HomeTech.fm - Episode 379 - Keep Your Nodes Clean

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

On this week's HomeTech: Aqara launches the ultimate door lock, AVA launches with two new products for dealers, Gavin reviews the new Zwave firmware while TJ takes a look at Turing.ai cameras, a project review, and an epic pick of the week! Note: Watching "The Afterparty" is now required for listening to this podcast (not really but it’s a great show).

This is the Hometech Podcast for Friday, March 11th, I guess. Yeah, that's right. March 11th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Palo, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kemp. And welcome to the Hometech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology and home automation. This week we've got a couple of, not very much, a couple of home tech headlines that came up over the weeks and a couple of new products that popped into the inbox.

But I think everybody here is probably, you know, talking about the big announcements from Apple, right? Is it you guys getting new computers? New Apple Max Plus MK Ultra computers? i won't be buying a new computer but i'm pretty jealous of anybody that does that uh that that new max studio actually does look really nice um the 10 gigabit ethernet port on it i'm sure would be really uh nice to have a certain certain points um the price tag is not appealing to me though so i will be holding off they really built that up so much they made

like by the end of their presentation i really wanted one and then i saw the price tag and i it just you know killed all my dreams i just took out a loan to fill my car with gas i can't afford this right now yeah the gas is up there too but yeah uh so it's a 2000 well i guess i don't know what it is canadian it's probably double so two thousand dollars two thousand freedom dollars for uh the base model m1 max I guess is what I don't even remember and then fourth it's like this is just I mean it's not out of the price range of what I would pay for computer because I have a mac pro that was probably uh four to six thousand dollar computer and it's like heyday but according to presentation, it's a piece of garbage and I should just throw it away in the trash can that it represents.

And yeah, I was just blown away. Like every computer that they've come out with for the past 10, you know, 10 years or whatever, you could have bought a Mac pro three weeks ago and they just, they just trashed it. They're like,

yeah, this is like 30 million times faster. You don't want that anymore. We have the speed. It's even worse when their iPad is faster than your computer now. They have a way of making you really feel bad. Yeah, yeah. I will say that the M1, I have the M1 Pro, the laptop version.

I can't even keep up with their, it's the M1 thing. But they've done a really good job of taking that technology and putting it into like making a supercomputer really fast out of it. Like it does things a lot faster. And I'm talking about like heavy workloads for programming and that kind of thing. I have one thing I do that I process a few thousand photos. And it's almost, the best way I can describe it. It's like Photoshop from the command line. So I'm basically just processing these big photos, masking,

doing all sorts of stuff with images and then, uh, compressing them to make them smaller, changing the file size and all that kind of thing. Um, and that I on my Mac pro from 2013, mind you, but it's a, you know, a six core Mac pro, uh, trash can edition. Um, that thing takes probably 20 seconds to complete and the, the M one, the little laptop on a battery on wifi took like six so it was it what what they're prioritizing these chips to do inside the chip is the exact workload for a lot like for what a lot of people need like encoding video uh you know processing images and that kind of thing all that's like built at the chip level they're able to make it super fast there otherwise you're just using programming like you're using you're using hard coded you know you're using a general purpose

cpu and that's that's not as fast as just having something in built and right onto the processor uh so that's good for them good for apple i uh anybody want a green iphone evidently they have those now green that's the new color. I've never once said I wish my iPhone was green. You know what? Like with my iPhone, color was never a big thing because no matter what color you got, you were still covering it up with a case. Yeah, exactly. So it didn't make sense to me. Yeah, that's all. That's always my complaint, too, is I always put a big bulky case on my phones because I'm always crawling in like attics or shoving my phone in a wall or something. Uh, so the last thing I want to do is beat up my phone. Yep. Do new phone, new phone colors. The, Oh, they have a new budget iPhone. Who's the

iPhone se? I guess we all knew that was coming out. It's actually not a bad price for an, I mean, it's an impressive phone. It has the same a 15 processor and everything in it that the new phones have. So, Hey, if you have an older phone, you want to step up, that's a good price point to go to. And they have a new iPad Air. I totally missed that one. I assume that it's faster and better. But I think I either walked away or fell asleep during that part. Oh, and a new monitor.

The new 27 studio display. Those actually look pretty good. Not quite as bright. It's not an HDR monitor, but they look nice. They Those actually look pretty good. Not quite as bright. It's not an HDR monitor, but they look nice. They're Apple monitors. They're going to look good. And I think the monitor I saw actually will work with PCs too, they said. There's interfaces.

So that makes it a little bit more friendly to me. But I was also looking at things in my budget range, and they released a new keyboard and mouse. So that was good to see too. I always like to play with the custom computer configurators whenever stuff comes out. And you can get the new Mac Studio up to $8,000 if you get it with a 20 core CPU, 64 core GPU, 128 gigs of memory and eight terabytes of solid state storage. So plenty of room to upgrade there if you wanted to. Yeah, I guess I you'd have to really just I mean, there are people that are justified just by spending the money. Right. But

and this thing is small, right? This is not like a normal size desktop computer. This is it's smaller than it looks smaller than the original like Mac mini. Right. But it's it's taller, like chonkier, I guess. It's a chonkier Apple. I think it's like seven and a half inches tall by like three inches wide or something like that. Maybe that's vice versa. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a little, it's, it's smaller. I would say it's like a, a, a bigger Apple TV 4k, right? Like it's just a little bit bigger than that. Um, wider and taller if you kind of just took the corners of the image and stretched it, right. That's what it would look like. Um, but yeah, pretty, pretty cool system, pretty cool products they came out with uh oh look a purple ipad okay i could do the purple ipad that that that actually looks nice there's a blue one too okay yeah i do

like the ipads um and and i'm we need a new ipad around here uh but i'll have to price one of those other probably be a thousand dollar ipad by the time i get done setting up what I want. And then I'll just like, well, put that over there in the wait for later pile. So thanks Apple. Thanks. Yeah. Uh, let's see. And, and, and speaking of Apple, um, we guys, we, we had some Apple homework over the last week and that was to watch the after party. I think, um, I think Gavin, you're the only one that gets a hundred, uh, score on this one. Yeah. TJ, you failed. And I guess, I mean, I didn um, I think Gavin, you're the only one that gets a hundred, uh, score on this way. TJ, you failed. And I guess, I mean, I didn't, I didn't, uh, I got like a 60% or something or 50%. So I got halfway through. Yeah. I'm only two episodes in, but Gavin over there has finished the whole thing. So I've always been an overachiever when it came to doing work. Right. So, uh, we, we started with the first episode and we just we binged it over the weekend

i really enjoyed it yeah it gets progressively funnier but the first episode is like you're kind of getting established there's a ton of characters to um get to know and learn who they are um but it's it's one of those uh one of those stories where they, they, they basically are telling the same night or the same story, um, from different perspectives and, um, add elements of comedy into it. And it, it, it, it gets pretty wild. There's that, at least from the, the, the home technology standpoint, though, uh, I think TJ, you've seen that part, uh, where, where they're basically using this intercom system that, uh, he explains how to use it. And they're basically using this intercom system that he explains how to use it. And they're trying to listen in on a conversation that's happening in another room. And he's like, oh, you just need to go activate the intercom system.

