HomeTech.fm - Episode 528 - The Best Home Assistant Meetups

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

It’s Home Assistant Community Day Season! Meet up with TJ or Gavin on May 24th in Ohio or Ontario. On this week's show: WiiM is on the AppleTV, Sonos gets AI, Samsung buys more receivers, Matter gets an update, letters from the mailbag, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 16th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. From Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home animation, home technology, and more tariffs. We found Adafruit's gotten tariffs this week. Yay.

Gavin, you're not paying tariffs. You be quiet. Gavin's always paid tariffs. I guess it's true. He now pays less. Yay. Gavin, you're not paying tariffs. You be quiet. Gavin's always paid tariffs. I guess it's true. He just now pays less than us. Yeah, I'm feeling good now. Usually I look at the prices in Canada. I'm like, oh, you're getting hosed.

Now look at the prices in America. I'm like, well, I'm getting hosed. Yeah, I order something from the States. It's like, oh, I only got paid $20 on this order. That's nothing. Adafruit, I guess they do all the like DIY products. Like you get, you can buy raspberry pies from there. They have all sorts of like little, what is it, the ESP homes, the ESP boards,

and basically all like components and stuff where you can assemble like kits. And they have a pretty good website and a pretty big community builds around them where they post a lot of code and stuff. And I'll see like code for somebody's project and they'll reference like a tutorial or something that Adafruit put together. So that's pretty good place if you're ever into like the little DIY electronic kits and things,

putting stuff together, it's kinda cool. Yeah, I've always bought a Arduino stuff from Adafruit. Oh yeah, yeah. It's a good selection over there, so. Their shipping sucks though. Whenever I ordered from themafruit. Oh yeah, yeah. It's a good selection over there, so. Their shipping sucks though. Whenever I order from them, yeah, to Canada. I gotta pay an arm and a leg. Oh, to Canada.

Yeah, well, again, after I pay all the tariffs and all the duties and customs and shipping, I pay twice the amount sometimes if I order from them. Well, they get hit by a $36,000 bill and they have a nice little blog post on it. Now they know how it feels. This is the first part, this is our first big bill where a large portion of it was subject to a 125% plus 20% plus 25% import markup. That's a big chunk of change. $36,000 is going to go out

the door. They say we'll have to increase prices on some of these products, but we're not sure people will be willing to pay a higher cost. So maybe we stuck with unsellable inventory that we already have paid a large fee on. So hopefully they also mentioned in here being able to maybe reclassify some of the items to avoid that 125% tariff. That's the big one everybody's picked out.

I guess it's gone now. It doesn't even exist. And now it's like 80% or something, right? One day later, they could have not had this tariff, right? So, yeah, it's all gone. Well, like they say, they can possibly get the money back, potentially. There's like a way to climb it and everything like that. But it's still months away, right?

And so all this money is just held up for all that time. And Adafruit isn't necessarily a small company, but that's a lot of money to be locked up on literally nothing. I bet they're not that big. Honestly, I bet it's like a mom and pop shop thing. Just a warehouse or something like that. But I hope somebody is keeping track of all these companies sending out all their emails saying that prices are going up because of tariffs so that when all the dust settles and everything, they contact them and say our price is going now that you don't have tariffs to pay. I was almost keeping track of this.

They say they have a six million square foot ecosystem in Brooklyn, a bustling workplace for professionals across multiple disciplines. They have a picture of their office and warehouse and stuff, and there's probably 30 people that work there, maybe a little bit more. It's a decent sized company, but not a massive multi-million dollar corporation. They're just selling like DIY stuff. Founded out of an MIT dorm.

Yeah. It's a cool company. I like their tutorials. If you ever want to put electronic stuff together and tinker with things, they've got pretty good stuff over there. So anyway, hopefully they don't lose too much money out of that deal. But and it's weird, like they're all gone now for 90 days. I don't think anybody knows anymore. We just, you know, the company I'm working with right now, put a put one of those tariff things up. It's like you paid all this money to developer to

to make a tariff thing that automatically gets added. And since like, now, do they need to? I don't know. Do they, when did they take it down? What's just all the confusion around it. It's kind of sucks, but this is where we are. You know, it's not confusing though. Home assisted meetups. That's, that's not confusing. Unless you're TJ.

Unless you're a host of a meetup and you get a bunch of information a week and a half before the event. Yeah, they're not confusing. There's two home assistant meetups and community days that you really should pay attention to. The other ones, I mean, if you're closer, whatever, go to those. Nobody cares about those ones. Yeah, go to the Columbus, Ohio one.

There's gonna be TJ there and he'll have things that I might send him which might arrive before time for him to actually use. Uh, yeah. And then, um, yeah, Gavin, what will you be in the Toronto one? Right? That's where you're going. You're not driving out to the countryside. No, no, I'm going to Toronto.

It's right in the heart of Toronto. It's the fur can on young. I'm going to have to bleep that. So right downtown. Um, you're taking a taxi so your car doesn't get stolen. Yeah. No, my car is too old that they'll return it actually. You know, even valet will pay me to park my own car.

But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We got, our event has about 20 people going and looking at the list, I know a number of people that I talked to that haven't signed up yet, so I expect them this week to jump on, so we'll probably have a nice little group. Nice. But it sounds fun. It sounds fun. And there's going to be what? Door prizes, t-shirt giveaways.

No, wait, I don't know. I'm confused. TJ got this letter. He shared it with us. There's lots going on. I'm just very confused about what community is about, but I can't wait to see the pictures and see how they go. I think it's going to be a free for all. Just go there, drink, have a good time. Yeah.

Honestly, this year is the first time they've done this. I think it's like they just said, hold an event and do whatever. They're just like, do it in honor of Home Assistant. A lot of these people are only doing it for a few hours or something like that, so it's not a long event. Right. But I think next year, it would be nice

if for next year, they give us a little bit more of a structure. It's like, all right, hold an event and you know, let's organize, you know, you can have, here's some ideas of things to have device swaps, you know, um, you can have like giveaways or talks on this or, you know, whatever, you know, like here's some vendors that will be willing to send you stuff and go from there and make it a bit more of an event. But again, this is the first time. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah.

I've already gotten in trouble once. So I might as well make it twice, right? You got to even it out. I don't know what I'm actually allowed to like share out of this and what, so I'm not going to share a lot of that a lot out of it. Um, but originally when I got contacted or when I signed up to be a host, I got contacted and they were going to send us shirts, right, for being a host. And I think they were going to send shirts for like other people as well.

And then like a week later, you know, yesterday, Monday, I received a document 12 days before the event. And it was basically like, all right, well, here's a bunch of information about if you're a host and if you are traveling for the event, you know, this is like, we're gonna reimburse you for certain things, which is nice, right? Because if you're gonna travel,

if you have to get a venue, they're gonna reimburse you, you know, X dollars per person that attends and they kind of give you some more information. It's 12 days before the event though, right? This is like what they kind of give you some more information. It's 12 days before the event though. Right. This is like what they kind of should have led off with initially. Um, and I understand it's the first one. I get it, but it just seems like it's a rush thing and I'm here for it because I

like to live, uh, live dangerously. And so I'm breaking all kinds of rules by getting sponsors. Uh, they're not really sponsors, but they, they, but they are sending us stuff that we can show for the event. So I think they're going to learn a lot about it. But it just it seems like like a half baked idea initially, because there was like, hey, we're going to do this thing. And there's no information about the people that are going to host it. And now they got this document, which is fine. But that's what they should have let off with.

It's an iterative process. This doesn't sound like Home Assistant at all. They're never bleeding edge and like... No, no. Breaking updates, but this is breaking things, breaking events. And like some of the things in the documents, I'm not going to say specific numbers,

but instead of sending us t-shirts, they're going to reimburse us for t-shirts, right? They're going to reimburse us for travel if we have to travel. They're going to give us money depending on what we have to do, like stickers and stuff like that. So, there's... So, OAS only. OAS only. Make that example. Yeah. Some of the stuff isn't there, like stickers. They're going to give you, like, you know, two Swiss francs, whatever it is, a purse, like a attendee, so you can buy stickers. But the problem is I have to like find somebody to make this stuff.

