HomeTech.fm - Episode 424 - Bugger Off Security

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

This week on HomeTech: Gavin talks for more than two minutes, IKEA launches a Indoor Air Sensor with an unpronounceable name, SimpliSafe starts monitoring indoor video, Fast internet is coming, Comcast is cutting off Peacock, a pick of the week, and we ask the question, "What makes the best dashboard for the home?"

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 17th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, all the fun stuff. In this last week, we had the super, I have in my notes, the superb owl, which is probably not how it's spelled. That's the best one?

Yeah, it's the best owl. You guys have a fun Super Bowl watching party? What did you guys do? Yeah, it was actually really good. I really like this year's Super Bowl. Close game. I actually predicted they would win by four, and they won by three, so I was pretty close.

We hung out with the neighbors. We got some chili some wings you know just watched it and had a good time and we enjoyed the halftime show with rihanna you know that was the biggest ever baby reveal you know i've ever seen in my life you know and she didn't even have to say anything everyone just said it for her so i really enjoyed it i thought it was good and she does have a lot of hits. Yes. Yeah.

We were talking about it before the show, how many number one hits she's had. And it's crazy. I don't really think, I don't know. It wasn't my generation, I suppose, that listened to her a lot. She was around when I was in college or something. She was there as an artist. I just didn't pay attention. But yeah, she racked up the number one hits left and right. And they always were on the radio for sure. I mean, I know

every single one of those songs. So TJ, um, you said you had some fun for a super, the Superbowl. Yeah. You know, I never watched the Superbowl. It's not really my thing. Sports in general are not really my thing. Um, I don't mind watching them in person, but watching them on TV, it kind of is boring to me. Uh, but I had to do an emergency service call for a theater that wasn't working properly um that i uh had a programming issue so it eventually it was it was my fault um you know things happen i'm glad they found out before the game started though um because i was able to go fix it you know it's an easy fix at least um but that would have been an awful service call during the middle of the game to go do that um especially with how late in the afternoon it was so um that is my only experience with the super bowl this year it was your fault yeah he's like

it's my fault uh hopefully you got some chips and dip out of it or something yeah well i had some drinks at my own house i think that counts right and seeing how you're a fan of sports ball you know this weekend's nba all-star weekend you know so make sure you're ready for that too i'm going to oh awesome excellent get some autographs pictures well enjoy yourself tj i mean that's probably oh yeah that's probably we won't be able to record a show next week because of it so i'll actually be on the court but you might not notice me so just just keep me in your thoughts he's got sunglasses on and a hat yeah totally he'll be in the celebrity game don't worry if you see pete davidson there that's probably me uh speaking of celebrities gavin you were on home gadget geeks and talking about all sorts of fun

stuff and uh you you plugged it on last week's show and then i got busy and i i forgot to listen in i know tj did but how was that oh it was awesome and you know i i didn't expect you to listen but you know tj doesn't let me down he's my biggest supporter and i love it you know like we we and you know on home gadget geeks they actually get let me talk a lot so you know that's the great part yeah yeah they don't cut me off they don't give me two minutes you never talk sandbagged us on that one man i'm sorry so i i got i'm gonna go talk about home assistant on uh home gadget geeks and you didn't say any words on our show i have the recordings i can see how much you talk and it was literally the same day too it was actually you always sound more excited to talk to him than you do us i mean

i'm not really sure what's up with that gavin but i'm sorry i'll try and lively up a bit more you know if you gave me more than two minutes to get the you know what i have to say i feel like you're cheating oh you know what if i was at least he knows about you guys because i mentioned your names yeah the very end i mean it was like oh yeah those guys i do that thing with them i almost felt special but we did talk we talked a lot he actually referenced one of our stories about the lightning lighting uh the school lighting and stuff so that was actually kind of funny we talked about that a bit but yeah home gadget geeks um the most shockingly the one thing that got the most the chat room all worked up was when i talked about my water meter and bringing it into home assistant all of a sudden the chat chat room just kept asking questions about that.

I think that went on the whole show pretty much after that. Were they asking, are you watching my water meter? Because since you watch all your neighbors. That is what they were asking. They were asking, like, how can I monitor my neighbor's water meter? You know, like everybody all of a sudden became like a water meter. How can I be the neighborhood creep? Yeah, exactly. So if you want to know how became like a water meter. How can I be the neighborhood creep? Yeah, exactly.

So if you want to know how I monitor my water meter, well, HomeGadgetGeeks, we get into it. Yeah, you were talking about like, you know, knowing when your neighbor showers and stuff like that. I mean, that's kind of a little weird. It's a little invasive. I know. I'm just helping conserve water for those long showers because he complains about his bills. So I set up an automation. Let me know when their neighbor is using too much water. And I message them and say, hey, you're using too much water this month. You know, like, got to cut back on

those showers. No, that is really, really cool. I've never heard of that capability. So you sent me the link for the I think it was like an Amazon listing for it. So I think I'm going to buy one just to see if I have anything around me. I mean mean i'm in an apartment complex i i doubt they really do but i'm next to a bunch of houses as well so i'm interested to see if i actually pick anything what is it sdr antenna i can't i always mess it up yeah i think you said sdr and there was like a specific one you sent me that actually had like the little usb thing because i was finding a bunch of sdr antennas uh but none of them had had the little USB dongle that you actually plug into a computer yeah so once I plugged it into the USB I passed it through to my home assistant it there was an add-on that you put

in and it just picked it up right away and started pulling everything out of the air and logging it to MQTT and you just have to create a device off of that to get it you know into home assistant it sounds more complicated than it really is but it was pretty easy yeah i have that's what i use the software the sdr radio thing for um to monitor airplanes it's kind of the same thing so i wonder that sounds a little creepier than what i'm using it for oh you're el, Chad. That makes sense. That's pretty good. Well, I don't know.

