HomeTech.fm - Episode 461 - The New Matter Slapper (with AI)

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

On this week's show, Inovelli launches a new fan canopy control, IKEA launches new, affordable sensors, Switchbot launches a new Pro lock, and Konnected launches a new garage door opener integration. All of these and more headlines, a pick of the week, and project updates!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 1st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Orlando, Florida, I'm TJ Huddleston. And still from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and cold weather in Florida that TJ brought. Why did you do this? Oh my my gosh it is so cold here i walked out yesterday it was like 45 degrees 45 degrees when does it get 45 degrees in orlando only a couple times a year and i am here for it

it'll be it'll be back up to 85 by friday so i don't think you have to worry about too much but yeah if you look at the weather like every day and it improves by like 10 degrees so by the time we leave on saturday it's gonna be like 86 so i'm uh i'm not complaining too much i have clothes so that's a good thing the poor iguanas that's all i ever think about now is falling iguanas when i think of cold weather in florida it's not even that cold well yeah it's not i don't think it's that cold yet but it's only cold this is like the one day it's gonna be cold or something that i don't know we're supposed to have a cold winter cold wet winter but my brother did send me an update on the iguanas i guess he follows some people that on facebook or something that keep up with this and uh there's a post that that said

are they falling out of the trees today and uh somebody wrote back said oh wait no it takes a few days basically for them to start falling out of the trees but they're adapting now they figured it out and when it gets cold they just go underground that's amazing nature nature finds a way they are adapting and learning i love it you know that's evolution right before your eyes how often do you get to actually see that and just to let you know seth there is a domain available you could do our iguanas falling.com and let people know if our iguanas are falling out of the tree and even make it to where people can submit photos and stuff wouldn't that be kind of cool you know because people like gavin they can't see these iguanas falling out of trees

but maybe somebody had surveillance photos or videos of that happening you know i always visualized uh like an iguana following a falling of a tree and smashing you know like when it gets cold like into a thousand pieces shattering just like all over the ground and but you ruined it for me you said that doesn't happen so it's like a thud and then they warm up and they scurry off oh yeah it doesn't stay that cold that long so i mean like i'm sure if it lasted a couple days then they warm up and they scurry off. Oh, okay. It doesn't stay that cold that long. So, I mean, I'm sure if it lasted a couple days, then they would probably suffer more damage. But it's usually like the morning and that's it.

I can get aretheyfalling.com. That's available. Also, aretheyfalling.ca. So, if there was a Canadian equivalent of this. You could do that one for the pawpaws, maybe. That way Gavin can get pawpaws finally uh for the pawpaws maybe no wait gavin can get pawpaws finally is it pawpaw season.com and uh yeah that's available as well i can get that in the one day of the year that it's pawpaw season i can i can turn that to say yes it's pawpaw season go buy them now i'm amazed that those domains are available

are you are you really, I'm pretty impressed. That's pretty impressive. I can also get the is it Pawpaw season dot CA as well. So if I needed the Canadian, there you go. That's too good. All right. Well, speaking of new websites, we've got a bunch of new products that have come out tonight. So what do you guys say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it let's do it all right all right well uh big news that over there in a valley we had eric on a couple weeks back and um they look like they have uh they're ready to release a uh a new zigbee fan canopy module we were talking about a little bit about this before the show um this is pretty nice it's just a little update they had one of these

before um but they wanted to update it. I guess it was that one of their number one selling switches or whatever devices. So there was an update a couple of days ago from Eric. He said, quick update. We received beta units last Friday, had the opportunity to test them myself over the weekend. And he said, first impression, solid fuel. It feels heavy and constructed well. It's very small compared to the first generations, which he has some pictures in the thread we'll link to. You can see that they are significantly smaller, which is nice. And then it has some longer wires and an antenna that come off of it.

It's just wires that connect to your wiring in the fan canopy. And overall, it looks and feels nice he's very happy so uh that it's actually a pretty cool product um you can i guess you can order it now it runs zigbee 36 does dimming and will work with ac fan motors so if you if you need you have a zigbee if you need this in a zigbee setup it works with smart things home assistant zha and home assistant zigbee to mqttt and then hubitat so it says if you don't see your hub listed here do not purchase this switch until the confirming compatibility so they uh i guess they're rolling out drivers and everything for it

but um if you got one of those four i guess three and a half systems there don't don't don't get this until they say it's good to go but i don't know it's pretty good this looks like a little problem solver it looks pretty good to me yep and I know Eric uh you know he hinted at a bunch of products they were working on and this is one of them and to me this is one of those products that yeah it solves a problem I know a number of people have been doing fans lately um and it's not easy especially when you have one wire going to the fan but you have to control two things, right? This solves that problem. And I know it's Zigbee. You can pair it with a Zigbee switch and use Zigbee binding.

So it's directly communicating. That way it doesn't have to go through the hub. But even if you had a Z-Wave switch, I'm pretty sure you can just use an automation or, you know, something like that on like a home, you know, a home assistant to do that automation for you. So when you press the button, it will turn on the light of the fan, right? But it's a really good, I like this, something different, more than just a switch or a sensor. Yeah, this is definitely a good idea. And especially if you're looking at the old one compared to the new one, the old one is i i guess what i would consider your typical fan controller it's the one that you would you would see if you uh bought a new fan from like

home depot or lowes or whatever um basically the physical size of it and so the new one is like absolutely tiny compared to that it's like almost i would say half the size uh it looks like um which is nice because there's not a lot of room in those junction boxes to put these things that now you have my pictures of it being installed and it's like yeah some of some of those fans have like the little the little mount that you like hang the fan into and then the wires come out of that like he has like shove it in there it's like so so much stuff in that one yeah yeah and yeah well i mean i think you can the the older one you would not be able to shove it in there i guess maybe you could but like i think it's designed to live

up in that that actual canopy and just kind of off to the side but those canopies always fall down there is a pain like it if they're not screwed up there properly they look weird and i don't know this looks like it's going to be a better fit for the job so yeah you're right yeah my problem with fans these days now is not so much the control of them we have a lot of control options and it's great to see this one as well but now my problem is not knowing if a ceiling fan is ac powered or dc powered and this switch is only compatible with ac motors which i think is pretty much older fans i'm sure they make newer fans with AC motors, but like,

I don't know. There's, there's not a good way to tell that on like packaging as far as I can tell, or even sometimes the manual. I think Gavin maybe posted a video a couple of weeks ago or a month ago about one of the smart home channels, automating fans like ceiling fans. And it was just like such a mismatch of like technology just to get like basic ceiling fan functionality to work so

i think that would that would be useful if they had a dc1 as well at some point but this is definitely a good new product for them if you have dc it usually it has those those wand controls that they want you to mount on the wall. And really, the only solution right now is to get one of those Bond controller things and hook them up. I think even they have the little Bond keypad things that should work with that now, too, if you wanted to go a different direction. Yeah, that's what we've had

to do for our living room fan is just getting a Bond, and that way we can have at least control of it. Yep. All right, well, let's move on here. We've got a couple of new products like I was saying. IKEA is expanding in the range of affordable smart home devices with three new Zigbee sensors. The Parasol with two L's, a door and window sensor, the Valhorn, also with two L's, a motion sensor, and the Badring, no L's, a water leakage sensor. These sensors will be priced less than $10 and will be available globally in the first half of next year. Pretty cool.

I'm all for inexpensive Zigbee sensors. This is, this is great. Especially, especially the water leak sensor for less than $10 or $10 or whatever. That's, that's really cool. You can just pop that in like behind a toilet, under a sink or something like that. And it can live there and do its thing. And you don't even have to worry about it. Yeah, the best thing about the water leak sensor too, is it does include a built-in

siren. And so if your automation doesn't work, or you've got to set it up, or maybe you got a new device and forgot to set it up with a new device, at least it'll make a sound to let you know water is leaking, which I'm a huge fan of for these devices. Usually, and usually I'm not a fan. Like when you see cheap products, you think, oh, they're going to be a problem or something like that. But Ikea products I've found to be like problem free. They've always worked well in my setups.

