Tech Talk tomorrow. If anybody wants to pop in and listen to that, we'll have that. If you're a supporter of the show, you can come in and check that out. But man, that really got me thinking, got me thinking quite a bit for the past week.

I'm like, how can that, how can we do it? So thanks, Ty. Thanks for reaching out. If you have any feedback, comments, pics of the weeks, questions, ideas for the show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form.

As always, 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 the Patreon page. If you don't know how to go to the 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 $5 a month gets you a big shout-out on the show,

but every pledge gets you access to the private Slack chat at the Hub. That'll get you an instant invite to that. And also access to those Home Tech Talks we've been talking about. If you want to support the show but can't help financially, totally understand, but appreciate a five star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice really helps people find the show. And with that kind of wraps up another week of home technology news and ideas. And I guess mostly this week it was soapbox discussions by me. Yeah, I'll try and keep that to a minimum.

But I don't know. I think there's some really, really good discussions that we should have around like new technologies, not being afraid of them. First off, I mean, don't be afraid. It's just Amazon Sidewalk. And they have a white paper explaining all the security stuff. Go read it. When your customer or your mom or dad or somebody reads the New York Times or Washington Post and sees that hit piece, maybe say, no, I know all about this. You're totally safe.

You're totally fine. You don't have to worry about it. There are plenty of products out there that are way more abusive to your privacy and that you probably use every day and that you don't worry about at all. Cough Roku, like literally track your TCL TVs, literally tracking every single pixel. Oh, there's a Vizio. Vizio tracks every single pixel you watch and can determine if even if you're watching a DVD,

what it is and when you're watching it, they record all that. But nobody gives that a second thought. But the second Amazon, I guess, comes into play. We've got to shout them down. And what happens when these products end? It's a really good question from Ty. I really appreciate him reaching out. But with that, let's call it a night. And everybody, I'll talk to you next week.