HomeTech.fm - Episode 382 - Trimming Fat in Ohio

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

This week on HomeTech: It might be April Fools but that doesn’t stop Dyson from releasing a strange set of headphones, is Sonos working on a theater system and remote, Wyze leaves security holes open for years, iHome shuts off android support, two listener emails about storage and networking, a pick of the week, and so much more...

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 1st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm T.J. Huddleston. April Fool's night. Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kemp. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. A podcast all about all aspects of home technology and really bad jokes. That was pretty bad.

That was pretty bad. Yeah, that was pretty bad. We've got a couple of small news stories that popped up this week, and there was one that actually fell in line last week from Sonos that we kind of forgot to cover, but I thought it was kind of an interesting story to talk about. But I don't know. One of the things, this isn't an April Fool's, I don't know. This could be an April fool's joke. I'm not sure, but Dyson has released a, some headphones that have a built in air purifier. I want these. I really want these. Um, I don't know why. Like I, I imagine these sounding like the Dyson vacuum cleaner as they're on. And then you have the headphones on and you can't hear the sucking sound of

their vacuum cleaner or something while you use it. This, this thing's insane. I'm split. I don't know if it's a joke or not. Like I'm looking at it and I'm just like, I could see uses for it, but is it a joke or even better yet? Why why aren't they licensed to like CPAP machines?

So, you know, it gives you your airflow and you can listen to music at the same time, have soothing sounds to put you to sleep even better. Right, right. Some white noise or dark. Yeah, yeah. That'd be a good idea. I think James Dyson has lost his mind, though. I'm not really sure what has happened in the past couple of years.

You know, they got the car that they were working on for the longest time. They supposedly spent six years developing this with over 500 prototypes. So somebody. Six years. Six years to come up with this. I could have come up with this in the past 20 or 30 minutes we've been talking before the show. I could have come up with something that looked just like this. Somebody's got a ton of money to spend right now.

So way before COVID was even a thing somebody was thinking of this is it wireless because it's gonna need a lot of power it's gotta be wireless right i would think it's wireless i saw a wire on the picture so i'm assuming it's gotta be wired wireless fan powered but but powered via 3.5 millimeter jack. I think, I think in like three months time, you're going to find a fully wireless one that may not be the same, but on Alibaba, I think they'll,

they'll be able to copy this pretty quickly. And, uh, yeah, this is really, it's very strange. Um, looking,

it has a little thing that covers your mouth. It's very industrial. Look, I, when I saw this, I'm like, Oh, they came out with like a Daft Punk covers your mouth. It's very industrial. Look, I, I, when I saw this, I'm like, Oh, they came out with like a Daft Punk themed thing,

but it's, it's not actually licensed by Daft Punk either. So like, I don't know. Um, but I, I kind of want to get one just so I feel like this kind of product could end up in the graveyard. It probably should be in the graveyard right now,

but I don't know. It's weird. It's weird. It's weird enough to in quirky enough to like toss in there. No, no pricing on it yet. What do we want to bet? It's like more than $500. Oh,

easily. Yes. Easily. Easily. You strap a Dyson vacuum cleaner to some noise, cancel, cancel, Bose noise,

noise, canceling headphones. I mean, I, I, I'm, I bet it'll be pushing $1,000. Like, this thing will be up there for sure.

You put a Dyson logo on it, and it's above $1,000. Six years. Well, I guess if the end of the world comes and you really need to breathe fresh air, at least you can listen to music at the same time. There you go. This would be great on planes, though. Think about it.

In a plane environment, it would be nice i i i guess maybe i want to be more uncomfortable i guess with your diced neck pillow you know like it's a package it filters 99 of air pollutants including bacteria allergens and car pollution and that one percent is going to be the 1% that kills you. That's the one that gets you. Yeah, exactly. Takes you down. Every time. Don't take chances.

All right. Well, so I'm guessing that's three. Well, two no's. I don't know. It doesn't sound like you guys are interested in this thing. But if Dyson wants to reach out and send us something to test, I'll wear this for a show or two and give it a go. And if it's, you it's louder than my server

fans, that does even bonus. I'll be going on a plane soon. I could definitely test it on a plane. So just send it our way. Exactly. Come on, Dyson. Let's do it. You're not losing your mind. I think you're doing a great job. Keep it up. All right. All right. What do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. This was last week, but it kind of skipped over it for whatever reason we were talking about the news stories last week. But according to Protocol, Sonos appears to be getting ready for a bigger role on the TV. The company is hiring multiple staffers for what could be a home theater OS project with job descriptions hinting at plans to run apps and experiences directly on the TV. This comes after the company considered various ways to play a bigger role in the TV streaming and recent years.

And according to multiple sources who spoke to Protocol on the condition of anonymity, anonymity is I can't say it anonymity, anonymity is, I can't say it. Anonymity. Anonymity. This is going to be a Jim Carrey joke there. Solos obviously declined to comment on this, but the company's looking for a UX lead, so a user experience lead for the next generation home theater experience who work, quote, across device surfaces, mobile, television, tablet, and hardware remote, interesting,

to deliver a next generation content delivery experience. Applicants need to have multiple years of experience designing for mobile and or TV. Kind of interesting here, and a couple of other like product managers and yada, yada, yada, that'll be coming out, but kind of an interesting space for Sonos to move toward. They typically have been mostly geared towards like whole house audio and how to make that experience better. Now, you can group a bunch of Sonos speakers in one room up and link them virtually in their software and make a surround sound out of it. But that's that's I don't think that's quite the same as what they're going for here. I know we're all big Sonos fans. I'm going to toss it around the room. TJ, what do you think about this?

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me. I've always kind of wondered why they never had anything else on the screen. You know, when you have the Sonos Arc or the Beam hooked up and you turn it to that HDMI input, it's always got the squiggly lines going across the screen. And I always thought that was a great opportunity for them to include some other kind of content in there. And honestly, if it was like literally any other company in the world, they would probably use it for advertising, right?

