HomeTech.fm - Episode 423 - There's Only One Gavin

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

On this week's show: Josh.ai looks to level up with ChatGPT, CEDIA launches a career toolkit, TPLink launches cheap vacuums that suck (dirt), more on the Netflix password drama, a pet pick of the week, and project updates from the team. All this and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 10th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kemp. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, all that good stuff. This week, we've got a number of like home tech headlines that have come through. So a lot of actually the news feels like it's picking back up or at least there's something to talk about. I don't know. I've been out of I was out of town all weekend.

Like I went to Mardi Gras on Saturday. It's all Patti LaBelle saying that was fun. And then I went to I got on a plane and went to Phoenix the next morning. So I didn't get back to Wednesday. So yeah, my week's been busy. That sounds like a busy week. Yeah, I've just had a bunch of boring meetings and getting stuff ready for tax time. You know, all the non-fun business stuff. So I am.

Oh no, tax time. Yeah, you know, I had to get all the documents non-fun business stuff so i am oh no tax time yeah you know i had to get all the documents together do inventory i'm still working through all of it you know oh you gotta automate all that with home assistant yeah well maybe one day but last year last year i waited till like september to do my taxes so this year'm going to try to get a little earlier, you know, I'm writing it down now, do taxes. So I will forget. Do you, do you have somebody do your taxes or you do it yourself? I mean, I still had to get all of it together. Like the business side of stuff, because last year was hilarious. Um, I didn't even balance my checkbook for the business for like the entire year, probably nine months. And then I was just like, well, let's just go classify things. So because there's nothing that my

business does. It just does nothing all year. So there's the same amount of money. So it's not a real business, you see. But I have to go get all that pulled together and figure it out and download. And I just I'll go do it. So yeah, see last year, I guess like everybody waited to the last minute to do taxes. I'm usually right. Like as soon as they open, I usually submit it to my tax person because I just want to get it done with. But last year I made the mistake of waiting to schedule my appointment until like taxes opened and, uh, we were, they were already booked out like four or five months so it took forever i mean basically the rest of the year to actually get it done yeah that's why they have

those extensions yeah well that's luckily they have that so all right what do you guys say we jump into these home tech headlines let's do it all right well josh AI posted over on a blog post, I think it was like today or this week sometime, showing off a new and apparently very early look at integrating with chat GPT. And while that integration isn't exactly flawless, it demonstrates how the two services could combine and bring some features that aren't exactly included in Josh AI, but they're there with other services, so like Alexa and Google Home. In the video, Alex Capilacelatro interacts with the Josh system as you would normally would, turning on and off devices,

lowering shades, all that good stuff. And you can use compound and complex sentences to do that. You don't have to say, turn on this light and wait say, you know, turn on this light and wait. You can say, turn on this light and close the shades and open the garage door and all that good stuff. You can just compound everything together and it'll just do it. But then he started asking questions like,

which restaurants are nearby that are great for vegans? And the response is, we're coming back. So that's kind of like something you'd be able to do with a service uh like siri or you know um like a google home or google voice and that kind of thing where you can you can ask it a question like that and it would respond with uh maybe not siri but at least google would respond with a decent answer um but josh a has kind of been limited to processing the more basic commands. And I say basic commands, but the automation.

That's what they've been focused on, home automation commands. And they can do little things like, what's the temperature outside? What time is it? The basics. But they didn't really have access to things around you and things that you would maybe be able to ask, like a Siri or a Google Home or Amazon Echo or something like that. So I thought this integration was pretty cool. A little early, like it did trip up on itself.

And Alex even pointed that out. But I don't know. I think it's a pretty powerful addition or could be a pretty powerful addition to the system and something they could layer on top of they already have and just make things better. It definitely works well with the professionally installed systems out there like Control 4 and Crestron,

and bringing what people think is a smart device or how a smart assistant should work, kind of leveling that up and bring it on par with things like the Echo and Siri and Google Home. I think this is a win-win. It looks really cool. Gavin, you had some thoughts before the show. What do you think about this thing?

Yeah, I really like the Josh AI. I only had two gripes about it up until today was, one, I can't get my hands on one. I'm not allowed to buy one. And two, it didn't do all those extra things that you were talking about, like other than like home control, you know, maybe what the weather, what the time. But, you know, it didn't do all those miscellaneous questions. When I saw this, though, I was amazed. I loved it. It filled in that gap amazingly.

And it took Josh AI for me to the next level. Like, even if they had a consumer version i could buy it it was like 250 you know i'd buy it right because this looks really good i'm a fan of josh ai what they're doing with it and where they're going with it and i'm just upset i can't get one yeah this is like i'm approaching on like actual home automation right i mean because a lot of times when people think about home automation they may think of controlling lights with their voice or setting up schedules and stuff like that, but that's not really home automation, right?

It's just, you're creating an action and then it's doing something else in retaliation of that. So if you can get some kind of AI in there where it actually learns about your habits and does things differently depending on, you know, time of day or depending on what you, what kind of question you ask or what the words you use. I mean, there's a lot of potential there to, to do a lot with automation. And I don't even think we're close to like finding out what that is. Right. Yeah. I mean, chat GBT hasn't really

been around that long. It's kind of blown up. Everybody's been talking about it recently, but we're in the very early stages of this. it'll be interesting to see what they do chat gpt has been around for well the the large language model has been around for a while but chat gpt put it into a chat where you and everybody else can interact with it and it's i think that's just like that service i guess the front end of it is really what what took off. That's what exploded. And we're going to see an explosion. I agree. This has kind of proven itself to be able to do things that we kind of expected AI to do early on. When we started, AI was like a buzzword, what, three years ago or whatever?

