HomeTech.fm - Episode 391 - A Tim Horton's Mirage

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

This week on HomeTech: Apple talks about Matter mattering at WWDC, Samsung talks about Matter not really mattering at event no one heard about, Roku might be acquired by Netflix, Facebook kills the Portal (at least for the home), Insteon rises from the grave, again, and Seth rants about traveling in the UK. All this, the pick of the week and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 17th. 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 about all aspects of home technology and home automation. We've got a couple of news stories that have come up over the last week when we were off. I guess I was off. You guys were like, let's record a show.

And I'm like, I'm in Scotland with really, really bad internet. We could have recorded it just giving you all the hard work of editing the show and posting it up and everything. So just be lucky we didn't. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, um, I decided to take a little trip and the internet there was not reliable. I was in the best place I had internet. Like I would go to hotels and they're like, Oh, we have,

we have wifi internet, whatever. Like it's never all that great. Um, and I went to one hotel and they're like, here, here're like, here's the QR code that you can scan and it'll let you join and add the password in and all that stuff. So I scanned it with the QR code reader and got all the password stuff out of it like a normal person would. And was like, went to log on to it and it just doesn't work. Like, we got in late. So then I went downstairs and these are like lodges in the middle of Scotland. Right. So went downstairs to talk to him about it. And they're like, did like all the lights are off. No one's there. I'm like, okay, well, I guess I'll bring this up in the morning. And so, yeah, the wifi, it gets a, it gets a thumb down from me from that. The best Wi-Fi I had was a BT, I guess that's British Telecom.

I'm not sure. But it was a DSL connection that I tried to run the speed test on and it would just crash. So it was reliable in that it worked, but it was, it was not, not great, not fast. So I don't think we could have actually recorded a show, even if we tried. Um, and if you guys had recorded a show and sent me some files, I would have just looked at them and laughed. Like it wasn't, wasn't going to happen. Yeah.

You messed up. I think you have to go with cellular while you're over there. Um, I remember when I traveled there, you know, several years ago at this point, um, mobile cell phone service was like super cheap for, you know, how many gigabytes you got and everything. Um, but I guess you probably weren't over there long enough to really buy a SIM card or need a SIM card. Um, probably could have done that, but I had, I had the same issue though, when I was over there. So it sounds like it has not gotten a lot better. Not, no, it hadn't gotten any better. I guess I could have done the, I didn't even think about that. Cause the AT&T stuff is like, well, it's $10 a day and you get unlimited, you know,

whatever. So I didn't, you don't have to think about it. That's one thing. Um, but the service, that service wasn't all that great either. So it wasn't until i got back into to canada lovely canada until i got like the 5g speeds back but everything over there was lte and there was one town i was in it wasn't it wasn't 5g it wasn't 3g it was just g i don't even know what that was i just got g service so okay um thanks it would it was pretty useless um but yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't do that my my my travel tech kit that i that i normally bring here in the states uh to like hotels and that kind of thing worked okay i was there was a lot of like adapters i had to have because they you know they use the different um power stuff over there for their plugs and whatnot and And, uh, everything, everything I had,

I, you know, just double check to make sure it was like the dual power, power supplies. It was all fine. Uh, but my, my little travel router that I was like, Oh, I'm going to use this for VPN to get back to all like Plex and all my stuff at home. Um, I was having problems at the first place that we stayed at. Right. And I was like, well, it must be a problem with this router. Let me just reset it. And I, I reset it and it deleted all my VPN settings out of it, which it turns out the reason I couldn't connect was because I had a VPN turned on, on my phone. So it was, it was screwing up connecting locally to the, yeah, whatever. Uh, I, I got all that worked out and then just had the router, the router that wouldn't connect to the wifi that didn't work. And then when I went down and talked to the guy in the morning,

he was like, huh, that's weird. It usually works. And that was the end of the conversation. Off, off to explore the wilderness of Scotland. We went,

you need to add like a portable star link thing to your kit travel kit now so that you walk with your own internet as well. That would be amazing. Just more junk to pack though. I don't, I don't think it would have fit in my bag that I went over with. Uh, cause we actually, we, we, we challenged ourselves to actually not check any luggage, I guess, you know, so we, we went with all carry ons for what was a week, I guess it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't terrible. Um, but I had to fit everything into a backpack and, um, a carry-on, uh, for the week. Anyway, um, let's get into some home tech stuff though. Not travel tech. Uh, we've got a note on here. Sonos voice. Are you using it?

Question mark. And I would say not me cause I haven't been home, but also I don't have any microphones in my Sonos product. So yeah, this is one of the few products I've added to the household that the wife has asked me to put it into other rooms just so we can use Sonos voice. I think it's a great feature to what we already have. And it works great. I only use it for like two or three things though. It's always the grouping, ungrouping and, uh, you know, stopping speakers in different areas. Um, and that alone is worth it for me. Um, so I'm interested to see if anybody else is using it and what their thoughts of it are so far. Um, my only negative

about it is, and I think it's a bug because I was just talking to Gavin about it before the show. For some reason, my Sonos Arc will like mute itself for like 30 seconds after it issues its command. So it just keeps the TV audio super low down to where you can't hear anything. And it lasts a good 30, 45 seconds. It feels like forever. I'll have to time it one time and see. But we've rebooted the Sonos devices and the network and all that good stuff. And it's still there. So I'm assuming it's just some weird bug with just my Sonos.

And since the day they released it, there's only two commands I've used on it. And I use them almost every day. And that was, hey, Sonos, turn on night mode or turn on voice enhancement. And the only reason I use those two commands is they can't be mapped to anything on my remote. So I now don't have to take out the app and turn those on and off. I can actually just tell Sonos to do it now. And those are the two most valuable commands to me. Nice. Yeah, see, I didn't even know that was like a thing or an option

because I always just left my, you know, night enhancement or speech enhancement on all the time because I just don't want to open the app to turn it on or off. So it just stays the same, whatever it's been on forever. So I'll probably use the Sonos Voice to do that now. And you see, that's like a bad design. If it gets to the point where you don't even want to use the app to turn on and off and you'd rather go with inferior quality, right? That's a bad design. They should at least allow it to be mapped to a button on the

remote, but I'm just happy to have it with the Sonos now. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. I'm in the same position. I wish they would have like a little, maybe you could just assign it to a button on one of the devices or something. You could turn it on and off. I turn it off and then my wife is like, wow, it's really loud in here. It's like operating as it's supposed to be. And then I go and turn on the compression

and turn on the night mode or whatever. And yeah, I don't like it as much, but I don't know, it kind of is what it is. Um, especially when we have a child that we would like to have sleeping at seven o'clock who doesn't go to sleep and we just kind of want to keep it down. So you have to do what you got to do. Anyway, you guys ready to jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. Well, I know we had some big announcements while I was gone. And I think the biggest one here

is a new firmware update for Hubitat. Gavin, this isn't, I'm joking. This isn't the biggest news of the week, but it's something we thought was interesting. We throw it on here. Gavin, I like how you laughed

with that one. I was like, he's really saying this is the biggest announcement of the week. No, it's a quick announcement. Hobbitat released a new firmware this week. It introduces a lot of bug fixes, a new app called Room Lighting, which is a really powerful control over rooms and automations and lighting and stuff like that.

