HomeTech.fm - Episode 586 - Distracted by Paperclips

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

On this week's show: the Open Home Foundation puts Community Day 2026 on the calendar, Apollo makes ESPHome a little less breadboard-y, Petlibro reminds everyone why cloud-dependent pet gear is a terrible way to miss dinner, and Whisker proves AI still can’t always tell one cat from another. We also hit Brilliant’s new managed-service subscription, Comcast turning routers into motion sensors with a privacy asterisk, Aqara pushing Matter camera controls forward, Sonos news, plus CEDIA-bound gear from DreamWall and DoorBird, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!Community Day 2026: Save the date! – Open Home FoundationESPHome Starter Kit is shipping!Universal Paperclips (Game)HomeTech HeadlinesCats and dogs are missing meals after a popular smart feeder went downWhisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodiesBrilliant Launches Subscription Service for Managed Smart Home AutomationDreamWall to Debut New Generation of Outdoor CooLED MicroLED Video Wall Solutions at CEDIA Expo 2026DoorBird Launches the New D22x Series - Residential SystemsComcast adds motion sensing to millions of its newer routers, with a privacy catch | TechCrunchSonos gets ready to launch new Ace Ultra headphonesSonos Adds Live Activities Support on iPhoneAqara enables PTZ camera control through Matter on the G350SEED - SEED Early Access | A brand new world, ready to be populatedWhats Up, Reynoldsburg?

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 21st, 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, a podcast all about home technology, home animation, and... Paperclips. Paper Clips, yes. We accidentally started playing the paperclip game.

And if you hear a bunch of clicking in the background, well, I can tell you what that is. That's going to be us playing the universal paperclip game. I guess you guys haven't seen this before, right? No, I've never seen this. I mean, there's all kinds of clicky games out there in the world, right? Yeah. But I've never seen this specific one. You introduced this to us about an hour ago,

and I think this is why we're recording the show so late. It's currently 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time when we started this show. So if you hear me doze off halfway through the show, it's because I've fallen asleep. We'll make it quick, I think, because I've got to get back to buying some paper clips here. I've already cured cancer and male pattern baldness, but I see, I'm up to 57 million paperclubs. And you guys have a line before. How do you get so high?

I'm like coming up on one million. Man, Gavin, you're slow. I mean, I'm already a quarter of a mill. I started way after you guys. Yep. I got the auto clicker going on. So I've played some games that require just clicking in random response all the time. And so I've had an auto clicker on my computer for a while,

and I might just set up to auto click at this point. Oh, wait, you're just clicking. That's why I don't click on your guy's links. That's a, DJ, you've just left it running while you're talking to us. Oh, yeah. See, I'm not clicking at all because my computer's doing it for me, so. Really? Yeah.

That's funny. You guys keep talking about these auto-clippers. I'm like, I don't even need that, you know? I guess it makes me go faster, but. Yeah, well, it is a fun game. We will put a link to the Paper Clips, Universal Paper Clips game. It actually has an iPhone and Android app, which I think is a little bit. better because I don't I don't really know if you can pause this one but you need to pause it for

well to record a show clearly we can't do two things at once you just let it go in the background and it just you come back and you got some money that's what they that's what they say I think and then you buy some big upgrades yeah well it's uh it's a fun game I say as I try to convince that to stop looking at the paperclip game yeah no no no I don't look at it just come back later you know it's a lot of you'll have so much money build up you know it's fine that could be true I just I just had it yeah yeah yeah True. Maybe, maybe. We'll see. Let's see. I've got a bunch of stuff that. We've got a community day coming up with the home assistant. The home assistant ground. November 7th, you need to save the date. November 7th this year, 2026. Is this far enough to plan for stickers and t-shirts and stuff, DJ? Oh my gosh. This is tons of notice compared to last year. I think last year we had like three weeks of notice, maybe a month of notice. And then there was nothing like ironed out. None of the details were like, you know, it was the first, it was the first time they've ever done it. But they didn't.

give us a lot of time to do anything this time. They're giving us a lot of time to do stuff. So I'm interested to see what we can pull off. Maybe we'll have Justin and Trevor up from Apollo again. Lucky you. I think this is like pre-noticed though. So they let you know that it's going to be coming up. I think come September, middle September, they're going to have much more details. In terms of who's organizing, what events where. I think it's again going to be RSVP and stuff like that through the Luna app. Mm-hmm. So keep an eye out for it because you never know where there will be a meet-up by you.

