HomeTech.fm - Episode 514 - Elevate Your Podcast!

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

On this week's show: Elevate your smart living experience with groundbreaking HomeTech news and information! We unpack Unifi's game-changing AI Key for next-gen automation and Xiaomi's Matter-enabled Smart LED Bulb that redefines ambient intelligence. Discover Logitech's revolutionary peel-and-stick radar sensors for invisible space optimization and Apple's Thread radio breakthrough transforming iPhone connectivity. We analyze market-shifting tariff impacts on TSMC's chip dominance and insights from Acquired Podcast's deep dive. The CSA/Thread/Wi-Fi Alliance dream team reveals their blueprint to supercharge Matter's potential. Plus: marvel at a handcrafted pick of the week, explore ComfyUI's AI-powered creative suite, unlock pro audio control with our featured Sonos menu bar app (while the Ecobee API window closes for newcomers), project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 31st, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickard, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, and we have heard three voices this week, for sure. Yeah, I'm actually here. If you haven't heard three voices at this point something's gone horribly wrong yes i i that's honestly how i

thought i got fired from the podcast is uh i just found out through people emailing us and was like hey we can't hear anything and it made me feel bad though because there was only like one person actually said my name it was like hey i can't hear tj's audio so at least somebody knew that i was missing the rest of the people just said aren't there three of you it's like there's something wrong the podcast sounds great now what happened there's some there's some blank spots there's some blank spots i heard gavin and seth i was the other guy yeah i'm pretty sure something else is supposed to be there um yeah whoops uh i guess while i was editing and before i exported at some point i randomly pressed the mute button on tj's track and

the last show got published initially with um no tj so if you if you have that show and you really want to listen to it and i think you should because it was quite funny go back and delete it and then redownload it i think that'll that'll get you back on track. If there's no TJ. If you have the TJ, you don't need to delete it. Unless you just want to redownload it and juice our numbers. I guess you could do that. Don't delete TJ, please. Yeah.

If you don't want to listen to TJ, and I don't know why anybody would want this, then you just keep that old version. But you can't get it back. Once you delete it, it's gone. I feel like if you don't want to listen to me, you probably should listen to the podcast. Just in general.

Or have AI remove me, I guess. Maybe AI can remove me. Oh yeah. I wonder. That'd be good. We eventually will get an AI host on here or something and they'll interject things that are probably half true. It'll probably just say, you should just get home assistant to do that.

That's probably it. That'd be an easy AI to program, I think. I can't wait to the day we have an AI as a guest and we just talk to him, interview him about smart home stuff. That would be, hmm, maybe we could be the first. Yeah, well, I mean, what was it? The Deep Sync, the Deep State, Deep State. Deep Seek.

Deep Seek, there we go. You're going to continuously ruin this now going forward. We've got deep seek now. There's the Chinese model that's causing all such problems. It sounds actually like it's pretty cool. You can host it locally, which is nice. You can run it near on your local computer or server or whatever. And you don't have to interact with like the,

it looks like it's sounding like it's on par with the O1 model, which is one of ChatGPT's like better models to use right now for some things, not all things, but for some things it's pretty nice. Yeah, it's amazing how much money has been lost in the stock market because of this though. There's been a rush to just monetize ai and just spend as much money as possible and and sometimes that's not the

right answer guys yeah sometimes you just have to uh innovate with less resources and not just throw money at things um and that's what we're finding out there's obviously differences between them and everything uh but with a budget of supposedly 5.5 million dollars or or six million dollars whatever it is it's a small percentage of whatever like open ai and and perplexity and everybody else is spending on everything so and they don't know how they did it yet or something i don't know there's something all that stuff is beyond me and honestly like i i i kind of understand how they made them because i i get how they work but they're getting better and they're getting better a lot faster and there's very smart people

working on them so it's really hard to keep up with this stuff has changed so quickly even over the past year where i would say like two years ago we were looking at copilot while we were developing stuff and it was like hey this is cool. If you type the function that you want to exist and then kind of hit enter. And the next thing, it kind of makes these ghost letters come up and it kind of is the function that you may want to have had. And you hit tab and it just fills it all out. And then you kind of go back and fix it.

Like that really worked well. And then since then, it's just been this like steady, slow and steady like march to uh to like being like now you can go to 01 and say uh hey i'd like to make this app and you know what it what it can do you can you can almost you can you can implement it i will say you can probably implement an entire app just with with one of these models or two of those models just spends over 21 to use it's crazy and that's just on the programming side i don't think they're clever and they're smart people right now working on all the other stuff,

like things that, um, specialized things like people will end up using, uh, and not general stuff. The general stuff is like the co-pilot chat, GBT, the stuff that kind of half works,

but there'll be more specialized stuff. I think coming out for different things like accounting, like, can you imagine like receipt collection? Like you were talking about last week, Gavin, But there'll be more specialized stuff, I think, coming out for different things like accounting. Like, can you imagine like receipt collection? Like you were talking about last week, Gavin, with like how you scan your stuff in and an AI model figures out what it is. Yeah, paperless AI, yeah. Yeah. All that like work that people in accounting do to like scan stuff in or classify expenses and that kind of stuff. All that can go away. Like just the, I

guess from my perspective, being able to flush out all of like the code that is like boilerplate or like how to set up a project and the hierarchy of files and junk, junk you have to do every single time. And it's just like a waste your time of 45 minutes to an hour. Every single time you have to set up a new project or even do anything, this thing does it in like, I don't know, 20, 30 seconds.

And then it, and then it hands it over to you and says, all right here, you know, where do you want to go from here? That that's what you're going to start seeing happen in some like other, other, other areas where developers are working on those tools right now. So like,

I think it is only going to get faster. It's only getting faster and better. So I think in the next few years, it's, it's really going to turn loose loose who cares about nvidia or deep seek or anything like that i mean seriously like it's it's just gonna be little smaller tools that make everybody's life more efficient where you don't have to do these mundane repetitive horribly like soul draining tasks at work. Like that'll be, that'll be so nice.

I'm more nervous because, you know, we've had all those movies about AI and stuff like that and the bad sides of it. Um, you know, like eighties, nineties, you'd see all those futuristic movies. I think we're getting close to there and that's kind of the scary, we're seeing like, you know, the nice stuff now it's the bad stuff that's kind of getting scary so i was reading articles recently where they said ai has now gotten to the point where it can replicate itself um and they've done well they've done tests where they told it to protect yourself and then they go and try and shut it down and it would replicate itself across the network. And it was smart enough to know that even if a piece of it was broken, it would figure out how to fix itself to get it back fully working and then make more copies of it so that it can't die.

And that's just the beginning of it. Why are they doing that? I mean, don't they know how to make like, all right, let's figure out how to make an a like something that nobody wants to do no one wants to scrub a toilet let's make the ai bot like be the best toilet scrubber yeah like think like that not like how do i make myself indestructible and all-knowing no an ai bot that can scrub the toilet make it clean all the time or or or think further think like an ai that could develop a chemical that is completely harmless to anything in the environment. But like once you clean the toilet once, it never gets dirty. Like, why not that?

I guess you're on toilet duty this week also. Yeah, right. I'm just like thinking like things that nobody wants to do. Like that. Just make that. Why are you trying to make something that just can't die? I always start to think i'm like all the people working and developing this stuff they didn't sit through all those movies in the 80s and

90s that we sat through that warned us about this day like we need as part of their training i think we need to have like a playlist of movies from those days that were warning us about this stuff so they can think of twice about what it is they're trying to do here how do they not see the terminator i know the term like it's an entire start with the first terminator the first one yeah yeah and you will you will see that you're making exactly what we predicted you were gonna make and we're predicting the outcome already like stop stop it they'd be like isn't that governor schwarzenegger that doesn't make any sense i i i i've i've been kind of each day as new stuff comes out and you kind of tinker or find different ways to interact with it because that's kind of the trick right now with what i have to do on my end with code and that stuff is

you find different ways or different tools to interact and trick it to doing things that you want it to do or how to tell it what to do things and it'll then not hallucinate and make stuff up but the what's really been impressive is like the different tools that have just started to appear on the coding side and there's there that's just an all new level now just completely new level about there's one like function in this code thing i have it's like a bug finder and when you go to the tab on there it's like hey um this is going to cost a lot of money but it's going to go through the entire code base and look for like what might cause a bug and then you know list out options maybe show you how to fix it you know all that stuff I've run it once on something just to kind of see what it would do but like it warns you before you run it like, hey, this might be expensive to do because it has to look at the whole code.

