HomeTech.fm - Episode 455 - Canadian Aliens Don’t Count

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

On this week's show: Ring offers $1m for proof of UFOs, Honda, Acura get myQ, Samsung wants hubs everywhere, Nanaoleaf Matters, and Matter 1.2 may being coming soon. All of these headlines, a pick of the week, project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday the 13th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Rattlesburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and Happy Thanksgiving, Gavin. Yay! Yay, thank you.

Yeah, it was last week. We had a long weekend, so I really enjoyed it. I feel refreshed. Thank you. Yeah, it was last week. We had a long weekend, so really enjoyed it. I feel refreshed. So much, so much. It's weird to say that because our Thanksgiving is not until November next month.

Yeah. And the next month we celebrate that too. I'm jealous. Yeah. Well, you guys get the good sales around yours. Well, I'm not,

I'm less worried about the sales and more thinking about the food. Like, can we double up on the food? Like if we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving? Sure. I'll send you down with something. Yeah. That seems like the most appropriate thing.

I guess that makes up for it if we're getting the best sales and stuff, though, right? I mean, we have Prime Day going on right now. So, do you have Prime Day going on in Canada, Gavin? Yeah, yeah. We get that Prime Day thing, too. You guys get better deals than us, though. Well, that wow that's typical yeah our stuff costs like half the price so you guys found any prime day deals no no i honestly forgot about it until i saw some news articles about it today and i was like oh yeah that is today but i've been seeing some posts about some jacked up pricing

which amazon would never do so never never no there was a post about a laptop that was like that was listed as 1200 yesterday and then today it's all of a sudden 300 but it was also 300 a couple weeks ago so yeah they're very shady and you know if you create a wish list on you know amazon then what you do is you get tied into camel camel camel and have it notify you every time a product in that list drops below a certain price or you know is on an all-time low and just looking at the stuff i had in my wish list yeah they look like they raised prices and then lowered them to say that you know they're on deals so if you watch the deals all year long this is no special day. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm looking. Well, even when you find something that's a prime deal, it's always a good idea to go over and run it through the camel and see what it says. Because sometimes they tinker with the price and you can see like, oh, usually during this time of year, it's a cheaper price. I'll just wait or whatever if you don't need it or something. Especially with these garage sales that they like to do. And Gavin, I have to thank you because you were like, hey, do this. And I was like, oh, yeah, I've heard about that. I never did it. And now I do.

Oh, purple light bulbs. I was thinking about doing that outside. Just purple light bulbs? Yeah. Well, for porch lights or something like that during Halloween. You could just get smart bulbs and like, you know, change. You can use them all year long. This gets back to my Hue debacle.

I have them. I don't know what I did with them. So, I seem to have lost my Hue bulbs. I do have the Ketra bulbs. I don't know how I feel about putting that outside in the weather. It's kind of an expensive bulb. But they work. They work great inside. But I did hook up the old Ketra hub thing and they still, they still work. I can

still change colors on them. Maybe I'll do that. It's a very expensive outdoor light in a rusty fixture. If I do end up doing that. So we'll see. One thing I am going to drop some money on is the, uh, meter block. Uh, so those are the little thermometers that you kind of when you're cooking, you can use them in the oven. I use them on the barbecue and, you know, they kind of let you remotely monitor your meat. So I'm grabbing a block of those. I'm grabbing the four pack.

And the key thing is if you're going to get the meter, get the meter plus because it has like a Bluetooth repeater and Wi-Fi connector built into the block itself. So you don't have to stand by the barbecue. But yeah, that's a significant sale that I found. Does the meter repeater repeat more than one meter? Yes. No. Yes.

Maybe. Yes. Maybe, yes. So if you get the four-pack and you put those out in the barbecue grill on, I don't know, whatever you're cooking, but you need four of them, like it repeats all four of those signals, I guess. Yeah, yeah. It's a repeater for all your meters in your meat. So if I get the meter plus and then later on I get one more just by itself, will that one get repeated as well? That's what my thought is man email the company kevin just likes the product he's not a spokesperson yeah i know i just like i don't know if you've tried this or not so i haven't tried this but if i do get the

four block and i have my one then i would i don't know if it supports more than four though well if anybody knows out there if if you can use the meter repeater to repeat more than one meter, just let us know. You just want to say that. Feedback. More than four, I guess, right? Like what's the, what's the most supported meters that you can repeat? Yeah.

How many meters can you repeat using the meter repeater? Meter, if you're listening to this, please let us know. Yeah, and sponsor this episode, I guess. I don't know. No, that was the only thing I saw so far. And granted, I haven't been looking very long for the Amazon sales, but I definitely want the meter. For the last five minutes, you were looking.

Yeah. Well, I've stumbled across projector screens and meters. But I'm on a ban right now. I'm not allowed to buy myself anything. So, I'll get that for Christmas. Whisper, whisper whisper there we go santa will bring it to you that's right all right well um we've got a couple of home tech headlines this week and a couple of new products have uh slipped across uh the the the finish line here uh towards the end of the year right in time for the holiday so what do you say we uh jump into these home

tech headlines let's do it let's do it all right well ring has announced a 1 million dollar bounty for anyone who can provide concrete evidence of extraterrestrial activity that's right the company's announced a bounty which runs until december 31st that encourages users to submit video footage that clearly captures aliens or us. And the company reward the winning submission with a cash prize of $1 million. I'm tempted to say, let's match them. Let's just match them. If you win this, we'll give you a million dollars. I don't know where it's going to come from, but whatever.

Yeah, okay. Anchor up the podcast, Seth. You know, for the record, Seth said that, not me. Yeah, I was going to say. I don't know if I can help you out there buddy good luck but they also have a smaller prize too for cutest outfit or cutest alien or something like that too right i think they're offering a smaller it's like most creative videos yeah it's like 500 gift card yeah but it'll be interesting to see what people submit for this. Well, it's got to be better than the alien footage from Mexico that came out, what, a couple weeks ago?

Did anybody pay attention to that? Yeah, it was kind of weird. Like, we had these, like, congressional things. And we're like, oh, the aliens are real. They're among us. And then everybody's like, Prime Day. Hey. It's like, I don't know what to think about any of this.

Should we be worried? We easily get distracted. That one specifically, the guy was proven wrong. It was like six or seven years ago or something. And found him in faking evidence. So when I go on a limb and say, it was probably faking evidence this time too.

