HomeTech.fm - Episode 580 - Gemini in the House

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

On this week's show: Hue brings wired wall modules to Europe and keeps pushing Matter, Schlage’s UWB smart lock finally gets a date and a price, Amazon rolls Alexa+ into Brazil, Google launches a new Gemini-powered speaker while retiring a couple of old Nest favorites, Sonos keeps trying to fix the app it broke, Matter 1.6 tries to make Matter less Matter-y, and a report says your smart TV apps may be doing more networking than streaming. Plus a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!Energy minister plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040HomeTech HeadlinesValve prices the Steam Machine at $1,049Europe - Hue’s wired wall modules bring non-smart lights into its ecosystemSchlage’s UWB-enabled smart lock launches this monthAlexa+ Launches in Early Access in BrazilGoogle Has Discontinued its Nest Audio and Nest Mini SpeakersGoogle's Gemini-Powered Home Speaker Launches on June 25 for $99.99Google’s first smart speaker in six years arrives next weekGoogle Home Speaker Canada: Price, Release Date, and AI FeaturesSonos Updating App With New Volume Controls and Navigation | iPhone in CanadaSignify Enhances Philips Hue Matter Support Through Collaboration with Silicon LabsInstead of new devices, Matter 1.6 focuses on making Matter less of a headacheMatter 1.6 Brings NFC Setup, Joint Fabric, and Smarter ThermostatsNearly Half of LG Smart TV Apps Contain Residential Proxy SDKsHow Roomba started a robot revolutionGoveeLife Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro, 60lbs Daily, 6-Minute First Ice, 40dB Ultra-Quiet with AI NoiseGuard, App & Voice Control, Self-Clean, 3.5lbs Basket & Dual Water Tanks, for Home Kitchen, Party

This is the HomeTack podcast for Friday, June 26th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Regalsburg, Ohio, I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gapin-C Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home technology, home automation, and we got to watch out for Canada, TJ. They're going to have a nuclear renaissance according to a story I ran across. Hello?

What? Yeah, you're going to have 10 reactors built by 2040. your energy minister's gone off the rails here. Oh, I have a reactor just on the street from me, and they're reopening that. They're working on them. See? He's got one in his basement, too.

I saw it. What? And you got one in your basement. I saw it, Gavin. Don't mind. You're Canadian spy. A little baby one. Yeah, we'll be ready for all the data centers.

Oh, man, that's where they're all going to go. That makes sense, actually. Yeah. And they'll be naturally cooled for six months of the year. Yeah, I mean, you're already getting global warming anyway. I mean, what's the matter? Heat it up a little bit more. It doesn't matter.

It's a nice green energy. And we have lots of water, too. Like, we have tons of water. Nobody's using that water except the fish. No, you could heat that water up. No one's going to care. Just the fish. It's lake water.

It's not affecting the oceans. It's just the lakes. Yeah. They freeze over in the winter anyway, or they won't anymore, but they freeze over. Exactly. If anything, I think I'll help you guys out because I've seen those mountains of snow, you guys have to stack up and everything, so you get rid of those faster. Yeah, that provides, uh,

They provide about one-fifth of the water to North America, apparently. So, you know, like, we can cut off the rest of North America and just keep it all to our data centers. Well, you know, our data centers are going to need some of that water, too, so that's important. Yeah, but you'll, we'll charge you for it. There'll be, like, export tariffs on our water. Maybe you guys are going for round two. Because the first, the reason the data centers, everybody's, like, saying, oh, it's AI, it's AI. Well, the bigger reason the data centers are all kind of building out now is there's, like, a big tax break on them.

until like 2030, I think, is when you have to have, like, everything built. So, like, the rush is right now, basically to get the construction done or the permits in place so you can build the thing and get the tax break or whatever. So that's kind of why everything's going on, less so of the AI thing. That's why data centers are going in everywhere. But if we run out of that tax break by 2040, Canada, you're looking good. Just give us a tax break. We'll be right up there with some data centers.

Just build them right on the glaciers, you know? Cut the middleman out, yeah. Yeah, well, just build it high enough up so many years from now it may slide to the bottom. But, you know, like, yeah, as the water melts, just feed it right into the data center. Seems like a good idea, yeah. Yeah, look at that. All right, well, I have to keep an eye on that. All that cheap energy you guys are going to have because we'll need the money because I guess the valve steam thing,

DJ's all upset about this. He was going to buy a steam machine and not to steam his clothes or anything. It's evidently a computer which you play games on. All right, Dad. I don't know, TJ. I keep forgetting this thing exists. Like, the whole Steam platform exists. And I see this.

I'm like, wow, that's really cool. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, lots of people use this. Yeah, I mean, the Steam platform actually is very nice. I have hundreds of games, and I would say three, four, seven of them. I probably never touched because that's the way Steam works, unfortunately. But I've had a Steam deck. I'm not, I wasn't a huge fan of the Steam deck because I just don't want to hold a giant console in my hands. it's hard enough for me to like hold my phone and play a video game long enough.

Like I just don't want to do that. So the steam machine, it sounds really interesting because I want to get a gaming computer for the living room. But I, first of all, I don't want to build one because I just don't have the desire to do that. But I also don't want a really big computer in the living room. So this is perfect because it's like GameCube size. You know, you just put it underneath the TV, you connect the controller to it. You're good to go. but for $1,000 for $512 gigs,

I don't think this one's for me right now. Yeah, wow. I was hoping for the price to be like $500 to $750 for like the entry model, you know? And I think the other, like the Steam decks, for example, I think you can upgrade like your own solid state. I don't think you can upgrade the memory because, you know, it's a handheld. But you can upgrade some stuff on that. So I don't see why you can upgrade your own storage.

But with the pricing on storage and especially solid states right now, I don't think you're going to get. any good deals on anything like this. See, we come from a time when, like, we don't complain about the size of things a lot like that. Like, we're used to holding big things in our hands, right? Because the old laptops were huge, but we were happy to have them, you know? I bet you didn't have to deal with those old laptops, right?

Like, some of our old monitors. I mean, you're always the dinosaurs. I understand. We're used to that, you know? So we don't complain about the size of things too much. happy to have something. Yeah, but you run micro pieces in your, like, in your house. I really don't care about your opinion on, like, the aesthetics and stuff.

They're small, and they're hidden behind the TV. You don't even know there. No, the one in the guest room. That's, it's underneath the TV. Oh, yeah, yeah. That one I can't do anything about, like, I wasn't about to, you know, one day I may put another one of those junction, not junction boxes, um, recess boxes behind it. And then hide it behind that like I do in my bedroom.

That was, those are actually nice. It's a guest bedroom, though. Yeah, I mean, I was just giving you, you agree for that. My guest rooms, guest bedrooms way worse. But the advantage of this is that it just acts like a console, right? I mean, like, and I know you can get all the same stuff and you can set all the same stuff up, but actually you can download SteamOS too. So if you had like a computer and you wanted to download this on, you could do that as well.

But I just, I like to have a plug-and-play device for something I'm going to put in the living room that anybody can use. Yeah. And that's kind of the appeal of having a console, right? You know, like you buy an Xbox because, like, it's just an Xbox. You turn it on it as Xbox things. And that's kind of the appeal of this machine as well. So maybe I'll pick one up, use at some point,

and, you know, they'll be released at some point. So why would you choose Steam over Xbox or PlayStation? I like the PC games better, and they're also more affordable. So Steam itself has sales all the time, where you can find games for, you know, half off or 75% off,

all that good stuff. There's constantly sales going on. Xbox, a lot of times you're stuck with just either doing like the GamePass thing that they have or you're stuck by it like digital copies which are almost always the exact same price as like a disc. So Steam is just more affordable for a lot of things. Makes sense, yeah.

It's a good platform. Honestly, it's like I don't want to see the day where Gabe Newell dies, the founder and owner of Valve because it's been such a good company for so long that they've done some really good things. That's just like, I don't know. It seems like a good company to work for.

They make a good product. Yeah, it's got a lot stuff on this. I mean, it's a computer at the end of the day. They look like they haven't made it into a custom form factor. But I don't know, it's only got Wi-Fi 6E. I think that's the only thing, you know, why didn't have 7, Wi-Fi 8? Why doesn't have that?

For that price, it should have all the Wi-Fi's. That's what I'm saying. Let's see. It's got gigabit, Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4, HTML2.0, 1 USBC, and 4 USBA ports. One USBC is pretty weird, too. Yeah. I mean, pretty much all of my stuff is USBC at this point. Looks like, how many monitors can you hook up?

