HomeTech.fm - Episode 547 - Reviewing the Smart Home with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

On this week's show, we sit down with The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to talk about all things smart home, how she approaches reviewing and reporting on new products, and what it’s like living on the cutting edge. Plus, a Pick of the Week, project updates, and much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, October 17th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Ronald Thurgo, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And I was willing to say his line, but I guess I'm not. Welcome to the Home Tech podcast. Podcasts all about home technology, home automation. And where's Gavin?

Where do you go? He's not here. Gavin's missing. He's taking a night off tonight. No. It's the birthday. Don't tell him. But he's our pick of the week.

we have a very flattering picture of them it'll show up in your podcast speed yeah we'll put it on that domain you bought that's a good one i don't know if i should renew it or not i have i have i think i have 20 days to decide oh so the the domain name is for some reason tj got a notice in his email that says is gabbin moist dot com is up for renewal and like now tj doesn't know if he needs to renew that domain well i mean just like set i've always have the habit of buying random domains. I think Seth has a worst problem than me. I'm not really sure how many domains he has. I'm going to assume it's way more than me, but I also buy random domains because sometimes I'm like, you know, I think I should create a website for that. And I never do

because I don't do anything with websites. But it always sounds like a good idea. So like right now I have one of my websites is spared dot parts. Maybe because I might start like a spared parts website or something i don't know another one is like something with my last name i've never done anything with it another one is is is zwave dead dot com matter is dead dot com zygby is dead dot com i just decided to buy those i don't know why it's going for the long play here yeah i mean maybe they'll be useful one day well if you head on over to should tj renew is gavin moist dot com dot com you can vote is i just bought that domain no i'm kidding i did not do that But I should. I should have done it.

Well, yeah, Gavin's singing the night off tonight, but we have a, this is the funniest night. This is the fun, like, the funniest part about this. It's like, there's nothing but home. This is the news to talk about this not here. So ironic. It's just all home assistant. Yeah. And we, we, we're going to go ahead and slide in a interview that we did.

We did a little while back with Jennifer Patterson Dewey over from the Verge. She was kind of enough to join us and talk about what she does, like, as someone in the, I get at the real media world that covers this stuff day in and day out because I don't know if you could, you know, T.J. But like, we read a lot of her stories on, on the air here. So it was good to have her on and chat with her and see what her approach is. So covering things and kind of her background. And TJ, you actually had to leave that interview. You had to something else to do and you had to bail early. And then we, we wrapped up, Gavin and I wrapped it up. And then we got up, we kept talking after that. Like, we just kept talking after we,

We wrapped up the interview, and she almost made me buy this robotic tennis server thing from SwitchBot. Have you seen this thing? No. What are you talking about? Yeah. Okay. It doesn't surprise me that you said SwitchBod. I know, right.

I was like, well, obviously. It's called the Ace Mate Tennis Robot. Ace Mate Tennis Robot. And it's a Switchbot thing. A Switch bot, I think. Is it Ace Mates.Tennis.com? Or is that something else? No, that's it.

That's it. Huh. I mean, that makes total sense, right? It's a little robot, and it runs around, and it shoots tennis balls at you, and you're responsible for using the tinnocet to hit it back into the little net, and then the net recycles the ball, and it shoots it back to you again. Yes. I mean, it's just like the batting cages of yester year, right?

You know, like, do you ever go to the batting cages when you were a kid? Yeah, I've been to one of them. That was always a thing. It was like a giant, like, I don't know about yours, but they were like a giant, like, I don't know, it was like octagon or like circle building kind of thing. It was like surrounded by mesh. And you just like go into like this little space and it would just shoot balls at you and you would hit them and then you get a certain amount of time or certain amount of balls

or whatever it was. But this makes total sense as a thing that you would buy. And they probably make way more money on this than selling you like a Switchbot switch. It looks like they, I mean, so there's not, switchbot isn't branding on this anymore. It was on their website when we were talking. And now it looks like they have taken it away to make it into something else. Because if you do a Google search for AceMate SwitchBot tennis, it does give you a link to the official SwitchBot website.

But then now they have their own website, their own website, and it goes to a Kickstarter. Well, that makes sense because you would associate SwitchBot with an expensive. But it does say they're about us. It does say AceMate is an independent brand incubated by SwitchBot. Yeah, there you go. So at least they do admit it somewhere.

But that makes sense because they're very inexpensive devices. And I don't know how much this thing is. $2,500. $2,500. Yeah, so I mean, that's pretty expensive. They have a limited time offer. It looks like $1,600 for whatever they're running for for a pre-order. But, I mean, that's pretty expensive compared to a lot of their objects.

And half off, I was like, and I think it was a little bit more than half off. And then we were talking about it and like, oh, that really looks cool. Because it was like super early on the Kickstarter thing. I don't know. It was like early. had it, they had it pretty low. And I'm like, oh, that, that's, that would be fun if it actually works. But, you know, it's SwitchBots. I don't know. And I didn't, I didn't pull the trigger, but I came close. I was like, that looks, that looks like a lot of fun. You could have a lot

of fun with something like that. Well, the thing is, I've, I've considered spending a lot of money on SwitchBot before when they came out with their, their auto, like, refilling a robot back, robot vacuum, and robot mop. And I was like, all right, that's worthy of spending a lot money and it wasn't that bad i think it was like 1500 bucks as well so yeah it wasn't too crazy you can have a vacuum or a tennis thing i think the tennis thing would probably went out i mean i don't play tennis so i think i would take the vacuum but did you don't have to use it for tennis i mean did they make a pickleball pickleball version i think that's what people play nowadays right they did actually um on the previous website more update no it was a different version it was for pickleball

and they they did have another version it was like pickleball or or the tennis thing i think I swear that's what they had on here. Oh, no. So, actually, they do. So they have a little checkbox here. I didn't see it before, but they do have a specific version for pickleball. There you go.

Huh. I wonder if you could just, like, change it in the app, though. Why is it going to be a separate thing? I know. Why is it, it's a different ball completely, but. Huh. That's interesting. Ace mate.

There you go. Never would have heard of them. Yeah. I would not have either. We just got on a side tangent of a conversation about tennis, and she brought that up that she kind of wanted detested or something? I'm like, wait, what are we talking about? That sounds amazing. It's a robot that

choose balls. I mean, genius. Yeah, but I've always listened to her. I mean, I've read her articles, but I've listened to her on like the The Birch podcast and all this stuff. So it was really good actually talking to her for the podcast.

I was disappointed I had to leave early though. So I'm interested to hear the rest of it because I actually have not heard any of it when I left. So, well, we just talked about you. We talked about I figure. Yeah. So,

so self-conscious. I'll edit that out, though, so nobody will hear it. We'll all see each other at CES in January, right? Seth, are you going to CES? That might be something that happens. Let's take a look at the prices on those flights.

Have you gotten your flight ticket yet, T.J. No. See, you're giving me problems for this. Well, I mean, hey, I'm already confirmed, so I'm getting in mind with credit card points, so no matter what I'm buying it. I'm just trying to save some of my credit card points. I've got two flight options.

One is 6.07 a.m. And one at 4.52 p.m. Yeah, I have to leave early as well. 607 gets me there at 11 o'clock the same day in the morning. So that's not terrible. It's a lot of flying, but not terrible. And you get to start up in Charlotte and sit in the rocking chairs. Oh, good.

Prices have gone up, so that's good news. Mine went up a dollar since I looked at it last. So mine's got up like $500. What is up at this? $500. Yeah, I mean, before it was like $500 per person. Now it's $763 per person. What is going on?

They really don't want you to go. Yeah, really. According to Google flights is like one of the highest prices too. Well, according to Google flights, this thing, oh wait, it could be cheaper in, no, it doesn't look like it's any cheaper. Never mind. Yeah, right? I mean, I should have bought it already.

I am running up on the lowest price times. Uh, oh, wow, somewhere near December here, so, hmm, I think, I think it's good, it's, yeah, this looks like it, what is it, uh, November, it's October right now. It looks like it does go down to November, so I may wait to November, and then, uh, I'll let you know. I think that's probably what I'm going to do that. If I can save $20. I mean, at this point, it's going to save me a couple of hundred dollars, because, I mean, it was just cheaper not too long ago. That is crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. Why's so expensive? Mm-hmm. Vegas. Well. Anyway, CES, woo. I'm going no matter what. I already booked the hotel, so. Airbnb.

Yeah, well, you still Nicole, like, sorry. It'd just be Gavin. The Gavin will show and be like, where's everybody at? What the heck? It's just you, buddy. And he won't know because he wasn't part of this podcast. I know, right? He probably doesn't listen.

I am. All right. Well, we do have, we're going to switch to show up in the order tonight a little bit, but we do have some home tech headlines, courtesy of our friends over at the home assistant. who can't take a week off. So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it.

All right, first off, entering the graveyard from Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Yellow is been announced into life. So the decision was driven, I guess, by a closure of a key component supplier and pretty much rendered the production impossible. So Home Assistant Yellow is headed to the graveyard. And what sucks is I could have put one of these in the graveyard because we got a friend of the show, send one to me. And then I send it to you to give a little.

away and you gave it away. Well, that is what, that's what happens when you give stuff away, stuff. Yeah, yeah. I don't feel bad. It probably found a nice home. And it sounded like it was a fun little, fun little project. This one had, what, did it have POE on it? There was like, this is the one where you had to, it had a POE optional intent on it. It had a Zigby. Had Zigby. Modical on it. Yeah. Yeah, no Z way of it built into it. But it was a nice little compact box. I actually set it up when you sent it to me, I set up as like a little demo home assistant thing so I can connect a couple of devices to it so people could see how it operated. And honestly, it was really nice. If I was going to get into home assistant these days, I would pick a device like that because

I don't necessarily want to like buy a micro PC and like flash it with software and do all this stuff. I just want to buy a device, plug it in and it does its thing. And it was nice because you could actually upgrade the compute module at some point if you wanted to as well. So it's not just like a like a one and done hub you could add on to it. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's been on for a while all the way back in 2021, I guess. So it didn't very have a very long life. But it's not like if you have one of these,

it's going to be unsupporting in time soon. It just can't make anymore. So the software is still going to run in. It's still going to run just fine. And I know they already, they have, what do they have? Like different versions now. They have a different, the green, right? Yeah, you can get the green.

