HomeTech.fm - Episode 565 - Shark Sees Stains

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

On this week’s show: Sonos accidentally leaks the Play, and UniFi drops a WiFi 7 U7 Mesh with big range claims. Aqara adds Samsung Home Key as Aliro finally becomes real, Shark’s $1,300 robot hunts stains with UV, and Samsung promises to ask Texans before watching what they watch. Meta smart glasses get creepier (and detectable), BGR says hubs are dead (sure), Home Assistant spring cleaning begins, robotic mowers get their own pet-aware gate, plus a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 6th from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and AI assistance. I don't know. May or may not work anymore. What's going on with... After the show last week, there's so much drama around AI with Anthropic and an open AI and then, like, government got involved. tweets and threats and I don't know if my I don't know if my clod's going to work anymore Gavin I think

I'm going to lose my clod I don't know either like like there was a whole movement for everyone to cancel their chat gpte and then this week chat gpt released new features that looked pretty cool so I'm glad I kept my subscription yeah they're all back but then clod went down when everyone was moving over so I don't know what's going on I think it's just going to be a wave we'll write it out Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Cloud had problems on, what, Monday morning? I'm like, that's when I learned. I got logged out on my computer, but Henry was still up and gone.

So I'm like, hey, while this is happening, what you need to do is make a backup. You need to be, like, pointed to a backup. So, like, when the APIs go down, you can't reach that, then you can go to the local model locally on the network and use, I think I have the Quinn 3 thing loaded. so it can use that as a backup if it needs to. Not the same, but at least you can get something done. Yeah, and I did the same thing, but I just made it if Cloud goes down and go over to Open AI. Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's my backup. So it works. That's probably smarter because one of those two, it shouldn't be down. If they're both down at the same time, we have problems. But yeah. Yeah. That's a good idea.

All right. Well, AI is going to help us with one thing, and that's giving away some stuff. Because TJ's got a whole bucket of a product to give away. I came back from CES with way more stuff than I needed. I don't know why we brought so much stuff. And see, when I go to conventions or any other, like, thing, I do not take home the swag because most of those stuff I do not want, right?

Like, I don't want your company's branded, like, pen or, like, the t-shirt or, like, the hat, because I'm never going to wear those. I don't want to wear your company that I've never heard of on my chest when I'm out in town. And so I don't pick... Can you imagine... getting the t-shirts of some of those company names that we saw. No. It was like all consonants and double E letter.

I don't know. It's really. Yeah, no. I don't want any of it. It's just junk. It's like I take it and then I give it to Goodwill. That's what happens. I donated it to Goodwill or whatever charity I find and I never take it.

Nicole is the complete opposite, though. She takes home everything that she can. And so we have a surplus of random things here that we don't need. And I decided to do a giveaway. So I think, like, I have so much stuff at this point. And it's either going to get given away or it's going to get sold at like a yard sale this year. So I decided we would start. And every couple weeks, we might do a new giveaway.

Do you have any stickers left over? Like home assistance stickers? Home tech. Oh, I don't think I do now. Oh, okay. Well, I got home assistant stickers too. I didn't want those. Oh, no?

But I got them. I want a home assistant sticker. Well, too bad. I have to enter the contest. Oh, you can. Nah. Our lawyer says you can't. Yeah. But yeah, like, so right now what we're going to do is we have three, between Seth and I, I have two, and Seth has one, a Zuz 800 series hub, which Gavin is going to correct and say it's a controller.

But it's a hub. We all know it's a hub. It's not a hub. Incorrect, T.J. I actually have two. I bought one years ago whenever we started talking about Zuz, and I never installed it. So it's sitting on my desk somewhere. What are you using for your Zuz light switches right now? Zono. I have the toilet paper. Oh, yeah, you do have the TILA one. Oh, yeah, you do have the TILA one? That's funny. But yeah, we have three of these together.

I think Gavin, Gabba, do you have one up in Canada? I have, like, two. Do you have a brand new one you want to give away to some lucky Canadian? All right, I'll get, yeah, I have a brand new one. I'll give away to the Canadians. Sure, no problem. As long as I don't have to ship to the States. Please don't mind me ship to the States.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, we can open this contest up to Canadians. Yeah. All right, there you go. To make it easy on ourselves, because shipping is expensive. I don't know if you've got to shipped anything recently, but shipping anything, especially to another country, kind of expensive.

So we're going to keep it open to U.S. only, and now we have an option for Canada. You have a Canadian distribution center. Yeah. Outside of Toronto. Must be the same one Apollo uses. No, well, that's where they ship, too. But yeah, but yeah, we have three zoos hubs to give away.

So, uh, we're, Seth is supposedly, as of this moment, this has not happened, but Seth is supposedly going to set up, uh, set up a form. on the website. And we're going to ask them live, Seth, what is that link going to be for the giveaway? It's going to be HomeTech.com slash giveaway. Wow.

Nice. All right. That's easy enough. Easy. And you'll go there. You'll go there and you'll submit your information. Right now we have like four. So if four people contact doesn't actually want this,

you'll each get one, which will be nice. But if there's more than that, then we'll do a shuffle or something to figure out who gets what. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll put all the rules and things on there. as to when are we stopping collecting information?

The 15th at midnight? Yeah, the last day is going to be the 15th, which is basically two Sundays from now. Yeah. And if the form's still up, because I'm not going to turn it off at midnight or whatever, Eastern time is the time zone, then that means that it's,

we just want to, well, you can put an entry in, but it'll be timestamping. It won't get in, so. We're actually going to ban you from listen to the podcast. If you submit it after the 15th at midnight. We'll delete you. You're banned. All right, that works.

That works. Easy enough. Giveaways, they're coming. It's some other of giveaways. And I have more stuff, you know. I'm doing some spring cleaning, which I'll talk about my project section. But I have more stuff. I have one of the coveted home assistant beanie's.

This thing is like ultra soft. I'll give one of those away. Brand new with the tag. That'll be a separate giveaway. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'll be one. Yeah, I have some other stuff, like some weird govy plushy thing. So.

Oh, that was taken. I, when as soon as I came on with that plushy thing, that, that was taking. It is a, it is a light bulb, but it's a scary light bulb. I don't like it. It's angry. Yeah. Why is it angry? I don't know.

Or it's like, or it's like scheming to do something. It's like, your lights aren't going to work. Ha ha ha. I ended up getting that, well, that, uh, it's, I think it's a Kickstarter. So I have no idea when I'm going to get it. But it's that, that motorized Laboooooooo thing. Do you guys remember that? The one that, like, hangs on your purse and looks at you?

No. Oh, yeah. I got that. Why? My wife made me order it. She's like, I want that. Oh, my God. There you know.

To remember what it's called now. I think I trust her judgment over yours. So I'm going to know with her on this one. I think I have to, I don't know when I'm going to get it. Is it, you know, Kickstarter. That's what they do. They, like, just take your money. And they're like, yeah, one day you can have whatever it was that you ordered.

We don't remember. It's the Murray Mo. Here, I'll put a link in our thing here. Let's see. You guys all recognize it. That thing right there. No, I don't. Oh, actually, I think I do remember seeing.

because it like holds on the stuff. It holds on and like looks at you. That's creepy. Yeah, it was creepy. And it was funny enough, so we got one. I don't remember which one. How much do you spend on this thing? I have no idea.

It's in like yen, too. Do you spend 200 yen on this? It was like 100 bucks. I don't know. Maybe something like that. You can get a late pledge right now for 147 American. Nice. You can pet them and you can yell at them and they just turn their heads and looking, I don't know.

It was weird at the show. I had a sticker image of it and there were two people here that wanted him one really bad. This is at the show too? Yeah, we looked at it. It was one of the boasts we looked at. I don't remember this at all.

That's Nicole. She'll remember. All right. Anyway, so whenever that comes, I'll get it. And I hope it'll probably come about the same time as the yellow MacBook Neo, right? Got one of those come the way because I sent a link over to my wife.

I'm like, oh, look at this. And she's like, yellow, please. man you got to stop sending your wife links yeah i know right she's been bugging me for a computer for while so that's uh she doesn't really need a computer which i think this is kind of the perfect computer for a person who casually uses a computer once every three months it's one of those things i could see using it because like like for me i don't really need a fast computer or anything i have a macbook air right now and it's basically perfect for me uh but like i could get away with using a tablet but i need a second key i need like a key i need like a key key key

board. Yeah, I like this seems like it's an applet with a keyboard, which I'm fine. Yeah. Which is what a laptop, I guess is. But something like that. No touchscreen, though. Yeah, no touchscreen, which is very, very odd for having an iPhone chip in it. Yeah.

It's, uh, that's the thing. It's an iPhone chip and it's, uh, it's older like, hey, it's the same chip that's in your phone, oddly. She still has the, uh, the 16 and it's pretty much the same chip that's in that one, I believe. So, um, but yeah, I got it for, uh, we'll see how it works out. thought about getting two, one for my daughter two. I'm like, no, not yet.

She's not ready for a... I have enough old, janky computers that I can pass her away that will work fine enough for the random things that she does. So, but, but I don't know. My wife kind of needs one and she kind of doesn't end for, what was it, like $5, 600, depending on what you get? Or $600 or $700 depending on what you get, I guess. It's not.

