HomeTech.fm - Episode 508 - The Great Jersey Mystery Solved!

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

On this week's show: A MAJOR HomeTech mystery has been solved! The FTC warns that smart gadget manufacturers could face legal consequences for inadequate software support, Ikea introduces adaptive lighting for smart lights, Homey unveils new dashboards, and Meross launches its first Matter-certified smart thermostat, Matter-certified updates from SwitchBot and Level, Home Assistant gets CM5 support for the Yellow CM5, 2024.12 release, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 6th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. God, I have here in the show notes, it says warm up. It's cold in Florida. I don't know if you guys know this.

Please don't complain. How cold is it? Do not complain. What did we discover? It was like 7C, whatever, 5C. I don't know. Five. And in Freedom Units, it's like 46 in the morning, 45 in the morning.

Wow, that's cold. Yeah, I mean, that verges on, I think, iguanas falling out of the tree. I've been checking, and it says iguanas have been safe. So I haven't seen any news stories, but temperatures under 50 degrees, it says that's when it can immobilize iguanas. I haven't caught the little thing going off. I think it has to go for some time. And I think I programmed it in for like a couple of days of cold weather. Yeah, we've been hovering around the 20s every night here and then the 40s during the day so it's uh pretty cold and uh my my den my three seasons room when i go out there in the morning it's like 40 degrees so uh it wakes me up immediately yeah you you're you if you had an iguana in there it would

definitely fall on your head oh if i had an iguana in there it would definitely be dead and if you can't tell this week i am also sick uh that that that nice cold weather that's going around everybody up here is sick so oh if i'm a little nasally this week that's probably why gavin did the cold weather get to you too the cold weather finally made it to us and we got some snow this week but it was like a centimeter of snow so i just pulled out the the leaf blower and blew it all off it's a white christmas yeah it was not it was all right but it's cold it's cold i think the cold without snow is the worst because you just look outside you know that you're going to be cold but when it's snow it's like well that makes sense because you know it's got to be cold for snow

but when you don't have any snow it's a little depressing i feel bad for the people just north of us they got like four and a half feet of snow, and then they expect another couple more feet. They're just getting hammered. In the city here, we haven't gotten much, but a lot of Tesla people complaining about unable to open their doors and stuff like that. That's a Tesla problem.

No, it's like these people own the Teslas, and then people are like, going to the app, there's a button that pops the door open, or there's a way to do this. But, you know, people just like to complain. I can't open my Tesla door. Yeah, Northern Ohio got hit with like three feet of snow, like right on Lake Erie and stuff like that. And we've gotten absolutely nothing in Central Ohio. So, well, I don't know what snow is,

but we don't have any of that down here. And it's just nice and cool. And it's been kind of pleasant the last couple of days. Mornings are a little chilly. Now is the good time to go to Florida. Yeah, this is- As long as you're not trying to go to the ocean, I guess. But this is what we paid for this weather.

We paid for it this year in so many ways. Anyway, speaking of paying for things, things you don't have to pay. Well, I guess let's talk about things you did pay for. Anybody grab anything on Black Friday? Way too much. I still have, you know, it's so bad. I still have boxes coming in. And I feel bad.

You know, I wish Amazon would group them up. I could wait and group them up and I'll bring them all on Friday or something. But they come and they drop one small package today and then one small package tomorrow and it feels like such a waste and it's like uh but i ordered way too much i think what kind of did you get any home technology stuff gavin or is it all different kind of stuff um all different kind of stuff i usually like to stock up on my batteries. So when I look for deals on batteries and grab those for all the different devices, but I grabbed a Yolink sensor from my freezer. You know,

I like them because they have a really thin cable on it and the sensor you actually can put in and leave the main module of the unit on the outside. And I like that because then the battery's not in the cold. You don't have to worry about that. So I grabbed one of those. I think, was it you that told me about the barrel travel router, Seth? Yeah.

Yes. I grabbed the AX3200. I think it's the same one I had. I saw you put a picture of it. Yeah. Yeah. I grabbed one of those. I grabbed actually a few travel things.

So with that router, I also grabbed a Fire TV and a little charging mat from Anchor that you could charge three devices on. So I have my little travel kit of devices going. I grabbed a couple SSD drives for my Unraid server. Always good to upgrade, add extra to my cache. Or I grabbed just an extra one to put my app data on directly, which I later found out that there's a better way of doing app data where you can make the share exclusive, so it bypasses the file system of Unraid and increases performance.

And I saw, yeah, it's pretty cool. I posted about that on my Mastodon, if you want the real details behind it. I'm going to look there. Yep. I grabbed a Sonos Ray. Now, I know this is not a popular Sonos device with people, but for the price it was, I was like, what the hell? I'll just buy it for my basement TV. It's better than the speakers.

It gives you another AirPlay device. You know, it sounds better. I'm not putting it in a home theater or anything like that, right? It's just to make the TV sound better. And for the price it was, it was worth the grabbing. I don't know if you guys grabbed anything. I still have packages coming in, so I lost track of what else I ordered at this point. I was kind of lame for Black Friday.

The only thing I picked up is I picked up a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. I picked up a set or a pair like a couple months ago, and I really liked them, but I wanted transition lenses. Yes. And so this time they went on sale. I think they were like $80 or $90 off. And so I picked those up, and I'm giving them a shot again. I'm trying to make some videos of installations and stuff like that with them.

So we'll see how that goes. I tried those. I tried those the other day, and if anyone's curious, I was so surprised at the quality of the audio in it um i was shocked actually because the speaker i think is just over here yeah it's like bone conducting in a way i think yeah it was so clear so you know like if you're worried about that don't worry it sounds actually pretty good well and what i really like about them too is that they're actual glasses with being technology. Second, like they're obviously have cameras or something like built into them.

They're thicker and everything like that. Um, but like, they don't feel like too heavy on your face. Um, and they like, I don't think they stick out way much. Like,

like some of the other smart glasses have in the past. So I like them. So we'll see. I wish they kind of had some more AI stuff built into it, but you can like have meta AI tell you what it's looking at, which kind of cool and so if i'm like looking at a flower or a boat or whatever it is i can be like what am i looking at and they can describe it to me um and it does a decent job so what about you seth anything yeah well first i think i think i'm gonna lose our friendly wager of patrick's been getting fired because tomorrow's december 6th and i don't think

he's gone yet but i'm gonna have to have to blame, I don't know, Gavin playing interference there, boosting their performance by buying Tona's stuff. Well, it was kind of depressing because they lost a lot of money in the last quarter, I think. He may be gone yet. I wonder why. I may not be helping.

Well, let's see. I got one of these things let's see let's just turn it nice oh i've been waiting to get one of those yes the emporia view three i guess yes it's a three yeah yeah it's uh i'm gonna just put it over there on the shelf and i'll get to it one day i'm sure oh geez did you get the 16 um uh 16 sensor model yeah it's really heavy um i just dropped it so i hope it's okay i'm sure uh the the uh the the sense thing that i have has been locking up for a while and i looked back i was like looking at it i'm like i haven't it hasn't read for about a month it hasn't been on and it's like come on like it's supposed to be sitting there just casually logging data and of course like it

doesn't it it doesn't it just kind of guesses to the sweats on anyway so it's just kind of i don't know now i'm gonna i'm gonna hook this thing up and and we'll see if it gets you know it does better so one of these days i'll pop the uh on that horrible, horrible circuit box I have. It's like full of wires and everything. I'm not looking at that. I'm not looking forward to that, I guess. That part is terrifying. I have to open mine back up because for some reason my 30 amp breaker for my UPS isn't registering with Emporia.

