HomeTech.fm - Episode 513 - Approving the Bots

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

On this week's show: Netflix raises prices (again), Snap One and AVA settle, new products come out of Lightapalooza, Smartwings introduces PoE powered shades, SmartThings launches ambient sensing, Zigbee has a new trick, a mailbag question about soil sensors, a pick of the week, project updates and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 24th, 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, and I always have our warm-up section here. We're not warm this week. We're all cold. Very cold. Yeah. Sorry.

I think everybody in the United States is cold right now. There's some crazy weather going on right now. There's snow. My parents are in Southeast Texas. They were sending me pictures of like five and six inches of snow, which is insane for that area. Like camp it out. Like the infrastructure is not made for that.

There's no snow piles. It's not going to happen. They're just going to be stuck for a while. Yeah. We're used to that where we are, you know, you get 10 inches overnight or something like that. You wake up the next morning,

you dig yourself out, you go to work, you can't, you know, can't even stay at home or anything like that. We're, we're used to it here, you know,

but I, I see certain us States. They don't have the salt trucks. They don't have the pl trucks they don't have the plows nothing they wake up and it's like armageddon out there just stay home yeah it's it's getting cold everywhere today for me it got down to negative six degrees fahrenheit what's that i don't know what that is in in syrups google it aren't you it was very cold i can tell you that i walked outside and i was like i do not want to be out here right now.

Negative 21. Yeah, that's cold. Yeah. You know, when we become the 51st state, we'll start talking in Fahrenheit just like you did. For now. Doubtful. We're going to make you keep converting. I'm not converting anything.

But yeah, it's been super cold. Today, I actually had a job. I left and then halfway there, the job got canceled because the electrician hurt himself. And I was like, why did you make me get out of my house today then? I didn't have to do this. You know it's really cold when you go to get in your car and we have a Toyota Corolla and it's got one of those CBT transmissions. And I put it into drive and it took about five seconds for the car to register that i put it in drive and then it started going and that car has never had a problem ever soon as

i put it in the drive it's ready to go that's how cold it was it was pretty bad i'm just going to check the iguana checker over it uh our iguana is falling and yeah we're they're they're definitely falling here they're falling in reynoldsburg they're falling and picking if you guys even have them anymore high risk yeah high risk high risk when they hit the ground they shatter up here at these temperatures poor things i believe them yeah i don't know it's very chilly i just saw the north florida and had snow it's pretty far north to get to where that is but the different climate completely up there but still kind of wild to see see palm trees with snow all over them. It's kind of fun.

Yeah, Pensacola had a ton of snow, judging by the pictures. New Orleans was covered in snow. They had people having snowball fights on Bourbon Street. I don't know if I would pick up snow on Bourbon Street. It's all yellow snow. Oh, man, that's true. That's bad street it's all yellow snow oh man that's true that's bad all yellow snow i don't want to say hell is freezing over but uh seems to be it's pretty close it's pretty close we're getting there uh i got a little bit of follow-up last week we talked all about e-blinds

and gavin was really like oh man e-blinds great. And I guess that wasn't the name of the product at all. And somebody wrote in somewhere, I think it was like a YouTube comment or something asking for a link to it. We'll put a link to the product this week in our show notes over at hometech.com slash 513. And yeah, Gavin, do you still recommend e-blinds or do you want to recommend another product? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, my my bad you know you know sometimes you're just focused on something i'm focused on the blinds and i said e-blinds but i really meant the e-wands and that's uh offered by a company called current luxury i believe they're based out of pensacola florida so i mean don't order now they're under snow you're not getting there

over for a couple days yeah give them some time Give them some time. But yes, I still highly recommend them. I still like them. Those are the Zigbee wands that you can attach to your blinds. Very easy to install and they're great. And you know, I'm happy with them. So they're E1, not E blind. I bet you they're not as loud as these SwitchBot curtain bot things I have. I have the SwitchBot ones too and they're loud.

No, these are way better like the difference is the switch bond kind of wraps around the rod and then twist it like that not what i do like is you can fully turn the rod like a normal rod and open and close and everything but they are loud and in my case the switchbot ones i don't like the way they look because it's so obvious they're there and then whenever they were opening and closing my blinds, they would just flutter all over the place. You know, like it was a pain. But these Ewans work great. Well, very cool.

We'll make sure we get a link in the show notes if you're looking for those. I apologize. Yeah. Yeah. I had trouble finding them too. And it's late and I'm just trying to get the show out. So I hit go and of course got busted on it. So sorry about that we'll get the links in the show notes this time and um

yeah they'll be there e e wands e wands current current luxury.com right yes all right well um we had a couple of news stories float across uh the table this week and a couple of home tech headlines what do you say we get started? Let's do it. All right. I got good news, guys. Netflix had a really good year last year. They reached over 302 million subscribers globally. So that's an addition of 19 million new subscribers over the last quarter alone.

So guess what that means? Higher prices. They're raising your prices. New pricing is going to affect U. US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina. With adjustments with the standard plan with ads rising from $6.99 to $7.99. Standard plan going from $15.49 to $17.99. Wow. And the premium plan going from $22.99 to $24.99.

And the plan at my house going from paying for it to canceling it. Because there's no way. It's getting crazy. Well, I sent this article over to my sister to let her know that our plan is going up in price. Gotta keep up with everybody else, you know? Exactly. I just let her know. That's nice. Yeah, I don't think, I don't remember the last time I had Netflix. What I like about streaming is at least I can just subscribe and unsubscribe whenever I want to.

And so some of these services, I don't use them for a year or two. And I come back and use them for six months and then I discontinue it again. So this this is crazy price, though. Twenty five dollars for the most expensive Netflix plan. That is a far cry from when it was like twelve dollars. Yeah. The I was talking to my wife about I'm like, we don't even watch anything. And she's like, it's kind of was like $12. Yeah. I was talking to my wife about it. I'm like, we don't even watch anything. And she's like, ah,

it's kind of my go-to. I want something on the background channel. So there's a lot of the baking shows pretty much it. If we want to watch something. Yeah, they've got some good baking shows on there. The baking shows. The British one. Is it Cake is on there? Yeah, Cake's on there too. Yep. That's a good

one. Yep. I think after she finishes this season, it's going to disappear because, man, that's getting crazy. Yeah. Too much. Good news. So much good news here. All right. Well, this is actually good news for one company, maybe two companies. I don't know.

The legal battle between Snap One and Ava has concluded with a settlement resulting in the dismissal of all claims between the two parties. This pretty much comes after Snap-1 was acquired by Resideo recently, and it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be reopened. It seems like the two companies came to a settlement agreement, and it's gone.

It's over. No more Snap-1 suing AVA over their remote, the Control 4 remote versus the Ava remote. But there is still an ongoing lawsuit between Josh AI, or I guess Snap 1 versus Josh AI. So that one's not settled. But I wonder if that will happen now after they get this one done. Kind of a dirty laundry, weird lawsuit that was filed by Control 4 at the time.

Or Snap 1, I guess, Control 4. And then it kind of reached over into, now that Snap 1 was bought by Resideo, it kind of went over into that as well. I suspect that the Resideo lawyers are like, yeah, that's like, let's get these off the books. These are dumb. Make them go away.

