HomeTech.fm - Episode 492 - Untrusted Neighbor

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

On this week's show: Sonos say "Sorry about that app," Logitech forgets it has smarthome products, Amazon kills an Echo and is horrified to learn what $25 Billion bought them, Google is coming out with a new streaming box for your TV, ADT wants you to Trust a Neighbor, two picks of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 2nd, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Cavill. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. I don't know. I've had a weird week. What about you guys?

Super weird. Outages. All about you guys? Super weird. Outages. All sorts of fun stuff going on. I had weird Ring tech support from end users today, all day. For some reason, Ring is funneling their customers to ours, which is great. I don't know how that's happening. I don't want it. I'm going to start funneling my customers' calls to you too.

What's the URL? I don't know. it's really strange i did i did follow up with the lady and she said she had basically searched for uh the ring website for support and ended up talking to our guys somehow don't really know how um she doesn't really know how but she said when she logged in with ring it bumped her over to our website which is great and everything but not particularly we don't need that many customers so yeah wouldn't that be annoying if it was just like an influx of a lot of people just calling yeah that's pretty much what it is all it's been so i'm not i'm not really sure like it's it's you know she's nicer she said your support was super responsive and i appreciate their message much better than amazon so like evidently she had a great experience with support,

but we're, we're clueless. And I reached out to my contacts at reading. They're kind of clueless too. Nobody knows what's going on. So yeah, very strange. That is super weird.

You don't want, you don't want a higher volume of support, especially for a company as big as bringing your Amazon to, to hit your, your support guys that, you know, starting, it started pretty early this morning too. It was like UK people like complaining about their like bill or they wanted to sign up for a subscription or they want to change their add to accounts. It's like, Oh my gosh, this is crazy. Like why, what, what is going on here? Did you

figure out what happened? Like, no, we still don't know what's going on. Like it's still happening. It's not what happened. It's still happening. So it's not what happened it's still happening so it's very strange wow yeah i would love for us to figure out what's going on well this is this is a perfect time to push router hats.com we can get everybody to buy router hats yes i think you just need a router hat is what you need turn those calls into sales yeah we should probably buy that domain one of these days i mean because obviously they're not av integrators they're not gonna be able to buy anything from blackwire but we could still turn them oh wait did i buy that domain i did i did all right so yeah we're gonna have to do something with it what router hats yeah man it's so bad that you forget what domains you buy

sorry you have a problem seth how many domains do you have now does it tell you is there a list of list of them i mean i have a list so where do you buy them at i don't like i only have one domain register yeah i'm sure i'm sure there's a list somewhere man you probably have like 12 domain i do wow wow are you just buying domains from random websites every time you're just like yeah whatever i don't care well i mean it seems kind of a fun thing to do you never know when routerhats.com is going to come in handy tj well no that makes sense to buy the domains is fine but don't you just buy them through like one central place oh yeah yeah i usually use hover or amazon has you should be able to see how many you have there though

give us an idea how many how many are we talking are we talking like a dozen i could if i wanted to talking like hundreds your wife doesn't listen to the show like how much do you spend on domains per year it's i mean you could pay multiple years in advance too for a discount well that's true when you first buy them you get them cheap right and then it's after that to renew them that they get you yeah especially if it's like one of the the top level domain ones right i've noticed that the prices on the dot coms have slowly crept up from like what twelve dollars up to like whatever sixteen so i don't there's only 20 here tj come on that's it yeah no no you have to click next on the page one it could no no no it's not

it's not paginated it's only 20 domains these are all useful that's not bad i feel like you have more but you just have them on different accounts or somewhere else. I haven't pruned them. So there's rack studs here. Oh yeah, rack studs. The PPDBDB, PPBDB. There we go.

You collect domain names like I collect filament for my 3D printer, you know. The only problem is the only thing is you'll actually use your filaments.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I plan, there's big, big TJ's cock squeezers.ers we're gonna have to do something with that that i feel is just a gold mine just sitting there in my domain okay funny story i actually put 3d printed one of those uh a tj cock a couple weeks ago well i don't call it the tj cock squeeze i know you wouldn't well you should i own the patent on it or the copyright but you

know for my um for my toothpaste it's a nice little thing you just twist it and the toothpaste comes on top and you get every last bit of toothpaste so i spent three dollars to you know save that three cents of toothpaste that you never get at the end of the tube yeah it's a great idea honestly yeah i totally didn't believe you about the tjs cocksqueezers.com but i just went there and it's totally legit there's even like a picture of my crotch in the foreground so it's it's true to form uh you can see the cock squeezer there as well so i mean i think it's a really good photo for everything is that i'm glad it's like blur it out i hope that's not i didn't really notice that but whoops all right well that's that's definitely my leg but you know the idea

is still there okay all right all right, all right. I was on a baseball field at a school, so I wasn't trying to become a person on a list. That's a fancy cock squeezer, too. Look at that thing. Yeah. And you have to scroll down. I think that one is by, like, Home Tech or Smart Home or something like that. One of those random Amazon companies, you know.

This is a family show, boys, family show. Yeah, it was it was until we were looking at never mind i don't remember ever saying it was a family show well at least the curse words do get bleeped out from time to time so that's good whenever ai gets uh well uh had a bunch of news actually pop up this week it's kind of surprising but um so yeah we've got a number of home tech headlines some some updates for home assistant we're going to talk about later um so what do you guys say we get started let's do it let's do it all right um so sorry uh sonos ceo patrick spence has publicly apologized for the issues plaguing

the sonos mobile app following its may 7th update. The famous version 80.0 intended to offer more personalized experience and a redesigned interface, but it sucked and everybody hated it. How do you feel about this, TJ? Boo! Hiss! He has like this letter.

I've seen that picture of it. I think it was posted like on Instagram and maybe it was an email or something i'm not sure but it basically goes on to say that you know they they we pushed out a bunch of updates we've done bi-weekly software updates uh and released a bunch of these features that were pretty big that were already existing maybe in your app and they just took out forgot to put back in oops but uh they've been working on it they've been working on it and we're sorry so it went from you're holding it wrong too we're sorry we were holding it wrong we fixed it we're still working on it so so basically what they said is that this software was not ready yet and we've taken all this time to update it and make it ready um and it's still not going to be

ready for another like three four maybe five months so um we could have just waited until like christmas to do this or something but we did it a little early for you so they had to tie it in with the headphones they had to that i mean that's that's why this existed right yeah we well you obviously needed the headphone support even though the headphones don't really support everything anyway so i mean yeah i mean good thing that we rushed out with this product. At the end of the show, when I'm going through my projects, I have some comments about, you know, their app. I found some other stuff that we're missing. And I'm like, man, their documentation's out of date.

Wow. I'm surprised they have documentation. It's honestly pretty good. They've had some pretty good, well, usually in the past they have. July, August, they're going to improve stability when adding new products. That's always helpful. And implement music library configuration for browse, search, and play. August, September time frame,

we're going to be improving volume responsiveness. And then the user interface improvements based on customer feedback. So if you can play now, maybe look at those in August, September time frame. And then they're going to be working on overall system stability and error handling. That's good. September, improving the alarm consistency and reliability.

September, October, restoring the edit mode for playlists in the queue and improving functionality in settings. And so there you go. That's the roadmap. I'm glad they're being a little more open about it, too. It's nice to see what's coming up. They don't have to be so secretive about fixing their broken app. But here we go. This company is a dumpster fire

i don't get it they got headphones now dj i just i just don't understand it right i mean and especially like ever since the transition to the new ceo this guy has seen like three what i would consider major disasters the whole s1 s2 debacle which is kind of whatever the recycling program which is kind of whatever as well that was a reddit that was a reddit problem but i think all of them were legit but none of them really mattered though until this like third thing happened and it's like all right well you've done all three of these things so you kind of just suck at this point i'm still holding on my theory i'm a big uh simulation uh believer here uh but i feel like patrick spence was sent by Amazon or Google to destroy

Sonos from within. They're like, well, it's going to be cheaper than doing this lawsuit longterm. So what if we just destroy it? You're doing a good job. Yeah. He was around before.

