HomeTech.fm - Episode 482 - TJBHD

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

On this Week's Show: Z-wave isn't dead, Brilliant might be dead, Sonos app woes continue, Matter 1.3 launches, IKEA is into energy monitoring, Siri comes to Denon (and no one noticed since December), a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 17th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, the fan favorite, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to Home Tech Podcast featuring Gavin Campbell. Thank you. A podcast all about home automation, home technology, and Gavin Campbell. And tornadoes. TJj you survived last week there's there's a tornado went through maybe i don't know yeah that was last week

that was actually uh i couldn't remember so yeah last week we were wrapping up the show and i think we were probably almost done and i heard the tornado sirens and i was like well i gotta go guys i don't uh i don't really worry about those things you know i feel like if a tornado hits me i'm just gonna probably gonna die anyway because my house is really small uh but my wife likes to go in the hallway to uh you know be protected so she's she's the smart one in the relationship obviously because i'll just wait for the tornado but yeah i don't think i don't think a tornado touched down in our area this time um we had one uh i feel like a month ago now they basically like destroyed a

whole other town probably like an hour away from here so very thankful that uh nothing actually happened we were on and off tornado warnings and watches for about an hour and we just went to bed after that. So that blows. And on that note, I'm done. Well, we kind of knew this because, you know, a couple of days later, we took over the Home Gadget Geeks podcast over there. And Jim couldn't say anything. We just talked the whole time. So it was great. That was a fun, fun time. If you like things that we talk about here on the podcast, take a listen to that podcast over there.

And we'll put a link to it in the show notes. It was number 607. But Jim, it's more like a broad spectrum podcast. He talks about all sorts of stuff on there. Could be printers, could be computers or servers one day. He's all over the place as far as gadgets are concerned. And it's a fun listen. I like it.

And it was nice because it wasn't necessarily like stories or anything like that it was more like our opinions on certain topics you know like you would ask us a question and you give us our we give them our opinion and you may not agree with it but you know like let us know yeah and honestly uh you got to you got to learn a little bit about seth which you know i don't i've been working with seth for a couple years and it's just kind of interesting to learn some of his background there, which I'm sure he's talked about in some capacity in the past, like, 12 years he's been doing this podcast. But, you know, it's kind of a nice little intro there. So, if you haven't listened to it, if you don't know much about Seth in general, I think that's a good episode to listen to. But

we all talked about quite a lot there. If we were forced to listen, you should be forced to listen. So, go listen so go check out the podcast yeah we're just gonna edit it in right now and pretend that's its podcast i mean that's a really long podcast then it's like oh no we've got plenty to talk about tonight including stickers the stickers have been mailed out right oh so actually i i made it a point to myself i was gonna mail them out today guys i was like you know i got all the names together in an excel sheet um google maps and the addresses to make sure they're right um doing all this stuff i had to order uh labels uh like little printers labels for addresses you know uh because i'm not writing all these people's addresses that there's some uh confusing addresses

in like ireland and in austral Australia and wherever other people are. Yeah, I think they just rest there like the cat took over and started beating on their keyboard or something. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they just made up the addresses. So I was Googling to make sure most of them looked legit. So I think we're fine. But then unfortunately, we had a medical emergency in the family. So I was not able to actually get them mailed out. But everything is here.

I'm getting ready. I think we have about 20 people to mail out stickers to right now so if you if you haven't sent your uh your name and your address in you can send it to feedback at hometech.fm and next week when i get back from florida i'll actually mail them out so you might see him show up in the next couple weeks that's what he says now yeah yeah it's on a seth project though so i should be able to complete it i want to give a shout out to all the people in ireland listening there were a number that were coming in from ireland for stickers i don't know why we're so popular there you guys all know

each other because i'm confused all gavin fans too weird yeah and the australia people actually shocked me there were a number for in austral in Australia that was actually we go that far. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And more people from out of the States have contacted us actually for stickers, I believe. So nobody from Jersey yet, though. Sorry, Seth. No. Come on, Jersey listener. Where are you? We'll hand deliver it at this point.

I don't know about that. I didn't realize you were that rich, Gavin. I don't know. Because I don't know the financials that well, but I don't think the that. I didn't realize you were that rich, Gavin. I don't know. Because I don't know the financials that well, but I don't think the podcast is that rich either. You know, we'll wait for a few more Patreons, you know, to come in, but we'll see. We'll see.

Send us your address and drop us $3,000 on Patreon. We'll get you those stickers immediately. I'll get one ticket. All right. Well, we've got a bunch going on tonight. A ton of new, like I thought there was only one thing to talk about because we were talking about the hub all day today. But there's a bunch of stuff, a bunch of new products and a bunch of stuff going on. So what do you say we jump into these Home Tech headlines?

Let's do it. After TJ's brilliant review the other day, brilliant, a smart home controller and lights. This is like completely unrelated to his review though. No, it's all because of the review. It's seeking a buyer after facing financial issues leading to layoffs and product discontinuation. Existing devices will remain operational, but the company is no longer selling new products.

Interested buyers are being sought through a quick bidding process. And I did read some of the owner's comments saying they're trying to sell off things, hopefully hire people back and keep everything running as long as they can. Not a good thing, though. Doesn't sound good. And this is why I tell TJ to go easy on his reviews, because bad reviews destroy companies, apparently.

And TJ, like, I know you didn't give a bad review, but you didn't give a really good why i tell tj to go easy on his reviews because bad reviews destroy companies apparently and tj like i know you didn't give a bad review but you didn't give a really good review to keep them in business you guys did not know i was the marquez brownlee of smart home gadgets did you we've got uh tjbhd over here so now honestly like it's it's such a weird product i don't think it's one of those things that like people i don don't know, just people, do people want a tiny touchscreen on their wall that's like not the head height? I don't think they do. That was always kind of the weird thing to me that-

It's like I have to bend down and- Yeah, it's not eye level, right? So I don't know. When I see products like that, I'm like, oh, that's cool. But like, it's down there i mean some some some like my lights in my house i'm looking at them right now if i'm sitting down i'm pretty much eye level with the light switch but like i stand up it's like at chest level yeah whatever and then if i uh some some houses like if they're more ada centric they're going

to be like even lower right so they'll be lower for people in wheelchairs or, uh, because those are like 40, 40 inches tall, I think for, yeah. You're being selfish guys. Like from us. Yes. It's looking down, but for my wife, Oh, it's like eye level for her. Like she'd probably love this. You know, my main problem was it didn't really like it was a closed ecosystem you know if it had home uh assistant integration or stuff like that you know it would have been a much nicer product for me yeah i think they should just made it a two gang touch screen and sold it the exact

