HomeTech.fm - Episode 430 - Printer Talk

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

On this week's show: Gavin has a printer update…. again, NEXX devices have major security issues, Google Assistant may be doomed, Innovelli launches a new radar light switch, a new survey says "AV techs are cool" (or something like that), a question for Gavin and only Gavin, audio issues for Seth, quick projects updates, and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 7th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all home automation, smart home gadgets, stuff to go in the house, and of course, what you're all tuning in for, Printer Talk. Printer Talk, we've got to know, Gavin, is your printer printing now? Did you figure it out? Did you do anything, and did you fix it? Because, I mean, the amount of questions

we've had about your printer that have come in from our social... No, it really hasn't been that many, but we're genuinely curious. Did you get printing again? I mean, it's more than anything else, though. Honestly, at this point, we could probably just change this podcast to like printer talk and it might be better i mean who knows the home printer podcast you know why it's because so many people can relate to you know having issues with a printer we all get together we support each

other you know like have a beer talk about our printer woes we're all good you know and and and the great thing about printer talk is our wives will jump in there too, because they have their stories about it not working too. So it's great, you know, it brings people together. But in my case, I just want to thank Justin, you know, like it's been working smoothly since, you know, he gave me the suggestion on the settings. And I think he mentioned it was specifically one setting on my UniFi called UAPSD, which stands for unscheduled automatic power save delivery. Now what it sounds like this does, it allows devices that support it to save power by keeping their wifi radio and sleep mode longer. So it kind of lines up with, you know, some of the issues. So once I turned that on, I rebooted my entire setup i haven't had issues

since the printer i'm happy the wife's happy you know the printer must be happy so we're all good yeah it makes sense lines up as long as the printer's working we're gonna say problem solved it's never gonna be an issue again let's just bench this for like two weeks i mean in two weeks time the printer's gonna stop working again g's going to have problems again and we'll be back in the same situation enabling and disabling okay i'll save it for end of summer you just need a hard wire i don't know like why do you keep us around with the wi-fi you just need a hard wire just get it over with gavin they don't even have in these printers anymore yeah i know throw more money at the problem that's how it is i just i just bought a new

printer it's got an ethernet port you want to send it to me no i don't it was expensive see there you go but the other annoying thing about this printer okay there's another annoying thing about this printer between that and my amazon device it's been hounding me to change the toner that toner is low now this is annoying because i keep getting notifications from my amazon devices you need to order more toner you need to now if amazon had was doing things properly they would have known i've already ordered more toner it's already here stop bothering me but it seems like every few days i get a notification that i need more toner i don't know how it knows my printer needs more toner i don't know why my printer needs more toner because it hasn't been printing often alexa can hear your

wife saying the printer's not working it's like oh yeah add a toner that makes sense you probably need more toner yeah printer you know it's just a weird this is such a first world yeah i i well i mean it happens it happens to the best of us i i um we have uh this a guide for setting up ruckus uh wi-fi products in your house like so if you you were to go out and i see it cited like all over the internet and people talking about you know features that we suggest that you turn off and like we have good reasons like to turn them off in a residential setting or whatever um but but one of them was like like this like the fast roaming thing and all these things that people think they need to have turned on that you actually don't need to have turned on it just causes more problems because you have to have like brand new devices all brand new devices

your printer has to be new to gavin Gavin. And then if it has the latest printer with the latest technology stack in it, then it can support that. And your printer has to basically be as updated as the brand new phone that you got, because that's what you're trying to support with these brand new technologies. And that's never the case. So like, yeah, all the fancy stuff that goes into Wi-Fi these days doesn't work across the board. And that's why we recommend turning all the stuff off. You don't need it. And that seems to be the case with technology is when you buy a new piece of technology, they kind of rope you in and make you upgrade every other piece it connects to.

Like when I brought my new TV, the LG TV, I had to rebuy some of the other equipment that connected to it just so I can get HDMI 2.1 or HDR. Like the cost never ends with just the tv it's all the accessories so they're doing it on purpose the surround sound the soundbar yeah i get it next next time you have problems and by next time i mean in a couple weeks gavin have you ever thought about making like a usb little like print server that you connect to it you know i used to on my unraid server have a little print server um that you connect to it you know i used to on my unrate server have a little print server um that was so we can print from our phones before i had um air

print on it but you know and i got this printer with air print built in so i didn't need it anymore but maybe i have to go back to that revert back to the old days yeah i i was just gonna make a joke uh but i was like, I bet there's a print server for Home Assistant. No, there's one for Unraid. It's called CUPS. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they're suggesting using, CUPS,

which is a Linux print. I recognize that from before. So I guess you can run that on the Home Assistant if you needed to. But it's funny that we're not, you know, I'm not the first one to think of a print server for Home Assistant because Home Assistant is like. It's got everything. Yeah. Somebody just thought about it.

Like, I wonder if I can integrate my water hose with Home Assistant. Yeah. Somebody's tried that. Somebody has tried it and probably done it. I think my printer is like one of the first things that Home Assistant picked up, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. No, it grabbed mine.

It's like, here's all the paper you have in it and here's here's your levels i'm gonna report this to alexa for you so you're like i'm gonna print off daddy is home thank you there's some add-ons on home assistant 2 that just don't make sense i think they just created it just to create an add-on like it doesn't tie in any way it just hosts something on your home assistant server i don't know why you'd want to do that, but everything's there. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's one of these products where you're like, I wonder if we can do this with this thing. And then like, yeah, somebody not only has like somebody already made the integration and there's about a hundred people using it somewhere and

they've all like pitched into, so it's kind of like, wow, that's, that's impressive. Now, now if only I wasn't so lazy not to set the thing up and finish configuring it, cause that's really just the problem at this point. Oh man. It's still there though. I've got all those, I've got all those data points going into it. So it's, it's keeping up with stuff. It's keeping up with stuff. My wind speed, my printer levels, and my water temperature, I guess. It measures my water pressure and my water temperature off the flow meter. So that's good.

Nice. I made some graphs. There's some graphs I made. Well, you know, it's true home automation when you have graphs. Exactly. It wasn't really working until I made that graph. All right. Well, we've got a couple of home tech headlines tonight,

a little interesting security story, a question about Google Assistant and its continued development in the future, a couple of new products, and an interesting report. I saw over at CE Pro, you're going to have to talk about and pick TJ's brain and see what he thinks about AV technicians. So what do you guys say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it.

