HomeTech.fm - Episode 515 - Gavin Quits Blue Iris

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

On this week's show: Sonos has ambitious goals for the streaming space, Amazon is teasing a February mystery product event, Apollo Automation is shipping their Temp-1 sensor for Home Assistant users, a pick of the week, project updates, Gavin drops a bombshell about is new NVR system, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 7th. 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 technology, home automation, AI. AI is big in the news, guys. And guess what?

After last week, I predicted it imagine this our government doing something stupid i know no no not recently not recently no no evidently um they're gonna hand over uh they're gonna they're doing a partnership with the u.s national laboratories to utilize open ai's ai models yay and those models will be used in the nuclear security program well there goes Canada. What could possibly go wrong, right? Why is this needed? I mean, I don't know.

I was telling you guys. I don't think this is needed. Nobody is focusing on the toilets. They need to focus AI on toilets and just clean the toilet, robot. And then they don't need robots that can kill you or survive or start a nuclear holocaust. Like, it's just not a good idea. You got to get your grift from somewhere, and you might as well get it from the Trump administration right now. So, especially with that $500 billion Stargate thing. Oh, yeah.

Are we going to travel to different planets? Not going to happen, but. Oh, okay. Yeah, Stargate's a weird name for that, too, right? Because as soon as I heard the name Stargate, I was like, this has to, Stargate's a weird name for that too, right? Because as soon as I heard the name Stargate, I was like, this has to be like Mars, like a Mars trip or something, right? Because their thing is called Starship, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah. That giant thing, the rocket that they have. It's a very weird name. But yeah, I don't really see this $500 billion investment going anywhere anyway, so maybe, maybe we won't give our nuclear secrets to ai are they gonna call it skynet they should they should call it i mean just get it just out of fun yeah exactly yeah well uh i i know that was that was a shock to me after you know we

talked about last week about how robot or ais just need to be instead of instead of giving them infinite power and wisdom let's just make them clean our toilets. Don't understand it. No, we don't want to take away jobs from, we don't want to take away low skill jobs. We've got to take away the high skill jobs. That's what we need. We don't need CEOs anymore or anything like that. Let's get rid of those people. We're going to take all of the jobs away. I mean, because they're just going to determine they need to eliminate us and they're going to have the power to do it. This is would you do that why would you just hand over the keys like here's how you launch the codes uh chad gbt uh what would you do and then of course it's going to be like i've run all the scenarios and if we eliminate you human race the world's world's so much nicer like sounds like an

80s movie i mean come on And then the AI can run everything. It's like war games all over again. I don't understand this. As long as it focuses on eliminating the Americans and leaves us Canadians alone, you know? This is why I treat my bots nice. I have bad news for you, Gavin. Winds will blow towards Canada. The fallout clouds will be placed over the top of you guys.

They're going to Canada. We're not that far away from you. So Seth is. Seth is a little far away from you. Well, we're going to build a wall. And America's going to pay for it. Yes. And it's going to keep those winds out.

Yeah. We'll get those, what do they call them? The propeller things that you said that you have. The wind farms. Windmills, that you have. The wind farms. Windmills, yeah. Yeah, the wind farms. Yeah, we'll go set them up at the border. Just blow it back.

All right, well, that's that. That's dumb. I have a tag in our little thing, and it's marked stupid. Because why would you do this? You don't do this. But you know what's not stupid? You know what's not stupid, guys? Our patrons.

Our patrons are awesome. And we have two patron shout-outs this week. John and Vince, who are $5 patrons. That's $10, guys. Woo! I know, right? Let's ring a bell. I feel special.

That's $10 more than Seth will give us. We'll never see any of that. It's going straight to the Mastodon server. Sorry. Can we afford the upgrade now? Yeah, I was going to say, can we get an update now? Yeah. I mean, it would be bad if I wasn't paying for the update already and just haven't turned it over.

So, whoops. One of these days I'll finish that project. I've been approving a lot of bots. Yeah, you always approve the bots. Yeah. Thanks, John and Vince. That's really awesome. Thanks for joining.

And they've already joined the Slack. So, if you join through Patreon, even for a dollar, just one dollar, that's all you need. Yeah, get's really awesome. Thanks for joining. And they've already joined the Slack. So if you join through Patreon, even for a dollar, just one dollar, that's all you need, yeah, get into the Slack. We're always doing stuff in the Slack. Did John get his invite to the Slack? I didn't see him join. I thought John did join. I didn't see John join. John, why have you not joined?

I know. Vince has joined. Let's take a look. I found out there's another... Oh, boy. Oh, no. Oh, no. What's going on here? Come on. You screwed it up, Seth, didn't you? It was just, it was kind of going crazy here for a second. All right. So it is, there's another way to go to invitations.

Oh, you know what? He might not have gotten it. Oh, no. It says private relay dot Apple ID. So I'm betting that he can't use that email. And that's when I tried to email him it bounced back same

same it wasn't to his relay though but whatever account he uses bounced my email back. We gotta put a shout out for John then

so that way he can contact us. Yeah yeah so John it looks like you used the old private relay Apple ID thing

and it looks like that email address doesn't allow invitations from Slack. So we got to get you fixed up. Reach out to us, feedback at hometech.fm or, you know, Seth at hometech.fm or whatever. We'll get you fixed up. We'll fix this invitation and we'll make it right. That's a new one. That's a new one. Thanks to the, uh, thanks to the Apple ID relay things. I did not know that. Anyway, if you want to become a patron and not get invited to our private Slack chat hub, check out hometech.fm support.

You can learn about how you can support, like TJ said, just a dollar. Just a dollar gets you that invite, as long as you have the right email address. Unless we do something crazy, which we might by the end of the year, I think some of us are planning on going to CES next year. We need money for that. You need to start saving some money, I guess. That's right. Yeah.

I have a CES fund I've been putting money towards. Nice. Oh, look at you. Look at you. You're so proactive. Yeah. I was just going to like bet on something and see if I could go buy a lottery ticket or something. Bet on the Super Bowl this weekend.

Oh, yeah. The Super Bowl. Yeah, exactly. There's two teams playing. Two teams? Is that normal? Yeah, two, I think. The Chiefs and the Eagles, they will be playing on Sunday, February 9th.

So by the time you hear this show, maybe. Yeah. Oh, guess where they're playing? They're playing in the Caes's superdome in new orleans not the not the caesar's palace in las vegas little caesar's pizza oh maybe it is a little caesar's i don't know i think it'd be called little caesar's but is it not maybe it would be i don't know anyway there's a football game this weekend that has uh stuff in it and commercials which is generally what i use it up watching uh throwing the old pigskin around yeah oh wait wait halftime show with kendrick lamar i'm in yeah there we go oh yeah and you know he's gonna diss uh just drake i know

gavin are you gonna be you guys do you guys do you guys blank this out you guys just like there's no halftime just, like, there's no halftime show. There's a halftime show? It says here that Drake is performing weird. Leave our Drake alone. Like, him and Justin Bieber are off limits. That should be fun. And then, yeah, if you want to watch this, you can watch it over on, let's see,

DirecTV Stream, Fubo,ubo youtube tv hulu plus live tv i guess they're all offering free channels if you don't have cable um or you can watch a fox affiliate because that's what there's going to be aired on so wasn't it i think i might be wrong on this um fubo was offering it for free but you had to just sign up for an account if i remember correctly there was there wasubo was offering it for free, but you had to just sign up for an account, if I remember correctly. There was somebody that was offering it for free as long as you made an account. Maybe it was Tubi? Oh, Tubi sounds right. Let me see. I have a whole article here from Engadget.

Yeah, Tubi. That's pretty nice. So that's kind of cool to see. And Tubi is a free streaming service anyway. They are going to make you create an account to watch the Super Bowl, which makes sense because you got to get those advertising dollars in. But that's kind of cool that you can watch them for free at least. Yeah, and Tubi is owned by Fox. So that makes sense.

Yeah. There we go. All right. Well, maybe if I can't get the old antenna to work, I'll use Tubi and tune in that way. Super Bowl 59. Watch some fun commercials. And the football game?

Oh, yeah. Well, Taylor Swift should be there this year. Maybe there's already bets on how fast they will shore on the camera. Oh, yeah. What are all the side bets? See, I could I could

I could start doing some of those side bets. What do they call them? Comp bets or whatever. Yeah, you can like you can make a lot of money with those, you know. A guy could go to CES with the money he makes on those.

Or he could just lose his house. Either way. I'm not sure. But yeah, the Super Bowl is coming around. And yeah, all sorts of fun stuff. So we'll put a link to how you can watch it in the show notes. And it links out to all those different services that will be carrying it this year. That's kind of nice.

We've got a bunch of new Home Tech headlines this week. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. All right. After a tough year and a rough start, Sonos is venturing into the video streaming market with a new product codenamed Pinewood. It's an Android-based streaming box.

It's reportedly cost between $200 and $400. It will be a streaming. I don't know why they're doing this. Honestly, this is the craziest thing. Supposedly it has an HDMI switch. Great. That's amazing. I'm glad I guess I don't know. And it's going to support advanced things like Dolby Atmos for the Sonos speakers it has will include a gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7 for connectivity. Let's see. Anything else on here? I don't know. $200 to $400. Let's go around the room.

Who's paying $400 for a Sonos streaming box? Nobody. Nobody's raising their hand. Okay. I want TJ to go first, actually. TJ go first. You know, I've seen this story floating around, I feel like, for like three to six months now. And the only two things that I can really think of, and I've thought about this a lot, right?

