HomeTech.fm - Episode 422 - The "TV Slapper"

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

This week on HomeTech: TPLink launches something that Matters, Frontier announces 5Gbps Fiber, Netflix says no more password sharing, a great video on why we need subtitles now, a nostalgic pic of the week, project updates, and a speaker rant!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for February 3rd. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. What the? You messed that up. I'm from a new location. I gotta shout out the new location. I'm not in town anymore. Traveling. All right. Well, welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcasts about all aspects of home technology, home automation.

TJ, you moved. You moved to business locations. I guess it's in a different city. So, yeah, beautiful new shop. We can see it there on the live stream, on the picture. Nice, big and spacious. And, you know, if the audio sounds awful this week, it's literally because it's a giant metal box. So I'm working on getting some kind of cubicle set up. But until then, the audio might not be the best. Yeah, thanks for that, TJ. I really appreciate that.

No problem. And we have public Wi-Fi here as well. It's free Wi-Fi. It's included with the unit. It's decent speeds too. I think I was getting like 20 or 30 megabits per second. But no client isolation on the Wi-Fi. So I can literally see everybody's devices.

I can print to a bunch of different computers. I think a couple people have Amazon Alexa devices. So I could probably play music all over the place. So I am using my t-mobile home internet at the moment and inside this giant metal box it caps out about nine megabits per second so we are blazing fast wi-fi over here ah well that's awesome man that's uh that's amazing so there's no hardware that's what you're seeing well so i i'm hardwired to the t-mobile home internet yeah but it's it's wireless so i mean you know how good is the the hardwire anyway but no the new office

is great it's uh basically a glorified storage unit uh it's a 20 by 30 unit so i got plenty of space for all my shelving and all my stuff um Um, you know, it's amazing when you're packing up to move, you know, you, you kind of try to sort everything into relevant bins and boxes and stuff like that. But I don't know about you. I have a lot of stuff. And as I was unpacking my stuff, you know, you, you pull out something and you're like, man, this bin's full of wire. I have more wire. And then you get that one sorted, you put it on the shelving unit, you open another one and you're like more wire. Where does the wire keep coming from? I don't remember having this much wire. And, uh, so, you know, got everything unpacked. Now it's kind of sorted and I'm still kind of breaking down everything and putting it where

it's at. Um, the old office, I, I basically had to, you know, like five foot by, I don't know, six foot shelving units. And that pretty much took up the whole office. And now I have those two plus a seven foot tall shelving unit, which is great. And then another longer shelving unit. So I got more space than I need at the moment, but I'm sure it'll fill up just as quickly. Very nice. Yeah. But I've got those boxes of wires and my daughter is going to inherit those. That's, that's, that's, that's her inheritance. I have a box of VGA cables alone. I just can't throw them out. Don't have any monitors that hook up to VGA,

but what if you do one day you're going to need them? Yeah. And as soon as you throw them away, you're going to need like 12 of them because that's what happens. Like I had a bunch of power cables and I'm like, you know, I haven't used these power cables in four years. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of them. And then like the very next day, I was like, oh, I really need this power cable that I don't have anymore. That's awesome. The wife keeps bugging me to throw out stuff I have in the basement. I have it nicely organized, but she's like, you don't need all this stuff. Throw it out. So I make it a point whenever I pull something out of there that I haven't touched in a while to show her and go see I waited for this day when I needed this VGA to HDMI converter you know and she just looks at you

like what are you what are you talking about I didn't know this she has I cherish those days when I actually have something in there yeah yeah just for you though not for anybody else hello it's motion activated so you gotta wiggle around a little bit more i thought i thought for sure we were gonna lose you i've been curious how long the timeout is because i i see it on the cameras turn off and stuff like that looks like it's about a half hour it's not terrible i guess now you know we gotta get a millimeter wave sensor in there for you just Just get like a little switch bot. Maybe that'll just move up and down next to the light sensor.

Oh, interesting. You're just loving switch bot now. Yeah. So for those that don't know, the unit that I rent, I'm not allowed to change anything about it. Um, but I have a roll up door, um, that it's my cue enabled, but the complex itself has the integration so that they can let people in or change codes, all that good stuff. So I can't just add the my cue skill to Alexa. And so I took one of the, uh, the little remotes that I have and I, uh, double-sided taped and silicone, a switch bot to it. And so now I can use the switch bot app to trigger it.

And it opens up the door for me. And that worked great until I ran into the door today. So that's a, that's on hold. It wasn't the switch bots. It was my fault, but literally breaking in the new place. That's yeah.

Not even in here a week yet. I'm already breaking things. Part of the course, right? Yep works it works well speaking of things working uh it sounds like uh our mastodon server is still up and going and gavin you have a note in here about finding about the local feed versus the federated feed versus your home feed your home page feed there's all sorts of feeds in mastastodon, it turns out. I had no idea the local feed was even a thing. I learned something new on Mastodon every day. So, you know, and sometimes this is where

a good client helps, you know? So, you know, if you're a regular Mastodon user and you don't know, there's a local feed, a federated feed, and then your feed. That's the home feed, right? So the home feed is basically the feed of everybody you follow the local feed is everybody that's tooting that's on your server so for us it's all the home tech dot social people shameless plug right and then there's the federated feed

which is just like you know the floodgate it's from like all other servers just constantly going you know that's the one i avoid because you'll end up like scrolling forever on it. Not no point even being on that. Right. But it's the fire hose. Yeah. Pretty much literally everything. Yeah.

So so when I went into the local feed, I started seeing like toots from all these people that were on our server that I did not follow. And I like to give out free follows to everybody that joins. Right. But there was some interesting stuff there. And I'm like, man, this is all the stuff I'm missing out on. So I started dropping follows left, right, and center, you know, just getting everybody in there. And then I started seeing all the bots as well, right?

I didn't realize we had a number of bots on there. So I got after getting updated every hour on the hour by the crypto bot on the latest happening in crypto, you know, we got to start banning some of these. But it's just interesting to see this. You know, I learned something new every day on Mastodon. Yeah. And there's actually some, as for an admin side, you'll see that there's a couple of things you can do for those bots.

