HomeTech.fm - Episode 523 - Risky Clickin'

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

On this week's show: Tariffs are a causing havoc on pricing, and then may not? The rich want “dumb” homes more than smart homes, Aqara adds the Matter for 50 device types, SmartThings gets Matter 1.4, Eufy has some interesting spring announcements, Samsung releases a BB8 style robot, Sonos drops prices, Z-wave isn’t dead for real this time, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 11th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Kevin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, podcast all about home technology, home automation, all the products you can't buy anymore because they're too expensive. Oh, man.

You get a tariff. You get a tariff. You get a tariff. No, wait. You don't. We're taking them away. It's okay. We don't know what's going on. We have no idea.

I think for once it's going to be cheaper in Canada. Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. It'll probably be cheaper for me to order in Canada and ship it down to you guys. So, you know, maybe we can work out a deal here. I'm not sure what reality we live in where that's even a possibility, but that is 2025, I guess, for Americans. Yeah. What businesses like most is just complete and total chaos.

What you want to do as a business is just like on your forecast in the future, you want to see like empty spreadsheet cells. That's exactly what you want. Like, don't know. Don't know what's going to happen three days from now. I have no idea. And just, you know, to snapshot this in time, we're recording this on Wednesday, April 9th.

Right now we have some, I think there was tariffs all over this morning, but now there's tariffs not all over just what, China? Yeah, just 125% tariff for China right now. So we'll see what that is tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning or even tonight. But there's a 90 day pause on all other tariffs, supposedly. I think the pause was down to 10% or something still though. Yeah, like the baseline. It wasn't like the other-

Oh, there's still tariffs. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, never get rid of the tariffs, I mean. So there's the baseline 10% and then there's like a hyper one that goes for China for whatever reason. I mean, so there's, there's the baseline 10% and then there's like a hyper one that goes for China for, for whatever reason. Yeah. I mean, that's today.

Tomorrow could be completely different. No idea. Yeah. Yeah. Good thing. No, uh, no smart home stuff is made in China guys. I mean, there's like cameras, access points, switches. Yeah.

Door sensors, all that stuff. None of that stuff's made in China. Exactly. I was wondering, um, I mean, this is from CNN 19 hours ago. This may not be true anymore, but like this coming towards the end of the year, it will have the new iPhones come out. And those are made not in America. It's saying here, CNN says iPhone could triple in price to $3,500 if they're made in the US.

Yeah, there's no way we can make things like that here. We don't have the infrastructure for it. Yeah, unfortunately, I think it's gonna be one of those things that it's gonna affect technology in general, kind of like COVID did, right? Because when COVID hit, basically most manufacturers are just like, well, we're not releasing new products and stuff like that.

We're just going to keep on doing what we're doing because they could even get all the stuff they needed to make their products or even ship them. Because of all the shutdowns all over the world for different factories and warehouses and whatever else. And so I think we're going to see something similar where companies are probably just going to pull back a little bit depending on what goes on here the next week or two. We're seeing some new product releases and stuff still, even some price cuts, which I think is an odd thing. But, you know, it's the only time we'll tell

what's actually gonna happen with this. Yeah, it says here, I found this article, this is what I'm curious about. How much would the iPhone be after all this? Well, do the math. As CNET says, it's gonna be basically double. I do the Apple, what is it called? The pay as you go plan type thing.

And I kind of grandfathered into that. I think it's like 50 bucks a month or 60 bucks a month for like the iPhone and like full Apple care and all the stuff like built into it. But if it goes to 120 bucks a month times two for me and my wife to have a phone, I don't think so. I don't care that much about a new phone that probably has Siri that works just as bad on it.

So I will sit that one out for sure. Yeah, especially for an iPhone, which isn't that like amazing at this point. You know what I mean? The cameras are nice. The cameras get better. That's about it. Not like you need a new phone every year or two

at this point. You can use the same phone for four or five, even six years. Oh, get out of here. That's insane. No one's doing that. No, it's fun. I don't do that, but you can.

And Nintendo Switch 2 also, I've been seeing the gamers are all mad about that one. That one is hurting a lot of people's feelings, I think. So the gamers are all mad that the Nintendo Switch 2 is what, delayed and or price increase or something. I mean, it's already expensive. It's $449. It's up there.

It's like a hundred dollar increase over the OLED model. And this is not OLED from what I remember. Well, it's bigger probably. I mean, does that count? It's LCD screen. Come on. Oh yeah, gross. Come on, Nintendo, what are you doing?

What are you trying to do? Money grab here? A money grab and on top of a chair? No, get out of here green come on. Oh, yeah gross come on Nintendo. What are you doing? We should come on money grab here a money grab and with on top of a chair if no get out of here Come on I mean Nintendo's never had top-of-the-line like technology right like that's never been their thing They make a good console most of the time and they make a game that nobody else can make and that's what they do but $449 for this is not that great, especially when you get a Steam Deck for basically the same cost, if not a little bit more. Well, we'll see what that's going to be now. They're probably double. Ah, well, there you go. Let's see, iPhones. Oh, they have a chart. This is crazy. iPhone 16 Pro current price $1,000.

$1,249 for the extended tear. So your new price is going to be $2,300. If you like the big boy, it's going to go up to a $2,700 price point. It's the price of a MacBook Pro. Oh no, well how much are those going to go up to? Oh my God. Yeah. Oh geez, Apple, Apple, what are you guys doing?

Well, and the crazy thing is no matter what, like you get your stuff from other countries, right? So, like, even if manufacturing moves back to America and we can make an iPhone in America, like, able to source all the parts and all that stuff, we're still going to get components and materials from other parts of the world. Yeah. And so, like, it's just, the whole thing is crazy.

It just doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't. I mean, it's very reckless. We kind of like figured this out years ago. Like we changed out our manufacturing plants, like the big like mills and stuff with the kids worked and stuff back in the 20s. We changed all that for like, we don't want that. We want shopping malls.

And we're like, now we don't even want shopping malls. So it's like, now we just want online stores to order stuff and for like Uber drivers, right? So like, I think, you know, if they really wanted to do something, it's like, let's make the Uber, Uber Eats work a little bit better or something, where they can get to your house without it going cold, you know, because I think that's what people want, not manufacturing. They don't want to do repetitive tasks. They just want to drive around town delivering food. We'll be screwing in screws and iPhones here soon enough.

Manually doing that as people do these days. Yes, manually. Yes. Yes. Uh, man, well, um, there's plenty of room up in Canada though. You know, if we need to move, cause it costs too much, we can move to a place that is notoriously cheaper than America. Gavin's just shaking his head and like, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, you don't need to come up here. It's too expensive up here. Like you guys stay down there. We're good. I wonder what this, I wonder if the news will be different by Friday, who knows? Who knows? No one knows.

It'll be different by tomorrow. I mean, yeah. The show's gonna be outdated by the time you post it. That's true. That's true. And depending on how busy I get for the rest of the week, it might be like I did this week, it'll come in maybe Monday. We'll see what happens, I don't know.

Tariffs, the new Sonos ramp. If you don't want technology, you might be in luck because you've got a story here from, where is this from? Some place called the Hollywoodreporter.com and they're saying high-end homeowners are increasingly seeking tech-free homes, marking a significant shift from the once popular smart home trend. Interior designers like Jamie Bush and Carrie Libeson note a growing preference for manual, less complicated living spaces driven by frustrations with unintelligible interfaces. Yes. And constant updates. Yes. Unintelligible interfaces. Yes. And constant updates. Yes.

Examples include a $100,000 renovations to remove complex automation systems and replace it with manual switches. Oh my god, we have failed as an industry. This is the trend. Man, this is this is actually pretty crazy. TJ, you posted this in the the hub and I, I gotta go back and look up. I posted, I had the brilliant idea. It's like, well, let's capitalize on this. Like, how do you do this? Like, basically you need to become,

instead of a smart home integrator, you need to become a smart home unintegrator? What is the, what is the, integrator? I don't know. That could totally be a thing. Yeah, yeah. So I gotta go find that.

Cause I posted all the, I went to Chad and I was like, hey Chad, make me a bunch of, make me a bunch of company names for dumb home business names. You know, cause we have right now, everybody, it'd just be a joke. Like there was like two wheels and you would spin one, it would give you a first name of your company

and you spend the next one, it would be like smart home technologies. So like three things and you would spin one, it would give you a first name of your company and you spin the next one, it was like smart home technologies. There's like three things and you just like spin the wheels and you just pick out of those, whatever it is. So, but I love some of these that came up with, analog abode, the unplugged home, dumb by design, yes, offline Oasis, let's see, no cloud house,

disconnected dwelling and just a house, disconnected dwelling, and just a house, that's great. Knobs and switches, that's my favorite. Knobs and switches. Knobs and switches. Knobs and switches. Yeah. So there may be a few domains registered

by the time the show comes out. And then of course I went an extra step and I was like, well, wait a minute, if this becomes a trend, obviously TJ, we have to start up a podcast about it, right? There has to be podcasts about everything. Clearly. Yeah, and so what are a couple of podcast names for Taylor 2 covering the dumb house lifestyle?

And so it was the Unsmart Podcast, which, okay, kill the cloud, off the grid, on the couch, push to operate, no app for for that still got a switch and Welcome to manual mode, which I thought it was clever. So Voice control not found was another one. I mean all of the stories in here totally makes sense Some of the some of my my favorites Speaking of switches and stuff Seth My favorites. Speaking of switches and stuff, Seth.

The shift is inspiring a renewed hunger for pre-internet home fixtures. Hyper-niche firms like UK-based Forbes and Lomax, which designs and manufactures historically accurate manual switch plates for upwards of $800 each, have become modern-day design darlings. Clients want an actual button that toggles so they feel the click. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Gotta love that click. Another example, somebody got mad that they couldn't turn the lights on easily, so they spent $100,000 installing manual switches and ripping all the Crestron

out of the house. Another one was a kitchen counter that lowers and raises up, but it needed a passcode to do it. Okay, I didn't get that one. Like, where do you put the passcode in? Yeah. All of these like totally make sense, right? Because technology should not be that difficult. Yeah. And like, and especially in your house where you just want to like go and use things like that.

It's just like, nobody, like nobody needs that. Yeah. And when I was reading this article, the first thing I thought is the smart home totally failed, you know, failed us. Like that's the first thing I thought of it. It shouldn't have gotten to this point. But then I also read some of the issues people were having and these people went to the extremes, like removing every switch in your home so that everything's automated.

We know that's not going to work. Especially with the AI, the IR sensors and stuff. We know the problems they have. I would have never recommended that at all. Um, and you're too unpredictable. Uh, you know, humans are too unpredictable. Like one lady was complaining that her husband could see where she was walking through the house because the lights get coming on. You know, humans are too unpredictable. Like one lady was complaining that her husband could see where she was walking

through the house because the lights get coming on. I actually found that kind of funny, but yeah. No, no, no, no. It's the next other time she'd enter a darkened room where the lights wouldn't go on no matter how much she flapped her arms. Yeah, exactly. You know, we know this technology. We've been there.

