HomeTech.fm - Episode 502 - Peppermint Rack Guard

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

On this week's show: Eero ventures outdoors with their new Wi-Fi 7 device, Sonos makes waves with their Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 announcements while maybe planning premium headphones, Wiim partners with Audio Pro, Philips Hue adds customizable lighting effects, Kwikset and Ecobee expand their smart lock integrations, Arlo introduces their first wired floodlight camera, TJ checks out Nanoleaf's new outdoor lights, Gavin dives into Home Assistant's LLM Vision capabilities, a pick of the week, project updatres, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, October 25th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm CJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation. Extended breaks. Extended breaks through the summer. Yeah, yeah. We're back.

Yeah. Welcome back, everybody. I did release the last time show eventually, but I guess, when did we record last? I don't even remember. It was like for, what, the 17th? Yeah, it was a while ago, and we're getting flack about things I don't even remember talking about. Yeah, I slept in then.

I can't really tell you. What did I say that upset people? Honestly, I was getting a little concerned. I thought maybe you guys just kicked me off the podcast and somehow blocked me. And so I was like, they moved to Discord. Like, what's going on here? So glad to know that you did not do that. So I think it was roughly, roughly what 20 days ago we were we

had a pod we sat down to record for podcast that's so long yeah it was a long time so much has changed so what's going on seth how'd you uh yeah yeah fun um we sat down record the podcast no it was on thursday that's what it was it was a super late thursday night thing we had to do and and i was like yeah i'm not gonna, not gonna edit this for Friday. Well, it turns out by Saturday, there was a category five hurricane bearing down directly on my house. And, um, even the little track maps were kind of funny. I have a nice little, like zoom and enhance video of the, the, the hurricane tracking, like zooming in to where it goes in at Florida. And it literally goes right. Like the little line was over like straight over two

houses, you know, it's kind of like a made up line or whatever, but like, it was kind of wild to see like, Oh, that's coming here. So, um, we, uh, we like quickly booked a hotel or on Saturday, Saturday and Sunday, I think I booked a hotel and then spent the whole weekend trying to get the house put together. And, uh, you know, you got the, you got the boards you put up on the windows. You're trying to, like, prepare everything. You try and pack some stuff up. And then we got out of town. We went to Orlando and set up shop there for the week.

And, yeah, hurricane hit, direct hit. Direct hit on Sarasota. It's a good thing you left. Jeez. And you guys got to see a little bit of it. That was exciting. Yeah. Yeah, exciting. Let's watch the weather on YouTube channel. I had the weather channel up on

one screen and then I had your camera house camera up on, you know, picture in picture. And it's like watching it live happen. Yeah. I don't, I don't think I put, I didn't publish that to the live feed. I just kind of like send it around to the the hub and everything i think just kind of like threw it up here and there um but we had like a so i figured this out while i was sitting in my hotel room i had connectivity back to the house and so i i was able to get on unraid and make a docker for this thing called restreamer or something what it did was it would it took it took a camera feed uh it can take any feed like you could take an output from like uh obs or whatever it's kind of like a if you've ever used that restream web service that's out there restream or something like that where it can like

pipe the video to different services this is kind of like a self-hosted way of doing that i just happened to run across it and i said you know what g Gavin told me how to use Dockers at one point in time in my life. I'm going to use this. Yeah, it's called Restreamer. And their icon looks like they stole it directly from Adobe, but it allows you to send streaming in real time. You can stream H.264 video of IP cameras live to your website, and you can pump your live video to YouTube Live, Ustream, Twitch, livestream.com. Basically, I took that and I shot it over to our YouTube channel, which we've done live stuff in the past,

but just made a little unlisted video and had what, I think it was like 18 hours of it going. Cause it was like done a day or two in advance or whenever and I had to see if it worked before I sent out the link. But yeah, what was cool was it was the new Uniview camera that I had right before I left the house. I was like, I'm going to drill a hole here and run this wire outside. And, uh, I ran a wire down my driveway, like in, in like the side of the driveway where you would normally edge and then up my mailbox and it faced my house.

So you're like, I had a decent picture of the house when all this was going on. And, uh, it's not a good picture now because like I parked my car in front of it right now. So now it just sees the back taillight in my car and nothing else. But for the hurricane,

um, it had a really good view of the whole house. Like you, and you can even see like the neighbor's trees swaying back and forth in the wind and that kind of stuff. And since it was what they call the owl view, which is the nighttime view thing that we talked about, man, it was nice and clean. It was enjoyable. Yep.

I kept an eye on your house for you. I let you know every time something was blowing off, your car cover was coming off. Didn't you say you got a package or something? I was joking about that. Yeah, that'd be funny. I did. He wasn't joking. I did actually get a package. It was a few hours before that, but FedEx came through super late and dropped packages off at people's houses. And my neighbor, who's the only one one that stayed saw them doing this stupid act and went out and got pack the packages off the doorstep from everybody's house but yeah i i do not know what they were thinking they could have held that for a few days he's just like nope off my truck yep exactly i get paid by the container here you go we'll deliver in any

weather lots of lots of notes on hurricanes uh i uh power power sucks evidently um when we lost power i guess we lost it on wednesday and it was if you're watching the video it was right before i mean right when the eye was hitting so that was like not the worst part of the storm turns out that was like kind of tame it was like everybody thought it was worse and then the eye went over people went out said they went outside their house and they could look up and see the clouds all around, you know, they were directly in the center of it. And, um, then I guess the backside of the hurricane was actually the worst that hit us. So that had like the 90 and a hundred mile an hour, 130 mile an hour wind. So that is when, uh, things went crazy, but I had lost power well in advance of that. And, uh, it did not come back

on until Sunday night, about nine or 10 o'clock, somewhere in there. And by that time we were back, we'd already cleaned out the fridge, you know, the fridge and freezer and everything that died there. But I, man, I've been looking at house batteries for the past week. Like as I'm there, you know, it's prime day, right? So it was prime day that week. And Anchor is putting them those, like, what are they called? The anchor Solux, uh, bat house battery things on sale. Like they were sale like 35% off these things. I'm like, Oh man, this is so tempting. But if you look at it, like they're not that big and the only, the only power things for a few hours, it's like a, it's like just kind of like a thing that like would replace the generator until you

can turn the generator on. Essentially. I am looking at house batteries when I use, and I hate generators. I'm going to make that. Every time I've had a generator, I bought a generator. I take it out diligently and I test it once, twice a year. Well, I guess the last time I tested it, I forgot to turn the gas knob thing off the valve and drain it like I normally do. And so that gunked up the carburetor and the carburetor did not work and as much cleaning. And I literally sat there for hours cleaning out the carburetor did not work, would not work anymore. Didn't, did not start. So went over, got a generator from a family member, drug it back to the house, put some gas in it,

cranked it up and I got the refrigerators cooled down. And then I was looking around like, all right, well, I may as well fill this up because the power's not coming on, you know, tonight. And I filled up their generator full of gas and then the power came on almost immediately. So that's payment. That's payment for borrowing. I had to drain all of it back out. It was ridiculous. Oh man. No, we should drain it this time. I've got a new carburetor on my generator. So in, um, you know, five years or whenever we have another hurricane and maybe a power outage, I will be ready for that. But I think I am going to switch it over to propane, um, because one propane doesn't gunk up your generator. And, uh, two, I can get like a decent size propane tank or whatever. And I guess a little conversion kits, like you can run it in gas mode as well. It doesn't have

to be just in propane mode but um you know i'll i may i'll keep a couple gas cans around for the extended outages but i think it'll run off propane well enough for us to keep the fridge and freezer if we're in town keep the fridge and freezer uh going this time we left town because uh i wouldn't play with a cat 5 hurricane yeah not where we live uh but it luckily it did slow down and hit as like a pretty strong three. Would you ever consider something like the Generacs, the whole home things that, you know, kick in automatically? Yeah.

Honestly, I would at this point. They're very expensive to get hooked up and everything because you got to get like an inverter. Well, not an inverter, a switch switch what do they call it a takeover switch hooked up where it when the when the mains kicks off it it it will completely cut off everything um and switch over to the generator power um i would do that i just i don't know i it's it would be it's one of those things that would be nice. The, are, there are people that in that I do know that's had power throughout this whole thing. And even when the power is off, like a cat three is going to kick power off for a few days for most everybody. And it's just,

it's going to happen. Like there's no getting around it. Um, anything bigger, it would be longer, but we would still be without power. But the people I did see with power, like some of my clients, they, they, you know, we were calling everybody checking everybody checking on everybody they had like uh one of those generac things with um they hooked up to the like the natural gas lines that's the way i would go yeah that's the best way honestly yeah we don't have we don't have natural gas in my neighborhood so like you know it's in the fancy neighborhood where they have gas for their torches you know yeah propane sounds like the best the second best option honestly yeah i think you get a little less power with propane if i remember correctly but oh like it doesn't

make enough it doesn't uh run the generator is jim from the uh home home gadget geeks uh is always talking about that um there's i i i think i remember this correctly that that propane is not as powerful as like gas or diesel or something like that diesel i think is the strongest one yeah you know and i remember him talking about he had like a storm go through and he's been talking about generators for a while and uh i remember him saying that he that's what he did and like when in one of the military branches he said he was uh kind of a generator yeah yeah i need to go pick his brain a little bit yeah i probably would he knows a lot about him and i will say like we we were happy well my wife was really happy watching like you guys were watching the front camera and we were kind of

keeping an eye on the like the creek in the back so we had like a rear facing camera i was watching that one too it was interesting yeah yeah well yeah you have you have access to all the cameras even the one in the bathroom so she was most concerned when that went off and it was like you know three two or three hours later, we were not hearing anything from, we're hearing from relatives, you know, family members that like, they're like holding their door, you know, they're leaning on their door to make sure the wind doesn't blow it open. And we're like, oh man, this isn't good.

You know, I wonder what's going on at the house. And she, my wife was worried. We're like, we can't do anything to see the level of the Creek. Like even after the storm has blown through, we know the worst, the worst is over, but like, we, we have no idea if the house is going to flood. And, um, I, I I'm like, yeah, there's really not a good way to do that. So I'm, I'm, I'm racking my brain trying to figure out some kind of sensor or something where i can get some kind of telemetry data off of it and pull it in somehow i mean he's got to work probably on like cellular or something they have um so i was looking at this for a friend um they have cameras that you add a cellular chip to

and they'll take photos or whatever and upload it over the cell network you can access it that way and they also have the battery or the the solar powered panel so yeah so they're made for um uh i think some of them are they set it up in a forest oh yeah like a like a trail camp yeah similar to that so if you really wanted to get into that but um they do have those kind of options if you want i don't know i i just want little a little bit of data all i need to know is like water is here and like if it's gone up to here then you know we can worry a little bit more but if the water's not there i you know we shouldn't have to worry just just don't even think about it seth i mean at that point what's gonna happen you're gonna worry about it even more. What's going to happen? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I don't know. Like, the county does have, and I guess if you look in your area, the county or municipality will have, like, sensors strewn throughout. And generally, those sensors are available online. And they report the levels of creeks and watersheds, you know, like rivers and that kind of thing. Usually about every hour or so. And you can pull data from that. I think what happened was their servers went down too until they came back online. There was like a black hole of data there.

But like there was a couple hours it was like waiting for the data to show up. And it finally did. So I don't know what happened. I mean, it could have been anything there, but like finally did come back online. Uh, and I was able to say, okay, well, based on historic evidence, like if I look back when it did flood, the level right now is not as high as then. And it's going down like based on like the last couple of readings. So I think we're okay. We can go to sleep. So the water did get high, evidently. It still flooded into my neighbor's swimming pool, which it did on the last big flood thing too.

And knocked over a bunch of things. Like the wind damage is crazy around here. And if you're on the beach, I mean, they got hit hard the last couple of storms. And this time, you you know just in a major way like there's sand covering everything i have a i have one client that has like five feet of sand on their entire property like like their swimming pool is full of sand like i've been watching them dig it out on the camera did your weather station survive this time it did survive yeah yeah unfortunately without the power

i thought this would it would um it would save like it's uh like a few days of data i i've got to call uh tempest up and find out if they have a better system because like when it when it doesn't have power it should save inside there like a couple days days worth of data. So I was like, oh, well maybe when I get back, it'll upload that data and I'll have like how fast the winds went and everything. But no, it didn't, it was,

it was gone. So that's, that's what I want. I want something that's like more offline and can like report and back up. And then like, if it doesn't report, like save a, save a log or something,

um, you know, so it you know so it can so it can be brought back in later i'm i'm i've got a couple of ideas i'm exploring a couple of things so it's it's that's going to go up on my project board of things to do sensors and uh when when when the internet's down kind of thing all right i'll just forget about it from now because we know it won't ever get done so i won't ask about it again yeah don't even forget about it from now because we know it won't ever get done. So I won't ask about it again. Yeah, don't even worry about it. It's all right, Seth.

