HomeTech.fm - Episode 471 - SMASNUG

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

On this week's show: Walmart acquires TV maker Vizio for the ads, a Wyze glitch affects 13,000, Inovelli launches Matter devices, and Josh.ai launches all new voices and a touch and other new products at their winter launch event. A pick of the week, project updates, and so more more.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 23rd. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Oxford, 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 technology, home automation, and Mastodon spam moderation. Jeez, this last week has been insane. I didn't even know we were getting spammed.

It wasn't until somebody said something, but I don't look at the federated feeds to see it. Yeah. I just follow people I follow. I think this is the week of spam. to disable the security company's website submission form because I have received like 20 website submissions for our security company and we literally never receive anything. And it's been like Russian spam and Viagra spam

and all kinds of stuff. So I don't know what's going on in the spam world right now, but it's getting obnoxious everywhere. The best part of this Mastodon spam, which was, yeah i guess it definitely caused more problems on some of the larger servers that were kind of open to registration it was it was kids it was basically kids in japan i think is what they said that were feuding over who had control over a particular discord server of course that's what it was

and i guess at some point they decided to like knock it off and um otherwise it was it was a few days of of hell the funny part was they were they were basically posting a picture of spam it was a can of spam with a discord address on it that was it i don't know why that was it that was it but but it also showed how vulnerable of it is mastodon is if they could just do this yeah um it's kind of scary you know like somebody else could just start doing it too and you know we're still vulnerable yeah to be fair this is kind of a problem everywhere right now like so i manage i think like four or five facebook like pages and we receive notices via message every day and i would say several times a day on like each page

basically like saying oh if you're the admin your account's gonna be deleted if you don't respond notices via message every day. And I would say several times a day on like each page, basically like saying, Oh, if you're the admin, your account's going to be deleted if you don't respond within 24 hours and blah, blah, blah. But like, it's getting so bad that a lot of businesses are posting about it was like, Hey, is anybody else getting this? Like, is it legit or not? It's totally not legit, guys. Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah. Luckily, our server was not in fact, well, I i mean i guess i did find one of the accounts that they used on our server at some point they had registered we had approved them they had kind of a generic sorry yeah gavin approving all the bots if you don't say that um that uh you're you're here to talk to gavin we're not letting you in so yeah exactly you know if you don't want to subscribe

to gas we don't want you. Exactly. But you know what? I have to admit the spam marketing actually was effective because when I found out about it, I actually opened up a can of spam for lunch. I was feeling for it. Like, to be honest, I haven't had it in a while, but we had one in the cupboard and it reminded me and I felt for it. I actually had one for lunch. So it was like, that's, you know, effective advertising right there tj's face was what making me laugh here that's not a pretty face

threw up a little bit in my mouth don't worry hey growing up you know we didn't have many choices and if you you can't tell from my introduction i'm actually traveling this week i'm in oxford ohio which you've probably never heard of. Nope. But it's near the Indiana border. And literally the only thing around here is Miami University. And not Miami, Florida, Miami, Ohio University. And so I'm here for a couple days working. There's literally nothing around. Every time I ask somebody what's a good restaurant or anything, one person recommended Bob Evans.

So that's how that's going. It's got a population of 22 000 people i mean that makes it iffy on the dating season you know the dating scene must be very like that's actually surprising though because the the town i lived in a pal i feel like had more things and this town doesn't have many things so i'll be i'll be here till friday night hopefully i'm working at the the university installing some cameras so nice if you're in the area i will already be gone by the time seth gets this posted so don't come it says there are 16 almost 17 000 undergraduate students at this

particular miami university which i have not determined yet if it is an extension of miami university in in florida that just got lost or something like that i don't know no i feel i feel like it's from the miami river which is not too far away but i don't know for sure so wait does that population include the students because then there's only 6 000 people that are actually there full time that's what i was thinking well that that does not surprise me the closest low is 30 minutes away just to give you an idea of where i'm at you must see the same people over and over when you're swiping on tinder it is kind of interesting though walking through like the downtown area i don't know if this is like a common thing because i really didn't go to like a stay away college or anything like that.

But all the houses have names on them. Like there's like signs above all the porches and stuff. One of them was like the Big Lebowski. One of them was called Church and Rescue. One of them was like Margarita Sisters. So all the houses seem to have names. And I assume that's to make them look less shitty. But I don't know that for sure like

well you know it's got a fun name you don't really notice that it's got mold in the bathroom right right yeah yeah it looks like a nice small town from these pictures i like small towns yeah no it's not terrible one of the one of the funny stories that came out of this is uh it was some lady from it's like thailand or something was applying for schools and she applied for Miami university. And she's like, Oh, this will be awesome. I'll be able to move to Florida and,

you know, experience the Florida life. And she got accepted only to find out that it's Miami university in Ohio, which is the middle of nowhere. So I don't think it was quite the, the college experience she was looking for, but she became a tour guide and she likes telling people that story now i'm stuck here my parents won't contact me back in 1848 students participated in the quote snowball

rebellion i was looking up movies filmed in oxford ohio i don't know i don't know any of them there's a there's like 28 but i'm like uh have i seen any of these? You know, I was looking at the campus and it does look familiar. Like I've seen it in some of like in the background shots or something like that. But it's... It is a very nice campus. I've heard it's like a rich people school. Yeah, liberal arts school only has a couple of degree programs. The baseball field I'm working on is is super

nice and just a correction the the student that i was talking about will link the story in the show notes but she is from vietnam yeah so i'm sure sure that was quite the surprise when she found out where she was accepted to i mean just just from like anecdotal evidence that i have it probably gets a little colder where you are up there in ohio than it does here in miami florida well one of the one of the pictures is with snow so i assume you're correct i don't think there's any iguanas falling out of trees here i mean they are permanently falling out of the trees at that point uh yeah well that's that sounds fun tj how long are you in miami i mean oxford um yeah well that's the other thing right is for the for the longest time and there's people will tell me i was going to miami university i was like oh that's in miami

ohio so i was like google maps in miami ohio and i was like that's not a thing no it's oxford uh i'm here until friday night so i got here today um basically a waste of a day just to kind of look around and get the lay of the land and everything. Tomorrow is supposed to rain, so that's going to be a great day to work outside pulling wire. And then Friday, hopefully it doesn't rain and I'll be able to install the camera gear and get everything working. That sounds fun.

