HomeTech.fm - Episode 484 - Gluing the Smart Home Together with AI

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

On this week's show: Hubitat has a new UI, Home Assistant has a clever voice control hack for iOS, Sonos defends the new app, iRobot backs away from subscriptions, a pick of the week, project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 31st from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Where was I? I don't know. From Reynoldsburg. Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Why does mine have a tornado emoji? Well, there's always tornadoes. Just known as tornadoes now. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm your technical therapist gavin campbell that sounds nice yes and welcome to the home tech podcast a podcast all about home automation home technology whatever a technical therapist is i don't know it

could be a sensual massage that comes out of that we'll find out we'll find out i don't know if i want to find out no you're gonna find out you can keep it to yourself you're the one on your way to canada not me no gavin's gotta pay me first i don't think he's gonna to find out. No, you're going to find out. You can keep it to yourself. You're the one on your way to Canada, not me. No, Gavin's got to pay me first. I don't think he's going to pay me. He's put all his money into his backyard. He's not going to have any money left over. That's true.

His backyard. He's been posting pictures of his backyard. Beautiful. So nice. I know. Let's save it for the end of the show. Save it for the end of the show. I'll give you some updates.

All right. We'll have to do that. I have an update. I will be... We'll probably not have a show next week or what will happen is the five hour long recording that we had last week will finally be edited and posted this week and then for may 31st this show this show that we're pretending comes out on may 31st may get bumped and come out next week i don't know the the point is is you

probably will have plenty of home tech to listen to um you know and you know it'll last you for the week i think because i will be in beautiful las vegas june 8th through 14th or whatever at the infocom trade show i guess and booth c 98 69 yucking it up there i guess i don't know what we're showing some stuff i guess we have things that we're showing some new software things that i did and then some hardware stuff that's come out you know we've got it all there is your hardware compatible with matter they don't do matter actually you know what's funny is that um i was talking to our preis today and i guess the big hubbub over at the um at the at the good old um infocomm it's like there's a lot of people that want open standards like for video over IP and that kind of thing. Oh, really?

Yeah. Open standards. Yeah. Yeah. So there's like this, like every time somebody comes out with this video over IP, like for video distributions, they're like, is that like an open standard thing? I don't want to get locked into some proprietary thing, right? Like Crestron or something.

I don't know. And like, I was asking, I was talking about that today, just about that day. And some of the conversations that we were having directly, you know, were almost the same conversation we had last week with Daniel. So it was interesting, very interesting that there is like a push for open standards in the commercial world. They don't want to be locked into any one particular vendor. In theory, they'll be able to be like, well, I have this video distribution system. It works over IP and it all works the same way with the same IP, API and all that stuff. And, you know, you're basically just buying the products

based on how well they work, which is what the open standards should do, right? That's the goal, I guess, for Matter and whatever. I forget the name of this thing, but whatever that's going to be. And I can see that benefiting the installers. Like I can see why they're asking for that, but that's not going to benefit the, uh, the, you know, the companies that want to lock you into their, their ecosystem.

Well, I mean, they can lock you in. They just got to make the better product, right? They make the better product that locks into buying it. Uh, it's cause as installers, that's all we care about. We just want, we never want to hear from you again. Like that's pretty much it. We don't want to do a followup. We don't even want to come and blow out dust in the thing. Like we're so lazy. Not we're lazy. We just want to hear from you again like that's pretty much it we don't want to do a follow-up we don't even want to come and blow out dust in the thing like we're so lazy not we're lazy we just want to go put in the new install um but there's plenty of it i guess there's plenty of companies out there that do have like the maintenance program set up um and and that that is good stuff to do but i can tell you we never want to walk into a house and be like oh

yeah that projector you put in it doesn't work anymore for some reason i get up there and figure out why it's not working. We never want to hear that. So make good products. Something like MatterCasting, I think, could actually be beneficial to the professional space. I mean, it's just one of those things, like, a lot of stuff has implemented AirPlay now. And AirPlay works great. But basically, you go into a lot of places and you can AirPlay, and that's kind of it.

Android devices and some other devices are kind of hosed. And so if you introduce something like Matter casting maybe everybody could partake and just one thing to send your presentation or your video or whatever to the screen and be so much simpler so i definitely see uses for that that could be yeah that could definitely be something that pops into that i'm more talking about like the like the broadcast quality um video being shared over like a 10 gig network or something like that like they want that protocol to be like an open standard and like how the video gets where they can make basically what they're doing matter where they're saying okay it's got to do this this and this and they're

like you basically have to build your hardware around that um that's that's what they're trying to get to so i I don't know. It's a good effort. It makes sense. Good luck. HDMI is a standard and they found a way to mess that up. But that's not an open standard. That's like a closed proprietary group that makes up the standard for the lawyers in Hollywood.

So I can tell you all the guts behind HDMI, all the video, the high definition stuff, that all works fine in broadcast. And you don't have HDMI cables. You have beautiful BNC cables that go on. guts behind hdmi all the video the high definition stuff that all works fine in broadcast and you don't have hdmi cables you have beautiful bnc cables that go on they turn and you never have to worry about them falling off ever and uh we have the hdmi cable to worry about because in broadcast it has to work right like yeah the tv has to be on the picture has to go out to the station the station has to broadcast it it it can never have a black screen black black screen means you're losing money so they never want the the picture to go away uh so yeah it always has to work which is what you know if we can get that in in our home stuff that kind of quality that'd be great

anyway um sticker updates we do have sticker updates we're getting we're getting closer i think we're one step closer there's what's holding us back i don't know yeah what is what's going on over there because i think my part's done i was just waiting on somebody else oh it's seth what are we waiting on there was a document document thing and like you know i will i will send you over oh my gosh yeah you just had to make it more complicated i had this thing i was like let's just make it quick and by quick i mean like after like four weeks um and now it's now we're waiting like more for you though it's kind of weird you know i think i think once we get done with all this i think everybody's gonna appreciate um how well this went and then they're gonna have this awesome like sticker kidding i'm talking up these stickers i think this is gonna be like one of your projects where it just goes on for like eight months so guys you might get your stickers by christmas i and

there's no promise we might as well reprint them what is it end of may right now we'll get them out the door i i have faith it's coming it's coming fast so we're almost there we're about to have a project management board set up so we can check off. There's not even anything to manage. It's just one little thing you have to do. It's like buy stamps on Facebook. Hey, I already have all that. I got labels.

I got counterfeit stamps. I did my part in like a minute. Seth, it's just. Yeah, you're going to have to redo your part, I think. We're not. We're not we're not all right i i've got i've got it i'm gonna i'm gonna send you guys a fun little thing here and we'll we'll get we'll get moving on this so okay it's coming it's coming i swear unless you do it live i don't think i'm gonna look i'll post it here there you go you guys can see what i'm working

on oh you can print that and put it in there right and? Wow. Look at that. That's fancy. Who's going to print that? I don't have money for that. I'll just send you a print. And it's in color. Now we're going to have to wait on Seth to print this and send it to you, TJ, for you to then mail it out. Yeah, what is going on? He just created more work for this thing.

Yeah, Seth is like the king of like, that's not complicated enough. Let's make it more complicated. Yeah. Okay. And he probably had this done six months ago. It does nice though i'll give you that yeah that's pretty good actually yeah i kind of prefer what this over what tj was doing so oh no 100 i would agree with that but the thing is if it doesn't get done is it better i don't know it's beautiful though right it is beautiful yeah all right well i have a. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll work on it.

I have a color printer. I could print this. Okay. If you haven't requested your stickers yet, send us a request for stickers just because of the upgrade. By the time you get this, it might be out already. It's so funny. It's so funny.

All right. Well, all right. So, there's... You're fancy. We're clearly alluding that there may be something else besides the sticker that goes along with the sticker. So, we'll get there. It's coming.

