HomeTech.fm - Episode 573 - Slothbot

Episode Date: May 9, 2026

On this week's show: TJ gets ready to head to Canada, Apple pays for promising too much from Siri, ULTRALOQ goes tap-to-unlock with Aliro, and Homebridge 2.0 finally speaks Matter. The Roomba creator builds a furry robot friend, Matter.JS Server gets smarter debugging, BEGA lights up Home Assistant, and the new HA beta tunes into sub‑GHz RF. Plus, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 8th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Pickering, Ontario, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. But maybe when the show is released, I will be there. I doubt it. I'll probably be gone by then. But it's possible. Could be, could be.

Well, welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcasts all about home innovation, home technology, and TJs travels. TJ's on the road, I guess. by the time you're listening to this, he will be on the road or has been on the road, wherever he will be in Pickering, Ontario, visiting Gavin and installing cameras. Get my car stolen. Get your car stolen. And Canadians return them.

Don't worry. It doesn't sound like it. Yeah. So originally I was going up there to install cameras, but it doesn't sound like Gavin that actually wants me to install any cameras. So I really don't know what I'm doing. He thinks it's a vacation. But I don't think I would take a vacation in Canada if I was going to vacation.

So I'm not really sure what this is. this point. Oh, you're coming to run wire. It's kind of like a booty call without the booty. You know what I mean? Oh, is that how this feels? Awkward trip now. Especially with my wife there. I mean, that's not good. Don't worry. Your wife will be there. I mean, you'll be pulling on a lot of wire. Don't worry.

I mean, pulling a lot of wire. Sorry. Oh, man, this could go wrong. I'm going to, I'm going to shut him out now. Are we canceled yet? talking about, Oh, we just lost the Patreon. For some reason, you just couldn't stop talking about

big racks and tight holes tonight. I'm not going to put that in the show, but... Oh, you are. I can't wait for you to see my BBR. He's got a big rack. Yeah. My big black rack.

It's a cis rack. Are we canceled? Yeah. Oh, man. All right, I'll stop. Well, good luck. Whatever you're doing up there, hanging out hanging wire hanging cameras i don't know j i mean we're not doing anything it sounds like i told

gavin he has to like figure out what to do what we're going to do and everything and this guy's like i don't even know what you're going to do so okay so this is my plan uh we will survey the house and figure out what's the best places to put a camera then you'll run the wires there okay okay and then i'll install the cameras yeah see this i don't like this but i i did order one camera for you to do it's my daughter bell camera no you already had that one that one doesn't count no but It's not installed, so you will install that one. And then the chime for it. You'll install the chime for it because another wire has to go for that one.

Okay, okay. And then the other cameras will plan out the other cameras, and then later on I'll order them and buy it. Yeah, yeah. So let somebody else run the other wires for them. See, I can install the cameras. I just suck at running the wire. I don't know all the tricks. And I can't fit in that attic.

You can definitely fit in the attic. Well, I'll fall through the attic. That's the last thing I really want to do. Well, Nicole is there. Yeah, she is not getting in the attic. I can tell you that. She won't do the attic crawl And I have definitely stepped through an attic before

Yours might be the second one Oh No Yeah I didn't really think this one through did you I know some dry wall people I know some dry wall Okay good Yeah

Keep them in mind I've seen now TJ cuts walls Yeah They'll match the other bullet holes I have in my walls Well when you guys get back TJ we got to figure out How we're going to spend our $250 million settlement

From the company Apple who is going to resolve this class action lawsuit that has, where they were, you know, overhyping Siri. What were they hyping up? Because, I mean, like they were just saying series is going to be smart as AI?

Like what? Yeah, yeah. Remember they, they were like, hey, on these new iPhone 16s, we're going to have the Siri and they did like this little video that had all this cool stuff that.

Apple intelligence. Yeah, it doesn't exist today. It just, they made Siri like have a little wavy lines. That's about all they did. It takes over the whole screen now. So it's like,

ooh. Yeah, see, whenever anybody mentioned Siri, I kind of just tune out with that point. So whenever they announced all these new features with Siri, I guess I just didn't listen to them. So that's probably my fault. Oh, wow. You get $25 per device. Oh, man. Up to $95.

How does that make any sense? $25 per device up to $95. So that way you can't claim four devices. Yeah, exactly. So we have at least one or, I just, I said we have at least. And of course, Siri turns on and starts trying to, okay. I think we have a few, I have an iPad and my wife has a. So yeah, I mean, I'll probably get $95, I guess.

Maybe, maybe we'll both get $95. Well, if you want, claim it has different claims. So she could have one claim, you can have one claim. My daughter has an iPad. Exactly. Yeah, let's see. It should, if you're in the U.S., not Canada, you should watch for some email notices because, you know, those are never fake within the next 45 days.

and you'll click that link, of course, and go give this, you know, some information, and it'll probably send you $95. Or it could probably take all the money out of your bank account. We don't know. I love those class acts and lawsuits because I watch for them all the time

and whenever we get one that we're affected by, I sign up like me, my mom, my sister, everybody I can find out. I just sign them all up. And then like three years later, you get random checks for $20. You don't even know what's for. And it's $20 more.

But you feel, yeah, you feel made whole. buy that $20. Yeah, you know, like, that's what happened with the, there was like a PayPal, lawsuit a couple years ago,

and I signed up for it, and then like, literally like two or three years later, I finally got a check for it. And I was like, what is this even for? Yeah. We had a bread fixing one.

I don't even know if I got that check yet. A bread fixing one where they're like fixing the price of bread. Yeah, they were all the, all the big companies were in cahoots and fixing bread prices and stuff. It's crazy up there. Canada is just, like the wild west.

They guys are nice up there. Yeah. We were nice. stealing trees, stealing cars, bread fixing. Like, I don't know, man. It's not all of Canada, you know, like, there's some nice spots of Canada. I don't know where, but there's some nice spots of Canada. No, there's nice cities in Canada.

Just not that you look like Pickering. Pickering's wedged between, is a nice city wedge between. Like Hamilton, right? Sure. I would really classify anywhere that you could possibly have your car stolen out of your driveway as nice, but I guess it depends on what the rest of the area That can happen anywhere. I don't know.

Not that often though. They won't want your car, don't worry. Actually, near my hometown this week, somebody had like 100 baby cows stolen, so you can steal anything no matter where you are. And that's in the middle of nowhere. Like how the, like, where do you get rid of those? Like, is it not going to be suspicious like calves?

Like, I don't know. There were some theories that they were taking them to Canada because they're like, they had literally just, I'm not even kidding. And it's because they, they had literally just got finished bottle feeding and everything. And they're like, where can you even take all these cows to like get rid of them and everything? If somebody's like Canada. Canadians love veal is what I understand.

Either that or I was thinking they were freeing them. Like, I don't know. Like, what's going on down there with your cats? Come back to nature where you belong, cows. Yeah. Like here, open fields. Have fun. Rome.

Because it's not Florida. They'd go in the swamps and get eaten immediately. Freezing the winner. Yeah, that's the problem, you know. He turned to lose in the Northern Territories. No, no. No wonder the price of veal went down. Went down, yeah.