And that means that you have to drive down here, Gavin, because you have a Tesla now and it can drive itself. It just drives itself. What? That might be a road trip. Yeah, drive down and hang out with us. I might consider it. Maybe I'll get Rohan to join us.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, road trip. You know, that's not bad idea. And honestly, you'll probably... How far is it from you? It's only like, I think we... It was like six hours or seven hours. Yeah, that's not bad.

Maybe you might just have to do that. Okay, okay. Let's maybe plan for that. And Seth, maybe you can fly up. Yeah. That's definitely not going to happen, but... That's definitely not going to happen. That's why I didn't even ask Seth.

I was like, you know, if I ask Gavin, that one might happen. Yeah, my schedule recently has been kind of weird, so... Sure. It's one of those things. Hey, if I make... If I continue making money at this paper quick guy I got to have, I'll be able to do whatever I want for the rest of my... Yeah, I'm about ready to retire, you think.

Well, we got that. We got Community Day coming up. We got ESP Home Starter Kids are shipping. So $40 for that little guy. They were shipping from the day of the announcement, actually. Like, people were getting shipping notices during the announcement. Gavin, you were on there? We saw you.

Yeah, I had a five-minute spot. I don't even know if it was five minutes. You know, I was a little pissed off. I had to sit through the whole thing for my little two minutes. I was in the green room. sitting there the whole time, you know, for the two minutes. But, no, it was really cool. And just working with the home assistant team is really cool.

Like, you know, when you're a fanboy and you finally meet you them and they're like, they know who you are, you know? I was like, yeah, we've made it. We made it. It's hard not to know you, Gavin. Yeah. You're all over. Oh, thank you.

I really appreciate it. You get to be on Jim show and, uh, oh, yeah. And the home assistant shows and, yeah, I see Gavin everywhere now. Speaking of Jim's shows, when is Seth going to be on Jim's show again? Is it next week? Yeah. I think it's next week. Yeah, let me take a look at the schedule.

Yeah, I think on the 27th. All right. Well, hopefully you don't break Jim's internet again. Yeah, 27th, looks like. So, yeah, yeah, I was really looking forward to that one because it's a show I don't have to edit or anything like that. It's great. That's the best, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. When that rolls around, I guess we'll chat about it next week. one more time and then we're off to CDia. Everybody's going, right? You guys are going? Oh, sorry. No, sorry. I'm supposed to go to CES and.

Oh, world peace. Nice. Wow. Good job. He went to Cedia and got World Peace. Yeah. It's what they're selling these days. It's the custom integrators.

Yeah, yeah. Going to Cedia. Gavin, you're going on a boat. Yeah. I have my houseboat trip coming up. What week is that, guys? It's the same week. What is CDia, though?

It is the, I think, the first week of September. So it's going to be the second through fourth, I think. Oh, nice. Well, actually, that weekend, I'm heading to the middle of nowhere, Indiana. So that's going to be fun. Look at us. I'm sure you're jealous. Getting around, yeah.

That's so funny. Well, that's coming up. We got CDia. We got, we got November. We got me next week. Then we got Cedia. and then in, I guess, September, October, November. Yeah, November, that's, wow, that's two months.

That's a long time to remember about saving the date. But I guess I'll add it to my calendar if you insist. Yeah, but just put it on your calendar, Seth. That's all right. October, November, 7th is a Saturday. Oh, that's the, well, we'll see if I can get to anything around town on that one. But yeah, I'll add it to my, I'll add it to something. So, home assistant, community day, done.

So you're coming up for it? I'll put it on there. I actually have a family. thing that day possibly. Wow. Excuse us. Always. One of those things, you know. Just don't talk to your family. Well, if I miss it. I mean, they get you out of CES. They get you out of Homelessness and Community Day. I mean, well, we have a couple of home ticket online. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. All right. So this last couple days, this last week, there was a morning that I was walking, through the kitchen and I saw my cat just sitting there staring at the wall and I'm like,

what are you doing, you little dumb cat? He's normally a dumb cat, but he normally like acknowledges you. But no, he was just kind of like staring at the little, it's like a little canned where we keep his little treats. He's just staring at it. Eyes did not break away. That's weird. And so then we were like, what, what's wrong with him?

