HomeTech.fm - Episode 389 - The Matter Man

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

This week on HomeTech: CEPro says its cool to hang TVs over the fireplace and your neck wont really hurt that bad, "Hey Sonos" might be rolling out, Best Buy has a bad quarter, Linksys launches new Wifi 6 kit, eero gets multi-admin, and TJ jumps ship from Hubitat to Smartthings. All this, the pick of the week, and more... 🐊

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday. What is it, May? It's May 27th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. This week, I've completely forgotten what month it is, which explains pretty much what's gone on this week so far. But hey, we've got a couple of

new things to talk about in the Home Tech Headlines. But first, guys, I think this is kind of like a big deal. I think we need to talk about this a little bit. Our industry trade magazine over there, C-Pro, says, hey, go ahead. It's cool to mount that TV over that fireplace. It's not a bad thing to do. And there's a seven-minute read, like, I don't know, 900-word article about how you – here's different ways you can mount that TV over the fireplace.

And, yeah, I don't know what to think. I mean, Gavin, you have a tv over the fireplace at least you admitted to no no he's like oh no no i don't know no no no listen don't throw me under the bus don't throw you know and i never ever thought it was as bad until i joined the hub and i i heard everybody complain about TVs over fireplace, but don't throw me in there. I side mounted mine. It's in the corner using a corner mount. I'm good. All right. Well, this, this, this article is, is, is just, I don't know. I, it's got, I don't even know what to think about. Like the picture, the pictures they have, it's not great installs of it and everything.

The solutions they give you is like, hey, install this big mantle mount thing, which is a, it's a nice mount thing. If you've got to put a TV over the fireplace, I suppose that's one way of getting it like lowered down into a viewing angle. I don't know. I'm not a fan. If you can't tell, I'm not a fan, if you can't tell. I'm not a fan. I know why people do it, because it just seems like, oh, we should put that TV there. It's a big blank place, and we don't have any artwork, or we don't have a big mirror or anything to put there. It's just the wrong place in the room. It's not weighted right there.

You know what? To be fair, though, these developers need to stop making these rooms and putting the fireplace in the most inconvenient spot. They they put the fireplace in the spot where the TV would look the best too, right? So I mean, in the end, you have no choice because that's where you want to put the TV, but there's a fireplace there. So we'll just put it above the fireplace. Yeah, this is a heavily requested install for my company. A lot of people want to install their TV over the fireplace simply because it is the only spot in the room that it makes sense to install a TV. I go into a lot of houses where the

room is just odd shaped, or you have, you know, windows on each side minus one of the room, one of the walls. So you don't really have any options. And I think people are just obsessed with putting a TV in every room at this point, too. So that probably doesn't help. Like, you know, when you have an 82-inch TV in the basement and a really nice sound system, do you really need a 55-inch TV above the fireplace upstairs? Not all the time. Well, I mean, if you need that new LG 55-inch OLED TV, where is it going to go? About the fireplace.

And you know what's going to be great on that LG TV? Tuning into the fireplace channel while I have my fireplace on. Right, right. Yeah. So we have fireplaces here in Florida for some reason. I have no idea why because it never gets cold enough here to actually have a fireplace running. But I can see it where you guys are, where you probably need a fireplace at least parts of the year, maybe. Like they're actually usable. But here they're just a design consideration.

And yeah, it's a big blank place, you know, over the top of the TV. So I can see why designers, developers will think, oh, well, we'll just put a something. We'll put that there over the top. And I don't get it. I would rather prioritize the room for the TV, like what you're actually going to do in that room. And if it's watching a fireplace, OK, prioritize the room for that fireplace. If it's not, get rid of the fireplace, like focus on the TV and put like a heater or some other kind of heater in the room that, that actually warms the place up. Well, you know, new houses have this thing called HVAC where you can like put heat all over the house. So I would wager that like the majority of people

that have fireplaces, at least in my area, don't even use their fireplace. It's more of a decorative item. You know, people hang stuff off them or it just looks nice. I feel like it's, it's more of a decorative item you know people hang stuff off them or just looks nice i feel like it's it's like a legacy thing right like it yeah it's like a dining room you know nobody uses a dining room at this point but every house still has a dining room it's great tool to get rid of evidence though like the fireplace is perfect for that i don't think you should be doing that with your fireplace gavin i just i mean it works all those downloads oh man you know this article i i it's annoying because if you go on reddit and you go to the tv too high subreddit uh it is hilarious everybody there just freaks out about tvs being too high

um the only thing that i was confused about this article is they mentioned like the small box that you can route wires through a cable routing box i think they just mean like a low voltage like an lv1 or something like that because i've never heard of a cable routing box or maybe uh like that wider pan do it stuff that exists that we're making. But I don't know how they would do that on like that. That generally goes like up and down. It doesn't go around a mantle or around a fireplace box or whatever. Like it doesn't. It's not what it does. I don't know.

It's weird. It's a weird thing to talk about. It just seemed like a it just seemed like a giant fluff piece that mantle mount paid for yeah it very well could be that i i don't know i don't see the advertisement thing on it but it definitely seems like that maybe just take the fireplace out and put a tv in would be the better route to go like i don't know i i i i i'm looking at all that i'm i'm now on this tv too high thing and i'm just looking through all these just shaking my head because they're just, they're just absurd. And I feel like, like this, this whole fireplace thing is just kind of a, a legacy thing that just, it got built into over older houses. So I guess we have to have it in this house now, like the dining room. And we don't actually need it because we have modern technology, know that you know fireplaces or other kind of like boiler heaters or whatever that could be used well in certain times it makes sense to mount it higher like the one we live in like a small condo apartment thing um and we have

our living room tv mounted up relatively high um and i'm not going to post it in the group because i'll probably get flamed for it or something but it's only up that high so we can see it from the kitchen as well. And it doesn't like it doesn't hurt our neck or anything. We're watching it on the couch. So I'm not that bothered by it. But, you know, there's many reasons why you would mount a TV up high anyway. So I don't completely dismiss it. But most of the time you don't need to mount it that high. In some of the bigger houses I've been in, even if they didn't have a fireplace and we were just like mounting it over a piece of furniture or something like that, that we typically did mount them a little bit higher in that, like that shared living room slash kitchen,

what a family room, kitchen, whatever they call it. And yeah, that makes a lot of sense because if you're sitting at the bar at the kitchen or you're just cooking or something in the kitchen, you look over, you want to be able to see almost at eye level that. And it kind of has to like float in between those two use cases most of the time. And I say more, at least in our house, more of the time am I standing in the kitchen watching the TV than I'm actually getting to sit on the couch these days. So it does make sense to mount it a little bit higher in that in that case but uh i don't know here we are in the year 2022 and our trade industry magazine is a proponent of of mounting tvs above fireplaces for whatever reason and yeah oh wait wait spencer greenwald is the vice president of marketing and e-commerce

at mantle mountain so there you go he wrote the article but why is that not counted as an advertisement like and so like the next next time it's going to be like it's okay to have seven gangs of you know and it's going to be like the levitan the levitan the ball plate guy is the one writing the article it's okay to have seven gangs of light switches in your room. We could even custom paint them for you. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Well, I guess, yeah. Just doesn't seem the right fit. I don't know.