So I think. Get some of that Osobucco for cheap now. I see the guy in the quarter go, yo, yo, you want some baby cow? What's it, torture baby cow? How many baby cows do you want? I got a whole bunch. Well, enjoy the trip up, T.J. to Canada and think about how you're going to spend your up to $95

when you get back. Oh, man. Well, we've got a bunch of home tech headlines, so what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. All right, ultra lock. That's with a cue, not a C. Okay, the smart locks have, they've achieved a Lero certification, enabling digital keys to be stored on smartphone wallets for a tap to unlock. This affects the Latch 3, Latch 5, Pro, Latch 7, Latch 7, Lach 7 Pro,

pro covering latch style in deadbolt designs um alero it's the nfc standard that works with all sorts of phones and stuff so this is a good thing i think we all agree like this is this is a nice thing to have yeah definitely i mean it's one of those things that like you know apple home key is is pretty nice uh but you know if i have somebody in my house that does not have an iOS device or you know somebody's coming over to my house maybe they're going to take care of my house or something like that and they don't have an ios device they can't use my love. lock for that purpose. So this is, it is nice to have this kind of stuff. It's literally the whole point of technology is that anybody can use it. And we should be able to do that with our locks too.

Yep. I like to see the other, the lock companies jumping on this. I'd love to see more. I think a car is also certified for this stuff. There's a fun. Yeah, Kara, I thought I saw what Yale or somebody was doing. Is Yale on it? I thought they, I saw they were announcing that they were going to or something. Good. So when they start getting in on it, it's going to be serious. It's kind of one of those things that doesn't really matter, though, until they actually start releasing products, right? Because anybody could just be like, I'm going to make this product. And like they just never do it. That's kind of like what we saw with matter too. Everybody was like, I'm going to release this product. And it's going to be matter compatible in five years with an update. And then it never happens.

So it's good to start seeing these companies actually, you know, get the certification and everything. But we need to actually see the locks and then have them working and everything. This is kind of like a Seth project, you know, where they start off with a great idea and, you know, never complete it. It's complete enough, I guess. HomeBridge 2.0 is here. Speaking of projects, this,

HomeBridge is an open source, no-JED server thing that you can run, and it basically will bridge non-home kit devices into Apple Home, so you can use them on the interface. I use it for all my Control 4 lights, and I bring those in,

and I'm able to control the Control 4 lights through my home kit setup, which which is great. But now HomeBridge 2.0, it's getting matter, guys. It's going to get Matter support. Nice. Yeah.

That means that devices connected through Homebridge could potentially just show up, not only like an Apple Home, but anywhere. Google Home, Amazon, Samsung Smart Things, even in Home Assistant through the Matter integration. So that's pretty cool. I like it. No, it's a good progression here. I used to use HomeBridge many years ago to expose devices to HomeKit, but now that's pretty much built into.

home assistant. So I had a device home assistant exposes a home kit so I didn't have a need for HomeBridge anymore. But I think HomeBridge, I think they allow

the exposure of non-home kit secure video cameras into HomeKit secure video cameras, right? Like into that ecosystem. I think so.

Yeah. So that would be still a good use for it. I don't think I can do that through Home Assistant directly. And then adding matter, you know,

is a nice little add-on for it, especially if you don't run a whole you know, I guess a home assistant instance at home, this would be a nice thing to have in your tools. Yep. So it's not just for home, Apple Home anymore. It's for many other things.

I like the software. I updated it recently because I, the driver I was using for the control for, it was like ancient. And there's been a couple of like newer drivers out there that integrate with Control 4 that work a little bit better to have more integrations and that kind of thing. So I decided to update to that. on the Control 4 side, I think, just to pump those devices in a different way. And they've made some significant advancements over, like, how that works between Control 4 and Homebridge. So it wasn't that bad of a setup, but Homebridge just keeps, I mean, the interface used to be pretty awful.

It's not the best still, but, like, it's gotten a lot better. Like, it used to be really tough to use and get everything to set up. but HomeKit or the Apple Home app is still just as awful as day one. Like, I don't know what they think they've improved in that over time. Have they even done anything to it? I doubt it. I mean, they've removed support for like different hubs and stuff, but I don't think they've done anything with the actual platform. Hey, with the new leader there, I think we're going to see some updates to their smart home.

I hope so. Because if you, yeah, if you, if you, if you like, you can go into Homebridge instead. things up in rooms and that kind of thing. It doesn't, does it go over to home? No, it doesn't go to Apple Home. Like Apple Home doesn't, you just get a bunch of devices that get dumped in. Like, if I have, let's just say I have 30 control 4 lights,

like all those devices just get dumped in as devices in the same room on the Apple Home thing. And you have to go around and move them and organize them one at a time. That's the same with all ecosystems. So annoying. Well, that's stupid. Like, I'm sorry. They need to update that. That's just dumb. Because even with

my Amazon, I explain. both stuff and it just shows up as devices. It doesn't get sorted. Every now and then when I tell it, because of the naming convention I use, it kind of, if it's not in a room, it kind of knows, hey, is this supposed to be in this room? It will ask me. And I say, yeah, and it will put it in. But it doesn't do it for all the devices.

Yes. Siri, see, we just talked about Siri. She can't do that. Just not, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, Siri needs some AI. Yeah, yeah. of please Google your only hope oh no no Google will talk on talk and talk and talk

they'll just never release the product oh yeah yeah speaking of which Google's Gemini powered home speaker like where's that where's that they announced a new Gemini focused Google Home Speaker back in October still hasn't launched in Canada or the US speakers describes having a new design with a light ring for visual feedback

Gemini interactions plus 360 degree audio nowhere to be seen as of today May 4th May 5th, whatever you want to call it, no release yet. So it still offers a notify me option on their store if you want to get notified when it does get release. It wasn't that speaker seen in like a Google promo video somewhere or two, like last year? And people are so excited for this. But this is why I don't invest in the Google stuff.

I just don't because the speaker will come out in January and be canceled by September. Yeah. There's Google I.O. I guess it's going to be later this month. So, oh yeah, it's midsummer. So we should start getting Google IO announcements. What was the Apple? WWDC is coming up soon.

Yes. So we'll get June, right? Yeah, June. So we'll get all that stuff kind of falling into place as we move through the summer. It was hard to believe, but we are in May. Oh, yeah, I just realized that. I'm going to blink and then CES is back. All right.

Well, we've got a bunch of new products here, and we're going to kick it off with an amazing new product from ubiquity. is it a dream machine beast? Well, sure, it's a dream machine beast, but that's not the coolest thing they've released this week. No, Ubikwit now has speaker wire. That's right. You can buy speaker wire from ubiquity.

To go along with, guess what? They have speakers, too. They've got an in-wall and in-ceiling speaker that you can pick up. So the speakerware is ridiculously expensive from what we were seeing, like $299 for, what, $300 feet, I guess? That's...

