HomeTech.fm - Episode 415 - NRG Energy NRG

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

This week on HomeTech: Gavin and Seth discuss the weeks news including some updates from Amazon and eero that expand the features of current products. Vivint is acquired for $2.8 billion in cash. What's the inside of Michael Jordan's home look like, a few things you should never say to Alexa, and Gavin gives us an update on his Home Assistant project.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 9th, 2022. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation. And Gavin got some big news. Well, first of all, TJ is not here tonight. He's taking the weekend off. That's cool.

That's cool. We'll get him back. Yeah. We may edit him in in random spots. You can't stop us. One less person to pay. Yeah, exactly. This is out of there's plenty of PTO.

I mean, that's it. Let's see. Gavin, I got some big news though. Uh-oh. Fiber is coming, man. The crews are like working down the street. There, there's like two of those big giant underground tunneling machine things they have where they push the con they're, they're doing conduit right now. And then I assume they come back and put the conduit, the fiber through that. Um, the little, all the boxes are

showing up in my neighbor's yards and they are presently, like one of the big machines is presently in my neighbor's yard, kind of in between the two yards and they're, you know, making their way this way. So I'm super excited. We're getting close to having maybe having fiber at some point. That's awesome. We got, we actually got all that run and hooked up and it's all hooked up to my house and everything this summer. But then they gave me the price of how much the fiber internet was going to cost me per month. So now I'm waiting on the competition to kick in so that they start offering the deals to get me to come over. So I have all the cables there.

Everything's there. It's all ready to go. I'm just waiting on them to come and offer me like a massive discount to switch over and the one thing i don't know if you'll you'll run into this but when they dug up my yard you know they ruined pieces of the grass and everything they oh yeah trenches and then they came back and they threw down some magic seed and i don't know what's in the seed but that grass with no water is growing taller than all my other grass that I've watered and fertilized and everything else. It's five degrees out right now. We're in our winter phase and that grass is still growing.

Like I almost had to go out and cut it the other day just where they fixed it because it's sticking up above everything else. And it's going to look awkward next year because it's like a different shade of green right so that's even worse so now i have like it's a light green so i'm trying to track the guys down so i can get like a bag of that stuff and just cover my lawn in it because that that's the type i don't know if it's like florida grass but i just think it's if it's just growing in the winter it's florida grass because it just doesn't stop. I was out there mowing. I actually mowed today. But it's growing slower. I'll give it that.

Like it doesn't grow. Since it's not raining every single day, it's growing slower. And I have to knock down the backyard a little bit to let the little clippy go back there and mow. So little clippy mowed the side yard today. Okay. And I, I kind of left him out there for a few hours and he kind of bounced back and forth in this little side area and did a pretty good job.

I went out there and looked at it today. I was like, Oh yeah, acceptable, acceptable Clippy. Did a good job. I'm so jealous of Clippy. Like I was looking at,

you know, videos and, you know, robotic lawnmowers and the wife reassured me once again, we do not need one. So it's going to take me some time to break her down. I'm working on it. I guess, I mean, I'm hoping that, I'm hoping that once I get, so I used the big lawnmower before it, I don't know, something's wrong with it. I'm just, I'm done messing with it. But I used it to like get about halfway through the backyard before I kind of had to stop and come inside.

But I ran over the wire and broke the wire. So I had to do my first wire repair that I caused. I figured it'd be like the neighbors and their giant, you know, lawn service or something. Nope, it was me. I ran over the boundary wire, had to go back out there and put it back in the ground, do a splice. Luckily, I bought extra splice cable and all that good stuff. Learn from your mistakes. with it because I'm done with that stupid thing. And, um, you can become somebody else's headache and I will just use a little push more if I have to. Uh, but yeah, I'm excited.

I'm hoping that, um, I mean, they soon I'll be able to just turn him loose in the whole yard, just schedule it up and say, go Mo, you know, this,

this day, just have at it, go Mo and just sit him out there for X, X amount of time every single day. See what happens. That'll be awesome. I'm looking forward to see like how, how well that works out for you.

