HomeTech.fm - Episode 404 - Wooabubbudub wooopbupbub

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

This week on Hometech: Sonos is doing something weird, Comcast rolls out 2-gig speeds, Home Assistant turns 9, Lutron Caseta now has non-Gunther switches, Ring adds a feature that takes away all their other features, and a cool pick of the week from Ubiquity.

This is the Home Tech Podcast with Friday, September 16th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm CJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology, home automation, and swabba-do-weep-do-do-do-do, Sonos Day to you. How's it going, guys? Have you been able to make any heads or tails out of the Swabba-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do womp, womp. It's bass. It's bass. They're about to either release something or they're just trolling everybody at this point. There was somebody posted a Reddit thread and they said he noticed that as they post every day, they have less words.

So the announcement's coming this Friday. But then somebody posted below that and said, your days are off because like if you count the days, it was like three days ago, eight words. Two days ago, zero words. Six words, days it was like three days ago eight words two days ago zero words six words 21 hours ago three minutes five words well it already launched so we just didn't know we just missed it whoops i think we're just overthinking this a bit too much someone's cat walked across the keyboard and accidentally tweeted i this has got to be what happened like they used tweet deck or something, and it just saved it,

and they were just like, every day for the next couple weeks, we'll be getting all these weird messages from Sonos. Yeah, I mean, possibly. Some of the words are the same, though, so they're using similar words, so it's not completely random. Somebody at least copy and pasted something. Well, after the first one, they're probably like, let's just roll with this.

Look at the response we got. Right. They'll just make it seem like it's normal exactly yeah like oh no it's just it's just a sale on the sonos boost but it's not in stock yeah right exactly exactly well we'll have to see uh by the time this podcast supposedly airs which all depends on when Seth gets to edit it. But yeah, we may know what the swab-a-do-boop-ba-woo-ba-hoo-so-bo-bo-womp-womp means. That sounds like a subwoofer to me. I mean, even a small one at that.

So I'm going for it. Yeah, I just pitched down my voice, so it sounds like a sub and not. Take my money now. Yeah, well, I'm going to have to go back and figure out what our our dollars were i know we announced it on the show a couple of times so i'll have to i'll have to go back and and take a look at what our our bets were on that anyway uh speaking of just throwing money away um how did the apple event go for you guys i threw away less money than I was really expecting to throw away, to be honest.

You know, like what they announced. They announced a new phone, new watch, new AirPods. Yep. So, yeah, I couldn't justify a new phone. I have the 12 Pro Max. It's new enough. I couldn't justify a new watch because I'm not climbing mountains or diving 200 feet deep or running for 24 hours so but aren't you aren't you afraid of like dying in a car crash or dying in an airplane crash or dying on a on the side of a mountain somewhere

like don't you have mountains in ontario not really do we kind of northern i mean you might and if you don't have a watch you're not going to be rescued with a satellite you get lost in the snow on your way to tim hortons i don't know yeah i'm good with that i'm good there's always a tim hortons walking distance no matter where you are there's a walking distance tim hortons so i'll never get lost there's always going to be somewhere you know and here in canada we have nice people they'll stop and help you you know you don't need a watch someone will drive by and see you all buried at the side and you know they'll roll you over and light a fire and keep you warm you know that's nice they are nice you know a moose will come by you'll have food that's not food gavin um the the the this is funny it reminds me of a story i was i was in a

wawa the other day which is kind of like a uh an east coast coming down like i guess it's a tim hortons essentially it's a gas station it's a gas station but coming down. I guess it's a Tim Hortons, essentially. It's a gas station. It's a gas station. But they have food inside there. It's got a kitchen or something. But it's a gas station. And they have a coffee thing in there.

And there was this guy in there. I saw him get out of the car. He was working for this irrigation company. And I saw him get out of the truck and walk in. And he had one arm. And he was struggling getting coffee put together. And so there were a couple of us in the area and we like helped him get stuff together. He's like, ah, an alligator ate my arm, like walked off and like, oh, that's kind of a weird

thing to say. But, you know, that's probably what I would say if I had one arm, you know, like I would just tell everybody, well, an alligator, you know, and he said something the same thing, like going out, he said, it's kind of the same thing, uh, going out to the cashier, like an alligator,, this guy's got a stick. But no, I was flipping through the news on Twitter, and I ran across, like I recognized this guy sitting there. I guess he got lost out in the woods. And after work, however, as you do, I guess, in Florida,

you just wander out into the woods and get lost. And he ended up on the other side of a lake from where his car was. You could see it. So what do you do in florida you swim naturally you swim across the lake immediately was eaten by an alligator and then like struggled in the woods for three days i guess before somebody found him with half his arm left but he could have used one of these watches and been saved you know he could have been like i'm lost and yeah um at that point he would have found the alligator that had the watch before he tried to swim he could have probably used the watch to to saddle then they would have been able to track

the alligator down because it would have been in his belly well that's that's like that's called peter pan i think is what you're thinking of but the thing was is like it was really weird it was surreal like i met this guy in a gas station and there he's right there on the news um but yeah i don't know i i ended up getting i'm on the little iphone upgrade plan thing that they have so i ended up getting the new 13 i like the new camera um i'm really in it for the cameras they have really good cameras on their phones so even the 12 that you guys were talking about you have like that's a great camera and i you know you're probably gonna love the the 13 or the 14 now, I guess, even more