Come back at noon and he's still just kind of like hanging around, like just kind of nervously walking around. I guess since we have this pet Libro thing, it just stopped feeding the cats. Some people, it messed with their litter boxes, their water fountains, everything went offline. Owners, like, said scheduling feedings didn't work. Some would, I heard some people were getting like double feed. Those cats really loved this. My cat would have that one. Yeah, exactly. Oh, mine would have two. But mine was just shell-shocked because his normal food in the morning didn't happen, and then his lunchtime feeding didn't happen when it should have.

So, yeah, luckily we were home to catch this. And this is crazy because, like, you would think that the schedule save locally on the device. So, like, if there isn't some kind of server outage or something, it wouldn't affect, like, the schedule from happening, like, if your internet went down. And they say that that is how it works, but that's not how it worked. there's clearly something wrong here.

So I guess Pet Libro's Savage page said schedules stored locally on the device should keep working. And CEO York Wu told the verge that the problem was tied to how the app communicates with devices through the Pet Libro's online servers.

Well, I don't know. Because our apps weren't exactly malfunctioning. It was the thing. The things weren't actually feeding the animals. So anyway, not sure. Bad day for.

cats and servers, I guess. We, while this was going on, we, uh, we, we ended up, like, buying one of those, a car things because we were going out of town for the weekend. We're like, well, we have to have a working. He has the savvy, so you can't be leaving that alone, you know? No.

That would be the end of the world for this cat. Uh, somebody would come over and feed it, but still, like, that's not inconvenience. His entire world revolves around being fed at certain particular times. So yeah, we got the aquaer in, and the aquaer is just sitting up front now because it came in Saturday while we were gone. So luckily my wife was on Reddit enough, and she found a way to like delete, basically delete everything and just like build it all back up from the beginning. New pet profile, new schedules. Yeah, just basically like basically tearing down, resetting the whole device and starting over.

You know, turning it off back on again type of situation. So that worked and we weren't really, we had a camera facing the thing so we could see that he did, in fact, get fed at pretty good time. So he wasn't a hungry cat this weekend. He kept eating. But man, Friday must have been, or I guess, what was this, Thursday, Friday, must have been pretty rough for him. Yeah, we've learned a long time ago to have a camera pointing at the cat feeder no matter which one we've had. Because, you know, depending on which one we've had, we've had problems with it not working in the past or, you know, maybe somebody didn't fill it up with food. not saying any names, TJ or anything.

But, you know, it's always good to have a camera on them. This is kind of silly, though, that a lot of this stuff didn't work when they had an outage, right? I mean, like, the schedules should just work. Yeah. There's no reason for a schedule not to be stored on the device. The silly things, like the manual feed button, not working because of the app, like that's,

what are you doing over there? So, like, some of this stuff is just, like, it's so silly that it requires cloud dependency. no reason for some of those. So hopefully that's a wake-up call because there's not, I would say there's not a lot of good quality, smart cat feeders on the market. There's a lot of them on there on the market. Most of them are Chinese-based and like the app just sucks. And I don't think Pet Libro is that good, but it's definitely better than a lot of the competition. And if you're going to have like a cloud-connected device like that, anything critical, like some

the stuff you just mentioned should be local on the device. Like, it should still be able to function when the, if the cloud were to go down, because no servers are up 100%, right? And this is kind of where when I think about like the Ratchio, right? You could send the command to start it. And in the command, it tells you how long it's to run. But it's locally on the device now that it stops it. Right.

So if the cloud goes down, loses its internet, whatever, it will still stop and not leave your sprinkler going. And then that's the safety. That's how things should be. That's why I don't understand. Like, it should be that way. It said it is that way. Clearly, not that way.

Clearly, there was a problem. So, yeah. Even the home assistant integration. Well, I guess the home assistant integration goes out through the cloud. So it goes that way. Yeah, I mean, this is a wake-up call. Hopefully to them that they develop a way that this does not happen again. Because now I'm wondering, too, because it's like if my internet goes down at home,

does this stop working too? I've never actually tested that myself. itself, but, you know, my internet goes down on occasion. Does that mean my cat's not going to get fed? Yes. I believe that's what I would assume, right? Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's kind of what I'm wondering, yeah, yeah. It's not good. The cat's very upset. It kind of stays very upset. So yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a pet tag. Well, I got the Akara one and it, I mean, that one runs through, what, Zigby? I guess. Yeah, that one's Zigby. So that's a local control. I'm thinking that one might be the better solution. long term? I don't know. So that's the one I use, but the problem is that we don't use ours all the time. And so we disconnect it. And Zigby, I find, is a little more finicky with that kind of stuff, whereas the Wi-Fi just, like, usually connects and updates and everything. Oh, so you, you unplug it. Like, basically use it when we travel. So, because if not, our cats just, like, hang out by it all the time