TJ has been there. So that's why even in my house, like as much as the smart stuff I have in my house I have manual switches for everything. Yeah, I can still control everything by walking around and pressing buttons And I've always left it that way. Yeah now I think this is a I want to say I think this is an issue with the smart home It's definitely an issue with the the higher-end smart home just because that's been a thing for much longer. But I would go into houses with so much smart home technology that was just never used

because either it was a pain in the butt to use, it broke at some point, or required somebody to come back and constantly to mess with it and stuff like that. And it's just not something that people want. You don't expect that from your electrical, right? Like if you go and plug something in, like you don't have to call an electrician to like turn your outlet on or like make it work with a new

update or something like that. Not yet. Not yet. Right. But yeah, it's just, this is stuff that like drives me crazy when I go into somebody's house and I see this kind of waste. Yep. Yep.

The manual mansion. Oh, I like that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's the other one on here? Let's see. Pool cord properties, I thought that was kind of clever. Just a house. And this one here, analog interiors, pretty good. And sanity systems. Yeah, yeah. Very fun stuff. Yeah, I think the smart home definitely failed. I think there's a lot of promises about what a smart home could be. And it sounds like, to me, a lot of these people may have moved into a house that

had like features and stuff that some other homeowner thought was kind of cool. It'd be like, it'd be like somebody who didn't know anything about technology moving into Gavin's house, right. And Gavin just left it all as is. But by keeping in mind my house, it's still, I still have manual switches for everything, right? Well, yeah, but some of this stuff is like, I think the Crestron one, it was like,

they had specific keypads installed for Crestron, but you can't just rewire those for normal electric, because that's all custom stuff. It's like a low voltage keypad that loops back to a processor. And the only way to do that is to actually install electrical at that point. custom stuff like that. It's like a low voltage, low voltage keypad that loops back to a processor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the only way to do that is to actually like install electrical at that point. So like there is a lot of like stuff that I agree, but like when you get in a big house,

it's like that it's hard to do like just regular smart switches. So it is a trade off one way or the other. Yeah, because you're going for the aesthetic. In a big house like that, we may have a living room with like 16 loads of lights for layered lights and lighting design. In a big house like that, we may have a living room with 16 loads of lights for layered lights and lighting design. And then, okay, you just want that one keypad that controls everything and does the lighting based on what time of day it is or what activity you're doing.

You're having a party, if you want to read something. Not anymore. Yeah, not anymore. They pull it out. And I will say what's funny about those, what was the name of that clicky company? The Forbes and Lomax or whatever? Yeah. I'm pretty sure, I mean, not that you can't automate them,

but I'm pretty sure they also, the same company, don't they have like, any Crestron compatible ones? I wanna say I remember seeing a company like this, who have like- Yeah, I remember a company sorta like this. I don't know about this one specifically though. It doesn't matter, because at the same time, like it's just of like this. I don't know about this one specifically though. It doesn't matter because at the same time, like it's just a conduct closure.

I mean, that's the most basic part of any Crestron system. I was just thinking like maybe they had like a Dolly or not Dolly, yeah, maybe Dolly interface or KNX interface, but maybe not. Oh yeah, they do have a whole automation lineup. So control four, savant, Lutron. There you go. So see, even if somebody thought that thisvant, Lutron. There you go.

So see, even if somebody thought that this is what they were getting, they thought they were getting the toggle switches, it could be something smart on the other side. They don't know. They just know that they go flip the switch and the light turns on. That's what they want. And then honestly, that sounds actually kind of appealing. These little clicks. I mean, these are amazing.

They have little flip switch things. I personally think this style light switch is ugly, but When you their homepage, it has like the white lotus wallpaper on it. Yeah, I like that professional systems give you the option to like color match things though. I wish more DIY stuff was like that. And they've got knobs here. Look at these knobs.

They've got a brush brass knobs if you want that. You want that in your house. These are not attractive, but to each their own. For the right house. I mean, a lot of those like the UK switches like that, or European style switches came from that. They had this what they had in the beginning. So it makes sense to like put those back in. Yeah.

Anyway, we do have, regardless of how the richer fleeing smart home and taking out all the TVs and using it as selling features for their multi-million dollar mansions. We do have a bunch of home tech headlines. So what do you guys say we get started? Let's do it. Acara, a favorite brand for the rich and famous

is significantly expanding its matter support, adding over 50 new device types to its platform, making it one of the most comprehensive in the smart home industry. It includes robot vacuums, dimmical plugs, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, air quality sensors and more. A pretty, pretty good update from from Akara here. I've got a we've got a couple articles and I think they had some announcements on what

we were looking at Reddit. They had a video on Reddit. So we'll put all that in the show notes. But I think, TJ, what were you looking at? It was the advanced matter bridging? Yeah, the advanced matter bridging. I need to look a little more into this and see what they actually mean.

But in the description here, it says, it brings Akara's AI power detection features, energy monitoring, and real-time triggers and actions to other matter ecosystems like Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and SmartThings. Jimmy Hawkins actually posted in our Slack group, and he said something about making automation by using hand signs at his G3 camera and creating automations. I'm pretty sure that's what it's talking about so

Kara in the app they actually have some AI detection stuff So you can you know person just is detected you can create automations and stuff like that And it sounds like you're able to actually bring those into the other ecosystems now homeless system was able to do this in some capacity for like smart detections and stuff like that, but it sounds like they're expanding that capability to include a couple more things in there. That's cool.

More integrations. That's always good. Yeah. And it's a way to bring like non-matter compliance stuff into Matter, right? Because a lot of this, Matter doesn't really support some of this stuff at the moment, but there's a lot of more advanced features that these, these ecosystems have, um, that, that we can't really utilize without this kind of stuff. And I really like what a car is doing right now.

They're, they're, they're moving fast. They're bringing all the latest stuff. They just updated their, uh, I think their matter, they're running on 1.4 now. So it supports a lot of stuff, but I really like how they're also opening up their products to like everything, like they're not trying to lock you in to their devices, but they're also allowing you to use whatever you want. As long as you use that and you're allowed to use their devices as well. Um, I become a fan of their company again.

Yeah. And their app isn't completely terrible. I actually enjoy their app because I use it for my office, right? So the office, I have one of the because I use it for my office, right? So the office I have one of the I think is the G3 camera. And then I have a garage store controller or relay contact. And I honestly like using the app. Some of the English translations aren't the best or like the words are

stuff is worded weirdly. But that's not that big a deal. The app works great and is very reliable from what I've seen so far. Oh yeah, what do you have to do? When does this come out? Or is it out right now? I don't remember seeing anything about a specific date.

I was just opening mine up to see if there are any updates to do. And of course everything's like buried behind. Actually, it says it's now available across all the car matter bridges. So yeah, I have upgrades to do. I have a little rocket ship to, to, yeah, that's what the update was earlier. I updated my hub as well.

And I was like, I wonder what this is for. Yeah, I have. Yes. I got the update on my, uh, my M three hub. So the latest version is 4.3. Five zero zero two five, which gives you all these features. Yeah, because this is definitely an older, fixed known issues type of release that I'm running here.

So yeah, I'll hit update and let everything update and it would be nice. I have there, what is it, the little sensor that we use to make sure that my daughter's in bed. I finally had figured out like, hey, I can just make a cars app, little dashboard show just the sensor of the bed area. It tells you if she's, it basically says the occupied and how many minutes

she's been in or something like that. So I can just launch that instead of having to go like deep down into the device settings itself and look at it. I don't think you could do that in Home Assistant. I'm curious if you could do it now if they're exposing all those little sensors inside of home assistant And maybe I could do it before I think there was there was some work arounds or something But maybe it's better this way. I don't know. We'll see All right moving on here. Let's see speaking of matter 1.4

A car is not the only one at joining the gang here smart things is now supporting matter 1.4 and the gang here. SmartThings is now supporting Matter 1.4 and gives it compatibility with devices like water heaters, heat pumps, and solar panels. Updates allows for more granular control in their operability across multiple platforms. It's got direct, it's got robot vacuums in there as well so you can tell it, hey, you know, go send off the robot vacuum into this specific room. Samsung's also added new automation triggers and a broadcast feature for SmartThings connected speakers. So yeah, everybody's jumping on board.

Matter's happening, Gavin. It's gonna happen. I like to see how all these companies are backing Matter now, and they're really moving fast. I think it's getting some really good traction. It's picking up. And yeah, I think we're getting there now. At the beginning, they were, they were doing all the basic building blocks. And now we have all these more advanced advice types coming in.

I think it's going to be, it's going to be better. And I think Apple, didn't they have an Apple say they were going to start supporting it? Yeah. The Apple added a few things, but I think the funny part is, is the major companies are falling behind. So the Apple, the Amazon, Google, they're all falling behind where you have like Acquara and, and smart things now and even Home Assistant running the latest versions of Matter.

I'd like to see those other companies step up now and move at a faster pace. Yeah. It says right here in the article, Amazon, Apple, Home and Google have yet to catch up. So yeah, catch up guys. All right. Uh, let's move on here. There's a new Eufy spring lineup stuff and things have sprung. And you can go check it out.

We're going to put the link in the show notes. There's all sorts of neat things in here, including a vacuum station for your robot vacuum that you can be the robot vacuum and go clean the most disgusting thing I've ever seen happen. Look, if this happens to your couch just throw the couch away and you need a new couch. Don't put it outside either. Well if you put it outside put it outside upside down so nobody knows what happened to your house. I'm just gonna say that and that's just embarrassing. So that's the it's called a portable deep cleaner

with multi-scenario spot cleaner. And man, there's a scenario that they came up with. I really don't, I really don't know what they were thinking. They've got a PCC cameras with like 50 lenses on them. It's like insane. One, two, three, three lenses on these PCC cameras. They've got a new NVR. They've got a little screen that can go along with it.

They've got a breast pump. They got what? Oh, that's odd. Yeah, a new breast pump for moms who want more. It isn't just a pump, it's freedom. And the picture in this, guys, it's something. We're used to the Photoshop pictures. This one, I don't know.

It's just, it's weird. I guess it is kind of like a better system. I don't know. Actually TJ, contact Eufy and see if you can get some for testing. This triple camera thing looks pretty interesting though. Minus the fact that it looks crazy. I mean, just look at this thing. It's a good idea though, because my issue with PTZs is that you always have to make sure the PTZ is actually looking where you want it to look. And this solves that issue, because it just has a camera looking

all the time, and it has a little like forehead with a camera, and then it has the eyes with the cameras. I like it. Yeah, there's a number of these types of cameras out, the PTZ cameras where they have basically like a fixed point camera on the housing. And then they will have, this is one that has two lenses, but I've seen ones that just have a regular PTZ zoom, zoom lens type thing on it. What's nice about this is that usually

when you do install a PTZ camera, you want to have like some fixed cameras around looking at different things in the area. So then you can just go in and like make AI or automation or motion detection, spin that camera to go look in the area of interest. And if something happens off camera with a PDZ, you don't get to see it. Or if it moves and it's looking some different direction, something can happen on the other side and you'll never know. you don't get to see it. Or if it moves and it's looking some different direction, something can happen on the other side and you'll never know.

