HomeTech.fm - Episode 477 - The Enshittification of TVs

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

On this weeks show: Josh.ai launches new integrations, LG TVs need an update, Roku ruins TVs, SwitchBot, Yale, and Aqara have Matter news, a pick of the week, a pick of the week, project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast, recorded on Friday, April 12th, 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 technology, home automation, and yeah, we're recording late this week, so probably, I don't know're we kind of messed up like i think we're off our wednesday recording day yeah it's already hard for me to get to show up by friday yeah now we're just going to do it on friday and expect you to release it on friday i don't know how that's going to work i mean it's like the same thing

though right i mean no one's going to know you start on friday and yeah as i say we all know you do this at work so it doesn't matter how early we give you the podcast you still just edit it on the friday oh right right exactly that's exactly what i do and it's always something i don't have to do anything to do on friday so no no no we know know the responsibilities i've seen your calendar if you get a calendar i noticed when something i was looking at it because we were talking about calendars the other day, and I want to say happy birthday, Richard. Now, this will be a belated birthday wish because I will not get this out before his birthday, which is over the weekend. Happy belated birthday, Richard.

Yeah, there you go. I'm sure it will be belated, but if not, happy birthday either way. Happy birthday, Richard. Yes. It's been a busy week here, and it's a late night already. So what do you say we jump into these Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. All right.

We talked about this before, but Josh AI has officially launched its Nimble Dev Suite. It's the integration platform for smart homes supporting various platforms and protocols, all aiming to enhance interoperability and flexibility with Josh AI systems. The systems will receive an over-the-air update with the Nimble-enabled firmware soon, if not already. I guess, TJ, you've updated, right? You said it's on there. Yeah, so I have access to it online. I have not got to play with it at all yet. I have Nanoleaf stuff, so I'll have to work on that over the weekend to get that set up ask me ask me yeah gavin have you updated yet no because i'm not allowed to get

a josh ai and i'm not certified you know hey look i tried to sell you one i think you said it was too much money robot lawnmower something something it you were also trying to sell me your service for support you know and that was where I drew the limit. Yeah. I know I'm not allowed to get Josh AI. So I haven't updated yet, unfortunately. Well, it looks like if you do get a Josh AI system and you do update one of these days,

you can use this with the, what they're calling inaugural integration partners. And I guess like Google nest, August, Yale, big ass fan, Shelly, Vantage, Infusion Systems, Hunter Douglas, PowerView, and a couple more. Yeah. partners and i guess like google nest august yale big-ass fan shelly vantage infusion systems hunter douglas power view and a couple more yeah the shelly one is really huge honestly yeah yeah it is that is pretty big i i'd like to see them open i don't i talked to them briefly at light

a couple months back maybe a month back now and they said you know they're 50 50 on kind of like opening it up for third party development. I'm really hoping they do because it'd be nice to put another control system and, you know, quiver in the hat, I guess, and start working on some drivers and integrations with them. So, um, I hope they do that because it does advance the platform, but I can understand why they don't want to do it and they just want to do everything in house. But at the same time, that's slower because you can't, eventually you have to support all the stuff that you make and it becomes harder.

Support is the hard part, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you definitely can't discount what they've done so far, but I agree. I think they need to open it up a little bit and so that way we can get some more integrations because this is a good start. It's an interesting list, I think,

especially the mix of consumer and more professional stuff that you see there. But it's a good start, and I really just hope they do open it up. Give me Home Assistant. That's all I want. Home Assistant with my Josh AI. Bam, done.

Yeah, open it up. I have so many ideas for the system that I'm not allowed to get, but I'll donate ideas, and Seth can then develop them. Yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah. And, yeah.

And it'll probably, I hear they'll probably have, like, Sonos headphone integration, too, one of these days. Ooh. You could just walk around and talk to Josh A. through your headphones, I think. Yeah, I actually have a development about the Sonos headphones, so we'll talk about that a little bit later. You're smiling.

You're smiling. Oh, that's a hook. All right, let's move on here. We have another fun story here. Well, this one isn't quite as fun, but as many as 91,000 LG TVs are at risk from being hacked due to four critical vulnerabilities identified in very specific models.

The vulnerabilities can be exploited by malicious hackers to gain root access to the tvs and run commands on the os level bypassing authentication methods um the effective models include the lg 43 um 7000 the oled 55 the oled 48 c1 uh c1 yeah c1 the oled 55 a23 and uh you need to update these things to get them fixed, or they can be hacked. You don't want to get hacked, do you? Yeah, I didn't even want to connect any of my TVs to the internet, but I kind of had to for IP control,

because I bought my first global cache device and tried to set it up, and I hated my life, so I took it back. And so now I just deal with the constant user agreements and updates that LG sends to me. Because IR control is still a pain in 2024. So the CVEs that are getting exploited are from 2023, it looks like. Yeah, way up there too. Oh, yeah.

Well, they're being tracked as 2023, but they were published recently. So I don't even know which TV I have. But I have auto updates turned on on my tv because it's just something i didn't feel like i wanted to manage and you know on the other side of that i've been burnt by auto updates as well because i've gotten updates i actually broke things like dimming on the tv so they need to make sure if you want people to update make sure your updates don't break the functionality of the TV. Yeah, these look pretty bad.

I guess if somebody already had somewhat access in, they could find the LG TV. These are not hard to find on a network. Usually they are broadcasting that they are there and ready to, I don't know, cast video or something to. And so it's not hard to find. It looks like these are these are, um, web OS exploits, which is the software that runs on there that you can get in and get down to the root level. And then you're, you have a, what a foothold within the, uh, within the house or

business or whatever. There's a lot of like LG TVs that run this web OS, like thinking like in your house, but these things that run web os commercially all over the place so think about like all those what are those golf places that have all those tvs in them uh top golf yeah yeah tvs everywhere those are all lg running lg web os like they somebody could get in there and hack into one of those tvs and then hack into the payment system who knows you know it's these are these are smart people. So get out there, update your TVs. This is a fun story we saw kind of pop up after the show last week.

In a recent article, a dystopian patent filed by Roku, of all people, reveals plans for, quote, HDMI customized ad insertion on its smart tvs and devices allowing targeted ads during content pauses you press pause you get an ad and it's going to detect that you you've basically paused whatever you're watching you know and now because you've paused that means you're not watching the tv the screen's not moving anymore that means you want to see an ad yeah there was a lot of articles like this i will link everybody in our show notes over to the one over the atlantic because it's well written and funny to read so i mean in a business sense this this is actually kind of smart and that's what's kind of annoying but it's just it's

one of those things that's awful and we don't need it it's like it's like the glowing very bright billboards on the highway you know you just you don't need this at all like it's like the glowing very bright billboards on the highway you know you just you don't need this at all and nobody's asking for it don't do this and just last month they they had that um like you could not they locked you out of your tv until you agreed to their terms oh yeah service agreement yeah yeah anyway roku not on the good list these days they've moved to the dark side, I think. Didn't Walmart buy them or something? It will always eventually reach a point where they're going to have to do something with ads.

