HomeTech.fm - Episode 394 - Deep State Surveillance

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

On this week's HomeTech: A new way to increase PPB on Lutron Pico keypads, 1 SOUND offers up a Mini Sub but not the one TJ wants, Seth rants about Blue Iris NVR software, and Gavin introduces using double stack for AI events. All this and a "blockbuster" pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 8th. I'm Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome everyone to Home Tech Podcast. This is a podcast about all aspects of home technology and the latest news that doesn't exist in the home technology world. Holy moly, it has been a dry week. We actually have two home tech headlines, which we were just going

to brush past and talk about some other stuff. But I guess something we missed in the past was this big dog announcement. I've known about it for a while, but I didn't know. I guess I forgot that they were announcing it ISE. And anyway, if you've heard of the company Metra, they have come out with a product line called Big Dog. And it's like if you're familiar with the Wattbox brand, it's kind of the same thing. But instead of orange, it's it's blue. And instead of having the the oversee built in, they they were like, oh, we'll just make our own. So pretty, pretty interesting product lineup they have here. I think they have a individually 12 controlled model and it's like 13 outlets on that one.

So it's a 13. I think there's a five, a three and maybe a nine as well. And they also have like a little plugin module. Like I have one right here, actually. I worked on their driver like a year or two ago for, I think they were at Cedia showing this stuff off. And they were like, we want to have a driver for Control 4 working at Cedia. And I made one up real fast. And I was like, hey guys, test this at your booth. Let me know if it all works. And they just kind of like disappeared. And turns out it worked great it worked great and they're like oh yeah we've already been sending this out to dealers who are using it so yay yay for software that works i it's very rare that happens to me so i can't complain um but uh it's actually pretty cool i shared in our channel kind of like what the dashboard looks

like and i'm not very familiar with what overseeversea looks like these days, but like, this is a pretty clean interface. It kind of shows you like your clients and everything as, as a dealer. And it's got like all the outlets, you can switch them on and off and you can set it up to reboot an outlet if, or an outlets or all the outlets or sequence of outlets, if the internet goes down or something like that. So it also has temperature sensors in it as well, I guess, and some IO stuff that you can put into some other kind of automated system that could tell it to reboot if you wanted to. There's all sorts of stuff you could do with the rack mount modules. The other ones are just like the little ones,

just a plug-in module that monitors and you can turn it on and off and that kind of thing. I thought it was pretty cool, but there's a bunch of conversation over in the hub about it today. Cause I guess I forgot to talk about it. It looks pretty neat. TJ, you seem pretty excited about it. Yeah, honestly, you know,

one of the reasons I joined up with SnapAV is just for the WAP box. I don't buy anything else through them because I just want some kind of hardwired solution for whenever I need to reboot things. There are plenty of wifi outlets out there. If whenever I need to reboot things. Um, there are plenty of wifi outlets out there. If you just need to reboot like a basic, you know, cable modem or wifi router, whatever it is. But if you want some kind of like nice, you know, rack mounted hardwire

ethernet solution, you pretty much have like one or two options. I think somebody was saying that, uh, Panamax, uh, their blue bolt lineup has a, uh Bolt lineup has a hardwired solution. Wattbox obviously has one. And then now this third company has one as well. And Metro is pretty well known. You know, people buy all kinds of HDMI cables and all kinds of accessories through them. Yeah, if you're in the 12 volt market, like literally every cable harness ever, like if you buy a car stereo, uh, to swap out the cable harness that comes from Metro, like

it's, it's, I think they have the market cornered. Cause I've never been able to find another brand that does it. They do like the OEM like connector on one side and it all kind of bolts up together. So it's good company. That's crazy. I didn't realize that was the same company actually. Yep. Yep. Yep. Cause I've, Because I've bought Metro car harnesses before. Yep, yep. What's neat about the bigger ones, the rack mount ones, they have the swappable MOV devices that you can kind of pull out. So over time, surge protectors kind of lose their juice, I guess.

They lose their ability to protect against surges and there's really not a point in time where you know that that has happened if you have like a traditional surge protector installed i guess it just goes bad when it gets hit by the next surge or something but um these have like removable modules that you can pop out and put in when they have lost their effectiveness so to speak speak. And there's actually like, if you go into the dashboard, um, there's actually like, you can see how many surges and what the electrical, you know, look like has looked like in the past going through it. You can see when you've had power outages and all that good stuff. So, um, I thought that was actually pretty cool that like,

you can buy this thing. It's got some outlets in it it it's got some smarts to it but also um if it if it goes bad or one of the modules goes bad because it got hit by lightning potentially you just swap the thing out and the rest of it should work fine it looks like on this too they have some kind of antenna adapter is that for wi-fi do you know it's wi-fi yeah yeah so that's awesome all of them have that ethernet i think it's ethernet or wi-fi on the bigger on the bigger boxes. Yeah. See, that's crazy because I don't think Wattbox has anything that's Wi-Fi itself. They have some smaller ones, I think, but not anything big like this. So you could put this in a relatively remote place where you still have Wi-Fi, but maybe you don't have hardwire Ethernet and still be able to reboot things. I didn't even think about that, but that's a good point.