Yeah, this always seemed like just like a petty little lawsuit. I mean, this whole fight just seemed like it was born out of jealousy and it just, it was unnecessary. So hopefully Ava made out on this one because I think SnapAV really did them dirty with this by just bringing it in general. It's not a good look. No, it definitely wasn't. It seemed like some of the charges they were coming out with. I mean, it was funny. You go to the different forums. It was just like, Ava stole the design and blah, blah, blah.

And it's like you, but you go to the other ones and it was like, staff one is being petty. It was interesting to kind of peer into the industry when that was going on and see what people said. I don't know. I agree with you, TJ. It seems kind of, I don't know, looking at what the responses were

and not having to actually go through and litigate the whole thing. I'm not going to be the judge on it, but it definitely looked like it was a little frivolous on Control 4's side. What other technology could you imagine professional integration companies fighting over besides remotes?

It'd be basically like speakers i think yeah speakers that's the only thing that's the only thing that the industry cares about at this point it's fancy remotes and speakers well no more lawsuit i guess we got to wait for the one with uh josh ai to either disappear or settle out or i don't know we'll see what happens yeah hopefully that gets settled now yeah be nice for it to go away all right uh we do have some new products though from Snap1. They are previewing at Lightapalooza, which is going on right now as we record in

Dallas. They are unveiling the new Lux by Control 4 lineup. The line is going to include keypads, dimmers, and receptacles for luxury spaces. It features premium metal faceplates in sophisticated colors

and finishes um they got a couple pictures of these over at i think this is residential systems they look pretty nice i um can see that it's kind of like the same looking probably the same dimmer configuration behind it or whatever like you've been able to like swap out different styles of the keypads like the the front covers of the keypads for quite some time now and i wonder if it's the same thing. I don't know. I haven't really looked too much into this, but they look nice. I like how these look nice and modern.

Yes, those look pretty nice, especially the two gang they have shown. There's like the first photo. I really do like the looks of that. And it does look nice. So it's cool to cool to see stuff like this. And, you know, honestly, what the professor, what the DIY space needs is keypads like this. I think Gavin had mentioned that Inovelli might be working on something that's kind of similar where you can configure it however you want. Yes.

I forget the project name, but they have one, and I think it, like, has eight spots, but you can configure it with, like, single or doubles or stuff like that. I think it's early in the works right now. I'm still just waiting on a regular. millimeter wave switches at this point yeah it's kind of just something you expect to see from the professional space at this point so it'll be nice whenever that that bleeds over into the diy space yeah that's i will talk about it in my projects but that's some of the things i'm like i still have all my control four keypads and interfaces and everything throughout the house so like what's nice is like with the allen chow driver and even some other stuff i can i can pick and choose what i want to trigger in home assistant and just kind of like bring it on over so that when i can use the control for interfaces to control home assistant

control devices it's kind of nice but i like the control four keypads better than i do the other stuff because they do make nice keypads and i can configure them still so what what does suck like is you have like an in a belly dimmer or something i don't know maybe you can do this i'm not sure can you can you decouple the switch it from the actual circuitry in the back of it yes like can you take the button press commands and what in a belly yeah yeah like yeah two in one that's how that's how all mine are working, because I have smart bulbs in every room. Okay. And so Anabeli has smart bulb mode, which is basically the same exact concept, though. Yeah.

And that's what I use to control my lights. Yeah, that's what I'm doing for the guest bedroom. I put some smart light bulbs in the lamp fixtures and then use the control four keypad on the wall to turn on on and off and if you're just coming in and turn on the light you don't know any difference but it's going to like three it's going through this rube goldberg system to turn on the lights but there it's doing it so cool i am glad i'm glad you can't do that inability definitely needs to come out with a keypad then that'd be cool i think it's called project bff i was trying to look it up i thought i heard them talking about that or something.

Five-button Steam Controller plus dimmer switch? Project Walt? Yeah, Project Walt. If you click on that one. Oh, they actually have a Control 4 light switch. That's the Control 4 keypad next to it. It says competitor switch. And yeah, those are Control 4 ones.

There you go. Yeah. Project Walt. Very, very nice. Huh. Interesting. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, those are Control 4 ones. There you go. Yeah. Project Walt. Very nice. Huh. Interesting. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm scrolling down and looking at the renders they have here.

Yeah, they definitely need this. That'll look good. Yeah, Project Walt. I think he named it after his dad from what I remember. And it's very, well, their plans are it's supposed to be highly configurable. So like some good backlighting. And it looks very promising, maybe too promising that we may not see it for another year. Yeah, I can tell you, at least from the control for side of things, it's hard to do.

They've been doing this for a while and they still don't get it right. Like the keypads I have, all those little tiny tiny plastic parts they do wear out and they do break and they are not forgiving from roughly electrician hand to smash and bang and put stuff in they'll be broken before you know as an integrator you get to the job site and all your keypad you walk up and then push a button and it just falls apart because the electrician was insane with it so well and depending which ones you are too they're they're super mushy like they're not a good feeling and click and stuff a lot of times so yeah that's another problem with them it's specifically some of the control four ones i've used in the past they've not been that nice so yeah and they can be clicky it's the problem the problem with the control four ones is they don't have the same opening as a

it's not the opening it's the same like width and height of the keypad as like a standard decora plate so like everybody you can order theirs and it fits perfectly in theirs but like if you just get a regular old decora thing from like lowes and slap it in which everybody does and you know me too like unless you shave a little bit off the sides it pinches and it makes it mushy it just it doesn't work as well so you kind of have to get in there with a dremel and just kind of like shave down on the sides and on the top and just make sure that it fits without affecting the front of the keypad or you can not waste all that time and order they're perfectly fitting versions but that that's the biggest otherwise they click you press the button it

goes click click click it works like you would want it to they're definitely pointing to control four has the there's the example option because they have a number of pictures of them in this forum. All labeled competitors product. Anyway, that would be cool. That would be awesome. Project Vault, make it happen. So hot right now it's labeled. I don't know what that means. The last update from them looks like

it was on October, so it's being worked on, but don't expect to make that soon. Yeah, expect another year or two out. That's a big project. So yeah, they're really busy with the Matt or the present sensor

stuff right now. So I'm sure that's eating up most of their time. All right, moving on here. Another product come out of Lightapalooza is actually DMF lighting

is introduced Phase X and Artifex linear lighting. Phase X is a tunable white lighting solution. This is kind of neat. It uses just the two wires that you have, Romex cabling, to go to fixtures. And I guess you need a PhaseX gateway

and probably some PhaseX fixtures. And when you have all that together, then you can do tunable lighting over just the regular Romex. And then they come out with a new Artifex linear lighting system as well. So it has magnetic connectors and all sorts of fun stuff. So I have not seen, I've seen these guys at the shows and their booths are so much fun.

At least like the first year they were at Lightapalooza. They brought out like this table of their fixtures and you could basically just, it was like Legos. It was basically like a Lego game, like make any fixture you want out of all these parts. And they just put all these parts and you snap them together and click and see how they all go together. I was like, this, what a genius idea for a booth because like, you're going to have integrators come over and installers come over and take a look at your product. Like here, give them something to do, give them some work and let them see how, you you know how your product works and goes together and all that stuff so cool products cool company i guess and uh i've heard pretty

early on that they were going to be getting into this linear thing uh so it'll be interesting to see what all all of that product means what it looks like i haven't seen any actual pictures of it i guess because it's so new but if i was at light of palooza this week i would see it but not now because i'm not there. I'm all about bringing color tunable. That's nice. Yeah, especially if you can retrofit. Like that whole product line has been designed to be retrofitted.

