HomeTech.fm - Episode 420 - Tooting All Over Their Timeline

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

This week on HomeTech: HomeTech.social gets a new feature, a new Wyze firmware hack adds dual streams, Wyze introduces new cameras, Apple re-introduces a new HomePod, LG recalls 52,000 TVs, a pick of the week that any parent would love, and project updates.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 20th. I'm Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio. I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bakery, Ontario. I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home automation, home

technology, all the good fun stuff. This week, we got a couple of news stories. We were going to talk about some updates and stuff first but I guess we can talk about our Mastodon server over at hometech.social it's been updated an intentional update it has translations now

so like if you go on the Mastodon server at hometech.social and you have an account and you're reading through and you see something in a language that has like symbols and stuff you don't understand, you can click the little translate button and it'll magically translate to whatever language I guess you have.

Maybe it's English, maybe it's something else. I don't know, but it does it. It does it just fine. So it works pretty well too. I thought so. It was pretty cool. I didn't know you can even do that. And boom, you can.

So waiting for the apps to build in support for it too. Like some apps I think have it. And you know, it's a cool i didn't know you can even do that and boom you can so waiting for the apps to build in support for it too like some apps i think have it and you know it's a cool feature allows you to interact with people from around the world i'm gonna start messing with people just by writing random things so it looks like another language you know then when they try to translate it gets nothing you're just you just go to just go to google translate and and every message is in different languages post up there. It'd be fun. Yeah. All I have to do is translate like a certain phrase, like five different times and nobody

will be able to understand what it is. So yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Gavin, you did rearrange my stories. All right. Speaking of updates. All right.

Well, um, Matt, I don't know. There's a couple of new apps that have come out. What I'm really worried about, we're getting into the discussion of updating things later, but Mastodon doesn't seem to update very often. I mean, they do have an update. They do update, but it's been on 4.6 or something. I don't remember what it is, but for a little while here,

and I'm sure there's another update coming with features and improvements and stuff. And I, I really don't, I really haven't tested that. So I've got to test that before, you know, to do an update or I just do it in production. Who cares? Like, yeah, I'll, I'll back up the database, back up everything. And if it doesn't work, I'll roll back and try again. Right. If we lose the home tech.social server, I'm probably just giving up after that just so we know so important i'm just gonna be done with it now what what app are y'all using for the uh for the mobile app for mastodon right now i'm using metatext that seemed to work the best for me but i like that one too there's a beta version floating around of a an app called ice cube

um which is actually really pretty good it it may detect some things that i like better but this guy seems to be really like pushing out updates all the time so like like he just did one as i sat down here to record the show one came in there was a couple there was like one this morning he's always adding features and and doing things it's kind of wild um and i think gavin you said you were using that one too a little bit uh i got in on the ivory beta which is made by the same guy that made um tweetbot on the twitter um and i really like it because it's familiar it doesn't have all the features yet he's working on it um but it feels familiar i like it but i did use use Checkout Ice Cubes,

the one you recommended. Yeah. And that one is more feature complete, like things like search work. It's really nice. And it feels really good. So, you know, if you can't get in the Ivory beta, check out that one.

And it's free. Yeah. Right? So. Yeah. I mean, there's kind of some big news from that TapBots and Twitter. Like they, twitter just randomly uh ended api support for a bunch of like super popular apps like uh

what is it tweet tweet bot terrific and twitterific yep yeah twitterific is like the oldest one like 16 years like it was like literally the word tweet comes from twitterific twitter didn't even have that they had like post back in the day and twitterific was so popular with the word tweet comes from Twitterific. Twitter didn't even have that. They had like post back in the day and Twitterific was so popular with the word tweet. They just, Oh, that's cute. The bird, the bird logo came from that, that, that like, if you look at, at Twitterific, they still are able to have, um, their little bird icon and, and, and that kind of thing. A lot of apps can't do that because it gets a little too close to Twitter's own icon, but they can do it because it started there. Twitter was not a bird-branded thing at all

when they were around. So just a huge slap in the face to those developers who have been promoting and working on the platform. They just randomly ended it. Still no explanation. They just said they did it. And I guess they're coming out with some kind of new um api thing in the future i don't know like but who would trust them at that point like if they just turn things off don't tell anybody

um and basically like those apps look like they're broken if you launch them yeah um i think i think tweetbot has a little like backdoor where he could add a message and say hey sorry things are broken we can't do anything but like a lot of them just say can't authorize and everything looks broken uh from the app and i'm sure they're getting bad reviews and all that stuff but because who who follows this other than tech nerds but just wow what a what a just horrible way to treat any developer who's working on your ap at At least they should have given them like months notice and said, Hey, like we're shutting this down in a month.

We're going to have a new thing come online. Nope. Just they cut it off and they cut it off randomly. Like they, some apps still work. I guess the Mac version of tweet bot still works because there's a different API key, but the popular ones,

they shut, they shut them all down. Crazy. Just crazy. And Twitter said that they shut down. What'd they come out and actually say as their official statement that they were locking off apps

that were misusing the API or something like that? But the devs didn't even know. They don't know what it is that, what API rule they're breaking or whatever. And I feel bad for Paul at TapBots because he put so much work into that. And some people said this better, but he basically shaped what Twitter was to me. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So by using tweet bot,

I enjoyed Twitter because I didn't see a lot of those ads. I didn't see a lot of the boosted stuff, you know, like I just saw my timeline in an order and it was always at the same point across my devices. I've loaded the official Twitter app now, and it is a mess. It makes using Twitter just, I don't like it. Unfortunately, there are things on Twitter that I need to follow for work, and there's still some news things on there that I follow. So I still am active on Twitter, but I'm trying to use Mastodon a lot more.

Yeah, I really haven't used, since they ended that, I haven't used Twitter at all, really. Like just a couple of times gone in and when somebody posts a link, it shoves you over to the app. I hear there is a RSS capability in NetNewsWire for Twitter.

So I may go look at that. And that would pretty much solve the read-only version of what you're talking about, like needing it for news and following people that are still posting there. But for the most part, the Mastodon stuff has basically replaced it. Most of the people that I was following are already back on this. And I've followed a bunch of new people. And I would say like when, every time I open it, there's the way it works is you have to follow who you want to follow, not who Twitter wants you to follow. So if you don't

follow anybody, you don't see anything. So you have to go in and follow people who are active and doing stuff on the platform. You can lurk after that and repost it. But if you're not generating the content, there's nothing there. So and repost it. But if you're not generating the content, there's nothing there. So I followed a bunch of people right off the bat. And every time I go in, there's like 100 new posts. I can open it up now and there'll be another 20 posts. There's plenty of activity in there. And if somebody gets too chatty, I'll just knock them off if I don't see any value. And that, you know, it's not like there's a couple of things that I'm following are clearly like news feeds just posting in, but

I find some value to them and find the stories that they're posting interesting. So to me, this works better than what Twitter was doing anyway. So I'm kind of happy with it. Yeah. And honestly, that's one of the more annoying things about modern social media is the constant barrage of different things in your feed that you have no interest in or that you just don't want to be showed. Right. You know, I use Facebook a lot for the business. And every time I go on to Facebook, three fourths of my page is covered with suggested content, random videos from people I don't care about or like just clickbaity stuff. And it just gets super aggravating because I just want to go to Facebook to see like my friend's stuff or like relevant business stuff. Right.

