HomeTech.fm - Episode 543 - Samsung Ads Everywhere

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

On this week's show: Samsung wants ads everywhere, including the fridge, CEDIA number are out - or are they? Amazon announces a new fall hardware event, UniFi NAS options are getting interesting, Wyze introduces a new smart lock, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, September 19th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, podcast, all about home technology, home animation. And I guess, technically, it's iPhone Friday today, right? Technically. Not when you're listening to the show, but when we're talking about the show, yes. Technically tomorrow, though, because it's Thursday.

Yeah. Are you guys, uh, you guys getting a phone? I'm going, I'm going to the Apple store to pick up my first phone on release day. Ooh. Yeah. I got my watch, my phone. They'll be delivered tomorrow. I can wait, you know, I'm good. I got to work in the morning anyway, so, I mean. Yeah, my pickups on to like five or six o'clock a night, so. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, I'm going to pick up an AirPods pro three as well, and that's it. So on my AirPods, too, I got the translation thing. But it only does certain languages, right? It only does like five or six languages.

I couldn't get that thing to work. And, you know, I guess it can filter out the TV, like it knows when you're talking to a person. So I have to find somebody that speaks one of those languages, you know, so I can test out that feature. I don't know anyone because it only gave like Spanish, French, German, UK English, US English. But it's not going to like translate those. We can listen to Owen now. I don't know what Owen's saying this whole time. No, I was trying to find somebody on OnlyFance that I can talk to and test this out with.

Which is that, is it, is it Omeagle or whatever it is that you? Omega. Omega, yeah. Don't ask how I know. No, no Pottswell translation. No, no Jamaican, no, yeah. I thought there, you know, I had so many. I was, I was planning places to go like for a pedicure so I can listen in.

I'm not when they're talking about me. But no, it doesn't even translate. They're like, those people are safe. They're safe. Looks like I'm, I thought I was getting mine on the 25th, because I waited to the absolute last minute to order. And, um, no, the phone's coming tomorrow.

So I'm going to have a phone tomorrow with everybody else. Yeah. Yeah, that's what mine said originally. It was like the 25th or 26. And I was like, I'm using this old phone right now. I need to get my phone fast. So I'll just do store pickup. I did get my cases.

I got two cases because I wasn't sure of the, uh, I got the silicon case. because that's what I've been using. I've been using a version of it. And I usually start off with the Apple until it breaks and falls apart. And then I get mad and don't buy it again. But I figured there's not a new version of that.

But I got the fine woven one to see how that was. That's the one I got to, yeah. It's way better than the old one, that's for sure. The old one gave me chills for some reason. Yeah, you touch it and yeah, you get the goosebumps up to your arms. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what caused that exactly. But no, this one's not bad.

It's not a bad feel to it. A little slippery, but we'll see how that breaks in. My favorite case was still the leather case they used to have. Oh, those are so good. I like that one, but oh, well. I feel bad for all the people that ordered through our carriers up here, because I saw that people were getting emails from the carriers that all their orders are back ordered. And people are getting, saying, like, four weeks away before you get it.

Yeah, and stuff like that. So there are a lot of upset people about that. Apparently, like, Apple will, you know, take the phones for themselves first, and then they divvied up amongst the carriers what? they can so a lot of people are getting not getting it tomorrow yeah i'm still going caseless but i did decide it by a screen protector for this phone so yeah i bought i bought a that's a couple of them yeah i never i never use a screen protector but with the iphone 15 the only thing i got beat up on my phone without a case was the screen it was covered in scratches everything else on

the thing was flawless so yeah i'm hoping for something similar i'll get a screen protector this time to keep the screen in good condition uh but i got on the apple update program thing that they have so no matter what I have AppleCare with yeah either of you get the air no no I really thought about it I'm I need the camera yeah I like the camera but I also I don't know I went back and forth on it and I think it's going to be a nice phone there's people saying it's not going to be a nice phone I saw mkbhs he's like no no it's not going to be good and they have a battery pack I think give it away like it's going to die pretty quickly they they made only one battery pack that fits only one phone this year and just that one.

Like, you can't even fit on the other ones. It's so funny. Yeah. Well, I saw, I saw the iPhone Air Bend videos. They look impressed. It looks impressive. It holds up to, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was pretty impressed. We'll have to see. I don't know. I think I, I'm going to be happy with this one. But, man, a little tiny thin phone sounded pretty cool, too, so. Yeah, I had to go to the Apple store today to actually buy some ear tips for my AirPods. And I was hoping really just to play with the air while I was the, there, but they didn't have it on display just yet.