Well, a market-leading garage door controller is so riddled with severe security and privacy vulnerabilities that the researcher who discovered them, Sam Sebiton, I guess, is advising anyone using one to immediately disconnect it until they get fixed. This is an article from Mars Technica. Each $80 device used to open and close garage doors and home security system alarms and smart power plugs employs the same easy-to-find universal password to communicate with the next servers. The controllers also broadcast an unencrypted email address, a device ID, first name, and last initial corresponding to each one,

along with the message received required to open or shut the door, turn on and off a smart plug, or schedule a command for a later time. Sebaton estimates that more than 40,000 devices located in residential and commercial properties are impacted, and more than 20,000 individuals have active NEX accounts, N-E-X-X. According to the post on the researcher's blog, the company has consistently ignored communications attempts from the researcher, Department of Homeland Security Security and the media. So if you got one of these things, probably a good idea to unplug it. It sounds like the company's not really looking into it. TJ, we know this isn't what you're using, but have you heard of these

guys, Nex, before? Yeah, honestly, I have heard of it. I think it's one of the more popular ones that the DIY community kind of recommends because you can just plug it in and it works off wifi. And as far as I know, it has a lot of integrations with things. So you can easily tie it in with, you know, different automation systems. You can use it with Google assistant and Alexa and all that good stuff.

And it's, you know, it's under a hundred dollars. So it's, it's very easily a go-to product for the garage door control market. I honestly would have thought that they would have sold more or more would be affected by this. $40,000 kind of seems very low to me.

But, you know, it's very popular at the end of the day. And I think it does a good job, you know, minus the obviously security risks that they're ignoring here. Yeah, if the opener opens and closes your door, it does a great job. It does what it's supposed to do. So I agree with that. But that's very hard. Security.

I know security is hard though. And it's, but it's very important, especially in this day and age, because especially when you got cloud connected products and I was thinking, you know, I'm like, would Matter solve this? And I don't think Matter would solve this because Matter, I think still would give you the local control, but these devices will

still be designed to talk to a cloud somewhere along the line anyway, right? So I don't, you know, Matter gives you that local control, but if they're still connected to the cloud, they can still get hacked and you can still use their app to open and close it still, you know, it doesn't close that loop. So when I'm looking at devices, especially for my home, I will look for local first. And then if I'm getting cloud connected things, I usually get something that's, you know, people have reviewed security wise, you know, like, or like if it's an Echobee, you know, if there was ever like a security disclosure, you know, Echobee is going to be all over that to fix it right away right they're not going to sit around on it they're going to lose

too much money so i look for things like that i stick with bigger companies for that yeah i just just kind of like looking through this it looks like i mean this just looks like it's a poorly designed uh security model of course they mentioned the joke the s and IOT stands for security. I mean, that's, that's a great, a great joke that has been around for a number of years now, but, um, uh, for the most part, people have getting, have gotten better. Um, but these kinds of things to do at scale are tough. So I can understand why they were like, well, um, we got this thing. It opens a garage door. Uh, it works. Let's ship it. Um,, yeah. Whoops. You can see people's email address, first, last names got it working. And it's like this code works. Yeah, exactly.

And they really need to get somebody in there to review this and fix it properly. I was hoping they can do like a firmware push or something and just re-encrypt everything, get it set up right, make sure the encryption is turned on, not plain text, you know, where you're sending things back and forth. There's a lot of stuff that can be done here. So they're going to have a busy time ahead of them, but at least also acknowledge that it's an issue. You know, pick up the phone and we're working on it. We know it's a problem. We're going to get it done. That's the worst thing these companies can do is just go dark

and not talk to anybody about it. Well, this is awkward because one of the points that it makes on the product listing on Amazon is it has excellent support. Seven days a week, U.S.-based support. Probably not if nobody can get a hold of them. Whoops. Whoops. Well, yeah. I don't know. I'm with Gavin, especially on stuff that's security related. Find something that works locally and use a local controller. Going up to the cloud is great for convenience, but, you know. Well, especially something like this, where you don't necessarily need it to have cloud access, right? Like you could just pair it to a hub and that hub has cloud access, but like your garage door controller itself doesn't technically need to connect to the cloud. You know, you know what I'm finding interesting, and this is kind of related thing, but VPNs used to be fairly hard to set up. I'll put it in the difficult to understand

category of things. With the newer style VPNs that have been coming out, specifically around like WireGuard, and I'm thinking even like Tailscale, it's almost like a one-click deployment i'm wondering if like there's not a time in the future where uh that is that is how maybe there's that there's a company that just basically makes gives you a vpn profile add it adds it to your phone and just makes a vpn from your phone to your house when you need to connect and talk to your devices rather than doing this cloud thing because the cloud thing is just convenience for what we're trying to do with the VPN. I mean, that sounds like a decent idea, but isn't there reports coming out

that the current generation of kids can't even manage file systems and stuff? So I doubt they're going to be able to manage VPNs. Well, I mean, you got to make it simple and easy to use, right? And the cloud is simple and easy to use, right? And the cloud is simple and easy to use, right? Setting up in the before times, it was either like, well, I'll use a VPN. No, that's too hard. I will do port forwarding and be able to access this as long as I know my IP address or whatever.

Or I'll set up a domain or something like that. And that was kind of like, you know, we all, we all know that we've done it. So, uh, uh, it's, it's been, it's, it's been done before and like VPN is definitely the way to go. It was just much harder now. Like I, I set up, uh, I've been kind of playing around with the tailscale solution and it's, it's stupid easy to, to set up and deploy a VPN between two servers and magically you're just connected. You're on the same network at that point. Like that is what, that is the magic that the cloud is solving.

I just think it's an interesting thing to see how fast these newer VPNs have been progressing, when it comes to security, the only reason we have these major holes in these server things is just to relay the communications back down to a device that's outside your house. What if that requirement goes away? What if your phone is on your house network at all times and you don't have to worry about that? Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. I think people are not going to do that because the convenience of the cloud, they go and buy a device and it just automatically connects to a server and they don't have to do any other steps.

