HomeTech.fm - Episode 398 - Spending Canadian Dollars

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

This week on the show, will streaming break sports bars? Leviton joins Home Assistant, Wemo’s new smart Dimmer, Google Nest gets an upgrade, finally, Canadian internet is getting faster, Seth talks about travel routers, Gavin updates us on his rack, and TJ automates his car. All of this and the pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 5th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology, home automation, mustard donuts. Evidently, that's disgusting, TJ. I don't know who found that, but.

Somebody in my family. Because they know they don't like mustard. I would give it a shot, but it's only going to be in New York City. So it's not going to be me. Hard pass on that one. Mustard donuts. French's is giving them away for free. Because why would they be able to ever sell anything like that?

That's disgusting. So, yeah. Anyway. Uh, but that's a, that's a news we missed this last month. Um, in, in, in the sports ball space. Right. I'd heard this in the past. Like we've all known the NFL Sunday ticket was going to be up for auction basically and sell off like direct TVs had it for like 30 years now. So if you, if you needed years now so if you if you needed to get if you wanted to watch like every single game on sunday you that that's possible

you would get the sunday ticket from direct tv get a bunch of uh tvs put them in your sports bar put them in your home and uh you'd be able to watch everything well there's a there's a headline here and this is dated back to the beginning of July. I just must have missed it for whatever reason. Well, I know I missed it because I'm not in the sports ball area. But here's the headline. NFL Sunday ticket is moving to a streaming service from DirecTV. Commissioner Roger Goodell confirms.

The deal is expected this fall. So not much to go on in the article here other than we know it's moving away from DirecTV, which is a satellite provider, and moving to a streaming service, confirmed. That means it's going to want somebody big. Somebody paid a lot of money for this. We're billions of dollars, right?

Somebody paid the NFL a ton of money for this. We're billions of dollars, right? Like somebody, somebody paid the NFL a ton of money for these streaming rights. And all I can think of is how badly this is going to go. If for every sports bar out there that has more than, you know, one TV that these streaming services are designed for, this is going to be just a hot mess. And I'm here for it, man. This is what integrators are for. Integrators, you guys got to get ready. We don't know what is... Actually, someone in the hub says they have sources and says it's Apple. And I'd like to think that this isn't one of those super confidential things, like industry insiders know that it's Apple. But can you guys imagine Apple TV having any kind of API whatsoever where

somebody could manage, you know, 30, 40 TVs in a sports bar from a Crestron touch panel? I just don't see it. It's not happening. Not happening. Yeah. I think, I think there's been some rumors that it's been Apple for quite a while now. This, when this news article came out about a month ago, I think it's the first like confirmed time that somebody actually said, Hey, it's going to come out to streaming services. Um, and there's been rumors for several months though. I would even say probably a year or two now where Apple might be a big contender to get

this. Um, and it would make sense, You know, they have probably the most cash that anybody could just throw at it. So they're going to be able to easily get that. But what kind of what you're saying, Seth, is, you know, a lot of these streaming services have a limit on accounts or streams you can have at a time. So if you imagine, you know, a sports bar with 30 TVs and let's say, you know, a top out for the accounts is like four accounts or four streams at a time. So you're going to have to have eight different accounts in order to watch streaming services on all 30 of these TVs. And if you multiply that by how many like restaurants or bars, you know, a group owns, they might own six or 10 or 20 of them. There's going to be hundreds

of accounts for people to keep like account of. And I just, I don't see how it's going to happen. Like, I feel like they're just going to leave behind commercial places and they're just going to have to figure it out. Um, cause I don't see Apple TV or whoever coming up with some kind of commercial streaming service solution for this. It's just going to be figured out on your own. Yeah, I posted in the hub a couple of like DirecTV, like integration type things that I've known of. And I've seen out in the wild too. Like I've seen there's one that integrates like directly with Just Add Power products.

Like DirecTV, Sports Bar, you can search for it. And it's in there. But what it does is it pulls all the guide data off of the, like every channel off the direct TV box. And you can actually present inside this app, the guide for all of the TVs that you're on there and just basically, you know, drag and drop what channels, you know, ESPN over here, ESPN two over there. You want the football game over there, the hockey game over there. Like it's all available for you. And it's, it's such a mature system at this point, cause it's all available for you and it's it's such a mature system at this point because it's 30 years old and now it's going to switch over to streaming

which is i mean it's so new they better not mess this up either because streaming is not easy i remember when um the zone was uh introduced uh nfl games right and they started streaming it and for the first few streams you don't mess with the nfl fans because they were complaining they were mad the buffering the dropping you know like they just better not screw this up streaming still you know a hard thing to do yeah yeah and i mean even i i had been involved with a company called Muzak when I got out of college. That's what I worked for. But one of the major things we did was set up like these TV systems and sound systems and bars.

And, you know, we'd get a call, an emergency call like, hey, it's Friday. They're going into the weekend and the DirecTV dish is not working. Or, you know, you got to get up on the roof and re-aim it for them. And, you know, I'd run out to some TGI Fridays or something like that on, you know, 5.30, 7 o'clock on a Friday night. There's no TVs on at all in there because they can't get anything on the screen because it's all on a satellite. And I go up and wiggle it around, you know, and get the LNB replaced or whatever, and it works. And I'm the hero for like five minutes and they forget about me so uh life of the technician yeah that's right yeah um but yeah so like the the it's a major issue if you can't get those uh you can't get those games pumped into a sports bar when they need

to watch them and i i think this is going to work well for home, you know, for, for in the home, like Apple has experience with delivering videos in the home and they have agreements too. Like they're doing stuff right now with, um, uh, what is it? The, uh, MLB and then a major league soccer. That's why I'm getting MLS major league soccer. They've got, they're doing like all the games, every single game is going to be broadcast, um, for, for the next 10 years, starting in 2023 through Major League Soccer. So like, this is kind of a big deal. Uh, it's, it's, it's going to be a huge deal. And of course, on that headline where it's like, uh, the, the, it's expected to be finalized and announced this fall. It's like, well, who announces things in the fall? Hmm. I know one company that

likes to do that. So yeah, I think, I think if it's, if it's Apple, uh, we're, we're sure to hear from them. Uh, and, and there has been, I guess it could be Apple or Amazon cause Amazon's done some investments into sports too. So we will have to wait and see, but I'm pretty sure if it came to money, I think Apple probably probably would win on that one. Three months, three months free NFL subscription when you buy an iPhone this fall. Well, there you go. I don't. Yeah. Well, I'm not a big sports ball watcher.

You know, it's the NFL's fun, I guess, for the commercials during the Super Bowl. And that's about it. But I don't know. Like, it's a big deal for a lot of people. And this is a multi-billion dollar deal. That's not, this is going to be crazy. But I just, I dread thinking about the integrations.