We forgive you. Let it go. Hurricanes. It's just a thought board. You just put things on there you thought about. You never look back at it again. It says Seth's project list. Oh, one of the things I did not do, but I did have a solution for,

as I was walking out the door and did not do, but I did, did have a solution for as I was walking out the door. And, um, I realized that on the ONT, since I hadn't done that first thing on the thing on the project list, which is as move my ONT over to the rack where the UPS battery backup is, as I was walking out the door, literally shutting off the, you know, shutting the last door, I was like, Oh no, the internet doesn't have any backup on it. If the power goes out, like there will be no internet. So I ran to my desk and I grabbed the little tiny little APC battery off of it.

And I ran over to the ONT and like quickly swapped the plug around and everything. And then ran out the door. So I think with the batteries, battery backups that I have, not really intelligently done. Like I should have probably shut down stuff. I still got about 30 minutes, 35, 40 minutes out of just running everything electronic, two servers and all that stuff. So I probably shut, shut things down and NAS drives down and all that good stuff earlier and got a little more power out of it. But then again, like the restreamer thing was

running on a giant Dell server. So I don't, I wouldn't have got much more out of it. But then again, like the restreamer thing was running on a giant Dell server. So I don't, I wouldn't have got much more out of it. But in the future, I'm gonna see if I can keep that thing going for days. We'll find it.

We'll figure out a way. Where there's a will, there's a way. Hurricane proof Seth. Hurricane proofing. At least get some sensor data back. At least get it.

Like, it would be nice, like you said, have something like a camera that does connect to a cell phone tower. Send a picture back of your house so you know it's destroyed or not. Oh, well, there it is. There it's not.

How long do we have until the next hurricane? You know, next year. Who knows? 50-50 chance. There was one I saw. Was it Oscar? Hurricane Oscar or something like that? Yeah.

Yeah. I thought it was coming up your way. I don't even know about that one. Yeah. It turned around and went the other way. It's been real nice and cool here for the last couple of days. So I think our season's over. Once we get into this weather, the Gulf will cool down and we don't have to really worry too much about them anymore.

Yeah, that's good. And the iguanas are okay. Well, yeah. Now we got to worry about the iguanas falling out of the trees. That's all there is. That's right. Iguana season. Yep. Yeah. Hopefully we won't have another one of those just like that was a i guess the first times that it's hit this area since like the 20s so oh wow yeah it's it's been a long time and

it happens and nature what are you gonna do Luckily we didn't have any house, really major house damage. I have about a thousand dollars worth of roof damage to, you know, repair shingles and stuff that flew off. But other than that, did you try shooting the hurricane? I mean, I don't know if anybody in Florida really tried that.

I mean, there's, there's some people in Florida. I think that's a good idea, but it doesn't, it doesn't do anything. Yeah. That's unfortunate.

Um, well, there's been like 10 weeks of news now but we do have a couple of home tech headlines so what do you guys say we uh jump into this stuff and get it done let's do it let's do it all right first up big news today ero launched its first outdoor wi-fi rated access point the ero outdoor 7 it's priced at 350 it's a dual band Wi-Fi 7. Offers both 2.4 and 5 gigahertz connectivity and up to 15,000 square feet of coverage with speeds up to 2.1 gigabits per second. So outdoor rated IP66 works from negative 40 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold, Gavin. Like that's pretty

cold. Negative 40 Fahrenheit and all the way up to 130, that's pretty hot, too. Negative 40 Fahrenheit, isn't that like zero degrees? No, no, no, no, no. Let's see. Actually, I think that's negative 40 centigrade, too. Oh, yes, yes, yes. That's, I think, where it intersects. It's where they match up.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right, because we go down to negative 30, so that's good. Yeah, well, and then if you ever get to 54 degrees celsius uh then you you'll also be able to use this camera this uh access oh at that temperature not even the iguanas will survive so i'm not worried about it you need to move somewhere else at that point so as an ero dealer i'm actually really excited for this and i have to ask why did it take so long because i do a lot of euro installations

and outdoor people want to use their wi-fi outside and other people already have the solution like orby already has an outdoor unit and a couple other people do and so just just make an outdoor unit and it's crazy it's taking this long but for 350 i'm happy with it 15 000 square feet that's a lot of coverage in an open space so put it up somewhere high and you'll be good to go so do you like at my place i don't have an actual dedicated outside wi-fi right but i have my wi-fi is mounted on the wall it's an outs uh what they call it on one of the outer walls towards the backyard and i get a great signal outside so i don't did do people really need this because my other i also have one in my garage though right um yeah well you've you've solved the problem by not putting them outside and i don't think i've never been to your house

but from the pictures your yard doesn't look particularly big or deep damn and so you wow i mean i mean i don't ouch no i think if you have like a larger outdoor space um and maybe you can't put like an outdoor access or an access point like an exterior wall like that i think they make sense yeah um or if like you're doing like an outside outdoor tv or something and you want high speed internet um i think it's worthwhile to have an access point i'm probably the worst person to ask though because i have three access points on my 1100 square foot house yeah definitely the worst person to ask yeah i have access points inside your house or they just all outface i do i have one i have one inside but

i have one in the front of the house and one in the back of the house um and the reason really is for iot devices right because the front of the house i have my lifex landscape lights one in the back of the house. And the reason really is for IoT devices, right? Because the front of the house, I have my LIFX landscape lights, and in the backyard, I have whatever I have going on at the time. And so it's nice just to have those dedicated access points for those devices. I have like, yeah, I have four access points in my little house. But it's like, yeah, I do get great signal outside. But I also, like I said, I strategically place them. So basically they are on different floors, but I also have them on different corners on each floor, almost like a spiral. Right. So like, you know, and one of them's in my garage.

And even though the garage gets cold, it's still protected from the elements. And I think it's the Flex. No, it's one of the other ones that they say can work outside. So it's been fine. Right. Yeah. So it's been fine. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. No, this is, it makes sense when you have a bigger backyard.

And yeah, like you said, if you want to stream like TV or something, high speed out there. Yeah. It would make sense. Yeah. Yeah. This is kind of neat too. It also works as a smart home hub for Thread, Zigbee and Matter devices. So it's got that, got some dual purpose built into this thing. It works as a smart home hub for Thread, Zigbee, and Matter devices. So it's got some dual purpose built into this thing.

Wait, it works as a smart home hub. Okay, yes. With Eero, they have their integration, I guess, into their ecosystem through there? Well, I think it just builds in. Like, it builds in probably for the Matter devices. They don't have a Thread automation system. It's just going to bring in those devices as a smart home hub.

Yeah. So you said it has ZigBee too? Mm-hmm. Thread and, I guess Thread, ZigBee, and Matter, it says. Yeah. Okay. I see what they're doing. Eero's also used by ISPs too.

So maybe some of those integrations, I don't know. Maybe they can use the stuff for that. I will say it also depends, going back to like why would you have this it also depends on like what your house is made made out of like we have a lot of homes here that are block wall uh and then on the outside of that they do that like chicken mesh and then they put the plaster over the top of that and so like it's really hard to get anything outside like it's there but it's not doesn't ever work and sometimes you really just need to have an access point outside so um yeah this is great i like how it's wi-fi 7 uh which is

i'm hooked it up it's not even it's not even a ratified thing yet they yeah, it's back to 2024 for the Wi-Fi Certified 7 program to ramp up. Better late than never, Wi-Fi Alliance. But, you know, here we are. And then Wi-Fi 8 is 2028. We'll be swapping these things out for Wi-Fi 8. Well, 2028, that means we'll be doing it in 2027. TV Link will have something out in 2027. Say it's Wi-Fi 8 so i i think one of the things we maybe we glossed over this too but one of the things that's actually kind of cool about this too is that it actually works it says and i i want clarification on this but it seems to work as a building uh bridge as well oh cool uh point to point so in the article it says the Outdoor 7 also offers point-to-point connectivity.

So two placed in a line of sight can extend a network to other buildings like a shed or garage. So, I mean, that's a good idea for only $350.

Obviously, you need two of them, so that's $700. Way more expensive than like the UniFi Air Max set up. UniFi has a couple, yeah. But, I mean,

if you're already in the Eero system and you just want something that's going to be plug-and-play for $700, heck yeah. That's the key mean if you're already in the euro system and you just want something that's going to be plug and play for 700 bucks heck yeah that's the key is if you're already in the euro system like you can just extend it instead of having to switch systems because yeah i was actually you looking at the unify one um and they give you like fiber speeds between buildings right and i was like i was impressed i'm not looking to get one, but I was impressed.

But if this can give you some kind of speed, that would be great too. Well, and the UniFi stuff works great. I use those for connecting camera systems to separate buildings and stuff like that, and they're rock solid years later. Supposedly, this is going to be about 20% faster than Wi-Fi 6 speed. So with a theoretical maximum speed

of 46 gigabits per second oh man that's that's not gonna happen but that's fast yeah

you're like sitting right on top of the device I suppose but yeah pretty cool pretty cool nice to see outdoor products

outdoor anything come from Eero that's kind of nice this is their first right they don't have they don't have

a Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 5 they just have no they literally don't have an outdoor of nice this is their first right they don't have another they don't have a wi-fi six or wi-fi five that they just have no they literally don't have an outdoor unit yeah this is their first one so it's always always been annoying well it says here that it was extreme it was tested in extreme environments including arizona heat and 100 mile per hour wind tunnels so it might have might have held up here oh yeah yeah that's what fedex was dropping off your house all right i would never. No one will ever know. Oh, man. Too bad. All right.

Well, in case you were wondering, yes, we do have Sonos news this week because they have unveiled the Arc Ultra soundbar and the Sub 4. Woo! Yay. And they've also done improvements to their mobile app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah. We hear that every week. All right.

So, uh, the arc ultra priced at, uh, nine, $999, a thousand bucks is, uh,

an enhanced version of the original arc has, uh, has the new mate. Did anybody listen to how they pronounce this? M a Y H T mate might. That's not, I don't know. I don't know.

The new speakers that they, uh, they've been talking about, uh, for a couple of years now, the company company they bought they bought a company and then they got these speakers and they put them in this thing and now they're charging a thousand dollars for it so uh and then they also have a new subwoofer uh which which uh i all i could figure out that it comes in a matte finish now instead of shiny finish so um there you go the new is i think it's the same price too yeah why even release the

new sub yeah that confused me keep the same sub just call it sub you're not gonna change it why why do you gotta make a new version i mean if if apple can release phones and make a big deal about a new color i guess they could do too right i guess so yeah i don't understand it's the same size same look same probably the same sub it just has different paint on it so you know they could write a number four on it and no one really well honestly i would i would be interested in the soundbar if i wasn't boycotting sonos right now uh because the regular sonos arc i've never thought was that good my play bar sounds better than the sonos arc um especially for the cost but i don't know if it's worth paying an additional 200 i mean i don't know a thousand dollars for a soundbar is a lot of money so is this gonna replace the arc are they

gonna have both of them do you see people gonna have both do you see people with the arc you know running out to upgrade their arc to this one now see i feel like they should just drop the regular arc price to like six or seven $700 and then have this one. That would be the best idea. As a $300, $400 upgrade? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And it's like you just have a better one, but it's Sonos and Patrick Spence is not around the company, so it's not going to happen.

Yeah, I don't think it's going anywhere either. It would be nice if you could do this and then have more speakers somehow rather than just a soundbar surround sound one of these days someone else gonna figure it out but yeah got new speakers you don't have any more like speakers people would buy if they just like opened up like the the fronts to have like three separate channels like if you would instantly buy like uh like three uh era 300s yeah instantly i i probably would i mean that's those things sound great and you put three of them or you put five of them in a room put nine of them i don't know like gosh come on sell me 11 speakers sono just do it i know how this works just tilt them at different angles yeah let me give you money let us hook up four

subwoofers let's do it come. Come on. Yeah. Open it up. It says sub four. That doesn't mean you can have four subs. It's just one sub. I guess you can have two. You can have two, right? Yeah, you can have two. Yeah.

I think a lot of people are asking just to be able to add the two front speakers, you know? Yes. Why don't they just allow us to do that? We'll buy more speakers. That's what I'm saying. Headphones. Headphones, guys. The future's headphones. Oh, we forgot to put that news in there, but that's what i'm saying headphones headphones guys the

future's headphones oh oh we forgot to put that that news in there but we might as well talk about that too sonos has been rumored uh to create a uh another pair of headphones and drop the current headphones down in price so um they're going to come up with a more premium brand of headphones because i guess when you're down you might as well just double down, right? And what will these new headphones do? Just sound better? I don't know. Will they become a zone?