And so I need to open my panel up to clamp it on or something like that. And I'm not looking forward to that because it's a a cluster i think we've posted a picture of my panel before it is a nightmare so yeah yours is a nightmare i mean mine mine doesn't look much better it's but it's absolutely chock full of breakers and circuit there's like so many circuits in there it's like why did they put all these wires in why couldn't they have just put two wires together i think i even have two wires that i put together because there's like three rooms and or two rooms of ceiling lights it's like they're just ceiling lights like what what could you possibly put on why do you need a whole 20 amps for that or 15 amps for that doesn't make any sense i have too many circuits in in my panel

i guess it's better than the alternative well power is terrifying i have a a quick little story here so we were uh installing a tv for a client this week and installed a new outlet. So I had to like turn off the power for the existing outlet. And I ran the Romex wire and everything and go to turn the breaker back on. I turned it on. Everything works fine. And I was like, huh, there's this other breaker that's off for some reason. Do you remember if that was on or off?

And the homeowner was like, I don't remember. I mean, it was probably on. And so I turned it on and it killed the power for the entire house. And it just like, boom. And I was like, what? I think that one's off. Yeah, you're supposed to leave that one off. Yeah.

Come to find out I had a piece of black tape on there that came off. So I was just like, what do we do? And I was like, well well you should get that removed immediately because that shouldn't happen something's wrong with that terrifying doesn't get better in the big houses either i was at a client's house the electrician out there looking at some stuff and he's like i don't i turn the power off here and i still get power over there it's like it's supposed to turn off the entire thing. But for whatever reason, like there's two breakers hooked up

to that side of the house. And he's asking me like, do you know how it was wired? I'm like, no, man. You're the electrician. I bet if you got in the attic, you could probably figure it out. He did not go into the attic, so.

People do all kinds of crazy stuff with electrical. They're just like, and then it makes me feel better about my stuff because i'm like well if my stuff if my stuff or if their stuff hasn't burned down then my stuff's not gonna burn down right in theory in theory yeah i found like wires spliced in my walls and stuff just electrical tape together that's fine just yeah just whatever as long as the things the fridge powered on who cared they're not touching uh well speaking of stuff we talked about stuff we paid for um so if we we

don't have to pay for uh we're giving away some stuff we're giving away uh some of these apollo h1s uh which you know we've got i've got one sitting on my desk here and i'll see if it no i changed the setting on it i think i changed the deep sleep setting or something and i it goes to sleep now i have to

unplug it and plug it back in for whatever reason. So now it'll work and all. There we go. Jingle bells, which we'll talk about. I got mine last week. I need to flash it with the custom firmware though. I haven't got it attached to home assistant yet.

Oh yeah. I got it. Once you get up to home assistant, it's got all sorts of fun stuff you can do to it, including breaking it by putting it into deep sleep mode. Don't flip that switch, whatever that means. Because then you have to, I guess, reset it to wake it up. I don't know.

It's a fun little device and I would highly recommend it. If you want one of these, head on over to hometech.fm, look in the show notes. There'll be a button there that says, I don't know, click here to win one of these things. And next week's show, we'll announce who's winning. We'll ship them out, I guess, at that point. TJ's got stamps. a button there that says uh i don't know click here to uh to win one of these things and next we show we'll announce who's winning we'll we'll ship them out i i guess at that point tj's got stamps yeah that way you get it before the holidays uh they'll ship they'll ship right

from our warehouse in uh in kentucky so all right wait who's shipping them seth right no no apollo is shipping them i've already talked to them about it so okay they're just they're sending it directly to the person because if it was seth if it was seth shipping it you know we didn't specify what holidays you'd get it before yeah exactly well then seth would have to like design some custom card for and everything and then oh yeah we'd have to wait three months for it to get printed on and everything yeah i already i already did it it should be arriving you did not already do it i know that's a lie. It's our pictures with little hats on it.

You know, Christmas hats. Santa hats. Oh, yeah. No, I didn't do that. But what I did do is put the little form up. So there's a form on the website. Go there, sign up, and put your address in if you want to win one of these. It's adorable. It's adorable little Christmas tree.

And it's number one. There'll be another one next year. That's right. And all the proceeds of it go to charity. I haven't looked at what they've been making recently i think it was like 2500 last i look yeah it kept growing if you if you don't want to if you don't have one of these register for it and uh and and and we were giving away what two of them or something next week yeah 2500 as of 12 three so very nice that's pretty good that's a lot of money very cool uh home tech that of him and you should see the button on the show notes there for

this show and the previous show. It'll be the same form. Uh, well, I guess I can do that. Hmm. I wonder if I can, I don't know.

Maybe just go to the last week show notes and look at those show notes. There'll be a button on one of them and then I click it and you can register for it. So, uh, that said, I guys, we got a bunch of home tech headlines that came in under the radar,

uh, this week. Uh, what do you headlines that came in under the radar this week. What do you say we get started? Let's do it. Let's do it. The Federal Trade Commission here in the U.S. has issued a warning that manufacturers of smart devices may be violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act if they fail to disclose the duration of software support. After reviewing 184 smart products across 64 categories, the FTC found that the majority did not provide clear information on software support timelines. Only about 11% of the devices examined

discloses information on their product pages. Additionally, when manufacturers do share software support details, the information is often hard to find buried in the specs, FAQs, or footnotes. The FCC noted that inconsistencies, such as claims of lifetime support, that were contradicted by the actual support timelines. Of course, yeah, you always buy something. It's like, yeah, it's good for life, and then the company just goes out of business.

The agency suggests that the lack of transparency in software support could mislead consumers uh yeah consumers and potentially violate the ftc act um the ftc report calls for law enforcement and policymakers to ensure vendors properly disclose software support commitments and this follows a letter from 17 consumer advocacy groups urging the ftc to address this issue uh where devices relying on embedded software linked to manufactured servers um may stop working we talked about this for a long time. Like there's, there's nothing on these devices that kind of indicates on like how long they're going to work. If they're going to work, if, if the company's even going to be around anymore, I've got, I've got an, I've got a whole shelf

back there full of devices that don't work anymore because of this very issue. So yeah, this is good to see. Finally, finally, the industry has to grow up a little. Yeah. There needs to be something. I mean, because there's just, there's so much e-waste and it's a bunch of random products out there that are probably never going to get firmware updates or they're just, the company's going to go under or whatever it is, and they'll never be usable again. And we shouldn't be doing that, right? I mean, if a company that makes your fridge goes out of business, you can still use the fridge. And I understand that cloud servers are different because it does require somebody else's computer.

There's other ways to build these devices to where it doesn't have to rely on those features. And there should be some kind of safe mode or non-network mode or whatever you want to call it that allows you to use the device in a basic fashion. Totally agree with everything you said. And I just want to add too is security here. If a device is no longer going to get security updates, but it's still being used by somebody, you know, the chance of it becoming a botnet or something is pretty high, you know, depending on, you know, whatever vulnerability. And we should get those kind of devices out of there, either have them patched continuously.

And if that's not possible, we need to get them off as soon as there's a vulnerability founding. You gotta get that message out to the users and say, hey, this device, you know, is vulnerable. You don't want it in your house. And I'm sure they wouldn't want it in their house. Yeah, I mean, well, we just got to the point

where we're not setting default passwords anymore. So I don't know. This could take a little while to get out there, but we'll have to see what happens here. There's a lot that could happen. There's a lot of ways that they could fix this this but it's interesting that they're like coming out so strongly saying hey there's this law out there that uh you guys may be maybe violating and i what would it take for like i think it'd have to be like a big player like apple or something like

that for the for the feds to go after anybody it had to be a pretty big product to just like stop working maybe maybe so i don't know not enough people have that one i'm just thinking like apple or google it may be google maybe google cancels one of their phones or something that a lot of people have and or android or something like that i don't know maybe that may happen anyway who knows see what happens with this cord case chrome's's going away, guys. I swear. Chrome's going to, it's going to disappear. Yeah. We'll find out. Yeah, we'll see.

