HomeTech.fm - Episode 485 - Pretty "Meh" Impressive Headphones

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

On this week's show: The reviews are out on the Sonos Ace headphones and the are... not very exciting TJ. Instead, TJ reviews a new camera from Argus, Google Home is getting some features back, older AppleTVs lose Netflix, and HomeKit gets a map view feature courtesy of a 3rd party app. All this, project updates, a pick of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th. I don't know. It's going to be in there. You'll get this eventually and then you'll listen to it. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. It's just like your stickers. I'm TJ Huddleston from Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Stickers? You still haven't said those stickers? I'm Gavin Campbell from Pickering, Ontario. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about time management, home automation, home technology, projects, all sorts of stuff. We're in week, I don't know, month three of sticker processing. It's going to happen, we swear.

Well, I just want everybody to know, again, I think we talked about this past five episodes now, but it's not my fault now. It's all Seth's fault fault because i was ready i have the labels ready to go the envelopes the stickers i'm waiting on something from seth though which we've talked about previously but we haven't really mentioned it so um it's it's seth's fault at this point i can just edit it out and no one will know what you're talking about it's crazy he just won't send me my stickers no they're ready come on d, DJ, send the stickers. What's wrong with you? Seth, for some reason, I don't know if anybody knows this,

but Seth likes to make more work for himself. He's always talking about these projects. He's like, I got these projects going on. I got all this stuff going on. But what he doesn't tell you is that he adds more projects onto himself and he makes it take longer. So this is a project for me. I was doing it.

And then he's like well actually i could go ahead and do something on this project as well trying to help but then he did the classic self set thing and just doesn't do it you know the most hurtful part of this whole thing is that's going to talk about a new project he started this week and he still hasn't done what we asked him to do hey i it just because it goes on the board doesn't mean it's anywhere near being done or completed. Have you been tested for ADHD, Seth? Is that a thing? Oh, yes.

Do you have it? Oh, man. Too good. Well, this show is coming out probably next week. And the reason it is is because we won't have a show next week because I will be at Infocom in Las Vegas. So as you're listening to this,

if you are in Las Vegas, stop on by the, uh, convention center. If that's a thing, if you're in Vegas and yeah, there's info calls going on. I'll be in booth.

See something in the center hall. See nine 80, nine, eight, six, nine. It's in the back. You'll find us back there.

We'll be having a good time at the black wire booth. Um, I think we have some like little stuffed puppies to give away again yeah snacks of course we'll have those there uh but we yucking it up having a good time and uh meeting with vendors all kind of stuff if this is a commercial thing like they do mostly like the big soundstage stuff large venues house of worship and there's actually there's a lot of education stuff there. So a lot of the schools send their technology people to this for continuing education on like how to set up the AV system at the schools and that kind of thing,

like the maintenance, well, the people that are designing in the it department or wherever. So that, that's become, that's become a big contingent there too. It's an interesting show because it's, it's not like,

whereas Cedia, we went to that it's mostly like i would say like 80 integrators and just like other randoms you know architects or things like that that pop through infocom is not like i don't i don't think there's integrators just a small part of it it's not like a an entire thing like installed sound is is a completely different thing when it comes to commercial um so it's it'll be an interesting show to go to this is our second time last year we just had a little table and a booth but this time we're bringing bringing the big boy we're bringing the big booth so should have some fun i don't have to put it together this time so i

should be a lot more rested is is everything on the commercial audio side still just like talking about dante is that like if it seems like every time i've gone to infocomm it's basically somebody just announcing like integrations with dante now uh i think that's coming to the home actually now so uh welcome uh honestly it should yeah yeah yeah it does help with something but i think a lot of people don't know what dante audio is and doesn't help. They think it's something else that it's not. They like the network sound stuff. Yeah. Network video, um, basically virtually patching things in and out and replacing the old analog cables like BNC cables or patch cables, uh, has been a big thing there for years. And yeah, there's, there's always interesting products associated with that, but they've got everything.

They've got the big video walls, like the big Jumbotron things, right? They've got those, like set up and playing in there. And of course, they've got the fog machine thing that smells like farts. So they've got that. What's nice is like a lot of the companies there, like Cisco, like they'll have like teleconference things there, like Cisco will be there with a giant booth, WebEx or whatever. Zoom has a big booth there.

It's just a very large and different type of show than Cedia. What, what, what I'll have to go in, in what is nice about this show is they did this last year. I hope they do this at Vegas because it switches back and forth every other year. But in Orlando, when you walked in in the morning, you'd smell these fresh cookies and you're like, what the heck is that? the the vendors at the show they will buy like fresh cookies and you go scan your badge and you get a fresh cookie and a cup of coffee and i'm like i i will scan my badge a few times a day to get this like it's it's there all day and they're just you can just go find the free coffee i'm like this is great this is awesome so free trade show coffee with cookies i feel like you might as well get something when you when like $100,000 on the internet.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Free cookies and coffee. I mean, at least you get something out of it. That was our big mistake last year. Yeah, the internet was, it wasn't that much, but it was like $3,000 or $4,000 for the bill. We have not made that mistake again. And we have our own like 5g internal nice yeah it's uh it's a it's a big boy so it like can do vpn over 5g can you can bridge in starlink and

all sorts of stuff peplink it's pretty cool product yeah peplink is great yep yep yep um we already talked about stickers we're not going to bring that back up again but we do oh yeah we are on youtube so if you like listening to podcasts on YouTube, we're there. Mastodon. We have a Mastodon server. It's our own. And if you like Gavin, he'll let you in. All you have to say is Gavin is great over at HomeTech.social when you sign up and he'll let you right in.

That's the password. Gavin is great. Something like that. Anyway, there's a bunch of uh home tech headlines turns out this week what do you say we jump in let's do it big news i guess i don't know this this is like the the longest meh meh story that has played out over the last 10 months of leaking every five days uh sonos has finally launched the Ace headphones, priced at $450,

featuring noise-canceling capabilities. It has the ability to transfer TV audio from the Sonos soundbar with the push of a button over to your headphones so you can not disturb somebody in the room and, you know, listen to the stuff on your headphones. It's out.

About the time you're listening to the podcast, I think, since we're recording on the 4th, this comes tomorrow right yeah tomorrow you can go down to the best so we won't have our reviews yet but um the reviews are in and uh and uh what is what is this the verge says they're here and they're damn impressive um not the reviews that i've been seeing but there you go the verge what i think the verge has somebody but i'm not really sure yeah the guy that gets all the leaks is giving the headphones reviews now all right that's all right weird anyway um yeah we we don't have them yet we'll wait we'll wait with dated breath for uh tj's review since he's gonna go down tomorrow i guess and get i'm gonna buy and

return them the same like 30 minutes later. Not keeping them. Yeah, everything I read about them is that they're good headphones for headphones, but that's kind of it, and they don't really, like, stand out. I mean, there's some things that some of the reviewers are calling out, like the physical buttons are nicer than some of the other headphones, and what I've heard, though. How is the bar this low? Yeah, it's just one of those products. What are you talk about i don't know their headphones what do you want black and white they're probably like the only like one of the only few headphones actually come in multiple

colors i don't i don't know i mean beats come in a coat done oh well never mind why are you gonna buy these i don't know it's a hundred bucks more. I think so. Yeah. The weird thing is that you basically have to have a $900 sound bar to use your $500 headphones. And it's just like, which is the only feature that separates it from anything else. Like otherwise it's just normal noise canceling headphones. Yeah. Who cares?

$450. It's just a weird thing. And if they would release it with like compatibility with the Beam or the Ray, like, immediately, I could see how that would be awesome, but, I don't know, you have to have $1,200 or almost $1,400 just to use this thing.

That doesn't seem like a good investment. Pass. I mean, what would be nice is if it was... Alright, so, like, what's the point of this product? If the point was, as you expressed early on, like, I want these Wi-Fi headphones, I want to have a Sonos zone that is in my head and I can walk around my house, this would be a good thing. But for whatever reason, that's not the bar that they went for.

They went for, let's make a product that can do what you can already kind of do with other stuff. Like I can, I can do exactly what they're doing here with my, my Apple TV and my AirPods or literally any one of the Apple headphones. And it's integrated right into the, the GUI and I don't have to open the damn Sonos app to switch over to it or whatever,

like, yay. So I guess it's good if you don't have an Apple TV and you're running some, some other system, like you can do this for this much price, this price. But like, I just, I just, the extra steps that could have been taken to make this have a wow factor. Like, oh yeah, that's really cool. I can just listen to Sonos radio all day in my headphones, streaming from my phone.

Or streaming over Wi-Fi to them or whatever they want to do with it. Like, I just just seems like a big miss uh not the last we've heard about these things though i'm sure yeah my biggest complaint is like i understand they probably didn't do wi-fi because of battery complaints because they're touting like a 30-hour battery life but like if i'm using these headphones in my house i don't need 30-hour battery life like just make them last like eight hours and maybe they couldn't make them last that long but it just seems like one of those weird things it's like you just make a dual mode like make it wi-fi and bluetooth and if you need it to last longer and use bluetooth bam problem

solved well and how hard would it be to have two things like 30 hours on bluetooth battery life and then they and in the fine print like apple does like down the bottom it's like two and a half hours on wi-fi yeah and it's like okay well i can only watch a movie basically um in dolby atmos on my headphones before i fall asleep and then i'll just put them back on the charger thing and they'll charge up come on yeah yeah and it's just for me too it's the fragmentation of the ecosystem as well because now sonos has this one product literally one product that does not work like the rest of their products. You have to use the app to set it up

or whatever, but it's just a completely different thing within the ecosystem and so it's fragmentation. It's like when Apple releases five different Apple Pencils. Do you need five different Apple Pencils? You don't. Nobody needs that. Why are you going to do that to everybody? You've got to collect them all. Yeah, it's like

Pokemon. Yeah, exactly. Just make them different colors then. Give me a red Apple pencil. No, white pencils, that's it. That's all you get. Yeah, see? Give me colors. When have you ever seen any other color of a pencil?