No, 500. 500 feet it's 150 meters which i think is like 500 feet basically is it because it's basically three feet to a meter so it's yeah 492 so close enough yeah it's 300 dollars for 150 meter can and up here in canada plus memory tax i i still think that's well i guess it's not it is 14 gauge wire though like let's just it's 14 two so that's not terrible yeah that's not terrible yeah and honestly the shipping on it's not bad i know like shipping in general is pretty ridiculous but it's like 30 dollar shipping for it So, I mean, if you can find it locally, just find it locally. But if you really want to, you know, just buy everything in the same order, then it's okay.

You want that 33 pound box? The box, honestly, I've used their boxes before, those little spool boxes for the, it's the same box they have, like, the cat. Six or something? Yeah, they have one of their category cables in that box. And it's got, like, this little break on it on the side where you can make it, like, have no, no restriction. Like, you can, you can tighten it up to, like, have some resistance. so you don't like pull all the wire out and get all messed up.

So I don't know. Their boxes are fairly nice, I guess. Compared to other boxes I've used where you just like start pulling it out and like, now you got a knot. You have to take the box apart. So annoying. I'm a little upset that their speaker doesn't come. The speaker wire doesn't come in white.

I mean, you're not going to see it, but I want to know there's white wire, ubiquity wire in my walls. It just matches their networking equipment. Yeah. Honestly, the black makes the most sense, though, because a lot of places are open ceiling now. yeah and so they want black so i mean that's all right yep yep in wall uh speaker 179 in ceiling speaker 149 not not terribly priced no not terribly priced i mean i would i would still go with like a you know name brand for audio like so nance or i mean ubiquity anything else at that point but

it's uh i'm just trying to see if the the i wonder if the i'm guessing that the grill is kind of like a magnetic grill it's got to be right yeah it looks like it is it doesn't have huge bezels or anything so It's compatible with the speaker wire. They've confirmed it on their website. That's good. That's good. That's good.

Yeah. Is it compatible with the Apple microfiber cloth, though? Oh, no. It's not listed. Mm-mm. If it be a commercial there, they're missing the tile bridges. You really absolutely have to have a tile bridge. I don't know why they don't have that for commercial.

But whatever. That is kind of weird. Yeah. Yeah. You can't put the speaker. If you're the integrator and you're listening and you haven't done any commercial work, you need a tile bridge. anytime you put a speaker into a tiny little tile because...

Well, I would say you need one. It may go in there, if that means. In Florida, we have this thing called humidity, and that will, like, cause it to sag over time, and it will fall out eventually, so... Spoken like somebody who's never used wood shims underneath their speaker feet. Wood shims are one thing.

I've actually just gone and gotten plywood and cut plywood and put it up because it's... Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it's weird they don't have that. Let's move on here. Speaker wire, speakers, covered all of that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot.

Dream Machine Beast. They've got a new dream machine. And it's, it's, uh, it's designed not for, yeah, it's a beast. It's not designed for anything in my house. Let's just put it that way. Um, this thing's crazy though. It's, it, what is it? It's a five, or 25, this is design for data centers.

I'm not going to get this. Has an arm, Neovirce into compute. I don't even know if that is. Yeah. Um, it's got VIRP for shadow mode. Sure. Yeah. There you go.

Uh, it's got a, Firewall. I can make up words too. VPN. It's designed to be the last gate there you need. You know what? I believe you. Yeah, this thing's kind of silly.

Like, I totally get it because the 25 gig ports makes sense. It's got two 25 gig SFP ports. It's got a 10, uh, 10 gig USB ports. Those make sense to me. It's got 10, uh, 2.5 gigabort ports. Oh, no, sorry. I'm 10 gigabit Ethernet ports, uh, which is very weird. me. It's like $1,500 for a cloud gateway, but your Ethernet ports, and it's not POE either. So you can't

even just use this as like an all-in-one box for like, you know, an install or something like that. You'd have to get a POE switch, which is the proper way. You should definitely get a POE switch. But $1,500 for this thing, I think it's a little crazy. This is designed to kind of live at the edge there. And those courtesy ports, those eight courtesy ports are just to go over to, like, other switches, right? Like, that's... Yeah, but that's why you have FSP. Or, I'm sorry. Yeah, SFP, but you may not have that switch, I guess, in all cases. I don't, I don't disagree, but I don't know. I feel like those are just courtesy boards.

And this is just kind of like just supposed to live right there at the edge. Not, not, yeah, it's got two hard drive bays. I mean, it's just, it's a weird combination of things, you know? Like, this makes sense in like a home user application or something. But for like a commercial thing. Nah, this is overkill for, oh, no, no, I was just saying the ports, like the ports and the hard drives and stuff like that. That makes sense for home use. But like, I guess is a business going to use this for a protection thing?

Small business, maybe. A small business. No, no, no, I don't think. It's 7,500, 7,500 client capacity. No, I don't think so. Yeah, this is meant for like a big, big place. This is for campus, yeah. And 29 gigs, too.

I'm not, like, the automotive shop I work for, it does not care about 25 gigs. So $1,500. you can also buy the high availability pair for 3,000. Yeah. There you go. I didn't even see that. That's kind of cool, actually. First time they've done that as a grouping.

You can do that with the Pro Max. I wonder if that's relatively new because they've had the shadow mode. Right. Because I've never seen the high availability pair in any of them. But now it's in the Dream Machine Pro. It's in the special edition. Pro Max. I've never seen that before.

Yeah. As long as you have the same one. I will say that, I guess they have the Pro Max. The Pro Max now has the dual hard drive base. That's a nice upgrade, I think, from the Dream Machine Pro. I mean, it's basically the same concept, but it doesn't have 25 gig SFP ports.

It has 10 gig. 10 gig. But I think for like $5.99, if you've got the two hard drives, that gets you a little bit better, like recording capacity that you can do, plus you have like a backup drive in case, it, you know, one dies or whatever.

And then you have the Unify switch. I think like an all in one, like for $599, that's actually not a very bad, like, residential slash commercial project. Like the Dream Machine Beast, that's, that's like designed for campus. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've used the Pro Max on like a, I have an auto motor shop. Another auto motor shop I do work for.

And they have the Pro Max because they're run on multiple locations from that same location. Yeah. So like something like that, you definitely need. a little more power for it. Yeah, I have the Dream Machine Pro SE, and I use one of the 10 gig ports, I have an SFP that my fiber goes straight into it. Yeah.

And then the other SFP port, I tied that to my 48 port switch. So it gets 10 gig from the straight to that switch. And yeah, it's really good for my home. Takes care of everything. Yeah. You can only have 44K cameras on the, uh,

on the beast. So sorry. Yeah. And then on my, I only have one hard drive bay in mine, but they added a feature where archives clips. Yeah. So I have it archive clips to my NAS to free up space. See, if I'm going to do 120 access points, I kind of get, I can only do 30 some odd

cameras. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think the dream machine's beast is made to do cameras. Maybe just network. Yeah, that's kind of why it's weird. It has the two hard drives. slots on there. You know, they could have knocked a couple hundred dollars off and just made it, you know, a little cheaper and not put the hard drives in there.

You could do, uh, you could do a lot of phones with it. Let's see. I'm up to 90 phones. So you could do 90 phones. You could do some access. Oh, access puts you way over. Jeez, what the heck. Let's see.

