HomeTech.fm - Episode 418 - Pre-Gaming CES

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

This week on HomeTech: We welcome in 2023 and the one-year co-host anniversary for Gavin and TJ. We couldn’t completely abandon 2022 without following up on a few news stories and then diving right into pre-CES coverage including: New TVs from LG and Samsung, smart lights everywhere, Matter matters matter, Withings watches you pee, a quick pick of the week, project updates and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 6th, 2023, first show of the year. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about all aspects of home technology, home news, home automation news, all the good stuff that's coming out of CES. Talking a little bit about that this week.

But first up, this is the one year anniversary for you guys joining me. I tried to do this for a year myself. It did not work out well. But since you guys have been hanging around, man, we've managed to do pretty good. So thanks. Thanks for coming aboard. This has been awesome. Oh, yeah.

I got a little emotional when I realized, you know, the other day it was the one year, you know, that year flew fast. Did I? You wrote that. I'm like, I don't know. It can't be right. But it is. Yeah.

I don't think we even missed the show. I mean, other than the little break we took at Christmas there, you know, but I think we were pretty consistent this year. Yeah, not bad. Way better than what I was doing. Yeah, pretty, pretty surprising. It's been a year already. I didn't even realize that we were talking in the Slack channel today about an earlier episode about this magic door that's coming out.

And I was like, you know, we talked about that earlier in the the year sometime and it was like the very first episode we all did together so pretty pretty funny how it all rounded back up to get today yeah let's say what's old is new again like everything just is on repeat so um i mean we've got we've got our own like social network now right we're gonna the mastodon server has server has been trying to keep up with all of the pressures of a decaying social network called Twitter. And I basically this month had to turn off the open invites or the open enrollment, I guess.

And now you have to type in something to be approved, which as long as you don't type in anything that doesn't look like you're a bot, then we approve you. So I think I think that's the rule. Unless Gavin's just approving everyone still. I don't know. Well, even me blindly approving anybody. It's still less than all those other.

Yeah. Yeah. Lots that were coming in were just killing us. So, you know, I pretty much approve everybody and I follow some whatever they have a witty, you know, little reason. I also follow that person. Cause they look like they'll be fun. Yeah. You can say like,

hi Gavin and get it. And that would be instant approval right there. Right. Oh, if they say we love home tech. FM, I was insta follow right there, you know?

Yeah. I'm looking at it. A 14, 1400 active users, just over 1400 active. It's a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah.

It's been a full-time job i swear i've been like every five minutes every five minutes i get dinged with a new person applying like it's good to see but it's a full-time job well it's pretty good to see too because it's like a lot of people are active you know it's i guess there's a decent amount of people that are posting um but you can actually go and look at the stats of everybody that's joined and most of the people have been active within the past couple weeks at least so even if they're bots they're active yeah good bots good bots exactly exactly yeah there's been almost 5 000 interactions i i know it's on the back end there's been like millions of things processed uh let's see 1.8 million things processed like queues have been

processed so that's that's pretty cool i i it's been fun a little a little like harrowing at times because it it it it kind of slowed down for a bit and i got i was out to dinner last week and all of a sudden i got a notification saying the server had been like 118 cpu load for the past two hours i'm like probably should check that when I get home. Reboot something. Might be something wrong. Yeah, yeah. I made some changes.

I made some quick changes. And also limited who could sign up to the, you know, just say, hi, I like home technology and we let you in basically. Or hi, Gavin. You can literally say anything. You can say Apple. I mean, you could put a letter eight. No, well, yeah, there's a lot that are, that are, that are joining. They're like, I like social networks and it's like, no, no, no sweet child. You're not getting it. So like that, that, that robot got rejected,

but there's a lot of, you know, they can go find somewhere else to play if they really want to get on. So didn't somebody say they wanted to post like bad content they couldn't post other places too yes they wanted to post something and not get banned and i was i it's kind of clever because i'm curious what they wanted to know it's too good well keep keep keep an eye on that home tech.social is the address for that it's a weird url but it's kind of like uh where i i really think that the uh i think that the tech crowd that i've seen has kind of migrated away from from twitter a lot of the tech crowd has and i've noticed like news organizations actually starting up their own servers um and and publishing

alongside Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff. They're just using it as another outlet. But it'll be really interesting to see what happens to this thing in a couple of years. It's still very early on and it still has very limited features. But the way this is all set up, like Mastodon and whatever we're logging into here doesn't necessarily have to be like the be all end all of what feature sets we get i think once this you know new wave of people get in and it reaches some kind of critical mass we're going to see some pretty interesting stuff come from it um you know it may look different in a year or two and we have a lot more um like from what i saw

tumblr was like going to integrate with this it's basically just an api that if you if you have a lot more, like from what I saw, Tumblr was like going to integrate with this. It's basically just an API that if you have a Tumblr account, you can follow that person and they can publish over at Tumblr and you're good to go. So like that's a piece of old school technology. But for Mastodon, it doesn't care. It's like here is who is talking and what they're saying. And it just publishes it out on the uh on the timeline i guess it's pretty cool so um aside from bot accounts uh what'd you guys get

for uh from santa there oh well it was a pretty good christmas my main mainly i got golf stuff right like i golf a lot during the summer and it's expensive hobby so i always you know add it to my list for christmas so i don't have to pay for it. So I got a bunch of golf stuff for Christmas. I'm happy about that. One cool thing I got was actually we bought, I bought the wife a photo printer. So, you know, we take a lot of photos, but we always, you never really print any of them out.

So this just prints four by sixes and it's just easy. It's an air printer. You just go on your phone and any of them out. So this just prints four by sixes. And it's just easy. It's an air printer. You just go on your phone and you print it out. It works out to about like 40 cents of photo. So it's not meant for like mass printing. But when you want to just print one here, one there, you know, and give it to a friend or something like that, it's great to have to put in the photo album, stuff like that. So there's actually a cool little thing. It's so easy to use.

It looks really good. Just doubling down on the uh the printer aren't you oh yeah haven't had enough printer problems just gonna add another one to the mix not enough pain not enough but you know what was really cool as soon as i turned it on and added to the network home assistant popped up and said hey i see this photo printer here you want to add it and then as soon as it went to sleep it said hey the photo printer is now offline please fix it so you know like i took it out of the whole assistant right away it'd be pretty cool you like make a little integration that every time you open your front door it takes a picture of you and then it's like a receipt yeah so you can take it that'll get expensive really quick yeah 40 cents a doorbell right through that ink tj what about you uh nothing exciting technology

wise i got a bunch of clothing, uh, which for me, I'm all right with because I hate buying clothing for myself. So anytime somebody gives me clothing, I'm pretty happy with that. So we, uh, luckily spent Christmas down in Florida this year. Uh, we got the flu while we were down there. So we didn't get to spend actual Christmas with anybody besides ourselves. Uh, but we got to spend the rest of the week with some families. So that was worth it alone. Welcome to Florida. I'm glad,

I'm glad your state was eventful. You know, it wasn't terrible. It was cold up in Ohio and it got to like 30 to 50 degrees in Orlando. So we were going to be cold no matter where we were. Um, but at least we weren't cold in Ohio. You're lucky.

That's all you got in Florida. Yeah. Cause in Ohio it was negative 30 degrees so i mean the flu yeah it's only just years you picked up while you're down here are you sure you know of yeah the other ones will we'll find out yeah you'll know later exactly it's not a problem right now uh yeah i'm kind of in the scene but i got some clothes which was awesome because i don't like buying clothes at all um so yeah it's the worst thing to buy um clothes as gifts is great and i got i got one of these things like it's called a a pal kitty i don't know it's supposed to be like a an emulator with all like i like it's happy face in the middle it's cool happy face on it i don't know let's see focus focus there we go anyway just act like a surface uh it doesn't work so trying to trying to figure out how to get it like to get it they just need to send a new one i think

so we'll see what happens there they're like no it is this like a legit product or well it's like a legit product but it's got like um it's got like uh tons of like roms on it i guess where you can like play the old games and whatnot and uh that'd be kind of cool and uh it just doesn't turn on and we talked to the company and they're like well just reformat the sd card and i was like okay i'll do that but it's not turning on doesn't turn on like well no it is turning on just reformat the sd card i'm like but i did that and it's still not turning on. Like at this point, I'm just going to like, just,

I'm telling my wife, I'm like, just tell them we did all of it and it's not turning on. And they just, I don't know. We'll see what happens with it. It's your problem. Yeah.