Come on. It's always been white. Never. Not since my mechanical pencil days. It sounds like TJ's so depressed about these headphones. He set the bar so low for when he goes and gets them but you were so excited for them for like years you know yeah and then they just let you down and i feel like it's something they could have done if they just opened up the bluetooth in the arc and

you could use any bluetooth headphones with it you know they could have done the same thing right pretty much yeah yeah there's nothing unique about them i mean they're just like they pair with your arc then that's it that's not i don't know that's not a neat and then like you just keep saying and then no there's no and then so maybe we should have a little game for this and like i'll take bets on how long these are going to last for i bet though i mean how much these things possibly cost them to make? Yeah. Probably $17, and they're charging $450 for them? Oh, they're more than $17. I'm just saying. From all indications is that they have a nice fit finish.

They are very comfortable. They're super light compared to other things on the market, and they have a long battery life. Everybody's saying they're good headphones for 2024, but there's nothing special about them. Yeah. I don't know. I think if they sell a few out of them, they'll good headphones for 2024, but there's nothing special about them. Yeah. I don't know. I think if they sell a few out of them,

they'll be, they'll do an all right, but I just don't know how they compete with the other stuff in the market. They can do what they can do in more without, and for less, honestly, like if we're talking about like the Sonys, there's Bose,

they're about in the same price print. Some of them are a hundred bucks less. Like I think the Sonys are a hundred bucks less right now. The Apple, the Apple ones are more right. right i think about 100 bucks more beats are probably around the same price and you can get them in different colors so well and i think this is one of those things too where like if you're not a sonos fan already you're not gonna go out and buy these like if you see these on a shelf next to bows and sony and whoever else you're gonna look at these and be like i don't know who sonos is so let me go ahead and go with Bose yeah these are these look like an established brand I've been doing reviews on these for the past 20 years right for these uh yeah yeah

um yeah MKBHD did review on these he he didn't see he really seemed like he really wanted to find something impressive about them and couldn't find a way to say it. But his recommendation was for people who have a whole Sonos system and want to have the ability to basically turn off the TV sound so they can watch TV while their partner's sleeping or something like that. And that's the use case. That's it. $450 for that use case. Get AirPods. I just, yeah.

AirPods and Apple TV. You should have an Apple TV already anyway. That's it. $450 for that use case. Get AirPods. I just, yeah. AirPods and Apple TV. You should have an Apple TV already anyway. Yep, yep. Speaking of Sonos and kind of like Google Home, remember the Sonos Google Home stuff? Google Home lost the lawsuit, or Sonos won the lawsuit against Google saying that they were infringing on a bunch of patents.

And so like now Google is finally rolling out some alternative ways to do the things that got taken out of google home uh particularly group volume control was one of them um all that's coming in uh but it looks like sonos won that one and google lost but we we have our own winners and losers here and um i don't know tj you may not have won the headphones that you wanted but you did win the bet because we're going to go way back to our little card that we when we do this it was uh 2013 november 15th 2013 2013 i'm sorry 2023 yeah i can't read i was like we weren't doing this show in 2013 and gavin and i weren't uh is he yeah november 2023 uh we made a little side bet uh that will sonos release

headphones in uh q2 of 2024 and if i can count my months correctly um and i might not be able to do that given how badly i scrubbed dates uh it looks like you won tj tj wins i get a dollar i expect you in the mail i'll send it to you in the mail. With a hand-signed letter, you know. I'll sign it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I got the price right, too. We can't find the price card for some reason, but I'm pretty sure I guessed $449. So, I was right. I just wasn't right about them being good.

Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. We could have bet on features or something like that. But yeah, congratulations. You won that one there. Woo! There's another one.

I guess we went past it. Will Seth get his lights up before Thanksgiving? I don't remember what happened with that one. I think it was your Govee lights or something, but I don't remember. I got stuff going for Thanksgiving. It's installed. I got stuff going. It was in and out, so there we go.

I hate taking that stuff down. I want to leave it up all the time, but then I don't want it to look like that and out. So there we go. I hate taking that stuff down. I want to leave it up all the time, but then I don't want it to look like that all year. So there you go. Speaking of inshittification of things, Spotify is increasing US prices again. Spotify is going to increase prices for its premium duo and family plans in the US

with premium going from $10.99 to $11.99 a month. Duo will now be $16.99 a month duo will now be 16.99 per month a two dollar increase in family will go from 19 per month up to 19 per month uh from 16 so um some increases are coming into our pockets uh from spotify there we go yeah i currently pay the 20 well i guess now the 20 hours a month for the spotify family um because it seems like the easiest option for me we so we basically have i have an account uh nicole has an account and then we have a house account and so it's like well i might as well just do that and then i have a couple friends that you know send me a hundred bucks or whatever a year to have them on spotify um but i just realized that i actually have youtube music for free because i

pay for youtube premium which is like 500 million dollars a month now um and so i'm just i'm gonna look at uh using youtube music instead of spotify so we'll see how that goes yeah we pay for a spotify account i don't know what version it is i probably should look it up but it's not it's not much and it's not the family one because we just have one account that we kind of go back and forth between it. But like, I don't really even use it because I don't, if I want to listen to something, I'll just go over to listen to the Apple music thing,

which I also pay for because it's built in. Well, you have to, it's built into like the Apple one subscription thing. So, so why do you have the Spotify then? Because some people don't like the apple one okay it's the same thing to me but uh well i will get spotify they do have a better search slash find it interface than apple music and apple music on your computer like on like the music app on uh any mac os computer is just a hot piece of flaming garbage. I don't think anybody in that company has ever used.

It's just horrible. I'll venture to say that it's worse than the new Sonos app update. That's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. The Sonos app set a low bar for us, you know? You know, I'm listening to all the people talk about it and I've seen numerous posts and people are just like oh they hate it how much they hate it

and like tj and i are like yeah we like it i think we're the only ones that said we liked it i think the ui is nice honestly like that's what's crazy it's like the actual the redesign of it i think it works a lot better and i i think i got they got rid of the stupid bar at the bottom i always hated that bar yeah it's like it doesn't need to have five different sections just let me control everything from one interface and they did that yeah but then they just screwed everything else up at the same time so it's like well the grouping ungrouping viewing of groups for your entire house is so much easier now it's less confusing in fact the only way i get confused on it now is that i'm thinking that it's the old app with the crappy bar at get confused on it now is that i'm thinking that

it's the old app with the crappy bar at the bottom i'm like how do i get back to the crappy bar thing that doesn't work yeah and i'm like oh yeah this is the new app i can click the little thing and it's right there i probably just need to like watch a video on like how it works too because i've only just been trying to learn how to use it i haven't watched any tutorials or anything i'm sure somebody smarter has figured this all out already. Somebody with a YouTube channel. Yeah. Subscribers with bell buildings. Yeah.

All right. Well, Apple has announced that older Apple TV models, specifically the second and third generation,, no longer be available on Apple TV, second and third generation after July 31st, 2024. So that deadline is coming up. If you've got any older devices out there in your house, in your parents' house, I think that's probably the case for some relatives of mine. They may not be able to watch Netflix, which would actually not be good because that's the only reason i bought them the apple tv years ago which when was this thing made it was like a 20 what 2010 2010 and 2012 yeah so which ones are they canceling it's like 2010 20 2010 and 2012 so i think it's second and third generation yeah i think it's the fourth generation now that we're on uh well they they moved into like two there's two generations of the 4k generation so maybe it's the fourth generation now that we're on Well they moved into like two There's two generations of the 4K generation So maybe it's fourth and fifth

Yeah they got confusing with the name If you want to see a horrible interface For a website Go to apple.com now Go look at it now And try to buy anything Try to purchase something Try to find what you're looking for

You will not be able to do it And the only reason I'm bringing this up is because This is what websites will look like this year Try to purchase something. Try to find what you're looking for. You will not be able to do it. And the only reason I'm bringing this up is because this is what websites will look like this year. This is the hot new design trend. And it's called BentoBox. And everything looks like a little BentoBox if you're browsing through their store and shop for a Mac or whatever. And everything's hidden off on the side. I looked for like 10 minutes to find the refurbished section.

Good luck finding it. You can't find it. You may as well just Google search for it. It's not in the links. What's that website you said? It's a very popular website. Apple.com. A-P-P-L-E.

Huh. Yeah, it's been around for a while. It's not pulling up anything. No, supposedly this is the Apple TV 4K third generation that's out right now. So they've just gotten ridiculous with their naming. Yeah. Yeah, there's a new 4K version of 4K. Oh, it's the third generation of the 4K, but the 4K has three generations.

4K was probably the fourth generation. So, yeah, way to confuse things. Either way. So this is like the sixth generation so uh yeah way to confuse things either way so this is like the sixth generation it's sad because the ones they're canceling the netflix on are probably still more than capable of playing the netflix like those people probably aren't doing well for sure not doing 4k on those but they're happy with the output of the video quality and it's probably just netflix doesn't want to spend the time supporting the old ones yeah that's usually what happens with netflix i mean they they usually drop support for like smart tv is a lot quicker though so like a samsung smart tv might lose support after like four or five years it looks like and this could be it uh which one is the there are two video

codecs that are not supported by the first second and third generation of Apple TVs. And that's HVC, 265, and VP9, which is that new Google one that everybody's trying to move to. I don't remember or know which Netflix is using, but I bet you that has more than everything to do with it. Is if it's not able to support the new codec they're going to push out, they need to shut down some servers and save some money on this old stuff and bandwidth. Yeah, that's probably what it is. And for a 10-year-old product, 8- to 10-year-old product, it's probably time to update. But that could mean Apple TV is probably not the only one.

