HomeTech.fm - Episode 421 - We'll Leave the Lights On for You

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

On this week's show: Severs are down, severs are up, lights have been on at one school for over a year, appliance makers really want you to put their products online, Home Assistant beta review, two picks of the week, project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 27th. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kemp. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology, home automation, servers. Broken servers. Broken servers that don't work.

Let's talk about a server that does work, though. Mastodon. We have our Mastodon instance, hometech.social. It's working, and a lot of people joined this week because of the new apps, I guess. iOS apps, maybe Android apps, too. I'm not sure. I'm on iOS, so I don't really keep up

with the Android side of things, but I do know that there's a... Ivory was released, finally, which is if you use TweetBot on Twitter, which has been discontinued now, Ivory is basically the same thing. And it feels good. It feels the same. They basically have ported their app over and made it work with Mastodon stuff, which is awesome. That's great. And then IceCubes still got that going on. I have like, and there's like a Tusker, T-U-S-K. I know it's green. It's got little tusks on it. It works really well too. Like there's like an unending sea of really good apps that belong with the service. I've been really impressed with them all. And they're all just like iterating

and doing more things. And I don't know, it's getting fun and excited. So I'm excited to see that. I'm excited to see all of the new people. Did we get a final count on those? I was looking at them the other day. Total users is like 1247. So that's a lot of people.

782 new users. And I've been going back and forth on my Mastododon apps. I've, I've settled on them at the moment on ice cubes. Um, it seems to be the most well-rounded app. Um, it's not hideous or anything. And the most important thing to me is I have my edit feature, uh, which I don't, I'm not sure why a lot of the other mastodon apps I've used so far haven't had that, but it is a welcome addition because for the longest time, I didn't even know you could edit anything on Mastodon. Yep. Works on the web app, but can't on the clients. You don't have it there. Yeah. And I've used like Metatext and I can't think of the other one I used,

but I had like four or five installed at one time. So I was getting notifications, kind of like what you were getting set. you get like 12 notifications at one time and it's all the same thing got 12 it's just 12 different apps exactly so i finally finally cleared them all out and i only have one now it's just ice cubes at the moment i think i'll stick with that one i don't really have any reason to to switch at the moment yeah yeah i earlier in the week i was posting about how many text messages i was getting but um i've i've done the same thing like it's kind of turned off the notifications on the other ones and we'll roll with that. Gavin, what are you using these days? You still using Ivory or have you switched to anything else? Yeah.

I've been using Ivory for a while now and I actually bought their subscription to support them. My main reason why is just, you know, I'm familiar with it. It feels familiar. You know, I've been using T using tweetbot for many years and switching over to ivory it just felt right so i'm just gonna stick with it i i know it's not the most feature complete but the developer is gonna be adding a lot of these features over time and you know i can wait i'm not in a rush but um this is what you know mastodon needed was good um apps and i think ivory and ice cubes are two examples of great apps yeah they're they're this is what, you know, Mastodon needed was good apps. And I think Ivory and IceCubes are two examples of great apps.

Yeah, they're different. I mean, in the design and everything, just kind of flipping back and forth and looking at them. The Ivory app has the benefit of like a very stable code base and UI. Like the user interface is smooth. When you pull up images, you like can still throw them and swipe them off the screen like is smooth when you pull up images you like can

still throw them and swipe them off the screen like you could do with tweetbot um on the other hand ivory it's very you know strict and like there's there's choppiness to it like if i take the keyboard have you do you use the mouse on the keyboard have you ever used that the feature you hold down the space bar have you ever seen that yes yes and and you move the mouse on the keyboard? Have you ever used that? The feature where you hold down the space bar? Have you ever seen that? Yes, yes. And you move the mouse, the cursor around the place. Yep, yep. If you do that on Ivory,

it does this like flickery thing, goes back and forth. And you know, there's a bug. And whatever he's using, and either it's the framework bug or his bug or whatever, but you use TweetBot and all the other apps for that matter don't have the same problem. But that's because TweetBot's been around for, what, 12, 13 years and has 12 and 13 years worth of experience and all these, you know, edge cases they have built into the code.

And like you said, not as feature complete, but it's kind of like a trade-off, right? You got the stable code base versus the like kind of buggy kind of thing. But you can also edit tweets or edit toots or whatever they call them. Posts. It's not toots. Toots. It's toots. But I also think they kind of got caught in the middle of things.

So he was working on Ivory from I think before even the API got shut down. Right. So he was taking his time. He was playing with new, I guess, before even the API got shut down, right? So he was taking his time. He was playing with new, I guess, new frameworks, you know, putting together something, just, you know, trying to get something going. And then they shut off the API. And I guess he was thrown into a situation where,

you know what, we have to release this now, you know, for income. Gotta feed your kids, man. Yeah, exactly. And because of that, now he made the decision of we don't have everything we want in here, but we'll get, you know, we'll show you our roadmap of what we'll be adding and you will be supporting us. So, and I'm fine with that, you know, so I expect to have some bugs.

He's working on a lot of them, very active. And you follow him on, on Macedon and you'll see like, he's very like, he's squ on a lot of them, very active. And you follow him on Mastodon, and you'll see he's squashing them. So over time, it will become better. Yep, yep, definitely. I sponsored both the IceCubes one and TweetBot. Oh, I didn't even know you could sponsor the IceCubes one. He's got a tip jar in there.

You can go give him a few bucks. Nice, I'll check that out. And that one's free. It's a free app. The Ivory one is a subscription. It's quite costly, but it's got a big company behind it too. Yeah, that's kind of why I didn't jump in with it right away. You know, it seems like it would be a good option,

but some of the features it lacks and the cost of it is something I'm hesitant about at the moment. I know it comes from a good company and they have a good reputation. But I'm not ready to invest in that just yet. Yep. No, it makes sense. And you have options here, which is really cool. Like with Twitter now, you just have the Twitter app, which I deleted.