And the only two things that I can really think of that make sense to me, and one of them I've just thought about the first one being a, a, just like Sonos has distributed audio that, that works in syncs throughout your house. They could do that for video, right? Because right now, if you want distributed video and you want everything to sync up, you basically have to spend thousands of dollars to do it, or you have to run HDMI cables everywhere. Um, And so having some kind of wireless set-top box that could wirelessly sync up with all the other TVs in the house would be amazing. Probably not going to have that though. The other option that I can see this making sense for people is so that Sonos doesn't have to rely on people having good quality TVs to use Dolby Atmos and other formats.

Because not every TV supports these formats out of specific HDMI ports. And so for that, that kind of makes sense as well, because they ran into that issue when they released the Sonos Arc, right? Because the Sonos Arc, it wasn't supported basically by every single TV out there. They had the HD Arcana Fury devices that people would buy to basically act as the middleman and stuff like that. I don't know if that's a real problem anymore. Maybe it was a problem when they started this project. But that's the only two things I could really think of that make any sense. And neither one of those really want to make me spend $400 on a streaming box. If it had wireless HDMI syncing and everything like that, that would

be the one feature I think would be really cool. But like I said, I don't, I don't think that's going to have this at all. That's a, that's a good point. I didn't think about that, but they could use it to simplify getting the more advanced audio formats on. I don't want to lend any like, uh, what, credence to this story, that this is actually a product they're going to come out with. I guess they are. I hope it's not.

This is dumb. I was just looking up how long it takes for people to replace their TVs. There are two answers here. From the Home Technology Association, it says four to six years, which sounds about right to me. And then Google claims five to ten years, which I cannot believe. So I don't know, maybe I've had a TV for

that long. So I, I don't know how I feel. First of all, I'm all for, you know, more streaming boxes. That's fine. Like if you want to enter the competition, go ahead. You know, Apple's kind of, I think the like standard, you know, everyone mentions competing with Apple TVs. They're kind of the standard and the Apple TV pretty much does like everything, you know, like you really have to come out with a killer feature to make you want to get one of these. And I just think $400 is way too much for this, especially because even if you do get this more than likely, you're still going to have to have an Apple TV anyway. You know, like I know for other services, right? So this is just going to be another box on your TV.

And this box is probably going to do, the Apple TV will probably do everything that this box does anyway. The one thing I saw that they were talking about with this thing was creating a unified interface for all your streaming services. You know, whether they succeed or not with that we will see but i think apple tried that i think google tried that i think other people have tried that same thing i don't know how if they succeeded or how well they're doing there's a lot of drawbacks i don't know why they're going this way honestly um i think the only reason apple failed on that front was they they like refused to give

or i guess netflix refused to give them any numbers on and access to like integrate like what shows were popular and everything like on for their dashboard but i think like if you go to some other services netflix does do that so it may be a little bit better of an integration but like the app and i always just say like the Apple TV dashboard thing is kind of weird and hard to use compared to other things. I hear people like using like the like, oh, I use my Prime account for subscribing to Peacock or whatever, because it's easy.

It makes it easy. I can unsubscribe whenever I want to. It's right there on Amazon. I don't know how that works on apple or if it's easy or hard or whatever but typically subscription management has not been a a great uh you know forte for apple let's just say they've made that that process confusing uh in the past well and it's and it's definitely an uphill battle anyway because if i tell somebody like if i tell my customers buy an apple tv they're like why I spend $150 on this compared to like $30 for a Roku?

And I'm like, well, it's a much better product. I like Roku as well. It definitely has its place. But, you know, Apple TV is much nicer. But a lot of people just are not going to be able to justify the price, especially after Sonos has like botched the past year. Yeah. It's like, why would I buy this brand new device that you have

when you can't even make your existing stuff work? And this is probably one of those projects that's left over from Patrick Spence that- Oh, 100%. Oh, it definitely is.

There's no way, no way they can come out. And I bet you, you know, it looks like one of those projects that's probably going to fail. And unfortunately, the new CEO is going to

have to take the fall for it too, right? You know, I don't know. Like, there's so much other things they could be improving or working on, and they chose to do this. Yeah. He can get another tattoo. He can get a tattoo with it on it. Yeah.

Of it. That'd be cool. Right, guys? Let's do it. Yeah. You guys want to get matching Sonos tattoos? No, I do not. No.

I thought that's where that was going. No. I just don't care about this product. I mean, we'll see what it comes out and see what it's like. But I would be their target audience for this. And I'm just like, no, why? Yeah. I can't imagine.

One, I can't imagine buying this. Two, everybody's like, oh, it's going to be like a premium set time box. It's going to compete with Apple. I'm like premium. You got, you got, you're defining premium. Like I've used the Sonos app for,

for a few years now. And I don't think, you know, what premium is like, this is not a premium experience. It may be premium priced, but it's not premium experience. Like this is garbage.

And what is like, what is premium streaming box even, this is garbage. I hate the Sonos app. What does premium streaming box even mean? I don't know. Just give me the streaming apps. More than 50 bucks, I guess. I guess. It's like luxury apartments. You have nice countertops.

Good job. Will they have all the buttons on the remote? No, of course not. No. It's going to be a five- a five button remote it'll be no remote you have to use the app oh i hate the app like i'm sorry i'm one of the few people that every time i launch that app i cringe the most annoying thing is the player is always on the bottom of that app it feels like it takes up i'm not even using it and it's still there

it's just annoying yeah i hate their app i didn't even think of that but yeah they'll have to make a remote if they come out with this product. It's not just going to be this. It's going to have a remote that has to go along with it. Oh, man. They could go so wrong with this. Well, good luck, Sonos. I feel another song is going to be coming on.

I feel some music is going to happen. Jeez, yeah. You can go really wrong with a remote, especially with a design-oriented company like Sonos, Apple. Oh, boy. This should be good. It'll be one button. It's just a scroll wheel.

I mean, I laughed when you said you have to use the app, but I'm like, they used to have a really good remote, and it was basically their app. Yeah, CR200, right?200 right yeah it was awesome this is the best thing they ever had and like they let that one go but there's there's calls for them to bring it back people people want to have that uh that little hand controller again which i don't blame them because when i'm at home like i don't want to pull my phone just to control my speakers like it's nice to like we have uh lutron pico remotes in almost every room, like, on the wall. And so that way I can walk in and just hit it and adjust the volume or group the speakers manually if I need to. And just having that manual control is nice without having to pull my phone.

Because then I get distracted and everything. It made the Sonos product seem like an appliance that you had in your house. And that's how you just went over. You went and interacted with that thing. You just picked it up or you just tapped on it. You could hit play. It had physical buttons on it. I mean, it worked. It worked just as fast.

It worked fast. Now, if they did it, it probably like booed up. It probably like, hey, do you want some headphones? Little pop-ups on it. Yeah. Come look at the Sonos Pinewood. I know that's a stupid little name for it but what if they call it the derby yeah it's like oh it was the pinewood now it's the derby the sonos derby

it's because we're crashing our company we're all it's all downhill from here come on to the pinewheel derby oh man well um yeah good luck sonos i really, I don't know what to think about this. Sonos is lost. They can also sell the user data, you know. They're not going to be a privacy-focused company that doesn't sell the user data. So just like Roku, anything and everything you watch is going to be reported up to some ad agency for tracking.

So I'm sure that's going to happen. It's really the only reason to get involved with this. It should be fun. And we'll have to see when you get it out. And then TJ will have to buy it and return it. I'll buy it from Best Buy and return it. Don't worry. I'm not keeping that.

Hopefully. All right. Well, big news from Amazon. They have announced a February event in New York City. Sparking speculation about the launch of its new Alexa Digital Assistant. They talked about bringing in, combining Alexa with the large language models they've been working on. This was announced way back in September of 2023, and it's yet to be released.

In fact, there's been a couple of news stories we've covered over time that were just like, yeah, we had to start from scratch because this doesn't work at all. So yeah, Gavin, I know you said something about this before we started. Are you excited for the new, smarter Alexa? I am excited, but I'm also nervous. I'm excited because new features, you know, AI, you know, making the device better and stuff. But I'm also nervous that they're going to probably add on a subscription service model to it. Oh, yeah.

You know, what's that going to look like? Is it going to be $5 per device that I'm going to have to pay 80 bucks a month to just keep my house running? Or is it going to be a something that they just lump in $10 on your prime account and you're good to go? I don't know. I don't know what to think of this. I it's one of those wait and see type of things, but, um, I'm all for them making it smarter because honestly, it's out of all the speakers I've tried, it's probably the best working one. I mean, it has its flaws and stuff like that. All of them do this one. Just I've liked it. It worked for me the best, but I'm nervous that

they're going to screw something up at this event and it's just going to ruin it for me. And, you know, with the home assistant voice, you know, out now and everything like that, you know, there's some other options out there, but they're not as good. Yeah.

