HomeTech.fm - Episode 564 - E-Ink Everything

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

On this week’s show: Google Home lets you delete its pre-made routines, Sonos shows profit but not growth, IKEA’s leaked Matter light driver, Heiman joins Works with Home Assistant with Thread-based safety sensors, a pick of the week, project updates, AI updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech podcast for Friday, February 28th, from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Stand up. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm the Gavin Gamble. You know, the best Gavin Gamble's of all the Gavin Campbell. Wait, you're clapping for me, though, so I'm not really sure. What are you introducing yourself for? Oh, no. Everybody claps to everybody yet because Gavin's watching the State of the Union tonight. Oh, yeah. The only one.

This is entertaining. You know, like I'm recording it to watch again later, don't worry. Well, yeah, you're about to be part of us, so you better get used to it. Yeah. Yeah. The amount of clapping going on tonight, oh. There's all those hockey players there that are getting there. Okay, let's move on.

Why? What happened, Gavin? I don't know. I don't know. Let's just move on. This is a tech show, okay? We're not talking about hockey here. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, hockey. Yeah. Well, welcome to the Home Tech podcast, the podcast, all about home technology, home innovation, and hockey. USA. USA.

I'd like to announce this is my last show. Man, that was easy. All you had to do is be in hockey. That wasn't easy, actually, DJ. I'm pretty sure that was probably pretty hard. I didn't watch it, so it's easy for me. I'm so outnumbered here. It's like two to one.

This is hard. I mean, that's what you get. You've been slipping in Canadian news for the longest time. I mean, we've got to take you down a peg. You know, I know you guys got mad every time I sent you to Amazon link. It was the Canadian one and it switched your Amazon over. I knew you took that personally, but I'm going to keep doing that on purpose. Yeah, whatever that random website, mobile syrup or whatever.

Yeah, get that out of here. I don't know my news to be sticky. Even one up you. I'm going to make them affiliate links too now going forward. Oh, man. They pay you in coffee from that coffee place that doesn't exist. Tim Hortons? Yeah, yeah, it doesn't exist.

I'm pretty familiar. It doesn't exist, but it's just not good. It's not in the airport. It's like Canada hockey. If you need anything, we don't have tariffs anymore, so. Ah, just kidding. Wait, oh, yeah. We do have tariffs.

We have more tariffs. We may have 10, maybe 15% across. We don't know one knows what's going on right now. So that's happening. But over the weekend, the Supreme Court, struck down the tariffs. So maybe nowhere in tariffs. Maybe we'll get, we're not getting rebate checks back. That's not going to happen. No. That's going to go to the companies that actually pay the tariffs. And then we won't see anything but higher prices because there's

another tariff coming evidently. Fustrating. It is bad. Like, I haven't shipped something to the States in a while, but I did recently. And here I am thinking I'm just going to pay a little bit of money, right, shipping this. Well, when I went to the UPS store and the guy, you know, after I filled out all the forms and everything, you know, you know, you know, He then looked at me and warned me. The first thing I said to him, you could have warned me before we went through this whole thing. That you don't know what's going to happen. Right.

But then after he pulled out the bill, I was like, are you kidding me? Right. Like when did it get so expensive to ship something to the States? And then he's like, and then when it gets there, I don't know what they're going to get charged because of all these tariffs. It's shocking what's going on. Yep. Definitely sucks. We used to have free trade.

You guys remember that? It's weird. What is it? I know. I've heard of it. I heard of it. Yeah. It would have been cheaper for me to just. jump on a plane and take it down there.

Wow. That's crazy. Yeah, that was bad. No, no good. Well, we may have terrorists. We may not. No one knows. But what we do have, we had a little bit of fall up here from the donut lab people. If you guys, we ran across these guys at CES. Oh, yes. They made some big news as they announced that they had some solid state battery.

And we kind of looked into it more through that week. And this could be a game changer of technology. but the trick was nobody believed them. And they were like, yeah, you don't have this. So now they have launched a website called, I do not believe you. Great name. Yeah.

And then so if you go to this website, they are releasing third party, what is this, validation results and technical documentation for its solid state battery that they're coming out with. And the first one is up. It is about the fast charger performance,

run under demanding conditions without active cooling. and the cell was charged at 5C, which I assume is cold, because it's close to zero, at an extreme 11C rate. And so the page claims that the test confirms zero to 80% charge in four and a half minutes at 11C.

There you go. I guess they didn't lie about that. And you know what? The website, it's just the first test. Like they're going to be publishing multiple tests over the courses. So, you know, you hear people publishing the stories and you go into the comments of the stories because that's all where the good stuff is.

but people are so negative towards it. And I'm like, listen, this is one of those technologies that I want to be right because it will change so much. It's so good, you know, and they're calling out stuff and it's like, well, if you read the article, you would see that they said they'll talk about that in the next one or whatever. But, you know, people almost like wanted to fail. And I'm like, I want this to be right. So let's let's follow along, see how it goes. This is their first test, you know, like if they are right, this can change so much. in our world. I like how at the top of this I Don't Not Believe website, they have all the troll

posts on there like, this battery looks BS to me. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Where's the battery? Paperware king, prank of the year. Yeah. The next there knows. So they called out all these people that have been saying this stuff. And we've seen it. Everybody's a battery expert all of a sudden. Oh, yeah, yeah. From a picture, they're like, you know, they're breaking it down. I'm like, you're looking at a picture. It could be anything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the problem is, too, is a lot of people have come out before and say that they've made a solid stay battery, and they just, they have, but it's not able to be mass produced. Not mass produced.

And the big companies that are committed to making these, like the bigger ones that actually have experience in this world, they have basically said, you know, been pushing back the date. And I think the last they were saying was 2030. So these guys got the jump on everybody here in 2026. And if supposedly this battery is shipping with one of those, those motorcycles, cycles. Uh, and then, and it's production ready, doesn't use, um, was it rare earth chemicals or

region-contrains chemicals? It could be made anywhere. Um, this could be something that they do well with. And it, like you said, Gavin, it can be a game changer at, especially at what they're doing with this. This is crazy. And the only thing that shocked me about this is that it's not bigger news, um, especially at CES when we just saw it at some guy sitting at a booth and I don't think anybody believed him

there either. Yeah, exactly. You know, and it's like, but, If you're really right, this should be bigger news. But I think it's starting to gain momentum now. Yeah. As it's becoming getting closer and closer to reality, I think it's gaining a lot of momentum.

Yeah, and they'll have to, I mean, when the motorcycle comes out, first of all, the batteries are just going to get torn apart and people are going to know how they made it, which is why they hadn't say it's yes, well, they made it. But they'll also be able, they'll also have all these, like, real world conditions. I mean, if the motorcycles work for a week, and then stop working, that's a problem. But if they do have the performance and people are actually using these things, the way they're talking about, this looks like it is too good to be true. I mean, honestly, like, this is going to be amazing.

So I'm excited for this. I really am. Imagine how much lighter and actual useful, like, UPSs would be. I mean, just everything. Well, everything these days is a battery. Just everything. I even think is it not better to dispose these batteries to? like in the landfills could be reused.

I don't know. I think they said, I'm not sure. But there's so many things that this will affect from electric cars to your cell phones, to your laptops, you know? Your Apple Watch, for example, even get a lot better life. Not so, maybe not, well, better life, but also, like, I think they were claiming 100,000 recharge cycles or something like that. And currently, you know, it's like under 1,000.

You have 800 for current battery. So that's going to be night and day. Yeah. And your Apple Watch battery is so small, it's probably like. If you want to fully recharge, it'll probably be less than a minute to just recharge it. You know, so imagine like, oh, I'm running low and you just put it on for a minute and you're back in business for the rest of the day. That's crazy. I'm wearing my recharge watch right now because my other watch is sitting on the charger charging.