So like you can put these fancy or I feel like it's like not like the super fancy fixtures that you can get that are fully DMX controllable. Maybe like a color beam or something like that, where it just adds hundreds and hundreds of dollars per fixture. Like this seems like their, their original product seems like it's a pretty good mix of, of like, it's an upgrade for sure. Like,

I'm not going to say it's not to go from your standard in ceiling fixture to one of these, but at least you get like the warm dim option, you get tunable lighting option, and you get a ton of different trims that you can do with it. And it all can get like snapped together. So I think that's why they've been successful

is because they made it kind of easy for that. But it's nice that you can get back to a house that maybe wasn't wired for the tunable lighting and put a couple of fixtures in, and then you can do tunable lighting matching and all that good stuff. So that's kind of nice. This is their picture on their website of this house.

And like, I think it's the stock photo house that you see everywhere. The house is so popular. I found, I did find a picture. I was digging through my laptop and I found a picture of the download folder from Shutterstock of that house. Fun stuff.

All right, we're moving on here away from lighting and onto, nope to nope nope more lighting stuff but with ai yeah well no this this isn't smart things this is smart wings with a w they've launched the first ever smart shades using matter over ethernet but with poe that's right you've got a shade you got a cat5 you've got a ubiquity switch we we've got a shade. You've got a Cat5. You've got a Ubiquiti switch. We've got a product for you. Do we ever. SmartWings is the first company to introduce matter over thread blinds. And now you can power them up with PoE using Cat6A inline coupler.

Not a bad idea, I guess. Yeah, honestly, I think this is a good idea. And PoE is one of those things. Ethernet wire is relatively cheap to run. So why not power shades with it as well? I'm looking at the website here, and I can't tell, but it looks like they're about $200 for a PoE shade. That's not bad. Let me see here.

I'll price one out real quick because I know I have seven windows, so let's see how much it would cost to do my den real quick, minus the wiring cost, because I'll do that myself. $350. I mean, that's not bad for a POE blind. And that's a 32 by 60 inch window, so I mean, a pretty average size window. So I think that's a good price, honestly. That actually is a pretty good price if you think about it. I mean, that's a good price, honestly. That actually is a pretty good price if you think about it. I mean, that's a fantastic price. I mean, you have to factor in the fact of having a PoE switch for one.

Well, you don't have to have the PoE switch, right? Oh, you just have an injector, right? Injector or a bridge or something like that. Those are cheap. That's true. That's true. So, TJ, when are you coming to Canada again? I don't – well, it depends if our dear leader bans it or something.

I don't know. I don't want to get stuck in Canada, or maybe I do. It's not a bad idea. Yeah, mine are about, looks like about $300 or so. If I'm putting in, yeah, $300, $299. That's not bad. I might buy one for yeah for back here one of these days put it behind me on this window that has the Home Depot blackout special roller thing

from when we were built when we were working on the house and do all the appliances in the garage and I was like maybe we should cover that window up with something yeah this will go great with my thousand dollar Lutron shade that I have back there that i got for free on random shipment now you have to get the window to go with it that's all that's right something like the crappiest door possible the door is literally falling apart it's great everybody comes over my house has no idea how expensive the shade is but that's fine oh man yeah but shades are very expensive so anytime you could make them affordable and 350 is a lot for a blind i'm not gonna like try to tell you that is cheap and window decorating world uh but it is cheap for motorized blind world and especially poe world yeah because poe

products are typically way more expensive anyway, because it's such a nerdy thing that only certain people know about and they're willing to pay more for it. And the fact that you can power a whole blind off PoE and it's matter. That's crazy. Matter over PoE. You don't even have to worry about the wifi part of it. That's great.

And SmartWings is a good company. I've heard a lot of good things about them. They're usually one of the highly recommended ones when you like look up budget blinds on reddit and stuff like that i've never used them myself so i can't personally vouch for them but a lot of people like them cool well it looks like they have quite a few options you could buy just the motor oh maybe you can buy the pou motor though well like yeah i don't think you can just buy the motor but like all of their blinds i think you can basically configure them with like Wi-Fi. You can get them with no motor.

You can get them with Zigbee or all kinds of stuff. And that's what's kind of nice about SmartWings is that you can buy basically any wireless technology with them. That is cool. They've got quite a bit here too. Zebra shades. They've got the honeycomb thing, cellular shades, woven, blackouts, dual shades, woven shades, and hardwired shades. Or drapery shades. So that's, yeah, they've got quite a bit there.

Interesting. Watch out, Lutron. Yeah. The problem with shades is once you do one, they just start to add up. That's the problem. Like, 300 bucks doesn't sound bad once. Oh, yeah. You've got a lot more windows.

That's the problem. It's like, you know, the only two rooms I'd really want them in is the living room and the den. And the den only has two windows. So that wouldn't be bad. That'd be like $700. But then my den, I've got seven windows. And so it'd be like $3,000 just for motorized shades. Not this house.

That's a Gavin house kind of thing. A forever house. That's my bathroom. That's your bathroom. Your bathroom has $3,000 worth of shades. cabin house kind of thing a forever house that's my bathroom that's your bathroom your bathroom has three thousand dollars for the shades yeah you gotta have a good view out when you're sitting there testing the bidet it's a full glass window next to the bidet it's really weird it's a one-way window so you know

but it's the opposite way so only your neighbors can see in okay that's awkward they installed it wrong i've been thinking it's a mirror this whole time oh man so i was just trying to find the specs on it looks like it says it's going to do uh 10 watt per shade is what it looks like. So that's pretty low. Or actually, three watts is sufficient for most applications. So between three and 10 watts, I guess, is the answer.

You don't need to have 2.5 gigabits per second for this. So just any old 100 gigabit switch will be just fine. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. All switch will be just fine. Eh, not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. All right, moving on here. Samsung is set to enhance its SmartThings platform with, guess what? AI for ambient sensing technology

that they're going to be introducing. I don't know what this means, but utilizing connected appliances like TV speakers and fridges as motion and sound sensors, you're going to be able to analyze daily activities, suggest automation, such as adjusting lighting or temperature based on if you're at home or not or using some devices. TV could, for example, detect exercise forms or a speaker could trigger a vacuum when hair is being dried.

Data from sensors will be processed locally on the SmartThings Hub, and then they'll suggest some automations for you. It sounds neat. It sounds like they're using a lot of stuff to do basically, like bridge all this stuff together and do some lifestyle programming, some creative programming or suggestions on things you could do. I don't know what the hair in the vacuum thing is for, but maybe you're supposed to do that. Maybe you have to dry your do. I don't know what the hair in the vacuum thing is for, but maybe you're supposed to do that.

Maybe you have to dry your hair. I don't know. Gavin, do you know? You know, the worst part about this announcement, the freakiest part about this announcement is I just realized that it's not just my Samsung TV that's watching and listening to me because they named out the fridge, the vacuum, everything. What else is listening to me in they named out the the fridge the vacuum everything what

else is listening to me in my house at this point not your samsung bidet totally that's totally fine okay don't worry about that yeah okay yeah you know the funny thing about it is i have all these things in my house listening to me other than my wife you know well i mean can you blame her yeah i don't know yeah the reason i do is because i get paid how many how many hidden senses are in our appliances these days that we don't know about yeah it's neat that they can they i guess have such an ecosystem like a diverse ecosystem they can actually work on this to turn on because they have the tv they have your washer and dryer they have the fridge they have your microwave they have your vacuum cleaner, like you're saying. It's interesting that they have such a diverse ecosystem and manufacturing diversity, I guess,

is that they'd be able to do something like this. That's wild. Samsung didn't state what technology they're using in their sensors, but specific motion detectors are detections are mentioned. It's likely to be millimeter wave sensing. So, Gavin, they're going to have some millimeter wave Samsung stuff. Maybe they got millimeter wave in your TVs. Who knows? Oh, that'd be cool. Yeah.