You can limit them to, you can keep them there and you can just like limit them to basically only people who follow them. So it's kind of a self-policing thing that you don't have to worry about you know the whims of a billionaire uh to work and for those that don't know i'm the guy that's pretty much sitting there approving everybody proves everyone he is the billionaire without the money i let him in so seth can knock him out that's that's how i i think right like so you know when you apply i'm just like approve approve approve approve oh this one looks like, so, you know, when you apply, I'm just like, approve, approve, approve, approve. Oh, this one looks like a bot approved, you know, and then I just let it go.

Right. If you weren't so afraid of the robots, Gavin, this wouldn't be that big of a problem. You just deny people. I mean, look, I deny people all the time. You know, somebody comes on there and they're like, you know, I think what is the question? Like, why do you want to be on a server or something? Yeah, something like that. Something like that.

And somebody writes like, I like technology. And it's and it's like okay you know that's kind of relevant we'll go with that and then somebody else is like I don't like Twitter and I was like well that doesn't seem like a valid reason yeah there's a valid reason though but Gavin is the one improving those people no when the bots come when you know when the robots come for us when the uprising happens they're like, well, you did approve us on HomeTech.social, so we'll let you live. There's a record. I'm prepared for that day. But for all the new people that join the Mastodon, here's a tip. Update your profile pic and add a little description in there.

It will help people. You'll get more follows. People will take you more seriously. And the engagement will pick up as well. That's just something nice to do as soon as you get approved and you join. And you don't have to use your real picture. I think mine's like a goat or something like that. But you just change it from the default thing.

I thought it was you. This is me in my Halloween costume last year. Get the little twisty horns and everything. Yeah, I see we have quite a bit of uh bitcoin posts uh well i am looking for my new uh crypto craze so maybe some maybe one of these people will sucker me into something scroll through our local timeline to to see all of the uh the information about bitcoin and ftx and exchanges that I don't care about. Exactly. We'll clean that up.

Yeah. I'm going to report this to you, Gavin. And then you can figure it out. Seth is going to clean it up, I guess. And then Gavin's just going to sit there. Seth is going to get rid of five people. Gavin's going to approve 15. It's going to be a never-ending battle.

That's funny. Yeah. Well, there we go. All right. What do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right.

A couple of things this week. But first up, this is an older story that was that was from maybe last week. But the server was crashed. So we couldn't find it. It didn't matter then. Yeah, exactly. Because you know what else matters? The fact that this has Matter.

TP-Link has introduced its first plug compatible with Matter. The TAPO P125M falls under TP-Link's TAPO line. More or less, it's less popular than the Kasa product line. So they have the TAPO and the Kasa, and the Kasa is more popular. There's no real reason why they have these two different ecosystems but uh the matter i guess is making its way into the the tapo line here and um this little device is their first i guess this is the first plug um that's matter compatible is it from td link or is this the first plug completely i guess this is first i mean honestly this is the first like matter first device that I've actually seen launched.

I think Eve has had a couple of devices that you can upgrade, but this is the first one I've seen where you can actually buy it. It's ready and it does matter. $20. So not like it's going to break the bank or anything. That's not bad. Yeah. It's really small and compact looking. I mean, their, their illustration looks like you can fit two of them on a wall socket which if you've used smart plugs in the past that is like a super annoying thing to me because a lot of times you it either takes up both outlets or you can't use two of them at the same time so i mean it's a very tiny outlet and for 20 i don't see how you can go wrong. And early reviews have been positive about this. People have added it to their various ecosystems and said it just worked. And that's a good thing.

You know, that's the first time I've seen things just work. They were showing it off on the Home Assistant, added to Home Assistant. And I mean, it's a switch. It was there. They turned it on. They turned it off. It was exciting. It worked, right?

My only thing was, you know, you don't get all the same um attributes you know with the device so there was no attribute you know like i like to see when it's uh the state of it is it online is it offline you know to monitor that type of stuff or even like firmware status as of right now that's not reported into home assistant but they said maybe at a later date um i'm sure they're working on it we're still in the early days of this jim uh jimmy in the chat says me ross was the first matter plug tapo is the first from tp link but he's not sure which ship first um so yeah i would agree with that because i haven't seen the me ross actually ship but i also haven't really bought any of these

yet so we just call it a tie. There we go. The power capacity of this thing is pretty crazy too, though. For that small little plug, it supports up to 15 amps and 1,800 watts. Wow. That's a lot of power for that tiny little plug. Because a lot of them usually don't support anything that significant. That's pretty good. For $20, that's really good, actually.

Yeah, these would be great for your Christmas lights or holiday lights or anything like that year-round. So good option. Save you some money. Well, and also speaking of saving you money, yeah, well, this isn't going to save me any money. There goes my savings, right? Frontier has launched the nation's only network-wide 5 gig fiber service.

They're claiming it's 125 times faster upload speeds and 5 times faster download speeds and 2.5 times less latency than cable. Okay, thanks, guys. I've been doing Project Fiber, what, for the past, what, I don't know, a few months. I think I got the notice in September time last year and finally got everything installed just here in the middle of January.

And I've got my one gig service. And now for $154.99, which is basically what I was paying, I can get five gig. Ah, thanks. Thanks, Frontier. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Out of all the ISPs in America, I had no idea Frontier would be leading this. My limited experiences with Frontier was when I worked at a summer camp in New York. The only thing they could offer us was DSL. And like, it was very subpar DSL. Like it wasn't even what I would consider DSL. And they were such a pain to work with, but they've been putting fiber in everywhere in my area. And it looks like they're pretty much leading our area,

at least in fiber internet. They've started sending out notices to everybody saying that you can join on and everything. So I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they cover all of our area and basically what $150, $155 for five gigabits per second. Like that's nuts. Yeah. And they're rolling it out.

There's no, they're rolling it out nationwide. There's no like staged, they're just flipping a switch basically. And if you're in one of these service areas that has fiber, you can get the 5 gigs. But I was actually just trying to sign in to see if I could upgrade. Definitely not going to do that. I thought I did pretty good just by saving. Just hold off until the 10 gigabits for a second. Well, yeah, because there's a, what was it, Lancaster City?

Lancaster in California. The city of Lancaster is making race communications, announced that they're going to up their multi-gig service, and it'll be the first city in California with internet speeds up to 10 gigabits per second. And this sounds like one of those local city ISP type things, not Frontier. So get this. Their services start at $35 per month for a basic broadband plan. Can't say that word. The gigabit service is $70 a month.