It's one of those, like, it's just like a little dongle thing, right? Yes. Like, it's, yeah, and it's got an antenna. And I wonder, I bet since all it does is pick up, like, since it's software-defined radio, you could just use that. I could probably use that to define what software I wanted to listen to, I guess, or what frequencies. Yeah, this one on Amazon

that Gavin links specifically, it's called an NESDR Nano 2 Plus. And my price on Amazon is $32, which is not much at all. I had a gift card, and the gift card that gave me only worked on American Amazon, so I had to find something

to use it on so i used it on this you know save me some money nice there you go all right guys what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines let's do it got some whoa i clicked the wrong button we got some new product this week ikea has uh already uh our side table that doubles as an air purifier but the company's not stopping there. Now you could have a little gauge you can put on top of the table and it'll tell you just how clean your air really is.

IKEA's released the VinSturka I guess that's how you pronounce it. Don't know. It's a monitor it's a sleek modern design plus an oversized display screen showcasing all sorts of information front and center. The company notes that it can measure a particulate matter up to 2.5 microns

in diameter, humidity, temperature, and TVOC, which is total volatile organic compounds. I'm pretty sure that just means fart detection. And then according to IKEA, the device will work as a standalone product however the company states it will also come packed with plenty of integration potential um and i i think i read that it also integrates with matter so pretty cool stuff uh coming from ikea it sounds like and and i i thought these were cool i got i got the aclara one um it has like five leaves on it and you know does all the same pretty much the same it and, you know, does all the same, pretty much the same stuff.

And then, you know, I was curious about these. So that's why I grabbed these. And, you know, it sits on my desk and it shows me five leaves. Everything's good. And some days it goes down to four. So I go take a shower. It goes back up to five. You know, it doesn't really tell me much. Like my air is good. And I don't know. Are these just just a fad i'm starting to think this just may just be a fad like how i guess where i am in the world it doesn't fluctuate as much and maybe there's other places it does i mean i feel like that's probably good right when it doesn't fluctuate for your interior house i mean exterior probably is a little more volatile but i think interior if you're constantly having air move around and stuff like that, it's probably not that bad unless you have some kind of major issue going on.

Yeah. And other like other issues could include like cooking. I know that like sets off the total volatile organic stuff like if you're cooking. So yeah, I don't know. That doesn't seem like it's a bad thing if you're cooking. Right. But I don't know. Yeah.

Now, Ikea has been doing a really good job at this though i mean their smart home stuff is pretty inclusive at this point and you know it's it's dirt cheap for what it is i mean i really want to try their their smart blinds that they have out because i've heard good things about them they don't have a lot of you know a lot of sizes out there for them unfortunately um but i think they're only like 100 to 150 dollars for one of them and if you've ever looked at smart shades that is nothing compared to what they normally are no and so i have those um and they are really good there's zigbee they work well with home assistant and they worked on habitat easy to add there too um only thing is buy an extra battery,

you know, like if you ever get them that way, when your battery does die, you can just swap in the other one and let charge it. And you always have a fresh battery. You don't have to wait. And you know, cause in my bathroom, then while it's charging, I can't control anything. It's stuck. Right. So they're good. They're worth the money. if you can find the size and if they don't have the exact size i've seen videos where people actually cut it down right if you need they bought a bigger one and they would actually cut off the size to they want what they want so yeah so keep that in mind if you need there's no pricing on this thing uh but everybody talks to similar devices like the airThings View Plus.

It comes in at $299 MSRP. There's definitely no chance that Ikea is going to be that expensive. It'll probably be 10% of that. I don't know. Maybe not. Like, it's a $299 device that does this worth it? Because the Aquara one cost me, what, $50 or something like that? And I was willing to pay that. But $299 that does the same thing i don't know like is it worth it yeah and it's

and it really i mean like i guess i just don't know the inner workings of it but it really doesn't seem like it would be that complicated to build one right like it's just got to be a couple small sensors and a small display i wouldn't really think there would be a lot of complicated technology behind it, but maybe I'm just way under thinking it. So the $300 kind of seems weird to me, but the $300 one probably isn't pushing out as many units as somebody like Ikea is, right? You know, Ikea is probably going to plan to sell millions of these things, whereas the $300 one, they might sell, you know, tens or if not hundreds of thousand so the the scale of them are probably completely different and the $300 one is probably nicer i mean ikea stuff is not bad at all this doesn't look bad at all like it looks pretty good now i mean some of their stuff just feels cheap and you

know it is cheap so you're gonna get that but i i think they're you know there's probably a quality difference there it probably does the same thing though yeah i'm looking at the one that they reference the air things u plus and it looks about the same i guess it has like a doesn't have near of a more interesting screen the ikea one looks like it has some color to it and this one one, the IKEA looks like it. Oh, yeah. That $300 one is very boring looking. Yeah.

IKEA looks more fun. I don't know. We'll have to see what it comes in as. Hopefully it's under $300 because, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what these things are worth to people, I guess. How much was the car one? It said $50, didn't you, Gavin? Yeah, I think it was about $50 or something like that.

