HomeTech.fm - Episode 437 - Disrupting the Printer Space

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

This week on HomeTech: An update on Telly's ad TV, Comcast launches a cable-lite streaming package, Netflix lied, Max rebrand kills remotes, Android has viruses, Matter matters, a pick of the week, and the crew plots to disrupt the printer market with ads!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, maybe Friday, May 26th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Powell, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, with a clear microphone, I'm Gavin Campbell. TJ, you sound different. What's going on? This is the Traveling Tech Podcast. The shop is broken Traveling Tech Podcast. The shop is broken down for moving tomorrow.

So the rig is not set up. And honestly, I just didn't feel like bringing all the stuff home. And it's really not that much stuff. But I just didn't feel like bringing it home. So if the audio sounds different or bad this week, I apologize. It is what it is. Well, what's going to be not good is if it's like the best sounding audio that you've ever had. This is how we're doing the podcast every week. Laptop, laptop recording me with my Bluetooth headphones and a phone next to me as

well. So at least you have two different options for the show this week. Yeah, we'll make it work. But well, welcome everybody to the Home Tech Podcast, where we talk about home automation, home technology every week. And we do talk about it every week, literally every week. And then during the summer here, we have to move our schedule around. And one of us moved our schedule, but the guy who edits the podcast did not move his schedule and sometimes takes longer than he should to edit the show. So sorry for not getting that out last week, but it's probably, it's also probably going to be next week before I get this show out,

just giving everybody a heads up. But as we get back out of the summer and, and or, or if I'm, I actually just rearranged my schedule. I might be able to get this edited on time again, but oh, well, sorry about that. Well, we can't, we can't do Wednesdays because I think Gavin does that, that golf thing he does. Yeah. We might be able to move until like Monday or Tuesday, but it's just, you know, it's busy all around for everybody. So not really a good day during the week to do it, unfortunately. Exactly. Exactly. So, well, we'll do what we can. And, um, there's definitely

news and stuff popping up here and there. We've got a big trade show coming up for kind of like the pro and even like the pro-pro crowd, like the live sound. Infocom. Yeah, Infocom.

So coming up soon, in two weeks, I think, I'll be there. I'll be sweating like crazy as soon as I get off that plane. Yep. It's, yeah, Yep. It's horrible. It's horrible right now. But it looks like we're going to get our first storm

or something is developing out on the Atlantic side. So it's time, I guess. Anyway, do have a little bit of follow-up from last week. We talked about the telly-free dual TV screen thing at length, I think. And there's a story that came out from low pass.cc. I'm not sure what this is, but it was a lot better, a lot more information about the telly free TV and kind of makes like last week,

it looked like the craziest thing ever seen. And it just kind of makes it look slightly less like it looked like the craziest thing I've ever seen. And this kind of makes it look slightly less. It looks like there could be something there and a reason why they're doing this. There's a lot of tech specs in what they're doing and how they're doing this, what they're going to preload the system with. They're going to have some games, Zoom, music services, workout app. They have all these ambitious plans around this. There's 40 games that they're going to be

launching with. But one of the most interesting things, I guess, that I was reading in this story is that they are not doing their own streaming apps. So there's not going to be a Netflix app

built into this thing. There's not going to be anything. It's going to ship with a Google TV dongle. So you're going to use that for those apps and telly TV, this free TV, is just going to be essentially a dumb smart TV, I guess. It just serves ads to you. I don't know.

Like this is like a mix of what Gavin has, right? Like it doesn't have the apps. It has like the attached Apple TV or Google TV, but it also displays ads at the same time. Pretty much what you do have, Gavin, like with LG. I paid a lot more for my LG though. Well, I hope so. This is free.

Yeah. One of the interesting things that they really talk about here with that is that there's this technology called automatic content recognition and TV makers will use that to monitor

what customers are watching and then deliver those personalized ads over to you through your LG interface that I guess that that from what you say Gavin that must not work very well because you don't get really good ads based on what you're watching or it's just really you've really confused the system but Netflix in particular I guess doesn't like for TV manufacturers to do that and And they kind of banned the practice. So a device like

a Roku stick can actually see what is playing on the Netflix app, I guess. And what they're going, what they're doing with this, admitting that doing that, there was like, we don't even get in the way of this. We're just like standing out of the way. And we're going to let the big guys like Apple and Google and Roku manage all those deals and content things, which is going to be a TV that you got for free because it has ads on it. And you're going to get all your streaming from these other devices.

I just think it's interesting that it's talking about that feature that I don't think anybody realizes that they are giving over to these TV manufacturers when they install anything on them. It's something probably there in the terms of service that you're required to click off as you set the TV up, and then you forget about it. And you're just giving them all that data

about what you're watching, and they're either selling that data off to an ad firm or whatever with your IP address, and they can match it up to some other data aggregate service and sell you other stuff some other way. But it's interesting to see somebody actually talking about that and saying that we're just staying out of the way of this. But at the same time, they are just going to serve you ads. And I guess like you have to, when you sign up and go through the signup process, you're going to give them information where they can pipe relevant ads back

to you. So it's kind of Gavin, I think this is right up your alley for all the ads that you want. Like you're going to be able to tell them exactly the ads that you want to see. And they'll, they'll be able to deliver them to you on a separate screen. Like you can still watch the game, but below that, you're going to see all these ads about, I don't know, like soil sensors and printers, cam printers, Wi-Fi access points.

All that will be right there for you. I think this is a win-win for you, man. I really do. I think you should get one of these. Just because the targeted ads will be placed on a second screen, you know, like and you know what? I could just cover up that second screen with a cloth or fabric or something. So I don't even see it and we're good. Right. So I'll get a free TV. Um, like you said, this article made it sound better than we thought it would be.

Um, it doesn't seem as bad. What I found interesting about this article actually was when they were pointing out everything that the other companies were doing right and all the bad tracking and stuff i found that so interesting i was like wow that's actually not that good so it's kind of good to see that they're focused on on privacy a lot but then at the same time too now is they're asking you to put a lot of trust in them right so they're kind of doing their own privacy thing like yeah they're selling your stuff anyway they're just they're getting the money rather than all this i guess you you know what's happening like yes it's a direct relationship you give me free tv and i'll let you show me ads i'll give you my personal but right now you're buying a very expensive lg tv or somebody's going down and buy a tcl or whatever at the store or vizio and

they're doing all this anyway yes but you're you're not even getting like anything out of that relationship so they also point out more like they actually get more information than the other people are getting too because they have um in the tv has presence detection so it'll know if somebody's in front of the tv or not they have a couple sensors that's why you can't use that sheet yeah yeah and they can also tell how many people are sitting there in front of the tv watching it you know so like that's some valuable information right there when you're looking at you know trying to trying to count something like the number of viewers, you know, instead of just households, you can get to the number of viewers of this program, for example, which is really crazy. anything back but who knows if down the road they change something in their their agreement and you have to accept it and they start recording and selling recordings and stuff like that 95 of the people will probably just click i agree i agree i agree and not even know and you'll have

the five percent that probably don't and they lose them they don't care well they they don't care because then they're going to charge them 500 for for the TV. Exactly. So that's something to keep an eye out for. But it's a good idea, but I don't know. I'd have to really think about it if I need it that bad. Yeah, I don't even think it's a good idea. This article made it sound like it was a good idea and like it was a little bit better. And I got to be honest, like smart TVs in general are pretty awful. So it really wouldn't take much to be to be better. But like, I just I don't see this making it.