So like what you're saying totally makes sense. I just don't think people are capable of it, unfortunately. Make it the same steps is what I mean. Like make the cloud connection, make just what you said, but say it goes over a VPN. They don't know any different right work the same way you just said yeah they have to like turn it on their phone or if it gets turned

off then what do they have to go in the settings to turn it on no like somebody needs to figure out how to build it like directly into the app somehow or you know just do it that way so it communicates like that on a per app basis or or i don't even think you can do that with like ios can you because ios you would have to like go manually go turn it on i think there's a per app vpn you can do that with um but it's more enterprise back end stuff but um i think for widespread adoption of something like this it needs to be built into the os so people aren't even thinking about it and somebody like apple like i agree with you says someone like apple would need to be the driving force behind this, whether they give a feature. They're just they call it like I'm home or I home or I'm always home or whatever they want to call it. And it basically connects back to the VPN server sitting on one of your other devices at your house so that your phone is always seen that being at home, you can access everything at home and it goes through a VPN. Once it's like that and people are automatically on it and not even thinking about it, then I think

you'll have widespread adoption, right? But asking people even to install Tailscale and like ask 100 people, you know what I mean? Asking them to do anything extra for security wise, people will not do it. They still use the same password with everything. I think your Apple example is probably the best thing. What if your Apple 4K, which is inside your house, sets up a VPN connection using some – you've got to have the stun service that they're using for Tailscale up in the cloud. There's just a server that basically pairs devices together. Apple has that through iCloud already. Don't have to worry about it.

You've got your point A, your point B. They can talk to each other. There's no port forwarding. It's just a direct secure connection. And then what if your Apple TV 4K turns around and talks like you're on the local network? I mean, that's a great example of how this could be deployed and set up. And then, you know, I think you're right. It has to be a major vendor like Apple or a phone vendor that has to build this in directly on the thing. Like, again, it's just replacing what we're

trying to do with the cloud to make it more secure without having to worry about cloud servers and these IoT manufacturers setting something up that puts your password in plain text. Like, it doesn't make sense. So, I don't know. I can see it. And the other problem is, if it's a VPN, then these, I guess, vendors won't have access to your data at that point.

Because if you're communicating directly to a device, they're not going to see what you're sending back and forth, right? Sounds like perfect for Apple to jump on. Yeah, it would be perfect for us, but then somebody like Next wouldn't see all this stuff that they want to see, right? But then, yeah, they could from their device in your home, upload whatever they want to their servers, and they'll still do that over an unencrypted pipe and everything like that. So you kind of lose all that security. You got to trust in the vendor in a way and some of them just let us down. Yeah. I have an idea how this would work and it doesn't involve

an outside party, you know, like it involves like going directly to the device on your home network and setting things up that way. Just as easy as the way we do it now with the cloud and, you know, it pairs the device together, take a picture of the little QR code in the back, and you're good to go. Like the same thing, but with a direct connection, take out the server online. Yeah, it could happen.

I don't know. Maybe not. Yeah, as I say, not without government intervention, in my opinion. So there's something, I mean, because companies need a reason to do it well the reason is convenience right now like more than more than your data privacy and all that stuff like next only did it because they said they want to sell a 79 thing to 40 000 people

to open doors and they are just trying to um get that thing shipped and out the door. Like that's, that's, they're not making money off knowing your first name, last name, first name, last initial and email, right? Like that's not, that's not their business model, you know, supposedly. I don't know anybody that's buying garage door open and closed state data either. I mean, maybe there is somebody out there, but like, more than anything, the reason these services exist in the cloud is strictly

right now convenience. And what if we took that away? What if we said, well, I've got a secure pipe 100% of the time to my house. I have these devices and they have this feature. I have it turned on. Go direct. Don't involve some kind of server. I think it'd be good. I think it could work. We'll have to see submit it to apple see what happens the the devices can still report what they're doing up to the server you know like that's the nothing stopping them there report some kind of analytics they do that all the time anyway but um you know the live data the the one that's important where it's transmitting back and forth like what you're doing when you arm and what video you have, like, why not make that secure point to point? Call it

a day. I say it's easy because, you know, I don't have to do it, but it seems kind of easy. It's so easy when you don't have to do it. Yeah. All you have to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Speaking of things that are easy to do, Inivelli just made a whole bunch of money by telling people they're going to make a light switch. They're introducing a new radar-equipped smart switch that detects the human presence.

So basically, if you're sitting in the room and the motion sensor turns the lights off, so TJ, this is for you, the lights get turned off, and you have to wave your hands around like a crazy person to turn them back on. Well, this thing's got a millimeter wave technology built into the switch itself and it can detect whether your presence is there or not. They say it's the same technology that cars use to detect their surroundings, you know, if they're backing up or that kind of thing. The company's launched an Indiegogo campaign for funding and over 500 backers have committed to over $180,000, which

is about $50,000 more than what they were asking for. So it sounds like this thing's getting made. It's going to come out. TJ, you got to put that in your office there. Keep the lights on. Yeah. I don't think I can install this in my office though. I'm not, you know, it's just, I think it's like a Lron motion sensor so you just need to i just need to finish cubicle 2.0 and i'll be good maybe i'll put this in cubicle 2.0 well uh not sure when this is going to be out but i don't know these guys are pretty these guys are fairly open uh with their timelines and everything uh so i'm sure we can go to their forum and find out what it's all about. Gavin, you posted this.

What do you like about this thing? Well, first of all, I think this switch was pretty much in response to Linus Tech's tips when he was griping the other day about his GE switches and the motion detection and stuff like that, right? From that time, he called out Intervalli. Intervalli responded, and they've been working on this for a while now. And it's good to see it's finally coming to fruition. The millimeter wave being built into a light switch, that's an awesome feature. You know, it's not going to work for everybody or in every room. People discuss this in the forums because the light switch isn't always in the most ideal position for a millimeter wave sensor. But sometimes it will work in that room. Uh, they've mentioned that they may

look into releasing a millimeter wave sensor separately. Um, so that's good to see for that too. They also mentioned, this is a Zigbee 3.0 version. Um, they mentioned they're working on a Z-Wave 800 version version. So that would be good to see too. So they get the best of both worlds and it's good to see them getting a lot of backers, you know, like it, I love their switches, my whole house, all in a village switches. I love what they can do. They're very customizable, very powerful. So I like to see this. Uh, my only thing is I want to see it. Let's see what happens in production because everything millimeter wave that I've tried so far, it's slow to respond first. Right. So I usually pair it with like a IR sensor and make that one trigger a light to go on. But the millimeter wave sits there and will

keep saying somebody's in the room. You know what I mean? So that's really good like that, but not for its speed. So I wonder if those switches will work well as, you know, turn on the light as I walk in or will it be a delay? Yeah, not really a good solution if you need another product to help it out. You know, hopefully this one doesn't have that problem. And there's an everything one sensor that was released by one of the YouTube guys. And it's great because he basically paired the two together and they look like they work really well. You know, the IR sensor kicks in right away and the millimeter wave sensor then keeps notifying you that somebody's still in the room. And that's kind of

what I do in my office here is I have those two and it works really well as a combo. So we'll see how it works if it's just one in that switch. Yeah, it is definitely a response to the Linus Tech Tips guy because the project name I'm just kind of reading through. I mean, they post everything on this. The project name is Project Linus. And they talk about how it was a product pitch to Linus Tech Tips following his issues with those GE motion switches that you're talking about. So that's kind of cool. I like this.