No P-O-E, right? But I think it's got... This one is the one where you have to add-on what you need, though. Plug-in power, plug the thing in, get the apps. No, I guess it has ZigB and Z-Wave, I guess, right? I don't know. I don't look into this. I have the big toilet paper roll.

Actually, get the green and then get the toilet paper roll thing, and you're good to go. Boom. Yeah. And actually, you can add two toilet paper rolls. A ZBD-1 is what they have to control Zyg-Bian thread. There's little add-ons you can get for this thing. But the point is, this exists.

And it's a plug-and-play option for how much this thing run? Yeah. Go to Amazon. It's nice. It's a good option. $59 to get started in the home-assistent ecosystem. And a lot of guys on the Control 4 side, since Alan Chow came out with that driver, and you can basically just bridge home-assistant devices over into Control 4 to control with.

You just get a lot of guys just saying, hey, just get the Home Assistant green thing and plug it in. You're good to go. And he's got all the integrations on it. I mean, because at the end of the day, right? Right. Home assistant historically has been for people that like to tinker and do all this stuff, but they are trying to target a new audience that does not like to do this. And in order to target those people, you have to create these devices that you just plug in and they just do what they're supposed to do. Oh, for sure.

They're not going to get there without doing any user interface updates, but devices like this, they help bring those changes in. Yeah. Especially for $159. That's not a bad price. It's all local. You don't have to worry about it. You can pay a subscription for $6. That's probably the biggest hang up with a lot of, like, average consumers.

Like, they have to pay for a subscription to access it remotely, but I don't even think that's a big of a deal. No. And if you like to tinker, there's ways you could just do a VPN and get back to it. Or you just pay them to $6. I think it's what, it's not expensive. Yeah, $6 a month. Yeah.

Is it a month or it thought it was like a year? Well, they have like a deal where you buy, like, like 10 months and you know or by by a year you get like two months for a year or something like that so it's pretty nice yeah i went ahead and as much as i like messing with the uh the platform and pressing the update every week and i guess i should probably do that since gabin's not here to remind me so let's take a look at it uh home assistant one two three oh yeah i do have an update look at that don't know what it is don't care it's getting updated it's actually kind of a fun platform to kind of tinker with um it's not ready for prime time but you know it's

If you're using it to tinker or you're using it to bridge in devices for your professional home automation system that doesn't support some most integrations that Home Assistant have, then it's a great product, especially if you know what you're doing. That said, let's see, we talked about the toilet paper roll thing, right, the Z wave. Very hard to hide. I don't know where you're going to hide this thing at, but I want to see your photos where are you hitting this thing. It's just over there. I just put it on top of the rack for now. Well, not you, Seth. I mean, you don't even use yours.

Oh, yeah. I was talking about people that use. Where are you guys installing this that use it? Yeah, where do you put this thing? I don't know. It's not a centerpiece of the house. It's not a... Just thinking of your ceiling somewhere, like a hospital?

That's what it looks like. There's funny, at the hospital's here, they have these little motion detector-looking things that are inventory trackers for the room, whatever. But on them, they had to put a label on them. This is not a camera. So there's like this hand-printed label from a label maker. It says, this is not a camera.

Let's see, the ZWA 2. That's the toilet paper holder. Well, a lot of people are like, hey, this is dumb. It doesn't have P-O-E. Well, guess what? Now they have a little dongle for your toilet paper holder that you can get. And it'll make it a Z, it's like P-O-E-N, USB, out. And it bridges over to your home assistant that way.

TJ, you were identifying ways this could be cool and useful, and I still don't get it. So what do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, so for, I think, I don't know about you, Seth, but I have a small house. So for me, this is not useful. And especially because my home assistant setup is basically in the center of my house. So this is not useful for me. But people like Gavin, whoever these like extravagant houses that are just so big, you want to be able to put your antenna somewhere central in the house, right? And so you can use POE in the network to put that network to put that antenna somewhere central in the house.

or Gavin actually sent me an antenna that has, I think it's a POE as well, but it has a VPN option on there as well. So I can actually create like a separate network at a different location and tie it into my main home assistant setup. Yeah. So there's all kinds of different applications for this kind of thing. I don't have a ton of options that I can use this for,

but I can definitely see the use case for it. Like so like at my office, for example, I need to find a Z-Way version of this and I, they probably exist but I have a ZWave garage garage door controller and I want to be able to just open it up on home assistant and control it as well

but I don't want to run my own home assistant set up at the office just too much effort for one device so I could use a POE device like this with a VPN built into it in order to tie it back to the main setup I don't know it's very nerdy stuff right I mean most people do not need this

but I feel like these antennas are coming out like crazy these days. There's so many different options of these. Well, I just went over to SMI because that's the one that Gavin sent you to see what was on their website. And as you said, they have a million products. And the first one on there was the hub, the smub that we talked about, right? The smub

I'm just, I'm scrolling down the page. I think I'm halfway down the page right now and it is more text than I've ever seen on any product page. And you're like, I don't know what this thing does. It's an antenna. What do you mean? It's got so much stuff. But I get down, I don't know. I'm halfway like I said. There's a, there's a

Adopter version, it's like, hey, important note, here's all the stuff that works. Here's all the hardware in this thing that works today. Here's the hardware that's not, it's available inside there, but it's not implemented yet in the OS. So, like, things like the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6. Not implemented yet. It may be one day.

IR transmitter and receiver. Okay, it's in there. One day they'll turn it on. They say. Anyway, I keep going down, because there's more text. I keep going down, more text. Hold on, wait for it. There's a Z-wave module, a 4G LT,

module, P-O-E-U module, a UPS module in development with a solar panel? What? Who's asking for this? I don't get it. I don't know. Yeah. As a consumer, I guess I'm just not that dirty, right? Because I'm just looking at all this.

And I'm like, I don't know what the difference in all these are. I mean, like, and I'm a total new because I look at this SM hub. And I'm like, oh, cool. It's got RGPs, you know? It's like a router. And it's got like this little, like, whole little LED stream. That's pretty sweet. oh my gosh it's just so many features

there's so many features on this thing and it just keeps going and going and I'm like okay I'm getting towards the bottom what I was going to do I just happened to be on the site and I'm like how much this thing costs because we couldn't figure it out the last time and I don't think I'm going to figure it out now I just I don't I don't think I'm going to figure it out

let's see there's still no pricing available for you I just have to go to Amazon it's an Amazon link it doesn't have the product so it's you know one of those things Um, so one day we will know how much this thing, how much this thing's going to cost and, uh, smub. Anyway, uh, yeah, I, I don't, I don't get this device and I don't get the P.O. I don't know. I guess it makes sense if you have a big house and you want this thing in the middle of it somewhere. Yeah. I don't think that people want Zigby to show off in their house like they think they do here at home assistant, but, you know, whatever.

They're making a nice device. They're having fun. Uh, it's got a, a blue LED light on it. And if you tilt it slightly, it turns red. and that's how you know it's like don't tell me i don't like that no tilt yeah exactly i do like that feature you know and if you like dongles we got a son off dongle max zigby and thread p oe dongle so we got it's dongle town tonight like dongle week dongle week oh man gavin's gone and we're just playing with dongles over here all right so this is a forty two dollar and ninety cent uh sewn off p oe thread zigby um dongle with high performance ship set. It looks like, what do you think it would look like?

I guess it's got to dangle with two antennas on it. There you go. It's kind of like, it's kind of the opposite of the homestine antenna where it has kind of opposite of the smub thing too. I mean, it's got like two antennas on it, not 40. So, this is weird. People like this, Seth. I mean, it's $43.

Can't complain. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have 4G LTE or a battery backup with P. Peeloole. No solar panel either. No solar panel, I know. This is lame. I don't want this. This is kind of, the only thing I think of two would be,

would be interesting is that managing like your Z wave or your Zigby or your thread network from like an actual like a web interface would be nice. And so you don't have to rely solely on home assistant. And so right now, because my, my hubs are plugged directly in a home system, I have to use Home Assistant to do everything, but it might be nice to access that from a web interface. Do I need to do that? Probably not.

If Gavin was here, he could tell me. He's like to know that you can. Yeah. That seems nice. Yeah, there is an interesting chart there on the Home Assistant website when it's talking about their dongle. And they say, in USB, the average millisecond speed that everything communicates with is 5.36 milliseconds.

and it adds about 20 for Ethernet and about 10 more for Wi-Fi. So it, it, if you want your Z-B-D-D-Fast, your Z-Wa-D-Fast, I guess, then you need to, you need to hook it up on the USB directly. But if you don't care, and you don't care about 25 milliseconds of delay, yeah, this Ethernet module might be a good solution for you too. Mm-hmm.

25 milliseconds really isn't that much. I like to see POE devices, no matter what it is, right? because it's nice to be able to just run a single cable and you don't have to worry about anything else and just all plugs into everything. And unless you're buying ubiquity switches, POE switches are very affordable these days. So, yep,

to buy ubiquity switches and you want two and a half gigs, though, you're going to pay a lot of money. I need it. It's a bigger number. That's right. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up our home ticket lines. Literally nothing happening anywhere else in the industry right now.