Who knows? It'll work well until the Florida grass takes over. And then, you know, just like you, it'd be like 10 feet tall and he's stuck upside down. Somehow, somehow the grass fall back and turn him upside down. He's stuck like like a turtle and then you'll have to borrow the neighbor's mower

no more i can see i see where this is going yeah yeah yeah hmm oh well we'll see it's just gonna escalate i'll just upgrade his motor or something did you build him a house yet or is he still like exposed to the elements still exposed sad little guy i i'm still trying to figure out how to do that i think i have some ideas um i i'm not gonna build him an extensive garage that i've seen the other ones have but just put an ikea table over them like and then send it to ikea hacks so that they can post a picture of it. Like, and then you can mount a rack in there too. Yeah, it's a 19-inch rack and a lawnmower garage. Yeah, that'd be a good idea.

That's funny. That's funny. All right. Well, we got a couple of stories tonight. So what do you say we jump into a few of these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. All right. Well, Amazon has pushed out an update for the Echo Show 15.

And now you can use it as a tiny little 15-inch TV. It's kind of cool. The company released a promised free update. It brings a Fire TV interface to the smart display. And as on other devices, you can stream directly from a range of apps, including Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube, all with the on-screen carousel that helps you find the content and resume shows. Pretty familiar interface, looks like, for anybody who's using the Fire TV.

But having the design where you have a touchscreen, it's kind of neat that you can have all of that kind of just right on one device and have a tiny little TV on your desk if you wanted. It'd be perfect for streaming like the World all of that kind of just right on one device and have a tiny little tv on your desk if you wanted be perfect for streaming like the world cup and that kind of thing yeah i'm not shocked that they had they did this actually i think when the fifth the show 15 first came out there were some people that actually thought it would be a great tv if they did they used it like that so you know i think some people predicted this was going to happen i think it's a great use case. Just turn it into a TV.

It's next to your monitor on your desk, and you can watch. Or in the kitchen. It's a perfect kitchen device. YouTube videos playing or something like that. And it's a good size, and it looks great on the wall too. So I think that may convince me to grab one. Yeah, it says normally it costs around $250, but they are sweetening the deal right now and it's 195 so you can buy uh some kind of bundle all together let's see what's in that

bundle oh it comes with a remote i guess that you can because they have that separate remote that you can use for the fire tvs now so that's pretty cool a high price for a 15 inch tv but it does all this other stuff so they need to make some money anyway, right? They have a long way to go though. Yep. A lot of $250 TVs to sell. So all right, we're moving on here. Oh, we do want to kind of mention one thing. We noticed that on Eero, on their blog, they had done a quick post about Euro internet backup. We thought that was kind of cool. Again, another kind of free updates have pushed out to Euro devices. And with internet backup, it allows you to basically use a mobile hotspot

or another Wi-Fi network as a backup if your wired internet goes down. So kind of like we saw that being used here in the hurricane. If you had a hotspot, some routers had the ability to connect to that and kind of like use it as your primary Internet connection until Comcast or Verizon or Fios or whatever it is comes back on. Would have been nice to have. But now if you're an Eero customer or you're a router user, it's built right in. So that's pretty cool. I think that's a really cool backup.

The only thing, it's part of the Eero Plus plan or whatever they call it. So it's something you're going to have to pay for. But like you mentioned, a few use cases right there. And if you live in an area where you have a lot of outages that, you know, especially we're all working from home now, we can't afford sometimes to be offline. Yeah. It's a great backup. No, I definitely had to, in some cases, while I had no internet, go to places I did or just kind of be on my cell phone and log into Slack and kind of like, say, hey, well, I'm still without internet, but if you need me, ping me on this and I might be able to answer if I'm not cleaning up

trees, that kind of thing. So yeah, it's, it's definitely, uh, quickly learning that the internet is a utility that cannot go missing. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, one more story here. Some quick business news. This is such a weird company name too. NRG, so the three letters, NRG Energy, has announced that it'll acquire 100% of the outstanding equity of Vivint for a total transaction value of $5.2 billion, which consists of approximately $2.8 billion in cash

and the assumption of $2.4 billion of debt, net of the cash. So basically, this Energy Energy company has basically acquired Vivint Smart Home, which is very large. The number two company in the CE Pro Top 100 has 2 million customers paying about $66 a month for monitoring. Has about 7.4 million customers. If you do the math on that, it's a few billion dollars a year in a billion with a B, a few billion dollars a year in reoccurring revenue that they're getting crazy amount of money to think about.

And Energy Energy seems to think that's something good and they want to get involved with it. So it'll be interesting to see. I've never heard of Energy Energy. It's probably a good home for these big businesses, but I'm sure that the Vivint brand isn't going anywhere and they're not going to call it Smarty Smart Home or something. I don't know. It's a horribly named company, but they're probably just going to keep the Vivint brand because that'd be something smart to do.

