HomeTech.fm - Episode 456 - "Forced" to Update

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

On this week's show, Mazda shuts down a (hacked) integration with Home Assistant, Best Buy stops selling CDs and DVDs, Netflix says they are opening retail locations, ADT has a new DIY system, a cursed pic of the week, and projects, projects, and more projects.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for October 20th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, all sorts of fun stuff. It's getting to be that time of year. It's Halloween time. We're going to get some candy, some lights. I've been seeing some like insane Halloween decoration things on like TikTok mostly, YouTube. I'll put some links, I guess, in the show notes. There's a guy the other night that I was watching.

He had a fire machine. Two of them. He sprang fire 10, 20 feet up in the air in front of his house for Halloween and I'm like I think I think you've made it next level and then I watch

his next video and he had a 400 foot what was the thing the thing off of like demagogue thing or whatever it is off of Stranger Things the bad

this bad guy from Stranger Things crawling over his house made out of drones 400 feet or something crazy I'm like okay when you you start doing light shows with drones for your house i think uh i think you're that's next level

that's that's that's out of my league yeah i can't compete i'm just giving him the trophy that's it you get the trophy yeah yeah i'm just putting up a sign that says better candy over there he better give out the full size bars yeah i thought it was pretty cool with my uh my twinkly lights outside of my giant spider web but i guess i got nothing on that guy that sounds fun yeah i i thought i was the cool guy in the neighborhood when i just gave out the mini old henry's not the cheaper candies you know like that that was my sense of like a good house is like hey we got the little mini old henry's at this house you know i i did go and bought a bunch of halloween candy but it didn't last long so i have to go buy a bunch more halloween candy that's what happened yeah it was it was on sale

though so it was a good part i've decided i was going to be the house with the full-size candy bars this year being the first year in the house so i've i've been stockpiling candy because supposedly we can get two to three hundred kids in the neighborhood depending on wow what the weather of the the place so we'll see if this is a mistake or not well the the amazing part my neighborhood my neighborhood doesn't have many young kids in it so we we get maybe 20 kids on our street but me and my neighbors sit out front with two big things of candy which is you know have a couple beers and enjoy some candy we have the tv going and you know every now and then a kid interrupts us it's really a reason to drink isn't it gavin yeah or hang out by the fire exactly sounds about

right yeah as long as it doesn't rain and had to look up oh henry candy bars i've never heard of that one peanuts and caramel and chocolate right man it's like a combination of a payday and a snickers i i'm not a big candy person believe it or not i don't think we have that down here i've never heard of that oh are you serious this is one of those this is one of those things i've just blown away because i grew up eating old henry's you know easter time they have the old henry easter eggs and those are like one of my favorite and you probably have no clue what i'm talking i've never heard i don't i don't think it's a thing in the united states or if it is it's not in our region no because i've never heard of this in florida or ohio oh henry is an american candy

bar so they i've never seen it their advertising team really sucks the eggs actually look pretty good they are i'm gonna give you that one and i really sucks. The eggs actually look pretty good. They are. I'm going to give you that one. And I can only in general, they all look pretty good. Can only order them on amazon.ca. So if that tells you Walmart.ca.

So I guess it, Oh yeah. It's a, it is a Hershey brand. Well, I think everything is. Well, that's true.

Are they in stock? Uh, I don't know. Yeah. They're currently unavailable. So no, they're not. They only come out during easter time um and it's very hard to find so usually i have family instructed if they're in

the store and they see it during the time to just buy the box like don't leave any behind just buy the box bring it home you know they're my best friend i tell um what are the the uh not not so much like this time of year i guess it's this time of year is the uh recess peanut butter cups ones yeah yeah those are always good you can get the factory direct ones like right off the show right off the the oven or whatever like the super fresh ones we've done that once like they're still hot whenever they send them to you yeah yeah they're just melted no it's it's like uh it's like as fresh as they can be i guess and i tasted them and they tasted just like the ones i normally buy at the store so either i have a really good store that has good candy

coming to it all the time or i just have no taste buds one of the two i'm gonna send you some old henry easter eggs i can't believe you guys haven't had this yeah only available in canada as far as i can tell gavin so i did not know that wow because i Because I did the same thing. I searched on their website for the locator, and it only comes with Walmart Canada or a real Canadian superstore. Wow. There you go. Learn something new today. All Henry is only available in Canada.

Oh, Canada. Well, we'll have to check them out. Yeah. You have to go find one of those stores that caters to Canadians and buy some old'Henry's while I'm there or something. Actually, I'll be in Cincinnati next week and there is a Jungle Jim's there, which is like a giant warehouse full of international foods.

I'm going to go here and see if I can find it. What if you don't find them? Will you buy other things? Absolutely. It's one of those places like you could just find anything from like any country or region. And it's amazing. So if I don't find this, I'll find something else good. We'll keep us updated. That's awesome. All right. Well, we actually do have a bunch of stories that popped up over the week here and not just Home Assistant updates. It's kind of crazy, but we do have a few Home Tech headlines. So what do you guys say

we jump in? Let's do it. All right, Mazda. I'm going to laugh at this one all the way through. Mazda has issued a cease and desist letter to the open source contributor

who maintains the library at Home Assistant. So they're saying, stop using the Mazda connected services to basically, I guess this must connect to cars and car manufacturers and whatever integrations they're doing with it.

And I guess Home Assistant has basically removed that from the code, right? So a lot of people over in the forums are all upset about the hacked API is not working anymore. But this is what happens when you don't have a, you know, an API that's official, that's been released by a company and you're kind of relying either on somebody patching it every time it changes or the company come along and saying,

no, you don't get to do this anymore. It's a, it's no, no fun, no fun. And this is just like a lot of integrations and home assistant, you know,

they don't use official, you know, APIs or anything like that. And I'm looking at my queue, Home Assistant, you know, they don't use official, you know, APIs or anything like that. And I'm looking at MyQ, for example, you know, I just hope this doesn't set or give anybody else the idea that, hey, we should also do this because Home Assistant is very popular because it integrates with basically everything. And sometimes those integrations are using hacked or, you know, backdoor methods. And if they don't have all these integrations are using hacked or you know backdoor methods and if they don't have all these integrations one it will probably just drive the integrations into the hacks environment you know which is just it's not really associated with home

assistant it's kind of like if home assistant can't do it legally they'll throw it in hacks and let other people deal with it that's the way i I look at it. So more than likely, you'll see this Mazda Connected Services integration go over to there so you can still use it. But if other companies decide to do this, this could hurt Home Assistant. They're resources. They're not a big team. And if they got to be fighting lawsuits and doing all this extra stuff, it will slow down development. Yeah, I thought about this whenever I got my van working through Home Assistant. So somebody supposedly found an unpublished API with Drone Mobile,

and then they made that into a hax where you were able to then add it to Home Assistant. And when I was adding it, it just had this exact same thought, like it could just disappear at any moment. Maybe not because they told them was adding it, it just had this exact same thought, like it could just disappear at any moment. Maybe not because they told them to remove it, but they would just remove the API at some point. So this is definitely a risk you take with this kind of thing when it's not an officially sanctioned integration. Well, not just that, like with anything, even at work when people come with certain scripts and it's it's nice now but at any time that developer could just decide that they don't want to do it anymore and nobody's there to take take it over from them and you could lose it right um that happened to me when i was

with habitat there were some community add-ons that i was reliant on and the developer just walked away so you gotta be careful when you do things like that. And I guess it didn't help that Mazda used a DMCA takedown, which is a law we have here to protect copyright in the United States. And technically not exactly what they probably should have used, but it's one quick way to, like you said, get home assistance notice. And what are they going to do? Fight it as a free open source software. Like,

no, they're just going to take it off. And again, it'll go over to being in the, the hacks, you know, kind of like off brand thing. And,

and now Mazda will have like, they've swatted the main, you know, head off the, what is the thing? Is it not Medusa? It's the dragon. Yeah.

The Hydra. They've taken one head off and now a million of them are going to pop up just because everybody's going to fork this thing and have the code for themselves and um it's not going to not work anymore like you said it's just going to go underground so one mazda could actually just release the api but they probably won't because of their car company but two whatever integration this was probably wasn't well written and was hitting their servers quite a bit more than they thought it was going to be, causing them to have to pay a lot of money, which they weren't expecting. At the end of the day, they probably don't really gain anything from this being available to people in Home Assistant either, right?

It's probably maybe a couple hundred people using it. So it's not like somebody based their purchase off of this availability. If they were to remove it from like a larger platform or something that was more, I don't know, readily available or something to people, then maybe they'd be a little more upset about it. And it was officially sanctioned.

Yeah. What, what, what they need is an officially sanctioned thing that Mazda releases for, for this. Again again it's not probably a few hundred people man it's probably more than a few hundred probably a few thousand but they they need to not have something that in the long run costs mazda money on servers if it's inefficiently written or something like that because i've seen that before too where um you

run like an api server and somebody writes an integration and all of a sudden it's hitting your server like way too much. Hopefully they will find a way to do that. It would be nice if more of these car companies did offer an API. They're not very, they're not very, like Tesla is the technology car company, right?

