HomeTech.fm - Episode 546 - The Shed Talk Podcast

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

On this week's show: TJ might get a shed, Amazon’s Device VP is out, UniFi announces UPS products and tariff prices, Sonos teams up with Peloton, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, October 10th 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, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and did I get my Halloween decorations up? No, I did not. But I intend to, one of these days. It's a good thing I didn't because it's windy out there right now. I've gotten blown over. So that's the excuse I'm using.

Did you start it yet? Started thinking about it? I did not even pull them out of the shed. So I thought about it today a couple of times this week because it was nice outside. But then today, really windy. And if I put those decorations up, they would have gotten blown over, which wouldn't have been good. You know, Seth, all I hear are excuses. I know.

They say, it's the thought that counts. Exactly. And I've been thinking about it. That's all it counts. I've been looking at getting some additional LED lights off or outside to hook stuff up. So I don't. I'm kind of tinkering with that idea still too. So maybe I'll order some stuff in.

So hold on a second. You think by ordering stuff, it will encourage you to install stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. I want to be up there. You're not even installing the stuff you already have. So just buy some more stuff to not.

Well, I don't have. I don't have this stuff. And I just want to go on record, right? When you hear this podcast, it's probably like, who knows when it says, but... Could be next month? Right now when we're recording, it's 22 days away from Halloween. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So, I mean, it's basically three weeks away, I'm just saying. I'll get it out there. It's just blow a lot of stuff. You just got to plug it in and it airs up. I want to get one of those... I'm the door's close. Okay. I want to get one of those wacky, inflatable flaming arm tube men.

Oh, yeah. That'd be sweet. The 20-foot ones that they have. Oh, God. Yeah, it's just huge, like, waving in the air and stuff. And you can buy, like, festive ones. You can, you can change out the colors on them. Yeah, they have different ones.

They have a red, white and blue one, Uncle Sam one for, for the fourth. So you just stick it out there. Any holiday, you just roll that thing on out there and just turn it on. And you know what else you could do with them? And put it on your AC. Right? And every time your AC kicks it, they're dead. 20 foot of dancer above it, yeah.

That would, that'd be interesting. Just on the side of the house, a giant. dancer um yeah i i i'm thinking about getting one of those they're on amazon oh my god set i was just looking on facebook marketplace because i was like obviously i need one of these always wanted one somebody's selling one locally uh for ninety dollars i don't i don't know if that's a good price but well that's a pretty good price it's like half price i think i'm gonna go buy it there you go you've talked me into it that was very easy is it a 10 foot or 20 foot it's 20 foot oh yeah get that one i mean that's amazing everybody else is getting these

silly like blow up like 20 foot tall skeletons and mummies and all kinds of stuff i'm gonna have a flailing tube man wacky inflatable flating hard tube man this one says it's a dance tube man i don't think they wanted to use the other words you got to have them all in there for the SEO yeah they don't they don't they my area sucks when it comes to the facebook marketplace and they don't have anything fun but also they don't have any uh flailing arm tube men here yeah we do have a a artist in the area that makes these things called tube dudes and he's like pretty prolific in getting the tube dude things out there. So there's a tube dude mailbox on here, but that's as close as it gets. It's just a welder that makes art stuff. I don't know. Or I can buy the costume.

Somebody's, uh, tube band costume for 45. Yeah. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. I've sent it, I've sent it to the, uh, the CFO to see if we should buy it. So yeah, I, well, I just go ahead and assume that she says yes because there's no reason why why you shouldn't have this. Too bad they don't have them on my marketplace here. Well, I mean, you're not going to install this year anyway. So you might as well go to just buy it for next year. Next year, just get ready. All right, all right. Well, speaking of next year, CES is around the corner. TJ, do you have your flight yet? No. Okay. I do not. I was looking again today. The prices have not gone down. So I'm still holding on. And I still need about like, I think I have like 10,000 pending points for, for, uh,

rewards points. Uh, another, like, I need to get like another 5,000. So I'm still off a little bit on my miles because I don't want to pay out of pocket for my flights. Makes sense. Make sense. Yeah. Are you confirmed yet, Seth? Have you, uh, have you decided if you're going? Oh, probably not. No. I should, uh, I should probably look into that flights thing we were talking about the other day. I mean, realistically, you're not going to do anything for Halloween. Just start doing CEO stuff now. So you have enough time, right? Yeah. All right.

Do you buy the wife anything for Christmas? Maybe you should sort of that. Here's my ticket, Stod, Las Vegas for Christmas. See ya. The CFO said no to the dance two men, so. Boo.

So that just means you'll have to ask for forgiveness after you buy it. Yeah, it's just going to have to show up at the house to get that at El Camino. Just message her back now and say, oops, too late. That says it's a good deal. Tell her that.

So, Seth, are you coming to see you, Seth? Yeah. Are you, Seth? I'm waiting to see what Google says on the flights here, and some points and stuff. Oh, it says, book now. We expect prices to raise $25 in the next five days. Huh.

There you go. Ah. You can get better buy it now. I'm not on Google. I'm on kayak. Maybe I should go to Google and see what they say. Yeah, use Google. Google flights.

So I got my flight. We have our accommodation. I'm ready. Yeah, we were talking about your flight. You got the cheapest flight of all of this. Yeah, I mean, somehow you're getting the good deal. Yeah, because they're trying to encourage us to come down, you know, they want us there. That's just because they want to deport you.

Get arrested. Yeah, it gets their numbers up. That's right. God. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like an American thing right now. It does kind of sound like something they do. I bought a one-way ticket because I know I can get sent back.

Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. I hear they're even offering to give you some money, too. So you'll probably play your cards right and actually make out on the trip. And probably bigger seats on that plane, too. Well, I don't know if you get seats, but. Hmm, there's actually a pretty good price right here for round trip price. What is it?

It's 374. Oh, my gosh. That's a good deal. Like, why aren't you paying for it now? Yeah. From the local airport, too, at that. So, like, yeah, not even, I can. I don't know.

You guys had a local airport. Well, there's, there's a, yeah, we have a pretty sizable airfield here. But if I drive to Tampa, which is 45 minutes away, plus a toll, plus parking, I can save $100. But I lose all that by driving 45 minutes away in Vancouver for parking. Well, yeah. And the Uber is about $40 to $80, depending on whatever the Uber time is. Yeah, and Tampa traffic is like Orlando traffic, too.

It's not fun. No, no. It's not a peaceful ride, I guess, is the best way to say. So, yeah, that's not a bad price. I have to keep an eye on that one. I don't see where it says to what to do. Oh, they're currently typical. Anyway, I'll have to figure that out and see if I'm going. Yeah. Okay. I did ask my wife if she wanted to go and she said no.