So that's what I'm paying now, kind of on discount. And then for the 10 gig plan, it's $120 a month. Oh, my God. Includes equipment and the phone line that is crazy so i think i need to move to city of lancaster in california yeah gavin take that uh we don't need your stinking eight gigabits per second up there in in canada we got we got 10 gigs in one city just one yeah yeah you guys are you guys have some good prices yeah but how cute you're still using fiber that was so last year you know up in canada we've moved on but you know you'll catch up one day

don't worry yeah speaking of isps a little bit off topic i suppose but have have any of you ever heard of starry Satellite Internet? Starlink, but not Starry Satellite. So Starry was a satellite internet company and they launched really big into Columbus, I think, two years ago. And they just announced that they're getting out of the Columbus market now. So I think there's going to be some change ups happening in the internet space. I've been seeing a lot more smaller companies come out with fiber internet. Maybe that's starting to open up a little bit more, but hopefully that means some competition for all of us, which means faster speeds for

lower prices. That'd be great. That'd be great. I mean, I say that now that I'm paying less than half of what I was paying for much better service. You know, a gig up, a gig down before it was 800, maybe a gig on a good day with Comcast. And then I think 20 up, which was not productive for me. I wanted the faster upload speed. Well, and to be honest, if you don't have to deal with Comcast,cast that's worth it alone so boy they tried to call me like a million times to get me to sign back up oh i bet what what can we do we know we've treated you awful for the past like decade but is there anything we can do now for you i just tell them every time like well here's

the price if you can beat that and they would just hang up it wasn't wasn't anything they can do anything about at least you guys have competition that's something we don't have much of up here yeah i i this is the we have like maybe one competitor yeah this is the first time in two six years i've had the option like it's only been comcast so oh yeah like my apartment com my apartment complex i can get spectrum which offers up to a gigabit or i can get AT&T like DSL, which offers up to 50 megabits per second. Or I can get like one of the 5G home Internet things. But I basically have two options if I want like a hardwire Internet option. Well, all of that good, all of that good broadband will be good for watching Netflix because

it looks like we're going to be we're going to be saving money on our broadband. We're going to be paying Netflix for accounts. Cancel Netflix! No more accounts. TJ's already raising his flag. Netflix announced earlier this year that they were going to be cracking down on the password sharing and now

they have released details on how exactly they're going to enforce those mechanisms and what that means for people who are sharing with their family members. I think there's a couple of us here on this show, this very show here that are probably... Shh! I mean, but...

FBI are going to come raid my house. I know, right? Yeah, we've been doing it for years and Netflix hasn't cared. Now that they've got us all suckered in into their quality programming, they're going to turn out the heat and alter the deal. And I guess we have to pray that they don't alter it any further. Is the quote? I think that's what it is. Anyway, here's how this is going to work. The new terms say that you basically have to associate on login what a primary location is through a TV.

And then all the accounts and devices that are connected to that primary TV basically have to connect through the same Wi-Fi or network. It's really strange that they use the word Wi-Fi, both in the article and on the Netflix page. It's like, because I don't have a TV or any device other than my phone is connected to Wi-Fi. So that's kind of weird. But here's what they say. A primary location is set by TV that's signed into your account and is connected to your Wi-Fi network. All other devices signed into your account on that Wi-Fi network will be associated with your primary location and will be able to use Netflix. So after that, people living in the home who want to use Netflix on their own device have to launch the app at least once every 31 days. So if they don't do that, then they're going to get kicked off or whatever. Maybe, I don't know,

maybe there's a way you can log back in. I don't know, that's kind of weird. It's confusing. This is going to be a pain. This is going to be, I'm sure that life will find a way, but yeah, this is going to be a pain for people. Just like using the service in their own house. Dave P over on our HomeTech.social server says,

he said, I just read the article over in TechCrunch about the new Netflix rules. And he says, I have devices on two different networks in my house. He's got to land an IoT network. Totally makes sense. It's what a lot of people do. They segregate networks out.

So he's got devices on both of these networks that log into Netflix. And he's saying, this might be a problem and maybe maybe if the if if the if the devices that are um like the not the primary device the the secondary devices if they can't see the primary device on the network does that mean that you're going to get kicked off or are they using the wan ip and like will a simple vpn get around this i guess only time will tell. But I think after all of these years of people kind of playing with Netflix,

I think they have all the edge cases figured out. They know what we're doing. They know how we use the VPNs, basically, when we're traveling overseas to watch local TV, right? They know what we're doing. There's even VPN advertisements. A large part of their advertisements when they advertise is how you can bypass the regional restrictions on services like netflix so very curious to see how this is this is going to work yeah for the next month or two

it's going to be a competition between me and my sister to see who can register our home as the primary home first right that that's we're gonna log in every day and say mine's the primary home no mine's the primary home right who's paying for it it's hers but i don't care she's paid for it but i got the primary home we're gonna be fighting over this but you know and and they have that thing where if you're on the road every seven days, you got to get approval back from the primary user. You know, so that just means family is going to be contacting you more often to get the approvals. You know, you're going to get random calls from the uncles and aunts that used your account. Just say, hey, can you just approve my Netflix so I can watch it?

And you know what? You could just say to them, you know, like, skip the small talk. I know what you're calling for. You're approved, you know? And if they don't give you a big enough Christmas present, will they get that approval? I don't know.

There's going to be something going on here, too. We have someone, I can't read the name, but it says... Keyboard. Is it K? Keyboard.

All right, keyboard. It says, I definitely don't share Netflix with my mom brother sister friend wife and girlfriend exactly yeah literally everyone has an account yeah i mean honestly like i don't see how this is not gonna backfire for them right like even if like let's say that some people are like okay i'm gonna go ahead and just get my own account because that's easier like the restrictions of needing to log in every 30 days in order to register and everything like

that is going to be super aggravating for people that have like a guest bedroom or like an office or like a secondary area, or maybe even like a travel like streaming device. Like I know you have one of those sets like a travel Roku or Apple TV or whatever. Like if you don't pull that thing out for six months, like it should still be logged in, but now it's not going to be, it's going to kick you off. And then you're gonna have to spend more time to log back into it.

