HomeTech.fm - Episode 581 - YOLO Updates

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

On this week's show: Apple makes Apple Home hubs a lot pricier, Samsung puts a $5 toll booth in front of the SmartThings API, and Matter itself keeps inching toward “maybe this really will work.” We also hit a THIRDREALITY timer clock, an interesting universal remote hub, Level’s rough week, Netflix’s new profile email rule, project updates, a pick of the week, and so much more!Building an Apple Home just got pricier: New hardware hikes affect key Matter hubsHome Tech HeadlinesNew - THIRDREALITY Smart Timer Light TL2,Digital Clock,60GHz mmWave Radar,RGB Light,Light Sensor,Simple Setup,Countdown Timer,Matter Enabled,2.4GHz WiFi only,Compatible with Alexa, Apple Home,Google HomeDREO Brings Matter Connectivity to TurboPoly™ Fan 765S, Furthering its Open Ecosystem CommitmentOpenInfrared Point: Universal Remote HubIntroducing UniFi Network 10.5Hackers target UniFi as critical exploits surfaceCrestron Launches Configure Pro Platform for Crestron Home OSJosh.ai Showcases AI-Powered Home Control with New Experiential VideoHunter Douglas Alta Window Fashions Motorized Shades Now Compatible with PowerView AutomationSamsung will soon start charging to access its smart home APIA New Enhanced SmartThings API Experience  - SmartThings BlogNetflix now requires every user profile to be tied to unique email addressSmart lock maker Level has been gutted and its founders are outMatter Just Underwent a Major Stress Test for Supporting Large-Scale DeploymentsHome Assistant upgrades to Matter 1.5.1 with a better codebaseThe Matter upgrade you’ve been waiting forInside the room where the smart home industry is still betting on MatterDroplet the #1 Smart Home Water Sensor - Hydrific, part of LIXIL

This the home tech podcast for Friday, July 10th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. Podcasts all about home technology, home automation. And guys, I went traveling this last week for the holiday.

And I brought my Roku along, and I think I really want a new Apple TV. So I should probably just go back. Oh, no. Oh, no. What's happened to the Apple TV project? $1 billion. Yeah, yeah. They're so expensive.

They've become gold. I don't even understand why they're so expensive. I mean, doesn't ABLE make basically everything? Like, obviously, they have to, like, get the supplies, and they're buying the chips from TSM and stuff like this. But, like, aren't they, like, putting the RAM into the chip themselves? Why is it so much? And the Apple TV isn't even like that incredible of a device. You watch Netflix on it and Hulu.

Like, it's not like a Mac Mini or something like that. So it's very confusing that this device is now, what, $250? $250 for the Ethernet version. I think the other one's a little bit less, but both are overpriced. Yeah, $199 for the not the Wi-Fi version. And the Ethernet version, which has 128 gigs of memory that I guess you use, goes to 149 to 249. So yeah, yeah.

And they had to do this right after the whole Roku thing, you know, because like now, like, what are you going to do? because it's it's Roku or it's, it's Fire TV, or it's, what's the other one, Google TV, which basically doesn't exist at this point. It exists on like Gull-N players. Yeah. And you're not going to use Fire TV unless you're Gavin

because Fire TV is garbage. Wait, wait, I don't use Fire TV anymore. I use the Roku. Oh, man, you just keep switching to the worst ones. But this is going to make it harder. Well, it was better than the Fire the TV, though. Yeah, well, yeah, the Fire TV is just so bad. I don't understand.

They just ruined it. It's so bad. But the Apple TV is so good. And this is going to make it such a hardware sell. I mean, especially if I get somebody that's buying like three or four TV, so what are they going to do? They're going to spend $1,000 on streaming devices. Yeah.

They're not going to do that. Yeah. I wonder how many people are, like, if you have Apple TV, like the app that you're being for, not this hardware thing that we're talking about, like you can log in on your TV. There's an Apple TV app on your Samsung TV, right? Like, it's just kind of like a strange ecosystem. But like the Apple TV, like the physical hardware box, it doesn't spy on you, well, as much as the Samsung TV does or the physio TV does or whatever, it's a great product.

And it works really well. And you don't have to live with buggy Samsung software, you know, dealing with that interface. You can just go straight to this little device and watch TV. And they've got to come out with a cheaper one, like later this year. It was rumored that they were going to have one. But like, I don't know. The rumors are rumors, I guess. It just kind of sucks to see this happen

because I was almost in the market for one but not now. I rummaged around long enough right before I left and I found a like an old, an old one. I think it's like the 4K, Apple TV 4K, it's super old. All the Apple TVs right now feel like they're all super old.

What do they need to do though? I guess that is kind of a big knowing thing about raising the price. You know, introduce a new model than raise the price. Yep. They need an Apple TV Neo though. Well, they're going to make this one look like a bad idea.

And then, yeah, they'll come out with the Apple TV Neo stick or something. And it'll be $150 or maybe $100. I don't know. And that's still better the price than this thing. You know what? If they came out with like an Apple TV stick, I'd probably get one of those. Because Apple TV has a great experience when it comes to all the apps and stuff, right? And to be able to just travel with the stick, it'd be worth it at that point.

Yeah, for travel, it would definitely be great. Because the Roku, the little Roku stick that I have, I mean, that, I gotta say, like, it worked out really well. I went to, we were staying hotels, plugging the die of the TV. It works. Fires right up and gets on that little travel router. Connects to Plex, and we're watching movies and TVs. And,

I mean, even, there were some nights we were just, like, toss on the free Roku TV thing, because they, they have that standard package that all the free TV players have, like, with, like, I don't know, weird shit, like, the Walker Texas Ranger channel or Little House on the Prairie channel or something. You can just,

like, find some random show and just, like, play back episodes of it. Sometimes you just turn that on and let it play in the background or something. Anyway, Apple TV. A lot of Apple products, too. Not just the Apple TV. Like, if you're using a HomePod, HomePod Mini went from $100 to $1229. The big one went to $3.49, which it was $3.49.

It came down to $2.99, and now it's back up to $3.49. And then, yeah, that's no fun. So a lot of Apple computers and those kind of, even the monitors went up in price. Yeah, the computers went up by as much as $400 in some of the computers. Oh, way more than that on high-end. Yeah, like when you get high-end, it's ridiculous. The Neo already went up $100, too, which I think is funny. I mean, it's just like, you guys just launched that.

You couldn't have predicted that already? Nope, nope. Get it while it was good, I guess. We did buy one of those, and it is a fantastic computer. I bought it for my wife, and she's been using it and really liking it. And I got to say, I'm kind of jealous because it was very nice. Yeah, it's a very nice computer for the spec and the price. But I think, I mean, well, I know everything is going to go up soon.

Oh, yeah. It's just the leading edge. Yeah. Yeah. As I say, I'm glad I bought a lot of my new stuff already. I went out and got, you know, a new Mac Mini, and I got a new MacBook Air, and I got a switch because I was like, within the next year or two, the price is going to go up so much. I can't imagine it. Like, have you heard all the news about the consoles?

All the consoles are going up, too. Yep. All the console prices. and then the games themselves are also, like GTA6 just announced that they're going to be $80, which I'm pretty sure Nintendo Switch already did, or Nintendo already did with the Switch 2 release, but a lot of games are going to get more expensive as well.

So everything is going up in price at this point. And like TJ, I'm glad I got, you know, the newer models last year now for the price because I'm afraid the new phones coming out are going to be more expensive. I've taken inventory of the family. Everybody's good. So, you know, we all can wait till this bubble burst at least. Well, they're saying 27, 28.

So it's going to be a while before. We can wait for Apple devices, in the Apple devices. We have, like, ours that can go through a number of years still. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was fun. And I got to say, we were summertime. We're like, let's drive up north where it's nice and cool. We're going to have a nice cool vacation.

You guys are liars. Oh, you came to the worst week. What happened? I mean, I get up there and it's 110, 15 degrees. I'm like, what the heck? This doesn't make any sense. Yeah, it was an awful week. I don't know what it was up in Canada, but here in Ohio, it was like straight 100 degrees every single day.

