HomeTech.fm - Episode 432 - Sonos as a Service

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

On this week's show: New products from URC, Aqara, and Sonos, Netflix ends DVD-by-mail service, Apple Homepods can now listen for smoke alarms, how to backup your pictures and files, project updates, and a pick of the week for organizing your things.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 21st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Hubbard. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home automation, home technology, home theater, dare I say? Like, I don't know. TJ and I have been partaking in Adam Justice's theater build, I guess.

And we sat down and recorded our second episode with him uh for the smart home show and i think we are we're we're we're still like trying to figure out seats i think at this point like i think everything else has been figured out but it turns out the most important thing you can actually put in your theater is seats and if you don't know what seats you're going to sit in it kind of holds everything else up yeah it kind of determines where the speakers are going to go and how high you need your riser to be and, you know, pretty much everything else about a home theater. So a little important. So this is episode two you guys are working on

and that's all you've done? Two out of 20 at least. You're going to have a whole Netflix series by the time you're done. You're going to have to binge listen. Maybe we can sell it to Netflix. That's a good idea. Or Max. And i'll get the snacks it's not just stop trying to make it happen gavin it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen

snacks and max i if it doesn't happen if it does happen you're first okay well yeah it it's a fun conversation we we we wrapped up the second recording the other day. Last Friday. Yeah, last Friday. I don't know how, it takes them a little while to get it out, but that was a good conversation. We talked about a bunch of different things. But now we're kind of at the point,

I think we got to talk about seats. So hopefully we'll get to that. There's all sorts going on. He posted a video for us to look at, and the room is already kind of like framed in and almost ready to go. It looks pretty good. It'll be July before I know it, and I'll be traveling to Illinois to help him with the theater as strictly as a friend. It'll be fun. Vacation. A working vacation. That's what they say. That's right yeah you know honestly those those are always the

best to me because you know you get to work a little bit you can make a little bit of money or you know hang out with friends and all that good stuff and then you can go have some fun so you know probably spend two or three days doing the theater and all the other technology in the house then go to chicago for a couple days and then drive back and the good news is it's only like six hour drive i think at most oh that's not bad so it's not gonna take long to get there at all which is nice we have to get gavin in there to to help watch the theater when we're all done yeah yeah i'll do a sound test uh we could just travel there after cedia you know make a group road trip everybody

to adam's house i'll let you know if you pick the right seats. All right. Well, we got a couple of new products this week, both on the pro side and the DIY side. And got a bunch of different headlines from things going away and things, new products, new things, and things going away, I guess is what I want to say. So what do you say we jump into those home tech headlines? Let's do it. Well, the first thing up is everyone seems to be excited in the DIY space about this new

Aqara FP2 sensor that they've come out with for $82 or 5,000 Canadian. I'm not sure which, which you want to say on that. Evidently it's very expensive in Canada to buy this. Um, but it's a, what a wifi it's a present sensor, uh, wifi required. And, uh, this, this sounds like the millimeter wave one, right? It's not the, like the PIR version infrared. Correct. So, and Gavin actually has one of these sitting within arm's reach of him and he's been playing with this thing. So Gavin, uh,, every every YouTube video personality has given their review. Now it's your time.

What do you think it is? Oh, I feel special. I feel special all of a sudden, you know. No, I they posted it a day early on Amazon. So I ordered it yesterday. I ordered two of them, actually. And they came in today and I've been playing with it all day. And it's pretty impressive. I'm impressed. So in the box, you get the sensor, you get a USB cord

that comes with no power brick. It's USB-C and a very small manual that no one's ever going to read. So like they could have left that out of there and some mounting hardware. So it's pretty small box, pretty nice. Feature wise, it's compatible with HomeKit, Home Assistant, Amazon, Google, IFTTT, Alice, and their own Acquire Home app, which gives you all the features, right? You don't need an Acquire Hub and you don't need a HomeKit Hub to use it with the other things, right? It's all locally based. So that's good too. Uh, it, you mentioned it does run on wifi. Yes. It communicates over wifi, but also has Bluetooth in there for the onboarding, you know, and apparently matter support is being promised later via an OTA update. But I mean,

honestly, after playing it with it, with it, it's like, what is matter really going to add to this whole thing for me you know like it works really well some of the features it has a light sensor in it um the multi-zone sensor so you can have it in a room configured so that it only acts on presence on things like if that happened in the couch or in a chair you know or in a specific part of the room. So you can have all these zones set up and they'll trigger independently. And you can have lights follow you around the room if you want. So they're only on when somebody's in that area, right? That's actually really cool. And it can track up to five different people in a room. Now, when you have it added to the app, you can actually

see in the app, it will show you all the people it detects and where they're moving around in the room and stuff. So it's actually, it's pretty impressive, like what it's doing and how accurate it is. So I was kind of blown away. Now setting it up, it's a little tricky with Home Assistant. So with the Aquora app, you just add it. If you have an iOS, it automatically puts it in HomeKit. That was easy. Like it couldn't have been any easier, right? Getting into HomeKit is a, or not HomeKit, getting into the Home Assistant was a little bit trickier. I found the trick, someone posted it on one of the videos online and it's in the Home Assistant forum. So the trick, you know, basically is what you want to do is you add it to the Quoraire Home app. You set up a bunch of zones. Then you go into the HomeKit app. You delete the zone. It will remove all the zones, but then you can also add it to Home Assistant at that point.