You can hook up monitors? Do multiple monitors? Well, that's kind of cool. You can play games on it and do work stuff, I guess? Just have a guy playing with cat or something on here. That's fun. Anyway, yeah, check it out if you're interested in this. T.J. definitely is, but it sounds like he won't be getting it.

Not at this price. Not for me. It's like a Mac price. I saw a warning that from, I think it was from Tim Cook or something that said the Mac prices will go up. So that's going to happen soon to everybody. iPhone prices, Mac prices. They said they can't hold out the price anymore because of the memory shortage and stuff. So we're all going to get more expensive stuff. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And if you want to buy me a steam machine, you can go to Patreon. dot com slash home tech and there's a option there where you can uh join us and uh as little as one dollar a month

i won't i won't get a steam machine from that but you could join that j needs a thousand of you to go right if only 1,000 people join i would still not have enough for a steam machine he 1,049 of you it's going to be a busy hug all right uh well besides all that we do have a couple of home tech headline. So what do you say? What do you say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. Well, a couple of new products this week, but first we'll talk about something cool that's coming

out of Europe. Phillips Hugh has announced its first wired wall modules, which install behind the switches and let standard non-smart lights show up in the Hugh app. It means that any recess cans or pendant latch you may have can be controlled alongside Hugh bulbs without replacing

the Wall Switch itself. Only problem with these are is that these are not in the U.S. and they're going to be in Europe. And the American market tends to favor full smart switches over DIY modules. So if you're wanting one of these, only in Europe, unfortunately, starting at, let's see, 45 euro for one and two channel and dimmer versions. So bummer, but definitely cool.

Looks like a Shelley. Yeah, honestly, I think like all lighting products need a solution like this. You know, it's just, it's one of those things that you don't need them everywhere necessarily, but it is nice to have available access to them because occasionally you have like a weird area where it's like this relay would make a big difference. Europe, this is basically how they do a lot of their lighting as far as I understand it.

So this is like a requirement in Europe. Not really in America. Most of the time you're just going to be changed on your light switches themselves. But there's situations where maybe you can't change the light switch, but you can install this relay in like the light panel or the fixture or something like that. So there's all kinds of different options. I think every lighting company should have one of these. Yep.

I agree. All right, we got some lock talk here. We've got slag, slag, slagger. I don't know. Everybody says this company so differently. Schleggy, I heard the other day. All right, Slagie, since ProLock is finally getting released date after being announced back at CS 2025, it goes on sale June 29th in the U.S. for $3.99.

The big feature here is, of course, the ultra-wide band unlocking, so you can walk up and top it with your iPhone and our Apple Watch. And Apple Home Key can unlock the lock for you. That's kind of what my, what does this thing cost? The Akara one, I guess, it's not $300, $400, right? But it's also not slaying quality. So I will, from time to time, I have to take the batteries out and plug it back in to reboot it because it just locks up for some reason.

I can't get it in my house. But yeah, this one also has Matter Over Thread, which can pair with Apple Home Hub and get on to any of those type systems. So let's see. Ultra really looks like it'll also support Google and Samsung devices as well. So they, because it also supports Aliro. It supports that as well. Yeah, that's good to see.

Is this like the, I think like only the second lock that they've really announced that actually has this? Yeah. The other one was the Ultra lock or something. There's only been a couple of these. I think Akara was one of them. I don't even think that was actually out yet. So. Yeah.

This is a $3.99. It's available June 29th here in the U.S. So there we go. This is a nice looking lock. Honestly, this is a pretty sleek thing. I don't like. I'm a big fan of having a physical key. So I think that if you're going to have,

maybe not on your front door, but somewhere on the house, you should still have a physical key access somewhere. So that way you can get in. But this is actually an attractive looking lock. I don't think I like it for $400. So I think $400 is a little much in my opinion. Yeah.

But at least it looks nice. The Akara U400 is 270, by the way. That's what, yeah. And one thing to know with this is Google wallet and Samsung wallet, digital key. That's expected later this year. So I always say don't buy something based on promises. You just never know if you'll get them. But something to keep in mind.

True that. Oh, and it's matter compatible. Watch out. Watch out. So, I mean, I guess you could have the aqua one if you didn't care what it looked like. And then if you needed this particular finish, maybe you could get this slage since pro. And battery life, though, kind of sucks. Six months.

Oh, I didn't see that. Yeah, it's rated up to six months battery life. I don't know if I'd be happy with that. I've Yale, Z-wave locks, and they might last a lot longer than six months. I hate what my battery has to be changed within a year. I'm rebooting mine. I reboot mine like every other week. Go-A-carra.

Ringing endorsement. Most of the time it does work, so I don't care. Let's see, we got, oh, Alexa Plus news this week. Canada got it last week. Brazil is getting it this week. So, congratulations Brazil. You Alexa Plus now. Yay.

Going to worldwide. It speaks Portuguese. Yep. And Google, this is some sad news, but we have got good news on the other side. Google's discontinued its nest audio and nest mini speakers. Oh, no. No. Let's see.

These products launched more than five years ago. And, well, the good news is Google is replacing them. with its new Gemini powered Google Home Speaker, which comes out as you start shipping on June 25th, which is in two days, right? And it's going to cost $99. So there you go. TJ is very interested in one of these.

It sounds like he's going to pick one up. Yeah, I think I'm going to pick one up. I like the green color ones. So, you know, the color is always getting me. So I'm going to pick up a jade one. We are not an Alexa household, but we've been needing some new Google speakers for a little bit. So I think I'll go pick one of these up as soon as they come out.

I have not ordered it, so I'm hoping I can just go to Best Buy and pick one up, and I imagine I will be able to. Probably, yeah. But, well, they have the color I want. That is the question. Well, it's going to be in hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry. So there you go.

I don't see, these look like a rounder, or not a rounder, a flattened, like if you, you picture an Apple home and you kind of like pushed on it a little bit from the top,

maybe that's what this would be. Kind of looks very similar. It has the same weave pattern. Well, these will never get updated and then the Apple HomePod will never get updated either. So whatever does anybody care? First time in six years though. Six years.

We've waited for a new Google speaker. Here it is. I hope they built it to last another six years at least. Can pair with other nest speakers, nest displays, and Google cast devices and Google TV stream owners can use it up to two of these as a mini home theater. and pair with for spatial surround sound. So there you go. It also has the Gemini for home, which replaces the older assistance experience

for more conversational requests. Oh, don't get me started on conversation with these things. Stop trying to talk to me. So mad at chat GPT. Ugh, just. Sonos is doing some big things here. According to AI CEO, Tom Conrad, they're going to be updating their app.

What are they going to be doing? Fixing things? Yeah, they're going to be fixing the volume control interface. fades, it's going to make it easier and quicker to make adjustments with up-down buttons. Is that their priority? Be excited. Be excited. Like, all the things they can work on, is that their number one priority right now, is the volume controls? DJ's right. Please clap.

Oh, man. I had, so I had a customer the other day that was having some Sonos issues, and he decided to call Sonos to, like, you know, go through the troubleshooting things. And they asked him, which they have never asked me before, and I'm kind of annoyed. They asked him if he had multiple Wi-Fi networks in his house. And he was like, yeah, I mean, I got a couple different ones. And they said, well, you got to get rid all the other ones and only use one. And so we did that. And his Sonos stuff started working better. And I'm not sure why.

Did he have them, like, each individual Sonos on its own Wi-Fi network? Nope. They were all connected the same one. Why did he have multiple Wi-Fi networks in his house? One of them was for everything, and then the other one was for, like, some IOT devices. IOT junk, yeah. And people do that. Yeah, so it was it the same devices, but they, he split, uh, they're broadcasting

two different, uh, signals or was it two different like physical networks? Well, no, it's like a, you know, Unify access point. Yeah. Just with two different networks. Okay. But yeah, they, they had me disable those and then all of a sudden they started working. Interesting. So it's very odd. I've never heard of that one.

Mine's set up that way. The problem that we're having right now currently is not so much the volume, is that just when you start playing, they will just randomly drop, and then they'll come back. They'll come back pretty quickly, but it's kind of like there's trippy because like around the house as they're syncing up,

like whatever it's doing isn't working as fast as it should. And one of them will cut out and then come back on and cut out and come back on. So like you hear the music, it's all in sync and it just kind of moves around the house. It's kind of weird. But after a few rounds of that, it cleans out and whatever it's doing and gets things up. So, Seth, do you have multiple Wi-Fi networks? I do, in fact.