You know, that would be hilarious, right? Is if they gatekeeped it and they're just like, hey, look, you have these headphones and they work exactly how we said. But now we have these new headphones for the same price and they work as a sonos zone yeah so i found the report is over on the on forbes sonos introduces its first first headphones earlier this year uh the sonos ace and now they're rumored to uh going going to market they're going to reach some more premium premium ones and then these are going to be discounted i don't i don't get this knock 50 off the price of the current model and then sell more upscale version at 450 some sonos employees are skeptical that the move would succeed but the discussions show that the company realizes it

has a problem this is rumors from mark german so a problem hmm who is that i'll put links to this in the show notes if you want to check it out you can more sonos news sonos news all the way down um this next uh story here i have labeled as sonos but it's not sonos it's uh it's uh the vacuum the the void that's being filled in from the vacuum of sonos dropping the premium brand weem which we've talked about here on the show is forming a partnership with audio pro to leverage their operating system, like put their software on the products that, that a speaker company offers. So CE pro has a story.

Weem is a partner with audio pro to integrate its Weem OS into the audio pros speakers, the A10 and the C10 MK mark two, I guess is what you call it, MK2. This collaboration merges AudioPro's longstanding expertise in speaker design with Wiem's user-friendly OS, which, just like the Sonos, the old Sonos app. The good one. The good one.

So this is kind of neat. They're dropping the Wiem OS right on into these smart speakers. Yeah, I assume there's a processor and computer in there and everything uh the c10 mk2 is priced at 2.99 and the a10 mk2 uh is a 3.99 and it's available through various retailers um pretty smart it's pretty smart by wem i always thought sonos was going to do this especially after they partnered with ikea to make speakers like it seemed like the thing to do like team up with somebody who makes speakers and put your smart software because that's literally what you are in there and make the speakers smart but they never did it they never pulled it off other than ikea yeah those random well those random like works with sonos like av receivers there's a few

and far between right yeah right that was i didn't want to like make it like a credible thing but had to mention it so nobody commented about it and i have nothing bad to say about weim like i have one of their devices i can't remember which one it was but it's set up with some speakers and i use it and it just works right um I think they're making a lot of good moves and they got a number of years ahead of them. I think we'll see them come out pretty big and they have a good price. Yeah, good price, solid software,

solid copy of Sonos' old interface. So yeah, if you enjoy the old interface that Sonos had, head on over to Wiem. They've got you covered. All right, let's move on here. So, yeah, if you enjoy the old interface that Sonos had, head on over to Weem. They've got you covered. All right. Let's move on here. In lighting news, Philips has rolled out a new update to its Hue app.

It introduces customizable lighting effects, allowing users to adjust the intensity and color of effects. Updates includes four new effects, Cosmos, Underwater, Enchant, and Sunbeam, expanding the total up to 10. Users can now modify existing effects like the candle and fireplace simulations, change the base colors, and adjusting brightness and speed. This is pretty cool. It's a little interface update, and it kind of lets you customize things a little bit further.

I really, I like seeing this because I like how this has been implemented in the Philips Hue app to make something like... These effects are not easy to do on the programming side of things when you are using something like WLED, which has a hot garbage of an interface. I was just going to say that. It's free software, so you get what you pay for. But the interface to set up these types of effects is just horrible and i think philips does a great job of making

their lighting effects approachable uh so yeah i'm happy to see this yeah and honestly that's why i've i've looked into doing a lot of like the diy lighting product uh projects um like like you've mentioned wled and stuff like that um and they all seem really cool and really affordable and flexible and all that stuff but then i look into uh i look into the rest of it and i just i don't know i can't do the programming side of things in a clean way yeah um and i and i prefer to have like like the nano leaf app or the lifex app or whatever it is show me those and let me edit them and everything like that. So I think that is one of those things.

I do like it internet connected. Yeah. Yeah. And like another, I had this article mentioned Govee too. I will say that Govee does, it has done a pretty good job. I mean,

they don't let you, they kind of keep you kind of like hands off a little bit. There is a place that you can go and kind of like make your own lighting effects like i have those color wall things and you can kind of draw something on it but it's very like there's there's guardrails around like what it actually allows you to do compared to what you can get involved with with like wled or anything else and sequencer software and a lot of fun stuff like that's a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. But making this kind of stuff work and approachable, I think Philips has kind of led the way on that.

They've been kind of behind the ball in letting people edit these effects, but now I think it looks like they've made a pretty nice interface to go through and kind of edit this stuff and put effects together. Moving on here real quick we got some lock talk this week uh we've got quick set drop in some new halo select touchscreen locks on us this is their first smart lock that's going to support the matter standard and uh the lock officer offers some flexibility allowing users to choose between wi-fi and matter over thread connectivity so tj i know you're happy about that um you can't use them both at the same time though you gotta pick so tj i'm sorry you pick wi-fi matter or matter over thread which one uh i feel like at

this point i would do matter over thread okay yeah that seems solid all right well and uh mid-november come up with $279 and you can have one. Well, I'm not going to buy one because my whole house is Yale, which uses the Schlage keyway in my instance. But honestly, I am kind of upset because this lock actually looks decent. It's not like, I don't know, it's not ugly looking. It kind of just looks like a normal lock in a way. And you've got two different wireless technologies you can use there so i think this is a win um especially for their first lock in five years that's crazy you see the battery life on uh the thread connectivity oh i did not what is it so

six months on wi-fi and up to nine months on uh up to nine months with a lithium ion battery pack and then the thread connectivity goes up to 12 months or more so yeah there you go that's what you need from thread yeah yeah and honestly like outside of a key outside of a few like um i guess if you wanted like the the nfc or the fingerprint or something like that this lock obviously isn't for you um but for me i just want my lock to like work um and i don't need like a bunch of frills and everything like that and i let my automation system do all the controlling of the lock and so for somebody that might want a lock where they're going to integrate it with like apple home kit and stuff like that and they just

want to be able to program basic codes that's a good idea to get a lock like this um because personally like i'm i don't want fingerprint locking and iris scanning and whatever else. I just, I want to lock. I totally agree. And, and, you know, I'm always, I'm happy to see matter devices popping up like this. Right. Um, even though I'm in a period of my smart home where I've been ripping out everything matter, um, honestly, like don't tell Daniel. I know. I feel bad. I gave it a shot, but things just keep going offline and I have to go and I reboot the Apple TV and everything comes back online.

Or, you know, in the case of the Acquire motion sensors, I've seen other people report this too, but false triggers. And I had automations for lights based on them. And people were saying in the house that these lights are turning on on their own and it would just false trigger. And I looked at everything like bugs or, you know, the heat maps or, you know, like vents or whatever. That's not where their old Zigbee sensors work perfectly fine. Right. So I've just kind of given up on matter for now, just because I've had too many problems with it. And I may revisit it again and later, but it's good to see more Matter and Matter over Thread too. Just like, I'm not a fan of the Matter over Wi-Fi

because of the battery life as you see, but Matter over Thread, it's good to see that too. And we do have one more story here in Lock Talk. Ecobee, the smart lock maker, I don't know. Ecobee has expanded its smart home capabilities, integrating with Yale and August smart locks into its ecosystem. The partnership allows users to control their smart locks directly through the Ecobee app.

I was going to say through your thermostat. The integration supports Yale and August Wi-Fi enabled smart locks, such as the Yale Assure 2 and August Wi-Fi smart lock. There you go. This, this, I don't know what to think about this. Ecobee is like dead last on insisting

that they're going to make a home automation and security system ecosystem. And it's like better late than never. Here they are. They don't want to just be like one piece of the puzzle. They want to help out with all of them. So good for you, Ecobee. Hey, I'm fine with this

as long as they don't try to release the smart lock because then we know that Ecobee is kind of over, right? So the partnerships and integrations I'm fine with because the more stuff I can do from one app, that's cool. And as long as it doesn't cost the users anything extra. So we'll probably read in a year or two when Ecobee is like, oh, we're going to release a smart lock. Yeah. I mean, they already have a doorbell. They already have sensors and door and window sensors for their security system so yeah i i'm i would say smart locks probably right around the corner i have no idea but i would i would suspect that that's you're probably right tj give it a year we'll see a smart lock if not sonos will make one

so you're not far off that's probably gonna happen but i'm guessing that echo b um integration is cloud-based i'm guessing that i wouldn't be surprised and that's the one reason i would not jump on this at all because i get notifications every time their services are down and they go down quite often for me right so if if it is-based, the last thing you want is you can't unlock your doors because their server is down. You do not want that. I'd rather keep it separate.

Just set it up in Home Assistant or something else. I don't know. If there is a local API, I'm not familiar enough with the Yeltsur 2 and the August Wi-Fi smart lock. If there is a local API and they can do local control, I suspect they would do that because the Ecobee thermostat could reach out and contact them locally but yeah you're right if it's something that's got to go up and up and down to the cloud yeah that would that'd be no fun especially during a hurricane you can't unlock your doors oh yeah

that's one thing the the i had my uh ring alarm system armed and the power went off and you know slowly it dies so again i get an email saying oh you're on cellular and it's like oh we're turning off the cellular to save battery and it's like one last gas one last dying breath it's like hey please plug this in and then like a few days later it's like it's gone uh it reminded me now that i have to plug it back in because i haven't i have have, I, when I got home, I unplugged it. So it wouldn't,

you know, turn on in the middle of the night if the power came back on and like, suddenly there are people in the house and there shouldn't be. So, yeah, I think it's still armed. If I plug it back in, it'll be armed.

So I'll have to, to quickly disarm it when it, when I, when I do that. Nevermind. I'll have to do it after the show. Get on that. Well, maybe, maybe I'll wait till tomorrow morning when people are awake so it's probably a good idea all right let's move on here um arlo got some little security few security stories here arlo is introducing its first wired floodlight security camera

offers continuous recording and illumination by connecting directly to the wifi and a power source. Uh, it's priced at $149. Uh, the wired floodlight cameras more affordable than Arlo's $250 wireless pro three floodlight camera. And while the wired system is more challenging to install Arlo claims that it is a simple DIY setup.

Yeah. I guess you've got to hook it up to power, right? Um, camera shares, many features, the same features of the pro three, including two K HDR, a simple DIY setup. Yeah, I guess you've got to hook it up to power, right? Camera shares many features, the same features of the Pro 3, including 2K HDR, 160 degree field of view, color night vision, and a built-in siren.

It's got 2000 lumens of brightness. I gotta say, it's actually not a bad looking camera thing. Ah, floodlight camera. I've seen some ugly ones in my day, and this one, this one looks okay to me. I can't remember, is Arlo cloud-based? I think it's a local. Do they offer like rtsp or on vif or anything like that i'm gonna have to cut this out because we'll get yelled at yeah we're gonna get yelled at for this but i do not think so last i knew they were not but i have not personally touched one and they got 30 day cloud

storage for recorded videos and uh creating custom alerts when people animals vehicles and packages are detected. Yeah. Honestly, though, it's not, it's not an ugly camera because for some reason they've, a lot of people have decided to make a flow light cameras stick out and look like aliens.

And I'm not really sure why anybody wants their camera to like stick out even more. Maybe it's like the notion that like if somebody sees a camera, they're not going to commit a crime. But most of the time people just look at video doorbells when they're stealing packages off porches. So I really don't think they care that they see your camera. Um, so just make it look like a normal light fixture.

I always felt that way too. Cause when I was researching floodlight cameras, now this was a few years ago, but I was researching floodlight cameras and I just wanted something that looked like a normal floodlight was direct wired, offered local streams and everything. And I ended up on Foscam, but I feel like everything that was offered always had some kind of downside, whether the quality wasn't good. Because I also have an Amcrest floodlight camera too. And even that quality is not good. Like it's not the best quality.

Like I get jealous when I see these other cameras, but the floodlight, if you have the floodlights out there already, the hookup so easy, the power's already there, you know, it works over wifi. Like it's just an easy,

I don't have to drill through anything, you know? So I wish that like sector got a little bit more love and they, they gave, unless there's something out now, a normal looking floodlight with great, you know, like starlight night vision and local streaming and not cloud based. You know, if a listener knows of something, feel free to let me know. But that's kind of what I'm looking for.