Whoever figures it out, like on day one, is going to make a ton of money. But it's going to ruin a lot of sports bars. Uh, cause TJ, we were talking before the show, you know, restaurants that like basically have to have direct TV dishes, uh, mounted at the sports bar, but like, there's like 20, 30 TVs and every single one of them have a receiver behind the TV. I've been in those bars too. Now they're going to have an Apple TV. Like, is it going to play something all the time? Like, how's that going to work?

Already, already getting that request. So yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's not even, nothing's even finalized yet.

And I'm already getting restaurants contacting me like, Hey, we want to put it like an Apple TV or Roku behind each TV. It's like, I would totally wait, but we can do it for you if you want. Oh man. Well,

um, it's going to be a mess. It's going to be a mess. Looking forward to it, though. It's going to be fun to talk about. Anyway, let's move on here. What do you guys say we jump into a couple of Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. All right.

Well, Home Assistant's got a big announcement this week. The first one, partner, that we talked about a couple weeks ago, is Leviton. So Leviton's Z-Wave line of devices will now work locally and integrate seamlessly with the Z-Wave integration in Home Assistant. It requires a Z-Wave stick, of course. All the connectivity happens locally. Status updates and controlling devices happen instantly over there in Home Assistant. So it's nice to have that low latency connection. And each device that is connected to power will also act as a Z-Wave router to extend Z-Wave mesh locally. Levitan is working on adding firmware updates that are publicly available to download. But in Home Assistant, you can navigate to your device page and use the update device firmware option to upload the firmware from Leviton for your device. So it's

kind of nice that we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that Home Assistant is going to be rolling out this option for manufacturers to basically have a direct contact with them so they can get these firmware updates and everything kind of built into home assistant and uh this this is big this is leviton uh first first out of the gate it sounds like gavin what do you think about this thing oh no this is great uh and leviton's a big name so for them to jump on first it'll open the doors for probably a lot of big names they're probably already working with a bunch of other big names, but this will give them like direct access to probably an engineer for support.

You know, when you buy a Leviton product and you have home assistant, it kind of gives you that warm and fuzzy that, hey, these are going to work together. You know, that's great and all, you know, but this is the stuff like Matter supposed to solve for us too. Like the last thing we need is these boxes

having five to 10 labels on it saying works with this, this, this, this, and this, but not Google Home. You know, that's like, I could see that happening eventually. But we need one label that just says works with matter. And then we assume it works with everything at that point. TJ, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's great. You know, the very first company they announced is somebody that has experience in the professional and the DIY space. You know, Leviton is a huge name in the, you know, the regular integrator space. Um, for a lot of the products they make cabling and wall mounted enclosures and those little in, in wall, uh, enclosures as well, all kinds of stuff that people use to build houses

and all that good stuff. And, you know, they have a wide array of devices on Amazon. So you can easily find them if you look up Z-Wave devices. So I think this is a great start to the partnership and the program that they have here. And it'll be interesting to see who else they add. Yep. We'll have to keep an eye on it. It's a good first out of the gate name to So, and honestly, I was expecting somebody smaller, you know, I was expecting somebody like Inovelli or Zoos, that kind of thing. And not that there's anything wrong with those companies, but I wasn't expecting a major name like this, the step up to the plate

immediately. Yeah, no, that's good. It's good. I love it on knows who's installing their, their gear and it's just an engineering. I mean, they have to have somebody there anyway. It's good. Levitan knows who's installing their gear. It's just an engineering. I mean, they have to have somebody there anyway. It's somebody that you have an email for if something goes wrong. The home assistant crew can just reach out and say, hey, this firmware doesn't work. Can we figure out how to get this fixed or whatever? So it is nice. So we'll have to keep an eye on it.

Let's move on here. Wemo. Some news from Wemo this week. They announced an updated version of their in-wall dimmer switch this week. It's the new Wemo smart dimmer with thread. Costs a total of $60. It's a wired smart switch that lets you dim

and turn lights on and off remotely. Works exclusively with Apple's HomeKit over Thread or Bluetooth, and it's available now from Belkin's Web Store and coming soon to Amazon, of course. Despite using Thread, the main wireless protocol for Matter, and having publicly announced it would launch Matter-ready products this summer, Wemo says the smart dimmer won't be upgraded to support the upcoming smart home standard. So I guess they're saying it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. HomeKit focus is a new recent trend for the company. Whose last few products, the Wemo stage scene controller, the smart plug and a video doorbell only work with Apple's smart home platform. This means that the new switch will use apple's home app exclusively and not the wemo app and will work with uh with siri over there for voice control gavin why are you looking

at me like that this is definitely your device no yeah um i always say don't buy devices based on hope or promises because you just never know. We've seen over the years we get a lot of promises and they never come through. You know, some companies offering saying they're coming with HomeKit support. And like five years later, they're still saying they're coming with HomeKit support. I'm not going to call out any names, but it's happened a number of times. Wait till matters out. If you want matter devices, just wait till the Matter's out.

Because who knows if, you know, a company announces, hey, we're going to, you know, add Matter devices to these switches. And then they later on say, but you have to buy new switches, you know, like just wait till Matter's out before you start making your Matter decisions and get the device that actually has Matter support on it. That's true. It's very true but nobody cares about matter at this point so who's who's who's waiting for devices i mean everybody's been waiting for the past three or four years i feel like so it's like if you're

waiting at this point i don't know what you've been waiting for just stop it'll happen maybe i bought one of these uh wemo I've actually bought two of them. Uh, the Wemo stage scene controller. It's like a three button keypad that you can get. The first one, my daughter took and dropped it in the toilet. So that one was gone. And then I installed the second one on the wall with a nice little sticky tape thing. And it's got the nice trim that goes around. It looks like the switch here in the picture when you're done with it. And it's really nice, but it uses a magnet to attach itself so you can actually take it out and use it as a remote if you wanted to or you can put it back but the magnet's so loose like

every time you like fumble around in the dark to hit the light on it would just fall out and hit on the floor and it happened so many times whatever horrible little electronic soldering joints they had there stopped working so now i dropped i my daughter broke one and i broke one so i don't have it anymore uh and i have this nice uh thing stuck to my wall now that would fit a wemo magnetic device thanks wemo yeah what's your uh what's your ppb on that device ppb i don't know what the the ppb is on that what are they like 60 70 bucks yeah i mean ppb now is is i'm zero what do you get which you multiply by zero it's still zero or divide by zero actually negative now yeah i'm

in the hole thanks uh so yeah lesson learned i'm not using these anymore i'll find something else that the magnet's not very strong it does it does when it worked, but if you drop them too many times or if you drop them in your toilet, they will cease to function. Just keep a note on that. All right, let's move on to the next story here. Some good news in integration that you would have thought have already happened.