This is cool. I really, this is a fun company. So I wish them the kind of cool. I like this. This is cool. I really, this is a fun, this is a fun company. So I wish them the best of luck. That's the best thing about this company. If you're in their forums, you can see the progress. Like you saw the progress of this for a while, even though they just went public in terms of funding, they've been talking about it in their forums for an actual while. And they talk about a lot of things in their forums.

And it's great to read some of the things they have to go through. So just join their forums for like the entertainment forum i'm going to share this with you guys the the project line is they have the picture of the charlie brown character on it that's great that's great um yeah they they post literally everything so this is like the pitch deck for this particular project i just downloaded it and the cover page had had that on there so um all sorts of stuff on uh in in there to to look at like you said gavin um man they they talk about everything people are even posting like well these are the specs for the millimeter wave thing that they're going to be using and here's the scc filing on it they were even comparing sizes of the switch itself in the box because the depth makes a difference.

When you're trying to jam all this into a little box. No one ever thinks about the depth. Yeah, no one ever thinks about that. But these Switches are actually thinner, and it's nice to see that because they actually measured it out and showed you how much thinner so you can look at it. And the most important thing is that it's upgradable to matter. Oh, yeah. They'll support that for sure. They've always been big with firmware updates on their devices they've released updates there's actually

a new update that i was looking at today for my switches i you know so it's good to see that they don't just abandon them yep yep no we definitely like to see products updated and continued on development so this is fun i i can see there's there's people like talking about different products and and comparing the features of them and going back and forth and uh this is fun. I can see there's people talking about different products and comparing the features of them and going back and forth. And this is fun to watch. If anything, if you ever get bored and have a bucket of popcorn, just go on over to the Innaveli forums there. Scroll through them because, man, people are brutal. Jeez Louise. Be nice. They're trying to make nice light switches. All right, moving on here.

Well, this might not be the nicest. Another R story came out end of last week, right after we recorded our show. And basically posed the question, it's like Google Assistant might be doomed. So the latest news from CNBC, reporter Jennifer Elias says that the Google Assistant division has been, quote, reshuffled Jennifer, um, Elias, uh, says that the Google assistant division has been

quote reshuffled to quote heavily prioritize Bard over the Google assistant. Bard's that AI thing they've been working on. Uh, all sounds like the team's being reassigned to other projects. So, uh, here's, here's a quick recap of the past two years at Google. I'm going to go over these bullet points that they posted here. Uh, Google assistant saw eight major speaker smart display hardware releases in the years 2016 to 2021, but the hardware releases seem to have stopped. I kind of noticed that.

Like, there's not the same ones that are out, like, the same ones that they've released a while back. It's not like they can improve them very much anymore, but, like, it's the same things. They haven't really released them. The last one released in 2021, two full years ago. 2022 saw Google remove Assistant support from two in-house product lines, Nest, Wi-Fi, and Fitbit wearables. 2022 also saw a report where the information said Google wanted to, quote, invest less in developing Google Assistant voice assistant search for cars and devices not made by Google. Google Assistant's driving mode was shut down in 2022.

The duplex on the web feature was also shut down in 2022. Google kills everything. Reminders is being shut down in favor of Google task reminders. And then, of course, Google Assistant has never made money. Hardware is sold at cost, doesn't have ads. Nobody pays a monthly fee for the Assistant. So there's a significant server cost with all the voice commands going through and being processed. And some of the newer devices have moved on to on-device processing with a, it's basically a cost cutting move. So Amazon Alexa coach being

kind of part of that same report, suffering the same losses up to about $10 million a year. All those points standing alone may not look so bad, but in total, things start looking differently, especially with a new report that has come out saying that everybody's moving around. I guess there was a memo sent out to employees that was titled, quote, changes to assistant and bard teams. There's a lot of executive changes. Pretty long article over there on the R's. They go through all the details of the memo and exactly who is being reshuffled. They must have had a copy of it because they're just listing their names and everything. Their name and names. This is crazy

to think about one of the major voice assistants going away. And I know a lot of people like Google Assistant over amazon or i mean the other thing siri geez nobody likes that one cortana don't forget about cortana i've already forgotten about cortana no this is kind of sad to hear to be honest they should just i don't and as far as i know bard kind of came out and nobody was very happy with it right and even when they announced it there was there was some errors in the announcement of it. I think it was like spelling errors or something like that. So it's kind of weird just to not see them just roll this into Google Assistant because they Google Assistant is already very well known.

So what are they going to do? Just start over from scratch with a completely new thing that everybody has to relearn and redownload. So that way they can kill this in like five year time. It's Google. So, I mean, the answer could be yes. I'm just waiting for him to kill like other useful things.

Like who uses Google maps anymore? Let's just get rid of that. Gmail. Nobody, nobody cares about that either. You know, it's just, it's,

it's aggravating being a Google supporter. And one of the reasons I don't use Android anymore is just because i'm tired of stuff being killed prematurely and especially after they do like no advertising on it and no improvements on it for years at a time it's like well of course that's the end that's what's going to happen in the end you know you're gonna kill it because nobody knows about it anymore. So this is super disappointing to hear. I'm not surprised in any capacity, but I just wish they would just roll whatever Bart is trying to be into Google Assistant because it's already there. I used to wonder if anybody was working on Google Assistant. Like, it barely got any updates.

You know, I have all three of them sitting in front of me right now. And honestly, like, I thought Google Assistant gave the best random answers. Like when I asked about sports or something like that, it was the best at giving me those kind of answers. Right. But I always felt like the Amazon was random, random answers or answers to random questions. Random questions. Yes. Answers to random questions. That's different. That's different. Because random answers. Siri does a great job of giving me random answers random answers series number one at you know answers to random questions google i found was the best at um but when it came to smart home stuff i always found amazon was the best at that right um and

it's more than just what you can do it was more of the api when i looked at work when i worked on the api and was integrating it and stuff like that so much powerful things you can do. It was more of the API when I looked at work, when I worked on the API and was integrating it and stuff like that. So much powerful things it can do on the backend that people don't take advantage of. But you need people to, you need to release new product and Google's known for killing stuff. You know, over the many years they're known for killing it. And that's one of the reasons like TJ, i just don't invest heavily in the google stuff is because i i you know i the first time i ever got burnt was when they closed down google reader a number of years ago right and i use that so heavily still sore about that one yeah i i found you know reader and i use that now and it's filled the gap but you know like i hate when they you

