HomeTech.fm - Episode 560 - Sidewalks, SwitchBots, and Sonos Zones

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

On this week’s show: [Gavin as a Service](https://www.youtube.com/@GavinAsAService) officially launches on YouTube and we have the exclusive! Sonos drops a new multi-zone Amp while Sony seems ready to drop the whole TV business. Amazon Sidewalk quietly infects Canada. ESPHome gets Control4 support, SwitchBot launches an AI hub with Home Assistant inside, and Zooz Z-Wave joins Apollo’s party. Seth tests drives a new AI assistant, TJ is all in again with Sonos (not really), a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 30th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huggleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Cappell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, podcast all about home technology, home animation, and frozen iguanas. Because it is, basically, they're frozen everywhere right now, I think.

I saw the temperature of Florida today. You sent it to us. You're like negative 1 Celsius. Well, okay, so that's the low. What is that in freedom units? Uh, 29 or 30 somewhere in there. Yeah. That's crazy.

That is pretty cold. That's the wind chill too. And it's factored in on that. Yeah, but you must be like dying down there. We are. I mean, I mean, there's no way. Everybody's walking around in very poofy coats right now.

Aguanas are falling out of trees. I know what happens in Florida when it gets cold. Wait, wait. I went to the gym today and like, I walked in. Like, you know, when you're leaving, they have like all these people like getting stuff out of the lockers and they're putting on these like puffer jackets. And I'm like, I, I, I'm not.

hot, but there's no way I could go out. I could put a jacket on and cover this, like, sweat up. Like, I'm just not going to, I'm just going to walk to my car and dry off. This is, there's no way I can do that. I guess people don't sweat as much as I do. It just was funny. I'm like, how can you wear that? Like, it's not that cold. It's like 50 degrees or 40. I think it's like 42 at the time. So, yeah, Gavin, that's, uh, let's see, 42F2C. That's, uh, five. It's five degrees. Oh, that's still chilly, though. Yeah. Yeah. And it does get chilly here because we do have a lot of humidity in the air all the time because of the ocean. So it's chilly. Yeah. So I think last week we talked, Seth, I haven't listened to last week's

episode. I'm sure you said this, though. You were telling me, you were telling me how cold and how much snow we were going to get. And I didn't believe you because they always say we're going to get a lot of snow, right? They're always like, oh my gosh, you know, tonight it's going to snow like two inches. And then tonight happens and we don't get any snow. That happens all the time in It's a drill high. I don't know what it is. I've heard rumors that there's like a weird mountain that interferes with our weather. I don't believe that because we don't really have mountains around here.

But, you know, it sounds like a good theory, you know? There used to be a mountain. They just tore it down to put the neighborhood up or something. Well, we have something called like Mad River Mountain. It's like, people go like sledding and stuff. It's more of like a giant hill. But yeah, whatever. We don't talk about that.

But you were talking and you're like, oh, no, I've seen the weather. It says you're going to get a lot of snow. It's going to be cold. And I was like, I don't believe it. But wouldn't you know it that we got record snowfall this weekend Starting at like 8 p.m. on Saturday night It just snowed literally from 8 p.m. until like 8 p.m. the next day. Wow. And then it was snowed again today In my backyard I confirmed that I had 10 inches of snow and that's in like the backyard closest to the house

It's an area that was not touched at all But the drifts were easily like 12 to 15 inches tall If you have not seen I'm sure sure some of our listeners are, are part of that winter storm. Uh, but we got a ridiculous amount of snow where we did not leave the house for basically like a day and a half because we just, we literally could not. Uh, the plow did not touch our street until, I think like Monday morning.

So we just, we physically could not get out of our house. So, uh, did you get any snow up there, Gavin? And you guys been pretty temp. Yeah. Are you one of those type of people that waits for the snow to finish and then go shovels? So typically, yes. But when it's this. this much snow, like, I was out there every, like, three hours.

Because, like, I was like, if I don't do this every so often, it is going to suck to shovel, like, 12 inches of snow. Yes. And so I would go out there with, like, the shovel. And I would just do a little bit every time. It's like, I'm like, like, it's going to keep snow. And I don't really, like, need to do everything. But I would, like, clear the driveway and the porch and stuff like that.

So that way, by the time I got to Monday, like, it wasn't as bad. Yeah. So that's pretty much how we handled it. We got record snow to, record one day snow. I mean, some places hit 60 centimeters and they're still getting more. But what we did was went out before the football game started and did our first round. Then in between the games, did our second round. And then after the games, it's our final round.

And it really wasn't that bad when you did it that way. Like if you waited until the end and then started, I could see you struggling. But because we broke it up, it was so much easier to deal with. We made a day out of it still. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. And I think I do want to invest in a snowblower just because we have a lot of like elderly people and stuff around us. And it would be nice just to go like hit up all the sidewalks and stuff and be done with it. So I think, uh, I think a lot of people prepared for this storm by buying a snowblower.

And what I'm hoping is that the next couple weeks, uh, they become very cheap on Facebook marketplace. So I'm going to try to pick one up. And then it won't snow for the next like five years because that's what happens when you buy a snowblower. I've been told. Oh, do what I did it. And just get together with a few names. neighbors and say, hey, let's share the snowblower. I mean, because we only use it so many times in the year.

So, I mean, who cares if you do all three driveways, right? So we split our snowblower. I stored in my garage and when it's time to go. I'm like, yeah, come grab it. And they grab it and they go, do their driveway. And it costs us what? We each paid like $300 for the snowblower. You got that, you got that communal thing up in Canada that we don't have in America.

We're so nice to each other up here, you know. Oh, I sold that on Marketplace six months ago. Sorry, DJ. Yeah, I feel like I could do that with a couple of my neighbors. So I might try to hit them up and do that because that was my first thought, too, is it was like, you know, it'd be nice if it just a couple of us got together. We bought like a $500 snowblower. We don't need anything fancy.

Just buy like a decent one and just split it. Well, the best is when you're out there snowblower and you see that one neighbor that turned down the idea, looking at you, like, try to catch your eyes so that you can come and do their driveway you didn't help to. You're like, nope, you didn't want in on the snowblower. No, no. And you just finish your driveway and go back inside. No, we actually still go and help them still. Yeah, that's what you do.

Yeah, that's what good neighbors do, right? Yeah. Here we help each other shovel the iguanas out of the driveway, I guess. So, yeah. That's good. Yeah. You don't show each other over that? We got to shoot the iguanas first, right?

Run out of bullets because you shut all the iguanas. Yeah, exactly. Let's see. Well, there's actually some news this week. some new products that have even been announced outside of the CS land. So we've got a number of home take headlines. So what do you guys say? We jump right in.

Let's do it. Let's do it. I just want to start by saying I'm going to buy one of these products we're going to talk about tonight. And I bet you can't guess which one it does. Put in your bets. I eliminated the Sonos already. I was trying to trick, yeah. All right.

Well, Sonos has introduced a multi- the output amplifier. Finally, 15, 20, I don't know, 15 years later, I guess. It basically, think of the solo sampe and give it eight outputs at 125 watts per channel at 8 ounce. It supports up to four independent zones, basically, powering up to 24 speakers, if you're doing architectural speakers, that kind of thing. We don't know pricing on this thing. They've got a nice little render video of it that they've kind of like been floating around. We'll put a link over to CEP Pro. It comes in a

one and a half U chassis, which is nice. It means it'll fit in a two U rack mount, not any of these strange Middle Atlantic rack mount things you had to do with the other ones. Which I think those were,

the Sonos amps were what, two RUs, at least? Yeah, and then like, two and a half, two and a quarter. And then the, the rack piece itself was like $300 dealer cost. I mean, so you only do it on like really nice jobs. Right.

So this will be nice. Four Zone audio amp. We were taking bets on pricing. I guess we do need to have a friendly wager on this one. Oh, yeah. We've got it. We have no choice. So the Sonos, it's called the Sonos Amp Multi,

because why wouldn't they call it the Multi Room Amp? But, you know, whatever, it's Sony. Sonos. Multi. And we're going to put TJ. Let's let me grab our table out of here. TJ, how much do you think this is 2650? Bob.

$2,6.50. Gavin, you have to specify U.S. dollars or Canadian dollars? Converting at what rate, though. Oh, yeah, the dollar is falling quite a bit, right now. No, I like the $2,99. $29.99? That's freedom dollars, I would assume, because it'd be like $8,000 Canadian. Yeah, in U.S. I like that. I like that, but that made sense because you got the four amps in there. So you're saying because it's, what, I think those are like $800.

$100 amps right now for the Sonos, the Sonas amp, are they more? Eight or $900, somewhere in there. And you're saying times four. Yeah, they're $800 American. I think they're $1,000 Canadian. Yeah. So that's your American price. I'll put a little flag next to it for you.

Okay. Freedom dollar. Yeah. And then. What's your guess, Seth? Those are really good guesses, actually. I'll say $3,500. I think it's going to be more.

I think it's Sonos. I think, no, it's Sonos. Yeah. They'll do it just to spite you. They'll be shocked when someone buys one. Yeah, yeah. We should do like a prop bet on the rack mount. How much that piece is going to cost?

It's not going to come with it. You know that. Oh, no, it says optional, so. Which is fine. That's whatever. So we got $2,000. They kind of just built the rack mount into the product, but whatever, you know. It's not like it's a professional product or anything.

It's not meant for integrators. That's what I just don't get because the, size and shape of it and everything, right? Where else would you put it? Right. It looks like it's just made strictly for a rack. Did Iraq care's on it, call it a day, yeah. Yeah. Do the ubiquity model, you know?

Oh, yeah. Put it on the side. Like, just put them on the side. You screw them on if you want them or you don't. Which is like what other professional AV solutions already do anyway, so. It's could be pretty heavy, though. I don't know. It's got G-N-A-N, whatever that is.

Yeah. Or G-A-N? Yeah. I've only ever heard of that in chargers. It's like a power supply thing. anchor chargers and stuff like that. I've never heard of it at anything else. Yeah.

Well, anchor marketing, I think. We will have to, uh, we have to see, I'm going to put this under our friendly wager section here. Honestly, this is pretty interesting though. I, like Seth kind of alluded to, like dealers have been asking for this literally forever. Um, and, and almost every other company that makes like an amplifier kind of like this makes a multi-channel amplifier.

Yeah. Um, so it's not like a, it's not like a totally crazy concept. It's not something that's out of the ordinary. This is a product that exists. that exist in other manufacturers, but Sonos has never done it. The questionable things that I don't like about this myself, and I'm probably not going to sell on A,

so my opinion probably doesn't really matter. The lack of HCMI, I think, is the biggest drawback because it would be nice to connect this to a TV and then have the TV audio go throughout all of those zones. And then that would be your introduction to have the TV audio go to other Sonos speakers as well. That's my biggest drawback for this. product and no sub output as far as I can tell either.

Hmm. So what's the input? The input, I think, is a digital or RCA. So, I mean, worst case scenario, you can get like an HGMI to RCA converter or something on what they call those audio extractors. Like a little extractor thing. Yeah. You know, and fix all of that.

So I mean. Well, not to get a sublifer, though. Yeah, for a sublifer. Yeah. Yeah, you can't do anything to get a sublifer. I mean, you can. But they're going to have you buy their sublifer at that point, which I guess makes sense because they're like in ceiling speakers or whatever.

