HomeTech.fm - Episode 516 - Barney as a Theater

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

On this week's show: Unifi drops their new SuperLink IoT gateway, Sonos makes headlines with executive changes and weird canceled products, we discuss the future of smart appliances, answer some letters from the mailbag, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day. From Sarasota, Florida, it's Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. Gavin, I am so sorry. What, what?

I know you probably don't hear that from Americans, but man, that was brutal. That was brutal on Sunday. Like, look, we kind of knew he was going to do it, but like, I didn't think he was going to do that. And I'm sorry. I mean, poor Drake. Just don't ever mess with Kendrick Lamar.

If you write one little lyric in your song five, ten years ago or whatever it was, he will literally take that lyric and he will become the greatest rapper, get all these Grammys, go to the Super Bowl, and then make your girlfriend's crip walk and make fun found it. Like, what in the? Okay, okay, okay. You're looking at it from one side.

The way us Canadians look at it is we got a free 10-minute advertisement for Drake and his new album on the Super Bowl halftime. We did not pay for it. We did nothing but 10 minutes long. And at the peak, 133 million people watched it and they all know about this drake guy and his album's coming out friday so there you go who won there i don't know i don't think drake still won oh man that was bad the serena serena williams thing i just it was not expecting that i fell out of my chair on that one and then

and then the little smile at the end i was like okay i still think he took it a little too far though oh yeah he took it way too far he's taking it way too far already that was that was back there the way i said it this is what rap is about you gotta take that you gotta take the beefs and just get it out you know obviously drake is taking up some space in his head right now drake needs to pay rent for the amount of space he's taking up in kendrick's head right now because kendrick obviously has issues about this thing it's like the guy's already dead and buried you know you're like what else you try to do like you know like really like but 10 minute free advertising at the super bowl halftime you know yeah there you go actually

found a funny reel on facebook regarding this i forgot to send this to you earlier but uh you know i'll put it in our back channel it's and it's it's pretty short it's it's and i think they ai made it too but it and it's got kendrick performing and then drake watching it turning off his tv of course and then uh going on and just hopping in a grave and being buried. That's what I saw that one do. You know it's serious when the New York Times, the Daily Podcast, they did a whole episode on the Not Like Us

and what it meant and everything like that. I was like, this is great. This is bringing Not Like Us to a whole new level. Everybody's going to know about this now. That was a great performance. I enjoyed it it's a great performance and lots of layers to it lots of super like i mean it was almost like watching uh like the the the hamilton musical where like there's like all of these layers behind the music and what they're saying on the stage and what they're performing what they're doing like kind of this like how

they're dressed like it was the same thing and you it in a Superbowl halftime show with good music. Like, I mean, wow. Like, I don't think, I don't think anybody's done anything like that at one of the shows. There's been some really awesome performances at Superbowl, uh, shows, but I don't think anybody's done anything like that. That was, that was wild. One of my favorites was still, I'm going to probably date myself here, but still like when they had um 50 cent and all those guys performed was that last years no it was like two or three years ago yeah because that was like you know la they have an la yeah yeah i remember that one or the michael jackson when he performed the halftime show prince in the rain well when justin timberlake did something that all of us men

appreciated. Just ripped it right off. Yep, just ripped it right off. Those were some of my favorite Super Bowls. I wasn't a fan of this one because it's a little younger music, people music. I'm still living in the 90s. That happened. I actually had a TiVo

at the time. My wife was like, what just happened? What just happened? And so, so we were, you know, we're like, and we're like,

and we're like, wow. Okay. And of course, of course it records it like what, like six 40 by four 80 resolution. So you couldn't make out or see anything on the horrible 27 inch TV. But the thought of it there.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, like, yeah. It would have been a different story with today's TVs, recording methods, 4K technology, HDR. You know, it would have been a completely different story. But yeah, that was, and then, you know, run over to the internet and see what the internet's saying. And the massive fallout from that. Yeah. AI enhanced, you know, run over to the internet and see what the internet's saying and the massive fallout from that. Yeah.

AI enhanced, you know. Can you imagine that happening today? Wow. Horrible game, though. It's just a horrible game. It was the worst I've seen Kansas City play. I think the Eagles just figured them out. That's the way it is, you know.

I wish it was a closer game. So it'd be a little more exciting, but whatever. They, they should make those guys, they should make them like back in the old days, like the quarterback was the coach type thing. Like they were the leader and they were just,

just at, at when they get to the Superbowl, what they should do is just say, okay, no coaches. You're calling the shot. You've run this all season. You know how this rolls.

Like you call the shots. You figure it out. And they don't get to do anything. The coaches have to go in the back room or something and watch it on TV or something. You know, that's a great idea. That's an executive order. We should get Trump to sign. Yeah, make him do that.

Instead of like Golf of America, do this. Make sports fun again. Yeah. The coaching was too good i guess i mean they've figured they figured each other out and you see that happen all the time where like somebody watches the tapes and somebody doesn't watch the tapes and then like do you get a horrible game out of it so i don't know i really wish the game was better because i mean when it's 40 to nothing i'm like i'm i want to i want to go watch severance i want to i want to do something else i don't want to watch this anymore and my wife is like no what if there's a good commercial and guess what there weren't any good commercials

either you know when it gets to a point i'm doing like division in my head and i gotta write it down and carry over numbers to figure out how many touchdowns they have to get to tie the game. You know, the one thing is, uh, that really upset me, you know, in the last, uh, minute or so of the game, like we had, you know, we had a little pool going with square set up and, you know, the score was perfect for me to win the pool. I was like, yes, win the pool. All you gotta do is kick the one point convert, you know, extra point. We're good. And they decided to go for two.

No reason why they just decided to go for two no reason why they just decide to go for two i'm like no they hit the two i lost out on a chunk of money that ticked me off well you know i didn't make any money off of it either because you know i didn't bet on anything but you know had i ever probably lost enough money not to go to ces so there we go oh yeah ces i gotta start saving up for that yeah now now that you lost all the money yeah i'm not gonna be able to come to us next year though don't worry yeah we're not really gonna have a passport system set up honored or by next year will we just be able to freely go across is it no longer a border it's just you know

like everything's just wide open by next year. Who knows? Who knows? No one knows. I don't know. Maybe they'll figure it out. Yeah. I'm going to go shovel some driveways to make some money for next year.

It's a good idea. It's a good idea. All right. Well, we did have some home technology news this week that popped up. So what do you guys say? We jumped into these home tech headlines. Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right. Uh, new product from Ubiquity. We have a new system protocol. I don't know what you want to call this thing. They've got a new thing called super link and it's a new long range unify protect the gateway that connects sensors with Bluetooth and a sub gigahertz frequency for extended wireless coverage.