And in a time when people are like just getting upset with ads and everything like that, I just I don't see the appeal. But I also don't mind spending four hundred dollars for a TV. So, you know, ever since last show, I kept saying to myself, I keep seeing these things. And I quote TJ. I wonder if someone's looking at this and just saying, how can we make this suck more? You know how many things I've been saying? How many times I've said that this week alone? And this is another example.

Yeah. It's kind of like the planned obsolescence, but just not that. It's just sucking more. It's like, how can we destroy this product category even more than people are? Well, they already ruined smart TVs. So why don't we make a smart TV that's not really a smart TV, but it has a bunch of ads built into it? Yeah. And I bet you after five years, I bet you all the apps and everything will probably no longer work, but the ads will still show.

Watch. Well, the thing too is like, I think this makes total sense in a commercial environment. Like this makes sense for like a sports bar or a restaurant or something like that, because you can have the game go in and then something down below

with the other scores for different games and stuff like that. So like I can see the appeal of the product itself. I would think that they would aim for commercial stuff, but it sounds like it's going to be a residential product. Yeah, I don't think there's as much money setting this up and watching people in a sports bar. I think this is, especially the part where,

according to their terms of service that this particular person happened across and published a bunch of questions on early on, they're going to be basically asking you a ton of consumer data, your personal data up front. So you're, it's a little more transparent, but like they're going to make money off of you, probably more than $500.

It's guaranteed, right? And they're going to be able to do that because they gave you a free TV. I don't I agree. This this is still like a gross product. It's a dumb idea. This article does make it sound like it was an actually well thought out dumb idea. Make it make it make sense. That's what they're trying to do.

Oh, go read it it's it's actually an interesting read they did put some thought it's better than the last the last published article so they're gonna have their own built-in voice assistant too so yeah yeah oh should be fun it's it's you can pull up your feed from your security camera access control or other smart home devices it's company a company using a custom assistant based on a third-party tech. It's not going to be a white-labeled version of... Chad GPT, you heard.

It's going to be Chad. Talk to Chad. As a large language model, I'm sorry, I can't help you watch this security feed. All right, well, we got a bunch of home tech headlines, and we're starting late tonight, but let's go ahead and... What do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it.

This week, Comcast announced Now TV, a new $20 per month cable streaming service for Xfinity customers. That includes access to more than 40 live channels and over 20 ad supported TV services and a built-in subscription to Peacock Premium. It'll be launching in the quote coming weeks according to a press release. The Now TV Live offerings include a lot of channels you might be you might be familiar with if you had a cable package but notably some of the more popular ones like CNN, ESPN and tbs won't be part of this now package um it it seems this all-in-one streaming package seems to be ideal for anyone who wants access to a small set of cable tv channels like history channel weather channel all that stuff um hallmark light light lifetime i think is in there but doesn doesn't want much pricier subscriptions

offered by Hulu or FuboTV, Sling TV, that kind of thing. And then adding in the basically $5 per month Peacock premium content at no cost, not a bad idea either, because I think even if you're a Comcast customer, those freebies are going away soon too. So for the right person, this might be a pretty good offering for 20 bucks a month. Yeah. It sounds like a really good deal.

We posted this in the chat earlier. Oh, and in the UK actually pointed out that this is the same exact thing it's called in the UK as well. So I find that kind of interesting because usually they have different names or some kind of difference difference in them yeah um who's naming these products though hbo max got rebranded this week to hbo max or just max sorry uh this is called now tv like who is coming up with these very generic names for like important services at this point you don't have to come up with anything crazy but now tv how generic can you get i want to watch tv now what do i do oh now tv there you go see it flows right off the top and then you're gonna be on the phone with somebody like some old person you're gonna say now go to the go to the now tv i'm already on the tv what channel is it no you gotta go to now tv why are you yelling at me but, it doesn't look like a bad deal. And you get the ad free or the free ad supported as well.

So at least you get a little bit of everything if you don't feel like paying any money. But then you can pay to remove those ads and get a bunch more channels. So yeah, seems like a good deal to me. So wait, are you getting ads on top of commercials? I would assume that they're just calling ads commercials now or commercials ads now, right? Because these are live TV channels, right? So they have commercials included in them. And then you're going to get ads on top of them.

It's a particular call. They call fast services. I think it's free ad supported television. I think it's more like Tubo TV or Pluto TV, Tubi TV, those where you, where you, Pluto is probably the best example of a fast TV service, um, where you get all those 250 channels and you can tune into like the Walker Texas Ranger channel and just watch nothing but Walker Texas Ranger. And it will have commercials in there, but it's just, it built into this. It's just saying that in addition to the live TV channels that will be offered through this for 20 bucks a month,

it'll also have a Pluto TV app basically. And you'll be able to watch it on there too. So yeah, you have an ads on top of ads. There's a Walker Texas Ranger TV channel, I'm pretty sure. I mean, who doesn't like Walker Texas Ranger? Just those round house kicks all day long. That's right. That was basically all we talked about in elementary school

was Walker, Texas Rangers. I watched him kick somebody through a windshield of a car and I'm like, this guy's amazing. How did he do that? He's like sitting like waist high in the windshield of a car. They really committed to that stunt there. All right, we're moving on here. This week also, Netflix said it is launching its crackdown

on illicit password sharing to its biggest market here in the U.S. It's angling to squeeze a bigger chunk of the change from its customers who share logins with friends and family outside their household. We've been talking about this for a number of months. Basically, what they said wasn't going to happen is suddenly happening because now they normalized it and said, oh, no, we're not talking about the U.S.

And then, you know, here we are. What? It's May. What? Three months later. Boom. Here we are. $7.99 a month for additional cost of the main subscription to add these external people outside the household onto your subscription. There you go. That's how that's how PR works. You get everybody riled up, you say, Oh, no, that was a mistake. And then three months later, you backtrack. This is exactly why I buy all my movies from some sketchy guy in the back of a van at the abandoned mall. So I don't have to worry about this.