So, I mean, that's, that's kind of a whatever. point. But the lack of HCMI, I think, is a big issue with this. I like the video where it has like the little holes on top of it and it has like the heat waves coming out of it. It's like a hot dog grill. Like you could put a hot dog on there. It's circling away. Like it's passively cool. There's no fans or anything. I guess the other answer is like that. That's how they want you to know that it's a true professional product is that it'll be very hot. Yeah. Well, we'll have to see. This is an amp is expected to be shown and debuted at the ISE 2026. show there in Barcelona. So just a question. Like, I feel like this product came out because

people were asking for something like this and they finally listened to them. Asking. We've been begging for you. Yeah, I was saying, they've been asking for so long. I know. Gave up on it. Is there another product that people have been asking for that, you know, they may release one day? Headphones? Oh, right. No, we already said that. My bad. We got that. We've been past that. I'm on my second pair. So I think in the past our biggest ask was going to be like an outdoor speaker. I think they kind of have that covered with some of the... The move and roam.

Yeah, the move and rome's now. Like a portable outdoor speaker or like mounted outdoor speakers? Because they kind of did it with so dense, right? I think it was... Yeah. Yeah. But that's like a passive speaker that's hooked up to the amplifier. It'd be nice to have like an actual outdoor rate at.

speaker. Oh. Yeah. And then I think, I think definitely the multi-channel amplifiers were the, the, the most requested thing from any integrator who's ever, like day one,

you sonos, oh, that's cool. But do I really have to have a rack full of these amplifiers? Like, this is insane. Yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to think, like, in a lot of these bigger houses,

you could have, like, eight to 20 amplifiers easily. And, like, that takes literally a whole rack by itself. It's just having sonos amps. You max out at 32 Sonos devices. Ask me how I know. Yeah.

You can't have any more than 32 in the thing. Yeah, that's, it's good to see. And I think, yeah, TJ, I think you're right. They did miss. This would be perfect for even a smaller home that had, because we used to do a lot of these where you had like, you'd call it four zones of audio, but one of them would be a surround zone,

and you would use the amplifier for the rear channel to speakers. So that would be perfect to tie in here. And maybe you can still do it. Maybe you still be able to do it. that way with like one of their sound bars and the subulfur and then uh and still use it um use it that way got to go wireless sub though i i hope so actually i didn't even think about that but if you could not use each one of these zones as a surround sound zone in a different area that would be a big mess as well yeah yeah but i think most of the homes that that we had here it was

it was designed we would design it would be packages packages with builders like you'd be wired for four rooms terminate we can terminate put speakers in which ones you want um this be perfect surround. This would be perfect for Lanai, you know, that kind of thing. If you want some of the master bed. And you just, you know, you put the, you have like a base price on it at that point, right? Sonos. Now, if it's, it just depends on the, uh, the price of this thing. If it is as much

as, uh, $4,000 for this thing, it's not going to sell as much. But if it's, if it's a good price and it makes sense, um, that it'll be able to be sold easily into those projects. So anyway, um, that's Sonos. To give you an idea on like space savings, this, this, uh, rack, uh, mount thing we're talking about for the Sonos amplifiers. It holds for the default one. I think they have a different one as well, like a two U or something like that. But the default one is four RU. So it's a four U unit. If you had a 32 zone

Sonos amplifier, it would literally take up 32 U's of rack space. Yeah. Like that's like the crazy amount of like space savings you would get with something like this. That's why people have been asking for forever because they just, they take up so much space. Um, that it, like if you had a house like that, it would take it. And obviously not everybody has a house like. that. But could you imagine to spend like an extra $1,000 on the rack just to hold the speakers? I had to your house. That'd be crazy.

I had to bring it to you. When I was building racks, the little black Sonos things were not out. It was the white ones and those were bigger. Oh, yeah. You would have a lot more than 32. I mean, you couldn't use all of them that way. But you would because you'd have surround zones. Like you

have 32 devices that you can pop into a Sonos system and if you fill that up, it fills up pretty quickly. So, yeah, especially, like, do sound bars in certain rooms. You start using more. So anyway, good for Sonos for coming out with a new product. It's, I will say this one's better than more exciting to me than the headphones, but

this one doesn't suck so far, so keep it up. Doesn't look bad. Yeah, we'll see what happens. Maybe it'll work better than the, it exists with the app. No, probably not. It's not going to work with the app. All right. Another big news here.

The industry has gone crazy because it looks like Sony has signed a memorand of understanding with China's TCL for a strategic partnership in home entertainment. But it's kind of a vague announcement and we don't really know what it means. But here's the deal. TCO is going to hold 51% of a new joint venture that takes over Sony's TV and audio business, including the Bravia brand. Sony retains 49% making this effectively a TCL controlled entity at this point. it's not finalized it's coming but it's expected that there's going to be a binding agreement by March 2026 and TCL may be potentially taking over the Sony Bravia TV business sometime in April so that'll be interesting I wonder if they're going to be like doing the whole thing or

because Sony was like really good with their processing I wonder if like it's going to be like one of those deals where like TCL makes the screens and puts it all together but it still got the Sony processing in it. I hope that's the case, because Sony processing was really good. Yeah, I think that's the biggest takeaway from this, right? Is that basically Sony processing is what makes Sony special. Everything else is kind of just whatever, but we'll be, maybe we'll see some of the processing going to TCL TVs,

which would definitely be a huge plus. Yeah, yeah. We will see, we will see. Big news for Canada. This is probably the biggest news out of Canada. Amazon Sidewalk has now arrives in Canada. Yay, Gavin, you can buy ring sensor devices now. And I just want to let the Americans know, you have this too already, you know, just against you didn't know.

You already had this. If you forgot, this came out like eight years ago, right? Yeah. If you didn't remember, you know, like you already had this, you know, it's nothing new. Yeah, when you post this and I think you said something like, oh, we finally get sidewalk or something, I was like, I'm pretty sure this came out like a decade ago at this point. I've never heard anybody talk about it, but it definitely came out a while ago. These ring cameras are like the first thing I know that uses it. Like, it's probably going to be the only thing that uses it.

Who knows? Every, every Amazon Echo, every ring device, that's, you know, every camera that's outside. And then, yeah, it'll be all of the little sensors and everything they have, it will use it. So, I mean, the coverage, the coverage map, if you look at, I love this coverage map, like, I'll put it in link to it in the show notes. If you look at the coverage map, it's insane. Like, there are wilderness areas that do not have coverage. But pretty much any city in the United States, even remote ones, are going to have coverage and a significant amount of coverage. So if you're talking about like a little sensor, a sensor or a device or tracking device that is going to be picked up on the things.

If you're if you're in around a suburb or a major city, it's not going to have a problem communicating on this network. It's absolutely insane. And an important thing about this, it's opt out. So they were saying all of our devices automatically are going to participate in this. network. If you really don't want your device to participate in this network, you have to opt out. Otherwise, it's automatic. Yeah. I think they rolled it out similar here in America. Everybody freaked out and then nothing happened because they didn't do anything with it. Nobody cared after that. So there you go. Here it was basically like it was enabled by default, but like during the setup process, it told you about it and it allowed you to like uncheck it.

Yeah. But it was like definitely trying to make you do it. It's a good idea in theory though, right? I mean, all this stuff kind of, it always, it always. always sounds good. It's kind of like the air tag solution and a couple other ideas like that. But it's always the company that controls that you're always questionable about. Well, if sidewalks nice in one run in respect is that Amazon doesn't really control it. It does use their infrastructure to move the message around, but the messages can be encrypted from the device to the endpoint. So it's not like they just know that, yeah, they'll know if a packet goes from a sensor and goes to a computer server somewhere. They'll know that much. They won't know where it goes after that. They won't know what the contents of it. It's very well designed. It's

probably one of the best designed wireless. Is it a mesh network? I guess it can be. It's, it's very well designed from a security standpoint. And I, you know, it's in millions of devices. So it's seeing this coverage map, impressive. Check that out. If you, if you, Canada, it's, it's, it's, Canada is not blue. You can see there's a dividing line there, but you're, you're about to turn blue Canada. We'll get you. We'll get you. We're becoming the 51st state slowly. Yep, yep, we'll infect you with our sidewalk technology. All right, moving on here. We've got a new product from EcoWitt, the WS90, 7 and 1 smart weather station.

It tracks wind, rain, temperature, humidity, UV, solar radiation, and barometric pressure. It features solid state sensors with no moving parts, ultrasonic wind monitoring, and haptic rain detector for low maintenance and durability. This is pretty much exactly how the tempest works, and it is true. They're very well, very, very durable. includes both Bluetooth and Zigby connectivity. So that's pretty cool. And it allows integration with Shelley's ecosystem pretty easily,

as well as other Zigby compatible hubs. It's powered with a AA battery backup. It has an IPX5 rated enclosure for outdoor use. TJ, we were talking a little bit before the show. Oh, hold on. This thing is, what does this thing cost? $211 pounds, or probably about $200. Yeah, $200 free.

I think this is European market only. And just to be clear, it's not really a new product. What's different about this one is it has Zigby now, right? So I have their original one and it uses the RF. And the difference is with the RF, it's just broadcasting the signal. So anyone your neighbor can pick it up. I mean, who really cares if they know what your wind speeds and temperatures are? But this one's Zigby, so it's more private.

I just didn't know EcoWit made Zip your products. That's interesting. I bet you anything is that what, um, ESP, what is it, S6 chip that we were talking about? That has like, yeah, the one that's on my snowflake up there. Yeah, I bet you anything, it's just being enabled that way because it works with Shelly and all that. Yeah.

Yeah, I actually have this one in the EcoWit form and I kind of want this one just because it's Zigby, right? I mean, I have the EcoA Hub, I have the soil moisture sensors, thanks to Gavin. And I have no reason to get this one, but I like the idea of it to be in Zigby and me not having to worry about relying on EcoWit for that. but I can't justify spending $200 for that right now. So, yeah, and the way the Tempest works, it's, I think it's a wireless protocol from the Tempestation

to a little Bay station that lives in your house. And then after that, it gets on your network. And I think it does MQTT around. Like, that's, I think that's how the home assistant integration works. It used to be, it used to be less, it's not more official, but official integration, but it doesn't use the cloud. I think it communicates locally. And your internet, your home network is flooded with every time the wind changes direction.

floods a bunch of little messages out. It's kind of cool. Anyway, check that out if you're interested. TJ's probably going to get one, it sounds like. No right now. No. Okay. Well, if you need to buy some Zoos products, I can tell you where to go.

Because Apollo automation, our friends over at Apollo, have partnered with Zoos. Our friends over at Zoos, two of our friends have gotten together. They're offering six ZEWave smart home devices and expanding their privacy first, locally controlled ecosystem in Zoos. And Apollo, see, they're going to be selling the ZuzZN04 smart plug, the Zen 30, double switch,

the Zen 75 heavy duty wall switch the 77 dimmer switch the 41 open closed sensor which is this little guy right is that the same yeah I think so

and then the no this is the excess sensor sorry and then oh no ZSE 41 yep that's the one open closed sensor and the ZSE

42 the water leak sensor so yeah if you need some Zeus products head on over there and buy them buy them from a small business don't buy them from Amazon I can tell you

that Agnes says like it if you buy it from Amazon. She does like it if you buy it. Let's just say that. But she would prefer if you buy it from Apollo or from a smaller business like themselves. You're in trouble. Yeah, come on. You buy it from the smartest house. That's their one. She's even said that in the interviews. Yeah, the smartest house. That's what it is. They have their own like thing set up. But I can tell you that most small businesses who deal with Amazon don't like selling on Amazon. It's just they have to. Anyway, what do you guys think about this? Yeah, I think it's interesting. They sell a couple other

devices they don't make, like the home assistant antennas. I think, I don't remember if they sell anything else that's not theirs. That was the two that I do. Yeah, I think right now they're just home assistant and their stuff. And now they're adding zoos. Yeah. I think it's a good idea. The more people that have access to these local first devices, I think is good for everybody.