I got new pants. So yeah. Ooh, the pants. Exactly. So excited. And I got the Snoop Dogg cookbook. So Gavin and I can have like cooking competitions or something. We're going to, I gave you two recipes, the Snoop Dogg cookbook. So Gavin and I are going to have like cooking competitions or something.

We're going to. I gave you two recipes. The Snoop Dogg spaghetti and meatballs. Delicious. And the Snoop Dogg mac and cheese. Delicious. Try those two first. I'm going to try them.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Those are two. What do we call signature dishes here in this house so if uh if snoop does better than than the previous chefs uh then yeah you'll get high marks for that one so you guys keep it up we'll have to have a cook-off when we go to cva next year right right this year not even next year and it's in denver so we can actually add the third leg of that element into

it uh pretty easily there you go yep Yep. All right. Moving on here. What do you say? We've got some home tech headlines to jump into, but we also have a little bit of pregame CES to do, right? We're pregaming CES to try and cover a couple of the stories. I guess that like CES starts tomorrow as we record this. And I don't know, like a lot of the companies like do about a of weeks worth of PR

push to get their stories out ahead of time. And that's kind of what we can talk about today. But we'll probably have a little bit more next week. So what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. All right, we'll get some that have that, you know, from last year, the end of last year that kind of came through. And one of the big things that we were talking about towards the end of last year was this story from Eufy and how they were exposing their cameras, I guess, to the cloud when they were saying they weren't. It's an anchor brand. It positions its security cameras as prioritizing local storage and no clouds. And it issued a statement at the end of the year and responding to a couple of recent findings by security researchers and tech news sites, admitting that they could do better,

but also leaving out a few other issues being unaddressed. In a thread titled, I guess it's regarding recent security claims against Eufy Security, Eufy official rights to its, customers and partners, and they misspelled customers, but you know, you can do what you do. You got to do better. Uh, Yuffie is taking a new approach to the home security. Um, and the company writes it's designed to operate locally wherever possible to avoid cloud servers. Um, video footage, facial recognition, and identity biometrics are all managed on devices, not in the cloud. So, you know, they have kind of take,

I'm still, I mean, this all seemed like clickbait stuff from The Verge. Towards the end of the year, they were just like, Yuffie's lying to us, Yuffie, and jumping up and down about something that some security, I'm going to put in quotes, expert, I don't know who this guy is. He could be an actual security researcher. But he

found out that when you turn on this feature that said push notifications, it sent an image to your phone. And that image was hosted on an Amazon server, which is pretty much how push notifications work. And then Yuffie's like, yeah, that's how push notifications work. We should probably just add a label to our app telling people that when you turn this on, it does use a cloud server for the image that appears on your phone. So I don't know. Like, I just don't, I don't get why this was so overblown as it was. And like, I don't, I don't have a leg in this fight at all. Like I do not care about Yuffie at all. Like it's probably a good product if for what it does. I don't even know how much they cost. I don't care how much they cost. I'll never buy one. Cause I don't care about them. But the

coverage on this was absolutely insane. And then the rabid, like latching on by people on the internet were like, I'm never buying an anchor branded thing ever again because of this. It's like, but they make power outlets. Like how is that even comparable? I don't know. Like it's the internet being the internet towards the end of the year when there were absolutely no tech stories, I guess. And, uh, I don't know what to think about it. I think it was just completely overblown and not even an issue. I think Eufy actually responded correctly by fixing the problem that people URL. And turns out that's like, if you share that camera's URL with your friend, they can watch the camera feed and whatnot.

And I guess that's a big deal. And Eufy actually turned on like a feature where it says you had to be logged in now to watch that. Like even if you didn't have a Eufy account, you have to register, get a Eufy account, and you have to be logged in to to watch that. Like, even if you didn't have a UV account, you have to register, get a UV account and you have to be logged in to watch it. So like they've shut down that feature. So I think they've responded to all this stuff. Like they haven't lied in my book, but I don't know, TJ,

what do you think we were talking about this before the show? You kind of had a different, a slightly different opinion, I think on this. I think it's a little overblown, but I understand where people are coming from because I think Anchor is like one of these darling companies of the internet. You know, a lot of people I know have Anchor products somewhere along the line. They're buying Anchor chargers or cables or batteries or whatever else. So I think it's mainly people just feeling betrayed by a company they've used for so

long now. And these people are never going to get their money back for these products. So if you bought this product for this reason, you bought a product that's not going to do what you wanted, and you're never going to get your money back from it. So while I understand that it's a little overblown, I understand also where people are coming from. And I think at the end end of the day if i bought one of these products for this reason and it wasn't true i would also be upset but if they went and fixed it and they changed it and you can turn off the notifications are you still upset no like now it's local local i mean they didn't fix it though right because they had a

feature there that was supposedly doing that. That's now gone. No, it's all fixed. And what do you mean? Like if you turn on, you can adjust, you can say, well, I want push notifications to come to my phone with the picture. If you don't have it set with a picture, then that doesn't send anything to the cloud other than the push notification. Right.

But that feature is now gone because you're not now gone because if you want that local only, you're not going to get that picture with it because that's going to go to the cloud still, which is what it's always done. Yeah. But that's not why people bought it. They were under the impression that it wasn't doing that. I guess.

I guess that's... I mean, and it's a silly thing, right? We all understand it's a silly thing right like you we all understand it's a silly thing because it's a push notification it's probably going somewhere in order to deliver the push notification right yeah that's how that's how all push notifications work but if you bought

this product because it said it wasn't doing that and it's doing that I mean that's that's a little deceiving I mean at the end of the day I don't think it's that big of a deal myself but I also haven't spent several hundred dollars on these products so yeah and i just think it was slow news it's they're making a big deal out of this and my thought is there's so many other companies too doing similar things and not fixing it not do not do not and not fixing it and you oofy just became the the target of the moment, right?

Like there's so many companies we can go after doing the exact same thing. But it's a non-news story. Like if I had these cameras, I won't. But if I had and I found this out, I'd be like, oh, well, my notifications still work. You know, like I wouldn't make such a big deal out of it. I'm not going to cancel the whole brand. I'm still going to buy an anchor cable and stuff like that. If nerds didn't care about anchor, you wouldn't hear about this.

If it was like an average consumer company, you wouldn't hear about it at all. I mean, that's the honesty behind it. And I think a lot of people were jumping on it and making so much noise. And I don't even think they really read the full articles. They were just going by the headlines. Most people were just absolutely we're canceling anchor and they're just going by the headline that's what the internet does i mean it never reads into a situation it just reads the title i will i will kind of go against that a little bit um the verge is covered was just by i'll mention his name here sean hollister was just absolutely abysmal like it was the most

unprofessional thing I've ever seen. Like blaming a company for fixing a security issue and then just saying, well, they didn't contact me when they fixed it and tell me what they did. It was like, that's literally what his articles look like in red. Like there was like a little temper tantrum over it. And he just like kept fanning those flames for clickbait clearly towards the

end of a slow news news year. And I don't know, like it just wasn't good journalism and what it did what it does for me and why i i would be upset about this is like these are good products this is what you want a company to do you want them to fix and respond to things when it hits the press or they find somebody finds an issue you don't want them to like go dark on you like it was captain was saying but like all the people who hit the verge site and read this and go oh man i was

gonna get some security cameras but no i think i'll just hold like it just scares everybody away who is just a normal person away from getting home technology where whereas they may have gotten this and like been totally happy with it and totally you know now have a way more secure product than they did a week before but now they think it's a tainted brand because of this guy's coverage and, and, and what he was doing just clearly to get clicks at the end of the year is kind of pretty pathetic. The way that those stories were written, the headlines were written, um, are, are, we'll link to the Ars Technica story, which, which actually had a pretty good, like more level-headed write-up, I guess about it, um, by Kevin Purdy, which I, I will link to in the show notes. I'm not going to link to The Verge on that one again because it was pretty garbage. No, the arts technical one's a

