HomeTech.fm - Episode 413 - HomeTech.Social

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

On this week's HomeTech: Happy Thanksgiving and Black Friday! We're happy to announce a new effort to save everyone for dealing with the collapse of Twitter: HomeTech.social – a new Mastodon instance dedicated for home automation enthusiasts. In the news, we look at another Amazon hit piece and talk about the rumors surrounding 4 new products from Sonos. All that, the pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, November 25th, 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 turkey, and stuffing, and dressing, and pie. Mmm, pie. I'll just leave this conversation to you guys. I ain't celebrating this week.

Two of the best things about Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie and turkey. Can't go wrong. Well, I mean, you can if you eat way too much of it, then you do feel not so good after. But a quick nap or a long nap fixes it usually. It's always disappointing, too, when you spend all that time making the turkey and you go to eat it and it's like the driest thing you've ever had in your life so i it is a lot of time and effort that goes into uh making thanksgiving food so if anybody's cooking this holiday season thank you for that well gavin you may not have thanksgiving but you

do have black friday right i mean kind of they of. They're just doing what, you know, they're jumping on your Black Friday and offering us the same deals or similar deals. Kind of the same deals. I don't know. There's a lot of stuff out there right now. I was at Target the other day or yesterday and they had started their Black Friday stuff

and there was, you know, stuff in their aisles, tags on some of the products and of course no one actually in the store shoppings but there were a lot of good deals it seemed i went back and looked at the tvs and man it was like a 70 inch tv a samsung tv for like 500 bucks uh some 60 inch tcls and different other things around the same price not 70 inches maybe 65 60 inch um for like anywhere between 400 and 500 which is like it blows my mind that stuff could be that tvs that are that large could be that inexpensive um it's kind of crazy it's crazy how far how much it's dropped in price like uh don't but the thing is that i find is even those tvs are better than most of the tvs in my house anyway their quality like uh it's an opportunity to

upgrade some of my tvs in my house but we don't have them that cheap up here tj have you seen any uh black friday deals that that stand out to you you were talking about getting an i robot roomba yeah i mean there's a couple things, to be honest, I just don't need anything at this point, right? There's always some stuff that you want. There's nothing that like is necessary at this point. There's a couple of good deals I found. There's like a, you know, an iRobot Roomba, just like the base one with no emptying trash can thing that they come with. You know, it's less than $200.

There's the, you know, Eufy Wi-Fi doorbell with the chime. That's $70. So there's some decent sales on various electronics if you need that kind of thing right now. I don't know how it compares to prices before, but, you know, this happens every year where stuff goes on sale. You might get an extra item with it or, you know, it's half the price of what it normally is. So now's the time to look for electronics. One of the things I do is I don't know if you've ever heard a site called Camel, Camel, Camel. Utilize that. That's one of my favorite sites. I just have on my Amazon, I have like a wishlist set up and shared with Camel,

Camel, Camel. And when there's something I want, I just add it to the wishlist. And eventually it will tell me when it drops in the lowest price or to a price that I wanted it. And then I can buy it then. So throughout the year, you'll find like things constantly drop in price that when you reach Black Friday, it's like you already got everything and you got for a good price. Yep. Yep.

They always trick you. Well, they have they have computers and algorithms to like trick you on that kind of thing. So yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye eye out that's pretty good site um i i was looking for some of those twinkly lights and i thought they were a good price and it turns out they weren't as good as like the price i could have gotten them for like six months before but oh well um it's kind of one of those it's kind of like a mixed bag there like if you need something um you're pretty much gonna end up paying the price for it but if you don't if you're just gonna need to like wait around uh for a good price on something you can

leave camel camel camel running there and it'll send you a notification or let you know when it's time to buy which is kind of nice and also one of my favorite things to do around Black Friday is renew my subscriptions. You'll find all the services that you sign up for. Oh, yeah. They'll offer some kind of deal around Black Friday and you renew it. For example, InnoReader is my RSS reader that I use. I use it every day. I use it heavily.

And they're giving you six months free if you sign up for a year. So obviously I'm going to sign up for that. Save some dollars right there. Good point. Good point. Yeah, that is a good point because I got to notice that my, the remote start that I use, Drone Mobile, they're offering, you know, I think 35% off their yearly plans.

I got a good cell phone service plan. I think it was about $5 a month. So I saved about $5 a month on that one as well. So that was a good point to look at your subscriptions and your softwares. Great idea. Well, I was looking at these Black Friday deals and one of the TVs I saw has the has a soccer ball thing on it. What we call it soccer ball. I guess it's football everywhere else. But the World Cup's going on down right now. Like I know Gavin, you're big into sports.

You, are you partaking in the festivities, the, the non-alcoholic dry festivities this, this year? Oh yeah. Every game I watch, I watch without alcohol mainly because I'm working,

but it's like eight o'clock in the morning. Not a good time to drink. Yeah. The five o'clock games. I usually watch later on if it's important you know and i don't look at my phone or anything until i watch the game um but i've been watching during you know the day i'll put the game on one of my monitors and while i'm working and yeah i've been loving loving the game go japan you know i love their win today

or this week um you know and we're rooting for canada yeah i i haven't tj i'm not even gonna ask but um i i haven't like been very enthusiastic about this one for whatever reason this year usually i'm like all over the matches and just have them on it was one of those like background things because if you put on the right and like the right announcer and you have to use like you can't use the american feed or the bbc feed you have to use the the latinos feeds from like telemundo or i think it's yeah telemundo i think is this year no i don't remember who's broadcasting it but i found it it's free you can just log on to it and you know i don't i know that they're seeing people's names and but not understanding anything else but the faster they get and the louder they get

