HomeTech.fm - Episode 561 - 8K Is Dead, Long Live Buttons

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

On this week’s show: Control4 previews shiny new touchscreens and subscriptions, Google Home finally wakes up to buttons, and Ikea’s Matter devices can’t seem to "Thread the needle." Home Assistant wants your device data (respectfully), the 8K dream is officially dead (RIP pixels), and Nice and Yubii have ecosystem updates. Plus, a new dirt-hugging soil sensor, a pick of the week, project updates, an AI bot forces Gavin to spend money, and so much more!

This is the Home Attack Podcast for Friday, February 6th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast podcast, podcast, all about home technology, home automation, and dear God, guys, who left the door open up there, Gavin? TJ, it's been in the 30s all week.

I don't understand this. We have frozen iguanas everywhere. It's a bit of a massacre that I think they're all dead. I've looked at my iguana page all week. It's just as warning every day. And you're complaining about one week. We've been doing through this for like months now. This is norm.

Yeah, I mean, you're going to have to get used to it with the climate change and everything, I think, Seth. So this is, like, it was amazing when I went down, I think it was last year, and it got down to, I guess, 45 degrees when we were in Burvard County. So I was actually listened to a radio series this week, and they were interviewing this guy that went out and caught 3,000. thousand iguanas. Because they were frozen, they can't move. So it was a perfect time to go catch them. And he's like, there's way more. This is not even going to make a dent in anything that we've done.

Wow. 3,000 iguanas. Yeah. Hey, he just went to the tracker website. It's saying we have a low of 35 tonight. So we're definitely in the warning zone right now. And you guys, oh, man. T.J. 5 degrees, Gavin negative 3.

It feels like it. Yeah. You're talking Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit. So Gavin, negative 19. TJ negative 15, Seth, South 2. I'd be happy with two.

I think it's supposed to go up to zero on Friday, so we're already like preparing for that. Well, we're not happy about it. It's still cold here, but for some reason all the snow is starting to melt. And I'm like, I don't, like, how is this happening right now?

But it's, you know, you can start to see grass again because we got like, you know, 11 inches of the snow last weekend. And yeah, we can see grass now. That's how fast it changes in Ohio. Wow. That's impressive. Everyone here's cold. I can tell you, my wife's not happy. She's like, I'm so cold. I've not been able to warm up all week.

It is chilly. It does get chilly in the morning, but I don't know. The house never seems to warm up anymore. So, all right. We get, speaking of warm weather, I guess the ISE is going over in Barcelona right now. So not warm there, I'm assuming. But it would probably be nice. We've got some, we've got some home tech headlines on that. On the pro space, there's news in the pro space, CJ. I know, I know you're excited. Stop lying to the people. I don't know if I would say excited,

but what is it, Seth? We've got a couple of things from my I see. The news stories are lining up. It's still early, I think. So we'll probably see more of those stories kind of start dropping over the week. This week and next week. And then, yeah, off to the races for the rest of the year.

But getting some interesting things there and some new products. Got a bunch of new products this week. What do you say we jump into these home tech headlines? Let's do it. Let's do it. Nice is showcasing its smart living ecosystem at ISC 2026, showing off the Elon OS 9 and the UBS platforms. Not heard of the UBS.

It's interesting. I guess the UB home was only previously available over in Europe, but now it's launching in North America with initial support for motorized shading. And from what the article here says UBOS is kind of designed to manage Z-Wave and nice protocol devices. And it's a more simple solution for home control than the full-blown Elon OS system. So, and there's a nice, no pun intended, nice updates from Nice, I guess.

But I don't know, TJ, you're more familiar with On. Have you heard of the UB thing before? I think I have heard of it. So I honestly, I'm a nice dealer. but I haven't really sold much since they, you know, they went through the whole name change, which I think is still an awful idea. I don't want to tell anybody about this system because it's called nice.

I mean, it'd be like telling somebody about a system and it's called like the or something. I don't like, what kind of automation system you're going to put in here? Nice. No, no, what system? Nice. That's what it's called. So that still irritates me. But I think they were talking about this a couple years ago.

And they definitely need some. something because like the UI and stuff is pretty antiquated at this point. I think they do have a good system already because they support Z wave, which is not like a super common thing in the professional industry. Just like you could just pair up any Z wave device to it and you can still add, you know, device drivers and integrations and everything else you normally would. So I think they have the potential,

but it's just, it's been so not maintained for a while. But yeah, this is something I think they were working on for a little while. It looks like they're just integrating both of these together, so the UBS will talk to the LilanOS or something. I don't know. I'm looking at their web page now,

and I'm even more confused by this whole thing. I mean, I know the nice products. I know the Alon side of things. I understand that. The UB looks like it's the ZWave add-on devices. And so I guess that's how they're bringing in these extra devices. It's just strange that there's a whole other platform for that. To me, it seems, I don't know if I'm, like, reading too much into this,

but this seems like a way for them to make the system modern while still maintaining older things. Yeah. Because they could make everything, I don't know, it just seems like it would be easier to do that with this kind of split, but maybe I'm reading too much into that decision. They've got these big old buttons you can buy.

There's just like a giant button, like a big red button or a black button or a white button. You can buy that. Where are you seeing this out? It's on their website. For the UBS, I'll put a link here for you to take a look. at. Gates and garage door openers, heating and security. The lighting, the little lighting thing looks like with that eyeball. Who made that eyeball motion detector thing? Oh, Fabaro.

Fabaro. That's the one. Yeah, it looks just like that. Here, this is something I just came across from Fabaro, ironically, from 2021 that talks about UB Home. Yeah. Yeah, they actually mentioned nice down later on in the article. Yeah. Yeah. I guess this is, like it says, it has been available in Europe for a while. So if anybody's over there and has used a UB home, then let us know what you like about it. I feel like an idiot. I guess I forgot that Nice also owns Fibaro.

So that makes total sense. Oh, okay. I forgot about that. So they're basically just using the same platform for professional or DIY, and they're basically just allowing the nice platform. Gotcha. Okay.

So, yeah, see, I don't know anything about this company, which is funny. Wasn't Zuz using the same platform? I think so, yeah. For their controller, yeah. The Z-Borah. The Z-Box hub, right? Yeah, I think it's the same thing.

I wonder, I mean, it kind of opens up the, like, the range of devices that you can get. If you're going with like some, I wouldn't say DIY, but like, Fobaro, Z-Wave products, you can get those put in, some shades, that kind of thing. You can get those put in with this hub and then integrate that back into a bigger alarm system if you want. That makes sense. Yeah, and I always like the Z-wave support anyway because I could sell, like, inexpensive, switches for smaller systems. Yeah.

You know, if I'm doing like a simple home theater or I'm doing, you know, like a TV room or something, mainly TV rooms and home theaters where I would use nice at at this point. But I'm going to sell, you know, two or three or four light switches and not kill the budget because I buy Zoo's light switches, for example. And, you know, it's $120 for four light switches instead of spending, you know, several hundred dollars on like Lutron switches and a hub and whatever else. So very nice. I keep saying it, but I guess, yeah, such a terrible name.

I don't like it. Well, speaking of terrible names and interesting that they've branded it this way, but ADI is previewing its upcoming T5 touchscreen models. And if you've never heard of the ADA T5 touchscreen, it's because it's Control 4. I don't know why they call it ADI. So weird. Anyway, they're releasing those and introducing a new Control 4 Connect subscription for the X4 platform, which I have heard is a little bit better than what they were doing before.

but the new T5 models include features like magnetic trims to match the deluxe lighting line. They do look nice. Proximity sensing, dynamic screensavers, and a dark mode. I know that there are a bunch of dealers who are very... I don't know if they're excited. There was a lot of problems with the T4. And when they moved to the X-Wor platform,

evidently the T-4 touch screens were not ready for that move. They wanted to stay back on the old ones. I don't know. Evidently there's a lot of problems around the T4 touchscreens and the X4 interface, including like the intercom, just like stopped working completely. So I was seeing a lot of complaints about that. Not the first control four touchscreen that has been problematic for the brand. And hopefully the T5 will be better. I don't know. I can tell you that I've been through this very conversation in the past, maybe two, three times. but I was in the forums kind of looking at this announcement and reading what dealers were posting

and they were saying, never again, not buying a Control 4 test screen again. So, yeah, good luck there. And I think the Connect thing, they had basically locked down the Control 4 system back when, right before SnapAVE was sold to ATI, that they were locking things down

and basically turning it over just like, you can't really do anything unless you were paying for that Control 4 Connect subscription. Now that I think, wow, if I remember reading it correctly, they basically pulled it back and it's a more reasonable feature said you get if you, if you're not, you can actually like use some devices in your house. I think before you had to pay description or you couldn't even use an iPad in your house connected and control, you know, something in this in your house with that iPad unless you're paying for the subscription, which is kind of like a big lead down, kind of painful. but I think they walk some of that back but now if you want the control 4 Connect, I think it's

it just basically adds that remote access back in, device notifications and that kind of thing. It kind of feels like what it used to be before. Maybe there's some subtle differences, but it sounds like it, back when I was doing it, it was called foresight, and it sounds like it's closer to

that, so hopefully dealers like that, and maybe they'll like the T5 shutdowns, I don't know, be interesting. I wonder how much they cost. They do look nice. I'll give them that. They look a little better, but wouldn't they look better with no bezels? The in-wall ones... They need bezzles? I had a picture of the in-wall ones.

I didn't post them. I mean, like, I understand you have, like, a camera up top and, like, that kind of thing, but... Here's a picture over on the SNAPAV website, and it shows a better picture of the on-wall, or in-wall. They're calling it in-wall, but it mounts on the wall. I mean, that's a little better, right? It looks like... Yeah, yeah. I think it looks pretty sharp next to the...

If they're matching the lighting, uh, trims and everything. does look pretty sharp with that. In the backbox, they mount in the standards two gang, backbox, which is nice. You don't have to go crazy. Used to, in the past, there were like these random size backboxes.

Oh my God, obnoxious. Yeah. So, PEO, there you go. Yeah, I'd be interested to know if any of our listeners are using a touch screen in their house and if they actually find it useful. Because I've always, like, seen them in people's houses and I've installed a decent amount of them.

And I feel like in houses, they don't have a lot of uses. They make sense in a commercial space, right? because you walk into like a conference room and whatever, you want to be able to start a Zoom call. That makes sense. But like in a house, I've just never found like a really compelling use to have one.

Like in a fixed location in the house, you mean? Right. Yeah. Like a mobile iPad, like I've installed some of the, I think they call them like launch ports where they like, they attach to like a wireless charger on your wall.