Yeah, you just got to buy them. They fall off the truck. I don't ask questions. They're right there. Just pick them up. Put them in the player. Done. I learned that from Gavin.

This has been happening all over the world. I think I heard about it in India and the UK possibly before it actually came to the U.S. So, not surprised it actually came to the U.S. at all. But it's just not worth it to me. I feel like if you're paying for a number of screens, you should be able to use those screens no matter where they are. And I get what they're coming at as well, but just leave it alone. Especially when, like, four years ago you said, like, sharing is caring or something like that and people should share their password. So it wasn't that long ago.

No, it was a big part of why the service was so popular in the first place is because you could share the password with your family member. add a completely different profile for them to go in and watch all their TV shows. And you didn't get like their watch history popping up for their weird TV shows. They like to watch, you know, you didn't have to see all those anime things. I don't know. Um, like that's why they got popular. And now they're just going to crack down on it to make, to eke out a few more dollars on the, for the stock price. Gavin, um, have you seen any more of those trucks crash with those discs falling off the back oh no they don't do that anymore they just sell the android boxes to you you know there's android boxes off the back of a truck but you know this gives me an excuse to call my sister every now and then to approve my viewing of her Netflix account.

You know, it brings families together. That's nice. Netflix bringing families together. That's right. That's right. Well, we'll talk about those Android boxes in a second. But we do have another funny Android TV thing. I guess Max has been rebranded from HBO Max that we talked about earlier. And evidently, somebody didn't get the memo

in the remote button department. And all of these remotes that have been labeled HBO Max now on Android TVs don't work anymore. I guess when they pushed out the update, they forgot that there were these special buttons on the remotes dedicated for streaming services like Netflix and YouTube. Those are pretty popular. I've seen those everywhere, but some of them had HBO Max buttons

and I guess those don't work. So I'm sure it'll be fixed soon, but it's, it's kind of funny. Like what, why, why did they, why did they do this in the first place? It's just like HBO in the name and don't mess up the buttons you had you had one job you had one job yeah we have hbo max and i was expecting them just to like update a new icon and push an update out but i opened the hbo max up app up and it was like nope can't use this anymore you gotta download the new one i was like really come on it's a new from what i was reading elsewhere it was like a new interface there was a It's a new, from what I was reading elsewhere, it was like a new interface.

There was a bunch of issues with like some of the content that was on it and how it was organized. Yeah. I guess they did push an update to kind of include, I guess, some other metadata that had been previously on there, but had been removed for some reason. So people got upset about the strangest things, but these apps are,

these apps are just never good. I guess that's, that's my thing. The apps just are not good. That's why, that's why we're always driving around looking for those discs on the side of the road. You see a fall off the truck,

you pick them up. That's what they say. It's a Canadian thing. You get the same truck. You can actually get a really nice set of speakers too. So hey, they they they ordered too many man i i if they bring them back to the warehouse his boss isn't going to know what to do with them so originally five thousand dollars but you can get them today for only five hundred dollars

probably talk them down to like 150 if you needed but you know yeah it's a steal that's a deal somebody's getting stolen something stolen oh white vans that is still happening today believe it or not it's an amazing scam i knew one guy in college that fell for that one and he had these like giant speakers in his apartment like where'd you get those from he's like oh i i everybody kind of like turned red and his roommate starts laughing at him and yeah he fell for scam, and when he opened it up, the outside box was there, but the speakers weren't. They weren't in it. It was just an MDF box. I think he went and found some speakers and put them inside there

just to make it look right. I mean, it's a waste of $500. Yeah, why not? All right, well, talking about these Android TVs, let's talk about these Android, well, anything. Android is known for anything on the face of this planet. It's security focus and its reputation about a top-notch privacy platform.

But this week, there's been two reports that have just, I mean, that are saying that all these Android devices are coming just pre-installed with malware and that can't be removed without users taking just like insane measures. So the first report came from security firm Trend Micro researchers following up on a presentation

delivered to the Black Hat Security Conference in Singapore reported that as many as 8.9 million phones, comprising as many as 50 different brands, were infected with malware out of the box. This is pretty wild. First documented by research from security firm Sophos. Gorilla, as they named the malware, was found in 15 malicious apps that Google allowed into its Play Store market. So that's kind of wild.

And then the second report, just adding to this great reputation that Android already had, was published by TechCrunch and it detailed several lines of Android-based TV boxes sold through Amazon that are just laced with infected malware. The TV boxes reported to be the T95 models

with an H616, I don't know what that is. It's a report to a command and control server that will, just like the Gorilla's server things, can install any application the malware creators want. So if you basically plug this thing in, it calls in and says, hey, what do you want me to install? And it just installs it in the background. You never know.

Default malware pre-installed on the boxes is known as ClickBot. It generates an advertising revenue by tapping in to ads in the background. So again, this all goes back to ads. You're not going to have this problem with the other Android-based free TV that we talked about. But if you pay for one of these boxes on Amazon, you're going to have some problems. So Gavin, you were saying this is a huge deal. I kind of agree. This is crazy. I know these Android TV things are just, they've been insane like

they're everywhere they're on facebook marketplace they're on amazon everywhere and turns out they're infected with malware that's doing something and that whole android tv thing it's a shady market you know and yeah it's insane the number of people that have come to me with their Android boxes and, you know, a lot of them actually, you know, like they don't even use them. Right. They say, oh, it's always giving me problems. I don't even use it. I give up with it.

But they have it plugged in still and sitting on their network. And I'm like, looking at this, it's insane how many of them are out there. And I've always told people like those Android boxes, not even worth it. You know, like I I'll just leave it at that, but I think it was Linus that, um, I watched his video when he was talking about it, he went into depth about it and he pointed out how like a lot of these boxes take, um, uh, the same image and they just duplicate it and add on and modify it just for their box and he said you could see that they all either had it infected or they had remnants of it where they took off the malware and stuff like that and it was very interesting and it's very

scary and you know that's that's the world we live in where there's just malware everywhere you know you just don't know where it is now yeah it's all right there in front of you it's on the android devices yeah yeah not not really surprised at this there's there is so many android devices out in the world and i'm sure majority of them are not getting updates or regular updates or anything like that so it's just this is not a surprise at all. And those Android boxes last, like, it's amazing. You almost have to buy them every one to two years. Like they don't have a long shelf life. Like after a year, all of a sudden they're starting to get slow. They can't handle it, you know? And like you said, they no longer get updates. So, you know, you can't even

install the new apps. If you wanted to put Netflix on it, for example. It won't even run on there anymore. So it's just it's not not worth it. Yeah. It says here people in the market for an Android phone should steer clear of the unknown brands and go for known brands like Samsung, Asus or OnePlus. Yes. Which have better QA and controls to their inventory. And sure, they don't come with it out of the box, but you can still download it from the Play Store, technically.