same way and i think people would have bought it more because it's a larger screen and those little two little slider things to control your lights those are silly get get rid of those you don't need those well they're not dead yet they're just they're just you know kind of hanging hopefully they don't get will i am that would be funny if will i am swoops in buys them at the last minute and then does nothing literally nothing with them just lets them sit there well uh speaking of not being dead yet uh z wave isn't dead according to the guys over at home assistant they wrote up this nice little long article uh i guess they they what did they do they attended like a conference of of z wave manufacturing people in texas there and had a good time

uh and came back yeah in austin texas and uh came back convinced that z wave is going to stick around so um interesting it's interesting blog post we'll link to it in the show notes i read and came back convinced that Z-Wave is going to stick around. It's an interesting blog post. We'll link to it in the show notes. I read through it. I thought it was pretty cool. One of the things I did think was neat was that the Z-Wave JS seems to be used a little bit more in the industry. I guess they found out that it was used more in the industry

for troubleshooting and testing and that kind of thing. And a lot of manufacturers are actually adopting that um as how they control their z-wave stuff so instead of doing all these proprietary or not proprietary but like custom control stacks or custom software they're they're centering around you z-wave js which is open source and i think one of the projects that is part of the open home thing i think it's one of the projects that home assistant actually contributes to. So all good. It's a good read though. I thought it was pretty good.

Z-Wave's not dead. I never thought it was. I'm a big Z-Wave fan, as you know, and I never thought it was. So I know people like to say it is, but I think there's still a lot of life left in Z-Wave still. I mean, they're thinking things like Matter are going to kill it off

matter's not even close yet um it's that's a whole different story but i'm glad somebody else came out and said it's not dead the thing that's gonna kill z-wave and it's gonna be a very slow painful death your review well maybe yeah yeah one tj reviewer i really like z-wave but the thing that's gonna kill it is is chip availability and cost and it can be it can be a great standard it can be better standard than everything else but when it's like four times the cost of a zigbee or matter device then the average consumer is not even going to entertain it and it's going to be left for nerds like us and it's just it's not going to get advanced features after a certain point because not that many people care about it and all the big companies that use it like alarm.com and

everything they don't care about the advanced features they just want the very basic things and they don't care about the long range or anything else because that's a liability and so i don't i don't think z-wave is going to go away necessarily and luckily it'll keep working i just don't see a future where they're going to be a prominent player but i'm seeing the cost of these matter things they're they're not cheap all right these matter devices aren't cheap zigbee devices were cheap but when messing around with the zigbee stuff sometimes you get what you pay for it too right but i never thought matter was cheap well i don't think matter is cheap because they're making matter over wi-fi devices right now and they're basically using other stuff that they already had laying

around and they're throwing matter on and be like here you go guys here's matter they're not actually designing them from scratch and i think that's holding up matter at the moment true it's not a it's not a cheap product because they're not they didn't start off with them hmm z wave as far as i'm concerned like they could survive forever off just the commercial stuff. Like you said, TJ, those companies don't care that you have an advanced feature in your alarm contact and they're going to pay the bills. And it may be that a few hundred thousand people go off the, you know, they're like, oh, well, we're not going to order a Z-Wave light switch or whatever. But I but i just i mean those big companies that are doing the alarm contacts they're not going to turn their entire

product development cycle over on this like that that's those products are 10 15 year products if if not just forever products like they're not going to change in a very very long time so i just i don't see it going away i think it's like it's stuck like it's like a cold sore it'll just it'll just keep getting smaller and smaller i mean i don't think it's going to disappear or anything but flare back up from time to time yeah like a lot of other things oh boy what a fun night here all right well let's move on here uh we've got a couple new products i'm gonna blow through these real as fast as i can because i know we talked about some of these before but a car has finally launched their m3 Matter smart home hub.

They've got emphasizing, they're emphasizing privacy and local home automation capabilities. The hub is offering edge computing for stability and safety, matter compatibility, encryption for local storage, sports, multiple protocols, threads,

Zigbee, wifi, Bluetooth, IR, which is kind of a neat turns on and off IR things. If you want it to, it offers a matter bridge for home kit and has the, Red Zigbee Wi-Fi Bluetooth IR, which is kind of neat. It turns on and off IR things if you want it to. It offers a MatterBridge for HomeKit and has the, let's see,

Wi-Fi with WP3 security. All good stuff. It's just an update. So if you feel that your M2 hub isn't enough, the M3 hub is now available. Get out there and get you one. Do you guys need one? I don't need one.

No. Three is bigger than two. so yeah this hub's getting great reviews you know in the circuits but everyone i see reviewing it has been sent one for the review and of course they're not gonna talk crap about it that's one thing i i noticed um so you know if you want a good, honest review, Aquara, send us one. We'll talk nice about it for sure. Here's the biggest feature I think we missed, PoE. PoE enabled port. Yeah, awesome. Yeah.

But the other thing that, you know, Jimmy, you know, he's in the Home Tech Hub here, pointed out was this hub had Matter 1.1 on it, which, again, is, I'm'm gonna be crapping on matter a few times today for some reason but this is the fragmentation of uh matter versions that you know i predicted is going to happen out there different devices are going to have different versions of matter and then which ones you know you're not going to know if your new device is going to work on what version of matter you need etc it's just going gonna be a mess but i'm pretty sure they can push a new version of matter to it um and get it up to the 1.2 or 1.3 at least and but we have no control over that we just gotta wait on them yep the the comment here from stompy on this uh nine to five max story says initial views say this doesn't work well with Matter devices from all manufacturers. I would recommend checking out some of those before you buy the M3.

Yeah. Try it before you buy, I guess, the old Amazon program. Which makes me go back to all these people, all these YouTube influencers that are going crazy about this hub. Why? That's why I don't really watch trust their opinions that much, because when you start to get your hands on it, you start to play around with the matter side of things. You'll realize things don't work as you like it to be, you know,

review it after using it for a month and see how you really feel. Jeez. I thought I was going to rant tonight. I know, man. I'm just building up to your rent. He's getting ready. He's getting ready.

Oh, don't get me. Oh, I have a lot to rant about, but I'm holding back. All right. Well, let's move on here to nice greener pastures here where we can be in a safe space with Ikea. Ikea is finally releasing their new energy insights feature to their first energy monitoring smart plug called the Inspilining. It's available globally in October.

It looks like one of the addresses we got. The Inspilining can monitor energy use for any device and requires that he is a didgeridoo hug. Energy Insights is currently a pilot project in Sweden and compares your home's energy uses to similar households and offers tips for saving energy like you know even turning off your lights uh so i don't know this is all good stuff i they have some screenshots in the article uh that have like the the picture of what the app kind of looks like so

you get a little graphs and stuff i'm all for this you get a little graph yeah i think this is a good idea i think energy monitoring i think is one of those things that kind of every automation platform or device should just have built into it i mean it's a good way to kind of keep track of how much power things are using um at my house i've kind of went a little overboard and we have home assistant and so we we monitor our gas usage our electricity usage and our water usage and it's kind of just cool to see like what we're using and how often we're using it. And it kind of helps me decide, you know, what I need to kind of focus on for like upgrading for, you know, more efficient products and stuff like that. You know, I can see how much my AC uses and my furnace and all that stuff. And, you know,

probably doesn't make sense to replace those devices just to save five or 10% thing, you know, probably doesn't make sense to replace those devices just to save 5% or 10% efficiency. But it could tell me that something's dirty or needs servicing or whatever. So I think the energy monitoring in general is a good idea. And I kind of hope to see it on everything. The worst part about IKEA's products is their names, trying to say their names, you know. But other than that, I've always been a fan of their products. They've been solid. The reviews and everybody talks about them.

