HomeTech.fm - Episode 396 - Do People Like the Smart Home?

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

On this week's show: Innovelli has a secret, Apple launches live music, Ubiquity increases security for IoT devices, Google wants to ruin its products, Wink is down... again, and a survey about whether or not people like smart home products. All this along with updates on projects and the pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 22nd. In Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Hullston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. This is the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology, home automation, all sorts of fun. Gavin, I've been sending you pictures of big racks all weekend and uh are you able to get anything done like no nothing at all yeah i'm still rack hunting it's it's not

even just the cost of the rack but all the accessories that i need for the rack too so uh i found some options and i may pull the trigger on some stuff this week but i'll see yeah yeah we're we're dance monkeys. Thanks, Greg. Thanks for joining us in that. Yeah. There we go. Yep.

That's what we do. Um, yeah, the accessories add up. They, they really do. Um, power. Nobody thinks about power and stuff in Iraq. Power is super important. Yep. You got to power things on.

You got to, you got to have your nice battery backup. And then also, you know, more than, more than more than likely you have uh other power needs uh so you have to get a nice like rack mounted power strip or surge protector as well uh i gotta expand those outlets a little bit so so not happy right now he's like what have i got myself every time i talk to you in the closet just throw it all i think like a thousand msrp you can get like a watt box and like a nice, like a, you know, face plate for it as well. So we could easily push that rack budget to many thousands of dollars. Many.

That's easy. Yeah. At that point, I'm just going to hire somebody to just come do it for me. We'll just buy one of the door. Just buy one of the door. And then you just shove everything in there. It doesn't matter what it looks like. You close the door and it looks beautiful.

There you go. Yeah. Just go buy like an Ikea wardrobe or something. Just chuck it looks beautiful. There you go. Yeah, just go buy like an Ikea wardrobe or something. Just chuck it all in. I keep getting the algorithm that must be listening to us through Gavin's echo there because I keep getting like pictures of DIY Ikea racks underneath tables and stuff like that. I'm like, this is no, this is not what I want to see. This is not, what do they call it?

The wire porn subreddit that I subscribe to. I don't want to see this. C it's not what do they call it the wire porn subreddit that i subscribe to i don't cable porn cable porn there we are yeah wire porn is probably something else don't go to wireporn.com and now i'm curious what's there here we go do it on your own time gavin i'm doing it live do it live and it live. And it's redirecting me and redirecting me. And I've just been selected for $1,600 free. Oh, nice, man. It's better than going to a Wink website. Okay. Yeah, exactly.

At least I got somewhere. We'll get into that later for sure. But first, we got some big news from the guys over at Inovelli. Well, evidently, it's secret. Secret big news. Secret big news, yeah. I guess they've officially gotten, they've teamed up and executed a contract between, quote, us and another IoT group. It's kind of a weird way of putting it, but I guess that means that maybe they have some cash coming into the company or they're able to team up with somebody that has a lot more cash and money to burn

making cool Zigbee products. So Gavin, you're a little bit closer to Inovelli and like ear on the ground or what is it? I kind of know what you mean. Yeah, I watch this company closely because they're very vocal about what's happening with the company. And I really find that interesting

to see like the challenges they have you know what they go through so every now and then eric posts a post a long-winded post and he gives us all the background gossip and juice and i really like that and this time he's talking about how they've partnered with another company he's not allowed to mention it but if you go into their shop on their website you kind of see a whole bunch of products from another company um but this company that doesn't just isn't probably just giving them cash but it's also looks like they're going to be helping them just because it's a bigger company within the z-wave space it will help them with um getting some product you know getting some priority because apparently you know they're not big enough in a valley's not big enough to get any

z-wave anytime soon so that makes sense yeah this bigger company is going to help them get that um while at the same time they are pushing out zigbee um devices as well so they're a great company i love their devices it's just i hope they can get through this so uh the other brand that seems to be appearing on their website i'm scrolling through aotech seems to be appearing on their website, I'm scrolling through, Aotech seems to be. Oh, you weren't supposed to mention it. I'm under NDA. I can't say that. Right.

Yeah. I mean, if you have the ability to team up with somebody who may be better at product management or have the access and like you said, a lot of the companies, like if you don't have a minimum order of, you know, a million chips or whatever, we're not going to talk to you, but maybe AOTech does because they're a bigger brand or they sell more product. And maybe even teaming up together, they can kick into, you know, another buying tier and getting in front of the line of some other people who knows, but it's always better. It's always better if, if you know, we we've done that at our, at our office. Like there's a bigger company that we work with that does manufacturing. We do distribution, but they do

manufacturing really well. And they, they have guys that come over and like product manage some stuff for us. And we kind of work hand in hand on a couple of things, um, to get stuff moving. So it's always good to have help where you can find it. Well, the good news is we should hear something, you know, relatively soon in the technology, you know, timeline as well, at least. They say they need some products by CES 2023. So I think CES usually happens what, January or February? January, February, yeah.

So, you know, less than six months to go until we see some newer products or maybe just replenishment of current products. Right, right, because this has been one of those ones that's been out of stock for just about everything. So it's kind of hard to keep a company going if you don't have anything to sell, which is not just these guys, but it's everybody else. Unless you're Ubiquiti and you can just make a ton of accessories. And just slowly dribble them out a little different little rack panels you know covers for access points patch cables you just gotta make all the accessories and and how i mean

i'm gonna i'm gonna say something i i gotta bleep out later but like how how how much of a um a move was it to uh to to call the rack panels, the blank panels, OCD plates? I mean, OK, that's what it is. But like something like OCD magic blanks or something like that. Yeah, I could just see somebody sitting there like, why does anybody want a blank plate? This is dumb. You don't need blank plates to match like internet. Yeah, let's call them OCD plates.

OK, thanks. Thanks, Ubiquity. let's call them OCD plates. And okay. Thanks. Thanks. Uh, ubiquity. Thanks for that one. Nailed, nailed it though. That is, that is one of the, uh, the complaints I've seen on the ubiquity subreddit is that, uh, you have all these nice silver ubiquity devices in the nice black rack and everything else is just black in color. Um, so totally makes sense that they would release something like that. They make a white rack too. So like they, they make the white rack and people go out and they, they have, I think there's like a couple of you, if you dig deep enough, there's like paint swatches that people have, uh, gone out and like, I think it's this. And they, they find the paint color

that matches close enough to the silver that ubiquity is. And they'll go and they'll paint all of their little things, all their, their panels and everything and show off their OCD rack. So yeah, Gavin, this is what awaits you once, once you get moving, like you'll, you'll, you'll get into the OCD realm of rack accessories and it just doesn't stop, man. It's, it's, it's a lifestyle. I just opened up a new tab with their, uh, mini racks and racks and these look nice. They're pretty nice. I think they're only like small ones, though, aren't they? Like 6U or 9U or something? Ah, close tab. All right, let's move on.