Okay. All right. Some really good sticker ideas we can do too so let's just get stickers out let's just get stickers out nah sorry guys you're never getting stickers if you send a request in you're just you're not getting anything you might as well just make your own there's a website it's called stickermule.com you just upload our logo right there maybe go to etsy we'll just give everybody a an etsy credit we'll just give you a download for our logo just go find it make it yourself screenshot of the amount of money we made off selling your data though

it's great so we want to thank you for that you are now all ai yeah yeah we're definitely we're being the advertisement money is just so good uh wait um sonos was gonna advertise with us but uh they heard i was gonna buy the headphones or return them i like that one did you patrick spends nope nope nope nope uh well we'll find out in a couple months how good those headphones are from TJ when he gets them, right? A couple months? I don't know.

Whenever they come out and are able to be returned. Well, they're coming out June 5th, I guess, at Best Buy. And you know that they're not going to sell out of them. Yeah. So I'll be able to go in day of and buy them. Oh, nice. Okay. June 5th.

Marking that on the calendar. And I think I should get the white ones. That way they look even more disgusting after I finish them. Yes. I'm a pretty clean person, but I don't know. White headphones sounds like an awful idea. it just yeah i mean yeah that's an awful idea you just look at my airpod pros that confirm that don't yeah don't look at the ones that stick in your ear no don't look at those yeah nicole looked at mine the other day she's

like why are they so disgusting i'm like what do yours look like hers are pristine how does that happen she's like i clean mine every day and i'm like all right do yours look like? Hers are pristine. How does that happen? She's like, I clean mine every day. And I'm like, all right, that is way too much dedication. I mean, I clean mine. And maybe every day, but still. Every day? No. No, that's. What does she have to do?

Like boil them? Like, I don't understand. We did wash and dry one of them. So maybe that's how she's doing it. I did that too. And it still works. Yeah, it works great. Good product.

I have an AirPod sleeve that you put it in that you could dispose of to keep it clean. Oh, a little AirPod condom. Yeah. Oh, I see. I'm just trying to give Seth an extra website to go buy now. AirPod condoms. AirPodcondoms.com. I got this little like, it came, I don't know, it's like a little pick thing.

I don't even know where my wife got this from, but like it's like a a little thing and like you start taking apart and it's got like little cleaning things and like little brushes and stuff on it so like I can use that to like clean the little screens and stuff out of it and I don't know that's fancy I don't know what else I could use to to clean they're still ugly like my fingers are just like dirty you know during the day and uh yes we you have to touch touch them you know we're just gross i guess yeah exactly we're just gross yeah that's all right oh there we go no questions that's pretty much it i guess in the discussion all right well um speaking of which you can catch us on uh discussing things on youtube uh not you know not anything more than the show here like uh we might post some stuff from time to time

uh on the youtube channel like a picture of our sticker like like tj may do a recording of him packing up one of the stickers and sending it off to somebody uh but youtube has uh has that link let's see what does the i don't even know that it's youtube.com search for home tech.fm i think you can go to our website at home check.fm and there's a youtube link right there at the top click on that'll take you to the youtube channel if you are listening on youtube thank you and we also have the mastodon server that we have set up if you like uh home technology and all that fun stuff and you want to join a our mastodon server uh home tech.social uh in to get in you just have to know the password which is gavin is great

i guess you fill that out uh in in the form and he's just like instant approve and and that way we know you're not some kind of weird ai bot thing you know there you go i rejected somebody uh this week actually oh why if it makes it you know i i almost accepted them i was like oh this looks like a fun bot to accept you know like what would they be posting but then i was like no reject i didn't want to you know i i didn't want to delay the signature for the stickers anymore by giving seth more work oh man well it's a good it's a good thing i i i really like enjoy there's a lot of picture of cats on mastermind you guys do you guys get that on saturdays the cat or what do they

call it it's amazing national holiday and i get i i follow like hourly foxes or something like that where they post the oh yeah the fox news but it's actually pictures of fox yeah and and there's like the otter guy he posts like otter photos i don't know why i'm a fan of honor now you are you know but it just it just adds some joy to my feed when i scroll through it. Yeah. And that's the thing. It's like this is one of those things. When you log in, it may be kind of quiet, especially on our server.

But if you start following some people, and we have some suggestions for people to follow, like TJ and Gavin. Yeah. But you can kind of like search for hashtags and things and find interesting people that are doing interesting things constantly way more than I can have time to do. So that's the social media world, I guess. But what's nice is there's no algorithm and we're not stealing your data. So there we go. And we're not. I'm stealing your data, but we're not talking.

Yeah, TJ might be. I don't know what he's doing. Anyway, HomeTech.social if you want to check that out. But we do have a podcast tonight uh but we've got a couple of home tech headlines pick of the week and some project updates guys what do you say we jump into the show let's do it all right uh first up big habitat release they have released 2.3.9.135 it's a great release name it's got a z-wave long grain support um it's got a visual rules builder app that's being introduced and i think the biggest thing it's the dashboard page has been updated with the new design and does it look

better it's option you know it looks way better than it did before i think but they're working on it it looks like it's a bunch of squares yeah it seems they need a designer like we've been saying this for a long it looks better than what it was oh it looks a lot better than what a lot better than what it was like not to not to say that but i mean it's still not at a level honestly if i could just do this easily with home assistant i would be happy just because home assistance natural thing is not attractive yeah i mean this isn't much better but at least this is better than what you get stock yeah and they have their visual rules builder app update which kind of reminds you of like uh was it node red type it looks like a drag and drop thing or like yeah so you know it's it's all great updates

um go and get it and the z-wave long range support you know it's only in the c8 and c8 pro hubs um that's great uh if you're looking for z-wave devices they're coming out now z-wave long range devices they're coming out now and you can look at like zoos as has been upgrading their whole line to long range support long range so if you want to play with something go order some zoos long range devices that's not a sponsored ad, by the way. Darn. But it should be Zeus. Man, come on, Zeus.

Pick it up. Pick up the phone. Call somebody. I'm hungry. He spent all his money on a printer. I can't feed his family. Just think of my dog that I can't feed anymore. He's not even feeding his dog now.

Because I'm not getting sponsorships. Dog won't eat 3d 3d printed benches at all no uh well here's a pretty cool update from home assistant too speaking of speaking of home assistant and their ui um there is in the latest version of the home assistant ios app there is a thing called assist that's for ios um now couldn't really tell, like, I don't really run the home assistant app. I guess I do, but it always felt like it was like a webpage that I was loading, but this has like, there's a video of how this works and home. This is basically like the voice control feature, um, that you can use to navigate around and send commands through, through your

home assistant. And now they've, they had to bind this. They had to do some trickery, I guess, in the iOS world because they bound it to their automations inside their phone. I think they were using the little button on the side of the phone to get this to work. But man, the demo is really cool. I thought this was this is pretty this is like a neat little demo i was just trying to see how much you were gonna butcher this but let's let's the action

button on the side right here some of things yeah it's the action button you can assign the action button to actions and basically the app has added you know triggers on those actions that you can now assign to to launch assist now assist is their um their version of the amazon lady or you know okay google or whatever that's the way you interact with home assistant through voice it's their they call it assist it's always been in the app but the cool thing now is you could actually tie it to the action button oh okay because you can't override siri you're stuck with siri okay right That's what I use. I use the action button to trigger a chat GPT right now.

