HomeTech.fm - Episode 469 - Don't Fat Shame the Pro

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

On this week's show, it turns out Comcast isnt selling 10G internet and is told to stop advertising that it is, Ring has a new battery doorbell, Disney+ starts cracking down on password sharing, sports networks are launching a mega-sports networks with all the sports, and Google kills Google Assistant on Samsung TVs. All this news, project discussion, a pick of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for maybe Friday, February 9th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home animation, home technology, and your vision pros. You guys got your vision pros? Two of them.

Oh yeah, two of them. One for each eye. I'm talking to you guys through it right them. Oh, yeah. Two of them. One for each eye. I'm talking to you guys through it right now. Oh, I couldn't even tell. Your avatar looks amazing. I'm not. I'm not for anybody that's not watching. How do my eyes look?

You know, I really want one, but it's one of those products that like I know if I bought it, I would be mad in like a year or two when they release a new one because it'd be so outdated so quickly. And plus, I don't have $3,500 to drop on it. That's the real reason. It's the real reason, yeah. But I mean, it sounds really cool.

I just know if I bought it, my wife would be mad because I'd be sitting next to her and not talking or enjoying what... I'd be laughing at her. Or saying, oh, this is really cool.

And she's just sitting there staring at you with evil eyes. Honey, have you seen this? Oh, I'm sorry. I've met her before. She might actually enjoy that. She might think that's a good investment. Oh, he's in his little world again.

Just leave him. Finally, you can stop touching all our TVs. I talked to a friend of mine who got one and he said that the mock-ups and everything we have are fairly, you expect to walk into this completely immersive thing and it's not like you're actually using binoculars to watch tv is kind of the way he equated to it because he doesn't have like a peripheral view it's kind of like just like you still see the edges right so you're still looking through this you're still looking through goggles essentially at the world um and that's kind of just that was distracting enough for him uh but he did say one of the things he said it was really nice was watching tv i was like because he actually has a nice theater like he spent a decent amount of money setting up his own theater and it's it's got good equipment in it and uh

you know he's he's got a good eye for things he's a designer so he he can see colors and stuff that i can't and um he did say that like watching it on, it was like really incredible. Like for the price for, you know, he, he could, he could say like that he spent like $60,000 on a theater. And for like $3,000, you're getting virtually the same experience outside the audio. Of course you're not getting the same audio experience that he's getting with that. But like for the video, like that's,

that sounds like it's a pretty good hit on the nail on the head. And everything, all the reviews and everything, I've heard that watching movies, the media experience is actually really good on it. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I've never used it or anything, but I feel like that would probably be a fair assessment if I did have one. And nowadays, it's crazy that a lot of people are just watching TV on their phones. Phones, yeah. And use it like the phone speakers. it's crazy that a lot of people are just watching TV on like their phones and use it like the phone speakers. And so,

you know, if you pair this up with a pair of AirPods, like it's going to be better than what a lot of people are used to anyway. Um, and so I, I can definitely see that as the use case. I don't know about buying it just for that reason. I feel like I would have to be productive in some capacity with it,

but it is cool to hear that, that, that is a good point of it i just wonder how long it's going to take before you just get used to seeing it in public like it just becomes the norm i remember when airpods came out it took a while you know like a few months before it just you were just used to it right like are people walking around with them like is it more than just like a youtube joke that i i mean i i figured it was just like why would you walk out of the house with it i won't be surprised if eventually people just start walking around with it on and you know

like they have extended battery packs or something like that i don't know but yeah it's probably gonna be the norm we've definitely seen people driving with them and apple issuing statements that you should not do that so the ntsb issue statement saying you should not drive which you know i think one video i saw was like somebody driving like a cyber a tesla cyber truck while wearing apple vision pro and like doing the driverless thing and i was like yep this is how you die i mean should not be doing that right now i don't know i i'm it like a very, very much like a first gen product. What my friend did say is like out of the gate, the interface,

the interactions, he said, they nailed that a hundred percent. Like it's amazing. Just extremely impressive for a first gen product. And that's, that's good. That's going to help adoption with whatever they're trying to get there.

And he also said that if, if they were to put this like in a glasses like into glasses form it's like instantly buy no matter what it for price it was like it this it's an amazing piece it's just kind of distracting not to be fully fully immersed like they were talking about so maybe one day maybe one day we'll have that cool technology if you would like to buy us a vision pro you can go to hometech.fm and become a member of Patreon. Yeah, at any level. There's $1 and $5 levels.

But honestly, underneath that, there's a make a custom pledge where you can choose your own price. Just drop $3,500 in there. We will share it. I will ship it to Canada. And we can all just participate. I think we have to have one of each. And Canada doesn't get one yet. I mean, Canada, you can't have one yet, participate. I think we have to have one of each. Canada doesn't get one yet. I mean, Canada, you can't have one yet, Gavin.

I'm sorry. It's only for sale here. You see, look at the thing here. TJ already said he would ship me one, and you're saying, no, you can't have one. Who loves me more on this show? I now know. I don't want to get in trouble with Canadian authorities

about sending you a Mounties. Yeah, Mounties. They'll come back and get me. I don't want to get in trouble with Canadian authorities about sending you a... Mounties. Yeah, Mounties. They'll come back and get me. I didn't think about getting maple syrup on it, though. So maybe we shouldn't send it to you. Listen, you can't. You're already too late.

So if you want to join our Patreon at the $5,000 level... So for only $10,500, you can buy all three of us a Vision Pro without upgrades. You know, we're not going to be stingy about it. If you don't want to give us money for the upgrades that's fine i'll buy whatever band not picky about the color either do they come in multiple colors no no i don't think they come in color i think it's just one oh yeah yeah so pick any color you want we'll take it it doesn't matter just like the first gen uh ipod or the first gen ipad and the first gen iPad and the first gen iPhone. Yeah.

Get it in the same color. Interesting looking product. Maybe they'll be able to iterate on it and move it forward in the future. It sounds kind of cool. Very limited base though. Yeah. The reason I say that is because I was listening to somebody in Canada. He was actually able to buy it like on the Apple store.

Bought it first thing. Did delivery pickup in the States. And then when he got back into canada he cranked it up and started watching something and it came up said not available like you can't can't get to the app store anything to download your apps you can't sign in with your apple id just kind of like locked him out um i guess he could watch his apple tv content and that kind of thing but no apps not no no fun can he filter it through a VPN to get what he wants? Like us Canadians are used to doing that. It's your ID has that address, man.