That's kind of where I am. I need to send you guys pictures of what my ring cameras look like right now. Cause I have like some of the original ring floodlight cameras, like right when they came out, I bought two of them. It made sense. Just like what you're saying. It was a really easy thing to hook up and get going. I had like, so I had a camera looking at my driveway and my backyard to see what was going on. Um, and I got a floodlight out of it, right? Like why not? But now they have certainly aged the IR filter I, I think, is blown out in them.

So they pretty much don't even see anything at night. And with the recent hurricane, like it just threw some dust up on them. So the IR light or whatever reflects back onto them. And it just, you can't see anything at night anymore. I think that happened to me once with the IR filter. And what I had to do was actually just go and flick it like on the side because it would get stuck and then if you flicked it kind of like it got it unstuck I can't remember if that was my ring camera or my Foscam camera but just tapping it on the side almost like you're

banging the side of the tv back in the day you know it's just put it back in busy yeah and it got it back in business I'll reach up there with a broomstick and hit it yeah pretty much yeah i'll get a shot i i gotta say that the camera like well even if i did whack it and it somehow made that work the camera image is poor if not disturbingly poor compared to the you know 4k cameras that i have hooked up now from like from uniview and even, even the ones from like, uh, uh, ubiquity that I have, like, those are 2k at most, like those are, um, those look great compared to this thing. So like, um, I'm kind of over them and I'm kind of over ring in general. I think we talked about that with their, their price hike. That's coming to going to hit me at

some point. So I need to start working my way out of them. And I think, you know, given how good these other cameras that I have are looking and how well they're working, I think I'm going to like pop the rings out, put some regular little floodlights up, you know, and just use them kind of like you, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe make them smart. Maybe I'll put a little smart modules in like you do Gavin and have them be able to flick on and off when I want them to. But for the most part, I probably won't need them with the cameras that are out here with that day-night view. I mean, that looks, you can see the color of the grass,

the color of the sky and everything. It looks like it's daytime. So I may give those a shot. HomeSeer had a great Z-Wave module with motion sensing, light sensing, all that type of stuff for controlling stuff like that. So if you just wanted smart floodlights like floodlights, I have, I had that. They were great. That worked great.

Home seer. Okay. Yeah. I'll, I'll check that out. I've got the Z-Wave module right here. So whenever I'm, I'm ready for that. Oh, let me know. I can probably send you my old ones.

Z-Wave install right over here. Do I have that on here already? No, I don't. All right. Let's get it on the list. Z-Wave. No, I have hook up the dongle on here that's on there you didn't specify what dongle that's true that's true all right well uh plug in dongle yeah let's let's let's fix that this week and just make sure that i know that's the z wave dongle so yeah when i get that going i'll

have a z wave network at my house and I can put the, actually, I think I already do have a, technically have a Z-Wave network because they have the ring stuff, right? So like it's all Z-Wave. They have a extender thing for their key pads and I had to plug that in. So I ran across that the other day. I forgot I unplugged it in. I have these plugs like underneath the cabinets that you really can't see. Like they're, instead of the plugs on the backboard, the, what a splash board, whatever, like they're instead of the plugs on the the backboard the what a splashboard whatever like they're up under the cabinets and i forgot i had plugged it up in there and i was uh doing something the other day i realized what's that oh it's a z-wave on it oh it's a

ring extender i forgot i even plugged it in so i probably could use that too i have more zoos double switches if you need them to send them on over i'll swap you for some stickers that i found oh well that's right before we send them anything let's like encourage them to finish a project first as i say if you don't finish it within two weeks you have to send them back yeah oh no this doesn't sound fun at all all right uh let's move on here uh One more security related story from Simply Safe. They are launching the ActiveGuard outdoor protection. It's a live monitoring service for home security. We've heard about a couple of these before, but the system uses new outdoor camera with both on-device and cloud-based AI to alert a call center agent about potential threats. So something walks through at the wrong point in time, it triggers off, you know, a person was detected, probably not supposed to be here during this time, system's armed, and a real person will look at it and call emergency services if needed.

So kind of cool. It actually lets them yell at the people too. So they can go on the little cameras and say, hey, you're not supposed to be here. And if they don't leave, then they'll call the cops on them. Active Guard, previously in public beta is now available to all SimpliSafe users priced at 50 bucks a month

for overnight monitoring and $80 for 24-7 coverage. Not bad, not bad. Way more affordable than Ring. I think Ring had $100 per month service. And yeah, not bad. I like this. And I want all like connected smart cameras to

start offering this um because i just think this is such a good idea in general and i can tell you so much more than just like a traditional alarm system right because a traditional alarm system it sees a sensor and it's like hey that sensor is not supposed to do that right now and then it calls the cops after calling a couple other people and with a camera at least they could look in and be like no that that guy should not be crawling underneath that car right now we should we should probably call the cops you should be messing with them yeah i think it's a good idea and i'm excited to see this starting to come to more cameras there's got to be some i mean maybe it is simply safe that's doing this uh i i can't remember how

big of a company they are, but there's got to be some generic call center company that has wipe labeled their services with an API that these companies like Ring and Simply Safe could subscribe to, I guess, and then resell it. That's got to have been out there. So yeah, interesting. Interesting, it's coming. So the camera is $200.

And then what does it cost? Uh, 50 bucks a month. So not bad. I mean, really, really not bad. If you, if you need something like that, if you're worried about things happening overnight, people walk, you know, I could, that, that would, that would actually be better than most security systems. If you, if it had a, had a, had the ability to catch somebody coming up to the house that shouldn't be there or in your backyard when they shouldn't be there and then communicate

and say hey get the heck out of here or um you know at any hour of the night and then uh and then call the police if necessary yeah that's that's actually way better than most security systems well i think it's smart too they broke it into two different price ranges they gave you the option for just overnight and 24 7 yeah um that i think that's a good idea because a lot of people probably just want the overnight but yep day shift night shift you gotta pay more you gotta pay more for 24 7 all right uh and uh we've got a no a safety notice i guess from emporia uh they've issued a safety notice regarding the view to smart energy Energy Home Monitoring Device, the MEMC-VT2. I guess despite the device being fully UL certified, the ESA, the Electrical Safety Authority,

identified that the current transformers that are used with the device were not included in the UL certification and do not comply with certain sections of the Ontario electrical safety code. So if you've got one of these, uh, these, uh, Emporia view to smart home energy monitoring devices and you live in Canada, I guess, rip it out, throw in the trash. No, I think, I think it seems pretty safe if you know, it, they just didn't ship the transformers in for the ul certification i guess ul doesn't even require you to to certify the things that are extended off the device i guess it was just only focused on the main device itself and this the it turns out the esa has different standards and says no no, no, no, if they're connected, they need to be certified along with the device. So kind of interesting that this has come up here. This is

a Reddit thread. So of course, it's a Reddit problem. TJ, you were reading a little earlier that they've kind of made some moves to, to like, help people out upgrade, give them the option to upgrade to the Vue 3. Yeah, so it's kind of a weird thing right because it doesn't look like it's really that big of a deal but they're telling people basically if you have these things you should not use them um and then they're giving you according to the email at least they're going to give you a 25 option to or 25 discount code to upgrade to the view three um it's weird though because like they're telling you not to use it. But then the emails to people, they're saying, well, if you install it, like everything will be fine. And that doesn't

sound like a good idea when they're telling you that it's not safe for it. So I don't think it's that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I kind of wish that they would like maybe give you a 50% off upgrade since you're not technically supposed to be using this anymore um but it kind of is what it is and it doesn't really affect a large group of people i would imagine um i don't know it's only in ontario right yeah it passes the u.s certification right but just not the canadian one so i mean you canadians are strict up yeah probably you have standards i guess and and i kind of wish this wasn't even an official announcement it was just an email back to somebody and they post on reddit right so if i imagine you have a view too they probably reached out and sent that and that i hope so

like or some kind of official announcement that people you know would see it but yeah just giving you a little discount for the upgrade if they tell you to stop, if they tell you to stop using it, right, that should be like instant. We're going to give you a new one. Ship it back to us. We'll give you a new one. And let's go from there. But to say, oh, we'll give you a discount on an upgrade for one. I'm not, I wouldn't be happy with that.

If this was Sonos, it would be all over the place. We'd be going nuts. Right, right. Well, it was when they did a recycling program, I guess. So what are they calling the transformers? The little devices that clip on? Is that what they're calling the transformers? I believe so. It was CTs, I think it is.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I guess that makes sense. Hmm. Okay. So, yeah, they're saying that those particular things aren't uel certified i don't know that they have anything in them that would necessarily collect enough electricity to cause a fire or a safety issue but you know they're just wires that wrap around

another wire honestly i'm amazed that it's even like ul rest listed and stuff anyway just because like it installs an electrical panel so yeah right you gotta have a fire in here it's gonna be a bigger problem well if you see mine it's like all jam shut which is i which i definitely believe is against code yeah uh but you know here's what it is i looked at getting one of these i had one in my cart and then you posted this story and i'm like yeah maybe maybe one but i i looked at all those wires they have and i'm like where am i gonna put those wires? It's fantastic, Seth. You just jam it all in there, and you hurry up and screw the cover on there. And if you don't have Phillips head screws for your cover, you buy Phillips head screw covers,

so that way you can just hurry up and use a drill on it. You can run all the wires out of the box, and then you mount the view on the outside and stuff like that. I was actually looking at the View 3. I was going to grab it, but it's too expensive up here for me to get it. So I'm kind of waiting for it to come on Amazon and be cheaper, but. Well, that's the, and the view three is the nice one because that's the one that actually has the trimmable leads. And so the view two, which is the one that I have is fantastic, but you have to use the cables with no matter how long they are um and the view three it comes uh with uh the option to to clip them and everything like that so that is

the perfect one to get because you can reroute the wire in my situation i could not because i i just don't have that much wire this is like pre-terminated the leads oh that makes sense yeah it's like a little mono jacks hmm oh yeah and so the the view 2 i think it was like they're they're all about they're about 300 200 yeah i think mine was 200 for a 16 amp or 16 circuit one i'll bring i'll bring you one gavin okay yeah i guess you're right gavin i was gonna say i already have to like do exactly that that little operation that tj described where you hold the panel and then you like have to like hand screw in oh yeah it's fantastic screws from 1969 in my case that are not phillips head screws um but yeah

that it's it's already it's already i'm already in that awful situation so i can imagine like dumping all these wires into my panel and having and having a place to put them just leave the panel panel cover off i mean what do you need the panel cover for true yeah just take enough space you guys at least have breakers though my house is still running on fuses oh my gosh yeah stop it it's not running yeah i'm still my whole panel is fuses i'm actually getting a quote to upgrade it uh how how is that even legal uh it's canada canada i don't they require you to have ul certification on your cts but nah you can still use those fuses that's cool it's 2024

panels where yeah my sub panels have fuses too and oh my god i'm looking to get it and i have no more um room in any of the panels so to add another line, I'm pretty much, I got to upgrade. So I'm getting a quote on it. It's looking like thousands of dollars to get that all upgraded. So it is a lot of money, but it's something I pretty much, you know, kind of have to do to clean that up. Luckily, I have an electrician friend that's going to help me out and give me a decent deal because I got a, I got a quote the other day from one of the big box store electrical companies.

And they wanted $10,000 to upgrade my panel, my meter, and the service wire coming in. And my buddy's going to do it between $2,000 to $4,000. Man, I think I'd move. Be cheaper to sell the house and get another house. If anybody told me anything on my house right now, it would cost me $10,000. I'd be like, well, my house is going on the market. I'm moving. Well, luckily, we're not going with them.

Man, yeah, I know it's a labor-intensive thing to do, and you run into all sorts of little problems when you do it, but man. Well, the worst part for us is the meter upgrade and the service line upgrade. Yeah. So the wire coming into the house is 200 amp, or coming into the pole is 200 amp. But everything past that is not. So we have to upgrade that. We have to upgrade the meter box.

And we have to add a shutoff. And so it's just a ton of work. And you know what? If you're going to do something that big, you might as well just do it right and, you right get it overweight because to do it later it'll cost even more money i need that 200 amp and the way i look at it too you do that on your house you upgrade to 200 amp you get prepared for ev it's a good resale feature you know you put it on the paperwork you know ev ready home you know 200 upgrade and you can get a few extra bucks that will cover that. Yeah, there you go.

I'm going to live, I'm going to stick with the sense thing that barely fits in the panel. It's only two CTs and the little sense module and the two wires that run off it. I struggle to get that in there. The Emporia has that as well. So if you just wanted like the

whole house monitoring without the individual circuits, you could get that as well. you could technically replace your sense uh with this well since since fakes figuring out when your air conditioner is working and when your other stuff so like in home assistant i can see that the air conditioner kicked on right but i mean it it also doesn't have any idea what some of the other circuits are doing. And I guess I think they have now the ability to break that out, like what Emporia's doing. I don't know. It's kind of like the Emporia one's better.