I kept getting, now that the TweetBot thing was gone, I was like, well, I deleted that. I click a link and I ended up in the Twitter app. I'm like, what am I looking at here? It's just awful. So I deleted that and now I get over to the website, which isn't any better. Twitter is just, it's, I didn't realize how bad it was till I had to use their app. It's still a situation where I have to use Twitter.

There's things on it I use for work, people I follow that they're not switching over. There's people that have their livelihood made off of Twitter still, and they do what they do on Twitter. They have all their followers. They're not switching over. I have to follow them. So I'm going to be between the two social media. Nothing I can do. I just need a better Twitter app.

That's all you're not gonna get it you're not gonna get it i know nope i like how this is set up because you can you can basically can subscribe to what you want to you're gonna get what you get out of it like i'm going through like the local timeline right now and i'm seeing like the local timeline to our instance there's people poking up you know know, posting about, uh, well, here's TJ talking about a home theater. He finished. And then, uh, here's a guy asking and talking about a ubiquity doorbell and that kind of thing. So, I mean, there's, it's neat that it's like all in one spot,

I guess. I'm sure there are other technology focused instances out there. Uh, and I could go join those as well and subscribe I guess to their local timelines and just kind of see what people are talking about but does ice cubes allow you to do that yes you can pin you can actually pin it in to your I think it like combines them at the same okay it's kind of cool I was looking for that on ivory today and I don't think they allow that I don't think they've done it yeah yeah it would be cool to add another mass on instance to your feed

so you can see their local posts. That's actually pretty cool. Yeah, that's one of the really killer features on Ivory right now, which I'm sure they'll get to. It's just there's an ever-expanding amount of work and features that you can plug into this thing because it's designed to be an open platform. There's some that are just like all you do is post images. They don't support text or anything. It's just you post photos open platform. There's some that are just like, all you do is post images to the,

like they don't support text or anything. It's just you post photos and that's it. And developers can just do what they want with this thing. So I'm going to try and keep this, these plates spinning and keep the server up and going because I can't keep my local server running. The Unraid server failed me. We made a joke about it last week, but it is dead,

not working. And, uh, soon to be just, I don't know, scrapped or gutted or thrown out in the trash. This is what happens when you make fun of your server. You should never, never make fun of your server. You know, Gavin's kind of going with the extreme where he's basically just like talking so positively about all the robots and everything. You just need not to talk smack about the robots and you'd be all right. If the robots work as well as my server, I don't think Gavin has anything to worry about because they're just going to crash and not work. That's true. So, well, we do have a couple of stories this week. It's a very slow week in the technology space, but we do have a couple of home tech headlines. So what do you say we jump into them?

Let's do it. All right. Well, this one, this story about this school has been popping up everywhere over the last week. So we kind of had to talk about it. For about a year and a half, the Massachusetts High School has been lit up around the clock because the district can't turn off roughly 7,000 lights that are inside the sprawling campus building. The lighting system was installed at Minnichog Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago, and it was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that ran the automation system inside there failed back in August of 2021, the lights have been on continuously around the clock and uh the story here says costing the taxpayers a small fortune school the school district official pushed me back a little

bit and said it's probably in the thousands of dollars not the tens of thousands of dollars because they've got energy efficient fluorescent style led lights inside there and um teachers are actually going up and removing bulbs when they don't want them. And staffers are turning off exterior lights with with with with the breakers. So, yeah, interesting. It's a it's a twenty two hundred and forty eight thousand square foot campus remodeled back in 2012. The school board wanted a green lighting system, so they got it. It lasted until August of 2021. And staff in the school started noticing the lights didn't dim in the daytime like they used to. And they were just burning bright all night. So there's quite the story about how, you know, all the issues they've had trying to track down someone who knows about the system.

Because this was done, you was done almost a decade ago. And the company that installed it went out of business. And just finding someone who knew about the software, knew about the hardware in there, they got a new quote to replace, just gut and replace the entire automation system for $1.2 million. They decided not to do that and just kind of piecemeal it back together. And the parts were put on order from the factory in China. And of course, pandemic delays and all that good stuff. It's pushed out the install.

Let's see, they started this in November 2021 when they start the order, got delayed until March, then again until October, and then now back into the February of 2023. So maybe next month, they'll now back into the February of 2023. So maybe next month they'll be able to turn off their lights. I've been seeing this all over TGA. I can hear you laughing there. What do you think about this thing, man? I think it's ridiculous that, you know, anytime you rely just on software to make things work,

it's going to go bad at some point, right? I mean, software is great. Technology is great. All this stuff is wonderful. But at some point, you need a physical shutoff. And this is a prime example of why. It sounds like they can fix the issue. They can replace whatever piece needs to be replaced. It just hasn't been in stock for quite a while, or they have to custom make it or whatever. And it's been nearly two years now that they've had this problem. And, you know, it's still a problem, obviously, but if they had some, some kind of physical override, it probably wouldn't have been as big of a problem and it wouldn't have cost taxpayers, you know, thousands and thousands upon, you know, thousands of dollars, uh, in order to resolve it. Um, so it's just, it's weird to me that systems like this are still designed

without a physical override in the event that something like this happens. And we're talking like a 10 year old system. Like it's not even that old. Like if it was like a 30 or 40 year old system, like it would make sense a little bit, like, you know, everything's kind of outdated. You can't buy anything anymore. You have to replace every single piece of it but this is a 10 year old system like you should have some kind of override to turn this off and this is a prime example of why yeah probably not design designed as well um greg greg in the chat is asking uh do we know what kind of uh system they have i don't think it's said yeah it's called it says fifth level i've never heard of fifth level before yeah that's that sounds like something out of china

it sounds like they could have gone with like lutron or crestron or something like yeah i guess good thing they didn't go with crestron that's probably the 1.2 million dollar replacement he's like well lutron exists and we can replace it with this and it'll actually work but uh yeah um it's just such a weird thing yeah i i don't know gavin do you have any thoughts on this thing you know what i've i've in the do-it-yourself space i've heard of people that want to do something like this they they were always talking about installing their you know their smart light bulbs and getting rid of all the switches for a clean look that everything was automated or controlled through an app and there was no physical switches everywhere and i just always thought that was a bad idea you know like

i'm just like there's gonna be a time when you know that app does and when they talked about their apps a lot of them were cloud-based i'm like this is a bad idea you know um one of my rules whenever i do anything it there has to be a physical switch to turn it on or off you know and i always try and keep it something familiar too like i don't want to be a physical switch to turn it on or off you know and i always try and keep it something familiar too like i don't want to be so different that people walk in the room and they don't know how to control it anymore you know a switch they're used to flip it on and flip it off but then it can also be automated it's just a rule of thumb you know and that's one of the reasons why i never liked the smart bulbs i mean the only advantage to the smart bulbs was, I guess, the colors.