I mean, he was a long time. I think it was the C was a CFO financial officer. Yeah. He was the CFO at Sonos. It's a long concept. I guess so. It's a long concept i guess so it's a long game we're talking about patents here you need to take your time you're gonna do this right i'm starting to see some parallels with logitech in this though uh happening at the same time like

people are starting to look for alternatives to sonos, you know, whether it's things like Vessel or Wiem. The same way people are looking for alternatives to Harmony remotes, right? What do you mean, like, looking for Logitech? The company, there's another story here. We're talking about it. Like, the Logitech circle, like, they don't even know they're making these things anymore. The CEO was like, yeah, I guess we have those still. I know they're making these things anymore the ceo was like uh yeah i guess we have those still um i think they're almost spent like we don't have any stock but like

they're still on their website yeah windy what uh another communications person came out and said that they had like oh yeah we still got stock please buy them it's not good when the ceo of the company like completely glosses over or forgets that they have an entire home kit secure video lineup for with their you know circle view door and doorbell camera like that that's crazy that's absolutely crazy yeah i was i was listening to this and i posted in the the slack group because um it was uh nilai patel interviewing the new ceo of logitech and they're like talking i think he mentioned something about like three like three major categories or whatever or four major categories and one of them included the

smart home and she was like well really just three and she was like the smart home is not really a thing nobody wants any we're gonna we're gonna get out of that and i was like whoa whoa wait a minute i haven't heard anything about this what are you talking about because i haven't heard any mention of logitech getting out of the smart home it would make sense they don't really do anything in there right they have like a video doorbell and they've done like the logitech pop i couldn't tell you anything else they've done the pop was discontinued right that's not around anymore yeah that was like a cool button thing i had it i don't know why i had it but i had it um so yeah i mean it makes sense that they would get out of it but it was just very confusing because i was like i've never heard of this before yeah i i agree like i think she just said the

quiet part out loud like you probably don't want to say that you know we're getting out of it when they still have people working in those positions selling and making the product but yeah it's probably not a if you're working at logitech right now on one of these products you're probably not feeling very good yeah i'm not even sure those are being sold. I think those are pretty much gone in the interview. Talking about a smart home. Yeah, I mean, she is new. I guess she would need to go back and double check.

They went back and double checked. Said, no, we still got some in stock. Please buy them, please. We'll ship them out. And then six months from now, they're going to be like, well, actually, you remember those doorbells? We are not selling those anymore. Yeah, well i i do know they are correct like their money was not in these particular products i don't blame them if they want to get out but

people do like that the home kit video doorbell or the circle cameras too because it integrates right with home kit uh and you can use it to upload all the video like directly off the camera or whatever. So that's kind of nice. But yeah, it's kind of weird, really strange. I've got a graveyard tag hovering on this right now. Wow, makes sense. I can join Harmony. For Harmony.

So we'll cover the whole graveyard section right here up at the top. Speaking of graveyard products, Amazon is discontinuing the echo dot with clock you don't remember this one it's got like a little i don't like a pixelated clock on the front of it and not the one we they that gavin has right this is the older one it's kind of like a cloth on top of it um and has like an led dot matrix display inside um we'll link over to a story here on the verge where someone's very upset about it the echo dot o'clock was priced at 80 and uh they they liked it quite a bit had a

a decent little i guess it had a decent response time it worked really well for them so i don't know it seems like some people didn't have such a good time with it, had freezing and unresponsiveness, so it could be fixed through multiple resets, just like the CloudStrike Windows machines. So, yeah, maybe it was good that they discontinued that and went over with the new one. The new one works great. The Echo Spot.

Yeah, the Echo Spot. I have it sitting here still in front of me. I like it. It's a good replacement amazon makes so many of these i looked at this and i was like no they can't be discontinued in this i just bought this a couple years ago and i did buy this but without the clock it's literally the same design and everything it just doesn't have the clock inside that's funny just just no clock oh man well well i guess we can still talk about amazon here you kind of keep keep amazon

and then the fray uh but amazon seems to be horrified the headline of this article amazon horrified by what people actually use alexa for um goes on to say amazon initially launched alexa in 2014 with the vision of it becoming a major revenue driver by encouraging users to buy more products in its marketplace however consumers primarily consumers primarily use Alexa for simple tasks like checking the time or setting alarms, which has led to significant financial losses for the company. From 2017 to 2021, Amazon lost over $25 billion on its smart home devices, including Echo, Kindles, Fire Stick TVs, and Ring doorbells. Despite these losses, amazon has continued to expand the devices team once well to over 15 000 employees dear lord a company used an accounting philosophy called downstream impact to justify these expenses company concept championed by

jeff bezos that assigns value based on subsequent customer spending but i guess that spending has not come in and 25 billion dollars holy moly 25 billion dollars that is that is something like didn't they see something was wrong at 10 billion dollars like how do they get that far you know you know what if you if if you made a really good clock and people are willing to buy or a timer and people are willing to pay that much for it, then you're doing something right. Jack up the price, you know, let people buy these expensive timers and be happy in my household. Yeah. We use the timer a lot. We also ask it a lot for what the current time is. We ask the weather, we ask traffic and every now and then we control something with it right so right you know like it gets a lot of

use and i have what nine of them around the house you know or something like that you know nice timers they keep the great time you know so i'm happy with it you know they charged a bit more probably still have nine of them around the house for timers. So if you're going to make a timer, make a really good timer. And that's what they did. Just charge more for it. Good job, guys. Yeah, great job.

You've created a great timer. Let's take it to the next level. Multi-timers, stuff like that. Let's up your timer game. I think they had multi-timers, right? I'm pretty sure they do. Yeah. But they need to advertise it a bit more, you know?

They got put in a, by the way, do you know you could set multiple timers at once? That would be helpful. You know? Yeah, that would be helpful, by the way, right there, you know? I think they've had that for a couple of years. And we're probably the one of the first, if not the first to introduce that, that particular feature. I, I, I will say, I did notice that Siri has, has gotten it now and you can, you can ask it to set up a, like when you say create a timer, you give it a name. Yeah.

If you remember, and it'll, it'll make a Siri timer with a name on it and associate the time. So when you're in the kitchen, you can say, create a potatoes timer, create a chicken timer, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it will keep those timers separate, which is kind of nice. And you know, it's even nice, like on the spot here with this little screen, when I set the timer, it shows it on the screen too. There you go. Right? So it's, you know, it's a really good timer. You know, I like it. Because you just screen too. There you go. Right? So it's a really good timer. I like it.

They could have just stopped there. Yeah. Not lost the $25 billion. They should advertise it as a fancy clock and timer with some smart home capabilities. I remember when this thing came out, and it was advertised as a timer, and a thing that you get dad jokes off of.

And do you guys remember the first ad for that thing like i remember watching it and thinking oh this is kind of cool like i'd get this and the smart home was not even on there it's like ask at the weather set a timer and ask a dumb dad joke and it'll it'll tell you a dumb dad dad joke smart home came later like i don't know down when the smart home kind of got like big when Apple pushed out HomeKit. And I think everybody was like, oh, we got to do a smart home thing. And I don't know if they, they just, I feel like they just wedged it on there. They're like, oh, yeah, the voice, the voice thing, it'll, it'll do that. And they're like, here, use this app.

That's kind of like a webpage, but not really like a webpage would probably be better. I don't know. Like they never really, to me, 15,000 people were working on this are you kidding me i think they would have a better app i just well that most most of those people are sitting there listening to your audio recordings and typing a response into it you know they they hear you ask for the timer and they're sitting there and they go okay i'll set it oh I'll have to remind this person in 15 minutes. 15,000. I just, oh man. I mean, I get that it's a bigger company.

You have to like translations. You have to support all these different, like they did a pretty good job of supporting dialects and that kind of thing. Like they really upped their game on like how they voice process things. But man, that is a lot of people to support that. That's Amazon. So, you know, they've got Amazon money.

All that money. I still don't have a web interface to add devices. They took it away. That was upsetting because it was the only way to delete all my device. I don't even know if it's still there anymore. I know they took it away, but it was the only way I can go in and kind of like delete every device and restart. Yeah.

See, and that's like why I haven't set up my voice control again. I'm using back to using Google, but Google doesn't allow it either. So she's like, i haven't set up my voice control again i'm using back to using google but google doesn't allow it either so she's like i have not set it back up why it'd be so much easier i got a lot of devices guys and they make it for like people that have three devices you know you're good to go yeah well anyway that's one way to lose money it's actually a couple good ways to lose money tonight. First, by registering lots of domains. Second, by forgetting that you have an entire video lineup and home automation lineup that exists in your product line. And third by-

It happens. Yeah. And third by egregiously spending money on a product that people use for a kitchen timer. $25 billion. Oh my God. That is crazy. Anyway, I love the subtitle of this headline or of this uh this article here from the bite too it says alexa please make money or

oh that makes sense why they're trying to go with ai that way they can teach you how to make money yeah alexa make money show title tonight too all right uh let's get on some fun stuff here we've got a new product rumor i guess uh it'll probably probably be something we see at the google event i think it's coming up on the 13th correct 13th of august so in a couple weeks we'll we'll have the uh the big google event and uh evidently they're coming out with a a new google tv set-top box. Yay! Right? We all want this, right? It's a 4K Chromecast TV thing.