And I think you wrote down the directions on how to do that. And it sounds pretty normal for a home tech from the home tech pro side. Yeah, my wife looked at me when I laughed at this, but it's exactly what you would do uh to explain somebody how to use their intercom uh you know it says if you go to the recording studio you press the following home intercom enter main floor bathroom three enter enter home and then me on this side i'll accept and mute it so yeah whenever you try to have whenever you have to try to explain this stuff to people, it is always so difficult because there's not just like one quick button that does it. It's always multiple steps.

And this show perfectly embodies that so far. Yeah, I made the comment as soon as when you guys were talking about that. I was like, I think somebody had a control four system. Somebody in the writing team had a control four system because it's not too far off from having to go through the hoops that they put you through to get to some of the devices and their interface. And there's also another pretty funny scene. I'm not going to give this away because there is a joke that coincides with the location of this camera. But there's a camera in the bedroom that just basically

sees where the murder happens. It sees the whole thing and it's there in the bedroom. And the technology guy remembers where it is. And he's like, Oh, he tells the cops and, and the cops are in the server room looking at this computer that's in the rack trying to see the video and see what's on it. And the interface is so confusing that the cop can't seem to get through it and ends up just completely wiping the whole video system. And you just see these, you know, no signal screens start to pop up on the camera system. And of course, the technology guy there is in the background going, just let me press, I can do this. Just let me push the button there. And the cops are like, we got this, we're pros.

And everything gets wiped. And he's like, you can just see the frustration. I can see this both sides. One, every camera system I've ever used is just a pain for an end user to go in and jump through the hoops to pull video off of. Like in the past, and TJ, the hoops to pull video off of. In the past, and TJ, you can probably speak to this,

we would schedule service calls. If somebody said, oh, there was a break-in at this business, the cops are here now. Can you come get the video off before it goes away? And we'd make an emergency service call to run out there to help them get the stupid video off this dumb, horribly put together software, you know, in VR into the cops hands. And yeah, I totally get that side of it. On the flip side of it, the guy that's standing there that actually knows how to use it's just sitting there going, just let me press the button. I can press the button. You can get it back. And I've been in

that situation as well. So I kind of get a laugh out of both sides of that at the same time i think they had an integrator probably consulting on the show because some of some of the jokes were just too like realistic to your business like in the first episode the remote joke you know that that's a classic like yeah i'm pretty sure you guys know all about remotes and the troubles with them so it's a great show. I really enjoyed it and I highly recommend it. Yeah, I had to look up to see if Ben Schwartz, the guy that plays Jasper, if he actually was an integrator in a past life just because it would make total sense at this point.

So definitely give it a thumbs up for that aspect of it. There's musical numbers too. I wasn't expecting that, but the musical numbers were A-OK, thumbs up. were actually really good yes yes and you know what the i don't want to root it for people but the joke i've been using like since i've watched the show is every time you know my wife says something you know i'll be like oh i'm inspired for some lyrics and i pull out my phone you know you when you watch the show that will make so much more sense when you see what that means interesting all right well yeah well again uh the homework continues tj

um you can turn it in late for for half the credit and uh i guess we'll i'm not i'm not sure i'll be able to finish it by next week but we'll get it we'll definitely get a couple more episodes all right all right well uh well let's talk a little bit about technology. We've talked about Apple and Apple, but let's talk about Z-Wave. Gavin, you've been playing around with this new Z-Wave firmware, 7.17.1, and you said there's some interesting things going on here. What's up with this? So this is a game changer to me. And I've been monitoring the forums, and for most people that have been playing with this, it's actually been a significant improvement. So before this,

this is all about the Z-Wave 700 series, right? So keep that in mind. When they released the 700 series, there were constant complaints, you know, devices, you know, the network hanging, devices not responding, things running slow, especially as you added many devices. And I spent a lot of time on my network tweaking it, you know, doing all the getting rid of ghost nodes to making sure the routes were right, you know, minimizing traffic on the network to get it working. But they eventually found a bug and they acknowledged the bug and they actually released a new firmware. And I've been playing around with it in a beta this week and it's significantly different. Like all of a sudden all my devices are responding extremely fast, right? Nothing's dropping off at all. It seems to have fixed all

that stuff. My network is running so well. This is how Z-Wave is supposed to be. If you have a hub out there and it has a 700 series chip in it and they haven't even talked about this new firmware and you're having issues ping ping your manufacturer and see what's up with that um or try and get a hold of the firmware you know or you know keep an eye out for it if they're working on it in beta because it will make a difference on your z-wave network is this the this is the one that we've been talking about for a while? For the seven? Yeah. Yes.

So it's the one where a bunch of people got together to convince, was it Silicon Labs? You know that, hey, this is the bug. We have captures now to point out exactly what the bug is. And this is why your network seems to halt under heavy loads. And they finally acknowledged it. They released this update. And I'm telling you, it's a game changer in terms of the Z-Wave world.

So walk, don't run to that upgrade. Get it done. Yeah. As soon as it comes out for whatever chip you have, whatever, you know, like some people have just the sticks that they add on to a home assistant. Yeah. And keep in mind, there's other reasons why Z-Wave could fail for you too. So it's not gonna fix everything.

Like if you have ghost nodes in your network that can mess up routing and stuff, you still have to address that stuff. Like there's other reasons why Z-Wave can fail on you. But this fix is one of the major reasons and that was when the network was under a heavy load and it makes a big difference. Ghost nodes. That's a fun one. And it makes a big difference. Ghost nodes.

That's a fun one. Yeah, I've always said there's ghosts in the machine. And that's why, yeah, why is this? Well, there's ghosts in the machine. You know, that's the Asimov explanation. Well, a ghost node is usually when people don't remove a device properly. It's kind of left in the routing tables. So when a device has to

communicate back, it will try and go through that node and, you know, fail after a certain amount of time, but that causes slowness and stuff like that. Right. So you got to keep those clean. Got to keep your nodes clean. That's right. That's right. Well, title. Hey guys, it was fun. Hey, guys. It was fun. Good experience there from Gavin. If you haven't updated to 7.17.1, 7.171, is that what it is? 7.171. Yeah, 7.171. Get out there and do it because it's pretty good stuff. But what do you say we jump to some home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right, Acara, the company that we can't seem to not talk about, has jumped into the smart lock market with the launch of the Acara Smart Door Lock A100 Zigbee. While not the best name, the spec sheet is actually pretty impressive. Let's go through a few of the bullet points here I pulled out of the story. The smart lock is Apple Home Key compatible,

which means that you can use the Apple Wallet to store your key and unlock the door through your iPhone or Apple Watch. Also, in this article, it said one thing in there that I thought was pretty interesting. When your phone runs out of battery or your watch runs out of battery, you can just walk up to your door and still unlock.