And all of that is hidden under everything else. And it makes me not want to use the platform. The most annoying thing about if I went Twitter and their app though is when i go to twitter i want to see what's happening right now right like sometimes i'll hear something in the news like an earthquake or something like that and i jump on twitter and i want to see what's happening right now but with the twitter app it's showing me stuff from yesterday or a couple days ago it's all over the place and that just drives me nuts so i as i said i just follow some work some work people on there and some sports stuff on there that are not on mastodon and that's pretty

much all i'm doing now yeah um kind of back what tj was um talking about on the facebook side of things i use the groups there's a lot of industry groups i'm still in and i would be using them and like if you turns out if you scroll down too far, it would bring up another group that it thought you wanted to participate in, but it wasn't the group that you're in. And I would respond to and post something for another group. And then all of a sudden I'm joined

into this other group in this other conference. Like I dropped in, like I was not part of this group, but suddenly like this post that was like, looked like it was part of the conversation or the group that i was in like just popped up in the middle of the it was so confusing so i've kind of given up on that too it's just that that that's a mess this is nice because anything and everything that i want is right here i don't have to worry about it and it's and it's all like technology nerds you know

that's pretty much who is joining our server at this moment. Minus bots. I mean, we got a lot of bots. We have the same bot problem that Twitter has, unfortunately. But, you know, we can kind of control that a little bit. And I don't know, most of the stuff I'm following at this moment is technology related in some capacity, which makes it pretty nice. So I'm sure that'll get diluted over time. But for the moment, it is all just technology based. Yeah.

There's, I've seen like the way it works. I like a little bit better too, because you're not reliant on like what we were talking about. Twitter has their API. They shut it down. What are you going to, you can't have third party, anything's you can have integrations, that kind of stuff. Um, this is a little bit better because like you can create a, there's, there's entire communities and servers

that are dedicated to like art like all their people that are going there for art and they're focused on that there's a little like when you go through the signup process over at the Mastodon thing like you can search for stuff on there and it is kind of that makes it kind of confusing

but like you can go you can go gravitate towards those communities and there'll be more people active on those communities on those servers that are looking for that kind of thing so not only could you have like multiple profiles on those little servers like that's easy enough to do um you you could you could have it set up to where like you could just join a server and only follow people that are on there for the art and that kind of thing if that's what you're into so it's kind of cool now i have a mess of the day do any of the apps that y'all use for mastodon at the moment support multi-accounts um yes okay i don't have any i don't have multiple accounts at the moment but

i've always been curious to that ivory does because i added the home tech uh account as well as my own yeah and so does metatext so like if you click on your picture um there's a accounts menu you can add a new account right in there and we have a little home tech account you can add in as well so i think most of them have that feature but it's been a it's been a learning curve and um but i i like what's coming out of it twitter twitter has problems ahead and and we'll see if it's long for the world. But when TweetBot goes down, that was my Twitter experience.

Like Gavin said, I think Richard said something along the lines, well, if TweetBot's dead, then Twitter's dead because I'm not using anything else. I'm not going to go anywhere else. I'm already happy enough over here that I don't have to go back and deal with anything other, unless somebody sends that i don't have to go back and and

deal with anything other unless somebody sends me a link or something to watch some funny video but um i'll click it and end up back on the the twitter site until it until it's completely down hopefully hopefully our update won't take ours down so oh now you jinxed it yeah right i'm gonna have to test it i'm gonna like now it's important enough where I'm going to have to spin up a new server and set it up exactly like I set this one and then see how the upgrade process goes. You better not be winging our server. Just willy-nilly updating things.

Do it A, B, and just swap out the servers. I want to see the change tickets before you do any of the work, and I'll approve them. Corporate IT's here. Oh man. Can I move my desk? I get a form for that too. Oh man. All right. What do you, what do you say we jump into some of these home tech headlines? Let's do it.

All right. All right. Well, speaking of updates, why is there, there's a, there's a new, I guess this is a new firmware hack maybe that that has come out for some of the new wise cameras. I know in the past you would have to basically run this firmware and it breaks a bunch of the wise features. But this one, I think, like can run alongside a bunch and keep the wise stuff working. But it enables a bunch of other stuff and i what was funny i saw in here um this guy is like why'd you do this and he says i started this project to track the local feral cat population in my neighborhood using cameras so uh it has like uh prerequisites you need a person a cat for emotional support during setup a computer 256 megabyte larger

micro sd card and uh yeah that's all you need so uh gavin you read into this a little bit more you had some comments on and some side notes on this uh what what what's what's so cool about this um it's not the first uh wise firmware hack that's been out there um there was one before but one reason i really like this one is because it supported dual streams. And you'll know on regular cameras, they have a lot of cameras have dual streams. Well, what is that? It's like when a camera will have, you can have one stream that's high quality and one stream that's low quality. And why that is good is because if you tie it into a system like Blue Iris, it will actually use the low quality stream for detection, right? It doesn't need the high quality stream and the high quality

stream it uses when it wants to record, right? And it does that because the low quality stream requires less resources for everything. So you can have like, I have 10 cameras running on my VM and because they're all using the low quality streams, it doesn't use up much CPU. Right. With this Wyze firmware hack, because it offers the dual streams, you can do that. And it makes it much more affordable. I mean, $35 or $25, I think it's US dollars for a camera. And you could tie it into Blue Iris with this type of feature.

I almost want to grab a couple now. Yeah, they are and i have mine sitting here they are inexpensive hardware and they work okay i i was using this for travel for an airbnb to make sure that nobody came in uh while we were gone and you know nobody came in but i i um it's a little pan tilt zoom camera that you can set up and and move around but i haven't used it since, but having more options like adding this stuff on, I mean,

this, this has quite a bit more than just, just the dual streams that this guy has added in a ton of stuff for, uh, USB gadget support. So you can connect, um, either the camera direct.

Yeah. Camera. Yeah. To an ethernet adapter. You can, uh, you can install wire guard on it if you wanted to, and VPN right to the camera direct, yeah, camera, yeah, to an Ethernet adapter. You can install WireGuard on it if you wanted to and VPN right to the camera. There's a lot of things in this that are interesting. And it's easily configurable through like a single config file, I believe.

So like if you just go to this config file, you just edit it, you do what you want. But the dual stream one was the one that stood out to me because it opens up a whole bunch of options especially if you want to keep your camera streams local this is perfect because you just stream straight from the camera to your blue iris and you handle it from there yeah and i think this this does uh basically void the warranty like i don't know it's hard not it's hard to care about a camera that costs like 20 but. It actually, no, it doesn't void the warranty because from my understanding, it runs right off the card. So you plug the card in, you boot up with the card, it runs off the card, does everything.

And then if you pull the card out and reboot it, you're back to the standard warranty. The one thing you can't do is if you're having problems with it, don't call Y support, right? Because your hacked firmware is giving you a problem. That's why they every now and then they'll release like a firmware update that actually breaks stuff like this so it's a constant game because right now they i guess they list a version of the firmware that you they do

not want you to update to or else it will break this stop this from working yeah one of the things that says on like one of the very first lines, it says no modification is done to the device file system. So that's pretty cool. I guess that's what I meant. Like, don't don't call by support if you're having a problem. Like, go back. Does Wwise even have support you can call? I mean, I'm sure you can contact them somehow.

