HomeTech.fm - Episode 579 - Roku is FOX'd

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

On this week's show: Alexa+ finally opens up across Canada in English and French, Prime Day deals are already leaking out of Amazon’s cart, Fox wants to buy Roku in a massive streaming-and-ads play, and ADI layoffs have Control4 watchers a little nervous. We’ve also got project updates featuring cameras, deck drama, Starlink, a new show notes server, a pick of the week, and so much more!Hetzner Price Adjustment 15 June 2026 - Hetzner DocsHomeTech HeadlinesAmazon Just Opened Alexa+ to All Canadians. Here’s What’s ChangedAlexa+ is available across Canada in English and FrenchThe best early Amazon Prime Day deals include Apple, Bose, and moreFox Corporation announces $22B acquisition of Roku in landmark streaming and live TV dealWith Resideo Spin-Off of ADI Imminent, Sources Say ADI is Cutting StaffMilwaukee M18 FUEL 18V Lithium Ion Cordless 4-inch Rear Handle Circular SawCamera G6 180 - Ubiquiti StoreAccess Point E7 - Ubiquiti StoreStarlink RoamZooz ZEN14 Double Outdoor Plug – ZOOZ

This is the Home Tech Podcast. We're Friday, June 19th 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. A podcast is all about home technology, home automation, and oh my God.

Prices for AI have hit me, guys. Oh, yeah? Hit me in the Mastodon. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So the Mastodon server, it started off in a nice little, like, $12 a month. server, right? Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. And then I had to like upgrade it because we, I don't know, of course. We invited too many people. Too many bots. Too many, too many elephant

toots or whatever it has on there. And then, um, and so like I upgraded it to like, I don't know, it was under 20 bucks. It was like $15, $20, something like that. Not too long ago, they said, oh, we're raising our prices because of AI. And it went from $20, I think it's like $23, 24 now, somewhere in there, $24 a month. So like double the price. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fully crept up. Well, now they just said there's another adjustment for the 15th of June, and it's going from $24 to $73 a month. Holy cow. Yeah.

Not exactly excited about this. That doesn't even happen. So, AI, it's some good, some bad. But, yeah, not really excited about that one. That's crazy. Holy crom. So I think our Mastodon is about to get served. from a Dell R70, 370 or whatever this is.

I'm going to set up a Docker and see what happens, Gavin. Yo, whoa, look Gavin running. I got a Raspberry Pi 5 right here. I got too much stuff going on. This might do it. Wow. That's crazy. Yep, the CPX 31, I think is what I'm on.

CPX 13. I don't know, one of those. I think it's 31. In the U.S. prices is where it is. Because it has to be in the U.S. because that's where most of us are. I could put it in Europe and save them. a euro or something, but it's still,

there's a lot of price increase here. So, there's also the helium shortage. You guys hear about that? Thanks to our little war skirmish that we had. Is that causing the price to go up because of the lack of helium? Yeah, because helium is built, they build chips and stuff with it. But also, they pump the helium into the hard drives. The hard drives have helium inside of them these days.

There is always an excuse. Yeah, yeah. That's why the hard drives are going up too, is that they don't have the helium to put inside them. You know, we may have to reach out to another provider, see if we could get the host of it for cheaper. So one of my favorite podcast I listen to right now is called the bitflip.shop.com, right?

And Alex was one of the main guys. He used to be on the self-hosted show, right? But one of the other co-host runs his own MSP. Maybe we should reach out to them, reach out to, I think it's Stephen. And see, I know he's based in Canada, so you'll probably get much cheaper. Yeah, it's some good American dollars flowing up there.

I think he hosts it like out of, he has his own little data center and his own farm or something like that. So, you know, maybe if it's something cheaper. But that is insane. But now would be the perfect time to mention, you know, if you sign up to be a Patreon just for as little as $1 a month, you'll get a personal invite to our Slack Channel to Hub. Yeah, I should move that up to the top. Oh, man. Yeah.

It helps support the Massanon server over there at HomeTech.com. social, but geez. And I haven't used it that often. Like, I still go and, like, just kind of skim through it from time to time. But I've been so busy. Just haven't had time to even look at it. But it's still still active, still stuff going on over there. For as well as three cents a day, you can keep things running over here.

There you go. Celeste a cup of coffee. AIs finally caught up with me, I guess. I've been using it like crazy. You know, we'll talk about it in projects, but been using AI like crazy for the last couple weeks. And you can see it if you go to our website, Hometech.com. of them. You can see our nice new look and how speedy and snappy and fast

it is. And I don't know if you guys have noticed, but like if you click, if you're looking at the main page and you click show notes, do you see little animations and things? I've been putting all sorts of stuff in there. Man, this is actually the first time I've looked at this. I honestly didn't even know you did this. Yeah, well, this is pretty nice. Wait, do you see your picture?

Yeah, you really have to go click on the About link and see what he did with our pictures. That DJ's is the best. I'm still not sure why I have a hat on. I don't know. AI did it. I'm sorry.

You're the monopoly guy. We do. At least I'm not creepy looking like Gavin. Gavin looks a little. I could give him a monocle, I think. That would work. Yeah. I don't know what I was thinking when Nicole took that picture.

It looks like you're pooping, maybe. The toilet or something. Maybe I do have to squeeze them out. This was taken in Vegas. Well, not the suit. Was it? Yeah. It was when we were recording the Apollo guys.

Oh, okay. I don't know. It looks so nice. Seth looks like a butler. Wait, no, you had a blue background on yours, didn't you? Did you, you Photoshop that into? The original one? Yeah.

Oh, no, I edited it up and now you edit it again. Oh, okay. So we're on like third or fourth iteration here. Yeah, yeah. I keep getting better looking. He did it. There you go. James Bond over here.

We're all going to the same wedding or something, I think. Except T.J. He's got accessories and stuff. That's right. Like, why didn't they put a hat on us? It's my wedding. Oh, man. Yeah, well,

HomeTex.comfim, you can check that out. Help, HomeTagvim slash support, help the AI addicted and move along here. But we also have the Mastodon server

we need to keep alive. So, yeah, I kind of need to figure that one out. 73 bucks. Plus, there's another 25 on Amazon that I don't really talk about because it's like the CDN backup of the images and stuff,

so it serves fast. And that costs around 25. So, yeah, bucks a month. No, thank you. I think I'm going to move stuff around and, I don't know, maybe, my internet here at the house has been fine for Mastodon. Like, it's been fine for this type of hosting thing. It doesn't use that much bandwidth. It uses very little bandwidth. There's not much that it does, but I don't know. I need to move it. So I'll just let all our Mastodon users know from now so they're not shocked. During hurricane season, expect outages.

I can lose like a backup and move it if there's a storm or something coming through. But I don't know. I've got a pretty good setup here now. There's big batteries on this thing now. It'll run for a few minutes. And then, yeah, then it'll shut down. But in that time, I could probably upload everything and move it over. Can we have it auto fail over to something else?

Like auto fail over to like my house or something like that instead? Yeah, exactly. I'll get Claude AI to do it or whatever. And yeah. Yeah, we'll just put it on my server, have it auto fail over. and then, yeah. We'll be redundant. Genius.

