HomeTech.fm - Episode 372 - Pass Smear

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 21st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. All right, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. A podcast all about all aspects of home technology, home automation. This week, we've got a bunch of home tech headlines that have come've got a we've got a bunch of home tech headlines that have come through and got a good round there's a number of things that are

like security related iot related all sorts of good stuff there but but first i wanted to kind of talk about our previous show when we talk about ces and all the tvs and qd things, and all those crazy HDR, VRR, HDMI things. I ran across an article, you guys, that has a nice little glossary of 2022 TV features explained. And this is over at The Verge. I think they did a pretty good job of putting together a nice little, like, if you ever hear one of these things and you're like, what the heck is this? This A-L-L-M. What is that? I have no idea. You can go over to the verge here. Look at the A.L.L.M. is auto low latency mode.

It's a useful feature that detects when you've plugged in a gaming system. Guys, what do you think about this? Do you like this? This kind of thing? I think this article is pretty interesting. It really does do a good job of breaking down all the different terminology and everything. If you haven't shopped for a TV recently, it's been getting kind of daunting with all the different terms and everything people are throwing around. And especially now you have AK and QLED and all these other technologies that are coming out. It's kind of hard to keep track. The most interesting one that I learned about and found out about it was actually VRR. And I didn't know anything about this. It helps with refresh rate for gaming consoles,

you know, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One. So that's pretty useful feature that some TVs are coming with. What about you, Gavin? I'm probably the one person with the oldest technology here when it comes to TV. My TV sound great. I have great surround sound, but you know, I still have a DLP TV. Some of my TVs are still 720. All I know is from a regular person point of view, I want it to work. When I plug in an HDMI cable, I expect that signal to work, to fill the screen. You know, like I've been in situations where you plugged it in and it didn't work and I had to cover up a pin to get it to work because there was some, I can't even remember. I went, I went too far into it, but it was frustrating. And as TJ said, it's getting daunting. I've been shopping around for TV this year. All these terms, all these things are getting a little daunting.

And I'm wondering, do I really need this? I just want to watch the movie. Just watch a movie. That's it. The picture on the screen is all I need. All I need. Yeah, no, I get it. Yes, I get it. It should be plug and play. Turn the TV on and you're watching something. But they had to put all these confusing marketing terms in the middle. And I do like I do like down here at the end terms you should ignore or avoid in 2022 first up 8k because you know bigger is better you got to have the bigger number that but they're all going to be talking about 8k tvs doesn't matter there's no 8k content there's barely any 4k content um i mean it's there but not like 4k 60 that That's not there. And then Edge Let LED, that's kind of like the cheaper LEDs, I guess, that have that. And those are the TVs that I have.

And yeah, I guess you have a mediocre picture with that compared to the local dimming that's all on the nice new TVs. Yeah, go for the local dimming if you can get it. All right, guys, what do you say we, uh, jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. First up, we've got a little security story here. Uh, the Ford Motor Company and ADT are weird, weird pairing here.

They're teaming up to launch a 1. No, $105 million joint venture called Canopy. And its aim is to bring the security, like a security system into a car for both commercial and retail customers. The first standalone systems will employ video cameras to monitor vehicles and equipment stowed inside. Customers will be able to live stream the video with a mobile app.

And the system is designed for self-installation in a variety of vehicle makes and models. It should be available for purchase from Ford dealers and other retail locations sometime in the next year or so. ADT will provide the monitoring services and for a monthly subscription fee. However, there's not any prices at all on any of this equipment or how much the monitoring for your car will be. Pretty neat, I guess, if you live in an area. TJ, you have a van.

You have a van. Does this appeal to you with having like a work truck? Like it kind of makes sense. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it does make a lot of sense. I would have to see pricing before I could commit to anything. But as somebody who does have a work van and is looking to add a couple, it would be nice to have some kind of central monitoring system for all these. They have GPS trackers and third party alarm systems for cars already,

but nothing that I'm aware of that provides you at least a centralized monitoring station for all of them. So definitely a very interesting partnership. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long. ADT is like a natural fit for this just because of their widespread presence everywhere. So definitely a natural partnership. It seems like we'll have to see how it plays out, though. And for work vans, I think this is perfect. The perfect use case for work vans. You have a lot of expensive equipment in there. You want to protect it. That's perfect

for a regular user. I just feel like it's going to be another subscription. It all comes down to price. We're already getting subscription fatigue. You know, everything I buy these days, I don't feel like I own it. I just rent it month to month. And this is just another subscription. Yeah, it's good to be that way. I think you're right. If you have a commercial fleet, this could be something pretty good. You know, we had a shop that was near a highway, and people would come in and they would break up on a truck or break out a window, open it up and steal all the tools out and hop on the highway and they're gone. I mean, there's they're gone to Miami. Who knows where they are? This this would not have prevented something like that. But we'd know before, you know, we got there in the morning, the trucks have been emptied. But yeah, this sounds pretty good for businesses.

I'm not so sure about the everyday Joe, unless you live in an area where you need something like that. The other interesting thing I think about this is they're actually going to offer it to other vehicle manufacturers at some point too. So I find that fascinating that ADT and Ford created this company and then they're going to market it to other companies. So you should definitely see it on other vehicles instead of just Fords, I would think within the next couple of years. Yeah. I think it said that the Ford ones are going to be built in, especially to like their F-150 pickup lines, because those are very popular, especially in the workforce.