And I don't even think they have an API. I think they're hacked as well, right? There's not an official Tesla API for their cars. I'm not rich enough to know honestly i guess there is there is something yeah there is and it looks like it's locally based too they're they're one of the seen as one of the more progressive car companies on the software side because they offer things like this um and yeah their their api is not as the public one i know is the reason i was thinking they didn't have one because i know the public one isn't as much as what people want to get off their car. And so you see,

you do see some hacks from time to time where people go in and they hack whatever endpoint the app is looking at to, to get another extra command out of it or something like that. So interesting, interesting stuff. I hope that more, you know, we just love APIs.

We want to see more, more APIs, please. Yeah. And it looks like for the Tesla, at least on Home Assistant right now, you can get the Powerwall integration and the Wall Connector integration. So I don't see one for the car, but I know people do integrate their Tesla with it. I thought there was something in there. Maybe not.

Maybe it is hacked. All right. Like you said, not rich enough to care my volkswagen from 2007 has no api whatsoever all right uh another another home assistant news here the latest chapter latest chapter of home assistant you're the voice which is this chapter four like john wick i guess wake words have been added to the platform. They're powered by a special system. What is it called? Open WakeWord? Yeah, Open WakeWord. And it offers real world accuracy and

can be trained for free in just one hour. Gavin, I know you're big on this. Have you been poking around and seeing what they're doing with this yet? Yeah, this is very impressive. So, you know, over the years, they've been working on this, you know. We have a very passionate community over at Home Assistant, you know. Very passionate. They'll kick people out of Facebook groups if you make one wrong comment, you know.

TJ. Excuse me, excuse me. Since the beginning, the community was always, you know, crying about wake words. We need wake words. We can't push them, but we need wake words. Of always you know crying about wake words we need wake words you can't push a button we need wake words of course they're working on wake words give them time right and ta-da here's the wake words and it's actually impressive because it's not one wake word it's they ship with a bunch of wake words i'm very happy because jarvis is one of them

uh you can say hey jarvis we're getting closer to getting our own Jarvis. And you can make your own weight words. So, I mean, that's a step above anything, right? So it's really impressive. You got to watch the demo videos. I don't know if you guys have seen the demo videos on their YouTube channel, but they have one guy who made a little droid from um was it mandalorian or one of the shows um and it actually when he calls it out it actually wakes up and he gives it a command and it it beep beep beeps and executes the command it's it's really cool like it just shows and

he goes as far as going around the the house as far away from his little speaker microphone and it picks them up really well and it still works you know i really like where they're going i'm keeping an eye on this i actually have it all set up in my home assistant but i can't get the um voice satellite set up yet so i need a little microphone for my arduino my esp board um to be able to then make it into a little satellite but the way it works is basically that these little satellites are of like ESP boards. You can throw them anywhere and they're just constantly streaming to Home Assistant. And then Home Assistant is processing the audio and then hearing for the wake word and

then issuing the wake up and everything, right? So you could set it up to do things like when it detects your name, it can respond with anything you want, right? To say, hey, I'm listening, right? It's so customizable. It's pretty amazing. I saw somebody mentioned because they talked about resources and, you know, there's limits on the number of them you can have because they're all going to be streaming straight to Home Assistant, right? But some people gave some good ideas as, hey, pair them with a motion sensor. So when you're in the room, they will turn on and stream

that and listen for you because why have it running in empty rooms too? And that was a great idea. I thought the Home Assistant team has actually come out and said they're working on this. They're trying to shift some of the recognition over to the satellites and reduce the load on the actual server and speed up things there there's a lot they have planned for this and honestly if you're watching this this is an exciting time my only thing is when it comes to my voice assistants sonos has it built in, right? And I really like that in my house. The fact that it has Amazon, not Home Assistant,

has Amazon and Google built in. And they're also, they're Sonos one, right? And I really like that because it does things like lower the volume and listen for you and stuff like this. If I were to go this way, I'd have to try and figure out how I can integrate that into my flow right but yeah it's fun to watch it's fun i wonder if there will be a day um clearly not right now and

it's going to be a while but i wonder if there'll be a day where there's the software that that sonos or you know these other products that have multiple voices is built into them could just put home assistant you know voice inside of Jarvis, so to speak, inside the Sonos. And that way, instead of picking Google or Amazon or whatever, you can go ahead and pick Home Assistant. And then you'd get to use that wake word and integrate with that system. It'd be kind of cool. It would be cool. But I don't think Home Assistant gets the recognition or the respect that it should because when you see certain products, they always list out the certain products they always list out the big ones they list out the google they list out amazon well yeah of course

because that's what everybody knows and it's one of the big players in there i saw one where they even listed out some brand i didn't even hear hear of welcome to uh being a custom installer where yeah i'll tell you all about control for ur RTI, brands you've never heard of, but they'll go into your house for multi-millions of dollars. Exactly. Yeah, they're never going to mention that off the bat, but it's usually one that some brands, I mean, we've been seeing some brands get around to doing integrations with them

or making strategic connections with them because they know that the products that they sell end up in these homes that have home assistant and being controlled so that i mean maybe there is a path for this one day yeah that that that could be integrated is just having an option and that's one other reason to buy a sonos speaker so to speak so yeah it would be interesting yeah the custom wake word is pretty cool because i'm not really sure I like the names, like the Amazon Alexa or Josh possibly. But I like to be able to use like other words. And so like computer or Naboo is pretty cool and other stuff like that.

And I know you can change them in those other programs as well. But being able to make your own would be super cool. But I'm not really sure what I would make mine. What would you guys make yours? Nothing I can say on this show well i i can't use explicit because the wife calls me that all the time so it just trigger all our uh but i'd go with jarvis you know like i'm a real fan of jarvis but i'd also want the jarvis voice too like if they somehow i know they possibly can't get it because of you know copyright or whatever but if somebody gets that in the community and we get that going i'll be so excited i don't know the way the way

these you know ai has been used to replicate voices you only need a couple of minutes to train it or a couple things to like 30 seconds to train an entire voice on and it can get pretty close so and because it's an open standard too anybody could take any voice and just add it and publish it and it's not tied to any big company like there's a lot of lines that will be crossed here oh yeah yeah there's a lot of dmca takedown notices that are going to be sent thanks thanks to home assistant here so yeah well i definitely have the uh alexa listed on the uh the article there so i'm sure it won't take long for Amazon to reach out about that. Yeah.

Alexa can wait to work for a completely different system. That's an interesting idea. But, you know, teach their own. All right. Well, that's pretty cool. I'll have to keep an eye on them and see what they do. I saw that there was like a – is there a charge to this? You have to pay them $13 or something?

No, no. I think that was for the hardware so they're giving you examples of devices that they've been testing on that have been working well for them and those devices have been selling out like as soon as they announce them they sell because everyone goes and jumps on one but they've been testing on an m5 stack, I believe. It's like a ESP32 with a speaker, microphone, development board, and just watching them use that, it's very impressive. From across the room, it picks up the wake word and their commands and everything.

And, you know, you can also tie it in with, like, OpenAI, you know, the chat GPT stuff, and have it answer all the other questions. But they're going to be working on all the other, like, non-control commands, right? So, like, you know, what's the weather like today? You know, we'll show you. They're going to be working on all that stuff

and they're adding it. You just got to give them time. But they've already noted that these are some of the next steps we're working on. This is only chapter four, so. We still have, what's October, November, December. We still have two more months in the year,

you know, so it'll be done. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be done in time. Hey, it's pretty, it's, it's pretty impressive.

56 language support. Uh, they've got all these little satellite things you can put around the house that are small devices that stream the audio back or stream, whatever it is all the way back over to the, the main thing to do all the processing. So that's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. All local inside the house secured and all that good stuff so nice all right well let's move on here um got some bad news for you guys best buy will be ending

the sales of physical media including blu-ray dvd and 4k ultra hd in 2024 no oh no i where am i gonna not buy my dvds from my dvds all the time, and I return them within 24 hours. In 1999, yeah. This decision is in line with the growing dominance of streaming services in the entertainment industry. Best Buy will not only cease in-store sales, but also online sales. So, not even going to sell them online for you anymore. Retail has been gradually reducing physical media offerings over the past couple of years.

I noticed when I was in there, it was actually kind of funny. I went in there the other day, not the other day, quite a while ago, just kind of like poke my head in and look around. And there were only a couple of shelves of movies and things, but the smart home stuff had expanded into like a whole aisle.