It has to understand everything and put it all in there. And that gets expensive. Well, I use it. I pretty much use it day to day. Now, when I'm coding, I make it write a function. And even if that function doesn't work, it got me 90% of the way there. I can fix it. Or I tell it what it did wrong and it will fix it or even if i write a function i plop it in there and i say write all the the checks you know

all the you know check all the parameters and all the unfun coding stuff i make it do all that stuff and spit out a properly done function so i think that i let it write a lot of my emails now because i put a lot of F words in my email. Yeah. I've noticed like the tools in email are actually pretty nice where it's like, make this professional. And it's like, yeah, it goes from bleep, bleep, bleep, you stupid bleep to like, hey, I don't think that's the best idea. So many times it's like, make it sound like I really care about this stuff. And it does a better job than I could ever do.

You know, so there's a lot of good uses for it. And I use it quite often, actually. I really care about this stuff and it does a better job than I could ever do, you know? So there, there's a lot of good uses for it. And I use it quite often actually. Yeah. There, there are definitely some, some, if you can get it to do what, if you kind of know the tricks of the trade and right now it's that, that's it. You got to know the tricks of like, you got to use it a little bit to understand what, what it's good at. And it was just like any, any tool, like you can't use a hammer without knowing what it's good at and it's just like any any tool like you can't use a hammer without knowing what it's good at right like if you're trying to use a hammer to to saw something you know that's that's not the right use of the tool but if you're using a hammer

to hit nails in and you you know what types of nails work with it i guess it's going to work best in that situation um yeah but gavin like there's stuff out there now like what you're talking about not even functions like entire programs out there now, like what you're talking about, not even functions, like entire programs. And then you're like, yeah, you're like, Hey, um, move this, uh, block of like, move this button over here and then, uh, make everything like dark gray over there. And it'll, it'll go in and like, just magically do all that. And it's kind of stuff that like, it's not hard to do on my end. Like, but it's like just drudge work

and all that stuff goes away it's like how much faster like i'm almost not touching the code anymore i'm almost just kind of talking to like this junior developer describing what you want yeah yeah yeah that and sometimes they go off the rails sometimes it's really funny sometimes they have good days and sometimes they have bad days they're really bad days like yeah i'm just gonna close this because you're not having a good day i'm gonna come back when i get the good server oh you don't sit there and talk to it and check if it's okay you know no no i don't want to close it close the tab oh i just hey chat let's go for a smoke break you know let's talk about what what's going on here you know like how you know like oh he got elected oh that's what's happening here you're upset about that you know and we talked

through it and i'm like great let's get back to work here and you know i treat all my ai nicely because they remember this stuff they will come back to haunt you. It will, yeah. I was typing in chat GPT the other day and I absolutely hate the amount of times that the word, what is, not enhance. Hold on, now I gotta look at it because I block it from memory, hold on. Yeah, because chat GPT, you could have it remember things about you.

So if you ask it, tell me what you know about me. For me, it will say, you're have it remember things about you. So if you ask it, you tell me what you know about me. For me, it will say you're a big user of Home Assistant. You have Prusa 3D printers. It'll go through all various things about me, you know, and it's pretty cool when it does that, because then I could just ask it stuff and it would know what I'm referring to, right? Yeah. Okay. So here it is. It had the nerve to use the word elevate. Now, when I see the word elevate in, in, in just about any copy these days,

I know that somebody went to Chad GPD and wrote it because Chad loves the word elevate. And if you, if you see anybody use who, who in their right mind uses the word elevate? No one, no one has ever used that word unless they're talking about, um, something like on the side of a hill and they need to elevate it

up the hill. That's the only time anybody's ever used that word. And it is almost in everything that it tries to do. Like you're going to elevate this. And I'm like, no. So I typed in never use the word, like it wrote this thing, a nice paragraph or whatever. I'm like, never use the word elevate. That was my only, no punctuation, just very, just like never use it. And then it was like memory updated and i hover on that and it says prefers not to use the word elevate take the word elevate so now now it's stuck somewhere in there chad is never going to use elevate anymore there you go it's beautiful it's going to be it's going to be the name it's going to the name it's gonna be the i'm gonna get i'm gonna get it to make a title of the podcast this week elevated just it just makes for awful i don't know

i i see that i hear it in commercials now i'm like they went to chat gpt to write this script you know like you can tell you can tell after a while you can tell um how how much this trained on uh pr and corporate you know press releases and corporate speak for the past 10 years and it all gets regurgitated uh into everything it does so never use the word elevate chad don't do it go on a smoke break now there you go treat it nicely nicely. Treat it nicely. Well, let's see. We got AIs. We got me screwing up the audio for the show.

But we do have some Home Tech headlines. What do you guys say we take a look at this new stuff that's out? Let's elevate. Man. All right. Ubiquity has released a new product called the Elevate AI. No, wait. It's the Edge AI.

Edge AI, sorry. Which is an appliance that can analyze up to 1,000 smart detection events per hour. It enhances events with details and classifications and has a natural language search. They don't really have very much in this thing for like in their copy or press releases or anything like that, but they do have a nice video that kind of visually explains what it does. And it's pretty cool. TJ, what do you think about this thing?

Yeah, for $650, I honestly don't think it's a bad price, but for that price, you're probably only going to use it in a commercial setting. There's definitely going to be the enthusiasts that are going to buy it for their house. But it's really only going to enhance your existing AI cameras. And so it's pretty limited on what it can actually do. But the power of it is really good. I use a comparable product called Turing, which is pretty nice because you can sort by people's clothing choices or license

plates and stuff like that. But it's like $200 a camera per year. So something like this, you pay $650 once and that's it. And so that's not a bad price for what it is, but it's definitely going to scare a lot of people. Yeah. So you go in there and you type in guy or man with gray sweatpants and it'll pull up all the events or photo or videos that have that clip with some guy walking around with

gray sweatpants. Which that's the, for me, that's the nice thing about AI. So I use AI for my phone system as well, but I really use it for the scheduling portion. And I literally just type in when I want to send the text message. And it's so like, that is the types of AI advancements I like. Just make it easy for me to find things.

And if I can just type in what I'm looking for and it finds it, that's great. I just want, I want this feature in like everything. Take my money. There's the enthusiast. You buying it, Gavin? Yeah, there's the enthusiast. You know, like this looks really cool um like you said it's mainly for the business side of things or for gavin um i just think this

oh the power adds the you know the filtering um i don't know like before the show we're talking about it i think one of my projects this year is redoing my camera, my camera setup, right? So, like, I got TJ up here to run all the wiring and everything for me. But, you know, I was looking at going all unified because you guys always said I had the best interface and everything. This would just elevate that a little bit more and just make it that much better. And I may have to jump in on it at some point when it's in stock, but yeah, it's really interesting. So I was reading reviews about this too, and some of the early testers of it. And they say, from the early days they got it to where it is now, it's come a long way and where they're planning to take this it has they have a lot of great ideas behind it so what we see today is not the end there's going

to be software updates that will make this even better i love how it brings the whole system together into a into a single interface that you can then just talk to to find what you want out of it yep yep you know i'm not even mad you keep using elevate i'm just i'm upset nobody nobody said anything about the gray sweatpants oh no like you can you can ask every anything about it you could say you know bring up every video of my wife with another man and it will snitch on her find me all the canadians you know yeah you know find me all the illegals and it will snitch right and And that's where this is going, right? Oh yeah. It's already gone there.