I just want to say Energy Energy. It's so weird. It's a weird company name, Energy Energy. I don't know. I've never heard of them, but it rolls off the tongue in a way maybe they'll call it vivid vivent you know after they acquire i don't know um but you know what at least someone's taking on vivent if vivent sold maybe they were like there seemed to be a lot of debt in there too right that they got with i mean there always is with these big yeah big um companies they always cook the

book somehow and make something make it's all funny money anyway so at that point like it's billions of dollars yeah it'll be interesting to see what energy energy does with them i'm sure they'll just make a lot more money and then they'll be called energy, energy, energy, energy. Yeah. Smart energy, energy, energy. Oh man. Well, uh, yeah, pretty cool. Good for Vivint, I guess. Vivint stockholders and that kind of thing. Uh, they purchased it for $12 a share. So I saw that it was trading a little bit lower, lower than that before the, before the announcement was made. So if, if they are, if you did have Vivint stock, you probably made some, a little bit of money off of it before the acquisition. So kind of nice. Yeah. 1190. So I guess this is maybe 10 cents per share

that you made off of it. Oh, it's still making money, making money. Yep. There you go. There's not much story. There's not many stories going on right now. This is Slow News Week, of course, because we're towards the end of the year. We sat down and recorded the Fireside Chat, and we're going to push that out on our feed later on. But we did want to have a show this week to cover a couple of little things

and kind of go over things. But if you want to look at the links and topics we discussed so far, they're over at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 415. We do have some mailbag stuff, but we'll cover that in later on. But we do have two picks of the week this week that are both really good. First up, it's this video that's been circulating around the Internet, touring Michael Jordan's mansion there on YouTube.

So I guess he put his house in Highland Park up for sale. And there's like this you know tour thing that that happens sometimes on these larger homes to get the word out to say it's for sale or whatever and uh yeah you can basically take a tour of pretty much every room of the house and it is a big house 32 000 square feet built in 1995 nice house though i mean top-notch i've i've been a lot of hangout homes in my life and uh this one this one's pretty good it's very well built and very very very well maintained over 30 years i can tell the craftsmanship and everything. Cheaper homes don't hold up like this. So he probably paid a pretty penny for this. It's Michael Jordan's home. I mean,

I was a big Bulls fan in the 90s. You know, he made a crap load of money, you know, so he's going to have I wish I could have a home so nice like this that, you know, when people visited you, they didn't even drive to the front door. They just drive to the part of the home that you were in. So you'd say, come meet me by the basketball court. And they drive to the basketball court or come meet me by the pool and they drive to the pool. Like, you know, I have to be Michael Jordan to get something like that, but the home, you know, needs some updating, but it's full of history there. He had his trophy room, you know, like it was, I would have loved to have seen the trophy room with the trophies in it you know that would have been awesome to see but it the the basketball court um you know if you

watched his other documentary um that they had i think uh what was the name of it again with michael jordan oh the last dance yeah the last dance yep they actually talked about some epic uh times they had in that gym some you know some some epic uh times they had in that gym some you know some serious games they had going on in that gym so that would that would be nice to have witnessed some of that but you know history can you imagine his new home yeah i mean there's there's definitely things i mean not to be picky but there's definitely things in here that need to be updated um in in, this was a fully modern home. And I run across homes that were built in this era,

nowhere near this level of finish, but of the same designs. I've run across very similar things. A lot of the TVs are still the 4x3 TVs, and they're in built-ins, and they haven't been updated, which goes to show you. It's a little shocking it hasn't been updated. Yeah. But there's, I mean, it looks like there's a Crestron system in there too. So when you have these bigger control systems,

it makes it a little more difficult to update that kind of thing on a whim, right? Like you're not going down to Costco and buying a TV. It's got to be re-engineered into the system and reprogrammed into the system. And then also like the cabinetry is going to have to be completely remade and done up. Yeah, that would have cost them a lot of money. I don't think you would have been able to afford updating that. Yeah, but I mean, where's your priority though? Like is it on this TV that's off the kitchen thing you never use because you always eat out?

