HomeTech.fm - Episode 436 - It's Never Going to be Good

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

On this week's show: TP-Link is boasting some crazy speeds with Wi-Fi 7, Amazon 'pops' out a new product, a new free* TV for people who want more ads, Wemo says they will or won't fix a security flaw on a discontinued product, Ring's former CEO has the Midas touch, and a massive rant on Matter. All this and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 19th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Hoxton. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast where every week we talk about home technologies, we talk about matter, we talk about smart thermostats, door locks, lighting, all sorts of fun stuff. I need to swap out this script, this old script from Chad. I think he used to have a better one before.

We need to make Chad write us a new one now that he likes the show, I guess. I mean, I don't know. I don't think Chad likes the show, does he? I thought he was just going to write a terrible intro for us. That could be I mean, I don't know. I don't think Chad likes the show, does he? I thought he was just going to write a terrible intro for us. That could be the case. I don't know. I thought he was talking terrible things about us. He definitely did. Outdated

and not useful and whatever else. And I just want to reiterate that that was before Gavin and I joined. So that was, it's pretty much you, Seth. Well, we'll have to use the new what chad for model or whatever it is and see what they have to say about you guys but yeah somebody needs to actually let us access their uh subscription i don't want to pay for it i have one through work

using it for something oh i'll uh i'll poke around and see if i can figure out how to do that we use it for well i was using it for a chat bot at work to see if i could make it say something that was smart uh but all it would do is summarize like the ticket and i was like that's done so speaking of chat the hub has been busy lately i don't know if you guys have been hanging in there i can't keep up with the canadians that have taken over gavin i think this is your fault yeah we're a chatty bunch you know you know what? It's because in Canada we hear about all the cool stuff, but we can't get our hands on any of it.

We like to support each other and ask each other where can you get this from or what do you use for this? You guys in the States have everything. We got several new members this week, I feel like. One of them has made me already spend money.

So I feel like that's what the hub is really good at, is giving you ideas on what you can buy and kind of makes you jealous sometimes. So you spend some money and you get some cool stuff. One of the users was talking about the Flume 2 Smart home water monitor and leak detector and this thing's 250 bucks and you basically just wrap it around your your plumbing and it detects the water going through and everything like that it'll give you a pretty accurate reading supposedly and the user that recommended it he only had it for a couple days but uh seemed to have pretty positive uh reviews about it so far so i went

ahead and bought it bro we'll get that installed hopefully next week and see what it can do for us nice but it won't show you your neighbor's water usage so well you know i'm not that creepy gavin i don't need to know what my neighbors are using if that's what you're into that's what you're into uh hilarious uh well speaking of new users we do have do have a new friend of the show who's joined at the $5 level. And that is Josh Henrik. Herrick? Herrick. No N in there.

So thanks, Josh. $5 and up level. You get a big shout out here on the show. So thank you so much for helping Gavin get to Cedia. Yeah. Flights are expensive from Canada, I guess. can't pay in maple syrup or canadian bacon i don't know well no i'm using my points you know so hopefully there's a hotel out there that i can get to if not you know a couch somewhere maybe i'll just rent a car and sleep in that we'll see yeah i like you but i

don't i don't think the wife is gonna like if you sleep in our room so you're gonna have to find your own way unfortunately not just a cot at the bottom of the bed you know like just throw a pillow down there for me that's all i need you know yeah as long as you don't move or make any noise or don't exist in the room i think we're good does your room have a balcony it's warm out there i'll sleep outside it does but yeah it does but you you have to get there without going through the the hotel so what floor are you on i i don't know we won't know till we get there you just have to guess i guess i'll pre-arrange the first floor for you too good we do have a uh a slight discount code for some hotels uh the same one i'm staying i

think it's like three miles away from the convention so you can use that i think it's under 200 a night which is relatively cheap for what i was looking at but yeah we're gonna have we have some planning to do i i don't i don't know how much planning i'm gonna be able to do in the next like week or two because I'm getting ready for Infocom. But after that, it's a straight downhill towards CDN. We'll have to talk about a party and all that fun stuff. Get together. Get everybody interested in meeting back up again

because it was a lot of fun. A couple of times we were able to do that. I know we did it in San Diego. We did it in Denver. I think in Dallas too. So lots of fun. We need to do it again and get everybody back in the same room. Drinking, eating, having a good time.

It was always fun to do. Yeah. And Seth and I will be at Infocom. Uh, what is that? June 15th or something like that. Yeah. 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, somewhere in there. I'm only going the first like actual day.

So, but, uh, if you're, if you're going to Infocomm, hit us up. Maybe we'll hang out or get some beers or something like that. Yeah, I will be at booth 4866 or 4688. I don't know. One of those two. Numbers. Blackwire, that's what it is. Yeah, Blackwire.

Look at the back row. That's where we'll be because we decided to go really late. And that's all that was left. So hopefully you will. I'm sure you got, I'm sure you got a discounted rate on it because it's in the very back. Oh no, no, we did not probably even more expensive actually. Cause you waited. So exactly. No discounts left. Oh man. So yeah. If you're in Orlando, uh, for Infocom and, uh and uh i guess it's it's less than a month out now yeah um yeah swing by the booth say hi tj may be there we'll make him a booth babe and have him hang out and help yeah yeah i bought some new short shorts so i think we can make that work

no no no crop tops yet though i gotta work on that yeah i mean just you have to wear that when you come to florida it's too hot yeah exactly gavin aren't you glad cd is in denver not florida it's still gonna be hot isn't it i don't know yeah i think denver is still gonna be warm isn't it it's mixed uh there have been years where it's warm but uh i i remember one time i got there it was really hot and then it rained and it was really cold. Like the next like I had to go to TJ Maxx and buy a jacket because I didn't I don't own a jacket. And I still have that jacket, actually, because we don't use them. All right. Well, I'm going to go there and pretend like I'm a pro installer and that I belong here at Cydia, you know.

But I'm always going to throw in, does it integrate with Home Assistant? You know, and I'm going to ask them, I'm going with home assistant you know and i'm gonna ask them i'm gonna say you know the pro market's really itching for home assistant and see what kind of answers i get well you'll fit in you'll fit into everybody else that's acting like a professional so nobody will even question you absolutely just throwing a couple matter questions once oh okay yeah if you say matter they'll know though it's a tell right off the bat matt matter doesn't matter they'll be like what's this guy talking about i've never heard of it before yeah yeah yeah all right well we have a number of home tech headlines tonight so what do you guys say we uh we get started let's do it let's

do it all right first up and do you guys need faster wi-fi is your wi-fi 6 or 6e not fast enough well there's only one solution out there right now, Wi-Fi 7. Now you just need a router and TP-Link is ready to take your money despite the spec not even being finished yet. TP-Link is launching its first ever pair of Wi-Fi 7 routers. One's a mesh system called the Deco BE85. And there's a single router slash access point combo unit called the Archer BE800. I guess TP-Link sent some samples and some sample data over to The Verge about

testing the BE85 with a OnePlus 11 5G phone, which I've never heard of, but we did look it up. It is a Wi-Fi 7 phone. And if true, the numbers look actually pretty good. The phone was able to get over 3,000 megabits per second throughput with being just a few feet away from the main router and only dropping to a little over 300 megabits a second at the farthest point away so not not terrible wi-fi 60 routers get that gigabit like 1000 megabits a second at really close range so 3000 that's three times faster i guess i mean it's it's way faster than than most i will say this american uh isps provide i mean canada you still got a ways to go, right? But not bad, not bad.

