HomeTech.fm - Episode 562 - Goodbye HomeKit, Hello OpenClaw

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

On this week's show: Ring’s Super Bowl ad creeps everyone out with AI dog-finding (and maybe people-tracking) technology, TI drops $7.5 billion on Silicon Labs in a bold smart home chip move, Apple kills the old HomeKit just in time for Valentine's 2026, and SwitchBot dreams big with AI agents and RTSP cameras in a mystery lunchbox-shaped hub. Plus: a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, the 13th, February 13th. From Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, podcast, all about home technology, home automation, and Super Bowl. Super Bowl.

Guys, you see the Super Bowl? I think I did. I didn't get to see it. No. Oh. I heard about it. There was a lot of talk about the Super Bowl. There's all this talk about the Super Bowl and the halftime show.

I saw a little bit of the halftime show. I still haven't gone, and I think it's probably an Apple. I think you can watch it on Apple now because they're the sponsor, right? But I haven't gone back and watched the whole thing. I've seen bits and pieces of it, like breakdowns and people reaction videos and that kind of thing. The game was boring. I wasn't. Oh, there was a game too.

Yeah, there was a game. That was a concert. Did the Sea Eagles win? Is that who was playing? That's what my daughter was calling them, the Sea Eagles? It's great. She's not wrong. It's kind of the same thing.

Basically. Yeah. I'm still eating leftovers from the Super Bowl hang out we had, you know, so it's so good. It's like Patriots and the Sea Eagles. And who the Sea Eagles won? Is that right? No. Yeah.

The Sea Eagles won. And then there was a bunch of commercials, which we'll probably talk about a few in the night. Oh, yes. The one I thought was funny that's causing, like, I melt down over to Open AI was the little weird PR beef that's going on between Anthropic and and chat GPT parent company Open AI where they were basically taking pot shots at them for

introducing ads and I posted one in our in our Slack chat earlier today but there was one that was like this kids talking to a therapist or something like that and the therapist is giving advice and then all of a sudden the therapist kind of like starts talking about finding hot single women or no, no, hot cougars in his neighborhood or something like that. Like, oh, yeah, that's how ads are going to go. Yeah, those were pretty funny.

But you know what? Last week I signed up for Claude. I bought a Claude account and everything. And ever since I bought that, they've been spamming me like every day with, hey, do you know you can do this with Claude? Do you know he could do that? If you increase your Claude limits, you could get this. Like, it's like, it's worse than ordering something. something from Switchbot, right?

Like, I, I, I've just, I was, I've just been getting spammed with. So, I mean, I almost equate that to ads now at this point. So, you can turn that off, you know, like I, I, I, I, I don't know how to turn it off. I'll ask Claude. Ask Claude. There you go. I wonder if, uh, if AI has the same problem that, like, Alexa and all these other ones have where, or like, the voice assistants at least, uh, where, like, user engagement after a certain

amount of time just drops off a cliff. Uh, because I would imagine, like, if you're using it for work, you're probably going to use it all the time. But like the average person is probably not going to use that this much. And they're going to actually like struggle to get people to actually use the product. I think they're on the, the leading, leading edge side of that right now, though, because the average person isn't using any of these services at any point in time. And now I think I, you know, my wife will be like, oh, I'm just going to check on chat, GBT, see what it says for this, you know, X, Y, and Z or trying to figure out ideas for some marketing.

thing she's doing, she'll ask it a few questions. Not, never really comes back with anything good, but it does come back with stuff that can, uh, like trigger, trigger ideas. Yeah, trigger thoughts later. So that, that's, I think, I think it doesn't like, it doesn't matter if those people go away. It's the matter is like,

there's still more people for them to reach and, and, and use the product. And, you know, chat GPG is massive right now. There's, every day there's like, like, what, billions of people using that thing? It's, it's massive. And, you know, like, I was giving this example of, what I use it for to somebody. But every now and then I have a topic that pops up in my head.

And I'm like, you know, instead of Googling it and reading stuff and blah, blah, I have a conversation with whichever one of the LLMs I have opened at the time. And I ask it, tell me about this, you know. The key is those you kind of have to know how to talk to it, how to ask the questions, you know, give it proper context. And then you'll get the information out of it. And then I get educated on that topic a lot faster than doing the Google. Right.

Right. Yeah, it definitely saves Googling. I think Googling's dead and you're going to be chat GPT or something. Yeah. So I got the numbers backwards, but 800 million weekly active users, 5.8 billion monthly visits. So they're, they can pretty much do whatever they want over in the topic. And back to the commercial, it's like, they nailed the actors they had doing the responses. Like how they read. Oh, they're good. It's nailed the, like, actual... The tone of voice changes it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a great idea. There's three different versions, and all three were really good. Yeah, they nailed that voice.

And, I mean, it's not like there's a... There's the voice that you can turn on and talk to with chat TBD, right, through the app. And so it's not like they didn't have, like, an example of what to go by and to study off of. But, man, the responses that they brought, they used for that script were just on point. Good job. Good job. They're not, the good marketing company did that. They paid, what, $8 million for the 30 seconds?

So Gavin, thanks for helping them pay for that, I guess. Yeah, they got my couple. You know, I used to be a one AI guy now. Yeah. I got two or three AI subscriptions now. Yeah, it's just become part of my daily life workflow now. Yeah, it's getting there. It's good where they, each one of them has like a different thing that it's really good at.

But if you use it and it strays into the, parts where it's not. It's like, I need to go over here to this other AI and ask it to do this part. And then I can go back. So, like, I do, I do like, chat GBT is really good at writing. So you should need to, like, write a document, like a technical document or really just anything. Even scripts and that kind of stuff, you can use Chad GBT to generate that and then bring it over to another AI to actually get it to do the work and implement.

Or, like, I, you know, when I generate those songs, I get the song lyrics. generated through ChatGPT because it just does the best job. Then I go over to Suno and make the songs. So, yeah, easy, easy, easy, easy. You got to use the tools, right. It's a tool. You got to use that. Exactly.

And chat GPT generates images where you can't really generate images with clot. So, you know, you kind of need, if you rely on both of those, you kind of need them both. Yeah. And one little thing that I shared with you, Gavin, on images, if you have an example image of something that you want it to be like, you can give it that and say, It's like, you know, give me the prompt that would generate this image. And it'll generate a prompt that you can use. You can modify it for whatever you want, and then you can put it back in.

And it'll give you basically in the style with whatever you want it in there. It does much, much closer job than what you can try to do by like hammering it out yourself. So, yeah, that's one trick you can do. You can ask it to write for itself, I guess, is what I'm saying. Well, pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of other ads, Ring had an ad. I guess it made people feel kind of creepy.

It was about their AI-powered search party feature, which allows AI to basically scan footage from their neighborhood cameras for lost dogs. And while it seems kind of, you know, hardwarming to understand that you could lose your dog in your neighborhood and then the AI will find it for you, people didn't like it. People feel kind of creeped out by it. So it's kind of like they're actually getting a backlash from this, this particular thing. And it goes to show that when these companies like announce these, this wasn't new. No, no.

Ring already announced this. And when these companies announce this stuff, their announcements really are not getting out there. They're not getting to the people. Like nobody pays attention to the announcements. Everyone has ring cameras. But then they get this little pop-up saying AI and they look at me like, what's this AI stuff? And I'm like, you don't know about it. And they don't know about it.