Google is rolling out an update enabling users of its most recent Nest doorbell and cams devices to stream their feeds directly to a TV. Much requested feature. It's been a long time coming, I guess. To do this, you have to have a Chromecast device with a Google TV connected up to your TV, and that can be activated by Chromecast Voice Remote or other Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers by saying, I have to say this because it's in the script here.

Anyway, you say, hey, the Goog's there. Show me the front door camera on my TV and it'll put the picture. That's actually a really cool feature. I have that with, with the randomly working with like home home kit stuff, right? If I'm watching my Apple TV, somebody rings the doorbell, a picture of the thing will come up on, on the screen of the camera that's, that's attached to the doorbell. So that's, that's really cool. I'm just, I'm glad

that they can, uh, they finally got this working. It's kind of weird, huh? It's taking taking this long i had to check the date to make sure this is like a relevant like a recent article um and it was just posted yesterday so it's definitely recent um yeah i don't why was this just not released at the same time whenever they launched the new doorbell it's it's it's like they're such a siloed company they can't they have all these features and all these can't talk to each other yeah it's like well that's the chromeoed company. They can't. They have all these features and all these products. Can't talk to each other. Yeah. It's like, well, that's the Chromecast guys. We can't let them get ahead.

They'll take our jobs. It's like you make doorbells. I don't get it. I really don't get it. When these companies get so big that they can't work on the home specific home technology that kind of goes in and makes all this stuff work. It just blows my mind. They can't do that. so well and it totally makes sense how like giant companies like tp link have like five different smart home brands it's like everybody's just doing their

own little thing and they're like oh wait that's what you're doing huh similar to what we're doing that's weird well matters will save us all like you said right, right? Is that what you said? I don't remember. Not me. All right. All right. So let's get this over with. I'm going to rip off the band-aid here. Canada. Yes. I guess Bell is saying

that it will introduce internet speeds of 8 gigabits per second starting in September. The company says the symmetrical download and upload speeds will be the fastest in North America along with major providers. The new speeds will be first available in parts of Toronto where download speeds will be five times faster than cable technology and upload speeds will be 250 times faster.

This is ridiculous, Gavin. It is. I can't. At least it it's Bell, you know, it's going to work. It's not like Rogers. It's not going to go down, right? Hey, yeah, that's true. That's true. You know, you know what, you know, it's actually from the Rogers outage a few weeks. One of the good things that has happened is it's really kind of stepped up the competition because when Rogers went down, Bell was quick to jump all over and say, hey, we're still working. And since then, I've noticed in my neighborhood, they're running

all the new Bell lines. They've been working on it for the last month or so. And I'm going to be getting Bell anytime soon. And there's a lot of people in the neighborhood just waiting to switch over because they give you, right now, Bell will give you a gig down and a gig up symmetrical. And that's all I want. I want the upload. With Rogers right now, I now bell will give you a gig down and a gig up symmetrical and that's all i want i want the upload with rogers right now i'm getting in my area gig down but they only give me 30 up for some reason right so that's why you see them say 250 times faster is because on rogers our upload speeds are really bad but bell like eight gigabits i don't know what i would do eight gigabits my i'd have to buy some new hardware to support that eight gigabits first of all but um it would be nice to have i

don't need eight gigabits i just want like a symmetrical one gigabit and i'm happy well the goodness is you have plenty of room in your rack to put a bunch of 10 gig equipment so i don't see why not gavin you know ever since i've met you guys and i've joined the show and been in the you know you guys have spent thousands of my dollars you know that's only a couple of american dollars but thousands of my canadian dollars on new equipment new stuff oh i just wait till we get into the rack section segment isn't that what friends are for yeah yeah we just want you to have nice things gavin you were just gonna throw it all in a closet before and just close the door and we were like no

bring it out my wife has told me to find new friends well uh just take comfort in knowing that our internet speeds are horrible here and i i think oh my gosh i think our fcc just came out and said you know maybe uh internet speeds we will only let these companies call uh high speed internet if it's 200 megabits down not not gigabits megabits uh 200 megabits down and 10 no maybe it was like five up or something yeah i don't understand why nobody cares about the upload. I get that a lot of people don't use it and everything, but we should have like 50 to 100. Come on.

Why has it got to be five? Even our cell phone speeds are getting so good now that they're now introducing, what do you call it, like wireless internet to the home, I guess you could say. Yeah. And that's even faster than the Rogers on getting over the wired now, right? Like it's getting so good now. I'm looking forward to even seeing that come in

because then you don't have to wait on wires coming to your home and you, it's just a device you put in your window and you now get gigabit down to the home. Well, what's nice too, is like, I have the T-Mobile one that I use for my work stuff. Um, and it's $50 a month and you basically get whatever speeds they can get you at the time. But every time I've done a speed test, it's 50 a month and you basically get whatever speeds they can get you at the time but every time i've done a speed test it's been like 200 to 600 megabits per second um which is crazy for 50 bucks and just like available when you plug it in yeah see you guys are only paying 50 for your crappy speed you know like i'm paying like 120 for my good speeds right yeah no 50 is an outlier because my spectrum is like 90 a month

for like two or three hundred megabits per second okay okay okay i don't feel so bad now because that's like 150 or something canadian dollars like you're getting ripped off the team the t mobile one is the cheapest one by far for like how good it is um and i think like verizon has one too but it's probably super expensive because it's verizon well we can run a bell line you'll have plenty of bandwidth yeah yeah we'll just share you yeah we got eight gigabits now so i'm gonna split that off and give you a little you can jump on my network we'll just run it right through the lake there we go no no fun we don't have fun thing that we don't have nice things here. You'll have the nice rack up there, the nice internet.

And, uh, you know, we, we, we'll just be stuck with the 200, uh, down and five up.

It's just so ridiculous that it's not even what they're talking about. I was hoping that we would see like those, those five G, like the new five G stuff. Everybody was all freaking out about it. I was hoping we'd start seeing those like pop up, but but i haven't i haven't really seen anything happen with that cell towers you mean like i if yeah well i mean i've seen the cell towers and my cell phone has it from time to time everywhere here now yeah they're they're still planting them um but i

haven't seen it roll like there's not a major push to roll it out to residential, like, or I'm not seeing that. So like, if you listen to, I don't know, the CDA podcast two years ago, this was like the thing that was going to happen. And we were just going to have to change the way we were our homes and yada, yada, yada. Like, but that just, it hasn't happened. Like, and it doesn't, it's, it's all quiet. Like I haven't heard or seen anything other than like them setting up the towers, you know, every couple of blocks they're, they're putting up a little light pole tower thing in a couple of neighborhoods. So if that's the density they're going to have to go for on this thing, I don't know. It's going to take them a long time before they get to

like a critical, critical mass on, on towers and what they can do for, you know, residential homes in an area like mine, where it's like, it's home, we're not very dense here, I guess is what I'm saying. Like it's, the homes are very well, they're not, it's decent sized lots, like everything's spread out and it's just like urban sprawl. If they've got to put in a tower every couple of walks, like that's not going to be a very profitable thing for them to offer high speed internet into the home, unless the price is up there. I don't know. I'm just, I haven't heard or seen anything about that since a couple of years back when everybody was freaking out that 5G was coming.