There you go. You just got to get rid of them. Yeah, I just got to turn it all off, I guess. Because that's what you shoved it to do. It's really weird. I have multiple Wi-Fi networks that don't have that problem, but you never know. You never know. I should just kept Sonos net.

That's what I know. But yeah, that's what Sonos should fix instead of volume. But what do I know? You know, I don't know how to run a company. All right. Well, they have tab navigations, three tabs at the bottom, a new volume and control interface, and the player sort orientation gives you more control

on how your players are listed and displayed. So there you go. You can rearrange the order that the little words are at the bottom whenever you can magically find that menu that gets you there. The only time I use their app is to configure their speakers, to be honest. After that, I just airplay. You don't, you don't, the airplay delay doesn't, annoy you? Like, that just annoys me to no end, where it's like a second or two behind?

Behind what? It's always, they're in sync with each other. No, no, like the control or the phone or whatever. Like, it's always, it's always delayed. Well, yeah, it's delayed, like, a little bit, like, when you, like, adjust the volume, it's, like, half a second or so. But, I mean, we just start a playlist and just leave it, and it just goes. Like, when somebody calls you, does it stop play? No, they fix that because Justin Bieber complained. Oh, interesting. I mean, like, I don't even worry about it.

It's like why you connect your Apple or Spotify into your sonosis. Because if somebody called you, your phone would stop playing anything. Yeah, I guess so. I just never deal with it. Nobody calls you. No one calls me. Like I just, I send all calls to voicemail. Just text me.

I'll call you, Gavin. All right, all right. No, no, don't know. I don't like when people. Only people that call me are numbers I don't recognize and my neighbor because he hates texting. But other than that, no one. else calls me. You know, like, even my mom gets mad because I don't answer the phone when she calls. All right. Well, a couple of matter updates here. We've got Signify enhancing Phillips Hugh Matter

support through collaboration with Silicon Labs. They're going to do a concurrent multi-proticle support instead of picking one radio stack and living with it. These bulbs are now being built to participate in the Hughes Zigby world. So it gets you going on matter over thread. So there you go. Phillips Hugh gets Matter support. There you go. I guess it's a good thing. They wear Wi-Fi, right? Or were they...

I thought they were Zigby. Well, so they're Bluetooth and Zigby. The Bluetooth is usually just for like, you know, obviously very local control. You could control the bulbs without having a remote or hub or anything like that. But they were Zigby. I think the newest versions, though, are Matter. So it's interesting to see them have Matter and Zigby at the same time.

Does they might know why you'd want to do this? Matter and Zigby? At the same time. Is it going to be... on at the same time, or are they going to be like you can choose one or the other? So that would make sense, but it does say concurrently. So does that just mean, I would assume that you'd have to pick? Because that's how everybody else does it too.

I mean, it's the same chip and everything, right? You're just putting a different firmware on it. So that's what I read it as, but. No, this says that right now you have to choose between Zigby or thread, but in the future, you can go both. It can do both at the same time. Yeah, but I'm trying to find out why. Why would you want to?

I mean, maybe just not committed to matter. So I have two hubs that I have twice as many problems. It's like, where's the problem? I don't know. Just gets caught in a loop. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, some of like the car devices, you know, like the, was it, the FP300 or 200? Yeah.

Whatever that one is. All their newer devices do this. Yeah, you can just choose it. And there's advantages, you know, like the Zibby one has better battery life than the matter one and a couple other things. So, like, there's advantages of, you know, why you'd pick one or the other. But I don't understand why you'd have both on the same time. Maybe for, like, backwards compatibility.

I guess within, then you would be able, it would be able to join the Zigby network and extend the Zigby network. But then also. I can connect to Home Assistant and Google at the same time. But would I be able to do that anyway? Their matter is over thread, right? So you would need to have, like, the thread antenna and stuff to be able to use any of that matter stuff. But if you don't and you have Zigby, you can see. still use that.

Right. I guess that's why, but why at the same time, I don't know. All right, if you're listening to this and you have any idea why somebody would do this

at the same time, you should let us know. It just seems messy. That's what I'm saying. It's like, pick one, come on. It's like when people tell me

they're using, like, smart things and they're controlling it with home assistant, and I'm like, well, that seems like an awful idea, you know? That seems like too much work. Yeah, do think, oh, wait.

I have all my stuff working with smart things, but I'm using a home assistant to actually control it. Oh, that's what I'm doing. Oh, crud. And then the control force that up and then it stopped working with home. What is it?

The home bridge, which then stops working with home assistance. So like nothing's working right now. Ah, man. All right. Let's see. Matter 1.6 has come out. And Gavin found every story

and put them in here for us this week. That's nice. It was nice. I was doing the work, you know, for you guys. I'm making your job easier. You don't have to go look for them. I post all the stories. The funny thing was,

every one of these stories is had the same almost the same headline. Like it... Yeah, I was from the press release. I think everyone just made the story up. It says, Matter 1.6, is it going to work now? I think it's pretty much I'll just summarize all of the headlines into one. But yeah, I guess there's a new Matter 1.6. It's not going to have any like new categories or anything like that, but it's going to go back.

It sounds like it's going to be a fix-in-it update type thing where it's going to go back and work on some of the protocols. more annoying pain points, particularly around the install, I think, is what they said. And they're going to do joint fabric, which is, basically, if you're, today if you're using more than one smart home platform,

the matter devices will have to be shared one at a time between those different, what they call fabrics. And the matter 1.6 is going to basically share the fabric across multiple platforms. So when you add one device in, even though it's controlled by that one hub, it's still visible across those other platforms. That would be nice.

Isn't that kind of what matter was supposed to be originally? I guess they had to get there. Yeah, that's the thing that matter. It's like, what, five years to get there? Well, yeah, it's taking them time to get where they should be. And I like the direction they're going. It's just I get so excited for certain things. And then when I actually play with it, I get let down again.

So, for example, they released that troubleshooting. So many things I can cut out of what you said tonight. It's just way out of context. I know, I know, I know, have fun, have fun. But I got their troubleshooting app on my phone because one of my, my EVE plug went offline. And I couldn't figure out why for the hell of me this went offline. So I was like, oh, let me try and look at their troubleshooting app.

I opened up this app and I was lost. I was like, what the hell is all this stuff in here? Like, I could not figure out what my device was. I just went to the device and ended up re-adding it and just joined back as normal. But they still need to work on this troubleshooting because I find what matter. It's a new set of problems and a new ecosystem. That's all it is to me. They just move the problems from over here to over there.

Yeah, it's like they want to own the problems too. But I think they've gotten to the point where they've added support for all the basic functions. I can't remember the terminology, but you know, like for a switch, the on-off. The templates reach each time. Yeah. Yeah. So they've

now reached a point where now that they got all that stuff done, they can start like creating their devices and doing more on other pieces. And I still think it's like, I know it's out and everyone's jumping on it now, but I still think a few years away and it will be more mature and settled in. I think the second part of that is kind of the bigger piece of this is now that they have adoption of it, right? Then they can, they don't have to worry about building a template every week for

some new device that's come online. They can start, they can take the templates they have for whatever devices they have. And those are out there that's kind of matured. Okay, now they can work on things like this joint fabric and they've got thermostat suggestions, which tells you how to set up your thermostat if you need to. And like standardizing how some security sensors it looks like will report their alerts and that kind of thing. Like those types of things, if they go back and kind of like working that over time, like if everybody's in and the improvements reach everyone at that point. So that's nice. Yeah, there were certain things I was looking at on their list, though. And I was wondering, like, should that be in the, you know,

know the matter standard or is that something to be in the hub like hopefully i'll explain what i mean right but like they added some some things i was like that's something that should be in the hub side of things or you know doing the automations and you know that type of thing but they're adding it to their standard so but we'll see where it goes it's still a thing they're they're getting close to two point oh matter two point out that'd be a big release one of these days but they do like one two releases a year so it's not not terrible yeah and then it takes time for the various devices to adopt it and roll it out and stuff. I think 1.6 is, is that going to be in the iOS 27?

I can't remember if they're now catching up with 1.5. It takes a while for it to roll out across vendors. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just waiting for like my Amazon devices and my regular thread network to all become one network. Right now it's still showing my Amazon one as separate networks. They're not joined.

