HomeTech.fm - Episode 360 - Viva la Vudu

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Vudu lives on, Snap One expands into a few more local markets, Google might be announcing new Nest kit soon, and IKEA shows off a new smart air filter. All of this and a fun pick of the week on this week's podcast.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 6th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. This is episode 360, come full circle, I guess. I don't know. Numbers are getting up there, but yeah, here we go. The Home Tech Podcast is a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week's, we've got all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week we got a little Home Tech headlines. I've got a pick of the week and actually a nice little response from someone helping me out with the watching the Olympics. I'm going to go over

that in the mailbag. But man, I have I'm feeling bad about my home technology exploits because I've been working on car. I've been doing car stuff recently. I hate cars. I think I've mentioned that on the show a number of times. But I was given, given, yes, a from a family member, a nice little 2007 VW Rabbit. We had like 46,000 miles on it. So decided to put some effort into getting it back up and going and as a daily driver. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's been a project. It's been an absolute brutal project to get everything fixed up and working. So, uh, yeah. Oh, and guess what? Um, Sonos and receivers. That's not the only thing that is hard to get right now.

Car stereos, surprisingly, all but gone, like most of the high end ones. So from like Pioneer, Alpine, tough to get. If you if you if you have a if you have a if you if you do come across when they're about one hundred dollars more, usually on third markets and that kind of thing, um, then, then they are now. So like they, they, they should be, so I don't know. There's some scalping going on, I guess there, but, um, I do want to touch on our home tech talks, uh, that I am recording and we'll publish one day. I promise to you patrons, I'm really sorry. I haven't gotten those up, but I can, I keep saying that, but, uh, last week had a really good, um, quick conversation about design and design, right? We did a quick design review on a couple of things. We're going to keep that

conversation going this week. So we're going to call it park part two of the design room. Uh, if you've got projects you'd like to show off, bring them, bring them in. And we want to take a look at the, uh, documentation specifically. Uh, you know, if you've got pictures, that's fine, but we're all about the documentation here. So, uh, bring, bring that in and we'll take a look at it. And, uh, I've got a, I've got a studio project that I, I did a number of years back, probably a decade ago, um, that I've got some nice little plans on. We were going to kind of take a look at and review, uh, to see how they had drawn everything up in.

I was at Vizio and that's that's what I'm using. I use Vizio. So I kind of like I like that kind of documentation. It's not CAD. And I know we have a lot of CAD people who love CAD. And it's there's a good reason to use CAD because that's the that's the language of construction. But if you're trying to sell something or you're trying to provide documentation that's a little prettier, CAD doesn't always do the trick. And that's why I've always kind of fallen back on Visio

because I haven't been a good CAD guy. Like I never took the time to learn it and I just stuck with Visio. There you go. Anyway, that's tomorrow. So the Thursday. And like I said, I am recording them. I do download them. I have them all saved. I do need to upload them all at once. We'll

probably have just a huge back catalog published all at once one of these days. So check that out. Home Tech Talks. To learn about how to join with that, head on over to hometech.fm slash support and become a patron. You can invite to that and our private Slack chat, the hub there. And yeah, let's jump into a few home tech headlines. We've got all right. Snap one,

formerly snap AV is expanding its local present and a recent with a recent launch of a new snap one local partner store operated by all net in Marietta, Georgia. And they've got a couple of grand openings scheduled for Hollywood, Florida, Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas. Those should show up by Labor Day. The new stores bring the company's national footprint to a total of 31 locations.

That's pretty impressive. SVP of local Wally Winna says, quote, increasing our national presence through four new Snap One local partner stores accomplishes our goal of bringing Snap One brands, services and education to our partners. Good for them. It's an impressive footprint that they've been able to amass over the past couple of years here in the States. And I can tell you from my experience with working with dealers, I do work for a competing distributor, I guess. I don't know if we're competing with 31 locations and SnapAV, but I'm a distributor. I can tell you, dealers are wanting products delivered faster and faster every day. And I don't think we have SnapAV to thank for that.