Yep. 13.9 outlet model. I think there's a three outlet model because that but that's a that's a good point yep 13 9 outlet model i think there's a 3 outlet model because that's kind of a popular thing for like behind tvs and that kind of thing yeah the 3 one is the smallest one with a hardwire ethernet spot they do have a single one but it's wi-fi only it looks like it's just it would cover all the bases yeah the single one is nice because it like the back of this like rotates so the outlet actually rotates around so you can actually get the powered outlet out of the way of the other outlet it's kind of nice they actually thought that through like it doesn't just take up the entire outlet like you can just move it out of the way so gavin you sitting there like what is this again like why am i doing this

why do i need this no i'm sitting here like it's 2022 and we're still solving problems by rebooting things yeah yes yes that's something that we will never get away from is having to reboot things nope my entire day friday my entire well half of my day i thought i was going to sit down and start doing something but like at noon um i was looking at amazon and i was like that's we were getting like a bunch of like support messages come in like there's a there's a support message that gets like relayed back to me. I'm like, when I start seeing more of them come in, I should like, oh, I should go check the ring server and see what's going on. Well, there, there was a server that Amazon decided to spin up like 21 days ago and then

just put out a commission. And I could not get that server to go away out of the state it was in. It was just like in a bad, it was just in a bad way. And the good thing about it is that because everything like kind of auto scales, like in theory, it would add a new server and everything would auto scale over to it. I guess that wasn't happening correctly. So even after I had tested it for whatever reason, there was an error on Amazon side and whatever health check it was trying to do, uh, was saying the server was down when it wasn't down. Like I can go to the server and get my information off of it. Just fine. It, but for whatever reason, Amazon's like own

health program, like the little program that lives on the server that checks its own health wasn't running and it was just saying the server's down. So yeah, the Amazon bill is going to be kind of big, kind of double this month. And that was my fire. But guess how I fixed it, Gavin? I just rebooted it. After all day of looking through logs and rebuilding servers and trying to kill instances to see if the auto build would start. No, I just had to reboot it. It was done. I rebooted it. Two of them came back up on green.

It's like, wait, I don't need two in my configuration. I just need one. And it deleted one. Robots. They can't be trusted. We'll never get away from that. I feel your pain because the other day I was working on a problem. 12 hours later, we just decided to reboot the server.

Oh, you got me beat. And it was a 12-hour call with Microsoft. And we finally just said, you know what? Let's just reboot the server. In the enterprise, it's not that easy to reboot. We have to go through all this, you know, like emergency change and stuff. I can't just reboot the server or else somebody calls me and says, why did you do that?

But we did it and everything started working. When in doubt, a reboot fixes everything. Turns out that is the case. And that's why these products exist. I mean, they can ping like Google and like I have mine set up at the house because we went out of town. I didn't trust. At the time, Comcast was doing some really crazy stuff. Every night, my modem would just lock up. We'd lose internet. It would lock up and not sync back up with Comcast. So I brought this thing over next to the modem, plugged it in.

And while I was on vacation, what I had to do was just ping Google. When it lost Google, it would just reboot outlet number one. And it happened a couple of times while we were gone that Comcast played that little dirty trick, but I was able to recover without being on site to physically unplug the modem and plug it back in and was able to still get back into the house, into VPNs and all that stuff while we were on our trip. So it's kind of nice to have something like this in place. And for those of us, you know, that don't need the big tools, I have one called the Reset Plug. I've had this for a number of years now. It does the same type of thing.

It just pings a website. If it doesn't reply for five minutes, it will reboot your router or whatever, automatically send you an email, you know, letting you know. It's kind of cool. I've had it for a while. I know there's another one from a company called ConnectSense that does something very similar. So if you want something for your home network, it doesn't hurt to have it on there. It will save you from some outages, if anything. Yep. ConnectSense, the internet rebooter from ConnectSense. It's 50 bucks over there from friend of the show, Adam justice. Uh, so yeah, check that out. His, his use case was

exactly mine. Um, but his parents here in Florida had internet problems and just need to reboot their modems. Cause that's, it's a, it's not just a Florida thing, but it's really, it is a Florida thing that you just reach reboot your modems all the time here. And, uh, he, he built this product kind of around some other products that he had, but it's a really cool idea. Like you just get this online when the Internet's down. It just reboots the modem. Genius. Yeah, a simple, simple and effective. That's what it does.

Well, a lot of people are stuck with like awful modems, too. You know, the most common use I see something or for something like this is when somebody has like a modem that, you know, stops working every day at 4 p.m. You know, that's a wonderful solution for that. And they're relatively inexpensive. You know, a lot of times the proper thing is to get that hardware replaced. But maybe it's not the hardware exactly. It's something else down the line or, you know, something else that's just weird. So, you know, any solution that works is a good solution.