Or, you know, like basketball stuff. It's probably basketball stuff, right? Yeah. I mean, he's got a nice theater in this thing too. A lot, like a lot of the mechanical stuff in the house. It looks like there's maybe a Vantage lighting system. I don't know. It might be Crestron or Lutron, but it looks like Vantage. Like one of the things I really It might be Crestron or Lutron, but it looks like Vantage. Like one of the things I really noticed that really stands out to me is all the air conditioner vents and AC registers in the house are very basic, like shockingly basic. Like this is one of those things it's like nowadays what they do is they hide all that stuff away and you can, you can't like, you would never see an air return or an air vent in, in, in one of these high, high end modern homes. They, they build them into the structure

a lot better. So, um, that's, that's one of the things like that really stood out to me in, in, in most of the rooms, when you're looking at like a focus wall or whatever, there's just this giant air register on it. Like, wow, that's really weird that they did that but um definitely definitely done differently these days uh but yeah if you're interested in this what four four million dollar house what's this thing on the market for i think it was 14 million dollars oh yeah sorry yeah 15 yeah i think it cost 50 million to build and he's selling it for 14 and a half or something like that all i know is you're getting a big discount on it yeah i guess i guess it's on an eight acre lot and it says 56 56 000 square feet i think a lot of that includes some of the amenities uh but i i think the official listing

says 32 so if you take out like the bass full cord basketball court and that kind of stuff maybe it's it's a little bit less you'll have to buy like a million dollars in clippies alone just to mow that lawn right yeah and maybe maybe one or two can handle it uh nine beds 19 baths that is that is wild um but you know it's uh it looks it looks like a very nicely maintained house too like in these homes you have to you have to have a staff like that maintains like you can't just have this house like pay 15 million like you're gonna pay 15 million and then you need to pay people like staff to keep over the lawns the maintenance all that all that stuff over a year. So it would be a very special buyer to come in and buy this and then also basically gotten remodeled

because anybody who pays that much is going to want to do their own thing. So they're going to spend a few million dollars on updates. So good luck to them. Wow. What a wild video, though. If you want to go see what a top-of-the-line house still would look like today, check that out because it's still got a lot of the amenities that are in high-end homes these days. 32,000 square feet.

Jeez. Huge. Could barely maintain, what is mine, 1,500? Yeah. Yeah. I complain about cutting my lawn. It's got a putt putt green out there like and that requires professional maintenance unless it's like fake grass or fake turf or something but even even even then yeah it the the the lawnmowers to i i do know this cause I, I have a friend that maintains one of these homes and the

lawnmowers to cut a golf course are not a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000. No, they're, they're close to like $20,000 for a lawnmower. So like you're, you're gonna, everything costs more when you go super high end like that. All right. Well, our second pick of the week is probably the funniest onion article I've read around technology in a while. And it's things you should never say to your Amazon Alexa. And oh, my gosh, whoever writes for the onion. I mean, they just need to raise right. Like they do such a great job. But there is a list of things here that you should never say to your Alexa, like, please don't collect my data.

Or where does my husband go at night? Especially if you're not prepared for the answer. What happens when we die? Says Alexa knows the answer. You just don't want to know. I like this one. Alexa, order Mountain Dew. It's like if your Amazon Alexa hears this, it will actually Alexa, order Mountain Dew. It's like, if your Amazon Alexa hears this,

it will actually order you the Mountain Dew. So don't say it. Don't say it, yeah. Yeah. This is a great, it's one of those slideshow things. You have to kind of click through to each one of the things. But man, they have really funny questions and then even better responses.

You know, like, where's the one uh can you sell me meth you know don't be surprised when the dealer shows up demands eight thousand dollars in cash like you thought you were joking no alex can order it for you anyway check this out it's a funny link and i got a good chuckle out of chuckle out of it today don't say anything bad about jeff bezos though yeah yeah he knows if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the weeks or great ideas for the show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right gavin this is your time to i'm gonna flip the coin this week it looks like you get to love home assistant last week was a hate now it's a love what's going on man well first

let's get into the home assistant news um home assist home assistant this week released uh their new update uh 2020 2022.12 final update for the year. A bunch of little updates, but the one major one was I added official Matter support now. So now when you get their SkyConnect, we have no Matter devices yet to play with it, but they'll have support in the OS now. So you can now you'll be ready for when Matter gets out there. When Matter matters, you'll be ready. Yeah, yeah.