There's one rule. It's never aliens. That's pretty much, pretty much it. But his things, he can't, he can't submit this contest though. Cause it's only rule. It's never aliens. That's pretty much it. But it stinks. He can't submit this contest, though, because it's only America. He's going to get his little concrete aliens to walk by. Or whatever they were.

I don't know what they were. They were like paper mache or something. They could have been. Yeah, they looked pretty awful. So basically, if the alien landed in Canada, we can't submit it? No, this is only for the US. Only US aliens. Oh. You can submit it no this is only for the u.s only u.s aliens you can submit it you just won't get a million dollars well in that case i'm gonna keep it a

secret by submitted i mean posted on mastodon ah nobody follows me there well if you if you do have any uh concrete proof of alien activity and ufos like uh let ring know because you you could get a million dollars if you recorded it on your doorbell camera yeah there you go it's a cute contest i didn't you know good for pr and that kind of thing you have to say good purposely on that one so yeah yeah exactly exactly we don't just give your camera footage to the police we're also looking for aliens oh that's too good all, let's move on here. Honda and Acura have partnered with Chamberlain Group's MyQ Connected Garage Service to allow users to control their smart garage doors through the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. The feature will be available for all 2023 and 2024 models,

as well as other models that support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Sounds like a good thing, I guess. It's kind of strange that it's only rolling out for like Honda and Acura, which is, I guess, mostly the same car company. But it's like interesting, I guess. Somebody made a deal there to get the MyQ service hooked up. Gavin, are you going to hook this up and get MyQ running? Are you going to have to buy a new garage door opener to get MyQ?

I'm going to have to buy a new car just to get this going i don't think i'm gonna spend the money on the car my one my newest car was like the year before they put um carplay into it you know and it's the worst isn't it it is bad but when you looked at the price difference it was significantly different so i just couldn't justify getting the CarPlay. But there's also, you know, in the article they mentioned that, you know, later on, it may be free at first, but then there's a subscription, right? So that's where they're going with this. They're trying to add a subscription to this MyQ thing. And I wonder if they'll ever win with this because they've tried it before and I don't think it really worked out well for them. I do not understand Chamberlain or whoever is running

the business unit that is responsible for MyQ. They have made literally, like they have a literal monopoly over every garage door opener here in America. Like LiftMaster Chamberlain, I can't think of a garage, like they're just so many different brands that they operate under and it's all has, oh, it has MyQ built in or whatever and i would say like 90 of the ones i ran across that were installed maybe 100 of the garage door lift openers that i i ran across in my career were made by this company and had the stupid myq thing that we couldn't integrate with and had the stupid keypads that were not like the contact closer type but instead they would use this you know rf signal from from them so like they have a monopoly like and they're just like they

have no desire to be customer friendly with what they're doing with this crazy subscription thing for for what like it's opening and closing your garage door it's not like if you if you told me that it was going to be a five-year subscription at 179 i'd be like i'll find another way and even at that it's just not worth it i have no idea like it's just not i i'm not that interested in in how i'll find another way let's just put it that way i would find another way i've got changed out my garage door opener before i did that like you can find another way that will work out cheaper than what they're trying to you know their subscription services like it's really for me i actually soldered a relay onto the actual remotes yep you know to bypass all that encryption and stuff like

that and it works flawlessly and the nice part about it is i actually have the whole setup sitting in my basement so it controls the garage from down there i don't leave it in the garage it's not in the cold and it works perfectly you know like it actually worked better than the mike you did so that is the one reason i tried mike you before i got so fed up of you know constantly dealing with it breaking and you know all that stuff so i switched over and i haven't had to deal with my garage door since it just works that's that's funny you say that gavin because that's also what professionals do in the field um every time that i had a garage door opener and we needed to control it we always soldered a relay onto it and that's how we

controlled it and the battery life on it it's so good it's really not a problem longevity wise so as long as you put it in a decent spot it can reach it and everything then you don't have a problem man i feel like a pro you know i came up with that one myself man i'm in the wrong field you should start a new company and there's a little company called garage it that actually for like 30 or 20 if you have the MyQ, they just ship the thing to you pre-soldered. And I've used them a number of times. And it's all you can do because it's so dumb that this stuff doesn't come with some kind of like contact closure anymore. I mean, they basically took that off of their garage door openers.

Said, no, you have to use our proprietary buttons. And then, oh yeah, or you can pay us some money to open and close it using the MyQ service that we don't offer an API to anybody for. And the integrations that they do have quickly get shut down because, you know, everybody uses the same ID or something. And they're like, oh, looks like there's a few million people opening

and closing their garage door. It's not even a million. It's a few thousand people opening and closing from this one API endpoint. Well, let's kill that off. And they, they always go in and mess it all up. So I don't know. I I've never don't support this company. Don't give them money. Don't give them a subscription. They're garbage. Just build into the price of the equipment or a subscription to open and closure your garage door. Are you kidding me? Come on. That's ridiculous.

I know the servers cost money, but I know here's what doesn't cost money, putting contact closures back on your garage door opener. That would be great. I don't need a subscription to know if my garage door is open or closed. How do you feel about it, Seth? I don't like them. I just don't like them. I do know for a fact,

and this is one funny story I heard, that there's a company, let's just say it starts maybe with the CNNs and the four, and we had integration with MyQ through a third-party driver for a long time. And I guess at some point

they started talking to them internally and like, well hack stuff all got shut down basically and you can't there's no more hack driver and it's hilarious because on every single control for forum the like somebody will post hey is there integration for my queue that's what everybody expects like yeah you should be able to say nope nope it's like literally once a month. And it's almost been like, um, I also kind of want to put like a poster up that says it's been, you know, zero one days or whatever, cross it out and like, Nope, it's back to zero, you know, the safety poster. But, uh, I, I did hear through the grapevine that the control four had made a driver and they were, you know, ready to go on it. But then my cue came back or Jamerlin came back or whatever, and they were just wanted money and money and like lots of money,

like a ridiculous amount of money to automate either from Control 4 or from the customers. And Control 4 rightly so at the time. I mean, they just told them to go pound sand. You know, it's like that's the home automation, the home integration stuff. Once you pay for the product, it should be free. I mean, I can understand ongoing service things, but like for you, my Q,