There's a significant amount of time that the phone or watch will work in kind of a low power mode and you'll still be able to unlock your door. So that's actually pretty cool. I didn't know that was a feature and it's really interesting to find that out. So in addition to that, the A100 also supports a number of other unlocking options like fingerprint, password. They have an app, of course, Siri, Google Assistant, NFC, and the barbaric mechanical key. Ooh, who uses those anymore? So you can also create a one-time code or temporary codes using their dedicated app as well. Uh, the A100 you'll need in that Quora, Quora Zigbee 3.0 hub and no wonder pricing or availability over here in the States or in Canada, uh, currently rolling out in Malaysia and Singapore.

And according to this article, availability will expand to other countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in the following months. It's actually looks pretty cool. Yeah, this is a nice looking lock. I like the, the physical design of it.

Um, not a fan of the touchscreen buttons as always. Um, but I do like that there's a physical key override. I don't think this is probably not going to make its way to the States, I would imagine, though. That's the one thing I don't think it will make its way to the States. They're very slow to bring things to the States, but it does look really nice. I like the look of it.

It seems to have every feature under the sun. And like you, Seth, I saw that line about the iPhone reserve power, and I've never heard of this before, but apparently if your iPhone runs out of power, it actually has a little reserve that's still doing things. And I've always heard in the past, people talk about, Oh, they'll be able to find your phone, even if it's powered off. And now I'm starting to think, what else does this reserve power allow them to do now? Because if you turn off your phone, is it really off or is it still listening to gather words for your advertisements? I don't know. Right. Makes me think about that. But in terms of the lock, I really like the look of this lock.

I'm into the modern look and this covers it. Yeah, it's very modern. And for the iPhone, I mean, it's just Bluetooth low energy. So as long as they can keep a few milliamps powering up whatever Bluetooth chip needs to be powered for that, it could probably run for a good long time. So it's kind of nice. I really like all the features here. That's for sure.

I wish we had any other lock available to us in the States here that had even half of these features. This is quite the options. Fingerprint, password, app, Siri, Google Assistant, NFC. I mean, you can hand out little cards to tap on there if you wanted. And, of course, a key. So pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff.

Moving on here. So what do you guys get when you cross a DIY remote on Kickstarter and a former Control 4 executive? A new smart home company. That's not a very good joke. All right. So the founder of NIO, Raphael Oberholzer, and former Control 4 executive Ted Hager have collaborated to launch a company called AVA, a new venture plans to enter the smart home space with two new products, a 2.1 audio system and a smart home remote control. The company says the new product solutions will pair together seamlessly to ensure performance of the audio components. Here's a quote from Raphael Openholzer.

Ava is on a mission to put true stereo back into people's homes while providing all the advantages of today's most popular connected speakers. Not only is this how music is recorded, but it's also the best way to reproduce the experience intended by the artists and the sound engineers. Anything less does not do their work justice. And it's a huge miss when it comes to the actual and emotional listening experience. So we're making a pretty big two channel play here with these smart speakers, I guess.

This is a 2.1 system. So that means two speakers and a subwoofer that can be kind of put together, bridged together using Clear, which is this kind of a near zero latency wireless audio protocol. I don't know, guys, what do you think about this? Let's talk about the 2.1 audio system and then we'll talk about the remote next, because I know we have opinions on remotes. Oh, yeah. What do you think about this 2.1 audio system, TJ? It looks pretty nice. I have to wonder how long it'll take until they get sued by Sonos for distributed audio or something. It looks like a tall Amazon Alexa speaker. I mean, the speaker itself doesn't look anything crazy to me it's got some physical or some uh captive buttons on top of it and an audio or a number sequence too i'm not sure what the one through five does

um it's uh oh yeah that's pretty nice um i thought it was a great idea yeah i you know i don't know i'm kind of in with sonos at this point i don't see why i would use this at this point but i obviously it's not even released yet. Um, so there's not much information we have to go on, unfortunately. Yeah. We'd like to know pricing. Like, is this a $500 2.1 system or is this a $2,000 2.1 system? I don't know. I'm not, I'm not too sure. Gavin, what do you think about this thing? Does it look, does it look pretty good? Like if you took a, if you took all the Sonos out of your house and you saw this on the side of the road, would you pick it up? It all depends on price, of course, right? That's the first thing. But

the speaker, I think TJ nailed it. It seems to take a lot of influence from a lot of other things, whether it be from the Alexa speakers to the Sonos speakers. they're gonna get sued by somebody i figure at some point for something in here right so it'll be interesting to see i don't know what they're aiming for here like what makes them stand out from the rest is it the fact that they're using this wireless technology so it's less wire so you still have to have the power wire but i mean sonos has that as well at this point um they offer all the same streaming services that everyone else has you know everything down to airplay too so there's nothing special there um if they're going for quality i mean i just don't know it's not a market i'm probably not their target market at this point. But it's price, too. Right. That's a big thing.

Do people want a more expensive Sonos? Yeah. Well, it could be that. But it also could be they kind of seem like what they're targeting is that to that that stereo sound experience. And Sonos doesn't really. I mean, you can do that with Sonos, but that's not what they're primarily going after. They just want you to have a speaker in the room. And you can add two, and heck, you can add three or five, you know? Like, you can add more Sonos speakers in there, but these guys seem like they're targeting that listening experience, which I don't, I mean, Sonos can claim they are, but their goal, that's not their goal. Their sales goal isn't to sell you a stereo pair at all.