because the 13 was a big upgrade from the 12. So I don't think there's much of an upgrade on the cameras this time. Well, my 12 still plays this podcast pretty well. So I don't need to upgrade at all, you know, like. Well, people are complaining about like, but what much more can you do with a phone? Like they're like, well, if you get in a car accident, we can detect if you if your car hits what are they like 270 g's or something like that it's like don't people like your body cannot survive like 90 g's like you're long gone after that point yeah you're

dying from your brain hitting your skull i think at that point or something like that right yeah 270 won't matter like that's that's not a number that's attainable attainable that realistically we're going to be talking about getting to. And no matter where I am, I get in a car crash, there's so many people around, it's going to be on social media, full video, everything anyway. So somebody's going to find out. I don't need my watch to call anybody. Exactly. Well, it was an interesting stick that they were trying to do right with the

like oh if you're lost in the woods and there's only alligator infested lakes around you know like you'll have this watch it'll save your life or your arm or whatever and um that i mean the the videos they had were just like crazy over the top like yes car crashes planes like i mean it's a good sales point that you can say hey not only is this you know watch covering your fitness or whatever but it'll also call the police if you're in a car accident you know well i i think that's kind of like one of the selling points of having an apple watch as well because you never hear about any of the other watch manufacturers doing this you know especially on the Android front. There's other watches out that do similar stuff. You can text with them or, you know, use it for GPS and stuff like that. But I think Apple's really positioned themselves as

the watch where you buy it and it kind of does everything you want it to do. And if you want to leave your phone behind, you can get a cellular option. You can do texting on and everything. Or if you're going to go out for several days at a time, you can have a watch that does that as well. So I think they're very precise on what they're doing with it. And it seems to be working for them. A lot of people I know wear an Apple Watch every single day. Yeah. I mean, if it's making you money and they sell them, I see them out everywhere.

It's rare that I see. Pretty much everyone I see now has an Apple Watch. Yeah. I saw somebody the other day and they had like, what do they have? Like a Hello Kitty background. I'm like, how did they get that? And I was like, oh, it's not an Apple Watch. It's probably some kind of Android watch or something like that.

Oh, you can put photos on your Apple Watch. But it was like the hands and everything. It was like done up as an official, whatever it was. It was some cartoon thing. was it was like done up you know as like the oh as an official whatever it was like it was some cartoon thing and i was like oh that'd be really cool if you could do that but no it was it was not it was not an apple watch that's right seth was making fun of me for my uh my apple watch upgrade uh i got my first apple watch uh a friend of mine gave me an apple watch series three funnily enough they upgraded their watch it works all right everybody's saying it's like a slow apple watch and it's not that good a friend of mine gave me an Apple Watch Series 3. Funnily enough, they upgraded their watch. It works all right.

Everybody's saying it's like a slow Apple Watch and it's not that good and stuff, but it does its job for right now. I think you did. I didn't make fun of you. I think you just paid too much for it. Well, I paid a six pack of beer for it. I stand by my point. It wasn't out much.

But if I like it, I guess I'll go with the newer one. I was looking at the se uh with cellular and i think that would be a nice option for i think it's like 420 or something for uh the cellular option or 320 if you wanted the just the regular gps so not that much money no uh and those actually are really those are actually really nice like um my my my wife actually um she upgraded her series three to the previous SE. It was just actually a couple of months ago. And it was kind of like, meh.

She's kind of like you. Who cares? She doesn't use it every day, that kind of thing. But it was a great price for the watch then. And it actually works really well. It works as well as mine does. I have like a Series 6, I think, is what we figured out it was but it i mean it's a nice watch like looks nice works nicely and it's a lot faster than the three that you'll be messing with but

that one's a oldie oldie very old yeah i plan on uh i've been looking for a apple watch seven uh just on deals and see what i can get on there they've come down to like four or five hundred dollars for the cellular option. So they're dropping pretty quickly. One of the features I like using on my watch now, I never thought I would, but answering calls on it and just talking to somebody, you know, it works really well. The mics are great, you know,

and I like the fact that you can swim in the watch and everything. It's fully waterproof. I don't have to worry about that. It's worth it. Do you guys know that you can use your remote like for Apple TV? You probably don't have to worry about that it's worth it you guys know that you can use your remote like for apple tv oh you probably don't use apple tv too often so yeah it has a little remote app on there and you can actually just like quickly um i do this with my daughter it's like hey stop watching tv and she's like she's like ignoring me and i'll just

reach over to my watch and go boop boop boop boop, boop. And it'll stop. And she'll just look at me like, how did you do that? I have the remote. And I'm magic. Because I'm fancy over here, I can actually control my van. So I can either start it, lock it, or unlock it from my watch as well. So it's pretty nice to just be leaving the store or leaving somebody's house. And I just go ahead and start Vann. And by the time I get there, it's already started.

There you go. There you go. Well, the magic of having a little RISC computer. Amazing. Cool. All right, guys. Enough of Apple talk because there's probably plenty of podcasts out there that have been talking about it. Yeah.

Nobody cares about Apple anymore. Exactly. What do you say we jump into some actual home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. Well, Comcast, and this is a big, I've got USA written all over this thing. That's a new tag that we've got in our upgraded show notes. Marca.

This is a good beat with a Canada tag. But Comcast plans on bringing multi-gig internet speeds to 34 cities across the U.S. by the end of the year. And it'll expand its reach to more than 50 million households by the end of 2025. According to the press release, the company has already started rolling out. Now, get this. It's not six or eight, but it's two gig speeds. Woo-hoo. Yeah.

Over its broadband network in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Augusta, Georgia, Panama City Beach, Florida, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Of course, it's the home of Comcast. It's like, why wouldn't they start there? Customers in these cities will also get to take advantage of the upload speeds that Comcast says are five to 10 times faster than what it currently offers, which is nice, I guess.