So we will see. Well, right. As long as you have, you have to get the adoption for the matter platform itself. And then we have to wait for. the big boys to update their platforms and everyone else to get on board. And then then we start seeing things happen. So, I don't know, we're not too far away. It seems like they've done what, I mean, they've done what they promised.

You go to the store, you buy something that says matter on it. You can hook it up to Amazon. You could up to Apple. You can hook to Google now because they're coming out with a new speaker. But, yeah, it works across all of those things. Now, how well it works to be debated. So that's, I don't like how, like, you know, you get a device that does Zigby.

it matter, right? You add it to Zygby, you get all these options. You add it to matter and you get like a subset of the options. And I don't like that because now you're making the people think, you know, should I really use matter? Should I use Zygby? They should just, it should just be matter and you get everything. But I don't think the protocol was, or the whole matter standard had all the options to add all the features of that device yet. So they're still adding stuff. They're like a custom feature thing that they can expose or something like that. Well, I, I, I,

I think of that, but every time you try and add something like that, like, it's the companies that just ruin it, I find. Like, they take it, they abuse it or they do something weird that just creates, like, more incompatibilities or more having to troubleshoot it. It's like, I'd rather just be locked down. I think that's the problem with Zigby, though, right? I think because they're using it, or extending it. Yeah, yeah.

So you're happy that you get the features on Zigby, but you, that's for the same reason that they're abusing whatever the standard is. No, they're not abusing it. That's just the feature. but like it's locked down at that point and you can't get the data out, right? Because like a car is like that, right? You have to go through their hub

with their Zigby stack to get their Zigby stuff to work. Yeah. And Zways were locked down where they have what they call it, the command classes. Yeah. But then you have the companies

that use the command classes in their own way to get what they want to do done and still like mess things up. So it's like, no matter what you do, you're going to have these companies just trying to do something weird with it. Well, we'll have to see. Good luck matter.

You're almost there. You're almost there. You're getting close. Sure. You almost matter. You almost matter. Day by day, you matter more. You do what you originally set out to do.

All right. Well, here's a fun story. I ran across this one and instantly thought of Gavin here. Nearly half of LG Smart TVs apps contain residential proxy SDKs. So the security report from Spur says smart TVs may be doing a lot more than showing fish tanks in Solitaire. Company scanned over 6,000 apps all across LG WebOS. Samsung ties in, sorry, WebOS and Samsung Tyson. It says that 2058 contained residential proxy SDKs.

That means if these third-party apps wanted to, they could route third-party internet traffic through your home connection, through your TV, even when the apps closed, and based on a one-time consent prop when you installed that Aquarium app. So, yeah, yeah, basically, if somebody is setting up some kind of one of these networks

that wants to abuse things? I don't know. It just seems kind of shady, right? Like, maybe they're using your house for a VPN or something. I don't know. But yeah, they found, what, almost half the apps there for LG smart TVs contain these proxies in them. Doesn't seem like, don't download those things.

That doesn't sound very good. The industry needs to regulate these TVs, though. Like, the TVs are becoming like a dangerous gateway into the home. You know, they're spying on you. They're installing stuff on you. They're doing things in the background you're not aware of. And they try and get around all these laws by giving you these tricky, like, Ula's and stuff like that that you have to read. And you must agree to to be able to even use your TV.

It's getting bad. Like, this industry, they need to find some way to regulate this. See, here's what you didn't like, though. Amazon, it bans this kind of app behavior. And Roku also blocks it, while LG and Samsung have no equivalent public. policy called out on this thing. So, yeah. Yeah, Amazon bans it because they want to be the only one.

They just, they want to spy on you all the time. Yeah, they want to own all your content. Oh, man. This is crazy. Would this allow like botnets to be easier, you know, because they could just funnel botnet traffic through all these proxies? Yep. Yep, yep, yep.

It's crazy. Let's see. Oh, oh, here's the real reason they use it money. What they do is they go. they go to ad networks and call those ads up from using your IP connection, basically. So it's basically, they're running up the ad and revenue for some ad that is out there. Great. It's always ads.

Have you guys noticed like everything? Everything is ads. Yeah. Yeah. Like this is why we can't have nice things. It's literally advertisement. Yeah. You look at our main square in Toronto or is it Times Square?

It's just all else. Yeah. Right. Somehow that's a good thing. All right. Well, there we go. All the links and topics we discuss tonight can be found on our show notes over at at home tech.fm slash 580.

All right. Pick of the week. Pick of the week. I got a World Cup thing one here. This one I ran across on Mastodon from our friend Paulus over there. His eight-year-old decided to go ahead and hook up some a spare development board touchscreen thing that he had laying around. and it shows like the score of the match that's going on.

It has like a little cheering crowd and everything on there. And I thought it was a pretty cool project for an eight-year-old. Like my daughter's nine. Like this, I don't know. She didn't like soccer that much, but like this could be fun, something fun to do. I felt bad because I couldn't even do this. I know, right?

Does it make you feel bad? You know? Like, yeah, it's like an eight-year-old did this, but I struggle with this type of stuff. So, you know, congrats of the eight-year-old. year old. Maybe you'll start working at home assistance. You're right.

He's put a little picture in there and says most of the stuff was open source on repos and he just kind of had to put stuff together and make it happen. So there you go. Pretty sweet. Yeah. I bet you had dad's help there, though, like, you know, he didn't do it all on its own. Hey, it says he used AI and then to make, to make score. So, I mean, I would say accurate, like, these things are getting good now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. the, they're getting really good, especially if you know how to poke them in the right direction, and they don't start regurgitating things like Chad GBT does. God, that's awful. Yes, I'm mad at Chad GBT. What did Chad do to you this week? Oh, man, it, I asked it a question. It would answer the question, it would for itself. And I'm like, okay, that's a good point. And then 45 paragraphs later, I would get to respond. I'm like, I don't need all this other stuff. Just the first thing you incorrectly answered and assumed that was the correct answer? You asked a question in the first paragraph. If this is correct, maybe that's the way to go. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like, you should, it took like three different turns before it stopped talking. I was like, oh my God. So I had to yell at it. I yelled at it. I yelled at it. I made it feel bad. Now I just, it's very curt now. It's like, yeah, that's probably good idea, Seth. You're mean. Gotta be. You got to tell these on limbs what the, where, where, where, where, where, where, where, where, where, where, what, where, where, what, where, where, what, for the show or picks of the week. Give us a shout. Our email address is Feedback

at HomeTech.com. You can head on over to hometec.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, product updates. Well, we got one little, like, I don't know, this is almost a pick of the week from TJ,

but you were talking about this before with, with, what was the Harmony Remote? There was a Harmony Remote centered podcast. I'm like, I'm never listening to that because I hate those remotes. And then you post... Well, yeah, if you're an installer, they're like the bane of your...

existence. Yeah, exactly. I don't think anybody talking good about this stuff. All right, and then the Verge, I guess the Verge

has a, um, how Rumba started a robot revolution. I guess, I guess they kind of did. Like, there was,

as far as like the first robot that people put into their house, yeah, I'd say the Rumba was probably it. Yeah, honestly, this is a pretty good podcast. Uh, the, the Verge cast is doing a,

or the Verge is doing a, uh, version history podcast series. This, uh, this series is smart home gadgets. So the first one, they had the Harmony

remote and I know Gavin listened to that and was very mad that nobody else really loved the Harmony Remote, even though it was, it was just remote. It's okay. Um, this one is the Rumba and they actually had the, one of the co-founders of Rumba on there. So it's actually a very interesting podcast. I didn't, like, I kind of knew a little bit of the history of Rumba. You know, they kind of started up was like a, I think it was like an MIT side project to like make like space exploration robots and stuff like that. and then they kind of pivoted to consumer robots, and now they're owned by China. So it's kind of come in our full circle.

They tried to sell to Amazon and that put them out of business. Yeah, but it's a good podcast. If you're interested in the history of Rumba, or just like in general, the robot vacuum space, I think it's very good. This is the second episode of a fourth of the fourth season of Virgin history. It's a good podcast. Honestly, they really go into depth on,

the products, the history, et cetera, et cetera. So it's good to listen to. I was impressed by the Harmony one, you know, all the history behind it. And I felt like I was there for a lot of that history because I've been using Harmony remotes for so long, like when it was just the IR remotes, I've had them. Yeah. Yeah, it really is like one of those stories

that they kind of just disappeared because nobody uses a universal remote anymore. You know, everybody has just like one single device that's connected to their TV for the most part. There's the occasional nerd that has like an AV receiver or a blue ray player or something like that. But, you know, it's, it's not that often anymore. Everybody just has an Apple TV or they're just using the build-in streaming services of their TV and that's it. They don't need a universal remote. And I'm seeing the return of multiple remotes on the, on their, uh, you know, on their coffee tables. Like, I've been to people's houses again and I'm starting to see different remotes on the coffee. You don't have a choice. Like, what do you?

