HomeTech.fm - Episode 533 - Alien Lamps

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

On this week's show: Rogers brings Wi-Fi 7 to Canada while in the US, a Senate bill could take it away, Ring adds AI video descriptions, and Gentex wants to keep your home safe with a smarter smoke alarm. Ubiquiti drops new dome cams, and SwitchBot teams up with Home Assistant. Plus, project updates, a pick of the week, and so much more!

This is the Home Check Podcast for Friday, July 4th, America! From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. USA, USA. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And for the record, we're actually recording this on the first, which is Canada Day, where, you know, I'm Gavin Campbell from Pickering, Ontario, Canada. It's not like the show will release on July 4th anyway. So I'm not really sure why we're putting July 4th in there, but whatever.

It's going to happen. Welcome to the Homecat Podcast, a podcast on home technology, home motivation, and holidays that I guess we get this week, right? So Gavin, you're off what? This week and Friday because, you know. Oh, no, I'm working Friday. I still have to work Friday. Yeah. I got cover for you. You guys have Friday because, you know. No, no, I'm working Friday. I still have to work Friday. I got cover for you.

How do you guys come to the American holidays off though? No, no. You just go get July 4th? No, we don't. Half my team does. And I just get stuck. It's usually really quiet on those days. When they're not in the office, things get really quiet.

It's because they're Americans. That makes sense. Americans like things. And they're loud. All right. Well, we've got a bunch of American and Canadian news this week. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it.

All right. Rogers has announced it's launching Wi-Fi 7 routers for customers in select areas of Calgary. What is it? Alberta, I guess? Yeah, Alberta. I've never seen that abbreviated that way. But anyway, the company will continue to roll out Wi-Fi 7, the rest of Canada, later this year.

Sounds fun. If you're there in Canada and you want the Wi-Fi 7, they're dropping the routers in that can actually do it. Now, whether your phone will do it, I guess. Is anybody phones doing it these days, Wi-Fi 7? I think the newer iPhones do it, don't they? Yeah. Wi-Fi 7? Only my iPhone 15 Pro Max does it.

None of my other devices do. Like my M2 MacBook Air 15 inch, it does not have Wi-Fi 7. It's fairly, I mean, it's still kind of like a picky, it's fairly unreliable if you're very far away, right? Like it's up close, good to go. But if you're far away, not so great. Most of my IoT devices don't even use Wi-Fi 6, I don't even think. Right, right.

I don't know, they're going ahead with these standards. And first I want to point out, good job picking a Canadian story for us, considering where it's Canada today. I'm proud of you there. But, you know, like a lot of these old, they're not even older devices. I'm still getting new devices and in the instructions they specific say, you know, point out they want the 2.4 network still. And it's like, really?

Yeah. Why? That's annoying, especially when it's an expensive device, you know? It's different if you buy something on like AliExpress and it's like, okay, you know, you can only connect this to the 2.4 because we just steal all your data.

And I'm like, that's fine. I get it. But when you buy like, I don't know, like there's certain devices I have around the house that are only 2.4 that were like $400. Yeah. I'm like, there's no way. But what do they need, honestly?

What do they need on like the fast Wi-Fi thing? The less congestion, that's what they need. The 2.4, the 2.4, yeah, I guess a little bit, but the 2.4 is- That's probably the only reason. Is more reliable and punches through walls for IoT devices, all that stuff. So like, to me, like, that's the way to go. If you buy a sensor or whatever for, you know, an expensive sensor or something,

and it only does Wi-Fi, what is it, 4, 3? I don't know. And it only does 2.4, right? It doesn't need to transfer a lot of data fast, right? Yeah. I mean, my problem with it though, is that certain devices are only 2.4, but they can still see the 2.4 and the five gigahertz. Oh yeah, that's stupid. Like, that's the idea as well. But you still need a separate one.

And so maybe it's just like better wifi chips. I'm sure somebody smarter than me knows, but just like put better wifi chips in your devices. That way I don't have to like create a specific network just for your devices. That way I don't have to like create a specific network just for your devices. Yeah. I'm still rolling the 2.4 IoT network and then I have a slow network

that I'm rolling every other client off of. And then if it does the faster, has the Wi-Fi 6 requirements available, then it'll get on the faster network. But mostly that's just my phone, my wife's phone, computers, things that actually need to be on it so they don't get messed up. They don't mess, the little IoT stuff doesn't mess that that network up. Seems to work out well. Yeah because my house is small I can get Wi-Fi 6 throughout the whole interior so it is actually beneficial to me with one

access point. Yeah. Well as long as sort of is you probably don't need Wi-Fi 7. It's a bigger number, but Wi-Fi 6 is honestly pretty good right now. I think it's pretty solid, right? Can Rogers even deliver these speeds, Gavin? Yes, they can actually. Okay. All right. Because like Spectrum here, they'll give you a router that has a 2.5 gigabit port,

but they do not offer more than a gigabit. So it's nice that they're preparing for the future, but they're giving you equipment that you can't even fully use right now. Yeah, it depends on where you are. I've seen them offering up to 10 gigabits both ways in some areas. So you won't use it, but I mean, it's there. Yeah, it says four gigabit down and one gigabit up. So that's pretty nice.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's go across the border here and see what the USA is doing for Wi-Fi. Senate version of the budget reconciliation bill backed by the president removes protections for unlicensed spectrum that broadens the capacity of the six gigahertz Wi-Fi band. This could result in selling off some of the spectrum in thorough Wi-Fi speeds. The bill is expected to be voted on this week, and the FCC would sell off some of that spectrum to mobile carriers such as AT&T, which could use it to make money. I mean, let's just say they're just going to charge us for it, right?

What was once free is now not anymore. So yeah, I guess USA go, go USA. You gotta pay for the tax cut and the deficit somehow, you know, we're adding $5 billion to the deficit. So gotta figure that out. How much could this actually be worth? I mean, they're probably still at for a few hundred thousand dollars and then whoever is the FCC chair will be like,

let's see, it's Brendan Carr. Yeah, they'll have a nice cushy job at AT&T when whenever the term ends or whatever. All right, well, slow Wi-Fi here, fast Wi-Fi Canada. You already went up, Canada? I listened to the Verge podcast and Eli Patel is always bashing Brendan Carr and it's pretty great. They have a section at the end of the show, it's called Brendan Carr is a dummy, and it's great to listen to every week.

So I feel like we have a couple more years of this. Yeah a couple. I could put a link in the show notes. We'll link people out to that if they haven't heard it. Here's a Canadian story. Let's see what Canada's doing with Hickvision. Canada's mandated Hickvision, a Chinese surveillance technology company, cease its operations within the country citing national security concerns. So I guess you're joining the fray here. The order requires Higvision to shut down and cease all local sales by a specified deadline. I didn't see this coming.

I know a lot of Canadians who were happy they could still buy the cool, nice Hickvision cameras for a while. And that was a couple of years back when we made basically what? Hickvision, Hikvision, however you pronounce it, I don't care. And then what, Dahua made those two illegal, right? Or not illegal, but certain ships that were made by them illegal. TJ, you install a lot of cameras. Do you have a problem getting Hikvision to do the cameras here in the US?

