HomeTech.fm - Episode 573 - Backdoors, Bots, and Baby Monitors

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

On this week’s show: Ubiquiti doubles down with a new UniFi NVR and a major Protect 7.1 update, Unraid ditches the USB stick (finally) with internal boot, and smart vacuums are getting weirder, Blink goes 2K on a budget, Yarbo promises to close its mower’s backdoor, the FBI is resetting routers, and over a million cameras were alarmingly open to hackers. All of this, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 15th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Mason, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. The podcast is all about home automation, home technology, and T.J. just being everywhere about home, it seems, wow. Yeah, I'm never home. It's really sad at this moment. I want to sleep in my bed, you know?

Hotel beds are never good. And this trip, we actually forgot the pillows, too. So I would have to use hotel pillows, which are always the thin as possible pillows. You're never great. They look nice. And then unless you lay on them and you're just, you may as well just compress instantly, you know. I like my hotels at, uh, or my, my pillows at Hotel Gavin. Those ones are pretty nice.

Oh, yeah. We like the fluffy pillows. Yeah. You guys have good ones. Well, how was, how was Canada? How was Hotel Gavin? It was pretty nice, honestly. It was, uh, we, we drove up there with Justin from Apollo Automation.

I think we left at like 5 o'clock in the morning or something like that. We ended up getting there like 2, 2 o'clock, I think. We stopped a lot. We started in Niagara Falls. We saw that. That was kind of nice, you know. A bunch of water rushing over a cliff. So, yeah.

Very, very fast water. And then we made our way up to Canada. So it was a good trip, honestly. Sounds like, I didn't realize you're so. I guess you're really close, actually. Yeah, I think it was like eight hours altogether. Yeah. To Gavin.

And Niagara Falls is all I think is like. like six hours. I drove across the entire state of New York to get to Niagara Falls, and it felt like it took forever. I don't know why. A big state. Yeah. I guess it is just about the same distance. I was at a two-year-old in tow, so everything takes forever when you have to stop every, you know, 20 or 30 minutes. Well, this trip was nice because Justin has a Tesla, and he drove it all the way there, and it had full self-driving. So it pretty much drove itself, I would say, the majority of the way. So that was the first cross-country road trip I've done in quite a while where I did not have to drive. That is nice.

So you just stuck it on an autopilot and just went on down the road? He didn't have to. Yeah. Wow. That is nice. It's pretty cool because we took it all over the city, too. And every time we took it, we'd just let it drive itself to everywhere. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Gavin was obsessed with Lenn to Park itself. It did good most of the time. Even when the lines weren't super obvious, it did a pretty good job. Yeah. Yeah. And those things are fast. Like, I'm glad we don't have this on video, but we're going around the corner. He's like, you want to feel it?

I was like, sure. As soon as you hit the straightaway, let's, ah! You got him both in the cellbus instantly, you know what I mean? It's like zero to 60, like zero seconds, you know? Like, oh. I don't want to say anything. We had to get the car detail the next thing. That's fine.

I apologize. It sounds like you guys have a lot of funny. And I'm assuming all the wires got ran. all the cameras are installed, right? Yeah? I mean, I had to, like, twist his arm to get more wires installed. Like, we ran the doorbell, and he was like, well, that's it. I was like, what do you mean, that's it?

Like, oh, and the chime. Doorbell and a chime. Oh, yeah, the chime, my bad. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in typical customer fashion, Gavin didn't listen to me. I was like, look, Gavin, we need to cut a hole right here on the wall where the doorbell is going to go. And then we need to cut one down below, and that's how we can get the wire.

And he goes, he goes, well, I think we could just remove the trim. We could just remove the trim. be easier. And I don't, I was like, I don't think it is. And he said, he decided to remove the trim. And he got the trim off. And I said, yep, look, there's no room here. We can't run the wire. And so now I have two holes still. Oh, me. Yeah. After he ran those two wires, I saw how many holes got cut. I was like, all right, we're good. We're good. I did cut one unnecessarily in as well. That was my fault, and I pointed it out. But that's kind of your, kind of your karma, I think. So.

Thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. At least it's an easy fix. Yeah. Just hide it with the mirror. Yes. No one stole Justin's car. That sounds like it was all right.

He had to park in the garage most inside. I told him to park it in the garage a whole time. All right. Safe and sound. Nobody wants my car. Man. I mean, I saw a bunch of pictures. I mean, Gavin, honestly, like, you live in a nice neighbor.

I just don't understand with all this stuff you're talking about. Well, it's not the people in my neighborhood. It's the people from outside the neighborhood. That come checking the cars and stuff like that. And they see that Gavin's nice things. That's why they target, well, now I'm going to have a whole bunch of cameras, some P-D's and stuff.

So that's going to be exciting when I finally get around to ordering it. Yeah, so we did run the doorbell and the chime. And then I installed two cameras in the driveway for Gavin, or two wires in the driveway for Gavin so that way he can add cameras there if you wanted to. I was going to do the one up top like overlooking his pool, but I knew Gavin would never get on a ladder that high to actually

install the camera and so I'd never did anything with him. I was like, see, this is why you have cameras then before I get there because you're going to have a nice camera overlooking the pool and see everything. Your next visit. Your next visit. Yeah. I could get

the neighbor to do it if I wanted to, but he would. He would. The only problem, he's old school. So explaining to him what I want to do half the time is the hard part. That takes longer than the install. Why do you want a camera here? Just put one of those solar ones in.

Come on. Yeah. I remember when I got my echo bee. He's like, what do you want an echo bee for? Just get this old school thing. It never fails. What do you want to echo? What are you going to do with an echo bee?

Now he calls me all the time. He's like, I need you to come help me program this person's echo bee. Yeah. It's happened to meet plenty of times. Yeah. I did get to meet Gavin. neighbor who within like 30 seconds offered me the video of Gavin falling into the pool last year with his sonosa's headphones, right? And as a joke, I put it in the Slack channel that I'd be

willing to sell it for a $20 a month Patreon subscription. And somebody offered up $20. And so I sent in the video. Nobody else was offered up $20, though. Yeah. We know one person. I haven't even seen it. So that's how exclusive this video is. is. So, so the story of this is he came, my neighbor came home one day. He was having the worst day possible. And I felt so bad for him. I go, you think you had a bad day? And I go, you know, what just happened to me. And I showed him the video and he instantly, his day just turned around. You know, he, he was laughing so hard. And for days, he was like, send me the video, send me the video, send me the video. I want to show my wife, send me the video. And

And I was like, fine, here. Within five minutes, he texted it to all my friends. He's been on Facebook. Like, I had my friends messaging me going, nice video. And I was like, how did you? Oh, yeah. Submitted it to one of those Canadian comedy shows things. It was hilarious.

