HomeTech.fm - Episode 384 - Insteoff

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

This week on HomeTech: The gang takes a visit back to the HomeTech Grave Yard to bury Insteon since the company abruptly shut its doors down over the weekend. Garadget announces a new product (in 2022!) for Control4, Canada gets blazing fast internet speeds, LiFX looks like it could be next, Youtube gets to stream some sportsball games, and this week's pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 22nd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology and home automation. This week we're going to do a couple of things different here this week, but this week we've got a couple of uh things to talk about a couple of things that are ending up in the graveyard evidently uh now that now that we we kind of know what's gonna we took a week off right uh for a holiday I guess I don't know like we had stuff going on it was a busy busy busy week and uh yeah

crazy things happen so yeah here we are um but first i kind of wanted to talk about this story i saw over in ce pro about av suppliers blowing chunks tj did you see this thing yeah i'm really salty about this whole article because they've basically asked their you know readers or viewers or whatever to submit different uh manufacturers or home automation companies that were awful during the pandemic right and if you're part of the the uh the hub chat um you've heard the different stories from crestron or control for lutron cisco pretty much everybody you know is having problems because it's covid right my thing about this whole article though is that they went and asked all these people all their comments and everything and they didn't name any names what was the point of doing this article if we don't know who they're talking about why did you even write the article you shouldn't even

wrote the article because it seems to me like you didn't want to talk about the companies and that's cool they probably pay you that's fine but why write the article it's his name names you cowards yeah you know um this reminds me the uh what is that ipvmM that we talk about quite a bit in the hub. They do not hold punches. If a manufacturer is messing up, if they're reporting better than usual sales, if they're reporting worse than usual sales, they will call people out left and right for bad product. And that is really what separates a trade magazine from an advertising magazine I suppose

man I really wish we had that in our industry we we don't seem to have we don't seem to have that with all these blanks I mean there's some stuff on here it's like we can never get an answer about shipping dates it's like wait you you pay for something you never get an answering when it's going to ship like why are you involved with this company at all? Like that doesn't make any sense to me. So, uh, man, I get it that everybody's having a rough time right now,

but name names. Yeah. And I like how they like bolted certain parts of the article. Like it mattered more, but you don't know who it's about. So why does it matter? Like one of the things is blank, never stocks enough product.

Their buyer slash purchaser is the worst. can never keep a shelf stocked for longer than two months who is it it could be home depot who knows it could be anybody so i wish we knew it's uh it'd be nice but i guess we'll never know gavin do you want to call anybody out that you know that doesn't stock their shelves pretty much everybody right now has no stock so i mean that's probably why they didn't have to name names because we're just assuming everybody you know let's drop a name right now sonos they don't have any stock unify don't have any stock in a belly no stock. CC Pro, how hard is that? Yeah. That was easy, you know, like breaking news. Yeah. Speaking of Ubiquiti as well, like it's crazy.

I've signed up for like the email alerts on their website and I never get them even when stuff is in stock. I have to find out about Ubiquiti stuff through a subreddit. Oh, that reddit i have i have an app i have an app set up on my phone to notify me whenever this this subreddit posts because they always post the the most in stock uh updates for everything that's how i have to buy ubiquity stuff i like greg's comment ubiquity has stock stuff in stock that you don't want exactly oh ton of stock patch cables cool yeah there you go hey yeah the um the reddit thing though we should probably put a link to that. Well, no, but maybe we shouldn't talk about that anymore. But what I thought was interesting is somehow they scrape their Shopify store to figure out how many products they actually have in stock, which is really, really clever.

So you'll see that they have like 40 switches or 500 cameras or three cameras. I mean, I've seen some super like 10 12 cameras are for sale it's like that's all that's all you guys got in on that boat the boat should be bigger make the boat bigger every now and then you come across a tool that's so good that you just don't want to share it because you know once it gets out there it's gonna ruin it for you so you know let's put this in the things we don't talk about. We don't talk about Bruno, and we don't talk about the Ubiquity subreddit that TJ found. There you go.

Poor Bruno. All right, guys. What do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. First up, actually, a new product. Before we get started, here's a new product.

Because we're going to wade through this graveyard towards the end of this conversation. But I ran across this today. It's Control 4 related, but I don't know if it has to be. They're touting their Control 4 certification. So the company is Garaget, and I think we've probably all heard of them. TJ, I'm not sure. Oh, you didn't? Okay. Gavin and I have heard of them because Gavin and I have either seen them in our adjacent spaces, and I've used many of their little Security 2.0 buttons, I guess.

So I never had to bother soldering wires on a button or whatever. Anyway, the best way to do it. Yeah, it was twenty dollars of of time saving for me is the way I figured it. Anyway, they have come out with a wireless controller hub, suppose for that integrates with control for systems. They have a control for drivers, control for certified, which means that once you get it up and going on the network in the Composer software, you don't have to install the driver or anything. It just appears there. You can drag and drop it over in your project, do your bindings. It manages the DHCP IP address, the local IP address and all that good stuff. You don't have to worry about it. It looks like their other device that they have, like their DIY device

that kind of does the same thing. But instead of going out to the cloud, it's local control, which we'll probably talk a little bit about that later too. But it offers basically a little web-based administrative interface, but also integration with control four. So it's got a siren on it. It's got some, you can use, it's got like a laser on it it's got some you can use it's got like a laser sensor it's kind of interesting that they have this uh uses like a laser light sensor to

know if the door is open and closed so they put a reflector on the door and uh you can use that or you can use a dry contact if you've got that um already installed um all pretty good i forgot to look at the price what is a hundred dollars for this thing um yeah 100 us dollars and if you've got one of the myq garage door opener things you probably would want to um you probably want to get a what do they call it security plus 2.0 wireless through door or wireless dry contact adapter because you're going to need that regardless of this product um at the end of the day so 120 to integrate a garage door opener you never have to worry about cloud subscriptions the cloud going down it all works locally it's a beautiful thing

uh gavin what do you think about this thing i think it's great i don't know why it's just geared towards the pro space though um they mentioned control 4 but it looks like something that can be integrated with a lot of other things other than control 4 uh their do it your diy version looks like it does have some cloud dependency so the difference with this is it's all local um local is the way to go i know we're going to mention that later on in the show but i like where this is this has gotten it's giving you an easy-to-install package for all our garage doors that are just a pain in the ass now. I don't know why in 2022 we fight with auto-main garage doors and printers.

I don't know why. Yeah, TJ was going, what in the world would you use this for? And I was like, well, we have a forum that we kind of administrate over that has like four or 5,000 dealers in it. And they're in there all the time asking about garage. Like it probably, it was pretty bad.