So that sucks. I think I saw somebody, somebody on like the Apple subreddit or Vision Pro subreddit, something like that, that has never owned an Apple device. And they bought the Vision Pro as their first apple device and i think like a good quarter of the content was locked because they they couldn't they don't have an iphone like set it up with them stuff like that so how do you yeah that's a little strange as your first apple product but i mean some people are really happy about it so yeah good for them well i'm sure apple's gonna lose a ton of money Like they always do on it. So yeah. Have you guys seen the,

what's that new social network thing? A blue, blue bird, blue sky. Blue sky. Yeah. New. That's been around for a while,

hasn't it? Well, it has been, but it's in beta. It was invite only for a while. It's out of invite now. It's out of invite now. So I went and signed up just to get my name and I looked at it and it was

kind of just like Mastodon where all of the people who've been there were like, maybe we can turn our invites into disinvites now. And like, just like, you know, talking about like all the new people. Were they bashing X on there too? Like every post is. No, just any, all the new people, they were just bashing new people. And I'm like, all right, well, this, this is going to take some time for this to blow over.

But it looks like an interesting little concept of a social network still relies on kind of one company. They say it's decentralized, but it's not, it still relies on the one company to exist and be there to moderate, kind of do stuff with. So I don't know, keep an eye on it,

see if it kind of increases in traffic. But if, if you find me over there, I think I'm like, I think it's like Seth Johnson, that whatever the blue sky default domain was. And then, yeah, if you find me on there, you can follow me, but I won't be posting. I'll just be a rough ass. I think it's like Seth Johnson that whatever the blue sky default domain was. And then, um,

yeah, if you find me on there, you can follow me, but I won't be posting it. I'll just be around Mastodon. So I find these social networks. It all comes down to the client to me. So like on Mastodon,

I really like it because I'm using the ivory client. Yeah. Right. Um, on X, I hate the client. You know, the only reason I liked it was because of the the old um

not tweet it was a tweet but yeah that's the only reason i liked it but the new one is just garbage i can't keep up to date with things every now and then i scroll i don't go on it often and if blue sky it's the same way i probably just wouldn't use it yeah it it's very much the same way what would it would i think they have figured out how to do a little bit better than mastodon was the discovery thing where you can kind of like follow lists or i think they have what they're called they kind of like went with the ai angle of things they have like a algorithm that you can follow and it'll introduce you to new content but if you're a developer you can make your own algorithm that gives you whatever content that developer wants you to see i don't know i think it's a it's a clever idea um but still kind of lipstick on the same pig but we'll see what

happens to it there's still a lot of uh of weird stuff happening over there that doesn't happen on mastodon mastodon i definitely have seen some really good content and conversations happening so i'm happy with that i'm probably going to stick over there and not deal with this other thing. I just signed up because I didn't realize I was out of the invite. It looks like threads from the interface to me. It's like an initial reaction. It looks like

Twitter did. I mean, or does I guess. It doesn't really look very much different. It's so sad because I'm signing up and it's asking for my birth date and it starts at 2004 still scrolling up still scrolling you can just type it gavin let that logitech wheel whiz sad i mean they start at 2004 now i feel old yeah that's old that's old enough for the internet i don't know what the website is it's not bluesky.com because that is some kind of shop for like day planners and calendars bs bsky.app oh okay well because that

makes sense this bluesky.com calendar company is gonna be making the money because everybody's talking about bluesky where's my social media all i see is these calendars their little shopify site is getting hammered right now so good for them but anyway that's that uh if you find us over there i probably will just keep everything over on mastodon seems simpler and from what i understand that the blue sky and the what is it the thread stuff is supposed to be integrating with the uh federer stuff so it's all kind of gonna be like dumped into the same thing at some point anyway i don't know i'm kind of i'm kind of over it seems like people

really want that you know that stuff and i'm i'm like i'm i'm content with the little community there over in mastodon if it continues or continues to grow i'll be happy with that anyway uh we got a couple of home tech headlines this week and uh some project updates so what do you guys say we jump in let's do it all right uh we talked about this before uh comcast has agreed to stop using the branding xfinity 10g network for its internet service after an advertising watchdog found it was misleading what the national advertising review board stated that the term could mislead customers into thinking that comcast services offered faster speeds than current generation networks because 10g is just a thing and comcast i guess uh the the

nrv recommended the comcast discontinued the use of the term 10g in its product service name as well as within describing the xfinity network and it found that using 10g to refer to home broadband was misleading because consumers would assume that they would get 10 gigabit speeds on every Xfinity connection, which is exactly what I thought when I saw their advertisement. Funny enough. And then I went and read what they were doing and couldn't believe that they were actually doing it. But here they are.

Kind of like the AT&T 5G thing that they did. Well, I mean, even that, it was like, well, it was five generation and nobody kind of knew anything about it. But like 10G is 10 gigabit like if you look if you go to the store and you buy a 10g a 10g switch it's a 10 gigabit switch like there's this is completely and utterly misleading i guess comcast says they will still use the terms 10g and xfinity 10g in some marketing but in ways that are hopefully not as misleading. Interesting, interesting stance. They do not agree with the NARB's assessment,

but says they will stop calling their services that. Good old Comcast. Won't anybody think of the ISPs? Jeez Louise. I'm still in shock they were able to go off and do something like that. It's just amazing. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Anyway, let's move on here. I's just amazing. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Anyway, let's move on here. I got a new product from Amazon owned Ring. They've got a new version of the video doorbell. The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro features a radar powered 3D motion detection for those aerial perspectives and advanced alerts. The camera lens is aligned with premium imaging sensors for clear video definition as well high efficiency compressions for lifelike color and sharpness the battery doorbell pro also has a low light sight for clear color in low light settings which is kind of nice it can be paired with other ring devices and create a whole home ecosystem that they offer doorbell is available pre-order for at let's see $229 and be shipping on March 6th yeah I don I don't like this big one, though.

I mean, I'm not a fan of the giant footprint. I feel like the Pro line has always been like the slimmer model. And so it's weird that they've taken this Pro and then made it the fatter one again. It's the fat one, yeah. I'm not a fan of that, but... Yeah, that's right. The Pro was the slim looking one. It's always been a slim one, as far as I'm aware.

You're right. So that's kind of weird. I understand because, you know, the battery and all that good stuff but i would have just called it the something else battery doorbell advanced or something i don't know well with it being battery powered too you can you have better more mounting options i guess at this point right so you can put it on a bigger wall because where mine is it's like i wouldn't have the space for it but if it's a battery powered i can mount it on the wouldn't have the space for it but if it's a battery powered i can mount it on the other side and have space for it right or you could do like

seth's neighbor and mount it up on their garage or their second above their garage door yeah yeah exactly you know yeah the battery lets you put it anywhere like there i've seen people who i guess on our older homes here a lot of the times the wire for the doorbell would come out like on the door trim or something like that so it was fine for the doorbells were like the tiny little button push button things but not so great for these fat ring doorbells that you can get uh so they're able to put the ring doorbells like on another wall and i guess charge them every so often uh which which you kind of have to do with the battery powered stuff. So yeah, I'm looking at their line now.