And it just kind of like came and went. Yeah. And that's kind of always been the problem with 5G is that, you know, when people are talking about it, they're like, oh, it's going to be great. You know, we're going to have these super fast speeds. And it does go super fast. But the problem is you do need those cell towers everywhere. Um, I don't know the actual range of them, um, but it's way more than 4g and definitely way more than 3g was. Well, it's almost like line of sight. You have to have, like you have to have antennas on the outside of the house facing and seeing like a tree can't,

a bunch of trees can't be in the way. Like it has to see the tower. So yeah. Is it some challenges to this, getting this rolled out? Yeah. And it's not, it's not available for everybody just yet. You know, like in, in my area, I can get it where I live. Um, but if I go two or three miles down the road, um, it's not available for a couple of my clients in that direction. Um, so, you know, they are, I think they're kind of limiting where they're allowing it to go. Um, just because they know, they are, I think they're kind of limiting where they're allowing it to go, um, just because they know that their performance is going to be subpar. Um, but it is available. It's out there. Um, I don't know if it's worth switching from like

spectrum to T-Mobile, you know, exactly. I kind of like that hardwire connection, even if I do hate spectrum. Um, but for, you know, somebody that doesn't need the fastest speed in the world, um, the home 5g thing works great. Um, it'll work great for a small condo to work for, you know, a retired couple, whatever. And it's $50 a month. Like you really can't lose out on that. I feel like it's the, um, it's kind of like the same solution that Starlink like it's like, eh, it's better than DSL, you know, like, and, and I guess that Starlink it's like it's better than DSL you know like and I guess that's what you have it's absolutely

better but the problem with 5G is that it's not something that you're going to see in a lot of rural areas whereas you know satellite is because satellite can go anywhere but 5G you know requires these companies to come in and put these cell towers everywhere and it's just not going to happen for rural America.

They don't even have broadband internet in rural America. They're definitely not going to go and install a bunch of 5G towers. Yeah, Ty's making a good point. And I remember reading about this, that the 5G rollout did get slowed down because of some communication. It crashed the airplanes. It was going to crash the airplanes it was gonna crash the airplanes like evidently they weren't talking talking to the the air traffic controllers when when uh they were rolling out the spec and it's like wait that used the same bandwidth that we use to make airplanes land and take off and like you can't do that near an airport and they kind of you know if you think

about where airports are it's kind of in places that need to have this stuff rolled out so like cities yeah i always thought it was hilarious because they spent the past like 20 years telling people they couldn't use their cell phones on planes because it was going to crash it. And then for like a year, they're like, oh no, you can use a cell phone. Like nobody cares about that anymore.

And then they're like, oh, wait a minute. This 5G thing though, it's going to crash all the airplanes. We better stop it. Yeah, I don't know if that's like one of those, like they're just guarding some spectrum that they have availability. I don't know. Or I like one of those like just they're just guarding some spectrum that they have availability. I don't know. I or I think I think in that case, it was like older planes that hadn't been updated to the new autopilot or something like that would be would definitely have interference.

But, you know, you don't want any plane having said you're on having interference with the autopilot. No problems. Yeah. Just just so some guy down there can get like you know faster internet than dsl like i don't know let's let's let's err on the side of safety with large metal objects falling out of the sky all right well and then that said like speaking of large metal objects in the sky the the satellite stuff the starlink have you seen the like the latest on that they they're getting slowed down too because they're they're like oversaturated and the link speeds that were like

um what were they getting like 100 down maybe more they were getting more i think yeah yeah it was it's like really slow now it's like 15 down so it's it's not much better than dsl uh anymore and people are not very happy about it and that's but that was some of the things i heard in the initial testing when people initially got it they said you get great speeds but as soon as other people start jumping on it it started to drop down significantly so you know i guess their solution is just to throw up more satellites in the sky i guess right i mean i figure it'd be cheaper just to put a pole in someone's yard than it is to throw a satellite up there.

You would think, but that's not what they're banking. Actually, they're banking on the new second-gen satellites that they're going to be launching. But those aren't scheduled to go up until the Starliner rocket is able to lift off the Earth without exploding. So yeah, they're actually waiting. The improvements will come with those second-gen satellites, and those won't be... They're too heavy to actually launch from the Falcon platform

that they have right now. So they have to wait until the new... the big shiny rocket gets launched up into the air, and that'll carry their second-gen satellites. And supposedly that's going to help with the bandwidth issues that they're having. But again, the more people get on it, it's physics supposedly that's going to help with the bandwidth issues that they're having. But again, more people get on it. It's physics, you know, it's going to get slowed down.

So anyway, let's move on here. That's pretty much all we have for Home Tech headlines tonight. But all the links and topics we discussed tonight, well, most all of them. I have to go back and listen to the show and edit a bunch of this stuff in. But we can be found over at our show notes at home tech.fm slash three 98. All right. And, uh, no, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we did have a topic that came up inside of the hub about travel routers. And I, I, I forget actually now who was asking about it. So I think it was Andy. Yeah. Uh, Andy was asking about, uh, what everyone used for travel routers. And I've been kind of

playing around with this idea for a while. Even like in the past couple of years, when we've gone to like a hotel or something, I've brought a little, it's made by GLInet. I don't know if you guys ever heard of this company or not, but it's a little travel router. And basically what I first started bringing it for was because when you go to the hotels and they have that like login thing, little portal, login portal, guest portal, or whatever you want to call it. Um, you, you set up your phone on it and then you have to go set up your wife's. And now the iPad comes out, you got to set that up. And if you bring an Apple TV or whatever along with you, that's really, you really can't get that to work with it most of the time. So when I started bringing the Apple TV with us, I was like,

well, I'll look into these travel routers. You get the travel router to log onto the Wi-Fi and it sits on the Wi-Fi for the entire time you're there. And then everything on the other side of it can attach that travel router. And the thing upstream supposedly doesn't know that you have like 15 devices connected to your travel router and that's what you're using so um a lot of these like the little glnets have a lot of features in them like you can uh dial in like nord vpn profiles into them and use a vpn so like once you're connected you you there's a little switch on the side that you can actually program you flip the switch your vpn connects you get a little green light and you're good to go. Like it's, it's a nice platform. It runs off the old WRT software, the router software, if you guys remember that one too. And, uh, you can actually get into like

the backend of that and make even more changes if you wanted to. but for under, I don't know, that's like not a very expensive router. I want to say it was under a hundred dollars, probably under $50 cause it's like a little two port router with 2.4 gigahertz and five gigahertz and a, you know, a couple of ports on it. It's, it's, it's a really cost-effective way of getting online and just doing the basics. And it was very, it's very easy most of the time to set up. And I only had a couple of issues with it while I was traveling in Europe.