They have launched a bunch of products here. Siren, a glass break sensor, environment sensor, alarm control, a superlink gateway, which is the only thing that's available now. Relay, air quality, smoke, fob and alarm hub. All those will be coming out maybe later this year sometime. Who knows? But the SuperLink is this interesting little device that has an antenna on it, powered by PoE, it looks like. It's designed to support sensors up to a 2-kilometer line-of-sight range

and has extended battery life. It will support up to 96 Superlink sensors and seven legacy what they call up since ble devices so they've got a bunch of little like door and window sensors out there still um that you could use ball or din mail din rail mount for the gateway like i said all the other stuff's coming later in this year but uh well we've got a nice little, looks like IoT solution coming from Unify. Looks pretty interesting. What do you guys think? Yeah, it does look pretty interesting.

There's no real word on what wireless technology uses. It appears from the FCC documents as using 915 and 928 range for megahertz, which is kind of LoRa RAM. That's 100% LoRa. So 915 is going to be the US. I think the other ones are out of use. Yeah.

So which makes sense with the long distance and everything. It looks like a pretty nice system, honestly. The issue with a lot of smart home devices like ZigBee and Z-Wave, specifically Z-Wave, is that you have to add repeaters to get to a lot of places. And you can use theee and Z-Wave, specifically Z-Wave, is that you have to add repeaters to get to a lot of places. And you can use the long range Z-Wave that just came out.

However, I've heard from people like Gavin that it doesn't always work as advertised for the long distance. And when you go into the long range for that, you cannot use repeaters anyway. And so you're kind of limiting yourself. This appears to be Laura, which is really good. The long distance is going to be nice, and especially for those commercial properties, or maybe you have a widespread building or something. This would be good. They're advertising it for homes. The way I see these sensors, though, these don't look like home sensors to me.

They look like they were commercially focused. I don't know if Ubiquiti is going to come out and directly say it's for commercial use because they don't really do that that much. But these sensors, I don't really see these being in the house. The weirdest thing about this though is that they are launching the hub now for $129, but they're not releasing any of the sensors until later this year. I'm not really sure. I know they're going to sell these, but I'm not really sure who's buying the hub with no sensors to use.

Yeah, there's a bunch of Ubiquiti nerds that will. But that part is really weird to me. At least give me a door sensor with it or something. It'll be sold out before the weekend. Should I not have ordered my hub i thought this was really cool i was really upset because it was the announced the day after i just dropped a whole bunch of money on my unified stuff but i'm okay with that this is i like their designs i always thought they were they really good designs and stuff like that um

i want to see how it integrates with Home Assistant. It may be a nice little add-on for the smart home, depending on how well it works. Like, does the gateway require their other hardware or is it something that could sit independently and we could tie it into Home Assistant? Because getting that smoke alarm fills a little gap out there. I know we have some smoke alarms out there, but adding another one is it's such a small market you know um i'll take a look at this when it comes out it looks interesting yeah i agree i'd like to see a full product line i think this is just the beginning too right like they came out with a bunch of devices but i have a feeling the way unify works they're just releasing product after product after product and i have a feeling we're

going to start seeing like water shut off valves or something like that eventually who knows i i yeah well maybe i i think this is a great it always has been like a great product for what i would consider like a small to medium-sized business especially if they have like the alarm stuff and if you could well i't know, it doesn't look like you can integrate much of the alarm stuff into like a monitoring solution, right? Maybe you can, I'm not sure. It doesn't look like they have thought that far through, but a lot of that stuff now has APIs, right? There's plenty of those API alarm services out there. So all they have to do is build that integration in once they come out

with the alarm control panels and that kind of stuff so it will be interesting the the products the products are nice they're nice looking as usual and uh we'll link to the video where you can kind of take a look at them but yeah i don't i i'm tj i don't really see them ending up in in my house yeah i think it'll be the same people that buy like that was the E7 access point, like the stadium access point for like $500. I've seen a couple of people on the Ubiquiti forums

and subreddits that have that device in their house. And that's going to be the same people that buy this for their house. But other than that, like I could see my, I could see myself using this for my business customers.

Just to know when doors and stuff open or, you know, just basic automation stuff. And Ubiquiti always has a good interface. So this isn't going to be something like I buy, like I would use YoLink, for example, for some kind of LoRa situation. But that's not really like a professional setup, right? You know, this is a nice professional setup.

Yeah, I hit pause on the screen here to take a look at these. I don't know. The smoke detector looks nice. The siren would fit in anywhere. The alarm hub looks like it takes a bunch of contacts into it or something. It looks like it has a bunch of sensors and relays. Yeah, a bunch of relays, yeah. Yeah.

That's probably for actual wired contacts. Yeah. Motion detectors. I don't know. The devices themselves just look more industrial to me. I don't know they just the the devices themselves just look more industrial to me i don't know the motion detector looks nice it's kind of like a little stick of gum or something like that and it looks like they do have some entry like door sensors that do look a little bit nicer so i i'm gonna wait and see yeah i mean ubiquity makes nice

stuff so yep a little key fob i wonder there's a thing called alarm control and a. Wait and see, yeah. I mean, Ubiquiti makes nice stuff, so. Yep. A little key fob. I wonder, there's a thing called alarm control and a fob, and I wonder what the difference is between those two things. So we'll have to find out. Well, so this reminds me of like a traditional security system. The alarm control is basically just like a push button for like emergencies and stuff like that. Oh, it's like a panic button.

Yeah, where the fob you can use to trigger multiple things. Because we have those in the alarm world as well, and they literally look the exact same. four button fob yeah all right well there's a lot you could do with these relays and this equipment and i'm very curious as to what the product the price and the product it's not going to be like super inexpensive it's not going to be esp home level pricing right but it's going to look nice it's going to be ESP home level pricing, right? But it's going to look nice. It's going to be in a nice package.

And there's a lot you can do both inside and outside of a unified system with relays. Optimistic on this. Well, it's ubiquity. So it'll work most of the time. And when it fails, you don't cry. It'll be that perfect price point where... That's right. Barring that you bought the $500 Wi-Fi 7 access point or whatever it was. When it breaks, you don't care too much.

You toss it in the trash, you buy another one. The ubiquity way. All right, let's move on here. We have some big news out of Sonos. Another one is out. Sonos has announced the departure of Chief Marketing Officer Jordan Saxmard. Effective immediately, Saxmard, who joined Sonos in May 2024

from Dyson, struggled to align the company's mission and face challenges with the problematic app rollout. Lindsay Whitworth, a 20-year Sonos veteran, will temporarily lead the marketing team, signaling interim CEO Tom Conrad's commitment to stabilize the company by 2025.