Yeah, they'll have their Apple Tables. TV remote. They'll have their Amazon Fire Stick remote. They'll have their TV remote, you know, and like you said, they could have their receiver remote, but I've seen that coming back now where with Harmony that you were getting rid of a lot of that stuff. Yeah, one, two, three. Oh, this is a Roku's temporary. See, I'm a single remote guy. I'm a single remote guy. You guys need to live a little more simple life. These were, these were all on my desk as I was cleaning off my desk. Don't ask me why. I'm so curious. Well, every time you clean off your desk, you find new tech, or all new technology. Well, I found a bunch of stuff. Unopened boxes. Yeah. Yeah. No, I found a bunch of stuff this time.

It was, it was time, though. I hadn't cleaned it off in a while. And I can actually see the desk now, which is cool, which is very nice. I got, I still have worked to do that way. But mostly, it's like camera batteries. I need to pick up. So anyway, yeah, well, I guess that's what I've been doing. That's my project is cleaning up the garage.

I guess I was assigned. that task. And I can tell you, it's not going great because I barely, well, I've gotten some stuff cleaned out. And I, someone bought one of the, well, they didn't buy the cameras. I sent them one of the cameras. They bought the shipping for one of the cameras I was given away the other day in the hub. So if you're not in the hub, that's a, that's a benefit. T.J. and I will occasionally say, hey, we have some cameras or we have some stuff we would like to send out to somebody. And we'll send it to you if you just pay for the shipping. And I send it across country. So I still got a couple of cameras here that I found a

to toss, I think, at this point. It's a good way to get rid of things, but, you know, they go to somebody that's actually going to use them, so. Go to a good home, yeah. They're just going to gather dust in my garage at this point, because I'm not using them. Well, and that's my problem. They, like, all mine go into, like, a bin, and then they get, like, damage or I lose the cords or, you know, whatever accessories came with it.

So I'd rather just go somewhere instead of ending up and a bin dying somewhere. Yep, yep. I have a bin full of stuff right now, but I'm saving it for a specific event. that you'll probably hear about in the next few weeks. Well, that's cryptic, Gavin. That's really cryptic. I'm just going to leave it at that. Homesteads Community Day.

I don't know if it's that one, but, you know, who knows? Better plan homeless this community day. As I was cleaning up, I was playing with my studio lights here, which are just some, like, kneewear panels that I picked up on Amazon a long time ago, and they're, like, really old. And they only have this RF remote thing. and I was like, I have one of these SDR radio receiver things, and I was like, let's see if AI can reverse engineer this.

Guess what AI can do really well? Reverse engineer, the protocol it uses. And now I just have to go buy a $11 part on Amazon Prime Day here. Happy Prime Day, everyone, for all those who celebrate, by the way. And that is, yeah, $9. It's $9 right now. It'll be here tomorrow, and I can hook up to a ESP 32, to development board or whatever,

and I'll be able to control the brightness and CCC of my lights here, all at the same time. So there we go. Nice. Yeah, I thought it was kind of cool. Little fun thing. It made me press the button a bunch of times, but we got it all learned in. It figured out what the protocol was and mapped everything,

and yeah, it's got it all figured out now. So it's nice. You just gave me an idea from my fireplace, actually, because my fireplace code, like on my fireplace remote, if I double tap, I think up or down, it will go to the max or the min. And I wanted to map that to a thing,

but I couldn't catch that double tap. But I wonder if I could use AI to decipher the code and make a new code, or if it will even know what the code should be to feed that right into my bond hub. Hmm. Yep. Yep. New project.

Yeah, it did a pretty good job. It was like, hold the remote close to the antenna or whatever and press the button, you know, and it kind of like honed in on where the signal was. And it was like, all right, I think I know where the signal is.

And then it just kind of, it said, it basically had to like press a bunch of buttons. And then we went one button at a time. And then like all, I guess it has discrete code. So if I wanted to send this thing to like 50% lights or 80% lights or zero, I think it goes on 10%.

I could do that by sitting in a single command. so that's kind of nice. But yeah, I'll see how well the transmitter portion of this works later. The receiver evidently worked pretty good. And then the last thing I was up to, oh, I want to plug a little ice maker that I got. I have this, what was it called? It was a first build ice machine. Who made that thing?

I think GE Opel ended up being the name, the brand name that came on it later. And he kind of sucked. Like it was the first generation and those Nugget Ice Maker things. It was really loud and clunky and, like, had its really loud fan on it and everything. And it just kept going out or something was always wrong with it. And, like, eventually it just kind of stopped working. I know, it was okay. I could probably have fixed it again, but I didn't want to.

I went out and got one of these govy ice makers because it's govy and why not. I mean, they still, like, stripper poles now, I guess. It's got RGBs in it? It's got RGBs in it. Oh, yeah. I can make it when it needs cleaning. Blood ice. Yeah, exactly.

When it needs cleaning, I turn it red So you don't go My daughter, she came running around She's like, Daddy, it's red She's all upset You're like, that means don't touch it Don't touch the ice machine Yeah, it's got it's got a like a single line

of RGBs that go across it And you can change the color On it for different things When it's making ice, it can be one color When it's ice bins full It can be another color Like they actually did a pretty good job of that part

and it's it's nice. I can't complain. It's very quiet compared to the GE Opel one I had. It makes a couple of clicking sounds. There's like a relay click that turns on or some type of click that comes on. But other than that, it is substantially quieter than the one I had before. So really happy with that. And get to play with the RGBs.

It's got a single line of lights and it lets you pick all of those govie, like, weird little, like neon things that they have, the scenes that they... I love it. Yeah, yeah. You can sync it up with everything. Now I want one. I mean, this is enough to convince me

to buy one at this point. It's Govy. I mean, that's what they're going to do. They're going to put that in there. I mean, that's half a steam machine, so... Yeah, and you get ice out of it all summer. That's right. Yeah.

It does make quite a bit of ice. Like, it makes it pretty quick, too. I've got to say, yeah. I'm very happy with it. I think it was... Actually, I think it's a prime deal right now. If you wanted to go get one, you can get it off for a little bit, but...

Yeah, I have an ice maker in my Amazon box right now. It's ew, homie. I think we saw him at CES, but I just can't justify it because my fridge ice maker, like every other fridge ice maker dies or gives problems at some point. But then I realize if I just empty it every couple weeks, then it keeps working. So I can't justify buying this now. Yeah, well, it's $100 bucks off right now. So I guess I should have waited.

Why, if we get mad at me? It's the GoVee Life, Smart Nugget IceMaker, 60 pounds daily, six minute first ice, 40 dB ultra quiet with AI noise guard. I have no idea what that means. AI noise card. Never, I didn't know it. Hey, but I guess it does. Oh, it has voice control?

Obviously. It's got voice control as well. Didn't know that. What do you yell at it? Make me ice. It's like, I already did that. I do that all the time. You don't have to tell me.

It says it has dual water tanks. It technically does. And it says for kitchen, for home kitchen, comma, party. So, there you go. Why does it have dual water tanks instead of just one? It does come with the side water tank, but it only has one. And I'm guessing inside, it does have another water tank technically underneath the ice bin where the ice melts. And that's technically the second ice bin.

That makes sense. But we'll put a link to that one in the show notes. And if you listen to the show, it's too late, you can't, you probably won't get the $100 bucks off. But it is a good ice machine. I would recommend if it goes 20% off again, grab one. If they make a slushy machine over it. Oh, it works with Alexa. that's what it is.

I'm not doing that. Why not? Not happening. You're already there. All right. Yeah. TJ, you've been busy.