and try to get into it. They're just like, oh, there's food, you know? It's like, no, stop. Mine tries to, uh, to poke at it and, uh, and, and, like, see, like, Like if it will open up for him. Yeah. Doesn't ever do anything. But it's very messed up. Yeah. Well, a little bit more in the old pet tech news.

I guess Whisker's AI powered litter robot. And Jennifer Pattes and Tui's review here, mixed her cats up. So this is a litter robot five. It's the $900 version. I guess Tia, you have one of these, right? You have the four. I have the three or the four, which I think it's. the four. So this is the, the, she reviewed the litter robot five pro and it's a pretty good,

uh, litter box and it's, it's got, it's got some AI, guess what's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What? Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. So, yeah. Previous version. Um, so this one used a dual camera and during testing that, that part failed, I guess. The robot repeatedly mixed up their two cats, undermining the whole point of the per cat monitoring. So yeah. Yeah. See, here's the thing is that I think the litter robot is probably one of the better robot litter boxes because it's a very simple design you know just it's basically a giant

gear on the back of a globe and it just rotates the globe it's very simple design it seems like it's very easy to fix I've actually replaced a part of mine the uh there's a little liner inside the globe it's like kind of like a vinyl rubber material and you know after you pee on

it for three years it turns out that it starts to look gross and deteriorate a little bit so and just to be clear, I did not pee on it, the cats peed on. Oh, okay. I just, just want to be, you know, make sure that's there. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, yeah, no problem. So I want to replace that. It was very easy to replace. You know, I just took the thing apart and took off some clips and put it all back together. And stuff like this annoys me because it's like you've taken a product that is like easy to use and easy to repair and everything. And you've just made it harder. So what, you can add AI to it.

Yeah. Like, we don't need that. And like, there's like a camera on there now. I don't need a camera on my litter robot, you know? And like in her article, too, she pointed out that she had to like, she had to like move it because it was like it was capturing everybody that went to the bathroom. Everyone? Not just her cats. You know, everybody that walked past the bathroom. Oh, yeah, she had it in the bathroom.

Well, she had it next to the bathroom and like it was every time somebody would like walk to the bathroom, it would catch them on the camera as well. And I'm like, that's creepy. Awkward. Like, I don't need to have a camera monitor me every time I go to the bathroom. You know what I mean? Like, I don't understand this stuff personally. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's really odd. Yeah, one of the rules we have is no cameras in the house. And like we have the ubiquity ones. We do have those, but I have them set up where they don't record, you know, unless we're gone. So if we're out of the house, we can go and see, you know, what's going on with the cat. But if we're here and something happens, well, we just never know. It could be anything that happened.

I don't know. But, but yeah, like, we're, anything that has comes in like that. that's, you know, a Chinese litter bot or the cat feeder. Cat feeder, yeah. Robot vacuum. I mean, I don't need any of the stuff with a camera. Not interesting. And I'm the same way, too, Seth, because we have ubiquity Wi-Fi cameras in the house,

but they're all tied to smart outlets. So, like, they turn on and off physically through power whenever, like, we leave and go home, we even come home and stuff like that. So that's the only way I trust cameras is if I can know that I can physically turn them off. Right, right. Like, I'm never going to know that. I'm never going to actually know if I can turn these cameras off and like this litter robot. Well, there you go.

I don't like it. We'll never know the virtuousness of the AI powered litter robots, I guess, because we won't have cameras in our litter boxes. Yeah, that's fine. I don't need my, I don't need AI to analyze my cat's poop. Yeah, there it is. Let's move on to some CD news because CD is coming up. Brilliant has launched.

What? Yeah, brilliant. The company that makes, what, the light switches, right? they have launched Brilliant Max. Is this a streaming service? It could be. If it was Brilliant Plus, I think that would be the streaming service. But no, this is a subscription service that turns existing smart home platform into a managed service model.