There's going to be a lot of old streamers out there that probably are more than capable, but they don't support for whatever reason. I think last week or the week before, we had a story about an older Panasonic TV or something like that that had an app inside of it that was going to get kicked off. So maybe this has something to do with it. Like it's one of these codecs that they're using, either VP9 or 265, that's not supported on the hardware that existed back then. And that makes sense. I mean, it's better than launching the Netflix app that you can't play video on.

Well, you know what Tim Cook would say about this? He'd say, buy your mom an apple tv yeah exactly tim cook and the apple shareholders thank you for canceling netflix if you if you're looking at these because it's that's what we were confused about if you're looking at these things these are the ones that were like the little flat boxes they weren't tall they didn't have like they were just little flat boxes. And with the worst remotes that have ever graced Apple TV. Yeah, yeah.

The remotes were awful. The worst remotes. Those were the ones that were like the, they were similar to the airport. Was it the, not airport. Apple had their, yeah, the airport extreme or, they were similar,

they were the same size, same design. Same size. One was white and the apple tvs were black yeah yeah yeah yep same form factor ish about the same size and yeah uh old product now i think it's so the eight the apple hd is what they moved into after that and that one is the quote fourth generation now um that one is was started in 2015 and then the 4k version started 2017, 2021 and 2022. So you've got the third generation now,

the 4k in 2022. Yeah. Apple and their naming conventions have never been good. Go look at their website though. You'll never be able to find an Apple TV on there. I challenge you try and buy one. You can't do it it's impossible oh i'm not happy with this bento box thing like this is what websites will look like and you have to scroll over to the right if you want to find anything it's garbage all right um speaking of apple we've got an interesting

story here about um a new app or an app that released it what's the name of the app because this thing is a new app that is controller for home kit it's a third-party app for controlling apple home kit stuff they have come out with this clever little thing for uh interactively controlling your house using a floor plan and the way they get the floor plan is you can do a 3d scan right there in the app of your whole house kind of transforms it into a map that you can use map a floor plan interface if you will and um it's part of the new version 7.0 so uh kind of cool the apple phones all have this ability kind of built into them and it's really neat to see it yeah the lidar yeah

yeah yeah as you can scan do 3d like high definition 3d scans of your house and where your furniture is and it can map it all out and make a nice little floor plan this is a pretty ingenious thing for a third-party developer to do it's actually really cool like i've seen products do this before where they map did a floor map for you, but this one actually is very nice how it works. It how it recognizes the furniture and stuff, the openings in your room. But not just that. Once you scan the room, the ability to now start putting your devices on that floor plan and then you can use that floor plan to control your home. And that was the really like the whole interface to design that is really nice um i think this is

impressive i mean if you're the type of person that has um you put ipads for tablets on the walls or something like this this may be something you really want to look at honestly i thought about using this with home assistant just so i didn't have to use the user interface the home assistant um because this is just so much better and like designing an interface for home assistant is awful so i mean if this just does it i don't know if I want to scan my whole house and upload it somewhere. Yeah. The only thing about like, when I look at floor plans like this, they kind of break

down when you start to have too much information on them or too many devices in your rooms, you know, then they kind of start to become a pain. But I mean, if you got a simple layout then yeah which most people will have yeah i feel like this would be good as like a general interface for a lot of people like just throw up your lights and your fans and your all your basic stuff that you access all the time with like a more advanced screen somewhere else so that way you could just easily go and toggle on the light for the living room or whatever so that's giving me a look right now i don't like that look uh you know what this is good for you know if you're planning to commit a crime just quickly go and scan your neighbor's house and then you can plan

out the exit routes that's true i'm just mapping out my automations i'm just mapping out this bank just yeah control this light over here is that? Yeah. Let me scan that real fast. Yeah, I am not a fan at all of any use case that involves a floor plan, except maybe one or two, and that would be for, like, in the service industry for a bar back to control bar TVs. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. Really, I think if you take your interface and you put it on a plan like this, I you've failed at the interface design now this is a really cool way to do it don't get me wrong i just don't think that people in general techie people do and people who can read maps do

but i don't think most people in general can read a floor plan to save their life or know which way like there's a picture in this thing and the ipad's rotated sideways and there's this like if if you handed this to somebody and the ipad was rotated sideways and their house is suddenly sideways from what they know it to be like it takes 10 minutes to like for some people to like figure out what spatially is that that the bedroom i have no idea they they have to look around i i don't think floor plans are a great way at all. And like Gavin said, if you start putting a lot of devices on it, you can't. You just, you can't. Then you have to put a label on there that says lights. And you click the lights and guess what you get?

You get a list of lights that you can control. And then you're back to using a list interface, which is where you should be in the first place. All you did was make a fancy graphic and scan your house and upload it to some guy's server. You know, when it comes to interfaces, you know, over the years, you know, surveying, it's only a sample size of one person, but it's a very vocal person, right? I find that my wife is, she's afraid to use the app. She's afraid to click on things in the app. You know, the interface she

never liked any app right but what she really got used to is using the voice you know so using the amazon voice and telling it to turn on and turn off and stuff she's really comfortable using that and it's also because she uses that a lot for other things not just home control but for you know like what's the traffic like today or what's the weather like today, you know, so she interacts with that a lot. And then as a side, she's for the smart home, being able to ask it the pool temperature and stuff. She's comfortable with all that stuff. Does she ever have to open her, uh, open up a map and walk around your house? Like, did she get lost? Like, okay. So like, like no one looks at the floor plan of their damn house. That's what I'm saying. Like, it just, it doesn't, it's like no one looks at a floor plan of their damn house that's what i'm saying like it just it doesn't it's not it's not a thing like for most people and i've been in

enough construction projects to know that most people i talk to when we're going through the construction process have no idea what they're looking at on the floor plans there's no way that they can represent a two-dimensional view of of of, of a plan of a plan, whether it's the like, um, or they call it the, like the, the floor plan, like straight down, look down, or like looking at the wall. What are the sectional view of a cabinet? Forget it. Like it is, it is so hard of a skill that needs to be learned or you inherently just understand it. I, I,

I have been in those meetings and sent across the people on the table so many times and they just don't understand what they're looking at and that's why you see these companies investing in giant buildings with projectors hanging from the ceilings where they can like map out an entire floor plan of the actual house on the floor and move actual furniture around the room that they project onto the floor so people can understand what they're looking at. I don't think this is the way to do it. When I came to Cedia, I remember looking at the floor plan to try and find you,

and I just couldn't figure it out. It was like, which way is which? All I remember is you said you were in a corner. And I think by the time we found you, it was the second corner. I was crying in the corner. You were under a counter you know crying but we we went to one corner you weren't there in the second corner luckily we found you so yeah i feel like those are valid valid things about floor plan layouts but i also

think that all those instances are things that you're not familiar with all the time yeah and so like when you're building a house you've never been there so like you're not going to know the floor plan and if you're visiting like an expo center you've never been there either so you're not going to know the floor plan but if you do with your house where you're like you're there every day i feel like it's a little more obvious uh but i'm also one of those people that cannot read plans to save my life so i am totally guilty but you bring up a good point too what if you have a guest over you know are they going to feel comfortable utilizing this if they have to? I don't need my guest to use this, though.

I don't need my guest to touch the automation system at all. I can see where TJ sleeps. I don't want to know that. I'll show you something. Here's the room. Here's the list of things that you can control. Good night. You don't need anything else.

What if they did a floor plan with like layers and so you could do like so you could have like different layers from now you're confusing information she doesn't even want to open the app now you're adding layers you added the most complicated thing of like photoshop into this like let's add layers on you know like a temperature sensor layer, a water layer. People design their interfaces based on what they like, but take into consideration other people in the house and what they are comfortable with, too. So when you're designing this. Well, the problem right now is we have nerds designing interfaces,

and nerds are not good at designing interfaces. Yeah. What if we put masks on those layers? I need a privacy layer on my lair. So that way Seth can't see my bedroom. And what if you go in one of these rooms you scanned and move the furniture around? Like, now it's going to throw off the map altogether and confuse people even more. Yeah.

Oh, genius business idea. Just a camera that goes in each room of your house and it uploads the floor plan no matter when you change it. Exactly. A new picture every day. An AI camera. There you go. It's got to have AI.

And obviously it'll take a picture 30 times a day. So that way it can know the exact changes that are happening. Yeah. We're not getting any money for that if it doesn't have AI. So it has to have AI. AI. Even though it doesn't. Then you'll be able to download things in NFTs.

Wait, nevermind. That'll lose us money. We were rich for like five seconds. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up everything here on the Home Tech Headlines. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 485. All right. We do have something in the middle back tonight. So this is from a listener giving some feedback. Luke,

he says, I have a Bose outdoor speakers on my back patio and JBL in wall speakers in my garage. So controlling this with an older AV receiver using A and B speaker options. Got it. And a Logitech squeeze box. Oh, the days. The receiver died and the squeeze box, of course, didn't die, right? But it doesn't support YouTube music. Can you suggest a good device or combination of devices that would allow me to control music and volume without always going back to the receiver that is in the garage?

Thanks for the suggestion. Enjoy listening to the show. Home assistant. Oh, sorry, sorry. Wrong part of the show. Wrong listening to the show home assistant you know the funny part about this one is i really am interested in this too because with the backyard update i was planning to put speakers in and i'm going to defer this question to dj just because oh man gavin how much money do you want to spend yeah i'm like all right let's spend some money man yeah no no no let's help luke spend money first and then we'll come back to me well luke's is easy in my opinion so you basically have in my opinion you have two options right

now you have sonos uh which i'm not a huge fan of right now so i might steer you away from that um and the other option i would consider right now, I don't have any personal experience with them, but they get really good reviews, is this WIM amp. WIM? WIM? I don't know. WIM? W-I-M. W-I-M, yeah.