You get way more out of IKEA tables than you do out of one of these. Exactly. Whenever you build your Lack Rack, you're going to have to find a paint swatch for white stained oak effect. That way you can make it the same as everything else. There we go. There we go. There we go. Well, what do you guys say we jump into some home tech headlines?

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Well, Apple announced Apple Music Sessions, which is a new series of live performances that will be available exclusively to subscribers of the company's music service. Carrie Underwood and Tenial Towns.

I have no idea who these, I know who Carrie Underwood is because she's kind of famous, but we listened to the other lady here before and I was like, I don't know who this is. Anyway, first two artists to be featured. And for now, the sessions will be mostly geared towards country, country music, which makes sense. I mean, country music is live music. So that's likely because they're being recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, which that no Nashville is like a major music market. Tons of people record their own country. Anyway,

Apple describes, uh, uh, uh, sorry, Apple has built a state-of-the-art studio there and that's what's bringing people in, but yeah, whatever. There state of art studios in nashville as well so um the company plans to tap into other genres and use other recording studios around the world in the future according to the press release um for each sessions artists will perform original songs as well as creative covers um carrie underwood went with ozzy odborne's mama i'm Home, and Talon's opening for Etta James, At Last. So sounds like a cool thing. If you're an Apple Music subscriber, you can just, there's a couple of links

in this article we'll link to in the show notes, but just click on that and it'll go right into the sessions. I think this is really, really kind of cool. I mean, it's bonus. Apple has trillions of dollars. They may as well spend it doing something nice for us, right? Betterd plates i'm surprised they picked that at last song you know i like the song but man it was killed by american idol you know i'm so sick of hearing that song now

the first time was like yes yes but after the 50th time i'm done but in this space i really like what they're doing with music. They're taking music to another level. And I like that because even Sony has a version of this, uh, 360 audio or something like that. And artists are releasing albums where it's recorded in this space. And I really like how they're making like audio, like, um, that you can get immersed in it. It's all around you and stuff like that. And that that's, you know, taking something to the next level. I look forward to see what they come with this. It's crazy to think that there's more that goes into good audio than just turning

it up louder. Um, I've never experienced spatial audio like this. I'm interested in trying it myself. Um, but you know, just like what Gavin said, I'm interested to see what this kind of, you know, brings forward for everybody else. And hopefully we get a lot better audio out of it. Yeah. One thing we noticed, I think James and the hub was talking about they were they were trying to get some Atmos music to play in the theater that they just made through a video distribution system. And for whatever reason, like this particular like Atmos is supported with the video distribution system but like this one particular aspect of it whatever I can remember was um was like Adobe Matt or something yes Dolby Vision Matt yeah a weird particular aspect of of getting the these like immersive audio sounds plus the video

down through a system into the project i mean the solution at the end of the day was just to hook directly into the the av system and the projector in the room rather than going through the video distribution system but kind of kind of one of those like gotcha things like uh we we as integrators we always run into because we try and go crazy with these systems sometimes and and And the only thing I'm thinking of, the file sizes are going to be huge on Napster with these emergency spatial audio things, you know? Like, it's going to take me a while to download off my Napster.

You're going to need 5G service in order to stream it, so. Exactly. All right, we'll move on. You need 5G in one of these new Ubiquiti Alien router things they have here. So Ubiquiti has released new firmware for the Amplify Alien. It has version 3.7.0. It has a couple of changes, including some time zone fixes.

But Ubiquiti says the release also adds Apple HomeKit security features to the Amplify Alien in standalone router setups. So that's the HomeKit secure router that launched with a number of partners way back when they announced this. But it's basically like a security feature that you can use with your home app to basically configure router to have like network segregation. So all your IoT devices can be put over here and they can't talk to anything inside the house. They just talk out to the Internet, do their thing, and then they can't side channel attack like a vulnerable computer or device that you have in your house. So it does improve security that way. There's different modes that you can put devices in. Restrict to home, which allows IoT HomeKit devices to use your Apple TV or HomePod as the home hub, but they won't be able to talk to anything any, any local devices. Automatic will allow the devices to use

HomeKit and get firm firmware updates as they need them. And then no restriction is the, you know, Wild West. It's basically what you have right now, if you don't have one of these and you're not using like VLANs or something like that, but it allows any device to talk to any device on the network or, you know, on the internet. So I think it's a good idea people have been really concerned about security when it comes to iot devices and um that that is a constant like drumbeat that you hear when it comes to you know what people want to see out of new iot devices and and definitely hits the news cycle i mean there was a article floating around this last week that Ring had opened up or given police video without a warrant in like 11 cases or something like that, where it was deemed an extreme emergency. And they just kind of used their better judgment to decide to not inform whoever owned the camera that they were going to be giving the video to the police, but they just did it anyway. Um, which, you know, some people would be like, okay, you know, maybe that's good. Maybe it's bad, but

some people may not like that. And, you know, if you, if you have these IOT devices, uh, and are concerned about security, it's a tough place to be right now, right? Like there's, there's not much that's offered with the traditional networking stuff other than like going and getting like a VLAN capable router where you can set up guest networks and wifi, IoT networks and all this stuff. Um, or doing something, something like the, the home kit version of it, where it's kind of like, it's just the same thing, but easier, you know? Um, but there's, there's not much in the way of preventing your data from getting leaked online and that kind of stuff or sent off to the police just because Amazon thought it was necessary. Gavin, I know you're not big into the HomeKit, but what do you think about – I know you do a security every day at work.

What do you think about bringing that type of security into the home? I think it's always good to have more security, but I wonder how many people are actually going to use this, you know, like sometimes when you add security, it makes things more difficult. They must be doing some magic because if your things are segregated, then would your airplay still work? You know, if you tried to airplay from your phone, you know, and your phone's on the home network, they must have ports open and handle all that stuff. Right. My in my smart home, I can't do this because everything's so integrated through everything that it would just be a nightmare for me to have to figure out every port of every device. You know what? Even if you had Wemos in your house, try and figure out, you know, broadcast messaging, messaging you know getting them to work across the the subnets it just gets it gets ridiculous and for the average person it's just too much work so if this is going to make it easier though that's great but things have to

work i think that's their goal with this is to make it like a three choice one click type setup like once you to where you can obtain or at least get close to the security you're talking about like i think that's their goal and i i again i kind of agree with you like who's going to use this if it if it causes like even the most slight inconvenience and my product doesn't work like i'm just going to turn this stupid thing off it'll be we'll turn it like like what is the thing in apple like the every now and then you download something from a website online you know it's like a legit thing but it came from this website it didn't go through apple and get signed or anything so you have to like go turn off the specific security settings like people are just

going to do that like they're just they're going to bypass and that's the default that's default feeling with a lot of people is once there's something not working just turn off your security and look it all works and they rather it work and be unsecure than it not working, just turn off your security and look, it all works. And they rather it work and be unsecure than it not working. Right. So yeah, they better get it right. The windows, this needs your permission to run this program or whatever. And it's like, I just know where the, but like user control. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the screen gets dim and this message comes up and I don't even have to look anymore. I'm just like, click. Something like this, I think could simplify the process, right? Um, where, you know, Gavin, you're talking about where maybe devices can't communicate across different VLANs and

stuff like that. Maybe this could help simplify that process where you could actually target certain devices to be able to cross talk. Um, and you know, kind of what nice features what nice features people get out of like PF sense and some other things where you're able to block specific websites or block, you know, different aspects of the network. Maybe that could be expanded into something like this eventually and give everybody access to it right in the same application. So I don't know if I would use this right now, but I can see where they're going with it as long as it does what it does and it doesn't, you know, hinder performance down the road.