At my Ecoid weather station set up, felt like 120 every day, which it made me feel like Florida. And one of the reasons I moved out of Florida is because I felt like that. Yeah, yeah. It was crazy because I would be outside trying to do stuff and I would last like 15. to 30 minutes. I'd be like, all right, I'm going back inside. I got to drink a bunch of water and hang out. It's just way too hot. And I don't have any shade in the backyard, minus the little deck area. And, of course, that's not where I'm trying to work.

It was pretty crazy up here, too. Like, I went golfing on Canada Day in the morning, and I was just drained after I was supposed to go again in the evening. I had to cancel that one just because it was just way too hot. And the people that did go, we had a freak storm just come by with winds and stuff. And they blew down on the golf course. All the trees got. blown down and branches. Branch got blown into one of my friends's faces and he's now as a black guy and stuff because it was just a weird storm. It was like literally it took like it just appeared in five minutes and it just had like my neighbor's stuff was blowing into my yard and you know all our

stuff was blowing over and then it just disappeared after like five minutes. It was gone again. You know it's weird. I have a friend that's traveling. He's actually traveling by boat. He's on like day 110 or something like that crazy. He just called me today from Canada somewhere and he's and he's going to end up in the Hudson Bay at some point and then make his way back over the next through December, I guess. And he's like, he said the same thing. It was a microburst and it like had some boat damage and everything. Like right on a river that he was on,

he just came out of nowhere. And from like from two minutes, it went from like five mile an hour winds to 80 mile an hour winds with like three foot waves breaking over the boat. He's like, this is on a river. This makes no sense. It was a weird, it was a weird storm. And I have a friend that just,

went to Newfoundland two weeks ago. And he sent us videos and he was in his truck on a road and the road was covered in snow. And there was a polar bear right next to the truck rolling around in the snow. And it was just like in June in Newfoundland. I didn't think we had snow anywhere. But yet we still do. Still there. Well, I didn't encounter any snow.

We went through Pennsylvania. We did a large road trip. meaning that I think the first day I drove 750 miles somewhere in that range and then 350, 400 after that.

Yeah, it was not fun. But we got up there fast and then made it way back slower. But we made it from, we went through Gettysburg to kind of take a look at that and my daughter really wanted to go and we got there.

I think she thought it was boring. Imagine that. I don't know why she wanted to go so bad. After all that. Yeah. We went to the Hershey Pennsylvania area. They have the Hershey Park with the roller coasters.

I've never been there. Is that pretty nice? Fantastic. Fantastic. They have some amazing roller coasters, which I highly recommend. They're wooden roller coasters. They have a wooden steel on it as well. It is probably top one or two roller coasters

that are ridden. What do people like about wooden roller coasters? We have one on Kings Island, too, and people are like, that one's nice because it's wood. They bend a little bit. I wouldn't say the wooden ones are nice because they can be very bumpy, especially if you're in the front. But they are, they're just like a teeth rattling time. This one is not.

The one they have there is, it has a steel track and it'll have a couple of like three or four inversions on it. So it was a very smooth ride, but it still had the track still had a flex to it. You can, as you're watching it, people going in it, it's kind of like moving. The whole track is moving like that. So, like, it was, it was very fun, a very fun, um, gravity-fed roller coaster. And yeah, I can't come up. Like, they had a number of them at the park. And you can, you could tell from like the age, like, even the steel roller coasters from,

I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, like, they show their age. And they're kind of rough to ride on and they kind of make you sick when you're on them. And then they have like this new one there that is, uh, I figure what it's called. It's like right at the front of the park, this massive drop. And they're like, we'll get on it at the end. there was nobody on. So if you're in Florida and you're used to standing in roller coaster rides, this park will spoil you because there were no lines. Like I think people are like, oh, it's going to be like a 75 minute wait. I'm like, oh, come on. Like any day I'll take a 75 minute wait.

Let's get in line now. And it wouldn't, it would be in like a 30 minute wait. Like it's nothing. So yeah, you guys are spoiled outside of the big parks where these, 75 minute wait is a 75 minute wait. And the lines and everything they have there, which is nothing. So, yeah, we, I think we hit like eight roller coasters or something like that in that, in one day, which was quite a few rides from what we would normally get done at a larger park here in Florida. So, well worth the money. Go, go check it out.

Just a good time. So we didn't even see all of it. Like, we didn't even ride all of them. Because we have a, our daughter wasn't tall enough to ride a couple of the bigger ones. They have every type of roller coaster you want there. So go check it out. I recommend it. I heard a lot about it because the summer camp that I worked at in New York,

we always had like a big trip at the end of the summer. And the upper kids always went to Hershey. Yeah. I've heard a lot about it. I've just never actually been myself. Reminded me the old Astro World we had in Houston. Kind of the same thing. The summer camps would go there or the school trips would go there,

that kind of thing. And I think they tore down recently in the last decade or two. but yeah, dude, it's kind of the same thing. It has a water park, a zoo, and some other locations here. So, yeah, pretty sweet. Yeah, check it out. Pennsylvania, fun time. We were in Philly for their, like, their fourth setup for their fourth festivities.

Oh, that's pretty cool. So I got to see all the big jumbo screens going up and everything. But we left right before. That all happened. So we didn't get to see the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff perform. I guess they did not. Yeah, I know. I've seen them twice.

Would have been great. But from what I understand, there were up and down the northeast coast, there was a, I guess here too, there were a ton of big storms. So a lot of those events in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia got canceled. And Philadelphia came back at like 11 o'clock at night or midnight or something and started their event back up. And they weren't popping like fireworks until like 2 o'clock in the morning. Jeez. So like, yeah, we're going to go do this.

So, yeah, it would not know how to do it. Yeah, yeah. The party just doesn't stop. We're paused, but we're not going to continue, yes. I mean, if anywhere needs to do it for the 250th, that's definitely Philadelphia. You know what I mean? Exactly. We didn't put that together for some reason.

Just happenstance, we're like, yeah, we'll just go because there was no camp this last week for the kid. And so, like, we'll just go. And for whatever reason, we're like, oh, there's some historical stuff to see in Pennsylvania. And we're there and we're like, oh, yeah, this is like kind of where it started. So yeah, they put on a good show. There was a lot of stuff going on while we were there too. Beautiful town. I mean, super nice people in Philly.

Holy cow. I highly recommend. If you haven't been there, go there and hang out. Because it is a, it's nice, nicely lead out, beautiful town. And everybody we met there was just super helpful and nice. Yeah, Philly. Check it out. That's my pick of the week.

Nice. Also, they have good sandwiches. Precious. And some... Here their pretzels are good. Yeah, their pretzels are good. And their pizza is pretty good, too. And we did have some Chinese takeout.

I don't know about that one, but... It was good pizza. Yeah, we purposely found two pizza plates and tried them, so... All right. Well, to be fair, you guys don't have any good pizza in Florida. Like, I don't know what is wrong with Florida. There's not good pizza. It's a few and far between...

It's a pizza desert. Yeah, we had one that was more like a... I don't know, your traditional... Not traditional pizza, what people would think. But it was like better. It was a good traditional pizza. Yeah. But we went there for the...

the Philly cheese steaks, but you know, you got to get a side of pizza, too, because why not? But then the other place was like the flat, it was like straight New York pizza, thin crust. Yeah, yeah. The New York style, I think, is the most common there. Yeah, you can actually find that was pretty good. Yeah. Well, their sandwiches are awesome, so, you know, given that. Anyway, we got a ton of home tech airlines, guys, so what do you say we jump in?

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, some new product. We got a third reality smart timer, light, TL2, digital clock, 60 gigahertz millimeter wave rate, our RGB light, RGB sensor, simple setup, countdown timer,

matter enabled 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi only compatible with Alexa Home Assistant and HomeGoo. Oh, I don't know what this is. This is some kind of, uh,

uh, what, can you repeat that, please? Yeah, one more time, please. I'll just play it back.