What can our Canadian friends up north, how can they prepare for this eventual decline of the Hikvision, Hikvision in Canada? Yeah, we stopped selling them. I used to only sell Hikvision because they were so cheap and you could buy pretty much anywhere, honestly, and you could buy off-manufacture ones or white label ones, which were always a little sketchy but

I stopped selling them a couple of years ago because they'll end the whole NDA compliance thing. Yeah. And I just like, I never deal with it but I was like, I might as well just find another brand that is compatible and that way I don't have to worry about it for future use. So I've mainly switched to Uniview and Ubiquiti

two cameras that start with U for some reason, but those are the best brand software-wise. Yeah, I've been happy with both of those brands actually. We got a Ubiquiti story come up soon here. Well, Ubiquiti, just do Ubiquiti. Yeah, Ubiquiti is pretty good. Unless you're a business, which I understand you want to do other stuff, but if you're a homeowner or a small business owner, Ubiquiti all the way.

Yeah, it's pretty good for those two use cases. All right, so let's go back to the US and talk about Comcast Xfinity plans. We talked about Rogers. Let's take a look at what Xfinity is doing. For some in the Northeast, it looks like. The company announced today that it will offer four plans. 300, 500, 1 gig and 2 gig across three different pricing tiers, an everyday price, paid per month without a price guarantee,

a lower price per month and a one year price guarantee and a price per month with a five year price guarantee. So if you go check out the little chart here, honestly, they've got some okay prices now and still not low enough for me to like be interested in going back to Xfinity, but they're doing a little bit better. Yeah, honestly, the $40 a month for, you know, 300 megs, I think that's a pretty good deal. The lowest I can get with AT&T, I think is about $50 or $60, and that's 300 megabits per second, but that's symmetrical.

Is this going to be symmetrical? I don't think so, right? Who knows? They said it has unlimited data, no caps. Yeah, about time. I mean, that should never even be a question, right? You should never have... I understand mobile in a sense, but in your home internet, you should never have a cap on your internet usage. It's a physical cable. Wireless, I understand, because you're moving around, and maybe you're not in the same areas and stuff like that. I get that. But it's a hardwired connection. Just build it into your price.

And the speeds, they're only downloads. So they don't specify if they're symmetrical. I think it's just the download, which sucks because usually the upload speed is something really bad. I remember when I was on Rogers, I had like one to 1.5 gig download, but my upload was like 60 megabit. Yeah, I'm looking at their own press release.

Of course, they don't talk about what the upload speeds are. They just take downloads. So it's probably lower. We know it's not symmetrical because it's Comcast, but Xfinity, I guess. So I don't know how to score this. Canada, I guess you win with the Wi-Fi 7, I don't know. Yeah, Canada seems to have better internet in general. So, I guess it depends on where you are.

Yeah, it depends on where you are. There's parts of Canada that they barely get internet. All right, well, let's talk about Ring. Ring has announced a new AI driven feature that generates descriptions for video clips recorded by its doorbell and security cameras. Antsmin aims to improve accessibility and convenience for the company's products by providing users with the detailed notifications.

Like instead of saying, hey, there's somebody at the door, you can say, hey, there's somebody in a blue shirt at your door or something like that. It gives you a little more descriptive words. One of the examples was, there's a dog chewing up a newspaper on the mat or something like that. So yeah, this could actually be pretty good. They were designed of course for people with visual impairments, narrating events. I think, Gavin, I want to say that you had something like this with them either through, yeah, was it Blue Iris or did you get it through Home Assistant?

No, it was through Home Assistant. So basically when the event happened, it would feed the image over to the local LLM, which would then create a description of it. Right. Um, it was cool. It was nice, you know, but in the end, all I wanted to know is our person, there's their car, there is, you know, I didn't want, I didn't care what it was doing. I didn't care.

You know, what color shirt they were doing. I didn't care about any of that stuff. I just want, there's a person at your front door. Done. That's all a nice simple description because when you, I was getting those notifications, I found I had to really read them to really understand what was that happening, you know, like it could just be a person walking across my driveway, but it was giving me some long-winded, you know, notifications.

So I just want to get to the point. I look at my phone, person, door, done. Right. There's only one like thing I really kind of wish the AI stuff does, maybe it doesn't have it looked into it because I wish that the, like, I would know when like maybe it was a UPS truck or FedEx truck outside. You could do that too.

Amazon. You could do that to Amazon. You could do that. Can you do yeah, with the LMS you can know if you tied in through home assistance stuff like that or even you could tie it in through blue virus and stuff and you can have it look for you know, UPS trucks and stuff like that. Right. Unify has package detection, which will tell you if a package is there, which is what you really want to, right?

Yeah, I have that. I'm just afraid that how does it work? It makes sense that you'd want like FedEx or UPS those because if you're waiting on like a specific package or something, you can know when it actually got delivered. And you would know if I mean the big giant truck pulls up in front of your house. I mean, it has a giant logo. I had the right the license plate turned on for my doorbell, license LPR, and it read some logo on a truck that pulled up in front of the house.

It thought that was a license plate. Then I was like, well, I don't need license plate reading on my doorbell that's 150 feet away from the driveway. Yeah, let's turn that off. That's impressive. No more false alarms like that. But yeah, I don't know. Like it would just be nice. And like I'm not, I'm kind of like saying exactly what you're saying, Gavin.

I don't really care that there's a person at my door. But if there's like a UPS person at my door, I do kind of care a little bit more than I normally. Like if they haven't walked away, they're just standing there ready to tag my door with their slip and run back to their truck. Like I kind of want to know that there is a UPS guy there filling out a form. That specific notification I really could use ubiquity if you're listening. I think we're there but we're not there.

Let me explain like we're there in terms of they're claiming we can do this type of stuff with the current technology. Right. But we're not there because I think the hardware is a limitation or, you know, there, there's certain limits. It's not perfect. It doesn't get it every time. Right.

You'll get that one out of five times. Right. And I think they, I wouldn't trust this stuff yet until it's really reliable. I'm still fighting with my patio set, triggering my cameras in my back because it thinks it's a person on, on unify. Right. Like if it can't get that right, you know, you're looking at trying to make it identify UPS person coming.

It's going to be a someone in a brown jacket is going to walk up and it's going to trigger like Brown Jagger with is going to walk up and it's going to trigger. Brown jacket with a package in their hands. I don't think it's perfect yet, but it's close. I'm still at the point where I just want to be notified that there's somebody there. Um, and then later on when they perfect it, then we can get more specific like that. But I'm also afraid that this is a step that they're going in the direction of, um, let us determine what notifications you're going to get. So right now they're probably classifying it.

And then I bet you later on, they announced, okay, now we're going to decide what's important, what notifications you get. And I don't want them really to do that because what do they determine is important, you know? Or I want, I want to determine what's important. Here's the other side of that. It's like, I also don't want the notification as much as I want to determine what's important. Well, here's the other side of that. I also don't want the notification, as much as I want to know that a valid trigger

can be made off of the UPS guy or the FedEx guy or delivery person in general. Let's make it easy. Say it's a delivery person in general, somebody driving a big truck that stops in front of your house that has a logo that's pretty recognizable. And let's just say like that.

I want to know, I want to blink a light. I want to send me a text message when I don't really care if it's some salesperson that's walking up, trying to sell me Comcast internet for, you know, non-symmetrical data speeds for double the price I'm paying right now. And it's going to have to do a lot of thinking and aggregating of data from different cameras too, because, you know, you'll eventually get to this point where I want to know if someone's stealing a package off my front door, right? How do you know it's not a delivery guy that's picking up a package that he's

supposed to be taking away too, right? Like the LLM is going to get like a little smarter to be able to determine all this stuff and I feel we're getting close to that, but we're not there yet. And eventually I think we will get there. Well, Ring, you hear that you're just wasting your time. So Gavin just says, Jeez, you're like my wife taking something and totally twisting it out of proportion. No, I'm just saying like, why are you even doing this Ring?