I haven't, I haven't really used Alexa recently, but I would be interested in a smarter speaker. I use Google right now. And I really, I don't even use it anymore just because it seems like it's such a pain in the butt to use. And so maybe,

maybe I'm only going to tell you guys this, but maybe AI will fix voice assistants. I don't have hopes it'll fix anything else, but maybe it'll fix voice assistants. We'll see. Just how much is it going to cost us? That's how we'll have to find out. In the end, it's going to be cost. And then I hope they don't take away features we currently have and then put that behind a paywall too because i think they've done that in the past with some other features so this is why i'm a little nervous it's like oh now you can't integrate it with like home assistant unless you pay a five

dollar a month fee or something then we'll see yeah i wonder if they'll rate the raise the price of whatever like to the hardware would be too because they've they've typically we've known that they ran this product as a loss leader for a long time, like in, in the tune of billions of dollars each year. So I'm, I'm curious to see if like a premium AI enabled, uh,

echo speaker comes out and the price point is much more expensive than the, uh, the regular one. And maybe, maybe in that is they have some subscription built into it for a little bit that you can test the fancy stuff out and then you know just alexa will be like hey i'm getting dumb next week this is gonna be like a flowers for algernon i'm just gonna just gonna go backwards right the the other part that has me really nervous is i hope they

don't just they introduce all these features and they add this AI, but they restrict it to their devices only so it doesn't work with my Sonos speakers. I would go beyond that. I'm wondering if it's only going to be new devices that they offer. Yeah. In a number of my rooms, I use the Sonos integration. It works great. And the microphone and those things are amazing i have to admit like we could be watching tv it's loud and everything

and i just say her name and it lowers the tv volume like i love that stuff right but if they go and they start like crippling those i'm not gonna be a happy guy you're it's gonna be like a two-hour show of me ranting i'm warning you from now march first week in march that show is gonna be a rough show if they don't if they screw this up clearing the schedule now yeah clear it now you know free up space on your podcast app and stuff like that because i'm gonna be mad let's get the bleep the bleep bell out again yeah it's gonna be a heavily edited show for seth all right well let's move on here we have uh we have an update from uh friends of the show over there at uh paula automation they they spoke about this in the interview we had a couple weeks back

a couple months back i guess at this point the temp one temperature sensor uh has been released it offers a local private uh and an open source solution for measuring all sorts of stuff let's see what's this thing got it's got rgb it's got a buzzer it's got uh temperature humidity probes yeah it's got everything this thing has it all what what can't you do with this is what i want to ask the nice part about this sensor too it's the type of of sensor where the main brains of it sit outside your fridge and then you can have a little thin sensor that goes into your fridge. So you don't have the whole device with the battery in your fridge and stuff. It's all ESP home base. So it works great with home assistant.

You know, these guys, if you haven't, they hold a live stream every month. And I join and I listen in, you know, on their live streams. And they talk about things they're thinking about, things they're working on. You know, they talk about some of the challenges they have. This last live stream, they even mentioned soil sensors, you know, and it had me even more, you know, engaged with them. Right. So we'll see where that goes. But. I thought you were about to say moist.

Yeah. They got me moist when they mentioned soil sensors, you know, and thanks to them, I now have two plants in my kitchen because, you know, I've been so successful keeping the one plant alive with their, with their, uh, soil sensor for the plants that I got a second plant. So I'm getting another sensor and now I get notifications when it needs water and I don't have to think about it. You know, I spend less time worrying about the plant and more time enjoying the plant. You know, I take it for walks, you know, we cook dinner together, all sorts of things, you know.

So these guys are great with their sensors. Like, go check them out. Yeah. And their live streams are great too, because they, they remind me of Eric over at InnoValue where they just like share everything. And the, the, the live streams are very informative. So I like listening to that, even if I can't participate in the conversation. You can get a, you get a lot of options with this.

You've got so many options. Yeah. You can get a small temperature probe, a long temperature probe, a food probe. You can get it with or without a cable, a charger, or both a cable and a charger.

And then you can also get a magnet mount. And that, and there's different variants. You can get a battery. You can get a non-battery version. So there's all sorts of little options that you can get on this. This is fun.

Yeah. And that's what's nice about Apollo. It's like all of their sensors basically do that, where you can buy like wall mounts or outlet mounts or different adapters and stuff like that. That's one thing I really appreciate about Apollo because they understand that there's not a one-size-fits-all. Like the sensor is going to work for you no matter what,

but you're going to use it for different reasons. And I just want to say for all the Canadian listeners, they now ship, like it's handled, their shipping is handled in Canada. So it's, we no longer have to wait four weeks for it to arrive here. You know,

nice. Yep. Got cheaper shipping. It's better now. It takes a lithium CR one, two, three, a battery or what is it?

A 16, three 50. Is that what it is? Yeah. 16340. I recently bought like a pack of those and chargers and stuff like that for seeing my future of buying more of their sensors. Yeah, I've got a couple of things that use the 123As.

I recently bought, TJ's probably had this problem. Like out in the field, if you need to tone a wire, you use those little wire toners. They always take 9-volt batteries for some reason. It's always the worst. Well, I found on Amazon rechargeable 9-volt batteries. And they take, yeah, they come with like a little squid cable, right? There's like four of them in the pack.

And they come with a little squid cable. I got one right here. Here it is. And it's got USB-C. It's got a little squid cable, USB-C. You plug it in and they charge up. And then you have a nine-volt battery that you can actually recharge in the field and don't have to, like, leave and go to a grocery store to find a freaking nine-volt battery or rummage through the customer's house and find a nine-volt battery. Which is generally what I did in the past.

Do you guys buy a lot of rechargeable batteries because i've been thinking about buying some just because i have so many things now uh but i'm not sure on brand i don't think there are brands anymore i know like for a long while there's like interloop and i think interloop and some other ones i think there's one called owl or something like that on amazon that gets good reviews but i i don't know i this this was a this is a uh a latum oh yeah a litum i don't know uh and it was just a nine it was a usb nine volt rechargeable battery so i was like you know what if i'm always running into the problem out in the field where these stupid like the little the stupid little switches on those toners always gets turned on in my bag or whatever yep and then you you get

them out and you're like never know yeah you press it and you're like the bat the light just doesn't even come on you're like oh my god and now you got to find a nine volt battery you got to rob it out of another one but it takes a screwdriver so now you gotta go find a screwdriver it's just awful um but yeah nine volt battery i've seen more and more of these batteries come these rechargeable batteries come with a little usbc on them and you just stick the usbc in in it, and it recharges it. I think that's a great idea. Genius. Yeah. Especially if it's something for a toner, too,

where it's like you're going to, you might use it quite a bit, but the battery usually lasts quite a while. It lasts forever, yeah. Yeah, and this is lithium. I have no idea how long this is going to last. 1,100 milliamp hours. I don't know what that translates to a 9-volt battery, but it's got to be better than cursing as much as I have in the field

over 9-volt batteries over here. If anybody cared to make a decent toner in this world, they would not put a 9-volt battery in it. They put like a hand crank. You know those hand crank radios that you... They would use that. You just crank on that thing and then like plug it in and tone the wire out. Now I need a solar panel.

Yeah, yeah. Like one of those flashlight radio things that you get from grandma or whatever like just crank on the thing my samsung remote comes with a solar panel now i can't do that with everything paula automation we'll put a link to it in the show notes uh i i noticed i noticed you guys talking about it there was a lot of people talking about in the hub everybody was like i ordered one i ordered one it'll be interesting to see what everybody ends up doing with these things. All right, let's move on here. Oh, and if you want a CES show to listen to, I think there was a really good one.

The latest episode of Ho-On, which, you know, go over to thedigitalmediazone.com, and you can download it there. You can download it in your podcast app of choice. Jimmy and Richard basically did a rundown of what they saw at CES. It was great. There's like interviews and stuff mixed in uh i i really enjoyed that so go check go check that out dj thanks for putting that in our our notes here it was good it was a good show uh i just want to correct something did you say digital media zone or the digital media the did you got to put the v in there the digital just make sure i want richard to yell at us. No, no, no. Link is in the show notes.

Good. Hey, look. It matters what you say. No, it was a really good show. I didn't really, like, I paid attention to the news articles coming out of CES, but I really didn't listen to, like, any, like, videos or podcasts about CES. I think I listened to The Verge a little bit, but they didn't really talk about home technology stuff that much. And so it's nice to hear Jimmy and Richard talking about home technology and all the cool stuff that they saw there.

What were they talking about? There was something that was really cool. The battery. Was it the battery? House battery thing. Yeah. Yeah, the house battery was really cool. What's that company though?

BioLite. So one of the things that I've been looking for in my house, and I don't know if I'm gonna do it this house, probably the next one, is some kind of basically just a battery backup for the whole house, right? And most of the time, people would just do a generator. And generators are fine. There's nothing wrong with generator. But I don't really want to dedicate space outside of my house to a generator when I could put batteries somewhere. And the biggest thing for me is basically what I assume a lot of other people have is where they just want to back

up their fridge or their freezer. So if they lose power, they don't have to worry about losing all their food, right? And last year, I got a 30 amp outlet installed with a giant battery backup for just our automation and networking equipment. And now my stuff lasts like two hours, basically, if I lose power. But I've wanted something for my fridge, but there hasn't really existed anything. Like you could buy like whole house batteries and stuff like that. This company, and I'm sure other companies as well, make basically a wall-mounted battery pack that you just plug into the wall and then you plug your device into it and that's it. And it's like $2,000 per battery pack that you just plug into the wall and then you plug your device into it and that's it

and it's like two thousand dollars per battery pack um it'll run the fridge for a good amount of time i think uh what was i saying between 15 and 30 hours for the one pack and then if you get to the two pack it's 30 to 60 hours of power so it's not a bad idea and that's great because for me in ohio i really don't lose power that often. Like, and if I lose power, it may be for a couple hours. And so really it's not that big a deal, but it'd be nice to have something like this. And $2,000 is pretty reasonable. A generator, a generator would probably still be the better option just because you would get more power out of it and everything for maybe the same cost.

But the battery backup, you don't have to have anybody. You literally just go install it yourself. So that that's that's the appealing thing of it well like here in florida when we have the the power outages from the storms or whatever you have that point of time where like the the refrigerator you you start your timer right the refrigerator is going to have a you know melt down or whatever over i don't know 24 48 hours probably this keeps it running for another 15 30 hours you have plenty of time to figure out what you could do for a generator or or pull food or just eat all the food yeah yeah yeah and you can chain them up too so you can have as many like i think like up to eight chained together so you can have it last a while not a bad idea i'm getting my uh panel

replaced in march and one of the things i asked them to do was put in a transfer switch so you know i will have a generator we have a generator and the new transfer switch as he says really easy to connect and switch it over and everything you know and the generator runs off gas so it's just a matter of you know getting some gas and putting it in there um which is what I'll do for these situations. We don't lose power often, but it's like, yeah, when it does happen, you want to be prepared. Yeah. And you never know how long it's going to go out for, right?