What's up? What's you doing? I've been doing manual labor, which is every nerds favorite thing to do. We, you know, we built the deck a couple weeks ago. And obviously,

I needed more excuses to buy more plants. So this weekend, I spent the entire weekend adding garden beds to the deck area. So we'll go ahead and include pictures in that. I went to the garden store. It's about like a couple hundred dollars on plants and I put them around my deck. The problem that we constantly have in our backyard is that we, because we do so much gardening, we have wood chips everywhere and compost and everything else. There's always a constant supply of gnats and other flying insects because,

you know, the stuff has got to break down. So we're always dealing with that. So we planted some plants that are supposed to help fight that kind of stuff. So we got some mint and thyme and basil and lemongrass and some other things that are supposedly going to help with that. We'll find out next year. You know, it's going to take a little bit for the plants to actually grow and everything. But it's,

I think it looks pretty nice. What do you guys think? Yeah. No spiders. No spiders. We'll have to upload the, uh, the picture that you made as well of the peppermint. So that was pretty funny. But yeah, I did that.

I went around and put edging blocks around the garden. I did that in a couple other spots as well. Like I have these apple trees that I installed this year, but I never actually did any edging around them, so I went around and did that. And then I'm getting all the wood and stuff cleaned up from building the deck. So I've had all those wood in the yard and everything else. So I've just been working outside.

It's a nice time of year. I'm not doing many, you know, nerd projects other than working on like my irrigation system and stuff like that. So it's a good time of year to be outside. Yeah. It looks like you got some speakers mounted on the fence now. You get some audio out there. Oh, yeah.

I don't think I actually talked about that. So I have a very well-off client that likes to waste money, as some of them do. And he bought one of those Sonance, you know, 7.1, you know, Garden Series speakers setups from Best Buy. You know, it always goes on sale. It's like $1,200. You get a Sonos amp. You get these seven or eight speakers. And then you get a subwifers.

So it's actually a really good deal for the cost-wise. They're the four-inch speakers, so they're pretty small. But, you know, if you're putting around like a small fireplace or a small pool or a deck or something like that, they're actually really good. My client bought them to put them around a giant pool, and they sounded like crap because they're just too small. They're not really meant to be cranked up like that. So he decided to go get new speakers, and I was like, well, what are you going to do with the old speakers? And he was like, well, you know, I was thinking about putting him around my fire pit down there. And I was like, yeah, you're probably not going to do that, though, to be honest.

So you should just sell them to me. And so I bought his seven, I think it's six, actually. I don't know, I keep saying a different number every time I say it. But I think it's six of the Sonan's landscape gardens speakers. You have more around there. Yeah. So I actually bought those two that are fence-mounted like the week before. No.

I bought them for when Nicole's family is coming over. So we listen to music and everything. And then like two days before they came over, he made me the deal on the other Oh, okay. And I was like, no. But honestly, the two on the fence sounds so much better than all six of the speakers. Really? Yeah.

Because they're just, yeah, I mean, they're just so much bigger and everything. Well, right, because those look like they're, those aren't four-inch speakers. Those are bigger. Yeah, those are huge compared. So, yeah, it's, it sounds really good. Oh, and all the other thing I also forgot that I did this week, more outside stuff, is I built a little platform for my grill. So I wouldn't have to mow underneath that anymore.

I saw that in the background in the picture. Yeah. Yeah, I had it's a leftover wood. I'm like, what am I going to do with this leftover wood? I don't know what I'm going to do. And so I was like, well, I'll just build a platform for my grill because I'm tired of weed whacking around it and move it and stuff like that. So that's what I did. And then I also installed a rain barrel.

So this, if you don't know what a rain barrel is, rain barrel connects to your gutter system. Typically, you can kind of have it connect to whatever you want, really. But it connects to your gutter system. The county we live in Ohio does a rebate program where they give you $50 towards native tree. native plants or a rain barrel. So we decided to purchase a rain barrel. It was $150 and we got $50 off. So we paid $100 for the rain barrel.

And we got that installed this week. I was in a rush to install it before it rained the other day and got it installed. And I came out after a rain and it had fell over. So I was like, well, I guess I should probably build something for this. So I went ahead and build a platform for that as well, similar to the grill. And it's nice and sturdy. And I can get three on there. So at some point we might add more rain barrels.

My next challenge, and this is probably a project for next year, because I'm kind of tied up with all kinds of projects at this point, is finding out a way to actually use the rain barrel water in the irrigation system. And this person on YouTube actually made a video on how they did it with Home Assistant. And so next year, I think I'm going to try to tackle that because it would be nice to be able to use the same water for the actual irrigation system. instead of having to manually go up and like fill, you know, a watering can or something. You can use that Apollo pump thing.

I could, but how do I channel that through my irrigation system? I don't think you're running more wires or lines. Which I could. I mean, so there's a way that you can, I have like a parts list. Basically, like, create like a Y adapter to the irrigation system. So there is a way to do it. I just have to, I don't have time this year to do it. Yeah.

Ask me about it in the spring. We'll figure it out later. Yeah. You can get the, the pump. one. I mean, I have one. I actually bought one to do, to water my, um, like my seeds and stuff as we were getting seeds started this spring. Uh, and I didn't actually get to use it. So I'll probably do that next year. Oh yeah. I, I just did a bunch of reseeding or what do they call it overseating on the grass to plant grass back down for the, um, for all the stuff that disappeared with the moles and

the, uh, the grubs evidently that the moles were eating, but the moles did some damage. So hopefully the grass comes back. It seems to be growing. I'm having to water it. It does. Oh, I, I, I've had that damaged my lawn a few years and it goes away. The lawn will recover. A lot of dirt out there right now, but I'm having to water it. Oh, man, it's going to be expensive. Yeah. Not looking forward to the water bill this month.

Yeah, this time of year, I basically just, because for some reason, our water bill only comes every three months. And so this time of year is I just, I just send $200 to the water company every month because I'm just like, I don't want to fall behind my water bill with all this. stuff because we're water and everything multiple times a day in the summer. It gets very hot. Yep, yeah. But that's all my projects. What about you, Gavin? Well, as usual, I've been a busy guy this week. So one of the things I did, the first thing I did was I was messing around with my home assistant notifications. So here's a tip I'm going to share it. So notifications and home assistant are very powerful. There's a lot of options with it. Some of it, you have to, you may have to do it through Yamow, I think you could do some of it through the user interface in the data tag, but one of the

things I have is like, I have my camera notifications, right? And because I have cameras all around my house, when someone's walking from like the driveway to the front door, I'll get flooded with notifications as it detects the person on each camera and stuff like that, right? Well, in Home Assistant, you can add a tag field in the data box. And basically what that tag field does is it gives a tag to that notification. So then as the other cameras are picking it up, it will update the notification instead of sending you another notification, right?

So as the people are tripping the cameras as they go to my front door, it will just keep updating that same notification instead of me getting five different notifications. God, you're so smart, Gavin. Yeah, so like, you just want the last notification, and usually it's them at the front door, right? Um, same with my backyard.

I have a few cameras in the backyard. And as you walk around the house, you'll get like four or five different notifications as they get tripped up. But now I only get like one notification. It just updates it with the latest image and, you know, like person detected here. And you just get that image. And, you know, if they trip the next camera,

it just will change the image to the image that was on that camera instead. But you don't get another notification. So I've cleaned up a lot of those notifications. So I actually get less notifications. But if you do read the documentation for the companion app in Home Assistant, they'll show you a whole bunch of things. Like you can force notifications to be grouped together. So you can have all your camera app notifications to be grouped in one section on your iPhone,

for example. You can adjust the size of the titles. You can even adjust the criticality of the notification. So where I use that is at nighttime, if somebody, you know, we're in the night mode and we're sleeping and somebody comes on my driveway, if it's high criticality, it will break through the Do Not Disturb and set the alarm still to wake me up. So my phone could be on Dino Disturb.

It will get through that. And that's another powerful feature because there are certain things that, you know, what if you had a leak in the house? You want it to wake you up to say, hey, there's a leak in the house. You know, go check it out. So if you want to like level up your notifications, just read the documentation. You'll be surprised at what. what you can do on your phone with this stuff.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people actually look at the options for notifications. That's only why I'm mentioning it. Because once you do, you'll be surprised. So that was one thing. I cleaned up a lot of my notifications. This may only, you know, be exciting to a few people. But if you use Co-Pilot at work and you're part of that W-365 Co-Pilot,

they added Claude to it now. I got Claude on mine this week. So now at work, I've Claude in the Co-Pilot. That's the model it can use. I can switch between because it was chat GPT before. But now we have access to Claude Opus. Very nice. Yeah.

Right. And that's the more, which is shocking because that's also the more expensive one and everything, but I seem to have unlimited access to it now. Well, they tell me that until I use it. And then they'll start, you know, ping me telling me to slow down or something.