you, you, you put yourself in this hole. This is your fault. You took away the contact closures that would have made everybody happy and made some like service that you could charge the money for through the app or whatever, directly to the consumer. But you then you don't provide any api for it without these crazy agreements and you want more money no now go pound sand it's going to be the show title go pound sand mike you there is a little bypass button you can buy on amazon i think for the rolling code so i think like what kind of the rolling code thing was like a thing to protect against people being able to like spam your garage door open because you were basically just able to easily repeat the signal and cause issues and get into your garage door without issue

so the rolling code thing like makes sense as a security standpoint but it does lock you out from like doing anything because the old one was just contact closure the new one it needs that security thing there um but one of them there's like a 20 item off of amazon where like basically replicates that rolling code i believe wouldn't the flipper be able to do that isn't that one of those products i've seen like it's like a little orange product or something yeah but you gotta you gotta do that manually i think i don't know you may need to like get the code and then it just can repeat or whatever it does what i have to do i don't know like the it's it's dumb they just need contact closures on the thing for people who actually want to automate their garage doors and call it like call it a day that would make too much sense like no go back to what it was before i don't know why anybody hasn't made like you remember that thing homelink homelink it's like in every single car at on the on the thing i still have it

in my car that's how new my cars are yeah i mean i don't know if it's it's still like i had a newer subaru a few years back and it was still on the mirrors there but it seemed to be in like a lot of cars and i i don't know why someone inventive hasn't like basically taking the home link transmitter and and taking the buttons off of it and made like a contact closure you know three home link transmitter device you can just plug it inside your house and automate your garage doors open going that way like it it seemed like it seems like that could could work and be get around this, but maybe home link actually licenses and keeps stuff a little bit,

you know, they don't, they don't allow for that and that kind of thing. Cause it is kind of like a manufacturer driven product line. Anyway, there's a thought there's a home, home, home link relay closure thing out there that can open and close three doors.

It'd be great. All right. Well, moving on here. Good news for Google. The big guy comes out on top here for once, uh, California federal judge has overturned a $32.5 million verdict against Google and the patent dispute against Sonos judge ruled that Sonos is improperly connected its patents to claim that its inventions predated Google's devices. And Sonos also plans to appeal this decision here.

This particular ruling is part of a larger IP dispute between Sonos and Google, which we've been talking about for ages, it seems like. Sonos previously won a limited import ban on certain Google devices. I know Google's appealed that, but also Google has kind of like turned off a bunch of features on their products

to come into compliance for some of these rulings here. So it's interesting. This thing is still kind of making its way through the court. I saw there was another story that just came in late that some of those features are getting turned back on, I guess, for this device. Was it like the one where it combines rooms and that kind of thing? Is that one of the ones? Yeah, I think it's the multi-room something. Yeah. We'll put a link to that in our show notes too. It just kind of like came in like right at the last minute here. Yeah. Restored Google Home

features for grouping smart speakers are beginning to roll out quote immediately across Google devices and the Home app on Android. So that's according according to the verge over there and it's i guess i guess this is how fast things can work in software uh if you win a you know a court case they're ready to revert the repo over to activate that and and push the code back out that makes this stuff work so um good for consumers possibly bad for sonos it'd be interesting if like sonos appeals this and it goes to the next judge. I guess it'd be like a three-judge panel or something. And they say, oh no, this is good. And they give it back.

And now Google's got to roll out another firmware update that takes the feature back. It's like, no, you're just teasing me. Don't do that. Google users are not going to know what to do. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. This is still an ongoing thing. Like I knew it would last quite a while.

I mean, I think we're still kind of in the early stages of it, yeah it's pretty crazy this is still an ongoing thing like i knew it would last quite a while i mean i think we're still kind of in the early stages of it but they just keep going back and forth and back and forth on who's actually responsible and just like you said it's amazing that they're able to push it out so quickly like the verdict just came out today google google is not a very fast company at all and it's one of those court cases the uh the end user wins in this one because they're gonna get their features back now so it's good to those court cases, the end user wins in this one because they're going to get their features back now. So it's good to see. and roll it out, especially if the other lawyer, whatever, had a bad day or didn't argue as well or as succinctly as they should be. Like, I probably can bet on winning that next court case. So anyway, it's got to go up to a – I guess it's going to be appealed.

It's going to go to another judge or a panel of judges, and they'll decide if you can group Google devices together if it infringes on this patent. It would be interesting. Also, at the bottom of the article here, this new article, there is a story from earlier in the week I missed. But I guess Google is asking about – Google actually is calling for privacy – I'm sorry. Patent reform. Privacy.

Google is not calling for anything related to privacy reform. No. Google wants patent reform, privacy. Google's not calling for anything related to privacy reform. No, Google wants patent reform. So they're saying that Google's, Sonos is actually just wasting time and resources on all these lawsuits. So interesting. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. All right, here we got some fun stuff.

I guess it's been the Samsung developer conference out there. Samsung's announced that its newest soundbar, the HWQ900C, rolls right off the tongue, is now a SmartThings Hub. It supports Zigbee, Thread, and Matter. This addition to Samsung's Hub Everywhere program aims to make it easier for people to get started

with the connected home. The company also revealed that more of its existing and new TVs and smart monitors now will have the full hub experience built in and support matter. Yay. Let's see. Samsung's multi-hub network is now live, allowing users to run multiple hubs in their homes concurrently for greater speed and reliability.

And Samsung also launched a new developer portal and smart home APIs, as well as showcasing new integrations with the car devices and the upcoming map-based SmartThings user interface for smartphones. All good stuff. I keep hearing about this Samsung developer conference and people are like,

are you going to that? And I'm like, I don't really play in this space, but let's just say from a development standpoint, Samsung SmartThings, particularly, play in this space but it it let's just say like from a development standpoint samsung smart stuff smart things it's particularly like they really look like they have fun stuff to play with over there kind of kind of wants me to like part of me wants to get involved with it and part of me is like no i don't i don't need another another thing like to get to get a headache with but i really do like the multi-hub network thing that's that sounds pretty cool yeah they're just gonna throw hubs in everything now.

You're going to see TVs, their phones, everything at some point. And yeah, I know how you feel. Samsung's very active right now, and they're doing a lot, and they're doing a lot fast. And you kind of get the FOMO. You want to get involved in it. But at the same time, it's like, I don't want to take on another project or something like that. So I'll just keep an eye on it. Long time ago, I had a SmartThings hub and I moved on from it and I just got cut out.