Well, even more reason to tell. Gavin and I will be there. No matter what, if you're listening to this podcast and you're going to CES, you should hit us up. We'll be there. Gavin and I will be. Just to be clear. Seth will not. Gavin, definitely. T.J., not so much yet. You don't have your flight yet. No, no. I'm going to be there. I booked the home i booked the Airbnb so Gavin's gonna get in no matter what so I'll be there I don't know how I'm getting into CES but I'll be in the city you know oh yeah we gotta figure that hmm do we have like a billion like podcast streams is that what we need I think we can just yeah I think you just make stuff up is what people do I don't think you should say that on the show what

beep edit here you don't listen to CES doesn't listen to our show this is the one episode they're going to listen to you. What are these people do? It's a title of the show. CES people listen to this show. Yeah, CES does not listen. We're going to get arrested. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. The CES cops are going to come. They're going to lock us in the back of the casino. You're never good now. Maybe they'll feel so bad. They just, you know, send us some free tickets. Yeah, pity party there. Yeah.

It'd be like one of those pig butchering scams where we have to just call people and get them to go to Vegas. Yeah. It's like, you're not leaving this hotel until you get 10 people to. to come here. Well, I don't think that's a good idea because you can barely get one to commit to. All right. All right. Well, that's fun. I'll have to, I'll leave that tab open this week. So for the whole week. You're just going to leave a tab up for the whole week. Book market and visit it later. I know. You guys, you guys don't use tabs? I don't leave them open for the whole week. I'll just leave this tab here. The whole week. I'll just leave this tab here. The whole week. I mean, you can always get back to it. It's still there. You just leave it open. Seth, your brain is a mess. I can't imagine what your computer looks like. I don't. It's just a bunch of tabs. It's all you need. You see that smiley face in Google quite often, don't you? Is it a smiley face? Yeah, on the, on the phone, if you have Google Chrome on your phone and you use it.

If you open over 100 tabs, it'll just have a smiley face where the tab count is. Oh, no, I haven't seen that. I don't think it does that on desktop. No, I use Safari most of the time, and it just breaks because it's Safari. I think you're that person that Gavin has to go help when they're like, my computer is very slow. Everything's working.

It doesn't work, you know? And you go there and there's like a billion tabs open. You're like, close these. I can't. No, I need to close them. They're fine. They're fine, TJ. They're not causing any issue.

No, they solved that problem years ago. If I, you know, if I ever see Seth on his computer, I was just going to close his problem. He just close the lid. If he complains about his computer running slow, just like, no. I had to read, yeah, it was running slow earlier. I'm not sure what it was, but I had to reboot because there were some audio issues going on. Yeah, well, I think mostly I updated too soon.

We're still, we're still in the early days of this glass bubble version of, what, MacOS, and I think they still have some weird audio issues with the software I use, so. And you know what, I find on my phone, now that the apps are all, updating and adding their versions of this, what I call it, glass, whatever. The Vista theme, right? The apps aren't looking even worse. They're ruining apps now.

Like, they're getting more cluttered and things are moving or hard to see. I'm not liking this. I think that's what interesting is, like, all the code people, we've had these, like, fancy IDs for a long time, and now everything's gone back to, like, a command prompt. Like, it's a command prompt that runs a chat. Like, every, every, and it's weird.

Like, all the commands are the same across the board. Like, whatever you're using, the commands are all, like the shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts, they've all standardized on them. But, you don't usually use a code thing anymore. It's kind of wild. See, I still use a command prompt a lot because I came from the days of DOS. Like, it wasn't even MS DOS at that time. It was DOS.

Yeah. I think Microsoft bought it at one point, and I remember upgrading to that. So I was used to the command prompt. I still like it, right? But people like clicks. It's faster in the command prompt. Exactly. That's why I do a lot of YAMO, my automation.

I can work with it faster. But I'll never convince you guys, I know. No, not NAML. You won't. Sorry. Definitely not. You like command prompts, but you hate YAML. I see where the line is here.

I see. Yeah, not going to happen. It would be funny if I decided to do a project with nothing but YAML in it for us. That would be fun. I'm currently redesigning the price per button database so we're going to have a nice side around that and I think make it make it to something pretty

I know it's totally worth my time doing Oh 100% Yeah Just keep ignoring those Halloween decoration Yeah I mean exactly Instead of finish a project He starts another one I was gonna say now that it's getting colder

It's not too bad to be outside But you're in Florida where It's still hot Happens so Because now it's like Here it's been getting like It's like 40s to 70s. And so it's been nice.

You wear a little jacket in the morning. It's, you know, you have your coffee. What's 40s to 70s in, uh, uh, uh, it's not like 10 or something? You guys got a switch over, you know, like, come to the metrics side. Oh, the government shut down. We can do it. No one would know. That's true.

Do what? Convert. I don't want to, I don't want to know Celsius. That's silly. Well, convert everything. Start working in centimeters, Celsius, you know? No. It's 6.7C is what TJ is. Now, it's 9.30 at night here, and it is 79 degrees.

Which is 26, 26 degrees for you. Oh, my God, that's hot. With high humidity. It was 27 degrees on the weekend, but now it's going to like three degrees at night here. 50 degrees with a frost advisory. Yep. My pepper plants are going to be dying soon. Yeah, the thin, the, the thin,

the thin-blooded here in this day don't last very long with that, so yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, we've got a couple of stories, not much of a show tonight, but we've got a couple of stories to talk about. Some things we found interesting,

some things, well, we didn't, but they're on the show anyway, because there's not much going on. I went to CEE Pro to see if there's anything in the pro space. No, the pro space is not doing anything. They have, they're like,

we did Cedia, that was our big push. There was two things there. Two things, yeah, those two things. Oh, well. For some speakers that are getting launched, I've seen some speaker updates, some new finishes on speakers, not much else. I mean, the only thing that I saw that was like, you know, it was something, it wasn't good, or it wasn't great, but it was something was the Josh AI, the like the AI lighting thing. That was literally the only news I saw.

Yeah, yeah. And that was kind of like meh, but, you know, at least that was something. Yeah, I don't think there's much going on. I saw that, I saw that the control floor is rolling back their mandatory subscription thing. to use the app, which was a mistake with... Oh, well, that's smart. Yeah. These all sound like stories we should be talking about.

If it was written up anywhere, I would, but nobody writes about it. So, yeah. Yeah, there's... Oh, okay. Sometime around the time when they wanted to get bought, they came up with this scheme to basically charge people for their, the Control 4 app, for... If you wanted to use your...

Any device, mobile device, iPad, whatever, even locally, you had had to pay... I don't remember what it was. There's some subscription thing. I don't think it was much. I think it was like $60 or $100 a year or something. Yeah, it wasn't much. It wasn't like a terrible price at least. Yeah.

But locally, like there's really, you know, locally. Come on. They did a bunch of other things at the kind of the same time. But this one was really one that was hurting people and making everybody scratch their heads a little bit. But they just want some RMR. And they got, they put out these numbers saying we're going to have billions of dollars because of this in like three weeks.