They've got all of, they've got a bunch of different doorbells now, but yeah, the pro one is definitely, has gotten some weight on it now. Don't fat shame the pro. So they've got a video doorbell pro, a video doorbell pro two, and now they've got the battery doorbell pro a video doorbell pro 2 and now they've got the battery doorbell pro which is the same as the video door same size as the video doorbell and the

battery doorbell plus so all right let's move on here we got some streaming news uh disney plus has started cracking down on password sharing here in the u.s after implementing the restriction in um the good old north canada Subscribers have started receiving emails notifying them about a change in Disney Plus's terms of service, stating that the password sharing outside the household is no longer permitted, unless otherwise allowed by their service tier. There we go.

Have you guys seen this word? I guess I can say it, because it's like the 2023 word of the year, enshitification. Have you seen it? Yes, yes. It's something, you know, I'm liking it. It's every time something like this comes up, I'm like, Oh yeah, that was why they came with

that word. And I guess it totally apply. I mean, it applies to all these online services. Uh, and it basically goes to describe, you know, the, the constant, you know, basically like how these online services really come in nice and sweet for everyone and then they turn the screws on everybody and just are mean to everybody and so we're getting there we're getting there i remember when disney plus first started it was like a ridiculous price everyone was so excited about it it was like 75 for three years i yeah we took them up on that offer and used it for three years with my daughter and it it was great. And now it's creeping up. The price is creeping up.

And now we can't share the password. Not that we were. I'm losing access to more and more streaming services as they go along. You know, my sister, you know, she's cutting me off slowly, one by one. Yeah, I think I feel like at this point, TV is kind of like the next the next radio. You know, people are going to use TV and they're going to keep doing it and stuff like that. But maybe maybe the Apple Vision Pro is just going to replace replace TV. You know, all these streaming services are getting ridiculous now.

And it's just it's hard to keep up. And half of them don't even make good content anymore. Yeah. And they're killing everything after a season or two and and not renewing and it's just it's just so aggravating so i don't even watch tv anymore just watch youtube videos when disney will give you like 50 different versions of marvel that you've never heard of it's like uh okay i see i get this is cool but uh at some point you just kind of get burned out about seeing marvel superhero heroes and that kind of thing it's like well they're introducing these new superheroes i understand they're trying to

but come on wonder man like seriously it's like you know like uh it's wonder woman come on we already saw that wasn't it did we watch that show oh yeah the the after party yeah yeah they're trying to build up some backstories from some new characters they'll probably see which one sticks and make a movie out of it but i i think their most success has been with the um star wars stuff well and especially like the superhero stuff too when you like push out 50 movies in a 10-year time frame like of course people are going to get burned out yeah it's the same with Star Wars they have introduced there's another like a Star Wars

series on there now and usually we're like on it and I was looking I'm like is that a Star Wars thing where did that come from and I guess I can't even remember the name of it but it's some new Star Wars characters to go and take a look at another story to

watch which is nice, I guess, but man, it's hard to keep up with sometimes. Yeah. Well, we got some sports ball streaming news here. This is for you, TJ. ESPN, Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery have announced

a joint venture to create a new sports streaming platform. A platform will offer live games from major U S sports leagues and events, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, FIFA world cup.

And of course, who can forget grand slam tennis. Hang on, hang on TJ. There's more. It'll also have content from college sports, UFC, the PGA Tour, golf, and NASCAR, among others. A new sports streaming service is set to be launched in the fall of 2024 with subscribers able to bundle it from Disney+, Hulu, and or Max. This is great, actually.

Yeah, I was going to say, if you're into sports, this is actually really cool. Because this sports stuff has been kind of like just spread thin over a bunch of different apps and you had to kind of like pick and choose but if they're all consolidated in one place and it's hulu or disney plus or wherever you're already getting your information your tv stuff from like man just hit play there good to go this this one actually makes sense because like you said i mean the the sports and streaming whenever somebody asked me about they're switching from cable to streaming they're like oh I watch a lot of sports I'm like well your life is about to get way more difficult and way more expensive

so this would be a good option for people well we didn't say this was going to be cheap like they didn't say it's definitely going to be like $1,000 a month I mean let's be honest but I mean it's a good option though because like you know you have to you have to have like YouTube TV then you have to have a local antenna then you have to do this and you have to do that mean it's a good option though because like you know you have to you have to have like

youtube tv then you have to have a local antenna then you have to do this and you have to do that and it's just it's so aggravating so if somebody is like a heavy sports watcher and stuff they want to switch to streaming i usually try to talk them out of it because it's just it's way more complicated sports and news i always found where the two like when it came to streaming were the two difficult ones up here because we have our local news channel that everybody pretty much watches right but you gotta use their app or you know go to their site and it's not cheap the key to me with this is the price right like if they can make it affordable and you get all this stuff that

would be awesome because that's what i always wanted was a place that had all the major sports in it. And I don't want, the other thing too, hopefully they don't black out games. I was going to say, do they still have the blackout stuff going on? That used to drive me nuts. That's one of the reasons I hated the streaming, because I remember once I got the NBA streaming service, but every game I wanted to watch was blacked out because it was on our local cable and that i didn't have cable that's why i got this streaming service so i couldn't the only way i

could do it was the vpn from somewhere in europe and i got what i want but it's you know for what you pay for it it just wasn't worth it so i'm hoping they aren't as annoying you know the other thing i hate is when you got a streaming service and it goes to commercial and you just watch some weird thing happening in between timeouts and stuff like that like i kind of like the commercial sometimes too right so fill that with something entertaining at least the timeout times you know so i don't just you know see the crowd doing weird stuff and during timeouts yeah yeah i see i mean commercials um that uh what's it called the taylor swift bowl is this weekend right so yeah i don't really know what it's about like it's it's

literally all the only news i've seen about is taylor swift being at the super bowl and i'm like who are the teams playing i don't even know but there will be commercials and um the commercials seven million dollars for 30 30 second segment that's crazy wow that's pretty crazy but taylor swift will be there taylor swift will be there so that'll be worth it yeah you get those swifties on your side man that's that's a cult right there yeah well she made them like 300 million dollars so i mean why not seriously who's playing? It's got to be Kansas City. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, San Francisco. It's bad when Gavin knows that. Gavin's a sports guy. I just thought that was true. I watch and we have our little day planned. You know, I pre-ordered some food. We got some wings, some chili, some, you know, spring rolls coming in. And we got some wings some chili some you know spring rolls coming in

and we got like everything's lined up it's it's it's not it's not about the football game as well it's just a group of friends getting together you know and there's a football game playing on the tv like we don't really care well we're getting good food yeah yeah we we generally do like uh we we go into the freezer and find all those frozen things we haven't cooked yet and cook them all at once and then just have like all the frozen freezer things. And my daughter will like whatever, like she's like, she'll be rooting for the team that is winning at the time. So she's like, I'm for the blue team. And then it'll change. Like I'm for the red team or I'm for the green team.