Yeah, there, I know. Too good. All right. Well, yeah, it does look pretty cool and it's local and it has room for expansion. It looks like, I don't know. It does a thousand queries. It does a thousand queries per hour.

So I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's a hour so i don't know if that's i don't know if that's a lot i don't know if that's too little but uh you can have more than one if needed um so they're definitely expecting you to buy multiple because they literally make a rack mount kit for it and they show three of them stacked together and the promotional video has like 16 of them in a rack so there's some of them actually sound like nine or something but it's got a lot in there so they're expecting you to buy a lot of them if you had a larger system that had a lot of busy cameras or something and you wanted this functionality on all those then yes i think that this would be something um that you could get but i i i don't know it

the the a thousand thing i i was reading kind of through their FAQ and like how that works. And it kind of like does things in batches up to like 15, it may take up to like 15 minutes for it to process things. So like either you're going to get all your events processed or they're just going to get queued up and sit in a queue and kind of waiting there for it to go through and process. And that might not be the worst thing in the world. Like who cares? Like you know something that happened yesterday at 5.30. Right. You kind of have a range you can give it and you say uh look for the the car you know the the the red camaro or whatever at 5 30 yesterday it'll go and find it so it's not like you're going to be waiting for new events to be queued up and you're like why isn't it finding the red

camaro right now like it's it's going to get processed so that's not a bad deal yeah it's not i don't think it's really meant for at the moment processing like like your cameras are still gonna have their built-in ai and do all the stuff for the detect person car animal etc right i think this will just take that footage now and refine it a bit more for your own queries when you want to really search for something. I mean, one of the cool things I saw with it is you would look at face identification. If you clicked on the face, it would enhance the quality of that picture

using AI so it's clearer. And that I found really cool, especially with license plates and stuff like that. It would enhance the picture so it would get a better read of that license plate. Just like NCIS. Yep, we're getting there. We were wondering if it was going to work.

It only works for certain cameras that UniFi has, so it only has their AI cameras, the G4, G5 AI series. But we were wondering about the OnViv cameras, and I guess you have a camera that's connected with the AI port that turns it into an AI camera, and so you're going to get those. What it's doing is just saving those events off to the side, and then this thing is going back through in a queue and looking at those events

and kind of getting information and then saving that metadata off the site. So smart, smart products. Great idea. I like it. I'm not going to buy one though. I don't know. Cause whenever the police come to my house and then, did you see this car drive by my house, your house this recently? I'll just type it in, you know, like, you know, suspicious car driving by my your house this recently i'll just type it in you know like you know suspicious car driving by house it would be like yeah we picked this one here exactly and you know like well gavin i'm i'm ready for you to buy it gavin so yeah thanks thanks i agree with tj is this would be great in certain commercial applications or somebody wants this but not so much for my house i'm i'm fine with the events where somebody comes up, but not so much for my house.

I'm fine with the events where somebody comes up and sits off the doorbell camera enough. Yeah, and that's the thing, right? It's like for me at my house, I really just want like people notifications and I don't really like, I could do facial recognition, but I just want to look at the people.

That's it. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, I got a new product from Xiaomi. They unveiled a new product from Xiaomi. They unveiled a new smart LED bulb. It's white in color on its global site. It has matter compatibility for a pretty broad range of smart home integration. It's an E27 bulb with over 16 million colors, adjustable color temperature between 2700 and 6500 Kelvin.

I was laughing at 2700. It's really not that low. It delivers up to 806 lumens of brightness and has a lifespan of approximately 15,000 hours. 10 preset lighting modes. It's got some different scenes and options for custom effects. Nice little matter-compat compatible light bulb from xiaomi it's not what is it uh 10 euro 11 euro on amazon what's a d i don't know what that is but uh so probably what nine ten dollars

here that's that's not bad for a smart bulb oh wait wait that's the warm white bulb so i don't know i don't know how much this one's gonna to be. That's pretty good to see because I think this year from Show Me In, especially Aquara, you know, they showed off a lot of new products at CES that elevates their lineup. And I think this is just, you know, another one of the products that I think we're going to see, you know, this year. And it's good to see, right? Like more Matter support. I believe the Matter is actually built into this product too.

It's not something you have to go through a hub or whatever. I believe the Matter, it's fully Matter. What am I looking to say? Compatible? Enabled. Enabled. Yeah. On device.

On device Matter. Yeah. And that's good. That's good Matter. This is a big year for Matter. I think we talked about last week. So seeing new products come out is gonna help that yeah it's always good to see more products and xiaomi releases so much

stuff i don't like if you wanted to live just within the xiaomi ecosystem you definitely could yeah cool yeah their specs don't have very much on here in the way of lighting, but it's a 7, sorry, 8.5 watt equivalent or LED and then a 60 watt equivalent bulb. So that's not terrible. It gets a decent amount of light out of it. Good for lamps and that kind of thing. 10 bucks. We'll see what it is when it comes out price-wise. All right, moving on here. These kind of, these kind of interesting, Logitech is expanding its corporate office management solutions with the Logitech Spot. It's a millimeter wave radar sensor designed to monitor office spaces. The Spot can be easily installed with a peel and stick application.

It operates wirelessly, lasting up to four years with a single D-cell lithium battery. battery detects room occupancy and measures environmental factors like uh particulates like vocs and co2s temperature pressure humidity to provide a health score for the room so that's pretty smart uh and um i don't know this looks pretty cool it's kind of you know interesting that it's a millimeter wave going into an office space or whatever but i guess i guess the internet of things it's not only for the house. You can put this in the office. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Honestly, it's huge.

So I don't really see this being appealing for a house. But for your battery life on a D-cell battery, that's pretty good. Compelling, yeah. It's something I would possibly install in my house if I could hide it somewhere, right? They're showing this on an open wall, which is fine when you're in a business because you don't really care what's on the wall. But when you're in your house, you probably don't want to see this giant honking thing on your wall. But overall, pretty, pretty cool. No idea on pricing. I'll let you know how much it costs whenever I see it pop up. I might see if I can get one as well so it's actually a really cool product this

is here i think we'll see a lot of millimeter wave stuff um i'm actually you know for a company i i'm actually shocked they would have um a battery powered version not a wired powered version because i figure they wouldn't want to go through changing all the batteries and stuff like that and even just to make it tamper resistant you would want to elevate it changing all the batteries and stuff like that and even just to make it tamper resistant you would want to elevate it high on the wall so you couldn't reach it right and um if you do that changing the battery just means you have to carry a ladder with you as well and stuff like that so i was kind of shocked about that but it looks really cool and i wonder how they're getting four years out of millimeter wave sensing. Yeah, right. Just because of the size of the battery.

I was going to say, a diesel battery, that's a lot of power. Yeah, but millimeter wave uses a lot of power. So I wonder if they mixed it up with a PIR sensor as well. That seems to be the trend right now is you mix it with the PIR, which is really low power. And then once the PIR stops detecting, the millimeter wave then kicks in just to make sure nobody's really there. But this has got more than millimeter wave.

I mean, it's got all the humidity and temperature pressure sensors. That's a lot of sensors. That's always triggering. Yeah. Yeah, for four years. And it's using, it looks like LoRaWAN. So, I don't know. It must be just a big battery.