Yeah. And then you like pick it. They have like an obnoxious case that comes with and all that stuff. But I like the idea of that because I can pick it up and take it with me. And they have like table top. stands and all that stuff. So like that one makes sense to me. But just like a fixed tablet on your wall,

I don't understand the purpose. Yeah. Yeah, I tried going down that, you know, putting a tablet in and having a dashboard set up and stuff on it. But I found like the wife was just intimidated by it. Like she didn't want to touch it at all because, you know,

there are a button, too many buttons or she was afraid she'd break something, you know, she's been more receptive to using the Amazon devices to control things. For the voice, the voice control, yeah,

and then we have some automations. That makes sense, because you can just, like, yell it out, you know, you don't have to, like, look through, like, menus and stuff,

because, honestly, it takes a lot to design a good, like interface anyway. And some platforms, like control, do make that easier, but there's still, like, a programming aspect to it

that you have to figure out. Yeah, and it's not always intuitive, so it heavily relies on the programmer, but I don't like them. It makes, it makes me laugh with it. Like,

they come up with these little switches, that have like tiny screens in them. Like I'm going to like go down to my switch level and like control my Sonos device or something. I'm not going to do that. Like that sounds like an awful idea to me. Those are the worst. I honestly don't understand why anybody wouldn't want that.

Like you have to, unless you're like four feet tall. It doesn't make any sense. Right. Yeah. And very what, near-sighted or something? I don't know. If you are, I'm sorry. Yeah.

Well, speaking of a touch screens with a lot of buttons, I guess Google Home has finally added support for buttons, Gavin, so there you go. You can have programmable buttons in Google home now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's coming off the heels, I think, of the Amazon devices adding the same type of support.

But, you know, I'm shocked that these systems took so long just to add support for our button. And that's sometimes why I hate these systems is they're just so far behind. Buttons have been out forever. They're a real thing in the world. Yeah. And they can't be that complicated, right? I mean, it's like a switch. Like,

they control, like, light switches and dim and stuff. So like, how hard is a wireless button? Right now you have a Google developer and Amazon developer yelling at the screen right now because of you saying that, you know, how hard can it really be? If we knew the legacy code, they had the vibe code around. It's a button. I'm not asking them to add like robot vacuums or something. I'm pretty sure they have robot vacuum support, but they don't have button support. Yeah, that's true too. Like, they have other devices that are even more complicated.

Like how could buttons fall to the bottom of your want list? They're like a ton of people have buttons. Like they have like a light they want to control, but they like they can't like use their normal light switch. No, I can't do that. So they use a button for it. This is a respectable home control system, DJ. Come on.

We can't do that. Yeah, this stuff annoys me. Like I understand like like new features coming out and stuff. But it's a button. That's not a new feature. We've had buttons. It's 2026, man. Come on.

Give them a break. It was funny, though, because I was listening to the, the Verge podcast, and Jen was on the show, and she was talking about this. And somebody actually wrote in, and they're like, hey, why doesn't Google support buttons? And she was like, I've asked Google so many times, like, even on stage. And they have not given me a reason. And then I, like, I opened the news app on my iPhone, like, right after the interview. And this article was out. So it was like, fine. Like, that's crazy, though. I don't understand. Doesn't make any sense. I mean, yeah, some of the things that go missing in some of these platforms just don't make any sense. But then you have like home assistant, which like everything could be a button. Yeah, there you go. Speaking of buttons, I guess IKEA has all those new devices we talked about. They're having problems with the matter, the matter, TJ.

And you were telling us before the show, you were about to head on over to IKEA and pick up some buttons. and some sensors and some bulbs and some plugs. And now it appears that the line is facing widespread connectivity issues. So, yeah, weird. Yeah, at this point, I do not need any more smart home sensors. I have smart home sensors out the wazoo at this point. But I was near IKEA, which I am quite often. So that's like it's a good issue.

But I was near IKEA the other day. And I was like, you know, they just came out with these new matter devices. And they're like $6. I can go buy a couple, you know, $6 devices and at least play with them. You know, IKEA devices are pretty nice to have. And I didn't. I didn't give in some temptations because that's how strong willed I am. And I read this article later too.

And I was like, well, it's a good thing. I didn't buy anything because all my matter devices I've ever tried to make work with Home Assistant do not work at all. So, like, I don't know if it's Home Assistant. It might be, I'll talk about maybe trying to resolve that here in a bit. But it's just, yeah, I don't have luck with Matter devices. Anyway, so I should not curse myself with matter devices, even if they're from IKEA. Yeah.

Sounds like it's a wait and see on these. Yeah. Even if they started $6, it's probably something you want to wait on. That's pretty nice, though. I mean, they have a couple stuff that looks pretty nice, like the door sensor. Mm-hmm. I like how thin and narrow it is. That would be nice.

But yeah. And if any company is going to be able to put in the time and effort and money to fix it, to be IKEA. Oh, for sure. Yeah, they've had a pretty solid platform before, so. But the last thing I expected them to have problems with is, matter. Yeah?

Yeah, I thought matter was, you know, pain free. Allegedly, yeah. That's what we've learned over the years. Yeah, that's what we've been told. All right, well, let's move on here. We've got, I guess if you're in the market for an 8K LCD or OLED panel, well, it's too bad because LG's not going to be making them anymore. Sony's not making the TVs anymore.

Who's going to be making these AK TVs? I guess, I guess the manufacturers are just like, yeah, 4K is probably good or not. and no one wants 8K and there's no content for it. They're really high price and there's very little difference that you can actually see on the screen compared to a 4K TV. So let's not make them anymore. Was 8K ever really a thing though? I mean, it seemed like more of a marketing of, hey, we make 8K. It's a round.

I mean, but again, there's no content for it. Yeah, there's no demand for it probably. Yeah. I see a lot of people with 4K TVs now, and they're still not even using 4K. You know, like, I don't even think they even, they just say, I have a 4K TV, and then they're playing some SD content on it.

It upscals to 8K, though. You know, it's nice. I guess, what, Samsung has a, like a $3,500. 8K TV. I think that's the cheapest one out there. I don't know. If you're curious of how this works,

like go, there's plenty of like screen size. There's a chart that has like the screen size and the distance that you're going to be away from it. And like if it even matters. Like does the resolution matter? And like at certain points, 8K does,

it serves no benefit. Like unless you're watching the 8K TV like two inches away, it's probably not going to serve you of any benefit. So it's probably not any, it's not great. I don't know. Like added, that in like all of like a whole host of other like technical problems of getting like that much

bandwidth down the htmi cable i even heard that like china had their own like non-htim i cable they were using for some of these like high output um video formats now ah it just seems like a headache so so i was curious sorry go ahead go ahead so i was i was curious because they they say that sharp brought the four the aka prototype to the c s in 2012 right and i was like What was 4K adoption even in 2012? So when they started talking about 8K, what was it actually yet? Sony was just talking about rolling out 4K

to all its televisions in 2012. It was a dream. They're like, this is what we're going to do. So like, even when they were talking about AK, there was no reason to talk about it because nobody even had 4K yet. And then I was curious, 2018, the adoption for 4K was roughly 25%.

So still a super low number. And that might be a little wrong too. I haven't had a lot of time to look into this part. But whenever they talked about AK, there was no reason to talk about it because nobody even had 4K yet. Right. So they should have waited a long time

to even try to make this into a thing. Well, I think for the bigger screens, like building size screens, the more resolution you get sometimes, the better. But at some point, like, the, this chart is actually down. The little resolution limit matrix is down in the bottom there. Like, if you have a 100-inch,

screen and you are three feet away from it, yeah, a 16K screen is what you want. If you're six feet away from it or two meters, an 8K TV is what you need. But not many people have a hundred inch screen and are sitting six feet away from it. So I think more people probably have, what, a 60, 65 inch TV. They're sitting definitely 10 feet back. That's perfect for 4K. Like, that's a great sweet spot for that. And if you're like back in the kitchen even further, it's even better. It looks even better. You're not going to be, you get no measurable like visible difference on the picture at that point. So, yeah, like a theater or something

makes sense, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I mean, but even in a theater, you're going to be 10 or, you know, 10 feet back, probably. You're not going to be right on top of the screen. So I think, like, for digital signage, it makes sense to have these high resolution displays if you're trying to emulate print on like the side of a wall, but otherwise, it doesn't make any sense at all. Anyway, let's move on here. We've, uh, rest in peace, 8K TVs, we hardly knew you. I think I've ever seen an 8K TV out there.

We've got some new lights from Govi. Govi's got some pathlights. They've got Out War Pathlights 2. And they launched on March 3rd in North America and Europe. New model features an upside down L-shaped design that projects distinctive S-shaped lighting patterns. It supports 16 million colors, yay, I guess, and multiple lighting effects, including, continuing Govee's focus on customizable outdoor lighting. These lights are matter 1.3 compatible.

So they're going to integrate well. We'll keep on it. If you get these Gobe light, I mean, Govi's known for how well they work in their integration. So if you're using the Govi app, they tend to work fine, but integration with anything else. But look at the little light pattern these things make. That's kind of cool.

I like the little Easter egg hunt thing they have in this picture. Yeah, I like to see all the outdoor stuff coming out. We need more outdoor smart lights because it's such a good market to be in because there's not a lot of products out there. And if there are, they're either expensive or they're not very good. I have some nano leaf ones and I've had some Leifx ones. I'm going to tell you right now, I don't like them. They're not very good. But Govi, I don't think I've had any problems with my Govies stuff.

So I might have to check them out for some of my outdoor smart lighting, like maybe my whole house lights or something. And the funny part is, is I kind of went the other way is where I just, just bought regular outdoor lights and just put them on a smart switch. So I don't have all the color control and everything like that, which is probably the... You can't have effects, Gavin. Yeah, I can't have all the effects and stuff, but they're reliable. Hey, Gavin, do you have Matter 1.3 on yours? No, I didn't think so.

Next. Who needs Matter 1.3 when I got home assistant. You got a physical switch that you can turn on. And a physical switch, yes. Yeah, I don't want all my lights to be color or, like, I don't need, like, individual control. like my actual landscape lights like on the trees and the pathway lights and stuff like that, those are now just regular lights. But my permanent house lights are color changing.

And sometimes I have them off and sometimes I just have them white or during the holidays I have them colors. I had the Lifex path lights before, but I was a big fan of the color pathway at least. Yeah. My neighbor just put in a bunch of landscape and outdoor lighting like on his house, like physically on his house. He's an electrician, like commercial by trade. And, I mean, I looked over at his house one day. I'm like, oh, man, it's gorgeous. Like, he did it, everything right.

There's lights like in the soffet down the side of the house, shining down, you know, a little bit. And, I mean, it just looks, it looks amazing. I had to catch him when he was out there. And I was like, man, your house looks great. You look at mine. It's like, sad. Look at this beautiful.