I get a day out of mine usually. Like, I get good time. And then usually at night when I'm going to sleep. Some nights I could sleep with it on other nights and just take it off and put it on the charger. And then I'm back in business again. but it's pretty the new one. It's the 11 I'm on now, I think. It has a nice battery life.

I'm running the, well, this is the older, not older ones, like the ultra one, but it's, it's, it's always had a good battery. It's a little less than it used to be, but I still got to charge it every now and then. It takes its time. Charges up. I have a recharge watch in the meantime, so I just pop it on and I still have a watch on my hand, and then I go back to the other one and it's charged. You have a watch for your watch?

I'm just making sure I understand this. I have a watch for, yeah, a day night, day night watch or something. like that. Yeah. All right. Anyway, we do have a couple of home tech headlines, so what do you guys say? We jump in.

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, you got an update from Google Home here. Their February 17th update, they continue a run of automation focus changes. In the automation editor, Google is adding some predefined voice assistant actions, which is nice. A couple for smart home speakers and displays.

Options include things like announcing the time or today's weather, playing a chime, news, music, podcast, radio, sleep sounds, all that good stuff. Telling a joke. This is just like default actions. They have some predefined actions, which aren't supported yet when using Ask Home or Help Me Create, but you can still use Ask Google for those custom commands. And then there's a couple of, like, decent updates around, like, automation portions of things. So if you've got a Google Home and you really like the automation side of things,

this could be a pretty good update for you. It seems like they're just building on this product. I'm surprised it's not gone and canceled it is like I don't even know what they're doing at this point and so surprising to see them release any updates but at least they have buttons now you know buttons are good yeah you get buttons one week new automation stuff the next week

I mean come on and these days any update to Google Home is a good update doesn't matter what it is just be happy you get an update that's right who would have thought there'd be something worse than HomeKit at some point well there is one thing worse than HomeKit Sonos News uh reported that's true I'm steady up for SOTOS. I guess Zonos reported their fiscal Q1, 2026 results,

and they showed the company stabilizing financially, but still struggling to return to their growth after the botched 2024 app rollout with Patrick Spence there. Revenue was $5.45.6 million down about 1% year over year, so that's not bad. But unit shipment fell 3.1 to 1.793 million units. So they actually started to turn a better profit. Gross profit ran rose up 5%.

Operating expenses dropped 20.8%. And then income more than doubled to 100 million. And net income increased to 93 million. So a little bit of business news. But hey, Sonos is making some money. There you go. That's good news. I kind of want to see what their next play is, though.

Like, are they just going to release new speakers? I think they have the amp, the rack-mounted, four amps. I can't remember what it was called. Yeah. Nobody knows what it's called. Yeah. It's over there in a multi-amp,

amp multi, I think. Yeah, they have that coming, but I'd like to see what else they have planned coming up, because right now it's been very quiet with them. It has been. It has been pretty quiet. That's because Tom Conrad

is used all of his AI token getting this thing profitable again. They took our, they took our breakout pretty hard, so. It's been hard for them. Yeah. They're trying to win you back to you. but I still have all my Sonos and I still have my Sonos headphones and I still like them.

I'm happy with them. I just like to see what they have planned. Hopefully they make the software better because that's always been their struggle. I'm trying to see. It looks like they broke down some of the categories. There's been a decline and the largest decline in sales is the Sonos speakers category, which pretty much includes what you think Sonos, when you think about Sonos other than headphones. So speakers, soundbars,

sub will for portable products, maybe, oh, and headphones. So I guess total revenue in that category was down about $8 million or 2% from last year. They said the decline was due to expected declines in ARC, as well as sub and portables,

partially offset by higher sales of ARC Ultra and the Era 100. So there you go. Air 100 was a result of the company's decision to reposition it by dropping its normal selling price. So I guess I haven't noticed that, but I also haven't been really in there. the market to buy any Sonos product. So if you wanted Sonos to make something, what would you be

interested in? Like, the working app? No, okay. Let's take the working ad out of there, a hardware device. If you wanted them to make a hardware device, what would you be happy with them? A hardware device that gave me a new OS for service. Maybe we could call S3. That sounds like a good name for it. Let me clarify, not software related. What would you like, what would you be happy to see them do next? I think TJ's talked about this a couple of times, real speakers for surround sound. Like being able to have... The front, left and right?

Yeah, left, right, center. Yeah, that's what I would say, too. I mean, they would be able to sell way more speakers then. If you wanted to have three arc ultrass for your front... And you know somebody would. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You would know somebody would. Let us do it, Sonos.

That's a good point, actually, is why they don't allow that. Like, I know you can get around it. I can't remember that app. Sonos Sequencer. Yeah. I know you can get around it and do that. But if they just officially allowed that, that would be a cool little update for them. But that still, again, sounds like a software thing, right?

Right. Yeah, it might be a software thing, but it also could be a hardware thing too. Yeah. I mean, the multi-channel amp, I think, is definitely something that is needed. It makes me, the Sonos miss, though, of course, because they always have to mess something up when they release a product. It's the fact that it doesn't come with the rack mount, and it's not just integrated into the product. Kind of like you think what he does. I don't get that at all. For the amount that you're going to end up paying for this, they couldn't just throw in some rack ears. No.

Not even Unify is that bad. They're literally making it too fit in a rack, basically. Like, that's the whole point of the product, and they're not even going to do that because it's for professional, for dealers only. So it's, uh, it's just one of those weird things. But the, the multi-speaker, I think, is a good idea.

Also, they need a, like a play five replacement. They have the era 300, but I really don't think it's a play five replacement. They need a beefier speaker for people that want to listen to music. Yep, I agree. I agree. Well, best of luck to them and Mr. Conrad, hopefully he gets his tokens replenished this week and can get back to work. The only thing I was kind of hoping they would come out with is some proper outdoor speakers, right? Because right now you have to, you get an amp and you wire it into, was it Sonance? Well, we have the little portable thing, right? The little. Well, yeah, but I mean, like the mounted outdoor, proper mounted outdoor ones, not like just a little portable. That would be nice to have.

I feel like it really wouldn't be that hard to come out with an outdoor-rated, like, wireless speaker. Just like an Arrow 100 and an outdoor enclosure. Yeah. And officially, I mean, the Arrow 100 is probably, they used to be like IP 67 or something like that. Like, it probably is, but they just didn't want to call it that because I think they had to re-engineer something like the power or something on it. But it would be nice if they had a proper, you know, just plugging in and forget an outdoor speaker. That would be, that would be nice. Exactly.

Well, the guidance for the second quarter, they say they're expecting revenue to go up. Two more percent, Gavin's clapping. Sorry, I feel left out. Every time someone claps at, you know, the State of the Union, I feel like I... Oh, I thought you were clapping for Sonos. Oh, no, no, I'm still watching State of the Union in the background. It's just a clap fest over there. Wait, that doesn't sound good at all.

That sounds like something that happened on an island. All right. Well, IKEA has a new double-kistel driver. It's a matter-combatable smart driver designed to control integrated lights. This is under cabinet or the wardrobe strip lights that they have. Expects to come in 15-watt and 30-watt versions for the EU in North America and uses that 24-volt system that's compatible with the existing setups for IKEA. Pricing, release date unconfirmed, but they will probably sit close to the current Trodfee driver's pipe point.

So there is a new IKEA matter device on the way. so keeping out for that, the double Keisel driver. Maybe I pronounce that one right. You're so good at these names. I know. I know. I love that IKEA's gotten like all in on matter. I really appreciate the effort they're putting into this.