You know, they've already hooked you with the cheap TV. Now they're taking over with the ads. Hell no, I will not stand for this. I will work on any ad blocker open project to try and, you know, block this at the network level, you know, like this is not okay. And it sets a precedence, you know, it starts when you're, you're paused, you know, at some point they're going to say, oh, we're going to start sliding in ads while you're watching the program, you know, kind of like how your TVs are now, you know, like the screen moves

over a bunch of ads started showing you know like they really are going to be intrusive about it at some point and they will probably come out with some kind of subscription service so that you could pay to not have these ads you know and then we'll all say gavin we'll all say uh oh only three dollars a month i can afford that but not knowing that next year it's now nine dollars a month right like like seriously this is just no like we should at this point we should not be letting them do this um i just don't think people will push back yet but i think we should stop it from now because it's just gonna get worse yeah and i will not buy a roku tv because of this i mean i complain a lot about my LG TV, right? And I can imagine them doing this at some point too, right?

100%. I also see it's- Well, now that they have the patent, they probably want, because it'll be locked to Roku unless LG's paying Roku. Can you imagine it gets to a point where your TV won't even work if you don't connect it to the internet? Because then you can't stop it from getting all these things. I'm pretty sure some of them already like that.

I think the Roku might be like that. A couple of others, though, are definitely you need internet to set them up. Yeah. Well, I blocked my LG TVs from basically doing their little reporting data out. And WebOS is such a great thing on my TVs. It locked them up. So I couldn't even turn it on and off. I had to hard power the TV just to get webOS from being locked up.

Yeah, see, that's crazy. And if you don't agree to like all their terms and services, their apps don't, like the apps on the TV, like the AirPlay 2 and stuff, don't even work. Yep. Why do I need your terms and services for AirPlay 2 to work? That makes no sense. Right? But that's, yeah. Oh, don't get me started.

You already got me. The inchification of our tvs yes where this is yeah yeah yeah yeah where it's here yeah i mean oh this is just a patent so like they could do this they could not they're gonna do this they're gonna do this well roku will yeah and the fact that walmart didn't buy them walmart bought vizio a couple weeks back so yeah walmart would do this yes and you know the fact fact that they even have the ability to know when you paused it just shows how much visibility they have

over what you're watching. Right? Which is crazy too. Yeah, that is pretty crazy to think about. Yep. I used to recommend Roku TVs just because they were so easy to set up. They actually have a decent amount

of integration capabilities with them. I don't think I'd recommend them today. Like they're just not, they're becoming a weird gross company uh even the little streamers i guess the drama last week um middle or the beginning through the the end of the week was uh was roku had updated some of they did like a rolling update it was kind of weird uh but it basically was started to break a lot of people's integrations with control four driver shocker and all the other manufacturers like yeah we're not having a problem so we must but it turned out it looked like it was a rolling update and it was on roku's end i guess they stopped it and then they had started rolling out a fix for it as well um but yeah it's

it's not that's never fun so if you're gonna if're going to put ads on the TV, don't break stuff, man. Stop it. Like Gavin said, don't break stuff with an update. And make them relevant ads, but don't look at my browsing history. That would be awkward if those ads came up in the family living room. You just want them to advertise. Robotic lawnmowers, you know? Yeah, robot lawnmowers.

Last year it was an LG OLED TV or whatever, you know, like, yeah. Just show me ads for robotic lawnmowers, you know, every time I pause the TV. Or not when I pause the TV, when my wife pauses the TV. Show her the ads. Yeah, yeah. You know, for robotic lawnmowers. Not me, I don't want to see that. I've already sold. i'm not the one

you need to convince it'd be funny if you got ads for the rc lawnmower instead yeah well uh roku you're on the naughty list we're not buying you anymore we're not recommending you so sorry apple tv that's what i always recommend now anyway apple tv it is you're gonna pay more it's not a 30 device yeah for some reason they split it between ethernet and wi-fi too which i don't understand just do one what's that they made two models the last time they released the apple tv oh and it's just annoying it's like it's only like 20 difference just release it doesn't matter yeah i don't know a lot of people just use wi-fi for everything so it's kind of like that 20 bucks if they had to add the little

port on there or whatever like it doesn't make much sense that 20 bucks if they had to add the little port on there or whatever like it doesn't make much sense why why bother if they're not gonna hook it up i think at least the one i have in here is hooked up with wi-fi so the one in the rack for the the main house like that's definitely hardwired but i think the one out here in the garage is happy to live on wi-fi sitting right over there anyway let's move on here we've got some some products that matter this week so let's get into this because there's a lot of matter so much matter holy this isn't old switchbot has a lot of mattering going on this week they they the switchbot hub 2 is uh is basically enabling a bunch of uh old products i guess from switchbot uh to be updated and support matter. So I have this hub,

the SwitchBot Hub 2 is getting an update to enable Matter and it's going to actually enable it across a bunch of different products. And man, there's a decent picture here on, I guess we'll just put a link to this in the show notes. And it has like what products are now supported in 2024 with matter. And it's quite a bit. So this is a, this is pretty, pretty good, man.

This is like my, my little curtain rod things are on there. The hub two's on there. I guess I'm going to update and have Matt. I should probably do that. My wife was like, I can't open and close the curtains. Why haven't you done that yet?

And I'm like, whoops, I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and do this and uh upgrade that and i'll have a matter device and um i think there's a little qr code to scan on the side of it get that going nice there you go i'm glad they are um my my only gripe is i used last time i looked at their matter stuff um you could get control of things but it didn't have like the battery for example which i was like why don't you have the battery coming over too?

So I can have the battery reporting in Home Assistant. Hopefully they added that because I know we mentioned it to Daniel. So he wrote it down. Hopefully he mentioned it to them. I'm going to have to take another, I'm going to have to take another look at it and if they see if they added that, because that was the one piece I was really like not happy about. Yeah. It looks like maybe let's check that because it looks like a lot of those little tiny,

small things that they've been adding in. Like it says here, the contact sensor. Well, okay. So on the temperature and humidity sensors found on the hub too, it now can be customized separately and synced by matter. So you,

it's got some things that they've been adding in. So maybe, maybe they've been adding in so maybe maybe they've added that in yeah hopefully they added the battery attribute so i can retry it do all the upgrades retry it and see that would be nice i feel like it's such an important feature too the battery is i think it's something you need to have well this is cool it's a bunch of bunch of devices that get matter compatibility thanks to a nice little software update. It's always nice to have. Well, Yale has updated one of their retrofit locks to work with Matter over Thread.

The $130 Yale approach, it will now work. It starts out with Wi-Fi, but they're going to be doing a promised upgrade to do Matter over Thread later. The retrofit locks is one that kind of like slips over your lock anyway, and that you don't have to replace the like entire workings of the inner door deadbolt thing, which is always tricky to do.