that's when something's happening you need to like perk up and look over and see what's going on because that's that's that's how i determine what to watch and i find if i'm not watching one of the uk feeds i don't feel authentic you know it's about having the english accent call the game is so much more authentic even the canadian feeds i feel like they put the english accent called the game is so much more authentic even the canadian feeds i feel like they put the english guys on there just on purpose just to give them more of a authentic feel that's funny that's funny well um we we got some we got some big news this week uh let's let's launch this thing because it'll be fun by the time this goes out i might actually have it finished breaking news yeah breaking news um i sold all of my car stocks um in in my large car company and uh i i bought a social media network and um and and i yeah i we have a social media network now guys so

if you go to hometech.social uh you can you can abandon twitter and sign up over there at hometech.social and it's a mastodon thing like that seems to be where nerd people are fleeing to i don't really know i haven't really figured it out but i was looking around i couldn't really find any like there's the twit twit twit has one twit.social um there are some other ones out there that are like technology focused but i didn't really find one that was like home automation focused which is kind of like what we could be uh if if it gains popularity i don't know there could be like three people that are interested in that kind of thing um i don't know that i am yet but i the the the the usage

that i've got out of mastodon so far has been quieter than the normal Twitter. There's not as many people on it, clearly. But I have just barely used it and kind of gone back and forth. But the people that are on there that I have followed are pretty good followers. So decent posts and images and pictures and that kind of thing pop up on there from time to time so um i i'm pretty convinced at this point that twitter is dead and uh you can't you can't fire that amount of people who know where the bodies are buried and expect the company to survive on just willpower alone that's not going to happen so we'll be interesting to see uh what happens

there but you know we've we've spent billions of dollars putting this together right so like you guys are testing it right now yeah i think tj's testing i don't know if gavin's even on there yet but i'm testing the migration process shortly you know like um yeah you know the testing's going slow because you fired half the staff i know i'm sorry i shouldn't have done that well we can't afford cd if we're paying all these staff you know to sit around do nothing we're going to cd so yeah yeah yeah we we can't we can't we've got a we've got to be able to put our money where we've got to have our priorities here i guess is what you're saying so you know i think mastodon at this point is kind of like cryptocurrency right where it's like the technology

behind it makes sense and you know i can see how it's a thing right like totally it's there i get it but like using it and like telling other people about it is basically the same thing at this point yeah i i agree with that yeah like it's just like listening to i think you guys talk about the migration process and i was listening to accidental tech podcasts earlier today and they were talking about mastodon and it just it just sounds like such a like a terrible social media platform like it just sounds like i guess like a blog or something i don't i don't know it can be a little bit of both i I suppose. It's not far from Twitter, but this thing has been out for,

I want to say like five or six years now. It's been out for a while. And the first time that we thought Twitter was just like, just everybody was done with it, they started this up and I kind of created an account over on one of the servers. The weird part about it is like, it's not like one place that you go, right? Like everybody, um, will go to twitter.com or facebook.com and Instagram and you can

make an account there and you can have multiple accounts there, but it's still on those sites. It's still on Twitter. Um, the, the thing, the way they've done this is more like email, right? So like you can have an email account at Gmail or Yahoo or AOL or whatever, and you can use those accounts differently. You can combine them all into one account and just use one of those logins or something. But for the most part, it's kind of like a hybrid

between email and Twitter or microblogging or something like that. But each individual server can kind of have its own rules and focus on what it wants to kind of talk about. And then if you want to talk about other stuff, like if you want to look at what's going on on a different server, you just kind of sign up and peer over into that. And it kind of like unifies the experience through whatever app or whatever you're using. sign up and peer over into that. And it, it kind of like unifies the experience through,

through the, through whatever app or whatever you're using, but you're just kind of like logged on and joined that other server. Um, I think it's got a ways to go. Like it's, it's not as easy to, I say it's not as easy. I had a Twitter account from like 2010 or 20, 2009, like way back. And I'm like, I never used it because I couldn't figure out how to use it. Like, it just seems so confusing. And then I started understanding what hashtags were. And I felt like an old person in an urban dictionary trying to like look up, like, what is that word? Like, is there a manual for Twitter and i don't know i eventually figured it out um and was able to basically uh mute a ton of people who were spamming the the the crap out of the timeline and once i did that like that was a uh pretty good like experience like i didn't see these giant walls of hashtags or anything anymore. I basically muted anything that was over like three or three hashtags or

something like that. If you have four hashtags, four, I'd never see those suites like for the past, whatever, five years or six years that I've been on Twitter. So I don't know. I think this has got a little ways to go, but it's fun. This is kind of like our own little playground that we can get into and have a little social network. And if you want to join, it's a home tech. Dot FM slash no home tech.social. That want to join, it's hometech.fm slash, no, hometech.social.

That's it. It's got its own thing. It's its own computer. It does not run in my garage. So does this have like individual rooms and stuff or is it basically just one continuous feed like Twitter? It's one continuous feed like Twitter. I don't think there's a concept of rooms or groups, but maybe there is. I don't know. We'll figure it out. Yeah. One thing I did was, uh, I don't know what's happening with Twitter, but I downloaded my whole profile.

So I'll have everybody that follows me and everybody I follow, you know, the lists and everything. Um, so if you want to do that, keep in mind, it may take a day or two for them to actually zip it up and everything for you. There's one guy, Gavin, that he fired everybody else. He's kind of like, oh, Gavin needs this stuff. I got to zip all this up. Yeah. Took him a day to do it.