And, you know, they're releasing a lot of products for it. Yeah. Right? They're beefing up the matter offerings. And I like that. And the price of these things are actually not that bad. Yeah. And like we said before, if there's any like large company that's going to invest into

matter and make. it work, it's going to be IKEA. They've been known for nice products at a reasonable price point and that work. So I'm hoping that there was a story, what did we cover like last week or the week before where some of they were having problems with one of them, but hopefully they've resolved all that. Yeah, I don't feel like that was IKEA's fault really, though, but they're going to take the flak for it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's their devices, right? Nobody cares that matters on there. It's IKEA's name that's up on their products. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 564.

All right, mailbag. We actually have a mailbag this week. Yay. Some listener feedback from Paul. He says, hey, Gavin, we chatted some his email. And let's see. He said a quick follow-up tip for the open-claw token hell. Create an invidia developer account. Oh, I'm not going to say this. People are going to know about it, Gavin. I told you about this in privacy. I know, but this is like, I've actually shared this with a number of people. I hope I replied to Paul. Oh, yes, I did. But I shared this with a few people because it makes total sense because we're hitting the walls when it comes to the tokens. All right. So here's the secret.

If you get an Nvidia developer account, you can use their build platform. And then you can go in and get free access to the Kimi 2.5 and the GLM5 models. And I think there's like, I think it's got like a million tokens or something on Kimmy 25 or token limit. I don't know. It's some crazy limit that they have. What I don't know, and like you have,

Nvidia kind of started messing around and how they lock that down. So what you have to do first is go explore the model first and then it will work. But what I had problems is Kimi 2.5 is that it's not fast. Like the speed, because it goes into like the developer access

goes into like a queue system. I've been seeing those take up to five minutes for a response. I wasn't really, like, that's not what I'm looking for. But it does save you money, and it does work because it's got a massive, like, a token window or something. What are they called it? Context window or something that you use? Yeah, context window, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, there you go. And context windows are important, but this is good little tip there as a failover, you know, because I've been hitting the limit so much. It kind of sucks when you hit your limit and they're like, you have to wait four hours, right? because that hurts and it's almost like, here, take a break, you know, walk around, come back in half an hour, you still have three and a half hours ago. It hurts, especially when you're in the middle of a project,

you know, and you hit that limit. It just, it hurts. So this is a good tip. I took another path. I'll get into the project section, but, you know, I just wanted to share this for everybody else. Very cool, very cool. Well, we do, we do, if you figure out and you,

I don't know, are you using that Gavin or no? Kimmy or? The NVIDIA, the whole that setup. Yeah. No, I'm not using it. I'm sick of signing up for new accounts for stuff at this point. For this guy. How are you doing, Cursor?

Yeah, my password manager right now has probably 1,500 accounts in there, you know? Like, I'm sick of signing up for things. And to sign up for something that, who knows how long it will be around. It'll probably get locked down at some point. So I'm not using it, but I've heard good things about it. Excellent. Well, I have two. I've heard people swear by it, but I'm not.

And I guess if you had a long task that you wanted an agent to go take care of, you could kind of direct that to go over there. And what it does is it's going to slow down how fast you're eating through those clod tokens. And it'll use that for the heavy lifting if you tell it to do it correctly. So, yeah, routing. It's a thing, even with these agent things. We've got to pick the week here. I ran across this on Reddit. There's a Reddit post that has this little thing on there.

But it's E-Inc Remote Control for Home Assistant, built with Fast EPD. I have something over on GitHub if you want to take a look at kind of what you can do with it. But I like E-Inc and you guys like Home Assistant. I like Home Assistant. It works. But this looks really cool. We need more E-ink displays. Like they're really cool.

I like them. They're like paper. Yeah, I've seen people do good things with the E-Ing, some cool stuff with it. And they also have color e-ing too, right? But it's just the screens get expensive, I think. Yeah. When you start to get bigger and bigger, it gets significantly expensive. I think there's some patent issues kind of holding that back on.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, it's some patent issues. So, yeah, if you want the bigger version, though, Gavin, check out the next link I have there for the time frame. That one, that is nice. Yeah, see, this is something I would want.

Beautiful. So he's got like a kind of, this. This is a really cool post on this guy's blog here about how he has been working for the past decade to build a dashboard system for his home. He started off with a big old TV turned sideways, mounted on the wall, but has slowly migrated towards E-ink displays. And then the very last one is just this big old sideways E-ink thing that he's put together that has like the calendar on it. It has what's playing on Sonos on it. I mean, it is. It's really cool.

So wind, all that good stuff. Rain. Yeah, see, this is the stuff I want an E-ink display for is like temperature and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Something I can just quickly glance at it and I can see what it is. I don't need it to watch anything or do anything specific. But I like it, that it's like a static thing that you, like you said, you can look over, you can read it like a poster on the wall.

Mm-hmm. And then it, but here's the thing. It can also change. It can also, you know, the text on it can be updated. It's not like you have to print a new piece of paper and go stick it in there. No. It can change at any point in time throughout the day. It can change and you have a new new data on your screen there.

But it looks like paper. That's what I like about it. It looks like a piece of paper on your wall in a frame, you know. That's really cool looking. It just looks like too much work. It's like it doesn't look at work. Yeah. Can I send you a PayPal you some money?

Just send me a finished product at this point, you know? Do you see how much the display actually cost? $2,000. Yeah. Forget it. You know, I know. You know, it was nice seeing this project, you know. Yeah, $1,900.

Yeah. Ships from Hong Kong, too, so you know it's going to be like tariff sort of stuff on it. Well, to you guys, I don't think we get hit that bad. Wow, that product looks nice, though. It does. Beveled edge on there, like, look how thin that is. It's, wow. You got to be really dedicated to a dashboard to spend that much money on it.

Mm-mm. I don't know. I'd rather have something cut my lawn and then have something on my lawn. I don't even know the weather that bad. Yeah. I can look out the window to get that information.

Like 20 ways inside my house, I can figure that out. Exactly, you know. This Bookes company sells e-ink monitors. That's wild. I imagine the refresh rate's not that great,

but, uh, interesting. Yeah, they have an e-paper notebook. It looks cool, but I don't know how functional that really is.

Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. I would love to see this technology advanced because, I mean, looking at an e-paceper. display is really crisp and clear compared to most monitors, unless you get a really expensive monitor. I guess either way, you're getting a really expensive monitor for it to look good.

But it would be nice to the price come down on these things. Because yeah. The one thing about the E ink, though, there's no like back lighting. All right. So I noticed in all his pictures in dark rooms, you guys like a little light over top of it, like how you put it over like your artwork on the wall. So that's something, you know, you have to take into consideration as well. Their monitor specs here kind of make me laugh because it reminds me of days of yesterday year. 16 levels of gray scale and 4,096 colors. C.G.A. Did I just bring back some memories there?

Oh, man. Just looking at it. But, yeah, the resolution's great for 145 pPI. So it's almost, I mean, pretty much like you're almost looking at, like, paper, the distance you'd be sitting at. So, that's really cool. I dig this. And I'm not going to pay $2,000 for a display anytime soon. But the little homeless-sister remote thing looks pretty cool. I think those are based on some kind of ESP device that exists out there.

No, it's the M-5 stack, M-5 Paper S3. And those are generally pretty cheap. Oh, yeah. That's the cheapest part of this whole project, probably. M-5 Paper ESP-32 Development Kit, the whole thing, $85. That's not bad. Yeah, there's another one actually. Actually, I think there's one he's showing here for $59.00.