I was like, Oh wow, that's kind of cool. They have so much smart home stuff. Yeah, it is whole aisle. I was like, Oh wow, that's kind of cool. They have so much smart home stuff. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Um, anyway,

uh, best buy decision to discontinue online sales of physical media comes as, uh, not really any surprise to anybody. I think, uh, you guys sounded, uh,

sounded not, not very surprised at all, but, uh, let's see, uh, Walmart, Amazon,

and target are now the top retailers of dvs blu-ray discs and with best buys exit uh they're gonna get any even bigger if they don't decide to quit selling those bins of those giant bins of dvds at walmart for a dollar for five or whatever it is have you guys seen those yeah i've seen them they're such super low quality cases and everything it's like the cheapest you could possibly make a physical DVD. In a paper sleeve. But it works. No, it's just, yeah.

If you open the case, it cracks and breaks. These ones are fancy. They have a harder case, but it's definitely not a high quality case. It's interesting with all the stuff that's going on with streaming that, I mean, I can understand. Retail's been changing for a while. case it's interesting with all the stuff that's going on with streaming that um i mean i can understand this retail has been changing for a while and best buy has been at the forefront of a lot of the changes and making those decisions early so it'd be interesting to see what happens to walmart target other retail stores uh in the future when it comes to physical media i know a

lot of people will be upset about this because it's sometimes the only way to get a great copy of a movie is to go out and buy that 4k UHD movie or whatever. Um, you're, you're not going to get the same movie streaming it, um, at all. It's the file doesn't exist there. So the data doesn't exist there. It's all either some compression or they've taken something away. Um, but yeah, to get some of the like super high quality movies you need, you need that 4k Blu-ray. So we'll I'm sure the studios will still sell those on their, their stores.

Yeah. And you know what? The Blu-rays and DVD section, you said it, it always took up a huge part of the store. I haven't been in Best Buy recently at all, but when I last was, it was a large section.

And that's now going to free up a lot of space for them, I guess, smart home stuff or whatever else they want to branch into. Smart home would make sense. That's getting big now when it comes to going and buying stuff. You got to make room for all these matter devices, man. It's all going to matter. Yeah, I remember when I was working at Circuit City, you know, 1999, 2000, 2001, somewhere in that era. Like, the entire middle of the store was CDs and DVDs. Like, it was a very large space dedicated.

Of course, that was like the heyday of CDs. Like, if you weren't stealing stuff off of Napster at the time uh you'd have to go to the store and buy a disc and yeah i guess now you'll just have to buy kaleidoscape i mean no it's not gonna happen so trade it trade in your 30 or 40 blu-rays and just get a kaleidoscape when i get that tesla with the api i will uh okay yeah i'll get this kaleidoscape oh perfect all right well speaking of streaming news, we've got some interesting numbers here about Apple TV and, yeah, all the other competitors that are out there

like Netflix and Amazon, Prime Video. Here in the U.S. market, Just Watch, it's an app I love to use, announced some market share figures for the third quarter of 2023 and show that Amazon Prime holds a commanding 22% of the market share. I prime holds a commanding 22% of the market share. I guess not really commanding followed closely by Netflix with 21% Paramount

plus Apple TV, both experienced 1% growth while Disney lost 1%. So here we go. There's a list. Amazon prime, 22% Netflix, 21 max 15%, same as before Disney plus 12% down one.

Hulu, 11%. Paramount, 8%. Apple TV, 7%. And others down at four. So very interesting. I guess it says Apple TV has shown steady growth since introduction in 2019. But the whole streaming market as a whole seems pretty stagnant right now. It took Apple TV+, over a year, to grow its market share by 1% in comparison. Paramount Plus had only 4% of the market share in the same period last year

and now has more subscribers than Apple TV Plus. I don't know. I still enjoy my Apple TV Plus stuff. The new shows are starting to come back on. Got the morning show, got physical back in there, and I still haven't caught up on two of my other ones. Invasion came back, Gavin. Did you see

that? Have you seen any of those? Oh, I've been watching. Yeah, I've been watching them all. I'm caught up to the latest one. It's been great. I'm loving that show. I was shocked. I thought it was canceled. Oh, no, it came back season two. I'm loving it. I was shocked I thought it was cancelled oh no it came back season 2 I'm loving it well it still seems

I probably made it through one or two episodes but it still seems as like slow as the first season so I'm hoping it when it picks up it gets a bit better it's a little faster yeah I think that was everybody's complaint last season but hey I'm happy I'm happy the fun stuff's coming back on and

I've been happy with it so far what would you guys i think tj you mentioned are you on paramount plus did you say uh no i do not have paramount plus but i think i'm about to subscribe because one of the shows we watch is on there i can't remember what is it like bounty hunter i mean i've just heard about paramount plus in the past like month did it just launch this year or something i think it's been around for a year or so year two i feel like it's been advertised heavily recently it used to be paramount um yeah it's a different thing i'm honestly surprised amazon prime is so high up on here i feel like the only thing i've ever watched on amazon prime was the boys i think amazon prime's cheating because it's included with our amazon prime subscription right for free so if they're counting me that's not fair because

i never i never launch it right so if yeah that's what i want to know yeah active users i hope that's what they're doing otherwise this is cheating for them i don't know that this is active users thing this is so this is the app just watch right so if you ever like just watch is great because what it is is it's um it's an app that kind of like aggregates all these things together and if you ever want to know where a show is or a movie is streaming at or you can buy it or render whatever you just type it in there and magic it it tells you where to go watch it at so you know where to go like oh that one's one's on Apple TV. Oh, that one's on Paramount. Oh, I have to go pay that. It's a rental.

I have to go pay on Amazon or wherever. I use it all the time. So what it does is when you sign up or sign in, you have to tell it what services that you are subscribed to or have access to. And that's kind of how it gets those numbers. So I don't think this is active. It's not active, but this is, this is going to be more of like, Hey, we think that they have this, this many subscribers or they're getting, they're going up because we see more people coming to our app and asking for

Apple TV plus stuff. And then it's weird too, because how do they count that for people that have more than one of these, right? Like how do you count the market share what do you mean like if i have netflix and amazon prime am i i'm reflected in both of those but i'm just one person yeah yeah you would be right yeah because there are several services so you're just trying to figure out the total amount of people per service yeah you you would you would you would have a number in both of those columns it would just be you know leveled out over over the, whatever the hundred percent. I mean, none of these are cracking. None of these are cracking a third of the market. So at least from this number. So, all right, well, that's, that's interesting. Let's move on here to even stranger retail.

This is, this is not the onion. So I guess Netflix, uh, is planning opening branded retail stores in order as, as the best buy just goes out of just goes out of business of DVDs and whatnot. Netflix, yeah, we're all in. So they're open branded retail stores in order to further enhance its brand presence and offer physical shopping experience to its customers. The company's in talks with landlords in several major U.S. cities

to secure prime locations for stores. These stores will showcase and sell a wide range of Netflix merchandise, including clothing collectibles and other novelty items inspired by its original content. The move to open physical stores is seen by many as a way for Netflix to engage in more of its dedicated fan base and capitalize on the popularity of its shows and movies.

So I guess you can go shopping and chill, I guess. Is that the idea? Nice try. I'll give it to you. I'll that the idea nice try i'll give it to you i'll give it to you i'll give it to you no it's just them capitalizing off the fan base and you know when a show goes viral on netflix uh before they didn't really have a way to capitalize on that you know other than more people shared it more people you know watched it but you know now they're looking we can make more money off of Squid Game by opening up this theme room or something for Squid Game where people can come and play a game or something

like that. And I think prime real estate right now is a good time because there's a lot of real estate open right now since COVID. Come to Toronto, you'd be able to get a lot of anywhere. There's so many open shops right now open spaces that's a great point you know so it's a good move they'll probably get in there cheap um make a lot of money and then they can close down whenever they want they can close those stores they should almost treat them as temporary locations kind of like the uh the spirit

halloween of the streaming world right yes come in and take over abandoned warehouses and then you know but something the only thing i thought about with this that would actually make sense to me like something that i might go visit do you guys have any of those like immersive art experiences near you um like we have one in columbus called other world which i've linked in the back chat there there was one in denver called meow wolf yep um i was thinking like that would actually be cool for netflix because then they could come up with like basically the same concept but just change the theme every like six months or 12 months or something so they have a stranger

things one and then they could do the squid games one or like a bunch of other ones and so that way it'd be like an actual reason for people to come because i don't think people are going to go to this just to like hang out and play random netflix games and stuff but they turn it into like an immersive art experience that people already love but they make a character theme people might actually go to that i think so yeah yeah uh well maybe i i was sitting here saying this my wife says it's going to be more like a hot topic so they're going to be selling merchandise and t-shirts. Yeah. See, I don't see that being successful. It might be, it might be. I mean, they, they're going to have to give a reason for people to

come in. And so maybe, maybe they can do something like that where it's a little more like they have an immersive experience or something. They, they will have a physical presence, I guess. So that's, that's more than they have now. Right. They were just, they were the DVD by mail company and, and now they can go sell all the toys and trinkets and stranger thing t-shirts in one location and make the money themselves rather than selling it through like an online portal you know through walmart or best buy or whatever and not getting the the not getting the full profit of those i guess um it'd be interesting to see what they do with it if they put a tim hortons in each location people will