It's got a remote. No more dongle. It's an actual set-top box. It's a weirdly shaped set-top box, though. It's like a cylinder-looking thing. It looks like one of those chargers for your phone. Right? Like a wireless charger, yeah.

Yeah. But it's like tilted, so if you put your phone on it would fall off yeah it's it's tilted to accommodate the hdmi and power cable i guess that are going to the back of it but it's pretty weird they don't want you to set anything on top of it yeah or be able to stack yeah stack anything good thing i have legos yeah i was i always like the chromecast devices i don't like the white remotes because that always ends up awful um but i always like the chromecast devices i don't like the white remotes because that always ends up awful but i always like the chromecast devices themselves i've used them in the past google tv is pretty decent i just like my apple tv at this point it's easier to use so i think google tv has gotten closest to like the one interface though where they actually show you

different things from different streaming services um so it's kind of more of like a cable box replacement but i don't think they've like really nailed that just yet i can't say that i've used the google oh okay so yeah it's it's basically like one of those it's like an aggregator from all the services that you have on there apple tv does this to some extent too yeah but you have to go to like a separate section for it yeah it's confusing like Google TV just makes it part of the dashboard. I mean, they could just call it dashboard, but no, they call it Apple TV inside the Apple TV.

And I think it's a tab inside Apple TV, the app Apple TV. Yeah, I've never opened that app. Called Apple TV. Yeah, it's very confusing how they have it set up. They tried to make it a little bit better with a side menu that pops out now, but it's, I don't know. It's weird. They've got a lot of good shows

on apple tv but i'm talking about apple tv the service not apple tv yeah confusing and apple tv um is one of the nicer services right now because they don't have all these advertisements but i also read that they may be getting advertising oh yeah so they're gonna ruin it slow it wow yeah they'll they'll come out with a um advertisement sponsorship thing that they can pop in on those things um because they you know they probably have the demographics to to average to charge a premium for them too so they're just sitting there staring at all that money that's not coming in through services and they're like we can get that too so the incentivification of apple tv will begin

as if it's not bad bad enough already did you see this new uh nest thermostat as well i forgot to post it actually uh yeah it was it was like a rumor i think all this is going to come out of that google event on the 13th um but yeah i did see there was a new nest thermostat i was a fourth generation i think now at this point yeah it looks nice. It looks very fake from the photos, but you see this thing in real life. Well, we'll probably see it on some big screen at the Google event next, but not anytime soon. Oh, yeah, it's got like floats off the wall. That's kind of cool.

Yeah. It's a look. It looks pretty nice if they pull it off. All right. Well, Google keeps updating their stuff too. So they're bringing Nest Hello, which is the doorbell support to the whole map. So if you, um, if you're, if you're using Google home, uh, Google is expanding Google home app to include nest hello, video doorbell and the garage door detection

features. And usually can now migrate the nest doorbell wired first gen from the nest app over to the Google home app, allowing it to be integrated and managed and watch all the video playback and everything through one location. So this is great. Everything's kind of getting moved over slowly but surely. I feel like we've been covering the Nest to Google Home migration story for like years now. Yeah, just make it happen. It just can't pull the Band-Aid off.

It's just like one of those like slow burns. You kill products all the time. How hard is it to kill to kill this oh my gosh they're killing the google short links thing have you heard about this no they had like a pro like you know like the bitly thing where you can like shorten the link well google had like one of those and they deprecated it years ago or whatever they said we're not gonna but they're they're now instead of like paying for the five dollar server a month server that they have that runs the whole operation. Like all those Google links that existed in the past, they're just going to go away. So like,

wow. Yeah. So if you ever made one of those, you better go out and replace it on whatever webpage you have it on. Cause it's going away. Jeez. Good deal. Google.

Come on, Google. They do not care. It's not egg and advertisement money. They don't want it. Uh, and, uh, adt is updating some fun stuff this this sounds like something gavin would do for his trusted neighbor maybe he's like nope nope all right i'm way out of the story let's go

adt is interested would you have a trusted neighbor uh adt has launched a new smart security system the adt plus featuring new hardware integration with google nest cameras smart speakers and the yale assure lock this is to introduce the trusted neighbor feature which allows smart locks uh to use the facial recognition to open up the door for trusted individuals uh sounds pretty good like if you have a neighbor you know say, say, come on over. The door will be unlocked. When they get up to the door,

the video doorbells will recognize who they are. Unlock the door. There you go. How is this? Why don't you just program a code and give it to your neighbor? Like the whole point of the Yale Assure Lock

is it has codes and you can, like I do, program a code and give it to the neighbor and say, come on over. You know the code. You can get in the house. But no, we're going to, instead of have a code, you're going to have a facial recognition and a hub and the lock and everything else. It sounds like overkill. Just put a code in for the neighbor.

This is the guy that has geolocation set up for his locks. He thinks this is overkill. Well, that's for me. But I mean, for this problem here is like, just put a code in for your neighbor. I just I don't want to have to enter the code when I come home. So I have my locks unlocked for me as I come into the house. Right. That's easy for me.

But my neighbor, you know, I don't want my locks unlocking whenever they come home too, because you can't get that narrow on your general location, but just give them a code. I'm not going to buy a camera and a hub so I can pay for alarm service for $45 a month. Yeah. So they could just walk up and walk him on. No, I'm just going to give him a code and save that money. Even though I have all that stuff already, I'm still just going to give him a code. You can do this with blue Iris. It would just take 20,000 steps. Yeah. It would have to start analyzing them from the bottom of your driveway,

but still just give them a code, you know, all the new, all the new locks that are smart locks. You could give them a code. You could use program their fingerprint. You can give them home. Give me your finger.

You know what yeah whatever you want but i would just put a code in and say wait so so hold on the fingerprint is more reasonable the fingerprint's more reasonable to you than the the facial id well because i don't need another camera for the fingerprint it's built into the lock all right so you could have one lock and you give them multiple ways to give them what's that home key thing you could have one lock and you give him multiple ways to give him. What's that? Home key thing. You could give him the home key. You're going in with ADT though. So yeah, I guess if you're going in with ADT. Because ADT uses Google for their cameras now.

Yeah. But just program a code. It's so much easier, faster, reliable. Just give him a code. Just give him a code. You can give him a key too. I mean, that's a slow tip. Just give him a key.

Yeah. Well, my locks don't them a key, too. I mean, that's a slow take. Just give them a key. Yeah. Well, my locks don't have the key, but I'm putting the key lock in the front door, so I'll have a smart lock with the key in the front door. But I just give them a code, you know? And their code, they have to give me their SIN number, so that will be their code. So your SIN number? That's security. Oh, what's the equivalent to you guys? Social security number? Yeah. I'll make the code their social security. You got to give? That's security. Oh, what's the equivalent to you guys? Social security number?

Yeah. I'll make the code there. So you guys give me your social security number. We actually have three codes. It's your social security number, your bank routing number, and then your bank account number. Listen, right now, I have all their accounts right now. I manage their IT for them. They're lucky I'm really private.

Well, and you're not really the ideal you're not really the ideal person for this anyway though because you're tracking everything your neighbors do and you can probably automatically unlock it whenever they're coming over you know what though my neighbor no i don't track everything they do but you know when something happens they come to me and they're like oh did, did you get that on your camera? It's like, my cameras don't record your bathroom. Oh, yeah. And they're like, why not? Why not?

Why not? I need, you know, like now I wanted to see what happened on my yard. It's like, get your own camera. Well, actually, John, you know, the camera did pick up something right about the time you turned off your shower. So I think somebody did see something coming. I did have a few clips of him falling on ice on my driveway. So those are good videos. You got to keep those for insurance.

Yeah. I sent it to him, but you know, he was trespassing. That's, that's my argument. That's right. Yeah.

Nobody likes a John trespassing. Yeah. I was, I thought TJ, you were going to say you're not the ideal customer for this. Cause you're not an ADT subscriber. Like this, this is like entry level, smart homes written all over it. Yeah, I thought, TJ, you were going to say you're not the ideal customer for this because you're not an ADT subscriber. Like, this is like entry-level smart homes written all over it.