Yeah, color or temperature change. Yeah, that type of stuff. But I've never been a fan of smart bulbs. All right, I'm going to push back. I'm going to push back on all of this. So I'm going to say buildings, like this size of building is not like our homes, right? Like this is, I've seen a lot of comments about,

well, why didn't they just flip a breaker off? It's like, you can't do that. That's not what you do in this. There may not be one breaker. There may be many breakers, many subpanels, many ways to shut this thing down. It's just not how it works. But at the same time,

these commercial buildings are not built or designed or wired the same way our residential homes are either. And I only have a little bit of experience with like these the whole building automation system land. But it's way different than what we deal with here. So on the residential side and. It sounds like to me, they went with something, the fifth element they got in China or whatever, but, um, they do have a way out without having to patch it back together. And that's paying for a new modern system that, um, does work for $1.2 million, or they

can just kind of piecemeal and patch things over time. And it sounds like they've gone with the latter thing. And it's just, you know, if you, if you, if you take a step back and think, well, why didn't they just pay somebody to stay late and shut all this stuff down? It's like, have you ever guys dealt with labor contracts and unions? Like you're insane. No one's staying late to turn off a light. Like it's just going to get left on, especially if it doesn't cost anything because it's LED.

And at the same time, they're being told from the electrician like, oh yeah, the parts are on order and we're going to have it in three months from now, five months from now, six months. Like it just keeps getting pushed back. So like there's really no time to make those kinds of decisions. I don't know. This all seems perfectly reasonable to me. It's absurd, but it is perfectly reasonable and I can see how it happened. And I'm see how it happened. And I'm glad that they were able to like engineer a way out of it that's cost effective for the, for a school district, you know, I'd rather them spend money on the kids and that kind of thing, rather than 1.2 million going to facilities for some reason. So I do like that the fact that they

installed these like dimmable LED lights, like fluorescent lights, because you, the schools these days are also modern. Like you want to dim down the lights it sounds like this had like a daylight harvesting system where during the day the lights would actually reduce their levels um based on how much light's coming through the window so that's that's like a more complicated system that there's a ton of them out there in the commercial world but at the same and it sounds like this is kind of just all put on a giant building control for building automation, which is, which is done. Like it's, it's always done Johnson controls, um, Siemens, all of these big companies, uh, have a giant building campus automation systems. It just sounds like they probably went with the wrong brand,

you know, like some, someone sold them the wrong brand and went out of business and it's all gone. So that does suck, but I'm glad that I'm glad that they, they took the effort to do this in the first place, 10, 12 years ago, um, and update their system to be all, you know, daylight harvesting, led controlled and dimmable. It's really, it's really good. And I, you know, it, it could have, it could have been much, much more if these were all incandescent lights or whatever. Not LED lights throughout the campus. Watch the follow-up post be about how an integrator comes in and puts a bunch of Zigbee switches in a closet somewhere. Yeah, the things I was seeing on Reddit were along those lines.

I would just do a Pico control. Or Shelly. Yeah, Shelly. Yeah, they wanted to was seeing on Reddit were along those lines. I would just do a Pico control. Or Shelly. Yeah, Shelly. Yeah, they wanted to put Shelly devices in. God, people love Shelly's for some reason. They're all right, but. You got a building with like 3,000 Shelly nodes. I don't know.

I think the idea of the lighting control system makes sense and everything. I just don't see how a project that size doesn't have some kind of manual override. And like, obviously you don't expect somebody to go through. I don't expect anybody to go through the building and flip every switch off at the end of the night. Yeah. But you would think that there would be something to kind of just bypass the smart system out of it. And that that's my only complaint is that like, you know, things break and software dies and all that good stuff but it just seems to me like it was a a bad design from the get-go

if you can't manually turn stuff off at least it failed to on i yeah i guess because what would they they would bring your flashlight to school right just lamps plugged into the we need reading lamps headlamps yeah there's a silver lining everywhere i think so i don't know i'm glad they did it it sounds like it did actually save the money although just quite inconvenient probably not now well yeah i mean because it's been on for a year yeah and now they've got to patch the system all back together maybe next time they'll go with a more reputable company and brand cost savings is negligible now exactly so all right well moving on here to other electronic things people don't like uh appliance makers like whirlpool and lg just don't understand why only about 50 or possibly fewer of the owners have connected their smart dishwashers, ovens, and refrigerators

to the internet. The issue, according to manufacturers, is that customers just don't know all the things that manufacturers can do if the users connect a device that spins their clothes or keeps their food cold, like providing manufacturers with data and insights about how their customers are using their products and allowing companies to quote, send over the year updates and sell relevant replacement parts or subscriptions. It's really sounds to me like these companies just don't understand why, why there's a disconnect here. It's a big disconnect here. Just, oh man. Uh, I, I just, we, we recently just bought a new refrigerator. It's got wifi hooked up and I looked at the sticker on the side of it and I said,

oh, that's neat. And then I took the sticker off and threw it away. So who knows what it's doing? It's not connected to my wifi. Well, and most of the time the features are not anything useful, right? Like, I mean, like the fridge one, they have an option where you can like see inside the fridge. And like, I guess that's kind of useful because if you're out and about, you can see what you have. But like, I don't need to start my washer remotely or start my kettle remotely or anything like that. Well, it's not even that they're just complaining that people can't, quote, send over the air updates for their software that's buggy or quote, sell relevant replacement parts or subscription services like. Yeah, that's why I didn't get up to the Internet. I didn't want you talking to me that way.