So it's not like they compete with each other. And supposedly it's handpicked devices that they actually use, which I think is good. You know, I don't think Zuz makes a bad device necessarily, but it's always good to have that curated product, uh, from the company you already buy your stuff from that you know that they like as well. And that's the nice thing about Apollo is they also take care of us in Canada. So if you order, if you're Canadian, you order from them, they actually ship from Canada to us. So we don't get stuck with duties and stuff like that. They take care of all that.

So nice, so easy. I think they were, they said at, at CES, they ship worldwide, like everywhere, right? I'm pretty sure he said. Yeah, but I only care about Canada. Canada. All right, all right. Hey, they ship the ornaments everywhere whenever we do them. Oh, no, they have different distributions. I think he said he had one even out in Australia.

Yeah. And they're shipping out there. So they ship around the world and it's local shipping from a number of places. So that's pretty good. Yep. And speaking of ESP Home and Apollo, I thought this was cool. I saw over the week that Alan Chowl, over at Chal, or at Chalman Software, released a native ESP Home driver for

Control 4. So you load this thing on and anything that runs ESP Home, ESP 32 hardware, you can flash it. You can, you can, you can integrate that directly with with Control 4 systems now, which, you know, I mean, everybody thinks about ESP 30, ESP Home and you think, oh, it's a home assistant, but no, it's an open protocol, and you can ride drivers like Allen did for it and get these really nice device sensors. I mean, there's not, I mean, there's not a POE, what is it, millimeter wave sensor. that exists in the pro space. But there is over at Apollo automation.

And when Alan actually didn't know about these guys, Apollo, and when he announced this driver, I'm like, oh, you should check these guys out. And I saw a bunch of guys commenting on the thread there about, you know, how awesome that POE millinery wave sensor is. So if you are in the pro space and you hear us talking about the guys over Apollo and you do control four systems now, now you have the opportunity to use some of the product in control four system.

set up now. How many hands of people? How many dealers do you think know about ESB home and hands? You may a hand count. Talking like five hands? Five hands, six hands. I don't know. Do any dealers know about ESB home?

I feel like somebody would have to know for them to make this driver, right? Yeah, I think they do. And I mean, it's also a worldwide thing. So it's not like it only exists in the States. And I can tell you overseas, there are people who are much more comfortable ordering a small device that has ESP, like an at, was it at home? Atham? I thought it was Atham, but.

I don't know. At home? I don't know. They're comfortable grabbing one of those or a couple of them and popping them in for some LED lights that are playing up, right? And this just opens the door for more integration, more control, more sensors, more these point devices that really are really nice. And you can get them putting in the project on a control board project or a home assistant project, doesn't matter. You can do it. So that's pretty cool. I think you kind of summed it up there, but like, you know, having this opens a door for some custom, real custom work. Like if they have a problem, they have to solve, they can now look at doing ESB 32 and doing like the wiring and everything like this and now they have a driver for it.

Like, they can solve some real problems. Instead of like soldering their garage door openers, they can actually put it in ESB home little driver in there and work with it. So this is great, actually. Yep. They do some really cool work over there at Chau Main. So check that out if you're a control four dealer. It's not a very expensive driver. I think it's like 80 MSRP or something like that.

So we're continuing the spiral down into the graveyard with WMO. I guess Belkin has announced support for a few more select WMO products. And the WMO app will end on January 31st, right around the corner. Actually, the day after this show may release. After that date, the cloud-based features on like, mode access and voices and integrations, we'll just no longer function. Let's see, a list of the devices.

We had a big list of these, but I guess the day is finally here, right? Like, it's going to happen. The Wimo Smart Light Switch, Wi-Fi Smart Light Switch, there's a ton of these. We'll put a link to little these in the show notes. And you can go see if you have any of these, they're just not going to work anymore. And nobody was probably paying attention, so I bet you the day after it goes off flying away.

He's like, what's going on? Reddit all just go up in flames. Can't stand these. that in support and don't tell anybody. Yeah, well, it does suck to see. It was funny, we were at CES and I saw the Weimo booth over there at the thing I went to. I'm like, why are they here? I'm like, oh, well, I guess they still have all the, like, not Wemo, it was Belkin.

I guess, I'm like, why are they here? And then, yeah, they have, like, outlet plugs and stuff still, so Belkin. Anyway, moving on, last story here, is Switchbot. We've got to talk about this. They've got a Matter product, a new product. they have officially released their new AI Hub, smart home controller featuring AI processing and Matter Support. Hub includes an on-device vision language model

for analyzing visual data and triggering automations without relying on the cloud. It supports RTSB compatible video sources integrates with the SwitchBBot's own cameras, managing up to eight 2K feeds with TJ, local storage, things in the VR. The Matter functionality is going to allow it to act as a bridge through like Apple Home, Google Home, all that good stuff.

It includes a built-in home assistant core container eliminating the need for any additional hardware, like a Raspberry Pi. So this is kind of a neat little product. $259 will offer, what does it say, it will support up to 100 devices, switchbot devices, and offers 32 gigabytes of internal storage. It's spandable one terabyte via USBC. So this has got everything.

This has got matter. It's got AI. It's got USBC. It's got internal storage. And I don't know, what doesn't this thing have? It's got this hub has it all. It's crazy. It's got all the buzzwords.

You can put Home Assistant on it, Gavin. I mean, it's got everything. Well, the interesting part is it looks like it's running a frigate integration. So if you're familiar with that on Home Assistant, well, it's got it here. And it's got the hardware for processing the Friget video streams. So it's got a lot of stuff. It can integrate with Home Assistant too, apparently through MQT. I believe or a local API access.

Yeah, this is crazy. That's so frigate cool. Wow. That's a T.J. Well, this is last show. 560. We made it this far. On that note, we're out.

You know, honestly, this is a good idea. I want, like, NVRs to have, like, their own renaissance. I don't know if we'll ever see that. We might see that now that matter of cameras are becoming a thing. But for the longest time, camera systems have sucked. And that is why people buy things like ring or, like, nest or whatever because nobody wants to use a very clunky like in VR and like physically attach their cameras to it and stuff with the crappy software. And so we really need like some

kind of renaissance for NVRs and I'm hoping we see that. And it kind of gives me a little hope that SwitchBot is released in basically an NVR for a camera system. So we might see some more of these kind of products here soon with Matter being released on cameras. And you know, like looking at their demo pictures, I don't know how much faith I have in their system now because they have one picture where it shows a picture and the description is, Grandma is lying on the living room floor. Grandma, Grandma's dead. I think that should be an alert.

I think there's more. I think it should say a little bit more than Grandma's just taking a nap, you know? Grandma looks like she's in trouble here. Please send help. You know, it is kind of funny. They didn't use red for that one, but they used it for like the others, human detected. I'm like, no, that's the red one. Like, if someone please go and just check on Grandma?

I'll shake her a little bit. Maybe she'll wake up. Oh, man. That is funny. That would be interesting, too, if they use this as some kind of like, like assisted living product or something like that. We saw some of these companies at CES where assisted living is becoming like more of a topic that people were talking about.

And like, you know, for example, third reality had like an assisted living kit that they would sell you. That's basically like their motion sensors and door content. and stuff, but it was like their own fancy software that did it, like, you know, told you if, like, Grandma didn't get out of bed today or something like that. Yeah. So it is interesting to see, like, another company, like, use this as, like, an assisted living option. Assisted living, yeah, it is a big topic right now. And some of those systems would have detected how Grandma got to laying on that floor and notified you, you know? She didn't go down

nicely. Right, she's just looking for her dentures. Yeah. Grandma's not sleeping on the floor, guys. She passed away. I don't know. I don't know. What chapter, Rooder like right now. This feels so bad now for grandma. Switchbot if you're listening, can you tell us if grandma's doing okay? Yeah, we need to know. Is this AI grandma or is this a real grandma?

Yeah, it looks like a real grandma. Well, if you, if you have a grandma and you use this to detect if she's falling and can't get up, let us know. Actually, I mean, this for $260 or whatever, this, I mean, it looks like a really nice piece. Very cheap. Very cheap, but all the stuff you can do with it, like if you don't have a home assistant controller, it's got it built, you can put it in. Like, it's got an NVR. It's got AI stuff. It could tell you if grandma fell and can get up. I mean, AI is worth at least $100.

At least, yeah. But I mean, that's really nice, actually. I mean, even the other little example that we're not talking about with the dog, it's like, if the dog is eating, then turn on the air-peer-fire thing or whatever, because the dog stinks when it eats, I guess. I don't know. It's usually what the dog does after it eats and it stinks. Anyway, it's an interesting thing because, like, I mean, I can set up my ubiquity camera. and point him out of dog eating and it'll just say pet detective or animal detected. It doesn't tell me that it's eating.

So that's kind of neat. All right. Well, anyway, let us know if you get one of these things and what you do with it. So all the links to topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.com slash 560. All right, got a bit of mailbag feedback here. Listener Joe says,

can you please stop using the smoke detector sound? It's very annoying and not funny anymore. Thanks. Yes, Seth. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I agree. Joe. I'm with Joe on this one. I have wanted to burn down Seth's house a couple times.

I didn't do it, though, because he has a family, but if it was just him, I would definitely consider it. Like, having my own sensor going off is enough, but now I got to hear it through this. Listener, what you don't know is that in the background of this show, not recorded, sometimes I can just press a button, and that little sound will come out, and Gavin and TJ will just be looking around. Like, what's happened? No, we don't now because we know. Oh, okay. It's happened a lot. It worked the first two times. It hasn't worked the 30 times after that, though.

You worked a lot more than two times. Yeah, you're right. I don't want to plead on, though. Anyway, it was funny from my point. I'm sorry about that, Joe. I did overuse it. In my defense, I was very loopy and tired after editing all those audio things down. So, yeah, we have all of the things. I will find something else to put in between there. but yeah. And we offered to send Joe something special, so he should be getting that in the mail shortly.

Joe, let us know what you think about it. It's a special sticker. Oh, so nice. It's just of my faith. If that sticker beeps on, he's going to kill you. It's just DJ's face. It's actually just going to be Seth's address on a box. All right, pick of the week.

Pick of the week. Hey, guys, this week was marks 100 years since the birth of television. Do you guys know that? Nope. I thought it was not that old. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was in a small room in Soho. And it's where it's being marked as the birthplace of television,

100 years after inventor, John Logie Baird, I guess, showed moving images on screen for the first time. Yogi Bear and Ben of the TV. Yeah, that's what it says. Logie Baird. Yeah. Anyway, he's got this contraption. It doesn't look like a TV, but this is where it says. January 1926, invited a small audience into his workshop on.

22. Okay, come on. They're just making things up. First of the street. Frith. Frith. The street. Come on. Spell things right, England. To see if his latest invention, and he showed pictures that could be sent and received using a system of spinning disks, light and electrical signals. There you go. TV was invented over 100 years ago.