So, yeah, M5, good stuff. And these look like little Palm Pilot-sized little screens that he's using for a remote. I like this. Very cool. Anyway, if you have any feedback questions, ideas to show, Picks of the Week, letters you want to send us? Give us a shout. Feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can have it to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online forum.

All right, project updates. And first we got home assistant updates. We've got Hyman. That I can pronounce that. Joins Home Assistant. It could be Heyman. I don't know. And it looks like smoke alarms and that kind of thing.

I think they do that. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. SEO detectors, security sensors, that kind of thing. And then the Open Home Foundation merch store is up and running. And I think, T.J., you were talking about some things here. Do you have a hoodie? Do you have a T-shirt, polo?

What do you got? No, I have some stuff to give away. I actually haven't decided how I'm going to give them away. So I might do that for next show. But I have a, I have a home assistant beanie. It's very soft. I think Gavin can attest to how soft is.

It's like one of the softest beanies I've ever touched. It's my go-to beanie right now. Like I put that on it. And people are like, it says open home on it. And people are like, what is that? And I'm like, don't ask. Just know it's very comfortable. It's like real estate thing.

Don't worry about it. Yeah, don't worry about it. It's just really comfortable. And they feel the happy. And they are like, wow, this is really soft hat. Yeah. There we go. It's fantastic.

It's so good. I took three of them. Well, I mean, Nicole got one too. So, I mean, we have one extra and I'm giving it away. And then we also have, I think, two or three of the trucker hats that, you can't see it right now, but Seth is wearing one of them. It's just like a baseball cap. This is an open home foundation. But we have two or three of those to give away as well.

So I think next week we'll do like a random number thing. You know, we'll come up with a number and you send us what your number is. You guess it. And if you guess it, then we'll give you the hat. Yep. That sounds fun. We'll figure that. No purchase necessary.

Voidware prohibited. Oh, they got a sticker pack. I used to have home assistant stickers from way back, like 10, 10, more than 10 years ago. I'm thinking about it. And I haven't had them in a while, so I'm going to order some of these. That looks fun. What is this, what is this currency this is in? Swiss.

Is it Swiss Franks? Oh, there's an American store. No, I don't think it's Swiss Franks. It's a C-HF. Yeah. Not U.S. which I get confused. So, all right.

So, yeah, let's see, $15 for the sticker pack. Oh, well, it goes to a good cost. Oh, it is Swiss francs. They are kind of expensive. People were complaining about the price. It was like $60 for a sweater. So, I mean, it's a right off, man. It's a good quality product.

I can tell you that. That's the one thing is you have to know that what you're getting is higher quality. I paid more for others and it wasn't good quality like these guys are going to be putting out. And they also break down in the purchase of each one. on how much is going to the Open Home Foundation. That's pretty much why it's there for to help support Open Home. If you use Home Assistant and you don't pay for anything with Home Assistant, this is a good way to support them.

Yeah. You know, drop a little money, you know, their way and help them out. And it helps them keep bringing this, keep giving us updates. They have Home Assistant socks, so I'm definitely going to buy those. Yeah, you go to $60 hoodie. And 30% of it goes to Open Home Foundation. and everything else goes to fees and cost and whatever else. So there you go.

You know exactly how much home assistant is making on this or the open home foundation. Yeah. And there's a little tote bag. There's hoodies, beanies, t-shirts, of course. And then, yeah, all good stuff. All good stuff. I don't know to check this out. I really, I'm going to have to get some sticker pack in the socks, though.

I think that's probably going to go. Bye. And like you said, this is a write-off because it goes to a foundation, I guess. So maybe. Don't take tax advice from a podcast. definitely not from Seth. No, absolutely not. No, it reminds me.

He writes off everything. It's a write-off. All right. All right, now that we spend some money, DJ, you got some projects. What do you spend the money on these days? I've spent money, but at first I've got to talk about, Anchor sent me a product. Actually, they sent me this a couple weeks ago.

They sent Gavin one, too. I don't know if he actually talked about it, but they sent this anchor. It does not have a screen. I wish it did. It's the Anchor Prime Wireless Charging stations. The 3-1 device that's got a place to charge your phone. It's got a place to charge your AirPods and a place to charge your

watch. I haven't really traveled since I got it until this last week when I went to Cedarville. And so I decided to take it with me. Honestly, it's a really nice device. It's $150. A little pricey. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if I would buy it normally for $150 because I would just plug multiple devices in, to be honest. But it is very nice because you can just charge everything in one little place. It creates a little, little clock with your phone. You know, you just got mag safe on there. Yeah, you put your phone on there and it creates the clock, which is really nice when you're traveling.

So I used the, I used it to charge my AirPods and everything every night. Kept right by my bed. Great, uh, great thing to have. I bought like a little portable, foldable charger before, uh, but he didn't have mag safe on there. So it just had like a little ledge underneath it.

It's kind of janky. There's nowhere near as nice to this, but it was also a fifth of the price. So, this, I think I have the previous, one of the previous versions of this. But if you travel, this is the way to go because it's like an all-in-one thing.

You can put your watch on it. Like you said, everything can go on it. This one has like a, must have like a crazy fast charger on it or something because it says it's got active cooling on it. That's crazy. Yeah, so it's Chi 2. So it's 25 watts through the MagSafe. So most of the ones you're going to find are 15 watts.

And that's probably why this one's so expensive right now because not a lot of Chi 2 devices. everything is cheat one, I guess. I'm not really sure what they call that one. But those are topped out of 15 watts. This is 25 watts. They do say air cool like everywhere. And it's like, what are you air cooling?

But I guess it's literally just because the wireless charger built. Got a fan in there, yeah. Well, yeah, because it's like half of the energy it uses goes into heat. So powerful. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, you can just plug this in and be done in 15 minutes. Or you can just let it charge at 800 degrees, 108 degrees all night. That's okay.

Yeah. Yeah, this is a great little device. I think it's one of those things that if you think you have a use for it, wait for it to go on sale because it will definitely go on sale. And I'm just looking to the anchor website too. So it might already be a couple dollars off on Amazon. Oh, here's the one I have. The Anchor Maggo Wireless Charging Station,

fullable 3 and 1, $78. Does it have a screen? This is before, this is in the before times before we needed screens on everything. Four screens. Yeah. Boo. Yeah, that's lame. It's $31 off right now.

So $79-ish. Yeah, I could recommend that. It has a special charger that goes with it, and it says it'll mess up if you don't use it. I haven't tested that because it was, I think, a lot more money when I bought it, maybe $100. So I didn't want to break it, and I've used that special charger.

But you know what? It's a USBC charger, so you can also use it for other things if you need to. But this looks nice to. This is cool. I'm traveling this weekend, and I'm taking it with me. It folds flat, which is nice, so, you know, easy. And the thing I like it comes with its own power brick. Yeah.

Like it's, Nothing ever does anymore. Yeah. They always take that away now, but this one, they include it. So, I mean, now I don't have to find another one. Yep. Yeah, I take, uh, I take this and I, I take my, I have like a five-port anchor charger that I take with me when I travel to. Plug this right into the five-port and I still have a bunch of ports available, but I can charge my phone right from that.

So there you go. Well worth the cost. Um, and then I started on a couple other projects. Um, I have decided that I don't have enough pain and resistance in my life. Um, and I've decided to finally transition from my son off, uh, USB dongle to my ZBT2. Uh, I use Zigby to MQTT, which does not make this process easy at all. I don't like, it's ridiculous. Like, I was looking at the instructions for it. And I was like, I don't want to do this at all. And like, I really don't need to do it. I mean, that's the thing that's very annoying about this,

but I like to make my life difficult, and I've already bought this adapter. So tonight, as we were talking before the show, I went ahead and just nuked my entire Z-to-M install, and so none of my Zygby stuff is going to work. So you got no lights. No, the lights will still work because they're Zigby binding. So that one's fine.