Like, maybe that's not the right solution. Maybe the solution is just to get rid of the fireplace. So just so nobody has to read this article, the only time it's acceptable to mount a TV above a fireplace is with a mantle mount. A specific one by this guy. That's the whole point of this article. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's okay. Your neck doesn't really hurt that bad. It won't be any heat problems, which there are, but whatever. The mantle definitely does help with that. But if you have a fireplace running and a tv over the top of it it gets hot i've been there i did not know they had a motorized version for 2700 so that's a great advertising piece right there well now you know all because of this nice little

advertorial here i guess in uh nce pro so yeah Yeah. All right. We should probably, we should probably move on and away from this. Um, a little bit of follow-up here. Uh, I, there's a note here. I don't know who it's from. Let's see. It's from TJ saying, I just got, Hey Sonos. So did you get that? Did you update?

I did not. So I updated the app and I updated my speakers but no update for me but somebody posted in the sono subreddit and said that they got it with the new 14.8 update um you cannot use it with google assistant but supposedly you can use it with amazon alexa so you can have both voice assistants enabled at the same time um that's pretty cool i use google assistant in my house but maybe this will allow me to use Alexa as well. But no, I don't have it yet. I'm kind of disappointed. Yeah, I think that's one of the things they said that, well, I mean, we've kind of known they wouldn't be able to do with

Google Assistant and the Hey Sonos at the same time. Yeah, they're having a little tiff right now. Just a little, just a little. I mean, Sonos keeps winning, so I don't really know how that's going for Google. But, oh, well. That's pretty cool. So they must be doing some kind of, like, soft rollout, you know, to kind of see how well it goes, to test the servers. And they said it would be out for everyone by the 1st. So it totally makes sense they would start doing this a week before. All right.

Well, I have some, like like information that i would share but it was it was shared with me under nda and then reminded like oh yeah i probably can't share that so we'll have to wait till after the first i guess after this thing's officially out um to uh to to kind of like talk about some of the features here that of haste owners that we didn't quite like touch on so much inside of when we did talk about, when they did release it. So there's some cooler things that we'll have to get to. And, you know, I'll just tease the show, like tease the future. And after the first, maybe we'll talk about it.

I don't know. We definitely have to come back and talk about our Sonos sub mini predictions and see what we paid for them if we don't delete that card again. Gavin. Sorry, sorry. paid for him if we don't delete that card again gavin sorry sorry i won't touch the the interface again where we store our notes little trigger happy he's like we can delete this wait wait no don't delete our bets i gotta know who's right yeah it's our bet we i think we bet something i figured it was yeah anyway uh moving on here, what do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it.

Best Buy reported it had sales decline across almost all categories, with the largest drivers on a weighted basis being computing and home theater. Imagine why. Best Buy's online revenues fell 14.9% versus last year, with a domestic online revenue of $3.06 billion, decreased 14.9%. Total U.S. online revenue accounted for 31% of all buying, down from 33% last year. Almost every business in existence today, Best Buy's overall gross profit rate took a hit. The profit was 21.9% in quarter one 2022 versus 23% last year. Lower gross profit was primarily due to lower service margins rates, including pressure associated with the $200 Best Buy Total Tech membership offering that they've been...

Huh. Yeah. Imagine that. Lower product margin rates, including increased promotions, and then higher supply chain costs. So it's harder to get a lot of... Harder to get... More expensive to get the products into the stores to sell them. These pressures were partially offset by higher profit sharing revenue from the company's private label and co-branded credit card

arrangements. So I hear that integrators out there. If you need a, need a little bit of revenue, maybe, maybe it's time to start up your own credit card, private labeled credit card. Uh, the company lowered the expectations of it's a full year 2023 guidance to they lowered it down. So basically, OK, so this is guidance. It's a range. So they lowered it from forty eight point three billion to forty nine point nine billion compared to the previous outlook of forty nine point three to fifty point eight. So it's gone down a little bit. They're not expecting to sell. It doesn't sound like they're expected to have a great rest of the year and moving into 2023.

It sounds like they're expecting in the retail channel, at least, to still have these problems. It's kind of what I'm expecting, too, in the wholesale side of things. We're talking to the manufacturers, and it's not like they're coming to us and saying, yeah, we're, we're going to get products in your hand instantly tomorrow. No, no, no, no, no, no. Every, everyone is talking, uh, end of the year Q4, you know, keep a lookout for stuff that should come in. Um, but I have a feeling like with everything

that's going on and we seem to keep tripping over ourselves as a, as a world for some reason. Um, like now that stuff with Russia has come up, that's just complicating things. Uh, China's on lockdown again. Like this, this is, this crazy stuff is just going to kind of move with us into 2023, 2024. I think we're still going to be fighting over scraps that long. I, this is a long-term thing. Really, really sucks. I hate to see it, but it doesn't sound like it's going to get any better anytime soon. TJ, you're shaking your head as a dealer. It's probably, you know,

you can buy whatever you want these days, right? Like there's no supply chain issues as a dealer. We don't have a lot of problem with a lot of our stuff, but AV receivers are the biggest thing. I went to spec in an AV receiver for a job the other day. And the only one that I could get was like $2,500 or something. Um, I could go to like Best Buy and buy a really cheap 5.1,

uh, AV receiver, but nothing like middle of the road for like a thousand dollars or not. $2,500. Right. So I would imagine that that if you do home theaters, that probably cuts into your projects a lot. Oh, yeah.

Seeing how that's the focus of most home theaters. Yep. Yeah. Components, TVs. Yeah. I don't know. TVs seem to have been in supply this year, right? They don't seem to have gone.

Yeah. TVs aren't too bad. Projectors have been kind of going in and out. You know, you can't really find a middle of the road projector right now. Um, I don't think screens have been a big issue, but they're just fabric most of the time.