And it was all caused by me because I had forgotten that on my phone, I had left the VPN on. And every time I tried to connect to a device locally, it would just freak out and not work. And I couldn't figure out why. And I ended up resetting the router, which deleted all the profiles and settings out of it. And I kind of had to start over. And at that point I was like, well, now I can't watch the US side services over my router. I'll just use my phone. So, um, anyway, long story to go to, like, this is what I, I was i i was using but now i found actually a new new platform that

i'm kind of moving to i'm doing some investigating on it now but uh it's actually have you guys seen firewall yeah i've heard of firewall i haven't actually had my hands on one though it's got that nice gold strip across it yeah yeah so there's there's a bunch of different ones of these and they start off at like the Firewaller Red. But that thing only has like 100 megabits bandwidth. And so don't bother with that one. Like if you have any modern connectivity, you're going to get stuck with the purple and gold,

which are the two higher-end routers. But so I got a gold one not too long ago. And I've been kind of tinkering around with it. And basically, so I run PFSense at the house here and I was looking at this and, and just about every, there's only one feature I'm missing, but every single feature that PFSense has, this has natively or not natively, it has built onto it, but it also has like a super clean like app and configuration pages you can go to and get

things set up like and like if there is a dummies version of pf sense this is it and uh that little all these boxes here are actually like raspberry pi type devices it's actually a pi device like you can log into it uh using the username pi and whatever the password is that you set up on it. So it's actually a really, I think on the gold, you can actually run Docker on, Gavin. So you'd be happy to hear that. So you can actually run some of the things I am missing off PFSense on this directly

and kind of tie it in that way. So what's neat about this is you can do site to site VPNs pretty easily. So with one of the smaller ones, like the red one that we were just talking about, not good for the home, but perfect for travel. I can bring that out on the road, throw it in, maybe the blue, because the blue one actually has a, sometimes you need a hardwire link out of it. So say the blue, get that one, throw that one in the bag. And then when you get out to the hotel or wherever, Airbnb, you plug that one one in get all your devices onto that and then you can turn on the site-to-site vpn and all your stuff basically lives back at home so i i can't stress how

much easier the interface to this is versus pf sense like PFSense is like god level router, right? But it's very unwieldy. Once you understand it, it makes a lot of sense. But you really have to be in the network space to really understand it. This thing is like plug and play PFSense. And it's the best way I can describe it. It's got almost feature matched exactly what PFSense has, including Unbound, which is like a DNx proxy.

It's got a couple of other things that I've been turning on. I think PyHole is directly built into it. It has an ad block built into it. So all this is like toggle switch. Toggle switch, easy to install, flip on. As soon as you plug it in and you'll, you'll start getting alerts, you know, uh, I, I saw that, uh, you know, how much two, two of my LG TVs were

uploading data to the, you know, basically tracker websites. And I'm like, block and block LG TVs. You're never getting online again. So they, they, the LG TV TVs have no way of actually getting online, even though they're plugged into internet. Um, so yeah, I, uh, I, I can't recommend this, this router more right now cause it seems to be really cool. Um, mileage may vary. We'll see how reliable it is and how well it works, you know, when weird things happen, but so far out of the box with the app and everything super easy to set up and uh and get deployed and and you have like a really uh really strong like router and platform to work on i'm kind of excited about the docker thing gavin thanks okay i got the because there's a lot that you can do with like you can actually run Home Assistant on your router. You could actually run the,

what's the HomeKit? Hoops, Homebridge. Homebridge. Hoops. Yep. Yeah. You can run that right on the router.

Like it's not like a full blown computer, like you can do with a PFSense, but at the same time, it's, it's not, it's not nothing like it's not, it's not weak, but you can,

I've seen people run Unify controllers on this, right? So you get rid of the old USG, put this in, it's got all, it's got all of the features that, you know, that Unify purports to have, but they actually work like all the traffic monitoring and all that stuff is in here. And I can tell you by opening my app, how many, you know, how many like gigabytes of data I've used since I plugged this thing in. It's in there, it works, it looks good, and it's consumer level easy to use. So I'm very happy with it so far. I'm going to be exploring this company a little bit more in the future and maybe grabbing another box for the travel router side of things. A lot more expensive to go this route than it is to go with the little under $100 version.

But having this at home, it's got WireGuard built right into it, and the WireGuard install was stupid easy. Like, turn on WireGuard. Here's steps one, two, and three, and four, what you need to do. Just go down the page. Click, click, click, click.

And it jumps over. Here's where you install the app. Here's the setting you need to make to flip this on and type in a user name or whatever, a client name, and then hit this button and it copies the profile right over to the app. Stupid easy. Like it's, it was, it was a million times easier than, than what I've been doing with PFSense and giving me roughly the same experience at the end of the day. So pretty happy with this so far. And site to site VPN, that's important. Like when you're on the road and you want to plug this in, that's a great feature to have just because you can one access all your content from, you know,

your home that you're used to. Like if you're traveling in another country, that's great to have, but also security, right? Just having that VPN is great for security. Now, Bruno did bring up a good point. And I actually, when I traveled to Boston in my hotels, they were like this too. They didn't have RJ45 ports. They had like, it was just wifi. So I had to connect to it. So would you be able to use this on something in a situation like that where you connect to their wi-fi and then you can reshare that out and then do the vpn over it that's what i've got to look into you can do that with the glinets and that's what i like about them because you can set up you can connect with um their with their little boxes you can connect on what like i usually connect on the 2.4 gigahertz band and then i have all my devices on five five the, the five gigahertz and just kind of like, cause most everybody at a hotel or whatever,

they're using the two, they're using the five gigahertz and polluting that up. So I just, I hang off and it's slow anyway. I'm going to go with the, the punchy 2.4, which I'm guaranteed to get a good strong signal on. Um, but at the same time that GLI net, I have the option of plugging it in and getting that. If this doesn't do that, I'm not sure. I've got to dig into it and figure out if I can do... Actually, it looks like the purple box will do that. It says that the feature is called Wi-Fi WISP.

