HomeTech.fm - Episode 489 - Smart Home Frozen Shrimp

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

On this week's show: What happens when a mystery box of frozen shrimp arrives at your door, LG buys Homey, the Aqara U200 retrofit lock is out, Philips Hue releases some ugly lights, Roku ruins your TV, project updates, and a pick of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 12th in Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. From Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, Amazon garage sales, Prime Day deals are here. What are you guys doing for Prime Day this year? Are you buying anything from the garage sale? I have a few things lined up that I'm hoping will go on sale. One of them is a meter.

You know, we've talked about this in the past, I believe. It's for the barbecue. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the thermometers. So I have one, but I have an old one. And what happens is if you go too far from the barbecue, you lose range, right? The original one. So I'm looking to get the pro, which actually has a Bluetooth repeater in the case.

So the case will sit next to the barbecue and then broadcast it a stronger signal out. Genius. Right. And that way I can walk further away from my barbecue and not worry about signals. So I'm looking to get one of those. I have a few other things. I just throw in my camel, camel, camel monitoring. And if they drop, I'm going to pick them up.

Yeah. I don't have any plans to buy anything, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to buy anything. You will buy something. Depends on what is, what pops up, you know? The most annoying thing with prime day is I always find out the most popular things after it happens, right? Yeah. Well well that's my problem too they're like oh this was so i was like i wish i knew about that i would have grabbed

that deal you know but we'll see i guess and i guess walmart is also doing kind of like a rival prime day where you can get all sorts of stuff too uh air, AirPods pro Nintendo switch. Oh, lead. Um, if you got the, the old Walmart membership, you can, oh, great. There's something I just,

just bought for a birthday present. It's going to be 20% off. Here's a pro tip. Walmart's giving out free 90 day, uh, memberships in Canada. I don't know if it's a U S thing too, but it's free delivery.

All right. Yeah. There you go. Uh, go, go V's a US thing too, but it's free delivery. Govee's DreamView G1 Pro Gaming Lights are down $80. DualSense Edge Controller from Sony. Let's see, what else we got on here? There's a bunch of stuff that Walmart's doing as well as the good old Amazon.

Yeah, the Prime Day wars have begun. They're here now. So, like, I guess this time of year, everybody's going to be doing inventory clear-outs for summer, and you may take advantage of it. Yeah, Apple AirPods second generation, they are $69. Nice.

You know, if they were smart, they would have moved Prime Day to other days because what happens is Tuesday and Wednesday are kind of like the return to office days, you know, for all the post-COVID hybrid people. They usually have to go in Tuesday, Wednesday, and usually have a third day that's flexible. Those are the days for Prime Days. prime days. You know, if they made those days like Thursday, Friday, then, you know, people would be, you know, working Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they'll stay home Thursday, Friday and do their prime day shopping.

So I need to think about that. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm picking up some stuff for a camping trip and I think I'm going to miss these prime days, uh, which. You're going camping with the family? Going camping out in the middle of the woods.

I looked at the, um, uh, campsite today. middle of the woods. I looked at the campsite today. I didn't schedule the campsite. I would have probably looked at this earlier. We've been there before, but it was like 10 years ago, right? And it says amenities, cell phone coverage, none. Wi-Fi, none. That's not really amenity. They just want to make sure you know.

Yeah. Also no power, which i thought was interesting you guys are roughing it yeah um i guess at least get one with power geez make sure you check your wife's uh prime day you know wish list because if it includes things like duct tape tarp yeah you know we're gonna see if your life insurance policy got updated yeah you better check that bag of lye yeah i don't know what's this is for i don't understand what you're trying to do uh yeah a bunch of five gallon buckets too weird um yeah it's strange i i grabbed one of those uh since i you know realized we didn't have power at the thing i'm like well we're definitely gonna

have to recharge stuff and i want to bring like my camera, right? Cause I do like to use my big camera and not my iPhone all the time. And it does eventually take, I can eventually like take better pictures than my iPhone, but it did, it takes some time. And I like to at least practice with it sometimes. Like those big cameras, like if you don't, uh, you don't take pictures with them all the time. Like you're not a professional photographer. Like you forget all the little tips and tricks. And when you start using it, like, oh yeah, I forgot to do this. Or I forgot to press this button when I was taking that picture, or I forgot the setting or I didn't move this dial. And, um, if you take a bunch, then you start remembering as you're taking and you can take

better pictures. And I always forget because I it's, it goes months and months and months. And then I use my iPhone. I click a button and a beautiful picture comes out every time. I don't have to worry about it, but those, you know, I've got the big lenses and everything. So I can take some nature photos and that kind of thing. I do, I do actually miss being able to tinker and toy with the camera. So I'm going to bring that, but it runs on batteries and they, those batteries get discharged and I got to charge them up somehow. And so, yeah, I bought one of the little solar battery things things on amazon we'll see how that works oh should be interesting you can leave it out all day in the sun and maybe it'll recharge we bought one of those for when

we do like um like the smaller like uh farmer's markets and whatever other conventions are going on to advertise for the business and it's done pretty good ran tv on it a couple other things so did you get one of the giant ones or just one i don't remember the capacity it was like three or four hundred bucks it wasn't like crazy expensive some of them get like crazy like you can spend thousands of dollars on them yeah yeah i was looking at those i'm not quite interested in yeah dragging around one of those things um but i mean we'll have a car there if we need to go somewhere and charge up you You can do that certainly. But you have walkie talkies.

What do you need batteries in your phone for? Yeah. I was, I was going over a list with my daughter. I'm like, oh, walkie talkie. She's like, yes. I mean, that's all she wanted. So I did, I snuck in some walkie talkies here. So hopefully we can, we can get those in and, uh, heck yeah.

And, uh, have some conversations five or six feet away from each other. Cause I doubt she's going to go very far. So we'll see. We'll see. But yeah, if there's no cell phone coverage, you're gonna have to walkie talkie. So why not? Let's have some fun. It's, it's camping, right? Well, we do have some big news in, uh, in, in, in sticker news. We, I have seen, I've seen in multiple locations on, on our Mastodon server over there, which is our, our home tech dot social community. I've seen pictures of people on our Mastodon server over there, which is our HomeTech.social community. I've seen pictures of people posting, you know, pictures of their stickers. And I've seen stickers stuck on cars and stuck on laptops.

I've seen stickers in our hubs. It must mean that the stickers have been shipped. Yeah, well, I mailed them all out. They're actually getting to people. So, yeah, we finally did it, guys. It only took us six months we did it guys we did it i actually don't know how long it took i should probably look at the first request and see when that was sent in but um they all they are all sent out so if you've uh contacted us

for a sticker um you should be receiving it soon if you don't receive it in the next like i don't know two weeks probably just email me and let me know um because some of them are going to like far away places like australia or japan or ireland or texas strange places foreign places so i don't and some of your addresses are weird i don't know i just typed them on the address label and i was like hopefully this gets there so if it doesn't in two weeks there's probably a problem i think i don't know how long just typed them on the address label and I was like, hopefully this gets there. So if it doesn't in two weeks, there's probably a problem, I think. I don't know. How long does it even take to get a letter from the U.S. to like Japan? Does anybody know? We'll find out.

Does ChatGPT know? I mean, you can ask ChatGPT. I'm sure it will give you a decent rundown and bulleted list and summary of what you asked. And maybe a question or a response that sounds informative and correct, but it's probably just going to lie to you like it always does. Supposedly seven to 21 days. Yeah, it's a lot better now. Back in the days when I used to send a telegram, it took, it was probably pretty fast.