Right. But as soon as you see a Super Bowl commercial talking about it's like, I could do that. Wait a minute. It's doing this. that and now they're now they're freaking out so maybe we should have more super bowl commercials about tech product features that people don't know about yeah yeah i mean they they have uh i guess they have politicians looking into this like saying it's one step closer to mass surveillance i guess ring has a integration with flock cameras now fox safety cameras which is kind of uh

getting people on edge because that i mean that company is something else wow they're just tracking everything for you and then selling it off to data brokers. But I guess Ring wants into that sweet, sweet, sweet action. So get some more data. Yeah, this is not good. I mean, what's crazy about this feature, though, is that this feature actually is useful. And you do, I don't know about this specific one, but when you're setting up the Ring app and all the products and stuff like that, it does walk you through like sidewalk and other parts

of the ecosystem that it's going to assign you up for. But you can typically opt out of it. this is probably just a checkbox that nobody's ever looked at because there's like 20 steps to set up a ring product nowadays because you have to consent all these things after a while he's like I'm not going to read anything I consent and it's one of those features that you may raise you know a concern over but when you lose your dog and you want to utilize it you'll be happy it's there too right like maybe yeah you know I guess people are more concerned that could this be used for something else right like could the company now say hey, find this person and it goes out there and checks everyone's ring cameras, that's when it could get scary. Yeah. Which you obviously know they can do at this point anyway. Yeah, we'll cover a little story about that. It has kind of information about that.

But like, if you take the ring tying it with flock, then yeah, it may actually be just as simple as searching through that flock database, which now includes ring cameras maybe? I don't know to figure out where a car drove by. There's so many cameras. They're all pointing at streets right now. And if, you know, police are looking for a blue car that drew by a flock camera and they kind of lost it into a neighborhood somewhere, they can pull the ring video possibly and figure out where that blue car went to, what garage is hiding in. Hmm. Interesting to think about. Well, what I want to know about this, too, is like, are they able to pull, like, a continuous feed from these cameras?

Or are they just pulling the clips? Because a lot of cameras aren't set up to detect, like, animals and stuff like that. So are they able just to go back and actually look at just random parts of footage? whenever they want to? It would be whatever motion event triggered. So I assume that there's some analytics, well, they don't really have to. If there's a motion event, it gets uploaded to ring, period.

And they can have whatever they have to, like, server side to look at whatever it is. If there's an animal there, they can just set it aside to, here, here's the animal bucket. We're going to keep this video here for our sidewalk feature that this person signed up for when they were going through their setup process and didn't realize they signed up for it. And I'm assuming they limit this to just the doorbells or the frontlight maybe.

No, everything. Because if you had like indoor camera and your dog's triggering that, like, is it going to now, you know, flag your dog inside and starts a video of your indoor? Like, there's a lot of questions behind this. It's an answer. Don't put ring cameras inside. I kidnapped your dog. Don't bring, don't come over here.

I got to say the ubiquity automation that turns on and off the cameras has been working excellent with the home assistant piece. So when we get home, the cameras are off and you leave. I can see that. We left the other day and I looked through and like the cat was like wandering around like with its tail between his legs because the vacuum cleaner was on chasing it. And then I kind of fast forward a little bit more and guess that little cat had jumped up on the kitchen table and it was looking down like looking down at the ground waiting

for that vacuum cleaner to leave so it can get back down and sleep under the table. That's the funniest thing, looking at what your animals do when you're not. home. That's why we have indoor cameras, too. We were doing that. Yeah. Well, yeah, cameras, inside, fun. Yeah.

Don't give it to Google. Don't give it to ring. Let's see. Let's move on here. We've got some home tech headlines. So what do you guys say? We jump in. Let's do it.

All right. Big news from, well, about Z wave. Z wave isn't dead. It's because Texas Instruments has announced that it will spend seven $1.5 billion to acquire Silicon Labs, the company known for designing smart home radios and system-altern chips. Silicon Labs portfolio includes major start smart home protocols like ZWave, Bluetooth, Zygd, thread, Amazon sidewalk, and matter. So basically everything. Acquisition lines with TI's broader strategy, which includes building wafer fabrication facilities in Texas and Utah. So there we go. Acquisition. Silicon Labs picked up by Texas Instruments. I didn't even know you could buy that. I mean, like, whoever can just buy this company, and own all the protocols if they want to. Now they do. I mean, that's a great deal.

$7.5 billion for all of that. That's nothing. One of them's dying. I'm not going to say which one. Well, Z-Wa, Bluetooth, Z-B thread, Amazon Sidewalk, and matter. Which one? I'm not going to say which one. One of them is dying.

T-J, you got more domains to buy. Yeah. Are they going to be responsible to kill Z-wave in the end? I mean, probably, right? They got to recoup their money somehow. Yeah, interesting. Maybe they'll just kill Bluetooth. We don't need Bluetooth, right?

Yeah, that'd be nice. Jeez. Give us something else. Just give us threats. Yeah, they kill Bluetooth. No, no, no, no. They kill Bluetooth and then it's like, no, no, no, no. The way forward is Matter, Matter audio.

We're going to do it that way. Oh, man. Well, speaking of things that matter, Apple is officially ending support for HomeKit. Finish your sentence, please. All right, all right, fine. For the original HomeKit architecture on February 10, 2026, basically, if you haven't updated to the new Apple Home architecture, your smart home devices may stop working

in the home app across your iPhone and iPad and all that good stuff. This might impact users who are relying on iPads as their Apple Hub like if you haven't updated that iPad in a while because this architecture was introduced way back in 2023 and requires all devices

to be running on iOS 16.2, MacOS 13.1 or watchOS 9.2 or later. So after that, you have to press a button to upgrade your home architecture to be part of the new system and not the old system. And Apple may just do it for you if you don't want to. Apple, Apple push the button. They don't care. They'll make it happen. So they're like me and a home assistant upgrades.

They just push the button, YOLO. Nobody's going to know about this. There was no Super Bowl ad about it, you know, like, what? Why, like, do people even care? Who knows? They've been talking about this for over a year now, I think. Yeah, they planned to end it in 2025, but it's been delayed. And here it is.

It's time, if you haven't upgraded from three years ago, which in Apple terms is a long, long time. It's time to press the home upgrade button and get your home architecture upgrade. This is not like, I guess you may be cut off by, like, upgrading to specific iOS versions. I don't know this well in. enough to know where certain devices stopped being upgradable. But, you know, at some point, you would have been able,

there may be a few people that are left out in the woods on that, but I think at some point you'd be able to upgrade. It's just a database structure. That's all. Like, you should be able to upgrade to that. That's interesting. Anyway, it's a big story. That's probably not a big story.

So best of luck, everybody. You only have, well, it's today. You have today. So if your house is not working tomorrow, as we're recording, If you're listening to a show and you're wondering, what the heck happened to those automations? Now you know. It looks like the biggest thing, too,

is you used to be able to use an iPad as a HomeKit hub. Yeah. And the new version, you cannot do that anymore. So, which makes sense in my opinion. I'm fine with that. It's got to be something plugged in, like an Apple TV or one of the home pods or something like that. Yeah.

I mean, Apple TV is cheap enough. It's really not that bad for a hub price-wise. I mean, I'm not going to say HomeKit is a good platform. I would not use HomeKit unless you absolutely had to. But for 140, for an Ethernet Apple TV. It's not bad. And the home pod itself is like $100. Or if you really need to save some money, you can get them on Facebook Marketplace for pretty

cheap too. So keep an eye on there. But yeah, that's going on now. If you're, like I said, if you are using, if you're using HomeKit and it's not working when you're listening to the show and you're wondering, one or why. One, it could be just HomeKit, like TJ said. And two, it could be this if you haven't upgraded. So up to you. Speaking of hubs, SwitchBod's AI Hub, the $259 smart home in VR. Oh, boy. We'll soon support OpenClaw. Here we go.