So it's really funny to have her. She sits there and watches sports all the time because she's just she loves to watch the little numbers go up i guess and tell us that she is for whoever's winning bandwagoner yep i'm gonna keep an eye on this though because it looks interesting of course it probably won't come to canada though oh that's true didn't even think about that sorry man what sports do you guys have up there anyway besides hockey hockey i can't believe you know basketball was invented in canada no it's been in indiana all right you can have whatever you know basketball was invented in Canada no it's been in Indiana you can whatever you want to believe I'll just let you guys believe what

you want to believe we have we have all the sport we have sorry hockey and curling what else do you got we got darts darts no Gavin I said sports that is a sport or you just offended a bunch of people

you know next you're gonna tell me pool's a sport we have cfl we have uh this is the guy that doesn't play any sports by the way so if anybody's listening to this and you're offended just know that i played softball in high school and that's it so december 1891 a canadian American professor of physical education and instructor. He was Canadian. Don't don't attach the American. I'm just going to say where he was in Springfield, Massachusetts. Yeah.

See, he wasn't even Canadian. Yeah, he was here. He's trying to keep his gym class active on a rainy day. So that's where basketball. To be fair, though, I understand where you're coming from, Gavin, because Ohio says that their first in flight, even though Orville and Wilbur Wright were born in Ohio, the first flight was in South Carolina or North Carolina. And I just want to say I'm sorry for all our Brazilian listeners.

We're not going to ignore the fact that you may have flown down there first. Whoops. Americans are very good at erasing americans we were first yes okay yeah we we said we were first and uh that's all matters what do you have to say yeah what do you what do you have history books to look at yeah don't don't don't like that there was no internet back then so you can't go prove it yeah it was what are you gonna get a steamship and come tell us americans that you flew first? I don't think so. Oh, man.

They'll just change the Wikipedia and that changes history. It's not changing those license plates, though, that's for sure. That's right. Speaking of that, when they released the new version of Ohio's license plate, they had the inaugural flight on there. But the designer put the plane flying backwards which everybody thought was hilarious and they made the announcement and didn't realize it and everybody was like hey wait a minute guys that plane is actually backwards just so you know didn't know oh wow that is funny you look it up yeah yeah it's just it's amazing i went through

all those checks and balances to a press conference and everybody was like, wait a minute. This doesn't look right. That's, that's, that's too good. That's too good.

Well, I mean, it's pulling the little banner across the thing from the, from the front of the plane. Totally makes sense. I get it. Yeah. So back to sports.

Yeah. I hope we get this in Canada. Cause we have tried to derail this conference. Yeah. Yeah. Left turn, left turn. ESPN, ESPN. You see all the things they mentioned is like do we get that in canada i mean there's

like 12 espn channels now so you know if they can condense it down to like four that'd be great customers always like what's espn max i'm like heck if i know espn8 the ocho you guys get everything yeah i mean this is all in one sports stream including let's see it's got espn espn8 the ocho you guys get everything yeah i mean this is all in one sports stream including let's see it's got espn espn2 espn you secn accn espn news abc fox fs1 fs2 because you can't have just an fs btn tnt tbs true tv as well as espn plus why could they couldn't put espn plus up at the front with all the other espns i don't know but i know who sorted this you know like even espn news it's on its own it's like come on at least sort the list but no it's a good selection there like you'll get the pro golf you even get the live golf you get the pga golf you know so i get to watch all the golf i want to watch you know like

if there's no blackouts and stuff and it's a good price man i might have to figure out a way to get this i think the blackouts come from the local broadcast not necessarily your cable but like the guys who well i guess it's the local tv stations who have whatever through their affiliates or whatever have paid for the the the rights to broadcast it locally and that's what causes the blackouts on streaming. So I don't know. I don't know that those contracts have necessarily been renegotiated because they kind of want you to watch their commercials and not those things you don't like anyway. So I don't know.

It'd be nice if they could just bring those streams in, right? Like work with all the local markets and bring those streams in. So you don't have any blackouts. You actually just watch the local channel. It's got no rugby though. So I'm going to miss out on that. I know wiffle ball either.

Stop. I feel like you're just making up things at this point. Wiffle ball pro wiffle ball is awesome. Like it's, it's, it's high action. Now give me a pro dodge ball and I'll watch. Oh,

they have pro tag. No, have you seen the pro? we're derailing this again don't we have stories to cover pro tag look at all this is it pro tag that's what we're talking about this week's home tech i'm just gonna put whack that rules into that into the into the show notes that's all that's everybody's gonna come and look in our show notes it's just gonna be uh whack that information so there you go what's that new tennis league what do they call it it's not tennis but it's uh oh what do they call it um it's everyone's playing it now oh pickleball yeah they have a pro pickleball league now i was watching i was actually watching

that the other day i felt i've never even seen pickleball yeah i watched the pro pickleball the other day and like i was like oh let me check this out for a couple minutes and like two hours later i was cheering on the winning team yeah it's uh it's like a low impact tennis thing they it's very popular here in ford and one of my one of my neighbors is a is one of the big pickleball coaches and it's like many champions and that kind of thing it's it's like tennis with uh with the wiffle balls. Interesting. Yeah, I've only heard older people talk about it. Yeah, it's coming down because it's like a lower, like if you have knee injuries or anything like that, it's definitely coming down in the age range,

but it's a lot lower impact. You can play it in a lot of different places. It's an interesting little sport. It's something fun to do. But it's not on this streaming service. Back to the news story here. Back to news. All right.

All right. Well, Google Assistant will no longer be supported on Samsung Smart TV due to a policy change. This means that users will lose the ability to control their TVs using voice commands through Google Assistant. This change will take place starting on June 30th, 2024, and will affect all Samsung Smart TVs manufactured from 2019 and later. The decision comes as a result of a policy change by Google

which is shifting its focus to its own Google TV platform, of course, something that it will probably cancel in the future, just like this policy. Google has been gradually phasing out support for third-party smart TVs, and Samsung was the latest manufacturer to be impacted. The move seems to be seen as strategic

to help promote Google TV and drive adoption of that particular platform. I don't like losing to stuff, especially stuff that exists. You've got a couple of months, I guess, to figure out where else to go. That's right. You shouldn't be using the built-in TV software anyway so you shouldn't be using google anyway

yeah they seem to not have a problem with doing stuff like this if you are integrated with the google home you've probably been frustrated in this this way a number of times in the past so they're not afraid of change. Definitely not afraid of change. Anyway, that's pretty much it. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 469. All right, we do have a, we have something in the mailbag today.

