HomeTech.fm - Episode 512 - The Ballad of Patrick

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

On this week's show: Patrick Spence is out at Sonos and we may have written a song about it... Needless to say this episode is best heard on a Sonos. What's more, we have an amazing pick of the week, tons of holiday project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 17th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Kappel. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. It's cold out there, guys. I don't know if you noticed, but I've had to wear a jacket for the last couple days, which means you guys are probably under snow and whatnot. I was going to say, what's cold out there guys i don't know if you noticed but i've had to wear a jacket for the last couple days which means you guys are probably under snow and whatnot i'll say what's cold to you

yeah well a jacket you have to wear a jacket like a wind light windbreaker like 60 or hoodie today 50 or 60 uh it's been in the 50s yeah oh man so cold those poor iguanas it was like it was like two degrees this morning when i woke up so a a little colder than you, but not by much. If we had iguanas, they would probably be dead. I don't think the thermostat goes that low here. I think people would be dead if that went that low here. Yeah, Florida would be shut down for sure. Yeah, I woke up this morning and I went out to our three seasons room or our den that we're working on.

And it said like eight degrees or 10 degrees on there. And I was like, man, it cannot be 10 degrees. And so I checked Home Assistant and I looked at my weather station and it said 1.4 degrees outside. And I was like, stop, that's not possible. It's even lower than you thought. The dog did not want to hang out outside.

He looked at me, he's like, I don't want to go out there. Have you had any winter weather out there, Gavin? We have like north of us, we have some, a lot of snow and stuff where i am particularly like it's not sticking around we're getting a little light dustings i take my leaf blower out and just blow it off you know throw it out some salt and everybody's happy you know we just got the snowblower fixed and of course we have no snow so that's the way it's gonna work that's weird we got we got all your snow we got like six inches of snow in the past week the uh the mother-in-law and father-in-law and father-in-law were up from florida and they never see snow when they're up here but it just so happened to snow

while they were here so that was a nice surprise well when you're driving across our our city you think those are wind turbines for electricity they're actually fans blowing the weather back down there oh that's a good idea so yeah i mean you know we got that we got it we do have a little bit of follow-up uh i know we we we talked about this i think before the end of the year sometime we were looking at this ai port product that sonos was releasing um this thing uh it looks like it's it's, we thought it was only going to be like $199 for one camera, but it looks like you can get five cameras on it. So it's not just for one camera. You get, well, it's tricky.

If you're using on-vif cameras in 2K, you can only do two cameras. If you're using on-vif cameras, on-vif are the third-party cameras, not the unified cameras. If you're using HD, you can get three cameras. If you're using protect cameras,if cameras, these on-vif are the third-party cameras, not the unified cameras. If you're using HD, you can get three cameras. If you're using protect cameras, you can get up to five. So if you're using like the small G3s or whatever. So that kind of changes the dynamic. Yes. Whether if I really want one of these or not, because I'm only going to get two cameras out of it.

No, thank you. I think when we first talked about it, it was such new news that we didn't know all the little details behind it. And eventually they came out with more details. Yeah. Yeah. And essentially, I think when I get, I'm trying to get my hands on one. They've been sold out since. I can't get my hands on one.

But I think I'll only get maybe one, if anything, because I don't need this on every camera. I just need this on the cameras that I want the AI stuff for. Right. I have some cameras that I don't even do anything with. They're just recording all the time. And yeah, if you could get up to five cameras on one of these, like I didn't realize this too when we first talked about it, but you could just sit this in your rack or something like that

and you assign the camera to it, right? Like the camera doesn't have to actually be plugged into it. So it just keeps getting better and better. And I really, as soon as it shows up in the store again, I'm grabbing one or two. Yeah. They're $200 here. And I think they've pretty much been sold out since they launched. I think I may have seen it in stock one other time, but that's it.

I think you're right, TJ. I've only seen them in stock one other time, and I think they went away pretty quickly. I want to say that there was also a, in their FA faqs they're always changing depending on what they're doing um but i want to say oh here it is if you want to do more than one camera don't buy it right now because the very first uh very first question how many cameras is the ai port compatible with each ai port currently sports one on vif or one unified protect camera. And then future product updates. Here we go.

Future product updates will expand the capacity to support multiple cameras. And then you go down to the bottom question and it tells you what they're kind of planning on. So I don't know. It's one of those products I'll say, buy now, buy now. And the only reason I'm saying that is because I know when you want it, it's going to be out of stock. So just get it now. And if it's out of stock, you don't want it, it's going to be out of stock. So just get it now. And if it's out of stock, you don't want it anymore. You can sell it easily.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe I've done that before too. And I had like this unified touchscreen thing and then they discontinued it. Well, you bought the useless unified stuff. Exactly. I was stuck with this useless unified six inch touchscreen that nobody wanted. So that went into the trash.

Anyway, that is all to say the ai port is out it's 199 it's on their website uh it's not in stock good luck maybe with the new tariffs things will get better yeah by the time you know i figure by the time we record the next podcast it will be back in stock and probably twice the price yeah Yeah. We're making AI ports in America, baby. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, we got a couple of home tech headlines today. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it.

Oh, what's that? What is that noise? Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. It sounds like Santa is bringing a Christmas miracle for TJ. Oh, my God. He actually came through and delivered. Nothing like a late present a Christmas miracle for TJ. Oh, my God. He actually came through and delivered. Nothing like a late present to get you through January, you know. I guess the big news is Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has resigned following the disastrous launch of the new app that led to significant customer dissatisfaction, layoffs, and a decline in employee morale.

So there's a trio of stories. Patrick Spence basically stepped down. I'm sure he got a $2 million handout on the way down. Yeah, he's got the golden parachute. He's really hurting there. Tom Conrad, who is a Sonos board member, is going to step in and serve as interim CEO. There's a story that we'll put a link. He has a letter to the employees that I guess The Verge really liked.

And guys, you're not going to believe this. He's got a tattoo. He says that in his letter. I thought, you know, okay. Thanks, Tom. Good for you. Do you know he's got a tattoo of? I have no idea.

I'm pretty sure. Maybe I just read this wrong wrong but i think it's parasono says headphones i hope it's not no that might not be i don't know uh anyway uh tom conrad he's a board member he will he he came he's got uh a pedigree he's got background at um pandora snapchat and apple he's been involved with, uh, some of the app problems too. So he, he sounds like he's, uh, he knows what he's doing. I don't know. It sounds like he's cleaning house because not only did Patrick Spence step down, but also had two other, uh, members. I, this is all kind of like late breaking just came in today. Um, we also had two other people, uh, leave. One of them was going to be the, uh, what CEO product, uh, chief commercial officer,

Deidre Finlay plans to leave. And then, uh, it said also not an immediate departure. So I don't know. I think the, there's, there's quite a few people that probably need to leave over this, not just Patrick Spence. Like I don't want to celebrate people losing their jobs, but like, man, they did hurt, uh, the company in this. And. And I can't imagine investors or the board is very happy with it. And obviously, new leadership will come in and hopefully shore up the company. I don't know. They're going to have a long way to go to get things back to where it was. All right.

So supposedly this Sonos Ace tattoo story is true. He has a Sonos Ace tattoo on his left forearm. So I don't know if I like this guy already. But this is what needed to happen, right? I mean, Sonos has been lost for quite some time. And it was only a matter of time before Patrick Spence left. But I don't understand how they even got this far. Like, there's been disaster after disaster that has taken us here.

And I just don't see how you recover from this. Sonos has always been a luxury brand. They've always been a product you've paid more money for because it was going to last a long time. It was going to work. It's basically the Lutron of the audio world, right? When you plugged it in, you could go and use it every single day and never have a problem with it. And that kind of has disappeared in the past couple of years with the very lackluster app and the poor performance. And so I just don't see them as a luxury brand anymore. They might be able to bring that back.