I love working in the rain. Oh, yeah, it's the best. It's like a weird setup too where they don't know where the conduit goes. It's kind of nice because they have all the conduit ran for everything but the guy is like uh this is the conduit i don't know where it really goes though but they have like a third party company that actually like installed the conduit and stuff and they're supposed to show up tomorrow to show me where the conduit they're just gonna come point that they're they're gonna come point they're not gonna like pull the wire or anything they're literally gonna point at the con to it which i feel like is a waste of money for everybody

but i i'm not paying the bill i guess don't worry yeah don't ask questions yeah it's like it's like a very annoying setup where i get like uh i get i get keys to all the buildings and stuff but i have to turn them in every day and so i have to go back to this office before midnight and turn the keys in or else i get like a 50 fine the ra is going to chase you down here here's a fun little fact there is a uh a satellite campus in uh hamilton not hamilton no by toronto it's hamilton ohio so i guess this part of ohio seems to um uh just take everybody else's names. Well, that's all of Ohio in general. So, I mean, we have Dublin and Oxford and London and Rushi, which is actually Russia. Oh, my God.

They have a Toronto, Ohio. Of course they do. City and Eastern Jefferson. Man, I'm learning so much about Ohio. What city are you in, Gavin? Is there a Pickering, Ohio? There's a Pickering 10. Close enough.

You stole our name still. We're learning so much today about Ohio. Well, welcome to the Ohio podcast. Podcast all about Ohio. The history of Ohio. Everything good about Ohio. It's only going to be one episode. Sorry.

Things to do in Oxford, Ohio. It's a very short episode. I'm probably next to a Dairy Queen. Oh you get some texas toast all right yeah you know i always found it fascinating that they serve you uh chicken tenders and fries and they give you a little cup of gravy with it like what is going on right now oh you haven't lived in the south very long i haven't you put gravy on everything well Well, I mean, my family's from Kentucky. We can drink gravy. I'll be in Milford, Ohio, the 11th through the 15th.

So I don't know if that's anywhere else. The TJ Ohio tour continues. That's right. I'm bringing you all over. You're welcome, listeners. Okay, that's enough about Ohio today. Find the Motel 6 and he'll leave the light on for you. I might splurge on a hotel for the next one.

You can just appreciate they have Wi-Fi this time. That's right. All right. Well, a couple of things happened this week. A couple of new products, too. So, I have to jump into those. What do you guys say we jump into these Home Tech Headlines? Let's do it.

All right. Walmart has announced the acquisition of TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion to enhance its television product. No, no, no. Not its television product line. Its advertising business. Oh, wow. Yeah. They have plans to leverage Vizio's SmartCast operating system for ad-supported content, streaming TVs.

Walmart aims to boost its media business. Walmart Connect potentially gain an edge over amazon's ad segment the move allows walmart to tap into vizio's 18 million active accounts and offer innovative entertainment experiences after the sale there you go not just moving the boxes but they're also ready to pump some new walmart advertisements and why why is everything about ads? I don't understand. That's the only way people make money.

Even with those subscriptions, people don't want to subscribe to things. They'd rather just deal with ads. I mean, no matter what the business is, it always comes back to ads because that's what people are fine with. I guess. It's gross, but I mean, it's the same reason like if Facebook turned around and started charging a subscription, people would just go away from it they'd rather just deal with the ads and promoted stuff than then deal with actually paying money even though it'd be a better product

this like this is an interesting purchase though i mean this you know for the longest time i i feel like during the initial like onslaught of smart tvs was like the recommended tv everywhere like if you talk to somebody everybody was recommending a vizio tv but that's kind of been replaced by like roku tvs and fire tvs and stuff like that and i really haven't heard that much about vizio tvs in the past i would say like two to three years at least i guess i never really recommended anybody i i always ran across the vizio tvs because i mean they were walmart samskill special right like but i always ran across them in in those clients homes that were like oh i've got a big tv i'm just going to use that and we'd go to install it and there'd be a

vizio tv there and like i'm not going to be able to program this there's no discrete codes that's that's all i've ever known it for i think later on they did introduce discrete codes into their products. You know, they paid the extra fraction of a cent to have the coders add that on for all of their TVs. But still, it was never a great picture on the TV. And also, they weren't easy to control. They were not possible to control um so always kind of like took a back seat to the big three or four tv manufacturers that were out at the time like sony lg samsung heck panasonic pioneer all the ones that were around back then and to be fair all those tvs you named are starting to get annoying when it comes to ads now like they're all doing the same thing now not hitachi not hitachi they're not going to or no mitsubishi not mitsubishi yeah i was like wait a minute they make tv still yeah i mean just just a weird weird company i mean like i said i feel like it was the original budget tv for smart tv stuff but their their smartcast operating system was never good and they always like excluded weird things.

Like I remember going to install a TV, a video TV one time, it didn't even have an antenna input on it. And I'm like, I've never seen a TV without an antenna input on it. But this specifically did not have one. There you go. I mean, they must have saved like five or $10 on it, but that's what they did. Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting here. I'll also link in our show notes, a story over to strategy strategy i was kind of like peeking through his coverage on this and he had gone through the financials and basically vizio is not a tv company it's basically a media company that has tv hardware that it uses to basically push content into your house they sell more tvs at a loss and you know they're basically using their advertising special software and all that stuff to kind of like make up the money and uh they make a decent amount of money it looks like there are 20 23 quarterly earnings uh 270 million dollars so not not a bad platform i guess yeah no Yeah. I mean, that makes sense too.

It's kind of the same thing we've talked about in the past where a lot of these TVs are being sold for extremely cheap because they're able to mine all the data from you. Yeah. And so, I mean, this is a good use case of that where Walmart recognizes that and they want a piece of that. Just sad. Because I think there's still people that care about having nice TVs. Like Gavin. He wants a nice TV that doesn't have advertisements. That's all I want. That's all I want.

You know? I don't ask for much. But why is it so hard to get a nice TV that doesn't bug you about advertisements? No. Or EULA updates. You know? That's just as bad, too. Like, stop updating your EULA.