I think this is going to be directed toward Gavin. This is from Justin. It says, question, if you might be able to help. Also, how are the printers going? So I'm not familiar with MQTT, but it seems like it might be helpful in my use case. I have a project with Lutron RA3, and I would like to control on and off

and dimming of media room using hue without changing the control. I would like to keep everything on RA3 keypads. So like there's keypads that RA3 has, like up and down buttons and that kind of things that you can put on them. It says the home has a dedicated Mac mini that runs as scripted and home assistant currently. And he was thinking of using one of those gang box modules that could be set with the Hue bulbs via Zigbee. He's looking for something that ideally will work without relying on Home Assistant.

Well, I guess this isn't for Gavin. You just crossed your name off right there. I would be more interested in a hub for reliability, but not sure if anything is available. Any ideas on how to do this? I know where I'm going to go with this. TJ? I don't know.

All right. I think, Justin, you're going to be the first one that should get this Homey thing because I'm pretty sure. Genius. I'm pretty sure Homey can integrate with both of these and do exactly what you want to do. And you'll be the first one to do this

and you can give us the feedback. Yeah, buy it. Buy it. Buy it and let us know. But I feel like if he doesn't want to rely on home assistant, he's not going to want to rely on something else though. Yeah, and I'll be honest, like I've had back and forth conversation with him about this topic and some ideas.

And, you know, we were talking about um uh zigbee binding because he had the hue bulbs and they work with zigbee binding right so you know we went down some rabbit holes where i think he was even looking at some kind of relay that can detect like power coming onto the light and then send the zigbee binding command over to the hue lights which is not a bad idea like i can imagine it very um and it would be very yeah that's the only thing it could break but it also doesn't rely on a hub or anything if you just you'll still need the home assistant hub to bind them all but once they're binding if that hub's offline it's actually probably going to be more reliable too right like it's not gonna because they'll be they'll be um directly connected to each other

at that point. Right. So we went back and forth a little thing. He's doing some research to figure out what his options are. But I was more thrown off and I brought this to you guys because I know nothing about the Lutron Ross stuff, right? And how it tied in. And I don't think you can get any direct integration with light bulbs.

I think he said that's on the higher end stuff. You can probably get that, but not with what he's working with. So I don't know. I like binding. I like the Zigbee binding stuff though. Yeah. I feel like that's probably your best idea. Yeah.

Cause I was thinking like a current sensing switch and you can, you know, something Zigbee like that. So it detects power. Once you turn the light on, it will detect power and then it can send the zigbee binding command over to your bulbs to also turn on right or whatever however you want to do it right um you know and sometimes you get it to the point where it's like just rerun new wire so it controls all the lights you know i don't know how hard that is add another switch rerun another wire you know reliability you know i mean so taking it back to the lutron stuff i don't

i don't know i'm trying to find if homie has actually lutron integrations and it seems like they should but i'm not finding anything in their support section for lutron so how about all of our iq and they they may be able to do it. I think the reason it kind of put me back a little bit, Lutron used to have a standard integration path that they had basically a telnet thing. You could open up and you give it a username and password and you can send the commands and receive status updates and that kind of thing.

It's a very basic integration. But I think recently, more recently, they started to do kind of something a different type of api and not required like to have like a key or whatever you know application id and a key or whatever from issued from lutron to to be able to communicate with the devices at least that's what i'm remembering i haven't dealt with lutron in a long time so from what i remember what like i'm thinking about like what the stuff used to work with how it used to work i would say oh that homie pro should be able

to do it but i'm not very i'm not sure that it can so i'm not and i'm not seeing anything on here um but that's just another hub now controlling everything right yeah and i wouldn't do that when you have home assistant that can if you have what the the thing here is is like you have two separate systems right he's got hue and he's got lutron and if you want to bridge them together there's only one way to do it you got to have a hub in the middle like it's going to be relying on that so if you want to bridge those two things together without changing out one or the other the idea and and i would leave the lutron controls because they're super expensive and they look nice on your walls. So I wouldn't put anything new in.

I would see if there's a way that you could integrate the RAW 3 stuff in and see if you can get those keypad button presses off of the RAW 3 into Home Assistant. Which you can, supposedly. Yeah. That's the way I would go. At least those little events you can have come in and you can make them trigger to turn on the whatever. You can change. As soon as it's Home Assistant, whatever you have integrated with Home Assistant,

you can trigger with those keypad presses. So yeah, this says here, yes, you can also trigger. This is a link that TJ put to a Reddit post for Home Assistant with R3. And he says, yes, you can also trigger a button press from Home Assistant. And the LEDs can be synced with Blueprint. For instance, he says he has his downstairs shades on a button that the LED will stay on until all the downstairs shades are closed.

There may be a pretty tight integration there and I'd probably recommend doing that and then that way you don't have to change anything out. You already have Home Assistant set up. Just pop this in between. It seems to be, Home home assistant's been pretty reliable i haven't had any problems with getting my graphs or my uh changing your terrible theme changing anything on my chair well changing my terrible theme yeah um i don't know i i would use i would use this this is the way i would go once once again home assistant is the answer to everything well he already says he's running it. A dedicated Mac Mini

running scripted in Home Assistant. Right. I would just try to... He doesn't want to rely on it, but I feel like you have to at this point.

Yeah. Unless you're going to change all your lighting hardware, which I would not suggest him. Because, I mean, Lutron RAW 3 is

great stuff. RAW in general. Yeah. I wouldn't get rid of RAW 3. This stuff is too expensive to throw away. And it's a really nice product. You can send it to me. That's all right. Yeah. I mean't get rid of raw 3. This stuff is too expensive to throw away. And it's a really nice product.

That's all right. Yeah, I mean, if you want to send it to TJ, he'd be more than happy to take off your hands. And then you can figure out whatever goes with the Hue stuff to control it directly. But I don't know. I think you have more options in front of you if you keep the raw 3,

integrate it with Home Assistant, and then you can trigger literally anything integrated with your media room for Hue to dim things on and off, change colors, all that good stuff. So that's the way I would go. Yep. And I just wanted to get your guys' opinion and feedback on this. So, you know, free consulting.