I did not say that Ring. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like his ring, you're just, you just messed up. Gavin says he only wants to know of motion and a person's there. He doesn't care. A package, motion, person. That's it. Now you don't need to do all this fancy stuff.

Well, yeah, in the end, that's all I care about. Package, you know, or animal. I like, the only reason I turn on the animals too is I like to see what animals come through my yard, right? Like I get some, I get some wild, I've had foxes, raccoons, a family of raccoons, you know, stuff like that. I like to see, you know, what comes through my yard. I have a black cat that, you know, every day comes around my yard.

And one day he was walking away from my yard and it looked like he had my chipmunk. So I wasn't too happy about that, but, um, and I also use it in my backyard cameras, where it detects an animal. It turns on the lights so that I know there's an animal out there and not to let the dog out, right? So, you know, person, vehicle, animal, that's all I care. And I could turn off vehicle in the backyard because unless, ah, nah, I don't expect any vehicles to be in my backyard, but this is Canada and some people drive wild, so it happens.

There have been cars in backyard pools. That's probably the best part of looking through the Unifi feed. Even if you don't have the animals thing turned on on some of the cameras, there's the older cameras that face other parts of the yard. And you can scroll through and see a bobcat walking through at night or something like that. It's kind of cool to see the wildlife. I do like that.

You've had the turtle. The turtle. Yeah. I've had some interesting creatures run through, especially right now since the grass is so high. They're just like, oh, a forest is back here. You want to live in here. Yeah, pretty much. All right. Well, let's move on. We talk about these Unifi cameras.

Ubiquiti has introduced its next generation of dome cameras, featuring significant technical updates and enhancements. We've got three of them here. We've got the G6 180 Ultra. It's an ultra wide, basically 180 camera. We've got the G6 dome and we get the G6 Pro 360. So the G6 dome is the only one that's available right now. $279. It's a 4K camera with IK10 Vandal Pro. I don't think you should ever buy this. $279. Don't buy this. I don't know.

A dome just doesn't work out. They're always dirty. They're always scratched up. I do not recommend this version of camera. I do not know why anybody would buy these anymore. It's $2025. Stop buying dope cameras. Hard agree.

Second one is, that's kind of cool I guess, and has use cases is the G6 Pro 360. We don't know the price on it, it's Q3 2025. It's the panoramic one, it's got a 360 degree image, usually stick them up on a ceiling, and you can kind of use it to kind of, look around the room. They have like special dwarfing video software

that makes it look like a normal camera. It's like a fake PDZ. Those work really well in places where you can get away with having a small pinhole size camera up in the ceiling or something like that, or just a camera in general, and then getting a 360 field of view of the room, so it's nice. But the one I think everybody should pay attention to is not a dome camera, although they call it a dome camera,

it's the G6 180 UltraWide. Yes. This is cool. It's got dual 8-megapixel sensors. It's got 16-megapixels altogether. 180-degree imaging, it has IR and audio accessories you can attach onto this thing. This is like the double lens camera and it stitches the video together and you can just see all the way from the left side of the camera all the way to the right side camera. And this is great. And

it's not a dome camera. I can highly recommend this one because it's not a dome. I'm looking at the pictures right now and the stupid thing doesn't have domes on the top of it I have one of these cameras and it's got these stupid domes on the top of it I put it outside for the hurricane Guess what happened two minutes after the way the wind and stuff started blowing it got dirt all over it It could see anything. It was just on just doing nothing. So I was like, this is useless camera. Don't buy dome cameras Don't buy him Wow. Wow,. Don't buy dome cameras. Don't buy them. Wow. Wow.

You really hate your dome camera. Yeah. What do I know this, this out of all these cameras, you know, the G six one 80. I was the most interested in. Okay. So this one, again, you mentioned that dual cameras and you can see one 80 view. Right. But you can mount this on a wall or you can mount it on a ceiling.

Right. So as a dual mounts there. So I found that really cool. Um, it also has some add-ons it looks like, um, for lighting or for speakers or something like that too, right? It's got an IR extender thing and a speaker thing to yell at people through it. I think. Yeah. It's got a multi-tops AI engine. I want to know how many tops it actually has.

You know, like this one looks really good. And I would put this, like, when I was thinking about some of the cameras, I want to get around the house. I was worried about like, what would I get along the side of my house? You know, I was thinking of like, you know, I know you love your dome cameras, but you know, something like that, that would, you know, cover, uh, you know, move around this, the corners or stuff like that. Yep. And I've seen people put multiple cameras at corners, you know, but this, I

could put this along the side of my house and get the whole side of my house. Pretty much. Yep. And I'm like, I want to know how much this is going to cost. I'm, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be cheap, but it's going to be at least 400 American, but it's going to be at least 400 American, but it's going to be coming in Q3. Um, so I'm like, oh man, that's about the same time as the new iPhone.

Yeah. You don't need a new iPhone. You need this camera, Gavin. Defense on when TJ comes up because he's going to have to run the wires for me. You know, like, but these, I these, I'm excited for this one. I think I'm gonna grab one or two of these to cover the side of my house. Yeah, honestly, these cameras are good.

So I have two 180 degree cameras now. I have a Uniview one and I have a RayoLink one and they are great. The RayoLink one where it stitches the cameras together, it's a little more obvious, you know, because it's a little blurred or it's not as clear as like the left and right side. The unit of view does a little better job with it. So I'm interested to see how they handle that because obviously you need software to stitch those images together. And it's going to depend on the layout of the actual cameras themselves or the lenses themselves. So this

is what ubiquity needs to be like a real camera company though, because they have cameras and like just recently they've started coming out with like what I would consider real cameras. And this is a good step along the line. Like these are just good options that they need to have, including the 360. I mean, they needed a 360 camera. I personally don't like the 360 cameras, but that's just me. But they need it in the lineup in order for them to actually be a camera company. They've had one before and they have the Theta one too, I think. Yeah, the Theta one I still don't understand.

Yeah. I'd understand the Theta if it was outdoor version. I was going to buy one. I'm like, this would be perfect for what I wanted to do with it. I looked at it and it said indoor only. I'm like, how can it be indoor only? Did you guys actually click on the link and see this audio enhancer thing

for the 180 degree camera? It's got a little thing on it. It is ridiculous. It gives it like a little head piece. I'm not really sure. With AI. Yeah, and you get AI audio announcements. See Seth, you could have just bought a $400 camera

with AI audio announcements instead of your loud speaker. I was looking at the rail link speak cameras You know to do the 180 on the side of my house But the problem with that being you know having unify in my as my main system You'd have to go through like the AI port to get it all in and everything like that And that's not a good solution like I know unify added this AI port, but it downgrades the quality of these cameras for you to be able to add it. And then it kind of does some AI to upgrade it again, but still not as good as like the original picture.

Right. So if you're going to go with the Unifi, get Unifi cameras, and I can see why they do that on purpose. They want you to buy their hardware. You know, they're kind of just patching in on VIF cameras. But in the end, they want you to buy their hardware. You know, they're kind of just patching in on VIF cameras, but in the end they want you to buy their hardware and that's why I would probably just go and I'm gonna grab maybe one or two of these. Yeah, I mean, that's what I do. The AI port's kind of a holdover

till you get Ubiquiti cameras, but you might not be able to switch until Ubiquiti releases cameras that replace your existing cameras. So it's a good placeholder. I'm honestly surprised they released the AI port anyway. So my favorite accessory for the G6 180 is I'm looking at the in the box and it's got like a circular mount.