Yeah, it'll still be up because I use this probably, I use this a lot. Oh, you have your snowstorms. It will fall over to the warm area. There you go. Yeah. It'll be like a little iguana.

Going back in first. Guys, we just got the note server working. Let's not over exert ourselves here. You know, this is pretty crazy right now. We'll work on something, you know. Like, I don't fail over the home tech. Yeah, that would be awesome. That's not server.

Sounds fun. let's do it. Well, we do have a bunch of home tech headlines, so what do you guys say? We jump in. Let's do it. All right, we got some news from Canada. Amazon just opened up Alexa Plus to all Canadians.

Yeah, exactly. The company said the new version is built on the new large language model, even includes the word A, I'm pretty sure. And we're sorry. And then, yeah, Gavin, have you been using the 29, sorry, 2799 a month plus N. NTA plus tax, what is all this mess that you need to? Well, I didn't realize this was even, like, not open to all Canadians,

but I guess what it was we were all using the tri-not the trial. You were sneaking over the border and taking Americans at Amazon's what you're doing. It was still in, like, pre-release mode or something like that, right? So if you signed up for it, you got added to it. So I didn't realize it, but now it's available to all Canadians. in English and French. And yeah, if you use the, if you have Amazon Prime,

it will be included, obviously. And if you don't have Amazon Prime, then yeah, it's like 27 something a month that you have to pay for it, which is kind of expensive. So you might as well just get Amazon Prime. And yeah, I'm happy for all Canadians. Even the French ones, because it does both English and French. You got another story here talking about that.

So you have to do that in, what is it, Ontario, right? Well, in Canada, I think you have to have everything. in English and French. But yeah, but specifically for Montreal, which has, or Quebec. Quebec, sorry, sorry. If you do business there, they have like this crazy law there that's like, yeah, you got to put it on there. We're going to charge you a lot of money.

Each infraction, each day, yeah, it's wild. They charge you lots of money. Yeah, I was in Quebec the other day, which is just over the border. And they kept talking to me in French, but I guess the look on my face, they knew I didn't know what they were saying, you know, the look of confusion. So then they'd start talking to me in English. So I was like, hey, well, we just always talking English, and then they got pissed off. It would be easier.

I'm back home. We're on to drive home. Yeah. Well, good on you guys. You guys are now officially Amazon Alexa Plus people, so that's good. No more pre-sales. We've got, speaking of Amazon, I guess there's a prime day thing going on. I feel like this prime day thing has kind of worked its way into like prime year.

It's literally just all the time. Well, they just had like a, they didn't call it Prime Day, but they had like a Canadian prime sales event too. But even last Prime Day, it's not, it hasn't been good. First Prime Day was awesome. After that, it just became like offloading junk. And people got caught raising their prices before it and then dropping them on Prime Day and stuff. So, yeah.

Well, we'll put a link to this Verge article that has a bunch of, a bunch of gadgets and gizmos, including the Logic Tech MX Master 3S mouse, which I'm currently using right now. Just get the four. Okay, well, you can you might as well. That's the newest one. This was 25% off, though, so. Pay the extra for the vibration for the vibration.

Yeah, right. You get the little clicky button too. Not vibrate, they call it the haptic feedback. It's kind of cool, actually. When you can have it when you switch screens, it gives you a little buzz, or when you're like, you know, you know when you're working in like Photoshop

and you have the ruler guide set up and, you know, it locks in, you get a little haptic feedback to know it locked in. So it's kind of cool when you do things like that. You get the Govi Outdoor Lamp Post for $200, that's $60 off. That's not. You shouldn't, but you could.

You shouldn't, yeah, don't do that. I want the Govi indoor pole. That was in our hub. And to understand what that's about, that's the, what we call it the dance pole, I think is what it's called. Yeah, we'll go with that. Yeah, the PC version. Govie is really spread. I was going, I was going to say spreading something,

but I'm not going to say that. They're really shooting for the moon on some of their products here. No, don't say that either. Oh, my God. Once I saw that you had to like mount it to the ceiling and then mounted it to the floor. The jokes just wrote themselves from there. I mean, it won't support any of my friends for sure. So I don't know who's that made for.

They should have made it a little thicker. Amazon Firestick 4K is $18 whole dollars. So there you go. And Apple AirPods Pro 3, 179, which is actually a pretty good deal. They're 249 usually, and I think they've been dropped a little bit. Let's see, Walmart has them at 169 as well. So you might be able to get them at Walmart if you can't find them at, well, it says them out

of its stock, but if you can find them, if you play is at 179, AirPods Pro 3 are pretty good. So get those. Avoid those fire sticks. Just avoid them. I don't get the fire stick, yeah. Yeah, I think their sales on fire sticks are going to drop now ever since they came out with the Vigas.

Oh, yeah, because you can't steal stuff with it. No, no, you can't load a lot of apps load. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put your own apps on there. That's what they're. People do that still. But you can't even load things like Mb on it anymore. So it's like, you know, it used to be a good device, but I switched over to Roku, but now that Fox has brought Roku, they're going to be shoving Fox ads in your face on the Roku screen.

Wait, what did you say? Well, that's our next story. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Breaking news, you know, spoiler alert. Fox says it's buying Roku for $22 billion. paying $106 per share and a mix of cash and Fox stock

and saying that fast. Yeah, that is the big news that's kind of rolled across today in the business world. Fox is interested in the news company, the Fox Corporation, is going to be basically,

I don't know, it's like end-to-end distribution here. They make the content, they have the distribution, and they also hold the TVs too. It seems like a monopoly. I don't know. Doesn't it seem kind of weird?

Should a company be able to do this? I don't know. It probably will happen because it's supposed to close in the first half of 2027 and there you go. I wouldn't see this with a monopoly, but probably like an antitrust situation. You know what I mean? It just doesn't seem right. Probably antitrust. I mean, because you're basically owning the whole distribution platform

at that point, but there's so much competition in streaming nowadays that it's hard to see this as like actually like tripping anything even like during a normal time. It's definitely not going to right now. I mean, we all know that, right? But in a normal time, I don't think this would raise any flags either. Nobody, let's just say, nobody cares about Roku and their streaming devices.

What they want here is Roku has a lot of data that they collect from you when you're watching their stuff. And that's what the Fox Corporation wants. They want all those analytic data is. They want you what you're watching. Oh, yeah. Nobody, I mean, Roku is Roku. It's just a little streaming stick.

It works marginally well, but it collects a whole ton of data on you and just uploads it. Whatever you're watching gets sent up to the cloud, and they know it. that's what Fox wants. I'm good with that. Take my data. I don't really care about that.

Just, you know, don't ruin the device. And I think one of their goals is to start shoving Fox ads down your throat on the home screens and stuff like that. And that's what I liked about the Roku is I didn't have to put up with all the Amazon crap on it, right? My home screen was really clean, but I think they're going to ruin it. I'm going to start looking at one of those on devices. I mean, what?