This was a transaction that I completed and I finished and I expect this refrigerator to work for, you know, five, 10 years or whatever. Like. I don't need it talking to me. I just want it to work, you know. Yeah, it's it's kind of like a lighting system, right? Like, I just want it to work, and I don't need my software to, like, stop it from working. Like, if I go to my fridge, and it's, like, doing an update,

and I open the fridge door, and it bricks the fridge, like, that's not useful to me at all. They're not that smart. I mean, I'm just going to say that. Hey, we don't know what these manufacturers are doing. I think's the people what people are afraid of is what you don't know they're doing right like you plug this in and you really don't know and on top of that every appliance is gonna have their own app you know unless you went with the same brands can you imagine you have five apps for just the different appliances you have in your house. It would be annoying. Then all the push notifications.

The other day I got my Amazon lady. I had a notification on it and I couldn't even figure out how to get this notification off. But when I finally did, it was a notification telling me that the toner in my printer was low and I should order some more toner. You know, and I was like, that was annoying. I see that when i go to the printer thank you you know i'll order it when i'm ready but i don't need her telling me that but i get i see why they want it yeah they just want your data they wanted your data so they can sell it to their data brokers or whatever i see uh greg greg saying some of his neighborhood set

up a samsung refrigerator and his phone tries to connect to it every time he drives by that's just time to send them something special on their refrigerator tv screen yeah i think the only thing i want from i don't really have any desire to have a smart appliance or anything but i think the only thing i would want would be notifications right like you left your stove on or your stove's been on for like two hours or like the stove i don't know the stove door is open stuff like that like i think would be kind of useful but like the remote start or any of that other stuff i have no desire for i wouldn't mind diagnostic information at times to say say your oven's not heating

properly you know let me know that hey you're not reaching the right temperatures in your oven you know something's up you know that type of thing you're not reaching the right temperatures in your oven. Something's up. That type of thing. And what if your furnace, for example, the fan wasn't spinning at the right speeds? That would be cool to know. Something's wrong. You better get this looked at. I don't know. I think that these companies are just approaching this from the completely wrong way.

They're upset, basically, that they're not getting extra money off subscription services for you to tell you that, not allow you to turn on and off your oven or whatever. They're trying to basically sell you water filters for your refrigerator because you forgot to do it. You know, and they want to send you those parts when they go bad. And they don't want you eking out another, you know, two, three weeks on an old water filter in the refrigerator. And I'm fine with that. Like, if you want to sell me the another two, three weeks on an old water filter in the refrigerator. And I'm fine with that.

If you want to sell me the water filters, I'm okay with that. Just don't make them the most expensive water filter. At least beat the price that I'm getting them for on Amazon. I'm giving you my data. Now give me something. Give me a discount on your expensive water filter. Exactly. Smart appliances are kind of like the crypto space.

Everybody's just shoving the things into it. It's like, oh, we have a smart appliance. We're not really sure why, but it's smart. You know, it's kind of like the crypto space where it's like, oh, we're on blockchain. Well, what are you doing with it? Uh, tracking stuff. I don't know. Smart appliances are the same thing. It's smart. It connects to your wifi. And I think one of the awful things too about appliances in general is like one of the bigger the biggest companies probably pushing smart appliances is samsung and samsung appliances are awful oh yeah yeah they are trash they just they break all the time they're basically throwaway devices and you don't have a four thousand dollar

fridge that you throw away like you you want to be able to repair it and stuff and that's just not the nature of those appliances so that's probably that's probably a bad you know bad uh taste in a lot of people's mind i have a samsung fridge dishwasher stove i'm not allowed to talk about it you know i love them great appliances uh that makes sense why you're always talking up about robots yeah you don't want your appliances see the robots can make or break your day but i'm like if you talk bad about your robot it just decides to you know like it could ruin your day it could see that hey there's some dog poop over there i'm purposely

gonna go and smear it all over the ground i I'm sorry. You're going to get overruled here because Greg in the chat is also saying I'll never buy another Samsung appliance. And I'm going to say I'm on board with that, too. We had a Samsung fridge and it would constantly freeze up below like where there's a little tray, bottom drawer you could pull out. It would freeze below that. And I ended up finding out they had a faulty design in their defrost mechanism in the back. Like you had to take the refrigerator apart, defrost everything, take all the stuff out, take the refrigerator apart. And then I ended up putting like a little copper wire on the defrost element and putting it down into the tube. Like I, I rigged up my own defroster thing and it worked a little bit better but we're just kind of like every now and then we'd come back

and there'd be like some water puddled up on the bottom i'm like i'm done with this refrigerator so evidently that's a uh a very very very common thing with the samsung and uh and uh they they uh they still sell them that way so So good on them. Good on them. My mom has a 30-year-old fridge sitting in her basement that's still checking. Oh, those don't break. Yeah, they don't break. They may use a lot of energy. But at the same time, she hasn't had to replace it. I don't know how they've ruined this.

Yeah, we have an old fridge, like a secondary fridge, kind of over in what we call the laundry room. It's more of like a laundry hallway, but it's, it's just a thin room and it has a fridge and, you know, washer dryer in it. And that thing, it's, it's this tiny, like ugly refrigerator we picked up for $20, you know, third fridge, whatever. And it's, you can't kill it. It just, you can't kill it. We painted it. You painted it gray. It's like, oh, this will look better kill it we painted it you painted it gray it's like oh this will look better if it's gray painted painted the thing did you say third fridge you have three fridges i mean uh well technically i do have three fridges wow living the life of luxury over there all right watch out ah well uh it is guys it's a day ending in y and that means another home

assistant update for you um We've got 20. Actually, this is 2023.2 beta release notes, which it looks like they're prepping and getting ready for their February launch of the new software and all the features and everything they've got in here. Gavin, you're the one that posted in here. You're the one that actually has a working Home Assistant install, unlike me, who's an N server wait a minute i do too oh okay i'm sorry just just leave me out of it that's fine seth is the only guy that has tech issues you're the only guy seth we all work fine and i think he's like one of the most techno technologically inclined as well i mean i mean i guess compared to me maybe not you it's all it's all just downhill. Like, I just don't understand why everything hates me right now. Because it's probably Clippy out there doing all this.