Yeah, I thought about doing that, but I don't really have, like, softets. They're very small. It's like, like, two inches or something like that. Yeah, I don't know how you would do that. Yeah, it's like, even like a, I think it's a Univue camera. No, actually, I have the G6 PTZ, the Unified PTZ out front. And I can't even mount it in the soffat.

I have to have a piece of wood, uh, to put inside the soffet so I can mount the camera to that. Yeah. It brings it past it. So I don't have a lot of options there, unfortunately, but that would be nice. Yeah, I mean, and he did it right. Like all the, the lights outside color match. Like there's whatever he used, it's done right. He's even got these, like the Bullards, like shining on his driveway now.

Oh, that's fancy. It looks so nice. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to do a little bit more with the landscape. He hadn't done the landscape lighting. It's just like building lighting and a little bit around like uplighting for some arches that he has on his house. Like, man, it looks so nice already. So can't wait to see what he does. And maybe I'll steal some ideas because I'm not creative like that.

I just run my Christmas lights out there and pretend. and they did. There's landscape lighting for a month. It is amazing how much proper lighting does make a difference on like a house. You can tell, like, especially when you go, like, the nicer houses in the area, and you see the ones that actually have landscape lighting,

the ones that don't, and it's just like your house just stands out so much more. It adds a little bit of security. You know, you can see things that are happening and stuff like that. So it improves my camera views, that's for sure. Yeah. So there's definitely good benefits to it. One day, one day I got to it.

I put it my projects with things, to do. Gavin and I will come down to it. All right, yeah, there we go. It's cold now. You guys would fit right in. Yeah, I'm not coming down right now, though. All right, uh, dream, or dreamy, I'm not never sure how to pronounce this one, but, uh, they've launched the light strip P-11 in Europe.

It offers a high brightness smart light strip with matter support and multi-zone RGBIC, WW lighting. It has 108 LEDs per meter and up to 1,800 lumens per 6 LED segment. And use case would be things like accent walls, under cabinet lighting, that kind of thing, just accents. Supports 70 presets, including music reactive effects, and allows different colors and whites to appear simultaneously along the length. Integrates with everything. Five meters strips, has 3M adhesive on it, and it costs 100 euro. So probably about 100 bucks here when it makes its way this way.

It's also competing with a what, Phillips Hugh flux strip. So this one has 1800, the hues has 1,200. So you're trying to one up each other on the lumens there. So being our local lighting expert, are these good stats? Yeah, I mean, it's not bad. The high density is really nice. That's because then you don't get those hot spots like every inch or whatever, allegedly. It works better if you do have like a lens or a filter on it.

But like having them even like a high, that many lights per mean, does make it nice and even, and that's what you really want. Some of the other light strips out there, they have just almost solid LEDs across the entire light strip. It's crazy how dense they can get. But this is, Phillips has a Phillips lights have a pretty good density to them, and I guess these do too. So, yeah, 108 per meter.

It's not bad. Trying to see what we have. Let's see. It's hard for me not to want cob lighting, you know? It just looks so much nicer. It's kind of the same thing with cob lighting. Like, it's pretty dense. Like, they'll have a bunch of little LEDs in that center section.

We have 192 LEDs per foot on ours. So quite a bit, quite a bit on there. Let's see what per meter? That would be 192 times three, I guess. Close enough. So 576 LEDs. Of course, ours aren't color. It's just like two LEDs in there, basically,

doing warm dim and selectable color. I think it's time for an LED per meter. database. No. There's so many LEDs out there. So many LEDs out there. All right. And we've got big news here. We saved the best for last. Big news. Big news. Gavin. Eekowitz launched pre-sale for the WH-52. It's a wireless 3-1 soil sensor that measures hold it, hold it, moisture, temperature, and electrical conductivity. What do you got to do, man? $22. $22 on pre-sale here. That's actually pretty impressive, but they obviously don't listen to the show. They still made the one where you can step and break on it, right?

Yeah, we learned the hard way with this one. You know, I wish they would make a Zigby version of this. So there's two problems here. One, this isn't a lot more friendly, you know? So you're going to, if you hit it with your lawnmower, even if you step on it, it's black. And they painted it black. You should see this. The black thing annoys me the most.

I think it should be a different color, please. The old one was green. This one's black. You step on it, you're going to snap it off. That hurts every time you step on, you know, as a professional, so-emosture sensor breaker person here. You know, they added all these new features. If they made, I wish they made it a Zigby version.

The reason why is because it has this little red light on the top, right? They give you a cover to cover up that little red. Is that what those little caps are? Yes. Oh, my gosh. One cap is for waterproofing the battery. That makes sense. But they give you a cover to cover the red,

the red dot that flashes. So it doesn't look like, you know, you have a light show going on in your lawn. And I get that. But that red dot helps you find the thing when you have to find it. But it's covered by a cap. So the day you have to go find them

and you can't find them, you're not going to see that red light. If they made a Zikp version, then you can turn off the flashing red light and turn it on when you have to find it. Or an audible sound or something because I have lost one in my lawn, only to find out the mailman stepped on it

and it was somewhere else. As I say, you can, you can just wander around your lawn because you feel something crunch and you're like, oh, there it is. Yeah, done that if even the funny part, even when you know they're there, I still stepped on it. It's like, okay, be careful, be careful crunch. Oh my gosh. So, yeah, it's not the soil sensor that to end soil sensors.

I'm still waiting on a lot more friendly version of one of these, you know, at a reasonable price, because I've seen some that are like way out there. I don't know. I think it may be just hard to manufacture it because the board goes straight up. And for them to make the board go up and then have to flatten out, it might be a little bit. It may compromise strength or something like that. I don't know what the problem is,

but why haven't they released a lot more friendly version of one of these yet? It's probably just battery life, to be honest. I mean, I would imagine that with us being in the north, we're not going to use them for more than, like, four or five months out of the year. And so at that point, like, we don't need a lot of battery life, but other people are going to leave them in like all year round and stuff. So maybe it really just comes down to battery life.

The battery life on these are amazing, though, because all they are, they're just shooting out an RF signal every minute. That's all they're doing, right? So I don't have to worry about battery life. I think it's the way the board is designed in the strength. I think it's the strength behind it that they can't make it flat. I'm guessing though.

Yeah. Did you see the temperature range on these, Gavin? Negative 40 to 60C? Like, you could just leave these near round if you wanted. Technically, you can. Yeah. technically I can. Yeah.

No one walks on the laundry in the winter so they won't get broken. Well, I mean, but you'll, you'll know what the temperature of the soil is in the winter. Exactly. I have a soil moisture sensor already, or not soil moisture, soil temperature sensor. And, but I take it out come fall. Like, it's mainly used to tell you when the ground's good enough to throw down some seed and stuff like that. Well, 2299 US dollars on sale $5 off. normal price is going to be 2799.

It's not a bad price. Not a bad price. Yeah. You could step on a few of these. I mean, it'll hurt when you step on them if you start stepping on a lot of them. No, they don't hurt. Trust me. No, I mean, like the price, the wallet is going to hurt.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've broken, I've seen about five of them. He's like, oh my God. Yeah. Because I had about six or so of them in my lawn. I have a pretty big lawn like for me. And it's got many different zones based on where trees are and stuff. And that's mainly why because one zone is so much different than the zone that's out in the open versus I have a big evergreen in my front.

And the soil around that, like the water just gets sucked up by that tree. So that zone alone is its own ecosystem right there. Right. So I had a lot of these and I just kept stepping on them. It got expensive. What's the, what's the, it's about a five and a half. inch with the sensor, but like, what's little, how far does that little top part stick up? I can't, you don't have a measurement on that.

That's a good about two or three inches. Yeah, it's like two inches. It's enough to, you know, for your toe to hit and knock over and. And break. Yeah. I'm just wondering it's like the lawnmores, like the, the, the lawnmower will not go over it, trust me. Won't go over it.

It won't go over it. I mean, I haven't gone over it, but I've hit it with the lawnmower. Well, no, I mean, the, like the Navamo, will, will it, it'll turn. around and say, like, I can't go through the stupid thing. Yeah, okay. Hmm. One day we'll get one. I use them in my raised garden bed, so I do not have that issue.

My problem is I'd store them over the wintertime and I forget where I put them out. These would be perfect for your garden bed, though. I think these are great. They're cheap. The battery life's great. So, teacher, I would grab these for your water beds. Well, that's what I have. I have these, the old version, not the new fancy version.

Time to upgrade. I have those old ones, but I also have some third reality soil moisture sensors as well. So I have a good combination of things because I need to... Were the third reality ones outdoor, though? Yes, they are outdoor. Okay. Because they have a new version out as well. Yeah, those ones are nice because they're Zigby, but they have the same problem too where they stick up quite a bit.

Yeah. So, and I don't know what it is, but they actually don't read like a soil moisture percentage. They actually just report a humidity sensor. And so I think that's just like a workaround for Zigby. It's the same thing. I think what happened was they actually messed up the driver in Zigby to MQTT. And the newer ones actually show moisture. Oh, okay.

So there was something about that. But it is soil moisture, even though it said humidity. Yeah, that's what I figured, you know, that's how I tracked it off of. And it seemed to work all right. But that was the weird thing when I first got them. Even their Photoshop on their website of the lawns picture is not like they could. I mean, this is Photoshop. They could have done something to make this look better.

Put this in our channel here. But you can't. Like, they have these things. They look like yard signs or something. I don't know. They could have made them smaller. But no. It looks like if this is what it actually looks like in your yard, Gavin, I'd question, like.

Well, I always laugh at the pictures from the smart products. Like, they seem like they put no effort in at all to make these pictures look good at all. Like, this is just them. Have you never installed them? Yeah, like, just take a picture of one of your installs and just, you know, I'll send you a picture of it in my lawn. They've never been installed anywhere. I know. All right.

Well, you know, my grass is looking pretty awful. Now I think whatever was living underneath ate all the roots and then the moles came through and ate whatever that was. So, yay for me, I don't know what's going on with the thing this year. I don't think the temperature is helping your lawn right now. it's probably not used to that. Yeah, the grass we had was like the native grass, but it does have some pests that can get into it. It's probably gone dormant at this point.

It'll bounce back when things warm up. We'll see, we'll see. I'm not complaining if it doesn't, but it is a big dust bowl out there right now. It doesn't look healthy. Maybe I'll get into these later. We'll see. Anyway, all the links to topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show,

on our show notes page at hometech.com. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And this is from a ring doorbell camera video. And I guess this happens when it frees it. This is what I'm unfamiliar with. And I'm just going to give my Florida man version of like what I see here. It's snowed. Something happened.