Like, send me an email or something, but don't put the prompt on the TV. Right. Right. Yeah tvs kind of suck so i feel like if somebody just came out with uh like a tv that did not have all the smart stuff and just charged like 25 more people might buy it but people are such in the habit of buying cheap tvs now that i don't even see that happening it's kind of like the amazon effect right where if you go to buy something from an online store and they don't have free shipping you might not buy from them just because you've been conditioned to get free shipping yeah i feel like i feel like tvs are at that point as well like if you saw two tvs next to each other and one was like 200 more and it was just because it didn't have any smart stuff you'd be like half the people would be like i'm never buying that why it needs to come with the smart stuff yeah i wanted to buy a dumb tv but then i'd plug in like my google cast or

chromecast or whatever it is they have and let that feed me ads instead like you're not going to get away from these ads like well then you're basically stuck to buying like a like a signage tv or a professional tv but then you're lacking on the quality because it's basically just meant to be on 24-7. Yeah, well, some of the higher-end ones look fine, but they're expensive. Yeah, if you spend like $5,000 or $6,000. Yeah, you're paying the extra. You're paying the non-subsidized price for a TV, right?

So, wild. Well, there you go. Walmart will own Vizio and have an advertisement wing of their company to stream those falling prices. Walmart ads coming your way. Well, the new year wouldn't be a new year without another wise glitch that lets 13,000 people see other people's feeds.

I don't know. There's been a lot of outrageous reporting on this one, I think. But let's talk about it. During a recent service outage, Wyze security cameras experienced a, quote, glitch that allowed approximately 13,000 users to view incorrect thumbnails and event videos. Well, that's not correct,

but not associated with their accounts. The incident, partially caused by a third-party caching client library, resulted in the compromised user privacy um wise was pretty quick to disable access to the uh they basically just shut down the entire events tab on all of their apps which is kind of funny and they launched an investigation to fix the issue i guess wise is pointing their finger at saying well there's an amazon outage it's a weird caching thing that happened. When everything came up, it caused our servers to kind of crash

and perform strangely. And what happened was the device ID and the user IDs got mixed up. And one goes one way and the other goes the other way. So what? And then you get a picture of, you know, somebody else

that's not anybody you know in your living room no they're in their living room but you can see them approximately 1500 users interacted with the incorrect thumbnails and wise noted all affected users this has been happening a lot for internet connected cameras yeah yeah i mean well wise i would say wise has a history of it but they kind of just have a history of these reddit problems this was a Reddit problem to what it seemed like. Like, this is not something that we're going to keep using this term. This is a Reddit problem. This is something that they really couldn't control until it fell apart in front of them. And they see like, oh, that's what happens when this breaks, then they can fix it. And I mean, if it was another company

that didn't fix the problem and just let it go, I could see like bashing them, but they, Wyze eventually will have the best camera platform, streaming camera platform, the most secure platform on the face of the planet, just because they take so much heat every time something happens. And they technically could have given us any excuse about why it happened and we still wouldn't be able to prove them wrong right like they could make up whatever they want blame whoever they want that's fine but i think these camera companies they still need to work on their security more do more testing more qa you know because it hurts them every time they run into a situation like this and, you know, the media picks up on it.

Yeah, that's going to happen. I mean, if you're going to offer a service, so what you're trading away, I guess, as a consumer from like, if you just went out and got a regular camera,

this regular security camera, went to, went to TJ and bought one from him, it's going to work locally and just fine. But if you want to go outside of your house and use it, then it's got to connect to some other service or a server or something like that and you're just basically rely on them and and these cameras from wise i think they're primarily i know there's like a firmware thing you can do to kind of turn them turn on the local stream rtsp yeah i don't know

if that's on all the cameras though or just you may not be on them i say that that's an old thing but yeah yeah for the most part they're designed to stream out connect to a remote server where your phone can connect to the remote server you don't have to worry about firewalls you have to worry about your local internet security anything like that and you get the convenience of connecting to your camera and see what's going on in your house when you're thousands of miles away that's great but you are trading that privacy for convenience and that is a simple fact no matter what you're using like is if you are if you want to have a lockdown security system a camera system it's perfectly doable you may pay a little bit more maybe not i like oh well the wise cameras are 35 a piece or something like that so definitely a little more you're gonna pay a little bit more maybe not i like oh well the wise cameras are 35 a piece or something like

that so definitely a little more you're gonna pay a little more yeah but oh i mean maybe not over time because i think there's subscriptions with that you you wouldn't necessarily have that with a dedicated um security system or a dedicated camera but you may not have as much convenience uh or it may not be as easy to get back in or Or if you have a problem, guess what? There's no YCTO to yell at. You're the CTO and you get to fix the problem when you get home, but you don't get to watch your camera while you're away. So I don't know.

Like these kinds of things are going to continue to happen. As always, it just matters like how these companies react and what they do to fix the problem. If Y is walked away from, oh, it's AWS, we can't do anything about it. No, they said we're going to try this, this, and this, and that'll mitigate this issue from happening in the future. That's great.

I mean, that's a little bit more than we can ask for for people who sell $30 cameras. You know, I honestly wouldn't expect it from them. Honestly, we're surprised they even announced anything. Right. So, I don't know. Like, with all the breathless coverage from The Verge and Reddit, like, you'd think that, like, the world was ending with this stuff. But, in fact, it's just getting better because every time they find one of these bugs or some of these issues happening, they're able to go in and fix them.

And those mistakes or problems shouldn't happen again. Now, if they do happen again, then, yeah, that's when you start saying, oh, these guys are not truthful. But it seems to be a different problem every time. Liars! They have multiple problems, just different ones. That's fine, right? Well, the first one that was a huge big deal that The Verge was freaking out about for like years was like a feature that most people use to turn on a, like to basically turn on and share your feed to somebody who didn't have

your account to log in. You could share a URL and you could, you can share that URL to somebody. And I guess there may have been a way if somebody knew something about your system, like the hardware IDs or something like that, they could either brute force or find uh may have it was never proven that you could actually do that i think some security guy did

but he also kind of like cut some corners too but like that wasn't that was a feature and if you you turn it off it's a it's not an issue and i think now what they do is they just ship with that feature turned off you want to turn it on you can still turn it on it's still a security issue no it's a feature it was just turned on by default um so i i don't know like they're i think they've been kind of like drug through the mud for a 30 camera but for the most part they are doing a good job of following up with this stuff and they're doing more than i i guess i would expect for somebody who's selling a 30 camera to to fix their problems. So good for them. I think they've gotten good experience with doing these press releases and, you know,

customer interaction and stuff whenever this happens. I mean, it's happened enough that they know they probably have it down to a T now. Well, yeah. I mean, it's just like we're talking about this. And if you go over to the actual Department of Justice website, they have basically shut down a botnet that was running literally on everybody's route, like literally every manufacturer's router. Fortinet, like Ubiquity, they shut down a botnet that was running across a thousand Ubiquity. They basically went into these routers, the Justice Department did, and patched the problem or set it up to where they fixed the firewall firewall rules on them and then rebooted the router so the the trojan that was inside of it went away and russia or whoever china couldn't use it to you for ddos attacks and that kind of thing so like you you see that happening that gets no coverage but these cameras they show a few thumbnails to 1,500 people. And that's like, stop the presses.