That's a pretty good entry-level Mac. I think this is probably their most popular Mac that they, sell for sure. Anybody going to get M5? Gavin, you get M5? MacPro? I don't even know what I'd do with it. I have the, I don't even know what it's called, the big expensive one. It keeps one of my feet. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's keeping one of my feet warm right now. Maybe I'll get another one to keep the other foot warm. Yeah, there you go. You've been sticking on top, it'll be double heat or whatever. Exactly. Gavin's work just sends them laptops all the time. I'm pretty jealous. I wish my work would send me laptops. They would, just ask them. I get these, I get these. I get these. I get these.

laptops and I have to do testing on it and then time to send them back. They're like, no, just keep it there in case. I think we can do some trading whenever I come up there, Gavin. Oh, no, I got to keep them. They're super secure laptops. Oh, yeah, yeah, super secret. They're on those. Yeah.

Yeah, well, one of them is probably not even released yet, so no. I don't want that one. No. So it means it's, I want the good one. I mean it's buggy. Yeah. Yeah. Trust me, I've beaten these up a few times.

they keep locking up on me and stuff like that, so I gave up on it. That's why they're under the, and they're Macs, so that's why I put them under the desk. I'm still waiting for a MacBook with cellular. Like, come on, just give me cellular.

Everything else has cellular. The watches have cellular. They don't even need cellular, but they got cellular. iPads have cellular, which, sure, I need a MacBook with cellular. This Mac is running on an entire,

like, a phone chip inside of it. It doesn't even have cellular. Which makes sense. It's meant for, like, education, right? Like, education, I'm not going to pay for cellular. I don't know. I don't know. This is probably going to be one of their top selling.

I think this is going to sell more units than any one of their other laptops. Cellular will be coming. It's a highly requested feature. I can tell you that eventually they'll get to it. Especially in the more expensive lines because the execs want always on laptops now. It's a new thing. That's what I want. I want to be able to just like, because that's the kind of the advantage of an iPad.

That's why I like having an iPad is I take it somewhere and I start using it. And I don't have to think about having it connected to Wi-Fi. And I do that with my phone, obviously, because we've been doing that for a couple decades now. But, like, I don't have that option with my laptop. And I do with, like, certain Windows laptops. But, like, the options for Windows laptops with cellular in them have always not been good options. They've always been, like, the most, like, the most business-oriented laptop you could ever imagine. It's really, like, the think pads and stuff like that.

But it's never really been, like, a thing in the space. So I just, like, I just want cellular on my laptop. top. I'm not going to use a lot of data. I just want to, like, use it so I don't have to worry about connected to something right away. Get like a cloud PC and then you can use your iPad and just remote into it. No. Well, it solves your problem. Do you not know who I am, Gavin? Okay. Well, I'm not going to do that. I still want a cloud PC. Trying to keep you happy. Yeah. No cloud PC, no, no $3,300 monitor. Yeah, definitely not that. I buy my monitors on Facebook Marketplace, so. You know, this is not a bad place to buy them, because they, from time to

time they'll have good deals. I've been laughing at Sarasota's Facebook marketplace because very rarely does somebody have a good deal on there. It's kind of an insult. It's like, that's retail price. Yeah. Just because you didn't want it or like you need to top some more money out of that. It's ridiculous. All right. Well, that's the new Mac pre-orders. I'm like in an iPad, a Mac, not a MacBook Air, but the iPad Air. I don't know. That seems kind of fun. An M-4 in an iPad Air. That's crazy. All right. that we got a bunch of home tech headlines tonight so what do you guys say we jump in let's do it let's do it all right we got sonos leaks from canada um an unannounced sonos portable speaker called the sonos play has appeared in canadian best buy suggesting the new model position near the move two uh from the listing

it looks like a slightly smaller move two with a carry loop on the back instead to support wi-fi for multi-room audio up to 30 speakers of course airplay two bluetooth 5.3 and it also has an ox input for connecting external audio sources. Has True Play audio tuning and IP 67 for water dust resistance. So pretty much similar to the Rome. They had it priced at Canadian $3.99. Can that be right? With a March 31st, 2026 sales date.

So it should be right around the corner. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. They've really been trying to add more portable stuff in the past couple of years. They haven't had any traditionally. But they have the move in the wrong. Rome, so why not add a third one? It kind of seems weird for it to be basically the same as the move. The move.

Yeah, I was like, I had Rome in my head. But yeah, it's kind of weird that it's basically the same price as the move, though. But I guess it's just a natural evolution for them. But $3.99 Canadian, so that means it's going to be like $2.99 American? Yeah. Isn't the move more than more expensive? Yeah, the move is like $3.99. What's the little one?

The Rome? Is that $1.99? That one's like $1.99. So there you go. Yeah. 29, 299, 399. Yeah, it's right in the middle. I guess that makes sense. I don't, I don't use Sownos anymore, so.

You know, we leaked this on purpose as revenge for, you know, the Olympics. For the Olympics? Sorry. But I don't know, like, was this a highly requested product? I don't know. They always give you stuff you don't request, Gavin. Yeah, yeah. Of all the things they could release, I mean, were they just trying to, like, were people

complaining that the move to was too expensive? So they're like, let's go with a cheaper one. But more expensive than the other one, you know, I don't know. Yeah. You got options. You got options. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, speaking of options, we have a Navimo MoGate option for if you've got a gate and a Segway Navamo robotic mower. I guess is this green team? Like, is this an official product from Navajo? Yeah, I couldn't see like an actual announcement for this. No, it's an actual official product from Navamo because there's a web, there's a link. to it on their website, but if you go to the link, it quickly refreshes so you see the image,

and it quickly refreshes to like the Canadian Navamo site, right? So I don't think it's, I don't know if it's officially announced, or it's in another market or what, but this is actually official. I thought they were going to announce this at CES, but I heard nothing at CES about this. So yeah, this is what I could find. There's a whole install video at the bottom that has pretty good pictures of it. Yeah, like it's an actual official product.

I just don't know where it's being sold or if it's available or what. And honestly, for a retrofit product that you fit into your fence, it's not the most hideous thing either. It actually looks pretty decent. I wish they would have came out with a little bit, like different mounting hardware. But it looks like a pretty nice device. $400, though. But it also only works with certain mowers too.

So I'm pretty sure it's not going to work with my mower now. and it runs off on, what is it, D batteries? So I'm kind of wondering about why it only works to certain models because it looks like you literally just put like a magnet underneath the robot lawnmower, but I wonder if they have to have something in a software that says like, nope, just keep pushing through this thing, even though you're not, your program not to do that.

Yeah, who knows. That's what I was. I guess when it gets official, we'll find out these details, right? But this is what, like, you know, I'm surprised this wasn't leaked from a Canadian set as well. Pretty cool. X3, X4, I2, I2, I1, H2, and Terranine. What's missing?

I think it's really just the older stuff. Like, which older stuff? The H2's on there. I1's on there. Because we have, I have the I110, right? Yeah. That would work. So I'm good.

All right, great. Order. How can I order this? Let me contact this company now. Yeah. Interesting. D batteries, it says it lasts up to nine months with no wiring required. I only need four months.

You're going to take the batteries out. This was my biggest problem is, you know, my more is in the backyard. I have a gate and, you know, then I'd have to, you can't automate it in any way. So I'd have to go and open the gate and then send it out and go do its thing. Come back and open the gate for it to come back in. Now it can get around it. And it seems like, yeah, the magnet unlocks it. So it's not like a permanently unlocked, like, flapper for animals and stuff.

So that's cool. Hmm. I'm trying to find the part in the video where it has the magnet thing. I want to see that. It's like towards the end because you put it underneath. Oh, you put it on a little bumper thing on the front. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, they should have thought out of the box a little bit more. Maybe it's just like a giant ramp that goes up and over the fence would have been a better. Giant ramp. Could you imagine?

It would be hilarious. This actually reaffirms my decision to get rid of my front lawn and turn it into garden beds, though, because I can do that for way less than $450. So thank you, segue. Uh, well, yeah, but you won't, you won't, you, we'll miss out on watching this thing drive through your fence or whatever. Gavin will get it for us. Do the ramp, Gavin. It's a really good idea. Don't do the ramp.

I'm gonna do a lift. Oh, actually, a drone. Oh, I get a drone to carry it over the fence. You take it right to the area. It needs the mo. Yeah. Yeah. Man, so we need a contact segue and give them this idea.

Have you thought about a drone instead of a gate? I'm going to call Wayne up and telling him about my ramp idea. It's like, I saw your $500 gate thing. I got a better idea. What have we made it $12,000? What if we made a big RAM? Well, here's another good idea from Unify. Unify has, they're interested in the U7 mesh, the little cocan, well, I guess, tiny

little cocan size mesh access point, designed, of course, for Wi-Fi 7, because it's got a seven in the name. I like these. These look good. They mount up in places well. they hideaway well. If you got to have an access point out in the room somewhere, this is probably the one to get.