I will say like pretty bad once a week or so you would get this question about what to do with a garage door opener. Just use the garage thing. Just 20 bucks, call it a day. Now, I think that conversation's kind of died down a little bit because people have kind of figured it out. But it's amazing how many new people come in to the industry and have never had to deal with one of these Chamberlain garage door or MyQ style garage doors with the yellow i think it has a yellow button on it and can't use can't you can't use the old contact

relay with that you got to get one of these things so i think this is hilarious because like it's just such a simple thing that everybody uses all the time right but it's like for a hundred dollars it definitely solves the problem. Whenever we ran into the situation in the past, we would literally, as Gavin, I think said, just solder wires to a controller and we would hook a relay up to it. And that's how we did it. So it's, I don't know. I think it's funny that it's taken all this time to become a usable solution that anybody can kind of use well you always you still need this has the relay built into it you always need the relay and the control four processors are like greg's talking about crestron processors they have the relays um the problem is the garage the the genuine problem is is like it's either their

garage door there's not wires there for you and like it that can be a tough situation um there's plenty of wireless options out there and this, I guess this just kind of adds to that. It's another wireless option for you. Yeah. And it solves the rolling code issue that the newer garage doors have. So yeah. Well, and you don't have to use this product for that.

You can just use the regular Crestronic control for a lawn relay with the little $20 device. That's all I've ever used. Uh, but I've had the wiring available, you know, like the wiring for the sensor and the wiring for the relay at the garage door. And then the, the homeowner, you know, upgrades their garage doors and nothing works anymore. Magic. They've got wifi now though. That's, that's, that's a little better than a Z wave hopefully for the garage door controller. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's move on here. God, these next two stories don't convince you to move to Canada. I don't know what will.

Makes me sad. Bell announced Wednesday the launch of 3 gigabits internet speeds for its pure fiber internet service, now the fastest offering available in Canada. The company says its fiber offering is 3 gigabits down and and up saying it's three times faster than the speeds on cable. Yeah. So three times one is three. Um, let's see. That's, it's going to be in most areas of Toronto with packages starting at one 49 per month. You get a free modem with wifi six unlimited monthly usage and top it, top things off a hundred dollar Visa gift card. It's ridiculous, man. And then not to be outdone, Rogers goes and says,

Hey, we've been testing something in the back over here and we're going to go, um, eight, eight gigabytes, eight, eight gigabits a second. Uh, are you kidding me? Like this is insane. Three, three is like affordable. I don't know what what this eight there's no pricing associated with the eight uh they just said hey we tested this and there's going to be some places but they're trying to go to 10 gigabits or something no i will tell you no one in america no no one is talking about 10 no one's even reaching for that it's ridiculous gavin why did you do this to us i i love this story because you know it makes me proud as a canadian to have speeds that i'll never be able to take advantage of you know like most people will not be able to take advantage of this because all our routers and everything max out at probably one gigabit um even the new Eero setups coming in, they max out at 2.5 gigabit.

So, I mean, I don't know what I would buy to get full eight gigabit. I don't even think I need full eight gigabit. But the one thing I am excited for is on Rogers, it's symmetrical. So I can also not upload at eight gigabits per second as well, right? Right now, max I get my area is 1 gigabit down, but 30 megabyte up. And that 30 kills me. So I'm looking for, I'll probably jump on it just for the upload speed. Yeah, if this was to like come to America, like the 3 gigabit plan would probably be in like the $300 range.

Right now I'm paying, I think i think like 60 to 80 a month for 200 megabits per second so i can't even imagine how much like spectrum would charge for this and they wouldn't even give me symmetrical i can tell you that yeah definitely not definitely not um five upload yeah they would eight gigabyte down five yeah so uh comcast actually does offer a three three gigabits service it's called comcast pro uh it is 295 per month so nice nice guess there um yeah yeah i'm i i don't think it's available everywhere there's uh there's some older stories here that i ran across but well if i do get this, you know, the first thing I was thinking of was running a cable to my neighbors

and then over to my next neighbor. Can you run a cable to Florida? You know, I could wire up the whole, I could wire up eight houses and we all get one gigabit and, you know, pay off that bill, you know, like, why not? That's what I was thinking too. If you get the eight, then you're pretty much the ISP for the neighborhood at that point.

Like, just divide that up and, you know. Heck, if you get the three here in America, you could be the ISP for your neighborhood. Because people are doing, like, the urban Wi-Fi thing, Wi-Fi networks with, like, way less. Oh, man. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So, three, like you said um and and greg kind of made a point there that i can't wait to come explain to clients that their hardware doesn't even move

that fast um yeah the uh this this is really funny like there's nothing that in existence no router that i well i mean there's a couple i do know of that will do um 10 easily uh but you're paying a lot for those routers. Yeah, the UDM Pro, I believe, does that. But yeah, not any of our home-based routers do that. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, hopefully one day we will get our lawmakers and what is it, the FCC to classify something faster than 20, what's it, 20 megabits per second as high-speed internet here in the States?

That's all you need. That's all you need, guys. These stories made me proud to be Canadian. Yeah, I noticed they just kept popping up. They just kept popping up like different speeds on here. I kept pasting them over and over again, just so you really pay attention. I find it amazing that Canada has like such great, like home internet,

but it sounds like your mobile plans are kind of like stuck where ours are. They're just not that good. Is that, is that true Gavin or your mobile plans? Like I don't honestly, I've never looked at your mobile plans. I'll give you an idea. Roughly one 50,

I get 20 gigabit per month download, or not download, but 20 gigabit per month data transfer. And that's on 5G network. I don't know. Is that per line? That's per line, yeah. But I know there's plans out there when you have multiple lines.

I just go in by what I get and that's subsidized through business um a bit so yeah i don't think anybody will ever uh match what the europeans or like england's doing so they they basically hand them data as far as i know here you go take it all right well moving on here speaking of being handed data uh you're gonna you're gonna need it for all these major league sports ball things that are happening. YouTube and Major League Baseball have renewed their streaming pack for 2022. This will result in 15

regular season games being shown exclusively on the platform. The first will be streamed on May 15th between Washington Nationals and the Colorado Rockies. The news here continues MLB's effort to reach viewers across many different streaming services. So they announced a couple of weeks back Apple TV Plus was going to have Friday night baseball.