But I guess, you know, I'd say, is that time of year. I said, I've been saying that all that all year. Like, just nothing's happened this year. So, uh, deep breath. All the links and topics we talk tonight can be found over on our show notes, HomeTech.fm. slash 547. Uh, all right, nothing in the mailbag this week. We do have a pick of the week. This is, uh, from TJ's travels again. This is, this is a fun one. T. DJ just goes around and I, uh, you just find code violations left and right. This is an interesting one. Well, what do you, what do you do when you want to put a, a camera, uh,

what looks to be probably of a love of bar, looking down at the back bar area so make sure that, you know, somebody doesn't hop over there and take something out of the cash register or something or grab the crown royal there on the right. What do you do? And you have what,

it looks like concrete ceilings, I guess, because it looks like they're bolt in the thing. You're not running that wire in the ceiling. No, you can just run it up, run it in the electrical duct, and then mount the camera to the electrical duct. Why not? No, that's not, that's a

age fact, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, why not? You know, I've thought about doing this many times, but you can't do that. I mean, technically can't, I guess, because if you use plan on wiring, but you're really not supposed to mount anything to ducks in general. So this is not good.

This is at a local bar here in Reynoldsburg, you know, as I'm looking around as I'm drinking, I always find these different electronic things going on. So this is what I found. I like how they were worried about, the wire not being visible on the duct. But then when it got to the wall, they're like, yeah, I'm not putting it in the wall.

Like, it's just going to, it's straight down the wall. It's not even that far. It's like, what, like five feet or something? Like, you can use magnets. There's, there's, there's, and the picture's pretty clear, T.J. There's, I can see the hole that this thing, they just like, shoved some tin snips in and like, yep, this is where we're going. Yeah, well, right here.

Fish it out three feet later. They do a good job, you know? Did they? I'm proud of them. whatever it works probably keeps the camera real cool keeps the electronics working longer it actually stops working in the winter of time

it's just overheats since in the winter it stops working I never know why they're like this camera always stops working in December that's too good if you have any feedback questions ideas for the show or picks of the week maybe some code violations of your own gives this out our email address is feedback at hometech.fm

or head on over to hometack.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates real quick um i had i swear i did something i can't remember what it was i've been doing some programming lately somebody told me there was a bog on the driver that i still sell and i'm like wow you guys bought that because i don't remember putting it up there it's been so long but there it is and then so i fixed it and then um yeah i got to see if it was so work so uh yeah it's it's on the store there it's a aquitil fluid level monitor for septic tanks i guess i don't know People use it for cisterns and that kind of thing.

So it's kind of cool. Anyway, it's working. I made it better. I even have little test things in there. So you can like press a button and it'll change all the icons. You can watch it. But that was fun. And I don't remember what else I did.

I swear I did something. I don't know what it was. I did get lights out for my Halloween display stuff. So my house is currently lit up. And it was all red last night. My wife was like, why do we have the red house? I'm like, it's Halloween. It's scary.

And she's like, we have a 10 foot blow up Mickey Mouse pumpkin head outside. This is not a scary house. I'm like, oh, yeah. So, whoops, I went and redecorated and now it has purple lights and other lights at the same time. So, but I did. Oh, I have this big giant light that has been rolling around my garage, literally

in the way, rolling around my garage forever. I got it for some reason. I don't remember what. It was like to test with. And it's, it's out on the side of the road, got it. Yeah. Not, well, it was Amazon. thing. I got it for work. And like it was like, it's a DMX controlled, um,

RGB par light that you would, I don't know, use on some kind of giant stage operation. If you had like 20 of them, it would be blinding or whatever. Anyway, uh, I, I remember this because the, the gentleman I was, I got it to test with. He had like 20 of them on top of this building in Miami and shine these lights at the top of the building. And that's, you know, that's what they did. But it wasn't working and I had to test it. So I was like, you know what? I'll just buy the one you got on Amazon there and then test it myself. I got it working. Well, I've had this stupid parlight rolling around that's big enough to light up buildings in Miami for a long time, can't actually use it on anything for the house. And I was looking at my neighbor. My neighbor has a tree in the back of their house, like a real tall one. It's and it kind of leans towards my house, too. I was like, you know what? I'll just shine it up in that. Man, holy cow. It's a giant tree. And you really don't know it's there until now it's a giant red tree at night, a murder tree. So, It's pretty amazing. So we should get the red end somewhere, you know?

Yeah, yeah. No one's noticed, I don't think, so. I'll send you a picture in the, in the, in the, and pull it up as, as, as it looks, it looks really cool on the, uh, the Uniview owl cameras at night because it's just like a giant red tree. I don't think my neighbor's going to notice. No, probably not.

Definitely not. That's fine. It's very bright. It's just sitting on the ground in the backyard. The lawnmower comes up and bumps on it. and I just leave it on. And it stays on all day. I look back there.

There's a red light sign on the ground. So it's massive. It's like 12 inches in diameter. It's very large. That sounds like something you have just rolling around on your garage floor. For two years now, yeah. Yeah. Here's the Mickey for context.

Here's the Mickey thing rolling out. Yeah, I need to know the Mickey. It's clearly windy for some reason and it's blowing around. I probably should turn it off. Got tied into your weather station. Yeah, right. I'm not going to odd. made any of this.

All right, well, that's all I got done. I have a red tree now. I have purple lights on my house and a driver that's working. TJ, what do you been up to? Your house is very confused. I've been up to a couple of things.

I have decided to keep my G6 PTT. This is the Unify PTZ camera. I talked about it, I think last week on the show. It's not very good at Keller Night Vision. And by not very good, I mean, it does not look good at nighttime at all. And I have a decent amount of like landscape lighting and house lighting in general. And like you can, you, it's definitely color night vision, but I don't know, it doesn't see very far. It's $400.

So it's a lot of money. But honestly, it's really cool watching the recordings come through where it's like following somebody coming up the yard or like walking in the front of the house. It makes very questionable decisions. Like the other day, it followed somebody like walking. down the street when the Amazon delivery driver was like literally walking up my sidewalk to deliver a package and it like zoomed back in and like, you know, went back to its home position and like the dude was like halfway up the sidewalk and it was just like, nah, I don't need to see what that person's doing. So it makes like weird decisions like that, but overall it's

a fun camera to have and I like it. I'm going to keep it. I might resell it at some point. Who knows? And the G7 comes out. Yeah, I mean, there has to be a better one at some point. There's got to be like an in-between between $4,000 and like $1,200 for a ubiquity PTZ camera. And they have the panorama coming out, but I don't think the first version is going to be very good. So I'm not holding my breath on that one. No, white-angle lens is probably going to look very much like this one. This one, the light-angle lens is not very good at night, maybe what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, it's so good during the day.

That's what's crazy. Like, during the day, it does a very good job. But at nighttime, it's not a great. So I think I'm going to install my previous camera next to it. I'm just going to be that crazy guy with like eight cameras on my house. I don't really care. One spot, yeah. Yeah, it is what it is.

And speaking of ubiquity, I also tried out to the NVR Instant this week. Honestly, I was excited when this product launched, especially for $200. Because if you've worked in the low voltage space, you've installed a camera kit and a box. It's just like you get a camera. like NVR that supports like eight cameras and you get like four cameras or six cameras with it and you install the cameras like that's it. There's nothing else fancy to it.

And this is a very big staple in like the low voltage space. And so it's nice that ubiquity actually has come out with just like a system that you just plug cameras into. If you want to plug a monitor into it as well, you can. And like that's it. There's not a lot of BS to it. There's not like you have to buy like 12 different parts to make this work.

And so I installed one for a client this week. It worked great. I installed it with the G6 bullet cameras. I just plugged the cameras in. It automatically found them. I adopted it. It worked great. I did not use it with a monitor.

I was kind of interested to see what that looked like, but it just did not have a use for a monitor at this moment. But very easy to set up. Like when you open it up, you know you have to put a hard drive into it. It's very obvious. You just put the hard drive into it. you put the bottom onto it.

When you do a normal, like, NBR, there's, like, a million screws. Like, you have to, like, secure the hard drive with, like, four screws. And then you have to, like, secure the case to the case with, like, eight screws or, like, whatever it is. So obnoxious. And you drop them in there under the racks and where you're like, oh, come on. They're so tiny. And, like, you only put, like, two screws in the hard drive anyway because, like, what do you need four screws for? And, like, you only put, like, two screws in the case because, like, what do you need, like, eight screws for?

know what I mean? And so like this one, you just put one screw into the hard drive and then you put the bottom on and you're done. Oh yeah. You're right. So I pulled the one off my floor here because of course I got one too, too, too, just to have on my floor. But why not? Yeah. And so yeah, you're right. You can tell that it needs a hard drive. It's clearly missing something on the bottom here. Yeah. And then I guess this is the other, this is the bottom plate that's underneath it. And it has a little mounting template, which all ubiquity stuff is coming with now. That is nice. Yeah. Here's my question. I have this question. So the switch on the, the back it has seven ports six of them p oe right it doesn't look like so that the seventh port is not

is that an uplink port does it keep the cameras yes so that's the uplink port but does it is it like does it make a flat switch network or is it configurable like because sometimes these systems will keep the cameras on their own separate network and then the uplink port will just go to the parent guys i don't know i was going to look at that so i don't know that i mean i was literally very basic install i was using mine for i mean i just plug the cameras into it and we were just using it to monitor the camera. So I haven't got to tinker with it much. Not the end of the world if it doesn't.

I was just wondering if you could plug like access points into it and get on. Oh, so I don't think so because I, so it was kind of a weird setup process. So if you've set up ubiquity devices before, specifically like the protect devices, like the UNVR or something like that, you have to use a protect app to set it up, right? It basically forced you to. This one though is weird because it made me use the unified name. network app to set it up. But as far as I can tell, it's not manageable through the network app.