And it makes sense. Makes sense. If you're going to have stuff stowed in there, it's a pretty techie truck now, too. It's kind of weird to say, but like if you've ever been into a new in a new F-150 with all the gadgets and gizmos that are in there, it's a very technology driven truck now. It's kind of wild. Yeah. And the two models listed are actually their electric lineup. So the E-150 and then the Ford Transit E as well. So they're definitely aiming for the electric vehicles with this one.

Yep. Yep. Well, moving on here, we've got another security story. Apple has rolled out iOS 15.2.1, which fixes a HomeKit flaw that caused a denial of service attack that would crash some devices. The issue was first reported way back in August of last year, and it's finally been patched because the researcher got fed up with Apple dragging their feet and published the details online beginning of January here. So Apple rushed out an update. The vulnerability, if exploited, would lead to HomeKit devices with really long names crashing iPhones and iPads on OS versions as far back as 14.7. So if your HomeKit is frozen up, it may not be a feature. It may be actually this bug. That's a problem. And the problem with it, the major issue with this bug is that even if you

factory reset and restored your device, once you log back into iCloud again, it would re-download everything and crash your phone again. So you are basically in bad shape once you got hit with this when i first heard about this i was like nervous about everything because the day it happened to my if it happened to my phone i don't know how i'd get out of this but this is one of the reasons why i tell people when you see this dot ones just pop up out of nowhere and just patch your phone just update it because they doing it for a big reason usually. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They're not, they're not just randomly upgrading it. I was looking through the exploit and it's, the names are long, like it's a programmatically generated name. It's 500,000 characters long for

some device name. So something you normally, you wouldn't come across, uh, normally, uh, but, uh, normally. But somebody or some nefarious app could do something and lock up your device. So good that they patched it, I guess. Finally, finally. I don't know if you guys saw this. I put in here one other HomeKit exploit. I don't think Apple is going to be able to patch anytime soon. But I ran across this on Reddit. Spammers. They are spamming people now by inviting you to a home. And the home's name is, hello, dear friend, HTTPS. I'm going to skip the crypto currency website. This is a blockchain hash game, which we call Lucky Hash Game. To determine if you've won by, and it's like dot, dot, dot.

But like, this is the home name invitation uh from some random hotmail you know spam email they're spamming people they're spamming people with home kit invites now this is insane there's no limit to the spam now there's no you know they're using anything they can to get to these people i wonder who falls for this because first you have to take a screenshot of that there's no link to click and then you're gonna have to type it out into a browser to get to it. Like it's just as difficult to get to that than it is to, you know, like that message to get to you. So do these work? I don't know. They, they must work. I mean, people still do them. It's like the gift card scams, right? Those are still going around like crazy. And it's,

to me, it's very obvious, but people are still falling for it. Yeah, I guess if it makes you money, yeah, they're going to keep doing it. That's it's really wild to see that, though. And of course, you know, if you read through the Reddit comments, there's no way to block it. You just kind of have to ignore it. They can keep doing it. Yeah, I think it's just like turn off notifications. You get like you can't get notifications from HomeKit anymore. So yeah, Apple needs to probably do something about that. Moving on here, we've got an interesting story about 5G. AT&T and Verizon have delayed launching new wireless services

near key airports after the nation's largest airline said that the service would interfere with aircraft technology and cause widespread flight disruptions. The decision from the companies came Tuesday as the Biden administration intervened to broker a settlement between the telecoms and the airlines over the rollout of the new 5G service. You may be asking, what interference exactly? Well, the new high-speed wireless service uses a segment of the radio spectrum that is close to what is used by aircraft altimeters, which is the devices that measure the height of the aircraft above the ground. Not good. Altimeters, this is a funny quote from the article here,

altimeters are used to help pilots land when visibility is poor. Like, you know, maybe at night, too. And they link to other systems on the plane. This is bonkers. Of course, the airlines and the FAA say that they've tried to raise these alarms over the potential interference for 5G C-band, but the FCC has ignored them. The telecoms and the FCC and supporters argue that the C-band and aircraft altimeters operate far enough apart on the radio spectrum to avoid the interference. And they also say that the aviation industry has known about this for a long time and did nothing to prepare for the 5G C-band rollout.

Guys, what do you think about this? You're going to turn that cell phone off when you get on the plane now? I always wondered about that, but this is even bigger than that. And I'm surprised they didn't sort this out before rolling it out. Like you think this is a big miss as far as I see. And they're just figure I think of that Spider-Man meme that's always going around where they're just pointing at each other right and that's exactly what i thought of they're just blaming each other but they should have sat down and sorted this out in advance yeah it's a you know i think there should be some kind of organization that like looks at all this stuff

and kind of decides if people are able to do it maybe Maybe a commission. Yeah. You know, some kind of place that I don't know. Maybe maybe at the federal level, like above states. Huh? Maybe that I just I just find it fascinating that we spent the past 10 years or 15 years telling people they can't use their cell phones on planes. We've started to use cell phones on planes again. And now we're back to the space where we're not supposed to use cell phone on planes anymore. And now we're back to the space where we're not supposed to use cell phone on planes anymore. So it's just come full circle in the technology sphere or anywhere near an airport. It's just turn your cell phone off when you get near the airport.