He asked me right away. He goes, have you seen the video? I said, no. And he showed me the video. And then he goes, do you want it? Send it to yourself. Yeah. I mean, how can I not take advantage of that?

Well, that's why I have the VR one with him, right? That was just as funny too. Oh, my God. So we took them to a VR area, a VR gaming place once, right? And he's in the machine. There's one game where you walk out onto a plank in virtual plank, right? And you're supposed to jump off of it.

So we were telling him, walk off the plank and jump. And he literally ran forward and dove, right? And the couch with his wife was in front. He landed on her. The couch, all the keyboard, the computer came down, everything. Oh, yeah. It was, yeah. So I have that video of him and he has my pool video.

It's funny. Yeah, I mean, if our listeners knew who he was, I would sell the video too, if that makes you feel any better. But other than that, we went to the Jays game. We saw it took you guys, he saw downtown Toronto. It's not really exciting. It wasn't. Lots of good food to eat.

It was pretty clean, though. I mean, cleaner than New York City. I mean, New York City just walk around. There's just stuff everywhere. It was not Toronto, at least. There was a Trump flag, though. It's not something I wanted to see right outside the train station. That's kind of weird.

I mean, there was some, like, delegates coming up and stuff. Oh, okay. Obama was in town and stuff, too. And then, you know, I took him to the beach by the house, and we walked, it was cold, but we walked it. And they could see the... We saw a nuclear plant. It was pretty nice.

Our nuclear plant was in the background, so they got to see that too. So, yeah, it was pretty good. If you guys came up for longer, we'd have more to do. Yeah, we weren't up there for many days. I think it was like three full days. Yeah.

We still did a lot. We went to Petapalooza. You know, we got to see pets and dogs available for adoption and stuff. We saw dogs jumping into water, seeing how far they could jump. Oh, that's entertainment. I mean, honestly, that would go for a lot.

It was very good. Who knew they did stuff in Canada? It's crazy. All sorts of fun stuff. It sounds like America. You should just be a state. I mean, it's basically the same thing. Yeah.

This is welcome. If it cuts back on shipping, sure. At some point that you guys are to be like, we give up. We surrender. Yeah. So we went to a bar Saturday night and, you know, we were ordering drinks. And the girls just like, We have no American alcohol here.

But their menu involved American alcohol. So I was there on Wednesday talking to her. And apparently they don't get American alcohol in that bar anymore because tariffs make it so expensive. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I don't drink, so I didn't know that, right? And I thought it was only the electronic stuff because I, you know, well, clearly we don't have tariff on alcohol.

But mostly the stuff I buy is affected in that way. So that's, I did not, I did not know that. Yeah. Learn something new. Speaking of learning and stuff, we've got a bunch of stuff to learn today. We've got a bunch of new products. Of course, we didn't know if there's going to be a show this week. We were just going to talk about what you guys did in Canada,

but ubiquities come out with something. So I guess, you know, it means we have to have a show. We can't have a week this week of that ubiquity coming out with something. So what do you guys say? We jump into these home tech headlines. Let's do it. All right. Yeah, well, ubiquity has a new unified protected network video recorder G2.

It comes in the pro. And I think there's two variants of this. One is like a 1U and a 2U. And so if you've got the UNVR, the regular one, I guess the UNVR G2 is just the 1U rack mount one. And there's a UNVR G2-Dash Pro, which is the 2U rack mount. And it has up to 8, 3.5, 8 hard-to-drive base,

What's cool about these, this new G2, it has HTML output on it and built-in AI event analytics. Woo! Yeah, yeah. So, TJ, you and I were talking about a little bit about this one before the show. But I think this little, the G2, the regular old G2 is going to be a winner for a lot of people. What was it? 699?

Yeah, so it's 699 for the, it's four hard drives. So, I mean, that's plenty for a lot of small businesses. 34K cameras or 60 HD cameras, which I think they classify as 1080P. So really the winning point of this is the H.TMI output, because that is not included on like any NVRs at this point. It's really just the NVR instant. And then also the AI build into it as well. So with this, you can actually search for like, you know,

person with Red Hat or, you know, whatever actual specific term you want, which is really nice once you actually. actually start using it. So I know some other companies that I actually use that have this capability, but they charge a monthly fee for it. So the fact that you can do this full free is great. So if you have this, you don't need that AI key thing then, right? Correct.

Yeah, and it's like, what, $1,000 for the AI key or something by itself. Yep, and the G2 Pro is $1,000, $9.99 US. But what I thought was interesting, too, on these, they're building in the, these have like, I guess this is part of the software update that comes, that introduces alongside of this because they've updated, you know, sometimes you have to update your software

to have new model numbers and new capabilities. The software actually updates for SIA-D-C-O-9, which is a way that you can integrate your cameras, the camera system, in with alarm monitoring stations. So in locations where that's a required thing where they have to have like a visual dispatch or something like that, you could use the, you could use these,

cameras to integrate with those alarm services and not have some janky alarm panel system hooked up to it that, you know, that has arguably worst-looking cameras and worse cameras than what you get from ubiquity. So I think this is pretty nice. Nice update all around. You can now fully customize your dashboard widgets if you want. Yeah, the actual update for itself was pretty sweet. They had another new product to the Superlink remote control. this is something you can tie in to open a gate, for example, by pressing a button. So they got a couple of new products that came out recently. It's like a little car fob thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Four buttons, one, two, three, four, press the button. It does something. Yeah. I didn't even realize they modified the design of the, like the G2. It's a different front design to it. It looks nice. Yeah, actually does look pretty nice.

Yeah. The other nice thing about the software, too, is that they added a support for on VIF. audio and motion detection. So there is some other possibilities with the on-fif cameras there, which is pretty nice. Interesting.