So, right. Yeah. Not, not really much of a drop though. And in my opinion, nothing to really worry about with how much product has not been available. So no,

it just kind of shows the slowdown or kind of turn, I guess, around the corner, at least on the retail side. Because Best Buy at least has been, through the pandemic, kind of tracking pretty closely along with what integrators were doing in the business. And they were having record profits, and we seemed to be doing all right until we started to run into the same problems they are not being able to get home theater receivers and that kind of thing. So, yeah, now we're now we're also seeing we were just talking about this in the hub today. Higher rates, you know, coming in. We're getting I'm seeing notices from suppliers, you know, that that prices are going to be going up, you know, eight, 10%, uh, in, in summer, like that there's, there's going to be a drop when that happens. Um, I think it was a couple of them, not just one, but like a few of them have said that there's going to be some, uh, some, some price increases on the wholesale level. So that, I mean, that,

that all ends up in the consumer's, you know, pocket and says, uh, you know, they're going, they're going to, they're going to have to decide whether they want to pay that extra 10% for, you know, whatever they're trying to do at the end of the day. Gavin, what about you? I know this stuff doesn't quite affect you up there in Canada as bad as it does down here. But have you been to Best Buy recently? Have you been trying to get any receivers from best buy i can't remember last time i've been to a best buy i think the last time i've been to a best buy was probably three years ago when i got an open box beam from there but i best buy is not one of the places i look to go these days like whether it's like

costco because their return policy i'll'll go there or you'll look online. Best Buy is not one of the places I look, but it's a shame because through this pandemic and with the shortages going on, I've seen a lot of the smaller companies actually disappear. A lot of small companies that just couldn't

survive something like this. They made some good products. They disappeared, but then you see the bigger companies they they had to source their chips from other places and that could be why things are going up is because they have to pay extra from other people for these chips in short in short supply so we'll see what happens yeah i mean it's not just small ones big ones yamaha i just named yamaha like yeah I would love to get some Yamaha pro gear for for commercial jobs that I mean people would just love to buy it um they can't get it because Yamaha can't produce it they well it's funny they they sent us a an announcement they announced

some speakers that they're going to be selling and they're like yeah you'll see them in four to six months it literally said that on the press release for the, you know, the announcement. It's not like, okay, what does that do for me? Like, I don't, I won't, you don't have any stock now. And it's going to be another four to six months before we see speakers. Um, okay. I mean, that's a pretty big company too. Like, it's not like they're small by any means, but man, it just, sometimes it really, it's, it's really tough out there. And, uh, sometimes it hits some companies harder than others. So, Hey, we'll have to keep an eye on it. Um, as we always do, I think the supply chain thing is going to be with us for a lot longer than we think though. Yeah. And if you heard me laugh

a little bit when Seth was talking, it's because the $199 total Tech membership. I've had a couple, not clients yet, but would have been potential clients who turned down like TV installation services or other things because they had this membership and Best Buy would come out and do it for free. Hmm. So. Interesting. Joke's on them. Well, there you go. It's a great deal though they would actually you so you pay 199 per year or whatever for that subscription and then yep and then you get certain services

for free um and then obviously they can tack on stuff but like like i think like a basic tv mount is free um if you buy like uh like an accessory for your car they'll install it for free as long as it doesn't need additional stuff. So it really does encompass a lot of stuff, but I would assume that you would lose all kinds of money on it, but I'm not Best Buy, so. Yeah, they probably kind of know how many people, it's like a gym membership, right?

Like, yeah, you have the people that are gonna show up every day, and that's very few. And then you have the people like me who are like, yeah, I'm going to the gym and like never show up again, so. Well, and I thought about getting it just because it extends your warranty as well so they'll actually honor your warranty for like two or three years or something yeah and so that might be worth it if you buy a lot of best buy and that was that was always kind of a that was a profit

center to those extended warranty things we were always encouraged to sell them so yeah i don't think they cared if greg is asking if what if you bought the TV elsewhere? I don't think they care where you bought the TV. I think you buy it anywhere and have them install it. And that's probably obviously different than like, you know, car materials. They probably want you to buy the car stuff there, but they'll come about your TV for you. No, no problem. I guess it keeps them busy.

I mean, yeah, it kind of reminds me of like a cable subscription, right? Like you're paying a little bit of money every month for the cable bill or whatever. And obviously Best Buy is not providing any service every month that you've paid this $1.99 per year. So if you're not mounting a TV up but maybe once a year, I guess that kind of makes sense. Like it could kind of pay for itself back to them over a couple of years. If you, if you stayed on, I don't know.

It seems like it's a voluntary thing too. So you could just pay it for the first year, get your TVs mounted up and never use it again. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,

interesting story there about retail. We'll have to keep an eye on it. And yeah, like I said, I was hoping that I would have gotten a better story off the top but yeah it's all uphill from here let's talk about some new gear linksys unveiled two dual band wi-fi six routers this week the hydra 6 and the atlas 6 could be an attractive option for those who want higher end speeds that are on a budget because these are actually not not crazily priced um both are dual band so they'll support the 5g and 2.4g frequencies uh the hydra

is more traditional router so kind of what you think has a you know a little base and some little antennas on the side of it um but the atlas is kind of like more like the other mesh wi-fi systems that are out there and kind of look like little towers. The Atlas 6 and the Hydra 6 claim to cover about 2,000 square feet and up to, this is kind of funny, 25 devices. All of 25 devices. Although the Atlas can be bought in packs of two or three. So with each one of those adds another 2,000 square feet and 25 more devices. For smaller households with fewer devices,

either one of these can be pretty good, pretty good options here. Um, for us for pricing the Atlas six, it should sell for about, uh, one 49 for the single router two 79 for the two pack and three 49 for the three pack. Uh, the Hydra six will retail for 179 and both will be available in the u.s uh this summer with global release plan for yeah whenever canada who cares about that now second half of 2022 so sometime in the latter part of the year it's important to keep in mind these are wi-fi 6 and not the wi-fi 6e not that that matters any because i don't think there's any client devices that are running 6E right now. All your cell phones and everything out there should have Wi-Fi 6,

and you get a little faster speeds off of them if you're close enough and connected to one of these systems. So not bad. Linksys does have an Atlas Max 6E. It's a three-pack for $1,000. So if you wanted that 6E certification label sticker thing on the side, you know, so you can brag to the neighbors, um, it's going to cost you a thousand bucks, but otherwise go out and get one of these, you know, $200 systems and you should be good to go. TJ's shaking his head. Nope. Don't do it. I don't know if it's gotten any better. I've only set one of these systems up and it was like three years ago, but it took me like two hours to set up just the three node unit because the

app kept having connection issues. So hopefully it's gotten better, but I've sworn them off ever since that incident. So that'll happen. That's me in Logitech remotes. Those are the worst too. I always have to talk about it. Gavin's just cracking up.

Gavin, you just shelled out a bunch of Unify. Actually, Unify is probably in line, mostly in line with these prices that I'm looking at here. I mean, it kind of scales up a little bit faster price-wise. But I mean, $179, $200 for an access point. That's about what Unify is running these days for a Wi six six wi-fi six access point is that what they're doing 149 for the pro i think yeah yeah not bad oh i did a full like rip of my whole network and replaced it you know i figured if i'm gonna have network problems let me do with a high-end system so i just moved from one system

to another to have you know high-end problems but this story is kind of like um a me too story so it's like yeah we're having a wi-fi six uh two so here you go you know like i just don't get this 25 device limit especially in this day and age it's just 25 devices like like you have 25 devices on your wi-fi network before you even move into your house you know like between all the smart devices that are now unloading it's just i don't like that i don't know if it's a hardware requirement or are they doing this to sell more of it no it's definitely hardware it better be hard i wouldn't put it i wouldn't put it past them if they did this to say, oh, you have to buy more to get more.