come for the coffee and stay for the t-shirts you know that's there you go right now they should sign that right there you know not if it's american tim hortons because american tim hortons is awful oh i'm also being told here this is breaking news i guess i'm also being told that they will be they'll have food as well so yeah so yeah it'll be it'll definitely be an experience sounds like you're being told that you're being told that you're going to be going then yeah we will be going i guess there will be a there will be a netflix store uh pilgrimage at some point let us know in 2025 when they might launch this i have a feeling they're not going to launch this but well we'll see we'll see what happens like gavin said uh retail retail location is probably pretty cheap right now because there's

plenty of empty stores around you know in prime locations there's plenty of empty places they can set up at at a good spot yeah i'd like next to an apple store or something like that same a mall or something i think i think we'll get some traffic i say that because the only mall we have in town that has the apple store is the only mall that's alive the rest of them are just like wastelands like absolute wastelands they they used to have hot topics no they don't have a hot topic anymore it's a bed bath bed was it bad bath body works thing and then like one thing in the food court and that's it the rest is tumbleweeds yeah they just tore down them all over here so i think the other ones are soon to follow sad day we used to like our malls we used to like our malls then we're like wait i can shop online and not go there

where we used to go to hang out yeah i think i think that might make a i think retail stores might actually make a comeback whenever retailers stop accepting returns because like you know like the online thing is super convenient because you can just return everything super easy and like amazon's terrible about this because amazon you can just like send whatever you want back to them right like they don't really care like they're just like hey here's your money back. Sometimes they don't even make you send the item back. But I think if they were to like put a stop to that, the retail stores might make a comeback.

But outside of that, there's nothing really going to happen. Yeah, and Amazon has kind of started cracking down a little bit more. Like whereas before they would do nothing to prevent you from returning whatever. Probably didn't even have to be the right thing. They would just take the box back. And now I think there's a lot more like pushback. There's some friction there that I've heard people having where in the past there was no issue at all

with returning anything that you wanted to return. In fact, I have a UPS here that a client of mine ordered and it was the wrong size for his rack. It was too deep. And there was just no way for it to physically fit in there so we tried to return it and they were like just keep it we'll send you it's a new one you need that's a ups that's like a 700 ups and the the point is they just want to pay for the shipping to come back and have to deal with that so i got it thanks

can't beat that win win yeah anyway uh yeah. Anyway, we'll be interesting. Get some Netflix candy. How much is it? Like Stranger Things ice cream or something? I don't know. You know it's a slow news week when this is the most exciting news article. Oh, well, I got one more that's really exciting here. Security company ADT.

Nope, nope, nope. Sorry, T-Day. It's not going to be exciting. Security company ADT is set to launch a new system called ADT Smart Home Security, which appears to be a more suitable successor to the Nest Secure system that previously ADT self-startup system that they had for this ADT self-setup system. The new system features a polished sensor hardware, sleeker base station with backlit keypad, and door-window sensors that can be disarmed with an on-device button. The system can be set up by the customer, offers both self-monitoring and professional monitoring options,

and integrates with Google products like the Google Home. Also work with Z-Wave products for adding in smart light blocks, garage door controllers, and thermostats. However, it does not support Z-Wave sensors. And the article mentions that Google invested $450 million in ADT in 2020, and the new system is expected to integrate with Google Nest devices as well. So an interesting little new product on the horizon. I guess we've seen a couple of these partnerships between Google and ADT over the years,

and I guess this is just a continuation of it. When does it get released? The article does not say. It says it appears to be launching. Does the article say when it's going to be canceled? I mean, these typically don't get canceled. Yeah, this is from ADT. It's good.

Yeah, this is good. Oh, okay, okay. Not on Google device, so it's fine. Oh, okay. No, I just heard a lot of Google integration and stuff. I think Google will just sell this. Oh, okay, okay. Not on Google device, so it's fine. Oh, okay. No, I just heard a lot of Google integration and stuff, so I don't know. I think Google will just sell this. Okay, okay. Because they're canceling their Nest Protect, so.

Exactly, exactly. So they got to cancel something to make room for something else. Or Nest Secure Hub, I should say. It looks good, but it's very basic. It just comes with one door sensor, one motion sensor. So, you know know it could get expensive when you start to expand this system to cover your house and cover more windows and stuff so you gotta keep that in mind when you look at things like this that's the adt way well last

i knew adt was trying to sell their their residential uh division so maybe google maybe this is like the precursor to google buying it to cancel it no i that would be canceled yeah i doubt i mean i doubt when they when they say that adt would sell adt residential off but they they would keep the adt name i mean that's that's that's too valuable it was commercial security would go some other direction be called something else because no one cares on the commercial side but like on the on the on the residential side that that brand i mean i have ADT signs in my yard and I don't have ADT monitoring. So like you just have to buy the signs on eBay

and stick them out of your yard and that protects your home better than their security system. So, oh, whoops, did I say that out loud? Anyway. We're going to get a DMCA notice now, dang it. Right, exactly, exactly. I do think it was interesting

that it will integrate with those nest devices though so maybe if you already have nest devices in the house um you know now that the google nest one is going away you'll be able to uh to utilize those and and with this system as well so it is kind of ugly though i mean basic it's very basic yeah i think it looks all right compared to some of the other stuff. It's like a little puck thing. Like a little... Little giant puck. Little giant puck, yeah.

Well, there's a big one and a small one. Is there two? I thought there was just one. There's a hub, and then I guess there's a base station. They're both around things with keypads on top. So maybe... One looks like an Echo Dot, and the other one looks like a Deco wireless router. Well, the hub is the discontinued Google one. keypads on top so maybe one looks like an echo dot and the other one looks like a decal well

the hub is the google one and then the new one is the tall one that looks the same yeah i'm looking i'm looking at the first picture and okay this is where i'm confused because the first one the one on the left is the google one that's discontinued got it yeah one on the right is just the top so maybe when you turn it sideways it looks like the thing further down which is yeah yes much larger than a than a google it's like a fat amazon alexa so fat short amazon alexa stack three of them on top of each other and that's what you get yeah all right well uh nobody matters this week i we didn't really see any matter stories coming these are actually pretty quiet i guess those uh oh henry's are gonna matter because that's what i'm gonna go look for oh i'm gonna be talking about matter shortly so i'll let you keep going don't worry all right all right i'll send you some oh henry's next week all the links

and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 456 all right i got a pick of the week it's's over on courtesy of our Mastodon there. And I came across the Cursed Voice Over IP Cable. Probably wouldn't work. And if you scroll down on here, you can see that other people have made different versions of it, including ones that hook directly to mains power. So if you want to use the Port Friar 2000,

as someone calls one of these things, you can. It'll definitely add more power over the Ethernet than you need 250 volts of it it looks like because this is uh these are the european plugs that are on here as well so will these make my cameras run faster i love that the community's coming together to solve a problem i know i know it's just wire i mean it's yeah you just need the wires it doesn't matter what connections are in the end they're also the same thing tomato tomato it's funny somebody puts something on here i don't even know this before maybe just a power device and it's not like i think some of them could be like those old like balans like an actual balan where you converted like analog av to cat5 and then convert it back on the other end because there'd be enough pairs that you could do something

like that are you talking about the the headphone or the 3.5 millimeter? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I've used this to send audio over quite a distance and they're pretty nice because I guess I didn't have anything else to compare it with, but I don't, I didn't notice any like a loss of signal or anything like that.

So I forget what I used it for. I think it was like a TV with a headphone jack or something. Go into like a Sonos amp. Yeah. It was the most random thing, but like I just had it in the truck and it worked. So why not? Had it in the truck, had a Cat5 extra. Done. There you go.

You don't need a fancy $100, $200 ballon when this thing just worked. I thought it was funny they called it the cursed voice over IP cable. Because, I mean, it would do it the cursed voice over IP cable. Because I mean, it would do it. It would do the job. If you do have any feedback, questions, comments, pics 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, well, we do have some project updates this week. Well, first, there's a home assistant update. So I guess I gotta I gotta I gotta go do that well uh gavin you want to tell me what what's going on in this thing well you may actually see like 50 home assistant updates this week so that they were basically

just updating a bunch of libraries dependencies etc etc so a lot of add-ons you don't be surprised if you see a lot of updates coming through um just click just click on it, brings code up to date, you know, makes things better, faster, fixes bugs, creates new bugs. Um, but what they did was they did update home assistant OS, right? Um, and home assistant OS is the actual underlying, um, operating system that home assistant runs on when you're running it on their home assistant boxes, or you're, you're running in a VM. So you want to get that updated. But they apparently made some significant speed increases in Bluetooth. So if you're using Bluetooth with home assistant, these were actually Linux kernel updates that they were able to find the issue and report it to the Linux maintainers.