What looks different about the front of these? It's like the hard drive is recess instead of flush mount. Yeah, compare it to the NVR. Take a look at the NVR is a more flat design on the front, where on the G2 it's beveled in a way. They have it like recessed. Yeah, it does look pretty nice. maybe it's a little less

easy to accidentally pop those drives when they're running, huh? You ever done that? Yeah, I have done that. They also do specifically state on the NVR page that they support 2.5 inch drives, which I don't remember them really talking about that in other NBRs.

They haven't talked about it, but I remember seeing it on there. I think it's on the other one as well. The UNVR? Yeah, it's like the, UNVR instant says 3.5 inch hard drive and then the, I guess the, so the NVR, the UNVR on the diagram says 3.5,

but in the actual description it says 2.5 and 3.5. Yeah. So, yeah, kind of weird that they specified it. Same connector, just different place for the screw holes. That's all. At least has a 10G SFP port, too. That's kind of nice. It'll be free up some of the congestion

across the little slower Ethernet. I don't remember. Was the alarm hub kit out last time we talked? We've talked about it, but I don't, what's it running? What's the price? $3.99. Yeah, it was a kit, though.

The individual parts weren't out. Yeah, that's what it is. Even good, he's always got something. Mm-hmm. Yeah, keep running across things on their website. I'm like, oh, when did they start doing that? We got some stuff from Ufi. They've got a new RoboVAC.

A couple weeks ago, we had the same. skeet vac. Well, this one is a, is a smelly one. This one will go around spraying, I guess, air freshener in your house. So while it's vacuuming, it will, yeah. I mean, there's always something here. I don't know. That's the trick for this one. They will, they will, they will, they will spray your house with citrus and basil, bamboo and sage and burgomot and leachy, I guess. It's a new $1,600 or $1,600 euro, Ufi robot vacuum Omni S2. And it's got a can of a breeze inside of it, I guess. I like how the base stations for these things just keep getting more and more obnoxious. I mean, look at this thing.

I actually can't tell how tall it is, but it looks very tall. Where am I going to put this at? In the middle of the living room, like this picture is telling me I should. I don't think so. You should, yeah. Yeah, right in the middle. That's right. They're coming up with all sorts of gimmicks now.

Like, it's pretty much a mature thing. And, you know, I've never complained that under my bed smelled bad, so, you know, I guess this will take care of that, you know. It's an integrated aromatherapy module built to the robot itself. There we go. Also, what's this thing here? It's not mentioned on the page anywhere that has like a ozone. piece to the, in the water tank? What are they doing here? I don't know. It happens here in Florida. Like, if I don't get over there, if I don't change the tanks like every day or every other day,

like it can get all like nasty and moldy or something. So I don't know. If there you have something inside the water tank where it like cleans, cleans it during the day, that'd be nice. Oh, here, ozinated water to help clean the mop clean. So it does, it must do something with a water. to keep the mops gleam. That'd be nice. And I've been on the market for a robo vac, but another one, but I just want the vacuum. I don't want the mopping, but it seems like they're all coming with mopping features now,

and the ones with the vacuums are like the older models. Now they move past, they're starting to move past the mopping. They're doing scents and squirting on your floor. And yeah, there's all sorts of gimmicks now, Gavin. I might be in the market for one, too. Mine has stopped mopping. I don't know. was kind of, we were talking about like this thing

is it's driving around with dry mop pads. I don't know what's caused it to just start doing this. And there's like all sorts of theories that you can do. This is the, I think it's the, the Chaumi version. Myho or, you can't remember the name of this. Dreamy. Dreamy. Yeah, the Dreamy bot thing.

Yeah. I don't know. There's all sorts of theories about what you can do. Like squirting water, like, to try and clear out the, like, where the water inlet goes in from the thing. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, this is a bunch of people on Reddit telling you what to do. I may have to call them up and see if there's any suggestions.

Kind of sucks, though. If they wanted a feature to add, why don't they add like baseboard cleaning to it? Little brushes on the side of it that clean off your baseboards, too, because I still have to go and clean all the baseboards. Yeah. Yeah, to knock off the dust off the baseboard shelf, that'd be nice. Yeah. No, no, no.

They'll just make your house smell a little bit better. With Ozone-Aid water. It's probably a subscription service where we've got to order the modules or something. Can't refill them yourself. It also has matter control, if anybody cares. It's basic. Stop cleaning and send it back to the dock.

So it basically works like our lawnmowers do right now. The nice part with matter integration and home assistant, certain models, you could map the rooms to home assistant areas, which is pretty cool because then you could command it to go clean an area from home assistant. So, but only certain vacuums and stuff, yeah. Might not be this one, because it says the integration is pretty basic. So, yeah, speaking of basic, the, uh, Amazon has announced two new 2K,

blink video doorbell models, a wired only model and a battery model. Uh, the blink wire doorbell 2K, hate these Amazon names, uh, is blink, is Blink's first-wire doorbell that doesn't require the blink sync module, though it still can actually work with one. Dropping the batteries makes it smaller, but also means that it has no backup if the power goes

out. The battery doorbell 2K can run on lithium-d-A batteries and requires a sync module. And both doorbells work with the blink smart video descriptions, which syntax summaries and alerts basically saying

there's a person with the red hat playing basketball, or walking up your driveway, taking your packages. Let's see, how much are these things? The 2K wired is $49. The battery one is $69, and the battery doorbell with the sync module, which you'll need if you don't already have one, is $79. So not bad. These are always cheap, but, you know,

I know people that have these and like them because it's pretty straightforward. Plus a subscription. Yeah, it looks pretty obvious where the button for the doorbell is, too. That's always a bonus. They know how to design a doorbell over there at Amazon. Good job. I like the AI descriptions, though. Like when Ring added it, I started messing with my neighbor,

and I would do weird things to just see what the description came up. But so many times it's like, there's a stranger looking into your vehicle or trying to open your vehicle door. He would open the door faster when he got that notification. Let's see. Some more security news here. We've got a slew of security news here.

The FBI may have rebooted your router recently. If they have, you probably need to get a new one because it can have. I swear they've done this before. But all right. So there's a... It's forever old. That's why you need a new one. Yeah, exactly.

