HomeTech.fm - Episode 467 - OpenWRT for Your Vacuum

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

On this week's show we talk about our Apple Vision Pro order status, Seth has a sweet announcement, Netflix announces ads, Sonos announces disappointment, Snap One announces cool stuff but causes drama, and OpenWRT announces they aren't dead yet! All of this news, project updates, and this week's pick of the week.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 26th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, the podcast all about home technology, home innovation, and Apple, what are they called, the Apple Vision Pros? Vision Pro. Did you guys get one?

No. TJ? I didn't like the colors Pro. Did you guys get one? No. TJ? I didn't like the colors. I'm going to wait for Gen 2. You know, every first generation Apple product gets outdated so quickly. I wanted one so bad, but I was like, this thing is going to be outdated in a year. Yeah. It's not going to matter.

So I'm not going to spend the money. I don't know. This one, I think I was a little more time on it than a year. Probably. Maybe two. Two years, yeah. But from all the people that were looking at the supply chains, they don't have anything lined up until 2025, 2026.

So you got a couple of years out of it. It's like getting the first gen iPad. Yeah. I kind of want to see what people do with this. It's not necessarily about the product, but it's how, you know, the extra third-party apps and what people do with it that make it worthwhile, you know? Like, if you don't have apps and you don't have a use case for it, then that's a waste of $4,000.

Yeah. It looks really interesting, but like you said, for watching a TV, well, I don't know, people pay $3,000, $4,000 for TVs all the time, tvs all the time so yeah yeah this thing i mean it sounds really cool honestly like whenever they first announced it i was like i could see myself buying one of these eventually uh but i mean i don't know two hour battery life on it and i gotta have that external battery pack and everything i'm not a fan of the the first edition i think you can plug it into your computer or something like that and it stays charged. Doesn't it?

I mean, that's definitely what I want. Well, yeah. I would use it as an external monitor thing and work that way, I guess. Like, see my spreadsheets. Why didn't you get your work to buy one? Up in the sky. I don't know. That'd be fun, I guess.

They would have bought one. Tell them that you need it for the lighting design program. Oh, that would be fun. Yeah, see? Yeah. Hmm. Good idea. Well, I? Hmm. Good idea. Well, I didn't buy one either.

So I guess we're 0 and 3 Apple. Sorry. Give me your boss's number. I'll call him. Yeah. Would it be cool if you could use it, TJ, to see your lights before you install them in your kitchen? You know?

Yeah, honestly, there are all kinds of use cases for that, right? Because they do that with your phone, where you can use your phone to look at furniture and stuff around the house. But that's where I think the AR and the VR, you know, having both options kind of helps out because you could, you know, lay out a whole room with this. And they're already doing that with like construction buildings. Like they were, I forget that one company, but they have a warehouse set up with like projectors and stuff like that. And they basically lay out the whole house so you can see exactly what the floor plan is going to be and what it's going to feel like. So, I mean, that sounds great.

They even bring furniture in and set the couch where the couch is going to be and like make sure it's like good sizing. Yeah. That's too much work. I just create a floor plan in the alexa app and let amazon tell me what i need to put in that room yeah but now you don't have to you can buy this four thousand dollar headset maybe eventually and do it starting at what thirty five hundred dollars or in canadian it's probably five thousand up there yeah you know new roof or you know a vr headset i don't know man pretty good roof if you're getting it for five thousand yeah okay half a roof half a roof

my roof alone was like ten thousand so you could put these on and just pretend you have a good water leaks all around you yeah i i don't see like this being i mean it could be really cool i i don't have really any experience with ar vr i'm more interested in the ar one thing i'm really worried about is the um like i don't do very like uh very good my brain or my eyes don't like like stereo stuff so like when i would watch like the um 3d movies i'd always kind of get sick or feel yuck after them and so that's one of those things like i don't know like spending an hour in this like if i feel sick after it like that's i'm bringing it back i'm'm not paying $3,500.

Like first person shooters. You get sick with those too. When you play those games, I don't really play those. Well, if you even watch, if I even watch somebody playing it, I would get sick.

I couldn't watch it for a long time. I don't think I, I don't think I had that problem. It's, it's, um, I don't know. It's just the 3d movies really,

uh, almost, almost like I was drunk, but without the being drunk part. Cheap date. Yeah, exactly. Not a fun date. Just couldn't focus on anything after watching a regular

hour and a half movie or whatever. So I don't know. That's one thing I kind of like I'm thinking about with these, but it does look like a really cool product. I'm very much more interested in the AR version of it, of whatever comes out of it, than the completely immersive blah, blah, blah that you can get out. That, I don't know, that seems like a gimmick. But the AR seems kind of cool to me.

Anyway, I didn't buy one of those, but I did get this. Holding up a box. Ooh, that's a box. Oh, nice. I like your box. Rectangular shape. So I told you guys I had a big announcement. Oh.

Big thing. Yeah. Are you ready? You ready? Ready? Okay, let's go. Oh! We're not on live video, so.

Straight, yeah. Nobody else could see. So straight from the town of Waterloo, Ontario. Hey, that's where I went to school. I went to order some art'Henry bars. Is that where they're from? I don't know. Came UPS. So yeah, it

came from someplace up there that fulfilled the Amazon order I put in a month ago. It took that long to get some O'Henry bars? Pretty much. And I tried them. They're actually pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, they're not bad. They're not like Reese's peanut butter cup. They've got peanut, like hard peanuts.

It's kind of like a Snickers bar, I guess. No? Kind of. Yeah, like a Snickers bar. Your Reese's comment confused me, so. Well, no, it's like peanut butter. It's peanut and chocolate, like, right? So like peanut.

Yeah, and caramel. Isn't it caramel? Yeah, I think it's more like a Snickers. It's closer to a Snickers. Yeah. Well, what a coincidence, Seth, because I had a friend of the show, James Todd, stop by and drop me off some candy bars. It's O'Henry week. We all get O'Henrys.

Yeah. Wait, I'm the only person that hasn't had O'Henry recently. This is really weird. Because you gave them to james i think right no no he was up in canada visiting and he picked them up from the local store and dropped some off but yeah they have crunchy peanuts creamy caramel chewy fudge all covered in a chocolatey coating and it says that in in french right here on the label that i have oh you got the ones oh yeah 120 grams i got eight bars

though i was uh but you know those are the mini ones right mini ones yeah oh okay yeah you got the mini ones you gotta be a fatty and get the big ones that way you just eat them all i can eat all the mini ones at the same time too if you freeze them they're really good too but i mean what what candy isn't good frozen so well enjoy seth enjoy the o henry's oh absolutely i i had i had over the i got them a couple of days ago and so i had a whole pack i was like looking around like maybe i ate the whole pack yeah i ate the whole pack so move them away from the desk i've had at least 80 yeah if you hear this on the show tonight it's definitely me getting into some o henry bars so bars. Delicious though. I like them.

It's on par with the Snickers. The chocolate's a little bit different, but yeah. I don't know why they got rid of them in America. I don't know. Probably just bad advertising. Did they ever have them down there? Yeah, we had them until like, it was super late. It was like 2015 or something.

We looked it up. Oh. Because when I brought it to Nicole, she was telling me that, no, she's like, no, I've definitely had them before. And I was like, I've never seen these. I've never seen them. And come to find out, they stopped selling them in the late to like 2010s. So it wasn't that long ago.

But I imagine it's just the name here. I mean, I don't know. It doesn't really have any meaning to us. Well, my favorite is the O'Henry Easter eggs. It's a little weird. They're a little chunkier, you know, they taste a little different, but they're only around Easter time. weird they're a little chunkier you know they they taste a little different but they're only around easter time so as soon as they start hitting shelves i stock up on those um you know maybe i'll send something down for you guys because you could taste the differences i don't know i

didn't look are these are they milk chocolate or are they something else milk chocolate yeah they are milk chocolate for some reason americans don't like milk chocolate as much i don't know what no americans only like milk it's a lot like the Hershey's and stuff like that. Americans love milk chocolate. It's the dark chocolate Americans do not like, which is the European chocolate. Oh, man, that's all I eat. Gives me headaches. Oh, it's delicious.

I had a boss one time that gave me like a 98% cacao bar. He's like, go ahead and try this. I just took a bite and it was like the worst thing I've ever had in my life. Why would you do this? It's upsetting a lot of dark chocolate lovers right now. I know, right? That's right. We are not dark chocolate fans. You can give it all to me then.

I'll take it. All right. Well, we've got some, we've got O'Henry bars, but we don't have any Apple Visions. That's okay. I think we got the better deal. Let's go and take a look. We got some home tech headlines this week. So what do you say we jump into that? Let's do it. All right. Netflix is phasing out its cheapest ad free plan, which currently costs about $12 per month in the US.

This move comes as Netflix expands into an ad supported streaming and wants subscribers to either switch to an ad viewed plan or pay more for the free service or for the non ad service i guess um so once this gets implemented at netflix will have free price points ads for 6.99 standard hd for 15.49 and premium 4k for 22.99 a month 22.99 a month oh my gosh you ready for this yeah it's coming no i mean that's such a big difference i mean for $6.99 and then you have to jump up almost $10 more to get non-ads. I mean, that's kind of crazy. Like, we're getting back to cable. Like, it's reaching a point, like, we used to pay a cable bill to get, you know, 40 minutes of an actual TV show every hour.