It's only manageable through the protect app. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. But it was very weird because I kept trying to set it up with a protect app and it kept failing. It failed like three or four times. And then I opened it with a network app. And it was like, yeah, instantly just set up, which is very odd for a protect device.

But because I've set up several like UNVRs and you just open and protect. Open and protect. Yeah. Hmm. All right. So I think, I don't know. Maybe there's like some capability. there that are not exposing or something.

At your install, did you have a Unified network already set up? No. Okay, weird. So it all ran on the same device. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I guess I will have to plug this thing in and play with it because that's very strange. Yeah. Yeah, that part was interesting, so. I opened it, so I get to keep it now.

Well, that's why it eventually just kept the G6 PTC. It was like a $60 re-stocking fee. Yeah. And I was like, I can probably resell it. for more than that at some point. I have three back boxes. I have to send back because I bought three. I'm like, I'll just see if it works.

And I got it. It doesn't do what I wanted to do. So I've like, I'd only opened one and I'm going to send it back. I'll be that guy. I mean, usually I would keep it and just put them on my floor down here next to the AI horn. But I think I'm going to go ahead and send it back soon. I mean, you could just deal like everybody else and post it on eBay for like $200 each. It's just a back box.

They're always out of stock as crazy. I don't know if they are right now. But, yeah, I mean, for a while, I couldn't find backboxes for my stuff. I got to say, their boxes, they have to put the back boxes in are, like, more complex and fanciful than the iPhone box that you get your iPhone in? Like, what are you doing ubiquity? It's a, it's a plastic box. You could put it in a bag and send it to me.

I wouldn't care. Their back boxes in general, I think, are way overly complicated. Oh, absolutely. Because it's just like, like, because they come in like, what, two or three separate pieces. They have, like, put together. And it's like, why am I doing this? This is a back box. I should just have a cover.

Yeah. Like, where are we doing all this? We figured out backboxes a long time ago. The packaging material is crazy. Yeah, I try to always

unbox my ubiquity stuff before I go to the job site. Or else I literally create like a whole trash bag full of garbage. Yeah, yeah, I had some phones to put in today and the phones were

the new G3 phones. I don't know. The newer ones. They come in, all the ubiquity colors. colors black and not white. That's like, really? I need it white.

Well, we got black phones now. So we got them pulled out and yeah, I was pulling them out of the boxes. The boxes are like wedge shaped because the phones are like dust clones. So they, like naturally the box can be square or wedge. No, ubiquitly is like, no, we're going to make them wedge. So I got them all pulled apart and started shoving stuff back in the box. I couldn't, for the life of me, get the puzzle pieces back in the box the same way because naturally open cardboard boxes

are somehow 20% larger than packed cardboard boxes. So I ended up with two large boxes of trash when I came in with one box of equipment. So I don't know how that worked but yeah, just multiplied. So much trash. We got anything else? Do you got any more projects that you've been working on?

Yeah, the next project I've been working on. So I got one more project. This is going to be probably a month-long project at this point. I'm trying to buy a shed. Have you ever bought a shed, Seth? No, we talked about this last time. It just made me, like, aware, aware. I have a shed in my house. And it's a, it's a piece of junk.

But it made me aware, like, the sheds that you were talking about and, like, the, the, the, the, the repo sheds and all that. Oh, yeah. We did, we did talk about the repo sheds. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was driving down the street, and I'm like, there's a shed store here in the street. I took a picture and sent it to you. And you're like, yeah, yeah. So, yeah.

Did you go to the shed store? Is that what you did? I did. We stopped by this random highway a lot that had just, like, a bunch of sheds on there. and they just have like signs on it. It tells you the size, tells you the price and everything. So we moved to the sheds.

We found the repo shed that I was actually interested in, but ended up not being the best of deals compared to just buying a new shed anyway. And so I think we're just going to buy a new shed at this point. That's how they get you. Yeah, well, so we figured out the way we have to get the shed. So originally I was trying to decide if I wanted to do like a built-on site shed because we don't have a lot of like clearance to like bring a shed in.

Like we have a double gate that's like 10 foot wide, but they use this machine called a shed mule which I think I talked about before that basically moves the shed and you need one foot of clearance on each side to move a shed. And so in order for I have a 10 foot shed, you need a 12 foot clearance.

And so the 10 foot gain, obviously is not enough. And so a build-on site shed is like crazy amount of money. You don't pay like $10,000. So now the plan is to remove two sections of fence. I knew this was going to come. I was like, it's going to be a crane or he's to take down his fence it's one of the two so it's like it's like so the fence company that

installed the fence it's like seven hundred dollars for them to come in just reinstall two posts in concrete they provide the new post and the concrete we provide the the existing fence panels and they'll come and install it and then they the shed itself is only like like four thousand dollars so it's a little like half the price to literally tear down half like two panels of the shed and to move the shed into place so that's what we're we're doing. We found a, we found a shed that's 10 by 16 and it's 12 feet high. So it's a pretty decent size shed. Yeah, that's big. Yeah, but we have no garage or basement. So we literally have no storage space. Right. So this is, this is our storage space. Nice. Well, that's,

fun. We've started the process. We have to file for a permit. So I did that this week. I walked into the government building and I was like, I need to file this permit. And, you know, I did the whole thing. I was there for like 10 or 15 minutes, paid $100. And then at the end, the lady at the desk, she was like, they'll contact you. And I was like, like, they'll contact me like at some point or they'll just contact me. She's like, they'll, they'll contact you. It was very ominous, you know? And so like an hour later, I got an email and I was like, you've been approved for your

permit. So that was very easy. So now we're a couple weeks out. We're going to get the pad built. It's going to be like a gravel pad. And then we'll get the shed delivered at some point. so nice nice very exciting but now is the hard part because i have to tear out all the garden beds i've put in wait wait you didn't i thought you were saving a spot for this shed this is this is taking up valuable

garden space well it's taking up the compost bin in like one garden bed but the problem is that the area that has to move into the garden i have to remove like several beds so i have to remove like three beds and then i have to put them back next spring i guess it's winter time anyway so Yeah, so that part sucks But it's a lot easier than coming through the other way So Well, you know, just do When you get done, make sure that you like

Put everything back real nice And then, you know, like make sure it's all like Beautiful like you had it And then pick the next large project That's going to make you tear everything down again Hopefully nothing, geez We'll probably just move out next year That's what happened.

Start over. Yeah, it's got a shed, yeah. But I am thinking of the technology. So in that corner where the shed is going, I have a, because of course I do, I have a panorama camera and I have an access point. And so I'm like, well, obviously, like the shed is going to block that area now. So am I going to mount the access point in the camera to the shed?

Am I going to put like a POE switch in the shed to like house some electronics? so I like now that's like a whole new possibility and I need some kind of light system in the shit I mean so I thought about POE lighting because that's an option so I'm interested to see if there's anything out there for POE lighting that I could use for a shit there was somebody came out with one recently I saw it was like a POE all right so it's like POE the RGB light little strip light thing that you could put around the top you know yeah I mean I'm fine literally I just need any kind of light yeah I'm gonna hang out there a night you know what I mean but like I'm gonna be out there at night at some point, I'm going to need a light.

And he's dark, yeah. Yeah. And so, like, I already have two Ethernet wires out there in that area. So I could already use them for a POE switch and whatever else I need. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I'm trying to remember who came out with that POE. Ah, you know what?

You know what? We're making fun of them. I'm pretty sure it was this in light because that's in their name. That's how it makes sense. Didn't they, I think they have a POE to, like, yeah, they do, they do. Oh man, what is that? What is that? Let me see.

Let's see. P-O-E mic LED controller. It's one of these 10 million products they have here. So let's just keep clicking. Of course. So I'm a dealer for POE Witt, which I've used on a couple projects, but they don't really like, they make like floodlights and stuff like that.

It's not really like, I don't know. I see what you're talking about, though. It's a modular LED controller. Yeah. So you plug that in, and then you'll have, let's see what the outputs are on this thing. Oh, this is actually smart because then I could just do like a Z wave button or something. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

See, you're smart. I'm not smart. It's these guys that make all the stuff. Yeah, I mean, this is the one product I need. It's probably got a VPN in it, too. Who knows? Well, I don't need a VPN. It's my local network, so.

Let's see, they've got color connectors version and a gray connector. What's the difference? Some light is made in Ukraine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gavin talked to them all the time he's he's on the like their discord or something

he's got WLAD so you can do all sorts of stuff this thing but uh 18 dollars that's very cheap yeah yeah I mean you can round up 2299 for the Ethernet POE mic

I don't really need the mic but it's only so it's only it's $2 more for the mic version if you want the POE what so you get the regular POE option for $21 or the mic version for $23.

Where are you See, because I can't figure this out. Their website is... It's Al-A-Express. Well, I mean, that's... Oh, okay. Oh, I see the links now. Okay, yeah, yeah, just got to go to Al-Express.

All right. Interesting. Okay, so they have color. All right. I mean, that's, honestly, that's probably what I need. I need Gavin to tell me if it's a good idea, though. I think it's a great idea. I'd ask them.

Well, I'm not going to trust your opinion. I don't know what the gray... They just said if there's a gray version and there's a color version. What's the difference? Is it the type of light you can have up to it? Yeah, so that's what I was wondering, too. other information, but they don't actually tell you what these... They're the same price, so...

It's just like a random color case. Oh, my gosh. It could be pink, could be blue. There's two buttons actually on the device you can use to control it, so that's nice. Oh, that's a good idea. A lot of the WAD controllers have that. So, like, I have one that I mounted underneath, like, a bar that we have, like, separating the kitchen.

And if I ever need to turn the light on, I just have the button programmed in WAD. I just tap the button, and it will turn the... It's like under-counter lighting. on the bar. So I'll tap that and it'll work. And then if I need to turn it off, I think I tap it twice and it turns off. All right, well, I need to.