It's kind of like faking a lot of it turns out, but it looks like it's doing it. And that's good enough for a lot of people. But one of the things he did say in here, and you, you, what you said, TJ reminded me of it. He, he said, I'm trying to film something in here and the light's a little low. Can you make it, can you, can you fix that for me and do something else? And not only it did all that, and then it raised up the, it said, I'm going to raise the lights up and that kind of thing to make it brighter in here for you. So that kind of stuff where it's not, you're not saying, hey, turn the lights up or turn the lights bright, make the lights brighter in this room. You're giving it a scenario and it's parsing through and making a

decision on what to do based on that scenario. That's pretty cool. I mean, what if you said, I'm having a nice romantic dinner tonight and set the mood, and it just, it goes to town, and it turns, you know, dims down the lights, makes everything just right, and starts playing some sensual music. I mean, that would be cool. It's automation. And that's where I was impressed, was when he said he was just like, watch White Lotus and, you know, and something else. And it just went and did it all for him. Like, it was so smooth and seamless. I was so impressed. That was almost like home automation or voice assistant Nirvana. Well, I think what's cool. I mean, you say you can't get this. It's a dealer only product. It's a CD, a channel product.

And they're focused on integrating with a smaller subset of products, right? Than what you would get involved with with DIY. But Home Assistant's also trying to do a voice play this year too. So, and you know how those hackers are over there. If they integrate, if their platform gets more mature and they're able to integrate something like chat with GPT into it, you could see, you know, a version of this

built into Home Assistant in the future. So that could be pretty cool yeah i can definitely see that happening and honestly i don't i don't know if anybody started working on it for home assistant yet but i imagine somebody out there is yeah i haven't seen anything publicly about it but everybody's jumping in the ai uh camp at this point you have microsoft coming out with their uh integration with chat gbt you have google released and their their new ai called bard um and i'm sure there's a million others that are in the works right now so it's uh we're just now getting there oh home assistant's already working on this

don't worry they uh they have they demoed their basic version um basic uh voice control um and i think they're gonna do stuff like add chat gbt as like a fallback so if you do your home control and it you know you ask it something that it doesn't know it will pass it off to chat gpt and answer the rest of the stuff so um they're already planning that for the future like i'm very excited to see what home assistant does with all yeah that makes sense yep yep it'll be really neat to see where all this stuff plays out and how these language models integrate into the home. I think Josh's AI is really cool because that's going to bring it into, like, the super high-end homes, right? You're going to see it there first.

And this kind of reminds me of what – TJ, do you remember Kaleidoscape? Do you remember that company? Like, they still exist. They're still in business, believe it or not. But where I went this weekend, we had one to kind of play around with because they still do like direct bit-for-bit digital downloads, like 60 gig files. And you can get the 444, 60K, whatever it is.

I don't even know. What is it? 4K60? Super magical resolution. Super magical resolution, exactly. And we were tinkering with it, and it's got, like, the Kaleidoscape interface. It's real smooth when you change through the cover art of the movies.

And, you know, kind of like looking at it versus what we have on the Apple TV, it's like, okay, this feels like a premium product. But that was out first. And what came after it were, were like Apple TVs and Plex servers and that kind of thing. And they almost like copied to me, it looks like they copied like what they were trying to do over there at Kaleidoscape and went a different direction over time for sure. But Kaleidoscape was out there with this super expensive, beautiful UI. And then if I'm going back and thinking about how Xbox Media Center and all that kind of progressed over time,

now I'd say they're on par with each other. I don't think if you had the equipment and everything to play whatever the Kaleidoscape has downloaded, you probably could do that with one of these, like, open source solutions, right? Or like a Plex or something like that. I don't think that's a problem anymore. But what we do, what I guess the point I'm trying to make is, like, you do see over time a premium product come in, introduced, and kind of like everybody looks around and goes, man, that's great for the rich people. But, you know, what about us peons here? And they get together and they start making something like something really cool.

And I'm sure that people, it could be Home Assistant. It could be somebody else. I don't know. I'm sure somebody's working on it out there. And I'm sure we're going to see it soon. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely going to be Home Assistant first. I don't know of any other home automation platform that that's as quick and as loose as they are so well yeah it's got to work

though i mean no it doesn't sorry it just has to be there it just has to it just has to be a check box they could say yeah we did it and speed on by nailed it yep all right let's let's move on here we've got it we've got a bunch of stories here to cover. And I do want to cover one more pro story here before we get into kind of like new products and rumors and matter stuff. But this one really floored me. And I don't know if you guys had a chance to take a look at the video that's linked in the story here.

But I think this is from over at Resi Systems. Yeah, Residential Systems. Cedia has announced the launch of a new collection of free resources designed to complement Cedia's existing workforce development programs. And this is all done in order to help, like a global Cedia channel, build awareness of the industry for employment opportunities and recruit new hires. This is really brilliant. This is what I really wanted to see Cedia doing for a long time. And this new resource is called the NextGen Smart Home Career Toolkit.

And it focuses on helping integrators develop local talent pipelines and pools inside their local community. You get things like, they had this video that I'm referring to. It's actually a really good video. If you go look at it, kind of makes everything look legit. It looks really good. They did a great job on the video.