You know, like I hope they're not going down that route. Well, and that could be as well, because they do have the thousand dollar super fancy one. So but I feel like they're just using inexpensive hardware and that's limiting them. Yeah. And my advice is if you're you're gonna have that limit of 25 devices just skip on this go to something else because you'll those 20 you'll reach that 25 device limit quickly oh technically i could use this i'm only at 20 devices right now so it might be might be ditching my unify system for it oh wait till you have some visitors come

over then you're at 29 devices and who gets bumped who gets bumped who do you not like nobody has visitors over just don't let them on your wi-fi problem solved my guest network has 25 devices that's what that's funny yeah i i think for uh i mean one i mean for like even a travel router like it's not that bad of a deal it's a little bit, like it's not that bad of a deal. It's a little bit big, but it's not that bad of a deal for that kind of device. But yeah, 25 devices is kind of on the low end. And the way these access point things work is early on, the higher end companies, the people who are actually making their – everything all the way through. Get the chips from whatever Wi-Fi vendor is making the chips. are actually making their, their, all the, everything all the way through, get their, get the chips from whatever wifi vendors making the chips and they start making their boards and everything and, and, and developing their products and antennas. Um, when those get rolled out,

that's generally the first wave of things. So like if, if something doesn't exist today that has wifi six, that means they, they didn't really make the product or they just took a long time to make it. Cause I think at this point, everybody is on wifi six that I can think of that makes their own stuff. Like even Eero has wifi six, like all over the place now. Um, and, and maybe even wise, it's like, there's, there's rumors that Wyze is going to have a mesh routing system. So, I mean, anyway, what happens is over time, those vendors chew up all those resources and everything, but it makes the chips cheaper. And companies like Wyze can come in and make their own routers. So here you have Wyze, TP-Link, Linksys, whatever.

They're going to make their own thing. Wi-Fi routers and security systems. Get into it while it's hot. So here you have wise TP link, link this, whatever, you know, they're going to make their own thing. So wifi routers and security systems get into it while it's hot. That's what everybody's got one. If you don't have one yet, you need to get one, make your own brand. Yeah. That's,

we can come up with our own home tech branded. Yeah. I don't see why we don't sell smart home products by now. It's only two connected devices at a time, though. We're not going to let you connect anywhere. You got to get in early and getting quick with your device before Wyze can make it cheaper. No, we'll just buy Wyze devices, put our sticker on there, double the price. Just acetone the label off it'd be fine just

tell them use the wise app to set it up yeah it's really cool it works with wise oh there you go device that works with wise certified the first the first wiznet certified beautiful yeah i i wouldn't be able to use these i have 33 connected devices something's gonna take off you'll need to buy two uh yeah yeah two separate networks yeah oh well yeah i'm not i'm not in the market for one of these definitely not in the market for one of these so um anyway moving on here uh, speaking of new products here, speaking of Eero actually, Eero announced this week that you can give other people on your network access, admin access, right from the Eero app now. With the new multi-admin feature, you can share the responsibility

of setting up parental controls or setting family members network from your own device. So it's kind of common and kind of neat. The new feature makes it easy to add up to 10 people as admins on your network so they can manage the features and settings. Those admins will be able to see your name, but they can't delete the network, remove devices, manage subscriptions or Amazon connected stuff. It can't add or remove other admins either. So it's kind of like a limited admin, not quite an admin, but kind of like power user or something connected stuff. I can't add or remove other admins either.

So it's kind of like a limited admin, not quite an admin, but kind of like power user or something like that. But I don't know. I think this is nice. New feature, software thing gets rolled into Eero. Makes sense to me. Gavin, what do you think about this?

It's a cool feature, but you know, like I don't like the fact that it's still limited because when you're an admin, you want to be able to do everything, right? Because you never know what roadblock you'll run up against. I currently manage two Eero networks, my neighbor's network and my mom's network. And, you know, they just give me their accounts.

I log in and I take care of whatever they need to take care of. But it's a cool feature to add, but they should not call it admin. It should be like multi-power user or something like that. Yeah. We, we gave you another user that has added functionality. Congratulations. Uh, I wish more companies did this though, just because I run into a situation a lot where like the, the husband and wife maybe, uh, want to have their own accounts, but only

one of them has like the master control. Um, so it would be nice to give both users, you know, the full control of everything. I just wish everybody would do it like the security systems and stuff like that. Right now you can do, you know, where you give somebody control of all the devices, but they can't, they can't make all the same changes that the master user can do. So bring this out, software people. Doesn't seem that hard. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Sometimes you have like the owner account and then you have the admins that exist underneath it. And really the only thing you can't do, traditionally the only thing you shouldn't be able to do is delete the owner account. But you should be able to transfer it. So that's kind of nice if you can do that. I don't know too much about this one, or how ero sets up i did have to go set up somebody's hero once and i still have it on my phone like their app and everything on my phone

i'm like i don't know what to do with this like it doesn't need to be me i don't want to look at your internet traffic or anything like that but here it it is. It's on my phone still. Well, months later, the funny thing about this update too, is actually it was a couple of weeks ago, but I never even knew about it until this week when Eero emailed me about it. So yeah,

I had no idea it was even a thing. Here we go. I feel like they have this kind of already with the pro side stuff. Cause they have like a pro dashboard that you can get into and kind of gives you admin features over the top of everything so i mean it's just expansion of features it's always nice to get that kind of stuff rolled out so to speak and i think on the pro side you have to actually delete your whole network and then add it into that pro section i forget who told me about that but they have it so that someone can manage multiple accounts yeah way more limited too yeah yeah it's so you can switch back and forth between uh remotely either remotely helping out or remotely diagnosing issues and that kind of thing

um it's kind of the same idea that you would use a unify system with you know but on a smaller scale i guess i, I don't know, on a, on a different, different brand altogether. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh, it's always nice to get new features. So, all right, well, here's a, uh, a story about matter mattering, I guess, again, it kind of kicks off a discussion that we're going to have here with TJ about something he's done. But Samsung announced a new partner early access program for SmartThings' smart home platform that allows companies such as Eve Systems and Aqara to start testing their Matter-compatible devices.

The company says this new testing program allows manufacturers the opportunity to test their devices with Matter, interoperability with Samsung SmartThings Hub-enabled devices through the SmartThings app. The new program is a complement to, not a replacement of, the official Matter certification through the CSA, which is only the testing devices that have to go in order to use the matter logo so this is like an additional samsung thing that they're doing to say the matter device that's already got the matter certification works with their stuff too and it'll have a little man this sounds like they're trying to make this into a mess because typical samsung they have to take something that already exists

their name on it and add their own flair to it to make it worse is it going to be a is it going to be like a stamp or it's like this matter device works with smart things you know and then works with amazon and works with google and you know we're going to get into that again it sounds like they're like okay this is a little certification that they're putting on top of Matter devices to say thumbs up works with smart things. But that should already be the case, right? Once it's Matter compatible. I thought that was the whole point. If it works with Matter, it should work with smart things.