It's not even how they release their financial reports. So you can tell what that company is trying to do. I think this kind of to me, I guess, like the goal, the way I read this article and the way I read into this and what they're trying to do, maybe we can get one of these guys on the show to talk. I actually know both of them personally. I know Ted from way back and Raphael as well from the Neo days. But it seems like they're going for a tight integration between a control setup, your AV gear, whatever you have as a source, and the speaker system. And that, so that kind of brings us to a remote control for AV control. We'll kind of talk about it and what it looks like. It looks very similar to the Neo. I mean,

in my opinion, if you just took the Neo and then you took an eraser and erased all the buttons off of it, that's what this would look like. Maybe a little bit bigger touchscreen. Not sure. It's Android based. And according to the article, will be the world's first Google certified remote control. Unless you do all sorts of stuff like you can add Android apps from the Google Play Store onto it directly onto the remote as well. So they're claiming there'll be compatibility to control

like the professional AV systems. Well, Sonos, Control 4, Savant, Crestron, Lutron and more has Bluetooth, NFC, an accelerometer to detect if somebody picks it up, an integrated rear panel fingerprint sensor, which was promised on the new remote, but never showed up. And a GPS, which is, I guess that helps you find your remote when it's lost. I'm not sure what that GPS is for, but it's there. Maybe

that's just part of the Android package. All right, Gavin, this ruined your day when we started talking about this remote earlier. So what do you think? Well, first thing I thought when I saw this is I thought like a iPod Nano or even the iphone down to the buttons on the side looks like an iphone just stretched out a bit and it runs apps and stuff i don't want to go into a remote rant you know this is a nice remote it integrates well but we want you to listen i'm a bit of a remote snob here you know there's certain things i have all harmony remotes and there's certain things i really think a remote needs to have and one of them is buttons physical buttons you know millennials stop taking buttons off your remotes you know like we need more than just up down left right okay

mute and volume up volume down that's it we need more you need a guide button i can do without the number buttons we don't we don't even use remotes at this point gavin there's there's no remotes i can do without the number buttons you know you know i i can do without that you know i've settled on that but please give me like i need more buttons even the red blue green buttons i can program to do something special you know but the other thing i thought about when i saw this remote is just yesterday i dropped my remote right oh yeah how is this gonna survive it you know how many times we drop our remote in the house and every time we think it's over no it picks up and still go in right and i don't think these remotes will survive a drop test maybe that will be a youtube thing we

should do drop tests of remotes right or urban armor urban armor gear or a otter box are gonna have to come out for cases with this guy yeah yeah it is kind of the uh the like just a piece of metal looking thing like it's it's it's it's it looks and looks very similar to the neo remote like if if you, if you have, I have one of those kind of behind me here, but I could go dig it out. It takes a while to get out of the incredible packaging that they had back then. But, um, it, it, it very much reminds me of that. It very much reminds me of, of how that looks and feel. And I mean, those are, those remotes exist now. So control four bought Neo and now they have like a Neo line of their remotes as well that are pretty much the same thing.

I don't know about their durability. I haven't seen too many posts about people saying that they've dropped them and they've broken. But that may just be because when people do that they expect it to break i don't know like it may just be because that's what you would think has happened they probably don't market this remote to people with kids yeah yeah on top of that right like these remotes at this point they've minimized it so much i might as well just use my phone yeah well that's all i mean it's an android tablet with a little extra metal and a battery well that's the biggest downside i see is that they're they're advertising up to six days on one charge for a 2200 milliamp battery that is not that long for a remote like even current you know quote unquote smart remotes last way longer than that like if you get like a

crestron home remote or control for remote or something like that they last several months on a charge and they're not always rechargeable batteries sometimes you have double a and whatnot but six days on charge is not long at all it depends on how it just depends on how often you use it like the the control for remotes you you can there's zigbee based i guess but you can you can stick them back on the charger um and overnight i usually told my customers just throw it on the charger once a week and you know you can leave in the couch cushions for the rest of the time but do you know how often i charge my remote now that now though seth once a year

once a year once a year what are you using i just use double a batteries double a batteries yeah so you don't charge it at all throw it away yeah oh man you gotta get these little green batteries from amazon yeah then it won't work at all uh no this thing this thing looks nice um it's important to note too that it's only for professional installers um so if you're a regular consumer you can expect to not get this um unless you go through an installer um and there's no information available for that yet i have signed up to become a dealer though so if you're listening uh nice go ahead and push that through and it's got some really cool features like the downloading of the apps open up a lot of things like imagine like when you're not using your remote it mines bitcoin for you like there's so much you can do with this remote you know

you can show all your nfts on there yeah yeah you can have your nfts as the background on the remote you know we gotta get into app design for this, like prepare. I do like a couple of things. I do like those preset buttons on top of the speakers. I, Sonos with their, what, three buttons that they have, play, pause, and then volume up and down. It's very minimal. And, you know, if you loaded a couple of stations in on the presets there, you could go up to the top of the Sonos box and press that button.

You know, preset number five is my music, preset number four, you know, that kind of thing that would, that would, uh, I think that would expand Sonos's line at least. And I think that's a really good idea. I did this little thinking outside the box, um, something that, you know, even Apple could have done with the home pods, uh, but they didn't. They put a little swirly, whirly screen thing on top that doesn't do anything. So I predict for this company, this company has a bigger play. And I think they're going to come out probably with more devices or they're planning. And they're going to be tightly integrated together and work really well together. And I can see a future of that.

So this is, again, just the beginning of this company. And you can't come out with everything at once. So I think we'll see some more coming from them later on. Do we think they'll be acquired by SnapAV before or after 2023? Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see. We'll have to see where they go with that. It's interesting.

Oh, I see. So they're saying that I was kind of thinking about they're going to be able to control all these pro control systems. It's like, well, wait, you can just load the app on there. And then, yeah, now your remote controls

a control for system. I mean, it's kind of the same thing. I'd be, I'd be interested to see how the Android app scale though. Cause I know a lot of the Play Store apps and stuff like that have different issues with different size screens. Um, so I don't know if there's any existing systems out that have a screen with a similar or similar resolution as this, but, um, so who bought the Neil remote again? Control four control for about Neo the company. And then

they jointly basically released or re-released the Neo remote with control for branding on it and tied it directly to control for systems. And I, I don't, I think it's still the same remote. I think there's, I don't think they've shipped a new version of it to date. I think it's just still, maybe they've done a couple of improvements. Like I think one of the first things I heard is they may, they may have put some more memory or something inside of it. But other than that, like, I'm not, I'm not too sure if anything has been up this looks exactly like that neo remote that's why it's just i mean even the base if you remember the neo brain they had the

brain base this looks just like the brain base but i guess it's according to the article it's just a chunk of metal that weighs you know weighs enough never the brain weighed a ton like if you pick that thing up you couldn't slide it around on your desk. It was, it was really heavy. So interesting stuff here. Um, we'll, we'll be interested to see what they, they do come out with. I still haven't seen, Oh wait, here's the spec sheet for this subwoofer. Ooh, I there's, there's no pictures on, on their website of the subwoofer. So I was kind of looking around trying to find out what it was, and I ended up landing on their support page,

and there's actually some support documents for it there. Wow. Okay, so with all the industrial design of everything else, like the subwoofer looks like your standard subwoofer that you see. I'm putting a picture of it here in our back channel. It's not very impressive. Like you'd have to hide that away see. I'm putting a picture of it here in our back channel. It's not very impressive. You'd have to hide that away somewhere. What is that?

Yeah. I need a giant touchscreen on that. It could have been a tube. I want a giant touchscreen in the Play Store. That way I can download whatever I want on it. It could be a footstool. It looks like a footstool. I'd put a cushion on it. Could be a footstool. It looks like a footstool. I'd put a cushion on top.