And then it will see it and you can have it in Home Assistant and the Acquire app. So now you can configure it and it's still all the settings like migrate over to Home Assistant right away. So if someone else is trying to do this, don't bang your head. I just told you what you're going to have to do. It's in the forums. Check the show notes if you really need to know, because I spent a good few hours trying to get this thing working. So, you know, it's really great. It's pet friendly. There's options for interference, you know, where you could block out certain parts of the room where you would have like a drape or a fan so that it doesn't trigger this sensor right so you can you could set up those

kind of zones um it's ipx5 rated so you can put it outside but like under a roof or something like that where it's not like getting rained on directly but you also got to make sure that the plug that you're using is also um waterproof um ota updates the they are promising a lot of few updates in the future. Right. They're talking about things like sleep tracking, people counting. You know, if you want to count how many people come into a room and leave a room, for example, it can do things like that. Now, the only thing I have to say to sum all of this up, I saw this written on their website and they kind of rubbed me the wrong way. There's a small note on their website that says, please note, some newly added features may require the Aquara subscription. Right. And that's a little note on their website.

And I'm like, what's this subscription? You know, is it going to be another subscription service? I'm going to start charging you for, you know, some updates with new features. You know, I, I, I'm pretty sure we'll hear more about that later on. So, but it was one of those things where it's like, Oh, these are all the things that we're going to be bringing to you through updates, but please know you may have to pay for them. You know, like, I don't know. We'll see. So my initial thoughts, it's a great product. It's a little expensive, but it does replace multiple sensors. Um, and it works really well. And I think this is one of those devices where I think you're going to see a lot of YouTubers giving ideas on how they use it.

And, you know, you're going to see people like me, like doing multiple automations in a room with just this one device mounted on the wall. So, you know, I'll be talking about it in the future when I get to play with it a little more. So you said it's pet friendly. Can you set it for like different weights and stuff like that? Is that what you mean? Or it for now, it says small pets, right? Which I guess they won't trigger it or you could set the sensitivity of it or

the zones or whatever but um they also mentioned that they're refining that um that that feature so over time through software updates i guess they will get more data and they'll be able to refine it to um know what is a pet you know because it can do um like right now it could do just body existence in an area, or it could do personal positioning, you know, the location and proximity of people to the device. But then it can also monitor things like falling, right? If a person following, you have to mount it differently for that. You have to mount it on the roof, but you know, from there, they also will be able to do things like, you know, tracking what someone's actually doing.

And that's, I guess, some of the updates we're going to see over time. And I think we saw them talking about this, but I'm pretty sure inside they're tracking as like a little stick figure of your body using that. And then they're analyzing it. And I'm going to say this only once this show, probably using some AI stuff, you know, to track all this. I'm going to make you say it again. Nope, nope, nope. I'm so sick of saying AI. I said it again.

No, that's pretty cool, though, because the problem I have is that I don't know if it's just my lack of searching or something, but I can't find any like Z-Wave or Zigbee motion sensors that are pet immune or let you actually adjust. Very few. It's a very common thing in the security industry that basically give you two options where it's one that's pet immune and one that's not pet immune. But for some reason, like the DIY automation space, it's not a very common thing. And I have a large cat that's like 20 pounds and she sets off my motion sensors everywhere

she goes. Yeah, very few and some people you know they like when i was looking into that with my small dog as well some people said tape over the bottom of the sensor so it didn't um pick up below a certain amount but with a cat cats jump up onto things right so you know they'll they'll they'll go above that and probably still trigger it at some point and So we'll see how this goes. But they said over time, they'll be adjusting that feature, probably making it better. So keep an eye on that.

Yeah, my biggest annoyance right now is we have a motion sensor at the bottom of our stairs. When we first walk into our house, we go up the stairs to go to the rest of the house. And so I have a motion sensor at the bottom of the stairs that whenever we open the door, it turns on the stairs light, and after five minutes, it'll turn everything off, but the annoying thing is that we'll be watching TV, which is right next to the stairs, and she'll go down there to play with thugs or rocks or whatever she plays with, and it sets the motion detector off every single time. You see, with a sensor like this, you don't have to actually do a time, turn off after five minutes, right? It actually detects as soon as you come in and that's the thing i did some timing tests as soon as i walked up to it it detected me right

away right as soon as i walked out of the room within like 10 seconds it would say no one's here and it would then trigger that way so you could it was really fast where the FP1 people were complaining it was very slow. This one is very fast. So I've set it up in my office. I'm going to be playing around with it because I sit here the most. So when I'm sitting still, I'm going to see if it triggers, you know, on and off at all. I'm going to set one up in my family room and play with it down there. But if they work out great, this is something you can put in multiple rooms.

And there's so many things you can do with this. And I'm looking forward to see what they do over time yeah i may have misspoken it it uses some kind of radar technology it's not it's not the same millimeter wave thing we've been talking about on other sensors i don't think so this is a little bit different but i don't know it's kind of cool oh i guess it is millimeter wave radar okay there we go yeah it is millimeter wave so it's yeah david talked about why does this one work so much faster than the other stuff that's out there that was taken like some of those you said that you had one that you put in and it didn't work that quickly you had to have a like a pir to

to make sure that it triggered instantly and then the other one finally kicked in is just i don't know secret sauce who knows they maybe they do have a PIR built in as well. And they kind of couple it up. But either way, it works really fast. Like, I really like it. Cool. I do like all the stuff you can do with this. I did get a kick out of their, the way you do the fall protection is you have to put it on the ceiling, like you were saying.

And the. That gets a little complicated when it comes to getting power to it then right like yeah yeah i mean if you're if you're creative um but what's funny i thought was the like the range on it on a eight foot ceiling is only about six foot diameter you know basically from the middle of that so it kind of restricts the range. Otherwise, it looks like this has a eight meter range. So that's pretty far. What is that? All right, grandma, you can only fall in the hallway here. You can't fall anywhere else.