And they have an amplifier. You can buy it on Amazon. It's $300. It's got Chromecast. It's got AirPlay built into it, Spotify Connect, Alexa Cast, Tidal Connect, all that stuff. It's got HDMI ARC, RCAs.cas i mean it's got a lot of stuff basically a sonos amp it only has one ethernet port though instead of two that the sonos amp has i'm not sure if that's necessary um but it looks like a really good product and it's only 300 so it's more than half off compared to the Sonos amp. And so if I was going into like just

hardwired speakers at the moment, I would consider that because you're going to get the AirPlay and the Chromecast, which is going to support basically everything at that point. And so that's what I would do. The other option is Sonos. Sonos has been around forever. They're not going to go away no matter how much I'm ragging on right now. I think they're a good option if you're gonna need other wireless speakers at some point um the nice thing about airplay and chromecast is you can kind of use other airplay and chromecast speakers and you don't have a problem with it um but if you want to eventually get a sound bar or you want to get a portable speaker or these other things

sonos is kind of your best option at the moment and so you kind of kind of got to determine if it's worth the extra price for you yeah i i would i i would automatically lean just sonos is going to be expensive right there's there's there's a there's a less expensive option with the sonos or the the we map i guess uh we map i have no idea um it's not win amp we figured that out earlier earlier you could do this and you have one of those little like ab speaker selector things that you could like turn on to have music out in the garage like you can ab select back and forth the old analog thing right um like a niles box or something so you can do that and then have the sonos or winamp plugged into it or you can just

do two sonos and winamp and just have two zones that are controlled together uh I would I would probably well it depends what you want to do uh future expansion you have all sorts of options on Sonos we don't know if this WIM company is going to be in business or WIM or uh but it is half the price and you can do two of them for the same price as you can get it one Sonos amp so I don't know it's it is a hard choice It just depends on how much you use it, how much you like using it, and then how much you want to expand listening to music out in the rest of your house. If you do have those options, man, the Sonos ecosystem is hard to back out of once you get in because it does work really well. I mean, the way those devices set up. Now, this one,

is it streamed from your phone? so they got airplay and chromecast so that would work the exact same but i'm pretty sure they have their own app as well uh that you would stream from so i guess it's kind of like a difference as well that like when you play sono spotify from sonos you're actually on the spotify service like it's not if your phone rings your music doesn't stop during a party or something you know like there's a huge difference between like bluetoothing over some music to play out of an amplifier and using sonos because sonos will just keep going and you can walk over and press a little button on to turn it off or whatever i don't know this may have that built into it or

similar casting features built into it as well i'm not familiar with it but for 300 bucks it's not a bad deal seth look at look in the back channel and tell me what their app looks like it looks like the old sonar there you go wow honestly i'm a big fan of doing the separate zones i think if you want to save money you do you know a speaker selector box and all that stuff but for simplicity's sake just do multiple amps even if it costs a little bit more um you only have two zones so i would just do two separate um unless they're like right next to each other if they're right next to each other then do the same zone um but to give you an idea on sonos land i'm doing a house right now with three amplifiers and it's twenty one hundred dollars um and we're sharing several zones. And so with Sonos, it would have been like $6,000.

But we're doing volume control knobs in a couple rooms and all that good stuff. So it just depends if you want that added complexity. Some people are fine with that, and you already have a receiver, so maybe you are fine with that. And if you are, save the money and just get one amp. Yeah, I was going to ask about the multiple zones. So he'll need multiple Sonos amps amps to handle two zones that's fine question does speaker wire length affect anything like quality wise technically yeah it does uh the the gauge of the wire i mean you can't you can't fight physics yeah gauge and distance are the

the two problems. Not the specific quality or the things that like weird salves and stuff that the weird audio people or the little trays that audio files. Yeah, they have little things that they run their speaker wires over so they don't touch the floor because the harmonic vibrations will make it off or something. No, that doesn't exist. Like electrons will flow over the wire but um there is this thing called ohm's law which is a law and uh it will not you know it will cause strain on the amplifier or not the best sound to come out of the speaker if it's not getting the right power to it so yeah over distance you do have problem like you can't use a cat5 for speaker wire yeah and there's a reason for that yeah well that's why a lot of times too if you're running into those distances you'll a lot of places will typically do a 70 volt system yeah and they don't have those they

don't have the the limitations of the wire distance and you can run it off a much smaller wire as well you do have the limitations of the wire just over distance it's just a lot further because you get power yeah that's true you get the power there's always going to be a distance but it doesn't sound as good as like a true stereo system not with the transformer thing in the middle yeah i'm gonna have to plan for that for mine and yeah one one thing i i like about the sonos i don't know if whim does this but like when sonos you can airplay to it but it's like it's always on you know what i mean and then when you stop airplaying to it it's not like the speakers turned up and still there you know it you don't hear a buzzing

sound as if you had like a streaming box hooked up to some external speakers or something so i that's why i kind of like the sonos um setup you get that honestly i know you're not liking sonos it's because of their headphones i know but it's still like in their app come on it's still probably a really good system oh no the ecosystem is great like i mean you even the product the products they have on they're just expensive i mean everybody says oh they're expensive they are you pay a premium the ecosystem is great minus the headphones because i don't find that part of the ecosystem that's not an ecosystem yeah it's not really an ecosystem it's a random accessory product that they made. Then you go like using the app to combine. Wow.

Wim really did just blatantly copy. It's literally the same as app. I'm on their website, which is way better than apple.com right now. And yeah, it, the grouping and everything that they have, the volume sliders,

it is a copy pasta of the good old. Wow. I mean, amazing. All right. Maybe we should try and get them in on the show if they if they made their logo to capitalize then they would be have the the the old trick that the sonos where you can turn it upside down oh yeah but they missed out on that man they'll just they'll have to connect those eyes and it will look the same either way i i don't i

i i would say my would lead heavily like if an integrator is i would leave lean heavily on sonos and then give you the option of doing the ab selector thing um if depending on your budget if you wanted to have like complete control over everything super nice tight integration with the app on your phone sonos 100 two amps like tj said um but if you need to back off and not spend 1200 bucks on amplifiers or what 1300 bucks on amplifiers at 1400 i think it's 699 are they oh wow okay yeah yeah that's why it sucks that when you go to the sonos hardwired stuff because yeah there's 699 at best buy so um they they are very expensive when you start doing multiple zones and that's what

like whenever i'm talking to somebody about audio for their house it i always tell people like first thing it's like it gets more expensive the more zones you want yeah if you want to group everything together it's super affordable you can buy one amp to do you know four rooms of audio and stuff but you're you're stuck with volume controls or speaker selectors or something like that if you want the ease of use you have to to do multiple amps. Yep. There's a pile four zone speaker selector amp on Amazon right now for $36.99. And I'm sure it works good enough to turn on speakers A for the garage and speakers B for outside. Protect the amp, protect the speakers. Good to go. And I've done that before. One of my friend's father-in-law bought a house and he was like hey he's got all these speakers and volume

controls around everything all these wires coming out what do we do and i i was like here you need this and the amazon link for that got him a sonos amp he went and put it in and i mean he says he says they listen to it every day it's the best thing that they have the whole house like it's like they love it and it's just because they just want to put music on in the room they go and turn the volume up and there's music there there you go yeah i think audio is one of those things i'm not like a i'm not an audiophile by any means and but i like listening to things and especially like as you're walking around the house and you're doing chores or or whatever it's kind of nice just to have something going on all the time and so that's why i really like sonos i just i have the tv going or

i have music going or whatever it is and it's just nice to have that all over yep uh gavin you're gonna need what two three four sonos amps for the house what are you getting how many how many zones you doing outside uh only one it'll just be the backyard yeah what what gavin needs the sonant sonar ray what okay back to spending money for luke let's is he gonna have to upgrade his speakers at all you know like i guess you have to take that into consideration though no you shouldn't have to upgrade any speakers as long as they still work okay yeah the jbl and walls are pretty standard i've seen those for years that they don't they don't particularly go bad they're not like i wouldn't i would would put them in like a good mid-range, mid-tier speaker.

Like, they're okay. Okay. And the Bose ones are super popular outdoors. I sold tons of those at Circuit City and they work great. They're just fine outside. They're great for that. They've lasted forever too. I mean, they've lasted, yeah.

Those things are, well, I mean, they have paper cones in them. So, you can actually take the thing apart and swap out the paper cones. If they blow, I know this because I, one of the companies I worked for Muzak back in the day had this contract with a big park city park up in Orlando. And one day they took me out there and they like, here's your lift. And you get to drive around and replace all the speakers. And I'm like, Oh, where are the speakers? You just gave me this random box full of drivers. No, no, no. I had to take them off the pole and then replace the driver inside.

It was all the Bose outdoor speakers. And they were all blown because they're on like literally on a bridge that crosses a lake. I think it was Lake Mary Park up there in Sanford. I don't know. It's north of Orlando. So anyway, they last forever. There's not much to them and they sound great so there you go done i would keep those speakers yeah get a sonos amp

power them up and i think you'll really like it see we we we don't recommend sonos and then we do recommend it's a love it's a love hate relationship i know it's like recommending spectrum or comcast yeah that's the only option oh yeah there you go gavin you you need to get uh tj has put the uh what the sonance mag 6.1 6.1 the the whole lineup is called a sauna right last i knew uh but this this is pretty cool we'll probably put it in the show notes too um this is actually a kit from best buy this is only if you're interested like landscape audio or pool speakers something like that um probably not for our listener here he already has speakers um but this is cool it's basically like six satellite speakers and a subwoofer that goes in the ground and what's nice about these is they kind of just blend into like your shrubs and bushes and trees and whatever

else you got going on but they kind of surround you with audio. So the problem with outdoor audio is that everybody puts two speakers on their house. Yeah. And they just, they put it right above their door. They put it next to their seating area and the music sounds great in that one single area. And then as soon as you walk off the deck or the patio or you go to the pool, you can't hear anything.