The pitches here is simpler automation, less homeowner tinkering. So at launch, Brilliant Max includes presets away and vacation modes that coordinate devices across the Brilliant ecosystem with Home and Night modes planned for later. The service also adds, or optimization, premium support, upgrade opportunities for older brilliant controls, and it includes one Shelley Bluetooth door and window sensor. So there you go. It doesn't say how much this is in the story, but, you know, it's probably less than Disney Plus, I'm guessing. I don't even know what this means.

What are you saying right now, Seth? So there's... This is what you're going to see a CDA? Yep, yep. They're going to start charging for, you know, for some things. Sure. This company died because they made a terrible touchscreen smart switch And now they're going to tell me a subscription for smart home services

It's a whole ecosystem Oh, ecosystem I forgot the ecosystem You forgot about that, yeah It's not just the ugly light switches It's the entire ecosystem, yeah It works with Shelley too It works exactly, it works with a lot of stuff

Oh man This is so weird to me It might be weird, but it is something I mean, I guess I think they do a lot of work with, you know, like production homes Or something like that Sure So, yeah, it's just a little add-on thing. They can get that RMR coming in.

There you go. That's one story that's going to launch here at CDM, sure. The next one, Dream Wall, says it's going to show a new generation of outdoor cool LED ultra-bright waterproof cob micro-l-D video walls at CDXpo 2026. So if you are in the market for something that goes up to 317 inches wide and has brightness up to 4,000 nits, the dream. beam wall might be Cobb,

micro-l-D video well might be for you. You're going to get one of these, Seth? I mean, you got to replace that big screen behind you at some point.

Yeah, when I keep breaking it. You'll have to worry about Android with this one. Yeah, yeah. It's got a hundred thousand-hour lifespan and a five-year warranty.

So there you go. Yeah, it's interesting. These video wells do, they do cost quite a bit of money, especially when you get the high-resolution ones. And these,

these Cobb, I've got to go check these out because I haven't, I haven't, been paying attention to the, uh, the technologies. I've been hearing a lot about this Cobb micro LED. Um, and I want to go take a look and see what it looks like. So I'll be a, I'll be able to, to, to see if I, if I want to buy one of these, DJ.

Hopefully you do. Since they're made out of little panels, then maybe I can just get a small one, like a 16 by 20 or something. Like that Johnny Cash song, uh, one piece out of time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'll just come back and buy you. Just wait until the end of the show. I'll see if there's anything they don't want to take home and you can grab it. All right. Right. Right. Oh, that's a great idea. That's a great idea.

They're going to want to bring this back, you know. Obviously. No, not at all. That's how you got that screaming deal on your TV. Exactly, exactly. Like I was like, I'm not taking this back to China. I'm not driving this back to China. That's ridiculous.

Yeah, this isn't going to fit in the Uber. Let's see. We've got also, oh, oh, here's a name you haven't heard in a while, DJ. Doorbird. Doorbirds. It's launching its new D-22X series of IP video intercoms, replacing the D-21X line with more than 30 models aimed at everything from single homes to larger multi-unit buildings. So I don't know.

Click on the link here and take a look at what these look like. This is, I mean, I think after joining Asaboy, they were actually able to put something together. It looks pretty nice. It's pretty decent. This does not look bad at all. I never saw why they're so big, though. I guess it's all the options and stuff. Yeah, because you can add all the different cards and the buttons and screens.

and stuff like that. Right. It's got dual RFID, Bluetooth, pen code, QR code, fingerprint, all that stuff built in. I mean, it's kind of the same thing

I have in a ubiquity thing, but, you know, this one's Flesh Mountain has nice panels that go over the top. Also has SIP, OSDP, RS-485, and Waygan, along with some other cloud and LAN API.

So, eh, not bad, not bad. They've gone a long way. They've come a long way. I mean, Doorbird always has all the integrations and settings, right? Because that's why you buy them.

You buy them, because you can literally tie it into anything. The problem is that their video quality has always been terrible. It's like you can do anything you want with it, but it just, it does not look good. And when it costs like $1,000 or more, you want it to look really good, you know?

Yeah, the one picture, it looks like it is a, it looks like it's about $2,000, $1,000, $1,700. That's US dollars, by the way, Gavin. Let's see what resolution this thing have. What's it got? Surface Mount IP video, this is the D-22. I don't, I don't know. It doesn't really say.

Serves my IP. It's probably 4K. It better be 4K. I mean, especially for $2,000. It's a 5 megapixel video camera. So what is that? What does that add up to you? I think that's under...