The company is actively seeking or searching for a new marketing leader. So if you're in the market for a new job, you want to do some marketing for a problematic company, Sonos is there. They'll pay you. I like this. You know, Sonos definitely needs a shakeup. So I'm glad to see it finally happening. And I don't know who else we need to get rid of. Who else is on the way this. You know, Sonos definitely needs a shakeup. So I'm glad to see it finally happening. And I don't know who else we need to get rid of.

Who else is on the way out? You know, this is this is good news, though. This means that Sonos has actually taken this issue seriously for the longest time. Whenever this issue started popping up, Patrick Spence was out there doing his media lab saying, well, it's not that bad, guys. You know, this whole thing's just overblown. Everybody just needs to settle down. And it turns not that bad guys you know this whole thing's just overblown everybody just needs to settle down and uh turns out that was not correct yeah it was not overblown i feel bad kind of bad for this person because they're like they didn't join until may 2024 and that's like

right when all this like that's right when the app was like dropping right that's when they released the app it's literally the same time so i don't feel like they got the like that all this stuff would have been in in progress and they would have been talking about like rolling out within the next week like it's all their fault seth don't don't don't don't feel pity i i i just i don't know like i can't blame this person who showed up at the last minute and was like hey what's going's going on here? It looks like, it looks like you got some headphones we're releasing next month. Uh, maybe I should start working on that. Like, I don't know, from a marketing standpoint, it seems like, uh, it's not a good idea to get somebody who is new into the company. Uh, I don't know, maybe a month before you launch a major product, Patrick Spence. So maybe that's, maybe that's why he was the first out the door.

We don't know. Maybe this Jordan person pushed the Patrick Spence to launch the headphones. You know, like they were hired to come in and like talk Patrick Spence out of it. And they're like, no, no, no, this is a really good idea. You guys should do this. Yeah. I don't know. If you're out there, Jordan, you listen to the podcast, you should write in and let us

know. We'll have you on the show. You can tell your side. Anybody that's been fired from Sonos, you just call and let us know. I imagine they have a nice little parachute to land with. And they won't talk to us because there's an NDA or whatever. I don't feel like writing a song for this guy. No, those songs are for special people.

Speaking of firing everybody. All right. Well, let's move on well speaking of sonos and i mean i guess this kind of came out too in tandem with this story uh sonos recently explored the idea of a magsafe compatible speaker for iphones targeting gen z consumers uh the concept was similar to jbl's soundboost speaker or motor's Moto Z phones, but we've used Bluetooth audio for transmission since MagSafe doesn't have audio. It just says power. So they were going to use one of their fancy little Mate speakers,

have a little rectangular design. You'd stick like maybe a battery pack looking device on the back of your iPhone and get better sound of it. And I guess I'm glad they're not doing this i'm not sure doesn't seem like the right product especially especially when the iphone the sonos iphone app notoriously notoriously doesn't do anything it doesn't play it doesn't play audio like that's the problem fantastic app stuff it's a app you can get sonos radio through that you can't use when you're not in your sonos system. It's great.

This seems like a whole gimmick thing, so I'm glad they did not launch this. It sounds like a good idea for somebody like JBL or Anchor, you know what I mean? But not a Sonos. So, this one, whoever shelved this one, you get an A for effort. Well, if it was gonna play

audio through Bluetooth because, and not be like another Sonos device that has its own Wi-Fi stack and everything that you had to set up and configure and it just stuck to your phone for whatever. If you can do that, why not make your phone a Sonos Zone and then play Sonos music out of the phone so I can listen to it on the headphones that I already have without having to stop. That would be impossible in the Sonos world. Just because Roku does that doesn't mean Sonos can do that. It's impossible. All right. Bad idea, but there's a good idea in there.

I promise you there's a good idea in there somewhere. Sonos, keep digging. Keep digging. You'll find you'll find your way. MagSafe does not transfer data, which I did not know. It's only power. So you can do the handshake that way. At least have to do'll find your way. MagSafe does not transfer data, which I did not know. It's only power. So you couldn't do the handshake that way, at least. You have to do it some other way.

Yeah, which is why you need Bluetooth to transfer. Whatever. Anyway, moving on here. We had a nice little discussion story that popped up from The Verge entitled, Why Smart Home Devices Should Carry Software Support Expiration Dates. It's kind of a little summary here.

As smart home devices age and lose security updates, they become potentially targets for botnet attacks, posing risks for both home networks and national security. These attacks utilize networks of infected devices to execute distributed denial- service attacks, which disrupt services and crucial infrastructure.

And I don't know if you guys pay attention to those, but man, they are absolutely massive right now. And somehow these big CDN companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, they're able to like mitigate them. But holy cow, the amount of traffic that they are able to just summon and hit a website with these days is unbelievable. It's off the scale, unbelievable. So yeah, keep an eye on that. Consumer Reports reveals that over 40% of Americans are unaware their smart devices might lose software support, and nearly 70% believe smart appliances should continue functioning post-support.

Well, there you go. The report advocates for manufacturers to provide minimum guaranteed support timeframe for connected products disclosing this information at some point in the sale. I think we've been hammering on this drum for a while. Yeah. Gavin, what do you think about this? I think it's a good idea, but I don't know if we decided on what do we want to do with these devices after they've reached end of support, right? Like you're disappointed. What do you do with your refrigerator after three years and it doesn't have support?

Well, that's what I'm saying is like, if I'm buying a smart refrigerator and they're saying, oh, it's going to last, we're going to give you five years of support. What do I do with it after five years? Throw it away. You know, we need to figure out what it is that can be done. Like, are you being, are you going to be forced to build in a replaceable module into it so that you can get a new module that will be supported still? Are you going to just be cut off from the internet? Because I work in some of my job, I deal with security stuff and botnets are a scary thing and they are just

growing and growing in size because of all these devices that are running some you know flavor of an os that's no longer getting patched and you know and it's even just as bad because even when they do um have support not all of them are getting patched anyway right like people may cut it off from the internet or people may do this or people may do that or it doesn't get its patch like are they guaranteeing it's getting the latest patches and up to date i don't know what if the patch fails to install there's so many things i don't think you know these computers are being left out there, these devices. And yeah, they're just going to make the botnets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And they're making money for people because they're mining Bitcoin on them. They're doing all sorts of things on them. Here's a story I'll put in our show notes. It's the size of these things here. Cloudflare, this was on, just so you know how recent this was, this was on January 22nd, 2025. So this year, just a few

days ago, Cloudflare detected the biggest attack ever recorded. 5.6 terabits per second. It was directed at an internet service provider in eastern asia that that's unbelievable like uh that's crazy that they were able to even mitigate something

like that because it's what they're using is all of these tiny little iot devices they're using routers they don't have patched firmware that are sitting on the edge of the internet they'll get in there and just put a little botnet in them and just hammer these these smaller websites isps whatever and if they don't have something like cloudflare in front of them they they can go down pretty quickly this that staggering though. And it's probably going to reach a point where the botnet that you won't be able to stop this botnet. Right. Right.