And that's Canadian. It's relatively cheap. And these things should be relatively cheap I figure right like I don't know what the difference between like I've seen some others in that two to three hundred dollar range and is it really worth it I wonder if it's one of those things you have to replace every so often too like does it wear out or anything like that or is it just you just keep using it I think I think you can get you using it i don't know i read the manual and they never you know never mentioned that well i'll have to keep an eye out for this thing and when it shows up at ikea i'll go get some with some hot dogs and some uh what do they have the cinnamon buns those are pretty good

hot dogs they have like hot dogs and cinnamon buns at my ikea they're pretty good uh i was thinking meatballs but they have the meatballs too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got a new product here. We forgot to talk about last week. Simply safe has unveiled a new wireless indoor security camera that will allow a monitoring agent to talk to potential intruders. The unimaginably named smart alarm wireless indoor security camera. That's great. Simply safe. It works similar to other cameras, but has motion events working in conjunction with the rest of the SimpliSafe security system. It has a little bit of AI built into it, so it can actually tell if there is a person or anything,

and then it actually sends that off to a monitoring station where someone, a live person, can help escalate the situation and dispatch police if it's somebody that's not supposed to be there. The feature is still in beta, according to SimpliSafe, though it does expect to roll out the option to users as part of a full release before the end of the year. So that's kind of neat. I don't think we've seen that too often in the marketplace

where it's like an active indoor, well, active camera that's monitored by a live person. If, if the triggers get set off, there's a couple out there. The only one that's really coming to mind at the moment is deep Sentinel. Um, they're, they're live monitored. Um, I'm assuming they're going to be way more expensive though. The deep Sentinel ones, at least. Um, I think like one of the cameras with like the little hub thing runs about $500, if I remember correctly. And it's about $50 or $60 a month for the monitoring. So I imagine the SimpliSafe one will be a little less expensive just because of their target audience. But you're still getting the same characteristics and the same functions out of it.

So this is really interesting to me because, you know, security cameras are great, um, because they allow you to go back and see stuff, you know, when, after it happened. Um, but a lot of times there it's a, it's a retroactive thing. You know, you're, you're, you realize that your car got hit or somebody stole something out of your car. So you go back and look at it. Whereas these ones, you know, somebody is actively watching it. And if something happens, they're going to come on the camera and tell that person to bugger off. And that makes a big difference because, you know, security cameras are good, but if they're not doing anything, you know, proactively, a lot of times the cops aren't going to do anything for

you. And it's just, it's basically useless. So you can watch somebody take your stuff and that's about it. So these monitored security cameras are really interesting to me. Yeah. Tell them to bugger off. That's funny. Um, this one, just to be clear, this one doesn't have anybody that's actually watching it. It's only after like, say you arm your system and this is an indoor camera, the system gets a trigger that somebody is walking through your house and maybe the system's armed. It hasn't picked up that there's a person walking through your house that's when it would send off that event to somebody to review and to make sure that it's you know an active case and they can they can yell at them and tell hey you need to bugger off and they'll and you know it

could be somebody to be fair i think that's how they all work at the moment but i might yeah yeah i think deep sentinel is probably the same and And I know there are some companies that it's kind of like, it doesn't work that way actually. It's kind of like how you would buy an ad on Google. Like it's not pay-per-click, but like pay-per-view, I guess, which is a different thing completely. But bear with me here. Like you basically are paying for your camera image

to be on the screen in front of somebody to be monitored is basically how it works. So you're guaranteed to have that on the screen for so many seconds for somebody actively looking at it. But I would probably trust an AI solution over that any day if somebody's sleeping or lazy at their job or whatever, and they miss somebody monkeying around and not see them or something like that, that could definitely happen. I see that in the movie all the time. And I can't remember if it was last year. It was either James or Owen. I think they posted a video in the hub of one of the services that did something similar.

So it picked it up on the camera and then told the person over the speakers. And they had bigger speakers it wasn't just camera speakers but it told the thieves to bugger off at that point and it was impressive to see that you know like having actually it's different when you have a recorded voice that hey this is being monitored bugger off versus somebody that says hey hey hey we see what you're doing bugger off i can see you right now i can see you right now you're wearing a red shirt it's like hey jimmy we know you you know right yeah that's a good great security i know that a lot of cameras have like pre-recorded announcements that you can build into them yeah but yeah it definitely is

better if it if it feels or sounds like it's coming from someone. A real person, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have a little camera sideline here. I just got shipping notification for my Ring dash cam. So I should have that tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get it installed in the van by the weekend. Maybe I'll have some feedback for it next week. So I think I pre-ordered it in early January and it was supposed to ship by now. So I'm glad it shipped just tonight.

It says Home Gadget Geeks had a guest on that provides security camera monitoring service. So yeah, it's not common, but it's becoming more common. Thank you, Keyboard101. They're in the chat. And I think it's a cool add-on service if somebody's doing it right. And this seems like the way to do it.

Grab an AI event. The cameras I noticed are pretty good at picking up like person detection and that kind of thing, even at a very low price point. Just drop that in to a stream. Send it up to somebody for review. Make sure that they're reviewing it in a timely manner and have them trigger off sound events or be able to talk back to them. It's brilliant idea. I like it. My only concern is I would want, especially for indoor cameras, I want to know 100% that when this is disarmed, you guys can not see this feed, right? Like that,

that's my only concern because yeah, they can say, Oh, when it's disarmed, no one's watching it, but that's different. I want to know that nobody can even access it you know when it's disarmed so i think that would be important that they announce that well and that's why we we pair a lot of times we pair ours i mean my house specifically we pair it with some kind of controlled outlet and so whenever we come home uh it'll turn all the camera outlets off and then the cameras are you know they're off then because i feel i think unify has a way where you can just like turn them off through the software

but i i just feel more comfortable if i know that they actually do not have power and those are relatively easy to set up for you know a 20 or 30 dollar little outlet so that would be my recommendation for anybody putting cameras inside their houses. Have some way to turn them off. And there's plenty of ways to automate that now. And if you're a Blue Iris person, you can set up schedules so that they stop recording. I'm just throwing this out there. They can stop recording when they're on your schedule. But that's you.