Gavin's definitely not at that level. But, like, it is something like if you are just kind of a basic smart home managed by others, managed by maybe ADT or something like that, you could do something like this. And it seems like a cool feature, but I'm kind of with Gavin. It seems a bit much to do the facial recognition thing for the trusted neighbor thing. And then just give them a code. Yeah, because you have to program their face anyway, right? Yeah, and you just stare at this camera a bit. I think Google's made that easy. They probably just upload their photo, I'd imagine.

Yeah, or if they've been over to the house a couple times, you probably already got it on there, right? And then they're wondering why you're taking random photos of them. It's like, you know, I need your need your mug shot you know it's for my security system you know you know what just you wouldn't understand let me scan your face real fast hold on it's interesting interesting new feature i but yeah i i like it i'm not gonna do it but i like it it's cool it's a cool feature no i i'm not saying it's not cool i just think it's overkill it's all right gavin we, Gavin. We know you don't like it. No, I like it.

I think it'd be cool for logging, not necessarily automating things off of it. Or, like, what if you wanted the untrusted neighbor feature, right? Yeah, that's what I was thinking, right? If DJ comes over, then the door's just locked, and the lights turn off. That would be better. All the blinds closed.

The sprinkler turns on adt if you're listening please make the untrusted neighbor uh feature that would be better and then the landscape audio speakers they just start yelling creep alert creep alert get out of here the cops 9-1-1 i see you neil that's good i was using my cameras to try and pick up uh dogs crapping on my lawn you know like uh i i was trying to feed it to um the chat gpt anytime it detected a dog on my lawn it would set it to chat gpt to tell me what the dog is doing and then it would say oh yeah and then if you know in my automation i could say if dog pooping trigger camera if dog pooping it got a little expensive but you know that way i can look at

the video footage if i see that dog walker was not picking up the poop. I'd have them on camera. There was a guy that made one of these. It's on YouTube, I'm pretty sure. Caleb Olson, I'll send you a link to it. He made a poop detector for his camera. He says he's got AI built into it. I think we talked about this before. You can feed it to ChatGPT.

I played with that a while back. It's not the fastest thing but it's pretty cool because chat gpt could analyze the photo and say yep the dog is stooping unfortunate part i didn't think it could really uh recognize the difference between a female dog pooping and peeing you know they kind of do it the same way you know where a male dog will lift his leg or hunch his back right hmm well there you go i know this is a tech show but yeah let's tech show we talked about dogs it was poop detection so that's fine that's technology yeah well hopefully we see an adt untrusted neighbor feature because i think that would be

more potentially more profitable for the company but yeah we'll see we'll see what they come up with but all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes for hometech.fm slash 492 all right well speaking of dogs these dog robots are everywhere right and we've got an interesting pick of the week here uh two picks of the week it's two dog robots are everywhere, right? And we've got an interesting pick of the week here. Two picks of the week. It's two dog robots, right? The first I thought was, well, it's an egregious waste of money for some law enforcement agency to have a little fun with their toy, but they've made the Department of Homeland Security. It's acquired a dog-like robot named Neo.

It goes around disabling Internet of Things devices in homes, and it's aimed at preventing booby traps during law enforcement raids so this little dog will hop on over to the house and i guess it's equipped with some kind of antenna array and it creates a denial of service attack overloads home network and disables the smart devices how much does this thing cost probably a few million bucks to develop but you know that's that's what we do with money it It's everybody's money, so. What's it matter? Who cares? I love how it has this little dog trooping through water and stuff. It's got these antennas on it. I don't know.

This seems like the militarization of robots. I'm not generally for that because when they take over, these are going to be the leaders, right? Yeah, and they're going to take down my Z-Wave and Zigbee network. I want my stuff to work, robot. Don't take it down.

Not good, not good. That's rude. I've been nice to y'all it's too good well yeah and then we've got another one here and i and this one's got if you've seen these robots the little robot dogs they're kind of weird looking they have little backwards legs like birds and then i guess this these people thought hey it'd be a good idea if we hooked a vacuum cleaner to its back and let it carry a vacuum cleaner around. And then, like, we'll just run hoses down its legs and zip tie them on there. And then we'll call it a vacuum robot dog. And this is called, does it have a name? No, it's developed by a company called Vero.

It's a quadropod robot designed to clean up cigarette butts and other small litter in challenging terrains like beaches. So this little guy walks around with his little vacuum legs and sucks up little small cigarette butts or glass pieces and that kind of thing. And in tests, it successfully picked up 90% of the cigarette butts identified with its AI vision. So there you go. Dogs, or robot dogs, I guess, are the picks of the week this week. These are great like honestly they're they're great they're solving problems that's what i like about them like the beaches nobody wants to see the cigarette butts and garbage on the beach but you know you could

send these things out night and at night and they go and clean up the beach and suck up everything right yeah they'll suck up the cigarette butts the glasses the baby turtles everything those it's great it solves a great problem yeah honestly it's a good idea i'm glad we're making robots to solve our mistakes you know this is what i think humanity is all about we destroy things and robots come and clean it up a little bit for us have you guys seen the uh the little robot things that uh clean up the ocean They basically set them at the end of a river or somewhere else, and it just sucks up all the trash. Yeah, I've seen multiple things like that, like little boats that go around and they suck it up and stuff like that.

Yeah, those are great ideas. I've seen some that are powered by solar power, so it could just keep going. Yep. I think we should invest more in that stuff. There's a bunch of these little robot things that go around and clean up. Oh, actually, this is what you're talking about. And actually, what everyone's... Yeah, the ocean cleanup.

Yeah, it's ocean cleanup. I've watched some YouTube videos on it. It's great. It's actually linked in the references of their white paper that they made. But it's called 4Ocean. And they've got these robots i've got three of them here one of them is a looks like what you're talking about tj floats in the water remote controlled autonomous electrical aquatic drone picks up floating debris

like water bottles and that kind of things surface oils from waterways uh and then they've got a four ocean collect thor which thor like you know the god uh and this one sits on like a dock or on the shore and just kind of sits there and picks up stuff as it as it comes by and then they got a little one that's like a little tank like a little robot lawnmower guy and it's got a little basket in the back and it just runs around and uh picks stuff up there so i don't know these little robots are i mean we could just not throw the stuff in the river or well that would be simple just not do that but you know we can make these robots to do this stuff yeah why do that when we have robots to it it's got a little rake attachment look at this little guy but yeah these are these are brilliant ideas i wish we invested more in

yeah this should be where a lot of our money goes to fix Fix our mistakes. Fix all these horrible problems. Because then, you know, once we start getting into space more, we've got to fix the mistakes up there that we've already started causing. We're going to make robots to clean up the space junk, you know? Yeah, we've got to make space robots.

They just float around in space and catch things as they go by. That's right. How much do these robots cost? Oh, they're not. Oh. At least $5. They're not terrible.

I mean, if you go over to AliExpress, you can get one. They're not terrible. I mean, if you go over to AliExpress, you can get one. They're not terrible. You can order them on AliExpress. Actually, I think I'm going to order one of these. Oh my gosh. It's only $468. That's it?

Yeah. To clean up your beach? No, no, no. I mean, I could strap a vacuum cleaner to this thing. It looks big enough. I probably will. Oh my gosh, this guy. This guy can't even finish a project.

He thinks he's going to strap a vacuum to a robot? It's not hard to do. Come on, I've got... Nobody said it was hard to do. I've got an extra Dyson laying around here. It's all about time, Seth. There's always room on the to-do list. There's always room on a to-do list.

I mean, what would you do with a robot dog? This looks amazing. $468 plus $2,000 delivery. Okay, that's how they get you. It's still $2,500. Okay, that's how they get you. It's still $2,500. Okay, stop there. Newegg actually has one for $705. So maybe I'll start there.

It looks a little more unfriendly. Let's just say it's unfriendly looking. But most of these, well, they range. I guess they range from $2,500 on Amazon for the one I was looking at all the way up to $13,000 for another one. So, and how much can you buy the Boston Dynamics one? What's the military? It looks like they're using that one. $75,000. So yeah, probably not going to be buying one of these anytime soon.