Yeah. Similar concept. But they also showed a trick because you can actually use the accessibility features to use voice commands. So then you can tie a voice command to trigger assist so that opens up and answers your request. So you can you can make your own wake word and that would open up the assist and it would be listening at that point and then you could talk to it like similar to siri but they showed where the drawbacks are in terms of um it's slow yeah you know it's not as fast responding as siri and stuff like that

but it's cool that they're looking at this it's cool that they're looking at this. It's cool that they're playing with it. And just even tying it to the action button is really cool because I do use a chat GPT, a lot of my phone. I like, sometimes I just launched the voice and have a conversation with it, um, about something I'm working on maybe on the car and it will actually, it's amazing how well it helps me, uh, fix things. Right. So this is a great update to the app and you know i'm just looking forward at least the app is getting a lot of love now there was a period when it was not but i think they hired a developer that's taking care of it now yeah it was a it was uh what was his name uh bruno and he said he's been working on this particular the app and everything for what like five years i thought i read in here that he was in he'd been working on this for a while so

i don't this is really cool i i get it now the demo was kind of confusing because you can't seem he has his thumb up there on the button but you didn't really see him press it so yeah i will have to check that out now now i'm like did chat gpt have a audio thing i guess it does you could trigger it to uh you can trigger it with the side button stuff stuff like that. Right. But the chat BPT, you can actually, if you press the headphones in the bottom, right. I think it is.

It turns it into like a conversation mode where you talk to it, it replies, et cetera. Right. And they will be releasing an update in the next couple of weeks. I think where you can interact with your camera and have conversations. Oh, right.

Right. That's the, this is the demo we saw where Scarlett Johansson's voice. I don't see it on here. Oh, they remove right. This is the demo we saw. Where's Scarlett Johansson's voice? I don't see it on here. Oh, they removed that. Yeah, it sounded too much like her. So who do you guys have set? I got an ember, I got a breeze,

I got a juniper, and a cove. I set it to a guy's voice because whenever my wife hears me talking to another woman, she gets jealous. So the last thing I needed to do was get in trouble by talking too much to Chat TPT. my wife hears me talking to another woman she gets jealous so last thing i needed to do is get in trouble by talking too much to chat tbt why are you talking to scarlett johansson over there who you talking to i heard a woman's voice down there it's like uh don't worry about it yeah

whereas otherwise who you talking to all the boys okay yeah i guess i've never actually pressed that button in the corner but but yeah, I see it now. I always just go in and start typing things. No, it's really cool because I'll be working on something. I press it and put it into like conversation mode, I call it, and I'd set the phone down. I'd just be like, oh, I have this knob. You know, how should it be set? Blah, blah, blah.

And it will tell me exactly what to do and everything without me having to, you know, press or type or anything like that. It works. The GPT-4.0 is really good. I've been hearing about the 4.0. It's there. It's good. All right. Well, I'll have to check this out. I might, I don't know. We'll see if I'll check out the, the home assistant assist thing. I don't know. Like I said, I don't really use the app very much. The, the home assistant right now for me is is basically acting as some glue between a few things and i'm not using very much on it other than some like automations i guess you would call it like to tie this device to that device and make sure they turn on at the same time the assist isn't as good as like uh you know the amazon or

the google when it comes it does the basic stuff turn on and off etc but you know if you want to know what the temperature is outside and blah blah the assist isn't not doing it yet but it's something they're working on integrating it with like chat gpt or something like that like i know people have been doing it um i'm pretty sure that's the end goal for them is integrating it with something like that so it can have more intelligent conversations with you um i know they added an api recently that will allow for like a llm to um interact with home assistant yeah you know through the api calls and stuff which means that you may be opening up your home assistant to be you know have some things automatically triggered by something like a chat gpt right so that would be cool or even even we don't know what's going to happen

in uh it was a couple weeks i guess maybe for the the old the old siri make it a a bump in an update i guess oh at wwdc yeah yeah you know what but every year i feel like we go into wwdc with such high hopes for like home kit and then they don't even mention it may pop up on a slide or something like that it's been like that for many years oh i think they have to i think this year they'll talk ai ai ai yeah they'll be like it has to integrate with your home like everybody uses the series stuff with their home stuff right now and it's just gonna have to work better and be a better product well i don't know we'll see we'll see what they do with it but i'm more like i would be surprised

if they're like oh and our syria we're actually licensed for scarlett johansson that would be amazing they'll get an applause and everyone will be the best thing ever and then we'll go out of there forgetting that i won't get got no right you're right that would be that would be that would steal that's, that would be, that would steal. That's, that's totally Apple. That would steal all the headlines. We got her.

Yeah. It's funny. I guess what I'm hoping for out of it is more of the, like a backend API stuff that would tie into these home assistant APIs. You know, they'd be able to put that together within the Home Assistant app to get all the data pumped over to talk to Siri a little bit better. But we'll see. We'll see what happens.

You're shaking your head. It might happen. You sound hopeful. Many years of being let down, you know, it's like, you know, like that Peanuts. It's like watching Peanuts, you know, they kept holding the football for us and we just keep trying to kick it as they pull it away every year. It's the same thing. Yeah, but Siri is such a bad product.

Everyone knows it. And I just don't see how they could go into introducing anything has to do with AI or, you know, they pretend that would mean machine learning and all that stuff that they've been doing for years or whatever. It's all AI. Oh, we're doing it. Apple's been doing it for years. Nobody cares. What they want is Siri to actually be intelligent and talk to her. Set the bar low, Seth.

That way you're happy if anything comes out. Don't set it high and then you're upset. I'm not upset. What people are going to do is basically do it, almost as in chat GPD are doing, just remap a button and get around Siri and not use it anymore. I mean, that's the long and short of it. And I think they know that.

I think they know that they've got just a horrible product that they're sitting on and they just need to dump it and go with something else. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what they do. I'm very curious. I think everyone's very curious. Anyway, speaking of, well, all right. I guess we're going to move into the anti,

what do we call this? Anti-advertisement portion of our podcast. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has addressed the backlash from the company's app redesign that removed key features like sleep timers and alarms and working in general, I guess. The redesign was aimed at enhancing personalization and performance. It faced criticism for the lack of warning and accessibility features.

Despite some positive feedback on improved navigation and response was the abrupt transition unsettled many loyal customers, including a couple of here on the show. Spence has been defending the redesign. I'm just going to go ahead and quote him here. He says in this, in this story, there were two things that customers have been sending me emails about and providing feedback for for years one of them has been headphones okay but the other has been

the app and i would say okay yeah i'll give him that definitely yeah he said he goes on to say i'd say probably the entire time i've been at sonos but as long as i've been ceo i've heard customers saying you need the app to be easier. Okay. More modern to navigate. Okay. Yep. I'll give them that. It needs to have faster response and lower latency and all of these things. I've been using the new app since Christmas. Everybody at Sonos has been testing it for months. It has delivered and we know from the data and from the feedback that it's easier to navigate, but as a change for customers, it's faster and more responsive and it's better overall experience. Basically saying goes on to say you're holding it.

Yeah. I think you completely missed them. The whole problem with what they did, but yeah, I mean, that's the decision. The whole thing is weird, right?

Because it's like, first of all, I don't, I believe that you guys tested it for months and it's probably only been like four months um because it's just it's weird that you would still release an app that is not actually complete with all the features that people use and i'm sure they have like metrics and they can tell how many people actually use these products and in these different settings and whatever else but it's just like i don't know it's of course you're going to get blowback from this because you don't you didn't release what people use currently and it just it overshadows everything that they have done because like i said i and like i said in a previous episode i really think the

new app is really nice looking i think it works a lot better and i just i think that the app needed redesigned but you can't just redesign an app and leave basic features out of it i mean the stuff that they left out are basic features that people have used for years now and some of the stuff is what they bought the products for and so of course there's going to be blowback for those features and it's not the customer's fault it's it's sonos's fault yeah yeah oh here i i was actually able to delete stitcher company that's no longer in business uh as one of my services but yeah i i agree i i mean this was a rush to market product i don't know why they had to push this out as fast as they did um every everyone's saying it's for the headphones,

but even the headphones seem to be rushed to market as well. So it's like, and the headphones aren't even coming out until June 5th. So they, I mean, they had time. I don't get it. Yeah, they could have just demoed them with Bluetooth at like, showing all, I mean, the Verge. I mean, obviously they showed the Verge

for like the past three years. I mean, because they just pass information back and forth. But yeah, it's just they rushed it out and they didn't need to rush it out. It's just very weird. And you don't even need the app to set up the headphones. You can use the headphones without the

app. Yeah. Because it doesn't work like any other Sonos. You just should buy some headphones. Oh, man. One thing i did like i don't know what sonos is doing one thing i did like about what he said here is uh the architecture that they've they've redesigned the app to be part of um is more modular and they basically he says they basically basically took a monolith and broke it into modular parts which allows us to move faster in certain elements so i've seen that happen before as part of like an app redesign.