This GR linked APT28, aka the Fancy Bear people have had these router access things set up where they can go in and they were using these were like botnets in the past is what I remember they've been using it for

but they hack the routers they put in this software stuff and it just sits there as ready to do its thing or maybe it can intercept credentials tokens whatever you've got a bad router it looks like TPLink models were targeted

in this situation. I guess the FBI had gone in and pushed a reset button on this because the reset will dump the bad firmware

from memory, but it doesn't solve the problem that the router isn't updated. So at this point, if you have one of these old routers

that is being hacked and the FBI is rebooting it for you. Maybe it's time to go buy a new one. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's funny reading the comments.

It was funny to read the comments on some of the articles because people are like, I can't believe the FBI. allowed to do this. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's already compromised. Yeah. It's like, you're causing problems everywhere else. They should just brick it and be like, I don't know what happened. That's what I was saying. Destroy it. Yeah. Tons of TV links are on this list.

We'll put a link to the article in the show. It's pretty much most. They're all like wireless and routers. You know what I mean? They're like old G routers and stuff like that. So I'm sure there's some newer stuff on the list, but most of these are very old. Well, if you have a TV link, well, you're not going to buy a new TV link because they're not on the list. They're not in America, at least. But if you have one of these old versions, it's time to update. Pay another $30 for new TP Link router. Get it put in.

Let's see. A million baby monitors and security cameras were, I guess, easily viewable by hackers. Many Wi-Fi baby monitors and security cameras tied to the Chinese white label maker Miri technology, meeri, I guess is how you may say that. were dangerously insecure, exposing around 1.1 million cameras across 118 countries. Yeah. When we were looking for baby monitors, there were all these Wi-Fi ones out there. And I was like, nope, not going to happen.

Like, no. One, there's a delay on them. Like, it's not like live. So we just went with the good old-fashioned RF1, and I had it for a long time before we actually stopped using it. it worked well. The video is 100% live. It doesn't break. And the only thing you had to worry about it was the battery would die from time to time.

Like you have to get a new battery for it. But these things, man, there's no way I'd use a Wi-Fi baby monitor. No thanks. See these companies like $30. They're not very expensive baby monitors. I'm not going to lie. But like I don't know who these companies are. I don't know who's made this software.

I don't know that the servers are secure. Clearly they're not. Yeah, definitely not. They said that some of the biggest customers for this company is wise, so that's always a good sign. But they had a server with all of their 678 employees with their emails and phone numbers, and he sent a message through each ad to the CEO or the boss.

So it's like, this is how I got a number from this way, blah, blah, blah. So it's been like this for a while. So don't see this getting fixed anytime soon. They said that they changed their password and they shut down whatever it was doing. I hope they didn't just add a number to the end. No, they had the exclamation mark on the end. Yeah, there you go. And they replaced the letter E with a three.

And, yeah, it's hackproof now. They said it only affects firmware 3.3.0 and below, but they want customers to update. So they've told you now, it's your fault. You have an update. I bet you 90% of their customers have no clue. No clue, yeah. They don't know anything about it. That's the issue with technology.

Like when we talked about the routers, I bet you most people won't even know their routers mess up. They'll just be like, my Internet's not working. working. Yep. And they'll change from Wi-Fi over to, uh, you know, to their cell service and just use that. Yep, yep. Well, uh, last one here in the security world, Yarbo. The, says that they will completely remove a remote backdoor from the robot lawnmower that they had set up. Uh, pretty much it allowed anyone to go in and reprogram the more over the internet. Uh, co-founder Kenneth Coleman tells the verge that, that, that, customers will be able to decide whether the remote access feature gets installed at all.

What is this? I guess it's for authorized internal company personnel to troubleshoot the devices. I mean. So this story is actually changing a bit. Is it? Is it? It's been updates since, yeah. They've said they were going to leave the intentional backdoor, but secure it more.

The reason why is they say they need to still get into the lawnmowers to help. support them remotely, right? Well, at that point, like, put a feature in the app where they can request access to your lawn more. You can click, yes, allow them, and then they get the access. Exactly. That's the way to do it. Don't just leave these intentional backdoors.

Yeah, that's what some other companies do as well. You have to literally go in there and approve it. I think even Samsung TVs have this option now. Yeah, yep, they do. You go on there, like, give them a code or something like that. That way they can actually see your stuff. So this definitely is possible on how I think it should be handled as well. Yep.

I was looking at, what was that, the little ADESB receiver, I have tracking all the airplanes, right? There was a feature in there. It's like, this thing is off. And I'm like, what the heck is this? It's exactly, I did a Google search on it. And it was, it's just a little, it is the back door. If you're having problems with it, that you can,

the company that is collecting the data from this thing can remote in and kind of poke around and see, it just kind of gives them access to, to log into the device remotely. but it's like you have to like physically like go in while you're on the phone with them I guess and turn it on right and I guess if you're that far at least they know that the raspberry pie that I'm hosting it on is up and going but they have the ability to go in and do it when the customer wants not like always on and just like yeah we we need to get in there and really figure out what's going on no no come on now they're going to put password on it so everything would be okay yeah it's right it's the parts of things go the road we're about lawnmower is probably like the least of my concern. Like maybe they'll make it drive down into the ditch or something, but I'm not, I would, I would not worry about that one too much. Like if it was the Wi-Fi baby monitor, that one for sure. Update, lock it down. For sure. All right, well, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over in our show notes at hometech.com slash 574. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week.

This comes from Jake, and he was putting up this really cool. He was showing us this really cool, like, install he did with one of those, like, wall hanging TV things. It was a calendar. Yeah, he had, like, a calendar on it. And he was like, he sent a picture to us. He's got a nice little picture here. It looks like some guy just working around a pool, you know? So family photo or something like that.

It was like a cold day. I mean, you know, it looks like the pool was half full or anything. It was a cold day. It was a cold day. The pool was half full. Man. The guy's in full clothing, heavy clothing. You know.

I mean the guy. Isn't that you? What a nice install, though, right? Like, I mean, it's a really well, really clean. It's really clean. There's no wires running from down behind the thing. It's like all tucked. Yeah.

I mean, really. nice. I don't know how it should be. Yeah. I know what that photo is. It's really strange, Gavin. It just seems familiar. It seems familiar. Whatever. And then there's a second one.