Oh, nice. Yeah. So it benefited not just home assistant, but the Linux maintainers. Oh, nice. Yeah, so it benefited not just Home Assistant, but just Linux in general. So, you know, that's pretty good. And other bug fixes and stuff. So you'll see these updates coming through. I forgot I had turned mine off,

so let's wait for it to boot back up. You let yours turn off? Well, yeah, we were having problems with the server earlier. You don't love Home Assistant. Man, you don't restart your stuff and you just let it turn off? Well, yeah. We were having problems with the server earlier. You don't love homelessness. Man, you don't restart your stuff and you just let it turn off all of a sudden? Yeah. What kind of person are you? I forgot to turn it back on.

It's starting up now. Oh, my gosh. Now that I know that it wasn't the cause of my server crashing issue that I was having. Wow. I keep getting, wait, when am I going to get this nice logo? They're still giving me the old logo. I want the nice logo. You got to update. Yeah update yeah which means you gotta run us south come on oh there it goes there's the nice new logo perfect forbidden closet of mystery

is that where you hide the christmas presents no that's where the server rack is i just call mine laundry room well you don't have a six-year-old that's where the server rack is. I just call mine laundry room. Well, you don't have a six-year-old that's curious. And you got to keep them away from certain things. So you just tell you never to go in there. That's the forbidden closet of mystery. And that's enough, right? She should pay attention.

Oh, man. All right. It looks like Gavin's been busy with some projects. ESP home, inefficient templates, AOTech. Whoa. Oh, my gosh, man. Are we. It looks like Gavin's been busy with some projects. ESPHome, inefficient templates, AOTech. Whoa. Oh, my gosh, man. Are we going to have time for this? You upgraded all your Z-Wave?

You did all that? You actually did that? It's been a rough week. That's all I have to say. So first of all, I'll skip through these. I finally jumped into ESPHome stuff. So if you have Bluetooth things like Switchbox products, right? This is great because I set up a Bluetooth proxy. So now instead of it sending the commands through like their hub,

which then doesn't really cover the whole house, it now sends the commands out through the Bluetooth proxy close to my curtains and stuff like that. And it's so much faster, better response. So that was my first thing I did with the sb home the second thing i put together i threw together a pressure sensor for my pool filter but we're at that point of the year where i just closed my pool today so i will have to test this it'll give me time to no no it's gonna give me time to test and refine it for later you know so next year i'll implement this but it was cool to finally get it working and see the values coming through so um i'll expand that later but that was esp home i plan to

do a few more things with it i already have some devices bookmarked that i gotta order off amazon and we'll see what else i can do with that um while in all of this i was cleaning up a lot of my template sensors if you're familiar with home assistant and templates, just a word of caution. If you write an inefficient template, um, it could actually reduce like, you know, response time of home assistant. Um, so if you're like noticing slowdowns and stuff like that, look at your templates. Don't be afraid to look at the templates, open them up, you know, turn them off temporarily and see what the response time's like. Cause I found one that was actually slowing down the response time of my home assistant

significantly. And I didn't see it in like CPU usage or memory usage. I saw it. I only saw it when you flick a light and it just took a lot longer than usual to turn on um and that's the only way i can do it once i disabled that template lights are instant everything's fast again it was beautiful so you know if you're ever noticing like something like that you have a lot of templates check them out because a badly written one can cause other issues um and then now what what wait a second wait a second what I had to ask you this before. What are the templates for? Like, is this like reusable? Oh, no.

I mean, I know what a template is, but like it doesn't. It's like if you're using an inefficient one, how does that in home assistant templating is almost like coding. So it allows you to write if command statements, but you would use them in like when you're creating your own custom entities, for example. OK. Right. statements but you would use them in like when you're creating your own custom entities for example okay right so you can make an entity that does something like uh it's a number entity that counts the number of lights that are on right and then every time a light turns on it triggers a refresh of that entity oh okay yeah we talked about this before you could do that but i had one that was counting the number of uh it was monitoring offline devices right but it's it was just the way it was written it was really i don't know if there's a queue that has to process all

this but it was processing like everything every time a state update was happening so i just once i disabled it everything went fast again so you you just got to be careful. You know, it's a learning experience. Yeah, that makes sense. And then finally, this is the big one now, right? I talked about this last week. I said I bought the ZOO Z-Wave 800 USB stick, and I was planning to, you know, do a little research, see how I can implement it. And I didn't plan to have it done by now, but something forced me. So, you know, while doing the research, you know, wondering, you know, how can I get my

old Z-Wave devices onto this new stick? I have about 94 Z-Wave devices. So I was looking at, you know, people were saying, well, you could do a backup of my old Aotech one. I was like, okay, cool. But then they're like, okay, you can only back up if you have version 1.2 of the firmware. So I was like, great. I got to do a firmware update first. Luckily that didn't wipe out the stick. I was like, great. I got a firmware update. Okay. Then I did the backup. I was like, great. Then I switched

the sticks over to do a restore. And I figured, you know, I have the backup. I have the old stick still. I'll just put the new stick into a restore, see if it, you know, it works. It didn't work. You can't restore. There's no backup and restore. So I said, oh, well, that didn't work. So, you know, I took out the new stick. I put back in the old stick, switched it back over. All my entities got renamed. All my automations were messed up everything the the devices were still there but it's like it reset everything on on it right so you know yeah good thing i did this in the morning because then i had all day to work on it but at that point i made the decision do i fix all the entities or do i just go through and uh migrate it now so that was saturday morning i just made the call i said all right

uh i gave uh the wife my credit card i said go shopping and i just started on it and honestly it wasn't that bad it took me about an hour to an hour and a half to move over all the z-waves so going through the whole house and doing the triple click exclude, triple click include really works smoothly, right? Like I was surprised. The new stick is really fast. It picked up. I had no issues with range, nothing like that. That was the easiest part of this whole thing.

You know, I really appreciate Z-Wave for that because when I was doing this and going through this process i just thought of what i had to do for a matter device and you know with a matter device you either scan the code which you probably lost at that point or you enter the little number that's written somewhere on the device usually on the back against the wall right or and then even after you got it paired i don't know what it is what matter but it took like minutes before it actually finished. Right. And that would always drive me mad. It would drive me mad with matter. Right. It was the fact that it took so long and that would have mean like, that would have been a multi-day project for me.

But with Z-Wave, it was almost instant with every device. It was, you know, Oh, see it. All right. Now it's at it.

Okay. Done interviewing done. Right. So I really appreciate Z-Wave and simplicity like that. So yeah, it took me about an hour and a half. Um, after that though, I, I only finished probably what's today. It took me about two days of fixing all my automations, renaming all the entities, cleaning out all the old stuff, you know, like that was the toughest part of this whole thing was just you know my whole home assistant having to rebuild all that um the entity namings default names you know i came up

with a naming scheme i cleaned them all out you know i'd be watching tv shows i went room by room it's a headache but you know it's done now everything's back up and running it's fast the new z-wave 800 stick is beautiful it's running like so fast so great range is good i don't have any long range devices yet well i have one but i don't think i added as long range um my zoos um smoke detector um little relay thing relay yeah yeah dc voltage thing um but i don't have it added as long range i should play around with that one a bit more but um it's beautiful like it's nice to be on a new stick i noticed the response time with the old gen 5 stick on my home assistant home assistant seemed to be choking with it sometimes and that was due to a recent update and i think they broke something in there

so i don't know but you know being on the z-wave 800 i'm the new one it's it's so far it's working great so i was kind of forced into it um yeah wiped out my saturday you know this sunday i was still fixing automations all the way up until monday night you know i finally got all the automations all set up everything's back in all everything's named properly um it was uh it was a chore so if you ever try to do something with home assistant like this do it in the morning early morning to give yourself the whole day to recover from what you just screwed up this is why i don't update this is yeah this is why it's right i was trying to update because you have

different problems yeah yeah you have different problems i was trying to get new hardware in there that's all yeah the first the first rule you learn as an integrator i guess maybe the first uh toughest rule you learn is never to update on like a friday night never yeah so updating in the morning definitely makes the most sense never update never do any installs on a friday never update never press that button as tempting as it may be you think it's going to fix a problem it won't it's not not on a friday it won't there's been no problems with it nobody's reported any issue the same button works on monday it's same button will work on monday and it'll actually work on monday on friday yeah it will actually work on Monday. On Friday, it will not work. Out of spite.

It just knows. It knows, yeah. Software has something built into it, doesn't it? We programmers, we write that in. If you're foolish enough to do any updates or anything on a Friday, we're going to hurt you. The pain is on. Like there's so much we can do as programmers. Like it's just built in.

It's at kernel level code. Home Assistant can't fix that. I'm sorry. They just can't. It's at kernel level code. Home Assistant can't fix that. I'm sorry. They just can't. It's in there. And if you're a user of Z-Wave JS, which used to be Z-Wave to MQTT, but name the devices in the Z-Wave JS integration.