Okay. Yeah, do not fall anywhere else. Eight meters, 26 feet. So that's pretty good. Like if you mounted it on the wall, 26 feet. If you mount it on the ceiling, it's only going to see left and right of itself. Six feet for the ball detection. We'll wait for the FP3 when they boost those ranges.

And maybe they will tweak stuff like that over time for more updates. I don't know if that's tweakable as well. So the thing is it does offer ota updates and what a piece of advice if you buy one make sure you go in the app and check for updates mine had like went through three updates before it was finally finished so it didn't do like one update to the newest version it kind of went step by step by step right so it's good to see that they already had some updates well that's the diy new product here's the pro new product which we haven't had a new pro product hit the market in quite some time and urc comes out of the gate here with a new game inspired handheld user interface that's right it's a remote control called the tdc 5100

has gaming inspired design hard and digital buttons and fast processing so it's it's it's a fast remote tj and i were looking at this before the show we don't see any like rgb leds on it but i i guess you could say it's gaming inspired because it looks like an old i don't know what what it looks like an old, I don't know what, what it looks like. An old PlayStation pro PS. It looks PSP. I guess it's like a mashup of their previous awful tablet remote and like a

steam deck that like had a baby, you know, but this thing, I don't, I don't get it. This thing is supposedly the only price I could find was some like random website, but instead of this $1,200 MSRP,

I don't... Wow. That seems like a lot. Well, if that's the case, and we do the math, that comes out to 21 buttons at $1,200. That's $74.43 a button. So $75 a button. That's going to top out on our list if that is that price.

And that's probably what it is. And you know this thing is going to have ridiculously awful battery life, right? Like, this thing is going to have ridiculously awful battery life right like this thing is going to have to be recharged every like six hours maybe maybe batteries have gotten better for everybody yeah usually you can get a day's use out of it so that's why they didn't put the rgbs on theirs because they didn't want to make the battery life worse well it does have voice control where you can integrate it in with Alexa, Comcast, Xfinity,

or the Apple TV. So that's kind of nice. It's proximity, ambient light sensors and pickup sensors. We'll wake up the device. Doesn't have the radar yet, but it'll get it next time. And it's got a five inch color LCD screen on it. Basically looks like any handheld console gaming thing that you can imagine that you won't be able to play games on it.

I looked on their website. I was really hoping that you could play games on it and you can't play. It doesn't say anything about being able to play games on it. I don't know if you mentioned it. Maybe I missed it or not. But the best part is that it features digital buttons. I don't know what digital buttons are, but I think I think they're fancy terms or terrible terms for touchscreens.

So I do like that. It does mix up having a touchscreen and hard buttons, but I don't know. It's a little bit overboard. Gavin, I don't think this is going to replace your Logitech Harmony. It definitely will. No, definitely not at that price. I'll get you a good deal on it, Gavin. It's going to be fun having you at Cedia,

where you can go around and you can walk up to these companies and hold these $1,500 or $2,500 remotes in your hand and say, wow. Yeah. Why would anybody want this and just watch their soul leave their body? I'm going to go up to every booth and ask them the price. And when they tell me the price, I'm going to ask them if people really pay that. You know, like I'm going to go. Does anybody other than a dealer buy this?

Oh, so nobody's, you know. Well, no, i mean that the dealer question won't really work because only dealers buy stuff for the most part but oh true i don't know there's there's plenty of urc dealers out there and they probably like this stuff so it it blends in with their total home total control platform that they have so that so not only do i need to get this you probably need to get a processor for it which is probably another two thousand dollars would be perfect for the 90 year old yeah that way they never lose the remote again you know what even i looked at this and that looks too complicated like i even like when it got to the point where i was like that just looks like overkill for a remote like where's the back button and then on top of that i was like it kind of has too few buttons.

I need a few more buttons on there too, right? That's why you use the digital buttons. Yeah, digital buttons, Gavin. I need the tactile feedback. You know when you just grab the remote and you know where that back button is? You know, that's not going to happen in this, you know? Or you're going to accidentally touch the wrong button and everything shuts off. That happens so much.

Well, I mean, the nice thing about the URC stuff is that you can program the buttons to do anything cabin so yeah you could you could have it set up to launch a rocket if you really wanted to and if the rocket's not going the way you want you can use another button to make it self-destruct that's right rest in peace spacex star star whatever it is starship starship there you go yeah it exploded today as as we record yeah well you don't learn anything from from success you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes exactly that's what i tell myself too i i imagine they'll get back on it make another 10 million dollar rocket 10 billion i don't know how much these things cost but yeah it's a lot of money down the drain. Now speaking of a lot of money going down the drain, uh, after 25 years of renting out

physical copies of media through the mail, Netflix will end its DVD by mail service. Exactly. Announced earlier this week that the company will ship its last red DVD envelopes on September 29th. So get your orders in now. Um, that's evidently this part of the business has been dwindling over the past decade, going from more than $900 million in revenue back in 2013 to less than $150 million last year. So end of an era. They've been trying to kill this thing off for years, though. I can't imagine anyone is surprised about this, but there are people who still use the service and I guess they're going

to red box now so you said they made 150 million last year yeah yeah i'll take over that business like oh man i only made 150 million this year i'm slacking you know like it's pretty bad when they kill off a business that's making 150150 million a year just because. You just got to be watching the auction sites way from the auctioning off pallets of DVDs, you know? Well, I know people that were big Netflix DVD users because they get the videos and then copy them and then send them back, right? Oh, that's illegal. Well, that's what it was popular for, right? You know, but now what are they going to do? Netflix has a quarterly revenue of $8.1 billion.