So if somebody sends you an app or you find it through an ad or a recommendation from somebody online or something, you download it, your device is then affected with it. So it's always going to be a problem, unfortunately. And it's not going to go away with any connected device. You know, this problem is going to exist forever. But it seems like we talk about an Android story like this, like every six months. I know what like Google doesn't really in Google and Apple both like there.

I'm sure there are software packages on the Apple App Store right now that somehow have a malware or virus or something for the iPhone. Like, I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist. But in general, Google and Apple both do a pretty good job of finding those and getting rid of them as soon as they can. As soon as they do, I mean, they even have the ability to like go into the phone and delete them off people's phones if they know it's like a big deal. So I think they both companies have done that at some point in the past. But yeah, not a good thing. Don't get one of these Android boxes, uh, because they promise

you free TV service on Facebook and plug it into your network only to find out that, you know, it's getting sluggish over the next two years because it's full of malware. That's infecting all the other stuff inside your house. So yeah, don't do that. What can go wrong? Yeah. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. All right. It's like a $500 TV. It's free.

Sounds too good to be true. Keep going back to it, man. It's just like, how did we get here? All right. Well, speaking of things that are just too good to be true um aquara has finally taken the curtain off of an i i feel like we talk about aquara all the time i feel like we talk about the same models all the time but literally it's the same name it's just maybe the numbers at the end or the letter at the end is different um there's a new Acquara light strip T1. Um, it's basically aimed at customers. It's an adjustable LED light switch.

It's basically a pixel LED light strip, two meter light strip, and has some extension options. Um, uses Zigbee 3.0 can work, does require the Acquara hub. Um, there's a ceiling light t1 i think we talked about this one before back when it first came out that one looks pretty nice seem to remember that one yeah uh ceiling light basically can do warm and cool whites and um it can do color as well it's a zigbee 3.0 about, it says 50 centimeters diameter in size. I have no idea how big that is in Freedom units.

In Freedom units. And then there's a new, this one's kind of caught our eye. This is why we're talking about this story. The Aqara Curtain Motor C3. Gavin, this sounds exactly like the Aqara Curtain Motors that you have. I guess you probably have, what, the C2? I don't know. Maybe it's the C1ara curtain motors that you have. I guess you probably have, what, the C2? I don't know. Maybe it's the C1s.

I have no idea. But this one is not battery powered. It requires mains power. So it's got like a plug-in thing. And it's capable of, sounds like it's capable of pulling a little bit more weight than the battery powered ones. Are the C2s what you have? No, no. I have the, this one's a little different this

one kind of sits along the side and runs along a strip i have the one that runs across the rod oh okay is it the p1 i can't remember the model number some number and some letter yeah it's just and then well this one doesn't break in the mold here uh there's a Aquara smart wall switch. And there's not much information to go on this one, of course, but it looks like it's just a light switch that you can use to integrate with the Aquara line and stick it on the wall. So probably wireless. They're saying it's doubtless there's wired versions as well.

But I don't know. Gavin, we were talking about these Acquire just kind of like hitting it out of the park with their updates and everything. What do you think about these? Oh, yeah, the C3 looks way different than the little ones that hang on the rod. Yeah. What do you think about these new products that they are pushing out? Oh, no.

Acquire has been killing it lately. They're coming out with all these new products. The thing I like about them, too, is they seem to, I wouldn't say follow standards better, but they seem to be making sure they're more compatible. So I noticed when it came to Zigbee, their newer stuff was a little more compatible than their older stuff.

Their older stuff always had problems with falling off and stuff like that. Their newer stuff seems to be a lot more stable works and it comes down to with the zigbee they use their own custom clusters and it has to be like reverse engineered so that you can know what's reporting and stuff like that so it's just it's not friendly but it works much better right and these the the thing with aquara too is i always like their design so like their contact sensors were always nice and small you know their temperature centers everything was nice and small compact it looked good um and it seems like they're just keep

keeping up with you know the trend um and they work nice like the stuff works nice when it works now you're saying you have to reverse engineer obviously don't they don't publish what their zigbee cluster api stuff yeah that's unfortunate no like when i when i got my my curtain um opener right what i had to do is i did it myself because it wasn't a driver at that point right so basically you know i trigger something and watch what it sends and see what changed in the message and i could determine oh that's the percentage basically you know i trigger something and watch what it sends and see what changed in the message and i could determine oh that's the percentage or you know that's the the you know the beginning or the end and i was able to get that working that way and that's pretty much how it's been with like their temperature sensor because they send it over their own cluster

instead of using like a standard zigbee cluster for reporting the temperature they send it over like everything over their own custom cluster. And they sometimes use the standard clusters, which I've noticed more in their newer products. Right. So they kind of got a bit better, but when it comes to like battery reporting and stuff, that's all in their custom cluster. And you got to reverse engineer that. And, you know, they give you the millivolts and then you got to convert it and all sorts of stuff. So they're good products, but they make it for their hub. So, you know, I know some people, I can't remember which hub it is, but they, there's,

they had hubs where you could integrate it into things like Home Assistant or Hubitat, you know, it had like an API or something. So people would add all their car stuff to that hub and get it very reliable and then just bridge that over so and i guess when their matter comes out i know they rolled out matter to one of their hubs lately i guess you know like you may be able to bridge it at some point hopefully we'll see i mean technically it should be the same right it should be the same there's no there's no custom cluster type thing in Matter. It's the same unified architecture.

Yeah. It should work. Yeah, and I agree. A lot of Aquaro stuff is very nice. I mean, I've used a lot of the devices in the past, but I had the problem that you were explaining where everything was dropping off the network, and it's just generally a pain in the butt to work with.

But I haven't tried any of the new stuff but i might give it a shot again because i do like them and there's just so many of them i mean it's basically like wise of whatever but they're like they make like every single smart home product you could want their new stuff zigbee 3 so if you have a zigbee 3 controller zigbee 3 device it works a little a lot better yeah the curtain driver we were talking about for the rod or track, it's called the Curtain Driver E1. So I don't know why they didn't call it the C1 or C2,

but here we are with the Curtain Driver C3 with no other Curtain Driver C1 or C2. There's those random terrible names we talked about earlier. Exactly. Just any old random letter and number will do just put it on your product there we go done all right well speaking of matter uh we are moving into a new segment this week and who matters this week of course matter matters this week matter 1.1 has

been released congratulations um there's a story here from uh jennifer tui uh over at the verge and she says matter 1.1 is here and it's not exciting i guess i went and looked at the release notes and i was a little more excited because it had like testing for developers and you know if you're if you're making a standard you want to have your testing tools up to date because you're going to make a product and ship it off to get tests and you want it to like pass because if it doesn't, they'll send it back and say it doesn't pass. And then you'll have to fix it, send it back again, like over and over and over again. And then that's cost a lot of money.