Uh, it's a third reality smart light timer, TL2. It's your new favorite plug-in smart device. I don't know what this. It's got a, it's got a,

it's got a clock on it. It's got like an RGB light on. What is, what is this thing? It's like, What is it not, I guess? What is it not? It's like a hallway light, right? Like you stick it in your hallway and you use like...

With the clock on it? But that's the part I didn't get because they had a previous version of this and I guess it was a PIR sensor or something. But it was just you put it in your hallway. It detects motion. Without the clock. And it didn't have the clock. Yeah. And then they added the clock in the millimeter wave radar.

I don't know what the purpose of the clock is. Like what? Because you get set a countdown timer, I think. Is this hardwired? Yeah. It's something you'd plug in. There's a plug on the back of it, and you just plug it into a wall outlet and it has the light. You plug it into your lamp.

Yeah. Yeah. At night. So you can, when you're, you know, you have to go to the bathroom at night, it will light up the way for you, right? I don't know what the purpose of the clock is. If they didn't have the clock and they had all this other stuff, that would be cool because, but it's Wi-Fi only too.

So I don't want Wi-Fi. Yeah. $50 on Amazon. It's got a light on it. I don't, I don't know. They are thinking different though, you know. If they took the clock off of it and made it like a, even if they just went with thread or Zigby or something like that,

you know, I'd be much happier with that. Okay, and the part that I think is even more confusing is that it's got a gravity sensor. So you can just flip it up and down to start a timer automatically. Like, wouldn't that mess with the millimeter wave after a little bit? Like the positioning and stuff like that? Yeah, I don't know. It's like they had every sensor. and just decide to enable them all.

They had to, they, they bought the boards, and the boards came with all these sensors. Let's just turn them all on. It's got an RGB live on it, too. I mean, maybe you can time how long it takes you to go to the bathroom, you know? I don't, I don't get it. They have pictures, the photoshopps are hilarious. They have pictures of people having these, like, on their desktop, on their, on their nightstand. But they look very large.

It's so big. So I'm not sure the size of this. In some pictures, it's the size of a wall outlet plug, and then some pictures it's the size of, I don't know, like a large box of tissues. It's very strange. Yeah. And they're also like they're hardwired plugged in.

It looks like you can plug it into an outlet on your wall, but also some of the images have wires coming off of them. Like there's a wire plug-in option. Maybe like a USBC or something like that, probably. Must be. Oh, yeah, I see the little outlet fins on the back. So weird. Okay, well, if anybody gets one of these,

write us in, feedback at hometech.fm, tell us why. Why you got this? What you're going to do with it? Because we don't understand it. Third reality, links in the show notes. And it's $50, $50. So I was going to buy one, but not now. Not going to happen.

Well, speaking of things, I'm not sure what you do with. This is interesting. I've not seen one of these before, but Dreo has a matter-connected fan And this isn't like a ceiling fan. This is like just a regular desktop fan. Or I guess one of these has what is on a pole type thing. I forget what they're called. Pedestal fan, I guess.

$159 has Matter access. Drea has like basic integration through Matter. And they also have some other, you know, they further their integration through their own app, of course. But it's a fan. It integrates with Matter. There you go. If anyone gets one of these, please let us know.

I'm going to automate it with my motion sensor. Oh, man. No millimeter wave in it. This definitely needs a millimeter wave. This is the thing that does. Turns off when it senses you not in the room. Just like while it's rotating back and forth, it gets like a complete picture on the millimeter wave.

Yep. Yeah. It's kind of cool, I guess. There does need to be more connected fans. The problem I have with connected fans, a lot of times that the LEDs are not replaceable in them, this doesn't have that problem because it is a tabletop fan or a pedestal fan. And it's just a fan.

That's all it is. That's fine. I'm good with that. You know what I mean? Hopefully it doesn't have, hopefully it has like buttons of some sort. I guess it has some kind of motion sync technology on it. So it's mostly we were joking.

I guess the app will unlock those utilities. So I guess maybe it follows you around, which is kind of nice. If I have a fan and it just follows me around. Oh, that'd be so great. Oh, that's the best. All right. Well, if anyone gets one of those less feedback of technology,

FM. And here's something I think we all want. Open Infrared as a Kickstarter that they're launching. And it's for a universal remote hub aimed at basically integrating with this new home assistance IR things that are coming out. And you will be able to learn commands from existing physical remotes, but also let you control those devices or anything else over home assistant or from your phone or tablet. So what this kind of reminds you. me of is the global cache stuff that's out there, but I don't know. No pricing on this.

It says they'll have pricing on it later, but it's a Kickstarter too. Yeah. Yeah, I've been burned by Kingstader for a few times. It's not launched yet, but it's a good idea. I hope this actually does happen. If not, somebody else will come out with their own version. So this is the kind of stuff that we need to see happen in order for the home assistant initiative to actually work. Yeah, yeah. I mean, IR has been around for a long time. Like, how hard could all this be? to really do. I mean, the hardware is a harder part, but it's pretty cool.

One thing I do like is it also learns, right? So a lot of these other remotes, they'll have their databases, you know, and you're kind of stuck with that. But this one, you can actually, you don't need a database. You just train it with your existing remotes. It uses the phone. You use the phone at that point to control your devices, which kind of sucks. But if they ever in the future come out with some kind of remote that then connects

to home assistant or it connects to this device and sends the commands you want, then that's probably the next step of completing that whole thing. And I hope it would communicate directly with this device and not have to go through home assistant. So it still works if your home assistant goes offline for some reason.

Well, even if it did, like home assistant would be what's running it. This receives the remotes from whatever remote you have. And then that in turn relates it. Yeah, because like the best remote ever made, everybody knows, that old TiVo remote, like the old T-R remote for channel serving?

I guess you don't need half the buttons on the thing anymore. But it was a very comfortable, easy-to-use remote, very well-weighted. The buttons were exactly where you knew they were. Like, if you could just use that IR remote, you know, and aim it at this thing, and then you can just control anything that your homelessness sits up to, right? So, yeah, that'd be the way to go. It's very small. Everything's getting smaller, I guess.

Yeah, the ESP boards are getting smaller. So I'm pretty sure it's just running off. Yeah, it's just running off the ESP board. So, yeah, it doesn't need to be big. No. All right. Well, there's a couple of new products and interesting things we found. We've got an interesting update also from Unify. They've updated to Network 10.5, but also you should update to Network 10.5 because there's been some critical flaws that have been filed, and hackers are already jumping on and exploiting the vulnerabilities that have been found.

So these bugs have all been patched back on May 21st, but researchers say the exploitation has started within days. Pretty severe CVEs. One allows unauthorized changes. One is a past traversal issues. We're going to let attackers manipulate files and potentially gain system level access. And one is a command injection bug.

So if you've got unify systems out there, it's a good idea to go ahead and update them. 9.9 out of 10. That's pretty critical. Yeah, and for something so critical, I'm finding they're taking a long time to push this to the official channel because my setup's still on the official channel and I only got 10.4.57. I'm not even on 10.5. I don't even get offered it yet. No, I don't think 10.5 is what this is updating, but everything was patched back in May, but it's saying if you haven't updated. Okay, so I'm probably safe. You're probably fine. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Most of the ones, Unify has a pretty nice feature

when you set it up. I mean, by T-FOT, I think it checks like 3 o'clock in the morning or something like that and downloads and like once a week and you can set your own frequency on that. But I think like once a week it'll check and do updates on the software that's in it. So that is a nice feature that they have. And it goes back to what we've been saying.

Like now, if anything, is it time to keep up to date with these patches, especially with all these new models. AI models coming out that's detecting all this stuff, it's getting insane. So always keep your stuff up to date. See, so there is some benefits of me, just yo-o and updates all the time. You know, I don't even pay attention.