Because just like what you guys said, as soon as somebody is inconvenienced by it, they're just going to turn it off and that's it. Unless it's forced upon them. So you got to make it easy and you got to make it work the first time. Baby steps. That's what I'm seeing here.

Baby steps. And most people just aren't that worried about this aspect of home automation. If you go into like the home automation subreddit, people are talking about different VLANs and not allowing devices to talk to the cloud and all that stuff. 90% of people have no idea what any of that stuff is and they just want it to work and they're not going to use this feature at all. But for the people that are a little more technically inclined and they want that little more control, maybe they will. You know, and when it comes to security, I, you know, for years when I built a new Windows PC and I put it on my network, the first thing I did was turn off the firewall on that thing, right? Like it's on my network.

I trust my network. I know my network, but that firewall was so annoying, right? Where things just didn't work and that was my default thing turn off the firewall it was actually only last month i started turning back on the firewall on all my pcs and the only reason i did that is because they keep popping up the most annoying message about your firewall being off that i decided to like screw it i'm just gonna turn it back on and they've improved it a lot. Things actually still worked when I turned back on the firewall. So I was kind of happy with that. It's like, you know, it takes time for them to get their security working properly. Right. And once they get to

that point, then people will just leave it on and utilize it and feel more comfortable with it. And that could be a future, you know, down the road where, you know, maybe you get a pop up one day and it's like, hey, you know, this Wemo light switch that you installed talks to the Internet like 50,000 times a day. Is that normal? Kind of like when you download certain applications now on like iOS and ask you if you want to be tracked or not for advertisements. So maybe, you know, as they start implementing that kind of stuff, you'll be able to see more of those things and people will be more aware of what's going on at that point and be able to make better decisions about what they're installing in their house and what they're allowing to have access. That's a great idea. Actually, you should like a patent that or something, you know, like already on the way. All right. It's in the mail. Yeah.

Yeah. I think I think this is the purpose of all this is just ease of use and to hopefully not stand in people's way, like you were saying. So they don't turn it off, but we'll see what, we'll see what it ends up being. I don't have one of these routers. I don't really plan on having one of these types of routers. You know, it's like, I, I'm comfortable living the flat land, flat land net, you know, lifestyle. I don't, I don't need to segregate things away. And I actually have just a giant subnet with thousands of IP addresses available just because I can.

And I'm sure that causes problems somewhere, but I don't care because it doesn't cause a problem for me. And yeah, TJ, it's funny you're saying that most people don't care. I would say 90% of the install technicians, the pro technicians have no idea how to properly set up, configure a VLAN. And even if they did, they probably like run into so many problems with it. They're just never like I did. They just never do that again. Like that was just a big mistake, but if it could be like a one click

thing and it gets everything up and going, Hey, there you go. That that's, that's a win-win for everybody. All right, let's move on here to Google and Sonos have been having this little spat for a while. Sonos wins at the international court and they say, yeah, you are infringing on these patents. And what's Google do? Instead of taking the products off the market, they just start taking features off of their products

without telling anybody. So there's no complete list. But here are a couple of things that you can't do anymore that you used to be able to do with Google. And the assumption is this has to do with the lawsuit and the loss here. You say, casting volume controls were removed and then added back in a way that presumably circumvented Sonos patents.

Volume controls for group speakers have been lost, both in hardware, like on the volume control keys, and in software, so the apps, assistant, voice-based controls. Can't do that anymore. Group speakers no longer work on devices running older cast firmware. Product installation and updates may require a device utility app for a small set of users. Google Home app has lost the, quote, cast my audio button for speaker groups. And Pixel phones in the US can no longer set up Chromecasts and possibly other devices.

Customers that own a Pixel device effectively can't move Chromecasts between Wi-Fi networks or set them up to a newly purchased or reset a device at all. Like if you have a Pixel phone in Chromecast, right, you're just screwed. Like you can't just get something else because you're not going to use that. Google has acknowledged some of these issues while others have been basically posted online. TJ, this is kind of wild.

Like we knew there was stuff coming down the pipe for this, but like I thought that Google and Sonos would come to an agreement. No, Google's like, we'll still sell the same thing, but you're just going to get less of it, and it's not going to work as nice. What's hilarious is that they could just pay Sonos, and all this would be over. And I'm assuming in the grand scheme of things,

it's probably not that much money. I honestly don't know how much it is, but it's probably not that much money to Google in the long run when they could just get everything functioning again, if they just paid for the patent. But instead they're just going to throw their users under the bus and destroy their products at the same time. And I just, I don't get that part. Like there's an obvious solution. It's relatively simple. Just do it. Why do you have to like constantly drag everybody around and ruin what they have already? Doesn't make sense to me. Gavin, what do you think about this? What this tells me is that Google is obviously,

it's cheaper for them to just kill this stuff than it is to pay that patent. It's like, probably who's using this stuff? You know, they probably looked at each feature and said, well, we're gonna piss off 10 people with this one, it we're gonna piss off 20 people at this one all right scratch it or we could pay 165 million um you know like i well that's one of the reasons i never really got into the google ecosystem is because you know one day like features come features go products get retired very frequently by them. The Amazon ecosystem is a little bit more stable. I mean, it's still a mess over there, but at least a little more stable in terms of their products. But, you know, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. And what's the future of these products going to be?

You know, you don't know if they're planning to retire these and they're just like, you know what, we're getting rid of these anyway. So let's not, you know, pay this patent. We'll figure out another way. Well, in true Google fashion, you don't know if the device you've bought is going to last six months or six years. So, you know, unfortunately now everybody just has to kind of wonder when this stuff is going to die because it sounds like it will sometime soon. I mean, it sounds like effectively for anyone who has a Pixel phone and a Chromecast device, it is effectively dead because it just doesn't work together anymore.

You can't set it up. You can't reset it. You just, there's not much you can, there's nothing you can do. According, at least according to this article and what they, evidence they have posted in their own experience. But man, it sounds like to me that,

yeah, I think Gavin, you hit it nail on the head. It's easier for them to pay a fine or to not, to not pay the fine and just pay lawyers to drag this out and wear Sonos down. And Sonos really doesn't like, they, they can appeal and maybe win some of it back, but like Sonos doesn't really have to do anything other than fight. So maybe they're just going to, it's a war of attrition, right? Like they just kind of keep Sonos having to pay the lawyers and, and repeatedly filing the same thing over and over again. Um, just, uh, just to stay on top. I don't know. Definitely.