You got to get it made in that time that, yeah. Yeah, I don't like know any local sticker makers. Like who's going to make 30 stickers? Sticker mule or something. And that's the other thing, right? I'm going to buy like 100 stickers. It's like make any kind of minimum order. Right. It's just like it's a very rushed thing at the last second.

So we'll, we'll see what happens. Hey, event planning is hard. I will say that. And if you're not, if you're just like, Hey, let's, let's have an event. And it's much harder than let's have a worldwide event. And then like, uh, yeah, there's, there's a lot of logistics that goes into it. So the biggest holdup though is Seth has promised to send me a homeless assistant, yeah, biggest holdup.

I see. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's for me too. Like Seth, I'm a week Assistant Yellow. The biggest holdup, I see, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the biggest holdup for me too. Like Seth, I'm a week and a half away and you know. Yeah, come on. You gotta put that right now. But Ty Benton in the Slack channel, Seth, this Home Assistant Yellow,

and it's gonna come live with me, and I might give it away, who knows? But Seth has said that he's gonna send me this Home Assistant Yellow so I can set up a demo for some products that I have. So, Zoo sent me some products last week. They sent me a bunch of long-range Zigbee stuff so I can demo that out and show it to people. I'm going to give it away. I don't need most of it. I think I'm going to keep the outdoor motion sensor.

But I don't need another USB Z-Wave stick and stuff like that. So, I want to get all this stuff set up and connected to Home Assistant, so that way people can see what is actually available, entities that shows up and everything like that. But I need the Home Assistant box to do that. I think you also need- Seth has it. Seth has it right there in his hands. You can't see it, podcast listeners, but it is in his hands.

He walked over to his giant screen and picked it up. He knows where it's at, which is very shocking. It's a long way from Florida to Columbus. Yeah, and so I told him he has to send it out tomorrow, which would be Wednesday. When do we think he's gonna ship it out? Is tomorrow Wednesday? Tomorrow is Wednesday.

Oh no! Are you realistic? If you're realistic to the show, that was last two weeks ago. Yeah. Home Assistant Community Day's already happened. Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering, because I know this is the Home Assistant yellow, right?

Doesn't it need a Raspberry Pi? How does it? See, this is why I need this. So I've got to take these four screws off to find out. I thought there was one in here, but I'm not sure. So we're about to find out. It's going to be a good time though. Even, you know, like even if you're not a Home Assistant person, come out.

Like if you're running SmartThings, Habitat, whatever, come out because it's nice. Sometimes I like, no, no, I like talking to people with all the different hubs. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the only ones. But I like learning about all the other hubs, you know, what do you like about it? What you don't like about it? We, you know, we have the same stories usually.

Yeah. It's got the Raspberry Pi thing on it. It there's a little chip thing on there. And then it's got a yeah, what it doesn't have is the NVMe SSD thing. Uh, it's got the M2 expansion thing. So if you want that you can get it, but I don't have one. Anyway. Yeah.

Give it to me, send it to me, Seth. I need it. You got to put it back together without breaking it now. This is kind of a cute little device. I've only looked at it once and it was a while back, but yeah, Ty sent it over. He's like, hey, I'm not using this anymore. You wanna use it?

And I'm like, maybe we can do a giveaway. And I put it behind me somewhere and it kind of disappeared. So, but yeah, this seems like a perfect time to do it. So yeah, Home Assistant. Does that make us sponsors too? Uh, well, I said, I said that we are, are helping host the event. So, okay. Okay.

Also my company, which I'm not sure how that is morally, but I figure at some point I'm going to have to pay for something and it's going to come out of the company. Coming on my own pocket. Yeah, exactly. All right. I'm going to donate $5 to your. It's not coming out of my own pocket. Yeah, exactly. Heck no. All right. I'm going to donate $5 to your event and just crash it because, you know, violates all policies. Yeah.

I just can't say it's sponsored. No sponsorships. The home assistant cops are going to come get you. I initially said that Azuz and Apollo were sponsoring the event, but they contacted me and said that I cannot say that because of nonprofit laws and things. So, they are sending us stuff. However you want to say that. Again, no confusion at all.

TJ knows exactly what's gonna happen. You guys are gonna have fun, I think. It'll be a good time. Yours is at a brewery too. It is, so I'll be- No matter what, guaranteed, guaranteed. That's why I wanted it at a brewery, right? I mean, that's always good.

Good icebreaker. It's gonna elevate your event. Yeah. It's gonna elevate my event as that home assistant yellow that Seth has. It'll be elevated enough on that. You're on the top floor, right? You're in the-

That's right, I'm at Atrium. Yeah, exactly. I call it an Atrium. I don't know what they call it, but it's got a glass ceiling, so. That's like the hall where you wait to get into the real bar rooms. We can't break the glass ceiling though, unfortunately. It's got a glass ceiling, so. That's like the hall where you wait to get into the real spa rooms. We can't break the glass ceiling, though, unfortunately.

It's very expensive. Well, everybody elevate your experience there at the Home Assistant Community Day and elevate right on up to the atrium and meet TJ. And then Gavin, we still don't, do you know where yours, yeah, you said yours is gonna be. The Ferkin on Young. Is that what?

Ferkin. Young. What? Ferkin. It's a pub. It's a pub. It's under the art of Toronto. It's that Ferkin pub. Ferkin pub? Okay.

That sounds like some Lederkenny stuff. Do they have Flickr modes there? Oh really? These Flickr modes? It's Ferkin, not Flickin. I mean we have Frickers, which is a chicken chain. so I don't know, wing sports bar, sounds close enough. Yeah, but it's a nice pub. All right, well, it sounds like it's gonna be a blast,

and maybe there will be a homestay in DA's future, we'll see. And you know what makes this even worse is I leave out of town for like all of next week, so basically, if I don't get up by like Monday. Then you can send it to me, Seth, you know. Yeah yeah I could send it to straight to Gavin and that way in a roundabout way it might get to you who comes first all right I will um yeah I have you know what's funny is I was I would I had it was trash day so I took a

bunch of boxes and threw away this morning I'm like, oh man, I shouldn't have done that. Hmm. Well go in your freezer. Find me a shrimp box House it did not out. All right. Well, um, yeah We should have some fun stuff there. I do have stickers. I did find those well now I lost them again Oh here they are stickers. So I've got a couple couple more stickers we can hand out to a couple people. I do have a new partner. I forgot to mention them, but a new Home Assistant Community Day partner, Rail Link. They are sending me three or four cameras

to show off as well, because they are actually part of the Works with Home Assistant program. Nice, nice. So hopefully the products they send me actually work with Home Assistant. Work with Home Assistant, yeah, because it was only a few SKUs, I think. That's where you looked. Theyfits. Hopefully the products they send me actually work with homes. Work with homes. Yeah, because it was only a few SKUs, I think.

That's what you looked. They asked me if they could put a banner up, and I was like, I don't know where we're going to put a banner, but sure, send it to me. Just like draw on the window with the marker. You're not even going to have a home assistant banner. I'm just going to have a railing banner. That all looks weird at all. Just pay a couple kids to stand there and hold it, you know, for the two hours.

You know, I'll pay you $20 an hour to hold this banner. Man. I'll buy you your first beer you $20 an hour to hold this banner. Man. I'll buy you your first beer. $20 an hour. Gavin, that's Canadian. Yeah. Well, it's only for two hours or so, two or three hours, you know, they're holding a banner. And then, and then if the banner touches the floor, they lose all their money.

It is all the money. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, there you go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Squid game. Or, yeah, it could be, could be that the, if, if whoever drops it loses their money and the other guy gets paid, right? So there you go. Oh, yeah, yeah. Squid game. Or, yeah, it could be that if whoever drops it

loses their money and the other guy gets paid, right? So there you go. So that would be squid game. All right, we got a couple of home tech headlines this week, just a few, so we jump in. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, Weme.