And also native Bond integration, which bond is something allows you to control devices using not IR, but RF. So I use the bond hub to control my fireplace, for example. So it's nice to see it's native now. So make sure you go get it. And if you haven't done this yet, upgrade the Z-Wave firmware. It's a different upgrade. You know, just figure out where you have to go to do that. Make sure you update that because it makes a significant difference with Z-Wave as well. Yeah. The bond device is really cool because it like here in Florida, we have a ton of those canopy controls for your fans or whatever. And the bond, if you get bond, it's like a bond bridge is like a hundred bucks or something like that. It's not much. You can plug

that in and it'll control like, I think that's what they designed it for is controlling the fans in those rooms um but it it does a whole bunch of other stuff like there's i don't think they can do garage doors they can't i think they they can't and they don't want to get into it i i talked to the owner of this company long ago i'm like hey my q sucks do garage doors and he's like yeah we're talking to my q we're talking i'm like just do it i mean just you will make so much money hand over fist but yeah i can understand why they don't want to do it because i think in some locales or some situations you have to have like that light and sound or something that go off if you automate the door so um probably doesn't work with their current product lineup, but it would

be nice if they could support that. But if you've got any weird RF devices, even blinds, like shades and that kind of thing, uh, I think you can add those into bond control, but they've, they've got a huge, if you go to their website and look into their support documents, they've got a huge list of things that, um, you can get done, uh, outdoor lighting, smart ceiling fan controls, just a bunch of stuff that this like RF device, dumb RF devices, this thing will control. It's kind of nice. It does more than you think. But yeah, it's a good addition to have into any smart home platform. I know that Home Assistant has it. I think they added that a little while back ago. I've seen that in their code. And it's good that Hubitat's getting it.

No, there was a community integration for a while now, but the integrated integration for Bond is much better. It's much smoother. Instead of polling for the status of devices now, it kind of gets the status from Bond as it changes. So it's much easier on the network and on the hardware. So it's worth it if you're using the community version to switch over to the integrated one. Yeah. And I see they added support for my new favorite devices, the third reality switch,

that funky looking light switch cover that I posted in the chat the other day. I actually caught a funny interaction with the maintenance man the other day. He came in to look at my sink and he was cursing out that we covered the light switch and he couldn't turn it on. I guess he couldn't see the small round button on the switch and just didn't realize he could just flip. You could just push the button and the light switch would turn on. So I currently love him, though. So a little a little on the ugly side.

Amazing. That's too funny. Well, there you go. Bond firmware updates, bug fixes, you know, all that good stuff. And that room lighting control thing seems kind of cool. Anything that gives you better features and options for controlling things and gives you more control over how you control them is a good thing. So let's move on. Uh, I think the biggest thing last week while I was gone was

WWDC, which is Apple's, um, developer focus conference. It's not even a hardware focus conference and people always expect them to launch new hardware at this thing. Like literally every year there's rumors and it's like, dude, this is software. They're going to talk about software. And you have to like read between the lines to see what they're going to do in the future for, for hardware, because they announced the APIs and everything kind of for it. And then kind of wink during their sessions when they're talking about programming for their devices that don't exist yet. So that's what this is for, this big conference is for. I think they've done a couple of things or a couple of announcements in the past, but it was like Mac computers.

And this one actually got new M2 Macs, one of them, which is like the Mac Air, I think, got an M2 chip, which mean okay that's great we all have m1s now m2 is next one is smaller than two two is bigger than one they got the marketing right that's what you're supposed to do um yay good good for you i guess i don't know uh ios got a bunch of updates new spatial audio junk that you can have new fitness features. Um, iPad is getting a weather app. The year is 2022. I just checked, uh, yay. Good for iPad. Finally getting a weather app. Um, let's see. Only thing we really care about is that new, uh, that home kit app and what it's going to do. It looks like Apple has decided that it's going to put some new skin and redesign the whole thing on there.

So let's talk about that. First of all, Apple did say that they were basically going to make some changes to the underlying architecture in HomeKit and make it more, quote, faster, comma, more reliable, and especially for homes with many smart accessories. So maybe they've figured out that when people add a bunch of stuff in to a HomeKit system, it kind of falls flat on its face. I don't know. Like when I look at how HomeKit is designed in a lot of these systems, not just HomeKit, like a lot of these systems, they're designed with developers who put, who,

and this has been my experience sitting in the room with developers on smart home projects. It's like, you have to focus your development for a specific target audience. And if you say we're going to target apartments and homes, you know, under 2,500 square feet for our product, that tends to make a lot of the decisions that you have, like hyper-focus on, on that individual group. And when you get a, you know, somebody who puts in 200 HomeKit devices on your system that was designed for 20, um, things can really fall flat on their face. So it sounds like Apple has found out that people like to have more HomeKit devices in their homes than 20 or 30. I don't know what their magic number that they were aiming for was.

And it sounds like in iOS 16, they'll have the option or have more reliable and performance-driven solution for people who are using HomeKit, which would be nice. Reliability is always great. When they add that in, I can't complain. Yeah, you know what? I've never, I started off with HomeKit and I've never been a fan of HomeKit since the beginning. I just found it was very basic for me personally, but I think it's a great ecosystem for people that just want something simple.

So you just want a light to turn on with one simple automation. I recommend they just go with home kit because it just works, you know? And like you said, if they have like 10 devices, it'll just work, you know? And I always recommend that. But if you want something to be more powerful, this is where the problem comes in is because when you get into home automation, you're always going to be more powerful, this is where the problem comes in is because when you get into home automation, you're always going to be trying to do more and more and more. You throw three switches here, you throw five switches here. Next thing you know, you have 40 switches and then you're going to outgrow HomeKit. It gets expensive to switch at that point to another ecosystem, right? So I always want to like consider too, is when I ask people is, do you see yourself doing a lot with this?

Right. Because then, you know, I take that into consideration as well, too, is because they'll come to you and they say, well, I want this to happen at this time of day when this switches off and these people are home and this is all happening. And these, you know, like some complicated thing. And I'll be like, you know what? home kit may not be the best thing for you then at that point but well it it it's not just expensive to switch but you also have to like say there's features on home kit that you get that you like yeah that that you've come to rely on and you need you're like okay well all the junk that i bought works with home kit but also works with habitat or also works works with SmartThings or Home Assistant. Like I can switch over to all that, but I've got to learn this whole new ecosystem and interface. I don't know.