So seven to 21 days, anywhere between a week and a month. And I mailed them out like last week but it was kind of a holiday thing going on so yeah two weeks is probably right i'm glad i'm glad that we finally we finally got the squared away i think we're gonna run out of stickers and have to do another order of stickers so i'll get on that yeah i think i have like four stickers so i'm a little upset i'm a little upset our listeners from Jersey didn't request any stickers. Yeah. Where are our Jersey listeners?

We're, we've been calling you guys out for what? Six or seven months. Country of Jersey. If you're listening on Jersey, not New Jersey, you already had New Jersey go out, but yeah,

we're looking for you. That one or two listeners that we have in Jersey or Jamaica. Yeah. In Jamaica. Yeah. Actually, there were more listeners in Jersey. Maybe I've been hand delivered the Jamaica ones. And not if you're vacationing in Jamaica, like. Actually, there were more listeners in Jersey. Maybe I'll even hand deliver the Jamaica ones.

And not if you're vacationing in Jamaica. Like, don't try to play that. We want someone that lives there. Right, right. We can tell. You've got to be a full-time. Yeah, exactly. We'd know.

We'd know for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, stickers out. Prime days are in. We've got to get some more stickers, so we'll get on that. We'll make some fun stickers, I think. Maybe while I'm camping, I'll have plenty of time

to open up the laptop and use Photoshop. Oh, wait, no. I don't think that's how it works. That's not how it works, huh? We really need stickers with just our heads, you know? I want to be able to put my head on things. I'm going to do that. I'll break up the one

we have and that image we have that Gavin had made. Just little floating heads. Yeah. We'll do something fun. It'll be like, we'll make them like little round stickers or maybe like pogs. We can make, do you remember pogs? That game? Well, the only reason I remember is because other people told me about it.

Not because I did something. Pre-internet. It's like things that, games that, like marbles, like games i did some pre-internet it's like things that games that like marbles like games that people played pre-internet and like when you got grounded from uh nintendo or something like they they would they would take these these things these uh cardboard discs and oh yeah they're like little cardboard yeah and you'd have a slammer and you throw it and then there was a bounce thing and i don't really remember what happens you're showing how old you are and tj you're showing how young you are yeah see there was something i compared this to it was like old-timey something i forget what i compared it to though

jacks or something i don't know i don't know yeah we did not have this we had um technology when i was a kid so yeah when we were kids we had to find ways to entertain ourselves and that sucks outside you know climbing trees like that yeah sticks don't sticks you know there's so many games you can play with a stick i mean come on you ever take like a i don't know the different people call this game different things but you know when you had nothing to do you take like a crushed can and you try and kick it between each other's legs kick the can yeah you know different people call it different things but we had our version you try and kick it through the leg and if you got through the leg everybody gets to kick that guy until he touches a tree or something like that

you know like those are the type of things you know nobody got hurt no you know but you know everyone knew the rules everyone followed the rules and it kept us busy for hours yeah we we had a little game where we take a basketball and instead of playing basketball with it we would we'd call it a curveball and we'd throw it at the curb across the street and if you bounce it off the curb and it bounced back to you you got a point see you had equipment it's a basketball right so yeah it's called it it's equipment i had a crushed can and that was left over from lunch this is what that crushed can was either that game or we played like hockey foot hockey with it you know that was our puck you know and you take off your jacket and your jacket was your goalie jacket you know

like you had a you went to the nice schools. They just pushed us outside. And Gavin had to save the can so he could get his deposit back. Exactly. Yeah. We had to make sure somebody was getting a pop that day. The juice boxes didn't work the same way. I bet you your grade school had fences to keep you inside the field and stuff like that. Oh, my God. Florida has fences all around their schools. Yeah. It freaked me out the first time I saw it. like fences to keep you uh inside the field and stuff like that oh my god florida has like fences

all around their schools yeah like it freaked me out the first time i saw it i was like why do you guys have fences around your schools that's pretty common now but yeah it they turned all the schools into little prisons forever for the kids oh it's so scary they didn't care about us they just pushed us out and hope we came back that's it you know yeah but i didn't want you to come back yeah we we had pretty much wide open fields and if you got out the door you were home free like if a gator got you that's your problem it's like don't go to that lake no i mean this this was in texas but yeah we we did not have any kind of gate or anything like as soon as if you walked out the door which was always unlocked like you know that that was it you could walk anywhere from there and then oh back then you were in texas i forgot yeah there was a kfc right across the street so you could go over there and get chicken and potatoes

if you want it was probably 50 cents for all that no no no no it's better than that better than me better than the lunch that was was for sure. But yeah. That's harsh. They fed you lunch? Well, they had lunch. They had a cafeteria, Gavin, that you could eat lunch at. Oh, no. We just had to go and pick off what the other students would bring in.

It's like, your mom gave you cookies? Not anymore. Gee. It was rough growing up. You got the good neighborhood, i guess so yeah sure letter county made you guys look so easy going up there i know right right oh no that's like rural areas yeah it's nice up there you know it's nice but no in the city the opposite in the city it's a different case yeah i know that we we we were not rural but we were in a city. But, I mean, they have school lunch and everything, so.

Nice. That was all they're in available. So lucky. So lucky. All right, well, we could talk about stick games and can games all night, I'm sure. But we do have a couple of home tech headlines this week. So what do you guys say we jump into them? Oh, yeah, it's a tech show.

Let's do it. All right. lines this week so what do you guys say we uh jump into them oh yeah it's a tech show let's do it all right big news dropped like right after we recorded the show last week lg has acquired an 80 stake in the dutch company anthem known for its homey smart home platform with plans to acquire the remaining 20 in the next three years strategic moves aims to expand lg smart home ecosystem positioning it to do better to compete with Samsung SmartThings. Homey supports devices from brands like Sonos, Ikea, Philips Hue, connects over 50,000 devices via

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, Matter, and Thread. LG plans to integrate Homey's connectivity into its ThinQ platform, allowing users to control LG appliances through Homey. Anthem will continue to operate independently, maintaining its brand and current operations. LG executive vice president Jung Ki-yong describes the acquisition as a cornerstone for LG's AI home business. Of course,

AI had to get dropped into this. It has nothing to do with any of this, but there you go. Homey's founders remain as executives, continue to develop Homey Cloud and Homey Pro. The deal is estimated at $61 million. So great job, Homey. You've got that LG money now. That's pretty good. And what's that? What's that song?

Another one bites the dust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, I don't know. Like if they're kind of, this is kind of like, I've seen companies do this for a while. We're going to, we'll see what this looks like in what, in what it's a three years,

two years. Yeah. Three years. Yeah. When this becomes like incorporated directly into, you know, LG's ecosystem and the people working there no longer have homey email addresses.

They all change over to the LG addresses or something. We'll see what it looks like then. But for now, I mean, I think it's a pretty good acquisition by LG. It's smart because now they can start rolling in a smart platform into their TVs and everything. Of course, I saw a couple of comments in the hub that was like, well, LG always kind of like does this and then says they're going to do something and then kind of fails on it. So we'll have to see what they do.

Be interesting. You think they can put ads on homey? They're probably going to incorporate blockchain or NFT. No, AI. Come on. It's AI. AI is it's got to be AI. I forgot what year it was.