Weme has launched its Weme Home app on the Apple TV, enabling users to control their multi-room audio systems directly from the Apple TV. It allows users to manage playback, access essential controls using Apple TV remote, and available in the Apple TV app store after being in beta for some early access users. That sounds interesting.

I'm looking at this, I'm like, Weme is kind of like the, I don't know, like a little Sonos competitor, I guess. They don't have all the products, but they have a couple of things, right? And I don't know, this seems like an interesting idea. I've never thought about controlling my Sonos system from my Apple TV though.

It's a different idea. It's a cool idea for those that don't like to control it from their phone. They could do it on a bigger screen or you have guests over. You probably have it playing up on your screen and you can control where it plays and stuff like that. It's something different. I like the Weiman product. I have one of their things.

But because I'm Sonos, I just find that I want more Sonos to integrate because it just works all better together, you know? And I can't slide that Wiem in, but it's a good look for them. Yeah. Trying to see if it even has, I guess it has like little, like you could put the cover art and it'll have, you know, that playing up there too. So it's not a bad idea.

It's interesting. I think if Wiem got into like TV speakers too, it'd be nice like... Like a sound bar. You mean? Yeah Then you'd be a more serious competitor with something like so knows when you start getting into that. Well, that's always the problem, right? Everybody's like, oh my god, is this so knows competitor and it's like alright calm down you make an amp Exactly. I need sound bars. I need little wireless speakers. I need an amplifier. I need everything. That's why Sonos is good. Yeah. And they spend a lot of time on the software because they got to integrate so many services, right? It's like, let's just go to basics, work on some hardware,

and then you become a more serious. Like, what are they missing right now? Just like the TV stuff. I don't know if they have outdoor speakers. Boeing? Yeah. But if they got into the TV stuff, I think they could be a serious competitor.

I think somebody needs to do it. I guess it's probably a hard thing. I don't know. Once you introduce the TV stuff, you're interested in like HDMI, some pretty low latency stuff that you have to sync with the video. HDMI seems to be a pretty big barrier on all products to get that right. Because you're having to like pay, you have to pay for like the Dolby tax for the Dolby decoder, you know, the DTS tax for the DTS decoder, all that stuff has to go into it,

right? So if you don't have that, like, what are you even doing, really? You know, so they wouldn't be able to do a sound bar without surround sound. And I think that's just like a high bar that Sonos somehow was able to do years ago, and no one else has been able to kind of follow up with it. There's a couple of companies, I say no one else. There's a couple of companies that like, what is that Denon version of it? Denon and H.E.O.S.

H.E.O.S. There we go. Thank you. Yamaha Music Cast. Yeah, but they don't have soundbars, do they? They have receivers. I think H.E.O.S. Yamaha music cast. Yeah, but they don't have soundbars, do they? They have receivers. I think, I think he has the end music cast too. Okay. And somebody who's installed music,

Yamaha music cast, I don't know if it's gotten any better in the past like six years. It probably has, but I had a really bad experience with them. So I've avoided them ever since then. Yeah. Denon Heos has a soundbar,

couple of subs and they, they like to build it into the receivers, right? So if you have a 7.1 surround sound, you can add that into the system. I don't know about Musicast. I think Musicast had their own little speakers, but I don't know if they had a soundbar. Maybe they'd have a soundbar with it built in. So if Sonos went belly up tomorrow,

who would you look at? You had a new client come along, they said we want full home audio, we want the TVs, everything. Is there another company out there that can do all that? There's companies that can do most of it. Just not in the same way. Yeah, the only company I would honestly,

and you're talking to somebody that actually listed all of his Sonos stuff for sale. So I was already looking at different options. Honestly, it'd be Vessel at this point, not just because we had him on the show and we talked to him, but because it's just the simplest product that I've seen that just does what it's supposed to do. When Sonos first started, it was a way to control your music and you could tie in different stuff and all That good stuff you can do that with vessel. Oh vessel has a soundbar

You could just use it as like a normal speaker It doesn't have like a bunch of like stuff built into the app that the Sonos has now So I think that would be the best option But they don't have a ton of different speaker options as well and that's always a problem with these these competitors Oh, yeah, they have sound bar. They have a subwoofer Etc. Yeah, they look very similar Their price was the last thing I remember from them though. There's a significant price difference I don't think it's really that significant

It's definitely like a hundred or two hundred dollars more like MSRP for some of this stuff But it's not like like blue sound is more premium compared to Vessel. I mean, Vessel's sound bar is $700. That's not, that's not terrible. And there's, yeah, because their sub is like $599. So I mean, that's not bad at all. Yeah, you're getting in the door less than you can with like an arc surround, right? So, yeah, I, I don't know. I think, I think you're right, TJ. I'd probably like, go, go simple. Maybe you miss a few features, but like at the end of the day, who cares?

Like, you can still... Yeah, I just want my speakers to work. Yeah. Like, and for me, like, literally all the thing I'm using my speakers for is to listen to my TV all throughout the house. It's the most expensive Sonos system to listen to the TV, because that's what I use all my speakers for. But that's all I care about.

Once in a while, I'll play music through them. Not that often, though. And they have a rack mount Amplifier. Yes, somehow they did it. Yeah, they have like a four channel amp, too This is nice looking speakers to like yeah, I have one of the the vessel which speaker do I have? I have the smaller cylindrical one the SX. Yep SX the little speaker. I like it Oh, it's nice and it's got a little rotating knob it or a Yeah knob at the top where you can like control the volume and stuff. Oh, is that what that is?

Oh, yeah. You can just twist it around and it's like, boop, boop, boop. That is nice. And it uses the good speaker mount. Remember when Sonos had the universal speaker mount? The one quarter. Build-in speaker, yep. And it's just build-in to all of them and you can just use whatever mount that's what

this has. Yep, I see it right there. That was a smart thing and I think they took it away. Now I saw they have their PoE version things and those are expensive. They're like play one. Yeah, like $800 or $900 for a pair. Ridiculous. That's like dealer cost.

It's like, no, thank you. That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I would go with Vessel. In fact, I'm in the market for a soundbar now because one of the things we talk about is like, I think the receiver died on my big T or like the game room TV, I guess, where my daughter would watch and play video games or whatever. But it's not switching to HDMI. Anyway, long story short, I think I need to do a soundbar.

And I'm like, I do have to buy a Sonos. And I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to buy a Sonos. And then that letter came out or that interview came out with from Tom Conrad. And I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to buy a Sonos. And then that letter came out, or that interview came out from Tom Conrad. And I'm like, are you kidding me? They haven't learned anything. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Is that even in here? No, it's not. It's not in our show notes. We'll put it in our show notes tonight. But like, yeah, it's the most ridiculous things. Like, did you guys, you know, one of the questions that just sent me off was like, I've talked, the interviewer said, I've talked to multiple people said, hey, these guys were warned,

they ignored everything they went forward. Are there any checks and balances in place to make sure that's not going to happen again? He never answers the question. He just skips right over it. He's like, yeah, it was all right. I think Tom, Tom Comrad, your AI buddy over there on Blue Sky.

I think he wants to be the new CEO of Arizona. So I think he's turned into CEO, giving CEO answers. He's not as hard hitting as the tattooed Tom Conrad we once had before. Yeah, I think he's gonna be the next CEO and cheesy answers. Yeah, it was a little annoying because it was like 1% of the people have the issue and they're all on Reddit.

Yeah, making smart comments like that. It's like, you know what? You know, the annoying thing though is that like a lot of these people's systems work though before the update. And of course they're mad and like a lot of them still don't work. I mean, I still have the occasional issue that like a third party app does not have, which is the crazy part, right? If I use the official Sonos app, I have problems all the time. But if I use Click for Sonos, which I paid like $10 for,

and it's like the worst interface possible, it's kind of like using Wim. If you use the Wim device, it's awful, it's not good. And that's kind of what this third party app is, and it works every single time. It's obviously not my network, it's something else. Well, and I know it's not just Reddit too, because I was on dealer forums,

I was on podcasts with other dealers talking about this. You know, dealers got hit hard by it too. They were like, oh man, this is a product that we once used to go in and were able to install without it hits. It got referrals, it got people excited, they came back and bought more. Now it's like, what are they doing over there? And everybody's asking that question. And it's not just Reddit, it's beyond that.