He edited it to make it look like I was pushing Gavin in the pool. Allegedly. I just want to go on the record and say I did not shoot that. Well, it's right there. It's on his wall screen thing. It's AI. That picture of you pushing me in the pool

looks more real than. the Trump, half the Trump posts out there now. Oh, man. It's true. Yeah. Thought he was a doctor. Let's see. If you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the show, picks of the week.

Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or you can head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out that online form. Project updates. Gavin, you're talking about your work working around the house. And TJ kept talking about the pee-pee you guys were working on. Yeah, Gavin's pee-pee. Justin was blown on Gavin's peepee a lot during that time.

Just like, what are they talking about? So I figure I just wait to find out now. You're going to stay until like 2 or 3 a.m. Just blown on Gavin's peepee. Wow. You can make everything sound like bad. So one of the things Justin did when he was here is he created a pool pressure sensor for me. Oh.

For my pool, my pool filter. Gotcha. So when you have a pool, the filter collects things out of the water. stuff, but then the pressure builds up into it. And you have to backwash everything out of it every now and then. Right. You look at the little gauge, and if it's too high, you know that the filter's clogged. And you kind of, you need to clean it out.

You backwash it out and it's good for a little bit longer. Yeah, exactly. So what he did is he created one using the various Apollo parts. I had that sensor actually because it was on my list of projects I wanted to do. But he took everything and threw it all together and created an ESP home battery-powered sensor that I would just put in and now I'm getting all the the pressure readings from my pool and I've even automated it to notify me. So it calculates, you know, the lowest point at when the pressure was, which is usually after I have backwashed it. And then it will calculate, you know, a certain

percentage above that and notify when it goes above there and say, hey, time to backwash the pool. Ah, that's cool. I mean, that's really handy, honestly. Like, yeah. And so you had, you already had the sensor sitting there. He just had to. hook it up to the board. He wired it up. He flashed the firmware and created, he spent a lot of time trying to get a Zigby version of it working because I wanted the Zigby version because it's better battery life, right?

But we're just having too many problems with the Zigby. It's still experimental at this point. So he, before he left, he quickly threw on the ESB home one. And it's been working great since I've been sending them graphs of the pressure from the pool. You could see what I backwashed it and how the pressure just drops. And it was going up because I was clean. me out the pool. So all the gunkos getting in there. So it works great. I'm happy about that.

Awesome. Yeah. It's the ESP home stuff. They have a ton of it over and a pot. I mean, it's kind of what the whole company's based around. Like, it's so good for like just if you have that sensor, right, you can figure out how to take one of his modules, like one of the development modules or anything really and just like adjust a couple of settings. in a YAML file to say, this is what this is, is how you read it, upload the firmware,

it works. It works, it puts the, like, the entities there in home assistant or wherever else that you can hook up to, uh,

to ESP home. I, it's a really, they're really doing a good job over there. I've been very impressed with it. My, my one gripe about the ESB home sensors, though,

and I'm going to bug Justin and see if we can fix it somehow, but when it comes to the battery sensors, because of the way they work, they have to go to sleep. and then you program and you say wake up every hour and report. And they'll wake up, connect your Wi-Fi back, send over the report, and then go back to sleep. The problem is, is when you reboot your home assistant,

that sensor now will be offline and unavailable until next time it wakes up and checks in, right, because of how things work. It doesn't retain. Oh, it doesn't persist it. Okay. Yeah, it doesn't retain the previous value or anything, which is what I want to see if we can get that working. because now every time I reboot my home assistant, this sensor will be offline until the next time it reports in.

Yeah. And it just messes up some of my reporting for online offline devices. So that's my only gripe with the ESP home with the battery powered stuff. With the wired stuff, it's fine. As soon as it comes back up, it bings it reports in, you're back online. Does it not go straight into offline? Does it not just go, does it not have like a third unknown state that it could go to?

No, it's like unavailable. All the entities get marked as unavailable. Oh, okay. I mean, that makes sense, I guess. Until it next comes up, right? Right. Where I had issues with this was, I think it was temperature sensors or something like that.

And I have them incorporated into other groups of temperature sensors. And when they went offline, then it just threw off all the measurements, right? Until next time they reported back in. And if you have automations built on stuff like that, it kind of messes you up until they start reporting back in again. So I want to see if we can fix that. He thinks there may be a way, but I was giving them some time to relax before I start bugging him again.

What a nice guy. The other things I did, I know, I think of you guys. The other things we did there, well, after TJ wired up the doorbell and the chime, those are going well. I have the G4 doorbell, which is the previous one because I think they released the G6. now, right? But that G6 one just looks so big. It looks like they took away features, right? With the G4, it has the fingerprint reader, which is really cool because now I can just walk up my door, put my finger on it, and it unlocks my door. And you do that through the Unify console. You set up a web hook into Home Assistant, and it fires when I am unlocking the door. And, you know, I showed the wife, and she was like, cool, one of the holes in the wall could be fixed. Yeah. Yeah, five years on that. So plenty of time still.

Next time, TJ comes in. And now that I finally got the chime up, I can really see how loud the chime is after putting on my custom ding-dong. Oh, you got your ding-dong on. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's actually much louder now than the original chime effect they have. So that's really good. Now I can hear the doorbell ringing.

Yeah, those, those, the default chime is not very, Not very good. Not at all. It's not. Gavin's got the best ding-dong out of all of them. Gavin's trying for his ding-dong. It's really good. Yeah.

I just bumped it up. So if you want my ding-dong, just, you know, feedback at obtake.fm. Yeah, you can do that. You can search our website for Gavin's ding-dong. I think it's a whole episode. You know, it'll show up on there. $30 Patreon. Kim.

$30, TJ will do that for you and send the file. I posted it on my only fancy account. That's a good idea. And the other thing that came out this week was Unrate 7.3.0 stable was released. I'm not upgrading to this yet because there are some significant changes in here. One of the key changes to it, though, is the license key and how it's tied to your hardware. So before you just have a USB key and the license key was tied to the GUID on that key. But people were complaining because it was starting to get harder and harder.

It was getting harder and harder. I'm surprised because a lot of USB keys are sold without that GUID, or they're sold with the same GUID on all their keys. So it messes up the license. You have to replace mine. You have to get a specific USB key. You have to get it. And you couldn't use.