Yeah. This actually caught me by surprise i i wasn't expecting this but i'm kind of happy that lg decided to buy something that exists out there and not try and spin up yet another ecosystem that's the positive spin i look on this one you know um but it caught me by surprise and i guess yeah like you said two three years we'll see the outcome of this samsung acquired smart things for 200 million dollars in 2014 of course that was kind of in the heyday but oh you know things of prices have come down on these home automation companies well and homie is relatively new and i don't think there's been as much hype around them as smart things yeah smart things is pretty big

smart thing like took off so i almost i don't know what to say it's like i almost feel like either lg got it for a good price because of what they're getting with it, right? Not the popularity of it, but all the work's done for them almost, right? To spend $61 million and now you have your own smart home system, that's a pretty good price for that, you know? The people will come once they integrate it well and homie i think i've never used it myself but from what i've read about it and what i've seen it seems like a pretty solid product um i've seen people talk about it negatively a few times but it's mainly because like integrations um which i think is a challenging thing for literally any platform minus home

assistant uh so i i think it's well even home assistant well certain ones yeah depending on which update you take that's true but yeah seems like an interesting project i hope lg doesn't kill it i've kind of been facetious there with it but um lg does not have a good track record with software so this there's a funny line here in the article we'll link to in the show notes lg has also clarified how homies connectivity integrations will be embedded into its products but notes the deal will quote allow it to quote gain deeper insights into customers lifestyle and usage patterns which may not mesh well with homies quote privacy first ethos whoops uh kind of lets the cat out of the bag there but um a lot of these companies they do need

that lifestyle and usage patterns information, whether it's anonymized or whatever, to train better AI models and that kind of thing. So we'll see what happens there. Be interesting. Let's move on here. Amazon has revived a dead product, the Echo Spot smart alarm clock, just in time for Prime Day this year. The refreshed model resembles the original 2017 version, but features a hemispherical display and a speaker split on the front face. It's available in black, glacier white, ocean blue, and you can customize the display

with six different hues and various clock faces. It's priced at $80, and right now you can snag it for $45 during the Prime Day celebrations. Gavin, didn't you say you got one of these? Do you have one of these? Yeah, I pick one up. Like in my house, I have like the Amazon devices all around, right?

They're my main voice thing. And this one actually looked pretty cool for the guest bedroom because it has the clock built into it. And now I can clear off the clock we had in there, right? And just have one device. i'll be honest it's pretty nice like everyone has their opinions and stuff but you know this is my first um one that has like an actual screen built into it and the whole setup process i found actually was really nice like it was like it was nice to watch the setup process. That's weird to say, but like all the things moving on the screen and stuff like that, whoever designed it did a really good job.

I think with that, um, I hate the power cord, but I mean, they've done this before. I used to like on their, their dots, how they had the USB power cord because it gave you so many more options. I could plug it in here, there, USB, whatever. But now it's like a physical plug. It's a short cable, you're kind of stuck with what they give you. In terms of response time, the A-Lady is really fast, I guess, that's what to expect with newer hardware, processes my command really fast, faster than some of my other devices, so I'm happy with that, and the sound, I played some

music through it, I was actually shocked by the sound i played some music through it i was actually shocked by the sound coming out of something so small um the bass it pushed out and stuff i'm not gonna say it's the best sounding thing out there like you can't compete with like a bigger yeah yeah i mean but for what it is the sound was actually really nice right like i can listen to music on it and uh i was enjoying. Like, uh, so if it, if it's something you're looking for, I recommend it. I wouldn't put this in your main bedroom, maybe because in our main bedroom, I use my phones as my clock and everything like that. Right. But it's nice for a little guest bedroom and stuff. It also has built-in ultrasound motion

detection, which I've been playing around with but i don't i haven't got fully into it yet to see how well it works but uh it uses ultrasound to detect people in a room and you can have automations and stuff off that the automation so you have to use in the amazon you know the ecosystem i don't think they get exposed to like home assistant or anything like that i have to look a little more into that but that's kind of cool if the ultrasound works similar to like the millimeter wave that would be nice yeah because then you could have this in the room it detects people in the room beautiful presence detections yeah it's always nice to have and for a little device like this for especially 40 dollars um to get that and voice control in the same room and a clock i mean it's not a bad deal it's it's

not a bad deal and there's not a bad deal. And there's a difference between presence detection and motion detection. You just got to remember that, right? So this will give you presence detection, which is really good for room automations. So I'm going to be doing a little more playing with that. I know there's tricks. I can create like a dummy sensor and have it trigger that sensor. And then that's how I get the ultrasound into Home Assistant, stuff that but you know i'm gonna play around see how well that works

and this is one of the more basic devices it does not have zigbee thread built into it like some of the that's fine higher end devices it does it does have wi-fi bluetooth low energy mesh and matter over wi-fi it says supports all that so part, I guess, lets you set up the Matter devices over Wi-Fi. So if you got Matter over Wi-Fi and this was the only thing you had, you could still use that device with this because the Bluetooth lets you

configure it and whatever else you have to do. Oh, cool. Very nice. Well, again, for, what, $40? Seems like a pretty good $44.99 right now. And after Prime Day, it'll go up to $80. I don't know if it's worth it at $80, but, you know, we'll see. I have a couple old Echo Dots laying around I'm going to probably, you know.

Swap them out. I'll give them to my sister. I'll swap one out, give it to my sister, you know. And then, you know, every time a new one comes out i just i'll get it and upgrade one of my older ones and it's a nice little transition keep things up to date we'll stay in on the amazon uh theme here we kind of have an update i think we talked about this before the echo wet um wh51l soil moisture sensor i think gavin you were pretty excited about this one because it's like a cable that you can kind of run off somewhere where you don't run over it with a lawnmower.

It's available on Amazon right now for $39, 40 bucks it looks like. Yeah. And regular listeners of the show know my fascination with my lawn moisture. Nobody has ever spoken that sentence before. I know. I know the moisture of my lawn i like moist is your lawn you had to take it there it's a family show okay no it's not no it's not people know that i like my lawns moist right and um with that being said these are just an evolution of their wh50s those were the green ones that stuck out. This one actually has a cord.

It's not the longest cord, but at least you could stick it in the lawn somewhere and then mount it to the side out of the way. And you could still mow your grass and everything. That's the key thing with this. Hell, you could probably just bury the whole thing at some point and still mow your grass too, right? But finding it is the hard part

when you do something like that. Trust me, I've lost things in my lawn. finding it's the hard part you do something like that trust me i've lost things in my lawn but it's it's a great i'm gonna grab a few of them when they come to amazon canada i think you know because there's some spots i want to put them in yeah it looks like you're you're supposed to kind of run uh it's a one meter 3.28 foot uh cable pbc wire yeah that's connected to it looks like you're supposed to run that over to the little device that could be outside but it the picture has it like mounted on a little like a pvc pipe like a one at you know half inch pvc pipe you put in the water or put in the water put it on the ground like that might limit where you can put this i wish you

could extend the wire somehow that would be nice nice. When I get one, I would probably pull it apart and just see if I can. Yeah. It's probably just like two conductor or something. Or yeah, something like that. And I could probably extend the wire and go from there. That would be nice. I don't know if extending the wire though affects the reading and stuff like

that because now, you know, the signals. You have to do a comparison. Yeah. These are all things you're going to have to try and figure out. Let us know. All right.

I'll get on it. It'll be my new Seth project. I'll order it and the box will sit on my desk forever. Until next summer. Yep. Wait till Prime Day. Maybe it'll go on sale. Well, it's not on Canada Amazon yet.

It's only on the US one I saw. So I'm waiting for it to reach Canada. Well, it's not even on Prime for Amazon. So I don't want it. For $40? Just a normal price. I just get normal shipping? I don't want that.

So sad. Well, it's cool that those are out, and they don't have the little blinky light things, and you can maybe set them off to the side and maybe even extend a wire further to get them a little bit out of the way of the chomping lawnmower thing. So, yeah. So yeah. So let's move on here. We've got a new product from Aquara. They've launched a new SmartLock U200.