So if you put this in perspective, it's probably not worth their time. But yeah, we're plenty worth plenty of Gavin's time. He'll get on it. He'll get out there and put the stamps on those envelopes. You want me to run your $150 million a year business? I'll do it no problem you know like seriously don't cancel this you know like at least sell it to google and let them cancel it i i talked to somebody earlier and they said that they they did like

the service for being able to basically test drive some of the like 4k blu-rays when they first came out like the the really high um hd blu-rays that you could get because some of the like 4k blu-rays when they first came out like the the really high um hd blu-rays that you could get because some of them they would come out and they weren't worth buying but if you got it and it had a good recording on it and it wasn't just like oh we made the menu in 4k but the movie is still the old 1080p movie and it was worth watching like he would go and buy the movie then because they're the blu-ray discs were still the 4k ones still expensive so um try before you buy uh no longer available at netflix now you could try before you buy off amazon right like you can return everything to amazon right yeah well it's funny you say that too because some of those uh online companies have stopped allowing returns.

Like they'll give you a refund, but you don't have to send the item back. So I actually just went through that with Walmart. I was going to return something and they're like, nah, you don't have to bring it back. But here's your refund. I don't do that more often. Best of both worlds. Yeah, that's happened to me a couple of times. In one time, it was with a, what are they, a cyber, the big ups cyber something power cyber power yeah from amazon it

was a 1500 so it was the largest one they they offer in the one are you they didn't want to pay for shipping they didn't want to pay that shipping back no and so they just like you can keep it and i'm like i can probably just replace the batteries on it and i did and now it lives right there got two years ago when i worked at the summer camp we bought some like pa speakers off amazon and we totally bought the wrong one so i just went to go return them and they're like nah you can keep them and i was like well i guess i mean they're the wrong ones but for free we can use them right excellent excellent sometimes you go and tell the robot that something didn't show up.

And then, because it didn't. And they're like, oh, well, why don't you wait tomorrow and talk to the robot again? You go back and talk to the robot. And then they'll say, okay, we'll send you another one. And then both the shipment that didn't show up and the new shipment comes in. So Amazon, I don't know how they're making money at Amazon. I really don't. Maybe it's just they're selling me servers because I'm paying for the servers. But wow. Isn't it basically AWS that

pays for it all at this point? No, I think they do a good job on the sales side of things, but I just don't know how they're doing that part of it. It's kind of weird. Anyway, big news from Apple this week. Apple HomePod smart speakers can now alert you a smoke or CO detector goes off in your house. The sound recognition feature was announced a while back, but it's evidently launched right now and rolling out, I guess, on first and second generation HomePods and the HomePod mini. Basically, for it to work, you turn on this feature feature you have to have a smoke or co alarms installed in your house the speakers themselves can't detect actual smoke or carbon monoxide but they will listen for the sound frequencies that come off of these alarms and send you a notification

apple actually has a couple of interesting features in here it allows you to like click on the notification and drop in and listen to what's going on in the area it in the name of privacy it'll it'll announce that somebody's listening you know but and i guess if you have a camera a home kit capable camera in the area it'll also allow you to get a live video feed uh from what's going on so if your house is burning down, you can watch it from your your phone if you got this feature turned on. So I thought it was pretty cool. Yay for I do like making like old non smart devices smart and for a free upgrade from from Apple. Hey, that's pretty good. Yeah, this is like an easy add on feature that pretty much anybody can use. Right. I mean, you just need existing smoke and co detectors and it'll work so genius idea and i'm glad more products are

coming out with this support it's a very simple thing but it really could be life-saving yeah and i believe the amazon product has this too but it was only when you armed it or something like that in the guard features i'd have to look that up but i thought they already had something like this they they do have it in in their free tier of guard it says but um they don't have the same direct integration with cameras in the home yes as as apple's giving you here uh google nest offers this as well but you have to pay for the nest subscription and ring also has it as well it's 35 but of course you have to pay for the monthly ring subscription now so this is kind of the only free-ish i guess if you if you consider how much apple tax you pay uh it's the freest version of

of of getting this feature and i don't know i i kind of like it i have all these home pods in my garage but no smoke smoke i probably should have smoked especially with those servers but it's not that important yeah this giant rack of equipment might catch on fire yeah that's that's one of the first things i put into my giant wood box i just built in my office is a smoke detector because i was like you know it's all wood and everything who knows and if you don't have the home pod there's like a do-it-yourself version a z-wave version called the eco link firefighter that does the same type of thing it's z-wave so you can add it to your home assistant or your habitat or whatever and if it you know it basically listens for the sound and then once it hears the sound it sets a trigger off and you can have whatever automation some people you know turn on the fan to their

furnace to blow air through and open unlock all the doors and turn on the lights and open the garage doors just in case you're at home, you know, it'd help you get out of the house faster. So something to consider. Yeah. Those are very popular in the, in the security industry, I guess, specifically for me, we pretty much sell one of those with every system just because instead of replacing people's smoke detectors, we just install one or two of these and we're good. We've got the whole house covered. And you can get that nice, sweet, sweet security discount on your home insurance. That's right. Did you say it was Ecolink?

E-C-O-L-I-N-K? Ecolink. E-C-O-L-I-N-K. Firefighter. Oh, I see it. And do not get the Zigbee one. It's not real Zigbee. It doesn't.

I don't know what they did. I could never get it working. But get the Z-Wave one. Yeah, and this is literally the same exact thing, but it comes in Z-Wave. I think the ones I use are 345 megahertz or whatever that is. Yes, yes. But it's literally the same shell and everything.