Yeah, they should have made it just a bigger tube version of their little tube speakers. I think that would have been a win-win. Oh, well. There's room to grow. Maybe the B2 can be a tube. Interesting stuff. We'll have to keep an eye on them

and see what they do in the future. And Gavin, I think you could be correct. I mean, they could start hitting some of the low hanging fruit and knocking out devices that all really work well together and kind of like, what's that company, like B&O, if you want to be in their ecosystem or Bose or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You can go with Ava. They've got a three letterletter domain, so that's pretty impressive if you ask me. Yeah, and if you think about it, like it's a 2.1 system now, but who says they can't add two more and it becomes a 5.1 later on, right? And now you're in the market for home theater systems. So, you know, I can see them expanding.

Yeah. Well, we'll have to keep an eye on them and see where they go with it. That's all the news for tonight. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 379. But DJ, you kind of put a quick little thing for us to talk about in here about some new security cameras you've been playing around with. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been playing with some advanced analytic security cameras. This week, I'm actually playing with some Turing AI cameras, or I think they're called Turing smart cameras. They have a series called

the smart series cameras, and they do face and vehicle detection. These things are really cool. They look like they're and I think this is confirmed that they're Uniview rebranded cameras, um, but they have their own branded, uh, smart box or smart bridge that kind of, uh, interprets all the camera footage. Um, but it's really cool. You can do face detection. Um, so as a camera sees a person's face, you can actually tag that person with a name. And then every time that camera footage finds that person again, it'll tag their name as well. So for example, if you clicked on my name, uh, it would pull up every single camera and every single piece of footage that I was in. Um, so that's really cool. Um,

and they also do vehicle detection, which I think is really neat. Um, the vehicle detection, you can search by a car type, uh, the model the model, license plate and color. So if you type in like red Jeep, it'll pull up all the camera footage with red Jeeps in it. So just started playing with it this week. We actually got a demo system installed at a local business. They are loving it so far. And it's allowing us to kind of play with it and just get more familiar with it. But I'm really interested in these kind of what I consider advanced cameras. They're kind of one step below the active monitored cameras where like people are actually watching them and reviewing the footage and stuff like that.

It's kind of just a smarter way to see your cameras and what's going on. Right. Getting that metadata pulled in to where if something happens, like my Unify doorbell kind of does something like this. Like if it detects a person coming up or I think Ring does this too. If it detects a person or vehicle, at least it pulls those events out

of what traditionally, like if we go back, like I don't know, a couple of years ago, traditionally we were pulling like motion events and you had to like tease the system down to be like, well, I'm going to mask this whole section off over here because this tree blows around in the wind too much. So we're not going to get any motion data from there. But if somebody walks through here and enough pixels get triggered and the sensitivity is just right. That's going to give me the motion event. And that's going to, and eventually what happens is like, Nope, just going to record full time,

all the cameras and just scroll through until I see something that happens. So this having that metadata in there where you can say, well, he type in TJ and then like, Oh, he was here at 8 AM. And then he came back at 10 AM. Yeah. That, that's actually pretty killer to have have as as far as like and i you were posting like pictures of the interface uh not not the same system they were using in the after party uh it actually looks really easy to use and like was pretty clean layout you said it was snappy like to get into and use so um was that a hope you kind of said that there was like a

little box that gets and interprets things how was that that the NVR you're talking about? Or is it like this, a cloud service type setup? Yeah. So there's basically two setups to it. Um, if you've installed camera system, traditional camera systems before it works the exact same way. Um, it's an IP based, you know, POE camera system. So you have your NVR and then you have your, your POE cameras. But there's also this separate box and they call it a bridge. And the bridge looks like a, like a little Intel nook, a small computer. And it basically just sits on the network along with the NVR. And that's what actually interprets all the camera footage. So what I really like about it so far is that you don't lose anything

that you compared to like a normal camera system. It's still 24 seven recording. Um, you can still set up motion detection for different areas or, or, uh, triggers, um, like crossing certain paths, that kind of thing. Um, but you get the additional features of face detection and vehicle detection and that kind of thing. Um, there's no physical connection between the bridge and the NVR. They just have to be on the network together. Yeah. And if you wanted just a really like just a not so great interface, but have all these features and more, Gavin, you have the Blue Iris system, which I think can do all of this.

Like it can detect vehicles and it can detect and you were telling us it can detect squirrels in your backyard now, like you've trained it, but you physically had to like twist its arm and say, find the squirrels first. Right. Like it wasn't, it didn't come in a box like, like this did. Well, no, if you add the deep stack add on to the blue Iris, right. You can add your own modeling data that identifies certain animals, but that's all

based on who programmed the modeling data. And what I've been doing last couple of weeks is I actually been capturing images in my yard of various things and started working on creating my own modeling data to help, you know, identify the animals going through my own yard. And it should give me better results, even better because the yard's a static image and it's just capturing what's moving now and it can identify it better um but blue iris yes it does a lot of this the amazing part it does it locally i don't know if your system tj does it is it all local like if you were to cut it off from the internet does it work all locally or does it need an internet connection so the bridge as far as i'm aware does require a constant internet connection um the recording abilities do not require a constant internet connection though yeah and with my with my blue iris it's very integrated into my smart home i do a lot more

with it um where i'm i am recording 24 hours that's a must to me you have to record to catch all those missed events if you miss something um but it also does like uh object detection to the point where it can know if an object a car is in a spot or not and it can notify you when the stop the occupant uh what they call it occupancy spots occupied yeah it does stuff like that too so it's a great system but um these other systems are really taking it to the next level, um, with their processing. This, this seems like it was more turnkey like for UTJ to set. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty much just plug and play the, you know, like I said, if you've installed camera systems in the past, that part does not change at all. It's literally the same setup. Um, like I

said, they're, they're rebranded Uniview cameras at this point. So if you've set those cameras up, it's even more familiar for you. Um, But the additional smart bridge thing is not a difficult setup at all. Does it have an API or anything like that for integration? That I do not know, but I will ask and find out. That's something I wish more people would open up to because you can allow things like if an event happened, pop it up on a TV somewhere or do something like that with your smart home, right? Like speak it over the speakers or, you know, something like that. And if more people did that, you know, it'd be a better user experience. Yeah. And they have some features

like that where like, for example, you can, once you've added a person to the system, you can actually like flag them to where like, for example if somebody's not supposed to be on the property and they come back uh it'll get you'll get notified you know immediately through text message or email or something like that um yeah i was actually just looking at some of the footage one thing i forgot to mention is license plate detection uh which i think is really cool so if you're in a busy area uh like a parking lot or you you know, shop, that kind of thing. It can actually detect license plates and you can look up by license plate. So that's pretty cool if you have an incident and you know the vehicle's license plate or you know the color it was or something like that,