Upload speeds appear to top out at 200 megabits per second, even with the new gigabit times two plan. But Comcast intends to change that. And it says launching this multi-gig symmetrical speeds sometime next year, which will enable multi-gig upload speeds. So that'll be nice. Looking forward to not getting this. It's probably going to be a very expensive, very expensive upgrade.

They didn't mention anything about the caps, though. Is it going to be unlimited? You're going to go over your data caps so quick, Seth. Exactly. You won't even have a chance. I think at some point they're like, yeah, we know we're not going to have a cap on this. I don't think they have a cap on this one. One bad update or one straight of ice and you're just done for.

I was done for before. I don't know. I got those removed. So those are all gone and I'm not paying. Like the gig, I think gig speeds is like $200 a month or maybe $300 a month. And it's so crazy they're able to charge that too

because like AT&T Fiber here for a gig is like $55 to $80 a month. Nice. And I think you get Spectrum for like $100 to $150. So it's crazy that Comcast is able to charge that much

for basic service at this point. Well, I mean, you say basic, they say super advanced, only data centers need this fast speed because we're charging I want to say it's like 300 bucks. I was going to look it up

but I forget what it's called. What a rip off. Do it. They're also the worst ISP I've ever dealt with in my life. I had a job down in florida where they were supposed to run new lines for and they would show up on several appointments and then cancel and then we would have to call comcast back and they'd be like actually there's no record of the installation when was it supposed to be and that happened like four or five times they ever

since that moment they've always been the worst isp, I'm trying to see how much it will cost. Everywhere is not working here, but if I go to Xfinity, it wants me to log in and change my plan. Just trying to figure out how to do that. Maybe it's not as much as I thought it was, but I'm pretty sure for me, last I checked, it was like $300 for a gigabit. And then I was like probably 300 a month and if you cancel it they like come and take your kidney in the middle of the night just leave you in the bathtub uh of ice yeah good old comcast all right we'll have to look that up later and

follow up on it but i'm happy where i am it i it's it's not it's not gigabit i think it's like 800 and it's still like 100 a month something like that maybe a little bit more yeah so and realistically like unless you're doing something crazy with it that's plenty fast i mean i have gigabit and i don't even touch it most of the time like i should really just downgrade but i don't want to call spectrum and do it so if you need some help on getting the most out of your gig let me know yeah i'm just out of storage space at this point so i gotta it's a big like investment maybe if i downgrade the internet for like 18

months i can buy new hard drives and then we can go back is it 300 seth it's ridiculous no i i'm like you when i want to change like the the the plan it's like i can't i can find it but, it's like I can find it, but now it's not letting me. Alright, so Gigabit is actually only $10 more a month than I'm paying now. So I guess I was mistaken. Oh my gosh. 6,000 megabits per second

for $299 a month. Do it. Let's get it. Do you think they have a point-to point that i'll go that far gavin i don't know buy it let's see just click order now there's a button that says order now click it go for it oh shoot yeah you just bring me a phone too i do want phone service as well interesting well i will I will figure it out later. But it doesn't seem like it's, yeah, it's going to be like $10 more. But they don't tell you $10 more is actually going to be like $50 more

by the time they add on taxes and fees. And then after four months, the price goes up 5% for every gigabit you use. Exactly. So I'm just going to close these tabs and pretend I never looked at this. Just going to make you mad. Yep, exactly. Well, speaking of being not mad,

but happy, happy birthday, Home Assistant. On August 17th, 2013, Paulus Scheltzen, I don't know how to pronounce his name, I know his name is Paulus, made the first commit to Home Assistant and started a big snowball

of home automation enthusiasts who were willing to contribute to the open source project. Nine years later, Home Assistant is actively used by more than 500,000 people. That's a big deal. They had a big birthday release party thing, I guess, or release that had a bunch of stuff in it. TJ, you were looking through some of the notes.

And I think, TJ, you're actually one of the 500 000 people using this thing yeah absolutely so i switched over this past weekend fully i got my nortec zigbee and z-wave usb hub seems to be working great um i was on smart things for the past i think like three or four or five months somewhere around there um and i just kept having trouble with like devices loading I would go to click on like a light switch and I would say oh I need to go fetch the data or you need to download the data and I just I just didn't want to mess with it anymore so I just switched over to home assistant it's been working great stuff is a lot faster I haven't got fully transitioned yet I'm still working on some of my automations but it's kind of nice to have everything all in one place. Again, I can see my

cameras in the same place, I can start my van, I can lock it, I can do all my home automation stuff. So it's kind of nice just use one interface. Now, one of my co workers posted over the weekend, somebody had, I think it's a Reddit post, I'll dig through our there's a lot of posts from today, but I have to dig through it and see if I can find what he posted. It was like a, what's it called? A kegerator monitor. That somebody had made for HomeKit

and basically made this custom. I was just looking at it and it's like everything there is just so bespoke. He's literally the only guy who can do this, all this at once. It,

it, you know, just looking at his setup and everything, you have to have the expertise to do this. You have to have the expertise to build the little Arduino thing. And then you have to have the expertise to do like do the graphics on top. He had like this really cool graphic setup that had like a keg, a picture of a kegerator.