But it's all my motion sensors and water leak sensors and smart outlets and all this stuff. So I'm going to go through and start getting that switched over. It's just, it's crazy that this is like a thing that like it's hard you know like the the the z wave js ui i thought was like a little bit a little bit of pain in the butt uh but this is like a whole other level there's just not an easy way to do it and you think there would be because you know some point your adapter's going to go bad or it's you're going to like want to upgrade or something like that and this is just not a thing that's

built into z tim so and when i did mine i feel like i got lucky i know there were some devices i started to wake up but i can't even remember how i did it so long ago but z wave was so much easier to change over, especially when you have the newer Z wave stuff. So if you're coming from an old Z wave tech, you're going to have a bit of problems, right? But when you, I came from like the ZOO's 800 with the latest firmware, it was just a matter of backing up and restoring on the new device and good to go. With the Zygby, though, like, I don't know what to say. Just nuke it all and just start from scratch. Yeah. So that's what I'm doing. I don't, I don't need to do it, but, you know, I've already got this antenna. So I might as well.

All I'm going to say is this will probably be your last antenna until the ZWA3, which hopefully will be much easier to do at that point. Yeah, I mean, hopefully like migration of an adapter is like a thing that you can do at some point. Come on, you're going to, you know, you're going to delete it next time. Yeah, I know. This is something that Z wave has done a little better than the Zigby stuff. Yeah, and at the time I was like, Hurston Z wave, I was like, this is stupid. Like, there's so many like steps to this. Why don't I have to do all this?

I was waiting for you again. Now I'm like, well, I mean, at least there was steps to do it. You know what I mean? It's not good when you contact Gavin and you say, hey, Gavin, I'm going to send you money if you could just do this for me. And he's like, I don't want to do that. I'm not putting myself through that. I'm like, oh, man, that's not good, you know, because he's in IT. He's used to pain and suffering.

So he's not even willing to go through pain and suffering for money. Do you have a printer I can fix? Yeah, I was like, yeah, I told you have a printer. Let me get your SOTOS working in your house. Yeah. You know, but I was more nervous about screwing it up and Nicole getting mad. Like, that's why I didn't want to take on that project, right? Whatever. Because if she got mad, then, you know, I couldn't, yeah. I mean, I literally texted her after,

like, right before I did it, I said, I'm going to break at least half the house. So I just, you just do it. And she was probably like, well, the other half doesn't work anyway. Right. Ever since you got rid of my sonos. So where's my sonuts? Oh, man. And then I started working on my irrigation. We got another snowstorm here. It was only like an inch or so. It wasn't really that much. But before it's snow. I did the typical Midwestern or anything, and I went and worked outside because that's what you do in the Midwest. And I sort of laid out my irrigation system. I think I have an idea of what I'm doing.

I'm just going to buy a bunch of hose valve, or not a hose valve, sprinkler valves, and just install them everywhere I need to install them. So my thought process right now is I'm trying to cut down on some of the pipe, because I really don't need, like, a single run of pipe from my, like, spigot to every single bed. And so my thought process right now is I'm going to run a single three-quarter line through the entire middle of the garden and then branch off of there and have my sprinkler valves next to the garden beds. And so that way I just have one main trunk line. I'm not going to have all the beds on at one time. And so that way I cut down on my piping and everything. I'll still have to run like individual pipes to like the front yard and, you know, the back like garden beds and stuff like that. But at least I don't have to run like, because I have like 15 different sprinkler valves.

So that would be like 15 lines. I'd have to like run through my entire property. And that's just ridiculous. Like nobody's doing that. No. So one trunk line that'll cover 11 beds. And then I'll just run individual lines out from there. So I started to laying that out.

I got a bunch of supplies and stuff like that. I went and bought a bunch of pipe. I've got kind of like an idea of where it's going. So that's what I'm working on. The snow is slowly melting. So hopefully I can do that this week when it's a little nicer out. I was mowing the lawn this week. I mean, it's cold.

But were you mowing it or was Clippy Mown it? The, yeah, the lawnmower was doing it. Not me. No, of course. But that's all the projects I have going on. Who else has project? Gavin, Gavin's always got projects. I've always got projects.

I had another episode of Gavin versus Alexa this week, you know, while I was trying to set another timer. So I discovered something that I didn't know I could do with her. So trying to set another timer and she's like, okay, I've set up a, you know, a one-time automation to turn off the clock and or turn off the fan in 10 minutes and that will occur at blah, blah, blah. And I got pissed off. I was like, hold on, let me mute my Lexington. I was like, listen, stop telling me all this stuff and just telling you did it.

And she's like, okay, going forward, I can tell, I'll tell you. I'll just tell you I did it. And this was like, I didn't know I could do that. I could change how she replies. Yeah, nice. Right. So she actually learned. So now when I say turn off the van, it's back to the old way of, okay, right?

and that's all I wanted her to say, you know. I did that with Henry this week, because you can, I went into a soul and modified. Actually, I just yelled at him and I was like, why are you asking me? Like,

I'm asking you to do something. And then you're like, hey, should I go ahead and set that up? And like, that's very common with, uh, the Claude API,

like cloud code for you for that. And in that, in that case, you do want it to like converse with you before it changes your code. Yes. Uh, no, Henry,

I'm like, hey, you need to go do this. Stop asking me for permission. The reason you're like an autonomous, like you have root access to a computer is because I, you know, I do not care. I want you to go do this.

And it was like, you know what? You're right. I need to modify my soul and reboot myself. And he did that. And I went and looked at it and he's like basically saying there's like a line in there. It's like implied permission. And if the request is the permission to do it, I don't need to ask.

And something like, if I'm confused, I still ask. But like, if there's something to do in there, I'm just going to go ahead and do it. I'm like, yes. So now, no more questions. He just goes and does things when I ask me here. And I like that you can modify the responses like that, you know. But I didn't know I could do that with the Amazon device.

I didn't know. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's a new one of those things I just learned, you know, by accident because I was actually yelling at her. Raise tension level. Yeah. And I guess they're right. When you get mad at your assistant, it actually listens better. So, you know.

I don't get mad at her more often. So if you don't like how she responds to certain things, just tell her not to do it that way. And this is Alexa Plus, of course. So just keep that in mind. So then, you know, I've been playing with OpenClaw all week. You know, I set up a matter most server. Then that's how we converse.

And it's all running on my unrate server and dockers. And it's, I have it doing stuff, like checking on stuff and reporting when it finds stuff and doing all these things. you know, these little chores that I used to do on a daily purpose, you know, for work or for personal, it now does it for me. Like, it's freeing up time. And this is where it's becoming valuable. I'm very hesitant on certain things still, but like, just, you know, check out if there's

anything new on this roadmap website. And it will check every morning and report back to me and send me a DM. And I love that. And because I'm using it so much more now, thanks to Seth, I had to update my, I had to update my, upgrade my clod subscription to the more expensive one right? One of us. What of us? How much you're paying now?