You know, I can't have any, you know, I can't go back to her. Yeah, and you bought an LG TV, so you're not even in the ecosystem anymore. Yeah. Going further and further away. Yeah. Now, Samsung products always, I always like Samsung products, like the hardware and stuff like that, but where it always falls short for me is the software. Especially like the soundbars.

I feel like all the soundbars, even the LG ones and some of the other cheaper ones like Vizio, they're always just the pain to use. And so whenever I hear them talk about like adding matter or other things to the soundbar it just makes me worried because somebody at one point is going to make me want to set like make me set this thing up and it's going to take forever because it's just you're going to have to go through all the steps to get it added and it probably won't be a problem after a long period of time but it's just not looking forward to that day. Well, at least some new, some neat features that are coming in too, smart things.

So if you're in that ecosystem, look forward to some nice stuff. And soundbars with hubs that may or may not work. Yeah, pretty soon you're going to have a hub. And even if you don't want one, it's just going to be in every product you have. It's like, oh, now you have a hub. Congratulations. I mean, it's smart. They sell a lot of other products right they sell it's a multi-faceted organization you know like they sell lots of stuff and if they can put smart hubs in their refrigerators or microwaves and may as well do it i'm up to three matter networks in my house right now so you know i could add more

oh you and your matter networkss. All right, well. Your next car is going to have a Matter Hub. Matter Network in it, yeah. All right. Actually, that might not be a bad idea. That way you can do little smart sensors and stuff. You can have like a localized security system for your car. Man explodes gas tank with homemade gas sensor.

Yeah. Gas flushing device. Yeah. It was just a switch bot shoved in a gas tank for some reason. I have no idea why they did it. All right. Nanoleaf today announced the upcoming launch of the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights, which are able to integrate with matter-compatible smart home platforms like HomeKit. The two 10-meter light strands include 250 addressable LEDs.

It can be set to over 16 million colors and multiple shades of white. It ranges from 2,700 to 6,500 Kelvin. IP44 rating, I probably wouldn't use those outside. The 250-lumen lights will be able to be used indoors or outdoors no no mostly indoors i think um the lights can be trolled with the nanoleaf app with the home app or with siri voice commands and um there's with the nanoleaf app not with anything home kit related uh you get access to customizable color powder cap color palettes and light animations plus the option to sync with music that's playing um so that's pretty cool this is uh this is basically nano leaf's version of what twinkly

right let's see i'm trying to compare it to the one i have so i only have one set of smart lights right now and it's the twinkly 600 led count and i think i'm trying to see what the total distance on the one I have now because the new one from Nanoleaf is 20 meters so roughly 60 feet. I feel like that's a pretty good distance for $120. But I don't see how many LEDs and how long my current one is.

Well the ones that I have, I bought the Twinkly they're 250 LEDs they're the special edition. I have, I bought the Twinkly. They're 250 LEDs. They're the special edition. I have no idea what that means. But they were $139. Oh, I think the special edition had a white light, a warm white light inside of it, if you wanted to use that. So it's 65 feet, 250 LEDs. And that one, I guess, retailed at $139 at some point. So basically the same price then.

Yep, basically the same price. Mostly the same features too. Well, you can get $20 off with an early bird coupon, so if you're looking to add some holiday lights to the list, then it might not be a bad one. Yeah. I wonder if they did the awful thing that well, the awful thing that uh well the awful thing that twinkly does and run like you have 250 lights but one goes one way one goes the other way yeah that's so annoying and i don't like that you can't chain them together like i understand why because the power supply and all that stuff but i feel like you should at least be able to chain it

together one time so you basically have to buy well at least what i did is i just bought a super long one because i'd rather have too much than come short yeah and so now i just have and just like you said it splits off from the middle so now i have to figure out how to like take it to the where it needs to go instead of just wrapping it around like i normally do yeah i i um i I had to buy two. There was no way around it. But at least, I mean, to Winkley's credit, they make it easy to, I had one in there

and the first year it was like, that's not enough. And then so like the next year I did the Amazon thing and waited for the price to go down and bought them that way. But yeah, I don't see, I'm trying to find the manual on this and I thought I saw it, but I didn't download it. Yeah, the manual is not here. It's like, here's the FAQ and manual

and it's like, eh, it's not there. The general information about the Nanoleaf one says it's two connected strings of 10 meters. So there you go. So it's just like, it's just two different ones that they connected together. But does that mean that I can connect them together?

Probably not. Probably not. Probably not. And Twinkly actually does something really weird. If you know anything about LED lights and these like RGB lights, they run on two strands, not three. Figure that one out because it's a head scratcher. Usually you have to have data line positive and negative.

And somehow they have done it. I think somebody figured it out, but you can go look it up. It's, it's quite fascinating, but smarter, smarter than, than I can relay back to you guys. Speaking of being smarter, smarter than I can relay things. I guess matter. There's a rumor that matter 2.0 is coming. Of course I say, of course matter 2.0 is coming.

There's a Twitter account or an X account, whatever we want to call this thing now, called Does It Matter at Does IoT Matter, which is kind of funny. And it says, Matter 1.2 coming soon?

Question mark. And another original tweet from our friend Jimmy putting some Matter slides from Samsung SDC session about what's going on with Matter and their timelines and everything. So check all that stuff out.

It's kind of cool. If you go over to the actual Matter code, though, you can actually see that they are getting close over at the GitHub account. If you go to their timelines, they've got 97 or 95% complete on their stuff for matter 1.2 and they've got seven open uh open issues that they would like to close before they release so i think they're pretty close it's looking good uh and it looks like some of the new features

they're going to be adding is like support for robot vacuums cameras uh energy management which was a big thing you know when it matter originally out, they're going to be adding it now. Air quality control, smoke detection, you know, and there's a few more, but it's looking like they're moving along. Yeah, this is good to see. I feel like some of this stuff should have been included originally, like at least door locks and HVAC control. That's kind of weird to me, but it's good to see that there's still progress on this

and they keep updating things. It's going to keep growing. And we kind of weird to me, but it's good to see that there's still progress on this and they keep updating things. It's going to, it's going to keep growing. And we, we kind of knew it going into it. That wouldn't have everything from the beginning. So I like that you could just go over to this, you know, the GitHub account, look at the code, see what they're all working on. So you, I mean, I can look up to matter 1.5 and tell you that, you know, they don't have any open issues. Nevermind. I can go to matter 1.4. They have one open issue in there of one thing they, uh, they want to do, which is OTA enhancements, you know, where they, where they, it looks like this is for supporting better communication or something,