I'm very skeptical of that at the moment, though, because once you kind of go down this path, it's hard to go back. That's a good um comparison uh that i hadn't thought about but yeah lutron tends to have always put out rock solid product products and there's a couple things i can think of that we're just kind of like hmm but for the most part their stuff works right like it it looks good if you're opinionated it might not but like they have options if you really want to pay a lot of money, they have stuff that looks different. But it works. It feels good to use.

Like, they don't feel cheap. And, yeah, well, you pay for them, too. So there's a price point attached to them. You're going to pay money for them. Yeah, that's a good comparison. Imagine, like, what, I don't know what lutheran could do to totally like screw up uh as big as sonos did in such a way that like i think sonos messed up because like they updated a single app that really took down their entire product line right like everybody was affected

i don't think lutheran could do that maybe they mess up caseta but that's not going to touch the raw people right that's not going to touch the qs people they're never going to know so i don't know it's really interesting i think sonos had a history of doing things that people just didn't agree with too right like i don't know was this all under patrick spence but like i'm thinking of um what did they do when they went from s1 to s2 patrick spence yep you know recycling program patrick spence you know and you know even with the headphones i i know there was a lot of excitement around it but when it finally came out you were like oh i don't want it you know and that was under him too so i all i know is i wish i had a job if my job paid me two million dollars when they fire you yeah i would be doing things

like messing up the company too and getting that two million dollars you they fire you yeah i would be doing things like messing up the company too and getting that two million dollars you know i just cash out thank you i'm gone i'm good well and i the issue too for sonos at this point is that like for a lot of people there's no reason for sonos to exist right and sonos has kind of always been a very niche product like you like you would know somebody liked watching TV or they liked audio or something if they knew about Sonos. Um, but the majority of people would never have any idea what Sonos is. Um, and, and less people have a reason to own Sonos at this point because of the, the, the prevalence of smart speakers anymore. You have Amazon Alexa and Google assistant AirPods

and, and, and, um, AirPods and HomePods and everything else in the house at this point. You can get them for super cheap and way cheaper than you can buy Sonos products. And you can say, are they the same sound quality? No, but who cares that much? Like literally $39 I do not care. It's the same people that listen to the cheapest headphones or they listen to the whatever the

videos on their phone and stuff. They don't care about audio. And they don't sound bad though. Like it's not like they sound like $39 or $99 product, audio and they don't sound bad though like it's not like they they sound they sound like 39 or 99 product right they don't sound like a 399 $400 product but like they don't sound that bad and they do pretty much exactly what sonos was doing plus all the voice stuff but but i found and this is why i'm sonos but they had a complete ecosystem to me so from their soundbars, you know, so my home entertainment system was all Sonos and, um, that's good. So then I went into getting all the other speakers around my house. It's all Sonos and that's good. Right. And you can even add in

the Sonos amps and do your backyard speakers and all these other things. And that's kind of why I went with Sonos because it was a ecosystem that all worked together, used their one app when it worked to do everything. And I also like the fact when they integrated the A-Lady into it and the Google Assistant into it. I like that. When they came out with their own assistant, I can't even remember the name of it. Yeah. Was it Hey Sonos or whatever? I think that was another waste of time.

Also Patrick Spence. Yeah, that was another waste of also patrick's you know yeah you know that was another waste of time but to me sonos now hopefully under the new leadership or whoever it's going to be um they have a lot of room to grow and improve you know and that's the way i'm looking at it now is maybe they will come out with a set of headphones that does everything we've really expected this set of headphones to do you know maybe they will do things like open up the the system a little bit so we could put something like imagine putting your home assistant voice control on it you know that would be cool right if you can do things like that i don't know what they're thinking there but these are some of the things that we can at least think they may work towards maybe outdoor speaker they will be nice yeah like simple stuff like a

rack powered you know rack amplifier with like two or three like two three of them yeah in there maybe the new leadership will listen to what people actually want and you know and and take us in a better direction i've been asking for that long enough i'm not even an integrator anymore you know what if if patrick spence wasn't doing it for us you know you have to get a change and maybe the change will be for the better, and we will see. Well, and you bring up a good point. The reason that I think Sonos really is popular and why I really like Sonos, not just because it works well, is because they make a product for basically every scenario, right? And so I can go into a house that has speakers in the ceiling,

and they have a home theater and all this stuff. And I can integrate Sonos with almost all of that in some capacity. I could put a soundbar, I could put amplifiers, I can do whatever I want. And that's why Sonos has always been really good. And it's so annoying when people offer whole house audio alternatives, because most of the time they're not actually alternatives. Like anybody can go out and buy an amplifier and connect a streamer to it. But that's not a Sonos alternative. That's literally an amplifier. And so to be a Sonos competitor or an alternative, you really do need the sound bars and the surround sound and the subwoofers and the amplifiers and stuff.

Because you need all of that in a house. Not every house is going to have all those things. But everybody that wants audio is going to have access to those things at some point. so that's why sonos has always been really good at what they do and when i've seen alternatives like true alternatives to sonos that offered like the package like that their price point was a lot higher right so sonos i know it's it's still a high price point but the other stuff is a lot more expensive and this is an sonos is something i can afford right you know still well and you look at like you know i have a i have a vessel speaker we had vessel on months ago and talked to uh don over there and i have a vessel speaker right now i love

it it sounds great it looks awesome and all that good stuff but they only have like five speakers and it's you know you can't really compete with a Sonos competitor at that point when you only have that many speakers, um, because you need more, you need more options. It's kind of like ring, you know, a lot of people go with ring cameras because you can buy a camera for literally any situation. They, they're not the best cameras. They're really not that good. But if you need a floodlight or you need a spotlight or you need a doorbell, they have you. So, uh, what do i get for winning uh the bet oh yeah i guess we buried the lead um yeah turns out uh does that tj won the bet there yeah i don't know like uh what are you gonna get you dang i said january 13th too

didn't i i didn't realize how close i actually got it when did the news break uh or monday i think oh i got it down to the day oh look at you oh man that is hilarious we need to send tj somewhere let's send him somewhere man well there i i did look at the map tj and and since you know guernsey is so far away there's actually a guernsey ohio you can go there oh where's it at seth it it's just he's driving you can drive to it i know you can i've drove i've driven places before yeah guernsey county ohio let's see how far away is it um is there anything there and it's only an hour and a half away so it looks like i'm going to guernsey all right i got something special to share though oh since while you're driving there you can put a special song that I made for you on the radio.

You guys ready? This is a world premiere. You made a song, huh? Yeah. I made a song. All right, drop it. DJ Seth. You have so much free time.

Of course, it's a country song. In the land of speakers, Sonos reigns supreme With Patrick Spence, steering the dream But one dark day, a bug came through A brand new app, and the users booed Oh, Patrick Spence, the board said no we can't let this broken app steal the show. While the world hit delete and frustration was met, TJ laughed loud for he'd won the bet. What is this?

There you guys go. The Ballad of Patrick, just for you, TJ. Oh, my. we need to put this on Spotify start earning royalties number one hit is this the first

Sonos song this gotta be on the Sonos playlist like I'm gonna put it on Spotify yeah we need royalties from this right now

it's too funny yeah it turns out AI is really good. That's a good country song. Yeah, yeah. I also made a pop one. Oh, let's hear that one. Give me a second. Hey, this is the Sonos show, so you might as well just put it in now.

Exactly. Let's see. That's all the news we have this week. Oh, no. All right. I haven't heard this one yet, but well, it's the same lyrics, but just in pop because AI can do anything guys. Man, I like it.