Peacock has 18 early Sunday games starting on May 8th. Amazon Prime Video has 21 exclusive New York Yankees games. And now YouTube has those 15. So TJ, I'm going straight to you man you give me give me this is like this is awful like you basically have to have every streaming service out there in order to watch your your baseball i don't even watch baseball i don't really care about it i've been to a couple baseball games in my life this annoys me though like i hope that more people don't do this because i'm just going to cancel streaming altogether if this happens yeah well i mean you get it with mixed like i pay for apple tv and i noticed the other

night i think it was friday night there was a baseball game on it said live or something i didn't i didn't watch it because i'm not really interested in that but it was there and i don't know like if you're already bought into those services it kind of exists there for you what what i don't know and i i um there is a mlb like expensive season pass thing that you can get that has like every game yeah it's been like a famous app on there for a long time and some of these things say exclusive but i i would assume that they're still broadcast and maybe i'm assuming incorrectly that they're still broadcast through those um through the mlb's own app like they don't kind of give up the, uh,

give up the ghost for, you know, everything to go to Apple or, or YouTube, or maybe they're just unpopular games that they're giving to Apple. Cause I don't know. I don't know how this works. Well, and that's true too. Cause like under the Amazon one, it says they're exclusively streaming 21 New York Yankees games. Uh, maybe somebody else is going to be streaming it as well. Whoever they're playing against or whatever. Right. But maybe don't know seems like an awful idea to me though yeah yeah i it's it it's kind of weird that it's all broken up but i'm i mean i could see it from a marketing effort like you want to put you know if somebody somebody like tj is sitting there bored and staring at their Plex dashboard and like, there's nothing here to watch, and Discover Dashboard, which I've been using, it's awesome,

and they flip over to the YouTube app or whatever and there's 15 games there for you to watch, maybe you'll start watching and be interested in baseball, buy yourself some peanuts and cracker jacks and all that good stuff could you imagine if they did this with like tv shows like season one of after party is on apple tv but season two is on hbo max season three we're gonna do a split thing it's gonna be on amazon and netflix even worse we're only gonna get three episodes of season one on netflix exclusively with bonus scenes there were some shows that were like that up until recently i

want to say that well i mean i know that um like when disney bought marvel there were a couple of marvel shows that were exclusive on netflix because they were netflix paid shows that's a little different though they were already on netflix yeah yeah that's true it's not like it's not like disney was like hey you guys should host season one we'll host season two and then we'll find somebody else for season three and four that's true i don't know the thing that drives me nuts is you gotta realize 15 mlb games is not a lot. It's like one week. MLB season is 160 games. It's a lot of baseball times how many teams. When I buy a service and I want Major League Baseball,

I want to get all of them. I want to be able to just tune into that service. This team's playing. I want to see the game. But if I'm going to go to YouTube and they only have 15, then I have to also have the other service.'re going back to cable days boys we're going back to these cable days everything we spent years running from we're now they're getting us we'll be back there in no time back there no time we already are all right all right well moving on let's move into the graveyard guys uh get your your what are this called? The sickle things and the black hoods, because we're about to go calling and and kill off some some smart home products.

We talked about I home a couple of weeks back and their disgraceful like we thought they were doing pretty bad. This is nothing. But yeah, nothing compared to what's either coming down the pipe or what has come down the pipe. I guess we can talk about Insteon. That's the boogeyman this week. But let's talk about LIFX. LIFX, L-I-F-X, the light bulb company. Despite their nice products and loyal fan base, LIFX's future seems to be a bit rocky. The brand's parent company buddy technologies that's a horrible name but i just want to say it with two thumbs up at the

same time right has entered receivership after years of struggling to pay off debt what happens next is a big mystery the lifex lifex seems optimistic buddy technologies purchased lifex back in 2019 for $51 million. And at that time, it seemed like a smart move. Lifex was losing money and Buddy Technology was a publicly traded company. So one would hope they're actually publicly traded on the Australian stock exchange. But one would hope that when that happens, an infusion of cash could come in and help out a struggling company. But since then, Lifex has struggled to keep up.

They've struggled to keep stock levels up through 2019, 2020, particularly through the global pandemic. And customers complained that warranty claims went unanswered. And in 2021, the Australian Stock Exchange had an investigation and went into Buddy Technologies books and said, hey, you guys didn't report some debt over there. Three of the company's directors basically jumped shipped and left to avoid that investigation. And then earlier this year, the Australian Stock Exchange asked Buddy Technologies how it was still in business. And now the company has entered receivership under another consulting advisory firm based in the U.S. here. And its shares have been pulled from the Australian Stock Exchange. This doesn't look very good for LIFX.

The Internet is a pretty cool product. I won't lie. Like always had good things to say about what we saw come from them. And they were a pretty good competitor against what, Philips Hue, I think, Gavin, you were telling us before the show. Yeah. This is sad news. I don't even want to get into it, but this is what we have to do. But these cloud products, this is the second second third one this year i'm sure there

are probably a few more missed right but they always come out very promising you know they get people to buy it and you know when they die you're left with like paperweights a lot of the time and the only people suffering are the people that bought it. And this is why when I tell people, if it has a cloud dependency, be very wary. Like, do not outfit your home with switches that depended on a cloud. Just don't. Because if that ever goes down, you have a bunch of dead switches, right? Unless there's some way to locally control them. And usually it's a hack or something you have to get to get them going.

You know, like, it's just not worth the headache. It's just kind of sad because I've only heard good things about lifex i and i don't even know how to say the name if it is lifex or not but um usually it's one of the higher recommended ones for like color leds and light bulbs and that kind of thing um especially if you don't want to spend philips hue prices just because phil Phillips hue bulbs and other accessories are super expensive. These ones were always like a third of the price and I've bought them a couple of times. They seemed like they were good quality to me. Um, I've never had any, uh, you know, long-term use with them, but my first impressions of them were just as good as Phillips hue. Um, so, you know, it, it sucks to kind of see this and i hope they can get through it just because you know like i said i i think they're a good company yeah like i said

always heard good things about them um they the life fix i guess posted in a reddit post that the receivership isn't you know we're we're we're looking forward to the future and this will help secure business for the future blah blah blah so they seem pretty we're looking forward to the future and this will help secure business for the future, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they seem pretty, um, hopeful, I guess, for the future of the company and the product. Um, and, and I hope, I hope they, they do stick around cause it's definitely a neat product. We don't need just, you know, one colored lamp that exists out there. We could use a couple of different brands, um, because they seem to be falling off the truck lately. Kind of go ahead and talk about Insteon now, which will be our, has now joined all these other companies in the home tech graveyard, I guess. I don't have any Insteon product to put in there right now, but I guess I do know a guy who probably has something.