I think we have Amazon to kind of set that bar and they're the ones who've kind of said, well, we can get stuff to you in a day, a few hours. Uh, the stuff I order on Amazon now, it just shows up like the same day. It's, it's, it's wild. Um, so I, I think that perception has led, you know, kind of filtered its, its way into, uh filtered its way into the dealer's way of thinking and having a local warehouse. And while that's expensive for SnapAV, it's a great option for dealers who are buying, what I like to say, they're buying just in time, just in time for the job. They wake up in the morning, they look at the calendar and say, oh yeah, that's where I've got to be. And they head that direction and do a quick swing by the supply house to pick up the parts

they need. I'm laughing because I used to do that. Go here, pick up the parts, then you can do the job. Yeah. Good stuff. Don't miss those days. Voodoo lives to see another day. Fandango has announced that it will phase out the branding of its Fandango now streaming service and focus on Voodoo as its loan app for rentals and purchases of movies and TV shows. The change means that Voodoo will now become the default portal for rentals and purchases on many Roku devices where Fandango now has long been the digital store,

you know, kind of the default store that you would go to. Uh, Fandango says the, um, United service, you know, kind of the default store that you would go to. Fandango says the United Service will, quote, offer more than 200,000 new release and catalog movies and TV shows to rent or buy, including the largest collection of 4K UHD titles and thousands of titles to watch for free,

all with no subscription required. It will also continue to support movies anywhere, which is really cool, which will let you kind of watch any to support movies anywhere, which is really cool, which will let you kind of watch any movie you buy anywhere, basically. It's really neat. I think it's amazing how far this company has come over the years. I remember probably, I don't know, a decade ago that I was sitting in, it wasn't CDS, he didn't put this show on. I think it was C pro had a show in Orlando called expo. It was kind of my, one of my first shows to go to.

And I'd go to it every year. And I ran across this little product called voodoo and it had this weird, funky little remote and a little streaming box before streaming boxes were even really a thing. I think you can get, you could get Apple TVs at the time. And it was kind of like the Mac mini Apple TV, the big one. Um, yeah, yeah. I remember coming across them, talking to them, getting really excited and sold a number of, uh, the like $300 voodoo boxes to my clients for their like dedicated home theaters. Um, cause you know, at the time there was nothing out there, butaleidoscape. And Voodoo had this little funky little box with a hard drive. You could just purchase movies on a whim for like, I don't know, 20 bucks or something. For the right client, it was the right product.

And they were sold a long time ago, I think, to Walmart. Yeah, yeah, there's a couple of things going on in the chat here. Voodoo was sold to Walmart. I think it came from Ty. No, no. Yeah, where, where, where? You guys talk so much in here yeah ty there we are thanks for helping yeah walmart walmart bought them and then walmart sold voodoo off to uh fandango and fandango has kind of kind of been like we've been kind of like thinking what are they going to do with these two properties that kind of do the same thing looks like now they're just going to combine them, get rid of the Fandango brand and

keep with, with Voodoo. So, um, it's a good thing. Good thing for consumers. I know a lot of people who use Voodoo, um, and have for years, uh, because it's been a really good and inexpensive way to watch movies. So, uh, if you haven't checked out checked out, do check it out. I just, I kind of have to go back in my memory and, and, and remember having to deal with that funky little, like the remote was, I don't know, it was kind of like figure eight shaped, but then like twist the eight along the middle, like grab each leaf on the figure eight and twist it. It was, it was a kind of, it was a strange remote. Let's just leave it at that. So put a link to it in the show notes. Somebody can check that out. All right. All right. Next one coming up. Looks like Google has started

prepping for the launch of its upcoming Nest camera products, which is why they showed up on the company store for a very brief at a time. While the listings are no longer available, the verge was able to catch a few glimpses before they disappeared. And apparently the tech giant will launch a battery powered Nest camera for indoors and outdoors, a floodlight camera to complete compete with ring, a wired camera for indoors, and there's a battery powered Nest doorbell all along those leaked products. So kind of cool. The listings are all gone and we'll have to see what Google comes up with. They announced earlier this year that there was going to be a refresh in that line. Uh, so hopefully in the next few months, uh, we, we will see maybe a few weeks. We'll see

what, what, what, uh, Google has out of this. I did think that the, uh, Nest Cam with floodlights was an interesting product. Um, it looks funky, but you know, the ring one doesn't look all that great either. In my opinion, it looks kind of strange. Um, but the Nest cam, I think, I think that's a pretty good product that it's going to have to, this is kind of the first like all in one solution type product that can start competing with Amazon and ring, um, from a, from a big player. So we'll be interesting to see what they do here. Oh, boy. Another week of wellness talk here.