It would just like throw up a bunch of advertisements for products and services all the time. And that would be the end of it. So I'm interested to see what they do here. They've been trying to transition to some of their own services over the past couple of years with the launch of their own Sonos radio. Um, so it seems like it makes sense to me, but I'll have to see what, what it looks like as, as it launches. Totally agree. At this point, I feel like they own the sound space, especially on the TVs now. Right. Because like, even I have a Sonos surround sound in my, my place. Um, the next step after that is to get on the screen, own the screen.

And, you know, if they're already in there, if it's an add-on piece, it's easy, even easier to get on there if you just got to add one more component to your Sonos setup. So I see it as the next move. They went into audio, the streaming service, they went into that. They can transition into video streaming next. So it's just another way for them to make more money. Do you think there could be a Sonos TV box that you hook up and out of that box you get nice Sonos movies and all these other apps and stuff that maybe an Apple TV or a Fire TV may have? But also it links up to a to sono surround sound or something like that

you think that's what's coming i wouldn't see a separate hardware box for that specifically i would it would make more sense if they just build it into the sound bars um then they could just push the update out you know retroactively and just make everybody part of it i don't see them getting into a specific tv streaming, you know, hardware. Um, but I've been wrong about things before. Yeah. I've been wrong about many things. The one,

one thing I liked on there was that hardware remote. What do you guys, I mean, there's a remote, this could be a new remote. We have, we're on remote watch guys. They're obviously talking about Ava.

Come on. So there's still waiting for that one to show up. Uh, we were thinking it was going to come up this week, but still in the post. Sorry. Hopefully we'll have it next week and we get to see it live and in action. All right, let's move on here.

We've got a new little security story that kind of popped up right before we started this show. TJ, you put this in here, but it was over at Bitdefender. They're reporting that security researchers there investigated a bunch of different functions on the Wyze cam and found three vulnerabilities that would have given attackers direct access to the camera, including all the recordings stored on the SD card. Basically, it's kind of a long story, but they discovered these three vulnerabilities.

The first one is an authentication bypass, basically. So they can just remotely just get in and control pretty much everything. Turning the camera on and off, PTZ functions, all that good stuff. Second vulnerability was kind of like a more standard stack overflow thing, which kind of basically, once you find one of those, it's a way to crash the system. You can kind of poke around, and then you find a way to get in that way.

And they found that that would give attackers access to the live video feed. Kind of a bunch of caveats on that. And then the third one is kind of an oversight, I guess, when they were setting these up. But if you have the SD card in, the SD card accidentally links to a folder on the web server that exposes basically all the stuff that is on there. These vulnerabilities have been in the software going back to March 2019. And it's taken a while for Wyze to update these. But they have released patches,

but only for versions 2 and 3 cameras. Remember we talked about version 1 were getting dropped off the boat a couple of months back. They're not getting these. So if you got a version 1, get rid of it. First of all, it's insecure. And second of all, it's not getting

these security patches that you will need. So people can't look in and stream. TJ or Gavin, 2019, that's a long time to respond to something that like an authentication bypass. It's kind of serious, especially with a security camera yeah so you know a few things jumped out on this uh version one yeah not getting patched and that to me is like again i think companies should be responsible for stuff like that there's a lot of version one cameras out there and they're running on it so that you know something needs to be done there but you know when you're when you're reading through these vulnerabilities the only thing i'm thinking of is, oh, that's awesome. I can integrate that with my system if I get through that hole or how I could use these vulnerabilities to get the feed into Blue Iris to do, you know, those, these sound like good vulnerabilities as well to someone like me, right? But they are really bad vulnerabilities. They, they are on the local network. So as long as you're not exposing

it, like by opening a port, it looks like they're all based on a web server getting stood up without authentication and stuff like that. So, you know, again, keep your home network secure. Keep that safe, you know, because you never know. But the companies should be responsible for all tech out there because it's just going to sit there. People won't know their cameras may still be working and they're just going to be vulnerable. And who knows what happens from there? It does. It does make you a little more vulnerable, especially if one of the

version one cameras that's just not going to get patched. Now, to be fair, this is a local attack, right? So someone would already have to be on your network. But I go around and I see these wise cameras all the time, like in coffee shops and businesses, because they were inexpensive, right? They were cheap to put in and they tossed them up there to watch what was going on in the coffee shop remotely or whatever. And they forgot they were there. They probably never get updated. And they also have their Wi-Fi wide open so anybody can get on it and, you know, while they're drinking coffee in there. So yeah, probably not, probably not. There's a coffee shop down the street from me. It's actually a breakfast place that I go to. And they have like their Wi-Fi credentials like published, like they're sitting. It says here's the Wi-Fi and the password for it. So I go in there and I'm drinking

coffee. I'm looking across. I'm like, OK, I'll do that. And I scan the network. All their point of sale machines are on there. The backend computer is on there. I'm like, oh, so I went in and upgraded the firmware, turned on the guest network and told them to cover up the sign, but it's still up. They didn't really understand what I was talking about. So, uh, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah. Well, something I would like to know too, is if, you know, a lot of people, when they think of these cheaper devices, you know, they kind of always think that the support is not going to be there for a long-term, you know, especially for like a wise camera, you're paying $25 for it. And, you know, realistically, if you got one year of software updates out of it, that would be enough, you know, for the $25 hardware costs initially. But anymore, you know,

a lot of these security vulnerabilities are happening to all kinds of devices. So it doesn't necessarily mean anything if you spend more on a piece of hardware. It's all about the company and how they're going to handle the software updates for it. So, you know, I don't know of Wyze's complete history on this, but this doesn't look good for leaving it alone for three years. No, no. And it was reported to them in 2019. And they just kind of sat on that for a while to the point where, you know, they're not updating those version one cameras anymore. They could have, they've could have patched a bug that was the serious security issue that was reported to them in 2019. And at any time they, after that, they could have updated those version one cameras to not have that bug anymore. It didn't. And now the version one cameras, they're not updating anymore. They're only doing versions two and three. Uh, yeah. What a mess. What a mess. So I guess the

moral of the story is don't buy from companies that treat their customers this way and i'm not saying that like i understand them dropping the version one camera off i mean i understand that it's 25 35 camera you get what you pay for in that respect but at the same time like they should also stand by the product if there's a major security issue like this, where somebody can just kind of get in and watch the live stream, or they can get in and see what you're recording there, that's a problem. That's a big problem. And that should have been updated faster than three years, right?