Oh, boo. It's like, come on, just put it out. We all know it exists. Let me touch it. Maybe I'll have time tomorrow to play with it. Let us know how that goes, DJ. I'll let you know in like four weeks when you hear the follow-up to this podcast. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I'll get it out one of these days. It's been busy. I've been busy. So, yeah. Let's see. We've got some CDO Expo numbers. They say there are 14,000 registrants for this, for this, for this show.

So 14,000. How many showed up? It's always a question, right? I don't know. They're trying to put a good face on it, it looks like. But going back and looking at the numbers, that's probably, so last year there were 15,200 registered and 12,239 verified show showed up. So I think it's probably, this is probably going to be one of the lower shows.

It's kind of crazy. See, this is what happens when we don't go to the show. It loses, probably 11,000 people there, I guess. Probably a smaller show. This is like half the size it used to be. It used to be over 20,000 that people would show up for. Of course, he did it in fun places like San Diego, which if it was in San Diego, I would go back for because that was beautiful.

And the weather was beautiful. Yeah, San Diego was really nice. And the food was great. And the people were good. I mean, not all of them, but some of them were good. And then, like, I don't know. I just had a great time in San Diego. So I'd definitely go back.

Well, I feel like back then there was probably a little more innovation. Nowadays, the CD is kind of just, it's stale. It's not a ton going on. Yeah, but I go back to San Diego. Well, yeah. Maybe that'll help a spur innovation, you know? Exactly. I don't know, it seems like one of those things that you go to now,

if you're just going to meet up with the manufacturers and maybe your sales reps and stuff like that, not necessarily a show you go to see revolutionary technology. It's like catch up with the industry. Yeah, I really feel like a lot of the good shows are like smaller, very focused, like hyper-focused shows. Like, one of the best shows I went to in the last couple years, has been Lightapalooza, which is, like, highly focused on lighting.

Now, there's more than that there, like, Josh A.I. is there, and there's other things there, but, like, there's probably eight or 900 people at this show, and it's super, super focused, and it's just a lot of fun, because it's, like, what they're talking about and who is there, it just kind of, like, focuses everything. And then the CDA, it's, like, everybody's there that can be there, a lot less than used to be, but it's just a huge show. and like you you you you you can get lost like just wandering through looking at different things and and not really have like a focused time when you're there but yeah i don't know i i i've definitely liked like the regional shows those those types of shows i think those are going to get more popular as time goes on definitely cheaper to get to yeah for sure all right well um that's that cedia sounds fun 14000 maybe maybe 11000 we'll see i think i think strategy will probably come up with some that he usually goes and looks at the numbers from the public company reports.

He usually goes and looks at the official numbers there and reports some of them. Well, you know what show has 10 times the amount of attendees as CDS. Sounds like a big show. What's that? CES. CES, 2026. Maybe we'll have more than that. We'll find out.

Maybe. Maybe it will have. In 2025, supposedly had over 142,000 attendees. Wow. That's a lot of people. Guess what will be going next year? CEDA? No, CES.

I get strong. You were close. Close, close. And the same letters, you know? Yeah. Yeah, no, that sounds fun. I should get in on that. You should.

I was waiting for you to say something. I already got a hotel booked, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds like a lot of fun. I don't have flights yet, but flights are expensive. I don't know why flights to Vegas are so expensive right now. It's like $3 or $400. And a lot of times they're not even

Non-stop Some have layovers for like eight hours And like random places like Los Angeles or something Eight hours ago That's weird Yeah it's like okay Cheaper than cheaper from Toronto for once I know what the heck

So I'm waiting for flights to come down a little But hopefully that happens Or not I don't know Maybe I won't go Possibly Who knows possibly We'll find a ticket Definitely possibly

I'm sure I can put it's Nicole to drive How long of a drive is not for you Oh probably forever I don't know I'm not going to do that. That's way too long. Probably forever. Just go with the stopover. I don't even want to drive to Florida.

Let's see. How far is Vegas from here? It is a lot of miles. It's only 2,100 miles. So it would take 29 hours of straight driving. I mean, it's not bad. You could do it. Yeah, yeah.