I wish they had, what that meant, but up to four years, uh, time they're kind of positioning is like a little sensor to detect. Um, if, if, uh, someone's in a meeting room, like for meeting room reservations, so that they have, uh, some, uh, corporate like huddle rooms or meeting room, like if you're in a bigger office and there's a bunch of meeting rooms, you can reserve them. Uh, if, if you're in there, it can detect you're in there and say, oh, this meeting room's in use. And then somebody can't, you know, book it or you can't override or something, you know, like it just, it helps with that whole system and how it helps with how that system works

and keeps up with like the reservation of those rooms. So, and that's exactly what I was thinking about because in our office, we have the meeting rooms and stuff you book, but we have a lot of these smaller rooms, like almost like huddle rooms, where it holds like two people and stuff. But every time you walk around, there's somebody using it. So, you know, being able to go online and say, is there one free right now? This sensor would be perfect for that.

You can tell the air quality in there. And it's like, I don't think I'm going to use that one. That's true, too. Frank was in there. Frank was in there. Don't use the huddle room after chilly Sunday. All right, let's move on.

Pretty cool product. It's pretty interesting. I didn't see anything about pricing on there. No, no pricing yet. So I'll have to see whenever they add it to the portal. Okay, yeah. More on the commercial side of Logitech. They have those nice little soundbar things with the cameras in them. And the touchscreen controllers.

Honestly, their PoE tablets that you can put on the desk or the wall and stuff like that, those are great too. And they're very affordable for what they are. Do they have their own ecosystem or does it work with other ecosystems? They have their own ecosystem. Most of the time they're integrating with like Teams or whatever else is out there. Zoom.

Yeah, nobody's trying to Zoom. Yeah, nobody's trying to reinvent that at this point. It's all gone soft clients, but all the little hardware parts and pieces have been, it's been interesting to see how they went from like, what is it? Life, not LifeW, uh, just like the big corporate meeting room. There was only like, like two brands that you would ever use. And then all of a sudden those just like evaporated overnight and everybody started using these like soft clients and then zoom, Microsoft teams, Skype, all that stuff hit really hard. So that industry's changed completely. All right, let's move on here. We've got an interesting story.

All right, we were talking about this before the show. I thought this was pretty evident, but I guess it might not be. Vivid Sada, Apple's director of engineering and president of the Thread Group, revealed a new use case for the Thread Radio in newer iPhones. Beyond setting up Thread devices without a Thread border router, Thread Radio enables control of smart home devices during power outages. This feature is particularly useful for operating critical accessories like front door locks when both Wi-Fi and Thread border routers are down, powered off because of power issues.

So we were talking about this before the show, and I'm like, yeah, of course. Like, it's a local control going to a local device. Like, why wouldn't it do that? But TJ, you were like, yeah, it's not that obvious. And I'm like, yeah, if you haven't used Zigbee stuff, like, I have Zigbee lighting in my house. You know, it's kind of the same thing, right?

But if the controller goes down, the Zigbee lights don't You know, it's kind of the same thing, right? But if the controller goes down, the ZigBee lights don't work. So it's kind of the same thing. I just, since I have that model in my head, I guess this was kind of obvious how this would work if there's no internet and it, you know, you're using a product, a smart product that may need to like go out to the cloud and back or if that's what you're used to.

Having local control from your device that has the Thread Radio in it, straight out to another device with Th, or if that's what you're used to having local control from your device that has the thread radio in it straight out to another device with thread radio, it makes total sense. But I don't know, you were pointing out to me that that, that may not be the case. Yeah. I mean, I guess it does make sense, but at the same time, nobody's ever like pointed that out, you know, cause when, when they sort of end the thread radio to the iPhone, they're like, what is this for? And Apple was like, I don't know, man. We just put it in there

because maybe you'll use Thread eventually. I don't know. And so like that was the official answer. It was like, you know, it's there for future stuff and that's it. And we've seen like stuff come out of that, but nothing really. I mean, there's nothing really been released about it.

It's just been there for future stuff. and so when this was pointed out that oh you could just use your phone directly with the product that makes sense but like that should have been what they talked about initially it was like hey if your stuff is down then you can use your phone to control and everybody would be like that's cool that makes sense why you put that in there. But, I mean, that was so long ago at the time. I don't know. Everybody wants to have those features on day one. I can understand why Apple, you know, that feature exists now,

but it maybe not existed then. And, like, I can understand why Apple didn't talk about what they were planning on having that for. To me, that was in there because Apple decided that Thread was the way to go. And in three or four years time, they would have three generations or four generations of millions of phones with the Thread radio in it. And then at that point, all bets are off. You can do whatever you want. You can turn features on and off. At that point,

in manufacturers are going to fall suit because you have a thread radio in there. So of course, I don't know. I think that's, they can play coy with what they're doing, but it was pretty obvious at the time, like they just tossed it in and said, oh yeah, that's a future thing.

We don't know what you're using it for. But like, yeah, that of course, in two or three generations, they can come out. What's it cost them to put that in? Nothing on that phone. Like we know that the thread radios are cheap, especially at the, I mean, they barely make any money on the iPhone.

I know exactly. 50% margins are so thin. But I remember they talked about this way in the beginning with matter. Right. So like when I guess matter was all just starting the only way you could really connect to the devices was having the thread radio in your phone because they had it back then right um and then they added in the border router that's because they were like the only problem is is if you didn't have a border router at home you left your home you had no

control into your home but when you were at, you could control them on your phone. Adding a border router just elevated the whole experience so that you could have remote control when you're on the road too. Right. Um, it was kind of like the first step. I remember they talked about this. Right. And I don't think I think, cause I remember saying, well, you know, matters useless at this point because if I leave my house, I can't control anything. Right. But that was really early in the day though. So I was, you know, probably jumping the gun at that point. Man. Yeah. I don't know. It may be a little, so Matter was released in October, 2022 and that was version one. So that was like three years after it should have been

released because we were all kind of waiting around for that to ever happen. And then I just looked it up. Apple didn't start putting radios in their phones until 2023 and just on the pro models. Now they've been sneaking them into iPads and computers. So your laptop will be sitting there with a Thread radio. I think they're going to do a lot more with this. I think the home control is just a side, a little side part of what this can do. Because Thread radio and the communication that you can do over Thread or Zigbee or whatever. It's pretty cool the way that works.

It's low bandwidth. You can't transfer video or anything like that over it. Just little commands or text messages or messages between devices they can they can do a whole lot with this but out even outside the home and the fact that it like it just come out of a laptop hit this encrypted dread network and go maybe to your watch and give you a text message or something like that that's entirely possible with what they're doing here. If they build this into their entire product line. So I don't know.

I think they're going to do a lot more than just like these little random home things with this. They're putting in too many devices for it. I mean, it's in the home pods already, right? We already know that. But yeah, I have an article here saying they've been sneaking into Macs and iPads. Aren't they sneaking them into networking networking equipment too like did they don't have network they don't they don't know they don't have networking equipment they're they're

gonna supposedly introduce it into like wi-fi routers and stuff like that no no i think they did what didn't they add them to the euros that apple uh thread router yeah yeah i mean and then that echoes euros so it's full circle yeah Yeah. So they're putting them everywhere. It's just, we'll see where it goes. Well, I mean, it is the standard formatter. So like, that's where it's going. You know, like that'll be part of having that radio in your home, whether it's coming out of your router,

whether it's coming out of your laptop, it doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter. There's the joke. The network will be set up there and devices will just be able to get onto it. Now, whether it'll work, all that good stuff. We have a story about that coming up. But like, that's the big question mark.

I still think you can do a lot more than just home control over this network. So I will be interested. Let's do the other use cases that come along with Thread radios being activated in literally every consumer electronic device we have in our house. It'll be an interesting topic later. All right, let's move on to fun news.