Yeah, that was my problem. I had my own modem, not a Comcast modem, and maybe it needs to be replaced. I don't know. But it sure looked like it was Comcast's issue because it happened at the exact same time every night. And then they had a service ticket the next day or a week after this happening, finally I see a truck working down the street. And it stopped amazingly. So anyway, the difference between all like the DIY products, the Connect Sense, the little outlet rebooters and that kind of thing, is that this is like a dashboard to like organize customers and for an aggregated like dealer or MSP or whatever to receive that information and look at it and process it as part of their service.

So that's kind of nice. It's a nice little dashboard, notifications, everything built into it, I guess, as you'd expect. So check it out. If you haven't checked out, haven't seen it yet, check it out. We'll put a link in the show notes. But there was a lot of chat over in the hub about it.

And I just wanted to bring it up because I think we kind of blew past it. And I've been kind of scared to talk about it since I've been sitting back here for like a year now. Yeah, it's funny. I've never even heard of this, but I guess it's been hiding behind you this whole time. And you're like, we're not talking about it. Literally every show it's been sitting in the background back there on top of the shelf.

But yeah, I can't talk about things that I signed NDAs for, so I don't. All right, guys, what do you say we jump into our home tech headline? Let's do it. This is horrible. All right, we really have nothing here, except we really wanted to bring everyone's attention to the ability to increase your PBB, which is your, what is it, price per button? Is that what we came up with, TJ?

That's right. Yeah, so your WallSmart has introduced a custom designed and engineered solution for the Pico keypad. And now if you want to flush mount a Pico keypad, you can do that. I'm shaking my head here just because I I imagine this adds about, I don't know, one hundred dollars in parts. Plus, I don't know what two or three hundred300 in labor to get the drywaller to cooperate? For what? What is this keypad?

Like $30, $40 at the most? They're not expensive. I just, I don't get it. But if you need to increase your PBB, that's very important. This is one way you can do it. TJ, you're shaking your head too. I didn't even realize that you actually installed this in the drywall. It's an even worse idea than I thought it was originally.

Like nobody, why would you install a Lutron Caseta actually installed this in the drywall. It's an even worse idea than I thought it was originally. Like nobody. Why would you install Lutron? Cause say to Pico remote in the wall, like choose anything else. Like I don't, you know, control for homeworks, radio,

raw three, whatever else. Why would you do a Lutron? Cause say to Pico remote, like one of the most DIY friendly remotes and lighting systems out there and you're going to make it into a complex beast rashid says 40 i don't know if that's true but so the the yeah the lutron picos are not expensive they're like 40 but this would add this would add a significant amount to it uh for for i'm just i'm considering the labor and everything coordination between the

trades and that kind of stuff that has to go in to get this thing to look right when you're done installing it. So like there's no like bumps around where the wall smart device ends and the drywall begins and it's all perfectly floated in and the paint looks right. Yeah. Lots of work. It's an expensive Pico. To be fair, wall smart makes a whole bunch of custom trims for stuff. So this is just one of their lineups. It looks clean, though though it looks very clean they probably have the cleanest device like you can install lutron

keypads control for keypads like we were talking like tj was suggesting um as well as like touchscreens ipads that kind of stuff they have some really like in really nice in wall like flush mount mounts um if you to you want to do that. But yeah, I just. This one's weird. I'm looking at this other one, one of the control for like touch panel ones, too. And like it just looks so nice in the picture. But I just know that whenever I see one of these installed, it's never going to look that nice.

It's always going to have like rough edges to it or just something off about it where it's not going to look that clean. Yeah. I've seen them at the show and they look good, but like that edge is just, to me, it's like, that's something that's going to get damaged or somebody's messing around with it. And you know, it's going to get cracked. The paint's going to get chips on it or something. It seems like it's just a nightmare, like a delicate nightmare that that's, that you have to deal with. Oh oh they even have one for the sonos arc it's not awful i thought the sonos arc was supposed to be out i think it's a wall mount for the sonos arc but everything you're complaining about seth sounds like a father you know like you have kids you know exactly what they're gonna do with these things you know like

yeah that's your point of view i'm sure in a nicer house this would be perfectly these people that buy this stuff don't have kids and have ridiculous amounts of money that they could throw around for this type of thing yep you're right they just want it to look nice the sonos arc thing looks pretty good it's just basically a box you mount the arc in and then you're not supposed to put the arc in in a cabinet so it's awful. Because the Atmos speakers have to go up and down and all that good stuff. Well, you don't get Atmos. You get a box. You get a box with a soundbar.