With this fixed camera on here, it would be able to determine if something is, you know, worth looking at. I wonder how wide, it doesn't really have any specs on this. I wonder how wide the top camera is. If it's a wide angle lens, then that would be really helpful

because then it could just notice something small and spin the other camera around and maybe zoom in and look at it. Not a bad idea. Yeah. I'm interested to see this MVR as well because I still, Unified Protect is all right, but somebody can definitely make an on-vif compatible camera system.

And Ufi makes some pretty decent stuff. So I'm confident they'll release something for us. I don't know if it'll be compatible with on-vif, but I like the DIY DVRs and MVRs people are coming out with. Yeah, because generally the software is better, honestly. It has to be easier to use, just given the audience. But like, I still don't understand how these massive companies get away with these garbage apps and interfaces. You know, like... Because you don't have any other choice. What are you going to do? Yeah.

The massive, the massive companies are Dahua and hike vision. Right. So like that's pretty much it. And, um, yeah, they pretty much have the same app that looks like garbage. It's because when you're in a big company and the top guy, you know, ask for your honest opinion, you can't give it to them. I'll give it to them. Like you, no, then you won't be employed anymore. Like I see this all the time at work where they talk about, you know, they want honest.

The only, like at our work, the only time they get honest opinions in, in their, uh, what do they call it? The anonymous. Yes. Yeah. They have the anonymous questions. They would get the really honest opinions and they actually turn that off now. The opinions were getting a little too honest, apparently.

That tends to happen. So now it's no, so now whenever they ask for questions, there's hardly any questions or you get the dumb questions, you know, um, but yeah, in bigger companies, people are afraid to give their honest opinion because you can't say to the top guy, this app sucks. It looks like garbage because then you get fired where the smaller companies like we could be talking. I say like, Seth, your website looks like crap.

You gotta redo something, you know? I know. You know, but the good thing is I never have to say that to you, you know? Like, yeah, I'm always impressed with your, you know, are the iguanas falling or whatever, you know, you do a good job. Quick to whip a website up. Yeah. I wonder if the iguanas, you know, I noticed the other day, the iguana

thing, there was a problem with it and I forgot to fix it. And now I don't remember what the problem was. Should have filed, should have filed a ticket. You didn't get my support request? No, I didn't. Wow. Probably should. Well, your support system's broken too.

It's set. Yeah. It's not active. Uh, let support system's broken too. It's set. Yeah, it's not active. Let's see the, yeah, it says all clear here in Sarasota and then Middlesburg and Pickering high risk. Yeah, we're getting some snow tomorrow. Oh, okay. So that's actually working.

But don't worry, iguanas here in Florida are okay. Hmm. I did find a bug. I just don't know what it was, but oh well. Maybe next year. It's not, it's, it's hitting summertime temps now. So we need to put a bug. I just don't know what it was. But oh well, maybe next year. It's not it's It's hitting summertime temps now. So we need to put a bug bounty out. Maybe somebody else can find it for us. Oh Maybe ah, all right. Well, let's move on here away from the eufy Strange thing but us as Samsung's releasing something called Bali. I think we talked about this. It's a little robot

It rolls around your house in the you it'll be in your house. The summer possibly there's pre registration available right now on the website announced all the way back in 2020. It's gone got a bunch of upgrades now has a built in projector speaker and microphone and functions a little like a little personal assistant similar to smart displays but it can run around your house. It has AI built into it of course because why could you have a kind of product released now a little personal assistant. Similar to smart displays, but it can run around your house. It has AI built into it, of course, because why could you have a kind of product released now that doesn't have AI? They have a partnership with Google, so it's actually decent AI. Gemini is built into it, and it has multimodal reasoning in Samsung's own AI models as well. So it

sounds like this could be a pretty cool little product. What do you guys think? You guys want a little BB eight running around your house? No, this thing's going to ruin my relationship, especially when the wife walks in and says, ask it, what has Gavin done all day and then starts projecting a video on this, you know, like, no, this is going to be like the number one snitch in your house. Oh man. I didn't think about it like that, but that's probably not a good idea.

Yeah. Does it watch you all day? I can't, I don't want a creepy. I mean, what doesn't watch you all day, Seth? Of course. Exactly. To be recording you all day. It's got Google Assistant, Google Gemini built into it. So, you know, it's definitely listening

to everything you say. I mean, it's small enough. I kind of want one of these things. I don't think this could take over. I don't think it could hold a knife and cut your throat at night. So I'm not afraid of this one. I mean, it's definitely going to run your toe over. Looks adorable.

Yeah. How much can this possibly weigh? I mean, come on. It's going to be worse than a Lego. I don't know. It's really cute. I don't know. I like how they have it projecting stuff on a wall.

Like, what is this, maps and directions or something, but really how bright can that be, first of all? Then I have a wife, I don't have very many spaces on the wall that things going to be able to project left. So there's been a lot of decorations put up. I think if it can project on the floor, we're fine. If they want to make a useful robot,

make me a robot that will do more than just jiggle my mouse so my teams doesn't go into a wait mode. Like make it look like my mouse is actually doing work on my screen and maybe you can reply to, use AI to reply to a couple of the messages to make it look like I'm really at my desk so I can get more naps in the day. That's like, that's a real,

where are the people with those kind of robots? Gavin, have you seen the mouse movers before? Like, no, the mouse jigglers are cool, but then, you know, on our, on our back end, we've implemented things that can detect those. So it can tell if your mouse is being jiggled versus if you're actually doing work. Right. So there there's it's, it's constant back and forth. So you need a more smart one that actually will click on emails and do what we do,

delete, pretend like you're reading them, move them around, and then use some AI to reply to some text messages here on your behalf. Make it look like you're really there. So it has to have a camera that's looking at your screen, physically moving around the mouse and like just randomly clicking on windows. Okay, got it. That's a useful robot to me, you know? Like that is something, you know, like, you know, then I can get my nap-a-tizer in in

the day and then get back to work and be more productive. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, LG, get on it. Use AI for good, not for Bollie. Well, Samsung's making Bollie, but... Oh, sorry, sorry. I think LG announced one that was very similar to this, is what I was thinking of.

Yeah, I think everybody's kind of trying to come out with one, but they've never really materialized, so... Amazon had that creepy little robot thing that would go around your house, too, and then they had the drone and Astro, that's what Amazon Astro. They canceled that though. Yeah, I think there was like a couple of them that got released or something like that, but it was never like a real thing. Well, it is now, I guess, available for pre-order.

I'm going to go, what if I get one of these? Should I get one of these? I wonder how much it is. Yeah, how much is, if I have to ask, it's probably too expensive. Yeah, so that's my thing, right? Because this is a cool thing for like $500 or less. But they're always like $1,000 or more. And that is not worth $1,000 to me.

I don't remember the Astro price exactly, but it was like $1,500 or something. I'm not sure. Oh, wow. Yeah, no thank you. Well, this has a projector built into it So I mean like yeah, I don't what how much could this be? Yeah $15.99 for the Amazon Astro 15 night. Okay. No, thank you. No, thank you

Yeah, and that one had a display on it. They didn't have a projector, but I had a display on it hard pass 50 I mean like you said 500 bucks. Hey, I don't. They still have that coffee pod that like poops. Coffee pod that poops. Yeah, we talked about that a while back. I'm sure. Poops, I bet I could just search for it and find it. Yeah, the poo coffee machine. It's called the...

I need to see this link it. Well, it's videos. Oh no, this is not correct. This is not correct. We covered this. It had like this like squat design to it. It would squat down and just like coffee would come out of it. People have made things on YouTube that we can't put in the show.

No, it's doing an incognito mode, obviously. Oh, yeah. That's nobody knows. Nobody can see your history then. Well, I found something. Here it is. Episode 445, The Squatty Coffee. I will put a link to it in our show notes. You guys can check it out. Oh, yeah. I totally came up with something else.

I'm glad you linked it. Evidently, this is a common thing with coffee. Yeah, I linked you what I found, so... Now you can see the difference. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I didn't want to link, TJ. Come on. Wonderful, wonderful.

Uh, yeah. it's really strange. I know that these have been around, but I can't seem to find them. And there's plenty of things called CoffeeBot out there. But this one, it basically looks like it's squatting and giving you a good ol' coffee. So, here you go TJ. Here's a video. I'm not watching yours.

You can watch the video in this Gizmodo article. We'll put a link to this in the show notes. But it is a pod based coffee machine with the twist It actually uses two pods and I would say that's not the only twist to this thing a little bit of moves. That's great It's got it's got like a screen on the bottom too. Yeah. Yeah, that's so weird. Yeah, I kind of remember this, so. Yes, $7.99. So I would rather have one of these. Oh, yeah.

Well, that's definitely going to be more entertaining than a robot ball thing. Can you imagine people coming to your house and like, hey, you want a cup of coffee? You'd be asking everybody. No, no, let me make you a cup. It's fine. Yeah, and they'd come over and then, no, there's little stupid robot balls running around projecting things all over the floor and stuff. No, I don't think so. All right.

Well, we'll put a link to all this fun stuff in the show notes and I will have a fun time editing all that too. Let's see. All right. Bad news guys. Apple is considering delaying its smart home hub until 2026. Apple it's initially expected to launch soon according to the guy who always says that Apple is going to do stuff and then they never do.

Mark Gurman said now it may be delayed until 2026 due to engineering challenges with the revamped Siri voice assistant device, internally known as the J490, is facing issues related to Siri and its AppIntense technology, causing significant setbacks. So I know this is the one that has a robotic arm on it. You know, maybe that's, that's the one he's hoping has a robotic arm on it. Yeah. Apple can't get Siri to work just like us. And everybody else in the world can get Siri to work. And, uh, yeah, they're not going to say we're not going to have it now.

It's probably, probably good given the tariff situation. It's pretty much going to be like $8,000. I'm surprised we're even talking about it. Does anybody even care? Right? Honestly, no, I don't. Like, and I would, I would, I would, if, if Siri was good, I would buy one. Right.

But, um, Siri's not good. Yeah. Baby steps here first. Let's, let's get one thing work. This is worse than a Seth project. Let's get one thing working first before we move on to the other. Like they really, really need to get that Siri AI working first, you know, before they can move on.

They don't even need Siri AI to work, Gavin. They just need Siri to work. Yeah. Siri was never good in the first place. Now it's still not good. Still not good. Yeah. You know, and she keeps answering on my phone now as I'm talking about it. I know, right? All day I say the name, I say stuff and it's like not good. Still not good. Yeah. You know, and she keeps answering on my phone now

as I'm talking about. I know, right? All day I say the name, I say stuff, and it's like ignoring me. And now it's like, hey, I'm waking up. What's going on? You guys are talking about Siri? What?

Mark Berman? Yeah, when we talk bad about her, she answers. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I really, I'm not even, I have no interest in this smart home mob. I don't even know what's good. It's all rumors at this point anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have no idea in this smart home app. I don't even know what's good. It's all rumors at this point anyway. So we have no idea what's being promised or what it's going to do.

I think a lot of people just throw iPads or, you know, cheat. I guess you have to do iPads with Siri on your wall and they use that with the home app and stuff like that. I don't know what more this is going to add to it. I don't know. They basic stuff like turn on light in this room type things, you know, turn on, with the name light. Like you have to name the light correctly or whatever.