And they were like, who's going to buy us now? and ADA bought them and now ADI had to deal with it and they're like yeah we we probably shouldn't charge people this. It's kind of what I got out of it because all the leadership has gone on to bigger and better things doing something else that was making those decisions. So yeah. Interesting, interesting thing to see fly by because now they're back to kind of being how everybody else in the industry is, except maybe Savant. I think Savant makes you pay for stuff. But I'm not. Savant's like a whole other world now. like battery bags and all kinds of crazy stuff was um i don't remember was the control four thing

was that uh like retroactive so like all the existing systems had to deal with that or it was like new installs um to a point uh yes i guess so it was retroactive in the fact that like if you wanted to upgrade to the new operating system i think you had to change something to do that um i could be wrong on that it was very confusing because they the rollout was was kind of awful but if you had a legacy account you you you could still keep using that uh and in the payment the the terms that they had for that yeah and they also did some weird things too where it's like a remote dealer can never help you anymore because they had to physically like be on site to do some stuff yeah that's still hurting people i think from what i've seen they they have like a yeah that's a terrible idea

they basically took oversee and built it into everything and said okay now that now that you're uh where snap one and control force all one like now now if you want to go into the site you have to bring, even to like upgrade or change out of the controller, you had to bring like an oversee module thing. Yeah, the pro hub. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then get that installed and up and go in. And I don't know. It was a big debacle.

I don't know if that's been fixed. I think they've made it a little bit nicer or figured out some, I would call it, like procedures or something to make it a little bit easier on people who run into those kind of situations. But for the most part, I haven't heard too much complaining about it from like regular installs like it's just kind of one of those things you got to do you got to right commission the system through overseen now so yeah that was always annoying about i don't mind the oversee platform i think it could be better but it could also be worse uh like that big dog

platform um just calling that one out um but it that was the annoying thing is that if you had like an oversee device that was from another dealer you had to have the oversee hub in order to add it to your account um and the oversee hub like depending on your dealer status like, it could be like two to $400. And it's just like, you don't need it other than to take over these oversee devices. Right. Even if you call like tech support or customer service, you're like, hey, look, I'm a legit dealer. Here's my, you know, dealer information.

I just need this on my account. They're like, nope, can't help you. You have to have this physical device. Yeah. And I'm like, all right, well, that's, that's silly. Like, I understand that you don't want somebody just come in like factory reset it and take it over. But if I call in as like a legitimate dealer, I should be able to take over another dealer equipment. Right.

You know, it's different, I guess, if it's like a, you know, like a Crestron program or like a Control 4 program, that's a little different. But this is a like a search protector or something. That's fine. Yeah, weird. It is that whole. All kinds of weird stuff going on. That whole, that whole mindset. I mean, I understand how some dealers get into that where they're like, I installed this product and if you ever want me to work on it again, you can't have anybody else look at it sideways or I'm never helping you. I don't know. It's just kind of an abusive thing. It kind of like locks the customer into like only dealing one dealer in kind of a weird way. I don't know. I hope that that mindset that kind of goes away because a customer should be able to like move to whoever they want to. You know, there's a reason that's happening. It has nothing to do with the equipment, nothing to do with the manufacturer.

But it's always been a weird thing. Like should just be able to transfer and move. If you need help with the system, anybody should be able to. Gavin should be able to walk in the door and help you, I think. Right. Why me? Well, because you're Gavin as a service. Yeah.

Oh, okay. For cost. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Of course. Yeah, of course. Cost for sure. All right.

Well, you know, I'm having a great sale, though. Just one ticket to CDia. Oh, you're going to CDia next year. All right. Yeah, that will be, you know, my January deal will be one flight to Cedia. Cedia. And you get a few hours of my time. I'm just going to have a table there at Cedia, just Gavin sitting there the whole time.

Windows is better than Mac convince me otherwise. That'll be a hot debate. Okay, well, we do have a couple of home tech outlines despite the lack of industry news we could chat about. I thought we were in the news section already. No, we haven't done it.

Let's get started. Let's jump in these home tech headlines. All right, let's do it. All right, well, days after Amazon announced an array of new products, the guy in charge... just decided to, quote, retire. Interesting.

Yeah, yeah. So shortly announced, Amazon had, what, the Echo products, Echo Pop, speaker, the new Echo Show. What was the Amazon Alexa Plus? Things all come into that. You got a bunch of new ring doorbells. Nope.

The vice president of device and software services announced just a few days later that he would leave Amazon after over 13 years at the company. And there were people that were kind of shocked that that happened all of a sudden. So very strange that he, he's taken off and um this is this is the division that is cost what was on track to cost

amazon 10 billion dollars a year or some crazy amount like that like i don't know he had to be in a hot seat at some point but who knows like how this what this means i don't know like does the Alexa plus not work is that is that the problem i i have not been hearing good things about the Alexa plus to be honest um so i don't have it yet but i know by the end of this month i will because that's when they're delivering the devices so it better be ready but um they're probably just doing some restructuring and stuff um maybe he is maybe he is just like you know what let me get out of here before the whole world comes crashing down yeah we will see yeah well we will see we will see i'm not sure what that means but i don't know um oh another week another ubiquity

product release we have here yeah all the time every week ubiquity announced a new line of unenruptible power supplies or UPS systems designed to enhance network reliability and I don't know, it's pretty cool. There's like a UPS that is a rack mount, two U rack mount and if you turn it sideways, there's

another version turn sideways that's you know, that's the standard tower thing that people use. Pricing wasn't bad, what was it, 200 bucks or 300 bucks? I don't remember. 159 for the desktop unit. The desktop unit is 1,000 watts, so that's pretty good.

thousand volt amp things or whatever I don't know what are they called 1,000 watts support 1,000 watts okay yeah okay I'm sorry I'm messing this all up and you'll have to edit that out scratch that it's uh the desktop one is 1,000 volt amps which is 600 watts

so I mean that's pretty good for 159 or you can get the 2U rack mount one which is 1440 volt amps or 1,000 watts for 279 for that one yeah 279 that's not bad honestly if somebody who buys a lot of UPS This is actually pretty in line with battery backup. You have one running your dryer right now.

Not my dryer, but a lot of other things. Yeah, I mean, it's good to see them actually enter this space. It's something I've wanted to see for a while. I want controllable outlets on this, though. And I'm assuming that they're going to go like the overseer or whoever else route where you have to have the separate PDU from the UPS, which, you know, makes sense. but it would be nice to be able to just plug my stuff into the battery backup and then reboot it and that way it's just everything.

It's my PDU and my battery backup all. And maybe they will. This is a pretty cheap price. I don't expect it to have the PDU build in because the PDU by itself is like $2.99. They also teased some of their enterprise series that will be coming out later, pro slash enterprise series of these that are going to have pure sineway filtering because you need that. And then lithium ion battery systems in there, which could be. be interesting to see what they do with that.

You get a little bit longer a battery than the old lead ones. And they can make smaller units, right, with that. There's a company, I can't remember the name there. I think they're out of like Houston that makes little UPSs that you can put behind your TV that will run your TV while the power goes out. Yeah, I've seen that company. They also have where, I think it's in wall too, right, where you can put behind your fridge or something to keep your fridge powered and stuff like that too.

I've seen that one. That one actually looks really cool. I don't know if that's the same company or not, but they were showing that off like CES or something last year. Yeah. But like to give you an example on pricing, I think that one was like $3,000 to $4,000. Right, right.