but they, they, they've punted this out to 1.4. So I guess there's probably stuff that's going to support it leading up to 1.4, but you can you can go in here and you can see kind of like what is uh what they're doing what they're talking about if you understand any of this stuff that's kind of cool not not me i don't understand it so i'll take your word for it seth nah well i what i understand is i'm looking at a graph here that says 95 complete 134 closed issues seven open and that means uh it was last updated four days ago i think matter 1.2 is is imminent so we may we may have a matter 1.2 story as soon as they wrap up

these issues yeah which takes no time at all i wonder soon i wonder what the timeline is though once they wrap it up to you know it starts to roll out to the like the various ecosystems right like yeah just because they they finish their piece now you gotta wait on amazon you gotta to start to roll out to the various ecosystems, right? Yeah. Just because they finished their piece, now you got to wait on Amazon, you got to wait on Google. You know you probably won't get it until next year's iOS release too, right? So it's going to take a long time. Maybe.

I am curious as to how long it does take to roll that kind of stuff out when you get new features and new... I mean, so if they implemented vacuums, right? And the integration for that? Yeah, you might have to wait for Apple to draw a nice little pretty interface for a robot vacuum, right?

You know they're going to do that. So I think, yes, we may have to wait some time before we start seeing this actually appear. But I don't know. It's good they're moving to do that. So I think, yes, we may have to wait some time before we start seeing this actually appear. But I don't know. It's good they're moving it forward. It's good they're adding more devices in. And a lot of people have robot vacuum. So maybe it'll be important enough for Apple to draw a nice, pretty picture of a robot vacuum. Put it in there. All right, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 455.

We got a pick of the week this week. This is actually really cool. I think we've talked about a dial thing in the past, but this, this company M5 has launched a new M5 dial, um, which is, which is basically, uh, a little, uh, little smart rotary control device with a color touchscreen display. I don't think this is as fancy as the one we saw before with the feedback on it, but I didn't watch the video. Gavin, did you check this out, or is this TJ? I think TJ put this on.

Yeah, I found this. I forget where it came from, Hackaday or something like that. It looks really nice, and the price is right. I think it was like $35. It's got a color screen on it. It's got a dial on there. It's got Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, pretty much a lot of stuff you need just to make it whatever you want, and an NFC reader,

so you can make it look like a little badge reader or something like that. Yeah, it looks great. I remember we saw this video i think gavin you brought in uh that had something similar to this now this looks a lot more industrial i think like aquara has one and then uh what's that company we saw at cd at gavin like yeelight or something i had that on my note notes to bring up but yeah we saw something at cd from from ye light um and they had actually a few touch screens that were really nice looking yeah you know but the the video

seth you're talking about was a while back um it was somebody making it himself yeah and it was kind of like a proof of concept hey look what i made and he he actually broke down the dial a lot better than this where he had a lot of configuration options for you know snapping of the dial or like springing back of the dial and stuff like that was really cool that's what i'm talking about i don't i don't think for 35 this has that built in yeah but that was that was what's really cool about that one is that it had that feedback mechanism yes and could like your hand to, to feel that there's a bump or a tick or something that you're, you're clicking over. That that's, that's really cool. I think this one is just the movable ring that rotates around the encoder. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be that advanced. Yeah. That's still really cool

that you can get that for this price. And he's got ESP32 built in, I guess. So you can run quite a bit on this if you're doing little smart home projects or that kind of thing. I mean, this would be kind of nice for like a thermostat or something. Like you can just put this in a remote area so you have a nice little thermostat remotely. Or if you have like a room with color LEDs, maybe you can easily adjust that. Yeah. Some bunch of different options. Music maybe. And it has Bluetooth built in. color leds maybe you can easily adjust that yeah it's a bunch of different options music maybe and

it has bluetooth built in so i wonder if you could tie this in with esp presence at some point you know hopefully so you could detect people in the room too right yep well i don't i don't need any other projects or else i'd be buying one so hmm yeah i don't think this isn't going to work on my vent hood so well it's not getting body that'd be hilarious you're like all right honey i gotta work in look at the new dial just rotate the dial to turn light on and then rotate it back yeah how do i turn it off oh you actually can't yeah i didn't really implement that yet sorry that's 1.2 version I'll add a bug report in an issue. Yeah.

We'll put it on a milestone for the 1.2 release, right? All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right.

Project updates. Project updates. I did something. I'm going gonna save it till later because i think gavin did it too so we'll talk about that together and then tj you've been a plumber master plumber um this this new profession now so professional yeah yeah i'm done with electronics i'm just gonna go plumbing now as long as it's only using quick connect connectors so a little shark bite those things are great yeah those things are great now so i've been uh i've been doing a little bit of plumbing as seth hinted towards so we have some old spigots uh faucets or whatever they call those things on the outside of the house and they all leak a little bit they're not like ridiculous and i kind of waited until i did some other things in the house in order to get those

done but i decided this past week i'd go ahead and just replace those and one of the things i wanted to address whenever i did it is they didn't actually have shut off valves installed they were in the northern clients seth wouldn't know this but in the northern clients uh climates you can buy frost proof or freeze proof uh spigots and instead of the water coming outside that the actual little shut off thing inside the spigot is inside the house and so i have like an eight inch one and so that way whenever the actual valve is off the water doesn't go outside uh in a normal one like the the water goes all the way to like the valve and so it just extends it to the inside of the house and so i already had those that wasn't a big deal but i wanted to get some shut off valves installed because i knew

at some point i have to replace the faucets again right and what are you making that face for so i'm just i'm searching for the frost proof oh yeah it's just got a longer thing yeah okay that makes sense because that's that's the thing that you have to worry about in the northern clients is uh climates is your pipes freezing right you're letting me down which you don't want because terminology there tj you know why from a master plumber like yourself i expect you to use uh real terms you know not thingies and you know yeah what's that one they what's that one they call the uh what else they call a spigot tap spout no they got like a uh a silcock so i'll

start calling it a silcock if you want. Sounds better. I know that's a little more professional. Yeah. And it will get the podcast band. Yeah. It's the family too. No, but so I wanted to get a shutoff valve installed. I got two spigots and I decided to install a shutoff valve. And I've never done plumbing before outside of like changing like a sink, you know, faucet, which isn't too bad. But I was like actually cutting the copper pipes of the house, which made me a little nervous because, you know, you can only go so

far until you like mess up a lot more things. But they have these super sweet quick connect connectors now, which if a legit plumber actually sees you using this, they'll probably slap you because it's like not the official thing, right? It's like the homeowner way of doing things or the cheap contractor way of doing things. But they worked great. You basically just like cut the pipe, you push the connector on and it's good to go. Like you don't have to do any soldering or taping or anything like that. And you know, if you read online forms, everybody says that it's going to leak in five years and your whole house is going to be ruined. Let's hope that doesn't happen. But they made it super easy. And now I have shut off valves installed and installed the new outdoor faucets.