And if you have pre-testing that you can do, um, that's one thing I, I was going through their little press release and in their press release, had a link to their github and on their github i was like well who's in this who's like working on this sdk and there's like you know 12 000 commits in here and i mean within a day there's probably half a dozen to a dozen commits of code coming from different people you know like poking down in there and it's i mean there's people from Apple that work, like in their GitHub, their profiles at Apple, Samsung, Google, Espressif. There was another one, it's Tela, was it Telink or something like that? T-Link?

They build another chip manufacturer. But like these are the people who are working on this stuff right now. And I'm just kind of impressed to see that. Like it really does. If you, it doesn't look like if you go out and look at the products and everything, like the end users are seeing right now that it doesn't look like a, like anything's good coming out of it. You go in here,

like there's people like Silicon labs. There's some guy, Silicon labs that added a build configuration flags, like all these little things add up over time. And I think the matter, the 1.1 stuff was like in here a while back, it's been in like release candidate status for a while. And then you finally get to the point where there are people are working on

it and moving forward. Like it's just good to see, like seeing all these people in here from different companies working towards a common goal. It's encouraging. No matter what people are saying on the outside it looks this looks nice and i hope they're just like they're dedicating people and resources to working on this and not just giving it to some intern or something as their side project or evening project you know that that's what i hope for um and it, yeah, a lot of the updates for this were backend updates to

bug fixes, just making things more reliable, more stable. You know, for the end user, it's nothing exciting because we didn't see any new devices added or anything. But when they list all the devices that they didn't see added, it kind of made me look at it and go, man, they're missing some basic stuff like you know that they gotta add still you know so over time we'll we'll see them um they mentioned uh it's certified over 1100 products we got a lot of products to go to catch up to that 1100 i think we're at five now it feels like that but it feels like we've only seen five released products so especially the ones that come with matter out of the box i mean i feel like it's not that many there's been updates where you know

you update it and it works with matter and you can't go back and all that good stuff but now we're starting to see actual devices come with it out of the box and be supported right away and and that's really good so it's it's slow moving but it going. And I hope it's not like 40 iterations of a specific light bulb that count as 40 products, you know? Well, yeah. Honestly, that's probably what they're counting as. It's all the same matter of light bulb. It's just different companies. Yeah.

One of the things here that I think is big that, again, this is all like foundational stuff that you have to do first before you can make a product. Like it says matter 1.1 enhances support for category devices that apply to many smart home products, intermittently connected devices, ICDs, sometimes called sleepy devices. So these are battery powered devices like contact and motion sensors that will look like they're reporting offline because they're just sleeping. But when something happens, boom, it wakes up, up sends the signal in but it's actually working and if they're like improving that and optimizing that you know and and getting bug fixes worked on that i think that's a good thing like this bug fixes and you know are boring but man you don't want to you don't want to have a flashy product that's full of bugs either like that's that that's no fun at all. But at the same time too, you know,

all the users or people that are going to be jumping on this matter, are they going to be sitting there updating all these products too, and keeping eyes on, you know, cause you're going to need new firmware updates for those sleepy devices, for example, if there's a bug in it. Right. So is the regular person gonna keep on top of that and say oh i need to i hope matter auto updates them or notifies people that hey you need to update i hope that's built into that i think that was one of the goals was that had an update

thing like a provisioning thing built into it um it certainly can be done through through this kind of protocol and this kind of communication yeah yeah i don't know i don't know like it it's good to see them working on it because like like you're saying gavin like what they're missing is kind of like some basic parts and pieces like wireless devices that run on a battery for three year pretty pretty basic to home automation like that's that's at the root level of getting, you know, sensors and stuff integrated into the system. And door locks,

I mean, there's another thing I'm not even thinking of. You don't want to have those powered. You don't want to have batteries that die out on you every month. And if they're working on making this system work better

with those devices that we'll see sometime down the road in the future, that's a good thing. Good job, Matter. You matter this week. Last week didn't matter. This week, you do.

Speaking of Matter door locks, I guess there is also a Yale Assure SL lock now with a Matter module. You guys were talking about this before the show. Got a link to the website. What was it? 200? How much was it? 229.

I think it was announced several months ago but now you can actually buy it you can go to the store right now you go buy now and it's right there you can get it in silver or the black color i can't tell if you can buy it from anywhere else i think it's literally just on the yale website and you can't buy the matter module separate that blows me away because i know there was a lot of people sitting there with the um regular yell locks and you know the promise of getting the matter module and they were waiting for the module and then this comes out and you can't get the module separately so i don't know why they did that maybe they want to increase sales of their

existing lock or their new lock maybe i don't know it's probably just a slow rollout to be honest because they usually make the modules available separately so they probably just want to release it in like a small scale and surprise uh not all features are available in matter at the moment so the only hub you can actually do pin code management from is Samsung smart things. So that's probably why they're doing a slow rollout. Amazon Alexa integration coming soon, doesn't have any updates on timing. Like this, this feels like it was just kind of like, okay, we've got it, let's release it, people can start buying it and getting it installed. If you have a Google Nest Hub second gen Hub Max Nest Wi Fi-Fi Pro with Wi-Fi 6E

or the Samsung SmartThings you mentioned or an Apple TV 4K or Apple HomePod Mini, this will actually work. Anything else, not going to work with those. Just as the range of it, it's only, they recommend a maximum of 50 feet of indoor range. Isn't that relatively short?

Not for, this is Matter Over matter over thread so i wouldn't say i mean thread probably being zigbee and in my experience that's probably about right walls and all things considered like zigbee you we we would always say oh outside you have like a 100 300 foot what range if you wanted on a good day but like inside 50 feet yeah and that's 50 feet to the first repeater for example so yeah yeah you know you don't have to work not directly to the hub that was always a good thing if if you had signal issues you just added another like in control for world we had or something yeah we had a little smart plug we just plug it in and identify it in the system and just nobody knew it was there it It was like, oh, there's a plug behind a dresser.

Let's just slap this thing in, and it takes care of it. So, yeah. One more new Matter product over here. First Matter lock that I know of, though, that's actually out. I feel like we say that every week. I don't know. Nah.