It's not just the app. It's like the entire backend services and all this stuff. You kind of, you have them all glued together for so long. And it's really like, if you update one thing, trust me, I deal with this at work all the time. You update one thing, it breaks everything else.

And then like, you can't just like pop pieces in and out like you need to. And so if they've actually done that, that's really going to help them kind of like move a little more quickly in updating bugs, features, adding new things in that's, that's a way better way to go.

And if they had that much technical debt, I can totally see wanting to get that out and pushed out. And man, obviously can't update it fast enough. Well, I was able to delete stitcher finally. So, I mean,

that's, that's progress. Yeah. I had to factory reset one of my speakers this past weekend and i was like oh man am i gonna be able to set this up again have they fixed that they did i was able to add i can say i'm on a lot of the dealer forums kind of like poking around uh lurking and watching what they're saying and this is the first time in in um in in a decade or two that i've seen dealers actually say you know uh if you're going to sell sonos right now it's kind of an s show over there and you just add time because you don't know what you're going to run into with what's going on i've never heard that not once it's usually like yeah you can sell it you go ahead and do it you know you're not going

to you're in and out you're in and out it's easy the customer will come back and want another one this is the first time i'm hearing this kind of thing uh and i mean there was a little backlash when they redid the app a couple years back from the original app like yeah they split it yeah well not the s1s like before that right they had the weird like redesign of it. And there was some backlash then. It kind of, like, went away. Everybody kind of just got used to using the horrible app. This app is much better. I will give them that.

They've done a better job of designing it. Yeah. It's a lot easier to use. It is really clean. Just, you know, release all the features. Just don't delete things. It's like if you, like, bought a car. I mean, like, any piece of technology.

You bought a car and they're like, well, well actually we don't have gas pedals for yet if you wait like a couple months all gas no brakes sorry the pedal will work um but yeah you can't use it right now sorry it's just it's so weird yeah well you're driving it wrong tj clearly i'm still convinced patrick spence was sent by amazon or google to crash the company. And so they could buy it for cheap. I think they'll do all right. They still have a decent reputation. I don't know. I'm not, not in.

I don't know about after this. I'm not happy with some of the decisions leadership's made. But, you know, it is what it is. It's a big company. Moving on to other things that we're probably not going to like either. Because it involves subscriptions. Amazon is upgrading Alexa with generative artificial intelligence and plans to introduce, here we go,

monthly subscription fees to cover all the technology costs. The new version of Alexa will offer more conversational capabilities to compete with AI-powered chatbots from Google and OpenAI. Subscription will not be part of the Amazon Prime and pricing is yet to be

determined. So there you go. If you really like chatting up your Alexa and telling her to set a timer, uh, and heard letting you know, Oh, by the way, you, did you also know that you can buy stuff? I don't know what they do anymore. Uh, yeah, you can pay for that. And I guess, I don't know, maybe they'll take that away. Maybe they'll take that out. Would you pay for that, Gavin? I see you shaking your head, but I think you'd pay for that if she didn't say know maybe they'll take that away maybe they'll take that out would you pay for that gavin i see you shaking your head but i think you'd pay for that if she didn't say oh by the way anymore you know what i don't get the by the ways up here as often i think you guys get it more down there in the u.s than we do get it up here because i barely hear it up here but all i have to say is i saw this coming like i think a lot of us saw this coming like this this is not like a surprise i i saw this coming from Like, I think a lot of us saw this coming. Like, this is not like a surprise.

I saw this coming from when they were taking away features and putting them behind paywalls, right? I think that was last year they did something like that. And the sad part is I can see myself paying for this. It just depends on how much better, you know, she gets. And if they bundle it with my prime subscription, for example, and I hate to give them these ideas, but it just makes it easier. You know, if it's in with my prime subscription, or even if they increased it as a $5 on my prime, I have to look at the price and see what it is. But at this point in time, that's my, I guess my voice assistant of choice and it works best for me. Um, I'm of choice, and it works best for me.

I'm not going to say it works best for everybody. Everyone has their favorite, but it all comes down to price, too. How much of a monthly subscription is it going to be? Is it going to be like a couple bucks a month if you have Prime, or is it going to be a Netflix subscription? And one thing to keep in mind is when you buy something like this, the initial price is never going to stay the same. Expect that initial price to raise next year and six months after that and six months after that. So always plan for that too. But we saw this coming.

Yeah, it's too expensive not to charge for this particular thing. I mean, it's an expensive technology. Data centers are expensive too. Like, uh, to do the processing, it's a lot of power that they have to, they're, they're using in their data centers and they, they have to make the money somehow, but they also, you know, to get people to spend money on this, they got to add some good value in it. And I hope they don't take away features from the free stuff to add it you know to add it to the paid stuff because that would just be mean but if they they make her a lot smarter that you know it may be worth it you know but if it succeeds i bet you it's gonna set

you know like a precedence for other companies to do the same thing too i mean josh already charges a monthly fee so we can leave them out of that conversation. Well, I mean, but yeah, like they're using language processing models and everything too. They cost money. They're upfront about it. And they say, well, we'll cost you monthly. We'll cost you yearly. Whatever you want to pay, you're going to pay us to make this work.

And I guess, you know, you can get the free version of is it not really like a free version like you can get the cheaper kindle or something and like the rest of its ad supported where it displays an ad it's kind of the same model i think here i think it would be an easier sell if they they bundled in with prime subscriptions at first right like or they add that i think it would be easier sell than just everybody now has to click on something and buy uh you know another subscription so i i don't know how they're going to present it but it'll be interesting to watch there's no value that's going to add like i don't want to talk to these things that much maybe maybe some people do maybe you will talk to it more if it is smarter though right like maybe but it's not

the same way i talked to so we have this well the same way i talked to my chat gpt it helps me with a lot of stuff but if my amazon lady is there and can answer the same with the same kind of smarts then i wouldn't need my chat gpt uh subscription i would just have that one but i don't know if it's going to be as good we have to you know figure that out first right yeah i mean so i mean like it's but it's it's not though because like we have this other story here which has the best i mean this story has the best headline of all time google is paying reddit 60 million dollars for foxsmith to tell its users to eat glue do we have to edit that out i will i'll be editing yeah but like still google is paying reddit $60 million to annually incorporate user generated

content into search results, such as suggesting adding glue to thicken pizza sauce from a Reddit post by user Smith from 11 years ago. Screenshots of this have gone viral. I've seen them all over. It basically had, what's it, but it says to thicken up your piece of sauce,

just go ahead and add a cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness yeah that'll do it i'm sure uh but somebody dug up the actual reddit post that came from from this from this from this user uh 11 years ago it had eight upvotes so i guess that means it's canon like that and grandma's gonna take that to the recipe book and put it in there i guess holy cow i mean how this isn't good like all of this stuff like they need to shelve this uh Grandma's going to take that to the recipe book and put it in there, I guess. Holy cow. I mean, how? This isn't good. Like, all of this stuff. Like, they need to shelve this feature.