They're great products. And for the price. Yes, the price. Their Zigbee is standard. They're really good. And they're just slowly chugging along. When it comes to energy monitoring, especially when you're on Zigbee and Z-Wave networks, I'm always hesitant to turn it on. And the reason why is because when you do on certain devices,

it will flood the network. Like if you're monitoring usage of like your washing machine, as soon as you run your washing machine, it starts sending a signal, you know, like the data every second of the energy. So you got to be kind of careful and tweak that aspect of it in the settings to make sure it's not sending too many reports or else you can slow down your,

your ZigBee or Z-Wave network or matter network if it's working. Yeah. I mean, and you say like slowly chugging along, but I mean, their website is just full of smart home products. Like it's pretty amazing to go there and see all the stuff they do support. I mean,

they've got, they've got the speakers, the Sonos compatible speakers symphonies speakers um but then they also have uh like the motorized shades they have all their smart lighting both like smart control bulbs lamps that kind of thing uh they got remote remote light switches and buttons and the air purifiers as well so and i have a bunch of those products of the air purifier i have the shade shade. I have the plug. I have the speakers, right? And all of them have actually worked really well.

Very easy to set up, and I've never had issues with them. They have an air purifier built into a table now. That's actually really cool. It's a Stark Vind, I guess. It's a $200. What's it called? Stark Vind. S-T-A-R-K-V-I-N-D. Close enough.

Yeah, close enough. Same thing. $200 or $225, I guess. It comes with an air purifier built in. It's like a little end table with a plug on it, and it's got a little dial. You crank it up, and it gives you pure air while you're sitting there watching TV. I like IKEA. All right, let's move on here.

Third Reality is launching new Zigbee, not Z-Wave. Nobody's doing that. Zigbee temperature and humidity sensor light features sensor-on technology for precise climate monitoring and compatibility with various Zigbee hubs. The sensor offers enhanced accuracy, updating every five seconds to drive Gavin crazy. Temperature accuracy of plus or minus 0.3 Celsius and humidity accuracy of plus or minus 2%. So there you go. You can grab one of these and pop it on your network and it's going to update every five seconds.

It's going to let you know what the temperature is. Yeah, you don't want something running every five seconds like that, especially when you start to install like 10, 12 of them. Yeah, exactly. It adds up. You got to be aware of what you're throwing on your network. But this is another company, Third Reality, that's been getting a lot of praise,

releasing a lot of good products. But they really stress the accuracy of this. And sometimes you get certain sensors, they only report every minute or something. So maybe that's too infrequent, but maybe five seconds is a little too frequent. And sometimes you get certain sensors, they only report every minute or something. So, you know, maybe that's too infrequent, but maybe five seconds is a little too frequent, but it's accurate. Yeah.

I really like third reality devices. I have a couple of them going on in my house. I have their motion sensors, which are just basic motion sensors. And then I have their water leak sensors. And the reason I chose their water leak sensors is because they actually have a built-in siren to them, kind of like the IKEA ones. And so if for some reason the automation doesn't work or whatever, it'll still make an actual audible sound.

And so I kind of like that feature. So I think Third Reality is a good brand. I use them in my apartment as well with their retrofit smart switches. And I just think they're a good company. This device actually looks kind of nice it's i think it said three yeah two triple a batteries are only required last two years of normal use ultra low power consumption so that's a great little sensor and it doesn't look bad like it's just a little small box that you can mount anywhere or hide anywhere i don't know it's it's nice for a sensor i guess i wonder if you can change like

how often it does record like what rate or frequency usually and i know in my z way i have the zoo's uh z wave temperature and humidity sensors and with home assistant i can control how often those updates so i'd imagine with these ones you could too depends on the hub i guess yep says it's directly compatible with a whole host of alexa hubs, the Echo Plus 2, Echo Studio. Some of the Echos it is not, so kind of keep an eye on that. And then works with Homey. There you got your Homey Bridge, your Homey Pro. SmartThings, Hubitat, Home Assistant, and Third Reality,

they have their little bridges as well. So not a bad list there. It's kind of nice. You can pick which route you want to go. It's kind of nice. Anyway, let's move on here. Speaking of Home Assistant, I knew about Home Assistant. you can pick which route you want to go it's kind of nice anyway let's move on here um speaking of home assistant uh i i knew about home assistant i didn't know about a music assistant but i guess

they've got a thing called music assistant now music assistant 2.0 it's a music library manager that allows you to play your music on various players speakers it's pretty much like works like sonos does. Maybe they won't mess up their app too. I don't know. This sounds pretty interesting. Gavin, you said that you spent some time setting this up and getting it working and

you like it. What's, what's so good about it? This is pretty good. It's a major version update to music assistant 2.0, but basically what it lets you do is integrate all your streaming services. So I have support for like, I think is it called Yahoo Music? And I use the Deezer and Spotify things on there.

You bring it under one interface so you can search and it will search across all of them. And you can play from even your local files all in one interface. And then you can also send the audio to multiple different types of outputs. So you can send the audio to AirPlay or Sonos. I know Sonos supports AirPlay, but you get the idea. Yeah. But you get the idea. Like there's various targets you can choose.

You can send it to multiple at once, keep them in sync, et cetera, et cetera. It works really well. I've been using it with Deezer in my setup. And the interface is all in Home Assistant. It has its own interface, but it's integrated highly with Home Assistant. So you can have a page just for this where you can browse your music, you can make playlists, you can view what's playing and you can control everything from you know adding to your playlist to where it's playing so if you you're looking at like

for something to unify all those apps into one uh you can get this you can install this in your home assistant setup and then you don't no longer have the five different apps on your phone yeah i mean it's pretty much what sonos does right like yeah but it's pretty much what sonos does but sonos sends it to sonos speakers right right this will let you go to other ones yeah so you can send it to solo speakers but on top of that if you had other airplay speakers you could send it to those as well like your tv or something like that too right so it allowed it kind of opens up a lot more possibilities. Well, Home Assistant's definitely getting sued. I can tell you that.

Well, Home Assistant doesn't make this. It's Music Assistant, so we will see. Yeah, and Home Assistant doesn't make any money, so what are they going to sue them for? Are you going to sue a nonprofit foundation? Take over the Open Home Foundation? Yeah. There you go.