It's unavailable. You can't find one. Yeah. Yeah. As a pain. It really was. So you don't have to do that anymore? Uh, no.

So with 7.3.0, they now can tie it to the TPM on the system if you want or to the hard drive. So you can use an internal hard drive or you can even use a part of one of the pools. So they've thought of multiple ways that you no longer need a USB key. Well, so don't run out and replace your USB key if you don't have to. You know, if it's working, it's working. You can still use the USB key. But when it dies, at least you can now switch over to one of the internal drives afterwards. So it's a nice update.

There's a lot of other updates in this, but including security. And speaking of security, if you're not ready to jump to 7.3.0, they also released an update to the 7.2 stack. So they released 7.2.6, which has some critical, again, security updates in it. So if you're not going to go to 7.3.0, at least update to 7.2.6. What security issues? Various CVEs. There's been some big CVEs released lately, thanks to AI.

Yeah, the AI is cleaning things up these days and making things worse, but also cleaning things up. So I may need to investigate that. Well, I mean, for the most part, mine aren't exposed to the internet. I guess it can of R from, I've got a couple of cloud flare. Well, if someone hacks into your baby camera, they can get into it. They can get into it, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's true.

It would be, what do they call that a side attack or side channel attack or something like that? These days, I don't know how things are connected to the internet because the unraid does connect to their unraid connect. They do have, yeah, they definitely. their own API. So, yeah, so to be safe, just update your stuff. Hmm. Yeah, I don't know what, update. What version I'm hanging out on these days.

I think I've been mostly updated on these. Don't do it on the show because it's going to probably take down your network. It'll probably take down something. Yeah. Break everything. Yeah. 7.2.3 is what I'm on. Oh, you're far behind.

You got two updates to go at least. Oh, my gosh. Get to 7.7.2.6. At least get yourself to there. Worry about 7.3 later. I'm giving 7.3 a few weeks. for other people to experience. It's got a good.

You don't want a 0. Yeah. You don't want a point no. But that summarizes my projects for this week. TJ, what do you have going on? No projects for me, because as soon as I got back from Canada, I went straight on a road trip for work. So I ordered a new kitchen door that hopefully I were a place this weekend.

Maybe it's some other tech projects I got going on. So not a lot for me. What about you, Seth? Yeah, I just continue tinkering with the little ADSB video. thing. I was getting frustrated with the way it was connecting to through the ESP home, the M1 chip thing. So I was like,

well, let's look it up to a Raspberry Pi. And I had a, I was having problems with the Raspberry Pi that's outside. It's an older version, right? It's a 3B. So yeah, they're pretty old. But I mean, for the most part, it's respectable still.

I think you can still do a lot with the 3B these days. But I went ahead and ordered up a 5, a little, what they call a POE hat, the little thing you can stick on top of them to give them power, and they have a, it has a built-in fan on it. I've always wanted to buy one of those POE hats. I've never had a reason to though. Yeah, it works well. Like, uh, it, it extends like the pins that you would need for, like, the I.O. pins, it extends those up above it. Um, this one's for the three, so you don't have to worry about that, but the, the five actually just sits over the whole thing. Comes with a little,

uh, the heat sink so that you can kind of stick that on. like a real thin heat sink where you stick that on it. It's like rides the fan like sits right on top of it. And then just there's no like POE ports on these. They're just like they have the components, I guess. And it feeds the power for POE through the little Ethernet port up into this and then back down. So everything runs. It's a fun little, fun little like upgrade.

I really wouldn't hard to do. Like snap the board on and put some screws in and you're good to go. That said, like setting up the Raspberry Pi the rest of the way was not fun. I had a 128 gigabyte card that it was like flashing and flashing and flashing. I'm like, I cannot get this thing to work. And start looking online.

They're like, well, maybe the port, the SD card port is dirty. You know, blow that out. Okay, try that again. I tried flashing like a smaller version of the Pi software. No dice. So eventually I was just like, you know what? I'll just dig around

find another, I found an Amazon brand, 128 gigabyte card. We're fine. Immediately booted up where I just like went straight through it. Now you put it on the TV behind me. You can just can see the hacking going on back there. That's a fun little like thing that somebody has set up. It's like you run a command and it makes it look like your computer is being hacked by a hacker. See all that stuff is going on. It's called Hollywood. That's the command. It looks like a Hollywood TV screen. Like CSI over here. And so all that to say, like, I wanted to move the M1 screen over to the pie. I should be able to do that fairly easily and just use the screen and then be able to have

like hardwired with POE going into it. I probably still have to power the screen because I don't think that the POE has not to be enough to power the screen separately. So I probably still have to do that. But it, I don't know, just having issues with the, I think it was just the, I think it was just way that the W LED software that runs on that the M1 chip thing was, I had to like use this streaming protocol from a Docker. It would drop frames. It would drop changing lights. So sometimes you'd have like artifacts of LEDs that just stayed on when you needed to like, you'd have like gibberish.

You know, it would turn their words and letters into gibberish because some lights would still lead left on. They would just never turn off. So I don't know. I'm going to try to just moving it over to the local fast processor, you know, Raspberry 3B or the pie, the 5 will work. So we'll see what happens. And then the other thing I started working, I was

finally, I was like, I'm sitting here, I've got these development boards from Apollo. So I hooked up my development board, everything all set up here. Ooh. Yeah, it's all wired. There's extra wires. Don't bring that on a plane. Yeah. That's true. That's true. So I finally got this,

this is my light sensor thing. I'm trying to like put it all together. Um, so this like does light sensing and it will tell you what the ambient light ccc value is. So if I stick this little sensor over in the window and it's sunny outside, it has to be pretty sunny actually, then it will tell you like what the CCTV of the ambient light is outside. And you can, I'm going to take that, feed that back into home assistant and match it on the lights inside so that the outside light looks like the inside light and you don't have bright blue lights during the at night. I don't have orange lights during the day.

That sounds pretty fun. Have you listened to the adaptive lighting integration with home assistance at all? I have, but it's like a straight across the board. Like it just kind of adjusts with the day and then goes back out, right? Yeah. So like if it's an overcast day, it doesn't change, right? Yeah, that's pretty true. I'm just trying to tinker with it and see if I can use this little light sensor to get the exact value.