The BE85 is available right now at Best Buy in a three-pack combo, and it's $1,500, so not very cheap for that. And the $600 TP-Link B800 is also available at Best Buy. And I think you can buy them on Amazon or pre-order them on Amazon as well. So if you're interested in getting that Wi-Fi 7 and you've got this one phone on the face of the planet

that actually has Wi-Fi 7, head on out and get that 3,000 megabits a second. I didn't even know we were on Wi-Fi 6 yet. Like, are devices out there for Wi-Fi 6? Actually, I... Gavin actually just found out he has a Wi-Fi 6 yet. Are devices out there for Wi-Fi 6? Actually, I... Gavin actually just found out he has a Wi-Fi 6 access point. Yeah, and this is how...

I don't pay attention to Wi-Fi anymore because ever since I put the UniFi system in, everything just works, right? But I had to buy a new access point and I didn't even realize it was Wi-Fi 6. Never thought about it. And I just realized my iPhone 12 is connecting via Wi-fi 6 to only that

access point so it doesn't really honestly it doesn't really make sense for me for wi-fi 6 or probably for anybody in the regular home for wi-fi 6 or wi-fi 7 but it seems like you know we're not even we haven't even reached wi-fi 6 yet it feels like now we're already talking about the next thing hey i'm just i'm just glad this this thing has the appropriate ports on it and stuff. I mean, it's actually got a fiber port on there. It looks like a 10 gig Ethernet port as well. It looks like two of them maybe. I mean, so at least they're putting some thought into this, but it's not even a real standard yet.

So whatever they release now probably isn't going to be like in the official standard. Yeah. You got to have faster ports because, you know, this this gigabit networking stuff is no good anymore. This is garbage. You got it. You got to at least be on the two point five gigabit, especially for your computer and your router. And if you've got 10 gig Internet coming in, you got to you got to have that 10 gig port. So, well it's like and it's just annoying because like products like the euro 6e have like one 2.5 giga port port and then one one giga port and it's like okay well that doesn't really serve any purpose so i don't think these serve any purpose for most people and even if you i guess if you had a fast internet coming in, right? Like if you say you had five gig down and could actually take advantage of this in some way, shape or form with a wired connection, you could stand next to the ugly thing that is, well, I guess the mesh one is not that bad.

It's like, wow, I can't, I can't believe you think this thing is ugly. It's got a really cool display on it. Show the logo and stuff. Looks like an X. I mean, it could be like a like a super villain logo or something it's got curves seth curves yeah the other ones look like a towel holder i guess like a paper towel roll if you just set it out that's okay i guess but that's the mesh ones look like paper towel rolls. And the other one looks like a big giant X thing like TJ was describing.

It looks horrible. Anyway, if you can stand next to this thing and feel the radiation coming off of it, I guess. Yeah, you can get that 3000 megabits of down. But if you're across the house, it really doesn't matter. You may as well just be on something else. Well, that's why you got to spend $1,500 and get the three pack, Seth. Come on. I guess.

$1,500 for some mesh Wi-Fi that's crazy I mean you could just buy like a proper Wi-Fi setup at that point and get more reliable I mean like a UDM Pro with like three access points would be what seven nine eleven hundred dollars or so yeah I mean there we sell some commercial access points that are $1,500 easy and you only need one where in some cases like this, you'd need three, but they're not also not going to give you 3000 megabits. They're not Wi-Fi seven yet. So it's coming. Wi-Fi seven will be here next year, I think. And just check out that sweet design, you know, the seven with the, on the paper towel holder dispenser thing. I mean, it's just, it's, it's such a classy looking device. I could see this in a multimillion house.

That was sarcasm. No, I picked up on it. I just want to make sure everybody knows. It's like, oh, I spilled some coffee. Can you get me some paper towels? No, it's not working. No, that's my 500 router uh yeah three packs you come up to 9600 square feet so not bad 1500 9600 square feet i guess we're gonna have to have like

a price for square foot database for these wi-fi for new wi-fi stuff yeah i mean because we were talking about it um with one of our partners that sells Wi-Fi stuff and I guess the Wi-Fi 7 stuff is coming but the price there's going to be some sticker shock I think I'm a lot on the

Wi-Fi 7 stuff especially at first I mean look at the TP-Link like what would a discounted brand is $1,500 for a three pack like that's

way more than most people are going to expect and when you're talking about enterprise grade stuff like it's going to be way up there. So I don't know. It'll be interesting. Like we have to decide if you actually need Wi-Fi 7.

And you don't. You don't. Yeah. Stick with the 6. 6 is good. Unless you have the OnePlus 11, the only phone that has it. If you have that, then go ahead. ahead knock yourself out if you don't have that phone it's probably not worth it just yet you know what if you wanted to future proof yourself

you could but i would still hold off until the standards at least finalized and then get those devices those wi-fi 7 devices and just and just don't i mean honestly like unless you're some super hardcore person that needs the speed you probably don't need this fast wi-fi speed i feel like an old man at this point just because like people keep talking about like upgrading their wi-fi to like five gigabit you know and all this stuff and it's just like a majority of people don't even come close to like a gigabit so if you're if you're asking if you need this you you probably don't need it. I'm looking to see if there's an article here from HowToGeek in April. Oh, this is April of last year. I'm trying to figure out if there's a list of Wi-Fi 7 devices.

So there's an article over here at HistoryComputer.com talking about what devices are Wi-Fi 7. Let's see. Qualcomm, I guess, has the chips coming out that have Wi-Fi 7. I guess this is a Qualcomm thing. So that makes sense why the Qualcomm-powered phone and TP-Link specifically actually support Wi-Fi 7. But I don't know if there's any client devices out there on that phone.

I guess that's it, huh? Well, go buy a phone from this one. What was it? One link. One plus. And then one plus. And I'm sure the, like the Snapdragon Qualcomm powered phones will start getting this wifi stuff as they get released.

Like I'm sure that like Samsung phones will have it right. Cause they use Qualcomm don't they? Uh, yeah. Well, and that's the thing, is that it's a Qualcomm chip that actually has the Wi-Fi 7 in it right now, and that's what OnePlus is using. Yeah. So, I mean, it's going to come to other devices.

I think it's what everybody's using. Well, unless you're a cheap, really cheap device, then you use MediaTek, but... And the phone isn't bad. You know, it's $700 for the phone, so you're going to pay more for your Wi-Fi router than you are for this phone. The Google Pixel probably has Wi-Fi 7, the new one that just came out.

The Pixel Fold. Don't know about the Fold. The Fold, it's only Wi-Fi three and a half. Oh, that makes sense. And it's $1,800. So it'll pair nicely with your toilet paper roll Wi-Fi 7 routers. All right, let's move on here. Amazon is popping out a new dot this week.

It's updated the Echo Dot, lowering the price, kind of. The Echo Dot's currently priced at $50 and the new Echo Pop is $10 less at $40, which kind of puts it more in line with the older and often discounted third generation Echo Dot. We talked about this a bunch before the show. TJ, you were like, no, it's a hundred bucks. The fourth generation Echo Dot, no, is a hundred dollars. And the fifth generation Echo Dot is $50. I don't know. It's very confusing. There's just so many.

There's too many, you know? How many do you guys need? Make like five. And stop selling the old ones. Like they still have the third generation for sale on their website. That's the same price as this new one. The third generation does have

the three and a half millimeter line output. I guess that's, if you needed that, that's really the only reason to buy that thing for $40. Otherwise, this one's a pretty good upgrade. I think it's got, it comes in four different colors, lavender, blue, let's just say purple, teal, black and white. I'm not talking about there's silly marketing names.

Come on. You got to say the proper color, Seth. No, thank you. It doesn't have the smart home stuff. And but it does have Eero built in. So if you wanted to extend your mesh network, this is a really quick and easy way to do it for $40. So not bad.