They're definitely being bullies here. And then the consumers are, their consumers are definitely losing. It's not, not great. Well, and it's funny if you go into like an Android or like Google home subreddit or other kinds of forum and you know, you hear the Android, you know, fanboys talking about it. Everybody's like mad at Sonos. It's like, I can't believe Sonos would patent such like a simple technology. And I can't believe Sonos would hold this against Google and stuff like that. And it's like, Google is a much larger company that could easily pay. Like the problem is not Google at this point or the problem is not with Son this point the or the problem is not with sonos at this point it is with google so you know if you should be mad at anybody you should

be mad at google and people obviously don't know the patents that people patent the stupidest the smallest little thing right and it you can infringe on that so easily like who owned the patent for z-wave switches reporting their status back was it it Lutron, I think? And for the longest while, switches could not report their status back. You know, you had to pull them to get their status. And you think of it and you're like, why are they even allowed to patent something like that? Like it should be a feature on everything, but that's the way the world works. So, you know, you got to understand that. Well, and sometimes with these products, when they, you know, I would, I would imagine a large percentage of patents are kind of silly. But you also have to remember that a certain number of

them are like truly revolutionary ideas or concepts that that company actually implemented for the first time compared to somebody else. So while, you know, now it makes sense to have whole home audio control all from like one touch screen, um, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when this was patented, that didn't make any sense to anybody. Everybody was probably looking at that and was like that. Why would anybody want that? You know, nobody's going to do that. Nobody even has cell phones or anything. How are they going to do this? But you know, it's just, it's, it's important to remember when some of this stuff was patented and the companies behind it. And I will say out of all the companies that I deal with, I think Sonos is absolutely one of the best in terms of support and, you know, just a customer service in general.

So I would trust them more than I would trust Google. Yeah, I mean, when I have problems with people having patents is when they're the patent trolls. They snap up some IP and they're just like, we're going to sue you in the eastern district of Texas so we can have our paid-off judges rule against you and charge a bunch of money. But Sonos is not that company. They are making the speakers that have

and contain these patented operations in them, and they're actively trying to make a better product. They're not a patent troll in any way, shape, or form, and if a court has come back and said, hey, Google, you did steal this stuff from Sonos, even though it is basic, you were aware, and Sonos asked you to stop selling the stuff or stop, you know, pay, pay licensing. And you refused like you are the bad guy. You are the baddie. That's, that's the case at this point. I don't

think that's very defensible and truly I'm sure Google is hundreds of billions of dollar company. I think Sonos is a few billion. Like they're a decent sized company now. They're not small. They're worldwide. They do a lot of sales, but they're not they're not Google. They're not huge money like that trillion dollar company. Yeah. Sonos could easily be snapped up by Google probably for as much as this fine is so or as much as the patent is. So they should just buy Sonos and get it over with yep yep yep yep so all right well we'll move on here from from a potential graveyard issue to probably this is like 90 i'm sure a graveyard issue uh wink guys we recorded the show last week kind of floated

over this because we really weren't sure what was going on. But within the week, like Wink had basically posted an update, but they've been down for like three weeks, like the website, everything, all their services, everything has been down for about three weeks with no sign of a fix. Outage has left customers of the company who they actually pay $ dollars a month to access the service so it's not like they're pre-loading on this thing um completely like down like they're not able to use their stuff is and i from what i understand if your if your device reboots like it you're just done like it's not going to talk to anything um it's so bad that even wink's website and email are affected and it gives uh according to this article strong whiffs if somebody didn't pay the bill this month.

I think it's a little bit worse than that at this point. There's a there's no initially there's no communication from Wink about what was going on. It's like July 1st. Things just stopped working. Website was down down affected. Um, but then like July 12th, they posted an update on their status page and said, um, update, we are continuing to work on a fix for connectivity issues. We will post here when we have a resolution that was the 12th. It's like we're recording on the 19th and I suspect that this isn't going to be updated by the time we publish on the, you know, this on the 22nd. So update, we have no idea what's going on. Thank you. We know we didn't pay the bill is what they should say. Well, this, this leads into my next conversation. We're actually going to set

up a GoFundMe. I think if we aim for like a hundred thousand dollars, we can just buy Wink and rebrand it to something else and have our own home automation platform. So we should be able to get it for pretty cheap, I would think. $100,000. $100,000. Maybe like a custom weird car. Will.i.am really likes weird cars. Maybe we can find them something down in Florida that they really like. But plenty of weird cars here.

Yeah. Make a trade for it. We'll see what we can do. We'll put that as like a Patreon stretch goal or something like buy Wink. We'll put that in there. A hundred thousand dollars at the a hundred thousand dollar level. We'll make an attempt to buy Wink if somebody wants to push that out through Patreon. So yeah, it's a good idea. I don't know. Everybody loved this product when it first came out because it was like, it was one of the ones that was like aggregating things. Like you could integrate all sorts of different products before everything got so siloed and then, um, easy to use. I even had like their egg minder,

which I threw away, unfortunately, because it was kind of awful, but, um, it would tell you like, if your eggs were bad or how long they had been there and if you need to get new eggs, but yeah, it was a nice little product and it was nicely put together, but it just didn't work that well because it was a, an egg thing, like a battery operated device with radios inside a refrigerator. Like, I don't know why they didn't think of that, but it just, it's wifi inside a refrigerator. It's not going to work. How often do you need to know the status of your eggs? I mean, I could check from my desk how many eggs I had, yeah and what date they were bought on and i guess if you're cooking a lot of like cakes or something i don't know omelets yeah why not come out with like a milk jug

like a wink carafe that sounds like a product for like switchbot or wise yeah there we go a carafe wise carafe there you go now i always liked i i liked wink for what it was i i actually had one of the hubs for a little bit i think i tried it for like two weeks it wasn't my thing um i will say the hardware felt all right it wasn't like completely awful um the software left a little to be desired um and this this has been kind of happening for the past several years now. Whenever Will.i.am bought it out, everybody was kind of just thinking it would just die within like six months. And instead of it dying within six months, it's been kind of gradually happening

over the past several years. So maybe this year we'll ring the death knell for a wink. This seems to be the new trend for products dying like so my rule of thumb now is if a service goes down i i don't panic right away but if it's down for 24 hours it's dead it's done i'm looking for the backups i'm out of there you know and you don't hear anything from management yeah it's gone yeah i would say after like the third day mark that would kind of prove to me that like there's probably nobody working on it or if there is it's one guy who's just like completely overworked like it's literally just will i am will sit there on a computer you know trying to figure out what's going on typing in commands and linux and looking on stack overflow like what how do you do this this is this engine X is not right. Enhance.