That it is outside your window, match it inside. And it's really not that hard. I probably just made it more hard than it should be. No. Never. Yeah. The little, this is kind of what you were saying earlier about getting Zigby working. I did Wi-Fi first Gavin because I started messing with Zigby and couldn't really.

It's like, no, I think I'm going to hold off on this. Actually, these boards, they're the ones that we were talking about that have the, they do matter too. So I could have this as a matter device. I just think the firmware may be experimental still not matured. So that's probably why he was having issues with the Zigby stuff. It's thread matter. I think it's thread. It can do thread or matter or Wi-Fi, I think.

But yeah, I'll probably stay on Wi-Fi until all the bugs get worked out. And then I can work on introducing other bugs. That's kind of way I look at it. Yeah, probably good idea. It doesn't, and Gavin, you were kind of saying, like, how the battery thing works. Yeah, that's, that's definitely tricky. That's why I have all these parts and pieces. It's crazy. Like, none of this stuff is, like, it's like $6 for a bag of, like, these charger thingies, like a little tiny chipboard things. Like, everything, it, none of this

stuff is, like, super expensive and it's all fun to kind of tinker with. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of nice. I'm getting like, to the point where I'm like, I really need to solder stuff. And, uh, it dust off those skills and, and solder something together. But for now, just experimenting. And I had to get a, I have one sensor that has like a factory calibrated sensor. I don't know if you guys could see this. And like this one is like pre-made. It's got like a little window on it.

Can you see that? It's a little white. There it is. You can see the white circle that has the sensor underneath it. But the regular sensor is over here. It's just like a chip. It's just like a little tiny chip with a hole on it. And the readings are, you know, wildly different.

And so I started reading, like, you have to go in and, like, actually find that component and see what they suggest the white thing should be over the top of the chip. And then, then you're buying, like, a $10 piece of plastic sheet from Amazon. See, you cut that and put it over. Yeah, I don't know. It's just funny. Like, all the little things that you think, you think, oh, this should be easy. I'll just wire it up together. Nope, nope.

There's all sorts of, like, learning that happens along the way. So, that's been kind of fun. And, of course, it's like the coding thing, like just sticking cloud code on something and say, hey, go, go just make this happen. I don't know, Gavin, they have this. I know you're not using the cloud code stuff, but they introduced a thing called goal, G-O-A-L. I don't know if I'm saying that. Yes. You type that in and you're like, I want it to be this at the end.

This is the end of the day. This is your project. And it just goes out and just it iterates and iterates until it figures out how to get it done. I'm like, oh, that's brilliant. They were doing such a good job over there. I guess they found it kept stopping too much. So now it's like, don't stop until you've created it. Which can run up tokens.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, the problem is, is that it, a lot of times it'll stop and say, I can do that if you want me to. I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point of what we're trying to get accomplished here. Why are you stopping and asking me? Like, just do it. So, like, I've had a couple of prompts, like, built into these things to just like make them not do that or attempt to make them not do that.

but even with some of the newer models that came out, specifically, like the newer opus, what, 4-7, yeah, 4-7, and then GBT 5, what are we on 5-5 or something like that? Yes. Yeah, that one, that one, for sure, we'll stop every time. Be like, hey, I could do this, blah, blah, blah. Like, that one likes to do the engagement thing where it's like suggesting extra things.

It'll try and do extra stuff. It's like, no, I didn't ask you. you to do that. Stop, stop. It's like, you're just trying to keep me engaged with you, so I keep using your service and blowing tokens. On the AI front, you're still using OpenClaw? It's sitting there. It is working, and I ended up actually switching it finally over to the GPT stuff. Just not the same. Just, it's not the same. And I realize, like, with every update, like, they just released like 2026.05.12 or something. And it broke everything.

All my agents and stuff. And I had to go and figure out how they get it all working again with ChatGPT. And I finally got it all working. But I realized because of all the changes, they're not as powerful as they used to be. What I've got it doing now, so I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I have eight different agents running now off of it. But what they are more or less now is just people that are agents that specialize in one thing. And that's all I talk to it about.

And I may have it do some tasks here and there. Like I have an agent called turf set up that's all about my lawn. Right. And this agent has access to my home assistant. So he can read all the sensors. like my weather station, the moisture of the soil, it can control my irrigation system if it wants, stuff like that. And it monitors the temperature, the soil temperature,

and it tells me it's time to seed or to throw down, you know, whatever, to do whatever with my lawn. So I've been kind of having more assistance created that will help me do things. I have one that just is my home lab agent. And he has access to my unraid and my unifying stuff. And I'll ask him like, I am. I'm seeing problems here, check all the logs and see if he can figure out why this is happening. Right.

I call him Raquel. That's what I've been doing now with Open Claw. Is there just purpose-specific agents, you know, like I have a financial agent. I throw them financial questions in my documents and stuff and he'll tell me about my retirement and stuff. So that's a cool one too. that's what I've migrated to. Yeah, yeah. It looks like Anthropic is back on,

I don't know. It's like such a drama thing over there with these guys. I did see there was like an announcement that said you could use the, I think it's the Claude-P command. I think that's what they were using. What they're allowing you to do is they're allowing you to use the Cloud Code CLI as the authentication, and then you can use your open claw with Claude, through that.

You have to share the files in. I couldn't get it working in my Docker, so I didn't switch back to Cloud yet, but I didn't spend a lot of time with it either. I'm still using OpenAI, which is getting a lot of love with OpenClaw. Like all their releases, they're constantly talking about Open AI, Open AI,

but like I said, every time they release an update. Yeah. Every time they release an update, though, it breaks something. And then one of the easier ways to fix it, is to run the open claw doctor, doctor, dash, fix. And it goes through and looks at everything and fixes them for you because they know they broke it, but they created a tool to fix it.

Yeah, I have mixed results on that one too. But yeah, same problems the other day when I was updating and moving stuff around and getting the, I was trying to use some local models. They just weren't. They would work, but not as good. Really, I mean, man, the big models that, that anthropic in opening I offer are the way to go right now. I will say that there's some like really promising smaller models coming out,

specifically like the Google one that they released the other day. What was that one? Gemma. Yeah, Gemma 4, I think. Yeah, yeah. And there's another one that somebody distilled Gemma, sorry, Gemini down to like a, 25 million token model thing that's supposed to have, I mean, it's like, it's trained like on like home assistant and stuff like that.