It's a retrofit SmartLock compatible with Apple HomeKey, allows users to unlock locks with their iPhone or Apple Watch. Follows the 100 and U50 models. It was introduced back at IFA 2023 and initially launched with kickstarter but now it's available through the aquara channel so if you haven't seen this u200 i've seen it kind of making the rounds on social media priced at 269 in the u.s and 269 pounds in the uk with a 20 launch discount so uh if if you there's some codes we'll put in the show notes, uh,

you could go put those in, but yeah, this, this looks like a pretty cool product. Yeah. I like this cause it's comparable to the, uh, the switch bot,

uh, lock that you can put on, um, perfect for people that rent, or maybe you just don't want to change your lock for whatever reason. Maybe you can't, um, this basically just goes right over it.

Um, and, and makes it work $270, i think is a lot of money but also it's apple home kid and matter and all the other stuff so it's literally compatible with everything um just more expensive than most of car products yeah um i don't know did you ever hook up your apple home wallet key thing tj did you ever try that out no i do not use that oh you should try it. It's like, I think it's probably one of the bigger features

that these smart locks should have. Like, cause I can just walk up and tap my watch on my lock and it just unlocks, there you go. And it puts a little card inside of your wallet, like a credit card looking thing. And if it's in there, you can unlock your door. So I don't know, I think it's pretty pretty cool i think it's a really neat technology uh anything that you have that's apple that has that uh what's it nfc inside of it can open um open your lock so my my house is

kind of like gavin's my my house is sentient it knows when i'm home or when i'm leaving so it just automatically unlocks and locks the door for me. No. All right. Well, yeah, that sounds safe. That's why I have 20 cameras. Safer. All right. Moving on here. We've got a new product from Philips Hue. They have,

God, I don't know what they were thinking. They have introduced an update version of the pillar spotlight series in Europe features a pillar spotlight and a pillar double spotlight because what's better than one two of these ugly things no no and a pillar spotlight extension because you may want it to look uglier drop it down further i don't know how to describe these these are horrible looking things but i guess if you want them and needed a 400 lumen light, uh, it's, comes with upgraded Phillips hue, GU 10 bulbs, um, works with everything that you think it should. I don't know. These are probably the ugliest lights I've ever seen though. At least in the

pictures that they have, I don't know how they could be better but if you imagine the light that sticks out of your ceiling and just like what if that was like a beer can and it's stuck down a little bit further and the light instead of being in the ceiling was on the end of that yes like an upside down candle that's what these look like i i i just i can't even imagine bringing that into the house and saying, hey, let's put these in. Instant return. That would not pass the design committee. I am sorry. Well, and this, like, and the guy in the advertisement, he doesn't even look that tall. But, like, he's not that far from the light either.

And so, what am I going to do? Stretch and hit my light and knock it right off the ceiling? No, it's very ugly, though. I don't get it. I don't honestly know what you would maybe it reminds me of like the track lighting you know like the track yeah people put in their house to like illuminate different things it reminds me of that minus the track minus the track yeah and uglier like if that was possible but yeah there it is i i just i don't know what you would use these for honestly uh i guess i think it's more like focus lighting so like maybe drafting plans or drawing or something like

that can't be because the problem with like regular recess lighting is that you can't really focus it it's just like broad light this one kind of looks like especially if you can rotate the light and everything like that i think it's more like focus light like track light but you can do that with you can already do that with um in in ceiling lighting like you i have some like where you can twist and angle the lens and and all that i don't know these these these make ceiling lights look even uglier to me i don't yeah but you can just reach up and grab you have to get a ladder for the recessed ones just poke it with a stick or something geez can they come out with a ptz version so i can just move it with the app pre-programmed light shows yeah you can have it moving around i philips you take my idea

could it be possible that these were made for ceilings that you can't recess something into yeah well it's a european thing right now so i would assume that that is probably correct but i mean you could get thinner puck lights like this one i don't know why they have to be this big yeah that just doesn't make any sense to me if i had this over my desk i'd feel like a hot dog on a like a heating stand you know because it would be so close to my head and you just feel the warmth like this i don't know no it's led so there's no warmth there that convinces you i wonder if these are like a more like a pot like maybe it's like replacing some kind of fixture that exists in europe that like it's just expected that exists but i have i have not seen

these before if you're in europe you should tell us is expected that exists but i have i have not seen these before if you're in europe you should tell us is this a normal is this a normal light uh did you get your stickers and is this a normal light because we do not believe that this is what people in europe are using give us some examples of why you would want this yeah i i mean i i i know some uh like like you said yeah i mean you can't retrofit it, but you can get like the, there's smaller pancake lighting that you can put up there that doesn't stick down six or seven inches or whatever the heck this is. And you still got to run the power to this,

right? So you still got to go up in the ceiling. Yeah. You still got to go up in the ceiling. You know, the first thing I thought of this is when I saw this, I was like, would Richard approve of this light?

But now that I'm thinking about it more, like usually when I think that Richard's not going to like something, he, he'll probably like this, I was like, would Richard approve of this light? But now that I'm thinking about it more, usually when I think that Richard's not going to like something, he'll probably like this. I wonder if he likes this. Richard, let us know. Do you like this light? Europe and Richard, give us your feedback. It's seven and a half

inches top to bottom. I don't get it. I don't understand. That's what she said. That's crazy. I don't know maybe maybe it's like no no in in sweden or finland we we have all of these these are what we have these are these are our national lights and we have to have these maybe that's the thing and then like phillips is like yeah we made them like we have to make them because we wouldn't be able to sell anything in in finland because they have a law that says you have to have these lights that stick off your ceiling seven inches and they have them

in singles and doubles singles and doubles yeah there's got to be a reason they don't have addicts there so they can't recess lights it's crazy crazy well there you go uh what do you think about this ugly light let us know feedback at hometech.fm and if you are in like a country that mandates that you have these lights like it's a european union thing like you know let's not call it ugly say it's different don't yuck my yum okay let us know let us know what you think about your ugly lights and uh yeah we'll we'll talk about on the show again because well it's ugly oh geez and if you do get them uh you might hit these bug here that philips bulbs randomly switched to 100% brightness without user input. The issue stems from Matter compatibility with Signify, a parent company, attributing it to random radio traffic disruptions being misinterpreted as power toggles.

The company is sure that a fix will be available within a week. So there you go. These may just kick on 100% all of a sudden. Don't know why, but there you go. These may just kick on a hundred percent all of a sudden. Don't know why, but there they go. Um, it looks like this bug affects the interoperability with matter smart home. That's yeah. So like it's a, it's a matter thing, just kind of a bug and they're working on it. So they'll fix it.