It's the same thing. Good idea. What are you doing? That's Walmart. It's Walmart. I know. Like, but the on devices. Just get an Apple TV. What are you doing?

Stop it. No, because the difference is, Apple TV is so much more expensive. I know, and you can't load your IP TV stuff. I get it, but just buy an Apple TV. It's so much easier.

I'd just rather travel with that little stick instead of having to travel with a whole Apple TV. Just pack a micro PC. What are you even doing, you know? If you're not travel with a micro PC for your TV, you're doing it wrong. I plugged in the little Roku travel stick. I think it's the same one Gavin has.

into the projector to see if I could watch the World Cup in the garage here. And I got one show, well, I tried to watch it. And it's like, of course, I had to subscribe to Peacock or blah, blah, blah. I'm not doing that. I'm trying to have to find a way. I put my VPN in to see if I could get over to the BBC and watch it there. Nope, couldn't find an app that it would download on there. So I'm like, all right, forget the VPN.

I'm going to go to Telmundo. And of course, it worked. It worked fine. And I get the Spanish broadcast, which is great because, you know, the calls are way better. Yeah, that marks. Oh, yeah. Whenever someone scores, it's like five minutes of celebration in one breath. Well, guess which game I was watching, Gavin, the Spain one, so no one scored. But there was definitely some interesting times in that one.

But, yeah, at the end of it, it said your trial is over, and now you're not going to get to watch anymore. So now I got to watch one game on that. And I'm going to figure a different way of doing this. So not happy about it. Apple TV, though, that's the solution. stop selling Roku at this point because I don't want to support Fox at all. I try not to. And everybody's just getting an Apple TV from now on.

You're going to have to because it's going to be a monopoly of some type here. Yeah. Well, if you're looking at something for the TV that you're not moving, you know, it's going to be like always stationary. Apple TV is the way to go. It's probably one of the better experiences I've had. But if you want something to travel with, I mean, I just want a little stick like that. I just bring my Apple TV, Gavin. Here you're just thinking, well, no, bring the Roku with you when you travel and let them spy on you when you're in vacation.

But like, you're not, like me, I'm only going to plug it in like for a few hours, you know, hotel or whatever. It's not going to, it's not going to. I never use it at home. I just use it on the road. I'm fine. Again, I'm fine with them gathering my data. I don't care, you know, give me better ads. That's all I asked for, you know, like, guys, know what I bought already and don't show me something I already bought.

Like, you already know what I bought. Why are you showing me that? We'll talk about it a little later, but I got a mobile Starlink satellite finally. Ooh. And ever since I got that, I get Starlink ads all the time. Exactly. And it's like, I already have one, though. Like, you, I didn't even get ads for this before I got it.

It's annoying. They didn't even know I needed this. Now I have it. I click on the wrong link on my Instagram account, and now it's like I can't even open up Instagram in public anymore. You know, it's like, It's a crime, Gavin. It's a crime. You know, I didn't mean to click on that link.

I wish there was an undo for clicking on links, you know? An undo for clicking on links. Control Z, control Z! Yeah, yeah. I just want to see what's there, you know? I don't really care. I'm just curious, but don't show me all over again. All right, well, that's the drama in the big business world,

is that the, well, I guess it's not really a trauma. No one because it's Roku one, and then Fox is going to do whatever they want because they're Fox and they have $22 billion to throw at this. They're going to be the third biggest, I think, after this acquisition, right? Third biggest what? I don't know.

I don't know. They said third biggest something, so, wow. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, my God, I need to buy some, does Fox have a stock because I should buy something before they implement AI in this Roku deal? Because as soon as they say AI, we're going to put AI in Roku,

everybody's going to be like, oh, my God. No, that's true, and that's true. I don't know what that means. Exactly, it's true. All right, we got Residio. So, Residio is about to spin off ADI. Everybody knows it. It's going to happen.

Residio doesn't want to do the whole distribution thing anymore. They're just going to do Residio stuff, which is, I guess, have their own automation thing that they sell. But ADI Global Distribution is getting spun off. And I don't know if you guys have been following the drama. Nope. Well, I think you have C.J., because you sent me the story. there have been a lot of like uh firings i guess within the adi company um and a bunch of like laid off

people are posting their grievances i guess on uh on on public forums which is which is wild but um from what what this is we'll put a link to an article over in strategy you can go over there and read them but i know this is this is kind of like the big kind of drama that's going on and honestly i looked in the cdia space for anything um there's no news happening. This is pretty much it. So if ADI get spun off, I mean, there's still no new product.

I really did look. Like, I've been going to the sites, and there's one that was talking about AI and what you could do to send emails to people. I'm like, okay, that's a cool story, but not really relevant. And then there was another one that was like, it's actually from Jason Griffin.

The title was like, are you still relevant or something like that? Which I thought was interesting. But, you know, I think his story was more about how to stay relevant inside the business. But I don't know, man. It is a, you know, infocom's going on right now? Like, Infocom this week is going on in Vegas.

Like, I haven't even seen any stories or anything come out of that. Nope. So, man, I do not know what's going on in the pro world. And I'm kind of curious to hear anything going on in the pro world. I don't think anything is. See, the thing that I can imagine that's happening that nobody wants to talk about and we're not going to hear about until something happens terribly again, is that all of these companies are not going to be able to get chips

because all of these companies are very small in the grand scheme of everybody. And so we're going to have another issue like we did with Crestron during COVID, where they couldn't get processors and they had to like make everybody, like make their own processors and everything like that. So I think we're going to see weird stuff like that again just because these companies are not going to be able to get these devices. Like, I guess Residio and your ADI or whatever, whatever they're called at this point. They're big enough.

They're going to be able to get some stuff because they have a bunch of different lines at this point, and that's fine. But some of these other companies, like, I don't even, Josh maybe, Josh might be affected by this because how many products are they actually selling it in a year? You know, so what are their products going to look like, you know? Are they going to go out more? I don't know. I don't know that there's much of a shortage on the, like, the components that they would use like that. I don't, I think you can get them. You've got to have to pay for them.

the prices are just going to skyrocket. I mean, you're seeing the raw server costs going from literally under $20 a month, over $73, $74, something like that in a matter of a few weeks. And this is like just week one. Like, nothing's really hit yet. Like, this isn't the pain point yet. So, I mean, that's going to carry forward into this. And they'll have longer, those companies that you're talking about have longer buy times, right?

So they'll put an order on a product and it'll take a, you know, a lot. to get that in. They'll sit on old stock for a long time. But I mean, as far as like... But eventually, it's like tariffs. Yeah, eventually it catches up. Everybody realizes that they can't charge the same prices anymore. And I don't know what's going to happen. You know, I don't necessarily think that like raising the prices out of the question or anything like that.

Obviously, everybody else is raising their prices. So they're going to raise their prices as well. But I think there's just going to be, there's going to be some weird developments that happen in the pro space. And we're just going to have to wait and see what they are. It's either going to be like complete stagnation because nobody can afford to do any kind of innovation. And it's just going to be the same products over and over again or we're going to, I don't know, it's just going to be an oddball stuff that happens. We'll see. If I could put it in a wager, I would. I don't know how I'd put that in a wager.