Yeah. Looks like you get more options. I still want one. I'm just waiting on the price. Well, Gavin, I'm coming up to Canada in a couple months. I'll bring you one. There you go. For free?

I'm not going to charge you to bring me something. That's messed up. No, I mean, are you going to pay for it, too? Like, do I have to bring you something that's messed up no i mean are you gonna pay for it too like do i have to oh wow geez just let me know i'm now i now i am gonna charge you know when you're coming up i'll have a list of things ten thousand dollars gotta pay for that electrical panel upgrade yeah the canadian officials thought me like what do you do with all these electronics in your trunk i don't know officer yeah you can name drop me they know me at the border no i'm sure they do gavin that's a guy that ran over that tim horton's person all right well we've got a uh security security flaw in uh ecofax robot vacuums including the flagship flagship D-Box X2, which allows hackers to access devices

remotely by Bluetooth and compromise user privacy, potentially. Despite being warned of this vulnerability back in December 2023, Ecovacs has not fully addressed the issue. Imagine that. Security researcher Dennis Geis demonstrated the exploit by hacking the X2 from 140 meters away. How? I mean, I got to tell what that is.

What is that in freedom, you know? Wow. 500 feet. Jeez Louise. Okay. That's crazy. Gaining access to both its camera and microphone. The incident highlights the broader issue of inadequate security standards for smart home devices.

I always laugh when I see Eco, what is it? Ecovacs and the robot vacuum. And then think about the one that you got off, what, Facebook, TJ? And you're like, yeah, this one's got to go. Yeah, I didn't like the camera. I don't know. Like, the fact that I could just watch the camera whenever I wanted to was creepy to me. And I was just like, nope, that just turned me off instantly.

And so I sold it. Not a fan of that. And it's one thing when you just have a little static camera pointing you know in your house but this one's roaming all over your house taking pictures of everything that's i am really shocked that this story isn't blowing up bigger than it is because we've had stories about floodlight cameras you know with their vulnerability just go insane and this seems no one, not many people talking about it. This is in the house. Yeah.

It runs around. I guess everybody loves their Ecovacs so much, they don't want this to blow up. But I am shocked that this isn't a bigger story. Maybe it's hard to exploit. Who knows? It's very strange. I think you're right, Gavin.

If this was like, it's probably the size of the company. Like, I don't think anybody's heard of Ecovacs. If it was like, what's the one, Roomba? Something like that. No, Ecovacs is a, they're a popular brand. You know, they get a lot of sales when you get the, you know, all the Black Friday and the, you know. Yeah, but anyway, it's like, I'm going to get an Ecovacs vacuum. Yeah.

Right. I'm going to get a Roomba or something. I think. Yeah, Roomba is like a household name. I wouldn't say Ecovacs is. I don't even know which one I have now. I think it runs in the Mi app. Like, what was the video camera where it just went insane because they didn't encrypt their feeds or something?

Like, not Ring. It was, was it Arlo? Oh, was it Arlo? You know the story I'm talking about. It was all of them. It just went insane. It was, was it Arlo? Oh, was it Arlo? You know the story I'm talking about. It was a hit piece over at The Verge. It was all of them. It just went insane. It just went crazy.

It was just getting covered everywhere constantly. You know, and I think this. It was the anchor company. What's the anchor company? Yuffie. Was it Yuffie? Yeah. Was it Yuffie?

You know, and I think this is even worse, right? And it's just, nobody's talking about it. It's totally worse. And they haven't addressed it and haven't mentioned or done anything on it. And The Verge is silent. That tells you what The Verge's motivations were with that Yuffie story. That's how I feel. Well, there you go.

Vacuums, not clickbaity. Cameras on the outside of your house, clickbaity, I guess. I don't know. Good job, Verge. There's still enough of your stories there each week for the news so thank you're doing something all right well all the links and to the verge and topics we discussed tonight can be found over at show notes at hometech.fm slash 502 all right got a couple of things in the mailbag and actually this is just comments on last week's episode from a friend of the show jimmy and robert uh jimmy writes in says the eufy s3 pro

does have a solar panel on top and or it can use a separate panel that tj mentioned on the show so yeah uh we were looking at it i couldn't figure out if it that's what i thought i mean that's why i had the black rectangle on there and i know there are other cameras do but it just wasn't obvious at the time it wasn't obvious and it's like their website doesn't have good and like it has pretty pictures but it didn't have the specs and like like a thing i what i need is a thing uh uh the the classic image with like little red line that draws to it says this is what this is that's yeah right it didn't have that yeah and like the cheap like photoshoppy not phot Photoshop way. Yeah. Yeah. And then Robert wrote in about the comment or two that were, I guess, were made about cloud cameras and how they record.

I guess, you know, we kind of like lumped them all in together. I think it was just kind of an offhand comment, but he wanted to let us know that the, you know, basic cameras like Eufy, Wyze, and Taipo stream real time to the cloud that'll use more bandwidth that way commercially pro commercial and pro systems have a hybrid setup with on both on-site nvrs and cloud streaming uh with more more often now like cloud options cloud only options are becoming common and then cloud only cameras like uh verkata access they have a little bit on board flash memory they store a little bit of video during the outages and then upload on the connection stores uh apple home kit streams to the cloud for live viewing and clips are stored there on the

apple home hub so um there you go a couple little uh bits of information from the last show when we were we were discussing cameras and and that kind of thing i think the uh so long since we recorded that last show set that i know right you know i i really appreciate these comments but i don't even remember what i said or what we said so now i have to go listen back and and see what it was you know because uh that was like four weeks ago yeah i had i i had just it took me a while to get to edit it. So I know what he's talking about. I remember editing it and listening to it. So I know what we're talking about,

but it just took a while to get there. So anyway, we've got a pick of the week this week. This is actually pretty cool. This is a new Android 15 feature that turns your phone or tablet into an interactive smart home control panel when it's charging uh and and i guess it's like not just for for google home so the the the google pixel tablet and pixel phones running android 15 um can see this now like if you've got this it's a screensaver and when your phone goes to sleep

or your tablet goes to sleep it turns into a home control like dashboard thing and this is this is great this is brilliant this is what i want for my ipad and i want to put a camera on it too like i just want to see the front door sometimes like this is the right direction everything's every tablet should do this for sure. Not just tablets. Oh yeah. Phones, tablets, like whatever,

like that would be great. Like the iPhone, if you put it on the dock sideways, now it'll have a little clock and like you can customize it. Let me put a camera feed on there and some home control stuff. Like it's my iPad. It's great. Yeah.

iPad would be great for that. iPad, iPad, I guess they can't do the same thing as the iPhone for some reason. Yeah, turn your phone into a little smart home hub when you dock it at night to go to bed, you know, or something like that. That would be a nice use. Yeah. And then, like, well, even on the phone, like when you swipe up and down, like you can change out what those things are on there.

You can change out what kind of clock is showing. You can change out. You can go to the pictures or whatever. Like just have one, just have a home dashboard. And then when you want to like, Oh, what's going on? You swipe over to the home dashboard and it shows you the few cameras, things that are happening. Everything, every phone should do this. This should be a screensaver option on every phone. So great job, Google. This is awesome. You'll probably kill it in three weeks, but you know, whatever. It's great. Good jobs this week. You've got the pick of the week.

If you have any feedback, comments, questions, questions, good ideas for dashboards for your home, 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, project updates. My projects were a couple of things, but I know TJ's got some projects. TJ's been doing stuff. What have you been doing, TJ? I've got a ton of projects going on. So I think we're going to talk about it here in a bit, but I might have killed, oh, is it a code project? Project code?

I don't know what it is. It's all your fault. It's all my fault because I- This is why we can't have nice things. I finally decided to get rid of Blue Iris. I was like, you know what? I hate this thing it gives me all kinds of false detections it keeps telling me my corn is a person

and i'm not and i don't know i don't want to go in and like program this thing because every time i like open the website i'm just like i don't understand any of this and i'm not gonna watch any videos on how to configure it you know for a good price you i can remote in and take care of things for you you got expensive you're bringing me up some devices so i mean i could uh you know help you out here oh now you suck up a little bit all right whatever uh now so when unify announced uh the the integration with onvif cameras i was like you know honestly i could probably just get away with this like my doorbell camera is Unify.

And so I'll still get the people detection with that. I won't get the people detection with like my driveway camera or my front yard camera. I don't really care about my backyard camera, my gate camera, though. So I just made the decision. I was like, I'm not really using this blue iris thing. I'm just going to go and shut it down. And so I shut it down and it's just it's just sitting there right now. So I'm all in on Unify right right now. I'm not going to go ahead and shut it down. And so I shut it down and it's just sitting there right now. So I'm all in on Unify right now.

I'm not mad at you. I'm actually keeping a close eye on the Unify thing because if they get it to a point where, you know, like you can, it does detection on other people's cameras or, you know, integrates the on VIF, I guess. I'm not sure what they're called, the proper profiles and stuff like that. Right. So you can get the motion detection and everything from other cameras. Then I might be looking at that a little bit more serious. I do so much with my blue Iris that, you know, it's, it's integrated into my home that for me to move off, I have

certain requirements and Unify is moving in the right direction well according to uh so the unify world conference was today in miami um and there's a lot of hush hush i guess people aren't allowed to talk about it but people are talking about it because that's how the internet works and uh supposedly they are talking about what's called the AI key, which is presumably a hardware piece that I would assume probably is similar to like a POE injector or something like that, where it has some smarts on there to allow you to set up motion zones and stuff with on fifth cameras in Unify Protect. And so there's there's been no mention of pricing. There's been no mention of release date or anything like that. But I figured something like that was coming along because, you know, why would you just announce integration with the cameras? Like people are going to want to use the smart features of it.

So I can see that being like a 90 or a hundred dollar or 90 or $200 piece easily, depending on what they do with it and how many cameras you can connect and everything. So I'm not banking on that. I just, I, I just just i don't have time to invest in blue iris and for my cameras i just want them to work it's kind of like my car every time i get it in i just i just want to start it and go and blue iris is not that for me so well i was like i i saw the uh thread that was posted on reddit it's been deleted the post has been deleted so i can't see anything but people are talking in here yeah about the ai key and how you know they have all these big dreams about it so that'd be interesting to see what it is yeah i was kind of hoping it would just be like a software piece but the way

that unify protect is designed is that the ai stuff is done on the camera not the server so yeah you have to have that hardware piece so that's unfortunate i was kind of hoping just like a synology pricing scheme set up where you just pay like 50 for a license and they just work but i don't think we're gonna get that i think we're gonna have to buy a hardware piece i wonder if that ai key is just gonna be like uh you know you know how they have like the coral tpu you could just plug in or something like that you plug it into their nvr and it offloads uh the processing and stuff to it you know that instead of adding like a gpu or something like that right that would be pretty smart yeah it'd be interesting to see what they do um really the reason that that triggered it

is uh i i've been uh looking at some permanent outdoor christmas lights guys or holiday lights whatever people are calling these days um you've seen them around, you know, you got the Govee ones, which are really popular, you got Nanoleaf, seems like a lot of people are coming out with them. And honestly, I never did a Google search for them until recently. And there is even a ton of off brand ones that are on like Amazon and everything now. They've just exploded in popularity. And so Nanoleaf actually sent me the permanent outdoor lights, and they sent me the holiday string lights to test out. And guys, they are fantastic, specifically the permanent lights. I have not got to install the string lights just yet,

but I got the permanent outdoor lights installed. I kind of did the opposite of like a Seth project. You know Seth gets a project and he holds on to it for like two months. I got the package and like literally within like three hours of getting the package, they were installed on the house. I just like, and I have a small house, like it's all single story. It's a ranch, like it's not that big of a house. And I was just doing one side of the house in the front of the house.

Installation was super simple. You basically, it has a little double-sided tape on the back of the house. Um, installation was, uh, super simple. Uh, you basically, it has a little, uh, double-sided tape on the back of the light. Uh, you just take that and you stick it on to the, uh, the soffit and it's got some screw holes and I just ran two screws up in

there to hold it onto it. Uh, and it, uh, through like, it's got like a physical mount. Oh, okay.