Oh, man, my thing is Matter compatible, but it's not smart things matter compatible, so I can't use it. Time to get rid of your smart things. Move to Hub Attack. Never. So that brings us to a little conversation we had with TJ because he dropped the bombshell in the Hub. Made some people angry. Yeah. Gavin's over here just livid.

He's just drinking. Why would you do that? You're pretty livid. I'm not. Yeah. Gavin's over here just living. He's just drinking. Why would you do that? You're pretty livid. I'm not crazy. Do what works for you. That's what I always say to people. So yeah, TJ, TJ, you've, you've moved from Hubitat over to smart things. It seems what, what, what, what, what caused this? What were you thinking? What's going on, man? What can we do to help? So I like to move around, right? One of the advantage of all the stuff that I have bought for my smart home is that it is Z-Wave and Zigbee only.

So one of the advantages that whenever I get bored of the hub or the interface is that I can just change my hub and I get a different hub. I repair all the devices and I'm good to go, right? I got a Hubitat hub probably about five or six months ago. I've used it. I just haven't been that happy with it. I would say half of my use case is literally just through my phone, opening the application and turning something on or off. And then 25% is, you know, voice control, and the other 25% maybe is automation. So Hubitat just didn't fit for fit within my needs for the smart home. But I'm also not using it as a complex smart home controller either. I'm basically just using it as a glorified smart switch for my phone.

So I was I've actually been looking for a SmartThings hub for a couple of months now, haven't really found anything in stock. Mentioned something in the hub the other day, and Jimmy was like, hey, they got them on Amazon right now. And I went out and just bought one instantly. And the beautiful thing is I just reset everything on the hub attack. And I repaired it to the Smart Things controller. And they all worked within like an hour and I had my automation set up. Um, everything was instant with the application. It just works better for my use case. All right. Hard to argue with that. I mean, it's what you wanted works better for you. All right. If it makes anybody feel better,

I've tried them all at this point and they all suck in their own way and they're all good in their own way. Um, so you really just have to find out which one you like the best and just make sure you pick devices that are compatible with a wide range of things. Um, that's the reason I chose Z-Wave and Zigbee is that I, they work with anything, so I don't have to worry about compatibility or anything like that. I feel like SmartThings has gone through the tough, like, if I remember correctly, Gavin, maybe you can set me straight,

or maybe TJ too, I don't know. Like SmartThings started off almost as like a, it was a DIY project, it was before Samsung even owned them, right? They were just kind of like a DIY thing that they kind of had a particular way that you could set stuff up and program using kind of this weird javascripty language thing groovy and groovy that's what it was you and it was like people really liked it because i guess they had a lot of radios inside of their product it's kind of like the Staples Connect or whatever. It had connected just about anything through smart things.

And then Samsung snaps them up, and I don't want to say, but like grown-ups get in charge of things, and they're like, this is great. We're going to run this for a little bit, but we need to make some changes. And then a couple years later, they made this huge change, and it just made a bunch of people mad. And it seems like that is is what a lot of home says.

Like I can point to the Apple HomeKit ecosystem that really hasn't happened with Apple. Right. Like they haven't they haven't gone from like the first generation product that they had and said, OK, we messed up. Let's let's scrap everything and flip the switch. And maybe they don't have to okay, we messed up. Let's, let's scrap everything and, and, and flip the switch. And maybe they don't have to, I don't know. Maybe they kind of learned from those lessons of everybody else and set the system up a little bit differently. Um, but it seems like, uh, that, that when you have to do that and you can mature your product by, by making that tough decision to like cut off older product, cut off older integrations, just kind of move on. Home Assistant just recently has gone through something like that.

It seems like that, to me at least, is a signal that, okay, the platform, it's been around long enough. The people running it know what they're doing enough and have run into all the edge cases with the way they're doing it now. And they have made a decision to set this thing up for the future. And it seems like Samsung's done that for smart things. At least that's what I'm seeing. I don't know.

Either one of you can kind of chime in and correct me there. No, I like where you went with that. Like when I first started, I started off with HomeKit. And I just found HomeKit was too basic for me. Like for the simple use cases, it was great, but I just found it was way too basic. So then I went into SmartThings and I love the power of SmartThings, but I just found like they got overcomplicated with their IDE because you had to go into one website to do something and another site to do something else. It just got really complicated, but I liked what they did. And that's when Hubitat eventually started at that point. And I jumped on early with Hubitat and it made sense because

they centralized a lot of stuff. It all ran off the hub. I learned Groovy and that's where the power came was. Once I learned Groovy, I could do pretty much anything I wanted in the hub. They opened up so much more in terms of calls, communication, and that's why I'm a Hubitat fan. Now, I'll agree their interface isn't the most friendliest. They don't have a pretty app on the phone. I totally agree that some of the gripes people over the years have um brought up but i don't think that's their main concern right now they're into automation they want you to set things up to happen automatically they don't want you to have to use an app but a lot of people still want that

app interface to control things to look at things you know so it's a battle um they're a very small team i'd like to see them expand and get someone dedicated to fixing their app, their dashboards. You know, there's a few like visual things they can work on and just make the experience much better. But it's a very powerful platform. If you want to learn Groovy and you want to develop your own apps, you develop your own drivers. You could do so much with that little box. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Hubitat was born out of smart things.

Like somebody was mad about a smart things limitation. Then they made a thing that sat over the top of smart things and eventually just kind of came its own. Well, they made their own hub, and the hub was compatible with all the smart things drivers. So instantly all the smart things drivers so instantly all the drivers could easily easily be ported over and it had compatibility with so many things right um and yes it was a group of people i don't know the exact history but it seems like they

had issues with smart things or the company or how things were being run and just decided to start their own thing and you know what i've been there since like pretty much since the day they launched it publicly. Yeah. And I knew about a lot of what I call the downsides to Hubitat, you know, before I went into it. I did a lot of research on it. I basically knew exactly what I was getting into. But I'm one of those people that I can't make an opinion on something until I actually try it and play with it myself. And I'm glad I did. It's still here in the house. I can use it at some point, you know, if I want to again. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's just, that's the beautiful thing about hubs is that you can switch and, uh, change to something else whenever you want to. Yeah. Very cool. That's well, it sounds like TJ that you're going to be a matter

man because that's, that's where this is all headed. And it sounds like you should be able to... It's a matter of household. Yeah, right. You should be able to swap out your hub no matter what you wanted to do. You just have to reset all your devices and bring them back over to whatever... You had to go through that process now, right?