Just start on Friday. We'll get there eventually. And then you got to leave like halfway through the show to get back. Oh, man. That sounds awful. So I did head over to this, I did over to strategy. He has an interesting story here about his experience at Cedia. He says to his eyes, he said, to my eyes, the floor looked pretty busy,

maybe not shoulder to shoulders in years past, but relatively busy. He said, as my schedule progressed, moving me around the venue, including the middle of the hall and even the back of the center, it appeared that though the traffic was more of an ebb and flow situation. The front of the hall tended to be more consistent. So, yeah, that's, yeah, a little back area then, there's never get all the buzz. Because I'll, like, yeah, crash around all the big booths are up front.

So what are you going to do? Yeah, interesting. I'll have to read this later. He's usually fun, he's usually a fun read over there. All right, we do have a couple of home tech headlines tonight. So what do you say we get started? Let's do it. All right, big news from Smolite.

The Smulhub is out, right? SM light. All right, all right. All right, SM Lite. Friends over at SMLite has a new SM Hub Pro that integrates five major smart home platforms, ZWave, Zigby, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and it has infrared.

And if you want to, it's got 5GLT or a 4GLT on it. Yeah, it's a hub. It supports 500 plus brands, including Phillips Hughes, Sonos, and ChaoMe. Gavin, you're a perfect, you love the SM light stuff. Are you going to switch off Home Assistant and get this? or is this something you integrate with Home Citizen?

This is something you integrate, but this is, like, I think this is more of an enterprise level type thing. I can't even find the cost of it right now. It has SD card. It has LEDs on it. It is pretty much a hub, but it also, like,

it hosts a lot of the software, like it would host the MQTT server on it directly, you know, and stuff like that. So it hosts a lot of that locally, which is pretty good too. But I think this would be overkill for me, but maybe it's not. Let's see the prices.

It's the prices. But no, it looks nice. It basically takes all your antennas and like disconnects it from like your home assess install allows you to do it POE and have it over the network. I don't think it has matter though. It's not a very good towel holder. I'll get them that.

Yeah, it looks more like a router. It does have thread. router. Does it have thread? Okay. That's thread. So that's good. But I also heard that thread doesn't like working like it. You could run into issues if you don't have it directly plugged in like over peel over the network type things. Because if you have a network kickup, it can cause devices to go offline. So it's not really the best way of doing thread or matter. But this looks interesting. And you know, you would say, why do you have so many antennas? Well, my homeless distance set up. I, have ZGB, ZWave, thread, I have the SDR antenna, I have Bluetooth, so I have five antennas right there on my home assistant install, right, just to get all these other devices working nicely. Yeah. Yeah, this thing has, I think we're, I mean, it's got all the antennas, we'll talk about that, whatever. It's got GPIO, it's got IJC output on it. It's got a buzzer. If you wanted to start buzzing for whatever reason, it's got a buzzer on there. It's got RJ45E3

with optional POE plus, or POE attachment on it, three and a half millimeter audio jack. So if the buzzer's not enough, you can hook it up to a speaker system or a horn or something. I don't know. I have an AI horn over here. Maybe I can hook it up to that. Probably not.

It's got 4GLTE, which I thought was kind of funny. It's an optional add-on. Bluetooth 5.2. I mean, who has Bluetooth? They do. IR receiver, IR transmitter. Which is interesting, an IR receiver. So you can point a remote at this and control things

with any remote. Exactly. Exactly. SD card slot. Don't know why you need it, but you can have it. And then all sorts of USB ports on this thing that say upstream and downstream.

And I don't know what any of that means, but there they are. And it's got buttons on it. This thing has buttons. So whenever we get this in, whenever we get the price of this, we need to put in the price per button database because it has like three buttons.

So, yeah, it does have matter on it. I just figured that out. It's got everything. Like what doesn't it have? No, C-Wave. It's got C-Wave. Yeah. Yeah, it's got it, man, they got it in everything.

He's got them, got it covered. It also has Node Red built, hosted right on it so that you can actually have it do automations. If you didn't want to hook it up to home assistant, it's got wire guard so you can throw this in a whole different house and it will VPN back to your home assistant. It's got anything you can think of at this point. Absolutely crazy. This company just keeps coming out with different antennas. They have way too many options at this point. I have no idea.