Trust me, it will make life so much easier because when you go into that and all you see are 40 Zoos contact sensors, good luck trying to find out which one is which you know so at least put the room name and you know the name of it so that you know which one it is because i had to inventory all my devices before and they were just generic names and i could not find where they were so i 94 devices that's all I saw. So, I had to actually go through and find them all and figure out. There were a couple that, you know, I was like, what did I do with these again?

You know, and I eventually found them. I was like, oh, yeah, this thing, you know. So, yeah, it's a chore. As I look over my shoulder and it's like,est st-0009 that's the name of the device yeah i don't know how you guys don't change how you don't change that right away that annoys me certain things don't annoy seth he doesn't let things get to him just rolls right off my back yeah i've been dangerous it's all behind him now it's literally behind me. Good job, Gavin. All right, TJ, you've been monkeying around with some camera stuff that sounds kind of crazy to me.

Maybe not to Gavin, but to me it does. What have you been up to? Yeah, so when we bought the house in June, I just wanted the quickest and simplest thing for cameras. Like I wasn't trying to invest a bunch of time and money. So, of course, I went with UniFi cameras. So I already had the UniFi networking. I already had a Dream Machine Pro SE. I had a Ubiquiti Pro Access Point.

And, you know, like a dozen of these little POE powered five port switches that work great as well. And so the Unify cameras were a natural fit. And so I bought them and they've been like, okay, you know, the best part about Unify cameras is the software because it's very easy to use. Um, it's got person and vehicle detection on there and like, it just works. Like there's not a lot of BS that that goes into it but if you know me you know i've always griped about the hardware because the hardware i think is the worst camera

hardware i've ever used in my life like for a basic camera it's like 129 which is which is reasonable their older version the g4 was 199 which i think was way overpriced for what it was. But for $129, it's not a bad price. Mounting them sucks because I don't think whoever designed them has actually ever mounted the camera. And so if you mount it like on the eaves of your house, there's not like a lot of lift that you can do to the camera. And so my problem was that I have these like little baby soffits. They're like two inches wide and they're super deep.

And so I actually had to like build a little wood spacer blocks to like bring the camera down. And so that way I can actually see what I wanted to see. I feel like they let Chad GPT design their camera mounts. Just like it kind of knew what it was supposed to look like, but then just kind of like, well, here it is. This is what you should have. And it got all the the parts and pieces that you need right but it's they're just not fully functional i think if you mounted them on the wall it would be a lot better like not on a soffit yeah which is fine but like when you're you know retrofitting wire you're not gonna like cut open your walls to run wire you're gonna go through the attic

or the basement or something like that and yeah it just i don't know it doesn't make any sense but it is what it is so this week i you know we were or i'm sorry last week um we had some kind of animal tear up our backyard um and i i checked the cameras and the night vision on them is just like god awful like it just we don't have a ton of light in our neighborhood um and so like whenever the cameras are on they just they look like butt and so i decided that i would just i would upgrade cameras right i was like this isn't going to be too bad um i'll just buy some some you know hundred dollar amcrest cameras they have some color night vision in and even if the color night vision doesn't work like

the ir is going to be better because i don't remember what the g4 the g5 range is but i feel like it's less than like 50 feet which is not ideal for cameras i think they even had some external parts you could clip on that address that it was like a they do ir yeah and i think that's only available for the professional though yeah and i think that's only available for the professional though i don't think that's available for the cheaper ones probably right and so like that's my other problem with ubiquity is like their their good cameras are like 500 each and for 500 in like the normal camera world that would get you like a killer camera with like heaters built into it and like 200 ir range and or 200 feet ir range and all this like crazy stuff

like 200 i guess or 500 dealer cost maybe um but it would just buy you like a way nicer camera and i'm not dropping 500 on a camera for my house uh and especially when i need four outside i mean that's two thousand dollars just on four cameras i'm not doing that and so i picked up these amcrest cameras and so far i've only I literally just got them installed today. So, like, I can't talk a lot about them. I've used these ones specifically in the past. The night vision so far is way better than the Ubiquiti ones were. So we'll have to see how they are long term.

The ones that I have, just because the ambient light and everything is not that good, they're not color night vision. But the black and white image is so far better. Nice. And one of the biggest problems is now you have no VMS to look at these cameras. Well, yeah, Seth, that's the problem, right? And so we get into camera software. And when you're doing this to people's houses and stuff, you buy an NVR and you just hook it in and bam, you can do playback and all that stuff. But in the house here, we like to do things a little more complicated.

And so I've delved into running my own NVR. And basically the only good option out there is Blue Iris. And if you've seen Blue Iris or or used it it looks like but like it just like it looks like it was made in the 80s or in the 90s and they've literally never updated it since and it does like everything you could want it to do no no no it looks it looks like they've updated they just updated and added more features and didn't fix any of those ui elements you're talking about they're just like oh we need more buttons we'll put more buttons on here done yeah like it literally does everything you wanted to do like

every time you tell you talk to somebody about it it's like oh i'm able to do this and gavin's one of those people and gavin's gonna tell us all these great things it can do but i just can't get over the fact that it just looks and works like butt i mean it's just like i somebody wants me to pay for this like this should be free software just because of the way it looks. Should be paying me. Like it is not expensive. I don't know. Like it's probably like, it's less than a hundred dollars, I think.

It's like $60 for a full. But then I got to buy the mobile app for $10 too. So it's like $70, which isn't bad. Like I'm not complaining about the price, but it's just like, why can't we just have like, somebody should buy blue Iris and just give it a UI update and everybody would be happy. They'd probably just like rebu't we just have like somebody should buy blue iris and just give it a ui update and everybody would be happy they'd probably just like rebuy it at that point so now i just i just don't want to use it so we're gonna find out i'm gonna end up using it because there's literally no other option but it's just it's so ugly it has an api i wonder if you could hire a developer to

create a new ui for you. Man, I know a developer, and if I tell him I need it by next Thursday, or by this Thursday, he might be able to whip it out. Yeah. Depends on how much you want to pay. There should, I mean, it does have a decent API, and it does have, like, known things. It doesn't stop the fact that, like,

the rest of the app is so hard to, I mean, it's just such a, it's a, it's really hard to use. Like, it really is. It doesn't make make they have things that they could do in that app to make it easy to set up to onboard to get in and it's like no we're just going to give you all the settings you've ever dreamt about and it's almost it's literally one step above like doing command line video editing oh my god with ff impact or something what's so hard about that well like i'm just to the point in my life where like you know i'm a young professional i run two companies and do a bunch of other things and in my other free time that doesn't exist

and so the last thing i want to do is like configure this stuff and so i just want something that like just works and i don't have to put configure this stuff. And so I just want something that just works. And I don't have to put a ton of effort into. And technology just isn't that, unfortunately. So if you're looking to host your own camera software, then Blue Iris is it. And you should feel bad about it. Well, good news for you. Blue Iris setup and configuration is on my list of things and services I offer. Ooh, perfect.

Nice. We can negotiate rates you know i'll have to have you do that and set up frigate at the same time because that's making me drag my head against the wall yeah free frigate is another one that it's simpler but it's also less um less feature because you use yaml instead of command line gui stuff is that simpler i don't know no they have uh cards and stuff that you don't have to use YAML. It's gotten a little bit better. So, yeah, but it's more... Not to configure it.

Not to configure it. Well, you have to configure the options. You do have to use YAML. Yep. It's more ingrained in Home Assistant, I believe, right? But at least I get to use Home Assistant for that, right? So, I mean, Home Assistant's interface isn't the best, as we've talked about many times in the past. but at least i get to use home assistant for that right so like i mean like in home assistance interface isn't the best as we've talked about many times in the in the past and you have to

really like build anything that looks good but at least like i don't know home assistant looks a little bit more modern and like the buttons make sense right and so like that's fine you know and just like you said seth it looks like literally somebody just gave you all the options possible with Blue Iris and I don't know, it's just too much. I don't think they care about users in general. They just want to put out a product that you have to be almost a

developer to configure yourself. That's their market, I think, right there is to get into the pro space and or like, you know, Not the pro space. Yeah, the pro sumer. Yeah, pro sumer space and are like you know into some not to pro space prosumer yeah prosumer some serious you know they have used in some serious locations but i just think that they want the person that uses this has you have to read the manual you have to read the manual i've

read the manual i'm not doing that yeah see you know me i'm not reading any manuals i've read the manual i've read the manual and then the manual changes yes and like you read somebody else talking about the manual and you're like oh go look at this no nope that's a different story this week from last i say this year from last year and you find stuff from like 2015 where people are complaining about no don't do that do this because this doesn't work and then you have to really dig deep and find out that they did change it eventually and fix that bug or, you know, who knows if they fix it or not. I don't know. Like it is a giant program. It is a, they've, so like you, if you look at Ubiquity and what they've done and, and, or Nest or anything like that, like they support like two or three cameras, like it's not very much, right. And they control both ends of it. So they don't have to worry about somebody messing up a camera configuration on some random Hikvision or Dahua camera and trying to integrate it with their NVR.