Like, someone else needs to shelve a new app. I just, I don't get this. And, you know, like, well, I'm finding some of these companies are rushing into this. Like, they're trying to play catch up, right? And I find they will have the bigger issues. Yes. I would chat GPT. I, you know, I sometimes ask for a piece of code and it doesn't give me exactly what I want. Right. But it gets me started. Like I'm not asking it to do my job. I'm asking it to help me get started with something. Right. And it does a really good job at that. And then you have to learn, I was listening to a podcast where they were talking

about learning to talk to your AI. Like you don't ask it, like you don't interact with it with like how you would with Google. You would, you would have a conversation with it to the point where it's trying to figure out what it is you want. So it gives you something back, right. That you're looking for. And it actually made sense. You know know it changed how i interacted with it to get better answers from it but you're always going to see stupid answers like this pop up but you know if the person adds glue to their pizza or whatever well are they the right person that should be using our ai you know like that's all you know like if we do we have to trade our ais to protect people now can you please stop people from injecting themselves with bleach or,

you know, eating glue, you know, like we got to take that into consideration. Well, and I think this kind of puts Google and a lot of these other companies at like a weird place because normally they would just bring you the information.

You would kind of decide if you were going to listen to it. And now they're basically bringing the information and they're like, this is what you should do. And like, I think unfortunately for everybody involved there's not a lot of smart people out there uh if you if you work in customer service you know the types of people that you deal with on a daily basis and somebody is 100 going to look at this and be like yeah i should go ahead and do that because the internet told me to do it totally makes sense you don't want your cheese sliding off your pizza add glue done yeah i mean and like in that person that's

gonna do that probably ate glue as a kid and they're like well you know everything's fine i didn't die or anything like that it's only an eighth of a cup yeah we used to eat a whole two back then just to clarify these dumb people we're talking about are none of our listeners. No, absolutely not. Our listeners will not eat glue. No. But if you do, send us feedback, you know, and let us know how it worked out. Which one do you prefer? Do you prefer the white one or the blue one?

Yeah. Elmer's glue. Let us know how much you put in your pizza sauce. We'll even send you two stickers. And probably eat the stickers. It'll be a pizza sticker. Just the Home Tech logo on a pizza our stickers are edible do we want to remove the glue from our stickers so we don't feed their habit

yeah but i don't know this whole ai thing is weird i mean i'm interested to see if it's actually going to be like blockchain you know like blockchain and nfts and everything were like the hottest thing for like one to two years and then like everything kind of like died out and like you still hear about them but nowhere near as much and i kind of feel like that's what's a what's going to happen to ai like ai i think i think is going to have its use cases and it's going to stick around and everything but i just i don't know how useful it's going to be to a lot of these companies or to putting it and slapping it on literally everything. Everything.

I mean, Microsoft has a copilot key on their laptops now. How ancient are those laptops going to look in five years? Well, copilot, you guys will see the copilot that's on the consumer PCs in front of you. But at work, we see the copilot on the back ends. And what they're doing with that is pretty amazing right so that's where it's really adding a lot of value helping us troubleshoot and ask it questions while troubleshooting you know multiple computers to help us get the answers faster you know things on the back end they're doing a co-pilot are amazing well i i'd say i

push back on that. All of it's amazing. It's great until it kind of falls flat on its face, which is what we're seeing here with the glue and everything else. Well, that's Google. Well, it's not just Google. Definitely just Google. Yeah, I mean. They'll cancel it next year.

Don't worry. There are things. Just rename it. There are things. There are bugs that you've probably run into Copilot that probably shouldn't happen, you probably shouldn't be doing. Oh, yeah. So, like, you've shared with us on the back end of the show that we know what's going on. But it's as good as the data it gets, right?

So, on the back end, it's pulling in data from our systems that we're able to query on much faster. So, it's giving us what we're looking for. It's not being fed through Reddit. So we're getting better recommendations on the back end. That's all I have to say. Oh, man. You just need some glue. Add some Elmer's glue to your...

Well, if you don't want to use Google search that has the AI, I found this little thing called udm14.com. And basically, I guess if you add the and percent, like udm equals 14 onto Google search, it'll kick you over to the old classic Google search where everything looks normal. It's like a better Google. I've been using that one. It's like a better Google. It's amazing when it removes all the other crap that's on the Google today, you get so much better like results i'm gonna search for home tech and see what i get you remember when google first came out i think i think they dethroned what was it alta vista back then yeah and the yahoo index thing

which it wasn't a search engine it was just an index of web pages like it was a list but everybody was like google it's so simple it's so clean it's just a search box on a home page and they went crazy but now like i look at the results and i can't trust half of them yeah yeah no this is this is great um i like this you definitely use this wow this is much better than like there's no ads there's no like spot maybe i'm just blocking them or something but i could be uh but I don't know. This is very clean. It's like everything came up on the first page. And you can modify your browser so that when you type a search in the browser URL field,

you can actually modify it. So actually it will auto-append that to do the search. If you really wanted to. You can Google that later. Yeah. Well, make sure you go to udm14.com and because, yeah, AI may tell you to eat some glue. That's how you do it. Interesting.

All right. Well, we'll put links to that in our show notes. That way you won't have to Google it. Well, one company is just not going to make you pay extra for things. And that company is iRobot, they have discontinued, um, the iRobot select subscription program, which offered a Roomba J7 plus vacuum at a reduced upfront cost, along with free replacement parts, accessories, and the ability to remotely disable the vacuum. If payments ceased, uh, TJ, I think you were talking about this a while back. You thought

it was a pretty good idea. I don't think he ever went through with anything like this but i mean a subscription for for reduced cost vacuum um it seemed like an okay okay deal like you you get a refresh on the accessories and all that good stuff you don't have to worry about it breaking not bad yeah honestly i thought i thought this is a really good idea it made me contemplate getting one of these iRobots um i never went through with it i think i ended up getting the DreamTek anyway and then i haven't purchased a robot mop or anything yet but i thought this was a good idea because you know it's only 29 a month i had to pay like 100 activation fee um but that's a lot better than paying 850 out of your pocket um it kind of just makes it more accessible for everybody and it's one of those devices i think that like every time i talk

about like my home automation setup and what i have going on my house i would say the majority of people i talk to that like have anything that i have they all have a robot vacuum it's just one of those super easy devices that people have um and everybody can kind of use it um so i don't know i think that's a good idea i wish more companies did this because I want a robot mop, but I really don't want to pay like $1,300 out of pocket. So just hit me with a subscription fee and let me pay for it over a couple of years. The only person asking for subscription fees.

Yeah. I mean, I'm fine with that. You know, that's a, I feel like that's a good one. It's a worth, it's a worthwhile subscription fee is what you're saying.

Yeah. You know, I don't hate on subscription fees. I just want one that gives me value i think this one was also much more valuable when i robot was kind of like at the peak of everything but they were still too expensive and they were kind of like you know a want but you had to find a way you know to justify it and this helped you justify it um but nowadays the vacuums they you know the even the lower price vacuums now have the such good features now that you can get into the smart vacuum space and still be happy you know

it's not just bouncing around walls anymore it's actually got some i don't hate saying this ai stuff but you know it's now as i just that's why it's not succeeding anymore. I think people are just like, I'll just buy one of these cheaper ones instead of having a subscription to a more expensive one that is probably not as good as the cheaper one I'm getting nowadays. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things they said is that the prices of the robot vacuums went down, but the activation fee actually went up to $199. So that probably turned off a lot of people who were, I mean, $99, $29 a month sounds good. I mean, they could just charge $39 a month

if it had a conversation with Gavin. You would have paid for it. If it told him to eat glue, I don't know. Yeah, like this seems like it was a good deal and then slowly got to be not such a great deal. So I don't know. Yeah. I kind of with Gavin too,

where I think, uh, if in the early stages, this is probably more popular than it is now, but kind of everybody has one of the gone sale. So often. Yeah. It's like, yeah,

it's eight 50 normal price, but you're going to be able to find it on Amazon for $200 off like a normal sale or whatever. So yeah, at least they gave it a shot. They didn't Google it right away. You know, Google had the subscription where they were like, oh, have our phone for two years and we'll give you a new one or whatever.