I know. I agree. any of them are like I guess I think we were talking about it in the hub this week or the last week yeah it was like just looking at their website I'm like there's like 20,000 antennas and they all do the same thing just get the one with the more antennas that's right yeah this has got this has got addressable rgb LEDs so like if you wanted to have it as a piece of artwork on your wall not in an industrial setting Gavin but like if you just wanted to put it up there with your Phillips Hugh and uh what's all the other stuff like you you could do that too and and have it

probably play, you could probably have it play music and move its lights to the music. I bet, I bet it'll do that too. It's an interesting device. Like I said, it looks like an old router, those old, um, what is the popular? It's just, like, spider router is what it looks like. Yeah, it's just, ah, it's got everything. I'm interested to see the cost of it when it gets released. It has a, it has an undisclosed button.

There's also a reset button, so I think we have to count that as a fourth button. So whatever, whatever the cost is, divided by four, that'll be on, whatever. have to put that in the price for button database, which I'm not maintaining very well, clearly. So I'll have to get it back to that one of these days. Okay, I found it on, this is Ali Express. I found a link on Ali Express.

Is it the actual price? Because it's saying 108 Canadian on Ali Express. What is that in US dollars? Well, everything else on their website is $99. So I can't imagine, are they going to, it's like four products in one. Are they going to sell that for $99 too? Because then why would you buy their $90? This can be, right?

Because on smartlight. It's saying $45. Wow. That seems too cheap for this. Yeah, this says pro in it. They may know their antennas. They may not know their pricing. So we'll get back to you on this.

Yeah. We'll come back and check it out and get it added in the database. But yeah, we'll put a little follow up in there. Once we know that what's the smug will cost. We'll put it on there. So SM light, check them out. They do have some really cool products.

And I know Gavin's been working with them for a while. so all good reviews on that end. All right, let's move on here. Amazon has sent out some invitations for an annual fall hardware event where we're going to see these new candles, some fire devices, some echo devices,

all that stuff. So I guess we have to keep an eye on this one too. Maybe it's a new product that comes along. They're not, I don't know, like these events have got to be boring now. Remember that Amazon was cool and they would do like, hey, we made a clock with it. I'm at a microwave with Alexa.

And it costs $38. Yeah. We spend a billion dollars and nobody bought this. But we're going to keep, nope, we're not going to do that anymore. And now they don't make any fun stuff anymore. They just make the... You can only make so many fire phones, you know? And they make a lot of the same thing in different sizes. Well, I mean, at this point, they really have no competition.

If you're looking at like the smart speaker space, right? Their competition before was Google, which is basically not existing at this point. They've not released any new speakers in quite a while. There's some rumors they might. but it's like two speakers, so whatever. And then their other option is, uh, is, uh, is, uh, Siri with the, the home pods, but, uh, not really a ton of options either. So I don't know, Alexis kind of by itself at this point. What would you like them to like release?

Microwave or some tissue or something? Wait, never mind. Honestly, I don't know, like voice control isn't for me at this point. So I can't really say that anything would make it appeal to me. Yeah. Um, but, I don't know. I think if I was able to use it better with my son-o speakers or something,

I think I would, like, have a higher chance of using it. But I don't really have any desire to go out and buy Alexa speakers. The funniest thing on this page is actually, since you mentioned Google, like at the bottom of this page of the story is on, there's another story from Jennifer Patton, Paterson, Dewey. It says, Google Nest may become Google Home again. So I guess there's a Google Home speaker. which may be bringing back the name of Google Home.

Yeah, they saw it in the Google event they had the other day. Yeah. A little speaker sitting there and it caught a lot of people's attention and that's where that's coming from. I mean, I just want Alexa Plus at this point. I just want to try Alexa Plus. Like, you know, it feels like it's been forever. Not for you.

Not for you. Yeah, I know. It says the Google Home speaker, which is not a Google Nest speaker, it's Google Home speaker, is expected to arrive on October 1st. So maybe we'll see that. That's a few weeks away, or that was two days ago, if you're listening to this.

Yeah, yeah. Just pretend we're in a time vacuum right now. Please, please do. All right. All right, some new product from Unified, because a week can't go by without us talking about freaking new product from ubiquity. Geez. They launched a bunch of new storage solutions, which are kind of cool.

And there's one, a little, little baby one now, that has, It's a P-O-E-powered NAS drive, right? Two hard drive slots. I mean, that's crazy. Or a four-hard drive one, too. Yeah. So that kind of thing, like, would be good for, you know, back, like, to me, that's, like, a perfect machine for doing, like, what is the Apple thing that it does? Time capsule.

Time machine, yeah. Yeah. Time machine, that's what it was. Be perfect for doing that. Because you have it sitting on the desk and sitting right there. I find these products very interesting because they open up a whole new range of, you know, target users. Because you don't have to have a rack for these kind of products. They can just sit on your desk or on a shelf and, you know, they work.