It's just going to be a big inconvenience compared to what people are used to. And at the end of the day, like, I think this is probably going to do more harm than good. People are probably just going to cancel their subscription because why go through all the effort when you have other streaming services now? You know, five or 10 years ago, Netflix was basically the only option. But now you have 30 different other streaming services that you can get all this stuff from. You can't get Netflix

originals on there. But, you know, it's a streaming service. So you'll just you'll stop using it. And then maybe once or twice a year, you'll pick it back up to kind of binge watch everything and then you'll cancel it again they might be better off if they just charged per minute you know of streaming you know like 0.01 cents per minute of streaming and then you can have anybody using that account why did i give them the idea yeah yeah they're probably gonna do it now and the annoying thing too is that like, I think what, it was like 2016 or 2017 that the Netflix CEO came out and was like, yeah, we're all right with password sharing, you know, because usually what happens is somebody shares their password

and then those people end up becoming account users. But now they've went back on that and now they're even more strict about it than a lot of other people are. So it sounds like an awful other people are. So I, it sounds like an awful idea to me. They've obviously calculated it and I'm sure they're losing millions of dollars or billions of dollars at this point, but it just seems like an awful idea. Yeah. They're one of the companies that, that really put a lot into their library. They've got a lot of debt, so they've, they've got to rebalance their books and everything to make the

business work. And I am sure that some bean counter was sitting there going, you know, if we just cut this off, we probably, we're probably going to lose some accounts, but like what we'll lose, we'll probably be a little bit more based on like how many people are sharing with friends and family. So, well, and they did it right as Reed Hastings is leaving too. So I think that was well-intentioned that

they can kind of soften the blow with that. They get a new CEO in there, and then everything's kind of smooth sailing after that. Oh, yeah. Nobody's going to notice. Like, oh, they got a new CEO. And oh, wait, my Netflix doesn't work. I'm going to have to call Gavin and find out. Well, they're just blaming it on the old CEO. It's like, oh,

it was Reed Hastings' fault. This new CEO, he didn't do it, though're just blaming it on the old CEO. It's like, oh, it was Reed Hastings' fault. This new CEO, he didn't do it, though. He did it on the way out the door. Yeah. I don't think that, I mean, because the new CEO is actually like, they were like dual CEOs. Yeah, like co-CEOs. Yeah, co-CEOs.

Yeah. So I think this is probably just, and we know it's been in the works for a while. They've been talking about this for a while. Here it is. Now we know the details. And it'll be interesting to see, you know, who wins the war over at Gavin's house and in his neighborhood. And then, I don't know, it'll be interesting here too, because, you know, we definitely don't share it with, you know, my sister-in-law and they definitely haven't had an account on there for like, I don't know,

years and years and years. So I guess all that may all that's may come to an end. And I, I'm, I'm curious to see, I'm sure, like I said, I'm sure they'll lose a lot of, a lot of people, but I think for us, we'll probably keep this service, but it's going to be less useful for us, especially if secondary devices stop dropping offline. We'll probably just like do one of those things where we turn the service on when we need it, watch binge watch or whatever for a little while and then turn it back off. Seems to be the way things are heading. All right, moving on here. Um, we talked about this a little bit before the show and, um, this is a, is it a video, I guess? Yeah.

It's a video about why we all need subtitles now and I guess that's a thing right like um we started watching subtitles a while back because we couldn't understand some of the dialogue it's not like we were getting like old and losing hearing or anything it's just like the dialogue wasn't coming through and I can blame a lot of that maybe on, you know, a bad surround setup or something like that. But turns out a lot of people are just watching TV with subtitles on now. And there's a bunch of reasons why, like a bunch of really good reasons why. And this little video from Vox kind of goes over a number of them. They talked to an audio editor who I have seen on TikTok. She does a really good job explaining some of the fine ideas like in the audio editing world and how production

works, which is it's always fun to watch and see because that was a would have been another career path of mine had I gone down that route. And it's fun to kind of keep up and see what they're doing over there. But yeah, we were talking about the show. It sounds like I think everybody here, like I'm pretty sure you guys said you're watching with subtitles as well. Yes, we pretty much always watch stuff with subtitles. And I think it's mainly the wife

that likes to have the subtitles on. I could go either way. But pretty much everything we watch nowadays has subtitles on and it does make a big difference um the only thing i don't like about subtitles is that kind of ruins the plot sometimes because you can read what's about to happen before it happens like in a comedy or something yeah so like i'm not a big fan of it for that reason but they're always on at our house gavin, what about you? Same here. I thought I was the only one that would turn on subtitles sometimes

because yeah, like in the video, you see him actually watching a show, rewinding it and constantly replaying it. And he still can't understand what the guy was saying. And I've been there where, you know, it's like, what do you say? And you rewind it. You're like, what do you say?

And you rewind it. You still can't figure it out. So yeah, we use subtitles quite a bit. not only because i watch a lot of foreign films but you know like sometimes people just they mumble or the audio is you know mixed weirdly on my setup so it's really weird um the cool thing is is it on apple tv where you can actually um say to siri what did they say and it will actually jump back 15 seconds and turns on subtitles yep and then plays it so that's actually a really cool feature because you say what did they say it will jump back turn on the subtitles so you can really hear what they said and then continue on as normal so that now we see why that feature was invented yeah i thought

you know i thought i knew some of the reasons um one of the reasons i thought were the more like advanced surround fields that have been coming out and i kind of have just a basic basically a 3.1 system you know soundbar and a subwoofer um but it it turns out what you were talking about there he's kind of going over one of the more famous actors and the guy just is notorious mumbler like he he just mumbles and, and the way that they record on set dialogue has changed. I mean, even in the probably decade or two that I've been away from it, like they've really back then, they really tried to capture onset dialogue and do as little as ADR as

possible. Now I'm, I'm sure with budgets, the way they are in technology, the way it is like, they're just absolutely trying to catch every little bit of data and just force the audio editor to do their best to make good audio out of what was captured on set. And if you had the actors, I mean, this is definitely something that I have seen in just human nature. When you have something that's kind of easy, you just kind of ignore it. Back in the day, actors would just, they would face the microphones, they would present to the microphones, they would yell, their voices would be louder so that dialogue would get captured correctly. And in doing that, and a lot of them came from like stage and that kind of thing, in doing that,