Yeah, I have no idea what the gray and the gray is. You probably, you probably want the gray of the color. You know what, just buy both of them. And then you'll have an extra for the next time you need a. I don't think so, but I think this is a good idea, though, for the shed because I can just put LED strips around. Yeah. I mean, that's all I need.

I don't need, like, crazy light. Just make sure you get the right LED light. Oh, this just works with five to, 24 volt voltage inputs so yeah this is this will work with anything yeah and i have for the cable that i have specifically for that area i have 210 watts available so oh that's a plenty i can do a lot more than you could do like three of these so just pick up a couple just pick up a couple of i want to be like the house in canada just the shed in canada i want to see everything yeah there you go i'm buying it right now i hope i need quality guarantee i mean it looks

amazing. Honestly, like, I've been... Yeah, it is nice. I should buy one of these. I think I have a bunch of extra LED strips, so... I'm wondering what... There's got to be more information on here about addressable... It supports all of the addressable strips that you want, so that's... It's the addressable

one, so you gotta be... You can't add just like the PCM strips to it. It's got to be the ones that are addressable. Mm-hmm. So it's constant voltage not the other way around. But it doesn't tell you on here what... If you use... I'm worried, like, if you use the PO, okay, so here it is.

It can be powered by POE, but you only get one and a half to two amps and only use a 5-volt strip. So you can only use the 5-volt, not 12-volt wires. But if you get, if you power with power supply or whatever, you can use 24-volt, 12-volt. It doesn't matter. Five, whatever. So, I mean, honestly, this is probably, five-volt is probably fine. Probably enough. If it's dark enough out there, yeah.

Like I said, I'm not hanging out there. It's not a hangout spot yet. And if it goes a hangout spot, then I'll just run power. I have that capable of. I've done it before. Just after you get it done, just decide that you want power out there. That's probably what I'll do next year.

You know, I'll just be like, this is stupid. Why am I not just running power here? Oh, well, this looks fun. Yeah, you get to experience the pain that is WLED, which is the most open source lighting project

I've ever seen in my life. It makes sense if you don't, no, it doesn't make sense. I don't, they have the most complicated way of doing things that could be a lot easier, but it's W-L-A-D. What are you going to do? Open source. It's free, and it actually works really

well. You just have to bang your head against the wall for a little bit to figure it out. All right. I think that's going to wrap up projects. That's all the projects. Yeah. We could have a short show tonight, but no, no, we're going to have an interview. So let's go ahead and start the interview with Jennifer Pattison Huey from The Verge, and well, let's get

started. Hi, Jennifer. Thanks for joining us. Hello. Happy to be here. All right, all right. Of course, for dramatic effect, sorry. Yeah, exactly. I thought my audio had gone out.

Thanks. Well, I guess a lot of our listeners may know of you through their own reading on the internet, and then they may know us from the many stories that we cover that have your byline on. But can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and where you're from and all that kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I am, so my name's Jennifer Passon-Tooey, but I go by Jen. just because that's much less of a mouthful. And I'm originally from Manhattan, as you can tell, by my accent.

Born Lennox Hill Hospital, grew up in London, England, though. But now live in South Carolina. So, being all over the place. And I am a senior smart home reviewer for Theverge.com, which is a technology website that hopefully a number of your listeners are familiar with. And I cover the smart home, internet things, pretty much anything to do with home technology and a little bit of sort of, well, branch out into a little bit of AI right now. That's obviously a big hot topic. But the home is a nice large space to cover, so it keeps me busy.

I also do some hosting and guest hosting on some podcasts. I have actually just guest hosted two episodes of the Vergecast. I'm not entirely sure when this airs, but the last one aired this week and one of the week before. So that would have been August 19th, I think it came out. So if you haven't listened to it, go and listen to it, please. And I also co-host Twitch show Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. And I always like to talk about smart stuff when I'm on there. So, yeah, I've been covering the smart home since about 23.

13, so over a decade. And I started out with a few different publications. I wrote for Wirecutter for many years. I also covered Smart Home for Dwell magazine. And then a lot of freelance writing on different websites, wired BBC Science magazine. They have a BBC Science Focus. Where else? Oh, the Ambient. I wrote for the Ambient. I was a deputy editor there for a while. another smart home-focused website. They're actually based in the UK. So, yeah, I've been doing this for a while, but I actually started in journalism way back before that

in more sort of magazine newspaper journalism back in the old days when we used to print things on. What is that? So, yeah, that's kind of crowned. And I've now, very much in the US, been here for 10, no, 10, 20 years. So the first half of my career was in the UK and then they moved here in 2003, 2003. I need to have my resume in front of me, sorry.

Moved here in 2003. I actually moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, as you do. So that was kind of random. But it was cool, you know, actually one of the reasons I got into tech journalism was because there's a very special event that happens in Sun Valley. Have you ever heard of it? I'm racking my brain trying to think of why, yeah, no, I can't. It was just last month, actually.

It happens every year. It's called Allen & Co. And whenever you see a picture of a tech executive in a relaxed looking outfit with trees behind them and a little name tag, which you will see all the time. Like Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, they all, you'll see these pictures, all the Sam Altman, there's a picture of him going around right now that looks where he's standing in front of the Sun Valley Lodge. because they have this big tech conference.

Well, it's not just tech, but it's called the Allen & Coe conference. It's every summer in Sun Valley. It's at their lodge. And it's called the like billionaire's summer camp because all these big tech execs get invited by this. It's like the Allen & Company is like a investment banking firm, consultant company and they put this thing on. Anyway, I used to work at the local newspaper there and I would go cover the event. and before it got, it's very tightly restricted now, but you used to be able to just go sit in the coffee shop

and like I sat down next to Tim Cook one day and, you know, asked him a few questions. Oh, wow. It used to be really relaxed. And so, and I just kind of, and I used to hang out with all the journalists that came from New York to cover it. And it just got me more,

I got me more interested in covering this space. I'd always been a big fan of technology and business and stuff. So that was kind of one of the things that pushed me this way. And then when I moved to Charleston from Idaho in 2012 and decided this was the good time to kind of pursue my passion, which was actually tech and tech journalism. Very nice. So there you go. What type of technology would you say you're most interested in? Obviously, you're focused on the smart home now.

Is that kind of what you're most interested in at this point? Or is there some other field of technology that you'd be interested in covering? Yeah. So I've always been a gadget fan, like gadgets in general. not just in the smart home. And that was one of the things that got me interested in. So when I had my second child was right around the time the iPad came out. And if you have wives or have had children and when you have a baby, you spend a lot of time sitting in a chair with not much to do. And an iPad is really useful piece of technology. But when it came out, there was nothing,

when it first came out, there wasn't a lot you could do with it, if you recall. So I started listening to podcasts from the Twitter network about they had a show called iPad today just to kind of give me some ideas of what to listen, what to do with this iPad, because this was before there were really that many apps and things that you could do. So, and then I started listening to all the tech shows on the Twitter network. If you guys are familiar with Twitter, they have tons of shows. And so that really kind of got me interested in, like I said, the more, the broader side of technology, because up to that point, I've been very much. much, you know, focused on the, from the consumer angle, like, oh, which, what can these gadgets

do for me, like the iPad? And I'd have a little iPod before, and the iPhone. And my husband is very anti-technology, so it was kind of hard. I had a robe. I had one of the first Roombas. So I got a few pieces of tech in there. But yeah, I just loved gadgets, always have always loved gadgets. I think probably because I'm a journalist as well, like I worked for one of the first newspapers in the UK to have an online presence, the first newspaper to go online. So, you know, in my role as a journalist and in my career, sort of technology was really pushing things forward. So that's kind of one of the things that got me interested in it. But yeah, love gadgets, really is the short answer. I mean, who doesn't? Who doesn't love gadgets? They're all so fun,

right? It doesn't really matter what they are and what they do. It's just fun to play with them all and see what the differences are. So it's very good to hear. Even the word gadget sounds fun. so tell us about some of the gadgets do you have a lot of gadgets in your home you know you fighting with the husband you know to keep them out like how's that go yeah if if he could my husband would live in a cabin in the woods in Canada we have igloos by the way I think all of our spouses would there's got to be one in the family right yeah I mean he yeah he's he grew up out west sort of in the wilds of Nevada and he yeah He reluctantly got a smartphone about eight years ago.

Wow. Wow. Just waited for that transition, huh? Yeah, I had to buy like the last flip phone that Verizon sold at one point, you know, because he just refused. People at the store are like, do you really want this, you know? And it was really expensive too. There was that point where they became like it was so expensive to buy a non-smartphone. But yeah, my house is crazy.

Unfortunately for him, and he's, he, he, he, he, we can talk about that a little bit more, but I'm sure I know all your spouses are long suffering. So you can't emphasize. Yeah. I can't speak. Sorry. Empathize. But yes, my house. So the, the biggest, I would say one of the biggest misconceptions about tech gadget reviewers is that their houses are like perfect. Oh, no. No. No. because my house is Frankenstein mess. Because I'm constantly getting new things in, so I'm replacing or switching things out and especially being a smart home reviewer. It's different from, say, you know, reviewing laptops or phones because it's in, you know, you actually have to change the infrastructure of your house to some extent. So that, you know, it is, it's fun, but it's also, I've got to the point where it's like,

there's so much. it's kind of it can be it can be hard to kind of manage the influx I wrote an article recently about how my desk and my office and how I have it all set up and I sort of have like a flow when packages arrive like they go through staging areas in my home and I actually have a little doll house where I put some of the things like before they go into the real house because it kind of helps me visualize where things are going it's it is but it's great I mean the smart home has had such a huge surge in the last decade, really, of products and companies and people that are making products for the smart home, that there's just a lot that I can be covering. I'm sort of spoiled for choice, which is a great position to be in as a gadget journalist. But I have way too many robots in my life, I will admit that, because those things are big. They are so big, right? I mean, even like the robot lawnmower is a very large size. And we all have the segue Navamo one. Seth has a much bigger one

but like these ones are pretty big already and they make even bigger ones it's like I don't even know where I would put them in my yard you know yeah well my husband has banned me from the garage but I I have like two shelves in the garage he's got to have a safe space that sounds like that's his safe space but I do have a shed

at the back of the yard which is kind of a joint space and that is mainly boxes because obviously I return everything I test so I can't get rid of the boxes which is a real challenge When you're trying, when you have like five robot lawnmowers at your testing and like eight robot vacuums, that's like 12 boxes you have to find somewhere to store. So, yeah, that's a challenge. But this is why I live in South Carolina and not Manhattan.