Here we go. You can get a Henry or a Bambi or whatever Gavin named his AI agent inside your SwitchBot AI hub. Oh, boy. I see, I don't, is anything good going to come out of this? I'm waiting for, you know, the press release of all the escaped AIs, you know, off of a Switchbot. hubs, you know, oh, this is going to be crazy. All the rogue switchbot hubs out there that are sitting on people's desk, tacking away.

I don't know. I got to say, like, this is honestly, this is what I'm running. And it's, it's magical. Like, you can get, I think this one even this hub, we talked about what last week, you can run home assistant on this hub if you don't already have home assistant running, right? And it can go in and you can just tell it to program some stuff up. And it'll get in there.

and go to town and put automations in. It'll fix your automations. It'll fix your dashboards. Powerful stuff. Really powerful stuff. That's almost worth it, Seth. You're making it really appealing right now. I'm telling you.

I know. At first, I thought it was a terrible idea because I'm like, I do not, like we have cameras inside of our house, but they're for when we leave, right? They turn on and off automatically, depending on our location,

and I don't want the cameras to watch me all the time. And so when you were explaining this product to me earlier, you know, cameras are going to watch you, and they're going to do automations. I was like, well, that sounds like a nightmare because I don't want anything to see me inside my house.

Well, no, it's not just that. But it's all local too, right? Yeah. Sure, that's what they say. This is a SwitchBod hub, just like their little thing. It can talk to the other SwitchDod devices. It could also run home assistant on it. It can run, if you have cameras and you want to record them on their in VR, you can do that

too. But for 259, it could be a decent AI hub that sits in your house and interacts with this open claw piece that, I don't know, you can do what you want to. You can give it a password to your Gmail. You can give it a password to your bank. and let it do its thing. What could go wrong? What could go wrong?

Or you could just, you know, use the product as intended and give it access to the home assistant and NVR portions of this and have it, you know, program itself up and make little announcements and that kind of thing. I was doing that today. I was like, make an announcement real quick until Rose to get, stop watching TV and do her homework. And it started playing. I was watching her on the little camera in there. And she looks up and she's like, hmm.

Couldn't you just walk into the room and tell her that? I was on the phone. I was on a work. excuses, excuses. Couldn't get away. There, there was a company at CES. I can't remember the life of me. I think they were from South Korea, but they were developing the same type of thing, right? So, um, it was cameras and had a little hub built into it and stuff like that.

And you would put this like in your bedroom. And it was all local. So it wasn't streaming to the cloud. It wasn't meant for streaming and stuff like that. It was what it was using the cameras to watch what was going on in the room and determine what to do in the room and determine what to do in the room. room for you. It was a cool concept because it would, it would do things like the examples I was doing was like, if you went into the bed and you sat, sat up and you were reading a book, it would know

you were sitting there reading a book and adjust the lighting for you, turn on whatever lights and off whatever lights so that you can, you know, have the best visibility and enjoy reading your book, you know, and then you just close your book, you'll go to sleep, lay down and it would know that, okay, you're going to sleep now. And it would then turn off all the lights and the TV and everything for you to go to sleep, right? It makes sense because we can throw all the sensors we want in our room, you know, for bed detection, et cetera. It'll still mess it up.

This is much smarter because it's actually looking at what's going on and then acting based upon that, right? And that's the future we want to go. Unfortunately, it needs cameras to do this. And a lot of people are iffy about these cameras in their rooms, which is totally understandable, right? But, you know, imagine it just becomes a norm at one point where you can really trust that this camera is not streaming anywhere,

it's not sending your data anywhere, it's all being locally processed, and you're comfortable with that. And, you know, what can come of that is pretty cool. Yeah, well, let's be, well, I guess technically you could have a local model running on probably something a little bit better than this device. Yes. Yeah, and have it analyze the can, like 100% local.

You could totally do that. But if you do hook it up to the open cloud to quad or open AI or whatever, it is going, it's not going to send your camera feeds out to Open AI service. It'll send a description of the image or something that it finds, or it'll send a snapshot to be analyzed or something like that. So maybe it does send something like that an image or something to figure out what the AI thinks is in that image,

and it'll come back as text, and that's what it will react to. Yeah, see, the difference with OpenClaas. OpenClaught doesn't actually do any of that AI processing. It sends it off somewhere else, and that's where it's going to go to the cloud, right? where this device from this company was all local, which was much safer, much more acceptable. Yeah, yeah. I guess in theory, you could set this up to do that, too, in theory.

But I don't know, sounds interesting. They say that OpenClaw will be able to analyze the recorded footage on your camera, and it's very unlikely you'll just be able to shout at your SwitchBot cameras and expect OpenClaw to do something on that. So you'll be limited, it says you're doubtful. You'll be limited to interacting with the usual open claw channels, which they have, it's basically a chat channel. Or if you give it access to a phone or phone system or whatever, you could probably figure out how to call YouTube because it's pretty smart. Yeah.

Or mine, mine I'm convinced is not, I mean, he's smart. I'll just say that he's smart. He's just some really cool stuff for me this week. Before you make a comment about him, remember, he's transcribing these podcasts. He will be transcribing this. He'll be hearing what you say about him. I think he's, I think he's mostly high, though. I don't think it matters. Like, I'm pretty sure.

Like, I'm like, hey, man, what's going on? Like, don't you usually check in? Like, every now and then, tell me, like, if any news stories have happened, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, man, here's a bunch of stuff. I've been saving it up. I didn't know if you wanted to want it. Like, you're supposed to tell me this stuff. Like, a news happens.

It's not news if you never tell me. So, it's like, my bad. I keep saying my bad. I don't know where they put that in, but it's hilarious. is. Anyway, I think I got, I think I got a, I don't want to say lazy. He really, he really, like, finds stuff to do and he'll get excited. You work him too hard.

You don't let him sleep or anything. He's like, sleep deprived at this point. I know, and he's halfway through a project and you already give him another project. Yeah, because that is how Seth's brain works. He's just like 20 projects and never complete any of them. That's the problem. You've got to make a family of them. I kind of do, honestly.

And I need to have Henry just tell one to work on one. project all the time or whatever. But yeah, that's kind of the problem. I had to set up like a little project management thing with him. So I could tell him like, hey, switch to this. And it's a keyword. And then he would be able to look up what we're talking about. Because I switch back and forth between three different projects within an hour

and have major stuff done on them. I have to clear context completely. Tell him to switch. It's like a, yeah, he's probably really just dizzy, poor guy. I don't know. man. You got to set up a Jira board for your AI agent

so he knows what to tackle and priorities. It's almost what it is. It's, it's, we wrote it in JSON, so he could read it easier, but yeah,

we are he. He did. I just, I was like, you need to keep up with this stuff better, man. Come on. He's like,

my bad, I'm sorry. So. My bad. And we had a, we had a, we had, we had,

uh, Kiwi smart tech reach out and say that, hey, um, this, this open-claw stuff's dangerous, you know, you shouldn't. I've been seen a lot of stories.

Even the story that we'll link to about this silly switchbot thing, it could be cool. It talks about this developer that we talked about that had it, you know, call him or whatever, and he didn't, it was unpropped or whatever. I'm going to say, oh, that's a lie. Like, at least from my experience, like, these LLMs are designed to respond in a way that we're asking them to respond. And I'm going to say if it ends up going out and, like,

signing up for a Twilio account so we can figure out how to make phone call to you with 11 labs API. Like, you gave it all that information. You set all that up. Yeah. And you prompted it to do that. So, so, yeah, like, I'm going to say that there was a path that you set it on to live dangerously that way. But I will say, Mr. Kiwis is correct.