good one. It actually goes into some of the problems that they still have and some other things. So I think it's definitely worth the look into if you're curious about the subject. Yep. Yep. And again, people have to understand products will have security flaws. Um, there will be a way that somebody hacks into a product eventually somehow, because guess what? All of these products are made by humans. They all have flaws and humans cannot write perfect code. It just cannot be done. Trust me. Um, even like, I'm sure somebody wrote code for one plus one, like somebody would find a way to break it. I it's, it's just, it doesn't work that way in the computer world. And so what you want to have happen is when something like this comes up,

that the company reacts and has a method update and has a way to fix these things in a timely manner. And Yuffie did all that. And that, and for them to just like sit there and hammer on them, because they didn't personally call this guy up over at the verge and have a sit down conversation with him when it's like, I'm pretty sure Yuffie is probably not like, like in the middle of the holidays, like really given much priority to what's going on over at the verge. Um, yeah, I don't know. Like I, I just, it really rubbed me the wrong way as far as the coverage went, because it was at the end of the day, kind of scare people away from what is actually, to me, appears to be a pretty good brand who is able to actually update their products. Because a lot of these companies white

label this stuff and they're like, well, we'll send it on up the chain and, you know, maybe the programmers in China will rewrite the code and give us a new version. That stuff gets really, really kind of crazy when you find out like all the odm and partners and how that stuff works so it's good that they were able to actually correct this stuff and and roll out changes fairly quickly it seems so anyway enough on that um we got we got another story towards it and and speaking of hacking i guess i guess this is a hack this is proper hacking this is this is proper quotes yeah This is proper hacking. Proper quotes. Yeah.

Two men in the U.S. have been charged with hacking into Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then swatting them. Basically falsely reporting a violent incident at the target's address to trick local police into responding with force. So the SWAT team shows up. Prosecutors say the duo used compromised ring devices to stream live video footage on social media of police raiding their targets' homes and taunt authorities when they arrived. Prosecutors in Los Angeles allege 20-year-old James Thomas Andrew McCarty of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Kai Christian Nielsen, 22 of Racine, Wisconsin, conspired to hack into Yahoo email accounts belonging to the victims around the United States. From there, they would check on how many of those Yahoo accounts had associated ring

accounts and then targeted the people that way using the password. Happened to the two swatted at least a dozen different uh victims across the country here in the u.s and good riddance to them i i hope they rot in prison for that also if you're using yahoo uh stop it just stop yeah you probably your password's probably bad and yahoo yah Yahoo has been hacked a million different ways. Get off Yahoo email. You don't deserve to get swatted, but you need to get a new email. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. No, definitely. These people should be in prison like forever. I mean, I don't want people to go to prison. Like it's never a thing that you like you want to send people to prison and stuff. But people doing this kind of stuff is really awful and it can escalate it can escalate super quickly and there's no turning back so i don't think this is what amazon was envisioning with their ring nation tv series so probably not a good start to that whole thing i was going to

say this is probably the only time ring camera footage has actually been used to catch bad guy that was low. Shots fired. I don't mean that. Anyway. Speaking of cameras, you now have three months to replace your old Arlo cameras.

I guess Arlo has a... Short notice. Yeah, well, yeah. A short notice on your cameras that are what? A few years old now. Arlo Gen 3 VMC 3030 and the first gen Arlo Pro VMC 4030. If you got two of those, the company has told this company that those two cameras will hit the end of their service lives within a couple of months. And these cameras, I guess guess aren't even that old it doesn't really say here in the article

oh eight to eight eight and six years old yeah i don't know this is pretty old for like a cloud connected camera but they really didn't give you much notice i mean january 1st notification for end of life in four months. That's not that much time. I'm trying to see. Arlo actually has an end of life policy. So they endeavor to provide at least 90 days of advance prior notice to implementing an EOL effective date. And after that, they will get no support, no former security updates,

no bug fixes. I guess it'll still work. It doesn't say. It looks like it'll still work, but it doesn't say it. It looks like it will still work, but it's probably time. We were kind of talking about this in the hub a little bit before all this happened or while all this was, was happening.

Like it, these are older cameras. And I think TJ, you mentioned that if it was a professional camera, you're probably looking for upgrades anyway, after a few years or they'd probably be broken. I would think almost any camera though, right? Like you could obviously, like a professional camera,

you could usually use for like, I don't know, like 20 years or something. You can get some obnoxious amount of time out of them, it seems like. But they usually are such bad quality that you want to upgrade them after like five or 10 years anyway. So I couldn't imagine how awful these cameras are anyway um being eight years old and probably the first cameras that they made it looks like they last manufactured some of these like the vmc 30 40 30 last manufacture date was december 2018 i think was it the 30 40 was the other one um uh 4030 the 4030 yeah the pro 4030 okay well that

was 2018 so i mean that's only like four years ago that and it could have been sitting on a shelf or something who knows i wonder if they were if if customers were sent notifications though or if this was literally the first notification because that's always my thing right is like obviously software has to end at some point but you should give plenty of notice and i don't think four months is plenty of notice myself yep so they they everyone will know i guess it's deprecation notice this month and again april 1st i guess they kind of go out of out of service but they kind of work after that but kind of is what it is i don't know i don't know how to feel i know arlo is a little more expensive camera too um and they've been really i i see these these arlos i see off more

often than like even wise camera like wise cameras i'll see people have popped up in like businesses but i don't know i i see these arlo cameras everywhere they're just so such a recognizable brand i guess i don't know. The shape of them, I guess, is recognizable. So I see them popped up all over the place. Well, Wise didn't really come out with an outdoor camera, I think, until like a year or two ago. So it makes sense.

Well, I'm sure we'll revisit these stories for Wise in a couple of, what, four more years now? So a couple more years, Wise will be discontinuing them, and we'll talk about them again. A couple more months. Yeah. Speaking of defunct technology. Yes.

All right. So cue the sad horn. Yeah. Taps or whatever. I have that. I can put that in. It's curtains for 3G, one of the key wireless technologies that helped usher in the age of the smartphone. Throughout December, Verizon has been disconnecting its customers who are still using the old tech, cutting off their phones, ability to use data, make calls and texts. Pretty much the last U.S. carrier to do so, AT&T turned these off in February and T-Mobile started started winding down the old networks there in March of 2022.

Verizon customers with 3G devices had plenty of warning, unlike Arlo customers. They were told in 2019 to hurry up and get off this stuff. I feel like we've been talking about this forever now. Yeah. In fact, you could still buy the Arlo camera in 2019, right? And it's still, yeah. So, so yeah, I feel like being in the security industry, we've been talking about this for, for the past, I feel like I've been talking about this 3G sunset thing for, I don't know, 10 years now. Like it seems like we've known this was going to come. And now that it's here, like, I guess in February, at the end of February, no,

the, the first day before their February billing cycle, it'll be kaputs for that stuff. So good night, sweet little child 3g. It's a, it's been nice knowing you. Of course, it's just here in the U S there's plenty of 3G networks all over the world. And if you travel overseas, you will occasionally grab a hold of a 3G network and use them there. But yeah, just here in the U.S., finally ending the 3G service. So goodbye.

There was people in the Verizon subreddit posting videos of them checking for 3G service and they were noting when their tower shut off and everything. With their flip phones phones i think it was mainly like old iphones but pretty much gavin do you have 3g service up there in canada uh yeah i usually fall back on it when i don't get a good signal you know it's always my backup signal i want to say when i landed in in toronto like it it went over to 3g and then things were just really

slow until until it like kicked in with the 5g signal like it's just like 3g's here and then things were just really slow until it like kicked in with the 5G signal. Like it was just like 3G's here and then it took a while, but it got on the 5G, so. Yeah, you don't realize how slow 3G is until you're on it. And you're like, holy cow, can we use this? But it doesn't help that they kind of reformed a lot of the spectrum.