makes it super easy to find footage. Yeah, this is a neat little system. And the difference between, I guess, the two systems we talked about, one is you're trying to get in, do the install, get out on with your day and let it ride, like let it do its thing. The other one, Gavin, you want to sit down, you want to tweak it, you want to customize it. Yes. And build it back into the home automation system where you can trigger events, you know, lights to turn on and something if something is amiss or, you know get a better view um yeah this is this is neat though i i like it it's the cameras actually look i mean pretty standard pretty pretty good if they are a unit view that that makes sense so yeah

and they have color night vision and um i think they call it low shoot what else they call it they have twilight vision and something else a little sony chip thing yeah that's that's fairly i think all that is fairly standard these days on on security cameras what i do find is weird is they don't have the bridge built into the nvr is it just specific series that they only have the yeah they said they're going to work on that they eventually want to implement it in the nvr but for the time being, it is a separate box. Um, if you buy the smart series, though, it comes with the bridge. Um, so it just comes with it in the NVR kit. It's in the box. So it's not a set. Yeah. It's not a separate purchase luckily, but that is something to

be aware of. Interesting. All right. Cool, man. We'll have to keep an eye on those guys too, to see what they're up to. But, uh, thanks. Thanks for the, uh, the feedback. I am always interested in these camera systems and everything. I think I'm with Gavin. Like if I was to like not have access to anything, blue Iris would probably, no, I would say like blue Iris would be my go-to, but for me, uh, I mean, I, I kind of stick to the unify stuff too, just because it's like, it's kind of the, the, this turnkey idea. It doesn't have near many features this, but like I can go in and I can just add a camera and be done with my day and walk away from, and I know it works like that's, that's as a, as a pro installer, that's what you're trying to get to just have somebody go out,

plug it in, hit a button on the app and it works. Um, I actually had an old client call me the other day and he bought one of those little unify ones, little egg ones, little G3 wifi ones. He's like, well, next time you come down, you can do, I'm like, we can do it on the phone. Like just open your app. And he, I said, plug it in and it pops up. He presses the button, adds the camera in, he names it. He's like, I didn't know I could do this. I'm like, well, there you go. Ken, you have the power. Those G3 instant cameras are so amazing. Yeah. Especially for the $30 price tag they have on them. Ridiculous. Yeah. If you can catch them in stock and buy more than one, it's a, it's a good, actually I have one on the shelf over there.

It's actually a pretty, it is a nice camera. It doesn't have the best like camera view to it, but it's a nice camera. So, um, but we'll have to keep an eye on these guys and see what else comes up. I'm like, I said, I'm very interested in the, the like analytics and everything that are being built into smart camera systems because for so long they were just dumb and, and, and you have to deal with the horrible in VR interfaces like they did on, they made fun on the after party, like just, just awful interfaces where you could never figure out how to, how to get, I remember spending time on, on like projects trying to find like a, the pixels where, you know, somebody moved a purse or something like that. And it's like, this would be so much better to like have every license plate that came in and out of the thing. And like, okay, well, between this time, these are the cars that came in and left. Here you go, Mr. Officer. See you later. Uh, yeah, that would have been a much better conversation to have, uh, because most of the time we would never pick up, you know, the person that had taken the purse

is kind of awful, but yeah, anyway. All right. Uh, thanks CJ. Appreciate it. Like I said, we'll, we'll, we'll keep on these and, uh, maybe, maybe we'll start looking into these AI camera things a little bit more, uh, and see if we can find some other brands to take a look at. Yeah. And if anybody is that is listening, has any suggestions for other brands to check out, I'd love to, to look into them and find out what the other options are. All right, guys. Well, we had a, a projects project submission here. Uh, quite, quite the project actually from Jason Adams, friend of the show. Now, um, he's, he's doing, uh, kind of, it's in progress. So it looks, sounds like he's building a house or doing some new construction. He's hired for some people, some, some work to be done, but he's going to do quite a bit of it himself. Um,

so, so it's, he's going to put some, some blood, sweat and tears into this. Um, he's got quite, quite a bit going on here. Lighting control, cameras. He's got some audio, uh, full, you know, he looks like he's looking at ubiquity for networking. He's doing security and shades as well. So quite a bit going on here. Gavin, I know you look through and read all of this, but he's got someone that's going to do the electrical and run all the Ethernet cables. Good idea. Have somebody. Don't do this yourself. It's just a pain. I hate doing it in my house, and by the time you run your fifth pull, you'll be done. You're like, I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah, and then just make sure you plan out where you want them to go that's my one advice like pull multiple runs but you can never have too

many runs um put run one to wherever you want a camera to be even if you're not going to put the camera and now have it there or two or two i mean or two yeah you're really feeling good uh yeah i well i mean you never know what's kind of going to happen if something gets cut or spliced or whatever. It's always good to have that backup, but that does double the price of copper wiring, which isn't a great thing. He says he's going to run all the speaker wires,

but that's not as difficult when you get those put up into the attic. What my advice would be on all of this would be to take pictures. Like whenever it's done, go around the house, take a video, forget pictures, grab your iPhone, your Google phone. They all have great cameras on them these days and run through and take videos and pictures, hold up a tape measure, you know, and measure off a wall. So, so, you know, the exact distance that something, you know, from point A to point B. And if, and if you don't know what that distance is, um, or if you can't figure out what that distance is in the future, if you had that tape measure up, you'd be able to like measure off

that and, you know, figure out basically scale your photo and figure out where the wire is or what, you know, chase it goes down and that kind of thing. Um says he wants to run some conduit for some wire in the hall closet. Smart. Yeah, yeah, that is smart. I don't know that you need to have conduit going out to a D-mark for AT&T fiber. Maybe you do. No, yeah, TJ's shaking his head.

Typically what they're going to do is put an ONT outside and a little device inside or battery backup inside. TJ, what were're going to do is put an ONT outside and a little device inside or battery backup inside. TJ, what were you going to say? Yeah, we always ran two category cables and two coax cables. This is before fiber really got super popular. But two category 6 and two RG6, and that covers your basis. Half of those or three of those are going to go unused anyway but at least it gives you options for for your data and voice for the for the rg6 wires i mean he sounds like he

needs it for us for dish but with dish you only need it to go to one place and then from there you can break out i think they're using the hopper it's like something hopper or whatever i it it all can be like transferred over to like an ip-based. So my kind of advice right now is to not worry too much about where the RG six goes, get the category cable and everywhere you can. And then some, and then the RG six, maybe it like the main TV locations or the head end location.