I think we're just saying it a lot now for a lot of products, because there's no Matter products. Like this next one. Yeah, until next one yeah until this next one gov launches an m1 led light strip with matter right out of the box so I guess gov has this um m1 led strip it's basically it's also a pixel led strip so you can change the colors of each individual light all the way around. This M1 sits on the high definition range of LED strips. It has 50 individual light segments and 60 LEDs per meter on the strip. Basically, that kind of gives it a lot more light output, higher lumen output than you would get from more of the like um lower quality light strips so you get more like a more even look you don't have those hot spots where the leds are and that kind

of thing and you get bright light out of it so kind of an interesting product um 59 for six and a half feet i guess that's what two meters um and you have an option to extend uh and splice them in and go further if you need so nice little product matter out of the box but also can work with the govi apps and products and that kind of thing so if you're in that ecosystem and you want a 59 pixel led strip check this one out looks pretty cool yeah they look pretty appealing to me 60 bucks i i feel like it's a little more than i want to spend on this because it's only six and a half feet which seems like it'd be taken up pretty quickly but pretty appealing product in general um and a lot of the you know the pixel like led strips are very popular now so good to see this as a matter

compatible device yeah i think the price is probably more relation to the the higher density pixels on the strip like you can get like i have some here like these are like super dense um there's there's always like a an led every centimeter you know on this one so it's, the more LEDs on the strip, the more you're going to pay, the higher power supplies you need. There's all sorts of other math and stuff that goes into it. But yeah, it's going to cost more.

It's something like Philips Hue, like, doesn't get dinged. Like, they don't have, their spacing on their LEDs is pretty wide, but nobody ever complains about it. So, I don't know. They're expensive, too. Yeah, yeah very expensive compared to other stuff it'll probably be even more expensive when it comes to canada you know we get the canadian prices it's even worse the price per foot will go up yeah it'll probably be uh you know wait a minute i gotta go register another

website price per foot database i was hoping you'd catch on to that one. Oh man. Always trying to find an angle on a spreadsheet somewhere. Well, all the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes over to home tech. Dot. FM slash four,

three, seven. We do have a pick of the week today. This one's really funny. We've got a picture of Thread Lighting Control from SwitchBot. Honestly, this looks like something that somebody could do with SwitchBot.

It's a standard light switch, like a bank of three lights. Very dirty. But it looks like somebody wanted to control it remotely and they they have taken some pvc pipe and and put it through the wall i'm guessing they're using that as conduit for the the pull string that goes through each pipe one above one below and i guess if you pull on the string that's connected to the pipe above it it will turn on the light and if you pull the string that's connected to the pipe above it, it will turn on the light.

And if you pull on the string that's connected through the pipe below, it'll turn off the light. I wonder what the I really, really want to know what the end of the other end of this looks like. That's what I want to know. We need way more picture here. And if you're on any tech, I feel like this has been circulating for the past week on like every tech group I'm part of. So if you're on any tech tech group on the internet, you've probably seen this photo, but it is, it's pretty funny. And they even like drilled a hole through the actual toggle switch so they

can run the, the line through it. So, I mean, this, this took a little bit of ingenuity and setup. They probably slipped off a couple of times and like, man,

you gotta fix that. You're going to turn the power off now. Pulling the string, it came through the pipe again. So like, yeah, man, it's lighting control at its most basic level, I guess. The cheapest lighting control you can get, I think. The PVC pipe really kind of is the chef's kiss on this one. That's a professional setup, you know.

That's how you know somebody who's an engineer. Whoever set this up, they definitely have an engineering degree. Well, they knew they needed conduit for making this future-proof ready. You can easily run a new line to it if you need to. You need to upgrade to paracord, you're ready. Well, yeah. What if you ran another line through there and you could turn on off another light? Like you just need to move to paracord you're ready well yeah yeah what if you ran another line through there and you could turn on off another light like you just need to move it over a little

bit and you could add like another like like an upstairs switch too well you could you could add another light switch onto this just right through the same pvc pipe another string maybe you color it differently maybe it's a pink string instead of a white one dirty white string and that's really dirty yeah i can tell the photo is just really awful or it's actually dirty, but it does look dirty. Like it's like a shop or a laundry room or something. They really used this, right? Like it looks like it's...

That was grandpa's favorite switch. Somebody put this in so they wouldn't have to touch the dirty switches. It's my theory. Ooh, it could be like a bathroom or outhouse or something. Oh, gross, gross. If you have any feedback,

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

All right. Project updates tonight. Nobody's doing anything. Some, some other guy in Florida is. Gavin, I think, did you find this video from The Hookup? I think you've talked about this guy before. Yeah, I've talked about him a few times. He does great videos on cameras and stuff like that, like video cameras. He does great video comparisons and he did a smart home tour, um, of his smart home. And,

you know, the thing about this one, it's very in depth. He has a lot going on in his house. There's a lot of custom stuff, but a lot of cool stuff. The one that got me was his golf simulator in his garage. That's, I was jealous about, I really want to do that. Um, I probably will never get approval to do it, but I can always dream of doing something like that. But he has a lot of products in his house, and I would hate to see the number of apps he has on his phone for a lot of these, but it looks interesting. It looks pretty impressive what he's done in his house. Yeah, I think my favorite thing was the drop-down clothes rack

that he had set up with his lighting system. I thought that was pretty genius. Probably going to implement that in some way at the house. And the garage door turning off whenever his golf simulator was on. That's pretty smart. So you didn't crush the garage. The garage door doesn't crush the garage simulator. Yeah. And it's simple. He just hooked up a plug to the power of the the garage door yep

because i was like when i said that i was like how did you do that is that like some kind of programming thing he's like no just a smart plug you know genius i do i do like his um like the very beginning where he has like the standing tables that he's using for a workbench and he can kind of like yes moving around and it's kind of he's got some space saving things here that i probably should look at implementing a lot of it was custom too like he's done a lot of custom work in there um some of the things i looked at i was like well i'm probably not that handy but um it was still impressive to see you know what he did i'm not that handy but i think i can hang a string from the uh ceiling up there

i do i do have a couple of projects here in the garage that i need to finish up but um i'm gonna need to clean that mess up over there according to my wife tonight is yeah no it's supposed to happen tonight yeah yeah she's it's geez that I'm going to need to clean that mess up over there, according to my wife. Tonight. Yeah. No, it's supposed to happen tonight. Yeah, yeah. Jeez. That, yep, that's on my list.