And then they should laugh at you. They should just laugh and delete the email that you send them or something. Most tech companies don't even have a phone tech support anymore. So I suppose they do. They have a phone number. number maybe you can tweet them you can mastodon them that's a toot yeah i can't say toot in a serious manner though so uh just toot all over their timeline i don't know why they stuck with that like that i think they did try to change it officially because it was like nobody's gonna want to say that and yeah it's like i'm not tooting all over the place they should have made it about cats and they could have made it like a joke at first. Nobody's going to want to say that. Yeah, it's like, I'm not tooting all over the place. They should have made it about cats,

and they could have made it like a purr or something. Oh, God. All right, well, on to another update. It actually looks pretty cool. Code Project AI released version 2. This is the deep state thing that Gavin uses for his Blue Iris. And it does work better, I think, than the original thing. I think that was like DeepStack or something like that they were using.

So, yeah, Gavin, what's cool about version 2.0? Well, Code Project AI replaced DeepStack. DeepStack was the original preferred AI tool that integrated with Blue Iris. This came along and Blue Iris is sunsetting DeepStack and now integrating closely with this. And actually, they're both releasing features that tie into each other a lot better. So it's good to see a lot of development going on. They finally released 2.0, which a lot of people have been waiting for. And it's got like a revamped dashboard. And it allows you to do stuff like install modules straight from the dashboard. So AI modules, you know, people are making their own custom things, publishing it in there. For example, I have a nighttime module and it works better at night to detect objects and

animals and stuff like that than my daytime module. And it auto flips based on, you know, sunrise, sunset, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it's there's so much you can do with this. They've also, you know, performance improvements and they've also added native Raspberry Pi support. So it's a significant update. And with that being said, they've had a number of issues while it's been coming out. So they screwed up the Docker container and my Docker auto updated and it broke it. And they're still having issues trying to fix the Docker container. So I had to

roll that back, but you know, a number of people are having issues, but that's why you usually sometimes want to wait for a few point releases unfortunately they're at like 0.6 so they you have to wait for a bit more than average point releases with this product than others but um 2.0.6 i believe is what's out now and it's looking good is there any way we can incorporate this into the server to uh auto approve people maybe we could tie in chat gpt to read their descriptions and approve them based on that it's a good idea there you go well this looks pretty cool other than the the broken update this actually looks like a good like a nice good update i did switch the one i know i the blue iris install i have

over to this and it didn't seem to make very much of a difference between deep stack and this one where i noticed the difference was the performance so um the number of milliseconds it took to analyze pictures i was looking at that so it was significantly faster in that regards which is good for your um video card And I have 10 cameras running off this. So I have to make sure my performance is like tweaked. Yeah. You must be identifying everything in your house then. Well, it doesn't identify, like you can set it up,

like if you're looking outside or whatever, it's one of those things that's nice. It's like if a person walks into the frame, it identifies that person and tags it on the video. But if the wind is blowing around and like the worst thing we have for motion in florida is these stupid palm trees and swimming pools like it it always messes up the motion detection no matter what you did no matter how masking that you tried like it always messed it up this you could just turn it on and if it detects a person like legitimately there's a person walking

around yes on the pool deck and you don't have to worry about the wind blowing the palm trees just wrong and fooling the camera um it's it's it's that's been really nice to kind of like see and use and set this stuff up where um and i think you can you can get a little more fine grain like gavin uses it to find animals and skunks walking through his yard, which we've seen pictures of. It's kind of funny. Skunk or not. Skunk or not, right?

Yeah, but you want to tweak things like your trigger settings. So like when it's raining outside, I tweak that to reduce the number of calls to the AI, the code project it does, because based on the trigger, it will then send the image off to get analyzed. So if I tweak the trigger, then it sends less images off. So that's something you always want to look at if you're looking at performance. Yeah, because it sends like three images to analyze those three images off real fast. And

I don't know, there's some magic math that happens for it to, you know, between those three images, then it sends it back if it's positive um otherwise the clip just gets archived or deleted and not flagged as a person so it's really cool setup i really like it i know that um tj you use the what's the turing ai one it's kind of like does a similar thing i know that unified like the g4 cameras and up have like this bait like they do car in person and i think package now like you can have a package camera and see if there's but that's in beta um like they're that's it's all seems to be kind of like rolling out slowly this is this seems to be like bleeding edge all the in in typical blue iris fashion it's like all the knobs and

tweaks you can make like they're there for you so um that's cool it even has license plate um detection so it will pull up a license plate and grab the code and you can have a trigger based on what license plate pulled up into your driveway for example or just record all the license plates and that's nice for automation because if it's your car you can trigger something if it's not your car you something else, you know, trigger more cameras to look at this car and turn on the sprinkler and shut off all the lights. Somebody you don't want at your house. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty cool.

I mean, it's crazy to think about what this, you know, security cameras will look like in the next five or maybe even 10 years. You know, a lot of this stuff is relatively new. There's a good amount of companies that have some kind of AI stuff built into their cameras at this point. But a lot of them I've used, you either have to do something, you know, like this,

the product you linked there, or you go with like a lackluster solution that's already built in. So it'll be kind of crazy to see what it evolves into in the future. Yep, yep. And we had a little discussion topic here. Auto update or not.

With my experience in Docker, auto update is probably not a good thing. It seems to be Docker and auto updating. Don't do that. Although you should update, maybe not auto update unless unless you're just not going to pay attention to it i don't know that's my opinion my setup is i usually um turn on auto update for things that aren't critical um if it's critical i'll leave the auto updates off but i'll also find a way to notify me because you know whether i follow them on twitter or mason or whatever um so i know that there's new updates or i get a rss feed of new updates that way i know there's an update and i

can handle it at my own leisure but um most of the time it's on by default but there's certain times when things just break and then you gotta figure out why it broke and when it updated i also get notifications of whenever my dockers update too so just so i know that they did get an update i usually i usually leave auto update on all my stuff i like to live dangerously i i don't know i just don't want to manually go through and do a bunch of stuff my unraid server i pretty much just update that manually um just because i had some problems with it initially uh but my UniFi and other electronics throughout the house, they're just auto update. And, you know, knock on wood here,

I haven't really had any problems over the years with that. I think UniFi is probably the biggest issue I've had where they'll just push out a random update and my iPhone won't connect anymore or stuff like that. So I'm a little hesitant on that, but I still let it roll. I've kind of given up on Unify and just turned all the auto updates on at this point because the good on having networking gear patch itself is better than the bad, like the random case where the iPhone won't connect.

There have been major security problems with that platform in the past and it's better to have it patched and updated the the two things i need to update for this and i'm not are uh mongo db and redis which basically are only in existence to power our note server which i can't update right now because we're using it so i don't want to lose anything so yeah i'll hold off on updating those and and update them yeah, I'll hold off on updating those and update them later. Yeah, definitely. Definitely hold off on the note server. We have enough problems with that already.