I have a few of their switches. I have their blinds and I've had absolutely no problems with them. They just work. I use them with Home Assistant. I've used them with Hubitat. No issues at all. I'm pretty sure these will probably work fine. And if they work great for under $10, it's almost a no-brainer. Yep. No MatterSupport yet. I guess Verge, your article says, despite MatterSupport being just a couple months away, over a year year ago the company still doesn't support it so yeah one day they may turn that on we'll have matter enabled or supported bad ring sensors oh this all seems

really good to me like this is this is the literal mass market of products especially at that price point and like you're saying even even the having just working standalone like just sticking that uh the water leak sensor just on the floor and if the hub is down or whatever it's still going to make noise that's great yeah those are my favorite type of devices because you just don't have to worry about them other than the batteries so just you know throw them in there and you're good to go no matter what. So I think that's a good functionality. Even this door contact, I mean, the window or door contact, it looks a little big from the picture,

but I still like how they designed it and the magnet and everything like that. That way you just match up. Traditionally with these kind of contacts, the magnet itself is like half the length of the actual contact and you have to like get it in a certain area in order to make sure it actually works and triggers the automations or whatever you're doing. This one is like the full size of the contact as well,

which I think makes a little more sense, right? Because if you're already installing that sensor, why not just line it up with the whole thing? And that way you just know that it works. Well, if you can imagine what an Ikea um instruction booklet is going to look like with this thing to install versus the um i don't know let's just say the instruction booklet that comes with a wireless contact with maybe a i don't know a dsc system yeah i mean it's it's gonna be night

and day like it's just there's there's no. Like this, this will be much easier to follow like five pictures of some, um, asexual person setting up a sensor. And it looks like it's big enough to like hold a regular battery. I don't know. It says that the, oh, it's got a coin cell battery on that one. It doesn't look like it can hold a coin cell battery, but it, it, I guess the motion sensor has three, uh, double a batteries that can go into it. It looks also, I was going to mention that it looked also kind of big.

But the door sensor, the parasol door and window sensor, actually, I mean, it looks like it could hold a regular AAA or a battery or something in there. But I don't know. I guess it's going to be coin controlled. They always make good devices, though. So I have no doubt these will be good as well. Right. Well, speaking of good devices, SwitchBot Lock Pro has been released in Japan,

and it offers various unlocking methods, including fingerprint, voice control, and Apple Watch compatibility. Love that part. It's got a longer battery life, quote, up to nine months, with an option to extend to 12 months with a rechargeable battery the pro model features a round knob for easier unlocking and magnetic sensor for automatic locking also compatible with matter for integration with smart home systems so a new um switch bot lock pro is looks like it's about to hit the market i guess it's only in japan right now but it'll probably make its way over here yeah this is pretty cool actually because my my favorite thing about this is the

the grip thing that goes on to the actual i don't even know what that thing is called but where you actually turn the deadbolt to lock it or unlock it the annoying thing to me with the original switchbot is that it had three different size like cups or adapters that went over that and so you basically had to figure out the one that would like that fit the best and then put the other one somewhere because like what if you you know if you're going to use this in an apartment you're going to have to keep the other one somewhere because you're going to move eventually it might not be the same exact size and so i like that this one is like a door lock controller thing right like you're gonna you're gonna move at some point with it so you need to have all that this one is automatically like door lock controller thing. Right. Like you're going to,

you're going to move at some point with it. So you need to have all that stuff. And that was like, that was super annoying to me. Cause I was like, that was the first thing I'm going to lose. Right. It's like, we're going to go to move and I'm not going to know where I put these

plastic pieces out. So that, that change is worth it alone for me. Um, it says that, that, that, um,

the adhesive sizing is a little bigger as well. I'm not really sure how you would do that because it was already taken up a large portion of the lock, but I will say mine didn't stay on my, my door for more than like six months. So they should probably fix that. It doesn't seem like it's the best method, I guess,

to stick a security device onto a door. But the whole point of it is that it's not a permanently installed solution thing. Right. It's SwitchBot. Right. And it's SwitchBot. I guess it's in Japan for 15,000 yen, which is about 107 US dollars. So it's affordable.

Well, and that's the thing, right? Is whenever these things are like this price, it's like as long as they work most of the time, you're fine with the price. And it's going to have caveats. Every product does. But, you know, as you spend less, the more you can deal with the caveats. The more you spend, the less you deal with them. Right.

There's a lot of caveats. I'm just going to warn you. If you're going to buy a SwitchBot product, just be prepared to get spammed by them anytime they have any sort of sale. Like, I bought a few products from them just today. I actually paid off my FedEx bill. Go figures. I got a FedEx bill for a warranty return that got shipped to me. You know, I guess there was some import thing I had to pay.

And on top of that, every time they have a sale, I get a text notification, a WhatsApp message. I didn't know that was possible. I get an sale, I get a text notification, a WhatsApp message. I didn't know that was possible. I get an email and I get a push notification from their app. And it's like, I'm trying to unsubscribe from these things. And I don't know if it's working or what. You know, I replied with, please stop reply. It was messages.

So that's the problem. You're too nice in Canada. You guys say, please. No, you just got to reply in all capital letters. Stop. Like they ask you here in America. I'm not a fan of a company that spams you that much. Like they've one up, you know, the Amazon app, you know, and I know you guys in the

States get it a lot worse than we do up here, but it's pretty like switch bot. It's pretty bad. Yeah. The spam over the last couple of days has been a little outrageous. I will say I'm a big fan of them, but Shelly did a lot of spamming. I got so many emails from Shelly. And there's another one. I can't remember off the top of my head.

It doesn't really work because I didn't really look at anything they were selling. Emails is one thing, but I got hit from four different directions with you can't get away yeah it's like all right delete the email oh crap i got a text message all right delete the text oh my whatsapp oh delete the whatsapp it's like and and it happened multiple times you know it was pre-black friday black friday cyber monday giving tuesday you know like they just kept spamming me i'm just like you know like uh i don't like a company that does that so uh i might not ever order from them again just because that i found that really annoying they hired the marketing firm that uh that that that's that working on the extended car warranties i guess it sounds like

yeah uh all right let's move on here. We've got one more new product before we can move on to some other interesting stories. Connected has just released an official driver for their smart garage door opener for Hubitat. Integration is 100% local and does not require any

third-party apps or cloud connectivity. I wonder who that is digging at. Firmware is based on esp home us utilizes esp home api one library for fast local connectivity with habitat um we talked about this a little bit a few weeks ago when the whole you know myq thing was going on with uh i guess everybody kind of waking up and realizing uh cloud connected garage door opener is probably not the way to go. And I mentioned that they were selling this. This one's interesting because it has the like the little laser thing.

I guess it's called a laser time of flight sensor and it detects the garage doors position as it's like going up and down. And it's got a built in flashing LED and warning sound into it. So it's like an all-in-one package, a little bit better than most that are out there because it's got the safety features kind of built into it as well. 100% local. You don't have to worry about cloud connectivity. And it's only $89. So pretty good.

And garage door openers are the hot topic right now. You know, like that's the thing about it. I'll let you know a little secret. I ordered a RAT GDO. Ooh. I'll let you know a little secret. I ordered a RAT GDO. Oh. I ordered one. I was looking at it, and it basically more than just controls your garage door opener. It does a lot more, and that's why I jumped in on it, right?

But Connected has a good one, too. There are a lot of new ones coming out. It's a hot topic right now. And I think they should have been doing this years ago. Nate's been working on this particular product, I know, for well over a year now. I mean, they're a small company. But I mean, he's put in he also like if you look at what Rad Geo did, it's a very DIY friendly product. Just put it nicely.