I don't know why it took him so long. It's just me. But I didn't have much to get anyway. So I have my list and everything downloaded. So if Twitter goes down tomorrow, I can try and re-find everybody on Mastodon. Yeah, and there's some tools out there, some open source tools that you can use that connect to your Twitter account and can cross-reference people. But what I found is once I find people that – or people find me on Mastodon, I can go and look and see who they're following and kind of, Oh, pick, pick out the people that I know out of those lists.

Cause it's kind of like the same social network. And at this point still full of nerdy people that are signing up for this thing, but it's, it's, the barrier is not that hard if you're familiar with Twitter on like just getting onto one of the big servers, the like dot social, the Macedon's dot social or whatever. It's, it's a very similar experience,

but finding everybody, you know, that may have a different username or altogether because they didn't get there fast enough to get their Twitter username on mastodon. Who knows? It'll be interesting. We'll see how it goes. There could be just like,

like I said, just be like three people on there. But I have Seth at hometech.social. So why not? It's like having an email, a vanity email address. If you want to have your name at hometech.social as your Mastodon name thing that may or may not be a thing in the future, come get it. It's it's there now is there any kind of like a verification status to know if these are legit people seth uh i don't how do

i know that you're seth i don't that's a good question um i don't i don't know if there is any verification on that are you are you suggesting that you're going to um create another a bunch of fake accounts and spam them? Not me. I mean, what if somebody acts like they're me? What if Gavin decides tomorrow that he's going to pretend to be me? I don't have any recourse for that, right? Yeah, I don't know.

Look for the people with the orange check. We'll hand out orange checks. You could post incriminating things about me or something. I don't know. It would tank my home tech career. It could. It could tank your stocks and your thing. I don't know. It would tank, it would tank my home tech career. It would, it could, it could tank your stocks and your, and your thing. I don't know. I have to look at all this. It's all kind of new to me. And there is some like forms of administration things that you can do in moderation and all that kind of stuff. So I'll have to step down

as CEO of my car company. Well, at least you'll have your rocket company to back, you know, oh, well that's true. Space, space rocket thing. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. It should be, it should be kind of fun and we'll see what happens. So if you're interested in that, uh, home tech dot social, easy enough to remember, I guess I should remember it, but I, I keep saying slash maybe it's easy enough. Maybe if you go to homeech.fm slash social, I'll have a redirect

that points you in the right direction by the time this comes out on Friday. I have no idea. We'll see what happens. All right, guys. What do you say we jump into a couple of Hometech headlines?

Let's do it. All right. We talked about this last week, but there's another hit piece that came out for Amazon. So we've got to talk about this. Over at the uh ars technica they posted this this story about amazon uh saying it's going to eliminate 10 000 jobs in the the the business unit that that also includes amazon alexa and the amazon echo people

so it's it's card it's called the the division is called Worldwide Digital. And it doesn't include just Amazon, like the Amazon Echo device people and the Alexa people. It also includes Amazon Prime Video. And let's see, some other things that are probably in there too. So when they say it's on track to lose $10 billion this year, that's a significant amount of money. But keep in mind that the video stuff is in there too.

And they spent $1 billion just to make Lord of the Rings. So that could be part of it, right? So it says that the division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022 with other division, which is double the losses of any other division. So this thing's bleeding money. It seems like from the reporting here is that Jeff Bezos was just like a huge advocate of the ecosystem and the new CEO, not so much. So they're letting people go, shutting down projects, it sounds like.

And it doesn't sound like there's like interest in losing the platform. I don't think I let's get this. I don't think Echo or Alexa is going anywhere anytime soon. But it does sound like there's going to be a renewed focus on the platform. And that may actually be pretty good. Yeah, maybe like a renewed focus on like the actual home automation side. I mean, it started out as, you know, a general shopper for everybody, right? It was an easy way for you to yell across the room and order more toilet paper through Amazon and they would deliver it the next couple of days for you. Um, it evolved quickly into a home automation platform. And I don't think Amazon was really ready for that and what that really entailed um i think i think it and i'm going to use a pun here it found its voice in home automation

like i don't think it was something they thought about um at all like it just it was if you go back and look at that original commercial and it's it's online somewhere they're like i can check the weather and ask a dumb joke and like it'll tell me a joke but there was nothing i don't think there's anything about home automation in that like mentioned at all um set reminders timers all that all the like core features were there but home automation is just something like popped up and people like oh this is cool and then it definitely gained some traction because of how open the ecosystem was for development yeah i mean that's absolutely true i don, just like you said it,

I don't think it's going away. I think they'll probably eventually add some kind of like add tier or, you know, subscription plan with it that will give you some kind of advanced features or something maybe to soften the blow. But, you know, everywhere is kind of going through a recession at this point.

Everybody's kind of cutting staff. You know, it's tightening of the belts, which is pretty normal. The only reason it's coming under scrutiny right now is because of the recession everywhere. If the economy was going good right now, nobody would be batting an eye and it would be business as normal. But now that everybody's kind of losing money and stuff is slowing down, like you're going to see these cuts everywhere. Kevin, I know you're a big user. Oh yeah I'm a big user and and I don't I don't think the actual core will go anywhere like you said I think it will still it will probably get some renewed focus you know some more specific we'll stop seeing things like that flying robot being talked about you know all these other weird things that they're working on.

Probably some of those are going to get canned, but I'm good with that. We'll see what it is. I know Home Assistant is using this year to focus on their own local voice control. So for us that are really into our do-it-yourself type of thing, we can look forward to something like that. Maybe if, you know, the Amazon was starting to annoy me because of all the, what's that prompt that it keeps giving you, you know, by the way, or whatever like that, you know, all these random prompts they keep throwing in there.