That's the most, that's the priciest part of this, if you ask me. Like it's not. The relearning. Yeah, relearning and losing out on features. And, you know, there's a couple of things I do in HomeKit me like it's not the relearning yeah relearning and and losing out on features and and uh you know there's a couple things i do in home kit that involve like the shortcuts app because they integrated that a couple of uh years ago um that like you can bring in your home your home kit devices for automation and shortcuts it's not really a thing that most people do or get involved with, but you can do it.

And if you move away from the HomeKit ecosystem, those devices and those features that you were relying on that may only exist inside of shortcuts because you're in that Apple ecosystem, go away and you lose big features that way. I don't know. I think I've always liked the architecture that they have behind HomeKit here. I don't know.

I don't think there's any reason to dissuade somebody from using it because you can get to more advanced features by using things like shortcuts or things like the, like the other HomeKit apps that, that really let you dig deeper into the, the, what you can do with the product in the ecosystem. Cause there, there are other apps. There's like, there's apps that have data stores that tie, that tie into HomeKit now. Like you can, You can store chunks of data and state and share that between different HomeKit. It's wild what people have done with this HomeKit ecosystem. But you have to know,

you really have to want to get involved with all that junk. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I think it's got longer legs on it than most. As far as like a basic to advanced system, I wouldn't say, oh, you immediately jump off HomeKit onto something else. There may be a way that you can do what you want to do with HomeKit. That is reliable and works. But if you bog down your system with tons of devices and it doesn't work, that could be a problem.

Yeah, and that's what i started running into as well as you know you started having a lot of devices and i don't know if it's still the same now but back then when you opened up the home app it would pull all the devices for the state at that point so i had to wait for them all to reply and i don't know if it still does that or you know if they didn't reply in time it would show them as offline in the home app and that used to drive me nuts you know so I still use HomeKit though even though I'm central on Habitat I use HomeBridge to expose my devices to HomeKit because there are certain things in HomeKit that I still have to utilize you know it's nice to be able to just use my watch for example to when I'm outside to open and close my garage door right I don't have to utilize, you know, it's nice to be able to just use my watch, for example, when I'm outside to open and close my garage door, right? I don't have to pull out the phone

and stuff. I just talk to my watch and it does it right. And I still use Siri in certain situations. So I don't discount it. I just say, you know, there's certain, you know, you'll reach a certain point when you want so many devices and I'm glad they're looking, focusing actually on performance now because that will make it that much better. And it's funny, they're looking at that now and Matter's just around the corner. So it means that HomeKit's gonna still be here for a long time, I think.

And one of the things they said in the presentation was like, Apple has contributed the foundation of HomeKit to be the foundation of Matter. And it's like, okay, did it? I mean, I guess technically there are some aspects of HomeKit. I don't have no idea what they did. And it may be why we have no information on what Matter actually is or does. It's like, oh, it was born out of Apple.

So, of course, we don't talk about it. You can't talk about that google's matter was built on apple's platform apparently right yeah right because in gadget the other uh a couple weeks ago i was like it's google's matter it's like it doesn't really belong to to anyone except i guess this the what the thread group or whatever that's kind of like the working group over the whole thing i don't know every everybody owns it i i guess everybody can lay claim to it and tell you what they're going to do with it or what they're really not going to do with it and then when it fails that's nobody's yeah it's not my it must be samsung's problem um a couple of different things popped up in this oh so i guess

the the home kit app gets a new redesign which is nice it's kind of big i think yeah it looked nice from what they showed um it looked like a lot of the third-party home apps like they had taken design cues and decisions that those third-party apps had made and they kind of integrated in so but that's nice it's always nice when um an app gets updated from apple because a lot of times they update it once a year and you don't see any more updates exactly a long time and it seemed like they focused on you know a new app that can handle people with many devices now right whereas it was frustrating in the past you know um so it was good to see that you know it looks much nicer um the the home the home app itself has been kind of wonky and janky for a long time and it's gotten a couple updates but it's it's not not great discoverability and

it's not great i don't know i i've not been a a massive fan of it other than like the quick control that you get out of it from like just quickly opening something up, hitting lights off, or even just yelling at Siri to do something. That's kind of nice. Yeah. I really like the way the cameras look and how responsive they are in it. But at the same time, I also see people say, make sure you have the latest iPad or at least a fairly new iPad to handle all this stuff, or else it's just going to be slow. Oh, no, no, no, my friend. Not iPads anymore because an iOS 16, according to the fine print on Apple's website, the iPad can no longer be a hub in your system.

So I guess you have to have a HomePod or a... Apple TV. I guess Apple TV still. Yeah, I guess that's all that's left there. Can you still use an iPhone as a home hub if you had like an old iPhone that you left at home? Not even them? You've never been able to use that as a hub.

No. Just the iPad and the Apple TV and the HomePods when they came online with those. So luckily it's not terrible. HomePod's only $100, I think, for the little minis. Yeah, it's not bad. Not terrible. Yeah, I think the for the little me yeah that's not bad not terrible yeah i think the only thing holding me back from home kit at this point is i switch hubs all the time i think i would switch to home kit if they just release android support but i know that

that's never going to happen so just like an android app like there is an android app is there one oh man it's been reverse engineered a hundred different ways at this yeah it's not like an official one though not an official one because because the wife has android i need probably not what you want anyway honestly like the official android app would be kind of like halfway done and just like done out of spite i i think what would you want is uh i don't think the android music app was that bad though i haven't used it since it came out though i guess it's probably probably the only update i've ever received yeah i hope it always looked nice to me yeah look look into it because there's probably um there's probably a home kit app that somebody has done for android um i don't i don't know i don't know how well that ties into the ecosystem because you, they would, they would have to do a lot of work to get at that, that database, uh, that,

that exists with HomeKit, but, um, sorry, the first comment is switch the home assistant. So there you go. There you go. It's always home assistant all the way down the rabbit hole. Um, another interesting thing that, that is popped up inside of documents that Apple doesn't tell you about is that HomeKit, Apple has added offline voice control for HomeKit to Siri. So that's kind of nice. It doesn't need to go out to the web to do basic commands, kind of like what we were talking about with the Sonos earlier. You just yell at it to turn on a light in the room and it room, and it's faster if it doesn't have to make a round trip to some server, do some processing,

and come back and issue that command. So that's nice. No more iPad hubs in the house as of iOS 16, and HomePods actually are getting public betas now. So if you're part of the public beta program, you can sign up to get buggy firmware for your buggy HomePod. I'm looking at my big HomePod. The little ones, from what I understand, work really rather well, but the big ones are, I just had it working today and the audio was

not in sync with what I was watching on the Apple TV. Lovely. Audio's hard. Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's Apple's audio. It's supposed to just work, but anyway, that's, uh, that's Apple in a nutshell. Um, they did mention thread on stage and talked about it a little bit, but I don't know, like I thought they were going to have a bigger push, but this isn't really the product forum. This is the software forum where they talk to developers. Um, so maybe, maybe you know we definitely are going to see a bigger push later in the year as we get closer to the holidays for shopping and that kind of thing for iot and thread and that kind of thing so should be interesting because they don't delay it again i don't think at this point they can um delay batter anymore

they don't think anybody would care anymore too many people are watching at this point and waiting. I think TJ's right. No one would care. Yeah, they delay it one more time. It's just dead in the water. They have to come up with a new name. Yeah. Call it Insteon.