Still haven't sold a Homey Pro. Kind of disappointed in that. Somebody buy one, dang it. Tell us how it is. You buy a Homey Pro for yourself and buy an Apple Vision Pro for all of us. Exactly. that's how it is you buy a you buy a homie pro for yourself and buy an apple vision pro for all of us exactly tell you what if you get me an apple vision vision uh pro then i will buy you the homie pro how about that just to even swap yeah what a nice guy wow so nice so nice i might take you up on that yeah it seems like a pretty good deal it's like three for one right yeah yeah let's see uh all right let's move on here uh pick of the week we've got a pretty good deal it's like three for one right yeah yeah let's see uh all right let's

move on here uh pick of the week we've got a pretty funny picture of the week this is this is hilarious uh somebody has says has put up what's called the ascii theater and this thing if you if you remember ascii art from back in the day back in the like bulletin board service days like you'd have these beautiful things you dial into and there'd be just ASCII on your computer screen, different colors, different shades. Well, that's all, you know, gotten a lot better now, nowadays, because computers are faster and there's all sorts of stuff you can do with ASCII now.

And evidently, one of the things you can do that nobody should have done, but you can do, is stream movies with ASCII. And they have made an ascii theater you copy a command and you paste it into your terminal and hit enter and you get to watch the movie of the day today that movie is the shining i've been watching it the entire time and guys you were asking if it has sound it does not have sound but it does have subtitles so i can see her in long and and see uh here's johnny see that happening i think they're at the point they got into the checked into the hotel and i think that's

a lamp made out of ascii things i don't know if if you step probably about 30 feet away you might be able to think that you see a picture but otherwise it's it's it's pretty wild movie a day you get to watch it streaming there in Asking. And set it up and get it running in the background. It's in 420 by 69 characters. Not pixels. Characters. This is how we used to pirate movies back in the day.

Yeah, yeah. This is what porn looked like back in the day. Some leisure suit Larry going on. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Back in the day, that suit larry going on back in the day that's how i still operate this is great hey it's it's it's definitely somebody's uh somebody's done a really good job at this i i i love this this is this is great i got the shining playing right now yep me too it's snowing i've been playing it since we started recording.

Oh, okay. They're getting snowed in right now. All right, let's move on here. Let's see. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, project updates well first we have a home assistant update we have to talk about uh 2024.2 has been released this is the shortest uh release of the year but here it is february it's a leap leap year though so we might get another update out yep and you know it it's a it's a update. The one nice feature I like in this is the drag and drop now in automations. So when you're editing your automations, you can drag and drop, you know, actions and stuff all over the place. And that's just a usability thing. I think people are really going to like that. Makes working with the automations much better.

So you'll enjoy that other you know changes that i added um zha which is the built-in zigbee um integration now has update entities so that's pretty good um they added some matter diagnostic and actions so you can get some more information when uh your matter is not working like it should be though i have to be, my matter has been very stable lately. So it looks like they did do some matter updates. And it's been, my stuff hasn't dropped off since. Since I merged the networks, it's been really stable. They listened to us, man.

We did. I know, I know. And, you know, there's a bunch of other stuff, but you can get that through their release notes. But make sure you review the breaking changes like there was one big one in there for my mqtt stuff i had to go and do some pre-work but you know the upgrade went pretty smoothly after i did that so always review the breaking changes is new icons uh it's it's a background thing that they allow you to put icons on certain things now

that you couldn't before so not like new icons it's just some more icon functionality interesting maybe i've got a um new sound event sensors introduced in unify protect so they've got an update to the unify protect integration some tuya stuff there's all sorts of stuff yeah i love all this stuff it's like brand new stuff that's oh they've got uh the new uh google ai conversation gemini pro thing they're tinkering with here so that's pretty cool yep there's a lot of updates like every month you gotta dig through the release notes and stuff like that to find them right and some some youtubers they'll cover the top ones and i just went through one that i the ones i liked oh goby lights local there we go yeah there you go that's a big one

there you go tj bingo moving from 1.6 to 2.0 for 2024 there we go go. Go hot dog, go. Hopefully it'll revert your theme for us. Nope. Yeah. Stay in. Yellow and red themes. Oops, accidentally deleted it. I don't know what happened. Thanks, home assistant. That's too bad. All right. Well, we got a couple of project updates here. Gavin, what you been up to?

People have asked about how my printing issues have been going. Well, my printer's been working fine, but I have my 3d printer. That's a whole different ball game. Right. So this week was a lot of, um, I broke the nozzle into the heat in the heat block when I was changing nozzles, that kind of sucked, but you know, it gave me the opportunity to pull apart my 3d printer, all the heat, the heat block, everything.

Um, and i got more comfortable with doing that so i always advise people you know if you have the time you're brave enough pull it all apart and figure out how it all works because you get to know your printer really well so when something's not working you it's not as bad as you think you know so i've been fighting with that printer but my regular printer that prints paper been working fine. Like I have no issues with that. And you know, like it's been working great. So yeah, I only have three printers in this house.

Maybe you need to get a matter printer. What the heck's a matter printer? Tell me, tell me what would a better printer print? Uh, matter. I mean, obviously. Hey TJ, Seth, you have to reboot. Something's going on in your background Matter. I mean, obviously. Hey, TJ, Seth, you have to reboot. Something's going on

in your background there. Seth doesn't reboot. I think it had a core update thing, did you? So... Yeah. I'll just let it... I'm going to let it do its thing.

All right, all right. The flashing boxes are, you know, distracting there. But at least it dimmed your theme, so we're good. Leave it, leave it, leave it. It's much more pleasant now.

Damn it, he clicked on it. It doesn't hurt to look at Seth. Oh, thank God. It it's back now it'll reconnect whenever it restarts but the other thing i was looking at this week so i have a couple sensors that run some cr 2032 batteries sitting outside and i noticed those batteries are constantly dying fast in the cold weather so i kind of was looking up you know like what are good batteries for outdoors in the cold weather. So I kind of was looking up, you know, like what are good batteries for outdoors in the cold weather? And, you know, there were recommendations. I was reading everybody's, you know, misinformation and stuff like that, but somebody recommended a brand called Murata. They make a CR 2032 batteries and they said they really last long in cold weather just because of their slow discharge at those temperatures.

And they gave like a whole all the specs around the batteries and the discharge rates and, you know, the different temperatures. So I was like, let me grab a couple of those for my outdoor sensors. And I have to admit, they've been pretty solid so far. You know, if they, if I get like eight months of them that, you know, during the, if they make it through this winter that we're not having, um, I'll be good with that. Right. Um, and then again, the heat, if they make it through the summer, I'm good with that. So, uh, if you're, if you have outdoor sensors, pay close attention to the batteries you put in. And that's my advice just because they're going to go through temperature changes and that affects performance. Right. So do some research, look for your outdoor batteries.