So, yeah. Anyway, speaking of software not getting updated, this one's kind of gone mostly under the radar and not really reported. I'm not sure why. I did a search for this iHome company and didn't really come up with anything. But the smart device maker iHome announced pretty much this month that they would be shutting down their cloud server starting on April 2nd. An email was sent out to the user of the product that says, The Home Control app and iHome cloud service supporting smart devices will be terminated on April 2nd. An email was sent out to the user of the product says, the Home Control app and iHome

cloud service supporting smart devices will be terminated on April 2nd, 2022. So the day after, I guess on Saturday, it gets shut down. iOS users can still use HomeKit. However, since the iHome cloud service is terminated, users on non-iOS platforms will no longer be supported. Please use this guide to plan your transition to Apple's HomeKit to continue using your device. So this affects the iHome smart plugs, iHome smart monitor, the iHome motion sensor, and the iHome dual leak sensor, and the iHome door window sensor. So quite a few products that are just, yeah, you have an Android phone? Sorry, not going to happen anymore. Yeah, the only way I found out about this,

it was Greg in the chat actually posted about it, I think a couple of weeks ago. And it's very awful for them to only give a month notice, like less than a month notice for something like this to happen. You know, realistically, you should give, I would think, you know, a year or more notice to let somebody know that their products aren't going to work anymore. So pretty awful policy for my home right there. And the thing about these devices is they're being bought by like just the average guy. They don't follow security. They don't follow this stuff. You know, they're just, they just plug it in. They use it. And to them one day, they probably

won't even see this announcement. One day they'll come home and things just not working anymore. And they are going to probably be calling support and overloading support with why isn't anything working? Like these companies really need to think about this stuff. And this is why when I'm looking at devices, once it's reliant on a cloud in any way, I just avoid it altogether. It's just not worth it. You'll always find, for the most part, there's an alternative version that works locally only and integrates with your hub that you can find as well. Like the cloud services, we're seeing more and more of them going down these days. Well, and there may be a reason for that.

And so right inside the article there, it talks about being able to use it still with HomeKit. Well, HomeKit, as we all know, is a local control system. It doesn't rely on the cloud to go up and turn on and off devices. Most everything is processed locally on a home kit hub that's in the area but what i what i'm what i'm thinking here is maybe that as we're getting closer to to ramping up and and having matter devices maybe they're just like cutting their losses on this older stuff that they're not ever going to update or have some matter of support on the next generation products. I mean, I home has been around for, I have one of these things. It still works because I use it with home kit and it uses local control,

but like, like you said, if it was Greg and I had an Android, I would be out of luck come Saturday. So yeah, I, I, I don't know. Like it seems to me like this is kind of them just saying, okay, we're paying for these servers for the Android people on these these older products. We want them to go out and get the new products. Let's only support the Matter stuff on the new products. That brings in, I think, that local control and they don't have to pay for the servers

anymore for all those Android folks that bought a smart plug, you know, two, three years ago. Not not a great look and probably not going to be on the top of my list of things to buy, you know, when MatterStuff comes out, because who knows how they're going to treat their customers, you know, a couple of years later. Yeah, I don't know. Again, it's one of those you get what you pay for, right? Like it's, I think I paid $30 or $40 for a smart plug and I got good use out of it, but I don't know if it stopped working tomorrow, I'd probably just go buy, you know,

another like a, like a Wemo or something or just, or just honestly, I'd probably just wait till the matter stuff came out and use that. I guess that's their goal. Yeah. And the sad thing is too, is that I just,

I was just checking out Amazon and you can still buy several of these products. Granted they're reduced at this point, but you can still get them shipped to you via Amazon prime. Yeah. So people are going to still be buying these devices, not having any idea that they're not supported anymore for certain, for certain devices.

Do they at least say like Android, no Android support, I don't get only or no? It literally just says the exact same thing as always it has. Yeah, that's a problem in the retail world. I mean, they've got all that inventory and they're probably not going to update those,

you know, until enough people complain. Oh, what a mess. The smart home continues to be a mess in 2022. All right, TJ, you posted this article here about GE Lighting. I thought it was really interesting. But I guess GE Lighting has begun a flurry of cost-saving maneuvers as it kind of shuts down two Ohio plants, sells off its historic Mila Park headquarters, where it will remain as a tenant, and eliminates jobs in the U.S., Canada, and China, all a few weeks after quietly announcing a new boss. So the company says it intends to close,

I don't know how to say this, is it Buckris? I don't know. And Logan Factories? Bucyrus. Bucyrus, okay. Yeah, it's Ohio. I don't know how things get pronounced up that way. Let's see. They're closing those two factories. Um, they say it's probably going to happen by

September 30th, but no, like nothing like formally announced. Um, those two locations have been making fluorescent and halogen bulbs. So like in the article, it said, yeah, we're probably not going to be manufacturing those very much longer because everything is literally moving to LED. And yeah, even they admitted in the article I saw that they didn't know how long the government would actually allow them to continue making those things. Because yeah, those kind of things are not so much in popularity anymore. GE also agreed to sell its 1 million square foot, 130 acre Anila Park building and grounds there to an affiliate of the Milwaukee real estate company, Phoenix Investors. They expect to stay on site and be a tenant there for a while as well.