You know, I was looking at these and my first thought was they were introducing a number of new features with these things and you're going to have to upgrade your existing shows or, you know, Echo Dots to get some of these new features. I guess this is the way they're going to make money off of it. Add features that are going to force you to upgrade. Yeah. And honestly, like we kind of saw that happening with matter and stuff anyway. And I think it's just the natural evolution of tech, especially when they make the devices so cheap anyway, you're going to be forced to buy new ones at some point to get new

features. It's just, I guess a matter of if those features matter to you. So I have about six of these in my house. Well, not the older ones, right? I just don't know what i'm going

to do with the older ones now if i upgrade them to the newer ones i'll probably buy one see if the features are any worth it or anything like that and then go from there you can always give it to the old people in your life oh yeah i could give it to my mom and you can you know talk through that instead of having to actually call her there you go they have like the broadcast feature like Google does so you can yell at people remotely. Yeah, they have the drop-in feature, et cetera, you know, the check-in feature.

But, you know, give her someone to talk to too. Some of the new features you're talking about are like the AI thing we talked about last week where they're going to be upgrading the voice processing inside of it, I guess. It seems like a decent update to the product especially if you don't need that three and a half millimeter out to go to like an audio system or anything like that which most people didn't let's be honest no i wonder what the sound quality is like on these two like because they're they're stood up in a way like

before it used to be flat and the mics seemed to be around it so this one stood up now it's more directional it looks like yeah the the one above this one i think is 60 it has a clock on it it would have been nice if they had been able to do the little led clock display on the way this sits up like you're talking about but uh unfortunately it's their entry level for echo pop is the entry level so i guess can't worry too much about it but yeah i am curious how it sounds too i finally went to best buy and and and tested out all the uh sonos devices and the new uh what was the arrow the new era era 300 it was okay it was right next to the five and and the 5 sounded better.

I mean, it's $50 to $100 more. I don't remember. Yeah, I think it's like $100. It seemed like that was worth it, just to do that instead of the era 300. I'd imagine they're just going to retire the 5. Yeah, I don't know. Who knows? They haven't updated it in quite a while.

Yeah, it seemed to have more highs on the five. The five in the 300 didn't kind of sound kind of mushy, but I don't know. I was in the best buy. I did finally hear the little Bluetooth speaker they had, which, you know. Oh, the Roam? Yeah. No, no. Is that the Roam?

The little, little small. They have the Roam, which is the very small one, or they have the Move, which is the larger one. The Move, I've heard. I liked it. The Roam, for what it is, I guess I liked it too, but a bit pricey. What Sonos isn't. Well, and I heard that one, the Bluetooth is very flaky on it,

so I would recommend not buying it. We have a need for a Bluetooth speaker from time to time, but I have like five of them, and just randomly find them rolling around in my garage. And when I need a Bluetooth speaker, I just grab one of those. And it's typically, even though I haven't plugged it in and charged it in two years, it typically works for the entire time that we need it. So just some random Chinese thing we bought off Amazon. I mean, they work great. So anyway, moving on here.

This story is depressing here. There's a new type of TV coming for your Samsung LG and Vizio televisions. It's a completely free TV if you don't count the price of your attention or personal data. Tele, it's a company created by Pluto TV co-founder Aya Pozen. It offers a TV that makes up for basically the non-existent price tag by showing constant advertisements in a second smaller display. The company calls this thin strip. It's basically like, think of it as like maybe a strip of a TV that mounts or sits below your TV or maybe above it. I'm not sure. But it's like a little smart display that basically has advertisements and maybe a widget displaying sports scores or something like that. Weather, news, that kind of thing.

Stock prices. I don't know. It's like a little ticker display, I guess. But ads could pop up on the far right side. We'll put a link to the story here. You can look at the picture and kind of get what they're trying to do. This is the story here in The Verge, and they have an interesting quote that I pulled out of here. It says, while the ads shouldn't interrupt whatever you're watching on the main TV display, telly's chief strategy officer, officer Dallas Lawrence tells the verge that ads might utilize both displays when you're not using the main TV. So when the main TV is, and this is a quote from the guy is not in use, the ad unit could just come to life and connect them both up in a fun way.

It's really, really gross. Uh, Lawrence also gross. Lawrence also says that the telly is also working on a telly rewards program that could reward users with gift cards for services like Netflix or Starbucks for participating in things like on-screen polls. Ew. But I mean, Gavin, this could work great for you. Instead of popping up on the TV, you could just put this next this other TV off to the side or down, come on, you know, like I should have just waited. But it's going to start off all nice, you know, maybe get one ad here, one ad there. But I can predict in a year's time, the TV will just be full of ads. You'll have ads all around and the picture will actually be one third of the size of the screen or something like that. Right. Like there's no way they're not going to kill you with ads.

They'll just add one more, right? I'll just wait for the hackers to reverse engineer it and find a way to block all this stuff and we get free TVs. I was just kind of joking. LG's not going to turn off their own ads just because you have this thing installed. LG's going to keep their ads

and you'll get these ads at the same time. So it'll be like a double whammy. Like you'll have the the Pizza Hut ad down at the bottom on the bottom screen. You'll have whatever is overlaid on top of the LG on the thing you're trying to watch on top. There you go. That's the experience everybody wants. Ads, ads, more ads. Please send them to me. I can only see this being like a thing that works in a commercial space. Like if you had some kind of bar or restaurant or something like that, where you're watching a lot of sports, this kind of makes sense to me because you can have the main game thing going on, you know, sport ball and all that good stuff on the main screen.

And on the little ticker screen, you could have little, you know, scores from other games and whatever else is going on. And there'd be some kind of commercial element to it where, you know, scores from other games and whatever else is going on. And there'd be some kind of commercial element to it where, you know, bar owners would get paid for how long the TV's on or something like that. But I feel like this is a super hard sell for residential people. I mean, a 55 inch TV now, like a normal one, not this monstrosity is like, you know, two to $500, depending on how good a quality you want. So I don't see why anybody in the residential space would pick this up when TVs are already cheap enough. You know, it would be nice if they gave you the feature afterwards to buy it out in

a way. Right. So you really did not like the ads. You could just, you know, buy out the TV and get rid of the ads. And at least you have the option. You're going to miss out on that sweet RMR though. It's not a normal size TV. Like it's, it kind of goes back what I was about to say when DJ, when you were like, why don't they just sell a regular size TV? Like sell a 55 inch TV for free or $20 or whatever.

And then have the bar owner install it and then put your ads on top of the picture. Like, or on the, on this, like I see that all the time with, uh, where, where they have like a digital signage experience and they put ads down on the side strip or on the bottom or something like that. Because with this, you're not losing the game, Seth. You just, you're not, you're not losing the game and you're getting some, some bonus features. I guess.

Yeah. You're not, you're not getting the the whole the whole 55 inch or 60 inch tv you're getting maybe a 40 inch tv on your tv plus ads so i guess that makes sense but i don't know this this this i hope is dead on arrival it's you know it's like somebody saw the like the samsung frame tvs and they're like you know that's that's a really good idea how can we make that worse you know samsung's already making it worse by giving you the two piece mount and then they they change the mount every single year and they give you that vcr size box what can we do to make this experience worse ads that's how we can make it worse and we can still give you that same big box so it's probably going to have that same obnoxious box that the

frame tv has it's going to have a silly mount with it. And then you're going to deal with that. So they just, they've made the TV worse somehow, but it does say future proofed on the side of it. So, I mean, I I'm sold, you know,

if they can make my TV future proof, then maybe that's worth it. Yeah. Well, looking, I guess it's not really clear to me in the story. And then they have a little picture that kind of has dimensions and stuff on it,

but it looks like this is like an all in one unit. So it has two screens, a soundbar that's in the middle and then a little small ticker screen at the bottom. Well, it looks like it's got a little camera thing, too. Oh, they got to watch you. They want to see what you're doing. Yeah. Hmm. It does.