Just push it under the desk. I can't. There's another mess over here under the desk. Seth, you need to clean your messes once in a while, okay? Yeah, no, Ned. I know. It's been a stressful week or month or whatever and i haven't a couple years whatever yeah you don't realize how many things i've hidden behind

the tv you know until what i can get to it wow behind the tv yeah where do you where's your tv that you can hide things behind oh these are corner mounted tvs there's a lot of space back there if you just hang the cables off the belt, you know, it's like, just don't look behind my TVs. No, I don't even want to know. There's a, there's an H HP DL three 80 server laying on the floor over there. It's one of the things that I'm supposed to clean up. I just like, what am I going to do with it? Like, I don't want it anymore. Like it needs to go. I'll just probably stick it down.

Take it and put it in the kitchen and be like anymore like it needs to go i'll just probably stick it down just take it put it in the kitchen be like well there we go all done i go put it up behind the tv that's singing on the wall like there you go on top of the fridge no no this is an appliance honey yeah it'll heat up the house if we turn it on. Seth, we live in Florida. We don't need heat. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Not right now. I think it's going to end up by the road.

It's done with its duty. And the ones I put down by the road went away. I don't know why. Everything you put down by the road goes away. Yeah, it's usually what happens. Well, he's got a bunch of cool things in the video here for project if you're looking for a smart home idea and want to implement maybe 20 of some of the things that he's done it's probably a good idea to start with but yeah gavin he's got a bunch of custom things in this video that are that are wild to look at so i i

personally do like his uh his studio lights that he drops down from the ceiling i've been trying to do something like that in in my garage and i only have one thing hung up there but it's not automatic like what he has we're kind of like it's this whole rig that can come down and then he's got curtains and stuff that uh he can bring down for backdrops great ideas all of it when i steal something there. You know the nice part about each of those things he shows, he has a video that outlines how he built it and stuff like that that you can link to. And you can get the more detail about it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you look in the comments, or not the comments, but like the notes of the video. Yep. Description. He's got a bunch of links to all that good stuff and what he used. The show is always costing me money.

All right. Well, speaking of costing money, Gavin, you got some printer news here. Have you bought a new printer? What's going on? What's going on? I thought you, you know, I'm borderline buying a new printer at this point. I've reached out to Brother and Unify on Twitter just to say, hey, how do I get some help here? Surprisingly, Brother replied back with some contact information. So I'm going to open up a support ticket and work with them.

Unify, I don't think they actually are a real company. I don't think anyone actually works there. So I don't expect to hear back from them but this is my last last ditch effort you know my printer was working for a nice while now it won't even stay on for a day i don't know who updated what where but um if i don't get this resolved i'm just tossing the printer and getting i i was gonna say hp but after hearing news on HP recently, I don't want to touch them. I don't know. I need a printer.

It's driving me nuts. I'm done with Brother. I will not buy another Brother printer after this. I don't know what you're going to buy because none of the other ones are any good. No, they're worse. I know. What are my options out there now for a good printer? I just want a dumb printer.

I just want a dumb printer that's it just i just want air print everybody besides you like brother likes brother gavin i don't know what's going on with your printer air print i just want my air print to work that's it that's all you know this is this is the printer that's not hardwired right and it doesn't have a network port on it oh yeah see that's your problem you need to buy one with a network port so you gotta buy a new one see and what am i gonna buy a brother yeah yep what else you're gonna buy an hp hp is gonna be much much worse it'll be bricked in like 20 minutes because hp has like bricked all of their office jet pro 90 20 e printers and uh they don't have any way of updating what about canon doesn't canon make printers what are you a bougie you want to spend a lot of money on ink? Man, like, is that the state of... You've got Epson, too, but you don't print a lot of photos.

Is that the state of printers right now? Is we only really have brothers? Nobody uses printers, Gavin. What do you want? Like, nobody's innovating in the printer space anymore. I think, you know, it's amazing how I thought we wouldn't use the printer anymore. But every time it breaks, my wife calls me and tells me it's not working. So we're using it a lot because, well, we're not using it a lot because she keeps calling me and telling me it's not working. So I need a printer. What you have to do is get a printer, like an office style printer that, you know.

Do you have a laser printer or inkjet? It's a laser printer and it's it's a scanner printer scanner i scan a lot of stuff too so that works surprisingly that's good you know i just i'll see what brother comes up with go from there i i think they'll be able to work it out guarantee you they're gonna say blame your wi-fi yeah you're gonna need a new wi-fi they'll probably just tell you to plug it in to a hardwired connection. And then I'm looking for a refund for another Brother printer, it sounds like. All right.

So genius business idea, right? We take the printer and we make it better by putting two screens on it. And one of the screens shows an advertisement. And the other one is the printer interface. Is the printer free? We give the printer away for free. Yeah. But we charge a million dollars for the ink interface. This is the printer free. We give the printer away for free. Yeah. But we charge a million dollars for the ink still.

I think it'll work. Perfect. Disrupting the printer space. Or no screens, but randomly it'll just print an ad out for you. I was just thinking that. That's a good idea. And you still have to pay for the ink. Oh, yes.

And I was thinking, you know, like you could have the ad thinking you know like you could have the ad free subscription tier or you could have the the ad supported subscription tier that prints a little ad on every print you print oh yeah okay okay we could we could we could work with paper like we can ship them paper and yeah the paper could come with a little ad zone and we just print it right there yeah you print them like a nice letter why are we giving them ideas oh this is cheap yeah they're gonna do it they've already thought about this stuff yeah they're just printer printers don't evolve that often so you got to give them a couple years you'll see it though eventually i promise they're they're basically having the

same conversation i saw this tv that's going to sell ads it's going to be a free tv they've already they're already there's they're sitting in a boardroom somewhere right now talking about how they're going to make a free printer that prints out an ad every week and um every week and you still pay them you every morning you wake up there's an ad printed out for you it's like a fax machine all right well um there's also another note on here for project update soil sensors i'm guessing that is not tj who has written this no no no so uh my echo it soil sensors are still going strong um you know it was asked how do i deal with the fact that they're sticking out of the lawn and lawnmower can't roll out of them uh roll over them. I mow around them. And

then I go back with the weed. I go back with the weed whacker and they're built strong so it can handle the weed whacking and I just trim them up afterwards. So, you know, but they work great. Now, one of the guys in the hub, Martin, he bought the spruce soil sensor that we mentioned before, right? So this is a Zigbee one. It doesn't look promising. Like, it doesn't sound like he's had great success with it. He still has to give me an update as we're recording. I think he's on a plane right now. So he said he'll give me an update how it's going.