That's not – you're putting like with SimpliSafe in this manner, like in this case. Or what was it? DeepSentry or something like that? We're talking about DeepSent. Yeah. Uh, with, with those, you're placing your trust in those companies to do that kind of thing. And, you know, I mean, we, we just have a, we just have a blanket policy. There's no eyeballs in the house. Like, so, uh, the eyeballs are outward facing and, and we'll monitor out there, but anything in the house is, is off limits. Well, and that's a fair, that's a fair point too, because I mean, like, you know, what

was that the Roomba story that just came out like a month or two ago where, you know, they have a little camera on top of the Roomba that can detect when it's under a couch or something like that. But there's, you know, third parties in different countries or wherever they're at in the world. And they can see those live camera feeds at various times because it takes pictures and uploads them to the cloud. And then, you know, magically those photos end up on social media and other places. So like that, that is a super valid concern that people should have. I mean, I don't, I personally do not want cameras on in the house when I'm there. Yeah, I agree. And we,

we kind of were like that at first, but then we had one camera and then the wife started getting into this. I want to see what the dog is doing when we're not there. And he's always in a room where there's no camera. So she'd be like, why can't we see over there? So you'd have to put another camera, but none in the bedrooms. He's at the card table playing poker with his other dog friends. Well, last night he was up on the counter howling, know like when we snuck out and he then starts

sniffing around his treats so i was like oh if he gets into that none of the bedrooms that you know of yeah exactly all right that's that's funny let's let's move on here uh we've got a couple of like uh interesting internet related stories and i i really there's not really much to say about these um but uh Let's move on here. We've got a couple of interesting internet-related stories. And there's not really much to say about these. But Google Fiber's launching a 5 gigabits per second internet plan. It started testing back in October. It's only covering four cities right now.

But Google says the $125 per month service will expand to other areas later this year. So right now, only Kansas City, West Des Moines, and Fiber's Utah cities. I don't know what that means, but symmetrical upload-download rates and upgraded 10-gig fiber option as well. It comes with professional installation, a Wi-Fi 6 router, and up to two mesh network extenders. Yay. It's also kind of couples in line with the

frontier announcement we saw last week, where they were rolling out, I think it was five gigabit nationwide as well. And then Verizon is talking about expanding their Fios lines in New York boroughs, to all five boroughs, making that two gigabits per second. So what's interesting to me about all these stories is that there's faster internet starting to become available in regions that have the fiber connections. And we definitely don't have Wi-Fi that's going to get anywhere near these speeds anytime soon. But I was kind of sitting back and wondering,

well, what are they installing for routers at these locations? Like when I got the fiber hooked up here, they gave me an Eero. And I don't I must admit, I've never even taken out of the bubble wrap. So I don't even know what it is. Like it's just an Eero. And the guy was trying to drive off and not giving them. I'm like, no, no, no, no.

Give me the Eeros. I won't use them for I don't know. They'll just sit there and resell. Good resell. Yeah. I mean, they're new ones with the wi-fi six whatever e on it so yeah the 6e so whatever those are that's what i got i'm not and tj you were saying that those have a 2.5 connection on them so yeah one 2.5 and the other one is a one gig so so that might work in some of these situations but definitely not in the five like you can't add them together and get to. Yeah, just put two together.

No, that's not how it works. And the Wi-Fi on them is not going to be two gigabits as well. So I was kind of wondering what people were using for five gigabit router and 10 gigabit router. If you got one of these services that that's those are crazy speeds. Yeah. And they have I mean, I link to a couple in the in the Slack channel there. They do have, you know, 10 gig routers. You know, there's several from MicroTik that are relatively cheap.

I think they're under five hundred dollars each. So they exist. A lot of times when you get, you know, service from an Internet provider, they will give you their own branded equipment, which I would assume would support the speeds, right? A lot of times, you know, until recently, they didn't really give you anything off the shelf. A couple of the carriers around here, they'll give you Eero's kind of like what you got. But until Eero, and I would say the past year, maybe two years at most, it was always their own branded like AERIS equipment or Motorola equipment or whatever it was. So I think 10 gig and 5 gig stuff is out there. It's very few and far between at the moment. But somebody that's building this fiber network surely shouldn't have problems getting the hardware for it. So the one thing I'm seeing is that they're

throwing one WAN port for this 10 gig or 2.5 gig but the other land port would be one gig so you're never going to get that full 2.5 gig to any one device but i guess they're protecting you so that if you have multiple devices then you can use you you can stream things at the same time even though you probably won't be streaming anything that uses up 2.5 gig anyway. But that's one thing to keep in mind too. Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of like stuck in the past or something, because I'm looking at the NetGate routers

that we would sell at my work. And the one I have is not there anymore, but the 4100 is the newer one. It has an 8.15 gigabit layer 3 forwarding and a firewall of only 4.0 gigabits. So that's still under spec on a 5 gigabit connection. You'd have to go up to the 6100, and that one goes up to almost 20 gigabits, but it's basically the firewall is 9.93 gigabits. So that one's an $800 router. Not as bad as I thought it would be, actually. That's not terrible. So if you wanted to go full 10 gigabit, they have the 8200 for

$1395. And that one is an 18.5 gigabit firewall. So that's not bad. You've got some headroom there. Yeah. Most of the time you're limited by the backplane. So I mean, you could have all the fastest internet in the world coming into it, but it really depends on how many devices you have hooked up to it and how much data they're using. I think the UniFi Dream Machine Pro SE or whatever has a 2.5 gigabit port, but the backplane wasn't that much. So you were actually very limited on what you could do

um but you know it's it's consumer gear at the end of the day so yeah even with my provider they they give me 1.5 down right but the ports on the land side of that that router are just one gigabit so coming into my house i can only utilize one gigabit, right? If I'm using my own router. So I have only one line going into my Unify Dream Machine and it's just one gigabit. So I can't get the full 1.5 that they're giving me because even if I put a Dream Machine Pro in there, I'm still only getting the one gigabit from my cable modem to it. I can't get the 1.5 in so we're kind of at a stage now where we're gonna have to start using their equipment yeah or getting getting one of these third-party things or like you could even build your own i guess with

pf sense you know out of uh some kind of server type thing but the the i still i still wouldn't be able to do that because if i'm if it's coming in on my cable modem even if i put my modem in bridge mode i still have to use but if you had it i guess if you had like a two gig service or 10 gig service they would give you a modem that had that output on it because right i would hope so yeah or you could just buy your own i mean they have modems out now i just worked on one today it was a really tiny one i've never seen it was a couple inches tall or something. But it had a 2.5 gigabit port on it. So, I mean, they're out there.