Good luck, Sonos. This is mine. Yeah, this looks pretty cool. private foundation take over the open home foundation yeah there you go good luck sonos this is mine uh yeah this looks pretty cool i will have to check this out so it's a little add-on you just click and it it installs it yeah if if you run home assistant in um a vm for example or on its own hardware uh yeah it's as easy as just installing. It adds, it's an integration, right? If you're running Home Assistant, I think in a dock or something, you might have to install it in its own docker and link it. There's a few more steps, but it was pretty easy to set up and get going like right away. Yeah, looks like a good project.

And they've been working on it, it says, for like five years in this blog post. So yeah, that's a nice little update. I just installed it. Let me go ahead and start it, you know, because why not? There it goes. It was easy. Two clicks, it was installed. I don't know what to do with it now, but.

Yeah, that was the confusing part. So you got to add your sources and then you got to add your targets, I guess. Oh. And then you'll now have, then you'll, and that requires, you know, getting APIs and tokens and stuff like that. But I suggest you do that after the show. We only have like an hour or so. It's just 502 bad gateway. So maybe I need to wait for it to finish doing its thing.

This is why we don't let you touch the tech. Whoops, broken. Okay, well, at least I can't put them out of business with my review. Hey, that's a skill. This might actually work for you, too. Denon Home Speakers now support Apple Siri Voice Assistant. Following a firmware update back in December that nobody was paying attention to, this works on Denon Home Series 150, 250, 350, the Soundbar 550,

all starting at about $250. Now offer the Siri Voice Control control and i don't this seems pretty cool we were we're talking a little about this before the show um and we couldn't really think of any smart speakers that this that do this that have siri integrated now this does require that you have a home pod on your network to do the processing but for the most part this works just like your ecobee thermostat right with better sound quality hopefully than your thermostat uh but yeah for the most part i can't think of any other speakers that are doing this can you nope no that's the

first time i've heard of this i i didn't even remember the ecobee thing until you mentioned it um because i don't remember like a siri siri voice coming to any third-party devices to be honest so pretty pretty unique for denon here yeah the eco b1 was a long time ago it was kind of like a wwdc announcement or something like that and i think they're the only ones that ever did anything with it up until now so and everybody was like well siri sucks so we're not going to do anything with that exactly Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Are you going to give us a Siri review? Apple is not going out of business.

I don't think we need to do a Siri review. I think everybody knows how awful Siri is. And they're still in business. And we've just accepted it for somehow. Exactly. The default awfulness. I mean, it's just getting to be like as each day that goes by where OpenAI has this crazy demo or, you know, just like it just gets more and more embarrassing. And it's like they're going to have to just like, wow, everybody this year.

Well, I have hopes for Siri because they signed. I think they signed the deal with ChatGPT now. So the more than likely they're going to be integrating that stuff in at some point i'm looking forward to see what they do it's gonna get better that we'll put a link to the the chad gpt 4.0 it's not like a 4.0 it's just like a 4.0 yeah for omega or something like that but they did a bunch of stuff uh they made the i think the most impressive thing to me was the latency how quickly things turned around and talked to you and it was around i think they said 300 milliseconds which is what people do when they're talking so they

take the information in your process you can respond within 300 milliseconds and that that was impressive that they had more what would you, like emotion or inflection, I guess, in the voices that they had. I've seen that before. That wasn't like anything major. But I think that the latency response and like how it was responding, they did a good job with that. It's still like not as smart as you would hope a robot to be that has access to the infinite knowledge of the Internet. But it does sound sound the puppet looks a lot better at this point it's working a lot better i think i mean i was talking to somebody

at work today i'm like that this thing it's it's like c-3po you're like this is this is we're getting close because it's like awkward it's really like it's cringy to like look at and it's funny yeah and it kind of gets stuff right sometimes you know it's got like it's cringy to like look at and it's funny yeah and it kind of gets stuff right sometimes you know it's got some facts that it can tell you it's just like c-3po if they made it c-3po's voice it'd be perfect so it's like this if they keep letting it scrape like reddit data um it's gonna insult you every time you ask a question at some point it's gonna get be racist you're gonna be afraid to ask it any type of question it will get mad at you or you know every bot on the internet becomes racist so

yeah i think it bodes well for humanity but yeah i i don't know i i think it's and i guess the google event was today i didn't see much with what they're doing but i did see the video stuff they're doing and that looked pretty cool too yeah so i'm just glad i'm glad all this stuff is progressing it's been about what a year or so with chat gbc or the open ai the progress they're making in the year has been amazing and it's getting faster and faster next time next year it'll be crazy what we see this time next year won't even be us on the podcast it'll just be ai i thought about that i mean the way the way to make the voices sound we could just you could just like say tell it what we want to talk about and we just ramble on for an hour it would create a little small talk that we do and everything or we just say edit this podcast

and it would do it that'd be great it would be released the same night because we could make so many more podcasts we gotta top up our resumes man because that's already looking to replace us he just laid it out he's like i'm already thinking about that you know like he already looking to replace us. He just laid it out. He's like, I'm already thinking about that. You know, like, he's looking to replace us. Yeah, I've got enough of your voices, individual tracks and everything. Seth has the hardest job anyway. I don't think he really needs to outsource us.

He needs to outsource himself. Yeah, exactly. There we go. Just replicate us somehow. They took my job that I made them take. Good thing I don't get paid for this. I have nothing to lose. Wait, you're not getting paid?

Wait a minute. Wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. It's too good. You get paid in stamps. Yeah, I got paid in all these stickers. Look at all these stickers I got. Sticker Ridge.

That you forgot in your pocket. That's what it was. Yeah, that was a crazy crazy night i would have forgot a lot of things in my pocket that ice cream was good though all right all right let's move on here uh oh this is tj's favorite topic here we go i got i got him ready to go so sonos updated their app uh we talked about that. There was no mention of any headphones. I wouldn't call this an update. They released a new version of their app.

How about that? He's already going. They released their app. It didn't quite work that well for a lot of people. It was missing features that we talked about last week. It turns out it's missing even more if you can't see because you're blind or you have disabilities that prevent you from actually using any of the accessibility features of your smartphone that existed before. They just forgot to pull those over. Man, and I guess they had an AMA today that they jumped in.

Now, I clicked on this, and there are a lot of comments. Yes. By the time I got in there, it was at 500 or 600. It's more than that now. I mean, there's 31 pages, 769 replies. But I can't tell. I mean, surely they didn't answer. I only see one reply, so I don't know if they answered more than one person.