It's kind of scary that we don't even know what sensors they have. But we will see how they apply this at some point. What we do with this going forward. And, you know, will it be open to other ecosystems or is it just gonna be a smart things thing you know we'll see yeah i mean the tv thing makes sense right because samsung wouldn't want to show you ads on your stuff while you're not there right and so if they can detect when you're there they can show you better at so so would it be good if i could trick it to think i'm not there so i don't see any ads at all you're gonna have one like

those people would tape over the camera there no but that's the millimeter wave will still have to go through we need some anti-millimeter wave clothing you know oh man we can get rich doing this you're gonna have like foil around your tv bezel or something like that to keep the the millimeter detect us in the room and not show us ads. Oh, yeah. Anti-ad gear. We'll see what happens with this. But this is kind of cool in general about just being able to use all the stuff that you already have to do other things.

And that's kind of what the smart home really is about, isn't it? It's kind of like taking all those inputs and taking all those inputs and taking all those those data points and everything else and doing stuff with it and this is kind of like the first step towards that i don't think this is the end goal uh or the end game or anything like that but i think this is the first step towards that um i don't know samsung will be able to deliver on him but it's cool and you know what's interesting like for me actually this week um so i have a samsung fridge and like every samsung fridge the ice maker froze up it's broken right so i i yeah basically i cleared out all the sensors are fine but the ice maker and fridge part now yeah they can get the sensor stuff working but they can't get a damn ice maker to last more than

five years anyways so while i was playing around with the keypad all of a sudden i see ap pop up on the screen i had to google what it was and i've had this thing for like 10 years and i never knew it had wi-fi built into it so i'm like apparently with the old app with the app you could get all the sensors from the fridge itself like you could control the temperatures and everything like that so i tried to find the old app and it's no longer around anymore. So I tried to use new app. I can't get this thing online at all. If anyone knows any tricks to get this thing online, you know, feel free to reach out. This is like a 10 year old Samsung fridge.

Um, but you know, again, I didn't even know it had smarts built into it, you know, at the time. So what else can this fridge do? I'll never know because I can't get the app. Yeah, it's been discontinued. Yeah, the app's gone. So that's, you know, like I bought this fridge and, you know, it's no longer supported. So, you know, if I ever did use it, you know, probably would have stopped working at some point too. Do I have to buy a new fridge? Yeah. I mean, Samsung would tell you, yes, buy a new fridge. Yeah.

Get the one with the TV screen on it. Yeah. And get our ice maker. Yeah. I do like this because this is, I mean, kind of getting back to having a smart home. This is a smart home. It's not just automation, right? It's not just like whatever I can dream up. It's actually doing smart things. It's right in the name. And figuring out the lifestyle programming that you need, maybe without even you wanting it, I don't know. Like if you have all this stuff linked together and then your Samsung app popped up and said,

hey, you know what would be really cool is if, you know, when you leave, what I'm going to do is I'm going to shut the shades, turn off these lights that you always turn off for you. And then, uh, kick on that vacuum cleaner to run around the house or whatever. Like maybe that's something you want it to do. And that's something that like, you know, you, you may not have thought of. And I, I don't know. I think that's a pretty, that is a pretty, uh, that that's a step towards a smart home, right? That an actual smart home, not one that is just pretty uh that's a step towards the smart home right that an actual smart home not one that is just passively doing things when we trigger it or based on like time of day and stuff

like that the senti at home i need my home to yell at me hey the robot's gonna take over eventually so all right well next story here we've got this is interesting it just kind of plays into a couple of stories i saw fly by this week. But there's this thing called Sensify. It's developed by Ivani. It's an ambient sensing technology. It can transform Z-wave powered devices like light switches, plugs, into motion sensors through just a simple firmware update.

Innovation eliminates the need for extra hardware, like motion sensors or millimeter wave sensors and you can use lighting devices like philips hue to automate lighting based on occupancy um sensify leverages wireless network sensor sensing wns to detect disturbances and radio frequencies and um we've heard about this before. I think Sensify has been, Sensify, Signify, Signify has been using this in the Wiz products, right? There's like a little thing that they're using to figure out if the Wi-Fi signal like goes up or down in a few in your room that someone's in there. Evidently, this takes three devices, I guess, to cross-reference the data and everything it

doesn't rely on cloud it can all be done locally um sounds interesting especially if it can be done on every z-wave device like it's just a little firmware update and it's like b can kind of is a z-wave or zigbee zigbee yeah you said zigbee sorry about that yeah if it can be done any any uh zb device with just a firmware update, that sounds like a pretty interesting advancement. I just have to see how it works, I guess. This is really what I was after with millimeter wave, right? Because for me now, I have basically recessed lights everywhere. And it would be so useful if all of the recessed lights were motion sensors or millimeter wave sensors.

Because they're in the ceiling. Most of them are in common areas. And it's in my ceilings, you know, because I live in a smaller house, my ceilings are about eight or nine foot tall anyway. And so it'd be right about the range you would need for millimeter wave to be effective on the ceiling. And so for my use case, having a millimeter wave built into recess lights would be amazing. And I would have it basically coverage in every single room minus like the bedrooms.

So that would be a welcome addition. You're in luck because Philips Hue app has introduced a new automation feature now available on iOS users with the update version to 5.3.3.1. There's a place you can go to in the automations page of the app called arming schedule automation it allows users to set specific times to arm and disarm their smart home now i think that's something different i think that's just a uh like a pre-made scenes for security kind of thing all right we'll cancel that i swear there was like three stories about this and one of them was philips was rolling this out but i guess not no so there's a lot of there's a lot of speculation that this uh the sensing from zigbee stuff will never actually come out uh because uh signify or philips hue or whoever it was actually had this years ago and they patented it uh but

they've never launched it and so there's a lot of a lot of skepticism that this will actually come out it's it's really weird. It's like, I don't know. This seems like this is like even on the CSA, the Connectivity Standard Alliance, like talking about ambient sensing and using Z-Wave. So like it seems like it's something that's going to be built into Zigbee, the Zigbee stack.

Yeah, I hope so. It's interesting. Well, we'll have to see how it works. I know that there were some people like Signify did do something similar with Wi-Fi wave, Wi-Fi signal strength. But I guess it does kind of work, I guess, if you don't rely on it to, like, instantly turn on the lights. Like, it'll detect if somebody's in the room. And, like, when they're not there anymore, I guess it can kind of figure out that they're not there. But I guess it doesn't work all that great.

Yeah, kind of like millimeter wave in that regard because millimeter wave is not good at the fast stuff but it's good at you know keeping or knowing if you're still there for example so it makes sense though i guess i guess it beats it giving everybody like a rfid tag or something it's like you have to wear this in the house all right well all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 513. All right, we got something in the mail bag here. We've got a message to Gavin. Gavin says, this is from Raju. He writes in, I heard you on the Home Assistant podcast.