So I mean, batteries get very expensive, very quick. Right. Yeah, the lithium ones will definitely be more expensive. Yeah. But Unify has been coming out with a lot of things that people have been asking for. It's not necessarily, you know, like it's mainly why it's exciting is because it integrates what your Unify set up. right nicely and you get like you know a single pane of glass or you know if you're a pro installer

that does it for a living you know it's nice that you can manage everything through the single interface so i think a lot of people are excited about the uPS and everything else coming out um i also feel like yeah i think i said last time when i said they're they're also releasing devices that you know if you have a compact lab or a really small office where you just want some devices in the corner and you don't need a rack they're they're giving you devices that just sit on a little desk too. So, you know, your, your client can easily just go and unplug a wire and then call you and say something's not working.

I, I will be in the market soon for a UPS. I don't know, I have a couple of them, but at least over here on my desk, I have this little, it's one of those little APC ones that just, I have it hanging off the edge of the desk. I was looking at a tower when it'd be perfect to replace it because I think it's roughly the same price as the APC. But the problem is, is that I don't think there's a way to hang this thing that I can see on here. doesn't look like, like the ABC has little...

I think it's just a desktop one, so... Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah, maybe next time. They'll crow it to the wall. Yeah, just glue it, it's just a hot glue gun or something. It should work. Yeah, I expect them to come out with more versions of this because the capacities on these ones are good,

but they're relatively low, especially because they keep introducing more and more commercial stuff. Right. And so I'm interested to see, I don't need one, because I just got a brand new UPS, but I'm interested to see a 3,000. thousand volt amp at some point because that would be nice to integrate into ubiquity.

Yeah. And they still have the old not the old, but like the old power backup stuff that were on there. They have like these specialized ports that has like, it's a 950 watt DC power supply that can be used in the commercial side of things.

They still have those mission critical products. So my question about the lithium ion batteries, do you guys know anything about the lithium ion batteries, the UPSs? Are they, like pretty universal or is it definitely like you have to buy a battery pack from the UPS company? Oh, that's a good point. Because that's my only thing is when I'm looking for UPS, like unless I'm looking for like a like just

like a cheap UPS, I can like attach to somebody's like computer or something, like I tend to buy a UPS where I can replace the batteries myself without buying like one of those battery packs, right? And so traditionally you would just buy like a UPS that takes a 12 volt 7 amp or 12 volt 5 amp batteries. and you can buy those at the store for 20, 30, maybe $40 for somewhere crazy. But those are relatively easy to replace yourself. Lithium ion sounds good, but I feel like that would just be like a proprietary battery package. Because you locked in. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, and that would be a big downside because I'm like you where I've replaced the batteries in my UPSs a couple times. And just being able to buy something from another retailer and get a good deal on it. And they're good batteries still. It saved me a lot of money. But if you're going to be locked in that you have to buy it from Unify or whatever, their batteries, they're probably going to mark them up big time.

And that's something we should check before jumping on their UPS. Yeah, and it's one of those things that, like, they don't even have it at stock at some point because Uviquity never has things out of stock. And so, you know, what if I need a new battery? So that's the only thing I was worried about. And this is the thing that UPS companies have been doing anyway for, over a decade at this point where they make, they make like just proprietary battery packs.

And so this is nothing new at all. But I've seen a lot of people say that lithium ion would be good. And it sounds good, but I don't know. It's smaller, lighter. Yeah, so inside of the lithium battery pack, there's generally a little small controller computer that gets installed in with the pack of batteries. And that reports back like the temperature of each cell and the state of each cell. and that kind of thing over

over this little signal wire. So generally you'll see like a charging, a few different wires that hook up to it. So I suppose if they made that connector or that thing proprietary, then yes, the answer is yes. But for the most part, they all kind of charge the same way

as long as they have that, you know, whatever little computer that's in there speaks the same language as whatever's hooking up to it. Like it wouldn't be difficult for somebody to reverse engineer that and make ubiquity fake,

Vubiquity lithium batteries or something for maybe slightly less, but let's be honest, like ubiquity is probably going to be pretty low on the price with that kind of thing if you had to buy a replacement. Just, they're never being in stock, like you're saying. Well, yeah, they'll never be in stock and then shipping will kill you, so. Well, we'll have to find out. Speaking of shipping and the tariffs will kill you now too, right? Because you pay for tariffs. You pay. You pay. Not me. If you go to Ubikity site, there's a couple products in there. People are shocked to find that you get to pay for a tariff serve charge. I think this is on

what, the G6 cameras that are in there. If you buy one of those, you'll notice a little thing at the bottom says tariff surcharge. And that's you paying for taxes. So there you go. Yeah, it's like, it's just cameras right now, but it's like, it's like 95% of the cameras. I think it was really. Cameras last I knew that we're not part of it. This is new because I order literally the same cameras like a month ago. And then I ordered them a couple weeks ago and there was the tariff on them.

It was only about $30 per camera on a $400 camera, so it's not the end of the world. But obviously, it's an extra $30 per camera that I have to pay for. And then this specific moment, I kind of messed up on the order because I was supposed to order it the week before. And so I had to eat the tariff cost

because that was my mess up. I should have ordered it. So that's just small businesses getting screwed. That's good. Yeah, that sucks. I see a lot of people mad about this. They're posting in the Unified Forum when they notice this.

charge on their bills, a lot of people seem to be unhappy about it, but we knew it was coming. And I think I told you guys this before, but I actually prefer that they added it as a visible extra cost because when the tariff thing gets sorted out, at least they could take that off. Whenever somebody raises a price on something, it's very rarely you see them bring it back down because of whatever was causing the price, you know, gas prices. Who knows? They'll say people are buying it at this price anyway. Let's just leave it here. yeah yeah well i can tell you from from my experience because we've gone through this twice now in the manufacturer i'm working at now we tried to do the you know the ad on price it was it wasn't

like a very calculated out on price because honestly they had no idea what the tariffs are going to be you know fire shooting from the hip it was just all yeah getting changed out from underneath them and basically when the boat shows up and there's some packaging on it and you got to pay that stuff to get you know off the boat into your warehouse you got to pay it um so they They just did like a blanket 6% across all the entire product line. And only recently did they, they actually just changed all the pricing and then took that line item off. But the thing was is like some products, it was like the tariff on it would have been like 9 or 10%. Some of it was like 2%.

So it just depended on what products you were buying as to what the tariff had on there. So they just tried to figure out a way to even it out and shoot from the hip. and get that 6%. But then it was like, this doesn't make any sense. So we ended up just having to raise all the prices. So all the prices are raised for everyone. Yeah, I agree with you, Gavin.