In the land of speakers, Sonos reigns supreme. With Patrick Spence steering the dream. For one dark day, a bug came through A brand new app and the users booed Oh, Patrick Spence, the board said no We can't let this broken app steal the show While the world hit delete and frustration was met DJ laughed loud for he'd won the bet

The app was meant to be sleek and smart A symphony crafted from the tech world's heart But crashes, glitches, the UX was dire And soon enough Patrick faced the fire Old Patrick spins the board, said no We can't let this broken app steal the show While the users complained and investors upset TJ cashed in on his clever bet The lessons we learn, oh, they come at a cost

In the world of tech, one glitch and you're lost Now Sonos must rise from this painful fall To reclaim the trust of music lovers all Oh, oh, Patrick Spence the Bond said no We can't let this broken app steal the show As the dust settles down, we won't forget The day T.J. stood proud, winning his bet Now the speakers still play, the music rolls on But Patrick Spence's era is gone

The moral is clear, don't gamble too much And always bait a test before you touch there you go there you go okay that that dropped the bike man that was that was great yeah you know if we don't tailor swift this and release all these versions on spotify i don't know what we're doing with our life there you guys go oh man i actually have um i'll just go ahead and put the lyrics on the website they're all pretty good and i'll just put them on the the website with links to our song all right if somebody's listening to our podcast i need an ai program that just turns our podcast into ai songs the whole podcast the whole podcast yeah it just splits it up into different songs the whole podcast the

episode is just an album yeah we could work and work on that one i see i like it there's a way to do it there's a way to do it where there's a will there's a way to come on episode. It's just an album. We could work on that one. I like it. There's a way to do it. There's a way to do it. I have found out. I found there's a way to do these things. I only have six more free songs to do though. Oh no. I gotta make a new account.

Alright. Well there we go. Fun with AI. You know. Patrick Sp he gets his golden parachute and works for sonos for the next few months i guess yeah i think it's hilarious he gets two million dollar hand two million dollar handout for taking the company and then he basically has to stay on for seven thousand dollars a month until like june yeah and i'm like oh man how terrible it does suck i i mean gonna slum it Not like you didn't see it coming, but you know, whatever. All right.

Well, that's that. That's the Sonos show tonight. All the links and topics, all the links and topic we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 512. All right. Nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a really fun picture of the week. I ran across a TikTok video and I'm kind of stuttering on this. I know it's from TikTok, but if we're going to put that in our show notes,

will you be able to get to it on Monday? I don't know. I don't know. We're going to find out. Supreme Court may save tips tomorrow. Who knows? The video on TikTok was somebody riding a boat down a canal behind these houses in Miami. And you kind of look through the window on this house and something's peculiar in there. It's literally like an entire wall of probably what a two and a half story, two and a half story wall. It's huge. That is an entire TV screen. And I just thought of our TV too high conversations. And I was like, this is, this is insane. Turns out it's, uh, the Memphis Grizzlies, uh, owner, Robert Pera, which is also the principal behind, uh, Unify or Ubiquity. Oh, that's where that name is familiar. Yeah. Yeah.

He turned his, uh, he turned half of his house or more than half of his house, into a giant basketball arena. And there's a jumbotron that, quotes, is blazing 24 hours a day. So he's got a massive video. You guys have to see this video. It's absolutely insane. Yeah, this is a crazy screen. I can't even imagine looking at that, though. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that would just hurt. You've got to look up around around did you see that i don't know which section of the screen i don't know i guess people that are that are living near him

aren't aren't very happy with it so i when i looked at it i'm thinking you could be out on your boat watching the screen like he basically can see that screen from anywhere you know you could be at the game watching the game on that screen you know it's it's it's way too bright well this this article you can turn down the brightness on them this article here uh from the my i see daily my uh the daily mail the mail online is um it says it's a two-story high 40 foot wide screen so that's that's pretty big yeah but does it does it's a two-story high, 40-foot wide screen. So that's pretty big. Yeah, but does it fold up and close up into the ground? No, no. Yeah, well.

Get your money back. Must not be worth that much then. Yeah, exactly. It explains the ubiquity booth at Cedia this year, though. It's a giant 40-foot wide screen as well. So, hmm. Big screens everywhere. Big screens, yeah screens yeah just do it that's too good yeah and there's there's pictures uh in this story of it being the house under construction and workers working around outside doing landscape stuff and like there's a giant cloud skyline oh it's the apple screensaver is what it is. That's what, that's too good.

It's the, the fly through New York city with the, the, the nice blue sky and everything. Yeah. There's just, if you're the integrator and you've done this, this house,

please give us a call. We want to talk to you. It sounds fun. Maybe get a tour of the house. Probably not. I'll fly that for a tour. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. It's a, it's a massive house, but it's a big house. And he's added a basketball court onto it. So there you go. It doesn't look like much of a house. There's a giant, there's a pool that's as big as the house. And then there's the basketball area.

I don't know. Maybe it's just makes the rest of the house look small. I don't know. I will never be able to live here. I don't know, Seth. You keep creating AI songs. You might be rich before you know it. I know, right?

AI technology songs. Too good. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of giant TVs, you know, send them on over. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out that online form. All right.

This segment, I think everybody's been waiting for. Our project updates. Well, first off, I think we talked about this months ago, but we got to talk about the Home Assistant stuff. There's been Home Assistant updates, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure there's really good stuff in them, but the biggest update i have for home assistant was i heard gavin on another podcast i think he talked we we knew this like three months ago when you guys recorded it but you were on the home assistant podcast that was really cool yeah

finally got released this week after uh see they got back from ces but yeah i know it was a good time um just go to the home assistant podcast i don't know if they're the official podcast or not i couldn't work that out i'm pretty sure they are because they're sponsored by like nabu casa okay okay so no they're great guys over there and yeah we sat down we basically talked about what got me into home uh into home automation eventually to home assistant and uh you know my journey and where it all started so yep give it a listen it was a it was a good podcast i listened to today while i was working so did a good job you even uh said that i was coming up to work for you or something

i'm not really sure i heard some kind of slide in there you know i said i said a lot of things thinking that you wouldn't actually listen oh we did you actually oh boy well i'm gonna run power and stuff my power you you could skip this podcast seth you don't need to listen to it no it was a good episode though i think everybody should go listen to it we'll put it in the show notes because it was a nice episode and it gave me a new podcast to listen to as well because i actually did not know that podcast existed until you went on there so yeah either yeah they gained one listener because of you i think it was over a year in the making like when i when we first uh touched base it was probably over a year ago um and they finally got back to me you know that's where i am in the chain you know with those guys you know

you're just that popular yeah not enough so i'll keep trying there's home assistant podcast there's home assistant updates and i guess since we we last spoke like it's been a while they finally launched all the voice stuff and people started getting their little voice box things in and yeah that's all happening i have one here i hooked it up and then you can say hey jarvis and it does stuff but i don't it doesn't really how'd you get one i didn't even get one i ordered three of them gavin i can send you one you got three of them this guy yeah and this guy doesn't even tell me this guy touches home assistants once a month

probably it's true it's true me he got it that's messed up i know i don't feel what the heck you know i really understand how the boss treats his employees at this company oh i i wanted to surprise you it doesn't really surprise it doesn't really work i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to trade in some uh what would a gavin as a service tokens or something so i can i can i don't know now after all this you know i've helped a number of people slack for him this week i don't know now after all this. I don't know. I was going to say, yes. You know, I've helped a number of people in our Slack forum this week. I don't know if you, after this, after finding out. It's betrayal.

Well, I wanted to see if I could do it myself. And, I mean, I can. I just, I figured it would be more straightforward. And I honestly, outside of connecting it into Home Assistant and updating it once, I haven't really done much with it. You know, if people could do this by themselves, gas wouldn't exist yeah exactly you know that's all right you know technology like this is keeping me in business so that's good you know i'm still waiting on mine to get delivered i'll probably get it in february or march i figure but we'll see we'll see and i've seen like i you, this is just what I've seen online.

I've seen certain people praise it like crazy. And those are the usual people. And then you see the honest reviews eventually come through and the difficulties they've had with it. And you got to remember, this is a preview edition. Yeah. You know, it's not all the bells and whistles and they're still working through bugs and getting stuff so um doing planning to replace every one in your house with one of these at this point i think it's a little too early you have to give it some time to develop i mean it still can't do everything like the amazon thing can and stuff like that but it's got good potential and they didn't i mean it

clearly didn't have a research budget to build, you know, microphones and stuff like it's slow. You know, you say the wake word and it kind of thinks about it. Yeah. I'm kind of used to the, the, the Siri thing where you just kind of, you can just talk in it and it starts picking it like this thing.