Oh man. Well, good, good luck. Well, I hope you get wink back up and going soon. Cause man, not that $5 a month is like an extraordinary amount of money,

but like it, you would think that that would say like, you'd be able to, they cut everybody off. Like, unless you have, if you had an egg minder and you wanted that monitored through, through wink, you'd have to pay five bucks a month for that. But you would think that like, they would have built that into the business plan. Like, okay, well we know five bucks is going to cover the basic, you know, keep the lights on bills and everything, but

evidently not like that's not how it works. So I don't even think you can buy it. Can you still buy a week? Like hubs? And so I think I have have one i was looking over my shoulder to see if i could see anything on the shelf right there i think i honestly they used to sound like walmart and everything and i have not seen one in a store in forever so walmart has this weird brand like kangaroo or something and it's like the branding on there on the packaging says this is a video doorbell like or something oh yeah i think that's their on brand oh and and i think yeah um what is i have to ask though what do you think is worse uh shutting down randomly and just not telling anybody or just telling somebody two weeks in that you don't know what the problem is

are you in the insteon camp or you know are you in the wink camp you know what if you told me two weeks in you don't know what the problem is but you're still working on it i'll sit there and wait you know knowing that one day it will come back they don't know what the problem is that's the problem we uh there's a problem somewhere it they're working on that fix still it they'll post updates when they have a resolution and it could be another two weeks who knows before somebody gets back to, maybe it's just somebody like part-time and they're just like, I have no idea. I honestly, I don't.

Like, I'd love to know what's going on here. It's kind of like a black hole, like that was Insteon. Like, where is this company? Where is it based? Where's support based? Like, how does this work? Like, do they just have a giant queue of emails

that are just being auto-replied and that say, you know, hang on, keep checking the status page. We're working on a fix. Like, I don't know this. Where is this? Where is this company? Like who, who is, who is in charge? It's very strange. Well, I think my theory, my leading theory right now is that will I am decided to cut costs and they installed a server inside of one of his custom cars and they accidentally traded the custom car in to somebody and the whole company just went out. Clicking, see all reviews on Amazon to see what, Oh, Tom, Tom is really upset. Useless now in all caps.

One star, obviously. you what oh tom tom is really upset useless now in all caps um one star obviously uh the next one is don't buy this or the wink hub 2 one star like it's all one star reviews oh works well here's somebody verified purchase that's will i am it's a it's ghost account will i am but unfortunately there's no uh there's no pros near me on amazon to set up my wink hub too so oh man i i definitely have one of these laying around back there i recognize the box but um yeah i figured they'd be dead long ago but they keep hanging on um maybe they'll get snapped up maybe maybe in a valley is teamed up with wink oh maybe that's the partner they've got will i am coming in the door no they said they have money well they got five dollars a month they're not doing they're not spending they're not buying the servers anymore so it's a decent amount of change that's coming back to somebody

that's true in a valley you know you laugh but in a Valley survived a lot of companies lately. Like, you know, like for a company that really has no product or they have their Zigbee product out now, but knows like they were suffering for a while, but they were able to survive through the storm, you know? So I got to give them credit. Yeah. No, I like what they do with their, like their customer service and the way they've structured their company to be open. It's kind of cool. All right, well, this is kind of like the last couple of stories. It kind of leads to this one.

According to a new survey that shed light on how people feel about the technology in their homes, the survey talked about 900 respondents based in the U. Uh, they, there was the, the survey, uh, talked about 900 respondents based in the U S and they were asked to share their thoughts about smart homes. On average, about 73% of those who took part mentioned how they were concerned about smart, about the smart devices in their homes, tracking them and listening to them. Um, 75% of people that responded aren't happy with their smart home devices. This is not, not very good numbers, uh, for, for the devices that are out there. Uh, 65% of respondents felt that their cameras had been hacked and 33% had problems related

with, uh, with Alexa based assistance. Imagine that. I mean, does timers really well. I really liked the timer thing um anyway some uh some also had we'll put a link to the actual survey uh some people had some problems with their smart locks and uh there was a lot of people that were like concerned about security and like feeling like they were being hacked and that kind of thing with their smart devices so you know we were talking about that earlier with the the the, the HomeKit router thing. That's maybe a good idea. Maybe a good move for Apple to kind of like

help ease that, that trepidation, I guess, when it comes to installing cameras and stuff in the house. Um, the, it says here, uh, with the negative views, there were some, there was a little bit of positivity around 60% of those who responded, make claims about how the smart devices in their homes have really altered their lives includes the added level of protection from security systems and cameras and making them feel safe at, at night while sleeping. So a little bit of positivity there with the security spin, but for the most part people are just kind of like, eh, still kind of arm's length, it feels like,

with getting smart home tech in. I thought this was funny. 55% are using the Alexa platform with Amazon, 32% with Siri, 22% with Nest, and 10% with Cortana. How is that even a thing? I don't understand how 10% of 900 random people that they found have Cort how is it even a thing? I don't understand how 10% of 900 random people that they found

have Cortana anywhere near in their house. I don't understand. Is that the only one that they could name? Like they're like, I have a Windows computer and it has Cortana,

so. Does it? I mean, I have a Windows, Windows 10 has it built in, so. Maybe I just turn it off when it pops up.

Did they take it out? Yeah, it's the first thing I do. Oh, maybe, maybe, I don't know. With the firewall, now it's Cortana.

I can't get through. Well, second thing, firewall first, then Cortana starts working and I gotta disable her. Oh yeah, she's still there. I can pull her right up. But yeah, 10%, that's kind of, I don't understand that. That's a lot of angry people. I wonder how many of these people are actually Google

and Wink users, you know, that are so unhappy with their smart home. And this makes sense. I'm not going to fact check this article because I don't know where they got all their facts from. They said it's a random survey. Yeah. So I'm not going to fact check it or whatever. But I can see a lot of this.

And I think a lot of people, especially in the DIY space, they don't trust or they don't know where their data is going. You buy these cameras, it goes to the cloud. You don't know where in the cloud. You don't know who owns it. You don't know what happens to it. You know, all these sensors you're buying, they send your stuff to the cloud. Even if the sensor is local to the hub, you know, it connects to the Amazon device. That Amazon device is sending that data from that sensor to the cloud.

You know, so they're harvesting all your data so i can understand that you know things are a pain in the ass to set up pain in the ass to keep working they break randomly on days you know and it's always the day when you need to get out the garage that the garage door won't open or something like that right like it's stuff like that and i think people are also being forced into buying smart devices that they don't, that they're intimidated by. Like, you can't buy a dumb TV nowadays. So you're intimidated by all these smart features. You know, you buy, you just want a toaster. But that toaster has, you know, Amazon built in and you have to put it into a network jack or connect it to your Wi-Fi.