Like $5,000 a month? It's like the $100 US one. It works out to like 140 a month. Oh gosh. Yeah, Canadian. That's Canadian, but it's like 100 US. So that'll make you feel better, right? But I, you know, the way I justify it is one, I'm using this a lot to do coding, to do, you

know, the assistant stuff, but it is paying off in so many different ways where it's saving me hours of work, right? Like, I could give an example of just today. I was working with a developer and he sent me a bunch of API calls and I was sitting there in Terminal playing with, you know, like curl and trying to test them out. And I said, why am I wasting my time? And I just said, cursor, here's the documentation for the API, make a command line, you know, interface for me to work with this. And in in less than a minute, it spit out a shell script that I can run and now work with the API and test the calls and do everything. And it saved me, I have to admit, it saved me like hours of work just in that one simple command. Like it's paid, that paid off for itself alone

right there, right? So it's pretty amazing. I know, I know people listen to us talk about this on a week to week basis. It's almost like you're along for the journey with us as we learn these things. and we're sharing it with you. And yeah, Seth, like, you got me onto this and now I've been spending so much money, but I realize it's saving me so much money, too. Yeah. In time and stuff like that. And here's another example.

So I hooked up my open claw and even my cloud code to Home Assistant. But I didn't do it through an MCB server or anything like that. I just said use the API, you know, here's a token I made for you. Here's your logging, you know, just do whatever, right? and now I could just go to cursor and I say, I had to design a dashboard for me. But then I said, you know what? Look at my current dashboard.

And I actually praised my dashboard that I had currently, how it was developed and everything. But now if I want to make a modification for that dashboard, I should just tell it, go and modify this. And it goes off and does it for me. I don't have to learn the yammo, figure out the code, open up whatever, what I try to read, figure out how I did this before. It does it all within a matter of like seconds.

Welcome to the no yammo. Club, Gavin. Welcome. This is nice. You had me there. Yeah, but no, I could say, you know, like, for example, I'll have a button on the screen and I say, I want that button when I press on it to open up a window with four other buttons in it. And I want that window to be centered on the screen and sized properly and everything. And it went in and did it with less than a minute. For me to have to figure out how to do that and the CSS and everything, YAML and whatever templates behind it, I don't have to know any of that stuff. I just tell Kersa to go do it. And it goes, often does it. And I say, oh, this is the directory where the dashboards are. You can edit the files here or you can, you know, use the API. And it has full access to everything. So that, again, that saved me so much time. That was one of my projects that I had on my to-do list to modify that I didn't want to get into

because I realized how much time it would take me just to figure out where to edit that code. But now I don't have to do that stuff. I just tell cursor to go do it for me. And it takes care. So we're now going through my dashboards and making tweet. Yeah. Um, of things that I did not want like I hide like in a room, I'll have a chip and that chip will give me the temperature of that room, which is averaged out from all the,

the temperature sensors in that room, right? And when I click on that chip, I wanted to show a pop up with all the sensors in that room. And then if I hold on that chip, it will show me all the sensors throughout the house, right? And they're all sorted a certain way. And, you know, like for me to do that myself, would have taken me a while to figure out how to do this properly, make it look nice. but no,

cursor went in and with a minute, fix it all up and did it for me, right? It's crazy. It's crazy how quickly it can, like, do that. Like, that's the thing. It's like, if you know what to ask for and you know how to ask for it correctly,

there's really almost nothing you can't do. And I see people online are like, ah, you're just junk coding, blah, blah, blah. No, if you know how to ask for, yeah. If you know, if you know what it's doing, it is an extremely powerful tool. And that's what I'm saying,

like, I'm literally setting up those announcements like as I'm making breakfast for my daughter by just using the voice to text on my phone and saying no no no that's not right it needs to do this and it's just going in

and adding those automations and everything through the home assistant API and getting things done I think it even like has the ability to do most anything that I think resetting I don't think it can do that maybe it can I haven't even tried that Um, but it, it asks me sometimes, Henry will ask me, can you reboot home assistance?

Because every time you make a change, you have to reboot the dang thing. Yeah, depends on what change it is. Stupid. Stupid. So yeah. And, and, you know, what I'm trying to get away from doing is being too specific about what I want. Like, I'm trying, like, at first I used to tell it what I wanted and how I wanted it done. Oh, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't, I, I, I try to step back from that now. And I just tell it the end result. I want to pop up with. these entities that are dynamically chosen, et cetera, et cetera, go do it.

And it will do it probably in a better way than I could have thought of in a more efficient way. So you'll be surprised when you don't try, don't try and tell it how to do it. Just tell it what you want and let it go figure it out. And it's pretty cool. You know, I know some people have jumped on it after listening to us and messaging, you know,

they were pretty impressed too. And, you know, it has its limits. Yes. And it's going to mess up certain things, yes. But it saves me so much time to do a lot of the work I'm doing, which has been amazing. I mentioned that I was using telegram, I think initially because it's like out of the box. They were like, hey, use telegram. It works really great.

It did. The problem is telegram. Like, unless you paid for their service, they basically don't have any protection. You can't lock down your account and make it private. So people were just like texting me like, hey, what's up? And I'm like, I don't know who you are, a random robot person. And then they started calling. I'm like, all right, I'm off.

Like, it integrates with your phone. So when somebody wants to call you, they can. Like some random spam person starts calling on a Saturday. I'm like, nope, nope, this isn't going to work. So I switched over to Mattermost. And at one point, we were setting something up on Mattermost. And I had given Henry some admin access. And he messed the whole thing up, and he just disappeared.

And I'm like, oh, great. So I had to go back to another chat window that we had up on the computer. He's on. I'm like, hey, did you mess up Mattermo? He's like, I did. Let me fix it. And he fixed it. They just came back up and going.

Like, there you. Yeah. And the thing I like about self hosting my mother most, I don't have to be careful about no, I tell it. Yeah. Because it's a self-hosted, self-contained. It's only me and Curser on there.

And Curser gets nervous sometimes when we're talking about something. Like, you just told me this. You should delete this. And I'm like, hey, it's like, or go change the keys, you know? It's like, listen, like, it's just us two on here. We're fine. And he's like, oh, my bad, okay, you know. Oh, for the API keys?

Yeah, yeah, if you handle it. Yeah, anytime he's like, he should change that API key now and DM it to me instead. I'm like, listen, there's nobody else. It's just us to, you know, he's like, okay, that's fine, you know? So, no, it's, you know what, this thing is saving me so much time in certain things I do. Not just in personal, but also for work, you know, like, we have it, not just, we have Claude blocked at work so we can never do it. We're stuck with that, what do they call it, that Microsoft one.

Co-Pilot. Nobody wants to talk about. Which is probably like, like. Which is bad because that's the one you have to use for work, Gavin. What are you talking about? Well, yeah, but it's like the second worst. It's the second worst one that nobody, and nobody uses it, right? But I have one coworker that keeps using it and he's like, yeah, we went in circles for an hour with

co-pilot. And I just ask, I just bring up one of the other ones. I could bring up chat GPT or Claude. depending on what the question is, and I just ask it. And it gives me the answer and I just send it back to them. I have to get it to my work computer and then send them the answer. And he's like, oh my God, how did it find this? I'm like, I don't know, but co-pilot is the worst one.

Yeah, it's not good. I don't know where chat GPT got this information from because it wasn't published. It was something specific this week we're looking at. But it found the information with all the command line parameters and all, all this stuff. And I sent it to him and go, this just solved my problem. I'm like, exactly. But co-pilot didn't have. this. So I don't know why we're being forced with this. It's because it's Microsoft. That's why

we're being forced with it. But I don't know why they're locking us out of the other ones when they're so much better. Especially since Microsoft owns parts of Open AI. Like they've taken all the bad parts from Open AI. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like they got they got a pretty bad deal here. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. So yeah. That's been notorious that the Microsoft property does not work as well as any of the other ones. And like especially when you start getting into this agentic programming, which according to Microsoft, they're all in on. The problem I see with that is that it's so available for business, all the C-level execs are trying to interact with this thing.