And I'll have to find a picture of this. This is actually pretty cool. Um, but it had like the, of a kegerator. And I'll have to find a picture of this. This is actually pretty cool. But it had like where the temperatures were inside, like the inside temperature, the outside temperature, the tap temperature, and how, I think there was a weight thing in there that could tell how many, you know, based on how heavy the keg was,

like how many six packs were left or something like that. So it was a very complete installation of a kegerator monitor um but but man it was actually pretty cool i thought it was neat but all done with home assistant yeah i've seen a couple of things like this i don't know if anything like off the shelf exists but when i was going to this uh coding school down in orlando for some meetups they had a similar uh setup for a k-grader they had and they had just the digital display board uh right above it and it would tell you what bureau was on tap how much was left and the temperature and all that good stuff so i think they were

theirs was custom made as well um it'd be cool though if somebody's mass producing these and selling them though yeah like some kind of kid or something that you could you could put together and you totally see that being a thing. Yeah, pretty cool. Oh, it was actually a TikTok link. I'll post this in our show notes so you can check it out. But it was really nice. I mean, really well done.

Like you don't see it very often. But again, it was completely bespoke and you would have to have, there's nobody mass producing it, right? So it's not something that anybody could go and buy off the shelf you'd have to have some know-how to put it all together so um anyway happy birthday to uh to home uh home assistant there and uh it's definitely come a long way yeah it definitely has like cow more than it's the yaml scripts and everything which is yeah i pretty much haven't had to touch any like actual programming to set anything up so

far which has been nice you know i tried it i think like two or three years ago and you still had to go in and like edit files in order to like add your z-wave uh usb hub and all that good stuff so uh so far this time i've not touched any programming i've just walked through the general interface and done everything that way so one day i I'll look into it. Right now I'm just, no. Control 4 is fine. It's working. It is one of those, if it's not broken, why fix it type things. All right. Anyway, let's move on here. Got some new product from Lutron. They released two new smart switches for the Caseta line. The switches are modeled on the existing Diva platform, the paddle system.

And by doing this, kind of removes the Lutron Caseta brand from being Gunther switches, right? So you can actually have a traditional toggle switch where you push a button on top and it does something, push a button on the bottom, it does something. So $69.95 for the Diva smart dimmer and then $59.95 for the Diva Smart Dimmer,

and then $59.95 for a Claro Smart Switch, which is a standard wired on and off toggle switch. Both products look like traditional paddle switches and have basically just a little LED on the side. And I think the dimmer actually has a little slide up and down thing where you can kind of set the level that it dims at or something like that. Available today, September 12th. So as we record Monday, September 12th, you can go out and get them in a kit. It has a dimmer, Lutron Smart Hub, and the Pico remote for $119.95. So I think this is great. This is actually probably the best update that Lutron Caseta has done in a long time.

These look way better than the weird button things, basically a Pico remote switch that they had put out. And also you can use these and you don't need a weird Pico three-way thing. You can just use a regular one of these on the other end i guess and and in a three-way so that's good this this is actually i think this is big news for them and i think it's gonna get all those people that wanted to get lutron but couldn't get over the look of their switches now this is a more traditional one you press up you press down the dimmer looks nice i really like

how they did it with the light at the side and everything like that um they added three-way support you know the dimmers i think you don't need a neutral for but i think you still require neutral for the switch or it could be the other way around but i think this is big news for them and it's going to probably bring in a lot more clients for them. Yeah, and just so everybody knows, it's already on the PPPDB, so the price per button database. The dimmer comes out about $1749 per button and the switch comes out to about $1998 per button. We don't know what the accessory switch costs yet

because this just says coming soon, but not too bad on the pricing. Very nice. I already got it up there and we've got the canadian prices because of the uh the magic of apis and so yeah it's a lot more canadian dollars uh for those buttons but you do get a nice looking uh lighting system and i mean lutron's normal yeah i mean but this caseta stuff is probably one of the more stable lighting control systems that's out there with they've got the clear connect thing which is not zigbee or z wave it's kind of like a super low frequency um transmission thing that they've been been able to do uh or had a patent on or

their own licensing on for forever. So they use that for all their communications. It just kind of blasts through walls. It's very super reliable. I have I have a hub here and some like outdoors, one of those little outdoor plug in things. And it you have to think about it. It just always works. And the hub is like in my rack in this metal cage. And the thing is outside through brick walls and everything so um yeah if you it's one of those systems like if you if you don't hit like their number the device number limits like it's probably a pretty good system um compared to the other stuff out there yeah it'll probably be one of the more expensive lighting solutions that you'll buy yourself.

Anything in the Lutron lineup. But it'll absolutely be the most reliable. And you won't have any problems integrating with anything. You know, that's one thing I like about Lutron is that you can tie it in with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa or anybody else. And there's not going to be any issues with it. How does it compare to like a Zigbee or a z wave dimmer is it more like at 70 is it more or less expensive oh definitely more expensive i think you can get a zigbee dimmer for the 30 to 50 range yeah 35 that's right okay yeah depending on what you want out of it but yeah 30 to 50 and then z

wave is always you know on40 to $60 price range. That makes sense. So it's roughly a double, I guess. But different technology, smaller footprint, I suppose. But I've really never heard of anybody complain about the performance on these things. It's kind of nice to see a company out there doing this and at least striving in that direction still. So now the only thing that people ever complain about

for the Lutron Caseta stuff is the aesthetics of it, which they've definitely fixed with this new release. So now I just have to find something to do with all my old Lutron Caseta stuff that nobody will ever want. Exactly, exactly. No good, no good. We've got some new product from Google as well. Uh, they're set to, well, maybe, maybe we'll, we'll see what they have, but, uh, they're Google set

to unveil a number of new products and smart home products and an upcoming event, uh, in October called the made by Google. They, they have every year, and it's always either before or after the Apple event. So it's going to be on October 6th at 10 a.m. We'll have to tune in then. And of course, it'll be headlined by their Pixel 7, their smartwatch, probably some tablets or something. Who knows? There's other stuff in there.