So pro industry get more fucked in two years. You're going to have to beat that one. Obviously. Like that's going to be a solid win there. Yeah. Well, that's fine. Yeah, I got a chirp thing. I can have AI do that.

Yeah. I've been since you were on the show last week, TJ, because I was not. You guys talked about me. But we got you on canceled. Yeah, that's very nice. We talked about all the deck picks that you kept sending us. Yeah, big dick. Yeah, that one, yeah.

And then the Gavin talked about using AI specifically for, like, improving his home automation. She probably has more to talk about it this week, I'm sure. But, like, I was thinking about that. kind of like led me to think about that and kind of converged with some of the Apple keynote stuff that they talked about. And then like also like my experiences too with the the open claw piece. And it just started thinking about like, okay, when we ran that at first, it was like, oh man, this is a glimpse of the future, right? Like it literally did what you asked it to do on your

computer. And it went around and poked around and read your calendar and read your email. could send emails. I had it send emails from, I was standing in line, you know, I hooked it up to a non-important account, but I had it like compile a bunch of stuff and send an email with all that information over to a bunch of people that I needed to send to.

That was, that was, that's what we've been promised a computer could do since like day one of the computer. And instead of like slogging through a bunch of Excel sheets and doing all this like boring work and whatnot, I just had this thing like running in the background and then it asked me, can I send this? And I was like,

Yeah, you can send it and it in it. Like, I think, I think if we get closer with on the home animation side, it may just be software that we're looking at now. Like the hardware seems like it's not going anywhere. It's pretty mature. But if we get software like what Gavin's doing on these pro systems, that could be a pretty big story because they're not, they're not home assistant.

They're not Gavin. They're not, like, they don't have like 10 different types of soil moisture sensors that they have to worry about. If they sell a small moisture, they only have to worry about one, the one they support, right? So they're like very homogenized and what they have to focus on. If they can like do that

and then add on some type of AI, I put in AI in quotes, but like some kind of thing like Gavin's doing where the homeowner can just say, do this and it does it? I don't know. That would be a really amazing thing. Maybe even a tool for the dealer.

Like program this system. I've got a Sony TV, a Sony receiver, and this cable box from this brand, and it just wires it all up. I mean, save some time. The closest I could see to somebody that does that is probably Josh right now, right? Not really. I don't know to say it.

I mean, the closest they have is that you can, as a homeowner, you could bridge pieces of their conversation together. And it does have like the agentic flow or like the build in with the chat GPT. But it's not, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like full system setup from just like, hey, I've got this, this, this and this set this up and program. Here's all the rooms in that. Let me see. Let me give you the plans to the house. Let me just upload the PDF of the plans of the house and you figure.

it out. Like that, we're, that can be done. We're just not there, right? So I'm curious if, if somebody will take that on it. It's going to take a lot of work, which given the state of things, I don't think anybody isn't willing to put all that in, but. Well, is it also, people don't want to do that because it possible loss of jobs or something like that, too? Like, if you have these systems, I could just do it like that. Why do you need the installer after that? Yeah, I have the physical stuff still. I mean, well, I mean, Gavin, you, you, why, why did I need to reinstall Hermes? I mean, that's why you need the installer,

because it's not going to stay working. Well, yeah, you'll be the AI boss, but I mean... Well, and you've got to think that's how a lot of these big companies work anyway. Like Walmart and stuff, first of all, Walmart doesn't have, like, their own installers for a lot of things. They use third-party contractors. And all they're doing is, you know, sending out devices to people to install,

and then they're programming it on the back end. So, I mean, this already happens a lot in the installation space already in sub-capacity. I don't think, like, I think AI in that aspect is going to make a big difference for like, like, a university job or somewhere where you have like crest drawn, your control in, like, conference rooms and stuff like that. But, like, setting up a camera and a network, I don't really see that affecting that much. You know, like, I can set up eight cameras in like, you know, 30 minutes or something anyway. And so, like, it's what I'm going to say, 15 minutes, I guess, by using AI. And the most useful part about it is asking it to write up all the documentation of everything afterwards. for future reference.

I mean, that's something you hate doing anyways, but it will probably do a much better job than you do anyway, too. Yeah. There was a essay. It was like an essay. I don't know if it was written by AI. It could have been.

But there was an essay I read not too long ago about a guy. It was like a, you know, first person story about going around and fixing farming equipment after the age of AI, right? And he was kind of the guy that would like, he knew how it all worked. He knew how the plumbing, like the ends and ounce, right?

And so somebody would say he would go and diagnose like what happened and figure out, oh, well, you told the model this, but here's what actually happened in the real world. And since the model knew how to do this, and that's just what it did. And so, you know, it's kind of the troubleshooting that we do, Gavin, with our Hermes and OpenClaw pieces. But it was just, it was an interesting story. I'll try and find it and put it in the show notes. I don't know if I would be able to, but it was, it was a while back.

And it was talking about like, you know, just noticing the small things, you know, like, oh, there's a, there's a puddle over here where the water is puddling. Why is the water puddle there? Because, you know, if you look back at the logs here on the irrigation system, it's watering that spot where there's no grass. It's just been watering it the same way. It has been for years. It just has never been updated because, you know, you need to update your core.

and get a new AI inside the AI Corp, to make it stop doing that. I don't know. I'll find it. But it was a fascinating reading. I keep thinking about stuff like that and where we're going with all this and how home automation will look.

How your computer will, like we interact with a computer with the mouse, a keyboard. I was talking to my daughter today about like the difference between Chrome and Safari, right? She's like, I think I'm going to use Safari because you use Safari. I'm like, use whatever you want. It doesn't matter.

It's all the same thing. It goes the same place. But, like, in the past, there were a lot more browsers. We're starting off right now with a lot of AI models, a lot of AI agent things and weird stuff. And, like, there was definitely experiments that were going on, you know, in the early days of Internet browsing. Just browsing the Internet. There was way crazy experiments that were going with browsers. And now we're basically down to, what, three?

Mozilla, Firefox, and Chrome, and then Safari. That's it. There's nothing else. So, like, I don't know. Yeah, chromium, you got the Google Chrome edge, right? But they're the same base, chromium in a way, yep. The rendering age, and it's always the same. They're rendering, underneath it's the same, like, there.

But whatever, whatever, like, Chrome's the big one. But I remember a time when, like, Netscape was the big one. I remember a time when Firefox was the big one. I remember time when everyone hated IE6. So, so, yeah, like. Still do. Still do. Yeah.

Cool. But yeah, I just have, I'm wondering, like, where all this goes, just with all that kind of in the mirror. And it's just thinking, like, yeah, we've got all these AI little models floating around. Like, you know, you can download stuff right now that does, you know, works on your computer. But, like, what does all that look in the future? And I really do think that it's just being like, walk up to your computer, say, hey, you need this. And it just doesn't. Like, that would be, that would be amazing.