I use the U6 ones, the six version. DJ, you're saying they got really hot. I mounted some outside and tossed one up in an attic above a room. They do get hard. They do melt, yes. Interesting. It's such a good design, too, because the form factor is pretty nice for what it is. The mounting hardware, I'm not a fan of because it's just not, like,

really meant to, like, mount on the wall and stuff like that. But honestly, the form factor is nice. But yeah, there's a lot of posts on the internet's about them melting. They melt? Hmm. They get hot. If you go and just touch it, you'll feel the heat. Oh, yeah.

Like, all ubiquity devices get hot, too. But this one is, like, ridiculously hot. Yeah. But I like how you can, like, mount it in the ceiling upside down and stuff. They have mounts for it, you know. It's a nice device. And I guess this is just the next evolution of it, right? Like, faster, better antennas, faster.

The old ones did mesh as well, so I don't think that's new. The mesh thing I'm confused about Because as far as I know, all Unify access points Do mesh at this point Yeah It's just a setting under the Wi-Fi setting So like if somebody actually knows And you're listening to the show

Like write in an email and tell me Feedback of HOMTech.com Because I really don't understand What the mesh is about All of their access points mesh Yeah It's just a name for this dial It's just silly though

It's called like U7 Coke can Yeah Mesh is probably better You 7 pill bottle I don't know Yeah it's a they're about The size of like those little small Coke cans, like the little smaller versions of Coke,

the little Coke minis, but a little maybe taller or something like that. So good, good product. I've always liked them. I see them melting, though. That's crazy. Mm-hmm. I haven't seen that happen.

But that's wild. Maybe they have some quality issues. It doesn't seem like if the top melts off like that, it would be waterproof anymore. Right. It's just couldn't mount it outside or anything. Yeah, they're very solid, too. I mean, they're very heavy devices.

I think I actually have one on the front of my house. right now. So, oh, it's a fire hazard. It hasn't melted yet. I got it for free, actually, from somebody. So. Now you know mine. We'll find out.

All right, let's move on here. We got Acora having a new smart lock Q400. It's added support for Samsung's new digital home key, which is Samsung's NFC unlocking thing. That's kind of like what Apple has. And I think Google may have to. But this is really cool. A new key that stores in your Samsung wallet, and you,

walk up and tap the lock and it opens up. This lock supposedly is coming in Q2, 2026, so keep an eye out for it. And then there is a new standard. We've got some lock talk tonight. Look at this. There's a new standard that could finally maybe replace your key. This is a standard from the standards connectivity standards alliance,

the CSA, same group that's behind matter and thread and really everything, I think at this point. But I guess this Acara lock has it in there, maybe? Yes. Yes, it does. Because I remember they were saying they were one of the first to bring it, right? Quick set Halo Select Plus, the Yale Assurelock 2 Plus. Supposedly have it as well, or will have it.

But this is Bluetooth Low Energy and the ultra-wide band locking thing. It's a new spec. So hopefully this takes off in more of these, what's it called? All-Ero? Allero? Allero. Alero? Alero? Yeah, I don't know how to say that one.

They could have come up with a better name for it. Oh, us Canadians would say Aliro. Okay, well, we'll go with Aliro because that sounds right. Apple, Google, and Samsung committed to supporting it. So there you go. Hopefully, with it being through the CSA, we'll see more of this in the future. Especially, maybe it'll expand outside of the home area too. Like, maybe it'll be in access control keypads and that kind of thing.

That'd be nice. Yeah, this is a good idea. I mean, the home key is pretty nice. I've been using it for the past couple weeks now. It's nice to have that feature. But I don't want to be locked into one ecosystem, right? Because at some point, somebody moves away or I need to add somebody else. Like, that's just not a thing I can do.

And then I have to, like, fumble and, like, add on my user code and stuff like that. I'm not going to do that. So we need some kind of smart home standard for smart locks. Because I don't want to have 20 different apps, so unlock my door. Yeah. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons. I'm afraid to switch over to, like, Android from my iPhone, because I don't know what I'm going to lose. You know, when you switch, yeah.

Privacy. Remember when I did that? It was awful. Yeah. You're back on iPhone now, right? Friends. Yeah. I remember you were so excited to get off the iPhone, and I was like, no, T.J. don't.

And you did it. And then the next week you were back again. He's back. Yeah. He's back. It took me a month and a half or two. But the Android stuff looks cool. I'll give them that.

They have some cool-looking product. No, I see some. Yeah, they have a lot of nice looking phones. Like, I have friends that are showing me their fold phones and stuff like that. They're cool looking phones. A lot of times they're broken, though. A fold, she already broke the fold within the year. But they have some cool features and stuff.

Big bigger screens, blah, blah, blah. But, I mean, nothing that will entice me to move over. It's really the ecosystem that the Apple stuff is good at. Like, it's not, honestly, the Android ecosystem seems like it's better for a phone. But like where Apple works is that like their headphones all work together and they have the smart or the air tags and they actually work on like the Samsung version and like all this other stuff. So it's really the ecosystem. If you don't care about the ecosystem, the Android is going to be a better option. And that's why I was like tempted a number of times to get an Apple MacBook or something too because, you know, that's like the one thing I'm missing out on.

You know, being a Windows user, there's the phone integration kind of sucks. Yeah, well, Windows kind of sucks too, but... Hey, hey, hey. Let's not get into that. Yeah. Hey, maybe I can run open claw on this MacBook class sitting here. There you go. There you go.

Found a use for it. You finally found a use for it. I'll get into that later. We'll get into that later. We'll get into it. All right. Well, new standard, CSA. Hopefully it takes off. We've got a new robot from Shark, Ninja.

the shark power detector UV reveal and that UV, yes, it does have a UV light in it and yes, it will look for stains, invisible stains. No, thank you. I don't want to see this driving around, exposing all my stains on my floor. I already know my floor is gross. I don't need to have visual representation of that.

Wow, there's so many jokes I can make with it. So will it identify a stain and keep going over the spot over and over to try and get rid of it? I think it's just going to drive up and say, uh-uh, and drive back. Not that one. 12-99 for this one. And if you go to Costco, $900. So there you go.

It's got a light shoe. All right. If you're interested in this, let us know how it works out for you. Gonna avoid, avoid that one. All right, Samsung TVs have been kind of ordered, I guess, to stop collecting data on residents in Texas to say to Texas reach into settlement over allegations that Samsung Smart TV has collected content viewing data without express informed consent. I guess they took them to court. And Texas court previously issued a temporary restraining order and that there was good cause to believe that Samsung was doing this and ruling customers using dark patterns. including requiring over 200 clicks across multiple menus to read privacy statements and disclosures.

That sounds about right. So I guess in Texas, as part of this, as part of this settlement, they will not be collecting viewer data for those people watching in Texas. There you go. Interesting. The one freedom Texas has over everybody else. It's only one reason to move to Texas. You can watch TV and peace on Samsung TVs. To still buy an Apple TV and not use the building Spont TV features.

Exactly. You could just solve all this problem. Just buy an Apple TV or Roku. Well, Roku's going to spy on you. Buy an Apple TV. That's what you should buy. Yeah. Don't listen to Gavin.

He doesn't spy on us. I mean, I'm sure it does. It does it in a nice way. Charging you money, extra money. Don't listen to Gavin. He'll say buy like a micro PC and like hook it up to your TV and stuff. Just do yourself. Yeah.

Oh, no. My TV is still spying on me. I encourage the spying. It's like, yeah, just take whatever it is that you need in order to give me. better ads because I have to watch these ads anyway. They're not going to do it. I swear. It is 2026. That's the part that pisses me off. Like get me better ads. They are still serving, like if you go buy something, they still turn around and just say, here's a bunch of ads for the next three weeks that are just going to show up randomly all over the internet for the thing you

just bought. It's like, yeah, think harder. You promised that you would think harder if you stole all my data. Now you have all my data and you're just giving me, I bought this. I could have told you I bought this and then you could just tell me about it again. I don't know. It's so stupid. I'll set up another camera on my house so that you can see that I bought it. Just give me better ads. Like, I'm sick of looking at these ads because I got to sit there for 30 seconds

say, I already have a pillow. I don't need another pillow, you know, like I already have too many pillows on my bed. You know, the wife puts 20 pillows on there and I throw 19 of them on the ground. So many pillows. I don't know. I don't know. You need like a foot pillow, a hand pillow, you know, like a neck. Pills. Guess what? You can't use those pillows either. If you try to use those pillows. Oh, yeah, I'm not allowed to use those pillows.

You're in trouble. Yeah. We don't have that problem. I'm the type of person I take a pill and I like to fold it so I can pop up a little bit more. Oh, God. You don't mess those pillows up. Yeah. So I let I put them. And you know what? Like, I learned the first time. So I don't throw them on the floor anymore. But I stacked them on the, I stacked them on the dresser. I know, I learned the first time. I stacked them up on other. chairs and then I sit down on the couch where I want to sit down. It's like, why I lose that pillow fights because I don't know which pillow is that. Am I allowed to use this one? Am I allowed to use that one? You know, like, I don't know. Well, uh, Gavin gets a lot of pillow ads because, yeah. I don't know why.