Just update. But that could be AI. Maybe AI is trying to give me an update. It's not good. Well, we've got some, I don't know, pro-ish-adjacent news here. Crestron has launched Configure Pro platform. It's a new configuration platform for the Crestron Home OS

aimed at residential dealers. And it offers a faster, more standardized setup without traditional programming. So kind of sounds like what they should have done. I don't know how many years ago. It sounds like... Pressure to hold, but it isn't even that old.

No, it's not. I think it was like 2015, 2016, somewhere there. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, this is, uh, it's got AV routing, visual keypad configuration for actions engraving and button behavior plus a visual sequence editor that supports delays in conditional logic.

So I'm not going to lie like all of that stuff sounds like pretty pretty nice. pretty big stuff, like for, I mean, pretty standard stuff, but also it's hard to do in an easy way. But, you know, hopefully this allows these crushed on dealers who are still using the homeless thing, you know, set something up and have it working in a shorter amount of time, I guess. That's the key. It's got to work. It's got to work in a short amount of time. You got to get in there, get it set up and get out because everything else is moving super fast. Like you can't be sitting around doing bespoke programming anymore. Come on.

Who does that? Yeah, you ain't nobody got time for that, especially when it's like, a lot of there's, a lot of those is like builder stuff. So builders, a low voltage company is getting like builder great houses and they just want to go in there

and control a couple TVs and control some speakers and that's all they're doing with it. You don't need a giant complex automation system for that. And arguably, arguably, you don't even need anything like Cresher on home or control for for that. But we'll save that argument for a different day. Yeah.

Well, yeah, it's still a profit center for a lot of dealers. So, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. Like anything that gives dealers in the pros out there a solid but, you know, faster way to get the install done, I think is a good tool to have in their pocket.

No mention of AI though. So that means the stock is going to go down. Yeah, where's the AI mentioned? I need AI in this. I need AI to program it for me, please. Well, speaking of AI, Josh AI has published a new experimental video that shows off its vision for AI powered home control. It's got to look at how voice touch and handheld control

kind of fit in daily life. I don't know. There's a nice little article or write-up accompanying it and talks about some of the new products and the things that they've got going on this year. So there you go. Josh AI.

They mentioned AI. Stock will go up. They've been AI since the start. I know it's in the name. If anybody's going to do it, it's going to be Josh AI. Yeah. This is a pretty cool, like,

consumer look forward facing video from Josh AI very well produced and yeah it looks nice so they're they're trying to try to take over that higher end market and I don't know how we should probably probably a good place to be and the last one here on the the pro adjacent news here hunter Douglas sorry Hunter Douglas says that their motorized shades from their alto window fashions line will now work with PowerView automation and I I guess that's not nice for other Douglas people. Gavin, you have Hunter Douglas? Is that right? Do you have any of these Alta fashion windows? I don't have the Alta fashion windows. I have, it's been probably 10 years I have there. I got their blinds for my kitchen and it does work with PowerView. I have the Gen 3 Power

Fuel Hub, I believe it is, or Gen 2. And I like them. I have to admit, they work well, batteries lost long. They're not cheap though. And that's the only thing is like I would get more Hunter Douglas, but not cheap at all. So it's not like, you can't justify by spending like $1,000 on one blind versus like $100 on another blind. Right? And they both do the same thing pretty much. I don't know, this has always been kind of on the, uh, the pricey end of things, uh,

when it comes to winter treatment. So the thing I did not like is like when we got it done, I had a, you have to go through a dealer to get them done. Yeah. And the dealer lady came into our house and, she went through colors and all the swashes. But then when I started asking her about the tech, she had no clue. I knew more about Hunter Douglas tech than she even did.

I said, can you get me this hub? And she's like, I don't know if I get on what? What's that hub? You know, I was like, this is the hub to integrate it. I need Jen this. I need that. She had no clue. So I ended up going on, I think it was Marketplace.

A guy had 10 of them. It was from a canceled job and he just wanted to get rid of them. So I ended up getting my hands on a hub. And yeah, they've been integrated into home assistants since. They work great. But I hate having to go through the dealer for it, right? It's like, I just want to buy this piece. And then they're like, oh, though, you're going to have to talk to somebody.

It's like, can I just order it online? You know, like, I just want a new battery pack. So if I ever wanted more, I'd have to bring this lady back in and she'd have to do all the windows. I installed them all myself and did everything myself, right? All she did was show me the colors. That's it. Well, yeah, I understand. A lot of products are like that that only go through dealer networks. There's a number of reasons manufacturers do that. A lot of it honestly has to do with support.

And I understand it, but when she came in the house and I knew more about it than she did. And she could not answer any of my questions about her newer stuff. I would have looked for another dealer at that point, but there's no dealer around here. I hate to break it to you, Gavin. Most people don't get these and are asking about the technology that's inside. And I understand. Can I control of my phone? Yes. Okay, deal.

Yeah, exactly. I understand, but I expect you to be up to date on the product you're selling. You know, like, if anything, that's all you do all day long is talk Hunter Douglas. Be up to date with it. Yeah, yeah. I think this Alta fashion, window fashions thing is a, like a, it must be a subbrand or something of $100. I don't know. I want to say I've run across them. Or maybe they acquired them at some point. I don't know. It's a dealer-facing thing, but it's definitely doesn't have Hunter Douglas branding on it.

Well, it says it's value conscious. So does that mean it's cheaper than their line? Yeah. So maybe I can look at getting how much these costs, but I don't want to have to call this company. You got to call this dealer again. Call your dealer. You got a deal. I wish I could just go online and figure out how much it was. And like, like I hate wasting people's time. Sometimes I go to these people, people's selling stuff and I'm like, listen, I'm not looking for an exact number. Just give me a range, you know, because if they come and they say, okay, it's going to cost you 25 to 30,000. It's like, thank you, have a good day. You know, I don't want to waste your time. But if they come with a price

that, a range that's like enticing, then I'll be like, oh, no, it sounds good. Like, let's talk, right? But they love to play this game. It's like, listen, just give me a number, you know? Am I looking at $1,000, $10,000? You know, like, I don't want to waste my time. Yeah, I've had to go through this guy with a guy that was doing my gutters and he was he was he pissed me off he got the sale in the end but i had to yell at him to get the price i was like just give me a price it's like it's like buying a car like they're always trying to do the reverse like what's your budget i'm like i don't tell me my budget yeah tell me what you're going to sell this car for and they don't ever want to have that they don't ever want to tell you whenever they ask me i go listen i don't play this game my

budget is zero dollars right i want this car free you can do that no no well, then what can you do? Now we've got a start in price. It's going to die. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, well, what can you do? And they go, well, what do you expect? And then I go, listen, I don't want to play this game.

Just tell me what the car is going to cost, you know? Like, whatever. They have all sorts of ways around that here and fly. Yeah. And I've gotten up and I've walked out. I said, you know what? I'm tired of playing this game. I just, you know, I've just been like, I'm done.

I walked out, you know? I go, there's another Honda dealership down the street I can go to. It's fine. You know what I don't? need to talk to you. Or is there somebody else here I can talk to? You know, I do, I do work in sales. I deal with a lot of salespeople and yeah, it's a pain. Yeah, definitely. The car market here in Florida when I was going through it, I learned that like all of them are linked together somehow. So like I'm looking at the software in the back end of what, you know, I'm inspecting their

web pages to try and figure out what they're using. I'm like, oh, it's all going, the data's all going to the same thing. So like, I have a cookie that says I'm on this website now. And now it's going to go to the next website. It's going to be shared. They're going to know that I'm hunting for a car and they're going to, like, I don't even have to log in anywhere. They just know that I'm looking for a car. They're going to give me a different price on this website every time I look at it. So car buying is not fun anymore. They've taken all the fun out of it. It is fun for some people. Not for me. I don't want to, I don't want to talk to these people. So true that. Let's move on. What were we talking about? Car buying. What else we got here?

Oh, we got some instantification news here. Samsung. has the smart smart things platform right and what are they going to do now to make it even better for everybody they're going to start charging for the API so if you want API access

it's $4.99 per month for what it calls a non-commercial individual developers if you want to I guess develop for smart things it's $499 per month or run any custom things on it $499.