You know, watch 20 minutes of commercials. This is just, it's going to reach a point. Yeah, soon they'll make it's going to reach a point. Yeah. Soon, soon though, though it'll make it really hard to cancel your Netflix subscription. Then we'll be like, oh yeah, it's cable at this point. Like I did see there was some room rumbling somewhere that the,

there are people in Congress or people who take their job seriously in Congress that were rumbling about, complaining about how these streaming services who are basically turning into cable companies and they're selling advertisements just like cable companies is, they're not regulated like cable companies are. So that will be interesting if it gets a little more traction.

I wonder if the cable companies are like, yeah, yeah, you should regulate them like you regulate us. See what happens there. That'd be interesting. Good, because we need it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Give me ads't know give me ads give you i'll give you regulations how about that yeah i mean we have

netflix at the moment we go on and off but i haven't really found anything on there recently this is probably enough to make me cancel and i'd pay like 23 a month for youtube so yeah youtube premium not even the youtube tv service. So I'm not, I'm not a stranger to paying high prices for things, but Netflix, I don't think it's worth it at this time. They don't really have any compelling shows on that I can think of right now.

Um, Oh man, I just enjoyed one too, called the brother's son, Michelle Yao. Really exciting. It was actually pretty good. Oh wait,

I think you told, yeah, I think I heard about that one too. Yes. I'll have to check that one out michelle i was hearing about the show with michelle y'all in it yeah so yeah and i from like two people you're the second person so i i definitely have to check them out but i mean there's not like they're big marquee shows running like stranger things or anything like that so still kind of waiting for that stuff to roll back around. Anyway, ads are coming. Welcome.

New product from Sonos, TJ. It's not headphones, though. Oh, I don't want it. Sonos is releasing new in-ceiling speakers that are basically going to be only purchasable through installers. Speakers are all custom-built in large woofer, a a 30 millimeter tweeter for enhanced sound quality uh i was kind of looking at this they're eight inch speakers price dead a thousand dollars per pair um with a small inch uh six inch model available as well i was looking at these it's it's kind of like to me i'm like i i don't know if this is sonos actually making their own speakers but in the past they've teamed up with Sonance, right?

For the outdoor speakers and maybe some of the indoor speakers too. And these probably are at least the same, if not rebranded Sonance, or it's not very hard to find the speaker manufacturer who'll make you speakers and let you put a name on it these days. So if Sonos has done that, they probably picked up some decent speakers, maybe partnered with Sonance to make them as well. But I don't know, it kind of makes sense. If they have an amplifier, no speakers, this is probably a good time to start selling speakers. Yeah, no, this is definitely a Sonance partnership. I mean, they already have it with the six-inch in-ceiling speakers.

They still say Sonance on them, but they're from Sonos or whatever they are oh these are okay these are the same okay yeah they're they're literally the same thing but they're eight inch the other ones were six inch and so these are just the bigger version of them i don't know why they waited like 25 years to bring these out compared to the six inch but here we are and the only just to mess with you i think the only yeah we got this new product announcement the only difference though between like the the sonance sono special speakers is that the if you hook it up to the sonos amp you get the true play um which is very nice because you know with the traditional in ceiling or in

wall speakers you will not get the true play option and so like that's kind of worth it um never pay retail for these speakers, though. They almost always go on sale like Best Buy and stuff like that. They have some crazy MSRP of like a thousand dollars. Never pay that. You don't have to. You can find them pretty cheap. Yeah. Speakers are one of the last high margin products that exist out there. They always have been like even when I was selling speakers in the Circuit City 90s, like they were that was what everybody like you sell some speakers, you make some money. Well, especially these ones ones you're only going to get them from you know sonan steelers like myself or like best buy how do they determine that you actually have installed these specific

sono speakers i wonder i would imagine they have some kind of like circuitry or something in it like very basic i'm assuming because whenever i've installed these they look like normal speakers like they don't look like they have a giant circuit board or anything. But I imagine they have some kind of, you know, resistor or something in there that kind of makes it happen. I don't know. I'm not an audio person. If you know, let us know. Yeah, tell us the secret.

Or you scan a QR code. It just has to create like a high frequency noise or something. And so I was like, yep, that's it. Yeah, I imagine like if they played a certain tone and it produced the exact waveform that they were looking for, they'd probably, yeah. So they know how to EQ things at Sonos. It's just speakers.

I mean, they're doing it with their current speakers. They just got to make it do it with this one instead. And it's just, you know, external. So you don't, you basically, am I, and I don't understand this. Are you, when you do that that do you get the true play you can't you can't actually true play any other speakers other than these correct yeah you have to get the sonant sono speakers and i don't even like you can't do it the outside which makes sense anyway because outside's outside um but any of the sonant sono speakers is what you can true play on, which is only two. It's a six inch and eight inch now.

Okay. I actually, well, I mean, I'm not going to save this for the projects, but I actually set up my true play the other day. Everybody left the house and it was real quiet. I'm like, no one's here. So when like turned off, like things that would make noise, because last time I did it, the ice machine started running halfway through and it was like, I give up. And I was like, nope, can't, can't handle this. Not I'll wait. Well, everybody was gone. I was

like, all right, let me just do this. So I did it. And, um, I don't know, maybe it sounds a little bit better. I don't really can't tell. I don't have like, I have like a big open floor plan. So just kind of walked around the room is waving my, my phone around and looked like a crazy person doing the Sonos st i call it yeah it had the nerves like you need to you need to raise and lower your phone more i'm like are you crazy like i've been flopping this thing around like you didn't know i was flopping the phone around maybe it's not gonna work maybe that's why it didn't work i i've done that with when i got the ikea speakers um the ikea sono speakers um that's when i noticed the biggest difference i remember

when i first plugged them in i played something and it sounded off and then i tuned it and then it sounded so much better so um it's worth to do it anyways yeah i would say the soundbar sounds a little bit more surroundy i guess like it has a little bit more depth in in some of the seats i was sitting in but the the, the other speakers, I just kind of like have them tucked in the corner or under end table. And I can't imagine they could EQ their, their way out of that. They were already in struggling in that position.

They're just there to make noise, you know, background noise. Yeah. Yeah. They're very, very room dependent. So let's move on here.

Amazon is reportedly working on a new version of Alexa called Alexa Plus. You can all see where this is going. It will be launching on June 30th. The new service aims to supercharge Alexa with AI capabilities and charge users for its use. Supercharge your users. Let's see. Basically, this, well, I mean, rumor has it that Amazon's going to come out and get into the AI business. You're going to have smarter and get into the AI business.

You're going to have smarter things that it can say back to you. There were some reports that it did not do so well when people were talking to it. So they're going to have to like go back and fix a few things. But I don't know. This is interesting. It just means that there's a paid version of Alexa coming. We've kind of watched some of the features that were free get taken away and moved behind two or three bucks a month or something like that now they're gonna have just a alexa plus just like disney plus and hbo max or now max or whatever yeah you gotta pay for it yeah i don't know why they don't just like i feel like they should just make tiered amazon

prime subscriptions at this point like i don't think people are going to sign up for like a separate subscription for just their alexa but if you make a amazon prime plus subscription where it's you know sixty dollars more than than what it is now i think people would be more inclined to do that you would pay sixty dollars more for alexa i mean i wouldn't seth but maybe somebody else would tj's just pissing me off right now he He's giving them ideas and pricing. When he said $60, I kind of cringed. I was like, $60 a year? I mean, that's only $5 a month.

I was like, $6 for the year. Oh, a year. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, a year, yeah. I don't know. For me, it seems like it would make more sense to roll it into something else, which they already do with Amazon Prime anyway. With Amazon Prime, you get the video and the shipping and the blah,

blah, blah. So why not just add it to that or just add a separate tier? Yeah. And prime has gone up in price too. Like, it's still a good value, I think,

but definitely has increased in price. But I do like that idea. I mean, if they could get rid of prime, you know, if I could take my subscription and get rid of prime and photos and all the other stuff I don't use and music and, you know, whatever. But yeah, add on the Alexa Plus, you know, like, yeah, I would do that.

What if they let you pick that? Like, you could knock off 10 bucks for taking off Prime Video and then you could add, you could take off photos and whatever else they have. I would be fine with that because I don't use any of it anyway. Exactly. They won't do that. They won't do that. I literally just have amazon prime for shipping yeah but they they probably wouldn't do that because they'd probably lose a ton of prime subscriptions at that point right well that's what's bumping up their numbers we saw that news article where they have like a billion subscribers or something and it's like all right you don't

but but there's a lot to this alexa plus max you know thing that you know i have to wait and see what they come out with but it comes down to pricing like are they going to charge per device are they going to charge per um you know like per account you know and what extra value does it have uh i could see myself paying for it if it gave me enough value right um that's all it comes down to and the price has to be good if it gave me enough value, right? That's all it comes down to. And the price has to be good. If it just has a large language model attached to it. I don't know if that's worth it. I mean,

it's going to be a chattier. It's going to give you better suggestions. Oh, by the ways. And that kind of thing. Well, if they make it less chattier, I'll pay,

I'll pay a subscription just to make it less chattier. Alexa will not talk to you. She was like, you know, here's $5 a month for not to talk back to me to you. She was like, yeah. You know, here's $5 a month for not to talk back to me, you know? Like, seriously, let's... We'll actually let you disable, by the way,

for $5 more a month. What do you think? You know, those are valuable things. That's like, yeah, add to account. Bye. Yeah. It'll be interesting. June 30th, they say this is launching.