Going to get Microsoft. Right now, Chrome's the only browser on my computer that seems to be working. So, I hope not. You know, I've tried everything else. And I just, I always come back to Chrome. I'm not sure what it is. I think it's just like familiarity at this point or something. But I just, I like Chrome out of everything else. I'm one of the few that probably still uses Firefox, actually.

Yeah, probably. I don't know if anybody uses Firefox. Oh, well, there's one add-on specifically that I'm stuck with, and it's called In My Pocket, and it's a front-end to the Pocket Link Saver, but it just works so good, and it's the main reason. The other reason is they can't lock down Firefox at my work like how they do Chrome and Edge

so I can get away with some other stuff. Truth comes out. Firefox is actually really good. There's a lot of like security features that it gets first and they actually turn on by default first. Like, and I say get first, like there's these like little codes

and you can type in i i forget what they are because i use firefox years ago but you you can go in and like change really deep settings within firefly i think chrome has the same thing but firefox generally pushes out like security related and privacy related features well in advance of the rest of the industry and and very much in advance of chrome doing anything because that's, you know, all your data is going to an advertising company at that point, which is why it's going away.

But yeah, it'll be interesting. Like I said, I can't, for some reason, single clicks have stopped working in my Safari browser today. I don't know why.

It's time for a new computer. I'm going to switch over ahead of time here. Get you an M4 Ultra, whatever. I do. I have one right here at the Mac Mini sitting here i just haven't really plugged in come on well that's all right you will have a couple weeks off at the end of the month so yeah yeah it will happen you'll definitely do it then yeah it'll happen yeah i gotta plug it in i can wiggle a mouse and it'll

turn on the screen and that's about as far as i've gotten so anyway let's move on here um ikea has enhanced its smart home uh app by introducing here um ikea has enhanced its smart home uh app by introducing dynamic a dynamic lighting feature for its smart lights enabling automatic adjustment of color temperature and brightness throughout the day uh this is uh basically just like philips use natural lighting or what's the one uh adaptive lighting i think is what apple calls it um it's gonna i guess guess this brings stuff over to the weird IKEA lights that they have through their software. They have a picture of the Sonos. Does that have the ability to change the color?

I don't even know. It includes products like Sonos compatible Symphonix speaker lamp. So there you go. Yeah, I don't remember if they actually came with a bulb for that one. I think you had to buy it separately, but I actually never bought one. So I'm not really sure. I know you could buy the shade separately as well yeah but you could just buy the base and then you can buy the shades and stuff like that um but ikea does sell adaptive light

bulbs so that's probably what they're really getting at so they you get the sonos uh speaker lamp thing that looks like i mean this thing has always looked like a like a tea saucer or something with a home pod sitting on top of it with one of those lampshades that goes on to a fan. Like just described it perfectly. Upside down though. It's probably the ugliest thing I've ever seen. But I kind of want one too. I don't think they make them anymore though.

Hey, it's a functional speaker. You know, everybody else is out here building these tiny little hockey puck speakers. And Ikea is like, no, your speaker needs to turn on lights. You need to have this ugly lampshade on top of it. And honestly, the only one I really wanted, I wanted the Ikea art speaker thing. Yeah. It was basically like an art print that you put on your wall because those actually looked pretty decent.

I could just never figure out the cable thing. I figured you'd have to like run the cable in the wall somewhere else. I guess the speaker lamp still exists. It has an even uglier shade on the newer one here. $249, though. Nice. Yeah, they're very expensive. Well, yeah.

Not as expensive as... Well, it's just about as expensive as Sonos, I guess. But adaptive lighting. I think adaptive lighting is going to be one of those things we're going to see a lot more of in 2025. I don't know if it's going to be like a major thing or not but i think a lot more manufacturers are going to adopt it because it does make a big difference and it's it's a step above just like normal motion lights um anybody can just like turn on lights whenever it detects motion and everything like that but it's nice to have it automatically adjust the brightness

and so that way it's one less step you have to deal with very nice good good job i i well i i'm gonna take it i'm not gonna take it back it's still ugly as sin but like they have newer shade options for this thing now uh that you can swap it out for and it actually does make it look better than the old one i i i guess there's there's even have a floor floor a floor stand option that looks like uh it makes it look like one of the aliens. What was that movie with Tom Cruise, the old radio show? War of the Worlds. It looks like an alien from War of the Worlds.

So there you go. If you think that's weird, just look at it. Have you seen it by itself with no shade on it? Look at this. Could you imagine just walking around and seeing that better what's up with your what's up with your uh air fresher refresher there all right well let's move on here a little update for homie as well they've unveiled new custom customizable dashboards for other smart home platform aimed at simplifying the control of connected devices uh these were these actually look pretty good they they remind me of something i can't quite put my finger on it

hmm i don't know very similar very similar but wouldn't be home kit would it no not home kit it's home something home something else it's really weird oh well no i do i do like this i think i would like it if my uh home assistant looked at this yours doesn't mine looks like this yeah well you how many hours did you spend on it uh too many but it's doable you need integration it tells you how long you spend on certain areas in home assistance that way we can know brilliant oh my gosh how long you spend programming yeah like you know those video games or you can go into the stats page? Yeah, high score.

Not high score. It'll just tell you like how many hours you spent. Is there like a home assistant unwrapped? Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. You spent five days in automations. You know. Total five years of editing YAML. You'd live seven years longer

if you didn't touch any YAML this year. You guys are really making me feel bad. This is something, we do not want to know these stats. I saw an Outlook plug-in that somebody was talking about that would show you the cost of a meeting based on average salaries and stuff like that. And, you know, you start looking at meetings differently and you realize this one-hour meeting just cost us $10,000. You know, these are things you don't want to know. How much time my home assistant's costing me? I don't want to know.

You know what? I don't even think about it as time or money when I'm enjoying what I do, fixing things every month. Well, if you don't want to know, you can switch over to Homey Pro. That rhymes. And you get these 25 Homey widgets with third-party widgets as well. They've got built-in feature with, they've got graphs and energy

for temperature and energy usage, device control, Homey flow automations, weather updates, and camera integration. So it actually looks really nice. Good job. Good job, Homey.

I don't know how much YAML you have to edit. Probably none, but it looks pretty good. Definitely no YAML, just LG WebOS or whatever. All right, let's move on here. We've got an interesting, we've got a bunch of new Matter products actually hitting this week.

We talked about Miros last week. They've also, I think they introduced three products that were Matter related. Now they're going to introduce their first Matter certified smart thermostat. It's compatible with North American HVAC system and priced at $99.99. There you go. Thermostat operates over Wi-Fi, features a nice little sleek white glass panel with a touchscreen,

and offers smart scheduling, all the good stuff that you pretty much expect to use. It does require a C-wire and makes it compatible with about 95% of the heating and cooling systems out there. It can integrate with Miros, I don't know how to spell it, Miros, Miros, whatever. They're Matter-compatible temperature and humidity sensors as well. Matter certification allows it to integrate with all the platforms, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings without needing a cloud connection. Really cool. TJ, you had thoughts on this when we looked at it earlier.

Yeah, you know, I like that it's one of the few matter options you have available for a thermostat. So it's good to see that product category is expanding. I'm not a fan of the overall looks, though. I've installed similar thermostats from Alarm.com. I don't understand what the appeal of an all-white screen with white LED lettering is. Because when it's in direct sunlight, it's very hard to see. And when I saw the photos of the alarm.com one initially, I was like, eh, it can't be that bad. But I have to tell you, it's pretty bad.