And I think this also includes like even if you run home assist and integrate to a whole yeah you have to pay for that So start planning to migrate off of Smart Things. Just get everything into Home Assistant then at that point, right? I guess. Do it free for now.

Yeah, I like how their blog post on the Smart Things website. It's a new enhanced Smart Things API experience. And the experience, of course, is paying them $5 a month for this API access. I get it. I mean, infrastructure costs money, especially these days, as I found out. and if they're going to keep these things up and going over time, they are going to have to charge something for it. I don't know.

It seems to be kind of hitting people at a bad time too. So there you go. They're getting your data and making you pay to give them your data. Exactly. Basically, at that point, like, smart things already knows all the devices you have connected to it probably, how often you use it, what you do. They can monetize that data.

But now they're going to be making you pay for AP. API access as well. Yep, yep. No longer staying free. Hobbies developers now have a countdown to the $5 monthly plan. So there you go. There you go. Fun stuff.

It gets better every time. And Netflix, there was a lot of hand-wringing over these two stories. Netflix is now requiring every user in the profile to be tied back to an email address. So now if you've got family members sharing the same profile on an account and logging in using that one unique, the one email address. No, every non-kid profile on the account is going to need to have its own unique email address and that rollout began sometime,

what, June 15. So there you go. Extra members of your families need to be logging in with their own email. And I get this too because like Netflix is battling a certain battle of people sharing their accounts. Like I understand that, right?

Something they offer though. It's not really like a, like, it's built into the system, right? This may be a precursor to something else they're going to do in the future, too, right? Because now they're going to know how many unique people you have and they're all tied to an email address, etc, etc. So who knows where they go with this? But I know people are up in arms about it, but you have options. When it comes to Netflix, you have an option, you can cancel the account, move on.

It's actually what we did. Yeah. Not anything related to this. It was just like, what are we watching on here? Nothing. And it's so much money, too. It's like the most expensive one. Yeah.

We just canceled Netflix as well. And we got, we picked up Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN for the same price. Oh, wow. So it's like, and granted, like, it's all the same company. But, you know, it's like it's so much more content compared to Netflix at that point. So much, I guess, good content because Netflix is just full of stuff at this point. Netflix has some things on it from time to time. But, and they have some good properties that come along.

But we weren't really watching any of those things. And I don't know. It wasn't, we can always turn it back on if we ever want to go back to it. but yeah. And then, okay, here's an interesting, interesting story from, from smart lock maker level. The company makes little electronics that hide inside a standard looking deadbolt. I guess it's been hit by some major layoffs recently. So according to the averge, Osaboy has eliminated most of levels staff and the source says the company's assets are being transferred over to Quickset. The same source says Level's CEO John Martin and CTO Ken Goto are the company's founders are also leaving along with most of the engineering team. So sounds like Level is dead.

Yeah. Sounds like it's quick set now. Yeah. I mean, the whole appeal of this is that it was not like a traditional lock. It was in quick set. That's the whole appeal. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this doesn't seem well. This doesn't seem like a good thing in the long run. Ultimately, this is like usually what happens in some of the moment. I acquire somebody else, you know, they kind of just fold you into the same company. But this doesn't seem good for the future a level. So if you have a level lock, I'm not really sure what to expect out of this.

Really cool technology and really, I mean, design forward thinking, but when I think of level, I don't think of a quick set. So it's kind of a weird role into that company. Yeah, I definitely think of like a more higher end, like an M-Tech or something like that lineup compared to Quicks-Sep. They could even left it its own brand.

Like, I don't even- That's what I'm saying. Just make it its own thing. Weird. Oh, well. Yeah. Fitness. Matter news.

We've got a couple of quick matter news things to talk about here. Here's a big one, though. Matter has Silicon Labs says it just completed a 200 node matter over thread deployment in Gavin's home. It says here. Oh, wait, no. It says in a commercial office to see how matter holds up outside the usual single-family smart home. So the test used 200 lighting and building automation devices with Bluetooth low energy for commissioning and open thread. border router infrastructure underneath.

They were going through basically just testing, see how this works, and had latency as low as 87 milliseconds, and under 1% packet loss across most payload. So that's pretty good. Sounds like they had a successful deployment. That's pretty good. And also, it feels like they're shocked that it worked. Guys, put a press release out.

It worked. We've done it. What I want to know is how many devices they tested with before. Was it like 25? Is that why everybody's having problems? I only tested with 25 before, you know? Because 200, 200 is a lot. Yeah.

But, like, I don't know. How much was it before? Is it a lot? I don't know. It's more than I have, but I have, I mean, I have 50 Zigby and 50 Z wave devices in the house. Oh, that's nice. I mean, like, I have half of that just in my house alone. Oh, I have a few hundred devices, so.

Now you know matter can support 200 devices. So that's what I'm reading here. I can support more than that, but they've tested. 200. 200. Just 200. Flat line. Now, it's only when you're in commercial building.

That's all it. Yeah. If you want a residential, don't do this. This is, you can have 400. I probably, I probably have 20 matter devices now, but I mean, do they work all the time? That's what I'm having a problem, keeping them working sometimes. Yeah, that's my problem too. It sounds like you've got 180 more to go.

So. Yeah, I'm under the limit. This says it's reliable. Yeah, it's got to get up there. I mean, come on. That's when I knew this article was a lie when they said it was reliable. J.K. I mean, it's a pretty good stress test.

And, you know, we'll see how well things work over time. I'm wondering what they used. They didn't really talk about, like, what they used here for, like, the controller system. Yeah. Yeah. It's what I want to know. Like, tell me what you use for the controller. That's true.

Like, what is the controller? What, you know, what devices did they use? What, what computer can hold, you know, work with 200, 200, what, like, Would it be the open thread border router? But is that a, yeah, it says it's open thread border router, but isn't that just a, is that a hardware product? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Well, I mean, it can be, yeah. It's the, all the border router devices like an Apple TV or something like that. They might have a specific one they use, though. Well, yeah, that's what I mean. Like, one of them has to have enough CPU power to run 200 devices, right? Like, man, that's probably the top end for some of the control four controllers I could think of. So like, what do they use to control of this? What's the back end?

That's why I want to know. I don't see that in here. Is it Raspberry Pi? Is ESP 32? I don't know. Somebody tell me. I want to know. It could just be some building control system we've never heard of, but, you know, I would like to know.

And they're leveraging the 1.6 version of Matter. So I don't know. Does anything help there have 1.6 right now? Well, this building does. I think Home Assistant may have 1.6 right now. No, no. Home Assistant has 1.5.1. That's what they said.

I don't know. That's the next story we have here. It says this is the one you want. 1.5, let's see, 1.6 is already in the works, but they have released 1.1.5.1. So there you are. I guess this is the one you want to get if you're in home of the system because they say it is.

That's the one you should be upgrading because it's the latest, right? YOLO. So do that. We've got that news in there. We'll put these links in the show notes. And I guess there was a big matter conference for things that matter and for people that matter. and everybody that mattered went there because we know Jimmy was there

and yeah there was like a big smart home industry like reviewing matter things that were going on and like how things worked so we were seeing pictures from that

there's a story here we'll put for Over the Verge from Jennifer Patson and Tui and kind of talking about like what went on at this conference and things people

things they were talking about there so it seems like there's a lot of like behind the scenes collaboration going on and I guess kind of after like the IKEA rollout that had some problems, engineers from different ecosystems kind of like got together and troubleshooting things together and put out those fires. So pretty good.

I'm glad everybody's working together. That's the main thing that we learned from this. Everybody's working together. Or they all just went to ask for help from somebody live. Can you guys use any of these? I'm having this problem. We put 200 of them in. There's 200 of them in.

You got to get to 200. That's the golden number. You've got to also be on 1.6, evidently. So, there you go. All right, well, we'll put a link to that in the show note, along with the matter upgrade, you know, info for home assistant and the stress test, large-scale deployment thing they did.