We've got to talk about it. But one's a major thing. There's thousands of these routers out there that are installed on the edge of the internet and being attacked and not updated. But we're going to go after these guys. I guess it's low-hanging fruit because they sell a $30 camera. Yeah. And the DLG, were those routers owned by various companies and stuff like that too?

Yeah, it was all over. Yeah, they just said there's a thousand. Basically, I think they scanned for them or they figured out where or how they were controlled or something like that. And they just went into them and- Rebooted them? Yeah. Well, they changed the firewall settings to disallow admin access over the internet. That's the big problem, right?

Because these routers could be set up by default to basically allow admin access over the internet. And why anybody would do that? I don't know. I remember seeing that setting for years. It finally went away. But they went and turned that off and just reboot the router. And, of course, the Trojan stuff goes out of memory when you do that. So, yeah, there's a huge bunch of that that going on that's an unscheduled change at my

company they'd get big trouble for that rebooting it you know without a change ticket no ticket no reboot it's a lawsuit waiting to happen well hopefully you didn't have one of these i accidentally rebooted a server once and got in big trouble. It's easy to type reboot. Oh, yeah. Instead of log off, you accidentally click reboot and you're like, oh, crap. Yeah, it's happened. They caught me once.

It's happened more than once, but they only caught once. Oh, that's all that matters. Yeah. All right, let's move on here. We've got some new products we've got to talk about because there's some pretty cool stuff here. Inivelli is introducing the White Series, which are thread and matter-compatible devices for the smart home enthusiasts

that are seeking speed, brand compatibility, ease of use, all within the elegant design of an Inivelli switch. There you go. They've got thread matter protocols. They've got a nice little video we'll put in the show notes a little sizzle reel of all the uh i don't know computer generated views of switches that change colors and that kind of thing these look like all their other blue and red series and everything but they're white series i guess not that the color is white on them you can get them in other colors but like they have thread and matter and that's the big

deal yeah that's fancy and you know you you know i'm a big in a valley fan right like i'm huge all my switches are in a valley and that's one thing i really like about in a valley is that no matter if you got the z wave zigbee or matter version they all look the same. So you can mix them up in your house, which I have done, and it's not like they look different. I like that. That's a big win for me. Yeah, that is pretty nice that they keep that consistently. They're just changing the internals to match whatever they need to.

And I use the Inovelli Blue switches in a lot of my rooms, and they work great, especially when you do the smart bulb mode and Zigbee binding with the Blue series. I absolutely love them. So I think it's a good change. It actually gives you a good matter thread switch. I mean, there's a lot out there right now that kind of work over Wi-Fi, but I don't know. This might be the first nice one that actually works over thread. They do have a nice product.

I bought a couple of those. Still don't know what to do with them, but. Are they installed yet? No, I don't have anything to hook them up to. There's no Zigbee radio here. I'm hoping one day that Control 4 flips a switch and says, oh, we're going to be real Zigbee now. No, stop it. Do you buy these things

and look for a problem to solve you seem to work a different way here usually we have a we have a problem and we buy something to solve it you buy something and then look for a problem to solve that has deep pockets i just like nice things gavin come on in boxes apparently plenty of boxes yeah yeah so many boxes. They're nice. I like the little LED on them. And one day, and I figure out what to hook them up to, I'll hook them up.

But today's not that day. I do have a hallway, like that the control force, which is like one of the old version one control for things. I probably picked it up in a dustbin at work or something like that. It was getting thrown out. And like the plastic on it has broken off. So I need to go swap it out for a switch.

It's just a hallway switch. Rarely gets used, but the switch looks ugly. So maybe it'll go there. I can't control it, but maybe it'll go there. To be fair, the control for slithers are kind of ugly. I mean, this would be a huge upgrade for you you oh yeah the yeah especially gen one control it's not the gen two gen one was ugly gen two is ugly anyway but gen one definitely these ones just look like normal switches which is nice yeah yeah they got the little status feed light on it they're nice nice product nice design

good job in a belly all right right. Well, let's, let's talk about, well, here's some, if you, if you have night, you want a nice product, here's some nice products here.

Josh AI had their winter launch event. What was that today? Was it today or yesterday? It was today. Yesterday. Yesterday. Tuesday. It's kind of blended together at this point.

Tuesday, the 20th. Yeah. They announced a bunch of stuff, but primarily among the big, big things, I guess. And they have a new touchscreen that they're going to be putting out.

They have a new quote, open source platform for developers called nimble dev suite. They have announced a ton of integrations using that nimble dev Suite with a bunch of third-party companies, including Shelly, thermostats, audio systems, Vantage Lighting and Shades, all sorts of stuff that they announced there at the end about it. And yeah, I think they had a new, a new voice too. I kind of like jumped into this video, like halfway, a ton of new voices.

Yeah. They have like 30 in total now. Oh wow. Yeah. Which is good because the, the original voice I think is a little creepy and it's like way too robotic. I mean,

I was not a fan of it. Um, but the new ones, they actually have like AI generated ones and then they have, I think human ones and the AI ones, they actually have like AI generated ones. And then they have, I think, human ones. And the AI ones actually sound really good. Especially if you've heard other AI generated voices, they've all been kind of robot-y. Especially if you heard the Josh AI default voice. Yeah, it was not good. I mean, to me, it was very off-putting. So, the voices, I think,

is the biggest change that i'm happy about because now i don't feel weird when i talk to my josh listen it was kind of like a butler and with a we almost almost an english accent but not quite i don't know i never could place it and it was just kind of we had a weird it was a weird voice robot a robot butler from from maybe england maybe maybe maybe they were from like maine and pretended to have an english accent i don't know like it wasn't a real english maine and england are different places i know i know it was like they weren't from england but they pretended to have an english accent yeah like lobster lobster fishermen that are stuck in london

yes that's it that's it yeah yeah exactly no honestly this is a good this is a good um good update the the touchscreen i think is really interesting as well um because dealers are always looking for touchscreens but in my experience touchscreens that you put in the house almost always kind of suck um and you're basically you resort to doing like an ipad with an iport setup um but then you have to worry like an iPad with iPort setup. But then you have to worry about your iPad battery blowing up in like a couple of years. And so it's nice to be able to have this touchscreen that actually has Josh built into it. And so you can control your whole Josh system and everything like that.