From going to Hubitat back over to SmartThings. Yeah, and I probably make it harder on myself too because I literally just factor reset the Hubitat hub and then I just factor reset all my devices and rejoined, um, a couple of that devices. It was harder for like, I have a Phillips hue Bluetooth light that also has Zigbee built into it as

well. Um, and I had it paired directly to the hub attack hub. Well, come to find out there's not actually a way to factor or reset the light bulb, uh, without one of the dimmers,

the hub Phillips or the Phillips Hue bridge hub thing, or Amazon Alexa. But luckily, my light bulb had Bluetooth built into it. So I was able to use the Bluetooth Phillips Hue app and factory reset it that way. But everything else was relatively easy to reset. And it maybe took me a couple hours. Um, but then I had, like I said, I had all my automations and everything running within a couple hours of switching everything over. So pretty, uh, easy switch in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. That's one thing you mentioned is that it was a lot easier, at least quicker for you

to, to set up the automations within, um, smart things than it was over with Hubitat. Yeah. And it's one of those systems where like, you know, if I want my wife to add something to the system, it's not going to be like, I don't have to explain it to her necessarily. I can just say, you know, open the app and add the plus, you know, hit the ad symbol or whatever, and then just add it that way. Whereas Hubitat it's like, like well you have to go to the website and then you have to go to this and do this and it's just more cumbersome for that um but if you're just the one messing with it all the time you know how to do it then that's obviously not a problem um but i like my stuff to be accessible to everybody so yeah i thought i was doing that here with the home kit thing and still it's hey, can you turn off the light? I'm like, Siri, turn off the light.

It's just not to yell at the thing over there, and it doesn't. You become the, ask Seth, can you ask Siri to turn off the light? I don't know. Yeah, voice control is luckily the savior of the house because that is the easiest thing to use at this point. Yeah. All right, well, cool. We'll have to keep an it on your Hubitat,

or sorry, your smart things experiment here. And then I wonder what, you know, by the time this fall comes out and Matter gets released, like what will you, what will the Matter man switch to? Like he's going to. Who knows? Maybe there'll be a new Matter hub that I can switch to. I have a feeling there's going to be all sorts of junk related to matter.

That's going to come out towards the end of this year. Oh man. I'm kind of, I'm kind of hoping the matter does push out, you know, some better hub options. Cause really there's not a lot of good options for consumers. You know, we've all, you know, beat the drum on Home Assistant and Hubitat and smart things, but really those are the only three minus this one we're about to talk about here in a moment. But there's not really any hubs out there for just regular consumers. So hopefully Matter brings out a couple more hub options for people. Yeah. But I assume it's just not a big profitable

market at this point. Yeah. Well, I mean, I didn't have this lined up to talk about. It's just kind of a note in here that Fubaro came out with a new Home Center 3. First off, didn't know that they had a Home Center 2, Home Center 1, or Home Center at all. Or that it was so expensive. Yeah, how much is this thing? $800, you said? I think it's like $800 MSRP. So I guess it's a dealer-centric product.

I have never... I mean, I've come across for borrow but i've never come across this product in particular so i didn't even know they had this going on this is well and i didn't even know for borrow had like a dealer only section yeah that too like they have the little the what most people probably know them for is that little like eyeball motion sensor they have that is really cool looking i think it's like 50 or 60 dollars but anybody can buy those and and they're like different i remember they had like little mini light toggle like light switch kind of control things maybe maybe like in the shelly form factor before shelly was really around i don't know it's interesting i didn't know i have to check this out because i didn't really know that it existed but for for eight hundred dollars, it's a lot of money.

Yeah, I don't really see what you get with that. I mean, it's Zigbee and Z-Wave and then whatever their LRO platform is. But if you look at the specifications, it's Z-Wave 500, which has already two generations behind. So I'm not sure why you're going to buy a hundred dollar hub that's already super old. Gavin's going to have an aneurysm. He's been he's been pumping up the 700. He's like, you got to get the 700, get on the 700. And this guy's much better.

If you're buying Z-Wave devices right now, make sure they have the 700 chip. It's faster. It's better. It's better range, better battery life, et cetera, et cetera. And they're working on the 800 chip. So, I mean, like, this is one generation behind because the 800 chip is one generation ahead right um but the 500s i i noticed there's a number of companies out there that still have the 500s and they're still releasing 500 series chips because i think it's easier for

them to get those chips right now too than it is the 700 series so we may still see some of those products but it's not the end of the world 500 it's not the end of the world it is the 700 series so we may still see some of those products but it's not the end of the world 500 it's not the end of the world it is for an 800 project i guess oh yeah uh interesting i i know that nice has nice is a bigger company i can't remember who they own everything at this point they buy the nortec brands or something like that yeah well yeah that which owns two gig and elan they also own adobe or abode abode that's what it is so maybe that's what that extra radio frequency brand a band is for for like the two gig contact sensors and that kind of thing maybe i don't think so but they're calling it something different because they just call the the other one like um encrypted or e-series i think this is like a new

i've never heard of lro but i also didn't know they had their own hub so yeah it's probably a ton of stuff i don't know about them we'll have to investigate this one a little bit more because they've been around for a long time and they i mean they have a pretty good name in the industry at least you know in the doi space like, people know of them. Um, and they have that weird eyeball thing. So I'm going to give them credit for that, I guess. It was pretty sweet looking. I always wanted one, but I never wanted to spend the money on it. It turns red if it's easier or something like that. Yeah. They're, they're, uh, they're, they're even their security con like everything that they make is kind of has like a nice design to it too.

Like I'm looking at their security system contacts and they come in like different colors and like they're nice and glossy. They look like suppositories, but you know, it looks nice when you put it up on the window. So I don't know. It doesn't stand out. Four, five, six, seven different colors this thing comes in. That's kind of wild that you can have a choice there. There's seven different colors for a basic door, window, contact sensor. Man, NICE should extend that to the 2GIG stuff

so that way you can get more than just white security contacts. Right, that's what I was just thinking. A brown one or something. No, this has two different shades of maybe a yellow and a brown or a brownish-yellow and a black. Two different blacks, two different grays. Yeah, this is quite the offering here. And it's Apple HomeKit and Z-Wave compatible.

There you go. Oh, well, maybe one day we'll have nice things. So anyway, let's go ahead and move on here. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 389. All right. Pick of the week. Kind of an interesting one here.