Like they'll probably grow so big. And what happens if that botnet decides to target a major bank or something like that and take them down for the day? You know, there's so many, like these smart devices are going unpatched or that we need to do something about it. I don't know what I would do. I don't know what the decision is because I don't want to have to buy a new fridge every five years.

Right. That would be the worst thing. So do we force these companies? Like if you release a device, you have to support this device forever until, you know, like there's none out there anymore. Right. Right. As long as it can get online.

Like I think a couple of weeks back, you even said that you had like a refrigerator or something. You just discovered that, or what is this refrigerator washer dryer? No, it was my refrigerator that I just discovered it had, I was trying to do something else and it popped up access point enabled. And I was like, what the hell is this? I didn't know my refrigerator had an access point in it, but then I looked in the manual and there was a small blurb about, you know, getting

it online so I can, uh, you know, control the refrigerator, but I tried to do all that. But the app that it needs to connect no longer exists and every other app doesn't work. So there was nothing I could do with it, but it's, I guess it's a smart fridge that's, you know, expired now. Right. So good thing I don't have it on my network. I wasn't able to get connected to my network because I'm pretty sure it's no longer supported.

But what about all those other people that throw things on their network and never think about it again? Like they, they, they may throw it on their network and they never connect it to anything. It's just sitting on their network. They would never know it expired. And then one day it's,

you know, never gets updated. Yeah. And one day it's mining Bitcoin and making money for somebody else. Yeah. And unfortunately you can't really expect people to think about this stuff, right? I mean, nobody really thinks about their, their car, for example. Um, you do the maintenance on your car and that's it, but you don't really have to think about the software updates for your car or anything yet. Um, we're, we're getting there and that's, that But you don't really have to think about the software updates for your car or anything yet. We're getting there. And that's not something we should have to worry about. But we do have to figure something out

with these devices. Some sort of expiration date or some way to relay to the customer that, hey, after five years, six years, whatever it is, this is going to stop working. And then the manufacturer just needs to cut it off.

I mean, that's basically what needs to happen. But I mean, that's a stinky solution because then it means that there's more wasted devices, but they're already doing that anyway. So why not just make it out in the open and tell everybody how long it's actually going to last? So maybe that's the idea. You cut it off from the internet

and you put a notification on the panel for the fridge so that somebody will actually see, hey, what's this flashing red thing here? And they then know my fridge no longer gets updated. It's no longer able to connect to the internet and stuff like that. Yeah. I don't really see another solution around it, right? I mean, you can't expect companies to support everything forever. And so there already has to be a limit somewhere. And you can't expect people to go around disconnect their stuff whenever it's not working, because that's just

not how people operate. And there has to be a compromise. And we have to have some kind of standard and solution for it. I don't think you can, you can trust the manufacturers or the like owners of these equipment to actually do the right thing. Like clearly that we've, we've tried that. That's not working. I'm looking at this. There's 13,000 in unique source IP addresses that participated in this, but 13,000 devices out there that were hacked for this one botnet. This is just one botnet that just was triggered.

So 13,000 devices push that much data. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they must've been some major devices. I've seen larger number of devices. I believe 13,000. It says unique source IP addresses per second was 5, yeah. Oh, they must have been some major devices. I've seen larger number of devices, I believe. 13,000, it says, unique source IP addresses per second was 5,500,

and they were pushing 8 gigabits per second for each device. So it only lasted about 10 minutes, and that was the 5.6 terabytes. The average contribution of each IP address per second was around 1 gigabit. So some did more, some did less, you know, and the did the little IoT camera do too much? Maybe, maybe it did the one gigabit, but maybe something did more. Anyway, I'll link to these stories from from that you can go check out stuff out. It's wild to read about this or hear about it

and see like how and what was neat is like cloudflare detected this and it was like completely it was detected and like shut down completely autonomously like they they there was no human intervention that had to take place like the their systems are getting better too at detecting and removing these types of threats so that that's, that's nice too. But I think that on the other side of it, like they shouldn't, we shouldn't have this problem with the infrastructure, like in the first place. And a good step would be some kind of regulation to say like, hey, someone needs to take responsibility. A little bit of the manufacturer, a little bit of a person who bought it, a little bit of education would go a long way.

And, you know, make sure that there's a sticker on there that says five years of this works guaranteed. And, you know, if it stops working one day, you're going to lose all of these features. And that might bring an interesting end to some IoT practices. I got to say, like, you may uh refrigerators with uh touchscreens on them anymore if that's which is fine i mean what do we really need some of this stuff i mean as somebody who like who i'm gonna talk about some stuff later that like i don't necessarily need at all but like do we really need touchscreens on fridges i don't think so yes i don't see a point yes gavin watson what we don't need is these damn ice makers.

Hey, I have an ice maker. It hasn't broken yet, has it? It broke a couple of times. The zombie ice maker now. I also repaired it each time, but also I have removed its brain. It didn't really even need to be online. It just need to be on or off. And I can do that by pushing the button on the front of it.

So I don't know why it needs to be online. Like my ice maker cap. Oh, wait, you have one of those countertop ice makers i'm talking the ice maker in the fridge you know i'm talking about my oh yeah i hear those all sucks they're just gonna leak on you one day yeah i was looking at fridges and basically it was like don't if you're gonna buy a fridge buy one without a water maker or ice maker and i was like well that's what i want i did i did find one there was one years ago i don't know they probably still make it but it was like one brand that i was just gonna buy and it was like uh it made the like hawaiian ice like you can make snow cones out of your ice maker essentially oh yeah that's brilliant like give me that i will take my snow cone machine

then yeah there you go i'd rather have a separate device now like i think my future one will just be like because if i'm going to replace that, it's easy to just replace that, oh, ice maker, snow cone maker, blah, blah,

blah, instead of having to replace my whole fridge, you know? that's true. I mean, this sounds like

the same conversation we have about, like, camera systems, IoT devices, like, home automation systems. It's the same thing.

It's all separate. You want it all in one? You want it all separate. What do you want? It's funny. All right. Well, all the links and topics we all in one? You want it all separate. What do you want? It's funny. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight, you can find over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 516.

I got a couple of messages here in the mailbag. One from YouTube from TheSodfather09. So I'm guessing that he listens to the show for our moist soil talk. Likes grass. Yeah, likes grass. Says, is Gavin feeling okay? No way is UniFi better than Blue Iris. Blue Iris is 100% local and supports a lot more cameras.