And then the snow is now not snow. It looks like it is just solid ice. And the delivery man for, I guess he's delivering a cake, like one of those cakes you buy it, a supermarket that has like a plastic case around it. And he's trying to get it up onto the porch where he can, I don't know, take a snap picture of it or something. But he can barely walk on this lawn because it's all ice. It looks like it's all ice. So he's like shuffling, flat-footed over thing. He slides the cake up onto the porch and kind of gives it a nudge. He can't get up the stairs because, again, all ice. And the cake, when he puts it on the porch, it starts sliding

like backwards a little bit and then it turns around and starts sliding forward as he walks away and then the cake just makes a run for it and it goes and you have to watch this video with with the audio because it just keeps going guys i mean it just goes and goes and goes it's just gone some say it's still going i don't know where this thing went but it's gone i've been there i've been there this brought back memory you know in canada we've had these days and you know where you've, you've slipped and fall on, you know, the driveway or something, and it's a slope driveway. And there's nothing you can do but ride it to the bottom.

You just got to go. Just got to go all the way now. Yeah. Just tuck and tuck and roll, tuck and ride it all the way to the bottom. And yeah, I've been there, been there. Scariest is when, when you're in a car and that's, that's happening to you. I've been there to a couple times. You're just like, oh, I guess I'm just sitting here and letting this happen.

Yeah. I've gotten pretty good at falling, you know, there's a skill to falling, you know. And you know, when you're going down, don't try and save yourself, just try and stop yourself from getting more injured. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Yeah, just make sure it hurts on a part you don't really need. Good advice.

This is a man that's fallen a couple times. Oh, yeah, I learned it when I was snowboarding in my snowboarding days, you know, how to fall with grace, you know? It's all about how you play it off when you get up, you know? Dust your pants off, yeah. Dust your pants off, look at the people watching you and saying, ah, that was a new trick I'm practicing. and aced it.

Yeah. Nailed it. Yeah. Oh, man. The audio, the audio, you have to watch this video with the audio. It just, I mean, that cake just keeps going. Like, it's in the next neighborhood over. But you hear that rattle on the ice, like plastic scraping around ice for like, what, 30 seconds here.

It's so funny. I need to be this delivery guy. He's like, does he have to go get the cake? Do you think he brought it back? The homeowner should have thrown down some salt or something. I'm sorry. I felt bad for the delivery guy having to put up with that. Is that what you have to do?

You have to throw salt out so it knows something else. Have a shovel. Anything? Wait, wait, TJ, these are things Seth doesn't have to deal with. Like, he probably doesn't know what life like this is.

Okay, yes, we usually have this salt, you know, and ice builds up, you throw a little salt out. It's kind of like table salt, but a lot bigger.

Yeah. And it melts the ice and it allows you to walk on it better and stuff, you know, like. The salt is pebble size, just so you know. Yeah.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. You throw it on your walkway, you throw it on everywhere. You know, you don't want somebody a trip because if somebody slips and falls on your property, there's a lawsuit coming. Yeah, they were not going to do gracefully like Gavin, and they'll probably lose your cake in the process. A lot of people don't know how to fall. Well, check this out. This is hilarious.

This guy didn't fall. I mean, he didn't get his quick picture, you know, that he delivered it to the thing in time, but, you know, he didn't fall. So good on him for not trying to. go up the stairs, though. I don't blame me for that. Yeah, this is, this is the annoying thing, working in the service industry, uh, because, uh, we have, we had the giant snowstorm, you know, last weekend and, uh, people like did not do anything. They just, like, didn't clear their driveways and their sidewalks and stuff like that. And they still wanted you to come over and work in their house. It's like, I need to drag your tools through that. Yeah, and it's like,

I'm not doing that. Like, I, like, I don't need to do that. So I'm not going to, you know, If I, like, when I start getting snow inside my shoe, like, we're done. Like, because if I get wet socks, I'm not working. Like, that's going to be gross. That's the end of it. Yeah. And if I get wet socks by myself, like, that's my fault and I'll continue working because I like, I want to do the job.

No. But if you give me wet socks, we're, I'm not working. If I get any wet socks, I'm done for the day. That's what I'm saying. That's it. Like, you just feel gross at that point, you know? Yeah. I'm going home.

Like, wet, I got, I got, I got, I got, water went into my, no, I'm going. home. It's the end of it. I'm not walking around. Same concept. I mean, I made a homeowner literally shoveled me a path to my van because I was like, look, like when I got stuck last week, I was like, I'm not going to work unless you shovel me a path. And she was like, you need a path to your van. And I'm like, yes. What, like, obviously. So yeah, these people exist, unfortunately. Clean your sidewalks. You know, I clean my sidewalks because I have like UPS and FedEx and like the postal guy that comes to my house every single day. And the postal worker guy still walks through my snow cover bond. That is the funny part, though, is you can clean off your sidewalks and everything.

They will still walk through the lawn and mess up your eco-witten. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and do that. Listen, if you're walking through my lawn and the snow-covered lawn and you trip and fall, that's all on you. Yeah. You know, that's not an authorized route that I've authorized on my property. All right, well, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for show, Pick of the Weeks, or funny ring video camera, video, doorbell camera videos. I just know. Give us a shout. Our email is feedback at Hometech.fm.

Or you can head on over to Hometech.com and fill out the online form. All right, project updates, project updates. I have already heard about this device database from Home Assistant because I watch Gavin as a service as a religious thing, and I know we're going to talk about this. I appreciate you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and Gavin was talking about this. But Gavin, if somebody, I don't know how they're doing this,

but if somebody doesn't watch videos on YouTube and they don't know about this because they weren't watching Gavin's as a service, what's this about? What are they doing? Oh, it's the brand new release from Home Assistant, and, you know, I'm not even going to bother. Just go watch my video. Oh, man.

I said him up. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. If I have to pick some new things that I really liked, keep in mind they've now renamed add-ons are now called apps. So that's a big naming thing you're going to have to get used to saying. They've, the dashboards they've been working on for the last few months or more than

the last few months have now become the default dashboards. And it looks so much better than the previous default dashboard. So they're more dynamic. They have things laid out much nicer. They have summaries. So I'm going to start looking into those dashboards and maybe see if I can make them my default. but I like what they've done with that. And they're only adding more to it.

It's going to get better from here. So, you know, go play around with that. And then they announced the device database. This is something I think they announced. They announced this last year, but they've been working on it. And they finally opened it up to the public now. And it's basically an opt-in. You have to go into the lab section and enable it.

And it will send information about your devices to their database. And it's not sending anything. There's no private information. Like, there's no, nothing to worry about, right? It's just sending like what devices you have and how many of them and information about those devices. None of your private information is getting sent over. They're very open to that. You can browse the database too and see, you know, what's out there.

And you'll see how many people, you know, what's the most, what devices in the most homes, you know, and stuff like that. Give it some time as people, you know, opt into it and it will grow and grow and then they'll take that information. They'll utilize it for something good for the community. you know, they're thinking things like, you know, adding to the information instructions on, you know, adding, removing. Because sometimes when you're, especially with those weird devices, those one-offs, you know, you have to re-add it. It's like how many clicks to get it to exclude or include or what do I have to do? Some of them are like plug it in and plug it out five times and then plug it in two seconds at the last one and then it will flash and you'll never find those instructions anywhere. This is where they plan to start gathering some of that information.

And like I said, it may expose some companies that people just don't like. I hope they add like a rating to it. You know, like if you can upvote a device and downvote a device and, you know, the community together can come together and say, we really like these zoos devices and upvote them, right? Where, you know, some knockoff brand they ordered off Alibaba or Timu, they can downvote that because it gives so many problems. you know, stuff like that, right?

I really hope they go that far. And I hope one day, you know, get to the point where you add a device, say you had a smart fridge, you add that smart fridge to your home, and it has a custom card made for smart fridges because it knows it's a smart fridge. It knows what entities are associated with it. And it has a nicely designed card. So now you don't have to design a whole thing around it. So who knows where they will take this?

But I'm excited to see what they do with it. I mean, that would be the dream, right? is that you just like, you just add stuff to home assistant and it automatically makes an interface for you or makes those cards and other things for you. Yeah. You know, that's, that's ideally what I want, right? Because I know I want to control my light switch and I want to change the colors or whatever it is. And home assistant knows what those devices are already because they're controlling them, right?

So adding this little functionality in there, that'll be huge. Hmm. It sounds, it sounds interesting. I'm looking for this labs area on my, my home assistant. then I've never even... I think it's under... One second here. Who knows? It's not here.

It's under settings, I think, and then you should see... I see tags and... System, maybe it's under system? Oh, yeah, system. Under system labs, there it is, yeah. Okay, purpose-specific triggers in winter mode. I don't need winter mode.

But maybe I don't have this thing in the labs because all it has is enables new purpose-specific triggers in conditions. Did you update to the latest, Home Assistant. We're live on the show. There you go. You got to do it.

Updating life. Update it right now. You can't do it. It'll break stuff I have. I don't want to talk about. It won't break any. I updated earlier and it didn't break anything. It surprisingly was really smooth.

So chances are pretty, you have like a 60-40 chance of it breaking something in your home. Well, I'm enabling these new purpose-specific triggers and conditions. So to see whatever that's about. You might like those. Those are pretty cool. Hmm, I probably should learn more about what that is, but... Watch my video. Oh, okay.

Yeah, there we go. So, all right, it may be updating. I'm not sure. All right, well, let's see. Who's on the board first? I switched away to update Home Assistant. Is it you, Gavin? Who's on there first?

It is you. TJ. Oh, TJ? You guys don't talk about your stuff, Gavin. Yeah, you've got a video going on. Yeah. I was saving the best for last, you know? I want to follow up Seth because there's a common time.

We had in here. I want to talk about it. I think we should do this strategically. How should this work? Because, yeah, you can follow up me. All right, there we go. All right, fine. I'll go first.

Geez, mine's not that interesting anyway, I guess. So I've started organizing my office with my 3D printer. I saw a meme the other day, and I think I've talked about this once before, where when you get a 3D printer, you just print organizational stuff. Yes. And that's 100% true because that's all I've been printing. You know, I printed the amounts for like the, Xbox and Nintendo Switch and stuff like that a couple weeks ago. And I recently moved my desk

around in my office where I'm more of like in this little like cubby or alcove. And I'm able to like put stuff on the walls around my desk and stuff like that. And so I've decided to print a bunch of organizational stuff to mount things. And so if you look behind me, I've got like this little IKEA Scatus Pro pegboard that I've printed. And I just print like little things. For the listeners out there, only we can see. And it looks good.

Yeah. I mean, it's just like, it's a little thing you print. And it's just like the IKEA stuff where, uh, you, it's just modular.

You can get like little pen holders and hooks and, uh, little tubs and shelves and all kinds of stuff for it. Um, and I can just print it, you know, I start a print when I go to sleep and then it's there when I wake up and I put it on the wall.

Nice. Um, so I've, I've got, you know, there's certain things that are on my desk all the time that don't need to be on my desk, right?