This has HD camera for video calling. So because I mean, that's what everybody does. I mean, in in 2013 when they were making tvs with pop-up cameras they were so popular so i am glad they brought that back yeah and honestly like that's how i can see it in a commercial space right is because they have the video calling feature too and like nobody's doing that in their house but they might do it in like a small business it's not like they couldn't put the camera in the sound bar they have you know stop it and and now you got me thinking, how could they make this worse?

You know, like how long before we got to accept cookies? On your TV. Before we got to close the pop-up windows over the program, you know. It's going to start off as a little ad at the side, but it's just going to get worse from there. Because they're going to have to generate more money at some point it also says on in the blurry picture that i'm trying to zoom into that the hd camera is for interactive something i'm pretty sure that's advertisements so uh probably ai stuff oh yeah gotta be ai oh well you know when i get one this summer because i've rsvp'd for one i'll let you know how it goes what a world what a world who wants this besides tj

oh gross well i mean they have 500 000 units who doesn't want one i guess it's better than no tv if you don't have a tv cat for the tv get a free tv and watch some ads i don't know about that but i mean it's like take this thing and just store it until this company goes out of business and plug it in it should be fine right now they don't never turn on i mean because some of the some of the tvs now they require you to connect to the internet before you can actually use them so that that wouldn't surprise me at all if you have to connect to their servers before you can actually use this as a tv somebody will reverse engineer it trust me so so i guess you they'll charge your credit card

five hundred dollars it looks like and then uh if you if you're not actually watching your tv or sharing your access to your data data it's cost you 500 bucks so that's how they're gonna make their money then yeah so when do you get your 500 back do you do they pay you back over time do you have to earn it back? Six years. I made that up. Would not surprise me, though. It's just like Chad TVT over here.

Making things up. It says here, if you choose to opt out of the data collection, you'll either have to return the TV or pay the cost of the dual screen TV. Plus the soundbar bar set up yourself, which is, I guess, $500. I don't know.

Gross. All right. Well, I'll make sure I put it on Seth's credit card. No, go ahead and get one, TJ. They got 500,000 of them. Go ahead and get one. Pop it in the new house. I'm going to get you drunk at Infocom

and get that company credit card off. Ain't going to be my money going to this. Oh, man. All right. Well, let's move on here to other broken products. Um, IOT security company, Sternum has discovered a vulnerability in one of Belkin's smart home devices. Uh, this Wemo mini smart plug V2, um, evidently can be exploited for a remote command execution. And Belkin has basically punted and said, yeah, we don't sell that thing anymore and decided not to patch it, maybe.

I'll put a star on the end of that because we'll get to Belkin actually responded after this thing came on. Sternum found the flaw specifically with the Wemo Smart Plug V2, which works with HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon. After reaching out to Belkin, Sternum was told the device is at the end of its life

and will not be patched. It's probably a lot out there. Version 4 is the latest model that Belkin has been selling, and it does not suffer this flaw. Belkin responded to this saying, and this is what's confusing. I guess The Verge has a quote from a spokesperson saying that it will be addressed. And it kind of says that in their tweet that we found. It says, here's their tweet. The security of our products is a top priority for us. Our security team works to prevent vulnerabilities and exploits and responds with diligence. As such, this vulnerability is being addressed. So, okay. We hope that moving

forward, firms will speak to official spokespersons before issuing stories of this nature. Yeah, so I guess Sternum just basically talked to somebody at Belkin and they said, you know, we're not touching that thing. And then they went to the press with their story and that's what happened. Um, Belkin claims this vulnerability can not be exploited remotely, basically saying that keep your home network secure and you should be all right. That's really not how it works though. And then, um, I guess there's a CV on this now that after it went to press i guess nine to five mac reached out to the organization that handles the cves and and that's what caught belkin's attention to get them to respond to all this so i don't know this sounds weird i guess

they're going to update this old device and make, I have a bunch of these actually. I may plug them in and wait for the update, but first time you've used them in a year. Yeah, no, I, they, they basically turn on Christmas lights. So that's when,

when they get plugged in. Um, I don't know. Like, is this, this seems like a big deal because they should, um, they,

they should keep up with this device. They discontinued it in 2020 and don't sell or support this model anymore at all three years later. So I don't know. It seems like Belkin kind of has, I guess, the right to say, yeah, we're not going to support this thing anymore. You should buy the new one.

But then again, maybe they don't. I don't know. What do you guys think? TJ, what do you think about this? I mean, I feel like any time that like a serious vulnerability like this is exposed, I feel like the company should have to address it in some way. But the problem always comes down to like, how long does that go on for? Right.

I mean, if somebody is using their smart plug for 20 years and it still works somehow at that time frame, is the company is still responsible for it? Probably not, but no, also nobody's like telling you this stuff when you buy it. Right. And that kind of goes back to, I don't know a good solution for this. What I keep coming back to is like expiration dates on products that basically say this device is going to stop functioning after X amount of time because the company doesn't want to support it any longer. And that's the only thing I can think of that, that like actually makes sense, right. Is because we're going to have a ton of these, you know, really inexpensive and expensive devices that are going to be on the network forever.

And these things are just going to keep happening and we're going to keep getting, you know, botnets and all kinds of crazy hacking stuff going on because these devices are still out there and still connected to the internet. And nobody cares or knows about the problems that they have. I mean, if you told a normal person what was going on with Wemo smart plugs, they would look at you like you had 20 different heads because they don't understand any of this. You got to have the smart plug mini v2 and like who knows what they have like i know what i have because i i i know when i got them and how old they are but like most people are just like yeah i got something and then it turns the lights on it you know at night gavin what do you think this reminds me of wise all over again right because

wise had the issue with their cameras where they were basically saying, we're not going to fix it. We can't, you know, stop using them, right? Their wording is very questionable because they're saying stuff like it's being addressed, right? Of course, it's being addressed on their newer products, but they didn't specifically call out the older products, right? And they also say, we believe, you know, it can't be exploited remotely. Well, they believe it doesn't sound so for sure for me, you know, like I'd like them to say it can't be right. But we believe is a different, you know, tone. So they really need to take this one seriously. Um, like, like TJ said, you know, like, I don't know what the right solution is, but I think the right solution is actually expiring the devices and the reason why and stop them from working.

And the reason why I say that is because we're getting to a point where all these devices with vulnerabilities will be out there and never get updated and will become parts of botnets, et cetera, et cetera. And if you just disable the devices and brick them, at least the device is sitting in, like if it's in a corporate environment, if it's in a restaurant, whatever, at least it'll stop working. And the person would know that, hey, this is no longer no good. Let me go buy a new one.

And their help desk will have to answer all the questions. Like, why did my device stop working? Well, because you got to buy a new one. We turned it off, right? Okay, so does. Let's have a conversation. Well, because you got to buy a new one. We turned it off, right? Okay, so-and-so. Let's have a conversation. Well, yeah, I know, you know, there's a difference between like a $30 plug and a $500 speaker, right? Like, I understand that too.