But, you know, there are reports of bad battery life. He had some difficulty getting it set up with the range, you know, are reports of bad battery life he had some difficulty getting it set up with the range you know it being outside at zigbee etc um so it wasn't sounding good so i think you know like i'm kind of glad i didn't waste my money on that one and he took one for the team for us so i just want to thank you thanks buddy you know saving us some money and we helped you spend some money if anybody has a recommendation for a printer for Gavin please send it to feedback at

hometech.fm make sure it has an ethernet port on it that's very important I think I'm going to have to get one with an ethernet part that seems like wifi just seems all your problems will be solved I think so yeah air print would work and if they're not i i didn't tell you

okay which which brother printer do you have by the way so i don't i'm gonna recommend one and then it'll probably be the one you have so i'm gonna avoid that this one's great i've never had any problems with it 2390 dw oh yeah you're down in the 23s now get up to 83 60s and you'll be yeah come on if you're not paying $500 for a printer, you're... Yeah, come on. Do you even have a real printer? Can you even call it a printer? Yeah, yeah.

The one I have is the... I think the 3460. I believe that one is no longer in program. They probably have another version of it out now scroll down uh 3140 uh that one was like it says it's 149 on their website it was not 140 i paid like 89 or 79 but he doesn't have the scanner thing so you have to have another scanner but i know they make the same printer with the scanner on it somewhere. So I would honestly like look at those because I've never had a problem with them

other than getting new toner for them. And then you basically can just buy the fake toner and put it in and they... The one I have works really well. It meets all my needs. It doesn't, I don't need a fax machine. I just want AirPrint to work and I scan and print and that's basically it it sounds like

the problems with the wife i think you should get a new wife before you get a new printer don't let her hear that that's even more expensive that's gonna cost me half of everything i own well there you go gavin the printer's not that bad then yeah exactly yeah 500 bucks right here see you just gotta put it in good perspective. This thing's pretty big. You're going to need some space for it. It's got to go in the garage. I mean, you thought you wanted a golf

simulator? No, you want a printer that works. Alright, I've got a TV show that we've been watching and kind of been mostly entertained by. It's called Silo. I guess it was a book series. I forget the author's name. It's right on the tip of my tongue.

But it's like a future dystopian thing. All these people live in this underground silo thing that they don't go outside. And if they do, they die. And there's a big mystery about if that's even true. After that, there's murder, intrigue. They basically kill off the main characters or who i thought were going to be the main characters so it's actually really good

and um yeah the sheriff the very first sheriff who i thought was going to be like the guy through the whole show no he's gone he's not even part of the show the first episode well no it's like literally the first episode like he's he's like, he says he wants to go outside. And I guess they put you to death for that. So yeah, you got to go outside. So interesting little show. I think it's what, four or five episodes in. And check it out.

It kind of actually makes me want to read or listen to the book because it sounds like it's probably a pretty good story um decent characters and everything's well developed gavin i think you said you started watching this your wife kept watching it because it was really good and she couldn't wait for you to stop talking on a podcast so yeah yeah i get it yeah i've seen the first episode but she's way ahead of me so i gotta do some catching up but it looked good um and don't get attached to that sheriff yeah thanks wow wow ruined it i mean he's gone like what the heck all right spoiler alert now

you know what's a great show though ted lasso i don't know if you guys watch that i haven't watched the new season yet it's awesome have they released all the episodes yet uh no not yet maybe by the time seth finishes editing the show and releases it it will be done this season but it's a great forever on that one i know it's a great show though it's awesome yeah i like the first two seasons so i'll wait for the i always wait for the full season to be released before i watch something but i'm excited to watch it yeah i've been i think i've i think i'm an episode i think there's an episode in the queue right now that i can go watch if i wanted um i'm generally caught up to that date on that one and this season is much better

than last season and it's it's just they're just firing on all cylinders on that show it's it's it's gonna be a good wrap up i hope i don't think they're doing another season i think this is it like after this one they're done um no i think there's more because one of the actors is no longer uh i think she's no longer going to be on the show. I can't remember her name, but when they said that, I think that meant that the show will go on. It's just,

she won't be on it. No, no, no. It's, you're saying that the series finale premieres on Apple TV, a long waited episode has a multiple of loose ends to tie up. Oh,

okay. So it is perhaps. Yeah, no, no. Ted last. I remember they were saying they were pretty much done with the project so um yeah it should be fun they're they should have uh

spinoff episodes some of the characters are just too fun to let go they have so many characters that they can they can build a new show around yeah yeah this same article that i'm reading says there may be some spinoffs on the table. You know, there's some fun stories. Like you said, fun characters, fun stories. And yeah, it's a good show. If you haven't seen any of it, you're in for a treat. The first one's a tearjerker.

The second season gets you there. And then the third season, they've just done a really good job of it. Like, it's just a good show. And it was one of those where you just watch in every every single show you're laughing out loud at something that's happened and that's just funny so good show tj do you have any projects what the heck are you doing these days lazy like you're just nothing nothing i think i'll have a lot more stuff i don't want to talk about anything right now. You don't want to jinx anything? You know, there's stuff happening. I'm moving offices

tomorrow, so that's always fun. And when's the closing coming up soon? That's tomorrow. Doing that tomorrow morning. We did the final walkthrough today. Office gets moved tomorrow, but thankfully I'm not moving

and I got movers, so I don't have to worry about that, which is nice. And yeah, just going into the long weekend. So I'm excited to not work on Monday. Nice.

Yeah. Nice holiday weekend. You'll be working. I mean, you'll own a new house. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's why, like, I'll just wait till next week to talk about Project Up. I'll have a lot of stuff house. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's why I'll just wait until next week to talk about Project Up.

I'll have a lot of stuff to talk about. Well, yeah. By the time this show comes out, TJ will have already probably moved in. No, definitely not. That's not until the end of June. All right, all right. Plenty of time to do the fun stuff. Hopefully everything goes all right tomorrow and you have a great long weekend.

Well, if it does not, you and I will both be surprised. Yeah, it sounds like everything's right on track. We went over today and made sure nobody took the kitchen cabinets and the toilet and everything. We're good. That's what you have to do, I guess, these days. You never know. You never know who's going to take those kitchen cabinets.

Alright, well I think that wraps up the show. 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 on the show.

But every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you can you can talk about photoshop and how everyone is an expert at photoshop now that they integrated chad into it i amazing amazing video that you guys posted in there for me like it's really cool crazy stuff crazy stuff go be an expert at photoshop, you're now an expert. Pretty much. Wild. Yeah. Just type in.

Like, I want this. I want better looking friends in my picture. And then it circles them and you're done. There you go. Done. I want friends in my picture. And it adds them. Just random people.

Just don't do something vague. Like, remove the ugly people from this. And it's like, oh, well, wait a minute. Why am I gone? All my friends are still there. All right. All right. If you want to help with the show but can't support financially, we'd appreciate a five-star review on iTunes

or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech, and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.