Oh, yeah, it was really good, Gavin. Yeah, it was a highly rated podcast. You know, if you haven't listened to it, you know, I'm getting awards for it and everything. So, yeah. I was giving you an award for that show. Get out of here. She gave you a sticker. Yeah.

I got stickers. I got awards. So yeah, go check it out. It's one of their most streamed episodes so far. Well, there we go. There we go. Yeah. Wow.

I even heard on the last one that Richard Gunther got a big shout out too. So I was like, I know these people. We're famous. I know famous people. All right. Anyway, Roger Roy is in. I heard you on the Homeless is a Podcast. Now, we'll definitely be getting the EcoWit sensor.

I was thinking about your difficulty with the sensors and mowers, lawnmowers, and people stepping on them. One option is to use these embedded EcoWit sensors in the lawn. It provides an Amazon link. It says you could probably find something similar. It has a six-inch diameter, and the EcoWit sensor is about three inches. So, Gavin, I don't know if you've taken a look at these. Have you seen these? Yep, yep.

First of all, thank you for sending me a US link, because every time I get one of those from CJ or Seth, it takes me forever to figure out how to change my Amazon back to a Canadian. I don't know why they make it so hard, too. I know, exactly. And it seems to move every time. Yeah, yeah. I think they keep messing with us. So, yeah, I eventually got it back to Canada. But, yes, I have seen these. I do actually have them in my lawn for my irrigation valves they put the the irrigation valves in the

ground around it's not a bad idea but i mean i have eight sensors so eight of these boxes would you know not look too pleasant in my lawn right you also have to worry like the sensors kind of have to be at a certain depth on the lawn too right and they're built so that the actual sensor goes in so many inches from the top so if you're gonna dig down then you don't get the proper moisture readings that you want i'm sure you can maybe go sideways or something and i think that's what he recommended but um yeah i'm still pitching the idea to certain companies like Apollo Automation, you know, maybe they'll come out with a nice lawnmower friendly soil moisture sensor. We will see. Yeah. But good. Thanks for the recommendation anyway. Thank you. I have these for the sprinkler valve things that are, they're mounted in the lawn for whatever reason. I don't know why. That's just where they put the

valves. Yeah. Same with mine too, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so like, I have one big one that has like a few valves in it and then a random one that didn't get put in the same thing for some reason. So this kind of floats off on the side. I could see how that would work,

but wouldn't that, would that affect like the sensor or no? Well, that's what I'm saying. So the sensor goes straight down into the ground, right? So it measures from the top of the lawn so many inches, I think it's like three inches long or something. So it's based off of that. But even, I think even if the top of the sensor, you're probably thinking the range of it, you know, if it was kind of buried a little, if that would affect the range, I think it could still, um,

uh, transfer the information. And the only reason I say that is because I have some sensors that are sitting right next to a brick wall. And on the other side of that brick wall is just dirt, like higher up, like it's a retaining wall and it's still sends a signal to my basement. So I think it could be in the ground. It might be something I might try this year, actually, see if I can lay them flat and put them in sideways. The problem is finding them in the winter is going to be hard if they're buried, unless I have something like this on them. Right. Yeah. No, it gave me some ideas.

I'll actually try it when spring comes around, because I've lost a few to the lawnmower, the weed whacker stepping on them. I think I'm down to two now. And you're still using the little green one, the WH 51. Yes. But they also have the WH 51 L, which is the cable.

They don't offer that in Canada. See Canada's not getting the good stuff anymore, but that one you can kind of mount off to the side and it has a little cable that you can put into the lawn. Right. So it is a little bit more you can put into the lawn. Right. So it is a little bit more friendly. I wanted to get some of those, but they only offer them in the States right now.

Interesting. Yeah. That, that, that would be better. Of course, once you introduce a cable, then,

you know, you're not weed, weed whacker friendly or edger friendly at that point. So that becomes a whole other problem. Yeah. You can put little protections around it. If you want to take a little conduit cutting in half and put it around and protect it, you know, if you mount it on like your fence, for example, you know, you can work around

it at least, but it's the lawnmower, you know, and you won't be stepping on anything. Um, I might have to get you to order me a few and ship it up if anything, you know, as a gift. Yeah, exactly. I'll know, as a gift. Yeah, exactly. I'll send him as a gift along with these home assistant. Don't use UPS, please. Yeah. Oh, man.

The little green ones that you have look, I mean, clearly these are made for like a garden, right? Like just stick in a flower pot or whatever and not. For your lawn. I don't think any one of them, they're designing for the lawn. Yeah. I think somebody needs to design something for the lawn. I don't think any one of them, they're designing for the lawn. Yeah. I think somebody needs to design something for the lawn. And that's what I've been saying for years now is that there's no,

it's a void in our smart homes right now is a nice battery. And again, you could get a hardwired one and run wires all over your lawn. Yes, I know that's possible, but a nice battery powered one that we can put in our lawns that are lawnmower friendly and you know i did i do have that other one that sat flat i can't even remember the name of it because i gave up on them because then they wanted to subscription per sensor what

were they something drop uh water drop something drop um it got to the point where they were doing too much with it you know like they were putting ai in my soil moisture sensor it's like do i nearly need that i just just give me a number you know that's all i want is i just want a number you know and now i have to pay ten dollars a month per sensor for this no thank you ai makes everything better cabin geo drop i think it was yeah that's the one you're talking about yeah i get that one actually looks pretty nice though from a hardware perspective because that was the like the flattish one well the the hardware is cool yes it was flat but the way

they built it to is when you take it out now you have a little dead spot in your lawn right and then it's just it was constantly going offline because I think it works off wifi and then their servers were always down. I guess I was an early guys a, well, I mean, let's just say it looks like I'm going to let you guys discover what it looks like. Uh, but it's, it's, it gets buried. It gets buried completely underground. And I've, you know, Well, you know, you'll never lose it because you can just pull out the string to get it out. Yeah. Oh, that's a family show, family show.

Yeah. Yeah, but this is, yeah, also hardwired too, and I guess. You need to be hardwired somewhere, yeah. Yeah, how does it connect into the ecosystem? Because remember, the ecosystem works nicely with home assistant. That's why I kind of like it, right? Yeah, I'm just trying to like it for me i would rather not i mean and maybe it's just a difference between like the install i would rather

have the hardwired solution and bury the the waterproof line under the ground and then like just bring it up on the side of the house to a wireless base station or something that could talk to the to the system yeah and in your part of the world, that may be fine. I don't know how these would, if you could leave them in the ground through winter here, I don't, I'd have to look it up too, right? Cause our ground freezes and stuff. So yeah, lots to consider, but I'm going to bookmark this and look at it later. Yeah.

It's funny this weekend. I, I, I, you, you guys are freezing and snowing and I'm like, hey, I'm getting the irrigation system working. It's like water in the lawn. Running your robot lawnmower, some of those photos too. It's a beautiful weekend to work outside. Yeah, different climates could do different things. I just wonder if this little guy could like,

just, I would want something like more permanent i guess that i didn't have to like always worry about stepping on or or anything like that and this seems like you can just go bury this little guy out in the in the field and it should detect but who knows it may just be a bad a poor sensor too yeah that's the same permanence nice but then like certain parts of my lawn it's very hard to run a wire to there you know um i'd have to go through a fence and through a brick wall etc etc so that's kind of why i'm looking for the battery powered ones i like you know i only need them to last like two months or something yeah canadian summer like i don't i don't need to

get a year out of them. It's a year-round affair here. I mean, like, it rains and the grass is growing. So you guys just need to give in to the no lawn movement. Get rid of your lawn. What are you watering your lawn for?