Open to lawsuits if you ask me but if you look at what nate's put together over it over it connected that's that's a full product like it's it's feature complete it comes in a nice box you don't have to get a 3d printed case or whatever and put it on there but and it's 89 whereas what raggio is like what 30 or something like that it wasn't 40 bucks with the full thing i I think, yeah. Yeah, but I will say, I do know, I talked to Nate when all this MyQ stuff was going on. I'm like, hey, I know you got the garage door opener,

but what about this? And I sent him the link to Ratcheteer. He's like, yeah, we're working on it. He's like, it'll be in a couple of months, they'll have another compatible one out. But he's been working on this for a long time. And there's still a big market for this type of contact closure one, yeah and and there will be into the future like there's there's plenty of garage doors that are either one type or the other so you don't

have to worry about whatever whoever's coming out with a product for this is going to sell very well into the future uh one thing i noticed is a lot of people were um posting their pictures of their installs but their installs but their installs were like naked like it was just a circuit board you know mounted to the side of the garage door opener you know i didn't like that right well i didn't like that at all so somebody posted on the home assistant forum um links to 3d printed cases where you can uh you could get the actual file download yourself and print your own case and then you have a nice little enclosure and everything like that so i was like beautiful i got mine on the way

i'm gonna print out a case and that way it will be this nice little house some of these look really nice too like it's it's not i mean it's a three a rendering of it i guess but some of them look really good yeah you can add your own flare you could do multi-color if you you want to, you know, do whatever you want. I was actually going to design my own, but since somebody already did, it saves me some time. Make a Home Tech podcast version. Ooh, there you go. Put our faces on. Alright, well, let's move on here. So there's lies, there's damn lies, and there's rumors about a Sonos earbuds coming out.

So what a mess this week though. Holy cow. You know, the headphones are bad. Supposedly Sonos is planning to release its own wireless earbuds and a smart speaker to compete with Apple AirPods and the Apple TV. Uh, the earbuds code named Sabrina will feature voice control and a wireless charging base similar to the AirPods and also come with

noise cancellation technology. Expected to be priced around $200. The smart speaker, codenamed the S25, will support both Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision,

and have HDMI eARC for better connectivity to televisions. It's said to come with Google Assistant, Amazon built-in, along with support for Apple Siri.

The release of Sonos' new products is expected to be sometime in 2024, next year. Hopefully we'll see them next year. Well, not headphones, but earbuds, TJ. Well, no, there's headphones and earbuds. Oh, okay. Yeah, so according to this Engadget article, they're going make uh over a

high-end uh over the ear headphones and small in-ear wireless earbuds so i mean i basically got my what i thought was gonna happen but we'll have to wait to see if it actually happened did you did you well i i thought they would have two different models they'd have an expensive model and then they would have a cheaper model so we'll just see how that plays out i feel like the monkey paw is just going to be like and they'll run finger on you and then well i mean that's how technology goes right the confusing thing about all this right is like you know that you can you can kind of forgive they're talking about making like a more expensive uh sound bar that's going to cost around twelve hundred dollars and to me that that's ridiculous but whatever i guess you can do that i mean there are plenty

of soundbars that cost that much out there on the market right now like there's there's sony soundbars and lg soundbar samsung soundbars that run up to two three thousand dollars easy so i think that's a that's a market space that they could definitely get into and not have any problems. The current one is, what, $900? So, like, yeah, I think... But it's $900 that you have to add on the other speakers. All the ones like Sony has or LG has, they have Atmos built into them. You supposedly don't have to add in other speakers. So, I don't know.

I think it's a good idea. Yeah, I think that's the big difference for me is that a lot of the other ones that maybe i've seen or compared to is that they automatically come with the subwoofer and the surrounds and so like i think it's a little more tolerable when you charge two or three thousand dollars for that compared to like just twelve hundred dollars for the soundbar but i don't i don't know the sonos arc i think is really good and i i don't know it just seems kind of weird to do that but that's not the weird thing seth i mean that's that's whatever the the next weird thing is the streaming box which i don't understand at all right i mean like who is asking for another android-based streaming box tell you it's a monkey paw man i it's a monkey paw thing like it's gonna happen like everybody was somebody

wished wrong and we're getting we're getting something's coming i don't know what it is but it's not gonna be what we're asking for the the the ear in earbuds are probably only going to work with like the sonos set box or something right right exactly that's it yeah it's like the expensive ones will work with whatever you'll have bluetooth and everything but if you buy these cheap ones they're only going to work with our set top box i want the headphones so bad though just just bring them to me please gavin are you in the market for any sonos headphones i would be in the market for sonos headphones possibly because that would be cool if it easily integrates with my my tv setup so i could just flip them all over to the headphones and not bother anybody in the house earbuds probably not because my airpods work better

with my iphone than probably anything else right and that integration i just don't want to replace so i i don't know if someone else you know how well they're going to do with the earbuds and yeah i'm like dj why do they need another android box like why are they trying to compete with that you know like why are they trying to compete with the apple you know roku apple yeah exactly it's like we want some headphones you know none of those other systems really have something that will integrate with Apple. Yeah, exactly. It's like we want some headphones. You know, none of those other systems really have something that will integrate with your system like that, you know? Like,

they're not listening to TJ. They just need to listen to TJ. They need to listen to the show. Yeah. Yeah, look, we know it's over if Sonos comes out with their own rebranded Wyze things, you know? There's Sonos automatically, or it just suddenly launches, like, their own smart plugs and indoor cameras and stuff.

Oh, well, now it's over for Sonos. So, well, yeah, we'll have to see. I'm cautiously optimistic for you, I guess I'll say. We're just not a fan. All right. Well, that's all the good news we have. The bad news is that Amazon seems to be cutting several hundred jobs in its Alexa division. I heard like 900.

And as it shifts priorities to focus more on generative AI. So I guess if you work at Amazon, Alexa, they are trimming some fat over there. They sent an internal memo obtained by GeekWire stating that job cuts are part of discontinuing certain initiatives and reallocating resources to align with business priorities. Amazon did not provide specific details on which initiatives are actually being discontinued. This restructuring follows the previous layoffs in the Alexa team last year.

And I mean, Amazon, if you look at who's been fired this year, Amazon is at the top of the list of layoffs as far as the tech companies go. It was a massive, massive year between Amazon and Google doing some major layoffs this year. Microsoft, too. And Amazon's still at it. Microsoft and Google seem to have kind of laid off, but Amazon still going at it with their layoffs. So it'll be interesting to see what departments, I guess, over there, what initiatives get discontinued from Alexa. So I wonder if they're just becoming more efficient. I don't know. Are they refocusing more on their AI? They had some big AI announcements too.

So they got to shift some of their resources, but they got to find ways to make money off this stuff, I guess, right? Oh, I mean, that was always their dream and their goal, but it seemed like everybody who bought one never wanted to use it for that. I never, like, I don't know. I guess it's cool that you can say, order me this, but everybody I talked to says, well, that was the end of Alexa at my house when my kids started putting stuff in my shopping cart and i just don't think people in the real world maybe there's a few appreciate that but a few

people that do appreciate it is not the mass market um i think most people just really liked their timer functionality and that they get the weather in the morning every now and then but other than that it wasn't a very great product for literally everything else they tried to monetize it with like i never trusted the the buy that because i i was always afraid i'd say buy the toilet paper and it would pick the most expensive one and purchase that one like well when you're on amazon you know you look in your price check and stuff like that like it's it's avoiding that so i don't know if that was a good use case for it and it doesn't help that their products are always on sale for

like a ridiculous half off or something like that right like it's every weekend they find some reason to be on sale you know so everyone always buys it at the discounted price so that doesn't help either well and that's kind of my thing too right is that out of the gate you know these devices were somewhat expensive. I don't remember. They were like 200 bucks. The original Echo was, yeah, it was like 200 bucks, right? And 199, I think is what we paid for ours.

I mean, it was like, really did nothing, but you could ask it to tell you a stupid joke and it would tell you a dad joke. And it would, I think, do the weather and various facts thing. There was no smart home integration at all. It was a kitchen timer. It did a kitchen timer thing.