I totally feel your pain because some of those devices are intrusive. Like water shut off, for example. Some of them require you to insert it right into the piping. The lawnmowers, you got to find places to put the antenna, mount it, and do all this configuration. Do you actually go through that with each one? Like, is that a lot, you spent a lot of time doing that? You read, did you guys read my robot lawner piece? Very controversial on the internet.

Yes. Loved it, though. Did you feel my hate? That's why I kind of brought that one off. Were you banned from the garage before or after that review? So I actually blame my husband for that one because he really wanted to try. those. I had sort of steered clear of robot lawmakers. I felt like they still weren't quite at a point where they were ready for the mainstream. I still feel like they're not at the point

where they're ready for the mainstream. But there was a lot more interest in them and many more coming out because all of Huscavana's patents had expired. So suddenly everyone was able to start making. That makes sense. That's why we're seeing it. Okay. And obviously now there's the new technologies like the RTK and some of them using LiDAR. So I was like, okay, I'm going to give these a try now and see how they go. My husband was so excited. But after about three months, he was done and left me to deal with it all because we really had really bad experiences with most of them for different reasons. And it wasn't always their fault. And I did try and make this clear in the piece that this was very specific to testing in my yard, which was a challenging

environment. And, you know, I have trees. I have no GPS signal. I have no cell service in my home. I have a sandy soil. And I have a dog that likes to dig holes. So like little robot lawn mower traps everywhere. And I just, they're still at the point where you have to spend more or as much or more time managing or maintaining them or babying them than you probably would mow in your lawn. But the guy that mows the lawn next to our house, he was standing outside, staring at my lawnmowers running back and forth. And he actually paid a compliment. And he said, you know, those little robots are making me look bad. And I'm like, I said, are they really?

And he's like, yeah, it does a pretty good job. I'm like, oh, okay. But we got to talk. And I was like, you know, I suspect like this isn't for everyone right now because there's still maintenance involved. I still have to go around and trim. I still have to do all this other stuff. I said, I told him, I was like, you have to watch the blades. I have to just change them out, Gavin.

They have to be changed. Well, I'm giving them another chance. I have three, four in my yard right now, new ones, like new models that are supposedly better, and I still haven't had much luck with any of them, but I'm trying. I've heard there is some, I've heard some, I've heard some interesting news coming up at ether about one model that I think will maybe solve all of my problems. So I haven't given up on the category. I just feel like it still requires a fair amount of work.

And this is one of the things about being a tech reviewer. versus maybe being really keen on technology is I have to approach these products. I mean, my readership is very techy, but surprisingly few of them are actually into the smart home or they haven't really kind of, it's people that love gadgets, more so than necessarily people that are going to turn their entire home smart. So you kind of have to approach these products as like, how is a regular person going to use this? Like not someone that's willing to spend, you know, 50% of their summer fiddling with a piece of technology to get it to work. How is this technology going to work in people's homes from the first day and work well?

Like, that's what you should be paying for. You shouldn't be some better tester for a company to make their products, their next product, better. And this is a worrying trend I've seen in the smart home is that companies releasing products that really aren't ready for prime time. and getting feedback and then releasing the new one. So I very rarely would recommend ever going with like a Gen 1 product, which... Oh, yeah, yeah. But I have seen a lot of companies doing Kickstarter projects, which seems weird,

because Kickstarter's always been the idea as like bootstrap startup. But, you know, if you're, with a Kickstarter, you're kind of entering into a bit of a contract. Like, you know you're getting a discount in exchange for maybe some sort of support. And in these cases, a lot of companies are asking their users to give them feedback. And as long as you kind of understand that you're testing a product, that's fine. But when you have to, when you're buying a product that's just not ready for prime time and it's been sold as this can do this for you.

And then it doesn't without a ton of work or troubleshooting. I feel like that's not fair. You shouldn't have to do that. And those are the kind of things I'm trying to weed out for my readers. Well, and especially for stuff that like you're just supposed to use every day, right? you know, like light switches and thermostats and all this stuff. Like, it should just work. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're putting all this experimental stuff out that's just going to annoy people and make them not want to do anything with the smart home, even though it's about convenience, you know? And you just have to, unfortunately, you have to weed through all the stuff and get the correct products. And that is very difficult with the smart home. Yes, it's a challenge, that's for sure. And, yeah, I mean, that's why we're here, though.

We're here to help everyone with that. Right. T.J. and I come from the professional side of the, the background. You know, like we, we come from the pro side, which, which has traditionally been the ones who, well, I mean, so the pro side's different because you'll pay a lot more for the product. Supposedly, it works better. It doesn't. That's the secret. However, you have a service person you can call when there's a problem to come out and fix the problem. And then they also have someone, they can pick up the phone and call to help them fix the problem. And

you're not without support in those situations, but you're not paying $35 for a dimmer, right? You're paying $130 for that same dimmer with probably fewer features, quite honestly. But that's the big difference. All that's come down downstream, come down market, I guess, and been made available to more people, and they have not improved, only slightly. No, no. And I think robot lawmowers are a good example of that, like a technology that perhaps still needs to be behind some kind of guard rails, like Husker,

for a long time, would only sell them through dealers. Like, you had to have someone come and professionally install it for you. And then it would work. And they wanted to do that for me, but they just didn't have a dealer here. And I was also like, that's also not DIY. I want to install it ourselves. Or I want to make my husband dig the trench, which I did. Oh, man.

That was the worst part of that particular model. But you know what? It actually, there's some things that worked really well on that one. Just because it was so dumb. It just bounced around and did its own thing. And I didn't really have to worry about it. But the new ones with the cameras and the GPS and the RTK, I'm noticing that they don't get all the way to the edges.

And then when the grass starts to go around the edges, they start backing off and getting further and further away until you have this big piece of grass next to your fence. Yeah. So it looks funny out there right now. And in Florida, that's like a day or two's worth of, I'm not complaining about the 10 or 20 minutes it takes to go weed eat the lawn every week now. Yeah, that's saving you time.

And that's ultimately, I think, there's, you know, there's two great things about smart gadgets. One is time saving and the other is some kind of energy or money savings. Then I suppose the third is ambience. Like, it's fun and cool, like lighting. But if you get smart gadgets that save you time or money are, you know, really have a lot of value. And I think, I feel like robot longers are getting there, but they're not there yet. Not quite there yet, yeah. I'd agree. I'd agree. But, I mean, it also depends on how big of the lawn is and how well they, I mean, since my lawn is a decent size in the backyard, and it's on a huge hill. So, like, I'm glad that I don't have to go out there and mess with that anymore. I still do, like, this week, I had to go out and mow because I noticed that it missed some spots. And as the grass gets higher, it's like, no, I can't, I can't mow that. And it walks away. So some of the grass had gotten a little bit higher than it should have been. I had to go knock it down. This is the other issue in the smart home is everyone's home is different.

Everyone's garden is different. There's just not this uniformity, and this makes it a real challenge for a lot of products, especially things that are supposed to be autonomous in your home, like robots and lawn mowers, robot vacuums, other. We haven't got too many autonomous things yet, but we're getting more and more. We're seeing more. This is why the ring always home cam still hasn't launched from what I've understood. Literally. still literally

I'm taking bets if we'll see it this year or this is the CES so again? Yeah I think so with Jamie back I think we will see it but yeah

they you know they said it struggles with ceiling fans and mirrors oh boy mirrors yeah so how much time do you give for your reviews

like that's one of the problems I have is I don't know at what point I'm comfortable to give my honest review about it. So I usually just talk casually about it. But when you're doing it, do you give it a number of months? How do you know when it's time now I'm ready to write about it? Yeah, that one's always a tricky, a tricky sort of give and take, especially depending on how much time we've been given, say, price. So sometimes we'll get products before they launch. Sometimes we'll have, you know,

products that come out. I won't get them until a while after they've launched. So every product I approach slightly differently, especially the category-wise is sort of one of the keys. If I don't have a long time, I will just do something like a hands-on. So I will just, you know, if I've only had a week or two with a product, I won't necessarily give it like a scored review. I'll sort of just do like initial impressions, especially with, as we've got so many products coming out and people really want some kind of feedback on them. So I, you know, I feel like that's a bit of a rediservice to just sort of like, well,

these are my initial impressions. then, you know, then try and then I'll try and do like a deeper dive later. So many products in my home, I feel like I need to test for months, really, to make sure, especially, you know, to make sure that they're going to work well for the long run. Because we're spending a lot of money on some of these products. And if I've only spent a couple of weeks with it, I'm not necessarily getting the full experience and especially things like troubleshooting. Because with the smart home connectivity, how they work with.

other systems. You know, I've had, I've been working with a lot of matter products and like for a couple of weeks, everything will be fine and I might might make a write a review and say it worked really well. And then, you know, like two weeks later, it drops off. So there's this is sort of fine balance between kind of getting the information out there. People want to know about these new products and then also doing like long term testing. So I do some buying guides. So what I try and do is like when a product first comes out, if it's new and exciting, I'll do the hands-on, but then in the buying guides, which I sort of update regularly, I'll do sort of the more longer-term testing, like I've tested this doorlock for six months, and then add more context and thoughts throughout and

update those over the months. So those I keep updated to sort of, for that longer-term testing, because especially with, as I said, as with the home, those are products that, you know, you find things change. They get, sometimes they get better as well. That's the other great thing about smart technology is you get these updates. Like I tested the robot vacuum with the arm, the Saros Z70, and that was really useless to begin with. And I haven't yet retested it, but that's like on my list now to test again after six

months because they had all these updates. They planned and they said it was going to get better. So this is also why my house is. Frankenstein mess though because I don't necessarily just test it and send it back because they'll be like oh we've got updates coming so you need to keep it so yeah it's it's a challenge things like thermostats like things like going to be in your home for a long time I will test for a long time but then you know security cameras those I would tend to just sort of maybe and video doorbells I'll tend to do those a little quicker because they all kind of connect

they have similar functions and features. But every category has a slightly different approach, I guess, is the short answer there. I'm glad you brought a matter, because it seems to be a trend in the industry. It's been a talking point for a while. You guys think it's just a trend? I don't. I honestly think it has more legs than most people. I think it's misunderstood as to what it actually is.