know something you use so much if they shut down down Gmail tomorrow for whatever reason, oh, I'm in trouble. You know, I'll just be upset. But that's one of the reasons I just don't invest in Google is just because of that. You know, the things like when they had their nest, my first one was a nest and then they pulled out, you know, they messed with the API and integration was tough. I don't even know if you can integrate it still with everything or is it still just certain people? But I stopped looking at that and I went to Echobee

because Echobee integrates with everything, right? So Google, and like you said, yeah, put BARD in there. You have the device, now put the brains in it. Yeah, put the brains in it. And if you had a working AI uh ai in your device now like you got one up on somebody else now and it shows that you're somebody's working on it yeah we just just reading a story uh i don't even know where i saw it probably on mastodon or something like that but it's a news story that people are kind of upset that apple was going if there's a rumor that

apple is going to be removing cloud services for older Apple devices. And they mentioned like the 3GS. I'm like, I think it was around like 2012 or something. That's a really old phone. I mean, I'm sure it's... If you have a 3GS, you know, you should remove that. Exactly, exactly.

So they're like messages and things like that may stop working on phones and older computers. And I like yeah i i guess i can understand like some of those don't even support like if you if you turn i do this all the time because i have these old servers that are you know over here but like if you turn on an old computer that you haven't turned on in in a while like all the certificates have expired on it like it does not want to connect to the internet because it's all insecure or the browsers that were built for it can't be updated to to a 64-bit version and they can't connect to the websites that are using uh like the new tls where you see the https and the lock thing at the top like all that stuff's been updated and all the security stuff's been removed. So like the things are basically useless. So I can kind of understand why they may want to move away from supporting

those, those devices that I mean, they, they do have the power to update them, but they may just, they're definitely well beyond their, their intended lifespan. One of the most annoying things about my, my Google assistant recently is I have two smart bulbs in my bathroom. So that way I can dim them depending on the time of day that we walk in there and everything. So if I say, Google, you know, turn off bathroom lights. It's like, oh, sorry, that device isn't set up yet.

But if I say, hey, Google, turn off bathroom light. It responds and said, turn off bathroom lights now or whatever. And it's like, wait a minute, you know what I'm talking about? And you even say bathroom lights yourself, but you're not going to, you're not, you're going to get angry when I say bathroom lights. Yeah. Well, I, I do it every day. I just use the Siri thing over here and it, it, well, it doesn't do all the fancy stuff, but it'll turn on and off one light that i want it to turn off and off every day that's about all i ask of it because i know if i ask any more of it it's not gonna happen

siri's so bad siri's so bad so bad like it's funny like we've been saying siri's so bad for years and then chat gdp comes out and people are like hooking up furbies to it and making it talk from chat gdt and it's like wow siri's horrible compared to this we'll have to include a link to the the furry the fur furry here we go again wrong thing no the uh the furby control wrong audience ai controlled furby that's it's not a good thing, guys. Don't do that. So, all right, moving on here.

In a recent survey conducted by Jobsage, audio and video technicians, otherwise known as AV techs, are currently considered to be one of the most, quote, interesting no-degree jobs currently available to job seekers. This is an article over at CEPro. Survey results were compiled back in December of 2022 by 629 americans on their level of surprise and interest on 100 different jobs that they don't require a college degree um i mean cool i guess like hey it's a sexy job come on you get to to like hang TVs and you get the blame for everything.

You get to install TVs and connect people's Wi-Fi routers. Oh, super sexy. And you don't even need a college degree for this. I mean, they're just giving away money at this point. I think they pay like it, too. So, I mean, it totally makes sense. That's that's always been my biggest complaint. You know, I really didn't know that this was an industry until i moved down to florida and i randomly found a job on craigslist um doing home automation stuff but my biggest complaint has always been um the the lack of people knowing about it right like when you tell somebody you do home automation like i would i would wager half the time the response, Oh, like I didn't realize that was like a real profession. And then my other gripe has always been that in my experience, it's always been very low pay compared to like other jobs that are, you know, similar skill sets,

right? Like, so in Ohio, for example, uh, locksmithing and low voltage, both do not require any kind of licensing. You have to have your, you know, your regular insurance or whatever. Um, but as a locksmith, like a first year locksmith, I made more money than like a five year experienced AV technician. Yeah. And so like overall, I think the AV field is super undervalued, but it's not like that. It's not like the companies that are, that are selling the services are not making a lot of money, right? Like all the companies I've worked for in the past are charging, you know, a hundred to $200 per hour per technician, but the technicians are making, you know, $20 an hour or less. And that's just not sustainable if you want to actually get people to stay in the field, right?

Yeah. In a career. Yeah, exactly. You got to make a career around it. Yeah. And like, and that's what it is. Like, it's honestly a career. There's you know, there's people out there just like I.T. people, you know, A.V. is definitely a real field. It's not going away anytime soon. It's definitely a skill set that, you know, is crucial in today's world. But until we start telling people about it and we start paying appropriately for it, like it's not going to be a real career for a majority of people. Right. Yeah. Like there's more to there's more to low voltage than just like pulling wire and installing security cameras. You know, it's like setting up conference rooms or setting up distributed audio systems or digital

signage, all that good stuff kind of falls under the umbrella. But you need the other parts of it, which, you know, is very slow to get there. Yeah. And I mean, aside from the pay, I guess it's kind of pay related, but I always thought the job roles were just like inversed. Like and you kind of you kind of mentioned it there. And like I will say, as like a programmer, like who I really wanted to be well paid and really good at their job was the guy who wired the house. And it's, it's like the opposite. Like that's where the green guys go in and you're like, Hey, you're going to wire a house today. Let me show you how to do one.