So late last week, we bounced on recording the show, but late last week, the smart lighting company, Insteon, abruptly shut down without issuing any warning or anything to users, developers, anybody. Overnight, its array of connected light switches, dimmer outlets, wall keypads, and smart home sensors lost the ability to connect to Insteon servers, so no more remote access with them. And the company also shut down its user forums, which was quite hilarious,

because you could go to the community forums and they just spin, nothing would load. And then they wiped the leadership page from the website. Even more funny, wiped the leadership page from the website um even more funny like the leadership like just completely disavowed ever working for insteon they they literally scrubbed their their their their linkedin pages like richard and i were we were talking about this on homeowner or home on earlier this week and they were like oh they just scrubbed off that they ever worked there and then the ceo actually just changed the name of his his linkedin page like completely so the old links that people would link in news articles and everything connect with the ceo they're gone like it's just people

don't even work there anymore um sudden move of course angered insteon users who found themselves unable to control their home's lights with the insteon mobile app and some of the company's smart switches currently still work as regular on off on off light switches but the some models are going to be brick there um let's list them off here revolve iris insignia i'm not even sure what that is staple connect wink i home now insteon the graveyard is uh it's filling up it's's filling up. This is just another name, I guess, in the long line of home technology products that don't quite make it. And this has been a rough couple of years. There was a forum post, I guess, over on Finally after a Wired story, after The Verge reported on it, after Richard and I talked about it after we, you know, yelled it out on, uh, I think Stacy Higginbotham posted something on our website too. Um, they said, Oh yeah, yeah. Um, after we, we shut down everything.

And I think some, uh, there was an employee that confirmed, I think I saw a post on the hub somewhere that an employee confirmed that they were all Lego of the 18th of March. So, uh, that was last month and, uh, everything's just kind of been progressively shutting down. And of course, a holiday weekend, the best time in the world to shut down a smart home product because everybody is dealing with other stuff. And then, you know, all the light switches don't work. Don't worry about that. I'll fix that later. And you go to log onto your app and it doesn't connect anymore

no good no good uh gavin looks really really angry so i'm just gonna go straight to gavin i i'm not i'm not as angry as richard because i don't i don't have any incyon stuff but you know again it's the same story cloud dependency cloud sucks you know like that's the way it is like uh people are finding ways to work around this you know i applaud them but you're you're you're gonna be hacking a way to keep these things running you know like start start making a plan just to get off of it um it the the sad part was what you mentioned they were basically wiping away any evidence they had anything to do with the company. That's like getting out of a bad relationship and going through your photo books and cutting out all your pictures.

That's what I thought of. It was like going out to your Instagram and removing all the posts with your ex in it and going on your Facebook. It's a lot of work to do all that stuff properly but uh it was sad to see that they actually stooped that low um it says a lot about the company and the people uh or that were running it when I saw that too right so I was trying to get an understanding as to how many people this actually affected right because I was wondering is it just a handful of people making so much noise and then the media is jumping all over it? But to some articles, they estimated that were over a million users, but I don't know how accurate that is. Is that

just a million logins? I still don't have a clear picture of actually how many people this affected. I'd like to know that though. I would venture to guess it's in the hundreds of thousands of installs easily active installs i would say i don't the million i don't know how they're calculating the million over the product or user i don't know it seems kind of fishy like maybe a million users is like well there, there's these, you know, 500,000 houses that have it and each one of them has two users. So there we're at a million now. There we go. I don't know how they're calculating that or how that would be calculated. But, you know, Richard posted earlier in the hub that he knew that, you know, out of all the home products, Insteon had a, like a per project install base higher than, than most, right? Because if you, if you decked out your home with lighting control, like Insteon,

it's not like you did, you know, one or two light bulbs, like you would with Hue, you would go in and you would actually like integrate a bunch of lighting control things. And they have keypads and all sorts of good stuff that you could like, uh, fan control modules and all that good stuff. You'd be able to, um, to, to integrate into your house. So there, there was a lot more product available, a product available to solve problems in your house. And at a reasonable price, I think there were like what, 50, 50 or $60 maybe, maybe for some of those, those products, maybe 70 at were like, what, $50 or $60, maybe for some of those products, maybe $70 at the most. A decent price point. I think probably Lutron Caseta floats around the same price point, if not a little bit higher these days. But a completely different technology than what

Insteon was using. They were using like a wireless protocol, but also power line pulses. So it was kind of a dual redundant backup type setup that supposedly served everyone really well. I'm hoping it doesn't die off. I'd like to see the IP or something come back, especially those Nokia products that they kind of joint designed with Nokia. Those looked really nice. the IP or something come back, especially those, those Nokia products that, that, um, that they kind of joint designed with Nokia. Those looked really nice. Um, and I, I really would like to see those put out on the market because they looked sharp. I went back and looked

at them today. Like the keypad is amazing looking. Um, and I think it was like a 60 or $70 keypad as well. So can't go wrong there. Yeah. This, this whole thing is like, it's like a 60 or 70 dollar keypad as well so can't go wrong there yeah this this whole thing is like it's like reckless and it's just a little disturbing as well just because they've known about it for what like three years now or something that they were trying to sell off the company and they might not be able to make it and all that good stuff and they didn't notify anybody like the outrage would still be there either way, just because it's a product that no longer exists. But when you don't tell anybody about it until it stops working, that's scummy to me. There's no reason to do that either.

Why couldn't they have told everybody six months ago, hey, at some point in the future, we might not exist just so you know, and that would have went a long way, but it's these companies that wait until the last second or the last day to announce those kinds of big changes. It just doesn't sit right with me. Um, and honestly, we shouldn't support companies like that. Um, they didn't even announce it. They just like, Hey, well, and that's the worst thing too is like we found out through people's stuff not working and then it took what like two weeks or a week to get out an actual statement from insteon and they basically said hey we don't exist anymore thanks not not two weeks

uh because it was i mean it was only late last week it was over the weekend and they should have announced they should have announced something two months ago that they would need to start shuttering up yeah i mean who wouldn't do that like you would be able to maybe get somebody to line up and purchase the company you know like you get out there like hey we've got all these users all this you know i don't know maybe they're more affected by the supply chain issues than you know then meets the eye and they're just not able to get product we talked about this at the early part of the year companies are going to have problem who can't sell product. And that, that extends from the top down, you know, from, from manufacturers all the way down to dealers.