All right. So I got 69 doors, 81 phones and 120 access points. And that gets me up to about 88% which is as far as I'm going to push it. That's the beast. Yeah, I just added 750 access points, and it's an 89% capacity. Yep, that's 750 access points. So that's, that's each access point can have some clients on it, and you're good to go. All right.

Well, that's that. They've got speaker wire. They've got the dream machine beast this week. So, let's move on here. We've got Bose introducing three new lifestyle home audio products that are targeted to position to get Sonos. It's got a $300 lifestyle ultra lifestyle ultra speaker, a $1,100 ultra soundbar, and a $900 ultra subwifur. The ultra speakers to stand out because it's, they've got a review here for about a first listen. And it's, it's, it's, uh, uses a front firing wolf for tweeter plus, uh, firing driver.

Um, and boasts us some magic processing for better Dolby Atmos. Um, I don't know. This, this sounds interesting. TJ, are you going to go out and get Bose now that you've gotten rid of everything? I think you've got to get, got to get this Bose system. I think you have to be over 60 years old to buy bows. So I probably not. Really? Why?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's just everybody, I've never seen a young person using Bose other than like the noise canceling headphones. Yeah. The only time I ever see Bose in somebody's house is when they're older. And if you're not old and you listen to Bose, that's fine. I don't, I don't have anything against them. I don't think their products are very attractive, though. So these speakers, I'm not a fan of the looks. Like the, what is this?

I can't even tell what speaker that is, but it does not look attractive to me. Yeah, the little, the little tabletop one. Yeah. It's just very, it's very weird. It looks like an appliance, which I guess a smart speaker kind of is an appliance, but it looks like a bottle warmer or something for babies. Yeah, I think they could have done a little bit better with the design there. It doesn't, I mean, it doesn't look too far off.

of Sonos speaker, but distinct enough, I guess, in his place. The soundbar looks very similar to Sonos. It just has like a cloth-wrapped portion of it, and then it has a, like, a plastic piece on top. Yeah, the soundbar doesn't look awful. I don't know how I feel about, like, the glossy piano finish, though, because I feel like that's just a finger-rubramagnet. Yeah, come on.

Yeah. I was speaking of, is that a volume control on top of that thing? I think it's a volume control. It's a cup holder. Oh, just like the CD tray on my Mac Mini. I think it's like there are controls. Like, that's the control section where you have that little like divot there. Yeah, I do like when speakers have physical controls.

Because I want to be able to just, some of my speakers are not accessible. Like I have to like, you know, get on a step stool or something like that. But a lot of my speakers, I can just walk around and I can adjust the volume without pulling out my phone. So I think all smart speakers should have physical controls on them. But when it comes to an ecosystem, though, Bowles is probably one of the, closer ones to having everything that lines up, right? Like, they have the home entertainment system set up. You could create 7.1.4.

They have those little speakers where you can throw them in rooms. They rely heavily, though, on Airplay and Googlecast. And I think they also do, what's the other one? Spotify Connect. Oh, yeah. Right? So it all works over Wi-Fi, so you don't have to fight with any Sonos Net or anything like that.

and Airplay, I'm hoping it's Airplay too that they put in here because that keeps everything in sync too. So they have the ecosystem where you could technically replace your Sonos with this if you don't rely on any of the other Sonos stuff. Yeah, it has multi-room audio with Airplay or Googlecast. Wasn't Bose one of the companies that releases a new ecosystem every once in a while though? Like they'll come out with some wireless speakers and then like five years later they come out with a different app to control them and stuff like that? Well, I think they did something recently like that, recently where we covered it, they open source the control protocol

of it. It wasn't really open. They said what the API was, public place, which is nice. So, yeah. But if they're doing everything through Airplane Googlecast, I mean, should keep working. Yeah. Yeah, unless Apple updates Airplay 3 and stuff like that.

Yeah, but I mean, Airplay 2 and Airplay 1 devices. They're still backwards. compatible, yeah. Yeah. Kind of, but then they had some finicky things. I don't know if it was with grouping or keeping things and sync. That was the Apple Airplay too. Well, if

you're mad at Sonos and you you're over the age of 60, according to G. You have options. Yell at the clouds and go get apples. Some ageism here. Geez, man. Yeah, that's fine. All right. And then we've got Sonoff

unveiling a NS panel pro gin two. It's got matter. It's got dual relays. For 86 type wall boxes that combine touchscreen dashboard. It's got Zygby Hub. I think this sounds like it's going to be what? What's an 86 wallbox? I think it's some European things. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. Which is mostly where I see these kind of screens.

I really don't see. The little square one. Yeah, yeah. They have a U.S. version as well too coming out. So it's really cool because it offers a lot in this little thing. Yeah, it's like a all-in-one panel thing that, yeah, it's got sensors and whatnot. But like, sensors and relays. But yeah, it's like every, it's got a Zigby 3O hub inside of it. Like, you can do a lot with this thing. It's kind of interesting, too, because it has support for F-Droid, which if you're in the Android ecosystem, is an open-source app store, which I have used in a previous life. So that's kind of cool. You can download apps on it. You can download apps on your light switch.

It's got RDSP compatibility for cameras. I mean, this is all in a little wall touchscreen. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's a matter bridge. Yep. And there's a dual relay wall switch so it can control two loads if you put it in like a double switch. But I think the most exciting part about this for me is integration with home assistant. Yeah. It looks like you can create a home assistant dashboard right on this thing. It looks like a very tiny, tiny, tiny home assistant dashboard can be created. Well, you wouldn't create a full dashboard.

You'd create like just a dashboard for this specific device in this room. And it would just display what you want. control in this room. You could probably make it swiping. You can control the thermostat and stuff too. But it's a cool looking device. I was actually thinking of ordering one because I think they're, I think they're on pre-order. They are, but it's too late. They are sold out. $120 or $130 would be the price was $116.90. They were, they were 10% off or whatever. That's pretty cheap. Yeah. For all of this, I think it's a great price. I can still add it to cart. Oh, pre-order now. See?

My mind says sold out in the dim gray And the white also says sold out Maybe it's only Canadians can buy this right now It probably son of panels Gen 2 dual in dim gray I would get this and get the little desktop Stand they offer I think that's that's the proper

Like I wouldn't put this in my wall But I think for a desktop This would be great for a little desktop Oh it's shipping from the US I'm gonna get dinged to it like $100 in duties It's $150 in duties Yeah This sucks

I'll wait till it gets released. Oh, man. Yeah, the 86 wallbox is definitely the European, like, round wallbox thing. So I don't know how we would fit that in here. Maybe there's an adapter or something. Well, the desk enclosure looks like it's a standard, like, wallbox, right? Well, no, no. It's still a little square piece.

The desk enclosure? It's just a stand with a little hole cut out for the little back part. Yeah, but that hole looks like a standard wall box. I guess maybe close to the same size. Yeah. Well, wait till it's released. Yeah, wait till it's released. Typically, these don't match up quite as well.

Yeah, because they have different models, right? So they have the NS panel US, which is a little more vertical. And then the NS panel EU is like more of a square. Yeah. Right. And then they have the NS panel pro, which is like a square. Trying a rectangle. It's like rectangular.