So I think that's a very good update. Dealer cost, I think, is really good. I don't know what technical MSRP isp is um but i think it comes in a good price so i think a lot of people will opt for this um instead of josh you know micro nanos in a lot of places especially in like your kitchen or your living room and stuff like that well i saw a lot of guys on the video not on the video but in the chat on the video um saying that they were using ipads and that kind of thing they're like oh this will be better than ipads you know or some of them were like oh i'll just keep using the ipads but just depends on what they want to use i guess but

well the problem with the ipad is you don't get the you don't get the wake and everything like that so you walk up to it it doesn't really wake up to you it doesn't really respond to your voice and everything like that so that this will solve that problem because when you have a tablet on the wall you want it to respond to you you don't have to just walk up and start touching and stuff like that so right and gavin what'd you think uh no i thought it was a great um great presentation uh they showed off a lot of new features you didn't mention the ava remote um integration looks like they they're more integrated with the new AVA remote.

They showed off their new area interface. I really like their interface. Like, it's very clean. It's well thought out. And I'm almost feeling like to start duplicating parts of it in my home assistant setup. You know, that's the first thing. It's like, I was looking at certain things going, hmm, how can I do that for myself? So, you know, I like that.

The touchscreen I was impressed with, you know, I thought touchscreens were dead. They kind of brought it back, right? And, you know, it looks nice too, right? So they're making good progress moving forward. And the one shocking thing, and I don't have any more details on this, but they mentioned Matter and Home Assistant. I don't have any more details on this, but they mentioned matter and home assistant.

I don't know where that's going. They just mentioned it and kind of like in one sentence quickly, um, we'll see where that goes in the future. I'm pretty sure there'll be more announcements later. Give it to me. I want to integrate with home assistant. I mean,

honestly, it's like, it's a perfect match. I mean, right. They're, they're both local systems. Um,

so it's just one of those things that seems like it'd be a natural fit. The coolest thing out of this whole announcement, though, is the Nimble platform. And, you know, last year at Cedia, they kind of started to make their play at becoming a home automation platform. And this has kind of been happening over the years. But I think Cedia kind of like cemented that. But the problem was that there wasn't a ton of integrations with third party services.

And so basically, you could integrate with like Control 4 and a couple others. But it wasn't a lot. It's not what you would think of with a home automation system. And so to see them coming out and supporting Shelley and Yale and August lock and Google nest and Honeywell and all these other companies is really good. And that's only going to progress throughout the year. And so I think, I think a lot of people are going to probably start looking at this to

replace their current automation systems, whether it's control for Crestron home or anything like that. Or, or augment augment as well. Like you can augment a lot like crestron home you crestron control four you can put this over the top of it and use this as the interface into your smart home yeah absolutely i i noticed here that the ai voices um i guess the ai voices what distinguishes them from the horrible and i just found the guy's name here is zermatt default voice yeah z-e-r-m-a-t-t

that's why it's awful yeah uh sounds like he's gonna destroy us it says ai voices are higher quality but may take longer to respond depending on the internet connectivity so it's and then zermatt of course is not an ai voice because he sounds awful. But it says local. So it sounds like those voices are local and the other ones kind of stream in. So it sounds like Josh is becoming more cloud dependent in a way, too. They were already cloud dependent. It was always made as a local processor for some of the automations. But the entire voice thing was always

cloud dependent yeah which is fine i mean if you're throwing this in somebody's house they they have internet so your your automations and stuff will still work locally but you know some of the other stuff you're you're going to need internet access for yeah i know which one to switch it to tahoe and anton sound much better as british people than zermatt yeah i know which one to switch it to tahoe and anton sound much better as british people than zermatt yeah i forget which one we chose some of these are just horrible uh but they they do have uh they do have american voices and uh breck is one of them hunter jackson i i chose veil and uh female british ai voice yeah there's something about that british accent that just makes you know interacting with your voice assistant better you know yeah it just makes you want to listen to

him you know yeah exactly i would never turn on an american one i would just try i'm gonna upset most of our listeners right now i tried the canadian one they just kept saying sorry it wasn't really getting sorry i can't do that sorry i do not understand you sorry for saying sorry is there actually a canadian one no oh i have to write them i don't think ping alex we need a canadian voice it's like everything else though american british australian uh indian irish scottish south african no canadian i'm upset now i'm like Australian, Indian, Irish, Scottish, South African. No Canadian. I'm upset now.

I'm like, we're just north of you. How could you leave us out? Honestly, I would choose the Canadian one if they made it sound like somebody from Letterkenny. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. Give your automation system a tug. That's what I appreciate about you. I'm glad you think of Canada as Letterkenny.

Oh, man. I would go out more if you guys were all like Letterkenny. I'll let the Prime Minister know. All right. Well, all in all, it seemed like a pretty good event for them. A lot of excitement in the chat that was streaming by during the video. And I like how they do that. They put a nice video together, well shot and produced, put together.

And then the people that are in the video, they're not having to do the video because it's already produced. And they're in there talking to people as it goes by. So I really like that form of of reveal or whatever they call it yeah that they do on youtube and they do a good job of it so all right well let's move on here all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm 471 all right pick of the week uh well we got two of them uh one that made me literally laugh out loud today. Thanks, Gavin.

He wrote on there, I've got a new TV from Timu. The price was great. And there's a TV on the wall, and it's booting up, it looks like. It's got the splash screen. It doesn't say Stamsong. It says Smasnug. You've got a brand new Smasnug smash snug tv hey the price was great though i don't care what it says on the tv okay quick glance it's in samsung but it's not it's smash snug so looks like a quality picture too oh yeah hgtv for sure 1080p those whites are not bleeding

out into the black at all yeah Yeah. It came in K4. K4. I don't know why Walmart bought Vizio when they could have bought this. It's mass nugget. Yeah, exactly. Uh, and the other one is kind of keeping in,

in our TV theme here. Um, I ran across this video on Tik TOK and it is, uh, it says POV buying electronics in the year 1996. And it is, uh, like a,

a video or a walkthrough of, um, an electric electronic store in the late 1900s. 1990 something. 1996. Five years after I was born. Oh wow. The funny

part about this video is everybody kept looking at the cameraman funny and then i clued into it he was probably carrying uh one of those big vhs cameras on his shoulder while he was following people around so no wonder they were looking at him funny not a phone no not one of those flip cameras nope it was definitely a camcorder or something yeah everybody kind of looks over their shoulder like what's this guy guy doing? This is weird. But yeah, they're measuring TVs to make sure they fit, you know, the width and depth.