It's interesting. It's nice to see them doing this. It's a UNAS4. Yeah, especially with the rack mount option they have now. They basically have a one U. rack amount option that looks similar to their UNVR so that's nice as well because it was only what

2U before there was a yeah it was 2U oh so the 1 U now okay I thought it was only there was like four different models today I'm confused yeah we got the the UNAS 2 and the UNS 4 which is the POE powered you know two or four bay and then

they have a UNAS Pro 4 and 8 which is you know 4 and 8 drives the 4 though is only 1 U which is very nice Yeah, that is kind of nice. I don't know. So, I mean, they just have to do Docker now, right? Like, what are we waiting on?

Then I'm off this Unray train. Dockers are. You see the thing, you see the thing why I wouldn't move off on rate is because, you know, when you get into Docker and hosting VMs and stuff like that, you rely on the power of the machine a lot, the memory and stuff like that. When you get into these other, like, Unify, you wouldn't be able to easily expand the power, or probably easily expand memory or something like that, right? So that's kind of why Unraid will have its spot still.

Yeah. No, I'm just kidding on that one. But like this would be a good spot for storage. I mean, what this is really going to go in after. Honestly, it is like sonology. Yes. CUNAP. Yep.

There's in one other big one I can't think of right now. But those types of products where actually I have, I have two of them. And I just looked over in one of the dry bays, like, the little doors, like, open on the Synology over there. I don't know why that's like that. And it should not be like that. And the price of these units were actually really good, right? Yeah, fairly cheap, especially compared to the Synology. Like, I think if you wanted a Synology rack-mounted NAS before, I mean, you were spent at least like $2,000.

Yeah. You can get this for $500 for a rack-mount. It's pretty nice. And it's not the same thing as Synology. The Synology is going to do way more. But, you know, it's getting there. It's a new product line. Yeah.

I mean, I don't, the Synology could do way more. I mean, it could do way more just because they run Docker, right? Right. But, and Synology does have a bunch of applications they built on top of their products for, like, backup and sync, file sync, that are honestly quite nice. But if you're just looking for raw storage, I mean, this is, this is not bad. Not a bad price. Not a bright price to get started, I guess.

Hmm. Do I go buy one? Should I go buy one? Go buy one. I mean, it'll be more useful than your AI horn. So maybe you can turn that into a NAS. Maybe I could. It sits on my desk where a NAS should live, I guess.

All right. Well, let's move on here. We'll put a link to all the new products they advertised on there. I was on their site, and I came across, like, little accessories that they have on there now that I'm like, I don't remember them releasing these, but they're there. You've got all sorts of little fun little fiber-de-copper accessories, and they had like a 5G, 5 gig USB port for like hardware port to plug into your computer so you get 5 gig network on your computer it's crazy anyway um moving on here we've got uh ultra lock we've got some lock talk stories here all right um and my my buttons are not working on my mouse there uh ultra lock has

added android tapped unlock to its apple home key smart lock so um this is not a very pretty lock it does not but that's okay i mean it's not the ugliest lock though right i mean there's definitely uglier locks it's it's on the closer side to that yeah yeah and the ultraloc bolt nfc is a smart lock it's got a free upgrade that's going to add near field communication uh to for a tap to unlock with android phones compatible android it also supports apple's homekey or currently does uh but if you uh if you're like tj and uh you know need to switch away from whatever phone vendor you want for a week or two, then you just will perfect lock for you.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things that I think should be like basic. You know, your lock should not only work with one phone company. You should work with both phone companies. Right now there's only two, so it's not that hard to support both of them with your product. And especially if it was all NFC stuff.

I don't know, like did Android have, like, I guess they did have like a little key thing. Oh, yeah. Because Apple's been added that for a while, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you know, Android usually has things before Apple, but Apple does a better job at, you know, making people use it, so.

Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. I never heard of the Android tap. I always heard of, like, people using the Android thing to, like, tap a thing that they install, like a sticker or something. Yeah, that was popular with the nerds back in the day.

Like, ooh, I could tap this NFC tag when I get in my car and automatically turns on my hotspot and does a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. I never saw an Android tap to unlock lock until this one. Yeah. Maybe there's a couple of them out there, but I don't know.