But we do know, I think we talked about a couple weeks ago, the potential of having some new Nest devices, particularly Nest Wi-Fi 6E device that was going to be coming out. At least they had somebody had saw that kind of sneaking through the FCC filing. So we might see that. And there also may be a new Chromecast model. In fact, there was a leak that had come out that said that there's going to be a new Chromecast, what is called a Chromecast HD, which is interesting because it's been a while

since that product's been updated. Supposedly, this one's going to be a cheaper version of it. We don't know very much, if anything at all, about it, but I'm glad to see that they are finally updating like google like we were joking before the show like oh well here's all the stuff they're going to

cancel and like or not need or not use in like three years but um it's been a while for some of this stuff and it's nice to see them actually uh go into updated it's interesting that they're doing it now of course right right before the matter launch so maybe there's going to be more news around that at this event you know like maybe we'll see them talking about how they're all these new nest devices are matter matter compatible i don't know what do you think gavin no i totally agree with that like i wouldn't be surprised if we get the matter talk when they announce all this stuff, right? But I don't really follow the Google stuff too much because I'm so used to them just canceling stuff on us that I'm afraid to buy something by Google now, you know? As long as they don't mess with my Gmail, I'm good, you know?

Like, leave my Gmail alone. But I know they have a strong following especially their phones their phones are some pretty good looking phones if i was an apple person i'd probably grab one of the pixels yeah and at this point it's kind of just like i don't know google does i think google's kind of just forgot about that they have like a home automation section of their company um and it just doesn't seem like they really care about it. They're not really updating anything. You have, you know, you have Amazon with their Alexa lineup coming out with all kinds of just crazy different things with ring and Alexa and all that good stuff. They got the flying drone that flies around your house and checks on it. They have the little robot

that drives around and looks around. And you have Google that's releasing like a brand new Wi-Fi system and like a new video doorbell and stuff. Like it's just there's not much innovation going on. And if you're in the market for those kind of devices, then you're obviously going to compare them. But it's nothing to really get excited about at the end of the day. Like a brand new like Nest speaker is not that exciting to me. Right, right.

Yeah, I agree. Like it seems like they're not playing catch up. They're just playing update like yeah we we still do this just so you know we're still we're still a player in this game yeah here's a here's a five dollar cheaper chromecast like and that's something I don't get either it's like the chromecast is already cheap like how much cheaper are you gonna make it like 10 or 15 dollars yeah and that's like their flagship device for streaming stuff into a tv i don't know i think they they figure that you know

they're just have an app on a tv or it'll be a google powered android tv or something like that they don't have to worry about chromecast but um i don't know i i i don't have i'm not like i'm i'm kind of with you guys. I'm not too excited about it. I'm going to watch the event, I guess. I'm curious about the Pixel phones. Curious about whatever else they want to come out with. Because they always talk about fun stuff.

And there's been a couple of years that have gone by where they've shown off some crazy technology. And then people are like, whoa, should you be doing that? The one where it was like... They had a fake assistant person Like, whoa, should you be doing that? Like the one where it was like it would, they had a fake assistant person that would call in, schedule reservations for you,

but not announce that it was like a robot. Yeah, the software stuff is always the most important to watch because they always talk about some of the features that are either going to release or they're working on. Yeah, I would say half of them

don't ever come out, but it's always just cool to see what they're working on software wise and their vision of what the smart connected home is has been the most cohesive vision like from a storytelling to standpoint like this is where we want the smart home to be this is what we want you to be able to do with our technology, with our software and platform. I've, I've always enjoyed watching their videos because they make the most sense and they're not like, they're not like a pipe dream. Like they're obtainable with some of the stuff that they have. But the problem is it's Google and like, they just kind of sit back and let stuff fester for so long. And it's like, at this point, I'm just not, if you offered me a Google,

like I've actually been offered a number of times, like having one of these Google screen things to sit in my, I'm like, I'm just not, I'm not interested. It's not going to happen. I don't, I don't want it. I don't really want to, to use it. And a bigger part of it, it's like, well, I use Google. What is it? It's, it's changed a number of times now it used to be called google apps now google for your domain i think it's google suite google business or something business now yeah g suite i don't remember what it's called

now but none of their home stuff integrates with that because that's not your the only gmail address i have is my the personal one i have like that's my junk email. Like I will never check that. No, nothing that I do goes on that. That is actually a permanent thing. I need the actual like Google for my domain stuff to integrate with my Google home stuff. And it doesn't work because that's business. So I don't know, like they have a long way to go there and they have a bunch of silos in their company. They don to have to bust through to actually make it a worthwhile thing for many people, including myself. But at the same time,

I'm not interested in jumping through hoops to work with that particular platform. So we'll have to see what they bring to us on October 6th, I guess. Should be a fun event. Should be fun. Maybe they'll make more reservations to restaurants with robots. All right.

Moving on here, we've got a TDGO. It's a new smart lock with thread built in. TD is a Polish company. And they unveiled a new smart lock that's called the TDGO that can use an existing cylinder and key to unlock the door. And I thought this design was pretty cool. TJ and I and Gavin all talked about this before this show.

I'd never seen these before. And of course, TJ has, but kind of interesting concept where you would have like, and I'm, I always, I always think of these types of lock as my grandmother lock like she she always put these on every single door exit door of the house and like locked the doors from the inside and then take took the key out of the door and like hit it away somewhere so whoever was breaking in couldn't break the window and run into your house and i guess tj you said that's pretty common. Like people do that. Yeah. So this specific smart lock is for, you know, the European crowd. And it's a European cylinder lock.