And if they start, if that gets worse, I'll just throw it out. Yeah, it will be, it'll be nice if this stuff has stuff to compete with, right? So like if there's an open source alternative for home automation, voice controlled home automation that really steps up the game, like it would be nice to see individuals who are in Amazon actually, you know, chase some of those features that people may be leaving for. And I think they have enough money to make really good, like really good product.

But like all of those things we talked about, like the subscription thing, TJ, like this article kind of does say that like they had all these ideas and really nothing has worked or stuck to this thing. Like it's like they've tried to put advertisements in people don't like that they've tried to do um a bunch of other a bunch of like inner like skills specifically tailored to maybe like ordering a pizza from dominoes or something like that um did not work like they couldn't people were just like i'll just use the app and order the

right pizza rather than rely on this thing to kind of guess at what i want so it they can't find a an exterior funding source for this and and and you were saying like maybe a subscription but i'm like i have one other idea and it's kind of mentioned down here at the bottom like why don't they just raise the price of the device right like here's here's the quote here in the article. Um, and I guess Google is having like almost identical problems, not, not to the tune of 10 billion, $10 billion, but they've, they've definitely cut back on their, um, the business unit that manufactures the pixel products. Uh, it says, uh, while Google and Amazon hurt each other with an at cost pricing war, Apple smart speaker plans focused on more on the bottom line.

Hmm. Uh, the original home pods, $350 price was a lot more expensive than the competition, but that's probably a more sustainable business model than charging nothing for the product, um, or at cost for the product and then expecting to make it up.

I don't know how, like, because nothing, they just didn't have a business plan for it. They just, we'll put this out there and the money will come is what they thought. And I think that's probably not a smart idea. And a lot of things you mentioned too, like it's weird,

but it's like, how do you find out about this stuff? Like, how do you find out, like, there's no interface. Like there's nobody's advertising that, hey, you can use your amazon device to do this right there's thousands of skills but you never know what they are who has a skill or how to use it or anything like that so i think a lot of that has an interface or an educational issue that i've heard people complain about too yeah and i think you know really amazon's in the best position for this, right? Because they have a giant, uh, what server company AWS. Um, so,

you know, their costs to run the servers is obviously something they have to keep track of, but they're probably in a lot better position than other companies who would want to start a voice assistant at this point. I mean, they kind of have that backbone at least, so it helps out a little bit, but it's still a big challenge to deal with all that information. Yeah, I mean, don't discount Google there. They kind of have their own servers too and infrastructure as well. And Apple, I think, was using Amazon and Google,

but has in recent years had enough money. I mean, like what, a $2 trillion company at this point to basically build out their own data centers and do their own thing. It's pretty interesting here. Alexa seems to be in third place in the U.S. for voice assistant popularity. Google Assistant has 81.5 million users, Apple Siri at 77.6 and Alexa at 71, 71.6 million. So,

um, I don't think, I don't think they're in a bad place at all. Like that's, that's pretty good. They just got to figure out how to make money on their product. And I don't know, it's a good product.

They just should charge for it. And then, and then actually have direction. Like there there's there's another thing in your uh one employee told business insider that currently quote there is no directive for devices in the future um they they need some leadership it sounds like some like leadership is going to get in there has my has an idea of what to do with this thing that doesn't involve maybe advertising, maybe making like some really quality products that work really well, like extremely well, that would be a good idea and pay for it.

You can pay for them. So what I, and I think there's a chance to, I mean, you know, I think it'd be kind of ironic, but what if they released a more expensive option that was, you know,

privacy focused first, where maybe stuff didn't leave the device itself as often or, you know, open it up something to like advanced automation. So it actually became like a true smart home platform. And a lot of that stuff. My problem with all this software, though, is that if you want good support in the long run, you're going to have to pay more than $40 one time for it, right? It's the ongoing support of all the products, it's the updates and all that good stuff. If you're not paying for the software at some point, you're going to be the product.

So why not release something else that kind of bypasses that and maybe it's more privacy focused or maybe you can do more advanced automations, that kind of thing. I don't know. Maybe they've already thought about all that. I don't know. Maybe they just realized our data is not really worth that much to them for something like,

Oh, look, this person ordered a toothbrush. That's really good information. Oh, Gavin has been talking about a TV for six months. Oh, and he bought one TV in,

you know, for you. Oh no, it was 12 months. months you didn't even buy it from amazon yeah exactly game ads for it every day uh all right well speaking of spending money on product um sonos is preparing a new wave of premium uh home speakers for release sometime next year we don't know when. This comes from The Verge, and they have had some pretty good hints

into what Sonos is doing. Some leaks, I guess. Mostly correct. Yeah, mostly correct, yeah. There's still one, the surround product thing that never materialized. Oh my gosh, that was a big one. Yeah, I was hoping.

But in this case, I think, according to this story, Sonos is going to be entering some new product categories, and specifically four new categories. We don't know what they are, because they're kind of quiet on that. But in the URL on this link that we'll put in the show notes uh headphones is in in that tj and i you've got to be celebrating at this point give me headphones already so what are you going to pay for your headphones honestly at this point i think i would pay at most like two maybe three hundred i mean it's one of those things, right? So I use my Bluetooth headphones a lot

with my phone just to listen to music and stuff as I'm walking around the house. But a lot of times I would like to listen to my TV instead. But maybe it's like early in the morning or it's late at night where I don't want the TV audio going super loud or I don't want to use all the speakers. So, you know, TV headphones have been around for decades at this point. I just need some that are compatible with Sonos. And I think it comes down to the features, you know, like I'm expecting that if they came out with something like this, if I turn on my TV, I can just instantly like either tap on the headphones or something and it would turn off all the speakers and just put

it in the headphones. Something easy like that. I'm hoping that it would turn off all the speakers and just put it in the headphones. Something easy like that. I'm hoping that it would offer. If it doesn't, then I probably wouldn't bother with it. I don't see why not. I mean, you can do that with their current speakers for the most part. So all they have to do is add a button. And as long as they have Bluetooth on them as well.