So for him to make comments like that, like it just, it just says to me like, all right, he's making a play for the CEO position. He's gonna be the next CEO and say, ah, no, everything's fine, we're all good now. And no faith now. And no faith as in like, and they did something I actually like here,

which they've unveiled a new AI powered speech enhancement feature for the ARK Ultra Of course, it has AI but it offers four levels of speech clarity low medium high and max I would probably always have it set to max because you can't hear anything on TV anymore. You know, you just can't I'm just on permanently Yeah, just put the captions on and you're good to go. Right? This sounds like a great feature I'm just now I'm not in the I'm not in the mood to buy anything from Sonos. So I probably will punt on it and go look over there at the Vessel product again. Because that actually aligns with exactly what I need. Honestly, it's a kid's gaming system.

It needs to have a soundbar and sound a little bit better than the TV speakers. Other than that, I don't care. I don't need it to do anything special. So you don't need Sonos radio, Seth? I do not need Sonos Radio. That effectively was banned in the house. I turned it on a couple of times. I'm like, hey, look, radio.

And it got shut down. Who's making this playlist? You don't need your Sonos Smart Assistant? I don't have a Sonos Smart Assistant. I have pre-Smart Assistant speakers in my system. Oh, yeah. See? Yeah, see, you're the perfect time where in my system. Oh yeah, see? Yeah, see you're at the perfect time where you can invest into another system, right?

Because it's all AirPlay at this point too anyway. If you want to play music, you can AirPlay and group it together. But the problem is I have all these new speakers. That's the biggest problem. Well maybe Tom will reach back out on Blue Sky. Tom's AI bot. Tom, Tom, we're here. I know you heard the songs.

We sent you, I sent you the songs that we made about Sonos. I know you heard them. There's no way you didn't. That's why he's not listening to us. Yeah, he's probably like, this is awful. We need to not talk to these people. All right, well, let's move on here. We got some business news.

Samsung through its subsidiary Harmon International, has acquired the consumer audio segment of Massimo. It basically brings in the brands of Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, Polk Audio, and Definitive Technology. This big deal is expected to finalize towards the end of the year, and let's see, it's going to give Samsung pretty much everybody left in the pro end audio. I mean, I guess there's like Sony still has receivers, Yamaha still has direct receivers. And then the Pioneer brand is still out there, but they don't make them anymore.

Or maybe they do. I don't remember the last one was on that. But like this is this is a large, they have JBL Harman Kardon. And this is Denon Moran's Polk Audio Defender technology. That's a pretty big company. I mean, if you're in the market for an AV receiver, and I don't think it's based on our last conversation, I don't think any of this are. I can't wait to buy a $5,000 pair of speakers that have Bixby built into them.

Are they still doing Bixby? Is that still a thing? I need that on my Bauer Wilkerson speakers. Did Bixby ever come out? No. I don't think it did. Did anything ever come out? No, I don't think it did. Did anything ever come out? No, it was definitely on the phones at least.

It came out as a software feature, I think on TVs. But the little trash can Bixby, that they were like, this is the Samsung Bixby speaker, that never came out. Like I wanted one of those so bad. Well, this is the time. I mean, I definitely used Bixby on a Samsung phone. I had a Samsung phone at one point.

Was it the Galaxy? It was a Galaxy speaker thing. Samsung Galaxy Home, of course. I mean, what else would Samsung call their products minus Galaxy something? Oh, I'm confused. But this, I don't think it's ever, yeah, it's a little, it's like a little collagen thing.

I don't think it ever came out, did it? Oh yeah, because it was like a weird, oh my gosh, such a weird shape. 2018, they talked about it. 2018, they talked about it. 2018, they talked about it as the start of 2025. It is yet to be commercially released according to Wikipedia. This is all they needed. This is how they're going to make the plea.

We need this to make the smart speaker. Well, maybe one day we'll get the Samsung Galaxy Home and have Bixby in our house. But anyway, you will have Samsung making, or at least being the company behind B&W, DnOn, Marantz, Polk, JBL, Harmon Cardon, Defendant Technology. It's a ton of brands to get wrapped up in the Samsung name. So there we go. Monopoly!

I don't know. I think it's like an extreme case of like the market's shrinking. No one wants this stuff anymore. I mean, there's a few people that want receivers. Don't get me wrong, like dedicated home theater enthusiasts. Yes, you need a receiver or a pre pre-amp and a, and some amplifiers, but it's like, it's becoming an ever dwindling group of people who actually need a receiver or want a receiver Well, everybody I knew when when I was wrapping up ten years ago

We were pushing everybody into a sona soundbar or some other sound bar that attached to the TV I don't think that's changed now The only time I use a receiver is if you have like some fancy speakers like you have some You know invisible speakers from sonance or you have a home theater everything else soundbar. Yep. Yep You want to it's really just because they complicate things, right? Because with the receiver, you now have to worry about two input methods because you have the TV which can change input, then you have the receiver, and then you have two volume controls which technically you can turn off some TV

speakers and control of HDMI CEC. It's just like it's so much extra work that like unless you're going to give a universal remote, which does not exist in the DIY space now, uh, you're, it's going to suck. Yeah. You pretty much summed up everything I was going to point out. Like, yeah, yeah. As soon as you need a receiver, you need some way to control everything and that there's

nothing that exists in DIY. I've been looking, I can't find anything that's great. I'm thinking I still need to buy stuff from the pro side. So maybe that's what it's all going to go to. I don't know. It's literally just sofa baton. Sofa baton, sofa baton and the flirk, the flirk over at the, what is it? What's the bar that you're going to Gavin?

The frik-frikin- Frikin. Frikin on young. I'm going to send this flirk remote to the frikin so you can give it away. The frikin remote to the frikin. can give it away the fork remote with the frickin That's what we'll do with it. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, send me that frickin remote Not to work remote. I'm just gonna believe everything and no one's gonna know what we said All right

Matter matters updated guys. There is a version, it's 1.4.1. It's introducing features aimed at simplifying the setup, smart devices. The CSA announced multi-device QR codes and NFC tap to pair onboarding. Woohoo! That helps streamline setting up your devices. I think NFC, I think one of the first people

I had ever come across was, were those plugs that Adam Justice made, right? For Apple, Apple had this feature way back when. And I think they were excited about it. They implemented it. And it was actually pretty cool. Like you could just go up and tap the phone on the thing and it would pull in the codes or whatever. Yeah, I think HomeKit had that, right?

Yeah, HomeKit had the NFC thing, yep, early on. But I don't think all the devices had it though. I think it also went around the device too, right? You had to build it into the device, but yeah, it wasn't on every device. You either had the little QR code, you had the numbers. And I hate that so much. Yeah, it was the numbers, yeah. When you want to include, exclude, whatever, and you have to type in those numbers, I hate that so much because they're usually

on the back of the device, where you have to open up the wall and put it in. And it's nice to see matter adding this, but first of all, how long before we start seeing it on the devices? Second of all, will manufacturers actually implement it, or are they just gonna stick with that sticker on the back? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. If they get, this has a, I mean, this is all iterative, right? So like, you know, whenever this gets released by the manufacturers, they'll be able to do these, what they're calling a enhanced setup flows. And it's built directly into the matter standards. So that's good. We'll keep an eye on them.

And maybe, assist what, 2025, the end of 2025, maybe we'll start seeing people roll out stuff. I mean, Home Assistant will probably be next week, right? They'll probably update to one. Yeah. They probably already have. It's probably in the release notes we haven't gotten to yet.

So. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 528. All right, mailbag, we got listener feedback from TC10, and he says, basic functionality from thermostats and cams should be available for 20 to 30 years. Your five to 10 year life needs to be for tablets, phones, et cetera, not that very basic functionality of a thermostat.