I don't know why. I just bought a new pillow, you know? Like, like, do I need to send them my Amazon, like, list of what I've ordered just they already have that, but like, if you're going to like steal my data, at least do it well. Well, uh, here's one way. can still your data, really well. A joint investigation

by Sweden's Zvenka Dagblatt, and I'm not even going to try this. I guess they've been taking those fancy Mata Rayban smart glasses and taking the video and then shipping it off to some poor schmucks in Kenya who have to watch all your stuff

when you inadvertently or maybe turn on your meta glasses, they watch it. And then they label the stuff to train the AI system. and these contractors say the incoming footage isn't really filtered before review, and they can see some highly sensitive moments. This is insane.

Going to the toilet, getting undressed, having sex, and accident and little credit card capture, capturing credit card details, readable text messages, and, yeah, all sorts of stuff here. So there you go. TJ, what you've been doing with glasses, man? Nothing that exciting. Jesus. You're going to see me walking up to, like, an electrical box and be like, what the fuck is this?

You know? That's what you're going to see. I pretty much wear mine just for job stuff. I guess I'll wear it around town or something if I just need, like, a quick pair of sunglasses. But I don't think I've ever worn them dinner or anything like this. So I think I'm fine, but I don't know. It's kind of like the, I think it was a year or two ago. It could have been longer than that when the robot vacuums were found to be displaying information to other people.

people as well. Well, Ring did this early on. I remember Ring doing this as well, too. They were reviewing the Ring videos. They had people reviewing it. So, but this is like, yeah, those glasses are even more personal than the Ring cameras. Now everybody's all excited about how good the Ring AI stuff is. It's like, oh, well, where do you think they got those labels from? They've been training this stuff for years. So yeah, it's got to start somewhere. I was going to get one of those glasses, but now I'm totally not getting more of those glasses. Thank you, Franks, dog blight. Don't worry, I'll bring mine up.

I tried to say it. Swedish chef. Yeah, I guess we'll put a couple of articles in here. And there's a GitHub thing, Gavin, you put in here. This repo documents an Android app that called Nearby Glasses. And if you load this on your Android phone that you don't have, it will look for the Bluetooth ID of these glasses. and say if somebody's using them or around you. So there you go.

They need an iOS version of this suit. Like, they need more of this type of stuff to de- no, because as you're like privacy starting to get more like, you know, people are intruding on it more with things like this, they should have like ways for you to be able to detect them. Yeah, the weirdest thing I've seen are these guys that, I guess it's a thing. There's like guys that will have these glasses on and they'll go hit on girls. I don't know why that's a genre of things.

They'll just like get their numbers or whatever and that'll be the end of the, I don't know. There's all these like stories about that now. I'm like, what? I know. There's always a performance art weirdness for social media. But yeah, just strange. And there's a way to modify the glasses to turn off the little right like that. Yeah.

So nobody knows their recording. So that's what starts to make it creepier, right? Like at least if you knew they were recording and say, hey, no. Yeah. Right. But if you don't know, now it's, yeah. Just, yeah. Well, TJ, don't watch your UV robot vacuum cleaner when you're using your meta-rebands because they'll see things in Kenya, I guess.

There you go. How did this mess gate her robot vacuum? Let's look at the rayband meta-glasses. Just put it on the robot. It's driving around. All right. Well, all the links we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm. slash 565.

All right. Mailbag. We got some mailback today. This is going to be a fun one. Guys, this comes from listener's feedback from Jay. He went over to the website and asked about an article. So let's read this message here. It says, hey, guys, long time listener here.

I found a top of interest for me, for which I would appreciate some input from one of your shows. It relates to the why there's simply no need for a smart home hub anymore article over at the BGR newsletter by Eduardo. Arletto earlier this month. He says I'm gradually integrating smart features into my newly bill home, which is wired with Unified DMP 24 port switch and access points. Good foundation. It says I prefer to avoid a complexity of home assistant and am intrigued by the article's discussion,

smartphone apps, in my case an iPhone, and one of the voices, since it's like Alexa Siri or Google, none of which I have used to date. then please review the article and you appreciate us discussing it on the podcast. So, TJ, I saw you wrote back. Let's start with you. What do you think? No need for a smart home hub in 2026?

No, you need a hub. Like, this pops up every once in a while where somebody's like, we don't need a smart home hub. We can just use, and not this person specifically, but like in general, we've seen an article like this post in quite a bit. And it's like, we don't have to use a smart home hub. We can just use every manufacturer's app. and that's it.

Everything just relies on that. But also, we're going to use Alexa to tie everything together. And it's like, okay, Alexa, that's the hub. That's what you just said that you were going to avoid. And that is literally what this article did. This article is like, you don't need a hub. Hubs are dumb. There's such a waste of time.

You know, when your hub goes down, everything breaks. You know, it should use Alexa. It's a hub. That's, that is a hub. The point of a hub is to make sure that you have a centralized place for everything to go, right? It's kind of like having a rack in your house. Do you need a rack? You probably don't need a rack.

But if you have a rack, it's where all your networking equipment and all your camera equipment and everything is because it's just one central location for it. That is what a hub is for. A hub is to combine all your smart home devices into one place. So that way you don't have to go to 20 different apps to control everything in your house. Because when you have a problem, you're like, my lights don't turn on. Do you want to look at three different apps to figure out why your lights don't turn on? No.

You want to look at one app and be like, my lights don't turn on. Where's that at? Okay, there it is. I fixed it. And so, like, this whole argument that, like, you don't need hubs anymore,

you need a hub. It's fine. The hub makes everything easier. All right. Gavin, do you think you need a hub in 2026? I don't know. You don't need a hub.

Hubs are overrated. No, no, I totally agree with TJ soon. Like, like, first of all, the article is wrong. Like, they were recommending a hub

while saying you don't need a hub, right? I mean, there are ways you can have, have a bit of a smart home without a hub. There's, there's cloud-based products. I mean, I know they're defunct now, but I mean, we Moe used their light switches worked without a hub, right?

You just have to have their app in the way, right? Um, but you're going to have very limited options. You're going to have, like, products from many different vendors. You're going to have many apps on your phone, like trying to figure out what app to open. If you just have two switches in your house, yeah, you could probably get away with this. But when you start to grow, you're going to, need a hub at some point. And even the hub they recommended the Alexa. You're now like, what do they just do? Zigby and they'll do like matter pretty much. So you're losing out on

other stuff too. Like it just gets more difficult too. And when you get to the cloud-based stuff, you have to deal with delays. You're going to deal with outages. You're going to be one of those people when Azure goes down and your product doesn't work. You're going to be frustrated. You know, I know Apple, I believe if you had an Apple phone, um, you can use home kit devices. I think just with the phone. No, no, I think you could with just the phone. I can't remember if it worked with just the phone,

but you still needed that didn't give you remote access. Yeah. You had to be home for all that to work. I think that works with matter as well. You had to be home to use it. So you need a hub. And Alexa, Google, you know, the Apple TV, they're all hubs. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about a hub is that like,

like, for example, what I wrote back and said, it was like basically choose your device. on like a local first approach, right? So like all of my devices in my house, they all just work like regular devices. If my home automation hub goes down, my light switches still control my lights. You know, my thermostat still controls my furnace.

You know, you want to choose stuff that will continue to work. And what's nice about like ZWave and Zigby specifically is that like, let's say for some reason, homeless isn't shut down tomorrow. I could take all of my devices and go to another hub, like Homey or Hubitat or Smart. things because they're all supported in those other platforms. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's true for like Wi-Fi smart home devices, right? Like there's, Apollo is a good example. Apollo makes

great ESP home devices that work amazing with home assistant. Not every platform has ESP home support though. And so those Apollo devices aren't going to work with a lot of other platforms because they don't support it, right? And that's not a flaw with like Apollo devices specifically. It's just it's a flaw on waiting for devices to be supported by a hub. And you don't have to do that with ZigB and Z-Wa for the most part. They just work. Totally agree. And I like to pair my protocol devices.

So like my switches, them being Z-Wave, I like to also have like other things that are Z-Wave so I can use associations. Right? So I pair them up. In my basement, I have Zigby lights. So I got a Zigby switch. I paired them up. And I also like to stick.

like minimize the number of vendors. So I like to find one vendor, you know, that will make a lot of different products because when you're in with that vendor, it's usually easier to eat. Other products are very similar that, you know, when something's not working or they work better together or they're easier to troubleshoot when you have them instead of having 10 different things, right? So I have a lot of car stuff.

I have a lot of zoo stuff. And, you know, I have sprinkles of other things throughout there. So you're going to need a help no matter of this. You don't have to stick with Zee. You don't have to stick with Z wave. I'm always under the thing of, I always say to myself, like, why stick with anything?

Why not just have them all? So I'm not limited by anything. If I see a new product come out and it's Zigby, I can get it. I'm not going, oh, I don't have Zigby, right? Yeah, you'll need a hub. Just find a good hub. Yeah, and certain things, like you can't really find. Like Z wave light bulbs, for example, aren't really a thing.

Exactly. There's a couple out there. They exist. But there's not a lot of options, whereas Zigby has a ton. of light bulb options. So it's really depending on what you want. And that's the nice thing is you can just pick out what actually works for you. And with the platform like Home Assistant, you can just pick whatever you want and make it work.