I like to see it broken down separately because it's one of those things that, like, it may go at some point. One of the arguments I've heard about actually having it as a separate line item is that at some point, it may be deemed illegal for the tariffs to be a thing. And at that point, you can potentially get a refund for the tariffs. And I'm sure that will never happen. man, but that would also

just cause a nightmare in general. But that makes sense, especially with a lot of commercial clients that you'd want to see that broken down in the event of that happening. Yeah, I can tell you it was an absolute nightmare and probably a few hundred thousand dollars each time

you had to adjust that one little line item because of the amount of meetings from top to bottom that that has to, all the developers time. Like, I was shocked as to how, like, at the end of that you see this one little thing that says 8619 on this thing. I can look at that now

and say with confidence that was probably $150,000 worth of work to do. Like, it's an insane amount if you add up everybody's salaries and time in the meeting and everything, I guarantee you that it easily topped $200,000.

It's insane. It's absolutely insane how much that one little lie down right there costs. And it's not like, it's like they have to do it. They want to get their product off the boat. So, all right. Let's move on. Fun stuff, fun stuff.

We've got Overlook feature in Pelotons. I know DJ used to always be looking at Peloton. So there's an overlook feature that I think we've all been waiting for for Pelotan. In there, in the new series, there's compatibility with Sonal speakers. And it allows users to get that high-quality audio out of their Peloton bicycles. TJ, back when you thought Peloton was going to out of business or whatever, I don't forget. Every week we had a Peloton story show up, I'm like, why are we talking about Peloton? But I think you thought they were going out of business any day.

No, they're still in business, and now what they're going to do, just what everybody's been asking for from both Peloton and Sonos, is they're putting Sonos speakers in the Peloton. There you go. Yeah, so I don't know if they're actually providing the speakers or the software. It sounds like they're actually providing the speakers. But yeah, I think it's like if you buy a car and it says it's got Harmon Card on audio. Right, it's just the software, yeah.

It's the soft. Well, it's like they help. Well, it's the tuning or whatever. They helped out. You know, yeah, yeah, wink, wink, nudge. Yeah, this is like such a silly thing. I don't know, whatever. I saw this pop up and I was like, well,

we haven't talked about Sonos in a couple months, so we probably had this one to there, you know. I guess if you're going to buy like a $3,000 treadmill, you wanted to have good audio, right? So I would have said two years ago, Sonos was the right option. Peloton was probably had this in development for quite a while. When they ran out of money after the COVID thing, yeah.

I think we did. did see in the hub somebody was coming i think it was jimmy was commenting that it would have been a good thing for them to have done this a while back because he had one of these and he always wished that he could hook up his uh his speakers to it but because the like they didn't have a good blue through stack and they didn't have like i don't know audio outputs or something on there you couldn't get good good audio to come out of this thing it would just probably sounded pretty bad so yeah it's probably you know honestly probably a good upgrade for the three thousand dollar treadmill And the one thing about it is you won't be able to send music to this through the Sonos app.

That's the thing about these things is there's going to be so many restrictions around it that it's like, why even bother? You know, they could have just added something like airplay or whatever, you know, so you could send the sound to your existing Sonos speakers if you wanted, right? That's another option too, but they probably won't allow that. Yeah, I mean, what am I supposed to do with my treadmill after I stop using it? I need to use it for something, turn it into a party speaker. Exactly. Where's the music coming from, my treadmill? You'd add a sublifer to this treadmill.

Soon enough, you'll be like, why do they have surrounds out on this treadmill? Good luck they were Peloton and Sonos for that matter. I mean, that's what everybody's going to ask for, I think. So branded Sonos things that don't actually hook up to Sonos. Whatever. Moving on, we got one more story here. And this is funny. This is what I've been talking about with my BMW car that we have in the driveway

that has been given us problems over the home assistant. There's now an official home assistant alert saying, yeah, they pretty much killed the integration. So, um, womp, I think it's stupid. Now there's a, there's a piece of junk car in the driveway. I can say that because it's not mine. And also, um, it doesn't integrate. If you want to make better cars, make them integrate.

Come on, this is stupid. I'm not affected that much, but you know what people are using this for that really makes a lot of sense is they were using it to monitor their battery usage and track all their battery stuff and charge their battery. Like there were people that were like insistent on charging their battery to 80% and turning it off or something like that. So like those people are really upset because you can't get in there. And if it's a BMW electric car, I guess it was reporting all that through the thing.

BMW, their statement says that they're, you know, worried about their customers' data or whatever getting out of this API, which is kind of odd because when you log in, it's your data with your login. which means it's complete BS. They do have an integration, like an official integration, official API now, but it sounds like it's extremely limited

and it doesn't do all the fun stuff. So that is probably going to end the saga of me dealing with the BNW app. And at least the Subaru win, they haven't figured out that we're using it this way and have it reverse engineered. So I still have my Subaru gas tank on my little stream deck here. But the BMW one says error.

Yeah, this is a common thing for car manufacturers. No car manufacturers want their stuff tied into home assistant. So dumb. It's probably because the nerds keep contact in the car company. It's like, hey, this isn't working with home assistant. Like, what is home system? I just think BMW is trying to find ways

to monetize any little thing. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if they open it up and then charge you a couple dollars a month for access, right? Because I remember there was a point they were going to start charging for heated seats or whatever, like a subscription service. I don't know where that went.

I think it stayed around in some location. So they were basically putting the hardware in, but you had to unlock it with a subscription. So, like, if you wanted to eat seats in your car, you could pay a little bit extra. Instead of, like, paying a one-time thing, it would come as a paid option inside of a thing. Otherwise, you didn't have to pay for it.

But it was in your car. I don't know. I think that's kind of silly. Car bill of materials remains the same. The car should cost the same. But whatever. It was their choice. I think they did roll that back

eventually and do something different. But this seems dumb. I mean, like, if they have an official thing, but it doesn't let you, like, turn on the air conditioner, which is, like, one of the key things you want to have done is to, you know, turn your car on before you leave. So it cools down here in Florida,

or warms up, I guess. I guess where you guys are, you probably want it to warm up and turn, you know, the heated seats on, right? But, no, they're not letting you do that anymore. And by the way, Gavin, you are, already paying for this connected drive service like you're already paying for it oh you are yeah it's a paid thing like you can drive the car without it oh what's it called the bmw connected drive is what it is

oh well wait for a connected drive max yeah you have a connected drive plus yeah oh we don't have it on here but uh speaking of of of random things like that uh disney's killing off hulu i don't think we talked about that so hulu is is not going to be around anymore it's Disney absorbed them so now Disney Plus Max, Hulu is all, you know, whatever, Disney Plus. So we'll put that story in there. If that interests you, at what? Yeah, that's weird. I don't like that because I watch Hulu, but I don't watch Disney.

Now you watch Disney. So now my Disney stuff is going to be my Hulu stuff. Oh, it's already there. Yeah, that's how it works for me. I mean, I don't pay for Hulu, but like there's Hulu content inside the Disney thing, the Disney app, right? So are there, are the Hulu shows, I guess they're going to go over to Disney. I just picked up a new Hulu show called, uh,

Chad Powers I've been watching, right? And it's a pretty good, it's about American football. But it gives me the Ted Lasso kind of vibe feel to it, right? So I hope they keep this show and it doesn't get canceled. Interesting. No, it's not getting canceled. It's just like the branding will go away, right? Hulu.