You can use the dual mount for this thing. Oh yeah. So you can have 360. You can have full 360 with this. Yeah. 360 ish because I don't know how that works but yeah you can do it for 59 plus whatever this costs times too. You're technically gonna need three of them to get 360 I feel like. I don't know. So how much you think this is gonna cost? I'd say 400. 399. US? Yeah it it's going to be up there. Yeah. Ah, Christmas is going to be like this here for the family. The Uniview 1 I bought, I think roughly MSRP is like $500, so.

They've never made a camera, let's see, they've never made a dual camera, have they? No. Their AI360 is $399, so their G6 is probably going to be in that price range as well. That's what I would imagine. I hope I have some good night vision too, because I'm not going to have a light tied to this at all. Well, I noticed that they had the full, what is it, the 1-1.8 inch sensor on these. So that should be big enough to draw into a decent amount of light and have good little light performance, finally, Unifi. The MSRP of the Uniview camera, I have a 719. 719, hmm.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Maybe I'll keep my iPhone 15. Maybe I'm up on my ubiquity price, 499 maybe. Because you're basically, I mean, you got to see it from their angle too. You're basically getting two cameras in one anyway. And so if you can replace two cameras, you'll probably pay for that. It's the convenience.

Yeah, this form factor is a problem solver. Although not as much as you might think, because the lens doesn't see very much, very far away. You pretty much have to be right up on it to get any detail. But it does give you a wide-angle view. In the right spot in an appropriate situation, it would does give you a wide angle view. And if in the right spot in the most, in an appropriate situation, it would work well for you, I think.

Well, and I'm sure if you're not worried about like the physical, cause most of the time you're putting these on your house or something. If you're not worried about the physical side, you can get a much physical size. You can get a much larger camera. And that way like you could have bigger lenses in them.

Cause that's the problem, right? Is you're fitting two lenses into this camera and you need to make it a presentable size and everything like that. So you can obviously get a better one, but it's going to cost you even more. It comes in multiple colors, it looks like too. Black and white, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I like that they're doing that for all their cameras now. I wish they just do it for their phones, it'd be nice. If only they would just have it in stock all the time, that'd be nice. All right. Let's move on here. We got another story about smoke alarms here. Smoke alarms. Since the Nest went away, what are you guys using? For smoke alarms? I've always used-

For smoke alarms. Right now, I have the first alert. The only Z-Wave one I ever found up here was the first alert ones. It works fine for me. But the other one I'm using up here was the first alert ones. And it works fine for me. But the other one I'm using for hardwired smoke alarms is the Zoo's add-in. And that one, that works really well because then you can just basically use any smoke alarm. You don't want to need a smart smoke alarm.

Just grab any smart smoke alarm. It just has to be the hardwired kind. And it will, it can distinguish between CO2 and smoke. So that's the nice part about it too. But I'll let you get into your story. Well, I was just going to say, well, Gentex, I'm sorry, Gavin says don't bother with your crap product anyway, because he's got one little Zeus device that knocks your stuff out of the park. Yeah.

Yeah. Geez, Gavin, brutal tonight. All right. Gintex has a line called Place. It's got a bunch of smart features, phone notifications, night lights, motion detector, temperature and humidity sensing, all built into this thing.

Air quality monitoring. Heck, you want a camera in common? They'll throw that in too. This thing starts at 139 for the base model and goes all the way, what was it? $350 for the ones with the the OC detection PM 2.5 air quality monitoring, white noise generator, camera, with two-way intercom. Wow. There's a garage unit priced at $299 that provides

heat detection instead of smoke, you know, because that's smart, includes camera and intercom. So they've got quite the range here. And if you're not Gavin and you were interested in a smart, a smart smoke, I don't even know how to call these smoke alarms anymore. Like how can you call this a smoke alarm? It's got everything. Where is this available?

Like is it available in the US? Yeah, Home Depot it looks like. I don't think they have it, cause Canada has different laws and rules up here, right? Oh, well, we're all the same. Well, not yet. We used to have those. Now we just do whatever we want.

You know, the one feature I'd love it as smoke alarm is the feature where it won't start beeping until the daytime. You know, if it's running low on battery, it will say, oh, you know what? It's nighttime, let me just hold off on my initial beeps, and then come like seven or eight o'clock in the morning and says, all right, let's start beeping now, you know, I would love that. All right, first of all,

every smart smoke detector should have two options. One of them is that the low battery, if it's gonna beep, it only beeps when there's light detected. And so it needs a little lux sensor in it. And so if you turn the hallway light on and the smoke detector battery is low, then it beeps. I'm fine with that.

Or just send you a notification on your phone. You know, maybe you still have the option for a physical beep just in case, but. Well, that would require it being connected, but, or do something like. I have the best, like the notification sound could sound like this. There. No.

No. And it's set up as an emergency notification too, so it's still watching you in the middle of the night. Like it will send out those beeps. All right. Once every minute or whatever it does. But as you walk under it, it says, Hey, somebody's there. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Right. You know, and let me know because trying to find out beep that happens once every 60 seconds is, that's what I'm saying. We need to get your stuff together as smoke alarm companies. I would I would pay for a very expensive smart smoke alarm, because a smoke detector because I only pay like $50 each for one of mine and the Z-Wave first alert ones. They suck I would not buy them. Why do you hate them? They work for me mine have all kinds of problems I don't know if like we're just like haunted or something But like I've had like I've had to go defective I've had like three like that just act weird with home assistant So they're just they're not good for me But you know I've realized at this point is that I don't need

Smart smoke detectors because I don't need smart smoke detectors because I don't want to know if my house burns down. I just want to come home to it. But you can watch it in progress burning down. That's cool, I think. My cameras, my ubiquity cameras, my interior ones, they have smoke alarm sound detection. So that's fine with me.

They just works through that. That works good enough. That's actually a good point there because I think with the smart speakers too, the Alexa Amazon one, they listen to like $10 a month for that now though. I think so. Yeah. But yeah, you mentioned cameras. Some cameras have features where they listen in for a smoke alarm and they will, you can have them send you the notification too,

which gets you around this. Do I really need a smoke alarm now, a smart smoke alarm now? Right. Yeah, especially, I don't know this company. Is this company going to survive the 10 years that the smoke detector usually lives? It's not even going to last 10 years. I doubt. Don't tell me they've actually tested this 10 years. Gintex has been around for years. They have.

Have they? They were like first to market for something. I don't know. It's an older brand, but who knows how long their intercom video camera, light noise. I went over to Home Depot and they're marketed a little bit differently. So they call them a nursery smoke alarm.

And you know what? Not a bad idea, Gintec, because parents... Well, that's one they have, yeah? That's like one of their levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a nursery, it's $350 for this thing. You put this up, you get a camera for your little baby's room, you put that up on the ceiling,

you know that the baby's not on fire. You can look in there, you can see it. And then if you wanna put it in there, you can see it. And then if you wanna put it to sleep, you can turn on the white noise. Like it's genius. And $350, there's not a new parent in to buy in that, I'm sure, so I know we probably would.

Although this doesn't integrate with very much right now. And it's got intercoms, so you know what it may be. It's called asleep. Yeah, it says, work with the Amazon Alexa right now. They're working on Google Home and exploring matter integration. A quote is here, our goal is to be the first smart smoke detector

on matter in the US. So, and should be interesting there. Oh, big goal there. That'd be interesting. We'll see, we'll see. Keep an eye on Gintec. They're going places. I guess they developed automotive technology,

including the HomeLink system, which controls your garage door for your car. So there you go. They developed the first dual cell photoelectric smoke alarm in 1974, and had been selling commercial grade alarms for decades. Oh, yeah. Nice.