It'll be fun though. Come on, get one or two. I know. I know know what what if gavin what if we put our two ideas together here though what if we had what if we had a little robot dog that went around and picked up all the dog manure or or tracked it and then like went over and then like stared down the dog well it was like uh or you know like if you had a neighbor's dog coming in it would run out there and chase them away or something this could this work. This could be something we could do. We do have neighborhood poop picker uppers. So you can pay somebody in our neighborhood and they go around to houses and they'll pick up your poop for you so you never have to deal with it. And they come like at whatever schedule you want.

It's a brilliant idea. I mean, for those lazy enough to not clean up their dog poop. That's me. Sounds like a shitty job. I'm just going to let that one slide yeah well if we can replace that person with the robot dog that goes around and picks up manure there you go our jobs are all going to the robots it's all being replaced i used to pick up poop for a living the robot took my job. I foresee one time, you know, in the future, my home will have one robot that will go out and pick up all the crap off my lawn. And then the

second lawn, one will go out and mow the lawn, you know, and then I'll have another robot to go seed the lawn. It's like, I wouldn't have to do anything. Really wanted your robot dogs, though. How much, I mean, we've got to be able to get one of these at like a not $75,000 price there's got to be something I can find I'm going to check out Aliexpress later

alright well now that the robots have all taken their jobs if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week great ideas for a 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

alright we've got some home assistant project updates you know I probably have an updated home assistant I probably should check that out but they have what yeah I know it sounds unprobable unbelievable right like I have an updated home assistant I haven't even logged into it in a while I wonder if it's still running but anyway What? Yeah, I know. It sounds unbelievable, right?

Like I haven't updated Home Assistant. I haven't even logged into it in a while. I wonder if it's still running. But anyway, they've been working on their UI, Gavin. It looks actually, this is kind of the new UI that they showed off a little while ago. I watched, skimmed through the video because I couldn't watch all of it, but they talked about a bunch of stuff, and it looks like they're working on elements.

This is the card element. This is kind of little things that sit on your dashboard and are kind of like the basic, what would you say, UI building blocks of Home Assistant. So they're going to start there and revamp all of those and make them all look good. So it looks like they're working hard on it. Well, no, we've known they've been putting a lot of effort and work into their dashboards.

They said that, I think, from earlier this year. They're focusing on a lot. And just by looking at job postings and stuff, we know they are. This is just another evolution of it. The part I like is that they are calling for the community now to start helping to start migrating some of the more popular cards over from hacks into home assistant right so that's the nice part because they've they're taking hacks a lot more serious i think they're working closely with hacks now

and looking to probably at some time in the future they might just integrate it right in right um but i'd be nice because it's kind of a confusing thing as a like as a new user of like you had to tell me oh you got to go get this extra thing and add it on and it's kind of like yeah it's one of their most popular add-ons though yeah when i go to it i'm like where is this settings for this thing like i can't even find where the settings are sometimes i'm like it's very strange but it's just you know over time they found out how popular it was they can't support everything in hacks hacks lets people publish you know their own you know add-ons and stuff too right so they'll probably keep it around but they've pretty much

they've come up with a bunch of standards when it comes to tiles and features and stuff like that that's what they needed in standards, such as the icon sizes and the spacings around the icons and how the, you know, all that type of stuff, even down to the settings. And now with that, they want people to, you know, the developers to start, you know, looking at migrating some of the popular tiles and stuff

into Home Assistant and convert them to all these standards to give it the unified design and look. And I really like where they're going with this. They're putting a lot of effort into it, and that's what I like to see. It's not, as you can see, they move at a really fast pace. As much as people complain they want it now, now, now, at least we know it's coming

they just they're flying yeah they're moving yeah they're moving as fast as they can but they still need time right like they got it still a lot of cards they got to convert from yamo you know i know people hate yamo i'm a yamo fan but you know there's a lot you could do with the yamo and they still gotta convert that some of that to the UIs. But it's good to see. I really like what I see. I don't hate YAML as much as I hate Material UI. And, you know, they pretty much,

the foundation of this UI is material design. And I'm not a fan of it. I know it's really, what is nice about Material is, like, Google put a ton of energy and effort into making sure that like things scale up and down between ui so like you get a lot of that for free i just i'm not a fan of the design but you know it does look good and consistent if you have all your cards and everything using that it'll look i think they'll make it look great well it's definitely better than what came before it as well so i think it's still material ui base like

like it's just an older version so i think they said they're moving to material three, which looks better. It doesn't have all the same weird things that previous versions of material had. So can't complain too much, I guess. But yeah, it all kind of, when I see this design, I'm like, okay, you know, it comes from that.

It's only so much you can do. But it's looking better. You know, they've come a long way. For sure. And they know they have a lot to do still, but they're working towards it. Yeah, because they're probably, I mean, there's some technical debt there that they have to overcome

from standards and conventions that were popular when they first made the UI to what exists now. So, yeah. And they may piss off a few people in the process because they may have to break some things. I mean, that's, you know, Home Assistant, though. Home Assistant breaks things all the time. You know, I updated my Home Assistant before the show,

and I just realized my Amazon A-Lady is not working now. So, you know, it's a part of having home assistant. Well, mine, I guess you guys will be happy to see I'm only one number off. It seems I have gone from 2024, 6.4 to 2024, 7.4. Whoa. So not too far off here. That's because we keep you updating. I actually can't believe I updated last month. I must've done it at some point, but I don't remember doing it. And you don't even realize there's a reboot in there. That's why you do click update.

Ha ha. Well, we'll get into it in projects, but I've been playing around with the server lately. But you guys have been a lot more busy, especially TJ. TJ, you've been probably the busiest out of all of us doing your electrical things, electrician things. Yeah, I'm been probably the busiest out of all of us doing your electrical things, electrician things. Yeah, I'm playing Sparky right now. I'm

upgrading the electrical in the house. Actually, today I just finished off the rest of the kitchen. I installed new 20 amp wiring for the kitchen so that is all good to go. Everything has grounds now now which is kind of essential in 2024 um got the living room outlets all finished got the lights done for a lot of

rooms so basically now it's just like the office and the bedroom for outlets and then the electrical upgrade portion is kind of done um and then we can put money towards upgrading like the electrical panel and stuff like that luckily like the electrical side isn't that difficult i mean like i know how to fish wires through walls and ceilings and stuff like that so like running the physical wires is super easy um and like once you connect to the panel that part's relatively easy too so um it's been been pretty fun honestly and it hasn't really cost me that much i've rewired a good portion of the house for like four hundred dollars and i would like that's pretty much including the wire and the outlets and everything like that nice i'm even and i'm even fancy guys i do screwless screwless plates so i just walk in my house and i got those nice decor plates and

the screwless plates i even have screwless blank plates for the areas uh where i don't need a light stop it oh oh yeah so it's been it's been pretty fun though honestly just getting it all done and uh nicole has a hard job she has to go in and fix all the holes behind me so good luck to her i guess it's a learning experience yeah yeah my wife won't let me fix the holes that i make either i did one of them she's like yeah i'm awful she was very disappointed in my work she's like i can't believe you did that and i'm like uh it's done though yeah yeah i just i just don't have the patience to do a good job it's one of those things that's like literally watching paint dry yeah that's what it is yeah waiting for the drywall to dry and then you sand it and you put more on and then you sand it and it's just

like yeah i it's an art because i always seem to like you know you skim it with a little coat of mud and everything and you you clean it up and then you sand it and you know it just seems like every time i think i need like i should be done but every time i i always do that one swipe too many and then there's a line in the middle of it yeah and then i go go smooth it all out again and i do that one swipe too many and i get fed up and i just leave that line there you know oh the paint will cover it up the paint does not cover up your mistakes i've learned no it does not it highlights it honestly it makes it even worse it's like oh wow that does look terrible like shadows there's certain there

were certain parts like when we did our bedroom closet like where i was like we did we did the drywall and everything like that and i was like well this area is not the best but i don't think it'll be that big a deal and then we threw paint on i'm like man that looks like yeah my walls at night why did we not fix this my walls at night look great but during the day oh man i see everything just don't go in the bedroom during the day sunlight yeah yeah no and then and then when i was running the the uh the the new electrical cable um i had to so ironically um i've cut into my wall several times in the same location to run network cable and everything i bet she's really pissed off about having to replace that same hole

over and over again well luckily she didn't patch it that time so it's fine so i like i had to cut into the wall again but i accidentally nicked my my cat6 cable and so for the time being i just i just put a keystone an rj4 45 on it and i just i put it in the wall um i knew i was going to replace it at some point but i was like it's good enough you know um and whoever gets the house for me is not going to care about this wire anyway so i was like but i was like you know what I'm going to run this new Romex wire. I got to run it over to the living room anyway. I might as well go ahead and just run Cat6A for no real reason. And it's really just because my client bought me a roll of Cat6A. He was very insistent that he needed Cat6A. And I was like, all right, if you do. And so I literally

have like 800 feet and just sitting here doing nothing. and so now i have cat 6a in my living room i'm not gonna buy a switch that's gonna utilize it i don't even have anything that's gonna utilize it but it's there and that's what matters that's right you can say there's there's cat 6a in that wall honey that's right nobody Nobody's ever going to know or care. No keystones, yeah. I know it. You're future-proofed. Yeah, exactly. That's all the projects I got going on right now. I'm still waiting on my new Innaveli switches to come in. I don't know if those are ever going to come in.