So it got robbed of most of its utility a while ago. Yep, yep, yep. Well, farewell 3G. It's been nice knowing you. We'll talk about this in a couple more months yeah i'm sure i'm sure they'll delay the february date again so probably be like oh no for real this time next year we'll be talking about it again get out of here guys stop using this it's like one of those things that like if it still works why aren't we throwing it away? There are people that just make calls and send text messages.

That's all they do, and 3G is good enough for that for them, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's probably just, I don't know. It seems like it's not even an age of equipment thing because if you're overseas, you could still, I mean, clearly those manufacturers still make the equipment, right? Like, it's not going anywhere. It hasn't gone anywhere. But for Verizon customers, at least it was the last hold out here in the states and and now it's gone so goodbye 3d we'll see you we'll see you later

all right uh moving on here we've got our ces coverage and we're we're not gonna go over this whole thing like in, in fine tooth detail. I mean, some of this stuff's like worth talking about, but it's not worth going into like depth about. So there'll be some links, check it out if you want. Yeah.

There's a couple of things that just basically caught her eye leading up to CS. I'm sure there's going to be more fun stuff that comes out and it hits the press. We'll be able to talk about next week. So next week it's just going to be all matter. There's not going to be anything else. It's just Matter Devices, Matter Hubs.

This is just the pregame. Yeah. We're just going to talk about stuff that won't matter next week because Matter matters. Matter matters. Yeah. All right. Cool.

Oddly enough, a lot of Matter stories tonight to talk about, but we're going to breeze through those as well. So first up, LG. LG released a couple of matter stories tonight to talk about, but we're going to breeze through those as well. So, um, first up LG, LG, I released a couple of, you know, their new TVs, the G3,

uh, C3 and OLED TVs for 2023. Um, I, I just pulled, uh, a couple of bullet points out of some of the stuff I was reading. Um,

they're doing AI deep learning. Uh, so they've got the deep state built in Gavin right into the TV. Yep. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. To, to help ensure outstanding picture quality and sound. So that's, that's good, I guess. Uh, so they've got the deep state built in Gavin right into the TV. Yep. Um, yep, yep, yep.

To, to help ensure outstanding picture quality and sound. So that's, that's good, I guess. Uh, they've got a brightness booster max technology, uh, which is able to increase, uh, brightness by up to 70% according to LG. That's kind of neat. I guess you need a brighter TV, uh, new refined, new refined version of web OS. Um, so they've done some interface changes to WebOS on the newer TVs here.

The G3 will introduce an ultra seamless one wall design. And what they're calling there is a claim. They're claiming that the design results in, quote, no visible gap when mounted to a wall. TJ and I had a good laugh about that. Yeah. And the TV mount will probably be in five different pieces that you have to mount in separate

areas. Yeah. Like that Samsung frame TV that sucks. Or the custom integrator would just use their own mount and it'll be an inch and a half off the wall anyway. So you might want an articulating mount i'm sure exactly exactly uh they've they've they're catering to gamers i guess with more low latency

uh talking about 0.1 millisecond latency time so i guess that's a thing i really haven't figured out if it's like placebo or just like, I mean, games, gamers like those stats, right? They like to have the numbers things like my, my, my, my video card is the 30, 60, and I got the 40, 80 or whatever. And like, they, they want the bigger numbers and they want the lower latency and they think that's going to help improve their game. Uh, which, you know, more power to them. I suck at video games. Uh, and then they've got and now this one's fun uh they've got they're the first displays to be certified with this hdmi quick media syncing vrr which you know it's yes the enact it's the an acronym for us qms-vrr yes okay good job so here's what this is you hear gavin saying yes he's run runs this. But this technology is claimed to be able to eliminate those black screens that kind of plop up and say, you know, when you're switching from HDMI, I will use HDMI 2, and it takes a while for that to sync.

And it drops a few frames. Basically, on HDMI 2.1a compliant ports, you're supposed to be able to just, like, switch to HDMI 2, and boom, you got the picture up. This drives me nuts. This drives me. When I got my new TV, this was one of the most annoying things. So basically when you're watching different content, they all come with different refresh rates. And when you watch, if the refresh rate of the TV doesn't match the content, you get jitter, you get, you know, tearing, screen tearing, stuff like that. And it's annoying. So you have to turn on this feature that tells the tv to change your refresh rate to match the content that i'm watching but when it does that you get this blank screen like a half a second blank screen while it switches over

and it's very annoying you know like it drives me nuts but there's no way around it and if i don't do this then you could be watching live sports it will just be jittery and it drives me nuts. So you have to put up with this now that they've introduced this and they'll be actually putting it into the TVs. I'm not going to buy a new TV just for this, but I'm happy that they're going to be addressing this. Just think about how this AI and deep learning and deep state is going to improve your ad pop-up ads on your LG TV. Ooh, that's good. Yeah. Oh, they, you know, these TVs are going to track what you watch even more and they don't want to know what I'm watching up here in Toronto. Uh, another thing that was pretty cool that we have a story kind of pulled out for it. They, um, they kind of fixed some of these picture mode things. And, um, instead of, And instead of, and this isn't a bad idea.

Because I typically switch mine over to the movie cinema mode and kind of adjust from there. And there's a couple of like, there's that really old THX app that you can use to adjust the picture on your TV. And I think even on the Apple TV now, you can actually use your phone and kind of calibrate the screen. Using the iPhone camera. But LG is doing this a different way. They present a couple of pictures on the screen and you can pick which one that you like better. And then after a couple of those settings get recorded, it can figure out kind of what you think your TV should look like. And it'll give you that picture mode. So I actually think this is a, it's called personalized picture wizard. And I think this is a great feature. And, and one, I think TV manufacturers should have thought of a long time ago, because at the end of the day, it doesn't care if you like

your ears on the, like the, the eyebleeding vivid or the smooth cinema one. It's your TV. It should look how you want it to look. And I have my preferences, and I'm sure all the video geeks out there have theirs. But if you like how the vivid looks, go for it. It's your TV. You paid money for it.

People might actually change their picture settings with this. Yeah. Because nobody ever knows you can change that. Especially, it sounds like a little wizard that it walks you through on setup and even even like even when you're doing like the calibration stuff um the light in the room or like what you have as a backdrop can change the picture so you know this is a good thing i think for for people to kind of you know pick up and use that i hope other manufacturers follow suit because it seems like it's a pretty easy, straightforward thing to do, like pick, let people pick what they like best. And then kind of the biggest thing that LG talked about,

they've done it. They've made the wireless TV. So they announced this 97 inch wireless TV. And it's got this basically got a transmitter box. It's got a couple of HDMI cables and, you know, audio cable things, you know, outputs on it. This box can shoot the HDMI signal wirelessly. Oh, from the box to the TV positioned about 30 up to 30 feet away. And supposedly you can get 4k, um, one 20 off of it along with USB and antenna inputs. So, um, plug in your 4k Blu-ray player and, and it across the room. And supposedly you'll get a nice clean 4K picture. DJ's like, this is like literally what everybody has.

Like, why do I need wires for my TV? This is a nightmare. I don't know why you would want this. Could you imagine like a service call to like, let's say you install one of these. And then it works fine for like six months. And somebody calls you out because it doesn't work anymore. And you get out there and they install like a metal coffee table and it's just like blocking the signal somehow you microwave yeah like just something i don't know i don't get it i'm all about making stuff wireless but

this seems like a terrible thing to make wireless or the the new unify routers interfering with the signal or something like that you know they a new Sonos speaker and the Sonos net's messing with it. There's so many things. I don't know. Who is asking for these TVs to be so thin? They could have easily just stuffed this into the TV and made it a millimeter thicker or something.

Oh, yeah. They want you to have the thinnest of thin TVs, but it's wireless now, so you can all... You don't need any wires except for the power cable. You gotta have that. And you know that this TV is not going to have the thinnest of thin TVs, but you know, it's wireless now. So you can all, you don't need any wires except for the power cable. You gotta have that. And you, and you know that this TV is not going to have any actual inputs on there. So when eventually this box craps out, you're not gonna be able to buy a new one. And your super expensive 97 inch TV is going to be absolutely useless.