Why are you making me feel bad now? That was my plan. People get these rock speakers i mean here's here's the other part of that is that you to to hear anything when you go over into the hot tub like you really have to crank it up and then your neighbors are like oh that guy's in his hot tub again i hate him gavin's dipping in his hot tub again splashing and having a good time mojito so what happens to these speakers in wintertime they just stay outside what do you mean they can handle the really cold weather?

Yeah, yeah. They're landscape speakers. They're supposed to be outside. Well, I don't know about Canadian winters. We don't really have real winters here. So you'd have to look that up on Canadian. Pull-a-beers. Sonans, I guess.

Well, the good thing, these are only available on American Best Buy. So I can't buy them. So good. Save me some money. They are expensive. They're super expensive. But they are really nice, especially if you're putting them around like a pool or something because they're they're directional and so you just point them to where you want to hear the audio and like as soon as

you stand behind them you can barely hear them it's crazy yeah they're they're pretty good there's there's a bunch of they're slowly starting to i think started with what james i think james loudspeakers or something had these and then uh sonance made a copy and then snap av made a copy and then like these have been everywhere now i think there's four forza is out there now forza you can probably get those in uh in uh in canada um but they're just kind of like osd i think has some they're starting to build lights into these things now too yeah which is kind of a gimmick but yeah, whatever. It's, I guess, you could... Money. They're horrible lights. Yeah, well. I mean, what TJ was saying is like, you have to

crank this thing up. You don't have to crank these up. These can stay pretty low. Like, it just makes nice little noise floor and it makes nice even audio all the way across your yard. And that's why, like, when you go to a resort. Like, if you go to a big resort in Orlando and you're there seeing Mickey Mouse, when you walk around, they're playing music all the time in those resorts around the pool and everything. You just hear it. It's coming from the bushes, from the speakers that they have. They just have a bunch of them.

They have 40, 50 speakers out there around the pool. And it's just not that loud. Like, you don't hear it when you get back into the room and that kind of thing. Ultimate luxury for landscape audio, I think. Yeah. You don't have to do that look like i mean you can use like even bows makes like an outdoor like the green indoor thing outdoor thing everybody sees everywhere there's a couple of other companies that make that as well but a little mushroom thing that's that hides away in the bush yeah

we used to do a lot of these a lot of these systems they make a 70 volt and a stereo whatever they call that one we used to do a lot of the systems. They make a 70 volt and a stereo, whatever they call that one. We used to do a lot of the 70 volt down in Florida. Tons of those. I worked on many, many, many resorts on iDrive. The landscape company would come in and cut a 70 volt wire and you have to go track down where it was, dig up why everybody's on vacation, dig up the landscape and find the wire, patch it back together.

Well, you guys gave me a lot of ideas. I'm going to be doing some research. I'll bring you a Christmas gift. We'll help you spend some money. Just let us know. That's right. Not just speaker wire. No, you'll just be a roll of speaker wire.

I mean, you got to pay for it, but I'll bring it to you. Gavin linked to some of these Sonance rock speakers. I've never been a fan of rock speakers. I think they always look like garbage. They sound like garbage too. But they're Sonance. But Gavin just linked me to these ones they said that thirteen hundred dollars i would not pay thirteen hundred dollars for rock speakers oh my gosh no well that's canadian dollars though

it's probably 13 i know but you know my cost on them i can't say live on the air um but it's not far off of that so yeah i would not i i would not recommend rock speakers in any way shape or form i've installed many of them here in florida they always suck guess what we don't have in florida rocks you guys need a palm tree one yeah i mean if they had a palm tree when it would look normal but the landscape lights really do help out with the aesthetic looks but the rock speakers they they never sound good. They never work good. Oh, I got a design for you. Look at an iguana speaker. You put it in the tree and it will really blend in.

You got to hang in the tree though. You can put it in the tree. It will just hang out there and no one will think anything of it. You're iguana singing. It's like Billy Bass. It just turns his head and sings to you. What would the Florida version of that be called? It's probably Bub Iguana. Iggy Iguana.

Izzy Iguana. I'm sure Alibaba has one I can find. More than likely. I feel like we've done this exact thing with iguanas. Don't buy a rock speaker but buy an iguana speaker yeah don't yeah i could highly recommend the iguana speaker over the rock speaker which one's like one you can buy and waste your money on and the second one probably doesn't exist but if we can find it we'll put a link in the show notes but

yeah rock speakers out don't use those i've never come across a nice one there's one company that i did come across that made maybe what you would consider a rock speaker it was called madison acoustics way back in the day i don't even know if the company's still in business but they would make like wooden planters and put nice speakers in them oh yeah and these things were like expensive like i would say each one of them were close to 2,500, if not $3,500 a piece, just for the speakers. And if you wanted more planters, you would, you would buy more of those. And they look like they were beautiful planters and they lasted for years, but still it's too much. Uh, anyway, don't buy Rado speakers. I would go either the mushroom, little green,

little mushroom thing. You can plug into the ground or in all 70 volt, I would not recommend doing anything other than 70 volt outside. And all, you can do the landscaping as well. I think, TJ, do you know if the one you linked here, but do you know the subs, they put transformers on the subs for base, or do they still just run those on 8 ohms? I think it's just 8 ohms as well.

Okay. Because I mean, it's just, it lasts, so I haven't installed one in like a year year now but it was all just chained together it wasn't anything extra special about it so in this system they probably have like it spiders off the subwoofer and they have one of those balanced transformers inside of it but yeah on the bigger systems you need to have 70 volts for the little speakers but then for the sub it usually needs more power and usually you have to do use a real 8 ohm amp so i was wondering about that it's magic magic magic of electricity uh and we got a pick of the week here tonight uh it's this is kind of cool

we we've seen you see all these specs off for your tvs and, where it's like, oh, it's got 120 Hertz or 480 Hertz. And like, what the heck does that mean? Or a refresh rate of 480. That's good. This little, there's a little gif, I guess. And it will, it has these little moving dots and you can actually, I don't know if this is right, but like you can actually see the difference between these refresh rates that you may have on your monitor, your computer monitor, or your TV at home. And I think it helps me understand kind of more of what I'm looking at. Like I can see when I drag a big window across a monitor and it's not a 60 hertz refresh rate.

I can see that. I don't know if I've ever seen 120 or 480, but I mean, it's showing you here in this image that it's a little more smooth. It's the bigger number it goes up to. It's a good visual. I like it. Yeah, I thought it was pretty informative. You don't really run across this stuff very often, especially now side to side.

So it's kind of nice to be able to see this and get just some nice little information about it in the following toots as well. Bunch of toots here. Yeah. Yeah, check it out. At least it was a little, I like these things where people can mock this stuff up and kind of show what the differences are.

So, yeah. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the weeks or great ideas you have for show,

pictures of rock speakers that don't work, send them to us. The email address is feedback at home tech.fm, or you can visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. You can also send Gavin all your rock speakers. We'll just give you Gavin's address and you just mail your rock speakers. I'm good with like any speaker donation.

I'm good with that. Help me finish off my backyard because I'm poor right now. It does look really nice. And project debates. Well, we've got a couple of project updates, but I guess we have a couple project updates but we i guess we have a home assistant updates oh gavin this is a beta i'm not doing this what is this

yeah it's it's the beta now but by the time you release the show the production will be uh exactly you gotta do multiple updates by the time this show gets released but um yeah they released their 2024.6 update uh pretty interesting stuff um they've been moving forward with integration with llms i know you you're looking forward to that i'm looking forward to that they have big they should have just called this year the year of the ai because they're making big moves i think with the ai in the background now no they, they're good without talking about AI. I am so happy that a company.

Okay, the year of the LLM, at least use a different word. But it seems like they're doing a lot of work with this in the background, and they're slowly releasing pieces. And I see where they're going with this, and I can't wait to see where we're at by the end of the year. But this is interesting to see what they're doing. Other things, you know, they've been making a lot of user interface updates,

which shows that they've shifted focus to improving their user interface, which is nice. The only downside to this is every time I redesign my dashboard, they add something new and I have to redesign my dashboards again, right? So now I got to look at, you know,

like the sections because they added an option to conditionally show sections based on, you know, states of entities and stuff like that. So that's pretty cool. And they also added dashboard backgrounds, which is awesome. Matter 1.3.

We talked about this last week, but they added that. Plus they added support for the devices in the UI for more devices in the UI that, you know, you can't buy, but, you know, they're ahead of the pack. So they're ready when they're out there. So a lot of background stuff, a really good update. One that I found interesting, though, in the notes was working. They added a working integration for the Things Network. I know we talked about

that. So if you're into like long range sensors and stuff like that, that use the Things Network. The LoRa network. They added integration with that so we can start playing around with some of that stuff and, you know, put a sensor down the street or something like that and, you know. Put it on your neighbor's car. Yeah, whatever.

And it will work through the Things Network. Wow, we're just like. and you know put on your neighbor's car whatever and it will work through the things network wow we're just like let me know when greg's home greg your water's running but you're not home yeah i know like but yeah good thing i have that key for your house somebody flushed the toilet over there i don't know what's going on it's weird my my my my home assistant just told me but that's one interesting thing I'm probably going to look into when it finally gets released or, you know, it will be tomorrow. So, yeah, home assistant 2024.6. All right. Well, we do have a couple of interesting things here. TJ, you've been – well, you posted this, I think, on our Slack channel and you posted on the HomeTech.social.