So this might be a pretty good option for some people. It's a little more expensive than I'll say a switch bot, which is kind of does the same thing, but not really, but I don't know. This is a nicer looking product for one, and it doesn't stick on with glue but hot glue and 3m tape but uh it it's also what what is the switch bot like five dollars or something it doesn't cost very much at least 650 inflation and all that no honestly as somebody that just rented for the

past like 10 years these kind of locks are great because a lot of times you can't change the external part of the lock because your landlord needs to have access in case of emergencies or whatever happens. And so there's not a lot of good options, and especially until recently, where you could add a smart lock to your rental. And so the most famous one that I've ever used was the quick set uh convert which is basically the same thing it just replaced the internal piece uh you know the the thumb turn inside the door and that's how you control it and that way you know the outside stuff remains the exact same and you get the smart stuff's in the inside and it works great and the key on the outside doesn't change like it's the same deadbolt that the landlord put on there they they don't really know unless they open up and they're like oh there's a smart lock in here yeah and everybody that i've had it with has never cared um because

they can still access with their key as long as they can get in yeah exactly and we always replace it obviously when we moved out um but the the quick set one was they had a lot of different models they had a zigbee one and that's the one i used and the battery life was awful on it i think it lasted like four to six months i'm not sure why that was so bad compared to like my z wave lock and stuff but that was the only bad thing it's kind of cool to see this keep going on though i wish it was matter over thread but um it's not so here we are i i was looking at this and i see the idea but i kind of also this gives you control of your lock, but I still wanted to have like a keypad outside just because then I can give somebody a code, you know, but this one, you still need a key. If somebody has to come in your house, that's the only thing about it. I know you can pair it with a keypad, but then that looks even uglier.

So I'm still on the lookout for a lock that is somewhat pleasing with our door that i can put on my front door still i wonder if this will work with my weird quick set thing that i have problems with yeah honestly i would get two of these just for my back doors because my back doors i want control over but i don't necessarily need keypads exactly that that would be a great idea yep my front, I already have a keypad. So that's all I want. Yeah. And so this is perfect for that.

But I can't put a keypad on my front door. That's not going to happen. And then since it's a weird, like, the way that the tumbler runs through, like the little small stick, I guess, that like goes between through the hole in the door, I guess, to like turn things. On the one I have is like, it's off center.

It's like on the bottom of that hole. That's weird. Yeah. And that made the level lock impossible to install because that expects the thing to be in the middle, which we're everywhere. Which is every lock, you know. Yeah.

So lucky me, we have the one that's artsy and yeah, it doesn't work. So maybe this might work. Yeah, it might, depending on what the inside of the door looks like. It's worth a try. I can give the old Amazon test and return. Yeah, get it. A try and see what happens.

My Yale stuff has been pretty reliable. I mean, I don't necessarily like the Wi-Fi stuff, but all the other Z-Wave stuff that I use works pretty well. So, all right, well, let's move on here. We got one more product that matters matters and this is everyone's favorite aquara aquara motion and light sensor p2 uh is brand new and it's it's a new motion sensor that uses matter over thread technology and eliminates the need for needing a zigbee hub priced at 33.99 yes that's right 33.99 you're probably like 80 canadian i'm not sure. It connects directly to the smart home platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, all that good stuff.

Gavin, I saw that in the hub, in our hub, not Acquire's hub or SwitchBot's hub, but like our hub, that you had posted that you had picked up one of these things and you said it was great. What's so good about it? Yeah. So I'll give you a quick review, right? A quick rundown. So, you know, if you haven't seen it, it looks similar to their previous sensors, you know, a little cylinder shaped thing, a little, a little stand they give you. So, you know, they already knocked the design all apart. Cause I love that design. It was so flexible, right? Um, my initial reviews after adding it and using it, these things are fast.

I mean, really fast compared to all my other sensors I have out there. I noticed it as soon as I installed it, I'd walk in the laundry room, light came on instantly. Now, I don't know if it's just because my thread network's not as busy as my Zigbee network, you know, that could be a very possible, but I've never had something that fast on, on like a Z-Wave or Zigbee. So I was really impressed. Now I didn't test their previous model. I have their model before that, that I'm comparing it to. Plus I have a couple of zoos. I have a couple, you know, in a valley, I actually have an in a valley motion sensor, you know, so I'm comparing it to all those. And this obviously was the fastest. So very impressed with the speed, um, adding it to home assistant. It was kind of difficult. I mean, technically you're supposed

to just scan the little QR code on the back and add it, but almost assistant, their process wasn't picking up the QR code. So eventually there's a number on the top and this is what drives me nuts on the top of it. There's a little number the top and this is what drives me nuts. On the top of it, there's a little number that you can use to add a Matter device. Why would they make it in the lightest possible gray? Seriously, I looked at the top, I didn't even know there was a number there, but I looked all over the device and then I saw a little thing on the top and I had to pull out my phone and use the zoom in to read that number. It's in a very light gray, almost white, and it's along the top.

And that's the number you got to use to type it in when the QR code doesn't work. It's white on white ink. Yeah, that's helpful. It was so awful. But once I typed in that code, it added to Home Assistant and worked right. I noticed people were having issues with that as well. Some said, try to add it to Apple Home first, and move it over. Even that wasn't working for me. So I'm thankful I've bought that code and I'm thankful they actually put the code on the device and I don't have to worry about

keeping around a piece of paper or the original packaging or anything like that. Cause that would drive me nuts too. Um, so in terms of the light sensor it also does light sensing now in their old model not the previous one but the one before that i know that the light sensing um the light wasn't actually updated until it was triggered so when it sensed motion or motion was off it would send the the light value over to the hub and that what made it kind of useless for doing any light-based automations right this one actually is nice because it updates the light value over to the hub. And that what made it kind of useless for doing any light based automations, right? This one actually is nice because it updates the Lux value on its own as it

changes. So you don't have that. You can actually do automations off of it based on light values now. So that was good. I was happy to see that it has a lot of advanced configuration. You can do it, this thing. Now,

the bad part is that you will require their hub to be able to get access to all that stuff, their M3 hub. Now, to make things even worse, that M3 hub is not coming until spring. So all these advanced configurations you can apparently make, you have to wait until you get their hub and make it. And this is what I don't like about Matter is they're just giving you the basic functionality but if you wanted to change things like sensitivity settings no you need their hub you need their app and they're not the only company that does this and this is something we predicted too that's not what matter is supposed to do anyway like matter is

just supposed to give you the basic controls or like in this case it's the inputs and that kind of thing it's not yeah because you're not going to have every single company out there expose that those kind of controls to it like the goal is to basically sell you something that you could hook up into your house and make it work but later on if you wanted to do these advanced things yeah there's another path to that stuff so i don't really blame matter for that but like it would be nice i, it would be nice if you could do that in a phone app, right? Like just without a hub. Yeah, no, no, no. And I don't blame matter for this. I blame the manufacturers. I blame matter for enabling them to do this though. Right? Like you gave them this out. So now they can expose the most basic

things but you need their app to get the battery level or you'll need their app to get things to adjust sensitivity level you know so you'll still need their hub and their app you know so matter is not gonna get rid of apps or anything like that eventually you're just gonna have their apps anyway um but having to buy another hub that's kind of upsetting actually because that's an extra cost i was looking at this and this hands-on review that um the verge has i'll link to it in the show notes i was scrolling down and i looked at it and they had it sitting next to the philips hue motion sensor which i think everybody loved or something at one point in time yeah and the eve motion sensor and i'm like those

were not that big this thing's tiny it's like an inch inch and a half tall by like an inch and a half wide i'm i'm that's impressive it is impressive it's like it's the size of the battery it takes um two cr 2450 batteries but the batteries are along the bottom so the you know like the width of it or the diameter of the cylinder is the diameter of that battery pretty much just a little bit bigger, right? It's the size wise, how you can mount it, everything. They knocked it out. It's always been a good design. I think they just made it better.