See, it just says HD videos. I bet this thing is only 1080p. Yeah, I bet it's 1080 as well. For $2,000, you get 1080p. See, that's the part it never made any sense to be. You know, you get all these features, but the video quality does not look good compared to like a ring doorbell. Yeah.

Well, that's unfortunate. But, you know, it does, it does, does look better than a ring doorbell. Wow, that's true. And you get in like a billion colors. Yeah, no kidding. Look at all the finishes. Bage, vermilion, light blue, turquoise.

Well, they even have the RAL colors on there, too. So if you really want to match it to something, I mean, you can get it here in nut brown or slate gray or night blue. There we go. Polar Raven. What is that? Polar Raven. There we go. What is Google colors?

Does Johnny Hyve make this? Yeah, well, there you go. $2,000 for A Doorbell. If you want it in gold, does the finish price go up anymore? I'm more positive about this story than the... Oh, it's $2,500 for the gold finish. Oh. Yeah, so...

Doorbird, back in the news. I haven't heard of them in a long time. And that's all I have for CDA this week. But there'll be more. They'll be more. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because you're going there. Yeah, but yeah.

Comcast has done something. They've added motion sensors to their routers. And you hear that and you're like, oh, did they do millimeter wave? No, they didn't do millimeter wave. They did the old trick with the Wi-Fi that can determine if you have a motion inside your house when there should not be. It's just kind of a cool trick, but I think these are, I mean, Comcast says like a security offering too. So I think this is the first one I've heard of being able to do that, right? Yeah, I don't remember of any other ISPs really doing this.

Not ISPs, but I know that there's been some, I think what was it, Signify was doing this with their light. with the recess lights and stuff like that. Like Phillips Hugh does that motion aware or whatever they call it. Yeah, I don't know of any other body else that's really doing that. That's interesting. I mean, for whatever it's worth, I have no idea what they're going to charge people for. But just to get like some basic motion sensing in the house, not bad. Not a bad deal.

It's already there. It's already installed. See how this works. Is it work? Comcast grade or does it work great? The jury is going to be out on that one. So, Gavin, this is a good story for you, because I know you may be in the market. Sonos is getting ready to launch a new set of Ace headphones.

It's going to be called the Ace Ultra headphones. There's an FCC filing that's gone through. And this place, Lopass has discovered the filing on Monday. It says the product also is referred to as the S52A. So, yeah, we don't know anything about it. But it does, it does may come in five finishes. instead of, what was the other one, too? Say five finishes?

Five, five different finishes. Stop. Gray? Why five? Shadow black, agave, blush, and sand. It makes no sense. Like, seriously, do people not know, is it bad to use just the color names? Can we not just say red, green, blue, pink?

I mean, tech companies got to differentiate themselves, you know? Like, really? Like, when do we got to that? Like, they say agave. I don't know. What is that? It's actually funny. They were having those.

this rant on the birds the other day was Nilai and David and it was talking about how when they did the review for, I think it was the Google Gemini speaker he called it, I think he called a pink or red and the Google Rev asked him and he's like,

can you use like the official name Barry? And he's like, no, I can't because berries are different colors. Like there's, you know, there's like blackberries and raspberries and strawberries and strawberries that, you know, they're all different colors. So, you know, it's the,

the names are getting kind of ridiculous. It's Barry, The names are definitely ridiculous. But what is this, what is the Sanos Ace Ultra going to get us? Is it going to get Wi-Fi? Yeah. That's really what it should have. What if it does have?

Wi-Fi would have been the best thing to have forever ago. Yeah, we don't really know. This, you know, could be a September launch. Could be, uh, could be soon. Um, but yeah, we really don't know. It'll be an Ace Ultra. And, uh, I guess maybe it's just the finishes. That's probably, that's probably good enough.

I would be shocked if it's tied into, uh, the rumors around their AI and stuff like that that they added. So they might have a microphone in it or something. I love how I got flak in our hub, you know, is it waterproof? Oh, yeah. That's an excellent picture. Yeah, that's a good question. No, is it waterproof, you know, or some kind of rating.