Reports of the closure job losses and property transactions first circulated in Ohio media outlets. I assume that's how you picked up on this TJ. Uh, but, uh, it's just interesting that, that they've, they've kind of, uh, kind of started to pare down what once was a pretty massive part of GE, right? I think about like all the GE lighting that, um, I mean, you see in the stores that I've owned over the years. These are kind of like some crazy products that are, that still exist out there. And it's all being paired back to become, you know, a smaller, smaller, smaller company.

And I'd say paired back. In that article, TJ, I thought it was interesting. The factories had, they were going to say, oh, it's like 50 jobs that are lost out of the factories. Like it was a super like highly automated factory that they're shutting down. And it's like super they can pump out a ton of light bulbs with 50 people working there. But it's still not as cheap as just having them imported from China. So I don't know. This must be bigger news up in Ohio. How are you guys feeling up there? Yeah, GE's been a pretty big company for the longest time. So I think anytime you talk about a company like this

breaking apart or selling iconic pieces of history, it really signifies like the end of a chapter. And for total job loss, just in Ohio, uh, the plant in Bucyrus, it's about an hour North of me. They're going to lose 175 jobs. And then down in Logan, they're going to lose about 50 jobs. So not a ton of jobs lost in the warehouse portion, but overall it sounds like they're going to make drastic cuts throughout the whole company. Um, and pretty interesting too, that they're going to sell their Nila Park location, but still keep renting out in it as well. So they must be really trying to wind everything down at this point.

Yeah. And going on to say the reason we're talking about this is GE was purchased by Savant. So it's now like GE Lighting, a Savant company is the official name of it. It's overseen by Kathy Stereo. I guess that's how you say her name. It's kind of a cool name. The company named president back in February, promoting from the chief marketing officer. She replaced CEO Bill Lacey, who left early in February and now is vice president of finance over at Amazon. So it's kind of an interesting story. One thing I did think was interesting was how many, when I think factory, I think like thousands of people working

there assembling light bulbs. And to read that and say, oh, it was only, I'm not saying it's only 170, but 170, I wasn't thinking it was going to be that big. Um, Gavin, when you think the future, uh, do you think about GE lighting? I think not in the smart lighting. I don't think of GE in the smart lighting space. I know they, they are there, but in the led space and they did mention in the article, the LEDs are making last longer, you know, so people are going to buy less of them. You know, this is probably just a shift, you know so people are going to buy less of them you know this is probably just a shift you know not no longer making halogen you know so let's close up those factories let's clean up shop get more efficient focus on leds you know and then we just

have to take that loss that hey we're making such a good product with leds now that you know we won't be selling as many and we got to accommodate for that. There's going to be an influx probably of people buying now as they convert their houses over. But I mean, when I moved into my house a number of years ago, I switched over everything to LED. And I think I've only replaced one bulb outside and it was probably the cold that broke it at that point. But every, I haven't replaced a bulb since where before LED, I'm pretty sure I was replacing a bulb a month, you know, or something like that, you know, so it's a different, I think it's just them changing with the times and the new boss is being smart about it. You know, they got to make money and we got to get rid of some of the old stuff. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about that

aspect of it. Um, until you said that I, we moved in here like five or six years ago and I, I mean, we didn't have any lights now. So I just put in little four inch cans and a little four inch LEDs and I've replaced, I don't know, maybe 10 of them over that period of time, but not like incandescent lamps and not over the period of six years. I still have led strip lighting. That's working fine underneath the kitchen cabinet counter. Like I haven't replaced any of those. Uh, you know, in the past, those would be some kind of like halogen bulb that would be dead or dying a number of times

over the five, six year span. So yeah, that does make a lot of sense that demand for these products has gone way down. The pricing has gone way down. You know, LEDs are still a premium, but not as much as they used to be. And it makes financial sense to get them. So yeah, yeah, you're right LEDs are still a premium, but not, not as much as they used to be. Um, and it, it makes financial sense to get them. Uh, so yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. Uh,

with, with those two things and pressures of, of, of getting those in, it makes sense to, to kind of pull back and scale back that aspect of the company and maybe trim some fat. Uh, they're, they're in Ohio. That's what you have to do around here. Tr in ohio that's that's what we've called the story we gotta we gotta make room for intel somehow so all right well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 382 all right kind of moving out of that and on to the mailbag gavin you had a bunch of emails flying back and forth this week. First, we'll talk about this one from Peter, listener Peter Harris, who emailed in. And I guess he was talking with you about a bunch of stuff that he has.

He has quite the system that he has assembled. It's all DIY, kind of putting things together. Looks like he's got Insteon, Hikvision, Ring doorbells, Slade smart locks, all sorts of really cool stuff here. I mean, all this sounds like stuff I have, like Ecobee thermostats. I've got that in my house. I've got a number of these things in the house.

But he was having problems, I guess, with his Plex system, which is his media server and was kind of asking a couple of questions on, on what to do there and maybe kind of get some ideas on, on what he should do next in his house. So I'll start with you, Gavin. I knew you talked with him a little bit more and then I, you know, kind of toss it around a little bit and see if we have any ideas of what direction he should go next. Yeah.

First of all, I love listener feedback. So don't be afraid if you have questions or something and send it in, you know, that's what we're here for. But, you know, Peter, you know, it was great to see this one because, and why I like this one is because like you, a lot of the stuff he had, I'm very familiar with, I have similar setups. I had similar issues, you know, um, and it's just the state of DIY. It's the state of the smart home. It's a mismatch of stuff. But what I really focused on was his home server question. He had a computer sitting there running Windows 10 with a bunch of drives just plugged into it that was serving his content. And I wanted to focus in on that because the first red flag i had was there was no uh redundancy in that at all if one of those drives fail and they were big drives they're

like eight terabytes big or big if one fails he's losing everything on that drive so you know over email you know a few discussions i was you know we're very familiar with unraid we all love unraid so i was pushing him towards Unraid, taking a look at that. And he was actually researching it. And as an alternative, he's running Windows 10. I threw at him Stablebit Drive Pool. And that's an application that you throw on top of Windows that will take all those drives and then present them as a single drive, and then also allow you to create redundancy. So you have stuff backed up in case a drive fails. So those are a couple alternatives, you know, that would be to me, before even talking about the smart home stuff, let's get that