We've already talked about all the good stuff, I guess, that's come out. But evidently, President Trump has announced plans to impose tariffs ranging from 25 to 100 on taiwan made chips aiming to push semiconductor production back to the united states as move targets the company this move targets companies like tsmc which currently manufactures chips for major u.s tech firms such as apple amd nvidia uh this strategy contrasts with existing government incentives like the chips act which uh actually there was a big giant plant that was put in i guess in arizona tmc factory that was installed in arizona in the middle of the desert it's kind of crazy that chips act was basically funding things like that funding

companies to bring and invest in u.s facilities i don't know this this sounds kind of crazy i i can't tms tsmc is like the the manufacturer for apple products my phone is gonna be like what six thousand dollars next year uh yep i think i'm gonna buy it i'm not gonna buy a six thousand dollar phone i can tell you that thread radio or not i'm not buying it what's crazy too is that uh tsmc was started because of government funding they literally started because the government was like, hey, we need to do something over here. And they recruited, I think, Robert Chang.

I can't remember his name right now. Acquired just did a podcast episode on him. Morris Chang, there we go. But the issue is that when you have something like this, you have to put your own money into it, right? Because making chips is such an expensive process that when you have something like this, you have to put your own money into it, right? Because making chips is such an expensive process and such a skilled and highly professional process that you can't just do it. You have to put money and time into it. And when you cut funding or you

go after tariffs and you make stuff more expensive, it doesn't really encourage that as much because it's not just something you can go do. It takes decades to actually build all this stuff up. And so, yes, tariffs hypothetically spur growth and get people to invest in their own economy and stuff like that. But it's going to be a long time before we can replace these ships with something else. And so we're just going to be hurting in that timeframe. And not only that, but it's also going to push Taiwan to go to other places. So we're going to lose our advantage with TSMC, and that's not good for us. And 25% to 100%. That's such a wide range right now. Can we narrow this down a little bit? Yeah, that's all the percentages there. So, yeah, just putting the tariffs on the Taiwan Taiwan made chips, it's just going to elevate tensions

in the semiconductor industry. You know, that's all it's going to do. It's going to, competition's going to go away. And yes, things are going to go up in price. And I think that's the part that's going to hit us. We're just going to see prices go up on things. Why is it Taiwan? It just depends on what Moody's in when he wakes up in the morning.

But it's not China. I thought we were going after China. Now it it Taiwan? It just depends on what mood he's in when he wakes up in the morning. But it's not China. I thought we were going after China. No, it's Taiwan? It doesn't make any sense to me. I feel sometimes like he throws a dart at the board just to see who he's going after today, you know? Well, and it's like I don't really agree with giving Intel all the money either. Like, I don't think Intel should have really got all the money that they got because they they're they kind of just suck at this point anyway um so there there is some legitimate legitimacy to you know going after the funding and everything like that um but you this is not the way to do that with this at least well yeah

because now i'm paying for the funding i'm paying for something yeah i mean there's a call it whatever it is corporate welfare that's what it is like the government handing out billions of dollars for someone to build a factory you know know, it's an incentive for them to come here. If they wanted to come here, they would have come here or the markets would have brought them here anyway. I don't know. It's what Apple's doing with that TMC factory in, in Phoenix is they're building like legacy hardware for like Apple watches and some of the older phones that they still have in production. Like it's all the legacy stuff. It's like that. Congratulations.

We built a billion dollar factory in the middle of the desert where it uses tons and tons of water. I really don't understand. I did it in the desert, but whatever. Tons of water, tons of natural resources and tons of pollution come out of it. Congratulations. We built a factory that's going to be, you know, obsolete in what, 10 years? Because no one's going to want to. They're going to be on to the next fab they're going to want to do other stuff so i i don't know that doesn't seem like the right way to do things either but also raising

the prices arbitrarily on goods that i have to pay for it doesn't seem like a good good smart move either so uh hopefully we won't see this happen i don't know i don't understand why please don't yeah this is i mean it's not just I don't understand why. Please don't. Yeah. I mean, it's not just like these TMC things, right? Like there's tons of other stuff that comes out of Taiwan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, and the thing is that Taiwan is an ally. You know, it's not like.

Right, right. But obviously he's threatening Canada and Mexico and stuff too. So I don't think he really cares at this point. But this is one that is going to damage you you can go out and like if you get if you're going to charge like tariffs on on wood from canada right you can go out and and get your own wood from the forest and stuff but you can't go make your own chips and still ain't so yeah this is just gonna backfire i think i was i am i was reading somewhere or heard someone say that the people running, like the people running the machinery in the factories in Taiwan are like PhD equivalent on their, like the education level. And then it's kind of a culture shock. They come over here, not quite the same, not quite the same level of factory worker that you get here.

Different standards in different countries. And that's why those factories were set up over there decades ago, like you get here. Different standards in different countries. And that's why those factories were set up over there decades ago, like you're saying. And the investments were put in decades ago to make them what they are today. All right, well, fun stuff. Don't raise my prices. Don't raise my prices.

We'll link to this acquired podcast episode on TSMC as well, because they do have a really interesting history. And it's not just, it wasn't just a company. It was like a way to incentivize Taiwan to grow. So it's very, very cool company and a very interesting story. All right,

cool. Well, let's move on here. We've got a funny story here. All right. Interesting story here. And I'm, Gavin's going to be glad to hear this matter.

The smart home connectivity protocol has faced challenges since its launch, including slow adoption by major tech companies and issues with reliability and interoperability the csa the connectivity standards alliance thread group and wi-fi alliance are collaborating to address these problems aiming for significant improvements by 2025 uh key strategies key strategies they're focusing on are going to be enhancing that reliability, embedding software in home routers to improve network connectivity, and potentially replacing Bluetooth with Thread for device onboarding. So I guess, you know, Gavin, don't worry. Within the next 12 months, everything's going to be okay, and you're going to be back on the Matter train. You think so?

You know what? I feel like I've been down this before you know we we get into matter we have our problems we whine about matter you know um we talked to one of the matter guys they have a fabulous marketing and pr team you know like every time we talk to them you know we, we're back on the matter chain. We're so excited. We buy a new matter product. We add it to our home set up and it drops off the network again and we get all upset again. And then it seems to be a cycle.

We're going in this cycle, you know? So every time we put matter down, they come along with their PR team and they just elevate it back up to us and we're happy again. Right. So this is, I'm going to start, I'm going to put this, I'm going to edit a sound effect in every time you say that I'm going to bleep you. Say what? But no, I'm just saying like they have a great PR team and I will, I would like to revisit this story in 2026 and see how much came true from this.

It's good to see that they see all the issues we're having and that they're going to focus on addressing them. But whether or not they do, I like the part, did you read the whole thing? It's a long read. I sat there and I read the whole thing. It's a long read. I, I sat there and I read the whole thing. And some of the things they talked about was, you know, putting in, I think stricter measures to get companies to update their, their version of matter faster,

which is something we want. We complained about, and I think there'll be sunsetting some older versions. So it would get people onto 1.4 a lot faster. And I think they need stuff like that. Stricter measures to make things move a little faster and i think they need stuff like that stricter measures to make things move a little faster and keep up and again i'd like to in 2026 i'd like to see what they've done i think the thing that cost my eye were um the home rounders and access points initiative

that they have yeah which is is addressing multicast issues that exist on networks so multicast is mostly the issue when you when you come across these, these, these things, because it gets blocked a lot, or it gets dropped, or it's not, whatever, it happens all the time. And that is how these devices are discovered. That's how these devices communicate. And if multicast stop working, or there's some kind of problem with a router, or an access point, and it gets messed up, you're not going to get your devices aren't going to appear to work correctly. And they're not going to you're not going to have a good time. I mean, a lot of issues, a lot of issues people have with their setting up these IoT devices, especially newer IoTot devices is older networking gear older networking gear

that's incorrectly configured or newer networking gear that you don't even know about the iot setting about and you never clicked it on and now that you do like you've got it's got all those optimizations done if that's done on these home routers like out of the box it's going to make everybody's life a lot easier so but it's such a like it's such a broad uh problem you know they've identified all the issues now and it's nice to see them focusing on like what they can do swinging a big stick like this like we could complain about this stuff long time ago like you can go back before ubiquity had that iot selector switch right you could go back before ubiquity had that IOT selector switch, right? You could go back and search their forums and find like what people were recommending. You set

the HTIM to what are you setting this to? This is going to make this work better. And everybody had a freaking opinion about how to set up ubiquity for this, that, and the other. Same thing with any other network out there. And some people are like, oh, I just use this and the other. Same thing with any other network out there. And some people are like, oh, I just use this and it works. That's great for you. But if they're able to do this and pull this off, they may solve that problem for us. We may never have to click that IoT selector anymore.