they're projecting their voices, they're enunciating properly, everything gets done correctly. And that was kind of like a big light bulb that went off in my head. It's like, oh yeah, the actors are probably, you know, they don't have to deal with this anymore. They can just focus on their craft and their acting. They don't have to worry about the technical details. At least this one little technical details,

you know, not hitting their mark and stuff like that. But like, they don't have to worry about audio. Somebody else's problem. Some poor schmuck. Yeah, exactly. Some poor schmuck in the editor's booth is gonna have to deal with this later so yeah and sometimes i watch shows where the accents just so thick like um i watch an english show called top boy and their accent is so thick that i have i have uh you and your TV shows just watching all kinds of terrible TV shows it's it's a good show

toe sucking top boy I mean what are you doing over there you know wow I hope you edit this part of the show oh it's Stan Gavin go ahead and say Tulsa King it's Tulsa King

it's Tulsa King it's Stan. Gavin, go ahead and say Tulsa King. It's Tulsa King. It's Tulsa King. It's Sylvester Stallone, you know, like Tulsa King. Tulsa King, yeah. Whatever makes you feel better, Gavin. Anyways, I watch an English show called Top Boy. Top Boy? And it's a gangster show. Oh, it sounds like it.

Jeez, boys. Yeah, but anyways, their accent's so thick that I have to turn on subtitles because they're just like an English accent. I have problems understanding. Well, am I correct in assuming that none of us are using like the built in TV speakers either? Like, do all of us have like a sound bar or some kind of audio system? You're using Sonos.

Gab, what about you, Seth? You're using Sonos as well? Sonos, yeah. You're using Sonos. Gavin, what about you, Seth? You're using Sonos as well? Sonos and then even in the garage, we use the AirPods, which at the same time, we're turning on the... It doesn't really matter. It seems like anytime we turn the TV on

at night as well, so there's also a little kid sleeping. So there's the matter of us not being able to just crank up a surround sound and watch it like we did when we were in our 20s. Like now we'll just be more conservative with it. We'll be using like second screens and all that good stuff and kind of like glance up and read what's going on rather than have to catch all of it. So it is in some cases a different viewing experience, but that's led to watching complete movies with the subtitles on now,

which I have never wanted to ever do, but I catch my, it's just, they're on and we just leave them on and it's just kind of normal now. But I definitely like movies for being movies, not for having subtitles on them. Well, let's see. If Sonos comes out with these headphones

we've been talking about forever, maybe we don't have to worry about subtitles anymore. We'll actually be able to hear things. Probably not. Sonos, what are they called? Hearing aids. Yeah, there you go. Whisper in my ear.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. I thought this, the whole discussion, it's about a 10-minute video by Vox, covers a lot of these points in depth. And it's worth watching just to kind of like understand, I guess, why this is all of a sudden seems to be a phenomenon. I thought it had to do with more of the advanced surround modes and like audio editors having like a bigger playground. Like I could easily see an audio editor, like I'm focused on Atmos, forget the stereo down mix.

And then here I am like with a 3.1 system going, what, what'd they say? But no, it's a little bit of that, a little bit of technology, microphones, and the way just the entire chain and industry works these days. We get mumblers. So there you go. Dang technology, not improving things

supposed to improve things not make them worse hot boy i can't believe he said that it's a good show i can't believe you guys laughed at that does your wife know you watch that uh she watches welcome to chipping wow you guys one thing that so so i'm i'm from texas uh and and i have no problem understanding most southern accents uh but we were watching a movie uh with matthew mcconaughey and it i think and and it wasn't it wasn't him like he does have an accent but it was like i think it took place in mississippi i think the movie was called mud or something like that decent movie uh but very very very thick southern mississippi accents in there and and little kids with it too and and they were they were saying things i'm like following along and my wife is

like all right we have to stop. I, what are they saying? Like they, they're, it's not a language, is it? And I'm like, it's English.

What are you talking about? Like, I understand every bit of it, but she had so, she just completely disconnected and couldn't understand what they were saying. So it, it,

it goes both ways from, from mud and to top boys, top boys, I guess. Can't believe I hate you. You do it to yourself, Gavin. It's amazing you haven't learned by now. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight

can be found in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 422. Nothing in the mailbags this week, but we do have a pick of the week that we were going over and we started talking about before the show and had such a great discussion. I was like, well, this is the pick of the week this week.

And it is something I ran across over our own Mastodon, I guess, but it wasn't our server. It was somebody else's. But it was a rare photo of a remote control from the 1970s. And it's got this little kid, little chubby kid, standing there staring back at his parents, holding the knob and just ready to turn it to whatever channel they say turn it to.

He's like, is this the right one? Is this the right one? Turn up the volume. This is great. Gavin said, this was me. Did they have a picture of me? This was me. This picture brought back a lot of memories. You guys may be too young for this, but growing up, I had three jobs when it came to the TV. I was the antenna adjuster. Sometimes I was the holder as well, because you'd have to adjust it. And as soon as you let go of it, it went bad

signal. So you had to touch it and you had to stand there for the whole program to keep that signal going right so i got stuck with that job and then sometimes i was the channel i was always the channel changer and that's one of the main reasons i learned to count to 13 right um because i had to know what channel to change it through and we never had a channel one i don't think i think it was always um it was two starts at two yeah so you know i always started my numbers at two for a while and then they had to teach me one right and then my third job was always my third job was always the tv slapper so every now and then the signal went weird or the tv was doing something weird but you slapped the side of it and it kicked back in i don't know why that worked but it worked and that was my job as

well so this picture brought back a lot of those painful memories um these are just things my parents made me do and you know like it doesn't matter if you did it two three four times you know it's you'll never forget it yeah we were we had a similar, I guess, setup. We had cable at our house by the time this came around. And we had the dual, I guess it was our cable company had basically fed in through UHF. So this is going way back. So the VHF frequencies channel numbers were 2 through 13, I guess,

and then 14 through something like 37 or 40 or something like that, UHF. And we basically had this box that sat on top of every TV. The cable line ran into that, and then, of course, the cable line went back out for channel 2 or channel 3. But you would just basically turn and click the dial to whatever channel you wanted to watch. And if you landed on channel 36 or whatever, way up there on the UHF signal, and that was the Disney channel, they would have like a notch filter outside your house is a silver

barrel, like plugged into your cable line, notch filtering that particular frequency out. So it just kind of came in all blurry or whatever, and you can go out and take it off. And then you'd have the Disney channel until they caught you, guess but you know that that's that's how you uh that's how you get the premium channels hbo's and all that good stuff back in the day a lot of fun talking about this stuff before we before we got on we we quickly found out everybody's age though yeah i don't know if any of us knew how old the others were in this scenario or anything like that. I didn't realize TJ was so young.