Uh, anyway, let's, let's move on. We got another, this, this one, I think, just takes the cake because this, wise. All right, are you, are you a fan of, uh, a palm vein technology? Are you a fan of the Tesla Cybertruck? Boy, do we have a lock for you? We have, Wise is coming out with a touchless lock that basically reads your palm. Oh, it looks like the Tesla cyber truck mounted to your front door.

It does. It does. We got a link Dave Zatz dug this one up from somewhere. Who knows where he gets this from? And then, yeah, it's just a keypad.

I guess it has the lock underneath that little door there for backup. But interesting. I mean, this looks better than the ultra lock one we just looked at. Yeah, I'll give you that.

I'll give you that. I really don't understand the whole like palm scanning thing, though. This seems like such a weird thing to me. Is this like a stop gap until we get somewhere else. And I guess maybe Gavin and I probably only the ones to have this problem.

But in the wintertime, like fingerprints and stuff don't really work that well outside. I wonder if palm prints work better. You have gloves on. Well, I don't wear gloves because, you know,

we're northerners. We need gloves for it. But it's just like, it's like one of those things your fingerprint, like, in the wintertime, it's always like messed up anyway because the gloves or you're in snow

or salt, whatever it is. So maybe it's, maybe the palm thing. is more reliable. Says recognition in 0.3 seconds. That's pretty quick. I think you'll have to get one of these.

Maybe. Well, he also notes that why is his whole, that's hard to say, why is his whole business bubble is looking a bit shaky as the company publicly amended a $255,000

tariff bill on a $167 worth of goods? That's not good. That's not a good thing at all. The Walk is Broke episode on South Park is pretty good on talking about terrorists. Yeah. And the,

what are the little things? La boo-boos? Oh my God. Yeah, those. Rub-boos, yeah. I saw one of those on a client's house this week. I was hoping they would not attack me. Oh, we've got them all around the house here.

Oh, they're a real thing? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They'll just like that, too. The song, the song they play, like, on their little, when they're selling them or whatever. Yeah, that, that was crazy. Even the packaging they got correctly, correctly done.

why these things look like they want to just jump out and kill you that's i'm pretty sure that yeah i'm pretty sure that it's case i did you not watch the episode yeah i told you you know ever since i was like i'm just not a fan of dolls because when i was a kid i sat there and watched a movie called dolls oh yeah it was a pretty long time ago and it really scarred me for life i'll have to add that to the list we're we're in the middle of our run-up through october watching all the scary movies that we possibly can and just going through the back catalog we're on Halloween. No, Friday the 13th will be part four soon. We watched part three, which I didn't realize was one of the crappy 3D movies of the 80s. So it was Friday the 13th, part 3 and 3D. And almost in the first, like, few scenes, they have those cheap tricks where they have like a stick that they're pointing in your face. It's like, oh, come on. The whole movie was like that. It was so bad. You can't watch those old movies

and get the same experience you had when you were like 14 watching them. No, no, no. No, no. They're like, did they actually write a script for this? No, I don't think they did. It was shot very well. The special effects were really good for the time period.

So good job. All right, let's see. Moving on here. All right, so this is a fun one. Samsung has integrated ads into its smart refrigerators. in the U.S. as part of its latest update. The Family Hub refrigerators will display advertisements on the screen when not in use for other tasks.

This is the most ridiculous thing ever. So you've bought this refrigerator. It's got your TV screen on it now that, you know, you saw there, and you may have stuff on it. It may tell you your grocery list or something. But when you're not using it, it's going to show you an ad in your kitchen. I mean, why not?

I need to see ads when I go to get, milk out of my fridge. This is like one of those things that like was obvious, right? I mean, like, it's got a display. It's going to get ads at some point, and especially given Samsung. I mean, if there's anybody that I would, a bet would put just, uh, ads on your, uh, fridges, it would be LG and Samsung. I'm not a fan of this.

You know, I, no, I hate when the vendors, like, you buy a product and you expect it to be a certain way. And then all of a sudden they come and they, they start dumping ads on you. And you're like, I didn't buy it for these. Like, if I had known this product would have had ads on it, I probably would not have bought it in the first place. But it didn't, and now they've changed it on you. And usually they introduce things like ads to subsidize the cost of the product.

Are the price of these fridge is going to go down now because the ads? No, there's tariffs. You pay the tariffs. That's right. Yeah. This upset me with my LGTV, because when I bought my LGTV, there were no ads on it. I may not expect ads, but now they started sneaking in ads on things like the screen saver. When your screensaver is going, all of a sudden, an ad pops up, you know?