They have presentations explaining the industry and viable career pathways. That's awesome. Fact sheets, job brochures, print-ready posters that you could print up, classroom presentations for integrators. This is really great, bringing awareness that this is an actual career you can get into. It's a needed career because there's a lot of people out there who will tinker and play with home automation and home assistant. And there's a lot of Gavins out there, I guess is what I'll say. But there's a lot more people out there who just don't want anything to do with it. They want to come home and they want to walk in their door and they're just, their home does what it's supposed to do with the technology they think is cool. And these jobs are going to be out there for a while. And whether they roll

into being electricians or not, or some other type of trade, I don't know. But Cedia kind of like drawing a box around this industry and say, Hey, a little bit more than just running some wire and hanging TVs. Um, it's really cool. And, and, and go check out the video. The video is really good. Like it is a really good explanation of what this industry does and, and all the cool stuff we get to touch and put together. I thought it was, um, TJ you're was. TJ, you're an actual integrator. What do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely well needed. Until I moved down to Florida, I think like 10 years ago or something now, I had no idea the

home automation space was even a real industry, right? I've always heard about home automation, but I didn't know people made a living out of it. So the first step to getting past that is to educate people on what the industry is and kind of give them those resources to get new people in. And that's been a struggle ever since I've been in here is that, you know, you can't find workers. Yeah. And it's even worse now because of the economy and everything else that's going on in the world. But even before then, you know, you can't hire people for an industry if nobody knows the industry exists, right? So this is definitely well needed. And I'm really liking where Cedia has been going. I was never a fan of Cedia myself. I just, it seemed like one of those certification classes or organizations that, you know, you basically you got certified on networking or something.

You gave yourself a pat on the back and nobody had any idea what it was. Right. Like nobody asked you if you were CDA certified or if you've done CDA networking unless they were already an integrator. So the new CEO, he seems to be kind of changing that a little bit. And he wants to focus on, you know, educating people about who we are, because there there is a lot of unknowns there. Nobody really knows anything about us. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I always thought of CD as like a party every year, which which it is. But that's the trade show part of it. And I think for so long, that was their bread and butter, and they focused on that heavily. And I really think this industry development stuff suffered because of it.

When they divorced themselves of the show, pre-COVID and everything, they kind of set themselves up to go down this direction and need to be a more, like an industry association that is focused on education and industry development. And I'm really, I'm really glad that, that, that it's panning out that way. I really am. We actually, I, you know, we're joining Cedia this year as a company. So like, it's the first time I actually feel good about joining Cedia because I really do like

where they're going with this. This is awesome. This is really good stuff. And if you haven't seen the video, Gavin, did you watch the video? Do you want to be an integrator now? Probably don't want to be an integrator now. But first of all, there's only one Gavin, OK? There's only one Gavin. But yeah, it kind of cleared up what it is to be an integrator, though, because, you know, all I thought you guys did was hang TVs and tie wires to cats and feed them through attics so that they can pull it for you. Yeah. So that's all I thought you guys did was hang TVs and tie wires to cats and feed them through attics so that they can pull it for you. Right. Yeah. So that's all I thought you guys did. But now I see there's a lot more to it. And it's good because like you said, there's a home automation is a big thing right now. It's a hot topic. And this gives people that are interested in getting in the field

a way of getting into it. You know, this is what you have to do. These are courses you can take. This is what your job, you know, entails, you have to do these are courses you can take this is what your job you know entails you know so it's i'm impressed well that's that's good to hear yeah it's it's actually just called cat five that's the cable we don't actually tie it to cat i think he's i think he's talking about the cat or the ferret program to run wires yeah yeah you see that's an advanced level course you have to take how to run wire with your pet. With your cat. I would try to teach my cat, but she would probably try to eat the wire. So not really beneficial.

You just put a treat at the other end of the hole and it will run right to the treat. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. It's good. It's good to see them do something. I'm glad you enjoyed the video too, Gavin, because it really, to me, it was just like, yeah, that's all the stuff that's really cool about this industry. And why I got involved is because

it's all this cool, fun stuff that you get to install. You get to play with rich people's toys for a little while and get to see the coolest of the cool things, you know, and be in the biggest and craziest houses you've ever imagined putting this stuff together. So it's a fun industry. It really is. So I'm glad that they're working hard on developing that out. Let's move on here and talk about Matter, stuff that matters. After delaying their Matter rollout, Aquara is now announcing that Hub M2 users are going to receive an update through firmware, through a beta firmware, to enable Matter.

The company announced this rollout should take around four to six weeks to complete, and once downloaded by M2 users, it should allow it to act as a bridge for the rest of Aqara's home devices. Other Aqara hubs like the M1S, Gen 1 and Gen 2, the E2, the Camera Hub G3, and the Camera Hub G2H Pro will be receiving the update, quote, over the coming months. So who knows when that's going to be. Thread support isn't coming to individual Acquire devices, though some of the new devices Acquire mentioned at CES will come with Matter support right out of the box. So this is one way, this is how they're going to basically allow their older devices that aren't

going to get a Thread upgrade or a Matter upgrade into the Matter ecosystem. Just use a bridge, which is great. But there's some caveats here. Alexa and SmartThing users won't be able to use it just because those two platforms don't allow bridge-type devices to be integrated for some reason. So until they offer that or until they update their platforms to support that, you're not going to do anything there. And then that leaves basically Google Home and Apple HomeKit. But for some reason, not really sure why, but the company says home kit isn't recommended because matter can't do everything that home could can at this time. So it's kind of like,

that's kind of a weird statement. I guess we're gonna have to wait for people to get these upgrades and find out what the limitations are completely there. Cause the video they provided wasn't very, pretty helpful. So, um, put a link to this in the

show notes. You guys can go check it out. Gavin, this kind of goes into your matter. They're going to screw this up. When did I say that? Last year? I think you say every week, every week, I think. Yeah, but I'm going to be fair. And, you know, it's still early, you know, and I'm curious, how long are we going to keep saying it's still early? You know, at what point is still early, no longer still early, right? Because right now it's still early. They're dependent on the other ecosystems to open up certain things. So that's why we have these caveats. I expect Samsung to eventually allow this because why wouldn't they want the other devices to come into their system? So I expect to see them. It's just, we got to give them time, you know, as expected. And I also expected like, yeah, a lot of these manufacturers will probably just have a hub that bridges all their devices

into it at some point. Right. So we're probably going to get a lot of hubs depending on what you have out there. So we'll see how it develops, but I'm not shocked. Well, they've only been working on it for like five years now. So I guess it is a little early for stuff to just be there, isn't it? Are we still early though? Are we still, is it early or late? I don't know which one it technically is now. Like, do we even have a thread matter device yet?