A picture of you rigging up some – these are, what do we call them? Deck lights, I guess, on your fence to light up your fence. And you have the results from this project. So what were you trying to do and what did you find out? Yeah, so we got this really nice privacy fence installed earlier this year, a couple months ago, whenever it was. And it's been nice, but my backyard literally has no light. It has the one exterior light that's like on my back door and it's been nice but my backyard literally has no light it has the one exterior light that's like on my back door and that's kind of it and i when we had the original

chain link fence i i had the same problem that i just couldn't see back there and the the problem with our areas we have you know wild animals like a lot of other people that do when they live in a place um and one night i like walked out and there was like a skunk in my yard and like luckily i just saw it like scurry away in the darkness and i was like oh man i should probably have some lights back here so i can see what's going on and so that got me started on some solar lights i was like well i'm not gonna run any lights right now because we're gonna do the fence and everything like that oh yeah you had the ring lights up for a bit yeah so i have the ring solar lights and they've honestly they've worked really good um i control them with home assistant but like they have this weird timeout thing that even

mqtt can't bypass and so like you can only turn them on for a certain amount of time if you like manually trigger them yeah but if you like set them up through the ring app you can set them up for like whatever schedule and so like they're they're great and i think they're like 40 or 50 dollars each and so i think they're like 40 or 50 each and so i think they're well worth it especially if you just need solar powered lights but once i got the fence done i was like man i really need something nicer back here and so i started exploring hardwired lights which you know i do landscape lighting for my company um and so i i found these deck lights and deck lights are basically just little hockey puck lights that you put on your deck like your stairs or or around the edges or whatever and i finally got some and i installed them at

the top part of the post for the fence just every other post i think i need like 18 altogether so i was like well i'll just i'll stick one every other post and that'll be more than sufficient to like kind of light up the perimeter. And that should give me enough light. And so I got that kind of rigged up. I had wires dragged all across the yard. I had to pause the robot lawnmower for a week because I just didn't want it to run over the wires and cause bigger problems. So I just got that set up again so I can cut my grass because I removed the wires tonight.

But now I'm in the process of staining the fence so once i get the fence stained i'll actually work on installing the wires permanently and everything um so it looks it looks really nice the picture makes it look brighter than it actually is because that's just what the iphone does now unless you manually change that but it lit it up enough to where i could see the perimeter without any problems and the lights aren't expensive. I mean, they're like $40 each with the bulb. So, I mean, that's not terrible. That looks nice.

That looks awesome, actually. I mean, did you say you needed? So, if I do every other post and then one on each side of the gate, it's like 18 fixtures. So, I got them on sale. I bought them from my distributor, Amplighting. I got them on sale, but it was still like $700 in lights. But once you have it all lit up, it's going to look really nice.

Yeah. When you have proper outside lighting, it makes your backyard so much nicer at night. Oh, yeah. A little more inviting. And we don't have people over too often. But when we have people over twice a year, they'll be able to see the backyard. So just look at it from inside be like this is our backyard my neighbor's done this for me um on the back of their house they installed

one of these um i don't know like blowtorch lights that it's got to be at like like 7 000 kelvin temperature on the back patio and they just leave it on all day all night and um i've never really said anything because it lights up enough of the backyard. I don't have to ever have a security light. But it does shine into like the window. Like if you turn off the lights in the house at night and you're like walking through, you're like, oh, there's a lot of light in my house because of that light over there. It's very, very bright. And I don't, I don't know, we kind of grumbled about it a little bit but then you know

it it's kind of nice to look out there and at least know that somebody has power i guess i don't know like otherwise it's just a dark backyard you know you can't really see anything yeah and somebody like i was telling somebody i was like gonna do the hardwired lights and all that good stuff they're like oh my gosh i wouldn't do that i would just call the utility company and they'll install light in your backyard and they'll just charge you an extra set price per month and i was like yeah but what happens if i want to turn the light right it'll look awful too like it's it's that yeah and just like a giant industrial light in my backyard lighting up just my backyard i'm good on that um this is just nice ambient light i don't need to see everything in the backyard just ambience um but there's actually like this

whole project got me started on smart bulbs again i've been kind of on a smart bulb craze i've been replacing a lot of my lights in the house with phillips hue um i've really liked that i like the the adaptive lighting through home assistant it's kind of nice to have your lights changed throughout the day to kind of match what's outside um so i was like man you know smart lights for landscape probably aren't really a thing like outside of buying a whole fixture, right? I mean, you can go buy Philips Hue outdoor. Yeah, but you can go out and buy Philips Hue outdoor lights, and they're all the integrated LEDs and stuff.

But could you buy a G4 bulb, which is what the DEC lights take, or the MR-16s and stuff like that? And some people make IR-controlled ones or RF-controlled ones. There's kind of no shortage of those but if i want like a wi-fi bulb um i basically found one option for the g4 uh bit uh bulb and it's from uh super bright leds which i've bought things from in the past they have and as far as like i can't tell if anybody else sells this but it looks like a tuya based um g4 bulb they're like 17 each they do rgbw um they look kind of cool i ordered one i don't think i'm gonna do these because it's like what are they they're 17 each and i would need 18 of them uh it's a lot of money it's a lot a lot of money for something you don't know 306 dollars for just

color changing bulbs so i was like i'll order one just to see what they're like i haven't got it yet um i'm interested just to play with it but i heard the the actual light is not that bright um so i don't really expect me to do any of these but obviously i have i have a smart home i need to figure out these light bulbs i've seen the the, you wouldn't think there's enough space in these things because they're so small. But I've seen the, I think we have some MR16s that we sell that have the WIZ thing built into them. They're like Wi-Fi controlled LEDs. So, yeah, they can get these Wi-fi radios and smarts and stuff pretty small anything yeah just the g4 i've only been able to find one and i looked up on aliexpress

because i was like well obviously super bright leds.com is just getting everything from china um but i can't i found one and it was like 40 on aliexpress and i was like who spends 40 on aliexpress yeah you just get the coupon and it's one cent so yeah i got i got that going on that's pretty nice once i finished staining the fence i've started the the stain uh process and it is a tough one i bought like a little uh sprayer that attaches to a current drill um and so that just like that's been going i got like a part of the fence stained it's hard not to make it look like crap though so i'm trying to take my time with it yeah take your time take your time setting's hard yeah and then uh so i'm not supposed to talk about this like technically

yet um but by the time seth actually launches the show it'll be out already so that's fine i'm no wants this tomorrow it's been tonight edit two shows and get them out you better not post this one immediately that's why i was like nervous about it because i was like dude my luck seth takes forever to do everything but my luck is i'm going to talk about this i'm going to get in trouble um so technically this is on embargo until june 10th um so if it's out before then i i blame set, and he's going to get us sued or something. But Rail Link sent me this new camera. It's kind of cool. It's the Argus 4 Pro.

And this is a, I think they just consider it a panorama camera. But it's a solar-powered battery camera. And its installation was super sweet. You just install two screws for the solar panel and two screws for the camera, and there you go. That's it. It's just there. It's got a super wide view. just installed two screws for the solar panel and two screws for the camera and there you go that's it it's just it's just there um it's got a super wide view i basically have it on my back fence line i'm using it to watch birds funny enough and um this really wide camera um it flew from there to there i can see it the whole thing yeah i could see the whole whole thing the full flight path

um but i have it like in the back fence line. You can actually, you might be able to see it in my night shot. Oh, you can. You can see it in my night shot picture there with my landscape lights. But it's basically in the middle of the fence line, and I can see the entire backyard. I can see completely to one side of the fence line. I think if I moved it a little bit more, I'd be able to see the other side. But this camera has been really nice i'm honestly i usually don't like wi-fi and battery or solar powered cameras but this thing has stayed at 100 battery life i not charged it

or anything like manually since i installed it um it's got motion alerts and people alerts and animal alerts so that's that's cool um you do time lapses which i think is really cool i think um you can set that up for like construction sites and stuff this would be like a good just time lapse camera for a construction site um really good quality though it seems nice it looks like a little robot though yeah it's got a funny look to it yeah like it's just like wall-e or something you know what i mean um but it's it's honestly been a really nice camera i think i would recommend this to people that just want like a basic camera um the night vision is really good it's a i don't know if it's starlight sensor but it's got a colored night vision uh image to it and so that's really cool the only thing i don't like is i don't

think you can record 24 77 or continuously with the camera. It's got a micro SD card slot, but I think that's only for, like, the push notifications and stuff like that. So, if it could record continuously, like, I would be all in with it. You just need a hardware version, though. They have hardware versions these days. Yeah, which they do, yeah. And, like, it's such a silly limitation. Most people don't need continuous recording on their cameras, right? hardware versions yeah which they do yeah wait and i like it's such a silly limitation most people

don't need continuous recording on their cameras right um but it's funny i have this 256 micro sd card 256 gigabyte micro sd card in this camera and it's using up like four gigabytes so and i've had it plugged in for like a month now it just it does not use the storage in it for the continuous recording so it doesn't really need it yeah it seems like a pretty cool product um i've i've seen these types of cameras come out what's nice about this like where you have it like you have one camera covers the entire backyard pretty much everything you want to see i'm sure you feel like you wanted to see more of your house you'd put on the house right and look out towards the backyard yeah um but this this is kind of a unique view that you can get and see like if something's happening at your house um that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise.