Where was I recently where nobody had a lawn that had, like, rock gardens and stuff like that? That's Arizona, California. That's Colorado. Yeah. Parts of Colorado, too.

Yeah. You know, it looked nice, but then you'd totally stand out in our neighborhood if you didn't do that yeah that's true you don't want to be that house alright I found the spec sheet for it and it doesn't have any information

looks like something that will soak up the moisture not measure oh man we'll put a link to this in the show notes, and you guys can click on it. See what we're talking about. Anyway, if you want one of these, there you go. Moving on to probably a better pick of the week. This is a pick of the week that TJ found on the internet called Next Level Truck Nuts. And I think we all know what truck nuts are.

Driving down the road and seeing those hanging underneath the big trucks well somebody took it to the next level for sure this guy what is the electrician or something he's got big giant blue truck nuts and they are electrician this is actually kind of creative like how did they get them on there yeah that is pretty funny um i would imagine they're 3d printed gotta be uh but this is these are the truck nuts i can get behind because if you've seen truck nuts uh traditionally they they're they're not something that you should have on your car uh but these these are these are fine oklahoma plates congratulations oklahoma is ok oh yeah it is oh yeah i'm not a fan of these

kind of nuts if it were me i'd use the wiggles. That's what I said. You need some Wiggle ones. Truck lever nuts. Yeah. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for a 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. All right.

Project updates. I kind of mentioned what I was doing earlier. I'll just kind of briefly touch on that. Like everything I did last week, I had to redo redo so that was my projects because i had two bulbs that decided to stop working and i think they're defective and it made my wife really unhappy that uh i guess at six o'clock in the morning they would just turn on and start blinking i have no

idea nice yeah she was not happy about that and then uh that sounds awful it evidently if you have blinky bulbs you can't do your makeup and stuff in the morning. Get really upset about that, too. So I found some old bulbs and slapped in the old dimmer that I had, I guess, in the garage. I don't know. I found the old dimmer and put it back in and call it a day. You undid your projects that you started then. Exactly.

I actually finished something and then had to completely go back on it. So there we go. I'm feeling great for the week. Anyway, Gavin, it looks like there's an unraid update that you need to update. If you're in an unraid, we talked about this in the past, and I think Gavin and I are doing, I don't know if TJ's doing anymore. I think TJ's. I have not. I gave up on servers. The only server I have now is Homosense. Well, there's an unread update that has security stuff. You should probably go update. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. So I'm going to go update right now. Yeah, the interesting part about this is it's not just an update to the 7.0 release, which I think we talked about.

I can't remember. But it's an update, actually updated the previous version as well, because I guess they felt it was important enough that these uh security concerns had to be addressed so even if you're running the previous version just update to the latest point release um you can read the article though to see if it's really important to you and make your decision from there but i like to keep things up to date i haven't upgraded to 7.0 yet just because i've seen so many bad things in the forums that are scary to me so i'm just like i'll wait for like 7.01 or something like that before i upgrade well this this in the six the realm of six the six versions of what 6 12 15 yeah i have two unraid servers one of them is 6 12 11 and the other one is 6.12.8. You have a few updates to go.

I have a second underage server, and that's I'm running on 7.0, but that one's not as complicated as my main one, so I'm waiting. All right. I guess I'll update to the 6.12. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, Gavin, what you been up to? Oh, it's been a fun week um i've been playing with a little ai so i bought the nvidia tesla t4 and threw it in my main server and that's like a 16

gig card that's really good for ai stuff so that i was looking for things i could do with it now i'm working on some home assistant things with it But one of the things this week is I use installed and set up paperless AI. So I use paperless for my document management, right? So my scanner, basically, I go to my scanner, I scan in the document or whatever, and then it goes automatically to my server. My server picks up the document, injects it into paperless, you know, and moves it to various folders and does everything automatically. Well, what paperless AI does, it's an add-on to paperless that basically will then take that document, scan it, feed it to like my old Lama instance on the server, and then analyze the document and then automatically tag it as a receipt, automatically fill out who it's from what it is etc etc and it does all the work all the tagging and everything that i was excited to do but i wouldn't keep up

on top of so just having this do it is doing a way better job than me not keeping up with it so it's it's just automated more of the process so when i want to go in and look up something from you know my the paperwork for my car for example it's all tagged with my automotive stuff and everything and it's very configurable you can create the prompts and have it tag it how you want so it's actually pretty cool it's all local because i have a local olama instance but i think it works with chat gpt too if you want to feed it through there. So really cool. That's nice. Yeah. I, I have that paperless thing installed and I, I don't, I don't, I just, I don't remember that I, um, have it. Yeah.

This is the problem. So I never use it. With the paperless, you know, when you first set it up and you scan all your documents in and you create your nice little tags and you do your thing and that's all good. Like I was all excited. I did all that, but you never kept up to date with it. Right. So you would scan new documents in, but you wouldn't tag them properly, or you didn't even keep up to date with it. So that's where the paperless kind of takes care of all that other work. So now all I do is just

scan it. It goes through the whole flow and tags itself and takes care of it. And I'm good with that. That's all I need. As long as i know the documents there and it's tagged with something that i'll be able to find i'm good and this is actually pretty good at that yeah i think even without this it would do a little ocr and kind of figure out yeah you could search for that kind of thing i could never get that not great no i couldn't get working right yeah i never had luck with ocr, but ever since I put that Tesla T4 in the server, I've been looking for AI stuff to do with it, right? Yeah, just to find out. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it currently does all my transcoding for my MB. It runs my Ollama instance on it. It does all the analyzing of the cameras for Code Project, the paperless AI now. It's a nice little thing because it's a nice little video card, not cheap, but it only uses one slot too. Now it's a nice little thing because it's a nice little video card, not cheap, but it only uses one slot too. So that's pretty cool. So it doesn't take up two slots in my server,

but it's got no fans. So because it had no fan, I had to build a little like, um, Oh, somebody built it and I printed it out on my 3d printer, a little dog. Oh yeah.

Yeah. A little duck that went from a fan straight to it. And I then wrote a Docker that regulates the fans and the server to keep the sounds down, but also keep the GPU cool, you know? So, yeah, fun projects. Yep. Speaking of fans, I just hit reboot.

I just remembered that Dell is going to get loud here for a second. Yeah, whenever you reboot these Dells, all their fans go to 100%, and that's it, yeah. It's the IT alarm clock. Oh, what's going on? Yeah. Supervision of a beep.

And I just wanted to give a plant update. The only plant in my house, thanks to the Apollo PLT1, that's the soil moisture sensor for the plant, it's still alive. Good job. Yeah, it's tied into my home assistant and notifies me every time this moisture's the soil moisture sensor for the plant. It's still alive. Good job. Yeah. It's tied into my home assistant and notifies me every time this moisture in the soil is too low for that one plant. And I dump a little cup of water in there and it gets watered. And yeah, without that Apollo device, I would have forgotten about that plant. It would probably be dead by now.

Yeah. We've killed a few plants in our time just by forgetting it was even there. You know. We need to, you need to pair the Apollo with the third reality watering station. Oh, well, for one plant, that's a little overkill. You know, I'm just happy. I'm just, you know, I just, before I make my coffee, I dump a little water into my plant for my little homie. And then I make my coffee, you know.