And then after a year, they canceled it. So props to iRobot for sticking with it. All right, new product here. This one actually looks pretty nice. A new smart lock for patio doors. The Smart Lock Matter Tilt-Turn by SecuU. That's an interesting name. Is the first to use matter over thread technology

and offers a smart home innovation with Scandinavian design. I don't know, I looked at this thing. It looks pretty good. It is going to run you about 200 pounds or 231 euro uh it looks like it's mostly over in uh the european countries now uh but i i would hope that something like this kind of makes its way over here because we have these thin doors we need these locks on them yeah i saw i saw this mentioned and i i got excited um because those are the one set of doors i don't have any automation

for um is my back doors and yet i wish i did but there's nothing out there for that and this is the first time i've seen something like this though someone did point out yeah it's european so it might not fit north american doors i will that well but at least somebody's working on it you know so who knows if at one point they may come out with a north america version um and it's matter over thread which is also a benefit there too so yes yeah i got excited i got excited when i saw this the website didn't have a lot of information like the pictures i was looking for pictures at certain parts and stuff but uh it didn't have much so it is kind of like you know take your

chances type of thing yeah to somebody who had a short stint as a locksmith i can tell you that all patio doors suck doesn't matter what brand you buy doesn't matter how old it is like pretty much all of them use custom hardware for them and like most of the time you can't even get manufacturer replacements and so a lot of times time you can't even get manufacturer replacements and so a lot of times when you go to people's houses around here their patio lock has failed and they have like a stick or a metal bar that keeps the door locked because that's literally their only choice the old stick yes i remember i had one of those it catches me every time i go to somebody's patio door i'm like why would it open oh there's a stick down there that's funny it works deal yeah it does and it's your only option

so i get get used to it i did run across these a couple months back i guess uh anderson if you have anderson patio doors uh yeah the yale assure locks have a line for that so that was very specific yeah yeah i mean it's a in the states at least the anderson patio and windows are pretty popular especially in the higher-end homes um so i don't know like it it may fit a lot of like i say higher-end homes but also like production homes will have anderson's in them so it it may be good for that um i don't know what it not not a very expensive lock it's 529 comes in all of three different colors satin nickel black and white so yeah it's out there need more options on those though yeah or we'll just automate we'll get switchbot to automate a stick we'll call it stickbot as i

say why can't somebody just automate a stick that that should be the door lock it's just a sliding door it goes down that's all you need this genius that's all you need yeah just pull it to the side use your finger button just put a piece of tape and have it retracted to the side and then push it back you know there you go yeah i think we're gonna make a million dollars guys we can do this that and router. We're on our way to millionaire status. Oh man. I'd probably get sued by the first guy who eats our stickers though. All right. Well, all the links and topics to discuss tonight can be found on over at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 484. All right, moving on here. We have got

something in our mailbag this week. A question from listener Kent. He says, hey, guys, love the show. Been working with home automation as a hobby since the X10 days. He said more recently using Samsung's, and he's tried the Hubitat C4, and then moved a little bit into Home Assistant, running on a VM on a Synology NAS. He said he had issues with the Z-Wave stick on the Synology NAS, so he moved Z-Wave and Zigbee back to Hubitat for a while with the Hax integration.

Wait, is Hax on Home Assistant or Hubitat? Home Assistant. Home Assistant. Hubitat has some kind of community store, but it's not the same. All right. He said, I had issues with my Z-Wave stick on the Synology, so I moved Z-Wave and Zigbee back to Hubitat. He says, this has been working well for years, but he's starting to see some delays on the Hubitat side of things. He said he recently moved his home assistant over to a Dell Optiplex micro PC, which is, I think, our preferred way of doing it.

He said, what a performance increase he has 56 z-wave devices and 15 zigbee bulbs running on it and the question is should he just ditch hubitat he's currently running the ca now should he just move everything over to home assistant gavin i think yes yeah right tj says yes yeah what do you think and that's the show thanks for listening stickers in the mail buddy i love having everything on one system um why complicate things with multiple systems you know i'll be honest the habitat c4 i love that little box it chugged and it did its thing i never had any problem so that was the z-way 500 and you've heard me talk about you know the z-way 5 7 and 8 the c8s running on

the 800 series chips and yeah i can see you seeing delays and stuff um the difference is you may still see the same thing kind of things with home assistant right like don't think you're coming over to home assistant and expecting reliability even if you you have the Z800 stick and everything like that, you're still going to be troubleshooting on a home assistant. There's so many things that could cause problems, like down to your devices that you have. You have 56 Z-Wave devices. Are they all 500? Do you have any 100 series devices? Because those can cause bottlenecks. You know, like, I don't know how much digging you've done into that to try and solve that, but you will also run into problems in Home Assistant. It's just the fact

that you're moving them over, it should help clear it out because then you're rebuilding the routes and everything, so that may solve a bunch of problems. but I am a fan of Home Assistant. A Dell Optiplex micro PC is perfect for it because it is like it's overkill even, but it's perfect. Like for the price, for what you get, you will notice a lot of zippiness with that. And yeah, I don't think you need the Hubitat anymore if you're going to have Home Assistant. Yeah, grow it. Do you think? Yeah, you're gonna have home assistant yeah grow it you think yeah you're outgrowing it and your system's gonna get a little bit more complicated and you'll find that you could do a lot more with home assistant you know especially when you get

into hacks and stuff like that but also keep in mind as you dive into hacks it's also opening up doors for more things to break every time you upgrade so just try and keep things simple have one system and try and even keep that one simple. I think I figured out what he's done here. It may not be as clear in this message, but he says he's used Hubitat controlled with the Hax integration. I think that he's using Hubitat controlled through Home Assistant. So he's got all his...

Yeah, it's possible, yes. And that's very common for a lot of people that are moving from Hubitat to Home Assistant because all your devices are already paired to the Hubitat, and so you don't have to necessarily go through and repair everything. But I'm in the camp that it's kind of best just to have everything in the same boat, and that way you know where the troubles are coming from. Because if you start automating with Home Assistant,

but everything's connected to Hubitat, it kind of makes it a little more difficult to troubleshoot in my in my experience and in my opinion yep i think i i'm kind of in the same boat because i use the control for stuff and i have a little bridge that kind of shoves it over into homebridge which runs on my unraid server right so it's basically shoving all the control for controlled lights and and switches and junk over to homebridge and homebridge is rebroadcasting all that information for homekit to integrate with and yeah it gets kind of weird sometimes sometimes things don't work and it's like well where is it falling down who do i blame here what finger do i you know what who's pointing

at who yes and it kind of have to like go tinker well it's like well it's weird because this light's working i know that's a control for light but this one's not and where like where's it falling down so yeah it is kind of easier to have it all in place if you can and it may just be time to bite the bullet and move stuff on over and that makes sense because if you're putting all your zigbee and c-wave devices on the habitat but then using the hacks integration to link the habitat you're adding another point of failure and another point of delay too, right? Because not only does the message have to get to the Hubitat, but then it has to get to Home Assistant for you to run your automations on, right? So just put it all in Home Assistant. So 56 Z-Way devices, 15 Zigbee bulbs,

that's under one Gavin, I think. One Gavin is like hundreds of devices. I have a little bit more than that. But even with 56, you got to keep in mind that Hubitat is going to be sending a lot of information over to a home assistant with that. Because the devices may have, you know, a switch may not just have on and on, but may also have power reporting and stuff like that too. Or, you know, temperature reporting. That might not be going through. It all depends on how they develop the integration, right?

Like, are they also sending the power or are they just sending the on and off state? Will they be sending the temperature changes? You know, all that type of stuff. Like, you may be also missing out on features of devices because it may not be included as what habitat sending over to home assistant a lot of things to consider here and just why i say you know just simplify it just make everything one is it is he gonna i guess he's not since he's using home assistant to mostly control things it's going to be it's going to be a pain to move all this stuff over and redo integrations redo

maybe some automations he has lingering over on on just pull off the band-aid yeah it's gonna have to be done i think i think he's kind of outgrown it and kind of wants to move this way anyway can't do it it's time to do it if something goes bad though don't blame no don't blame blame gavin that's just gavin as a service went off the rails and started hallucinating and told me, eat glue. I don't understand what happened. I said it in a different context. I was like, eat glue, Seth. It's different than, I think you should eat some glue. And make sure you have batteries on hand, because I always find whenever I'm excluding and including Z-Wave devices, any of these devices, you're going to drain batteries. So always have some extra batteries on hand.