I'm going to see if my Rogers will let me do that. I'm not sure. What, switch your own modem? Yeah, they're a little picky about what you can use sometimes. I'm not sure if they'll let us use our own things. Sometimes they'll have a list of approved ones, and if it's not on the approved ones, then you can use sometimes i'm not sure if they'll let us use our own things sometimes they'll have like a list of approved ones and if it's not on the approved ones then you can't do it yeah same thing down here in freedom land where they let you switch to a toucher modem i don't know i don't i don't have a modem i just have the ont um but i was asking the guy when he hooked it up it's like

if you guys do the uh if i did had done the 2.5 at the time because that's all i had they didn't have the five um it would have been a completely different setup completely different ont and he didn't really know too much about it so um i i didn't get very very far with him on that one so maybe maybe uh maybe if the price comes down right now i i did get my first bill from them for $70 or whatever I'm paying a month for the next year. Yeah, for gig up, gig down. That's nice. Yeah, and Comcast is sending me a check someday for about the same amount of money that I overpaid for. So, yeah, can't complain there.

Nice. Well, actually, I have some internet to talk about as well. I've been using the T-Mobile home internet, not at my home. It's been on my business, which isn't supported. Don't tell T-Mobile. And I was getting about 9, 10 megabits per second, which isn't very good in the grand scheme of things. So a couple of months ago, I saw that Walmart was selling Straight Talk, a Straight Talk home internet router. And the router itself is $100 and you just buy it up front. And the service per month is $45 per month. And you can get speeds, I think it's like 50 to 200 megabits per second. It's supposedly unlimited.

And, you know, I'm in a big metal box and right now I'm hitting about 90 megabits per second so that's uh pretty good for 5g internet inside a big old metal box I uh moved the unraid server over to the office that seems to be working a lot better now that it's not overheating all the time and uh everything is good now so very nice I. I, I, um, I was looking into that, uh, that services like kind of as a backup and there's, there's all sorts of like ways you can get unlimited 5g internet of decent speeds inside and into your house and that kind of thing. Um, and one of them I ran across and I, I'll have to go and look it up again. I actually ran across on Reddit because you can't find anything on Google anymore.

You have to like site colon Reddit now. Like, have you noticed that? Well, I've been doing that by nature a couple of years now, so. Nothing is working on Google anymore. It's all just like ads and stuff. So yeah, site colon Reddit, what you were looking for

and somebody has posted on Reddit the question and answer. And I don't know. I ran across like these co-op things that are like, I guess some law in America here forces cell companies to provide an unlimited plan to companies that are nonprofit. So there are these various companies that have popped up that are, quote, nonprofit.

And you buy a, quote, subscription or a member fee to them. and it you pay yearly but it comes out to about what you're paying but it's unlimited internet at like halfway decent speeds and people use it all the time for like rving and that kind of thing but um thought it was interesting that you know there's all these other hacks where you can get it for like 20 if you hack an ipad I M I or whatever number. And I was like, ah, this seems so unreliable. I'm just gonna, I'm going to put this on the, on the back burner until the next time we lose internet for three weeks or whatever hurricane, hurricane time. Hopefully never again with new frontier internet. Yeah, I know. I know they actually stayed up for the hurricane. So hopefully, hopefully we won't see any problems with it. Hopefully we won't see a hurricane again,

but if we do, hopefully we won't see any problems with it hopefully we won't see a hurricane again but if we do hopefully we'll see the internet a couple more months at least yeah it's cold right now so um all right well moving on kind of keeping in with the internet internet chat here um this is i thought this was pretty interesting comcast subscribers are about to lose a pretty big perk uh free access to Peacock streaming is ending. Since they launched back in April 2020, the ad-supported version of Peacock Premium has been provided to Xfinity TV and broadband customers at no charge. But starting on April 3rd, it will no longer be offered to new subscribers, and as of June 26th, existing customers won't be able to get it either. And NBCUniversal has confirmed that over to variety.

Um, all good things must come in. This is, this is, uh, kind of one of the perks. Actually, I just found out that we were actually using this the other day. My sister-in-law is a Comcast subscriber and she gave us, uh, her Peacock, you know, login or whatever. And so I guess, I guess we've been using that the meantime we needed to watch Peacock shows. know, log in or whatever. So I guess I guess we've been using that the meantime we needed to watch peacock shows. But I guess that will no longer be the case anymore. So womp womp. I don't even know this is a thing, to be honest.