You can't just say in this room, cause that's, you know, Siri's not that smart, but yeah. Sometimes they say open the shade in the dining room. And there's literally only one window set up in the home. And it's like, yeah, I can't find that. And then you have to say open the curtain. And it's like, oh, I can't find that. Then you have to say, open the curtain and it's like, oh, okay, I'm on it. He's like, figure it out.

Whatever. But it's convenient in that respect that I can just yell into my watch or something and stuff happens, but I don't know, fix Siri. I mean, you can do that with anything though at this point. I know, right? I could do that with the home assistant thing. That was cool 10 years ago when Siri was the thing, but at this point, I could do that with the homocyste. That was cool 10 years ago when Siri was like the thing, but at this point it's just so far behind. I don't know why anybody would invest into it. Siri has become like, you know, every time I ask her a question, she just passes

it off to chat GPT on my phone anyways. Oh, that's nice. You know, it's like, like, why don't you just allow me to talk to chat GPT directly? Then like, why do I, why do you have to be the middleman or woman? Exactly. Like just middle robot thing. Um, middle AI, uh, why, why, why not just like become like, why, why not just like up in the industry? Cause it's Apple and they could just do it.

Right. They could just say, you know what you want to use? Yeah. The, the, the quad you can use, you can talk to the cloud you can use you can talk to the cloud you want to talk to the Chad you can talk to the Chad and like if you don't want to talk to Siri we'll leave it Siri will be the default right and a lot of people will never pay for Chad or quad or switch it over or whatever but maybe they would maybe the Apple is just so afraid that Siri's so bad that they would just like yeah we'll move we'll

move over to quad and and and never talk to Siri again, because Claude has a free tier for doing this. They really missed the boat on Siri. Because Siri was like a thing before Apple bought them. And they introduced Siri. And I think there's a number of notable things about Siri. Like, it was literally the first way that you can interact with the home element in your house right like but when there was a when the when home kit and it was introduced right so like you could actually start interacting with home stuff and programming through through

through siri and say things through siri and activate things on and off in the house i think is one of the first ways you could do that and um i think i think it's just been flat on its face since they i don't i don't know what they're doing, Siri. It's nowhere near what anything else is, much less what they're doing over at the start-ups, like OpenAI and Claude and all that stuff. You can have full-on conversations with that thing. Anyway, boo, Siri.

Don't care that your home hub's not coming out. You suck. Speaking of sucking, Sonos. Oh, wait, this is actually a pretty good story for Sonos. Sonos permanently... We're keeping our streak alive. Every week at Sonos week. I don't know, this one isn't bad.

Sonos is permanently reducing the price of its Era 100 smart speaker in the Ray sound bar to $199. It's aimed to boost hardware sales amid a weird slump they're having for some reason. The Aero 100, initially priced at $249, now offers stereo sound, line-in, and Bluetooth audio support with more intuitive controls. And the Ray soundbar, originally $279, lacks HDMI connectivity and Dolby AMO support but remains a solid option for enhancing audio in smaller rooms. What do you guys think? Should I get a ray and replace my play bar with it? No

Probably not honestly for $199. I think the the ray is actually a good price It was 280 before which I think is way too much especially because it uses optical I personally don't like the way it sounds for the TV It sounds alright as a standalone speaker though. And the Aero 100 price drop of $50 off is pretty nice as well. So I think this is a good idea. Oddly enough, be for all the tariffs though. So I'm not really sure what's going on at Sonos where they thought that dropping prices

before a bunch of tariffs would come into effect. Prices will be going back up. Again, who knew? Who up again Who knew who knew? We not may not have them anymore who knows I mean this is a very odd time to announce price drops with everything going on So we'll see this actually sticks around but if not, I'll just be another son of a splinter unfortunately But I think it's a good idea of them dropping price I felt their stuff was kind of overpriced sometimes like some of their stuff was kind of overpriced sometimes. Like some of their stuff was just really overpriced. And, um, they, the, the dropping of these two things puts them in a much better

category, I think to increase sales. I wish they dropped the price of their Sonos ACE headphones. Those are really overpriced. Yeah. Um, you know, like I'm looking at, I can't remember why I told you guys, but here in Canada, we're looking at like seven, almost $800 before, you know, like I'm looking at, I can't remember why I told you guys, but here in Canada, we're looking at like seven, almost $800 before, you know, after taxes and stuff to get a pair of them. And it's just for a pair of headphones.

Wow. Yeah. That's a little too expensive. Yeah. I agree. $299 for some headphones. Yeah. Like if it was $299, but nope.

What, let me, Where are they at now? I can get some used ones for $315. Yeah. The used market is, has some good price ones, right? $250 is looks like 250, $260. I could probably pick some up. Yeah. But the new you're looking at, yeah.

$599 plus tax, you know, you're almost at seven. It's getting a little up there. Well, uh, yeah, yeah, I kind of agree. Their products were a great value and stuff worked, but now if you want to sell it, definitely not a premium product if the app doesn't work and it's 279. 199 does seem like a better price for that little guy.

I now see that's a small one. So yeah. Anyway, Z-Wave is striving to remain relevant, not dead yet, against the rise of Matter, which has been backed by major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google. Historically, Z-Wave has been integral to the smart home smart security systems,

offering reliable, secure, and interoperable connections, but has lagged behind due to its reliance on a central hub and being a closed protocol. There's a couple of other things that held them back. Like, didn't they only have like one manufacturer for a long time that could make their stuff? I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, they've been transitioning to have an open source model and introduce Z-Wave Long Range,

which extends device connectivity up to a mile and a half. So they're really trying to be made over and stay relevant. And yeah, I think even Home Assistant was announcing some big changes with the Z-Wave recently. So, I don't know. Seems like they're coming back. They're not dead yet, guys. Z-Wave's coming back, TJ. Well, that's good. My Z-Wave is Dead website will have to wait around, unfortunately. But, you know, it's good to see Z-Wave sticking around. I honestly like Z-Wave. I use it for security systems and stuff like that, just like what they say. But for mass user adoption, it just does not exist.

Nobody knows what Z-Wave is. Nobody wants to have a hub or anything like that. So it's just, it's a very hard product to sell unless you're a nerd or you're a manufacturer. Right. And at this point, if you're a manufacturer, you're going to adopt Zigbee or Matter. You're not going to look at Z-Wave for the most part. So, I think it depends on the product. Like you can do Z-Wave and then Bridge into Matter if you wanted to. Right?

That's what, that's what you should do, I think. Like support it as like a car is doing for the Zigbee. Well, that's really what Z-Wave needs, right? Z-Wave needs a product like a company or manufacturer, whatever it is like a car who can bring Z-Wave devices into the Matter ecosystem. Yeah. That's ultimately what needs to happen.

So hopefully they're working on that. Z-Wave's problem historically has been that they basically had one chip manufacturer and that one chip manufacturer obviously controlled everything that went on with it. And it was very expensive to get Z-Wave devices. I mean, until really Zeus came around, there's never really been an inexpensive Z-Wave device.

Z-Wave devices historically have always been very expensive. You're talking $40 to $70 for a light switch or dimmer, $30, $40 for a door and window contacts. That's a very tall ask for people that are getting into the smart home ecosystem where you can get a Wi-Fi sensor or a Zigbee sensor for 10 to 20 bucks. Zuse is the first company I've seen where you can get Z-Wave devices for relatively cheap.

Yeah. And I never thought, I never thought Z-Wave would die. I thought they would pivot. I thought they'd go into more industrial setups and stuff like that, but I'm pretty sure their play with matter here is not something new that they've probably been thinking about or working on for a few years now and try to figure out how they can do it. And I think it's a good move.

It'll keep Z-Wave alive. It'll mean probably another hub to bridge Z-Wave in there, but, you know, at least you can keep your Z-Wave associations or you could bring your old Z-Wave devices in. It depends on how low level they do it though. Cause if they build it in at a certain level, I don't know. I don't know. Matter is set up for a particular type of communication based around pretty much Zigbee, which is like an 802.11 thing.

So I don't know. It will be interesting to see what they're able to do with it. And like they're saying here, it allows them to seamlessly integrate the devices with the matter platform. I would be nice. It would be nice honestly, cause there are some really cool Z-Wave product out there. And like TJ was saying, like they're cheap, but they work well. They're expensive, but they work well.

I think Z-Wave has a, they're a little more expensive than their Zigbee equivalents. Oh really? Okay. Yeah. Um, um, Zuse is probably one of the cheaper of the Z-Wave products, but then, um, people still look at Z, uh, Zigbee alternatives because you could get Zigbee versus our cheaper. But the thing I find with Zigbee is you could get, there's a lot of cheap stuff out there, but it's also cheap for a reason.

Right. Right. It's gotta work. I mean, that's kind of like, goes back to the first story. Like it's great that you built this lift into the kitchen, but if you need a keypad, exactly that's the best of luck. Z wave they're not dead yet. And I think they're going to be around for a while because, um, because, you know,

having that foothold and security, that's going to go for a long, long, long, long time. I don't think that's ever dying. So anyway, um, let's move on here. Hubitat has a new feature called command retry. And it's supposed to enhance the reliability of device actuations. The feature captures commands sent to a specific devices

and rescinds them up to five times if the expected event wasn't triggered. They could call this the crappy network fix feature. Pretty much, yeah. It starts, it depends on the device type, but initial, uh, relay intervals, uh, will be like 150, uh, one and a half seconds for switches and thermostats and up to 60 seconds for shades. Uh, and it has a back off strategy, all sorts of stuff built into it.

Actually, I think it's a pretty good idea. Like he's kind of smart. It is a good idea. And I'm not going to say the crappy network fix because even like I've seen issues with this, like even when you had a good network, um, you know, too many commands get sent and some get dropped, you know, and the fact that they build it in that it will now retry. I think that's smart.

Um, when I was on Hubitat, I did that on some of my apps where it would verify, um, if the command got through and if it didn't, it would resend it. And that just helped with the reliability of the command. I mean, I thought you were doing that too, with some stuff on Home Assistant. Yeah. There's a couple of things on Home Assistant where I send the command more than once just to make sure it gets through there, but those aren't necessarily

Z-Wave or ZigBee. Ah, okay. Um, I do that with my blinds because sometimes the command more than once just to make sure it gets through there. But those aren't necessarily Z waivers. I think I do that with my blinds because sometimes the command just doesn't get to them. So I send it multiple times. I'm just like, wait a couple seconds and just send it twice. And it's going to get one of them. But I think this is great and it will make things a little more reliable, even if with the bad networks.

But we shouldn't have to get to this point. It's like, why are we at this point where we now have to send commands twice? And I know some of these protocols have, they have stuff built in to determine if commands reach their destinations and stuff like that, but it's obviously not good enough and they've had to go down this route, which makes, I'm pretty happy they did this. Yeah. It says it's disabled by default, so it's not going to be on, but you can enable had to go down this route, which makes I'm pretty happy they did this. Yeah.

It says it's disabled by default. So it's not going to be on, but you can enable or disable it by basically each device in its preference settings. So that's smart. If you have a trouble, like if it's your blinds Gavin, a hundred Douglas I'm guessing, right? Yes, they are. How'd you know? Okay.