Exactly. That's with us. I think the longest we've lost power for here has been like six hours or something, but I don't know if that's going to keep happening. It might be 12 hours or 18 hours the next time. So, well, there was that one time, I want to say it was in the early 2000s where they had the big outage up here um i we lost power for like three four days and something in our house right um yeah and the fridges yeah we lost everything in the fridge and everything like that right but um you never know

if that could happen again. I mean, if they let AI run the power company, who knows? All right. I know it's happening. I know it's going to happen again. It's happened already. It happened last year a couple of times. It'll happen again.

So, it's not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. I kind of like it. It's an individual appliance thing. You want to put it in the fridge. You can protect it that way. It's not terrible. Yeah, it's a good idea. And like I said, no electrician or anything needed, which is the biggest thing, you want to put it in a fridge, you can protect it that way. It's not terrible. Yeah, it's a good idea. And like I said, no electrician

or anything needed, which is the biggest thing, right? If I wanted to have a generator, I'd have to have somebody come out and wire it up and do all this stuff. And obviously the generator would do the whole house, but or at least more of the house, but I don't know. Battery's pretty nice. Yep. UPS for your fridge. Pretty cool.

That's right. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 515. All right. And we do have a mailbag this week. This comes in from John, who we mentioned earlier. Thanks, John. Super supporter of the show here. Says, right, guys, I've been a listener of the show for a long time,

but it was the ballot of Patrick Spence which sealed it for me. I really need to pay you for the entertainment value, if nothing else. Well, thank you. Thank you, John. Says, I have to say your podcast is the one I look out for each week, even when TJ gets silent. TJ, he knows your name. Oh, man.

That's two. Presumably he said something that your new president took exception to. Yes, Seth, we all know that you took, you took the rap for a mistake, but we know the truth. It goes on.

One thing I'm not sure about being a describer. Does it give me full access to Gavin as a service? And I would say, yes, yes, it does. He's British. He lives in London,

a big city. He says there's a five hour time difference, but that's as. Messes you away. He's British. He lives in London, a big city. He says there's a five-hour time difference, but that's as fine as Gavin's service does provide 24-hour support. Correct? I think so. Gavin was telling us his schedule for tomorrow for work. And, I mean, it sounds like he's going to be up 24 hours to get that done. Anyway, yeah, Gavin is a service. He says, can I call him at 4 p.m uh if you don't mind sending me his number i expect him to answer immediately and give me a rapid response solution to all of my home assistant issues sounds like it sounds like john's got this figured out

i i i really i really think he's gonna he's gonna give gavin a run for his money here i already sent i already sent him him Gavin's number and address. Oh, perfect. That way he just automatically connected. I already sent him the bill, but the email bounced back. Yeah, the email bounced back. So yeah, John, I wrote up a big response attached to Bill and everything like that. And the email bounced back.

I don't know why, but, you know, like, reach out to us again and, you know, like, we got to get you in the Slack channel. But, yeah, if you have a question or something like that, you can reach out. I'll respond when I'm available, though, you know. I can't guarantee. One thing I can't guarantee is I can't guarantee I'll solve your problem, but I can guarantee

I'll get you to spend money. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we do that well. Yeah, I'm really good at that, yeah. Sorry, sorry. Well, thanks, John. Thanks for the support. Thanks for writing in.

That was funny. I really like the timeframes here that we're dealing with. Man, we've got to encapsulate Gavin in some kind of AI service. It's going to happen. Gavin.ai. Gavin.ai. Gavin chatbot. I'm going to hover right now.

Is it AI domain? Is there a Gavin GPT? I'm sure. We need to make a Gavin chatbot. There is Gavin GPT. I almost bought that once. Gavin GPT.ai. What about Gavin.ai?

Gavin.ai is taken. It's taken. How about Gavin Campbell.ai? Yeah. Gavin as a service. Gas..ai i think that's probably gonna come back gav.it.com is available gas.fun why not that it's only 2.99 should get that one gas.it.com gavinAsAService.com is available. G-A-A-S.B-O-T. There we go.

That's what we need. GasBot. Oh, that's $79. What's GavinAsAService.com? Is it taken? I think it's free. Free? No, it's not free.

No, I think it's available, I mean. I still think Gas.Fun is, but no, Gas.Com is taken. It says on my end. No, no, GavinAsAService.com. Oh, I got to write? is, but no, gas.com is taken. It says on my end. No, no, Gavin has a service, the full. Oh, I got to write? No, no. Come on. Anything four letters is going to be taken.

No, gas.fun is available. Well,.fun. Gas.bot is available. Gas.ninja is probably available. Gas.lighting. Yes. Okay, gaslight you. Gaslighting, there there we go it's our new lighting design program oh it's too good i wasn't expecting that one to be available but there it is um gas.camp

gas.charity here we go i'm doing it for free gas.chat. Man, those get expensive. Wow. There we go. I think we'll pass on that one. Yes, there's gas.support. Again, $29, though.

You'll have to design my website for me, too. Yeah. And then we got to put a cost to my support cost to pay for my trip to CES. Yeah, there we go. That's how we can make make wow did they really come out with a dot zip domain name that is stupid yeah that's that's a windows nightmare i'm sorry rest in peace windows administrators it's been there for a while. Whoops. Let's see. Yeah. There's, there's, there's so many, if we're going to do gas, then there's, we, the options

are just there. They're endless depending on just how much we want to pay here. So. Well, pick one and see how you want to pick me out. You got to set up the, the, you know, all the, the, the purchasing and everything like that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We don't even need permission because there's no rules with AI. So no, exactly. You do whatever we want. Paper hour. Gavin, Gavin gets no money out of it. Here's the,

uh, gas dot XXX. There's an adult section here. Uh, I can recommend good videos. Let's keep sharing them with me. It's really weird. Let's see.

Yeah, we have options here. There's so much. There's so many we can buy here. Gas.Christmas is even one. I only worked during December. Yeah, that's it. That's all you can do. Oh, a gas party? We've got that.

Between gas lighting, gas.bot, I don't know. I'll have to figure this one out. There's so many, though. Gas.ai is taken. I mean, this one, though, gavingpt.com is available. Kind of.

But we need the gas in there, you know? Yeah, I know, right? Gas chat or gas support or... People put me on retainer, you know? They'll pay for access and you know, I have SLAs. I'll respond within so many hours or you know. You know, gas.casa

is available as well. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, that's a pretty good one. I actually, I use gas.casa is available as well. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. That's a pretty good one. I, I actually, I use the.casa domain for my house. Uh, just stuff I have in my house. I'm like, yeah, casa, that means house. Uh, gas.app is only $30,000.

That's within our budget. Yeah. I think I'm going to pass on that one. Oh. It's definitely not within the budget. Just a couple thousand dollars. It's a few, it's a few over. We're so close. Gonna have to cut the budget. Just a couple thousand dollars. It's a few. It's a few over.

We're so close. Gonna have to cut the website. We're gonna get a couple more Patreon subscribers. Yeah, just a couple. Might have to cut back on travel for CES next year, but yeah, there we go. That's too funny. It'll be a nice little side hustle, you know, answering people's questions and, you know, do you pay per question? Gas.tax?

Gas tax. That's a good one. Gas tax. Gas tax. Oh, that's too good. You've got gas chat. I really like that one. Gas chat's not bad because it could be live chat. Yeah. It could be a live chat. It could be a bot. You don't know.

You don't know until you show up. Yeah. We'll figure it out. We'll have to figure this out. Gavin is available. Gavin is offline. Talk to the Gavin bot. Gavin has 50 messages waiting. Too good.

All right. Let's move on to pick the week before we get, spend too much money here. Got 10 bucks to spend. We got to spend it. Just wonder where it goes. Where's the money go? Domains?

Servers? Sorry. Sorry. Let's see. Pick of the week. We've got a... TJ, I think you put this. This is from Reddit.

Using an Acora window sensor to detect toilet flushes. And I've got to say, this is probably not the most long-term solution I've seen. But inside the toilet bowl, they have mounted a Quora window sensor. And on the float, they mounted the magnet. And if the magnet moves away from the contact, well, that means the toilet's flushing. Yeah, I actually had these exact same sensors outside on my gate. And they lasted about two weeks. And that was being directly rained on, so I feel like it might last a little bit longer, but I don't really see this lasting too long.

What I find funny, though, is that one of the comments says, does it automatically turn on the fart fan? Because that would be the obvious use case, right? When you flush the toilet, the fan turns on. And the person says, not a bad idea. Just using it for data tracking right now you're just tracking how often you use the restroom you're not even doing the automations with it just get some graphs you know you want to learn how long it the toilet took to refill and like yeah all that stuff so it was like that would have been the first automation i would have done

is that the fart fan turns on for like five minutes can you imagine going to somebody's house and they had this hooked up and like you flush the toilet and the fan came on? It's like, what? What just happened here? Like, why did the fan turn on? It's a magic. What magic is this? I have one of those.

I think Gavin told me not to buy it, but I have one of those Aqara VOC sensors that I've never got working with mine. And that was the intention of it is to that when somebody was using the restroom, it would turn the fan on automatically. But I just never got it working right. I convinced you not to buy something. That doesn't sound like me. Well, you didn't convince me because I still bought it.

You told me not to buy it. Oh, you didn't listen to me. And I was. Yeah. Learn the hard way. Just buying more Aqara stuff that doesn't work that well. There's a lot of funny comments in this thread. I'm just going to leave it as is.

And if you want to check that out, it's over in our show notes. That's good automation, though. If you have any feedback, comments, questions, picks of the weeks, great ideas for data tracking, 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. But first, we've got Home Assistant updates and major updates.