And that's what we used it for for years until it started getting kind of creepy. And then we turned it off. But yeah. Yeah. It was basically like a race to the bottom, though, very quickly on pricing. And, you know, kind of like what Gavin said, they're always half off. And whenever you have a product that's always that inexpensive or basically like it takes nothing to get to nobody wants to pay for the long-term support of it right because if they've paid 50 for this device

most of the time people are not going to want to pay 60 a year for some subscription or whatever it is and so i think they shot themselves in the foot by by going you know bottom of the barrel as fast as they did i feel like they could have did that a little more gradually and introduced some of this stuff, like subscriptions and whatever else, and people would have been a little more susceptible to it, but not now. I don't think they ever implemented anything that was compelling for people. Like I said,

when they did put the things that could monetize the product in there, they just weren't compelling features for people. I don't think they ever found the right use cases for a voice assistant to be able to go out and monetize for the company at least on a mass market scale like like i said most people i talked to as soon as their kids started ordering stuff off of amazon it it went went away ours just went away because it was annoying and it's like i'm not dealing with this and the company was getting kind of creepy at the time too so it wasn't a very hard thing for it just to disappear yeah i think a lot of people are

getting annoyed by the by the ways too or the tinfoil hat started coming out on a lot of people because you started seeing you know things that you maybe talked about show up in your ad feed you know um and even though you didn't google it or anything like that it just showed up so people are like it's listening to me you know what if So people are like, it's listening to me. You know what? If it's listening to me, it's listening to me. That's how I am at this point. They'll probably not want to hear some of the things I talk about.

That was one of the conspiracy things. But what it turned out to be was the data aggregation between all the things that you did and the people who stood next to you because they figured you were talking to them and they were tracking them too. But since your phone pinged next to them on the same cell tower or in the same IP network, oh, they must be your friend. So you were talking to them about something. Let's see what they were doing.

We'll put all this five and five together and it comes out to equal this. And oh, look, now we know that you want something. I did see a funny post. I think I put it in our channel it was like uh the the targeted ads like we all think they're funny they're fun and games now but wait till they start putting them on your smart tv it's like that's gonna be quite awkward and you're watching tv with your family and a targeted ad comes up for whatever you've been

looking at the internet on honey i have no idea how that got there clearing my history now it's just oh man yeah anyway um it's interesting i wonder what initiatives they are doing that are going away there's a lot of weird things that that system did like the celebrity voices you know they canceled that project there's probably a few people that were working on that still. So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what kind of falls off the wagon in the future and is discontinued. And you're like, oh, that must have been with those few hundred people we're working on or something like that. But I think with all the generative stuff that they're going to get into, it will make for a better product. It's more conversational and feels like it's working a little bit better for you um but i don't know like it's it's i don't like tj said they just need to start charging more for it for for what it is rather than giving them away for like twenty dollars or free with a purchase of i don't know something at thanksgiving time i mean there were years that we go by and they're like oh you could just walk in target and just you can walk out with a amazon echo for five dollars or something like it where you got it for free as part of a bundle with

a bunch of stuff yeah buy a buy a twenty dollar light bulb and you got a free amazon echo right there's a loss leader and i mean i'm sure those ended up in people's homes but then i'm sure they unplugged them and put them away somewhere or tossed them or whatever they're definitely gonna have to start focusing a little bit better and doing more. Anyway, there's no one that matters this week. I guess technically there is. SwitchBot does matter because they

do have that lock pro that has matter compatibility. So congratulations, SwitchBot. You matter this week. Your $170 matter compatible lock. Yay! Somebody else matters too this week, Seth. The new InnoValley 2-in-1 switch is available for pre-order with Thread and Matter. Oh, okay.

There we go. There you go. Two people. I don't know. I actually don't know when they started the pre-launch, but, you know, why not? There we go. Congratulations. You guys matter.

I know, I mean, we'll go ahead and announce it this week, but next week we may have somebody on who is an expert in all things matter and be able to tell us what matter is. And that week, our show will matter because that's pretty much all we're going to talk about. Let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight

can be found on our show notes over to hometech.fm slash 461. Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And that is an interesting video. Have you guys seen this technology connection? Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And that is an interesting video. Have you guys seen this technology connection? I guess I do watch his videos.

I can't remember his name now. He's a really good explainer of things. He does like deep dives into like the most tedious thing. He had like an hour or two long video on a refrigerator or something like how refrigerators work which was fascinating he bought a i remember watching one where he bought a um like a dishwashing machine and like cut a window into it and was looking at how it washed dishes i'm like this is the most fascinating thing i've ever seen like why don't they put windows on dishwashers like why they need like what that would be amazing just sit there and watch what was going on inside your dishwasher. They put them on the washing machines. Yeah.

Why don't they do it on the oven? I want to see in there and see if my dishes are getting cleaned. But anyway, he's got one on the clapper. And it's great. It's actually a pretty cool video. It goes over, tears it apart, looks inside, goes over some of the things about the company behind the Clapper, and I don't know, just kind of brought some memories back. I actually had the triangular looking one that he shows there in the video and used that in college in my dorm. Clapper was ahead of its time. I could still see a use for that today.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I never owned a Clapper, but I feel like it would be an awesome device, especially in 2023. But you know, if these people that run Matter want to get Matter adoption up, I feel like they should make a Matter compliant one. So that way you could clap and then have it trigger things through home automation. I mean, wouldn't that be awesome? So you, what you're saying is that you want a Matter clapper? I want a Matter clapper. I'm just checking that domain right now. I mean, wouldn't that be awesome? So what you're saying is that you want a MatterClapper? I want a MatterClapper. I'm just checking that domain right now. I'm sorry. I knew that.

I saw the look on your face. You know, for the listener, you can't see Seth's face, but he has a certain face when he's looking up domains and you just know he's looking up the domain. It's his domain lookup face. Yeah. Yeah. I guess in the video, it goes over a couple of things, reasons that the clapper was not very good and that it has a lot of false positives. I mean, it's a very inexpensive device and was based on some pretty basic circuitry and basically sound detection. So when it heard a loud noise, that was one click. And then if it hears another loud noise, that's a second click.

And it did have a sensitivity thing on it, and you could turn that down, but then you would just be, you'd have to clap louder, and it would be kind of weird. What year was that released in? The Clapper? Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. It was, I think, like an 80s project?

Yeah, I mean, for that time, that was good, because we still had our remotes, you know, tethered to our TV back then. Now you're going to make me look this up. There's got to be a Wikipedia article on the clapper. It's definitely in the video, but I forget what he said. 1984, San Francisco based Joseph Enterprises with the slogan clap on, clap off the clapper. I remember that jingle. It's nice.

But yeah, now they have aapper. I remember that jingle. It's nice. But, uh, yeah, now, now they have a new version that, that, uh, that looks a little,

it's a little smaller. They've, they've gone a little smaller and they know they don't no longer recommending. According to the video here, they no longer recommend on the package that you use it to turn on and off your TV. I wonder why. Amazing. And Wikipedia here.

Although meant to activate by clapping, the clapper can inadvertently be triggered by other noises. That was my experience as well when I had it in my dorm. I eventually did switch over to something like the little remote control-based things to turn on some extra lights, to turn off some lights that I had. So I didn't like the fluorescent tube lights that were in my dorm. Anyway, we'll have to wait for the Matter Clapper to come out. I would just want a Zigbee Clapper, but you know, if you got a Zigbee Clapper and it also offered Matter compatibility, that'd be great.

Yeah, there you go. That's how you get interest in the new platform. You know, nothing else is exciting about Matter at the moment, sensor wise. So we need something like this to draw interest. And I figure, like with all of the like um i i think what you'd have to do with it we we can totally get eric on this like i think eric could put this together and what what we do is be like you see all the complaints about this over in the the original clapper like i think what we could do is say no this one this one guess what it has it has ai it uses ai to determine now it can identify your clap yeah you could train it on your clapping

yeah who's clapping is that a gap or not is that an applause or is that a clap on you know like oh man there's so much with technology these days is that a frisky teen injured. Well, I got to cut that out. All right. I got to get the clap. That could be an X-rated sensor, though. I mean, why not? Oh, man. Yeah, I think there's some... As long as you say that it's got AI,

I think today, no problem. It'll sell. People are like, oh, and that's the clapper with AI? I'm totally getting there. You can use it with your AI pen. Yes. Oh, man.