You know, they just get you prepared. So that was the major thing. I mean, they had a bunch of other things. But the one cool thing, they had like a release party on YouTube. So I watched that. And they had the gentleman from Everything Smart Home. He released his Everything Presence 1 sensor. So he actually, you know, was trying to solve a problem. And he came out with his own little device. And he calls his Everything Presence 1 sensor. So he actually, you know, was trying to

solve a problem and he came out with his own little device and he calls it Everything Presence 1. And basically what it is, it's a PIR sensor, a millimeter wave sensor. And then on top of that, he added temperature, humidity, and ambient light sensors in there. It's a little device he put together. And basically the problem he wanted to solve was, you know, room presence, right? And knowing when someone is still in the room, right? So he made this device. So the PIR sensor will pick up the quick, you know, somebody walked into the room type of situation and trigger your automation. Then he uses the millimeter wave sensor to continuously monitor somebody being in the room because it can pick up things like your breathing or stuff like that. So if you're just

sitting there on the couch, vegging out to Netflix, it will still know you're in the room because it can pick up things like your breathing or stuff like that. So if you're just sitting there on the couch, venting out to Netflix, it will still know you're in the room, right? Mine knows I'm in the room because I'm constantly reaching for the chips anyway. So it knows I'm there all the time, but some people just lay really still. And it's selling for about a hundred Canadian, but he sold it out. Like the first two waves of a few thousand of them have been sold out. So it's hard to get, but it was really good to see him featured on the release party for home assistant and talk about this and what went into it. And, you know, he built it for home assistant. So, um, I was really, you know, I was impressed, you know, he's doing well with it. I believe the third wave is going to sell out in a few hours when he announces

that. So if you really want one, just follow him on Twitter and make sure you, you know, are ready for it. In terms of my home. Yeah. Well,

that's the, the whole thing is, is, is $75 us. So a hundred Canadian. And yeah, you got to wait till basically may of next year before you're going to see that thing.

So it looks like a cool product. I mean, it's got a bunch of really neat stuff. I mean, first wave people are getting it now. Second wave people are getting it in February. So now the third wave, you're going to be waiting till May. So I don't know if I'm ordering one. I really like what he did, though. You know, it's a Wi-Fi device.

You know, I'm not fond of them, but if it works, it works. So I might grab one or so, one or two eventually. Um, so that was good to see now in terms of my state of my home, right? Um, after last week's, you know, a little rant about, you know, my Z wave 700, um, USB key locking up, causing me all sorts of trouble. I did get some feedback. I got, you know, I got hit up on Twitter. I got, you know, feedback in the email. I got feedback on Mastodon, which I was shocked about because that was my first one. You know, I was like, yeah, so I was shocked. I even got feedback on the Hubitat forum.

So it was great to, you know, get that feedback feedback and they pointed out one thing and i should have thought of this honestly um the firmware on the usb key you know um i did not check the firmware version it was a brand new key so i was assuming it was up to date but i don't think it is um and i know that's something i always paid attention to on hubitat was the firmware version of Z-Wave because they did address a lot of these problems in the 700 series chip. So, yeah, I'd just like to thank Carl, Matt and everybody else who sent in suggestions. Good, good thing, you know, you mentioned that I didn't check the firmware. So right now I have a 500 series uh usb key running and it's running beautifully my house has been fast no issues no lockups it's been running beautifully

i'm loving home assistant again because of this you know and i don't want to upgrade it right now because i just got through that whole headache and because it's working so well i just don't want to upgrade if i don't need to, then why would I upgrade it? If it's not broken and you don't fix it. Exactly. I mean, yeah. If it's not broken, don't fix it. Especially when it comes to the house.

But that being said, I did notice this week that Zeus actually has a Z-Wave 800 USB key listed on the Z-Wave database. So, you know, I'm just like just like man as soon as that comes out because you know the thing with the z-wave 800 that i'm really excited about is the long range right so that yeah i know i i you know i don't want to upgrade but if that comes out like i'm gonna have to take one for the team you know know, and just dive right in, you know. So, Zeus, hurry up and get that out because I'm a little excited about that, you know. I can use a little more torture right now. So, you know. I guess.

I mean, you didn't learn your lesson the first time. And at least you have a long, you know, USB cable that you can use to reset your system back up to where it works again. You know, if you didn't have people like us willing to, you know, go through this, you know, you guys wouldn't know what you're in for, you know? I know what I'm in for. You know what you're in for, right? But yeah, right now it's settled down. My home assistant, I finished the migration.