Oh. Oh, that's just by Insteon. Wait, well, never mind. Let's talk about the second major thing that no one really heard about this last week was Samsung has launched a new home life to make your connected home even easier at their bespoke Home 2022 event. Samsung revealed a brand new SmartThings Home Life. It rolls out to 97 countries later in June. SmartThings Home Life promises a more, quote, holistic smart home experience.

The service will be integrated into the existing Samsung application, SmartThings application, sorry. It provides centralized and integrated control over all your smart home devices. And it kind of reaches beyond what we would consider maybe what we consider smart home and home automation stuff as far as the conversation we're talking about HomeKit. So this goes into six integration areas smart things cooking um it has smart things energy smart things clothing care pet care i'm just going to stop saying smart things because it's just redundant at this point home care and air care. So interesting if you're a Samsung and you're making products or you're an OEM partner that is integrating with the smart things ecosystem and you don't fall into one of

the buckets that matters providing automation for how, like, for example, like washers and dryers, not supported in matter. Okay. Samsung's a big maker of washer and dryers, not, not supported in, in matter. Okay. Samsung's a big maker of washer and dryers and they're a big maker of like, uh, appliances, like refrigerators. Like where do you put those things and say they're still smart devices. If they aren't supported in matter, well, you're going to step back from matter and make your own smart things, home life product and push all the other segments that don't qualify or fall into a matter integration into that. So, um, DJ, you, you, you and I were talking about this before we hit record. Like this sounds like what we were talking about a couple of weeks back when

Samsung was kind of like saying that they weren't going to fully integrate with matter, but they're going to be there with matter, but also have Samsung stuff at the same time. Yeah. I mean, I, I guess I fully don't even understand this myself just because, and I even have a smart things hub, right? It's like, what are they trying to accomplish with this in total? Um, I think I would just need to see it like how it actually works or how it lays out in order to fully get it. It just seems like it's just adding more complexity on top of stuff that's already complex. I don't I don't get it. Yeah, it is.

This is further confusion, I think, from. Well, I mean, we've talked about this before. Like matter is a standard, right? And if you don't, if you like smart things, energy, like energy monitoring is not part of matter. They don't, they didn't, this committee that made up matter from these companies, they don't have that written into the standard. So devices that provide energy monitoring aren't going to show up as a matter device. There's no way to really, well, so how do you bring those into your home ecosystem?

Well, Samsung, since they make everything and they have all these silos and part of their companies, they're just going to give you the ability to connect all this stuff together, but it'll be kind of like one layer removed and like step back from matter. Like your matter stuff is part of this, but also if you step out of that, you have this broader Samsung ecosystem and you can connect your washer and dryer and your,

I don't know your, your pet, like it says pet care. And like maybe there's a feeder they have like a Samsung pet feeder and you can feed your pets remotely with that. And is this the next thing that's going to start happening are we going to have these companies fighting to be the center now so you have samsung they'll import the uh matter stuff and they'll also have their own stuff but nobody

can else can use their other stuff are we going to see that with other companies for example what if wise wise for example you know had their little hub and all the wise devices worked with that all the matter devices worked with that but the wise devices didn't get exposed to matter you know but you needed the wise to be the central of your house like i know they're gonna screw this up somehow and i'm already starting i think we're starting to see how it's gonna happen you're gonna make me talk about this y scale, aren't you? Like, okay, so Wyze is going to do this Y scale X, which has one star as a brand new product for $33.99.

And they only came out with it because I just threw a Wyze scale onto my order the other day when I ordered a Wyze camera. It was so cheap. It was $30. Yeah, exactly. So I got the Wyze scale, and was so cheap. It's the buy, right? It was 30 bucks. Yeah, exactly. So, all right. So I got the Wyze, I got the Wyze scale

and now they've got this new one out and it does everything that the old one did, but it has an X after the name. But if Wyze wanted to have Wyze Fitness as part of their ecosystem and they support Matter, like fitness isn't part of the Matter API

or, you know, it's not in there as a Matter, like there's no Matter API for scales. So what is wise to do if they want to have their own home control app like Samsung does? Well, they've got to wedge it in there somewhere. And I think this is smart, a smart move from Samsung, a smart thing to do. Yeah, dad joke central here. But it makes sense to me more than, like, they've got all this stuff, and they've got to put it somewhere. They've got to be able to sell it as smart devices.

And if it doesn't integrate directly in with, you know, this Matter junk that everybody's talking about, what do we do with it? Well, we make our own. Like, we just roll our own. And if Matter doesn't want to do it, and if you don't want to go to this committee and wait for this committee to argue

on how to integrate a scale for the next two years, let's just do it ourselves and keep rolling with that. And that may be what dooms Matter is because it's this committee that's going to decide how to integrate a scale for two years before they release an API and delay it 15 times. Jeez, come on.

Just release this junk already. Well, and just like you said, Samsung does have all these other product lines. And this is something, you know, Samsung's used to experimenting or coming out with oddball things or what people think are oddball things. And eventually they might catch on.

I still don't have my home Galaxy. I'm still mad about that one. I want the little Bixby cauldron thing that I can, where is it? Where is it? They were going to blow away HomePod because it looks so, hey, whatever. It's not going to happen.

360 audio. Somewhere those are going to exist and they're going to be sold on eBay for like hundreds of dollars and I'm going to have to buy one. I'm going to have to buy one. I'm going to have to buy one, like the prototype unit or whatever they, they were, they had like 40 of them on stage once, like showing them off. Those have to exist somewhere. Well, I think it was like the,

the essential company or something like that. They had a smart speaker that came out that just came up on eBay a couple of days ago or a couple of weeks ago maybe. Um, and that was like five or six years ago at this point it seems like. wait another five years you might have it might maybe maybe maybe see it i don't know be nice be nice samsung where's that galaxy home speaker thing want to see it we don't need it nobody needs it not really no it can it can be buried in a landfill somewhere that's okay like with the atari all right all right uh let's let's move on here uh sam right. All right. Let's move on here. Samsung, thanks for confusing us. Let's move on here to something that's not so confusing.