We don't we don't need any more problems with that. Exactly. And it's been pretty good the past month or so. It's because auto updates off. Yeah. See, solved. Yeah. yeah it's actually um the updating the note software is actually super um manual like you have to change the version tags on the docker for it to update not it's not not

to the latest they don't do a latest release so you have to manually change the version tag you want so i'm probably way behind on whatever bug fixes and everything they have on that i have to manually change the version tag you want. So I'm probably way behind on whatever bug fixes and everything they have on that. I have to go check it out. Maybe I'll do that later over the weekend or something. We'll find out we have a note server next week. If we're not on the show next week, that's why. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, let's move on here.

We've got a couple of new products that popped into view today. Some of them exciting, some of them not. i'll let you decide what this one is um today wise launched uh two new cameras which are iterations of the original wise cam they're calling them the wise cam og uh with the price a launch price of 20 and it'll be up to 24 whole dollars. So save that $4 while you can, I guess. And there's a Wyze telephoto camera, which is called the Wyze Cam OG telephoto. That's going to be $30 at launch and it'll go up to $34 later on.

So again, if you want to save $4 on whatever Wyze camera you want to buy and then put firmware, new firmware on, this could be fun. The OG, the regular OG camera has the 120 degree field of view. And the telephoto version has a three X zoom and a 27 degree field of view. Otherwise pretty much identical cameras.

They have 10 ADP HD lens are a resolution with a colored night vision. They have two way audio support, motion detection. And in their daytime mode, the cameras will record up to 20 frames per second. And at night, it drops down to 10 frames per second. You can do the cam plus subscription also on these things. You get features like the web view, AI-powered package detection,

vehicle pet detection, all that good stuff. So just kind of adding on to the wise cameras line. I don't really understand the OG thing. Like I guess all their cameras kind of look the same to me and this looks like just another wise camera. Look a square box, right? Yeah. I think the OG is literally just referring to the price.

I mean, cause it's not anything like the original camera minus the pricing of it. So if, if the other wise cameras were way too expensive for you, then this is probably a good model to pick up. Um, I will say though, I really like the mount for this one. Something that has kind of annoyed me about the DIY security cameras is the very, uh, terrible mounts they give you with the cameras. You know, for example, I did two ring spotlight cameras today and they have a really small mount that you can't really pivot the camera that much. You can move it, you know, maybe five or 10 degrees in either direction, you know, up,

down, left or right. But it would be ideal if it had some kind of like telescoping mount like this, just because it would allow you to put it into different spots. But I don't know if that's worth it alone. So, yeah, I'm looking at the wise cam V3, right. And it's got this kind of weird,

like bridge type mount that it can rotate and do what you're talking about, but it's not, not quite the same. This is just, this is kind of like one of those threaded standard threaded mounts it looks like yeah and there's and there's no shortage of third-party mounts you can buy third-party mounts for literally any camera so but it's just nice that this will come with it yeah i mean what do you think about this thing i've always liked the wise cams for their quality i always found their nighttime quality

was awesome um and you know it's good to see that quality was awesome. And, you know, it's good to see that they're constantly releasing new product. You know, at this price point, you never would expect this company would still be around. But, you know, they're doing really well and they got a lot of hype behind them because whenever they come out with a new product, you see a lot of people, you know, tooting or tweeting or whatever about it, you know, and there's a lot of excitement. Yeah. And people put these everywhere. I mean, though, I see a lot of posts on Reddit and other social media platforms where people will put this $30 camera outside. And the only thing I can think of is like how awful the IR would be at night or something like that. But they post pictures of it. It looks pretty good. And they last outside, depending on where you are, for quite a while.

So I know some people in the north have had them outside for two or three years and they still work great. And that's the best thing about it is throwing them outside is like it's a $25 camera. Yeah. Like, who cares? You know, if it goes bad after a year, if you just get a summer out of it, you're happy with it. So you can't beat them you seem to have the little white led on them for night vision so you can kick that in and get the extra color night vision color night vision yeah a lot of cameras are moving away from that infrared the infrared black and white thing

and going towards the color whatever they call it starlight as they should because that makes a huge difference it is a it is amazing when you look at a camera at midnight and it's just like full color i don't like the i don't like the little lights on them like i think those are those can be kind of tacky they are kind of annoying though to be honest because they do randomly go off and like sometimes i'll forget to tell a client about it and they're like is my camera light supposed to be on and i'm like yeah that's how it does it i can imagine that's going to be on and i'm like yeah that's how it does it i can imagine that's going to be a problem with some hoa communities but you know

they'll learn they'll learn um just like random lights turning on or being on all night some of the cameras like when they're in night mode and they need that light they'll just turn that bright led on and they'll just be on all night like a floodlight. Yeah, it's pretty annoying. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't like that. I wish they could do like half and half, but I don't know if there's enough ambient light

around. It seems like they work just like what you're talking about. Like if there's landscape lighting or street light or something, it's fine. But if they need to make up the extra light, they'll kick that bright LED on. And man, it's it's bright. Yeah yeah and that's how it's supposed to work you know if it if it doesn't have enough light it'll it'll kick that light on and it kind of boosts it a little bit but if you don't if you have enough light then that white light will probably never turn on so just add more landscape lighting yeah just all you got to do lighting yeah it's just i mean it's easy fix right

your your $20 outdoor camera just turned into a $30,000 landscape lighting package but okay that's funny all right well um let's move on here's ikea not to out be done be out done has released two new LED products here. They've got their smart lighting products under the range name called Pilscott. No idea what that means. The gadgets are LED floor lamp and an LED pendant lamp, and both lights are made using a bendable LED light strip. Expected to last 25,000 hours.

Light can be dimmed to suit your mood and save some energy they also work with ikea trod free uh so you can get those set up uh they're pretty bright though these get up to 1100 lumens so and they we looked at these they actually look they look kind of nice like the i like the floor i have one of those like floor lamps kind of behind me not really using it for anything other than kind of like light stuff over in the corner when i need it um this is kind of nice though i and UK. And the floor lamp will be nine 90 pounds or, Oh, wow. Here we are. $80, 80 euros, $87. And I guess they've got all the translations here. So 90 pounds should, should be interesting. It's in the, I think these are in the UK markets right now, and there'll be appearing here in North America later. So, but they look pretty good.

I like them. Yeah, I would buy this floor lamp, obviously, honestly, because we have a couple old lamps that we've bought from, you know, Goodwill or other salvage places. And they're not the best looking aesthetically. But this looks pretty nice and it looks like it would give you plenty of light. So you'd have one of these in the bedroom and one of these in the family room, and I would be good to go. And lamps get very expensive. So $80, presumably, for this in America,

that's not that much for a lamp. Nothing. Yeah. Especially for one that's bright. And even the pendant lamp, this would be good over a workspace or over a table to work in. They have it shown as a chandelier-type setup over a dining or you know over a table to work in and they have it shown over like a as like a chandelier type setup inside of a over a dining table or something but i don't know you could use it in multiple places i might have missed it is the is the pendant lamp like hardwired to

like main power or is it some kind of battery powered thing yeah they're all hardwired it looks like okay because i mean like when you look at the the diagram of it it's got basically the two suspension wires and it looks like there would be no wiring at all for it but it does look pretty nice it looks like it has a big box that it floats up to the top that's just a lot of d cell batteries but these look great i love the design of these and like i'm looking at these lamps and i'm thinking if you were to buy this right now, something like this style design right now, you're looking at like $700 or so in Canada. Like that's how much like lighting is expensive. And then Ikea comes along and offers it for a hundred bucks. You have to buy it.