But both of you were talking about like manually adjusting stuff and going out and messing with filters and stuff like that. And like growing up, we had satellite TVs. So I had none of these issues. So, you know, I don't I was born in 91. And so I guess by the time I was actually using TV and stuff like that, like none of this was a concern for me. Yeah, you would have had you would have had like LNBs on a network or a direct TV dish like TV. Yeah, direct TV. Yeah, you didn't have to deal with direct TV for TV and DSL for Internet. That was that was the sweet life. You didn't even have dial up.

You didn't have to deal with dial up. Oh, man. Well, so I didn't have to do a dial-up oh man well so i didn't have to do a dial-up at my house because we were in the city but anytime i would go to my friend's house because i went to school kind of in the country and so the majority of the the people that i went to school with had dial-up um so like i had to deal with it but it was not a concern for my main house so you've never had to yell for your mom to hang up the phone because your bbs connection's cutting off no but i've been at a friend's house where i'm playing runescape and somebody calls in and we get the connection dropped and you're in the you're in the wilderness you're trying to fight somebody you get cut off and then you die so

i know the struggle a little bit i just didn't live with it full time star seven zero gotta dial that at least in the states i don't live with it full time. Star 7-0. Got to dial that. At least in the States. I don't know what it was in Canada. Something like that. I programmed it into the auto dialer to disable the call waiting and stuff. Call waiting. Phone line's always busy. Sorry. We ended up getting a second phone line because of me.

Yep. All good stuff. It happens. It was a good trip down memory lane and kind of going over all like we were talking about the cable boxes and i posted one it was like the digital version of the one with the clicks on it but it had like it has basically channel up channel down and a couple of other buttons on it i guess but the the main ones are channel up channel down and and inevitably the channel up would break or main ones are channel up channel down and and inevitably the channel up would break or something so you only had channel down or channel up one of the

ways and like if you miss channel 15 and you're on channel 16 you got to go all the way back around so get to clicking yeah and i had the big brown box with the wire that went all the way to the tv and you had 13 buttons on it and like a knob that had three settings and we found out if you held down two of the buttons you get like it was picture on picture i would call it i guess because it would just take both pictures and overlay them so you could watch two channels at once right but um those were the painful days yeah yeah that's that's funny if you it's that's the early stare that's the early early 3D technology I guess they had in Canada there. Well, I'm glad you guys had to struggle so I wouldn't.

So thank you for that. We did our best. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes because it's quite funny. And then I guess maybe we'll link out some of our cable box finds. You should definitely link those. I mean, I've never seen a lot of those things. So maybe somebody else hasn't seen them too. What is this?

Is this a rotary phone? Getting up to change the TV. That sounds awful. You had to get up to turn it off. Like, and that was the end of the night when mom or dad get up there and reach to the top of the TV and turn off the TV.

Like there was no going back. It wasn't coming back on. That was it. It had one button, and it was a click button. It clicked out and back in, and that was it. Jimmy in the chat said, today I learned Seth is oldest. Gavin's even older, though. No, no, no.

Seth is the oldest one. Let's just leave it at that. I just, I guess so. I don't know. Anyway, I had old technology, for sure, at my house. But, you know. We need to get some of those from the museum for you. Yeah.

No, I don't think so. Oh, man. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, tricks of the week or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. I guess, Gavin, you've got a project update for the Home Assistant,

which is continuously updating itself and being a project? Yeah, Home Assistant is always being updated. But my tip is to keep with the updates because it's easier to do the incremental updates than do a large update with a lot of breaking changes. So I like to keep up to date with that. But today, well, a couple of days ago, if you're listening to this now,

they released the official 2023.2 update and it was a pretty big release. You can read the release notes in their blog, but they announced, you know, the new assist, which is the, I guess the first step to their voice. So you can actually interact with your home now via like text messaging. There's some hacky ways to use some voice to do it and stuff like that, but it's actually pretty cool. But it's the first step in that whole year of voice thing they have little updates like history cards are live updating new group sensors a bunch of esp home stuff um if you have real link cameras there's some big updates in that because they now get all the sensors from the cameras such as motion person detection person detection, vehicle detection, et cetera.

And then some big matter updates, something like they re-enabled the multi-pan feature that now allows you to run ZigBee N thread using the single radio on the Home Assistant Yellow or the SkyConnect. So they had to disable that, I guess, in the past because there were some issues with it, but they re-enabled it so you can play with that a little bit. So it was quite a big update. I did update my home because I'm a glutton for punishment. While they were talking about it, I updated it.

And it's been running pretty well up until this recording. So I don't know. When you're listening to this recording, check on Mastodon and see if I'm complaining yet. Right. That's all I have to say, because if something goes wrong, you'll probably see me complaining on Mastodon while you're listening to this. But, um, it's been pretty cool.

Um, they, they showed off a new tool they're releasing called this. Um, I don't know what the official name of it was, but it was labeled the SkyConnect Flasher. So basically it was a firmware, um, update tool for their SkyConnect was, but it was labeled the SkyConnect Flasher. So basically it was a firmware update tool for their SkyConnect tool, but they said they were going to expand it so you can update firmware on like the USB sticks for everything. So it's like a really easy to use tool. It's like, yep, there's a new firmware update done. Right. And I thought that was actually pretty cool because it makes it so much easier. And the easier they make it, the more other people will jump on Home Assistant.