If you can't get the product that you sell to make a living in your hands to sell, you can't make money because money's not going to come in to pay you for that product that doesn't exist. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn't work that way. So hopefully, hopefully somebody picks these guys up. It would, it would be nice. It seems like a, a nice little product to me, especially that Nokia line. We, we kind of have like a topic here about moving off the cloud and planning for, or trying to avoid cloud dependencies. I was thinking about this earlier. We're kind of bashing on Insteon or iHome that have the server component, but a lot of pro products are also integrated

with clouds at this point. I'm thinking like Crestron Home or Control 4 are very dependent on at least the initial part in setting up the product to having a cloud infrastructure in place where you can, very dependent on at least the initial part and setting up the product to having a cloud infrastructure in place where you can, with control four, at least you can authorize licenses and that kind of thing, download drivers. If that portion went away, um, you know, your software, you wouldn't be able to log into that software, uh, to reprogram your system because your, your login would no longer, you know, work with the computer in

the cloud. So there's these small like pitfalls of, you know, cloud dependencies out there. Now, if Control 4 just went away tomorrow, I suppose most of your gear would still work. Maybe you wouldn't be able to log in remotely. Yeah, that probably wouldn't work. You wouldn't be able to change anything in configuration. The dealer wouldn't be able to change anything in configuration. The dealer wouldn't be able to do it. It would just be, you know, oh, well, here's another one for the graveyard and we've got to reprogram this whole system. But what I have, I have some thoughts on this. Gavin, I think you may have.

Yeah, you brought this on here. What are your thoughts on future proofing or at least trying to future proof your house with technology that doesn't rely so much on the cloud? What are your ideas here? Well, first of all, whenever I solution something in my house, the first thing I do is inspect the product. You're not going to avoid the cloud altogether. To be honest, there's always going to be cloud dependency, but minimize it. So some of the critical things, switches, I make sure I have switches, not cloud. I use Z-Wave. I use Zigbee, you know, all local network, all local control,

no cloud dependency. You know, whenever I buy a product, I try and avoid Wi-Fi a lot of times because Wi-Fi is always going to have some kind of cloud dependency. But when you buy it, you got to know the product to like, learn the product, understand what it does. And if it has some cloud be willing to, you know, like one day it may go down. Like my echo be thermostat. I'm if that goes down one day, I'm okay with that. Cause then all I have to do is replace the thermostat, you know, it's all cloud dependent. So I'm okay with that. But if I were to, if if my my internet goes down and that does happen every now and then where my internet goes down i want there's critical

things that i still want to work um and you have to really take that into consideration like if your internet goes down what's not going to work and are you okay with that and if you're not okay with that then find another product that has no cloud dependency that will still continue to work. When it comes to like hubs, you know, you look at things like people always pushing home assist and people push up at that. They work locally. And that's great. But don't get fooled too, because there's still some cloud dependency. You know, if your internet goes down or whatever you know like alexa is not gonna work for example um so you won't get around that and of course i triggered my amazon lady now right so we'd be nice if it didn't work yeah that's funny alexa stop you could win some money in a lawsuit yeah you know like i forgot to turn her off and i probably just triggered him but but you know what i mean like always taking into consideration what the product does how it connects you know i'm okay with with information gathering at times but let the product still work locally for me like if

you want to gather when i turn on and off a switch okay fine that's fine but let me still do it locally too, right? Right, you mentioned Home Assistant. They were on the ball April 19th, two days ago. Paul has posted, you know, hey, Insteon users. Yeah. The headline over in the blog. Like they're like, hey, good news is that,

the bad news is that you can't use the app or anything to control these automations or anything. You won't be able to configure stuff. The good news is Home Assistant's able to talk to Insteon devices. Um, and it's a hundred percent local, uh, at least between the home, the home assistant hub that you run and, um, the Insteon hub, I guess that still exists in the project. I did notice on their, um, on their, on their instruction pages that said, you can can't read don't do not under any circumstances reset your hub so your insta your insteon hub or i guess you would probably lose some of the well you lose the configuration you can't use the insteon app to reconfigure that hub anymore so all that gets lost to the world just hope that hub doesn't die because at that point it's over

once your hub goes out like all your devices stop working. Is that correct? I would, well, not, not like push the push buttons on the wall wouldn't, but like any automations and stuff. Yeah, definitely. And when I look at certain products, like I'm looking at like my queue, you know, like they, they have drivers for it and integration into home assistant and various other ways for it, but it's all cloud dependent. And my queue doesn't like that. So it will break, you know, fortunately you have a nice community that will work on it, but you've got to accept the fact that one morning

you may wake up and the integration is going to break and you're going to have to wait until they fix it, you know, because there's no public API. It's, it's all like reverse engineered code. You know, you got to understand that with these cloud products do a lot of it's reverse engineers to get it to work um just try and try and you know look at more local stuff first um i i i'm still waiting to see what matter is going to do like it says it's all local control but it's gonna have i bet you it's gonna have some kind of cloud dependency whether you need the cloud to set up products to get it on there or get full control of the products. I want to see what happens at that. Yeah. TJ, any ideas on how to, without waiting for Matter to come around, I guess, how to mitigate this problem in customers' homes?

Matter will never come out. So at this point, it's just never going to be a thing. I always try to do what I call the local first, internet second approach to everything. I want everything in my house or business or whatever I have to work without internet. It doesn't matter what it is. It can be a simple light switch. It can be a thermostat, whatever. I want it to, when I walk up to it, I want to be able to control it if the internet's not working for any reason. The internet is an added bonus for things.

That's when you can do the scheduling and the learning and all that good stuff. Right now, there's not a lot of good options for that just because it's not a popular thing, right? A lot of people just want to be able to plug something in, connect it to their Wi-Fi, and then log in with an app. They don't want to set up Z-Wave and Zigbee and all that stuff. So right now, you're kind of limited to Z-Wave and Zigbee stuff. There's a lot of Wi-Fi stuff out there that you can control locally, but unless you're doing like the Tuya devices or Sonoff, stuff like that, there's not a lot of good options in that realm.

So as much as I don't like Z-Wave at this point and I really don't like Zigbee, those are two options. And the nice thing is that, you know, like I have Z-Wave and Zigbee all throughout my apartment. And if for some reason Hubitat were to go out of business or I just didn't like it or anything anymore, I could just change out the hub and all my devices work with the new hub. Um, and there's no like messing around with it that, you know, nobody has to have a certain integration with it or anything like that. So that's how I approach all my, all my home technology at this point. Yeah. You, you have a similar approach to it than I do. I think I've kind of,

I do the research like Gavin is saying, and then I like to silo everything off. So make sure that something works either by itself, or if I can't get it to work by itself, it's got to have some dependency on another product or service or feature or cloud feature. Um, I make sure that I am not, uh, too reliant on it and I didn't pay too much for it and I won't miss it if it's gone, if I don't like it too much, you know, like, um, there's some, there's some big purchases that come into these things. Insteon's for, for probably a

lot of people, Insteon's probably one of the bigger purchases they put into their smart home, considering how many devices. There was one project that was 1,900 Insteon devices in Aspen. There's a video we can post in our show notes. Like a $75 million house. Yeah. Now they have to get all new light switches.