Those 27-inch TVs, they must have cost a lot back then. I can't see any prices on the video, but they're very expensive, I'm assuming. Yeah, I don't... I mean, so like, this store is not Circuit City, but it very much

reminds me of, of working in circuit city way back. Um, the way it's things are laid out, the TV is the big, it could be just a massive circuit city or something. I don't see the name of this store, which is kind of weird, but there were all sorts of these little regional electronic stores like this all over for, for a while. of ended in the 2000s at some point, unfortunately. But yeah, this is a large one, and they've got tons of TVs. They've got, it looks like CDs and things. There's even like a balcony in this place. People are walking upstairs looking at more TVs.

So this was an extremely large electronic store back in the day it's funny to see a little little nostalgia here just for the tvs the tvs they were so big you had to have large areas back then right like now they're flat and you can stack them nicely and you know fit more in but not these ones now you can't even get rid of the furniture for free that all these tvs went into because i'm constantly going to people's houses where they're upgrading TVs and stuff like that. And they're like, what do I do with this building cabinet? I'm like, well, just chop it up and burn it, I guess,

because nobody wants them. Yeah, we would, there were a lot of times that people had the old box, you know, when they built their houses, they would have the DLP TVs because those are popular, you know, in the, about this time, I guess, around the 2000s, 2001, somewhere in there when Samsung and others came out with those DLP and even the projection TVs before that were pretty popular. They have built-in cabinetry and that kind of thing. So

like a lot of times we would get a cabinet company to come in and like build a custom cabinet underneath it to match the finish of their cabinet and then put this backboard in there and then hang a flat TV in the space that's given. And it was always like a nice thing where they didn't have to, like, they were all freaking out that they were going to have to update their cabinetry and everything. And it's like,

no, no, we'll just, we'll get this done. This little, one little step and it'll look nice. And whenever you do go to remodel and you want to rip out the cabinets, you didn't break your bank, you know, doing this stupid TV update.

So it's fun. Nostalgia. There you go. Times have changed. I think I had this, like, there's a guy walking around with a Nike outfit on. I was like, I had that outfit. You wore that to work, didn't you? You're balling.

Yeah. It's like, I think I shopped at the same place he did. So, all right, let's move on here. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

I can't say that i had any project updates i was working on a car this weekend so i hate working on cars by the way i don't like cars yeah it's horrible and basically all it does is tell me and let me find out in the worst possible way about an hour or two into it that i don't have the tools to do this i have the tools to maybe like hang a tv or punch down an entire network rack don't have the tools to do this. I have the tools to maybe like hang a TV or punch down an entire network rack. Do I have the tools to take a starter off a 1996 BMW Z3? I do not. I do not. I didn't even know some of the tools existed that I needed for this. So thanks, German engineering. Whenever I work on cars, I do two things. I make sure I work on them while the stores are open.

And I always make sure I have a backup car to drive to the store to get what I need for the car I'm working on. You know, whenever I go to work on a car, I just take it to the mechanic because I don't work on my car anymore because it sucks. Yeah, no, that's, these need to go to the mechanic. Well, actually this little one, it shouldn't have to go to the mechanic, but like the starter didn't work. And I'm like, oh, it's right there. I can kind of see it. And there's just two bolts that

hold it in. I can kind of see those two. And they're the two bolts are like some weird star shaped Torx bolt thing that I've never seen in my entire life. I had no idea these things existed, but they do, they do. And I packed up and Amazon was still open and I ordered the set that I needed. So it's in it's sitting on the floor over there. And maybe in three more weeks, I'll get back to putting this stupid car because it's not going to happen anytime soon. DJ, we know what projects you've been working on. Do you got any updates on the house project or anything or you're just i do i do have to give a shout out to you seth so uh seth seth heard my complaints and i don't know if we talked about this on the last show or not i feel like we didn't but seth heard my complaints that i was using three different poe switches in my ubiquity system and he was like well actually i have this other switch underneath my my desk i think he's just using it as like a footstool or something i'm not really sure um but he shipped it to me and i got it installed and i went from a 42 watt poe

switch to a 500 watt poe switch wow and i really like it my only problem is though is that it's so freaking loud oh my god i knew it when he sent it to you i didn't i know it lived in a closet i didn't hear it at all yeah i got it installed and i was like oh this is great i'll plug all my stuff into it and then i went into the laundry room later and i was like what is that noise and i'm like looking around i'm like it is so loud in here and it's it's the ubiquity switch data center yeah i was looking it up and it's like a metal cabinet you know it's in a rack too and so i was like man it's just so loud and so it's like looking up information about it and i was like you can change out the fans to noctua ones and it'll be a little quieter but nothing crazy you can disable some of the poe ports and that

might help it it didn't help. I disabled some PoE ports. I don't really feel like switching the fans out. And so it's just, it's going to be my white noise machine whenever we're in the laundry room. So luckily you can't hear it like really in the hallway, but as soon as you step into the laundry room, it's just, it's so loud,

but you know, promise to Seth, I don't have to worry about PoE power anymore. Silver linings. Yeah, you know. So, thanks for that, Seth. You just happen to have an extra one. No problem.

What a nice guy. I had an extra switch and I didn't need the ubiquity one. So, bye. He went bye. I bet you that's why it was sitting under his desk this whole time, not plugged in. He probably plugged it in, said this is too loud. And he said, I'll give it to TJ. No, no. plugged in he probably plugged it in said this is too loud and he said i'll give it to tj no no that one that one lived in a closet in the in the uh forbidden closet of mystery as we call it

so i i um i was i was kind of moving stuff around i had a net gear switch of kind of the same vintage and i wanted to use that instead of the ubiquity for various reasons so i i popped that one in and had the ubiquity laying around. I just have, and the, the net gear honestly is, is just as loud. Like I noticed when I was working on,

I'm like, it's loud. It's just when you get a 48 port switch with POE, that's what they sound like. Yeah. Well, it's a lot of power. I mean,

it's like a, it's basically a desktop power supply at that point. So whenever you, whenever we have our desktop computer on, you can hear it as well because that's, you know, six or 700 watts. So not complaining, just something I noticed.