So I'm, I'm interested to, I think it's called like cactus or something. I don't have to go and look this up. I just saw it the other day. But for like, that, that's tiny. That's absolutely tiny. It's something that's going to be like working well for what you're talking about. Like just check on my home assistant, check on this. It would be perfect.

Very specific driven, yeah. I mean, on normal hardware, it's like 1,600 tokens per second. It will, and it can, it has tool use. So, like, that's probably a pretty good thing. Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be screaming fast. Well, what I've noticed is more, I don't know what you would call these, but more alternatives to open claw. So, you know, some people have pointed me at Hermes,

which was made specifically to run in Docker. and I may switch over to that at some point. I have one running. I just haven't really played with it much. Another person sent me one called craft at craft.d.r, agents.craft. But they all are like what open claw is where it kind of interacts with the LLMs to get the results. I'm going to be looking into them because I really like having an open claw type of program running. that I can work with to get things done.

And again, it's like an assistant. You know, it remembers things. It will, in the mornings, it can look up things and let me know things, stuff like that. The things I don't want to waste my time doing, it will do it for me. So I'm taking a look at some alternatives.

There's a lot out there, though. Yeah, here it is. It's called a cactus compute needle. And they say they distilled Gemini 3.1 into a 26 million parameter, simple attention network that you can even find to locally with your Mac or PC. In production needle runs on cactus at 6,000 tokens per second. It's like weights are fully open, blah, blah, blah.

So like, I mean, this is like something you'd have to set up a bunch of other stuff to make work 100% correctly for, you know, but still, like, it's amazing what people are doing on this. From what I understand, this isn't, this is, discouraged from Google Gemini for them to like take their model and distill it down to something like this

they would rather you pay them for the Gemini model so it does look pretty interesting I wonder if there's a way you can I kind of I saw a couple of people who were like saying that they were going to throw it up somewhere where you can you can like test drive it I was going to try to do that

do you know how much GPU memory you need to run something like this for 26 million I mean, nothing. Like, really? I mean, yeah, it's like, let's see. It has postering it a 26 billion tokens of function call data. 26 million would be very little.

Nice. Yeah. Well, I'll try and find the, I'll find a demo of it, and we'll play around with it, Gavin. Okay. There's a demo somewhere. I know some people were like, oh, I put it on this, and it was one of those things where you could go test drive and AI. so check that out.

But for the most part, I haven't been using it as much as I have been using ClaudeCode because they kind of like really, they were favoring, pushing people back into that ecosystem. But if I can hook the subscription thing back up to it, I think I might do that. This is so much better. So much better.

It's like, well, you can. Because you run it on a Mac Mini, it's a lot easier. Just install CloudCode CLI and then set the authentic, authentication through that and she'll just pick up the, it looks at the auth files to get all the information and just picks that up. Yeah. I mean, they were doing that.

He's just sort of like blocking it for some time. Yeah, it's back now. Yeah. The Open AI stuff, I don't like, it's not, it's not sassy. The Claude stuff was really sassy, you know? Like, it had an attitude. And Open AI, they're just, they're corporate and bland, so. So, Seth likes sassy.

I mean, it just had a better attitude. Like, it would come up with funnier things than... I always liked how it was like, my bad. Yeah, it doesn't say that anymore. It doesn't say that anymore. Yeah. I'm going to work on getting that working and switch back over to it. Yeah.

I think I's going to wrap up the show this week. We want to sit a big thank you to everyone listening to show, but I want to sit a big special thanks to those who are able to financially support the show through our patron page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support and learn how you can become a patron for us little as a dollar month. If you pay five bucks a month, you get invited over to our Slack chat. If you pay $20 a month, like Jake, oh my gosh, thanks, Jake. Not only do you get the big invite to the Slack chat, but DJ will send you a video of somebody falling into a pool.

It's supposed to be amazing. I don't even, I haven't even seen this. So, and then we do want to give a big shout to Peter as well, who updated his pledge to five bucks. Thanks so much, Peter. You need to upgrade the Macedon server at some point prices are going up. I don't know if you guys noticed. Oh, for the Macedon server? Yeah, it was just the price. Prices go up.

Evidently, if you're running a data center, Hedzner's like, hey, we're going to charge you more. Wait, wait, I thought this was like free open source. What's going on? The software is free, but to run it's not. You have to have a computer that lives on the internet. And that's all they get you. They get you in first cheap, and then they're like, hey, we raise prices.

Well, Hedster's been cheap for years. The problem is that the hardware is no longer cheap. So a lot of the prices are going up, yeah. So anyway, you know, there's all that kind of stuff. I have another project I guess we'll talk about later that may, that's going to save a lot of money for the show, at least, you know, money that I say the money for the show. Money I pay to produce the show. That will go away. And I think I've figured out something that I can do to process the files locally and have them do exactly what I want

to do to sound nice and neat like I'm doing it with theophonic. So anyway, if you want to, if you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating and podcast. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech. Everybody have a great weekend. And we will See you next week. Until next time. Take care. Will you ever come to Canada, Seth? Yeah, I'd love to.

It's fun up there. You guys have coffee, allegedly, in your stores that don't exist? It's not very good, to be honest. They have the big donuts, though. Oh, we're getting Dunkin' Donuts up here. I mean, that's not good either, but. Oh, they always had big donuts, that's why. Yeah, they've got them worse.

Well, when you guys are ready, Seth, You have a place to stay or bring the family. Cool. That's pretty nice. You can go to Wonderland. He's upgrade. The TV is in the guest room, but he doesn't want to stay that long. Well, if you come during the warm weather, you could take, go to Canada's Wonderland.

What is that? It's not like our theme park with the roller coaster coaster. Oh, okay. It sounded like a euphemism for something. No, it's Canada's Wonderland. Come ride Canada. Yeah. This weekend we're going, we were supposed to go to rage room, but we're going axe throwing. Oh, axe throwing. Oh, yeah, yeah. They have that up here around. It shows up at various breweries where this guy has a trailer.

And you can throw axes. And I'm like, drunk people with axes. This sounds like a great idea.