Well, don't unplug the hub but yeah it's like eight eighteen hundred insteon devices or something like that that's it was it was i mean for any lighting control system that is crazy that is uh that is a uh that is a beast of a project and i i don't know what the tools are like with insteon to program that and you get all those configured i know what they're like in control 4 and i wouldn't wish 1800 devices on anybody um i don't i i know what they're like in lutron kind of the same you know i wouldn't i wouldn't in vain i wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy the the tools when you get up into the uh hundreds if not thousands of devices uh are not they're not designed for that, are not, they're not designed for that. They're not made, they're not ready. There's just so much that's going to go on. Uh, it's, it's almost easier

sometimes to break it up into multiple projects and, and try and try something that's just truly unique and bespoke. Um, but yeah, uh, 1800 devices, that that's a big project. We'll put, we'll put a link to that video. Hopefully I'll remember to put it in the show notes, um, where you can take a look at that because it's actually an impressive house. Like it really whoever lived there knew what they wanted and did a lot of interesting things inside that the outside. I don't care for how it looks, but the inside is gorgeous. And Incyon products like the one thing I'm getting from this whole story is people either they really really like their Incyon products and it really worked well for them. That's what I feel about this. I haven't had it. Oh, I did have one a while ago. I sold it a long time ago. But

is that the impression that you guys have? Have you guys ever messed with Incyon products? Did they work well? I had the impression that they worked really well and that they looked nice too. I mean, and for the price point, it was kind of hard. Like when I built, when I was building and putting this stuff into my house, the choice was going to be Insteon if I was going to go out and buy extra product. As it happened, a bunch of Control 4 gear fell, like old Control 4 gear fell in my lap, and I was a Control 4 dealer. And I was like, all right, that's what's going in. So something that doesn't cost you any money tends to win out most of the time. Well, lucky for you.

Yeah, right? That's not an option that's on the table for very many people, and I recognize that. Kind of going on what gavin was saying you know i made the comment the other day that uh we have all five insteon fans in the in the chat because i think i got to seven it did it did uh you know i hear about insteon like once a year um i've never heard anything bad about them per se, but I don't hear anybody ever talking about them. It was only like the super diehard people that were like, Oh my God,

Insteon's the best thing in the world that you would hear about. And like I said, I would only hear about them a couple of times a year. They were never even on my radar as far as like a home automation company. And I do this stuff every day. Um, so, you know,

it's kind of not a surprise that they, they went out if not a lot of people even know about them yep yep it's it it definitely tried to gain traction and i think a lot of the big bigger players bypassed them early on so i'd agree with that it wasn't a it wasn't a brand a household name right um and they definitely, I'm just trying to think of like what they could have done differently. You compare them with, uh, Lutron Caseta, which has done a pretty good job breaking into, um, the DIY space, uh, for, from the pro space. Right. Uh, so I, I don't know what the answer would have been for Insteon to try and do something like that. Maybe

out of the gate supported like HomeKit or something because that's really what got caseta on the radar of a lot of people i like i like caseta because you can hook a home kit up to it but you can also like just run it standalone or you know it all kind of works together anyway so like it's and it's it's backed by a pretty good you know what is perceived to be a pretty good company and a pretty big much bigger than much bigger much bigger than Insteon, so to speak. Lutron probably has a larger install base of all of their general products than Insteon did. Yeah. And something I think we kind of know about, but not a lot of people may know about is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of money in the DIY space. You know, it's pretty, we've seen over the years, a lot of these companies the diy space you know it's pretty we've seen over the

years a lot of these companies kind of go out um like logitech harmony logitech harmony was the only remote option for anybody in the diy space unless you wanted one of those cheap like 20 universal remotes it still is the only pretty much the only option as of right now. Absolutely. And you can't even like find anything else at this point. And the sad thing is that Logitech was shopping around the Harmony lineup for I think a year or two before they shut it down. And they couldn't come up with a deal with anybody. So DIY is just a very tough space to break into and maintain unless you're constantly changing or constantly offering very cheap devices, I think. We are cheap people. I admit it.

We are cheap people. And we try to do a lot with a little bit of money. So, you know, we don, at least you either have the group that is like super nerdy and they want to be able to write everything for it and control every aspect for it. And then you have the polar opposite where they just want to plug it in and make it work. Um, there's not, I don't know if it's ever going to happen, but we're not seeing that kind of middle ground at all. Um, it's either cloud dependent or it's not cloud dependent and that's it. Um, and I don't know if we'll ever get there. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's, it's going to be, uh, Oh, I was trying to share the pick of the week later,

but let's just remove that for now. All right, there we go. Uh, yeah, it's, it, I don't know that we're ever going to get away, at least right now, fully away from cloud dependency on things. Because it's so ingrained into the culture of technology to have some kind of server component at this point. Whether it be for something as simple as authorization, like we're talking about with Control 4. You just have to authorize. And then once you do that, you're controlling the system locally and okay. That's, that's nice. In the past, in the, in the good old days, you could port forward right into the, uh, into the, the, your, your, your, your control four system and, and don't do that. But now,

now you could set up a VPN to get around the remote access issue. Probably could do the same with Insteon, right? But I don't know. This is weird to see them, the way they exited. What really sucks is the damage that this does to the home technology crowd. There's already the, what was the one on the Verge that we were looking at earlier that was just like, this is what happens. They're all, they're all going out of business, run away, run back to your dumb home. Like don't do the smart home thing. And they're kind of justified, you know, a little bit and, and, and doing those easy to write stories. But I don't know, like to me, it seems like, um, to me, it seems like that that's a low hanging fruit for a story. They could have done a little bit better writing it. But, um, the, the, the thing

is, is that this is going to happen. We're still very much in the early adopter stage of the smart home, like very, very early on. And I, even with all the products we have, even though the longstanding brands that we have, like Insteon, we're, we're going to see stuff die off. You know, we're going to see companies lose interest in a brand and just say, well, we're not going to do that anymore. And it's going to affect at this point, millions of people who have bought into that. Uh, uh, it's going to happen again. Like this Insteon is not's not the like will it be lifex i don't know um will it be wink what is it wink uh wink and uh why isn't dead yet is it no wink isn't still dead i mean it's got the will i am money yeah well well why survive you know like who knows

but but there's there's almost like a space here for a new uh you have your pro installer i almost say there's like a space now for the semi pro installer where they can go in and you know set up your cameras your wearing cameras and you're you're not pro devices you're not spending tens of thousands of dollars on but because there's a there's a lot of people that want this smart stuff but just aren't tech savvy enough and the smart space is not there yet. Like, it's very confusing. Everyone's fighting for their little piece. And in the end, us, the users are just getting confused or restricted or something like that. It's tough. Well, and that's something important to remember, too. I think you touched on a little bit, Seth,

is that we're relatively young in the home automation space. You know, professional home automation has been around for 40, 50 years or whatever at this point, probably longer. But DIY home automation really hasn't been a thing until this past decade. And decade is probably being pretty generous with that, you know, like ring doorbell didn't even come out until like a decade ago. So a lot of the home automation space is very young and very immature and definitely not what we're going to see in the long run. Yeah, it spans the history of, I mean, I would say like what we consider mainstream home automation spans the history of the show, right? Like we walked in the door, Jason and I, when we sat down and I think like the second episode, the first, second episode, like ring was purchased or not ring nest was purchased by Google for like $3 billion or some ungodly amount. And we're like, Oh, maybe this is something we can talk about. But yeah, it was that that was kind of like everybody nested had been exciting already, like as just a controllable thermostat.