So we don't really have this style in America. I'm sure you'll find it floating around, especially in like bigger places like New York City or something like that. But it's basically just like an August go lock in the sense that you just put it over your existing lock. These locks actually have a key on the inside. So it just fits over the key. And I'll just turn the key so you can lock and unlock the door. A lot of times when people have this type of lock, they'll just keep the key in there. And then you know, when they go on vacation or something like that, they'll pull the key out in order to do that in order to keep

it safe um but yeah i mean it's a really good idea just fits over your existing lock um and i don't see why it wouldn't work on like a wide range of different locks you know realistically like if i use this with you know my my deadbolt in america i don't see why i couldn't make it work with that so so the the deadbolt is a different style or type than the cylinder that's that's here yeah so this one the td go it just fits over the existing uh you know the door where the key goes at um so you're not replacing any hardware or anything like that okay yeah that makes sense no i just thought it was a kind of a different way or different take on how. I haven't seen this particularly.

Usually you're replacing the entire door hardware or portions of it. Or like you said, putting something over the top of it where it can kind of like move stuff around. But I don't know. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. HomeKit News has said they've been testing it and it's been reliable and smaller and quieter than the competition that's out there. And again, like you said, it was a European model, so it's going to be available for less than 200 euro when it is released.

So pretty cool thing. Gavin, any thoughts? I'm just thinking it reminds me of the SwitchBot lock. You know, if SwitchBot just adds a little attachment, they can almost do the same thing. It as this turning key instead of turning the bolt. You know, give them an idea. Give them an idea. There you go, right there.

Yeah. And I don't know about every state, but I know in the state of Ohio, you can't, you're not supposed to use these type of locks anymore. You're supposed to have, you know, basically one motion to get out of a building. So, you know, if your house is on fire, you shouldn't have to find a key in order to unlock your door in order to get out of the burning building. So I know in a lot of places, this is not, you know, not up to code and you're not supposed to do this kind of lock. But I guess they have different locks in different parts of the world. So this is still a valid thing. we we had these on our house because we we ended up buying the our house that our grandmother had and yeah it was always a struggle to like oh i gotta get out i need a key i'm locked in inside

of my house like uh i i don't i never never understood it and always thought it was a safety issue because you could never get out without rummaging around and finding somebody's key to unlock the door so yeah there's i've only been one place in america where double double-sided deadbolts are a thing and that was new york city um and like every shop there basically has them um just because i assume that they have to have at least one emergency exit or something but that's the only place i've seen it. Nope. If you, if you go into certain parts of South, certain buildings in Southeast Texas, I can tell you that my grandmother's installed in there.

So that's, that was our go-to lock. So, all right, well, last bit of security news here, rings, battery powered video doorbells and security cameras are finally getting

Indian end to end encryption. More than a year after end-to-end made its way into the ring wired cameras and doorbells. Support for end-to-end on ring cameras means that only the person who owns the ring camera and has their iOS or Android device enrolled will be able to access the video on there. So the recordings and everything. This is basically the most super secure way that you can operate a ring camera, locking it down even more than they're absurd. You know, I'll email you a code and you can type that into our thing, two factor authentication for their doorbell cameras. But I guess they've had some security people knocking on them for a while

and saying you can do better and and this this certainly is better but man does it it really not it's not it doesn't really work well gavin you you and i were talking before the show like you basically have to disable the entire all the features and then you get like this into this feature like for yeah it's the cost kind of dumb yeah it's kind of dumb you you enable this feature i understand why you're enabling it but at that point you lose all the ability like pretty much all the features that you bought the ring camera for you know you'll you lose rich notifications you lose the ability to preview videos on your on the timeline you know uh shared users if you're sharing it with

other accounts right uh they lose all the ability when it comes to videos um you can't use greetings or quick replies you know the bird's eye view which was a big feature on on the newer cameras that doesn't even work what does work at that point is it just records video for you you know like if that's all you want yeah and you needed to be super secure like you're running a government facility with um with ring cameras maybe it's a good thing well actually i do have that government building in downtown columbus with 30 rings there there you go maybe they need is it it is this like a response for them like supposedly giving access to videos to police officers or something like maybe they're like oh well

here's our compromise if you don't want that to be a thing like you can turn this on but good luck you can't use anything yeah i i maybe i feel that uh they had kind of some knee-jerk reactions to security in the past. After the Amazon acquisition, people started really looking at the product pretty hard and their API and all this stuff. So they did a number of things, even on the back end through the database, to remove a bunch of information and things. Like PII information is fine. That probably could be separate from the device information.

So that's personal identification information or something. Basically addresses, names, phone numbers, that kind of stuff got removed from the APIs, which is OK. Fine. As a developer, I don't need any of that. But the other stuff like this, like the end-to-end, it seems like that was basically put in to basically appease security nerds to me.