Like, I'm not just going to buy a set of Sonos headphones. Like, I want to be able to use them with a Bluetooth device if I want to. This article mentions them purchasing a company called T2 Software and had been focusing on Bluetooth, Bluetooth, L.E. audio standard and a related LC3 codec. So probably won't be disappointed with whatever they come out. It sounds like it'll probably work with with Bluetooth for sure. Well, and I know there's a lot of complaints about the sonos roam

i've never used it myself but supposedly a lot of people have problems with the bluetooth in that device either cutting out or dropping dropping out um so it's a common complaint and hopefully they resolve that before this is released um i don't think the move has that issue so i don't know if it's some different Bluetooth device that's inside there or what. But that is a common complaint. Yeah. So headphones, possibly some kind of home theater product.

And then there's another company they bought with that has to do with like they were working on something, a transducer, which is a speaker, that will be smaller and lighter form factors while producing exceptional sound. they were working on something, a transducer, which is a speaker, uh, that will be smaller and lighter form factors while producing exceptional sound. So maybe a smaller, a smaller device that produces really good sound from Sonos. So there's your app of speakers. Yeah, could be, could be.

Yeah. Headphones seems to be all over this article though. So yeah, they've been, so we've been talking about headphones now for like six years i feel like i i you guys mentioning it i think you mentioning it was the first i'd heard of it like i never even thought about putting a sonos inside of headphones but i guess you can do it make it happen yeah be good for like watching tv at night too like people use it i i've known a lot of people who like watch tv they'll put headphones on and what's what's weird to me too is that sonos hasn't opened this up to like let you do separate left center and rights i don't know if it's just like

an ease of use thing but i feel like they would sell way more speakers if they let me you know do like like a sonos arc as my center channel And then like a beam as a left and right, um, or even like a seven dot one. So maybe, maybe they'll expand a little bit. Can I get five arcs like in a 5.1 configuration? That's what I'm saying.

Why not? Just big speakers everywhere. I don't know. Uh, seems, seems pretty cool. We'll see what they do. The,

the, one of the other things was a home theater OS thing that they talked about job postings, uh, and needing things for that. So it'd be interesting to see what they do the one of the other things was a home theater os thing that they talked about job postings and needing things for that so be interesting see what they come up with keep to keep an eye supposedly next year we're going to start seeing some of this stuff fly onto the shelves so it'll fly off and not be in stock shortly thereafter i'm not buying it unless it's matter compatible headphones with matter there you go that's right all right well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 413

there you go i got a little follow-up here uh in the mail back from uh tokyo gem there in the the hub he he wrote on last week's podcast there was talk about airplay requiring the stream to pass through the phone or computer before streaming to the tv or audio device so although this was true for the original airplay airplay 2 which is what's in all the new tvs acts more like chromecasting whereby the stream is then loaded directly to the tv i did not know that i knew there was improvements in the airplay 2 i did not know it was doing this. And that's actually really cool.

Very cool. I wonder if it's different, though, because when I'm streaming from my phone, my podcast I'm listening to, I've heard it break up and stuff like that when I've been out of range. I wonder if it's different if you're casting something that it can connect to um you know on its own like if it knows it's a youtube video for example will it then cast that um versus audio on your phone if you're sending audio yeah so uh but it's good to know though um that that's good yeah because big things like videos probably be better if it directly connected. The, the audio on your phone is good enough to go through the wifi most of the time.

Yeah. Very interesting piece. Thanks. Thanks. Uh, thanks Jimmy for writing in. We're did not know that. So it's a good piece of information to get in into the head here.

Um, all right. I, we got a pick of the week from TJ courtesy of a post that he did over in the hub. And I have this laid labeled tj sucky thing um describe this thing man it's it's a little vacuum attachment that you found yeah you know it's a very basic item right um when you're mounting a tv or cutting holes there's all that drywall dust

that kind of gets everywhere and when i worked out in florida we learned several different methods kind of deal with this you make a little tape shelf with some drywall or some masking tape or drywall paint tape whatever that's called um you put some plastic down you put a cardboard box up to it whatever i mean drywall dust still gets everywhere push it underneath the cabinet yeah yeah i mean all kinds of like you know you put a drop cloth down, whatever. You hold the bag. You just shake it out in their living room. Yeah.

I've been there. Wait till you get out in the driveway at least. Jeez. And you didn't work with the technicians I worked with. But then hopefully you remember it before you get to the next house and you shake it out in their house. Yes. Yes. But this is a little $50 tool.

I think it's called an air tip, uh, something, something from Milwaukee. Um, it's compatible with a wide range of vacuums. So you don't have to like use a Milwaukee vacuum. I'm using like a $40 stinger vacuum, I think like a shop vac. Um, and basically what it does is it creates a suction against the wall. Um, so it actually uses the vacuum to suck against the wall. And then there's like a little slot up top. So as you're cutting your hole or drilling,

the dust just falls right into it and just gets sucked in. And it's $50. You can buy them at Home Depot or pretty much any hardware store that sells Milwaukee tools. I'm sure other companies make them as well. It's probably not a new invention or anything, but I saw it at the store the other day and I wanted to give it a shot.