It's pretty big. So that's, I guess, for the U.S. market to fit in a single box. Looks like it. Looks like it could work. Yep. Everything's in metric, so I can't tell. All right. Well, check those out.

$120. I mean, really not a bad price for everything you get. If you can get it because it's pre-orders sold out. So they'll come back in stock, I'm sure. And the creative Rumba is back. You thought they were out of business? You thought they were gone? Not for a good reason.

I can tell you that. They're back now. with a furry robot dog-like companion, they're calling familiar. It's built for emotional connection rather than chores, though. The first unit is a quadruped. Quadruped, yes, quadruped with expressive face and 23 degrees of freedom for head, eye, ear, eyebrow, and tail movements. It walks around your home autonomously at a slow, slow pace. It can grip onto objects or climb chairs.

That's great. Great, great, really smart guys. Why would you do this? The robot is uses an on-device generative AI system aimed at social reasoning, combining vision, audio, language, and memory. Great, so it's got an element built into this thing. And it's powered by Invidia's Jetson-Oren.

It doesn't require internet connection and is designed not to stream audio and video to the cloud, though it does use cameras and microphones within the home. It won't talk to you. It will communicate with body language and nonverbal sounds. There's no price on this yet. It says around the same price as owning a pet,

but the exact price we don't know. And it's going to be sometime next year at the earliest that you can get this weird towel-wrapped robot-looking thing. I don't know. It's very strange looking. The word dog is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because this thing is creepy. And they have a picture of it, like is the,

our friend over at the Verge Jen, posted this photo of it next to a dog and the dog is just looking at it like what is my life this thing is creepy I would not want this in my house It's like a sloth more than a dog That's what I'm saying

It's definitely sloth like Yeah Which is not a good companion I'm not gonna like BS or anything like that Because sloths don't like to be touched by humans So I think this is when the dog realized It's been replaced actually

It's like oh you do whine less than I do I've lost my job I was supposed to be man's best friend If dog's job aren't safe, then nobody's safe. Exactly. You know, the last thing I expected Roomba to be releasing is a furry. Like, this is just nuts.

It looks like it's terry cloth covered. I don't know. It doesn't look very furry to me. I don't like this. TJ's creeped out. Yeah, it's just weird. And it doesn't do stairs. Like, come on.

Even my dog can do stairs. Actually, I never take my dog to stairs. But I assume he can do stairs. It'll probably learn to do stairs one day. You got to train it. I think we haven't learned our lesson. You don't want it to learn how to use stairs because there will be eventually a time when they take over. Stairs are going to be safe for you.

So I guess they can burn down your house. That's when you go in the attic or basement. Not if they burn down the house. That's true. You're trapped either way. If this is what my pets look like in the future, maybe I want my house to burn down. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I will say it's interesting as far as technology goes. I mean, this is kind of one of like a more commercial adaptation of this. but I think what we're going to start seeing in the future these like LLMs being put into use this way. Like everybody thinks that you, in sure you're using like chatGBT and that that's what we're talking about with LLMs. It's not.

Like LLMs can be various sizes and they can fit on something as small as your phone and have an immense amount of like data and everything wrapped up in them. And on something is like the, uh, what was that the Nvidia Orum is no joke. This is a pretty decent computer for this.

but like it's small. And as these things start getting smaller and smaller and smaller, I mean, I've seen like even a Raspberry Pi, like there's a little tiny like add-on GPU thing you can buy that is about not even the size of like an SD card. It's that big. And that's the GPU. You strap it on.

It's got a little fan on the thing. And that actually enables it to use like a local language model on a Raspberry Pi. I mean, you just think about how like this stuff gets miniaturized over time. and then the things that you could do, like these little things can end up inside of like toys and things like this in the not too distant future.

It's only going to get cheaper to do this. Because once you have the model made, you don't have to make it on the device, and device is going to get cheaper. It's a copy and paste thing, right? It's just software. So, oh, I think this is kind of exciting to see that.

Now, making creepy dogs, no, not so much, but, or sloth dogs, I don't know, this is weird. But as far as, like, what a model can do, like a language model can do in that size of a space. I think that's pretty cool. Oh, it's a sloth bear.

That makes sense. It's not a dog. I mean, look up a picture of a sloth bear. It looks just like it. Well, here's the quote from the CEO of Rumber and Maker Eye Robot. We chose a form factor that's not human, not a dog, not a cat, because we wanted to steer away from all those preconceptions. Not any other animal either.

Except the sloth bear, evidently. I don't know. I think that's a bit of a reach too, T.J. You're probably right. They're both just ugly, so. Poor sloth bears. Oh, poor sloth bears. We'll put a link to this in this show note.

This is weird. I do think the technology being miniaturized like this is pretty cool, though. And, like, you can, again, you can use this no internet connection needed, right? It can be completely off-grid on a local computer and have access to these large models. It's pretty cool. All the links and topics we discussed. tonight can be found over on our show notes at HomeTech.com. Slash 573.

Pick of the week, we're going to go into the TJ's driving around, taking pictures of things machine. T.J., you took a picture of this old burglar alarm. I cannot say that word very well. Burglar? Burglar. If you're getting burgled, this alarm would go off. And it looks like a serious alarm, though. Is it like on a bang?

or something? What is this? I think so. It's not a bank right now, but it definitely looks like an old bank building. Long before my time. D.B. McClintock Company and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's like, that sticker survived. Oh, that's a new sticker. You think the stickers new? Yeah, that's a new stickler. Maybe it's just one of those fancy boxes they put over like a bell or something. They're like, well, we can't replace this bell.

Yeah, that sticker is not from like the 1800s. The box probably is. I like in this building This building's like made out of some type What is this like marble or something? Yeah and then they got this rusty box up there And they're like yeah we're not going to replace that box We're just going to slap a new sticker on it and call it a day It's probably because nobody can reach it

They got that giant like a shelf there and everything So it's like it'd be so much work to remove this now I bet if you climbed up there you'll find a screwjabber sitting up there Punchdown tool All right well we'll put the picture of that in the in the show notes If you've got any feedback questions, ideas for show or PIX of the Week, it was a shout. Email address is feedback at Hometech.com. Or you can head over to Hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form.

Project updates. Quick Home Assistant News. Matter.js servers updated. It's got a tool for troubleshooting matter and thread and stuff built into it. Tools for troubleshooting are always great. And then Biga or Bega or I guess it's Baga. I don't know. B EGA joins Work with Home Assistant.

They make some actually some pretty nice looking like fixtures that run on Zygby. They have some like outdoor lighting fixtures. It's a German firm that has been around for a while. Looks very nice. But they've got Zygby lights, like path lights and that kind of thing for outdoor lighting. Not so bad. There's let's see, one, two, three, four, five. Probably about to say, 10, 10 or so lights with different variants of them that you can take a look at

if you are, if you can get these, I guess. I'm not sure if these are available in the U.S., but maybe they are. Who knows? Put a link to the show notes. We've got a filtered device list over on the Home Assistant website. You can scroll through and find a pathway light that's right for you, I guess. Let's see, what else we got? We got a Home Assistant beta update.