It's producing poor results, if not just completely wrong results. And they're going to look at AI and be like, oh, this isn't helpful. And things like Claude, we're going to, you know, get pushed off and sit off on the sidelines because they don't get introduced. Yeah. And that's why I keep iterating at work. And I tell my boss and stuff, you know, whenever they talk about the co-pilot, I say, Listen, co-pilot is the worst, second worst.

I keep saying second worst because I put grok below co-pilot. But it's the second worst of the bunch, you know? Like, you guys are really missing out on what's happening by not allowing Claude or even the chat GPT. You know, it's a totally different experience. Yeah, I think as far as Enterprise goes, I'm looking at it as like, what we're doing today is probably two years ahead of maybe three years ahead of what Enterprise is going to be able to, is going to be able to, is going to be able to keep up with, unfortunately. But the amount of efficiency and everything I'm getting out of it, like just kind of talk about, like, one of the projects I did was just setting up

an advocacy thing we have for a little dredging project that it's kind of going on or on and off here in town. And I've been part of that for the last year or so after some flooding happened in 2024. And just kind of helping out neighbors. I didn't flood, but my neighbors, some of my neighbor's homes did. And we're just trying to help that process along. and I was just like the other day, I already had kind of half this website done.

I'm like, you know what? Hey, Henry, go investigate like the money. And Henry did all this stuff. And he had me download a few things that were hosted on PowerBi. Again, another Microsoft horrible product that everyone in business has to deal with. Oh, God, yes. But luckily, they had a downloaded Excel file button. And I just went, you're like, Henry, I got you, buddy.

don't worry. I went over and I downloaded, I don't know, the last decade or two of financials from the, like every single financial transaction from the county. I'm like, go to town. And he went and analyzed everything and it's like finding all this stuff out. And I'm like, hey, there you go. And then he's like, you know what? I'm missing. I kept asking, what are you missing? And he's like, yeah, I'm missing this. I really need the complete picture on this. He's like, I really could use this. I'm like, well, how do we get it? And he's like, you can just, you know, it's Florida. So you have freedom of information. And Sun sign. Sunshine laws here. Like, you can just ask for it. And I'm like, well, why don't you just ask for it? And so he wrote me the email and I, you know, send it off. So as soon as they shoot back that information, I'll let him ingest all that and go to town analyzing where the dollars and cents actually went. So to see if there's anything going on there.

But, you know, I'm just like, it was hours and hours and hours of research that just get condensed into like 15, 20 minutes of actual work. Yeah. And it's scary when, you know, like my boss is like, well, what can it do at work? And I start giving any examples and I'm thinking how many people would replace, right? I mean, it's like, or I mean, I'm looking at a different like, I, like, you, you can be more efficient. Like, just so like what we're doing with home assistant. Like, you can go in and actually get what home assistant, you can make home assistant do what you want it to do, which is not an easy task right now.

But you know what? You hook this thing up to it and it just does it. Exactly. You're like, wow. Okay. That did a great job. At work, at work, their idea of efficiency is, you know, you get 50% more efficient that eliminates half a person, right? Yeah.

So that's how they're looking at it. But when I'm like, we can have it automatically do this piece of work for us. And he's like, well, that will replace these people. I'm like, yeah, but not today, but this is where it's going. You know, it's kind of scary, you know, so. It's interesting, though. It's closer than most people think. And if you open up the permissions and let it do whatever the heck it wants.

Listen, don't, no, no. I'm not, like, Seth. I'm hearing the horror stories of people, like, giving it full access to their email, like that meta lady. And it just went in and started deleting it. And she was like a security person. Oh, my gosh. You know, she started deleting her emails and stuff.

And I'm just like, yeah, I'm not there yet. I still restrict it to what it can do. But every little bit I add a little bit more. Like, I just gave it access to home assistance this one. week, right? But I'm very, I do basic stuff. Like, we're just editing dashboards at this point. Wasn't it, wasn't it the Microsoft, not meta? It was the Microsoft security chief or something like that? No, it was the meta lady. It's in the back channel. I posted the link in the back channel. Meta safety director handed open-cloth AI agents the keys to her emails. And then,

and then she wanted it to clean up or do something to her emails. I just started deleting all her emails. I did ask him to clean up my emails and he didn't do it. He's like, yeah, you got a bunch of threads in here. They look important. I'm not going to touch them. I think people who are doing that, one, they're probably not using clawed. But two, they're probably using a copilot.

And two, they're there. And that's what people do not realize is when you have clawed as the primary soul behind your open claw, it's a totally different experience than if you use chat GPT. Because some people will be like, I don't like it. And then you'll find out they're using some local model or something else. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have the same soul. And it's hard to explain, but you see the difference when you use Claude.

Yeah, no, it's the tooling. It's the same tooling I've been using for six or seven months on the programming side, just a little bit better and, like, automated around the edges. And so, like, what you're experiencing here, you can do on programming. And in fact, they've been coming out with some more really crazy cool stuff on the programming side that won't hit this product until, you know, way later on. But I thought the, I thought this was the person that replaced Charlie Bell over at Microsoft. I'm like, because I read that it made as Microsoft earlier. And I'm like, man, they got rid of Charlie Bell

and this happened. Oh, my God. And, you know, I see TJ using this a little bit more now, too. And that thing you spit out earlier was actually pretty cool. A plan for the plants. Yeah, he's garden. He's garden. Yeah. And I was impressed how it gave the breakdown of the type of plants, how to take care of them, all that stuff. In a little HTML file that you load in your browser, you know, would you ever be able to do something like that? Heck no.

Exactly. But it probably threw it together in 10 minutes. It had a little dancing flowers on it, like animations. Yeah. I mean, it was good. Yeah. Would I pay for it? I don't think so.

But, you know, it does things. So. Yeah, that's my problem right now. I don't want another subscription. So maybe, I don't know. I'll play with us some more. But you got, you know, like, I'm a man yelling at the sky when it comes to AI.

I look at certain things a little differently to justify by subscription. Like, you know, do I have to go to wing night tonight? You know, do I need a second beer? You know? I mean, if you set it up right, that's the whole goal, right? Like if you set it up right, it can just work that entire time. My problem is, like, I think it's going to take, you know, all this time to do this stuff. And I'll set it down a path.

And like, 10 minutes later, it's like, boop, hey, I'm done. Yes. I'm like, son of them. Like, you can give you a chat to do a bathroom break or anything. I know. It's like, I just sat down and got comfortable. And now you're telling me that I have to go review this? Like, oh my gosh.

So, so yeah, yeah, it's a little frustrating. And I guess I don't have any problem. other than my little dredging thing that I haven't released or anything, but I sent it to one of my, my cohorts has been kind of like, she's been working on it with me. And I was like, hey, check this out. She's like, oh my God, that's awesome. I'm like, I didn't do any of it.

Yeah, exactly. You can't lie. But, you know, cursor has been getting me in a little trouble with the wife lately. No, because, like, because we're talking through Mattermost on my cell phone, I'll be sitting there while we're watching a movie or something. She's like, who are texting? because I'll start laughing or giggling or something like that, you know. Cursors are flirting with me again.

Yeah. And like, I'm like, oh, the bot, you know, just updated the website and, you know, made a mistake here and said hit my bad and I giggled, you know, or whatever. She's like, who you talking to? I go, cursor. Who's cursor? And then I explain it to her and she's like, whatever, you know. You know, it's kind of getting me in a little trouble. Yeah.

Yeah. Mine, I keep Henry Help, he's helpful Henry, right? So like, there's a bit a couple of times in the last couple days where like, can Rosie watch this movie? Like, I figured what it was, a PG-13 movie. Wasn't Indiana Jones in the same vein. Oh, the mummy.