I don't know. I was trying to find one. Yeah, I think we're still, I mean, it's early in that respect, right? They finalized whatever this thing that they've been promoting is for five years, like you're saying, TJ. So that's out in the world now. And now it's up to manufacturers to build to that spec. So, you know, that's going to be a 12 to 19, 12 to 18 month process

for manufacturers to bring stuff from today until, you know, when that spec was completed, it's going to take that time to go okay it's ready to go to we have a product sitting on the shelf at amazon or wherever so i think it's good like we're finally we're finally catching up here with with this spec that kind of basically does what the pro systems have been doing for you know decades at this point and it's it's going to bring hopefully the idea if they they all follow the spec right it's going to bring, hopefully, the idea if they all follow the spec right, it's going to bring better stability and everything into what the products are able to do.

We just got a little speed bumps along the way to get everybody on board and all the incompatibilities things ironed out. Like, why doesn't HomeKit, HomeKit does more than matter or something? I don't know. Like, it's a weird statement. It's's very weird well maybe by the the holiday season we'll have some some devices we can buy and start using a couple outlet plugs yeah some light switches it's getting there it's getting there slowly slowly but surely all right well we got

a new vacuum guys hang on hang on to your loose socks around the house because this thing hopefully this one doesn't have a camera on it so it can watch me uh no it uses gyroscope so all right so tp link uh briefly teased its intro into robot vacuums over at ces but the company has released more detail on its first pair of budget-minded cleaning machines. All right. The Taipo RV10 is a $250 vacuum mop combo, while the Taipo RV10 Lite cuts out the mop and doubles the dustbin size for only $230. Both models use gyroscope-based zigzag path planning.

Zigzag path planning is a quote from the company. And he says the company claims it'll clean your floor more efficiently than the random path vacuums. And also includes noise suppression to keep the sound as low as 53 decibels in a quiet mode. That's kind of cool. Both devices work with the Tape-O app for iOS and Android. Alexa and Google Assistant voice control are also supported. Not bad for, you know, $250 for a robot vacuum.

It's pretty good. Yeah, it looks like a pretty solid device. I mean, I've been pretty happy with TP-Link devices in the past. I've used a lot of TP-Link networking devices. I have a couple of TP-Link smart home devices like plugs and light switches and light bulbs. And they all work pretty good. I don't know if this is going to have like a local only mode so if you don't have internet is it still going to work um but

i imagine it would right like there's probably nothing that is blocked behind the internet for it to work but that would be an interesting thing to find out um i think it's just a value add thing for it to have that you know it's got buttons on it so you can go and press it and start or schedule it or whatever i don't think it's going to be internet to work well and if you i was i'm just looking at it on amazon because i really do want a robot vacuum at some point um if you buy it right now you actually get a 70 off coupon so it makes the regular vacuum from 229..99 to $159.99. So that's not a bad deal at all.

For what you get, that's a great deal. Yeah. I might just bite the bullet and get one here. There we go. Spending money live. That's right. You know, there's one feature in my next robot vac I'm going to make sure I have. And you really won't appreciate this feature until the day it actually saves your life.

Is it going to be a kill switch no poop detection poop detection detection like seriously if you have a pet and you get a robot vacuum just make sure you have poop detection because when they have that accident that robot vacuum goes to do its uh you know its schedule you don't want to come home to that smear it all over the place that's the last thing you want i'm not talking through experience either almost experience though almost it's close enough is that what is that what they call that feature poop detection or they have like some kind of fancy term like uh like fecal matter no i think they actually call it poop detection uh is it roomba that has it roomba has that feature i figured i want to say they call it poop detection so this one doesn't list anything about poop detection

so maybe it's not a good buy assistant i don't know yeah yeah you just got to tie in homeless listen so if one of your sensors smells poop then the robot vacuum doesn't run oh fight him with your uh your air quality yeah the aqi in this area way too high in here if it's if i get down to three leaves it's like don't vacuum don't vacuum you've got zero leaves it's negative three leaves you have a negative three leaves we're not we're not not taking the vacuum out or with those new fancy cameras i can detect you know they make a stick figure out of your shape and stuff like that maybe you can detect the dog in a certain position to know that it's what it's doing there there was an idea there was a guy who did that i thought we we may have covered it i know we saw the video where he had

used his use like ai or yep models built onto the cameras where it could detect where the dog had pooped and uh mark it on the camera. No, he was marking with lasers. He had a laser and it would mark where the dog pooped so he could go clean it up or whatever later. And I don't see anything on this one about like a geo fence or marking out certain areas. I think that's usually reserved for more expensive robot vacuums, is it not? So like telling it exactly where to go or something like that.

So this will just run continuously, kind of like one of those toy cars you had as a kid where, you know, you wind it back and it would hit the wall and then go in reverse and stuff like that. And that's a feature I love in my vacuum is the mapping of the rooms. You know, I had a vacuum that just bounced around and it would never find its way back to the dock. Right.

But when I got a vacuum that maps around not just that like the roomba maps two floors so when i put it upstairs and i press start it actually knows it's upstairs and what to do too it it figures it out somehow yeah and i think i would like that because you know we live in an apartment right now um but it would be nice to have this run at night while we're not doing anything you know but i would like it to like to uh cut off near the. That way it like doesn't accidentally crash into the bedroom door or something like that and give us a heart attack at night. So maybe maybe this is not a good buy for me. I'll just keep holding on.