Solve the problem with money. Solve the problem with money. Oh, well, solving the problem with an apollo automation you know like there you go there you go you know i gotta get another plant you know all right well cool uh tj what what you got going on uh i got a couple things going on so last week we talked about my new keyboard i got a new keyboard uh for christmas uh it's the keychron v6 but i finally got my new switches. I had to order them from China, and they finally got shipped, and it was only like two and a half weeks, so that was nice. But I got them in, and I got the new switches installed, and they are amazing. So these ones are the, I don't even know how you say this, I want to say Otomo

Yellow Jade Silent Switches, and I replaced the springs inside of them with 150 gram springs. And for all you people that don't know anything about keyboards, it basically means that it's super hard to press the keys now, but it's so quiet. Listen, listen to this. Can you hear anything? No,

I can't. No, I'm typing like crazy on this right now. It's so silent. So that's nice. I ordered a bunch more stuff from China before we go to war with them. So I'm going to get some more switches and springs and some other things to try out. So that'll be fun. You know, nobody in America really makes a dollar mechanical keyboard switches. So I kind of have to order them from Asia somewhere. So I went ahead and just

ordered some more of those. So those will be in got nicole the same ones she really likes them so i'm going to be building her a keyboard and then she'll have a super silent keyboard just like i do so i've seen i know you guys have seen a few emails about you know pricing changes based on all these tariffs and the unexpected happening and stuff Have you seen any pricing changes start yet? No, supposedly nothing's going to go into effect until February 1st. Okay. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, I think that the pre-announcement and everybody was like,

oh, yeah, he's probably definitely going to do this, has kind of led a lot of companies to also pre-purchase inventory, which would be obviously sitting in a warehouse and they don't have to worry about it as much. I noticed a couple of companies were doing that to buy out. It's a smart thing to do. If you can keep your prices low for longer than your competitor, just by sitting on the inventory,

it might be one way to stay in business a little bit longer. I saw mentioning the Canada and Mexico tariffs starting tariff starting february 1st so i'm starting to place a bunch of orders for stuff you know well if it goes if it goes like how he thinks it's gonna go uh you and i are gonna have to trade our barter for wood gavin since we get like 99 of our wood from canada i've said you some oil too that's never been expensive in the past hasn't yeah wood no yeah yeah definitely didn't spike up and during covet or anything like that you know um so yeah i got the got the keyboard thing going on i got some more stuff coming in um i also got some new stuff going on um a couple weeks ago i

think i posted it but there's a uh there's a uh air tag case from elevation labs that has come out um and everybody was talking about it for like a week or two and i haven't heard anything about it since um but basically it's a big old a big old case for your air tag and you put two double a batteries into it and supposedly the batteries will last like 10 years with the air tag and so they're it's about 30 for the case um i've got a couple AirTags. I've got like two dozen AirTags at this point. But I've got a couple in like places that I definitely don't want to lose them and where battery life is kind of important. And so like one of them is my laptop bag, for example. I don't want to lose that anytime soon. And so I've put one of these 10-year ones

into that. And I've got another one in my van van and depending on how they go, I'll probably put, get a couple more for the car and everything like that. Um, installation was super simple. You basically just take the air pod apart, uh, or air tag apart. Um, and then you, you put it onto this little, uh, this little cutout that it looks like a little battery inside the case. And then you put your batteries in and you put it all together. And so it took like 30 seconds to do all of it. So, uh,

I think it's worth it. It, we'll have to see if it actually lasts 10 years. I'm a little skeptical on that claim. Um, but I mean, I usually get about a year on the 2032 batteries for the air tags. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I feel like the double two double A batteries, I feel like that is going to last a very long time. So, uh, the only downside that I've noticed so far is that the little beeper that you get on the AirTag is obviously encased in a giant case now. And so the beeper is not that loud. Sweet. My stalking tools have gotten better.

Oh, yeah. You just silenced it altogether. Yep. So, yeah, that's the only downside. So, you know, I'm really just putting it in places where i don't really care about that like it's obviously not going to work out on my keys where i want to find my keys instantly kind of thing um but like my backpack you know the the air tag exists in my backpack literally just in case somebody steals it uh so that that's fine i don't need it to be super loud so there's certain use cases where i think it'll

be fine does it have a magnet on it so you can attach it to the BMW down the road if you're walking by? Man. It does not, Gavin. It's plastic. Okay. But it is watertight, so you can, you know, whatever you want to do with it in water, I guess. Okay. The boat at the dock.

Yeah. Stuff like that. Put it in their toilet tank. You know, whatever. Sounds good. He's just checking. He's got questions. Yeah. at the dock yeah stuff like that put it in their toilet tank you know whatever sounds good he's just checking he's got yeah questions yeah he's he's always trying to track his neighbors um the next thing i have so i bought um two new products i bought this wireless hdmi thing uh seth when's the last time you tried a wireless hdmi device i i don't think ever have i answered been able to answer that question i said i was

gonna say even like the professional ones kind of suck so yeah they they've all there was always a an issue at some point with them and they they didn't work i'm i'm using this uh so i've got uh in my house um i want uh i don't really watch tv but for some reason i have this desire to see the tv in every room that I'm in. And so I've just, this is the problem I'm solving in my house for some reason. And so when we moved in, we had like one TV and it was the living room. And now we have four TVs all throughout the house. And I want them all to play the same exact thing.

And so I solved this with the kitchen because I ran a fiber HDMI cable. I solved this with the den by doing a bunch of hokey pokey stuff with hardware uh and so i decided to continue the trend of doing hokey pokey stuff and i did i bought wireless hdmi transmitters and uh this is for the office we don't really use the office that much but but it's kind of nice to have the TV going occasionally when you're in there. And so with this $70 wireless HDMI transmitter and receiver, it's actually pretty decent. There's a little bit of a lag to it. And you can notice if you're like, I had tried it in the kitchen right next to the living room at first, and it was very noticeable. But I have it in the office now, which is a completely separate first um and it was very noticeable um but i have it in

the office now which is a completely separate area and it's not that noticeable um because with the with the sonos uh audio lag that you get as well um it basically stays in sync with each other yeah so that's that's kind of nice um and it works pretty well for 7070. I think it's worth it. And all throughout my whole integrator life, I've tried wireless HDMI devices, and they've all sucked in some capacity. They were very slow, very unreliable. They didn't work for $70, though. This thing has worked great for about a month now.

The last one of those I ran across was, believe it or not, made by this company called DVvdo which you may remember from back in the day they used to have like upscalers and that kind of thing for your vcr or whatever yeah so you could watch it on your fancy projector at 480p or whatever um they've since moved on and you know pivoted to other things but they they do have a an hdmi and i want to say it's a wall plate HDMI thing that's wireless. Like they have wireless HDMI, which we,

we were actually at Infocom and they were the booth next to us. And, you know, we finally started talking to them eventually sometime during the show when we had a little bit of downtime. And they actually had a wireless HDMI thing. We all laughed about it. And they're like, yeah, no, it does work.

So I have to go back and find it on their website to link to it, but it's probably not $70. Let's just say that. It's probably not $70. Well, and that's what kind of amazed me about this, right? And I've already told you that it does have some latency and everything

like that. So I mean, it's definitely a real thing. But like, I don't know, it just seems to work good enough, especially for the price. and i've bought way more expensive wireless hdmi stuff in the past mainly for like conference rooms and stuff like the biggest thing is like somebody could go into a conference room and either plug something into the laptop or type in a url or whatever it is and they'd be able to do the thing that they wanted to do and those have always just sucked so hard. And so, I don't know.