Um, and so I, each light has one built into it. Uh, what's nice is that it has double-sided tape and screw holes and so what i did is i'm installing it they have i don't know what the distance is between each light but let's say like nine inches between each light um and so what i would do is i would stick one up and get that installed and then i'd stretch the other one out as far as i could take the tape off and stick it up there um and then take the the

mount off and permanently install with the screws so um installation did not take long at all and they look fantastic um during the daytime they i think they're a little noticeable just for people who are kind of nerdy about that stuff um in my house is it's not really optimal for this because certain areas i just literally do not have soffits and so i'm attaching it to like the fascia or the trim board and stuff like that so that's that's on me um but they look nice and at night they're super bright i think i only have about like 50 brightness just because my my house is low to the ground i don't need a lot of brightness um but they they work great trim pieces that connect the light things together uh yeah so it's basically a wire mold that connects between them.

So that way it hides the wire. Wow. Okay. So that is nice. Yeah. So it's like a whole package. It's like really cool. Um, and I like the way that they've designed it.

I was gonna say, it's a little more expensive than Gobi, but if you get more than just a wire with some double-sided tape, I mean, I, I'll give Gobi, like they have a little thing that hooks up similar, but you still see the wire. And that's what I just couldn't get past. But this looks more like when you get done, even with that wire molding and whatnot, that'll look pretty good.

Yeah. Huh. All right. Well, I think it's worth it. I wonder if I can get this before Christmas time. You can get it you can get it yeah yeah i think it's good and a lot of their uh their preset themes and stuff like that are pretty nice um we've just been kind of cycling through them it does uh integrate with home assistant as well

and so i just have it as part of my exterior uh lighting schedule now um and then if i want to change the colors i can do that through home change the colors, I can do that through Home Assistant, but I pretty much just do that through the Nanoleaf app because I have other, there are other products as well. I have the hexagon panels and the lines and stuff like that. I've been a big fan of them so far and they've worked since I've installed them

without any issue. It has RGB CW, so does it have white lights you can turn on? It does. When you're not wanting. So you can turn on? It does. When you're not wanting. So you can just do warm white instead of color and make your house look normal? Yeah. Nice. Or you can make it look like a haunted house every night with bright red lights, which is what I do.

Yeah. So I need to get it set up to where it integrates with, I do like an automation with Unify. And so if it detects somebody, it'll like flash the lights and everything like that. do like an automation with uh unify and so if it attacks somebody it'll like flash the lights and everything like that i'm working on that i haven't got to it yet 50 feet or 15 meters i guess is 180 dollars right now and um what's the expansion back oh if you need five more meters it's 56 dollars and then you can get it in a 30 meters for i guess it's 350 technically 332 on sale right now and if you need 147 feet or 45 meters that is going to be a whopping 530 dollars for 500 bucks on sale right now so um yeah it looks the i gotta say it looks it looks one of the nicer kits that

i've seen uh it looks very nice yeah the only thing i wish um i i think you can do this unofficially but i wish you could splice the wires because they they do give you like certain trim pieces and stuff to where you can like hide the wire and stuff like that but when i go around certain bends it's not really possible to hide the wire in my situation and so it'd be nice to cut the wire and make it shorter and stuff but at the end of the day i don't i don't think that's a big deal breaker so yeah that's always the problem with these is that um well to make sure that they're ip67 and waterproof like you would have to have ip67 splices which would be massive yeah like it would be honestly it would probably be the size of a light right and so like

they're probably not able to do that um but yeah i it does look like they have like little jumper cables and things that you can install which is nice yeah yeah i don't know this this looks pretty nice i like it i think it's a good option especially if you're looking for permanent outdoor lights and i the nano leaf app is not a dumpster fire like a lot of other apps. So like the twinkle, yeah, for example, but I don't need to talk about that. And I have a, I have a lot more projects, but this is the one I'm going to wrap up on today. We'll talk about the other ones later. Um, uh, I have had family staying with me for the past, uh, basically a month.

I think whenever the hurricane hit Florida, uh, the day before that, or two days before that, I had, uh, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law, uh, come to stay with us. Um, my sister-in-law just had a baby, uh, like a year ago. Um, and so we, we got to see, uh, her child and it's actually our godson too, which is kind of nice. Uh, but they're, they're staying with us for a month now. Um, and, um, it's made me realize that I really need to create a guest mode uh for my automation system typically i'll just disable like certain rooms like if nicole's gonna go take a nap we'll just disable like the motion of the bedroom or something like that but i've never really had

a reason to disable stuff because people typically don't stay with me and they don't stay with me for very long if they do stay with me but when they stay with you for a month they don't want the lights to turn on in the guest room when they're sleeping in there and they don't stay with me for very long if they do stay with me um but when they stay with you for a month they don't want the lights to turn on in the guest room when they're sleeping in there and they don't want the speakers to turn on when their baby is sleeping at seven o'clock at night um and so i have to come up with some sort of guest i know right i was like well you're kind of ruining the party here um so i've started creating a guest mode um and i don't know it's it's pretty all right but i feel like I'm missing something. So I think I'm gonna have to pick Gavin's brain about it

and see what he's doing over there. He's got a guest mode. Yeah, I got a guest mode. And basically when I was designing my smart home, everything has a manual control for it. Like I didn't wanna explain to people or show them a touchscreen or a dashboard or worry about, don't flick off these

lights. No, everything has a switch and works the same way as you would normally see it. Like the most confusing things probably are the blinds because they have another switch on the wall, you know, but I have little icons on them. So hopefully they look at the switch on the wall and if they happen to pull it open, they automatically open on their own anyway. Right. So for my guest mode, I disable stuff that is automated. That would be inconvenience or something they'd have to not know about and stuff like, um, part of my automation is when we all leave the house, the doors lock and the alarm arms. Right. So guest mode stops that from happening now because I don't want to have to add all their phones in for the auto detection and stuff like that, right? And they know when they leave the house, they'll lock the door manually themselves anyway, right? So

they don't need the automatic thing. So that's pretty much it's that. And then my night routine, my night routine would kick in at a certain point and it does things like close blinds and turn off lights and stuff like that. But in guest mode, I've disabled that because if your guests are up late, you don't want everything it's happened. Everything just turned off on them and scares them. So I disabled that. And when they're ready to go to bed, they know to just turn off all the lights and lock the doors. And they, you know, they do it the manual, just the way they would do it in a non-smart house. Right. Um, so that's kind of my thought process around the guest mode. And it's worked out pretty well.

I've had guests stay at the house and no complaints or anything like that, right? So something to consider. Yeah, that's a good idea. Well, that's all I wanted to discuss this week. What projects do you have going on, Gavin? Oh, where do I start? First of all, again, I'm not hating on you for checking your Blue Iris 8 right now. I totally understand. It sucks.

Yeah. And reading in the forums, Code Project, for those that don't know, is the main AI engine for Blue Iris. And it looks like they're having some drama over there. The main developers seem to have stepped back from it and maybe put it on GitHub. And there's some changes going on. They didn't know how they were getting funding for it. So I don't know what's going to be happening with Code Project or even with Blue Iris' integration with Code Project, whether they change that. Even worse for Blue Iris, their payment system hasn't paid them since may um they announced whoever they were going through the digital river or something like

that um what yeah they said anybody that's renewed since may they have not gotten paid for and they had to switch their quickly switch over their payment recently their payment system but they're still honoring anybody that's ordered it because it's not their fault right um so the poor the poor blue iris guys you know they're just getting hit hard you know i feel it so i also took a look at frigate i'm not sure if you've ever heard of it you could run it in a docker um and it was getting a lot of love out there. But honestly, you guys would hate it. It's YAML configuration. All YAML.

Yeah. I think I could just stop there. Oh, this sounds better than Blue Iris already. It's pretty much all YAML, but it's highly configurable, highly integratable. I played with it for a bit, but I didn't like it. I like the YAML because I can configure a camera and copy and paste that section quickly and get all my cameras set up that way. But I also didn't like the YAML because configuring certain things was just a headache, right? So they have a lot of UI they got to work

on and eventually I'll take a look at it again in the future. So I, I, I played around with that. Um, moving on, uh, just a public service announcement announcement. If you have a rat GDO and you were using MQTT and you were running with the issue where it would stop responding every now and then, it looks like they replaced the fix and I've upgraded my firmware and I haven't had issues since. So that was the only thing that was giving me problems with it. And now it just works beautifully every time. Right. So I'm just happy they uh found a fix uh another thing i've been doing i did in the last four weeks since we last recorded um i redesigned my dashboards

so i've converted all my dashboards over and this is a little bit more advanced but it's worth uh you know considering i've converted them all over map to macros, right? And what that means is now all my dashboards are dynamic. When I get a new device, all I, a new temperature sensor, for example, I place it in the room and I'll place it. I'll label it with a temperature label and it automatically shows up in the places on the dashboard. Perfect. I don't have to go and edit 10 different dashboards. It will go into the, the places on the dashboard perfectly. I don't have to go and edit 10 different dashboards. It will go into, put it on the room dashboard.

It will put it on the device dashboard everywhere it's supposed to be. It will put it there. So it's all based on labels and areas, you know, and even floors, all my dashboards. So I used to have about 30 views of things. I've compressed that to less than 10 views now because everything's generated on the fly and it works really well. So, you know, if you're looking at a way to automate your dashboards, look at doing it through macros, right? It just, it takes a lot of work, but in the end, the automation saves you a lot of time. Uh, so I've been playing around with that.

And the reason I was redesigning it is because 24.10, the home assistant release, caused me so many problems. And it's the little things they changed that broke a lot of things, like the case sensitivity in MQTT. You know, all of a sudden, all these things were breaking because I had capital T and true or capital F or whatever it was. It now requires it to be lowercase or uppercase. I can't remember right now, but so many things. So I was, I spent like a week fixing my home assistant after that upgrade, because they made all these little changes and they don't announce a lot of these. This is stuff I just found out after I upgraded. And it's like, oh, my blue Iris just took a dump and it stopped working. And that affected a whole bunch of stuff.

So that's another thing. One question I have for you guys, when it comes to your racks that you set up, right? So my rack is in the basement, right? And my rack has cobwebs all over it. It's in the basement. It has cobwebs. And the wife said, you know, it's probably because I haven't touched them in a long time, in a long time. Right. So, you know, I went down there and I moved my rack around and jiggled it a bit and, you know, got all the cobwebs off of it. But I

was also thinking, you know, like, how do you keep the cobwebs off your rack? Like, do you guys in the pro spaces and whatever spaces, like, do you guys even consider that? Do you just set up a rack and leave it? Or do you like put anything in to keep spiders off of space is like, do you guys even consider that? Do you just set up a rack and leave it? Or do you like put anything in to keep spiders off of it? Or, you know, like you even think about it, right?

Cause seriously, I had a lot of cobwebs around my rack. Right. And they just love the warmth. They love, you know, whatever it is, you know,

no serious question. Do you guys consider anything like that? You don't get in there and dust it out each week with the vacuum yeah mine's been running so great i haven't gotten down there in probably a few months at least and these spiders were all over it so why do you have to why do you have to dust it off are the spider webs affecting like your speeds or something i'm confused well they're just they're just it was a lot of cobwebs and then i had a camera on top of the rack so it was starting to go in the camera and stuff like that and spiders just bugged me one thing i did i did look up you know like natural deterrence of spiders and i brought um peppermint uh peppermint spray oh yeah and people said this this helps repel the spider

so i sprayed it around the rack a bit like in the ceiling area and just along the top of the rack because i put a cover on the rack and it smells really nice down there now so i want to see if this helps but i was always curious like do you guys even worry is that does it affect the machinery at all because if you get you're the first person to ever bring this up i would think about it though i think we're in uncharted territory i've seen computers that people have opened up and there was a snake in there you know do you guys ever worry okay a pro installer in australia do you ever worry about stuff like that like you open up you know you're gonna service a rack and there's a big spider in there that would i hate spiders as you can tell you know have you ever had a gator in your rack seth not i feel like that would be a real worry right I came, I did, I did discover a snake in the garage one day.

Like it had, after one of those floods, there was a little snake crawling around in the middle of the floor. But it wasn't in your rack though, right? It wasn't in your rack. On the floor is one thing. Didn't make it there.

Like, like wouldn't bugs, or if you got a little mouse in there, wouldn't it affect the electronics or something, you know, like. I guess, but I mean,

to answer your question, the pro thing to do is just like not do anything. that's another service call it's a service call all right somebody making business then you know exactly maybe maybe i gotta sell some like rock guard or something like that that will keep that rock guard go register you need a little laser point little lasers yeah to shoot out the frig little- Frigging laser beams. I was always curious about that, but I'm going to let you know how this peppermint works, right? Because I get a lot of spiders.