That's that's kind of what I have decided on the cheaper vacuum. They've all been good deals here and there. Even the Roombas have been pretty good deals. But I keep going back to like the mapping thing. And I think the one that has like the dustbin collector and I'm like i mean it's yeah that's that's a worthwhile feature yeah very expensive i think the dustbin one's like 800 or something yeah and i keep looking at that going well if that was a better deal i would get it but even when it's on sale for like 200 off i'm like that's still expensive yeah so i don't know. It's tough to swallow. I have a vacuum.

I just run around the house and vacuum still, like a savage. All right. Well, we've got some leaks here, guys, and the Verge has struck again. This time, they're outing two new Sonos products. And TJ, you want to take a swing at what they're not going to be? Not headphones. No headphones for you. Nope. The company is preparing a new generation

of smart speakers known as the Aera 300 and the Aera 100. They'll be debuting in the coming months. The flagship Aera 300 is designed to showcase spatial audio tracks and Dolby Atmos content, and both speakers have

a completely new design compared to the existing Sonos products, according to the leaks that The Verge has. No pricing on this yet. And apparently the name, actually, The Verge, we talked about this on the show a while back, but The Verge has kind of been on top of these leaks. And I guess the names leaked out from some catalogs from Sanus, stands and wall mounts.

They were posted on the web like over a month ago so they've had those those names like era stands era 300 era 100 sono stands uh and i guess nobody noticed and the verge ran across it and now they got the story about again so fun stuff the most exciting thing out of here is the the automatic tuning and sound optimization um for anybody that has sonos you you know, that funky dance that you have to do around the room where you you hold the phone upside down and and you wave it all around. And when when you're at a customer's house and you start doing that, they look at you like you're insane. You know, they're like, what are you doing? And you're like,

oh, well, I'm tuning your Sonos system. i have to start over again because you talk during the whole thing so now you have to just walk around it's just like it's such a silly process to be honest it does make a big difference whenever you do the true play but the whole process of it is just silly and if they can figure out how to do the automatic tuning on all the speakers like that would probably be worth it alone to upgrade i've never done the true play never do that yes it makes it does make a difference yes and there's two phases to it the the first one it asks you to sit down in your normal seat and i think it's like hold the phone up eye level and it calibrates it for that spot and then the other uh the other uh part is that you actually walk around and you wave the phone up and down like a crazy person, and then it kind of adjusts the audio for the whole room.

And it does make a big difference. And one of the gripes I've always had with it is that it's only available on iOS. So you must have an iPhone or an iPad in order to do it. If you have an Android phone, you're never going to be able to do it. Not even just that. I noticed whenever a new iPhone came out, it took them forever to add support to that iPhone too. So even if you got the new iPhone, you wouldn't be able to retune your speakers until they

release an update to the app. Yeah, it usually takes them like three to six months to add support for the new phone. Interesting. Maybe they model the microphone or do some testing on it. That's interesting. I've never done it. I've attempted to do it in the past, and it failed. And I just didn't have the patience to do it, so I gave up.

But I'll give it a shot again if the house is ever quiet enough again for me to do that. Yeah, and do it while nobody's there, so that way nobody thinks you're a crazy person. Yeah, yeah, something. All right, well, I'll give it a shot. All right, well, we covered this on last week's show, but there was an update immediately after we released the show,

or recorded the show, rather. And it was about Netflix and their password sharing stuff that was going on where they were going to lock everything down and everybody was mad about it. And then Netflix released this story. And I was like, whoops, we, uh, we didn't mean to release it. We didn't mean the U S of course we didn't see. Yeah. That, that was meant for other countries. Um, but you know, they, they haven't really taken that down off their website either, but, um,

they've also expanded the same policies into other countries. So they've rolled out, they're rolling out the ban on the account sharing there in Canada, Gavin, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain after trialing the effort in Latin America. If you live in those countries, you'll need to set to either the standard or premium tier and pay $8 in Canada and New Zealand for up to two extra users outside of your home. Gavin, what's going on? Are you the primary account holder now? My sister beat me to it. So we got the notifications today about this. They said you have to claim your home to the 20th

she didn't even wait she instantly went in there and claimed it and you know she she knew she knew she knew we were up to it yeah i think she may have listened to the podcast and tried to beat me to it but i tried to go in there and it was like nope you're not the primary owner we're gonna have to have a talk. Just cancel Netflix. You don't need it. You know what? I'm going to have to be nice to her from now on because every few weeks she's going to have to reauthorize my account or something like that.

And we'll see how this goes. Yeah, it's funny. And we were talking about this a little bit before the show. And actually, I was talking to my wife about she had seen the announcement. And then I went back and we were talking about how they had walked it back, basically, after the outrage that everybody had over this decision. And there was actually a really funny video about a guy yelling about butterscotch. It's got explicit language, maybe I'll put it in the show notes because it was really funny. And anyway, she said, you know what they're doing? They're just making everybody mad about this. And they'll wait a little bit while longer

and then they'll just do it. And since we're already mad about it once, we're not going to get mad about it again. We're just going to. All right. That was that. I'm the primary home now, Gavin. And you have to wait. So I think TJ, you and I were talking about this before the show. You said it's a pretty common tactic for these companies to do that. Outrage everybody. Sit back. Oh, no, you're not going to do that. And then come back and do it again. Anyway, because, yeah, why? Why would they have happy customers? Well, you're going to have Netflix groups now, you know, to get that discount. It's like, just add me onto your account. I get it for cheaper, you know, like that's it's like just add me onto your account i get it for cheaper you know like that that's what's probably gonna happen now uh we'll see i i just don't get

it because i figure you know like why even allow it at cheaper because then you'll get everybody just go under someone's account and everyone gets it cheaper right instead of just force everyone to get their own account i guess that's the next step for them i don't know why i keep giving them ideas nah that's probably just their way of like don't know why i keep giving them ideas now that's probably just their way of like you know softening the blow a little bit like you're gonna have to pay for another account basically but it's half the cost of an actual account so i think a lot of people are probably going to be all right with that and they're just going to do that um but there's obviously going to be a lot of people that are just going to not do that at all

so we'll just we'll have to see how how how it plays out for them in the long run. They've obviously done the math to think that they can make more money this way and they, they need to make more money. They're, they're losing money like crazy with all their original content. So we'll, we'll see what it does for them.