They are working on it. Does this just affect like any Phillips you, if you're not using their smart hub, do you have to be using their smart hub? I guess, I guess you'd probably have to be using yeah since it's matter you would have to be using their their smart hub with that matter thing enabled that makes sense yeah because that's where the bug would come from something like misinterpretation and then it would send out like oh we're supposed to be at um 100 whoops turn on the lights another plus for home assistant yeah yeah there you go i don't have a single phillips hue hub in my house yeah i i threw away my phillips hue hub because i was like i don't

i don't know where the bulbs are or anything and like i ended up finding one you don't need it anymore yeah well now i got a bulb and i found a couple bulbs that i had i'll send it back in my shrimp box oh we do have to talk about that. And here's more yuck in your yum, TJ. A recent update to the Roku OS 13.00 has rendered many TCL and Hisense TVs nearly unusable due to a forced motion smoothing implementation. It's a feature despised by many film and TV purists. Basically, they updated this thing

and they're like, Roku Smart Picture, you like that? No, you don't like that? It's on now. And you can't turn it off. You love it. Yeah. Motion smoothing, the soap opera effect on your TV, it's permanent. No option to disable it. It sparked a pretty widespread frustration

among users who've taken to the forums and Reddit to yell about it because that's what you do. sparked a pretty widespread frustration among users who've taken to the forums and read it to yell about it because that's what you do um but uh roku hasn't really said anything about the issue so maybe it'll get updated like signifies maybe it won't but uh there's there's a funny piece uh entitled entitled dear roku you run my tv over at the verge we'll link to it in the show notes but man another strike on roku i guess the ads weren't bad enough now you get motion motion smoothing for free that's like one of the first things you turn off on tvs so i try and turn it off in the hotel rooms i stay at like i i try and break into the the like some of them are pretty locked down installer set yeah i try

and break into the like unplug the communication to their server and go into the installer settings. Yeah, I try and break into the, like, unplug the communication to their server and go into the installer settings with the magic remote codes that I may or may not have, and then turn off motion smoothing so the TV's watchable. But yeah, that's awful. I try to turn it off at everyone's house I visit. It's amazing. They're like, you know, oh, commercial break, break quick let me just do something quickly you know i just turn it off and they're like oh thank you it doesn't take long to improve your tv picture yeah i don't know why that's turned on it's i don't who is who is making that decision to turn this on by default who is sitting there going we like this like i can't figure this out

i i think it's more i think it's more like for sports people. Like, it does if you don't know what you're looking at or you don't know any better, I guess. It's like if you didn't know that you could turn that off. Your TV does look a little more like sharp and like clear and it looks like you're right there. But that's not necessarily how you're supposed to like watch the TV. Like you're not supposed to feel like you're in a soap opera when you're

watching Magneto float down from the sky in X-Men, you know? It's like, no, that never happened in real life. Like it should, there should be some, some suspense, you know, it kind of ruined the movie. Like when I saw it and with, with motion smoothing turned on because it's like, wow, really awkward i i can almost see the wires you know it's like this is a guy dressed up in a costume not like when you see it with motion smoothing off and it it looks like a real movie like you kind of get more immersed into it doesn't trip you up and mess with

your head that way so i think it does work better on sports too because that of course you want to feel like you're there on court side or whatever but i i just don't i don't understand why it's on by default uh for for the most part they should they should say hey we're we're gonna you know give you the option when you're setting up your tv to turn it on off do you want your tv to look awful leave this setting on that's what that's what the the tv mode should be uh you know when it says like vivid and and bright and everything it should just say awful and not awful yeah if you turn vivid on um that that can turn motion smoothing on i don't care but if you put it on movie mode or something like that like just turn motion smoothing off there you go should be part of that toggle or just like a dip switch on the back of the tv

just manually flip it no it's got to be under 20 different menus yeah and everybody has to call it something different all right well um all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 489 nothing in the mailbag tonight other than pictures of our stickers being stuck on things uh but we do have a fun pick of the week. I don't know if you guys remember this, but if you ever worked in an electronic store, like I did at circuit city, um,

getting the DVD logo to box into the corner. That, that was, that was what you just sat there and stared on, stared at that logo all day long, bouncing around. And somebody has made a game out of it. So this game is a cute little game that

somebody made to uh give you a nice little dv logo that bounces around on tv screen i guess and or no in in your computer or whatever i don't know uh it looks fun there's a little gif of it bouncing around but the idea is you can move the tv around and try and line up the dv logo to bounce into the corner. And when it does, you get a point. Increases your score by one. Yeah, you get a point. I just played for the first time, and I got a score of 10, which I don't think is that good.

I've been playing for the last five news stories, so I hope the listeners doesn't realize I seem distracted. Gavin was very quiet there. Yeah, my high score is 12, but I. Gavin was very quiet there. Yeah, yeah. My high score is 12, but you know, I'm improving. I'm improving. It's harder than you think. Yeah. Yeah, right? Yeah.

Well, I mean, when you played it in the store, that's exactly how it was. Oh, it's got cute little sounds too. I haven't done that. So yeah, yeah. Move it around. Oh, this is great. I just got two points, guys. I didn't have to do anything. Wow. I think you just leave it sitting there and it'll be fine. Yeah, that it around. Oh, this is great. I just got two points, guys. I didn't have to do anything.

Wow. I think you just leave it sitting there and it'll be fine. Yeah, that's it. Just leave it sitting there. That's the key. Just don't move it. Just like back in the day. Back in the day.

It'll bounce. Eventually, it'll bounce in there. So there you go. You're not going to beat a high score at that. It speeds up too, damn it. Yeah. Yeah. You can connect a joystick.

That's pretty cool. You see, it just goes to show you don't need like a $10 million budget and voiceovers and stuff to make an addictive game. No. You know, give me something like this and it'll keep me busy for hours. I mean, this kept me busy for hours and hours when I worked at Circuit City. It was boring. So yeah, definitely.

Definitely. Just sit there and stare at the DVD logo bouncing logo bouncing around man what a time what a time see you had equipment we had a can what did your circuit city sell i didn't work i didn't work at circuit city but you know if they sold pre-crushed cans They would have huge sales for us kids. Flying off the shelves. Yeah, for our hockey pucks. Times are tough. Times are tough. But yeah, 13.

All right, Neil. If you beat Gavin, or if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, some great ideas for show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right, project updates this week. We've got Gavin. First up. Sorry, I'm 13. Still playing the game. 13. All right, project updates.

Where was I? You see, Seth, you introduced me to a game and look look what happens uh i just want okay first off i'm still i'm still playing around with my z-wave just want to give an update yes the latest home assistant z-wave update fixed it all right i even re-enabled z-wave long range and let it sit for a day and no more drop off so it was obviously a bit a bug in certain versions of their Z-Wave plugin. And it's all been sorted out. So I'm a happy camper.

That being said, I started testing out long range again. And yeah, once I put the sensor back in the back corner of my backyard, yep, it loses connectivity. Obviously it's having issues communicating, but the Z-Wave mesh out there works beautifully. So to me, I look at this as figure out your use case scenario, right? Like use whichever one works for you. So if you have a situation where you don't have repeaters between the device and say the hub, then maybe long range will be the best thing for you.

But in my house, I have Z-Wave everywhere. I have repeaters outside, I have repeaters inside. So the mesh is very strong here. So I don't really have a use for long range, right? Unless I had like a mailbox that was really far, then maybe long range would be good for them. And, you know, thanks for everybody sending in the tips and stuff like that,

but I'm just doing long range testing. I'm not planning to migrate to long range. Um, one of the things that I use a lot is associations. And when you start mixing mesh and long range, they don't work. You have to have them on the same, um, system. So I'm going to keep everything in mesh. Now I don't have any problems with delays or all the other issues that they're saying the long range is supposed to fix i'm happy with what i have now it works it's it's very reliable and as long as home assistant doesn't break it yep i mean i think you know it may just be unique to your install too because we have josh in in in the hub he's kind of giving you a report too he said that he was testing Zoo's LR contact sensor. He has the 800 stick located in his basement as well,

but he's getting communication upstairs and outsides to a mailbox. He says it's over 150 feet away. And he has a motion sensor too, that he's going to go play with, but he didn't need to have the long range on that. But yeah, I mean, it radio,

radio signals are always going to be dependent on the structure they have to go through, how thick the walls are, what's got the walls inside. Like here in Florida, we have that. They put like this metal mesh on before they put plaster. Yeah, it's crazy. Sometimes, like, even the Zigbee room-to-room was a difficulty to pull in between, like, light switches, especially early on when we were trying to figure out how Zigbee meshing worked. I mean, it was just, who knew how it was going to, you have this thermostat, and it was just, like, no signal on the thing in the other room. And it's like, well, got to start putting some devices in until we can figure out how to get that thermostat meshed meshed in a little bit better and of course it was magic right like you'd identify it and then the zigbee thing had to figure out what route to take exactly yeah so like it was like it's either gonna work or it's

not who knows but yeah uh wireless is is tricky because again it's the magic part right it's got an antenna there's a magic portion that goes between here and there and then antenna on the other side. And, you know, who knows what's going to happen. And that's why I mix my ecosystems. Like I have some stuff on Zigbee and some stuff on Z-Wave. Between the two of them, both of their meshes in my house are strong, right? So I don't have to worry about a Zigbee mesh or a Z-Wave mesh. I have enough devices that fill in all those gaps and help it out.