And we talked about this a little bit before the show. Is that technically correct, but also technically not correct? I think UniFi is is 100 local as well like you can it can be yep blue iris is a dumpster fire that's all i'm gonna say okay it hurts me you know like it hurt me to come out last week and admit what i was saying right like it hurt you know father we're changing you gavin father of sod you know like i'm sorry if i offended you but i i found like in the end that use what it works for you but um i found that all the tweaks and everything i was doing on blue iris was to get it pretty much to work with what unify had come to

now right like it it this unify after playing around with it. Like I got the AI port this weekend, the stuff it's doing, I'm just shocked. Like it added license plate, um, recognition. That's the way I was looking for it to, to my, my camera. But I know that's doable and blue iris and everything, but the part that blew it away, it was, it did it with my cheat cameras that are currently there. And I'm looking at the video and I can't even read the license plate, but it's somehow picked up that license plate and gave it, I was just, I was in shock. I've tried to do that with blue Iris and cold projects and stuff. And it was, the cameras were never good enough for it. So I never got into it, but blue Iris has its uses. It's it's local. So is unify. Um, it supports a lot more more cameras but to get that support of all those cameras you

really got to know how to tweak those cameras like i have i had 13 cameras in my blue iris and when i remember the first day i set it up it was maxing out the cpu and seth had this too with not not even and you had to go through and yeah i had to walk you through tweaking each camera you know to change it to h.264 and modify the frame rates and stuff like that so that your cpu wasn't taxed or your gpu even wasn't taxed right so yes it's you could tweak it a lot and everything but unify i just found like it was like no thinking solution in a way right like i just plug things in and it worked the way I wanted it. I was always tweaking blue Iris to get to now with the AI port, like blue Iris,

I was constantly fighting with, you know, rain and snow, uh, triggering my cameras. The AI port is able to distinguish between that. I don't have that issue anymore. Right.

And I spent a lot of time on modifying and tweaking settings, trying to stop that stuff. Like it's, uh, I, I, I'm still using stop that stuff. Like it's, uh, I, I, I'm still using blue Iris at today and it will still be like in, in use in my setup.

So I'm not totally getting rid of it. Um, I'm not hating on it. I'm looking out for blue Iris six, which is, it seems to be just around the corner to see how they, update the software. It seems to be a big UI update,

but they've been adding a lot more other features into it as well that look interesting. It's just Unify, I think I'm going that way. And I do find gaps in Unify. There's things that Blue Iris does that Unify doesn't, such as, you know, the imaging, being able to pull an image of the alerts or, you know, their interaction, their API and stuff like that. Unify doesn't have that capability. So, yeah, there's pros and cons to both. It hurts me. Trust me.

It hurts me to say this. That was a lot more words than dumpster fire. And I agree. Like when you were talking about setting up and configuring all those cameras and giving me like flashbacks of, of, of that time period, which I, it's just,

it was rough that the problem, the problem with there is like, it was infinitely customizable, but also like getting the graphics card to even work. Like I was running an Intel NUC. I'm sure it wasn't the best. I don't even think in the version that I had, the,

the graphics card that was built in there was even supported until like a later update and I updated it and then suddenly it started working. But even then it was like, okay, I offloaded a little bit of the processing over here and it's still, I mean, hours and hours spent customizing. And like you said, out of the box, Unify has a whole lot less hardware to worry about

right they're not dealing with different people's windows computers the hardware is standardized blue iris you can do anything you want right you can set up you can get a big giant windows computer and just set up and and and have a field day with nvidia graphics cards doing all the processing and everything yeah and or you could do like an intel knock or just a random computer and just do a couple cameras like it unify has a distinct advantage here is that they have like standardized all their hardware and they can use like an nvr that they developed with all the hardware and bits and pieces that he developed and they know exactly what it can do every single time on every single install and And Blue Iris does not have that advantage. Just by design, it doesn't have that advantage.

So I'm more in favor of the, I mean, and you're going to pay a little bit more for it, right? You're going to pay more. Especially if you want to do as many cameras, right? You're going to pay for it. It's kind of like the whole Linux debate, isn't it? Like whenever somebody is like complaining about Windows or Mac, somebody's like, well, you should just download Linuxux linux is awesome and it's like but i just

want to use my computer like i like i don't want to like download and learn a whole other software view the camera like yeah like i just want to view the camera and like i don't want to mess with a bunch of settings to do it or anything like that that's basically what it comes down to the most tinkering i do is like home assistant at point. But that's just because that's fun. Yeah, I think it all kind of has... It all comes down to how much you want to tinker with the system. And if you have time and you want to tinker and get the Blue Iris things dialed right in and keep tinkering with what it can do over time,

do it that way if it works for you. True that. Yeah. As much as I'm not satisfied 100% of what unify is doing like i wish there were a couple of things that were better overall it's a pretty good system and you can drop it in just about anywhere and people are happy with it and the app honestly the app is the best experience on the camera system like if you the phone app like you can bring that up and just like scroll right through the feed on the camera and it it, it, it does its job. It does exactly what you think it's going to do when you're interacting with

it. And I haven't seen, I mean, blue iris, come on, what are you guys doing? There's like squares. Wait for the redesign.

It's coming up. I'm hoping they. Oh, I'll wait on it. Yeah. Just trust me. I'm not holding my breath. We will be talking about it for sure.

We will be, but they both have their strengths. They both have their weaknesses. I'm actually using, going to We'll be talking about it for sure. We will be. But they both have their strengths. They both have their weaknesses. I'm actually going to be using both of them together. So, you know, it's compromises here. Sorry, compromises. Too good. I can say without a doubt, for me, the worst part of dealing with Blue Iris, with Windows.

Not so much even the Blue Iris software. Because Windows would just decide to up an update itself and lock up the computer because it wanted to do an update. And I'm like, why? Why does this happen? So there we go. Windows. Not recommended. Anyway, we do have another bit of feedback here about bed sensors from Jussie or JJ Jussie or J Jussie.

I'm not sure how you pronounce that either, but juicy. How's it say juicy? Juicy. It could be juicy. He says about those bed sensors. Just put millimeter wave sensors under your bed mattress and point them upward. The sensor will see the person right through the mattress. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

That's a good idea. Yeah, I like it. I might, well, I don't know. I might try that in the future in my daughter's room. The problem with the bed that she has is like the outlets and the plugs and everything are accessible. Where I have the sensor now, it's like up on the top of a bookshelf. And she doesn't know it's there because it's way up high and i think for like an

eight-year-old if it's like eye level she sees it she knows what it is if it's way up high she doesn't care about it that much and if i put something under her bed that has like a has to be plugged in next to her bed she's gonna unplug it yes she's gonna like she's gonna figure out what that is so i'm i'm i wait on that. But if you have other beds in the house you want to track, put sensors on and that kind of thing, it might be a good idea. So good idea. I'm going to put a UniFi camera in there and turn on the loitering sensor. So now we'll know when someone's loitering in the bed

and we can do automations off of that. Plus I get a view of the bed. When I'm on my business trips oh my gosh you're ready you're ready to start up an airbnb it sounds like the neighbor's water shut off and the bed was occupied that's weird is that how airbnbs work uh it could be well i gotta post my house up all right right. Moving on here. We've got a pick of the week. And this one's interesting. Comes from Mastodon.