All right. Too good. Well, let's move on here to our pig of the week uh good luck kent uh it should be it should be fun it's a project save it for a rainy rainy day and uh you got nothing else you need to go around and unidentify things and move stuff over that'll be fun all right well speaking of uh our crazy virtual assistants this has been sitting in our peaks of the week for a while. And, uh, it's time, it's time we put it out there. Cause we've been talking about these voice assistants, but, uh, this is, who is this? This is, I've seen her before Ellie Cordova. She's like, uh, uh, she's on Tik TOK a lot, I think, but I think she's like a, an artist of some type, uh, like a singer. But she has a really good video here that kind of goes through all of the, uh, like a singer. Uh, but she has a really good video here that kind of goes through all of the, uh, assistance and how well they work. It's a very, uh, I've seen

a couple of her things with fonts, which are really funny too, uh, where she kind of has different personas set up as different fonts. This is kind of the same thing where, uh, GPT, it's all that like Siri anda and everybody's kind of sitting around in a room having a conversation and uh open ai walks in the door it's like oh so it's a really funny video uh tj i know you like this one especially uh but go check it out we'll put a link to it in the show notes yeah it gave me a good chuckle yeah i feel like it's pretty accurate too so i felt bad for cortana bixby got the worst yeah right poor bixby uh it's good stuff good stuff go check it out we'll put a oh wait clippy makes an appearance too so we do have to point that out i forgot about that i'm watching this again but yeah this is great oh man too funny

too funny all right uh if you have any feedback questions comments picks of the week are great forgot about that. I'm watching this again, but yeah, this is great. Oh man. Too funny. Too funny. All right. Uh, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, secret ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. Big project updates this week. Um, I think mostly, I don't know. Whoa, what is this? There's, there's, there something tj's put here but uh gavin let's let's start with you you've got some big news whoa look at tj's news what i know right okay that's a tease we're getting the opening act i'll be the opening act so this week i finally put

together the prusa mk4 that i ordered um it took me about four days to do it i did a couple hours every day and you know what? It was an amazing experience to put it together because I feel so comfortable with this printer now that like I know it inside and out. So when something happens, I have to pull pieces apart. I know how to do it. It's awesome. I still have the MMU3 to do, which is going to be another eight hours probably.

And I still have the enclosure, which is probably another eight hours. But by the time I'm done all that that i will know this printer inside and out just in time to probably want to sell it but my uh my first it was amazing because after i put it all together i was afraid to plug it in at first i you know so i ate all the gummies and then i uh and those that put together prusa knows what i'm talking about. Wait, what? I plugged it in. Wait, is this why you had so much important? Yeah. So, so when you, when you get the, the whole thing about Prusa is when you're putting them together, it's actually in the instructions.

They send you a pack of these Haribo gummies, right? Yeah. And it's actually in the instructions that when you reach certain milestones, you're allowed, they give you instructions to eat five of them. Oh, that's good. You know, or six of them. And they give you a little history of, you know, the gummy was invented in Germany and stuff like that, right?

So it was really cool, you know, and then at the end you get to eat the remainder of them. So, you know, it was nice reaching the end. But the best part about it was when I plugged it in and booted it up, it went through its config checks, like it checked all the parts of it and everything passed. And I was like, yes, I did it all right the first time. And then I just fired off like a test print right away and bam, it was so good.

So it came out great. So I'm happy. And now that I have the MK4, I also have an MK3S Plus. I know what I want in a printer, right? Like it's so nice to not have to worry about bed leveling anymore. One less thing to tweak, one less thing to worry about going bad. Like it all just does it for you, you know, like it's a nice printer, you know, and it's twice as fast, right?

So it's really, it's twice as fast. Nice. Right? So it's really fast. So I have two of them right now. And the one thing I'm looking for is I need a printer desk. You know, something for my basement. I don't know if anyone has any recommendations, but I want something big enough to hold two printers. Yeah, I said two printers. I think you need, like, one of those, like, workbenches that they sell,

like Home Depot or whatever. I need something like a Husky workbench. Solid, like that doesn't wiggle because when it starts to wiggle, it throws everything off, right? So, you know, I see some – I'm looking for a solid bench to get into my basement that I can really put these on so that, you know, they don't shake a lot. And, yeah, it's the beginning of my print farm. For mine, I had to get a like isolation pads like really thick rubber pads and that made a big difference i've heard of people using like like cinder blocks or other stone pavers and stuff like that as well yeah so so the best part about it

all of this is you know i was able to record this podcast because the wife hasn't realized that i've got a new printer yet she hasn't realized realized that because they look so much the same, she doesn't realize that the one I have in my office is not the one that was downstairs. She thinks it was the one that was downstairs. And maybe I just brought it upstairs. I was tweaking it or doing something with it. So it hasn't clued in. One day she will realize that deja vu or something like that.

She's seen this somewhere before. And wait, there's two of them. But yeah, for now, I i'm surviving build it myself to say oh my gosh that one printed that one that's amazing it had a baby it's a modern miracle but she hasn't clued in yet so i'm alive i'm good i'm good for now so that's my journey this week with the printers oh very cool very cool uh i don't have much updates on my end i've been pretty busy with work stuff and home stuff and school is over so um i did have something i wanted to bring up but i forgot what it was but i did get these um these are amazing my wife gave me these things these are like can you guys see this uh what are you showing me i don't know what to say like uh should i be seeing that

it's a tea bag all right uh so so oh man can i see the other side of it so these are like oh the finger glove thing oh yeah it's got little lights on it so you turn them on and while you're working like in a rack or something like that um you know you can uh you can get in there and your fingers actually have the flashlights that's really cool it's like finger lights my wife found these and i opened them up like i really don't know what to think about this and then i tried them on and i was like oh wait that's that's a great idea like this i mean it really makes it really makes a difference like you can go and yeah it your finger right where your fingertips are you don't have like usually i walk around with the headlamp on and and then and my wife will be like hey

and i'll look at her and that's the and now you can point at her yeah i can point at her that would have been great not to turn it back to me but that would have been great Yeah, I can point it out. A finger gun. Hey, yo, you're good to go. That would have been great, not to turn it back to me, but that would have been great for assembling my printer, right? Because there were a number of times when I couldn't see properly and I had to pull out my flashlight to see where I was. That would have been awesome for that. I'm going to look that up, actually. Yeah, Amazon, I think, a great idea.

I've never seen anything like this and yeah no it's it's really cool so um i hadn't even looked up how much they were but i i mean can't be that much they were like little pieces of cloth that look like some underwear which i was are those the perigal ones they're like 1299. I would say anything that gets the flashlights on the tips of your fingers like those, it's a great idea. And you'll be able to touch any. Oh, here they are. Yeah, $12.99. That's them.

These are Moip Ejo. So there you go. Yeah, they're probably just white labeled stuff. I'd totally walk around going pew, pew, pew. Does it have a party mode where they flash different colors you'd be the life of the party yeah right yeah no it's basically the on off operation they come with some extra batteries too so i assume like if you leave it on they're the little tiny batteries little little baby batteries they're coin batteries like 26 i don't remember what they

were but um yeah it comes like four extra batteries oh nice and a little screwdriver to open the little screw port on it but you know uh that might be hard to see if you don't have it comes with two gloves so i guess if you need to change the batteries in one they need to make one with a magnifying glass too. There you go. But yeah, I would say pretty awesome, pretty awesome product. I looked at it and I kind of laughed and then I went and I was like, wait a minute. And she was like, oh, you can use it when you're working in your cabinets and your racks and stuff. I'm like, oh yeah.