It's like you said, stylish. It looks good. And the specs on it aren't bad. Once again, another DIY lighting product that i could probably see in like a higher end house you know we we had a couple of those previously on the show but this one i could totally see in like a million dollar house yep yep well uh speaking of things that you only see in million dollar house apple has released a new 300 home pod uh smart speaker nearly two years after discontinuing the original HomePod.

That one was released back in 2018. I have two of them. New features available on the second generation include support for Matter. Yay! And an upgraded S7 chip, which was first seen

in the Apple Watch Series 7. It'll be sold along the HomePod Mini, introduced back in 2020. And the new HomePod is available for ordering today, but will start shipping on February 3rd. A couple of kind of big differences or differences between the original model and this one. Instead of, it's got a single 4- inch woofer that's in five tweeters. It's down from seven in the original model. It's got total of five microphones down from seven as well. Two speakers can be arranged in stereo pair, just like the original.

And it's got support for spatial audio with Dolby Atmos. So it also has some, some like a temperature and a couple of home automation sensors built into it too that you can use for HomeKit automations and that kind of thing. So overall, like, I don't know. I think it's a pretty good upgrade. I don't know. Is it an upgrade? I guess it is. Like it's a new product.

They probably didn't need seven microphones for the original microwave. Like it seems like everybody else uses two or three, right? I don't know. What do you guys think? Are you guys going to run out and grab one of these? Probably not. You know, we're a, we're a Google household. Um, I have a couple Apple devices, but I don't really see me getting into the Siri home assistant or a Siri voice assistant thing anytime soon. I just, I just don't have a use for it. Honestly. Um, I've heard that people that do have them generally like them and they, they sound pretty good. You know, the audio quality is good and everything, but that doesn't make sense for me. And I'm a Alexa household, right. And, uh, I have no need for

Siri. Um, and I also have Sonos, right. so that's my speaker of choice you know so i don't see myself running out um and getting them because they're also 300 each right um and you know sonos has so many more options i know i pay a bit more but it has so many more options in terms of size and what i want well not only, but the music services, right? Like you can attach just about anything to it. That's been my biggest complaint with this product from day one. It's like, all right, you did Apple Music, yay. But like, where's Spotify?

Where is Tidal? Where is Deezer? Where is like literally all the thousand other things that are out there. Let me listen to those music services on this awesome speaker. I think it's a good sounding speaker the price is up there with sonos as far as how i think it sounds but it's so limited like it i just it's hard to say it's worth having it you know like as a 300 speaker i guess it was 349 when they first came out. They did cut them down to $150. And I think I bought mine for, I mean, it came down to $299. I bought mine well below that.

Like I think they were like under $200 when I bought them. Like they were like used fire sale or returns or something like that. But they work fine for now, I guess. Yeah, that's always my problem too, right? I kind of want to use HomeKit just because it seems like a pretty simple platform for what my household does. You know, we're basically using our home automation platform to

turn stuff on with our voice or to set up schedules and stuff like that. But like, for example, HomeKit, my wife couldn't even use it because she doesn't have an Apple device. So I wouldn't be able to set her up, set it up on her phone. And then we also wouldn't be able to use any of our existing voice assistants with it either. So she would be completely locked out of it. Um, and I just need something that is compatible with everything because, you know, I have an iPhone right now, but if I want to switch the Android in two years, that would mean I'd have to get rid of my whole house,

all the electronics that control the home automation. And I'm just not willing to do that. No, I agree. It doesn't make sense if you're not in the Apple ecosystem. I think it'd be a more successful product if they were able to open it up somehow and let other assistants run on it. I don't know.

It's a premium price product. Let it do premium things. Crazy concept. I mean, charge for it. Especially a home automation platform, right? I mean, I get the whole walled garden ecosystem. I'm cool with it and everything. But a home automation platform should be accessible to everybody.

It's kind of like how they opened up Apple Music to everybody because they realized they would have to. Maybe they'll eventually realize it for this kind of stuff, too. Well, with MatterSupport, you should be able to use this to control other devices that are hooked up and maybe configured through other assistants. Should be. If you wanted to, I guess. I mean, you have options that are similar to this and a lot less expensive than the amazon ecosystem right like they have

premium versions of the amazon echo and little subwoofer modules you can add on like there's a way you can get to this and in like so within the sonos ecosystem or other ecosystems easy enough. So I don't know. The value, even at $299 with MatterSupport and a temperature and humidity sensor, I still don't think it's worth it for most people. I do like them used in my garage in the stereo pair for surround. But I sit you know, I,

I sit here and dream about just getting a Sonos arc and a subwoofer out here. Honestly, like that would be way better than these two things, you know, that are wirelessly connected over wifi to an Apple TV. And sometimes you have to go in and remind the Apple TV that it needs to be connected to these speakers, like make it less problematic i i'm sure there's just a problem with these particular versions because

they're old but um if it was less problematic i probably wouldn't worry about it but you know what's less problematic a hardware going to a freaking soundbar um that that would be a lot less problematic that was that was a lot of information on a home pod so yeah especially when i don't have one you know like uh i'm just going by what you say i'm i'm more excited excited about the pick of the week so well we're gonna get to that i i've got i've got two of these things and you know we have an old pick of the week that we'll just throw in here for extra extra notes here um there was a nine to five mac article a couple of weeks back about not letting anyone like if you,

if you owned a home pod and your home pod looks like this thing, don't ever own one again. We'll put, we'll put these a link to this in the, in the show notes. These home pods are horrible. Like it looks like they just rolled them around in the mud outside and then brought them back in.

Yeah. I thought these were supposed to like sit on a counter or like desk or dresser or something. How does it get this dirty? Like, are they in like a shop somewhere? Like an automotive shop or like a CNC shop or something? That's what it looks like. Like if you...

A smoker's house? I don't know. And they're all the white ones. Like if you're going to be in a CNC shop, buy the gray one, right? Like you should probably do that. Yeah, and these are like genuinely disgusting. Like I would not touch this. Yeah, yeah well good thing there's no buttons well i guess there is buttons there's volume buttons on it but you never really have to touch yeah it's like what are these people

touching them for like what how do they get like this it's so gross i almost never touch mine i mean maybe like to do the volume manually or something that's what happens even that's what happens when the smokers are yelling at them they're too close i guess he's breathing all over this is so gross i don't even know how you would clean this the the the fabric and everything that's on there it's so gross you would kill it with fire that's how you would clean it you would buy the new version oh man hopefully a dark black one or something. Yeah.

Interesting. There's a blue one there. Like what happened to that one? I mean, that one doesn't even look that bad, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, compare the other ones. If it came in blue. Yeah.

That's very sad. If you're going to make your HomePod disgusting, then get a blue one at least. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, don't buy the white one if you have dirty hands and you work in an automotive shop dealing with grease and stuff all day. Or touch the HomePod.