Major updates to backups, I guess. Gavin, you were saying there's some community complaints about the encrypted backups. And you said, yeah, they'll probably get around to fixing it. Well, they did. Here it is. 2025.2. Oh, yes. Major updates for backups. You know, I was still writing 2024. I haven't gotten over that. Okay 25 2025.2 oh yeah updates for backups you know i'm still writing 2024 i haven't

gotten over that okay 2025.2 updates yep they're iterating on the backups they've listened to the community and they're allowing you to do things like turn off the encryption uh on certain backups depending on where they're safe to or download unencrypted versions. They've also allowed you to customize the time of the backup. They've added the toggle so the backups now happen like they had before, where you can select backup before you do updates. They modified file names and added new locations. So in the end, I was saying it was the first stab at the redesign of the backup. Now they're kind of refining it with all the input they've been getting.

And they, you could tell they've been listening to people. So when people complain, you know, home assistant listens, uh, but other things, they have a lot of voice updates in this one.

They've added features like calling analog phones. I think that requires other hardware, um, doing broadcast messages, setting the temperature, um, the LMS, LLMs can now reference calendar events or they have access to shared history now. And something clean your toilet yet.

Not yet. Not yet. We'll get there. We'll get there. No, you won't. No, we won't. They're going to bomb us before that happens. Probably.

But they also mentioned something called model context protocol and i think what this means is just i i saw paulus uh put out a post this week talking about making um like an open standard for interfacing with all these models and stuff like that so that you can integrate them easily yeah it's a great idea um but this space is still hasn't settled yet. So we'll see where that goes. But, you know, I think Home Assistant is preparing for stuff like that. Right. And as usual, new updated integration, some Bluetooth love in there and some breaking changes.

So go update. I updated today, like within minutes of it getting released. It didn't break anything in my setup. I'm happy. Go for it. Enjoy. So one of the integrations was Home didn't break anything in my setup. I'm happy. Go for it. Enjoy. So one of the integrations was Homey. Homey's in there.

So you can integrate your Homey smart home system directly into Home System if you want it. And what is the other one? There was a couple of other things in here. Well, I think you covered the MCP ones, the model context protocol and Google Drive stuff. So that all kind of came along with the other stuff but yeah i thought it was interesting that homie was was being put in so that's cool that's pretty cool yeah backwards incompatible wow they got a bunch here there's always something that breaks oh well but that's really cool that i mean who writes all

this stuff they have to have like lm write all this right the notes have to have like LLM write all this, right? The notes? There's so many notes. This is Frank doing it. Yeah, because you could see if you look at the beta notes, you could see it as he adds and adds and adds. He slowly goes through all the changes in the GitHub and he writes it all out. He does

a great job, but it's not an easy job. No, no doubt. There's so much here. Jeez. All right. Very cool. Press update and see if it goes through. I should have done it earlier. Oh, well. great job but it's not an easy job no no doubt there's so much here geez all right very cool press update and see if it goes through i should have done it earlier oh well um all right uh i i did a plumbing project last night i don't know why by choice or yeah unfortunately this one was by choice um i know we noticed there was like some water at some point on next to the shower that my daughter uses. And we're like, where's that water coming from? And we asked her and she's like, oh, yeah, I saw an ant coming out of that hole.

So I poured water down in, you know, the crack there. Well, that's good. Pest control. Yeah. So evidently she'd been doing that for a bit. And, you know, so we have one of those old cast iron shower tub thing, combo things, right, from like the 60s, way back in the day. And I pulled the little door down to kind of see what was going on behind there. And there was a lot more water behind that than I expected to see.

But it turns out I think some of the, like, something was leaking either through the tile or, you know know a crack or something and getting back behind there and causing more damage and probably what what little ants or bugs or whatever were coming through the hole that she found were interested in the first place like probably going there um so i uh i proceeded to take apart probably too late in the night uh the the the valve and remove everything and replace some of the o-rings i actually had o-rings i think i i was prepared somewhat but um and then i went to put it back together and the stupid valve wouldn't go back in and about this time it was

about 10 o'clock and i was really regretting things i was hot and sweaty and all i wanted to do was take a shower and i realized wait i can't even turn the water back on to our house because it's just spray all over the room. This valve's not back in. So I just started. I basically had to use a hammer and I hammered it back into place. And now it works, but I put it in upside down. So, of course, the hot water is cold and the cold water is hot now. And my daughter thought that was hilarious today when she took her shower.

She just thought that was the craziest thing. You know, I thought it was funny, too, but probably not for the same reason. Are you going to fix it? No, of course not. I barely got that thing back in there. Get some spray paint, respray the handles, you know. It just like take a Sharpie and mark on the right. Yeah. Yeah. You're very gutsy for starting a home project at night because maybe it's just me because I always need something whenever I start something. Yep. But I have to do like three trips to the hardware store no matter what the house project is. Especially with plumbing.

I don't know what made me decide to pull that out and try and fix it at the time I did. And then when I looked up, I'm like, oh, no, Home Depot is closed. Ace is closed. I have no backup here and it's not going back in. So yeah, it's just a little public service announcement. If you start a plumbing project, don't start it. Well, first of all, just don't start it. Hire somebody to come do it because you're just going to, you're going to regret, you're

going to hate your life. And, and then second of all, if you do start it, don't start it at seven o'clock in the afternoon and then like run into problems. It would have been nice if I could just have gone and bought a new valve for the stupid thing and replaced that instead of all the little O-rings and everything that I probably got wrong. But you know what? It's back in, and it works, right? There's not water leaking everywhere now, and it's backwards, but oh well. What are you going to'm not i'm not replacing

that's a problem for future so anyway that was that was my fun that was my project uh yeah yeah it's a problem for whoever i don't know this thing it's the original valve and everything so i'm not gonna replace it like it's a problem for later we'll replace the valve and the shower and everything before um i deal with that again. So not going there. Anyway, it looks like, you know what, TJ, we're going to go with you first. Gavin has an amazing project update that he's going to have to share with us. Yeah, Gavin's way more exciting than me. This week, I've been working on the den.

We got a couple days of nice weather. It was like 50s and 60s. It was a crazy heat wave. And so you can follow me on Mastodon or Blue Sky and see the pictures there. But basically, I had to remove like half the plywood from the wall because it was all rotted out and everything. And I had to replace like eight studs. And the water damage is crazy. I think there was termites back there at some point too, which makes sense because we had termite damage in our kitchen whenever we did our pantry.

Um, so this year I'm definitely going to have to get treated for termites just because I don't want that issue to come up again. Um, but I went through and I replaced all the, all the plywood. It's kind of patchwork, you know, just little pieces everywhere, but it's getting covered up with, with wrap and stuff like that anyway. So I don't think it really matters that much. Um, but we're,

we're getting some nice days. So hopefully I can get that part finished and then we can start drywall in here in the next month or two. Um, cause that room is, uh, it'll be nice when it's all done right now. There's,

there's just holes in my den. So do you have the, do you have the drywood termites there? I don't know. Or do you have the, there's different termites. Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't know those different termites. There's the drywood. The drywood ones are the ones that go in and kind of kind of live in the wood for a while but then there's the one that goes under the ground and those i think those are the bad ones like i don't know we mean they go under the ground like they live there they they go underground and you look on the side of your house and you see the little like termite tracks where they are going up into the house and eating the wood those are the ones that like destroy things fast. The dry ones, dry wood ones, we have those here. I had those at my house, had to tent and everything for them.

But I guess they go in and they kind of eat slowly or something. And then five years later, they swarm everywhere. Like they just come out. I don't know. It takes them a while to decide to leave. And yeah, that's when we discovered we had them as we saw them popping out one at a time out of these little tiny holes and uh yeah yeah so we uh we tended the house and killed them off or whatever but i guess i guess if you have the ones that are it looks like you have mostly subterranean ones those are the ones that are bad so but you would you would see

that i guess on the side of the house like you would see little tracks and stuff yeah well and we're on a we're on a slab foundation too so i don't know if that makes any different um but we don't have any active termites as far as i can tell unless they're somewhere else in the house i hope not uh but everything i've found so far looks like very old damage like the one in the pantry was pretty old this one there was only like one track like i guess one whatever i guess they're called tracks uh but it was like one track on one piece of wood so i don't think it was that bad out there maybe they were moving to the den before they got treated for them or something but not enough to be concerned about

at least but i should probably go ahead just get the house treated this year yeah um we got offered there's some company uh or by one of my neighbors knows somebody that works for a pest control company um and so he's going to come around and put chemicals in the ground to do things or something. I don't know. There you go. They go around and they drill the ground and put baits in and stuff like that. And it's supposed to last like three to five years or something crazy. So we'll probably just do that.

Yep. Not to worry about it for a while. It helps with ants and spiders and stuff too, which will be nice because we get a lot of ants. I know a guy that has some spider stuff he can send you. I need some peppermint oil. It's still working. I don't care what anybody says. My rack is like web-free

so screw y'all. It's funny too because we're all thinking about it because Justin sent me a photo Justin from Apollo Automation sent me a photo of some spider repellent and he said, moving out of the basement to our new building, bringing the spider spray. See?

They haven't come up with a sprayer yet, though. They really need to come up with a sprayer. They really need to come up with a peppermint sprayer when it detects a little peppermint volume in the air. Put a little mist and, you know, just put it on the rack, top of the rack. That's right. Oh, you see?