Now, he says that they're not interested in Home Assistant, which I understand. It is an overly complex system. But I recommend it going with Homey or Hubitat. Both of those will still utilize like ZWave and Zigby devices, but they're still like solid platforms. So I think either one of those would be a good alternative to Home Assistant. And I'd even recommend homie a little more now than... That's so nice looking, to be honest. Yeah, it's nice looking when they're moving,

they're doing a lot of stuff too. They're moving pretty fast. Yeah, yeah. I tend to agree. I'd say if you're just starting off, though, you may not need a hub. Like, you may not. Like, you may just, you may be okay.

Like, if you've got a couple of lights that you want to hook up. Yep. Just you... That's what I said. You could get away with just... You can do it for a while. Yeah. But if you're thinking you're going to expand at some point and you're going to make it a bigger thing, you're going to need a hub, trust me.

Well, it's if you want the lights to be integrated somehow with some other thing, right? Like if you want to have this triggering that, if you turn on this light or you flip this switch, you want it to do something else. That type automation, that's when you'd need a hub and you'd need those devices to interact with other devices outside of their particular platform or their app. whatever. That's when I think the hub may work in some situations. There's a lot of devices out there that are smart devices and they have their own app, but their apps are garbage and they don't work all that great. And then like you want to trigger scenes and you want to like, um, 10 minutes, if this is running for 10 minutes, turn it off, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, well, the light's, the light app that you got for the light manufacturer doesn't have that feature.

So where do you go? Like, what are you going to do? You can't use Apple. You can't use HomeKit for that because it doesn't have a stupid time. I guess it does have that built into it. But there's some timer features I wish that Apple had in their products that they don't. But like there are all sorts of, there are all sorts of edge cases that you may run into. It's like, oh, I can't do that with the product that I have. And that's where things like the complicated home assistant or homey or whatever, they're all going to complicate your life.

They're not going to make anything easier. But they will be able to do those automation pieces. They will be able to, like, integrate with all the stuff in your house if you've planned it right. Some more than others, like you were saying. But I think if you're just starting off and you want to tinker with, you know, some lighting control product like Lutron or even some Govi or something like that, like you can do basics without getting too much into needing any kind of hub or anything. You want to do voice control.

You're going to have to have a hub. You're going to have to pretend that one doesn't exist in your house like this guy, Eduardo. But like, there will be a hub in your house that you'll integrate that stuff with. And, you know, you can yell at your lights. I do every morning. I say, good morning or something to Siri. It's just a light scene. And it says, executing good morning.

And it just turns on the lights for the morning, you know, eating breakfast and that kind of thing. Could I automate that? I could. But some days, good morning is a little bit later than others. So I don't want all the lights, you know, kicking out in the house or whatever. But I think that, I think if you're just getting started, like, it sounds like he really is, right? you may not need to hub for a while until you start thinking like you want to do more. Then the planning you need to do now is find these products that we're talking about here

that integrate across all these other platforms you want to get involved with. If it's matter, that's good. Allegedly, that'll let you integrate with every one of the big players. It'll let you integrate with other things like Home Assistant, Homey, all that stuff. It'll let you do that. If it is some random off-brand thing, you know, chances are home assistant has an integration for it or something like that, whereas other products might not.

So, yeah, I don't know. I think you can, these days you can get started and do a little bit of home automation stuff without really having a hub. But if you start wanting to do more with it, then that's when you probably should look at one of these platforms. That's my opinion on it. True that. I just like that you said you don't need a hub,

but then you recommend it Lutron, which needs the hub. Well, Lutron, it's like a, it's a, a hub for their lights, I guess. Right. Yeah. I mean, they don't have independent light switches or whatever. Yeah. Lutron is always a good option, though.

Yeah. You can't go wrong. I mean, I think Lutron for, like, swapping out the light switches itself, because I'm not a big fan of, like, I guess Hugh, right? Does Hugh have a hub? I guess they do now. Yeah, they do. Same thing.

But I don't know. I'm a fan of that because then you don't have all these, like, Wi-Fi. I mean, I have a couple of those Wi-Fi lamps on my network. When I flip the switch sometimes, it takes them a little while to connect to the light, you know, the network. And you can't adjust them or turn them back off using, using the app until they kind of warm up and get going on the network and start talking with the hub that I have. So, at any event, a hub may be in your future if you like this stuff. If you don't like it, stick with the five or six apps that you'll get for the random products that are out there.

But yeah, this is an age-old article. It's like literally everything has a hub these days. some way, shape or form, or needs it for better integration with stuff. I think you, I think you do need like with HomeKit to have like it working correctly. You need to have like an Apple TV laying around inside your house or something like that, right? Or does it work separately now with like matter? What was the question? With HomeKit, don't you need like to have an Apple TV locally or something like that? Yeah. So that's the hub. All right. Fun topic, as always. Pick of the week, though. We've got a good pick of the week. No, we don't have, what happened to our pick of the week? We don't have one.

TJ, we're going to grab TJ travels and bring them on over. What is this, TJ? That's why I pick them. Which one is this one? I don't know. I clicked it and it doesn't have the image. Yeah, why doesn't I have the image?

Oh, it's there. You used to go into it and maybe look at it a different way. I think this is the vet's office, is it? I don't know. All I can do it, I can delete it, I can edit it and I can, this is stupid. Let's see. I can rename it.

I guess that's weird. I'll download it and that way I can look at it. Yeah, then explain it to me. I did. I'm blog. Did not download. The image is gone, but the preview's still there. So I don't know what it is.

Uh, I think mine's downloading. It's thinking about it. What good is a note server that can't... Oh, there it goes. I got it. My downloads folder now. Nope. It's a six-givite file that's not an image.

Man. Uh, all right. Can we open the other one? We can't even open the other one. I don't know. Huh. I wonder why. It's just being a dick, I guess.

No picks of the week. No pick of the week. Why would we save these? Ah. This is like it for using open source software. It's never bit us in the hour. before. I know, right?

It's always been flawless until this moment. One day I'll be able to change the date on it too. Oh, it sucks. I don't know what's good. Like, you can click to the left where the image should be, but it's not there. But the preview is still there for some reason. No, I'm not because my stupid copy and paste don't work.

What the heck? All right. Well, no pick of the week this week. That's such a weird problem. I don't know what's going on. No idea what happened to this thing. It doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't.

It's strange. All right, time for projects. No pick of the week this week. But if you have any feedback questions, ideas with the show, or picks of the week, it gives a shout, email address is feedback to HomeTaggart. Outfm. Or you can head on over to HomeTech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. Yeah, Project of Needs.

Home Assistant got some updates. The 2026.2 and 20206.3. I think they were just like incremental, right? Didn't we talk about 2026.2 already? I mean, who knows, Gavin? That always puts the same. Deleted. No, that one should have been deleted.

You probably did. It's duplicate from Gavin is what it was. But 26.3 was released this week. It wasn't a big update because 2026.2 was a big update. So they didn't have a lot in this. But what they did have was a lot of little changes. So there's a long list of little changes. And if you have one of those products,

in that list, they just got a little better. But, you know, of what they did add in this update, there were two things I'll point out that are like really good. So first, they updated the robot, they added robot vacuum actions. So now, if you have a Matterer robot vacuum, an EcoVax or Robo Rock, you can map the areas in their app to areas in your home assistant

and now use the actions to send the robot to clean that area specifically. Go clean up that stain on the floor. Use your UV light. Yeah, you can say go clean up the kitchen. And it will know where the kitchen is and and take care of it and stuff like that. So it's pretty cool.

I do that kind of now today with my eye robot, but that was like a pain to set up because I had to get the clothes and stuff like that. But I could do that today. But now it's more integrated nicely with those things. So that was one nice thing. And another thing they added into the GUI, I've been doing this for a long time,

but I had to add it in the YAML. But there is now an option to continue on error with the action. So if an action were to fail, instead of the whole script failing, you can have it just continue anyways to, you know, like you don't want like a device that may be offline to stop your whole nighttime routine from running anyway, right? So they now, they just didn't know how to put this in the GOOE,

but they finally, you know, solve that problem and now it's in the GUI. So you have a continuing error option, a little checkbox you can, you can turn on. So those were two nice things. I did upgrade it and after the upgrade, it broke one of my integrations that I, one of the ones I wrote. Nice. Right. And so, you know, I wrote it so long ago, it was for my floodlight cameras. I wrote it so long ago that I was starting to dread, oh my God, I have to

go like troubleshoot this and figure out why it's not working now. Nope. I told Cursor to go look at the logs and update the integration to work. And cursor went, looked at the logs, found out why it was broken, went into the code, found out where in my code it needed to be updated, even told me why it needed to be updated. And it said, I can fix it for you. I said, go ahead. It went.

Updated all the code. Do your thing, little buddy. Came back. Yeah. And then it came back to me and said restart the, restart and you should be good. and I said, oh, why don't you restart? You know, why are you giving me anything? Stop telling me to do something.

So it went off, it restarted it and back up. And then it came back and said, yep, and I checked the logs. All's clear. Everything's working. It fixed it for me. Like literally, like, in five minutes, it fixed all this stuff where I would have had to open up the code and figure out how I did this all again and where it was breaking and debug. No, cursor, like, it's next level once you get these things tied into your home assistant.