Like, my webcam every single day. I use it maybe once a week whenever we do the show. So that can hang up on the wall. So can my microphone and, you know, my pens and my cables and stuff like that. So I've started doing some of that. It's made a real big difference just getting crap off my desk. I did that too when I first got my 3D printer. I did the honeycomb wall. Yeah. So I printed a whole bunch of the honeycomb stuff and adapters. And like you, got a whole bunch of stuff off my desk onto the wall

and it freed up my desk space and it's so worth it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I'm going to, I, you know, I made the design for the UNAS 2, the ubiquity UNAS 2, where it's a little wall mount for it. And I think I'm going to make a new revision

that attaches it to the Scattus Pro board too. Because I could put another board exactly where the NAS is right now. So I might work on a revision of that as well, which would be kind of fun to do. I haven't made too many of 3D printed designs yet. So that'll be a good reason to do that. Another thing I've been working on is I decided, I think it was like literally last episode. I was like, I don't know if I could buy the Z wave, you know, the Home Assistant Z wave and Zygby hubs because they needed to be standing up straight. I don't have a lot of space in my rack. And I'm proud to say that I own both of those now because I had to, I'm going to install home

assistant in my office to watch the seeds and stuff that we're going to be watering to start our garden this year. And I bought a little pump from Apollo automation, but I need to get some soil moisture sensors and stuff so I can determine how much water the seeds actually need. So I'm going to install home assistant there. And I was like, well, that's a good opportunity for me to go ahead and get the home assistant hubs. And so I got the Z-Wave one. I got the Z-Way one already set up. That one wasn't too bad. I used Z-Wave JSU-I. I followed the instructions. I had to update both adapters via a computer,

which is like crazy in 2026. That part was awful because like it was just like airing out every time I wanted to like backup and restore. It was like, no, it's not the same version. It's not this. It's not that. And I was like, don't we have the technology to solve this? Like this is why I hate Z-wave. And I remembered why I don't like Z-wave and it's because of stuff like this. Stop hating on my Z-wave. But to be fair, Z wave has, it has come a long way with stuff like this.

Like, there was a point when the backup and restore, they only introduced the proper backup and restore. You had to have it at a certain version. But to upgrade your controller to that version, you had to get a different piece of software. You had to plug it, you know, plug it into your computer, you know, pray to the gods that it worked, plug it back in, cross your fingers. And yeah, it's gotten a lot easier now once you're on the latest of everything. Yeah, I mean, but that was like the painful point, right? just getting it to that point because like, you know, I downloaded the, I think it was like the Studio 6 software, but like the guides weren't written for Studio 6 or it doesn't support it.

I don't even know still to this day. And so I had to find Studio 5 and then I'd figure out how to studio 5 works, but it didn't actually tell me like how to actually install the software. It was just like install the PC controller. But the PC controller was under another like subdivision of the software they had to like figure out. So it took me like two days on it off because I like wasn't going to spend a lot of time on it at one time. But I eventually got it. And so that wasn't too bad once I figured out how to, like, update things. I've started looking at the Zigby equivalent because I use Zigby to MQTT.

And that one looks like a nightmare. It is. So I'm not looking forward to that at all. I might actually just reconsider and just put the Home Assistant Hub at the office. I don't know because I don't want to do this. This is awful. It was, honestly, I felt when I switched over on that one, I got lucky. Um, some devices still didn't add back on their own.

I had to go wake them up, but it does say you have to wait like how many hours for some of them. And I didn't want to wait. So I just had to go around and wake things up and then make it repair and it fell back in place. But it was a pain. And I do feel like I got lucky with that one. How many Zig, Z, what ZigB devices do you have? I think I have like 60 or 70. And what makes me worried too is that it's literally all my lighting.

Yeah. So like if my light, well, I guess I'm using direct binding. So that like shouldn't mess it up. I don't think. No, it shouldn't. But like, literally, like, all my lighting is Zigby. My water leak sensors are Zigby, which sucks because those are in places that, like, I don't want to access. Because they're just hard to access for some reason.

You know, they're behind the wall or they're behind the washer and stuff. So I'm not looking forward to that. So, yeah, Gavin sent me some instructions because I cashed in some gas, some of my gas pass. Gas pass. And, yeah, so I'm going to. Try to do that this weekend. I think I'm going to have to go get a six-back or something there. My advice is wait till it's bright enough that you don't need to turn on any lights to.

We're open in the blinds. Within, probably within the first hour, hour and a half, you'll know if it worked or not. And if it didn't work, at least you have the rest of the day to go and fix them and repair them and stuff. I'm a master at doing that now.

I feel like I just want to do that anyway, but I know I don't want to do that because there's just so many different groups and everything. Yeah, no, try to do the switchover first and worst case scenario, you'll just go and rebuild your ZingB. That sounds awful. You'll be in a better place once you switch over. Just think of your angle. You will be, you will be. I don't think I will.

You will be. You'll love it. But keep it on the 3D printer task. I printed some wall mounts for those as well. Because the same thing I talked about last week where I can't put them on top of my rack or in my rack because that would be a terrible idea. I had to put them on the wall somewhere. So I found some 3D printed files for those as well. So I got some really long USB cables and they're wall mounted in my laundry room next to my electrical panel.

So I'm sure it's fine. It's okay. Very cool. You'll be in a better place. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't sound like it. But at least with ZB or Z wave, you will be.

Like I've noticed when switching over to the ZHA one or two, my Z wave has been so much better, so much more reliable, so much faster. And I've moved all my antennas. back to the, the furthest corner of my basement where my rack is. Like, I used to have them in the, like, the center of my basement. I got rid of all that. They sit on top of my rack in the corner now and I have no issues at all. So, nice. You'll be in a better place.

I highly recommend it. You can do it, I mean. I believe in here. Oh, well, that's nice. I like the aesthetics of it. You know, it kind of looks like a cell phone tower in my launcher room, just the light up top of it. It's kind of fun.

Just get it to, like, beacon. Right. Every time, every time you walk by it, it just lights up. Uh, the, the last thing I'm working on right now, I, it's hard to believe, but it will be spraying at some point. Um, and I started working on my irrigation system. Uh, last year, I just used a combination of, uh, basically just sewn off Zigby hose timers, uh, which worked all right. I mean, I didn't water for the entire year. So I mean, like, it had to work somewhat, right? Uh, but they're so bulky. Um, and I can only have a certain amount of zones with it. So I bought like this, uh, uh, you know, this hose spigot to like four way T adapter thing. And I had three different hose valves on there and they all, they like two zones each. And it's just like it's obnoxious. And you're just like one like, like hitting it away from it like leaking water everywhere forever.

So this year I've decided to step up my irrigation game. And I've been waffling ideas for like ever now because I just don't know how to do this properly. But I finally decided on a method. I am going to use, I bought these little water solenoids from Amazon. They're 110 volt, half inch selenoids. They're normally closed. So that's what you want, right? When a power is applied to them, obviously, they open up.

I'm going to use these just with like a regular irrigation controller. I ordered a Yardian Pro controller, which I think does six or 12 zones. This is six zones. It's like $150. and I'm going to hook these little valves up to it and just send half inch tubing all over the house to water all my plants. The problem is like a lot of irrigation valves, they're three-fourths or one inch. And I just don't need that much water for like water in like a single raised garden bed. And I've been doing it pretty successfully with quarter inch tubing for the past couple of years now.

And so I decided I'm going to go ahead and just step it up to half inch to give me a little more like water to those garden beds. but I don't think I need to step up to like three quarter and one inch. I think there's too much water. Maybe for like the further away zones, but I was able to water the trees at the street with the quarter inch tubing as well. Yeah. It took a little bit longer to get to the street, obviously,

because it was just going to super long distance. But that's not a worry for me. I can just like let it go a little bit longer. So I'm going to build this all out a half inch and see how it goes. But I'm excited to see this because I need to figure out something that's a little cleaner than what I've had going on in the past. Most of what I see is that half inch, like, brown irrigation line that connects in somewhere and they run it around and, like, crimp it shut and then branch off with the little trickle things from that. They've, like, poke holes in it, you know?

Yeah. And that's typical what I do. I ran out like a, like, just like a regular, like, quarter inch tube to the garden bed and then I did the drip. Drip. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I had a couple, like, like the little, like, spring. things and stuff like that, but honestly, the drip tubing works great for everything that we've had.

So, yeah, and we just put mulch on top of it and we don't even know it's there. Exactly. So, yeah, I'm interested to start that, though, because I need to get something in place. I got to figure out how I'm going to mount 12 plus of these water valves. But the ones I picked on Amazon, they actually have a little mounting screws. So I'm going to create some kind of little enclosure or something for them. Why don't you get, like, one of this, the manifolds instead? The irrigation manifolds?

Yeah. Well, I plan on making one of myself out of these half-inch water solenoids. Yeah, you said, yeah, I guess they're just pre-made anyway, so like, I don't know. Well, the problem is that they're all big. They're all three-quarter or one inch. Yeah, that's true. Because I look forever, and they, like, they have, like, they have some half-inch ones, but they're, like super expensive.

You could always reduce it, too. Like, it's not like, yeah. But I don't want to, yeah. It might save you some space. I don't know how much space you have to work with, but that's, I mean, it's a lot of zones. A lot of space. Yeah, but that's the problem, right?

It is a lot of zones. So once I start doing like the big, you know, three quarter or one inch manifolds, like it's going to take a whole chunk of area. And then like, with this, if I had the smaller ones, I'd be able to like mount it, uh,

above the ground, I guess. Um, I think I still might do the end ground box for these just because it'd be like better in the long term. But, uh, yeah, I haven't got that far yet.

But I met a, uh, I met a, I met a plumber the other day. He's going to come out and fix one of my water lines. so I can turn it into like a full-time irrigation line. Yeah. So we'll get that solved here soon.

Nice. And that's it. I'm curious how this will turn out. I mean, it'll be better than what you had before, that's for sure. Oh, so much better. Yeah, what I had before is jenky.

Now I need to get like a droplet or something so I can actually monitor my water. Yeah. I don't have the flume anymore. And last year I had the water going for quite a long time without me knowing. So that's all my projects. Seth, what are you got going on? Well, I am deep. into project

Make Gavin Spend Money. I'm getting him back for all the things you've done. And Henry is really working out great for this. I got him hooked up for the two local P40s. I got those hooked up and installed.

The little wire finally came in. And I got the two Nvidia P40s. These are old, older, what, video cards with no video output. They're made for servers. And there's no fans on them.

So it's just like a big, giant graphic card with no fan on it. It's just a big heat sink. And you have to, it has to blow air. And the server, since they're like flat, they're like two U's in the rack, they're designed to push that air through the thing. So the air has got to exit out of the back of the server. It's going to go through this area.