That would be great for, I mean, for productivity and everything. And if the home automation system is just a number of one of those computers, why not? Like, don't hold it back just to pretend save someone's job. I don't know. Like, it needs to work the exact way the person using it wants it to work or it's not a home automation system. Yeah. I also think that right now, the whole state of it is constantly changing. Oh, it's too early.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And in the pro space, they need stability. That's true. That's true. Right. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're just waiting. to see where is this going to settle?

Like, are we going to be using the cloud alarms, or is it going to be local LLLMs, are they going to be good enough to do what we wanted to do? You know, is there going to be another breakthrough that? And I was going to run better LLLOMs on a certain hardware, and we need to work on that. So I think they're probably looking at it. And they're probably just waiting for it to all settle down

before they jump on it. Yep, yep. Well, this all stemmed from that conversation about ADI spinning out, or sorry, Residio spinning off ADI. and all the rumors about the layoffs. I don't know. I haven't really spoken

with anybody in that area in a while. I don't know if there's been layoffs. It sounds like there has been. It really sucks in this job market to get laid off. So wishing all those people the best of finding a new job, if there are indeed layoffs

coming out of that. So nasty. Anyway, that's business. We have Roku going to Fox and a bunch of layoffs at ADI, I guess. The only professional news in the past two years has been layoffs. It's not great.

Not great, TJ. What does that tell you about the future of the industry? Yeah, yeah. Kind of a sad state, I think, but I don't know. They were always need, I always look at it this way. Like, if AI does indeed take over, you always will still need the skilled labor to actually do things. You know, set things up, do things correct.

It's going to be a while before they can take those jobs over. All right, all the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at humptake.fm slash 579. Nothing in the middle bag this week, but we do have a pick of the week from TJ. I can't read the title, but it's a stupid robot vacuum. And let's see, oh, here's a bug. I had to fix this, but. Oh, why is this so small? I can also can't see the other images.

You can right click and open a new tab. It's just the robot vacuum. It's not that important. So it's a, oh, that's because the title of, the ad for this robot vacuum is a stupid-ass robot vacuum. It works, but the stupid thing just does stupid shit, like randomly stop and spin in circles, trying to figure out its next move. And honestly, I think it's my enemy. I have to resort to hitting it with a pillow aggressively just to get it to resume course. And honestly, I can't take this kind of toxic relationship right now.

I'm sure there's a problem that's easy enough to fix. But transparently, I have no patience to see that through. So please take it from me. It works. I just hate it. As somebody who has owned multiple robot vacuums, I agree 100%. Sometimes I, so I always browse Facebook Marketplace, and that is where I found the set, and I just thought it was hilarious. I was like, this is definitely pick of the weak material right here. LaDonna has five stars. She's a solid seller, so you're not going to get ripped off. I mean, I mean, 46 reviews, five stars. That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. So it's probably a pretty good vacuum, but I like how she has to hit it with a pillow.

Yeah, I, so I've been using the UFI, I think it's the S-25, you know, vacuum and mop for the past six months or eight, nine months or so. And it does the dumbest stuff sometimes. Like I have this routine where it's cleaning the same exact room twice a day. And sometimes it'll start the cleaning schedule. And then I find it like the complete opposite side of the house. And it's like, I'm like, what are you doing over there?

I didn't send you over here. Nothing's sending you over here. And it's just like, I don't know, I'm just cleaning it over here instead. Just exploring. You know, this area seemed dirty, so I was just thinking I'd hit it up for you. It's just mapping out your house and sending the information back to China. That's all. Yeah, I guess so.

It's like, can you at least clean the other area first and then, you know, do your side quest? No, too dirty. See, yes, Donna. I agree. Yeah, mine is doing stupid things, too. Mostly not the water or whatever coming out of it doesn't work for the most. mopping part. I don't know. And sometimes I can get it to work and sometimes it stops working. So I haven't really figured it out yet. But it's, uh, it's getting on my nerves.

That, and mine's the, I forget, because I always use an app that's a Chau Me app, but it's a different, it's dreamy, dreamy bot. Yeah. Yeah. Dreamy bot thing. Um, I don't use the dreamy, dreamy app, which I suppose would be better translated or something, but the Chaumy, uh, one works well enough, so. I have a Rumba. For the most part, it works great. It does what needs to do. The only problem I have with the Rumba is the charging contact sensors. Every few months, I got to clean them off because when it redoxes, it then doesn't, it loses contact and it doesn't start to charge. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. So I go over and I have to kick it just to shift it, and then it starts charging again, everything's fine. But, you know, every few months I got taken off the stand and I use, like, contact cleaner to clean everything off. And then it's working perfectly fine for another month or so. Just use a pillow. Like I grow a Ladano over here. I mean, she's, She's got it figured out, Gavin, I think. Oh, I treat my bots nicely, though. Like, I'm not making it.

You should use a pillow. Come on. I don't, well, it's not really kick. It's a nice nudge. Oh, okay. Not aggressively with the pillow. Yeah, just to shift it over. It's like, here you go.

You look hungry, and I just nudge it over. And he's like, thank you. And you makes a nice little sound like, booming. Ow! All right. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show or Picks of the week, our random Facebook ads you find, Give us a shout.

Our email is feedback at HomeTech.com. Or you can head own over to hometech. com slash feedback and fill out

the online form. All right, project updates. TJ's got some stuff on here. Let's start with TJ because we missed you last week.

What were you doing with your big deck there? Yeah, I heard you guys talking smack about me on the podcast and I was like, well, that's kind of rude. And that's why

this week I made my name on, for those that can't see because you're listening to the podcast and we don't release this part. We give ourselves names whenever we join this little video chat.

And mine today is Gavin's unfixed wall. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Because I was very proud of Gavin because he called it out that I wasn't there to say it on the podcast. So I just want to say, I appreciate that, Gavin. So for the record, I fixed the hole. You did not fix the hole. I fixed a hole in my drywall, but it was none of the holes that you made. There was another random hole around the house I had to fix.

I was like, you know, let me practice on this one first before I go to fixing TJ's big holes. that you had to make it my wall. You got a practice hole. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I did fix some drywall this week, but it wasn't any of the drywall that I should have been fixing.

So I guess we should have a new bet going on is how long are you going to pretend that you're going to fix this compared to just paying somebody to fix it? The tools have been sitting on the bar area for like over a week now. They're laid out there, you know. And the wife was so happy,

she's like, oh, you're finally getting started. I was like, kind of. I was trying to just, out what I have and make sure. I moved the tools closer. I made sure I had everything I needed. It's there. It's not all.

It's like, yeah. And I was like, and the worst part was is I was ready to go. I was like, all right, here we go. I'm going to fix the holes, right? And she was like, oh, are you going to cook dinner tonight? And I was like, oh, I guess I can't fix the hole. Important.

I went to cook dinner, you know? I went cook dinner and it's her fault. The holes haven't been fixed. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so I obviously wasn't here last week because I was building a deck. I dragged my family. way up from Florida and really it's just my father-in-law who helped me build the deck. And I had some plans.

