HomeTech.fm - Episode 578 - Furry Friend Detection

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

On this week's show: Apple Home gets Thread 1.4, 4K video, and energy tracking, Amazon gives the Echo Hub a makeover with smarter Ring features, and Google teaches Nest cams to recognize your pets. We also check out Eufy’s biometric locks, UniFi’s campus-level security gear, WiiM’s first soundbar, a Donut Lab battery scandal that’s gone flat, and Music Assistant’s sonic smarts. All that, project updates, and so much more!HomeTech HeadlinesApple Home goes pro: Thread 1.4, 4K video, and native energy management in iOS 27 | Matter Alpha - matteralpha.comCameras get an Apple Intelligence boost in Apple Home | The Verge - theverge.comApple’s Home app will soon show you how much energy your smart plug is drawing. | The Verge - theverge.comShark is bringing some style to robot vacuums. | The Verge - The VergeAmazon’s Echo Hub gets a customizable new look and Ring’s AI features | The Verge - theverge.comNest cams can now recognize your furry friends. | The Verge - theverge.comEufy launches new smart locks with facial recognition and palm scanning. | The Verge - theverge.comUniFi Protect is Now Campus Security Ready - blog.ui.comWiiM expands its whole-home ecosystem with a new soundbar | The Verge - theverge.comMusic Assistant 2.9: Discover Your Sound - Music Assistant - music-assistant.ioFeatherSnap Smart Bird Feeder Camera | Wi-Fi, Solar, & Bird ID

This is the HomeTep podcast for Friday, June 12th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm South Johnson. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. Oh, no. Welcome to the Home Tech podcast. Podcasts all about home technology, home automation, and where's T.J? So we had a little bit of a situation. And to avoid us being canceled, we had to get rid of T.J.

We canceled T.J. Yeah, exactly. You know, so that settles the lawsuit. but we still have another one coming up. All our Patreon money is now gone. We have to pay some lawyers. Thanks, TJ. Thanks, TJ. Appreciate it, buddy.

I hope you're doing well. I know. Poor guy said one thing bad. And, you know, that was it. Yeah, all right. All right. Well, yeah, TJ's off. He actually called us earlier.

He was sitting, he's built a deck. His family's coming over. He decided to build a deck. and he's sitting on it playing dominoes with them. So living the life, living the life this week, it seems. And you know what? If DJ was here, I'll just say it for him. You know, he would have said,

I've built a deck and installed a door and repainted the house and did all this, and Gavin still hasn't fixed his drywall. Oh, the drywall still has fixed. Oh, bummer. Yeah. So I said it for you, TJ, don't worry. That's disappointing, Gavin. Come on.

You can get it done. One of these days. I have priorities. Priorities. I have other things. There's a lot of sports balls on, but we'll get to that in the project. That's true. That's true. World Cup time.

Well, speaking of being disappointing, I guess the guys that we saw that had the amazing solid state battery over at the donut lab at CES, I guess they were lying to us, Gavin, because there's some... No. How would they lie to us at CES? It doesn't make any sense. They had a... It was just a table, really. I mean, I really... No, they had a big booth with a car in it at the main show. Oh, did they?

Okay. Everybody had those little tables at that thing. All right, so what happened? I guess there's a YouTuber that's done some digging, and I guess there was a test that said that, no, it's pretty much a standard lithium ion battery, not a solid state design. Based on the...

I forget it was like the profiles, I guess, or something like that, like how it charged and discharged or something. It's got to be a lithium battery. Further, like, they haven't shipped the bikes that we're supposed to have them in there and a bunch of other stuff. So, he went through all, like, the financial part of it, too, where maybe there are, like, some, some, like, shadow companies

and companies that got, like, split off and moved around. And I don't know. Evidently, there was also a whistleblower. that described the former chief commercial officer of Nordic Nano Group, the company that Donut Lab supposedly partnered with manufacturing. So there's a bunch of stuff that's in there, but I guess they may have been a little shady on this to raise a bunch of money,

and then maybe they'll disappear. I don't know. Like, how do you do this? It's a pretty public thing to be like the biggest story that came out of CES this year for a lot of people. And then everybody's like, no, no, no, this is fake. And they're like, no, we'll set up a whole website where we debunk all the things. And now I guess it's fake, which is sad.

I really wanted this to be true. This one was, this was a little bit of hope that came out of CES. And I guess it's always going to be lies. Nothing but lies at CES. And I know CES is a launching ground for a lot of products that never make it to mark. The launching ground of lies. Yeah, now it's a launching ground of lies. And I feel bad for the next company to come behind them with their,

you know, solid state battery claims, because you know they're going to get scrutinized even more now after all of this. I really wanted this to be true. But I also felt like there was something not right with it at the same time, but I didn't want to, you know, I wanted to be positive about it. But when we saw the guy sitting at a little booth

at that one event, you know, he did not have to look on his face like somebody that was about to be rich beyond his wildest means, you know? He was like, yeah, we have a battery. Okay, cool. you know, like if he knew what he really had, he would have been excited about it, he would be like, we're going to be rich.

Yeah. Nope. Yeah. Like, why would they, how could they lie to us at CS? Can you go to CS and lie to people? I guess you can. Apparently you can.

You just got to pay your entrance fee to lie. Lying's expensive, though. They bought a booth. Yeah, boots aren't cheap. Lying's not cheap. Yeah, well, evidently you can make a lot of money doing it. So, well, hopefully, maybe this debunking thing,

maybe they're going to release one, Gavin. Maybe we can still say hopeful. Maybe we can say, yeah, they'll debunk the debunk. Yeah. That's what we may see. Yeah. Probably not, though. The technology is still out there, but the bigger companies that have committed to making them,

I think the last I heard, it was like 2030, you know, so like, it may be a couple more years before we get this technology. What's taking them so long? I don't know. It's hard or they haven't figured out how to make. They're going to manufacture it in bulk, right? Like, it has to be done a lot. But I've seen like there's some new, there's some new. battery technology coming online too.

Not necessarily meant to compete with lithium ion, but it would replace the lithium ion batteries that they use in vehicles and that kind of thing. So maybe you'd have a lithium ion battery in your phone or something, or maybe it would be like use in conjunction with or something. I forget it was a, I think it's like a salt thing or something.

I don't know. I was watching a video on it. So the battery technology keeps progressing, which is nice, but every different type of battery that comes out has a different use or set of abilities that make it special. Yeah, restrictions or something like it doesn't work well in cold weather or in hot weather or something like that, yeah. Yeah, this one didn't have that problem, but it wasn't, it was like a lithium salts thing. I don't know.

It's some new factory that's coming online in China to manufacture them, but it also doesn't do something. So they were saying that maybe... It just has a specific use. Yeah, they're going to use it basically in car. or something, I think, is where we're going to see it, which is nice because that would free up all this other stuff for the phones and make it cheaper, too.

So, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we'll get some nicer things, one of these days. We can't have nice things. I kind of want an electric car, man. I think that's the way to go now. I saw the video. Have you seen the technology connections guy? Have you watched him?

No. On the YouTube? You'd recognize him. He did a little thing about, like, combustion engines and solar power. and I started thinking about what he said. I'm like, yeah, it totally makes sense. Like, every time you, like, the gasoline you burn, like, it's gone. Like, once you use that energy, it's gone forever.

It's like, oh, yeah, that's, I mean, that's why they say it's non-renewable. But also, like, it's a, like, you're renting. The full value of your car or whatever is based on, like, that money you still have to put into it. Like, you could pay off your car. No, you're still renting it. So I was like, I, you know what? Battery sounds like a good idea. I need a battery car.

Well, if you can, I look at the battery car like that too, right? Because the batteries are only warranted for eight years or so, you know, and you're going to reach a point where you're going to have to replace that battery. And it's going to be so expensive that you're almost like paying the lease on your car again, you know, so you're going to be pretty much just renting your car as well. Well, yeah, but the energy, I guess, the energy that you, that is renewable. Like it comes, you, you can reach, charge it back, you can use solar panels, and whatever that you get the energy from,

like, you can have it on 100% renewable, and the energy doesn't get evaporated from the earth in the form of heat for your fancy air pump that you have in your car. Have you ever noticed that? I don't know if you noticed that. Like, a car engine is just basically a fancy air pump. Have you, every time I hear one of those, like, hot rods and it's like cranking up, I'm like, it sounds like an air pump to me. Like, I don't know. Now you can't unhear it. You can't unhear it. No, like, Once you think of it, like, it's an engine and it pumps air, and then they have these really loud blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like, oh, it's just really pumping air well today.