Yeah. They've made some big gambles on original content and spent billions and billions and billions to compete with everybody else. And yeah, they're not making money. Yeah, it would probably help if they didn't make a show for like a season or two and then cancel it and then repeated that like 80 times. But I'm not a Netflix executive, so. Cowboy Bebop, man, that was a really cool show.

And like they canceled it, they said before it was even over, they were going to cancel it. I was like, I was enjoying this. Oh, man. Anyway, I guess it's going to happen. Or it's going to deal with it. Yeah. Life will find a way, as they say.

All right, well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at home tech.fm slash four 23. You know what? We didn't pick a pick a pick of the week this week, but I guess since we talked about it, we'll put it as the pick of the week. Using your cat to pull underground cables. It's a good idea. I've seen, I've seen people use cats and i've seen i i was reading an article the other day too about people using ferrets and i've always thought about ferrets

because they're they're so i don't know what the actual word is but they're they're very trainable trainable whatever where they can fit into a lot of tight spots um and supposedly that's a legit thing they they have used ferrets in the past to run cables through conduits and stuff. You know, I've been guilty of this. You know, we've been I'll admit we've been in the living room or something like that. And, you know, the wife has said, hey, keep asking me a tissue. But I've taken it and shoved it under the dog's collar and said, go. And he runs across the room to her with it and she gets it.

You know, it's a similar and she gets it you know so similar concept but you know like the animals are tradable they're good for something give them some treats and they'll make it happen for you exactly i love streets this largely depends on the cat i think like you you wouldn't be able to do this uh and yeah cats are stubborn definitely definitely i would i would worry that the cats that i've owned would just go down under the house and go to sleep and then you're like come on get out from underneath there yeah i don't think i would trust a cat to do it you know mainly because just like you said all my cats are lazy so lazy yeah or they're just not going to do it because that's the point like oh

you attack you attach something to me i don't want to do this anymore. Yep. I think I'll just sit here and lick my leg. There we go. Cats. What are you going to do? All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments,

picks of the week, or great ideas for a 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. Project updates. TJ's got a big picture right there oh my gosh all the projects you know now i'm getting into the fun stuff so i uh speaking of sonos i needed a new speaker for the new office and i wanted something i could hook up to the

computer so i bought one of the sonos rays and it is meh I mean it's you know it's it's a cheap soundbar um I don't this is kind of what I thought it would be to be honest but it's not in my opinion I don't think it's really worth the $300 when you can buy a beam for only like $150 more right the ray is $279 regular price the beam is is, I think, $449. The Beam sounds miles better. And I think a lot of the reviews that I read before I bought this were basically saying the same thing, right? It's a very low-end soundbar. It's in the Sonos ecosystem.

That's probably the reason you're going to buy it. I just don't think it's worth the $279 price tag um one of the cool features about it though and i don't think i've ever seen this before for some reason but that little that little optical connector on the back of the sonos ray it uh it's basically reversible so it's like a it's like a like a star pattern kind of thing and you can plug that optical adapter in pretty much any way you want. And if you've ever had to try to plug an optical cable into something, especially something that is already mounted on like the wall, like a TV, for example, finding that exact spot that this connector goes into sometimes can be the worst thing in the world. Right. Because it's kind of like USB. Right. You got to plug it in. And even though you plugged it in the right way it doesn't line up correctly um but but this the star pattern thing it just

you just plug it in and it just works i don't i don't know why nobody else does this that's really smart because yeah i i have i've broken cables trying to plug them into that stupid thing i've broken i've even seen people break the ends off inside the tv trying to plug them into that stupid thing. I've broken, I've even seen people break the ends off inside the TV trying to plug it in incorrectly. Yep. And I've seen them mash the cable in incorrectly, but it's in there and kind of worked. And that was the service call.

That's why I was there. But yeah, that's genius. I don't know why that wasn't part of the original spec. Like why they would do the cable they did the way they had it. You can put that in any way it looks like and it would work. That's genius. I don't know why that wasn't part of the original spec. Like why they would do the cable they did the way they had it. You can put that in any way it looks like and it would work. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and as optical is going away, we're getting this sweet new connector. So I wish I would have saw it on everything for the past 10 or 20 years.

Even I know that pain. But you know what will make your array sound better, right? A Sonos sub and two Sonos 1s ones behind you like yeah i don't think that's gonna happen in this place maybe maybe a sub mini but i feel like that's overkill for an office uh do it i don't know i i'm going with gavin as long as you're spending money on stuff tonight just go all out man yeah maybe well maybe i'll move the the regular sub to the office and then just get a sub mini for the house we already saved you money on telling you not to get that vacuum cleaner yeah that's true just get more yeah yeah that's that's what i need to do is keep spending money speaking of speaking of spending money i uh

i think i talked about this a couple weeks ago but i wasn't really sure what it entailed and everything and i haven't got a chance to play with it yet um but i got my innovo home assistant cube thing today um and it's basically a little tiny little box it's got an ethernet port it's got a power port a usb and micro sd slot and it runs home assistant and you can tie it in natively with a lawn um and i think a couple other control systems but i don't really use those so that's not my concern um but I'm interested to try it on my house because I currently use Home Assistant. I love it. It works great and everything. But I want to see what I can integrate into Elan with Home Assistant. And talking to the founder of the company, it sounds like it pretty much works with anything. They haven't

tested it with every single device that Home Assistant supports. But it sounds like, you know, if you have a smart lock that maybe is cloud based, but Elan doesn't support it, you tie it in with this Home Assistant cube, and then you bring it in natively to Elan, and it'll work. So that's pretty cool. My cost was about $100 or so, which is not bad. I mean, you would pretty much pay like 50 or 60 bucks for a Raspberry Pi at this point. Plus, you know, the power supply and micro SD card and all that good stuff. So $100 for the cube is not a bad deal. I'm excited to try it out, though. So hopefully next week I'll have a little more hands on time with it. That's cool, man. I saw those guys had a booth at Cedia.