Yeah, train your clapper. You can have one clap. You can have two claps, three claps, four claps. The possibilities are endless here. You can have patterns of claps as well. You can just say, shave and haircut for me, like that. And you can have patterns of claps as well you can just say shave an haircut for me you know like that and you could do that you know you can highly secure something with you know dual claps it doesn't activate unless two of you are clapping at the same time

that's a good one this is how they will run the nuclear silos in the future mr president could you clap on the heat? We have to clap at the same time. Oh no, you activated the secret bomb. You moisturized your hand. Your clap is different. Keep clapping. Keep clapping.

All right. I think we should talk to Eric. I think he would do this this would be awesome there's got to be there can't be any more patents around the clapper at this point right like 1984 patent has maybe i mean there's probably a trademark but patents have got to be old and busted at this point so we just rename it the slapper and we can avoid all of them the matter slapper matter slapper is that available so you should check that one out We'll just rename it to Slapper and we can avoid all of it. The Matter Slapper? The Matter Slapper.

Is that available, Seth? You should probably check that one out. I'm sure it is. If not, I can get MatterSlapper.ca. All right. If you have any questions, comments, pics of the week, or great ideas for a slapper, I mean a clapper, or whatever, a domain I can buy, give it a shout. The email address is feedback at hometech.fm,

or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, all right. We got project updates and we've got updates to talk about because Home Assistant has updated. Gavin, you posted this in here. I looked through the release notes.

It wasn't anything about graphs. I just did a quick control F, but I did see in the farewell to the following section my q my q has been removed yep they were warning about that for a while now um and there was an upgrade to the graphs like the history history graph i guess they have long-term statistics they added or something like that so yeah something for you too seth but um the 2023.12 beta was released this week, and I expected it to be a light release. It's the end of the year. It's the last one. A lot of it was based around UI improvements.

So they're just making things look prettier, better for the users. One thing I did like to see is that I did see was they have better error messages around YAML issues. So if you have a bug in your YAML, you actually have a more descriptive message that will tell you where that bug is, because trust me, finding where that bug is in a thousand line YAML was sometimes very difficult. Right. So they've improved that. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And of course, the usual new integrations, including the linear garage door, because that's a hot topic. And always review the breaking changes.

But I'm already looking forward to next year. And on the... Is it the 10th of December they're having the Year of the Voice? I want to say 10th of December. Let me see. I was going to ask. It was the Year of the Voice. Do we have Voice yet? I guess it's kind of. Yeah, December 13th. Sorry. They have the year of the voice do we have voice yet or i guess i guess it's kind out yeah december 13th sorry they have the year of the voice um part five oh they'll be doing that on

youtube so they'll be wrapping up the year and everything they've done with the year of the voice and and stuff like that so i still can't get my esp32 working with voice um i i've tried multiple times i've followed many videos everything's hooked up exactly how it should be hooked up. And it just doesn't work for some reason. So kind of have it sitting in the back there and I'll just pick it up one day, probably next year I'll deal with that. So that's the updates with home assistant and continue with updates. Uh, unraid 6.12.5 also released. Mainly bug fixes, updates.

It's always good to keep it up to date. Security, bug fixes, et cetera, et cetera. I updated the morning, this morning, Wednesday morning. No issues. It booted back up. Everything was fine. So if yours breaks, it's not my fault. So feel free to update, but keep your things up to date.

If you were on Unraid version 6.12.1, I guess that means I need to update. Yeah, you should update. You see, and this is the reason why I try and keep up to date, because I don't want to fall. Some people are on Unraid 6.9, and they go to upgrade to the latest version. It's like you got to read all the breaking changes between those 20 versions. Just keep it up to date. I will say on Unraid

they have made an update assistant. I just click that on one server and it will go through and say, oh wait, you need to update. Like right now I need to update the community app plugin. No big deal. I will press update on that. But it goes through and does all these compatibility checks on all the plugins and it will to its best ability make sure your hardware and everything is compliant with the update it's going to go to and um if it if it says you're good

to go then you can go over there and hit the update button on the uh on the on the settings but i'm gonna go ahead and update my plugins first or my always update the plugins and everything first um yeah and then sometimes when you. Always update the plugins and everything first. Yeah. And then sometimes when you do an update, it will tell you plugins that are incompatible. You have to disable or uninstall them, but be safe, right? But it's always easier to do that point one upgrade

than wait for, you know, like five different versions later. Yep. I do like the tools that will help you figure out like with the ammo, if you got an arrow in your ammo page or whatever, having a better tool to tell you where that error is. It's better than not knowing. I hate what it said.

Cause I used to get yammer errors and it would just say a random line that never matched up. So I was like, great. My favorite one in the code editors. Sometimes like if you get, if you mess up or you pay something in that doesn't have the right closing brackets or whatever, it'll be like, yeah, there's an error. And it just has the last line highlighted.

It's like, that is not helpful. There's something wrong here. Figure it out. Yeah, exactly. That's what we have Chad for now, though. So don't worry. Yeah. Paste it in.

Chad, where's the error? Yeah. You know how many times i think this for me i've had to use json validators to find the error for me i'd paste the whole json code in there and it would be like oh one quote off and i'd be like damn it yeah yep yep yep i yeah i run into that all the time because i i write a lot in Lua and there's, I mean that gaming, there's some gaming stuff in Lua. So it is what more supported than you might think.

But for the most part, Lua is not very well supported. Like, like if you go to like JavaScript and see some of the tools that you could get with writing in like OJS or something like that, PHP, any of these like large languages that millions of people are using um there are parsing tools the things that you get in the code editing and that kind of thing are just i mean yaml yaml has probably got better tools than you have for lua so anyway ah let's move on here um you've got some you've you last week you teased just a little bit you said all right it was actually the week before last because we were kind of going into the

thanksgiving break and you said um i'm thinking about updating the fiber at the house here and what ended up happening with that i ended up upgrading the fiber it was actually kind of quick they um so what happened was i got a notification from my Rogers that my bill's going up. So it was going up to like more than double the amount. Um, so that gave me the, uh, you know, the push needed to go to fiber,

you know, bell happened to be in the area offering crazy deals. So I was like, all right, let's do it. So I called her on the Wednesday. I said, whatever,

let's sign up. She called me back. And then by Saturday fiber was installed and activated and it's beautiful like it's night and day different so right now i actually still have both enabled on my unify setup so i have my cable as a failover and i have my fiber as the thing the primary and i've been doing speed tests random speed tests and on fiber speed exactly what they promised 1500 down 1000 up i love it every time it never slows down it's always the right speed on my cable whenever i do a speed test it can go from anywhere 300 megabits down to 800 megabits or you know it's always 60 up because

you know that's only 60 right so my internet is so much it's always 60 up because, you know, that's only 60, right? So my internet is so much. I haven't even thought about internet anymore. It's just working. It's fast. I can't wait to upload the show tonight because it's just going to show up right there. It's going to fly. I'm excited. So if you have the opportunity to go to Fiverr, honestly, give it a shot.

It's worth it. And I don't know if you guys can hear this but the uh i i accidentally hit update on this upgrade thing uh unraid server we were just talking about this yeah server fans have gone to max level uh the audio processing may probably remove that for the show but for for now, it's kind of loud. Are they even working if you can't hear them, though? Who knows? Who knows? I think on Unify you can turn on

a periodic... Load balancing and stuff like that. The speed test. You can turn that on periodically. It'll do a speed test. I think you can kind of look back and see if you were getting lower fast. I know on the Firewalla, it's got... Not very accurate in my experience, but...