So I really don't have any comment on it. What is on there? I mean, what what did what do you watch on there? They have some peacock exclusive shows uh like what isn't isn't your uh toe sucking show on there isn't that oh that's is that on hulu tulsa king yeah i can't say it that's what i said thanks to you tulsa i think that's on a different streaming service i think it's on hulu yeah you're right anyway i thought it was interesting interesting that these kind of free

arrangements and things are, they're all kind of drying up pretty quickly here. Peacock, Netflix, and the belt tightening has begun on these services, which we knew was coming, I guess. But that's the annoying part about these streaming services, I find, is that you can't rely on any of them, you know, to be there tomorrow or be there tomorrow at even the same price. Like, they're constantly changing, they're renaming, they're splitting, you know? And I see people even complaining about

they want to go watch a show and the show is either not even complete, like they don't have certain seasons of it, or they've deleted the old seasons. Like, that stuff just drives you you nuts you know and they're just ruining something that should be so much better this is why people download stuff illegally so much less hassle yep i saw um richard on mastodon complaining about uh something uh along those lines and yeah it was yep it's kind of my reaction too it's why people go off and they

download things because you can't you can't trust these companies and their their lousy licensing agreements and whatever when they say they're gonna have something and then all of a sudden it's not there anymore so yeah it's so it's so upsetting sometimes when i tell people you know here's a great show to watch go watch it and they're like well how can i watch it i'm watch it? I'm like, you default to say Netflix. And they're like, no, it's not on there. And then you say like, yeah, you're like Amazon prime check there. And they're like, oh, it's there, but I got to pay for it. And it's like, okay, well, um, you know, like I don't know where to tell them to watch some of these shows sometimes. Yeah. Amazon prime is like the worst one because I never open it. You know, the only reason I have Amazon Prime is for the shipping at this point.

But once in a while, you know, I'm like, let's check out Amazon Prime video. Let's see what's on there. And then I scroll through the whole list. You know, I spend like 10 minutes. I'm like, oh, this looks like a good one. Oh, do you want to rent this one for $5? No, I don't want to rent it from. Show it to me.

Come on. Oh, don't get me started. So aggravating. Annoyed Gavin. Don't get me started because that happened to me the other day. I was trying to find one show and I was so excited. And you know what? We actually, you know, I was like, okay, it's there.

I didn't actually hover over it. I just saw it there. And I was like, okay, it's there. We'll watch it. Get the popcorn ready. Guy all comfortable that we hovered over it is like 5.99 i was like you gotta be kidding me and out of spite i did not pay for it you know if you know i didn't i wasn't so mad you know i would have probably just paid for it just to watch it but out of spite i was so mad i did not pay for it we watched

something yeah i'd be curious how many people pay for it because i've never bought or rented anything from amazon prime like because i just you know if it's not included in my subscription which like i said i don't really care about it anyway but if it's not included in my subscription then like i just don't want any part of it so i think that's where my hang-up is that was the one thing i always hate about amazon prime they're like oh you get all this free stuff with it and i'm like awesome we get amazon prime music but every song i asked for i'm not allowed to listen to you know like that was the it was like it almost feels like false advertising it's like stop say stop saying i have access to all this stuff you know like when really everything i really want i don't have access to same same here i guess they did have

the that lord of the rings thing and we started watching it. I think we made it through like half of one of the first episode. My wife fell asleep and I'm like, hey, do you want to watch this? She's like, oh yeah, yeah. You can't watch it without me now.

Because that was their show, I think, right? So yeah, it was theirs. They would give it to you for free. Yeah, but we haven't we haven't gotten past that first episode. So it gets better.

I don't remember what happened now. I'm gonna have to watch it again. Start over. Yep. Start over. All right. Let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight

can be found on our show notes over at HomeTech.FM slash 424. All right. I did the old witcheroo on you guys. Pick of the week. Mr. Jimmy over there on TikTok. If you if you haven't seen his videos,

they're funny and also very informative. And, uh, let's see, I'll put a link to this hilarious one about, uh, it's the meme that, uh, you know, nobody wants to live this way. And then of course it's, it's, what is that? It's from, um, I was going to ask, I've never, never seen this. Is it from a tv show devil wears prada it's a movie yeah yeah and uh it's a clip from that but the the he he has a bunch of i was watching some of his other videos he has uh things about automating and and detecting signals on your dryer i just saw that was posted um so yeah go go check him out. Automated underscore house, friend of the show,

Jimmy. Good to have him as a friend of the show because he's always got pretty good answers, but he also has a pretty funny TikTok thing. So go check him out. Wow. He's quite prolific. I didn't see, didn't think he had this many videos, but holy cow. Yeah. I follow him on Instagram and stuff. And I feel, I feel bad for the wives of us home automators, you know, like, cause they, they really go through a lot with what we do. You know, I just noticed mine trying to control the fireplace. I'm going to have to go and explain to her. Obviously I did it wrong if she can't get it on. Right. But that's the part of the job living with me. Yeah. Oops. Same thing happens here. And luckily it hasn't happened since,

since I hooked that, that flow meter back up, but it used to turn off the shower, you know, like at 30 minutes when she was in there a little bit too long or had been running it or whatever, and then got in the shower. Yeah. Luckily that hasn't happened in a good while so i think i think i finally found a setting to turn it off or they added a setting because it definitely wasn't there before but if i ever screwed that up i'd be moving into a storage unit she she was very angry i got very angry but i was like i'll turn it i'll turn it back on

and uh and and you can go finish rinsing out your hair. And then I turned it back on and I left. Just run away. Nope, gone. Where'd you go, errands? I had to run. I had to go to the store, pick stuff up. Yeah. The child needed things.

I would have just said, oh, there's a water got cut off. Oh, no. You know, blame it on the city. Yeah, see? You got to think ahead. Then you fake a call to the city and say get it on right now you know my wife's showering and then turn it back on and be like thank you and hang up and you know blame it on somebody else you gotta think faster than that

yeah the worst part was when i was like at cd or something the tvs just stopped working and i that way and since it's not like a video distribution system, that's what stopped working for some reason. I don't really know why to this day, but it just took a good old power reset and it came back alive. But man, that wasn't good. But I was actually, well, the funny part,