taken care of backups as well. Redundancy is not backup. That's a lot to backup though. It's a lot to backup. So if anything, figure out how much you can backup and backup the most critical stuff. If you have documents on there and stuff, always backup that. Videos you can always find again later. If you have to re-rip them off your DVDs or whatever,

you can always do that again later. But figure out your backup plan, get the redundancy in there in case a drive fails and then start focusing on making uh the rest of the stuff because i just get nervous when i see something not protective i've been through too many drive failures last week or week before i had a drive failure you know and because of my plan i just pulled it out put in a new one it rebuilt in six hours and it was you know i was back in shape i could sleep better that night you know, I was back in shape. I could sleep better that night, you know. So hopefully I'm not ruining his sleep by making him think about that right now.

But, you know, that's the first thing I let I let you talk about your Plex, what you thought about the Plex issue. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get to that. There are a couple of things that came out of that, but I kind of want to like, okay, so your, your, your first thing, your first big red flag that you saw was the, the data and, and how to like harness that. I would say, yeah, implement some kind of backup strategy just because you install now this program, the stable bit that you recommend. I just looked it up. That's really cool. I like that. That would be, that would go a long way to making sure that if one drive fails or maybe two drives fail, then you don't have such a big problem. I ran that for years.

It's cheap. It worked really well. That was my redundancy plan before I went to Unraid. Now, it's still not a backup. Correct. Yeah, Raid is not a backup. This thing's not going to be a backup. Like, you still need to implement some kind of 3-2 plan or 311 or whatever, like make a copy of the most important things you

have, upload them to Amazon S3 or, you know, some, there's plenty of like, I think even Synology has like a C2 cloud thing that you can upload stuff to now. Get stuff out of the house because your house burns down, all this stuff is gone. If you have like me, I've got a Sonali drive. If I've got, um, like family photos and pictures of my daughter when she was born and all that stuff, like if all that goes, because you know, the lightning strikes the house, the house burns down or whatever. I'm never able to get back to that hard drive. Um, at least I know that I have a copy of it, you know, out there in, in, in the cloud somewhere that I can securely get to and, and, and download if I need to. Um, but TJ, what there in, in, in the cloud somewhere that I can securely get to and, and, and download if I need to. Um, but TJ, what was your big red flag that you saw that you're not

red flag, I guess I'm a little being hyperbolic there, but like, what would you start with, uh, to, to help him improve on what he's got here? He's like, like Gavin said, he's got a lot of good stuff. I would immediately fix the, the server issue there. there. I personally run, I think I'm up to like 30 terabytes right now with like 20 terabytes used in an unraid server. And nothing makes me more nervous than thinking about like all that stuff just disappearing. And as I say that, I'm going to knock on some wood here because I don't have a proper backup in place just yet. I'm not even sure how I would start backing that up. So maybe we all need to have a private conversation later or something. But that's what I would do.

I would figure out some platform that you're comfortable with. You know, Unraid is great, just like we've talked about many times before. If you're not so technical savvy where, you know, maybe Unraid is a little daunting for you, I would look into a Synology unit or some other kind of NAS. But the Synology units, I think, work pretty good as long as you're not trying to run Plex off of them as well. Yeah, well, I think even some of the newer ones you can do.

I ran Plex off of them, which is fine, but kind of one of the things he talks about is Plex works okay, but stutters on certain TV shows. So what he's doing is kind of, I do this in my house and I had the same problem with, especially with TV shows, using the, like a, like a roof mounted antenna and HD home run. He almost has the exact same system I do. He even has, he has the Beehive. I have that little Beehive $25 sprinkler system. It's great.

Yeah, I think he said he had an antenna as well too, right? This is why I was excited about this, because it had a lot of stuff that we were familiar with. Yeah, it's got tons of stuff I'm familiar with. Anyway, going back to how to fix that Plex, basically on that computer that he's probably, it's probably an older Windows 10 or something, it's probably just getting bogged down

trying to transcode some of the higher definition stuff to a player that can't accept that higher definition signal. So maybe the Fire Stick or maybe, I don't know, maybe the Samsung TV is kind of an older Samsung TV. I'm not sure. But typically what happens is Plex determines what signal basically those devices are compatible with and then has to on the fly, transcode it and send it out over your network. Now, your Wi-Fi may be slow. You may have Wi-Fi issues that could be compounding it. But

typically, if Plex can do its job transcoding, those bits get to you pretty quickly anyway. And most of the time I've had issues with it, it was because Plex was bogging down. So moving that off of the computer, or I think, Gavin, you even suggested maybe getting a little video card and putting it in there and kind of giving Plex access to that, where it can kind of offload that transcode. We've discovered that transcoding is so much faster on video cards. Just let the video card handle it. And the CPU processor just does nothing. All it has to do is serve files. That may go a long way of incorrecting this. And I know you guys are going to push towards that unraid, but I'm going to push back and say, get the Synology.

The large drives are cheap. The Synology is not cheap, but the software is really good on it, especially for a novice who just wants to go in and like put a drive in, set up a drive pool and hit go. You can't go wrong. It's hard to break those. It's, you could get QNAP, but I wouldn't recommend that one right now. It's one of those security things. I like those little NAS boxes.

My only gripe with them is they're expensive. They're really expensive up here. For what they are. They don't even include drives. His server is a four-core that he's running the Windows 10 on, which is more than enough to to service files and stuff like that and i just think if he got a graphics card offloading transcoding or turn off transcoding altogether because most end devices can handle it right

um if you have videos that doesn't handle re-encode them into like a if you have like h265 re-encode it into h264 you know you know, and see if that helps you, right? Because it's probably choking on the 265 transcoding. Right, right. Yeah, it could go one way or the other. There's a lot of, like, when you get down in the weeds like this, there's a lot of little dip switches that you can flip back and forth that are going to make, what is going to happen, it's going to be like your printer, Gavin.