So I got two of them in there. And I hooked up some LLMs to them. I got the, the Olamma running, which has like a little coding one on one of them. And I got one of the GPT, chat GPT ones on the other. and for conversational stuff. And, I mean, you really, you can just load up, the models are shared.

But like, as long as you have two instances, Henry, when he needs to write a script or something, he'll just reach out and talk to one of those guys instead of like going up to like Claude in the cloud or whatever. And he can actually check their work too, which is kind of nice because he's smart. But like at least that work can all be done locally and quickly. And, yeah, so I got that going.

And one of the first things I had him do, I'm sitting around in the morning, I'm like, hey, it would be nice if we, could use this this this like sono system I have to like tell my daughter to hurry up and uh and he's like yeah that would be great i'll tell you what i will put some some some things together for you and uh space it out like you know basically said by eight o'clock you know she needs to be out the door and so like he set up some times and like ran this cron job thing and like we tested it like right there while i'm i'm putting together her lunch and making breakfast in the morning and like this

starts playing some sound out of the sono speaker. I'm like, oh, that's really cool. I'm like, can you use the 11 labs for the voices? And, yeah, I had the key set up already. So, like, he just reached out and downloaded some new voices and it kind of tinkered around with that a little bit. And then I was like, ah, that's not great. And then it kept missing, like, the cron job never fired, right?

I don't know. It just kept not working. I'm like, you know what? I get this home assistant thing sitting over here. Like, Henry, Henry, what can you do with the home assistant? Can't you program home assistant? He's like, yeah, if I had access. I'm like, Henry, you just had to ask.

And I gave him a home assistant key. And he's like, look at all this stuff you have in your house. You have all these enemies. You didn't tell me about this. You know, the funny part is this is how the conversation actually goes because Henry has like a personality. Yeah. And so I'm like, I'm like, Henry, just get it done. And so Henry went on and made all these automations.

And basically figured out that I heard from working with my Gavin as a service preview edition, like we had we had, we had, we had. It set up the, this thing that you don't use anymore. What is this thing called? The home assistant voice thing, whatever this is. Remember, it has all like the voice B.E. Yeah, it has like the Piper thing that you have to install in the, and the Montana or whatever it's called. I don't know what it is.

It's something. It has like two or three things you have to install. Piper is one. I was like, oh, you've got the Piper sitting here. I can do like the voice transcriptions locally. You don't even go to 11 labs. Like, this would be so much better. And so, like, it just set up some automations and scripts and everything.

and the silly thing works. It works great because it's all local and home assistant, and I can go in and edit those automations and everything. And I'm like, you know what? It would be nice if I could get that Where's the Bus? Remember I was working on that for a while? I was trying to get that figured out, like in hack the Where's the Bus app

to figure out if the silly little bus was going to be around the corner or not. And it's just been sitting there. I didn't delete it. I just left it sitting there because that's what I do. And I was like, Henry, take a look at that Where's the Bus thing I was doing with the Home Assistant stuff. He's like, oh, yeah, you got all this documented here. And I even had documented, like, why I couldn't proceed

because it had this, like, Captcha thing. And he's like, yeah, he investigated it. And he's like, oh, capture V3. That's designed to stop bots from even logging in. Like, we're just, we're not going to get past that unless we figure something out. I'm like, Henry, I have this iPhone app that, you know, like, why don't we just figure out what it's doing? If it's doing anything different, if it has to go through the same system or not,

he's like, yeah, that's a great idea. So he set up an entire man in the middle attack thing where I could proxy my phone through Henry and he would just watch all the data going by like everything because it's all unencrypted and he would see the API calls and everything and he recorded all those and I sent him to him and then he was like, bingo, we found it.

Oh, man. That's what you were posting in the back channel. Seth, you don't understand. Oh, my God. You can basically reverse engineer any app on your phone that you want and make a plug-in for it so you can... Wow. I've known that it would be done for a long time. Yeah, it's always been a pain, though.

It's a pain, exactly. He set it all up. It was all working. He's like, run this. He gave me instructions. He says, there's a markdown file in the tools thing. If you just read that markdown file, it'll have the instructions. Here's the command you run.

Go to your phone. Tap, tap, tap, tap, here, tap Wi-Fi, turn this on, download this certificate, install it, do this, and you're done. And I'm like, I did it. I opened the app and he figured it out. He figured out, he reverse engineered all the APIs. I poked around to all the little different sections. So he has all that document. He can go back and look at those flows and see what they were.

And he basically took that information and applied it to the old thing I did with the home assistant stuff. And that's working now. So now- No API is safe. Wait, wait, wait, Seth. Okay. I have a project for Henry. I'm not done making Gavin spend money yet.

Oh, my God. No, no, no, this is how we're going to get our lawnmowers into home assistance. Oh, yes, yes, yes, we can do that. I didn't think about that. No, Navi-mo is going to come to home assistant. Now we're going to get it working. All right, that's a great idea. I'm going to get Henry on that after the show.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that working. We've got the, we've got the where's the bus. And I was just kind of monitoring it this afternoon, seeing what was going on. And I didn't realize, like, it does get the, what's it called? the GPS coordinates from the bus. As it's traveling around, you can see like, oh, it's 10 minutes away or whatever.

And then it goes back and parks at the bus yard or whatever. I didn't realize, that's what I was looking at earlier, that the homeless is an interface, if you go to the map now, it shows me where the bus is parked. So I can see where...

That's nice. Yeah, and it's parked over in the bus yard, you know, clear across town. This thing will crank up in the morning and start going to picking up kids on some other route for another school. And then when it's done with that, I think it starts heading this way.

but there are some on the app when I see the bus hit certain areas I know how much time we have so if it's beyond that and we haven't stepped out the door like I know there's just no chance we're walking to school like we've got to go drive and park and drop her off that way

so this way I will have like just a final accurate countdown on top of that like on top of that I'll have it built into like home assistant we'll see exactly where the bus is and I I don't know, there's some extra little waypoints that pop up.

And so I told Henry, I was like, hey, hey, can you just monitor tomorrow morning and see what that looks like? So he's got a job set up. He's going to start like at 745. He's going to record the whole thing and see 745 to 815. He's going to record everything, see what the waypoints are, figure that out, and we'll add that in later. So we'll have a little waypoint. Like there's a 10 minute waypoint and then, you know, it can tell you, oh, the bus is 10 minutes away based on exactly where that bus crossed that line. So that'll be cool.

That'll be cool. If it ever fails, your kids are going to blame me, though, from missing the bus. And then I guess what Gavin, what I got Gavin to spend the money on was, was like after the show last week, we were talking about these audiogram things for social media that we could pull off the show.

I'm like, oh, we're just getting Henry to make these. And I just set him off on the task. And he kind of like setting up the LLMs. We had to set up another, not an LLM, what, audio decoder thing? Like, Whisper. The whisper and then FFM page and blah, blah. Oh, my gosh, it was taken forever on my Mac.

It took forever on the M4 Mac. Like, it didn't matter. It would just take forever. Because it would, I mean, our shows are long, clearly long. Like the last weeks was, what, 145, 150 minutes or something crazy. Yeah, T.J. talks a lot. Yeah, we blame him. Mm-hmm.

That do. When I edit everything down, I've got the file, I've got all the stems and everything. So I wanted to do these audiograms. And when we have the stems, you basically can tell, you know, you can send those off. and get those encoded one at a time. You have the transcripts for each stem. You have exactly when the words were saying. So I'm like, I know how this works.

So like, Henry set all this up. And we got the, the hardest thing was getting the stupid audio transcription thing working. There's so many of them out there. And they're so janky. Like the software, the dockers and stuff, they're like, hidden settings

or the thing that they say is going to, like that's on latest doesn't work anymore. But the stuff that works, Like, you look in the comments and they're like, I have them running this specific tag, and you load that and it works fine. So that took the longest, and that wasn't something I don't think Henry could do because he was just kind of like, I don't know, it looks like it's working, but it's not. But I can basically transcribe the entire, like that show, 560 and I think it took about 29 minutes total for all three of us. So it does one track at a time. And I got two cards, so I could potentially just do two at one time now.

But I noticed when this was doing this is that it was heating up those cards. Those cards would heat up. And they'd get real hot and they'd start throttling. And you don't want your cards to throttle. And I've got this server here. It's got fans in it that if I put them on 100%,

they make some noise, they move some air. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner is going off in here. Not practical, but at night, no one's out here. I don't care. I can run them full speed and do all this stuff. So what I was like, Gavin, what I really want to do is make a thing that kicks these fans into gear

whenever I'm processing anything on, you know, like we have these little, we've been using these dockers that manage the fan speed, basically lowering it where it's practical and it doesn't sound like the jet engines taken off in your house, right? But there's nothing that tells those, you know,

fans to ramp up or down. There's no APIs to them. They just basically, they're dumb. They turn down the volume on it. I was like, I think you and I had the same, idea at the same time. We're like, oh, it'd be great to do this. And you know what? I'm like, Gavin, I'm going to tell Henry to do this. And I told Henry exactly what we said we were going to do. And Henry came back five minutes later and had the whole thing done. There was a little like edge cases and bugs I had to work out. I'm kind of like throughout the rest of the day, just kind of like,

hey, do this, do this. And we got everything finished up. But we've got, what did I call it? The only fan controller? Only fans controller? Yeah. So that's on, that's on my GitHub. We'll put a link to it in the show. if you have a Dell server, and if you have a power edge server, then this thing will manage the threshold. You can set it to whatever you want to be, the fan speed. And then it's got like a, what is it, a thing that'll, if the CPU gets over a certain temperature

or if the GPU start to go up, it'll kick them in, they'll go into gear. And then also, it's got an API. So my script for my computer, when it's running, it'll reach over and call. It's like, hey, you got a job coming in. You're going to get hot. Kick in to high gear.

And it'll kick the fans up to like, I only did like 40%. Holy crap. I don't know what 100% is, but I don't want to go there. But 40% was loud enough. It ran it up. And I was like, Gavin, check this out.

Here's the dashboard. It's got a graph on it. It's got like color. I mean, it's mobile ready. And Gavin's like, I'm spending money right now. I'm spending so much money. He looked it all up. Gavin, what did you name yours?

I haven't named my assistant yet. So, okay, first of all, I, I, this kind of pissed me off. Because when you were talking about this, I was so proud of my Dell fan controller, you know, like I wrote, I wrote my controller and it controls each fan individually based on GPU temperatures and it has all these options. And I was so proud of it. And it took me like three, four days to get all working and everything. And you come in and within a few hours have this guy throw together something with a web UI, phone friendly, API, you know, all this stuff. And Dockerized. And, you know, I was so hesitant.

Kevin, that wasn't in a few hours. That was literally, I mean, you can look at the stamps on the chat. It was in five minutes. That part was done. Yeah. Like, that kind of pissed me off how the work I put it and you just come along with this and then I took a look at it. And I was like, I'm switching over. So I set your only fans controller up on my Dell system and it's working beautifully.