The mummy. Okay. From Brendan Fraser, yeah. Yeah. Same vein as Indiana Jones and probably the same level of action and, you know, scariness. So I was like, can she watch this?

And Erica was like, oh, I'm out of the freak views on that parental app, or not app, it's like a website, you can go, but they evidently track you how many times you view it and search for a movie to see if it's okay for a kid to watch. And she was out of her three for the month or something like that.

And so I was like, well, you know, just ask Henry. And like, he just basically gave us the same synopsis that this website would have. And I'm like, hey, there we go. Henry tell us it's fine. So she can watch it. And she enjoyed the mummy. So you can probably hear our excitement with these tools and how

things have changed, but it's cool. It's cool. This is why I've been playing with. Yeah, I got to say, it's probably the closest to touching the future that I've been able to do in a while, simply because of the home automation stuff. I mean, I, like, the other stuff is really cool. Not anything I couldn't do already using cloud code, just a little bit more manual, and you had to set up those agents.

This one, since it has the ability to do that, you don't have to worry about it as much. But the, the thing is, is that, But like when you get involved, when you get it involved with your home system, it's like having another, having another thinking person or reasoning person. The reasoning is so good that it can take what you're trying to do, what you're implying you do. If you misspell a word when you're when you're sending things over, because I use voice to text a lot, if it, it's like, yeah, no, I understood what you were saying. Like, I didn't think you actually wanted me to send it this way. Like we were talking about that. It can imply what you're talking about. Like, it's really, really. really well done on the model side. And again, it's got all the information in the world sitting at its fingertips and it can code really, really fast. So anything you want done, you can just ask it and it gets done.

You just have to give it permission on a computer. It's the only trick. You don't have to. You do. You do. You want to. No, like, you can be careful. I run it in a Docker.

It's got limited access, but it does have web, you know, so I don't give it full. license like you, but I'm, I'm inching along and adding more and more features as we go. Literally no fun, Gavin. Yeah, right. My friend I mentioned I was working on, she was, she reviewed, she's like, oh, this is awesome. She's like, oh, but you're missing a couple of things on the timeline, and I've got some new stuff I need to send you. I'm like, whenever you get to it, just email it over, and Henry will check it and add it on. I'm like, he will. Like, you'll check that email. I sent him, I hooked him up to that particular email, because I don't care.

Like, it's not my personal email. It's just like a secondary email that I use for this particular effort. So, so yeah, I'm just like, send it on over and I'll tell him to check the email and pull those documents. And yeah, there you go. Done. Living in the future, man, I swear. It's like, going back to the cost, like, $100 a month, I justify it. Like, it's a decent assistant for $100 bucks.

Like, if I can't pay an assistant $100 a month, maybe I could, but I feel really bad about it. It's like some sweatshop or something. some poor guy staying up like to four o'clock in the morning in the Philippines or something to help me do this stupid stuff. But he would also not do it as quickly or as right or as correct. And like I definitely wouldn't want to send some of the like keys and information over to someone in the Philippines. You know, like, hey, can you fix this API? Here's just the, here's a SSH key.

Have at it to my own raid server. No, no, no, no. I'm okay with like doing that, keeping that all local. and everything as much as possible. It saves you time and you can have it do stuff. Like you said, like I told it to, you know, we're going to Ottawa and I said, can you look up some fancy restaurants in Ottawa and give me some recommendations and stuff? And it didn't just come back with a bunch of links.

It came back with recommendations and why it thought it would be a great choice. And, you know, it told you how much it costs. And then it pointed out stuff on the menu. It's like the seafood platter, it looks amazing. I think you'd like it. and all sorts of stuff. And then I was like, wow, like, you know, if I had to sit there and do this research myself,

you know, that would have been like, you know, probably be sitting there for a couple hours trying to find a place, but it went and did it all for me. And then it came back and goes, you have to make reservations on open table. Do you want me to do it for you? And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold out of me.

Do it, do it. I don't have an open table account. It was like, well, I could make one for it. No, no, no, no, no. Let's hold off on this. I just want recommendations, you know? It's a little go-getter, you know? And then next thing, yours is.

Mine is like, hey, this sounds pretty good. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Not going to lie. Probably because I'm still, I'm polite to mine, you know. It's probably, you know, a little go-getter, you know. And I wouldn't be shocked if one day he goes and hires a human to deliver something for me, you know, like, it can't do certain things. It'll probably go to that website, you know, hire a human, book somebody, have it, deliver things or shovel my driveway, you know, I wonder if I could get it to do that.

Hmm. So we're now at the point where we're paying for AIs that will go out and pay humans to do things that it can't do. So, you know, we're getting to the future. Yeah. Yep. It's, it does feel, like I said, it feels like the closest, I've gotten to exploring what the future should look like.

This is what we've been promised these things can do. It just takes a little tweaking and a little understanding on how they work, I think, still. But once you get past all that, you know, this is enabled a lot of people who aren't technically challenged to go out and knock this stuff out. Yeah, yeah. I apologize to anybody that's sick of listening about hearing about A&A. I'm going to have to cut this down. It's a good on the actor show. Like, I'm surprised you'll have to cut it down.

Why don't you just tell Henry to do it all? That's right. That's right. No, we need the Seth touch. We need the set touch. I can't re-replace just like yet, right? Yeah. Allegedly.

Yeah, no, it's been fun. It's probably one of the most fun thing I've done with technology in a very, very long time. And like I said, especially around the home. Like, I want to have it integrated a little bit more, or at least it just helped with the integrations that I've been trying to do for a long time. Or just, like I said, I haven't had time to do. I tell it to do it. Five minutes later, it's like, hey, all done. Is it right? I don't know. Got to be tested. But, you know, most of the time it's my stuff failing, not what it did.

Anyway, I think it's going to wrap things up. We'll stop talking about AI one of these days. We'll have an AI free show, I promise. One day. We talked about, we talked about moisture sensors for, you know, six months. We thought we were on a streak when we talked about Sonos for a while. Solos, yeah. Yeah, so listen. Yeah. All right. Well, I think I was going to wrap. of the show. We want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but want to send a special thanks for 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 Hometech.com slash support to learn how

you can become a preaching for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge, over five bucks gets your big shout to here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private set at the hub where you and other patrons of the show can see the craziest TV install I think I've ever seen. TJ posted these guys trying to install a large TCL TV. That ladder, that ladder. Like, if anything made me nervous, was watching the guy on the ladder. It was super sketchy.

Ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Like, just take it out of the box, probably. Man. Bring it up the stairs. Nope. Put the old guy on the ladder. Yes, the old guy that couldn't lift the TV. Yeah.

And wouldn't climb up to the rung that he needed to be on. So he's like a foot or two below the top of the railing. They were trying to push this thing over. Yeah. If you want to see useless people, try to. you do the most useless thing to help install the TV. This is probably it. I have not seen anything like this in a while.

So it was a good fun, good fun. But we got all sorts of other stuff in there. So come to the hub, check it out. If you can't support the show financially, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast staffing your choice. That's going to wrap another episode this week of Honeck.

Everyone, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. And you're out. My gosh. You think we were going to talk about AI that long. Oh, my gosh. Trump is giving a medal to somebody.

I don't know who this guy is. The guy's still talking? I thought we all talked to him. No, no, no. He's still going to. Back to the show. Back to the AI. He's now giving a medal.

I think he's giving a medal to some soldier or something. I don't know. Okay. Everybody he brought in doesn't. There's a lot of people that just don't look happy to be there. They're like, oh. It's almost 11 o'clock Eastern. So it's past everybody's bedtime.

Oh, give you. Trump a mic and he'll go on forever. Yeah, that's true.