So there you go. I already knew. Yeah. If you, if you had the device, it's problematic. You go and flip the switch and, uh, it, I mean, it almost guarantees that the command is going to happen, right? Like it's, it's gonna send the command out 60 seconds if the desired result wasn't received.

So, and sometimes, um, more than anything, that's what we want to ensure. Right. Is, you know, when you have a good night routine, for example, you want to ensure that everything gets executed that you want. You don't care how fast it was executed. You just want to make sure that all these lights were turned off. And this will ensure that happens. And if it doesn't, then you, it actually logs and say it failed after five times.

That's great. Logging, troubleshooting. Imagine that. Imagine that. Nice. Yeah. No,, troubleshooting. Imagine that. Imagine that. Nice. Yeah. No, no, this is Hubitat.

No, Hubitat has always been good with their logs. Um, reading their logs and like gathering information and stuff like that. They've always been great with that. Very cool. Well, that's a good feature. I like it. Especially that it's like built into the device and you don't have to do it yourself.

Because honestly, that could be building that correctly and not having like the back off feature and the five times. Like I could do it, but am I going to miss one of those steps and then just like almost just keep sending the same command over and over again and then it doesn't have any logic in it to stop or you have to think about that every single time you set something up, but this is just built in. You just toggle the thing.

If it doesn't work, toggle it. It's not easy to do because there's a lot of things you have to take into consideration. Say you, say you send the, like the on command and it didn't get through, but in that same time you've turned the switch off, you know, you got to be smart enough to say, well, we got to stop trying to turn this thing back on, right. Or else your switch will turn back on by itself. Right. Like there's time.

And then multiply that out by like 16 switches that you just put in. Exactly. Yeah. That's great. That it's like a first, like a, at the lower level, like it's built into the OS. You just toggle the switch and you're good to go. I like it. Great job.

All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show, home tech.fm slash five, two, three. All right, well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show, hometech.fm slash five two three. All right, pick of the week, we got a pick of the week. This one's fun and it's from our friends over at Apollo. They have announced the first industrial sensor installation at, I don't know how to pronounce this, Lot Aluminum USA. So they, it's a, I think they were talking about this when, I

don't know if they talked about it on the show, we talked with them quite a bit after the show. And I think they were talking about have, getting ready to go do this install or put some custom sensors or something together for them. But it's an aluminum materials factory in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. And installation features all sorts of sensors. It's got that measure temperature humidity and they feature Wi Fi and POE capabilities as well. So this was really cool. I will put a link to the article that they wrote up about all the stuff that they did inside the in our show notes.

One of the things they highlight here that everything is 100 percent local and private. They don't have their sensors reporting up to some Cloud somewhere and they could potentially leak this industrial complexes information or something like that. So maybe somebody could sabotage the operations or something with, I don't know, but it's secure. There you go, no Cloud subscription. So it's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's a good idea and it's good to see this kind of technology making its way into industrial. Industrial has always had different things that they've used to monitor whatever's going on. But it's cool to see like what product that you can go on by being used in this capacity. Yeah. And that's how you know it's a very good device, right?

Because if they're gonna trust it in a commercial environment, they know it's going to be robust in a home environment. Um, and, and Apollo makes a bunch of different devices. So I can see this becoming a good market for them, uh, especially for the capabilities that they're offering. And I'm pretty sure Locke got it for a really good price because if they had to buy the industrial versions of this stuff, it would probably cost them an arm and a leg compared to what they paid.

A hundred percent. Yeah. And the guys over at Apollo are pretty, I don't know, anal retentive about the quality of their products. It seems so. Like they probably got a really good deal out of it too. So. But, but it looks like, it looks like because of, you know, maybe lot had some requirements such as POE and, um, they, you know, added it to their,

their catalog, right. And we're going to benefit from that. So, you know, I got to find a contact over at lot and ask them if they need like soil sensors and get them to push that, to get them to push that development over there, Apollo. Or my light sensor, nobody will make because I don't know, it's too esoteric for anybody to make. You know, I'm going to have to do that, to get them to push that development over there, Apollo. Or my light sensor, nobody will make because I don't know, it's too esoteric for anybody to make, I'm going to have to do that. Well, we'll see.

All right. Well, great job, Apollo. Really liked their product. You know, what's funny is that, that, that, I don't know, somebody was talking some shade, I think it was TJ in our hub. No. Like, Seth doesn't, Seth too good to be on our discord or something like that. And you know what?

I was in the discord. Like, I just don't ever go and check it. There's like, discord is just basically got a bunch of like numbers and stuff on it. I don't look at any of that stuff. I, I was right there. Guys were just talking about me talking noise. Yeah.

I have, I have issues with discord too. It just seems to flood me with so much stuff that, you know, things get lost on me. Yeah. I just, I just mute mostly the channels I'm part of and I just pop in a cage lane to see what's going on. I like it because you can, the channels are a little more organized in my opinion than like Slack or something else. So I, I've been, I've been enjoying discord more often.

We only have one channel in our Slack DJ. Yeah. We only have one channel in our Slack, DJ. Yeah. How hard can that be? It makes it the most easy organization ever. One bucket. I think, yeah, that's not organization. It's like we had a conversation before the show about how Seth and I are doing these

community projects and stuff like that, and we're, we're contacting people through texting and email. And it's like, there's just, there's no organization. You need organization. Yeah. Yeah. And for Slack, it doesn't really matter as much because unless you pay for the pro plan, which we do not, uh, you don't get unlimited history. We got it free for 20 days.

We got it free. Somebody activated this trial. Yeah. I don't know who did that. And it's been spamming me about this since you activated it. I know. Like, ugh. 27 days left.

Well, we're never going to pay you Slack or who owns it now? Salesforce? Yeah, we're never paying you, so. Definitely not. Squarespace. Salesforce. Yeah. Squarespace.

I was thinking Squarespace. We did a lot of Squarespace stuff recently. Yeah, yeah. We're definitely not paying them, so I'm like, eh. I would consider, like Discord has a lot of like integrations and things in community type things set up on it. I would consider moving over to it. It has like a kiddie feel to it too.

That just, I just don't like like all these icons and stuff. Like, I don't know. I don't have time for that. I think, I think what most, no, no, no, I'm thinking of teams. Leave my teams alone. Teams upset me the most when I figured out that I couldn't have time for that. I think what most, no, no, no, I'm thinking of teams. Leave my teams alone. Teams upset me the most when I figured out that I couldn't add extra reactions to a single message.

Like you can only add one emoji to the message. Are you kidding me? Like I can't have two emojis? I make messages out of the emojis. You just gotta see, you just gotta see, I will encode messaging into our emojis and I will make custom emojis for things like glory holes and that kind of thing.

Which if you're not familiar with that, you need to come over to our hub because Owen is really good at making them. I'm just going to leave it at that. Wow. Yeah. Breast pumps and glory holes, that's what this show is about. Show title.

Hey, if your home theater doesn't have a glory hole, it is not a home theater and that's what I've learned. I've learned. Wow. You didn't get an O in home theater. He puts his glory hole in everything. He puts a lot of time into it too. He's really proud of his glory holes.

Painting it. Handcrafted, artist anal glory hole that you've ever seen. It's amazing. Is that how you pronounce that word? I don't know. Anyway, moving on here. Uh, if you have any picks of the week, great ideas for show, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at home. Take it out of him, uh, or you can visit home. Take it out of him slash feedback and fill out the online form.

All right, moving on. All right. We got a project updates, but first we got home assistant updates cause 2025.4 is out and it is time for new dashboards and fun stuff. There's a clock card. Gavin, Gavin, what should we pull out of this? What, what's significant about the Home Assistant 2024 2025.4? The only real, I think the big significant piece to me was the

new experimental areas dashboard. So they added some new dashboards where it will auto add devices and sort them into areas and into types and stuff like that. So I don't think it's the answer yet for your automatic dashboard, but I think it's the first step in the right direction. I know. I'd say I heard about this actually separately, and I think it is probably what should be the default for most people.

Cause that's, that's what that it's a good step. I will give them that. And I think it's like the first step in a nice direction. And I think in the next few releases, you're going to see iterations of this and it's just going to get better and better and it'll reach a point where this will be probably become just the default dashboards. Um, and that to me was a standout feature. I mean, you can, you can read about all the other features in there.

Um, I, I was kind of proud and also disappointed that my name wasn't mentioned at all. But yeah, cause there was a, in what did they add in the template section? They added a few new functions. Um, and one of them was floor entities function. And that was my suggestion, you know, uh, on X, you know, I submitted that as a suggestion and they, how it works. You gotta use GitHub.

I know, I know, but Frank asked on X and I sent them a few and I wish he did the floor devices too, but he did the floor entities one. And you know, I was so proud when I saw that he added this, but then I couldn't find my name mentioned anywhere. So, you know, I mean, that's why you do the coding. Did you do the pull request? Well, you know what? Integration. I created my own add-on for home assistant where I added my own function in there. Like I have a few extra functions that I added myself into my personal home

assistant and that was one of them. So yeah, I did my own coding for my own version. I didn't do the coding for this one, but still it was my suggestion. Did you write the unit test? Come on, Gavin. It was my suggestion. The poor guy has been there programming. He's like, what is Gavin talking about?

Not just me, but I wish you would, you know, add everybody that, who suggested, you know, give us, make us feel good. You know, on next time I talk to him, you know, let them know. You give them, you give them the word. Put Gavin's name on there. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm updating right now.

So I'm updating, uh, the OS right now. So that's going to take a bit, but. Yeah. It right. I'm updating right now. So I'm updating the OS right now. So that's going to take a bit, but. Yeah, it was harmless. It worked out pretty good. They had another fix they added, I think, for the Raspberry Pi or something like that, but that hit a few people. But I mean, other than that. Oh, I did see that.

Yeah. Yeah. Read the, make sure you read the breaking changes and stuff like that too. Nope. Nah. Nope. YOLO. Oh, YOLO. You don't need to know. Yeah, that's fine. You don't need to know and stuff like that too. No, no, YOLO. Oh, YOLO.

You don't need to know that. Yeah, that's fine. You don't need to know that. That's fine. You don't have to, just YOLO it. Lots of updates. Even the voice assistant has an update, which I had to turn off because it kept getting too answery.

Yes. And I don't know what's going on now. Like it's been, it's funny because this thing is actually buried under papers on my desk and I'll be talking and it'll be like, bloop. I'm like, oh no, it's been it's funny because this thing is actually buried under papers on my desk and I'll be talking and it'd be like bloop and like oh no, it's under there somewhere and I start rummaging through this thing during a meeting and It times out it's still under there somewhere under these papers I don't know where it is mine is just lighting up the area So you don't bump your knee at night right at this point because I got the mic turned off and everything

I was just waiting for them to you know, make it better. I still have three of these things. I need to do a giveaway. I need to do this giveaway. It'll be in the hub. I'll do a giveaway. I cleaned up my garage. Why would you do that to somebody else? I mean...

They're curious. I will throw in... I will throw in along with the Home Assistant voice with our giveaway, I'll throw in an Ava sticker too. I don't know if you have any of those. Boom, I'll throw in an Ava sticker too. I don't know if you have any more. Boom, I got a bunch of them. I don't know how I ended up with this many.