Cause you could cause that you could actually cause that plane to crash because they think they're at 30 or 300 feet when they're actually at 30. Yeah. Not, not a, not a good thing. And yeah, the FCC has been a pretty feckless organization for, I don't know, the past 10, 20 years.

I don't expect that they'll get any better, but yeah, here's to hoping, I guess. This is the kind of things that come out of, of poor decision-making or not doing anything when you actually do have good uses for government regulation. This is wild that they've gotten this far down the road where they're actually rolling out these networks. And the other half of this is like, well, this is going to hurt our airplanes. Like, they're either going to have to update the altimeters or they're going to have to stop the rollout near airports.

I don't know of a good way around this. This is crazy. This is wild. Who has the most amount of money and who has the least amount of money? Exactly. That's what it's all going to come down to. That's what it's going to come down to. Exactly. All right. Well, Amazon owned Eero seems to be close to announcing new routers in the upcoming weeks. The Verge has spotted new FCC filings for devices that appear to be called Eero 6 Plus and the Eero Pro 6E. Interesting enough, Amazon did not reply to The Verge with a comment about these new things,

but the 6E seems to imply that we've got some Wi-Fi 6E gear coming from Eero. TJ, have you, well, have you had any demand for 6E Wi-Fi from your customers? Most of my customers don't even know what Wi-Fi 6 is. So the demand isn't there for 6E for sure. I'm interested to see if this new version of Eero products are better. The current Wi-Fi 6 models that they have have a lot of problems. If you read into them, a lot of people have drop connection issues or just poor software updates, that kind of thing.

So I don't think 6E is going to be the savior for Eero, but I'm hoping that they iron out any problems that they had with the Wi-Fi 6 models. Gavin, how's that Eero system you got going? It's still unplugged, actually. So, yeah, no, the Eero 6, I had so many problems with it. And I think a lot of it was just because everyone in my neighborhood started putting them in and they're just conflicting with each other. I set it up at my mom's house. She doesn't use it as much like as heavily, but it's been working fine for her. So I'm happy with that.

You know, so we're going great there. But most people, like you said, they just want reliable wifi. When you're on your phone, you just want to be able to get that YouTube video, you know, click on that meme, have it be fast enough. And you don't need 6E for that. Right. Um, the technical people, the really, you know, hardcore people want gigabit down to their wireless device. Okay. That's different, you know, but you don't really need that. So, uh, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm liking that they're coming out with this stuff, but it's not something I think a lot of people are just going to jump on. The Wi-Fi 6E models too are super expensive compared to like traditional mesh too, which I find fascinating. You know, in this article,

they're saying that an Orbi Wi-Fi 6E system is $1,500. And that's a crazy amount of money for a mesh Wi-Fi system. When you can buy a prosumer Wi-Fi system like Ubiquiti or something and probably spend the same amount of money, it's not going to be 6E as Ubiquiti doesn't have that out yet. But you could get Wi-Fi 6 and get a lot better system for that money. So it's approaching very high end luxury network systems with that pricing. Yeah. And of course, this is cutting edge stuff like this. There's I can't think of a single 6E device that exists out in the world right now because

6E is kind of Wi-Fi six, but it also has the six gigahertz spectrum that's kind of added on top. So you've got the 2.4, you've got five gigahertz, and now we've got a new thing tagged on for 6E called six gigahertz. And that that's a it's a shorter wavelength, so it's not going to punch through walls very well. You're going to have to pretty much be in the same room as the the access point and probably the only device connected to that six gigahertz antenna. And then it'll be really fast for you um but otherwise i just fifteen hundred dollars to get to get just um you know the bragging rights uh i don't know that seems a seems a bit much right now i don't it doesn't seem that appealing to me like

you said go with the six systems and until more devices come out with 6E compatibility, it's probably the way to go. URC has announced that they are integrating with Comcast Infinity cable boxes. And they're actually the first integrator to do this, it sounds like. Very interesting, I think that URC is actually the first one to do this. I would have thought that somebody like Control4 or Crestron would have jumped on that. But they've launched integration with their touch panels, their 7 and 10 inch touch screens, and their in-wall controllers as well. And along with a couple of their handheld remotes. And there's several cable boxes that are supported. So it sounds like it's pretty widely supported at this time. And I'm sure they'll add on to it.

Yeah. Having voice control on the remote, Like I, I, I know my clients, um, and I have a couple of friends that I've got, you know, control force systems for whatever. And they go over to their friend's house and, and they pick up the Comcast remote and they're like, they yell into it, you know, turn on ESPN and it, it just works. And it's like, why can't a professional system have that? Well, now it can, but it's URC. Doesn't really, as we were talking about in the pre-show, we mentioned that it's URC and Gavin goes, who's URC? Yeah, pretty much.

Not a very well-known name. Yeah. They're the brand that you've seen everywhere, but you don't know who they are. Yeah. They've got a very large, they've got a pretty large install base as far as universal remotes are concerned.

And they do a lot of OEM work as well. But at the same time, it's kind of odd to see it come out. I think URC's kind of pivoted a little bit towards commercial. Maybe resi-mercial is what they were talking about. But it's interesting that they are the first professional installed product that's going to have this. I guess the integration was released to URC dealers in December, and Comcast Xfinity will start rolling out updates to all the SetDocBox firmwares last week, and that'll be 100% by Friday, January 21st.