I was actually in the booth of the video distribution company. I was like, hey, tech support guy, come here. Why is it doing this? Why is it doing? Talk to my wife. And you're the phone. Yeah. See you later. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, uh, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right uh you got a couple of project updates i don't know i haven't really done anything i've been troubleshooting and messing around with work server stuff if

anybody cares i you know uh you know basically uh tested a uh reverse proxy that i set up on amazon to make sure they can handle a few thousand concurrent WebSocket connections. I mean, it's just stupid, but that's what I've been doing. But Gavin, it looks like you've been busy working on dashboards and stuff. That looks more fun. It's not really that fun. But since my home assistant's been so stable, you know, I've had some time to actually play with, not really, it's the dashboard, but the interface that we use on our phones, right? And, you know, been tweaking it, modifying it, you know, trying to find a good way to present things, minimize, you know, the initial screen, because there was too much on there. And it just had me

thinking, I'm like, what is considered a good dashboard? You know, so the guys over at Lewis over at Everything Smart Home just released a video where he, you know, got submissions of dashboards and he kind of rated them and went through them and stuff like that. So, you know, it was interesting to see his take on what he liked versus what I would have liked, right? Because he would give like 9.0 to some things and I'd be like, no, that's a six in my books, right? But it did give me a lot of ideas on how to tweak my own. So I'm working on that. But I'm curious what people think is a good dashboard. And, you know, like if you want to send me a screenshot of not necessarily

yours, but like an interface to like if you're using Elon or if you're using, you know, whatever system you're using that you think is good, send me a screenshot of it and let me see. Cause I just think it's, you know, everyone has their own preference, but some people will just say mine is the best way of doing it for everybody. Right. I think the home assistant does a great job with what it has. And it's very customizable. So, you know, out of the box, I think you have something nice looking that you can tweak, you know, like with different cards or even add different themes pretty easily. So I don't know. I'm just curious. And it lines up with what they have in their app, too, which is nice. Like I noticed that. Yeah. So it's like what you have on your computer screen the way the cards work and everything kind of

falls right into place on the app so that's that's kind of nice then you can go in there and customize it and it still looks good it can be annoying by default because the default one it kind of feels like it's throwing the cards anywhere so what i do is i use a vertical stack always so that's just everything's on top of each other or you can do grid or you can there's other plugins that are front end well you know things you can add that you can line it up how you want to and make it a lot easier instead of these things just seem to be popping up in random places um so it's easier to design but you got to use like the hack store they have a lot of integrations and stuff that you'll add that will make it so much nicer right um well i have to plug it back in i guess because and turn

it back on yeah it didn't it didn't well i guess i have to rebuild the whole that that night that you and i stayed up uh a little bit late you know on the show here and and we're like getting my virtual machine up and going like i have to redo that clearly like pretty easy the the bad memory took the home assistant virtual machine down so but yeah if you're on mastodon gavin campbell at hometech.social if you're on twitter gvn campbell just send me what you think is a good interface i'm just curious what people think yeah me too me too i don't like it i don't like a lot of interfaces. What I like, what I like best is, is honestly the little, the, I forget what it's called, control center on iOS, where you just like swipe down. Yep. AI they have on here works right. And most of the times the couple of devices I want to actively

control are just right there. And it's usually the same couple of devices, but it does change up. Like earlier today, when I was talking about this and looking at it, it had like a lighting scene that I probably normally trigger something or tell one of the HomePods to trigger something at this time. But for the most part like it when i swipe down it gives me a couple of options and most of them are pretty much what i want on turn would interact with i guess so that's my extent of a dashboard yeah really going to the home app though because i've used the home app i've used the home app a lot and when you have a few devices i found it nice but when you start getting into a lot of devices and organizing into rooms and stuff, I just found

it like it was just hard to work with it. Very time consuming. I didn't like the interface, you know, like having to swipe over to the rooms and stuff like that, you know. So I'm not really a fan of it as you grow, but some people seem to love it. And in the end, I think it was TJ that told me earlier, it's like, it's what works for you, right? It is the best interface, you know? So I'm not going to knock the home app because if it works for you, awesome. That's your thing, right? But I'm just curious what other people, you know, what kind of interface, even just the design, if they have, you know, if you're able to customize yours what what design do you like what's your favorite design yep and um i will plug because i tested this app really early on and i was a horrible beta tester because i didn't really do anything with it but if if you are on the home kit ecosystem that you the way home kids is designed is you can just have another

app right like you can just do whatever you want to do. And this guy, um, I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes at sceneflow.com. Um, they put together, he put together a really cool, uh, like app that you basically can go in and just make your own custom dashboard. Like what you're talking about with home assistant, but for home kit stuff, I guess. So if, if depending on the ecosystem you're in, you may have these options available to you. But again, I started using this, and it's kind of that thing what you're talking about, Gavin, like I just don't know what to do. I have to look at somebody else's thing

to be creative, to like, well, I don't know what's good, like what dashboard, what I want to hear. And what serves my purposes usually is yelling in the air for the thing to turn on and off the light or swiping down, not necessarily a dashboard like this, which is probably why i wasn't a very good beta tester for

this guy but yeah i did like this looks really nice though it looks nice yeah you have to admit you can customize all sorts of things you could and what i really loved about it like you could put emojis on things like you used to be able to put emojis on things and i was like oh man you got me in with emojis but um i don't know it looks like it's actually take done a couple of iterations since I've seen it but it it's it was definitely a nice app to to use and see so and it looks very similar to home assistant in terms of the layouts and stuff so I could take some I yeah I could take some ideas from this even for my setup but the hard thing I have is when I'm designing this and trying to put it together like in my head I know

what each thing does but I want I want my wife to be able to open it up and her to go, Oh, these are the rooms, you know? So I have to make sure I can fit labels on it that says, Hey, rooms, right. And not just a little icon of whatever to symbolize rooms. Right. So, you know, it's a learning experience and I'm constantly playing with it and it's kind of fun, you know, just designing this and then testing it on her. It drives her nuts, but it's a fun social experience. Okay. Well, good luck there. I'll pay for it somehow, but that's all right.