Those are great ideas that even sono should take this sounds like a sonos product yeah it does yeah absolutely uh my next thing i uh i ordered a new product don't tell anybody um i ordered a bed sensor um this is elevated sensors dot com um it i don't know the full story on this, but I believe this started off as an open source project. And then the person that was working on it, basically they kept the open sourceness alive. Um, but they started this, uh, they, they started this. Um, and so for $55, no $70 for a King size, uh, bed with dual sensors sensors so you better detect both sides of the bed. I'm going to

get this here in a couple weeks and I'm very excited for it. I don't know what automations I'm going to set up yet. I think one of the first ones I'm going to do is our lights are activated by motion and one of the things I really don't like is that sometimes my lights like if we go to bed early, right? My

lights will turn on automatically still if I like to text the cat moving or something like that. And so I want to eliminate that and just basically use it, do the automations if we're in bed or not. So if neither one of us are in bed, then the automations are working

because the other thing is I don't have my automations for motion or Sonos starting until 10 a.m. in the morning, just in case one of us sleeps in or something and so it'd be nice to be able to automate that portion and so that way it just knows if we're out of bed and so they're they're doing this shipping in two phases they they weren't able to get the actual bed sensors immediately and so i think right now we're getting the actual sensor and then in like two weeks we're getting the the little uh cable things that sit underneath the mattresses to tell if somebody is there. That's weird.

You just use it for data collection. That's all. Yeah. Just like the toilet sensor. Yeah. You're like me. Lay down in bed and the fart fan comes on. You're like me.

Just, you know, load up all the sensors. We'll figure it out later. You know, I was telling you before the show, I'll probably put a little, you know, tile up all the sensors. We'll figure it out later. You know, I was telling you before the show, I'll probably put a little, um, you know, tile on the dashboard that, you know, if my wife ever complains, you know, I got no sleep this week, I'll say, actually based on this tile, you've spent 40 hours in bed this week. So I don't know what it is. You're not getting there. Yeah. I've, I've wanted one of these bed sensors for a while. We have them in the security world.

We use it for assisted living, though. And so we use it underneath chairs or couches or beds or anything like that. And so that way the caretakers can know if the person got out of bed. But there's not really an easy way to add those to Home Assistant. You can make your own bed sensors by using like contact sensors and stuff like that. I don't want to make my own thing. I want to just buy something. So that's, I got that.

And then I've started working on the garden. It's, it's only, it's still winter time, but I tend to get a very late start on the garden every year. And this year I'm determined not to get a late start. And so I've already started the seed ordering process. I've got to build some new garden beds. And I've got to contact our friend Maxwell over at Aquaflower because I need to buy one of those new Aquaflowers. They're coming out with them, I think, March for the release date.

And I need to get one because that was super nice to have. So if you got any suggestions on things you like to grow, maybe you should send me an email at feedback at hometech.fm. Let's see what garden setups you guys are going to do. I'd give you a suggestion, but I don't think it's legal there yet. Is it? Is it weed? I think you can grow one or two plants, right? Well, so we can grow six, but Republicans are trying to take that away right now.

Oh, of course. Of course. Can't have freedom here. But yeah, we have some seeds. I need to try that, but I haven't got that far. Just be warned. They grow really fast. Grow like weed.

Yeah. Yeah. Not that I know or anything, but I'm just saying. Not that you would know. Yeah. Well, that's all I got going on this week. What do you got going on, Gavin? Yeah, Gavin.

What's going on? You guys are doing like real projects and stuff. Oh, man. Like, all right, let's take it back to tech a bit here. First of all, you know, I was debating whether I'd actually talk about this or not, but I was like, screw it. TJ probably said something that will upset people anyways by now so you know they won't remember this but i want to give my honest opinion of this home avoid home assistant voice now that i've had it for a week and i've been playing with it and stuff right gavin gavin you can't you can't do this you can't say anything

bad you can't know you know what sometimes you have to say something bad for good to come out of it. And this is one of those situations where I just have to say, I don't like it. You know, straight out. I don't like it. I can't, I can't, I can't use it. It's unusable to me. So, okay. Where do I even start?

Wow. Yeah. Like, like, like where do I see? Yeah. Yeah. Like a ringing endorsement from Gap. No, you know, you, you, you, you know, why where do I see? Yeah. Yeah. Like a ringing endorsement from gap. No, you know, you, you, you, you know, why is because I've seen all these people online doing the reviews and saying, it's the greatest thing ever.

And people saying, I'm going to buy 10 of these for my house and blah, blah, blah. No, you can't. No, it's not like I'm seriously like there's problems with this thing. First of all. Yeah. For basic control, you know? Yeah. I can say, Hey, blah, blah, blah. And then wake it up and tell it to turn on the lights or whatever.

And I always find that the first time it doesn't really catch me. And the second time it does, I'm like, all right, whatever. Okay. So basic stuff, it works. Okay, great. It's fast. Yeah. It's local. Okay. But I want it to do more than that. My current speakers do a lot more than that. You know, as dumb as, as much as people complain about a lady, I can ask her about current events and stuff. I didn't get certain answers, right? That, so I actually decided to connect it to my Olam assistant, my Olam set up, right? So I can get some more, you know, better answers. Well, for some reason it was like crashing my Olam, right? So I'm like, what the heck is going on? It took me forever to figure out that when it communicates with the Olam, it seems to send over all the data from all the

entities over so Olamah can do it. And that's too much for Olamah. Olamah cannot handle that many entities and that much data. So I had to cut all the entities back and now I have to really restrict what it has access to. And I'm just like, and then it was doubling the memory in olama and like it was just costing me more money so that was the first thing that was really you know ticking me off right because you know even when i do connect it to olama i still it still isn't as good as asking the a lady for for stuff because olama won't reach out to the internet and get current events and stuff like that you know like if i want to know who's playing in the super bowl today i can't ask my home assistant you, so it's not replacing my other speakers.

Can't ask me either, evidently. But the one, the one thing that really drives me nuts and is the reason why I cannot use this, right. And I know people are saying, well, it's just a preview edition and it's just whatever they want to call it. You know, that's the one thing about Home Assistant is everything's always in beta. And that feels like how they cover their butt. Like, how long has the Matter integration been in Home Assistant? It's still beta, you know? It's all preview edition.

To be fair, Matter is a beta. It's going to keep being a beta. So, yeah. But this one thing really drives me nuts. I cannot use this thing if there is any sort of noise playing in the background, right? So when I have my TV playing in the background, I can ask the A-lady whatever, and she hears and she filters out my voice. And that's what a million dollar, billion dollar company gets you, a nice thing that

can hear you properly. With this thing, I would wake it up, say whatever, and it will still keep listening because it hears the TV or it hears the music and it will still keep listening because it hears the TV or it hears the music and it's still listening. It just won't stop. And I can, I have to turn off the volume to everything and be in a quiet room to be able to talk to this thing that makes it totally useless for me because how often is your room constantly quiet? You know, it's never constantly quiet and I cannot use it. And I know they've, they said they show things where if you have it playing music, it will lower the volume of the music and filter out your voice. It's got to filter out your voice from everything else around the room.

And again, that's what a billion dollar gets you with the Amazon stuff. It does that type of stuff. This, I can't use it because I'm not going to stop my TV and turn out and make the room quiet. Anytime I want to control it, it just makes it pointless. So they have a long way to go. I'm not saying they'll never get there. You know, I just think if you're looking at this as a replacement right now, really think about it. Cause those reviews online really misled me as to how good this thing was.

And I don't know if they're getting paid for it. I don't get paid for this. I, if they want me to say good things about this, I'm willing to take a pay payday. You can put me on your payroll. I don't mind the free open source software place. Yeah. Like I can be bought easily. Don't worry.

We'll have a website set up soon where you can purchase me for an hour at a time if you want. But I, that's my honest review. And I had to, I had to go there with this because, you know, people, you know, I feel I'm doing my job. If I give you an honest review of things, you know, um, and I'll probably upset some people and they'll probably reply and send me messages. You know, I was probably wrong, wrong about something, but you know, this thing, I can't

use it. You know, if we're going get cancelled yeah that's I mean I'm in Canada I'm protected by the US Army so Amazon Amazon has a a pretty large

budget like machine learning yeah well a budget yeah for sure but I don't even remember like a lot of these companies like Google and Amazon

started making products like audio products way back in the day like google remember google had like google voice yes and they would use it to like transcribe voicemails for a while they were like it got really good at learning what a voice sounded like so they have all these like um they built up the software about it and then they they also were like you know what we can probably do this uh on the hardware side so they i mean they have like these trained machine learning things that they have i think amazon's called voice focus um you can actually use that it's a it's a software product they offer so you can like spin up an ec2 instance and um process some audio using their their their

model it's pretty much what they what they use on it but they have it like built a smaller model of it built in on the uh the echoes i'm sure yeah uh without having to go back out but that's not maybe they don't that maybe they don't that's i don't know that's not the part that that that that that upsets me though it's like all these reviews you read of people just giving it the like five star review. And it's like, listen, do you really use this thing? Probably not. Yeah. You know, do you really use this thing?

You know, like I've only had it for, this would be the second week I've had it, you know, and I've probably, I can't use it. Like I've tried and I cannot use this thing. Right. It's working. I got it working. Um, when I did, I accidentally turned on every switch in my house at one point. I still don't even know why I did that, but it's, it's just, yeah, I'm not a fan. Um, they have a lot of room to grow and I will continue to watch it, see where they

go with this, but there's some key usability issues for me with this. So I just felt I had to give my honest opinion. I feel better now. This is a safe space. This is a safe space. Get that off his chest and the next one's worse. The Home Assistant Army is going to come after us now. Yeah.

And I'm fine with that because- I'm not even going to publish this episode. We're getting canceled. I'm good with that. I'll take the heat. Nobody listens to this show anyway. So, but going into a, you know, and this is going to shock a lot of people, right? This shocked me.

Yeah. Still shocks me. Yeah. So this week I decided to, you know, take a look again at the Unify Protect setup and the cameras and everything. So, you know, I have it on my Dream Machine pro and I was like, all right, let me, let me order a couple of the unify. What are the G five cameras?

They're nice little cameras too. Right. And let me just. A G four instant. Yeah. Yeah. That one. Yeah.