I pre-ordered some, too, but they're not shipping until September, end of September, I'm told. Did you order the Presence ones? Yeah, the millimeter wave, Z-Wave ones. Oh, you did Z-Wave. Yeah, you see, the only thing I'm kind of upset in a valley about is I liked how they had the two different switches. The one with the long bar, which was the dimmer switch, and the one with the little light, which was the switch switch. Right? I liked how they had that because you kind of knew what you were getting into when you hit the switch.

If it was a dimmable switch or, you know, just a switch. But now they have a single one and they all have the light bar. And I'm not a fan of that because is it dimmable? Is it not dimmable? You know, you just, it's, I wish they kept it too. But I'm still a big fan of theirs i ordered i pre-ordered their z wave millimeter wave ones mainly for a couple rooms um i don't know if i'll ever get them but i pre-ordered them okay well i'm excited to get them so hopefully those come in at some point so i can move some other switches around you go sparky

very nice i'm just i'm impressed by the screwless blank plates if i noticed that if i came over to your house and noticed that i'd be like oh man it's it's beautiful so posh and you know it's hilarious though is that like the screwless blank plate is way more than like just the regular one and i'm like why is it so much more it's more plastic screws yeah it's more plastic i guess but it's just like more plastic here let me see if i oh here you go seth i got a picture for you and it was hilarious i have a phyllosu motion detector uh mounted to it yeah what no well because it's just for my pantry like it seems like you've wasted the blankness of it well i see i see them they're just they're

just they're exactly what you expect them to be. But man. But it was better than buying like a motion switch to work there. Ten bucks a piece. Jesus. I think I paid like five dollars. Oh, man. Yeah.

And you ruined it by putting a little. Is it just stuck on there with like some. Hell no. I screwed it right through there. That's too good. We'll have to that is there a show art where we're talking about this i think it's crooked too don't tell anybody yeah well you know photoshop it or something maybe probably not yeah that was that was the easiest way to or the cheapest way to get motion activated lights in the pantry so that cost me 40 and that was it nice all right gavin what do you got going on uh not much this week so i've been fighting with sonos my sonos setup you know i know everyone's unhappy

with them right now but um i just pile on pile on everybody yeah i'm just gonna jump on this too but um yeah my sonos i was getting a lot of buffering or you know certain speakers and having issues and stuff like that and ever since i installed sonos in my house i remember when i first installed it i had it on wi-fi only and then i was having issues so i switched everything to sonos net and that solved those issues for that time right well you know it just finally came around and started bugging me. So now I was having, again, just connectivity issues with my Sonos. So I went through and I decided, OK, well, you know, the newer ones don't have Sonos net anymore. So let me just turn off the Sonos net and get it back to regular Wi-Fi.

So they're all on Wi-Fi now and I have a good enough Wi-Fi I can handle it all. So I did all that and it works so much better now you know so you know if you know people out there you know you have a bunch of sonos speakers and you're using sonos net and you have problems um switch it back over to wi-fi just meant unplugging any ethernet cords really um i think that's what all you had to do was if they're plugged into ethernet you had to turn unplug them all and then make sure you had wi-fi turned on and they would all just use wi-fi the part that you know got me mad was how do you tell if it's using sonos net or if it's using wi-fi now you know and every document i was looking at said oh go in the app go here

go here go here and it will tell you if it's w oh that's the old app the good app so that's coming january next year yeah that's another feature they they took out of the app that you know um especially for you installers maybe that might drive you nuts but the only way i could tell after that was to load the app on windows and then in the windows app i can still go into the menu and see how they were connecting to the network so interesting yeah did you not go to the secret sonos matrix website i know i i went to robert's website i believe it was on his website um port 1400 on there yeah but i don't think it tells you how it's connected i couldn't remember i was just looking for the simple am i using wi-fi or am i using you know yeah whatever and in the windows app it's pretty laid out i mean you had to google what wm0 meant

and stuff like that but it then told me everybody was on wi-fi and at that point i airplayed to all my sonos speakers all at once. And bam, everything was just working great again. Yeah. So for those of you with Sonos, you know, maybe time to give up on Sonos Net if you're using it and it's giving you problems. Mine was giving me, well, mine was giving me some problems the other day. I wasn't sure what was causing them. But then I was also having a lot of Wi-Fi issues.

Yeah. And I went into my access points, which never give me wi-fi issues and i realized at some point and i don't know when i did this and i don't know how it happened but it must have turned off the uh the 5g radio on the wi-fi 6 connections yeah so it was really weird like everything was trying to not do what it was supposed to do and like as soon as i flipped that back on everything kind of calmed down and worked but i I'm not, I'm not really, I make it like I have one of those Sonos, I guess, is it the boost or something? It's like a little thing you plug in to give it some range for Sonos net.

And that's the only thing that's plugged in hardwired. But I wonder if I don't just like unplug that and go straight to wifi and see how the system reacts that way. It's worth a try. Cause the boost would be the central point then, right? It would go through the boost and then out to all the speakers so unless that's centrally managed essentially located i think now it well that's one thing i notice is it's not it's not at a great location but i did notice it had some like bad connection like you go to that matrix thing in the port 1400 or

whatever it is and it would be like yeah you're not doing great here with your uh with your um connection to um i don't know it's like the living room s3 or something like that play 3 or whatever it is i i did notice that i was having some connection issues with it, but I've never done the, hey, just throw all those Sonos on Wi-Fi. So maybe I'll give it a shot. Maybe I'll just throw it on the 2.5 network and call it a day, see what happens. Yeah, give it a shot. Because I also noticed on my- Can't get any worse.

Yeah, exactly. On my unified network, I also have a dedicated 2.4 network advertised because there's certain devices that just do not work with the shared five 2.4 networks. So I have a dedicated 2.4 network. And I noticed I was having issues. And when I looked at it, at some point, it enabled the 5G on that network, too. So I don't know if there was a unified update or something like that. Yeah, that's unify they love doing that they love turning things on and off on you so yeah so watch it

once i realized that and i turned back off the five um everything that was on that network started working properly again so thanks unify yeah they love doing that on their updates just randomly turning on things they think you need or turning off things or hiding a that's annoying especially when i don't know the updates you know i don't really know when it updates you know so yeah though they turned off they turned on the auto updates now pretty much by default i think when you install it so um yeah unify what are you gonna do yeah love hate relationship with them exactly are you gonna find something more Yeah. Love-hate relationship with them. Exactly. Are you going to find something more expensive? No.

No. Are you going to buy something better? No. Are you going to TP Link Omada? No. Yeah. Not going to happen. Yeah. And then, you know, next up, you know, I was talking to our friend Richard Gunther, you

know, earlier today about 3D printing stuff. And I felt like we were in a support group of, you know, overbuying filament for a bit, you know, like we're, you know, realizing we had a problem and, you know, thinking about how we can manage our problem. And what came out of that was, you know, looking for a spool manager app, you know, so we can know how many rolls of spool and, you know, like track our inventory of spools.

Wait, no. This is too much. I don't think that's necessary. Can you just look at them? Not really, because when we started counting up the number of spools, when they're not sitting in front of you, you don't know what colors you have and stuff like that. It's not just the, you don't have just one color,

but you'll have a silk spool, or you have like a silver, red, gold spool. You know, you have like a rainbow spool, stuff like that. Right. Like when they're not sitting in front of you, you don't realize what you have. And then you don't know what you're low on. So like my most useful is probably black and it would be ptg for example so i'd like to know when i'm out of that without having to go to my closet or look at it so i can reorder it and stuff like that um but yeah we were just looking at he created something and i was like that it looks really nice of what he created an online thing but i wanted something more integrated with my setup um so i on docker on

my unrate server I installed something called Spoolman. And in there you can go in and you create all your, uh, you add your, um, you know, your manufacturers, your spool types, you add your spools and you know, the tracks, the weight and everything like that. But even better is that it's integrated into the, into my OctoPrint so that when you print something, it will actually calculate how much of that spool you used and update it in the dot in the app itself. So, you know, when your spool is low, you know how much you have left. I even used it before this show. I had like 30 grams left and I needed 26 grams to do the print and bam, I was able to just finish that spool off.