And I believe it says yes here in the feature list. So I'm pretty sure I'll just have to check it out. Again. That one's 329. So the other one is not that much. It's like a quarter of that. So, uh, if that at the most, but like at the same time I can take that GI net with the, with the wire guard setup, this has, I could, I could be on the road and physically set up the WireGuard installation and certificates and everything on my phone remotely, plug it into the GII net and connect remote, you know, if I didn't do it before I left the house and it would work. So it's really a decent setup and a decent router. And it's hard for me to explain like without having, I don't know too many people to put their hands on these, but, uh, it's, it is actually a decent platform. It looks like that. I know I've talked,

I've actually spoken with the, the owner of the company and the whole crew there is like ex Cisco, uh, people, and they've just kind of started up this company. And so it's, it's an interesting, interesting company so far, uh, interesting product. I'm just going to keep my eye on it and, uh, and see how much further we can get with it. Sounds exciting. TJ doesn't travel enough. Yeah, I don't, I don't travel with my wifi stuff, I guess. Uh, it's not like a big concern for me. I mean, I see the value of the firewall, uh, obviously, and I think I should probably get one to play with it. Um, but I just, I have my own little travel router that I bring with me to jobs in case I need to like tap into somebody's network without getting their wifi password or something. Um, but I guess I just don't use that feature

when I'm traveling. Yeah, no, it's only if you're there for like a couple of days that I would bother setting this up. Like if you're there more than maybe two nights, uh, that if you're there for like a couple of days that I would bother setting this up. Like if you're there more than maybe two nights, uh, that, if you're there overnight, don't even, I don't bother. Like sometimes I'll break out the router, plug it in and get it set up. So the phones get on, but I don't do like the Apple TV or anything like that. It's just a waste of time. It takes too much effort. But if I'm there for like maybe two, three days, uh, two, three nights, especially I I'd break this out and and get

it set up um i just i just i just don't watch tv when i travel so it's but it's nice yeah i mean but it all depends too like if uh i when we were traveling i put the that wise camera in the oh yeah that's a good idea too so i i had the wise camera set up like sitting in the living room when you walked in the door to see if anybody came in, but that was also connected to my setup and, and able to be recorded that way. So yeah, you can bring a whole security system. That's what I was about to say. You can bring like a ring system or a wise system with you. Open my door. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's too good. Well, um, that's not the pick of the week that was just like suggestions that i had i don't know so gavin you you don't have any travel router suggestions or anything like that no not really like when when i travel i just like tj i

don't usually like watch tv or anything i usually just fall asleep and wake up early and then I'm back on the road again. Right. But if I do, then, you know, if I'm using my phone, I would throw on the VPN on my phone or my computer is all VPN if I have a computer with me. Right. And I just watch whatever is on their TV. Yeah, I guess. I mean, the biggest thing that I think that the travel router thing has done is simplify that. Like everybody's in, my wife wants me to type in the thing on hers and like, I got to get the computer set up too. And like, it simplifies that, but it also hangs on a lot better than my phone. Cause you end up leaving with your phone. You have to come back and you're like, Oh, I got to type my

room number in. What's my last name again? You know, like you have to remember all that stuff and, and, and how many days you have to remember all that stuff and and and how many days you're staying and all that good stuff to match up with whatever portal you're using and like this seems to like once i get on it doesn't turn off like it always stays connected and and it actually maintains that connection so i think that's actually like if you're there for a couple days and you don't ever want to deal with like having to log in that this actually kind of works uh to your advantage there, too. So anyway, let's move on.

Not the big of the week, but definitely something you should you guys should check out. Get the G.I. net thing. If I if I get the new firewall, I send one of you guys one of the G.I. net that I have and you guys can check it out. In the word of James, in the words of James, it's cute. So, yeah, maybe I'll get one. Yeah, no, it's actually got cute little wings on the side. It's like it's cute so yeah maybe i'll get one yeah no it's actually it's got cute little wings on the side it's like it's gonna fly away it does it does a little duck or something who knows well i don't know if those antennas do anything but it is actually very

small yeah there's there's a picture of like it slipping into a pocket it is it's just uh the the antennas actually just rotate a bunch and it'll just move around your house, so you get whole house Wi-Fi. Yeah, it just spins. It's a good idea. This is $75, it looks like. Much cheaper than the firewall around. A little bit.

Not near the fun experience that you get through the app and everything. Or the fun colors. Yeah, exactly. The colors are nice. All right, we'll put links to the show those in the show notes and you guys can go check them out um but not the big week the big of the week this week has to be roughly the same time we were having this conversation richard posting uh how he labels his uh outlets and wall switches and i don't know why this never even remotely occurred to me. I take things off the wall all the time to rewire things. Like I'm an electrician officially. And I just,

the way I find out what, you know, is hooked up is if the wire actually, the hot wire actually touches something that it shouldn't and I get a spark, it'll pop the breaker. And that's how I figure it out. That's the, that's the best way to do it yeah and if you're lucky you hold on to it a little bit that way you get that nice shock yeah on the back of your hand is the best part too that's where that's where it feels the best right there right there on the back of your hand where it's nice and tender oh but no this is this is genius hey guys on there like what breaker panel what breaker i i'm just i'm stupefied it's one of those things i just literally never thought of like it's like he's a professional electrician that's weird i know right it's amazing so yeah um do that like we'll put a picture of this in the show notes this will

be our cover tonight um gavin we were talking about your rack earlier and it's kind of this is one of those things i was like why don't you take the wires and plug them into the patch port and then bring them back out and then you just have this nice clean look to the front of your rack and you're like i never thought of that i'm like oh it's just one of those things like i i do all the time and i'm like i well yeah that's what i would have done but if you've never done it before um who would know yeah like it's my first rack but before we get into the rack talk like no this was great i've heard of electricians they either write it on the the inside of the plate the face plate i've heard them do it that way or they just scribble it on richards of course

it's a lot nicer in my house when i first moved in the first thing i did i actually drew out a map of all my circuits in the house and i i drew like what they controlled in every room they were in and everything like that. And I, you know, I have that right by my panel. So when I need to know, you know, how to turn off this, what breaker it's on, I just look at that map. It tells me I flipped that breaker and I'm good. So I have the, I have a similar setup like this. And I recommend this for everybody. You know, label your breakers like properly. Because when you go in there and you just see first floor, it's like what on the first floor? The first floor lights, the first floor outlets, like what on the first floor?

Best thing to do is create a map of your house of all the switches, lights, you know, outlets, and just label them all. And that will make your life so much easier, especially when you start doing smart switches, you know, like trying to find where that breaker is for that switch. Sometimes you, you turn off things you really don't want to turn off. And I've been there. Yeah. It's pretty annoying when I go to like a client's house and I'm like, Oh, well I need to turn this outlet off. So I can add a new one or change it out or something. I'm like, do you know which one it is? No, I've never found it before. And you're just sitting there flipping off random breakers and hey, is that off? No. Okay. Hold on. Check this one. Oh, just turn your fridge off. Sorry about that. The breaker that controls whichever outlet you're

trying to find is always that last breaker and the thing that you never switched off like that i'll go through like eight of them and the ninth one is that one you know like it drives that drives me nuts yeah i always turn off like all this is this is what we were talking about last week and i was like complaining about the microwave oven not having the time on it because i'm always flipping the switch on that thing trying to find the right breaker yeah The other breaker. Yeah, it's always that one. And who would know? Like it's one breaker for the microwave, right? Because that's typically how it gets its own dedicated 20. You flip it off and like what turned off in the house?