I think that's when this show comes out, right? So yeah, by the time you're listening to this, your Comcast Xfinity box will be URC voice ready. And that's actually pretty cool. Hopefully this is not the only integration we see. Hopefully Crestron and Control 4 just are up next and we'll see this more ubiquitous because I can tell you there are a lot of customers that want this feature, but having no API for Xfinity voice is a big problem. It sounds like there is one. It sounds like we're going to hopefully get there one day. TJ, you're looking into Crestron.

They have mics on their remotes, right? I think so. Control 4 does not. So I guess that's the first prerequisite of this. They have to have a remote with a microphone on it. So API is there. api is there urc is there uh it's time for savant control for crestron to play catch up get some mics on those remotes get them always listening but you wouldn't think control 4 would be that hard with them buying neo out a couple years ago yeah you think the neo doesn't have a mic on it though um one thing that does have a mic is josh

ai so it'd be interesting if to see if they're in talks with xfinity and can do a deeper integration that way since it is like it would be voiced later on top of it it'd be kind of cool so speaking about josh ai there was actually a fun article over at c pro um you guys don't click on this but i'm going to ask you, what do you think the most common smart home voice commands in 2021 were from Josh? It's specifically from Josh AI customers, but I would assume these are pretty generic. What do you think the most, like, let's do this family feud, the family feud way. Hopefully you haven't clicked and read this.

But what is, what do you think the most used command would be voice command in a home would be Gavin? I'm going to say the time asking for the time. Okay. All right. I'm going to do the little ding thing. All right. You didn't get an X. All right. There we go. And TJ something with lighting control, turning off lights. All right. You both got it. Gavin, number four was actually what time is it? And of course, turning on and off the lights was the first one. So the number one most used command in 2021, according to Josh AI, was turn on and off the lights or turn on the lights, I guess, which makes sense. I actually use that every every night. I have a little HomePod mini

sitting on a bedside table and I have a Wemo switch connected to a lamp and I just use that to turn on and off lamp. I don't even use anything else. I don't use any other integrations, just voice to turn on and off that lamp. So. Out of my entire house, that's probably the biggest voice control. Gavin, I know you have some pretty extensive voice integrations. What do you use the most for? I use the Amazon products, right, in my house. And my main reason is because their integration, I really like their integration, developing their API. I could do a lot with it, but basic, like the simplest thing. And because with voice control, the problem is, is you don't have a list of all the commands in front of you. So I try and keep things simple. So, you know, the family, basically the basics, turn on and off the

lights, turn it off, the pool pump, turn on and off the TV, stuff like that. Right. Um, I have more extensive, um, more complicated things, but they're hard to remember. Like I can control, tell my TV to change it to a specific channel, for example. But the wife doesn't really use that because it's too much to remember. I introduce things slowly to her so that she'll, when it works, because if she uses it for the first time, it doesn't work. I'll never hear the end of it. She'll never touch it again. So I got to, when it works, because if she uses it for the first time and it doesn't work, I'll never hear the end of it. She'll never touch it again. So I got to make sure it works right the first time and then she'll like it.

Yep. Yep. Yep. I know the process. TJ, do you have any voice control in your house running anything? Yeah. So we use the Google Assistant in our house and we control all of our lights. Pretty much just lights.

We have our security system tied through it as well. But yeah, I mean, we're every day we're turning on and off lamps or the kitchen light or it's just nice also to have a button, you know, a single button at the end of the day, I can just press to turn all my lights off. Yeah. And that that just makes it a lot nicer than walk around and turn all my lights off. Interesting. So lights are big, big feature in your house. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Cool. All right. Well, let's move on here. HomeKit News is reporting two new products this week from Aqara, I guess, A-Q-A-R-A. The first is a brand new in terms of their product category for Aqara, the Aqara Curtain Driver E1. It's a different, it's different from the curtain motors that they already sell.

This actually sits on one side of the curtains and, uh, we'll pull them using the pulley system that's already in the rail. Um, the motor has a built-in battery can be charged with USB on the base and last up to a year between charges. It also includes a light sensor designed to open and close depending on whether you need it or not. Um, and there's a rod version that works with rods, U-rails, and I-rails, and a standard version that only works with U-rails and I-rails. The second device is the Aqara Motion Sensor P1. It's kind of an update from their other motion sensor that's already out, but this one was announced before. It's got a larger chin to accommodate two CR2450 batteries, yay, and it gives the P1 a five-year battery life expectancy. Not for sale at this time, but they're expected to come out soon. Gavin, you put this on the board.

Yes. What do you think about this? I have a love-hate relationship with the ShowMe and the Acquire line. And my love for them is they're really affordable. They work, they last forever when it comes to battery. Now, my hate for them, the current set of devices, is that they don't follow Zigbee standards. So they work with things, but they can run into problems. Their messages are off. If you don't have the right repeaters, they drop off frequently.

You know, there's ways to get them working reliably but it's a lot of problems um but i keep watching them because they're coming out with zigbee 3 versions of their products and that's a better standard um they're gonna follow the standard and should work much better and their battery life is great now with their new products the the um one that closes the blinds, the drapes, that was a rip off of switch bot, like directly. Right. But I really liked that. It's Zigbee three, it's going to be open. You know, you can integrate with other things, you know, where switch bot is their own little ecosystem. So I'm watching this very closely because when these products come out,

I'll probably grab a few and play with them. And if they work, I'm expecting that they're going to work great. And the battery life in them is awesome. Interesting. And they're using Zigbee for that. So this is where I was like, earlier you were like, what's URC? I'm like, what's Aqara? I've never, this is one of those things you could just, you would be speaking Greek to me. I have no, I've never heard of this brand in my life.