Wake word, wait, talk, wait for a response because it has to go off and think about it. So, but yeah, Mort, Mort, morton in the um slack channel there you know when he got it he was saying the same thing it was slow at first and

he did a few back-end upgrades i think getting the n100 um compute whatever it is right to handle all that stuff sped things up for him so i have done nothing i'm i'm running it stock and it doesn't even i don't even think it knows how to do anything. You may have to get more hardware. I just threw a new T4 video card into my server to handle all the AI stuff. And I think that will be a good use when I eventually get the speaker. It can handle all the ai stuff for the speaker you know so i will see when i eventually get one because seth got it before me and didn't tell me and doesn't even want to order me one or i didn't i got i got i got you one gavin it's right here you want me to i'll send it to you yeah your mail service has to work first and then i think well no we're back in business but do you think you can get it before the 20th or after the 20th?

Gotta get mailed. There's something happening on the 20th that may affect this shit, man. I'll send it out. I'll put it in like a first class thing and send it out tomorrow. There you go. No, you'll be part of the US. You'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah.

It's good you're annexed. It'll be all right. Your governor will just sign it over and that'd be great. Oh, that's awesome. So your thoughts about it just it's slow it's not what do you say uh it it seems like it's an i like the fact that you can you can hook stuff up to it like you can you can you can go in here i haven't done any of this like you can change out the services that are in this buffalo thing this little buffalo guy that

i don't know what he does. It's a Wyoming protocol. I don't know what it is. You see, if I got this first, I wouldn't be saying things like this little Buffalo guy or change out or I haven't done anything with this yet. I would have said, I was giving you breaks out with technical terms. You know, this is why it's not fair. It's not a good experience for an end user. I can tell you that. Like I put this in and now there's a Buffalo living in my home and I don't know why there's a buffalo there buffalo buffalo and a piper i don't know why

there's a piper there now and above and somebody whispering to you it's all your see it's hard working with you end users sometimes you know i know what you're talking about now i have to be the end user advocate here and yeah yeah but it's not made for an end user like you no i i would say i would say hold off on on it for sure if you're if you're thinking of doing this there's there's going to be some setup involved to get it right because it doesn't i don't think it works straight out of the box but i have been kind of like tinkering around with home assistant and doing more stuff and cleaning things up and turning things on that i haven't ever like the apple i made the mistake of turning the apple home kit thing on and like now all the thousand entities from that weather station are in whoops got a bunch of switches in the default room now great

so go delete those spend then spend half the day deleting those but yeah there's a lot that you have to do to get it set up and i think they did make a nice little wizard out of it for the setup. So like getting it in, stalled into the system was, I think, flawless. Like that was really good. But I think that's always been home assistance, like the install and setup process for devices. I think that they've always excelled at that. It's what you do after that. I think they have a lot of work to do.

So anyway, I'm curious. I'll tinker around with it more. at that it's what you do after that i think they have a lot of work to do so um anyway i'm i'm curious i'll tinker around with it more i can say hey jarvis what time is it 9 30 8 p.m there you go that wasn't too bad you got the time right no that was kind of slow we need to speed you up we need to get you a video card to do AI processing and stuff in your server. Yeah. No, I, I, I, well, yeah, yeah, maybe. Uh, I, I did discover that my home assistant was out of memory. So whoops, there was a, uh, sure.

That was not a good surprise. There was a lot of backups. You remember, I remember that a few months back, Gavin, you're like, Hey, you should make an automatic backup. Well, I did, but there's not an automatic delete the old backups yeah so good news seth yeah in the latest version of home assistant they uh added a new automated backup system that also cleans itself up so you can tell it to yeah you know and and the nice part about it is it will actually you can have it back up by default to the Home Assistant cloud.

They actually give you free space to back it up there, which is really nice if you're already a Nabucasa subscriber. Really nice of them. It doesn't cost you more or anything. It's just added. But if you want it local, you can set it up to back up local. So there you go. You look into doing that. And when they announced this feature, um, by default,

the backups are all encrypted. And I didn't realize that this would cause as much problems as it did, but it caused some heated debates in their discord channel. People were really mad about the backups being encrypted, even when they're local, like they could understand if they're encrypted when they're uploaded to an online service but then to all you know they wanted the option and i think nabucasa didn't add the option i wouldn't be surprised if they add the option later on to not encrypt the backups you know if you want to um but all that being said people is it's their backup that they just introduced yes it encrypts by default but if you

don't want an encrypted backup you could still back up how you were doing it before you know using just using action in a script to generate a backup at whatever time you want whenever you want to whatever server you want and it won't be encrypted so you know like instead of getting all violent about it you know just do it the way you want to do it. You have options. Man. Right? So it was a heated debate.

Like I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. His first real problem. Yeah. There were some comments and I was just like, damn, you know, you know, but yeah. So there you go. It will auto clean up to Seth. Just make sure you save your backup keys though i just i clicked on i found it i found where it was in the settings there and i and that's the first thing that popped up and it says save this and download this emergency recovery thing and i'm like yeah i'm not gonna do that now and then the the the next

thing that you said was you can do it like you are always doing it. And you know what? I'm just going to do that. Exactly. Why change it? I have mine just run a backup every day. And every few months I go in there and I delete all the old backups. And I'm good, right?

I was just going to say, this was like three years of backups at this point. And I had to go and just select all of them. You'll never run out again. Yeah, I just deleted everything but the top one. There you go. Yeah. So there you go. Every day I'm backing up i don't know why i don't have anything i back up every day but because you know there's a day when i'll just screw up something i i've

only had to restore it maybe once or twice um and that was mainly because an add-on updated and broke things so bad I had to go back. But it was good to have the backup. So if you're not backing up, it doesn't matter if you use the built-in system or the non-built-in system, backup. Turn something on at least. Turn that on, yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea.

Good idea. And if you do turn on the other one, download that encryption key. You probably want to keep that. Yeah, keep that key. I do have some projects. You guys want to hear my projects i actually did stuff did you finish them how many projects i did finish things yeah i mean okay it was like i well i think we talked about me setting up wlad christmas lights on previous shows. So technically did finish all of those. And, um, yeah, I took them down mostly. So that, that project I would consider done. It was a success and I have a, all sorts of little new little things to use next year for the Christmas lights and that kind of

thing. So I'm excited. I got a little ones with little ESP 32s with little hats on top that do ethernet and POE options and power supplies and all sorts of fun stuff. So I had a lot of, a lot of fun with that. And I'm going to, my, my biggest thing is now I've been putting them in these like little boxes outside with the, uh, waterproof boxes, things, and you've got to get like, uh, power supplies in there. You've got to get all sorts of like cables into it but they also have to stay dry and then um antennas antennas coming out too um i bought some like waterproof antennas that are supposed to sit on top so like i've got all sorts of like little accessories and things to go on this junk next

year uh hopefully make it make it better and uh only have one box i'm kind of proud of that i put together yeah i found this Wi-Fi antenna. It's like a little flat cell phone looking antenna. I'm going to stick it on the box. If the antennas are inside the box, they work okay. And then the box will jiggle around and that antenna will flop behind like something metal, like a power supply. And there's no Wi-Fi anymore, which, you know, either the Ethernet thing or the Wi-Fi antenna

thing, we'll solve that in the future. So excited about that. I don't think I mentioned this, but I did a complete reset on my Sonos system after I griped about it. And it all works now. I put it all back together. I had to go to a friend's house

and do the same thing and completely reset. And the problem is, I put a picture in the back channel. TJ, do you see that? And I will entitle that picture Sonos Hates Integrators because they made these nice amps and you can get these nice rack shells from Middle Atlantic

and they're like laser cut to fit four amplifiers in it. And I did. I put all that in there years ago. But the problem is when you reset everything. You have to service it. Yeah. You got to get the little numbers. The little numbers.