So the mesh works for me and for outdoor devices. And I do have outdoor repeaters too in devices like an outdoor plug or an outdoor switch. They repeat the signal as well and it works. So I'm just going to stick with my mesh for now. Sounds good. Sounds good. signal as well and it works so i'm just gonna stick with my mesh for now sounds good sounds good i mean you've got enough devices too that the mesh probably is the way to go yeah yeah well the thing about the mesh is you want to just make sure it's tuned properly or else you run into the delays and stuff like that and you want to make sure you have like updated devices the last thing

you need is like an older device that's a repeater in your fast mesh because then it just creates a bottleneck for you and that's where you start to see a lot of delays or issues so you gotta be careful with stuff like that and we talked about the echo spot but the other thing that just arrived today was my unoriginal prusa dry box so you know just for the 3d people out there uh it's it's like a little dry box that looks like the Prusa, um, enclosure and it sits on top and it will hold all your up to five or six filaments and then feed it right into my MMU through the case. So I'm really excited. I have to put it all together and I'll post pictures on my Mastodon. Of course, that's where I like to share my 3d. Every time I share a 3d printing out thing on there, my phone starts

to vibrate with likes and re what they call it, retweets or retuts or whatever they call it. Right. But, um, the, the thing that blows me away is you can print out like an auto rewinder for it. So if you understand the MMU, it has like a buffer for when it ejects the filament, it will fill in the buffer. That's where the filament kind of gathers. So it doesn't get tangled around the spool and stuff. Right. Well, I just, I'm so amazed how people design stuff like this, but they printed an auto rewinder that kind of like is a spring loaded mechanism. So when it ejects the filament, the spool actually will rewind it back on.

And it's hard to explain. You have to visually see it and understand how it works. But, you know, people put their minds together and they come up with some amazing stuff and I'm going to be printing out this stuff and then I can get rid of my buffer, shorten the length and everything works beautifully. So I'm loving this printer. As you can tell so i'm loving this printer as you

can tell i'm loving this printer i'm like i'm looking on printables this is something that you can print yourself it seems like it is you know yeah if you want to spend like a week of 24 hour printing yeah but and then you'd have to source some of the parts where i just ordered it straight from their um alibaba or aliexpress store and it came like all the printed parts it came with uh because the the pain in the ass part would be the plexiglass sides then i'd have to buy plexiglass and then cut it all down to the right size it's probably cheaper yeah yeah you know at that point my time you know and everything like that i just decide just let me just order the kit and put it together yeah that makes sense i was trying to see there's a assembly video here uh and i was hoping this

um this adventures with dr joe was going to show me what it did but he doesn't he just kind of shows it being put together yeah um so i maybe there's a video i can find where it shows what you're talking about with the little rewind thing. Yeah. That sounds neat, man. It is neat. It's cool that you can like print the thing if you want, but then it's also cool like you can just, if you don't want to waste your time, you can just go to Alibaba. Like, I'm going to go to Alibaba and buy it. And that's what I really like about Prusa printers is they're so customizable. You can print out parts.

You can print out things, you know, like, and then even just maintenance. A few screws and this piece comes off and you can clean it out and do what you have to do. You know, like it's so easy to work with where some of the more complex ones, you know, you got to take off 50 screws to get to one part to unjam it, you know, and you don't want to be fighting with that. So I'm happy with my Prisa. I like how on here you can print it, but then there's also the little remix thing you can click. And people have like, one guy has a ball bearing spool hole. Yes. Like, okay.

And then there's like somebody that has done like a door handle or put a handle on it that didn't do this or something like that. So you can get it with a door handle. Like there's all this stuff that people have done to improve, like little things that annoyed them about a product that they bought. It's like, well, that's really cool that you can do that.

Cause it's mostly all 3d printed product anyway. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. That's the 3d printing world. I mean, even if the dry box, you want it to 3d print it, you could print the parts and then they actually have a kit of everything

else that you can't print. So you can sit there and print everything and just order for cheaper, just the other parts and put it all together. But I didn't want to sit there for like, then you have to pay for film. Save your time. Yeah. In the end, it's just, let me just order the whole thing. It has 135 files and it makes, wow, that's crazy.

So yeah, that would be, that'd be quite a, quite a bit of printing, I guess. It's a pretty big box though. And like you said, you had to source the plexiglass and all that stuff. It's actually not cheap. It's still kind of more expensive than you think to buy plexig and it's already up to a score of nine wow there you go there's the trick don't don't don't touch it just don't touch it naturally that's the update of the game all right um i i i had a couple i've been kind of working on this olama thing this is like a self-hosted uh ai thing that you can do it basically downloads the models and you can put whatever interface you want on top of it i was using it for code completion and vs code because somebody was talking about on youtube i'm like oh i've heard of the olama and you can get like a a chat gbt let's just call it another program like an interface into the olama thing uh that you can

use to communicate with it i guess like you would chat gbt like it's a chat window i really don't have any use for that right now maybe later but we'll see uh but the code completion seems kind of cool and um the install was actually really easy on the on the docker stuff on the unraid um because usually you know gavin you have to like copy and paste those like ids for your nvidia card like i went and like you know how like you have to copy those and put them in like docker flags or something like that yeah to expose the card to the docker container yeah yeah this one was like nope i got you and it was like it just said it just brought it in i went and looked at the logs i was like well you know what do i do here and it like detected it and and brought those ids in so i've got the whole it's

like when it's that tesla m60 or m40 i forget which one it is and it brought that right in using the nvidia driver so i didn't really have to do anything it's like one click install and then it was a plugin in vs code i point it to the ip address of the, where that server is in the port. Good to go. Got code completion and everything. I was like, Oh, that's cool for like a 15 minute project. Easy peasy. I'm going to try and do more with it though. Cause there's, there's all sorts of, uh, a fun stuff that, that can be done. And if I wasn't, if I had internet, maybe next week I would try more, but, uh, it's probably not going to happen. Um'll see we'll see i've got i've got some ideas of things that i can do with it um that um that may be kind of fun there's like see if you get tied into a home assistant to do some stuff i'm curious what kind of how much tell

me how many graphs should i have yeah like i don't know what i really don't know what i should do it's got like three devices and home assistant and my printer i wonder how much resources it uses up on your card like it doesn't do much i because i can see it um i can like you can watch the log file go and you know you can bring up the um i mean i'm only doing like code completion so it just kind of like scans the file that i was doing as i type and it's constantly communicating back and forth so you can watch all that on the dashboard of unraid yeah and kind of see what it's doing and you just see like the memory usage of the card like bump up real fast and then it goes back to normal or whatever i i did find when i was doing some heavy encoding the other day um that i that i would need to i need to like put some fans on

that card or put it into the server chassis just kind of move it around i guess um all of which are more probably more work than i want to put into it because it does um it did get to a uh like an overheat state when i was left it running for a bit doing a bunch of decoding work so or in encoding work so i'll probably want to eventually move that to where it can get a better airflow through it. Cause it doesn't have any, it's like a fanless thing.