Exactly. Cool. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. All right, big news from Sonos. They've launched a new product. And no, it is not headphones, CJ. I'm sorry. No!

Sonos says, finally, I guess, for me, I've kind of been waiting around for this one for a while. They've announced their expansion into the commercial sector with the launch of Sonos Pro. It's a new software as a service offering and is designed to make it easier for business to deliver music in their business or across multiple locations

using a subscription-based model. Sonos Pro provides businesses with a user-friendly dashboard, enabling remote system management across various locations, commercially licensed music, personalized support, and seamless integration with existing Sonos hardware. I don't know about you guys but like almost everywhere i go it's a

small mom and pop shop or you know even uh like a hair salon or something like that you you're gonna see a sonos device sitting in there playing music and uh i kind of always looked at that and thought yeah that's probably not legal because it's not. But now for $35 a month, I guess you can have Muzak basically hooked up in your salon and don't have to worry about the, what is it, ASCAP and BMI to come giving you a fine for playing music that's not licensed. Yeah. I install a fair amount of Sonos in commercial properties and you pretty much have to have somebody sign something that's like, I don't know what you're using this for, but you have to legally, you know, get a commercial streaming service, which not that many really exist for

Sonos. So the majority of places are not going to be doing this legally. So it's a good idea to actually have something like this. $35 a month really isn't that expensive for what it is, especially with all the extra remote management features you get out of it most of the places i go in they have their own playlist on their phone playing you know because you see them you see a song they did not think was in their playlist come on and you see them run behind the bar and press a button it skips the next song they're like oh that was in my car playlist you know like so yeah i don't think it's just sonos i think anywhere people don't play commercial music that commercial stuff

no most of the time nobody's going to come around and actually look for you violating this but they would probably make a lot of money if they did i think it depends on the business yeah yeah i think it depends on the business especially if if Yeah. I think it depends on the business, especially if, if, uh, and they do, they do. I've known piano bars to get hit by ASCAP and BNI reps that, that basically turn them in. And there, there are people that are hired to go around and, and, and shut down bars and that kind of thing. So it just depends on the business. Um, and, and now that this is offered, I mean, and it's not just like the only one that was there. Like you could get a mood music and tie it in with, which is the direct derivative of Muzak. Like they bought Muzak years ago. And look at the other prices. They have a $30 and $35 plan, a $40 plan. So like it's about the same price.

You know, it just depends on kind of what you want to do. Do you want to just use the one that's built into Sonos or do you want to use one of the other ones and add it in as an app on Sonos and go that direction yeah there there's been ways to do it just Sonos is just you know a while back they did their Sonos radio thing that pushed for like their own like free music service on Sonos where you don't even have to install Pandora or Spotify or anything like that. You just play their music. This is kind of like the, what, what, where I figured they were going with it. It's just, I figured they would be there a lot faster. So probably the pandemic

slowed them down a little bit. Now all the streaming services just need to do something similar because I go, same thing. I go into a lot of businesses and doctor's offices and stuff like that and they're they're playing netflix so yep yep not supposed to do that i'm sure they do offer something similar but these things have never been like real easy or inexpensive to do right like i said majority of the places are not gonna get in trouble for this like i'm sure that there are people that go around but they're probably targeting like the kroger's and the walmarts and stuff like that more than, you know, churches and other doctor's offices. Yep. Oh, I've only ever known bars and restaurants to get hit with it.

Basically it, you know, that that's never fun. If you own a piano bar, you're not paying your licensing. And then you've got to shut down for the night. It's not a, not a good thing. Anyway, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 432. All right, we got something in the mailbag this week. It looks like a question.

For Gavin. Yeah. I might be able to answer this one too. Not Seth, I mean. It's a NAS drive. All right. This comes from David. And listener David asks,

I've always wanted to set up a NAS, so a network attached storage, hard drive on your network. It says to provide a local media server and to provide a photo backup for all of our digital pictures. My concern has always been if there's a fire,

that my NAS would also likely be damaged and lose all of the digital pictures. He's onto something here. I had the same thing. I've moved to a new house and it has an outbuilding with a conduit connection where I could run a fiber connection out to a switch in the outbuilding. This is now giving the option for an off-site nas location that could still be on my local network does unraid provide such a software option that the primary on-site nas would handle all the intensive transcoding but have a more basic nas uh that would be in the outbuilding to provide redundancy there are are there other things in the situation where i'd be worried about

or should i just keep paying two dollars per month for Google Cloud Backup? Gavin, I have opinions on this, but I want to hear what you've got to say. No, I want you to go first. You go first. So you go first, and I'll correct you. All right. Well, I guarantee I don't know what to do about Unraid, but I do have Synology, which has options to back up to cloud services

like Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2, which is much, much cheaper. I back up all of my photos from literally everything. And they all go into Backblaze. And if it saves in there, this analogy is smart enough to play. I know that those, maybe a plugin or something probably exists on Unraid as well to

do that. And that is truly offsite backup. And it costs me probably $2 a month. Okay. Maybe $2.88, I think is the last bill I saw come through. And it's terabytes of data. It's a lot. So check out those services. I think Wasabi is another, Wasabi cold storage or something like that. I don't remember what they call it, but they have different options with different price tiers for what you have. And as long as you're feeding the photos up, it's inexpensive and they just sit there on the storage and they're fine. When you start downloading is kind of when things cost, but hopefully you never have to do that. Hopefully your NAS drives are okay, but that's, that's what I would recommend. The outbuilding thing is kind of fun and something

to think about, but the problem with that is it's still on the same property. If the fire happens and it spreads to the outbuilding, then there's your, there's your backup, your backup, or if a lightning strike hits it and it just fries both of them you know it's not the fire you got to worry about it's the surges and that kind of thing so that's my opinion um gavin what you got you you pretty covered it you know like i have to i'm impressed i i agree with uh everything you said um i personally, I have multiple backups. So I actually do have a backup server on premise, but it's not really to guard against something like lightning or something. It's just to have a second copy of the data, a second media in the house. But on top of that, all my data is backed up. I use iDrive. They give you five terabytes for a really good price per year.