So put all that in the show notes. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on those show notes at hometack.com.fm. slash 581. All right, nothing in the mailback, but we do have a pick of the week. And this one, this one's kind of funny. If you're Douglas Adam fan

and you like Marvin, the robot, that was depressed because I guess, I forget what the character, I think he was like a super smart computer robot or something and was just like, had to go around helping these stupid humans do their things and just got depressed and wanted to off himself, I guess, but that wasn't in his programming. So he just kind of had an attitude about everything. And if you want Marvin in your house to be the voice of your home assistant, there's this program called Greg, and you basically put a sensor on it. a vibration sensor or something like that.

This guy put it on his coffee table. And every time somebody like set something down on the coffee table or walks by or rush to the copy, like your coffee table will talk back to you and tell you, maybe it'll just sigh wistfully and say, oh God, not again, you know,

that kind of thing. There's all sorts of sayings in this, that he's put in here. But it's got a sarcastic, depressed character that uses the vibration sensor. And then they figured out a good text of speech. It sounds just like Marvin the robot off of Hitchhackers Guide. So there you go.

Oh, there's so many things. Because given your furniture of personality, you could have so much fun. Can you imagine giving your couch like a personality that any time like somebody sat down and it's like, oh, you come at me, you know? Or it was like, it would be like, ooh. When you got up, it's like, now I'm warm. It's fun. I like seeing things like.

This is definitely fun. I'm loving like all this stuff is coming out. I mean, this uses, it looks like everything this doesn't, it isn't very hard to set up. It looks like it just needs like a Google, not a Google Nest. It can use a Google, it just needs a speaker. And he's a sensor of some type, a binary sensor in Home Assistant.

And it needs a speaker to play the sound out of. And I guess everything else is like Piper. It's all built into Home Assistant. Yeah. And the speaker could be a Sono speaker or whatever. Sonos anything. Yeah. Yeah.

You could just send the audio out. to it. It's a good idea. I guess also his has in here, like, there was a bunch of work to figure out how to make, how to make his voice from the movie. They have like specific settings on here that you would use. Let's see, it's

Piper. There's like English G.B. Allen entity, I guess, is what you want to set up. And it's got, you set it as medium or high, depending on your hardware, and then you give it a length scale of 1.3 to 1.5, which

slows the speech down for dragging defeated delivery. And then for the cadence, for the sentence pauses, you set these other settings on here, which adds pauses in between the phrases, so it really sells the misery. This is such a fun project. I really want to set this up. I plugged in my little home assistant speaker thing over here,

but it's got a red light on it. I don't know if that means. I think it means it's muted. Oh, okay. Maybe that's why it's not working. But I also don't remember where in home assistant this thing gets set out. or what it's called.

So I probably need to figure that out first. Good luck. Yeah, good look. But you can also set in Home Assistant, it can add a sidebar panel with an image of, you know, like his face and stuff too. So if you wanted to, if you had a little screen with him on it there too, you can get him to.

But maybe you can use one of your Apollo panels to be like his face. So when he talks, you can, you know, like you could judge you from that. You should like, yeah, you could just be angry or sad all of the time depressed, yeah. There's an idea. I found the home assistant voice, but I don't know how to. Yeah, good luck. It's kind of confusing. You'll spend all day on that. All right, man. Maybe I'll just use

the sonos in the speaker thing to play the sound in here. It'd be fun. I'll try and get this set up one of these days. But anyway, a fun little pick of the week here. If you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show or picks the week. Give us a shout. Email address is feedback at hometick.com. Or you can head on over to hometech.fim slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. TJ. TJ projects, also known as things I've completed before Gavin Fixes Wall, is the title of your card. Fixes the whole wall or just part of the wall?

I mean, I would say all the wall. Oh, okay, you beat me. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a never-ending project list by the time we actually get done with this. So I have to make sure we don't archive this. But honestly, it's been like, what, two weeks now since we did a show. So it's hard to know what projects I should talk about. because I've done so many. Been a holiday, though.

He's had Canada Day. He had to go golfing. That's true. I'm a busy guy. And for the record, I've got to put a new hole in the wall this weekend. I got to run a cable for my charger, so there's going to be a new hole going through somewhere. Oh, my gosh. Oh, well, at least that hole will be filled with a cable.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Should be fine. I forget what I've done, though, but I bought a new storm door for the front door. that has made a huge difference. I got one of those low E glass storm doors. It's half retractable.

So the bottom is glass and the top is retractable. So you can just slide it down and it's just a nice screen window. Yeah. So I got that installed. It's a big difference in the heating. So I actually chose a good time to install it because we had that giant heat wave that we talked about earlier. And it made a big difference. We basically had the door open the entire time, which is the storm door open.

And you really couldn't feel anything on it. So, and I went ahead and added my privacy tint to it because that's what I did my old storm door as well. So you can't even see inside the storm door. Just walk right up to the door. Can't even tell if it's open or not. So that's pretty nice. I have a question. I have a question.

Yeah. So a storm door. This is an interesting concept we have here. Is this like a door? Like when I was in Philadelphia area, like I noticed there was doors and then there was another door inside that door. Is that what we're talking about? It's a door to your door. Yeah, it's a door to door.

It basically stops weather from going on to your door. Okay. So it's like a wind break and it's also like stops rain and stuff from getting into like the door area. So it's like more of a disposable door? Like I would say so, yes. But it's also like our front door, for example, we have it, we have a storm door, which is all glass at this point. And then we have like a main door, which does not have any windows into it. And so like if we want to like see outside or let fresh air in, we can just open the main door.

door and then have the storm door right there. Oh. So, like, it's, it's a way to, like, also, like, let fresh air and stuff into it. Because it's got the mesh in it, too. It's really good to open those up and the air goes through your house. Yeah. Well, you know, like, here in the South, we have, we have basically the same concept, but it's a screen door.

It's just those thin screen door. Right. Same type of thing, you know. Yeah, it's the same concept, but, you know, we have winter here. So, like, when you go outside in the winter time, it's cold. And I guess you have the same problem there, but it's hot. It's hot, yeah. I mean, yeah, like, what are you going to do?

Get wet, I guess, if you open the door in Florida, you know? Wet and hot, I guess. What happens is you get critters come in your house is what happens, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but you guys also have, like, the giant glass sliding doors everywhere. And I guess we do, but not as much as Ford it does. No, it makes sense. So there's a couple of trailers. Okay, I had a question you were talking about.

Yeah, yeah, so that's what. And then I've been doing some work in the shed. I started installing some shelving for the shed. So just some simple 2x4 with some plywood shelving. Made a big difference because we can actually stack up. I have a bunch of irrigation connectors and screws and stuff like that. So I've been running the 3D printer 24-7 to create little bins and storage areas for all my random stuff. Because until I had the shelf, I didn't really have a place to organize all my little, you know,

my little like drip irrigation connectors and my three, you know, half inch or three quarter inch PVC connectors. and all this stuff. So now I've got them neatly organized, and I can finally just walk into the shed and grab them. Nice. And I added electrical everywhere, too. So now I have outlets. I already had power in there,

but I didn't have any actual outlets installed. So I went and installed, like, five or six outlets. Now, you know, my battery charger for my, my electric lawn tools are like on the wall now, charging up batteries all the time and, you know, all the other stuff. So I've been trying to do some organization.

It was hard during the heat wave. I would only go outside for like 15 to 30 minutes each time, and I'd have to go back inside. So it was very difficult to do anything over the holiday weekend outside. Yeah, I would say it was pretty awful. It was just like walking around here, but in Philadelphia. And, yeah, of course, you're like walking. You guys have hills and stuff too.

That is difficult. Hills and the heat are hard. Yeah, exactly. And then I've started my newest project. I think I posted a picture. on the slack. We'll have to include it in the notes as well, but I've started my new project, the pollinator garden.