But they'll need to figure out what they can do for the customer at that point. Give them a discount? I don't know. But in the end, they could say, you know, to make your environment safer, you know, to make your network safer, we disabled this. We bricked this because there's a vulnerability we can't fix. Sometimes they truly can't fix it because the libraries are just too difficult that they're using, too difficult to update. Maybe they can't update it. Maybe the hardware can't support it, you know? So they got to make that call. But in the end, I think it's best to have a safer network. And if that means breaking the devices for a safer network, that may be the way they have to go. Right. But they need to figure

out how to compensate the clients because there'll be a lot of people that are mad. I think they're going to they would have a bigger problem if all the devices started working. Like you said, people are going to contact their help desk and it's just going to create a bunch of problems. And for the most part, I think they have a better handle on how many of these things are out in the wild actually running. Yeah. Then sternum or nine to five Mac or any of these media outlets do like there, it could just be a negligible number because most people have not gotten tired of these things and thrown them in the trash already because that's what i was thinking too i think most of these things now they're probably like oh there's 50 000 out there but most of them are sitting in a drawer

or are thrown out already because they they didn't work properly anyway they didn't work properly yeah this this i i have one of these that i think of one or two of these that robert friend of the show robert spivak sent to me because he hated them. They worked on my network, but they did not work on his. And, and before I had like the ruckus thing set up, they didn't,

they did not work on like unified networks at all. So, yeah, I don't know. Like I'm trying to figure out when, I guess this thing's was, was retired and it's basically at the end of its four-year promise

that they're going to update it. But I think Belkin can say, okay, we can do this one last time. We're going to send out an update after this. The update's going to say, we're not fixing this thing. You need to update your device and get something new because this was, this was made like years ago. It's probably wifi to support it. Four years old.

We can't do anything with it anymore, guys, but they're just prolonging, prolonging the inevitable. It's going to happen again. They fix it. This, yeah,

it's going to happen. They're going to be in the same boat. So might as well just deal with it now, you know? And I think it's all these companies responsibility to keep the internet boat, so might as well just deal with it now. And I think it's all these companies' responsibility to keep the internet safer, right? They're just throwing devices out there and the botnets are just getting bigger and bigger if they're sitting there vulnerable. We need to hold them accountable. I think they put these initially, yes, they were just throwing these devices out there. Everybody's learned a lot of lessons over the past, you know, four or five years.

And especially larger companies like Wemo, a lot of these companies and a lot of them today still like just throw something against the wall to see if it works. I mean, what was the little garage door company we talked about not too long ago? Like all of a sudden they have a completely exportable thing and people can just open and close your doors and they, but remotely, and they just basically disabled all of them until they have a completely exportable thing and people can just open and close your doors. But remotely. And they just basically disabled all of them until they could be patched, I guess.

Devices like this where they require some kind of like firmware update or maybe, I mean, maybe Wemo doesn't even have access to the firmware that runs inside of these chips that are in there because that could. Wemo has access well maybe maybe they push updates to these things right like these things could be updated remotely without you interaction mine were getting updates remotely without me even pushing it to them yeah i mean kind of but there are also flaws in those chips and if if they stop working, then you can't, you know, there comes a point where it's just not practical to reverse engineer, to update your products anymore. I, I, especially after such a long time, I mean, like if I have an old white, one of those white Mac computers back there. And if I go plug that thing in and try and get onto any website and this thing I

used maybe six or seven years ago is the end of its life. But like, if I go to like any website on the face of the planet, it just, it can't even, the Safari can't even connect to it because the technology we use for the little lock thing at the top of your website, the encryption is completely different and websites now reject what that thing can accept. And there's no new modern browser that I can download, first of all, because I can't even connect to download anything with, but there's no new modern browser

that I can load on the thing because it's an old 32-bit computer, and they just don't work with any of that stuff. So without going in and disabling a lot of the security features, I can't use that computer. And the same thing, I mean, these aren't, that's a Mac computer.

That thing was, what, $1,000 or more back in the day. These are $20, $30 switches with little tiny chips inside of them that were just being like rigged together at the beginning of the smart home revolution that we had. I think the version four Wemo has probably learned a lot about what to do, what not to do with these things, and has a

better product on the market and would rather see people move to that. I do agree with TJ what we were saying at the beginning. There should be an expiration date on these things. After this point, no more updates. We're done. We're going to tell you

just put a sticker on the box like like with the uh the milk the carton of milk at the store like best if used by this date and after that you have you know a year and then we have no uh no control over you know updating it or no promises we're going to support it at that point so i don't know but it needs to be removed altogether because just doing that you still leave the vulnerability they're still out there yeah right they're still out there so they need to come up with something where it's just disabled so it can't do any harm yeah this is i'm reading through the sternum how they broke this thing and it's like super low level c code stuff. I mean, most of

these companies don't even touch that stuff. Like Guivo probably does, but the most of these companies out there, they're, they're using some package that right rides on top of the chips and just like doing, you know, some, some JavaScript programming or something over that or Python programming over the top of it. Yeah. The, uh uh the device expiration is kind of like taxes you know everybody knows the right answer a lot of times is to raise taxes or implement a new tax just like they probably know the right thing to do it is to introduce a expiration date but nobody's going to do it because it'd just be suicide at that point like nobody's going to buy your device if you're the only one or two people that's coming out and saying, hey, this device is only going to work for five years.

Right. So like it really unfortunately, it's got to be like a government regulation thing. Yeah. Because no, nobody is going to do that on their own. Unfortunately, it would be suicide. Can you imagine Sono saying that or Apple? Oh, no. And that's the thing.

And like and like I would get upset, too. Right. Like and I talk about it all the time because I think it's the right solution. But if I bought like a $900 soundbar and they're like, this thing is going to work for 10 years, I'd be like, are you crazy right now? But like, that's unfortunately when you have internet connected devices, we have to figure out something where this isn't a problem because this is only going to keep being a problem, especially as the amount of terrible internet connected devices keep increasing,

you know, like stoves and fridges and tea kettles and the silly dual screen TV that nobody's going to buy. I mean, it's just all this stuff is going to die eventually. And we're going to have to deal with the DDoS attacks and everywhere, everything else. And, you know, once companies figure out, like once we accept that, you know, expiration date, companies will figure out, hey, we can get them to upgrade every five years, you know, because we'll just make it expire after five years and then it'll turn into three years and then two years and there'll be a yearly thing, right? Like that's going to be the ugly side of it. I mean, I was thinking about that with the Google screen they announced last week,

right? They were only guaranteeing it for, what what was it three years or was it five years but still you would think like a screen like that for 500 you'd get more than that you gotta start putting a price per year on it and don't buy that website seth please i was almost sharing my screen i was thinking you were gonna put a price per year database or something like that i was already talking about his 900 sound dollar soundbar and i was like well that's 90 bucks a year like what is this what is this i knew what you were thinking. The 90 bucks a year is better than the three years you get out of Google. That's $166. Now we're comparing our life. It's turning into now we're just leasing these devices.

Right. Well, and it's like, you know, and how everybody always complains about like planned obsolescence. It's like literally planned obsolescence at that point. Yeah. But it's kind of got a valid reason for it. There's ways they could figure out to make it work locally only and all that good stuff. But they're never going to do that. Right.

And as soon as they do say, OK, we're going to turn off all cloud, well, it's kind of the same problem. If they say, this doesn't work with the cloud anymore, it's only local. The problem is that this device in particular has a local issue. If your local network is compromised with another device, then they can, I forget what is it, a side channel check or something like that? The technical term where they basically, they've hacked your computer. Now they can go over and get a foothold in your Belkin Wemo and just kind of put something

in there. It hangs out. If you fix your computer, well, it doesn't matter. The little Wemo switch in the wall that you forgets there and it only, you know, turns on and off the lights at night. That thing is what's, you know, infecting your computer again. So no good solution here for anything other than, I guess, don't use products with technology in them, but that's not why we're here folks i i do think i mean i hate to say it because we're going to get into our goofy matter segment later

but like this this is one of the i guess the like the promises of what something like matter could do like it especially if you're not and this is wemo's problem especially if you're not, and this is Wemo's problem, is if you're not using Wi-Fi in particular, right? Like, Wi-Fi is a major network. It's pretty ubiquitous. You have Wi-Fi hacks and all this stuff all the time. That could be, you know, a way around this. Well, get on another network.