I don't see anything like you could, like, does it have, and I'm looking at a motion sensor, it usually has some kind of like screw holes, but this has this weird little stand you have to hang it from yes and the stand you mount on the wall and you can tilt the the device any way you want you could turn it tilt it up tilt it down any way you want so it's actually really good it's battery powered no cables so that's nice exactly so they they i haven't tested battery life obviously but they um they claim you get two years out of it um the previous version which was zigbee actually they claimed five years so it's actually declined in um battery life but you know it could be because of the matter chip and stuff uses more battery life so

we don't know right the thread and having to communicate so i mean two years is still good though yeah i can't can't complain i'm gonna, the speed is what impressed me the most. And I'm probably going to grab another one to do the other motion lighting, um, setup I have just because the response time was so fast. I would recommend it. Yeah. I'm not impressed with the stand,

but it's better than like, I like to put like where I would put it. I don't need the stand to connect it up like you can sit it up on a shelf if you want um just have it sitting on a shelf you don't need the stand the stand is if you want to angle put it on a wall and angle it like you put it above a door and just angle it down a bit then you can use the stand and you can tilt it any way you want right yeah like that's the nice part that's that's kind of my use case but not really so i i don't know i i i might do kind of actually one of these pictures they have on uh on their

amazon page is of it attached underneath like some underneath uh the cabinets like uh yes the kitchen cabinets and you like upside upside down up under there like no one would really notice if i did that if it's you know over in the corner under the cabinets like i can do that get away with it and that would be like a present sensor i i have one on my bed underneath like mounted like that like it's it's hidden you don't notice it but to turn on the bed lights when the dog walks around so he can see better right oh um that helps with him at night when we're sleeping right uh he is an older dog so the lights really help when he moves right so yeah you can melt it upside down and keep it hidden it's really it's really good like that design is really good well it is small and i don't know how it can't weigh that much so

nope maybe some sticky tape for my other location where I do not want to see the stand, but I need to mount it. Or you can, you can design and print a 3d mount for it. That will fit even nicer. You know, like there's, there's probably some designs out there that, that are out there now that you can corner mount it, for example, or something like that. But the stand really does give you a lot of flexibility.

All right, cool. You've convinced me. I might, I mean, since it's like all of $33.99, also the number one release right now on Amazon for motion detectors, I might grab one of these because, you know. Oh, do a quick Google for a coupon code. You might see one.

I mean, it might be over by the time the show gets published, but I know there were some coupon codes on the initial day that you might see. I might not get them now, but get them right now. We'll see. Spend that money. Looks pretty cool. It is.

It's so small, so small. And it's fast. In Home Assistant, I get, this is what I like to actually, you know, it's a gift and a curse, but I like that when I added it to Homeosystem i didn't get flooded with 500 entities you know really truly you just got the is it working how do you even know if it's working gavin that doesn't make any sense well you got the motion detection and you got the battery and those were the pretty much all the entities you got so and that's all you really needed right that's all you need yeah but it would be nice to have the other configuration off

option so i can set things like sensitivity and stuff. What happened to TJ? See, if TJ had the Aquara. My life turned off for some reason. If you had the Aquara Z-Wave motion sensor, that wouldn't happen to you, buddy. I mean, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do need to get a couple more presence sensors, so. Get the millimeter wave for your office. It would be much better suited. Yeah. Well, I'm in the den right now. I just have a basic motion detector out here. Yeah. No, get the millimeter wave one.

So much better. I have the FP2s. They work fine, but they're expensive. They're worth it, though. You don't have to wave your arms. Yeah, that's true. All right. Well, yay for Aquara.

So, let's see. We have SwitchBot, Yale, and Aquara all mattering this week. Thanks, guys. We really appreciate that. Nice. We love it. Well, all the links Aquara all mattering this week. Thanks, guys. We really appreciate that. Nice. We love it. Well, all the links, topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 477.

So nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And Gavin, you came up with this thing, and this is awesome. Like, if you were worried about having a part of your lawn that I guess here's the sales pitch for this, right? Do you like Disney World? Do you want your lawn to be watered? Where are you going with this? how you spell that not a uto it's got this cute little smiley face logo it's this thing looks like a i don't know book heavy book bag sized maybe i don't know women's purse size thing it's got a little spigot on top and an app that accompanies it and you hook your water hose up to the bottom of this thing and uh it just like sprays water around your lawn with like military grade precision on this. Like, I don't know.

This reminds me of like going to Epcot. And if I had this in my yard, my daughter is going to be out there playing in this, getting squirted in the face. Like this is just going to be a mess, but it looks amazing. I really want one of these. I mean, it's honestly not bad priced either. $500 normally. It's $400 right now.

Yeah. I mean, if it does what it says it does, that's not bad. It's for normally it's $400 right now yeah I mean if it does what it says it does that's not bad that's for 2,800 square feet now here's my problem is I don't know how many square feet I have I mean I would definitely need two I need one for the front yard in the backyard but I really only care about the the backyard you can't just move it I'm not gonna move it Seth I'm lazy I had to put out sprinklers last year Gavin you gotta get one of these are you buying it right now you're so quiet right now. Did you already buy one of these? What's going on?

I need to know. Um. When you heard me say that, what went through your head? And you bought two of them already? Yeah, no. You could buy a couple of them for the price of a robot lawnmower so yeah i mean you still have to cut your grass because it's going to grow when you water it yeah but i have you see the thing i have i have an irrigation system so i'm good but this would

be something good i i think this thing's awesome for a lawn and there's more than one reason first of all it's like a little box with a little hose nozzle on the top and you program it and it just waters up to the edges where you say the water, like just where there's grass. And the cool thing is you could see that you can even shoot over things. So if your air conditioner was in the way, the stream actually shoots over the air conditioner to get to the other, the grass on the other side of it. So you don't waste water hitting the air conditioner. So I thought that was really cool. I think this is really a water saving thing you throw it in your backyard um you'll probably water your grass better than you know the traditional water sprinkler um but what i was

really impressed with it it says cartridges right so they they have these cartridges and i was looking this up but it's like some they have some to eliminate insects, you know, or pet odors or, you know, even probably add nutrients to the, to the watering and stuff like that. And you can buy them and slide them in. And as it's watering, it mixes it in at the right proportions and, you know, gives your lawn that extra, you know, nitrogen or something like that, that it would need, you know, I thought that was cool, you know, because it's mixing the watering with the, you know, extra lawn food. And that's great too. Um, this would be, it's pretty impressive, honestly. And how far it shoots that stream is pretty good.