How did she end up with so many Ava stickers? That's a good question. You see, when Seth moves something in his office, he uncovers other stuff that has been sitting there forever. Yeah, I have a bunch of Home Tech stickers. I don't know how I have more of those. I thought I gave them all to you.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I thought you sent them all. I don't know. There's a, I actually have a drawer tech stickers. I don't know how I have more of those. I thought I gave them all to you. Yeah, I was gonna say, I thought you sent them all. I don't know. There's a, I actually have a drawer of stickers. I did some cleaning and found some stuff. So yeah, yeah. There'll be some giveaways in the hub. So make sure you're in there keeping an eye on stuff. Yeah, it's gonna happen.

I got stuff to give away. I might, I might, I might guys. I might even give away some cameras. Oh, no, no, no, no, I need a camera. How do I sign up? So you just gotta be in the hub. Gotta be in the hub. Okay, well, I'll be first to reply. I need a new camera for, I need a couple new cameras.

And so you need so many cameras. Yeah, I know. All I'm gonna do is feed your, what is it, the ubiquity AI thing addiction. Like you're just gonna have to buy more and more of those things. You're gonna have more of those little AI things inside your house than actual cameras, I think. That's right, you gotta fill going to get, have to buy more and more of those things. You're going to have more of those little AI things inside your house

than, than actual cameras. I think that's why you got to fill the rack up with something. I mean, I got two of the AI points. They work really well. And I've spotted, I've spots on my rack for three more if I want to add, but they work really well. They, they added so many features to my on fifth cameras. I'm I like it.

I like it. And there you go. Yeah. I think I'm going to order one the next time I like it. I like it. And there you go. Yeah. I think I'm going to order one the next time I have an order to throw in. So they just updated, they released it, um, to everybody. It's out of beta, but the update to it that allows you to add more than one unified camera to, to, to it. So, but it only works with unified camera in that so far. So I think the on-vif cameras, you know, multiple on-vif

cameras will come probably soon. I just wish mine worked a little bit better with the on-vif cameras, you know, multiple on-vif cameras will come probably soon. I just wish mine worked a little bit better with the on-vif camera. Like I feel like they've stopped working on that feature. Oh, wait, do you have an AI port though? No, no. Oh, the AI port. So if you have it- Does it make it load faster?

Well, yeah, if you have an on-vif camera and you put it directly, all you can really do is basically just record the stream, right? Like there's nothing else that it does. But once you add the AI port, it turns it into like a UI camera, unified camera. Like you get all the person detection, animal detection, it up samples the stream somehow and gives it better quality. You get license plate detection. It's pretty amazing what it does. Yeah.

I mean, my biggest gripe is that like, when you load up the UniFi interface, like you normally see their cameras like that. Like they just load up. And the OnVif ones, it's either an old image, like an image that is the last time I looked at it, or it's black. And it doesn't come on for a while.

I mean, it could be up to like 10, 15 seconds. So I don't, I don't know why. I don't know what settings I need to change, but I feel like they've kind of like, yeah, on VIF we're done and they're walk, they walked away from it. Yeah. The, the AI port loads up instantly. Um, some of my on VIF cameras load up right away. I have one that always takes forever, but the ones on the AI port, yeah, they are mine load up instantly.

Hmm. So yeah. Maybe, maybe they, maybe they did something there and put some extra horsepower. I mean, that thing has more horsepower than the little NVR things and that's a problem. So maybe, maybe one day, not anytime soon. I don't know. I'm happy with it. Just recording there and I just want to like load it up and see what's going outside.

Some times we're letting our daughter's a little older, she gets to go play outside with kids out front, and they run around in the street and do all sorts of crazy stuff, and you just keep an eye on them. You can still hear them scream. Depending on the scream, it depends on the urgency, how quickly you need to activate the camera.

And if it doesn't load up for like 10 seconds, that could be a problem. So, yeah. All right. Anyway, moving on. Project updates. I guess I'll go start with me. I got like, like TG was referring,

I got involved with the community project and ended up in a bunch of meetings and doing a bunch of stuff. And I didn't do anything. But one thing I did do is I attempted to make my own, my own Teams, what's it called? Teams mouse wiggler thing with my computer just to keep Teams activated.

And it actually does, I don't know, this one I back past years, but see, I couldn't run it at Gavin's place because Gavin locks the computers down. But I kind of wanted to like do a thing where I stepped away for a minute. Even though you can still reach me on my phone, like I still have my phone. I just want to step away from the computer for a minute and walk in the other room. And I, you know, just like, I don't like how teams like after five minutes, it

makes you go to sleep and makes you like, Hey, he's offline. So I made it where you could just like switch the teams and it clicks. There's a, it does a key, it sends key commands to the teams thing. So maybe, maybe I shouldn't tell Gavin he'll like bypass. No, I'm just letting you know, like all these things that you're coming out with, like they detect these things. Like those, those USB mouse jigglers. Yeah.

They can detect those. Um, then there's those mouse jigglers thatigglers that you actually sit your mouse on it. Yeah, and it will shake the mouse. It won't like so. It kind of like randomly moves it. Yeah. So you don't have it plugged into the computer so there's nothing to detect there, but they are, there's software that will analyze mouse movements and and detect stuff like that. So yeah, there's a lot of people. You're just telling me I'm going to have to up the game. Cause my wife uses those too. So like every time you up the game, like you'd be surprised.

Like if they really need to find out what's going on. Oh yeah. They can probably just look at the screen and say, yeah, the mouse just moved from the upper right-hand corner and kind of randomly moved across the screen to the bottom middle and like, yeah, that's clearly not going on. So yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of tracking software out there and you'd be shocked what the companies are tracking now in the larger corporations. It's actually kind of scary.

Yep. Yep. Is what it is. So what are you going to do? Yeah, that back to my, my robot, you know, that actually looks like I'm working, you know, open emails, close emails, you know, do things, do actual work on my computer. You could text other robots in the company if you want, just make it look like you're using my teams and you guys can have a conversation, right?

No, don't let them talk. Don't let them talk, Evan. They'll unionize, they'll unionize and we'll have a- I come back and they have a project, you know, completed or something like that. Yeah. So, organized, there'll be like a robot labor movement and we'll be, we'll have all sorts of other problems. I'll get invited to meetings.

You're in management, Gavin, you know better. All right, well TJ, what are you been up to? I have no projects this week. I've been just doing outside stuff. We got the first mow of the year done, starting to do some more landscaping stuff. All the grass is growing. We had like four days of just straight rain.

So everything is coming in pretty quickly right now. We added all the landscaping for the front of the house last year, and that included a couple trees and bushes, and all of it's coming back to life. It's really cool right now. Everything's got little blooms and flowers and everything else. It's pretty nice.

So just outside stuff. It's been hibernation mode here for the past like six months or so. Yeah. Yeah, we're starting to... Well, today was a nice day. There was some kind of cold weather. I'm sure you guys are much colder, but there's some of the cooler weather.

This is the weather that everybody wants to be here for, like 60 something in the morning and like 75 during the day. Nice and breezy, windy, low humidity. And then, you know, by the end of the day it's back. It's, you know, it's summertime again. I think tomorrow will probably be in the 80s. Sure. So, most of the tourists are gone.

So you know, traffic's nice, but the weather's awful. So there we go. Yeah. So it's a nice time of year being in Florida. That's when I like being in Florida. Well, just every now and then it's over. We're moved into summer now. Yeah.

Well, I mean, not like June or July summer though. No, no, no. Pre-summer. It's the warm-up. Yeah Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cuz we always come down for like info comments and what June and I'm like why? Why is that in June? Why do you do this? Well, it's they pick the best places It's in June also in Las Vegas. So yeah, you know, there you go. Pick your poison. Yeah, that's that's all the projects I got did you could you get your TV mounted yet, Seth? Why do you guys keep bringing this up?

No, I mean, the TV's mounted. I just, I have been working. Uh, TJ, what's the bet here? Is it like, he's gotta have it fully done? I said two to three weeks. So fully done or just mounted. I can't remember. Yeah, no, fully done.

Like it can, can the family sit down and watch TV like they could before the old TV broke? Okay. I mean... It depends on where you mean they sit down and they watch TV, because they can do that in one room, but they can't do that in all the rooms. Yeah, no. Just like what was before, but with new TV. No, no. They can't do that.

Alright. We're still good. Alright. How long has it been? I think it's been two weeks now, right? It's been a while, I don't know. Who's counting, TJ? Who's counting? I have another, well, I am, obviously. We have a bet going on, so. Well, I can say, you know,

it was the project I thought it was gonna be. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and has gone wrong. And I think I'm waiting on a, oh, I know what it was. The Luxo switch died, right? So I bought a Cisco switch. Of course, the first one, they said something was wrong. I don't know, they forgot it.

They dropped it. It got lost in the mail. So now I'm waiting for the next one to show up. And it's just, I was worried about paying $1,000. No, Cisco makes a nice little eight port POE switch. Nice little guy, no fans on the thing. So it just produces heat off these like heat sinks on the back of it and Yeah, it's like a little eight port POE switch

I think it was a few hundred bucks and I got it refurbished on eBay. So hey, why not? It's got rack mount rack gears and it's a it's a nice little switch So I'll put that in and hopefully hopefully be here tomorrow. I think it was coming in maybe tomorrow the next day I'll put that in and we'll have TV up and going back everywhere. Yay. Nice. We won't have my home assistant back up because the updates seem to have failed pretty dramatically here and I don't have home assistant. Little guys blinking red on my desk and oh boy.

Yeah, no TV Hong. Sorry, but I've been too busy to do anything anyway. I've been community junk. That's right. If you get it done by this coming week or no, I'm sorry next weekend Then I'll still win the bet. So that's fine. Get some time. I take some time. Take some take your time I'm not worried about it clearly not in a hurry TJ. So Gavin what you been up to? I feel like I'm the only one doing projects these days. Yeah, I gotta say, you probably, yeah. You've been very busy.

I'm always busy. I don't know what it is, but we're getting into the golf season now. So I'm trying to get all my projects out of the way. But this week, the excitement was I got my electrical panel replaced. I know I've been talking about it forever, but it finally happened and the guys did a good job. So now the 200 amp service and I have all the circuits in the world and I have a transfer switch and a whole home search protector to protect all my smart devices.

Really happy. Fast internet. Um, my internet was always fast, but when they were replacing the, um, the, the, it was funny because when they were pulling out the old panel and everything, I showed them the fiber line. I said, please be very careful of this line. This is the most important line here. It's the fiber line.

I come back down a couple of hours later and I see, uh, the end of the fiber line sitting on the ground and the fiber line got cut and I said, uh, what happened? And they're like, um, it got snagged and, you know, I was like, great, you know, cause it's fiber, like he hadagged and I was like, great. Cause it's fiber. You had one job. I wore two jobs. Let me tell you a little bit about every lectern

I've ever met in my life. Bull and a like China shop. They are not the most gentle people. I know. With delicate operates. Luckily, I have a friend that works in the industry doing fiber lines for telecoms. Right.