Just don't touch it. You don't need to touch it. I never touch mine. It's behind a monitor over there. I can't even reach it. But for some reason they uh they thought it was a good idea to man these are gross so yeah anyway we'll put the link to that in the show notes that's all the home home pod news we have here on the home tech podcast um one more quick

a story here about lg issuing a recall for four models of the 86 inch 4k tvs uh due to tip over concerns it's no surprise to anyone who's ever purchased you've seen a 86 inch tv on the little tiny feet stands they have um the recall affects about 52,000 tvs sold between march and september of 2022 the recall notice uh from the u.s consumer product safety commission says the tvs can become unstable while on the assembled stand posing a serious tip over and entrapment hazards that can result in injuries or death to children and others the recall notice uh notice says owners of the affected tv should detach the tv from its stand place it somewhere safe and away from kids and it also advises customers to contact LG for instructions

on how to inspect the unit and obtain replacement screws and stand parts. LG says the LED TVs, which weigh up to 101 pounds with the stands, aren't defective on their own. The TVs only pose a risk if the stand isn't installed properly. Otherwise, the TV can be put too much strain on the stand and the stand is potentially damaged at that point and fall over so yeah um i don't i've never trusted those little stands like like even on smaller tvs the little tiny feet stands they have on the tvs now like they just they don't look like they can do it i don't i don't i don't look like they can do it. I don't trust them. Two questions here.

Why have they stopped giving like the pedestal stands with these giant TVs? You know, some of them include that. But like you said, a lot of them have these really tiny stands. And when it's a smaller TV, like a 40 or 50 inch, it's not that big a deal. But I would think with a larger TV like this, I mean, obviously it's a problem. Um, the second question is who is buying an 86 inch TV and leaving it on the stand? I,

I don't know where that would fit into like any house I've been into, but I, I guess I just find that weird. You're going to spend what? A couple thousand dollars on a TV and just leave it on top of your cabinet. I don't know. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me. And I've never trusted those little tiny stands.

Yeah. Well, especially if you have kids around. I would think you'd want to mount it anyway just so you don't have to worry about it at all. I remember seeing some of the instructions on some of the earlier TVs that had those types or any kind of stands, really. They had like a wire and some like drywall screws that they included and you were supposed to install that into a stud in the wall and from the top of the tv there is a screw and you would you would run that back so like if it ever attempted to tip over at least one way away from the wall um that wire would catch it and it would it would flop

back but i don't know maybe maybe that's the instructions people are missing because it seems so absurd to do but also it seems pretty absurd to put an 86 inch tv on a stand so yeah and those are those are still pretty popular i go into a lot of airbnbs that still have those anti-tip straps um oh for sure like furniture and everything too so they're uh definitely still around just about every piece of furniture I've ever, well, I've bought from Ikea. Even some of them have like recalls on them and Ikea would send like little anti tip thing.

Like they have hardware that you're supposed to install on the back. So things don't tip over. Makes sense. Makes sense. I catch my daughter like pulling out drawers and trying to climb up to the top of the dresser all the time. I'm like, no, this is not how this works. This is why those safety warnings are there yeah exactly exactly

so um yeah interesting stuff all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 420 all right we have a a pick of the week. That is, um, as odd as it comes as a parent, I will weigh in at the end of this and, um, it's the glukes kind smart stroller. And, uh, TJ, did you take this? I don't know. Somebody put this in here and who's who needs to admit to putting this in here? Well, the way that Gavin talks it up, I think Gavin, Gavin gavin has side notes on this so gavin we're gonna kick this over to you you know when whenever i look at any type of product these days and i see smart in it i get

excited of course you know that's why we do this podcast and this is a stroller that's smart and yeah for the price it's got to be really smart and i actually found it is really smart the battery powered and it has so many features that i was impressed i don't have a kid to put in it but i i could see myself getting it and put my dog in it and just throwing him around the city you know like my dog would fit nicely in it he's less than 50 pounds so it would be great but it has like features like uphill assist you know and you're walking uphill you know it makes it a little bit easier or even downhill auto brake so you know if you accidentally slips on your hand it won't go running down the hill into the

streets or anything like that right it has safety bubble detection it can detect if it's about to get hit by something like how cool is that you know like at least you know it's about to get hit by something i don't know how much time you have to save your baby in that case but you'll know it's about to happen um it has okay this is the best and i i would love to see them build this into other furniture but the auto rock my baby like it will sit there and rock back and forth like on its own can you imagine you're in a mall and you just see a cart sitting there you know the first thing you think is haunted but no i'm gonna think that's the gluckskine smart stroller right um it's it's this thing is worth i think it

would be worth the money it's got apps the app has gps in it and they also they also gamify it so you could go up against other nannies or other moms and stuff like that to say who who strolled around the block the longest with their kids you know it's gamified and and i had to check the sizes because i wanted to see if i could fit in it you know but it only holds six grocery bags you know that that's the size of it so you know even if you go to the grocery store can you imagine you take the kid out of it hold it in your hand put six grocery bags in there and you let it stroll out to the car you know like there's so many things that you could do with the stroller i think this is either a hoax that gavin put on or this is gavin's company because

i've never heard anybody talk that positively about a baby stroller smart stroller smart stroller get it right it looks like it's got carbon fiber too which is fancy you know what we'll wait for the ikea version and that will be much cheaper okay gavin you have glazed over the the keyword three times since you started talking and that's the keywords price how much is this thing this smart you know what you can't put a price on you can't you can't you know child safety and you know mental. You can't put a price on that stuff. If you got to ask the price, this isn't the stroller for you. That is true. That is true.

I think, what was it? $3,000? $3,800. That's nothing. That would buy you a car that the baby could drive itself, you know? This is like the Tesla of strollers, you know? Like, you got to pay that little premium, the Apple tax. This is like the tesla of strollers you know like you gotta pay that little premium the apple tax this is gonna crash into random strollers is that what you're saying yeah oh it has lane assist too like like no seriously so when you're walking along and you

have your little furry friend next to you and you get distracted you wander out of your sidewalk lane it will notify you to your you're coming out that's like a tesla right there you're about to get hit by a car you're about to get hit by oh never mind never yeah exactly like this is a stroller oh man like gavin i i really think that you want this stroller for yourself like you want to have some skin in the game there's no way he is this you want this stroller for yourself. He has to have some skin in the game. There's no way he's this excited about a stroller. You see, I wouldn't buy this yet because... Why wouldn't you buy it, Gavin?

It could be the lack of a child, could it? I don't buy things based on promises, and it doesn't have MatterSupport or Home Assistant integration, so I'm not going to buy it based on promises. We'll promises we'll wait till and you know there's a couple room there's there's some room for improvement so you know i'm gonna send them an email and see if they can incorporate this but you know at the golf course i see people walking around in their golf clubs in their own strollers follow them automatically why don't they have this following you automatically why do i even have to touch it you know i just sit there on my cell phone talking walking down the street and

this thing's following behind me i don't even want to look at my kid anymore exactly you know it's like oh i didn't even know you were there anymore you know like that was a great walk you know that's what i was doing yeah this thing should follow you automatically you know i'm gonna send that in you know um and you know they can even do things like put some blades on the bottom so you can walk around your lawn and it cuts the lawn while you're walking the baby you know or it pushes itself around the lawn while it walks the baby yeah and hopefully the baby doesn't fall out that's okay no recall needed yeah not at all worse than peloton yeah i'll wait for version two when i look at this thing which is just a monstrosity i'm like i how much does this

thing weigh it's what 30 pounds you said like that's just massive i mean it's all battery yeah the weight doesn't matter though if it walks itself so that's battery weight it doesn't walk it doesn't walk itself into the car when you have to lift it into the back you know not with that ad so you'd get a ramp to your car it's a you get a workout from it too so oh yeah yeah i guess the only reason this is on here is because it's it's in canada it's it's a canadian yeah exactly i don't know i i there's a lot of crazy things that come out in the world of child. Somebody will buy this. I will say,

I will, I will probably go to like a theme park in Orlando and see somebody walking around pushing this thing. But man, you won't, you won't see him pushing it around. Cause no, you don't have to.