Those look great. A little ugly. We'll post some pictures in the show notes if we feel like losing a couple of listeners. It's not the prettiest thing in the world right now, but it works. But one of the things I wanted to do when I installed the outdoor faucets and the shutoff valves is that the backyard faucet is like behind our kitchen cabinet and so i have to take off a piece of drywall and like basically climb into the cabinet in order to work on the plumbing and i wanted the option to like remotely shut off the valve in case i wanted to for whatever reason and so i bought a like a $40 Zigbee water shutoff valve off Amazon

and I got it installed and it works. You know, you can tell it's cheap. You know, it's not as nice as like the Zeus Titan thing. That's like $190 or the Moen Flow, which is like $500. But it'll do its job. Like the two times a year, I might actually use it. You're very trusting. That's all I'm thinking.

That's it. That's all. Yeah. i don't know how i feel about it it's it's it's very on there very loosely too because it's not really a good way to like attach so like it probably will break at some point so i'll probably just remove it to be honest just put like uh one of your water sensors under it yeah there so there is and that's where automation comes into the set because if you've ever not done plumbing before one of the things you're worried about is water leaking everywhere right and so one of the things i did as soon as i cut into the pipe and i got everything all the water cleaned up because you always spill a little bit of water is i put a water leak sensor underneath there and i programmed it to send me an automation in case it detects water and knock on wood so far nothing so just a regular good old plumber over here you know he's he's that that's pretty good i hate plumbing yeah yeah i didn't like it's one of

those things like i've got everything i need and like i know that it's just going to be three or four more trips to home depot before i actually oh yeah well that's I'm glad I live down the street from Menards because I like whenever I do a project it's five trips in the north so it takes me like five minutes to get there I go there so often now that whenever I get in the car my phone pops up a notification and it's like five or ten minutes to Menards i'm trying to go to work phone leave me alone it's so bad i only do projects during home depot hours just because i know they are open uh yeah that that would be that would be the smart thing to do i unfortunately like don't start them in time and then i'm like oh i need to go into home depot and like yeah oh they may

be closed today or at this time today. But I use several pieces of automation for this, right? And so I got the water leak sensors and I was like, you know, that's kind of nice. But then I forgot that I have Flume installed. And Flume, it'll actually tell you if you have an active leak. So it'll tell you like your usage broken down by like five or ten minutes i think it is and so that way i can actually see while i'm gone and make sure there's no actual water running which is like super nice because i was kind of worried about that you know we're going on

to florida actually later this week and so like one of my worst nightmares is like we go and get on the plane and i start suddenly get a water leak notification so i wanted to do it like a week or so before we actually went to Florida. That way I can make sure everything was all right. Sometimes it's nice not to get those notifications because why ruin your vacation? You know, like, just find out when you get back home that the house is flooded. But you're going to be in Florida. The house is flooded.

Now you're going to be stressing and you ruin your whole vacation. Just turn off notifications. Everything's been all right, but I might just turn the water off when I leave. You trust your plumbing that much? No, I'm just a nervous Nelly, I think they call it. I'm just nervous all the time when I do plumbing. I'm still captivated by the freezing of pipes, considering all my pipes are actually running outside of my house.

It's kind of funny. You would not last one winter here. It doesn't really snow that much here, but it gets very cold. Yeah. Not supposed to get that cold. I mean, it's supposed to be a cold winter actually, from what they're saying. Florida is going to have a cold winter. It'll be in the 70s or something.

One more update for the plumbing. I've been... One of the reasons reasons that or one of the things that spurred me replacing the faucets was i had the lawn aerated and seated and so i needed a way to like water it because i'm i'm lazy i'm not going to go out there every single day and water it i mean why do that when you have technology right and so i was like well i have the I have the smart water valve that I can use. And I was like, eh, I really don't want to use that unless I have to because, you know, as we discussed earlier, it's kind of janky. And it might just like break everything and make it worse, which I don't want to do. And so I got to looking for another technology solution.

And I found these hose timers. And Rayquio has one. I think it's like $100. But I was like, was like i don't want to really be locked into somebody's ecosystem and so i found a much cheaper option i think it was around 40 where it looks very similar it's a lot bulkier uh as far as it looks and it works with home assistant if you do the zigbee to mqtt uh integration like it'll work with that but it doesn't work with like native Zigbee

because that's the state, the nature of Zigbee, unfortunately. So you have to use the Smart Life app, which I'm using right now, but the hardware works actually really good. We'll post a photo of that. I've got two of them right now that I use to control like the master faucet.

And then I have like a little splitter that splits into four different ones and so that way like eventually i'll be able to water different parts of the lawn and stuff like that um but not a bad little device for 40 so if you're looking for a hose timer uh and you're handy with home assistant this is going to be a great addition for you it's called a smart life smart faucet uh let's see what it's actually called and it's like under like there's a general one you can buy on like aliexpress this one is specifically from rain seer but it's supposedly available with zigbee to mqtt i haven't got that set up with it yet uh when i do though i think it'll be it'll be pretty nice to have it and this thing works great

i've had i have two of them right now that i'm using um and they both respond every single time um and they just like the app has a built-in timer for it as well yeah and that part works pretty good so i can just set it for whatever i want to water it for and just turns on and off automatically for me i remember when we first started this show jason and i were talking about me filling the pool and i would notice that the pool had been been filled for too long and it was overflowing in the backyard and I was always like I need like a smart thing and I was like I could probably just get by with the I think at the time they were like $30 just regular old timer like it was like a one of the wind-up timers like an egg timer type thing on the thing I was like I think I can just get by with

that and I never bought one and we sold the house i don't have a pool anymore but this thing is like 41 like it would have been smart and uh prevented me from over watering the pool which i did quite often it was definitely a flooded backyard from time to time yeah and i was definitely worried about the quality of it but i left it on overnight like i just left the the faucet on with this thing connected and off um and it held water nice for the past couple nights so sturdy enough for at least a couple nights use cool so you're gonna use it and you said you're gonna use those for maybe sprinkler system type things yeah i'm using it right now to water the back lawn but i might use them next year because we're gonna do some more gardening next year. So I'll use it for irrigation of the yard or something like that.