There's a report out there from Insider, which probably suggests that it's true, that Roku employees have been talking about a potential Netflix takeover for a couple weeks now. This is in response to the company's plummeting stock price as demand falls for streaming services. Insider sources remain unnamed, but apparently close to the matter. Roku declined to comment, and Netflix did not reply to or respond for request of this information over from the insider. So, yeah, if you ever read something on the insider, it's probably a true rumor because they they have some really good uh really good sourcing over there uh this this looks good to me uh roku

evidently we were talking about this in the hub while i was gone and i saw some stories go by roku and netflix used to be kind of the same one in the same company or at least like live across the hall from each other it's gonna make sense yeah i had no idea supposedly uh roku started out under under netflix um it was a like an employee side project and then eventually they spun it off because they didn't want to you know step on any streaming competitor toes or streaming device uh toes i guess i should say um and i i guess i didn't know that or i completely forgot about it. But that would be funny if they just come around again and they're the same company again.

Makes total sense, though. You know, Roku has been going for the ad supported streaming services recently. Netflix does not have a free option. Why not bolster their numbers with some free freemium content? Yeah, exactly. It's interesting. I've been looking at Wikipedia because I couldn't remember. Anthony Wood, previously founder of Replay TV. So he was one of the founders of Roku. And this was founded back in 2002. So really early on.

Really before streaming was even a thing. We were still exchanging envelopes, right? Netflix was not, there was no net in Netflix. It was Mailflix. You would have to mail your CDs around. I think they still do that for people who want to, but this is like, Wood came over to Netflix and in 2007,

they began working on a, a Netflix with an in Netflix on a project called Griffin, which is a septet box to allow Netflix to stream content to their TVs. Um, and Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder decided would hamper arrangements with third parties. So yeah, like you're saying,

and that makes sense. Cause like back then Netflix was like, I had a Nintendo Wii and it had Netflix on it. Like Netflix was everywhere. They were just trying to be everywhere with every, and they, they, they probably, if they had their own device that worked better than everything else, they probably would have had a hard time signing up an agreement with, you know, the Wii Nintendo. So, um, I don't know. I, the only thing like here that I'm like, Oh no, like this could be potentially bad would be for a bright sign, which is a division of Roku. And I, I, I really like that, that for a digital signage product product. And I, I really hope

that it survives an acquisition, like,'s it's literally the same hardware the same apis and everything and i i just i i really hope that they are able to do something with it because i like that product it's really good for digital signage yeah i had no idea bright sign was even owned by roku until you brought that up it's hilarious though because they are the same color and everything so yep it's a roku company um it has been for a long time just kind of their commercial commercial side as they go gavin you have any roku's um i think i have a i have a roku tv in the basement um and i have netflix and everything on it anyway so them buying it i'm not sure i'm not sure what what they're thinking um and would it hurt agreements with other people if they now own roco i don't think at this point

it matters like yeah i don't think anybody cares yeah no one no one would care if like same thing with apple tv like apple tv is everywhere um it's you know and they have their own apple tv product so the only person that that cares at this point is google they uh they remove their stuff at will though so right they'll just get in an argument with with uh with them yeah yeah it would be uh youtube would be missing from the netflix roku player or whatever yeah exactly um i i will say that i have one of these littleoku devices as part of my travel tech because it's like the remote is bigger than the device itself. It's like this big, it powers with USB and there's usually a USB power port on the TV.

Now the TV that I actually plugged this into this week did not have USB. Um, it was old, seriously old, so old that it had a SCART connection on it. I don't know if you guys know about SCART, S-C-A-R-T. Have you ever seen one of those? It's a British thing. Wait, did your Roku have or your TV have HDMI? It did have an HDMI. It had HDMI, but it also had a SCART connector.

It had a SCART connector, yeah, S-C-A-R-T. It's a 21-pin connector. I'd say it's probably like the S-Video for the UK, I guess. I don't know. That's huge. It's massive. And it was plugged into a DVD player. So I'm like, I have no idea how old any of this stuff was. But the Netflix worked without a hitch. I just plugged it into a power adapter that I had for charging phones or whatever, and it worked fine. So yeah, big connector. It's like a, like a printer connector. If you're looking at the thing. Yeah. It reminds me of like an old

serial or parallel port. Yeah. I looked at it and I'm like, that can't be a scarred connector. Like it just, I can't be living in this in 2022 and actually see a TV with a SCART. No, it's got it on there. Crazy, crazy. For $850 off Amazon, you can buy a SCART 2 composite and S-video adapter. So if you ever need that, it's there for you. Does it do HDR? It does not. I didn't even look at the description.

It does. i didn't even look at the description it does it so inside of one connector it has composite rgb s video uh and and that's it doesn't have audio in yeah you say one you say one connector like it's not like an inch wide i mean it's big connector it's got audio right left it's like we're talking about like 3.5 millimeter yeah it. Yeah, it's got some voltages on it for status and aspect ratio up and down. So there's clock data. There's all sorts of pins on here that could be good for more advanced things. But this is not an advanced connector. I'm glad we don't use these.

I don't know. We're saying this now and somebody over in the UK who's used these for years is like, no, SCART was great. Here's why. It's better than HDMI. Yeah, well, I mean, it probably is better than HDMI, everything is. You could probably field terminate these things somehow and fix issues. The only thing with HDMI is like...

You can field terminate that with enough dedication. Right. Well, the way you field terminate HDMI is go and cut the ends off and then terminate with a Cat5 and then put a ballon on it. And then you're good to go. There's a tech tip for you if you ever cut an HDMI. Anyway, let's move on from this. SCART. What were we talking about? Rokuku and then i got off on this scart connector so anyway um moving on to the graveyard here meta this this had me crying while i was gone you guys posted this and i was like just ruined my trip but made it i'm just

gonna call it facebook because it's not meta who cares Who cares? They're no longer going to release portal devices for consumers. They're discontinuing the line. I'm not going to be able to walk in Best Buy and see dusty boxes of portals sitting there on the floor. So this is according to the information and Variety. The company is reportedly repositioning the smart display and home video line as a business product and will be discontinuing consumer versions. A variety says that Facebook will, and I'm not calling it meta cause it's stupid.