Cause that, that's what happened with the old pioneer elite plasma TVs. That little brain box died. You were done for, you couldn't use your tv at all nope and it guarantee you uh you're saying there's no there's no ports yeah the one of the pictures they took a picture of the back of the tv no ports so it's just a power cable yeah not not i i would not say go out and get this 97 inch tv who knows how much this thing is going to cost. It does look nice in the pictures, but, and, and could solve problems,

but man, what problem are you solving? Not, it won't be a long lift solution. Yeah. One zap on either side and you're done. It's crazy. I don't,

I don't know. I don't even know what problem you're solving with this, but it would look great above the fireplace though. Yeah, that's, that's, that's it. Yeah.

If you've only got power above the fire, all 97 inches above the fireplace, though. Yeah, that's it. If you've only got power above the fireplace. All 97 inches above the fireplace. Yeah, but everybody streams everything anyway, so. That's true. That's true. Well, not 4K. Well, I guess you are streaming 4K, but not 4K 120. Yet.

You put in the new UniFi router to stream the 4k 120 and it takes out your wireless and your printer all right well we got we got one looks like one little security it's the year of the lock uh thing and we had the the the special door that we talked about last year that tj was talking about um come through but uh lockley has released this new smart lock that, that kind of installs and retrofits over your existing lock in a way, I guess, and literally over or under in another way. Yeah. Maybe, I don't know. It's hard to describe this. Like you have your, your deadbolt on the outside, right? Take that out and you put this little like shim thing with a fingerprint thing underneath it and then put the deadbolt back with this big with the big motorized battery box on the back of the other side of the door like you see on all the other smart locks. I don't know.

I don't know what to think about this. Like you keep your door aesthetic, but it's got this weird hang down thing. They should call it the Lockley hang down that no, that's probably, that's probably not what they want. That's probably not the, the idea that they're going for in this. I don't know.

It stores 99 fingerprints. Uh, it's got Google home and Amazon Alexa, all the good stuff in there. Um, it, it, it,

I guess it could solve a problem. I don't know if you scroll down, there's one that's kind of like built in a little bit better. The Access Touch Pro. I think that one looks okay. Anyway, available for $249 for the Access Touch Pro. And the other one's $229 for the Flex Touch. Shipping sometime in the spring of 2023.

So an actual product from CES. Yay. Not Matter compatible though. Sorry. Oh, that's from CES. Yay. Not matter compatible though. Sorry. Oh, that's a deal breaker right there. No, no matter.

Yeah. Doesn't matter. It's going to matter. All right. So I think the biggest story that we saw, yeah, brown switches now brown switches. Yeah.

I guess the biggest story we saw this year we've seen so far uh is is this like lighting thing it's kind of gone crazy so um but so there's a couple of cool things and then there's there's there's this one um i guess if this gets you excited you can get excited uh lutron uh diva and clero home kit dimmer switch they're launching in six colors now so um before you could get lutron deep and clear i guess in in any color you wanted as long as it's white now you you can pick and choose from uh these six other colors black brown gray light almond ivory and of course white course, white, the traditional white, the air one. Um, okay. This is great. Um, I I'm glad that Caseta is getting additional colors. I'm sure this has been needed for a long time. I just don't know why. I don't know why this is like huge news. Like Lutron has

had finishes for you ever. And I don't know, TJ, you, you seem to find this just as funny as I do, but this is, this is it. This is what they're coming up. This is what they brought to the table. Kind of disappointed. This made it into the, the new segment for us to talk about, but I thought I deleted it, but here it is. We were making fun of it so much before the show.

Like, I can't believe they released an article about this. And here we are talking about it. And they, they made me sign a embargo on this and, and I couldn't talk about it. For color switches. I'm like, all right.

I don't even understand why it's an announcement. Just release it. You should have just released it when it came out. It would have made more headlines. Whatever. You got new switches with new colors. All these years I've been spray painting my switches. This makes it easier for me.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. I have more colors yeah just uh all the colors under the krylon rainbow and then i've got five or six from lutron so okay i i i good for lutron and and good for the the like the caseta stuff i mean it is nice to have those options and these these actually look like switches and not for the the like the caseta stuff i mean it is nice to have those options and these these actually look like switches and not like the what are they called the uh stupid little remote control things they have with the five buttons picos yes yes yes those are nice and handy but they shouldn't

be the on wall control thing but these look good so yay you. You did it. You solved lighting. Well, the, the, I guess the biggest story I saw like everywhere, all at once, everything everywhere, all at once. Is that, is that how you say it? Um, yeah. Was this nano leaves like ceiling light thing that they came out with? They're calling the skylight. Um, it is basically a tile that you mount on your ceiling and you can like gang them together so they make one long continuous tile thing that looks like a fluorescent light but you can tune them to different colors of course and have fun colors come out of them i don't know looks really different and not a bad idea i think dj you had you had some thoughts on this,

um, in the hubs. I'll let you take it away here. Yeah, honestly, I think they're pretty cool looking. Um, you can replace just a regular light fixture on your ceiling with it. You can pair up. I don't even see a limit on there. I'm assuming there's some kind of softer hard limit on there. Um, but I think they look pretty nice. The only thing is I wish the transition, you know, they have a picture here where the tiles are different colors and you can clearly tell like the visible line between them. I wish that was kind of a little smoother, but I'm not even sure how you would do that because they're physically different pieces. But this is something like usually when I see these like LED lights like this, I can never envision them in somebody's house because I'm just not an LED light person.

Like I don't want blue all over my wall or whatever. But this is some product I can actually see installed in somebody's house. And I could even see this installed on like somebody's high end house. You know, even if they have like a like a man cave or like an office space or something this would be an easy addition to that yeah it looks like the uh like the the the the photo they have reminds me of like high-end um condo it has to be because you see those giant cylinder beam things there that hold up the ceilings and and building um but yeah this is uh it could easily be installed as a high end fixture over a dining table as they have here. They have another picture of it in the hallway, kind of like running down the entire hallway. I don't know.

Seems like a seems like a decent idea. This one's not. I think they said coming out until Q3 sometime. Yeah. Sometime in Q3. I don't see any pricing on here either. No, no pricing. They did this with their other products as well so we usually don't get pricing until right before they release if you have to ask about price then you can't afford it that's true yeah nanoleaf is

not on the cheap side of things either so and even this like 4d i think they're calling it a 4d thing um they've got a nice picture of some of these light fixtures behind a TV for this other product they announced. And even that looks pretty decent to me. You know, I kind of like how it's kind of like artsy in a way. You know, a lot of times when I see LED lighting in people's houses, that's literally just like hidden in a corner somewhere. Or it's a very boring, like, you know, just an LED strip. But they've kind of started turning these into like artwork. So it kind of blends in with the house and it looks like it's supposed to be there instead of just something you've cobbled together. Yeah. Well, this is the, um, the bias lighting

thing, but it, it like, it uses kind of the same thing that, so Phillips, you used a, um, uh, like an HDMI input and output device, little hardware device. So you went in with your source out to the TV and it would read the pixels on there, whatever the colors were around the edges, and reproduce those roughly on a pixel strip around the backside of the TV and give you that bias lighting. Looks like they're using,

I've seen other companies use cameras. Looks like they're using cameras for that. So the cameras focus in and watch the TV screen and pick the colors that are coming off of it in general. And they use this five meter pixel strip to do kind of the same thing. So it looks like they have two kits available, one for a 55 to 65 inch TV and a 70 to 80 inch panel. Get no pricing on that one. But like Kevin said, you have to ask. You're going to find out.