So we had to file a permit to do our entire yard or we had to file a permit to do a large portion of our yard in the pollinator garden that I previously talked about. And I decided I'm going to go and just tackle the rest of the yard. So we're using a method called solarization

where basically you put thick plastic. It says like two to three mill thick plastic, thick clear plastic. actually, you put it on top of the grass and you just wait like a couple months and the heat and the moisture will kill the grass. And so typically whenever I've done a pollinator garden, I've done a new garden bed, I put cardboard down and then I put compost on top of the cardboard and that eventually smothers the grass. I didn't want to do all that for this. I wanted to kind of

make this a little easier. And so I'm using the plastic sheets to do that. So we'll include a picture of what that looks like. It basically looks like a giant mattress right now. I'm sure people are like going past my house and be like, what the heck is this crazy guy up to? Because it's just literally my whole yard covered in plastic. It's just a crazy guy up to again is what they're saying. That's right. It does look interesting.

I'll give you that. Yeah. So that has been started. And then the smart garden did a fantastic job of the heat wave. So I did not change anything watering-wise. It was on the exact same schedule as it was. But all of my plants survived the heat wave. So I would say the smart garden is,

success. I'm going to try to do some videos on it as it gets towards the end of summer. Things I've learned about it and things I'm going to try to change and do different next year. So I'm going to start working on that. Excellent. Yeah. Lots of yard work. Lots of yard work. It's the season for it.

I'm trying to, yeah, I'm trying to do it now because, like, it's one of those things that like it creeps up on you, you know, and then all of a sudden you have to do so much of it. Like, I can't imagine if I waited to do all my yard work until now. like all the irrigation stuff and oh yeah whatever else I've had. It would just, I would hate my life.

So I just, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, I'm trying to break that habit. I'm like, even if I just like start on something and do a little bit each, each day or each week or whatever, it still beats doing it and when it's a hundred degrees outside.

Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Yeah. I'm, I, I, I have my, my,

my, uh, my grass project kind of in mid-flight right now. So I did the, seed planting things, I guess, in May, into May. So now I'm, or no, mid-June, I guess. And so now I should be seeing like little things popping up. I'm not seeing any little things popping up.

But also, the lawn is like starting to overgrow because it's been raining now. So now the grass is getting really high. And the gray spots are going away, but I think it's mostly wheat. Maybe it's like my house where it's just crab grass. Yeah, yeah. You guys get the good wheat killer down there, though. So why don't you go buy some and spray it? The wheat, no, no.

I looked into that, Gavin. We don't get the good weed killer spray stuff. We don't. We don't get to good stuff. No. The par three stuff that kills all the weeds. We don't get the, well, I guess we don't get the, I can't put it down now. I can't put anything down now because of the.

Yeah, you just put down new seed and stuff. Yeah. Wait, I'm wasting money no matter what I do. Gavin, what, what did you been up to you? Well, not fighting weeds, but, uh, If you haven't seen the announcement, there was a new Home Assistant Companion App update. That's the app that you install on your iPhone. The only reason I'm mentioning this is because on the notifications, they added these all action buttons so you can snooze notifications for a period of time.

But with the companion app before, you could add your own action button. So on my notifications, I have all my own actions buttons. They clash. So they're like overlaying each other. It's a mess. So I'm probably going to have to talk to one of my people over at home assistant and say, hey, you know, look at this. You know, can somebody get on this, please?

Because I don't know how to open up a GitHub request or whatever. You know, I don't want to go through all that work. I'd rather just ping somebody and let them know. But yeah, so just keep that in mind when you update. You might have to make some changes or something might not look right. So just figure I'd mention that. And then one thing I found out this week, one of my favorite product, is the droplet for monitoring your water usage and stuff like that.

And then notifying you if, you know, there's a leak. It descends a leak or if water's been running too long. Well, they finally released their app in Canada. So up until like now, it was all like only available in the U.S. and I had to ping them to get on their test flight so I can get the app working and everything like that. They finally released in Canada. So us Canadians can now download and install the app and order the device.

So, you know, I highly recommend the droplet, just in general. I've been using it for a while now, and it constantly pings me when, you know, my irrigation, for example, runs for a long period of time. It knows that I never got to set it, but it knew that something was running too long, and it sent me a notification, hey, you bears check something out, water's running too long, and that's exactly what you wanted for. But then I can tag that event as that's my irrigation system, so it stops pinging me about it in the future.

and it just knows my irrigation system use this much water. So for all you Canadians out there that want a device that's easy to set up, easy to work with, go grab the droplet smart water. I highly recommend it. And don't forget the coupon code.

Home tech, it saved you $30 or something like that. Yeah, I did actually, I forgot to mention, I did get mine, but I haven't got it properly installed because I have to clean my pipes off. So it clamps onto it and reads the pipe somehow. And I got to like sand all, paint and stuff off it.

Hopefully I can talk about that next week. Yeah, that probably is interfering with the signal to somehow if you have painted your pipes, yeah. All right, well, looking forward to your pipe cleaning project that you have next week. Yep. Video record that do it yourself

how to clean your pipes. That'll be exclusive Patreon. Yeah, Home Tech after dark. Cleaning TJ's dirty pipes and tight spaces. Oh, man. Oh, man. Because that's why I haven't done it. It's honestly, it's like one of the

worst spot. It's like behind my water here. I'm like, this is going to suck. Yeah. Is it a three quarter inch pipe? I don't know. It's old. So it's probably like half inch or a quarter inch. Did they make quarter inch? Not for the main pipe, though. Let's see. I've got a couple of things I did.

Well, I went on vacation, but when I got back, I opened up my, my clod code thing, and I noticed that I had Mr. Fable sitting in there. Yes, I've been seeing you rave about this fable recently. The fable, yeah. I was like, let's see what it can do. And I was like, you know what? I want to plan out. I just honestly, I was typing in.

I'm like, I need to plan moving this server. We have Mastodon running that's going to start costing me $75 a month. Plus another $25 or $30, I think, on Amazon for S3 storage. Like, I need to start planning this out and moving things over. So how can I do that? Well, I asked Fable to plan it because I was just being lazy and I just got home. I'm like, this thing says it can think. Go to thinking.

And it asked a couple questions, which is kind of the normal thing that I have it set up to do. I have some like instructions basically on how things normally work. And it sets up and makes a plan. And it made a plan. I'm like, all right, do it. And it started doing it. And it started doing a lot of it. And I was like, you know what?

If you just SSAH, you can just SH right into the box and check it out yourself. And it was like, hey, thanks. And it just went to town. And it was like looking around inside of the Mastodon server. And he's like, okay, where do you want to host this? Here's some options. I'm like, you know what? I got a server here at the house.

Let's put it there. And basically found that Coolify, which is the VM thing, a program on the VM that I have set up. I had an MCP server thing. I was like, hey, do you want this? It's like, nah, no, just give me the SSH of that too. And it did everything from the command line. I just let it run. And it transferred the back.

It did a backup of the database. Fixed a bunch of stuff on the main server that was running at the time. the backup of the database, like, did everything. And I would say I was most impressed by this because it was like probably 10 different domains of knowledge that you would need to properly move this from one system over with like security, DNS, like between all of that, probably like 10 different domains of knowledge that you'd need to have. And like, yeah, I could do it.

It would probably take me a day or two. I'd probably mess up from time to time. This thing did it within a few hours. And I mean, we were basically, it probably could have probably could have done it. but I was basically waiting for things to transfer, you know, there's transfer time, 30, 45 minutes to transfer the database. It would do stuff like set up the DNS records.

I was like, oh, I've got to go set up DNS. I wouldn't look down it, it's already set up. Like, how did it get the, oh, it just looked at the DNS records we have now and just copied them over to this. And it, I guess I was logged into my Cloudflare account, which is where I wanted the stuff to go. And it just went in and did it. So I was like, okay, I forgot it was logged in there,

but I'm glad you found out, and I guess that. That's scary. So this is what dangerously skips permissions means. But it made a lot of right decisions. And whereas like the OPA system, you would have to like prod it and poke it to keep moving. This just went and plowed right through. And it was like, I'm waiting on this, this and this.