We'll sell all the remaining inventory previously released models and we'll continue providing support for existing customers. That's good. Cause they're not like completely turning the servers off anyway. It's just going to focus on the business applications, um, for future releases. Uh, I think this is a really good move because this is out of the pandemic when people were trying to figure out how to use zoom, it turned out the best, like drop in place zoom device was this Facebook portal thing and nobody wanted to use it because it had Facebook written on it. But I think if, if they repositioned it as a, like a business and start using it for business

use cases for this, I think it'll do really well in that marketplace because all you need to do to have a video conference with somebody is drop this device in connected to wifi, launch zoom, and you're good to go or Skype or whatever. The microphones are great in it. The cameras are great in it. They make you look good. They follow you around, you know, they focus on you correctly. The video display was good and it was a home, it was just a home run as far as a drop in place conferencing device. And that's kind of what it was designed around to be. Um, just turns out it was better for business and, you know, video conferencing for that than it was for anything else so i think this is pretty cool this is a pretty cool move by them and um sad sad to not

be able to see them go uh and i'll probably have to unfortunately purchase one now and put it over there in the graveyard because i've been talking about it for many years um but i expect they'll be they'll be cheap on ebay i should be able to pick one up because they're just on the floor gathering dust in someone's house and they'll be like i need to get rid of this thing maybe i'll find one at goodwill nobody nobody even knows they exist so oh man i so they were according to the IDC research firm, made us sold 600,000 portal devices in 2020 and 800 in 2021. So that would have been their good years when people were saying buy these things

for video conferencing with the family. I mean, that's nothing. That's a drop in the bucket for a consumer product. That's half a million the bucket for a consumer product. That's half a million for your product line? That's not good numbers. That's bad. Reminiscent of the Facebook phone of yesteryear, too.

Facebook does not have a good success rate with hardware. No. Nope, they do not. Well, it's a creepy company, and I really don't want to support them other than saying this is actually a good product for video conferencing. If you needed to like hand it off to somebody who just needed to have a good look and do their thing, like it worked.

All right, well, under the dark of night, I'm going to set this up because I wrote a whole story along with this. And with little fanfare, the super secret home technology company company Insteon posted on their website that the company's back and under new management. This is really how all this went down. So scouts patrolling the dark lands actually reported seeing an elusive message in the form of two sticks of hemlock next to a stag last week. All right. They quickly began lighting signal fires

along the ancient border wall, as is customary in these times. Once the signal fires reached the city, a large bell in O'Sullivan's Tower started ringing day and night, which alerted nearby scribes to make those writings and post them on neighborhood bulletin boards

for the casual passersby to see. The city governor finally sent a message up to the king that would so that all would know in the whole kingdom that the great insteon was alive yet again that's my story and i really don't know why people say this company has problems communicating with uh with users and and the public i mean just that everybody should know right like insteon's back that that's what they did i don't understand like it's this is crazy so i guess insteon's back guys again they're under new management it's it's a whole new day for for the company that shut down on easter weekend abruptly too just yeah just not telling why doesn't our stuff work anymore gosh this company is is something else and i i i don't i don't like to me the first order

business maybe to hire like a decent pr firm to do some damage control because but then they may not have enough money they may like it sounds like they have bigger problems than that i don't know i don't know what shape the company is in and like it's hard for me to say i i like what they did i like their products i've always liked them but i can't recommend this to anyone based on how they communicate out to their their out to the world like this is horrible this is bad like this is not exciting and we've got a we i mean it's going to be like a wait and see like the company clearly needs people to order their product to survive right everybody should be on wait and see if this thing dies in a year like that's that's what everybody's going to be going to be doing like that's not good for the company either like the best thing they can do is start communicating you know what

this company needs to do they need to hire basically like take over what is that company gavin uh not zoo is it zoos no the one that's like just in a valley in a valley that's the one yeah yeah yeah yeah yes wow they need to hire those guys to just dump all of their information online and just say, here's how much we owe people. This is what we're working with. This is the challenges we have. Yes. But we're alive and we're here for the long haul.

In a Valley is great at communicating with their community. I think, honestly, I think that's the only way. And it sounds like it's a Ken Fairbanks was a previous vice president of the company. He's the management that comes forward and says, here's all our problems on the table. Like, like in a belly would it, it doesn't, this just doesn't seem like it's going to be, there's going to be a good path forward for the company.

Now they did announce, I saw that they did announce there's going to be a $40 a year charge for the company. Now they did announce, I saw that they did announce there's going to be a $40 a year charge for the servers that were turned offline. So basically if you want that remote connectivity for your incident on devices, you're, you're probably, you probably need to pay that $40. That's not a big ask. I don't think like it was free. We went out of business and now it's $40 a year. Like either pay the $40 a year or you, your company goes out of business. Nothing works again. So like, it's, it's better than going out of business. Right? Like 40 bucks is not that much. I don't think that's a big ass to keep those servers running, but man,

what a, what, like they, they should be talking about like how much their AWS bill is going to be like, and just, just putting everything in front of people. So they understand that running a smart home company, isn't just like free because they, man, I, this, this is crazy. I just, I don't know what to think about this. I, I wouldn't recommend Insteon to my worst enemy right now. And I say that knowing that the product is good and it works well, but Holy cow, this is just one forced error, unforced error after another. It's, it's kind of ridiculous. Yeah. I think just like what you were saying,

they really need to come out upfront and just be honest about everything and tell us what their intentions are. If they just did that right off the bat, I'd probably trust them a little more off the front. I'm not going to run out to purchase them just because I don't have any use for them at this moment. But I can still see it as a viable option for people that want a little bit of nicer home automation system. Insteon, you know, technology and the products are very nice. There's no reason not to recommend the hardware. But if the company is not going to exist last week or in a year, then there's no point in buying them. You might as well go with something that's a little tried and true, unfortunately, like

ZigBee or Z-Wave, or you can wait another couple of years for Matter to come out. And there's another big thing. This is the company that has never really really supported home kit i don't think like it like they they claim they were going to have a hub that did and they never did and i know that's kind of an expensive and long process but you're a lighting control company like just do it like lutron caseta is only lutron Caseta because it has HomeKit compatibility. Like no one would have cared that that line existed outside of like a few, you know, integrators if they didn't add in that HomeKit compatibility. I just don't, I don't understand why.

I don't know. Like, I agree. They need to put everything on the table. This is our roadmap. This is where we're going to be. We need to do this, this, and this, these are our challenges. We're clearly in debt. We clearly can't buy product. Um, like even if we wanted to make it, that's what I think. Like if you've got this, this product that like, you can't even make, like focus on the software a little bit, get those, get the home kit released, like get, get something that you can't even make like focus on the software a little bit get those get the home kit released like get get something that you can get done done and then start worrying about like how to how to get the the products that you have out there i don't know well and i think and i

think new hardware is probably is a little far off just because i think richard brought it up the other day they've kind of had problems you know getting product in stock even before covid yeah um so i mean it sounds like this has been a problem for many years already the supply chain's they've kind of had problems, you know, getting product in stock even before COVID. Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like this has been a problem for many years already. The supply chain's probably already dried up for them, so they might not be able to get new devices for quite some time. Yeah. I'm looking on Reddit and there's like posts on here. There's one, it's like roadmap question mark. It's like, when can we expect to have a roadmap? And the first reply is like, be patient, give them a chance.