Super expensive soundbar. Exactly. Well, it's even more expensive now. Now that it made it look like an air conditioning register. Some of the stuff looks nice, though. I see the Josh AI mount. It looks nice. Yeah, I've seen their touchscreen. They have a decent booth at the trade shows and i've seen that like how the touchscreens and everything mount and they do look good but again like it just

it's it looks like a delicate nightmare and you know that's that's gonna break it's like i as a technician would be scared to touch it in service just because i'm clumsy so yeah and then when you have to upgrade the device it's like well okay so before we had to just swap them out on the wall but now we have to cut out your whole wall to replace the bracket that we installed yep yep because ipads don't change and control four touchscreens don't change oh wait they do they do hmm yeah i mean that's that's always the problem in bespoke systems right like you you always run into stuff like that yeah yep it's the name of the game um not my thing but it looks cool yeah it does look cool i'll give them that the the the pico one doesn't look that

cool to me but uh teach their own Um, another, the other thing we ran across was this one sound mini sub five and, uh, I don't know, it's a, it's a small subwoofer that seems like it'd be installed and in some useful places. So we thought we'd bring it up. Uh, again, not, there was no news this last week, I guess, you know, if there was any news going into the holiday, they, they held it and you know, there's, we had a holiday, there were stranger things on Friday. Nobody wanted to do anything, but what's that? And we have a, you know, uh, Canada day, uh, as well. And then we head over the weekend, we have the USA day, you know, July 4th, we're all like blowing fireworks up. So really nothing has happened and, uh of moving moving on towards the trade shows but

we've got a subwoofer here uh it's 20 inches square and four and three quarter inches deep it has a five inch low frequency sub driver uh no branding design and it has a flinch uh french cleat mount i don't know i can't mix that up but um to be able to like hang it right onto the wall real tight looks pretty good to me. Like seems like I would I would probably like slide it underneath the couch, maybe two of these into a decent sized room and you can really hide the subwoofers away. It looks like you're going to need an amplifier, though, but looks like a decent product. I don't have any idea how it sounds, but at least from the looks of it, it looks pretty good. Yeah, I could see this easily going into like an office space or, you know, gym somewhere where you want good quality audio, but you don't need a giant subwoofer or you can't do something recessed. This is not the mini sub that I've been looking for, though. So a little disappointed in

the headline, but nice looking product. It's not the sub mini from Sonos is what you're saying. That's right. Well, you know, you could do we could take one of these things and then hook up the uh the like trod free piece to it right yeah the ikea symphonist symphonist yeah that's what it's tried for you i'm sorry um yeah hook that one up and then yeah you've got a sonos sub done bam we've solved the problem yeah and it's salt water salt water resistant too you could throw it on your uh on your ship. You got a boat, maybe a little dinghy. I don't know.

Maybe you want some good sound. You live near the ocean. That's funny that they actually point out it's IP55 rated and saltwater resistant. That's actually not a bad thing. I mean, and something that small, if it performs, it'd be pretty good to put on yachts and that kind of thing. So they know their market and who they're trying to target. But yeah, not a bad. Saw it saw it was kind of cute and thought we'd

bring it up that's that's all we've got for for our home tech headlights tonight guys uh yeah no news just a lot of griping oh yeah oh yeah oh well sorry yeah yeah so yeah let's head into the the griping portion of the of the show here where I complain endlessly about my Blue Iris Blues. I had I had had to upgrade a Blue Iris install from four to five with their air quote lifetime license, which isn't really a lifetime license. Like it just means that the version four is lifetime. Like you have a lifetime license of version four. But when they go to version five, you got to pay for that, which is fine. It's just like make that a little more apparent on the website when you call it a lifetime license of version four but when they go to version five you got to pay for that which is fine it's just like make that a little more apparent on the website when you call it a lifetime license anyway um the upgrade went fine except for this warning message that

comes up when you actually do the install for five and says hey it's okay if you go ahead and uninstall four but make sure that you don't delete, you don't answer this question, that doesn't come up, but don't answer this question, yes, and delete all your data out, or you're going to have to just restore from backup. So I knew that was coming. I knew I'd probably do it anyway. So I backed up right before I closed down number five to uninstall number four. And of course, I read the questions and still didn't understand them because it wasn't the question that they said would come up and i ended up deleting all the data anyway um started back up restored no big deal but uh it's actually some really cool features that you do get in blue

iris 5 gavin has been talking about talking these up forever and uh you can actually like there's a there's a thing called deep state that you can install to watch the cameras deep stack yeah the the deep stack sorry and and it's really cool like it goes in and and gavin you were explaining this earlier a little bit better than i probably can but i i what it looked like to me in the settings is that you are sending like two or three images over when a motion event is detected to this other program that's running on the computer that program figures out what that thing is and sends an answer back to blue iris is that is that what it's doing yeah you did actually you surprised me how well you explained that you explained it really well earlier so i'm a good teacher so you know but yeah that's pretty much

what it is deep stack is just a webinar um like an api endpoint and when blue iris sees um motion or however you configure it it takes a bunch of pictures sends it over to deep stack deep stack will analyze it and then respond with you know was it a cat an animal you know like a dog whatever um and then blue iris then acts on the response so it's pretty cool like that yeah it is really cool because you see like these demos that like TJ probably has one with his Turing AI thing where it's like got the little box drawn around. It says person or car or whatever. You see those demos and you're like, oh, that's, you know, I don't think I'll ever see a camera system like that. But it's right there.