And, yay. Now we can watch all sorts of stuff on TVs, our cell phones. It's had a wild ride. So there you go. I thought it was pretty cool. TV is our pick of the week. Yay. Yay, TV. Fun fact, if you're ever in Columbus, Ohio, there is a TV museum that has a bunch of old TVs there. I think they're mainly from like the 50s to the 80s, but there's a lot of cool stuff there. Who is in Columbus, Ohio by accident? Well, a lot of people accidentally find themselves here.

And they don't leave for various reasons. There's a lot of so. But, you know, honestly, it made me kind of like, you know, urine, I guess, for, like, older TVs, because a lot of TVs are, like, statement pieces. You know, it's nice that, like, modern TVs are, like, Bezillis and. And, you know, they're a black slab on the wall. And, like, they're very beautiful. I'll give them that for the most part. But you go into, like, some of these, like, you go into the TV museum in Columbus, Ohio.

And you see these pieces, like, I think it's like the Comet TV or something like that. Mm-hmm. Where it's just, like, an ornate piece of, like, wood that they've, like, carved out. And it's just, like, an amazing piece of hardware. But you're like, I don't want to put that in my living room. Like, that would take up, like, half my living room. And it totally makes sense why they don't exist anymore. They used to have those old TVs that were built into like a whole unit and it was sat on the floor.

And they, of course, were mounted too low. But it was like, yeah, you're right. They were like statement pieces. You walk into someone's house and you'd be like, oh, that's nice. That's a TV because nobody had them. I mean, they were very expensive and they would take up a lot of space. So they naturally, they started building into furniture. And like what TJ's alluding to there, like the furniture of the time where they had these fancy, like some of those pictures, you've shared those before on the show.

Some of those pictures are incredible, like some of the crazy designs and, like, art, was it, art deco or mid-century modern designs that they had for giant pieces of furniture with a, you know, a tiny nine-inch TV screen. But, you know, that was huge. It cost thousands and thousands of dollars back then. But yeah, yeah, I don't know. Birth of TV, if you're ever in Columbus and stuck there because of snow, go check out the TV museum. Yeah, we'll put this one in the notes, too. This is the TV. I was talking about the Cuba Comet.

I mean, look at this thing. This thing is amazing looking, but the screen is like, I don't even know how big it is, like 12 inches or something. It's a very tiny screen. Oh, it's a baby. But it's like the huge, the whole thing is like a whole like dresser size. I mean, it's ginorma. If you had a child, it would like definitely injure itself walking by that thing. Oh, 100%.

It's sharp edges, yeah. But it's got like, it's got a record player. It's got a radio in it. I mean, what else could you want in a TV? Betcha has better speakers than all the TVs that come out now. Yeah, probably. Really? That is more reliable than some of the system.

No. Oh, wow. Those drawers on there, it doesn't have it in the little picture, but the drawers had all sorts of stuff. You could get like a real, real tape layer in there. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. I mean, this thing is beautiful. That is something.

Oh, yeah, it has a big speaker on the side there. Look at that. It's got a subwifor. That whole top thing is like a passive subwifor box or something like that. That's crazy. This TV was out from 1957 and 1962 with a retail price of 1260 America. American dollars. More than a year's wages for the average. Yeah, as I say, way too much money. But, yeah. It's like an old, old timey iPhone, you know.

It's a, it's a radio, it's a record player, it's a TV, all in one device. Yeah. There you go. Just, just pay us your yearly wage and we're good to go. You can take one home. That is actually impressive. It looks really cool. All right. We'll put a, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. If you have any feedback, questions, ideas for though picks the weeks or TVs that are really cool. Give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at Hometech.fm or head on over to humtick.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates, project updates. We got Matter.

Matter is going to go to, uh, home assistant is, oh, they're just changing the language. So home assistant is going from, was it, a Matter Python, probably script or something. Now they're doing Matter.js and it's in beta. So there we go. Yeah. And this, there was a lot of conversation about how. home assistance slowed down with their matter updates. And I think the main reason why is because they were working on this.

And now that it's MatterJS, it's in beta. I don't advise jumping over to it yet. I mean, I see a lot of posts of people saying, yeah, it worked fine. But I also see just as many posts of people saying they lost their whole, all their matter devices and they're having issues. So wait until it matures a bit more. But I guess this is the first step. And then they'll, I believe it'll be easier for them to get matter certification and move

on getting things like matter 1.4 and 1.5 and moving forward. And then you'll start seeing them take off a lot faster once this is... Yeah, they did the same thing with ZWave. There's a ZWave. There's a ZWave thing, right? And that has become like the industry standard, well, I mean, like the industry that uses ZWave, even the people that are developing their own ZWA products, use that to test their products with because that's, you know, it's easy to work with and easy to use and it's JavaScript. Yeah, so it was a C++-S-DK. Yeah, no one wants to use that. that. No one wants to compile C code. Harder to manage. Oh,

it's awful. Yeah, it's awful. So use JavaScript, TypeScript, much better and much more higher level, and literally every programmer on the face of the planet can, and every LLM, and for that matter can program in JavaScript, TypeScript, just fine. So

this will be probably another one of their industry standard things, and we'll help, I mean, honestly, it'll probably help push Matter along, too. So, it's good gun on them for, this is all, all pushed by the Open Home Foundation. So there you go. Support them.

Send them money. That kind of thing. And another cool Reddit thread you guys posted this earlier. This is an open source Sonos-style smart speaker for Home Assistant. And it looks like somebody has basically developed the home assistant thing.

I don't even plug anymore, the little voice control thing into a better Sonos one-sized product size thing. And it looks kind of cool, actually. I don't know how it probably sounds a lot better. with actual speakers than what I have. But I don't know. What do you think, Gavin?

Is this something you go for? Well, I've been watching this company since I think they started working on it when the voice PE stuff came out and they were like looking at ways to make better voice PE, better hardware. And I've been keeping an eye on this stuff. The problem I have with what's offered today is that the speakers don't pick you up well enough when there's background noise and stuff like that. Yeah.

Not like the Amazon or the Googles, which work much better. But I think they're getting there. And I can't remember who it was. I think it was Mike in the chat said he had these and they still aren't up to spec, like in terms of picking up her voice. But I think as they add more mics and the libraries get better to filter out the background noise, it will get better. And when it does, I will start looking more into, you know,

maybe replacing my Amazon with this stuff and see where it goes. Because then you could tie this into your chat GPs or your Olamas or Claude or whatever and have it do a lot more stuff and that's where the power comes in. Yeah. Yeah, and this is one of those things that's good to see like a cheap product like this

or an inexpensive product, I should say. But this is one of those things that like I don't mind paying a little bit more for it if it actually sounds good, right? Because it's one of those things that like, literally the audio is the most important thing when it comes to a speaker like this. And if the audio doesn't sound good,

that it's not worth having at all. And I think the race to get really cheap products into home assistant is great, but we also need to have some better products that actually sound good and work well once the platform actually gets there. We're a lot further than we were with the home assistant voice, but we're still not quite there yet.

We're like you said, Gavin, where to replace your Alexa or something like that, you're not going to do that right now. I'm still just looking for something that does the microphone and the voice assistant. I'm not playing music over these things. When it comes to playing music, see what my Amazon devices today,

like they're kind of paired with a speaker in that room, a sono speaker in that room. So when I tell it to play music, it actually plays it out the speaker, the sono speaker and not its speaker. Like it's smart enough to know that. It's also smart enough to know that when I talk to it, turn down the volume on that speaker or my sound bar or whatever.

And so it can hear me better. So I like that. And all I want is a little device that will have the microphone built in. And maybe a little speaker to answer me back. But, you know, I need it to work well. Right. Or else it's just more of a frustrating experience. Yep.

Well, hopefully, hopefully this make this, you know, like you said, this will get better over time. We have come a long way. Because I can imagine this sounds a lot better than this little thing I have over here that I unplugged because it sounds so awful. Anyway, and it doesn't really work. I don't use any voice control, I guess. It's the problem.

Yeah, and it's not just voice control. Like, just having these speakers you could have conversations with. It picks up. Yeah, yeah, it's not just voice control, but, you know, like the wife uses it for a lot more than that, just random questions. Yeah. What to where, you know, travel to work, you know, all sorts of things. We got, uh, oh, let's move on to, no, I don't know if there's a home assistant update. I'm not going to update right now, so I can do not.

I think there's a dot update on Friday, but, you know, by the time the show comes out, the beta will be out. Probably need update, yeah. All right. Well, Gavin, what's you been up to you? Well, before the snowstorm, my week last week ended with my neighbor knocking on my door with a pile of CDs, right? I haven't seen a CD in a long time. Where did they get those? I don't know, but he's like, hey, I have a box of these CDs.

Are you able to rip them? Because I want to put them on my iPod. The fact I said iPod, too. I don't even know if I had a key. What is going on? I know. Did this guy just get out of a coma, Gavin? I think his wife just let him out of the house or he was cleaning up or something.

But he's like, I want to put it on my iPod so I can listen to it. Call me on my landline when you're done. I was like, share. I took his pile of CDs. I was like, no problem. I'll rip these for you. And I took him inside. And then I realized, I don't have a CD player in my house anymore.

I haven't had a CD player in any of my computers for like the longest time. So I think I just, I think the easiest way was just to download them off the internet for him from some great marketplace and put it on his iPod. for him, but I had to find that cable, too, for his iPod, which was kind of tough. But I had one in that box of, I had it. It was in one of those boxes that my wife keeps telling me I need to throw out. No, I got the cable. I walked upstairs. I showed her.

I said, see, this is why I keep these cables. Yeah, exactly. We just got him a gift card for, like, Spotify or something. Yeah. The problem is, is he's pretty stubborn, so he doesn't want to work with Spotify. He doesn't want to use Spotify. He just thinks of his, you know, Spotify. He just thinks of his, he's been.

music on his iPod and I'm surprised that iPod still works but he has like a cupboard full of his old iPhones and he just keeps pulling one out he goes put some music on this one and then you plug in the headphone jack it's you plug the headphone jack into his little stereo and listen to it so he's that kind of guy I don't I don't know it's funny how he works had different genres on different phones yeah he's like country today it's this phone you know so uh anyway so that's how my weekend I did last week, but I've been playing around with this new integration, the home system called entity manager integration. It's pretty cool.

It basically lets you work with entities in bulk. So you could select a bunch of entities. You can hide, group, do a whole bunch of things with them in bulk, right? Most of that I felt can be done in the interface already. But one thing I requested, and he actually added it really quick, was allow me to expose entities to voice assistance in bulk. So that's something I never was able to do in the interface today. Like I had to go into each device, each entity, and then say add it to the Amazon lady, right?

And I couldn't manage it. I can add a whole bunch at once. So he added that feature and that's going to make my life so much easier. So because now I can go in and take all the lights that I really care about and then just say, add them all to expose them all to Amazon, right? And I don't have to go through them one by one. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, even the voice assist and stuff like that.

So I'm so glad he will include a link in the show notes. I'm so glad he added that feature. So check it out if that's something you're interested in. It's something I'm probably going to take back to the homelessness team and say, you should be able to do this through the interface too, right? Like, it should be there. So maybe one day my feature request will get implemented. We'll see.