IKEA is at it again and launching its first smart air purifier, the Stark Vind, which is expected to be available later this year in October, they believe, is an indoor air purifier that is expected to be available later this year in October, they believe, is an indoor air purifier that is optimized to work in room sizes up to 20 meters squared. And I did the math on that. It's 215 square feet if you're metric impaired. That's not terribly large, but this is IKEA. So there you go.

Pretty good-sized room you could use this in. Here's a quote from Henrik Tellender. He's a product owner at IKEA. Quote, for IKEA, the smart home is not about gadgets. It's about making life and home much better through combining our solid home furnishing knowledge with digital solutions and technology. That's why we explore the possibility of integrating the function of purifying air and technology to provide good experience for the customers at home. Stark Wind, Stark Vend, I don't even know how this, Stark Vend, I guess, is available in two versions, a floor standalone model and a side table model. Curiously enough, it's built right into like a side table that you put next to your couch.

It can be used on its own, but connecting it to a Treadfree gateway enables scheduling and control, I guess by the Treadfree app. In auto mode, the StarkVend will adjust the fan speed to correlate with filters down with a PM 2.5. It brings the air quality using a three filter system to remove 99.5% of smaller airborne particles from the air, things like dust, pollen, that kind of thing. So yeah, Ikea, week two of wellness. Here we go. I'm not going to say much about this other than air quality stuff is a hit and miss field too.

But it's very much easier to measure the results on this than changing the colors of your lights. Um, I, the biggest problem I think you'll see in this field is products just don't live up to what they say they're going to do. And in this case, maybe not removing is the most amount of dust and particles that, that you'd get off of, you know, a better filter, like a HEPA filter or something. Um, there was a popular one of these a couple of years better filter, like a HEPA filter or something. There was a popular one of these a couple years back called, I think it was called Molecule, that purported to remove tons of stuff using some crazy technology. They were kind of all over podcasts and advertised.

I think they were even at Cedia one year. They showed up on Innovation Alley or one of the corner booths there. Had a huge marketing budget. But it turns out, when the Wire wire cutter got a hold of these things and started testing it, they quote it as being the worst air purifier they'd ever seen. And in fact, many of the company's claims hadn't like rulings settled against them from the National Advertising Review Board. So a lot of things they were saying were just completely made up pseudoscience.

It's kind of what I was complaining about last night or last week. Um, that all said the Ikea purifier is technically a purifier PM 2.5. Isn't all that great compared to your standard HEPA filter. I was just saying before that's 2.5 microns versus 0.3 microns from HEPA. Uh, their previous unit, the foreign of TIG is on the not recommended list over at Wirecutter as well. Not because they're lying about what it can do. It's just that the unit performs poorly when compared to other units around the same price point that are using a HEPA filter. So if you really want to get rid of all that stuff in a decent amount of time, use one of those HEPA filters rather than one of these. On the positive

side, I will give something to Ikea on this. I am all for technology built in being built into furniture like this. If you look at the little side table, I've got a picture of it here on the live show. It looks really cool. Like it's something I could see kind of going into most people's homes. You know, it as long as you can get homes. Uh, you know, it, as long as you can get power to it, you know, without having to run, you can actually see the cable running across the floor in the picture here, but if you can get power to it, I think it's not that bad. Uh, you know, in tables mostly catch dust anyway. I, I think I, I, I am all for this, uh, I'm all for this, uh, method of putting technology into furniture and kind of hiding

it away, building it into the things that we already use. Um, so it kind of seamlessly integrates with your life. And I think, I think a key is trying to do that. Um, uh, with this, it, it may not be the best, but again, we're talking Ikea here. We're not talking about, you know, some super high end HEPA filter thing. So, um, there we go. He's there saying I'm holding back. Uh, yeah, I don't know. Like maybe, maybe I do. I, I do like the way this looks. And, um, you know, if, if I lived in a place where we had bad air, which we kind of do right now, um, because of some, something called a red tide, which is a nasty little algae bloom that like kills off fish and that kind of thing. It can cause respiratory issues here in Florida. Uh, nasty. Um, yeah, uh, you want, you, you'd want something to, uh,

to, to filter that out because it doesn't smell very good. It doesn't smell very good at all. Anyway, let's move on. Let's move on. So all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 360. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 360.