Just, you know, I'll, it set up an agent in the background to kind of like check when stuff was finished going. So I basically have this thing moved over to a local in my house. Dell was this R730 computer. One is Hurricane season again? Yeah. Well, there's a backup plan in place. That was one of the things.

Oh, okay. It has a, there's a downtime thing where it'll throw an error, but that's all hosted on Cloudflare 2. Cloudflare is monitoring if my internet connection goes down. So it'll show that it's like a temporary interruption, which it should be. If there's anything bigger than that, though, there is a way that I can spin of a VPN or a VPS,

and it will automatically take over with, you know, no data loss. So, yay. And so yeah, it's, the, the cost on this is basically on to zero, I mean, it's electricity use and my internet bill. And then the hosting, like of all the files and images and all the cash data and everything is basically going to $3 down from like 30 or 40 from Amazon.

So there's really not much cost left to it, which is great. So I'll be able. And the machine that I have it on has 40, what, 40 CPUs. I think I had 20 something. What did I say? 12 or something, cores associated with this with 24 gigabytes of memory. So we have search. We're up to date where all the security stuff is hardened.

I had to do multiple passes at security-related things. So we're very, we're much better off than we were, what, 48 hours ago? before I kicked off this one prompt thing. And it ran through the whole thing. So impressive, just very impressive. And this is the Fable, the new Claude LLM, right? Yeah, yeah, the new larger, I mean, I guess it's part, it's like a subset of mythos with a bunch of stuff taken out.

But as far as like the stuff I needed to do, very impressive. The way it, I could have gotten this done with Opus, no problem. Like, absolutely no problem. Opus, you just kind of just like, poke and prod along. It sometimes makes the wrong decision. Fable did not make a wrong decision that I can see. And it covered everything and then was very informative only when it needed to be like, hey, this is what's going on. I need your answer and this, this and this. It was basically like having

a really smart assistant do it. If this was in Henry, I think we'd be way more impressed than using like GBT, and I think GPD has like a new, what's it called? A soul Oter or something like that, soul, I think, that nobody can use right now because it's top secret, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I think they have something coming out that's similar to mythos. Is it 4.6 or something like that?

I don't know. I can't keep up to the. They've been given its names and there's like 10 variants on each one of them. It's really hard to keep up with now. So you have soul, you have Tara and Luna. and yeah, there's different settings you can have for each one of those now. But yeah, I think that one will, it will probably be just as impressive. But man, I've been using this stuff for a long time this way.

And this was the first time I was like, oh, that, that's impressive. That really did what it was supposed to do. And it does use your tokens, though. So like today I was like, well, I'm going to throw it some programming tasks. And I had it fix a couple of things. One of the things I had to do, there was a little bug I ran across on our show notes, and I had it fixed that. And while that was running, I cranked it up to fix another, well, like, basically

harden and error check another application I was working on and it checked for like bad code. And do a code, code check, but code review, I guess. And it was going through doing that and then all of a sudden, I mean, because it was spending on multiple agents at the time to do all that, which is what I would normally do. But in this case, it just ate all the tokens. So I was dead in the water until about 4 p.m., 4.30 p.m. today. And I think I'm going to switch back over to Opus because it just sucks things down so quickly. The better it gets, the more it costs.

And some of the cool things I've been seeing lately with Fable people posting is they're having it write NES games for them. So they're like, write me a World Cup NES game. And it- That's interesting. It wrote the whole game that you can pull. in your emulator. Wow. But it even goes as far as to, you know, like write it in a way that it fits on like an NES cartridge.

So the memory limitations and everything. So it writes everything as if it was a real NES game. And then they load it in the emulator and they play their game. Interesting. Yeah, there's all sorts of things you can get it to do. I mean, it has the world's knowledge at its finger. I mean, already memorized, I guess. Yeah.

You can give it an idea for a game and say, write me an NES game or a Super Nintendo game. about this topic and make the story up or write me on Dungeons and Dragons game that's, you know, you be the dungeon master and it will, it can generate you a new game every week if you wanted to. That sounds interesting. I never play any of them. Yeah, exactly.

But you'd probably burn tokens doing it. It sounds like a good way to blow them. I got 10 games here, but I don't play any of them. Maybe your daughter can play. You'll make a game that she can play. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting idea.

There's a couple of things I've done in the past. Like when she had some spelling words to learn, I made like a little spelling game for her to use. Because, I don't know, like, just a different way, like, giving her, like, ways to see. And I, this, like, I worked with the, I think Claude, there's probably Opus 4-6 or 4-5 at the time, like, hey, this is the way she learns.

Let's come up with more inventive ways than just, like, the hardcore, like, memorize every single vocabulary. word, which is like what we used to have to do, you know, growing up. And it came with this little game, like, and basically had her, like, reviewing, uh, and it, like, highlighted letters that were next to each other or something like that. It had its own, like, methodology, like, it did all the research and figured it out, and it made a little spelling game for her to play to learn her word.

So I've done things like that in the past, but not, not an NES game. That sounds kind of fun, actually. So I have, I have, I have, I have some of those systems set up on, like, where you can put an SD card inside of them. with the games later on. So maybe something something really is. Does Plex not have an emulator built into it?

I don't know. I watch movies on Plex, Gamma. What are you talking about? No, because Cody does. That's where I play my, my ROMs.

I download them and play them on Cody. I don't know if Plex has it, or if MB has it built into their system. iOS has it. Like, I have a game, Game Boy emulator on here. Oh,

there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I don't know, Driving took up most of my time this week. So I'm like lots of driving. But I have, as I was driving back,

T.J. was talking about how he's going to be on the cool, you know, HomeGadge Geeks show that you guys always go on. Yeah, suppose I'm going to be on the 23rd of July. So I'm like, one day, Jim, Jim will love me enough to invite me. And then like, I don't know, like 10 minutes later, I get an email from Jim. Like, well, how did that happen, TJ? Who knows? Very coincidental.

And I, he offered, I think, about a month or now in August. So I will have a, I'll have a super special project to talk about with Jim by then. Then I'm going to be sandbagging for his show. So I won't talk about it here at all. You'll have to go over there. I'll talk about it here later. But, you know, you have to go over there and check it out. Yeah, I told him you were crying.

So I was like, hey, Seth's over here crying because you don't invite him to things. Can you invite him to something so he stops? Only the pretty girls get to go talk to Jim. I'm surprised you accepted. I figured you'd come up with some kind of lame excuse. You'd be like, no, I'm busy or, you know, I got to go do something for my HOA or I don't know. I had, yeah, I have a headache that day. I don't have a project to talk about.

One of the weeks he had, I have some family in town, so I wouldn't be able to do. But, yeah, I think it's August 6th. So it's about a month for now. I should be on there. So, yeah, it should be a lot of fun. We'll come. we'll make sure we come and harass you. Bring it, bring it, yeah, it'll be fun.

He has that, that, that, uh, what the, the live show set up that he does. Yeah. We curse way too much to do that. His show gets posted the next day too, Seth. Just saying. That, that's getting closer. That's getting closer. All right.

Well, I think it's going to wrap up this week. We do want to send a big thank you to everyone for listening to this show, but I want to send a big special thanks to those who are able to support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to home tech.com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five bucks gets your big shout out here on the show. Like our friend Kevin S,

who pledged over $5. Thank you, Kevin. Woo! Yay! But every single pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack Chat, the Hub, where you and other patrons of the show can go in there and discuss. Awful installs, T. T.J. comes across.

I have no idea how many of these that you have in Ohio, but wow, what is going on? you seem to be running across all the little big contracts. Yeah, this is my office complex too, which makes it even worse. I did not do this. This is not me. Yeah, it makes it even worse. Every time I have to touch anything, I'm like, this is awful.

Maybe bring some zip ties with you. All right. You can't support the show financially. We just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating in the podcast app for your choice. That's going to wrap up this week on HomeTech. Everyone, have a great weekend. And we will see you next week. Till next time.

Take care. I'm sorry.