There's really no need for this. It doesn't make the product any better. It actually makes it worse. And if this is what you need if this is what you think you need then you probably need a different something else right and that's kind of like what i would think too right it's like if you're so worried about security where you're going to enable this feature wouldn't you just roll your own cameras or something at that point like they they even have wi-fi cameras you could get that work locally and you could just record like an nvr or something at that point like they they even have wi-fi cameras you could get that work locally and you could just record like an nvr or something so even if you're renting there's like

options for that as well so these these plays always you know never make sense to me just because it's like who wants to actually use that that is a ring customer well at least if they have the they have the option they could say yes we have the option even if they have the they have the option, they could say, yes, we have the option. Even if nobody uses it, they can at least say it's there. Yeah. And it's important to note, I guess it works pretty much now on all of their security cameras and doorbells, except the Ring Video Doorbell Wired. For whatever reason, that one, maybe it's an older version or something like that and couldn't get the processing or the keys or whatever they need to install on it to make it end-to-end but that's okay if you have that you can't use this which arguably makes the device a lot worse than it already is so anyway again if you need end-to-end encryption maybe ring is not your not your thing but um i don't know i i'd be willing to i'd be willing to say there's probably a few people out there,

maybe you can count them on one hand, maybe two, who are really happy to see this feature released. Anyway, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 404. And I'm really going to have to make sure that that URL works because I'm pretty sure that's going to get redirected somewhere else. But yeah, if it doesn't, well, maybe we'll put something else on our show notes link.

But if you go to hometech.fm, look at the top of the page. This show should be there for at least a week or two. All right, guys, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a really cool pick of the week. I think TJ, you posted this in here and it was just a video from Ubiquity, UI Innovations video about the Wi-Fi Man Wizards early access product. This is really cool. They can't make access points, switches or routers,

but we can get this little Wi-Fi Man device. It is really slick. And it is pretty sweet though. I mean, I'm a big tooling person so like if you give me something magical like wi-fi right like it's not something you can see it's like hdmi like the reason hdmi is not fun is because you can't test it right like there's really like there are hdmi testers that do exist and they're expensive. But if you have one, then you can definitively say that the cable that was installed here

does not work with this equipment. And here's why. This kind of is in that vein. Like if you're walking around with your phone and picking up like Wi-Fi signals, it's almost just not enough. And Apple has restricted their APIs to the, you know, their wifi chips over time. So I guess this is kind of ubiquity's answer to,

um, getting around that and giving you a decent, like little spectrum, spectral analyzer, you know, reports inside of the wifi man app that you would otherwise not be able to get using an iPhone or, I guess, Android or smartphone of anything. It's just a little bit, a dedicated piece, a dedicated device to basically do all sorts of stuff to get better insights into what's going on in the Wi-Fi network. And again, it's invisible. This is stuff that's just bits and radio waves floating through the air. If you don't have the tools to measure it, then it's almost impossible to troubleshoot why this device over here gets, you know, with the new Wi-Fi stuff, gets 50

megabits download. There's some interference somewhere. You have no idea what it is. But with something like this, you can at least have a fighting chance of figuring out what's going on. Yeah, pretty sweet, too. You can attach it have a fighting chance of figuring out what's going on yeah pretty sweet too you can attach it to the back of your phone it's got a the mag safe connector on there so you can just walk around with it you pair it up with a pocket ethernet i mean you're pretty much your phone would be your computer at this point you can do a full network test with everything you can test the wi-fi make sure you're getting good signal everywhere and then you turn around test some hardwire connections so pretty soon your phone

will just replace the whole computer. I feel like we've been talking about this for like 20 years, but we're almost there. So close. So close. This is pretty cool. Are you going to grab one of these things when it comes out? I'll probably try to grab one. It's $100. I don't see

what could go wrong. It'll probably be more expensive once it fully releases, I bet. They've been doing that on a couple products. So I would imagine the price go up $30 or $40. So I'll pick one up in early access. Still isn't a bad price if you think about it. Maybe I'll grab you one if I think about it. Yeah, send it up to Gavin.

He's got the... See what Gavin's rack. You can do like before and after. Like before you take down the... What is it? The UDM and go with the UDM Pro. Oh, there you go. Before and after.

Yeah. Oh, you guys are already talking me into that now? Well, and something you didn't think about with the UDM Pro is that you have to buy an access point because it doesn't have Wi-Fi built in. So can you use the UDM? No. So, well, no, because you can't have two controllers at the same site.

And both of them have built-in controllers. So you wouldn't be able to add it. You would be able to add them, but you wouldn't be able to add it to the same system. Access points are too expensive. That's okay. Then I'll send you one at the same time there you go that's one that's one thing that's good about ubiquity is that uh the the products are not that expensive i mean even for 130 dollars like just to get something like this is actually a steal compared to some of the other stuff that exists out there

like i i know of products that are well especially when you like compare it to like mesh like mesh products too like euro you can spend seven or eight hundred dollars on an euro three dotes and you can buy a really nice you know yeah for three of them and you can buy a pretty nice ubiquity system for that price so yep yep i'm trying to think of like yeah here's uh the echo how sidekick to four thousand Like basically this, probably a little bit more performance of a device. But if you want to have like all the AI pro software and everything that goes along with like heat mapping a house out, pretty much essentially doing

what Ubiquiti is kind of doing with this. That's a $10,000 price point, like $9,990. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. It's an expensive system, but this is what exists out there. and when they come in at $100 or $130 who cares like every technician in the company will have one of these rather than the one network

engineer you know that can have access to an actual wifi spectral analyzer thing you know that you can do site surveys with so yeah good on Ubiquity. I like it.

Good pick. Insta buy. All right. That wraps up another week here, guys. I do want to, I guess, Gavin, we've been talking like back and forth before the show was going off or going on air. And actually after hours too, like of the TV shows we've been watching,

we need to mention them now because there's some good stuff that's going on. But you found, you found, and I think you took one for the team. of the TV shows we've been watching. We need to mention them now because there's some good stuff that's going on. But you found, and I think you took one for the team, you found this Margot movie that is about a killer smart home. I don't know how I came across this, but once the title said killer smart home, I was sold. I was like, I have to watch it.