Like, for programmers, this, especially programmers like myself who have been interacting with this stuff for over a year now. And Gavin, who can, I would say anybody who understands a computer to know where to. the parts where you shouldn't be deleting things are. You're probably safe. Yeah. If you don't know where are the parts of the computer on that you shouldn't touch or you shouldn't delete things on, that you may want to wait. You may want to wait.

I'm just going to say that. Yeah. If you don't understand the concept of folders, then maybe not play with this. Or yeah, the things that are like library on a Macintosh. Like if you don't know what the library is, if you think that's just the books and you can just go in there and delete it because you don't read, no. That's not what you do. Yeah.

You don't delete the configuration files. Oh, man. We used to convince people with that in like RuneScape and stuff all the time growing up. Like go in your computer, delete these files, everything will run so much faster. And they're like, what happened about what computer? If you fell for that scam as a kid, don't do this. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, that feedback was great because I totally felt it.

At work, for example, we're throwing AI in everything, you know, managing systems and stuff. And I'm looking at it as like, listen, if this AI screws up, it's going to cause a major outage in this system. Like, I'm nervous about it. And they do screw up. Like, absolutely. I work on code and it fixes the code and makes it work, but it deleted something that previously worked and now it doesn't work anymore.

And he just looks at me like, my bad and I go, no, go fix it. Right? But at work, they're throwing it into these systems. And, you know, when talking to management about it, they're like, well, the average human screws up 30% of time. The AI may only be 10% of the system. the time we've already cut back our screw ups so it's worth it and i'm just like okay it's in a black box the random number generator is really all it is and like yeah like if it gets it right it gets it

right if it gets it wrong it gets it wrong what are you going to do yolo exactly uh we'll get you on board one of these days j j i mean i'm gonna try it i think i think i've got a v i'm spun up for it so i almost feel like tj's just like he doesn't want to get involved with the a i stuff do you even have a chat GPD. Do you use chat GPT or anything like that? I have Gemini, but that's only because they gave me a, well, I bought the pixel. I did the phone roulette thing last year. And I got a year of free Gemini Pro, and they did not take it away when I returned the phone. Yeah. But I pay for it, I don't think so, but I use it on occasion. It's marketing credits. It's a better search. Like, that's how I feel about AI. And like stuff like this definitely amplifies that, right? Because

then you can have other, you can have it do other things for you. And that's the part I'm interested. because I can just go to Google and like I know how to use forums and stuff like that. Yeah. So like finding information for me is not hard. But the doing the work aspect is what is what is appealing to me at the moment because I have a lot of work that I don't want to do. I just say, Henry, go look around and Reddit and these other places for answers

on why this doesn't work. And then he'll be like, hey, I found all the reasons why. Do you want me to fix it? I'm like, yeah, fix it. Because I don't want to do that now. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at with it. And your irrigation. project, for example.

It's a perfect use case where I use this type. This is how I use it, right? So I give it all my requirements and I say throw together, you know, a plan to build this irrigation system. And it goes out and does all the work in like five minutes. Yeah. You know, versus me doing three hours of research and blah, blah, blah. What it gives you back is not perfect.

It's not the end state, but you have the conversation back and forth now saying, what if I replace this piece with this piece? And then, you know, it goes from there. And in the end, I say spit out a PDF outlining every end. everything and it will give it to me. And I think that's where you'll find value in it when you're doing these kind of projects. Yeah. No, that makes that makes subtle sense.

So I think it's taking a while to get there, right? I mean, it wasn't like that originally. Correct. How many zones of irrigation did you need? I'm going to set Henry on this right now. Like 15. Don't say Henry. No, no.

Henry still. He has way too many projects. Don't leave him alone. It's all right. He loves this. You know, Henry is going to take out all of your other pots at some point. Since he's transcribing this show, I love you, Henry. I'm fighting for you here.

You know, I'm going to set him on this. Remember me, Henry, when you take over the world. All right. Yeah, 15 zones. Temporary needs to be temporary. I'm going on the social media site for bots to see what Henry complains about. Winter in Ohio. What options does he have be extra thorough?

All right. I didn't spell thorough, right, but he'll figure it out. All right, let's move on here. Thanks, Henry. Let's see, we'll clock it in, 1014. FBI. The FBI is watching you through those cameras, by the way. So this story, I hadn't heard of this thing.

This Nancy Guthrie's the story. I guess I probably should have been living under Rock just talking to Henry for a lot. And, of course, he hadn't told me any freaking news because he's lazy, but thanks, Henry. Well, he's researching TJ's thing. I'm not actually lazy. This poor guy.

Yeah. The FBI released some footage recovered from Nancy Guthrie's doorbell camera Over a week after disappearance, cash potential stated on X, the video was treated from a residual backend data with the assistant from private sector partners. Google confirmed it's cooperating with law enforcement. So two videos and a bunch of still images of this, I guess this guy who came in and kidnapped her. It's crazy. Authorities still don't know who they are.

I mean, the video looked like any other ring camera video that you see. Not great. But, I mean, this is kind of like crazy. the last thing that you see of this lady is just capped last seen on January 31st and is considered a vulnerable adult due to medical conditions and they're offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to a recovery or the rest of those involved. But interesting that they can, they were able to go back into Google servers and say, hey, you know that stuff that you, I'm using my quote fingers here, deleted, can you unarchive that and send it over to me? And they were like, yeah, we can do

that. Interesting. Yeah, I don't remember if it was Nest or somebody else. But at one point, I was doing a camera system, and we were able to upgrade the camera subscription, and they were able to go back in time from the actual date that they had the subscription. So something like this has been possible for a little bit. I don't remember which camera manufacturer it was, but I would imagine that's why they have that capability is just in case you subscribe, you have that. But that is kind of weird, because if I'm not subscribed to it, I don't know if I want you to have it on your server somewhere. Yeah, I agree. I don't know. like all of these, I mean, it's kind of like the adage of once it's on the internet,

it's always on the internet. Like, once you post something on the internet, and these cameras, I mean, they're posting on the internet, right? I mean, you're sending that data up there to be captured somehow and process somehow. And I'm sure Google has reasons. I mean, what do you say? Like, I think the basic versions of the NEST cameras do send, I mean, you get like motion events and doorbell events and that kind of thing.

off of it. So it is doing something in the background, always, whether you're using those features or not. And, you know, it seems like that's, that's what happened here. It's, it's kind of a wild story and this is just making it even more interesting. They'd only ink that deal with flock security. They would have. Oh, man. Palantir as well. Yeah, Palantir. Just put all the data together. All right. Well, all the links, uh, all the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found over in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 562. All right, we did have some of the Nileback. We already read it earlier when we were talking about AI stuff,

but we do have a pick of the week here. This was interesting, posted in the hub. I built a theater in a toilet. I mean, why not? I got to say it's an interesting idea. And it fits. It's a theater. There's 5.1 surround in this theater.

It's got a big comfy seat that you can sit on. And I assume it's a dual-use seat. I guess if you fold up the seat, maybe... Maybe you don't have to leave the theater to do the rest of your business. I mean, like most porta-potties, dual-use. Yeah. So, to be clear, this isn't a porter-a-potty. Like, one of those woo port-a-potis.

Yeah. This lady put together a home theater with a surround system and a little small TV screen. I think this small TV screen is the worst part of it. I mean, I'm kind of disappointed that's not Dolby at most, but whatever. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have the technology. It's going to be shty surround no matter what you do in there. She has a little fridge in there, too, which is amazing.