And they're, they're really nice cameras. You know, they're, they're well built, you know, they feel solid, you know, you just plug them in and whatever. And I was like, all right, let me, let me try out this protect thing that, that, you know, Seth and TJ has always been talking about how good it is. Right. And I plugged these cameras in and instantly it shows up easily ads. They're good to go. I'm like, great. Then I started playing around with all the settings. All right. Unify protect is the real deal right now. That's all I have to, you know, that that's, I was just Mic drop. Yeah. So the third party camera integration to me is the game changer of this.

And one of the reasons why I never looked at it because you were kind of stuck with their gear and what they had and they didn't necessarily have the best cameras out there. And I understood that, but, you know, I didn't want to invest in buying all their cameras again and still not having the best experience with it. Right. But their software has come so far in terms of offering detection for people, cars, animals. Right. Which is basically what I've been doing in Blue Iris, writing a script to filter all the, you know, potato and stuff. It detects down into people, car animals. Right.

The audio detection, you know, the recording, the interface is so much better than Blue Iris, which we all, anything's better than Blue Iris in terms of an interface, right? Netscape's better interface than Blue Iris is, but it's just, it is such a good product with all the features. You have line crossing, you have, you know, and the one part that blew me away was the integration with Home Assistant is so, it's so good. Everything's exposed to Home Assistant. You can write animations based on all this stuff, pretty much stuff that I was doing in Blue Iris. And I started looking at my setup going, why do I even have Blue Iris anymore? That's what we've been asking for a long time.

I was so crazy. You guys have been talking about this for a while and again it's ever since they opened it up to they've been opening it up to third party stuff is when i started looking at it again but you guys suck at selling stuff that's all i have to say you know you didn't talk it up enough you guys just said yeah it's pretty good it's got a good interface but no you have to sound more excited you know like like add some emotion to when you're selling stuff. Right. And that's what you guys lacked is the emotion that didn't get me excited to go try it, you know, but now I see what you guys are talking about. You know, if you sign up for my course, I'll have you selling this

easily. Right. But the integration is awesome. Um, of course it works great with their cameras, the, the, the setup of their cameras and everything. It works great. Um, I've been playing with the third party camera, so I just added them directly. Um, and you know, for what it is, it's just recording and that's, that's great. Just view and record. Most of my cameras are just recording or not recording. It's just meant for live stuff. Right. And I've ordered an AI port. It should be coming soon where I'll play with it. That gives it all the AI smarts on a third party camera. So that will bridge the gap. Um, my plan this year, I put together a new plan. I'm calling it project unify. I'm going to be redoing my, my camera setup at home and I'm going to be moving

everything over to unify. Um, for the most part, I'm going to be moving everything over to Unify. Um, for the most part, I'm still waiting for TJ to come to Canada, run all my POE lines, right. Um, I'll be putting in, you know, mostly as many Unify cameras as I can, like in terms of their brand, but for some cameras, I'm going to want to look for a better camera with better like night vision and stuff like that. And that's what I'll use the port for is those cameras. Because, you know, I understand that there's some cameras out there that are way better than Unify when you want to pick up things at night, especially. And that's what I want to do.

So I'll use the port for those. And it will still give me the nice interface, the integration, everything I wanted. It's all built into it. I don't know how else to talk this thing up but it's come a long way it's looking really good it's not cheap so i guess that's the other argument right there is people go with blue iris because they buy cheap cameras and you know you're you're but my blue iris setup was going into like getting video cards and ai processing and all that stuff which made it more more expensive. Right. Where, you know, like I'm still fighting with like snow triggers and stuff like that, where,

you know, at the unify, I'm thinking I'd be getting away from that. But, um, there's still things that I'm looking at, like before the show, I was looking at the API and seeing how I can get like, um, images into home assistant, you know, when it triggers. So I can do things like, like on my TVs. Um, I have it pop up when there's motion in certain cameras and stuff like that. So there's certain things in my migration, but right now I have them both running. Right. And I still have like the unify will use as the interface in my blue Iris.

I still have running as like doing detections and stuff for most of the cameras. And they're, they're working hand in hand as I worked through this transition. Now I'm introducing the new app to, to the wife later tonight, you know, I created her account and everything. So she could view all the cameras and stuff. And the first thing she's probably going to say is this is so much nicer, you know, than any, than, than the blue Iris. And I get it. I get it. But this software has come a long way and it's looking really good. And I see why people like it. I really want to replace my doorbell soon with the unified doorbell. I want to, you know, get that going, you know? So TJ, you got to get things sorted out. I need you up here. I feel like, I feel like I have to defend myself here. Uh,

cause I feel like I've been slandered over here or something because I've always talked up ubiquity. I think ubiquity is camera software is the best where they suck though, is their cameras. Yeah. And so that's their, their cameras are, are good when you're in the more economical cameras.

So the $200 cameras are good enough. Uh, but then when you start getting the three or $400 cameras, they're not as good as the other three and $400 cameras are good enough. But then when you start getting the $300 and $400 cameras, they're not as good as the other $300 and $400 cameras. And also installing them is a pain in the butt. They have like the worst mounting hardware ever. Other than that, though, they are the best cameras in the field. And I will recommend them almost every single time unless somebody needs color night vision.

Which I want. Because color night vision is the one thing that some people want. And you need that in certain areas. Like our house, we have to because color night vision is the one thing that some people want and you need that in certain areas like our house. We have to have color night vision. When I moved in, we had ubiquity cameras everywhere, but they just, they couldn't see anything at night because it's so dark. Yeah. And even in my front, I'm going to want a really good camera that does license plate detection and stuff like that in my, in my front. So, you know, when I get to that point, I'm going to be leaning on you guys for recommendations and stuff like that. Once the wires is run, I could swap out the cameras as needed and do what I need.

Right. But, um, yeah, that I know some people are shocked because I was a big blue iris fan. I still am. It's very powerful software, but the unify I feel has caught up in terms of like a lot of their features. And again, the fact that they're opening it up to third-party cameras i think is a big thing yeah right um just because now you have options out there and you said you mentioned it's expensive like i don't know like the nvr the the

unvr is 300 bucks like in the grand scheme of things with the software you get i really don't think like that supports up to 18 4k cameras or 60 uh 1080p cameras i think at the grand scheme of things like that's a pretty well it depends because the unvr that's just one piece of your whole solution that you're gonna need for this now you just need that you can you don't even need you don't need anything other than the unvr don't you need poe a poe switch if you're gonna go all poe cameras and stuff like that right oh yeah yeah that's where you start to add up right is when you start getting it to poe switches and stuff like well sure you know sure but like say you you're in your situation where you already have the cameras like oh i'm talking about swapping out the blue software he's gonna get new cameras i going to be getting the POE switches. I want them all hardwired. You know,

Project Unify this year is going to cost me a lot of money. Yeah. But, you know, like, it's worth it. Well, I think, I really feel like,

and I kind of know, like, they have a bunch of products in the pipeline. And I'm really hoping that we see, like, they have to have a better night vision style camera.

On the way, yeah. On the way, yeah the way yeah i hope so that is that is the one thing that's missing yeah and maybe it'll get released before i get to that point right um but for now they don't have anything i like in that aspect so i got the port and i'll get you know i'll integrate my current camera setup. I eventually want to get those all swapped out. Right. And when you're looking at price, like I look at price a little differently. You may compare it to pro pricing and stuff like that, where I'm comparing it to like the lower end stuff.

I guess the cheaper stuff that. Yeah. You have Fos cam right now. Yeah. I'm comparing it to even the ring camera. Everything's high end. Yeah. Like it's, it, you get a little bit more, it's a little bit more expensive than the do-it-yourself stuff,

but not as expensive as the pro stuff. So it's that middle ground. It's a nice middle ground for what you're getting, I think. I think the most apt comparison for Ubiquiti really is the Sonos ecosystem, right? You can buy cheaper speakers. you can buy cheaper cameras, but yeah, you're paying for the experience and you're paying for the ecosystem. Yep.

Well, and I, I don't, I, their, their cameras are one, like, I think their cameras are overpriced,

uh, for what, for definitely the image and what you get out of them. Like I'm looking at this, uh, let's just say the G5 Turret Ultra. That's a 2K HD camera. It's $129.

That's not bad. Yeah, that's actually not a terrible price. It's really just when you get into their higher-end cameras. It's like the AI Pro and the AI Turret and stuff like that. It's like $500 for an AI Pro, and I know that that IR is garbage. Yeah, and it's like 82-foot IR range, three-timed optical zoom. So, I mean, it's not a bad ir range three timed optical zoom so i mean it's not bad camera but for 500 yeah but but when you're designing the layout too you gotta look at

what the purpose of that camera is gonna be too right so if you want something to do license plate detection in the front of the house detect you know people at night and stuff like you invest in a better camera and it's not gonna be a a unified camera, you know, it, whereas like, if you just at the front door, you don't need something that sees 20 feet out. You just need something that sees two feet out in front. So you don't need to invest in something there. And same with your backyard. If you have something pointed just at your back door, you know, you don't need something

that can see 30 feet out, you know, maybe IR is just good enough too for that, where it's going, you know? So I will be looking at that when I look at my camera decisions, but I'm going to try and get as many as the Unify. But then again, when I need really detailed stuff, I'm probably, like I said, for my driveway, that's what I'm going to probably invest in. Something with the starlight or after seeing your starlight camera in the backyard that you had. Oh, that's old. Starlight. I know.

Starlight's first generation. But even when I saw that, I was so blown away at the night quality when you had, it was total pitch dark out there. And it was like, it looked like it was daylight out almost. I was so amazed that I'm like, I want that. Yeah. You know. It's well worth it. Yeah.

Yeah. I have to imagine that Unify has something on the radar, the radar that they've got. I mean, there's such a, a forward looking company. Like I, they've got,

and they seem to be investing in more of their products these days. Like even in, even in the camera lineup, I'm looking at this, the, the AI LPR, which is your license plate camera you're looking for. But there was the, the other one, the AI LPR, which is your license plate camera you're looking for. Yes.