Let me put it up on the screen. Share a screen. Share the Chrome tab and this video. So Gavin had some crazy windstorm thing come through. And where I'm from, they call this a hurricane. So I don't know what you guys are trying to prove here, but this is a Canadian hurricane if I've ever seen one before. No, we had, for those that may uh watch the weather network or you know those type of things

right uh we had a freak storm come across ontario this week and um by the time it hit me pickering it was the winds were strong enough that they were blowing over trees in our neighborhood but it kept intensifying as it went east um and by the time the the video you're looking at is actually in ottawa by the time it hit them it it looks like that looks like a hurricane for sure right yeah it did a lot more damage than when it hit me so it was a weird storm because we got like an amber alert on our phone saying storm you know incoming find shelter now and i looked outside and it was sunny out we were all confused i was at home depot but i still loaded things up quickly

and raced home and yeah we got hail winds damaging winds you know greg lost shingles i saw pictures you know a lot of people lost shingles actually i think i found a few of my neighbor's shingles in my yard you know but it was it was a weird storm that just came out of nowhere apparently it came from the states so we'll blame you oh yeah um yeah it came up from the states and just intensified so that's an interest that video is actually crazy um and there's still people without power right now i thought y'all only got snow storms up there i didn't realize you got actual storms oh this is like uh this is this is our warm weather snow storm so we got hail there here you go so you lost power you said yes yes so so what what was that like like living in a smart home that's just boring is that well no like like

like when you lose power your smart home's right? Like there's nothing working at that point, right? Like, but we lost, what happened is we lost our internet connection. We lost cable. We even lost our cell phone signal. So even our cell phones were all like disconnected, right? So it was kind of weird, but I still watch my local media. So I kind of caught up on a few TV shows. But in terms of the smart home, because again, I'm a Hubitat person, everything's running local. It was amazing

to see how like most of my stuff still work just based around planning. So like all my automations were still kicking in. You know, I lost, you know, certain cloud things like the voice assistants. I lost those. Those didn't work, but I could still access some of my local dashboards. You know, like it was great to see that when you don't have a cloud dependency, these things still work when you lost your internet connection, you know, because that happens. Right. And the wife, we didn't even notice because the wife she still manually she still controlled things but even when the evening scene kicked in you know things still turned on and off as needed right like it it was great and i felt good that i have a habitat and it's all local like that yeah yeah i was just thinking like i i've made those plans like i have local media i've backed up all my dvds

and put them on a nice little server where i can watch them anywhere you know also it gives me the ability like if we lose internet i'm not relying on netflix or anything like that i can just watch my dvds or ups or whatever and um the problem that we have here is like I lose power as well for like a week. So that didn't help the last hurricane that came through. And I was hoping at some point that the power would come back on. I'd have access to all of my media again. But by the time the power came back on, the internet was back up too. So it didn't really matter too much for me.

But yeah, local control, local planning, and that kind of thing. It's something smart to think about because you don't ever want to be stuck with your home not working for some reason because your internet connection's down, which is, you know, it makes things boring. But if you plan around a little bit, maybe you can, it's possible to, uh, to, to keep, to keep the entertainment going, I guess. And that's some of the things I, when I'm buying a new product, that's some of the things I evaluate is like, what happens when, you know, how is this connecting in and what happens if I lose my internet connection? And that's one of the reasons why I kind of try and stick to Z-Wave or ZigBee

is because they still work. Right. Even my camera setup still work because there's no cloud dependency on that. It was all goes to my blue iris. It's all local. It was still recording the storms and everything like that. So it was great. And when you buy a buy a product, look at what's going to happen when you lose your Internet connection. Is, you know, like your irrigation system. I'm pretty sure that's not important to you if you lose your internet right so that's fine not not in that storm holy moly yeah yeah you know like and thermostats for the most um still work when they lose their connectivity right like they're not

going to stop working so that that's fine but if you have light switches that are all like they own if you have light bulbs that only work when they're cloud connected oh you're gonna have some upset people in your house when they can't turn on and off the light just like that right yeah that's what i always think of whenever i see people doing like the smart bulbs instead of like switches like man whenever you have a power outage or internet outage something like that it's just gonna wreak havoc on anything yeah can't can't turn on my lights right now because the internet's out yeah that well yeah i think there's mostly an override for that but uh yeah the point is like if you had like a internet connected switch or something that was supposed to talk to these

lights yeah that would be a problem so, it's just something to think about when you're setting things up. How does this work? And you know what is a good test? Just go to your router and just unplug the internet and walk around and poke at things and see what works and what doesn't work. I do that from time to time.

Not on purpose, but because the Comcast internet just drops out here for some reasons. So I can go around and poke at things and see, oh, this doesn't work. This doesn't work the way I thought it was going to, you know, this isn't a good backup solution, that kind of thing. Uh, same thing with, uh, Greg was posting earlier about the UPS that he set up, you know, same thing with that. Um, it's always a good idea to unplug, you know, power into the UPS from time to time, just to make sure it does actually work the way it says it's going to work. Cause I have had those just like shut completely off it's like oh

yeah they're either batteries are dead or the ups electronics inside are bad or something so um just just test those things for power outages and should be good to go my uh my unraid server sits on a ups and when power is cut it will run until a certain percentage and then it all gracefully shuts down all the vms and everything you know and that's for safety and everything and i also even have my hub attack hub sits on a ups because if their power is cut it affects the database but it's just a little it's not ups it's just a little battery pack i plug it into and it actually lasts for five six hours easily i've never seen it like die, but it just keeps the power going to

that, you know, if it went, when I lose power, so it doesn't like corrupt the database. Right. Yeah. My, my, my, I think I have a ring alarm and I think it has a battery pack in it or something. Um, and what's funny is when you lose, connectivity, it'll reach out through its cellular backup and email you and say, Hey, you've lost cellular, but my phone is on the local network, which doesn't get out or get new emails. So it's kind of like, oh, I don't really get those emails until I figure out that the internet's down, turn off my Wi-Fi, and start getting cellular connectivity back. But at that point, I already know that there's no internet at the house. It's kind of a useless feature.

Anyway, if you have any questions, comments, feedback, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, Gavin, speaking of Unraid, speaking of Unraid servers. About to get a talk in too.

Guy says, 610 is out. Go press the update button. Some idiot goes and like, yeah, I'm going to press the button. And guess what, man? Everything, it's gone. No, no, it's not. It wasn't that bad, but like it destroyed, like it didn't destroy anything. It destroyed the configuration, I guess. I don't know what

happened. Um, I eventually figured it out. And then there was a button that I pressed. It was like, Oh, upgrade the certificates. Because I think that was a big feature that they were talking about too, um, to make it like a secure connection. And so your browser doesn't complain every time you connect to it. And, um, that just hosed everything. I had to reboot to like safe mode and all sorts of fun stuff to even get that to come back a lot. And I just went in and kind of deleted that thing and got it back up and going, but man, that, that took out most, that was the longest one. And the worst part of it is that was like Saturday night, like early in the morning. So Friday night, early in the morning, like two o'clock in the morning, poking around at this stuff. And you know, Saturday morning is like, my daughter's going to wake up at seven, six,

six 30 in the morning, seven in the morning, and then want to watch cartoons and nobody else wants to get up so how do i you know i'm like i have to fix this or i'm just gonna i'm gonna catch hell like there's gonna be nothing for her to watch so i had to stay up and fix it but i did thanks gavin thanks man thanks you know like i saw the upgrade button i was wondering what was gonna happen when you pressed it and i fortunately enough, I tricked you into doing it. So thanks for taking one for the team. Taking one for the team. You know, we found out what happened. But to be fair, I eventually kick upgrade on my backup on RAID server, which is a very simple server.