It's like, no, no. If you're going to post like this blog post that they have on here is pathetic. I mean, I'm sorry. It's pathetic. It says, it's a new day at Insteon and we're dedicated, a group of passionate, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's probably 150 words here at the most. And I it's fluff. I'm sorry. You're not telling me what you're going to do to help this company survive in a year. And if I'm going to spend money on my house and, and, and putting

in product that other people in my house are going to use and wonder why I spent thousands of dollars to, you know, to have something that didn't work, Like, no, you're going to, you guys need to come out with more and tell me more how this is going to work. Cause I'm not, I'm not impressed with what I see now, I guess is what I'm saying. They, they, I'm not running a multimillion dollar company either, but like, or multi, I don't know what they're doing. Multimillion, multi-thousand dollar company now, but like, you would think that they would multi-million dollars in sales every year of their product but like at the same time like they they they need to to change how they were doing business and i i don't know ken fairbanks i don't know you know he's he's say says he's ceo of insteon technologies which is the company that purchased insteon um

i don't i don't know him from anybody else, but if they're going to just continue doing what they were doing, that didn't work. Lights out. Yeah, lights out. Again, for the third time for Insteon. Anyway, let's move on. I can bash this company all night long.

I do like what they have, but I will continue bashing this. This is just bad messaging. They need to do better. Do better, Insteon. There you go. All right, well, all the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes

at hometech.fm slash 391. Less than 399, which is what it was last week or last time. Whoops. All right, let's open up the mailbag for the first time in a while. Um, I had some Twitter feedback, uh, about a discussion we had about measuring, um, AQI and I, I did briefly think of this while we were talking about this, but, um, didn't,

didn't really know. I don't really know how bad it is, but, um, listener, Just Me over on Twitter reached out and reminded me that many, I'll just quote him here, many of us on the West Coast have learned to check AQI regularly during fire season. I have an indoor sensors and also a purple air outdoor sensors. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense for fire season when you have, uh, all those fires going on out West, uh, having those, those organic compound or air quality sensors and indicators in there. Um, it's a good thing to have. Uh, it's just, it goes on because it's kind of like a little thread that a reply that he made. It's something that most don't

think about unless you see the AQI go over 100. We have multiple air cleaners now, and I purchased two of the wildfire smoke ones this spring. So, yeah, if you're in one of those areas that is prone to fire and fire issues, obviously not an issue here in Florida where we're prone to rain in various ways but yeah uh this the ecobee thermostat and all the other you know the dead canary thing that we were talking about may be a good product for you but no this made sense it made me think too because isn't it in hong kong or not hong kong but in china they also have issues with air quality this would be great for there um you know in canada we have a place called hamilton

you know hamilton seems to be coming up a lot in the podcast but you know we always want to know our air quality out there for some reason you know so yeah it's good use there are good use cases for it and i can see why it's getting more popular it was funny is when i was flying on canada air right this is the air canada yeah There was a map, like in-flight map that popped up and it would cycle through. And one of the locations was Hamilton. And I would die laughing, but then I'd realize quickly, it wasn't talking about Hamilton in Canada. It was one of the islands, the city in the islands. So it was like, oh, but it was funny because every time I looked at it, I'm like, oh, we must be close. but no, we weren't, we were still over the ocean.

Anyway, uh, fun stuff there. Thanks. Thanks so much. Uh, just me for the, uh, the followup there. Yeah. Um, air quality is an issue for, for, for some, I, maybe we need to, I guess we already have water quality, water sensors, water rain detection sensors. There's some pretty good weather sensors out there. That's all I would need. All right, let's move on here. We've got a pick of the week. Gavin, this is all for you and your record collection. Ikea is announcing a record player and it might, it says quote here, it might actually make it to the stores this time it's designed in collaboration with sweetest house mafia uh looks pretty sweet um the only

thing i i don't see that it has the new obergasad collection um it doesn't have sonos integration which it it really should have has us USB powered by USB and features a replaceable cartridge and needle, built in preamp and works with the Enby Bluetooth speakers. So that's a miss, I think. They should have the Sonos stuff built into this thing. Genius idea, but I don't see Sonos going along with that. i think they're pretty happy with you buying a 450 accessory or a 500 speaker and you could still tie it into the sonos if you get a sonos 5 you wired into that it will work that way but i was you know i was hoping it would be wirelessly you know we could just add this to our sonos setup and you know it would stream it to our Sonos system without the need

for a Sonos 5 but nope I understand why not but it was a nice to you know dream if we can't get Sonos headphones we can't get this dang it what if they come out with this before Sonos oh my gosh uh this is funny so yeah this is, this is interesting. I guess they had, they, they teamed up with teenage engineering, which they, they do a bunch of things.

Nice things too. Yeah. Super nice things before. And that collaboration never, never finished, I guess. So hopefully we'll see this one land. Yeah.

And teenage engineering, whenever they're asked about that, they always say, well, you should ask I guess. So hopefully we'll see this one land. Yeah. And teenage engineering, uh, whenever they're asked about that, they always say, well, you should ask Ikea. So who knows what happened there? Let's see. It must be some, uh, some bad blood or something like that. But yeah, it's, it was the Freck Vins, uh, collection that of designer audio products, I guess. I don't know. I guess sound and controlled lights, yeah. Would have been cool because they do a really good job on everything. In fact, I've got one of those Playdate things coming in one of these days.

But they worked in collaboration with, what is it, Panic, I guess, that made that one. So it should be interesting to get my hands on it and see what that design firm does but i do like everything that they put together so uh anyway hopefully we get one that we see one of these things gavin and and you can test it out and see how well it works i don't know i don't know if i'd be replacing my turntables mine are probably like 30 years old now the techniques but they're they're solid. You need a new one. They're still top of the line. They still can't be beat.

I'm afraid to touch this one. It looks like it'll break. It does look frail. I'll give you that. And another thing I don't like is the preamps coming out the side. It's kind of weird huh like you you'll have to put it on the back yeah come on what the heck collaborate with somebody besides swedish

house mafia because they don't know how to design this is why teenage engineering never materialized they actually wanted to put it on the back and ikea was like no it's going on the side well a lot of djs know you turn the turntable a certain way anyway so technically for a dj like swedish house mafia that would be on the back it's right there it's right there in the name you turn the turntable hey just don't look at it too long this is not going in richard house, I can tell you that. Oh, man. Probably not, probably not. All right, well, let's move on here.