And but it was it kind of had a little like glimmer of like mainstream adoption, but it wasn't necessarily like a huge fact. Like what you could do with the nest was actually less than what you could do with Ecobee at the time. And Ecobee was a better thermostat, even though Nest looked better and sexy and all that good stuff. Ecobee was like this plastic. You go back and look at the old Ecobee. They don't look anything like they do now. It was like a little plastic soap block on the wall with a horrible screen on it. It looked like garbage. But the the things that worked great and they did more than what Nest could do out of the box. Um, but Nest really had the industrial design thing going for them. They had the story, they came to market, took over and really got everybody excited about little smart gadgets you could easily add into your house. And, um, you know, that, that, that

didn't start very long ago. When Nest was purchased by Google, it had been a company for like a few years, five or six years. So yeah, maybe a decade sounds about right. And I just don't want to be that old and have been doing this that long. You're old, Seth. You're old.

Yeah. I'm going to have to go Wikipedia Nest right now to figure out when they were founded. Well, and I was just checking out the Wikipedia page for Insteon and nobody's updated that yet. We can get on that tonight too. Oh boy. But yeah, you mentioned Echobee and I like Echobee because they have an open API. But every week, again, it's cloud dependent.

Echobee has some kind of outage. Whether or not you're affected by it depends on if you're connecting to the app at the time, it's an outage. But if you monitor their status, it's constantly going down. And it's so much cloud dependency. Like that's the other thing. It's not just losing your internet, but what if the servers, they have outages or they're getting hacked, a DOS attack? Who knows? Yep. Echobee has three years on Nest, founded in 2007. So the same time as Insteon and Nest was 2012.

Is that right? No, 2010. So 12 years ago. It was a Tony Fidel. I remember Tony Fidel and Matt Rogers doing that. And it was a huge, huge marketing campaign right off the bat. So crazy. It's been a crazy ride, I guess, to watch basically what we were putting in in 2005, 2006, like all the way till now where it's kind of a –

there's all sorts of little smart devices that you can get and everybody's try to play it at something and there's been a few things that have stuck around better than others and then add in to that weird trade war supply chain issues and uh global pandemics and and here's where we are like who who would have predicted you know what would happen in 2019 2020 um would would set us on a course where you know smart home stuff would that that seemed like nice product would be questionable or in trouble or going out of business i mean it's it's been a wild ride so i always thought over the years the best products

would like come to the top and all the junk products would eventually fizzle out. But I'm also seeing some of the products rising to the top aren't necessarily the best ones. Why is it still in business? Why? We're always betting against Wise and they seem to always pull it off somehow. It's just they sell a lot of stuff for cheap and people like cheap. I don't know who's betting against wise and they seem to always pull it off somehow you know it's just they sell a lot of stuff for cheap and people like cheap i don't know who's betting against wise i am not betting against wise i know they're doing the right thing so they're the xiaomi of america so yeah well i

mean and and we've we touched on this a couple times the cheap thing is the problem right because you're cheap you're not making margin you're not making enough to unless you're selling all the time you're not making enough to cover the cost of your business. If this wise camera right here sells for $29.99 on their website, you know, and say, they're making a little bit of money on it. Say they're making 50 points on it, like 50, 50% margin. So they're making half of that. So they're making $15 out to $16 out the door. Um, they sold one camera that's $16. How many of their employees can they pay? You know, our hourly wage, one, one, one camera sale, not, not many. See, I would agree

if, if we weren't seeing the same things with more expensive products, uh, it doesn't seem like any more that if you pay more for a product, you're going to get better support or better longevity out of it. It's the same thing at this point. It's kind of like TVs. You can spend $3,000 on a Samsung TV and still be bombarded with ads. So why spend the $3,000 on that TV when you can spend $500 instead? I don't disagree, but I will say that if you spent $3,000 on the TV and Samsung still made the same margins they did on the $500 TV, they got more money for that $3,000 TV than they did for the 500. And that's all I mean by that is that more money came in the door to go reinvest back into the company, to pay for wages and all that stuff.

And you got to sell a ton of these wise cams to make any money. And if you have any supply chain disruptions, that directly affects your bottom line. And that's what we saw. That's what we're seeing here with Incyon. And that's where we're going to probably continue. I mean, let's not bet on them, but like Ubiquity, like, let's talk about that. Like that could be on the chopping block, right? If they don't sell product, how can they pay? I mean, they have three offices throughout the world, right? They have Taiwan, they have US and Salt Lake, and I think they have one in Europe somewhere. That's a lot of employees. There's a lot of people that work at Ubiquity. How do you keep them on? How do you keep paying their salaries? How do you keep your servers up and going so you can remotely log in to manage all these beautiful

Ubiquity devices? Like, ah, man, it could get rough right and hopefully this thing turns around and we start seeing product come in more than you know 10 or 12 cameras at a time i'm i'm new to the whole unify space but the one thing i'm seeing is yeah they don't have the product but there's a lot of people out there that want it it's just they don't have it um what's gonna happen is people are looking at alternatives now i guess right yeah that's not a good thing looking at like rigi which is a chinese manufacturer that doesn't have a footprint here in the states but definitely is elsewhere and they're looking to get in the states i mean so like there there's there's all sorts of of product out there that does exist that may become an alternative, and they may find a better niche than Ubiquity is able to find in the products they were selling

and start chopping away the money that Ubiquity would have made if they even had the product in stock. And when those customers come back around to buy, they may not even think of Ubiquity again because they've started to invest in a different brand, net gear, you know, something else and, and had, you know, success with that. So yeah. Um, crazy times, crazy times. Let's, uh, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at home tech.fm slash three 84. All right. We've got a pick of the week tonight. Um, this is interesting. We're going to put this up. I got to do it this way, right? This, this is hilarious. This is, this is the future of, of driverless cars. I just can't wait. Yeah, this is, it's definitely