And then you got all the other ones on your own. And, and like, it's usually, it's usually somebody that's not, I mean, they get better at it over time, but it's usually the lowest paid staff on staff. And I think if it was kind of flipped around a little bit or they were paid better, you would get better work. And the jobs that the technicians at the end wouldn't have to fix so much, they would be paid probably less because they wouldn't have to have such a high skill set to figure out how to magically make telephone and computer work over one wire you know i've had to do that before because things didn't things weren't pulled right you know the wire didn't get pulled so what am i supposed to do and it makes the whole industry look like crap to be honest you know you have these homeowners that are spending you know sometimes tens if not hundreds of thousands

of dollars on this technology. And it really comes down to like the installer itself. Right. You know, you can you can buy the nicest gear in the world, but the installer makes the biggest difference. And when you have, you know, crappy installers that are doing a terrible job, like those people feel like they wasted their money and they're not going to want to do that again. So it just leaves a sour taste in people's mouth. Absolutely. And I'm going to, and I'm going to harp on CD a little bit too, right? Because CD in my opinion is, is good for, uh, you know, the inner workings of the industry. Um, but you know, nobody knows who CD is. Nobody really cares who CD is kind of like, you know, or I guess the opposite of like you know the

bixi certification and stuff like that where it's like you know there's not there's not an outward push from cd to be known in the world and so like when you don't have an organization actually supporting you in the outside world telling people about you and kind of helping them build up that that rapport it doesn't really do anything for the industry as a whole. Having training in the industry is nice, but if nobody knows that that training is super critical or that somebody should have that training, it doesn't really go anywhere, unfortunately. I think the biggest thing that held them back for so many years was the show. Like the, the, the show was a major distraction for that organization, for the size of it, the size of the show, the size of the organization I've run shows about that size, maybe a little bit

bigger. And it's, it's basically all you think about all year. That's your one thing to do. And yeah, you got membership, you got education things, but committees can take care of those. You don't have to worry about like what you're focused on is making sure that show happens without a hitch. And when they got rid of it, I was like, oh, that's interesting. They'll be able to do, they'll be able to do what an organization does. Like they'll be able to focus on training. They'll be able to focus on the, the getting the word out and that kind of thing.

And to their credit, I think they have, like they have a a new like it's moved away from being the good old boys club. The new CEO is doing a lot better, in my opinion. That video that they came out with not too long ago, I think we may have talked about on the show. Like it's like it's an inspiring video. It makes me want to be an AV tech. So maybe they showed everybody these in the survey that video and they're like, oh, I really, really want that job. Look, if you told me a year ago I would be a CDA member, I would tell you you're crazy just because it didn't seem like it was a value to me. But now it kind of seems like they're shifting focus and they're kind of working on that.

So like I'm a CDA member now. Yeah, same. So it'll be interesting to see how it kind of transitions and what they do with it. But we need stuff like this because it's not going to go away. It's only going to get bigger. And as these people are going to trade schools to become electricians and plumbers and HVAC technicians, they need to know about AV as well's it is an interesting field you know one of my favorite things is making things work and going into a different place every day and kind of playing with technology and stuff

and there's a lot of other people that are like that and they really enjoy that line of work they just don't know that it exists yep yep exactly and we need and we need less it people so gavin's like he's like shaking his head i agree i agree wait a minute i was gonna say a bunch of good things about you guys and you had to end it off with that wait a minute here gosh if we could if we could save some people from becoming it people i think oh you guys are going in the direction it's been in for years now so don't worry about it downward spiral yeah yep but we actually you know it's interesting because we see this in other industries too where you don't need uh college degrees to get jobs and certain things because they're finding i guess when you come out of

college you have either just a basic degree or they're already behind in the technology you know they may have learned some fundamentals, but, you know, they're finding people coming out of high school with even better skills at programming, for example, in certain languages than people that went to the university for five years. So it's not just your industry, but I see it in other industries. But you guys still have certifications. We still have training that you do, you know, outside of a college, right, that help you with your job. Because especially in your field, things are changing every day. You know, you have HDMI 2.1 today. You have 2.2 tomorrow.

And you got to go to training to learn everything that's different and how it works on these devices and stuff like that. So it's never ending. So you guys still have to keep doing certifications or vendor training to understand how their devices work, you know, and you can do some of it on your own or some of it, I guess, through your vendors, they host training for you. So it's never ending. To say it's not a college degree,

I don't think, maybe when you come into the field, some things people, you know, you don't need anybody with a college degree. If you're just going to have them unloading the truck, then, yeah, I don't think they need a college degree for that. And I'm sure if they are unloading your truck for 20 years, they learn something by then where they can actually hang the TV or install a TV, too. And they got on the job training when sometimes people you find valuable people that way, too. So it's not just your industry no no no this survey goes on i mean there's a lot in this survey 70 percent of people people

believe college degrees are less important than they used to be i mean i'm absolutely one of them like me too yeah i i used to that's how you got a job and that's like but that's no longer the case like i have not used anything i learned in university in my job. I came out of there and I did not learn anything. I got my job. I learned on the job and I'm self-taught a lot of the time. Yep. Yep. Well, here's the top five most interesting jobs that require no degree. Number five, chefs and head cooks, which I mean, definitely an interesting job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of cocaine. Number four, commercial pilots. Also a lot of cocaine.

Number three, sound engineers. Also a lot of cocaine. Interesting. Number two, audio and video technicians. I don't know. I can't really, I don't think there's any cocaine there. They're crazy. Oh, there's a lot of cocaine.

All right, all right. And then number one, most interesting, is private detectives and investigators investigating the previous jobs, I guess. Probably just weed and the aliens. Weed, yeah. Just vape pens filled. A bunch of potheads. And in my neighborhood, every neighbor is a private investigator.

They're watching everything you do. Oh, there you go. Here's the least interesting jobs. Gambling managers, number four computer computer numerically controlled tool programmers gambling manager was a job that is yeah what was that computer what computer numerically controlled tool programmer programmers like a cnc yes it must be it yeah cnc's yeah uh personal service managers don't even know what that is commercial divers like okay and then uh tele telecommunication line installers and repairers so yeah that makes sense yeah it's not a very interesting job but it is what it is uh it's

part of that's muddy yeah well i guess or you know climbing poles and that kind of stuff that's your thing a lot of cocaine a lot of cocaine yeah a lot of cocaine gavin's a pole climber he looks like one. Did you say dancer or climber? All right. Anyway, let's move on. Hold on. Wrong show. Pole climber?

Let's move on. All right. All right. All the links and topics. Well, most all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 430. All right. We got a little bit in the mailbag this week.

And it's a question that TJ and I immediately read and just said at the same time in our respective states. Gavin. So Mitch writes in, I'm using the latest Blue Iris and Code Project AI. Do you know of any way to not get notifications for cars that remain parked in the driveway? It seems that a notification will go off

when lighting flashes or car lights reflect off the parked vehicles, or a blowing tree casts a shadow on the vehicle. And the Code Project AI seems like it gathers that object and says, oh, there's a car and gives him an alert. He says, I want to know if a car enters and leaves the driveway, but I don't need notifications for a car that remains parked there most of the time. Thanks, guys. So I'll say it again. Gavin?

You know, I saw this question. I instantly thought you guys would have no clue. So I'll just jump in here, you know, you know. Thanks, Mitch, for the question. And all I have to say is I have the exact same problem you have. You're not alone here. It just hasn't been a big enough problem for me, but it's been on my list of things to solve. Well, what's happening is basically, I guess, your cameras are getting triggered. They're sending the images over to, I keep wanting to say DeepStack. DeepStack.