You see, turn it on and off, set the temperature, turn on and off to look at a camera. I don't know, I guess I agree with that. Five to 10 years or 30 years for a camera, I don't know, that's a stretch. Fifteen years for a thermostat. I feel like thermostats, what people are trying to compare them to, that the ones that did last 30 years are

those ones with the mercury inside of them. Like they were all they had a spring coil inside that they used for the thermostat right and it was like attached to some mercury and when the mercury like bulb tilted down because the spring coil tightened up or whatever the two contacts inside the mercury switch would touch and that would kick your air conditioner on. And I'm like, that's not, we don't do that anymore. So unless we go back to a truly mechanical thing like that, there's no way that you're gonna expect, security devices get updated more than that. So I think five to 10 years for a smart device

is probably okay. If the thermostats probably should last a little bit longer for basic functionality, like turning it on and off, but I wouldn't expect it to talk to a phone or anything after that 10 year period. That's what I'm saying. I think 10 years is probably a good time, honestly. It's just, unfortunately, it's one of those things that unless you're going to adopt an open standard, like not even open, I guess, but you know, Zigbee or Z-Wave or Matter or something like that,

I think it's just unrealistic to have software support that long. And where I kind of draw the line right is that the item should be usable at the end of the day, right? And a thermostat is on, if you can't use it with the software, it can still function as a regular thermostat. You should be able to set schedules up on the thermostat itself. There shouldn't be any, you know, app reliance for that if somebody wants to set up in this thermostat to turn on and off at certain times and stuff like that. Cameras, though, I don't know. I think that's unrealistic. Ten years at most for a camera as well.

The unfortunate thing is it's kind of like it's kind of like politics and saving money and cutting taxes and everything. Nobody ever wants to talk about it because it's bad, right? Like nobody's just going to come out and say, hey, we're going to support this device for five years and after that you're on your own. Go buy a new device because it's just bad for business for the most part. But we have to adopt some kind of policy because it's just unrealistic. I don't know 30 years is crazy Yeah, it needs to be realistic like it shouldn't be like we there's somebody who posted like the whole internet is like 30 years It's older than that because the Internet's been around for a while

But like the Internet the Internet that you like you and I could mainstream around for 30 years now So like that's just crazy like there's no way I thermostat from that long ago. Right. I mean, Nest has only been around itself for like 10, what, 10, 11 years. They're just saying, hey, the first generation stuff that released is not gonna work anymore. And I don't know.

That seems like with enough notice that's acceptable. I think these companies are getting a little bit better at being more upfront about that. I mean, we got a little note here about somebody posted in Reddit complaining about the Navinlo X3, which is the lawnmower that they just sent me, right? The big one has a end of life for security update support on March 4th, 2028. That's three years. So that seems maybe short, but then again-

Yeah, three years is not long. No, I don't know. The problem is that three years, for the amount you pay for that product, like how much is that more, like $3,000 or something like that? Yeah, yeah. And you pay $3,000, you get three years out of it.

That's like a thousand dollars a year. Yeah, I can pay somebody to cut my grass for less than that. I forget when Wayne said that they were, they were, um, when these lawnmowers, I mean, clearly they're mechanical machines who are running around in the, in the weather all day. Like they do age out. We're going to have to like, they will age out in a couple of years, right? The battery will probably die in two years. The battery or- Not if you get a garage for it like Gavin.

You get a different element. Printed it all up. It's mainly because the birds were pooping on it, so. Yeah, I hate that. Yeah, so like, well, what's this one at the bottom? Oh, this is for the Navamo app that's on my phone. They say it will support through 2032, guaranteed support. I mean, at least when you go to buy one of these, right?

This is available. You could go and look this up if you were concerned about the end of life or the life expectancy of the mower. Um, you know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to, I thought he said they, that people are getting about five years out of them. Um, or three, like three to five years anyway, like out of a mower, like they have that information. And that's understandable. They're not saying it's gonna stop working after three years There's a crack to be security updates after three years So, you know, and I'm surprised there isn't some third-party company that's like hey We'll take over your software for security updates, you know outsource that to us

We'll handle it and that could be a business to keep you on. It could be, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, there's like on the Windows, like Windows stops releasing updates for, Yes. Like Windows. We're doing that now. Something. Well, there's like an entire, there's

a group of people that will reverse engineer the major security patches and release them for older version of Windows. Like you can go and download the security patches from them and apply them to your system if you need them. If you're like running what Windows, was it Windows 10 or something? Yeah, Windows 7, Windows 10. There's even a company out there that releases, it's hard to explain, but it's kind of like they release a software that will patch things in memory. It doesn't actually patch your operating system, but patches it in memory.

So you're still fully patched and you can pay them per end point for that. And they usually do that for older operating systems until, unless Microsoft releases a patch or something like that and you pay them. They're not affiliated with Microsoft in any way, but they ain't touching the files on the OS itself. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like you said, it could be a business. I mean, that's a great idea. I like it. We'll have to get, we've been in talks, we're trying to get Wayne back on before summer goes out. Cause I'm sure he's got a lot, lots to talk about, especially with the new X3 launch. Yeah. So hopefully we'll get them on before it, before it gets too, too late and people have moved on from lowering their lines.

I gotta say, well, I'll talk about, I'll talk about what I'm doing with the craziness that's happening in my yard with two of these things. It's, it's been fun. I'm just going to say that anyway. They're dueling. It's like robot wars. You need to attach like, uh, uh, some, uh, sticks to them so they can. Like jousting.

I just set them up to poke each other. Yeah. And nice. All right. All right. Uh, pick of the week. Guys. I just set them up to poke each other. Yeah nice All right. All right pick of the week guys. I don't know if you've seen this But this guy this guy made the screamer and you know about the clapper like when you want to clap and turn on and off Your lights. Well, what if you just screamed at the top of your lungs? And he has a video and this is the best video I think I've ever, it's so funny. He's just screaming and the light turns off. The light turns on. It's great.

It's great. So we'll put a, I like the warning on it. Volume warning, I am yelling. I love this. I need it. It's so quick. And that's great. I need this in my life.

If I could build stuff with my hands, I would totally build this. Well, it uses ESPHome, so I'm sure it has excellent home assistant integration. I'm going to send this to Agnes and tell her we need an official product. We need the screamer. Exactly. All right. Well, check the video out. It's great.

He has a little small write-up on it and how you put it all together. And it doesn't actually take very much to do. Look at the little bit of yaml you have to tap, tap into there. So there you go. So much yaml though. That's like one, two, three, four, like what? Seven or eight lines. It's not very much. I need Chad to do this for me.

I'd like the variable currently screaming. It's set to true. And that would be a great little like, uh, somebody help me the variables, what are they called? The entities? Entities. Yeah, that'd be a great entity to have currently screaming, screaming at the top of your lungs. All right. Let's see. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, entities, screams of the week, great ideas for a show, give us a shout, email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online

form. All right, project updates. Gavin was on another podcast. Again, again, again. I was. Oh, yeah, I was there. I was there. I was there in the audience trolling you. You pass through you pass through. No, I was on home gadget geeks. I think I mentioned this last show, but now I was on home gadget geeks. I think I mentioned this last show but now I was on home gadget geeks Um last week, so make sure you check that out. Just go to home gadget geeks.com And you'll see my show. It's in the top five He's right right right at the top. Yeah, uh, yeah

Yeah, he's he's like a fun show you guys were talking about all sorts of stuff. Yeah, jim jim's great He we just have a bunch of topics like there's nothing formal It was a good fun show. You guys were talking about all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Jim's great. We just have a bunch of topics. There's nothing formal. It's like, what do you want to talk about? Let's talk about this. All right. We have a list and he directs it. Usually, I give him a long list and he just picks from it.

It's like, he left out that one, we could have gone on for two more hours. But it's an hour-long episode. I don't know if you saw. I think I lost it. Uh, but it's somewhere in our, in the hub or somewhere, uh, where, where Jim said, um, Seth, you're my favorite. So,

Oh, that was AI Jim. AI Jim is the one that actually, uh, he, he, he got AI to monitor the chat for himself and he just replies to you like that, right? Well, I'm just going to make that the pick of the week. So AI Jim also wondered if we should kick you because he kept talking about hot dogs. I'm sure he did. Well, Kevin, what are you been up to anything this? Oh, wait, we didn't do, we didn't do any of the home assistant stuff.