Yay. If you're on the Mastodon server, hometech.social. You can go join there if you're interested or any one of the other servers. But you find fun stuff like this. Homeowner. I want to feel like I'm inside Barney the dinosaur. Interior designer. Inside.

Homeowner. Deep. Inside. Dinosaur, interior designer, inside. Homeowner, deep inside. And there's a picture of a theater here that is undescribable. I think, actually, Gavin, didn't you make Chad describe this to you? I think maybe we just read what Chad said about this, because I think it was pretty accurate. Yes, yes, we did.

It's in the hub. You'll see the posting there i had chad uh give me its opinion of uh this purple room and you can read it out i'm looking for oh you know i'm not the right thing i just i just don't know this looks like it's ai generated though because it's from the mls it has mls in the bottom but what is up with this projector setup why is it going through the trough i don't know what's up with the projector it makes no sense unless there's two projector setups oh that would be even worse i don't think so i don't know i don't know it looks maybe it comes maybe it drops down oh my god stop i don't know i don't know in the bottom left hand corner you see the mls logo so i'm what it comes from somewhere. Um, anyway,

and not that you can't fake that, but still, uh, here it goes. Uh, Chad's opinion was all right, here we go. Brace yourself. This room looks like Barney threw at house party,

got wasted and redecorated with his own tears and regret. The walls are so purple. They could give Prince PTSD. That carpet is like someone took over all the leftover yarn from every failed arts and crafts project and said, yep, perfect for a luxury theater. The seating looks like a lineup from a thrift store, thrift store recliners that retired retirement home.

And the mirror wall definitely where, definitely where you want to reflect all your life choices, especially after walking into this purple fever dream. Also, is it a theater or Willy Wonka's chill-out room after a long day at the factory? Either way, my eyes need a vacation after just one glance. Oh my gosh.

Chad is brutal at times. Make sure he doesn't insult Kendrick Lamar, alright? Because we need chat around oh man this this picture is awful and we'll put it in the show notes so you everyone else will see what we saw and i i don't understand it either tj it's such a weird layout of a room yeah the part i was laughing at it looks like they vacuum the walls and they vacuum the roof and everything because you can see all the vacuum marks. You can see handprints on the ceilings.

Oh, yeah. You know kids are jumping up to touch that. Come on. Yeah. I'm 32-ish years old and I would 100% try to touch the ceiling. Oh, my handprint's up there. Nice. Do it again.

Do it again. I don't think this is AI. I mean, there's speakers. I know. In it again. Do it again. I don't think this is AI. I mean, there's speakers. I know. In the headers. I mean, it's clearly, it probably has a Trino system in it, you know? I mean, given the budget they had on. So we sent this over to Owen.

I haven't yet seen feedback from him yet. Maybe he just quit the chat after seeing that, but I'm not sure. We'll have to wait and see what he says about it. But that's an opinion. Fever dream. Oh, Chad. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for a show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, project updates. Um, well, I mean, I, I'm, I'm doing more, well, technically I'm, I'm fun employed right now. So I'm just kind of like doing my own stuff. I, I, I kind of got, I guess I haven't announced this like probably, but kind of got laid off, uh, towards the end of the last year, uh, the company I was working for, they don't want to do software anymore. So I've been just kind of like looking for work, but also I had plenty of work to do and my like old fake, what do you call it? Integration business. So I've been doing a lot of work with that and like specking out work and selling stuff, which is kind of funny that you could just retire for 10 years from that. And like people still need stuff done

10 years later. It's wild. Anyway, I've got a bunch of stuff to do. I almost went today or I almost told somebody that I would be at their house tomorrow to dig a trench and put some conduit in the ground. I'm going to eventually have to do it. I don't want to. Yeah, that part of the job sucks. Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, it's a paycheck. So what are you going to do? But yeah, that's what I've been paycheck. So what are you going to do? Uh, but yeah, that's, that's what I've been doing. Uh, put in speakers around somebody's pool and cameras and all sorts of fun stuff like that. So, yeah. Uh, but it sounds like you guys have been a lot busier than, and doing more fun stuff than me. So what do you guys been up to? Gavin, what you been doing? Uh, no, well, I kind of went over my ai port i've been playing with the ai port all week um got that all set up and we talked about that earlier what i like about

it and it's pretty amazing um so i kind of spent a little bit too much money on more unified equipment but uh it is what it is a little more sent us a picture, and it looks like, I mean, it's funny that you sent us the picture of what you had on the counter, but, Gavin, I can see the background. You left another box. There's another box down there on the ground that you had open. So I know you had more than what you sent us. Listen, I was pricing a 16-port PoE hub,

and by the time I got done with the price of it new, plus the rack mount and everything like that, I ran across a guy selling a 48 port PoE switch online and for almost the same price. So I was like, you know what? Let me go with all the ports. It had 10G in it, links in it. And 600 watt, 600 watt bees too. I think it's the same one I had. Yeah. I'm like you

know what let me go for all of it i'll never have to upgrade again in my life you know so i i'm i'm doing a bunch of work prepping for tj's arrival because he's going to be running cables all over the house for the new cameras and stuff so you know i'm just making sure everything's here and i installed the switch like the same day you you know, I said, screw the change tickets, you know, everybody's going down, you know, I don't care. The house will be down and I flipped it over. It was, you know, it's a seamless, it was a seamless process. You know, you just plugged it in, plugged everything back in and adopted the new switch

and bam, I was back up and running. It took like no time. Right. Um, no one ever notices any of this stuff you know i don't think anyone appreciates the amount of work i put into this but you do that's what you know after getting that now i needed some new patch panels and i needed a little rack mount for my ai port my ai ports ports, ports. Plural. So, you know, I have a problem here.