Yeah. Why are you doing that? It's like, Gavin, yeah. Our bill is once with $1,000 from you alone. I'll be like, oh, God, sorry. So, yeah. I was just mentioning that because I was excited to see that at work, but I've been doing a lot of, like, AI stuff. And, like, you know, a few little things.

Like, I've been thinking of things differently. So when it came to my pool level, in my pool, you know, I want to monitor the water level, right? And know if it's too high or too low. And the first thing I used to think of is, okay, can I make a device that, you know, with a float switch that does this type of thing, blah, blah, blah. Well, this week, all I did was I asked one of my agents to every so often check the camera feed to my pool and look at the pool water level. And it's supposed to be at this level and blah, blah, blah, and notify me if it's outside of that range. So, yeah, my pool agent called Skimmer, every half hour, every hour, he goes, he connects my home assistant, grabs an image of my pool. And then he just looks at where the water level is in comparison to my skimmer.

And he's like, nope, you're good, you're in range. And if it goes above the other day, because we got a lot of rain, so it went above the other day, he notified me. He says your pool water is kind of high. You might want to drain it a bit, which I had to do. And he will let me know if it ever goes slow. So those are the type of things I've been thinking differently about. I didn't need to create a device or make a device or think of it. I just have them watch the camera for me.

Wow. You know? And that was actually pretty cool. I mean, I know there is a delay, but I can tell them do it every 15 minutes if I wanted to or whatever. and I'd be good with that, but every hour is pretty good. And then if it's low, I can have them turn off the pump. I can say, hey, if it's low, just turn off the pool pump, and then I'll deal with it and I get home or, you know, whenever I feel like it, right?

So that's one thing. And even with my lawn, my lawn, like, I've actually expanded it now. So every evening, he checks the moisture in the various zones. And this is my AI agent. I call him turf. He'll check the moisture in the various zones. zones and then he'll give me a report and say, all right, tonight, you should water zone one or the backyard or whatever, the tree line. And he will watch, he watches all the, you know, like,

if it runs for this long, you know, he will tell me, run it for this long, do a cycle and soak, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And I would set it up in the Ratchel app and let it go. But then I got brave enough where I just said, you set it up. You do it. Yep, yep. Right. And I just gave him the parameter. I didn't even give it any parameters. I just said, you know the zones, you know the switches to turn on the watering for those zones, you know the moisture levels and everything. So he's like, okay, no problem. And he sets up his own automation where just for the zones it needs, it would just start it, run it for however time it says to run it. Then it would stop it and then let it soak in and then restart it for that zone or go on to the next zone.

Like it laid it all out presented to me. I was like, wow, that was better. than what I could even do in the Ratchel. Right, right. How it's cycled all the zones and stuff. So now I just tell him, and then he has like an emergency shut off at four, um, whatever time in the morning. I tell him what time to have it all done by, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't, you know, um, spray water on all the early morning walkers out there and everything.

And so nice. It's, it's been pretty, it's, doing a great job. That's all I could say, you know, like I don't have to water every zone every week. It just tells me, okay, this zone. well, I'm just going to water this zone. We'll rent for 15 minutes. I'll wait 30 minutes and then we'll run up for 15 minutes again. And, you know, and then the next morning,

it'll say, okay, yep, that brought the moisture up. You know, we're good here now. And then it will, it watches the zone. So it goes, this zone seems to lose moisture a lot more than the other zone. So we have to take that consideration and stuff like that, right? And I was always nervous because you'd think, oh, what if it left it running? What if it's screwed up? What if it that?

I also have my hydrophic droplet. it. That's the device you put on the pipes to monitor the water usage and it will notify you when the water's been running too long and stuff. So that's a backup that will let me know if it's been running too long. And I highly recommend this device. And even if you're going to go out and buy it, use the discount code home tech. They'll save you like 30 bucks, I believe, on it. So, you know, go out and buy that if you want to monitor your water usage for safety. But I've been using AI. That's how I've been using AI instead of creating automations and stuff like that. I just been having it just do it for me.

Right? Just, hey, go create the, go create the routine to water the three zones. So that's what I'm going to ask you. It creates its own routine. So it does the same thing every time. Yeah, own cron job. Okay.

Well, not the same thing every time, but it goes, okay, these two zones, I advise you watering tonight. And I'll be like, yeah, sure, and do the tree line at the back. And it goes out and it will create its own routine. I'll say, make sure you're done before, you know, sunrise.

And it will go and creates its own routine. It doesn't create automation. It doesn't create anything like that. It creates its own cron job that goes and triggers the things in home assistance. Interesting. Right? So it will say, okay, run zone one for 15 minutes, and home assistant will trigger Ratchel that. So it's actually the automation system.

It's just using home assistant. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. But I'm just naturally just telling it to do it, and it comes back and it presents to me what it's going to do tonight. And I'm like, look, good, schedule it. And off it goes and it does its thing. And the next morning, it reports back on the moisture. during my lawn and everything.

So I've been working with it a lot differently, like how it looks at things and how it automates things. And it's just like, it's amazing how it just does it, right? Like, it's so much more flexible than Ratchett. Because in the app, I would have to, like, it was a pain and you have to create a one time. Yeah, yeah, and click on all sorts of things. And then you have to determine the, you know, the timings.

And then I couldn't adjust how long, like the soak time was. Or I couldn't just say water one zone, then wait, then water it again. And, but this just handles it all. And it built in emergency, um, safety shut off just in case, you know, and stuff like that, even though it doesn't need to do that because you switch when you trigger the zone, it will, it, it, one of the parameters is how long to run this zone for. So then Ratchio will only run it for that amount of time anyway, but it's still built in a check. Yeah.

At the end, it goes in. It says anything's still running. It even was smart enough to say if any, um, along the way, if any of the steps were, you know, starting and it detected rain at the same time, it was smart enough to say, okay, then I'll just skip that step because rain is being detected too, right? It also takes into account my local weather. It takes into account the amount of rain that fell that week and stuff like that. So it's really like, it thinks a lot more about things than I would have ever done. Yeah, when you set it up, did you say, come up with a plan? You told it to make a way to do this. Or you just, you just said one shot, let's go,

gets us done and this is what I want to do or did it come back and ask you a bunch of questions? It didn't really come back and ask me a bunch of questions. Shockingly. I just, I said, connect to my home assistant. Here's the keys. Here's the IP. Here's what I'm going to do. And you'll see I go find my soil moisture sensors because based on my naming and everything like that,

it knew which ones they were. And I said, find the Ratchel switches and it found all those zones and it mapped them to each sensor and everything like that. And yeah, When I told it, you know, he came back with its first plan. And I didn't really have to correct it because it knew to do the soaking piece itself. Right. So it knew run it for 15.

Let's sit for half hour and then run it. And then when I said add another zone, well, it took into account that, hey, this zone is going to soak for 30. So while that's soaking, I'm going to run this other zone instead and then take that away from the time. And then, you know, let that soak for another 10 minutes. And then I'll run that zone again. If you know what I mean? Yeah. Like it was smart enough to fill. in those gaps where Ratchio didn't do it like that.

Like, it kind of does, but it wasn't as smart or flexible. So, yeah, I've kind of stepped up various things, just using AI and thinking differently. Like, I always said the more sensors you give it or access to cameras or, you know, whatever. You could just tell it, look at the camera and tell me if someone's home or, you know, like, if you want to spy on your neighbor, you know, like, just look at the camera. Yeah, you know, or, you know, you can use. it to tell you if there's a car in the garage, you know, and it would look in the garage and would say, hey, yeah, based on the camera, the car is there. And you can wire it in so it can

turn on and off a sensor based on what it sees, right? So that's kind of cool, too, if you really want to get that in depth. But the fact that it can do all this stuff is really cool. Yeah, it reminds me a little, like I was sitting on the couch this weekend, and my wife's like, I want these couple of movies. She made it made a list of things for me to go find in my my newsrooms. And I was like, yeah, I can look those up. And I'm like, I don't know. I have to go and like search it and click. And I'm like, oh, you know who can do that? Henry can do that. And so I just sit in a list. I'm like, hey, connect over here to the, the, the, the R's. And he just like went to task. He put all the stuff. I was like, oh, this isn't a movie.

I think this is what you're talking about. It's a TV show and you put it in. I'm like, yeah, that was right. It was on the movie list. It was a TV show. Whoops. I'm sorry. But it's all in there now and I even had some of them that were like TV shows that were like she wanted like season four on or something like that because she's already seen the other ones. She just wants to see season four whenever it comes out in like a year or two.