The common complaint was that after an hour, there were still no responses to any of the questions. So I assume they answered maybe five questions. They had to consult with the attorneys first or something. All right, TJ. Wait, wait. Before TJ gets into this, I just want to say. I'm ready. this app is like a seth project it feels like it was started and never finished that's all i want to say go ahead

dj ouch i just want to defend seth though because because seth doesn't promise things when he starts a project he just says that i'm starting a project and like that's it and then like maybe five months from now we actually hear about the project again and it's completed so you've forgotten about it it's a whole new project i mean i never said anything that's fine you know things happen but this is i don't even understand how this happened so just to give you an idea sonos updated the app uh it's if you remember the whole s1 s2 debacle, this is significantly worse because they basically took an app that was working mostly fine. It was the same old app. I mean, people had connection issues and dropouts and everything else they've always had was Sonos. But they took this app that was mostly working

fine and they released the new version, which I think looks awesome. I think the app itself looks a lot better and I think it functions better I think the app itself looks a lot better. And I think it functions better. Because I always hated like the five little options you had at the bottom of the screen to like basically do whatever you wanted to do. And now you kind of have like one fluid interface to do things. And I think that part is really good. I think they nailed that. What they didn't nail is giving you the same features in the new app that the old app had. And I just, I don't want to run down this list right now. This list was posted four days ago. And these are things that are not in the app right now that were in the app before and when they're

coming back. Blind people. If you're blind or visually impaired, you can't use your Sonos products until May 21st because they didn't build accessibility into the new app. Adding to queue and playing next. That's coming in early June. So you'll be able to add songs to your queue list in early June. Sleep timer. This is a little sleep alarm that uh ironically i started using a couple weeks ago uh you can't use that until mid-june and so they push that out like a rapid update where they like allow you to make an alarm but i don't think you can cancel or edit it at the

moment so that just keeps going wait you can't cancel the alarm they just like made it worse uh you can't well speaking of cancel alarms you can't snooze alarms until mid-june uh local music library search and playback mid-june update wi-fi settings mid-june wait wait wait update wi-fi settings you don't need to do that yeah so like let's say you move or something and you get a new wi-fi or you get a new router and you want to connect that router or that uh that your sonos speakers to the new wi-fi router guess what you can't you know you have to do right now you have to factor reset your speakers if you have multiple speakers you gotta factor reset them all just so you can

connect to this new wi-fi name and sonos shot themselves in the foot by getting rid of sonos net because traditionally you would just plug in one speaker and there you go all your stuff would be there but guess what on newer products they don't have sonos net so good luck factor reset and all your stuff and they might not even add to your system again because a lot of people are posting that they can't even add products to their sonos account right now. So, like, I don't... Why? Why would you do this to yourself? I mean, it sounds like mid-June is probably when they should have released this.

Right? And it's like, you try to understand. It's like, yeah, you know, software's is difficult and there's going to be bugs and stuff. But like when you release an app that doesn't have the same things as the old one that people like, you know, use all the time. I feel like that was a major oversight. Well, I almost feel like they had to release this app now in preparation for your headphones. This is all your fault. Well, this is all your fault.

And that's supposedly the rumor. But I don't think anybody needs headphones that bad you could have just waited because it sounds like the headphones aren't coming till mid-june anyway so like why did you put why did you rush out this update you should have just waited oh man i feel bad i mean you know it like and it's so bad like i'm just annoyed at this point like i just i i don't understand how the the ceo can keep being the ceo at this point it's basically like three different debacles that this guy has been part of since he took over the ceo uh patrick spence over there firing everybody one of them because that's probably the problem i i would think you know because he had the whole recycling

program which was like whatever i think that was blown out of proportion by the media they had the s1 s2 debacle which i think could have been handled better but that's kind of whatever and now you have this whole new app update i just i i don't understand how you're able to keep leading a company and this crap keeps happening it's just it's so weird and sonos is a premium brand right like you buy sonos They're expensive speakers. You kind of expect them to work forever. In the past five years, Sonos has kind of just crapped the bed and just decided that they don't really care about the premium stuff anymore.

They're just going to wing it every day. Every app update, they're just going to wing it and throw it out in the air. If you don't like it, tough. And you pointed out there they're they're not cheap speakers i would expect this kind of stuff from a cheap speaker company you know but sonos isn't cheap you know like and and i i my first reaction is i was questioning don't the

developers use the apps they're making and morton in the hub pointed out like sometimes the developers are in in in fights with the marketing people because the marketing people got to get something out. And the developers, even though they say it's not ready, they have to prioritize what they can get ready in time to meet deadlines. And I thought Wi-Fi should have been at the top of the list, but maybe there was something else. And it just sucks. Like I said, because I think the app, it looks really nice. I think it's well-designed, and I think the actual UI update is really nice, but it's just overshadowed by all this awfulness that should just not exist.

Like, they could have just pushed the update out in mid-June, and everybody would have been like, look at all these features and this new app, and they would have just been angry about how the app looks instead of, like, all the functionality missing about it but maybe that was also sonus's goal was like let's not talk about the design let's just talk about these missing features that'll come back eventually well they would have been more mad if their their headphones got released next month but the app's not ready till mid-june so yeah patrick spence you should be fired sorry i mean i i will say it's probably what happened.

It was probably what happens to most companies when they do. I think the original Sonos leadership was there for a long time. I can't remember his name for somebody that's just escaping you. He was pretty... His goal was to make the best home audio system, right? Patrick Spence was the CFO. He was the money guy. And the first thing he did when he got it in is fire people. And the next thing he does every subsequent year is fire more people.

And just, I don't know. It's not the same company as it used to be, unfortunately. And I think we just have to live with that. And we'll see what the headphones come out, the $500 headphones that TJ is going for sure no i'm not buying them now i'm boycotting so no no 100 boycotting it's how that's how bad this is it'll be mid-june everything will be back to normal in mid-june you just don't want them now i'm gonna buy some bows headphones instead uh mid-june it's around the corner um sorry that we're pretty much gonna put sonos out of business with that tjbhd review but like fisker out of business tj thanks a lot brilliant out of business brilliant wink out of business i'm sure we had something to do with wink too are they are

they still in business i've never heard of them shutting down so i feel like they start they are i think he's like yeah they're still there still there. Wow. Maybe we should contact Will.i.am and be like, hey, you should give this to us. And then we buy Sonos. Turn it all around. We'll buy Wink, Brilliant, and Sonos and turn it all around. I just went to the Wink status page because that's where I go. The Wink website's up. But everything has got green checks.

But for whatever reason, since April 14th, which is a whole month ago at the time we're recording today uh they're investigating uh intermittent issues with controlling and reconnecting field cue devices so wake and sonos must have the same programmers or maybe they just forgot to take that notice down i don't know oh too good they're still there though plugging away all right uh well let's move on sorry Sorry, Sonos. There you go. It is. Well, let's talk about things that matter this week.

Do we have time to rant more about matter? But Matter 1.3 came out. It's going live. We are trying to get Daniel back on the show. So hopefully next week we can talk a little bit more about Matter 1.3. But I think, Gavin, you had thoughts about this. It's like we've got new features in 1.3, but we just don't have the adoption. Like we were talking about earlier, Aquara releases a hub, brand new hub, M3 hub. Does it have Matter 1.3?