So I'm not really sure that this is a good idea, but it is cheap. It's only $100. And launch price is $69. So get it while it's hot. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not a bad price, but I don't like the design. I don't think it's a good idea. But for that price and the fact that it works with temperature and humidity sensors, that's a killer feature right there i love um with my echo

b you know i have sensors around the house it works with those um and it adjusts based on you know where we are or you know i have a mode where when the fireplace is on don't you know only account for certain sensors stuff like that right that that seems to be a minimum when you're looking for a smart thermostat now for me is it has to have external sensors that you can utilize in your automations or routines and stuff like that. And for this price, that's really good. That's a killer price for a smart home thermostat. And it doesn't look terrible, TJ.

I mean, ideally, you'd never have to go up and push buttons on that anyway, right? If the smart sensors work and the software they use works to cool your house or heat your house uh in in in all the zones that you have sensors in ideally you never have to go and look at that thing you never have to mess with it i i say that i never really go i never touch my ecobee thermostat like i walk by it from time to time same here everything's routines now so i never touch the thermostat at all i even tell the a lady if i want to adjust the temperature like i don't have to actually go to it so it's pretty nice like that like you could just hide this away spray paint it black if you want i think i i think that's what

they were designing for it is white on white i agree it's hard to see a little bit even in their product shots it's kind of hard to see maybe it's even worse in person who knows uh but i mean they're just trying to make it hide away i guess that that might work well i guess i'm just old because i turn my mac mini off all the time and i touch my thermostat all the time so wow you go blind man yeah wow well i don't know i don't know i've only rebooted this computer you know twice tonight i guess it's time for a new computer other than that it's been on for months once you get to rebooting computers you know it's time for a replacement yeah i mean it needs to be scrapped now i can't i can't trust

it if i have to reboot it throw it in the room you have to reboot it get a new one just turn it off that's right that's my rule if this computer ever turns off i'm buying a new one don't trust it anymore you've let me down. Don't let me down. We've got a SwitchBot releasing a Matter product here. Two Matter-certified relays. SwitchBot has released two Matter-certified smart relays designed to upgrade traditional devices into smart ones

without needing to replace existing switches. These relays, the 1PM and the relay switch 1 support matter over Wi-Fi, which basically eliminates the need for a SwitchBot hub. They also include Bluetooth radios to function as range extenders for other Bluetooth-based SwitchBot devices. Price is pretty competitive on these. This is in Euro. So on Amazon in the eu it's uh 21 euros or 22 euros and for the 1 p.m and then uh 20 euros for the one that's pretty good yeah honestly i think this from what i can tell this is the first switchbot device that does not require their hub um all of them have been kind of standalone with like bluetooth um but if you wanted matter or threat or if you want to

matter you had to use their hub no matter what. I don't know of any other device they have that doesn't use their hub. Maybe their robot vacuum mop thing. But like every other smart home device they have uses Bluetooth and connects to the hub. That's kind of interesting to see this difference here.

It looks like, and they look like Shelly devices. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, they look just like Shelly devices. Just tiny little I was going to say. Yeah, they look just like Shelly devices. Just tiny little relays. So what's the difference between them? Dry contact. Oh yeah, for like, okay. So one is for single channel circuits.

The other one is dry contact for doorbells or whatever else. So, and that's not a bad price difference between the two of them anyway. So I can see them selling a lot of these. So it's mostly, I mean, it's kind of aimed at the European market, but I don't know. Like it would probably work its way over here. Yeah, I imagine so. We'll see them soon a lot of these like it's it's mostly i mean it's kind of aimed at the european market but i don't know like it'll probably work its way over here yeah i imagine so we'll see them soon ah all right well uh another uh thing from level we talked about level i think last week or

the week before i'm not sure but they've been uh upgrading their devices over to matter over thread and they're going to do that with the bolt smart lock they're going to do that with the Bolt Smart Lock. They're going to do that with the Bolt Smart Lock as well. That's hard to say. It's priced at $229. And this is going to be a free upgrade to existing Bolt users. Yay! Another Matter device. Another device getting updated for Matter. That's good. Especially

locks too because there's not that many Matter locks. So it's good to see this. And I've never used the Level Lock but I like the look of it. So I think it's a good option for a lot of people. And the upgrade's free, so that's even better. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to buy a hub or anything like that. Like, you're just going to update it.

There you go. Good job, Level. All right, well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 508. All right, guys, no pick of the week this week. We're skipping everything because a mystery has been solved oh this is awesome i was i was sitting at my desk today staring at a computer screen and this little thing the email popped up from somebody submitting feedback on our feedback

form home contact.fm feedback and uh keith wrote in and and here's his message here this is this is it hi i wanted to say hi from the island of guernsey a smaller island next to the original jersey famous for our cows jumpers and one of our local heroes isaac brock he even saved canada from the u.s back in the day it's true he did our ip addresses sometimes get mixed up with jersey so i may be your single jersey listener long time listener and love the show have a great christmas i think we found him guys Our IP addresses sometimes get mixed up with Jersey. So I may be your single Jersey listener, longtime listener and love the show. Have a great Christmas. I think we found him guys.

I think he's here. Keith. I've blown away. I'm like, so amazed. We found you actually. This, you know,

you know what this feels like? This feels like when Seth like finishes a project, you know, it's like a celebration, you know, you just feel so good um oh man hi keith well keith and keith from guernsey yes hi and thanks for listening this is pretty awesome i i did look up guernsey it looks beautiful i don't know if you guys have been over to the wiki media

page we'll link it in the show notes you know what guernsey you're the pick of the week uh thanks to keith and um isaac brock you, you're a hero over there for the UK. You thinned it off. I guess the US from taking over Montreal. So there we go. I even learned some Canadian history about Isaac Brock in Lower Canada. He even was in Detroit, too. He was fighting over in Detroit.

So there's a lot of history there. He got around, yeah. From Guernsey. A little tiny island, 24 square miles, right there in the channel. More north of, like right north of France, I guess. It's probably closer to France than it is to England, it looks like. Amazing. Contact us back with your address.

We'll send you an ornament. Yeah. Yeah, he's... No hand delivering, but... Yeah, no hand delivering. Although I will say, I would like to go here. It looks like a pretty good tourist destination.

They have castles. I think TJ... Who cat they have castles uh i think i think tj who doesn't love castles i think we need to send them some stickers at least you know like because like we're pretty good about you know being put in front of castles i think you know that's happened that's that's true so and man this does look like a beautiful place it does i'm looking at a picture of it and i, they have one picture from a plane covering the whole island. So that's how big it is, you know? Do you have space for me, Keith? Can I come crash in you?

There's a couple beaches there, too. Those look like some nice beaches. Yeah. I will hand deliver the ornament. The water's cold, but it still looks like a beautiful island. The Guernsey Cliffs, I've heard of the Guernsey Cows too, amazingly enough. So yeah, it's a famous place there

for a tiny little island right off the French coast. So there we go. Well, I can't find any flights over there, so I don't think I can hand deliver it, unfortunately. No, actually in the Wikipedia article, I think they even have like the loan, yeah, transport. There's one airline that goes there it's called our argony air services it takes off from bristol airport so there we go where does it land is it a

helicopter no no it's a seaplane looking thing oh they have no like they have no like the bahamas okay okay so round trip from bristol uk is only $170. Oh yeah. The flights are cheap over there. So, I mean, that's, that's not bad. I mean, you'd fly over to the UK for like a thousand dollars. Well, you're saying that's not bad, but the people, people in the UK are falling out of their chairs right now hearing those prices. I mean, they get, they get around for like 60 bucks.

It's ridiculous. Ah, yeah. The cheapest flights I could find are like $90 to Florida. So, and nobody wants to go to Florida. Wow. You guys have cheap flights. Don't even ask. Don't even ask.