Last night, I got an argument with a, hold on, I'm going to say this name a lot. So mute your speakers. or whatever. But last night I got an argument with Alexa, right? Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. And the wife found it very entertaining that I was actually arguing with her. And I afterwards, I kind of found it entertaining, too. But for the longest time, I would tell her to turn off my bathroom fan after 10 minutes or so. And she'd be like, okay, no problem. And she'd just do it. Amazon changed something. And it just pissed me off. Now when I asked her, it was about 1115. I said, all right, turn off. the bathroom fan in 10 minutes.

She said, okay, no problem. I'm creating a one-time automation to do this for you. I'm like, what the? And then she goes, it has been created. The light, the fan will be turned off at 12.20. I said, no, that's like an hour and 10 minutes from now. And I had an argument with that. I go, yeah, I don't know what was going on with her, but I would say, I told her,

I said, I said 10 minutes, you programmed it for an hour and 10 minutes. And then she's like, oh, you are so. Correct. I have corrected it. It will now turn off at 12.20 a.m. I go, that's still an hour, 20 minutes away, right? So I don't know what Amazon did to her, but one of the most basic features that I did use so often. This is what LLMs do, Gavin?

Oh, that's just them changing something. I don't know if it's to introduce the sidewalk crap we talked about earlier. But yeah, I was, the wife found it very amusing that I was arguing with her, and I corrected her, and she accepted the fact that she was wrong. but then she still programmed it for a hour and 20 minutes later. I'm sorry, you are so right. I said it for the wrong time. I am now setting it for 12.20.

I said, that's still an hour and 10 minutes. So, yeah, this is one of the frustration. Yeah, that wasn't a nice. Eventually, eventually got to the point where my wife said to me, he goes, I'll just turn off the fan for you in 10 minutes. I go, that's not the point. That's not the point. She's feeling sorry for you.

Yeah. She's like, you know what? I'll turn off the fan in 10 minutes for you if you want. I go, no, I want her to do it. Just imagine the whole situation happening. Yeah, it was not a fun. One of the frustrations I have. So I tested her again today.

She got it the 10 minutes, but it's still, she sets up like now a one-time automation that you can view it. And she tells you, I just want her to say, okay, and that's all I don't care about. I don't care if she set up a one-time automation and that I can review in the app and blah, blah, blah. Oh, man, I hope they just don't start ruining her. And I think they will. And this is why I'm, this is why I'm waiting on the voice B.E for home assistance stuff to get, you know, really good.

I'll be quick to swap her out and, you know, she'll let me know. But now that you've had your first real fight, I mean, it's, you know, we can, everything's better from now on. I bought her flowers this morning, you know, and some chocolates to make up and stuff. And she said she wouldn't talk to me for another hour and 20 minutes. But she did make a one-time automation for it. Yeah, she made a one-time automation to check back you, you know. Yeah, so that was the one. And finally, this is kind of a big announcement, small announcement, I don't know, big for me.

But I've soft launched my YouTube channel. Oh. So it's up. It's there. I have a little intro video. By the time the show actually gets released, I may have my first review video on there. But yeah, I got, you know, when we were at CES,

a number of people talked to me and said, you know, you just do it. So I said, all right, fine. So I finally soft-launched it. YouTube, Gavin as a service, you know. What else could I name it? It has to be Gavin as a Service on YouTube. Go check it out. Just hit subscribe.

Like, even if you don't watch it. YouTube videos, just hit subscribe, please, you know, and just so, you know, help me get like five people watching, make me feel good, you know, and I will be posting. I got like a whole bunch of product reviews, um, uh, unboxings, you know, I'll be doing home assistant videos, whatever I can, you know, um, the goal right now is a video a week. Um, it's a learning process. I'll be honest. It's a learning process for me right now. Um, I'm getting pretty good at DaVinci all of a sudden. And I did like whole bunch of tutorials and practice things just to get to the point where I'm at now. And it's just getting better.

So sign up, you know, let me know if there's something you want to see, you know, Gavin as a service on YouTube. There we go. There we go. It's here we go. It's here we go. I found it. Oh, it's good. You got to have YouTube.

It's got an at thing. Yeah, it's YouTube.com slash at Gavin as a service. It's easy to find. I couldn't find it. And I just searched for Gavin and service and that came out fine. Yeah. You know how like everybody, like all the YouTubers tell you. that you should subscribe,

but they, like, come up with their own silly way to say it. It's like, ring that bell or whatever. Well, it's going to be your staff. No, the bell's for notifications.

You got to ring the bell, you got a mash buttons. Yeah, I can't, I was to say that. I couldn't think of the proper turn, but they always say something odd, you know?

I don't know. You got to come up with some kind of fun thing to tell people to subscribe to your channel, is what I'm saying. All right, we'll work on it. We'll work on something.

Give me any ideas you have. Oh, I have some ideas. I think I should say I'm off of there, though. Kevin here. You could say your automations won't work unless you subscribe to a YouTube channel as a service. So, yeah, something like that. Let's see how this goes. It's going to be a fun project. It's going to be a fun thing. But, yep, Gavin has a service on YouTube.

All right. I will put a link to that in our show notes this week. So everybody can go there and sign it and check it out. Very cool, Gavin. It looks like a lot of fun. So I watched it. I watched your one video. Yeah, I haven't even watched that. Actually, I said it to the wife. I say, you know, what do you think? But she's kind of biased, you know. She's like, oh, you're so cute. That's not what I wanted to know.

I didn't think she'd say that. That's what I was typing in the comments. Oh, that's who typed that. She was reading the comments. Oh. Well, congratulations, man. It looks like it's going to be fun. Yeah, I'll be fun.

You got a lot of ideas, I think. It'll be fun. Fun project. Yeah, I should add my first review video. By the time, probably you post this, I was editing it today. So we'll see. There we go. I'm glad somebody gets to do some editing on this show, then.

Yeah, I feel bad sometimes, Seth, that you do all the editing. I offer to help, but then you won't take our help. So because of that, we just make your editing harder. Yeah. You know, we talk over each other. We use two microphones, you know, a lot of background noise, things like that, just to make things harder for you because you won't let us help you. I got that fixed, though, because, uh,

After I got it figured out what you guys did, then I ran it through the processing stuff that I have. And it pulled out all the audio from the back. There was no background when you guys were talking to like Ari or any of the people. So it sounded like you were just talking to them on the show. I'm like, I got to put the background noise back in. Nobody's going to believe this was at CES. So I just looped a background noise of a conversation.

Are you telling us we have fake background in our audio that had real background in it? Yes. Yeah. Oh, TJ, we got to come up with something for next year. I got to go listen to that again. You put fake background in an audio that we had a real background noise in anyway. Yeah, it was just bad background noise because it was noisy. So I took it out and then put all the real background.

But just, yeah, sometimes you got to do what you got to do. It's all fake. I was telling my daughter, we were watching. It's all fake. Yeah. Those interviews were fake. It kind of goes into my projects this week. So I was telling my daughter, she was doing.

doing a project, right? She had to do an inventor. She had to pick an inventor and they had a whole list of inventors and she had to write a report and do like this like a poster board thing. Classic third grade, you know, thing. So we're looking through the inventors and it's like a whole page. It's a whole page, like a letter-sized page of all these inventors and what they invented. And there was literally one woman on there. And she made chocolate chip cookies. That was her invention. And I'm like, what is this? So no, no. I mean, you are in Florida, so.

But that's a big invention. I'm sorry. I mean, they made the world a bigger, better place. Respectfully, that would have been what I picked, but it's like, this is not happening. So we did a whole, like, thing on Hedy Lamar and kind of led into, like, talking about, like, how movies go together and some of the roles and things that she did early on. And I was telling her, like, hey, all the sound you're in a movie, it's, it's all. fake like every footstep they have to go back and recreate every background noise every car honk everything why are you ruining it for her did you tell her about santa class yet so oh no no that that's

real oh so so so yeah no the the the yeah the she was just fascinated by all that so we we we we kind of remind me of that but yeah so that's that's one of my projects for this week but um she got that knocked out in put together so heady lamar basically the inventor Wi-Fi if you didn't know She was a movie actress back in the, what, 30s, 40s? And yeah, basically invented the technology that led to secure communications and garage door openers and all that good stuff. Go check it out. It's a really cool story. They didn't want to use her technology in World War II.

So there you go. It just was forgotten about. I did some more project around the cat. We got our new pet feeder in. It's called a P-Laff 103. Great name, P-Laf by Pet Libro, which means pet book, I guess. I don't know what that means. Anyway, it's actually pretty good.

It's a little Wi-Fi thing. And it's got integration with Home Assistant through a hacks thing, which I brought in. And I've got 34 entities added on to my home assistant for all the stuff that I could get out of the app. I can just go look up in here and see when the next feed time in eight hours is going to be, how much we're feeding, how much he fed today, all the good stuff. And no cameras looking at the cat. So yeah, I don't want, I don't want, I don't want, I don't want any cameras on my random products. We have, uh, our cat feeder does not have a camera. I don't think I would buy one with one.

Uh, but I say this is a person that has like six cameras inside their house. So, you know, leads me men at less. My next thing is when we discovered that we're not going to be able to watch the cat eat or it's shenanigans, which is really what we wanted to see. Um, my wife's like, hey, can you put a camera up? And I'm like, I've got one of those extra ubiquity, like little G4 mini things. They're perfect for that. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um. I grabbed it and realized that it had the, I can never remember the one quarter inch, whatever the standard camera mount thing is, one quarter or something, that little thing. And I was like, it's got that on the back of it. And I just need to go find my camera mounting stuff. And I had like a clamp thing that you can like tighten up and I clamped it onto the side of the blinds.

Look, you can't even see where this camera is in our house and it sees the entire living room. and my wife was like getting notifications. There's an animal. It was ubiquity. She's sending all these little notifications to her that there's an animal. Oh, it sees a person. And she's like going around looking. It's like, where is this camera?

She couldn't find it. And it's just tucked up. It's the sloppiest install I've job I've ever done, but like you can't see it. And the little cord goes behind the curtain in the living room. And if you didn't know it was there, you probably wouldn't even notice or see it. It's just in a really tucked away place.

that said, it's all the cat. And then when my wife started going through it, and she started seeing that she could all CC herself sitting on the couch and relaxing and eating food, she's like, no, you can't have this. We don't, I don't want recordings of this. So she's like, hey, can you turn the recording off if we're here? I'm like, I think I can do that because I have ubiquity. Yeah, yeah.

So I went and started looking for that. I'm like, there's automations. Gavin, I'm just not familiar with where to go in the ubiquity thing. Did you add the protect integration? Yeah, I've had protect. Look, if I get a product, I'll add it in here because I just want to collect entities, man. I just want all these. It doesn't use it for anything, but just add everything to it.

Updates and entity collection. Under the camera device itself, you should see options where you can turn on and off recording and stuff like that. That's what we do in our house because we have some internal cameras. But when we're home and it's in home mode, the cameras are all turned off. And then once we leave, the house turns into a way mode. It turns on those cameras. and everything for security. Yeah, because you can set it, record never, record.

I forget it has a couple of options. You can set it to do like events only or something. But yeah. Yep. So I was like, I knew where that was. And I could turn that on off. I'm like, what is going to trigger it? And the best thing I can come up with is like our cell phones.

Like if our cell phones are out of the house, then we do that. And you have to install the home assistant app to basically get that. So I was like, hey, I got to put something on your phone now. I'm going to track you. So putting that on. and and then I was like, okay, now I've got to write the automation. Again, not really knowing where to go with this.