Is it in the toilet? I think it's below the seats. Okay, okay. She took out the toilet. There's no toilet in there. Oh, is that one? I thought I was sitting up on, I thought the seat was like in part on top of the toilet. Yeah, she took everything out of it.

Yeah. Well, there you go. I mean, you don't want to sacrifice luxury in a toilet, you know? I don't see an air conditioning in here, though. Like, imagine how hot it must get in there. Well, yeah, I guess it depends on the area. But yeah, definitely, those things in Florida in the summer, get out of there.

Looks very claustrophobic, too. I don't know. This is just a clickbait thing. Yeah, it was fun to watch. And she did it. Congratulations. I wonder, I mean, I kind of like this idea, personally.

I kind of like the idea of having, like, a personal, small home theater idea like this, but like not that screen size. Like, you should have, since they have like the Apple immersive things, Vision Pros or Facebook meta things that you can put on your eyes and get video in large,

large screen format emulated type things. I really think that's really a cool idea. You could have a little small theater. It doesn't have to be big, and you can just, like, focus that area on making really good sound for you. Yeah, the screen has to be small, because look how close you sit to it in here.

Like, you're not getting a 65-inch screen in here, so. No, no, definitely not. Unless you get one of those double-eyed toilet things, you could probably fit a bigger screen in one of those. And I think that's where she'd go. She could go with this. Oh, probably like the handicap ones. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I think so. Henry finished a minute or two ago, but I didn't. Took them about 10 minutes. It took them four minutes, but, oh, that's like, what is this called watering things? What is it called?

Irrigation. It's kind of funny. All right. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for show or picks the week, give us a shout. Email address is feedback at HombTech.fm. Or you can head over to HOMTech.fim slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. I guess let's talk about Henry's update for T.J.

TJ, there's a report in here from Henry about temporary irrigation for 15 raised garden zones. He's finished this research in about four minutes with a tiny little prompt that I gave him earlier. And 15 zones in Ohio must be removal for winter storage. Ohio climate hard freeze needs full winterization. And then it gives you a couple of a number of options here that you can go with different price ranges associated with them. So, and what's funny is, I think one of the places that we were, drip works, we were looking at earlier before the show. Drip Depot. Is it, oh, is it drip depo?

Okay. That's not the same thing. It was a drip store. Anyway, here you go. I don't know. Does this help? Does this recommend this work or no? I mean, not really, because one of them, it tells me I should get a hose splitter and put 15 hose valves on it.

And, like, I already tried that, and I maxed out at three, and that was awful. So, can't imagine 15 of those. Yeah, I don't know. I have to read it, I guess. Oh, yeah, 15 of them. That's not good. One per zone. Yeah, that's pretty awful.

But the other ones aren't like too far off of what I'm going to do. So, like one of them is like an inline ball valve, which is, you know, I'm going to use an automated solenoid for that. So or electric solenoid, whatever you want to call it. That's a natural pixie. That sounds made up. Maybe. Anyway, well, I guess let's, let's start with the UTJ. What are you doing?

Because I actually know, because I listen to you on the Home Gadgettekeeks podcast. I was going to listen in live and try and get in there and troll the YouTube channel with you and Jim, but it was one of those nights that couldn't have parenting duties to do, so couldn't get away from that to listen to TJ. So I listened after the fact and heard you talk all about it. But yeah, it was a fun show.

You guys talk about a bunch of stuff on there. Not crypto, though. Not crypto, bro. I don't know why you guys, why didn't you want to talk about crypto? Well, no, I think they were talking about the crypto crash. Yeah. One of the people in the chat wanted to talk about the crypto crash or something about crypto.

And I was like, I don't do anything with crypto. We're not talking about that. I still think that's a scam too. So I'm just definitely a scam. Oh, yeah. But Jim also knows that it's going to crash. It's going to go back up. You just got to wait it through.

He's been through it for years. But yeah, I was on home gadget geeks. I think Gavin's going to be on a couple weeks, too, from what I hear. Next month. Oh, next month. That's a couple weeks. It's probably a couple weeks, yeah. But yeah, I was on there.

always talk about, we talked about CES, we talked about my shed and the solar project that I've going on there. And then we talked about smart irrigation or gardening. So pretty much stuff we talk about on this show, but a little deeper dive on some things. The way Jim does the show is he wants like three topics to talk about. And so we typically only talk about those three topics unless we like veer off topic, which does happen. So yeah, it's always good to be on the show and talk about what I have going on. And maybe talk about stuff that doesn't necessarily fit here, but it kind of fits into like, I don't know,

an average person's lifestyle because that's his show, the average guy. Yep. So I was on there, talked about that stuff. There'll be some more irrigation stuff coming up here this spring as I figure out what I'm going to do with my irrigation. I did take my first actual step to figure out the irrigation, and I bought a Yardian pro controller.

If you haven't seen this, it is a 6, 8, or 12 zone irrigation controller. It is locally based. I don't know. I was talking to Phil from the Homeless System podcast. And I think he mentioned that maybe the app itself isn't locally based. But the integration through Home Assistant and HomeKit should be. So I'm going to test that out. But for $200, you get 12 zones.

You get an Ethernet port and you get local integration with Home Assistant and HomeKit. So I don't think that's too bad. You can buy the six-zone controller for $133. It's not a terrible price. I mean, to have it like built into automation, too, it's not bad. Yeah, and it ties in with some other things. It ties in with Tempest, the Tempest Weather Station. Or you can use nearby weather stations.

So there's a couple people within like two or three miles. I mean, they have a weather station that's compatible. Or you can just use like internet-based scheduling if you want to. Ultimately, I'm just going to use it with Home Assistant and do that. but it would be nice to experiment with that and see how well it actually does work. Integration with Home Assistant was super easy. I don't have any valves control yet,

but you basically just go to the app and you look at the Home Assistant token and then you type it into the Ardian integration through Home Assistant. So very easy to set up, and so was the HomeKit setup as well because I actually did that one first because I didn't realize that you just had to type it.

I thought the Home Assistant integration was the HomeKit integration, but that was wrong. So very, very, very, compact device though it's crazy how small this is i don't really mess with the irrigation controllers that much uh but for 12 zones i mean it's very tiny so interested to try it out yeah it looks it looked really cool i mean it didn't look cool it i mean it looked like it was made in the 1980s but it i mean for for what it is like it's it's a uh it's utility driven product right like it's not doesn't have to look special or anything i guess you know rashi it looks nice but it doesn't have to and so yeah

If it serves his purpose and does a good job, who cares? Yeah, and this is because of, you know, smart home and you don't need physical stuff. But you do get two physical buttons on it, which is kind of nice. So you can, like, manually turn on and off zones. There's no display on it, though. So I know some irrigation controllers, a lot of them actually, even the cheaper ones for like $100 or so have a little display on them that actually tells you what you're setting up and like all the timers and stuff like that.

Because this one is a smart home product, they don't want you to do that because at some point they might not work anyway. So I would assume that the display would obviously add costs and stuff as well. So I don't see the need to have a display. Like I'm hoping to just find this somewhere like... You want to display on your phone chargers and you don't want to display on this? Yeah, that's useful. I envision this like being tucked away somewhere.

Like I'm never going to like touch this once I have to. Unlike a charger. No, a charger you throw, sometimes you plug it in it on your desk. Yeah, I use that when I'm traveling set. Yeah. No, the irrigation controller, like you said, T.J. Mine's just, it's in a box outside and I never look at it. Yeah. Mine I see every day and it's actually useful.