No, 1.1. Doesn't even have 1.2, and we're already at 1.3. We need to get Daniel back. Talk me off the ledge again. I'm jumping. I'm just hanging on right now. So, yeah, the fragmentation is just killing me now. Like, but we saw this. I kind of saw this coming.

But there must be something I'm missing here. So, Daniel, clear it up. About five years of your life. That's what you're missing because you got to wait five years for the standard to do something.'re probably just waiting for 1.5 you know or maybe 2.0 just get the big ones 2.5 because matter 1.2 launched as i said six months ago like we we can't have this six months later still wondering who updated it should be updated within the first few weeks on every device you know we gotta keep things in sync. Yeah, I don't know.

Like, that's not how these devices are made, though. These devices, I mean, the Aquara Hub probably was not even barely in production. And so they were working on Matter 1.1. 1.2 comes out and they're like, yeah, that's nice. Let's release this product. And they got six more months to go before they ship a product. And now their product is rolling out the door. Everybody's excited that it it works and it's got 360 ir and it's got matter 1.1 so i and maybe hopefully it just takes an update right like they they'll get to the working on that

when all the bugs are but until that you guys say okay i have a matter device but does it work with this right like like it works with my amazon device, but not my Siri. But we're used to things not working with a HomeKit. But that's what you now have to think about because of this. What's it going to work with? It would be nice if these hub companies, and I say hub companies generously, like big, Acora, Apple, Google, Amazon, like they got in a race. Like who can be at 1.3 the fastest? Yeah.

It'd be nice. But we all know that's not how it works. Apple will give you an update maybe once every year. Yeah. And Google will give you an update, but then discontinue the product. Amazon, I don't know what they're doing over at Amazon, but they're probably on the ball over there. They'll release new products with the update. So you have to upgrade.

The old products don't work with it anymore. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, you can keep that Echo, but you're going to want this one. You fire a tablet, yeah. Yep. All right, well, all the links to topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes

over at hometech.fm slash 482. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And TJ, I do not know where you found this. This is hilarious. This is an Android tablet, like you would hang on your wall, right? It's got two modes, though. Tablet mode and DVD mode.

And what might be DVD mode? It just doesn't make any sense. Well, this has got to be the show arts this week. I mean, this thing, the tablet, the touchscreen, like, folds down in the front, and then you put a DVD inside, and you close it it and you can watch that movie in there amazing simply amazing i want i want to buy this thing it's only 89 it's on sale 20 off normally 109 which i find hard to believe uh but i i have no i have no reason to own this but i want to buy one so bad just so i can go places and be like yeah my my you know my tablet

was playing a dvd the other day and wait for somebody to correct me but no no you were not watching a dvd be like no actually check this thing out i whip it out and i'm like look at this where did you get a dvd from from the pawn shop that's where yeah yeah this thing is this thing is pretty sweet it's not a blu-ray player so you can't play those fancy blu-rays but you can play dvds and cds which uh i think is all right this would go so great with my android tablet cassette player i would not be surprised if samsung made that i'm really worried because i'm reading this and it the the product description says 10.1 inch quad core tablet case and keyboard does that mean that it's just like a case where you can store your dvds in the wall or is this actually play dvds i'm so confused i go to their

website and if you try to download the manual the there's an application error so you can play dvds like it would be a waste if it just stored one dvd i mean i mean it's always carry your favorite what am i gonna do with the dvd though i have no other place where to go that's 100 plays dvds yes what do you what do you what do you store in a dvd and a tablet for like people have needs they have their favorite dvd when do you find it you're gonna have to store it somewhere like you bought the one dvd it's gonna go there it's just it's just blue on repeat okay somewhere like you bought the one dvd it's gonna go there it's just it's just bluey on repeat okay so it allows you to play dvd video cd vcds cds and mp3 discs i suppose i don't know uh and you can hook it up to your tv with like an hdmi cable or something

too so okay i mean you could just have this as a glorified dvd player for your house oh man and it's 89 when you purchase online. Yeah. I love it. I don't know where else you could purchase it. $1280 by $800 resolution. Oh, my gosh. And it has USB-C, guys.

I'm in love. Oh, my. I was assuming it might be for USB. Old school tech with new school tech. And a headphone jack. I mean, what else would you want besides usbc and headphone jack oh man amazing oh so this isn't the way it's displayed is like a wall mount thing but this is like a big giant computer thing that you basically it's like a laptop essentially that you open up

well it's basically like if you remember like the portable dvd players that you always brought the car and i we weren't rich so i never had one of these but i knew people that had them uh and you know the normal one it has the screen and then it folds out and kind of like a laptop basically the same shape as a laptop and then you had the little buttons and where you put the dvd and stuff like that this basically just puts the dvd behind the screen oh it's sold out on amazon ah well you can get it stock here you get walmart.ca canadian amazon sold out uh yeah it's a it's it's a out on Amazon. It's in stock here. Can you get it at Walmart.ca? Canadian Amazon, sold out. Yeah, it's a portable DVD player, tablet, Android tablet, and it's got USB-C. So there you go, $89.

If you're listening to the show and you buy one, I'll send you two stickers if you send us proof. You can put them on your DVD case thing. Somebody's going to listen to this and be like, I actually need this. Yeah, I could see it and be like, I actually need this. Yeah. I could see it having its uses, I suppose. I can see this for kids on a car trip. Yeah. Because you don't always have cell service.

Android tablets always suck. So, I mean, hopefully you can at least get to DVD mode without much effort. Oh, look. People also bought with headphones and then a CD-DVD wallet. Like, I've seen one of these in 20 years. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, good find, TJ.

Yeah, you're welcome. All right. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, pics of leaks or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. Project updates. I'm the only one that have anything in here.

I guess I was the only one doing have anything in here. I guess I was the only one doing stuff this week. I don't know. Gavin, I heard him like mumbling when we started the show and he was like, where did I put that? Where, where is the code for this? And I think he was going back and forth trying to find some code. So yeah, I was digging through the home assistant code, trying to find something specific. But if I find it, maybe that's a next week project. I'm, I'm gearing up for Infocom in June. So kind of slowing down what I can do around here and then work is going to take it over

because everything we have to have done for our booth has to be done next week and shipped. So kind of working on that with the office. It's going to be shipped. It goes to the advanced warehouse or we have to wait and ship it directly to the venue. So either way, stuff gets there. Weird how early you have to do and ship it to the directly to the venue so either way stuff gets there weird how early you have to do a lot of these things uh i found somebody else that was

doing a home assistant or as you a control for assistant driver integration thing on github and i was like you know what they're a little bit further along with some of the things and i'm gonna check out what they're doing some of the code they have isn't, they're doing things that would kind of block and maybe slow down the performance of your control board system. So I might just like, what do you do? You fork that and you do a pull request and fix some of their bugs.