I was like, you know who does know about this? My friend Chad GBT, but also better, I have this automations creator on here still from one of our letters that we had come in about this and to check it out. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to write in, this is what I wrote for the prompt, set the living room cameras record,

never when Seth or Erica are home. Otherwise, set the recording mode to always. And I hit enter and it failed because I didn't have the settings done correctly or my key had gone bad or whatever. So then I switched over to a Lama Local and gave it the right little model to AMAT and the right IP address and hit Enter. And it came up with some stuff. I hit install and it works, Gavin.

This is great. I don't have to do any programming. No yamel? It is all in yamel. Yeah, it made the yamil form. But you didn't have to type any yamble. Didn't have to do a thing. I can go look at it.

Don't you feel like you're missing out? No, absolutely not. This is what I want. This is what I wanted to do. This gets crazier because this is like, yes, all right, it's here. This is what I wanted to do. This is how I want the home to work. If I wanted to do something, I'm just going to go here and type something in, the

conditions that I want to be met. And then it's just going to spit out the yamel and I'll hit save, done. And it just tucks it away in this little automations folder that I don't even know where it is. I'll have to go look for. But you know what? It's in there and it works. And it's, that's great. I mean, so that led me to like, okay, well, I got this Alama thing running, and I used to use it a lot more. But that, that, that Tesla card that I had really sucked.

So I should probably get two P40s. So yeah, buddy, I'm on the P40 Club. Nice. Hold on. What's the difference between like the P4 and P40? The P4 is one you got. What is that? I have the P4. I have a couple P4s and I have a T4.

I think the P40 has more memory. P40, yeah, so the P40, it's got 24 gigabytes, whatever that one is. Yeah. I saw two of them for sale for, I think, like, 300 bucks or something like that. So I was like sold. And because all of them alone were like 200. So I'm like, well, if I can get them for less than 200, that's got to be a good deal. And they came in.

I only had the cable for one of them. So, but holy cow, it's way faster. at generating anything you want than that the older Tesla M40. Like it's, it looks like it's the same card. But like I was holding up the M40 and the P40 at the same time, like just two, one generation apart. And it's just a massive difference. Oh, you're going from the M40 to the P40.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, that's a huge jump. Okay, that you'll notice it. I thought you were going from something like the P4 to the B40. No, no, you'll notice that part. The only problem with the P series, I was talking to somebody about this, They dropped support for the P series in the newer Nvidia drivers. Oh, bummer.

So, I mean, you just got to make sure you don't upgrade your driver after a certain version. And it will still work. But how much longer will it work? I don't know. You'll get a few years out of it. Yeah, yeah. And maybe, I don't know. I'm not really, I was just playing around with it.

But the, like, the coding models and everything you can load on it are screaming fast. and there's the Quinn 30 billion thing you can load on screaming fast. Like out, I would just randomly, I just wanted to test, I'm like, to see how long it would take to respond, but also see how much I had to turn the fans up on the Dell server. He's kind of like balanced that. Because those don't have built in fans. They don't have built in fans, but it's- Yeah, they're passively cooled. The P40 has 24 gigabyte.

Yeah, with those Tesla cars. in my Dell server, I actually built fan shrouds and put some Noctua, small Naktua fans in. And I have- How do you put those in? Are they on the backside of it? Yes. And they're really small, they're really small fans. And I have them actually mounted to the backside of it. And they're going at full speed, but they're silent. Yeah. Right. And they keep the cards cool enough. Um, because I notice like if you use the Dell, like you have the Dell server. If you relied on their fans, they would always ramp up. to like full speed just to keep these cards cool.

Well, I haven't done anything major. I just did a few prompts. And I mean, within that, like, it just, it spit out code almost instantly. Yes. Fast, if not faster than chat, QVT or Claude code. So I actually took the cloud code and there's a way that you can kind of like,

bring it to a llama. Bring, you can kind of bridge them together. It's going to get to my third conversation. You get me all excited. because we're talking some things I've been played around with as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I think cloud code, you can point it at Ulama and say, use this instead of cloud code online or whatever,

and just basically run it for free at home, which is amazing if you have the time to sit there and wait for it to do its thing. But honestly, I like the main thing I want running AI right now, like managing all of the other agents, is Claude Opus, the 4-5. Um, that is probably that that's amazing what they've, they've done with that and the tooling that they put up around it. So that running all of what needs to happen is the best, uh, setup I have come across so far. So Claude Opis is that at L.A, you can run on a Lama? No, it's, I think it's only on there. It's only online. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Um, you, you, you, you can get to it either, um, by paying, I think you get to pay for 20 bucks or 100 bucks or 200 bucks,

depending on how crazy you want to get with it. And this is the problem I have with all these AI models is because they all have their strengths. Yeah. You know, but I don't want to subscribe to all of them. So people are always like, if you're doing coding, Claudecode is the best one, right? Um, chat GPT, well, it just knows me at this point. I've used it so much.

It knows me when it answers me. It answers me based on things. I wish I could export what it knew about me and feed it into another system so I can migrate easily and continue the conversations. But, um, yeah. I'm just like, I don't know where to go. It's getting, it's getting better to make that jump, but I get what you're saying. So on the coding side, I'm like, hey, I want to chess this out.

I made some jokes about our iguana site, you know, the tracking thing. Let me go fix that bad boy up. So I completely remade the UI. It doesn't look like it, but I completely remade the eye using my friend Claude and his buddies. And, yeah, if you go to the Ariguanasfalling.com now, not only will you get the results from Sarasota, Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and Pickering, Ontario. Like, it will use your IP, and it will track you that way,

because that's, you know, the legitimate way of doing it. It'll use your IP, figure out where you are in the world, and tell you if iguanas will follow the trees where you're living. Oh, yeah. Look at that. If you're on a VPN, it'll tell you, if you're in Costa Rica on a VPN, it'll tell you it's nice and warm there. They're going to be happy.

They'll be good to go. But here, I also updated the artwork. So there's a really frozen iguana. There's like a kind of a loosey iguana that exists now. And there's, you know, the happy iguana that's always been around. I put little buttons at the bottom that will let you toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Oh, yeah. And it saves it locally.

So you don't have to worry, Gavin. When you come back, it's going to be in Celsius. And I gave my favorite feature is the theme. You know, I got a light theme and dark theme. And you can switch between those two, but I also got hot dog theme because why wouldn't I? Oh, man. You got the hot dog theme. Oh, yeah.

Come on. That's the best one. And that, and also, when I, when I put this on our Slack, who is it? Is it Jake that was harassing me about it looking awful on home assistant? Yeah, with the cards. Yeah, yeah, it didn't look good on the cards. Well, there's now a home assistant, basically integration, well, it's not integration. So you just put it on a little web card, and it will make a little button that tells you are the, you know, what the risk is for the iguanas falling, either, you know, colored and red, green, yellow, whatever, it is supposed to be. But it's basically simplified version of it. I'm amazed at the amount of work you put into this.

Literally no work, Kevin. I'm telling you. Like, I can just say, I want to do these things. And it does it. Like, and it did all this stuff. So this was not, this was the least difficult thing I did this week. This is what we are putting data centers all over the world for, guys. And I hope your boss isn't listed to this.

I've got one in my house, you know? So it gets easier. It gets easier. It gets easier. It gets worse. It gets worse. Oh, it always does. So I also, at the same time, those P40s came in.

I ordered a Just-Ed Power piece because I realized after all these years, or not all these years, but a couple of months now, I've been using the Just-Ed Power AVP encoders. And finally realized by digging, it's got like this big Dolby Digital logo on it and everything, finally realized by reading it, it basically decodeled. codes the Adobe Digital and puts it as two-channel audio. So I'm like, why does this audio sound so bad? It sounds so bad because I'm not getting 7-1. I'm getting 2-channel. It's just, it's down-mixing everything for 2-channel, which is great if you have like,

if you need to down-mix Dolby Digital into 2-channel, but it's not what I need to do when I'm watching Apple TV. I'm a snow-s surround system. So I got a new, a new, just regular old 707-P-O-E, I don't know, whatever. The regular encoder is, and boom, guess what? I have surround sound now, finally. Oh, and so, like, after doing that, I got my P40s in.

I've got one more wire to get for the second P40 to hook that up so I can have two models run in at the same time, burning the electricity. I got my new friend, Henry, Henry Gavin. You were talking to this a little bit before the show. This thing I ran across, his name is it's Claudebot. Oh, my God. So we've been renamed since. So it was Claudebot.

Now it's called something else. Yeah. I wonder what they've renamed it to, because Claudebot, Oh, it's Maltbot. Okay, so it's got a lobster theme to it, I guess. So it's Moldbot now, which is going to be decidedly harder to type, I guess. But you only have to type it once. This is basically what everybody in the AI world has been promising for the past year or two.

All the stuff that Apple demoed that said that they dreamed about that their phone could do, this actually does. All the stuff that you see and hear people talk about, oh, I wish I could do this with Siri. oh, I wish I could do this with whatever. This does it. If you do this now, you're living in the future. Like, there's no other way to say this. This is what people want AI to be now. And it's early days and it's rough around the edges.

Installing it is, eh, okay. It's not as fun as it should be. But this does the job. And there's one caveat to it. You basically turn over the entire computer to an AI bot and let it run your computer from the command line up with all your files sitting there. brave. So brave.

They did that in Silicon Valley and it did not end well. So I didn't believe it. I didn't believe that this would work. It's based pretty much on Claude, which I've been using in the dangerous mode anyway. So I'm like, who cares? I've had this Mac Mini sitting here since I was laid off.

And I was like, maybe should return this. Nope, I'll just keep it sitting on my desk collecting dust. No, this Mac Mini's been sitting here, just doing not much of anything. And now I loaded on there. I integrated with, they recommend you integrate with Telegram and you create a little bot, a little bot friend,

and you can use your phone anywhere in the world, texting this guy named Henry, because I named it, it's like, what do you want to call it? I was like, I'll name you Henry. And so it's called Henry now. And it gave itself an owl emoji, no idea why. But it decided to do that. And then it interviews you a little bit,

learns a little bit about you, what do you for work, that kind of thing. I'd set up some like news things to cover like for the show. Like it'll like send me like articles throughout the day like, hey, do you see this? Like no, I didn't, but you did. Thanks. Let's save that for the show. And it'll put it aside.

And I was like, hey, what story should we talk about on the show? But it'll, it'll kind of monitor that throughout the day and send me text messages about what it's to do. It'll, it has access to everything on your computer. I mean, everything. So if you have something on your calendar, it can see that. And it'll tell you, hey, you got this on your calendar. and let you know, hey, you need to go, when you need to go, because it knows where you are, too.

So it's, this is pretty much it. And what's cool is it's open source. Like you guys are like, this can't be the thing. It's open source to a point. You can use it with local models. You can use it with the Claude models. You can use it with anything you want. Prefer, my preference is, again, on that opus,

to kind of like over the top of everything. I didn't generally like it the best. but it does have access to the Olamo models that I have running locally. So anything I need to do, if I need to tell it to set up and do something for code, which I did this afternoon.

I had some stuff I needed to get done for work. I didn't want to do it. So I told this thing, I'm like, hey, write a Python script that will parse this CRM stuff and this blah, blah, blah, like I just gave it some things. It kind of knew what to do,

and it just did it. And I was like, you know what? That's great. That's stuff I don't have to do tomorrow, and it did it within like eight or nine minutes. I don't have to do it. Now I can just run the scripts and call it a day. You know, all this bragging about work that you don't have to do anymore,

your boss listens to this, you're going to get a little trouble. Yeah, I mean, again, these are just tools. Like, you just need to be more efficient. And, like, I don't, this is not going to replace, like, the idea that goes behind it, right? But you're going to do one hour work in an eight hour day. That's the point, right? Well, then he's got to give you much more work. No, I mean, like, I was talking to something about this.