It's right there in like one of the biggest, biggest DIY, um, security camera system offerings out there. And it's like, it's pretty easy to do. I installed it, I don't know, within minutes and had it up and going on at least one or two cameras within, you know, about half hour or so. Um, where I, I think it's working kind of the way it works and the way it gets the events back into, um, blue Iris is kind of confusing, but you really have to really understand how blue Iris like triggers an event and then goes through whatever actions come off of that event. And then like how that event gets labeled back into the database.

So you can go back and reference it so you really have to understand that and once you do this is such a complicated product that it's one of the products i i actually recommend reading the manual it's got a really good manual and no but spend some time and skim through it like you want to read the read the silmarillion while you're at it too like it's just it's such a good book say manual what is what is a manual I I actually read the manual because you'll find out there's little things that it does that you will never know about such as like um occupancy uh sensor so you can set it up so that it could tell you if a parking spot is actually occupied or not right um which is kind of cool you know like if you put a say you're at your office put a little

camera in your window and then you can know if the closest spot to your your office door is open before you even get to the office you know and then you can just park there stuff like that but there's so many little things it can do it's almost too much but when you read the manual you'll find some nice things in there that's my biggest problem with it is that you have those little things that you can do and they're all like a million steps of of like um clicking of clicking yes there's a oh my gosh they should just name it click iris because like the the amount of clicking you do just to change one setting you know you can't just change it on one camera you change on all the cameras and it's just click click click click click like it's right click left click right click click click tap tap tap tap there's they should surface up like the most popular things to like some kind

of aggregated menu structure um that would be nice but yeah what what they also should do is kind of like what you gave an example there and it was like the thing that i was having a problem figuring out earlier was like how i have a driveway, a long driveway, and I'm trying to catch a car either coming from this way or coming from that way. And based on which way it's coming from and going, I want to trigger PTZ cameras to do a different thing. Um, and there doesn't seem to be like a recipe for that. And what they should have is a recipe for, for here's an empty parking space. Where is that? And you know, is this, is this spot empty? Is there a car parked here or is the car driving this way or this way or, you know, that kind of thing. They don't have

those recipes and it's, it's, there's a million ways to do it. Um, but it's all like a giant Rube Goldberg contraption by the time you get down to it. Like it's absolutely infuriating. Uh, and you're like, why don't you duplicate the cameras and then only use the substream on this camera? I'm like, Oh my gosh, what am I got myself into? Like, but you can hide all these cameras. Like you were going to have all these ghosted cameras in here that aren't doing anything but creating events that make the other one record or I don't, I don't know. It's, it's way more than I want to get involved with ever again, ever again. And what, what would be nice is if they had some kind of like higher level, like this is what we know people want to do because we've been making

this software and you can go in their forms and people are asking about this left and right. But for whatever reason, they're just like, no, we'll, we'll give you all the settings and all the settings you don't need. And this setting right here, if you click it, it will crash your computer, but we're not going to tell you that. Um, we'll give you all the settings and you will just, Gavin, this is how ridiculous these settings are. I went in there and it was like, how big do you want your drive to be that you back everything up to? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, I'm just typing stuff in. I didn't realize that I typed in six terabytes. There's like a two terabyte drive in this computer. It, it took this, the six terabytes. It's like, it's complaining to me

that I have over allocated space. I'm like, why, why is this even possible? Put a check on it. Like, you know that it, you, you know, enough about this computer that you can turn that text red, but you can't check me while I'm putting the input in? There's so many ways that you can shoot yourself with this program that I can't get around. There's no guardrails on this thing. None whatsoever. So Blue Iris needs to protect us from the mistakes Seth will be making. Yes. That's what you're basically asking for.

You got to pay extra for that. That's like another subscription there. Because that's a lot of checks he's got to put in there. I'm telling you, there's got to be a way that they can surface up some of these things that people want to do. And I think like TJ, you've talked about the, I'm going to forget the it now during the ai when you're using touring ai and like how easy that is to set up and you're just basically like you set up your cameras you aim them and then you put this thing in and it's like it starts picking off people's names and associating their faces with it and that's like

that's what i'm hoping something like blue iris because it clearly can do that it's got all the brains and smarts and everything. And you can, you can, you can put all your million different pieces together. Your little Rube Goldberg machine and a little mouse pushes over the ball and the ball puts down the cage and diver jumps. You can do all that stuff you want to do,

but you got to do it on every single camera and it takes like 300 clicks. And then sometimes you got to duplicate the camera and do it all over again. I just, it is, it is an over complicated system, but once you, like I said, once you really get to know it, you really understand it. It, you realize how much it can do. Like my blue iris setup is integrated throughout my whole house. It's integrated with my habitat.