I might help them out and see what they're doing and maybe add some stuff to it. I don't know. It seems like that would be the better way to go. And I think I finished. I don't know. It's been open on my computer and things got done slowly over time,

but I think I got my AquaTel Fluid level monitor working with Control 4 finally again. So I'm going to publish that thing out. And then I'm going to have to put an IT ticket in, Gavin, and get this, I think I'm going to move video card because I was looking at some fun stuff online that you can do with your video card. And I've got that Tesla M60 sitting in my, my, it's not the server. It's that one's, that one's made for the server. And I put it in the, I don't know,

it's a consumer grade computer. You know, it's like a gaming PC, essentially Intel i9, whatever. And it really messes things up because it, it basically the, the motherboard says, oh, you've got a video card? That means you want video to go out the video card. And guess what the video card doesn't have? Outputs. A video port, yeah. So, I have had no video output on this thing, the server, my first Unraid server, for a while.

So, I'm going to move that over, I think, to the second Unraid server. I have a P400, a P600 P 600 Nvidia card I can swap over. So I'll still be able to like do encoding decode pretty quickly with that fast enough for Plex. And, uh, I think I'm going to try and see if I can hook that thing up, uh, and, and do some, some fun stuff with like machine learning or the new AI stuff. There's, there's all the Olam a thing that you can get and, and build your own chat gmt so i'm gonna see if i can get that up and going that looks kind of fun uh but to do it i i definitely need to move that over i was doing some encoding and i logged into the uh the unread dashboard and at

the bottom of the the video card stats it said throttling i mean it was encoding a bunch of like or re-transcoding i guess a bunch of uh files that that i needed i was using tdar to save some space on and it basically had slowed it down quite a bit so probably a good time to to move things over to a case that has better airflow through it and the server case definitely has that so uh and then i got a fun i got a fun project that popped up front of the show james called me and said hey i've got this idea can we And I was like, Hmm, it sounds like we can James let's, let's do it. So we're going to, we're going to, we're going to make, uh, what I'm primarily calling the bad M driver. And that stands for big ass Dante matrix driver. And it is, it'll be,

uh, uh, it'll use theamaha piece of equipment that i pretty much already have the integrations written for uh and be able to do like a audio matrix of like up to i think it's 64 by 64 channels um could go any bigger yamaha has some bigger like the dme 9 i think can do 256 by 256 so could go bigger if we wanted to one day, but for now he had this cool little project where he had some Dante sources that he wanted to bring in like microphones and that kind of thing. And we can use this piece of equipment that we have and just kind of build out a matrix inside of it.

So it seemed like a fun thing. And I was like, you know what, free info, common trade, get it done. So I'm going to start working on, I'm started working on that this,

this week and hopefully by the end of the week, it'll be wrapped up. So that was James. Yeah. James, James hopefully by the end of the week it'll be wrapped up. That was James? Yeah, James. James Radcliffe over in the UK. Yeah. He's going to do some project with it. Yeah, before James takes up our Seth's time, he should bump up his Patreon page up there.

Seth doesn't come cheap. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff going on. End of the school is next week. And then the end of the school is like next week. It's the last week of school. Then we get our little tornado that comes and lives in our house, TJ. Yeah. Hopefully not. No, no.

She does. She lives here. I have one question. TJ, how's the robot lawnmower going? It is good, but I think I'm going to return it. Oh. You're going to put the company out of business too? I don't think so. I don't think Segway's going to business.

Segway's going away. But it's really nice. It's honestly really cool to have a robot lawnmower. It's one of those things that I just don't have to think about. But it's just the software itself is missing some things. I can't even add a second user, and I can't have multiple devices logged in at the same time. But you can change the Wi-Fi.

Maybe. I don't know. I haven't even tried. But, yeah, I'm going to do the Amazon special and return it. You'll have to keep listening to see what i buy instead oh he's gonna have amazon credit see that's what he's saying oh no i'm gonna i'm getting that return to the car i'm gonna get amazon credit now for 1400 you can't have that money jeff let's see where he goes to next well i mean it it it sounds like it was an okay i mean i will say that mine has the worst

software it's basically i don't know if i've ever shown you guys what this looks like but it's basically a a green screen with a giant play button on it and it means go and that's that's pretty much it like there's no i mean what else do you need yeah i mean with mine for sure it's time to mow the lawn no i just i i think my money would be better spent with like a used husqvarna and i've been looking at like the husqvarna 430x or 430xh um and it seems to be a more refined product they have the the boundary wire uh but i don't know it just seems like it might actually last me longer. I'm trying to decide. Do I need a robot lawnmower I can only use for like three months out of the year?

Oh, I mean, that's perfect. Go. That's just showing us a play button on a screen. That's how he starts his robot lawnmower. Well, I'll send you a picture of this. I mean, it's funny because it says error. It's been errored out for a little bit here.

I think I'm going to go towards a robot mop because I've been looking at my floors and they're and they're pretty good so i feel like my floors being gross are more of a concern than me taking 30 minutes to mow my lawn once a week 1400 robot mop what's that gonna get you i don't hopefully i don't have to spend that much hopefully like 800 to a thousand right right so if you have any suggestions for good robot mops only, I really don't need the vacuum. I guess I could do the vacuum as well,

but I just want a fancy robot mop. So if you have any suggestions, go ahead and send it to us. You want a combo one? Get a combo one. And get the one that auto, get the one that auto empties too, if you can,

or auto washes itself, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I got an auto empty vacuum. It's a DreamTek empty vacuum it's a dream tech and it works great i just want i just want a really good mop auto empty mop i got the dream tech with with both i mean it's like a combo thing and like yeah then but then you don't have to worry about not having a vacuum dj so i already have a vacuum though yeah well if one gets stuck

the other can unstick it oh that's true he needs a buddy they're friends and you can have robot wars ah then they can make me a little baby robot vacuum no you don't you don't want that you don't want that that's that's no i want that the replication part is what we have to avoid then it can it can get rid of the dirty things in the house which are the animals and just suck them all up like oh no more dirt problem solved oh i actually have two updates and two updates yeah i just realized so we've already ended the podcast sorry okay well this is for post show but uh my i got notification that my 3d printer is uh shipped so my prusa mk4 will be here by end of week hopefully so that i've been waiting since February for.

And then I was able to get my hands on one of the Expressif ESP32 S3 Box 3s. Those are the devices that, you know, the Home Assistant crew were pushing to, you know, for voice assistant stuff. So I get to play with that. So I'm excited when that comes in. That should be here tomorrow,

which is probably a week before this podcast gets edited. So the only problem, like I posted it when it was in stock in the forum. So hopefully someone else in our hub. So someone else probably got it. But the thing costs $50. Okay. And then it was $32 in shipping to me. I'm like, all right, fine.