So I had to call in a favor. Um, and I called him up and I said, Hey, I just need you to terminate this fiber, re terminate this fiber line for me. I need it tonight. Cause I got to get to work in the morning. Right. And he came by and it was, I don't know if you've ever seen this done before, but you had like this $12,000 machine And he came in with this machine and, um, you know, it was kind of interesting

because the first thing he says is like, I have two shots at this. I said, okay. And he's like, cause I only have two ends with this machine right now. I'm like, okay. And he goes, and second, I just came from bowling. So I have a few beers in me. Right. So then we started sweating a bit.

Right. Confidence. Yeah. Confidence. I'm like, you could do this buddy. Well, he screwed up the first one. So, so I started sweating and I was like, listen, you know, well, we'll learn from your mistakes you made with that one and not do it again.

So we were down to one. So luckily he was able to do it, but this machine was cool because you put it in one section and it kind of like, um, strips it. You put it in another section. It cuts it. You put the two pieces in another section and it kind of goes on the video screen and analyze it and lines it up and then connects them and then, um, does a, like a single degradate, uh, degradation.

What's that word? Signal loss test on it. Right. And it says, yes, perfect connection. Then you got to take it out very carefully because the first time you took it out, it stopped, right? So take it out very carefully and put it into like the heating section where it then heated it and the shrink around it, compressed to kind of

make it a secure connection. And then it was done, but it was really cool. I've never seen the fiber done like that. And it was just cool to see that process. Um, I was impressed that he was able to get that second time. I don't know how many beers he, he, he had in them, but I he was able to get that second time. I don't know how many beers he had in them, but I- He was one too many for your fiber first of all. Yeah, he could have been one too many.

Well, I think he was one too many because when we were leaving, I realized his wife had to drive him over. So I think he got lucky with this one, right? He took it. Yeah, you're all lucky. We weren't working at all. Yeah. He hops in an Uber.

Yeah. So, you know, I had to call it that fiber, but that's cool. So now my fiber is fixed, the electrical is fixed, you know, and everything's working. So one of the things that I did too, I don't know if you guys have ever done this, but while my internet was down, I kind of looked at my smart home and I said, I wonder what works and what doesn't work. Right. While this was all down.

Good idea. You know, like I said, I might as well look at this because it's down anyway. Right. Nothing I can do. So, you know, when designing my smart home, I always thought local first for the most important stuff. And then other things that weren't important, I'd say I'm okay with the cloud. And surprisingly, my house was pretty, worked pretty well with no internet.

So the things that didn't work was Yo, my yo link, obviously that's cloud dependent. Um, but those are just some sensors in my fridges I have. Right. So I was fine with that and I'll probably replace them with Apollo sensors at some point anyway. Um, Ratchio was offline. I didn't need it now anyway, but that's fine if it goes offline. If I don't have internet, because that's just for watering the garden. I could reschedule.

It doesn't matter. Right. Um, my, my Echo B wasule it. Doesn't matter. Right. Um, my, my echo B was offline in terms of remote connection. You can still manually control it, but you can't control it through like home assistant. It still has, it still has to go out to the cloud and back down. So, you know, any automations around my, my, um, heating, cooling and stuff like that would not work while that was out and it kind of made me re want to rethink that one by mean, is it really that important?

Right? My water heater, that's not important. It was offline. None of my Amazon Alexa's worked, obviously. So we had no voice control, which was fine, right? Because we still had manual controls and we still had the automations working. And then I didn't have remote access into the system again, which was fine. But all my cameras still worked, you know, any automations I had that still worked, my blinds, everything, lights, everything still worked. And I was kind

of impressed that all that still worked when my internet was gone. Right. And it just kind of reassured that when I'm thinking of implementing things, let me try and go local first, right? Because in a situation like this, you'll appreciate it when your internet's down or flaky or something like that, you know, things still work. Yep. I think one of the biggest surprises I think that you came out with the unified cameras didn't work. Well, I was having issues like they were working, but I was having issues with the unified app.

Now I don't know. I know in the unified app, there's a way to connect locally and collect via the cloud, but I don't know if the protect app allowed me to do that. I couldn't get through that. It does, but it's one of those like, it's not, it means something that not what you think it means. It like allows you to connect directly to it, but unfortunately I still think that it requires you to have a cloud connection to do the authorization handoff.

And like, if you don't have that you to have a cloud connection to do the authorization handoff. And like, if you don't have that, then it's not going to work. Because I was able to get into my UniFi networking equipment. So the main UniFi stuff, I was able to get into all that. But once I launched the Protect app, I couldn't see my cameras or anything like that. So all my cameras, I still have feeding through to Blue Iris, right? Because there's certain things that Blue Iris still handles for me. So I loaded up Blue Iris and I was able to see all my cameras and stuff, but I

still wasn't able to access the UniFi. And that may be something I'll look into further in a bit. Cause if I do lose internet, I want to be able to at least access my cameras still. Right? So I might play around with that again and see what it is that if it's possible, and maybe it was just something I was doing wrong. I was looking around about the time because I swear it was possible. And then I was looking around at some forum posts from like even a year ago

and even more back way back, like five years, where people were just complaining that it's not like a feature that they have. Like you still have to have this cloud login component to it. Even though they added Direct Connect for reasons, I think that was like related to security. It did not fully make it over whatever like what we want is just basically like, oh, yeah, the things right here. I'm authorized to it and you connect right in. But I guess that doesn't work. Yeah, so they should fix that if it, you know, doesn't work, I think.

Yeah. And that would make it 100% local because they brag about it being a 100% local thing, no cloud component required, but turns out, if you want to access it with the app, you're going to need the cloud. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that I always found was weird. But I could still get into the UniFi side,

and I could reboot or reconnect the devices. I just couldn't view them. So, and they were still recording and everything. They were still doing all their detections. They were still tied into Home Assistant. So everything was still working. It was just, I wasn't able to launch the app and connect. Right.

So, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, it's not like your camera stopped recording during this time. Everything was still going, all good to go. Yeah. Totally makes sense. Still an annoying thing. If your kids start screaming outside, you wouldn't be able to check on them,

but you have to go outside because. So it was a fun project just to see what's still worked and what doesn't work. And you know, my, my house mostly worked. There's a few things I'm probably going to replace just because, you know, I don't see why they should be cloud. I wish there was a full local way with EchoBee. I know you can add it to HomeKit and probably bridge it in through there. And that should be local and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's cool. I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to have to do that. I want it to be directly. So, you know, I'll investigate that later on, but you know, and I know people love hearing about me fighting with my printer, right? So this is a new one though. This is, this is not the usual printer problem. Okay.

Okay. So, you know, and it only just came to light because, um, I had a little UPS in my office here and, um, it, it, it blew, right? Like some internal thing blew on it. But, you know, uh, what happens is when my printer kicks in, it uses so much watt, watts on the network and stuff like that, that everything else in my office starts to like fluctuate in terms of the voltage and stuff like that.

Yeah, I mean, you should get your panel replaced. Well, the problem is, I was looking at it and I'm like, I have one circuit that comes to my office, but in my office, I have so much stuff, right? And I'm just like, man, this damn printer again is coming back to fight with me. You know, and I had like an extension cord running all across the upstairs to another room to put me on another circuit. And I'm trying to figure out. So janky.

Yeah, I know. Do is there like, I like the laser printer. Do I get a lower wattage one? You know, is there, what are my options here? You know, so I'm now fighting with the, I mean, the printer works, but I'm now fighting with power in the printer. So every time it prints, you can hear my UPS kind of click on because the voltage is dropping on my office circuit and it's trying to regulate

it and stuff like that. Gavin, just add a new circuit into your office. Well, well you think that's easy. Like, yeah. Is it a second story or something? Uh, that's the problem, right? So getting another circuit from the basement is going to be painting the ass of fish it up and stuff like that.

So yeah, you think if it was just a one story house, yeah, well, I'd put another circuit in, but yeah, I'm thinking about that or even, well, no, I can't split off my, I have too much stuff in this office running power, but yeah, I want to get a dedicated circuit or get one of these outlets switched over to, you know, the circuit, but I'll have to talk to my electrician and maybe pay for that. Just for this printer. I don't know if there's a lower, lower wattage laser printer out there. You know?

I mean, I don't, I feel like it shouldn't do that in the first place. It is something else going on. But that's, that's. If you see what I have in my office, you're looking I mean, I don't, I feel like it shouldn't do that in the first place. It is something else going on. But that's, well, if you see what I have in my office, you're looking, I'm looking at like, uh, I have five laptops plugged in and running. I have like four monitors, my 3d printer, you know, like, like when you look at what I have in my office, you, I'm surprised this stuff even works. Can handle this. Space heater, the coffee machine, the microwave

You just need a couple of solar panels and inverters set up That way you can just have dedicated power there Get one of those anchor things I'll put a solar panel just for the printer A little battery There you go No, I can't put the printer on the UPS because it draws too much power for the UPS. And so, yeah, I'll figure. So I just thought people get to kick out of my latest fight with the printer.

Some of it's the printer we need to blame in this situation. Okay. I hate this printer so much, but I need it. Like, this is the one thing I just want to throw out the window, but the wife prints something all the time. And every time she prints something like it, what happened was she was printing something when I was in the middle of doing work and my PC would just shut off because the voltage dropped and I kept telling her to stop, but she kept printing

stuff, so I almost threw it out, but then I moved it to the other room and then it was fine. I was like print away, but I can't have a cord going down my hallway all the time. You know, cause it's two rooms fine. I was like, print away, but I can't have a cord going down my hallway all the time. You know, cause it's two rooms over. I gotta go. Yeah. Anyways, I'm glad you find this funny. Um, another thing I did is I upgraded the batteries and my UPS that's in my rack.

But one thing I found cool was, um, if, so I have multiple unraid servers plugged into one UPS. Yup. Yup. Why are you laughing already? It's not a funny story. I don't have another funny story about this one. It works.

Okay. It's not giving me any problems, but, um, yet, but I wanted the servers to be able to shut down properly and gracefully. So I found it cool. If you, I guess this is going to be funny, but if you, uh, have, um, I know what you're going to say, I know what, I know the name of it, so go on, go on. If you have unraid servers, you want a little extra control with a UPS install the nut plugin, not plug in.

Yeah. That has been around forever. It is a, is a Linux thing. Yeah. Yeah. What does this have for. It is a Linux thing. Yeah. Yeah. What is this app for? Network UPS tools. Right?

So Unraid has it built in by default, but that is for basic control. But if you want more advanced stuff, there's an actual NUT plugin that you can install. And the reason why is you could do it is because you could have your your main server as like the host and your UPS is plugged into that one. And then my secondary server kind of connects into that one as like a child

server and, and, and then you can have them both sharing the same data. And that way, when, you know, the power goes, if it ever does, then it can gracefully shut down each servers and stuff like that So that's not was the mention because you know if anyone has multiple under eight servers and one UPS That's how you can share it. You don't even need UPS like Even like Synology will support something like that too So you can actually use it to shut down your Synology's if you you know Other stuff that's connected to the UPS is that you may not have monitoring

stuff plugged in. Synology has its own like UPS monitoring thing, but it also allows you to connect to remote, not servers. Yeah. So it's pretty cool because you have to actually install the plugin, you get more advanced features. So just thought I'd mention that. One thing I wanted to mention for you, Seth, is I know you were interested in my drive

array. to mention for you, Seth, is I know you were interested in my driver, right? Well, my, my AliExpress feed has finally cleaned itself up from that one. Um, that one click I made by accident. Um, I'm now been getting some good suggestions back on my AliExpress that I can open up in public and, um, I've seen some driver raise on there and they're just basic, like rack mounted driver arrays, like there'll be like a 12 disc thing and they, some of them come with like a card, you know, for the SAS cable and card that you can actually plug into your machine and they're, they're just the basic thing. No rate or anything like that.