Cool. Well, Gavin, before I let you talk about stuff and what you're doing, let's talk about our project that we did called Bird Cage, which I was complaining about the lousy pricing on Raspberry Pi 4s, I think, and not being able to find one because I wanted to do this little stupid bird project which i think is called bird net uh bird net yeah bird net bird net pie so i guess somebody has made this not it's actually really nice it's a a bird net thing and i guess bird net is a framework developed by i don't know some some uh some school somewhere and they basically took all of the recordings from birds

and they piped them into like a AI thing. And you basically can pull out from that, like based on a sound that may be playing somewhere, it will identify and tell you what the likelihood of what bird you're listening to is. And so somebody made this like all into like a all-in-one tool called BirdNet Pi, and you can load it on a Raspberry Pi. But I could never get one that would be able to run

the little AI engine thing because pandemic. You have to have a Raspberry Pi 4B, Pi 400, Pi 3B+, or some other stuff. I think I had the 3B+, you had to have a particular version of their Raspberry OS running on it. Anyway, Gavin was like, I talking about making all this noise last week about how he doesn't like running Raspberry Pis because he's just got this big Docker thing he can do. And I'm like, you know what? I have a Docker thing too, Gavin. And I was like, somebody out there has got to have gone and taken this and

said, this is a great idea, but I want to run it on Docker. And so I started looking around and there's a thing called birdcage and birdcage is exactly this. It is, it has all the stuff built onto it and I can go into my birdcage now and I can see what little birds have been singing around my house. Oh, and the coolest thing is, I guess this is like a new thing they weren't doing before. You used to have to set a little microphone out there for things to run off of. No, no, they're smart enough. You can take the RSTP stream off your cameras and there's audio on that. And you can listen to that. It records it and it says, is there a bird singing? Yes, there's a beautiful little bird singing. I'm going to tell you what that is. And it identifies for you. And it's like, oh, you've got a blue jay chirping around. He's fun laugh kookaburro there it is i i i am i'm so excited i

have this and i was showing my daughter i showed my wife she just rolled her eyes she's like she had choice choice words in which she called me there but like i really think this is cool this is this is this is awesome and i know Gavin I think I think I said I I got it done on on docker and you're like yes what is it I'll do it too because I want to know what birds around my house and did you end up installing it yeah I installed it I got it took me like half an hour doing docker compose was up and running um it wasn't picking up I don't know if I just don't have any birds in my area or what's going on but all it ever detected were uh what kept saying uh rock pigeons i don't know what a rock

pigeon is but it just kept picking there there is a setting where you have to set your um location location yeah you're yep i said all that and i think the rock pigeon was being picked up by like when a helicopter flew over or something like that um because i i listened to the samples and i was like oh that's a car driving by or it was a helicopter going by but all it ever said was rock pigeon i didn't get no blue jays or hummingbirds or anything like that it didn't even identify my dog barking it's just rock pigeons by by far my most active bird is the northern mockingbird which of course makes sense because they're all over here they're infested um i have

a red-shouldered hawk and a blue jay and a red-bellied woodpecker that is flying around doing things usually in the morning and late in the afternoons so like i saw a red bird sitting on my fence while i was recording and nope it didn't even pick that up so I just gave up see them it has to hear them they have to say something I could hear it they have to say something I could hear it singing it was chirping away singing its morning song but no rock pigeon and it gives you like these little spectrograph things where it's gone through and it identifies like I'll send it could have been the microphones in my camera just aren't as good as yours you have the unify cameras yeah the unify camera setup yeah it just i used one in the front

yard and one in the backyard and figured that would be enough so i have two two streams coming into this thing i could put more on i listened to one of them on the side of my house it was mostly the air conditioning noise so i was like this probably isn't the best one to use but the one in the front far side of the house, there's nothing over there. And then the one in the backside just kind of like opens up to our backyard and down into the creek ditch thing we have. So it, it, those two seem like those that's, that's what I should use.

And I don't know, there's, there's no cars in the backyard. You know, it's, it's, it's got a creek, another big yard on the other side. So it's just like in the backyard. You know, it's got a creek, another big yard on the other side. So it's just like an extended backyard. So there's plenty of places for birds to go back there and frolic and sing. And now I know. I know what they're doing. I know what time they're doing it.

And I have little recordings. I have little recordings of them doing it. It's so great. This is amazing. So now with that information, do you know what kind of bird food you're going to put out now for them? I'm not putting any bird food out. No, they're on their own.

No, I'm not going to do that. You just want to know what birds are in your yard, right? Yeah, I just want to know what birds are sitting in there. I've seen this project for like, what, two years now. And I'm like, I got to do this. I got to do this. And I bought a little external microphone, a waterproof microphone. And I bought the little case that the, a waterproof microphone. And I bought

the little case that the Raspberry Pi was going to live in. And now I don't need it. I already had the stuff. I already had everything I needed. I just needed the, the, the Docker guy to come along the Docker Santa and come give me this, this, this beautiful piece of stuff. And now I've got these two streams coming in. I've got, let's see, I'm trying to see 29,000 successful iterations on each one of these streams. So it is going through and recording this stuff and checking it. And I know how many birds I have. I'm so happy for you. It's like Pokemon, you got to catch them all.

Here this week, I can do a weekly report 869 uh detections and 18 unique species and the first one is blue jay at 255 which i you know i'm pretty sure that's the mockingbird because the mockingbird sounds like a lot of other birds i think it's been fooling him i don't think that we have a carolina wren here i could be wrong but it says we have Carolina RINs, but I don't know if you have, if I play that back, it sounds like a mockingbird to me. So all fun, all fun. It does keep the, the, um, the, the files, right. It keeps the audio files and I probably need to keep an eye on that to make sure it doesn't fill up whatever cash drive I stuck it on. There's a cleanup setting, but make sure you, uh, make sure you set the cleanup on there

because it'll fill up your drive quickly. Well, I did look at it. They are using, I think it was MP3s or something. They were very small files, and they're not very long. They're like a few seconds long. And I had looked through the code before. What I did find was interesting, like it's smart enough to know if it detects a human talking,

it will kick that clip out. Even if there a bird speaking it like it will not record people talking so i i thought that was actually pretty cool it's like some privacy stuff built into it anyway that's my story i'm excited i've finally after two years got these birds talking to my computer and uh we're gonna start counting birds see how many birds i have flying around this house this is the most ridiculous project i think ever but you know what i've done it so there we go And we're going to start counting birds. See how many birds I have flying around this house. This is the most ridiculous project I think ever, but you know what? I've done it. So there we go.