Um, and like I said, you can buy fertilizer pest control a deodorizer and uh strengthen they call it extra plant food so this might be worth it if you're the type of person that's spending a lot of money on your lawn and you want it to look good and you don't want to waste water watering for the price what was it again? My price, it was like 400 bucks. Yeah, yeah. It was 400 bucks. Right now it says 15% off. Yeah, $400 right now.

You could get two for $7.56. Might as well get two, you know? Just go. Why stop there? Grab the three pack for $1,113 and you can cover your whole lawn. Yeah. I think this is great. This is like, if you don't want to put an irrigation system in your yard, I think this is great this this is like if you don't want to put an irrigation system in your in your yard i think this is great well especially like my house like we're going to do

some kind of irrigation system for our raised garden beds we're going to plant a bunch of fruits and veggies and stuff like that and like i can just run a hose out to those raised garden beds and control the water from there but i'm not going to like dig a whole new irrigation system in my yard it's not that big anyway but i'm just not going to do it a whole new irrigation system in my yard. It's not that big anyway, but I'm just not going to do it for my yard. I don't care enough about my yard, but I could plug in this device and I totally see myself doing that. Yeah. It will shoot a stream.

Yeah. Shoot a little stream over into your, into your bed. If it tied in with the home assistant, I could in blue Iris, you can have it shoot people as they walk up to your house. Oh yeah. We don't want any visitors

right now i didn't look into that if it has integration though that that would be a key component to me i want some integration with homo system i don't see it natively through homo system but maybe somebody has a hax yeah i was looking at uh i remember we had something similar to this but it was in ground and it's called era green. And it was like an in ground version of this. Yes. But the heads were like very expensive. Yeah. A thousand dollars each.

You got to buy like the little hub thing. However, what it does have on their website that I do remember thinking was really cool was a way to calculate your lawn footprint by drawing on like a satellite version of your lawn. So I did that real quick while you guys were talking. Turns maybe five of these things it's gonna cost like three thousand dollars from my backyard yeah same here i think i'll skip that but the let's see if so it did tell me based on the calculated square foot of 7165 square feet i don't even know what a square foot is but evidently that's how many i have according to this map thing so it looks like i need two to three of these autos that's not gonna happen yeah see the

the weird part about my lawn is just it's a weird shape so yeah mine's pie shape so yeah it's not the square footage it's this the where i have to place them um because of all the shaping i need more i i would need like three probably like four or five just because it can't shoot around corners i mean this this is honestly if i was if i was really wanted to do this i would i would probably use the air green thing yeah because it's in ground and permanently installed and i don't have to drag a hose around yeah that's the thing i would talk about this auto is you wouldn't have to have hoses everywhere all the time. Yeah.

Unless you're, I guess you put it near the house. Well, you would put it at the edge of your yard, though, right? So you can kind of hide the hose, too. You don't have to run it all to the middle of the lawn, for example. Yeah, that's true. I don't need one, but somebody will. Somebody's going to want one of these things. And if you do get one, tell us how much you liked it, because I'm curious.

And how many you needed. Just go ahead and send me one. I'll just take one. Yeah. And TJ always loves playing with these kind of toys. So I'm just tracing the rest of my lawn to see how many of these other things that I'm going to need. Yeah, the ear green stuff is pretty cool. It doesn't look like it has any sort of API yet.

So integration might not be possible man not surprised that usually takes some time nobody needs integration oh this is a cool idea imagine you had like um you know you could program it to fill your pool so you know pool water is low you say fill my pool it shoots the stream into your pool just watering for three hours yeah i have to do that now when my pool level is low i have to put the hose in turn it on let it run you know but no now i could just say hey shoot the stream into the pool and it will fill up over the amount of time that's hilarious yeah it's an option i will say what's kind of cool about this i'm just kind of measuring out like for my front yard i only need one of

these sprinklers like it would it would potentially if's, if I could run this thing out with the hose in the middle of the yard, which I'm not going to do, it would actually cover most of the whole, the full front yard. That's kind of cool. Order one. The problem is, is, you know, if it's out there and Clippy comes out to do his thing, you know, like they're going to clash, right? Yeah.

That's true. They're going to get in a fight. I'm going to have to get them to break it up. You're going to have some bot wars going on in your front yard. Homeowners associations going to be like calling police because you have illegal bot wars going on in your front yard. I just designed my whole system on the Irrigreen, and it's $4,300 for all of the heads that I need. Yeah.

Oh, that's a tall order right there. Eight sprinkler heads. Plus you got to run power to each of them. Sounds so cool, though. It is cool, though. Both of those solutions are cool. It's just one's more expensive. Yeah.

I like that on one of the how many devices do I need section for the small yard, it shows one wall mounted and watering the raised garden beds. And I'm like oh man i'm designing all this smart watering system and i could just buy this 400 device and be done with it some people did say that it's a little aggressive for potted plants um the stream of water i mean that makes sense it's probably thinking it has to shoot at a far distance you know yeah so you might have to be careful they wanted a lighter mode but yeah put splash cards on them or yeah do something like

that put a little splash guard on them so something to keep in mind and if i if i if i just so right now i only have the um like my front yard being watered because the backyard i don't care about because it's basically a giant hill that goes down to a ditch but the front yard if i was to do that i don't i could get away with just two of these sprinkler heads, one for each side of the driveway and be good to go. You sure it can't shoot over the driveway? Oh, that's true. I wonder if it can. There's usually cars there, but.

Yeah, just shoot through the cars. Over the cars challenge. I don't know. Check Amazon so you can use the return model. Yeah, I know, right? Hmm. Yeah, these things are yeah yeah the ira green ones the heads alone were 278 dollars plus the controller for them is 1500 geez all right well there's the major cost along with all

the pipes and stuff you got to put in your yard maybe i will go with an auto maybe i will the app looks really cool it looks like you can just make a game out of this yeah it looks like something that when you go with the auto you don't want to move it around a lot though because the app probably has to be adjusted for your lawn so you almost like to want to put it on a fence or a gate or somewhere where it's always the same so it knows where to shoot the water i did see that where they had it hanging on a fence yeah like i thought that was a interesting idea so it's it's kind of weird to me that it has the hose hookup. Like you said, this feels like a more installed solution, I guess. I don't know.

You can run any type of hose to it, though. If it's on a fence, run the hose through the fence. It'll keep it off the ground. Wireless water. Just do wireless water. Yeah, wireless water. There you go. The other side of the fence.

My neighbor's yard is like, what the heck do you drill a hole for and run a hose behind the fence? That's weird. Got some hillbilly stuff going on over here. Yeah. No, it's my $400 smart home device. You wouldn't understand. Yeah, exactly. It works on wireless water.