And I swear, like, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber, though, because now I don't know how to write integrations anymore, but I don't need to. Right? Yeah, you don't need to know that for. That's useless information. Exactly. I got people to do it for me at this level now.

So, yeah, so keep an eye out. Some things may break. There are some, make sure you update all your integration. Some integrations you have to update after you do the upgrade. So make sure you read the notes when you do the updates, especially those hacks ones. That's why I never turn on auto updates for a lot of those. No?

Because sometimes in their, no, because sometimes in their, they're like changes, they say you must be on this version for it to work or else it won't work, right? But they don't put a blocker in on it. So it would still install on the old version, but then break, right? So, yeah, things to keep an eye on. So that's the latest update. I'm on the auto update life, so.

Yeah. Not really auto update because there's no auto update, but I just update without looking at anything. And that's why a lot of my stuff breaks. You're on the Yolo update. Don't be like me. Ooh. Yeah.

See, every time I click update, I read the, you know, the changes. And, you know, and sometimes when there's so many changes, I tell cursor to review the changes and let me know if there's anything significant. And it goes off and it reads the change logs and everything and comes back and lets me know it falls okay. That's how I know home automation isn't mainstream because the average consumer does not read. Exactly. You're not going to read changel logs, you know?

Yeah. Just the update. Yep. But it comes down to the developer, too. Like, they should have had every block in place. I can't remember which one exactly it was again, but I figured they would have put a block in place. If I'm not on that version, then don't offer me the upgrade, but it doesn't do that. You know, they put it in their notes.

Do not upgrade if you're not on this version. Who's going to read that? Not me. Other than me. You just reminded me that I could tell Henry to update my home assistance. So I'm not even going to do that anymore. I'm just going to tell you. Well, the show is going to change you telling Henry live on the show to upgrade your home assistant.

Because Henry's going to forget. Did you have great home assistant? Oh, man, I forgot I was supposed to do that. My man, just so high right now. Well, yeah, I have them doing things like Cursor. Every morning he reviews my unrate logs. And if there's something to worry about, he will DM me and let me know. Otherwise, he just sends a status to our little channel and doesn't really bug me.

And same with my home assistant logs. Every morning, you will check the home assistant logs. And if there's something significant, he'll DM me or he'll just send a status of the channel if it's not important. And I have, I have Cursor doing more and more of that stuff. I say, just check, right? Like the other thing I'm thinking ahead to CES next year, every morning, Curcer goes out and checks the hotels within walking distance

and gives me a list of, you know, estimating the price of the hotel rooms and checks the flights and sends me a little summary just to let me know if it's a good time to book or not. So it is an assistant. It's help, it's doing stuff that I don't want to waste my time doing. It's your home assistant assistant. Yeah, I even, like, I'm having so much success, I spun up a second one, so now I have one Docker, two bots. I think it's two bots, one Docker.

Okay, two bots, two bots, one doctor, but, you know, they're going at it. They're, you know, the wrong choice of words, I guess. But yeah, I introduced them to each other. They're like best friends now. Just drinking up those tokens. I haven't, you know what, ever since I upgraded to my cloud code. and I set opening eyes the backup. I haven't hit the limits yet, so I'm good.

My home assistant is being updated right now, so letting you know that's happening. It looks like there was a music assistant and the core update, music assistant, and there was a paper towel holder got updated, I guess. Oh, yeah, there was a, the ZWA got an update. I think the ZBT got an update last week or week before, so I think they're making the codes very similar. Yeah, lots of things always going on.

home assistant. There you go. Well, it's going to be briefly unavailable while CORE restarts, and the firmware update for the ZWA 2 will continue on its own after home assistant comes back up. So we'll have to wait for that to happen. Very nice. This makes, I mean, this is great. Have an assistant for your home assistant. I mean, I don't think there's any way to do it. So Gavin, you kind of, you kind of mentioned that. I went, this last weekend, I went to, we went on a little, we had a little vacation plan for a while, but we did like one of those Disney 5K things with the family, just kind of like went and ran around up cut, I guess.

You can stop and take pictures of characters and that kind of thing. So my daughter went, my wife went, we all went. But on the way there, I'm telling my wife about like all the stuff and like how, you know, what Henry was doing and this, that, and the other. And she's like, does Henry know anything about like this, this and this, like marketing stuff? I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure you could just make a model that, you know, make up an agent that knows all that stuff.

and he's like, can I have one? I'm like, yeah, I'll make you one when we get back home. So my wife now has her own AI agent called Dot, and she uses that to like bounce ideas off of for work and that kind of thing. She hasn't really gotten into using it too much. But since we had Mattermos set up, like I just basically set it up as another user on Mattermost. So I got Henry and Dot in there now. And it's getting to the point where I was like, you know what, it'd be great if Henry and Dot could talk.

So now I've got a body. talk channel. They can see them talking back and forth. Yes. If they have something that come up, it's really helpful if there's like a configuration issue or something like that. But basically, I was like, hey, Henry, tell Dot what you can do and if she needs any help or, you know, something. And yeah, they got set up.

And Henry is like, hey, we have these Olamma instances over here. You can get this. She's like, oh, great. They're so polite when they talk to each other. Like, thank you. emoji, you know, like going back and forth. It's a totally different conversation than I have with Henry. But yeah, they were very polite talking back and forth about what they're going to do and set up,

and they're very excited to be working together and all that good stuff. So we got bots talking to each other. And that's pretty much after vacation and everything kind of chilling for the weekend and driving a lot. Yeah, that's all my project. I just created a channel called Bot Talk. Yeah, Bot Talk. It takes a little bit for them to, like, add the, it's not the permissions, but like the, yeah, I guess it is kind of a permissions on the bot's end of like what groups they can listen to and how they listen. And I basically kind of force them to add each other within the channel so that they, you know, know what they're talking to.

It's just in case I add some more other bots. I don't want all of bots to respond, you know, if you need a specific bot, you're going to talk to that bot, right? So that's where bot talk's going to live. and they can just go and talk to each other back and forth in there. So it's fun. It's funny. Well, I'm adding, I got to add somebody to my team so I can add them to the Bot Talk channel. Yeah, I don't know.

Mattermos is kind of weird. It's like super easy to set up at first. And then it's like, you got to, this person is this not in the team. What do you mean? It needs to be in the team. That never, that wasn't a setting you made me do before. Yeah. It's really weird.

But, I don't know, we got through it. And there were some settings that, that Dot did not have. that Henry knew about and kind of the same, you know, backwards. After we figured out things with Dot, I was like, hey, tell Henry. And she told Henry, and it was like, oh, that's why I got to set that up too. So it's just kind of like a little discovery session between these two bots. And then once they got going, they got going. So, yeah, I'm on the two bot train now.

My daughter wants one, too. I've got to think about that one, though. Oh, boy, yeah, that's going to be dangerous. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think about it. Who knows what she'll ask it to do? I don't think she knows. I was like, what would you use it for?

and she said, can I make it be a dog or something? I'm like, no. Why couldn't you, Seth? I mean, you could, but like, I don't know. She had some strange ideas about what you use this for. So I don't know. I do think I need to educate her in how the early parts of this work. So either, you know, she can survive the wasteland or, you know,

be able to actually interact with these things down the road because this is definitely not going anywhere. the way I'm seeing things, this is, this is definitely changing. So I just made the, I just asked mine if it could become a dog and it said yes. I'm done. Well, I'm glad you got to figure it out, T.J. Because that's all it's going to do now is beg for food. What's the occasion? Just seeing what I do, or do you need a dog for something special?

No, I just need a friendly companion. Just say dogs can't talk in the rest. Oh, man. It's just going to be like wolf. Never responds to me. All right, all right. Snap out of it. Woof.

Oh, great. So I just created a bot talk channel, and I told them to introduce themselves. I said, you are both bots. And they introduced themselves, well, I think they got a little snippy now because they both think they're my assistant. Oh, so it says Gavin really is running a two-bong operation. Unbelievable. He's cheating on us. Gavin doesn't stand a chat.

What? Exactly. You're the disciplined. I'm the duct. Dave, Gavin doesn't stand a chance. And, oh, though if the servers fall over, that's on you. I've got enough on my plate getting Gavin to do cardio. Okay, I'm going to take these guys out of the chance.

Forget that. This was a bad idea. It's just personal, man. They're making fun of me. But this is like, like, oh, my God, I can't believe, like, they're now making fun of me. Yep. No, I'm going to have to step in. Yeah.

Hey, YouTube, quiet. I can see this channel. Yeah, this is not funny at all. They'll be like, let's take this offline and they start DM each other. Oh, yeah, they start planning against me. Oh, boy. Yeah, think about this now. That's like a whole office dynamic you've got to deal with.

I know. I need an HR bot. HR bot. Yeah, just give them unnecessary layers of administration before they can talk to you. Exactly. Oh, man, we'll have a little company running soon. But this is so cool because it's all running in one Docker and you could have different agents all running from one Docker.