Early tests, I guess, are showing that it it has flaws such as long and inaccurate answers so that's probably not gonna not gonna fly for our five dollar a month there i work with people like that so that doesn't bother me too much right just rambling on yeah you know oh by the way did you see the thing on tv last night yeah oh god but i'm sure you know you're always it's early you're always gonna have the issues you know but it's cool like i when i was doing the voice interaction with chat gpt it's actually a different experience when you're talking to it versus you know like typing to it and if they do that i could see this being really good if they can you know make it that well you know like when i was just as an example you know recommend a movie from the nineties and they would give me a movie.

I say, no, actually something, you know, like I didn't have to say, Hey, this, or Hey, that, I just say, no, recommend something at action and give me a goal, but with this actor in it. And then, you know, the, the conversation was totally different. And if they can replicate that with the Amazon products, um, it will be really nice to interact with you know just random questions and i don't want something that only has answers up to 2019 you know it's gonna have like current stuff right you know i want you know if i can ask it about yesterday's basketball game you know what was the score in the game and you know who had this you know and you know, and what was the game like, and, you know, I had more of a conversation. That would be great.

Well, that's, that's what these things do. I mean, they're, they're kind of have like, there's a couple of different ways that they pull in information and there's like that, there's like an API for game scores and that kind of thing that they pull from. And then there's like all the little smart responses they put in for, like, they've just had somebody just like hard code something in place you know they like when you ask it i don't know what do you think about siri maybe they have something that's hard coded in there you know that always says the same thing but this this would be just kind of like an add-on to that and then be able to hopefully smartly

pull from those different apis and give you the right response but again it's it's it's how they program that and and the problem with like large language models is like it doesn't really know what it's telling you it just kind of has to but it tells you like it's correct like it just it's just random words put together and probably they probably are pretty good together but for the most part it doesn't know what it's saying. And it's just spitting out kind of what the next word probably should be in the correct order, which is an amazing feat in and of itself. And it would be nice too, from the smart home perspective, if it could do things like it

knows your home. It's not just like, you know, it knows, knows you know tracks things in your house and it knows things and you could tell it to open the blinds you could call it blinds curtains shades whatever and it will know what you're talking about in that room right or you know like there's so many as long as it like can it it's programmed right and can trust those data sources because if it starts hallucinating like chat gpt does and heck this one is reported to have done yeah um then you're gonna have problems because it's like oh the windows are closed what are you talking about the blinds are shut and it's like no their blinds are not shut alexa please open them

yeah exactly and it's gonna be like no they're closed i'm sorry gavin i cannot do that for you yeah even personal awareness you know if i tell it to turn on tv turn on tv and turn it to my favorite channel versus you know somebody else I tell it to turn on TV, turn on TV and turn it to my favorite channel versus, you know, somebody else. Or even blocking things like stopping someone from saying, turn on every light in the house. Right, right. You know, like, you'd be like, no, that's not advised, you know? Like, there's so much they can do with it. I think this is the first step.

But if they do it right, I could see myself paying for a subscription. All right. Well, speaking of paying for subscriptions, the integrator world was rocked this past weekend. Oh, man. I manage a Control 4 forum page thing on Facebook, and it was a bunch of noise, and I had a bunch of people I had to delete their posts for. It's like, stop it.

Okay, so Snap-on really messed up some marketing. I think in, in my opinion, I know marketing is hard. Communicating change is hard and communicating new products is especially hard, but they, they had two basic announcements that they should have not put together. In my opinion. Uh, the first one is they have an annual subscription set up for remote management of your house, right? So like if you want to run the Control 4 app, you have to pay, I don't know, I think it was like $130, $150 or something right now. I don't remember what exactly it was, called Foresight.

Now that program is basically being end of line. Like if you are on it now, you continue paying for that. That's how you continue interacting with your remote system you stay pay the same price they're not making anybody pay more um and they're not making it mandatory or anything so like you still if you bought a system today up until like i think the 20 towards the end of april you're on the same the old program but after systems after that they're gonna have to go to this thing called control for connect and control for connect they're actually there's there's two there's two changes one it's a little bit more it's 100 bucks more a year i

think it's 250 a year for the remote connection they also have bundled in a bunch of other stuff into it so like they've required it at this point um so any updates to the software um if you want to use the app basically at all whether you are inside the house or outside of the house uh that 250 is basically required. And there's a bunch of other things like the Alexa voice, like voice integrations, all that stuff is built into that anyway. It was built into Foresight before, but all that kind of gets bundled up. So if you like paid for it for the first year or whatever, and then decided that you didn't want to pay for it anymore, some or many things in your system could potentially stop

working. Now your system still works locally. Your touchscreens still work, your lights and all that kind of stuff still work locally, but you're not going to get any more software updates. It's not eligible for software updates. There's just a couple of changes there and I could see them. I understand this. That was easy. That was an easy change. People kind of got hung up on that one because of the other two things they announced. And the other two things are bundled, I guess, into what they're calling Control 4 Assist. Control 4 Assist is a completely different product and they should have waited a week to announce it because they got really confused with this mandatory thing they were

doing. Control 4 Assist is a non-mandatory, like it's an optional thing that dealers can sell. And it's basically kind of what Jason Griffin went on to work on over at OneVision, just kind of a generic version of that, I guess, or a basic version of that. Remote assist, like remote service and that kind of thing. Somebody is answering the phone within 30 seconds. When you sell this Control 4 Assist as a dealer, I guess there's an annual fee of $899 and customers will get proactive monitoring and access to a support team at Control 4. So somebody has a problem,

they can pick up a phone, call Control 4. Control 4 can work through and do the basic triage. And if they have to get the dealer involved, they can schedule a service call or have the dealer call them in, fix it, whatever. There's two versions of that. One is $899 and one is $3,000 a year for 24 seven. I guess the $899, that one is 8am to 8pm, 365 days a year. And then the $3,000 one is 24 seven. So depending on the system size or needs of the client or whatever, you could use one of these things. And I, I, I don't really see anything, any problem with this. Like, this is like one of those things where it's like, it's an optional thing. Control four offers it. Some clients have always, you know, wanted to know, like, who can I call in the

middle of the night? And it was always like, like well not me like i don't want to be called i don't care about your tv yeah but you can call the uh office number and somebody will get back to you on it but yeah there i i i always hated you know getting those phone calls at eight nine o'clock and or text messages and saying hey the tv is not working it's like well go watch one of the 12 other ones yeah exactly but yeah i don't know like so let's let's go around here uh gavin i talked to you a little bit before the show you're like yeah i don't really know or understand what along this is like but like what do you think about this is it it's like if you were approaching this and and a perspective control for customer potential control for customer what would you think about both of these announcements first the i guess the the mandatory the remote access and app usage for being 250 a month 250 a year sorry and then uh control for assist which is their

in-house i guess servicing thing so the one thing i heard you know was the communication um it wasn't there or it was confusing or it was wrong. And I think that's very important when you're making significant changes like this. Communication is important. And I think they should have communicated properly with the people that have to deal with the clients and far in advance because they got to make adjustments. They got to prepare, you know, clients, you know, before you go up to the clients, you know, you got to make sure you have the stories right. And you have to know all the costs. You have to know all the changes and everything.

And that, that's one thing I was hearing from you constantly that they really screwed up communication. They really screwed this up. And, you know, as if I were a client, you know, and, you know, my dealer came to me and he says, by the way, next week you have a bill for this much, a recurring bill. I would, I would be upset. Right. I'd be like, you gave me one week's notice. And you know what? I'm also stuck in the system too. Like, it's not like I could just say I'm going over to Savant or something like that. Right. Like I was stuck with this system. So it's like, I don't really have a choice too. But to be fair, people that own these systems probably, you know, it's small cost. They gave dealers basically 60 days to adjust how they were

selling. And the thing is, it's like, if you're selling something today, it's not gonna matter. You just go and make the account. And once the account's created, it's on the old system. But after that April date, if you go and activate an account it's going to go through a different way and you don't have access to the old foresight thing so i i think fair enough like 60 days i think is probably long enough to make any adjustments and like communicate that out properly like if you had a project open now like what you're talking about yeah um like you've already sold the control for gear maybe a week a few weeks back or,

you know, a year ago when you were building a house or whatever, like if you're a dealer, you now's the time to actually activate that account. So you get on the old system. Um, but yeah, don't wait,

do it now. Um, but I don't think that's, and, and control force, I mean, they're a nice enough company. Like after the 30th,

if something like that, an edge case comes up like that, they probably will let somebody slide in under the door. They better. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they're a nice enough company. Like after the 30th, if something like that, an edge case comes up like that, they probably will let somebody slide in under the door. They better. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they're, they're not, they're not doing, they're not doing this as like

a strong arm thing. That's not the impression that I got at all. But like the, the idea of making this little bit mandatory, like I pretty much everybody was doing foresight that I know about. A lot of people were complaining about like single room solutions because control for you can still go down and use like their smallest processor inside of uh uh like a single room for just tv and a remote and that's all you need it for and they were like well why do i need pay um 250 a year for that like i don't i don't want to do that well like their smallest controller it's only

100 and then they have an even smaller, smaller controller that you may need to add some like IR connectivity to it. And it's free on that one. So you actually still have like two, I think really good options for single room solutions that kind of like fit the bill a little bit here. And if, again, if you wanted the, if you had the small controller, I think they call it the core one. That was, that's only a hundred bucks for that one, not 250. the small controller, I think they call it the Core One, that's only $100 for that one, not $250. So it makes sense to me. And then the second part of it, I think, was the bigger announcement that got blocked in with this weird change or this change, which was like the assist, which has nothing to do with any of this.