It's integrated with my TVs, you know? So when someone comes up the driveway, it shows on my computers and various TVs. When someone rings the door, it shows on all my TVs, you know, it's integrated into my dashboards that I use to control my system. So I don't actually have to go into Blue Iris app. It's all on my dashboard. You know, there's so many things you could do with it, but yeah, keep in mind, it's been, it's a product that's been upgraded over many years so features are constantly added you know they they've had to keep backward compatibilities it's kind of like windows you know you know when mac os came out it was so pretty because they didn't have to worry about all this

historic stuff and keep it all compatible and working and they still yeah and that's what i get the sense of too is they just say here new OS. Um, who cares about everything before you have to rewrite your apps, right? Where windows has to keep so many things still working in the past that it gets ugly. Right. And that's kind of how blue Iris has come. Um, but it's for a professional installer. It's not for the DIY person. It's for, it's for a professional diy person it's not for professional installers because i can tell you 99 of the technicians i work with would look at this and just be overwhelmed on day one and not know what to do um and i think this takes like an inordinate amount of time to set up a simple the nvr type setup that that out of the box you

can get for a lot less if but you get less features like you're saying but if i'm just going for like simple setup blue iris oh man i did i did see all the like um the mq is it mqtt stuff that you use for yes you can integrate with mqtt as well you can utilize the cameras um uh what were we calling on vif yeah profiles to take so they can do actually all the thinking for you but in the end you lose things like um the boundary crossing right like cameras don't usually have that built in where they can detect if something crosses a boundary do they no they just they they may have some ai stuff um they'll have motion detection and that will trigger Blue Iris to record and stuff like that.

So Blue Iris takes it to the next level, but you also, there's a learning curve, big learning curve. Yeah, I think the lack of a logic engine too kind of threw me for a loop. Like it doesn't have, like it's a computer, right? And you should be able to say, if this condition is met and this condition met

or this, you know know and or then do this but it's kind of got like the trigger happens and then this is that you know here's the action to once that trigger starts and once the trigger starts and there's really no way to like break all that apart we kind of talked about that kind of in the back channel earlier of how to like work around that and you can do it but again it's just a lot more work to kind of like do i is there another way i can do this i'm thinking like in my head like is there another faster way i can just do this with another camera you know that triggers this event that kind of thing so but that's where you got to understand the differences between the trigger and the action

so you have the trigger that and then it does a bunch of stuff to determine if the action should be fired so you can have stuff happen at the trigger phase or have at the action phase right like an action wall is something like it fires after it's confirmed that it's a dog on your dry on your lawn taking a poop you know like then the action gets executed this is what the double stack will get you i mean the double stack is yeah deep stack but yeah that's exactly what you got you got to understand that's why i say the manual is very valuable but if you don't have time for the manual seriously don't even bother with this product product you know yeah well yeah and tj made the classic integrator joke like what's a

manual like yeah integrators don't we just go in blazing like there's a manual it's it's the first thing that's on the trash before we leave the office and for anybody that's really um gonna jump into blue iris wants to play with it i highly recommend finding the article about um setting up performance tweaks right using the multiple streams because when i first set it up i was stubborn i didn't think this would actually help my pc was running at 80 90 constantly with the cameras going and then i did all the performance tweaks and it got it down to less than 20 percent um it really helps and even with speed and stuff like that and you might want to get a gpu too to do the processing if you're going to get into deep stack right so uh the the bigger

the the more memory on your gpu the better because if you're going to get into custom models every custom model requires more memory right so it all depends on how far you want to go with it yeah i i will say some of the really cool things i did like about this um when you play back there's a way when you play back a clip you can actually adjust the like the motion detection or the ai detection and then like play back a clip, you can actually adjust the like the motion detection or the AI detection and then like play back a clip of that camera to review the changes you've made and how they would apply to that event have taken place with this this video. I don't think there's a professional system I know of that can do that or that has that feature. But that that really helps. Like

I could let this thing just record a bunch of stuff, come back a couple of days later. And now I've got like traffic going through, I've got people walking through and I can go back and find those and say, okay, well, let me just set something up that I know will go off with the mailman pulling up and getting out, you know, or the dog taking a poop on the lawn. Like you, you can do that with this system. Uh, and it gives you the option to do it and test it, which I really, I really did like and appreciate um but man there's there's so many fiddly things that you can do with this it's it's unbelievable it really is powerful but it's it's settings man here's all the settings every setting you want here's a way to do it yeah that's where the trade-off is like the power versus the settings like you everybody wants it to do everything and it pretty much can do everything. But how do you make a good interface?

It's hard, right? With everything there. Yep. And then, and then I get over here and you have a little note here that the deep state is going away and it's getting replaced by the sense, since, since AI, which, and then you're like, oh yeah, they're, they're, they're getting rid of that thing that you set up today. You spent all that time setting up.