And I am very happy to go down to one switch compared to three I think I was using before. Nice. That is the only project I've had, though, minus working. What about you, Gavin? I feel like I'm the only one that really does anything during this week. You guys actually work? You have to make time for your projects, right? That's the life of an IT person, though.

Let's not play cool here. When people call me, I ask them to reboot their computer first, and that gives you a lot of free time while I wait on them to reboot. You're one of those tech support people that's like, oh, let me go ahead and pull this up. Go ahead and unplug your machine for five minutes no five minutes why five minutes i don't know just give it a shot i'm gonna put you on hold i'll be back call me back in 30 minutes after you reboot reboot and wait 30 minutes and see if it's still happening you know that's that's my

thing usually but anyways yeah exactly anyways i've just an update on my z-wave floodlight project so this was for those of following this was the project where i took like a floodlight cam um and basically gutted it and rewired it so the lights are controlled by z-wave and a reason i did this was so i can associate the switches with it. So if the hub or anything's still down, I could still control the lights on my floodlights through the switch using associations and stuff. And it's been working beautifully. I basically put in a Zeus relay in there to control the lights. But after I put it all together, I realized if I ever have to unpair and repair this thing, I have to actually take it off to be able to press the button three times to do all that stuff on the Zeus relay. So I went up one more time.

I added an external button into the case. So now I don't have to disconnect anything. One, that button allows me to manually control the light. If I ever press it, it'll turn on and off the lights, but two, I just triple press it and it will put the Z wave relay into, uh, you know, exclude or include mode. And I don't have to actually unwired or anything. So I'm loving this project. I'm now moving on to my other Z wave floodlights. Cause I have a few of them that I want. And it was part of my ongoing project of making, um, I guess my house still,, my house still more reliable if the hub ever goes down, for example. So there are certain automations that are very hub dependent, right?

But if Home Assistant locks up or gives problems or whatever, for whatever reason, I still want this switch to be able to turn on that light, right? Without an automation. So I've been going through my various automations and just saying, make sure manual control still works because I had a few of them. One of them was my basement lights. You know, I ended up doing a putting in a Zigbee, in a Valley Zigbee and doing bindings to all my basement lights. So now if the hubs ever down, I can still control all the lights in the basement.

No problem. So that's just one of the projects I've been working on throughout the year. Slowly I'll find something and then I make it more reliable. Uh, and then, yeah, this was the week again, I'm loving my 3d printer.

And the fact that I haven't gotten in trouble this week means that my wife really does not listen to this podcast because I know last week's podcast, mentioned i was thinking about getting the prusa mk4 well i ended up ordering it i don't know when i'll get it you know they're notorious for shipping months away but you know i ordered it i placed the order she probably hopefully still won't listen to this podcast and know so until i get it but I'm already planting seeds. So I'm leaving like a threaded rods by my other printer and stuff like that. So when it does show up and she asked me, what's that?

I'll say, Hey, I 3d printed another printer. That's what the threaded rods were for. And those other parts sitting by the printer these last few months were for, I'm thinking ahead here. So I don't get in trouble. Right. So as far as she's concerned, I'm going to be

3d printing another printer. She's going to be like, Gavin is so industrious. Yeah, yeah, you know, and if she sees leftover, like threaded rods and stuff, she'll be like, oh, look, you must have cut those rods and put it in the 3D printer, you know, and stuff like that. I'll be like, yeah, exactly. You know, this is pro.

I'm going to send you guys a letter so she knows. No, no, stay out of this stay out of this these are pro tips for our listeners you know i have pro tips too here you know right um so i'm looking forward to that mk4 like i've been reading reviews and so many things on it um it's a nice looking printer it's gonna going to double the speed. I'm so excited. Uh, also this week was the home assistant year of the voice chapter six. Right. So I watched that presentation and it was so good to see that, you know, after last year's year of the voice, they haven't stopped iterating on it. So they're still holding, you know, um, presentations and stuff.

And then this one, they basically announced local wake words. So basically before you, when they had their little satellite devices, it was streaming the audio to home assistant and home assistant was doing the wake word detection. And it created a lot of network traffic. It created a lot of, um, uh, CPU utilization on your, your home assistant, depending on how many you had. Right. Well, now they've released, um, uh, ESP home, uh, what do they call it? Uh, they added a micro wake word service for ESP home. So now that can be programmed to capture the wake words. And once it detects the wake words, then it starts, you know, sending everything

off to home assistant that it needs to set off. So that was a big deal for them. Um, it's another step in the right direction for their local voice control, which is looking really good. Every time they, they add more stuff, um, it's just hard to get the hardware that they're playing around with. And it's still not at the point where it's going to replace, uh, the a lady or, you know, Josh or anything like that, but it's getting close. Right. Um, I was actually, you know, seeing if there were any iterations of integrating this with chat GPT because, you know, it'd be nice to just say to it, you know, like,

without me having to program these things, just go, hey, are any windows open in the house? And it tells me what rooms are open and stuff like that, right? Like, I don't want to have to program anything, but it could integrate with chat so it could analyze what's happening in my house. Like if you're feeding chat, this is where I would like to see it. But say you're feeding chat GPT, like all the events happening in your home assistant. Right. Then chat GPT has all this information.

I'd like you to analyze that information and say something like, hey, it's going to rain this afternoon. You have a window open. You know, you might want to close it. You know, that's the kind of thinking I wanted to get to, or, you know, nobody's home going to lower the temperature in the house to automatically. I know you could do that by creating things, but it'd be nice if this is all automatic. It's built in. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, and it starts thinking like that. So it becomes a more aware home house. And I have a feeling we'll get there at some point. I just keeping an eye on it because all you got to do is feed the information. If it knows all your contact senses and their states, it can make decisions. Right. And it just needs to be able to constantly monitor that and then how it notifies you is the other thing.

But it would be cool if we get to that point. Yeah. The, the, the seeing trends and um so these large language models are at least the way they work um the language could be anything so like seeing a sensor turn on and off can be a language to this thing and if it has the correct setup and i guess prompting and that kind of thing to do what you're talking about and kind of like be able to infer or figure out like something that is maybe outside of the norm like oh the door that window's open it's 9 30 he probably doesn't know like that that would be a really cool thing to have yeah

it'll say oh he left the garage door open but they're all in the bedroom right now you know maybe he wants to close the garage door. Let's let them know. Right. Stuff like that, you know, cause currently we program all that stuff, you know, and there's, there's so many points of failure, like where it could go wrong. That's why I don't implement some of these things. Right. But if it's got that information, that would be nice if it would just act, not act on it,

but at least notify you that that's where i want to see this going and i'm like i said i think at some point we will get there um i just we're not there yet but i could see us moving towards that yeah i i've been doing a lot of like reading and and and figuring out how this how the tokenization stuff works with it. You know, I got to make this Gavin GPT thing. So it's an interesting product. It really is. Like, I don't think the nuts and bolts of this stuff is so far outside how everything else we understand works.