Okay. Yeah, I think what Hulu is like 20-something years old, that, you know, Disney was bound to take them at some point and just take that brand and absorb it. So the shows and everything, I mean, they're already kind of already in the Disney. It's kind of weird because Disney, you think of like, oh, it's Mickey Mouse and Kid shows. And then you go into it and it's like, it's got Hulu content in it, which is also not included. Yeah, kid shows. Yeah. So it's, it's kind of weird in that respect, but, you know, they're a content company. They're going to put their stuff out there.

Well, if they can simplify things and less confusion, I'm all for it too, right? I mean, have you seen their app? No. No, no, I don't subscribe to any of it anyway. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. You just download those articles. All right. All the links and topics we discussed tonight, including that story, will be found over in our show notes at HomeTech.fm. slash 546. All right, nothing to know back this week. I don't know. Who put this on the thing? This is a, this pick of the week is a video. This could be AI generated. We were talking about that for the show, but someone has some really cool Halloween decorations. and this is like a house fire and they have basically, I don't know, projected images of fires in all the windows and then they've got a smoke machine

rigged up probably under their front porch and it's just pumping out smoke. So look at this actually looks like the house is on fire. Like this is amazing. I could see why people would be calling the fire department because if I saw this, I would 100%. A hundred percent. This would totally get

shut down in the neighborhood. This would cause way too many problems. I mean this is good. but it's a little crazy to have in a neighborhood, I think. But I think this is like a bed and breakfast or something. It is literally all over the news websites. So I do think it's real. Oh, all right. Well, you never know what to believe anymore these days.

I saw Stephen Hawking on a half pipe. Well, I mean, that's definitely not real. Well, he did win the hell in the cell, right? Yeah, he was jumping off the top. I saw it. Must be real. Rolling off the top, by the way. Well, how do you get up there?

I don't know. It's like a lift or something. Why, I just hit the turbo button. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, if you want to check those out there on, what, Reddit AI craziness, I don't know. It's AI videos, I believe, is the subreddit. Yeah. If you want to go just see how basically the world will not exist in video format anymore.

Like, you just won't be able to believe your eyes. Go to that and just see where they are today. That's going to get worse every single month from now. Anyway, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show, pick the weeks, or, I don't know, interesting AI videos you can share with us like the one we have tonight. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or you can head it over to home tech.com slash feedback and fill out the online forum. All right, all right. Well, we do have some home assistant updates before projects. Zbox integration. The Zoos has that, what, Zwave Zeebox that they use to integrate their products with. They've got some pretty tight integrations with home assistant. That's got. and then connected, connected. They're friends over there, and Nate over there,

and connected has joined the works with homeless system program. So that'll bring some of their devices, um, you know, under the, under that, that wing of that particular program, which is, which is nice. That's big. The connected one, I think is huge because they,

it's like the alarm panel thing. Yep, and they have the garage door opener thing and I like that. And the Z box one, I was kind of, you know, up in the air about this because it allows you to bridge your Z wave devices into homicistice on, but I mean, maybe if you don't have a Z wave antenna, but if you have a Z wave antenna, well,

you can just add them directly to home assistant and cut out the middleman. But then I guess it will let you easily transfer over, not transfer over, but integrate all your routines on the Z box into home system as well. So there must be somebody out there that needs this.

If you already got it set up, why do that? I mean, honestly, like why, like if it already sets up and works. And there could be settings and features inside the Z-box that home assistant doesn't have that works very well. No. Could be. Could be. No. Whole assistant does everything. Just open up your YAML. There's a lot of people that run a home system with smart things, for example. Exactly. This is definitely a thing that people do a lot of. And it's really just because, like, they don't want to move everything over at the moment, right? They just

want to keep doing everything else. It's easier enough just to tie it in with an integration. Everything just works the same way. So this is a very, very common thing. I don't know how common, I guess, but it is something I see posted about quite a bit. I run a bridge to Control 4 for all my lighting, most all in my lighting. I run a bridge, what, to HomeKit for some devices.

You don't, like, it's completely common to run bridge devices and this type of thing into Home Assistant. So I, I, no wonder, none of your stuff works. I mean, geez, it works fine. Your Control 4 stuff. You can't add that directly to Home Assistant. assistant though. Right. Yeah, Lutron's the same way. I can't add Lutron. That's what I'm saying. You need those bridges in that situation. That's fine, you know. But in this case, it's Z wave device. Right? You could add them directly a home assistant and cut out the middleman because once you start adding all these extra hubs, it's another point of failure to me. Right. Then, you know, one day. Yeah, but you still have the same amount of hubs technically though. I mean, because you still have a Z wave hub and stuff. You got a toilet paper rule thing. I was with you, Gavin. Now I'm against you. I'm sorry. I think, I like it this way because I can have the product that I want.

It doesn't have to be Z wave. It can be like a product that I want to have in my house and use its native software to set up or whatever. And it works fine, standalone. Like home assistant can be updating, the lighting still works. You know, control four updates. Maybe the lighting doesn't work. I don't know. But, you know, it works fine.

Like, same thing with Lutron. Like, I would set everything out on Lutron and then use the bridge and bring it into HomeKit or HomeKit or HomeKit or Home Assistant. Right. And that makes sense. That totally makes sense to me. It's a different ecosystem like that you have to bridge in. You don't have a choice. Yeah. It could be that. And it could just be that there's features and things that people like in those Z boxes. Or like you said, they already have a 100 devices set up on the Z box. And they, they, why do that? Why do you? Why put yourself through that pain? Why put yourself through that pain? It works. It already works. You don't have to worry about it. There's a Z wave JS update and it takes everything out again. I mean, how many times is that going to happen before you're going to get me. to trust this again, huh? Never. Yeah.

I don't know. All right. So we got those two stories for Home Assistant. TJ, um, TJ actually did some work. I, I did work this week.

I'm just going to plug my two things that I actually did. I didn't do my, we know the Halloween decorations didn't happen. Uh, but I did edit three podcast shows, not realizing that I had,

uh, not put out one of them and I edited last week's show, not realizing that two weeks were gone. So sorry about that. Everybody, you should have like three, shows in your feed right now

of us of us talking about home home technology stuff so that's out what's funny is you always do this right before Kenny goes on like a long trip and the Slack channel I think you've done this like two or three times now and Kenny's like oh perfect I'm going on a long trip tomorrow load it up

the best things come those await yeah so yeah and then we got a new website up that if you were interested in me going to see us What is it? Should I don't even remember now? Should Seth go to CES? I think is the website. You can go vote. And yeah, yeah, I got a nice little website there and just you can click right there and see. Oh, man, it didn't work on my phone. So this is funny. On my phone, it just let me hit the button. Oh, well, yeah, definitely use, it shouldn't, but definitely use the desktop experience because there's a little squirly button that you got to chase down and see if you can click. But there is one button that you can click and it will give you a. A little alert there that tells you something. So anyway, that was, it was fun to make.

Didn't do, didn't do Halloween decorations. We got this site. You know, I spent way too much time on this site. You'll see why I was trying to find a ways around it and try and break it. Way too much time. I'm still on it right now. It's, it's not really possible to hit that yes button, Kevin, unless you, I don't know, disable all JavaScript or something.