And I'm like, no, no, Gavinavin this can't happen what is this about yeah they actually they actually said in their documentation that they're getting uh what a deprecating i didn't read it didn't happen it was kind of funny because i first saw it on reddit and then people were ripping this guy about where'd you hear this from they're deprecating deep stack and he actually quoted the actual manual so i'm not the only one that reads it he quoted the page and the manual and what they're it looks like they're replacing it with an open source project or called sense ai and that is pretty much a plug-in for deep stack like it'll work pretty much the same way it's just a different i guess algorithm and um the developers seem a lot more uh in touch and working with the community to get it right so

i i it's not gonna be replaced like today or tomorrow but i think it's still like months away but probably by end of year you'll probably see sensei i probably start taking over i wonder if this is actually pronounced sensei that That's what I was wondering. I was like, man, that's a, that's a great opportunity right there. I'll pass along the feedback. Yeah. So,

so hopefully if, if worse comes to worse and you know, the deep state goes away, then I'll, I'll be stuck with deep stack sensei, but, or sensei I, and then I can,

I can just swap. I can just, cause that actually was easy to set that up it was actually easier than i thought it was going to be because you you just have to go in and like you you're gonna you're gonna use this well i'll just use this i'll click this button here that says i'm going to use um deep deep double double stack deep state deep stack there we go deep double state got it all right man that's confusing this the sensei will actually be just a plug-in all you'll have to do is like it'll be easy to replace it you just gotta change the port

number and it will now use sensei you could actually have both of them running at the same time if you want um you know and flip back and forth it's still a ways away though. Yeah. Well, it, it, it looks pretty cool. Um, the, the, the, the, the, the thing that I set up and how easily that comes back and gets rendered inside of the cameras that, you know, are old, they're old cameras. They were just at this job a long time ago. So like, this is just a software update and you get all this, this free features kind of from using the same software. The client doesn't ever see anything different. It still integrates. What initially I was using this for was taking some older cameras and bringing them to the Control 4 interface because Blue Iris can actually take in the high-def camera feeds and then re-encode them and spit them back out for other things to look at at

a lower rate, like Control 4 touch panels. So Control 4 has a driver for it, works really well, and you can actually just use it to consume all of the cameras that are compatible with it and then spit out, you know, just a, I guess it's RTSP stream of generic web camera views that Control 4 can pick up and use. So it's kind of nice yep there's so much you could do with it like i have it um set up so i have all my cameras recording 24 7 but then i have copies of those cameras and they don't add any extra cpu resources

a copy just uses the same stream but the copies are just for the alerts and stuff so it you know the 24 7 doesn't flood my timelines. If I ever need to refer to the 24-7, I could just go back and look at that. But all I deal with are the cameras with the alerts on it, and it works really nice. So it's about 20 cameras doing recording and alerts, and my CPU is very low.

Yeah, and you can actually set that up to record 24-7, but only for so much memory. And then for the events, you can actually save that up to record 24 seven, but only for so much memory. And then for the events, you can actually save the events off. Like there's, there's a lot of different ways you can configure this. And it's actually pretty easy to do that. That's actually one of the most basic things you can do when you start setting this thing up is go in and tell it how you want the clips to be handled. And not only do they give you like three different ways. No, no, that's not good enough. Gavin, they give you like the 20 or 30 different options that you can just like no but next after 25 days i'm gonna store these on an ftp site like you can go you can do that it's it's absolutely insane um how many options are

built into this one program well if you get sick of it you can contract my uh you know contract me out and i'll set it up for you and send you an invoice. I will send it to you. Do not joke about this, my friend. I am not cheap, though. I'm just telling you. You don't understand. You just saved Seth thousands of hours. You totally did. Yes, you did.

Good luck. What did I just say? Oh, boy. Gavin's services are going to be utilized now. Man, you're already being utilized as an unread server guy. Now you're a Blue Iris guy. You're a Hub Attack guy. I realize I'm giving you guys too much free work here.

Warm up your invoices, Gavin. This is coming your way. I need to create a banner first. Yeah, exactly. Pay him and Tim Horton's gift cards. Yeah, which I'll never be able to use because they don't have them at the airport. Oh, man.

All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight, including the deep state, will be in our show notes over there at hometech.fm slash 394. Deep stack. All right, guys. Not much happened in the news this week and with Seth's complaints this week,

but I did find this really cool pick of the week and I absolutely fell in love with this. I have all of these DVDs sitting in my house that I've ripped using my drive. They're on my Plex server now. I don't need these DVDs anymore. What are you going to do with these things? This is brilliant. You've heard of the little libraries that people have

out in front of their homes that you walk up and you grab a book out of there. Why not grab a DVD out of there? Somebody's done it. They have a little blue box that they stole from like, it looks like one of those newspaper boxes and they spray painted blockbuster blue with a little blockbuster tag on it and you open it, and there's all these little DVDs in there. How cute is that? I totally want to do this. This is just brilliant. I don't know if this would work in my neighborhood.

You watch the DVD. You bring it back. You put it in. Yeah, nobody's going to bring it back. I'm looking at this. Yeah, exactly. I'm looking at this box, and I see Star Wars, right? It looks like the first trilogy.

It looks like. So trilogy, it looks like. So in my neighborhood, they would probably take that and then leave a note that they're looking for 5, 6, 7, or the second trilogy, you know, and you still would not return it. Oh, well, I mean, it's a trust system. And it's probably, if it's a Star Wars on DVD, it's probably the ones with like the stormtroopers all have like walkie-talkies instead of laser blasters. Like they really botch those movies up anyway.