Do you want to cover that too? Yep. Well, what else you've been up to? Well, this week or last week, Home Assistant 2025.5 was released. That was a perfect time, Seth, live on air to upgrade your Home Assistant. I find it's gotten a little bit more stable lately with me.

I probably just jinked myself, but that's okay. In the show notes, you'll find the link to all the updates, you know, what's new, like the updates, the backup system. The one thing that I found really cool is they finally updated the Z-Wave. Um, so now when you're adding a Z-Wave device, you can actually choose your network type. Do you want it the long range or do you want it in the mesh? You know, before it was like a pain in the ass.

You had to go into like the Z-Wave and you had to like pre-scan stuff and do all sorts of things. But now it's actually built into the UI. So now if you want to use long range devices, so much easier to add it to your home assistant setup. So that's 2025.5. I mean, there's a lot more other things, but that was the one that stuck out to me. Very nice.

I'm updating right now. I just hit go on it. There you go. And you'll be fine. Don't worry. I'm not. Yeah. And then they also released their roadmap for 2025. This was a good read. It was an interesting read.

They touched on it on the state of the open home presentation they had. Right. And I think I'm starting to see the vision. I think I'm starting to see what they're trying to do here. interesting read, they touched on it on the state of the open home presentation they had, right? And I think I'm starting to see the vision. I think I'm starting to see what they're trying to do here. And when they talk about adding context around devices, and they use the fridge as an example. You have a fridge, it has many sensors in there, right? You can have temperature sensors, it can have open, closed sensors, etc., etc.

But in the concept of the smart home, the temperature sensors aren't, um, displaying the temperature of the room. It's the temperature of your fridge. The open, closed sensor is not a window or door. It's the fridge, right? So it shouldn't be included in certain areas in certain, um, you know, in certain, you know, questions, you know, like when you say, what's the temperature in my house, for example, it shouldn't be included in that.

I get where they're going with this and they're building a database where they're going to have all the devices in there. I think it's going to be a dumping ground of device information. It's going to be a community thing. I see. They're calling it collective intelligence. Yeah. The community is going to come together and they're going to dump all their devices in it and I think it's going to hold things like, you know, the ad removal, you know, how to include or exclude the device or add it, or, you know, maybe even firmware versions or things, you know, about the device. And then give the device a context.

And where you can eventually take this is now it all comes down to the interface and the dashboards. Right? So now they can create a dashboard, knowing that it's a fridge and all these entities are tied to it, they can create a fridge dashboard for you automatically and have something nice and designed. So at the end of the day, when you put all your devices in, it's not in the database and everything, all your dashboards and your whole interface gets created for you. So if you have a weather station, weather stations come with like 50 different entities from, you know, the wind, weather stations come with like 50 different

entities from, you know, the wind, the temperature, the humidity, the light, whatever, but because it knows the context of the device, it can create a dashboard for that alone and have everything nicely laid out and designed for you. Right. And that's, I think where they're trying to take this and it makes sense. It will, in the end, it's better for all of us. It's a big initiative, you know, because there's a lot of devices out there. But, you know, it's a start and it will probably get better.

They have pretty good, like a little, a pretty good roadmap ahead of them. Like here's, here's, big music assistant, easier to set up. Yeah, I'm shocked. That's a priority honestly The one I did like to see on it was improved privacy for users guests and public That one I think should have been that that should be more of a priority than making music assistant easier to set up because

You want to give somebody access to your smart home? But you know, you don't want them to have access to everything in your smart home. You don't want them to be able to turn on or off certain things, maybe just control what's in the guest room, for example. I wish they would prioritize that one a bit more, but there's a lot of focus on user interface, making the thing out of the box look a lot better, and that's a good thing to see.

Then easier to set up. I also noticed on here, Nabakasa is going to be working on the most reliable hardware and antennas to support more open protocols such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and more. Yeah. They have their Zigbee one, they have their Zigbee thread one,

the ZB one, I think. I can't remember what they call it. But they also I, they also talked about they were bringing their Z wave one, but it's also nice to see them talking about Bluetooth or maybe they'll have newer models of these, right? So that's good to see too. Them getting into a hardware game, they're expanding, you know, you also see mention of, you know, suggesting or making default automations again, it comes down

to the context of your devices. If it knows this device is a fridge, then an automation can automatically be created for you, so if the door of the fridge is left open, it notifies you, or if the temperature of the fridge drops, it will notify you, things like that. And you don't have to keep building all these things. Yep. And that makes sense. I mean, that's one of the, the jokes on my Home Assistant dashboard is like, it's

pretty much unusable because. Oh yeah, because you one of the jokes on my Home Assistant dashboard is like, it's pretty much unusable. Because... Oh yeah, because you have the hot dog theme on. Yeah. Oh, come on. It's not bad. That's beautiful.

No, the dashboard is like, it's just like all those entities, like just dumped on the thing. And you know, I added my new car Subaru thing in the other day, right? And I can tell you my tire pressure, it's just dumped right on the front page. Like all of that, getting that all cleaned up, where it's a usable interface. I mean, it's gonna be hard to do, because there's people who,

everyone uses this system differently, right? So, you know, I primarily use it to turn on and off a light just about every day and group a few things together that don't have integrations with other stuff and to glue stuff together. I really don't even mess with the interface very much anymore, but it's there. It works really well and I've been pretty happy with it. So I'm going to keep plugging away and putting stuff in, checking my tire pressure. I noticed the other day I was low on gas before I even got in my car because there's a graph

now that tells me that I ran out of gas. Nice. Yeah. I get in the car, turn it on, and it yells at me there too. Nice. You have no excuse for forgetting. No excuses. Why did I run out of gas? Yeah, well, I was explaining to my wife,

I was just giving her example. It's like, you could use it to have a little like, we have a lot of the control board system. It has a little LED lights on the wall, right, with the lights or whatever. A lot of people have that too, little like, we have a lot of the control board system, it has a little LED lights on the wall, right? With the lights or whatever, a lot of people have that too, with like a InnoVeli and that kind of thing, where you can set the color of the LEDs.

I'm like, well, what if like, if you're going out as the car and you like, you can put a red light on the wall that tells you that you need gas, or you can tell it, put a red light on the wall that tells you that your tire is low, like one of the tires is low. She's like, oh, that's a really good idea.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's what I can do. Now, am I ever gonna do that? No, probably not. Probably not, probably. But what I do tell people usually is when you add new devices to your home assistant setup, just delete all the entities that you'll never use. Like just go into that device, if it's got 50 entities,

just disable all the entities that you'll never use. Even if it's an entity that you may use once when you added that device and you may never ever go into it again, just disable it because you can re-enable it later on if you really have to, right? And then you'll end up with like two entities, two or three entities. And you know, they, your dashboards will be a lot cleaner. Oh, why would I do that though? I wouldn't be able to see all of the random things.

You know, you complain, we give you a solution and then you don't want to follow it. Yeah. I'm just, I think, I think out of the box, what they're doing is going to make that better. Right. They're going to automatically hide the entities. Right. So, yeah. And it kind of goes along with how I do my dashboards today. So all my dashboards are all, I guess, YAML made up.

Right. It's a lot of YAML, a lot of coding, a lot of templates. Um, but essentially I set it up in a way that I can just tag, um, entities and they show up in the right places on the right dashboards. Right. And, and that's where I'm hoping they will, you know, with their context, similar kind of concept where, you know, the entities have a type or something associated with them and they'll just know where to show up on your dashboard.

That makes sense. My update finally just finished. It wasn't working there for a minute. I was worried that it was going to lose everything, but it is warming up now. So yeah, starting backup, not everything will be available until it's finished. Yeah, give it a minute. Yeah, I'll let it do its thing.