I'm going to leave this tab open for the week Just do that It's a good game you can come back to later And get a high score on or something You should put a score in there Or you know Your closest I want to have a more project

All right hold on Or do it a lot Or the record for the closest You've gotten to it It's not a bad idea Actually It has avoided you 500 times It's just put a counter on there somewhere

the high score is or have it trash talk you come on stuff up the game see Gavin all these features are going to be implemented probably before this show is edited so everybody's going to be like yeah I went to that site

and it's funny and stuff and all this stuff you're talking about screw the Christmas screw the Halloween lights so we got a site to work on exactly all right well I'll get on that so DJ when you've been up to

oh man I've actually done a couple things I've been doing some more drainage stuff. I still haven't fixed the sidewall outside my den that I fixed up. But I noticed that one of my downspouts was kind of broken a little bit. And I've kind of not liked this area anyway. So I decided to dig it all up and I put some better drainage in. I got to fill it in with rocks. This is also the area of my robot lawnmower sits in.

And so like this little cutout that's next to the asphalt here, that is actually where my robot lawnmower sits. So I'm just going to put some stone down there because I always have to weed whack it to get rid of all the tall grasses and stuff around it. Yeah, because they don't mow next to their little bait. It's so annoying. It's like it's just like just add as part of the thing. Clean up your home. So it's starting to become cold here.

So I'm trying to wrap up the side of the den. I got to put the siding back on. I've never done siding before. So I'm not really looking forward to that. But I'll figure it out, I guess. Oh, see, I thought you were like that was part of this project. Is that the siding was you were going to have to do that or you did that. Yeah, that was the spring when I, when we were, we were working on the day last year, last winter, and then I noticed a leak in there.

And so I had to, like, rebuild the wall. I still have not put the wall back together, obviously. It's just sitting there, but you probably need some siding, yeah. Yeah, probably before wintertime. So I'm going to keep working on that, but drainage. I'm always working on drainage for some reason. I don't know why. Get the water away.

Yeah. And we have, like, very hard clay soil, so the water literally has nowhere to go. I'm looking at your soil there in the asphalt that you had to chip into. And I'm not, like, this is not a project I would want to do at all. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and I don't have it. Last year, or this year I had to pay somebody to come, like, haul away all the dirt because, like, I can't even use in, like, the garden beds.

Like, right? Like, I would just put it in the garden beds and that we have tons of them. But it's such crap soil that I don't want to use in the garden beds. And I don't have any order to put all this crappy soil. Like, I don't, like, so annoying. Because I'm going to fill all this area back in with stone. I don't want to deal with the, uh, but we, and stuff over here.

So I've got that going on. And then I've got a little fun project going on. We went antique shopping the other day because we had to buy new dressers. I made the mistake of buying some dressers from Big Lots a couple years ago. And they're already broken. I mean, it's just like cheap particle boards, like way cheaper than IKEA stuff. And I think I paid like $200 each form. They weren't bad.

But we went antique shopping because I was like, well, if we're going to buy a dresser, I don't have money to buy a very fancy dresser. And honestly, I don't really don't care about my furniture that much. So we'll just go to an antique store. We'll buy a dresser there. We found a dresser. It's great. But I also saw this radio cabinet.

I don't know if it works or not. I don't want to plug it into the wall because, you know, it's pretty old. So I'm going to take the speaker out. I got to replace the speaker because the speaker's broken. And I have an extra amp from that company acrylic. I think it's acrylic. It's like a Sonos knockoff. And I'm going to put that in there.

And so I have an airplay stereo cabinet. That would be fun. It'll be just a little simple little project. Hopefully, I'm going to keep all the components inside of the box. I don't really want to modify it a bunch. Maybe at some point I can make the knobs work with the acrylic system or whatever I put in there.

But I just thought it was kind of a cool little cabinet. It's not really anything special. But I think it was like $30 or $40. I looked at it and I was like that. to look good somewhere in my house. There you go. I've got a speaker coming in. I think I bought it from,

there's a company OSD or ODS. I think it was like $100 on Amazon. So we've got the replacement speaker on the way. Yeah, you were asking about this earlier. I'm like, yeah, you put a subwoofer in there, though. Honestly, it would be cool to have it as a subwifor, right? Because I don't have a sub for my sono system at the moment. But I would have to do some kind of like sono sequencer or something like

that because I don't have a Sonos amp in the living room and I don't want to buy $800 sonos at the moment my system still does not work perfectly Why not? Yeah. I'm not trying to buy Sonos anything. Buy a Peloton. Yeah. And working on that. Any more cloud-connected stuff.

What's another network node? Yeah. But that's the project I have going on. Kind of like Gavin, it's starting to get cold here. So I'm doing all the outside stuff that needs to be cleaned up. I'm usually pretty late on this stuff. And so I'm trying to go out and get all the stuff picked up that I need to. And I've also been looking at sheds.

We have no outside storage. And so I'm looking at getting a shed. Sheds are very expensive. I don't know why they're so expensive. I mean, it's just like some wood and stuff. But like you can easily get like spend like $10,000 on like a 10 by 16 shed. It's crazy.

And it's like, all right, that wood is not that expensive. What is going on here? We have one of those metal sheds in the backyard, and it just, I mean, it's big enough to hold, like, the lawnmower, a couple of bike. It's a decent size shed. I'm not going to lie. It's pretty big. And, but to, like, the hurricane came through and, like, blew the wall kind of inward. And the junk that I actually had thrown in there basically caused the wall from not falling down.

And it's tied down and stuff. So it wouldn't have gone anywhere. But, like, I was like, well, probably time to get a new shed. And I looked at the price. I'm like, nope, not time to get a new shed. shed and I just took some you know outdoor wood and went and just basically short up the entire wall with the wood so now basically on the inside it's it's framed out so the wall is much more stronger than the sheet metal whatever it's made out of um so maybe it'll survive the next hurricane

who knows yeah and it's like one of those things like at first I was like I'll just have one delivered like I like you know you can buy a pre-built shed like a like a good like 10 by or 10 by 14 or 12 by 14 around that size for you know three to five thousand dollars delivered it doesn't have a loft you know not all that fancy stuff but it's a basic shed it's a good size loft uh but the the problem yeah a loft for just storage not really hanging out um but the problem is that uh they use this machine to move the shed have you ever seen this i think it's called like let's see oh yeah look this thing up it's called a shed mule um and this is how supposedly all these shed companies move sheds, and it needs a foot of clearance along with the shed.

So if you have a 10 foot wide shed, you need 11 foot of clearance. Well, the problem is our double gate is only 10 foot wide. So the widest shed we can technically fit in the area is 9 foot. And so we're going to have to do some kind of like build on site shed or like a shed or something like that. So I think I'm going to build a shed this call. Get a giant crane. List one. Maybe.