That's ended up where I pulled mine to was like my head in closet. And then that's where my TV tuner is. And like my head-in closet and then that's where my tv tuner is and from there it goes out ip and i don't have to worry about anything else um looks like he's doing a little bit home um home audio with htd uh fair like it's speakers amps i got no problems with that um i think i think the only thing I would say watch out for that is how, and I'm not familiar with this HTD stuff, but I would say watch how that integrates into things like surround zones and that kind of thing. You may or may not want to get fancy with that. Sometimes people just pop in an extra pair of speakers in a room that has surround sound. And when you're listening

to music, the sound comes out of that. When you're listening to music, the sound comes out of that. When you're listening to surround sound, sound comes out of that. And it's two different systems and you don't have to worry about it. We would always get fancy with it and kind of like make things take over and descend the other with relays and that kind of thing. Pick your poison. I know he's in the hub. If you have any questions on any of this, just start talking in there.

We'll definitely type back. Lighting control. Now this one started to throw red flags up for, for a few of us here. So Gavin, I think you, you want to say something about his choice in the, the lighting control.

Oh yeah. My, I don't know if he mentioned what hub he would go through. Cause he's's he's looking at z-wave switches home assistant oh okay so it's homeless oh yes there it is it was right underneath so yeah the one thing i had um my switches of choice are either in a valley or zoos in a valley you can't get they're out of stock everywhere so zoos is it is and they make great switches when it comes to z-wave switches um the ge i hear you know

quality issues and stuff with them every now and then they break down um you know so just keep that in mind um and if you're gonna go with the aotech 7 usb hub that i think is a 700 series so you're probably listening to the beginning of this show where i talked about the z-wave firmware make sure you have the latest firmware on that it should you know prevent you uh from having to go through what i had to go through um and fight with the z-wave stuff but that should be fine home assistance great um i have nothing nothing else to say about that it looks good home assistant we don't we say only good things about home assistant or we'll get yelled at i'm not allowed to talk about it i will back up the uh the z-wave switch change as well um i've been hearing a lot of these switches have started dying um a lot of them

have a lot of posts i've seen in the the home automation subreddit um so definitely a good resource for that kind of thing it's lighting control is one of those things that you don't want to have a problem with because the basics are so it's frustrating. If you walk into a room and you turn on a light, it doesn't turn on, period. And that may not be frustrating for you, but for other people in the house, if you walk in and you push you push a button and it reliably does not turn on the light or like in my case, we have a button in control for never made great keypads with their second gen of lighting. Maybe the first generation lighting either. Um, you walk in, you tap the button in the bedroom, the light turns on and then it turns off. It's like it registered two clicks for some reason. I think it's because the keypad is loose. I can go

and I can push the button. The light turns off, turns on, doesn't turn off. The light turns off, doesn't turn on. Someone else in my house can do the same exact thing and have the complete opposite result. So just keep that in mind when you replace it with stuff you especially especially lighting control you want it to be super super duper reliable uh network unify dream machine se uh looks like he's going wi-fi six got no problems with any of that wi-fi six enterprise i'm jealous let us know how it is and if it's way bigger than the long range because the long range is on my ceiling right now and it is massive you gotta get those antennas in there uh let's see um it's kind of good to skip one and go to the cameras uh poe cameras talking about you and unified too i i i if you've got the dream machine se pop a hard drive in the thing and you know hook a couple of cameras up if you you need more storage, how many did you say? One or two by the front, one by the garage, and two by the...

Yeah, that'll be fine. That'll be fine with a decent-sized hard drive. Should be good to go. And then shades. We had a good conversation about shades with no direct answer, so that's not going to help anybody. I think the consensus for shades was basically just look at all your available options now and just see what the best course of action was. Gavin, I think you're recommending run an actual AC power and a control wire of some sort, like a 16-4 or maybe a category cable. Yeah, figure out what the most common ones are and what they use to get power to their shades and run the power.

It doesn't hurt to have it there but get the power there and then figure out the shades after i have uh hunter douglas shades and they're all battery powered each one takes 12 um double a batteries and you should see how many batteries i go through like you know it's 36 every time that all three of them die you know but they last about a year so it's pretty good um just hardwire shades and avoid the batteries yeah i i would i would say that if you're pulling and you don't have to do anything fancy just pull some cat5 to pick this is what you do you just pick a side so you know what shades you're doing on the window and you've got like four windows or something just pick the side and run a cat5 up into the wall right there you don don't even have to take it out of the wall. You can just leave it tucked

in the wall and just take a picture and you'll know it's there for whenever you put the shades up. As long as the shade guy doesn't put a drill wire, you know, drill right through your wire, you should be good to go. Ask me how I know. But yeah, Gavin, that was a great suggestion there. Depending on the width of the window, the type of fabric, that'll determine the motor that you need. So if you have a big wide window or some really heavy fabric, that's going to determine if you need the 120 volt AC motors. You can live with 12 or 24 volt or 36 volt motors, low voltage motors. Um, those you can, you can either power on like either a cat five cable or speaker wire, like 16, four or something like that would probably be pretty universal for you there. Um, so I wouldn't personally, I wouldn't worry too much about the one 20 volt shades, like some high voltage shades, unless you know that you're going to need

them. Um, but pick a side left or right, and just do all your windows at that point. And that way, when you go to order the motors, you'll say, well, the motor's on the left-hand side. That's where the wire comes out the wall and that's where the power is going to be. And you don't have to deal with batteries. Great idea. And there's one thing in here,

a video looking for suggestions. He's wanting to use HDBaseT or some kind of video over IP from his dish receiver in the media closet to the living room TV, as well as hooking up Apple TV and maybe an Xbox with some kind of balance of some sort. He has Plex servers on his computers for movies. So I guess you could probably use an Apple TV or Roku or whatever media player for that. That's not a big deal.

But getting the video from point A to point B, TJ, do you have any suggestions on kind of like the main media room? Yeah, if you're, this is for the HDMI extender. Yeah, like HDBaseT or over IP. Yeah, there's, I'm a big fan of the monoprice version and that's what I was trying to look up right now. They're pretty affordable in like the $100 to $200 range.