The most useless project ever, I think too. At least it's fun. You know, it's fun useless. He's entertained. This is a very, this is definitely a fun, fun project. So gavin since you did this and you don't really care evidently that you have these uh rock doves or whatever flying around your house rock pigeons yeah yep um what what what have you been up to no this this week was a week of z-wave stuff but um uh you know i like to keep up to date whenever there's an update in my home

assistant as seth turns around i'm gonna click on the update button um yeah that's right yeah yeah i i usually click update right away but in the latest set of updates this is more of a psa um but the z-wave js released some updates uh 2.1 updates and stuff and it kind of of holds my Z wave network. Um, things were just hanging. It was giving me a lot of problems. Then, you know, you jumped on Google and I found a number of other people complaining about the same thing. And the solution was to downgrade and wait. Right. Um, so it was very specific. If you're using a 500 series controller and you update the latest Z-Wave JS, it could cause some problems. So this has kind of pushed me to move all my devices over to Z-Wave 800. So I ordered a Z-Wave 800 controller.

And in the next week or so, we will find out next week how that goes. I'll be migrating all my devices over. You know, some people say i could do a backup and restore some people say you have to go through and re-add them all which i really don't want to do that's a lot yeah in my house that's gonna be a lot so we will see but can you imagine like if this was matter and i had to go and re-add them all and scan the little matter codes and stuff like that at least with the z-wave i double triple press on the buttons and you know you exclude include um it would be bigger mess if it was

matter so i will see you the next show i should have some updates on that when the controller comes in but that's my psa about the z-wave um the other thing i ran across this week was somebody on Mastodon posted an article in Links to Code on a software matter solution. So basically, they developed a library that they could use to connect pretty much anything you want via software to the matter network. I mean, I'm having trouble trying to figure out what I want to use this for because everything I come up with, I can think of a solution or a way to do it through Home Assistant. And once it's in Home Assistant, I can expose it pretty much to every ecosystem out there. But it's a really cool thing to see. Like, you can have something running on your server that uses this.

And now all of a sudden, one of your server vms is now just a sensor in home kit for example right so if it ever goes down you know you can have automations kick off things like that right so just you know we'll link to that in the show notes but i just thought that was really cool that somebody developed a library to make like a software matter linking solution um and i'd love to see if anyone has ideas, what would you do with something like this? That does sound pretty interesting. Like there's,

there's gotta be, you could use it to make some kind of like a bridge between devices, I guess. Like if you had an unsupported ecosystem that wasn't like on matter already, you could, you could use it to bridge that out i don't know that sounds interesting i just think it would be nice if like you know software certain software started building something like this in like it say cody had it built directly into the

code now your cody are matter compatible devices you can control cody through you know whatever ecosystem you want that would be kind of cool right there you know like right there are some solutions out there um i could think of but like i said i i find other ways to do this already once you have home assistant you just go through home assistant like i i can't think of anything that I would do without, you know, that I couldn't do today. Right, right. I guess if you were starting off fresh and didn't have all that set up through Home Assistant, it'd be one way of doing it. But yeah, they've already developed their way of integrating that way.

So why upset? You know, why do that? But for the cool factor, I thought this was really cool. It looked like a very simple library too. Very slimmed down. why upset, you know, why, why do that? For the cool factor. I thought this was really cool. It's, it looked like a very simple library to very slim down, um, easy to implement if you're a coder. Um,

and I will be playing with it once I figure out what I would want to do with it. Yeah. It may help with like maybe troubleshooting or something. I don't know. I don't know. It will be interesting to find out, uh, somebody,

somebody is going to have a good use case for it. And the fact that it's in, like, Node.js and, like, it's really easy to use. Like you said, really easy to install and get it up and going. Yeah, I was thinking you could tie Birdcage into it. But then Birdcage, you can tie that into Home Assistant. So, you know, when a blue jay gets detected in your yard, you can, you know, send yourself a notification. Hey, there's a blue jay out front, you know? I can already do that.

Yeah, I know. But Birdcage has MQTT built in, so you can tie it into Home Assistant. So, yeah. See, every time I try and think of something, it's like we can already do that without matter. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I don't know so i just realized on his article that he has all his mentions on it and i'm in the list of mentions

i'm famous all right you're famous and you matter now gavin i think that's what it means. Feels good. You've made it. You can turn yourself into a matter device. Only downhill from here. I'm looking down at you guys, waiting on you to reach this peak. I think I'll die before I get there. So just go ahead without me.

All right, cool. It's cold up here. Yeah, that's not all I got. All right. Well, I think that's probably all I know. All right. Well, I think that's probably kind of a wrap of the week here. We do want to give a big thank you for everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm 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 but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slash at the hub where you can join in i it looked like there's a lot of installation stuff going on not just tj is doing projects um friend of the show here uh who's it morton was putting some speakers in looked like this morning yeah oh yeah he put in a controller for a sono speaker i think i'm in this kitchen um owen's been posting uh project updates on a theater room he's been working on i love seeing what you know when people are doing projects and the steps along the way um you know sometimes we can see what they do behind the walls it makes a lot more sense i find that interesting many dog pictures i guess i miss these but now i'm having fun looking there we go lots of dog

pictures yay uh so yeah um it's fun the hub's great and yeah owen's pictures of those theaters are pretty amazing because it's always good to see behind the scenes how how the uh the soup gets made yeah anyway uh if you want to help the show but can't support financially, I totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. It really helps people find the show.

And with that, that's going to wrap up another week of Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time. It's amazing how we have nothing to talk about but an hour and ten minutes later. Hey. You know.

We find stuff to talk about. We find stuff to talk about. Oh, underwear. More underwear is on sale. Go Prime Day. Underwear and socks. That's all I sign up for now.