I mean, it would be nice. I'm sure that won't be expensive. No. But yeah, like, even like the, like, if you hire somebody like build one of the sheds on site,

you know, it's eight or nine thousand dollars. But if I go to Menards, I can buy a shed kit. They have like a materialist. So this one's like a 12 by 16 where you literally just get all the materials and stuff, but it's $4,000 bucks.

Hmm. So I'm not, I don't know if I'm going to go that route just yet. I do know I want a wood shed because I want to be able to repair it. Oh, you can repair metal. It turns out, you just add wood to it. Well, two different definitions of repair.

It becomes sighting. And then another thing, there's two fun things about sheds. I didn't, there's all kinds of options. Obviously, you're going to, like, add windows and doors and all this stuff.

One of the things I did not expect, was deciding if I wanted a floor or not. Yeah. It's just like, Jed, do you want a shed with the floor or without the floor? And I'm like, I, what? Okay. I want a floor, yeah.

And then the other thing is that there's a bunch of repo sheds. And I think I've talked about this on on the show before. Repos sheds? If you go to Facebook Marketplace and you type in repo shed, there are sheds that people obviously have repossessed. And it is crazy. Yeah, if you're paying $10 grand for a shed and you miss a payment, they're going to get out there with their mule and take it away from you.

Yeah, and all these shed places offer financing. Ah, see, that's how they get you. So it's like, you can get a shed for a 50 to 100. $100 a month. No credit check. You know, $100 down. So it's kind of like a sleazy car salesman. Oh my gosh. There's tons of them. But there is a ton of refo sheds on Facebook marketplace. Wow. And they're like, they're literally out of all sides. Like here's a, here's a 10 by 20 repo shed for $4,000 delivered. I am not getting one of those. If I get something that big, I'll end up sleeping it. I'll do something. Get kicked out of the house. Yeah. See, like I don't, I don't want that big of one. But like, we

literally have no outside storage. So we need something, unfortunately. Here's somebody will trade this shed for a brand new shed or an e-bike. It's okay. Don't know what's going on with that. I'm going to avoid that ad. But yeah, that's fun. These sheds look nice, though, even up here. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I would like to live in one of these sheds. And so that's the problem, right, is because housing in, I assume everywhere, but housing in America is so ridiculously expensive now that people are literally buying sheds to like convert them into houses. And so you see sheds that are like, oh my, like so many different amenities inside of them. This one has a bed in the loft. I mean,

$20,000 to $30,000 sheds. Wow. Somebody was talking about a shed online the other day that they have a bathroom in. And I'm like, that's not a shed. That's a house. Just a house. Wow. I, so I thought the, I mean, so around here they have the golf courts that drive on the streets. And like, those get 10, $20,000 easy. I mean, sheds, wow. Yeah. This is crazy. Could you imagine you to like come home and your shed's not in your yard anymore? Did we have a shed out here? What happened to it? Somebody stole our shed? Oh no. I forgot to make the payments for the past three months. Oh, man. Well, I think we have a shed podcast. This is crazy. I've never seen so many different shapes and sizes of sheds in my life.

This is wild. Yeah, the world of sheds is crazy. I would have classified many of these as as full-on homes like yeah exactly there's dick i found the shed here so i bought some unify stuff from this guy when i drove up on his property he had basically his man cave was in what looked like it's a building like had three garage doors on it and he put couch and TVs and all his computer stuff and his toys were all in there and it was awesome looking but that's not a shed that's like another building yeah so here is uh i'm looking at This is a, just like a regular, this is actually a portable garage. Have you seen these portable garages?

It's literally just like a garage that's kind of like a shed where it's just, you just bring it and drop it down on your property. This is 12 by 24, $7,000 altogether, which I feel like it's not bad for like a roll-up door garage thing. That is a fourth of the size of my house. Oh, man. That is. They have a 12 by 28. I mean, there's so many options.

It's crazy. That is, and the repo, the repo portion of this is, is great. I put an ad that I ran across. It has a little cats. I don't know, it's an insane deal. It's like, just like a used car salesman. He's got a cat, though. I don't know what the cat has to do with anything, but it's there.

Well, all right. Shed time for T. You are out for TJ. You can, you can follow me along this journey as I buy or build a shed. Digging holes and buying sheds. There you go. that's that's that's that's life man all right um maybe maybe i will put a blowup decoration outside my next week so you can do it seth i believe in you all right thanks i appreciate that

i kind of want a shed meal though i mean isn't that sweet looking it's kind of like when i worked at the locksmith we had like the uh the dolly that climbed stairs so like when we delivered safes and stuff like that we could not have to carry it downstairs it's just one of those specialized machines that you'd never think about but like of course it exists yeah it makes it makes sense it's got little wheels that go on the back it's got a forklift on the front and yeah picks it up and runs all right there you go all right um i think that's going to wrap up everything's week gabin you didn't have any you didn't have any projects right oh this week i spent the week um addicted to should i should set go to c s dot com i just want to give you i want to give

you an update set i beat it naive i figured out a way that yes i did and i know now that you have nothing programmed behind the yes button right how you want to know how i beat it how'd you beat it if you just press that tab button on the keyboard that it takes you over to the oh it tab it's accessible it's accessible yes you need to take off your tab so i was able to beat it and you got to put something behind it yes all right even if you can never get to it if anyone ever figures out i'm gonna fix that bug and you know i'll i'll we'll gamify it somehow yeah we'll yeah i'll yeah i I had successfully beaten your game. That's my project for this week.

All right. Basically, you hit the yes button, but it does do something, Gavin. You just have to wait. Just wait. It'll give you an answer. How long do I have to wait? You know, if I get the baby, it comes up right away. I've been waiting for about an hour now on this yes one.

It's too good. Thanks for beating the game. Like I said, fix that bug, push it back out there. Maybe before the show's edited. Anyway, we want to thank everybody for listening to show, and especially want to send special thanks that was able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page,

head on over to, head on over to home tech.fm slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as $8 a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month. Get you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat the hub where you and other patrons of the show can gather in there. It's a nice little Slack chat channel

and see all sorts of fun stories as they come across some advice. I saw literal ceiling fan light bulb socket. I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm shocked. I thought the PTZ cameras that TJ is always talking about was one thing. And now I know that there is a light socket ceiling fan.

No words. I love China. It has a light and a ceiling fan okay Americans would never think about this no China is thinking of so many innovative things there it is there it is light socket ceiling fan all right thank you it's there can't unsee it now but and it's got RGBs yeah oh yeah yeah yeah because you have to have that I mean I mean required and it's got the same RGB remote that every RGB product has yeah yeah I have one on my desk actually I have two on my desk because I don't know what happened to the other product but

I have two of them anyway if you if you want to check that stuff out that we have in there, including random AI videos that we're probably going to start posting in there because they're just too good. That's the hub. You can go in there and check it out. If you can't support Finanxley, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review

or positive rating and whatever podcast app you're listening in. That's going to wrap up the show this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. Oh, maybe they can make an AI video of you going to CES. Oh, I've already thought, I thought, like, I should make some videos of me finishing projects. And then, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's a good idea. Don't show it to your wife. She'll be like, no. We will all know it's fake. Who's that guy?