Interesting. I would not have thought about that. I'm having all sorts of problems with my ring light things outside right now. Like what battery do you have battery? Is it ring batteries that you put in or is it just regular batteries? They're, they're like a long rechargeable. Yeah. They have the proprietary battery.

Yeah. You don't really have a choice with those, right? But you would figure Ring would give you an outdoor battery. It's roughly, I don't know, it's roughly these lithium, was it the S18650s or whatever? Like this? Oh, they're normal batteries then. But Ring. 18650s.

They're a little bit bigger. So I think whatever Ring is using, they have added a little extra piece of metal to the end of it so like i could i could put these in there but i would need to modify or modify them in some way to to take up the extra space maybe like a little bit of foil or something yeah and you had some really cold weather there so you know oh yeah your battery performance too you know really i think mostly it's the sun like we don't have as much sun as it's used to and it's like i just give giving up the ghost one of them's not even turning on anymore so i gotta go get take it out plug it in let it charge and kind of do its thing so there it goes almost it's back good idea on the outdoor battery zone yeah would never even thought about that tj tj what have you been up to i've been doing some projects as well so

i decided to make my life more complicated this week and switch from z wave js and home assistant to z wave js ui uh which is basically i guess z wave to mqtt but not the exact same thing um i had to back up my my z wave stuff, which Gavin, you know, graciously sent me a link to do because I subscribed to Gavin as a service. And I got everything backed up and restored. But one of the annoying things is my names didn't transfer. And so I had to go through and figure out where all of my devices were and rename them. But of course, the names don't translate't like there's two different parts to it. So you name it in the one part and it doesn't really transfer to the other part.

And so you have to go back and forth and figure out what it is. And it's just it's way more complicated than I need it to be. But literally, the only reason I did it is because my my second project, I guess the main project, I installed some LED strip lights in my den, which basically is like a converted backyard porch. And so there was like one light in there and it was like an outdoor light and it wasn't given up. It wasn't given enough light for the room. And so I needed something in there. So I installed some cob LED strips that I had just laying around. They were great, but I wanted to be able to control it with my my smart switch without relying on like automations. And so in order to do that with

Z wave associations, I had to install the Z wave JSUI thing. And now that I've got it all switched over and everything, it's great. It works fast. It's kind of like the Zigbee bindings where it just like directly connects the devices together. And so you don't really rely on the hub, which is nice. And the response time has been really good, just like the Zigbee bindings that I did with the Philips Hue lights. So that was definitely worth it. It was just more complicated than I was probably hoping for. And the LED strips go around the whole den. And it's so bright in there right now.

I can only like set it to like 50 percent brightness where it looks like i have like a grow operation going on in my house so that was pretty nice you know it's legal in ohio now it's illegal yeah yeah guys passed a law and stuff yeah so that's all the the fun tech projects i've done we're in the process of getting our fence removed right now because we're going to install of getting our fence removed right now because we're going to install a new privacy fence next month. And so I'm looking at adding some lighting out there as well. And so somebody in the Slack group recommended some lights. But if you have any idea or you've done lighting for your fences, I'd kind of like to see that because I want to

get some ideas. I don't really need RGB. Really don't care about that. I just want like some ambient light whenever we're working back there or, you know, I want to let the dog, the future dog out and be able to see things. So if you have a privacy fence and you've done some lighting around it, I would like to see that.

So send that to us. That's like an interesting project. What do you, what do you have going on, Seth? Well, I have been finally finishing on my interesting project. What do you, what do you have going on, Seth? Well, I have been finally finishing on my work project, so I'm going to be able to get back to editing the show on time and that kind of stuff this week.

Maybe, um, yeah, yeah. But I did pick up a dream LS 10 S L no L 10 S ultra on recommendation. Ooh. Yeah. I didn't even know about this. Yeah. I got yeah i got one of those things in and um

and uh plugged it in and uh my daughter had just gone to bed and of course it it it has a speaker on it and starts talking to you just like why wouldn't why would a vacuum start like yelling at you at at nine o'clock at night of course it did and she came she came out like what is that noise who's talking and i'm like go back to. I'll show you in the morning. And yeah, this, this thing has a speaker on it. So my only complaint is that it did that. And then I probably should have waited and not, you know, but you get something in, you want to, you want to plug it in, you want to tear it, take the boxes, you want to throw them away. And then you want to plug it in and see if it works. Cause that's exactly what I did at nine o'clock at night and i wasn't going to wait till the next morning to set this

thing up so but i guess like the first time you connect it to your wi-fi it says okay i'm going to do a i'm going to map your house and it just took off it starts yelling i'm like oh shut up and it just took off and it ran into me and then it stopped and then it turned around and it sat back down i'm like so i looked at little, it gives you a little floor plan to map out your house. And it's like, it had like nothing on it. I'm like, oh, this is, this is going to go so well. But the next day it did go out and mop the house and run over some carpets and get stuck in a few places, got stuck under a couch and then under something else. But I have, I have slowly, um, and meticulously limited the places where it can go. And, um, so far so good. It hasn't had too much

work to do. Um, after that first run, it, it sucked everything up. I guess that was like on the floor. And since it got stuck under the couch, you got all that good stuff up too. So, Hey, bonus. Right. And then I was like, okay, well, I'm going to let you, and my daughter like on the floor and since it got stuck under the couch you got all that good stuff up too so hey bonus right and then i was like okay well i'm gonna let you and my daughter is on the floor crying because she could hear it just running over the leg i was like oh my god it's still there don't worry we'll get the legos out later i'm pretty sure she lost a few heads or something but um yeah i was able to like fish it out, but after it went under the couch, all the dust in the couch is all gone. So I know at least know how to like make it go under there. And, um, yeah, so far so good. I've got no complaints other than the very loud voice, which you can turn down in settings,

but you kind of have to get into the app. The app is weird. I will, I will say the app is weird. Yeah. It's the Xiaomi app. So yeah. Um, it's, it's definitely not the best user experience you know it needs some richard work on it on this thing i think but for what it is it kind of makes sense if you can kind

of like look at it sideways from a programmer's perspective you can make you can make out what they're trying to do and but my wife can't so she's like hey um i think we named it judy or something i don't know why we named it Judy. I think my daughter came up with it and we're like, we'll just name it Judy. Um, I haven't put googly eyes on it, but that's coming tonight. I'll go put them on tonight. And then the, like she said, uh, she ran around today and she didn't mop anything. I'm like, oh yeah, I turned off the mop to do like just a quick vacuum. And I guess when I did that, I turned off the global settings. The global settings are basically the stupid like time it's supposed to go out every on schedule and like uh she's