Usually it's faster. This must've been a pretty big update. Or it's going to fail. Yeah. It says it's starting. You're downloading a whole peer for your hot dog stand. That's too good. Well, it sounds like they're going to have an exciting 2025, I think.

So it'll be interesting to see what they do move into here. Other than that, it's pool opening time. So I've been putting back in all my pool tech that I pulled out, but Unraid released a few updates recently. They've been coming pretty quick with the updates. I should update. Usually, usually I'm quick with these updates and some of these updates, they have some serious like be warned if you don't update, there's a potential, you know,

data loss with the mover if you do this and stuff. So it's kind of scary updates because it's like, I want to not have that bug. So I want to get the latest patch. But the latest updates have been very problematic. So I went to install 7.1.2 and it crashed my system and I had to reboot it and then did not finish the update. And I'm like, I don't know, but I didn't want to touch it again. So I'm just leaving it at 7.1.0 right now.

And even on 7.1.0, I've had a few random crashes ever since I came up to version 7. I don't know if it's the Nvidia driver, so I might have to downgrade that. the version seven. I don't know if it's the Nvidia driver, so I might have to downgrade that, but if you're running the old version, the 6.0 version is working fine for you. Upgrade to the latest one so you have the latest security patches and stuff and just stay there. You know, let the 7 version mature. You're always gonna have that Reddit person that says it works for me. I understand that, you know, but if you don't need the new features or anything like that, just stay on the six old version and be happy because I'm not

touching it now. Yeah. That's not happening. Like as long as you have the latest six old version, cause there were some security fixes in there, right? So I have a six, 12, 15. I don't know. I think that's the latest.

I think that was the latest one. There was some security fixes in there, but don't rush to go to seven. Don't do what I did. Now I wish I could go back to six, but update buttons in me. Uh, you know, like, yeah, whatever I see the update, I, it just bugs me. At least in Home Assistant, I can say ignore this, but then, you know, at night I'm like, oh man, all those ignored updates, you know, I could have updated. What could go wrong?

I'm looking at these. I think that may be the last one in that branch because everything it's like go to seven after this. It's trying to push me into seven, oh, or seven, one, whatever. Hold off. Yeah, I'll just hang out here. I was looking at the uptime, 110 days. So that's, there we go. Yeah, my up just hang out here. I was looking at the uptime, 110 days. So that's, there we go. Yeah, my uptime is about two hours now.

Yeah, I haven't updated in a while, so. All right. So yeah, that sums up, you know, my projects, things I've been, you know, keeping an eye on. Nice. Nice. TJ, what have you been up to? You got a bunch of pictures here.

Yeah, I haven't done a ton. I've got some travel in this week and next week. But I dug a new landscape light today. A couple of weeks ago, I added the tree with some wildflowers. It's mainly sunflowers right now. There's a ton of sunflowers, as you can see from the photos. But I wanted some hardwired lights. Cats.

I wanted some hardwired lights at the end of my driveway. Previously, I had some solar lights that I bought off Facebook. It's literally the first thing I've ever bought from a Facebook ad. I would not recommend it because the lights sucked. And I paid a decent amount for them. They look nice. But I was like, you know what? I have to place an order for some landscape lights and stuff anyway. I'm going to go ahead and just throw a couple extra lights in there for me. And so this afternoon, before all the rain came in, I have to place an order for some landscape lights and stuff anyway. I'm going to go and just throw a couple extra lights in there for me.

And so this this afternoon, before all the rain came in, I went ahead and dug my whole trench for my fence lights and I got a light out there. I made some videos with my Ray-Ban glasses, so maybe I'll release a video at some point showing how I did it. This whole area is a utility, isn't it? So I can't really like dig down that deep. I probably shouldn't have dug the tree there, but you know, it is what it is.

And so I didn't want to drill through the sidewalk or underneath the sidewalk to get a cable there. And so basically I was able to wedge the wire in between the sidewalk to get it there. And I have some cement colored caulk that I'm going to fill that hole with with so that way the wire doesn't come up But the plan is to add a light on each side of the driveway So that way you can you can see where the driveway is at nighttime. Yeah, that's how fancy we are. It is fancy

Yeah, so I got that done. I got it. I got to go across the other side of the driveway Still I'll work on that probably this weekend in between stuff. So got that done. That's been nice. Just more garden stuff. We actually went to the garden center this month of the day, which was not a good idea because it was just lines like crazy. But they were moving pretty quickly.

So we got in and out. I bought a lot of vegetables to plant in the garden. So we got all those planted. I'm still working on the smart garden. I got a lot more drip irrigation done. All the front yard is done for drip irrigation now, minus this tree that I have in the front yard or by the street. But the whole front of the yard has drip irrigation now,

so I can just water from wherever I am. So I'm working on that with the the sewn off water valves that we talked about a couple weeks ago So that's that's all I have going on right now I got a lot of traveling here in the next week, which is not good because homelessness community day is next weekend So that's it's coming right up So I'm preparing for that, talking to companies and getting products and I'll probably come up with what we're doing like this weekend.

So. Many, many projects. The driveway light looks really nice. That little garden bed there. We got, I got that from our buddies over at Amplighting. So I paid for that. It's a nice light. They're only like 80 or $90.

It's nice. It's classy though, man. It's nice. Yeah. And I figure once the tree gets bigger, I'll put an uplight on it. You know? Yeah. We're like one of the only houses in the whole area that has landscape lighting. So it's going to be very obvious to tell people where I live.

Look for the house with all the lights, because we have the we have like the Nanoleaf house lights. I have LIFX path lights. And then now I have this like random light up here. You're not going to need any uplining for a long time. Just letting you know. Yeah, probably not. One of these days we need to, like I've been like threatening to go and put a tree out in the front yard because like we lost our big tree a while back.

And basically we don't have any trees in our yard. Like our neighbors have trees, but we don't have trees. We lost our big tree a while back and we're basically, we don't have any trees in our yard. Our neighbors have trees, but we don't have trees. And we kind of need a tree and probably have to start up something like that, so it's gonna take a while. Yeah, they just cut down my side tree. Our backyard is surrounded by trees. It's perfect for privacy.

We had a big maple tree at the side that was blocking everything. It was beautiful. And the city just came and chopped it down because it was, it was dying. Um, but I mean, it could have, you know, a few more years out of it still, but I think it was the random branches dropping and they weren't small branches. They're bigger than iguanas, you know, falling in. A lot of the parents parked right under that tree to go pick up their kids. So I guess it was dangerous, but now when you stand in our kitchen, you can see all

your neighbors, everything like it's there's no privacy there anymore. And they, they're going to put in, I think they still have to grind the stump out, but they're going to probably put in one of these Charlie Brown Christmas trees there. You know, they'll take forever to grow. Yeah. Well, best time to plant a tree is you know, you're going to have to grind the stump out, but they're gonna probably put in one of these Charlie Brown Christmas trees there You know They'll take forever to grow. Yeah. Well, best time to plant a tree is yesterday. So yeah Just don't know what kind of plant this my my my problem You know you do Seth you go to the garden store and you look for the sick ones

You spent like you spend like $30 on a cyclical country and you plan it because what does it matter? It's yours is gonna get lost by a hurricane. I know So, you know buy like a 10 to 20 foot tall tree and then buy it buy one from the sick area And just don't want to do my house, you know, that's all like yeah Well, that was that was my thing Right is because I like I don't think we're gonna live here long enough to for it to be my problem But I didn't want a tree that's gonna like tower the house and like if it fell on the house would kill anybody Yeah, you know like I don't even think you'll be alive by the time it's a problem

It's far enough away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my it's cute. I was telling my daughter like I really want to plant a tree off And she's oh great. I'd be to put a swing on it. I'm like no It's too funny alright, let's see I did a few things. Um, well for Mother's Day I got my wife a skylight, which is one of the, is it installed? It's installed. I actually know. Well, okay.

It's technically not. Did you order somebody to install a skylight? No, no. I, I technically it's not installed to my standards and, uh, like the wires coming down the wall and plugging in the, so like be a technical. Technically, it's not installed to my standards and like the wires coming down the wall and plugging in so like that's unacceptable. I still got to retrofit the wire in and I pretty sure I can do it. But you know, I still got to do that. The mount is awful that comes with it.