I'll suck it. $32 for shipping? Yeah, yeah. Holy cow. No all right, fine. I'll stop. $32 for shipping? Yeah, yeah. Holy cow. So I was like, okay. No, no, it gets better. Oh. I just get notification that I have to pay $30 in import duties.

Wow. And it's like, by the time I get notified, it's like, they should have told me this in advance because I can't turn back now. Just buy a Google speaker at that point. Yeah. So at this point, you know, I'm glad I only ordered one. Holy cow.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. That's awful. That's from Adafruit. Adafruit? Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to make fun of you for that one. That's awful. Yeah, I got burnt with that one, but you know, tomorrow I'll get this new fancy new speaker that I can play with, so. That should be pretty cool. Yeah. It's ironic if it's DOA. My dog's going to miss a few meals just so I'll get this fancy new speaker that I can play with. That should be pretty cool.

Yeah. Be ironic if it's DOA. My dog's going to miss a few meals just so I can get this speaker. Poor puppy. He'll be fine. Till payday. So those are my updates. That's awesome though.

You get your printer. That'll be cool. That'll be fun. Yeah. Well, the fun part is going to be the month it will probably take me to put it together oh because it's not assembled you gotta put together and it's like 500 steps or something like that yeah take you a weekend you'll be fine you put a rack together because then i also gotta put together i also gotta put together the case for the enclosure which is also special wiring

and stuff and i also got the multi uh material unit that's going to be extra wiring and stuff so yeah i won't be reporting on this probably my first print will probably come next month i think it'll surprise us i have to ask forgiveness for spending this much money on that. So TJ, I've been looking for your, your, your robot vacuum things or robot non vacuums, just the mop part. And I ran across this every bot thing.

It's got three spinning heads, but this, this graphic made me laugh. It's noise. It says noiseless brilliance. And then it's got like 43 decimals and it's got the sleeping kid who dropped his little teddy bear on the floor. And the mop is creeping up on it, scanning it.

So, yeah, there you go. Must destroy dirty toy. Some of the other pictures in here are great too. There's a cat where it's kind of like snuck around the cat sleeping on the floor and that kind of thing. I just love the word. It says equivalent to the sound of rustling leaves or a gentle gentle breeze yeah yeah that'd be the one to go for 43 decibels is pretty low so clean without concerns it's on sale oh it's even got it's got a handheld remote control i mean obviously i'm gonna get this yeah i don't need a smartphone

app i need a remote yeah why would you do ir will never fail you except every other time never uh it's only compatible at matter 1.35 throw it away that's not good no no that's too good all right just noticing they had a mother's day ad it reminded me of this really cringe ad that shelly sent everybody it's for mother's day like get your mother this smart plug and it was like oh my god why would she want a smart plug but okay thanks shelly good good try you don't know how often i've actually installed uh like smart home devices like a ring camera or something because somebody's husband got it for them for like mother's day like three years ago. I've had a lot of clients like,

Oh yeah, my husband bought me this ring doorbell two years ago, but we never got it installed. Could you install it for me? And I'm like, man, you know what? My mom asked me for one.

So, you know, I didn't have to buy it. She came and she said, I want a ring doorbell. Yeah. I think your mom's a little different than your, your partner.

Yeah. True. Would you, would you give Rose a video doorbell? No, I think your mom's a little different than your partner. Yeah, true. Would you give Rose a video doorbell? No, I don't want her to see me leaving and coming and going. I want to control all that stuff. I don't even give her access to her current doorbell.

Nope. Otherwise, she'd see my 3D printer. It must not be working. It's only three giant packages. Yeah's like oh the video oh the camera crashed as soon as that delivery happened it's really weird yeah really weird oh man well keep us updated on the uh the printer for sure and tj let let you know if you find any of these i was looking at the reviews the reviews aren't very good on that. It says. Yeah, I wasn't going to buy that one.

Just so you know, Seth. As soon as I saw the handheld controller, I'd have a control of my bond bridge then. If it even works. Yeah. It's IR. You know it's IR. Yeah, I can program it. Oh, there you go.

But, you know, if you just want gentle rustling leaves, that's the way to go. That's what I need. Because I definitely have my robot vacuuming, vacuuming or mopping next to my head. While you're sleeping. Yeah. While I'm sleeping. Naturally, the time you want the house to be cleaned is when you're sleeping. So, yeah, my, my, I assume this is probably a normal feature, but mine the other day was, was vacuuming and it ran out of battery.

So I had to go back to the base and I was like, we'll resume cleaning once we charge up a little bit. Well, it happened to resume cleaning at like midnight. It started going down the hallway and I hear, and I'm like, nope, turn this off right now. Yeah, I usually kick mine off around nine or ten o'clock in the morning sometime every few days a week and yeah just like we when we're in sometimes we're in meetings and in here in the garage we hear it and we run over and close the door so we don't have to hear it running around but yeah so far so good with uh the the uh dreamy the dreamy bot yeah their software i think is actually pretty decent too. I can't complain.

They did have, by the way, I mean, I think we linked to it previously, but they do have a robot lawnmower coming in. Oh, yeah, I did see that. Let's see if we can get a review unit for you. Send it to me. DJ's the one with grass. Mine's all dead. I came home today and there's this giant machine on my front lawn.

Just like shooting more pipe underneath the ground for the power and whatnot. And I'm like, Oh wow. Like this, this is amazing. Like the entire yard was taken up at this machine. And I was like, well,

glad we, we saw it at this place. Hopefully they'll come through and replace all the dead grass that they didn't kill, but I guess I could blame on them. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see.

All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show. And especially those who are able to financially support through the patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.

Dot. FM slash support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everyone else can gather in there. And I don't know. I think between Gavin and Richard, it looks like it's going to be 3D printer talk for a while. I feel like that's coming.

Yeah. I have a feeling richard like i i wish i had somebody like me to bounce some printer talk off of when i first bought my printer because i i did made a whole bunch of mistakes that i learned from so i have a feeling richard may ping me a few times you know that's fine you know i got a. Nah, I'd do anything for Richard. He's a cool guy. And Morton also has discovered that his bird stand, I mean, his Tempest weather station, also gets triggered by birds sitting on top of it, even though he has the bird spikes installed properly. Those bird spikes, they look like their supports for the nest. You know, they're like little rebars and you build your nest around it.

It's perfect for the birds. Oh man, it's too good. It's too good. I took mine down and well, when I replaced it, bird spikes had fallen off. So I kind of like put those, threw those in the shed out back and I forgot to put them back on. But I look out there now and there's always a big giant bird perched on the thing. Big hawks in the morning and then little birds in the shed out back, and I forgot to put them back on. But I look out there now, and there's always a big giant bird perched on the thing, big hawks in the morning and little birds in the afternoon.

But it hasn't triggered as a false alarm yet. Maybe they figured out that birds like to dance online. Anyway, if you want to help the show but can't support financially, we appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week of Home Tech News here. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care.