You already are. Honestly, this scene flow is probably one of the nicer ones I've seen. I'm kind of in the camp that all the user interfaces for automation systems kind of stink. I mean, there's functionality that is usually there, but aesthetically, a lot of them are not very nice looking. They're like data-driven almost. Yeah. And my home assistant one's very basic. It's basically just little toggle switches.

It tells me the temperature and all that good stuff. I haven't done anything fancy with mine, and it just works. I mean, it does exactly what you need it tells me the temperature and all that good stuff i haven't done anything fancy with mine and it it just works i mean it does exactly what you need it to if i were to give somebody my phone they could look at it and tell exactly what everything does and for me that serves its purpose because most of the time we're going to be you know like seth we're just going to be yelling in the air telling stuff to happen or it's just automated in the background for me so you know the for me the user interface doesn't matter as much as long as it's just automated in the background for me. So, you know, for me, the user interface doesn't matter as much as long as it's easy to use, which I guess is part of the user interface.

Just flipping through this, there's all sorts of HomeKit apps that are out there. Home Plus, I think, is another one. This, the way you can go in and customize it, just always looked better to me. I guess it does look pretty good, but it also comes with dashboards already. So, like, well, I guess this is grouped by rooms grouped by your scene security lights and devices um you can just

kind of go through and scroll through everything if you wanted to so that yeah you have options right out of the box there you go yeah it's pretty nice yeah probably do like gavin and just copy that from my home assistant i probably just yell at the air, I'm not going to spend any time on this. TJ, any project updates? Looks like your office is coming together. You got a nice brick wallet behind you now. Yeah, you know, I just built that over the weekend. It's been going pretty good. I can walk through it. So that's impressive. Now I got the cubicle built. Now I'm kind of just, you know, getting everything into its final place. I've got shelving everywhere and, you know, finally have it sorted to where, you know, I have like an area for customer products. I have an area for stock. I have a product or a shelving unit for, you know, wiring and

all the wiring tools that you need and more wire. So that's, that's pretty nice. Everything is kind of getting into its appropriate place. So no fun projects. I finished the home theater a couple weeks ago. We're going to go back and take some photos of that here soon. I've got a couple other things in the works right now, but nothing too exciting. Well, I don't have anything exciting.

Like I said, I've been working on work stuff and trying to juggle a bunch of things and spin plates and what is this thing i'm going to light a palooza light up yeah i like how i know what it is but you don't remember it's like light arama light up lose or something i don't really remember uh it's it's a little thing in phoenix i guess it's kind of centered on the industry that we have uh the custom, the Cedia channel. And it's focused on, like, lighting control and LED lighting and lighting design, all that good stuff. So hopefully I can find something there to bring back to the show. Going for work.

Got to go around and schmooze and talk to people about stuff. But it did let me sign up for, like, education panels and discussions. So, you know, maybe I'll learn something while I'm there. Who knows? If you're there at the the the Lightapalooza, say hi. If you recognize me, I will be wearing the Blackwire shirt and and probably hiding in the back corners. Feel free to wake them up. Pretty easy to spot.

Don't talk to me. All right. wake them up pretty easy to spot don't talk to me all right uh is that it for this week guys i think that's it let's go ahead and wrap things up 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 patron page head on over to home tech.fm slash support and learn how you can support homeTech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our Slack

chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and force Greg to change the directions of the screws on the space plate. Man, TJ, brutal. Well, it's still the wrong way i mean everybody knows the screws go up and down not sideways no no no i'm a side i'm a sideways person you know like

why is that wrong it goes with the flow of the box but now gavin has to change all his because all his are sideways so no the sideways goes with the flow of the box yeah that's wrong so it's gotta go it's to go up and down. Up and down. You know what? What works for you is the best screw. Screwless plates. That way you don't have to look at them.

Yeah. Screwless plates. There you go. Exactly. Screwless plates. Yeah, I'm curious. When you're sending in your dashboards or your opinion on dashboards, send in horizontal or vertical screws.

Which is which. If you're in the screw camp, if you're not in the screwless faceplate camp. Or star screws. What do they call those? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Philips. Yeah, you could have a plus screw, but then you have to line it up as a plus or an X. Which one? X is a little risque. They have the star ones where

it's like, doesn't matter where you have it. It's always ones where it's like those are perfect it's always right then yeah those are perfect it would be hilarious you just like buy a new house or something you go in there and change the light switches and it's all security security screws and you don't have the screwdriver for oh one way one way security screws so you can't even take them out you have to like drill a notch into them. You're stuck with this. God, that'd be hilarious. All right. Well, check that out in the home. Uh, you want to, you want to help out and support the show, but I can't do it financially. Totally understand. You just appreciate a five star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That wraps up another week here at home tech. Uh, everybody have a great weekend. care adios yeah it's eight o'clock let's do this we're already recording i mean it's live right now before they discover another balloon well and i like i like how their reaction to the whole thing

was like yeah we adjusted our radar and there was all kinds of stuff up there who would have thought and it was carrying a payload eventually it's like drunk people could you imagine just being like somebody like doing some drone shots of like the lake and stuff and all of a sudden a big old jet just comes out and shoots missiles at it you're like oh i guess i'm not flying my drone here anymore it's not high enough but yeah that was the scary part because they were like one was like the size of a bus or something and they're like oh there's all sorts of things floating above us now it's like oh my god you guys now see this yeah i'm glad we i'm glad we spent all that money on spying on people for the past 20 years to be upstaged by a balloon balloons who knew we've been looking down this whole time and not up.

I thought the terrorists were inside of our country. We've been building walls. They've been taking hot air balloons. Oh no! We've been blocking them on land and they've been going by the air. Oh man.

No, up, up. There's a house up there floating around. Maybe that's what it was. They finally found the up house. Let's wonder what happened to that old guy. Such a sad story. Still crying about that. Okay, let's get going.