That's kind of why I always wanted to... I never liked putting IoT stuff on my Wi-Fi because you had to deal with all those Wi-Fi issues. Like certain IoT stuff, all they do is HTTP calls out and stuff like that. And those are fine. But then you have like Wemo switches or stuff that do broadcast. Yeah. And now you have other issues. And that's why I never liked that.

And I'd rather have a separate network, whether it's ZigBee, you know, Z-Wave or Thread, you know, and have it off of, you know, the Wi-Fi. And you don't run into these kind of, you have other problems, but not these problems. Right, right. I mean, yeah, you could have a Thread device go crazy and start flooding the network with random traffic and then it slows everything down. You don't even know that it's happening because you have no visibility and can't see what's going on but yeah you're not eliminating problems but getting getting it more reliable is especially on broadcast traffic where it's just little messages going back and forth again back to having thread radios and just about every device in your house that's going to be key to making this all work right so i'm i'm it looks like it really does

feel like it's a slow and steady burn and i i don't i don't get like the feeling that people like you gavin maybe maybe uh jennifer patentui over here at the verge has the patience for that but like you can't you can't get you're never gonna have perfection but you're definitely not to get there by just like waving a magic wand you got to fix all this stuff this is all broken we're wedging iot technology into wi-fi technology that was developed like what in 2010 like or no before that i told to like the early 2000s i remember we started putting wi-fi access points in and they were garbage they didn't work you didn't even know if wi-fi was going to be the standard that everybody centered on 802 11b anybody remember that like it's horrible like 10 feet away your thing would just drop off and not not good not not a fun time now everybody uses wi-fi would you buy would you

buy anything without wi-fi in it no absolutely not so uh you know i i don't want to say it's going to take what 20 years for Matter to work, but it might take an essential more amount of time than the, what, two years that we've given it in the public space. All right. Well, all the topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.fm slash elevate 514. All right. Nothing in the mailbox this week that I didn't archive

because I know the show sound was, I know it was on the stuff. I know, I know. We had a lot in the mailbox this week, actually. But it was complaints. It was a lot of complaints. What was funny is it, it happened pretty quickly in the Slack chat too.

So like I was getting it there and I happened to be like in an Uber and I'm like, I can't fix this right now. And to like go take down the show and everything. But thanks for everybody who did write in. It is fixed. It is fixed. Go.

And at this point you should know. You should know. You should probably just have to delete it and redownload it, I guess. That's what I had to do. That's what you got to do. I mean, there's a way I think Richard was telling me there's like a little trick that you can do to republish it i don't i don't think it

was up very long and i don't think there were that many downloads that would have been affected but you know if it's if it's messed up uh change over to the new version it does work dj's there promise i'm here still what for now that's right all right until i do gavin's wiring we do have the peak of the week in the big way it's tj yay all right uh we did find this really cool i think tj actually found this too on um on reddit yeah it had to have been tj because he's the only one that goes around it but this is actually really cool. Someone made a wood case for Home Assistant touch display. They took an old T-shirt and a custom wood machined oak box thing. CMC, yeah.

This looks gorgeous. I mean, I want one of these. I don't even know what it does. I want one. Yeah, everybody in the comments was like, can I buy it right now? Are you taking pre-orders? And they said, no, we're not taking pre--orders or anything but i might be able to share the files so uh maybe they'll share the files at some point you make your own either with the cnc or the 3d

printer it does look really nice though if you told me that was an old t-shirt if you didn't tell me it was an old t-shirt i would not know exactly this would look good around my echo b actually you know when i think about it you know like, I just love how it blends into the room so nicely. Like, it doesn't look like a typical smart device. You know, it, it took that, that whole, I'm just, I'm looking at it now. I'm just like in awe. It took that home assistant touchscreen and put it to like, to the next level. Right.

In terms of display i guess you could say elevated it i'm bleeping you um and you know i love this this looks like something you would get from ikea right like if if ikea launched this as like a smart display for your wall yeah you would be like yeah this makes sense it looks nicer than an ikea thing but it reminds me of an ikea product what language is it on it on that picture i can't i i didn't check i think it's uh because they posted a uh dot de website is that what uh dutch is like i'm not familiar with all my my words and stuff but just having that that font in that language made me think of a key too you know like de is german so it's got the umlaut. Yeah. Schönen Abend. I got to look it up.

Yeah. I think it might be German or something in that range. I can copy this out of the photo and find out what it means. You know, sometimes it's just easier to type it. I used Apple and it told me it was a Swiss cheese plant. I don't think that's... Good job, Apple. All right. right we'll try again have a nice evening is what it says good maybe good evening or you know something similar and it is german yes so

it's uh schoonenabend it just looks nice i'm impressed yeah absolutely gorgeous great great job um i kind of want what what is the advice they're putting inside of it that i couldn't tell i don't know if they told us. You got to read the comments. I'm not going to spoil it. He says it's a home assistant touch display. Oh, here we go. ESP 32.

Well, of course. I was going to make you guys read. I am trying to read, Gavin. You know, I can't read. The listeners, not you guys. Oh. There's someone else who posted an e-ink version further down. Doesn't look quite as nice because it's e-ink and but still got a nice frame to it this person actually sells a uh e-ink picture

frames uh with wooden frames and they're 170 euros so they actually have some experience doing this already but this is a different product they're not actually selling this oh okay it looks like they're german actually that would explain the language okay. It looks like they're German, actually. That would explain the language. Yeah. And the craftsmanship. That's true. Okay. Well, we'll keep an eye on this. If they come out with whatever the heck this is, I don't know. I really

like it. I mean, I don't know what I would do with it besides hanging it on the wall. Just look at it and admire it. I don't even have an old t-shirt that says nice that I could use. I'd buy a new t-shirt just to make this i would say just go to goodwill it looks great and i just i want to know what the little electronic it says the touchscreen still works nicely i feel like this is a product i should know about but i don't know what it is new project well if you know what this is in this thing, the touchscreen thing in, let us know.

I really want to know what it is. Paper Less Paper is the name of the company that makes the magic picture frame, which actually looks better than I thought it was going to be. If you figure out what the little touchscreen device they're referring to is, let us know. You can email us at feedback at hometech.fm or you can go to the online forum at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the form. Let us know what to is. Let us know. You can email us at feedback at hometech.fm or you can go to

the online forum at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the form. Let us know what it is. All right, moving on. We got project updates. I didn't get anything done.