So I'm not too worried about that. But like, I don't know. I think this would be fun. Like people read books, but people watch movies like we should we should do this. This should be something in neighborhoods. Another thing to think of, Seth, in Florida, it's really hot. Putting DVDs in a hot box is that a good thing i'm just saying you know it sounds like a good idea until the dvds warped

you know what's hilarious about this is they have an actual website uh free blockbuster.org and they actually have a section on there where you can find you can found your own franchise which involves finding a random box painting it taking pictures of it and then letting them know where it's at and they actually have a locator so you can see where all of them are located in in the united states so i can build up my free dvd collection they have oh they have a couple in canada they have looks like they have one or two in mexico oh my gosh there's one in or. So I mean, they're international. What's the website again? Free blockbuster.org. Let's see if there's one near me. There's not one near me,

but there's several in Cincinnati. Okay. That's funny. It's a two hour drive to Orlando for me, but hey, when I'm down there this, uh, this winter, yeah, I hit it up. You go get it. You get that, uh, Harryter movie there on top and return it before you leave good to go bad thing is i would have to i would spend money on this because i would have to buy dvds in order to put into it so because i don't own any dvds oh yeah it's just like a link to my plex server or something well that's what i was thinking when you guys were saying is like what am i gonna do put a link to a plex server in here that's just crazy we'll start a new one for just Netflix, free Netflix, free Netflix. Uh, that's you're, uh, you remember the, like, uh,

at one point there were like DVDs, like all these, like AOL DVDs that you would get, like just thousands of them. And at some point, like I, when I was at circuit city, they, they started to, um, like flood the store with these things. But then we figured out like, Hey, these boxes are great for like holding DVDs. So we just like take handfuls or boxes of these like free DVD cases that we got that say, you know, call AOL. And we just take the AOL sleeves out, pin our own sleeves in, put our own burn discs in good to go. We have, we have a full DVD collection. So good times, good times. Well, and I just read an article the other day, too, about is from Engadget about how these how CDs are coming back. So I guess this is fitting that

we would come across this now. Interesting. Well, I may have to do this, especially with some of the with some of the like older DVDs that I have. I'll have to find one of these boxes, though. That's going to be the fun part. I mean, I know where I can find one of these boxes. All right, you're in Florida. Just go take one. Nobody's going to say anything.

Nobody's going to care. But, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to do it legit, I think. Oh, they even have T-shirts.shirts well uh guys buying one of those right now this is great this is amazing oh shoot you can even buy a box already made up 229 free shipping yeah i don't know if i'm not invested in it you get a deluxe one for 259 that's hilarious they even have membership cards oh this is this is a founder's kit man they have vhs tapes what comfortable i've seen i've seen one of their uh press release pictures

of vhs tape i'm like that's great comfortably holds 50 dvd cases or 25 vhs tapes i mean comfortably the picture that we have is they're thrown in there. There's no organization at all. This is too good. I think I'm gonna have to do this. I'll stick it out there. I'm sure that the Homeowners Association won't care that there's a blue box that says free movies on it. And we'll go from there. See what happens. Put free adult movies on it and see what they say. Yeah, I was gonna say this is Florida. There's a Florida joke in here somewhere, but free adult movies on it and see what they say. I was going to say, this is Florida. There's a Florida joke in here somewhere, but it's probably not the direction we want to go on the show. All right. Well, if you have any ideas about a free movie campaign

or Pics of the Week or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can visit us at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, guys, that wraps up another week. Yeah, not bad. I didn't think we were going to talk about much. That was 50 minutes of nothing.

How did we do that? I don't know. Nothing is a big topic. I guess so. I guess so. Yeah. We had two stories to not even talk about tonight and we managed to fill up 50 minutes. So, wow. Uh, yeah, we, and, and also we've been on like talking to each other for another hour and a half before that. So we, we, we do chat, we do chat quite a bit. Um, we need to get our home tech, uh, therapy sessions back for, for Greg and, and up and going this week. So keep an eye out in the, in the hub. If you're a member in there, uh, we should be pushing those links out, um, towards the end of the week here, um, Thursday or Friday, I gotta, I gotta, I'm going to do a survey to see if what day is better, but yeah. Um, over the long weekend, I saw him crying a bit.

Like he needed some help, unfortunately, and I had launched the cut, couldn't step in there, but you know, maybe this week. That's just what he does. Well, we'll, uh, we'll make sure we get that, that up and rolling this week, uh, and, and get back into having our, our little therapy scream sessions and, uh, help out everybody who needs help. Um, so it should be fun. Um, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, uh, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can support home

tech for as little as a dollar a month, any pledge over five bucks a month, get you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you can you can go in there and talk about like products that we probably should have talked about a month ago this is really a lot of conversations around it so yeah anyway um if you uh want to help out but can't support the show financially um totally appreciate a five-star review on itunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. It is pouring here.

And I don't know if you guys can hear the thunder and everything behind me and slamming on the garage door, but, uh, that wraps up another week in home tech, uh, from everyone here. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. I'm not saying anything anymore. Yeah. I miss it.

That's all I do. It's a podcast, man. It's such a podcast. It's always clunky when Gavin and I say it together. All right. All right.