But here we are. That's why we're having the show here with you on it, because I don't think I would have ever run across this story. But it's pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff. TJ, you've actually run into this product before as well. Kind of have the same feelings as Gavin? Yeah, I've bought a couple of their door contacts and a couple of the other sensors.

I never got them to work fully with Home Assistant, which I was using at the time. They would always work for six or eight hours or something like that, and then they would drop off. So I don't have a good experience with them myself, but I've also never used them in their own ecosystem. I'm always trying to use them somewhere else. This is very interesting to me, though, because we have a lot of shades and curtains around our house. And it would be great to throw up some affordable controls for them without changing shades or blinds completely. So for I think this is like 100 bucks or no, they don't have price. Sorry. It'll probably be cheap, though. A car is a pretty cheap, cheap lineup of products. And we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, I'm just kind of looking through some of the things they have. They have this little, you know, air quality measure thing. That's I mean, it could just be a standalone device, but it's enabled. So you can get those numbers and pull them off into a control system if you needed. It's got an ink screen. So that means it doesn't use anything to power the screen up. It just kind of has the display on there all the time when your battery life. That's really cool. Really cool stuff. I'm

glad you guys brought this to my attention to see if I could play around with it one of these days. So very nice. Yeah. And the curtain thing sounds like it has some smarts in it where it'll actually close your blinds or curtains as it, you know, the temperature changes or the light adjusts in there. So that's pretty cool that they're coming with that kind of stuff just built in already. And if you want to jump into their products, just wait for the new products. Don't go through the headache that I went through with their current line of products. Wait for the new stuff. It's Zigbee 3. You'll be much happier, more than likely be much happier. Wait for Zigbee 3. Got it. All right, cool. Good advice. Good advice. Well, speaking of waiting for Zigbee or waiting for product in general, this kind of

brings up an interesting thread over at Inovelli. I've had them on the show here in the past, but this company is, I would say, super open about everything, about the drama that happens in the company, about any products that pop up. They do forum posts and anybody and everybody can go in and comment on those forum posts. And it looks like here is they're saying we can't get product from Silicon Labs until 2023. So don't bother ordering stuff from us. It's kind of crazy. Gavin, I think you put this on the board. What's this all about? So I'm a big Inovelli fan. All the switches in my house are Inovelli switches and dimmers. And I went with the red switches. So I dropped a bit of money on it and I love them. They're very open on their forums about the challenges they have over the years.

And I feel for them because there's some challenges with internal employees they've had, you know, from their distributors to, you know, their suppliers. And right now they're having problems getting Z-Wave chips. So they actually come out and said they're not getting any Z-Wave chips this year. And then in their dimmers, they have the LED strip. And I think they're having problems even sourcing the parts for that now, too. So they're just in a bit of a, you know, a pickle right now, but as a backup, they've been working on a Zigbee version of their product. And they said Zigbee chips are much easier for them to get. There are a lot out there. They won't have these same challenges and they're going to migrate probably over to Zigbee. So,

you know, like, I don't know if all the Z-Wave people are having this challenge. I see a lot of products coming from Zoos. I see a lot of products coming from Zoos. I see a lot of products coming from Fibaro, all Z-Wave products. They don't seem to have this problem. But, you know, Inovelli, they're not as big, but they're having issues. So it's interesting to see, though. That could be it. They're just not as big or don't have the same kind of planning roadmap as a bigger company

like Fibaro might. That's kind of what I would probably read out of that. It's like they just didn't get their orders in fast enough and everybody else did. But I don't know. This is kind of wild. And I would assume Zigbee means that they're going to put thread on this stuff so they'll be able to be Matter compatible? I'm hoping, but Zigbee is different. I think you have to, I hope they think ahead and they're going to get on the Matter train because if they don't say Matter, at least on their packaging,

I think a lot of people, the way it's going may just not look at them anymore. This has kind of always been my fear with Z-Wave. I like Z-Wave myself. I use it more than Zigbee. Z-Wave doesn't really have that large of market share, though, compared to a lot of other solutions, it seems like. And Z-Wave has always been pretty expensive to integrate into your product. So seeing this happen now to this one small manufacturer is not a huge deal. But if we keep seeing the availability issue that they're facing with other manufacturers,