Oh. Yeah, Unify has always had this weird problem with whatever... Like, they use third parties, and then they use their own, and it's never been good. Yeah. But, yeah, I have Firewalla,

and it's got their... I mean, they have... I don't know what they use, but it works really well. And it reports back. Like if you have some, some, some issue or something. Well, what Unify, whenever I do the speed test, it, it gives me the max speeds on my fiber and then on my cable, it doesn't. So it's probably servers that are in Toronto and that's what DJ and I are trying to get to.

So I'm a happy camper. Now it comes to my internet. Nice. That it's awesome i'm jealous because i'm using hotel wi-fi right now so yeah tj's tj will be the lowest speed upload tonight so will we get it done tonight is the question i'll probably bring it to the uh the family's house tomorrow and i'll upload it there they have have real internet, not fiber, but real internet. Oh, and then the other project I was working on. So I ended up upgrading my home server. So I previously had a 12 core server there chugging away.

I kind of outgrew it. So, you know, I just was keeping an eye out for a server and I ended up picking up a Dell PowerEdge R730 server. So a real server. And this thing's awesome, right? So it's got 24 cores, 48 threads. I run everything on it, and I'm loving it. I migrated all my Unraid over to it, all my cards and everything over to it. It works great.

The first day I got it and I plugged it in, though, and I turned it on, the fans went on, and I was like, hell no. Like if you hear one of these things, it's in my basement. I can, I can right now. When the fans kick in on these things, it's loud. It echoes through the whole house. So I quickly had to fix that with a little docker container that controls fan speeds and temperature and stuff like that but now it's working sweet it came with like eight network card ports on it i plugged in only four of them low downs them plug in four you know i have multiple video cards in it this thing's big

i'm gonna rewire my rack now because i've changed so much stuff in my rack it's gotten messy so i gotta pull it all down and redo it all from scratch so that's fun you know just you know tell the family no tv for the day and take everything down you know yeah i'm looking forward to that there's there's a couple of major differences between like the like a normal computer and one of these server computers a lot of things i like about it like the biggest thing is like all that you have is in a 2ru package size like it's it's three inches tall it's like 50 inches deep or something like that it weighs like 300 pounds but it's still it's still like really well engineered and like just all kind of like

put together everything has a purpose in the little box and all like all the wires routed correctly and everything it's really nice um and uh the other thing is it takes like 15 minutes for the stupid thing to reboot so loud one of my favorite things about the dell was the idrac uh yeah you can i can actually remote into the server and get a little console and work with it and see everything happening on the server without an operating system on it. And basically, once I plugged it in, I just went up to my office and I worked on it from upstairs and I can reboot it and see everything, go into the BIOS. I love that with the server. Yeah yeah, it's like a computer in the computer that's always on and it's connected to the video output. And it's, I mean, it's for lights out.

So like if you're not in the data center, they will typically give you a patch into that or whatever. And you can, that's how you can log into your server. You can reboot it and do it. You can do, you can literally turn it off and the computer can be powered off

and that little computer inside they're still on and you can turn it back on. It's like you physically being in front of it it's really cool yeah all computers should have that i know i know but this is what you get a server for and i got for a good price so i'm not complaining my next my next addition to the rack i'm looking for right now is i want a a disk array so i have a of boxes right now with like four drives in each one and I want them rack mounted and stuff like that. So I've been, I priced out like making my own with some SAS cards and stuff and it got expensive at that point. So I'm looking for a used disc array.

Hopefully they'll, one will pop up somewhere in Canada. I can buy it in the States. You have lots of options up here. It's still a little expensive. So, you know, I just keep an eye out. And if somebody has one for sale at a good price and I'll jump on that. States, you have lots of options. Up here, it's still a little expensive. So, you know, I just keep an eye out. And if somebody has one for sale at a good price, then I'll jump on that. But that's my next one.

I want to rack mount my drives and connect it to the server nicely and clean that all up. And, you know, that's my next project on the rack. You may want to do some research on fan controls on those, because I do not know if that's available for you. I think on those, if it's too loud too loud i'm gonna be pulling out some fans you know it doesn't need all eight fans i'll just run with one and you know it'll be fine it's in the basement basement's cool yep yeah it doesn't care at the bottom of the rack you know so it's not it doesn't catch all the heat rising yeah it doesn't care the fan speed there's two fan speeds on and still on very loud on yeah that's that's what the default settings are now you like you can get the little docker things and set that up and all that but like yeah it's still going not rebooted yet oh wait there it goes it's

back on all All right. We never heard it this whole time. So you're good, Seth. I didn't hear anything. Thanks to the power of probably Zoom. And I think I had the voice isolation turned on from the Mac. Like, yeah, you probably wouldn't hear anything. But also, yeah, it'll be processed out of it before the show. Oh, never reboot your server live on air.

Yeah. I forgot about that one. There's one server I. Oh, never reboot your server live on air. Yeah. I forgot about that one. There's one server I can reboot, but our show notes are on it. So I didn't want to reboot that. But then there was that. Yeah. Yeah. I would want to do that.

That one I could reboot, but it was very loud to do. So anyway. And moving on. One more thing. I saw this video this week and I thought it was amazing. Right. And I wish I had seen this before, but it was how to migrate your Z-Wave 500 or 700 series controller to an 800 controller.

This video, I wish I saw it before I went through this because I had to go through all 90 devices and do the three exclude, re-include. This video shows you how to do it just by adding the new controller into your z-wave network migrating all the the devices over to it and then removing the old one and then doing a couple other steps after that to make it the primary controller but it's so much easier to do it this way if you're thinking about migrating from a 500 or 700 series there's no backup and restore to the 800 series. This is probably the easiest way to do it. And the key thing about this is it's a lot easier on the batteries of

the devices, because when you go through doing the exclude, exclude, include, exclude, you're going to be wearing down the battery of those devices, right? That's one thing I noticed is afterwards, a lot of my batteries drop because it's very intensive. But if you do it this way, you don't even have to touch any of the devices. It migrates them all over. We'll link to the video in the show notes. If you're thinking about migrating, look at this video. It looks scary.

It's actually not that scary, right? And it's pretty easy to do. Yeah, looking at the Z-Wave PC controller software that they have open it's like very daunting but yeah i don't know if it makes it makes it easier or a faster process rather than doing all that stuff you're talking about yeah absolutely do this way yeah that controller software sucks like it honestly it's so confusing like but the video just follow what he says to do he says click here just click there don't ask no questions the words that he's clicking on um doesn't even make sense what it means no this something i have no idea just click on it and do what he says because in the end your devices will be migrated i mean in home assistant

you may have to reset some of the naming and stuff like that i don't know how it will handle that but i think it should keep all that if it's migrating all the devices it should keep all that um but it's so much easier and the last step where he migrates it makes it become the first one that's a little daunting but it makes sense what he's doing just follow don't ask any questions just follow what he's doing just do this right and it's gonna save you a lot of time because i went through excluding and re-including devices multiple times. It's not fun, you know. So it's worth a watch. Yeah, I mean, seeing stuff like this, it makes me grateful for dealing with Control 4.

We've had our problems with the Control 4 and ZigB and and what they did but never anything looking like this like if you move a you you can migrate devices across controller there was processes that they basically set up and they were probably doing all of these commands in the background to do their thing but for the most part all of this was managed by the system and we had some very basic tools on top of it to move stuff around and just you know the zb is working it's working you could go in and delete stuff you could accidentally delete everything out of your system and then you have to go around and tap everything back in but um wow yeah i'm watching this thing flash and move everything over just like going crazy but uh yeah

it it it definitely um this is very daunting but i'm watching this guy click away and it seems to be doing something so it trust me it's so much easier to do what he's doing than to go through every especially when you have like 90 devices if you have like 20 devices yeah go through re-add them all right you have 100 devices yeah you want to do this interesting well we'll definitely put this link in the show notes. This is a good tutorial thing or information to have. Yeah. All right.