And as you do when you drink and build a deck in the heat, you do not follow the plans. And so we ended up with a deck that is not level. But it's, it's there, you know, it feels strong. We had like six of us on there at one time and it didn't move. So, I mean, that's good, right? I mean, you don't want to shift when you stand on it. Well, look at the on the bright side too. Like, and when it rains, it'll, it'll drain easily.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And we, um, you know, it's one of those things where, like, I wanted to be low as low as as low to the ground as possible. I'll put a, we'll put a picture in here with it completed. Um, I wanted to be low as, uh, to the ground as possible because I didn't want to have steps going up to it or anything.

And so that is also the reason that it's not level is because, uh, our yard slopes down. Um, but, you know, it's, it's pretty nice. I think it costs me about $1,000 altogether. Uh, so it's not bad for a place to sit down and hang out. Very nice. It does look nice. It looks like a very nice deck, PJ. It's solid.

I mean, we put like six or seven of those like deck block footer things underneath there and dug it out and put some paper base underneath them. And, you know, like, even if it falls, it has nowhere to go. It's literally on the ground. So it's fine. And now the sunshade sail up. So we actually have like a legit place to sit. And I've been acquiring furniture, outside furniture,

from the side of the road for the past year. Because I don't know if you've ever priced out outside furniture. But outside furniture is very expensive. I think it's more expensive than inside furniture. Yes. And it's like, I get that you have to like make it last in the sun and stuff like that. But is, is an outdoor chair really worth $600? I don't think it is.

Well, one thing I learned, you know, buying outdoor furniture over the many years is you do get what you pay for. Sure. So I've bought some cheap outdoor furniture and it would last a year, maybe two. Because they do get beat up. They're out there in the winter. They're out there in the summer. where I have spent some money on some good outdoor furniture and I've still have it like 10 years later. Yeah.

So that's something they keep in mind. Yeah, that's why I pick up all my furniture off the side of the road from the rich neighborhoods because... That's true, too. That's a good point. Yes, that's a good point. I've got some nice stuff where it's just like the cushions are moldy or something. So it's like, all right, throw away the cushions and get new ones. Yeah, sometimes those rich people, they're just remodeling their backyard and they just want some new furniture and it's perfectly good.

and they can't be bothered to sell it on marketplace, so they just put it out. That's a good point. I got to find some rich neighborhoods in here. There you go. Yeah. And then it was an excuse to buy new power tools as well, so I bought a new Milwaukee saw.

This is fantastic. This picture is great because it has the little box for that sitting there. It's like, well, you need a tool to do the job. So there you go. Well, it was funny because I had a Milwaukee, like, you know, a little battery powered saw, but because the wood is so dense and wet, it, like, was not cutting anything.

And so I was like, we got done with everything, and it's just like, we had to cut, we did diagonal boards, and, you know, we just put the boards on there, and I was going to go later and just cut a straight line through them, which is what I did. And I used the saw to cut a couple of the boards, and I was like, all right, this isn't bad.

And I got to, like, the fourth board. And it was like, nope, this isn't going to work. And so I went out and bought a new saw, but it's actually a lot better. It's the, I have to see if I can find the model number, so I can leave a link below. But it's actually a saw that has a handle at the back of it. and so it makes it really easy to use

compared to like a traditional sol. So I don't know if I'm going to hate that long time or not. It seems like a cool idea. But yeah, new excuse to buy a power tool as always. So I guess I gave me the link for the power tool in the back channel. I think it was very nice. Well,

we'll put it in our show notes. I bought a power tool, but I'm not going to talk about it just yet. No. Yeah, I'll leave you hanging on that one. Yeah, it's funny.

My father-in-law was like, oh, you went out by a new power tool? And I was like, I love any reason to buy a new power tool. Give it to me. I have more to buy around this power tool. And I've gotten, I'm probably a third away there. But, well, I don't really need to buy the rest of it. It just keeps things clean.

So I need a, I need a shop back. I don't really want the shop back because then I have to put in somewhere. I don't really have a place to put a shop back. I love shop vacks. Oh, you just get like a little Milwaukee battery powered shopback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I have. I have multiple shop facts.

I love them. Yeah. And then I got some new technology. I'll just go through them real quick. I got a Ubiky G6180. Finally got in stock. Nice. I had a panorama Uniview camera on the back of my fence,

basically just to like watch the entire backyard. And it sucked with Unify Protect, as you can imagine, because the resolution is just crazy. In AI key, didn't work with it unless I like toned down the resolution like crazy. And so every time I went to go use it, it would just, like, not work correctly.

So I was like, you know, I'm just going to replace it with the G618. I don't need, like, the highest definition, you know, quality and everything like that because the G618 is not a high-deaf camera. I mean, it's not bad looking. But at nighttime, it's not the best either. But I just need to watch, keep an eye on stuff, you know? Watch my plants grow and stuff like that. So see when the dog's at the door, that kind of thing.

So it's good for that. And in the same order, I purchased an E7 access point. this is the big honkin square access point this thing has like I don't know crazy speeds like I think it's got like 10 gig port on and everything like that I really bought it because I was trying to solve a white I have a weird Wi-Fi issue

I have two access points of my house I have one inside which is basically in the middle of my house and then I have one outside at the very back of my fence like at the property line but I have weird spots like throughout my property where I don't have internet service at all or like Wi-Fi service or it's like very slow.

And I messed with the settings. I've adjusted, you know, frequencies and all that stuff. And it's kind of a little better, but it's still not great. And so I was like, maybe I just need like a big honking access point just like in the center of my house.

And that'll be good enough for my property because my property is not that big. I mean, it's just, it's a small house, small property. And that did not work. I basically got the same results. And I have no benefits of it. So I'm going to return it because it was like $500.

I got to pay a restocking fee of like $50, I think. But that's better than key. even a $500 access point I don't need. So still trying to solve my Wi-Fi issues. I think I got it fixed a little bit. But it's just like a couple weird spots. I'm not really sure what that's about. So maybe some kind of interference or something.

This is for outside? Yeah, well, so it's like different areas. Like my outside I do struggle with. But it's like really like my three seasons room. So if I'm sitting in my three seasons room, I can connect to either my outdoor access point or my indoor access point. But either one of them doesn't really work that well. Hmm.

Okay. So it's like, I don't know, it's something. There's something, and there's nothing like, there's no like metal walls or anything. I mean, I've had the walls completely empty and tore apart and everything. So I know there's not like a big metal duct or something in the wall. I just don't know. There's something weird in there. Interesting.

Yeah, I'll solve it at some point. The E7 didn't do the trick. I wonder if it's, it's got to be, it's got to be some weird interference. And the only reason I tried the E7 is I know people are going to be like, oh, my God, you're going to be able to use the capabilities of the E7, blah, blah, blah. And I know that the E7 is really powerful, though. We have installed them in warehouses where like a single one covers basically a whole warehouse. Before you put like the metal shelving and stuff in. So they are very powerful and that's why I wanted to try one.

But did not solve my problem. And then I went ahead and solved another problem I actually have. And I went and got a mobile Starlink satellite. So I visit a lot of job sites. Sometimes I visit job sites when they're under construction. Sometimes I visit them during construction or after construction. And sometimes I visit them when they don't have internet service installed yet. And so I go to these jobs and, you know, I'm the type of person where I want to do everything while I'm there.