It's a marketing thing, not not. so much a, it's a technology thing, but it's really a marketing thing. Like, it, it was basically made to get products on the shelf with a sticker on it that didn't have four other stickers along like Google, Amazon, Apple, you know, all these other things on it that no one could figure out and you didn't really know, you thought you were going to get locked into an ecosystem. And so, like, I think it made a lot of sense for them to push forward with something that standardizes on how, once the product sold, how it gets into your house and gets set up and all that. But I think as an industry or as a consumer, I think it was presented in a way like

this solves everything. And then it kind of like stubbed their toe launching, you know, getting it out. So it didn't have a great thing. But like now, well, I guess how do you think it's been progressing so far? Like what do you what do you see matter doing these days? Do you see it mattering yet? That's always a joke, right? It's such a good joke. It never ends. Never ends. I know. So I do think it is important for the smart home. I think it was necessary. I agree that the marketing side has not lived up to its potential, which is generally kind of what happens with marketing. That's in tech, right? That's tech in general. And we see that a lot in tech. Exactly. There's this very big splash. This is what it's all about. Get the excitement going. Then the reality kind of sets in. And there's what we need to do. to make this work. But I think in many ways that was necessary

to convince all of the companies to get on board. We kind of needed that flywheel consumer pressure to the companies because we saw a lot of resistance from some companies early on. We saw companies taking a while to adopt,

but now suddenly really going for it, like IKEA, just suddenly not everything is now going to be matter over thread. And that's a big step for the standard. So I think for the early adopters for the people who like us who cover all of this and keep close tabs on it, Matt has been super frustrating and annoying. And like we just want it all to work now. But also from watching the sort of the industry inside like how the companies are adopting this and how the platforms are adopting this, this was always going to be a slow burn because you're moving

mountains, really. It is a huge effort to get all of these companies to work together from the platforms to the manufacturers. And I think a lot of people have been burned along the way. But the ultimate technology here, the local connectivity between every device that you can bring into your home, being able to have things communicate locally in your home without cloud dependency is just something that the smart home needed. We relying on internet connected devices in our smart home, which is what the DIY smart home has done for the last two decades, has not gone well. Right. Right. And as installers, professional installers, you know this. You need local, you know, everything has to work within the home easily so that.

that when you flip that light switch metaphorically in your smart home, it just works. It's not a metaphor. That's what we're replacing. It's got to work the exact same way. Yes. Yes. It has to do that. And that's what that infrastructure is what matter brings. And that is what we need. And that's why I've been so bullish on it because I've seen that. I mean, I said I've been covering the smart home since 2012, 2013 with all the internet cloud connected. What happened was that companies were like, oh, let's embrace things. internet of things. Great, but it's so easy if we can do this all in the cloud. You know, there were local protocols they could have used, but those were expensive. They meant hubs.

They were complicated. Let's just do it all in the cloud. It'll be easy. It also means dealing with everybody's different network, the horrible ISP router they have. Yeah, I, that's, T.J. and I know that that's our, that's our nightmares. So, like, absolutely. And then a lot of them were like, oh, I don't like this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. And the clouds would go away and shut it down. Yeah. And then consumers are left with paperweights. that they've spent money on and that, you know, like, what, what is this? Why would I do this? So this is why we need something that the industry gets around and understands and pushes towards. Whether it's going to keep going forward, I don't know. I mean, I do have worries and

concerns. We just, you know, because one of your points earlier, people don't really know what it is. Do they need to know, is my question right now? Like, that's the, that's the, that's, it's so confusing. That's kind of like my second question. Do you think anybody cares? Like, do you think any consumer goes out to the, to the spy right now and says, oh, it's a matter thing? Yeah. I need to have that. Or do they, or is it just a tech standard just like, um, spouting off IAE, no, I don't know, I triple E 80211 B, A, C in whatever, you know, like no one. And then they had to rebrand that Wi-Fi, right? So like, yeah. What, well, do you think anybody cares about that? I, right now, no. I think in a way we do, I think we do need people to know what.

matter is just in the way that they know what Wi-Fi is and what Bluetooth is. But only once it gets to the point that matter actually delivers on what it's promised, which as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have shown us, can take a very long time to do. I mean, I remember when Wi-Fi did not work the way it works today. Oh, I do, too. Absolutely. Five feet away and it drops. Like, oh, my gosh.

So, but we need, it needs to become a symbol for, okay, I want to connect things in my home, not just my laptop and not just my phone. It's, I need, I want smart lighting. I want a smart fridge. I want a robot lawnmower and I want it all to work together. And if it has, if it works with matter, that means it will. That's where it needs to be. That's, you know, but we're not, the problem today is it's still so fragmented and confusing and all the platforms have different levels of support. But yeah, I do think people need to know, and they will know what it is, but just maybe not yet because if you learn about it today, it's still too confusing. And that has been, you know, back to my point about companies rolling out products before

they're finished. I mean, matter has been rolled out before it was really finished in order to, for them to learn and get and figure it out and make it better because they couldn't really, and we couldn't really be doing it all in a lab because there's what 500 companies all working together. So we're all their test guinea picks for now, which, you know, is frustrating, for sure. And whether it'll actually ever work, who knows? I mean, I've had a better experience with matter and thread products recently. I don't know if you guys have.

It's gotten better. It's gotten better. Yeah. And once they fix a thread border route to issue, I think that should make life a little easier. And there are more products coming out, which I think is, you know, another that's been, I mean, almost every product now these days. that is released seems to work with matter. Mainly over Wi-Fi, though. I want to see more thread.

Agreed with that. We all do, yeah. Exactly. So talking about the cloud servers shutting down and products not working, kind of brings up an interesting question. We've talked about this many times on the show about, I think that products basically need to have an expiration date. Yeah.

That whenever they're released, they tell you, you know, this product's going to last, you know, seven to ten years or whatever. It's kind of like what we do with phones now, right? If we buy a phone, we have an idea of how long it's going to get OS updates and security updates before we buy it at this point. Yeah. Do you think something like that needs to exist in the IoT or the smart home space? Oh, yeah, for sure. And I've written about this a few times.

And my old friend and colleague who's no longer in the space, but Stacey Higginbotham, who writes about this, has been sort of crusading for this. And now that she's working through consumer reports, she's actually crusading for this. in legal routes because, yes, it's like phones. I mean, we're starting to see it with phones that you know how long your smartphone is going to get supported and security updates. We totally need that for devices in our homes because we see this backlash when things happen like Nest is shutting down support for its oldest thermostats, which, you know, you can understand it's for, as a consumer, I would be very frustrated.

But from a technology standpoint, you can see, I mean, the thing is, 11 or 12 years old now, it's hard for them to keep supporting it. I think they could maybe, there are things they could have done differently for sure. But technology, you know, when the flip side of the smart home, the flip side of connectivity and all the great advantage of advantages that you get from technology is that it is not going to last forever. It's not your grandmother's thermostat. Those just don't exist anymore. It's sad. I would love a device in my home that is going to last for four decades, but that's just not the way technology works today,

washing machines, fridges. They've all got shorter lifespans, but they do so much more than they used to. You know, the advances in technology, you know, it's a double-edged sword.

But that means, I think, yes, we need, I mean, and we're getting that with the security labeling, what's that thing called, that the government's doing? It doesn't have an expiration date. Oh, yeah.

The IOT security label. Yeah. But I think, I mean, it's weak source because it's not required. But again, once people start looking for it, you'll start to see more companies using it because it will be a selling point. And being able to understand that this thermostat that I'm buying for $250 a day will only last 10 years gives me, you know, okay, I can do the math in my head. Is it worth it? I, you know, that's something I, I should be given that knowledge. I mean, we have it with smoke alarms.

Like, you know that today that smoke alarms will only last 10 years because they've been mandated that way. But, yeah, I agree. You should, we should have, we should have expiration dates. Yeah. It sounds awful. It's kind of like raising taxes. Nobody wants to do it, but we kind of have to do it sometimes.

Otherwise, because it's given the smart home such a bad name because of when products have been phased out. and many times companies have done it when they I don't think they necessarily needed to and they shouldn't be an out for them to like oh we don't want to use this we don't want to support this anymore we're going to give it an expiration date

this needs to be something that sort of built into the product from the beginning like we understand that this is how and it doesn't have to mean at 10 years you cut it off but it's like we promise at least to do it for 10 years like remote connection basically or updates or whatever it is and then have you have to leave. I have to leave, so I'm going to jump off. You guys keep doing your thing, though. But it was very nice to meet you, and I will see you in January, sounds like. Yes, I'm excited.