Good job, guy. Yeah. Anyway, now that we're probably going to get canceled for finning all the car people now. Yeah, unfortunately. You know, when looking at different EVs, there's such a wide range. It's like Windows laptops. You get the cheap ones, but they're really bad, right? or you pay expensive ones and they're not as bad,

they're much better than, you know, the other ones, right? But you got to pay a lot of money. With the EVs, like, you know, I just find, like, there's such ranges in how far they will go. Like some, you know, it will be like 300 kilometers in Canada, where others will be like 540 kilometers. And then there's charging speeds. And when I'm talking to people that have gotten non-Tesla cars,

they've always been so excited about their car. And it was always at first. They were really excited in that first. And then like two years later, you know, all you. Well, not just as a car, but they're always going to the dealership to get it fixed. Like I have a couple friends and their car is always something's getting fixed at the dealership. Like Rivian or one of the other. Yeah.

One of those. I think Ionic has a big battery issue and stuff like that, right? And they're always fighting to get it fixed because the dealerships weren't ready to handle the EV cars properly too, right? So I don't know. I think it needs to settle down a bit more and all these companies need to get more reliable with it, right? The only one that's

like reliable-ish is probably the Tesla's probably one of the more reliable ones. But I also think these cars have their own problems. And they do have their own problems. Yeah, but they seem to have it worked out too where like you can get them to fix certain things in your driveway. You schedule

appointment they come to your driveway or they now have a Not a dealership, but where you can go get fixed. Yeah, some places have, like, we have a service center here that if you put an appointment and, I don't know, does the car drive itself over there? I don't know, but like, it would be funny.

That would be the future is if you can, if you schedule the appointment and send your car and it goes and it, it gets itself fixed. And when they're done, it comes back home on a minute. That, that's where Tesla is going. And that's crazy to think of that, you know, like one day I'll be able to send my car to go get my mom. You know, and bring her here.

She'll scream the whole way, but that's fine. Yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, so to do the conversions, the 540 kilometers is that 300 miles range. Okay. Yeah, that's what we're looking for here, too. But, I mean, that's a long way. But if for me to drive to Orlando, I think it's maybe a hundred, 150 miles.

It's 120 miles, something like that. So, like, yeah, I can get there and back on 300 miles without stopping to charge or whatever. But if you go in America and Canada, too, like if you're going for a long road trip or whatever, that you really got to plan it out and you got to know where to stop. And I think from whatever, Tesla does it for you. Yeah, Tesla had a good system for that.

Yeah, it's really good like that, yeah. I think they're all, they all should be getting back. Do you guys have the BYD cars? Do you guys have those, the Chinese? They're coming. I don't know if they're here yet. So the funny thing is Canada signed a deal to allow so many Chinese cars to come. into Canada now, right?

Mm-hmm. So I think B-Y-D was going to be one of the companies, but there's going to be so few of them that are allowed. And the first cars started to come across from China, and the funny part about it is they were mainly Tesla's coming from the Chinese factory. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

You know, so we're kind of stuck with that. But then, you know, you're hearing the talk from your leader over there that he does not want any cars from China coming into the U.S. That's all those Tesla cars. Well, he'll probably say except Tesla because, you know, they're an American company, but if someone buys a BYD over here, you know, like, are they going to get turned away at the border now because that's all he's talking about doing? He doesn't want their GPS mapping and all their cameras and stuff.

I understand what he's saying, but it causes that kind of problem. So you don't really want to buy one if it's not going to be allowed into the U.S. Yeah. And I've heard bad things about them, so I don't know. Yeah, but they're like 50 bucks. So like, who cares? Again, the cheap Windows laptop. You know, always always remember that.

I haven't heard good things about, I've heard some bad things about them. I mean, they look really nice. I have to give them that, like really fancy. Their price is really cheap, but I've also been told by some people is like, don't get one. Yeah, here it is. VOD confirms Canadian launch for late 2026 with 20 plus dealers. ships, and they start at $25,000 Canadian. So, I mean, 25,000, yeah, like, there's going to be a lot.

Yeah. There's going to be, insurance is going to be high. There's going to be a lot of garage fires. I can predict that. That's bad. You know, it reminds you of that cartoon with the guy, the cartoon character, sitting in the front and the fires behind him, he's like, everything's fine, you know. It's a lithium fire.

Yeah, that's all everything. things by. That's too good. So we will see how they do. I don't know if they're part of that deal they made because it was very limited the number of cars. I think it was like 60,000

or something. I can't remember. So we will see. Oh, so like the number of cars they're going to be able to import? Yeah. So what do you say? 50,000? You said? 60,000? Yeah, 50,000.

It's like 49,000. Because Canada imposed 100% surtax on Chinese-made EV. right to try and keep them out. But they signed a deal allowing $49,000 each year, I think at 6.1% tariff rate instead. So these cars are so cheap that, you know, like, they must have found a way to make a pretty cheap.

They get a foot hold, yeah, yeah. You'll probably start seeing them, and maybe we will too. I don't know, you know, who knows what's going to happen here, but there are probably $30,000 to start, but if you want brakes, you have to pay another thousand dollars. You got to rinse your brakes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a subscription, a breaking subscription. I guess I say some of the cars they have look really nice and really, really cool. Yeah, they do. And the software even, I mean, we talk about it, but like the software even inside of them is top notch. Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, we'll have to see Canadian cars.

But we do have a couple of home tech headlines. So what do you say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. Well, Apple, WWC happened. Usually for the past, I don't know, five, ten years, we haven't had to talk about this because nothing has happened. But this time, Avon, they mentioned the home app. And they said the home app is going to get smarter because of all the Siri AI they're putting into their products now.

And but I don't know. It sounds like it's going to get cool and start doing more of the things we kind of expected to do. like summarizing events and notifications. I saw one feature is that kind of will group a bunch of notifications kind of together and give you a heads up, you know, this happened. It may give you things in order as it happened as one notification rather than just like a flood of notifications that you may get off a sensor or something like that. And then 4K video, 4K video into the Apple video thing if you use that.

So if you won't be stuck on the old 1080p cameras anymore, you can go up to 4K. So that's kind of nice. Yeah, usually I'm really excited for WWDC, WDC, right? But in the last few years, a number of years, I actually don't really get too excited. It's all software. They don't do any hardware.

Yeah, well, I'm not, I don't care about the hardware. I like to see the progression in the software. And I find a lot of things are in the background, and it will get exposed as the various YouTubers and bloggers, influencers will get their hands on it and start exposing. And that's the cool stuff. That's when you see, oh, they change this whole feature that could, you know, benefit you and stuff like that, right? But they did mention the whole app and we got a little excited.

And the first thing I thought is they only talking about this because they have nothing else going on to talk about. They have nothing else, yeah. Nothing else because they spent way too much time, I think, on the whole Siri AI to prove that, hey, it works. Yeah. And it does this stuff. And it's like a lot of stuff they showed, it's like I would expect it to be able to do that stuff. Oh, my God. Like everyone else is doing that stuff and more, right?

But they spent way too much time, I think, sitting there. I thought, you know, I thought they would at least edit out the weight, you know, because they would talk to it, and then there would be an awkward silence of a couple seconds while it gets its answer and stuff. And it's like, I wish you guys would have just cut that out and made at least look instant, right? Because that drives me nuts today. When I asked my phone a question, it's got transferred to JetGBT. Man, that's a painful process.

Yeah. to the point where I just canceled and I launched chat GPD and ask it. That's one of the things I know in those videos is that they were like, yeah, this is the real thing. And here's how you can tell it's going to take a hot minute for this thing to respond and actually do what I asked it to do. And you know what? That's about, I mean, how long it should take, you know? Like they did not edit those. And I saw somewhere like somebody was watching closely.

And some of those were just like one takes. Like the whole thing, the whole like video demo was one take. Like, it was just straight through. And I'm like, that, you know what? And production-wise, that is impressive. We don't do that even on this show. Like, we just had the audio crash. I closed the wrong window.

And, yeah, so we don't even do that. That's pretty impressive, I got to say. It was pretty impressive, but, I mean, I also am curious what the effect on your battery for your phone is. If the models are local and stuff, what kind of effect is it every time you talk to Siri, you know, it's going to run it through the models and how much battery usage is that going to take, right?

It's just got to be in the memory. I mean, it's going to take up, it's going to take some of that precious memory that they have. But, no, I'll see. And then it's got to process it and stuff like that. And you know how hot our video cards get when they start processing AI queries, too, right? So, I mean, there are no iPhone or a neural network chip or anything like that. But still, it's going to take a hit on your battery.

And I'm curious what that hit's going to be like. I'm curious if they're able how quickly or a faster, they're going to be able to change over, like, the phones and the chips and the phones and all that kind of stuff, that's all, like, planned out, like, two years in advance, right? A year in advance. Like, it's more than a year advance. Like, it goes back a while. And so, like, they kind of know their roadmap.