Ever since you got Clippy, actually, your technology has been failing. Maybe it's interference. It was well before Clippy. So, Gavin, what's going on with this thing? Okay, so, yeah, every month, the last Wednesday of a month, they release their beta for the next release. And then the first Wednesday of that month, they actually release it out to the general public. So the new beta for Home Assistant just came out. It's the 2023.2 release.

You can find the release notes on their beta websites and stuff like that. But one of the really cool things about it is they gave us a little hint at their voice integration. So they're kind of coming up with a, they call it the conversation integration, and it allows you to interact with Home Assistant like a conversation. So you can text the question, you know, like ask it to turn on and off lights if you want and that's just a piece of the bigger puzzle because eventually that will tie into the voice where you know you'll just end up converting that to text and then we'll ask home assistant to do stuff so as of they have their release party they always have a release party it's going to be on thursday january 26. It's probably already happened by the time this airs. Um, but they'll go more into detail as to what

that is. They, they don't want, they didn't want to give all the details ahead of time. And I'm going to be watching that for sure. I want to see what it is. Um, like I said, I want to see where they go with this year of the voice. Um, but other than that, they fixed a whole bunch of bugs, you know, they've updated you know there's matter changes going in there so hopefully that that stabilizes a bit more um they've also announced android auto integration i think that that's a cool feature if you have android auto um you know various things so look the the thing is they're developing very fast and there's there's a whole bunch of code changes in this one so it's

a pretty big release yeah i'm gonna say that they're iterating but it i mean it's almost like there's a ton of stuff i'm just going through all the notes here there's a ton of stuff in here yeah if you actually look at all the commits there's like you scroll you scroll you scroll you scroll there's a whole bunch of commits that went into this month's update oh i can now integrate my eufy smart scale over Bluetooth. Yeah. One of the most important things to look at when you see these release notes is the breaking changes, though.

I haven't gotten there yet. Oh, wow. Yeah, look at all that. A lot of it may not affect you, but sometimes there's some stuff in there you have to pay close attention to. Wow. They already removed python 3.9

which is hilarious because i think just in the last release that like the last major apple software release for mac os like they removed python 2 so it's like uh these guys are no python 3.9 out 3.10 is in so that may break some things um yeah they they actually have quite a few breaking breaking things yamaha music cast network receivers twinkly oh no not twinkly it always amazes me because they usually only give like the beta release comes out this wednesday and then they release it to everyone next Wednesday. So there's only like a week in between. So it's like, you're going to test all this stuff in a week.

Probably not. So that's why when they usually release it, you want to wait for a few point releases for them to actually fix stuff. No kidding. And this is every month they're doing crazy stuff like this. So yes, they're moving fast. Oh yeah.

That is screaming fast. I mean, yeah, that is crazy. Well, good on fast. Oh, yeah. That is screaming fast. I mean, yeah, that is crazy. Well, good on them. Again, a lot of new integrations, a lot of broken integrations that will have to be fixed. I was kind of looking and clicking on a few of them. They don't look that bad. It looks like, oh, this element here was removed rather than nothing major.

I can't believe they do this every month. And it's just, there's only like two people working at this company and the rest is just like open source commits. This is crazy. It's a well-run project, I guess you could say. Yeah, definitely. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 421.

Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 421. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 421. All right. Well, we've got a couple of picks of the week here. Actually, I think we talked about this before, but TJ, you have successfully installed a YoLink. What is this? Is this LoRa that this is running on? What are you doing? Tell us what you did. Yeah. So this is, Gavin brought it up before. I think he's using it for temperature sensors and something else, if I remember correctly. My pool. Yeah, your pool. That's what it was. But it's LoRa. It's supposed to go up to a quarter mile in range. So I live in an apartment complex. And Google Maps says it's

about 500 feet. But you know, we're going through several apartment buildings themselves. And it's inside of a giant metal box. I kind of get annoyed because I have USPS informed delivery. And it tells me what I'm getting throughout the day, but it never tells me actually when the mail is going to get there. Right. And so I wanted a way to be notified whenever I got mail, um, without having to manually check it every day. And so this past week I was kind of thinking, and I was like, you know, let's go ahead and just solve this. And so I bought a kit off Amazon.

I think it was like 65 bucks for two motion sensors and the little Yolink hub. And I set it up this morning. I put it inside the mailbox and it works. It works great. Um, I got notified. I was kind of worried just because it's so cold outside right now. I wasn't sure if it was actually going to work. Um, I put it inside the mailbox and I got notified as soon as the mailbox opened. And so now I know as soon as I get mail. Um, and like I said, it's quite a bit of a distance away and it's in a giant metal box and it still works and it works pretty instantly. Like as soon as I opened the mailbox this, uh, or tonight to check the mail, um, it

sent me a notification within seconds. And that's pretty impressive for that kind of communication. I was so impressed because uh i actually wasn't expecting to work through all the middle box and all those buildings and everything like when you described what it was going through i was actually shocked it made it through all that because i'm just going from my pool skimmer to the front corner of my house you are much further distance so that that's good and the yolink people you know they did talk about like right now it's all cloud dependent but they did hint that they will be look they're looking at um they're developing um local apis it may require another hub but you know what the price for this

stuff i was i'm actually shocked how cheap this stuff is right like yeah i mean it's dirt cheap for what it is exactly um and yeah like i said i'm going through four different apartments you know because we're basically in a unit with six other apartments and so it's going through all of those apartments to get there and the metal box and it still works you know super quick so it must be really good technology for to to work that efficiently and i have their temperature sensors in my fridges in my place um and it's already paid off once because it notified me of my basement freezer it was actually the door wasn't fully closed so once the temperature was starting to rise i got