All right, so this might be a solid hardware project at least. Very nice. Well, there's, this article here goes a solid hardware project, at least. Very nice. Well, there's, this article here goes on to explain that there's many brands who have thrown their hat in the ring to replace the old Nest Protect. KID or KIDD, I don't even know how to pronounce that. K-I-D-D-E.

It released two models, partnering with Ring earlier this year. It's the hardwired KID smoke, KIDD, I don't know, smoke alarm with Ring. It's a 54.97. And then another one for 74.97, and it has smoke and CO. And then First Alert, I think you guys mentioned them,

now owned by Resideo, partnered with Google, they've got a $129 First Alert, Smart Smoke and CO detector. So this one's significantly higher than those, especially if you get all the add-ons to make sure your baby's on fire. Or smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes, right? Stop smoking cigarettes! Not that young.

All right, let's move on here to something nice, right? Govee is launching lamps and a... Alien lamp. ...questionable taste here. The Uplighter Floor L lamp, it's the main model in the third generation floor lamp series. I love lamp. The lamp includes a upper section that produces ripple projection effects in a mix of warm and cool tones intended for calm and relaxing settings, I guess. It's got RGB IC and it's got a lower light, lower white light for wide zone and goes up to a thousand lumens. They've got a torturi floor lamp. I don't know how to pronounce that.

It's a triple zone color control music sync designed to provide soft lighting. So it will for bedrooms, players and shared living spaces. And I think Tia you were telling me this is one you like the tree floor lamp it features three adjustable light arms and a geometric design. It's basically like what we say track lighting with RGB ICs I'm sure on it. On a stand. On a stand. There you go. It's a tree light. Yeah. I feel like out of all three lights this is the most normal looking one. Like I can see this one in my house if I needed track lights on a stand. I do like that these ones actually have, you can rotate the lights,

you can zoom them in and out kind of thing, and focus them. So that's pretty cool to me. And it looks like a normal light. These other two do not look like normal lights. Like they just look like something that you would find in some like 20 year olds bedroom, if they had $180, they get the normal light.

They are ugly. I feel like this missed props off Star Trek or something. Yeah. The prop department got creative one day and we're like, no, we can't put that in Star Trek. Let's go ahead and put that out for sale somewhere and go we picked it up off the side of the road. In the pictures on Amazon,

they have these in nicer apartments. I'm like, I don't know if that's the right target audience for this, but maybe it is. These look nicer than my house and I would not have these in like nicer apartments. And I'm like, I don't know if that's the right target audience for this, but maybe it is. These look nicer than my house and I would not have these in my house. Oh, there it is. Oh yeah, no. Like these are way too classy of places to have this, especially the upright floor, up, up lighter floor lamp.

Yeah, if I put that, if I put that in my house, my wife would be like, uh-uh, out. And then I put it in the garage and she'd be like, no. Like out of the house. It's like out into the street somewhere. Yeah. What a weird concept. The lighting effect thing is interesting. That is cool. I do like

that little artifact effect going on. I'll give them that. Why did they need to have the weird shade thing? Well, the other one's actually uglier for me. Yeah, it's the one. artifact effect going on. I'll give them that. Why do they need to have the weird shade thing? Well, the other one's actually uglier. Yeah, it's a one-shot. So this looks like a giant what? A torch caterpillar or something?

I don't know. It's very strange. This one looks like it's something out of Halo. This one is worse somehow. At least the other one, you could be like, oh, you know, I'm into UFOs and I believe in aliens and that would fit in this one. Where are you gonna fit this one in?

Well, I'm looking at the mock-up they have here in this room, and it looks like it fits right in over next to that floor, floor plan right in this. Why do they have the couch in front of the bookshelf? You wouldn't be able to, like if the couch is there, you wouldn't be able to get to any of the books, right? That's really strange. I think this is AI generated, is what I'm trying to say.

No. Not on the internet. I think it is. You can't just do that. Oh, they've got it here in a teenager's room, which I you know, honestly, it probably could fit in to a teenager's room, maybe I don't know. Would work. Yeah. It gives you like three different light zones that blend together. It's got three different lenses, three different lights on it, and it blends together to make it like a soft light on the ceiling or something like that. But man, what an ugly looking device. If you buy one of these, let us know. Tell us why.

Tell us why you bought it. And there's two of them, the tree lamp right now and the ugly one we were just referring to. I have $20 off right now with a coupon. So. We make enough money from this podcast. I think you should buy me one. Buy one or two, yeah.

Send it over. All right, well, big news from SwitchBots. They are joining the Works with Home Assistant platform, right? So SwitchBot devices are now compatible. Well, some SwitchBot devices are now compatible, include smart curtains, humidifiers, and thermostats. These are the integration allows for automation, voice control enhancing the user experience.

TJ, you were telling me there's some kind of like a fallout over this though. Like it's not every Switchbot product, but you know, just some of them. Well, it's not that it's not every product. It is actually quite an extensive list of products. It's not every product, but there's certain things that just don't work in general in regards to like the integration. And that's kind of the point of Works with Home Assistant is that you can kind of use every feature of it. And so there's certain things like

one of the commenters pointed out that you cannot map to a certain or vacuum a certain room in the Works with Home Assistant integration, but you could in the Switchbot app. And the other one is that a button is not available with the contact sensor, with works with Home Assistant, but it is with the Switchbot app. So, you know, is it that big of a deal?

Probably not. The only one that kind of stinks is the Switchbot vacuum, where you can't mop a specific room or vacuum a specific room, because that is a really good feature, right? Like we have a laundry room where we have a litter box,

and you know, for some reason, the cats like to run out of it as soon as they use the restroom and it causes litter to go everywhere. And so we have an automation that just goes and vacuums the room every third time the litter box goes off. So there is useful use cases for that kind of stuff. So it does kind of stink to see the works of Homeless not include literally everything,

but I guess you gotta start somewhere, right? It says, will you be adding more SwitchBot devices to the program? It says, answer, absolutely. SwitchBot is quickly, has a quickly growing set of products lines that we're working to certify together, so. Yeah, it seems like it might be easy for some of this stuff because now it does matter, right?

So you get the little hub and you can bring it in with Matter, so that's always nice. But also a lot of them use Bluetooth. And so like I have the switch. The only thing I have switched by at this point is a couple of door lock and curtain motors. And those all work with Bluetooth. So it says the Bluetooth devices in the list were tested with a standard Home Assistant green hub. So there you go. I guess it goes right to that. Nice, yeah. Oh, a USB Bluetooth adapter. Okay, I see.

I get it, I get it. They tell you how this works. That's what a Home Assistant does, I guess. Yeah. Very cool. I still have the little, the hub, the SwitchBot hub, and then the curtain mover things. I don't know what they're called.

Yeah. And they go every day, open and close, and I don't even have to think about them. It's probably, we had somebody over the other day that hadn't been over to our house, and the curtains just started closing, and they're like, what's happening here? It's like, is there something behind your curtains? Like, well, I hope so.

So yeah, because it. It just silently moves. It just keeps going until it gets to the end and then it stops. But cool product. They work with Home Assistant now, so yay. Go to the Switchbot. That's going to wrap up the stories this week. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 533. All right. Nothing in the mailbag.

We do have a pick of the week and this is cool. It reminds us all about mowing the lawns and stuff with our fancy robot mowers. If you have a gate, I don't have a gate, but you guys have gates. I've often wondered, how the heck am I going to get my lawnmower from this side of the gate to the other side of the gate

without just leaving the gate open all the time? Someone here has figured out how to do that. They have created a automatic gate opener that will open up and let the mower back into the, I guess the backyard. And I was reading through this, he just basically he's got a linear actuator and some batteries and some solar cells and like put this all together with some some Fibaro smart implant, it looks like. It opens up the gate in the morning, the mower does its thing, closes the gate after the mower should be done. So there you go, not bad.