Well, everything in Canada is ridiculous. So you can't really compare. Here's the Guernsey Gosh is what I was interested in. It's a special bread made of raisins, sultanas, and a mixed peel. So yeah, I'm all in for foods. It sounds like they have good foods. All right. So $1,000 for me to get from Columbus to Bristol, round trip, and then $200 to get to Guernsey. It's not bad. Yeah, not bad. Not bad. Right on my way, Keith. Well, Keith, thanks so much for listening. And it's, it's, this is absolutely amazing. I didn't, I didn't think we'd ever hear from, from anybody on this.

And it's kind of been a running joke for a while, but now, now that we found you, we're going to have to find those, those two or three listeners in Jamaica. So if you're in Jamaica, uh, hit us up slightly, slightly, uh, slightly better chance of us visiting. And you know what, if you're, If you're from an island close to Jamaica, you know, take the chance. Maybe your IP is going through Jamaica for some reason. So, you know, just let us know you're close to Jamaica.

You're listening. You enjoy the show, you know? Especially like I might be going to Jamaica next year, so I can actually hand deliver. There we go. There we go. Like I said, is a slightly better chance of us hand delivering something to Jamaica.

Alright, very cool. Thanks, Keith, so much for writing in. You've made Guernsey proud. They're the pick of the week this week. And, you know, learned a lot about looking through Wikipedia articles on Guernsey this afternoon. So, thanks for writing in

and letting us know you're there. Appreciate it. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. big news i guess the home assistant yellow gets cm5 support so that's the commute compute module five which is the newest version of the raspberry pi compute module thing computer right was just the cm4 was what they launched with and then the cm5 came out and now they're saying it'll work i guess yep that's big news for people that are looking to do a little upgrade. They can just swap it in and it should work. But you have to have the latest home assist in the OS 14. So make sure you have that. Yep, you get improved speed

and faster backups and reboots. So there you go. Yeah, this is kind of the advantage of using the compute module. I mean, it's very similar to like a Raspberry Pi, like the regular, I guess, what you'd consider the normal Raspberry Pi. But it's nice because this is a little chip and you just plug it right in

and it's good to go. There's not like, it's kind of like RAM, you know? Just plug it right in. Yeah, well, and it says the CM4 should be powerful enough for most users and it has a long life ahead while Raspberry Pi has confirmed that they will fully support the CM4 until 2034. Wow.

And will continue to manufacture them so yeah that's crazy it's a long it's a while there's an article we'll put in the show notes and if you've got one of these uh these boxes here this might be uh a good upgrade for you uh and you can check it out and see i don't know cm4 seems like it'd be good enough i'd probably get that yeah it'd probably be fine for now but yeah yeah go for it if If you're a pro user like Gavin with his thousand cores. Yeah, exactly. And then the last release of the year, Home Assistant 2024.12 has been released.

Lots of stuff in this. I think there was a breaking... Something broke for... Everything breaks. What? Sonos, right? Or Sonos broke or something like that.

I've been seeing people complain about Sonos. I thought Alexa broke. Everyone complains about Sonos. Don't blame it on Home Assistant. Yeah, I was going to say, Sonos is Sonos. I'm sure they broke it, but then I think there was an update already to fix the Sonos thing, and it's been fixed.

But, well... Not Sonos. Spotify. Spotify, sorry. Wrong S company that has music related to it. But, yeah, Spotify. Spotify audio features, sensors have been removed since Spotify removed access

for them starting November 27. Yeah, I guess there was a problem or something like that. So even if you didn't upgrade it, you would have had broken sensors, it sounds like anyway. So it doesn't really matter. So while I go through

some of the new stuff, why don't you go ahead and click update on your Home Assistant. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, update. We'll do this live on the show. He's clicking update now but uh some of the other things in the new home assistant 2024.12 a lot of voice updates so they uh showed how it was much faster um they also had a feature to fall back to an llm model

so you can have it process locally first and if it can't handle that then it falls back which is pretty cool i was actually playing around with that before the show um and they've come out and said they're gonna be releasing new hardware their new voice assistant hardware on the 19th that's awesome so they have a live live stream set up a lot of people are excited we'll be watching so that will be on december 19th keep your eyes open if you're looking to get into the Home Assistant voice assistant. On top of that, they added quality scales for integrations. Music Assistant is now integrated. It's no longer a hacks component.

Nice quality of life improvement when editing your YAML files. It will show errors in the UI. Genius. Yeah, exactly. genius or you know yeah exactly um they added a new feature uh where you can edit scenes now so a lot of people got excited about this because when you were editing scenes before as soon as you went to edit them they would trigger and everything would close and open and whatever and it was really annoying to edit scenes well they added this little edit mode or I can't, I think that's what they call it, where you can now like kind of edit it. You can edit in Yamo mode or, you know,

you can edit a few things, but if you still want to edit the actual scene in the GUI, it will trigger it still. So I think this is one of those where people are going to be like, oh, this is so awesome. But as soon as they go use it, they'll be like, what the heck? And speaking of what the heck, this is the month of what the heck at home assistance. So what they're doing is they open up their forum and you can go in their forum and give your what the heck, you know, contributions and just tell what annoys you, what bugs you, what is not there, whatever you want. And they will review them all in the forum and there's already hundreds in there like i went to submit i had five what the heck's i want to submit yeah i slid i cut it down to five because i only have so much time but you know i slimmed it down

to five and um i did a search first and found that other people were already uh already submitted them so i just had to add votes so that saved saved me some time. So search for the, what the heck, see if somebody already has the same problem, submit it, add the vote. And it's not guaranteed that it will get fixed, but it will bring it to awareness of the developers, you know? So if it's something easy, maybe they'll just do something quick, but yeah, that pretty much wraps it up for Home Assistant, which every month, every week, it seems like there's Home Assistant news. They seem to be one of the most busiest home automation platforms out there. There's always news when it comes to Home Assistant.

Well, and the crazy thing is that there's professionals that are using it too, and they're building their professional products off of it as well. And it is kind of crazy to watch it evolve over the years and what you're able to do with it. It truly is an incredible platform. Yeah, I guess I'm going to talk about some of the projects because like one of the projects I was doing this last week was putting up Christmas lights. And I ended up like looking at it. I've got a bunch of the like little ESP devices laying around and I ended up putting what's it called WLED on them to control some pixel lights. Actually, I was just going to use it as a bridge, but that's later

for me to do. Right now, I was just hooking them up and WLED is kind of nice. It's got a bunch of built-in, a horrible interface with a bunch of built-in functions. You can just integrate all these products into Home Assistant, but I was walking around like putting stuff, plugging stuff in inside the house. Like we have these little like Christmas decorations and stuff that you'd plug in. And I had a, you know, three or four or five of those, what are they called? The Shelly devices, the Shelly plug outlet things. I was going around just plugging those in, bringing in the Home Assistant. I was able to go in and just like make like a one button press thing to like turn on the Christmas lights.

And it goes across like it's nice. It goes across platforms. Now, like it's hard to say like it was very easy to do. I would say I would probably have done it. I can't I can't say that like once the devices are in, I think Home Assistant's got everybody beat there. Like just tapping a button and bringing the device in saying integrate this or whatever and maybe you have to do a couple of changing changes of settings on devices but for the most part they just go right in the programming interface in home assistant's pretty awful

like i mean i was like how do i do this going back and forth and then i finally asked i had to go ask chad because you know chad is or gavin is a service sorry and uh and I didn't ask Gavin I didn't bug him because it was late at night and I asked Chad and Chad told me a bunch of yaml to paste in somewhere and I'm like oh my god so I really that that's that's my what the what in the world like the the program interface to make the automations is so clunky like I had to move stuff like you could copy it and what was nice is i copied it and it realized you wanted to copy and paste it you know down somewhere else and as part of the automation and it showed up first on the little list of a million things you could search through but man i don't know it seems so

clunky but as a glue a glue device i was really happy like everything i got most everything that i want to have happen except one thing, which is basically I need to set up some kind of like Boolean condition or something like that to test off of before, you know, I have one button and I want to use that button as a toggle button for a bunch of lights, basically, you know, the button to turn on and off the Christmas lights.