And I have everything back up every runs every night. There's a Docker container you can get and run on your unrate if you want. And it will back up there. And I have all my important, most important data sits on that. And that's my offsite backup. So I do have a couple of copies on top of that. You have your photos on your phone as well. You know, so I have a couple of copies of my data backups, very important, but in your case, I would keep the $2 a month for Google cloud backup. And the other reason why I like the Google one is it gives you a nice app that you can view it for with, right? So if you're backing it up to that, you still have an app. You can, um, view your photos on, or, you know, do person recognition or whatever, you know, have some fun with it. Whereas if you

didn't have that, I still am trying to find the perfect, you know, Docker container for, you know, displaying my photos to me, but still giving me all those features where it would group people together and I can search on photos, you know, so Google does it pretty well. Um, but yeah, Seth, you summed it up pretty, pretty Unraid, look at Unraid because if you're going to be doing a local media server, it's very powerful. There's so much you can do with it, especially when you start throwing a video card in there

and let it handle all the transcoding for you. You know, it will. And yeah, there's rsync. I think Duplicati can back up to an FTP server running on another box at someone else's house. You know, that's other options too. I know people running on another box at someone else's house. You know, that's other options too. I know people that have put boxes at each other's house and then just set up backups to sync to each other's box and they're good with that. Or they just back up to the other

person's Unrate server sitting at another house, right? So those are things to consider. But yeah, get one of your backups offsite, whether it's to a cloud, whether it's to a computer in a total different town or something like that, as long as it's offsite so that if you get hit by a tornado or anything, it's still safe. Yeah, I personally, I would only do the NAS if you want the media storage. I don't, maybe it's just me. I'm pretty clumsy and kind of YOLO things once in a while, but I don't trust to save my personal photos on my own NAS. I just use Google photos for, you know, the two or $10 or

whatever I pay per month for the family account. And I love that because I can go through and search everything, but I have my unread server for like my actual Plex server and stuff like that. So my personal opinion is if you're just doing it for the photos, I wouldn't do it. I would just do some kind of online backup if you actually want to use it for the media and Plex server and stuff. And getting into it is fun, but be prepared to spend a lot of money

because hard drives are expensive. No, they're not. I mean... They are when you have like 10, 10 terabyte hard drives you know that kind of adds up pretty quickly so if you're if you're like gavin where you delete things which is yeah yeah impossible for me so it's not as expensive but those bits i mean i might as well just have like a cd burner you know something like it just may as well be permanent because i'm never i'm never

gonna delete it like just give me something that just can record it and and that'll be it forever i'm not gonna delete it it's gonna stay me something that just can record it and that'll be it forever. I'm not going to delete it. It's going to stay. Yeah, I only deleted stuff recently because the only way I can upgrade my server at this point is by buying 12 terabyte or larger drives. And with Unraid, you have to have the parity drive plus the first drive.

And I'm not spending $500 on hard drives right now. Well, the good thing about Unraid is the parity drive has to be the biggest. So if you only want to add another four terabytes in, as long as your parity drive is 12 terabytes, you're fine. You can slowly creep in four terabytes at a time if you want. That's true, but I don't have any more room in my computer case. Time to upgrade.

Come on. Let's device. Yeah. Time to upgrade. Yeah. The 321 one backup strategy three copies of your data two on site one off site it's the way to go i guess that kind of like people don't like that as much so there's there's different types of backups that you can do now but as long as three copies exist like um I know we're talking about Unraid, but, and,

and Synology is a different thing. I do like this Synology cause they're kind of like just their own little hard drive type devices. There's less I have to think about with them in that situation. They're not performance driven, like what you can get with Unraid. So like if I, you can run dockers on them

but i don't think you can run them very well on there like they're very tiny little processors in these things uh unless you pay a lot of money i think they have some that are bigger yeah they're very expensive for what you get i mean it's nice because it's like an all-in-one solution you really don't have to tinker with it and everything but you are going to pay a premium for that functionality yeah and they do have photo management apps like built in so like you say you load that app on there and say this is the full the drive with my my or the share whatever with my photos in it and it does basically um not a it's supposed to be pretty good it's just like google photos except doesn't quite have the smarts that google has you know it i think it does groups

the people together sometimes um but they're getting better with it. And it's supposed to be a pretty good thing. And they have the thing where you can, I've thought about this too, like you can ship one of your Synologies to, you know, a relative's house or something to say, hey, plug this in. And then they can basically sync backups between themselves. Either, you know, you could let them use a little share or something to say, Hey, plug this in. And then they, they can basically sync backups between themselves. Either, you know, you could let them use a little bit, a share or something on there.