I think this is kind of the end of Z-Wave if nobody can get it for the next two or three years. And I can still get Z-Wave switches and outlets and stuff like that, but they're not as easy to come by as they used to be. So it's very unfortunate um it's kind of been on the on the writing on the walls for a couple years now i think i feel like we just announced the end of zigbee you know the beginning of the end of zigbee on the show live z wave sorry z wave yeah i think we just announced the end of z-wave live on the show we have to say well and you kind and you kind of have to think if it's if it if it isn't there because you can buy a wi-fi chip for next to nothing now and you can buy you know zigbee chips a little easier and

integrate them a little easier and especially with the new stuff coming out, why would anybody choose Z-Wave if it's not compatible with Matter? Yeah, I think that I have to remember a while back. I'm just it's probably a headline that I saw float through. But Silicon Labs traditionally has been where you had to buy that. Sorry, I'm going to get confused here where you had to buy the Z-Wave chips from. It was one vendor that would make all the chips, and you'd have to buy everything from them. I swear that not too long ago that they had come out and said

that they were going to let other people manufacture their chips and that kind of thing. I'm trying to remember if I can find it. I want to say this is probably the story I'm looking for, but just kind of skimming it. I don't know. It seems like that's kind of like a pinch point, right? Like if you only buy it from one place, you know,

the people that make the spec and everything, it's going to be tough for, you know, if you have any supply chain interruptions to have one place be the sole dependent, like have to buy everything and put it all together. If they have any issues, then where else are you going to buy this stuff from? And I don't think Zigbee is the same way. I think Zigbee can be manufactured, you know, kind of anywhere by whatever contract manufacturer puts it together as long as it's a spec. And then you can utilize that in Zigbee or if the processor is fast enough, like Gavin indicated, you can put thread and then matter on top of it.

But yeah, I'm not going to call the death to Z-Wave just yet, because, again, there's nothing that stops companies or the matter group from including like Z-Wave radios in the spec. It can still be done, I'm sure, because Z-Wave has a secure protocol and encryption on it. It's a good product, but the Zigbee group kind of grabbed everybody and said, let's go this way. And so they got in first, but I don't think there's any thing that stops another control signaling kind of, uh, uh, thing.

The thing is Zigbee and Z-Wave. There's probably like, uh, we talked about, um, kind of in the back channel, we were talking about the low, low pan, low ran stuff, like the, the helium networks and that kind of thing, they're using like super low frequency, maybe sub 900 megahertz or 900 megahertz frequencies to send signals two or three miles. There's nothing that really stops that from being included in matter other than, you know, the matter group kind of writing information and standards around that. So I'm not going to call the death to Z-Wave just yet, but we're definitely going to see a lot more Zigbee devices come out and go into people's homes over the next couple of years just because of Matter.

That's it. That's the only reason. And it looks like Silicon Labs is part of the Matter group, whatever you want to call it. So it shouldn't be that bad, I guess. We'll find out. Now, yeah, they just have to get added in, you know, like there's Bluetooth, there's ethernet, there's thread. Okay. Add Z-Wave in,

done. And you, you have all this, uh, maybe it's something that sits on top of Z-Wave because thread kind of sits on top of Zigbee. So there's probably something else that I have to put there. Uh, and that would just open up the Matter integrations for tons more devices, sensors, all that good stuff. I think it'd be great for the entire ecosystem. All right, moving on here. Last story we have. Netflix is raising its prices across all of its plans in the US this week. The company's standard plan will rise to $15.50 per month, up from $14, while the 4K plan will rise $20 per month from $18, so up $2. The basic plans will go up $1 from $9 to $10, yay, but it doesn't have HD. The price hikes will go into effect immediately for new subscribers, but existing subscribers will be kind of rolled out

gradually, with Netflix promising to email members 30 days notice before the price hike goes into effect. TJ, what do you think about this? Sounds like we're getting close to having just cable bills everywhere, right? Yeah, these streaming services just keep getting more and more expensive, you know? And I think that was kind of their idea, is that they'd launch with a really low price to get people in and then slowly start raising the price. I feel like Netflix, though, has kind of they've always been the last to kind of raise prices. Well, maybe not. I don't know. I see Netflix price raises all the time, so maybe not.

I still think it's a good value, though. You know, the for the 4K plan is only twenty dollars a month. If you watch a lot of TV, twenty dollars a month is not bad. If you tie that in to with the 12 other subscriptions you have going on, though, you're back to a cable bill and you might as well just have cable at that point. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So. And here we are talking here we are talking about subscriptions again. Right. But, you know, Netflix is one of those subscriptions that they put out quality programming and a lot of it. So it's one of those subscriptions you get a lot of value from that, you know, I can see. And that quality, you know, they're going to have to raise the price to put out the better quality stuff. They need to make the money to do that. There are certain other subscription services, though, where, you know, you want to subscribe to them and they only have one show you follow.

You know, like Disney Plus was like that at first when it was just The Mandalorian and you were paying just to see that. But they have some other shows now that are making it worth it to also have Disney Plus. But they need to add some more. So I'm just afraid over the years, this is just going to go up and up and up. And we're back at cable prices, like you said, again. And I already see that happening when you have multiple streaming services, you know, and then you already got to worry about

where is this show playing on what service? And, you know, or does this service have that package with these channels in it? It's already becoming a mess. We got to figure something out. It's pretty, it is pretty daunting. I think like Roku and Apple TV have both tried to, um, maybe poorly, maybe one better than the other, um, kind of have like an aggregate dashboard of, you know, what you can watch. I think Apple TVs looks good. I don't know if it works very well because it always shows me things to apps and things that I don't actually have. So I can't actually watch

what they're suggesting I watch, but it's nice that they're thinking of me, I guess, in that respect. But yeah, we kind of need that over-the-top dashboard for this kind of thing. And not to mention some way of managing all of these subscriptions and prices and everything. But yeah, you're a hundred percent right. Netflix is paying a lot of money for good content there. They do produce a number of good shows. They buy a lot of good shows from, you know, I'm thinking like Squid Game or something. It was purchased from South Korea where it was produced. And just, you know, a lot of their shows, especially the foreign language shows, will just have, yeah, Netflix series. But it's, you know, done by somebody else in another country. But they do