I just find it hilarious that something like a Barco click share, which is probably like one of the more robust solutions, is like $500 or $600 like dealer cost for basically the same thing. I'm looking at the two here. They have two of them, a 2K and a 4K version. And it's $229 and $399. So, there. Yeah. Which still isn't bad. I mean,

for wireless HDMI, I mean, that's pretty good. If it works. In this case, you probably have a company you can go like, hey,

yell at them and find out, you know, why it didn't work. Yep. In your case, for $70, you just throw it away and try again.

Yeah. Well, you know, ultimately, I'm probably just going to run a fiber HDMI cable, but I mean, fiber HDMI cable is like $80 anyway. So, you know, why I'm probably just going to run off fiber HDMI cable, but I mean, fiber HDMI cable is like $80 anyway. So, you know,

why not try to save the time and hassle to do that when I don't really need it? Like, you know, if it was one of my main TVs, like the kitchen or something like that, I would just do the cable, but this is something we're going to use like a couple of times a month, probably. So, right. Right. Cool. Yeah. That's, that's all the projects I got going on. We're just dealing with a cold. I go to a Fort Lauderdale tomorrow so i'm escaping the cold so just wrapping up the projects now yeah watch out for iguanas they're falling down there too so yeah can't be can't be too careful

iguana kebabs whatever floats your boat man tastes like chicken i'm sure iguana jerky yeah all right well i think that's going to wrap up the the show this week uh we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those are able to financially support the show through our patreon page if you don't know about patreon 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 single pledge should get you an invite to our private chat the hub that might not be happening uh because the automatic thing may have stopped working i don't know i have to go this this will be a project for seth to do to go check out and

you'll manually invite them anyway so yeah that's what i ended up Seth to do to go check it out and see why it's working. You'll manually invite them anyway, so. Yeah, that's what I ended up having to do. Exactly. Anyway, yeah, you can join us. As long as the invite gets in, you can come in and enjoy us. And you can see all the snow that's getting posted in there or projects people are working on.

There was a free giveaway today from Jimmy. You know. Those were some nice things he was giving away, too. I wanted to grab them all. Zoo's Relays. I don't want to toot my own horn or anything, but I've kind of started this giveaway in the Slack channel. And so if you're part of the Slack channel, occasionally, right now it's really just Jimmy and I. I think occasionally somebody will jump in.

But we give away free devices. You just have to pay for shipping. And so Jimmy's giving away a Z-Wave relay and a couple other things. I mean, where else do you get free technology stuff? Free shipping from Canada, probably. Just buy it on Amazon.com. Oh, yeah, 100%. I wouldn't even dream of sending you anything, Gavin.

Feel the love. That's for other reasons, but. Hey, and on top of that, also check out the Mastodon server. We'll be getting a of that also check out the mastodon server i've been getting a lot of people joining our mastodon server hometech.social i've been approving all the bots all the spammers everything for seth for seth to clean up um but do we get an upgrade to that yet because i'm i'm looking for a new home i'm i'm deleting threads um but i need a i need yes seth said he's working on the upgrade. He's got a database backup running.

He literally does nothing all day, so, I mean, he can upgrade. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's on 4.1.20 right now. Is that the latest? No. We're like 8.9 or something. Let's see.

Latest. I just made that up. Well, on the 4.1 branch, I think I'm probably close to the latest. I don't know. It's 4.3.3 right now on the on the 4.1 branch i think i'm probably close to the latest i don't know it's 4.3.3 right now on the 3 branch so you're you're you gotta do some upgrading 4.1.22 whoops yeah that's a little behind well i will uh i'll get on that yeah i'm about two releases behind on this and then i yeah i gotta i gotta figure out a way to i actually have another server running i just need to transfer stuff over and that's the hardest part is moving stuff over without downtime maybe there'd be a little bit of downtime i don't know

there actually was not too long ago but it didn't work so all i hear is problems i don't hear solutions yeah it is problems i don't have solutions right now fix it you have one job exactly fix the mastodon server uh well we'll we'll see if we can get it up and going yeah and mastodon's free i mean yeah i mean it's not free free but uh with hessner servers it's almost free it's one mastodon server seth how much? Just one. Yeah. But we have a lot of people that use it now, so, you know. Needs some upgrades. Needs some love. Yeah, the bots are draining.

Are you trying to tell me the bots are draining the power of the server? The bots are complaining that they can't send out enough spam per second, you know. Oh, yeah. Needs some more memory or something. Yeah, I was going to see how many we had in here let's see trends i forget where this thing is no administration oh yeah let's see active users we're doing all right i think it had a higher well higher at one point when we had the bots oh yeah i guess that's true so 135 135 active users right now, plus 13%.

So, yeah, people are on there using it and that kind of thing. There you go. Three pending reports. You're not even doing your job. See? Look at this. Oh, boy. Come on, Seth.

We're going to replace you with AI. Yeah. Call it Seth.ai. Well, I guess we probably need to fix whatever this is. Oh, yeah. This is a Gavin. I don't know how Diana got through. I have a soft spot for the ladies.

She has a pretty picture. And 12 posts. Let's see what they are. Media hitting. Well, I should click that and see what it is. Don't click on anything, Seth. Gavin, her reasons for joining were visit gosh you really do just said to everybody i dm'd her but she didn't reply what are you what are you facebook you

have no moderation policy canada or me visit you you are Jamaican oh yeah alright well I'm probably going to take care of Diana over here and jeez well like I said I usually just approve everybody that Seth's sort of out so

it's such a spammy server that we're're gonna have i don't know for the most part it's it's not i don't see very much spam no maybe they just go somewhere else and spam i don't know anyway if you're looking for a new home for your for your social thing and uh and one that's like pretty low key and and won't won't bug you with uh with things yeah yeah home uh home tech that's social it's a place to place you there's no algorithm at all no algorithm at all yeah i like i server because there's no politics like i i see the people fighting on other servers and i'm like what are you fighting about you don't have politics oh i server is nice and quiet and calm and i like it that way yeah you know calm nice easy exactly yeah oh this guy wrote first post here blue sky or mastodon it's like It's like, well, nobody replied to you in a day. So I'm going to guess you're probably

going to go to blue sky. You got to utilize those hashtags. Yeah. I think Mastodon does have some, some new stuff coming online in the three, the four dot three brands that I'm not on, but like they will have some of the new things like, uh, like starter packs and stuff that, that, uh, some of the like blue sky has packs and stuff that some of the Blue Sky has been implementing. But there's no algorithm. That's the thing. It's not going to just feed you random things into your eyes. And if you want to follow something.

I like that. Yeah. I got a home assistant hashtag I follow. And there's always good stuff that comes up on home assistant hashtag. I don't know if there's any more. I probably should go look for more hashtags. But I was like, you know what? This works really well.

And I see what I get, I, I see what I want to see and nothing else. All right, let's see. So yeah, home tech.social, go sign up. It's free. It's free. Anyway. Um, if you want to help out and can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up the week, uh, here in home technology news. Everybody have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Take care. Till next time. We do have a mailbag, by the way.

Oh, we do? I sent it to the back channel. This show is going so smooth today. It's one of those it's because america's on fire yeah i know you got other things to worry about i can't blame seth ever since monday it's just it's because we're all going to be jobless here soon