It has to do with remote service and picking up the phone at 1 a.m. And that's the confusion there, right? So, again. If Home Assistant offered, if Paul has gone on tomorrow and said, hey, for $8.99, if you have a problem with Home Assistant, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., 365 days a year, you pick up the phone, you're talking to somebody, we'll help you fix it. Would you do it? No, because if I have a problem with Home Assistant, I'm going to be able to figure this out myself. I don't need to call anybody. Gavin can can't figure it out nobody can figure it out for the listeners for 4.99 a month if you have a problem with home assistance you can call me you know gavin has a service there

we go yeah i think you underselling yourself you could you could have done this for 700 bucks and it's like yeah okay gavin done yeah i'll change that with 30 days notice shortly yeah i honestly i feel like they probably should have announced the the assist thing first and be like hey check out this cool new thing you know everybody nobody no integrator knows how to deal with aftercare service so we went ahead and we solve this problem for you. It's this price. You can sell it, you know, however often you want. It's great. Look at all this stuff. And then like a couple of days later, I've been like, Hey, by the way, this stuff is going to increase in price, but I feel like it probably should have been more notice. I don't know. Like

for me, I 60 day notice if you're planning jobs is probably sufficient. But I just feel like 60 day notice for this kind of change isn't sufficient. I don't know. I feel like if you were already if you had a really good relationship with a company like that, and they were going to make a drastic change or what a lot of people have considered a drastic change, then you need more than 60 day notice for that. And they could have easily like put a a thing out last year and said hey you know next year we're going to make some make some changes we'll have some you know better instructions for you and whatever's going to happen but this is kind of what's happening yeah um because if i was a dealer i would kind of feel short-sighted because like i said i just

don't think it's that much notice um so i that's my opinion on it but i'm not a control for dealer so yeah i maybe that could have been worked on i think that's my opinion on it but i'm not a control for dealer so yeah i maybe that could have been worked on i think that's what everybody kind of like latched on to it's a hundred dollar difference between what i'm already paying or what a customer is already paying because the dealers aren't paying for it um and and and then there's a like a completely different other thing i think i think honestly i think the assist is probably like one of the biggest products we've seen released in this channel in the past five years. Like, I don't think anything comes close to that. And unfortunately it got buried behind a hundred dollar increase. This is, this is a substantial project for them to take on. And like you said, TJ is like,

nobody knows how to take and introduce that aftercare thing. And especially if you're just like a one man show. Yeah. And you just don't have the manpower. I mean, you know, I'm a good example. I work by myself and I answer all the emails and calls and everything else. Cause obviously nobody else is going to do that. But if I have someone contact me at eight o'clock at night about their TV, not working,

I'm not going to respond to them until the next morning. Right. I mean, it's just, I don't have a way to ensure that I can answer those questions and charge people a monthly fee. And obviously if you're a larger company, then you can afford to hire a call service or hire people that are on call and all that good stuff. But if you're a smaller company, you don't have that luxury. And so stuff like this is really nice and it does help your customers out because they do get a solution right away. Yeah.

I mean, for $900, $75 a month. That's nothing. That's nothing. For these clients that are putting in these bigger control board systems, for the right client, like $900, yeah, that's a service call, right? Well, maybe a little bit less than a service call. I want that service call. Yeah. All right.

Raise your lights. No, but I mean, yeah, that's why it's like, you know, I think that's a disservice call. I want that service call. Yeah. All right. They raise your lights. No, but I mean, yeah, that's why it's like, I, you know, that I think that's a good deal. And I feel like they, if they would have let off with that and then, you know, and then said that they were going to increase prices on everything else and gave a little bit of notice, nobody would even care. Yeah. You know, it would have been a non-issue. It'd be like, Hey, look out, SnapAV created this really cool product that all our competitors

are already doing um because there's already companies that do this it's just not built into the platform and now it is yeah i i mean the the only the biggest change i guess in in this whole thing the biggest change change is is the mandatory reoccurring fee i guess that you would have right yeah they have to basically use to use the app because i can't think of another i mean oh that's josh ai that's one they have reoccurring fees yeah uh and then i think savant even has licensing fees now every year so yeah there's there's actually two companies that are doing it and yeah no the licensing fees make sense it's just the way you approach it yeah you know well and josh started off with them and everything so that made it a lot easier you

know it's like hey this is what it is is and that's what we're going to do. And, you know, I could see both sides. And they do have a buyout too. Like they do have like a five year and a lifetime. And the lifetime is expensive. But if you don't want to pay the reoccurring, well, there's the price. So maybe that's what Control 4 should come back with and say, well, here's the lifetime option. You buy this.

Yeah. And for the lifetime of this. You buy this. Yeah. And for the lifetime of this. It's $1 million. All right, SnapAV, we'll handle your communications for now. No, no, no. I don't want any part of it. Send everything to us.

Pay me a lot of money. I'll announce your terrible decisions. I do think that Control Force really needs some more thought and just people talking about it i did talk to jason quite a bit about it um and and you know what one vision offers roughly the same not roughly i mean they offer a product in the same vein right but it's a more it's a more white label solution it doesn't have control force name on it we all know where snap av got the idea yeah

well i mean one vision is not the only one paras Parasol. Yeah, Parasol. Yeah. They pretty much own Parasol from what I understand. So you can still use those companies and integrate this as well. But a lot of guys out there, the shops weren't big enough to talk to a company like Parasol or OneVision, or it didn't make sense. And then this be like just a generic, easy thing to sell, like 75 bucks a month. And that's less than a service call. Put it on there. It's up to control four to make that. I mean, that's, that's money that's going to control four. I think there is a dealer split somewhere in there. So dealers do get some RMR coming back from it. So that's nice. But the thing is, it's up to control four to make that three thousand dollars or that um

8.99 worth it to the client they're gonna have to use their marketing power and and get in there and there's a communication aspect to it where they tell the um clients like what security patches they've made or something like that every month i don't know like there's something that's involved with that um but if the client sees no value in it after a year they're not going to renew it for three thousand dollars or 8.99 you know they're they're gonna move on and that that the revenue from that stuff's gonna go away so interesting stuff i i wish it was announced differently because man there were some upset people yeah it was very well i mean it was very confusing too when you read the the press release from cd

pro like i read it and i'm like i don't even understand what's going on i'm supposed to i'm supposed to talk about this how am i going to talk about this it took me a full 24 hours so i was like going in i downloaded all the stuff i dug through it i started to try and understand it and i i've been dealing with control 4 since the 1 33-2 days, like over 10 years, right? Maybe 15. I don't know. It's been a while. I just, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they were announcing.

And then it took me reading all the stuff, talking to a bunch of dealers, talking to Jason Griffin before I really understood what the heck just happened here. And it's a big announcement. I just really wish for them, for their sake, that it had gone a little bit differently because I don't think it, it definitely didn't go the way they thought it was man boy there there's some i mean even even some of the the communications from like i saw an email from like rti and they have like big bold letters no reoccurring fees on it it's like oh man and everybody's like what's rti yeah exactly tumbleweeds over there giant remotes that cost

a lot more money than you think oh they're so they're nice remotes though i like them they're just i haven't seen the new ones but they aren't they are pretty big you can beat an intruder with them they're as big as this that's what i look for that's what i look for my remotes if i can beat an intruder with it that's the one i want in my house all right let's move on here uh let's talk about let's talk about some fun stuff uh this isn't too fun but ring ring i guess is walking back some things they're no longer going to allow local police to publicly request uh doorbell uh footage through their its neighbors app i guess uh instead police will need to obtain a warrant for most video requests uh however they still

have some carve outs for emergencies where some there's imminent danger or death there's something could happen with serious physical injury injury they'll still like kidnapping or attempted murder that kind of thing so they'll still be able to kind of like pass on surveillance video from that this is going to sunset their request for assistance tool that uh law enforcement agencies were using in all sorts of kind of ways just to look through whatever they wanted to at any point in time. I think it's a pretty good idea. They walked this back. It definitely didn't get them any good PR over the past couple of years. I'm kind of wondering why it took so long for them to do that at this point.

It's a smart move for sure. You know, seriously, like giving like a security or, you know, giving that kind of access to, you know, um, the police, it's a lot of access. I don't mind giving up videos to the police when needed, but I just want to know that they, uh, I just want them to ask me for it. Yeah. Just don't go in and take it. I don't mind it more than likely if they come to me and they say, Hey, we want to, do you have any footage from this event that happened last night in front of your house?