It's really amazing that they're very smart people that put this stuff together. Let's just say that. They are very, very smart people that put this stuff together. Let's just say that they, they are very, very smart people that, that have been able to program and, and put these neural pathway network things together to make this seemingly thing full of this,

this thing that's full of gibberish to literally everyone else on the planet. Just think like, or pretend to think like, it's really, really cool what they've done. It's only going to get better because like, you know, it can even protect us from doing dumb things like if i just say turn

on all the lights i'm hoping it would sit there and go are you sure you want to turn on all the lights you know you know or something like that right it would be cool so i'm i i'm excited to see where they go with this um there's so much potential there though with it yeah we say all that with the hallucination hallucinations of the chat gbt did yesterday i guess people were experiencing all sorts of anomalies from chat chat gbt was just kind of like going off i saw some screenshots where they would ask a simple question and it had like three or four paragraphs of response it just kept going it was like this thing is hallucinating i don't understand so um i guess they have done a post-mortem on that and it says there was a bug in a step where the

model chooses certain numbers you know these tokens and there was a there was a bug in that and they did a rollback on it and and it turns out it's back to normal. Yeah. Chad's back. And that's why I'm not, I don't want it to be, like, able to control anything yet, right? So at this point, I'd be happy if it just monitored and notified, but had no control.

So it'd say, hey, your garage door is open. Do you really, you know, or it would monitor my driveway and say, Hey, I see somebody walking up the driveway, trying your car doors, maybe, you know, and they would know to wake you up. You're sleeping. It's like, Hey, maybe I should really wake them up, you know, that type of thing. So like I said, it's the potentials there. It's just taking time and I'm looking forward to it. I mean, I have the paid version of it now, and I've been using that more and more. Like just today, I was having an issue

with a script I was working on and I just took the section of the script, fed it to it and asked it why this was happening. And it spit back the reason why it was failing. And I was like, I was amazed that it figured that out. But it's pretty good at what it does. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's good. Yeah, and does i mean it's not perfect but it's good yeah and there's and so we're just talking about one particular brand of this thing

chad gpt because you know that's what everybody knows but google came out with gemini pro today i guess that was the renamed bard i think right they keep changing name but it's available in canada now i think too yeah i think i think they rolled it out i don't know they it's and people have i put a link in our show i'll put a link in the show notes about somebody saying that the killer feature this is video and how it can analyze and figure out based on a video you shot um or upload to it what um what's in that video and in this guy had a he says it's a video of his bookshelf and he asked for a JSON array which which is a programming thing of books in the video. And it's the second video of just scanning by his bookshelf.

And this crazy thing has basically broken everything down. It responded in bullet points, and he asked, no, I want a JSON array, and it gave him a JSON array. That's incredible. And it didn't use very much, it uses 1800 tokens of his 1 million tokens that he had. So that's really cool. There's all sorts of stuff going on.

I saw one today that was also an open source local thing that was kind of doing what GBT4 is doing, where it kind of figures out what route it wants. You can give it anything and it will take a programming language,'ll take a video a picture and figure out you know what you want to do with it uh text of course it'll go on that this stuff is just iterating so quickly i mean on itself and not on itself like people are really working on this right now because it's kind of a cool thing it's happening it's happening

what i'm talking about is any gpt and it will take uh anything that you throw at it speech image music send it to music uh everything it'll it'll go into it and process it and figure out what it is it's a rabbit hole like when i eventually decide to find some time to go down that rabbit hole you know i would want something where you know just here's all my shares on my home server right just yeah index it get to know it so then when i can say i need a receipt from this store you know that i bought this that it would then be able to pull up the receipt and feed it to me you know like that's where i'm hoping we get i'm pretty sure they're working on it um i i but that kind of thing i want to keep local too right uh and maybe have it running on the home server you

know yep yep that's all coming that's all coming it it does take a long time to in computer power to kind of like process this stuff but what you're talking about it's not very data intensive and it should be able to we should be able to have that stuff what you're talking about is not very data intensive and it should be able to we should be able to have that stuff what you're talking about fairly soon. Maybe we'll even have Gab and GBT fairly soon. I don't know. It'll come to control 4 here soon. Yeah.

Gab and GBT we're targeting home assistant first. It's a home assistant first platform so we'll see what happens. As long as I get paid for this. Oh no. No. I see what happens. As long as I get paid for this. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, you might. I don't know. This is my problem.

I have all these ideas. I just don't know how to monetize things. So speaking of which, I will be in Phoenix next week at Lightapalooza showing off our non-monetized product for linear lighting design. And if you want to check that out, there's a conference you can go to in Phoenix. And then we're have some features that we'll be launching next week as well, which are really cool.

Ooh, vision, vision pro integration. Is that what I hear? Vision pro. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah.

No, it's a webpage and we deliberately cut off using it from your phone or tablet. So it's like, this is a desktop application for real people doing real work what year is this yeah i i i have enough i don't know like it seems like we probably could open it up but right now it's optimized for desktop so we're gonna we're gonna focus on that anyway yeah phoenix be there, be square. I'm sure a lot of news will come out of that because it's a fun conference.

It's gotten big this year. Like 900 people are going to this thing. So it's bigger than it was last year. All right. All right, well, let's move on here. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support through our Patreon page. If you don't know the Patreon page, head over to hometech.fm slash support

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to call our servers. I don't know. We have less spammers. We have less spammers. Yay.

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 and every a month gets you a big shout out here on the show. And every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slash at the Hub

where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about moving to Discord. I don't know. Should we move to Discord? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe if you feel strongly about it. If you don't want us to, sign up for Patreon this week. Patreon, exactly. That'll help us decide. Let us know.

Alright. If you want to help out but can't support financially totally understand just appreciate a five-star review uh or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice to help people find the show that's going to be all the news for this week everybody have a great weekend we'll see you take care till next time anything more about ohio nope nothing okay not for a couple weeks a couple weeks i'll tell you about a new location okay pawpaw season yet no no for