notified and you know it saved save something there so the it's it's a good product the low stuff i wish they had soil moisture sensors that would be the next thing I want from them for my lawn because, you know, between that and the Laura network, the range would be great. Yeah, and honestly, that would probably make the most sense, the soil sensors. I'm considering it for, like, driveway alerts as well because, you know, I've used a lot of the, the standalone driveway alerts and it makes a little chime inside your house or something like that, but getting one that actually ties into the internet and we'll send you an app notification. It's either super expensive or it just doesn't work that well. Um, this I'm looking at an Amazon right now,

you can buy the, the hub and the outdoor motion sensor for 60 bucks so i mean even if you already have the hub so you just need the sensor yeah and the sensor by itself i think is only like 20 or 30 bucks and they make all kinds of things in the laura uh they make uh like an outdoor plug for landscape lighting they make light switches they make uh temperature sensors valve valve controllers, all kinds of stuff. So sump pump monitors. Mm hmm. How's the build quality on on this stuff? You know, it's plastic, but it seemed like it had a good heft to it, a good weight to it. It didn't seem like it was like Ikea cheap necessarily.

Not that there's anything wrong with Ikea, but it seemed like it was really good quality for what it is yeah and the temperature sensor i use for my pool is actually outdoor rated so it's water not waterproof because i'm not submerging it in water but it can handle the elements out outdoors yeah they have garage door sensors and all kinds of stuff and the good thing is they also integrate with things like home assistant so you can pull the sensors the entities into that and act on them for other things too yeah i've got it i've got it installed on home assistant but i haven't used it yet i wish their

website didn't look like it was made in like 19 2007 or something yeah i guess well there's a reason why everything costs so cheap from them, right? That's right. I don't care what their website looks like if their product's affordable, you know? Oh, that's not that bad. There's professional companies that have way worse websites. Go to the Smart RV page. Tell me.

Smart webpage? If you go into the products area there's a smart rv page i don't know i think they're just talking about putting humidity sensors on your rv or whatever but um anyway it's uh it's it's definitely a dated looking web design or whatever but uh the stuff looks pretty cool you could do a whole house in this though you could yeah i wish they i'm gonna wait before i do anything with this i'm gonna wait house in this though you could yeah i wish they i'm gonna wait wait for anything with this i'm gonna wait yeah wait for the local yeah i want the local api yeah they like and i like that you know their website does look kind of janky but i like that

they break it down into like different categories like they have one for like a queer like smart aquariums and rvs and stuff like that and that's kind of a unique twist on it usually people just give you the products and they tell you what they can be used for but they're actually breaking down like different uh industries like they have they have like water control like you can turn off the water to your house and monitor power failures like there's so many products they have but my only thing is i wouldn't want to leave something that important to a cloud service. Like, you know, that some of these things,

there are certain things I'm okay with a cloud service, but if I want something emergent in emergency, like the water shut off, I wouldn't want that cloud service. I agree. I just think it's fascinating. They have like power plugs and stuff that do quarter mile range. Like you could buy,

you could buy a, like a, a power strip or an app, like a plug in outlet or like you could buy you could buy a like a power strip or an like a plug-in outlet or like a wi-fi you know light switch and they do a quarter mile range like that's not i might just buy this and plug it into like one of my neighbors outside lights and mess with them they have they have a hub for just speech so you could just send voice things over the internet that's hilarious if you find their product catalog it's much better than their website it's a pdf download and it's it's laid out nicely and it's got all their products with all the

information and it's legible i guess is what i'll say do you know if this is like proprietary like technology gavin or is this just like anybody can use it kind of thing? I've been trying to figure that out myself. I know the LoRa is a standard, but I don't know if their devices are in a way forced to connect to their hub. I've been trying to figure that out because I wanted to see if I could join the devices directly to my home assistant. Right. And just skip their hub altogether. That's something I actually have on my list because they use a certain, I think somebody's able to read it out

of the air and just put it into MQTT. And I was going to actually try that and see if I could bring it in directly without having to use their hub, but I'm not sure at this point. Well, and supposedly according their website it says even if your internet's down it will still work with paired devices so that's good it will still work but there's certain things that like you're not gonna be able to schedule and stuff like that i'm sure into that yeah yeah the schedules and stuff but then you can pair up certain devices and even when it's almost like Z-Wave associations. And even when your internet's down, that still works, right?

Yeah, definitely worth a shot if you're looking for a long-distance solution. Like a motion or door contact or something like that. Or even a short-distance solution. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of DIY-type looking product in here. But they've got all sorts of like outdoor motion detectors, outdoor alarm systems. A little bit of everything, to be honest.

You could probably do a whole house in this. Yeah, I think you could. I mean, there's dimmer or light switches. I'm not sure if they're dimmer, but they have a remote. There's a Yolink remote that has, how many buttons does this thing have in it? Key fob. It's a couple of buttons on it.

500 foot range for the remote with a five-b yeah a couple buttons on it 500 foot range for the remote with a five-year battery so yeah it's it's interesting technology this laura stuff so it's got looks like it has 10 12 buttons i guess to figure out what the price of that is and add it to the db all right it goes cool stuff a good, and I'm glad to hear it's working really well for you there. I've often thought about putting some kind of sensor out in my mailbox, too. Well, there you go. Now you can. Yeah.

Well, not without the local API. I'll send you one of the motion sensors for free. You just have to buy the hub. Pretty good pick of the week. Gavin, you also ran across something, the ar ability in the unify app what would it's been out for a while what did you find uh interesting about it oh i may be late to the party with this one but i actually thought it was kind of cool um it's kind of hidden so i don't i don't blame you like it's it's like what button is this yeah that's basically how i found it i had

the unify app open on my phone. It's an AR. And I was like, what button is this? And then I clicked on it and it said, you know, scan, you know, on my Unify switch, scan the little code and you hold the camera up to it and you scan it and it does some stuff in the background. But what it does is then after I hold it over like my switch, it tells me what's plugged into each port. Um, using AI, it just overlays the information on the, on the camera image. And I was just, I was amazed at how well it worked actually, because my ports were all covered up by like the plugs. They all had cables in them. They're all plugged in. So I was like expecting it to not be able to find the switch or whatever. No, it worked perfectly. And it told me what was plugged into each port. And I actually found it.