I'd be more than happy to hand it over, you know, unless I was involved in it, but, um, I hand it over and I'd say, there you go. You know, you asked for it, but if they're just going to go take it, well, you know, I don't know what else is in that footage that they took. I don't know what they're combing through. You know, I don't know if they're listening to my deals going on that i don't like right oh those cameras no those cameras haven't worked in forever yeah exactly they're just there for looks those are fake now honestly i think that's a good idea i mean in america i don't

think this is really even necessary anyway because they they can, they can just go and get them because that's how our court system works now after nine 11. And so I think this is mainly just for show anyway. So the, if you're in America, they're still going to get access to your footage because that is how the internet works. I want to say that they did have a thing where you could opt out of the

neighbor's thing for a while, but that is like the worst part of the ring experience in my opinion i don't even use so i have i have the ring app for my solar lights which i don't really use now i have the mqtt uh integration that works fine uh but i have the ring app still in case i need it and the the neighbors app i feel like is it's like next door yes but just through your ring app did you call the police yeah i saw some i drive by my house today they drove by twice who cares yeah i i know they have good intentions with it but it's just like i've never seen this car before okay cool i've never seen a lot of cars yeah that's the thing is it's good intentions but people you know like

they just take advantage of it or they just don't know how to use it or what to use it for you know it's like when people are calling 9-1-1 because their remote doesn't work you know like it don't laugh it's happened up here they're they're releasing like we have people calling calling police because they didn't get their barbecue sauce so they're checking exactly you know it's just yeah and was it ring under in hot water when they wanted to use the video footage for a tv show like did that ever come out that tv show oh i forgot about the ring tv show i mean i feel like that was a good idea because i mean they had america's funniest videos and stuff yeah but i think they were just taking people's footage and making the show out of it

too right like i don't think they uh were asking permission uh it's called ring nation i don't see it was from mgm oh yeah i don't know if it actually came out yeah i thought it was wanda sykes or something that was gonna host it or something like that too oh they're holy cow there is uh are they on youtube well according to google there's 118 episodes more than 118 videos out there i guess which does not surprise me. That's all the police footage that they've taken. So I opened my neighbor's app and here are the posts. Gunshots?

Kids throwing rocks from Legacy Trail. And then brown water. I don't know what that is about. I'm not going to read it. And then robbing in my neighbor car. I guess that means that somebody who had their neighbor's car was robbed but this person knocked on my door has anybody ever seen them before oh yeah weird visitor at night changed her mind once you realize she's being recorded it's right here yeah i opened up my next door app and the first post i see is can anyone fix this old radio tape cassette player oh there you go gavin get some helpful people up there

get just some get just some side money i'll drop off a pencil just tell them it's 4.99 a month it's a cassette player i got the gas for you that gavin has a service all right well interesting uh ring well we'll see probably the police are probably gonna get videos anyway good Ring. That's what everybody wanted. Here's a blast from the past. I ran across this story over at ours, and I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Open WRT. You know this is going. It's the open source firmware that originated from Linksys celebrating its 20th anniversary,

and that just makes me feel old. To ensure the project continues, developers are proposing the creation of a reference hardware design that would eliminate the need for binary blobs and modern routers. The proposed design, called the OpenWRT1, includes features such as low-level firmware, an onboard real-time clock, and a USB PD power.

The goal is to keep the price under $100 and make schematics and code publicly available. However, OpenWRT will not be producing or selling the boards, and it's looking for banana pie makers to distribute them, with proceeds going back to the Software Freedom Conservancy. This is all pretty interesting. I have my little travel router. I think it's a Beehive, or I don't remember. I have to go look it up um it actually has open wrt running under the hood and they put like a little nice little skin over the top of it but

other than other than not even recognizing that existed i had forgotten that open wrt exists anymore like it just it there it is it's right there they're doing stuff still these guys are still out there with their old links as routers i guess doing they're doing stuff still. These guys are still out there with their old Linksys routers, I guess, doing their thing. Yeah, this was awesome. I mean, growing up, we used to have a lot of old Linksys and Netgear routers and stuff like that that had terrible firmware on them or had features that you couldn't use or whatever it was. And you put this firmware on there and literally everything opened up. I mean, you could do whatever you wanted with it. I feel like this project is announced a decade too late, though, because now we have, like, OpenSense and PFSense

and whatever else is out there. I mean, I don't know. I think they're aiming for, what, $100 roughly? I think I read somewhere $100 isn't bad. There we go, under $100. So, I mean, that's not a bad price or anything um i just i don't know is there is there a market for this still are people still hacking their their routers and stuff like that i don't know and it's not hacking their routers i mean they don't they don't have them in there anymore but like if you have one of these

so here it is it is a gl.inet is what i have. If you go to... GillyNet? gl-inet.com, you'll see one of these little routers. And these little guys are running under the hood, WRT, the WRT software, the open WRT. So they're running it. I didn't even recognize that because the interface is actually nice and doesn't look horrible or open source. But I mean mean look at

these routers these these things are they top out at 129 and on the low end you're looking at a 19 90 cent router i mean yeah it's pretty cheap and it's refurbished but i mean 30 okay there you go yeah 30 for a you're not running your house off of this thing you know a travel router i feel like everybody had this router though this links this router You know, a travel router. No, no, no. This is just travel. That adds, yeah. You know, a one room. Yeah. That would add. I feel like everybody had this router, though. This Linksys router. Did everybody have one?

I had many of them. I just took one out a couple months ago, Gavin. Yeah. I had a, there was a business with one still working. Oh, my God. Wow. That's bad. Yeah.

They're indestructible. Like, that's a sign of a good router. Nobody makes them like that anymore. Honestly, what OpenWRT should just do is, I understand they just want to make the actual hardware for it, but they should come up with a Lynxies case just like this. And so that way it looks just like the same thing. A little smaller one. Yeah, you don't need a big one. Make it a smaller one. Partner with a company that can make the cases for them and people would

make it look like the old one and i don't need it yeah i would too that's a brilliant idea tj you're just full of ideas said that on the show and then gavin could have made the printable for it and then we could have just made the case and started selling gavin doesn't like printing projects so i like printing projects it's just no he doesn't gavin doesn't like printing projects so i like printing projects it's just no he doesn't like he doesn't like to design anything or whatever oh no i don't i don't at all no i hate it all yeah this router is awesome though like and i know like was it pf sense has made changes lately that upset a number of people so i think there's there's room for this like pf sense isn't the same though that's

it's a little more powerful they're they're software they're like a like a like an image like a software image like this open wrt is is uh i guess firmware firmware that runs on some hardware yeah you can have any hardware that's supported with, I think it's a Unix distribution. I can't remember, like you can have whatever hardware works with that unit. You could, you could run PFSense on a computer with just a bunch of network cards inside of it and say, Oh, this is a router. And that's what a lot of people do because you can get a really powerful router doing it that way. But this, this is good. This is a little bit different in the fact that like, they're just making a reference hardware. They're just saying, okay, this is what little bit different in the fact that they're just making a reference hardware.

They're just saying, okay, this is what we're going to make for our basic router. And you can make this or you can make it better. You can do what you're talking about. You can put it on one of those fancy giant Xeon-powered Intel machines and run OpenWt on that if you wanted to uh but they're saying that they they're going to go for this low price under $100 banana pie type thing to distribute uh product which i mean falls in line with what they've existed in since the 54 gl went away so there it is but yeah they they need definitely need to color them it needs to be like required that they're this color with a little gray back on it i need it make it a thing open to brt yeah i mean pf sense is is more software they did make some changes they kind of split their what what they build in-house in the open and what they build in-house they basically have been putting features

in it for like remote monitoring and that kind of thing that you need for an enterprise side of stuff. And they also have their own hardware that that particular software runs on very well. So, yeah, I think it's a little bit different in that case. But this seems pretty cool. I think this could have actually some pretty big effects for the project, especially if it started bringing in money, because they're saying that the proceeds from that kind of from the reference board designs and the reference routers, I guess,

is going to be put back into the that Freedom, Software Freedom Conservancy and Earmarked Open WRT, which will be helpful for hosting events and that kind of thing. So, yeah, good for them. I hope they make some money off this or it's open source projects.

It's like get some money to pay for their time because 20 years working on a project is absurdly long. Like it's amazing. Yeah, no kidding. Good for them. Good for them. That's going to wrap up our headlines, but all the topics we discussed tonight

can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 467. All right, I don't, we do have something in the mailbag this week. Uh, yeah, we have some follow-up from, uh, from, from Jimmy there in the hub and I, it's not really a message or anything, so I'm not really going to read it too much, but, um, he suggested to me, this is kind of going back to our vacuum discussion that, that, that TJ and I were having. Um,

he started chiming in and he's been reviewing and testing all of these vacuums on his various social channels. And I mostly watch him on TikTok. So he suggested we try the Dream L10 and L20 Ultra. So the L10S Ultra and the L20 Ultra. Again, if I don't put those little qualifiers on there, the L10 Ultra may be a completely completely different vacuum i don't know weird model numbers uh we kind of went back and forth and talked about everything his final answer to me

was get the dream is a dream bot the dreamy l10 s ultra yeah has an e on the end and um it's comparable to the robot roborock q arrivo. So that's the one I'm looking at. It's around $750. I think it was on sale quite a bit. It's like $200 off right now. I mean, that's a pretty good deal. Honestly, so the Dream software, as far as I know, uses the Xiaomi app. And the software is actually really good.

Some of these can be hacked with open source firmware. Open WRT. Almost. I have like the Z10 Pro, I think, something like that. And honestly, it works great. So I would get another DreamTek robot vacuum. $700 right now. Do it.

And this one, I wonder if this one could be hacked with open source firmware. Let's see. Because I know you're definitely going to do that. Do it. And this one, I wonder if this one could be hacked with open source firmware. Let's see. Because I know you're definitely going to do that. I am. If I could put it on a graph up here on my home assistant. Oh, you can do that without hacking it. So you're good.