And I don't really see an easy way to doing that other than setting up this YAML stuff and creating this Boolean variable. And like, why isn't that like a top level thing? And then also why is it so hard to find if it's not? There's a, what the heck for that? I think like a global variable. Yeah, there should be a, what the heck for that?

There is a, what the heck for that? You know, you sound like a couple of people. I, uh, one of my coworkers pinged me, you know, one conversation with me and he's now switching over to home assistant, know he was he's currently on habitat but now he's switching over to home assistant and he said he looked at it before and he didn't like it and then he loaded it now and he says they've come a long way that it's so different and so much better you know so he's really happy with it now and there was definitely has like i don't want to disparage it like, it hasn't come a super long way, especially when it comes to getting devices

into the system. And there's a couple of other things in here that I'm looking at, like the calendar feature. That's kind of been a pain in my side here at the house for a while about like, it seems to me it has a calendar system built around families, like where people are. And like, if you're in the house or not based on your phone and that kind of thing, it's like that would actually be really useful. Apple. Yeah. Right now, my wife and I share a calendar and she puts all the stuff on it. I put all the stuff on it, but it would be better if we had something like this. And I don't see how this integrates with everything, because that's that's the biggest problem.

And then I have to get other people to use it. But it would be nice to have the calendar stuff built into the house until into the home assistant thing which is what it says it is so i don't know i'm going to investigate that but it just they've come a long way of getting devices in but they still got a very long way to go i mean programming uh what i was talking about like on a control force system or rti system you're seeing like it'd be i mean it would be like five seconds to do like it's very fast getting the devices integrated with them may be a little bit more challenging uh you know especially since a lot of them aren't you'd have to bring a third-party driver in you have to go

find it download it buy a license for it all that stuff like that takes time uh with home assistant you click a button and it just it sucks all of it in and which is kind of cool but it two different approaches to do different systems. But like I said, I don't want to disparage it. Like as a glue device, I have in our projects, like home assistant glue is one of the things I did. I was very happy with the way everything got set up. I was able to go in and like group a bunch

of the devices together and treat them like, you know, we press this button on the wall and all the Christmas lights turn on. And that's where I was trying to go with it. And I was able to do it. So, so far, so good. So far, so good. I just, and I just finished maybe updating to, uh, I had to update the operating system

as well. So that went, that went to 14. So now I'm on 14, but I'm updated. I'm updated. See, look how fast and easy that was i was watching another youtuber this week uh shane watley and he he's uh he's a home apple home guy his youtube channel is always about apple home stuff and this and that and he finally his latest video he he released uh he he gave home assistant a try and you know i i know this is a clickbaity type of title but he was like i was wrong about home

assistant as a title and he actually admits it in the video and he was impressed with how good it was and how far it's come as well so i've seen the transition over the last couple years well what one of the things i did was was and i probably shouldn't have done this is i dumped the the home assistant stuff into the Apple interface. Like I finally hooked that up and like it pushed all the junk over there. Cause my wife has been complaining for a long time. Like I've been putting all these Shelly devices in and she's like, that's the lights not on here.

Where's the light to turn that on and off. I'm like, I don't know. Like she's been complaining for a while. Cause she just wants to go on her phone and tap the thing that she's always tapped to turn on and off lights. I'm like, yeah,

it's a, it's a different thing. You know, it's, it's not going to show up where you thought it was going to show up and now i you know with a couple of button presses and then a million million taps on my phone to put the devices that i wanted in the right rooms and then oh god i made the mistake of importing the uh the uh the the sense thing with the billion sensors that i gotta delete that out uh but yeah so but yeah the home kit interface

needs some work now on organizing many many devices but uh just for a couple of clicks worth of work on the home assistant side to bring those devices in and then like hey here's your solution those lights are on there now you can turn them on off or tell tell siri to like hey that's a that's a win that's a big. That's a big win. You know, I noticed today I was fixing my kitchen light and I added to home or it was already a home assistant, but I added to the Amazon lady ecosystem and they auto discovered it and stuff.

And then I said, turn on the kitchen light and she did it. But then she came with a, by the way, just to be clear or something like that, you know, no, but this was really interesting. She goes, is this in the kitchen? And to be clear or something like that. You know, no, but this was really interesting.

She goes, is this in the kitchen? And I was like, yes. And she's like, okay, thank you. And I should check to see if she. Thank you. No, because I'm curious if she actually moved it into the kitchen for me. Either that or just add an alias, I guess. Or something.

Yeah. So it was really, I've never heard her do that before. So it was just interesting. Look at the a lady getting smart. A little quality of life thing. Google can never do that. Oh, they changed the app again.

I can't find the damn kitchen. Where's the kitchen in my app? Google would be like, we're discontinuing this. Nevermind. I'm just really like having all of the, the lights, like the Christmas lights and everything,

at least in options, like shoot commands from Home Assistant out to make things turn on and off at the same time when something else turns on that it's monitoring or a button gets pressed or whatever. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Even if it's only like a temporary thing, I can just like make that work and then flip it off. One thing did catch me, I guess, when I set up my outside lights on the WAD thing initially, and I've forgotten I

did this. There's a way on that little ESP board that you can have it set up to turn on at sunset and turn off at sunset. And so for a while on Home Assistant, I was like, why isn't this automation not working? Because I had a Home Assistant was setting up, you know, to do a sunset trigger for the exterior lights for the house. i'd come home and they i wanted them green because it's christmas and i come home and they're yellow like i don't want these stupid yellow lights i want my green lights and i'd have to turn them on every time it's getting old and i i finally went into the wlad interface and figured out that i had checked off you know activate this preset or whatever uh when when sunrise, sunset hits.

And it was doing itself. So that was basically overriding whatever Home Assistant was doing. So maybe for a brief moment, I had green lights and then they turned orange and I never saw them. But now I think it's fixed. I should have green lights out there tonight. We can't protect you from yourself. Well, it's actually a big problem around the house too for me is they've got like stuff automated in control for stuff automated in home kit i've mostly done

all the lighting i moved all that over to home kit because it was so much easier but there are some things that exist in control for that kick on and off and then some of the devices like this have their own triggers inside them as well that are triggering stuff off so sometimes you know i'll be walking in i'm like why is that light on who did that like what did that what i did find was nice is that home assistant will tell you when something happens so you can like go back in the logs and see like oh this light was turned on at 5 22 p.m what did that and you can kind of like yeah go around and figure out what what did it so good good on you guys for logging stuff because that that's really helpful yeah and i like what is too. You can go to the actual device and the automation to see when it was last triggered and everything.

Yes. And so that way you see everything about the device. So that is a good feature they have. Yeah. I was wondering why one of the front lights kept turning off at a certain time. And it was bugging me for the longest while. And I went into the log and found out that the wife kept turning it off because it was shining into the bedroom. So I was like, okay, now I know why it wasn't a bug in the system.

But no, just an update on the Amazon lady thing. So yeah, she actually put the device into the kitchen. That's awesome. So yeah, that's awesome. Like, because in the past I used to add the device and have to go in and put it in the rooms and everything like that. But no, this time I added a device. And then when I used it, she actually said, is this a kitchen device? I said, yes.

And she actually moved it into the kitchen. Smart and brilliant. Love it. Siri would probably just be like, uh, do you want me to do this? Now it's asking me, do you want me to do a Google search on that? Like, I don't know what to do. Amazon, that's a good use of, by the way. Yes, exactly.

I like it. Not tell me useless tips I need. I do more playing with that. So yeah, I guess I'll kind of go into touch on some of the other projects I was doing. I actually did a project, guys. I got my Christmas lights up. But what? Yeah, I bought, I dug around behind me.