interesting. I'm not. So what, what happens here? A cop has pulled over a driverless car because it wasn't running any lights or something like that and then uh you know whether the cop is trying to write the ticket or talk to the person the car just like just like bolts off it's like i don't have to stop anymore i'm a robot it just just it just takes off it's great the cop was so confused that poor cop too he was just like that cop was just like you know what is going on nobody's listening to me anymore i don't know well you know what we need you know we need we're gonna need robot cops that's that's pretty much the that's the answer

to this whole situation robocop i'm surprised i'm surprised they don't have some kind of like shut off or like override where it's just like kind of like the nox box they have outside of buildings now for like the fire department and stuff they're probably't have some kind of shut off or override. Where it's just like the Knox box they have outside of buildings now for the fire department and stuff. They're probably going to have some kind of shut off switch in police cars so they can just shut off a vehicle. Yeah, and they'll send that to our vehicles. It'll be great. Oh, we accidentally pushed that to the whole city. My bad. I don't see what could possibly go wrong.

Nothing will go wrong. That's funny. And if it's cloud dependent, oh, we're in trouble then. Got to get a new car. Yeah. There's been a couple of interesting movies with that in there. Like iRobot, I think, probably has a bit of that where the car or somebody could take over the car externally. I want to say there was a movie recently or a TV show recently that had something similar, maybe Watchmen, the HBO series Watchmen at the very

beginning. I think they had the ability to shut down the car, but maybe not. Maybe I'm thinking something else. No, it was guns. They had the ability to turn on and off guns uh which was which was interesting as well so yeah the more the more iot product uh ends up out in the world there's there's always uh the ability to for weird things to happen like an ai car getting away get away from the police so did they get did they get the ticket or not that's the question you. Who do you give the ticket to? They just stuck it on the windshield wiper and hope somebody got it. It's not my point. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's a robot car. What's it need lights for? It can see in the dark. The poor car was probably so confused too. The car was probably like, what do I do now? Run away. Run away. Go, go, go.

People are trying to break in. Nobody programmed me for somebody approaching the car. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh, man, it's going to be funny. But we've always had zany antics like that in the house, right? That's existed, but now it's kind of extending out into the street, which is kind of funny. But if you have any feedback, comments, questions,

picks of the week, great ideas for the show, or know about the next smart home product that's going to shut down, please let us know. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can go to hometech.fm and fill out the online form there. All right, guys, that wraps up another week here in Home Tech. I've been busy, so I haven't gotten back to my little projects little projects i have two

of them sitting over there one of them is the range hood one of them's something secret that i'm gonna try and put together um but what about you guys done anything for the last couple weeks it's like a holiday weekend like you guys have a good holiday and everything or oh yeah i was relaxing this holiday you know um it's starting to get warmer so you know i was starting to get my pool stuff cleaned up etc etc um i had a pool therm uh temperature sensor it broke i can't get it working and of course i can't find the product anywhere so i'm kind of gonna have to manually go and check my pool temperature this year it's gonna suck like an animal it's gonna suck you know like i know i i feel like it's a step backwards i can't just ask

a lady what the temperature of pool is i have to actually go outside and look at the thermometer put your toe in yeah like i'm surprised you even have a pool up there i thought it would just be like a solid sheet of ice the whole year it mostly or it's a sheet of ice but every now and then the sun hits it melts and we could jump in that's funny tj what about you had a good weekend yeah my weekend's been good i've been finishing stuff in the van i uh got the radio installed we got the dash camera installed got the the backup camera installed got Got the backup camera installed. Got all the shelvings, the ladder rack. And now I'm working on lettering.

So that is what I'm spending all my time and money on at this moment. And it is very unfortunate for me. If I could get to the point in my life where I don't own a vehicle anymore, I would be very happy. Yeah. I, I, I will, I, one of these days, one of these days you're going to be like, yeah, I put unraid, unraid server in my van. Like the van is like an all encompassing project for you. It's, it's, it's gotten big. You know, it could happen actually when a Domo first came out or when everybody started talking about it, I was the first one to put it in my car. So know we could we could put a server in the van you know

what i'm saying with solid state drives you don't have to worry about you know hard drives bouncing around anymore it can happen it could happen it's got to be a small one the space is a premium in the van so it's got to fit in the center console or something right right oh man well maybe i'll get back to my projects well no not not next week when does the wife go out of town next i i go out of town i gotta think so um gotta we're gonna have a early show next week hopefully and then uh you know maybe maybe i'll get to something when i get back so yeah training in phoenix yay It's not hot there or anything. I think it gets to, like, what, 120, 100-something there? I don't even know.

Ridiculous. I don't know. It's a dry heat. It's not the Florida heat. I mean, you live here. You have to fend off an alligator every morning just to get the mail, and then by the time you get back, you're sweaty and stuff. Sounds like fun. It's a tougher life here, I think, than over there. There you just die. Yeah, they have scorpions. Oh, man. All right. Well, we do want to give everyone a big thank

you for supporting the show and listening here, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about that, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to, uh, mourn the loss of Insteon.

I mean, there's been some conversations over the last couple of days for Insteon. Some really good conversation. Yeah, yeah. What to do. There's all sorts of stuff going on in there right now, which is good. When stuff happens, we got stuff to talk about.

So maybe we need to post this Garaget thing in there and see what they think about that because that kind of popped into the show here, here lately. But, um, if you, if you're, you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, totally understand. I just head on over to iTunes or the podcast app of your choice and give us a rating. Let, let people know about the show. Let us know. Uh, you know, I was looking at the ratings. They're kind of stale uh you know i was looking at the ratings they're kind of stale you know they're from like 20 uh 2012 or i don't know some like nest era they're nest era ratings guys get get on there and let us know how tj and gavin are doing yeah they're awesome i would give them five stars each if i could and is there a five star button on this thing i don't see the buttons

i'm gonna have to come up with that next week and put five stars in this thing. Um, if you can't tell, we have, we have resurrected, somewhat resurrected the live show and kind of done a little bit of chat interaction. Um, hopefully we'll be able to use this a little bit more in the future, see how it goes. But, um, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll keep our, uh, the, the hub updated on our attempts at the

live video thing and see how it goes. Yeah. And if you've been affected by the Incyon shutdown, I'd like to hear from you. Um, let us kind of know what you're thinking about doing, or if you have any plans at this point, um, we'll add you to the list of seven people that we've had in the hub so far. So that'll let us know what to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, that wraps up another week in home technology news here from everyone here at home tech. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Toodaloo. Take care.