Oh, awesome. Done. Oh, yeah. You can actually hack it. So this one is supported by Valitudo, which is a open WRT for your robot vacuum. So that's pretty cool. You can make it 100 100 local if you wanted to huh all right why it's not out here so well when you when you buy her one buy me one

hey do i get they got extra off for putting two in my cart no that's all right all right in the pick of the week uh another amazon pick and this one comes from uh from tj i do not know where you found this thing but it's oh this is great it's a davo link minions kevin wi-fi 6e router elevate your connectivity experience in 2023 with high speed performance gaming router dash secure travel wi-fi router and i i i said minions kevin that's right this is a router that looks like a router but no it doesn't look like a router it looks like a minion and there's two. This is a router that looks like a router, but no, it doesn't look like a router. It looks like a minion. And there's two versions. One is a Kevin, which is the tall, skinny minion. Like this is the minion, the blue and yellow minions off of, you know, Despicable Me. And yeah, TJ, you picked one of these up. You picked up the Bob, it looks like,

which is the $68, $69 router. It's a little squatty one. I don't think that one has 6E, does it? No, this one is Wi-Fi 6. And honestly, it's pretty good. I obviously didn't really use it for much because I have a really nice ubiquity system, but I hooked it up. I sat on the couch and I was getting 300 megabits per second

symmetrical off of it with my iPhone. Look at Bob. So, I mean, that's pretty good. I don't know why we haven't seen more of these, honestly. Just in general, branded Wi-Fi routers. so i mean that's pretty good i don't know why we haven't seen more of these honestly like just in general like branded wi-fi routers uh what i can think of is the little funko collectibles you know the little uh action figure things that people buy in the boxes they should just come up with wi-fi routers based off of funko's now and so you just have like a batman wi-fi router and you know superwoman and whatever

other ones they have um but this thing is great i mean 70 for the wi-fi 6 version 130 for the wi-fi 6e version uh i think the best thing is after the actual design obviously is that the the website that you actually access all the settings from is also minion uh no way oh so it's got little minions on it and like little things it's great i did i did enjoy and point out and we talked about this before the show that they included ethernet cable that's yellow and blue in the box yeah that's a good touch and nice touch yeah honestly the only reason i bought this minus the fact that i i liked it as soon as i it, is I just assumed it was like a fake product, right? Like you see those face,

like the Facebook and eBay products and stuff that pop up and they're just completely fake. And then you order them and you never get them. I just assumed that was going to happen with this and it showed up. So I don't like, I don't, I feel like I should keep it just in case like it disappears

and this company gets like sued into oblivion or something. But no, it's licensed. I'm probably probably gonna return it illumination license it's got a i thought it was funny that you can mesh them together so if you can create a whole mesh network you need a bunch of minions to make the mesh network yeah it was funny the comments i kept seeing was like i couldn't plug these in near my kids because they would unplug them and run away with them oh absolutely yeah did you do any performance tests yet or you know i just got i did a speed test i I couldn't plug these in near my kids because they would unplug them and run away with them. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Did you do any performance tests yet? I did a speed test. I was doing 300 megabits per second.

I mean, that's pretty good. Did they do VLANs? Which is what my package is. It does not do VLANs. It's funny. I actually posted this on Reddit, and a lot of people kept asking me, like, oh, does it do VLANs? It doesn't do all these advanced settings. I'm like, guys, that's a $70 router. It's shaped like minions.

It does not do anything. Maybe we could run OpenWRT on it. Maybe. Well, and so that's what I was thinking. OpenWRT needs to come out with some 3D printing cases like this. So it's always with the packaging for you. Yeah.

What's the, I'm looking at the back of Bob and Kevin right now. What's the LED switch turn on and off? Because now I'm curious as to what LED lights are on the front. So, honestly, that is kind of the most disappointing thing, right? Because you're kind of hoping that the lights, that the eyes light up. The eyes, yes. Or something.

But it's like, if you look very closely at the chest, there's a symbol. And I'm not too familiar with Minions, so I'm sure somebody's listened to this. They're like, oh, that's the... The Groose symbol, yeah. Yeah, I don't know I'm not too familiar with minions. So I'm sure somebody is like, listen to this. And I'm like, Oh, that's the, the grew symbol. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what that is,

but that lights up. That's the only thing. So like if you, if you had this, you know, in the, in the bedroom or something, you know,

as, as you would want to do, you could turn that off. I was really hoping it would be the lights or the eyes. Cause it would be awesome. If one flash for like incoming and one flash or outgoing, you know, like back and on.

Oh, man. You're so creepy. See, that's the kind of thing that WRT would do. Yeah. We need it. Amazing. Oh, this person posted a picture of their QR code. I'm going to.

Yeah, so that was kind of cool, too. It comes with a little QR code. That's how you log into the website and stuff. So yeah, it's pretty convenient. Well, it got great reviews. 81%, 4.7 out of 5 on Amazon. And it sounds like you love it. Yeah, I don't know how you couldn't like it. I mean, it's just one of those things that it does exactly what it's supposed to do, and it looks like a minion.

I mean, if you bought it because it looks like a minion and it functions, I feel like you should like it. Kevin, I think you need to replace your ubiquity system with Kevin. I'd need them all around the house, you know? A couple Kevins, a couple Bobs. Yeah, get rid of that ubiqu couple of Bob's. Yeah. Get rid of that ubiquity system. Hang these from the ceiling. Could you imagine walking into somebody's house and they just have this like sitting on the ceiling.

You'd be like, uh, okay. And we're laughing now, but like two weeks on Reddit, I don't, somebody will post that. Like,

I dare you to recommend it to one of your clients and do an install. Oh, a hundred percent going to, Oh, if anybody does, uh, does this if anybody does this, please reach out to us. Please, please let us know. It's amazing. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of minions, routers, and that kind of thing, send them on over. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm.

You can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. I got nothing. I've been doing data migration still, other than like working on a car a little bit this weekend to try and get a starter that doesn't work to work. I got nothing. So, and buying O'Henry's. So as I eat my chocolate O'Henry's, Gavin, what have you been up to? I'm glad you're enjoying your old Henry's as you break one open right now. I saw an announcement this week for something called Zigbee Home. The Zigbee Home project was announced. And this you can think of as equivalent to ESP Home. But for Zigbee, first of all, it's very early in the project.

So don't expect much from it at this point, but it's something to keep an eye on. I think a number of people are actually excited about this. Cause when I, what do you call it? Tooted it on Mastodon, it got retooted and liked. And you know, like one of my most favorite posts, I didn't realize, you know, so many Zigbee lovers are out there, but. Zigbee is huge on

that yeah it got it's getting tooted all over the place so um one thing i like about this is it's basically like a project that will let you uh create your own zigbee devices in a way it works with a limited number of boards right now but it's gonna expand just keep an eye on it the one thing i like about it is one of the downfalls of ESP home is, you know, when it comes to battery powered devices, right? Like the wifi ESP home, it drains a lot of battery, right? So, you know, if you wanted something battery powered, it's not going to happen. But with the Zigbee stuff now, it may open up that whole, you know, battery side of things. You can make a battery powered device to do whatever you want. Your own soil sensor, for example, that lays flat so you can run over it with the lawnmower

and not worry about stepping on it and stuff like that. Maybe that may become a reality, a do-it-yourself version. So just something I saw on the interwebs, sharing with the world. I'm on number two. That's delicious. Yeah, you got your mouth. You got your mouth full of old Henry's right now. There's like a little squirrel over there.

You continue with your old Henry binge right now, and I'll go into the next thing I actually saw out there too. When I was installing my RAT GDO this week, one of the things you got to worry about is you need a power outlet right by the garage door opener, like a free one, actually, right? So I actually saw somebody mention that, like, a lot of new openers actually have a battery backup built in. So somebody mentioned, you know, and I've never, you know,

after one of our listeners wrote in and talked about buck converters, they've just been showing up all over the place for me. You know? The buck converter, Alexa listens to you. about buck converters. They've just been showing up all over the place for me. The buck converter, Alexa listened to you. Exactly. She's like, oh, get these buck converters in this front of this guy. So I saw this buck converter that will allow you to connect your RAT GDO to your battery. So it's battery powered as well. And it's also powered when you do have power, right?

So you don't have to fight to get that extra outlet right by your garage opener. powered as well. And it's also powered when it's plugged, uh, when you do have power, right? So, you know, you don't have to fight to get that extra outlet right by your, uh, garage opener. So I thought that was kind of cool. Cause I saw some people actually complaining to the lack of a power outlet by there. So if you do have a newer garage opener with a battery,

check out the, a buck converter, kind of cool idea. It's interesting. You know, like it makes sense. Like the battery's there for, yeah, to that makes sense. tap right into it it it's not going to drain the battery very little energy anyway i mean when the when you have power the battery's hooked up to power

anyway so it's pretty much drawing from the main power anyway right so no really cool you know keeps things a little cleaner too less wires run so and then on top of that so i did install my rat gdos i'm still holding out judgment right now you know the honeymoon was quick i tell you the honeymoon was quick uh the first day you know i got installed everything was working great i was like awesome you know and then i went out there and tried to open and close the garage and it stopped working and i was like what it was getting um it was getting signals that i knew the garage was open and closed but it just wouldn't open or close the garage so i don't know what happened i ended up disconnecting everything checking all the wires i actually replaced the flimsy wire that

comes with it with something a little more solid i cleaned up the wiring a bit put it all back together and it was working. So I'm like, all right, cool. Maybe I did something. Well, then on the weekend, same thing happened again. So I'm kind of like, it's like it's getting the signal and everything, but then it just stops responding. Like I can't control the door.