It could sync to yours and yours could sync to theirs. And they make it really easy. Like that's one thing about Synology is a lot of the features they have are just like point and click dumb and easy. And there's really no thinking about it, which I do appreciate that from time to time, especially when my in-rate server is crashing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It really depends on how tech savvy you are and how deep in the weeds you really want to get you know and if

you're going with a backup solution my only other advice is have something that notifies you when things are going good or going to bad right so my main backup that it does every night every morning it sends me an email letting me know if it's successful um it doesn't do much, but I've got, there's been mornings where it actually failed or it was failing for the whole week. And I realized it was because it was looking for something that wasn't there anymore. So I fit, I was able to fix it. All my computers in my house back up to my Unraid server. And if they fail, I get an email or a notification that, Hey, they failed to back up. So then I can rectify whatever situation it is, right? So just make sure you have some notification monitoring it. And then you want to test your backups every now and then to make sure that, hey, I can restore this backup and

get to these files. Because you don't want to find out that you can't get to them at the time when you need them. So just some things to keep in mind. Yeah, yeah, that I'm kind of lazy on the on the computer backup case and that's i i use backblaze and i just run their little thing and it backs up all my files to their thing but yeah what has happened before is i've deleted something and and like oh i need that file back i shouldn't have deleted i deleted a week ago well it uploaded to backblaze a week ago i can still go back and get it um but there have, what you're saying is so true, you have to test this from time to time. I don't know how I could do that with a computer backup,

but you do need to know that your backups are good because it did happen to me once where the backup I needed to restore was not good. It wasn't in a good state and I had no options. It's kind of start over from that point. I did, I was able to recover a lot of my files, but there was about a week where the stuff I was missing completely. So yeah, luckily I didn't do much that week, I guess. Didn't affect me very much. But I would be devastated if I lost all my photos. And I could totally understand that.

And that's why I don't trust anything at my house other than just storage here and then sending it up to these fancy Back backplate servers that they have data centers of. All right, moving on here. We do have a pick of the week this week. This is kind of fun. I ran across this video of the DIY Smart Organizer. And this is one of those little drawer organizer things that you see people have in their garages with all the little nuts and bolts and everything.

And he made this every little shelf in there. If you imagine, there's probably 20 of them, I guess. Maybe more. Every little shelf in there has an LED behind it and he can use an app that he made to find what he's looking for and it will direct him to the correct drawer to open, which is clever because when you have one of these, most of the time when you're using them, you're just like pulling the thing out, looking inside. Nope, that's not what I'm pulling the thing out. And that's not what I want. And the video is great because there's a little surprise at the end. And we'll put a link to the video and

Jesse Gavin laughing. He must've gotten to it. And if you scroll down to the comments, he's like, yeah, I just couldn't. I was like, that's that's it i wasn't gonna try and redo that just because that happened so uh it's really good there's there's a little uh what do you call it uh malfunction at the very end so it's a cool idea but honestly it takes a lot of discipline to be able to like categorize all that not just that but put them back in the same spot you took them out or put like so many times when I'm in the middle of a project, I'll, I'll, I'll open up the one I thought that I pulled that screw from and I'll put it back in that one. And, you know, later on, I'll find out my screws are all mixed up because I'd never put them back in the same one or, you know, like, or I didn't put this in the right slot, you know? So it'll take a lot of discipline

that would never work for me you know i'm i'm the open every drawer and figure out where it is type of guy that's what i do with all of my stuff in my garage and i still can't find it yeah that's like my kitchen you know i'm looking for a pot i open every cupboard and look for it it's always the last cupboard this is a good one not only is it a clever little project there's a really funny thing that happens at the very end while he's demoing this thing. And after setting up demos

and I've been kind of working on training presentations and videos, things for some stuff we're working on at work, I can totally understand. I understand. You get to the end of it, everything went perfect, except that very thing at the end, and nah, hit publish. It's going out too good too

good i will put a link to that in the show notes um all right well if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the weeks or great ideas for organization or the show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates this week. Gavin, Home Assistant has the Home Assistant GPT plugin. Have you gotten that installed and are you asking it to do things? No, no, I'm not. I'm not messing with that yet. You know, like the GPT is nice. It's cool concept. But when it comes to home um not home assistants but like smart assistants it's all about the hardware you know like you're gonna need something with a good mic

you know and the logic behind you know if you have multiple mics and you know which one picks up the audio etc etc right um the gpt is making it easy i guess um a lower what do they call it barrier to entry lowering the bar, yeah. Yeah, when it comes to integrating a smart assistant into the home. And I'm pretty sure it's going to be a big player when home assistant gets more into that voice part this year. They'll probably have a lot, you know, like of integration with the GPT. But I'm just waiting for it to mature a little bit. Right. I want it to mature. A lot of this is almost like still POC or this cool look at

something I did, you know, wait until it matures a lot and then see like reliable, reliably what it can do. I I'm more afraid that, you know, if, if they're going to be feeding it all Reddit data, uh, this thing's going to hate me. It's going to be a, it's going to be feeding it all Reddit data. This thing's going to hate me. It's going to be a jerk to me. You know, I'll be like, I don't know. You're doing your automations wrong. Why are you doing it like that? Yeah.

I can't believe you spent $20 on this. Yeah, I'll be like, hey, hey, home assistant, what's the weather like outside? Well, can't you look out the window? You know, or can't you buy a you know i see how it is i i i let a robot mower in my house and you you're like oh you better treat it right you won't even let the robots in your house my house is full of robots i just i'm just selectively not the smart ones not the ones not the ones that think for themselves those Those I'm not letting in my house yet. You know, I'm letting the ones that won't question me into my house for now,

you know, but I treat them well so they can send the message back that I was a good, you know, robot guy. It's in there. It's in the code. When they come to take over the world. There's an API for it.

I'm sure. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Be nice to your robots. We do have a little bit of follow-up uh uh last week we talked a little bit about tailscale and i kind of mentioned that i'd used it and thought it was you know the bee's knees for doing vpns and how easy it was to set up a friend of

the show robert spivak wrote into our slack channel and he actually did a video on how to set up a uh a tailscale vpn so you know we don't have to explain how to do that and everything just watch this video and you get some more info on that and i guess this needs that sorry this week they also announced that uh in their usage based stuff that they went from like having three devices for free you can go up to 100 devices for free so that's that's awesome yeah tailscale is very popular with people i mean we talked about it last week, but it was just interesting because I saw this and they're making their free plans even better for people. And that's awesome because more people get on this.