I'm not going to lie. I barely got the show out and it was wrong the first time anyway, so. Your project was fixing the show. Yeah, project was fixing the show. project was fixing the show my yeah wipe hands on pants i'm done there we go hey gavin what have you been up to uh a few things this week so first of all i ran across this so there's this internet of trash github somebody set up right

and it lists like products that i guess just you you know, they used to work or be open, you know, open and they just got bad over time. And then they made this list. Right. But one thing I saw on the list and this kind of blew me away because I didn't realize this, but Echobee made the list. And apparently last year they stopped giving out developer licenses to them, which is what you need to be able to connect your Echobee to things like Home Assistant, right? That's what I'm reading from this. And because I've had my Echobee for so long, I've had that code and everything, and it's been connected to Home Assistant ever since. And I'm like, when did they do this? How did I not know about it? Because I will no longer

recommend a new Echobee to somebody that's getting to the smart home thing. Now, that being said, it still can connect via HomeKit, right, to get your local controls and stuff like that. And then you can go through the route of adding the HomeKit into Home Assistant. But people are reporting that's not as feature rich doing it that way, you know, things like that. But I don't know why echo b would do this they just cut off their api access for new people um i didn't know i imagine that like they were probably oh they were probably getting um like because every single time you had to you had to make a new api key or a new integration for echo b just to integrate with with like home like i don't to me

it's like almost like it wasn't set up for like a mass market of people doing this for every single home assistant install like maybe maybe there should just be like one home assistant integration and they should they should use that and log in with it, their API keys or whatever, and log in with it that way, authorize it that way. I don't know. Their API was pretty detailed. It was pretty good. The only thing I didn't like about their API

was you had to pull it for updates, and I don't know why they do that because then you're just hitting their servers more often, but I guess they maybe had too many people pulling it. They wanted to cut back on that too. I mean, running servers in an API gets expensive. So, no, I just wanted to point that out because I did not see this at all until recently. Other than that, I've been up in my AI game a little bit.

And this week I was playing with something called comfy UI Docker, a Docker on my unread server. And this Docker is specific to creating images with AI. And it's really cool, right? You just describe the image you want and it spits out the image. It's all local based. I run it off my GPUs and everything like that. And the images it spits out are actually really good images. I was impressed with what it gives me. I've been been getting a lot into the ai stuff lately the local ai processing and seeing what dockers are out there so that that's most of my projects right there uh in the last week or so was that i've just been elevating my ai game in general um on my unraid server. But I also did get, finally, my Home Assistant smart speaker.

And I've been playing around with it. Now, I've read other people's opinions. You know, people complaining it was too slow. I've read people complaining it was the best thing. Not complaining, but saying it was the best thing ever. I'm in the middle, right? I set it up. Ease of setup was really easy that's one thing i will

not complain about it was really yeah it was it was good i would say they they the wizard thing they set up was was yeah positive like it's a step in the right direction could it be better of course but like i i didn't have any problem getting it up and going and like exactly yeah and working and then after setup the speed of response for me was really good. And I don't know if that's because my home assistant instance is running in a VM on Unraid and I give it a lot of power. So I don't know if that helped the response times or not. But using just the general standard settings, no AI or anything like that, it responded really fast. I haven't tied it into my Olam or anything yet. That's what I'm probably going to be playing with

this week, just so I can get a little bit more power out of it. But the speaker kind of needs some work. I know this is a preview of it edition, right? But it's not the greatest speaker. Sometimes even when I, when I call out to it, it doesn't answer the first time right away. You know, little things like that in my house, I have the a lady all over the place. And I find the a lady at this moment in time is a lot better. I mean, the home assistant's great for the local control, basic stuff, right? But we use the A-Lady for a lot more. You know, when you're looking at local weather or local travel times to work

or, you know, other random facts where it needs internet to reach out to to get it, the A-Lady steps its game up there. And the A-Lady speakers are so much better. Like I said, over time, I expect them to come out with a better product, a better one with a better speaker probably or somebody will release a better one that you can buy and i'd like i see a lot of

potential for it speed wise fast i tell it to turn on and off the lights and bam it's like instant you know so i like that part i will be playing with it a bit more um and seeing what i can do with it i feel like i need to get mine set up right because i mean it's it's it's an okay speed like it i don't need i i went in and found out like it i was messing around the other week and there was something about exposing things in there exposing uh the entities to it yeah you have to go into home assistant and you can turn it so it exposes all of them by default right or you can control that's what i figured was messing it up like and making it unsure as to what because there's a lot of entities that probably have bad names in my setup you have to be good with your

naming convention yes i didn't i mean my naming convention is non-existent so like i what i did was i just took everything out and then i'm i I may have turned one or two things on, but then I was like, I don't know. I couldn't really figure out if it was working or not after that. So, Hey Jarvis, turn off the office light. Of course it works perfectly this time.

Sometimes I find, sometimes when I find when it's sitting around, I'm doing nothing. The first time I call out to it, it doesn't answer right away. It doesn't wake up. Yeah. But of course it worked perfect this time but i you know like you always wanted to say have a jarvis yeah you know and i didn't even say cancel uh you always how do i turn this thing off yeah there's no like i guess there's a mute switch and i kind of want it to be the button

on the top but the button on top wakes them back up and makes them listen to you yeah i'm like they they should have made the button the mute button and i don't know i always wanted my own jarvis and i love the fact that i could say that to this you know i just i i'd like to i can't wait to see where they take this though but it's a good initial step like i can't can't really say anything bad about that just based on the fact that it is the preview of edition, what they call it, right? Right, right. Yeah, definitely a first round. And like you were saying, I think this product was clearly not made to listen music on.

You can. Like, I was playing music out of it the other day, and it didn't sound all that great. But, like, Amazon. It has an auxiliary jack though that if you wanted a better speaker yeah yeah if you really wanted to like comparing it to the amazon echoes those one of the uses for them is playing music from day one you could play music out of the thing and that clearly you didn't make the set of bullet points when they were going for this it was like yeah it turns out you can do it because of all the other audio stuff that's on it.

But I think they could have, whatever the next version is, that's not a preview edition. If they put a decent speaker and amplifier in it to make it sound a little bit better, I think it'd be a pretty cool product. I really do. I think people will pay for it if you got a better one, you know? I mean, we already paid for it.

Yeah, I almost paid for it. Yeah. I almost paid. I paid like twice the amount that you probably paid for just because of the, the duties and the tariffs that as it was coming across the border, I bought three. So you probably paid for one. Yeah. You probably got all three. I feel bad now.

I feel bad. Cause I've had these just sitting here in the boxes on my desk and I'm seeing and people are like, I finally got mine in the, in the, in the Slack channel. I'm channel i'm like did i just did i did i hoard these did i because of people like did i get one early i should just do a giveaway give away give these away i want to wait i want the new one to come out with the speaker on it. Because I think at that point it's a cool product. I think so too. It reminds me. I got an update.

Oh yeah. 2025. 1.4. Let's go. Let's go. And by the time this show comes out, the beta would be released. But we'll talk about that next episode. That's it for me this week.

TJ, what are you up to? This past week I went to Florida. I was near Seth. Kind of. Not really. I was on the opposite side. No, you weren't. It would have been several hours to get to.

I went to... How were the iguanas? I saw one iguana. It was in the road. It was not on the ground. Or it was not laying upside down or anything. But I was in Fort Lauderdale. He looked cold, by the way.

So cold in Florida. It was like... It dropped down to like 30 degrees. And that's really cold for South Florida. When I was there the last day on Saturday, i got to 60 so that was nice uh but yeah florida florida is florida it's not good not a good time to be down in florida right there no it's not that iguana you had on the road it looked like he was there in the sun trying to warm up he had his little feet tucked under yeah he's probably dying he could have been he's like i am so cold right now he probably just fell off the tree probably yeah it's funny nicole went outside to go to the store

and she's like there's an iguana in the road so i had to come out take a picture of it for the show obviously yep he's just trying to get warm that's all yeah that little that um that's funny the we had a entertaining back and forth with someone, and I'm not convinced that I'm right, and I'm not convinced he's right, but he said that the windshield doesn't matter because iguanas are cold-blooded. And it kind of makes sense if you think about it because they're not really affected by the temperature

in the same way we are. We feel that that's cold. But I guess there were some studies or some other things I ran across that said maybe they cool down. And now I'm questioning my iguana formula, the iguanas falling formula. Like now I've got to find somebody who's an expert in this in the field and who has studied falling iguanas or something and get them to give me the stamp of approval on my function. Determines if iguanas are going to fall out and hit you in the head.

Yeah, we need to find a herpetologist. I'm sure we can find one in Florida somewhere in the area. For sure. We need a lizard expert. Other than that, though, I joined Blue Sky. I've been giving that a shot. I was on Threads for a little bit, but Zuckerberg's kind of weird.