So like if I'm there to install a camera or network or something like that, I just want to get everything installed and then, you know, configure it and test it and all that stuff. So that way I'm done with it. But sometimes I can't do that if I don't have internet. And so I was on a job last week where Spectrum could not install internet at the building. They lost the conduit going to the building. They're just like, we don't know where it's at. We're like, it's right there. And they're like, yeah, but we don't know where the other ends at. And I was like, well, that's a whole other problem. And so we couldn't make cameras and stuff work.

And so I was like, dang, what do I do? So I was trying to set up like my gilleynet, you know, mobile router or using my hotspot for my phone. And like that didn't really work that well because I had to be like near the window and stuff like that. It just wasn't a good solution. And so I bought this Starlink mobile satellite. It's like $200. for the actual hardware, and then it's $55 a month. Is this the Rome? The Rome? Yes. And with that, you get, like, I think up to 100 gigabytes of data.

100 gigabytes, yeah, $80 for $300 and 175 for unlimited. Yeah. That sounds fun. Yeah, I mean, it's not bad, and I've been using it. Actually, today it came in handy. I was in at a job in the middle of nowhere, and the, like, the Wi-Fi wasn't good at the building I was working in. And so I just connected to the Wi-Fi.

was already in my van. I just have it in my van at all times. Nice. And it's just going. So that's going to lead me to my next project, which is, you need a U7 for your van. E7, yeah. I have internet forever. Or E7, E7, sorry.

Yeah, it's an E7. There is a U7. I think that's the outdoor one, right? That's the one I was. Yeah, U7 Pro and U7 outdoor, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then I've been slowly upgrading a lot of my outdoor outlets to double outdoor plugs. I've been using the zoo's single outlet,

Z wave outlets. They were great, but I've been needing double plugs in a lot of locations where it's just like, like, because the zoo's double plug, it actually has like this angled plug, which kind of is kind of annoying in my opinion, because it kind of blocks the other port in a way instead of just shooting straight out,

instead of a weird angle. And so like you basically plug one of these plugs in. You can't plug anything else in next to the outlet. and so I really need a double outlet. So I've been buying all the Zuz double outdoor plugs. We'll put it link in the show notes. I just really like these. I have four of them going at this point,

and they work great. They're $40. So you can probably get cheaper on Zuz's website, but I needed it like ASAP. So this is out. I'm not following how you say you can cover an outlet. Is it the angle plug? Yeah, the angled plug is covering the other outlet.

So if you have a duplex outlet and you plug the center of the top, the angle of it like pushes it out to the side. Right, right. And basically box. Yeah, they did that just for like, see if you had one, an outlet below, not a duplex.

The duplex is definitely the problem. But I, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I understand why they did it because then, like, it makes it, you know, a little profile and, you know, it doesn't stick out and all that stuff. And a lot of people don't actually have,

like, in-use electrical boxes outside on their outlets and stuff like that. So I understand the reason. and it's just annoying. Like every situation I'm in, I'm using the in-work electrical boxes, like the outdoor covers, and it's just, it's annoying to use it with it.

Yeah, I could see that for sure. Like it kind of angles off and would push the cover out. Yeah, it's just like, you know, you have to, the slot has to be on the right side and stuff like that. It's just weird.

But these plugs are great, though, minus the actual plug. The part you plug in is not great, in my opinion. Everything else is fantastic about it, just like most of those products. Get an extension cord and run it. Yeah, I have a little pigtail hooked up to it now.

It's a little ghetto, though. Anyway, that is my projects. It looks like Seth has projects. I know, right? I've been busy. I've been really busy. Me and my AI creations, finish off the website.

I didn't finish off the website. The website's going to be a fun little project. It's never going to be finished. It's been fun. Did they get another goal? Because I saw three. Oh, whoa. Argentina's escort again.

Yeah, they have two. It's two of right now. Yeah, it's two know right now. Yeah, it was a nice, a nice, easy goal. I like how the live probability of a win is just like 97% Argentine, like, when Messi scored, it went over 40. I'm like, well, I mean, come on. Yeah. All right.

Yeah, I worked on the website, and yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks nice and everything. But then one of the major annoyances of the show is how we produce it every single week. And we start, Jason and I started with Trello way back in the day. And Trello worked great until Atlassian bought it. And then it worked awful. I don't know what to, they, I mean, well, Atlassian, they just make things awful. Let's just say that. Jira sucks.

Anybody who has you ever used Jira, I'm sorry. Anyway, Trello was great until it moved there. And then they, I don't know. We stopped using it. And then I started at some point using this WeCan board, which was like a clone of Trello. Except it didn't work as well. It never worked. It seemed to work, and then it would stop working.

And then it was, and it started saying. And then there was some Docker problems that I had, honestly, like, I figured out, well, I didn't figure it out, but I sent, I sent Claude in there to figure out. Like, what's going on with this thing? And it turned out, Gavin, check this out. It turned out it was a Docker network problem. You weren't supposed to have a Docker network on this Docker, and you were supposed to delete it. But the template that came from Weekend had the Docker network. I don't know, blah, blah, blah.

I deleted that, and that's what kept it working. except the program actually sucked. Instead, now we have a little bespoke application that does exactly what we want, has our pictures on it, and we can keep changing it and iterate and do everything. This is the dream of AI, right?

Like, this is definitely, I don't think there are very many people that could pull something like this off specifically, but this is, you still have to know your way around development to make this work, but, man, I'm ecstatic now. This is a lot of pain points that just go away. And I can still do more with this.

Like, I can still have the show notes export out of everything we post on here. Straight to the website, so I don't have to write those. Like, I mean, it's just all sorts of stuff that is just like speed up the production of the show and everything in kind of the back end. It's like a little drag and drop card server like we used to have. But, you know, if there's an improvement, like we just found one today, like where we click on images. We can't see the images. They don't open up all the way. So I need to make them bigger.

Like when you click on them, I can do that. No problem. But I can just sit the little AI thing off on the path, on the little golden path, and it does its thing. So this is what it's made for. Yeah.

My only concern when creating custom solutions, though, is maintaining them. So over time, you have to, like the libraries they may use and stuff like that, they get updates with security updates. And, you know, you're not tracking all that stuff, right? So. There's no security. this, Gavin?

Come on this, Gavin. I'm not a programmer, but that sounds like normal anyway, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty much. Well, it is, but usually you have people that will go through and then they update all the libraries and they do everything they have to do to the latest ones to close all the security. And then you just, on your end, all you're doing is clicking update, right? And it has that stuff all rolled into it. But with a custom solution, you have to do that yourself or you have to tell your AI to do that. Tell your AI, yeah.

Yeah, update all the libraries and spin up a new Docker and do what you have to do. I see this has no dockers, and it runs entirely on cloud flare, and it has a live web socket connection, so we see everything all, I mean, this is like bleeding at, like, I mean, the website is crazy fast. Like, if you go visit Homecheck.com now, I mean, the pace loads speeds are just insanely fast. Like, I am just blown away on how fast that works.