It was cool. I'm not saying that you couldn't do this before because I know in the app, you could go to the switch itself and look at the details and it showed you what was in every port anyway. But I just thought it was like a cool thing that they could do.

Whether or not it's useful or not, maybe if you're out in the field doing this every day, it's nice if you just walk up to it and look at it but um it's really cool it's like a big rack install it'd be kind of useful like if you had multiple stack switches and you know you see those pictures of those data centers that have just gone wrong and they've got wires everywhere like it could probably be useful for something like that it was actually that now that you pointed out somebody on Macedon sent me, it was like a little gif of them going through like a big rack where I had multiple switches and they were just waving the camera over and it was telling it what was everywhere, right? So if you're looking for something specific, that's probably a faster way of doing it just by

using your camera, you know, to find it instead of having to go into each switch in the app. So there's one reason why this would be cool. I'm looking. So looking through that Yolik PDF, and they have a garage door controller too. It's called the finger in quotations, quotation marks. They've got a, they've got a button pusher garage door controller. So you just stick it on the wall next to your button on the wall, and it reaches over with its little finger and presses the button. Oh, do they have like a SwitchBot? It's like SwitchBot, yeah. Yeah.

That's awesome. I was looking for one of those. That's pretty cool. Works with all push-button types of controllers. There you go. That's a good idea. Yep, yep, yep yep yep yep little automated finger there very cool very cool well um we will put all of the links and uh from there from our

pics of the weeks there in the show notes uh hometech.fm slash 421 if you have any uh pics of the weeks great ideas for the show discussion topics head on over to home tech.fm slash feedback and you can fill out the online form there or you can send us an email at feedback at home tech.fm all right real quick project updates Gavin you said you were shoveling multiple times like I'm sure a lot of people got hit by the snow storm recently uh this week you know we got it looks like we got about 20 centimeters of snow um i went out there shoveled my driveway you know help the neighbor help the other neighbor help the the fourth neighbor and then had to shovel my driveway again it was falling so fast you know so it's good to have

neighbors but you know i got it next time i gotta understand how many you know i can really help before you know it's not worth my time almost eight inches of snow for all those uh metrically impaired it's a lot of snow yep yep you know we bought a snowblower you know after doing that we went out and bought a snowblower so the days of shoveling are over yeah we got we got a ton of snow today i think it snowed like four to six inches but it's pretty much all gone already so did not last very long it's about 10 centimeters i mean based on my other math what What? It's like two bowling pins or something like that? Bowling pins. It's like half a banana, something like that. Seth does not know the struggle we go through. What, snow or measuring things?

Snow. Both. Oh. I can't measure anything to save my life. Yeah, it's what the number sticks are for. All right, TJ, you've got some cubes you want to tease. Yeah. So I want to give a shout out to Brandon Miller in the chat. He was helping me with some Elan programming this past weekend. I've been working on a home theater project and

haven't to my stupidity. I haven't touched the lawn in the past four months. And so I was programming it up this past weekend. He, he jumped on a video chat with me on Sunday to help me out with the programming. Um, and he was telling me about this magic cube from an Innovo. I'm probably saying that name wrong. Uh, but basically it is a small little computer for about a hundred dollars. It runs home assistant and you can tie it in directly with a lawn. So if you had some kind of Zigbee dongle attached to it, you could, you know, pair Zigbee devices to it and then bring them straight into a lawn. So I haven't had a chance to play with this yet. I've just started

doing some research. I think I'm set up with a conference call on Friday to kind of discuss it and see if it's a good fit. Um, but honestly, like, it sounds like an amazing product for what it is. And I'm sure it's kind of hacky, right? Like you're bringing in a third party home automation system into like a, another home automation system, but it, that would be like a game changer, right? Because a lot of times when you get into these professional home automation systems, you can only use their set things or what people make drivers for this, though, they've made a driver for home assistant basically. And anything that home assistant supports, you can bring into it as well. So I'm interested to play with that. Maybe I'll have one

in the next week or two and actually get to play with it. Um, but I I'd give a shout out to Brandon there and shout out to the product because it sounds really cool. For the record, most of these home automation systems are hacky. Once you dig down into the code far enough, you realize how bad it really is. Well, and they're just so like, they're so constricted to what they do. And, you know, part of that is because they want things that are going to work a certain way and it's going to work that same way all the time, which makes sense, especially in a professional product. But sometimes like they're too restrictive where you can't add just like normal stuff. Right. And sometimes that is a problem because if I just want to add like a simple USB, you know, outlet or something like that,

I have to buy the specific one from this control company that is probably a couple hundred dollars. With this, I could just buy, you know, a $50 Z-Wave thing or $50 Zigbee thing, plug it in and bring it in directly. So, you know, I don't know if I would use it as like a permanent solution everywhere, but it would be nice if like somebody buys some like off brand shades or off brand lighting or something like that. And I can just buy this little device and plug it in because everything works with home assistant. Like I said, yeah, that's right. Well, that's that's what's funny, too, right?

Is that like from the same company, you can buy like a MyQ driver for like eighty dollars or you could buy this hundred dollar magic cube thing which ties in directly to myq for free um and then you can integrate directly there so like it's kind of bypassing all the other stuff that you would need and home assistant supports everything so yeah it's a it's a bridge on top of a another bridge on top of another bridge like i mean i've it makes sense to like it's kind of what i'm doing in my house right i have a home bridge running for bringing in all the apple stuff but then i have control for running and it just pipes all that information over to home bridge it's kind of the reverse of that i guess because you would be using elan or control for

um but yeah it it's interesting these guys were at cds so there's a video of uh of their booth over in rave i'll put a link there's a youtube link now um. So there's a video of their booth over in Rave. I'll put a link. There's a YouTube link now to that video. Of course, there's a Rave link for it. Yeah, well, they attack everybody at the booth at Cedia. So I have to think about that. I think we're going to be at Cedia in a booth.