Yeah. Whoever decided the number thing needs to be shot. Hopefully that person got fired because that was a stupid idea. They weren't. They said. The instruction said, look at the numbers. They're located above the speaker outputs, right? The speaker banana plugs. Or it's the word said or on the bottom.

Guess where mine were. Yours is on the bottom because that was the first generation yep yep let's blame patrick spence yeah well it definitely was him his product people did it anyway um at least they fixed that but yeah i had to pull the entire rack out undo all the wire management not not the entire rack the rack shelf and then pull them all out and i guess what i did labeled them. So if I ever have to do it again, they're labeled on the back in the correct spot above the, above the speaker thing with these nice white labels. So yeah, I put in a bunch of cameras at the house. I put a new driveway camera and a front yard camera in, and I've been tinkering around with the, the, the frigate thing, which involves me writing YAML,

which I hate to do, so I made chatGBT do it. And I told chatGBT where my IP address was and what the passwords were, and it just made me a frigate thing, and I did that that way. So I didn't really have to touch the YAML other than figuring out how to copy it over

into the container, which I eventually did. And got that up and kind of going, but it was working last night when I was tinkering with it and then now this morning there's no it's got no cameras stopped working sometime in in the morning no idea why do you have um a gpu dedicated to it i do i do but there's something it doesn't like you know that gp the one i have is the m60 tesla m60 and i don't think it likes certain types of encoding and i'm sending it h.264 but it's still throwing ffmpeg errors and the problem is like the cameras are

different series so i'm not sure like it likes one of them it doesn't like all of them i don't know what settings to put on for the camera so it's like a big experiment thing. And at some point I had different cameras putting video into it and I was able to set up the motion detect and all that. And then I messed with the camera video resolution again and screwed it all up. So- You know, for the price of a home assistant,

voice assistant, you can get some help here if you really want. I've played with frigging a bit. It's going out first class tomorrow. I'll send it in our u.s postal service i'll probably get it i'll probably get the one i ordered before that one yeah this will be in november it'll show up what the heck i did some some actual real work on my house network too i have an access point here in the garage, uh, and an access point kind of like

in the backside of the house that kind of, I don't know, services most of the inside of the house. Um, when you're not connected to the one here in the garage, but my house is kind of like an L shape, I guess, in the garage is in the crook of the L like in the corner. Right. And so like, if that leaves like the entire side that way, like the north side, the small part of the L, I guess, without an access point. Right. That happens to be where the the we call it the master bathroom or the library is. And yeah, I don't know. It's always causing problems.

So I drug a little access point, a little ruckus. I had a ruckus R550. Pop that up like above the doorframe. It fit nice, a nice little cozy thing in there. And man, what a difference that makes. You just have like perfect, even over in the living room, kind of like sitting in the couch. I'm sure I'm connected.

I know I'm connected to it. Like everything just kind of lit up and started working better. So really happy with that. And I'd run the wire years ago, just never had poked it out of the wall. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to make a mess. I got to get up in these, I got to open the hatch for something I was dealing with around the holiday time. And then saw the wire sitting there. I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm going to spend the extra 15 minutes drilling a hole. So I and i got better wi-fi because of it and i installed

uh two no no only one dimmer zoos thing for my friend tj he sent two of them to me and i thought i could use two of them and i pulled one of the wall switch things down and realized that i had not run was it four wire for the fan and the switch oh yeah whoops and i retread that into pain yeah so it went back to being i just made it a regular old switch and i ordered some whiz light bulbs to they have some candelabra bulbs that can go into those fan fixtures and maybe give me a little bit better light in there i ordered at the same time um my uh bathroom, one, one of the lights went out in the bathroom, three lights, like pendant lights in the bathroom that sit over the vanity. And that's kind of like the vanity lights. And one of them went out and my wife was like, it's kind of dark in here. Can

you, can you order another light? I'm like, you know what I can. So I ordered like three whiz, a 19 bulbs to go in there as well. And they're really nice. Cause they're like, um, 90 plus CRI, they like color match and everything so um popped them in and then here's the cool thing i've been playing around with the chow mein home assistant driver over there in control four so i've got control four keypads on the wall i had to take out the dimmer that was running those lights i just put a i put a switch in just a regular like a regular toggle switch because i just have to like leave it on, right? Like those whiz light bulbs, they can turn on and off with an API. But if I turn them off with a light switch, it's in another room. But I have a keypad in the bathroom that I can program to turn off and on

the whiz lights. So I grouped them together in Home Assistant and glued it all together with the with the control board driver. I press a button in the bathroom lights turn on, turn off super bright. I think they're brighter than what was in there before. Uh, she's out of town now. So when she gets back, we'll see what, see, see if she approves. I'm not sure it's going to be very bright, but at least I can probably turn that down too. And then I think the final thing I done I've done. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I updated iguanas falling.com, our iguanas falling.com,

uh, to account for windshield. And, um, and, and I added AI or sometime around CES, you know, cause I had to add a, I mean,

you even have a website that's not, doesn't have AI anymore. I don't know. All it is a little banner that says now with AI. So it has that. And then, um, yeah,

I, I wasn't, I wasn't tracking windshield beforeill before and what i did was i opened this up into and and put this project into uh into chad gbt basically and said hey check this out um do you see any ways i can improve the formula here and and chad was like yeah this looks great but i don't think you're accounting for windchill and you're a little conservative on like what temperature you're going to trigger stuff at. I was at 50 degrees.

I guess 40 degrees is where iguanas start falling out of the trees. So we worked a little bit, me and Chad, on improving the algorithm here. And it works. It's way better now. And I've got little like high risk warnings, like different colors that pop up on little banners and stuff like that. And right now, I mean, I'm high risk here in Florida. So like we could have iguanas falling out of the tree. You just don't know that if it's more than a couple of hours, these iguanas, they just start falling out.

So there you go. I'll be high risk for another few months, but it's good to know. Iguanas are definitely not going to invade either one of us, Gavin. They will not take over. They probably won't. You never know. Like, what if there's, like, an iguana shipment going over Canada towards Greenland from the U.S., you know, because they, you know, took over Greenland. They may drop them out of a plane.

They could be falling, you know. Like, you never know. That's what happened here. I mean, well, not quite. of a plane they could be falling you know like you never know that's what happened here i mean well not not quite like there was a pet store that was breeding a bunch of iguanas and they all just kind of it it burned down or something all the iguanas escaped but and the pythons too i think it was the same pet store okay the iguanas i could deal with but those pythons yeah that that happened but yeah i i check it out if you haven't if you haven't gone to argoinasfalling.com in in a while it's it's it's new and improved i like how you had the added the

section on how we track falling iguanas oh i know that's very important because before there was like no information it was basically just the three block the three little boxes the little iguana frozen in the ice cube and that was it and now i like that it gives you some information so that way nobody knows or nobody thinks that we're BSing them, you know? We're just making it up. Yeah, why would we do that? I mean, it's got AI, guys. We can't make anything up.

Exactly. It's bulletproof now. And it's 100% ad-free. That's right. How many websites on the web is ad-free? I never even thought about that, Gavin, but now I'm going to have to do some LG ads over the top of this thing. A little captcha to get in there.

So every time you actually look at the screen, it just shows an ad? Yeah. Hopefully nobody from Europe is visiting this because we'd have to accept cookies on it too. Oh, the cookie exam. Can you get eye tracking on this, Seth? I want to be able to tell where people's eyes are looking. They're looking right at that adorable guano.

Not their mouth. It's amazing. It's a good website. Good website. Yeah. Yeah. That's my favorite. And I've done a couple of other things.

I was showing you guys a theater designer software thing that I was putting together. And it was a little fun. A little fun project. I'm going to keep plugging away at it. I showed it to Owen. He's like, it should do all this other cool stuff i'm like yeah you're right owen but look it makes a room out of things and dimensions and put speakers where they should be after the show i have a test we're gonna run it through so i i got i got i got some information right now you know and i want to see when it

kicks out so it's probably gonna break it doesn't matter since you're in a since you're in a designing craze i need you to help me design a website. Oh, I'm not doing websites. I mean, you have AI websites, so I need that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you could make AI do it. That sounds fun. Is it for your company?