Like, the problem with this tool, I think, is going to be that people, and I agree with this. The problem is that people are going to start using this and tools like this, because it is, this will come, whether it comes in a year for the mainstream or whether it comes in 30 days, I don't know, but this will come for people. This type of product, the worry I think most people should have is if it makes you that much more productive and takes, away a bunch of this stuff that's just, honestly, it's just cruffed. Like, it's stuff that you shouldn't have to do and fill up your brain with every single day, but you have to. Um, if it can do that, like, what do you do with that time that opens up? Uh, and my goal is not to make myself busier, but it's to maybe like learn some more things or just have a little bit more time for family, that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's not for opening up more possibility to do more work.

Uh, so yeah, I think that's where we would fail if, if this comes in. But, This is Maltbot for whatever. It's C-L-A-W, like a lobster quaw, d.B-O-T, is where this thing is. If you're interested in installing it, I recommend having a dedicated computer for it or Docker container or whatever. Go ahead and set this thing up.

This is the future. I'm not kidding. This is legitimately all the tools I've been telling everyone that they have on cloud code that don't exist for the average Joe. this guy's put them together and made it really easy for you to send a text message and say, hey, do you have integration with my Google Calendar? Oh, you don't do it. And it goes through and does it without any interaction on your part,

other than maybe like grabbing a token or telling it, you know, pasting in a password somewhere or something like that. There's nothing you have to do to get everything up and going. It'll install brew packages on the Mac. Basically like if it needs to have a command line utility, to run. Cool stuff. Cool stuff. That sounds crazy. It is insane. Absolutely insane. And yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. You put a lot of faith in it. And I find a lot of people these days, like, especially at my work, they put a lot of faith in the answers they get from Co-Pilot.

But how they try to protect themselves, they always say, well, I ask Co-Pilot and this is the answer it gave me. And it's like, well, I hope you would validate that answer and then make your final answer before presenting it to us, you know, I could have just asked co-pilot, you know? Co-pilot, unfortunately, uh, is absolutely useless for anything other than summarizing, um, meetings. Yeah, I agree. It, it falls flat everywhere else.

It is not the tool to use. Unfortunately, we're stuck with that. Yeah, well, because they sold it to you. I guess, yeah, but like, uh, the clot, clot even has like an Excel plugin now that just blows everything co-pilot was doing out of the water. Like, it's just absolutely insane what they've done with this thing. So, I, I would.

Anthropic is making the tools now for people. Like I'm seeing that come out. This is not one of them, but they're making, I imagine they couldn't do this now because I don't think people would want to turn over an entire computer in their digital life and all of their life, basically, to a computer. But I think maybe in six to nine months, there will be a mainstream product made by Claude,

made by OpenEI, I don't know somebody. And they'll be asking you to run this command and turn over a computer locally for them to work off of. Or will they sell you a little device you can put in your house that will just do it and you can interact with?

See, that's the thing. This, yeah, this could become, its own operating system essentially. Yeah, I could see that because it just, it basically works off APIs. And if it has, like, this one has an API to the things app that it used for, like, doing like, task management and that kind of thing.

I'm like, hey, remind me to do this, it'll put that task, in there, I don't have to do it. I think about stuff all the time and I'm like driving around that I just can't like have time to like go and research and do while I'm driving around or sitting on my couch at night. I just typed this thing in now. I'm like, hey, do some research on this, blah, blah, blah, whatever, and write it in a report and let me know in the morning. And it just goes off and does it. And it'll come back in the morning, hey, here's that report you want it. It's like, it's literally an AI assistant, personalized AI assistant. I mean, highly, highly personalized AI assistant.

and it knows what you tell it. I mean, but it is, you can engineer it for yourself. So really cool stuff. I highly recommend it, but not for everybody. I'm probably going to play with it this week. I've been multiple people have told me. You will be, this will, I think, put you in the same. I mean, they've probably got a Home Assistant integration too again.

I'm like anything you want to do on Homesteads. I just want to set it up in Docker on my, on my Unraid server. I have a llama sitting there and let it do its thing. Yeah, yeah. Give it a shot. Give it a shot. All right, that's all for me. I actually did a bunch of projects and was a lot more productive for me and my new friend Henry.

Did so many projects. You didn't even have a snowstorm. I know. It was really cold here. I wouldn't get it outside. One thing I did want to mention, though, before we take off here, last week we dropped an interview with Droplet. And they're the smart water metering that just installs over your clamp.

And they were kind enough to give us an affiliate link. So if you've already bought one after listening to us, then, you know, let them know you heard it through us. One. And buy a new one with the affiliate. And buy another one with the code. You could go to shop hydrificwater.com slash discount slash home tech. And that will take you there or use the code home tech. I think it gives you the same thing.

Just use home tech in the code. And it looks like it gives you about $30 off or so. Oh, there you go. So there you go. We'll save you some money while getting you to spend some more money. There's more than one pipe in your house. So just get one to each pipe and you get to get it. Exactly. You want to know what, yeah, so you can measure your irrigation independently of the rest of the house.

Actually, my neighbor called and she's like, hey, I just got a notification from the water company and they said that we've had some like high usage. Can you go and see if my house is flooded? I'm like, oh, God. So it's like, I have our key. And I went over and they were out of town for like two days. And I, you know, I'm like, I don't see any. There's no water in the, you know, no toilet overflowing or anything like that. you know, that's what I immediately, like, thought was like, go check the toilets, go check the little valve things. And I'm like, I walk towards one side of the house. I'm like, I do hear water running. There's water running somewhere.

Because you can hear it kind of in the pipes when it's quiet. And I walked outside and she had a sprinkler going on our garden for like two days. She's like, oh, my God. So that's some expensive vegetables now. Send her our. She needs, yeah, I'm just going to tell her this. Yeah, she'll get one. Because this is honestly, I was like, I have the flow, but it's a pain.

to install. This one just clamps on. You're good to go. Yeah. And it doesn't require a hub or anything. It's all, it works all independent. So it's just an easy to install device.

Uh, we, we got to talk about TJ's projects because TJ, um, has probably the, the biggest T's going on right now. I was like what he's doing with his audio system. And I'm hoping he's going to tell us this week.

Are we going to find out? Hey, what sonos? Yeah. I bought all new sonos stuff. No. I got a lot of jokes about that though. And I told people,

I solved my audio issue. Everybody's like, what sonos did you? by and I was like I would never do that again hopefully. The biggest hurdle for me with the sound system is that I had to find a soundbar. And I couldn't ask Reddit. I actually asked a couple of subredits. And Reddit, kind of like TVs being too high, are vehemently against soundbars.

Like you would ask like, you'd ask like the home theater people and then they would flame you and call you all kinds of names and say soundbars aren't real speakers. you would ask like the TV people and they would be like get a Sonos arc and then you ask like the soundbar people and they would tell you get something else. And so finding a passive soundbar that I could use, a passive soundbar is a non-powered soundbar that I could use with like an amplifier or receiver or something like that was pretty difficult because not a lot of people make a passive sound bar as I'm sure you can imagine because literally nobody knows what they are. but they actually do make passive soundbars, but it's usually a higher-end audio companies. So companies like Sonans or Kef or Paradigm or Triad, all these companies usually have an option

where you can get a custom-built soundbar with color matching, it'll match the size of your TV, all this kind of nice stuff. Yeah, but there are thousands of dollars, right? I mean, whatever you get a custom, like anything made, it's always expensive, but you get a custom soundbar made and it's like $2,000 or $3,000. and I'm a realist and I'm not rich.

And so having a soundbar designed exactly for the TV I have right now sounds like a stupid idea because in like five years I'm going to have a different TV and it's not going to match. So that was never an option for me. But I was looking at like other speakers like the Sonance soundbar and stuff like that. And I just didn't want to spend $1,000 on a passive soundbar. It's a lot of money on a passive sound bar. And so I was browsing Facebook Marketplace and about an hour away from me

in a town that I said I would never go back. to somebody who was selling a paradigm trio speaker, a millennia trio. What was the town? Why? You can pass over that? It's all Gavin and I want to know now. We don't need to talk about. It's a little town I work there.

It's a restraining lawyer. It's a little town I did one of the baseball jobs at. And we were doing something like antique shopping or something. And somebody like gave me a flyer. And they're like, oh, you should come back this weekend and do this like this little flea market thing we're having. And I was like, I'm never coming back here. And then I did end up going back there.

The Paw Paw Festival is. No, I would definitely go back there. This is like near Dayton. Nobody wants to go to Dayton. That place sucks. I found this paradigm millennia trio speaker. And I think this is like, like the MSRP on this thing is like $13 or $1,400. So this is a very expensive soundbar.

But it's a true like left, center, right soundbar. So it's got separate inputs for all those. It sounds amazing. Oh, cool. The only thing that's... Oh, no, it is thin? Oh, no, it is not. It is very thick.

I will send you a link to this website on paredygum.com. And the images they have, they take a picture of it like sideways, and it looks like it's... Actually, this might not be the right one then. Hold on. Let me see. Oh, okay. We'll do this lot. Yeah, this is definitely not a...

This is a thick boy, as they say. I don't see it. Is the decor? I don't know. I'll define it. maybe we'll put it in there in the show note. Okay. It's not the Millennia LP trio because that one looks really thin.

Yeah, it's not the cinema trio either. Hmm. I don't know. It's a paradigm sound bar. Is it one that matches to the bottom of the TV, though, like width-wise? No, it is not like a custom length one. It makes me laugh because it's actually like a chrome color. But where it's sitting at, we actually don't see the chrome, like, unless we're, like,

standing up or something. But I might try to wrap that at some point. But yeah, the guy I bought it from, he's had it for like five or six years. He supposedly hasn't used it in the past like three years. So, you know, it's relatively unused, it sounds like. But it's a nice sound bar. It sounds really good. I bought a denon receiver.

It's just a little 5.1 receiver. I bought it off eBay. I think it was from, what is that company, Adorama. They sell like electronics and stuff like that. But they had like an open box denon receiver for like $300. So I solved my living room TV audio for about $700 altogether. Nice. And it sounds pretty good.

And then I bought Denon-Hio speakers for the rest of the house. I got a little 150 speakers. And they all work together. I haven't figured out the home assistant portion yet. There's a couple, because I'm using the receiver, I'm using the TV audio from the receiver. There's not just like an input I can go to. I have to do some kind of magic with home assistant.

But I'm able to group the speakers with the receiver. and listen to audio all over the house again. So that part has been solved. Nice. Nice. I'm glad you found a good sounding sour. That's honestly, my experience with sound bars is they've been kind of like hit or miss on like how good they sound. You know, like right. Even Leon, like some of the Leon speaker ones and they get too small of speakers in them,

they do not sound great. So yeah, glad you found one. Yeah, and honestly, it's one of those things like, I didn't want to spend like $1,000 on a sound bar and have it sound awful. So it's very hesitant to spend a lot of money on. soundbars. But yeah, this one for $300, I didn't even try to like negotiate the guy down or anything like that. I was like $300. That's a heck of a good deal for the speaker. And I just bought it. Very cool. Very cool. Well, I look forward to your adventures in Heos land. Tell us how that's

going. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's fine. The app is going to take a little bit to get used to just because I've used Sonos all my life. I don't know if I'm going to sell Heos to my customers, though, because like the actual powered soundbar they have, I think sounds awful. And they only have one right now in the Hios lineup. So it's not something I'm going to sell my customers. But for my intended use case at my house, I think it's just fine. Yeah. And I got a lot of the speakers for dealer costs.