I don't know. And you turn it back on, you hear beep. And you're like, aw. It was that thing. Yeah. What a pain. What a pain. Anyway, anyway yeah this is a great idea i i'm gonna say i'm gonna start doing this in the future easier said than done yeah it's easier

said than done exactly i have the label maker the label maker's out in the garage though oh well yeah it's on the car and it's hot yeah yeah that that's exactly what will happen. But I like it. This is really nice. He's got a nice Oro going in, it looks like, right? That's Oro? Yeah, I think it's Oro. A little touchscreen? Yeah.

So very nice. Very good idea. I got to step up my game and start doing this too one of these days. So anyway, let's move on here. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right, Gavin, we've been teasing this all show. We talked about it quite a bit before the show. So, but our project, our project updates, Gavin's got the biggest update I think so far. The rack is up. The rack is in and it's beautiful man it's it's a work in progress you know and you know i have to admit i spent way

too much money i overspent um you're not even you're not done yeah way over budget and i'm not even done yet yeah like you know i got i sourced the rack and then i started getting into the rack parts and then that just started adding up and then there's like oh i need another part i want a shelf for this and i need a you know so but you know what i'm happy i did it it's cleaned up like my what the setup i had before was just like it was messy this rack actually looks a lot cleaner um it's a 32U and it's much taller than I was expecting, right? Much taller, but I really like having all that space. And, you know, I put my server on a slide out drawer, you know, so I can slide it out, easily service

it, get in there. You know, I like having a slide out keyboard, all those little things just make, you know, when you have to work on something down there so much nicer, um, and it's so much cleaner and like getting tips from you guys, you know, like run the wires here, do this, you know, I don't do a lot of racks, but when, once you say that, it's like, Oh, that makes sense. You know? So for my first rack, I still have a lot of wire cleanup to do, but I think I did a pretty all right job. You know, like, this is great for for first first effort and everything this is way better than my first effort at a rock and you'll you'll learn i mean you'll go in there and you'll take stuff out and you'll be like oh i messed it up and then you

won't put it like mine like it was nice when i first started but this this is it's garbage now and i'm like the other the other day i'm like i need to just start over you pull everything out and start over but yeah this is this is great it looks good you have all this empty space though man you've got to fill this up i'm gonna get another pdu throw in there you know there's a whole backside you didn't even know about that you got the front side you're worried about the whole backside's free and clear man you can oh my you could i you know i could put other things in the back of this rack too so many rack mounted what boxes can fit back

there i gotta stop hanging out with you guys no this is it it got all my cables coming in you know like i have a feeling the next thing i may invest in is probably an upgrade of the um the unify dream machine you know i might not now that i have a rack everything i buy i want to be rack mounted and i have the dream machine that's the round one i'm like man i wish i got the i gotta buy a new one i know i know so like uh it's it's a never-ending story you know like uh i just gotta figure out how i can order that so the box you know doesn't come in when the wife's home right you gotta get on that unify lottery is what you gotta do and then just got to figure out how I can order that so the box doesn't come in when the wife's home. You got to get on that Unify lottery is what you got to do. And then just trying to get one of those.

But no, cleaning up the rack, I got to do a lot of rack cleanup. And I'm loving the final outcome. It's so much smaller, so much cleaner. And I'm sure the spiders will love the warmth coming out of it. Every now and then I have to go down there and just you know dust out the cobwebs vacuum up the spiders you know they leave a mess with all the food they they don't finish you know that's normal that's that's all normal stuff for yeah free barbecue exactly exactly yeah so gavin the only thing i want to know you know it looks nice it's a little sloppy you got to clean it up. Whatever. Thanks. But when are you going to replace these screws with black ones?

Like, I can't stand all the silver on top of the blacks. I'm like, where did these come from? Yeah, like, you need to replace them. One of the things, devices actually came with black screws, but it's only going to be for that one device. So, you know, do I got to buy a whole bunch of them? You got to switch them all out. Yeah.

I got to get all black screws now? Yeah. The cage nuts don't matter, but the rack screws do. I wouldn't have put it in i would have waited yeah yeah i mean you need the same color i mean and you could like do a sharpie or like spray paint or something but that's not really efficient you just need to buy new rack screws if you find products already white so you don't have to worry about swapping that one but the rest of them yeah no you got to swap that out because it's not rack mountable so no no no he's got a unified switch in unified switch in there. Oh, yeah. I was talking about the UDM. Yeah, yeah.

I'm just happy just having a rack down there. It's cleaner than it was before. I don't care about the color. You got a rack-mounted camera. You know. Rack-mounted monitor. You guys, stop. I'm going to stop.

Rack-mounted boom box. I thought you were getting the rack mount. See, I see you got your keyboard there, but I thought you were getting the rack-mount keyboard with the monitor. So I'm kind of disappointed. Have you seen the prices of those? should just automatically pop up when it pops up yeah yeah i actually looked at that and it's expensive so i was thinking of getting i was thinking of just getting a slide out shelf that i can lay that monitor down on and i'll slide it out and lift it up and then i can view it you know as needed that would be nice like a peasant okay i'll automate it i'll put like a

spring on it so when i pull it out it pops up on its own or something like that right i like motorization we're talking more money here yeah but do it yourself rightization is less than more gavin dollars ppr went up the price per rack ppr you yeah i'm gonna stop talking to you guys about this stuff uh this is great this is a really good job uh really really happy you're able to get this put together because it it does look good and uh yeah i'm glad you're happy with it because it's it's uh that's a huge rack too man you get you that's that we both made the same mistakes like i don't think that's that big yeah i mean i i measured a couple times and then i ended up the wrong one anyway so like i have the monitor on the top and the only saving grace is the fact that I'm six foot two.

So it doesn't seem as tall to me. But for someone shorter, that monitor is way too high. I could post that in the mounted too high forums. So it's a little rearranging. You could actually mount that monitor in the rack, like right at the top. And then it's all kind of like one clean unit. I need like a monitor, like,

uh, I guess they have monitor mounting things that I can put on it. Let me Google that. There's like little brackets you can get for that. And I've actually like constructed them myself. It's not very difficult. It's the monitors have like the antsy screws on the back. They're all like 200 by 200,

you know, millimeter or centimeter, 200 by 200 millimeters. Like they're not, they're not big. So you can actually like just use any piece of metal and drill a hole. I just Googled it and I see a Visa mount. Yeah.

Thanks for spending more money. You can even make a wooden one, which I've seen many times before. You don't have to have metal. You can't see it. It's behind the monitor. Thanks for spending more money. Thanks for spending more of my money.