TJ, you're traveling, but did you get anything done before you left the house? Yeah. You know, we had Thanksgiving last week. So we obviously didn't work on Thanksgiving Day. And then I had the entire weekend off. So we pretty much just hung around the house we were supposed to go to chicago and see our friend adam but that didn't work out we had some problems with the hotel bookings and some other things and it was just

like yeah we'll just stay behind uh the house this weekend and just do some stuff here so i got a pair of sonos aero 100s and I installed them as surrounds in the living room and I finally got surround sound back. I had surround sound at the old apartment. I was using Sonos One speakers on stands, but this room wouldn't really look

good with speaker stands, so I had to get some wall mounts and I figured I might as well go ahead and buy the Aero 100s being the newer speaker got those installed they seem to be working fine the annoying sonos problem that always exists whenever a new device comes out is that you can never true play your system with the new device because they haven't adjusted the programming for the new phone and so i had to like find an old ipad that had you know, an old iOS on it

in order to actually true play the system. So that was kind of annoying, especially because the phone's been out for what, like two months now almost. So that was kind of annoying. I'm not sure. Should I stick with the Aero 100s or if I should just upgrade to the 300s

to have Dolby Atmos for the surrounds? I'm not really sure. It's like twice the price. That alone makes me not want to do it, but it's also like, well, I'm only going to buy these speakers once, so should I just go ahead and bite the bullet to do it? But the best thing I've done

so far with my Soto system is I added a hallway speaker this weekend. We don't have a very big house. Yeah, we don't have a very big house yeah we don't have like a very big house but we have speakers in literally every room but it was annoying going inside like the hallway because like the hallway has the like the laundry room that you go to um and then like you know toiletries uh closet all that good stuff and you'd be in the hallway and like you couldn't hear the sonos system at all or you'd be walking to the room and you'd get like a dead zone and so i had an extra sonos one um that i went ahead and just

installed in the hallway and it's like set at like 20 percent volume it's not even that loud but it's perfect because now as i walk to room to room i don't get any of that dead zone anymore so highly recommend that if you have two hundred dollars to waste on a speaker that won't get that much use well even if you if you want to save some money, grab one of the Ikea speakers and do the same thing. Right. And the, one of the reasons why I like Sonos,

I said this to you before was when you have all Sonos and you airplay to like all the rooms, they're all in sync. Like when I play all my rooms in my house, everything's in sync. It sounds great in the house. Right. And you walk into every room and it's the same thing in sync like when i play all my rooms in my house everything's in sync it sounds great in the house right and you walk into every room and it's the same thing in sync when you have different devices i used to have like different devices i would airplay all at the same time and they'd

slightly go out of sync and that was annoying because then you start hearing the echoes so yeah i love it so i think i think i only have basically two Sonos purchases left that I'm aware of, at least. And this will probably obviously change because what doesn't? But obviously the headphones you'll be buying next year. So there's three, obviously. And the next one would be a Sonos Beam, probably the second one. I have a Sonos Ray in the den right now, and it works fine. But the annoying thing about it is that it's optical only,

and so it's hard to control with my Apple TV remote. And so I shouldn't have got it in the first place. But I need to buy these things to use them and see what they are. So I'll replace that at some point. But I think I'm pretty much done. I've got little speakers in every room now. Nice. Almost every room, you get them in your hallway too.

It's crazy. Yeah, there you go. That's, that's how fancy I am. Uh, and then this past weekend, Gavin graciously donated two hours of his time on a Sunday to help me set up

my blue Iris. So the blue Iris is mostly set up, but there's, there's always like, you know, different settings that you need to actually go through and set up and, and learn how to add the motion zones and stuff like that. And we did two different one-hour Zoom calls that kicked us off both times to get that set up and everything.

So thanks, Gavin, for helping me get that set up because now they work with my phone and I get motion notifications and all that kind of fun stuff. So what you would basically expect out of a camera system in 2023 no problem you see the thing is is because i've been through this and i understand it like it only took us two hours but if you were to do this yourself you would spend days probably trying to figure this stuff out right like it's blue iris is like that the first time i set it all up it took me a long time to get to that point. Right? Yeah. So this didn't make Blue Iris better, but, you know, at least it's easier to use. Yeah. Yeah. The hard part was getting your GPU working, you know.

That was just a pain in the butt. Yeah. But we got it. We got it. Yeah. Nice. I keep wanting to give up on Blue Iris, but. Oh, man.

It's so easy to give up on it Iris, but I'm so easy to give up on it. It is, but so powerful. You know, like one of the things I showed TJ a little trick if you have Blue Iris is all my cameras record 24-7, right? But then I hide those, I leave those, and then I make clones of those cameras. And it doesn't create two streams from the camera. It actually uses the same stream. But the clones I use for all the motion detection. So you get all the notifications only on the clones and the clips and stuff like that.

But what if you miss something or something was out of your motion zone and you want to go back? You can go back to the recording one and you can have the full recordings there. So, you know, that's that's like a power blue iris tip for people, you know. And then always, always, like, your computer shouldn't be running at 100% if you got Blue Iris. It just means you need tweaking. And there's a lot of tweaks to Blue Iris that you need to do, you know, in terms of video encoding or even the frame rates and stuff like that. They make a big difference. Yeah, my server was definitely being not optimized. It was running at 100% CPU for the longest time.

I was like, this is not good uh yeah yeah all right well i i i'm still on the journey of of avoiding the inevitable switch to blue iris right now i'm still in the mad phase where it's like i just didn't want to look back at it because it had the stupid evaluation copy written across the video feed, the only video feed I connected to it. And even though I wasn't using that much processing speed on it, it was okay.

But my latest try out was the Security Spy, which is a macOS-based NVR software. And it's, it's okay. It's still making me hate every NVR software available out there. Like it's, it's not, not optimal,

but it does have a lot of the features that blue Iris has also doesn't require like in, in, in normal Mac fashion. It's like, it doesn't have very many settings that you can get into. Unlike blue Iris, which has all of the settings, like it, it literally has everything. But one of the things is, is it's, I's like, it doesn't have very many settings that you can get into. Unlike Blue Iris, which has all of the settings, like it literally has everything.

But one of the things is, is it's, I was like, well, I wonder what, you know, I have this Mac Pro sitting here. Let me just grab it and see, you know, what I can do. I probably could put like a hundred cameras on this thing. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Think again, this Mac Pro, which is the trash can version is pretty much that at this point because i literally could not put very many cameras on the mac pro at even 10 frames per second like there's a calculator i'll put a link to it in the show notes and you can

go through and like put in what do you think your system requirements are going to be and i'm fairly low it's like six cameras they're not they're not very big cameras i mean at most like 1080p it still didn't matter the mac pro just kind of never really showed up and i think i did get it to show oh yeah there's a legacy max button you have to click and it's in there but it's like the most cameras i'd be able to get onto it like 24 and if you start adding in like 265, it's 265. You're like, it says, no, don't do that. But I do have some Mac minis. I have a Mac mini laying around the late 2012 Mac mini had like better support for things. And I was like, well, I'll just use that. So I fired that up and connected my one camera test camera to it.

And it seems to be working. working okay and it has an okay like okay interface i don't know i might i might stick with this this is like 40 bucks it looks like 33 pounds it's got an app like blue iris you have to pay extra for the interface isn't all that great but i get at this point i'm just like well what is great like what the bar is very low so i've just yeah i just i don't know It's amazing that there's not many good options out there. There's not many options out there. Like nothing out there is great. And yeah,

it blows me away. Even, even on the pro side of stuff. We, I mean, we saw a lot of interviews and they just came out with this new app called, uh, I don't know.

It used to be called the old one. Easy view. Easy view. Yeah. But now there's UNV-Link. UNV-Link. And UNV-Link is actually really good. You can log in and it transfers all your stuff over to it.

Works really fast. You can do firmware upgrades. It looks a lot better. But it's still just kind of halfway there for me. I don't know. I'm okay with it. But it falls in the realm of literally every Chinese-made NVR solution I've ever seen. I think the Uniview is probably one of the better professional ones, but that's not really saying much because all the other ones are really awful. Yeah, like Dahua, Hikvision, and Uniview.