So I'll have to think about what wild stuff we can do for a Rave video to go viral. Ooh. Somebody going to streak our video or something like that. It'd be fun. Let's see. Yeah. I'll put the link to this, this video in the show and you can check it out.

It's like you said, it's just a little raspberry pie. Yeah. A little tiny thing. Yeah. We'll have to, we'll have to keep an eye on them. Cause that's a lot of stuff that it can do.

All right. Well, I have been watching movies. Does that count as a project sure sure let's go with that i haven't been fixing this stupid server i think that's going to take a while but um yeah uh the oscar announcements came out uh this this last week and i've seen a couple of the movies that were nominated for Best Picture. All Quite on the Western Front. It's a Netflix produced movie.

It's kind of pretty cool. Avatar, of course, it's on there. The Banshees of Inertia. I don't know how to pronounce that. But Elvis is probably, I've heard that's really good. It's probably going to win. I don't know. It's pretty good.

Everything Everywhere All at Once. Also pretty good. But I kind of like that but a lot of hype the wife didn't like that i don't know there was a lot of hype in that movie and i i don't it was good um the fablemans uh actually saw that really good um steven spielberg so the just directing and good movie uh just leave it at that uh tar top gun Maverick seen that one too. I think, I think everybody's probably seen that TJ. Have you seen top gun yet? I have not. Oh, get, get, get busy, man.

Just plug it into your theater tomorrow while you're there finishing it up and say, this is why you bought this theater. So you can watch Tom Cruise. All right. And then, uh, triangle of sadness and women talking are the last two on there. Um, uh, a lot of nominations a couple of years back, they did a lot more than like the five nominations for best picture. There's a ton of other things that, you know, that get nominated for the Oscars and the technical awards and that kind of stuff. So best sound, best, you know, sound, sound design, all that good stuff. Uh, so I can't wait to, to watch them. I, I, I love this, this season, but I'm trying to watch all these movies and I've, I've only seen the Fableman,

Top Gun, and then everything everywhere all at once, which were all excellent movies. Can't, can't complain. I'll have to see Elvis. I think I've been, um, hearing that that one was actually really well done. It seems kind of hokey and corny but it was it was pretty good it was better than that i i enjoyed it and the other movie i want to watch is whale um with um brandon fraser oh the whale yeah yeah that one looks good had a couple of nominations as well but not for best picture i can't remember probably best actor or something like that. I'm not sure. I don't know. We want to see that one as well,

but I don't think that one is out of the theaters just yet. I think all the other ones you can kind of watch on stream. A couple of them you can watch on streaming service. I really like that when it's actually available for you to watch the movies before they have the award ceremony. It's nice to go ahead and be able to see them without having to rush out to a movie theater at the last minute. I saw something fly up there about Yolink devices. Connect only to Yolink Hub.

Oh, bummer. Yeah, to any Yolink Hub. To any Yolink Hub. Can we join them to a non-yolo link up like a a laura um hub or something like that yeah i'm not sure only other laura device i know which i i saw today actually it's kind of funny uh is a guy i know makes um like this device uh he works for a company as a startup that makes a device that you install and it detects gunshots and they they're lower devices low powered five-year battery blah blah blah and they

can put a bunch of them up they look like little street light things he was showing me the outdoor version there's indoor and outdoor version and they actually they're not microphones on them they're like some kind of subsonic thing that they have developed and it can detect the ballistics and everything. It's kind of a cool thing. You get three, you put up one or two of them and I guess you can triangulate where the gunshot comes from and what gun shot it and all that good stuff. So they're in with Homeland security and law enforcement. And, but it's, it was Laura. He was like, Oh,

this is a Laura hub thing and it hooks to this, and theirs is all locked down. And I was like, can you compare this with anything else? Of course I asked, Gavin. He was like, no. These are all deployed, ready to go, secured, locked down. There's no messing with these. So I'm guessing if it's in the spec that you can lock it down that way, then I'm guessing YoLink will only will only join Yolink hubs.

Right, right. Yeah, I mean, Zigbee is kind of the same way too, right? Like there's Control 4 Zigbee, which has some kind of magic stuff that doesn't let it join with anything. And there's the Zigbee that everybody else uses. Grestron has their own Zigbee. Well, no, I mean, that's the problem with Zigbee though, is that everybody can make their own version of Zigbee,

which doesn't pair to other things. So that's that's why a lot of people use them. Oh, we'll have to see. We'll have to find maybe we can get those Yoling guys to come on the show and talk to us. We haven't done an interview in forever. We have not at all. I haven't done one. We have not actually done one since we started.

So we talked about it, but we never got around to doing one. Yeah. Maybe Yoling could be the first one. Like, but we never got around to doing one. Maybe Yolink could be the first one. You've got to reach out to them. We'll see if we can get them on. Maybe the note server will work that night. All right. Well, let's see.

I do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to HomeTech.fm slash support to learn how you can support HomeTech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub where

you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about all sorts of fun stuff. See TJ's theater installs. That's pretty cool, yeah. But this week we did have a new patron join at the $5 level, so we want to give a big shout out and thank you to Matt H.

Thank you so much. He really helps us, support us, and keep the Mastodon server up and going and all that good stuff. He says he's been listening since 2020, so glad to have you on board Matt. Thanks very much. And hope you can get in there and learn something

from everybody in the hub and ask questions or contribute. That's kind of what the community is there for. So happy to have you aboard. That does wrap up a week here at Home Tech. Have a good weekend, everybody,

and we'll see you next week. Till next time. Take care. weekend everybody and we'll see you next week until next time take care that was just a short one hour show that yeah that was that was super short yeah that's amazing how it goes holy cow nothing to talk about two stories we have nothing to talk about but somehow it lasted an hour