All my devices are over. My new integration, I wrote one integration myself for my cameras i'm loving it it's settled down i actually don't even know what i want to do next right but like today i was showing you one cool thing is um when i get when my cameras get triggered out um outside i get a notification on my watch and i can actually watch the live feed of my camera from my watch. And I honestly thought that was really cool. I was in the office today and I showed somebody, you know, like my dog was running outside and I showed them and they were like, that was live. And I was like, yeah.

And they're like, what are you doing that with? And, you know, we got into home assistant talk and I think I have another convert there. So, you know, like it's little things like that, that is just like, like wow this is really cool i'm watching a live feed of my cameras on my watch from a notification that there was motion out there from an animal you know like it's pretty amazing it's pretty amazing so yep i'm loving it this week you know next week i may hate it again who Who knows? But right now I'm in love. I'm going to have to, like, I'm looking through this. The Twinkly stuff is now supported.

Yes. I mean, there's so much I like about the system. It does, it's starting to check off a bunch of things for me. Like, and I don't, I mean, I'm pretty sure if I look for a control for integration, they have one, but I'm pretty sure they're using like a reverse engineered web API, which is fine. They can do that. A lot of the integrations I find, like a lot of things when you look at it

is through some kind of reverse engineering or something like that. Yeah, but there's just so many people doing it. So it's like, yeah, if it breaks, somebody there's just so many people doing it. Exactly. Yeah. If it breaks, somebody on here will hack it and fix it. They have a counter of the number of people running Home Assistant right now. It was in one of the Discord chats. And I think it hit, where did it hit?

It hit 200,000 people, active people running Home Assistant right now. Hmm. Which was kind of an interesting stat. It seems like it's low but i don't know maybe i wonder where they get all that those numbers from well it's uh installations in 200 000 installations in analytics so it's again that's their analytics so you have to i think you have to subscribe to analytics it's not on by default into them yeah so. Yeah. So more than likely, it's like 200,000. I think it's low. I think there's more people that didn't.

I know I didn't opt in. And that they're, you know, yeah, they're offline. They don't want any internet connectivity. But yeah, they still got, that's still a lot of installations though. And that's why their community is so big, right? And that's one thing i found out about home assistant is anything i think of somebody's already done it wait till you get into the wait till you get into the home home assistant community store is that what's uh

ty saying is there a home yeah it's it's called it's hacks for short but it's a home assistant community store it's an it's an add-on yeah like it's unofficial add-ons, but, you know, they're still well-maintained, still well-developed. You add this store, and then you can add on all these other integrations or tiles or, you know, other front-end things if you want. Like that's one of the first things you install. And Ty, you know, Ty in the Hub was the one that got me into this. Like he's the one that, you know. Oh, he's the one we blame yeah he's the one i blame because he's the one that you know was offered me um a yellow one day and you know i couldn't find a pie so i just said let me try

this on my server as a vm and from there it just took off so he's really caused me a lot of headache see we got blamed for uh we got rain for all this there's rack purchases and all these rack shelves accessories and now yeah ty you get blamed for the the home assistant there you go yeah the good days and the bad days you get them both there you go so yeah that that's my wrap-up of home assistant so you know hit me up like like writing my first integration was very interesting i like doing this because it lets me know a lot of the details of the inside, the underlying infrastructure. And I actually wrote what I wrote was integration for my Foscam cameras. So they had basic integration where you just got the feed.

But I wanted to be able to control like the IR sensor and the light, the floodlight and stuff like that. And I wrote all that integration. So that gave me a really good view of the internals so whenever you want to learn something just pull apart an integration write your own and it'll you'll learn a lot python python python yeah i learned i had to pick up python again and then asking asynchronous versus synchronous was giving me a headache but i figured it out there is a control for integration really all i wanted to do is turn on and off my lights which i think is all it really

supports that's the gate that's the gateway drug you you start off with just turning on and off the lights yeah yeah i mean i've got i've got a bunch of home kit stuff too which could probably be used as well i i pretty much use home kit on on top of everything anyway that's like the interface because it's it's native apple and fast but i do like you know that you can get camera video feeds right on your watch that's pretty cool gavin it's pretty cool that's yeah that might uh that might bring me over too to get some more even cooler is the cameras don't have to be like internet connected or anything. Home Assistant proxies the video feed. I guess I don't know if that's a proper term, but it basically sends the video feed through their servers to you.