I mean, the app experience is... The same thing. Like they have the same UI requirements document or something they stole from each other. They're just running off that. And they're like, yeah, we'll just make it with this thing.

And when you click the camera, it'll load real fast. And it's just kind of weird how they all look the same. And of course, if you have like another brand that's been OEM from one of these brands, it's the same app. It's just reskinned and it works exactly the same. There's just, they're just weird works exactly the same there's just they're

just weird in that in that respect but yeah i don't know the uniview link app is is new and um like i said it works well enough i can see the camera outside my test camera outside pretty quickly off of it um i haven't tried remotely i should probably try that but i actually i take that back i have remote cameras at the office that i'm tested i'm i'm dialed into to test different things with and it works really fast as well on those so anyway i'm watching cameras at the office that I'm dialed into to test different things with. And it works really fast on those. So anyway, I'm watching TV at the office right now on a camera on my app. Still not what I'm looking for for my home thing.

I kind of want to have all these advanced features and everything. So I'll keep tinkering with this security spy thing. It seems to have everything I want without the two-hour phone call. Although I would appreciate that if it comes down to it. You know, I'll let you have your fun and everything. But when the honeymoon's over, you know, you can schedule my calendars open. You can schedule me for a couple hours, you know. Oh, man.

Oh, man. Time to send her some Timmy Ho's. Exactly. And, and I, I did get some things done that I've been kind of like meaning to do for a while that probably weren't on any honey do list, but they were kind of on my list of things to do. I finally hung my projector for my garage ceiling.

I posted a picture of that in, in the hub and asked Owen to rate my theater. He didn't, he didn't say much. He was being nice. He was being nice.'s why i have and i did i did have i had an lg sound bar that was just kind of like laying around um literally on top it was actually on top of my daughter's little like coloring table that she uses out here in the garage when she's out here and she couldn't use it because there was like it was just laying on there and the hdmi cables and power cables were just like strung about and so i finally picked all

that up when i hung my projector and ran the wires um along the garage door opener track because that's where i where i uh zip tied them to and um yeah the the lg soundbar is now garage door mounted below the screen which which is also garage door mounted. And yeah, it's the most janky rigged up theater. But I love it because I can just turn it on with my Flickr FLIR remote. Right. My FLIR remote. There you go.

That has the use finally. Yeah. It does finally have a use because I can't control the volume on the LG soundbar without having this. And of course, you know, the natural order of things. Once you have more than three devices, you have to have a remote. So I'm back in the remote camp, Gavin. I'm sure you're glad to hear that one. I'm still waiting for a harmony killer.

It's not, it's not this one. It's not the FLIR remote. I can tell you that it's still marked in beta. The software still hasn't really updated very much past when i initially tested it out towards the beginning of the year um but it does basically turn on my system and turn it off i didn't have very much many issues like setting that setting it up to do that so they did have a ton of diagnostic things built into it now where i could go in and see logs and everything.

You could turn that on and then hook it up to USB and then press the button and watch all the commands fly by and that kind of thing. So that was nice. I did like that. You do read logs then. Yeah, yeah. Well, I didn't.

I just turned it on just to, what's this option for? Let's have it just in case. Yeah, here's the Gavin checkbox. And then it's like, oh, let's turn that back off. I don't want to read this. But you can get in there and mess up things. You can get in there and I think it even had some YAML configuration or something. Maybe it was JSON, but same thing.

Anyway, not a Harmony replacement anytime soon. It really needs RF. That would do it, right? If it had a little base station that could communicate back to those little USB things. That's what it needs uh and i finally installed an outlet and then i know that's not news but back on show 453 when we were talking about our new iphones oh man that was a while ago it's 461 right now uh Yeah, I bought, we were talking about an anchor outlet that I was going to buy. I bought the anchor outlet and snuck into the kitchen to install it real fast.

And my wife was like, what are you doing? I'm like, oh, I'm putting this new outlet in USB-C chargers. And she noticed that it only had one outlet on it. And so I had to return the anchor and get the one with the two outlets on it, which is still fine. The Amerisense GAN 65 watt, 6 amp 3 port usb wall outlet whatever it's got the 65 65 watt usbc output so i can put my laptop on it and it'll charge and run or do whatever it needs to do without having the big power brick and in there but you could quick charge your your cell phones your ipads all that good stuff and it's got it also has a normal USB-A on there, whatever the original version was on there too.

So it should cover everything. But I must have returned the other one and ordered that one and set it on my desk at some point. Because it was sitting here when I was cleaning off my desk for the holiday. And I was like, oh, here's that thing. I'll just run and install it and i i did and finally got it that put in september 29th is when we talked about that so that's how that's how long november 29th now it only took two months to put in an outlet it's not bad in terms of projects you know sometimes they take a while it's actually not that bad i'm just

like any contractor at this point when are you gonna get out here and do this um give yourself better credit than that i'll be out there tomorrow two months later yeah well what's cool is i have the i still have like an out the outlet thing with the usb a version the old ones and i've got like on the wall over there i've got a a sensible that kind of turns on and off the ac out here so what i'm going to do is plug it's got it has an old iphone charger that is plugged into and takes up an outlet so i'm going to use use that and replace it out here and that way we'll have um two outlets out here plus the uh the the charger plugged into the sensible for the ac unit

to turn on and off which which is not needed tonight. It's not even on. I'm not even sweating in my garage. Amazing. That's how you know it's cold. Yeah. So you know it's really cold. Gavin is in a hoodie.

It's minus four degrees Celsius up here. Oh my gosh. I don't even know what that is. How cold is that in freedom units? I don't know. But I had to brush snow off of my car this morning. And, you know, like it wasn't a lot. Just little flurries.

24 degrees. Yeah. 25 degrees. Yeah, that's cold. Yeah. Sounds cold. Can't believe it goes below zero. Oh, this is just the beginning.

This is just the beginning. Yeah, we haven't even made it to winter yet it's weird uh anyway that that's all i've got i actually did a bunch of things around the house and oh and my christmas decorations are in progress still i i have with christmas the lights and everything there's the things that i want to do and there's the things i can afford to do and then there's like the things you have time for exactly there's like afford time yeah basically i i ran out of zip ties with the amount of lights i'd put up this year and what i was trying to do and but i did take time to um i in the past i have

used these pvc pipes that connect to the soffit using some like clips like pvc clips or whatever and uh in the past i had basically taken time and just zip tied cables and and things to that this this year i basically cut the wires and and and soldered little connector waterproof connectors in between them so now i when i go to take down the the those lights that go across the soft and everything's all labeled and I can just pull them down and strap them together and throw them in the back. And I don't know, I shouldn't have to do that anymore. But as I was doing this and zip tying everything, I found other ways to do the same thing that would probably have been better. And now I kind of want to do those. I'll have to cut it all off and start over.

So, oh man, it just, it never ends. It never ends. Anyway, that's what I've been up to. I'll try and post a picture of that in our show notes as well. Cause it's been fun. My janky theater and my zip tie lights. Luckily you can't see them when they're on.

So that's probably a good time to stop the show here. Yankee Theater and my zip tie lights. Luckily, you can't see them when they're on. That's probably a good time to stop the show here. We do want to give a big thank you for everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $8 a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show,

but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slash at the Hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there every day and talk about all the news and things that are going on and see my janky theater pictures as I get done with them. And the Owen rating, which, you know, I don't think he's

rated, actually. I think he suggested I go talk to somebody else. Yeah, probably for a good reason. uh anyway i i know we talked about owen probably in the about the exact same spot that he does have a really cool podcast i've been listening to and now i really want to pick his brain about this rp22 spec thing this is really it's actually kind of fun i've been hearing about it for for a few years now from him and and from people around the industry and Cedia podcast. And it's actually a really cool spec that they've, they've drawn up and put together and I'm reading through it and thumbing,

thumbing through it. And I'm going to have to learn more about it. So anyway, if you want to help out, but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice really helps people find the show.

That's going to wrap up the news this week. Everyone have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.