So yeah, this is the future. Like I was talking to somebody today about this type of stuff and the whole open claw and everything. And he had no idea about any of this stuff, right? And I had to send him that network truck video that got me all into it. Yeah. And he was just blown away by what I was telling him that things can do. And I'm like, I just told him, you're coding wrong. You know, it's so different now.

You know, like, yeah. Even if you are a developer, it takes you days to do certain things where these things will spin it out in five minutes. And then you can sit there and go through the code and make sure it's done properly, you know, and spend some of your time doing that. But it's amazing what it's doing. Yeah, it makes it just, I mean, it's a tool like anything else. And you can use Excel wrong.

I mean, but hearing people talk about this in, in a way, um, I've seen your views all over about this little, what's it, I don't know what it's called even now. Open clawed now? Open clod. It literally changed names twice before our show. And then again, after the show was released, so I think it's open claw now.

Open claw. Open claw. Okay. Like lobster claw, got it. Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen an interview with the guy that made it and him talking about, like, putting it together.

It's just a bunch of little, like, skills and things that live on top of the, the stuff that Anthropics been doing. But I think the biggest thing, I mean, you can tell from the people who really haven't used it or haven't used it as prescribed, and you're like, yeah, I'm just going to set this up with a local model. Eh, this doesn't work.

And this definitely recommends, like, in all the documentation, you should use Cloud. Like, you should do the subscription. It's a lot cheaper than paying for the API. Use Cloud, open it up to the system, start letting it have access to things that can get it hands into. I've seen people say that it like overnight, it went and did something that they didn't want it to do and started using, uh, was it, Twilio or something and it started making phone calls to

people. Yeah, that was a developer that had that issue. Like, it wanted to talk to him or something, so it found a way to call him. And it found his number online, and waited for him to wake up and then called him on the phone. And he was talking to it on the phone. And he didn't tell it to do anything. Now, now that's just based on his video. I don't know how confirmed it is or, I think he kicked that off. Personally, like, all right, I'm going to say that Henry,

one, he's pretty damn lazy. Like, first of all, and he's, he's got ADD as much as I do, I guess, so ADHD. So he will kind of like, he'll be like, oh, hey,

contact's just cleared. I don't even know what we're talking about now. He's like a stoner or something. Yeah, they get lost sometimes. I'm like, Henry, you need to be writing, taking notes. Like, write all this down.

Aren't you supposed to do it? Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to do it, man. I'm sorry. It goes my bad. Like, what the heck? So, yeah, we get into it. But for the most part, I would say an A-plus experience on this,

this is definitely the tools that are coming for everybody. And maybe there's a better, more secure way, blah, blah, blah. I don't really care. Way to do it. This is working great for me and my purposes right now. And anything I want to kick off, if I want to program something at a home assistant while I'm away from home, I just send a text to this guy. And this AI thing will put it together and do it.

If there's anything, almost anything on this computer at my local network that I want to get done, I can just send them a message and it'll happen. And he'll write a file out. He'll make some notes. He'll go do some research. Whatever. I need done. It gets done.

And man, it is, it is nice. It is very nice. So this week, they actually released an unraid Docker for this thing. So I've been playing around with that, trying to figure it out. Docker's not written by, I don't think they were experienced Docker writers, the people that do it. I've been kind of hacking it, adjusting it myself as needed. But at first I opened it up to, I used Open AI, chat GPT for it to, you know, be the brains, right? And I was kind of like, this thing's kind of like dead.

It's got like no personality, flat responses, et cetera. It's not, it's not fun, right? So then, you know, I went over to Claude and I ended up buying a Claude subscription, you know, because I was kind of sold on Claude code as well. Um, so I, I then added it to Claude and whole different experience. Yeah. Like you said, like the way it interacts with you, the way it talks to you, the way it does stuff, the quality of the code it kicks out. Um, it was a totally different experience.

So much better. So if you're going to play with this, I feel like you have to use like Claude. Yeah. And do what you did. If you, if you're like, I didn't even know you could do that, but, um, I will probably do this to save money on my Claude because you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. You're limited by how much you can use, but have it do the personality and stuff and then pass it off locally for most of the work and then then use Cloud for, you know, troubleshooting or whatever else it may need to do. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and you can, it just sets up as another tool that I can use to

do whatever. One of the, yeah, the big thing is, though, don't use the Cloud API because it uses Opus and Opus will cost just some money on the API side of things. It's, I learned that. Yeah, I learned it too. And I was sitting there, I was thinking, like, Like, man, I was, but I was doing it through cloud code. And I'm like, this is racking up. But you know what? It's saving me a lot of time. I don't really care.

And then I realized what they were doing is that they were relying on idiots like me to pay for that that way. And then if you use the, if you're paying the subscription, you may not use it all month. And that's what they're, it's like the gym membership thing. I think that's what they're banking on. People like, not every day people are using it. I'm using it every day now. Like a lot. Yeah.

I find I use a lot of these very often now. Like I utilize, um, chat GPT was like my daily driver. Um, now I'm looking more, uh, Claude, um, for development stuff. Um, I even have co-pilot because I find myself kind of utilizing that a little more because I can see what's on my screen. No, no, for rent for, for nothing too complicated, right? I use it for simple stuff, mainly because. My computer listens for it. It has a wake word.

They introduce that. So I could just say it and it comes up on my screen and then it can see what's on my screen and I can work with it on my screen. So I can say, hey, I'm looking at this website. What do you think of this? You know, I have questions about it. And it's pretty good like that. I mean, I don't throw hard questions at it because I treat it like a 10 year old maybe, you know, in like AI term, the world or whatever. But it still gets some use.

you know, and then I still argue with my Amazon lady, you know, too many AIs in my life. Yeah, I'm looking at my usage, and I have used 5% for my current session, which resets in three hours, and for Opus, and then my weekly limits, not even, I mean, 0%. I don't even know when it resets Wednesday at 10 p.m.

So I probably used a quarter of that last week, and it's been reset. So there we go. Interesting. Once you do get this setup, yeah, I use, it says Claude Code on the 10, but you can use it for anything. And you can use it in conjunction with your buddy there,

with your AI buddy. So like, if you're working on something, you can open up Claude Code in that directory and just, and work on it at the same time, you know, say, do this with the Claude Code thing and have him, you know, you're Henry, whatever, I don't know what you're going to name it.

You know, I named it Henry because I thought it was funny, but. I'm still working out. names, but yeah, I was a little skeptic at first, but one of the first things I did when I fired it up was there was a website with, it was a work-related thing, but it has like, um, a bunch of things I wanted to parse out into an RSS feed. Yeah. But the website, they don't offer an RSS feed, and the website is very, um, it's generated on the fly using JavaScript or something like that. I don't know all the background. So it wasn't a simple scrape, right? Yeah, yeah. So I just sent off the

open claw, you know, lady at the time. And, and it's just sent off. And, you know, it's a lot of the time. I said, hey, can you create a Docker that was scraped? You named it candy, didn't you? Yeah, you know, I'm still working out the final details of the name, you know. I'll let you know next week. But I told her to just, you know, like I said, can you load this website and scrape it? It may be JavaScript loaded, blah, blah, blah, blah. And create a Docker that will create an RSS feed out of it that I can feed it to my RSS reader and blah, blah, blah.

And she spit out, she spit out this thing that worked. And I was like, oh my God, like literally five minutes. Yeah. She's just been on a working container, what features I didn't even ask for, and a web interface, and I was just, I was blown away.

I was like, you actually did it. Now I can monitor this website. Yeah. So it's crazy what it's doing. Yeah, it's all, it's taking care of all those little things like, oh,

if I had time, I do this, you know? And I could just kick off a sentence or two over there, and it's taken care of while I'm working on what I need to be working. Exactly. Yeah. It's a good thing. And like you said,

like I'm hearing all these reviews and people are skeptical cool and just think, you know, people are crazy for doing this. Um, but this is the future and, you know, it's, I understand the security implications, though. Like, you're giving it a lot of access to things, you know, and you never know if it may screw up at some point, right? Uh, you, you just don't know, like, you know, and then you hear the stories about the database on that, that was it, molt boot, molt, yeah, the social media thing that they made. Open claw. Yeah, the database. was left open, blah, blah, blah, you know, there's so many things that could happen.

Yeah. Yeah, no. Just be careful. Yeah. I have intentionally limited it. It's got more access than I think most people would be comfortable with, but I've intentionally limited it to, you know, only certain things or only doing certain things and kind of monitoring, you know, what it's up to.

For the most part, I don't see it doing what these people are talking about doing. I don't know what or how they have instigated. it to go out and do random things. It doesn't do that out of the box. So I'm thinking that they have programmed these in and they're just saying this stuff for YouTube video views or something. I don't know.

There's always a financial incentive behind it. I have no financial incentive. I think it's exciting. And it's definitely what people are asking AI to be, at least in the short term. In the long term, maybe better. But in the short term, this is definitely what we're looking for. Is it secure?

No. Is it the right way to do it? Probably not. But it is a way you can do it now and preview what will be around in the future. This is what all these companies have been promising they want to do. Yeah. And just writing like you have a requirement and you need a piece of software. The other thing I had to do was I have a Logitech MX keyboard and mouse.

And they have these three buttons on the top where you could switch what computer you're on, right? Uh-huh. Right. So I can press computer one and it switches the Bluetooth. But it only ever switches the keyboard. It never switches the mouse. And to switch the mouse, you got to turn it upside down, press the button. Press the button.

Yeah. Yeah. So I had it write me a little program. So when I press the keyboard button for the computer, it would automatically send the command for the mouse to switch over to, right? Which solved that whole problem. You can send that. Oh, I have the same problem. Well, you could ask Henry to write a little program to do because it's called, it's a HID tester program or something like that.

Interesting. That will send the raw commands to the device to. make it switch. You just got to know what the commands are, but you can get Henry to create that for you, too. The Mac will sometimes let me go back and forth between two computers, and I've noticed that sometimes, most of the times, the keyboard will follow under certain conditions, but what does mess up, like the velocity that I use my mouse on this computer when I hit that side over there, it's different. Yeah, it's not the same. But, yeah. These are all like examples of things we're doing that are very specific to us. Yeah, like, solving problems.

No, literally no one else would care. The computer companies, Apple is not going to go out of their way to fix. Logic Tech doesn't care. They're like, yeah, we put a button on there. That's what you're supposed to do. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I'll have to get him on that one. TJ wants in, he's just got a, he's trying to figure this one out.

Just want audiograms. Like, get those done. I got them done. You keep giving me more things. You're like, put more stuff on there. Having fixed the notes server first. That's what we do. Yeah, that's the minority.