Yeah, this is nice and it looks like a really nice fence as well. So this is a nice clean solution. You know whoever owns this house next is going to be like, why is this here? You know, why would they install this little door here? It's not like a dog door. Maybe it is a dog door. But a weird dog. That's the only thing I can think of though.

It is really nice though. It looks like it's some faraway place too, which is nice. It is. I believe it was, well, it's Fibara. So it's definitely over in the European market, I believe. I thought I read somewhere in here that that was in Sweden or Finland or something. I don't know. You just got a solar panel to power everything, which is nice too. Yeah, it's actually a really good solution.

I've seen solutions where they just had like a swinging hinge, like cut out where the lawnmower would just push its way through, which also works too. You can program the Navi most to just push their way through, but it also allows animals to just push their way through as well if they wanted to. But yeah, this one's a nice automated one. I don't think it opens when the lawnmower comes up to it. I think it's, they just have it timed. So it opens up in the morning and the lawnmower does its thing.

And then it closes later on. Yeah. You just, it's just open and close at specific times, I guess. Yeah. But nice solution to a problem We have what lawnmowers and gates it's a Norway Yeah, that provides in one of the comments he provided all the links to all the products to the fibaro smart implant solar panel plus battery plus charger some dual pole dual throw relays a linear actuator and

Everything there runs on 12 volts. So it's completely off the grid, open and close gate system. Kind of cool. And when I first saw Moorgate, I thought it was like some drama. Yeah, I did too. Like Moorgate, oh no, is this a Reddit problem? No, it's a Reddit problem.

It's a Reddit solution. This is actually a pretty cool solution here. So pick of the week, there you go. All right, if you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the here. So pick the week, there you go. All right, if you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the show or picks of the week, give us a shout or email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can head on over to hometech.fm slash feedback

and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. I'll go first, I didn't do anything but I was mowing and my grass is really, really high now because I haven't been able to mow the back, what do you call it? the hill in a while. And it's really tall. So I was like, I went on Facebook marketplace and there was somebody selling a, one of those

electric lawnmowers that has the same battery as the blower that I have. And I'm like, I'm just going to buy this from this guy right now. And I ran over to his house, I bought it and I came back and I mowed like, I don't know, 30 feet and it died. I'm like, all right, good. And then I called it a day. So that's all I did. Put it on the charger.

I got on Amazon, ordered another battery and we'll try it later. Batteries are expensive. Yep. Yep. Always are. Yeah. The tool's cheap, but the battery's expensive. Yeah.

I think it lasted for a pretty good charge. It just wasn't, the grass is very high. Let's just say the grass is extremely high. I would say at this point, it's probably four or five feet high in this area. It's definitely not what the lawnmower was designed to be cutting. The other parts like where the grass is low and it has not grown into being obscenely high, it handled it perfectly.

I mean, it's a nice little, it's not quiet because it's electric and it still makes that fan sound or whatever. So a little louder than I thought, but it's not noisy and whatever. Now I have to worry about the stupid carburetor blocking up from some random bad gasoline that I have stored in the shed since who knows when.

I'm happy to be off the gas right now and tossing the old lawnmower down by the road next trash day should be nice. How does it get four feet high? You ain't cutting a lawn at that point, you're cutting down a forest. I could send you a picture. It's like those fields you see where the grain just waves back and forth in the wind. That's what it looks like.

It's pretty if you're looking at it, but it's just what happens when it rains here and you don't mow the lawn every day. You have two robot lawnmowers. What are you doing? They won't go down the hill. They get stuck. They're getting stuck. I couldn't get them started.

So I've got to chop it down real low and then clean it up back there. And then see if the big one can handle it now that the grass is lower. I've noticed that both of them now, will like if the grass is too tall, they're like, not going near that. And they'll just turn around and walk away. And there were a couple of spots that I had to go weedy in the middle of the

yard that weren't getting mowed. I'm like, what the heck? Just mow over them. Yeah, they do do that. That even happened in my yard. Um, we had a fence going up, so it was a few weeks in between cuts and it actually looked at a spot in my lawn and said, now I'm not going over that.

I'm good. I'm good. I just went with the weed leader, just cut it down a bit and then it went and started doing its thing again. Yeah. They're a little picky about that. But you guys need to tell your robots what to do. I just say, hey, go mow my stuff. My robot's like, you got it.

Yeah. Well, you have pretty grass, I guess, not five- foot tall grass. Cause it just, it, it, it, well, it, one time it went and tried to go through it and it got stuck and it was like, well, I'll try and get out and it can't. So it just kind of wiggles its way down and it just walks its way down to the ditch

and then falls in. So it's already happened once or twice. So I gave up on, on that until I can get the back cut. So just gotta do it. Just gotta get through to it now. Yeah, when I bought the house, I went to an electric weed whacker and a leaf blower. Yeah.

And I've loved those so far. My neighbor, I think my neighbor doesn't think I like them. He's like, he came over and he's like, don't you wish you had some of the little more powerful or something and brings out like this gas powered one? And I was like, no, because I can weed whack at like seven o'clock in the morning and nobody has any idea minus like the whacking

of the grass, you know? Like that's a little loud. So I probably wouldn't do that at seven o'clock in the morning, but I don't have to deal with the motor. I don't have to deal with starting it. I just pull the trigger. And I only have one battery because that's really all I need. I'd probably buy another one like next year or something.

But one battery gets me most of my day. I've had the electric. I've had probably the same tool set for about a year now and been extremely happy with it. I think it's EGO, E-G-O, the green one. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I've been very happy with the performance and everything out of it. Like the weed eater will get all the way around the lawn, usually no problem. And then if I hope the blower up, I'll get like five minutes of blowing out of it.

And then it's like, no, I'm done. And so you got to go charge it and come back and blow the rest of it later. But yeah, the, the lawnmower did, did a pretty good job. I thought, I mean, considering the grass is so high had to raise the deck all the way up and just kind of like push it in, you press a thumb button and it'll actually push itself. So it's kind of nice. It's like a wall walk.

My other lawnmower had that too, the walk behind or whatever, but like, I don't know. This is a, it's a different beast cause it's all electric. So I guess like, I don't want to use that because like you're wasting electricity. It could be going to the blades and cutting the grass. So you go like zero to 60 in your lawnmower in like five seconds.

Whoa, too fast lawnmower, too fast. Slow down, buddy. Yep, yep. So far so good for my used lawnmower from Facebook marketplace that I just randomly picked up. So I charged the battery and I'm gonna order another one on Amazon and get it in. There's off brands, I wonder how well they work.

We'll see, cause I don't care care for a hundred bucks versus whatever the 200 bucks or 300 bucks, the name brand costs. I'll go for that. Maybe once or twice. Anyway, Gavin, you did something. What you up to? Oh yeah. Well, just continuing on your lawnmower talk here.

So I finally, you know, graduated to like mapping out the front of my yards. You know, so up to now, I only had the backyard really mapped out and it was just taking care of the grass. And it's looking really good back there. I really like what it's been doing. So I finally mapped out the front one this week. And I'm nervous because I have a big hill on the side. It's a pretty steep hill.

And I've been watching it and it kind of struggles at some points, but then it kind of backs up, then goes around and then tries again. And eventually it makes its way up. So I've programmed that one still, it only cuts in a certain direction. Um, that way it won't get stuck on the hill. Like I think it would, but we'll see how that goes. But for the most part, um, my neighbors give me one of two looks. Uh, usually it's like, you know, is this guy crazy or I am so jealous.