Get on a LoRa network, like one that's less known. And then you definitely would drop your footprint off of having a problem with the device that has an exploit in the LoRa radio versus the Wi-Fi radio, right? If it's on a different network. So I guess that's the promise

of having a different network set up. But don't worry, Matter will solve all this. You know, Matter is going to work locally. There's not going to be any exploits or hacks. Problem solved. Never, never. All right.

Well, I don't know really how to transition to this, but Latch, maker of LatchOS, I'm sure you've heard of it. It's a full building enterprise software as a service access control platform. Announced it's a definitive agreement to acquire Honest Day's work. It's basically Ring founder's Jamie Siminoff's

latest company. They're gonna acquire them and they're bringing it, they're, Latchware acquire 100% of capital stock of Honest Day Works with exchange for 29 million shares of Latch common stock and $22 million in aggregate, blah, blah, blah, business stuff, yada, yada. First of off, what is latch and what is honest days work? Honestly, like I never heard of any one of these companies and evidently it's, there's a $50 billion or what? $50 million deal here that

happened. And like between two companies, nobody's ever heard of. And if you go to honest days, work.com, it's just like a joke of a website. It just says Honest Days Work. I don't know what to say. Must be a bunch of remote workers. TJ, you've worked with some locks and stuff in the past. Have you ever run across a latched lock? You know, I have not.

This looks like it's only in where they're stationed at, which is New York City, it looks like. So I would assume that they're probably in like one or two high rises, and that's probably it. But I know that access control is like a really big market. Access control has been around for quite a while, but the actual like cloud integration of it is relatively new, and there's all kinds of new companies coming out. There's popular ones like PDdk or open path and i don't know the exact price on a lot of them but you're typically paying you know between 50 to like 150 dollars per door in a lot of situations that you actually want this access to and that's per month so there's a ton of money to be had in

commercial access control especially like apartments and stuff like that. So not, I think we're going to see a lot more of these devices. And we were talking about a little bit before the show and showing off some commercial locks and stuff like that. They're generally really ugly and very like-looking. So it wouldn't surprise me to see some company like this come out with new fancy and flashy-looking devices as long as they work, and they could charge a lot per month for them. Gavin, you were looking at reviews on this thing. What did you find? Oh, man. Not even Chad GPT can write a review that bad.

That company was getting torn apart i i guess it was on a fate their facebook group too but um i've never heard of this company you know and it must i don't know is it a new company is an older company been around for a while they make it sound like it's been around for a while it's proven but we were just trying to find pictures of these locks and that was being you know that was difficult just to see what they look like um i don't know well maybe it's the beginning and we will see them in the future being offered everywhere i'm trying to find i mean it's a publicly traded company so i'm just like trying to find their financial information and it doesn't look like they have filed their quarterly report forms

in in quite some time um are they an american company yeah they're on nasdaq that's okay it's like a penny stock though it's not worth anything like there's so many weird flags around this company i just don't know some kind of scheme or something i don't know. Some kind of scheme or something. I don't know. I still cannot find any of their financial documents that you would normally expect to see in a real company file, at least for the last year, for 2023. Maybe there's stuff in 2020. I don't know.

It's really weird. Anyway, that's probably why it's a penny stock. $28 million sounds like a lot of shares, but it's a penny stock. $28 million sounds like a lot of shares, but it's not. Best of luck to Ring founder, who is no longer at Ring. I guess, I think we covered it over about a month ago. They announced that Jamie Siminoff would be stepping down. There'd be a new Ring CEO that was taking over.

And it only took him a month to found honest day's work and sell the other company for 50 million dollars not bad not bad wish i wish i had his track record geez no kidding that's that's what yeah i feel like it's just gotta be like an aqua hire more than anything it's like you're a good name to lead this company just come lead this company so the funny thing is is chat gpt seems to know a lot about this latch company it was founded in 2014 um reimagining how people interact with their living and work working spaces you know no it actually is giving you you know what it offers the smart lock software platform latch os, integrations and partnerships. So, you know, it's been around for a while.

Just want to know how much money they're making. Like, you should be able to look it up. And I don't know. I don't see it. Anyway, this stock is evidently up. It's $1.02 now. So it's up 9%, 10%. And I looked at it. It wasn't very much the other day.

It was below a dollar. So I guess, uh, Jamie Siminoff has worked his magic again. It'd be nice to have that golden touch where you just walk in and the door and make the company millions of dollars just by having your name on the, on the sign touch. No quarterly reports in 2022 2022 i can't find an annual report well we'll let the financial experts look at that and gamble their money away at jb simenov's new investment so have fun uh let's move into our new segment here uh who's mattering this week and um lg tvs matter this week gavin lg has silently uh updated and and added support for an lg tv uh to act as a matter controller and uh you can add devices through the app um how's that going i hate it i guess you need a bit more detail than that so my lg tv you know i was excited when i got this thing i plugged it in i accepted all everything you know i hooked it up to the web and bam i got

an ad or five right so you know what i eventually at some point reset the whole tv to factory and i kept it off the internet and tried to keep it as a dumb TV. And then this article came out. So I was like, cool, let me just play with this. So then I installed the Think Client on my phone and tried to connect it to the TV, but the Think Client kept crashing or it wouldn't connect or it was just not working. I even rebooted my phone. Eventually, I got it to work, and I just gave up. And then, you know, I was upstairs, and I got a text from my wife that the TV wasn't working. I had another message on the screen. I was like, what the heck is all this?

So I had to go downstairs. It's just a mess of an experience, right? So eventually, to get the app working, I had to accept all their terms. And then as soon as you accepted all the terms, you got the message. Thank you for accepting our terms. Here's an ad, right? That's all this is about. They're just giving you ads.

And this is why I don't like these smart TVs. I still, I just gave up on it. And at this point, I think I'm going to reset the TV again, just to turn it back into a dumb TV. And I don't even want to think about this anymore. Like it's just a frustrating experience with these smart TVs. And it's like, as soon as you accept the terms and the thing is, is nothing works if you don't set those terms. So I can't airplay to the TV. Airplay is a local thing, but I got to accept their terms so

that I can use the airplay on the TV. So, you know, I, instead I just, I don't use that. I'll use my Apple TV, the AirPlay to that instead. Right. But anything smart on the TV, you have to accept their terms and they have multiple ones. But if you just accept the first one, nothing works still. You have to accept them all for everything to work. And as soon as you accept them, like you turn on the TV and it's like, here's an ad, you know, and they don't even do ads, right? This is what really even, you know, I could just hear Richard, you know, going on about this. Right. But when I turn on the TV, sometimes I'll get five ads, but they just pop up over top of each other. So you only end up seeing the last one, but you hear it bling like five times, right?

And it's just driving me nuts, so it's going to go back to a dumb TV, and any future purchase of a TV I make, I just want dumb TVs. They've ruined the whole TV experience for me. In the words of TJ, they sat there and looked at the TV and said, how can we make this worse?

It's a glowing review, by the way. It's it's just glowing review no but but that's the difference okay yeah and there's no technical explanation between any of that because I never got it working and I just said screw this and I just deleted the app and I I was mad right you know and it's one thing if I buy get a free TV knowing I'm going to get hit with ads. I'll accept that, right? Like I got the free TV ads, but this TV wasn't cheap and I'm still getting hit with ads, you know? And, and I know the number of ads in Canada don't even compare to the ads you get in the U S right. And I knew that you guys get hit hard down there. And I knew that because once I switched my Alexa, um, over the US so I can get the feature sooner, it started hitting me with more ads, you know, that I never had before.