But I'll be interested to see what you find out about it. It looks like a good idea because Home Assistant has integrations with everything. I mean, toothbrushes and stuff. And there's not a chance that Elan is going to integrate with a toothbrush. So if your client needed to integrate with their toothbrush you've got a solution yeah that's good yeah and i've started shopping it as like an experimental thing you know i've started telling some clients about it and it's like look i have this thing you can try it out it costs this much money um i'm not responsible if it doesn't work though so

we're gonna put it through its paces first and see before I actually install it at a client's house. But I've heard really good things about it. There's certain clients you could use this with. Then there are certain clients you would just say, that doesn't exist, sir. Yeah. There's no way to do that. Yeah, the more tech savvy people, right, that would understand that it's a beta product for the most part. So nobody that just wants their stuff to work all the time,

but somebody that's willing to try out and do stuff. So Gavin, basically. Yeah, Gavin. I'll send you an Elan system, Gavin. Sure. Yeah, I need multiple devices too. Oh, okay. You just have to factor reset all of your Z-Wave and Zigbee devices

and pair them again. I've done that multiple times. I'm a pro now. And actually, no, you're running Home Assistant. So you can just back up and restore right to the cube. You wouldn't have to do anything different. There you go. I'm a pro now. Problem solved. Get you a CD, a t-shirt.

It's in you on your way. Like I said, I'm going to do the cat cable pulling advanced course. Honestly, you could start that as like a business. You know, everybody short on uh on help right now if you started up some kind of ferret or cat wire running company people would probably hire you like crazy they work for warm milk so and and tj i think you've basically spent all your

money on this packout solution you have in your van this is insane like what were you thinking? Yeah. So I, for the past like six months or so, when I bought my van last year, I, I bought some shelves off like Craigslist or Facebook for next to nothing. And you know, those are the traditional metal shelves that you put in a van. But I wasn't a big fan of them because you can't, you know, you can put bins inside the shelves and then take the bins out and everything like that. But I go into a lot of jobs where it's like, well, I know I need patch cables, right? So let me just bring all my patch cables and use what I need and then bring them back out. So I've been slowly converting the whole van to pack out. And it's been really nice, honestly.

I still have to finalize some walls. So my van originally was a movers van. So it has a track along the side of it. So that way they can tear down or tie down different cargo. The weight of my pack out, though, for some of them are way too heavy for the track. And it's starting to like bend and break some of the the rivets. And that's you know, that's obviously my fault. I put way too much weight on it. But I think my next project for the van now that i've kind of got all my packouts ready and everything is to add more e-track so i can i can fully stabilize everything and i don't have to worry about breaking anything um i've never done any kind of walls or anything in a van

so i'm not really sure how to approach that just yet but i guess i'll find out i have a spot that i can pull the van into and mess with it so there's plenty of tutorials on youtube on building uh what are those those campers that people build into their vans yeah yeah there's a lot of that on there but i haven't really found anything that's like specific for like cargo vans there's a lot of you know people turning their vans into places to live or campers and stuff like that um but i haven't really found anything for for my use case i'm sure there's something out there though some kind of written guide or video guide or something like that well gavin what about you are you have you been rebuilding vans and that kind of thing what are you what are you up to these days no no van rebuilding but this week i did get my home assistant sky connect finally nice finally but i'm probably not even gonna play with it till i actually get a device that i can uh use with the thread radio so my plan is to use this just for

thread and matter right um and i'll keep my zigbee and my z wave as separate devices you know and this is what i thought matter was going to be to me anyway, just another antenna on the home assistant box. So everything's panning out, you know. But we'll see. When I finally get to this, you know, one day, we'll see. We'll see. He's got his checkmark. And done.

And done. It's such a small little dongle, isn't it? Have you opened it yet or you just haven't even opened it? No, no. I've opened it. It's a small don little dongle, isn't it? Have you opened it yet or you just haven't even opened it? No, no, I've opened it. It's a small dongle. It comes with an extension cable, you know. But what I'll probably do is buy another long extension cable so I can centralize it in my basement, you know, like what I did with my other antennas, right? So, you know, one day I'll get to it.

Like I said, I want to get a device first. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I've got mine installed, but I can't use it with anything. Mine is Zigbee devices, so it doesn't really do me any good right now exactly my my whole setup is running so smooth right now i don't want to go through and replace the antenna i'll just give it time for that to work you know um and we'll see where it goes other than that um this week i'm going to be on home gadget geeks the home gadget geeks podcast so you know like uh go over their home gadget geeks i think it's home gadget geeks.com just google it you'll find the podcast and um i'm gonna be talking a lot of home assistant there this week they wanted

to get me in talk some home assistant so if you like home assistant come over listen to that podcast cool cool well i've been out of town but i didn't i i mean i didn't do any projects around If you like Home Assistant, come over, listen to that podcast. Cool. Cool. Well, I've been out of town, but I didn't, I mean, I didn't do any projects around the house, but I did, I did kind of tinker with some like robot stuff. Cause I heard Jason Snell and some other podcasts talk about this website called make.com. And it used to be like either a magazine or like some other thing before, but there is a company that has taken it over and made a pretty little interface to basically automate a bunch of stuff.