I just want to announce it, but. You're in a safe space, Gavin. You're in a safe space. Yeah, I think I have a problem here. And I'd just like to thank David who, you know, in the hub there who kind of showed off the stuff he had and made me accidentally open up the unify store and accidentally click on some stuff into a basket and order it you know it doesn't help that it came here in two days it was pretty fast shipping yeah i gotta say i i had to order some stuff too uh they've been waiting for them to come back in stock and i ordered it and in and bought it uh earlier this week uh probably on monday and it's coming in tomorrow which

generally i don't see that. Unify is on the ball right now with whatever's installed. So, no, I'm pretty happy with the Unify stuff. You know, I'm going to be making you a true convert now. Yeah, I feel like a pro installer at this point. I'm wiring up racks and, you know, I designed a little diagram of where I wiring up racks and, you know, I designed a diagram of where I want laid out, you know, and I have it planned for when they do my electrical panel upgrade, everything

will be down so I can do all the swap and reorganizing of my rack and rerunning the wires and everything. Yeah. It's like a full-time job next to my full-time job. Well, that's pretty much it. I've been playing around with this week tj yeah i've got i've got a couple things going on um first of all i want to talk about an annoying problem that i've i've partially solved safe place we're in a safe place nicole doesn't listen to it i'm gonna tell you she's gonna slap you when she comes up you didn't say you fully solved it gavin oh yeah geez now so um i've talked about it before but i have some kind of like uh some janky tv setup with like an hdmi matrix and hdmi balance and stuff like that and one of the side effects

is that i do get hdmi cec control uh but one of the side effects is that my Sonos Arc doesn't always recognize that my TV is on. And I have to like basically spam the volume up button on the Apple TV in order to get the soundbar to realize that there's volume. And then it starts from zero and it ramps all the way up. And it's just super aggravating because like every time you turn the TV on, I have to hit

the volume button like 20 times to get it to go up. And so I've partially solved this problem. Not all the way yet. Partially. Whenever the TV is off now, I've actually installed a smart plug. And so whenever the TV gets power, it automatically sets the Sonos Arc volume to like 30%. And then as soon as the TV turns on, then it automatically kicks the sonos arc volume to like 30 and then as soon as the tv turns on then it automatically kicks over to the soundbar and so that seems to solve the problem

the only time it doesn't solve the problem for some reason is i assume it's some kind of standby power mode thing from the tv um that if i turn the tv off and then like i go back to it like 10 minutes later or something it won't work with that automation anymore. I have to spam the volume up button again. But I assume it's some kind of power reading because right now I'm just basically reading the power or the watts on the TV to determine. And I probably just got to adjust the settings on it. But I was happy enough that I got that solved with a smart plug. I just have to remember to, you know, if the smart plug turns off, I got to turn it back on. The other day we lost power and the smart plug was not set up to restore previous state and we couldn't get the TV back on. And I was freaking out because I was like,

no, don't tell me my TV's dead. And I realized the smart plug was off. So that's the only downside right now. I love, I love you solving a problem with an automation there. Like, like right now i love i love you solving a problem with an automation there like like right now my doorbell for some reason stopped the chimes not working so you know instead of me going out there and unscrewing the doorbell and figuring out the wiring and figuring out what's going on what did i do i made an automation so when it presses it plays a little sound on my sonos speakers problem solved i don't care why the doorbell's not chiming anymore. Yeah, and it just randomly came to me. I was playing Civilization or something,

and I was like, wait a minute, I can solve my annoying sound problem because this has been going on for six months or nine months or something since I've really installed the HDMI matrix. It's not a problem with the HDMI matrix, it's just there's so many things going on right now with it that it's hard to know with the HDL man matrix. It's just, there's so many things going on right now with it that, uh, it's hard to know

what it actually wants to do. So, um, that, that is partially solved. The next thing I've been working on, uh, uh, I actually bought an AI port to send Gavin and I've been playing a little bit with it. Not as much as Gavin has. Uh, but I thought it sounded kind of funny that I bought the one to send to Gavin and then Gavin bought one at the exact same time, but he got his first somehow. I'm not sure where they're shipping them out in Canada, but I think they're shipping them out from like Utah down here. So it took me like a week to get

mine. Haven't had a ton of time to play with it. I was trying to make the, my rail link duo floodlight. I got a POE floodlight camera work with it. Um, and it crashed the camera immediately when I paired it to it. Um, so I haven't really got a chance to play with it, but I got sent to Gavin anyway, so I'll probably just send it to Gavin. Uh,

it's been pretty fun to play with though. They're great little devices. Yeah. For $200, it's pretty solid. It basically looks like the viewport, uh, or display port or whatever they call that thing that they have for their

camera system. It looks like the exact same thing. So I did get a new device this week. It is the Elevate Bed Sensor. This is not made by AI just because it has the name Elevate in it. This is a ESP home-based device that detects bed presence. So you put it underneath your mattress and you can detect presence on it. They have a single use.

So if you have a twin size bed or you can get a king or queen size, which is a dual sensor. I got the dual sensor so I can tell, you know, if the left or right side of the bed is occupied. Pretty easy to install. I don't like the connection. There's like these two little flat ribbon cables that come out of it and connect via DuPont cables to the little unit. And we'll link it in the show notes here. I don't like that connection to it. The ribbons are pretty

nice. They seem pretty delicate though. So I'm assuming if you're going to like swap your mattress around, like there's some double-sided mattresses out there or, you know, you're going to flip your mattress around or whatever it is. Like, I assume you're probably going to break one of these cables at that point. But you can probably get extra cables for it. So that's not a big deal. Pretty nice device so far. Setup was super simple. Like I got it and connected to the little access point that I put off, connected it to my Wi-Fi and Home Assistant found it instantly.

Got it calibrated. Everything seemed to be working all right. The problem though is my mattress is too heavy, guys. So I didn't realize this would be a problem, but my mattress is too heavy. And so didn't realize this would be a problem but the my mattress is too heavy and so for one side of the bed it detects presence when there actually isn't presence and that's because i can't go above the set parameter uh for pressure and so they unfortunately they have to release an update for it um in order for that to be resolved because i have to go to a bigger pressure point but it's working pretty cool it's nice to be resolved because I have to go to a bigger pressure point. But it's working pretty cool.

It's nice to be able to just lay in bed and have your lights turn off and stuff. Right now, the automations I have set up for it is that if one of us lays in bed, it will turn off the bedroom lights and then disable motion lights and the motion Sonos for the bedroom. And then if both of us lay down after two minutes, all of the lights in the house turn off the door locks, all that good stuff. So I'm playing with the automations right now, but if you've got some kind of some bed presence things set up,

I'd like to know what you're doing with it. Cause I'm, I want to find some automations for it. No, let us know. Let us know for sure. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Honestly, I think it's a nice device. I, I don't know. We'll,. Let us know for sure. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Honestly, I think it's a nice device. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I think they should change the connector and it sounds like they might at some point. That's my only hang up with it right now. Everything else about it's pretty nice. The actual body of it is really solid and everything. So I think it'll go far. There's not a lot of stuff in the space right now. There's like the Withings smart sleep sensor that integrates with Apple HomeKit. But like, I don't know of many others, to be honest. So, yeah.

And I always looked at creating my own version of one. But this one, I actually ordered it too. So when I get it, I'll play around with it, you know, set up some automations, you know, like if I'm not detected at home, but two people are in the bed, you know, send a notification to me. Do you want to know that though? And do you really want to know? I don't want to know. I just want to know if I have to come back home or not, you know, like, can I go over to the casino, have fun, stay longer, who knows?