And today I finally tried it, worked great. The only thing is it left a little residue on the wall, which is to be expected, but I did not get any dust on the carpet or anything. One thing I didn't really like about it though is it's very tall as you add the actual vacuum hose to it. So depending on, you know, where you've installed like the mount or if you're cutting like in a wall plate or something, the trim might be too close and it doesn't actually create suction because it doesn't lay flat against the wall. So the sizing is, you know, a little bit of a factor depending on if you can use it or not.

But it's good for most things, I would say. Yeah, it's like it's almost like a little dustpan that has a vacuum attachment at the bottom instead of a handle. Super, super simple. Yeah, I don't know why it's taking them this long to come up, somebody to invent something like this. And maybe something like this has been out for years but i've never seen it i've always tried the tape or the cardboard box or just many drop cloths all the all the stuff that kind of work not really there's nothing more infuriating than like drilling four holes and yeah you have all the drywall dust on the tape and you're about to fold the tape into itself and all the dust just flies everywhere and it falls on the ground and you just avoided all the work that you tried to avoid.

So why did I even try? Yeah. Just let it go on the ground. Yeah. Very cool. Always cool. I like tools. Tools are fun to get, even though I don't want to use that tool.

Like I would, it would, it would come in handy. Well, tools are, tools are great when, you know, they when they do the job and they save you time. And something like this, it's $50, but it'll save me some time in the long run. All I have to do when I'm done is just wipe down the wall. So well worth the money. Does this snap in with our red tool cases? Does it snap on top somehow?

It does not. It's not pack out compatible it might have a maybe the maybe like the milwaukee pack out vacuum has like a spot for it or something but it's pretty large honestly so i think whatever you mounted it on would be like an external mount instead of like internal so i'm sure you could get like a little pipe or something and just mount it somewhere that way it doesn't get broken very nice gavin you have anything to say do you need a sucky thing gavin i had something similar uh on my um sander you know i'd sand the walls and it would just suck it oh yeah a little hose attachment good i mean got most of it but this looks like it's even better. Supposedly, that's like a requirement

for some job sites now because of OSHA. Like, you have to have a vacuum attached to your tool. They can't create airborne dust. I don't work in those environments myself, but I've heard about it. No, I haven't in my entire career. I never worked in a non-dusty

environment. Yeah, pretty standard. In fact, the more dust, that was pretty much the guaranteed sign that I was going to be non dusty environment. Yeah. Pretty standard. In fact, the more dust, uh, that was pretty much the guaranteed sign that I was going to be working in that, that particular spot. So the more pet dander,

dust for, well, I just like just all sorts of stuff. Probably should have worn a mask for years. Uh, anyway, uh, if you have any feedback,

uh, questions, comments, picks of the week, a great ideas for show gives a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, all right. This has been a short show, right? Like we haven't been going on very long. We got plenty of projects to talk about. First up, some business projects for the business. TJ, you said you're converting to details, man. What,

what's, what is that about? Yeah. So right now I'm using a software for my business called house call pro. Um, we do all our, you know, invoicing and scheduling and all that kind of good stuff.

Um, it, it creates basically a general estimate or job layout and kind of tells you the line items and stuff, but it doesn't really make it look attractive, right? Like it's, it's a base program. It does fine. You know, I go out and install TVs or a ring doorbell. Nobody really cares about the presentation of the estimate, right? But the problem is when you get into some of these larger projects where they want like a

full breakdown or you have to put a job description and you have to kind of give more information to, you know, sell the job. That's where Housecall Pro kind of falls short. So I'm starting to look into DTools. I've started my trial with it. I've used it in the past. I know a lot of people that use it. They love it. It's got a lot of nice integrations. You know, you can tie it into like ADI and snap av so you can automatically import items and pricing and it suggests labor and it's all around a pretty good product um i don't know if i'm going to convert to it fully just yet i mean it looks really nice for those larger projects when you're doing like a very you know nice home theater or conference rooms that kind of thing but if i just want to like install a TV or something, it seems like

it's a little bit much. Yeah. Yeah. A little complex for that. Um, so I don't know where I sit with that. I've got 21 days left on it. We're going to go ahead and give it a shot and see what happens. I think pricing is similar to what I pay right now, maybe a little bit more. But the benefits might be worth it in the long run. So if you use DTools, maybe drop us a message and let us know what you like about it. If you don't use DTools, maybe use something else. Let us know what you use. I'm always looking for new software to kind of help the business and get everything running efficiently. So looking for suggestions there.

I will say, I mean, from my experience, I never figured out exactly how to do that, the presentation proposal very well. And like for small projects and hanging TVs, like going from like quoting the job or, you know, and getting invoice I think was kind of like the biggest like hurdle. And one of the, one of the, like many, many, like even the, the software I use now it's called wave wave apps or something like that.

It's, it's basically like QuickBooks online. Like you don't have, it's all in the web and you just kind of go in and do all your banking stuff in there. But it's free and they have like invoicing and people can just pay with their credit cards or bank draft or whatever and it goes right into your bank account um through their through their software so like that's always been like getting the money like sending that off and making it convenient for someone to pay has been like my number one, like realizations like that. That's the number one feature need. Like it doesn't really matter like how good or bad the quoting software is.

As long as you can like get the system designed out and to where you think it's going to need to be within the budgets and everything, and then just be able to get that deposit put in with speed. So everybody's happy that, that, that, that was always like the, the challenge. I know that probably the one you're talking about, has it house call or whatever, probably has that electronic and everybody has it invoicing. I think details even has that now. So, yeah.