Rental POE. Yeah. built in and you have to put it into a network jack or connect it to your wi-fi you know yeah you know and i think people are just getting intimidated by a lot of this stuff and they you know i can see why people are unhappy sometimes you just want to flush the toilet with a handle you know like you don't want to have to tell the a lady to ask switchbot to flush your toilet you just want to push the handle you know it shouldn't be so complicated but i think things are just being over complicated now well one of the biggest things i always see whenever i go into somebody's house um is a lot of people like to automate like everything and they like to automate stuff without having a reason to automate it um like you know i go into like a new build and it's like well all of our light switches are controlled and it's like

okay cool do you use any of that well no i mean we basically just use it's like, well, all of our light switches are controlled. And it's like, okay, cool. Do you use any of that? Well, no. I mean, we basically just use it to set up a timer for the outside. So it's a lot of times people just going out and just buying random devices without having any kind of game plan or knowing why they want it and using it and then being like, well, this is silly. I don't know why I spent $60 on this light switch when it doesn't improve my life any at all. Um, cause there are a lot of devices that really do improve your life, like a video doorbell or, you know, security cameras, those kinds of things where you may

not use them all the time, but they work when you need them. And they're, they're something that actually enhances your life a little bit. Um, and I will say maybe it is a bad idea for SwitchBot to come out with the toilet flusher if 52% of people think that the smart toilet is unnecessary. So maybe that's why they haven't released it yet. Could be spying on you too. Yeah, recording your toots. I saw that episode of The Boys last night where they had the, never mind. Oh, you can't talk about it.

This is not well you know when it comes to your data is it comes down to like you know i was reading in the another article where they said you know some of the things your apple watch can detect can can say whether you're pregnant or not you know and how that information can be used you know not to get into politics and all that stuff, but used for bad things for tracking people, you know, that, you know, for abortions, whatever, you know, and it's like, you, do you have control over that data? Probably not because it's all going up to Apple and on the light switch thing, you know, I started with five in the valleys, but it drove me nuts that they didn't match every other switch in my house. So I had to switch them all. Okay. Richard can appreciate the fact that all my switches look exactly the same.

There we go. There we go. Yeah. Well, I did find this interesting in this article here that the most desired home products, in the past, it's been security and cameras and that kind of thing. Light seems to be topping the survey, which is kind of the first time I've seen that happen. It used to be, by far and away, cameras, security, video doorbells, that kind of thing. Doorbells is actually down in the lower tier of this list, just right above blinds. Hey, there we go, there we go.

But thermostat, security system, lights, those are the top ones, kind of in ascending order. And people are willing, they have invested an average of about $1,200 and are willing to invest on average about $2,500. So they still want this stuff. I just think they want it to work better or to be part of a more cohesive experience like TJ, which you're talking about. Like there's just no plan as to why you're doing this stuff.

You're just doing it to do it. It doesn't make any sense. One in 10 have had to contact tech support about their smart tech, which seems kind of low, but whatever. I love the one here. It's like 3% of the people spotted said they had to contact more than six times.

That's pretty good. Most of which was for security camera systems, a little bit for security camera systems a little bit for their tv a little bit for their doorbell and lights is actually one of the lowest ones on there which is surprising because i don't know maybe in the consumer light space it's a little easier but lighting seems to always haunt me when i was in the pro space and getting those systems fine-tuned and up for people well and, and I think light's probably one of those things too, where like, if you're getting like switches, at least the lights will still work. Even if like the home automation part of it doesn't work compared to like, you know, your security cameras, if the clouds down, then you can't see your cameras at all. So some of that stuff is a little flexible.

But I mean, yeah, that, that support um, support, that support fact was actually really interesting because, you know, a lot of the cheap products, there's nobody to contact for support. Right. So when you're buying a product, you know, it's always good to look at, you know, their support lines. You know, I remember when Eero was before they were bought by Amazon, I contacted their support a few times. Um, and it was great support. They shipped out

a new device. It was here within a couple of days, you know, and I just shipped them back the old one. You know, they did some great work. Same with Ring. I had to contact support a few times. I haven't done it since they've been acquired. So I don't know what it's like now. Right. But, you know, something to keep in mind is, you know, the support. You will need to use it. It says here two in five people would not go back to living without smart tech. So we've only managed to convince two out of five people they need this tech in their home and to not, you know, that it's essential and they shouldn't leave.

It says, which devices could you not live without? Security camera, of course, topping the list there. TV. I don't know why that's not the first one on the list, but I guess you don't need a smart TV, so to speak. Doorbell, lights, and sound system round out the bottom of that list. And then here are the, we talked about the most used or the most wanted smart home tech. And here's the most unnecessary home smart home devices starting out at 59 the smart toaster that runs on poe i don't even know about the smart toaster but i've got to find out about the smart toaster i might i might get one um you could control how um dark you want your toast with an app on my phone is that is that the idea oh it's great you can do

different images and stuff like that too what oh yeah all Oh, yeah. I'm going to check this out. 52 percent, which I highly disagree with the smart toilet. Like anybody who's ever experienced one of those total toilets really knows that this is this is just dumb. Like whoever wrote this is like smart toilet. Why is this on the list? And they just checked it off because those those things are just amazing. Forty nine percent is the grill, which, again, I'm going to have to disagree with if you have a Traeger grill and hook it up to your phone. So you don't have to get out there in the middle

of the night and reload some firewood or whatever. Uh, I know they have them like where they just do, do them automatic, but it sure is nice to like sit in the comfort of your own home and check on the grill outside and make sure it's still cooking. And a refrigerator which i think should be at the top of the list and and gym equipment like 25 gym equipment like i don't know like it seems like those devices like those have been really popular i i just think there's like i think a lot of these were just implemented bad and gave people a bad taste like the smart fridge you know having that a lot of useless features but i could see really useful features in a smart fridge such as what if the temperature in your fridge starts you know is off by so much and it lets you know because then that means there's something wrong in your fridge

or your food could go wrong you know that kind of smarts but i don't need to watch the basketball game on my fridge door tv yeah i don't do any of that yeah and that's why i say some of this is like useless stuff workout gym equipment i think is a great space for smart stuff can you imagine you're working out and you tap your watch and it automatically tracks you know how much you ran and how much you did this how many lifts you did and then that's logged to your favorite app and it works across all equipment because there's some standard somebody made you know that would be perfect for that but i think in the industry everyone tried probably to lock it down you have to use a an app that's probably half baked because that's just the way it is and i think people have a bad taste with a lot of this stuff but it can be done properly

well yeah 75 of them have a 74 think smart home tech devices are unnecessary so like, it's definitely a lot of people that still have a bad taste because of the poor implementation, like you're talking about. And there, there, there definitely were outliers, like the gym equipment stuff, the Peloton thing seemed to be super popular during the pandemic and around, you know, it still seems to be kind of popular with some people who, who've kept up with it. But, um, you know, there definitely have been things that like knockoffs that were um like what do you call it like just not implemented very well so like what you're saying and funny enough bruno actually just mentioned smoke or flood sensors so um flood

sensors i have those in my house i've've actually saved me twice from leaks. So they actually are very valuable. Smoke is something I actually have a tab open with right now. I was looking at smoke detectors. And when you're making a smoke detector smart, you're not replacing the functionality of it. You're just adding to it. So it's still going to beep and go off and do everything it does. But it's going gonna beep and go off and do everything it is does but it's gonna send that

it's it's z-wave so it will send an extra notification to your hub so that you can get another notification when you're not home right and that's only gonna work for as long as your home's still standing because once the fire hits your hub that's it it's gone you ain't getting any kind of message but um i was looking at that but they're not certified in canada i think first alert makes the z-Wave ones. I don't think I can use them in Canada, and that's big because we'll have to deal with insurance. But I'm still researching that, but great suggestion there. Well, and a lot of these devices, too, you know, it's easy for us to kind of justify buying a $60 light switch or whatever it is.