Yeah. Well, it's got those like, if you see one walking itself, you know that it's at, I don't know. It's got self-adjusting leather handles on this thing. You might want to touch them.

It's probably warm. I'm just waiting for the first TikTok where someone comes across a group of them doing that auto, auto, you know, rock my baby thing together. And then they put it to a song and it looks like a little dance going on. Someone's going to do that on TikTok eventually. Watch. Well, you better hurry up. According to the website, there is only three pre-orders left they make these by hand they do they're handcrafted and in uh vancouver here you go magnetic buckles oh man i mean it's like every

premium feature you can think of plus a hoverboard strapped to the bottom plus an app and cameras with ai detection plus a white noise machine some kind of uh yeah i i don't know it's only 3800 your kid is worth 38 the kids are going to use this for like a few like a year no not even a year and then they're they start running around i don't know they rese They resell it for $3,700. Could you imagine how angry you would be if your child threw up all over this? Exactly. They're just going to mess it up.

You know the amount of Cheerios and dried fruit and strawberries and stuff. You get peanut butter. You're going to see sweet. It looks nice now, but this $3,800 is going to be worth nothing. Why are you so negative? Kids aren't that bad.

Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I don't see, I, we, we, when we,

when we got, we had a stroller, um, we'd ever bought like a big one. Like we, we bought the little umbrella thing. That's probably like, should be recalled that we, we,

we had to like dig around cause you can't find them. And they like 25 at walmart but they don't stock them at walmart you have to order them from like walmart online and they deliver it to the store or something i don't know we we went through like two of those because the wheels eventually fall off they make this like horrible noise and that's how you know they're about to fall off um but that's all that's all our child ever got like there was plenty of room in the trunk and everything and it's light and actually one of them broke at one point we just threw it in a trash can and walked away like couldn't do that with this like if it broke down on the side of the road like what are you gonna do you gotta push that 30 pound thing back home get it repaired

how long is the warranty on this thing two years well yeah three years three three years of software support and updates and two years of actual warranty your kid's not even going to use it no you're gonna need selling this even harder gavin you need like five kids for this to be like to even start paying for itself like i it's probably gonna be popular value will be great i'm sure yeah with all those cheerios and crusted peanut butter and stuff you know what you're gonna see a bunch of these in california little puppies i i do not doubt somebody will 100 yeah yeah yeah all right somebody will buy this thing and uh yeah it will be it's gonna be to be Gavin. I mean, that's.

We get enough patron support. Well, Gavin will get one of these. I think Gavin wants one, you know, a huge adult size one. Like he wants to sit back. Wally style. He wants to. Yeah, it's a wall. That's what this is.

This is the Wally. Like as far as you guys didn't put that connection earlier. I bet Gluckstein means Wally in. Buy more or whatever i just like the auto rock my baby you know that's the best part of this whole thing just you know rocks you back and forth you know maybe you could airplay some music over its built-in speaker you know that would be awesome oh man oh man well if it had matter support i think gavin we got it but revision to next year yeah if it if it had if it had zigbee could write a home assistant routine or something for it or uh what do they call them schedules no something else anyway that would be done in in a matter of a few days and it would be able to like

follow you home and then kick on the lights and all that good stuff. AI it's here. Yeah. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week's are great idea for the show. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm. Or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form project updates. Anyone, Gavin, you said you had a couple of minor things. Like your air quality has gotten a little bit better, but it's gotten worse.

It's worse? Oh yeah, like when I first got this air quality monitor, I was at five leafs and I was all, everything was great in my world. You know, I felt like I was breathing good air. Then it dropped to four leafs, you know, and I was on Mastodon and I'm like, how do you drop to four leafs, but you don't was on mastodon and i'm like how do you drop to four leaves but you don't tell me why like they don't give you the information so it was

driving me nuts because i'm like i took an extra shower just to be sure you know i moved it around the room it's still at four leaves i'm just like what's going on and then somebody actually pointed out to me like if you're near a kitchen, you know, that could affect it. And that made sense because my office is above my kitchen. So maybe the cooking is affecting the air quality. So I now feel comfortable when it's at four leaves. I'm OK. If it drops to three leaves, I'm changing rooms.

But they need to give you more information. It's like, oh, your air quality got worse. Why? Let me know why it got worse. What happened here? You know, because it was bothering me for a little while. So yeah, I got that a little sorted out. So that'll be good. The only other thing this week,

homeless isn't still loving it, but you know, came across a little bug in it. And I've seen this in the forums. There's actually GitHub's where they reports for this and stuff like that, where the Z-Wave devices seem to every now and then you'll reboot it and they get two devices, they, they go back to the default name and I got to figure out where it is and why and rename them and stuff like that. So just something to keep an eye out. One of the things I do do is I have a watcher add on bill. It's, it's, I think it's in the hack store. And basically that keeps an eye on your, your entities, their names. And then it also keeps an eye on your config files, your dashboards and stuff. And if any of them go missing, it actually notifies you. So it will say like this device is missing and it's in these automations, you know, you might

want to fix them. And it's kind of cool because I have like a little icon on my dashboard that will tell me, you know, how many are missing and I can fix them and everything's good again. So otherwise you would have no idea. Your automations would just fail and you don't know why you'd have to dive into them. You got to be proactive sometimes. And this is the watcher add-on is a real good way of doing it. So install that, highly recommend it. It's a great idea. Yeah. I'll have to do that. It's a really good way of like if you have to if you have to rename uh an entity for example it will tell you everywhere after you renamed it that it was it's now broken so you can now go through your automations and fix them in all those places

oh my gosh that should be built into everything i wish yeah everything yeah hmm well um what's what's good is um it seems like i just had to restart the home assistant thing after it's been offline for a while but um it's usually working like it rebooted and came back online so just just in time for the new updates oh yeah there's there's all sorts of updates to do here hmm it's been down for like two weeks you have like eight updates yeah they push out updates all the time so i'll run those later and crash the server later while i'm not using it so um i i've got a little project starting tomorrow guys oh what is it called project fiber and that's not like raisin bran or anything. You're going to make like a star ceiling.

No, no, no, not a star ceiling. The fiber is finally to the home. And tomorrow the ONT comes out and I'm going to get it all hooked up, hopefully. They're scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. So hopefully we'll see a technician come out. And I don't know what's going to happen. I don't, I don't. One thing, one mistake I made when I was remodeling the house is I forgot to run like any kind of DMART cabling.

So, um, I never ran any like cat six out there. So I've got like some cat six that I probably need to like retrofit and real fast. And, uh, I don't know, maybe I don't need that and maybe they'll do it. They probably won't. Um, but I do kind of need to get some cat six out there now that I'm thinking about it. Like it's weird that I, I completely forgot about that.

And you waited till like the very last minute. So you're going to have fiber tomorrow and you're not going to be able to use it. Oh, I'll get it. I mean, it's not very far. I can get it in.