It is. Oh. Oh. Okay. Price just went up. It's of a legitimate commercial interest. All right. I'll help you out for the exposure oh yeah do it do for the credits okay yeah there we go all right um that's it i well i did one other thing i i you got a lot of projects done yeah i got my shelly alert light i think we

talked about this maybe not i don't know i tied it into home assistant so i have an alert light and uh i don't know what i'm gonna do with it but well whenever your kid gets out of bed it should flash obviously yeah i think i have to bring in the little sensor into it's a it's a matter sensor right so i think i've got to bring take it out of apple and put it into a home assistant or i don't know i'll have to figure that out um because i think i have to do the same thing with the Aqara stuff, the FP2 that's in our room too. So kind of want to get the same warning triggered. And yeah.

But this is working great. It at least works right here on my stream deck. And I can just push a button. It turns on and off. So that's great. That's pretty sweet. Fun stuff. Fun stuff.

Between writing country songs and making theater website website things i want a rap song version while tj goes to his projects you know make a rap version all right i need a rap version yeah so all right so my projects i'm actually surprised i think stuff got more projects done than i did we'll find out um so actually since we haven't really talked about it, but last month I went to San Francisco. So Nicole and I's birthday is December 18th. And then our wedding anniversary is December 19th. And so we like to just occasionally we'll go on a trip. You know, we might go to Florida. We might do this.

We might do that. Our plan actually this year was to go to Canada. But TJ messed up and didn't realize that TJ's passport expired last year. That was the reason. Yeah. So I looked at my passport in November, and I was like, oh, I should probably look at this and see when it expires, like November 28th. And I looked at it, and I was like, oh, you expired like a year ago. That makes sense.

And so I was like, man i could pay like the rush fee i can do it online and stuff but it was still like it could take like two to three weeks to get it and i was like by that time it's gonna push it too close and so i was looking somewhere else to take a vacation to um and we uh came across cheap flights to san francisco and so we spent uh december 18th uh and we flew back on christ Christmas, but we spent the entire time in San Francisco. Basically, our hotel was right outside Chinatown. So that was really fun. Got to see all the normal touristy things.

One of the cooler things I got to do, though, guys, is I went into a driverless car. They have Waymo out there. And that was like one of the first things i wanted to try when i got there because i was like this is gonna be awesome and i gotta tell you it was pretty awesome um not having to like interact with somebody in the car is great because like especially when i've been at the airport all day and stuff the last thing i really want to do is interact with people and uh it was nice to not have to interact with the driver or anything and the price basically came out to the same cost uh as if you were gonna like tip the the lyft and uber driver so relatively the same cost and uh they were jaguars too really nice cars

nice how did the car find you at the airport well so it doesn't go to the airport um so i had to get a lift from the airport to the hotel. But they can drive all around San Francisco after that. But I think they're just now opening up the airport now. Nice. Yeah, that was fun. I went out there. We went to Golden Gate Bridge.

We saw Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, Japantown, all that stuff. So it was really fun. And it's funny because everybody's like, oh, it's so cold it's so cold you got to bring you know winter clothes and stuff like that it was basically the same temperature as it was here so it really wasn't that much different uh than what we were used to which was nice i i saw the videos of the driverless car that you posted and oh i don't know if i'm there yet, but I definitely would try it, you know? Oh, yeah. I'm here for it.

Look, I don't mind driving. I drive all over. I have a big work van that I drive all over the city and stuff like that. But if somebody told me that I could buy a driverless car, even if it had a subscription, because I assume it would have to, I would heavily consider it. If it was fully autonomous, I could sit in the back and not have to worry about the car. I would, I would, I'm, I would absolutely.

I'm in, I'm in, I do not want to drive down on Florida. Right. I mean, geez, I never want to drive again. The,

I don't, I, I'd rather, I'd rather not have like, I, I'd rather, I don't want anybody else to drive either. It's kind of the biggest thing,

right? That's my thing, right? It's because like most people just suck at driving. Yes. And it's like, like, and there's so many people out there that are like, I would never trust a computer to drive. And I'm like, I would a hundred percent trust a computer to drive. Cause you should see who's driving out here.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm good. I'll, I'll trust an algorithm. I don't know if I'll trust Chad, but I'll trust an algorithm. Um, and then, well, you know, when I got back, I decided I need some kind of project to work on here because Seth is showing me up. And so I've started working on the den, our three seasons room. When we bought the house, one of the appealing things was this three seasons room that we have.

It's basically like an enclosed porch, basically. I don't know how else you would describe it. It's built on a slab foundation. It's got like seven windows in it. A lot of like natural light into it. The problem is it's not really temperature controlled and whoever built it kind of did a shoddy job. And so it's got like cheap wood paneling on the walls.

It's got, you know, vinyl siding for ceilings. And it's just like, it gets crazy. Like temperature wise there, it's basically 20 degree vinyl siding for ceilings um and it's just like it gets crazy like temperature wise there it's basically 20 degree difference than what's outside and so you know like this morning when it was one degree outside it was like 19 degrees inside the den and so you know i i understand that i'm never going to get it like fully like temperature controlled it's like never going to be a bedroom or anything like that but i just really hated looking at it it because it like, it just has so much potential guys. And it's got this cheap wood paneling everywhere in this vinyl siding. And so when I got back, I was like, you

know what? I need a project. And so I just started tearing it all apart. And so I started with the ceiling. I ripped all the ceiling down. And one of the appealing things of redoing the den minus making it look nicer, um, is redoing the electrical in it. And right now, um, there, there's no lights. Um, when we got the house, there was a ceiling fan in the middle of it. And then there was like a single light on the, the wall, uh, that, that shares with the house. And that's how you could tell at one point, it was literally just a porch in the backyard and somebody enclosed it because the only light was on the back door for a back door light. And so one of the things I've done is I've installed four recessed Phillips Hue lights into the ceiling. They're controlled

with Inovelli Blue Switch. And so now all all my lights in the house are phillips hue and so uh this is the last room that didn't have any kind of lighting control in it um i was using like just some led strips along like the door um just to give us some light because we literally had nothing um but now i actually have four six inch phillips hue recess lights um and they're part of the adaptive lighting system so just like the rest of the house they they, they turn on and off with motion. Um, they automatically adjust the color temperature and brightness throughout the day. Um, and, and all that normal stuff that the rest of the house does. So that part is nice. I can actually go out there and use it now. Um, but when the father-in-law was here, uh, this past weekend, uh, I was looking

for a project to do with him. And I was like, well, let's go ahead and just tear out the walls now. You know, might as well just keep moving. The ceiling's done. I got to get the spray foamed and everything. But the walls, we can go ahead and start ripping those apart. And so we started ripping the walls apart. You know, got all the wood paneling out.

We got all the insulation out. Put new insulation in. We chose rock wool insulation um had to do the vapor barrier so we got you know the the two walls done and we started ripping into the third wall and i was like huh why is this insulation wet and so i removed the rest of the insulation yeah and i just see like i just see wood rotting out basically um and it's on the the side that faces like our trash cans and like the the double gate that we have and i guess the driveway um and so that whole bottom section of the wall is is rotted out at this point

and so we i i have to take the siding off from the other side and basically replace all of the wood on that side. So that part kind of sucks, but I'm kind of using it as a silver lining because it's like, well, at least I found the water damage before it got much worse. Because right now it doesn't look like it rotted out the bottom plate of the wall and everything like that. It looks like it's just the plywood. But now I have to figure out where the water is coming from because on that section of the house, it's a flat roof. And so I might have to put a gutter

or something on that side where it's getting water. And you can clearly see where water is pulling up on the slab there. And so unfortunately, I've got to figure that part out before I can finish the rest of the den. So now my den looks like a scene out of dexter um it's just plastic plastic walls everywhere um and just stuff everywhere so i you know i guess i i'm waiting for the snow to melt basically so i