And they also had a couple of other interesting products, including this. Gavin, you described this as a mouse wheel light switch. Can't unsee. Yeah, it's a smart light switch, I guess. Sense Plus smart light switch uh can't unsee uh yeah it it's it's a smart light switch i guess since plus smart light switch it's a matter switch it's got a bunch of buttons and a scroll wheel for a mouse on it i i don't get this these are i get the scroll wheel but it's just not attractive so you can quickly dim things but they're not attractive at all but they got some smarts in it um to know when to turn on and off lights and stuff like that like it's it's more than just a switch but i think they

could have done a much better job at the looks the aesthetics uh if if you are listening to the podcast you should let us know if you think the uh lutron pico remote is uglier or if this is uglier it's a contest this is a good mastodon vote going on right here yes you can yes you can go for it tj he tj's learning all sorts of stuff tonight you can edit posts you can all right uh yeah i i don't know it looks like there's also a little wireless one that is kind of like the pico that slaps into the back with a magnet or whatever um i don't know it looks a little bit better it's just instead of the scroll wheel in the middle it's got an up down but it doesn't have all the other lights and things on it from what i can tell so uh and then i guess there's this uh this little matter bridge thing that is a nightlight.

Did you guys take a look at this as well? Honestly, that's, I think, one of the cooler things. I think the ceiling thing is the coolest one. But this little nightlight bridge border router thing, I think, is a good idea. A lot of times these devices are kind of like hidden in closets or cabinets somewhere, and they're not very useful. I kind of like that this oneets or cabinets somewhere and they're not very useful i kind of like that this one is actually useful and it's supposed to be out in the open it's supposed to repeat the signals and everything so i think it's a good idea to turn something that's

a utility device into something that's actually you know attractive or useful as well kevin what do you think no i totally agree summed it up right there like uh sometimes you know we have devices out there that are just doing one thing but they're not they're not useful and they're an eyesore this kind of eliminates all that too right and i like that when you have that type of thing the only thing i don't like about when you merge multiple devices in one is when you want to replace one piece of it you gotta replace the whole thing but in this case you're losing a nightlight yeah in this case i'm fine it's not like i'm taking out a wi-fi router and something else

you know like this in this case i'm fine um and it's good yeah all right so we kind of jump ahead a little bit here but samsung smart smart things put an entire like matter controller inside of a wireless charger for your phone so don't don't forget that's what that is yes uh and when you unplug it move it across the house and your lights don't work oh i spilled water on my hub it's kind of an odd decision but my hub is not a coaster yeah yeah i don't know it's interesting that it's there it supports matter and thread devices um isn't it also a switch too there's a button on the top of it or something like that it uh does it have a button i don't see that i think there was like a smart i see a button but i thought it was just to like connect something oh it's a uh fine device thing yeah there were

so many things in this one little Samsung smart things device. Oh, no. Yeah. It is a controlling button for scenes and stuff like that. Don't make it an important scene because you don't want to rest on your phone and then accidentally trip that button and it locks down the house. Something like that, right?

This seems like more of like a proof of concept thing, right? Like, hey, look at what you can do with smart home stuff. You can put it into whatever you want. It doesn't seem like more of like a proof of concept thing, right? Like, hey, look at what you can do with, you know, smart home stuff. You can put it into whatever you want. It doesn't seem like one of those devices that people should buy. It also is CES, so not everything gets released. I mean, I'm still waiting for my what the Galaxy Home little Galaxy Home little speaker thing to come out. When's that coming out, guys?

I think you'll be waiting a while. Man, they had they had them. They had like 30 of them on stage or 100 of them on stage and they were all there like somebody has those locked away somewhere and they're gonna come out on ebay one day i'm gonna have to get one those are so cute i'll keep my eye out for you it'll be a government auction probably we're with the twitter chairs and stuff yeah all right well that that that was an interesting little device. But kind of going back to the lighting stuff, we talked a little bit about the Philips Hue device.

I guess they call it the sync device. That's a hardware device. It goes HDMI in, HDMI out to the TV. Well, a lot of people looked at it and said, well, why do I need this? Just put it in the TV. And Samsung said, that's a great idea. Let's put it in the TV. Well, a lot of people looked at it and said, well, why do I need this? Just put it in the TV. And Samsung said, that's a great idea. Let's put it in the TV and we'll make an app out of it. And we'll just send those pixel colors over to whatever devices. This actually works really well

over the Hue products that use all this. And yeah, it actually does work really well. I know people who like using this. It's very expensive to do. And this isn't going to be any cheaper. It's just not. Because for the app, they've decided instead of charging you, what, $249 for the app or for the device, the app is going to be, what, $149, right? $129. So $129. All right. So it's like $130 for this. Man, I don't know. Like that's an expensive app. Maybe if it was under a hundred, maybe it's under 75.

I can think. Yeah. And my thing too, is that, you know, they're going to stop supporting this in like three years. You're gonna be like, oh, well, sorry. Actually, we're not using Tizen OS for our TVs anymore. So you just lost that capability. Like I know people don't want more hardware, but I would just buy the hardware

and just be done with it. I'm half on that. If it was built into the TV from the factory, that's a different story. But if I have to pay more than $100 for an app that probably is not going to be supported long term, I'm not going to do that.

I'm kind of half on that because so if you have that external box, it means you have to have external players, right? And so if you're using the internal apps, that not going to work it will work with this um and then like if you have a signal chain that the old sam's or the philips hue sync didn't work with so like say they come out with a new hdmi signal chain that requires you have a new philips hue sync you've paid what 250 bucks for this box it is out of spec now like it doesn't have the right ports on it so you're not going to get that full 8k hdr

signal to your tv or whatever you want so maybe that's a little ways out or whatever i don't know like i think if you're it just depends on your situation which one's best if you've got a bunch of external gear using an apple tv or roku hd like the box is probably better like you're saying if you've got if you're just watching streaming and you just want to hook it up like 130 bucks steep but so is everything philips hue i guess yeah that's true it is a luxury lighting item yeah but are you going to do this on your LGs if they come out with $130 LG app? Probably not. The TV seems to struggle just running the webOS sometimes. I don't want to add more to it. I've been bit by TVs and their OSs before. After a few years, the Netflix app just struggles to show any content. And I'm not talking like 10 years.

I'm talking like four years, five years, maybe. I don't want to be replacing a TV every five years. Heck no. It's another good point. Another good point is that things will slow down and your lights may get a little janky when they're trying to watch some nice 4K Netflix content. And yeah, not a bad point.

Not a bad point. We'll have to see how it works for people. $129, somebody will go out and spend it and let us know. Yeah. All right, moving on here. SwitchBot is getting madder. I know that's going to be huge for all our SwitchBot fans out there. Ooh, I need to upgrade my hub.

They've got a hub to uh bridge uh for switchbot bluetooth devices to work on the ecosystem with matter so they're on the matter bandwagon now so they're just they're just gonna be replaced uh giving you a new hub that you have to buy that's now going to connect all the switchbot stuff into the matter ecosystem but that hub is probably still going to be uh cloud connected at some point i'm guessing a hundred percent i mean the current the current one is so this one's definitely going to be so that's how they're working around all that because the reason you buy the hub is to use it with the internet i think all the switchbot devices are bluetooth so if you just wanted to use a bluetooth you don't need anything so this is wrong on that as well it's like a little bridge that brings everything over to matter yeah that'll work

so like i have my my uh switchbot lock and it'll work with the app uh without any issues but if i want the internet functionality that's where the hub comes into it hub 2 available later this year i don't see any pricing on this but it'll probably be 20 or something 20 switch bot stuff is so cheap ridiculous yeah it's basically the opposite of philips hue so yeah we we should see uh we should see that come out later this year be interesting to see what happens there um and then uh samsung has a bunch of new tvs that have come out with that fancy ZigBee thread matter slash whatever Ethernet chip all kind of built into it. So the Neo QLED micro LED and Samsung OLED TVs will have this new enhanced connectivity thing inside of it. So everything's coming together, guys.

It's going to matter. It's all going to matter. It's not going to be all this magic stuff all in one chip. I think this is the one chip thing that uh tj you were talking about i think it came out like at the beginning this is this feels like it was one of those one-year-old stories too like we talked about this yeah we definitely talked about it last year but well cool stuff we'll have to revisit maybe if if sam Samsung came out with any cool TV things, um, besides this and the, uh, Phillips hue, uh, $130 app.