There's a big box, big yellow box from Home Depot back there behind the TV, uh, that, that I've been storing all these pixel ladies in and all these like control boards and stuff for like a year or two. I don't know. I was like, you know, I'm going to get these things out. And so I even have like the, the outdoor boxes that I put them in with the little fans on it, which is hilarious. When the fan kicks on, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. This thing, uh, I've got this thing hooked up. I've got a 300 watt power supply, uh, pushing through this thing. Uh, I I'll, I'll put some links to the mass down post in, uh, that I made, but I went up on the roof this weekend and was kind of, kind of figuring out like, maybe I can do

an outline of the roof. And I figured out that I could like zip, put a zip tie around the wire and then shove the zip tie up under the tile. And that kind of held everything into place just enough for the lights to kind of sit up there on the roof line. And yeah, it looks nice. I've got a little like moving Christmassy roof line thing and I can change the lights around and it's pretty easy to uninstall as well. Cause you just go up there and kind of like give it a tug and it comes right out. That was, that was my, that was my projects. And I still got a little bit more work to do on it,

um, to get it doing what I want it to do, but it's okay as it is too, if I never get to that. So happy with it. Awesome. Anybody else do some stuff? Um,

I'm in the middle of a few projects that I'll get into the next few weeks that are pretty interesting, but, uh, lately. So I finally upgraded my, uh, Prusa MK four to the MK four S. that i'll get into the next few weeks that are pretty interesting but lately so i finally upgraded my prusa mk4 to the mk4s so if you're looking to do that yourself the upgrade is really easy don't stress about it takes an hour or so you know you just pull apart some pieces you put

on some new pieces you get speed increases and stuff like that so it's it's worth it for the price it was it's worth it um and what exactly did you get with the upgrade uh it was mainly uh better cooling um because they redesigned the whole cooling um fan and how it's oriented and you know etc etc so the cooling goes around the nozzle and you know with their high flow nozzles you get 20 speed increase so faster speeds and stuff like that so and then i got gpio board and um i can't remember the other part they but i haven't played with those yet i'm still uh printing stuff you know enjoying the printer for what it is and you know if you have one of those old Prusa printers, upgrading to the 4 or even a Bamboo Labs where it has the auto leveling and stuff like that, it's such a quality of life improvement that you don't worry about these things anymore. You just print and it goes.

So it's worth the upgrade and the extra money. The only other thing I was, you know, what do they call it? Tooting on Mastodon a bit recently, you know, about, you know, just mean what do they call it tooting on mastodon a bit recently you know about you know just things i discover but um it's better better than skeeting on blue sky the blue sky what do they call it skeet oh man there's actually a blue there's actually um an app that i've been using for blue sky called skeets. You know, I'm done.

I quit. Yeah. Yeah. Skeets. That is somehow worse than toots. I didn't think we can get worse than toots. There's skeets on my home screen. You need to stop skeeting on your home screen,

Gavin. I know. I have moved the skeets to the second screen. I think you need to talk to Rose about that. Skeets is my folder. I'm fine. I'm fine with toots. I'm fine with toots. Yeah. Toots is better. I'm sorry. I to the second screen. I think you need to talk to Rose about that. Skeets is my folder. I'm fine with toots. I'm fine with toots. Yeah, toots is better. I'm sorry I made fun of you.

I know there's a few people out there wondering what we're laughing about and what are skeets. All I got to say is, you know, if you Google it, we're about to ruin your day. That's it. We apologize. It's a very popular song. And then, yeah. Yeah. Just type in skeets website and you'll's it. We apologize. It was a very popular song. And then, yeah. Yeah. Just type in Skeet's website and you'll find it.

Just don't click on any of the pop-ups, please. Anyways, one of the things I was playing, so, you know, I was, you know, I have a bunch of Sonos around the house and they're all named funny and stuff. And I was trying to rename all the AirPlay speakers to make more sense. Right. And I went into the Sonos app and i couldn't rename these speakers so they came out like like you put them in rooms but i guess you have to make the room name the device it's kind of yeah you have to create a custom room name it's kind of dumb so um i had to actually google it and

it came out that once you you go into the home app and then you add the speaker in there, and then what you do is you then rename the speaker in the home app and now it shows up in AirPlay how you want it. So I cleaned up all my AirPlay devices. So they make a lot more sense now. But the fact that I had to Google how to do that, it just was kind of crazy. Why isn't there an option to just change the AirPlay name in the Sonos app? Wouldn't that make sense? No, because Sonos doesn't split it into separate things. It is the speaker, and that's what it is.

Whereas other companies can do that. But I don't think Sonos does that at all. Like, theirs is just whatever. Like, Sonos has the room. They just, you say office, and it's going to call it office speaker, I guess, right? They just call it office. But what if you had multiple speakers in the office or well realistically you wouldn't have multiple speakers in the office unless they were grouped together as a zone so they wouldn't it would still

show up as one zone then anyway so it wouldn't really matter but yeah you basically you just get around that by creating custom room names and that's what i did for mine because we have we have little google speakers everywhere but But we also have Sonos speakers in every room. And so I just named my Sonos just literally the room and then Sonos after it. And so that way I know exactly what it is. Yeah, when I did that in the past, though, Home Assistant started creating its own areas with all those custom names. And then I was messing all that up.

Home Assistant does create a custom room with it. Yeah. So it's, I don't know why it's so difficult, but if you ever, if you're looking to do that yourself, just, you know, do it in the home app. Just want to share that bit of advice. Hopefully I helped somebody out there, you know, maybe I should skeet this advice too. Just skeet it everywhere. Skeet it all over the world, Gavin. Yeah.

Skeet it out there. To theeted all over the world, Gavin. Yeah, skeeted out there. To the windows and to the walls. Yeah, from the

windows to the walls. From the Mac to the walls. Oh man. We're just, this is just,

you know, oh man, this is a family friendly show, you know. We're getting removed from

Apple podcast. You know what's amazing to see this week, you know, because I want to just extend this show because people love the two-hour episodes but we're showing up on people editing them i really do i mean that's why it comes out monday we're showing up on people's

pocket cast uh list i love to see people posting it and they are you know we snuck up on richard's pocket cast list and we're even getting highlighted as the longest show they listen to that's what i love you know we're getting attention you know we gotta get they listen to. That's what I love. You know, we're getting attention, you know. We got to get a three-hour show out next year. That's a goal. Oh, man. Oh, man. Well, we have a little bit to go into the longest podcast I listened to this year, which is six and a half hours long.

So, are you listening to Hardcore History again? Well, yes. I was listening to the Acquired podcast and the episode about Meta or Facebook. So that was a very, very long episode. So yeah, thanks for everybody for sharing their Pocket Cast wrapped up. I'm sure we'll see a few more and hopefully we make it in your top five. All right. So I have a question since we're talking about podcasts already.

Do you guys listen to our show? Unfortunately, yeah, I have to. Like three or four times you have to. Do you listen to it once it was i unfortunately yeah i have to like you have to do you listen to it once you release it though yeah i generally do because i i sometimes i find something that i don't hear and then when i'm listening to it and then i'm like oh that makes sense whoops i forgot to do that and then i'll go back and edit it and then uh pop it in real fast so i don't want to hear some of the stuff i say so i don't really but i do skip to the end to see if seth added any post show uh commentary things that's a good idea when the show just ends i

get a little depressed i'm like you know sorry sorry just letting you know seth i enjoy the post credits yeah i i posted my my pocket cast wrapped uh whatever on uh threads and jimmy commented he was like you don't even listen to your own show. And I was like, I honestly don't like my voice. So I don't listen to the show. That's funny. Yeah. Evidently I listened to 36 hours of our podcast, uh,

which is not, not the highest by most out of all of us. So Seth puts in a lot of hard work for us. You know, we appreciate it. He does. He does all the work to be honest. We should probably buy him a Christmas gift or something.