Just no, they have parameters. They know exactly what they are. It's very controlled. And the feature sets get controlled all the way back. And that's why they're able to make such a clean app, clean interface and everything, because there's no surprises to any of that. The entire product line is fixed and they can over time add in more cameras but at the same time they own both of them they don't have to worry about you adding in some random camera or doing something random or trying to do what is it uh the the the ai thing that we we always um the code project ai yeah code project yeah you don't have to worry about somebody setting that up to do object detection. No, they just built it in and you get that on some cameras.

And yeah, okay, great. But I don't know. There's got to be a happy medium somewhere. Like Blue Rice is at the opposite end of that, where they're like, yeah, we'll work with just about anything on the market. And as long as your computer can run this program which is optional because sometimes you can put too much into it and it'll just crash the computer or the computer because it's windows will just decide to randomly do an update and crash itself because it's just underpowered or whatever blue

ice is great for that i just it's just such a big program i just don't think anybody who's not a developer but who just wants to sit there and tinker with it is going to have the patience to deal with it. Like just it, I, I kind of lost my, my way on it. And it's like, well, we're just going to put an NVR in on this, this project. Cause I just, I can't sit here and baby this thing. Like I just, I can't do it. It's just so unreliable. Not, not because of BlueRise,is the software just because it runs on windows and it crashes because windows just the windows computers suck you guys are hurting me today you know you're bashing blue iris you're bashing windows and you guys are having all the issues that i don't have you know like uh that's because you're a super nerd guy like his network admin over here like you just you have like you have the background and everything and tools you need like at your disposal you literally do nothing all day

Gavin I mean you're an IT person you have time to configure this I don't you were just messing around with your light switches all day you told us I'm off this week if it makes you feel better but Blue Iris is the perfect example of an application that adds in every button their

user requests they say there's a lot of them they can get rid of my problem isn't even the options it's just the interface to do everything like give me all the options sure but just make it look better yeah i mean it's like i don't know it's like wise or uh ways like the the navigation app i think that one looks awful too so i just can't it's hard for me to use stuff that that looks terrible yeah i think they could they could use a designer to come in and just take away all the features that you wouldn't like they have to know that somebody that most people like 90 of the people never touch this tab the 15th tab on the settings screen and and that might not need to be there it might just be mad though it'll be just put it in an advanced section click the advance button tick off toggle the advance and all that stuff comes back

but everybody else can just kind of relax and like set up the basic stuff and i i don't know i just man that i'm with you, TJ, there needs to be something out there that's like for gate that doesn't require you to learn gamble to set up this so dumb. And then like something between unify and, and, uh, and, and the good old, uh, for gate slash, um, blue Iris stuff that's out there that looks, I mean, it's honestly really cool. The stuff you can do with blue iris is awesome the stuff you can do with forget is is really forget forget i don't know what it is forget whatever it's really cool but to the onboard like to get on that on that stuff is so frustrating and there's a ton of like super expensive professional stuff out there

that you can get involved with and pay a whole lot of money for i guess you can throw money at the problem but like where does that leave us like tj and myself well i'm back on you i'm back on unify i think i'm gonna throw money at the problem seth because what i'm probably gonna do and we'll figure out this week how i really feel about it because i got the the trial of blue iris i think for 14 days and one of the things that annoys me about blue iris so far too is that i'm doing the evaluation and it puts a giant watermark across the whole thing that says blue iris evaluation and it's like okay like can you just let me use it without the giant watermark too can you just not yeah yeah

come on just let me just stop So that already annoys me too. But I think what I'm probably going to end up on, and I don't want to do, is I'm going to end up buying a Synology NAS with some camera licenses. And so the NAS itself is like $600 for whatever their fancy one is with like four drives. Or they have one that has like ai detection with two drives and have like another one without the detection that's four drives they're about the same price i'm probably just gonna bite the bullet and just buy that because the the sonology software at least is better and it does have like the smart detections and stuff built into it i just don't

want to do that because the sonology is nice you know it's six hundred dollars whatever but then you have to buy a per camera license and so like depending on which one I actually went with I'd have to pay $50 per camera that I want to install and so if I just get like the regular one it comes with two licenses and I have to buy two of them so it's $100 if I get the NVR one I think I get all four for free I'm probably just going to do that but I just don't want to spend $600 either. Kind of a cheapskate right now. I want my cake and I want to eat it

too is basically what I'm saying. I also warn you about the Synology hard drive controversy that's going on right now. Well, I don't care about that because they just warn you. I don't know. I haven't looked into it very often, but it seems like a weird thing to do for a company

that just based itself on dropping in hard drives or whatever. I can see that they don't want to support them, but. Yeah. I don't know, but I've actually used that one in the past. I have a couple of clients with it. It works fine. I don't know. We'll find out what happens, I guess.

Stay tuned. Learn more next week or the week after. Gavin's quiet. I'm just getting bashed on now. I don't have much more to say. You guys hurt my feelings. There is a cool hack for Unify Protect, which doesn't seem to work anymore. There might be an updated version.

Somebody figured out a way to add non-Unify cameras to Unify Protect. That's one of the annoying things about Unify Protect is that you have to use Unify cameras to Unify Protect. And so that's one of the annoying things about Unify Protect is that you have to use Unify cameras, which during the shortages made it super hard to do installations and everything because they just weren't available. And if you want to replace a camera or something, you need an actual Unify camera, where like most other camera systems will allow you to use a third-party camera.

So that's pretty annoying about the Unify setup they're supposedly work around but i haven't got it to work and i don't think i want to rely on that anyway because it's obviously not going to work forever yeah and ads and latency and stuff you don't want to add on all that right yeah no i there's there's there's got to be a better way one of these days days I'll find it. I'm not sure. I've run across a few of the very expensive EMS things that might be a good solution. But I don't know. Still, those have their own problems because once they get to that price point, they're like, oh, well, our customers are casinos, not homeowners. Right. And the cool stuff that you thought you were going to have, it's not.

That's for the casinos. And we're going to raise our prices. You've got to pay $20,000 for that. And it's still an awkward thing to use. It's still got this weird interface that's not easy to use, not easy to set up. It doesn't integrate with anything because it's secure for the casinos. Not supposed to. Yeah.

I don't know. What a mess. What a mess. Well, I can tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Let us know. Let us know've got a i've got another camera coming um that's about twice the price and it should have a longer ir range so i'll give that a shot for some actual color night vision but the camera software is

still up in the air so if you have any suggestions let me know i don't think anybody does because i think there's like three options out there so there is that mac only option if you had an old mac computer it's like security spy right something like that i don't remember it it's it's ancient too and it doesn't it looks like but but i don't think it looks like as much but it's because it's just like it looks like old mac software but yeah it looks like it Ooh, rounded, rounded corners and stuff. That's cool. I don't know. I think it's pretty basic as far as what it could do.

I don't know if it has any kind of AI integration. It's got, it's got something in there now, I guess. So it's got intelligent. He analyzes the video, but all I have is a really old Mac mini laying around. I don't think I would switch to this just for this i downloaded

and used it for about five seconds it didn't make me happy it's not not expensive it's like 40 dollars or something yeah it's actually cheaper which like i said price is not not a big thing for me it's just i just want it to work i don't want it to be reliable. There you go, TJ. Price is no object. So give him, let him know. Let him know. Perfect. All right. Speaking of price not being an object, I decided to purchase some of these Govee outdoor lighting things.

Let's see. I got some of these over here. And this box is really light because they're outside and they're installed. Ooh. Yeah. I was actually surprised. Oh, I didn't realize what they were. Yeah, those are just little flood lamp versions.

And they show them on the covers of things like installed all over the place. And I was thinking, you know, I wonder when I get these things, because it's a pack of six of them. So I wonder when I get them, that they're just all going to be connected with a cable. And they were all connected with a cable.

So I don't know how that they you know installed these on the first floor and second floor of the house that they have on their picture on amazon but um a little little dubious there but uh i don't know i put them in the app is not great it has very limited software options for programming lights but for what it does have it's pretty basic and it does work and then it's easy to set up and work with it does not work with anything uh that i could like any home kit stuff but it does have a local api so i'm sure there's like an integration for home kit or even homebridge i'm sure i could toss it into that and somebody's done it so there's

a little toggle switch you can turn on for local api which is great um so should be fun i just put it outside to light up half the house uh that i couldn't light up with this big giant flood lamp that i bought a couple years back and um i was like oh that looks kind of dim i like the big floodlight i'm like say no more say no more so i do have some big DMX-controlled wall washers that I have priced out on Amazon right now. And it will significantly light up the house a lot more than the couple little tiny four-inch flood lamps that these came with. 24-volt flood lamps. No, these will be bright. But we'll see.