It was already running release candidate eight. And I just said, let me go to the stable version. And after I hit upgrade, it would not boot anymore. And the only way i could fix that was to rebuild the key restore the config they obviously have issues they're working through it i'm not even touching my primary server until like they come out with another couple releases um because there's a lot of people in their forums complaining about it right now. Just issues upgrading it and the keys not booting anymore or hardware not being found after a reboot or something like that. So if you're an unread person, you're brave enough.

Let us know what experience you had when you clicked that upgrade button. And if you haven't upgraded yet, go for it. It's perfectly fine. Just let us know what happens. Just don't do it at a particular like do it when you have plenty of time, like you got nothing else to do for the next couple hours and nothing has to come out of the server for the next day or so, you know, just do it then. And I think you'll be all right.

Yeah, it's hilarious. When we were talking about this update last week on the show, I actually was in the process of updating it as you guys were talking about it. And I was like, I better not update it right now because the wife's probably watching something. And so I didn't do it. I totally forgot about it. And I'm so glad that I did not. Unraid has a history.

When they come out with the major releases, there's a lot of issues. And it goes through. Why didn't you sell this last year? I really wanted to know what happened when you click that upgrade button, how well it works. So, you know, like, because when they came out with 6.9,

there was a lot of activity in the forums of issues and stuff. And now they have 6.9.2 where, you know, it's so down, right? So wait for that point release. They came out with 10.1, but I'm still waiting on the 10.2. Oh, did they? I'll go upgrade right now. Yeah, let me know what happens.

I thought I was going to give Gavin a heart attack earlier when I said that I switched from Hubitat to SmartThings and I was going to move from Unraid to Synology. Just killing all his hopes and dreams over there. Yeah, I still haven't committed. I think I out and this may be this will be another show but i i think i figured out um what i'm going to do with the the server situation that i have that doesn't like that i can't use very well because it's got these like another government blow dryer fans built into it yeah um i don't know i've got my use out of it and i've actually gotten my money back by selling the two like what are they called uh switches i don't know

they were like there was there were switches there were routers um sonic walls i had two sonic walls that i sold so like basically for all the money that i had paid for these things like in these nine servers uh or whatever i got like six servers and sonic walls and a PoE switch. I feel like I've gotten my money back, but I haven't gotten my money back from like all the upgrades and random things that I've done. Like three different hard drives.

But with Unraid, what's nice about that and Gavin, you kind of like, that's what kind of convinced me is like, I can take those drives out and keep them in order, but in theory, I should be able to move those over to a new machine, plug them in, plug the USB stick in,, but in theory, I should be able to move those over to a new machine, plug them in, plug the USB stick in, boot up, and Unraid should be fairly agnostic as to what happens there.

Yeah, Unraid maps it based on the serial number of the drive, but I know in your system, it kind of does something weird with the serial numbers, so you got to be wary of that and how to switch the serial numbers. But I've done it a number of times where I just picked up the drives, the eSATA card, plopped it in a new machine, booted up with the key. It saw all the same drives and started up the array perfectly fine. Yeah, that'd be nice. I think I have an idea what I'm going to try and do by scavenging some of the parts that I have.

I'm like, I realized that I was sitting around like, I have 90% of what I need here today to make the computer I actually want and not the server thing. Although I do lose some features on the server thing that like it has this lights out feature where it's just a separate, it's almost a computer built into it. And it gets the, like you basically gets the screen.

Like I can remote into the thing if it's crashed and fix it. Like it's pretty wild because it's an entire separate computer built onto the motherboard inside this. It's really cool. All the, all the, the bigger servers have that, but like if you go to, uh, um, just a standard, you know, ATX motherboard, it's not on there. You don't have that kind of feature. So, um, anyway, I think I have an idea, but, uh, I've, I've got, I just thought about it today while I was sitting, uh, doing, doing nothing somewhere. I was like, Oh wait, I have, I have parts. I have parts in pieces. I can piece something together. And it just went from there, just snowballed from there. So it's amazing when you have parts just sitting around. Someone

actually asked me today if I had, um, a way to connect an IDE drive into their computer. They have an old IDE drive. And I, you know, surprisingly, I had an IDE to USB connector cable, right, that I will give them. I do too. I always keep that around. You never know when it will come in handy. You know when your wife looks at that box of wires in your basement? She's like, why are you keeping this crap around?

Throw it out. Today is one of those days when I look at her and I go, this is why I kept this around. She goes, what is that? Yeah, she has no clue why, but I say, this is why. This literally cost me. I had the same situation, but it cost me $20 on Amazon to get a new one. So it was like all that pain that you kept it for for 10 years um but yeah it's it's there on amazon for 20 bucks and you can

get it in a day that's that's what's happened to me i have three of those now so yeah yeah i i have one too it's sitting sitting right behind me i connected it to both drives one of them spun up and made this crunching sound, which was amazing. I should have recorded that. And the other one just didn't spin up at all and just kind of looked at me and was like, um, no. So, uh, nothing came of those drives that we had sitting around since college

and I was able to just toss them into the bin. So, there you go. This is why. Yep, yep. This is the way. This is the way. Alright, 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 patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and i i just look at face plates that should not exist like oh so good though five gang five gang face plates installed sideways because there wasn't enough room on the wall there's two of them next to each other. That was the most ridiculous thing I think I've ever seen, TJ. It literally gave people heart attacks in the hub. Like we had to – this is so gross.

Oh, man. So now I get to put that in our show notes. It's so good. It's going to tank our SEO rating. There's that one with the vertical vertical switches and then let's see here it looks like there's more in the back room there like oh there's switches everywhere the person got paid by the switch so oh clearly and then we have this one oh chef's kiss right there yeah so eight switches in a row two of them are dimmers i love. I love it. The fact that they couldn't find a, an eight,

eight dimmer, eight switch plate. And so they just cut one down and slapped it next to the other one. Just kind of like, it would bother me so much if that was my house. It's crooked in the middle. Like it doesn't line up. Luckily the homeowner was very nice and we were able to make fun of it together. Yeah. that's so funny. Anyway, yeah, if you're in the hub, you get to see those. You get to see those beautiful pictures that TJ took and posted in the hub there. Well, let's see. If you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of

your choice. That wraps up another week here at Home Tech. For everyone here, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week take care see you later alligators see you later see you later see you later can you uh tj what are those big lizards they have here um iguanas no the big lizards they have here? Iguanas? No, the big lizards. The ones that live on golf courses and stuff in Florida. Big ones.

I only know the small ones. The anoles or iguanas? The lacoste. It's on the shirt. What are you talking about? The ones that are always running around the golf courses. They're in the Amazon and stuff. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Alligators, Greg said. Say that again. Gregreg said alligators there we go there we got you can see you later alligators wow y'all are ridiculous what if there's only one of them, DJ, on the course? What are they called again? I ain't saying it. Oh, we're editing that in.