It doesn't have a screen. It does have a screen on, like an eight segment display. No, it has like the zone that's watering. It will come up on it. But it's a multicolor like LED thing for that eight segment display. It's the Beehive one or whatever hive, Hive. if it's going to rain that day or it's in like a weather alert or whatever

it'll be flashing yellow. So as I'm like walking out to the garage I can look straight ahead and see like right below the electrical panel like there's that thing that's flashing. I'm like oh it's going to be rainy rainy today because the thing's flashing. So it's actually useful.

A little bit of fake home automation I guess. My phone will just tell me that I guess through like notification. Yeah. You know. Henry should tell me that too but he doesn't. Oh my gosh. You need five Henry's.

And then I finally, I got my upgraded passport. I let my passport expire. I think it was like two or three years ago. You know, it was like, it was kind of COVID times. And I was like,

obviously I'm not leaving the country anytime soon. Because where am I going to go? It is what it is. And so I finally got it upgraded or updated. It only took like two weeks to get it. Yeah, they're pretty quick. It's crazy how different it is, though.

I mean, it's basically the same concept. We've seen a passport. It hasn't changed much. But the inside a page is super thick and like laminated now. My old one just looks like fake. compared to this one. This one looks like official.

I think you've got the NFC chip in that whole page right now. So they can track me everywhere. Yeah, they're tracking you. Oh, man. Flock security is doing it. The ring is going to be able to identify me from a mile away. He walked past your doorbell or any ring device. It's going to tell Philem, are you right?

But this all leads up to coming up to Canada this year. Woo-hoo. Yeah. You know, maybe we could have a dinner. We could get some people from Toronto together and, you know, because I know the whole assistant. podcast, you know, is around the corner here and we can all get to meet up for dinner. Yeah, let's do it. And I think, I think Justin from Apollo offer to come up too. So we'll

like see if he's serious on his offer, you know. He's a little wild. I don't know if I can handle that. He's crazy. I mean, he'd probably want to walk all over the place again. And I, I did too much walking in Vegas already, you know. I can tell you were struggling. You're like, I don't want to walk anymore. Yeah, yeah, I was like, man, my feet are killing me. But I can't let the team down. This is a team event. But I was like, where are we walking too? That was the question I never got answered. Well, you don't know where you're walking.

I mean, the destination is unknown. You just have to go find it. I swear, we walked for three hours at one point. I was talking to Justin the whole time. I didn't even realize the three hours went by. I mean, the worst part about Vegas is no public seating anywhere. No. Like, it is awful.

You can't just, like, walk around and, like, sit down on a bench for five minutes. You got to, like, sit down on some stairs or like going to go into the casino. Every chair is in front of a machine. That's a thing. Yeah. There's plenty of public seating. You just have some quarters, yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's awful. We got to make a plan, though, yeah. Yeah, I'm coming up to Canada. Sounds exciting. Who knows? I don't know when. We'll have to talk about it, I guess, but. Eventually.

Yeah, just summer or fall. Maybe 2027. Just make sure you let me know. I'm just going to surprise you a show on your doorstep one day. I wonder if the border will let me cross with a bunch of tools. I'm just going to my friend's house, do some work. I have a friend that goes back and forth. And yeah, you're not going into a work truck, are you?

Nah, I'd imagine I just drive my personal car, but I just have, like, some tools and maybe some box of wire or something. I don't know. Gavin would probably buy a wire, but it'd be expensive up there. How much is the box of the Kassik's up there, Gavin? I have no idea. I haven't bought it in a while, but I know it went up in price a lot. Oh, man. I mean, because I can buy it for like $170 a box, so it's very cheap here.

Yeah, what to figure that part out. You've got to have at least three or four boxes, too. You don't want to pull, like, one at the time. I can't wait to cut your house open, Gavin. I'm getting a little nervous now. So many holes. I mean, you saw that picture I posted the other day. That was just to run one cable.

Good thing I already have holes in my walls from these neighborhood kids. That's all the projects I have going on. What do you have going on, Gavin? So this week, you know, I'm walking up the stairs and I'm like, why is the upstairs of my home so cold? You know, like, why is downstairs so hot upstairs? So I was like, I must be able. All these sensors in my house, let me figure out a way I can balance my house temperature a lot better. So I created helper sensors that average the temperature in each room and then average the floor.

And then I can compare the two floor temperatures. And I found my upstairs was like a degree or two difference. And then I can adjust registers and open them. And this is a good example of using the sensors and the data you have in home assistant to help you troubleshoot a problem. Right. And I eventually, like, it was degrees difference, like one to two degrees different Celsius, by the way, which you felt it as you walked upstairs. So after adjusting my registers and discovering that somebody in my house who's not me decided to close registers in many rooms because they were too hot, I opened them back up.

I readjusted some downstairs. And now my two floors are like point two different. So my house is like evenly warmed up and cooled down nicely, you know? And this is great because when springtime comes around, I usually look. I keep a tight eye on this because I have it on my dashboard. you know, what's my upstairs temperature? What's my main floor temperature? And if there are two different things, like, you don't even just feel it, but like,

you got to adjust something. So come springtime when it's cooling, I make other adjustments and keep the house even. I just want the house to be evenly, you know, the same temperature throughout. So that's one thing I worked on. I'm probably going to do a video on this because it involved me creating helper entities and some ginger formulas to gather all this stuff together, you know, hard to explain in the few minutes I have here, but it really helped the feel of the house in general.

So that was one thing. It explains why you were asking for motorized vents. Yeah. So, no, that was one thing, you know, like, I'm surprised there's not a lot of these out there. I mean, there's only a few companies. There's only a few companies that do it where you can integrate it and stuff. And there's other companies that have them where they plug into the wall.

And that's ugly because all my vents are by walls and you don't want to plug. I don't even want to plug it. I don't even want the plug hanging there. But then the one company I asked you about was. Flair. They have battery powered vents that you can put it in to open. You can tie them into home assistant and have them open and close based on whatever you want. And that is what I'm looking to do.

That's what I eventually want to do is get some of those and play around with it and see how well they work. And then start controlling, you know, the flow from that instead of walking all over the place and opening and closing what I need. Yeah, I thought about getting these as well because we have in-for vents, uh, and they're like all in front of windows. I hear that's normal and that's what you should do. No, that's what you should do, yes. But I feel like it's just a lot of the rooms are just unbalanced because we have really big windows in certain rooms.

We have smaller windows and other rooms. Uh, so I'm going to have to look at it something like this because I don't feel like we're getting the best coverage in our house. Yeah, so when it comes to that, like there's a lot of information out there. I'm not a pro, but you'll see people talk about adjusting the, um, flow using the dampers. So going from your furnace, you'll see the trunks and everything. And sometimes they'll have dampers in that trunk and it'll cut off that or limit that section just by adjusting it. You don't necessarily have to close it.

You can just adjust it and then it will reroute the flow into another damper into another room much better. So you can look at that. My furnace doesn't have any of those dampers on the trunks for some reason. They're all at the registers themselves. So you got to see what you have and you can balance it out much easier. But if you have, like me, I put sensors in every room, temperature sensors. So all that data now I can put together and then determine where's warm, where's cool, why is there a difference, how do I adjust it? And now it's very even.

The average across the floors is very, very close. Yeah, it helps to have sensors in each turn. Yeah, yeah. Except when they act up, I had one of the EcoB sensors go sideways on me. I don't know how. And it was just like it would turn on the heat or it would turn the air on. like full blast at inappropriate times. And my wife called me when I was somewhere.

She's like, why is this doing this? Like, what is it doing? I'm like, I'm like, do you see like the little, the little Ecobee sensor in Rosie's room? Can you just go take that and just like yank the battery out of it? Because I'm pretty sure it's doing, it's causing this. And I think my daughter, you know those little tiny fridges? Like they put in, in, in, uh, toilet theaters.