If you have any feedback, questions, comments, 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 that online form. All right, well well that wraps up another week here um i got i got some i got some british complaints here let's we already talked

about the thumbs down on the internet we're about to upset some people i guess yeah well i i will say british plugs um they're massive like they're freakish freakishly massive like ridiculously oversized outlet plug things but um from what i have seen online like they're easy to repair like and and they're like made for safety i so i understand why they would they work really well like they have long like plug things like we have these little short little nub things and if you plug a plug in it sometimes just falls out the wall uh theirs are long enough there's three of them uh you you plug it in the thing's not coming out the wall it's great um but one of the things i noticed that they had and i just i guess i didn't notice they had it last time i was there where they have switches on their outlets so if you want to turn off an outlet you just flip the switch right there on the outlet it

turns it off it It's brilliant. I never knew how handy that would be. And now I want outlets with switches on them because, but there's no room on the little ones we have with the guy, like the little person like, oh no, those outlets, we don't have room on those. So I, I, I really like these. I wish that, um, I wish we had something like that on, on our outlets. It was great. It was great. Good stuff. I like that. Things I didn't like. Why do they have the taps on the two sides? I go to shave in the morning and I turn on the water and it's like, okay, there's a hot water spigot. There's a cold water spigot. You turn on the cold water, it comes from a glacier. It's freezing. You can't touch it. You physically touch it it's so cold hot water it comes from hell itself it's on fire i cannot express to

you how hot the water like it's scaldingly hot it's mcdonald's coffee level hot um you you can't touch it either so what you have to do is like freeze your hands real fast and then move it over and burn your hands real fast and you're that, that'll, that'll numb your nerves fast enough for a few seconds that you can actually mix warm water within your hands. And that's the only way I could figure out how to, how to, how to shave. I don't understand why it's 2022. And, and they, they have, there's some, some articles and things people posted in the hub. Cause we talked about this a little bit like, Oh, it has it because the drinky water came out of the cold one that was good drinky water but the hot water could have had dead rats in it and so that was the hot no it's 2022 you people have plumbers stop this

madness like this was a brand new bathroom i don't get it i don't i don't understand it just needs to stop this should be illegal this should be illegal anybody. Anybody over there in UK, don't do this. This is bad. It's not just crazy Americans complaining about this. You can't freeze yourself or burn yourself when trying to use. I mean, what are you supposed to do? You don't get in the shower and have two spigots and have to stand in the middle. No, no, that wouldn't make any sense at all.

Anyway, that's my rant. And also Toronto, Toronto airport. I'm in Canada. I can buy maple syrup. Gavin, this is for you. This is for you, Gavin. I can buy maple syrup in the airport. I can buy Canada shirt, a bright red shirt. This is Canada. There's no, there's, there's no Tim Hortons in the entire international terminal. I walked the whole length of it. Starbucks is there. No Tim Hortons. I can't buy the great Canadian coffee and donuts.

I can't. Why? Why? None of this makes sense. The two-spicket thing doesn't make sense. No coffee. I was so upset. I really wanted that tim horton's coffee

gavin this is all your fault so you were in terminal one right yep and you're looking it up no no no i i just messaged my friend who works for air canada and i said is there timmy's in air can in terminal one and he says yes there is So basically, he said there is. So you obviously, in the terminal, there will be two long lines. One is for security and one is for Tim Hortons, right? You stood in the wrong line. That's all it came down to. I was there twice and we walked from end to end in that thing. And I did not see a Tim Hortons.

And he says there's multiple in Terminal One. There's multiple. If you see a lineup of Air Canada employees, they're not going to work. They're in the Tim Hortons. And I must have I must be in like a segregated area for American travelers that I don't know how to wear masks properly because all of Canada still requires masks. But American, it was funny because Americans still refuse to wear them properly. Like there were tons of chin diapers and everything. It was great. I was like, we are just, we are just protesting. We were just protesting at this point. Yeah. Our mask mandates got listed last weekend. So now you don't have to wear them anywhere you're not

forced to anymore funny funny thing uh getting back into the u.s requires you to get a required you while as we began this trip required you to get a full like full screening like the full what the rap pcr rapid test right so there's like companies set up in these international airports to do this so you can get back into the US and they charge you quite a bit. We pay like 300 bucks to have our tests done. That was lifted on 12.01 AM on the 12th and our flight was 10 AM on the 12th. So we didn't even have to do the test. And we paid $300 for it. And we were just like, no, we're not going to go to the airport

to do this stupid test the day before because it's 24 hours. You can't take it 40 hours. You're 24 hours in advance. So yeah, we lost $300 on that, I'm pretty sure. They haven't. Wow. We asked for the refund, but all we got back was a message of, due to an unexpected policy change, our email is flooded.

Please wait to get back to and we haven't heard anything from that company so i doubt we're gonna see it back too bad wow and you know what just for reference in the future you know if you're in the international terminal one air canada tim hortons is by e80 i'm just letting you know i i gotta to say. The next time, buy E80. I got the inside scoop. There's multiple, but just go E80. What is this? Y by R? Is that what it is?

Y by Z. Y by Z. Were you looking at the wrong maps when you were looking for Timmy's? I was literally there. I didn't have to look at a map. I just walked the whole thing that I had access to. I just don't think that I had full access to Terminal 1. There's no way that I,

I, I, his actual response was poor guy. It's, it's pretty sad. I'm, Oh, you know what?

Just like Linus blaming somebody else for your problems. It looks like there's multiple levels for terminal one though and i think i was on i gotta go upstairs no no i i i was there i mean it was it was a confusing airport for sure but i don't think that i i think we were just like locate we there was a starbucks and there was like a a panini pizza place that was closed and then a place that sold bread uh sandwich place something crust i don't remember anyway um i i don't think they did have a really cool sculpture in the middle that you could go in and yell in and it would it would echo like around like you could hear somebody whispering in the middle like my daughter and i played in that for quite a bit um but i didn't find any tim hortons coffee okay next time you come through canada just you know i'm gonna stay over a little longer yeah i'll call you and you send a text to your buddy come meet me in the airport and show me

where this magical tim hortons is you gotta knock three times on the door next to the bathroom yeah some guy will bring it to you it's a secret only canadians can see it it's only gavin's friend that brings it to you we we said the americans to starbucks because we figured that's what you want it's like if you walk to the back of the starbucks and knock on the panel three times it'll open it up into the actual you know what if you went into starbucks and asked them where tim hortons was they'll tell you where to go that would be funny i should have done that oh it's too good that's too good that's too good oh well next time next time we go to up to toronto i'll have to uh to poke around i i've got to find this on the map now there's there's no way i i missed it because we we were there long enough and walked around long enough.

And I went from one end to the other, like where I had access to. And I don't think that either the doors are closed or I just didn't have access to where the Tim Hortons were. Or it's, like I said, magical. And it's like the gold pot at the end of the rainbow. I can see it, but I just can't get to it, is essentially what it was. Just a mirage.

You guys messing with me. I wanted that coffee. I wanted some donuts. Anyway, that wraps up this week in Home Tech News. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We want to give a big thank you and shout out for everybody who supports the show, but especially for everyone who are able to financially support the show

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Take care. See y'all.