Like, it's either going to work or it's not. Like, you're just going to have to find the right magic incantation. I knew it would show up sometime. I knew the printer. It's sitting next to me looking at me. All right. I can keep working for the next week. All right. Well, give a shout out to Gavin's printer. And so a lot of things to do here. And I think everybody kind of agrees, like, let's get the data situation taken care of and at least backed up. I do like that software option because there's only like $30 to do that. And maybe that can help, you know, not necessarily back up and make that a little bit more stable. And then you can kind of go on and address some of the other issues that you could have here in the system.

And I think I may have a license for that. I mean, if Peter, if you're going to go with stable bit, I can look up to see if I have my license and I'll give that to you. I'll donate that to you just to help you because I can't sleep at night knowing that your data is not safe. Secure your data, Peter. I mean, we're're gonna get you there we're gonna make sure you're okay so so many terabytes that are vulnerable i know right think of the terabytes think of the 40 terabytes all together oh my gosh wow all right well moving on gavin you got another one uh are both of these people in can? I think they are. I was proud this week.

Us Canadians represented this week. All my viewer and listener feedback, they're from Canada. Peter was actually down the road. Ian's on West Coast, I believe it was. You know, like I joined the show and all of a sudden all these Canadians are coming out. I love it. I love it. I love it.

Yeah, that's great. Well, Ian has got quite the long email to you here. But basically, I think the gist was he was asking you about network security and talking about segmentation and how to kind of prevent his maybe his old wise cameras from like infecting his network. What was the gist here? So the gist of it is, you know, I guess he also heard me on the Home Tech, not Home Tech, Home Gadget Geeks podcast,

where we were talking networking. And I guess he was saying, you know, a low cost, low budget way is to create a different network for your IoT devices. Right. And we got into that discussion as to how I felt about that. But I also wanted to bring this to you guys, you know, like in the pro space in your own spaces, what are your thoughts about creating separate networks for IoT devices? Don't. Don't do it unless you want every single phone call ever to come to you. A lot of, I see this recommended all the time in like the home automation subreddit and a couple other places on Reddit

where people want to create separate VLANs for their devices and all that good stuff. In a corporate environment or an environment where you need to do that, it totally makes sense to do that, right? There's some places we go into that require their cameras to be on a separate VLAN so that way they can't get hacked or whatever their reasoning is.

It adds a lot of confusion to the network though and makes things just not work the proper way in my experience. There's a lot of finagling you have to do in order to get something to work correctly again. So I personally avoid it every chance that i get unless it's absolutely needed yeah i have to agree i i've gotten in fights with our network guy uh at the office about this because he's he's he's an it guy he definitely wants to um get everybody you know segmented network have the traffic routed here and he knows how to do all that stuff. But my whole point, at least on the pro side, is that's great for you. But if you get on the job site, you got to think about the lowest common denominator of that's

going to be out there. And that could be that could be the installer that's at the job site trying to get this up and going. That could be the technician that has to come back and service it. And it's completely undocumented and there's no way to know what port goes where. And that could be the Comcast guy there, the ISP guy that walks in the door when the Internet's down and says, well, it all works when I unplug their stuff. And then who who looks like the fool for putting in, you know, $10,000 of networking when the Comcast, the free Comcast box works. Why can't you get your stuff work? Yeah. Get, get, get it out of here. Um, it's, it's a business nightmare is what it is. And unless you're willing to be the CTO of every resident that you have, I mean, it's perfectly valid position to

take, but it's a service nightmare. It is an absolute service nightmare in the residential world. Now, I completely understand VLANs. I completely understand why you do those network segmentations. We talked about a stupid camera having vulnerabilities for three years, you know, like, and that's exactly this kind of thing that would be like, okay, somebody can attack that and then, you know, sidestep into something else in the network, or they attack something on the network and then sidestep into that. And they're watching you walk around your house and your birthday suit. Like that, that kind of thing is, is a threat is,

is a problem. Um, but I think better security practices elsewhere are, are, would be better for you in the, in the long run. At least the way I've seen it in the house. I would recommend against, mostly against segmenting things off inside a residential install. If it's your house, if it's your what they call a home lab and you want to set up fancy VLANs

and segment things off and figure out how to get the multicast broadcast to go through and punch holes in the VLAN to think where things can still – you can do that. But I don't know. I don't recommend that at all. These days, it doesn't make sense and if you buy if you're buying quality gear yeah some of it may still communicate to a server in china but that's kind of one of those things that you kind of have to live with when you put an unknown computer on your on your network if that makes you uncomfortable don't buy it don't buy the smart light bulb because it's going to talk to you in china every time exactly and my personal view on it i've played with v lines in the past i thought about it um but

getting everything to work was just so much of a pain like we deal with this i deal with this at work all the time you know firewalls ports you know forwarding two-way one-way and those people are pros and they can't even get it right i'm not even gonna try and get it right at my home network right i i just give up so I put most of my focus on just securing the network in general and ensuring the devices I put on it are, are quality devices. I keep up to date with their security, et cetera, et cetera, you know? Um, but everyone's needs are different. Um, if it works for you, it works for you. Um, I just think it's more hassle than it's worth. What I found too, is my house is so integrated you know

like my cameras talk to my blue iris server which talked to my tvs which talked to you know all sorts of things i ended up having to i would end up having to move pretty much everything onto this isolated network right which then makes that just my main network like it didn't make sense right like because i'd have 90 of my stuff over on this isolated network because they're all talking to each other anyways, right? Right, right. My sensors and stuff are all ZigBee and Z-Wave. So they're not on my wifi. And that's why I say with IoT devices,

you know, as much as possible, I just avoid wifi devices. I throw ZigBee, I throw Z-Wave, you know, HomeKit, Swap, Bluetooth, you know, I try to understand what devices I have on this network right but you know this is a cheap way um if you don't go with vlans you know there's devices out there that monitors your network too um for suspicious activity and it will notify you devices like fingbox um i think defender was one that you could throw on your network. You guys mentioned a couple others in the space.