Well, we'll talk about it next week. Um, let's move on here. We'll, we'll skip the, uh, CE pro scented theater thing, which was the strangest. Uh, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. And if you want to go learn about how smell a vision may work, um, head on over to c pro because they're they're on on top of it uh and then uh this this is the most interesting story i think that has come up this week so far out of cs and and usually you're you're getting pissed off at your technology but i think this gives you an opportunity to get pissed on um why things has announced announced i have to give you a problem

i thought about that all weekend honestly you saved that one just for the show i did i did i saved that one just sign out now thank you and we're wrapping it up yeah we're done now so uh white things announced a breakthrough uh urine lab uh lab, uh, that lives in your toilet. It's kind of like a smart, uh, what do they call it? Urinal cake that kind of lives in your toilet. And, uh, it has an in-home biomaker and analysis platform. It's named you scan, and it will, um, basically test, uh, for, uh, you know, your health, uh, your, your, your, uh, like nutrition and, and, and cycle tracking as well. So kind of a cool product, but also kind of a weird product. I, I, I'm not sure what to think about this. Um, is there's a lot of urine talk in this, in this press release. And, um, I don't know if we want to have urine talk on the show here, but you go to the bathroom, you expel this stuff, and this little device has sensors in it, and it can read it and tell you if you're eating right.

And then maybe we can use it to turn a light green or red. Oh, that's a good idea. Is there a home assistant integration? There will be they'll make it happen you had too much salt you had too much salt in your urine so your uh or your sink just pours you a glass of water you you know reading this article you know the examples they give i i wasn't too excited about that you know cycle tracking i already can tell you that i i know when that's happening but um it's one of the ideas I thought is if they could use this to detect COVID, for example, that would be really cool. I think, you know, like you just an easier way to test for that every morning. That would be cool. If an employer puts this in their bathrooms, I'm not going into the office again. Nope, because they

may find out some stuff. There's a lot of use cases I could see with this that are great. The examples I gave weren't exciting though. Yeah. So in Alice's specific gravity, pH, vitamin C, and ketone levels helps people monitor their metabolic intake to optimize their daily hydration and nutrients so um yeah i guess i guess if you're like it's one of those i guess it's going to be available in the uk first it's got a past fda clearance here in the u.s um so there'll be a longer date on that but uh they're saying q2 2023 with a starter kit starter kit so do you have to swap out stuff i don't want to have to do that job that's what i'm like there's a starter kit wait a minute wait a minute now like are there sensors like there's little tabs like every time

every week i'm gonna have to go in there and and pop the top on this thing and like i don't want that job i wonder how hard it is to clean up like somebody accidentally poops on it you know well that's a whole that's probably what the other part like there's a kit though like maybe there's a cleaning gonna replace the outer cleaning kit or something i don't know something for your kids to do oh here it is one card one cartridge that lasts three months the starter kit is uh 500 euros that's gonna be a little little expensive like it's expensive i mean that's not that's not bad for like a all-in-one like health thing though doesn't your apple watch do cycle tracking or apple has an that's why i need to pee on my apple watch and see what i don't think you're gonna no no but i mean it does this i i don't know what people are into i guess you could

i mean i think it's ip rated ip maybe not direct contact it does it does it does keep up with it i think it's more manual than than than this and i think they use like a temperature thing for like the the other part so and it's not even the best temperature tracking thing like you could do but they tried so that's good built-in pregnancy test would be cool yeah it's like depending depending on what what type of alarm you want to uh issue yeah it starts playing music and the lights like either you're happy or you're wrong so you get a call you get a call because of texting your yeah like do not i got a text from your toilet saying you're pregnant oh man well there's always interesting um products that show up it's yes this one this one looks very well developed i will give them that like the app

here looks interesting if you're into this kind of statistics of your your waist um it's there right on your phone like i said i'd like to see where they go with this because there's a lot of other use cases I could see them doing other than just this. It's interesting. So it's probably, like you said, there's probably more that they can get off of this than they are starting with. And maybe they'll add some more stuff in the future. Ty is saying, go look up 2050. It was a discovery miniseries that talked about toilets that do all this. But it was more for health.

Oh, man. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Like, this makes sense as like a company investment. Like, you know, we'll judge your health insurance coverage by what you excrete out of your body, I guess. Can you imagine Blue Cross getting a hold of this data? Because they're doing that with car insurance now where they shove a little device in your car. Yeah.

Or they use your phone and they determine it. Well, even for health insurance, they make you go through like a physical and stuff like that ahead of time. And they monitor that over time as some companies do too. Yeah. Not here in the States. We don't have really health insurance. And you have to, they monitor that over time as some companies do too. So yeah. Not here in the States that we don't have really health insurance. So like accident insurance. Well, it's interesting. It's interesting to see we've known about these sensors for a long time and

them getting smaller and smaller. And here it is. They've got a smart urinal cake here that can live in your toilet. Oh, there you go. A urinal cake. That that can live in your toilet oh there you go a urinal cake that's two devices in one it can keep your toilet clean smells good and monitors everything like that oh we combine this with the aroma player there you go this sounds like a genius idea yeah you can pick your aroma that you want the urinal cake to smell it could be a bluetooth speaker oh my my set my scent pods broken it smells like asparagus that's what you picked i don't know why oh oh man too good well that's that's that's what we have for this es uh talk this week i'm sure we'll have more i'm sure we'll have more wacky

products and if anything is beyond this this why things break through smart urine and now lab in the toilet thing. We'll, we'll, we'll talk about it next week, but all the links and topics we talked about tonight can be found over our show notes at home tech. Dot. FM slash four one eight.

All right. We, uh, don't have anything in the mailbag this week. Um, but we do have a pick of the week and I think, uh, TJ,

you had picked this and i didn't move it over but here it which one is it where'd it go i don't even think it's you didn't put it in that's why i don't know what it is i gotta find it give me a link i'm just gonna pick another one oh my gosh oh here it is it's a youtube video so it's about this guy and i don't even know where he's at he's in some foreign country that's not america um built a trash can train for his trash cans so this guy puts a metal track through his yard and at the push of a button he can bring all of his trash cans to the front of his house so they can be taken out. And I just think this is a good idea. I don't,

I don't think this is going to catch on. I don't think people are going to be doing this to their houses anytime soon, but if I had the extra space and the extra time, I think this would be a worthwhile, uh, investment. It's the trash train.

Yeah. Not, not, not a bad idea, I guess. Um, it wouldn't last in the way he did. It wouldn't,

wouldn't last very long here in florida but um it's a novel idea i like it i think my trash the guys who cut my trash would also not treat it fairly oh no and they definitely would not put it back on oh they throw it next to it like his they would intentionally do i don't know like the the guy who does the recycles now all he does he he doesn't like they used to have a recycle truck right and there were two guys that came around one was driving just like a traditional trash trash truck they pick up the recycles they toss them in now it's like you get the blue the blue bin and they have a robot that will pick it up and that guy has gotten so lazy now. Like he'll aim for your recycle bin,

but if he knocks it over, he knocked it over and he just keeps driving. That's a you problem. There's just trash all, yeah, it's not a me problem anymore. Yeah, I knocked it over. You should have put it in that awful position. Yeah, yeah.

He's not a good sport anymore. So used to, there were two of them and if you had a lot of extra cardboard, you have to like slip them a 20 and they let you help you put it on the truck or whatever but now like i just gave up and i had a bunch of extra recycles i just put it out by the trash i don't know who picked it up i have no idea i know it wasn't him because he didn't get out of his truck with his robot arm so um yeah trash train uh we'll add that to the show notes here uh and and and go check it out it's actually a pretty cool idea i think we're on the same youtube algorithm because i saw that i saw that one as well i think we all saw it independently um yeah i think that's true

uh it's there's a lot of steel like he did a lot of steel work in this and i'm like that's going to rain on once in florida and it's gonna be locked up like over the week it'll just be a locked up heap of iron that you get out there and have to spray down with wd-40 um every week oily mess out there and then your robot lawnmower child won't be able to mow the lawn yeah oh clippy oh clippy. Clippy has finally been released to the front yard. I got the Christmas blow up things taken down. So he's now allowed to venture into the front yard, go up there and take care of business.