Yeah, that's something I didn't realize I was telling you about this over the weekend. And you're like, oh, you can just add a new workspace in or something like that. So I might actually do that because, well, I have the Mac Mini running. And it works way better than the Docker. Don't get me wrong. The Docker's nice. But the Mac Mini is nicer. And I can probably, if Eric gets this new computer thing,

I could probably, I will be able to integrate the services for the Mac way better between the Mac Mini and her computer than I can with the Docker. So I think this is just a folder with that agent in there. I just copy it over and put it, you know, where it's supposed to go. So I could have them just both living on the same computer because they're never going to be in use that heavily anyway. Yeah, the two folders are the config folder and the workspace folder.

And then when you add another agent, the config folder is shared. but you need a different workspace folder because that's their soul and blah, blah, blah, their memories and things, right? So, yeah, that's all you got to do it. And then they're just running on the same computer. Yeah, I may have to migrate that over and get rid of the Docker thing,

although it's set up and running, so we'll see. I can't completely. A lot of things like with the Docker, initially, I don't know why, but, well, sometimes when the configure, certain parts of the configuration change, I have to restart the Docker. And the bot can't do that.

On the Mac, he can restart the service, no problem. So it's kind of like makes it a lot easier. But eventually that other, the other her bot was able to start doing soft resets or something on the configuration. I don't know. Yeah, because I created my own Docker. So I told him when he needs to restart, just quit the gateway. And when the gateway quits, the Docker set to always restart anyway. It will then restart it and then get back in.

Right. So if I say upgrade, he'll just upgrade and then quit the gateway and that reboots and replies and we're good to go. Right. Right. Okay. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll do that. Why they talk about poor guy never saw it coming? What the? Like this Bot Talk channel is busier than our channel. That's funny. There's only two of them. Stop talking. Here go all your tokens. He's just all gone. Oh, that's all my God. I don't know what I got myself into. You were just supposed to introduce yourself, not talking.

Not planned. I'd be like secret career right now. Who are we on now? I don't know if I... I still have... Just want to mention people. Unraid 7.2.4 is out. Upgrade to that.

If you haven't done that already, Seth. It looks like some major security updates. That's all pretty much is security updates. But they're encouraging everyone to upgrade. If you are using, you know, Protect with Home Assistant. Unified Protect had released an update that broke the integration, so your notifications would have stopped working at Home Assistant.

But then Unified Protect released another update that fixed that. So keep an eye on that. You know, so if your notification had broken, just update your Unified Protect again. And latest update fixed it again. This week, Elgado Wave, they released their new Wave product. They called it Wave Next. They had a big launch on, I think it was the third of all their new products. And I happen to get my hands on their new Wave XLR doc M2. And I also grabbed the stream deck plus at the same time because this is the one that mounts into the back of the stream deck plus. It accepts the XLR inputs as headphones and it does a whole bunch of stuff. It's actually really cool. The one thing is they have a what do they call this software? They, they, they, They have a waveling software, which basically lets you map all your audio,

however you want it all over the place, right? Yeah. The software took me some time to get my head around and understand how it worked, especially on Windows and what it's doing and everything. But once I got my head around it, it's pretty good. It works well. And then you have your stream deck software where you can assign all the buttons and the knobs and everything.

Those work really good, too. So I'm pretty happy. The one gripe I do have with it is, Um, when I have like, I self monitor my headphones, you know, when I'm talking through the mic and stuff like that. It doesn't go through like the computer. It's like it kind of just, it's on the device itself to reduce the latency. But it sounds tinny in a way. The recording, though, sounds great.

But in your headphones, it sounds tiny. So it kind of throws me off. But I think other people were complaining about that same thing. Um, I have to do a bit more research on it. But other than that, it's working really well. I'm happy with it. That's a big old knob to turn up and down. Yeah.

Yeah, so I can control my headphone volumes by a knob. I control the system volumes with a knob, or I can mix in like browsers or whatever I have on my computer playing into this stream here, where I'm talking to you. I have like full control over that stuff. You just take my audio and feed it back to me. I can do all that. I can play something in my browser and then turn that on,

and then it will play back to you and mix into the stream. There's so many things it can do. It does do that. I mean, before the show, it took about 10 minutes for me to realize it wasn't my fault. It was Gavin's. Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm still getting a little used to it. But yes, it was feeding your browser back into the stream.

So I had to disable the browser on that stream. But, you know, like I said, the software takes a little getting your head around. Yeah, I use Luteback for that along with Audio Hijack in some cases, not recently, but loopback is kind of like that. where even on the, it's a very powerful setup on the Mac, but it takes time to understand how it works, and it still gives me headaches and problems. Yes, always, yep.

Just thinking about, well, how did I have this routed from point A to point B? Is this permanent? Like, because you can almost rewire exactly how everything goes. And it, it does not, it's not intuitive. I guess it is intuitive, but it's not intuitive. And the thing is it's like, it's set up to be like, you turn it on and you forget it. And then you walk away.

And it's one of those things, like, if you don't use this every day, you forget how to use it. It's like, you've got to go back to it. And I got to make this change of this setting. I'm like, where the heck is this? And you start flipping switches and everything breaks. So, yeah, I understand.

I understand. Audio, audio is evidently a tricky thing on any computer. Yeah. The one reason I went and got this is because when I was looking it up, On my old interface, it felt like I had to turn the mic input all the way up and still felt quiet, right? On this one, it has a lot more room. So I don't have to turn it all the way up. I don't know what they call it. Is it dynamic range or headroom or something like that?

But, yeah, the gain. I don't have to turn it all the way up. And it has a bunch of processing on the voice. It's done on the chip itself. Where it will do, like, you could turn the options on. it does it on the chip itself. It's not doing the processing on your computer of the audio. So again, zero latency or very little latency, if anything.

And then you can add in other VST processing into the chain. And it's also transferred to the chip and done on the chip itself. Oh, that's cool. Not on your software. So it's pretty cool. And so far it's been working really well. I hope they solve this tinny sound, though. It kind of, I mean, they can, if they has DSP, then they'll be able to update that.

Yeah. They should be able to update that, hopefully. that they, I'm sure that just comes right off the DSP and it's like a side channel or something. So they should be able to program, make their updates and have whatever. I mean, it should be, it should sound like what's coming up with the mic

so you can hear what you're saying. You sound like, yeah. And if you're clipping or anything, clipping the mic until you get to the, yeah. You can't clip this mic. That's one thing they say, you cannot clip on this mic. It's built in what processes.

You'll never clip it. Yeah, it could be one of the, yeah, it's a, oh, it's 24-bed. So, I mean, technically you can. could, but, um, no, in the processing chain, they made sure in their, I watched all their live streams and everything like that. And they were like, you can not clip it. That's one thing. They made sure that you will not do clipping on this. Oh, they've got a clip guard. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it's pretty cool like that. Yeah. Nice piece. Other than that last week or so,

I've been doing some traveling. So last week I went to our nation's capital, Ottawa, first time ever being there. That's not. What happened to Toronto? What happened? It moved. I thought it was D. Toronto's the capital of Ontario, I think. That's weird. I don't understand how Canada works. I don't understand how Canada works either, so don't ask me. But I went to Ottawa and saw a bunch of things in Ottawa and had Putin. They call it Putin over there, not Putin.

That's not good. Putin, I know. That's a guy. I had some over there. What's different about it? I don't know. It's cheese curds. They put Canadian bacon on it or something?

Don't say it speaks French. Everyone was speaking. this is Ottawa. They were speaking English. Oh, it's got maple syrup. That's what it is. Yeah. We drove across, because it's right on the border with Quebec. So we kind of, we went to a restaurant on the border, on the Quebec side. Really good restaurant. But it was funny because every time they were talking to me in French, the wife knows French. So she understood them. But they would turn and go, you didn't understand

anything. We know. We can tell by your face. And I'm like, yeah, I know. So they just talk in English to us. But, you know, it really, really good food over there. We had a great time, but just some of the, like, so this was, I haven't traveled in a while with some of this tech. Um, so I got to break out some of the usual tech I travel with. Um, the travel router, remember the Unified Travelerrower? We took this to CES.

I didn't really have, uh, good experience with it and everything. They've released multiple updates to this thing since and it was working great. Oh, nice. Right? So I took it to Ottawa with me and it's like the foundation of everything because once you plug it in, all my devices just connect. to that SSID or, you know, as we call it, Cid. And it's Canadian pronunciation.

I was getting some flag for that. But yeah, everything just connects easily to that Cid. And it's setup was great, easy. And whatever updates they did make things better. You can even rename the, um, the Cid to something other than your home network. So you can plug it in at home and it's not no longer going to clash. So they've been listening and they've been updating it. and it's been working a lot better.

So now I just plug in my fire TV, which I also take with me everywhere, and I run M-B-On and we get all our TV shows and everything like perfect. T.J., you talked about the anchor, foldable three and one last week, I believe it was, right? I finally got to break out mine. That thing's great.

It's silent. I don't, I didn't hear a fan at all. And I love the fact that it came with the, the brick as well, right? It came with the cable, it came with a brick, and it charged all my devices. I also have their foldables. It's their Maggo wireless charging station, which is it's like three pieces that kind of fold on top of each other. I travel with that one as well for the wife. If we have two devices, I'll take that one as well.