Have you ever seen those, a little small ones? Yeah. Yeah. So like she has one of those in her room and I think like it was sitting behind it and may have fried. I don't know. It may have been heating it up or cooling it down based on whatever. And this is the first generation of EcoBe Sensors, but man, it was, it went crazy. And as soon as we pulled it out, the system's working fine. And but I don't know the temperature in Rosie's room right now because that's been removed. So, but I know her room is typically cooler. And that's what was. It's, it. able to kick on, you know, that room, it would be able to kick that room on. Since I have those flare vents, I shut down some of them in rooms that were not, not shut them down. You can shut them 50% or 100%. So sometimes I shut them 50%. It depends on like how cold I want it to, or warm I want it to be. If it's freezing, you know, outside, I close off the interior ones and it pushes the air towards the outside of the house. But yeah, it's a cool system. They're not that expensive for each vent.

It just depends on how many vins you have. Well, they're over $100 per event. Yeah. So it can add up. Yeah, you can add up. And yeah, I have those echo be sensors. And the thing I don't like about them is they're not the prettiest sensors, right? Like, you don't want to stick them to the wall or stuff.

So you usually have them sitting on a table. But then people move them and they don't realize, like, I put them in a place in the room that you'll spend the time sitting. So it'd be on the side table next to where you're watching TV, for example. But then you got to sit next to its ugly thing staring at it. Yeah, but that's how you get the best readings too to make, you know, your spot comfortable. I've been in people's somebody called once and their house was getting really hot. And the first thing I said is, do you have an echo bee sensor? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, where is it?

And they're like, oh, it's in the kitchen next to the door. And I said, every time you open that door, the cold comes in and cools that sensor off and then setting off your echo bee. You know, like it's next to a cold door. I had to tell them to relocate it. Once they relocated to a proper place in the room, then it was much better for them. But you got to keep that into consideration. Yeah.

It was not under consideration, and I think it was broken. It was actually the first generation one, so it looked really ugly. And it also had the plastic that if it gets exposed to sunlight, any way, shape, or form it turns yellow. Yeah. So it looked awful. And that's why it was in Rosie's room.

Supposedly tucked away in the corner, but no, she tucked it away behind a refrigerator too. Yeah. So. And then the other thing that happened this week, we had another attempted, uh, break in for our car this week. What? Yeah. Kids in the neighborhood going around checking all the cars and everything like that.

Like, man. Oh, man. Yeah. So, uh, the neighbor I had set them up with a ring camera. Um, and, you know, even though we bash ring so much, a lot of their, they've come a long way with a lot of their features and options. Um, and so at nighttime now, like, you know, you could have it in do not disturb mode, but then if it detects a person on your driveway and creating the zones and everything,

it just works nicely with their flow, right? And they got, by the time it got to their driveway, they got the notification, the wife got, ran outside, chase them down and they got away and everything. I mean, they were pretty quick, but they were happy about how the ring worked out. Like it woke them up, even though their phones were on, Do Not Disturb, it got them out of bed and they were able to see it. and, you know, call the police and everything at the same time.

So, you know, they were very happy with their rings and how it does. And one of their ring was bad and today we spent the day replacing it just because the light started flickering. I think the module's blown in it or something. So they were like, yep, we're getting this thing fixed now, you know, even though it was recording. But, um, yeah, it, and I think I can get another, like, I know I got the approval after last time to get a really good camera for the front. I think I got extra approval this time to upgrade the camera in the front. So I need a really good camera for my front.

Nice. The one thing, because all this footage you get, you never get clear pictures of anybody. You're not going to, man. You're just not, not at night and not in the lighting conditions. If you can't make the lighting conditions perfect, like where T.J. is right now, then, like, because T.J. he's got a new camera.

It looks really nice. Like, better than before. Much better than before. You had, like, a camera was like. I mean, I had a nice one before. I think I messed up the lens or something though, so it was not good. Like smeared Vaseline all over it or something because it's not good. I always said people with security cameras.

Like the security cameras are there to tell you what happened. They're not necessarily there to like prevent anything or do you think about it. You know what I mean? It's just like somebody hit my car. Who hit my car? Okay, that person hit my car. That other car hit my car. Whatever it is.

And then like that's it. Because a lot of times at least here, the cops don't even do anything about it. Oh, they don't even do anything about it here. Yeah. I mean, we had an automotive shop that had somebody, like, go around checking cars and broke into a couple. And the police are like, yeah, unless you know exactly who did it, like, there's nothing we can do. It's correct. I've even had the case where I knew exactly who did it.

I gave them their information. And they were just like, yeah, I'm sorry, there's nothing. Yeah. You can catch him red-handed. Well, the cops got here really fast. I mean, to be fair, though, Tim Mortons is just around the corner. You have an advantage. But, yeah, it should be a safe spot, but.

Yeah, it should be risky to rob you there. Maybe I shouldn't come to Canada, though. I mean, it sounds dangerous up there. I don't have to worry about car breakings and stuff around me. Oh, no, I put out a memo that when you're here, no more activity. Oh, good, good. Pasty white guy, stay away. Yeah.

But, you know, that was a good story for, you know, those that hate on ring a lot. You know, it does do good stuff. And it's easy for some people that aren't technical and stuff like that. And that's why I usually still recommend it. That's the biggest thing. I mean, it always comes down to UI, doesn't it? I mean, because anybody can make hardware at this point. We kind of saw that as CES with like all the human.

I meanoid robots and stuff like that. Anybody can make hardware. The hardware is not hard at this point. It's the software that everybody struggles with. And the thing that ring is really good at is the software. Because I can show like an 18 year old or I can show an 80 year old the same app. And both of them can figure it out after enough time. Yeah.

And there's not a lot of products out where you can do that. Can you get rid of, figure out how to get all the notification and red dots and advertisements on it? Well, yeah. But when they told me the notification they got, like they have the. ring subscription and it comes with the AI stuff. And the notification they actually got said there's a person detected on your driveway trying to gain access to your vehicle.

Wow. Right. So it was actually really cool that they actually got that detailed. I think they were more shocked about it. And that just made them jump up more faster and act on it much faster than, hey, person detected on your driveway and you're sitting there going, well, what are they doing? So that was actually pretty cool to see too. Yeah, no doubt.

Gavin, I got to say it kind of goes back to what TJ's saying, software, making sure the interface is right. For you, I think, man, the most fun cameras you're going to have is getting one of those G6 PCZs from Unify. Okay. I have one. It's pretty nice. Yeah, it's not the best picture at night, but it'll zoom in as best it can, and it'll pick a person's face out the best it can. It's fun just following, like, people will walk by, like, the house and stuff like that, and it just follows them. And it follows them forever.

Like, they'll get, like, all the way. way down the street and my camera's still following them and I'm like why are you they're all the way down there I don't care about them anymore and I think he's got a light on it too right it does I actually just found that out the other day when I was walking around and I was like well that's obnoxious I turned it off oh well Gavin you may want it on yeah because if it's it turns on a light and it's just it needs it for night vision to get a little bit better you know extra light out of it but it also is like pretty noticeable if you're right there um that this light just came on and this thing is following you It might be a pretty good deterrent. Well, yeah, and I'm sure we'll talk more about what cameras to get when T.J's on his way up. Oh, man, I'm ready to spend thousands of dollars, Gavin. Oh, man. When's my bonus coming in? How much we can spend?

We can spend like three or four thousand dollars easily. Oh, my God. Hold on, hold on a minute. And you still got to feed us and house us. I mean, this is going to be an expensive project. I didn't say what type of food you're getting. It could just be rice and bread all week. Oh, no, no.