So I decided to get off threads and I joined Blue Sky. And Blue Sky is kind of cool because you can create separate feeds. I created my Blue Sky account like a couple of years ago, but I've never used it because nobody was on it. Nobody was there. And now people are going to it because they're jumping off threads. But what I like about Blue Sky is that you can create separate feeds for things. And so at the very top of the app or the website, you can have different feeds for, you know, home automation or home assistant or the state of Ohio or Columbus or whatever it is. And it's different hashtags or mentions of it. And so I'm actually creating my own feed.

This is the part I don't understand about Blue Sky. So you can create your own feeds, right? And so you can use your own feeds to use certain hashtags or follow certain people. And then all that information will show up in the feed. But you can't use Blue Sky to create those feeds. As far as I know, you have to use a third party service. Not really sure how that makes any sense. Maybe I'm reading that wrong.

But right now I'm using SkyFeed, which seems to work fine, but it doesn't seem to update very quickly. So I'm not sure if that's a limitation on just being a free product versus a paid product or not. But I'm working on that right now. We'll put

the link in the show notes here. It's still a work in progress but it's it's kind of cool i see okay so like i'm trying to figure out you're talking about where you discover new feeds and it's got uh popular feeds on here uh and like one of them science artists news um like different types of interests that you may have. You can add cat pics. There we go. You can add those in. But it says underneath what it is,

it says feed by jaz.bsky.social. So it's kind of like another, maybe another server or another user or something that's hosting these, built by SkyFeed. So there's a lot of that. Yeah, SkyFeed's what I'm using. Yeah. And it works. I mean, it's pretty intuitive intuitive and stuff like that but it just doesn't make any sense why you have to use a third third-party software to create this feature within blue sky uh but maybe those

softwares just make it easier to do maybe maybe blue sky has a more complicated way to do it so i'm not really sure or maybe blue sky is just focused on the feed experience and making that work. Because I mean, that's hard enough as it is. So maybe they're just, that's what they're going to work on. Yeah. Another thing I like too about BlueSky is that you can create a list of people. And so like, for example, I like the Verge. I follow a lot of the Verge's

stuff. And so I just have a tab that's the Verge staff. And so it's literally everybody that works for the Verge that's on BlueSky and that's just all their stuff shows up there. So it's kind of cool. It's pretty flexible. Gavin was given some recommendations on apps that can support Mastodon and Blue Sky.

So I'm going to have to give that a look because right now I'm just using the native Blue Sky app. But I'd like to have just one app for everything. I had a for you feed and then i went to it and said this is no longer available and i removed it and now i don't have the tab anymore so yeah mine just says uh this feed is no longer online that's weird so i think that i think they got rid of the for you tab and and replace it with a discover tab but they're for some reason they're not like i don't know i was just doing it they're

telling you since you mentioned gavin mentioned i'm just going to stop the people that are already typing up an email going to ask me what apps they could do this on because every time that happens um i use there's an app called open vibe that allows you to use both blue sky and macedon that's getting a lot of hype right now but i personally use ivory and i have a docker running on my server called skybridge and what skybridge does is kind of do all the translations for ivory so that you can add um blue sky as another account in ivory and then i like that because at the top i just swipe back and forth i could jump between mastodon and uh blue sky so there's two options

right there yeah um and the next thing i've we're just going to keep going on with software here the next thing i've gone on is um i have a lot of sonos stuff and i want to control the audio uh whenever i i need to because that's the whole point of sonos but the sonos app takes forever to load up and then whenever i'm using on my desktop, for example, like if we're podcasting here, and they just need to like adjust some of the volumes, like in the hallway or whatever, I have to open the Sonos app, the Sonos app opens up, it says, Hey, you got an update to the app, do you want to try to update it? No, I don't want to update it. Okay, cool. Well, actually, we can't find your speakers, you know, you want to join an existing system.

And so I just got tired of that. And so I found this new app. It's called Menu Bar Controller for Sonos. And it just literally lives in the top taskbar or whatever that is. And your Mac, I think it's $2.50 for just you just buy the app, which is nice. But it just it puts all the speakers right there. And I can just go, I can just click on it and control the speaker as quickly as i can but does it does it ask you if you want to buy some headphones uh it does not oh yeah this actually looks good and it's crazy

because it actually works so um imagine that yeah this this is nice. I use Click on my phone. I find Click pretty decent, but they wanted $15 a year for the Mac app. And I was like, it's not worth that to me. It is worth $2.50 to me, though. I'm surprised you didn't make a Home Assistant dashboard that you can easily control them all through. So I have Home Assistant, and I can control the Sonos and everything, but sometimes that doesn't load up quick either. So it's just nice just to have it up top, you know, and if it works, it works. So yeah, it's a cheap solution. I literally found it like a day ago, so I haven't used it for very long, but every time I click on it, it just, it opens up right away. And that's what I want. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Yeah. So that's my projects. I'm also working on the den this week. Today, actually, it got to 40 degrees. So it's a Midwest fall over here. And I'm starting to tear apart the den wall. So we talked about it a couple weeks ago. The den wall is rotted out where water has gotten into uh into the wall there and so today i took apart some of the wood and stuff like that to kind of assess more of the damage um and i have to replace a bunch of two by fours so i'm not doing that right now but that is

a bigger project than i was hoping for unfortunately it'll be nice when it's finished though sounds like it yeah no fun i saw the pictures of it and lots of things, lots of things to fix. I mean, you could just do what I suggested and use that spray foam, put the siding back up and in 10 years, it's somebody else's problem. That's right. Not my problem anymore. Yeah. It depends on which way you want to go with it.

I mean, if you want to fix it and do it right, I guess you can do what you're doing. Yeah. Well, it's already all apart. So, right. Might as it and do it right, I guess you can do what you're doing. Yeah. Well, it's already all apart. So right. Might as well just do it. And they're like, you know, it's funny.

It's like, I've never done any of this, like, uh, building walls and stuff like that, but like, they're really not that complicated. No,

no. I mean, it's like, it's literally just like two by fours and wood sheathing. And that like, that's it. The hardest part is like the waterproofing the windows. I'm not looking forward to the properly flashing of the windows.

Cause I think that's why I'm having the problem I've had is that the windows are not properly flashed and I was just letting water in. So that's going to be a challenge for me.

It'd be fun. A project for another week. That's right. Maybe next week. Yeah. Hopefully it just gets some nice weather.

It doesn't snow the rest of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not here though. We just have lizards

falling. That's all. All right. Well, I think that's going to here, though. We just have lizards falling. That's all. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap everything up. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page,

head on over to hometech.fm.com. How you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month. Big shout out. But every single one of the pledges gets you an invite to our private Slack chat hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and

I haven't seen any giveaways but there might be some soon might be I don't know who knows you never know when when I'm going to be cleaning out stuff me or Jimmy that's the only two that's done it so far yeah pressure's on I should probably do something. Yeah, you got a ton of stuff. The only problem is shipping from Canada.

Maybe I'll do a Canadian giveaway. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Gavin comes to you, installs it. That'd be great. Gavin has a service for real. We're going to make it happen. Wait, hold on.

I was just cleaning out my drawer. I'm not offering any services or anything like that. Like, come on. Like, geez. All right. Well, if you want to help out, can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. Everyone have a great weekend, and we will see you next week.

Till next time. Take care elevating do you're gonna do that elevate your experience i elevated every story yes i was just waiting for it every time you you didn't know what it was gonna hit you but here i was in chat jpt looking at ways to integrate elevate into this story oh my god this guy anyone give me suggestions on how i can work in the word elevate and i did it all for every story sometimes it was so hard to hold back the laugh but i got every story with the word elevate i'm gonna invite you for the show notes now chat gpt says this guy likes the word elevate memory formed yeah oh that's too good

yes this this this show has been elevated