Um, and I knew it wouldn't run out. So it's a cool thing called spool man. Um, and I have all my spools in there and it, it tracks it. And I know when to reorder certain colors and stuff like that. So, you know, that that's, once you get into 3d printing, these are the things you got to worry about, you know, you just real, you just open your closet one day and there's 30 spools sitting in front of you. And you don't know how it happened. You don't know when you ordered them.

You don't know what they are. They're just sitting there. You don't know what you'll use them for. And now you have an inventory problem. Yeah. Well, now with this inventory app, I know what kind of problem I have. You know, so I'm able to track my problem how does how does the spool man or whatever you call it filament man how does it know which filament

you're using you just have well in in octoprint like in mine it would have the five slots and then i just assign what spool i have in each slot so when i send a print to it it knows how much it used from each of those spools and then it updates back in the app what you used and decreases the the leftover amount right automatically so it's pretty slick how it works like that right so i can you know the the only thing is you gotta keep um keep on top of it so you got you know when you change the spool you gotta make sure you change an octoprint so that it knows what spools you're using and stuff like that but you know when you have five uh five um spool changer the mmu3 i don't have to change them often because i load them with my most common stuff

so i only have to change them when i do specialty prints you know it'd be really cool gavin if you integrated this with adt and then your neighbor can come over, unlock your door, and then start a print. Wow. Why would he even swap out? Why would he have to come over? See, you see, TJ, you're so behind. I'm sitting on my couch in my living room and they have a color printer and I needed to print up some stuff in color at like two o'clock in the morning. i changed my wi-fi over to theirs and i sent some stuff to their printer and the next day i'll pick it up in the morning yeah yeah but what if what if he needs to use your printer though gavin well he he doesn't even know how to use his cell phone so you know you know but the next morning my printouts were in his garage.

I saw him in the morning. He's like, by the way, these came out at 2 o'clock in the morning on my printer. I was like, I hope it didn't wake you up. And he grumbled something. And I was like, I laughed. Good enough. Good enough for me. They came out.

Moral of the story, don't print something at two o'clock in the morning on your neighbor's printer i'm being hacked oh it's just gavin again yeah is that the printer oh it's gavin again and i sent him a message a text message you're low on black ink you need to refill it before my next print yeah yeah oh i did order some for him so you know oh that's nice it was nice i was nice about i did order some for him you have to install yourself though yeah well no his wife knew how to do that so i left her to that yeah see i'm a nice neighbor so yeah that's spool man uh helping me manage my addiction you know that's what it's all about yeah managed managing yeah you know like if it seems like you've been managing it yeah yeah

people have as a former printaholic i understand you just get filaments all the time you have so many you don't even know where they are exactly that's what it is you know like i understand the struggle some people you buy that one because it's really shiny and you never use it again. Yeah. You get that silk PLA and you're like, oh, it looks so great. And you do one print and then you're like, what else can I print with this? Right. I don't need anything else than the shiny silver.

Yeah. But one day, well, you know, somebody will say, can you print me this? I'll be like, I have the perfect filament for that. Let me check my inventory app real quick. Yeah. You know, I'm looking for some skin colored filament now because i want to print little bobble heads sir you have a problem if you have an inventory app for your printer yeah i know i know but you have a business my problem

is organized i know how much of a problem it is and you know when i have to order more to feed that problem that's nice and your wife found out about the second printers. I mean, really, you're living the high life. The pressure's on to sell it now, but I'm going to save that for a future show. I hope people are getting a laugh out of this. One day we're going to get on Zoom one day and the background that Gavin has behind him will be different. We'll be like, Gavin, where are you?

One printer short. Looks like you moved. One too many printers. Uh, well, I have, I'm not having any good luck finding, uh,

dogs or dog robots that cost less than, uh, you know, $20,000 on Alibaba. But I did find this, which, you know, $20,000 on Alibaba. But I did find this, which supposedly costs less than $20,000. And it looks amazing. And this is the 2044 latest model,

IOT unmanned autopilot, automatic excavator demolition robot with remote control. Oh my God. I mean, obviously you understand our finances better than Gavin and I do, but I don't think we make this much money, Seth. No, no, we don't. Look at this thing.

Look at this thing. It's amazing. So there are Facebook groups dedicated to these and like the mini excavators. Yeah. And people will tell you which ones are like worth everything. Oh, man. There must be a Reddit forum. I know there's all these Facebook groups because they come up under my Facebook for some reason.

This is awesome though and it's five thousand dollars plus four thousand dollars shipping yeah under ten thousand i can get this or i can get a stupid robot dog which one would you get uh clearly clearly this is the answer order it just to test their return policy yeah it's alibaba they don't have a return policy yeah i know there was there was some youtuber that bought like a sports electric car from aliexpress and it like it did not arrive uh like a little toy golf cart thing arrived basically and they're like yep that's it that's what you bought uh yeah no but this looks amazing let's put it on a company credit card seth it's a write-off It's a write-off. It's a write-off, yeah.

If you order it now, you can get it for CDO. Drive it around the showroom floor. Drive it around the show floor. You obviously need this to advertise your lighting program. This would be great for picking up the dog poop and part of your lawn. Oh, yes. Your dog is so tiny, Gavin.

I don't think you need this. I think I feed it too much because that thing, sometimes I don't know where. You ever look at your lawn and just go, that wasn't my dog. That must be someone else's dog that came in my backyard and dropped that one. Yeah, no, this is amazing. We'll definitely put a link to this in the show notes because, man, for under $10,000, you can get one of these things. And i i i would definitely say it's worth it i mean thing looks amazing so if you got this you just use it to take up your lawn and then you never have to get a robot lawnmower well yeah

exactly you wouldn't need you wouldn't need anything you wouldn't i mean you wouldn't need anything this is yeah this is it this is everything all you need food a loving family you don't need them anymore you got this i will take one please there we go ten thousand dollars wow if he accidentally clicks buy no i know ollie ollie ollie bob is a little different you have to like talk to somebody to get stuff shipped. Yeah. That's why I've never bought anything. I don't want to talk to people. It takes some time.

I want to make late night decisions that are not good. And that does not involve talking to people. I recently ordered off AliExpress and then I started getting emails like three times a day about things that go along. $2 off coupon. But you know what? I realized what AliExpress is like, man, every mistake only cost me $3. Yeah. Right.

Like, it's like, oops, I accidentally ordered that, but it's only $3, you know? And then like for the whole month of August, I'm going to be getting like a new package every day.

It's like Christmas every day. It's like Christmas in August. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I feel about all like the two years Zigbee stuff I bought on on aliexpress i'm like it doesn't really work that well but i paid like a nickel yeah exactly better than these brilliant keypads that are sitting in my waste bin what are you what are you gonna do with those i didn't pay for those but those are still like 400 well um i i finally made my server move stuff this weekend or this last week. And I had something happen and I needed to take the server apart.

And I'm like, you know what? While I'm doing this, I'm going to rip out this, uh, was Tesla M 60 card and put it in the, in the proper server, put it in the big machine, put it in the Dell seven 30, whatever, seven 40, whatever this thing is. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do that. So I pulled it out. Oh, I, i don't know i can't remember what happened it was something to do with the video card conflict with this

motherboard or whatever because it's a consumer motherboard and um i think it kind of assumes that there's an output for video once you plug another video card in right so when you have the tesla m60 in there it's two video cards and neither of them have an output on it. Like there's no video out. It's, they're just virtual cards. So yeah, I think it just got too confused and I, I, I took it out and I had to reset the Ram or whatever.

No, the BIOS and fixed all that junk back up, rebooted. Um, Docker stuff is a little angry. It's like, Hey, where'd your video card go? I don't know. Um, but I was, I switched everything over basically plex transcoding basically i switched that over to using the built-in what do they call it igpu the intel built-in gpu in the yeah gpu yeah intel gpu yep and it works just fine because it's a modern chip and like has some kind of thing that they threw on the modern chips it's not a modern chip that you know it's breaking right now because evidently all the 13th and

14th generation are bad like whoops we broke those uh but this is the 12th generation and yeah it's got this like quick something in it quick sync i don't remember what it's like it's got that built into it and finally after years and years i guess it's all supported with the linux kernel and in unraid so it does work it worked right out of the box and i was able to yeah just get i could see like on the dashboard on unraid that it was actually doing something and transcoding video within the chip and it worked fine um so then i went to the big computer and i'm like all right shut, shut this thing down. Let's pull it out. Let's dust things off.