And it's like, I didn't pay for that. I didn't want, I can't turn it. Like, if I turn it off, I actually lose features on my TV, which I'm not happy about. That's why you just don't connect your TV to the internet. Your fridge, too, I guess. Well, you're for fridge. If I defeats the whole purpose of the display. But that's the whole thing is like, if you don't connect the TV to the internet, you

lose features on the TV. Features like Airplay. So yeah, you could get Apple TV, put it in HMI 1 and run everything off there, but they actually take away features from you until you accept everything. And one of those everythings is the ads, and I'm not a fan of this.

But all the vendors are going this way. It seems like all of them you can buy, no matter what TV you got, they'll eventually do this. Can't win. Don't get me started. Just don't buy a smart fridge with the display. I feel like that's the answer, right? What do you need to display on your fridge for?

I'm just trying to find a fridge without an ice maker that breaks on me, you know? Wait, you're not buying a Samsung, then. Yeah, exactly. You want liquid all over your floor? Buy Samsung. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, vote with your wallet here.

I mean, that's really all there is to it. Nobody should be buying these. And it's kind of, kind of wild that they are going to be doing this to, quote, strengthen the value of owning a Samsung smart fridge. Jeez. This actually makes you not recommend the fridge to people. Yeah, someone came to me and said, oh, I'm going to get in this fridge, smart fridge and has a screen on it. I go, if you're willing, you're going to get ads on it, too, you know, do not buy.

Yeah, big old, do not buy. Don't buy it. I mean, like, don't buy a Samsung TV for kind of for the same reason, or an LG TV, evidently. Don't buy those either, so. And my mom has an old school fridge in her basement. It's probably older than me. And that thing still works perfectly fine. Yeah.

My Samsung broke down and had issues in the. first three years and the ice machine the ice box keeps freezing out but just turned it off now yeah they they don't they don't they don't defrost correctly or whatever yeah yeah yeah all right well we'll put a link to this in the show notes and uh all the other links and topics discussed night we found over there too over at hometech dot fm slash 544 all right nothing in the mailback this week but we do have a pick of the week and courtesy of our our traveling tj You've been all over and you took a picture of what I thought was a one of those jerky dehydrator oven things. Nope, nope.

It's, uh, it looks like you're at a bar and they made one little shelf with very tight, close, confined shelves for their direct TV boxes. That's right. And I don't want to, I don't get too technical here, but these are spectrum cable boxes. Oh, so they're even hotter. Yeah, that's right. They're built to fail automatically. Yeah, I was in. I was in Tiffin, Ohio, which is in between, like, here and Toledo.

It's like Sandusky area for work this week. And this was at the restaurant slash bar next to our hotel called Carmi's Barbecue and Grill. So thanks for the picture there, Carmi's. I like the remote shelf. Yeah. They actually, somebody actually went and built the shelving unit for it. And they've actually prepared for expansion by adding two extra shelves. Well, actually, the top one is where they keep.

their menus that. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. It serves multiple purposes. That's right. Yeah. Yep. Now, there's notes on here, too. So I guess that's what TVs it's feeding. I would assume so, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And they sit there having problems with their Wi-Fi, too. And I was like, well, it's in a similar equipment box, you know? Jeez. All right, we'll put a, we'll put a, I mean, this is, this is hilarious. I can only imagine how hot that is to walk by? That's fine. The spectrum gives them to you for free, so... Yes, it doesn't matter. That's what you pay the high monthly fee for,

so you can kill these boxes, and I have to pay for it. Exactly. All right. Well, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show, or beautiful picks of the week, to share with us, give us a shout at our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can head on over to hometech.fm

slash feedback and fill out the online form. We got project updates, and it doesn't look like anybody's done anything. I haven't done anything. It's back to school. TJ, have you done anything? No, I've got no projects. I've just been, I've been traveling.

I got back from Maine and then I went to Tiffin. I don't think I have any more travel plan, though. So I'll be doing some house projects and stuff. No projects for me right now. I'll have a project over the weekend, probably. I've got to finish off that dock camera. My ubiquity stuff is coming in tomorrow. So along with the Apple phones and everything.

So I'll have an Apple phone. I can go out to the dock. I can plug in the stupid switch with the right size power supply, and everything will work. You can do it. I can do it, yeah. Gavin, did you do anything? No, it's kind of been a slow time.