So that's a pretty cool product. Yeah. And I think if I, I might end up moving into like one of the corners and just moving the bird feeder over there as well. And that way I would literally get the whole backyard. Oh, it's smaller than I thought it was.

Like I've seen pictures of this. Yeah. And it's not obnoxious. Like some of these cameras, especially like the three 60 cameras, they look like not obnoxious. Like some of these cameras, especially like the 360 cameras, they look like wall-mounted robots. And this one kind of does, but like a miniature version of that. It's not like big and obnoxious and unsightly.

I like the monkey ball thing of wire that's underneath it. Yeah, I was like, what do I do with this? Just tie in a monkey ball. There we go. Just tie it there. It's good. Yeah, thanks for sending that camera, RayoLink. We'll have to see if we can have them on the show to talk about some cameras and other

stuff in the future. So I hear all about RayoLink quite a bit. They seem to be doing a lot. Yeah, they're good budget cameras. And this one, I mean, this one kind of is really nice. I just, I really like it. I think a lot of people would like this. It's just a very good image and setup was super easy.

That's always my gripe with a lot of these smart home products is that like setup kind of takes forever sometimes. And this was just super simple. Just scan something and I was in very quickly. Oh, and I didn't even make an account for it. That's what I liked about it too. I just like downloaded an app and I scanned a qr code and it just worked i didn't have to like make an account on rail links website and that's like that's almost impossible oh they should get like extra

bonus points for that yeah i mean is there ai well i mean it tells when it's a human or animal so you know i guess it does have ai yeah yeah that's local ai if anything i think rail rail links pretty much won 2024 now i don't think anybody no account sign up no email harvesting like good job yeah they beat sonos they released some of that works they have an app that bj likes you can change the wi-fi network i can i log right in and change it oh too good too good well that's awesome i have i it's always been a problem like on projects where you're like putting specking out cameras you're like putting cameras in like if i just had a camera that looked here and there it would cover the air like i wouldn't have to

have two cameras one pointing this way one pointing that way and there's still a dead spot sometimes it's like all these awful cameras that you have to set up just to get like perimeter coverage on a house and it's like this would be great like something like this pop it out there you see 180 degrees and anything that goes on in that area is covered that's great i've been waiting on their dual lens camera to come to canada their bigger one not this one they have a poe they have a floodlight one um wi-fi and you can basically see your whole street if you mount it on the front of your house yeah that one looks really cool i was expecting this i think this is the one you're talking about it's more like hard angles on it for their yeah yeah yeah this the one that tj is reviewing that we can't talk about uh it looks it looks adorable compared to that one

that one looks like yeah this one looks like it's gonna shoot me that's good i'll scare away if my mom walked up to me walked up to my house and she saw this she'd probably walk away and that's an idea you know if if somebody can make a camera that you know if somebody walks up to your house it shines a little laser right in the middle of their chest little they have those yeah they would they do they have a laser tracker thing that they put on it and it will shine the laser light what it's looking for we have one of these cameras at the office that watches people go to the dumpster or something i don't know we put it out there and it follows them

and it's the amount of people that because i think it's got the light thing that turns on on it as well i haven't looked at it But the amount of people in the middle of the night that wave to the camera, like they're just like, hey, I was digging in your dumpster. I'm sorry. It's humorous because we get... Regulars. We get certain messages. Yeah, regulars come in.

I don't know. It's funny. Just like they see the thing moving. It catches their attention. They wave to it. It's just natural, I guess. This railing duo floodlight would actually work good in my driveway because I need to add a floodlight to my driveway anyway.

And I have two cameras there already. Yeah. So I could just illuminate one of the cameras and bam, I have a light now. Well, that's the one I'm waiting to come to Canada. It's a dual floodlight Wi-Fi version. And once I get, I'm on the notifying list um once i get my hands on one i'll throw it on my driveway nice very nice very nice products um yeah this would be great i i could probably swap out the old ring floodlight that i have with one of these uh because it

doesn't actually see very much where it's mounted uh under my eve and yeah this this would cover more well this this always helped the homeowners too because whenever i do a video camera consultation with a homeowner or business owner too but mainly homeowners uh they always think the camera can see more than it can actually see yeah like they always like they have this giant front you know front yard and they're like well i want to put the camera over here and i want to be able to see the entire front yard i'm like're like, well, I want to put the camera over here and I want to be able to see the entire front yard. I'm like, well, that's not how cameras work.

But if you have a 360 camera or panorama camera, that definitely would work like that. You just miss out on the finer details. And that's kind of something I've noticed about this one. The image quality is really good. But when you start to zoom in, the quality is not that good. But I mean, that's not the end of the world right it's still seeing everything that's happening everything but i can't like zoom in and see somebody's face depending on how far it is i used to go to the job site with a camera that had a

decent like wide angle lens too and you know just a telephoto like this would just point and shoot camera but i would go and stand on the ladder hold up the camera where it would be 16 feet in the air where their soffit was you know because it's big giant homes and take a picture from there of what they would actually see, you know, the, you know, roughly matched, you know, what they would see. And, you know, if the camera's that far away and you take a picture of, of, uh, you want to see the whole front yard, you're not going to see your front door and who's walking up to it. Like you're, you're there You're not going to see your front door and who's walking up to it. Like you're, you're there. That's going to be pixels. Like you're going to see a blur of,

of that guy with the white hat on walking up to the front door and taking your package and walking away, but not really useful. That's it. Yeah. Not, not really useful as far as getting like identification information and that kind of thing.

So it was always, that was always part of the education things. Like I want to take pictures of it, show them what it looked like. Cause they were familiar with the, the construction project at that point they could, Oh, that's the part of the education things. Like I want to take pictures of it, show them what it looked like. Cause they were familiar with the, the construction project at that point. They could, Oh, that's the picture that I see. Okay. That looks good.

We should move it over a little bit. No problem. Anyway. Uh, that's it. Yeah. So you got, that's, that's all I got right now. We'll talk about other things next show. Cool.

What do you got? I've got a, I've got a, I've got a, I've got a stupid purchase that I made. Um, man, another one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so see man, another one. Yeah, yeah. So, see how long this one stays on the shelf. I was, I had someone's, well, I hate Unify, basically, right? So, I had somebody's Unify Dream Machine Pro die, and they called me up, and they're like, hey, how can I fix this?

I'm like, you can't. Buy a new one. They're like, can you fix it? I'm like, that house is four hours away and no so so i was calling around people um uh kind of in the area and they're like hey why don't you just restore one from backup and like give it to him so i'm like all right so i'll go to unify's website and i dropped this unify dream machine pro into my shopping cart and then i see this little banner at the top it It's like, Hey,

you should try out our NVR. I like your NVR stuff, but I'm looking for something else. I'm talking to the website at this point. I'm like, I don't want that. And it's like, at the bottom, it's like, you can buy this, what is it? $299, uh, UNVR thing. And, uh, we'll give you, we'll give you a camera. And I'm like, come on. I'm looking at Blue Iris, right, Gavin? I'm looking at the AI stuff. And I'm like, no. I'm like, wait a minute. It's a G4 bullet camera for free?

That's a $200 camera. This is a $300 NVR. And so now I'm the proud owner of a unified G4 bullet camera. Oh, my gosh. And the NVR. Yay, Rock mountain NVR. You got roped in, didn't you? Wow.

You got roped in. How many unified cameras do you have? One, two, three, four, five maybe? Five, something like that. And I have the doorbell, I guess, so that counts as one or two. All right. I mean, you're approaching NVR territory. Yeah, no, i'm excited about it because i have the cloud key gen 2 piece of garbage that heats up

like a no yeah was a coffee warmer or coffee thing like you could put your cup on it and it would keep it warm all day um yeah that that thing's horrible and it likes to crash and do all sorts of random things that can go away. Right. And I can, um, I think I don't even have to have a cloud key for this. I think it can run in a standalone mode. If it doesn't, I will just run a software version of the unified cloud key and manage it that way. Uh, and dump this piece of garbage cloud key gen T gen two thing and thing and uh never look back and just hopefully they never require me to use a unified dream machine for their uh for anything uh the nvr thing i i really do like the software and everything on there so um i got nvr

now yay i just i the biggest problem is is like um, two, two hard drives that I pulled out of, um, of a Synology, uh, not too long ago because I needed to, I just put like two extra four terabyte drives and these were two terabyte drives and I couldn't have those in the same array. So I was like, well, you know, I'll just upgrade them. So I think there's, I know that there's two terabyte hard drives two two terabyte hard drives laying around somewhere and if i had those i could you know pop this in and get it up and going but since i can't find them and i know i've seen them like that's pretty recently when i was cleaning up the garage uh but i don't know what i did with them because you know naturally when you clean stuff you put it away where you'll never find it again not in the pile that's been in for you know two years uh so yeah whenever i

find those whenever i find them i will pop them in and i'll have uh you know a couple terabytes of storage for this thing to sit here and record my cameras i think there's a docker version of the cloud cloud key too that you can run on your underrate server if you need. So I'll make things easy for you. That I've already thought about it. Like as soon as I saw that, I'm like, all right, you're enticing me with a little free camera. So it's a $200 camera, right?

And it's $300. So that means I only spent $100 on this, right? Sure. The logical math that was going through my head at the time. It's like, it's only a hundred bucks. It's a free camera, right? No right no no i don't think so but uh yeah they uh they suckered me in so uh unify fooled me and i will um i i'm gonna run it i like their unify the nbr thing though it does work well and the app is nice i can kind of pop into it and uh we have bunnies all over our yard right now for some reason well probably because that's what bunnies do yeah they multiply uh so i can

just watch the bunnies scoot around at night yeah unify software is definitely the best camera software take that from somebody that uses blue iris on a daily basis they're so so far away now they're not even close even if i the the um the blue iris app i i i mean you just launch it and you're like okay connect to the thing connect to your server refresh it oh they're finally connected and then it's like man what why are there number buttons on this why why does it do this like i don't get it it's just you think you think the sonos is sonos app is bad just just imagine if sonos didn't actually have any UI designers. That's what the Blue Iris app looks like. And it looks just like their Windows program.