can continue that project because i don't want to work on the snow at least you found that though you know yeah that's that's how i'm treating it you know because it's like well if i would have waited another two or three years that whole side would probably be gone and then i'd be in worse shape so it sucks but it could always be worse that's a big project yeah definitely but it'll be nice when it's done um and then a friend of the show jimmy uh sent me some switchbot blind uh or switchbot curtain bots i don't know what they're called uh these are the gen ones though as from what i can tell uh they're they're pretty nice to have i have them connected to home assistant via bluetooth um little slow to

respond but that's probably because my bluetooth i don't know where that's even at gavin's shaking his head so it's just bluetooth in general they're they're just um slower because i have those i have the gen 2 actually i think it is and i have the aquara ones which are zigbee and that's the one thing that drives me nuts about them even with the hub even or through home assistant you press a button and it just takes some time for them to kick in where it takes like it sometimes it takes like a minute or two okay it's not that bad i'm sure and i'm sure i'm just being impatient because i'm a millennial but yeah but the zigbee ones from aquara they work like as soon as i press the button they open and close them yeah the uh the switchbot on switchbot ones work i haven't had any problems with them they are so freaking

loud though like i could never have this like a bedroom or anything like that and the only time i use them is i don't have like any automation set up with them. It's really just lazy. So I don't have to get up off the couch, sell my curtains. But like, I could only use them in like the middle of the day because there's like,

even if I use them like in the morning before Nicole was up, I feel like they would wake her up. Yeah. I have like all, a lot of my windows are automated, but they don't actually open up while we're still sleeping. I don't have them automatically while we're still sleeping. I don't have them automatically. I have a little routine that when we get up and when we're ready, we could say good morning,

and it would then open up all our blinds and stuff. Because in the end, when they're all going, it is loud. Right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, unless you got that Lutron money. I'm sure it still makes some noise. No, but it's silent.

Silent. But yeah, that was pretty nice but you know what is not loud is my new keyboard uh nicole got me a new keyboard for christmas i'm just kidding that's loud you can hear it there's a fancy loud keyboard um it's it's pretty nice it's got like a little volume control thing on it um it's from key key cron uh it's a key cron v6 and it's got the hot swappable switches uh it's a full-size keyboard the reason i wanted it though is because my old keyboard is pretty nice but i really like having this volume control knob on the keyboard it's such a such a silly thing but you know it's it's just nice i can just right now if I don't want to hear Seth, I can just go ahead and mute it. Oh, I muted him. I just pressed the button there, and that was it.

It's kind of like having a Steam Deck in your keyboard, but it works. So that's pretty nice. Or Stream Deck, that's what it is. But I'm still waiting on my replacement switches from AliExpress. I had to order switches from China, and so those are coming um so you're gonna hear the loud clacky keyboard right now but maybe in a week or two it'll be a little quieter i hope so yeah me too that's why i got it because you guys always complain you're you know i i can't i can never really think of what i want for christmas and for this year i got you guys the

gift of a quieter keyboard well that's quieter? You'd appreciate it. Like, every time you're typing on it, I just think, oh, man, Seth's going to have to edit this out. He's playing on drumsticks, like. And every time you type on it, you'll smile. But it sounds like somebody that's angrily typing up a bad email. You know, you're banging on your keyboard but you're just typing away you know it's like it's like when germans talk to you i always think they're yelling at you but they're really just saying hi yeah yeah same way i i just i you know

i type really fast i haven't done a speed like one of those uh those word typing tests in forever uh but last time i did one it was over 120 words per minute yeah i was up i can i can just i can just type quickly. Slow down. That's what happens when you spend time on the deep net. The dark net. Yeah, you got to go to the deep net. It's deeper than the dark net.

Yeah. I can swipe like this now pretty good. TikTok. You're one of those generations. We already moved to Red Note. Oh, yeah. I hear that's happening. Yeah.

Well, that's all my projects projects what do you got going on cavin as usual i got more projects than everybody yeah i tried i tried a for effort you know um last time we talked projects i know i mentioned the sense of wand blinds uh to control my blinds right well i was put on to another company they make something called e-blinds and they are zigbee uh based uh wand controllers really cool they're based out of florida seth i ordered a couple because i still needed more and i have them running in my bedroom now and i really like these e-blinds i mean the sunso ones were nice but these take the cake because you could still turn the the um the rod like it doesn't spin all the way around you kind of like

twist it a little to one side or the other and it will open and close manually too and stuff like that so it's really cool they're really easy to install you know they look really good and i can really recommend the e-blinds if anyone's looking at something like this so just wanted to give that a mention in a show because i'm always looking out for better products out there um our friends at apollo automation i just wanted to mention um the holiday ornaments i ordered in november arrived yesterday so finally got them after waiting almost two months. But that was because in Canada we had a postal strike for just over a month, so they got kind of caught up in that. So we're now getting back on track.

But they did also announce that they're getting a works with home assistant and homey certification, right? So they will become like not a partner, but, you know, like officially supported on home assistant. So that's good to see there too, right? So they will become like not a partner, but you know, like officially supported on Home Assistant. So that's good to see there too, right? Yep. Anybody that's in the Home Assistant and uses ZigBee to MQTT, if you haven't upgraded to

ZigBee to MQTT 2.0, make sure you read the release notes, please. There's a lot of breaking changes. A lot of people are unhappy. Essentially, what you have to do is go into the configuration.yaml file for Zigbee to MQTT and add an extra line so it can find your adapter and then you're back in business for the most part. But a lot of people were mad about this because after, you know, blindly upgrading, it broke their Zigbee stuff, right?

And when you have 100 hundred devices on zigbee you're not happy but uh just wanted to mention that um i got my gas water heater online oh what is that safe so this is a smaller part of a bigger story so i'll start with the other part of the story so our friend morton again you know he's getting a lot of mention these days i i believe it was him in our slack channel that mentioned uh iot setting on unify and i've never seen the setting before but i have uh i set up a 2.4 gigahertz network and it's called enhanced iot connectivity and i've always had it off and And apparently when you turn it on, it does some magic and disable stuff and configures things. So IOT devices work better. So I've been fighting

with, uh, I have a ream water heater and they have this wifi, uh, accessory that you plug in and it brings your, you can now control it with home assistant and stuff like that. Right. And, and get reports and stuff. And it was never getting online. Even when I had a 2.4 gigahertz network. Well, I flicked the switch and then it got online, right? So I've been looking at other things around the house that, you know, were giving me problems with Wi-Fi and dropping off randomly, including things like the Sonos speakers, right? They would drop off randomly, including things like the Sonos speakers, right? They would drop off

randomly and come back on. And I added them to this IoT network now and they stay online too. My Harmony hubs, they're not dropping off. So this switch is doing some magic in there that now I'm my printer, more reliable. You know, I'm happy about about this so it was a nice find by him i'm glad he shared it because now when i add a device to wi-fi i'm looking at what it supports in terms of that wi-fi and if it's a 2.4 device i'm just gonna put it on this 2.4 network and just let it stay there right instead of put it on the regular network that kind of shares 2.4 and 5 and determines where the device goes no i'm just gonna put it on a direct 2.4 network. And they seem to be much happier with that.

So something to keep in mind. And if you have the gas ream water heater, the Wi-Fi module still kind of sucks in terms of how reliable, like not how reliable it is. Just it still is hard to get online, but I ended up just sitting my phone right on it. And it seemed to work at that point. And with this new network and now my gas water heater, I can control it and turn it down one or away and stuff like that.