Yeah. And I don't have any problems with my current software. I mean, it works mostly fine. But like I said, when, when you get to those larger projects that kind of want like a whole PDF layout and diagram and all that kind of good stuff, the Housecall Pro isn't really meant for that. It's really more of like, you know, an HVAC or electrician software.

We're kind of just going in repairing things or replacing things, not necessarily doing full, you know, build outs and everything. So we'll see how it goes. Gavin, you running any software for your business that that you can invoice quickly with? I don't even have any clients to invoice. You know, these are the problems I don't have to deal with. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Software software is expensive. Yeah, it can get kind of crazy for sure. It adds up pretty quickly, especially when you start adding the different, you know, layers and everything like that. It's not just enough to have the invoicing and estimation software. You have to have the tracking software or the mailing software or this or that.

So, I mean, it's every little piece adds up and eventually you're pretty much at what it costs for rent or something. Cost of doing business, man. If it makes it easy, that's all it matters, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I said, the, the, we would, we didn't really care that we were paying X amount a month for so many seats, as long as like, if it paid for itself, you know, it makes sense if it was, it made the getting, getting the job done faster is good, but like, also like getting money in for the job was even better so like going around and tracking people down for a check deposit you know that wasn't really working but

you could send them a little form online and they just had no problem putting your credit card in or bank draft or whatever and just doing it that way that that seemed to be like the a big differentiator that we had on the software that when i was doing this and it was this was a while back so imagine that online payments was it was a thing like crazy i know who would have thought all right uh well uh gavin's got no business got no clients uh but he's got projects uh and specifically the state of gavin's home automation home home assistant home uh he continues to expand it's like it's just a virus i guess now at this point like it's just it's getting into everything just keeps cheating on habitat i know i feel so bad every time i uh

make another change i know i'm gonna be powering it off soon. I hope it didn't hear me. That's going to be a sad conversation. I know. You know, the sad part is canceling my Hubitat subscription. You know, like I almost have to send thank you cards to the support guys. Just, you know, for the years we've been talking, you know, there's some it's a sad time. But like this week, I basically migrated all my Z-Wave stuff over. So I picked up a Zeus S2 stick, a 700 series stick, plugged it into my server, started up a Z-Wave JS and pretty much just started migrating stuff over all the hardwired. So this was one of the things I really wanted to see was. Are the problems with Z-Wave or were they with the habitat?

Right. Like this is some of the stuff I was dealing with. And so all the hardwired stuff moved over easily. All my Inaveli switches discovered easily done. Everything worked. Where I really had problems was when I started getting into the battery stuff. They were just, you know, finicky to get them added. And eventually I got through them all, but it just took too much time. One of the things I didn't plan properly, I guess, was my hub is sitting in the basement. It's on my

server. It sits in the basement. The USB key is in the basement. So some of the devices in the further part of my home were having a hard time communicating with it, right? Especially when adding it, it doesn't, it doesn't go through the routers to add it. It needs to talk to the USB stick directly. So the only thing I came up with was I just grabbed a really long USB cable, extension cable, ran it all the way up to the middle of my house and that, you know, I was able to add the rest of the stuff. And then once I added them, they were in the mesh and they would be able to communicate later on so it's just getting them initially added but um once i did that i went through a number of batteries you know i have to order more batteries because adding and

removing drains the batteries um but it's now running um one thing i have to say is i haven't had yet any z-wave problems devices are Devices are always responding, you know, very fast. Nothing's dropped off. It's been good. I'm crossing my fingers. I'm hoping it stays that way. Next will be Zigbee, you know. So I still have.

Is that the last hurdle? That's the last one? The only thing I have left. So I did about 100 devices z-wave devices but i have like about 10 to 20 zigbee devices still sitting on my habitat hub plus my camera integration so i've actually written my first integration for home assistant for my cameras um i'm just cleaning up the code and fixing and adding a few little things but then i'll be able to move my cameras over and my last of the zigbee and then you know it will be a sad day when i you know power off the hub and do a reset you know um

i don't know i have to you know have a cake or something you know i'm feeling so bad what is the uh what is the hub attach subscription i didn't realize they had one they have um and it's a really good subscription so they have a subscription where you can you get um if your hub dies they'll ship you a new one so that's one of the features of it it's like instant like they'll ship it the next day um the other thing it allows is not backups, but backups of the USB, the Z-Wave stick. So if your hub were to die, you could backup and restore the Z-Wave devices as well. And there's a few remote access to the hub, I think was another feature in it. So there were a couple of things.

It wasn't expensive. I think it was like 40 bucks for the year, but it was more of a backup thing because these hubs become like the central part of your home that if it dies, it becomes important when things don't work. Right. So it's good to have a nice little backup. And a lot of people want to remote access into their hub. And this is kind of like they provide a proxy service or whatever to get you into your house. Very nice. Well, I've had a little project that I I'm finishing up on. And if it's anything, if it's, if it's, if it's anything that you thought it would be,

um, that you guys can name a lot more. Nope. Oh, I was going to try and do the, uh, the, the bird, the bird software. Uh, so there, there's this little application you can run on a Raspberry Pi and it will identify, like you put a microphone and it records, it records audio. And then it processes that audio through AI and figure out what bird that's making that noise. And I'm going to do that one day. But I I realized that.