Usually the jealous ones are the ones though, and they have their wife out there too. Like, hey honey, we need to get one of those. You know? Like, yeah, yeah. How much does that cost? Nevermind. She gives him the, are you crazy look? And you know, that's how it works, right?

But yeah, today, like today I sent it out to do the side of my house. And then I went and sat down with my neighbor and he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm cutting the line. He's like, no, you're not. You're sitting here. I showed him my phone and he was like, Oh my God. So first he gave me the, are you crazy? Look, and then he gave me the, Hey, can you program it for my line too?

Look, if you subscribe to gas, I got you. Yeah. Yeah. But no, it's nice. Um, you know, I have, I've always hesitated doing this up until now, because I tried a few times, I kept messing up the maps, right. And I know when you move the antenna, you have to redo all the maps. And that's a bit of work, right.

Um, so I finally, now that I have everything settled down and Everything going I've programmed it all out and you know, I'm thinking of a little design of a nice piece of grass That's like it's a long piece I could put a little word in it or something and it faces like my neighbor's house So, you know, I'm thinking of what I could put there, you know, to, uh, you know, so my neighbors see it, they'll get a good kick out of it, you know? It's great. Finally got that done.

You know, one less thing, you know, the thing is I still have to go around with the weed lacquer and, and, and do the stuff and I'm fine with that because I could just trigger it and then, you know, while it's going, I just go around and cut all the edges and then it will do its thing. So I'm fine with that. I do have a gate. I wish I had some kind of automatic gate solution, like we were talking about. But all I do is, you know, if I'm going to be cutting the front, I just open the gate and let it go through.

You can also program it as like a, what do they call it? Like almost like a drop zone where it's like, if you're going to cut those, it will notify you that you have to pick up the lawnmower, take it there and put it down on that and it will do its thing and then notify you when it's done. I just didn't want to mess up my map to try that out because those maps can be finicky, right? But for now it's working good. It's cutting away. It's living the good life. You know, I treat it well. I washed it down, wiped it off today, you know, gave it a drink, you know, we're all good. So that's one thing I've been playing around with Second thing I just want to give an update on these inner valley switches. So again last week

we talked about the millimeter wave I see wave of valley switches and I was I kind of had them they were new for a week. I was playing with them I really like them. I still really like them. So I was playing with them. I really liked them. I still really liked them. So the, the one concern I had was how are they going to do the whole millimeter wave zoning thing. Right.

Um, and I finally got used to how they did it. So basically you specify in centimeters, how far left, how far right, how far forward, except almost like a box, right. And then that's how you define your zone. And I'm like, this kind of works and you can even go up and down. So I set all that up and it was really good. And the only thing that was happening, I was getting some ghosts. So like middle of the night, my, um, I have one in my bathroom, uh, master

bathroom, it would just turn on. Right. Um, I slept through it, but the wife would kick me every time it came on the lights coming on again, right. But that's the life, you know, she signed up for living with a smart home guy. You know, this is what you signed up for. You got to realize this is what's going to happen. But I was able, I think I able to fix it just by adjusting the vertical scanning.

So it's almost like it was picking up something on the ground by the, maybe it was the vent, so I adjusted, you know, like the height off the ground and now, uh, I'm not getting that. So they're working great better than I, as I said, I'm excited for these things to come out. You know, I have a few more, I've ordered a couple, I'm still waiting on them, but, you know, I have a few more places I'm going to be throwing them in. Um, great devices, great, just working. And other things I've just been doing this week, a lot of vibe coding.

Here we go. Here we go. I am not a developer. I can code. I know many different languages. I'm not a master of any of them. You know, YAML. That's the hardest one. That's not even a language to me. That's just a format. You can probably do COBbble too at this point.

No, that was many years ago. I think I studied that in high school or something like that. With Turing, my first language was Turing, I think, in Visual Basic, I think. And Assembly, way back then. Anyways, that was a long time ago, another Gavin. But this week I've been doing a lot of vibe coding. And that's a term that I guess came up recently. I think it's, you know, it refers to, you know,

coding with AI. So, you know. Well, more specifically, it's you give AI some instructions and you literally do not care what it does. That's the idea is that- Whoa, okay. The idea is that nothing, like you just, you tell it to do something,

if it messed up, you say, hey, you messed that up. And it doesn't, you don't care what the code looks like. You don't care anything about it. So. Yeah. I've been giving this a try because I saw a lot of, you know, people talking about this. So I've written a number of dockers and stuff using this method, almost like I did get a little bit more in depth,. I would say, can you rewrite this function or let's do a code review?

And it's really cool doing code reviews of your code. And I know we're like a home tech show and I'm talking about programming, but this opens up, the reason why I bring this up is this opens up so many possibilities for your home automation, right? When you can write a Docker to do certain things and interact it with your home assistant, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for your home automation, right? When you can write a Docker to do certain things and interact it with your home assistant, it opens up a whole bunch of things for you if you ever wanted to take it to the next level, you know, and the whole vibe coding just, you know, it allows anybody with basic coding skills to be able to throw together scripts or,

you know, not just automations, but scripts or, you know, programs that you can run in, dockers that do things for you, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're not a coder, but you always like to take it to the next level, check out Vibe Coding. I hate saying that too. I don't know why I hate saying it.

It's kind of like a used and abused thing. Yeah, it's like a buzzword. It's like the new buzzword, you know? But check out using an AI to help you code. There you go. GitHub, what do they call it? GitHub Copilot. It's built into Visual Studio Code.

You know, get familiar with it. Maybe I'll use that to make me a dashboard. Yeah, I've seen people do that. You can get it and it will spin out either the YAML or it can spin out Jinja for you and you know, all that type of stuff to do your dashboards for you. Oh, you know what Jinja is. You know, but with the latest, uh, with the latest version of Home Assistant

that will be coming out, well, by the time Seth releases the show, it came out three days ago, um, they updated the latest dashboards and I think you will like them. Mmm. Some of the updates they added, um, to the latest area dashboards that automate think you will like them. Some of the updates they added to the latest area dashboards that automate a lot of dashboard creation. So, we didn't talk about the show, but we'll talk about it on the next show. And that pretty much sums up my projects.

I mean, TJ, it looks like you didn't do much this week. You were just slacking off, I see. Yeah, I basically did nothing. The only thing I'm working on is we're preparing to install a sunshade sail in the backyard. And so this weekend I had to get a four 14 foot long six by six is delivered. They're going to come install that on Thursday. I'm going to install the sunshade sail, but I paid somebody to dig the holes and put the post into the ground.

So I don't have to deal with that. So they're coming to do that Thursday. So that'd be nice. Then I can hang outside on the 4th of July this week and better this week. Because typically we cannot use our yard because it's just in full sun all day and it's miserable. There's no shade back there. And I've been collecting outdoor furniture from the from people's trash. We work in a lot of rich neighborhoods, and rich people are always getting rid of something. We've found a couple of pieces of furniture that were pretty nice.

Working on getting those, and it'll be nice to have a spot to actually sit in those. It is amazing what rich people sometimes throw out. They'll have a cut in the cushion, and they'll be like, I'll throw out this whole set, I don't like that cut. Whereas we're like, I'll just fix that cushion. Yeah. Yeah, like one of the things I got, it's an outdoor thing and it's got a little bit of mold on it,

but I'm gonna scrub it off there and clean it up because outdoor furniture is expensive if you're buying it during the season. You can always find off season sales, but even then, it's three or $400 for a basic like chair setup or something. So for something that's just going to live outside in the Ohio weather, because I don't have anywhere to keep these things in the off-season. They can be free things from the trash. So I'll post pictures of the sunshade sale install whenever I whenever it's done.