I'm shocked that I actually got the stupid thing level. But it's a fun little thing. It's definitely spoiled with advanced apps that do lists and task management things. This doesn't have really any of that, but what it does have is a nice little calendar for the family and we can put everything in there. I'm going to have to do some work to separate some of the calendars that we have and make sure that we're all kind of like using our own calendar now. Like, right now we just have one calendar that's an Apple calendar thing that we just

share between our phones and we're like, this is on there, this is on there, just telling you where I'm going to be. But I think going forward, I'm going to have to like break those out into accounts so everything gets color coded correctly and labeled for who's which calendar and whatnot. So yeah, yeah, that's coming. It's there's going to be some technology organization on that because it's actually a pretty nice, powerful system for that kind of thing. So, so yeah. And then it was pretty nice. I've been wanting to get one. Yeah, you have to let me out as long term. I'm not like it's one of those products is like it's about 90% of the way there of what I would want to see.

Maybe like 80%. I'm like, man, I could do better. But then I'm like, no, I don't want to I don't want to do that. This is fine. This is fine. You know what? It's fine. Yeah, especially for something out of the box, right? I mean, because it's one of those devices that you need everybody to be able to use. Right. Right. And like if your server's off or there's a breaking update or whatever, then it just

ruins everything. Yeah. And I mean, it's the I got the big one. So I got the like the 20, 27 inch thing. So it like hangs on the wall in the laundry room. And yeah, and it got a retrofit the cable, but like you just walk by and you can put some like photos on it, like that rotate through. And so like, it's fun, you know, just walking by

and see photos on the silly thing. The moment my daughter comes in and checks off her like brush teeth, she gets a little star for that. And I was like, go confetti party. So like we've got her kind of using it. We'll see how well that goes. But they have a little like reward system. So if you get so many stars, you can get a reward out of it.

So, you know, it's not a bad little, little device for a family. So I think Adam just has recommended that on last year's, what's it called? The fireside chat. Yes, exactly. That's originally how I heard about it. I thought there were like a few other competitors and I looked it up and there's there are but like they're all like the posts from them are like this one has this and this and this and I'm like looking at mine and going well all those features that you say it doesn't

have it does now. So clearly somebody's working on it and updating it. So that's a good thing, I think. Happy to see that it's getting additional features that weren't like there three, four months ago when people were complaining about it on Reddit. So I mean, somebody's, somebody's there doing stuff. So can't complain at all. It, it, it, it's serving its purpose, like you said.

So, uh, and then, uh, for, for then for funsies, it's been raining actually here. The last two days, I think it rained and it really rained, really, really rained yesterday. So that means that the grass shot up like four or five inches overnight. And I still have some of the brown spots. I don't know what's going on there. I think there's something has gotten under the ground some of the brown spots. I don't know what's going on there. I think there's something has gotten under the ground and maybe eating the grass. I don't know.

You guys have like moles or something? I don't know that there's like moles. This particular grass, there's a mole cricket here in Florida that likes to eat things. Yeah, it's a bug, right? So maybe that, it may be some kind of fungus I got on there. It may just got, it's like the high spots too.

So maybe they got too dry or something. I don't know. There is little things popping up now in between, you know, in the great, the brown spot areas. So something's going to grow there. I don't know what it's going to be, but you know, we'll see. But since the grass shot up so much, literally overnight, I set the both Navimos, I set up the big X3 and the little i110 I guess to drive around the front yard and face off with each other and get things done.

And let me tell you, they both did a great job. Like I drove by other than the edging that I go, you know, the weed eating and whatnot around the edges. Both of them set to work and mowed all day out there. I think even the I-10 came back again and did its scheduled bow. I was looking at it like, man, that's exactly what the lawn is supposed to look like. So I'm pretty happy. I didn't think mole crickets are a real thing. I thought you were just kidding.

These things are scary looking Yeah, they're they're they're a pest in Florida. Yes, they're like considered not native But this is a if I saw this I think I'd run away It looks like a lobster mixed with like a cricket. Yeah, it's Florida man. They have weird stuff here Crazy look where the heck you get this from This seems like some Australia It's from Latin America, but it looks like something you would see in Australia because it's trying to kill you I think it eats the type of grass like I have a native grass and I think it like loves that type of grass

so I mean there's a there's actually a a video Kind of like it's like a Facebook shorts video of mole crickets find their way into your lawn It looks just like my lawn like the little brown spots that have started around the edges and through the middle. So maybe that's what I got. And I just need to put some bug killer down or something to get rid of them.

I don't know. I mean, look at the second image for the in the back channel I just sent. This is terrifying. They should make a movie about this. I'm watching mole cricket videos. It's even worse when they're moving. Oh man.

Like static images doesn't do anything. Oh. It's got little hands. They just, they've got little hands on them. Yeah, they're like little mole hands. That's so crazy. Oh, these are scary. They're not that big though.

I mean, they're big, but they're not that big. Yeah, but could I fight a hundred of these? I don't think so. And after we, I think, I think something's been rummaging around there. In wintertime, it's been a drought up until like yesterday, so I'll figure it out. And I probably won't have to because honestly, the grass is probably going to grow back and take over or whatever fairly soon, especially once it starts raining. But that's all I got.

That's all I got this week. I got a, I got a big project to pack a bunch of stuff up and ship it to, to Ohio and Canada, the next couple of days. Wait, wait, hurry up. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm looking at this mole cricket video of a guy pulling them out of his lawn. We can't leave this. I mean, I'm watching a video. It says the mole cricket is the platypus of the insect.

Whatever. Yeah. It's like, if, if my lawn was like this, just burn it. I'm just putting interlock everywhere. Just move. Yeah, I'm giving away my Navi-mole. I'm getting rid of the lawn and that's it. That's why so many people do the zero scape around here.

It's like, I'm not dealing with this. Yeah. Okay. Man, this person's got a whole bucket full of them. I know. They put a bucket in their garden to catch them. Like, it's like they're throwing down soap or something on the lawn and then they come to the top.

It's like, no, I don't want them to come to the top. Stay underneath. Hmm, is that all it takes, some soap? I can't do that. I don't know, he's doing- Should I see how many I can get out of the ground? No. Doing that? No, like, you have fun.

Just leave them- My daughter, my daughter might come help. You think she'll help? She might not roll around in the lawn anymore. Send me this video with the soap thing. I'm gonna try this. You can just put it on your robot lawnmower and it can deliver it for you.

Yeah, put the soap down, let them come out and get chopped up. That's enough for me today. No more mole crickets. Yeah, this is what nightmares are made of. I gotta go to sleep. I know. You guys links. I'm not even afraid of insects or anything, but mole crickets. Yeah, this is what nightmares are made of. I gotta go to sleep. I know. You guys links.

I'm not even afraid of insects or anything, but these are weird. Yeah, they are. I wish you wouldn't have shown me this. I know. Sorry, it's late. Gonna have bad dreams tonight. Why am I being eaten by mole crickets?

I hope it links in the show, if you wanna go check them out. If not, I understand. Yeah, I mean, don't do it while you're out in public. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, we do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm 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 on the show, and every pledge gets you an invite over to our private slash chat, The Hub, where you and everyone else can look at Richard's banged up finger. I don't know what he did. It looks like he- I don't know what he did either. Yeah.

It looks like he sliced it open. Yeah. I mean, it's not gruesome. It's just like, that's not what we have there. Like it's all bandaged it up, but like, I think he was trying to, we had like some big shelves he was gonna use to organize his garage right or his workspace And I guess I guess he got pinched or something. I don't know. I hope it's not broken

That's that's what it looks like But I hate it when that happens because then I can't work like I have to type all the time and I'm like Has been type with pinkies, you know, yeah Well, hope we get better Richard Richard. Hope we get better. So it didn't look good. Yep. Feel better, Richard. If you want to help out but can't support this show financially, I totally understand.

Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the 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.