Gavin, you pop this in the show notes. What's new about this radio frequency? So, yeah, this is, by the time the show's released, it will not be beta anymore. But it's the 2026.5 got released. And you know what? This release is actually a very big release, but a lot of it's not mentioned in the notes and stuff like that. And there's a lot of under the hood changes

that are setting things up for the future, which is really nice to see. But last release, they added support for IR. This release, they add support for RF now. So if you have a RF, and keep in mind, this is only for transmitting, receiving right so receiving it's a lot more work if they have to do receiving I think they may be looking into adding that in the future but I'm sure they're right now so right now you can

send the signal but you won't be able to receive the signal so RF is big because there's a lot of things that run on RF like maybe um your your ceiling fans and stuff like that or they've added support for um an arrangehood stuff like that it's like 315 430 33, 868, and 915 megahertz band, along with 433 megahertz. Like, yeah, I don't know. If you've been in any RF, like that's like most of them. All of them. Yeah.

Exactly. The easiest way to get into it is if you bought the Broadlink RM4, I think, but that only supports a couple bands, but it's natively integrated to Home Assistant too now. So if you want to play with it, take a look at that. They've added that. They added a new maintenance dashboard, which is kind of cool because I kind of had created one of these myself in the past, but it will show things like the status of your batteries, things like that. So that's pretty cool that they added. They also added a security dashboard

or it now shows the activity of what's happening in your house. So it has like a live activity. So when the alarm was armed, disarmed, things opened, close, etc. So that was pretty good. They made a bunch of updates to the cards. So the media player tile card, you can now add like, You can add features to it to show controls in it. Well, one of the new things is now you can add the source selection to it. So you'll get a little drop down and you can choose what source for an input, depending on the device. And they also let you modify what controls are shown.

Like if you just want to show play or just fast forward and rewind, you can hide the play stuff like that, right? The tile card, they added weather forecast features to it. So it's now a nice little card with some nice weather. using your weather entities. It looks really nice, actually. And they created a shortcuts card where you could just make that card

on your dashboard that executes actions or opens links to other dashboards or anything like that. It doesn't have to be associated with an entity. In the past, you just have to create like button cards or something like that. Now they have it integrated nicely. As usual, they have new integrations.

There's a whole list of them that you should review. Other improvements, They have a lot of good quality of life things. Like they've updated the info dialogs for a number of things like vacuums and lawnmowers, so they look really nice now. Nice little animations, nice visuals. They also updated the visuals for the toggles,

so they're more modern, got rid of the old look. And then in the code editor, they made the code editor smarter and added things like auto-complete and tool tips. That's nice. When you're working on templates or you're working on automations in YAML, You mean my AI friend is doing that?

Well, yeah, yeah, it makes it easier for your AI friend now. Exactly. So, but these are quality of life improvements. As usual, there's breaking changes. Make sure you check out the breaking changes. See if you're affected by anything. And one huge thing they've been working on is updating the documentation for template writing. So the template documentation was kind of rough before.

They've really updated and added things like example code clips. and links to other things. So you could jump around in the documentation very easily to get the information you want. You get tool tips when you hover over things too. So it's pretty cool. They've done a lot of work on that documentation. And like they've admitted that they've utilized AI

to help them get a lot of this stuff done. And that's why they're getting a lot of this stuff done. I mean, it's a tool like anything else. I hate seeing these like developers and platforms or like anything submitted with AI or rejecting it and I can understand like that but you can do this responsibly like this is a tool like anything else

I get so sick of these people like I'm all high and mighty about like what code they've written and handcrafted with their artist's anal coding like get out of here you like that's why this this AI stuff is punching holes left and right and your dashed you know like

finding security flaws that were 25 years old you know and like supposedly the most secure Linux come on you can't you can't do that i totally agree and i mean you can spend the six months rewriting all the documentation for this stuff if you want and it still probably wouldn't be as nice as what the ai is kicking out here so nope you know ii is a tool and it's allowing them to do things a lot faster a lot better um they're not like sitting there making it rewrite like all their code for them you know but like who wants to rewrite the documentation on a website

just to make it look nice or more concise or whatever. Get the AI to do it in 10 minutes instead of how somebody waste six months on it. I'm going to add on to our little call-outs of improvements here that I think integrators

should start taking notice of this platform now. There are a couple of things that are falling in here. PJLink. If you know anything about controlling projectors, PJLink is kind of like a standard protocol. That's now in here. It's not really

anything that you need to set up in the UI, like, it's just a protocol for that. They've got to basically put in there. They're laying the groundwork for a lot of things. ESP Home now supports RS-232, like bridge devices. So, and there's a Denon RS-232 driver built into this, like a native Dinon RS-2-way driver, so that you can control den-den-on receivers.

You could do it now over ESP Home, over, like, an IP connection. Like, this is really, they're really, they're making some moves here, Gavin. This is going to be an AV control platform. Like, I don't even truly understand the serial ports over the network with ESP home, but from what I saw, it's going to open up a lot

of possibilities. It's massive. For like the professional space, for example, with the RS-232 integration, right? That's pretty cool. Most good TVs will have RS232 on them, like, you can control like Sony's, I think LGs

do. Samsung's, I want to say they do, Or maybe it's LG. I don't. One of them have like a little thing you can plug into. Allegedly it will work. But most of them do have an RS2 port still that you can get in there and you can actually send actual control protocol to make sure they turn on. And you can check, are you on or off?

And it'll tell you, yes, I'm on and off without a stupid network being in the way that goes down and causes problems. So yeah, 232 is the way to go. And I am excited to see that they have made some interesting, integrations here. This is nothing big, but I think, I mean, this is groundwork. This is all,

they're laying groundwork right here. And I think it's just going to pop up one day where everybody's like, oh, yeah, I'm using Home Assistant for all this stuff now. Interesting to see. See, I said it was a big release, but a lot of the stuff is under the hood, right? So it's, as you, I think it's laying the foundation for some bigger things

that are coming in the pipeline. Yeah. So the ESB Home serial proxies. is what it's called. And it basically allows you to use a, like, an on-network device or a device that's not built into directly plugged into the Home Assistant Box to be like an RS-2-integration, kind of like you would do with a Bluetooth proxy. I think that's a pretty big, pretty big update here. I just saw that my TV control has RS-232 support.

That's where you want to go. If you can get it to work, it's a pain to get to work because it's like old-school wire, right? but it wires directly into the chip, right? So like it's going directly into the control's chip. If you can get it working, usually it's just by, you know, swapping two wires. If you get the wire, they're wrong, oh, I got to swap two wires, the transmit and receive.

You've got them backwards. You hook that up and boom, you're good to go forever. You will not break. You cannot break it. Well, let's see. TJ, you got any projects? I think you're getting ready to leave, so you probably don't have any projects.

Yeah, no projects. I did order my new door, so I ordered a door for a kitchen. It should be in next week. But no technology projects going on this week. Well, I'll mention, I did some work after the show last week on the little remote thing, which is back over in the charger over there. And it's cute. It works.

Now that there's more interesting AV stuff being done on home assistant, I'm kind of glad I got this remote, because it might become pretty popular. So I'm going to see if there's, slowly see if there's anything else I want to do with it, especially around in the garage room here. That might be a good place to do it. And I've had this like M1 sitting on my desk, the Apollo Automation M1. I bought this thing when it came out. It's, I don't know, what, a $60, $65, 64 by 64 LED panel thing that you can get.