It's going to be a big one. It's a 24 by 16. So it's going to take like basically half of our yard, which will be nice. Nice. Yeah. I've looked at those. I don't know. I kind of need something in my backyard to kind of block some sun every now and then

because the sun sets on that side, it gets bright in the afternoon, but like it's unlivable to do anything on the back porch in the afternoon. So I've looked at those before and I see them popping up around the neighborhood. The look is cool. Let me know how it goes. Yeah, honestly, it's one of those things I could do it cheaper myself if I did everything myself, but altogether with the sunshade sale and the labor and the post and everything like that, it's like $1,000.

I looked in getting a gazebo or a pergola or something like that, but then it was $2,000 to $4,000 and I needed a permit with the city. Because this is not a structure, I guess, I don't know why it's not a structure probably because the posts don't touch each other or something. It is not considered a structure and it does not need a permit. So even better. I think it's about the same here.

Even though, I don't know, I feel like something like that, if it got loose at a hurricane, could do some damage. If you want to pay attention. Yeah. Yeah, these ones have to be buried. The posts have to be buried four foot deep here. The frost line is like 32. But by the time you add the height and everything like that,

so it'll give me 10 foot above the ground for the sunshade sail. I did buy a reinforced sunshade sail, so it's got like actually like a metal guide wire around it. And then instead of having like the fabric end points where it connects to the post or whatever, it's actually got metal as well. So hopefully it can stand a little bit of windstorm because I don't want to take it down But I'm obviously I have to take it down like the winter and stuff like that if I want to make last a long time so

Yeah, I'll figure that part out because it's huge. It's 24 by 16 foot so it's a quite nice to be nice. Can't wait to see it. Yeah. All right Well, is that all you're doing? It sounds like you guys are actually doing stuff I'm sure I'm attempting to moving lawn and like not successful. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's all I've got now. I'm sure I'll have some the next couple of weeks. And you know, if you mow your lawn more often, it gets it's pretty easy. You don't get into these situations. Yeah. Well, I technically was waiting when I

could use the lawnmower, the robot to go do it and force it to try and keep up. And it didn't because the grass wasn't grown back, right? And it would get stuck in the sand. Now the grass has grown back, but you know. Have you upgraded the wheels on it yet? I have not. I have not. You can get the spiky wheels.

Yeah, you should try and get those spiky wheels to see if they help you. I watch it get stuck out there on tall grass and dig itself into a hole and then try and get out. And like, I don't know if the spiky wheels are a good thing. The sand is so loose between, it's just not really packed in there and with the grass kind of in the condition that it's in. Especially on that hill, like it's, until it really starts growing and greening out and all the vegetation starts coming back, there's really nothing for it to like grab onto

with the wheel, so, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we'll figure it out. I've got the, what's nice about the Ego Lawn Mowers is they literally are designed to like fold up. I know my other one was, but like this one, I can fold it up and like lean it against the garage or, you know, up against the wall.

Like it tucks up out of the way like instantly. Like it's actually meant to instead of like just being like a side feature. Right am I gonna dump the gasoline and oil all over the ground if I do this? But yeah it just folds right up it makes it goes right into a nice little corner and I don't have to worry about it so I'm really loving that feature of it so yeah, electricity. I think that's gonna wrap everything up this week though. We do wanna give a big thank you to everyone listening to the show tonight, but we wanna give a special thank you to 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 the podcast here 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 pledge gets you an invite

over to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can gather each week. And I don't know, what are you guys talking about in there today? I've been so busy with the Loet website launch. I have not paid attention to very much. Ugly life.

We're just talking smack about you all the time. Dang it, why are you guys talking about me so much? Yeah. OK. Hey, we got to give a big shout out to a friend of the show, Robert Spivak. I'll put the link to his video podcast, video. I don't know what he does. Videos on YouTube.

Yeah. He's got the Apple TV, How to Hook up the Apple TV with TV OS 26 up to some real speakers, I think is what it looks like. So, that's pretty cool. Well, the AirPlay speakers, right? Because we talked about, last time we talked about being able to permanently group your Apple TV to an AirPlay speaker. So, if you wanted to use a wireless speaker instead of having to have a hardwired somewhere, you could. They made a nice little video on how to do that.

Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. Check it out. Robert's a nice guy. He has these really informative videos on YouTube as well. We'll link to that in our show notes here. I think my favorite post in the Slack channel was the magical fireplace. Oh yeah. That should be a pick of the week actually.

Yeah. Just to sum it up, they put a slab. Oh no, we can live, no, come on guys. We cannot go there. Jeez. We're gonna get delisted. Okay, there's a slab that they put behind a fireplace that looks like a specific body part, you know, and the person was asking what they should do.

The comments were the best. Like the first comment was like what they should do. The comments were the best. The first comment was like, I should call her. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everything reminds me of her. Everything reminds me. I don't know if these are AI or not, but I see this happen a lot.

So I assume it's a real issue. You would think that it wouldn't be. You would think that these slab companies would know, like, hey, we don't cut the grain right here and put it together in just this shape. Yeah. Let's say because it's going to make that shape every time. Yeah, right. This is what you asked for.

Everybody just doing this. Oh, man. Well, it was funny because the guy was like, I don't know if it's real again or not, but the comment you could walk through and find some of the comments He's like, okay, so I'm not losing my mind. This is everybody seeing the same thing. I'm seeing it It's like, oh, yeah, we're seeing it. How could you miss it? It's like 20 feet tall and your wall there so Anyway, yeah, we know we can't put we're not gonna put that in the show notes guys. Come on. It's not the pick of the week

To get not yet to get that yet. Yeah, you got to be a patron head over to the slack chat and you can look at questionable work from contractors I Don't know it could be the best thing you've ever had in your house. It could be the worst Who knows depends on the person true silicon wild material right there. I think all right, I She's gonna put a TV there too, right? Oh, man. You're gonna ruin it. You have to get a small TV.

Just in the upper corner. See, if you're not in the Slack channel, this is what you miss out on. That's right. And you can join the Slack channel for only one dollar a month. Exactly. Thanks for wrapping that up, DJ. Any plan to over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out here on the show.

But every pledge gets you an invite over there to this live chat, so please do that. If you get support financially, we totally understand you just appreciate a five star review or positive rating in the podcast, Happy Your Choice. That's going to wrap up this week on Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time.

Take care. [♪ Music playing. [♪ Music fading.] I mean, I'm even down. You give us $10 a month and we'll just put whatever image you want on, you know, on the show notes. I feel like we should sell that Will link any one image you want for $10 each Can be can be truly three weeks

It's like three weeks later and then like the podcast We're just extremely sorry for the episode that we released It can't be truly not safe or work. It would just be indirectly not safe for work. If it can get Gavin in trouble, then it's not good. We know Gavin gets away with everything. It's not a good- That's true. He does have the keys to the kingdom. What do you mean, I get away with everything?

We hear about all the stuff you do, Gavin. Yeah, come on, Gavin. I don't cause any trouble. We're all friends here. I don't cause any trouble. What do you mean, I get away with everything Bypassing firewalls and using brows illegal browsers that work. That's right. I upload personal files to Gbt, if it's your vibe coding with their their chat Gbt account, aren't you? No. No, I pay for my own

They give me copilot at work. Yeah, I can't use it outside of work. Yeah, that's lame. Yeah sucks