get they are paying for those deals. They are getting good deals on that. And I think I mean, like you said, value wise, I think Netflix probably along with, you know, maybe contrasting with you and me, Disney plus, I kind of like all the options and everything that we've had kind of from day one, but Disney plus, um, HBO, we just added that in and I I'm having a hard time like justifying continuing that one, um, past the end of the month. Like it's not, there's not much there that's keeping me locked down. There's some older shows that I was like, let me catch up on, but I don't know. I go to their app and I look at it and I scroll and scroll and scroll and I don't find anything that I want to watch. Um, Netflix, I can usually

find something that I want to watch, uh, Disney plus with all of the properties they have. I can usually find something that I want to watch. Disney Plus, with all of the properties they have, I can usually find something I want to watch. And not to say HBO doesn't have properties, right? They have tons of stuff you can watch on there. Just none of it's that appealing to me. Like TV shows and that kind of thing. Just not what I'm looking for. TJ, how many subscriptions do you have over there, TJ? We have one right now, and that is just YouTube just YouTube premium um I go through phases and our

household goes through phases where we use Netflix for a year and then get rid of it and then get Hulu instead um right now we're pretty much using Plex uh we've got a bunch of downloaded content that we use for that. And I am saving myself like 50 or 60 bucks a month doing that. So eventually we'll probably pick up Hulu, you know, the other streaming services again. But right now I'm good without them. I'm definitely not tossing this to Gavin for he might be incriminated at the mounted police there uh no no no i'm a big netflix fan right like um they always have something you can watch that's what i find with netflix is no matter what you turn on the the hardest part about netflix is deciding on which one to watch there's too many

that look so good and then i really hate the ones that look so good and you start them, it's like a B-rated movie. And you can't get past the first. It sounded so good. I was so ready for this. And I can't watch it past the first five minutes. But, you know, there's always something worthwhile on Netflix. I'm a fan of them.

It's an interesting figure. It's in another article we'll kind of attach in the show notes. It says that there's going to be 150 million subscriptions canceled across, like, guess, cable services this year. So people are moving from traditional TV services still. They're just still canceling those and kind of moving over. And Gavin, you kind of asked us earlier what customers are expecting from custom integrators these days. Are they expecting to walk in the door and have a direct TV box or cable box?

How are normal people who aren't involved in streaming from day one, how are they hooking up television services in their house? I think TJ is probably in the best position to answer this question. Yeah. A lot of people are still using cable boxes, honestly. Um, I, it's, it's a age divide at this point. A lot of my older clients prefer to use the cable box. A lot of them are used to, you know, channel flipping, um, or just a certain way that the cable box works, um, or people that are really big into sports, into sports and that watch like every kind of sport. Cable is still best for those two two types of people. Other than that, though, you can pretty much find anything on streaming now.

It's just a matter of how much it's going to cost you per month compared to cable. There was a ton of new ton of talk this morning, early this morning about the new Skybox, I guess, from the guys that are over in the uk and just or maybe it's a sky tv like we're just integrated all in one um but they were just seeing how great of an experience it was uh for this particular client the remote was great it all just worked really well um and sky is kind of like i guess comcast is here uh you know It's just a big cable company, essentially, or kind of like DirecTV, I guess, in that respect. It's just a big company that provides programming,

but they're moving to online, and I think they have their own TV that we've talked about in the past here on the show. And they're just saying, how easy it is just to plug the TV into the Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and there you go. It all works. Up here in Canada, it's either Rogers or Bell, pretty much, the two big players. And I cut my cable a long time ago, and my main argument was that as a longtime subscriber to your service, you were charging me an arm and

a leg for this service. But somebody new coming on was getting it for a fraction of the price. And even if I called in and, you know, for some reason, they always called my bluff. If I called in and I said, I'm going to cancel, they would say, OK, thank you for your service, sir. And they let me cancel. No one ever would call me back and offer me, you know, a retention, you know, thing. But I switched a few times. I just got fed up and that's why I cut cable. They didn't treat me right when I was a longtime valued customer. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's kind of the the impression that I had here, too. Of course, here we have cable cards that we were using in our TiVos, and it was always a headache. Every single time you had to change out a TiVo box, if a new one came out, it was so daunting just to set it up with the new cable card and call Comcast or Verizon at the time, Frontier Now, get everything changed over.

There was no pleasure in that. Like they couldn't, it's, it's, it's literally like a set of numbers that somebody just has to enter into a computer and hit enter. And they could not, they couldn't get that right on their end, much less give like a website I could log into and just do it myself. Like just swap this number out for this number, hit enter and go that that's how easy it should be. Nope, never happened. Service was always horrible. And for what you pay for it, like you said, just wasn't worth it. So that's, yeah, we moved off cable years ago, went streaming only and really haven't looked back. Don't feel like I'm missing anything. That's for sure. Well, that wraps up Home Tech Headlines. All the links and topics

we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 372. Guys, we've got a good pick of the week. If you saw this in the hub earlier, some security to obscurity here. I'm going to try and describe this, but it's a pretty funny picture. I think Greg posted it in the chat this morning. It's it's a pretty funny picture i think greg greg posted it in the chat this morning uh it's a security like a door uh or gate keypad or something like that just a security keypad standard digits one two three four five six seven eight nine star zero pound you know like you see i'll hang it on the wall and uh in in you you typically would type what a four digit code into this. Well, above it is the address to this place. It's three nine four four.