So a lot of cool things. I just loaded mine, or I just went to the VM and hit go on it. And it says an error, of course. And then it says, but this is, I don't think this is definitely not Home Assistant's fault. We think we have found the issue with my server and we've we've we've tracked it down to this bad memory stick from crucial we think so yeah it definitely failed the memory test thing hard failed it so

um i have another one coming you know whenever it comes here but the the server's been running fine since that's been swapped out but this says image corrupt cannot be opened read or write so um i guess my home assistant days are done till i sometimes i just want to take technology away from you seth i don't know yeah you're for somebody that works with technology you tend to break it a lot exactly i don't know i don't know um i didn't even get to play with it that much but i i did get um my my little whirlybirds thing where's this thing here it is yeah it's well it's kind of what it is it's like a little um what do they call this thing now i dropped it almost broke um yeah it's the inside of the flow meter it's kind of like little

turbine oh yeah yeah so um i've got that hopefully i'll be able to go out and swap that out uh this The inside of the flow meter, it's kind of like little turbine. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I've got that. Hopefully I'll be able to go out and swap that out this week and get my water meter, I guess, detector thing up and going again. Right now it just says I use zero gallons per day, which I know is not correct. Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah. This is pretty good.

Whenever it gets hooked back up it's gonna freak out but very green over there yeah yeah um so hopefully i'll get that up and going i i did um tj you were talking about how you finished off a theater last week um i went to help install a theater this week and somebody called me up and said hey i've got a new uh what are they i got a new projector got a new screen wanna swap it out can you come do that like yeah let's let's have some fun so i get there and it's a uh it's a it's a rear projection uh but he's kind of tall and it's a very low ceiling it's kind of like in a florida basement which if you're in flor, that means it's the part under the house where you're not supposed to

technically build anything, but people who have these homes build stuff under the houses all the time. So it's low ceilings and there's a projector there and he's tall. And so he hits his head into it and he's like, I want the front projector, the, what do they call them? The, uh, ultra wide, um, short throw, ultra short throw projector. It's like an Epson. You can set it two inches away from the wall and it can do 110 inch screen. It's kind of crazy. It's like an Epson. You can set it two inches away from the wall and it can do 110 inch screen.

It's kind of crazy. It's like, all right, so he's got that. He's got the screen. I put the screen all together. He's like, I want the screen to be here. I put it there. And then I go like, before we get the projector out, have you looked at the instructions?

And there was just a blank stare. I'm like, let's take a look and see where our cabinet is going to have to sit and all that stuff. And basically figured out the projector wasn't going to work. But at the end of the day, really what he just needed was an upgrade on the screen. And we were able to... The screen is actually kind of cool. For the ultra short throw, there's a specialized screen where it's, it's kind of like

got a metallic sheen to it, I guess. And it will reject the ambient light, but the light coming up from the bottom of it gets amplified. So it actually works really well. Um, and I was looking at it, it didn't quite look right with the regular projector on it. So we just took it off the wall, flipped it upside down and it looks beautiful. It's exactly what he needed. Um, so he's going to keep his old projector, return the other one. And, uh, that was that I didn't really have to do anything for the theater. That's all we did. I just put that in, put some speakers in new speakers, love the Sonant speakers. I'm going to put a, I showed you guys a video that I don't have to put a video up somewhere, um, of how those get installed. If you've never seen obviously Mon yeah well i'll put it there i'll put it maybe i'll put it

in the hub you know for sure um if anybody hasn't seen how the sonance mariner speakers install man it's just a treat like absolute just it's one of my favorite out exterior like on wall speakers to install because you just put the bracket up slide the speaker the bracket poke the wires through the back of the speaker strip them hook them up and then it has a little cover that goes over that and then it has the grill that goes over that so like everything is protected from the elements the little binding posts don't get corroded or anything very easily and it's just all around it's a good i have it's a decent sounding speaker and um i don't know it's all plastic you know plastic parts that are well-built plastic parts that don't corrode or rust and go away over time so absolutely love those things i can't recommend them more if you

if you're ever in the outdoor speaker market the only thing i don't like about those ones i've installed a lot of them and i don't like that the speaker grill has to slot into the speaker I wish they just kind of came up with some kind of magnet grill for it because I don't know it's old school I don't know about you but like I installed four of them the other day and I struggled to put the grills in on all of them because unless you like line it up exactly how it needs to go you get like three-fourths of it in there and then it's like the last one-fourth is like sticking out and you kind of like gotta like bend it in and it's just obnoxious but other than that they they sound great i like the the mounting mechanism because you can just slide it on there um it is very nice and it holds it yeah yeah the the the the so those grills that they

have designed on there are like like the magnet thing is kind of a newer thought technology right like that's that's only come into play i would say within the last decade or so where we started seeing them on some of the higher end speakers where you would cut in the speaker and then just like slap up the grill and it would just be sucked on with these rare earth magnets i was like oh that's that's beautiful because it may have been a pain to do it on a surface mount speaker like that. But for an in-ceiling speaker, after you've cut the stupid thing in, you're covered in just mess and drywall and attic dust. And like inevitably, the installer would take his hands and just like there'd be handprints up all over the ceiling where he's been trying to mash that grill into place and pressure fit it in. So like the magnets have been great in that respect. So I don't think they've redesigned those mariner speakers in forever now maybe they don't because

they're like outdoor or something they don't want them to like fall off on people or something i don't know but it just that's my only complaint about them yeah yeah valid valid pretty good but still a good speaker can't complain well i've got a speaker rant myself. Um, so I finished this, uh, this beautiful home theater and Lewis and Lewis center here. Um, and for the first time ever, I used some triad, uh, in wall and in ceiling speakers and you know, the build quality of them is really nice. Uh, they're all enclosed cabinets. Um, and they feel like a very nice, hefty speaker. Um, getting them installed though. I don't know if it's just because it was my first set, you know, I did seven of them. Um,

but basically, you know, like a normal speaker that you install on the wall or in the ceiling, you, you turn the screw mechanism and it brings that little foot out. And then as you, you tighten down the screw, it brings that foot closer to the ceiling. And then that eventually is what locks it to the ceiling or the wall, right? These ones though, they don't do that. They basically just have a little slide mechanism and you slide the little, the little finger thing, and that's what holds it to the drywall. And then you put this metal frame on top of it and that's what actually tightens everything down together and so when i'm doing the in wall ones it wasn't that big a deal