But this AI stuff, like, popped up pretty quickly. And, you know, it wasn't until, like, I don't know, mid last year, kind of at the beginning of year that was like, oh, this is actually something to this. We can see how it's getting big. And people started making moves. And of course, that's when Apple, like, said, oh, well, yeah, Siri could do all this stuff and it could do none of it. And they got sued. But, like, that was, like, this time last year was when everybody was, like, convinced that AI was, like, the next huge, big thing.

And honestly, like, that's when I was already kind of, like, pushing on the agenic side of things. Like, just, like, it was, it was just coming in where I was personally seeing, like, oh, that's what we're talking about. here. And now, like, that's what we have access to. That's what you get when you just run the Claude app or whatever or the Hermes thing. Like, you get all these agents and that kind of thing. So that's, that piece, like, seeing all this kind of like fall into place, like, I wonder if they've been able to update their chips that quickly or redesign them in a way that allows for better AI processing, you know, so it doesn't take a hit on the battery like you're talking about. Or, you know, it does it better or faster or whatever. I don't know. And I think they did that on,

was it the 16 or the 17 the 17, the one that they went out and said, hey, AI's coming. Everybody, you need a new phone for it though, too. So I have a feeling they'll get some adjustments back then. Yeah. But, you know, like, I just wish in their hardware, they'd stop focusing on how thin these phones are and just

give it a bigger battery. He's sync on the back. You know, yeah, because you're getting these phones and people are putting these massive cases on it. And the whole thinness just goes away at that point, right? Just give us, like, make it the size so you don't have a bump with the camera or something like that, right?

And then just, you know, give us a nice big battery. So, you know, every time I look at somebody these days, they're plugged in and using their phone. Mm-hmm. Because they're, they're constantly draining now. So that's one thing I wish they would fix in the next release. Yeah. Yeah, and the, I do remember seeing that the,

there's only two phones that can actually run their big fancy model. One is the pro, like the 17 pro, and the other one is the, I think the flat one, the small, thin one, the thin one. Oh, yeah. A lot of people are going to be upset. I think it's going to be a bit of a disappointment again because just like you said. You got a better hardware. Yeah, yeah.

And then the second thing is I'm hearing that there might be a waiting list for, like, there's a waiting list now for everyone that's installing the developers for the new series, right? When you install it, you have to click, you know, out of the boarding list. They did that before, though. And they'll roll that. But will it be at lunch? At launch, will Siri be open for everybody? Are they going to do that again with the whole waiting list thing?

Because that's going to upset a lot of people, too. I don't know. I feel like to be that they've got to kind of like roll that up into some kind of, because it launched like how ready are they going to be for that? I don't know. They better be because that's their main selling feature for this thing. Yeah, that's true. Like they talked about two things.

Buy all the servers. Yeah, they talked about two things and one of them was this, right? Like, if people get their phones or gets the upgrade come October or September October, and they don't have access to this and they got to wait for them to go on the waiting list. Yeah, you know, and you know it's going to go in the U.S. first and then Canada and then blah, blah, blah, right? Right. They should be working on this from now to have it ready for launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess so.

I mean, that's, that's, I don't know, I don't know how to do that. It makes sense through the beta period because they really don't know how many people are going to be kind of like playing around and tinkering with it so they don't have to buy all the servers until later. Like all the servers are all the same, right? It's just one Docker thing. He's like, well, I need 30 dockers and not two. And right now during beta, we could run on two or something. Yeah, but everybody's going to be using it because there's a lot, it's going to be interacting when ever you talk to Siri. It's going to be part of the camera stuff or video editing.

photo editing, you know, like it's a lot more ingrained in the whole experience now. Yeah. So they'll have an idea of how many people have their iPhones that can be upgraded and run this, and they'll be able to prep the servers in time, I would hope, or pay Google to do it, or pay somebody to do it. Right, right. Well, we'll have to see. I'm curious as to what hardware is coming out.

I mean, I'm on this plan thing with them that I can get the new one. I got the new 17 last year. My wife is like, no, I'm going to keep my crappy 16. And I'm like, no. There was no reason. There's no reason to upgrade to a 17. She had a reason. She didn't want to.

She didn't want to lose her color, but she had a reason. Her battery has gone to crap. There's something wrong with it. Yeah. And so like, I'm like, there's something wrong with your phone. Like, you need to swap that out. And she was like, no, no, I like the color. And I don't want to chat.

I don't like any of the new colors. And she was like 50-50. But now, like, we're pushing, you know, we're going to be going on two years. But the rumor, she said there's a rumor that they're not going to launch the little guy phone. They're only going to launch the big phones, like the pro and the, in the foldy phone, which will have the- Probably because the AI stuff only runs on them, yeah. And then they're going to wait to like an off cycle like next spring or something to launch the regular iPhone 18s, I guess they would be.

So she's kind of mad about that. Like she's like, oh, they're just going to, they're going to juice all their numbers too. selling these real expensive phones. I think they're going to make a few decisions that people might not be happy with, but you know, you've got the fan boys there that you cannot upset. You're not going to upset me by giving me a better camera.

I'll tell you, like, the cameras on these things are just amazing what you can do with them. Just point cute. I agree. Yeah, the cameras are amazing, but I mean, I don't need a better camera. You know, like I do. I'll take it any day.

No, the camera these days is so good, but I don't need for the, 18. I don't, you know, every, for the last 10 years, every launch was, oh, we got better battery life, better camera, smoother screen. Siri still sucks. And Siri still sucks. Like, yeah, exactly. You know, like, address what people are complaining about. They're complaining about the battery life. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Don't get me started. Don't get me started.

Battery, I don't know, man. I'll be fine without the, without the battery, I think. I'm on a weird I keep forgetting to plug mine in at night and so I just kind of set it on a charger on my desk all day and it seems to do a thing my drains during the day and I'm not even doing anything with it

yeah yeah just since they're doing it I don't know what it's doing an app or something like that like I gotta start cleaning up these apps but I turn off all the background apps and stuff like that but it's just drains like yeah I don't know like by 4 o'clock it's at 20%

you know and then you wake up in the morning it's only charged to 80% because you're not supposed to charge it to the 100%. We'll make the 80% the new 100%. Yeah. You know, because when I see 100%, you know, if your battery is not supposed to charge from past 80%, we'll make that to 100% then.

Yeah, and the rest of its bonus, don't ever tell me about it, right? Exactly. Wow, this phone really stays at 100% for a long time. For a long time. Exactly. Do that. Because when I see 100%, I'm calm, I'm relaxed. Once I see 99%, I'm sweating.

Right? Like, I'm looking for a charger at that. point. I don't even have that on. All I have on is just the image of the battery. So if I look at it and I'm like, it's mostly full, I'm good. If it's, if it's getting down to that yellow or the red, I'm like, oh, time to put on a charger. I don't have the numbers. The numbers is called, no, I don't like the numbers. Anyways, back to Apple Home. Apple, yeah. They mentioned it. Yay. Yay. You know, but we'll wait and see what actually comes out because the thread thing was kind of. Nicole that they, you know, they actually mentioned it. Thread 1.4?

Thread 1.4, yeah. I was shocked. They actually mentioned it, you know. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I was, I was busy doing other stuff. We were watching it kind of at the same time in the hub, and I just had it on the background, but I looked down and was doing something else. And then you guys were talking about the home map.

I'm like, well, did I miss the home? The home? They talked about the home? Amazing. For them to mention thread 1.4, they really, really had nothing else to talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're digging at that point, but, you know,

the home kit secure video is now 4K, that's nice. That's big for people who like that. I mean, that's been like everybody's complaint, like, oh, home kit, severe video, it's only 1080p, yada, like, who cares? But like, they wanted the 4K, full 4K recording, and now it'll do it. So there you go.

It made people happy. Exactly. The native energy management stuff that I saw, I think Jimmy posted a picture out. Yeah, yeah, I saw a picture of that. Yeah, that was kind of cool because I know people were complaining about that, but I mean, I don't use home kit anyway, so I don't use it as a dashboard. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, so I don't know how many people that use full home kit really want that. I almost feel like people that, like, were full home kit fans, you know, they probably moved on by now or just gave up. Oh, for like only home kit? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like, there's, you got to consider.

They accepted their fate. No, I mean, I think you look at it as the wrong way. Like, you've got to consider that, like, for most people, that's the native integration. And if they get a Shelley plug or if they get, you know, this thing off the shelf at Walmart or whatever, it's going to work with the HomeKit app. And they'll just put it in there. And that's how they know. Oh, no, I'm talking more advanced people. Yeah, more advanced.

Yeah, you can move on from it or just use it. Like, I use it for the overlay on top of the devices I want to put in from, like, Home Assistant or Control 4. and I use it as the interface of the house because it's so simplified. Like, that's, that's what I enjoy about it. It's because it is simplified, it makes it a better interface. There's no way I could, I could do the,

yeah, and I use, I tie them into series so that I can at least use my phone or my watch to control things too, right? So, I mean, I'm using it as front ends or ways to connect to my other systems. Yeah, same thing. It's the same thing. It's just a dashboard that lays on top of everything else,

which is, that's really, what they should. It should just be a really nice dashboard. And I mean, having the energy come in and tell you, like, when you're looking at a plug, it says the energy metrics on it, hey, that's great. That's good to have. Speaking of things that's nice and good to have, Shark is bringing some style in for their robot vacuums. They've got a power-to-tech UV reveal robot vacuum. And now comes in four color options, brown, green, blue, and ivory. There you go. Over on the verge, there's a link to a story. You can check out how the home luxemes.

collection will look inside your house. It doesn't look bad. It's just a vacuum cleaner. It kind of still looks like a vacuum. Just a different color, different color plastic. We've done it. Amazing. Good job, Shark. You know, I saw this and I thought, man, this feels like an Apple launch, you know. Here's a laptop, but it comes in all these colors. And everyone's like, oh, my God. And sharks, like, we got to do that too. You know, like, they don't have orange. Nope, I'm not getting a shark. Yep, yep. Then the Echo Hub also got a little update. It's got some a new look to the dashboard.

You can resize, rearrange some sections on it. It doesn't look at that. That looks kind of like the home app, honestly. A little more cluttered, but it's nice and clean. It's got, it seems easy to operate. It builds in some of the ring, the AI ring things. Alexa plus AI support stuff that they've been pushing. So, I don't know.

Nice looking at your face dashboard. If you're running, what is this, the Echo Hub with the screen? It's a way to go. Yeah, which, is it any of them, or is it specific sizes? Because I kind of hated that, too. They give features to certain size ones, but not all of them. Oh, right. So, yeah.

Echo Club is all it says. Okay, so it's probably all of them, which that interface is way better than what I have to deal with today, to be honest. Like, the most annoying thing, yeah, the most annoying thing that on the one I have today is how it's constantly, like, there's one tile I can't. get rid of and it's just a constant ad for something. Right? And it's just like I got to swipe over to see the tiles that I do want to get a hold of. And that drives me nuts. You walk into the office, it says, hello, Gavin, and then it starts showing me other ads of things that happen.

So I don't know. If they clean that up, I have no faith. I'll set the bar low. So if they go above it, I'm happy. There you go. Yeah. But it looks better. That looks pretty nice.

It's nice and clean. Yeah, there's just like there's no ads on this. How are they making money? You don't know. I'll take it. I mean, I'm not going to run one of these, but like, you know, it works. Nest did a little update too. Google is adding pet face detection for your nest indoor cameras.

So you get little analytics things on your poppots that just don't say, they don't say cat or pet. They will tell you which animal is running around on the counter. Like, we were out of town on Sunday. We went to the park and we were driving back. And we were like, let's check on the cat. And we have a little ubiquity camera stuck up in the corner where we can kind of see what it's doing. We're like, where is he?

And the little sucker was sitting on top of the table just staring at, just there for like three or four hours. Just chilling. So that's what they do. But it just says on ubiquity, it just says animal detected. And you can find it that way. This one will say Cheeto has been detected. Oh, nice. So it knows your animal's name.

You know your name. Yeah. And Jennifer, when you name this story, it's that Ness Camps can now recognize your furry friends. Okay, I only saw the headline. You didn't even let me get to the joke. It's a different, a different furry friend. Well, I realized I was thinking of my buddy Jamie from back of the day, and I read the story and I was like, oh.

That's what they're talking about. That's what they're talking about. So she, you know, she got me with a click. She did it for the clicks. Yeah. She did it for the clicks. So, yeah, very smart. Good one, Jen. Also, I think from over the verge,

Ufi is also detecting faces. They launched these over at CES, but they got the Family Lock, the FAMILOC, E-32, the FAMI-40 and E-35. The E-40 is the one that has facial recognition on it. The 35 has Palm Vane identification, and the E-32 is just old fingerprint.

So, yeah, yeah. What's strange. is the palm vein detection is 299. The facial recognition also 299. But if you just went old fingerprint detection, the Ufi Familock E32, 140 bucks. That's not bad. Yeah, the technology is more expensive for facial

and palm detection. I'm pretty sure that's why. No, that's good. I like seeing them building these things into it. My G4 doorbell enabled fingerprint scanning. And I tied it in home assistance. So when I, you know, I scan my finger and the door opens and, you know, I showed the wife to, I said, Hey, look at this.

Look at this. And, you know, I scanned my finger and it opened the door and she looked at it and she says, cool, are you going to fix the walls anytime soon? Nice going, Gavin. Good job. Yeah, yeah, you know, so I kind of like, don't try to use it in front of her. That reminds her of the walls, what I'd go through. But it's really nice to be able to just walk up because before I used to have to press a button,

type in my code and then press another button and then it would. unlock the door, right? Now I just scan my finger print and it would open the door. If I pair it with an AI port, I get the facial detection. But the problem with that is it's not secure. Like you can trick it because it's based off the image, whereas real facial detections using the radar, IR, whatever they call it. Yeah, it's a 3D scan to your face.

Yeah, that's different. So, you know, I've got to be careful with the facial detection stuff. Yeah, this one looks like it is using the, uh, the, facial recognition, according to the image that I see of it. The mapping. Yeah, it's just like a mapping of your face. So I think they've turned wrong. This is like a doorbell, a door lock, and I guess a camera, kind of all in one.

So it's one of those devices. That's like the MyQ device. Yeah, yeah. It's all in one. It was an all in one, yeah. For $100, well, $300 for the two fancy ones and then $140 for just the $140 bucks for just the old fingerprint. Not terrible.

Unify has released some products that we've got to talk about. They have a new smoke alarm that's got daisy chain connectivity and a 10-year battery backup. It's also got built-in superlinks, so you can integrate it. They've got a vape detector, an air quality sensor that's plug-and-play POE. And I think they have a G3 thing. fingerprint reader. So they've got that for their access control. They announced the G6, this is all in one day, I guess.

They've released the G6 mini dome, which is a 4K camera that has the Gs, that's got all the, if it wouldn't, if it wasn't for the mini dome, the dome part of that, it was like mini turret, I'd be all in, but like it's a dome. So I really don't care about this one. But it's got the AI sensor thing in it that will get you the advanced analytics, 4K sensor. It's just going to, the lens is going to get scratched. stuff and muddy, so you'll never be able to see anything out of it.

But the biggest thing they've released, Gavin, Gavin, they've got an AI speaker now. Yes. Yes. Indoor version of the AI horn is all I really get out of it. I watched some guy review it. And it was funny. He did the old unboxing, like half the video is him taking out of the box and blowing over stupid stuff in the box and taking a part of the speaker and looking at a little foreign

speaker inside of it. And then, like, he gets the adoption, he gets the programming. He's like, there's not much here. I'm like, yeah, I know. What's the purpose of it? Well, evidently, you can hook it up and make it a doorbell that make rings really loud. So it has that going for it for, what, $200, right? So when I installed my doorbell, I put my custom ding-dong on it that was louder.

How? Think about your ding-dong on this. Yeah. No, it's, the doorbell one, the chime is so much louder with my custom ding-dong in it on it. This one can get up to a little. 100 db indoor speaker AI alerts. A.

Much bigger hole too. Yeah, well, I mean, your ding-dong would fit right on there. So I think I think it would be a great, a great fit. And it would be very loud.

So I want to have a problem with this one. It's POE plus-plus power. So it's pretty much, it's pretty much an indoor version of the AI word. Like there's, there's no,

it doesn't look all that great to me. But, yeah. You got to make sure your, your P-O-E switch has enough power to power because you're a power. Oh, yeah, you need the plus plus, yeah. You need the plus plus for one, so that's a big thing.

But I don't know what else is it really meant. Does it hook up as a chime, or is it just to play audio files? You can hook it up as a chime. Yeah, it will play alerts. And like the AI horn, you can type something in and make it play it on an event. So actually, I plugged in the AI horn. I set it down on the floor down here. So it's been plugged in for the last week or two, or I don't know.

the other morning someone dropped off a package at the front door and it goes there's a package at the front door you know and I'm like my wife is sitting in here she's like what was that? I'm like,

AI! Horn. AI horn, yeah. That came over the horn so the horn can play audio files. It's not an audio file. It's got like, or you just text.

You type it in, yeah, as an alert and it has a voice that it, you know, renders out what you type or whatever. that's the AI. Yeah, I guess that's the AI. But any event that you bring into, any event that you have can be brought into Unified that way, like and triggered that way.

Yeah. So this is kind of the same. Yeah, I guess it's made for like announcements and that kind of thing. You can do paging over it if you wanted. So, you know, it's got it. It's more of a commercial piece. Pretty much everything they announced was like a commercial thing.

Commercial, yeah. Vap detector and that kind of thing. Well, I don't know if the, not the Vap Detector, but the CO Smoke alarm, right? Because the CO Smoke alarm is battery powered only.

I don't think it's POE. No, it's not POE, but it's hardwired too. You can hardware it. So it's going to replace... Does it come? Because I was looking at the graph, the thing in the store,

it looked like it was all just battery. All right, hold on. Now I've got to go check because I thought it was the smoke and CR alarm, USL Smoke. Yeah, it's a battery-powered CO Smoke alarm.

I thought it had power on it, no? I guess not. No, it's only battery power. So in a commercial environment, they would have a bunch of these, would they want to go around and replacing batteries all the time? Yeah, that's kind of, well, every 10 years or whatever. I would expect it to have like POE power too, but I guess in a fire situation, you don't want the, because if you think about the fire hits your server rack, knocks out your POE switch, you don't want it to take this offline. That's true. Right? That's the main concern. You want it to still be online no matter what and communicate with the other ones.

make its noise and alert people. If it was POE powered, it would go offline, whether the switchbird down, or even just the fire hit the Ethernet line. Just a POE for backup or whatever, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, the battery says, the battery says 10 years for smoke, it's got two batteries in it,

a CR123A for the Superlink part of it, and an L-91 for 10 years of smoke and CO battery. And after 10 years, you've got to throw it away anyway because they don't work after that long. There must be regulations against allowing a POE and a smoke detector. And I don't think this is offered in Canada at all. Like, I don't know if it meets our. It says, I don't know, there's got some, no, it's got Canadian, uh, certifications on here.

So. Yeah, but I don't see it in our store. Smoke. Oh, there it is. No, it's there. It's available in June 2020. It's available this month. Okay.

So, yeah, we have the smoke and seal a lot. Do I have to buy one? I don't know. Do I need to buy one? I want to buy one. Notify me. Okay, there we go. Oh, but do I need the superlink gateway

to be able to use these things too? Yeah, you will need that. Ah, it just got more expensive. Yeah, it's more expensive. Yeah, that's how they get you. They nickel and dime you. They keep releasing good stuff and, you know, like, oh, just one more access point,

or this access point is so much better than the other access point that works perfectly fine as well, too. I got to say, like, for us, well, you probably, you probably don't need the gateway if you just want to be a smoke alarm, you know? Like, but if you want to, integrate you're probably going to need it. I want to integrate it and then I want it to be passed through to

home assistant and do whatever I have to do because you can have, if it detect smoke, for example, unlock the doors. Right. Turn on lights, stuff like that. That's kind of nice. $89, not a bad price point for 10-year smoke, integrated smoke alarm, right? Or 129 Canadian with,

plus you're going to have your memory surcharge and all that stuff. Oh, yeah, you get the memory. Oh, I don't even know how much the memory surcharge is going to be on this guy. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. There's probably memory in it somewhere. It's got to remember it's a smoke alarm.

Yeah. That's funny. All right, well, I don't know. I have a couple of smoke alarms that are getting up there in age, and I can replace it. Does it work in the garage? Because I'm going to want a smoke alarm in my garage. They can. Typically, you would want to get one.

But our garage gets cold and our garage gets hot. Oh, this one definitely not. So 32 to 104. So it's indoor, indoor only. 32 Fahrenheit? 32 Fahrenheit. So zero to 40 for you. I would not put that one in the garage.

We would put in when we were doing security. We wouldn't put a smoke alarm in the garage. We had these like... Zero degrees is nothing. That's like T-shirt weather. Yeah, yeah. We would put a heat detector in the garage. So in case there was like a fire that got hot enough,

it would trip to heat detector. But smoke alarm, like stuff happens in the garage that causes smoke all the time. So we never wanted to put anything like that in there. So we always ran with the heat detector. Yeah, that makes sense too. I've been asked about putting one in the garage for a reason. A new project, I guess.

Yeah, new project. Put it on the board. It's already on the to-do list. Right after you get that trim done. No, it just pushed the trim down. I just keep changing it out. All right, well, ubiquity. They've got a bunch of stuff.

Go check it out. And decent prices on them. And I think the biggest news, besides the, the AI speaker. Weem is now really trying to get after Sonos here. They have expanded their home-host ecosystem and introduced a new Dolby Atmos soundbar with A-drivers and four, let's see,

four passive radiators sports Dolby Atmos, DTSX, and includes room correction, dialogue enhancement, and a night mode. Sonos, your move. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Are you done? Yeah, I'm done now. All right.

So when I saw this announcement, I got really excited. I had the same mentality. Sonos, watch out, right? It looks like they are stepping on Stonos and Stos. They're coming out with the right things. I think there's room for them in this area. Oh, definitely, yeah. Definitely room.

So I was like, oh, William Soundbar, let me look at this. I, you know, I'm not comparing quality because you'll have those people that say, oh, is it comparable to the beam? or the arc or whatever that i'll leave it to them but as a soundbar the one key thing deal breaker missing from this sound bar for me no airplay airplay oh yeah because they got they did the thing with the apple they got they messed up their relationship or whatever yep and they didn't put it in the last product they released i believe no they don't have it in this yeah they're missing and when you have no airplay that that's a deal killer from because we use that all the time yeah right you play something

on your phone, you send it to whatever speakers you want. No airplay? Well, I'm still out by Sonos. Hmm. Well, I mean, the sound bar here is 479. I can't imagine it sounds very good for that price, but, you know, I'd be willing to try. The sub is a 449 sub, so you probably need both.

You probably knew both, it sounds okay. It could be, they could sound good, right? Like, I'm not going to knock it without hearing it. Like, it's possible they could be sounding good. They just market it for cheaper because you get the Sonos tax, right? Yeah.

You want the premium solos tax. Maybe they are great sounding speakers and they just charge less for it. Smaller company. They don't.

They don't pay their tax to Apple to get the airplay. They got in trouble for that one. I think they really need to get that airplay sort of note.

Yeah, they do. For me to take them serious, you know, like they have Google cast, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah.

This is, I mean, going back, I'm trying to remember exactly what happened, but they ran a foul with Apple and we're like basically maybe they were selling her product without the actual license to to say they were airplay compatible. I don't know. I remember they're getting in trouble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just just, just sort it out. Like, like sit down with somebody, have dinner, make amends, hug it out, you know, like, do what you have to do to get that airplay back and you will be like much more serious contender. Cabin says weem, airplay's got to happen. So make it happen. Make it happen. Yep. The sad part is it's on their old stuff. Like their old janky equipment and you don't want. They've got it.

Yeah, I have, well, I have one of their devices in the basement. I don't really use it. I was planning to get a speaker that I can run to my backyard and power it with that, but it had airplay. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, that was a key thing. So I could be in my backyard and just send it to the backyard and it would play it out through the backyard.

That's all I want. Something simple like that. Would have been nice. But to get that within the Sonos ecosystem, I got a Sonos Aux amp, then get the speaker and run the wire and everything like that, and that's going to cost. The Sonos amp is like 900 Canadian alone. It's a double what the weem is.

Probably. Exactly. If somebody has a cheap Sonos amp that works in the new system that they want to offload for cheap, let me know. Cheap Canadian. Because I can, yeah, I'm frugal, you know, like, do it for the show. Yeah, exactly.

Well, yeah, if you've got one like Gavin know, that he's, he's in the because he needs that he's got to have that airplay too. He's Airplay too junkie. So I am an Airplay too junkie. And I've been looking on marketplace like every day for somebody that will list a Sonos amp that I can buy off them. But unfortunately, people here know how much they're worth.

Yeah, same here. You know, so they market up almost the same as a brand new model. You know, it's like, oh, you pay without tax. And it's like, I'll just get a new one at that point. Right. That's what they do here. Yeah, it's kind of wild. Even with the old equipment, they're like, yeah, full price.

I'm like, no. But, I don't know. It's hit or miss. I've seen some good deals out there, and I think I got a good deal on mine. I still haven't completely, I mean, I've got the two S-1s, I guess, sitting out here in the garage,

the little small ones. So I never even looked at those, had the little microphone where I could do like the Hesonos thing on it or whatever. I don't use that anymore. That used to be a deal breaker to me if you didn't have that, but because,

the, because the A Lady Plus doesn't work on it anyway, I've disabled it, and then I have like an Amazon speaker in the same room. And ever since Phil from a home assistant podcast show told me I could do this, you can now set it up. So when you talk to her, she'll duck the audio from the solo speakers in the same room. And then you could talk to her and then she brings the volume back up. And that's all like, that alone just makes it like, all right, this is good enough. Perfect. That works, right? I can say I've never, I used Airplay to date while no one was here to play something in the garage.

I never use Sonos with Airplay. Like, never. If we're playing anything, it just goes through one of the services and connects directly into the speaker. Yeah. Never, it's just funny that you use it that way. And I was like, we use it that way all the time because we're always, the main reason why is because whenever we want to play something on the speakers, it's usually something on our phones. Like, we have our podcast apps on our phones.

if you want to listen to it in the house. And some of them are mixes and stuff. So we just go on our phone play it and then send it to all the speakers in the house. And you know, you have to have airplay two because then they stay in sync. If you had airplay one, then they go out of sync.

But when I have it playing through the house, it's so nice to have it like going on through the house. Yeah, I only selected the speakers here, but it played everywhere. So I don't know. Maybe it's still grouped together or something, but in the Sonos app. But what was nice was, like you're saying,

it was in sync. So I had to grab something, I was in the garage listening to it, and I walked in the house, and it was coming out of the speakers out there, too, like, all in sync. So I just, I was able to keep moving and keep listening. So it was nice there. Um, anyway, just thought that was funny. Just way different use cases. I think the weem stuff I would actually be okay with, you know, just got to sound good. So, who knows? Uh, order one. Yeah, I have to, yeah. Oh, no, I got to, I got to save up for this AI speaker first, so. All right. Well, all the links and talks to discuss over tonight will be

found over at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 578. All right, nothing in the mailback of the pick of the weeks this week. TJ is usually one that picks the pick of the week thing. He finds funny stuff all the time. So if you have any feedback questions, ideas for their show or picks the week, gives a shout or email address is feedback at hometack.com or you can head over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates.

We got project updates. Well, first we got a homeless system. We got Music Assistant 2.9, Discovering Your Sound coming out. And it's what, it's got personalized top picks. I have not really, well, I don't have anything hooked up to this. So it's just like a feature on Home Assistant that I don't really use. But this looks like it's got a bunch of interesting little add-on things. Like it's got the acoustic identification fingerprinting on it so it can identify tracks

and pull the correct music, whatever's playing from music brains. all sorts of stuff. Little creature comforts they've been adding in on this thing. Have you started to use this yet? I feel like I can't do this one justice. I've played with early versions of music assistant and they've come a long way since.

It's looking way better, yeah. It's looking way better, but even when I installed, I think it was 2.8 was the last one I played with. I got lost in the interface still, you know? Like, with my setup and where the speakers are and then it created all these entities and stuff I was like, I was still lost in the interface.

But one thing I did see is people have made cards that are like front ends. Cards are dashboards that are front ends. That looks so nice. And I just haven't had the time to dive into them and try them out. And if those work really well, then I can see myself playing with this. But most of the time, like I said, when we're listening to music or whatever, it's just in our podcast app. So I don't really have a use for this, really, especially since I can tell the A lady to play

whatever music I want and she could just play it anyway, right? Or the Hays, it's own nose or whatever, too, right? Mm-hmm. This is for your local music collection, obviously, so I don't know. I'm probably going to check out 2.9 again. I like to check out each version. Just give it a chance and see if it's something I would use. And if it's not, then I just disable it again.

Here we are. I've got to update this thing. I'm on, what am I on? I'm on 2.8. I've never, I've opened this thing a couple of handful of times. But yeah, I'll have to, oh, it's got a wean provider built into this. So, I mean, if you were in the weem ecosystem, this is probably the way to go, Gavin. Yeah, it's just, you know, the interface, I can't give that to my wife and say, hey, if you want to use it.

Use this. Yeah, yeah. No, if I, the way I look at it, if I'm lost, she's going to be even more confused. I don't know. I don't know. If it worked better than the Sonos app, though, I mean. Oh, but we don't use the Sonos app. That's true.

That's true. That's why, again, we use Airplay because it's so simple. You just airplay what you're listening to and you pick the speaker. The most confusing part about airplay is all these other devices I keep showing up as airplay and you're like, I want that to be airplay, but I don't want it to show up all the time. I wish I could sort the list somehow so they're always at the bottom. But she's figured that out, you know, it took a while and then, you know, she got that sorted out. But, I mean, giving her this and saying, hey, you want to listen to music, do this, she'll be like, I don't know. You know, it feels like it's a geek's local library player, you know, like it's, it needs some refinement.

I may be harsh, but this is just, you know, from me loading it up. Sometimes I load apps up, I give it a few clicks, and if I'm lost, I just give up. You know, I'm like, certain apps should not be this complicated for me, right? Music's one of them, yeah. Music's one of it. I should just go in there, like, if I went to the D's or, website. I'm in there and the music plays and I'm good, you know, like it should be very intuitive like that. Like, it should not be something I have to really think about and they have to add sources

and you add targets and stuff like that. And I said getting lost in how they group their targets and stuff. I was like, this is way too complicated if I wanted to play it on three speakers. I was getting lost and then things were hanging too. So it was giving me some problems. Mind you, I was using the Sonos speakers as the targets. That's probably why, yeah. Well, no, but it says it works with Sonos. They work perfectly fine over airplane and the Sonos app and everything like that. But it was hanging or crashing on me.

Maybe 2.9 they fixed some of that. Who knows? I will give it another try. Yeah, I'm going to have to check it out. I just hit install on it. So I have like five updates, believe it or not, Kevin, I have to update. So is there like a big one update button? Because I really don't like hitting update like five times.

It's kind of ridiculous. Create an automation that whenever an update shows up, you auto-unsells it. That might be the way to go. You can do that. No, don't do that. Don't do that. But I have a Z-Wave update, a music assistant update,

and SSH and Web Terminal Update. I'll do them later. Never do my updates at night. I'm doing my updates right now. I always do my updates at night. Well, it's different. I do mine when the wife's not home, and it's daytime and I have enough time to fix stuff that's broken.

Yeah. Well, everything says I need to restart, so I guess I probably need to do that. I'm waiting on home at Music Assistant to finish its 97% update right now. So whatever it's installing, it's taking its time. I still don't know where I can access Music Assistant now that I'm looking at it. Like, where do I go? It's on the sidebar. It is not on the sidebar.

It should be under, like, where you see Overview and blah, blah, blah. It should be one of those. If not, you turn it on. You can turn it on your apps. If you go into the app for music assistant, there should be an option to show and sidebar. Okay, maybe that's what I turned it off or have not turned it on. Yeah.

Something's gone wrong here because it's not, the interface is no longer responding. So I will figure this out later, and we will move on with the show. Yeah, like, you know, like one of my gripes, I've griped about the interface, but I load this up, and it's got my players at the top, which are all my speakers, right? But they go off the side of the screen,

and you got to scroll it. But how do I scroll it? I'm like, I'm like sitting here going, how do I scroll it? So luckily my MX mouse has that scroll wheel on the top, and I can just use that. Yeah.

You know, at the top, but I mean, that's not intuitive. I could click and pull it. You know, like it shouldn't scroll off the screen like that because things get hidden. Hmm.

And I'm going to have problems with mine because, oh, no, it came. back. Let's hit the restart button while it's, oh wait, music assistant still needs to finish. All right, I'm going to let you do the thing. I don't know what's going on. The interface is

chugging along here. So, Gavin, what'd you do? Projects. What you got on the board? Oh, projects. Yes. Okay, so, well, this week's been a busy week because there's a lot of sports ball going on. So between we got NBA finals I've been watching, we've got NHL finals I've been watching, you know, my usual Blue Jays I've been watching. The Canadian PGA

Open, the PGA Canadian opens on this week, so I've been watching that. That's a lot of watching of sports ball. And then there's another small event happening in Toronto that's causing all sorts of traffic. I think it's World Cup or something like that. I don't know, I don't World Cup of something, but

it's got a little hike behind it and a lot of excited people and stuff. But I've been watching that too. So, you know, today we're the first games. So a little excited Canada plays tomorrow. Um, but that's, you know, if you're a sports ball person, now is a good time. You know,

I say sports ball, but, you know, for the NHL, we'll say sports puck as well. Um, there's a lot of, uh, that going on. It's a great time to be watching this, you know, um, and it's hot out. But, so I'd be watching that. Um, I did get a new bird

feeder, one of those smart bird feeders, um, you know, like full disclosure, Feather snap sent it to me, yes. But I got it out of the box. We got it charged up and everything. I haven't played around with the software yet because once I had to charge it, I was like, I got to come back to this later.

So I went off and bought some bird seed and stuff. And tomorrow I'll probably install the app. Because to me, with these bird feeders, the app experience is very important, right? You got to make sure you have a good app experience because it's pretty much all app. But this thing's cool because it's, um, it's, uh, powered by the sun, so solar powered. It's got the camera and everything built into it. It has the bird feed.

You load it with bird feed. It has, you can even pull out little steps for the birds to stand on while they eat. And then as they land and eat, they will, uh, it takes a picture of them and sends it to your phone and you know, identify the bird and everything like that. So it's really cool. We'll play around with it once I get the software loaded. So I put it in my neighbor's lot in my neighbor's yard. Okay. Um, main reason why is because the birds are going to make a mess and I'd rather make a mess in their yard.

So, yeah, yeah, I haven't told them that yet. They were just so excited to, you know, his wife was so excited to be able to have this. So I was like, yeah, you know, I'll put it in your yard. She's like, oh, that's awesome. Yes. Wait until she sees the mess they make. So, um, yeah, I'll let her find out the hard way. Jeez, Gavin.

Hey, you know, like, hey, I'm putting the bird feeder. You could get all the notifications for all the fancy birds. and stuff. Like, enjoy it, you know? So just an update on my camera, install. So I told you I installed those Unified cameras last week, right? They've been working great.

That P to Z camera that follows people around and stuff on your, as they walk on your lawn and stuff like that. I think the neighbors have finally gotten, you know, noticed it and sees it following them around because they even clean up their dog poop now, right? You could see it going through their mind. They're like, I don't want to clean that up. And then they see that camera just turn and look at them.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, you're cleaning that up. I actually put a sound effect going, you're cleaning that up, right? You know, like, but yeah, they've been cleaning up their dog poop and everything. I'm like, yeah, you know what? Even if you had a fake camera out there that moved, that would be cool, because they double thinking leaving it behind now. So that's just an update. Yeah, you know, that's just, I've gotten middle fingers and stuff.

in it too, but I mean, that's expected, you know, but you're on my lawn. Like, what do you expect? You know, like, don't walk on the lawn. I sound like a grumpy old guy, you know, get off my lawn. I got full into the lawn maintenance this week, a little bit more. I progressed it a little bit more. So I've... As I say, weren't you already, like, more in it than lawn people? No, no, well, it got very hot this week. So, you know, I had to start. I spent some time putting back in the sensors and working on my automations or whatever, right? So I put the sensors in and everything, tied them all back in.

I still have those equal-wood sensors. I'm down to four now because the other four broke. So I might order a few more because I still like, love the concept. But instead of creating an automation that will auto-do everything, what I tied in, what I did differently this time is I just created an agent. You've gone full LLM on your lawn maintenance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I created this agent a while ago.

I call him turf, and he basically, he has access to my home assistant, and he knows what sensors he works with, right? So he works with my weather station. He has my lawn temperature sensor. He has all the moisture sensors. He knows all the weather, what's happening, everything. And at night, he actually, I had a conversation. I said, these are what the zones are, you know,

this zones in shade, this zones in sun, this zones this. These are the sensors for them, as you can tell. You know, we talked about it. And it was like, he's been great. He would actually, he looks at the zones at night. Every night he'll do a review and be like, all right, tonight this zone needs a little water.

So I don't have to water all the zones. And I can say to him, how long should I run my rachio the water for? And based on the watering times that he's done before, he can estimate, like he'll say, oh, run it for 30 minutes to get it back up to this. right? Because he's seeing the before and after when we've run it before. So he could say, okay, that one ran a little too long. We can dial it back a bit and run this zone at this length. So it's so much better than trying to create any automation is because he's analyzing past data and giving me his recommendation. So at nighttime, he'll ping me and he'll be like, hey,

tonight run this zone. And then I'll just go into the Routio app. I haven't gotten to the point where I'll just have him do it because I'll say, just create, just do it, like schedule it. And he can go into my home assistant and schedule everything to run at a certain time. Yeah. I haven't gotten to that point yet because I'm still in that, like, let me make sure this works phase. But at night, he'll ping me and say, this zone needs a little bit water, run it for 20 minutes. And then next morning, he looks at it all and he says, ah, we're good. Everything's good.

You're up to speed, you know? Or he'll say, like, yeah, this didn't raise like we thought it would. Next time we'll increase the amount, you know? And stuff like that. So it's really the next level of lawn maintenance. It's like him monitoring the temperatures of the soils, he would be like, great time to seed. Or, you know, I'll be like, hey, I'm thinking I'm mowing today. And you'll be like, great time to mow.

Or he'll be like, no, leave it a little high because the temperatures are getting up there. Or, you know, make sure you run a little water too just because it's going to be really hot. Stuff like that. He keeps an eye on my lawn for me. Only, only Gavin would make LLM mean large lawn maintenance. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, all my LLMs are assistants that will watch things for me, because I find that, you know, like, they know those specific topics a lot better than I meet,

or they bring things in that saves me time because I would never have thought of certain things, or, you know, like, it will take, it takes, it's really good. Yeah. I'm really liking it. And you just having it, giving it access to a lot of sensors helps it make its choices and decisions, too. because it has access to my home system. And through that, it has access to weather forecasts and has access to my local weather station. So it even tells me, it goes, oh, you got seven millimeters of rain last night.

You don't need to water. You're good, you know, because it knows how much water I got. Or it would be like, don't water tonight because, you know, it's going to be windy. And you don't want it to blow away. It'll just be wasting water, you know, stuff like that, you know. So I feed it a ton of data. Just don't feed it your age because it may call you boomer, boomer at some point. You know, like it thought it was being funny.

I didn't like that. But, uh, okay boomer. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not doing that. My agents always make fun of me for some reason. That's right. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't understand that, Gavin. Why, uh?

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I'm too nice to them, unlike you guys. But yeah, that's why I've been doing my lawn. It's so much nicer to have this conversation and just be like, hey, you know, like, I'm seeing this in my grass. How do I get rid of it? And it goes off and it says, oh, yeah,

go do this or go do that or dig it out or whatever. You know, I could take pictures and send it to it. And it would look at the pictures and identify the plant and, you know, tell you how to take care of it. So it's really cool like that. Very nice. Very nice. You know, LLM your lawn, you know.

LLM your lawn. Like I said, I keep finding different things from my LLMs, and I spin up a new agent and I give them a specific role and task. It's not a bad idea. Like you're saying, it's more of like you were doing all that research, you know, initially to find out, like, where to water and that kind of thing. And you can just feed that into these things, and it can look at the data and spit out something to do, you know?

And it doesn't. Does it a fraction of the time. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it does it probably better than you can, and you could tell it to do stuff if you don't want to automate it. Like I spent a lot of time writing on the automation.

Now I don't need it because this thing will just do it for me. You know, like this is where I've changed my view of these LLMs and stuff like that. It's like I have more constant. conversations with them and then have them do stuff instead of having them create stuff to do stuff. Yep. Right? It's like, no, you just do it. You set the water at 4 a.m.

You go out and turn on the water for 20 minutes. And he'll schedule a little task and do it for 20 minutes. And it's like, done. Right? So I'm going to have it at some point I'm going to have it at that point. I just don't trust it yet to honor that 20 minutes. But like at some point I will. I'll say, okay, water these zones tonight.

And it will go off and do it. and I'll be like make sure it's done before sunrise. And it will go off and look at sunrise and then calculate how much time back with all the stops in between and everything. Like you can have it do it how you want to because one of my zones I want, I can't remember the term for it, but basically you break up the water. And so you water for like 10 minutes, then you wait 10 minutes. Yeah. And it's soak in a cycle. I think they call it cycling in Ratchel, right?

So I can tell it, make sure you cycle the water in this zone alone because it's on a hill, right? And it's like, great idea. and it will handle all the cycling and everything instead of me writing some automation for it, right? So that's how I use my agents now as more of like assistance, you know? Yeah, yeah. Just do it for me. No, it's a great idea. I've been so busy, like, keeping them doing some of these like electronic, you know, programming, things.

I've been trying to get off my plate for a long time. And, like, I have the ability to time in. Like, I checked in with mine today. I'm like, hey, Henry. And of course he didn't respond because, you know, it's freaking broken again. But then I had mentioned him in the channel and he woke up and he was like, oh, hey, yo, what's up? I'm like, dude, fix this. And it's like, oh, yeah, I just check the configuration again.

Because literally every time I go in, I'm like, hey, check the configuration. So he updated his configuration and now I can talk to him again. I'm like, hey, the lawn plan that you had to do, like, where are we? Because I was kind of like put some poison down in wait before you reseed. and I'm at the point where I guess I can put the seed down. So like I was like, give me what I should be doing this weekend and he gave me all the stuff to do. So, so yeah, yeah. That's all I'm using it for.

Just more of a chat, a chat. I'm kind of using it like anybody would use chat UBT with, right? Because they would use the little folders on there to make your projects or whatever. That's what I've done with just individual chats. So I don't know. I need to get into making it more of an automated piece this way too because it definitely can replace a lot of the day-to-day things like that what you're talking about, especially with integrations into the home.

I need to really get in on that. If you're listening to the show and you've got some ideas like this, tell us what you're doing with them. There's people in our AI hub that are talking about doing some crazy stuff. So I'm curious as to what I should be doing. But giving it the information, the sensor data and stuff like that, It's so big for it to make better decisions. So that drives me to buy more sensors to get more of them out there.

So we can look at all these things. And then, like I said, always give it more context. Like backyard lawn is only exposed to sun half the day. And he's like, oh, that makes so much sense. And then he'll be able to make better decisions on the backyard lawn area, for example. So it's really, they're really powerful. And now that I've switched everyone over to Hermes instead of through OpenClaw, It's been so much more reliable.

So I highly recommend it. It's been way more reliable. Yeah. I can't say the same. Yeah. Well, you run it differently to me, too. You run it on a Mac Mini, right? Yeah, yeah.

And we talked about that too. Like how you were running yours is like three different things. Yeah, Docker containers. Yeah. Yeah. So I keep mine all in Docker containers. And it just runs. It's made well.

Like, yeah. I mean, everyone's going to have their different experiences, but, you know, that's just my feedback. But moving on, my last thing, if you haven't checked it out already, I was on Home Gadget Geeks number 680 with Jim Collison. So, you know, we did talk a lot more, like I gave him a list of things that we were going to talk about. He said, no, no, no, no. We're talking AI, right? Because after the last time I was on that show, he went off and he was excited for OpenClaw. And he dove right in.

And he wanted to talk about his experiences. Now I got him excited to switch over to Hermes. So now he's been playing with Hermes and stuff, right? But he was really, he was like, we're talking all AI. This whole show is going to be AI. So I kind of became an AI person over there, I guess, right? But if you like that topic, you know, just how I'm using it, what I'm using it for, you know, we talk about all my agents and their names and the roles I gave them and stuff like that.

So it was pretty fun. So check it out. Home Gadgette Geeks number is 680. Excellent. Yeah, I'm trying to get to his website to get that link. And I'm wondering if his website's down or something. It's The Averageguideot TV. Yeah, yeah.

It's loading for me. Hmm. The Average guy. TV. I got it. Weird. I don't know. Send you a link, buddy.

Maybe something blocking on my end. I don't know. I'll, thank you. I will take the link and put in our show notes for people that go listen to the show. I haven't caught up on that. I need to catch up on it, especially when the Gavin Camel is on. I think I was busy that day. I could have jumped in the chat.

Yeah, Thursdays are always rough for me, too, for some reason. Here we are on Thursday. Yeah, here we are on Thursday. But, you know, like I'm finding every day of the week is getting, especially with the warm weather out now, and then Friday's my lawn mowing day, or else my agent gets all over my case about it. Yep, yep, yep.

Yep. Well, let's see, what else we got? Do you have projects? I do, I do. I've been busy. Yeah. So I got tired of our website because it's been on Squarespace forever. And Squarespace is great and everything.

But I need to like stop using Squarespace. And I'm on like some old ancient plan and it doesn't have all the, like going in and editing the show or adding a show each week and editing it and that kind of thing. On the Squarespace interface is all clunky. And it just hasn't been working. And I opened it up the other day and it had like two. like two player interfaces on it. Like, what am I looking at here? So clearly something had gone wrong

on the Squarespace side. And there's a lot of times where I save the show and it's just all gone. It just disappears. I'm like, oh, to start over. So something's clunky going on. I think it's just because I'm on this ancient plan and we're using this ancient theme and everything

and all that good stuff. So, yeah, I decided to kind of delete that and make our own website and our own CMS and our own everything, pretty much. And I'm almost finished with it. I think I just got to cut things over. And yeah, we just kind of need to,

let's see, just need to push the DNS stuff in and we'll have a new, nice little website. I've got, it's all hosted on Cloudflare in like static pages essentially, so it should be super fast if you go to it. And yeah, right in time for no one to actually use websites anymore

because we're all using LLMs to look stuff up. Yeah, exactly. You know, like who goes to the website? finally a refresh of the website yeah yeah it's got a new little look and there's some fun things to it let's see I think I've only have to do

update a couple of things on here to get it to get it working but well you should see it by the time you listen to this show you should see it online and everything so oh so you have about a month to get it up in a moment yeah yeah because it is Thursday you know I'm not going to get it yeah it's fun

We should have something new to show off. And right now it looks really nice because it's got this little E. E.E.E.O. Phone home that I did last week. So it's got this nice big hero image of that one on there. I don't know what the image is going to look like this week until after I added the show. But, you know, it'll see. We'll see. It'll be T.J. Les. T.J. less, yeah.

You know, I don't give you enough credit for your, you know, your artwork that you put into the show. The artwork prompts. Like, I don't know if people, like, because, On my podcast player, it shows me the generic artwork, right? And I have to actually go in to see the other artwork that you usually put in for the episode artwork, right? Yeah, yeah. But I don't think, you know, if you don't see the episode artwork, I don't give Seth enough credit for this because the, the, what is it, the Screamtrip Run episode was that artwork, you know, was next level. That blew me away.

I was laughing at that one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the houseboat one, yes. Yeah, so make sure you check out the artwork if you haven't done so already. Yep, yep. It's fun putting that up. And I think I should, so that's one of the things.

Like the podcast feed from Squarespace, there's not much customization I can do to it. But from time to time, like, I can update certain things and I figure out like, oh, this goes there. I don't know. I haven't changed what I've done in like 10 years. So once Jason and I figured out, worked, we just kind of like, let's not change it,

and don't know mess things up. But one of the things Squarespace did was they stopped, they cut off like the episodes after 300 episodes. They stopped the feed. And so when you get to 301, well, that drops episode one. So we're on like, we're on episode 578 this week, right? So like, it's somewhat 270, 278 somewhere in there, I guess, 277, 278, I guess showing up right now that are missing.

So what I did was I fix that. So now all of all of the episodes. going all the way back to episode one, should be in the feed and available for Apple or whatever to ingest and do whatever they want with. Because we get new listeners that want to listen all the way from episode one. Yeah, it's true. You might want to. Now you can.

And yeah, there's actually the website, if you use it, has a nice little player on there. So if you want to play the show, you can listen to it on there. I don't know. It'll be fun. It's like a persistent player. So you can play it on one page and it follows you around the website. it's kind of nice. Again, just in time for no one to actually use this kind of thing anymore. So, yeah, it's a website. But that's what I've been working on. And I spent an inordinate amount of time on it.

And there's a lot of cool tools out there. A lot of it was me exploring some of the design tools, some of the skills and things are the agents that I don't ever get to actually touch and mess with. And it's just exploring how things work, especially for like this large of a static site. because there's like 600 some odd pages that it has to render out each build, which sounds like a lot, but it does it fast. So computers are fast. So I actually have a multi-step process.

I can build it from the computer itself, but if I don't want to do that, like if I'm a remote or something or you can do it from an iPad, I can update it, hit save, and publish the show. And then what it'll do, it'll kick off a little worker on my Coolify server that will download all the show,

and the, make a Docker and the Docker will build it, and the Docker builds it and then puts it up to Cloudflare, all of the pages. So that happens every time I hit save, which is kind of cool, I think. There's a little automation in there.

So I did some automation work this week. I don't want to hear about my automation being complicated. That just sounds like too many places to break. No, well, it's basically like if you don't want to edit, you don't want to run a command or to build it and push it up, that's how you have to do. It basically does it for you. So after you hit save, it will take all the new information, take all the show information,

compile it and then push it to where it needs to go. So it's kind of how modern websites are all done. And it only takes like a few minutes. So it's kind of nice. Okay. I don't know. I just wanted to see. Maybe it's not working yet.

I don't know. I haven't seen what the thought I switched things over. But maybe not. Nope, not yet. So I don't know how long the DNS records will take to switch over. Oh, so I'm hoping to get it done with the show. but it's not seen to happen. Anyway, that's all I got.

I think that's going to call the show. We're going to come back next week and talk about somebody's big deck they have that they're really proud of. And honestly, it looks pretty cool. He keeps sending me deck picks. Yeah, that's why he's canceled. All right.

We want to thank everyone for listening to show, but especially when I send a big thanks to those are able to support the show financially to our patron page. If you don't know what the patron page, head on over to HomeTech. FM slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks months to get you a big shout out here on the show.

But every pledge will get you an invite over to a private Slack Chat Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can discuss each week's news. We talk about Apple in there. Jimmy will post things that he finds that's very interesting, like that Shelley Plug screenshot of the Apple thing that had the Shelley Plug thing. I think he was one of the first people that noticed that. That was really cool. And then we got the AI channel still plugging away in there.

There's still some fun stuff in there. If you can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up this week in Home Tech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Take care.