All right. Well, I think we're all kind of run up against the time here, but we, we, we, sorry, I talk too much. No, no, no, no worries. It's great, because it's less editing I have to do. There was, there's a bit a couple of, like, recent, I'm not going to say recent, but recent talks over in the UK and Europe, the European Union from legislation. one of them was more interesting along the lines of really holding software vendors to task on the Yula agreements and making sure that you have some skin in the game outside of that Yula

and you can't just write everything off by saying this is software and has no warranty as is. So I'll be curious to see how all that plays out because I don't think we're going to do here anything in the States, but if it's Europe and possibly California, because they're kind of their own world, they can kind of, between those two,

they can kind of mandate what the rest of those end up doing. Yeah, and I was just about to say before TJ dropped off that, like, if you are going to have an end of software support date, which I think people should know about, you also should have an option

for how you can connect and still control that device locally in your home, which is what would, you know, these kind of the Yula ideas as well. Like if we have, okay, I may not be able to use it in the way that I originally did, but it will still function

as a device to control my thermostat or to control, you know, my fridge will still keep my food cold. It's not going to stop being a fridge. It's just going to stop having this, the connectivity. And then on the flip side of that, you know, how to disconnect it from the internet because you don't want it to then continue being potentially insecure. So there's got to be really easy ways for consumers to deactivate, decommission these devices from the internet of things, but still be able to use them in their home. And that's, and, you know, but who, this is, this has to be something that comes from legislation.

It's just not something that companies are going to do on their own. So as you say, I think the chances have seen this in the US anytime sooner. I think the best thing you can do is push off the consumer, like the consumer, like the computer Wi-Fi network. Get off that, get on another network like thread. Right. This is where, this is obviously where matter's going to come in because, yeah, you, these devices could keep working happily along in your home on matter,

even if they're no longer talking to the mothership. Right. You can't do that with things like cameras and routers, but those tend to be the big ones right now. But you can do that with all the sensors they keep putting on Wi-Fi for no reason. So, yeah, I would gladly see. It would be nice to see more things move over to that network. Yeah.

We are kind of running up in the time, but we do want a couple fun questions here. So we were to talk again maybe in like five years from now. What do you think the biggest change in the way people are experiencing smart homes is going to be? What do you see? What's in the crystal ball that you have over there? Where can you see coming? Well, I think there's two big trends in the smart home that are going to be transformational within the next five years. One is AI.

I was going to say, I know that one. Okay. The next one. Other is energy management. Oh, okay. I do think that that is going to be the biggest driver for smart home adoption. Like we said, I mentioned at the beginning, like two of the best reasons to have smart devices of convenience and money savings, cost savings. And just with the instability of our grid and the, you know, a number of natural disasters and that, you know, everyone in the country faces now on a monthly basis.

I live in South Carolina. and we just had what a Category 5 hurricane like brush the shore. Yeah. There's just a real focus on energy independence for people, you know, solar panels, energy management, battery power, EVs, not just for environmental benefits, which obviously they have, but also for having control of your own energy. I think it's really important. And even if you're not going to kit out your home to supply its own energy, just being

aware of how your home uses energy and being able to lower costs by, you know, right now, it's really complicated. Like, you can use a platform like Home Assistant or Samsung Energy and you can plug all your stuff in and you can try and kind of monitor it and manage it. But it's a full-time job. I think with AI, with artificial intelligence, with algorithms, really, more advanced algorithms that companies are able to, you know, platforms and companies, manufacturers of your appliances and devices in your home are able to produce so that your home can kind of manage

itself so that, you know, it knows when half the house is empty and it can reduce the energy in that half of the house. It knows that it's nighttime and it can start running your dishwasher and your tumble dryers at night when perhaps you're on time of use rates. So it can manage. all of that for you without you having to do any of it. There's many pieces and parts that need to come together to make that happen. And I think we're getting all of those pieces and parts now. And in five, maybe 10 years, that's going to be a much more plug and play solution for people than it is today. And that's compelling for people because it's like, it's not just, oh, look, I can turn my lights on with my voice. It's, oh, look, you can save $200 a month on

electricity. And that hit me because I just installed the Emporia of View, so I have a visual of every circuit in my house. And the first thing I found out was how much my server rack costs me. So that one I kind of hid. But the pool pump, I found out the pool pump, if I turn off the pool pump between certain times, I save $1.50 a day, just alone with that. So that now adds up. That's a latte a week. Yeah. Unless you go to Starbucks, then that's a latte every three weeks. So that's interesting. And in terms of the smart home, what is a product that you wish existed

but hasn't even been invented yet? Like, what's a dream product to you? That's a really tough one. There are so many. And when it works, I think. What it works? I think that's a valid answer, though. Based on our conversation, yeah.

I do want computer. I want Star Trek's computers. Ah, yes, yes. That's the dream, you know. And then this goes to what I was saying about the energy management too. Like, I want the device, the sentient being, I don't know, the robot, the, or the, whether it's a physical robot or it's like a robot in my, in the speakers.

I want something that I can just talk to and that will manage my home for me. And I feel like that's, again, we're getting there. Again, it's going to take a long time. But that was the original intent for like Alexa. That was like the North Star that Amazon had when they first started with the voice assistants. And I feel like voice assistants were at a real tipping point right now. They could go, it could all go terribly wrong, however. But I want a local device control that will, I don't necessarily need to know the, you know, the latest football schools.

I kind of want, I just want my home to run like computer. and like Star Trek like it runs the enterprise I wanted to run my home that way and I can just say you know just bark commands at it like Captain Picard you know I have the accents I feel I feel like we're getting

oh gray we're getting closer to that than I think I mean the the way the LLMs work they're getting smaller and smaller and then like you said all these sensors that are going to come on have to be online for us to

know the energy management's, you know, your house has got to be loaded up with sensors for computer to work, right? Because there's, yeah, that, that ship had sensors and all sorts of stuff and every, and it was plugged in everything. And it could tell the captain what he wanted or, you know, it was plugged into the automated food dispenser. And, and yeah, it could make our old, great, oh, great tea. But, but it's all got to be there first. Yeah, that's, we don't have that yet. I think that's the next big leap, really, in the smart home is the, there's the sensing technology, because I don't think little white PIR sensors all over the home is really the solution. You know, RF sensing is probably going to be big, a millimeter wave, obviously with

very specifics, but not in, again, not little white boxes around the house. There's got to be, and that's a big, that's an infrastructure issue. That's a big change. So that's again, going to take a while, I mean, there's, but the potential that, like you say, all the pieces and parts, it's just how it's all going to come together. So, but I don't, I'm hoping it'll be in five years, because I'll still be able to enjoy it. Exactly. But right now, none of that works for me in my house. Yeah, well, you and me both. Um, well, Jen, thanks so much for taking time today to come to talk with this. Do you have anything exciting coming up? Any events coming up that you're excited about?

Well, yeah, I'm heading to Berlin in 2-2 weeks, so I will be at the IFA Tech Fest Conference, and that actually is a festival. They have, like, live music. Oh, nice. It's really fun. And there'll be lots of fun stuff coming out of that. So keep an eye on my articles on The Verge and hopefully some videos, but it's sort of like a pre-CES appetizer.

There's always a lot of fun stuff. So, yeah, I've been, I've got a. you know, a few pre- sneak peeks already, and there's some really cool stuff. Especially in the robot lawn space. Just to bring it all the way back around to my favorite topic. It's an evergreen topic. Evergreen. And more puns.

And then we mentioned The Verge, but where should our listeners head on over to find more of your latest work? Where can they follow you? So I'm also, well, Theverge.com, we actually have a new follow feature if you haven't seen it, which is really fun. And if you don't want to read all the other boring stuff that people just want to read my stuff, you can just click plus next to my name and go and just hit follow and you'll just see everything I've written and no one else. Perfect, perfect. But you can follow all topics like smart homes, CES, IFA, and just get your own personalized feed on the verge.com.

I'm also on Blue Sky at JP2E and then the threads at Smart Home. Mama, if you want to connect with me on the socials. So, yes. And like said, go listen to the Vergecast. Let me know what you think. Lots of robot talk. You want more robot talk. And thread.

We did a deep dive with thread. So that was, that's for the nerds. That was for the real nerds. Very good. So, yeah. And it was fun to chat with you guys and appreciate you inviting me on. Thanks for being here. Yes.

Thank you very much. All right. Well, that is our interview. Jennifer Patterson Dewey. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really did enjoy talking with her and like I said, we talked for quite a bit after. And I almost spent way too much money on a tennis ball thingy. I don't have a tennis racket, but like, it would have been so much fun to just have that. Like, I mean, you don't have one because you don't have this robot, obviously. Exactly. I would have gone out and bought the tennis racket.

I would have ordered the tennis racket. It would have been here before that robot got here for sure. It's 2025. What are you going to do to talk to other people so you can play tennis with them? It makes no sense. No, come on. If you had that and you went to the tennis court, I don't know if you know about like Sarasota and like the people that are here. I don't know. Okay. Well, I, you would be like king for the day. Like, what is this? All right. Uh, that's going to wrap up the show today. We do want to thank everyone for listening to show, but especially those who are able to support the show through our patron page. If you don't know of the Patreon page, head on over to humtech.com slash support to learn how you can support the show for

as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you to invite over to the private Slackchat the hub where you and Everyone else can go in there and get previews on picks of the week. This time of year, there's all sorts of stuff going on. Domains. Domains. If you want to buy a domain off, TJ, he's had a pretty good one. And, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff going in there.

So make sure you stop on by if you are a patron and say hi. That's going to wrap up to the show this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. And I will eventually edit this. I promise. Yeah, maybe.