Just, it'll just expose 12 drives for you or something like that. So I've been seeing some of that pop up on AliExpress and the prices have been really cheap. Now you may get what you pay for, or you may have to pay a lot more based on tariffs. Kevin, did you, did you, were you not paying attention in the first part of the show? Okay, I saw this before the tariffs were announced, so I had it in my notes and it just clicked in that, oh boy. But if you want me to order it for you and ship it down, you know, like, and then finally, um, you know, I've been fighting with eBay, people on eBay lately.

Um, uh, and you don't get to hear this often said out loud, but I'm actually on the market for some Sonos headphones, you know, and I've been losing a bunch of auctions on eBay, you know, I guess, because the prices are half the amount people don't want pay $700. Right. So, uh, I have another option coming up tomorrow that will end and I'm trying to get that, but you know, my thinking is I need a new set of headphones for even this podcasting, right? The headphones I'm wearing now, they're, they're broken, but they're also from 1999.

They've lasted me a long time. They're almost as old as me. Yeah. I know. I have people at work. I used to say, I have headphones older than you. Right. And I actually did, but yeah, yeah, they finally got to get retired.

So my Sonos headphones, I'm going to use them for podcasting, but I'm also going to use them for watching TV that, you know, like, uh, I, I like to watch TV at night and, you know, I don't want to disturb anyone in the house. And the headphones will allow me to do that as well. Multi-duty things. Right. So I actually have a need for a pair. So I'm looking for them now and hopefully in the next couple of weeks, I can get my hands on one. You know, I found what now they, I remember when in the next couple weeks I can get my hands on one.

You know, I found what now they, I remember when they were first released, they didn't work with all the soundbars. I think my Beam ones were not on the list at that time, and I think they've released updates and now they work with the Beam one and stuff. So it makes them a lot more useful. So yeah, I'm excited to try and get my hands on some. I'm glad I talked you into these. That way I can experience this whole issue with you. Never in my life did I think that at the beginning of this year when TJ was all excited about, was it the beginning of this year or last year?

I think it was this year. Yeah, it was last year. Okay, last year. And then like we were laughing about it. And then all of a sudden now here comes Gavin. It's like, yeah, I think it works. Yeah, like, yeah, they've added support for my, my soundbars and you know, I can easily transfer what's watching on the TV and I have the Sonos like I'm in the ecosystem.

I've soundbars on, I think most of my TVs now. So I could be on, you know, any of my TVs and just transfer it, I guess from that. Um, there's a couple of things I was reading that I'm not sure about where they said you have to turn on wifi on the beams and stuff like that. And I know I've hardwired all my beams. So I wonder if turning on wifi is now going to mess with my Sonos setup because it's working so beautifully right now. So I hope it doesn't introduce a Sonos net and starts messing with that and

causing like, if that happens, they're just going to go right back on eBay, you know? And the people in my house, I'll just say too bad. You're going to have to listen to what I'm watching. But we will see. We will see. I learned the hard way sometimes. Well, it will be interesting to hear your feedback. I got to get them first.

Like brand new, too expensive and on the used market. I keep losing the auctions. I'm just not eBay pro. TJ gave me some tips. Yeah. You know, so I'm going to try it and see if I can win a pair. Well, I'm still getting lingerie when I go to, I mean, yeah, AliExpress. I'm not finding these things.

I'm searching for the right stuff. Oh, wait, here's, you need to stop ordering lingerie from AliExpress. Here's a Zinlong. It's not good. Here, I'll send over this email to you. Send me the right link. And I hope it doesn't pollute my Aliexpress feeds here.

So. Like, I'll just send you this email with all the suggestions. Yeah, these are cool. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. These are, it took like, interestingly, it took about two or three months before it started cleaning itself up.

I found one for $226, which is a 10% off and $457 in shipping. So I don't think I'm, I don't know what the prices are going to be with the tariffs and everything now. So yeah, yeah, we'll see. I just sent it to you. You can take a look. I know you're interested in a driver, so we'll see. I just sent it to you. You can take a look. I know you're interested in a drive array, so we'll see. Hey, it would be nice to utilize the servers that I have.

The only thing I don't have is storage attached to them because it has the little small two and a half of drives and you get a few terabytes out of it, but it kind of max out after a while and I'd rather use the big drives. I want the big boy drives. There you go. Hopefully I can help you out. Thanks, Kevin. Yeah.

Don't click and don't make the mistake of clicking on some questionable items. Like, don't click on the questionable items. There'll be, yeah, that's AliExpress. They were like, oh, you like that? Let me show you more. And AliExpress sends you multiple emails a day. So they're like, you must really like this. I can't believe you keep looking at these and clicking on them.

I'm like, yeah, when you open this email again, we'll send you another email with some more suggestions. Oh, geez. That's too good. So, oh yeah, that's not at all what I was looking at. But let's see what it is. Canadian. Let's see.

This one's 399 Canadian. Let's see what it comes up as. I'm here. Oh, two, I think it's the one I was looking at. Did let's see what it is Canadian. Let's see. This one's 399 Canadian. Let's see what it comes up as. I'm here. Oh, two, I think it's the one I was looking at. Did we use loose Seth? Nope. He's there. Did you lose me?

Nope. We lost Seth. I lost Gavin. I hear you. There's Gavin. Oh, he's back. Oh, the Aliexpress virus got me when I clicked the link. All right.

Uh, now we're controlling your computer. I wasn't supposed to click the link. IT is going to email me now. Encryption has started. Yeah, this is close to the one I was looking at. So $275 for Americans, but it looks like it's going to be shipping is $297. I don't think I'm. How is that like, cause it's saying $122 Canadian.

What's shipping? Oh? No, I clicked the one that was 399 can I got I don't know why all my languages are being I'm now in Espanol All right It's the virus you click on the links of the expansion 121 so what which one did you choose the 399? So which one did you choose? The 399 one? 399 one, yeah. Which is 407 Canadian, blah, blah. That one's a big beast though.

Oh man. Which you're, yeah, I know. That's a for you. You gotta. Go big or go home, Gavin. It's got two power supplies, you know? Do you have a dedicated circuit for this? Easy to be hot swap.

Yeah, come on. It's a full computer. Oh, I don't need that. No, no, no, no, no, no. no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Yeah. I wonder if I buy it now for $84. What is the type three? Yeah, this is perfect. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is what I need, Gavin. Thanks.

Thanks for looking out. I mean, look at the card though. The card, this one's eSATA actually. Uh, yeah. So you plug the card in, you'll have to run the cable kind of like out the back of the server slot. Yeah. It's fine.

Up to this box. So it may be just what you want. You know, just a bunch of this. Yeah, JBOD. Yeah. Perfect. Well, hopefully, I don't know, for $88, I might, well, I guess $123 in shipping and it delivers April 18th.

I wonder what the odds are. I don't know how good it is. So don't, you know, I'm not responsible for that. I mean, the case does look like it was- For my data loss. Well, no, the case does look like it may have been 3D printed. There's a line down the middle that looks like they may have 3D printed each side. Oh my God, you're right.

Like what? What? No, I don't want a plastic one. It's got to be real. It's got to be rack mount. Yeah, so you might want to continue searching, but I just thought I'd mention this to you that these are popping up on my feed now. Well, yeah, that's what I need.

I need the click and then it'll start putting random stuff like that in there. Yeah. So, okay. Well, thanks Gavin. So, yeah, I've given you the click to get you into the, you know, the algorithm. The club. Yes. There you go.

Otherwise, we'd be looking at weird things. Here's another click for you to get you into another algorithm. No, no, no, no, no, not clicking anymore. Not clicking. I, I, I T is click. I T is yelling at me already. Don't click the links. Gavin says trap.

It'll make your AliExpress algorithm interesting. It's spicy. AliExpress after dark. I mean, who knew? Who knew they have all that stuff, but there it is. There it is. Wholesale pricing. I didn't know they had all that.

I don't even know how I got the first click. I don't either, but once you click on it, it's like, oh, you're interested. And it just starts feeding you. And like you said, they send you emails with the most explicit things possible. I could not open those emails in public. It was getting, it got like, you know, like it got spicy at times. It took a few months to get rid of it all. Yeah.

Yeah. You just got to click on random things and now you're, you're back on track. You're seeing, you're seeing the servers. I'm seeing car parts because evidently I must have searched for a car part. Swade dashboard mat. Okay. You definitely need that. Yeah. The algorithm works. You definitely need that.

Yeah, see look at that, the algorithm works. Yeah, great job Alibaba. Risky click, risky click. Yolo. Yeah, exactly. All right, well I think that's gonna wrap up the show this week. We do wanna give a big thank you to everyone

who supports the show, but especially those able to financially support through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our Slack chat, where you and everyone else can gather in there and look at Richard's new workspace shop.

I mean, I cleaned out my garage and I was going to take a picture. I'm embarrassed now. I just delete the picture off my phone now. That's ridiculous. Yeah, I'm pretty jealous. It's pretty sweet. And the best thing is we're not gonna have tariffs that are gonna raise the price of the slack, so it's still gonna be $1 no matter what tariffs go in. Right, right. It's a good old homegrown American-made Slack channel, I guess. So yeah, no tariffs are involved.

But yeah, still a buck and $5, depending, or more. I mean, it doesn't. There's no limit. There's no limit at all. You can give us a lot of money if you want. We're not going to say no. No, no, we won't turn it down. It just brings you right in.

It'll send you the link, and you're in. But yeah, I was looking at his tables. I'm like, man, I won't turn it down. It just brings you right in. It'll send you the link and you're in. But yeah, I was looking at his tables. I'm like, man, I want those tables too. He's got, man, just a beautiful, nice workspace, very well organized. He's got all the toys. He's got all the toys. All the toys, so.

Nice stuff, nice stuff. Well, if you wanna see that, you know how to do it now. And it's tariff free. But if you wanna help out with the show, but can't support fan agency, totally understand. We just appreciate a five star review on iTunes for positive rating and podcast after your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week.

Till next time, take care. Gavin, I'll just forward this to you. Princeton University wants to do that. This guy wants to give us $15 if we do it at 40 to 60 minute interview about managing the Macedon server. Man, my time's worth more than that. I know, right? It's like, well, good luck, Brad. Well, can we negotiate that price? I just do it. Gas is not cheap. Gas good luck, Brad. So can we negotiate that price?

Gas is not cheap. Gas is expensive, you know? This is much more than a gas price. Yeah. Tariffs, huh? Tariffs apply to survey results. So sorry.