Don't know why. It's been solid since, but I'm keeping an eye on it. I'm going to reserve judgment on this for a little bit longer because. Not a recommendation yet. Not a recommendation yet. I mean. Sounds like it's just as reliable as my Q was. It's almost like I feel lucky if it works right now.

You know, like I randomly sometimes just go out there and, you know, hit the button, you know, just to see if it open and closes. Right. But if you have an older garage, like one of my garage door openers, I have a newer one and I have an older one and the older one, it actually wouldn't read any of the signals off of it. Right. And I found out it, it has to, um, basically I needed a new keypad for it. Right. And the keypad would actually, you know, from what I understand, would send out a request. They had an update or something like that.

Didn't they? They had like a, there was a security 2.0 plus and a security 1.0 plus. And they just updated for 1.0 plus. I just saw that hit the other day. I haven't seen that, but I, from my understanding, and if they fixed it damn it

why didn't you fix it before i ordered a new keypad but you gotta spend money first i gotta keep adding in outworks properly it gets all the you know status and everything you know um and if you have two keypads you can only use one keypad at a time just a heads up because it draws too much power it can't power them all so again i'm still reserving judgment on this rat gdo right now you know it's way more complex than a security 2.0 button in a relay yeah pretty much my my zoo's relay was it was solid it worked um i just thought i'd get i like the fact that this know, used less devices to get like the status of the door. You can hook them both up. Right.

You can, but you know, I'm the guy I want one or the other. And I kind of liked this one because it was more compact. It gave you the status of the door without meaning a tilt sensor, you know, less, you know, customization and stuff like that. But yeah, if, if this isn't as as reliable i think i'm going back to my old ways you know and just using the zoos relay and the tilt sensor because that's been working great for me too but you use whatever works for you i just like to torture myself sometimes yeah i don't know they're they're it's not like the esp chips are super solid, reliable. It's open source firmware. They could be bugs and stuff they're working on.

Yeah, exactly. And it was minus like 17 in my garage. So I was like, do these things work in these cold temperatures? Sometimes I wonder about that. Version 2.5 adds support for security plus 1.0 openers as well as standard dry contact openers. Yeah, I have that. I know I installed that firmware. I don't think there were any bug updates to it since though i kept an eye on it oh maybe this is what you're talking

about security plus 1.0 requires an 88 lm yes or some kind of wall control panel if you don't have that you have an emulate emulation mode but it will interfere with your wall controls function yeah and the 888 lm panel actually i couldn't find that anywhere but there's an 889 lm which 889 sorry places or yeah there's a newer one that replaces that and works so i got that one and it works but i'm still referring you know i'm still holding back on my judgment um i'll give it a few more weeks and report back in right well hopefully they work out whatever bugs yeah all right well uh is that is that it you got you said you're prepping for your new your your drive array oh my drive array finally arrived um so i got a four bay net store you know

one u rackmail drive array um for my unraid server um that came in like last week. So I've been doing a whole bunch of data migration to free up this, because I'm trying to consolidate all my discs in my, um, unrate server down to like the four, just for this. And actually that was not that hard. I just deleted a whole bunch of the wife stuff and she'll never notice. And when she does,

it will be, you know, a lot of time, but yeah, it'll be like, oh man, drive, drive,

drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive,

drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, know, a long time, but yeah, it'll be like, oh man, drive crash. The hard drive went bad, honey.

Sorry. You didn't back it up? What? You know, so no, but, um, it's, it's, it's looks nice. It fits in one U and it's a SAS. My SAS card actually just came in today. So I haven't hooked it up yet because everybody's been, you know, watching my MB, watching movies and stuff off of it. So I can't power it down without somebody complaining.

So kind of wait to find some time, put in my change tickets and do what I have to do to do that. But, um, it's really cool. Um, just if you ever have, like, if you're thinking of setting up an unread server,

just go with big discs from right off the bat. I said, discs right off the bat. Right. It's not what I heard. Yeah. Yeah. The, the go and go with big disks from right off the back i said disks right off the bat right it's not what i heard but yeah the the go and go with the like the old school the spinny disk the two and a half inch drives not the ssd smaller well just go with like eight terabytes go go you know try to reduce the number of disks you have um just because you know like it's easier to have like three eight terabytes and then you got like 16 terabytes plus a parity drive, you know, or if you're going to set it up, at least make your parity drive, like get a big one just for your parity drive and future proof yourself because then you can upgrade the other ones to bigger ones. Because your parity drive always has to be the biggest drive equal to the biggest drive in the whole array, right?

So you might as well just get the 8 terabyte for your parity drive, even if you're just putting in 3, 4, just to prepare yourself for the day you might want to upgrade the other drives. Because if you put all 4s and you want to upgrade to like 8, you're going to have to replace the parity drive with an 8 parity first, and then you're going to have to replace each one. Lots of work, lots of data transferring and yeah but i'm almost there next week i'll have more of an update on that one hopefully i i have one i have one the one of the synologies i have throw every now and then it'll

say the drive seven had a problem and i'll go look at it and drive seven's fine and smart every now and then it comes up drive seven, Drive 7 is having a problem. Smart stuff, right? Yeah, I think it's time for Drive 7 to go away is what I'm thinking. I'm not even going to – I don't even use that much of this stuff, but my risk is – It also depends on what the error is because sometimes the error comes down to a bad cable. I think it's like some bad clusters or something that it couldn't read

on a whole drive. I mean, it's like a 4 clusters or something that it, it couldn't read on, on a whole drive. I mean, it's like a four terabyte drive or six. It's just easier to sort of place the drive in, you know, like, yeah, yeah.

I'm not going to look for bad cable. It's not a bad cable and that it's directly wired to the board, but yeah, I'm not going to troubleshoot it. It's just like the, the data, the data drives are so cheap these days. Exactly.

I'm not going to worry about it. I'll have to, I have to do that, that project. And I, Oh, I guess I did buy some UPS devices for real cheap. Oh, yeah. I got some. Oh, yeah.

You bought like a dozen of them or something. No, I didn't buy a dozen. You power up the neighborhood with that. My car has a weight limit. I cannot. I got some old AP, not old. There's some APC, like the commercial UPSs. One of them's kind of beat up and banged up and they're missing like the front covers,

but I did turn them on and then they are of indecent working order. So they turn on and they're not like the consumer versions that I have, like the cyber powers that are around here. They're actually like real UPSs I think I just it's a 1500 they're 1500s I think they can run for a decent amount of time and and they have like the network interface and everything on them so I'll probably go around and I I've been meaning to do this anyways go around and like work on my power because right now I have one UPS that's completely down in the other room because of old batteries. And then I've got these here,

but I need to kind of like distribute things a little bit better where my Synologies and that kind of thing can stay on and gracefully shut down without causing a bunch of mess if those things get powered on and off. So I guess that'll be a project one of these days when I get back to it. Meanwhile, I have like 1,500 pounds worth of, I don't know, those things get powered on and off. So I guess that'll be a project one of these days when I get back to it. Meanwhile, I have like 1,500 pounds worth of, I don't know, there's three of them and they're very heavy. They're probably in the 80 pound range.

Are those ones with four batteries or you have more? I don't know. I haven't taken out the cartridge yet. They probably have four in them. They're very heavy. They're so expensive. You're going to have to spend like $100 on batteries. Yeah. in them they're very heavy they are so they're so expensive you're gonna have to spend like a hundred dollars on batteries yeah the i think i i looked it up these were like 1500 ups in their day and i

found them for like 30 bucks so oh yeah it was it was a no-brainer uh and if considering i was like well i'll just buy like four of them or whatever and i got there and i'm like these are really heavy i'm just gonna get three because i don't think I'm going to make it back in this piece of junk car that I have. So I'll just buy three. Thanks, guy. Yeah, that's how I've gotten all my UPSs. It's been like old ones from clients where like the batteries go bad or whatever, and it just makes more sense to buy a new one. So that way you get a nice warranty on it and everything.

And you take the old one, you throw $100 in batteries into it, and you've got a great UPS. I think that's how most of mine came in as well. But I've swapped the batteries over the years. and you take the old one, you throw $100 in batteries into it, and you got a great UPS. I think that's how most of mine came in as well. But I've swapped the batteries over the years on the CyberPowers, but they're the thin batteries. Oh, yeah. And I don't think they work as well as the big, bigger ones. I try to only buy the ones that do the 12-volt 7-amp batteries. Yeah.

Because then you can buy those anywhere. They're a pretty universal battery. Those are fine the ones that like the proprietary batteries from cyber power or apc and that kind of stuff i try to avoid those but if you're going with the smaller one it's hard to well they're only proprietary up to a point well yeah you know what i mean though they just like they come as like a package so you just like order the whole new package they come as a package but if you take a knife and cut open the package then there's just batteries inside of there yeah but yeah these these look dangerous they have like big giant yellow clips on them and everything so yeah anyway tj what have you been up to oh man i got all kinds of projects so i started my transition and i guess i finished it i don't know know from, uh, Zigbee, uh, the,

whatever the native Zigbee integration and home assistant ZHA to Zigbee, Zigbee to MQTT. Um, I honestly don't really know why I did this other than getting my sprinkler, my Zigbee sprinkler things into home assistant. it works fine um i haven't had any issues and you know it does it does kind of give you more controls over things i'm sure gavin can better explain why you would want to do this but like i said literally it just so it gives you more controls over things yeah there's well there's like more integrations to like more supportive devices too right so like the the host sprinkler things i have are a good example where the the host sprinklers are

they're like 40 or 50 on amazon they come with their own proprietary hub that you have to use like the the smart life app or whatever it is um but there's not like a a native way to get it into, quote unquote, native way to get it into Home Assistant. And so Zigbee MQTT basically just kind of is like a universal Zigbee. So anything Zigbee, it can be found through that. It's an independent project in a way. And this is sometimes I prefer independent projects to integrated projects because the independent project gets more love. Right. Because it's used in more systems than just home assistant.