If you didn't spray it in the rack, though, that's the only place now that they'll go. They'll be like- No, well, no. They're bunching down from the roof, right? They're bunching down from the roof? The only reason I say that- Are you sure they're not trying to steal your server? I don't know. They're bungeeing down from the roof. And the only reason I say that. Are you sure they're not trying to steal your server?

I don't know. They're trying to steal my data, but they're bungeeing down. And I saw it on the camera because I set up a little camera and I saw them bungeeing down from the roof. So I sprayed along the roof and I sprayed on top of the rack so that they'll say, nah, I don't want to go down there anymore. You know, maybe I should have sprayed on the ground so they wouldn't jump up. But well, I'll deal with one thing at a time and i'll let you know how the peppermint works all right you

know but i was curious about what you guys do but i guess yeah it's a service call it makes sense yeah yeah we i've never experienced this issue so i don't know how many racks you have in a basement like that i don't know like i've had people request me for me to turn their wi-fi off at night but not to clean up their spiders. Well, I may be a first. When you come up here to visit, you can, you know, fix my,

get the spiders off my rack. Oh, I'm not coming to Canada now. And then the last thing I was playing with this week is really this, this just kind of blew me away. I was playing with a new plugin called LLM Vision in Home Assistant. And basically it integrates your cameras with like chat GPT or mod or whatever AI solution you have.

Now, first thing I did was, basically you're sending your camera feed up to them and asking them questions and they look at the camera feed and they determine. So you can send either just an image, you can send, um, a clip of like a video clip, or you can actually send the stream and it will analyze the stream. So I was playing around with it and doing things like, you know, sending the streams for outside. And I would just ask the question, is there anything interesting going

outside, going on outside? And it would actually describe everything outside and tell you what's happening outside. I was blown away by this, right? Just by how good it was and how fast it was. So one thing I integrated it with, I use it with open AI and I've always had an issue with snow and rain, right? So my cameras, you know, when they do their AI detection, snow and rain always triggered them because it would trigger a person and I could never get this right. You know, and even with cars that drive by and the reflection off my car, all of a sudden say a person's there. And I had an automation that would do something like if somebody was in my driveway at night when the alarm was enabled, it would wake me up and let me know. Right. But the problem is I had to disable that because I got too many false notifications. Well, now I take that notification and then I feed it to open AI and I say, is there somebody in the driveway?

Tell me yes or no. And then based on the response, I will then trigger. And it has totally taken care of all false notifications. So it actually looks at the feed. It says, no, there's nobody in the driveway. And then it doesn't notify me. And it works awesome. Amazing.

And I'm probably going to integrate it a bit more once I determine like the cost aspect of it. Because you have to have the API you pay. It's using like sense, like not much right now, but like when you start getting into like, you know, is there an animal in the backyard when my camera thinks there's an animal or code project thinks there's an animal, you know, I'm using the AI just to confirm if there's an animal or no animal there. Yeah. Right. And it will then get rid of that. And it adds a couple extra seconds, but for critical situations where you don't want any false positives, I thought this was amazing, you know, and there's so many things you can do about it. People do with it.

People are coming up with ideas, but it adds another level of AI to, you know, like your cameras, like, you know, my, my original idea that I played with was, you know, if a dog was detected on my front lawn, you know, is this dog taking a crap? You know, and if it is, let me, then I'll notify my. Does that work? It was having an issue determining crap, the difference between crap and pee. And, you know, like I couldn't really determine, you know, because, you know, the dog looks similar doing different things. You got to go over time. You have to like a before and after like this and and this dance is usually the same right yeah have a history of that dog too though yeah so it it knew the dog was doing something

but it couldn't determine which one it was and i was only uh interested in number one or number two i don't know i lost my numbering but But that's another, like, you know, cool idea that people could do. Or you could say, is that a male? When it detects a person in your driveway, go, is it a mailman? And it will tell you it's a mailman. You can say, okay, the mail's coming, right? Stuff like that. Like, it's so much smarter than just, like, person, car, animal.

So I highly recommend, if you're interested in that take a look at llm vision you can find it on github and in the home assistant forums that does sound pretty sweet yeah i'd use it with blue iris and that pretty much sums up what you know in, in the next couple of weeks, I'll be getting into some Apollo things. They sent me some devices, really cool devices. So, you know, I'll get into that next couple of weeks. That's really cool. I like this.

You can, it's compatible with OpenAI. So if you want to use ChatGPT, you can, or whatever, GPT. But it does Anthropic, Google, Gemini, Grok, local AI. So you can actually use gpt but it does anthropic google gemini grok local ai so you can actually use the local stuff that you down olama like you can yeah you can process it all locally if you wanted to uh it wouldn't it wouldn't cost you any money claude was the one they highly recommended using because it's speed versus price was the sweet spot but if you wanted all local and you didn't care about speed because let's i mean let's be honest like we're talking speed of like five seconds versus like a second

so like yeah if you want to be pretty local yes you could use a llama yes that's all there too yep and download download one of those models as long as they work well um yeah they got it that's pretty cool i like it that's it that's pretty cool i i like it that that's yeah that's really cool all right well i i do have a couple of projects i've been kind of busy well all right so first uh switching some on vif cameras over to the interview i did lose two like two cameras on the well i i lost one i lost the the camera that was on the front of the garage for our for for Unify which was kind of expected it was just one of the little G3 things and I just kind of have it like stuck up

there and I guess it got water in it probably from like the relentless rains and everything it didn't survive uh and then there was one on the back it also did not survive but turns out I I took off the thing and I think it was just like the water had gotten, a drop of water had gotten inside the Cat5 because I didn't cover that up. I just taped it up like real quick with some electrical tape. Probably not the smartest thing to do in a hurricane. The one on the mailbox, though, that one survived. And I used the little wire kit that comes with the camera and terminated it correctly

and put the gaskets in and all that stuff. So that one was good. That one's fine. But with OnViv coming to the Uniview, I mean, Uniview over to Unify, like the Uniview cameras I have, it's really hard to say because one of them is Uniview and one of them is Unify.

The Uniview cameras are amazing and I can get the performance and the interface that I want done. Like I'm so happy about this. So definitely moving over, uh, to some of those cameras. It seems to finally be getting better before I would only get like a static picture and it would just try and connect to the stream over and over again. Now it seems to be connecting pretty quickly, like just about as fast as some of the, the Unify cameras. I noticed that if I put it on the, I don't even know what it does.

There's some setting when you're setting up the stream. I set it to basic and it, it gets rid of a lot of the configuration stuff on the Uniview camera. And I noticed that that one did load a little bit faster than some of the other things. So maybe that's the setting. I don't know. I don't know what they need or what they're doing for Unify. They really haven't told anybody, which I think is kind of on them. It would be nice if they publish some information about like what kind of streams work best with their products. And then you can modify the cameras to output those streams. I did have one camera that I was using on the side of my house and it's got

two cameras built into it. Uh, and it, it worked great for the hurricane, but unfortunately this is why you should never install dome cameras on a house. Um, when the hurricane was whipping up dust and dirt and stuff and water, like it almost immediately became, uh, just a horror. You couldn't see anything out of the picture. So it was done. Before, the other cameras were fine.

They're just bullet cameras or turret cameras. I guess is what they call them. They're fine. But this one, you couldn't see anything out of it until I took it down and cleaned it all, the lenses off. Don't ever install a dome camera outside. They're awful. That's a public service.

They are pretty awful. Don't ever ever do it it's just dumb stick with bullet and and i guess turret cameras yeah so i'm excited i've got a unify i've got a unify nvr the company or uniview nvr also here which i'm thinking i can go ahead and connect up to those cameras too and have just another backup of it but i didn't have a hard drive. So I went looking for hard drives on the internets there. While I was buying some other stuff on Amazon, I noticed that you can get refurbished hard drives for really cheap. Very cheap.

Very cheap. So I picked up, guys, I picked up four 12-terabyte, I guess they're, what is it, HTGS? I can't remember the model number. Hst yeah yeah uh drives i picked them up for like what 89 90 somewhere in there wow and i i mean i thought why not like that's as much as i was going to pay for six terabyte drive like just get those and if they're bad they're bad for an nv for, well, I ended up taking it. I had three drive bays open on my NAS drive. So I just stuck them in there. And now that thing's up to like 40, 40 something terabytes, which is, you know, I was already getting full. I was going

to start deleting stuff. You know how I am about deleting anything. I don't ever delete anything. So that wasn't going to happen. So now I've got more space and then I've got one left over. What I think I'm going to do is, to do is swap out one of the drives, the six terabytes or four terabyte drives that are in there, swap it out for the other 12 terabyte, and then just kind of like put the four or six terabyte in this NVR and call it a day. And then I'll have like a backup NVR of the NVR too.

Are you putting them in your Unraid server? No, I can't put anything in the unrate server that uses the uh smaller drives right so you'd have to upgrade the parity drive sizes and stuff right no no it uses the uh 12 the the 2.5 oh uh oh you have uh that's your dell uh server right yeah i had that problem too yeah but so you get you max out like two terabytes and i don't want to pay for those. So I have a bunch of one terabyte drives in there and it's fine. It does the caching and VMs and all that.

So I got plenty of space for all that stuff. And anything else, I just copy over the NAS. Like just kind of like just move it over. Because in an unread server, I'd recommend, you know, nothing wrong with buying those drives. But, you know, if you're going to go that route, put two drives as parity drives. And that way you could survive two drive failures if that were to happen.

That's a good idea. Because they're so cheap for that price, you might as well throw in two parity drives, right? Yeah, it's like $60 to $70 right now for a terabyte. I think I've been using the Crucial drives. Yeah. SSDssd so yeah i may as well pop it in you're right use a pair another parity drive and does it make the parity go faster if i do that uh no but it just adds extra resiliency right the parity drive not the cash drive it's the parity drive and all it does is just like you have one parity drive so if a drive fails, you're still safe.

But if two drives were to fail at the same time, you're kind of screwed, right? So you add two parity drives. And now that gives you a little more protection. Makes sense. I set up one on a server at the office for some office applications and things that we're doing there. And it came with these two smaller like half terabyte intel drives and so i made those like a cache the cache pool yes i guess together and then we stuck in some of the like nvr drives that we had um it's always funny because like every now and then it does

the parity check on that and i'll get the notification that it started and um and i'm like you on mine i'll get the notification started and I don't have very much. I mean, I have a few terabytes of dry space, right? But with this, like there's, there's multiple terabytes. It takes, it takes a few hours, like a number of hours for it to finish. And when it gets done, I get the notifications like the next day, what happened? Mine takes about 28 hours to run, but it can continue doing everything while it's running.

So yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's fine. And my cash cash drive i set up a mirror drive so basically it mirrors it to two drives so if one of them were to fail i have the mirror back up and the reason i do that is because there's certain things that are permanently on the cash drive so i need to have that resiliency right right right like the virtual machines are there i think yeah that makes sense i'll have to go back and look what i did on that and see if they're mirrored properly if not i'll have to tear that down and put it back together but i'm just creating another project

yeah another another work project he's uh great and then i i i when i was at the hotel we were using our little travel router which is what i used to hop on the wi-fi there now the room i stayed in they had a a an ethernet jack on the wall what i know right and so i plugged into it and and it it worked it got online so i was like all right so i used the router and i plugged into that. My stupid router would just decide to reboot and shut down. It was just, it would, it was like, I'm done with life. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm quitting. So I had to find another travel router and you know,

I'm a big fan of the Firewallet brand stuff. I have a, I have that in my house. We, we use it. We use it in our office. It makes VPN simple, like dead simple. But I gotta say the price on them is up there. And I think I need the, like the purple, I think the purple one has the wifi for travel router, whatever, but I can get this GL inet router with wifi six and everything for like $89. So that's, I, I, I had the old

version of this. I got the new version of it. I it was under 100 bucks and it works the exact same way i can import the same vpn like i what i do is the vpn wireguard vpn profile you i think you just copy and paste it into this thing and there's a little switch under one of the little silly ear yeah antennas when you when i like turn that switch on uh it will connect the vpn so like sometimes at the hotel wi-Fi or hotel systems, you don't want it to be on at first. You want to connect and then you want to flip that switch so all your traffic goes through the VPN because you have to go through the guest network thing,

the guest portal page where you have to like put your room name and stuff. Once you do that, this little guy maintains that connection and you don't have to put that in through your stay. And the reason I like it is because I just set it to the same, the same, uh, no wifi network as my house and all of our wifi devices that we bring in. I don't have to get everybody on the network.

I just get this stupid thing on and then all the devices connect to that. And I don't have to, we don't have to like do the dance like, Oh, what's the password? What room are we in? No, we don't have to do that. I had to do do the dance. Like, Oh, what's the password? What room are we in? No, we don't have to do that.