You can buy more and stack them together. And it's been sitting on my desk. All I really had on it was some. really funny images they put on them before they shipped them out for me to look at. But I haven't found any use for it. Well, I was sitting here, I'm like, hear an airplane or helicopter flying over the other day. I'm like, I wonder what that is. You know what?

I have an ADSB, like, radio thing set up at the house. I use it to get like the free flight radar 24 subscription, business subscription, so I can see like all the airplanes. You know, anytime you're traveling, it's kind of nice to see. You can see where your airplane is, like, real time. time. And I decided to make a little like flight tracker thing out of the M1. So what it does is there's, I made it into a Docker. I think I'm going to put it in a home assistant. So it's a Docker. It pulls this thing like pretty much real time. And it'll pull the computer running the

ADSB signal on it. Get the live data. It'll enrich some of that data if it needs to. and I've got I drew out some like little logos for Southwest and you the bigger airlines when they when they pop up and yeah when there's a plane flying over I will get a little like logo if it's a logoed plane I'll see where it's going from see the tail number I'll see like the heading the direction speed height height I guess all that stuff that'll just kind of like flow through I would show at you now but he's a little late, so there's not many planes flying over? It just turned off. But there is a plane doing, like, touch and goes at the airport right now. And if it pops up, I'll show you. But I posted a couple pictures in our channel there, and I'll put one on the show here. To show what it looks like.

It's a basic thing. I'm trying to make it into a home assistant plugin that runs into Docker. I guess that would be hacks that you can install that with. And, yeah, if you've got an ADSB receiver, it will look at that and pull it. for changes and spit the information on the screen. So, yeah, fun project. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Seeing the screen and the background we had it on.

Yeah, there are no planes flying over right now. Of course. I said a distance to 10 kilometers, right? Which basically encompasses if they're landing on either side of the airport, but pretty much will show, actually there's a plane turning around right now. So we'll see a Delta flight land here in a second. But it doesn't pick up like everything on the map. But there is the sheriff's office that likes to fly over with their chopper, I guess,

and do circles and make a lot of noise. And so I made them, I grabbed their tail number off their chopper there. And I made a little special like sheriff star thing. So when it's going over, that's the logo that pops up. And sometimes it can be, actually like most of the time, that's the one that's on there. It's just flying around all the time. Do you have like news choppers that you can follow and stuff like that? Yeah, if I catch them, I could.

I've seen them. Like, the Tampa Market has one or two of those. And if like there's a big story going on down here, you'll see those kind of fly in for those. Oh, here we are. So we got, ah, I unplugged it. I saw the Delta flight number on it. Yeah.

What happened there? You unplugged it. Yeah. Here it is. Let's see if I can get it. No, I can't. make it work. Maybe it's the cable. No, there it is. Oh, it's the cable. When you, when you twisted it turned back on, it's the cable. Something's loose on the cable. Yeah. Yeah. You broke it.

It's been working. I've been like sitting here staring at flights fly by the entire time. We've had the show. And of course, yeah, now it stops working. So I'm going to change the cable out. Anyway, it's been a fun little project. And, uh, yeah, if I can get it to a point where I'm like, like, it started with like, be just kind of like tinkering with it to see if I could get something on this screen. I will say that the protocol that that that I'm using for the M1 is pushing over like like a protocol on a WLED. I'm not a fan of it. It doesn't seem to work all that well and the antenna on the the M1 does not seem to be very good. So I might I might take the M1 off and switch to like a Raspberry Pi or something like that because it will I can hardwire it

at that point and not have these wireless issues or, you know, just, just run directly off the Raspberry Pi rather than having, I mean, honestly, ESP 32, it's a great chip and everything, but it's very, you know, small in what it can do. It doesn't have much memory, all that stuff. I could run this off a Raspberry Pi attached to the back of these and could actually, the way they have these, you can get multiple these panels and, like, latch them together. I don't know if you've seen them, like, is I make it like two of them and have like a widescreen version of this. in the future. Yeah, I think they had a limit to it, though.

I think the limit was, too, based on power requirements of the ESP 32, I think. There's a limit, but there's not a limit. Like, there's a practical limit, but there's always a way. Like, with these electronics, like, I mean, these are the little panels they put together and make big signs out of, right? No, yeah, the limit is with, I guess, their configuration. Yeah, I'm sure the little ESP chip, they're used to, the, you, the, uh, ESP 32 S3 or whatever it is,

doesn't have enough, like, juice to do that many more LEDs. Like, each one of those LEDs is a different, you know, an LED it has to control. So, so I'm assuming that's probably the limit. Like, maybe it's a memory limit. But, like, again, if I go with a Raspberry Peg 5, I don't have that limit. So I can go way bigger if I wanted to. Anyway, I'm, I'll see how that works out. We'll see how that works in the future.

But it's been a fun project. and kind of nice to kind of like put hands on hardware again got excited i got a bunch of uh bunch of these screens in my in my cart over at apollo um you know maybe maybe order a couple more of these to strap them together go for it when you see just and tj uh show him showing the picture what i did i could probably send it to him in the in the discord yeah send it to him in the discord he'll love it uh Gavin you got some stuff you did oh yeah so now that's spring and it warmed up a bit for a couple days. I finally got to set up my Navimo,

my Segway Navimo, lawnmore again, right? Welcome. So, yeah, I'm happy to have it back cutting a lot. It's out doing its thing. But this time, I use their home assistant integration. Ooh. So it actually, I know when it first came out,

it was very buggy and stuff, but I guess they fixed a lot of the bugs by the time I got to it. And yeah, adding it to home. assistant through the hack store and you just had to sign in and authorized and I had control over my lot more. You have basic control though. You can start, pause, send it back home.

And then you get a status of it running or not, which is pretty much everything I kind of wanted in home assistant anyway. So it does it. There's one issue with it where it doesn't refresh all the time. So I think when you start it, it refreshes the entities. But as it's running or when it stops, it doesn't refresh the entities. There's a bug in it somewhere. They'll eventually fix it. I think someone opened a report.

But for now, I had to create an automation that when it detected, it started. It would refresh the entity every minute until it finally finished. So then I got the latest progress and what's doing and the latest battery percentage and stuff like that. So you'll find that. that in their GitHub, people have been talking about it. So it works well. And he's out cutting my lawn again. So I'm kind of happy about that.

Yeah, I do like that you could see that like if it's docked, if it's not. Sometimes I miss the notification that the, you know, it didn't get back to the dock for some reason. And it'll be sitting out there for a couple of days in the yard, like in a hole or whatever. And this, you can automate off that, right? And I hope one day they'll add zones so you can send it to do specific. zones and stuff like that. But I mean, having it in a home assistant, you can add, you can schedule everything in a home assistant and add conditions like if my irrigation system's running, don't move on. If I'm in guest mode, don't move on. You know, you can do other

things like that. So that's why I want it in home assistant so I can control things like that. Or you can make home assistant ping you if it gets stuck in the area or whatever. So it works well for now. They'll be adding features, I hope. If not, I hope somebody will reverse engineer the protocol that they're using a bit more and add the other features. I don't think that's like internal.