Well, I found two I found two Raspberry Pis, first of all, and I didn't realize I had two. So I was like, well, I'll just get one of them going with this bird thing and it it i don't for whatever reason like i didn't realize that the raspberry pi didn't have a microphone input it just has the headphone output on it um so i was like well what else can i do and there's this uh there's this flight tracker app that i've been looking at for a while and they have this little software you can run on a computer or Raspberry Pi. And it, you just plug in like a, um, a DBS antenna thing. Like it's just a little antenna you can get off Amazon for like 20 bucks. You plug that in and then they give you like a subscription to their business flight tracker software for is like a $500 a year value. And it's for free. And so like i hooked all that up hooked the little antenna up

to the raspberry pi and uh i'm i'm tracking some flights man it's all live real real time i can see like who i'm tracking and all that good stuff um a lot of fun like just little fun raspberry pi projects that um i'm doing to instead of doing all the outside work that i should be doing to get the lawnmower up and going we're never getting that lawnmower done are we i really want to hear about the lawnmower not the birds uh i mean i'm excited about the birds but you know potentially uh lawnmower will be done this week i don't i don't know i don't know all right um it's they should have some time uh coming up. And if I can,

I've got the wire halfway running around the house. If I can get it the rest of the way, then that's it. But I've got all these other distractions. So I bought, bought one of these things too. It's a, it's a weather station,

a Tempest weather station. So like, I'm going to be tracking birds and airplanes and rainstorms pretty, pretty well at my house. This one's made by Tempest, T-E-M-P-E-S-T. I know, Gavin, you've seen it. I hadn't seen it very much until some developer friends of mine were like, hey, you really have to check this out. But it's just a little weather station. You stick on a pole outside and it does all of the data collection, wind speeds, all that good stuff.

Lightning strike detection tells you how far the lightning strike was, you know, away from the house and that kind of thing. That's important in Florida. Yeah, it actually is. Um, there's a, we, we, we have a pool at our community and like, there's not really any indication when you're there as you know, if, if lightning is striking is striking, it can be like 10 miles away and still strike you. But you need to know, like you can't even hear it.

You may hear rumblings way off, but you may not know it's, it's going to come strike you. So yeah. Does lightning, does not lightning like sneak up on you in Florida? Cause usually we know it's coming. No,

no, no, there will be storms inland and people on the beach get struck by lightning and it's just sunny. There's no, not a cloud in the sky at the beach. It's wild. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. It's not that important. Like if I hear thunder, I generally get inside, but, but, uh, I will be interested to see like what the lightning counts are. Cause it can get pretty intense around here. Um, like the, the lightning storms are are are no joke like it's some nights it's almost like constant just giant lightning bolts one right after another

it's it's really wild um so i've got that to put in i bought a pole for today the pole was too big for the little pole mount that i had so i gotta bring it back i don't know it seemed to be complicating things uh this seems like it's probably one of the easiest things i could have installed but at this point it's gonna get installed before the lawnmower it's just like everything it probably will be because it's i mean it's already paired it's ready to go it comes with this little base station that you plug in and hook to your wi-fi and then it talks out to the thing in the yard and um you know if you get the lawnmower installed and you don't have to cut the grass you'll have more time to install the tempest you know and do all your other work because you don't have to cut the grass all this

logic gavin i mean i know really but for those listening the tempest we were looking it up before the show the tempest has local control um so it looks like it can do everything is locally on your network except for the weather reports which it needs the internet for. But also the cool thing is it integrates with the Ratio system. So I guess Ratio has it built in so it can know how much rain you got or if rain's coming, so then it can decide if it's going to water your lawn or not. So I'm going to take a look. We were looking at it, and it looks like they're going to have a Black Friday sale. So I might pick one up on Black friday depending on what they offer yeah yeah if if you um by the time you're listening to this

check it out and they may still have some stuff online that you can get um i can't remember how much it was like 350 or something like that um maybe 299 i don't remember um but i was like been staring at the thing for a long time and it got really good reviews from a couple of friends of mine. So I was like, I'm going to check it out. And I was kind of surprised of all the like sensors that are built into it. And it doesn't have a little whirlybird thing on top. Like it uses kind of like an ultrasonic way to determine what the wind speed is.

Like it, it just kind of looks, it looks different and it's got solar panels on it to keep it charged um and it uses you just there's no wires you don't have running wires too it's completely wireless to the little bridge that you have inside so um as far as install goes it's it's a lot easier than a robot lawnmower yeah yeah the never-ending projects of seth's house oh man i tell you i tell you they, they don't stop, but I think I'm, I'm hoping this weekend I can get, uh, the robot christened and named or something. I gotta find a name for it. Then I clippy or I don't know if you, if you're listening to the show and you, and you, and you think you've got a good name for the robot that needs to go in there. Let me know. Cause I I'm Gavin's got some pretty good ones, uh, for robot vacuum,

but I don't, I don't know what to name this guy. So my, my robot vacuum is named dusty. That's a good one. He's a good name for vacuum. Yeah. I don't know.

Well, hopefully I can, hopefully I can get this thing cranked up this weekend and get the wire put in for the rest of the yard. Oh my gosh. And then go from there. So projects, projects, it's a holiday weekend. I'm just going to be as busy as ever. So even more busy, actually.

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yeah yeah i noticed like when i was i can transfer my current social account over to this and it says you know you can transfer it back and i think even the admins of a server if there's a process that they can do the transfer for everyone else you know as they're moving moving shutting it down or something like that so it's not a completely lost cause, I guess, if you were to do that. So you still have both accounts, both places. It's just which one you want to be active at, I guess. Anyway, if you want to help out but can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of

your choice. With that, that wraps up another week in Home Tech. Have a great weekend, everybody, and happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble, gobble. Happy Thanksgiving.