Well, yeah, Domot's. Domot's and Oversee, but I don't think they're doing network traffic analysis. Yeah, they're not trying to do that. They're trying to make sure that what is on the network is up and going and healthy is their goal. Okay, and then there's the Unify built in. Unify has built in tools, or even if you run a PF server, there's plugins you can throw in that little monitor. Unify one doesn't work. So don't even bother turning that one on. Turn the PF since one on, that's pretty good. Yeah, exactly. So there's other cheap options out there as well. But

segregating your network is, you know, if you got it working, keep going for it. But I don't recommend it for other people. Just focus on other ways of securing your network is, you know, if you got working, keep going for it. But I don't recommend it for other people. Just focus on other ways of securing a network. Yeah. And a lot of times what we focus on, too, is designing a system that works without the Internet and the Internet is just a bonus. Right. So like just how you were talking about using Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, Gavin, you know, we use a similar approach, right? As I want all my devices to work, even if there was an internet outage or something like that. So I think if people were to maybe think about that whole process a little more, we wouldn't have as many Wi-Fi connected devices on

somebody's network. And then you'd have your risk factor would be down by a lot as well. So I think that's a good step as well as just figure out if you really need those devices to have an actual internet connection. And if they don't, then don't buy them. Yeah, I think a lot of this gets solved with Matter and at least the industry shifting away from using maybe, from using Wi-Fi as the go-to communications protocol between devices that just need to transmit a few packets back and forth. really think that's gonna you you have high hopes for this matter i'm hoping it it like no no no no not not necessarily matter i'm hoping that it prods people to say okay that topology is proven we've been using it in the in in the pro space for decades now there's no reason why we we're already we're already mostly doing it in the home but we still have devices

that why do you need a light switch to be on the network and have a web socket connection all the way to server in china full-time like why does that make sense data harvesting it all comes down to these companies are creating this cheap device for you and what they're getting is your data whether or not they're using it or not they at this point now have every time you've turned on and off this light switch but you can get all of that information with the zigbee network you can get all that keeping off of your wi-fi like you can aggregate that somewhere else you know on a on a well no if it's built yeah but then these companies will have to rely on that edge router or will have to rely on whatever hub you're going through to supply them the information they want to be the people that

collect it firsthand and sell it at that point right and whether or not they know how to sell it yet it's like you you just they probably got all this information they don't know how to sell it yet you know so at some point they will figure out how to sell it and then your clicks your clicks are making that's, your clicks are making. That's when your clicks are really going to make some money for somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Click it.

This guy turned on and off the light switch on the wall. I have a feeling he wants to book this trip over to Scotland. Yeah. There we go. Let's look at his wise cam. Let's just watch him on this insecure video camera that i hacked oh man that's that's great stuff um yeah cool well networking in a nutshell i guess on the pro side it should be known that we're interested in the like the most easiest least, you know, friction for everyone involved install. And so that doesn't include

VLANs. And for some guys out there, they're probably yelling, no, no, no, we do that on every installment. I'm sure you do. But, you know, for the vast majority of installs out there, and I will say, yeah, I'm comfortable saying the vast majority, because the vast majority of the installs out there don't involve a custom integrator. They involve just getting the ISP's modem and plugging it in, plugging something into it. And those don't have VLANs on them for all these devices.

So you kind of have to take cues. Like there was all these times as an integrator, I was like, we'll take cues from these big companies that have figured it out. Take it if If you have an issue or a problem with a process and how security system, how your security business works, look at ADT, look at their pricing, see how they set up and sell things. Like they, they can be an example. They don't have to be the, the example. They don't have to be what you go after and mimic, but you can see what they did and to understand the problems that they had to overcome in bulk. Same thing with Comcast, same thing with, um, you know, all, all of these bigger,

uh, firms that serve millions of customers and not just a few hundred or thousand in a local area. Um, see, see how they alleviated those pain points and, uh, kind of go, go that direction. It's always helpful, at least in my opinion. All right, we got a pick of the week. This is Wi-Fi related, right? So what is this thing? All right. So someone has invented the White Claw 6 mesh. And this is this is kind of cool. It's, it's just a unify access point, wifi six mesh that somebody has painted a white claw logo on and they've kind of done their own little thing to it. It says hardwired, which is nice. It's not, not completely mesh and says

access point where the flavor should be. I don't know. Those things are about the same size as a white claw can. So I thought it was funny. This would, uh, this would get stolen at any location near me. So if you were to, if you were to put this at any bar or any restaurant, I'm sure somebody would just take it and not even think anything about it. But I thought this was brilliant because the first thing I thought of was putting one of these in my bar area and then just, you know, like disguising it as a regular can on the wall or something like that. And it blends in with the environment. Pretty smart. Yeah. You know, some of these some of these ubiquity products, not these, but the other ones have the little

like camouflage or wood grain sticker that I guess you can stick over the top of them. That's what ubiquity this is. This listen, ubiquity. I know you can't get you have any product anyway to sell. So listen to me. I've got something for you here. It's a great marketing idea. Partner with liquor companies, Coca-Cola. You've got a Coca-Cola can next to this thing on your website. Partner with them and get wraps

for these Wi-Fi six mesh things. And anything that looks like a can in the store, just go out, get Snapple, whatever. Just get get them logoed up. And yeah'll save your company ubiquity it'll it'll match all the other covers they have like they have the g4 instant cover and they have the one for the nano hd which is the one you were talking about but they're all pretty boring you know they're like black or camo or wood grain make them stylish make i mean these things are actually pretty neat nice looking

anyway like and you can kind of ceiling mount them and drop ceiling and they look pretty good Make them stylish. I mean, these things are actually pretty neat, nice looking anyway. And you can kind of ceiling mount them and drop ceiling and they look pretty good. Still, like, no, just have them out there in front of everybody. White Claw, Coca-Cola, 7-Up. Yeah, just get them out. I've seen people get creative with the UniFi products. Somebody 3D printed an R2-D2 stand for the Dream Machine Pro. Or Dream Machine, not the Pro, right? And you just slide it in and it looks like a little R2-D2.