So I feel bad for you guys. You know, like we only get a fraction of the ads that you guys are getting. It's not even an election season right now. I mean, just wait till that happens. Yeah. Yeah. This ad was paid for by mean, just wait till that happens. Yeah, yeah. This ad was paid for by blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

So that's my review. That's my review. It's a glowing review. Every time Gavin talks about his TV and how awful it is, I just can't think of the times that I told him not to connect it to the internet. But he was like, no, I want to AirPlay or I want to do this. I want to do this i want to do this i'm like stop it you buy a tv and it's like okay airplay is built in all right great but then as soon as i airplay to it it gives me a prompt that i need the actual remote for but i have harmony

remotes so then i i gotta flip get the other remote out to accept whatever you know like there's features on tv and it's like like i said airplay is a local thing like why would i need any sort of cloud it should be local it should be an apple thing you know it's built into the tv but no they want you to accept all their agreements before even that works so yeah i agree with you don't connect it but the other issue is there's updates that because you don't need them right so? So, no, you do. In this case, there was an update. Resolution, right? No, it wasn't resolution.

It was with the TV. They had an issue with it getting too dark. They had a bug in the HDR or something like that. And the screen was just getting darker and darker to the point you couldn't see anything. And you had to get another update to fix that. And I think they fixed it. Can you just flash it via flash drive though yeah but then you got to keep up to date with it and stuff like like like now now i'm gonna have

to subscribe to forums to make sure i know like the updates out there like the regular person doesn't do this so they're gonna suffer with the ads you know it's like every time you turn on your tv it's hi welcome to lg here's an ad you know and the ads aren't even relevant you know like like i don't care what's on you sound very distraught gavin yeah sorry sorry sorry this lgtb thing was my trigger word you know like how matters that's trigger word you know it just got me going right well okay i'm gonna calm down now it's it's my time to rant now, Gavin, that you said matter. Oh, tear into this doofus over here who wrote a story, said I'm done waiting for matters. Smart home thrown in the towel.

Yeah, doesn't doesn't actually exist. at HowToGeek as well about how this guy bought a smart home or bought a house and decided that he wanted in 2022 to go all in on Matter, which didn't really even exist at all and still doesn't to this day. So I don't know. I think tech punditry has basically ruined Matter and what it was supposed to be. If you go back and look at the original press announcements and they say, this is like, what did Apple say? It was just like,

this is just a thing to make our voice assistants work together rather than, you know, having a label on each individual box. And they never really talked about what I think people labeled the product of Matter to be. And everybody is expecting this thing to just like work today on day one. And I think it's going to take another three or four years. And if it's still around in three or four years, then it's time to throw in the towel. And if you can't get a product in three or four years that has Matter on it, it doesn't work like it says. And you still get ads on your LG TV for just installing an update, I think it's time to throw in the towel then.

But like, right now, it's just wait. Just be patient. Don't pretend that you can get these Matter devices now, because they don't exist. They won't. Not for a long time. That's my only rant. Like, it's just ridiculous.

And you said something key there. If it's around still in three or four years, that's my only rant like it's just ridiculous and you said something key there if it's around still in three or four years that that's important to me because the way companies are looking at it right now they're they're like yeah we're going matter matter matter and then they're like hold on we're gonna hold off on this matter for a little bit so they're obviously not seeing you know the urgency to it like they saw i think it was so hyped up and we were very cautious from the beginning we i i personally did not see a point to it i didn't see like i i just was waiting for the gotchas they eventually gave it hit us with the gotchas but other other people reporting on it thought it was going to be the savior to the smart home industry and i never thought so because the names

involved right like they they they only have their best interests involved and they gotta figure out how they can keep their best interests right so i'm not surprised i never waited for matter i i don't i have a matter like controller like i have the sky connect i haven't even plugged it in because after watching you know automated house jimmy on twitter and all his frustrations would matter. I just every time I see one of his posts, I'm just like, I don't have time for that. You know, I'll deal with this in 2024 because he's just fighting with this thing, trying to get it working. And, you know, it's like when they get a product that works, it's like everybody celebrates.

Hey, this works, you know, and they're happy, you know, and it should have worked from the beginning. It it it should have. And I think I put this in my little my my little my long rant this morning about this. This guy talking like Seth went on. If you're not if you're not part of the hub, Seth had a good rant earlier. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's trigger word. Yeah. Well, OK. Matter is not the savior of the smart home. It's not it never promised to make a ubiquitous smart home and an irrelevant smart like a word. It never promised even make a working smart home. Right. It's a standard. It's a standard. So these devices can talk together. OK. And we have other standards we can look at. Wi-Fi is a good one. We just talked about exploits that happen because of bad Wi-Fi chips. If you remember what Wi-Fi was like, what was it, 802.11a and b? Like, dear God, you would celebrate if you got a device working. You really would. If you got a lousy touchscreen from Control 4 or Crestron working on your Wi-Fi network

more than five feet away from your access point, you were screaming hallelujah. And being able to get paid for one of these $5,000 touchscreens to work with your $30 access point. Wi-Fi was not good in the beginning, right? It's better now. And it's just taken time and it's taken investment from many companies over many years for Wi-Fi to get us to Wi-Fi 7, where we're having to like laugh about how absurdly fast and stupid thing is that you can only use on one phone. So give it time. Wi-Fi was not around in the early 2000s. It hasn't been around, what, 20 years, I guess, in most people's homes. And now it's finally to the point where sitting two feet away from a leaky radiation box,

you can get really fast internet. But again, it's still not even reliable. It still doesn't even work well with most devices. It still doesn't work well with little small IoT devices because they probably shouldn't be on Wi-Fi anyway, Belkin. Give this thing a couple of years and hopefully the big players that you mentioned, Gavin, invest back into it and we get a decent standard like Wi-Fi out of it. And if we can do that, then I think we'll all be geared for the better here. But like this, these tech pundits really just screwed the pooch on discussing even what matter was. And I don't think that like Apple or Google, anybody really helped like the matter people helped. They were really silent on what all they were going to come out with.

For a long time, they were just like, we're in this working group. We're talking amongst each other. And then finally, they're like, we're going to release it. No, we're not. Here we go. We released it. And they delayed, delayed, delayed. It just took forever to come out with any information whatsoever.

And what they did come out with was finally there. It was so confusing, nobody could figure it out. And all these tech pundits got it wrong again. The thing is, is this is just a standard, just like Wi-Fi, just like Ethernet. Give it time, give it, let it adopt, let people adopt it, let companies adopt it. If it's worth being around, it'll be around in five, 10 years from now. If it's not, then something let companies adopt it if it's worth being around

it'll be around in five ten years from now if it's not then something else will replace it like wi-fi but what we do know from past experience like wi-fi is not really good for this stuff it needs to go away and there needs to be a better solution out there for setting all this stuff up where right now when you get onto a wi-fiFi network, there's a solution for that, right? Like you go to your computer and it pops up on the thing and says, do you want to connect to this network? Yes, type in a password, boom, boom, boom, you're done.

There's even, if you go to Starbucks, there's a standard in there where if you connect to their access point, it pops up a little pop-up and says, type in your email address, click agree, you're done. Like there's all these little things that were built into this process to make Wi-Fi work for people

that did not exist at the beginning. You guys remember the, it may not even be around anymore, but there was like a button, like an easy button you could press on your router. WPS. Yeah. WPS like that, that looked good and was completely, it was completely security. Like it was a failure. Like you should never use that. Turn that off. You can easily brute force the past those. Yeah. It was, it was so bad. Like the standard was completely bad.

And that luckily over time went away. So like there will be all sorts of things that get applied on top of this standard for matter. There'll be all sorts of devices that do and don't work well with matter, but just give it time. Like you can't say that you're giving up and throwing in a towel on a thing that doesn't actually even exist and on day one, but I don't know, like, I know there's going to be problems, but I think that it's worth the

investment because if we can get to the point where setting up a smart home product is as easy as connecting your wifi at Starbucks, I think we're all going to be in a better place for it. So that that's my rant. There we go. Matter. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. None of it matters.