It works the same. Yeah, it works the same. Oh, man. All right. That's all I got. I'm a sucker. I bought this Unify thing. And I'm trying to wrap up everything for work for this last week.

So I was hoping I would be able to have a project update was more than me just being suckered into this uh this purchase from unify but it seemed like a good deal so i bought it well at one point we'll get these stickers out but probably not for another month so if you haven't got if you haven't sent your request in for stickers yet you can definitely do that you can send us an email at feedback at hometech.fm and just give me give me all the information about your house tell me you know what color it is and the address and i'm gonna edit all this out no one's ever gonna know it's just gonna be like tj took forever to get the stickers it's all seth's fault all right uh gavin what's what's going on over there? Oh, man, I don't know how to follow you guys up.

I gave my Unraid server a hard drive upgrade. I noticed this week in Canada here, the Western Digital Reds, they've been on sale at Best Buy and stuff. So for the Canadian listeners, check out Best Buy. Well, depending on when the show gets released. But the drives seem to have come down in price and they've been on some good sales so i grabbed a couple just one to add to the server and one as a backup so something to look out for um if you follow me on mastodon my prusa mk4 is alive it's up it's running i the whole thing. I put it in the enclosure. The MMU3 unit's all functional.

I've been printing a whole bunch of stuff, like pool noodle sword handles, you know, for the kids when they come over. They just stick them in the pool noodle, and they can whack away at each other, you know. Keep them busy for hours, you know. And it will drive the parents mad when they start turning on all the parents. So that's the main reason why I printed those. Right. So, you know, you got to print some good stuff. Right.

Um, so that is been amazing. The MK4, I'm loving it. Um, I don't have anything bad to say about it yet. Well, the only thing I have bad to say about it is not as, how can I say, contained as something as like the Bamboo Labs. You know, the Bamboo Labs has everything in a unit and all the filament. You sit it on top and it's nicely laid out. Where with the Prusa, you kind of have to figure it all out yourself and plan it out. And it's like wide open.

But that's the nice part about it. You can customize it it so you can put things on top you can print out other parts um so that's the next thing i'm doing um backyard update it's finally done all the irrigation school um set up and everything the coolest thing was turning on the pool refill i bet that that's so cool Running like one zone into the Ratio. All I do is I quick run that zone for 30 minutes and it tops up the pool, you know, or whatever I want. You know, that was, you know, it was all worth it just for that, you know. So I'm happy about that. Wife's happy.

Everybody's happy. You know, now I got my furniture and set up speakers. Where did you end up putting the, the like how did you end up putting where'd you put the pipe was it just kind of like run into the skimmer right into the yeah skimmer so my skimmer has a little space in it and i think my neighbor pointed out to me that's actually because it's separated but i use that to my advantage anyway so there's a little gap in the skimmer above the water line way above the water line so i was like you know what and i have a little chipmunk that lives back there um and he he actually chewed

piece of the skimmer out right um to get to the water you know in the winter and stuff so you know worked to my advantage too because he chewed he chewed a hole nice enough that the pipe fit right through so i'm like all right great like everything everything just worked out you know so we now he now he has plumbing nature and humans working together it's always beautiful yeah so we um we we ran a pipe along the around the pool and then straight into the skimmer so when you turn it on it just goes straight into the skimmer you don't see any pipe and nothing so it's beautiful right nice yeah and that that chipmunk um it's very interesting because we felt so bad because he

had a home back there for the longest time in the lawn and then we dug up his whole home but every time they filled in the home he would re-dig the hole right and then there were two chipmunks so we were like what the hell so we felt so bad because we were like when we put the brick over we were hoping they left the hole well now they have new holes on around the yard i think they dug new trenches under all the bricks which i'll probably find out you'll find out in a couple years yeah yeah probably find out in a couple years but it's got some new homes and it sits there and just sits on the wall and looks at me and, you know, like it's upset, but it's like. Yeah.

He had a waterfront view and you took it away. I know. I know. But he's got, he's got, he's got, you know how I have the tree line in the back? He's got a new home in that tree line. And that we found the exit to that is underneath my fence outside. He's got like, like he's got it all thought out. I'm afraid.

He's going to trip you. I know. That little chipmunk there is. And the sad part is I've been trying to get rid of this thing for years, but my neighbor keeps feeding it, right? So we would be sitting there. He's got the life. He has a pool.

He's got an escape hatch, and he's got your there. He's got the life. He has a pool. He's got an escape hatch and he's got your neighbor. He's got food. Like, I mean, we would sit there in our family room and I just see that all afternoon, this chipmunk running back and forth, back and forth from the neighbor's house. So I messaged the neighbor. I go, you put food out, didn't you? And she's like, yeah, I'm trying to get him used to, we're doing a photo shoot tomorrow. So I'm just prepping them.

I'm like, what are you fattening them up? So then what she does is she'll, the day before she'll put food out and the chipmunks all, she preps the chipmunk and then she puts out like a little scene. So she had a haunted house at Halloween, right? And she had, she put a little food out there and the chipmunk would come and she would take pictures of it in the scene. Another time she had like a laundry, it it was doing laundry hanging clothes on a line but she put a little bit of peanut butter on the top of it and it looked like it was up hanging the clothes on

the line and she took a whole did a whole photo sheet with this and this is why i can't get rid of this damn thing because it's being fed next door it's got a home in my backyard you know like i don't know what to do right so yeah i'll never get i i didn't think they lived that long but this one's been there for like ever because he's got no that he's he's gonna die for there's no like he's not in the elements starving in winter no he's getting hell he has to do is hang some laundry up and he gets peanut butter like yeah so that's my chipmunk story i'll never get rid of that we had to put flip like we had to like the downspouts we had to stick stuff in it because it would go in the downspouts and and store stuff and clog them up

and stuff like that you know like this thing causes problems for us you know it's it's it's not a nice chipmunk you know if it sat there and just lived a nice life and didn't create problems for me, I'd feed it. You know, but then, you know, this thing, when it chews things into your skimmer and ruins things in your pool, I hope it doesn't chew through my lines to get the water or anything. But, yeah, that's my life. He's going to be digging up your pavers and all the pavers you just put in are going to, like, just randomly start falling. Yeah, you'll be like, that chipmunk, that's you know i i thought we buried them under there um and we were gonna put a little plaque you know here lies maple you know and put the years he

was there right but then as we were planning that out it ran by us so man he already planned his death and they filled the hole probably four times. And every time they came the next time, they dug another hole. They put a brick over the hole. And they dug another hole. It had a new trench. And it's just that. He's got a great home.

Why would he want to move? I know. I mean, it's a great home. He gets fed and everything. It's awesome. Other than that, you made me spend some money last week. And I got a pair of those finger gloves. Finger light gloves.

Yes! The finger gloves! I had to get those finger light gloves they just made sense for so many reasons and but i got the usb chargeable ones so they don't take batteries you just plug it into usb and charge them and i'm like yeah i haven't used them yet but i have things i gotta do that i know i'm gonna need a little finger light on. So, you know, it just makes, it's one of those things that just makes sense. You know, when you have something, you're going to be like, yes. You know, three years later, I'm going to be like, yes, I finally bought these to do this, a job like this. And then as soon as I pull them out, I'll be like, I got to wait two hours for them to charge. Exactly.

So, yeah. I'm going to keep them in my rack over there. As soon as I go in there and I open it up to like, as soon as I go put this thing in, I'll have this NVR to put in. They're perfect for that. That shouldn't be too difficult. Perfect for that, yeah. I really need to rearrange some of my server stuff because, well. You know need to do is get tj what he's been asking for like before you start

up this other yeah yes gotta sign that thing one of these yeah i'll get on it yeah yeah i'll get on it it's only tuesday and i still have a entire show to edit uh from not this week but last week so yeah there we go don't worry you have a whole week for projects whole week yeah coming up i'll be nothing but free so i got plenty of air time that i'll be in an airplane i'll be able to edit these shows so no worries all right well i think that's gonna wrap up everything this week um we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who helps support the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patreon page if you don't know about the patron page head on over to hometech.fm support 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 the hub where you and everyone else can uh gather in there and chat about all sorts of fun stuff recently did you guys see owen's birthday party oh yeah man like i didn't get my invite, but that's pretty awesome. I did, but that's pretty awesome. I said, no, I'm a sticker. Yeah, well. Maybe. Maybe, yeah, I don't know.

Unbelievable. That was, that looks really cool. Yeah, that was sweet. I guess, I guess, I guess it's like, if you're the guy with the awesome theater, like, you can, you can do that. Right. So, yeah. Yeah, if you don't know what we're talking about, you weren't in the hub. So, get in the hub and find out about it. But, yeah. Donate us money. Donate So, yeah. Yeah. If you don't know what we're talking about, you were in the hub. So get in the hub and find out about it.

But yeah. Donate us money. Donate us. Just a dollar. Just a dollar. One dollar a month. You get an instant invite too, I think. It still should email you.

I don't know. It's a robot. It does its thing. Yeah. It's still working. Yep. It's AI. Okay, good.

I made that so long ago. It's going to break one of these days unmaintained I don't even know what I did but we'll find out if you want to help out

but can't support the show financially we just appreciate a five star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice

that's going to wrap it up here at Home Tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care till next time or maybe not the next week maybe the week next week. Take care. Till next time. Or maybe not the next week. Maybe the week after. I don't know.

But till next time. Yeah, some point. Still take care.