But we also have to remember that a lot of these devices are substantially more expensive than just like a normal device. You know, I can go out and buy like a normal light switch for a dollar or two. But, you know, a decent connected, you know, Wi-Fi switch is at least 20 or 30 dollars. And maybe you can get it cheaper with like a discount brand like Wise or something like that. But a lot of these smart home tech devices add a huge upfront cost to the device itself, and then it has to be maintained for an even longer period of time. So it's very easy at some point to kind of sour that relationship and make somebody regret their purchase. And when the price does come down to the point where people are,

it's like a no brainer to buy it, then you start getting those cheap cheap devices the ones that go to the cloud that are logging everything that are coming from china you don't know where your data is going you don't know where it is and that's not a good thing either yeah i i honestly don't know how water sensors aren't like required in code by now like the little automatic shutoff valves that can all work especially in florida holy cow condo stuff i see happen here and i i've even seen like videos recently or just elsewhere. It's just like a water main can bust or something happens on a floor above and everything below it gets flooded, like all the way down. It's kind of wild. So yeah, I don't, I don't know how they are. They're not required even, even in a house, like just put some sensors in and put the little

shutoff valve on the, on the incoming line. And something happens, the water turns off. You don't have to worry about it. Good to go. So anyway, let's, let's move on here. Hopefully we can, we can have better product. This is, this is why we want nice things. We want people to have nice things. So, um, hopefully we get better products here in the, in the future and kind of move forward. And I got to look up this toaster, man. And I probably should look up the fire things as well. Smoke detectors, if I get the new toaster that can print. Yeah.

First alert. I'll have to check that out. But all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 396. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And courtesy of Gavin, I'll just throw you under the bus now, but no. He actually, we talked about this quite a bit before the show and the pre-show.

There's a new Zoo Z-Wave Power Plus strip. That's really hard to say. It's basically, so this thing is a five outlet power strip it's got a couple of usb ports on it too if you wanted to put some phone chargers or something into it but each one of those outlets is controllable it's got power sensing and all sorts of good stuff on it got timers built-in timers to turn on and off outlets this would be like the ultimate like i use those um what are they called wemo switches for for the christmas lights like this would be the ultimate one because it's like you plug one in you got five outlets you can turn things on and

off that's great um but gavin you you posted this in there you said this thing is great you've used them in the past and this is even better now this version three that just came out yeah so i it's the zoo zen 20 power strip and i i had the original version of this and the main thing I use this for is a charging station so I have all my tool batteries I plug them into there I when I want to recharge a tool battery I plug it in turn on the socket and then it charges and when it's done charging it turns it off automatically afterwards right it's like an automation it lets me know it's done charging you know because I go through some of these batteries quickly when I'm doing the lawn and stuff like that the problem was on the one, it wasn't rated to handle battery

chargers. So I blew that one pretty quick in a month. It was dead. Um, Zeus was great. They replaced it. I just don't have another use for it. Then I saw that they came up with a version three and they specifically said it was made to handle those chargers, you know, those kind of power supplies that were causing problems before. And I reached out to them and they confirmed that the battery chargers will no longer blow it. So I'm going to grab another one and I'm going to set back up my charging station because I really like that. And I thought others would know like the, the, they're great switches. They follow Z-Wave standards. They work great with all the hubs, Five controlled power ports. The USB ports are not controllable, but you get power reporting on all the ports.

And that's useful for certain things. Yeah, these things are great. I had one. I used it with SmartThings, Vera, and Home Assistant, I think. And I worked with all of them. No problem at all. The pairing process, I think, for some of the hubs was a little complicated just because each device is its own device or each outlet is its own device, but also you can

control the whole thing as well with one single button as well. So certain hubs just don't read that natively and they kind of get confused. But in the long run, I was able to make them work. I used it for the longest time for plant and aquarium lighting. So for like our indoor garden or aquarium lights, you know, setting up schedules and stuff like that, basically just so I wouldn't have to have a bunch of different Z-Wave plugs in the one area. So it's a good idea. Yeah, I was looking at the list of integrations they have. It's a ton of stuff. Vera's on there, like you said.

But so is the Wink and Wink 2. Oh, perfect. Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah. No energy monitoring or advanced settings. But what are you going to do? It's a non-working platform. And ADT pull.

So if you have that, you're in luck. Yeah, but also no energy monitoring. And it's on-off only. Wait, yeah, that's kind of wild. But yeah, they've got a ton of, this is what I like to see with these types of integrations, just tons of products. And this, we didn't really see the price,

it was like $70, $70 US dollars, so it was like $150 Canadian. But still, like price per port, if we're going to go that way, price per power port, PPPP, yeah. That's seven port seven power ports there yeah those two usbs count for something um yeah five watts each at least yeah and they do report on on off status so like if you can't control it but those you if you plug

a tablet or phone into it it does report that that it's turned on. So that's, that's something like this is for a little tiny product with just like a couple of features that you can do a ton of stuff with this thing. So it's, it's kind of cool. Really do like it. Um, 70 bucks. Good to go. So yeah, good pick of the week. I like it. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the weeks, or great ideas for a show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form hey guys that wraps up another week here um gavin you're still working on the rack yeah but last week on last week's show you know i bought the aquara um blind controllers live on the show i actually what i when i said on the show i hit buy i actually did purchase it right at that moment right um they came in this week and i actually

set them up and they actually work really good so if you're into automating your your um curtains for example just keep in mind there's a few gotchas you gotta worry about like you know check to make sure the rail or you know the the you know it fits you just gotta make sure it fits because i ran into that so you know a simple purchase started to balloon a little bit more because i had to buy a new curtain rods and stuff like that so you know but just make sure it fits you know um i ended up writing a driver for it so i kind of had to pick it apart. But that's a quora. That's why I hate these devices. But I love them because they don't follow standards. But I was able to reverse it to get the drivers working. So now I have automated curtains in my office that, you know, open and close based on light or time of day or whatever.