So my Blue Iris is disconnected from the internet altogether. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Oh, yeah. I would have to do Blue Iris. No, you probably have. Direct integration. oh yeah i gotta do i would have to do blue iris no they probably have direct integration no you don't have to do blue iris because uh you can have it go directly to the camera's rtsp stream right

um and it will like i said it will proxy all that stuff for you so you don't have to open ports or any of that stuff interesting it's pretty cool all for a dashboard uh i don't know maybe maybe i'll hold off. I'm pretty content with... Again, it's one of those things. If it's not broken, don't fix it. And if I fix it, it's going to get broken through my broken server that keeps crashing. Do not host this on your Unraid server.

That's all I have to say. You've got to figure that out. Just give me control to your Unraid server and let me... All right, unless you log in, you can take care of it. I don't know. It's it just it locks up. It doesn't. There's no way to pull logs from it when it logs up.

So I was trying to. It's one of your dockers doing something. It's always the dockers. Dockers. Something with the video card. I bet you it's something with your video card. It seems to be running fine. I'm not even using it, actually.

So it's kind of weird that it would. I don't know, do anything. I use it for transcoding and I don't even have, I may have that running, that Docker running, but it's not doing anything. Yeah, just it running, though, it could cause some kind of problem, too. Or is the wife messing with it at all when you're not looking? No, all she does is say, your thing's not working again. That's what I get.

It's like, the Plex is not working. And I'm like, yeah, I bet you're right. Yeah. Because it's very consistent about not working. Did the kid stick bubble gum anywhere in it? No, no, no. It's got a glass door on this thing, man. You can't even get to it.

OK. You got protection. It's a glass door. There's a key lock. You have to find the key. Is it overheating? Do you have it cooled properly? It's nice and cool in here.

It's nice and cool. We don't get... It's always cold in the garage here. It's 74. Oh, okay. Which is... That's Florida cold. Well, 19, I guess.

I have no idea. Let's see. 19 degrees Celsius, 74, 40 yeah around 21 22 23 sorry 19 that's like that's our summer there you go yeah there you go that's not cold i think you need to put a few extra fans freezing in here it's very cold you need a few more fans in there. Your server's overheating. There's no way we're going any colder than this. If you walk in from the house sometimes and you hit the garage, it's like, whoa, whoa, it's cold in there.

That's like tank top weather up here, like 24 degrees. I'm not saying I don't enjoy it. It's very nice to have a nice cold room in the house, but's sometimes it's just too cold it's the humidity that gets you oh we're five degrees right now so i'd really appreciate that 24 that sounds cold in either c or f i'm sure so yeah don't know what it means but it sure it's cold so all right well let's move on here uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page.

And if you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech. FM slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for an inside look at what's going on in as somebody posted oh gavin posted a scene in the wild picture of a oh my gosh this is a a volume control it's labeled volume control that's how

you know it's a volume control um with two different like it's a white volume control with a different colored plate which i don't know why they did that but it's two different colors and then off to the side there is a lutron pico controller maybe it's a caseta switch i don't know they look the same but it's mounted maybe i don't know a couple centimeters up and then crooked yeah but you know the amazing part about this picture is they actually lined up the screws oh yeah the caseta plate vertically so you know the whole picture is messed up except for those two screws they're lined up which is straight like it should was the lutron caseta went straight and or was the volume control crooked who knows oh are you

asking me i'm gonna go back and look let's start a debate on the internet which one's the straight one and richard richard's the first one that posted awesome that just nodded my stomach before dinner it is i saw this it is pretty gross uh i saw this and i thought richard will hate this and i just wanted to touch the buttons but i was afraid to for some reason. Because I didn't know what they would do. I mean, if it's a mess like this, who knows if that's really a volume control. You know, like I didn't touch it at all.

It's clearly labeled with a label thing that it's a volume control. I think you're safe. You're pretty. It may have been a volume control in the 90s, but I don't know what it does now. What is it controlled now? Is it still a volume control? No, it's still a volume control. I can guarantee you that it is.

Okay, because they had Sonos in the place, so I don't know what it's controlling now. It's probably just all the way up. Fun stuff. Yeah, at least they updated their light switch. Here, I'll straighten this in photoshop and uh and post it back and then that way it won't look so bad and then richard will be okay i'll just straighten i'll straighten the one on the right and the one on the left still be crooked and maybe maybe that'll be acceptable. How about that?

Oh, the things I start. Oh, yeah. You started this for sure. Sorry. No, you're not. This is great. This will be fun. Okay. Back to the show here.

If you want to support the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a positive review in the podcast app of your choice. It really helps people find the show that way. That wraps up another week here at Home Tech. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye.