HomeTech.fm - Episode 575 - Gunk Tank

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

On this week's show: Google I/O 2026 is all about agentic AI and Search that answers before you ask, Homey hikes hardware prices and Plex triples its Lifetime Pass price, Hubitat hooks up with Ring, UniFi announces a new 5G backup, Birdie Pro faints at bad air, and iGarden’s robot goes for an Olympic clean. A pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the home tech podcast for Friday, May 22nd from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm C.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcasts all about home automation, home technology, and, well, Google I.O. happened. And guess what they didn't mention.

Anything to do with home technology. Imagine that, right? Smart Home doesn't have anything to do with AI. They're like, we can use AI for everything, but I don't know. think we're going to use it for the smart home. Still mention that smart home stuff, yeah. We don't need that. Yeah.

Yeah. Mimini everywhere. Jim and I in your search. Gimini in your car. It's, jimini in your car. It's in your car. It's, I'm going to be everywhere. Geminii wants nothing to do with the smart home. Yeah, except in your smart home. And I was like, oh, yeah, we were doing that. They probably even forgot they had that division. They're just like, nah. Did we shut that down? It was NIST, right? We shut down Ness. Yeah, yeah. We don't have. have anything left. It's okay. Nothing there. Three billion dollar company they paid for it. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing was mentioned at Google I.O. about the speaker. Of course, that was kind of known going into it that it probably weren't going to get mentioned. And everything at the official Google IO was all about AI and stuff. And then I think WWDC is around the corner too, which I expect is probably going to be all about AI too. I'd be interested to see what Apple

does to help. I would like to see them like help. People use these agents and stuff that whatever agent you pick like like just make it make like we have the harnesses that we put these agents in right whether it be open claw or clod code or whatever but like all the hooks into the operating system and all that stuff like all that needs work and it'd be nice if they like worked on that because i think they're in a unique position to be able to do that like my calendar doesn't really there's not really a good way to get the calendar stuff like it's it's always stale it doesn't ever refresh events that like get canceled stay on there it's like maybe Maybe that's something they could work on over there at the Apple.

Do you think they'll actually mention AI? Because, I mean, they just lost a, you know, a lawsuit because they mentioned AI. And they told people, you know. They're going to mention AI this time. Was the lawsuit worth it, I guess, you know? Yeah, it'd be interested to see what they do. Supposedly there's, there's been some moves going around with Apple that they're going to allow you to basically just choose whichever AI you want to... To run Siri behind the scenes.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's fine, honestly. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of other companies that have way better AI stuff. I mean, mainly because Apple hasn't done anything with. Literally anything is better than their AI stuff right now. And that's kind of how it should be anyway, right? I mean, like the search, like you can use whatever search engine you want.

And AI is basically just a fancy search engine for a lot of people. So why shouldn't I be able to just choose whichever one I want? Well, speaking of search engines, you're not going to be able to use your search engine anymore. Because Google is going to make it an AI search engine, which is it's going to make up its results and give it to you there. And then you can click in the links if you want, but they're not going to have the links anymore. It's just going to be a search for AI. Which, honestly, like you said, that's how people are using chat GBT right now. Instead of searching, they're asking the chat GBT.

So basically, the search becomes chat at this point, right? Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's the way it should be. I just, I don't like how Google currently has it implemented. It gets more annoying with all the fluff at the top and everything, right? Oh, you think it's getting any better? If they made it all, you know, sometimes I'm just wondering if I'll be able to get to my information faster, or it's just going to get more in the way.

We will see. Yeah, that's my concern, too, is it's just going to bog it down with just more junk. Because it used to, you know, 20 years ago or so, you could just type into Google in, like, the first page

and get most of the answers you wanted for, like, whatever you're looking for. And now, like, a lot of stuff's getting pushed to, like, the second or third page because there's so many advertisements on everything. And it's getting much harder to find information these days. Yeah.

And now the problem is you don't know if information's real or not. So, you know, it used to be just like people were just giving you crap information. You know, you'd find, like, Reddit threads or urban dictionary links. But now it's just like, now AI is just like, oh, yeah, all that's true. Just go ahead and use it.

That's fine. It was funny. I was listening to it. I know the comedian's name. I just can't think of it right at the top of my head. Talking about, like, how it was when, when, I think it was it Josh Johnson? I don't remember. Talking about, like, the internet, like, was when we were growing up.

It's like, you used to have to dial up. Like, you used to have to have to dial the, you have to wait. The internet, it came on a CD. And you came out of the email. I remember those days clicking connect and then going to the bathroom. You got plenty of time. It's going to sit there and scream at itself for a bit. And then you'd come back and then finally be connected.

You're like, okay, cool. And then you get a phone call and it kicks it off. And you're like, no. Oh, yeah, your mom picks up the phone. Your sister picks up the phone. Yeah. Because that was always the worst. You know, playing video games online.

And then you just get a phone call a sudden to just drop out, die in the wilderness somewhere. It's not good. I found the video of this. I'll share it with you guys. You can watch it later. It's really funny because he talks about like how we remember growing up with this stuff

and like how much things have changed. But here we go. I'll put this in there. Slack over here. I'm pretty sure this is it. He'll be arrested tomorrow, TJ. It's all right. All right.

Anyway, we got a bunch of home ticket lines besides Google. So what do you guys say? We jump in. Let's do it. Here's a couple of stories about price raises that we're going to get. Everybody gets a pricing increase. Homi says it's going to be raising prices for Homi Pro and the Homi Pro mini starting June 1st,

2026. The company attributes the increased mainly to start higher costs for RAM and EMMC storage. It notes the Raspberry Pi, which is basically as supplying the core component of the Homi Pro has also passed along those higher component costs as well. So they announced that another price increase could affect production later in 2026. So There we go. They said they've held the pricing study as long as possible, and that retailer margins and fats, the value add tax stack on top of the new S-R-R-Pee. So it's still absorbing part of the cost difference, which is nice, but everything is going to cost a little more. Current price for the Homey Pro is, what, $3.99, and it's going to go to $4.49.

And for the Homey Pro Mini, its current price is $199, going to $2.49. I mean, it's kind of just one of those things that unfortunately it has to happen, you know? By now, you got until July 1st. So buy now if you won't win at $1.99 or $3.99. And sure, it's a big company. You know, LG owns homie now, but it's still, you know, prices are increasing. AI is screwing everything. If you haven't, if you haven't been to the store recently, looked at, like computer hardware, for example, like hard drives.

Hard drives are basically non-existent at this point. You used to be able to buy a hard drive, like, you just walk in the store and they would throw hard drives because they were so cheap. And now you're like, you're like, that's that like Dave Chappelle skit where it's like scratching his neck. You know, he's doing like cocaine or whatever. And he's like, you got any more hard drives because nobody has hard drives. Nobody's got them. Like I went to the story the other day and I was like, what's the chance of me ordering like four 10 terabyte hard drives? And the guy goes, that's not possible.

Jeez. And I was like, even if I like pre-order it, he goes, no, we don't even know what we're getting. Like we just get a truck and there's like three hard drives on there and that's it. Wow. So if a big, big retailers are struggling with it. And I know Gavin's struggle with it for a while too. just like a replacement hard drive. Like you had a warranty hard drive you couldn't even get a replacement for.

They just didn't give you a B stock and they wouldn't do it. Yeah. I eventually got the warranty drive back and then Richard Gunther sent me another drive the same size. So, you know, I appreciate it so much because I now have backup drives because one day I'm going to have a drive failure. Yep. Yeah, by that time, hard drive is going to be like a billion dollars in Canada, especially. I know. I know. I know.

Well, they're not the only ones that get in price increase. Plex, the lifetime past for Plex is going to go up. And if you're, it's going to go up in the U.S. to 749, which it sounds bad enough because I think what? It's $250. It's like three times as much now. But wait, but wait. If you're in Canada, it's over a thousand dollars Canadian. Wow.

What are they thinking? I, I know what they're thinking. They want everybody on the subscription. On the subscription. Yeah. Yeah. So that they can have reoccurring revenue and then they can slowly raise. has subscription.

Anytime they want just to generate some quick money. I think it's nice they still offer it. Like, they don't have to offer the lifetime, never pay again pass thing. They could, they could always cut that off as an option for people and just say, no,

we're a subscription only, like just literally every other software vendor out there is done. Or they could say, no more lifetime and we'll do like the major versions thing. You know, you can pay us $250 to the major versions. And if you want to upgrade past, you know,

pass the next thing, then you'll pay another $250 or whatever the price will be at that point. But I don't know. Every, all software is pretty much gone subscription. So yeah, I think it's going to get to a point. There's so many alternatives to Plex out there now. I think people will eventually get fed up and move over. Um, just watch it happen.

Like the subscription thing is getting really like at one time I was complaining that there were too many of them. Now I'm complaining that they're all raising their prices. Like I have a subscription for an app on my phone and they just raised it 75% for no reason. It's the same app, everything. It's just now more expensive. Maybe they put AI in it, Gavin.

Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, offer that as an add-on at least. So my existing app will at least work and then say, hey, if you want the new version with AI feature, you can pay an extra $2 a month. At least do that. Well, not for Plex. Pone of a thousand bucks.

Plex says it also It did in this article says it previously Considered removing the lifetime plan entirely So yeah I don't know Yeah I don't see why they don't honestly At this point Yeah and it's like And it is one of those things like nobody really has lifetime anymore

Yeah It's because like after a while You're actually costing them money at some point Well I'm definitely costing them money Right because I'm pretty sure I bought Plex when it was at or below $100 Like I could probably go look it up whatever I paid Yeah But it was not that much

But I was like, this is such a cool app. Like, I'm in. And it's only gotten better. They've only tried to do more with it. But yeah, I can see them wanting to have that seven, that sweet, sweet $7 a month coming in from people rather than a one-time purchase 10 years ago for 80 bucks or whatever it was. I think I have a Plex subscription somewhere. Well, now you're sitting on gold.

I got a $1,000 in Canada. I got a, look it up now. I bought a lifetime subscription in 2021 for $85. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it's one of those things as long as they don't screw over the lifetime pass users at some point, you know, like, because usually what happens when somebody does this is they like, they fork it and they create a new version eventually. Yeah. And they're like, oh, you can't have this one because you need this new subscription, you know, it'll keep working, but, you know, you're not going to be able to get the new AI features or whatever BS they have. So as long as they don't do that at some point, I'm fine with it, you know.

But if they do that, I'm going to be a little salty, even though I don't use it. Yeah, it's called Pleistie. AI as soon as that comes out, they fork everything and, yeah, turn it over. Yeah. What did you search for? Plex receipt? I typed in like Plex subscriptions. So I said Plex find my license. And then there was like a subscription management page. Oh, and Plex itself? So it's actually account.Plex.t.tv slash payments. And then you can go and actually see your transaction history and see when you bought it. And for a while I was paying the subscription. I don't know what Dasso's subscription was.

Oh, yeah, I was paying the subscription for a while and I just canceled it. I don't have a lifetime, boo. I paid, how did you pay $89? You must have got a coupon or something. I paid in 2017, $120 for the lifetime. Oh, wow, I wonder why. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was like pro-rated or something.

You typed in a coupon somewhere. Yeah, I don't know. I don't ever look for the coupon codes. That's got to be it. I wonder if I have the actual, like, email confirmation. Hmm. Yeah. Well, still for what, almost, 2017, almost 10 years, nine years.

Yeah, it's served well. Yeah, not really surprised at raising prices. This is something that happens, unfortunately, with everything. Crazy. Well, sorry, Canada. And Hubitat is releasing a new platform version 2.5.0 for Habitat elevation hubs. The big feature this time is a new ring integration. It brings in ring doorbell cameras, lights, sirens, chimes all into Hubitat.

and this ring connection relies on ring cloud services so if you don't have those i mean you got to have that hooked up for it to work um not a local not a local integration for ring at all um so pretty uh pretty good update with this and uh yeah if you're using ring and have hubbat at this may be a good way to um integrate the two two systems together they give some examples about connecting z wave lights when a ring camera on detects motion you can flip on the lights outside or when a doorbell gets pressed you can do that kind of thing. There's two things about this. One, that article was on Business Insider website.

I was actually shocked. It was on that website. And two, their marketing team screwed that up at first. They said all, you know, with the ring integration and everything, they were, their marketing email saying, all local, blah, blah, blah. And I actually had to go to their forums because I was like, how do they make that all local? And other people called it out and they actually confirmed it's not local. it's through the cloud.

Their marketing team had it wrong, blah, blah, blah. So keep that in mind if you get those emails. It's not local. A little confusion there. Yeah, I could see kind of how that happens because Hubitat does promote the like, we're an all local hub, you know, they take, you know, that kind of thing. So their marketing team takes that. And they say, oh, we have a green now and they just kind of keep plugging away at the same things.

So I could see how that could happen, especially if it's like subbed out. But good for Hubitat. A lot of people are getting that ring integration. stacked in these days. Well, once it's on one platform, so it's on home assist. All the codes open at that point, so they just look at the code and grab it.

They opened that recently, they recently started actually offering the integration, because we had it for years at Blackwire when I was there. It's one of the first things I did was get set up and sign contracts with actual ring before they were Amazon and get an integration on board, work with the developers to build that integration. And that is just basically doorbell press,

and events, you know, motion events, that kind of thing, which is, for the most part, like, all that was really needed. Everybody wanted the video, but just couldn't do it. These are all coming in. I think some of them, like, Home Assistant has the video. Like, you can get video and image snapshots and that kind of thing pulled in, so that's nice. But I've noticed there's a lot of platforms now

that are directing, Reign Integration, have all the bells and whistles and everything. And Ring itself has that new integration platform, too. So it's all coming from that direction, I suppose. It's kind of nice. Anyway, move on here. We've got some pool tech here for the 133% of us that has a pool. IGarden M1 AI series is a cordless robotic pool cleaner. And it claims they can do a 20-minute clean and has a 30-day hands-reuse.

You have to touch this thing. For 30 days, you just leave it in there and just goes around cleans your pool 20 minutes a day. And it's got all sorts of AI. There's AI everything on this promo page here. But man, I got to say, we have like the robot lawnmores and everything. And I thought those were future shit. No. The pool?

The pool technology, the robots in the pool, those are like super sleek. And, you know, I guess they have to be to go through the water or whatever. But man, they look, this thing looks like a sports car underwater. It's crazy. Gavin, you're going to grab one of these? Gavin, disappeared. He gone. Where did he go?

I definitely don't have a house for a pool. But I've always wondered if something like this is worth it over like this. just like the dumb pool vacuum things. It's kind of just like, you know, run around and crash into the wall and then go the opposite way and stuff like that. Yeah, they're like float around with the like the tube connected to them. This doesn't even have a tube connected to it.

It's like all in one. Like just vacuums up whatever and sucks it in. I guess keeps it there. Yeah. Keeps the gunk in. He's got a spot. It's got gunk tank. This pool cleaner was actually cool.

And I added it to the notes because it was different from than the other ones. The other ones just bounce around your pool and and clean up. up what it can, right? This one actually uses AI to target the dirt on the bottom of your pool. So it looks out, it says, hey, there's a leaf over there and drives the leaf. It doesn't necessarily like clean the whole pool in that mode. Oh, you just trying to get all the big dirty stuff. Yeah, just it finds the dirt and just makes a path straight to it. It does have the option to do the back and forth and map out your pool and everything. It does stairs apparently. It has a whole bunch of good feature. It's, it's pretty nice. It's different. And the thing I liked is, um, they,

They say you can leave it in the pool for up to 30 days because it goes into a sleep mode. And then it will wake up and then target the dirt and everything like that. Of course, he's got AI. It's lazy. Yeah, it's lazy. Exactly. But that's kind of cool because with my current pool cleaner, I throw it in today. And I forgot I did that a week later.

And then I really, it's been sitting in there anyway. Wait, he's just been sitting there not doing it? It's just, yeah, it's just been sitting there anyway. Because my current one is still a corded one. So to restart it, I have to turn off the power for five seconds and turn back on and that it starts to go again. But, you know, this one's actually cool. I was looking at getting a new one. And if I did, I'd probably look at this one.

It's kind of nice. Just like, oh, there's the stuff I need to clean up. It'll go around and thing that up. Yeah. It doesn't waste its time cleaning places that are already clean. It will just target. I just don't know how well it will find the dirt because sometimes you have like, um, especially when I open my pool, some of the dirt will settle to the bottom in little spots and stuff.

Will it be able to see that and then actively go towards it, I hope, instead of just seeing a leaf or something major under there. Like another thing that happens is on the drain on the bottom of my pool, sometimes the robot will get stuck on that for some reason, right? So you have to turn it off and then turn it back on. This will actually avoid that drain. It will recognize the drain and drive around it and stuff or even the pool ladders. Sometimes they bump into the pool.

and throws them back down to the bottom of the pool, this one will probably go around the pool ladder, so it's cool. Interesting. It's all those things. When you have a pool, you understand the struggles. Oh, yeah. The only way I wish this thing had would be like,

maybe like a little ballast where it could, like, float up to the top or something, and then like have a little solar panel where it could charge itself. And then when it's done, that would be cool. That would be the next version. Yeah. I mean, some of them now, what they do is they'll, when they're done, I think all of them do, when they're,

When they're done, they float back up to the top so you can grab it. So it'll go like to a designated area float and then you can grab it. They're always heavy and hard to get out of the pool. But that's a good idea. Float back to the top, start charging and just float around, you know, and then drop back to the bottom. Too bad I don't have a pool. You got to get a pool so you can get one of these. Yeah, this is right, right.

It takes six hours to charge this thing, though. That's kind of wild. I guess if it sits in there for 30 days, you don't have to really worry about it for six hours. Yeah, I'll take that because when you do take it out, you just plug it in and leave it there. You don't need it for a little while anyway, right? Like the speed of the charge is no big deal.

You can go up to a maximum pool length of 40 feet. So that may be a problem for some listeners. I don't have that problem. No. Wow. All right. It's kind of cool. I really like how sleek it looks, though.

It's kind of like a little race car running around under D-D-Rer. your pool really slowly, I'm sure, but it's kind of cool. All right, we've got a new product from Ubiquity because it's another week, and they have to release a product every week, I guess. That's just what they do now. Um, Ubikini has a new Unify 5G backup, and this is, this is for using like a cellular 5G as a backup. It has a little screen on it for some reason, but, you know, because I guess every product has to have a screen, um, from ubiquitous. but it's got 5G connectivity plugs in with PEOE powered, and you just plug it in,

whatever your Unified Gateway is. And if you need to have internet, it'll switch over off of your internet to basically fill in all the downtime. Like if you lose power or internet goes out for some time, it'll switch over to this. And you'll get a little bit slower 5G performance, but at least you won't be down for that time.

So I think it's just kind of nice. We could have used something like this a couple of years back during the hurricanes to get online and do things like that. But I don't know. Sometimes you really wish you have that. And then the power comes back on. You're like, all right, well, back to it now. And you forget about ever buying one of these things. But I think it was only 20 minutes.

So you're like, oh, 20 minutes wasn't that bad without internet, you know? Not the end of the world. Not just that. If we lose power, I mean, my UPSs are only there to run stuff for so long, too, right? Like, they don't have to shut down. When we lose power here for the hurricanes and that kind of thing, it may be, like, you may get power back, but then it may take more days for the internet to come back, basically.

So, like, if you have power, that's great. You can get, you know, you can get cold food and take warm showers again. But then you can't, like, you can't do anything on the internet, which is quite a bit, believe it or not. Even with CLECs, having all these movies locally stored, there are components that like to reach out and go online. So it's still a pain sometimes. It's amazing how dependent we are on the internet.

Yeah. For everything. You realize that when it goes out, you're like, oh, man, I can't even work. Oh, no. This thing's only $100, which is nice. There's very few of them that are at this price point. So that's a really low cost, especially for POE. Well, and the other option you have from Unify is for $3.99.

And granted, you get, like, way faster speeds. It's like 3.4 gigabits per second. So much faster. This one's like 200 megabits per second. But for $100, that's pretty nice. Yeah. I mean, it's something. It'll get you through an outage.

You know, this is perfect for, like, a business. I don't think I'd use this for my house. I think for my house I would just get, like, T-Mobile home internet or something like that. You know, it's $50 a month, but you'd have unlimited data at that point. So a lot of my clients have access to cellular home internet at this point, which would be a better option. But if you don't live in an area where, like, it's going out all the time and you just need it for that time that it does, this is perfect. You get 10 gigabytes of data for $60 and it expires after a year. That's one thing that I've kind of wondered is,

and I've never had one of these to play around and see how it works. And I also never investigated it. But like, I have things that will trigger and start downloading large files that would eat through that pretty quickly, the data allows pretty quickly. Does this, like, ignore that stuff? Or can I, like, say, only allow these devices online, you know, that kind of thing? Is there some kind of management for that? I think there is something you can set up like in the gateway itself.

Like if it fails over, then you can limit that specific internet access at that point. Yeah. I don't, I've never actually used that though. That's my only worry when it comes to things like this. And I think about it, I'm like, well, I can't let the Apple. I can't let Apple TV on, you know, it's like it's a 4K video and you're going on. Yeah. Well, especially I think the backgrounds and stuff like that.

I mean, if you're, if your internet fails over and it like has download those high-res backgrounds, I mean, that's going to be over instantly. Speaking of backgrounds, I would make this the pick of the week this week, but we actually have a pretty good one. Have you guys seen the Apple TV, the Snoopy Apple TV background? No. Oh my gosh. I don't know when they added this.

I probably should have paid attention. But it is actually, like, I don't care about, like, I'm not a big fan of Snoopy or Peanuts or anything like that. This background is in Screensaver is really amazing. Like, it's got Snoopy, like either sleeping or doing some activity. But it changes. Like, if it's raining outside, it'll be raining on the, there'll be activities where it's raining and that kind of look over and you'll notice.

There's always something different that it's doing. It's actually really, really well done. It's the most impressive screensaver I've ever seen on my TV. And I don't ever care to ever have, like, to read a Snoopy comic or anything like that. Like, I don't know, it's not my thing. But, man, they did such a great job of this. It's actually enjoyable to, like, look over and see Snoopy. doing something or playing with the birds there and doing things like that.

You know, they'll be like doing little activities like playing or dancing or something to music. It is so well done. I just, I can't get over it. Every time you look over, it's doing something different. So check it out. It would be the pick of the week this week, though. Like I said, we already have some good ones. Side change it.

I'll check it out. I'll see if I can find it. I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, it's just an option on Apple TV. You know, usually I do the area. views and that kind of thing. And it was a new option on there. So we selected it and it's stayed up there since we've updated whenever that was.

I'm not sure. I've been meaning to talk about it because I haven't heard many people talking about it. It's really, really well done just because it's not the same thing every time you look over at it. And speaking of birds, the birdie pro has a new version, the wall-mounted air quality bird that dies. I like this thing. I wish I cared about air quality because I want one of these, but I'm like, I have no reason to have this.

When you're into our CO2 hits a certain level, the bird physically faints and hangs upside down, prompting you to open up a window. And it returns to normal ones that your quality improves. We honestly, we need more sensors like this. Do we? Like, we need more interactive stuff like this. I think this is fantastic.

I want to get, I wonder if this is sensitive enough to pick up if you pass some gas in there. Oh, put it in the happen. That would be hilarious. You let one go in. dies. Your wife looks at you, like, what happened?

It was the dog. Wasn't me. They need more devices like this. Like I need like a, like, you know, like a display that just looks like it's broken if I spend too much time on it or all kinds of things. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember this. It's like a little clock. Looks like a little. It's basically set up like a clock. And when the bird faints upside down, what is it? Its wings like hang upside down. It's like it's dead. Yeah, that's great.

$1.99. Not worth that price in my opinion, but it's... Well, if you don't buy that early, it's $2.99, so, oh, boy. I don't want one that bad. But, you know, it has moving parts and stuff, so I guess I can understand. I guess. I don't know. It seems like this would be something fairly easy to do with a couple of Apollo automation sensors.

Everything's easy with Apollo. Right. Well, what do they update here? they've got a CO2 temperature, humidity, mold risk, AQI, and pollen sensors built in now. And the birdie pro app pairs with, they have a birdie pro app that you can't. There's an app that comes with this thing. Like, I don't know why you need the app. Like, if this thing could just work standalone by itself, I think it's good enough, right?

But if you want to keep up with what the pollen count was in your house, I'm looking at the app, it's got a screenshot of a deadburn that, It's got like it's upside down with an X over its eye. It's great. I think it's well designed. I will give them that. Yeah. But you can probably do this with what, 30, 40 bucks over at Apollo.

Without the bird, of course. Oh, man, fun. All the links of topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at home tech.fm slash 575. Nothing in the middle of the bag this week. But we have the pick of the week. We got one real quick one. This is a little article that we ran across over to Apollo Automation

talking about a field trip that Justin did up to Canada with a bunch of people we may know. I had fun reading this. Even though we talked about the recap last week, Justin, I guess, put up a blog post about getting up to Canada and meeting up with you guys and a bunch of other stuff, meeting up with Rowan and, I guess, doing a check-in with the postman there in Canada who re-email. Postman Pat.

Postman Pat. Yeah, yeah. And his wife, they're great. They're awesome. Yeah, this is cool. So a little more follow-up, I guess, for the big trip that TJ took up to help Gavin wire up all his cameras. Stop rubbing that in. He still hasn't fixed his door yet either, so. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I got a whole new door installed and everything. You still haven't fixed yours.

I have updated the project section. Save it for projects. I'm going to save it for projects. But yeah, I did message Justin and I said, you know, that that article was so nice to read. And you brought a little, you know, my eyes got a little watery reading it until I realized that the P.P. sensor he made for me didn't have battery reporting. So my eyes quickly dried up. You know, if you're going to give me the sensor, you got to give me battery reporting. Like, geez.

He said he'll get it fixed, though. Didn't you say it's going to last like the whole season anyway? what you need battery reporting for. That's true too because I only need it to run for six months, but, you know, since it's like a custom one-of-a-kind type of thing, I wanted to see how well the battery was holding up. So if other people wanted to create something like this, you know, at least we could say,

I have a report every hour right now. If the battery is holding up at that frequency, I'd like to reduce it to 30 minutes, for example. But he'll get me fixed. He said he'll get me fixed. Well, Gavin's Pee, he could always be updated. So there we go. Oh, yeah.

It's a good thing about having a remote connected PP. All right. Second pick of the week this week. It's a funny little TikTok video that ran across a skit of basically what it's like to be in a disaster movie. And somebody says, hey, turn on the news because you really can't do that these days. And they're going through like, the first thing he does is like start looking around for the remote. He can't find it. This drawer.

Isn't this drawer he finds it? Turns on the TV. TV's booting up. You got to wait. Where's the news? It's a Roku TV. It's a Roku TV. It's a forever.

Oh my God. They always takes so long. And the guy's just sitting there like, oh, come on. Like, just turn on the news. He's like, it's on YouTube? I don't know where to go. The pain is real, though. Every time there's like a live event or something on locally, I'm like, how are I

going to watch this? Like, how do I watch the Olympics? How do I do that? I don't know. Do have an antenna or something? This one did hit close to home, though, because I totally. got what they say like quick turn on the news though that ain't there is no quick turning on my tv you turn on the tv you got to wait for it to boot up you know you got to wait till the ads disappear

off the screen hopefully you don't have a firmware update that needs to be applied at the time then everything else slowly starts up and then when it finally gets there you got to figure out the channel yeah what streaming service is it on what channel is it yeah there is no turn on the news you have to give them exact turn Netflix onto this or whatever exactly You know, yeah. Yeah, where, where is the news? No idea. Is this something I can just watch on my phone?

I usually like Google search for it. I'm just going to go to X and look it up. Yeah, exactly. But X used to be like when I wanted to know things that were happening in the world, like, right away. Because the news was always delayed and you'd see a little post, oh, earthquake hit here. And you go to your local news and they haven't even started talking about it. I used to go to Twitter to get the information. You'd see pictures and videos and stuff.

Now when I go to X, oh, man, I can't even scroll through my X feed in public anymore. I don't know how that happened, you know, but it's the algorithm, Gavin. The algorithm. I don't know. I must have, no, I don't know how this. You clicked on it one too many times. I think when people follow you under or you follow a certain account, sometimes they change that account. And all of a sudden, you're getting a different type of pictures.

You know, it was cat pictures and now it's a different type of cat pictures. So I don't know. So I unfollow them, but it already influenced my algorithm because I clicked on a few of them. Just a check. Yeah. Just to check. Yeah. Well, this is not a cat photo.

Let me check again. Algorithms. Algorithms. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's the unfortunate thing about the way that system works now is that they don't. They don't really want you to know what's going on.

And that is, I think, one of the reasons they've changed it so much. I think for the most part, Mastodon still kind of works that way. Like, there's a trends thing that you can kind of look over and see if something happens. But again, it's not like hyper-local what you're talking about. Yeah, Mastodon doesn't really have an algorithm. I don't think on it. I think it's just who you follow. Who you follow.

Yeah. Yeah. How Twitter used to be is it just showed you the new post and you just used to scroll through it. That's it. No algorithm. There is a trend thing. on there. If it, if it, if enough people that you're following or like talking about something, it'll show up there. But other than that, no, there's not, not a thing. I heard there's like a new

app out there that bridges blue sky and mastodon together. I might. Yeah, I have, there's, there's multiple ways you can do that. You can pretty much, if you want to run a self-hosted tool, um, what's the name of it? There, there's one you can run called Skybridge. And that what that basically does is it kind of mimics the Macedon API and Bridgette Blue Sky, right? You could do it that way, but there is also clients out there that will allow you to do both Macedon and Blue Sky. I think the one I run allows that. The one I run, it's called Mona, and I think it allows you to do that.

Actually, I can confirm that right now. Yeah, it does allow you to do that. So I have both my Blue Sky. I never use my Blue Sky, though. Yeah, I don't, I signed up for it just to kind of grab the thing, but I don't use it either. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't use my blues.

I have it, but I think Josh messaged me the other day on it. I should check it just to see. If you message me on blue sky and don't get a reply, this is why. It's echo chamber over there. Yeah. All right. Well, if you have any feedback questions, ideas to show or social media networks for Gavin to check out with his advanced algorithm, gives a shout.

our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or head over at hometech.comfm slash feedback and fill out the online form. These algorithms are killing me, though. Like, I can't, I fixed my Facebook one. My Instagram one is, I just, I had to delete the app at one point. And my Twitter one's now gone off the rails. So, you know, like, I don't know what's with these algorithms.

It's like a weird trend that keeps happening to you. Yeah. And then I was on Alibaba, their email. for the longest while are sending me questionable emails. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. But they have no shame. I mean, that one, that one, you can accidentally

like, what is this? And you click it and you're like, oh, that's what that is. And then from then on, you're getting random strange, yeah, yeah. It took me a while to fix that one, because I had to click on a lot of boring stuff to get it to filter out all the other stuff. Yeah, Ali Express, Alibaba, yeah, weird.

Project updates. Uh, homest system is welcoming, welcoming zuns, zuns, zunz. I'm not sure what this is. Zunzabee. Oh, yeah, I didn't do it correctly. Oh, thanks. Zunzun B. And it is a little, like, uh, what is this, a Z wave switch that sits next to your switch that you can use as a little keypad.

So I talk to them at CES and they actually have a kind of a cool product because what it does is it just goes over an existing light switch. And the reason I think this is cool is because a lot of people were installing like floodlight cameras and other things that attach to their light and then they have to block the light off, the light switch off in some fashion. So that way you don't turn your camera off, right? This just goes over the existing

light switch and it gives you several buttons that you can program and it works through Zigby. So it's one of those things that's like really cool if you have to block off a light switch for some reason, put this thing over it and you have a useful light switch all of a sudden. There you go. A bunch of little keypads and stuff. It's a nice, nice idea.

Zunzabee. Zunzunbi. I only had part the name on our show notes for some reason. Anyway, got projects to review. I'll get mine out of the way because I didn't really do much. I messed around with my audio processing product. I alluded to at the end of the last week and made, I don't know, some headway on it, but nothing great to report yet on that one. And I wrapped up, I'm trying to wrap up on a project from 2024 for a client that's just been sitting there.

Oh, I have some of those too. Yeah. This was one of the hurricane ones. It's like, well, I guess technically the hurricane was in 2024. I couldn't get out there to 2025 to even check to see what was going on and get them a quote on what we needed to get. And then it's just kind of been like, well, we'll make progress on when we make progress on it. And I've done the classic thing and waited until the heat of summer to need to come out there and fix anything. It's time to wait.

Yeah, it's been beautiful. I could have gone at any other time and fixed this stuff. And, yeah, right in the middle of it. So, so yeah, that's what I've been up to. And Gavin, what's you been up to? Not actually a lot. So just giving you an update on my drywall. All right?

Okay. So it's scheduled for tomorrow that we will be working on the drywall. Well, actually. First of all, who's we? First of all. Did you hire this out? Because you talked about hiring it out for a little bit. No, no, I didn't hire it out.

But I attempted a little patch job. And drywall's an art that I, like, seem to suck it, right? It takes patience, which people in tech do not have. Exactly. So, you know, I went next door and I said, John, I want to come over and show me how to do drywall. Look at this mess, TJ did when he was here. So, so I already know I'm going to have John show me three times how to fix them.

Because there's three holes. And he's just going to do it for you. I know where this is going to go, you know, I'll be like, after the. The first one, I'll say, show me again. And then the third time I'll pretend like I didn't learn anything. It'll just take it out of my head and do it himself. So it's scheduled for tomorrow. I laid out all the toys and everything to get that done.

So the drywall by next show, I will probably say the drywall's fixed, but not painted. Nice. Right? So I'm just like you, I got to give you an update because, you know, my wife keeps every day she walks in. She's like, oh, you still didn't work on it today. And I looked at her today, for example. Well, she came in, she goes to drywall, still not fixed. And I said, no, but I installed a new camera.

So that's the other thing I did. I ordered the, um, a unified G6. What was it? The turret, I think you said? Pro turret. Yep. Yeah. And I installed it today.

Um, so one camera's in. And then I ordered a P to Z and the, um, recess mounting. So it doesn't stick out so much from under my soffet. And I'll be putting that in when that comes probably next week sometimes. but very easy. It was dropping off line at first, and I found out that my POE switch was underpowered, which all I needed to do was then change it to another port on my main switch,

which now gives it 45 watts a power, which is more than enough to handle the two cameras in an access point. So I am good now. It's working. I got the extra camera in there, and then I can get rid of the other camera out there and put in a nice light and everything that will make the wife happy. So yeah, things are moving along.

I don't work at a fast pace. I'm like at a slow, steady pace. That's better than, you know. Is it really steady, though? I would say slow. I don't know if it's steady. I schedule things in between because I got a lot of other stuff I got to do. I got to like, you know, the show.

I got to clean the pool, mow the lawn, do all the other type of stuff, you know. Like, so I, I, I, I, I, I work around the weather, you know, when it's going to rain this weekend. So I figured this is a perfect weekend. And I'm not going to be doing outside stuff. So I'll do the drywall stuff, you know? And while I have the tools out, I might as well fix all those stupid holes around the house that I made by accident, I should be fixing. You might as well.

You might as well, you know, just get it all done, you know? So that's good. Are you doing the PTZ flush mount? G6 PTZ. The G6 P2C. So it's tall, but then you can get the ceiling mount for it where it recesses it in the ceiling and basically just the ball part sticks out from below. Okay.

So it's not as obvious, but it will be funny to see people, looking at it as it follows them up to my front door. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Okay. It's cool. It's honestly one of those things, too. Like, it's so quiet that I don't, most people don't actually notice that it's moving. Um, like, I, like, even if I, like, look directly at it sometimes, I can't even tell if it's moving or not,

and I definitely can't hear it. So I've stood underneath it as it's moving, and I still couldn't hear it. Um, it's pretty amazing. But even the G6 Pro Pro Turret was really good. The quality, the video quality. And I was amazed. Like, it's picking up the license. plate, and I can't even read the license plate in the image, you know, so it's really good at what it's doing. I haven't seen it yet. It's really good at seeing the image, but not saving it good image. It really, I trust me, this is what it said. I look at it. I haven't yet seen it

at night. It's not dark enough yet, but I'm really, I might have to tune it a bit for night and just see how it works at night. But that's really what I wanted to get it for because that camera had a really, had a wider lens, so it's better at night. It has color night vision and stuff like that. So I'm going to go play with it probably after this show. Go play with it and adjust some settings and see. Yeah, this is the one I'm starting to use more too because it actually has a motorized zoom on it. So you can, I think this is the only ubiquity camera that actually has a motorized zoom.

That's not a PTZ. Yeah, it's the optical zoom. It can do up to 2.5 optical zoom. I was playing with that earlier as well, yes. Yeah, not really necessary in your situation. But it is nice to have, so. Yeah. Looking at the ceiling install instructions for this thing, and it's a little, like, backbox.

I didn't realize they had. So that's kind of nice. It's just like you should walk right up in there. You need a five and a half inch, uh, wholesale. Wholesall? Oh, that's a big hole saw. That's going to cost like $80 Canadian. Uh, neighbor has one of that size, I think.

So I should be good with that. But, um, yeah, and then the P2Z, you just push it up and it's like a light bulb. You twist it in, I think. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So how long before people steal that one, I don't know. The PTZ mounts are actually the least offensive mounts from ubiquities. Yes, I agree.

I hate all of their mounts for pretty much everything, but the PTZs are fine. I had to take one. I have one that was acting up. I have to take it down. And I couldn't remember it was just mounted to a pole. So it's just the standard mount that comes with it, right? And for the life, I'm like twisting on the thing. I'm like, how did this thing come off?

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I think it was just, it was easy. You just slide the little thing forward. It pops right off. I'm like, okay, that's how it went. But yeah, I couldn't, for the life of me, couldn't remember, I thought it was more complicated because it looks like it should be complicated, but it's not.

It just goes up, turns maybe less than a quarter turned, and it pops right down. So, yeah, they do a good job on this particular mount, not so much on some of the other ones. Yeah, all their access points, they suck. Yeah, access points, forget it. They only started doing good access point mounts,

like the XG and the XGS model, where it has like the metal ax of the metal mount, those so much better than the stupid flat mount that they didn't. for so long. Like, I hate those things. I did the, um, was it the, uh, outsword U7 outdoor pro? Uh, that's, yeah, the outdoor pro. Um, that one was in bed amount, but it was a pole mount, so. Yeah, yeah. Now, the outdoor ones are fine because they just like slide on kind of thing. It's the ones where like, you have to like, it's the, the flat access points where you have to, like, mount on the ceiling and you're like 10 feet in the air. You know, like, where, like, where do I put

this thing? I don't know how to line it up with the stilly tab and stuff like that. You know, a lot of other access points from like, you know, Arachnus or Aruba or whatever, they kind of just like slide in the place, you know, you just like you put the mount up and then you slide it right in. Like that's it. There's not a lot of guesswork to it, but yeah, ubiquity likes to challenge you. Definitely. Speaking of mounts, the building bridge, the building bridge mount, the little UB thing, I got that and I got the big tall one, whatever the sector pro thing. I've got to do two of these to that. They work great. Yeah, it's play and play, like way easier than some of the, uh, stuff on the UASP side.

This thing, the mount on it, though, is just very basic. I didn't realize how basic it was. And I thought I swore that it had the little, like, they have a little mount that you can get that will, like an accessory mount that you can extend off the wall a little bit more. No, this one was just, it was very basic. It's like I, I didn't, I did, it was not successful. I've got to figure out a different way to mount it. So just to get it pointed and named in the right direction.

I kind of like zip tied it to a conduit pole and it's kind of like janky and has a little signal on it for now. But it's working. So despite my bad install and my attempt to bad install, it was just powered right up and connected. And I got to say, the Unified, remember that I was telling me about the only time I ever bought that switch that's like the industrial switch. Oh, yeah, yeah. Industrial P-O-E thing. Oh, my gosh. That thing, that thing was mounted on a ceiling in this, in this, uh, in this, uh, in this, like shed.

And, um, the water probably got a foot away from it, like salt water and stuff got it, probably got a foot away from it. And that thing is still running to this day. I mean, it has like dust covers on where the ports were and everything. So it's fairly well protected, but man, what a beast. That, that's, that's crazy. I was not expecting it to run. It's been, it powered up. Everything, P-O-E, everything, all good to go. So, okay, I can recommend those things. If you can stand the look of them, man, it was really ugly, though. I don't even see it anymore on their website. So I'm looking at the camera outside. The quality is really good. Yeah. Is your car still there? Yeah, cars are still there. I can... They're not going to touch Gavin's car. I can almost zoom in through the neighbor's dining room window. And that's what the AI is for. Yeah, that's what the AI is for. But it's very clear picture. I turned off all the lights outside. And it just looks like a nice clear black and white photo. Like, It's shocking how good this is. So, yep, I'm excited to get the P to Z one and install it on the other side. And yeah, I think the wife's going to really like this one.

Yeah, you had a really good view of the driveway in the car there. Yeah. You were showing earlier. Yeah, really nice. Good spot. Good pick. Yeah, I'm going to be happy with this one. So she'll be happy.

And that's what's all about. The other project I've been working on, just an update in the agent's world, AI agents world. So, you know, we've been talking about open cloths probably for a while now and what we've been doing with it and how well it was. I just found over the last number of months when, you know, it got popular and then the dev started getting in there and adding all these security lockdowns. It just started to get worse. They made it boring. Yeah, it got boring and then just it kept failing at stuff. And then every update they released was breaking it again. And then with Claude constantly changing and everything.

Open AI has been a lot more reliable in that sense. Not just me, but when I was looking this up, more and more bigger people have gotten fed up with, you know, constantly breaking that they were moving over to another, like, I guess you call these harnesses. Yep, it's the harness is what you're. Yeah, they moved over to another harness, and the popular one seems to be Hermes.

And so I've been switching all my agents over to that and yes it is so much better so much more reliable so much faster so much easier to set up you know their updates don't break it with every update so i have most of my bots now running on that and i basically just took the config folder from my open um claw put it in the workspace of the new hermes agent i said import everything this is the old open claw stuff and it went through and it grabbed everything and then took over the identity and it's the the agent, same agent running now in Hermes. So I don't know.

If you're getting fed up with Ovenclaw and them breaking things and making it worse, take a look. Just go play with it. It does look nice. I thought there was like an open claw migration thing that it could do, too, like to bring everything over. I think he can. I just got lazy and I just told the bot to do it, right? But it's also written to run in a Docker too, which is really nice.

So I have it running an unraid. and I use their official Docker, and it's really, it's made to run like that. So really nice, really nice work they've done. And they're getting very popular now. So you might want to take a look at it. Yeah, I'm kind of, I mean, the open, the funny thing, we joked about this a number,

number of times with Open Claw. Like, the problem with it is, like, you spend, like, it's great for like 40% of the time, but the other 60% of the time you're interacting with it, you're trying to fix it, or updated or fix something that's broken on it. And it's like for most normal people, that's like, you shouldn't have to do that.

But this has a bunch of the really, like, this actually has a couple of things that you can add on or you can get OpenClaught to do, but it looks like it's like built in and they have a nice little way of making it work around it. And I like that it's a little more stable. I think OpenClaught's probably getting there because the adults that are in charge of it now

are in charge of it, but I don't know. Well, they're adding security, which I understand, but the security is now making it. The security is now making it so much worse, and it's just not working the same. I like the memory things they have on this for the Hermes agent. There's that memory plug-in that they use. I know you can get it for a lot of this stuff exists in OpenClaw or is something you can kick on or tell it to do and it'll do. but it's nice to have it just like all in one. Yeah, it does self-learning.

Yeah, yeah, which is really cool because after it performs a task, it then reflects on that task and just, you know, all lessons learned and stuff and make notes of that so we can do it faster and easier next time. And it reflects on stuff. And I really like that too. And it honcho memory is what I was thinking about. I noticed it had a home assistant integration.

So, you know, that's kind of nice. It just integrates right with the home assistant. I just give it the key and tell it to do it. Go to town, yeah. Just go to town. You know, that's what I do. But yeah, I'm now running most of my agents on that, and it's been so much better.

So, you know, get to it before they get their claws in it and, you know, start to make it worse again. Yeah, well, this one I think is older and more mature than open claw. It's built in a different direction. So it may be the one, I don't know, I'll switch over and see how I like it. Open claw. I'm not, I mean, I haven't been using it for, while until recently where I could add

anthropic back in officially. Yeah. And now old Henry's back. He's actually Henry. So that's nice. Well, your anthropic might be in trouble again because I know they allowed OAuth to work with it again, right? But you had to use the Claude CLI or whatever. But I think I saw a post recently where they're now

taking that away again. They're going to give you, you have to have a separate bucket of API tokens again. No. Come on. Yeah. It's Anthropic just every week it's a new decision with them and I I'm I have a hate love hate relationship with them. I love their product but I really hate how they keep switching it up and changing and yeah. Yeah. I mean I think with these like little things like this, these harnesses right, are doing or just educating like the big boys what to like Anthropic has cloud code. There's the codex one for what is that open AI. I think it's just like educating like

what they need the direction they need to be going and some of that some of the decisions that we see them doing now are like directly you know influenced by what open claw did with no security so um it is nice to see i mean i could move everything over to open uh sorry uh what's it called clod code yeah yeah it would i don't think there'd be a problem it it it may work the same way it may not but um for the most part like the routines and everything that i need to do i can i can totally do through. And in fact, what I did was I open, open, a quad code and said,

fix open claw. And it just went through and did it. So it's clearly something you can do. But again, I'd rather not spend the time fixing this stupid thing. I'd rather just work and have an agent that you can talk to when you need to talk to it. So, yeah. So that wraps up my projects, TJ. Yeah, my projects are traveling still.

So I just got done. Yeah, I've been traveling. Stay home, man. I want to. trust me. Don't you have pets? Did they feed them? I mean,

oh, actually, I forgot to add that to my list. Good thing you brought that up. But yeah, we usually have to board the dog and then the cats stay at home. So, yeah,

it's been awful. But we were in Dayton this week. We got done with that job early and I just got back on Tuesday afternoon. So a lot of traveling. So not a ton of projects going on. I did do a couple things. While we were gone,

I think the trip after Canada, we had to go to like Cincinnati or something. Our cat feeder just would not work. I have the Akara. I think it's a C1 pet feeder. And we don't leave it plugged in all the time. It's a Zigby-based cat feeder.

Whenever we, like, you know, we don't need it. We just unplug it and tuck it away somewhere. And then before we leave, we plug it in. And sometimes it has problems with that. I mean, Zigby in general and Z wave doesn't really like if stuff just disappears and comes back. You know, it's not one of those things. That works pretty well.

So it, like, it failed us. And we had to have, like, our neighbor down the street come over and feed the cats because I was like, I realized like a day and a half after it stopped working. The cats were starting to eat each other. So I had to have my neighbor come over. And so I decided to get a new pet feeder. I think you have the same one or the same brand, at least, the pet Libro cat feeder. Yeah, pet Libro. Yep, yep.

It seems like a, like a Chinese brand. It does seem very. especially the app, yeah, it's very unrefined. Yeah, and it's like, it's not terrible. It's not as terrible as like bird fee or whatever that brand is that I tried it out for a little bit. But it's not the best. So I bought a RFID pet feeder at first. Come to find out you cannot train or teach it multiple RFID callers.

And so like I really don't understand the point. That is. Yeah, why would you do that? Yeah, it's $140. So I got rid of that one. And I got a new one. It was like $40 because they had. They have a ton of different models.

It's crazy. Like, you can buy them, every price range you could want. They have ones with cameras. They have dual pet feeders. They have all kinds of things. And so I got, like, one of the cheapest ones.

It's like $40. I was like, I don't need the camera. I literally just need to schedule to, like, feed the cats. I just need to feed these cats. Yeah. Yeah, like,

I have cameras all throughout the house. Like, I don't need another weird camera. That's, you know, my pet feeder or something. So I picked up a cheapy pet Libro one. I too think it's funny. So I programmed it to, to dispense two cups of food.

And it actually doesn't have capacity to output two cups of food, like in the little bowl thing that it puts the food into. Oh yeah. So every time it dispenses two cups of food, it gets like jammed up. And the app contacts me and it's like, hey, there's something stuck in the motor. And I'm like, yeah, that's you. You did that. I mean, you know you don't have the capacity for it.

But so far it's working good. I haven't tried to integrate with homeless system. I honestly don't know if it does. I really don't need it to, though. You know what I mean? I just need to go off like once or twice a day. and just feed the cats, that's it. So.

I would say it does, but what you have to do is make a separate user. Because it, like, some, the home assistant will, if it's using it, it'll, like, log in, and kick you out. So keep that in mind. Yeah, that makes sense. But, yeah, it's, it's working. It's one of those things that, like, now we're worried about it. So we're just leaving out, like, a bowl of food whenever we leave. And then I'll keep messing with the pet feeder.

So it seems to be working fine now. Gavin hasn't fixed this door yet. but I installed a new door completely before he got his fix. So I just want to point that out. I completely removed my kitchen door and had to like redo everything. And I got a new door installed and include a picture of that. It's actually pretty nice. I had to custom order it.

It is a nice door. Because we, so the way it was is that the door before opened into the kitchen. And so like that's kind of inconvenient when you're in the kitchen because you have to like move people out of your way and stuff. So we custom ordered a door that opens into the den, our little three seasons room, because we have internal blinds in the door. So I went ahead and I had to order that. It was like a $700 door. But we have a hardware store here called Menards. And you get rebates for like everything you buy.

You get 11% rebate. And so I've been saving my rebates for a little bit and I only paid $300 out of pocket for this door. So it's fantastic. But it makes the kitchen look so much nicer. We don't have a window. in this room. And so it allows some like natural light from the den to come in and everything. So, uh, it was a pain in the butt to install a door. Uh, but good thing I've, uh, I've done that before. I was a commercial locksmith for a bit and we installed a lot of doors. So I have an idea of what I'm

doing at least. And I make it level and put it in with the shims and yeah, it's, it is pain. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like one of those things. Like, it basically took me like, like six hours or something because what, what would happen is I would get it installed and it'd be working fine. But then, like, you know, just like there's a little gap at the top of the door, you know, and there's no gap at the bottom. And so you have to like, you know, unscrew it and kind of shim it and move it around a little bit and screw it down. So I took my time with it. It's one of those things that, like, I wasn't in a rush to do it. Like, you know, the house is secure if I didn't get it installed and everything. And so I took my time with it and now it's perfect.

Yeah. I was annoyed, though, because I ordered it with lock, uh, a dead bull and like, you know, lock cut out. And they, uh, they notch the frame out. They cut the holes, but they didn't, like, they didn't do the little, like, the little cover plate for, like, the strike and the, like, the little deadbolt latch and stuff like that. So I'd, like, hand cut that. And of course, like, my, you know, not, I don't have skills. And so, like, like, definitely messed up my door. Like, like, a very annoyed that I paid, you know, a custom order this door, but then I'm going to cut out the plates for it for me.

Yeah. And I'll throw some pain on it. You won't even notice it, I guess. So, oh, good job. Yeah. Put a mirror in front of it. That works. Yeah.

I don't want to see my face. I'm good. And then I've been getting more garden stuff planted. The irrigation system has been working great. And now we're actually over the frost warning that we have to deal with in Ohio. I know you don't know what frost is, Seth, being down in Florida? Like, what is going on here? Yeah, it's still a thing.

I mean, like, yeah, it's still a risk. I mean, I think it just frosted like a week or two ago. I had to turn out my heat again today. Oh, man. We went from 30 degrees Celsius down to, like four degrees at night. Jeez. Yeah, it's supposed to get like 47 here like this weekend. Perfect for Memorial Day. Global climate change is definitely isn't a thing. I'm just saying.

I would just check them on the iguana calendar. Yeah, Pickering Ontario. You've got a big warning for yours. And DJ, I think you're okay. You'll be okay. Yeah, I think I'm fine right now. But yeah, we got all our stuff playing out. We've got a lot of tomatoes and peppers and a bunch of stuff going on. I'm getting the irrigation installed. Everywhere that I've installed irrigation for, but I actually haven't turned it on yet. I just go and I hook it up and I turn it on and it just works. And there's something beautiful about that, isn't it? Yeah.

And I'm getting my soil moisture sensors installed. I still haven't refined the automations. I'm kind of just doing basic automations right now. This is always my struggle. There's so many factors that go into when you water your garden. And the problem is that if one thing isn't connected correctly, it doesn't do anything. And I ran into this last year where I was, I put an if statement in there for my EcoWit weather station that if it's rained in the past like, you know, six or

eight hours or whatever, don't water the garden. Well, at some point, my EcoWet Weather Station lost connection with Home Assistant. And so, like, literally, the garden didn't get watered at all. And so I'm trying to figure out that part this year is like, how can I make this, like, actually work and not have to worry about that? And I haven't got that far yet. But the basic scheduling works just fine. It's so nice not to have to water stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It takes so long. My, my, my, my, this is, we're, we're, we're hitting into rainy season. And it's been like really bad raining thunderstorms, all the good stuff. Um, last couple of days. So it's, that's been nice. Then I, the grass is good water. But what I have noticed is the grass is starting to grow finally. So, um, it is just all the, the brown dead grass that I, I, I have a bunch of seeds over there I need to replace. It's, it's, it's my next thing. I've got to go reseed those areas and it's, it's going to be a process. So, so. Yeah, we're in the, grass growing session right now. Like our lawns look beautiful when you cut them because they're growing so much. Oh, yeah.

Wait a couple months and it looked like crap again. Yeah. Not art. Not our, well, ours are supposed to start. It's growing right now, but it doesn't look beautiful because half of it's dead. So fun, fun, fun, fun. Yeah. And then I put a little fun project on there.

I bought a bird buddy. I think it was like a month or two ago. I talked about it here on the show. I really like it. It's kind of nice to get the little postcard. or little video clips of the little birdies that stop by, it auto identifies. So it's like, oh, you know, a house sparrow stopped by

or, you know, a turtleneck crow stopped by. That's a made-up one. I don't think it's a real one. But, you know, it sends you a little postcard, a little little video of it and everything. It's really nice. The problem is, though, is that the seeds go so fast. It doesn't have a lot of capacity for the bird seed.

And so I'd have to fill it, like, every day. I'm very lazy. I'm not going to refill bird seed every day. My other bird feeder has last me. like, I would say like three to five days depending on how, you know, depending on what the weather is and everything. And so I decided to look, uh, before I went on my last trip. I was like, you know, somebody had to make a 3D file for like an extended like capacity, you know, like hopper or something for the bird bunny, right? And I found one. There's not a lot, but I found one.

Uh, and it is hilarious. It's huge. Yeah. I mean, it's ginormous. And as you can tell from my print, I 3D printed this in PetG. Uh, I ran out of my orange pet G half. way through the print. And I had to swap in a black one.

And that's the first time I actually had to do this with my bamboo P1S as well. I've never like, it's done the automatic filament change. Like if there's two white filaments in the same, you know, area, it'll recognize that the white is ran out and then it'll just pick up from the next one. It doesn't do that if it's a different color, though. So I just had to manually swap it and just put a new rule in and it continued printing. It didn't have any issue.

It's very smooth. Like you cannot like, obviously minus the color. difference. You know, it's very, very obvious going from orange to black. Oh, I thought that was intentional. That was, that was something that just happened. Yeah, my film, it just ran out. Oh, okay. I started printing it and I was like, oh, no. And, yeah, but, like, it's, it's very smooth. Like, you, like, minus the color change, obviously, because it's very obvious. Uh, you can't even tell that, like, it started with a new film and everything. So that part was pretty cool. Uh, the extended capacity thing is obnoxious. I don't know if I'm going to leave it on there full time. Uh, it is so obnoxious that whenever you fill it with seed, it actually tilts the bird feeder back. So I don't think that is like an actual issue. I mean, it's just like hanging by like a metal thing, like a wire basically. So I don't think that's a big issue. I'm interested to see how long it actually lasts.

I do have some moral quandaries about this though because I'm basically just feeding microplastics to birds. So I don't think I'm going to keep this long term. But it's a fun little thing. Oh man. It's just a massive. It's like bigger than the, the, the, bird buddy. Oh, yeah.

It's like, it's more tank than bird feeder at this point. Like tape some counterweights to the front of it, you know? Yeah, I'm just waiting for a chunky bird to get on there. Squirrel. I think the squirrel would get up there and... Nah, that looks squirrel-proof. Definitely not squirrel-proof.

Yeah, I just say... Nothing is squirrel-proof. Yeah, squirrels are crafty. They're terrible. Yeah. I hear the only thing that works for squirrels is, actually, I went to the garden center the other day and I was talking about how squirrels destroyed my garden last year. and they said that if I take coyote urine and put it in cotton balls and tuck around my garden, they'll stay away.

So I'm going to try that this year. Where do you get coyote urine from? Yeah, you got to go milk a coyote. I mean, what do you? Wow. I had a can of it because I was trying to get the rabbits or something to go away. I forget what it was. But, yeah, you don't want to spill that.

Yeah, I was insane. I imagine it smells awful. It does, yeah. It smells exactly like you think it would. Put some, like, clipping oil or something on the rock. so we can't climb up the ride or, you know, if you don't have that, try some lubricant. Well, we have squirrel problems anyway.

I don't know. We talked about it on the show last year, but like I had a fight with squirrels. And I actually... DJ lost. I did lose. They, they just, they defeated me. I actually bought like those,

you know, those like bird spikes or maybe like those anti-homeless people spikes? So they put on like benches and like walls and stuff like that. I put that on my fence. And it worked for about like five hours. until the squirrels figured out that they could just walk slowly across them. You know, the first one that like, what,

that like, tried to run across it, he hated his life. You could tell you. He's like, this is a terrible idea. And then by like hour five, they're just like,

oh, you just walk slow across it. Like, that's it. And I spent all that time doing all that for nothing. So I'm actually going to try the coyote urine because they destroyed a lot of my garden this in the last year. Yep.

And they're terrible too because they would just eat the tops off of plants. You know, it's not like they would just eat the whole plant. Like we had a bunch of sunflowers and corn growing. and they would just eat the tops of every plant off. And then the plant just keeps growing. It doesn't realize that it lost the top of its head. You know, squirrels are terrible.

I don't like them. I hate squirrels. I like your squirrels because they got, you got the black squirrels up there in Canada, Gavin. Oh, yeah. Our squirrels are, I like our chipmunks. The chipmunks are really cute. Yeah, shipmunks are really cute.

I have a few of them. Yeah, it was Mark Rober did the giant squirrel maze thing in the background, in his backyard to keep the squirrels out of his bird feeders. And I don't know. Like, I think as far as he went, I think, like, the squirrels also won. Yeah. Yeah. The squirrel's just trying to survive, you know.

He's just a rat. Yeah. Just trying to get a nut. Squirrels are faties and they need to stop. The raccoons are more annoying to me. You get my nutting, okay? Mr. Mackie. That's, that's all my projects.

I got my door. I got a new door installed before Gavin got his fixed. Yeah. So I want to point that out. My door still work. I'm going to send a picture to Rose. I'm going to be like, look, I got a whole new door. What's your man doing?

You don't, don't you, dare. Don't you? Send it to her next week. I'm going to be like, you know, I bought this door in literally the same day I installed it. Isn't that crazy? Don't you dare. You know, I'm going to go play with my camera now. It's dark out.

All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap the show up this week. We want to thank everyone for listening. but especially when a big, send a big special thanks out to those are able to financially support the show through the patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to Hometech.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month to get your big shout out here on the show, but every single pledge gets you invite over to a private Slackchat tub where you know the patrons of the show can gather in there and look at weird decorations again. Zillogun Wild has been appearing, but you can also see TJ's giant, uh, giant, thing.

What do we call this? That's not a good thing. You want people at side off. You will not see that. Yes, you will. It'll be there. I promise. I'm going to pin it.

This giant, like, bird buddy thing contraption. Great. Yeah. It's not that big. It looks like a pelican. Like, I don't know. It's a few like, what am I looking at? Who knows?

Yeah. And I think we've had, yeah, and Owen's been doing like this. This attic feeling. Attic theater thing? These theaters are always so crazy. I know. That one is wild. Like the curve ceilings, the, like, what he had to do?

I'm just like, wow. It's impressive work. Impressive work. It's always cool to see. And it's amazing. I'd love to be able to hear it. Like, I'm pretty sure it's going to sound amazing, too. Oh, yeah.

For sure. For sure. Well, that'll get you over there. Any pledge over there can get you that. But if you want to support the show, but I can't financially understand. Just appreciate a five-stronron. review or positive rating in the podcast. That's going to wrap up another week here on HOMTech.

Everyone, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. Oh, and I am still selling access to Gavin falling in the pool. So for only $20 a month, you can subscribe and get Gavin falling into the pool. You just get it. Yeah, it's good sense you. Allegedly you pushed me in the pool, so.

That was a good edit. I like that one. I'll never live that, though. Nah, it was great. I just love that Johnny offered it to me immediately. Oh, no, he takes it. I texted it to all my friends that he had my number as. He sent it to a couple of my friends.

And then they sent it to my other friends. And I was just like, you know what? No one ever asked how I'm doing. Or actually, no, they laughed first. And then they said, oh, were you okay, though? Well, we just knew that your feelings were hurt. That's it. Yeah.

Physically, you're fine. Emotionally, you're not. Where do you go? I don't hear him. Are you disconnecting or? It's a good thing you got that new software. You just had to upgrade your stuff, didn't you? You need to tell Windows that this is a problem.

Yeah, I think it's a Windows problem. You need to convert to Mac, Gavin. It requests one of the docking stations and you use one of the Macs you got from work. There you go. It would work every time. Yeah, and you want to have to, like, worry about your technology. I don't think you can hear us. I think you can't hear you.

No, we can't hear you. We haven't been able to hear you in a while. At all for a while. Now you can hear me. Yeah, wow. Did you think you were talking that whole time? Yeah, I was. I thought I was talking about this whole time.

Sorry. Why are you laughing so hard? It's El Cattle software. What were we talking about again? Oh, my God. If you're thinking about buying El Cotto, just don't. Just don't.

Move on, get something else. Their software is crap. It crashes. It does all sorts of stuff. It looks good. Their hardware is great. Their software sucks. Anyways.

Does they have AI? Is that the problem? Guys, they got AI. I don't know. They probably vibe coded it at this thing. Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.