I had to do that a bunch this time because the stupid thing kept dying and I kept trying to figure out what was causing it. So I I'm going to toss that one in the trash. It's, it's, it's been, it's been all over the world. Actually. I took that on the cruise and was able to use the cruise wifi across multiple devices and watch like the Mandalorian in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, which was pretty amazing to think about like, Hey, I streamed the Mandalorian from my, my Plex server at home and was able to watch it on a, on, on a TV inside the inside the room.

I will say I brought an Apple TV this time. Cause we were going to be in the hotel for extended period of time. Apple TV is so much better than using a Roku. God, the Rokus are just so frustrating and awful to use. And they just beat you over the head to remind you about that every time you try and use them. The Apple TV fired right up, did exactly what you wanted it to do.

But without a travel router, you can't hook that up to the TV in the room because you can't get through the guest portal with an Apple TV. So what travel router is that one again? It is a GLiNet. GLiNet is a, what was the old thing? The old WRT54GL thing. It's a WRT router. So underneath all of the little skins and stuff they put on top, WRT. I know people are excited because Unraid announced integration with Tailscale. Tailscale, yep. Yeah, that's a great overlay network.

They're going to be building it right in and you'll be able to connect to all that stuff. Oh, good. So if that router supported Tailscale, then you'd be able to just do that without VPNing in. Yeah, well, I mean, Tailscale is essentially WireGuard with a little thing on top of it. And it really,

it's like a management interface. I already use Tailscale, but I have the computers all set up and like I already have, there's already plugins or Docker modules or something. For Unraid, yeah. For Unraid, yeah.

So I've been using those and it really makes it easy to connect two unraid boxes together transfer files i mean super simple uh like you have to do all the command line like if you have a vm or whatever you can just transfer files that way so i've been i've been doing that um and it it certainly makes setting up a vpn frame very much easier because you just install the service and you're on you're good to go i still use still use the VPN with my Unify switch, my gateway. Yeah.

And the only reason why is because my Unraid has crashed in the past. Like, what if I wanted to get to my Unraid, you know, and that's down. So, you know, the Unify stuff has never died on me. That's the one point of entry, you know, that's going to be up and working. Yeah. Well, if it's down. Yeah, exactly. If it goes down, I can't do anything. So yeah. I usually set up multiple just, I mean,

sometimes I want to go straight to that box with tail scale and I'll have that set up, but like I do have multiple devices, multiple profiles set up on Firewalla to get into that router and just get into the rest of the house. But yeah, it, man, I gotta say coming from like the open VPN world, WireGuard has changed everything and, and Tailscale is built on WireGuard. It's just, it just gives it a nice, pretty interface and they do a bunch of fun stuff. Uh, that company's interesting. They do a bunch of stuff. So, and, uh, you know, I'm, I've got, I've got another little project that I've, I've gotten really excited about and, and, you know, I've got another little project that I'm getting really excited about.

And I'm going to have to blame Jim over there from the Average Guys podcast. Average Guys podcast. Is that what it is? Yeah. The Average Guy. No, Home Gadget Geeks. Home Gadget Geeks. Average.

What is this? Average Guys. The Average Guy TV. I don't know. Average Guy Networks. Yeah. And the podcast is Home Gad geeks so yeah i've been listening to him and he comes on there's this guy he has on there every now and then and he

talks about this mesh tastic stuff oh mike yeah mike wieger yeah i'm like man it'd be nice if there was some like little sensors up and i'm like well what are the mesh tastic things can do it so i started looking into it man it might that might be a solution for some kind of like little relay messages that I could put in. And like the devices are so small, I could put them around town. No one would notice. Like I, I could stick them up on top of buildings. Like literally I, I, I, it would be much easier if I had a service truck, I could just roll

up and get on top of a building and stick something on the roof. No one would notice. Yeah. I mean, it's, I could just roll up and get on top of a building and stick something on the roof. No one would notice. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing. So they don't require internet. They just require a little bit of sunlight for power. And yeah, I'm going to put, I bought a little antenna. I'm going to put an antenna on my roof and see how many pop up. Well, I've seen two devices pop up.

I don't know where they are. Somebody might have put them on your roof. Well, they could be miles away, but I don't know what's happened to them. Like they haven't shown up. They showed up like over the weekend and then they disappeared. So maybe the people are walking around with them or something. And they just happen to be in the area when I happen to be outside with mine. But I got this little thing, the LilyGo.

It's like an all-in-one unit, like this little thing. And it's got a little antenna on it. But I got a bigger antenna for it. I'm going to do a couple of things and see if I can – I'm going to get some sensors and tie it to it and see if I can use the sensor reporting on it to kind of like log that stuff. So this gets involving and involves like MQTT. And what I like is like it's got physical stuff

that you can actually connect to it and it can live by itself. I don't need to run power somewhere. I don't need to get a Cat5 out there. Like I can put it somewhere out of the way. No one will notice it's there. And yet I get a little sensor out of it. And, and it contributes to this little mesh tastic thing. It's a little mesh of all these little devices out there that other people can use to communicate to like, if there is an actual

power outage that all the communication goes down on, these things will still be just humming along, doing their thing, relaying messages and, and, you know, my data, like the little data that I need. So yeah, it seems like a cool little product. In a time of disaster, people will appreciate what you've done. Maybe. I mean, like the two other people that are using it now, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I looked at like, there are still the local radio,

ham radio chapter people that do that. And they do like, they seriously, they go in with like, uh, the Red Cross and we'll coordinate with them, set them up with, um, a, uh, devices that do, they like do email over ham radio so they can send messages that way. I'm like, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're still maintaining the ham, the big radio repeaters and everything. So they, I mean, they can, they can essentially communicate with anyone in the world, the way that stuff works. This, this is more of a local level type thing. It doesn't, it doesn't quite get out to the rest of the world. As far as I can tell, there's, there's people playing with this, this stuff and there's people doing crazy, interesting things with it. Um, but

I, I barely scratched the surface. I, I've got one powered on and then noticed that there was another person in town that may have one too. So i'll send them like a little message that says hi and see if they ever respond to it yeah should be interesting i thought about making one of these because i have an extra raspberry pi keyboard uh that i'm not doing anything with but i need to look into antennas and see if i can find a usb one that works with it because it does sound like a cool project yeah it's got the special radio it's got to have like the lower radio thing it's got to be a specific type i actually had in a in a thing i bought on on on facebook uh at one point in time was this uh this helium miner thing i don't know if you guys remember helium oh yeah helium that was there for a while i picked this

up for like 20 bucks they were like three thousand3,000 or something at the time. I was like, that's an NFT, right? Yeah. Well, I think that what they were doing is they were setting up a Laura network, but then they were selling it. They were going to, they were like, we're going to sell the access to this network. And then that didn't ever come to pass because it seemed, you know, it didn't work. But what they did was they were like, well, we'll pay people.

They made a pyramid scheme out of it. And I think they're still trying to do that now with 5G connectivity. I don't know how it's going to work. Anyway, I took this apart. It turns out to be like a little Linux machine that has a little hard drive. And I just wiped the hard drive. And I used this to check my hard drives when I got them in. And then it's got a rack radio inside of it.

Um, but unfortunately this one, this very type one is not compatible with my stacks. So I couldn't use this when I had to buy some other ones. So anyway, it is interesting. I'm hoping that when I get the antenna put up a pie on the roof or something,

uh, I will, uh, I'll see more people. Maybe it'll be more than two people. I don't know. I haven't seen anybody else, but if it's just me and my little sensors, I'll be, I'll be content with it. And then I'll, I'll see if there's anybody else. There's probably other people in town and be

interested in it. Cause it is interesting that you can take something like this, which is like, this thing is under a hundred bucks, right? I can plug it in, charge it up last three or four days by itself. And then you, it pairs with your phone, right? I can plug it in, charge it up last three or four days by itself. And then you, it pairs with your phone, right? So it gives you like a little message system right on your phone. You can direct message people. You can, you can send basically text over like a local network to local people within, I don't know, a few dozen miles of your, of where you are, as long as it has the repeaters in place. So I think it would be good for potentially emergency situations, but just to have like a back channel thing where you can set up and communicate with that may be good for in a number of other different reasons. So

I don't know. I'll see if, uh, I'll see if the, the local ham radio club is interested in digital technology. I did check their meeting minutes and, to see what see what kind of conversations they had and it's it's uh they seem to be they seem to be pretty technical technology challenge they had a windows computer that was crashing and they were they were gonna have to send somebody in to to check on it to reboot it or something could probably fix that but then I don't want to get involved. Yeah. I don't blame you for that one. Yeah. It's like,

let's, let's set up little mesh things at our house and see what happens. And let's do that. Let's, let's have fun with this. So I don't know. I'll see where it goes with it. I,

I, I, my, I been texting my brother too. He seems to, she seems to be pretty interested in it too. So maybe he'll get something started. He's up in Dallas though, so this won't

reach there. But, you know, see if there's a group that he can get involved with up there. That's all I got. Actually, well, I started a bunch more projects, I guess, is what I did. I didn't actually get anything. I still have to go mount the cameras. Now, there's one camera over there sitting on the table. There's two back there that are sitting on the table.

I'm going to go put them up. Not tonight. My faith in you. Not it's just right right up with the outdoor lights permanent outdoor lights yeah this year i don't know probably yeah it'll be this year no i'm i'm i had to take down the unified cameras anyway because they were dead uh so i think what's going to go back up is going to be these, these cameras that can see really well at night. And I'll just miss out on the AI events for a while and go from there. It does suck. Cause when you do get the on this stuff in, it just records.

That's all it does. It just records all the time. But if there's any like motion or, or, or people or whatever, you don't get those events. It's kind of unfortunate that they can't just ingest like on vif events or something like that and you could you could like map them to what it is because these cameras have full ai engines

built into them too and it seems kind of ways to have to add a an ai key or whatever to reprocess the video and spit it out the way unify wants it so i'm pretty sure they're war i wouldn't be surprised if they're working towards that like you gotta remember we're really early in this on V on V thing. Right. So, you know, just even seeing the rumors of that AI key mean they're thinking about this stuff. Right. And I've looked at the on V profiles and stuff like that, and they're all over the place when it comes to a manufacturer, they, they, you know, just because it has this profile doesn't mean it integrates everything from it. A lot of them is just the stream, not the events, right? So maybe they're trying to think of how we can open this up so it works with everything nicely.

And part of it may be that they have to actually process the video with their own thing to give a unique experience. In the end, they're just using your camera for the video feed. Right. thing to give a unique experience in the end they're just using your camera for the video feed right right and they want the unique the you know unified experience across all their cameras yep yep i'm excited for it yeah no i am too it's it's a great step in the right direction uh we had some conversations with unified at cdia and i mean they did mention that they have a whole lot of product on the roadmap uh a lot of new stuff so i'm i'm i i didn't get any details on like what that new stuff would be unfortunately but um i'm gonna be curious because it sounds exciting it sounds like they've got a bunch of

stuff they're ready to come out with uh which is good good we all like we all like little toys all right well that's gonna wrap up my projects and i think that's gonna wrap up the show this week but 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 through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to the private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everyone else can get in there and, and talk about cameras and the Unify world conference. That's right. And, and all sorts of fun stuff. There's, you know, and if you were in there, um, I, did I, I think I posted the video link. Yes, you did.

It was a whole week of Seth. All right. It's Seth. All right. It's Seth. All right. We realized nobody cares about the rest of us well i mean here's what you need um a major natural disaster and then you know

over your house and then yeah people will be writing to you yeah it doesn't hurt to ask if gavin's all right you don't know if i'm all right you know like gavin you're all right yeah i'm good i'm good i'm hanging in there you know tj you all right what's gonna be your problem g, you're all right. Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. I'm hanging in there. TJ, you all right? What's going to be your problem, Gavin? You're going to have too much maple syrup or something? You don't have any natural disasters. Okay. Well, you know what? Since you want to get into it, we, you know, I got an espresso machine and I've cut off

Tim Horton's called Turkey and it's, it's been kind of rough transition, but I. Wow. So you're going to bankrupt Tim Hortons yeah but I I used uh chat GPT to um uh tell me how to replicate my favorite Tim Hortons coffee in the Nespresso they told me what pods to get and how much sugar to add and you know I bought a milk frother and stuff like that so you know it's it's I've been going through a rough time but you never ask if I'm okay so you don't know these kind of things so you know the Nespresso holding me over, but I'm doing all right otherwise. Oh, that's good.

That's good. If you want to help out McKittsport financially, you don't have a fancy coffee maker like Evan, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up the news here on Home Tech this week. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Till next time.