I can control it through a lady. I'm really impressed how well they work. Very nice. Very nice. So we first sat down to record and we hit record. They were shutting. The blinds were shutting behind you. I didn't hear them. So is it pretty quiet? They are pretty quiet. They're not too loud, even though I have two of them going at once because it's either side, right? they they aren't too loud they're actually i'll know tomorrow morning because i just set them up so tomorrow morning when they open up at sunrise if they wake me up then they're going to be too loud and somebody's going to tell me to turn that crap off won't say who you know because i'm under nda but somebody will so the secret yeah yeah yeah um i'm under nda too about someone who who tried to watch a movie um and my server was crashed and i was like that's it i'm done with it so the old hp 2011 enterprise grade server is

going out to the trash can and um i i just went ahead and just ordered everything i need to do an actual build and the up the unraid thing seems pretty cool because i should be able to in theory take the drives out of what i have running plug them into this thing and it should detect and run with it doesn't it's not the end of the world there's not really much on there like keyword is should yeah the only thing that will get you is uh if the serial detected serial numbers changes then it doesn't know how to associate the drives but there's ways of reassigning them you can go out and drop yeah not reassigning them but actually saying these are actually the drives for this pool build it anyway so that's just the one gotcha you can probably run into i think i've had to do that once

before because of the way this strange raid card that exists inside the server had to be hacked and to actually allow it to read the sensors on the drives to tell me what the temperatures of them were like it was this thing's been a headache from day one and like it keeps crashing randomly and i'm just not very interested in it the only thing i do like is the form factor the fact that it fits in a 2u rack space it's not very loud right now but it can be loud but i got the you know the special brown fans that that you're supposed to get that everybody knows like if you're if you're pc shopping they have the the rgb fans and they have the brown fans and i guess the brown fans are quiet i don't. So it sounds like you're unhappy with your smart home right now,

but you're willing to throw more money at it to solve the problem. Yes. Throw more money in it to solve the problem. And the goal here would be not to have anybody to sit down. Like TV is supposed to be entertainment, not work. And the goal here is to sit down and be able to watch the movies that we have or, you know, fire it up, you know, any, any time. And it's, it's been like on off good. It's a lot better than what I had before because that was very unreliable

between running it on like a Mac mini like Plex was on the Mac mini and half on Mac mini half on the Synology wasn't all that great. This, this has been a lot better and more stable as far as like the connection between the Synology and the server. But the thing crashing or having kernel panics for whatever reason, probably because it's just on ancient technology,

like 2011 was a long time ago. Wink was like 2014 or something like that. So like you can see, like Wink has probably got some of these servers that they're just like, what are we doing? They keep crashing. And yeah, so this thing's going to go,

I'm done with the home lab experience. I'm going back to consumer grade PC and you know, see congratulations. You gotta, you gotta make sure that SAF or the spouse approval factor is at a hundred percent or else all of it's a waste. So no, no going in the rack i got a rack mount case i'm not i there's no leds that are going to be built into this thing it's going to hide away in this giant box that i have right here and then yeah yeah she's she's not gonna no nobody's gonna see

anything it's there's not even gonna be there's just gonna be some junk down by the trash can on on friday or something so you're basically hiding it. So she doesn't know you better get to the, there's a sheet covering it right now. This is a green screen, but it's a sheet covering all the stuff that I've got. It's just going to work and she's not going to know. It's just going to work from now on.

That's my, it just got better. Yeah. It just, I don't know. Amazing. Yeah. It was an update.

It's always easier to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Well, this one should be fun, but I don't know. I've got to build a computer. I haven't done that in a long time. So it seems kind of easy. That's the most fun thing out of the whole process.

So I'm jealous. I'll build it for you. You can do the rest of it. Okay. You can build a computer. Gavin, you're supposed to be setting up the blue iris on that guy's house. I don't know if you've ever gone back and done that, but I haven't gone and touched it since you said you were going to do it.

Oh, yeah. No, there's a reason I haven't built a computer in a long time. I haven't wanted to. Don't need to? No, yeah. You just buy a laptop, and it's perfect. No, I don't know. Anyway, I'll have all the parts by thursday it

looks like is is what they're saying now whether that happens or you know could could be true could be false who knows it's coming from canada so it could take three weeks it could be in custom why does all your stuff come from canada i have no idea stuff comes from america no it's in dfw right now so there we go it'll be here by by friday thursday or friday so yeah there we go the stuff is faster to come down than it is to come up so you'll get it you'll get it soon okay you can't complain can't complain so well all right well that's it uh for this week we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

If you don't know about the 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 gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you met. It has been busy the last couple of days,

but the biggest thing in there right now that i just cannot let go is richard got his engravings back from from leviton there and they're crooked like they're just not they're not centered and i can't unsee what he posted and i'm gonna he'll probably talk about this on his show maybe he won't i don't know but i i we were talking about earlier, we should take over and under bets on when these are coming down and getting swapped out, or he's going to figure out how to do his own engraving.

But the accent one bugs me the most. You guys were saying coffee time. Yeah, coffee time looked like it was one-tenth of a centimeter off. I mean, he wouldn't notice that because he doesn't have centimeters on his, you know, tape measure there. But it's a little off. Yeah, I don't really get bothered by this kind of stuff. I think this would bother me, though, every time I just looked at it.

Like, coffee time and the clean slash all off, they just look too high on the button for me. And they just, like, everything else button for me and they just like everything else is like in the center so i'm not really sure what's going on there but accent is not in the center accent is bumped up no no definitely not in the center but more in the center than like the other ones at least yeah they they are in the center like uh vertically but not like horizontally they're not they're not matched to the center of the button for some reason they must have let the intern engrave the button so yeah they've got some work to do on that process for sure because it's the accent one would bug me like i'd have to get that one redone coffee time at a distance

the other one clean on off that that one i could get i could give forgiveness to because you wouldn't be able to see that but accent that one just just do the Gavin approach just throw some white label tape on there and be done with it label maker a label you pay money for this too that's the whole thing this is your pbb like this is this gets your price per button up and yeah I don't know like it's it's in the hub if you're in there go check it out um very very very interesting to see it's actually the labeling doesn't look as bad as i thought but anyway um there's been a lot going on there's been pictures of like installs and everything in there so that i found interesting owens install there seeing how they did the steps that was a great like round of pictures i appreciate

the people that post these kind of pictures. Like, and TJ posted some pictures of a, uh, a wire cleanup. He did this week, some installs and stuff. I love seeing that stuff, you know, like the before and afters great stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been a lot of, it's been, it's been fun watching that stuff fly by in here. So you guys keep up, keep working, keep doing more and posting them because we're enjoying it uh i don't get to see that much stuff very often anymore but yeah i'll live vicariously through your your job jobs maybe maybe we'll swap i'll come up and help do an install one day and then and you'll build my computer perfect yeah'm, I'm coming down in December.

Maybe at that point we'll just swap. Yeah. You have to watch my cat though. Sorry. All right. If you want to help about the show, uh, but can't support the show financially,

totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps up another week here on Home Tech. From everyone here, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care.