For example, if you just need like a basic extender, you can buy a 50 meter one, um, for 47 bucks. Um, and that'll just do a basic HDMI over category cable. Um, so I guess it depends on what your exact needs are on that. Most people don't need anything fancy with that though. It looks like you might need a switch to like some type of uh like a like an hdmi matrix switch or something like that to to change between the sources from a dish receiver apple tv and xbox maybe yeah we'll have to well i'll have some suggestions that we can post it in the in the hub he he joined in this week actually so that'll be

some good info to share back and forth there yeah yeah. I wouldn't suggest any video over IP unless you're going to share it to multiple rooms, like from the base location. If you run, and this is what I did in my house, but then I don't actually utilize this at all. I have basically one or two sources in my closet and then I feed the three or four TVs that we have. And essentially I just watch Apple TV all the time. So I probably could have avoided that entire thing and just put an Apple TV

behind every TV and called it a day. So, but that's because technology just kind of changes. So like I started this house, we had two TiVos in the house and, you know, recording all sorts of stuff off cable. And that it's just kind of like gotten whittled down to basically apple tv and streaming services now so technology will change on you and you'll you'll have to adapt and adjust and um i think from what all i see here i think you'll probably be pretty ready for you know anything that gets thrown at you everything is going digital and it's all going wireless anyway what would you recommend as a universal remote because he needs to think about that as well to control all these things well obviously this ava remote comes out and you'll have to go through tj to get it the sofa sofa potato did we talk

about that sofa baton there's still waiting for their hub version to ship yeah that would be the one to use there right you need something with a hub. You know what? Go on Marketplace, go on Kijiji, grab some used Harmony remotes with the hub. They're still good for at least another four years or so. Hopefully someone else will have something else. But to me, they're still the best remote that, you know, us as a do-it-yourselfer can get a hold of. Yeah. And that's actually what i was going to bring up too the hd base t kind of adds another layer of complexion if you don't really need it um so i would consider that and see if you actually have a use case for it first yeah well i mean i think his use case is hiding the equipment away so at that point you do have to have it but um yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know i don't i don't

have a good uh solution for diy control other than the harmony remote so that would be that'd be the go-to on that one i think if you can get one new or you know in the box still or somebody's getting rid of a used one like evan suggested ebay you can probably pick one up for a decent price now they're not are they scalping them still they're probably like a million dollars now right um no no I well what's the elite one I see going for 400 Canadian people people know what they got on their hands with that one but um I'm seeing the companion ones for about $100 with the hub and everything that people, they pop up and they go pretty fast. But, you know, keep an eye out and grab one and they're well worth it. That was the best version right there.

The companion with the hub. Yes. Nothing will ever compete with that. I have an idea, guys. It just came to me. We should do an NFT of Harmony Remotes and sell that. And then I think a million dollars right there. Bam.

If I could really figure out what an NFT is, i would agree with it's just a url it's just a link to an image we're just going to make an nft remote where its only job is to show you nfts oh yeah it's great i mean you could like you said you could probably do that with the ava remote i bet that we can do that we're gonna make it happen so yeah but but you could do other things with that remote. Oh, that's it. We just want NFTs. I want NFTs on my remote's display and I want to be able to cast them up to my TV and that's it.

That's it. There you go. These are million dollar ideas, guys. If we were in Silicon Valley, we wouldn't have venture money just being thrown at us right now. Just like, shut up and take this money. All right. Well, that wraps that up. We've got a pretty cool pick of the week here. I think this got posted in the hub as well. This is hilarious. This is great.

As an installer, I can say this is actually pretty accurate as to what i i saw some of the the veterans of the industry do and you get a mount up yeah you hang off of the thing to make sure it doesn't fall off the wall right and i'm gonna hit play on this thing because this guy is this guy's great so one two three sync the play now you see me i weigh 170 pounds if i can sit on this mount and not do shit then you know i'm the man to mount your tv stop playing because it ain't coming off the wall hit me up on instagram and his name is i'll call you 314-536-1661 that's what he said all right guys yeah this is this is brilliant this is brilliant uh if this

guy doesn't this guy doesn't book for the rest of the year i i this i there's there's something wrong with the world like he knows that amount of tv he this guy knows how to mount a tv when i saw this video i thought of you guys i go this is perfect advertisement like yo why don't you guys put up ads like this you know i wanted to hire this guy to hang my TV. I don't have any TVs to hang. And I just want to hire this guy to hang a TV. I know. I used to work with a guy down in Orlando that always hung off his TVs like this whenever

he got done with it. And I always waited for like one to fall off the wall at some point. But if you're listening, Ken, that was, you know, this guy's taking your place. Yeah. I mean, he's he's not he's sitting on this thing. I mean, he is. This is like this is the articulating mount. So, I mean, he's sitting on this thing. I mean, this is the articulating mount. So, I mean, he hung it on there.

It's not coming off the wall. There you go. Perfect advertising right there. Exactly. Pretty good amount, too. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout in here. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, guys, that wraps it up

for another week in home technology here. Not much in the way of news. I think everybody saw that Apple event and were like, don't release anything in case they have like a one more thing, you know? So maybe we'll start hearing, you know hearing news over the next couple of weeks. That one more thing used to be big back in the day. I miss it.

That one more thing. And it was a shocker. They need to bring that back. Well, they're too big now. Unless it's software side. Now all the hardware gets flushed out you know by supply chain leaks and that kind of thing um i don't know what they've done with these processors has been pretty impressive i thought like kind of knew they were coming if you if you think about this is um

the a15 technologies in the phone i'm pretty sure this is all like a 13 based. So like if you, they've got a waste, they've got runway to go. Like the phones are still the faster process, the better technology. So you can see kind of like, okay, if I go back two years to my iPhone 10, I guess it's 10 or yeah, 10. That's what this M1 stuff is all based on. Um, the iPhone 13 is a whole lot better than the iPhone 10 was. So, uh, yeah, yeah. I think, I think there, this Apple company may have something to it, guys. I don't know if you've, I haven't looked at their stock price or anything, but they may, they may be doing pretty good. I heard they got rid of the, uh, the airport. on the the down list now was it the airport the airport express everybody's been begging for the airport express to come back the little why are the time capsule or the wi-fi

device those were great i mean they were they were they were marginally okay they were better than what was out at the time and then like Eero leapfrogged over them. And it was just like, they're doing a good job over there at Eero. Why, why compete with them and update this whole product that we don't really want to sell anymore? I can see why they, they would kind of move away from it. Networking is problematic. Everybody's shaking their heads. This is a podcast, guys. You have to agree verbally. No, I know. And it changes too fast. It changes pretty fast for them that they probably don't want to get into updating a network device even yearly. They probably want to only update it every four years, if anything. My network has been working great,

so I try not to talk bad about it. Well, we all know that the only thing that keeps Gavin's network going is if he mentions the printer on the show, and that his printer's working. So, Gavin, is your printer working? I don't need to talk about my printer because I don't like to talk about things

that are still working every day. It's such a great thing. Yeah, when it still works, it works, and you don't have to talk about things that are still working every day. It's such a great thing. Yeah, when it still works, it works, and you don't have to worry about printing. Every time I look at it and I see a printout sitting on this thing, I'm so happy to pick it up and take it to the wife and say, here you go. The light switches are working now, too, so she's really happy. There you go. This technology has only been around for about 30 years now,

but we can finally do it seamlessly. It's great when it works. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, 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 our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm 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 on the show. But every single 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 baseball conversations on all everything. You know, Apple Watch Party. We were in there, you know, in real time kind of commenting and saying things about what was on screen. It's always a good time. It's always a good time when we have a live event that we can all kind of gather around for technology.

Let's see if you want to help out and support the show, but can't do it financially. Totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And that wraps up another week in home technology from everyone here. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. Adios.