I didn't even look at the trailer. I just instantly watched it um i took one for the team i'm gonna save you guys from having to go watch this yourself like like i wasn't gonna watch it anyway but i'm glad you did yeah it was going along all right and then it just like started getting ridiculous especially when it got into the fight scene i was just like all right this is just dumb but there's the the premise is a group of college friends rent a smart house for the weekend of partying i mean this is where they all the horror movies start right later they start to realize that margo the house super advanced ai system has a sinister designs for them so there you go

there you go so not not very good it's got a 4.3 out of 10 rating on IMDb. Do you mean that's not a good movie? No, it was a bad movie. And the smart home is not like a smart home you think of today. It's more futuristic. But yeah, I don't even know why the smart home wanted to kill them at that point. It was just out to get them. And it used everything that, you know now now i look at massage chair differently you

know i don't want to sit in my massage chair anymore you know like every every smart device i'm looking at it a little differently going hmm how could that kill me you know like you better never get a robot lawnmower i'm not oh man or or if i'll be indoors when it goes you know when it does its thing i'll never go buy it i took one for the team though so you guys don't have to watch it it's a killer smart unless you really want to know how a smart home will kill you you know like they go why well i might watch it we're in the middle of watching like bad horror movies this month i mean it's it's it's that time of year. Like, yeah, we, you pretty much,

we've watched some like, like night teeth or something like that. I don't remember. It was like some Netflix originals that are, uh, you know, adjacent to the horror movie era. I don't know.

We're just basically, I think they, they're just like, how can we design our squibs to splatter the most amount of blood on somebody? Yeah. That's, that's what I've seen so far. Remember back in the days, it was like the killer car. What was that movie? Christine.

Yeah, and you watched it and you're like, how can a car be a killer car? It was. It was a killer car. Well, the same kind of thing is how can a smart home be a killer smart home? You'll find out it's not the way it's not like she's just turning up the temperature on you no no no it's all boil you alive inside the smart sauna nope there's a little bit more of all the explosion scene and uh you know what you might want to go watch it just to see i might have various kills

still like nope not doing it yeah i'll put it on the put it on the back burner if it's ever the end of the world and I'm looking for something to watch maybe that we do have some pretty good shows that are out there besides this I've caught up on I'm catching I've caught up on

Sea which is the on Apple TV it's the final season it's got Aquaman in it so it's good it's not actually it's the final season. Yes. It's got Aquaman in it. So it's good. It's not actually, it's the same guy. I got Jason in the law, but like it's,

it's a good, it's a good movie, show type thing. It has an interesting world. It's basically like if blind people did Game of Thrones, then that's, that's the best description, right?

Everybody's blind, except there are some people that can see and shenanigans happen. But yeah the word it's it's one of those post-apocalyptic things and uh i couldn't recommend that one more actually and then there's a documentary thing light magic i think we talked about it on off the show off the air if you haven't seen that and you like movies in any way, shape or form, go check out Light and Magic. It is absolutely amazing and so well done. It's a great documentary. It keeps you on the edge of your seat after the end of each episode and you want to watch the next episode. I think Crasden, Lawrence Crasden, put it together. So the writer of basically Indiana Jones. it's got some some pedigree to it and they basically have like interviews from literally everyone like everyone the inexistence going you know

um steven spielberg uh everybody shows up on on this thing so it's it's amazing to see the technology and things that they were doing to get Star Wars up and going. And then Lucas is like, no, I think computers can do this. And they're like, but computers are just things that have blinky lights. Like, how do we, and they're like, well, let's just find people that can do it. And he, he had this amazing ability to say to people, like, just think about it. And then they would, the people that he hired would go home and think about it and then come back with, like, brilliant ideas, and you get ILM out of it.

So check that out if you like movies, special effects, or anything like that. It is amazing. And I can't recommend that one anymore. It's probably one of the best things we watched in a while here. Another one I've been watching is called Yellow Jackets i saw this on the emmy nominated list so i just thought i'd give it a shot um really good dark you know like it's about um a high school soccer team they crash in the canadian wilderness and they're there for like 18 months and the stuff they go through

they show them now and they showed them back then so it's jumping in time but it's um it's really messed up worth a watch oh man it's a tv series it's not not just a movie so there's there's a lot of them oh wow yeah it's pretty good pretty good i don't know man all right that one looks that, I'm looking at some of the pictures from this. I'm like, okay. All right. Well, there's a birth, you know, like it was in House of Dragon when we were talking about the birth scene in there.

Yeah. Well, there's a birth scene in this one too. That was kind of like messed up too. So it's worth a watch. They keep going there. All right. Well, add it to the list. yeah added to the list added to the list yeah i've got a bunch of them here see yellow jackets light magic house of dragon lord of the

rings of course everybody's talking about house of the house of the dragon and lord of the rings uh what is it called the rings uh rings of power something like that the prequels it's been really good it's been really good yeah if you're if you're in the world of the silmarillion it is definitely a place to uh enjoy the enjoy what they put together and the special effects in there have been i mean i just can't believe i was watching a tv show you know like it is movie level quality special effects lord as you would expect from a lord of rings franchise like it's done well so definitely check those out we want to give a big level quality special effects, as you would expect from a Lord of the Rings franchise. It's done well, so definitely check those out.

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everything in a 20 meter radius. That is not that's a that's a mine oh my bad it's a landmine oops that's too funny check that out uh if you uh want to help out the show but can't support uh financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that wraps up another week in home tech from everyone here have a great weekend. Take care. See you next time.