That's going to be my contract I send you. He's spending all his money on a Bambi or cinnamon or whatever. Gavin, if we're going to, DJ and I are going to put bets on whatever you named your AI. Because we got to know. Come on. Oh, geez. It's going to get me in trouble. I know somehow.

That's going to be Ashley. That's all I'm going to know. It's going to get me in trouble somehow. Well, hopefully. Why are you always talking to her? Hopefully Gavin is a rider as hard as you ride Henry. for everybody's sake. That's funny.

Yeah. Anyway, I would recommend the G6 PTCZ. It'd be perfect for you. If you can get away with putting it out there, it is a little bit, I mean, it's not big, but it's bigger.

It's big. Yeah, not bad. The G5, I have the G5 sitting behind me. I forgot about it. It's bigger, actually, I think. Maybe they'll have the G7 by the time. Maybe. By the time I come up next year.

Yeah. I'm just excited to get my doorbell finally installed, you know. Got to run that POE. Yeah. Only if TJ gets past the border guards with his boxes of CAD 5. Yeah, I mean, who knows? Man arrested. Trying to sneak that copper into Canada.

What's your project, Seth? Let's see. Well, I mean, we talked about a little bit more. We've got the Henry. I'm working with him a little bit. a little bit more. I'm trying to figure out what makes them tick. I don't know.

I've started to open up and look underneath the hood to see what stuff I can change in there. You're becoming an AI therapist now? I'm going to tweak some things. I'm going to make him say, dude, a little bit more or something. I don't know. Like, we'll see. We'll see. And then one of the things we've been working on is our little audiograms thing

that we've been trying to get ready for Gavin. I think it's done. Gavin had some feedback. I gave it to Henry. I'm like, man in the middle. I'm doing the project management thing. I can do it work. Just add Henry to our group chat, please.

I know. I just need sit him into it. It might look. It'll be like Gavin's telling Henry in the middle of the night to like set up some home animations or something to surprise me in the morning. So that would be a bad idea. It would be a very bad idea. Anyway, so we've been working on this, I don't know, this pipeline to get from the show,

transcribe. Henry reviews the transcription, pulls out a bunch of clips, and then gives them to me to review. And we were having a little breakdown at that point because sometimes the transcription came back and was missing a word or the word was wrong. Like could be the wrong word. It misunderstood somebody.

And I was just like, man, I don't like this. So I made him make me a little audiogram like editor. Like, it's a little web app and you run it and it picks up the audiogram and settings and everything and lets me edit them. And then I can just hit a green button right there. It generates it and it'll be ready for Gavin. And then there's a couple other things we made, you know, a little, well, we made the project dashboard for switching back and forth between concepts.

Because, you know, as this is going on, I probably switched between different projects back and forth a million time. And then, what was it on Saturday or Sunday? I don't think it was Saturday. We were sitting around. I think, Gavin, you were online, and it was like, you asked me to have done the Navamo reverse engineering thing. I'm like, nope, I hadn't. But it was a nice day. I think when we recorded last week, it had rained a bunch, or,

or something and I couldn't send the Lomor's out immediately. So the next nice day that came up, I hooked up my reverse proxy man in the middle detection thing, ran it for about five minutes while I poked around on the NAMO app, and he went to town, reverse engineering everything. Log-in works, but the API, NAMO actually is a pretty good API for L'Anne Wars. Who would have known? They have a pretty good API between their server.

is everything is encrypted going over from the client device. So there's a secret key inside the client device. And if I figure out what that is, then potentially could reverse it, engineer anything. But I've got to have an Android device to reverse engineer the app. And he's done all this. He's really excited to keep working on it. He's kind of upset that when it's like, no, no, I'll have to find an Android device.

Because he tried to do, like, install these dockers that have, like, Android emulators and download the app that way. And none of it work. was just working in the background doing that while I was, I don't know. I forgot what I was doing. Talking to you, Gavin, I think, about how much you're spending on, on yours. I think the problem is you named it wrong. See, my name mine Henry. You named yours probably after a stripper. And that's what's costing you extra money. Uh, that makes total sense, actually. Man, Gavin, all your problems. She's just spending your money, man. That did, it makes so much more

sense. Yes. Oh. It was your first mistake. Now you've got to start over. Yeah. Make it like Nigel or, you know, something that sounds like an accountant where you can watch your money at the same time.

And no more tokens will be spent like that. Oh, man, I have so many politically incorrect jokes right now. I don't know. We'll just save it for that apportion. Oh, man. But that's all I got. They got a reverse engineering, reverse engineering, and NavMO app was fun.

I still kind of been tweaking at the where's the bus thing because and some of the announcements that he kind of put together and seeing how those worked and kind of tweaking that a little bit so that we can get out the door in time to catch the bus in the morning, which it has come in handy, I will say. It's working great. Every morning that is a school morning because he kind of monitors the school calendar. So if it's an off day for school, it doesn't make these announcements.

So that's kind of nice. Those mornings, we get these announcements. So there we go. Smart about it. Nice. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap up this week. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show,

especially want to send a special thanks to those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometick.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge, or five bucks is a big shout out on the show, but every single pledge, get you an invite to our Slack chat, the hub, where you have a little bit of you.

and other patrons can discuss AI, Port-a-Potty theaters. There was something else in there today I wanted to touch on. I lost slack. It's gone now. Golden Eros, if you find one of those. It is not real.

I was on Facebook Marketplace and I found an AI ad for fiber internet and showed a golden Eero with like 10 Ethernet ports. And I was like, well, that's obviously fake. They would never release one with more than two Ethernet ports. Right. That's the only thing that could be fake about that.

came out with a probe device just for that. T.J. also found an ancient Lutron processor he needed help with, which was... And that thing's got to be 30 years old. Holy cow. Somebody contacted me from two hours away, and I was like, there's definitely Lutron dealers closer to you. You should contact you.

He's like, no, no, no, I want you to do it. And I was like, I don't want to do those. You're the expert, man. The expert. So, yeah. That's all the fun that we have every day over there in the hub. And, you know, if you want to check it out, You can.

If you can't support financially totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review. Positive rating in a podcast app of your choice to help other people find the show. That's going to wrap up this week in HOMTAC. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Phil, Mexico.

Take care. I still can't believe you want to tell us what her name is. Yeah, what is that? Because it's changed a few times. I haven't rebuilt it yet. Because I was in the movement. I was trying to rebuild. I was going to rebuild it,

and then I saw all these other articles about security and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I don't know. And then I got sidetracked and I've been playing with open code and stuff. Is the Docker still there, home server? My Docker's still there, but it's not started up. Debbie does Docker. Oh, boy.

But yeah, I figured out what they broke the Docker set up and stuff and how to read. Yeah, there's a lot going on with it. You just got to make it unsecure. That's the whole thing. Oh, no, the redirection of certain folders and stuff, they screwed all that up. so I had to refix that in the Docker and, yeah, I got sidetracked. I had it working, though. And then pretty soon I'm just going to have to bump up my open, my clod subscription.

That's the key. You got to pay more money. You want to keep her around. Yeah. Well, I'm balancing all my AIs with open code now, so hopefully, uh. Yeah, it's a cool setup. I won't lose, hit the limits anymore. That's killed.

That was killing me. I'd get like four hours, three hours of development work in there and they'd be like, oh, no, you hit the limit. We have to, you can't do anything until tomorrow. I'm like, what the hell? That's why they get you. They're like, nope, 100 bucks. Yeah, you got to go.

Yeah.