And it's big images and all sorts of stuff like being thrown around on CDNs. And so, I don't have to do any of that, Gavin. There's no servers. There's nothing. Like, this is, uh, this is like, what I have been wanting to do for a long time with a bunch of stuff. But, I mean, 55 millisecond load times is nothing. And it's actually slow compared to what it could be.

So I could tweak things and get it down. You know what? I'm happy with it. I'm happy with it. And this, yeah, this doesn't have any servers that it works on either. So, like, it's all just kind of just an application loads in your browser. And, yeah, it's got to maintain compatibility of the browser. But there's been a couple of things that I've come across when putting this together

that like, hey, this works on Safari doesn't work on Chrome, why? And it somehow works now. So like, just, I don't have to know everything with this stuff. But I know how it all kind of like works and puts together. And I think that's like the secret sauce.

As soon as soon as that's replaced, AI will take over. And they'll be able to, AI, these language models that I'm using to like program an entire website will take over and be able to do this all by themselves. But yeah, this was a fun, This is a fun little project.

What's funny is on both the website and this, you could see your token. Like, I have that little plug-in that I use to keep track of how much it things cost. So in token uses, this one's actually more. This one's floating around like $6 or $700 when I got done with it. And the website was, the website was like $5 or $600 too. So roughly the same.

I don't have to pay any of that. Like, that's, but when they start turning off the prices, when they start turning off the free, $100 a month, you know, Claude subscription, that's what you'll be paying for this. So get all the work done out of the way. Get it done as fast as you can now. At the same time, I did find an article. I was trying to dig that up again.

That had instructions on how to put a Gemma 4 model on your Mac Mini, and I was getting like 45 tokens a second. Is it 45 a token second out of this thing? Like, it was flying. Like it pretty much was as fast, if not faster than the foundation. Like when you say foundation models, they're talking about like Chad GPT and Claude and all that stuff on a good day when it's working really well and not sitting there thinking about junk forever.

Man, and I'm impressed. This is on a Mac mini. It's a decent Mac mini. It's an M4. It's one of the newer ones. But it's like, wow, if this is the future where I can just, you know, put this thing, if you don't care about time, that's the thing. Like, if you don't care about time, like this thing can,

churn and iterate and go through its thinking process and check itself and then it can just you know go through tooling and that kind of thing i think i think we'll be uh i think we'll have a really really cool future ahead of us where we'll have these like local things that run on your computer uses a lot of memory though still use a lot of memory which gem a four model are you using uh is the 28 28 billion parameter IT uh it's it's very very long and complicated on that one um there's the E2B or the E4B? I think it's E4B. Or the 26B, A4B?

I don't know. I have to go look it up now. I ended up compiling an entirely new Lama CCP for, uh, just for the Mac Mini. For the Mac Mini, for metal. Yeah, it runs on metal. Oh. So that's something. Um, hold on and say, oh, here it is.

I can just, it is the Gemma, Unsloth, Gemma, 26B, A4B, IT, G, G, G, UF. Okay. So, oh, that's pretty good. 40 tokens per second? Yes. Well, that's pretty good. Yeah, I was impressed. I was impressed.

I was shocked. No, I mean, I was shocked when I, when I, the guy said he, you cranked it up and it worked. And I'm like, okay, well, we'll try it. And it's usable. I mean, if you think about this, this doesn't need to go to the internet to get this question answered as fast as you'd expect it to be answered. Like, it does it all locally. If it needs tooling and anything to go out, I'm like, I don't know if it can attach to a, like,

an internet session or whatever and didn't go out. I haven't gone down that far yet. But just asking it a question, develop a Python script that can do this or asking it a general, you know, general question about anything. Came back with a, you know, a snappy little response. It's really cool, really cool. But that's all I got. Websites mostly this week.

Everything's looking better. And so far the Node's server hasn't crashed. So that's always good. Yeah. Usually by this time it crashes. Yeah, it's true. Or you couldn't scroll or anything like that. It's kind of annoying.

If it crashes, if this node server crashes, the internet's down. Because it's running on cloud fire workers, which is the backbone of the internet at this point. Like, that company goes down. We're all in trouble. Anyway, that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to this show, but especially when a big special thanks out to those who are able to support the show through our patron page. If you don't know out of our patron page, head on over to hometech.fm. slash support and learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show,

but every pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat at the hub where you and other patrons of the show can discuss this week's news and everything that's going on. We talk about all sorts of stuff in there now. And I'm going to give a shout out to what Thomas, who evidently was listening to me read this and every week and being mad at me because his invite never came in the mail or whatever. And I don't know.

I mean, I don't know why. I kind of have an idea why. About the time I think he started was the time that we were having problems with the old system, and I did move it over to Cloudflare again. Also, like, it should be working technically. But that said, Thomas is right. If you haven't gotten your invite and you don't know where it is, please reach out and let us know because we'll get you into the hub where you can get in there.

You may even be invited to the back channel, which is our secret group that has somehow invited somebody to today. If you wake up at 7.30 in the morning, you're like, what the heck is this about? And you're just like, oh, I'll just invite him real fast. You don't care where he's going. You're like, there he is. Done. So, anyway, well, we're glad to have him on board.

He seems like he's going to be a fun guy to talk to. And yeah, yeah, if you're listening to this and you haven't gotten your invite and it's got lost in the mail, please let me know. You can go to feedback at hometack.fim, which also, if you notice, goes right to our Slack chat to hub now. It goes into our back channel. Let us know what's going on. So yeah, there's all sorts of fancy stuff coming, guys. In fact, I think in Slack, I think I'm going to take that little robot that I made. I didn't make it, but somebody made.

And that's going to be how we can submit shows, stories and stuff to the show. Like, we can be able to, like, directly interface it together. Oh, so I can just paste the link in there and we'll do all the summaries and everything for us. No more show on our board. Yeah. Get on that. Get on that. There's already a bookmark that, Gavin.

I've got to show you about that one. That one's fun. And we're going to train it on my voice so I can actually record. show for me and everything. It would just do the whole show. There you go. Well, if you can't support the show financially,

we just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast of your choice. That's going to wrap up this week on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Till next time. Take care. AI is replacing us all.

Slowly, slowly. Slowly. Train them on our voices. You have like three, four years of shows. At least we don't have two. at least we don't have to wait for, you know, the show notes server to churn, whoever's running that thing,

to fire that guy, geez. Train it on all the voices to have like a reunion show. Yeah. You know, we'll be on. Richard. I mean, you got to think, like, all of our voices are out there. They're all over other podcasts. Like, you only need four minutes of recording,

of you talking, like, and you can get that out of just about anything. And you pretty much have the convincing, like the convincing version. Like if you weren't used to hearing your voice, oh, yeah, that's Gavin talking. He's saying those bad things talking about. Genocide.

Yeah, yeah. Don't train it on our non-recorded segments. Non-posted segments, please. Yeah, we're one step closer now to HomeTech After Dark. Home Tech gone wild. a while. Woo!