And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room Wednesday. Like quite a few people are. The chat stuff's going so fast right now. I can't keep up with it. But you can join us live in the chat room Wednesday. Like quite a few people are. The chat stuff's going so fast right now. I can't keep up with it. But you can join us live over there somewhere between Wednesdays, somewhere between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out how to do that more over at hometech.fm slash live. Pick of the week.

Pick of the week uh has to be this 55 wi-fi driven amazon smart soap dispenser i mean how could it not be so amazon uh it looks just like a soap dispenser but amazon quietly introduced a dispenser that works with its alexa voice. It includes a set of 10 LEDs on top that will count down as you wash your hands for 20 seconds, which is what's recommended by the CDC to keep germs and harmful bacteria away. You can pair it with an Echo device to access supporting an Alexa routine

that can play your favorite song or tell you a joke or fun fact or something. Maybe you can get it to play Row, Row, Row Your Boat twice. I think that's what you're supposed to sing when you can get it to play row, row, row your boat twice. I think that's what you're supposed to sing when you wash your hands. At least that's what I told my daughter. That's 20 seconds, right?

And depending, this is actually kind of cool. Depending on how far underneath the nozzle you hold your hand, the device will provide you with more or less soap from its 12 ounce reservoir. The closer you place your hand, the less soap it will dispense. And battery, there's a battery that you can recharge can recharge last about three months on a single charge.

This is going to go, this is, this is, this is one of those products. I guarantee you, this is going to be destined. I'm going to get one. I'm going to get one. It's it's, it's, it's already ordered. Um, this thing is going to go to the museum for sure. This is, this is going to go to the museum. It's just going to be on order. I'm just going to put it off to the side and, uh, it's, it's going to be, uh, it's, it's going to be sitting there next to the small thing. I'm gonna have to get my hands on one of those one of these days, but they're, they're still quite expensive. The, the smart salt shaker. Yeah. I know we talked about that in the past, but this is, this is, this is in that same vein for $55. I can, I can handle it. Not, not the a hundred dollars or $200 salt shaker. It's

not going to happen. So, um, I do have, uh, let's see, do, do, do, do I go over here? I do have a mail mailbag, uh, coming, coming in from Matt from Twitter, who was listening to the podcast last week and, uh, had a really good idea or way for me to watch the Olympics. There's a couple of, I didn't think about this, but you can actually route your DNS through using a couple of different products to route your DNS through like an Australian DNS. And you don't have to set up a full VPN for that. I can set up a VPN and kind of do the same thing he's talking about here. But the goal is to make it appear that you're in Australia. Then you download the seven plus app and you can just watch pretty much everything you want right there in Australia.

So, um, it's the, it was a really good idea. I hadn't thought of that because what it does is it lets you, um, it lets you use a single device. Uh, like you could, you could just change a couple of settings on that device. And it appears from the servers overseas that you're coming from a different location. Cause that, that server kind of routes that DNS query, I guess a different way. And it makes it look like you're showing up there. So a little bit better than VPN, I guess, I don't know. Maybe not as successful, but like a VPN completely routes every piece of traffic that you have to come out in another area, like another server in Australia or wherever, Japan, wherever you want. But I guess the 7 Plus app has all of the Olympic events on it. I was

kind of looking through all the stuff they had on it. And it's like, that's exactly what we want. NBC, give that to us. I don't know why NBC can't give that to us. So anyway, if you have any feedback, comments, questions, pics of the week, great ideas to watch stuff overseas, the email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online

form. And I want to give you a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to chat about what we were chatting about in there earlier. It was, uh, I was asking what people did for like these long, uh, long conduit runs, like thousand foot outdoor conduit runs down a road,

over a bridge. Uh, I'm still kind of curious as what people do on that. I didn't, didn't get too much feedback on it. So if you're in the hub, pop in and answer, help, help me out with that. And, but I know we were talking about a bunch of, a bunch of different things over the last week. It is always active in there. If you want to help out the show, but I can't support financially, totally understand, but just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's what we're looking for. And that wraps up this week.

Thank you so much for Ty, Rashid, Greg, trying to see if there's anybody else in here. I'm kind of falling back to all the comments here. Thank you so much for joining in and, and feeding comments over here into the comment thing that I'm going to have to figure out how to read better as I do these live shows. And making the show kind of entertaining, at least for me.

Hopefully it was entertaining for everyone else, but at least for me, keeping me on my toes this week. Thanks so much for everybody for tuning in and we'll talk to you next week. Have a good weekend.