Book a round of golf. I think, you know, it's one of those things that I use some bed sensors for the assisted living portion of my business. So we can tell if somebody has gotten out of bed or they've gotten out of their seat or something like that. But you're basically just getting like detection and that's it. Whereas this one kind of gives you a little more information. It gives you pressure and some other stuff, which is kind of nice. So we'll see what happens with it. But yeah, it's good to see competition in this space because I don't know much in here.

And it's amazing how easy these ESB home devices are have gotten to add. Because, yeah, I forgot to mention I got the new apollo automation temp one sensor and yeah adding it to home assistant is so easy once you plug it in it auto discovers it and you pretty much click adopt and that's it it's in there and it shows up and it's amazing now yeah that's always been my problem with like the the esp based stuff is if you go on reddit people are like oh you know buy this device and you can flash it with this firmware and you can do this and do that. And it's like,

I don't want to do any of that. I just, I want the Zigbee or Z wave approach where I just buy a device and I plug it in and it just works. And that's, you know, that's what companies like elevated are, are giving us there,

you know, just plug it in and it works. And they have an auto calibration, uh, portion of the software too, which is actually really nice. Um, you basically, uh, you sit in the bed or lay in the bed and hit calibrate. And then you get out of the bed, you hit, or sorry, you lay in the bed and you hit calibrate occupied.

And then you get out of the bed, wait a couple seconds, then you hit calibrate unoccupied. And that's how it determines what the pressure is and everything. And so that part was super nice because I really didn't have to think about the setup i just hit two buttons or four buttons and that was it and so that that was super easy and they've done a good job of packaging it up and also you're not really going to be able to tell this from the podcast anything like that but they they printed this little inlay for the actual sensor box when they shipped it out. And this is 3D printed.

I thought that was so cool. It's actually like how they shipped everything. And I was like, that's smart. Also time consuming. That thing will take like forever to 3D print. It's very thin, so I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this company evolves over the next couple of years.

They might be like an Apollo where they just come out with a bunch of ESP home stuff and maybe they'll be focused on the bedroom. Who knows? Real time follow up here. I have found this house. Oh, yes. Is it in Florida? Okay. Is that your guess?

Gavin, where would you Is that your guess? Gavin Where would you guess That this is? Oh Which house? The one with the purple theater I think it's California Alright

Well I think you'll Illinois You'll be surprised to find It's in No It's in Ohio It's in Ohio?

4.5 million dollars Yeah It's right up on Lake Erie it looks like it's on what do they call it Port Clifton Catawba Island right outside Put-in-Bay man I couldn't imagine paying 4.5 million dollars

not even being on Put-in-Bay yeah well actually aside from the theater and a bedspread that looks like it's made of little creatures from Star Trek, it's actually a nice looking house. I think I could live with the Barney throw up theater. Like, it's pretty nice.

It's a very odd house. Yeah. Like, I'm looking at the bedroom. Bedroom looks like it's inside like a trailer or something like that. You know, like, or a can, one of those shipping containers. Yeah. It's like a trailer or something like that. Or a can, one of those shipping containers. Yeah, it's got metal. I mean, it's opinionated. Everything here was pretty opinionated.

But the kitchen, it's a nice house. Yeah. Not just the theater. It's purple, though. They have purple throughout. I guess this is the theater bathroom. Theater bathroom, yeah. Purple shower.

Wow, look at that backyard. Whoa, the brown water is so beautiful. Oh, yeah, it's such a nice view. It's a two-bedroom, five-bath. The water's brown like a mile out, then it turns blue. Wait, how does that work? Don't ask. Why do you need so many?

Yeah, why is there so many bathrooms compared to bedrooms? Just stop making bathrooms. Make another bedroom yeah i've been to this place uh in general like put in bay and stuff like that it is a nice area put in bay is known as like a like a party island so maybe that explains the bathrooms yeah and you should you should meet me meet me over there we'll party oh yeah in the purple room you guys have peely island right across from us. Yeah, that's true. When I bought the house I'm in now, one of the rooms was like this kind of purple. It was painted this way. And it took us multiple layers of paint to get rid of it.

I don't know why they did it, but it was ugly. Well, I bet you didn't know at the time that you could have did purple ceilings in carpet. Yeah. You missed out, Gavin. You elevate your game. They were ahead of the curve, the previous owners. Maybe they moved here and made this house. That's true.

I'll put a link in the show notes here. I mean, it's an interesting house. I'm looking at some of the wall. Yeah, the interior wall stuff being that metal. What is that? Like the diamond plate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, see, I wall, like the interior wall stuff being that metal, like, what is that? Like the diamond plate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, see, I don't like this house.

It looks like a nice house in general, but I don't know. Whenever you take the wood and the metal, it just looks, I don't know, looks too much. Yeah, I think I would probably have to take that. Not that, like, if I had a, what is this, this 4.5 million dollar house that if i bought this i wouldn't be able to afford it uh anyway but like i think i would take the metal stuff off the wall and go back to being a regular wall all the wood stuff looks nice yes but uh the metal stuff kind of makes it way more industrial and two two bed five bath doesn't make any sense to me so you can definitely tell certain people of the family got certain areas of the house because

they're completely different. Yeah. The husband definitely made a deal to do the rest of the house in rustic antique wood. And the wife was like, well, you know what? That's fine, but I get a purple theater. So you're blaming her for the theater. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm blaming, but. Anyway, the outside of the house looks really nice, aside from the muddy water of the Lake Erie, I guess.

But I don't know. The outside looks really cool. It's got this big stone wall thing that looks ancient. I don't know what that is. That was the previous house. Previous house that burned down or something. Yeah. And that's why they made the walls metal.

They're like, not burning down anymore. All the wood, though. Hey, look at the switches. Hey, they have some interesting switches in that purple bathroom laundry area. What is that? It's definitely a lighting control system. I just not, I didn't recognize what it was. Maybe Vantage or something.

I don't know. I'm not familiar with that keypad. It's engraved and backlit, so it looks nice. Yeah. There's a decking and hot tub. There you go. The shower has a sign in it that says, do not use. Look behind you this this area is monitored by three cameras

reach out to gas right now wow okay well we'll we'll put the link to this thing in the show notes and there you go ohio comes from uh zillow gone wild so thank thanks i love following them there's all kinds of crazy houses yep yep yep alright cool well I think that's going to wrap up

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

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out here on the show but every single pledge gets you a big shout-out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our Slash at the Hub, where you can jump in there and see Purple Theaters. And the reactions in there were quite hysterical, including Chad's. Chad had a great reaction. Thanks, Gavin.

And if you want to help out but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or pause a rating in whatever podcast app you're listening. That's going to wrap up the week here in Hope Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time.

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