Right. And it has alerts and blah, blah, blah. If there's a leak. So that's cool. Um, and then finally, one of the other things I just quoted this week, I'm getting my electrical panel upgraded finally. So my electrical panel is finally so my electrical panel is currently fuses all fuses it's an old one right i cannot believe that's a thing but it is a thing and you know what it's funny because you know i've had fuses blow and i actually bought those

resettable fuses so when they trip you just press a little button and then you don't have to buy a new fuse but oh like breakers yeah kind of similar concept yeah right so yeah i i got fed up and i finally got approval you know to to to get somebody to come in and replace it so they'll be coming in to replace it and i'll finally be in the new era with the breakers and i'm gonna put in something like a whole home um surge protection to protect all my devices i'm putting in a dedicated like 30 amp plug for my server rack and stuff like that i'll even put in a i think they call it a transfer switch so i can hook up a generator outside and just flick a switch and then it will be able to power things in the house too so i'm getting all that done but on top of that i took tj's advice

and i ordered an empor View 3. And this, you hook up in the breaker panel on all the legs and it monitors energy for each of your circuits. And you can integrate it with Home Assistant. And I know the popular thing about this was flashing it with ESP Home. So it's all local. But for for now I'm just going to leave it the cloud based. I'm okay with that. Um, people have said they've had no issues with the cloud and it working and it's not a critical device to me. So it can be cloud dependent. Um, and, and then at least I know later on, I can flash it with ESP at home if the cloud becomes a problem. Right. But I ordered one of those, I got it and I'll be installing that as well so i'll have full visual into how the electricity in my house is being used you know and i could say stuff like hey stop doing your laundry

at this time because it's costing us a lot of money and i know you did the laundry at this time don't tell me you didn't you know so yeah yeah i think i think it'll be one of your favorite your favorite uh automation products whenever you get it installed. For me, it's just really nice to look at. It hasn't really changed any of my behavior, and I wouldn't say it necessarily has helped me in any way. But I have created some automations based on when the dryer stops running or if the UPS loses power or the fridge loses power, stuff like that. And so that part is nice. But for me, it's really just the data.

I like to see how much power we're using and to see if it kind of collaborates with whatever our power company is using or saying we're using. Because we've run into that problem with like water and stuff like that where it's just like, well, they say you've used this much. But really, you know, this over here is saying you haven't used that much. And it kind of gives you something to go back to yeah i totally agree because at least it should line up with what they're saying right so and it will give me an idea of you know we can actually get into that argument of are we running the ac too much or is the pool pump running too much it's costing us this much you know that type of stuff well and home assistant will uh it's nice too because you can put a dollar value on those two and so you can actually see how

much circuit is costing you yep so in terms of utilities i'll have electricity tied in i'll have the water tied in uh even the water heater is tied in i don't have gas yet because i don't think our gas meter smartness is we can tap into that i think it's encrypted or something but i know some people have used um i forgot what they called it but sdr antenna no not the sdr that i use for my water um so that's what i use for my gas people have used like little pies with cameras and a little ai thing and it's basically just watching the numbers and and reporting what the number on your meter is um there's an actual app that does this for you. It ties into home assistant.

So it takes a picture like every how many seconds and sends it over and then analyzes the picture and says the numbers now this, and then it updates the sensor and that's how they get the, you know, I don't know if I'll go that far, but it would be cool to get my gas in there too. Cause I use a lot of gas between, you know, um, whether it's like cooking or drying, using the dryer, the pool heater, it'd be nice to know how much I'm using, right. When we have our parties and stuff like that. So, uh, that will probably be this year's projects.

One of this year's projects. Nice. That'd be cool. We will see. And that pretty much wraps it up. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade going on there. Oh yeah. And, and it's a

it's funny because whenever i give these ideas to like like the electrician coming in doesn't know anything about smarts and stuff right but when he came in and he saw my server rack first of all he asked me if i was mining bitcoin right you know he said no no but you know he didn't know anything about tomorrow but when he started seeing around my house he was like wow all this stuff and i told him what i wanted to wire he's like no wonder you need a panel yeah and then when i told him about the emporia view he was actually he was interested in that he was like wow i didn't know he could do that i said well sir welcome to home assistant i got you i got you you know like we could do some bartering here you could get a little gas

for you know a little discount on the work you know like we will see and you got and you got a good deal too so you were telling me about the price and uh that is uh way cheaper than what i can get it for and so i would be jumping on that as well so i think you're getting a good deal i was expecting a higher price i hope he doesn't listen to this podcast now but i was expecting a higher price. I hope he doesn't listen to this podcast now, but I was expecting a post COVID price, but no, he came with a pre COVID and it helps when you, um, if you have a pair of like,

uh, the worker pants, you know, go to like in Canada, we have a marks and you can buy like, you know, like, um,

a Carhartt worker, worker, just blue pants and stuff like that. Then they come in. These guys come to give you a quote and they see you in that they're like oh this guy works in the industry right he he's one of the tradesmen and then they can't give you some bs price at that point because they know you know and he actually said he goes okay i'm giving you a good price because i know you know the pricing

in the industry and i went along with it and he gave me the discount i was like okay sounds good but i didn't know man what to expect but that's a little trick for some people you know like he doesn't know you just sit behind a desk all day he thought i was a you know tradesman and stuff he's like okay i know you know about you know the price and stuff i'm gonna give you the discount and i'm like oh awesome all i had to do is wear these pants. You know, that's a good investment. Go buy a pair of Carhartt pants. Good investment. Not the stylish ones, the worker ones. You could even throw some dirt on it, make it look.

Yeah, get some dirt. Yeah, get it dirty and wrinkled up. And when they come to give you a quote, they will think that you know more than you really know. I mean, I'm going to keep that in mind because I've been using spray foam in the den as we finish it. And I've got a pair of jeans with spray foam on them now that I can't wear out in public. But maybe I can wear them when I go out to buy things. Or when people come to give the quotes or something like that. They'll be like, oh.

Well, this guy's homeless. Not homeless, but you know the pricing and how it works. We charge you for, we mark it up 200%, but can't this guy knows that so i can't do it that much you know well it's kind of like the it sounds similar like along the lines of uh like when i've heard of people when they go to somebody's house and they have like a tesla in their driveway or something like the quote automatically doubles yes because it's like well we know you can afford a tesla so i believe there's probably some merit to that yeah Yeah. So I keep my cars in the garage and then I, yeah, I wear my worker pants and get some good quotes. Man.

Life hacks from Gary. There you go. Oh man. Epic project showed this, this, this. Yeah. It was building up.

Sonos and projects. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't, we didn't have like any, there was so many stories of CES last week. It was kind of hard to do anything else besides CES. So just figured it'd be good to do new projects this show.

Yeah, it was like a nice and quiet week. Nope, Sonos. Yeah, there we go. Well, thank goodness. Yeah. All right, well, I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. We've got more projects to get back to. I've got a couple.

I have one for you guys. I have one for you guys that I have to show you. Yeah, I haven't showed you yet. But for everyone else, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, and 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 support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and everyone else in there

can see all sorts of fun stuff. You can see the big TV before we post it. You can get all those projects that Morten's been doing that, I mean, he needs to be on the project show. He was getting stuff done. I mean, really, he was. Yeah. You could see a big TV that one of the people in the group, I'm not going to say

who, installed above a door i'm not gonna say his name but his initials are tj that's all right hey i'm just impressed i got that all by myself uh yeah and then the um the big tv you also have posted a a interesting youtube link we'll put it in the show notes too about the the the big tv the big tv sona sony made i watched that whole thing it was 45 inch crtv crt tv that was the biggest crt tv that they made suppose can you imagine having to lift that into the house like no it took them like if you watch the video it took like eight people just to move it out of the room so we i remember doing a one of the first 103 inch panasonic plasma tvs right and those were monsters they

ran off like 220 volts and i it took two ac lifts and like eight people to get it up onto the wall it was not a fun fun install at all i have nightmares about that still it was a decade ago uh anyway if you want to help out you should talk to a therapist you want to help out with our mental issues and uh can't support financially appreciate a five-star review on itunes for a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice that's going to wrap up another week here on home tech we will see you next week take care till next time yeah i this this thing doesn't know what rap is i mean hip-hop rap doesn't know it does not it um the rap songs are not good they are not rap uh they are they're not um but they did it

did actually do a really good uh a hip-hophop song, so I'll get that up real fast. Hip-hop rap, same thing. Eh, it's not hip-hop. It's more like pop. Let's see if I can find it. I made many of them and then had to subscribe to the thing because I ran out of credits.