This seems like a really fun thing. I'm going to investigate this more. I may have one of these by next week. Yes. Gavin, thanks a lot. Gosh. All right, let's move on here if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the weeks or great ideas for watering your lawn give us a shout email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form

all right project updates um before i get too involved with the lawn projects uh i i've been messing around with some govi lights i bought i bought those um i i don't even know what they're called they're outdoor landscape lights right so there's like the govi they're not the flat ones i had the flat ones for like holiday like through christmas or whatever and those i had mounted up because they were on on sale or something but govi also has like these like just normal landscape light things that you can get and plug in and find the model number. They have these outdoor spotlights. That's what that's what they're called.

Officially, I have the Govee outdoor. These are floodlights, uplights or whatever. And they're just square lights. Oh, yeah. Those things. Yeah. But the spotlights are like the traditional can style. Like landscape.

Landscape. Yeah. Yeah. Like they look like a small coke they they're about the same size as a coke mini can or whatever um i've had them sitting like behind me for i don't know a couple months uh looks like yeah it looks like about a month and a half um and i've been meaning to like put them in because um with the little govi floodlights which i'm not really impressed with the front part of my house gets lit up fine.

Right now I just have it set to just a warm white color, but if the holiday comes up, I can change them. Like Easter came up, I changed it over to like pastel colors and that kind of thing. When I got these can lights or these spotlights, I guess they look like cans to me. I took them apart, of course, to see what was inside. Because the other ones I couldn't take apart. These, these like little top screws off and you can see inside and what's going on. Um, and I was like, Oh, these are just standard control WS, uh, what? 28, 11 chips inside of here. So really anything can be used to control this. Uh, and I had some

of the like little WLED thing laying around. Uh, and over the weekend, I, I basically to get this installed, I, I couldn't use the wires that they sent because I needed, I needed one on each side of the driveway, like one on this side, one on that side. So I needed to like extend the wires. And I did that over the weekend, soldered some new wires on kind of basically ran it into the garage around the garage door back up back down whatever yada yada yada finally um i got two spotlights working outside hooked them up to wled and boom they work they work great um kind of tricky the way that govi has laid out the lights inside of these things if you do this uh and you're setting up in a controller or whatever, they have their RGBW lights, right? Or

their RGBWW lights. So there's two white lights inside of this thing that is on the first controller and it's still treated like as a three channel RGB controller. It's really weird. So you can send RGB values to it and it will go between warm white and cool white. The second chip, the second pixel, I guess, node is all of the RGBW. Sorry, RGB color chips are in there. So all of those are on a second, the second pixel. And then if you go to the next one, the third one, that's going to be your two white pixels all being controlled again on one controller. And then the last one is the second.

So it's really weird how they've laid these out. I did some research online. It looks like Govee does that quite a bit. And it's probably how the other ones are wired up. I gotta tell you, I like WLED a little bit better than the Govee app because the Govee app is kind of weird to use. It's actually really weird to use.

They have some scene things on there, but I've never been able to make sense of anything they have in their app. So I'm gonna move everything over to WLED and just run it that way. And that has full ABI control. It has integration with home assistant. I can do whatever I want with it. And since I know what pixel nodes are on each segment, I can send whatever command I want to and turn on the lights however I want to have them turned on so i i really like this setup and they're running right now and and now when i drive up to house it doesn't look so dark and dingy in front of the garage because i've got these nice little

up lights i'll try and send you guys a picture later dark outside now yeah but yeah that was a fun little project and i tore i didn't even get to use this govi controller like i've got this thing i tore it all apart they use a standard esp32 chip inside of this thing just like everybody else these days it seems so i knew uh i knew i'd be able to do this pretty quickly and um it only took like five days to solder four wires i guess it just took me that long so that's better than me i don't even solder anymore so no that's really that's really cool though i mean it's kind of cool to see these products keep coming out like that because you are able to control them however you want in a way, as long as you're willing to hack a little

bit. Yeah, it is. And you got to kind of tear them apart and see what, look at it and see what you're, see what they're controlling with. So you can make the decision where you're going to like ditch the little control box that comes with it and just look it up the diy method i will say these things i forget what they're called because i lost the little thing that goes in i guess ferrules or whatever a little oh yeah yeah like crimp on things uh make sure like if you do any kind of work on anything that has like screw terminals

make sure you get those because they are like i have never used these my entire career and i got these like recently and man they are great for any kind of like Phoenix connector or anything. You're like, have a screw type terminal on. I do not know why I've almost probably never seen them before, but absolutely use those crimp down the wire. So you don't get this frayed piece of garbage sticking out and shorting out with the next terminal over like oh my gosh it is night and day um as far as frustration goes so get those they work great i have to pick some of those up that's that's pretty cool i've been meaning to but i have i've never have so yeah the little like you could get them literally anywhere and the little they have

a little crimp tool that um you just kind of slip the wire in crimp it down and then you just never have to worry about it fraying apart. And when you go down on the screw terminal and you screw it down, it actually sticks in there and doesn't like pop out because it's some random copper wires that are half cut off or whatever. So yeah, get those.

I'll put a link to whatever I got on Amazon in the show notes. And you can buy them in like packs of thousands because, and they come in the great, the best boxes in the world. So make sure you get a new box for them because when you drop this, it just goes everywhere and you'll have people picking it up for days.

It sounds like experience. Yeah, ask me how I know. It's a good game for the kid. Put all the red ones in the red one, put the green one in the green one. Yeah. Well, that's cool. Landscape lighting, what makes a huge difference for your house we didn't have any until i added the lifex

ones um and it's such a big difference even with the pathway lights so i'm looking forward to adding more myself i never really realized how dark the front of my house was at night like i have the like one light on but when i put those lights in for the holidays like the little i used them for christmas like i noticed like hey that really does like light up the holidays like the little i used them for christmas like i noticed like hey that really does like light up the front of the house it doesn't look great i mean i don't really care for those yeah floodlight things that they have and they're also like unevenly spaced so i really need to like chop the wires and spend another five days soldering i guess i don't know if i can space those out how i want them to be and then run the wire to a real controller. I think they would they would be OK, but just don't seem as well-built. And the floods seem like mostly standard landscape lighting.