We'll see. Where do you have the one on your garage set at because it looks like it's in the middle of the garage is it just like on the far left it's on the yeah it's on the far left so yeah it's it's kind of sitting that's the spotlight one and i i i had to i had it aimed at the house it actually lights up the whole house but that was the one where it was ending up in the a neighbor came over from way far away and said somehow there's a purple light turned on inside my house i'm like oh it must be this one and she's like no no i think it's around the corner it's aimed at my house i'm like nope it's this one here this is a fun light and it's probably

really bright she's like yes it is so i i that. That kind of also spurred me to go ahead and get these. And I also got the Govee Outdoor ones, the little, I haven't put these in. I'm kind of debating on whether I'm going to do that or not. But there's the Govee like permanently installed ones. And their permanent install is not quite what I would call a permanent install. It's more like, oh, we had some sticky tape stuff and you can stick this underneath your eaves. And there's wires that, you know, go between each thing. And like, that's just not going to look that great, I don't think.

So I'm still kind of in the market for, I'm probably going to send these back. They weren't expensive. They were on sale. They were like 100 and I think 150 or something during the prime day explosion or whatever I don't remember what it was but it was it was a it was a decent amount off I was like okay I'll get 100 foot of this stuff I don't need that much but I'll get 100 feet of it and see how it works and augment the little tiny floodlights if they don't they're

not powerful enough and at night the tiny ones are okay enough they're not they're not super bright but they're okay um and these would be kind of in that same realm and i don't know i'd rather just send that back and spend a hundred dollars towards something i'd rather do so yeah i think that's probably what's going to happen to them and isn't this what you said you showed us a picture that you bought uh yeah last week oh man so we could still bet seth or gavin on when he's gonna get them installed so that's these things he may never get them installed if he's thinking of returning them now so that's true yeah hmm how am i gonna bet

you go for the never install one dollar bob will seth install the govi you know seth you didn't seem so excited about them you know so yeah it didn't seem like an impulse i was excited until i got them and i saw how they installed yeah you know what's insane is because i see the YouTube, usual YouTube people doing their reviews and they're loving these Govees and blow. And this is what I keep telling people, never trust reviews from people that get their products sent to them constantly by a company, right?

Because yeah, they may not be sponsored. Yeah, they may not. But once they got it for free, they want to keep getting them products for free. They will not talk bad. I never see them talk bad. And then you get it and you're like, these aren't great lights. They're cheap lights.

All the stuff you pointed out, I don't hear about from these other reviewers. Yeah, I will say that the Govee lights, the ones I have that are outdoor flood lamps, um, are all marked IP 65 or 66, which should be okay. Uh, for, but I've seen reviews saying that the seal will leak and you should actually silicone up the front lens. So the water doesn't leak through them. Like, okay. So I did that with one as a test and then the control box is IP four X. so i have this outdoor product with the control box you can't detach from the outdoor product as ip4x there's just there's literally no way to remove it so i just kind of have that like i have it wrapped around the like water hose thing on the side of the house so it will stay off the ground and out of the sprinklers when they turn on and i'm hoping

that you know if it rains or whatever that that the, the Govee lights in general, I mean, IP66 rating should be okay, but flooding, flooding, you have decent rain here in Florida. You have sunlight that heats up those seals and tears them down over time. So I don't know. I don't know how well it's going to last over time. And I know that I can do way better with a more real permanent install setup. If I were to just, um, commit to doing that and get the aluminum extrusions that

I need and that kind of stuff. So like it, all that exists, I price it all out. And it's just like a matter of like, by the time I want to do this every year, I'm already too late. Like I decided to do this in March and then ordered all the stuff and just wait for it to come in and put it all together but then now again in march moving into the the month of may or whatever april it's not it's not exactly cool i guess in florida and i'm not motivated at all during the summer today was the first day we had where it was like 79 degrees is a high or something like that wow so yeah yeah i was very now is the perfect time to do it then it's yeah this there's no like 58 humidity wind was like you can see on this well on the charts behind me was a decent wind today um it would have been

great it would it was it was this is our perfect day this is the one day we get in florida and um i wasted it inside on my work so well at city i saw this uh company released something that may help you um they're called blackwire they made this app that you can price out all those lights and the cables and find out exactly what you need yep to you know i thought you should take a look at that and see if you can order all your parts i I'll look into it. Never heard of that company. It looked great. No, a small company, but it was a great product. I was impressed.

And I don't even deal in that space. You don't get impressed that often either. I know. I know. But what they demoed was pretty cool. You know, you can have a whole project, design your lighting, and it just gives you the parts the price everything you know and you'll know it eliminates all those random trips to home depot that i always have to do no no those are still included like you'll still have those don't worry it's it tallies them up for you yeah yeah yeah i i i don't know don be fooled. I have run my project through that a couple of times.

So my, my house through that one a couple of times to do things like cabinet lightings and measurements in general. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if I'm keeping these just because the effort that it would take to put them up is not, it doesn't take much effort, but it's just not gonna look good. I know it's not going to get past. There's going to be wires with these little lights and it's just not gonna you just don't seem excited so don't bother no no i i think i think if i had an aluminum extrusion that i could hide the wires in i would yeah but i haven't run across anything that would fulfill that you know easily so i think

i'm probably gonna pass on these and just get put in what I want to put in, which is a more, it's the same thing, just more DMX RGB driven, that kind of thing. So we'll, we'll, we'll see. These are actually decent lights. I think they're 24 volt power. So you could actually put quite a few of these things together. The ones, the little ones that I do have, they're 24 volt power as well, which I was kind of surprised because usually you get these led things in and they're like five volts or 10 or 12 but to bump it up to 24 you can get a longer run wire out of it and you know get decent power

delivered to the lamp so that's that's good i was i was pleasantly surprised in that and the setup was easy enough i mean once it it got set up it updated got it on the wi-fi and i can control it it's just the software was limited i know what i want to do and the software is never going to do that so it's kind of like well one day i'll tear these apart and put an actual control on them if they if they don't flood with water like the reviews say they're going to i would just return it like i said you don't seem enthusiastic about you have to like the product you know putting them in is not going to make you like it any better well the flood lamps solved a problem.

I, I, I, I'm okay with them. I'm okay with them. And for the price I paid, they weren't very much. I think they were under a hundred dollars for all six of them. I'm okay with them. And then the, but the other ones are, I mean, the other ones are substantial amount of lighting and, and, and that kind of thing. I just don't think that I'm going to go through the effort of putting it in where it looks

like, Oh, it was TJ. It looks like poo. It looks like butt. Looks like butt looks like butt exactly yeah there we go i i that's not gonna fly and i'll have to take them down so i'm not gonna take them down when they go up they go up it won't permanent it's a permanent never touching it again never touching again exactly if it breaks i'm still not touching just gonna stay up there and the next homeowner is gonna deal with it i mean one flashing light up there i don't care and the control box not being outdoor rated is just mind-boggling i do not know why they had made this whole outdoor system and then the control box cannot get wet that doesn't make any sense what the heck no it doesn't it's it's just insane

like just keep it above the snow line down there where am i supposed just keep it above the snow line down there. It's like, where am I supposed to put it? Above the snow line. Snow line, yeah. I got one of those. All right. I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm to learn how you can support the Home Tech 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 Slack chat at the Hub, where you and other supporters

of the show can gather every day and talk about all sorts of fun stuff, including helping Richard determine if he should get the sonos 100s or 300s in his fantastic room that i just want to curl up on the couch and and take a nap on that looks beautiful great job i think the 100s are good enough though for the record i agree and they're gonna they're gonna disappear you don't want that room is what you want to see you don't want to see these giant 300 things around so i'm glad i'm glad he picked the 100s because that's what I'm going to put in my room first round. So I'm interested to hear his feedback on that one.

And if you want to help out the show but can't support financially, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And with that, it's going to wrap up another week of news here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time i should have given richards uh decorating the pick of the week jesus yeah what a nice room i what am I doing? That's exactly what I thought.

I was like, no, it made me sit there in my room and just go, man, this place looks like crap. I live in a sh**hole. You know, this is the sh**tiest million dollar house I've ever seen. I knew my house was a dump, but we don't got to rub it in geez it just looks so comfortable like i know i just want to i want to curl up on the couch and take a nap like and the dog's right in front of the fireplace so when they turn that on he gets warm we need to roast him about the corner tv though like i'm surprised i think we already have to do yeah yeah it's the only thing i could pick on he's he's smart and he didn't put it above the fireplace so

at least he gets a tv in the room and it looks like a legit fireplace like an actual wood burning one so putting a tv above there would even be even more difficult all right we're cutting this all out of the show right no because i don't want him to know i'm jealous it'll maybe it maybe show up at the end or something you gotta put you gotta post your living room for comparison