I'm just tired of talking about it at this point. I feel like we've been talking about it for like a decade now. It hasn't really gone anywhere. I know it exists kind of now and stuff. I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of talking about Wi-Fi too, you know? Yeah, but like Wi-Fi works.

It's here we can use it but it took 10 years for it to actually work right like it did yeah i mean it was it was a long time but that was that was forever ago we can forget about that now i would love to figure that i mean it's the same growing pains with every piece of technology right like if you introduce something new you're gonna have the same growing pains and to expect the wi-fi you know 300 or 500 touchscreen to work with your 89 wi-fi router that you got from what was it the linksys wrt 54gl right like that was everybody used that thing and it worked great and those things are still going still exist yeah you can flash them uh with with with open wr. So, yeah.

Go ahead, Gavin. No, his whole concept, his whole theory breaks down, though, with printers. They've been here for decades and they still don't work today. Like, they have not standardized the printers to the point where it works properly. My printer, you know what? One rant is show. I'm going to calm down one ran to show we'll save it for next show what we need is is a printer standard like you said you know that that that

will work i thought we had one air print no we don't printers just need to go away at this point nobody needs a printer at this point actually i just bought one not too long ago so i still need one but stop making them just make them good that's all like yeah i think i think the matter thing would be better if we didn't talk about it for four years before it actually came out and then it launched with no devices and a year later we still have nothing to show for it so i mean like i feel like it would probably be better if that stuff didn't happen yeah and it was going somewhere at this point and i know standards take a while to develop and you got to have people get behind it and stuff like that but it's just

it's just been awful so far so i can't blame anybody for hating on it at this point i guess and they're gonna keep hating on it until it gets better i mean it's just the way it works you know i mean it's a promise I remember sitting in people's homes trying to connect these stupid touchscreens to access points, and they just simply didn't work if you moved to five feet away or the battery would run down in five seconds

or, you know, like all that stuff took time for manufacturers to figure out and do right. And I think it matters in the same situation. If you're hating on it now, like, yeah, it's version one. If you don't like being an early adopter, don't early adopt things, stick with what works, stick with what we know works, you know, Zigbee and things that Gavin just talked about.

Stick with that stuff that's got a decade or two of experience behind it. And then five years down the road, grab your Matter devices, sync them all up, use the unified app experience, that kind of thing. I don't think that expecting day one products, most of which have been retrofitted with Matter to work with other Matter products. There's only been a handful of actual soup to nuts designed Matter products that exist out there right now. Most of them are like, oh yeah, we updated our software to work with Matter

that was never designed to work with Matter. So just give it time. It'll take over or we'll have something else, Matter version two or some better name than Matter that matters later. And if you're building a smart home, don't wait for it. Like my advice today, if you're going to build, you know, look for a hub that supports all,

whether it's smart things, Hubitat, you know, Home Assistant that supports Zigbee, Z-Wave, you know, everything, right? And make sure that hub can export your devices to all the various ecosystems. So I know with Hubitat and Home Assistant, you can export the devices to Google, to Alexa, to Siri, and you can use those ecosystems if you want, right? Through that.

And that to me was almost like what Matter was promising, being able to use your devices on all the ecosystems. Well, you could do that today with these hubs. So look at doing that and you will be happy. Don't't wait around for it you'll just be waiting for a number of years before it reaches something you really enjoy agreed now that my rant has lasted longer than it took me to type this morning it's gonna it's gonna suck next week it's gonna suck next month it's gonna suck for a couple years yeah absolutely and by that point it'll be a decade old So it might be all right by them. Yeah, it's got to mature.

They've got to polish off the rough edges. It's never going to be good right out of the gate. Nothing technology is ever going to be good. Heard he gets the full stop right there. That's the show title this week. It's never going to be done. I don't like thinking about show titles. So that's for sure going up.

All right. Well, all the links, topics, and rants we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 436. Nothing in the mailbox. We do have a pick of the week. This one is actually really cool. Gavin, you've found this thing. It's a DIY haptic motor knob thing. i was like what's gavin talking about like this

this sounds weird and i watched it um it's really cool it it's it's a fully programmatically controlled knob that these guys have a smart knob it's got a little screen in the middle it's got led light around the side you can twist it and turn it just like a knob. It's got some feedback mechanism, basically from a little motor DC motor inside where it can actually give you the little clicks that you would feel when, if you were turning a knob that had clicks on it, or it could just be perfectly smooth. Um, really cool idea. It's, it's kind of hard to explain a lot of the features they're talking about here, but if you go watch the video they have all the examples they they run through and it's really cool good find gavin no it was an uh it's amazing like when you watch the video and they describe you know all the

feedback you give and how it's um you know configurable and stuff like that so like you can have it click but you can have minor little clicks or you can have larger clicks you can have it you know snapping you know like when you get close to a click it'll actually pull and they go into details about the motor they used how they did it etc etc really good looking device but it's not a device that will make the market they said right off the bat the motor they use you can't even buy them anymore So they don't even know what they would do, right? Because they're all sold out. They would have to get it custom made.

But just seeing what they did with this, it looks pretty amazing how smooth it and how well it worked. It's a really cool video. And you said there's another one we'll have to put in the show notes, too, that goes over the technical details or whatever. But it's really fun to watch so definitely somebody's um passion project i guess and yeah it it's really cool though like to go it reminds me you know what it reminds me of like a nest thermostat you know with the ring around it that's what i was gonna say it kind of has the same interface and so to speak but like i don't think the nest had a motor inside that could like snap back the thing or apply pressure while you were trying to turn it i think the nest it just kind of spun around

in circles from what i remember yeah no this one the motor does a lot of like they program it and the snapping you can have it snap at just one point right or you can have snaps almost like a clock you know you could have it give feedback, you know, like, there's a little, you know, dot on the screen that will follow around kind of giving you an idea, like if you turned into a volume control kind of give you an idea, you know, zero to 100, for example, like there were so many things that they were programming this to do. And it's almost like it's just a concept right but when you look at it you could see so many ways they can apply this concept yeah it reminds me like the old receiver knob like the

volume control knob some of those had this kind of thing built into it like a pressure motor that you would be able to spin or move like that i don't i can't think of any of them that have like a clicky part of it to it yeah unless they were mechanical yeah they're so nice really cool very cool find if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the of them that have like a clicky part of it to it. Yeah. Unless they were mechanical. Yeah. They're so nice. It's really cool. Very cool find. If you have any feedback, questions, comments,

pics of the week or great idea for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at home tech. Dot. FM, or you can visit home tech. Dot. FM slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right. Well, that's going to wrap up the show. I think we ranted enough tonight about just about everything. But we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, especially those who are able to financially support through our patron page.

If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash 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 here on the show. Thank you very much, Josh.

Again, big shout out on the show. Sometimes this is a two for one. Like he didn't even have to but we gave him two right uh anyway but every pledge gets you the invite to our private site chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there every day and talk about how to ship smart products to canada because or smuggle them into canada i guess is the better you guys are going to need like um iot mules or something to smuggle things across the border. Oh,

I don't want to know where you're going to put them up. All kinds of good options. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Uh, if you want to help out the show, but can't or don't want to be a IOT mule for,

for Gavin, um, you can uh you can head on over to itunes and drop in a five-star review which evidently is very hard to do so thank you if you've done that recently we really do appreciate it i guess it's not easy to find a way to do it you have to google search it um to see it goes through like the web interface or something weird anyway thank you so much if you have dropped a five-star review on iTunes, we really do appreciate it. It really helps people find the show and promotes discoverability and all that good stuff to bring more listeners in. So we really appreciate that.

That's it for this week. Everybody have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.