I was also hearing that they're playing around with, I can't remember what the name of it, but they're testing something called Tailscale Tunnel, I think it's called, where it may allow you to expose like um a web app or something like that on your tail scale out to the internet to somebody that's not on cloudflare or in rock yeah yeah like that type of thing which is kind of cool to think about it too right so they're doing a lot and they're just getting better and they're getting more popular yeah i

i had a project at work i called these guys about because fairly early on it's the sales guy was nice he was like yeah we really don't have anything that'll fit you know gave some reason why but he was like you know you just use whatever like we don't even he's like we don't we don't keep up with device counts like it says three but you can just do however you want so i guess i guess the secret has been just like just don't tell anybody maybe we should edit that i mean it's 100 now has been just like just don't tell anybody maybe we should edit that i mean it's 100 now who cares like clearly they don't so yeah but he he was like you can just use how many you know they they are still in startup mode as far as it goes and and i think the the

from what i gathered from him from what he said about the ceo he's like he's just he's this is a big toy and he loves every bit of like he's playing with you like that week they announced the uh tail scale there's like an SSH thing that they added on to make tell uh tell SSH SSH connections in devices like native to tail scale it's really cool so he did they just keep playing and doing more stuff with this thing and it's all based on that that wire guard vpn which is it it's easy to set up and manage and it's this is just kind of wrapper on top of it so cool stuff um and then i had one little update project that i was working on i posted on mastodon so i'll i'll put a link to that in the show notes but i had a a switch on my desk that had fans

and I was sitting here listening to it and it just was so loud and it would crank up from time to time, like the fans. I had three things plugged into the dang thing and I was like, nope, it's got to go. So I tossed, I had a Ubiquiti, what is this thing? It's like a, it's an old one.

It's like one of the little eight port switches that was made for business. And for whatever reason, they made these perfect little rack ears for it. And they're just little stubby rack ears. They weren't a full 19 inches wide. Like the thing is probably 10 inches wide. And there's nine X-Riches.

Well, I started digging around in all of my junk that I have next to all the old equipment that I have. And I found a Cisco SG 300 and it had rack ears on it. So I took those and put them together with some bolts that I found in one of those drawer things that I have. And then I, I, I was able to extend it the extra, you know, a couple inches, six inches or nine inches or whatever it needs to, uh, to, to reach the end of the thing. I made it my own little rack years, I guess, as I'm trying to say, and I'm, I'm proud of myself because that's really good. Yeah. I really, that's really all I got. You got to spray paint a silver, but no, no, I don't even want the silver switch here anymore. Got to spray paint it, spray paint the switch black. Like this thing's

old. It's, it's been used somewhere. I this thing's old it's it's been used somewhere i grabbed it from somebody's house or something when they were throwing it away so it's it's serving a purpose right now to basically power the like touch screen on my desk and that's it so as soon as i get some new uh new stuff from work they're supposed to be shipping me some new switches so the new versions are all coming in so I guess you can run those in fanless mode. Hopefully I can, because if they have fans, man, it was just too loud right here. It was just too loud.

Had to go. Bye. TJ, you got any projects you're working on? Got any fans you're turning, you're killing? Not this week. It's a pretty lame week. I'm just getting back into the flow of everything, really. So nothing fun going on.

I did replace the speakers in the van and installed the radio but i think we talked about the radio last week so got new speakers though you're really really decking out the van man yeah you know i i i'm not really like an audiophile or anything but you just you know when you have terrible speakers and the the speakers in a stock van are not good so i got i traded up my hold my old uh head unit that was in the van for two sets of speakers one set of the speakers went into the van one set's going to go into the wife's car this weekend and all is good um but i when i installed the ones in the van initially i didn't realize that they made like a special bracket for it because the door itself isn't actually deep enough to hold a speaker. And so the speaker is externally mounted on the door with this like giant, like three inch tall bracket.

And so I got them installed and they're all like rigged up with like a TV mounting spacers that and everything. So I'm not the only one has done this weird, this weird rack. Yeah. Oh, no, definitely not. But you know, when I, when I went to go close the door and I heard the speaker slam into my window, I was like, ah, I should probably go ahead and just get the proper bracket. So that's what I spent some of my day to day doing. I love doing things twice. It's just, it's the best. Yeah. The best. The. The way you know you got it done right. It's all right when you're not getting paid for it, though, so that way you don't have to waste your money. Yeah, yeah.

Just waste your time. It's worth nothing. It's infinite, you know? Yeah. All right, guys. I think it's going to wrap up this week, but we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show,

and 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 help 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... There's been quite a few posts in here recently about that really cold day you guys had in Canada, Gavin, where everybody turned blue on TV for some reason. That was fun.

It's been just a pretty good post. We've been kind of talking about recently... What were we talking about uh recently what were you talking about that richard dug up one of those um home seer apps and posted it and i'm gonna have to delete that photo out of there that interface was awful oh so something today i learned i didn't realize that cat 6a stand stood for augmented category 6 cable so if you didn't know that as well, welcome to my world.

I knew that E, but in the E enhanced or something like that. Yeah, E is enhanced. I didn't, why didn't they just stick with the same, you know, terminology though? Like they just, in the order of it's completely wrong too,

but you know, augmented cat six, there you go. Today you learned. All right. And if you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, I totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating

in a podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Take care.