Hey, we're here for the, we're ideas're ideas that's we're here for your ideas but amazon order well uh speaking of ideas that cost money uh tj tj's tj's i might have spent more on mine gavin i don't know tj writes in and says uh over the weekend hey I just started my car from home assistant. What? Yeah. So I, um, this past weekend, uh, or this past week I got a keyless entry installed in the work van and it did not come with one from the factory. And anybody that doesn't have keyless entry at this point, you probably hate every time you have to unlock your door, physically pulling your key out, sticking it in the lock, turning it, and then opening the

door. Right. Um, every modern car has keyless entry. And I just, I was like, ah, I don't really need it. It'll be fine. And then after like four months of just doing that every single time, I just kind of got annoyed with it. Um, so I finally decided to get keyless entry installed. Originally I just wanted keyless entry. I just wanted a keyless remote to get in. Um, but everybody I talked to is basically like, yeah, you might as well just get a remote start. Like it's going to be a little bit more money, but you're going to get a lot more features out of it. And nobody really just does a basic keyless entry installation. And I was like, fine, let's just, let's do the remote start. Why not? And I started thinking about it and I was like,

you know, the remote starts cool, but it would be nicer if I could have a cell phone app with that. So that way, you know, if I'm on a job site and I lock my keys in the van, maybe, um, I could pull my cell phone out and unlock the van. And the first time that I do this, it'll, it'll save me, you know, a half day of waiting for the tow truck to come and unlock the van. Um, so I got it. It works great. Um, I literally just press a button in the, in the app and it starts my van. I can lock or unlock it from the van or from the phone. Um, if you, there's different tiers for the subscription plan. If you buy the one for like $6 a month, you get GPS coordinates and everything. So you can actually tell where it's at, um, at all times. Um, you could tell the inside

temperature. You can tell if the hood is open, if the doors are unlocked, um, a lot of different statuses of it, the battery voltage at the time, um, all that kind of information that nobody really needs. Um, but I decided, you know, this weekend I was like, you know, it'd be really cool if I could tie this into my home automation platform. So that way I could, you know, this weekend I was like, you know, it'd be really cool if I could tie this into my home automation platform. So that way I could, you know, lock the van every night at 9 p.m. You know, let's say one night I forget that the van's unlocked. It'll just lock itself and that'll be great. And I right now use smart things.

Smart things didn't have anything, but somebody made a open driver using an API that they found from drone mobile. Um, and it does everything it says it does. You can do pretty much everything the app has. You can get an home assistant. Um, so I have a, you know, it's card on home assistant now, and it tells me the information. It tells me the battery voltage. I can lock or unlock the van from home assistant. I can start it, all that kind of fun stuff. So I was able to set up a home automation routine to just automatically lock my van every night at 9 PM. And it is the best thing in the world. I think that escalated quicker than, than Gavin's rack. Yeah. I went from like, I think I should, I want to unlock my doors you know i want to

have remote start oh i want to oh my gosh dj yeah you know and honestly like i i was not it's not like i was going out to spend this much money right like originally i was like oh this should be like two or three hundred dollars like i just want a keyless entry um but then i was like well no you might as well do a remote start it It's going to be better. And it's like $500. And I'm like, well, heck, you know, what's another $200 to get cellular. And you know, $4 a month, I think is what the basic plan costs, you know, that gets you, you know, basic app access. It doesn't get you GPS coordinates. Um, but it'll still tell you, you know, if the hood's open and all that good stuff. Um, so $770 later and $4 a month, and I can start my van from home assistant or my phone. So that's a pretty nice. It's pretty cool. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. It is,

that is pretty cool. Yeah. I'm waiting for, uh, you need to go get a Seth. I mean, you got to travel quite a bit though. It looks like, so yeah, we were looking up where I have to go to actually get this installed. It's not at a, uh, I think it's like 20 or 30 miles away if you didn't want to best buy. Yeah, exactly. Go to the geek squad to get it done. But yeah, I don't know. Uh, I've, I've, I've recently dropped another few thousand dollars on my car for a maintenance that, you know, it's just, I, I love throwing money at this car.

Like it's great. It's great. See now, now you owe it to yourself to get something nice for the car it's all been maintenance now now you need some of the dice i did it was air conditioning that's that's a necessity important yeah well it wasn't like my secret was like i was like oh i can live i can live with this like it i'm pretty sure i i know what the problem was but i was like i i'm i can live with this i can let it let it do its'm pretty sure I, I, I know what the problem was, but it was like, I, I'm, I can live with this. I can let it, let it do its thing. And, um, basically once you get on the highway, it's all, it's all good to go. Well, like the, the, my wife, uh, got to ride in it once. She's like, yeah, yeah. You have to fix the air conditioner. So fine for me, not for anybody else in the house. And so now it's like a normal car.

I get in it, turn on the air, I turn on the car, the air runs and cools down pretty quickly. We've got tinted windows and everything. It works fine when it's on. Yeah, so all good to go. It's just, you know i i don't know the the remote i i do i i want like the keyless entry and remote start thing that sounds fun i don't know you're gonna lead me down a rabbit hole i i'm gonna have to back away slowly because i just got this server thing here

and like uh the the air compressor changed out like i don't i don't want to do anymore stop make it stop you now see the pressure i'm under whatever i have with you guys you guys usually try to get me to spend money come on seth you need to get this for your car you know install it along with the car play we're already uh planning on adding this to the second car so my wallet's about to be a lot down here yeah sorry about that um happens my only saving grace is my car is is rather old and i don't think i mean i think there's a couple of things that that work with it uh there was one that was like claiming to be the only aftermarket product that works with with volkswagens so of that era uh so yeah it's old it's 2007. How much do I really want to remote start it?

Probably not. I, yeah. Don't even care if it starts most of the time. Oh, can't go to work. Yeah. It's too bad.

Stuck. Anyway, pretty, pretty fun project updates over the last weekend. I was fighting server things. I'm still fighting server, maybe fighting server things. I no idea uh but uh we we were all talking over the weekend about all of our different uh project updates and yeah um i'll be i'll be busy it's grass mowing season

right now so that means is i have to mow the grass twice a week now, maybe more. If I mow it in three days, it's as high as like up mid-mid-calf. Like it's ridiculous how fast it's growing right now. We're in a two-week cycle right now. So every two weeks I have to mow. I wish. That's winter. All right. All right. Well, let's move on. We want to thank everyone and give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out on the show. And I think we had one this last week. Thank you, Michael Moore, for updating to five dollars yeah really appreciate that yeah yeah i'll edit some yeah you probably can't hear my claps that well so it's there i promise some cheering and stuff yeah exactly i'll find something to go in but uh every every pledge no matter the value gets you a invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about tons of stuff. And fire hazards, evidently. Thanks, TJ. You are posting some gems right there.

Wow. That's awful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but there's been a lot of great conversations that have been going back and forth recently. I got Wabox and Eero though. So they're good to go. Oh man. That's a lot. Anyway, uh, moving on that we, uh, if you want to help out, but can't support financially, totally understand.

We just appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app for your toys. Uh, that wraps another week in home tech from everyone here. Have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. Bye.