And it's basically like a, I don't know, what's the one Zapier type setup that has business integrations? It has all that junk. But it does give you the ability to do HTTP posts, web connections. They have an app that you can download that has little buttons that you can set up to deploy into this thing. So you basically go in and you make your scenarios. And I've got one that will look at the Home Tech FM RSS. And if a new show is posted on Friday or Saturday, or maybe even Sunday,

it will look at it and see if anything's changed and then post the link to that show. And, you know, like it would normally do on Twitter automatically through Squarespace. Since I don't have that integration in Squarespace, this is what we've got. And it'll, it'll just start watching the RSS feed on Friday to see if anything's changed. And if it has, it'll post it on Mastodon for me and I don't have to do it, which is great. I love little robots and automation and things like that. So it's kind of cool. I liked it.

It took a little while to figure out. And it messed up last week because I actually had it done. But it messed up. And because the title of the show had a like a quote mark in it, like a quotation marks in it for and that messed up something and it didn't post right. But then I figured out that was the problem and I corrected it and I'm sure I'll break it again. But it's automation for you. It's fun. Make make dot com. Check this thing out.

It's got a lot of integrations in it's very very cool see those are the robots you need to be friends with gavin okay okay i'm friends with all robots by the way you know like i just just just in case but i think if you're a developer we've all fallen victim to that quote in a string issue at some point in our life yeah like i hate that so much well it was it was the title of the show which was comes off the rss feed so it has the quotes in it but then to post a mastodon you had to put it inside json text string which already had the quotes around it and since that wasn't escaped out it messed up so yeah it's mastodon was like no i'm not posting that and it just took a little while

to figure out this is a really cool, it's like a graphical thing. You just drag stuff around and drop, and you can test stuff. I really like it. It's got thousands of integrations, though. Like, just absolute thousands of integrations in this thing. And I even had it sending me an email. If the thing doesn't post right, or if there's an error or something, it'll send me an email and if the uh if the thing doesn't post right or there's an error or something it'll send me an email and tell me so it's really cool um for for all that it can do

i liked it check it out make.com that sounds pretty cool give it a shot because i've used zapier in the past but it was uh didn't really work out for what i wanted it for but maybe this will have what I want. You know what I found on Mastodon? Is there a certain bots on Mastodon that will repost content from Twitter accounts, right? So I was able to follow some of my sports teams because these bots just repost the Twitter feed

from the sports team. So I, you know, like I've been trying to find more of those little bots, but maybe I'll make some. Just make it yourself. You can absolutely make some. There's definitely, well, no, you can't because Twitter's cutting off their API. You gotta pay for the Twitter API. Exactly. Or just scrape the web pages. I'm sure there's some, somebody will figure out a way to do this. Um, but yeah, Twitter is, Twitter is a mess and Mastodon has a great API. I was playing around with this thing and I'm impressed.

I think I'm going to start, I'm going to make a little Mastodon control four driver and just post updates from my control four system anytime a light changes or something. I think Home Assistant already had one. Yeah. People were doing all that junk way back. Like when Twitter first came around, people, you would always run across stuff like that and it was like oh that's that's fun like it's a dumb little thing that that can sit there and post stuff all day long clog up the uh local feed gavin's gonna be one of those people yeah he's gonna mute this thing band gavin sorry

from my own instance it's just gonna be like home assistant needs an update home assistant Yeah, he's going to mute this thing. Ban Gavin. Sorry. From my own instance. It's just going to be like, Home Assistant needs an update. Home Assistant needs an update. Home Assistant needs an update. Just over and over again. Yeah, I'm going to flood it with Home Assistant updates.

It's all it does. It just updates all the time. You only get two a week. And every time they add something, too. So there's a separate two for every time they add a separate service. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right.

Well, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support and learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar per month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out on the show, um every pledge gets you a private invite to our slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can go in there and uh look at look at uh greg's awesome keypads those are amazing those look great that was impressive actually they came out better than i thought they

would i did a good job way better those are the are those the zoos ones yeah i believe it's the zoos yeah yep they're actually engraved yeah he had them there's a company that zoos partnered with to do like laser engraving and i guess he sent one off to have it done and um it it looks awesome looks great and i realized uh greg was rich because i'm like what 40 or 50 dollars for the engraving there he goes he's paying for it more i think they're more than the scene controller i'm sure it is i mean but it i it looks nice having experience with with setting like setting all that up and doing it like it's it's a that's a pain like it does cost money to do so well and it's like you know it's like reminiscent of like a professional automation system right because if you were to walk into like a really nice house that had automated lighting, they would have ingrained keypads like this. So we're getting closer to closing that gap

between, you know, professional and DIY home automation and simple stuff like this goes a long way. And you know what? It passed the Richard test. So it was well worth the money. Oh yeah, it did. Well, look at that. i'm gonna pin that yeah no it does actually look really good um he could he could line up his screws straight but everything else looks good now that you pointed that out oh man first thing i saw oh yeah adding a comment now yeah that's what i was doing oh man all right well uh that that's what I was doing. Oh, man. All right. Well, that's fun to check out.

If you want to help with the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps another week up here in Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Godspeed. Take care. have a great weekend we'll see you next week godspeed take care it's on the list tj it's on the list tj tj downloaded what was this from chat gpt on how to close the show i think so yeah yeah and we just pasted it in here so every week he goes through and

for whatever reason the strike through doesn't work uh on this version of markdown so yeah that's pretty weird godspeed's off the list we're just gonna we're just gonna keep going through the list i mean that's what we've been doing for the past year anyway it's not like i'm gonna find a permanent phrase all of a sudden so peace out i can't wait to use that one yeah that's actually the one i was thinking about using tonight but decided against it you know godspeed sounded more uh i don't know catch you later or see you later would be perfect you know like i would probably be able to say like normally but like during the podcast i would definitely

see ariva dirchy there you go i'd butcher it either way