You put some stickers on it. It was great. I thought it was awesome. But people have gotten very creative with this. And their form factor allows for that. Yeah, you hear this ubiquity. You're missing. Get your licensing people to call Disney up and Marvel.

And I mean, who wouldn't want an Iron Man Dream Machine? Who wouldn't want that? this ubiquity you're missing get your licensing people to call disney up and marvel and and i mean who wouldn't want an iron man dream machine who wouldn't want that i i'd buy that instead of a blue light it's got to be like bright white or you know whatever they're gonna have to change that but yeah that that would be great there's so many things we could do with these dream machine it's just perfect for that i've seen someone do a Death Star print, I think, on the top of it. There's opportunities here. Yeah. They're missing big, big bucks in this licensing agreement. So Ubiquiti, that's how we'd save your... I mean, it can't sell anything else. It's easy to get stickers. So that's all I'm saying. I'm on their page now. There's no networking product to buy. There's no cameras. Can can't buy those i think i bought all the cameras out sorry last

week oh g g3 flex are in stock order now so april fools they're not in stock anymore all right guys all right if you got any feedback comments pics of the weeks or emails for gavin uh go ahead and email so email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm and fill out that online form. All right, well, that wraps up another week in home technology news and ideas and unraid talk for this week. Guys, got anything big plans for the weekend? Well, I was hoping to get my Ava remote for the show this week, but I think I'll have it by the end of the week and we

can talk about it next week. So I'll be able to play with it all weekend and be able to get it set up and we'll see what happens with it. Nice. Gavin, what about you? Believe it or not, I'm still messing around with my, my Tyler project. Oh no, I believe it. I believe it. So, so if you're in the home tech hub area this this week i gave like a preview of some of the stuff i do with my tv you know like having the camera at the front door come on uh changing channels using alexa and then my new tyler thing and i've been looking at tyler videos you know out there you know i like this avant one and i even stole some of the features off that and implemented it. And it has changed the way I view TV. That's all I have to say.

I watch like four things at once and flip back and forth and I'm loving it so much. I just want to give one call out to anybody out there that if you are familiar with FFmpeg and the SendCMD command, please reach out to me, please. Because I am having problems getting this one thing and this could change this tyler project big time for me so you know just feel free to reach out for me you know like i'd love it if you can just get this one thing figured out i i liked your uh the um the doorbell thing that you have implemented where it like swings out and puts the little picture of the doorbell camera video on the front of the TV, kind of like as an overlay. Um, that's really, that's really cool. And I know a lot of, like, you can get that while you're watching an Apple TV or whatever, if you have a HomeKit camera hooked up, but this is a little

bit more flexible for you and kind of looks better, honestly. I do multiple things with that. So when someone rings the doorbell, it shows up on all the active TVs in the house. When somebody walks up the driveway or, you know, it will detect somebody coming up the driveway or a car pulling into the driveway. Then it will show on either the gym TV or my computer at my desk so I can see that and it doesn't bother the rest of the house. Right. So there's there's cool things I do with this stuff, but it's not easy. Not when you're dealing with FFMP. Yeah, that's the hardest. That's the hardest one. Well, my, my, uh, my, my project for

not really the weekend, but maybe, maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow and the next day, it depends on how much I can get done at work um my wife's going out of town so i might be able to take apart at least take apart and see what a what i'm going to get out of the uh of that that vent hood uh and and if it'll give me enough time that if i break it i can run to the store just buy a new one and put it in but well the vent hood should have 120 coming into it i've but well the vent hood should have 120 coming into i've been thinking about this and i have 120 coming into it you could tap off of that if you need to get what you need well depending on the you know the device you have and what it needs so oh you should take pictures and share your findings so because i'm gonna want to do this too

yeah don't break it don't break it you'll never live it down no no i i mean it what i'm thinking is is there's a little control board in there right and i'm thinking i can just take that out like because it's probably easily removed i can just take it out and then i can kind of prod and poke around at that to see how it works outside of the vent hood because no one's going to use it like we're not even using that thing we never do i mean yeah until it's broken and then she going to use it. Like we're not even using that thing. We never do. I mean, yeah. Until it's broken. Then she want to use it all the time. What are the odds? That's how it works.

She's going to come home on Saturday or whatever. And like the first thing she's going to do is, but no, she's not going to do that. That won't happen. Yeah. Okay. Place your bets now.

I also want to give a shout out to the home gadget geeks crew. I was on their podcast, hockey network last week. You know, it was a great time, you know, so make sure you go check out their podcast. It's for the average guy, you know, Home Gadget Geeks. Yeah, go check that out. But 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 the 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 on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to the private Slack chat at the hub where you can see what Gavin's up to and watch those videos. I pinned the video to the top there. So once you come in, if you can't find the video, because who can find anything in Slack, that thing's pinned to the top now so you can click that and see the videos you know it was pretty bad when posting those videos i just wanted to make sure that my tv wasn't too high you know like that that's what i was most nervous about when posting those videos i was like i hope nobody says this tv my tv's at eye level so i was like all right i'll post this video yeah i think owen will roast you if it's too high so it's at eye level so i was like all right i'll post this yeah i think owen will

roast you if it's too high so it's not near my fireplace at all like yeah there's there's a very anti-fire tv over fireplace contingency uh growing inside the hub so if if you want to join just for that to join that crew yeah yeah i i think we found a subreddit that was dedicated towards tv too high it's like our tv too high art i follow it it's so good all right all right uh if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that wraps up another week in home tech for everyone here have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Toodle-oo. Take care.