Yeah. Um, people make 3d printed fan things for it, but I, I don't feel like dealing with any of it. And if anything, I should put it into the server thing that has the big fans running all the time anyway,

rather than where it is in kind of a consumer chassis. So I, whenever I move it over, it might make it a little bit more performance. Yeah. It's a Tesla M60. I may get a little more performance out of it, but I don't know those, those things, those cards have come down way, way down in price, like the M60s and 40s. If you, if you need one, like you can get them for a few hundred dollars now, whereas like in the past they were $600, $700, $800. And then, you know, new out of the box, they were in the $3,000, $4,000 range. I have right now I have two graphics card in my server, so I don't have room for one more. But I was thinking of getting one of these and replacing one of those other cards because it can be shared amongst dockers.

Like you don't have to have a dedicated. The only thing can't share is between a vm and docker right right the vm has to be like dedicated but this would be great to throw on the dockers but i wanted one with h265 encoding on it and decoding just because the one i have to use for all this stuff has to be able to support my mb server so yeah that's when it gets a little more expensive the price is yeah because that's what everybody's looking for right now and the prices bump up a little bit on that but i mean i'm looking at heck i'm looking to the m61 that i have now 50 is the going rate for them and it's it's a. It doesn't, it doesn't have that particular encoding in it, but if you just need to do H two 64, I think it does some H two 65. Um, but not as efficiently as the newer stuff. Uh, but you know, it's, it's like having two graphics cards in one and

it doesn't need a fan. So 50 bucks on eBay right now. Not bad. Yeah. And you can, you can, like you said, 3 3d print like they have um like it's a duct that will direct it directs the the the breeze from the fans at the front of my server directly through there to help cool it which is actually really nice yeah it definitely needs to have that active airflow on it. And I don't even know, like right now I have the fans on the server turned down. I don't even know if like at the state they're at, if that would be, like if it would keep up, like it may need to bump those. I may need to bump that up, which I can do manually. I can turn them up manually.

But as soon as they get over like 14 or something crazy low like i think oh man they're loud it turns into what server do you have it's the 730 dell 7 r730 so there's a unread plugin called is it idrac so basically yeah the idrac yeah and it monitors the the temperature of your your server and auto adjust the fans for you. Yeah. I have that in every now and then I'll hear it spin up if something's going on, but, um, it, I mean, as soon as anything goes on, it turns into a vacuum cleaner for you. Yeah.

And those fans will spin up high when they have a device in the server that it can't detect the temperature from right it's not supported and that's why they spin up high but um when you put in a proper server like a proper video card like this one it should be able to detect the temperature and then have better fan control and stop them from spinning up like crazy yeah so yeah i might as well i wasn't i'm not like it's if it's if it wasn't right here like if i had a basement or a closet to hide it in or something where i didn't have to listen to it i'd probably bump it up a little bit more but right now it's mostly quiet i actually can't hear it running

right now the fans are all at about a thousand actually this is not the right server um but the the fans are pretty low uh but it does bump up the the server that the gpu is in right now doesn't have that issue like yeah it's it's using the those brown fans whatever they're called the ones that are quiet anyway but they're big and they just they're just there to move air through but it doesn't knock to it yeah yeah yes it just doesn't keep up with it so at the end of the day i'm not doing anything crazy i'm not processing a bunch of numbers and like just doing code completion with like this little plugin seems to be just fine and every now and then i'll go and encode or decode something and it i don't care it can run all night for all i care you know it's

just re-encoding tv shows to save a couple of megabytes for each show rather than taking up, you know, a terabyte. It'll go down to 900 gigabytes or something. Yeah, it's like it just saves a little bit of space here and there. And then when I delete them, they go away. So that's it. That's all I got, TJ.

Oh, well, I got one more thing. TJ sent me a box of shrimp while I was out of town. Thank you, TJ. Hopefully you put it in the fridge fast enough. It was hilarious because we were out of town for the holiday. My in-laws were picking up our mail and they're like, somebody sent Seth a box of shrimp and sent us this picture. My wife was like, what the heck? Who's TJ? There's been a lot of questions that uh the past couple weeks who's tj because when we sent all the stickers out i had to put my name on them as well

just in case they came back so everybody's gonna know my name but i'm glad i'm glad you got that i uh i've been slowly uh don't tell agnes but i've been taking out some of my zoo switches and replacing them with in a valley switches um and so that's the one i took out of my bedroom and you could tell it came from the bedroom because it's got that nice paint on it so blue paint yeah i think we had a wall in our old house that was the same color nice um yeah it's so yeah this is the zoos it's the double switch s2 double switch that we were talking about the zen 30 it's great um so i would just look at it it's got two relay outputs on it right uh i think only one works though. I don't know. Oh, okay. Okay.

I don't, I don't know for sure because I was only using it with a light and a fan, but it might have two relay outputs. I don't know. That's going to be my use case too. And I showed my wife, I'm like, Hey, check this out. And she's like, you can order three more of those. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's what's in the shrimp box, honey. Yeah. This is what's in the shrimp box. And was showing her like yeah you know like we we have these locations that have um a dimmer and a fan or two fans or a fan and a light bathroom fan and light and that kind of thing it's like yeah i've never been able to actually put those on the system where when you're out of the house you can make sure that they're they're turned off that's

really our only use case and now i can thanks to tj in the shrimp box the magic shrimp box that showed up yeah that's literally like the best solution. So right now we're doing a lot of the Philips Hue bulbs, which is so I can't really use those because they're just, they're not compatible. I can use it with the automations, but it's a little janky. So they're like the best solution.

And outside of that, there's not a lot of good options. So, yeah. Well, thank you. I will have to have to take this and put it in soon one of these days and i've got my if i haven't lost it i have the zoos it's so small the little usb stick thing oh the usb stick yeah you should just plug it into your server so you don't have to worry about them well i think it it's inside a rack so i think i'm probably gonna have to extend this up oh yeah well yeah. Well, you have to be extension.

Poke out the top, because the Z-Wave stuff is going to be clear across the house, too. That means you're going to have to buy more Z-Wave stuff. Or I can put it in long range. Well, that doesn't have long range, so the switch. I've failed all around here. You got nothing for my interview with Agnes. Stick it back in the trim box for now yeah so i got a couple small things going on this week i uh the switchbot remote which we

talked about a couple weeks ago um i said when it whenever i got apple tv support i would buy it and it got apple tv support like four days after and And so I purchased one. I'm using it. I have a very simple use case. We basically have an open living room and kitchen area. And we have two TVs in the area. That's literally the only two TVs we have in the whole house, right in that same area. But right now we have like four remotes to control it, right? We have the LG remote to control the living room TV, along with the Apple

TV. And in the kitchen, we have the Sony TV remote, and then we have the Apple TV remote. And so with this one SwitchBot remote, we can control everything. And it works great. I mean, it's one of those things that I really wanted to control multiple Apple TVs with it. And it basically just pairs to the Apple TV with Bluetooth. And so I was able to pair it to both Apple TVs. Works fine. Not the best looking remote. Whenever I pulled it out of the box, Nicole said, what is this hospital remote doing here?