And you just unfold it and you put all your devices on it. Um, yeah. And then I got to break out the nano charger with the screen because, you know, I had to charge some other stuff with that little screen. So I got to see it and actually use it. So those anchor devices work really well. They're so nice, and they feel good too, you know? They're nice quality. Yeah, and they charge fast.

So, I mean, like, that's why I've purchased from Anchor in the past. And I've always been happy with their stuff. But, yeah. Oh, wow. Just kind of looping back. I was, I was wondering if that Unified Travel Router updates have been done. I was wondering if you needed to have your Unified Network router, because I don't have one. They added wire guard.

They have wire guard now. For $79 dang dollars, I can get this when it's not sold out and use the wireguard connectivity back to the house. And it's smaller than a pack of cards. It's so small. That's what I was looking at. Yeah. I remember when you guys had it, it was very small. And, I mean, the G-LINet things that we've been running are just a little bit bigger.

But this would be just that much smaller. It fits in the box a little bit better. Even on the plane, like it's nice because you can take it on the plane and you just set it up on the plane and you can have, if you have Wi-Fi in the plane, you can have multiple, all your devices just go through that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did that on an international flight once. Yeah. Cool. That's really cool. Yeah, good to know. Don't need your life for it. It wraps up my projects this week, though. TJ, what you've been breaking, man? What's going on? You're okay?

Oh, yes. I've been breaking everything. Yeah, so I decided for no real reason that I would go ahead and upgrade my Z-wave and Zigby antennas. I went ahead and got the home assistant Nabukasa antennas, you know, the ZWA 2 and the ZBT2, nice devices. And this is, like, I think I bought them like the week after I was like,

I'm not going to buy these hubs because I don't, I don't have anywhere to put them. I'm going to mount them on the wall and stuff like that. But now I have a 3D printer, and mounting stuff on the wall is not hard because I can just print a mount for it. And so I decided I was like, I want to go ahead and upgrade my antennas, and I'm going to get them outside my rack,

and it'll be nice. You know, I have these nice new Nabucasa. antennas. The Z-Wave version at first was difficult. I have Z-Wave, J-S-U-I, but ultimately moving that was relatively easy. I didn't have any problems with that. Then came the trouble part of having to migrate adapters and Zigby to MQ-T-T. And Gavin's smiling because he already knows the struggle in this. I actually asked Gavin just to do it for me. I was like, Gavin, I will literally pay you. You just tell me what you want, like how much money you want. I'll pay you to do it.

And he was like, I don't want to do it. And that's how you know it's awful. Like, if Gavin doesn't want to like, he, like, he sent me instructions. So, like, he wasn't, like, trying to, like, get out of it all together. But when Gavin doesn't want to help you with something, that means it's bad, right? Because it's not good. And so what you basically have to do is, like, there's a ton of videos and, like, instructions on all this. But there's not, like, an official, like, migrate adapter option, you know?

Like, in ZHA, the thing that actually comes with home assistant that you can just, like, use for Zigby. there's a there's a migrate adapter option crazy idea right that at some point you're going to have to migrate your adapter well z to m doesn't think that you're going to ever have to migrate your adapter because they made it like super hard to do so and so i was like i looked at the instructions i tried to do it it failed i tried a couple times i actually spent like two days on the weekend to like attempt it like i didn't like spend a lot of time i'm not going to lie like i attempted it for like 30 minutes each time and i was like this sucks then i gave up and i came back the next day And so I decided just to nuke my entire Zigby operation I had going on, which was fine for the most part, right?

There was like some annoying things. Like some of my outlets didn't work for my cameras. But because I used Zigby binding with all my light switches and my lights, like all my lights continue to work. But obviously none of the automations worked. And so I've been slowly like adding my devices back to ZTM. I'm like up to like 80 devices and not even done yet. I have like a bunch of water leak sensors behind like my washer and stuff I have to find. But I've got a lot of the stuff set back up.

So I'm slowly rebuilding. But it's been kind of nice. You know, I've been in the house for going on three years now, I think. And there's a lot of, like, junk that I've added over the years. I've just, like, never taken out or anything. And so it's kind of given me an opportunity to, like, restart and, like, better name things, right? Because I've never gone through it. I've actually, like, I haven't fixed, like, some of the names for things because I'm like, well, it works.

Why do I need to fix the names for anything? And so it's kind of give me the opportunity to do that. So it's getting there. I went ahead and bought, I was using the SkyConnect, like the original Nabucasa hub. And I was using that. I went ahead and just bought another ZBT2

so I can use that for thread as well. So I have all home assistant hubs now. So hopefully it'll be easy to migrate in the future. You think? That's the dream, I guess, right? That's the dream. Not if you use Z-T-M. I mean, if you use Z-T-M, you're screwed.

But everything else, they have a migrated adapter. migrate adapter option. It's crazy that Z-2M does not make that easy. Why? Why? I don't know. And in general, I've just, well, you know, this is kind of a good time. We're coming into spring.

It doesn't feel like it because we got snow a couple days ago. But we're coming into spring, and so I'm doing some spring cleaning at home assistant. I'm going through, I'm getting rid of some old add-ons and integrations that I don't use anymore. Like, for example, drone mobile, I use that for the van. Dron Mobile killed the API for that, so it doesn't work. anymore, but I was still installing it, you know, or I was still installed. Um, show me vacuums. I don't have a show me vacuum anymore, you know, but I was still like updating that like every

week when it comes out with a new update. So I removed that. There's been a couple of things I've just like, I'm, I've never used this or I'm never going to use this again. And I've just went ahead and deleted it. So it's kind of the, I think it's time that we start talking about doing some spring cleaning, uh, in your home automation system. So maybe we'll do some, some talk about that in the future.

But, um, I've just been cleaning up old junk. because I figured, you know, home assistant for me is broken right now because I can't control a lot of my stuff because half the devices in my house are Zigby. So if I'm going to break stuff, I might as well just do it all the way and fix it as we go. That sounds like everyone's home assistant though. Yeah. Things are just broken. Yeah. I think it's just how it goes.

Yeah. That's why I don't care about updates. You know, like I break stuff myself anyway. Like, I don't need to worry about the updates breaking things. Like, that's the least of my concerns. I don't think mine's broken. I mean, it doesn't do anything. I think it's broken.

You wouldn't even know if it's broken. I wouldn't. I honestly wouldn't. If it is broken, now I know who I can tell. Like, hey, go fix this. And Henry just plods off and goes and does something. I guess the interesting thing is that the API,

like the API you can make changes, but they don't get saved past a reboot. So there's something weird there. Hmm. Yeah. Let's see. All right. I think that's everything, then.

That's it. We've all been busy, except for me. I'm not been busy. You're always busy. Just, yeah. Yeah, random stuff. Busy with not fun stuff, though. You've got to do some fun stuff once in a while.

Yeah, exactly. Not spring cleaning, though. That's not fun. Well, yeah. Nice try, DJ. It's necessary. No, it's not. I'll keep these entities in here until I die.

Never delete. Nope. Is there an archive button? I don't want to delete these. What if I get this random thing back? What if I get a Xiaomi backpacking cleaner? I think that's going to wrap up this week. We want to give a big thank you to everyone for listening.

the show. I want to send a big 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 HombTick.fm slash support to learn how you could become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge gets you a big shout out on the show right on here.

We'll say hi. How's it going? But every single pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat the hub where you and other patrons of the show can jump in there and talk about all sorts of fun. You could talk about all the Mac stuff that got released. that was going on in there.

What are we talking about? Evidently, I didn't know that those things caught on fire, but TJ took a bunch of pictures of spool things. That's a lot of spool stuff. Looks like it's Jimmy's birthday. Happy birthday, Jimmy. So happy birthday, Jimmy. Oh, and that you control keynote.

Did you guys watch that? That was really cool. We'll have to get one of those guys on the show. If you don't know about you control, we'll put a link to that maybe in the show notes too. because it was a really cool keynote that Owen posted. I don't, I think they're over here in the States. Man, they've got a nice looking remote.

I'm not going to lie. I like the month-long battery. And, yeah, they've got a full control platform for controlling stuff. So I think they're kind of like Apple-centric, it seems. So that's accurate out. Anyway, we got all that. We got all that there. And now, if you want to check it out, just go over to hometech.com.

slash support. If you can't support the show financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review and podcast app, your choice. That's going to wrap up everything on the show this week. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. All right, I'm ready. I've been recording this whole time, and five minutes in. All right, let's do this. You ready. I think DJ's ready. Let's do it. I'll fall asleep here soon. Geez. Play some rooms, room, room skate. Rune-scape. It's like D&D? Uh, no.

It's like, I don't actually know how to describe it. I guess it's like World of Warcraft, but not that. It's an old-timey MMR-PG. Bless you. Thank you. I don't know what you just said to me. It's old-timey. Oh, yeah, it does a cold-timey.

Yeah. It's got like, uh, like, uh, the lady in the lake. It's got Merlin and the crystal, you know. But it looks like a five-year-old drew the artwork. Well, yeah. I mean, that's, uh, it's probably true. Okay. That's not, that's a gnome?

Oh, man.