And I just sent it with like parentheses S4 and he figured that out. He put it in for like I have it in there it says season one, two, three. Season four whenever it comes around when it drops, it'll it's set up correctly. Everything was done. I went back and checked. All good.

Like all right. Yeah. It's amazing because even like I like to watch a lot of foreign movies, but when we watch them, we watch them in their native language, and we have the subtitles on. But then a lot of those movies, I don't have the subtitles for, right? Or they're screwed up, right, for some reason. Everyone that I try to do that with is messed up.

So yeah. Yeah, so I just told it. I said, go scan my library, find all the movies that they're not English movies, and fix the subtitles. That's a great idea. Get the subtitles from it. And it went through my whole. library and it fixed every subtitle in there.

Wow. And it took it minutes compared to like, what if we had to do this or something? Oh, my gosh. It would take forever. The worst is in place when you're like, you're like, oh, I'll select another file. And it's like milliseconds off and you're like,

I'm going to go back. Like, it goes up and down like 200 milliseconds at a time. But like, I don't know which way to go because I can't, it's so close. I can't tell. And you're like, 200, 400, 600, 6. I guess I got a negative. Let's try that.

And you're like eight seconds away. I'm like, nope, I guess it's the wrong way. Yes. Yeah. It's so hard to find. No, it did all the subtitles, but even crazier, it actually made sure they were in sync as well. Oh, man, that is so cool. I don't know how it did all the analysis, but I guess it looked at the video file, a piece of it,

and made sure some of the words lined up with it and everything. And once it did, it was like, all right, you're in sync. This is the right one. Or I don't know if it actually adjusted the subtitle to just nudge it into sync too. But in the end, I got everything I wanted, and it did it in min it. and it worked great. That's interesting. And, you know, those are the type of things I tell it.

I don't try to install a subtitle docker or anything. I just tell the agent, go fix it. No. And off it goes. You just got to give it access to things like your library or the radar keys or whatever it needs. And I usually say to it, what do you need to finish this job? And it will let me know. And then I'm like, here you go.

Have fun. Wow. That's a great idea of the subtitles. I didn't even think about that one. So I'm going to have to go do that because I have some movies I want to watch that I could not find in the English language. And I think I downloaded them. They may have

English, but I don't think it's right. I think I'm not to find them. So, I've even download subtitles for English shows, too, because every time we're watching a show, the wife always looks at me and she's like, what do you say? You have to have that on now. And I just turn the subtitles on, and I say, here, you can read the show from now on. Yeah, we have that on. Because most of the time, like right now, if I go in,

we're going to watch something, it's 1030, and it'll, it's, we don't want to turn it up too loud. So, well, that's why I have SONOS iPhones. Oh. Well, you still have to see, see we have a little one

that may wonder around and like if Euphoria is playing, you don't want her to see that. True. That's like to Sidisini, like you don't want, you know, that's not something

that needs to be shown to a nine-year-old. Is that true? That's not a nine-year-old. That's messed up, man. I haven't started the season, so don't ruin it for me. I have it there to watch. All right.

Well, is that everything? You got it anymore? Yeah, that wraps up all my things. It's just, you know, thinking differently with AI. Yeah, so many things going on. Well, you got to get it in now, become relying on it, because their prices are about to go skyrocketing. So I just looked over at mine.

I hit a session limit. I've not done that in forever. So kind of wondering what I did. I was doing code review on every single commit change. So maybe I shouldn't do that. I think it was doing some kind of extended thinking now. Whoops. Well, somebody this week sent me a podcast and I said,

you should listen to this, this episode. And he's basically said they were talking about something like, I haven't listened to it yet, but the way he summarized it was they were talking about how Trump stopped the mythos. What was the other one that they released? The models. There was mythos. Mythos was the big one, but then there was one right after that. Fable.

Yeah, they turned that off. So, yeah, he blocked those two and, you know, didn't really have a reason or whatever. Amazon. Amazon tank them. Yeah. But they were saying these companies are building up all these things on AI now. And what will happen if for some reason they just come and say, hey, we're going to block chat GPT from your country.

Yeah. You know, so companies are, they are stressing the companies, start thinking about bringing your AI models local again and start running them locally. So you have control over it and somebody can't just stop you from using it. Yeah, this is a very strange use. of the export controls. I remember back in the day that PGP encryption

was considered a nuclear weapon here in the United States for whatever reason. So yeah, it's growing pains and this stuff is growing really fast. But I've noticed that there are definitely some open weights, open source, like completely open models

that have been kind of released lately. There was one just, I think it's a GLM model that came out that, I mean, if you had five grand worth of equipment, maybe 10, 15 grand to run it on, it would be as fast or as good. I guess they were pulling specs that were as good as Opus.

And that's completely open source, completely local model that you can run. Just buy a spark at that point. You need a few of them, but I don't think it would have enough memory. You need a few like 250 gigabytes of memory or something crazy. All right, buy that new Nvidia computer,

Microsoft computer, 1,120 gigs of memory and blah, blah, blah. A few of them, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I really think that these models, so like these are, these are the big ones, these are the big ones. We don't need big ones for everything. We're going to need little, little tiny models for everything.

And just like small things, they can work really well, have a little bit of reasoning, a little bit of figuring out. And they can be very, very, very small. Running in memory, you know, there will be an ESP 32 chip that has some kind of AI model built into it that we can utilize in the future here. And that'll be a really cool day. Yeah, and I think that's a really cool idea.

Like, if I had a model that just was specific to lawns, for example, and my agent only ran that, I could run that locally. It would be a small model, very small model, very fast model. But it could make those decisions. Yeah, it can make the decisions. But I want to be able to have the ability to add other models in along with it. So, like, if you had the home, it would need the home assistant model for example, as long as alongside the lawn model so that it would know what to do with home

assistant to be able to get that stuff too. Like, that's where I'd like to be able to group a few models of knowledge together so that they can get the job done. Or would I have multiple agents that work together to get that job done? I just throw them together and make them talk to each other and say, hey, get me the information from a home assistant, for example, and let it go. Right now, they need a lot of memory in space to live in that memory, which kind of sucks because that's constrained everywhere.

and but I see people like compressing these things down all the time or trying to figure out some way to make that memory footprint smaller. If they can do that. There will be a breakthrough. Yeah. I mean, even running that little one was a Gemma 4 model on my Mac Mini. I mean, that, that is incredible. Like how fast that was flying, like how responsive it was,

getting correct answers and that kind of thing. And it's just, it's like the Mac Mini's right here. It's a tiny little Mac Mini, not doing anything, just running that. that's really cool because it's local. It doesn't go anywhere for that. Like, it's got some, you know, it takes a chunk of memory, but still, like, that's pretty cool.

All new world, everything's changing. Imagine how this will look next year. Yeah, yeah. I know. All right, well, on that note, we want to thank everyone for listening to show, but especially want to send a big thanks out for those able to financially support the show

through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, You can head on over to HOMTech.fm slash support and learn how you can support TJ getting that steam machine. He's got to get it. A thousand of you. Please join. That's right. For as little as you.

I don't need to go to Vegas next year. You know, give me a steam machine. That's what he wants. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you invite over to the private Slack chat. The hub where you and other patrons can discuss this week's news and everything that's going on. There's been a couple of posts in there. I guess Jimmy's upset. that the Unify doesn't have Alexa support for the protect?

Yes, it does it. I was trying to get that working through Home Assistant by exposing the cameras, but I could never get it working. Oh, I thought I saw somebody had figured it out. I don't know. That's why I posted the little, you know, the answerjimmy. I tried to get it working with Home Assistant because my protect goes into Home Assistant, and it gives it the video feeds, and I should be able to feed that the Amazon lady,

but I couldn't get it working so I gave up. Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, you didn't learn, Festi, enough, who do you have to get to do this? Ah, you know, maybe I'll just tell my agent to do it. Yes, that's the answer. You see, that's how you have to think now. Instead of trying to figure it out yourself,

sub it out, exactly. Yeah, I learned. All right. If you can't support financially, totally understand. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast, have your choice. That's going to wrap up a week here on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week.

Till next time. Take care. Except we won't see anybody next week, Seth. Oh yeah, that's right. You have it off next week. Yeah, we're taking out next week. So maybe not next week, but the week after. We'll see you.

See you in two weeks. See you in two weeks. Bye. Bye.