I don't think that has anything to do with with them. It's what they expose. Yeah, it's what they've decided to expose. Yeah, I don't like the polling part, but hopefully they fix that eventually. The app pulls. I don't, that's what the app does when it's running. It pulls for changes.

Yeah, it wasn't picking those. up. But if I run, there's a home assistant command to refresh the entity, then that gets the updated battery levels and everything like that. So that's why I make it just refresh that entity every minute while it's running. Then once it's docked and then it stops doing that. Yeah. So it does its thing. It works. The other thing that happened this week is Unraid released. If you're an Unraid user, they released a 7.25 upgrade. Now, I advise everybody to keep their Unraid up to date. And the main reason why, especially with connectivity, internet and stuff like that, there's some serious security issues in, um, been found not in Unrated itself, but in the Linux

distributions and stuff that have been fixed. Um, there was one big one, I think that this addresses. I don't know how serious it is, um, because I see people debating back and forth, but it's always good to make sure you have the latest version of Unraid, for example, uh, just to make sure all that stuff's patched and you're safer than you were. yesterday. And some people, like, they'll sit on like Unraid 6 for the longest time and eventually one day decided, oh, I'm going to upgrade now. Going from like Unrate 6 to the latest Unrate 725 is a much bigger drum with a lot more that will break than if you just incrementally did it along the way. I got to tell you, anybody's sitting on stuff right now? Like if you're not, the updates that

are coming out right now are especially in Microsoft, Apple, all these big companies. Android. Like, this, what is the, the mystic thing or whatever over to Anthopic, they're, they're pushing that through to look at all the source code. Yeah. If we are

seeing those, those updates hit, like, and they're attributed it as like, thank you, blah, blah, blah. And it's usually the person that's over that project or whatever. I can't remember their name.

But it's not like they're calling it out and saying, thank you AI robot for fixing our bugs that have been like in our system. There are some major bugs that this thing is finding right now. The only way you're going to get ahead of it is you for update. So go update everything right now. It's important today.

Right now these are important updates. Anything you see, I just saw Apple. All my Apple devices have come through with update. I'm pretty sure it, you know, it's a security update. It has to do with that. Go update.

It's time to update. Yeah, I think the big one that was for Linux. Well, it's not just Linux, but I'm seeing it mentioned everything. Everything. A copy fail. vulnerability, which enabled Linux root privilege escalation, even in the cloud environments. But from what I was seeing, this has been there for like 20 years and they just discovered it.

So that's why they're like, this is being, you know, actively attacked. Go update. And I always encourage people, update. It's not just that. It's finding, like, novel approaches that haven't been used before or haven't been discovered before. And I think you were talking about, like, how they chain known attacks together or known issues together and then find, it can chain those together and then find another way to get in because of something that dropped out of that chained attack. And it's relentless. That's the problem is, like, it has all the time in the world to mess with this, you know, in micro seconds.

Yes. Well, that's why this is so good. way better than humans programming. Like this thing can just iterate and iterate and iterate and find the little bit that gets flipped and go and attack that or fix it. And that's that's an amazing use of this tool, I think. So I'm happy that they're using it, but it's important right now. If you see an update on any major. It says security update.

It's time to update. It's not that we don't, don't play around right now. But it's scary how many people like, uh, I see. like my friends with iPhones and they get mad because they're like, oh, constant updates and they skip the updates. And I'm like, just click update. Like, who cares? Just, it's, just let it update. Yeah, just let it go because like when I was reading, I think it's called the copy fail when I was reading this and then, you know, they're talking about having the ability to break out of Docker containers to get access to the whole system. I always thought Docker containers

were like a box that nothing can get out of it. I was safe. Nope. You're not safe. So you have to make sure you update those dockets, especially if you expose any of them to the internet and stuff like that. Like, keep your things up to date. Yeah, yeah, especially right now. Right now it's important. I would say like last year, if somebody said, oh, I have to do these updates or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's a pain. Just doing when you can't.

Now if you see an update, especially when there's come to say security enhancements, it's time to update. Just do it. You need to be ahead of where they are going to be. because Claude Anthropic or whoever that has this, I can't remember the name of it, especially the name. They have that out now. Somebody else will have it out in three or four weeks. You know, it'll be, and then somebody will do an open source version or figure out how to do it with just off-the-shelf hardware or whatever. And it's off to the races at that point.

But you have to be ahead of that. They were limiting the use of those models to specific companies and stuff like that. But like a week after they did that, I saw articles of people that had unauthorized. access to it. Yeah, there was some Discord server that. Yeah, yeah, that figured out how to get access to it and that's scary as it is, you know. So, yeah, do your updates. It's update time. There's no excuse right now, so do well. Yeah, even Home Assistant released an update with security to fix security. So just do your updates. Yep. But other than that, those are all the projects I did. You know, I'm excited for TJ and, you know, like the wife's even more excited because

she's been prepping everything in the house. We bought snacks. Very hurry up because these snacks are pretty good there. They're very tempting. Like it's hurting walking bites over those snacks all the time. And she's just like, don't touch them there for the guests. That's right.

We're not coming to see you, Gavin. You know, so yeah. She's nice. And then and then the Apollo, Justin from Apollo's coming up. And then,

you know, Rohan from the Home Assistant podcast lives around the corner. So he'll, be hanging out with us, so it'll be a fun time. We'll have to record a short little segment. Yeah. Do something. Hop on, bring a microphone, or I guess Gavin has a couple of microphones.

A day in the life of TJ working. That's right. That's funny. All right. I think that's going to wrap up this week. We'll look forward to seeing you guys together next week. It would be fun. We want to thank everybody for listening to show, but especially want to sit in a big

thanks to those who are able to financially support the show through their patron page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to humtech.com slash support. To learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every single pledge gets you an invite to our private SlackChat, The Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can get in there and look at fans, only fans. No, they're talking about like fan blower things in there.

And I got, I mean, those look actually a lot of fun. I actually have one. I have one. T.J. got convinced me to get one. Where did I put? Well, I think they're all talking about the ones. TJ got. Yeah, that thing.

Yeah, that's what I got. No, not that one. Not the one Gavin has, but I got it after somebody complained because I left dust somewhere. And it was like, I couldn't have like, very strong. Yeah, like, it blows all the dust off of my dust. Like, I like using it on the keyboard. Yeah, it's good for random stuff like that. Yeah.

Well, I have a cat too. So I'm like, you know, the water bottle or the cat, it's getting used to. Yeah. So I'm thinking like, I think that might be coming handy. It's a lot smaller than a waterbollies. We won't see it coming. But yeah, 200, 200 miles an hour. They were saying that blows wind.

That's pretty crazy. So I might get everyone of those. If you're in the hub, you'll see the discussion we have on our only fans' discussion there. So that was pretty cool. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show. But every pledge gets you invite. Oh, I already did that. Let's see.

But if you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review, a positive rating in the podcast app for your choice. going to wrap up the week here on HomeTech, everybody. Have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time, take care.