But there was the other one, the AI Enhancer, which is $180 add-on for that AI bullet camera we were talking about. It adds integrated radar for detection of people up to 20 meters away and vehicles up to 35. It's got a built-in floodlight. That's crazy and it's and a loudspeaker as well if you want to start i guess yelling at people on this thing i don't know get off my lawn it's really funny uh but anyway like they they they have a bunch of uh they have a bunch of cameras here that i they're they're they're a little overpriced, but if you're looking at them from the pro space, I guess they're almost competitively priced at this point. I can kind of look sideways and see what they're doing, but as a pro, I can still buy much cheaper cameras, much better features that will probably honestly last longer than these.

It's disappointing to see them do that but i don't know they've got all these little add-ons and everything it is a good ecosystem yeah um i think the ecosystem really takes it right in the interface and i really have to plan out the hd 2k 4k stuff because when it comes to the um dream machine pro you're still limited on the resources and how much you know of the cameras you can get. And I already got a notification that I was almost exceeding the max at this point. Right. And that was just because I have a couple of extra cameras that I'm testing with.

But when I, if I do get a 4k camera or whatever, and put it in the front that I'm going to have to cancel like two other cameras or may have to even upgrade and get the, the UNVR or something like that to handle more cameras. So we will see where this takes me, but this is my plan. I've been really happy with the UNVR. One thing I, I really hope they do in whatever, maybe it'll be the UNVR AI is they built in the, you know, some, some of the AI add on products. Yeah. Yeah. The AI key and stuff like that. Yeah, build something into it. Maybe they'll make it a $400, $499 product like the UNVR Pro.

I don't know. I think they definitely have something they could do. If you open one of those up, there's no guts to them. They're just all all like hard drive trays and like tiny little board in there for a computer. So like there's plenty of space in these cases that they make to put fun stuff, but you know, they haven't had to.

And it still makes, it's still a nice product. I've been, like I said, I've been really happy with that versus other software. And maybe not even Blue Iris, but other software like I've been really happy with that versus other software. And maybe not even Blue Iris, but other software like I've used and other like hardware in VRs. I have the Uniview in VR that came with these cameras that they sent. Like, it's okay. It's a Chinese made in VR.

The software is meh. And like, I got it to the point where I can look stuff up and kind of like look at the live feeds, look at the, the, the, the replays and that kind of thing. It's just not as, it's nowhere near as nice as a user experience. Right. And there's a lot more to it with my decision to like integration with home assistant, for example, and stuff like that. And the AI detections, like there's a lot to it that blue iris can do but this is now seems to make it so much easier and better yeah yeah all right well welcome to the fold i i'm not gonna i'm not gonna bad talk blue iris yet because i haven't broken up with her yet

but um i will you know say the plan is you know like the relationship's coming close to an end you know i may not renew my subscription an end, you know, I may not renew my subscription. We'll see. This is like when you switched from Hubitat to Home Assistant. Oh man, yeah. It feels like a monumental change. It was like, I may just leave my blue iris on with one camera just to feel like, you

know, keep that connection there, you know, we'll see. Cause I remember switching off of Hubitat and, you know, I still had it plugged in and I could see the green light and, uh, you know, I felt bad every time I looked at it, you know, it was not flickering or anything, you know,

you know, but then the day came when I had to turn it off and then, you know, she's with, uh, another partner now. So, you know,

like, uh, I found her a new, new, new guy and maybe I'll have to do that with my blue Iris, you know, just find a, you know, kind of move on. Yeah. No.

I just, I went to one of their other tabs on here and I was looking at the, does anybody remember the power amp? I haven't heard much about that recently. I see a couple of photos pop up on the Ubiquity website, but. Yeah, it still exists, but I haven't heard anything about this thing. Well, I assume that the market for people using hardwired speakers is already very small. So I don't think we're going to hear much about these anyway. I really think they missed the mark completely on this by not doing an 80 volt or a 70 volt version of it for a commercial. That is weird.

Completely missed the market. Should have had a 70 volt. Yeah. Oh, well. Maybe that's why the dial is removable. So that way you can switch it. It's removable switch it to the wasn't the power wasn't that power i announced recently too like it was like six months ago or something yeah it was back at cd a time frame yeah like right around then i totally forgot about it yeah five five months

ago six hundred dollar power amp for two speakers or four speakers, I guess, technically, but don't think so. Well, that's fun. So I know you're in shock. I know you're in shock. I am. I am actually in shock. They also, Gavin, you also have the option. Is it free? Don't mention it unless it's free. No, no, no, no. It's not free, but you can, you can order the U-NAS Pro and use their Ubiquiti NAS drive. I free but you can you can order the unas pro and use their ubiquity nas drive i think maybe you can store some uh camera stuff on there i don't know maybe you can't no no you can't no no you can um the protect has a feature in it where it can export um recordings to a nas or something that that's something new i think they recently okay i was gonna say that wasn't how much

i dove into this is that i know these new features now right recently okay i was gonna say that wasn't how much i dove into this is that i know these new features now right but they added a new feature where you can export to a nas because i was looking at exporting videos to my unread uh you know free up space on on the drive so they they have they've been doing a lot with the software yeah well you'll have to keep us updated so what they they're updating in the software that tj and i've been running happily for years yeah i'm still confused how you didn't think we were talking it up but i'll let it go for now i guess no no no you were talking it up you guys just didn't give me that kind of like feeling like um you know like you guys weren't

talking up to the point where it's like, I got to really get in on this. You know? No, you guys are just like, yeah, it's a better option, you know? And stuff, you know? No, when you talk up stuff, you know, you got to get me excited, you know? What's the last nerdy thing you have to get rid of? Is it like the HTPCs? Is that what the last?

Those I will never get rid of because I do way too much on those. I mean, that's what you say now. You said you never get rid of blue iris like a year ago. So competition, I do way too much on my HTPCs right now throughout my whole house. Just wait, just wait till the Sonos streaming box comes out.

You never know. I don't know because my HTPCs, I can, I can sync a video on multiple TVs in my house at the same time. So, you know, like, no, like that's through my MB and Kodi and stuff like that. So, but yeah, that is one of my nerdy things I still have running that you guys probably don't approve of. This time next year, Gavin's not going to use those anymore.

I have to upgrade all the PCs because they can't handle Windows 11 and the Windows 10 is falling out of support. So, you know, I'm going to be upgrading those too. Expensive year this is. Maybe I won't go to CES. Sale of stuff you won't be able to buy. Yeah. Because you don't have any more money. Yeah.

But I want to go to CES just so we could do a show with Richard. Yeah. Because you don't have any more money. Yeah. But I want to go to CES just so we could do a show with Richard. Yeah. You know, I felt missed out, you know, like I want to do a live show with Richard too. And we can say we're pressed so we can get in early. Yeah, exactly. If they'll believe us. Go to those fancy dinners he was talking about. That's, that's, that's, I was like, Richard's been to enough CESs where he knows which, which things to go to.

He was even, he was even like helping out the home assistant crew, like which ones to go to. So like, yeah, I think, I think he's the one, he's the one to go with. Next year, next year. It's going to happen. Yeah. We made it to CDS. So, I mean, we got to make it to CES. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. I'm trying to figure out how to add storage onto my Unify thing. Oh, if you go into, if you go into GavinAsAService.com, you can hire me. If you're under your protect, it's under, is it settings? There's like a storage manager and a recording manager now. That's kind of the new thing. Managed storage. Where did I see this again?

Console backups. No, integrations, no. It's under recording manager. Nope, storage manager. Where the hell is it again? Archiving. Linked accounts. Nope, continue archiving.

Nope, I don't think that's it. There's a way you can add NAS drive as an archive area. I just can't figure out where it is again. That's one thing they're still juggling. They still have things in workplaces. Their settings are a mess everywhere.

Yeah. And it's better now that they don't have the old interface prominent a lot of times, but I find their settings confusing a lot of times. Oh, I clicked on it the other day and I was looking at it. Uh, control plan.

What else can we get Gavin into so he can figure it out for us? Hmm. He's going to be clicking around all night looking for this. I saw, I was looking at it like today or yesterday. I was looking at it cause i was like oh oh here it is i found it i found it i found it where is it so under your it's under this is crazy under the gear for the settings right yeah you go to systems and then archiving and then add an account and

then it's got nas drive there you go so it's not it's not under anything else it's not under the recording manager yes that's it so now but that's in it it's not recording to a nas drive but it's not under anything else it's not under the recording manager yes that's it so now but that's in it it's not recording to a nas drive but it's archiving so you can have it move old stuff off onto google drive one drive dropbox or your nas this is what i was looking at well i mean and that could be that could be um that could be kind of what you want yep in in fact because you don't really need to like look if there's something really old you can you know you can go back and look on it but like i mean what do you need for longer than a week you know unless you're out of town for that week or something and you want to find out what

happened you can go back and look but well with my with how many cameras do i have set up in here right now 14 i think it is um and most of them are just playing with but it says capacity of 67 days and all of those cameras are constantly recording and it's a three terabyte drive it has continuous archiving automatically upload and store camera recording events in real time so yeah yeah so it's built in now yeah so yeah you can you can get their nas drive and you can just uh or you can just use your uh unraid and just create a share app app. See, I taught you guys something today, and I feel good about that. I knew they were doing this for Google Drive and whatnot, but I didn't realize they had added the NAS.

Yeah, that's new as of 5.2, I think. Okay. Well, great job. Great job, Unify. Good job. What's a recovery code? Oh, my God. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in here.

I'm still learning. Report false detection. You don't want to report anything. I'm not a narc. Alright, well I think that's going to wrap up everything this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page,

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That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.