It's not brass. It's like an aluminum thing, but they're okay. Yeah. For $89 for two of them, it's not terrible. Yeah. Landscape lighting is great for, like, I added some to my backyard for, like, under our trees. We have our trees elevated in a way right so i added some under the trees and it just lights up that area so nicely right and along the fence we had a garden

it lights up there nicely and i didn't realize how dark it really was until after like you said after you added these then you're like what a difference you know it's really so much nicer yeah but some pictures in the in the back channel here for you guys to look at if you want to look at them but the interior is basically like a can like the it was constructed well enough like for a $89 um light i didn't expect much more out of it so i want to add the uh the lifex up lights to my house but i feel like they're going to be way too bright because there's 1600 lumens and i think the ones i have are like 800 lumens and i already turned them down i didn't even check to see what these were but oh 500 lumens so yeah they're not that bright but ever since it's so

dark in front of my house they seem like they're bright enough so what are you gonna do all right uh that's that's all i got done um clearly the server's not updated and uh yeah update the server now yeah i'll do it while gavin's talking so any updates i need to do besides besides home assistant there's there's about three updates i need on that one yeah home assistant probably had like five updates this week alone but um ever since the last major one i've just been working on rewriting my dashboards i've been chipping away at it like it's not like i've been working constantly um you know with the whole labels and rooms not rooms um floors uh it just adds so much functionality now make things so much easier for automating dashboard creation so now i add a device into the proper area i give it a label and it will show up on the right dashboards

where i want it automatically don't need to go through all the dash it a label and it will show up on the right dashboards where I want it automatically. Don't need to go through all the dashboards in Atom. It will be on my light dashboard. It'll be on that room dashboard. It will be, you know, everywhere it needs to be. So been doing that. But one non-home automation thing I did is I did install AdGuard Home. And if you're not familiar with this, it's similar to Piehole, I guess. So AdGuard was a plugin I used to install on my, say, my browser. Well, now adding it as the DNS server, I can, you know, filter out ads at the network level. So this is great because I have this running and I switched the DNS of my iPhones over to this, and now we don't see YouTube videos

ads anymore, thank God. You know, like, I guess content creators will hate me right now, but I'm to this and now we don't see youtube videos it adds anymore thank god you know like i guess content creators will hate me right now but i'm sorry um sometimes i want to see you not the ad right um it works really good really fast i have it running on my unraid server um and it's easy to enable and disable as i need so something if you're ever looking into that it's called adguard home yeah i've tried the pie hole before but I didn't have good luck with it. Cause it just blocked everything. And I didn't really want to spend the time to go through and fix it all. So just blocks your internet.

You can't get out and see anything. Then I just bought YouTube premium. So sorry, I'm trying to update my home assistant. Oh God. Oh God. No, that's great.

I can just skip it. I never noticed this has a skip button. I don't have to update ever. I can just skip. Yeah. Just skip it. Come on. You can ignore it. Yeah it all right all right well dj you've got quite the list here uh what you've been up to yeah i've got a couple technology projects going

on a couple other stuff going on so um we got a new gate installed a couple weeks or a month ago i don't even know honestly i've lost track of time. One of the first things I wanted to do is put a contact sensor on the gate. And so I decided I would go ahead and get the Aquara door contacts. They were indoor rated ones. I 3D printed some enclosures for them. I never installed the enclosures.

I just installed the contacts on the gate. And it only took several heavy rains for the contact sensors to stop working. And I was on the search for new outdoor rated contacts because I looked before and I couldn't really find anything. There was a couple good options. There was that, I can't remember the brand, but it's like a really slim contact. It's like a really long stick. But those are supposedly outdoor rated, but they don't make them anymore. And they don't have user replaceable batteries like their internal batteries or something.

So I wasn't feeling that. But a friend of the show, Jimmy, recommended the Ring Outdoor Contacts because they work with Z-Wave. And so I ordered a couple of those and I got them added right away to Home Assistant and they are on the gates now. And they're properly outdoor rated, so I don't have to worry about them breaking, hopefully. I was actually happy with the mounting bracket. So if you've ever installed like door or window contacts, most of the time you take this piece of plastic with a circuit board and you double side tape it to the window or wall or whatever it is and then you take the magnet and you do the same thing this one actually has a

mounting bracket and so you attach the mounting bracket and then you can easily take the contact off later because everybody knows that you're going to have to change batteries out and so you just easily slide the contact off of the mounting bracket whenever you need to and why i like this is because a lot of times when you go to change the batteries in a contact it's like they put the tab on like one of the ends and it's always annoying to get to because you either put the contact at the top or the bottom of the window and it's just sometimes you break the plastic tab because it's been there for like 10 years and this is just a nice nice, easy way to take it off because you're going to have to service it at some point. And so they've been working great. They're huge.

Like all outdoor contacts I've ever used are. They're like, I would say, almost the size of my hand. I don't have particularly big hands or anything, but it's a pretty big contact. Hand for scale. Yeah, we'll need a TJ's hand for scale. I guess the sensor and the magnet are three inches by two inches by about an inch. So then you've got kind of small hands. I do.

I'm not good with measuring either, so who knows how big my hands actually are. Anyway, this contact feels huge. That's the point. Yeah. You don't look that big in the pictures. It doesn't. It looks. Yeah.

Well, the pictures always make it look deceiving but yeah i'll get a banana we don't buy bananas but i'll get a banana so you can do a banana for scale please uh send that as soon as you can yeah and i'll put it in the show notes whenever i edit the show yeah actually that that'll be what holds the show up production yeah i'm sure that's what it'll be i can't post this show until tj sends me a picture of a banana he does not have and a uh just for a banana uh next up we had the the in-laws visit and i was you know this is the first people we've had stay at our house and um i was kind of excited for that um first time nicole's dad has come up to visit so that was kind of cool um they were defeated by my light

switches though I thought guys I thought I did right you know I have uh zoo's double switches in the in the bedroom in the guest rooms and I have you know in a valley switches in other areas like the kitchen or or the outside lights mainly zoo's double switches though for all the like the interior lights these are not gunther switches these are these are like switches that look normal yeah i mean they look like switches there's nothing going on they have a little button underneath the dimmer thing but they kept like holding it down they're like how do you control the lights i mean you just press it like it's on right now and you just press the bottom and there you go and they seemingly i don't know but they seemingly were holding the switch to turn it off.

And so then they'd be like, well, the light doesn't work now. And I'm like, well, yeah, it doesn't work. You dimmed it all the way down. And so that's how you turned it off. And so that was, I thought they were foolproof, but they're not. They're not foolproof. And you like an old person mode, you know, just anybody over 65. I enabled a certain mode and home assistant and it just like disables everything.

Yeah. As soon as you touch the bottom button off it just turns off instantly no dimming just off and then you're good you're good to go yeah so defeated by light switches this week just when you think the home automation's foolproof uh and then we had a couple other things going on this week we had eclipse mania uh obviously yeah we were in the in the path of totality and so we drove like an hour to go see that we weren't like complete darkness but we were as good as i was gonna get because i was not gonna go fight traffic um one of my friends lives in the path of totality and so they were expecting a hundred thousand

people to visit the area and so we drove to like one of the areas that was like a minute and a half totality and that was pretty cool so i'm glad we did that um definitely worth it though i can see why people travel all over the country to do that you tell you in the hub we had everyone posting their uh well there were there were two camps i guess some people had like weather stations like either a tempest or something else they were posting the solar radiation or luminance or lux levels or whatever. And some other people were, were posting there. I didn't even think about this cause I don't have them,

but like they were posting their solar panel efficiency charts. So we were, we, for the eclipse, we were just sitting inside looking at our charts here. Cause we didn't have a totality thing to go look at. That's no fun. Yeah. Well, I had the little glasses. I went outside and looked at the half of the sun that had disappeared but otherwise you really didn't know it got it from if you look if you use my solar radiation graph or whatever the sun light level or whatever got down to basically like 10 o'clock in the