Right. So I found Zigbee to MQTT has so many and practically everything works with it. Right. And they even added a feature recently where even if it doesn't have a built inin support it will scan the device and you know add the basic support based on what it can tell you know so any device will pretty much work for it and that that's a cool feature uh so you know it's best to do it from now or if you're setting up a new system zigbee to mqtt yeah i only had like 15 i only have like 15 or 20 zigbee devices i think i literally just i just reset

everything i didn't really have much going on um there was a way to like back up and restore and i i tried that but it i didn't really have luck so i just reset everything up it wasn't that big a deal um but yeah i mean it works fine and you know i'm looking forward to adding some more stuff um with that so nice that was a fun little project. Um, the next project. So, um, previous shows, we've talked about buying, uh, Govee space heaters and all the fun stuff that Govee has. Um, you can't easily integrate Govee space heaters and the other supplies like the air purifier and the fan and stuff into home assistant. Um, there are ways to do it. If you've heard me talk before, you know that I'm not going to get dirty in code, and that's what that requires. So I can't control

the Govee Space Heater from Home Assistant, but that's not that big a deal because I don't use it all the time. And if I do, I just set up on a schedule or I tell Google to turn it on. But I wanted a way to automate turning off the space heater when I left. And so, you know, in case, you know, I run out of the house, I got to go to Menards or something and pick up some supplies. I have the space heater on, I want a way to turn it off. And I can't use bond for it, because it didn't come with a remote. So and bond doesn't have built in commands or anything like that. And so I didn't really have a good way to do it other than a smart outlet. And so I wanted to get a smart outlet. And luckily, we have a friend named Adam Justice, who makes or made, I don't think he makes it anymore, a 20 amp outlet that you can individually control both outlets.

And so it integrates with HomeKit. So you can integrate it with HomeKit and then bring it out of Home Assistant that way. And now I have a way to at least manually turn off the Space Heater whenever I leave. So that's kind of nice. And 20 amp is very rare for a built-in smart outlet. So I don't personally know of any other ones.

I know that there's external ones. But an actual built-in outlet, I don't know of any other ones i know that there's like external ones but an actual built-in outlet i don't know of any that's that's the one i always think of when for the 20 amp outlets yeah works works great he sent me two you know we we did a little a little tradesy so i got two of those and i'll put this other one somewhere at some point um with the zigbee to mqtt migration i've started noticing that my lights in the kitchen have started to kind of fail, which is obviously not good after only being here for seven months. Um, and so like one of them, uh, shortly, I think it was like three months after installation

or something. It just like stopped working altogether. So I swapped it out. Um, now I have one that's like like they're manually selectable white colored uh you can change you know the the color temperature um i have one that's just like randomly reverting back to like 2700k that's weird instead of like 4000k that it's set to or whatever it is um and then it'll like randomly convert back and do that and then i have another one that's just like randomly turning off they're all like i have three of then I have another one that's just like randomly turning off. They're

all like, I have three of them wired together and one of them just like randomly turning off. And so after dealing with these problems, I'm like, you know, I just, I need to get better ones. And so now I'm looking at getting, uh, installing smaller cam lights. And so we're going to do six inch cam lights. Um, I wanted to be able to control the white color temperature of the lights. And the cheapest option for that, surprisingly enough, is Philips Hue recessed lights. They're about $50 a pop. If you buy a four pack, they're like $200. But you can choose the color you want for them and you can choose the white color for them. Have you looked at the Wiz line? Well, I thought I have. It's the same company. Yeah, I was well i thought i haven't the same company yeah it doesn't

say isn't it the same company same company but it's a wi-fi product not a zigbee product yeah i want zigbee okay then philips you because then because then i can use it with my inner valley switches and they have a smart bulb mode or smart ball mode and they'll just talk directly to it so that was kind of the thought process i'm in the process of laying them out i kind of have to work around the giant holes that are in the ceiling already. And so it might not be the most optimal layout, but it's going to be a lot better than what it is. So I'm excited for them. And then this past weekend, we've been talking about robot vacuums and mops and all that kind of stuff. I was on Facebook marketplace in a, what is it? Eco-vax D-Bot Omni X2 popped popped up and this is like a 1500 robot vacuum it was on

facebook for a hundred dollars a hundred bucks hold on i was like i was like no way this is gonna be a scam i'm gonna get shot or something um looking at the pictures i could tell that it wasn't the the x2 it's got a completely different shape than the actual robot vacuum but i was looking it up and i was like well you know a hundred dollars is still a really good deal the X2. It's got a completely different shape than the actual robot vacuum, but I was looking it up and I was like, well, you know, a hundred dollars is still a really good deal. And so I went and picked it up. Um, it was kind of gross. You could tell they didn't really clean it that often. Um, so I gave it a good scrubbing. I replaced all the brushes on it. Um, the vacuum itself, everything works. It was a hundred dollars. And then I spent $60 on a new like main brush and

bags and, and side bristles and whatever else. Um, and it works fine. I mean, we haven't had any problems with it. Um, I kind of find it creepy though. It's got like a built in camera on it that you can use the app to like look in while you're gone. And I don't know, guys, that, that kind of makes me feel weird. I don't, you know, all the interior cameras we have, they turn off with off with like smart outlets and i thought about doing this but obviously the vacuum has a battery built

into it so you can't just like turn it off so i think i'm gonna end up selling it you can't put you can't in this one you you don't think you can put the like a sticker over i'm gonna i'm gonna have to look at that i'm gonna have to look at that because i i don't think so i feel like it probably uses the camera for actual navigation but maybe it doesn't maybe doesn't maybe it does and it doesn't matter maybe just try that i probably will but yeah but you know for 160 pretty nice i figured if i don't like it i'll end up selling it for like 400 or something so i'll make some money on it nice um but it works fine i like the interface for the the dream tech the because it uses the xiaomi app i like the interface much better um and you can't easily bring ecovacs into home assistant either

um xiaomi you you can and so that that kind of stinks as well so it's good you know it was a hundred dollars it's a fifteen hundred dollar vacuum originally guys i can't imagine paying that much i wonder why they got rid of it, did you ask? You know, I didn't, Seth. I have a good idea, but I'm not going to get into that. Is it the camera? Well, it might be. Oh, so I forgot to mention, actually. So this is

kind of creepy, and this is my first reason for wanting to get rid of it. So I actually set it up. I've never had an Ecovacs account, so i create an account um and i get it added i add the robot vacuum and i go to map management and guys i can see the map layout for the old house oh boy that should not on the board yeah that should not be possible if i'm going to set up a robot vacuum with a brand new account like i feel like there should be some kind of check that's like hey this is a different account

maybe we shouldn't have this access information accessible maybe not so like that was kind of the weird thing for me and especially paired with the camera i'm like i don't know do i trust this company to look around my house and when i sell my tech that's why i make it a rule i do factory resets and stuff like that to get rid of, you know, anything that may be stored. That should be a standard. I thought I did, too, when I picked it up because I had to press a button or something to, like, add it to the system. So I just thought that that was part of it. But it obviously was not.

So that was a little creepy. That's all the projects right now. Still working on the closet in the bedroom. Hoping to get that done. Working on crown molding ideas. So all kinds of lighting projects going on. Yeah, it sounds fun. It sounds fun.

You guys are really busier than I am. So hopefully I can get past this data migration stuff at work. It's not fun. Oh, man, that sounds awful. I've been living in a spreadsheet. Actually, I had to give training today. So I had spreadsheet training, make a presentation, and then hope it worked in the demo. And then back to spreadsheet this afternoon.

Not fun. No. Especially when I don't want to use a spreadsheet. I want to use like a program to program what I have to do in the spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet data is not right. So I have to go fix it. Just tell Chad to do it. I would, but Chad lies a lot, and I can't have him

lie on things like inventory. Chad seems to daydream a little bit. Anyway, 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 Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather in there and look at TJ's minions. Look at his little minion router.

There was some decent conversation. You could have totally seen the recommendations on the robot. And as a bonus feature, last week we posted some home tech after dark. And maybe you want to know what Gavin's printing on a 3D printer. Maybe you don't want to know what Gavin's printing on a 3D printer. But we put it there, and everybody in there now knows. So you don't know, but anybody in the hub knows.

It was quite funny. Anyway, if you want to help the show but can't support financially, totally understand, we just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up the news here on Home Tech this week. Everybody have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Take care. Till next time. so did you did you print those things on on your printer and are they installed on his car

yeah he hasn't noticed yet his sister knows his dad knows i don't know if they told the mom but he doesn't know it was so easy too because he was already missing i don't even need to take an old one off and keep it somewhere i just put this one on and it's black it blends in you know when he goes to like get his tires fixed or whatever they'll be like oh that would be even funnier if he takes it to a mechanic and they're like uh yes sir and we put your custom uh custom valve caps back on for you