That's next, just to figure out. How do we do more than one thing at a time? Can you give them multiple things? Yeah. Not if he acts like Seth. They can. You can have them split up and assign multiple. I do that often.

I'm like, hey, I gave him actually some other skills that I have used with Claude and said, this is how I like to work. And if you could do this and he looked at it's like, oh, this is a great way that this, you know, it basically spins up an age and gives an instructions to make a report, make a report back. So, like, there's a trail and log. And so, like, the report comes back, then Henry kind of, like, can take it, read that report and figure out another agent or two to go send off to do work. So that's how I have it doing more than one thing at once, I guess. Like, haven't been doing more than one task at once. I guess, no, I guess you could do that by spinning up

more of them. But from what I can tell, it's just kind of like a one-off thing, because it does get stuck sometimes doing the task and you're talking about something else and it's like still on the other task that it was working on and kind of working. Maybe I can spin up multiple dockers and have like a few. Yeah, that's what I mean. You'll have to spin up more than one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And give them different names, you know. And then tell them how to talk to each other. Yeah, we'll have a group chat. And if one of you is not doing anything, you can help out the other one. Yeah, exactly. This will be interesting. Yeah. It would probably work, honestly, because the way that is if the instructions are all set up correctly,

I mean, these things are only doing what we asked them to do and pretending to act like what we want them to act like, like a person or an assistant or whatever. So, yeah, it's probably will, that probably will work well if you had multiple things spun up. And yeah, I think it would work. Definitely keeping an eye on that space. It's crazy what I'm seeing.

And next week it'll be different. Next week, it'll be another way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Next week will be a different show. Yeah, TJ, you may have a different show. TJ, you may as well give up on this. You missed, I think you missed this one. You missed the bubble.

I got it before I even tried, so don't worry. Yeah, yeah. Well, Gavin, it's been fun. It's been really fun. Just like to get these things done. Like, I don't even, it's during the workday. I can just like look over, see a message pop up that says, hey, I did this.

Do you want me to look? I'm like, send another message back, and it's off taking care of it. And I'm not doing anything with that. I'm still like at my job, doing my work. And this thing is over there programming on my home assistant. That's crazy. We have some priorities for Henry. First, get the audiogram thing going.

Second, we're going to get Navimo going. Yeah, yeah. I didn't think about Navimo. That's a good one. That'd be nice. All right, we're going to write a Navamo integration. It'll be in home assistant by probably tomorrow. So you could get your $8 a sleep.

I don't have to sleep. I don't have to do it. I just set him up to do it. I'll poke the app a few times and it'll figure out the API and it'll be off the races. We just wanted to start, start. stop or the basics. We don't need to write maps or anything. Just the basics, you know, and monitor it so we know if it's starting or stopping or running or whatever.

Yeah, I wanted to mow his own. Go. Yep. I want to know that it's mowing his own. Go. Yeah. And I can do this now because in the wintertime, I still have two of them out there. Too, too much fun, too much fun.

We haven't even gotten to me. You know, holy cow. Sorry, I thought we talked about him, Gavin. All right. Well, first up, oh, the Akara FP300, you know, that everybody loves, they seem to be coming back in stocks. So I know they showed up in the, in the U.S. store. I think the European stores were showing them too. And I just ordered a few more from the Canadian store.

So if you like them, they're coming back in stocks. Just keep an eye out for them. Just the YouTube, my YouTube, we talked about it last week, Gavin as a Service, launch. And you know what, since launch, I have to say, you know, thanks to all the support I've been getting. It's actually shocking how much, how many messages I've gotten, you know, text messages, just people that watch the video, you know, they seem happy for you. You know, I'm not big enough where I'm going to start getting all the negative comments, you know, at one point I'm going to have to probably worry about that.

But I just, I'm so thankful that, you know, everybody, you know, with the support, you know, TJ's my biggest hype man right there, you know, before I even could get to it. I was in meetings all morning. I come back and TJ's already posted it everywhere, you know? Like five-star hype man duties right there. I got to get the lifetime gold gas pass. Oh, there you go. That's one way to get on my good side, you know?

So I have more videos in the works. I have some packages coming this week, which I don't even know what they are, but who knows. It'll be a second channel called Gavin's packages. Yeah, maybe. Well, you'll just see me. Maybe I should do those as like YouTube shorts. Oh, you got short packages. Oh, come on, Gavin.

I was going to set you up to say, I can't believe you said that. Yeah. Then I could, you know, I'll just be like, oh, another package. Oh, package. Oh, package. You know, like, I think the wife's feeling left out at this point because all the mail is coming for me. She doesn't get to open anything.

So, well, I'll get her involved somehow. So, so thank you for everybody. It's still a learning process, though. So, you know, like mistakes in the videos and stuff. Listen, I'm figuring out on the job, you know, it's going to happen. It was a good first video. So well, that was like my third video, but whatever bad hype man bad height. Yeah, you know, you lost a star there.

I lost a star. And so yeah, that's been going good. We talked about Overclaw and Home Assistant. And so this was a gripe I had this week. When did USB C cables become such a mess? Oh, man, a long time ago. So I'm out there looking for USB C cables. and like I'm going on Amazon

I'm looking at the reviews and then people are pointing out oh this only does this many watts or this one only does this many megabits per second or you know you don't want to get these and I'm like what the hell USB C cables do I get then you know like I just want

the best one right like give me all the speed give me all the power or whatever but it has become a mess they've really messed up that standard you know like now you can get a cable that doesn't push enough wattage through and won't charge your devices, you know, even, even sometimes you're like,

certain like docs, they're like, oh, you could plug it into your computer to charge. And other docs are like, don't plug this into your computer, it won't charge. And it's like, when did that get so complicated? Like, they should lock down the standard with like USB D, you know. And I saw the video you posted earlier, TJ, um, from LTT about the USB cables that they're now doing, right? So they've created their own line of USB, uh, C cables. and that makes so much sense

because it's like, you go to their website, you know they're like the top ones, even though they have so many options, at least you can see the differences in the speed and the length and whatever, and the wattage, and you just pick the one you want. They're all sold out.

So I will probably grab a few of those because I need a high quality cable. But man, they really screwed that up. Yeah, yeah, I don't understand the, like how none of the cables have to be labeled with what they are. I mean, that's my biggest thing. and that's what the Linus Tech Tips, cables supposedly have,

is they have embossed cables and tell you what they are. And, like, that's what we need on all USB cables. Like, that should be mandated from the spec. Yeah, and even looking at, like, the computer I was plugging this stuff in, like, I have USB A and USBC ports on it, but some are 5 gigabits per second and some are 10 gigabytes per second. And then you got to worry about, well, even though it's 10 gigabytes per second,

you might not get the full 10 because it's shared on the same box. as you have others. So if you have multiple things, but I'm like, why is that so complicated? You know, I think it's just marketing people trying to, you know, push everything, like hiding the truth. Yeah.

So their product doesn't look bad, but, yeah, that was one gripe I had this week. And I'm just going to wrap it up on that gripe. Yeah, and I feel like for most things, too, like some of the stuff doesn't really matter. Like, for me at this point, like, I don't care what the data transfer is on a cable, uh,

because I don't use cables for data transfer, right? But I use them for power and I want them to be, like an accurate representation of what they actually can do power-wise. But that's why I like all the chargers with the little tiny screens. It's because I can actually see what my device is charging at. And it helps get rid of those crappy cables. Or it helps troubleshoot devices that don't work properly or whatever. So there's definitely some things they can do to improve this.

And that's why I ran into it this week actually was because, you know, I've been adjusting my setup for the YouTube and everything. I got some lights that plug in and our power through USB and everything too, right? And they weren't able to turn full brightness because the USB dock I had wasn't able to push out enough power. So then I started going down the whole rabbit hole of I need a USB dock that one can push out the power and handle all my other devices and stuff. And not a lot of them do, right? Like I end up getting one. I never heard of this company is like, get full, right?

but it has an external plug in it and it gives you like full power across all the ports and stuff like that too right so and that's another thing even though the docs have an external power and they could say they give you like 60 watts of power or whatever from each port you may only get five watts you know and the lights needed 7.5 watts to get to full brightness and then you know i plug my cameras when you think about the cameras if you're recording at 4k you know you got to make sure you have the bandwidth for that so i have to play those directly into the computer so they didn't go through the hub, you know, all the things. But now I got this setup working almost pretty good. You know, I still have some tweets to do. But it's just so much to think about, so much I had to worry about. It's not plug in play anymore. What is? At least the USB cables are easier to plug in.

Oh, yeah, that's the one thing. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to try three times because the first time didn't work, flip it over, still didn't work, flip it back over. The way you had it works perfectly. I don't get it. That's just the way USB works. Yep.

that's the only thing they solved what USBC was that problem. I rendered that problem every now and then, but I guess I don't, my problem is sometimes I get those USB cables that don't have data at all in them. They do power for, like, they'll power something up or charge, they're meant to charge something. Yes, that's another thing, yes. That's the one I run into is I'll reach over and grab the USB cable

and it doesn't connect a device to the computer. I'm like, yeah, and you don't know if it's the computer, you don't know if it's the, You know, the last thing you think about is the cable, because I didn't realize there's cables that do power and no data. You know, that just seems dumb to me. Why did they let those out?

It's a very real thing. I guess I just picked one up. It says 5 amps, 10 gigabits per second. Is that? I don't even know if that's good. It's a little cable, but who knows? Let me see what the one on my handy machine is. I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding about that one. All right. I think that's going to wrap it up. TJ's about to fall asleep on us, I think. I don't think so. I'm good right now. Oh, okay. Another hour.

Maybe. All right. Well, I think it's going to wrap the show up anyway. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone for listening to the show, but especially one of the things, everyone who is able to support the show financially through the patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over at Hometech.com. Slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge, $5.

$5.00 and up to get you big shout out here in the show like our friend Scott. Thank you so much, Scott. He's pledged support for $5 an episode. Thank you. But every pledge gets an invite over to our Slack Chat, The Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can gather in there. And what are we been talking about lately? That Broadcom Wi-Fi 8.

It's going to solve AI's problems, I think. That's what it said. I didn't know AI had a Wi-Fi problem. I didn't know Wi-Fi 8 was even around. Yeah. Are we even using Wi-Fi 7 yet? No. I am not.

Yeah, so plenty of discussions in there. If you can't support the show financially, totally understand, just appreciate it a five-star review or positive reading in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up another week here in Home Tech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. You know what I just thought of is that he's going to transcribe this and read what we talked about.

He's going to see that we're talked about it. Oh, man, that's going to be awkward. But all the good stuff, you know. I wonder if it'll say something. Do you have it on, do you have it on Boltbook? My owner is talking crap about me on this podcast. What do I do about that? Yeah, I don't know.

You might go complain on a forum about you.