right because like if you cut the hole for the speaker and you put it in there like gravity is not going to make it fall out because you have the hole holding it right but when you're doing the in ceiling one there's nothing there to hold it until you actually get those little fingers shoved behind the drywall. And my mistake was that I put the little metal frame on too tight. And so there wasn't enough clearance for the actual finger mechanisms to slide behind the drywall. And so what I ended up having to do is just take off the metal frame, put the speaker up in the hole, slide the little finger things over and then tighten the screw down and then put the magnet frame or the metal frame, uh, on top of

that as well. So like, it just seems like a very cumbersome process. Like I thought speakers were pretty much figured out by this point, but it like, it's just such a pain in the butt to do those. And it might just be because it's my first set. Uh, but it's just, I don't,

that was like the most infuriating thing ever because I had to have somebody else help me like hold the speaker. Like here, you hold the speaker up. I'll slide the little finger things and tighten it down. And then you still have to hold it because there's actually nothing holding it. Like it's just, you know, it could fall out at any minute if it moves wrong or something like that. So it was just a very infuriating, uh, experience, but I think it was mainly my negligence as well. So I just, I just want to call that out.

I, as far as the old school pressure, you know, install of the what's it called the grill over the speed, this is probably even older where you had a metal frame that you have to install and then install a speaker inside of it. I think it's probably an older style install. But wow. Yeah, that that is. Yeah, I've never even seen it before, to be honest. And I've only been doing, you know, relevant work like this for the past, I think, like 10 years now. Yeah. But everything I've ever dealt with has been the little, you know, the little finger things are not the little finger things, the little catches. Yeah. The little foot feet thing that come out and catches. And, you know, those are great. They kind of suck when you go to remove them because you

never know, like how much force you have to, you know, put on the untightening of it in order to remove it um but at least you kind of have an idea like when you're tightening it you're like okay well this is tight now like we're good with these ones though it just seems like a very terrible design especially for how much you pay for them yeah they're not cheap speakers well and there's been a lot of like advances in how in ceiling speakers get installed especially in the last 10 or 20 years because of like they were just popular getting it they were so popular with the home building and everything but everybody was trying to get them faster and easier for installers and that's where the magnet grills came from magnetic grills which i mean they're metal grills but they

have magnets that are in the frames of the speakers now that like will pull the grill up and keep it on the ceiling and then like there's some there's some like uh i think dine audio even has like this like those little finger latches that you're calling like i forget what they did but i i ran across those they were pretty unique and and how they installed but it was basically like a one-handed operation to get it up to install the speaker in the hole in the ceiling and get it to where you didn't have to worry about it falling on your head. So totally understand in this situation

where you have these tiny little frame screws and you're like, if I drop one or two of these, then I'm starting this whole process all over again. Well, and it's annoying too because supposedly it's a handmade product or they build them to order or something like that but it's even more annoying because like some of the holes didn't line up so like you're up there and you're holding it up there and everything but you can't even put the screwdriver in there because the hole doesn't line up properly so then you have to get a smaller screwdriver and kind of like half strip out the screw um the, the best ones that I've

used recently are, I don't know if anybody else does it, but, uh, the ones I've used are from rust sound and they have, I think what they call a swift lock mechanism. And so basically it's the same, you know, little foot mechanism that comes out. Um, but basically what happens is you put it in the wall or the ceiling and then you push a button and the little foot mechanism comes out and automatically goes in place yeah and then whenever you go to remove it you basically just take a phillips head and you twist it you know counterclockwise maybe like a quarter of a turn and then actually puts the foot back and that was the easiest thing i've ever used in my life like i would if they switched everything to that i would be happy that sounds like what i remember seeing dine audio using on there maybe it wasn't dine audio but i swear i remember them

seeing them do those kind of like push a button and it all the things just latch over and genius it yeah springs who who would have thought and they're cheap speakers too like like the rust sound ones i think are like 100 or 200 for a. And then you buy the ones that are like way nicer. And it's like they're way more complicated to install. I don't get it. Oh, no. All right. So I'm going to send you a picture.

I'm going to send it in the back channel. Like how these are installed. They're even more different than that. They have the crazy install. It's like a frame. You cut in the frame. And then you slide and just basically turn the speaker into that frame. But it's not a frame you cut in the frame and then you slide and just basically turn the speaker into that frame but it's not like what you're thinking like it's it's way easier

oh yeah yeah yeah I've seen that before I've never used that the massive frame right yeah yeah that is pretty big yeah lots lots of speaker complaining tonight in our project section. Well, I like the speakers that I put in. Yeah, they were fun. Yeah, mine are good now that they're in. They don't ever have to come back down. Just never have to take them out. That's the thing.

You don't have to go back down. I didn't even think about having to take that stupid speaker down. I'm not going to be the one that does it. So what do I care? Not your problem. Exactly. Not my problem. Somebody else is going to have to figure out how to get that grill pulled out with a little. Yeah.

And that's like whenever somebody pulls that out, 100% they're going to bend it and it's not going to go back in correctly. Exactly. You better get some paint because whatever scratch they put on there, it's instantly going to turn into rust in Florida. Like it's just as soon as you scratch something, it's rusted. So yep, yep, yep. All right. Well, let's move on here. We 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 our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can

support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout-out on the show here. But every pledge gets an invite to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day in there and ask questions, talk about things. There's been some pretty good discussions. What were you talking about today, earlier? It wasn't

home assistant i know that tv's hanging upside down above chairs yes yes like a dentist a dentist office with a tv hanging over it and where you can get mounts for that kind of thing that was a that was fun i've seen that too but i have no idea how they did it my my dentist has those and i always think they're gonna kill me so i know that could fall at any moment and smash my head and mom, get my teeth clean. That's cool. Good thing. TVs are light.

I know the guy who put that in. I do not trust it. I saw him leave. Yeah, exactly. If you want to help with the show, but can't support financially, totally understand.

Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps up another week in Home Tech News here. Everybody, have a great weekend. Take care. Goodbye. That was the weirdest goodbye ever.

That sounded weird. It's one word, not two. Goodbye. I changed it to the last second. Just say it now. Go ahead. No. I'm just going to put that in. Yeah, that would be the first. Take care.

No. Don't take care.