Except for the stamp licking. TJ is our shipper. TJ will ship the most interesting things in the most interesting boxes. That's right. This week I shipped Jimmy a flume water meter sensor. I shipped it in a beer box. It was a 12-pack of, what is it, line and kugel cherry something or whatever it was.

It works. And then I shipped a bunch of rocks to Richard, cherry something or whatever it was. It works. And then I shipped a bunch of rocks to Richard and it was an alarm.com camera box. Wait, rocks? Rocks?

You guys don't ship rocks to people? I mean, pet rocks? Wait, what? I had this idea that, so we planted a bunch of stuff in the garden

that we talked about a couple weeks ago or a month ago or whatever it was. And I had this idea that I would take some rocks that I found around the yard and engrave them with whenever the trees were planted and what the trees are actually what they are and so that way whenever i die i get hit by a bus or something

so i was like i wonder when this tree was planted they could look at this rock and be like oh it's planted then that's kind of cool oh you're you you're late and he's gonna label the rocks i get it he's gonna laser he's gonna laser them okay so interesting yeah might as well just uh label one with here lies tj you know like yeah i mean that's probably where i'm gonna be buried but he's getting new lasers so it's gonna be way more powerful and he said i'm gonna be the first one to try it so nice on your rocks hopefully it doesn't break my rocks though um my project i got into this week uh is i got sick uh over thanksgiving so i didn't really do any projects however sunday i got a uh i got a fire under my butt and i was like you know what

i really want to watch tv in the den uh but i don't have any way to watch tv in the den and so luckily i had a spare 32 inch tv at my office and so i put that in there and i was like well that's cool but i want to watch the same thing that i'm watching in the living room in the den. And so I was like, well, I have, I have ethernet wire. Why don't I just run more ethernet wire? And so I ran two new lines of ethernet, uh, cast six, I ran it to the den, to the laundry room where all the rack is. Um, and I'm using a hodgepodge of cabling and hardware to get the TV from the living room to the den. And so I have a four output, two input matrix, HDMI matrix in the living room. And I've got it split off.

It goes to the living room TV and it goes to the kitchen TV. And so I can watch the same thing in the living room in the kitchen. And now I have a HDMI ballon that plugs into the matrix and it goes to an ethernet cable to the laundry room and then from the laundry room to the den. And you don't think it would work because video can be very fickle, but it works great. The only problem is that my TV is a really cheap 32 inch like Amazon fire TV and it doesn't support IP control.

And so my entire house turns on as you walk around. So the lights turn on, the speakers automatically group to each other and the TVs do, but this room doesn't because it's a crappy 32 inch fire TV. And so now I have to buy a new TV or wait until one of my clients upgrades. I think it'd be a new TV. Yeah. Buy a new TV. Yeah, I probably will. I mean, a 40 inch TV is not expensive. It's like $200. Right, right. Or you could buy an IR blaster, you know, for that room if you want. For the same price or more. Yeah, just buy a new TV at that point.

Broadlink's cheap, though. You can get a Broadlink one. That's one. I do have a SwitchBot hub somewhere. I was going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do have a SwitchBot hub, but I don't like that you don't have feedback, so you don't know if it's actually on or off. You're just sending signals every time.

So put in a power plug. Listen listen we can solve this without buying a new tv no we're buying a new tv i'm trying to talk you into buying graphics cards i need to buy a tv to catch up to you you guys got them cheap down there but yeah that's the only thing i did and so now uh the only problem i have to solve now is i want to do the same thing for the office because i have one more output from the living room. So I probably have to get a wire from the laundry room to the office. And that way, all four TVs in my house sync up together. And I'll have the audio and the TVs all synced up, which will be really nice.

Very nice. Very nice. Nice. Let us know what new TV you got. I was looking at some Hisense. There was like some Hisense with some Vita OS I've never heard of. And it was like $140 for like a 50 inch. And I was like, hey, as long as it's got IP control, that's all I care about. I was looking on Facebook as I do every single day, 20 times a day. And somebody posted a two year old commercial display from NEC. It is a 43 inch. So you know, it's definitely has IP control.

Oh, yeah. Probably doesn't have speakers, which I don't care about because I'm using Sonos anyway for $100. There you go. So I'm probably going to go pick this up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll definitely have IP control. It'll have all sorts of control for that one. It'll have just like open

protocol control on that. And then you also probably have RS-232. I'm not going to use that, Seth. I'm too young for that. Come on. No. I don't even think Home Assistant supports RS-232. It probably does.

It does. No. Yeah, see? Stop it, Gavin. It does. Buy a device. Don't help him out. I'm using IP control.

IP control is so reliable, Seth. I think everybody should be using it. If you're a professional and you're not using IP control. Well one that'll work that'll make it for a hundred dollars that's not bad can't be bad i mean it could be i stepped on my monitor this week and it broke you stepped on your monitor how did you step on a monitor i had one on the floor and i didn't i was gonna put it on my desk and like it he got stepped on so was it a good one or was it like an old one it was an old one i didn't really care for it was it your 55 inch wall tower your 55 inch tv stuff you can step on that it's got like a a covering or something on it that makes it childproof um

no the the it was a like a dell curved one whoops stepped on it whoopsies it was it was very heavy i'm glad it's out of the garage now. It's taking up a lot of space. Didn't have room for. But I thought I was going to hang it up on my desk here for this new computer. And no, it didn't happen. I turned it on. I was like, whoops. I must have stepped on that because I can see the footprint.

And that screen is really cracked. And I turned it on. You held your shoe up to it. You're like, yep, that's definitely my shoe. Evidence is in same tread so i've got i've got a couple other computer monitors in here believe it or not so i'm not really uh missing out on anything but uh i kind of bummed out that i stepped on that one oh well oh i i did i did have one more thing uh that i worked on yeah and i'm probably gonna i'm gonna have to so i got my christmas tree in, right? I don't wanna complain about it.

But it did... The song... All right, so I have a music background. I started with music education in college. The songs are wrong. Are you talking about the Apollo automation? Automation ornament? Yeah, yeah.

The notes are wrong on the songs. Oh, man. I don't get it. So you can... What's nice is like, it's an open platform. You can update it. So what's nice is like it's an open platform. You can update it. So I updated it with some different songs.

I've got to find, evidently it had three songs on it. You can press and hold the long button and there's a song there. And then you can double click the button and there's a song there and you can single click the button and there's a song there. And all three of them have wrong notes on them. I don't understand. I don't know. It's just ringtone stuff.

And you can go in and edit it. And I will submit a poll request. Yes. I challenge you to do that. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. The problem is I want more notes. And it only lets you have 255 characters.

And you have to figure out what notes to get rid of to make it work right. And I'm editing this. I don't know if you guys remember this. It's like aia thing or nokia i guess how it's pronounced uh from way back in the day called rtt rttl i think it's it was an old way that you can express like ringtones for the phones and used to have all sorts of ways of getting those into your phone and i was just kind of surprised that the esp looks like the esp boards use that and kind of convert it over to a little little speaker sound which makes sense i guess uh but yeah some of the notes are wrong i don't know it's like jingle bells like it's the wrong note anyway uh i will fix them and and send them a

pull request over so but it's a great little product i put fleece nabby dot on a lot of them which is great. So yeah, yeah, I'm going to get, I'm going to get mine flashed this weekend so I can add some home assistant. Cool,

cool, cool. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show

through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech. Dot of him slash sport, where you learn how you can support home tech 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 single pledge gets an invite to our private Slack

chat, The Hub, where you and everyone else can gather in there and see what boxes TJ is shipping stuff in, because it's always random. Very random. Depends on what I have that day. Yeah. If you want to help out but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in whatever podcast app of your choice to help other people find the show.

That's going to wrap up everything this week. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. Take care.