I went and tried it. Yeah. Totally, totally a great idea. Get them. That's a good idea. Better than headlamps for sure. Because those get kind of bright and awkward to you so anyway they're always in the wrong spot too whenever you're working on that kind of stuff it's a helmet aim my head a little bit lower here yeah

get my neck all right well that's all i got uh dj uh what is this what's this here what's going on yeah so i think last week or the week before i don't know one of these episodes that seth hasn't released yet uh i talked about uh my robot lawnmower and i was like i don't think i'm gonna keep my robot lawnmower it's got some like software things that like you can't add like another user and if i want somebody else to like do the mapping i i can't i don't even know how to parent different bluetooth device to it but honestly i started thinking about it and i have not cut my grass in like a month now at this point and it's so nice not to have to cut my grass that's how they get you it's crazy it's just one of those things that like i don't mind cutting grass but i just go outside and it's cut and because my yard is so small it like it just within two hours my

whole lawn is cut anyway and so it just runs like once every like four days and that's it and so i've gotten like i'm like the ultimate level of lazy now though because uh i have the robot lawnmower for my backyard and it's all fenced in and everything so nobody really knows i have it minus the ups guy my front yard though i was like man i really wanted to cut my front yard but i don't want somebody to steal it and so i i haven't got over that fear yet but i hired my neighbor to cut my grass and so my neighbor cuts my front yard and my robot lawnmower cuts my backyard it's a subscription service just think of it like that it's great i don't have to do anything now so i think i'm gonna keep it like minus the like the weird like a couple weird software

things like that i can't add multiple users and i can't like pair multiple devices at least i can't figure out how it's honestly worked good and the app like doesn't have any issues every time i go to use the app it works great um i think i'll work on finding it like a permanent installation location um but i think i'm gonna keep it it's been nice what time do you cut what time do you let it go out and cut the grass uh i think right now it's cutting it at like 11 a.m so i try to make it whenever we're not home um because the dog isn't outside and now the dog doesn't care we're fostering a dog right now and when i first started it up he like went ape crazy he was like he just did not like it and it like i think he about tacked it so i just stopped it and so at that point i just scheduled it to run during the

day um but i did run it at night the other day and it was so quiet i could like i couldn't even hear it inside my house and so that was cool but the problem is we get a lot of dew and that that dew like kind of gunks it up a little bit yeah and so like i pretty much have to cut it in the morning like after the sun comes up because it gets rid of the dew and it doesn't get gunked up so yep that's uh one of the bigger problems with it if it's wet grass or there's dew out there i i would always cut mine you know starting around like seven or eight in the evening and letting it run to like 12 at night or something like that just kind of giving it that window to do do things in Cause usually if it rained,

it wouldn't mow anyway. And then if it wasn't, um, if it was, if it's not raining, it's dry and it can go out there and get things done. But yeah, that is,

is really nice to not have to use a walk out there. And it's like, Oh, it's all mood. I don't have to worry about it. Yeah. And especially the backyard. I mean,

we pretty much always use the backyard where we're gardening or, or doing other things. So it's just nice not to have to worry about it. And it does like a good enough job where like I'm basically just weed whacking like every two weeks. And so I go around like the garden beds and I go around the house and everything like two weeks. And, you know, within a half hour, I got the whole backyard weed whacked. So I think I'm going to keep it. I have until this weekend to decide.

So that'll be my final verdict. Your dog was like, it's either me or this robot. And he was like, I'm going to prove that I can be a good guard dog. And it was like, all right now it's like, oh,

well I guess they're keeping me. Maybe the robot's going to go. And now the robots stay in. So, yeah, well we had an incident where it ran over a golf ball or not a golf ball. Yeah. A tennis ball.

And the, the robot lawnmower did. And it like shredded the tennis ball. And, and uh the object detection was not that good there and then one time it was driving towards the dog and like it was going right for the tail and i was like we should probably go ahead and just move your tail out of the way there just in case yeah i know a little razor blades will go to town um yeah clippy clippy would definitely have not survived the the tennis ball yeah this one just like we didn't even know about it we went to go grab it the next day there's like a giant cache and i was like huh that's cool interesting wow yeah works works fine i'm keeping it welcome to the robot community

hopefully it works this time next year yeah that's that's the whole thing is keeping it going. Gavin, it's just you. Yeah, come on, Gavin. I know. I'm looking. I'm looking. I'm looking. It's, you know.

You're going to get the Luba. I'm going to try. I'm going to get that one. If I get one, I'm going to get one that's better than both of yours. Okay. And that's heavy, so somebody can steal it. I set the bar pretty low. Yeah, you did.

But you seem so happy, you know? Well, I am when I can get it. So, like, the grass is still a big mess out in the front lawn. And, like, this weekend, there are parts of the lawn that decided just to grow and parts that didn't where they had been doing the construction. And it's like, I can't send a old clippy out there to do anything because it was just like get stuck in some dirt or fall in a hole or something. Like he's done it a couple of times. And so I had to get the old lawnmower out and push it around like a loser. It's a shame.

And the sad part with, with my backyard renovation, I cut my backyard lawn in like half now. So I have less to mow. Oh, so it's more just for the front pay your neighbor to do you gotta get a neighbor yeah he all he does is whenever i need to cut the lawn he'll run the lawnmower and make one strip down the middle of my lawn

to signal to me that's time to cut my lawn he does that all the time and then he'll send me a text message with a picture of it he doesn't put any text any text, but it's known it's time to cut your lawn. Wow. In your own friendly terms with your neighbor. I had a neighbor do that to me once, and I didn't know him. It's like, hmm, what are you trying to say? Yeah, time to cut your lawn. Yeah, hmm, just one strip right down the front there.

I see what you did. Look around, I can see who's mowed their lawn. Oh, it was you. It was you. Tell me it's time to cut my lawn without telling me it's time to cut my lawn. Yeah. It was,

it also, we were also out of town quite a bit back then and, uh, did not, I didn't even have a lawnmower. I had one of those push things that you like, that has the blades. And,

uh, yeah, that was, I mean, Florida florida grass will fight back in in florida grass one uh because that that thing did not work really well yeah i think that's going to wrap up this week uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support through our patreon page if you don't know about our patreon page head over over to hometech.fm to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every 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 and talk about what glue recipes you have, I guess. I don't know. There's actually been a lot going on in the Hub as of late. And I have tried to participate. It looks like Richard's 3D printing things. Hooks.

He's been 3D printing, you know, hooks for. And that's what I have. I just kicked off just now some utility hooks for the garage. I'm 3D printing some as well. The mounts and mounting accessories are like one of the best things about having a 3D printer. Exactly. Because it's like, oh, I need like a mount for the speaker or I need this clip. And it's like, oh, just Thingiverse or whatever probably has one.

You can go print it. Or design your own. Yeah, I'm not that fancy. But yeah, you could do that. There's lots going on in there. Seth is busy with Infocom stuff. Oh, and Owen's on YouTube. Oh, yeah.

I need to watch that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seating layout. Oh, I binged it today. You guys haven't watched that? Is it good? Yeah, Owen's on YouTube. Oh yeah. I need to watch that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a seating. I binged it today. You guys haven't watched that? Yeah. It's very informative. I actually told him I liked it.

It's not long videos. It's nice to the point videos. And that's why I like my videos. No fluff. You know, I don't need an introductory paragraph or, you know, any of that stuff,

you know, some videos before they get to the meat, it takes like three minutes of watching. No, Owen's was was to the point and it was interesting to see what he's working what he's been working with so uh give it a view i subscribed um i liked you know like all the bell all that stuff yeah yeah all right i'm gonna do that right now make sure i can get that into my watch later but yeah uh that's's an expert. So, oh yeah, like, subscribe, hit that bell. Boom, done. All of them.

I want all everything from Owen. Podcast is really good too. Check that out. We'll put links in the show notes. Anyway, if you want to help out the show but can't support financially, we totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating. The podcast app is your choice to help other people find the show. That's going to wrap up another week here

on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care.