I'm kind of waiting on a few products to get released. So they're supposed to be coming third quarter and when they, or fourth quarter. So when they get released, I'm pretty sure I'll be working on them. You're going to get that unified dual lens camera, aren't you? Is that what you're waiting on? I love that one, but TJ won't come up here and run the POE lines for me. I've been busy, Gavin, and you don't want to pay my high fees. He's driving all over Ohio.

I'm also looking at the Rio Link 180. What do they call it, the elite? Real Link Elite. Floodlight one. I'm looking at that one because the camera in my front garage is, it's gone now. I need to replace it. So I'm kind of waiting on that one.

I hope they don't release it when it's cold outside, so I don't have to fight the cold. I mean, it's the same camera, though, right? It's very similar to the Unify. But that one, that one's a floodlight one, right? Where the Unify kind of like sticks on the wall. Yeah. Yeah.

But the Unify one looks awesome. It would be such a perfect for my side of my house and get the whole side of the house. Yeah. And the rail link one is pretty nice. So I think having the panorama camera does make a big difference, depending on what you have. But the corner of houses and everything like that, they're great. I have two of them.

I'm just afraid they might not. Did you ever get them working in the Unify through the AI port or anything like that? Nah, I've not tried to. I think the back one I can, but I don't know if I was able to ever get the railing fliplight too. Yeah, that's my only fear. I need something that works with the port. Yeah, I'd never try to adjust the resolution or anything on either camera,

so it could be as simple as that. All right, well, maybe next week we'll have more projects to share with everybody, project updates. I just haven't had time to do very much. I did do some soldering stuff, and man, I just, I'm going to have to buy a microscopes thing, microscope like zoom in things because i i can't see small stuff anymore because i'm old old now yeah i'm sad same way yeah yeah but this stuff was small anyway

electronics have also gotten smaller to my defense like when i was younger the electronics i mean i was i was smaller as well but like the electronics were not as tiny as they are now and i'm trying to solder some uh some stuff onto like some old gaming system motherboards to get HTML out on them. It's kind of interesting projects out there. Yeah, you have to like solder onto the pins that are on the chips and it's very small. Like you have to solder these ribbon cables onto it. And I'm like, I wonder if I'm this delicate to be doing this work. But it's getting too small for me to look at each individual with a pin on the chip and make sure that I get the solder touching the ribbon cable. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a mess. So one of the most used apps on my

phone right now is the magnifier. The magnify glass. Yeah. I use it to check the sodders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It works. The funny part is, is I see people pull out their camera to do the similar thing. And I'm always like, hey, you know, there's a magnifier app that's so much better than using the camera. It works great. Yeah. You know, and it's like a game changer for them, you know? I just hope I never get to the point where my font is like 200% on my phone because, you know, those guys to read one message have to scroll like three times. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I see people do that all the time. And I'm still lucky enough. I don't have the, like, I'm still using like the smallest font. Like I crank it all the way down to get all the stuff on the, on the, I went to the eye doctor this week and they were like, okay, do you need

readers? I'm like, nope, nope, I'm still using the small font. And, and, and, and, and she asked me for something. I'm like, oh, it's on my phone, but I'll never be able to read it because you just dilated my eye. So, yeah. it's like forget it you're not going to get this information now it's funny but yeah yeah i'm still still in the small font train here until as as long as i can be but yeah i had a i had a boss that had it like cranked all the way up and it was still too small for him like you could read his phone from across the room it's like man that's that's something anyway uh eyes when they when they come out like a little pill that you can take and it corrects your vision and all like

it stuff that'd be great no no we'll we'll give you late we'll shoot lasers that at it. Yeah. That's what we'll do. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up the show this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to Hometech.com slash support. Learn how you can support the show for as little as dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets your big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets an invite over to our private Slack Chat, the Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can go in there and

see all sorts of stuff. Like, you could have seen these pictures that TJ posted. That's right. Before they, they were this week, but it would have been before they were picks of the week. You can see them four weeks before they're posted on the show. Exactly, exactly. Anyway, if you can't support the show financially, totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating, the podcast, after your choice. That's going to wrap up the show this week.

Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time, take care. Hey, this is the Home Tech podcast for Friday, September 19th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. Stop it. From Pickering, Ontario. I'm Gavin Campbell. Wait, that means I have to be me.

That's not fun. Yeah. You didn't choose fast enough. Doesn't it? Sucks being you. want to be me. Nobody else wants to be me either. It still says Ryan Reynoldsburg, Ohio.

I can't believe that. How long that's been there? Wow. Never even noticed. I don't even look at it.