But it's CodeProject now. And it's seeing the cars. Now, I'm assuming you already have the detect slash ignore static option turned off in the settings. We'll just assume you already have that. But I'm going to tell you some of the things I was going to look at myself when I had a moment to do it. But I was going to first look at adjusting the triggers. So what's happening is it's triggering the camera that, Hey, something's happening. And then it's starting to send the images over to code project to analyze for, um, you know, objects I'm thinking I'm going to adjust those triggers so that not as many things are sent over for analysis. So you can

do things like setting the minimum object size so that the light, you know, a small light is not going to trigger an analysis because a car is a big object in the field. So, you know, you can make it pretty big and it'll still pick up the cars, but it won't pick up the things like the lights beaming off the windows and stuff like that. So look at that. You can also mess with the object detection setting. There's one in there I know that will only cause a trigger if the object moves a certain distance. So if this object's sitting still and a light just shows up on it, it won't actually trigger because that light didn't actually move, right? So that's pretty good. There's also settings for, you can set how much confidence it has in what it detected too. So if it's detecting a tree as a person, it may say, this is a person, but we're only 30% confidence. You actually can set that threshold. So you can

say only notify me if it's 70% confident. So it really knows it's a person, right? These are things you're going to have to toggle and tweak. It's worth the time. It will take some time. There's also a tool in Blue Iris called the AI Analyzer. And you can actually, if you miss a notification, you can run it through this and see what it detected or what it didn't detect. And from there, you can adjust even more your settings so that if you really want to detect that, then you can make some tweaks and see if it will detect it there. So, you know, you got to play around with those tools.

All that stuff's in the documentation. They have really good documentation if you read it. But those are just some of the things I was going to look at to try and solve my problem. I don't know if it will solve the problem, but that's where I'm starting at. It sounds like the initial problem that he's having is the triggers are going off possibly when they shouldn't be. And then the code project thing, AI thing is just saying, okay, here's an image and it has a car in it. So that's the, I got motion and I know there's an image with a car in it. It puts it together and says that's an event. Um, but yeah, I would,

I would look heavily into trying to figure out how you can debug those trigger events. Cause like you said, you can play back that video and put different settings. Like you can say, well, in this case, you know, you can, you can, you can tweak the trigger settings as you're playing back over and over again. I don't know. Trees, trees are tough though. Trees are really hard. Cause those, those can do wonky things and really full of camera and set off like a big tree shadow can move over all of a sudden or my, my backyard goes off all the time. Not for trees. all of a sudden or my backyard goes off all the time not for trees I have no trees in my backyard and it's not clippy running around back there

it's uh it's it's clouds like the cloud will go over the the fast cloud will go over and all of a sudden it gets real dark in the backyard and the camera triggers and it's like well yeah okay because of a large portion of this frame the pixels went from like a bright green to a dark green. So it thinks of this motion. And that's all. And there's actually a setting for that too. So you could say if something this size, if 60% of the frame changed at once, for example, don't trigger.

There's settings for that too. There's so many settings. There's so many settings. That you can tell. Yeah, it's so many settings. For things like trees, yeah, they are tricky. But like I said, sometimes they pick up a tree as a person, but they only say it's 40% confident. Yeah.

So that's when I kind of tweaked that to say, okay, you have to be at least 60% confident. You know, I'd rather get the random notification than missing, you know, the important ones too. Yeah. I mean, I guess it would kind of suck if you have automations based off that like if somebody comes so that's that's one of the things i had a problem with with blue iris was like detecting when somebody drove into the driveway like he's trying to do like they're the blue iris does not have good support for that like they have like a a path where you can move into from point a to point B. It'll detect if the motion moved

between those two squares or whatever, or across the line. Yeah, the zone, yeah. But it's not intuitive, and I think they could probably make it a lot better. All the major AI company, camera companies out there, you draw a line, and you say if something walks over the line this way,

count it this way. And if something walks over the line this way, you this way and if you if something walks over the line this way you count it that way and you send a different event and blue iris just doesn't do that it's a completely different setup and i don't know why they should they should do the line thing line triggers yeah and blue iris is uh one of those jobs that requires a degree for you know like yeah you have to have that complicated yeah. It's that complicated. Yeah, it's that complicated. But it's that powerful. So once you get to know it, you start to like it. Yeah, I like it. I do not like all the settings.

That's just, yeah. There's a reason that integrators don't touch this because they don't have college degrees, but also because there's so many settings and you have to really just want to get in there and tweak and dig and dig and dig and then once you get it up set up it's perfect like it really you can do a lot of stuff really well yeah cool cool well i hope that helps out mitch um moving on we got a little pick of the week um you guys ever wanted to redecorate your room but just didn't know like what you wanted to put in

all the time all the time well ai has you covered uh there's this little website you can take a picture of your room and then uh click a button it says generate your dream room and off to the races you go it'll take your original room and put shag carpeting over the wall all over the fireplace i think that's what this one looks like it'll'll completely redecorate your room. And it looks fun. Like, I don't know. People have somehow put this together where it will. It will. It seems to be open source, too.

So I believe you can like launch your own. Yeah, it's open source. So whatever model they're using, they've made public and you can go in and generate rooms. You can tell it what you want to have in it. This is perfect for the people that redecorate the room like every other month you can just do that on the computer and then see what it looks like before you redecorate or perfect for people with no style that just don't know how to decorate a room this wouldn't whoa whoa why you call me out like that well i didn't call you out but since you mentioned it he's got a virtual background for a reason i know yeah that's right now this is this is really cool i

could see this see this is like one of the things that i think you know the the ai would be useful for right as like just stuff like this where you just kind of put in what you have now maybe you put in what colors you like or what objects you like and it's just like this this is what it'll look like and step it up one, put like tags on it so you know where to order these things from. You know, like if it's Amazon links. Well, that's the Amazon. You know, exactly.

Well, that's what they should have on there. So I know I like this layout. Where can I buy it? And just make it easy for me. Actually, I just made this all up. You can't buy any of it. It's all made up. This is a four.

You can't afford if you need to ask for this. I guess it uses a machine learning model to generate variations of the rooms. Application gives you the ability to upload a photo of any room, which it will send through the model and use an API route to basically generate a new room for you. So sounds fun. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Go wild. Go generate some rooms. We want to see them.