morning sun and you know that's right in the middle of the afternoon so that's kind of nice i guess for florida uh it felt weird outside but there was you couldn't tell that there was an eclipse it was still bright so yeah it was just it felt like it was gonna rain like you want to just right before it storms yeah when it gets like really dark and just kind of eerie and stuff that's what it reminded me of that that was super weird it's just less um less intense sun like i've experienced that when i go to northern climates overseas or whatever i've noticed that the sun is less intense than it is here in florida like when like you really feel the sun uh but you know at the same time of year if

i'm in like germ or Scotland, like, I'm like, why is the sun way over there? And why, why is it not killing me right now? So it's just, uh, it's just a different feeling on, on your, on your skin. And then like, uh, it, it does feel different when you're walking around out there. So it was a fun time. The next one is, uh, in Barcelona. So we're all, you know, we can all travel over there, Barcelona. And then another one, I guess, in northern Spain or France.

I don't remember. One of the two. A year or two later. I think 2045, Florida, Orlando specifically is supposed to have totality. So just go to Disney that day. I hate to break this to you, but I would bet the eclipse is going to happen, but Florida may not still be happening by 2045. Well, maybe not. Sorry.

Yeah. We're not going to be around. All right. I'm not going to be here. It's just going to snap off. We'll just snap off that part of the state. Snap off or underwater, whatever. Who cares?

It's gone. It's a toxic waste dump now. I'm not not gonna be able to afford the home insurance anyway so exactly yeah yeah so yeah good luck 2045 um you know that could literally be the end of the world or whatever for florida but who knows i'm not i'm not gonna be here that's for sure it sounds like you've had a really fun week, though, TJ. Yeah. That's quite the bit. Well, the last thing in the development, kind of something I alluded to earlier. So, Nicole officially left her job and joined my company full time.

So, she is my first employee. So, we got that rolling. She went out to several jobs with me this week. She's worked with me in the past because, you know, before I went full time with it, I worked on the weekends or after hours and stuff like that. And she would come out with me anyway. Um, so she's kind of used to some of the stuff anyway, but it's never been like a full time capacity. So I was like, well, just come out, we'll do some jobs. You'll work at the office, you know, other days and we'll see how it goes. So, so, so far, so good, super helpful to have a second person a second person there just to do all the stuff.

I mean, as a business owner, you have to do so many things. I mean, it's difficult being a business owner. You got to go out there and find business and do the work and stuff like that. But there's just so much crap you have to do on a daily basis running a business that it's so annoying to do it all as one person. And so having another person to take on some of that is very nice nice even just small things just like answering the phone you know congratulations yeah and she you know it's she she she must be employee number

one though right like well yeah obviously you're you're you're employee number two somehow that's worked out yeah i'm ground zero i'm the reason it exists yeah but um so when she joined though she was obviously going to start taking phone calls and stuff and she needed a pair of headphones and i was like well i mean you obviously have an iphone so let's just go ahead and get you a pair of airpods um we'll get you the little foam tips that i have for mine as well and because i i can't use mine without the foam tips um so we got our pair airpods but she's using it with the tv now and so i'm kind of conflicted because i feel like we don't need sonos headphones to be fair she said she would still buy them

but i think i don't know if it's needed anymore. This is a plot twist. I know, right? Isn't that hilarious? As soon as I thought about it today, I was like, oh, dang, that means I'm not going to need these headphones now. She should not be using work equipment for personal use. Wow. Yeah. So is she on a three-month probation right now? She is, but I think that it has to go on no matter what.

That'd be an awkward conversation to have. Yeah, you're fired. What's for dinner? You didn't make it. I'm going to have to let you go, but what do you want to do for dinner? Let's see. You want to order Indian? So, yeah, that's what I got going on in my life.

So, are you not looking forward to sonos headphones now or you're finding no need for them or there's a strength in your argument well i mean i feel like there's still a need for them in general because especially if you're in the the multiple input crowd like you are gavin the airpods are good for the apple tv and that's it and so if you're switching to your ht htpc what are you going to do you need sonos headphones what are you going to do if you put a blu-ray in you're going to need sonos headphones true well if you're switching to your HTC, HTPC, what are you going to do? You need Sonos headphones. What are you going to do? If you put a Blu-ray in, you're going to need Sonos headphones. True.

Well, if you play an Xbox late at night, you're going to need Sonos headphones. True. So I think the AirPods are nice and I do like that functionality, but I still think there's a market there for it. So we'll probably still buy them. It's just,

it's just, uh, yeah. One or two people smaller now. Oh, Patrick Spence, We'll probably still buy them. It's just, yeah, one or two people smaller now. Yeah. Oh, Patrick Spence, you have your work cut out for you. Convince us. I sent you an email, Patrick.

Just respond. Yeah. Just respond. You're losing your market every day. Every day this happens. It's too funny. I still don't see the reason for these ah it's such a good reason set it's for old people and me oh man oh it's too good all right well i knew you guys

would like that that's too good man thanks for sharing yeah save it for the very last but that was too good i thought about keeping it to myself honestly honestly, because I was like, man, I'm never going to live this down. But, you know, I'm here. I'm vulnerable. Well, I don't think you have anything to worry about. Those Sonos headphones are never going to come out anyway. That's true. That's true.

All right. All right. I think that's going to wrap the show up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm.com. You can support

Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. A single dollar. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for sharing graphs during a solar event.

That's what we do. That's what we do there. No, it was actually entertaining. You know, we got to see different. Yeah. We got to see like different pictures from people that day, you know, as it kind of, you know, flies through,

the little shadow flies through over different parts of the country. So that was fun. So we did have a, we did did have a we do want to give a big shout out to um illingo who we talked about last week who had the question in the hub about the cameras and i think he he did like a short session of the uh the gavin is a service or something like that and uh and then and then upped his pledge to to support us a little bit more so we do want to give a big shout out to him and say thank you very much we do we do appreciate it it goes to uh it goes to the upgrade uh a server upgrade price i guess it's gonna eventually get

there goes towards our toys you know i i gave him a call last week we jumped on a call and i just you know we went through all those questions and stuff like that and he feels better and the best part about it i think i got him spending more money than he was anticipating because it went from. That's what you do. Yeah, I'm a pro. It went from home cameras to unrate servers to all sorts of things. Trust me. By the time we were done, he was looking at Dell servers, you know.

So we're, you know. He's going to have sprinklers that, like, shoot water like he's at Disney World. Oh, I should have went into the whole lawn watering thing. Maybe that's for the next session. Well, that was the guy from Adelaide. We could have got him onto this if we had known about this thing that week. But too late, I guess. But no, thank you anyway.

Do appreciate it. If you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in whatever podcast you choose to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in whatever podcast you choose to listen to the show on. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend. Richard, have a happy birthday and we'll see you next week.

Until next time, take care.