You know, just some basic maintenance. I've been sitting down there running, doing nothing for, I don't know, a year or so. And I plugged the card in. It took me a little while to figure out like where the power cord was supposed to get plugged into because it wasn't evident. Like it wasn't on the motherboard. It was on the riser card. Turns out, uh, got all that situated, turned it back on. And it just like, iter card turns out uh got all that situated turned

it back on and it just like it's like not not gonna happen and i was like what the heck and i go and look at the you know the uh what's it called the lights out program that they have on the dells and it's like yeah you're fine just turn the thing on that's all you gotta do so i'm like turn on turn on and the little power supply lights are just blinking in the back like yeah something's wrong and like ah what could this be well it turns out after reading that the dell requires you to have 1100 watt power supplies minimum for adding a gpu card in so oh my gosh so 1100 watts watts. Had to upgrade two power supplies to 1,100 watts. And it should be here later this week. It's like 30 bucks, but yeah.

It's a 30 bucks well spent, I think. Eventually I will have the system back up and going to do random. I've been running the LLM stuff on code generation stuff on it too. So it's been kind of fun. But now that it's down, none of that's working, which no one misses but me. And I'll get it back up and going. But that was kind of my big project,

was finally doing some unraid maintenance, I guess, that needed to be done for a while, six months or a year. I don't know. It's been a while. It's been on the project list, that needed to be done for a while, six months or a year. I don't know. It's been a while. It's been on the project list, but I got it done. And all is well with the Plex. Although my Plex, and if anybody has an idea what this is, Plex does not work on iOS or my phone when I look at my movie library. Okay. So I look at my movie library, it says no content, nothing in there. If I go to the webpage, all the content's there all the movies are there if i go on my ios device or my apple tv right and i go to plex and i go to like categories for the movies and select like a category drama

horror or whatever the movies are in there and you can play them they're in the you know up next or you started watching but for whatever reason the library and um what is it the collections no content it's gone i don't and i don't and clearly it's not not gone like i it's it's there uh but i don't i don't know what it is if anybody has any idea how to fix it i've done everything that i could find roughly related to this uh including making sure it's updated and all that good stuff um but i for the life of me i can't figure out why i can't see my movies inside plex anymore they're just all gone i think i'm gonna have to just kill the library out rebuild it from scratch um and hope you know and rebuild

all my collections back up that's gonna suck yeah i think you need um a 1500 watt power supply oh yeah probably the 1500 watt that's probably what it is. No. Yeah. That's how they get you. It's always something with these nickel and diamond me left and right. $30 here, $30 there. Soon enough, I'll have a closet full of power supplies and not know what to do with them.

I'm going to have to get the power supply man app here on my Docker. I just checked on my server. Yeah, my server has two 1200 watt power supplies. So that's how I'm running two video cards off of it. So that my server. Yeah, my server has two 1200-watt power supplies. So that's how I'm running two video cards off of it. So that's nice. Yeah. I had no idea. I guess people were complaining it's not written down anywhere in the Dell documentation that you have to do this.

So it's kind of like, hey, we got you. But not a big deal. Power supplies are cheap. Yeah. At least these are. What server is yours? I think it's the r730 yeah that's the same one i have and i find when you start getting into these servers

um like things work but are they supported no right like oh right right i throw i throw a couple video cards in and they're non-supportive video cards. And yeah, I got them working, but they do things like drive the fans crazy because the server can't tell the temperature of them anymore or something like that, right? So you can get them working, but when you get into the server hardware type of things, you start to run into these type of issues. I do like the hardware. I mean, it's extremely well built,

extremely well built. Like it's awesome to open it up. I show my daughter, I'm like, Hey, this is what a computer is. And she's like, okay,

can we go play? Yeah. I love, you can slide it out and you open up the keys and, you know, and I got a powerful one. So it's like, I have 24 cores or 48 hyper thread or 120 gigs of memory.

I have like everything on this and i love it right um you know it just takes a little bit more understanding yep yeah and and i guess general knowledge about servers but yeah yeah at least it's google like a lot of people have these so they run into the same problem so you can google the issues right and i will say that at least as far as i can tell dell is a little bit better about um supporting this not supporting this stuff but uh like having more of an open forum for you to go and figure out like how to get it the hp that i had was all kind of like locked down behind enterprise forums and they you know all the information they had when this thing was out was of like locked down behind enterprise forums and they you know all the information they had when this thing was out was of course deleted yeah and moved over to a new website for hpe

so now you have to go and say though hp.com where this thing existed when you know you can't find all the drivers or anything or updates or anything there so what a pain that was um but the 730 is fairly modern like you said many many people have them they're very inexpensive to get and i i got and and that's the sad part is like if you're building an unraid server like look for something like this because they're so powerful and they're so cheap because a lot of companies are offloading them because they're not the latest ones you know so you could pick them up used um fully loaded for a really good price because companies just don't need them anymore.

Right. And we're talking lots of computers too because everybody went to the cloud, so they got to get rid of these things. Exactly. Yeah, there's lots of them out there. And for a good price, you know, a few hundred bucks, you can get what was, when it was shipped, probably a $10,000 server. Exactly.

Insane how much those things cost new because i was recently buying one from work and my boss was like hey let's just get one from dell.com let's just get a new one and i'm like i don't think you know what you're saying so let's take a look at the new price and we looked at it and was like that's a that's a that's a new car and then uh and i was like let's go look at the ebay price and we bought on ebay for like 600 bucks and yes done like it's way it's way more than we ever need for the little development machine that we put in so and it's like a newer version like 740 i don't know it's it's not it's not it's like a rack mount it's not a rack mount it's a stand stand up and down one that they yeah the rack we had at the office wasn't deep enough for the oh yeah you you need a deep rack for these things but my basement's like looking like a data center now i had the space for it nice all right well that's all i got i

think that's going to wrap up this week um if uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support the show through our patron page if you don't know how to uh you don't know about the 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 gets you a big shout out here on the show but uh any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show but every single pledge gets you invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about well this today we were talking about you know what if we had a hub that didn't have matter on it and this this idea came

from uh greg and what we would call it we call it the animator hub and yeah it would have like uh z wave which is dead tm that's trademark tj and then uh bluetooth mesh because it's always popular next year and because they always say that and then wi-fi with uh five gigahertz because uh 2.4 is for losers you know you only want the five gigahertz only and then uh insteon because you know they they survived maybe they're still there yeah they're around yeah just and then x10 you got to have that on there for legacy stuff and knx for our boys in europe hey yeah there we go we mentioned them we mentioned them a you gotta have dolly in there some dmx you know we have all that stuff in there dante uh yeah dante why not we'll put dante in there we're not doing audio but we'll do it

we'll pay for the license why not yeah it's it's just a chip who cares uh and then all join we'll have that in there i mean you remember all join that was supposed to be like you know like firewire we're supposed to like revolutionize the smart home but you know whatever uh and then you know we'll make it run home assistant you just because like it's not going to actually run home assistant that won't be the software but just make it like off on the side yeah like kind of like another hub that we know i just thought the voice control that. Yeah, we'll just use it for voice control. And then the request for IR. Oh, yeah.

I threw in a request for RF. Oh, and you said I had to have a mic, not for voice control, but for identifying birds, which I thought was genius. There you go. You have to have that mic, yep. The mic will not work for voice control.

You'll have to have another device for that. This is only for bird identification. So, yeah. Any Colorado VNet support, though? Oh, yeah. I don't know. I don't know if we can do that. Probably can't do that one, my bad.

Yeah. Well, I think if we were to make an anti-matter hub, that would be it. That would be the specs. Pretty good stuff there. Comes out to CES next year, right? 2025. That's right. Greg, give us your money now

see you later it'll be matter compatible right no just it does everything but matter yeah although i guess you could like use home assistant to backdoor matter into the thing so yeah well there you go ah we'll have to take home assistant out yeah what are you gonna all right uh if you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating app. And the positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech.

Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Until next time. all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes for hometech.fm slash 492 who put that up there what are we laughing at where where ah it's too good the title name