It's not, it's not hard to, to retrofit. I actually have like conduit in most of the walls yeah i did think i had inside but getting it to the outside um and down the house is a little tricky uh because it's a block house and all that fun stuff so i don't know i'll um i'll figure it out and uh hopefully tomorrow by this time i will have my new fiber all set up. Now, I talked about Clippy being damaged at the beginning. Despite my best efforts of warning the guy who runs the fiber cable

and has this giant shovel-looking thing where they just drop it into the ground and wiggle it to put a trench in the yard where they want to put the fiber um they ran it like over clippy uh over his little wire thing uh at least three times and um i keep finding extra times that they decided to cut it i'm like i told you where this was like i could have like i was like it's right here it's right here they they had to go under the driveway they use that pneumatic like pound like it's a little like tube and it's got a pneumatic camera inside of it and uh i guess you just set it under the driveway and shoot it shoot the wire eventually shoots underneath it and they can pull it through so that was cool to watch and um it's all here like they got really

lazy like right when they got up to the house and there is um it's there's like a flower bed i guess i don't know there's like a separator like a little um lawn separator thing and instead of going under it they went over it and then they covered it with grass that was there which was very nice of them and i was out there kind of like roaming the ground like oh i need to get this cat six out here and i looked down down and I was like, what's this grass here for? And I like kicked it back. And, um, the, the, the wire where, where I would normally edge and we'd eat the little, um, fiber optic cable was just like hopped up over, over the top there. So the first time I came through with an edger, uh, that, that thing would have been cut. So I had to basically redo

their work as it, you know, approached the the house so i was out there before the podcast with a shovel digging up my lawn and making sure that was deep enough and everything and installed correctly thanks thanks verizon guy who cut my clippy wire three times they also like installed it really close to the road like they i don't know why they did any of the stuff that they did. It was very strange, but they, they, they didn't seem like they seemed like they were, they were competent, but then it turns out they're not.

So yeah, they just, they usually don't care when they do that kind of stuff. It's just, everything's in their way and they're just going to make it happen. Yep. Hopefully the guy tomorrow will be better. I will be actively haunting him.

So if he, if he makes a mistake or does something that I don't want him to do, I will, I will be there to, to tell him. You're one of those homeowners. Yeah, no,

I'm definitely going to be the one in this case. I will be, I will definitely be one of those homeowners. So I want to get the ONT in the right spot and make sure that power to back it up and all that good stuff. So I don't want to go internet going down, right? Like internet's got to be on. So I'm excited. Tomorrow's the day, guys.

Tomorrow's the day. Now you got to say some nice things and throw some salt over your shoulder because you're going to jinx it. No, I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, it could be that they just cancel the appointment and miss it completely. And they'll they'll show up when i'm not home comcast you didn't cancel it 20 times in a row yeah well we'll see what happens oh hopefully like i said tomorrow this time i'll be on fiber and have nice upload speeds and all that good stuff so we'll see how it goes i'm just happy you didn't do it on podcasting yeah try out a new try out a new hot uh internet service um i already had to like reboot the uh cable modem tonight so we were having a little bit problems uh

there's this anthony saying the cable itself is still on top of my lawn and driveway oh yeah he had his installed and yeah they didn't do a very good job of getting it to go where it needs to go. And it's not like they can cut it. I mean, they can, but they don't want to. Yeah. So they'll have to like uninstall it and then somehow get it under your driveway or whatever. It's really weird. But like you said, somebody else's problem.

Yours specifically. Good luck, Jimmy. Good luck, Jimmy. Good luck. Yep. Oh, is that Jimmy? I couldn't see the thing.

I'm on a small screen right now. All right. Well, TJ, you have any projects you still, you still doing your, your, your big job thing that you're trying to get done?

Yeah, no, no fun projects right now. I'm in the process of packing up the office. I've got the movers scheduled for the 31st. So two weeks exactly from now, I will be in the new warehouse and I'll have to start constructing a workspace of some sort. So it's just a 20 by 30 open warehouse, giant roll-up door. So I think once I get all the shelving in there and kind of figure out where I'm going to do

everything at, I'm going to set up a small cubicle of some sort. And it's probably going to look janky, but nobody's going to be coming over there. So I'll send you some nice acoustic panels you can use. That's a good idea. I'll definitely need them. I will definitely need them. So it's too good. Yeah, nothing crazy.

I got the home theater project next week so hopefully i'll have some pictures for uh show and tell next week um that's uh i think scheduled monday tuesday and wednesday so we'll uh see how long or how far along i get with that it's going to be some you know behind the screen speakers and a nice projector and all that kind of fun stuff so hopefully i have some uh better uh updates about that awesome awesome uh now we do we did have a patron come in at the five dollar level this weekend um scarcel i'm not sure i i did that's what came in as the name so scarcel i guess whatever anybody puts in the name and pledges at five dollars we'll just read it on there i don't care what it is yeah whatever you can put whatever you want in the name and pledges at $5, we'll just read it on there. I don't care what it is. Yeah.

Whatever. You can put whatever you want in there. Like money talks matter is awesome or something like I'll, I'll say it like, but thank you so much for, uh, for, uh, uh,

coming on the show and, and, and being a, uh, a sponsor of the show. It really, really does help, uh,

keep things running, helps keep the Mastodon server up and going. And, and it, it would probably pay for some of us to get to Cedia at the end of the year here. So just keep saving it. And part of the 5,000 domains that Seth has. Yeah, well, those have to be paid for too.

All the router hats and price per button database and everything else. Until we start selling router hats and somehow monetize button databases, then I'm sure there's a way to do it. I'm just not where it is. I'm trying to find a local, you know, crafts person that wants to take on the router hats.

I really think it'd be a good idea, you know, but nobody's biting on it yet. I don't know why. They just don't see the potential that you, they don't. Yeah. All right. nobody's biting on it yet. I don't know why. They just don't see the potential that you and I in currency. Yeah.

All right. Well, if you want to give a big thank you to the show, if you want to help out the show and you don't know about our 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 per month gives you a big shout out on

the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slat chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there every day and chat about i don't know there's been a couple of conversations been rolling through but like mostly around the news like the home pod thing that came out um things like that uh i haven't seen too much uh about i guess there's there's there's talk about ai all the time like tj and tj thinks that or tj thinks that the the ai is coming for the jobs gavin of course is in there just praising robots i don't think i don't think we should really trust gavin's opinion after he really talked up the stroller so it's a robot stroller you know he's he's all in hey if that

stroller is going down the street and has to make a decision if it's gonna hit you or me it's gonna remember that i treated it well it's gonna hit you you know because i'm gonna get out of the way because i have legs it has that little screen there with like the person person chair boat and it's like gavin it's like green with a smiley face it's like don't there is gavin friend friend and not those killer strollers are gonna remember who their friends are all right well if you want to help out the show but can't support financially totally understand but we'd appreciate a five-star review on itunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice.

Let us know how we're doing. That's it for the news this week. Everybody have a great weekend, and we'll see you next week. Take care. Farewell. Do not wing it. We are not prepared for winging. are you talking about this whole show is one gavin that's how you say it we're just winging all the time that's right or wrong i think you're

wrong there stop winging it it's not wing night