So it is not an attractive remote. I feel like if they just made it like black, it would probably be a lot better. But the white color is not helping at all. And I know that's like switchbots thing is just white electronics but some stuff like the remote that i'm gonna touch after eating chicken wings should not be white so that's gonna get dirty fast yeah and like i'm not like the grossest person in the world i wouldn't say i'm cleanest either but this remote is definitely not gonna look good after like four months hey seth look up uh remotecovers.com hey we need a new website we need a new website well you basically ship people ziploc baggies all like the little cell phone holder thing so when you go like yeah exactly um but yeah it's been working fine we've

been trying to use it exclusively um nothing weird it's got like programmable buttons on like the hard buttons uh but you don't seem to be able to actually program those so i'm not really sure why i can program them um like for example the uh with the apple tv um by default if you hit the home button, it like opens up their Apple TV service or whatever. I don't know what they actually call it, like the user interface. Um, but in settings you can change it to where it just like basically just goes

to the main screen. Um, but the switch by remote, when I press the home button, it like just goes back a screen and I can't reprogram it. So like, that's annoying. I have to like hold it and it goes to the home screen.

Um, so that's weird. That might be like the only thing. I have to hold it and it goes to the home screen. So that's weird. That might be a Bluetooth thing. I'm not really sure. But the Apple TV remote does not do that. So I'm blaming SwitchBot. Yeah, that's... I mean, even in the Control 4 world of things, there's a couple of different ideas of what buttons should do what

and how it should operate with the system. And some guys have made their own IR driver that kind of might be a little, it doesn't let you configure what some of those buttons, like what you do when you press a button, like what button does what and what brings you back, how it brings you back to the home screen and that kind of thing. I know Apple even has a setting in there.

I guess it's more like that home button and how it works can bring you to the Apple TV app or to homescreen. So, yeah, I, I don't know. I wish, I wish Apple had a better idea on how to control their box than they do.

But yeah, you're kind of stuck with what you get sometimes when it, when it comes to Apple, Apple and the control that they offer. Then like, just be, just be like Roku. Yeah.

It's just, it's turn on that sweet sweet sweet motion smoothing minus everything else roku does but yeah yeah and then yeah so i got that going on and then um for some reason i've decided to just go all up this uh all down this path for adaptive lighting and so i've been slowly switching over a lot of my light bulbs to phillips hue i've got adaptive lighting set up through home assistant so we're basically just adjust the brightness and color temperature of the lights throughout the day i really like it it's kind of nice when you wake up and you turn the kitchen light on and it's not like

bright white light it's just like a very soft dimmed light and i think it makes a big difference i don't know if it's any like the health benefits some people claim but it is kind of nice just not being blinded um and when we moved into the house i installed under cabinet lighting and i've been really happy with it really liked it um it's really been helpful actually because most of the time like especially at night time we the under cabinet lighting turns on with motion and we don't have to turn the kitchen lights on. So this past couple of weeks, I've decided that I want to switch out the LED lighting in the cabinets. And I went with white tunable LED strips as well. So instead of just having 4,000K, I now have, you know, 3,000 to 6,000K. I've got that hooked up to the adaptive lighting as well. And that's been really nice. It's been a pretty big difference.

And I can just, you know, use Home Assistant to change the color temperature whenever I want to. And so if I'm actually just like working in there or whatever, I can change it to 6000K or whatever I feel like it. So that part's been not too bad. I'm stupid. I'm always preaching running better wire than you need at the time. And I only ran two conductor when i installed this um so i had to replace all the two conductor wiring with new three conductor wiring oh yeah i probably should have just did that initially so i have to rerun the wiring but

here we are yeah i i'm in the same mostly in the same boat um i did run, kind of as a saving grace, I did run some regular power wire, I guess. Romex? 14.2, yeah, Romex, alongside the low voltage. I think I just ran Cat5. But what it allowed me to do at the end of the day was to run the low voltage over the Romex, and I can power up a local Shelly device under each cabinet. A little more expensive at the end of the day but yeah i should have should have thought it through and and put in better wire

so i could get in there and power things up the cat5 is just not not enough to do that kind of stuff over longer distances but yeah yeah yeah this time this time i installed four conductor and then as i'm doing this i mean i was like man i probably should just install like six conductor because what if i want to do rgb at some point but i don't think i'm gonna do rgb so that's fine yeah i know it's the white tunable though i think i really like that and we've we've converted every room minus the office and the guest room in the living room i guess to adaptive lighting now so yep i totally like how you can change the mood and the feel of the room just by adjusting that color. Again, I like it being bright white when you're trying to work and then nice and comfortable in the evening. Yeah, you walk in at two o'clock at night, you don't need to see everything. I just want to make sure I don't kick the cabinets or something.

Exactly. Or my cat. That sounds fun, man. you've been busy yeah that's pretty much it i'm waiting um i've been doing some more irrigation stuff so i actually ran some irrigation lines out to the front yard um i have an irrigation company actually coming out this friday to give me a quote on installing whatever it is you install for irrigation stuff like the head and stuff so not the controller but everything you need before the little things yeah the the manifold and then you have the spray heads you could do that yourself well so i just i basically need like the back backflow prevention installation oh um and that's

pretty much it so which i can i guess i can have any plumber do but right now we're it's kind of janky because we're just using like the regular hose spigot. But I want to just get something mounted on the wall so I can not use the hose spigot anymore. That's probably a next year project. Our neighbors just put in a sprinkler system. And it has like, I don't know if they're like newer style heads, but I've seen them at commercial stuff. But it's like they're like rotate and like this like i don't know how to describe it it's like a slow rotate of little tiny streams yeah and it it'll start and stop you know it's it's

it's not so much different than the one that normally like swings back and forth but it's just kind of doing it in in the same motion across the lawn i'm like oh i like those i really do so now those streams are actually adjustable so yeah yeah if it's like a corner you could adjust it so stream stops at a certain yeah yeah i have a couple of those in the basement but never put them in it's a seth project it involves digging a bunch of stuff and then like yeah right now um i mean we've gotten like within like two days we had two inches of water like it was like two and a half inches of water some crazy amount of water no it's four inches of water that's what it was it's like there's no there's no way i can mow the

lawn and my my sprinkler has been on like bypass blinking bypass for the past three or four weeks now. So it's funny, he put it in, I saw him test it, but I haven't seen it run since then. So clearly it's been on bypass too. We've been getting a ton of rain and the grass just keeps growing. Same here. Yeah, same here.

We've gotten so much rain, my sprinkler hasn't really gone off often. I've only really been watering some new grass i seed that i've been putting down but other than that like the rest of the lawn's been growing yep i i put i'll put in the show notes i found the uh the biodegradable poly remote control covers 0.7 mil gauge and you get a 2000 i'm in a case so So that will keep your SwitchBot remote pretty clean, TJ. And when it gets dirty, you just swap it out. Perfect. Yeah, $56 for a case of this

stuff. So there you go. Is it worth it? Probably not. Probably not. Alright. I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show

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gather in there and talk about all sorts of fun stuff. I saw somebody joined earlier this week. Tyler, I think. Yeah, he joined the hub. Not a $5 pledge, but thanks, Tyler. We saw you pop in this week. If you want to help out the show but can't support financially, just appreciate a Firestar review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice to help others find the show.

That is going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. Did you see I hit the high score of 20? Holy shit. During the show. Yeah, I know.

It just went off. How are you doing that? I don't know. It just went off in a... How are you doing that? I don't know. It just went off. The things I accomplished when we were recording the show.