I saved like, you know, $90 per speaker. So they were relatively affordable to replace my things with. When I'm curious, I mean, so we all know, like, the biggest thing you have to do is make the home assistant thing work where it follows you around the house. So that's, that's, you know, that was called out. You got called out on that one. I did. Don't screw this up, Nicole. Don't mess it up, DJ.

I mean, that was literally my favorite feature of the Sonos. Yeah. So I would agree with that. That is the thing I definitely miss. If you just pop in this AI coder thing in there, it'll do it for you. So, yeah. Maybe I should do that because I don't want to mess with it. I really just need to look up, like, the device classifications for the Denon receiver.

That's the issue I'm having right now. Because all the inputs and stuff, like, I've got to figure out those. But it is what it is. Well, good luck. The next project I've been working on is we were obviously snowed in our house for the past couple days. Sheavling snow. So I shoveled a lot of snow. I went out there and shoveled every like two or three hours because I was like,

I'm not going to deal with all the snow at the very end. That's just that's going to suck. But one of the things I've been enjoying about having a 3D printer again is I can print whatever I want. And so this week I printed off a bunch of mounts for various devices because I bought a new soundbar for the TV, right? And so I was like, well, if I'm going to do the soundbar, I have to put the soundbar somewhere. It's going to take up more space than my Sonos arc, ironically, just because the height of the new soundbar. So I was like, well, I'm going to go ahead and mount the living room TV because it wasn't mounted before. And I'll put the sound bar right underneath that.

That'll solve that problem. But I was like, you know, it'd be kind of nice if I could just clean up all these other devices. Like, we have an Xbox One. We have a Nintendo Switch. We have a Nintendo Wii. We have an Apple TV. We have all these devices that just sit underneath the TV. and after a certain amount of time,

there's just so much crap underneath the TV on the TV stand that I just have to like rip it all out and clean it up. And so I was like, I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to mount a lot of these devices behind the TV. And so that way, they're there. They're, you know, right next to where they need to be. And I don't have to necessarily look at them if I don't want to. And so that's what I've done.

I've mounted all these devices, either with 3D printed mounts or I bought a couple mounts off, you know, Amazon for the more important things. You know, like our Nintendo Switch. I was like, I don't want to break up. that one. Yeah. But it's like the Xbox falls. I don't really care about that.

So I printed all the mounts in PetG. Um, so they should do pretty good with the, the, the, uh, how much weight there is and everything like that. Uh, but yeah, I've just, I've been mounting stuff. I've got, uh, I clean up my computer desk this week as well. And I've been mounting, uh, my Mac minis to the wall behind the, the monitors here, along with my, uh, Sonos Ray that I cannot get rid of.

Um, so it's just a, uh, it's a, it's a mount. everything kind of weak. You're not mounting at all. I mean, you're snowed in, so may as well do it. I guess are you snowed in still? No, I can go places. Yeah. And I'm legally allowed to.

For a while, we were under a level three snow emergency, which I know you don't know what that is, Seth. But a level three is basically when they say, hey, you cannot go anywhere. And if you do, we might arrest you. Oh, wow. Because they need to get the roads cleared. And they can't do that if a bunch of people are on the roads. So for the first time in 20 plus years, Franklin County, the county I live in,

went under a level three. Wow. So we legally could not leave for like a day. No, here they have that for all the hurricanes. They basically say at this point, you can leave your house. We don't recommend it. And if you do, you're on your own because we're not coming to save you if you call 911. So there's that part of the equation.

But yeah, we don't have it like staying home or arrest you if you walk on the street or drive on the street. Yeah, it makes sense though. Yeah, I don't think like, I don't like, I'm sure that they have, but like, I've never heard of me by just being arrested for being on the street. I think probably what happens is that if you get in an accident or you do something dumb, then they're like, okay, well, you're not supposed to be out here anyway. Here's like a bigger ticket kind of thing. Right, right. Because people are like freaking out. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm stuck at work now.

How do I get home if we're under a level three? And I was like, just drive home. Like, if you tell them you're just driving home from like work, I doubt they're going to care. Yeah. You know? But if you're just like out, drive around like, oh, it's going to try to get some McDonald's. today. They're probably not going to like that. I'm going to be upset with you.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad all that's passed and you can legally drive around and go places. And I'm glad you got a sound bar that sounds good. So that's, that's important. Hopefully, hopefully this new system works for you. And you don't have any weird issues with, no dropout so far. I was using mine today.

I was like, can you play some music? She had to do some stuff. I'm like, yeah, I'll play some music. And I open up the Sonos app and I'm looking at it. I'm like, press a button. I wait. I'm like, what is this even waiting for? Like, it's just, one speaker started playing, and it's just like trying to, like, figure out how to talk to the other speakers.

But they're all present. It knew they were all there. As I'm playing it, I'm like, all right, I'm going to turn it off because she sat down and wanted to watch a little part of a little cartoon or something, and, of course, it had it grouped all together. So the TV automatically clicks over to Apple TV. I go in to, like, ungroup them and just stop the music. Or just go in and stop the music, and I have to wait, like, five to ten seconds.

for it to even figure out what it's playing. I knew it was playing something. I just didn't have a pause command I could hit. Like, how do you not cache any of this stuff in a reasonable way where you can just immediately get back to, I don't know. Like, come on, Sonos. Get with it. You open the click app and boom, you can do it instantly, right?

That's the problem. Yeah, that's what's annoying, right? The third-party apps work every single time so quickly. So fast. So I know it's not my network. I know it's the Sonos. But luckily, you know, most of the times we're just hitting play. And not worrying about what's coming out or how long it comes out.

And eventually we'll turn it off or stop it. But it's definitely frustrating because you know how fast it can work. Well, Seth, I'll have you know that not only could you have one device that does not work well. You could have one device that has four in it that does not work well. If you want to try out the new multi-M from Sonos. It's not going to happen, but. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. No, thank you. No, thank you.

So, now, then my last shout out for this week, you'll probably, you might be able to listen to it next week. Who knows? Supposedly, I'm going to be on Home Gadget Geeks next week, the fifth, whatever the fifth is. Thursday. Nice. Yeah, I'll be on there. I haven't talked to Jim in several months now. Yeah.

Must listen. Yeah. I forget what I told him the topics I was going to talk about would be shed and solar, which I think that's a good one. That's kind of fits into his audience. CES. Then I'm doing a mystery topic, which I think might be 3D printing, but mystery,

mystery for that one. Is it your mystery or is he's going to surprise you? Mine. Oh, okay. He always has this pick three topics that we wanted to discuss. We might not talk about them or whatever, but it kind of gives the conversation somewhere to go. That's pretty good idea.

It's better than we do it on this show. Oh, man. It's all over the place. Nah, we do pretty good with our guest. Besides the awkward intro we have. But here you are. Let's jump in. It catches everybody off card every time.

So, yeah, well, I don't think we could put the live stream in there in our show notes or anything like that. But it's home gadget geeks. Yeah. Google it. And if you want to listen to my voice live, you have the option to do that. And if you don't, I won't know and I won't judge you. So, yeah. I'll be there typically posting something, you know, comments because Jim can read those comments while you're talking about.

I do like when he reads the comments live. Yeah. It's quite fun. So. All right. Well, that's going to wrap up this week. we do want to thank everyone for listening to the show

but especially want to send out a big special thanks for those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page or our affiliate link which Gavin will actually paste into the notes here so I can put it on the site. If you don't know about our patron page,

head over to Home TechDat of M slash support and learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you big shout out here on the show but every single pledge will get you an invite to our private slot chat at the hub

where you and everyone else can get in there and see it snow. See people snow shovel things because that's what's been going on in there. And T.J.'s van, doing like Tokyo drift style maneuvers in the street. That was

fun. But if you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a far-star review. Positive rating a podcast after your choice. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech News. Everybody, have a great weekend. And we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care.

I have a task for Henry. I want you to try. Oh, I'm going to miss my Henry up. He's going to, I'm going to mess my Henry up. I want to see if he crashes. No, I'm just kidding. Ask him to take our show and make the audiograms and see how far he gets with that. Oh, okay, like when I'm done with it.

Well, yeah, well, like you could take our past show, but say take our, take this episode, um, find the best clips, you know, make audio grams out of it that we can, uh, post a social media. and see how far he gets with it. Okay. Because you'll have to transcode the audio into text and then analyze the text, unless they do the audio directly. And then make audio files and cut them up and all sorts of things. How, like, what, three or four?

Ah, you can make eight. Just do eight because a bunch of them may be crap, right? So then out of those eight, you can pick the ones you want. I'm just curious how far it will get with that. Do it like the last show. I just said, um... I'm very curious how far it will get with that. Yeah, I just sent him a message.

I just send him a message. He's typing. What are you messaging through? Telegram? Telegram, yeah. It's like, it's a chat. I mean, it's, I use my WhatsApp. He says, he says, I can do that.

Let me figure out where to grab the audio from. So he's, he's off doing his thing. Yeah, I'm just letting him go. I don't care. This is hilarious. I'm going to get it set up like tomorrow, but I may bug you for some help. That's hilarious. He's asking which episode to pick from.

He's given me a couple different, uh, Download the audio trans guide, find eight punchy moments, 15 to 60 second clips, generate audiograms late, yep, with waveform visuals. There we go. All right, so I'm just saying your choice. All right, you wanted to be the latest one? Always, yeah, do the latest one.

All right. There's something we can use if anything, you know. All right, yeah. All right, there we go. The latest episode will work. This is insane. If it does it, if it doesn't, I'm installing this tomorrow. It's doing something.

I can't see what, oh, no, I can see its tool use go by. if I figure out where the... It probably will need FFM peg and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I forget that it's like a local host. Oops. It's got, I mean, it's got access to all that. So, like, literally the power of a Mac Mini plus LLM plus local LLN, like, it's got access to everything.

So, uh, what, oh, wait, it's on Safari on this computer. Your AI. What are you doing in Safari on this computer? It's on porn. Oh. He said he downloaded the episodes, 72 minutes. He's going to take a bit to process. He's going to spawn some subagents to handle all this.

And to handle the audio, he's still typing. Is this running off your Olamo to or is it going through Claude? No idea. No idea. Wait until I get the bill. I saw somebody go, my, my, my, my cloud bot signed me up for a $2,000 bill for a I saw that. I saw that.

Oh, it's got whisper. It got, uh, whisper is what I used. Yep. Yeah. It's going to, it's going to do. extracting a and create a 1080 by 1080 audiograms way form visualization and pingu mary ready and it's it's just executing things

it's just executing things in the background here I don't know what it's doing but it will come out with something I hope and we'll see how that goes oh he said on it some agency is working on boom boom and then I'll pinguwin they're ready output will be in a developer folder so that I told him to save stuff into so 8 MP4 files plus a summary with the suggested options captions are you kidding no i i literally said none of that up like it has access to the command line so it'll install brew ff and peg all that

stuff it's crazy how long will this take like i don't know i'm going to stop recording though i need stop recording