Let us know what they look like. The little like original rooms, generator rooms, they have a couple of examples. They look pretty good. So, I mean, there's odd things and, you know, for sure. But like if you wanted to, I could see this being toned down and used like for MLS listings, right? Like you could like say, oh, this could be your house.

Oh, you can virtually stage it. Yeah. Good idea. The computers are going to change the world. Nah, they're just a fad. Well, if you've had, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks the weeks fads are great ideas for show. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm. Or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. A couple of quick project updates.

I haven't done anything. So yeah, it's been busy. And I've been watching Clippy cut my lawn. I have a nice little video of him zooming around the other day, cutting my lawn. And my lawn doesn't need to be cut. I just wanted to make him work because he's had a couple of days off and uh work robot yes yeah so he was out there doing his thing happily uh scuttering back and forth and i was watching him on the camera inside at the air conditioning because it's like 80 degrees here i don't know if you guys know like

it's it's hot you're making clippy work in that weather oh my my gosh. He loves it. He loves it. Don't tell him. Don't let him tell you. I read a review actually the other day of one of the Husqvarna. I hope I said that right. Lawnmowers. Somebody bought one and they put it in their yard and their yard was way bigger than yours. Right. Probably three or four times the size of yours. And this thing just went out and did a little piece every day.

Yep. And they loved it. You know, it makes me so jealous you know i gotta start putting you know toonies into a jar just you know save up for mine because i'm getting jealous you know this weekend's this weekend i'm gonna be doing a lot of yard work i'm gonna be sitting out there looking at the lawn saying i need something that can cut this automatically yeah what's nice about it is like it'll work for eight hours you know on and on like it'll go back and do a recharge and then go back out and mow some more and like i don't keep

up with it i don't know what it's doing but like after a couple days of it working eight hours you know over that period of time it's it's run over most of the lawn like you it's got start over yeah well i mean it's just it's just out there doing a maintenance run rather than just like how i would do it i'd wait for the grass to be at least knee high before I'd get up there with a push mower and just suffer. This is a much better solution by far, by far. Yep. That's all I got. But I can see, Gavin, you have some things in here about your poor home assistant.

What's going on? Is it breaking? Did you break it? No, no. It's not breaking. It's not like the house is burning down or anything like this but they did release this week we talked about it last week they released the 2023.4 release of course yeah this um yeah and we went through all the new features last week of what was going to be in it but the one thing that we didn't cover

last week that came out over the weekend was that one of the things that they changed on the back end is gonna it broke a lot of the custom cards, right? So before you upgrade, a word of advice, just go into your hacks, install all the updates for all the custom, install all updates in general, right? And that way, once you upgrade, your dashboards won't be as affected. One thing that hit me was I had a bunch of custom CSS for, you know, my dashboards. Some of that broke. So now I'm, you know, my dashboards. Some of that broke. So now I'm, you know, working on fixing it, but it's not major.

It's just some small things here and there I got to tweak. But the upgrade went pretty well. But just keep an eye out for that. Yeah, I should update. I should do the 2023.4. I'm on the 2023.03, which is March. Time to move on, Seth. Yep. Time to'm on the uh 2023.03 which is march time to move on seth yeah yeah time to move on seth tj you got anything anything going on you're still working you're still working in uh zoom rooms yep still finishing the zoom rooms this week hopefully knock on wood here um working on

cubicle 2.0 now that i'm not sick and i got some van stuff. I actually changed out the van steering wheel this past weekend. It was probably the scariest thing I've ever done. To be honest, I had to, uh, you know, remove the battery terminal at the back and let the power drain a little bit, remove the airbag. And I put the new steering wheel on. Wow. Um, I got to take it to the Chevy dealership to have it programmed all so I can have cruise control and audio controls the steering wheel so that'll be nice um I think I'm going to replace my radio with a new radio I've got like a 10 inch one of those uh janky Chinese uh Android auto carplay radios you buy on Amazon for like two or three hundred bucks I'm gonna do that um but i'm just i'm ready to get this big job over with it's just it's been draining if you've ever worked on a large job before you just

know that it's just the time suck and it just kind of kills your motivation to do other things so yep yep especially like you have the time suck but then it's like also you're supposed to be lining up new jobs for whenever this thing is done and it's like no i'm done working i don't want to work anymore yeah the last thing i want to do is like call people back at the end of the day like you work till like five o'clock at night and it's like oh i need to send emails out and stuff so i'm uh i'm ready for it to be finished but honestly like the the zoom rooms have been super easy i kind of just want to transition to like fully commercial now, just because it's like,

it's so simple in the grand scheme of things. Right. Like I'm using these, these D 10 TVs and you literally just plug it in. Yeah. Use an activation code. And like, that's it.

Like there's not much configuration to them. And even like the, I have like a large conference room with, you know, four speakers and, and Aver moving camera and two of the Shure ceiling lawn microphones. And you plug it all in and you program it.

And it took maybe an hour, maybe two hours to actually program everything. And it just works. It's just so simple. And in the commercial space, there's not really like people's emotions in it. Right. It's just like, they just want it to work. Like they use it for work. So it just needs to function.

And like, that's it. Like they just don't care that much about it. So it's, it's been, that's been super nice, but yeah, I'm just, I'm ready for it to be finished. Well, hopefully next week. Yeah. It reminds me, I did actually install one of those random android auto things in my wife's car over the weekend so i guess i really did something not really home project related that's fine it's

technology technology yeah it seems to work yeah i got some breaking news here guys uh home assistant has found a new device on my network so oh is it a printer i have no idea there's a whole list of things here i have no idea what it found. That's probably because you just rebooted it for the first time in a month. Yes, yes, that's why. That's why. Oh, well. I've got a notification.

New devices found. There we go. It found the sun. Ooh, that's cool. We don't have that up here. It's because it's installed on mine. You just got gotta install hacks i know a guy he can help you all right uh we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports

the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about. Did we talk about the Furby thing? No, no, no. Richard posted a fun picture in there that I in turn posted at work.

And some people were like, what happened here? I'm like, well, it's just wrong. Like, you shouldn't do that. I guess TV mounted to a uh a drainage pipe yeah yeah they they found they found what they thought was a stud it was not a stud it was the it was a plastic stuff here's a place that does not exist exactly um yeah so well maybe we'll put that in the show notes too you can go check that out over at home take that with him so yeah, it's all sorts of fun stuff that flies by in there every day

and good conversation about stuff going on out in the world right now. If you want to help out 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 up another week of news here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend.

We'll see you next week. Take care. Farewell. What about Catch You Later? Oh. That one's not good. What about Auf Wiedersehen? Auf Wiedersehen. Come on.

I'm not cultured. Sorry. We know.