like how do you change that i'm like i don't know i don't know where i changed it it's it's such a weird a weird app so but um we'll get used to it and eventually we'll get this on a schedule and then um you know i was seeing there in home assistant maybe i can get it i can get it brought into that where i don't even have to look at this it does integrate with home assistant so i can send it off to a zone to get mode uh mode to to mow down the dirt i guess in those zones it'd be all right you ever see that screaming robot vac video whenever it bumps into something it screams or it swears yes oh yeah if you could do that mod to it oh if you hate the app for this you would definitely hate the ecovax one the ecovax one it's a dumpster fire man it just it just wasn't needed at nine o'clock at night they win

yeah it just wasn't appreciated and of course i put like the thing where we were like, oh, we have this place. It's perfect over here. It's like out of the way. Nobody ever sees it, but it's the wall next to my daughter's bedroom. And of course, like when it gets back from the five feet that it ran before it bumped in my feet and decided that was as big as our house was going to be, it decided to like empty the tank. And of course the tank is like, sounds like a regular old vacuum with no you know just

crazy sounding vacuum so she comes running out for that again uh so uh the setup was frustrating but i think we mostly have it um we mostly have it working now and going to the places it it needs to go yeah yeah very cool i'm interested to hear your long-term thoughts on it because I, I, I need to get a different, uh, robot mop. So trying to, trying to sell mine currently, you know,

the one that doesn't work at all. I mean, it works perfectly. If you're interested, contact me. You can buy it from me and no problems, no problems at all. No problems at all.

Yeah. It's probably fine. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, I got that going on. on um i swapped out my unify switch for a netgear for um for no reason at all i have somebody that i know that need a unify switch and me that's that's me i need it it's it's dj and it's me mine's max though he needs some poe and i was like well i got extra poe in this thing and i don't want this unify switch anymore so

i swapped that out um and then it has this thing called insight i guess it has a local management interface and i must have switched it over to insight or whatever and insight works great it's just kind of like unify um but it it allowed me somehow to un or to i don't know what the term is like you can tag a vlan you can untag a vlan and then you can whatever the other state is where it's neither tagged or untagged whatever that is i did that on my sonos port the little the port that goes to feed the sonos equipment and my wife is like sonos doesn't work it doesn't work i can't get it to work i'm like yeah you're right it doesn't work i don't i don't know what the problem is like i'm like going around trying to figure out what multicast thing stp settings which you can't get to or find on this thing.

And turns out I just had the port basically turned off and removed from the management VLAN, which once it was fixed, Sonos magically started working like super fast and everything.

So there you go. Whoops, my bad. Don't just keep an eye out for fat fingers in the inside application, I guess. When you mess with settings on these things you should know what you're messing with you know word of advice well i will say that uh

the app for insight is not there it has a device specific thing that you can get to and then it has like a a location like you can go in there you can it allows you to set up multiple access points to deploy the whole thing one you set them all to the same ssid and all that stuff so that's what the idea behind this app is um the problem is is that those settings like aren't the same in each area so i would go and check one and look at it and be like well i guess this is right but i swear i saw something about stp where's that i go and go look around i can't find it go to the switches go to the port configuration turns out it was like on the site i don't know it was it was buried somewhere on the phone app and of course i'm just like tired and fumbling through it so um i woke up in the morning and

had a uh you know one of those things like oh yeah it's probably something stupid on in this area and i went to it and as soon as i did boom sonos came up everything else started working and it was great so i bet tj's excited though get you can get some get some more cameras no well yeah maybe you think i'll get the switch this year though or well i did find a box so i have a box it can be it can be shipped in so i got a bigger box now. It may say DreamBotVacuum on it. That's fine. Nicole may get all excited and then be like, oh, wait. Nah, she would not get excited.

All right. Well, that's all I got. So maybe I'll do more next weekend. That's all right. Maybe I'll edit a show or two. Maybe two of them. All right. Well,

that's going to wrap up this week. Uh, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know how to support, you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.

Dot FM slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as what? $3,500, right? That's it. That's all. Yeah. Monthly pledge though. You got to keep it active for three or four months. little as what three thousand five hundred dollars right that's it that's all yeah monthly pledge

though you gotta keep it active for three or four months we'll give you a special shout out on the show maybe even put your name on the on the website i mean you might even do it there yeah we'll post a post a mastodon and uh where tens of people will see it yeah yeah yeah um no for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private slash at the hub where you and the other supporters of the show can gather in there and i've seen a lot of things about uh home theaters passing through there owen's been building racks which is kind of cool right there's there's the uh the great three million toothbrushes have been infected

and caused things that was like a thing that i found today it was a denial of service attack from from toothbrushes turns out to be a mistranslated fake article that went viral today so that was fun lots of stuff going on especially around theaters oh i know that you guys have been talking about the uh the what is it the uh in a belly a smart two-in-one switch on and off dimmer with richard the matter ones yeah i've been i'm eyeballing those too because yeah i'd like i i bought some of those but they're z wave or no no they're zigbee yep i just picked up a couple zigbees myself too the zigbee ones are nice i'm using at my house so yeah the z wave ones are nice. I'm using them at my house. Yeah.

The Z-Wave ones are nice too. I don't know why I bought them. I don't have any way to connect to them or anything. But they're there. They look nice. I will give them that. And the instructions are fun in the box and the packaging I like. So you just buy it because the instructions are fun?

I really didn't think it through. I thought i was going to be able to to do something different and you're like the perfect client you know we're just hey look instructions no he's not because he's all the wrong stuff yeah yeah yeah he's not the perfect client because you're like hey we need to get this project done and be like i don't know what you're talking about yeah we just show them fun instructions he was like bought yep i want to they do a good job on their products and it wasn't i mean it wasn't that expensive i think it was like 40 bucks or

something i think yeah i think there was even a sale for like two for whatever when i bought them so stop talking prices because what i had to pay for them it's not cheap well we need to start smuggling these things up to canada now say i'll bring i'll bring you up some gavin there we go you know what i'm gonna place a whole bunch of orders for stuff and just have them shipped to your house. Just get it shipped to my house. I mean, I'm only like six hours from you. Exactly. You could drive it up. I'll smuggle them in.

You can put one of these ASCII art videos on and just drive on up. There we go. On your glasses. With my Apple Vision Pro. And your Tesla. Yeah. I'm not that rich. Tesla service truck's got to be pretty awful. with my Apple mission pro. You're a Tesla. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not that rich.

Tesla service trucks gotta be pretty awful. Uh, if you want to help out, uh, but can't support the show financially, totally, uh, understand,

just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week of news here on home tech. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. home tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week until next time take care and now we have the second show for this week boom it all get released on the same day backdated yeah you get a good

long weekend of listening to what you can do on your road trip to Canada