Hope he doesn't run away. I caught him down by the street trying to get away the other day. Help, he's abusing me help i mean it's raining on me it's so sad uh yeah yeah clippy clippy was trying to yeah i i think what i think it was my fault because i was taking out all this extra christmas deck trash that we had like all the wrappings and i had this big like contractor what are these husky cleanup bags like the massive bag and i i set it down and it fell over into his little path and i think he he was trying to get back home and what he does when he tries to go back home he just

follows that wire around until he finds the thing and he just hops on board and um he starts doing this about i think about 25 something like that he'll start heading back home and he just hops on board and um he starts doing this about i think about 25 something like that he'll start heading back home and he he kept he must have kept coming up to that trash bag and and getting stuck and having to turn back the other way so i found him out by the front yard kind of like just kind of giving up on life and and out of battery i feel so sad hearing this story. This story brought some emotion to me right now. Poor Clippy. I'm going to put some more cameras up to help identify. And we need to talk about this later on in the project updates because there's a lot I've been thinking about with Clippy. So if you have any feedback, comments, questions, pics of the week, or a great idea for

the show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form there. All right, moving on to project updates. We've got here a note about the state of Gavin's home, and then also the Home Assistant 2023.1 release, Year of the Voice. And I think you posted earlier about the uh the party they had right they had a little video party every month oh yeah every every month they have a release party and uh this month actually it was today they had their 2023.1 release um nothing really exciting you can go read the release notes if you want nothing really exciting i I, you know, me, I update right away. I can't resist that little update button. I just noticed it broke my, one of my tiles, one of my cards on my dashboard,

but that's okay. That's okay. I'm okay with that. I'll fix it later. But, you know, in terms of the state of my home, it's actually boring. Ever since I set up Home Assistant and everything's settled down now, it's all just working. And it's amazing how fast things are like as soon as i open my door that sensor trips the lights turn on like it's amazing how well this is working um i i've added um today i added a tvoc air quality monitor for example um just want to see what I get out of that. You know, see what all that hype's about. I got a smart water heater. I added monitoring of my actual, my water meter itself. I was able to integrate it into Home Assistant. So now I can see the water usage. So now I can do things like monitor it. And if it's excess usage, for example,

send a notification, you know, something's up. There's a leak going on. You know, who knows? That I actually found cool. And when I added that, it was an antenna that picks up their signal. I also realized I get the water sensors of all seven of my neighbors as well. So I know how much smarter they're using or when they're in the showers or like that. So I was messing with my other neighbor saying, hey uh you're taking too long in that shower watching you you know uh he was kind of shocked but yeah no right now i don't even know what more to do

it's all working it's working well and you know i'm just waiting for it to break now with this latest release so i have something to fix just goat mouth and gavin just saying too many positive things i'm loving it i'm love it's it's working really well you know uh not much i can say i have i have my homestead review we know what yours is gonna be so you can just yeah we know yours yeah yeah don't worry we won't talk you't talk, you know. It's a learning curve. It's a learning curve, I admit. But once you learn it, it works well. It'll be in depth.

We'll get into it and talk in depth about it. All right. It's upcoming. It's upcoming. I'm not going to go there today. But I did look into the flow issue. I have that flow sensor for water. Yep.

Moen, I think, owns them now or has some kind of controlling stake in them. But FLO is the name of the company. And they have a little device you put on your pipe. And it will measure the pressure, the temperature, and the flow rate of the water coming in. And it can do some basic things like test to see if there's any, um, like leak inside your house or anything like that. It doesn't, but I noticed, um, the other day that like, uh, actually it was while you and I were working on the home assistant thing, Gavin, um, that the wife, the, the, um, the, the water usage was zero gallons from zero gallons per minute. It had always been like, since I plugged it back in had always from zero gallons per minute. It had always been like it,

since I plugged it back in had always been zero gallons per minute. So, um, I was like, well, why, why could this be? I looked up online,

said, you may need to clean this little turbine inside. And I sent him a support, a message. And they got back to me. It was kind of like over holiday. So I wasn't really expecting much and took a while for me to go out there and do anything about it. Um, but I took it apart and found out the little magnets inside it uses like a little a

magnet sensor and there's a magnet on the uh the turbine when it spins around those little I guess detector at the top and it can detect when that turbine's spinning around um there was nothing blocking it it was just the magnets had corroded and rotted away, which says something about the water supply I have here. But, um, I ingest that and I'm sure that the, why things would just get rotted away too, but I'm not going to go there. Um, so I, I've got one of those $9 later. I have one of those on the way. So hopefully I'll see that soon. And, um, I, I, I've got some other cameras I'm putting up around the house to kind of keep an eye, better eye on Clippy so I can see what he's doing, making sure that he's mowing the lawn,

and making sure he's not stuck somewhere and falling off the rails. But I have been, Gavin, I got to admit, like, you guys made fun of me when I first started this, like, that you were going to, like, see me, like, look, the open mower thing. Like I started looking at that and it looks, it looks kind of fun. Like they're using some fun stuff and I kind of want to make it. I want to kind of want to take Clippy apart and change out his insides and

give him like a super like down to like 10, like 10 centimeter GPS receiver. And yeah, it sounds kind of fun. Like I said, I get emotional when you keep saying things like this about clippy like you want to take him apart and rip open his insides you know it's like i hope he doesn't hear you say if clippy is listening to this i did not encourage it so don't come after me neither i love robots robots are great you guys are so worried about the robot

overriding i tell you it's gonna be so easy there's a big red button just hit that that's what everybody thinks you know the big red button is uh is a robot right that robot's not gonna listen to you yeah till they big they're gonna develop big red button shields and like put it over the top so when you hit it i'm just imagining like a scene out of a futurama where the button just gets up and walks away smoking a cigarette yeah nice try to meet back yeah yep yep yep uh i i i don't know i'm thinking about i was looking at it uh it seems to be kind of the same or the same model that i have uh that that this guy's operated on and and and, uh, he's published all this stuff for setting this thing up and it looks, it looks kind of fun. So, um, yeah, yeah, I might do it. I might

do it. I don't, he, he's, it's, he's only got a couple of videos put up and, uh, kind of uses some, uh, some like, uh, open, I guess it's open source hardware. So like you can basically have the boards and everything made to spec and solder stuff on if you need to. I don't have all the equipment to do that because you kind of have to like do that bake soldering thing where you put it in the oven,

kind of heats it up and melts the solder at a specific rate. But we'll see. We'll see what happens i i know you can get that stuff done and and online like somebody there's a service that'll do that for you so we'll see what happens it'll be 2.0 upgraded clippy so clippy 2000 i guess because we're what t1000 t2000 the next you know clippy will be traveling through time to go back to take out the creators of uh we could see where this is yeah all of a sudden there's like 15 clippies in my yard like looking at me in the morning it's like i am gonna glue

some like googly eyes i have decided he does need eyes so he's gonna get some googly eyes at some point absolutely yeah now clippy is gonna gain intellect and just realize that you actually don't need a yard he's gonna be like why am i doing all this work when you could just get rid of the yard and then you'll come out and there'll be no grass left that would be great that'd be great if he did that that would be awesome so just put himself out of work some eyes and a cigarette on the front oh okay he's got he's over there he's over there making he's over there hooking up uh trash cans and making a train for a trash train or something oh man all right well um i guess that wraps up everything tj unless you got so many any projects that you've been able to do since

you've been traveling and and getting sick in florida nah i've been traveling getting sick i'm about to move offices again. It's just, it's not a fun time for projects right now. So yeah, yeah, no, no kidding. All right. Well, that sounds fun. I'm here, you know, that's what matters. Yep. Yep. Well, for a year you've been here. So thanks man. There we go. All right guys. Um, I think that's going to wrap this show up we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show um and especially those who are able to financially support through our patreon page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to

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you totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app, your choice. We're hoping that that helps other people find the show. That wraps up another week here at Home Tech. We will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.

Wait, wait. wait wait tj you messed all that up you're not supposed to say anything new year new me new my resolution this is all i'm doing