And I don't know, like, can you guys guess as to what the passcode is? And it's funny because I've worked for a lot of companies that do this kind of thing where they'll set like somebody's password up as like their address or like their name and then their address so this is not shocking to me at all no not at all so the three worn out numbers are three four and nine obviously for the listeners that can't see it so from that you could guess what the passcode is yeah yeah and it's they're either worn out or just super dirty i don't know it's quite funny though it's like our luck it's they're either worn out or just super dirty. I don't know. It's quite funny, though. It's like our luck. It's backwards.

Well, I mean, these types of devices, you get a couple of shots at it. So narrowing it down to three numbers in a four digit set, not very many combinations that you'd have to go through to to guess it. So, yeah, that's that's kind of unless this is like a ruse and the real code is just one two three four and and then like if you set that other code and the alarm goes off that that's that's the way it should be done that would be that would be you know that's smart yeah this is actually this is actually a used keypad they got it from somebody else to make it look like that's their code yeah it reminds

me of the old iphone days before you had the touch sensor to log in i used to look at people's screens i could see what numbers you know their greasy fingers were touching to unlock their phone right yep so similar thing saying android had the same the same thing with the smearing like you could see the smear where they would drag their hands around like, okay, there's your past smear. It's right there. All right. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a big shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm, or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through

that Patreon page. If you don't know about a Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here 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

for inside conversations about streaming. And I'm just kind of like popped in there to see what their things are talking about right now. And it looks like Greg is trying to, he's still trying to make a cable qualifier out of raspberry pies, which I'm following this because it's, it's kind of, kind of fun to think that you can make a little project like the,

the like ethernet testers are pretty expensive if you, in qualifying them are pretty expensive, of fun to think that you can make a little project. Ethernet testers are pretty expensive. In qualifying, they're pretty expensive. But if you can do it with a Raspberry Pi and get the same kind of results and that kind of thing, using iPerf or something, that's a pretty good idea. So I'm going to follow that. Maybe Greg will make a product out of it. I don't know. We'll call it something for him. We'll make up a out of it. And I don't know, we'll call it, we'll call it something for him. We'll, we'll make up a name for it over there.

But anyway, if you, if you, if you want to help with the show, but it can't support financially, totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice.

All right, guys, that wraps up a, another week of home technology news. We've got two in a row here. Two of two. I think we're doing pretty good so far. Two of two.

Still 100%. So can't complain, can't complain. Last week we talked about big things for the weekends. I'm happy to report I was able to spend a couple hours taking down some of the Christmas lights last weekend. This year, I decided to be kind of smooth about stuff and install these little clips, these little clips, and then popped PVC pipe into them and zip tied all my Christmas lights to those PVC pipes. So putting them up and taking them down, it's actually really easy.

But the design committee does not like those little clips that remained behind. So they have to come down and, um, I'm reminded a couple of times a day that, that, that still needs to happen. So what about you guys, you guys, you get anything productive done over the weekend? This weekend, you know, like I'm trying to find a way to automate my dryer and this is a little project. I may talk about what I came with, you know, later on another show. But I'm looking at a way to announce that, you know, the dryer is done. And there's a few ways I can do this. But the challenge is it's 240 volts.

So, you know, I want to do it through power measuring. And I found a cool little thing I didn't know that existed. But it measures the amps it doesn't need batteries and it will create a little open close uh circuit that i can utilize with a z wave uh you know switch or something like that so i'm gonna look into this and this is one of the projects i'm gonna work on and probably report back in a few weeks and see what's happening yeah that sounds that sounds fun actually uh and and just to remind everybody we did start off

that technology showcase stuff. If you have a project like this that you want to brag about and show off, head over to hometech.fm slash projects. That's where it is. Yeah, hometech.fm slash projects. And there's a form there where you can kind of fill out and let us know what you're up to. If it's a small project like this that's kind of novel and unique, or if you're doing something around the house, let us know. You want to come on the show and talk about it. We'd love to chat with you about it. TJ, what about you? Got anything crazy going on this weekend? Home tech related? I've got some computer upgrades going on. Actually, since we recorded the first episode last week, I've been notified that my fans are pretty loud. So I've got $150 or $200 worth of computer fans

to install at this point. So that's the extent of my technology for this weekend. The editor of the show will definitely appreciate quieter computer fans. Yeah, I didn't think they were that loud, but now I hear them all the time, so I appreciate that. No worries. I definitely appreciate it more than you can imagine. Thanks for taking the deep dive there and quieting down those server fans you had going

because they were screaming pretty loud on the last show. So hopefully that, I i mean audio quality stuff and you know we're we're gonna try and make really good audio quality for every show but sometimes things happen and uh you know you kind of have to live with what you've got recorded in the can and you can't go back and record the whole show over again so you know hopefully uh it wasn't too apparent on the last show, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Well, and I think we all kind of record in our own little home lab here. So at some point there's going to be noise for everybody.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I dropped a couple of things on my desk earlier and yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens in the edit. See what gets cut. All right, guys. I hope everybody has a great weekend and we'll talk to you next week take care