Gavin proof. We will see. If you happen to drop yours in in the pool here soon, maybe you'll get these ones at CES, Gavin. I highly doubt it. I wonder if they're IP 65. No. Oh. Well, some other news have come out of Sonos,

they, according to Therot.com, they've added live activity support to the app. So it'll bring playback in info and controls kind of into the iOS lock screen, which is kind of nice. I don't mind it when apps have this setting. There's a couple of different apps that I use that take advantage of this. Let's see, the podcast app that I have. has one. There's a flight tracking app that I use that has it as well. I like it. I like that. So, hey, not bad. Not bad, Sonos. This is a good feature. Nice little quality of life. Do you guys use the little

activities on your iPhones? Yeah, I like when my apps have that. Like Starbucks and Lyft and Uber and all the big names have it on their stuff now. So it's pretty nice. It does also, what's it called? come from, like, I've seen it pop over onto the computer screen every now and then. So it'll have like a, the little live activity thing will pop over and show up in the taskbar on the computer. Sometimes. I don't know. I'm really annoyed when I get a notification, though, and I click on it and it has to launch like this iOS simulator-looking thing. It's like, oh, I'm going to bring up the phone interface of this app on your computer because there was a notification.

it looks exactly like it would on your computer and I'm like it's not what I want I don't want and it never connects anyway so I really don't know that's a that's a horrible feature bad apple so and then we got we got some good news here is some matter news this week Akara has enabled PTZ camera control through their matter through the matter we got matter ptz control on the G350 this new firmware rolls out for the camera hub G350 and adds pan tilt and zoom control over over matter. TJ, you were, you were trying to convince me this. It matters. Why does this matter? I mean, it matters because it matters, Seth. I mean, what else? What else do you want? You know, I mean, I feel like this should have been. I feel like I'm very negative this episode with technology.

You know what I mean? I feel like this is a basic feature that should have been there with cameras. But even other big companies are slow to add this kind of stuff, like ubiquity and some other big names. So it's hard to know who to actually blame for this kind of stuff. Who to blame? Yeah. Well, we've got pan-tilt zoom. It also ships with matter 1.5.1. So there we go.

All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show. We've got home tech.com slash 586. All right, so we got a mailbag this week. I think Jake was kind of wondering. What was going on with Gavin's? Gavin's holes that he had in his wall. Because I think Jake calculated it 100 days.

I think I have them somewhere in the 70s. But it just could be because like when TJ cut the walls and then by the time we reported it on the show and I released the show it took a while. But, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, yeah, okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't blame me for Gavin's problems.

You cut a few of them. I cut the necessary ones. You cut that unnecessary one. That's right. You cut it. You want a necessary one. Thank you. But that's better than the door frame.

You ripped off for no reason. Somebody came in. We had a little family over this weekend. And one of the in-laws looked at the door, and she's like, what happened there? And I had to give her that look like, stop, stop, no, don't ask, don't ask, don't ask. Luckily, she got on quick. She got on quick, and she was like, okay, we'll talk after. Well, a friend of the show, Jake Sutton in our hub there, has gone ahead.

And he's sent over an update from, who is this? This is the Toronto Raptors announcer, right? Jack Armstrong. There we go, Jack Armstrong. Toronto Raptors commentator. Hello, Jack Walsh Show here. Gavin Campbell. Bonjour.

Gavin. Hey, just want to reach out and say, congratulations. Why am I congratulating you? I don't have the slightest idea why. I mean, it is crazy. I mean, are you ever going to fix the dry walls? the hole, everything, 100 days you've not fixed the holes in your drywall. I mean, are you that cheap?

Seriously, are you that cheap? Can you just go hire somebody to fix the holes? It's not that hard. And if you're too helpless, too incapable of fixing it yourself, just write the check. Come on now. seriously and I hear you're clumsy as well you know you fall in the pool with your sonos headphones on I mean seriously Gavin you need to get it together and you know what I

say to you Gavin Gavin is time to get it together get it straight fix the wall make sure you know where you're walking so you don't form pool and get with the program. Would all that be and said, you sound like an amazing person, and I just want to wish you all the best and enjoy the remainder of your summer. Have a great, great time. All the best of you and your family. And the next time we cross each other's paths, whenever that may be, I'm sure you're

going to have that house looking beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Gavin, you are the man. All the best. Have a great, great day. And I don't know who the clown is that asked me to roast you like this, but clearly not a great friend. All the best. Cheers. Simply amazing.

There we go. There we go. That is from Jake. The only person to buy the poll video. Yeah. So when I saw this video, I died. I watched this video so many times. times because people know

I'm a Raptors fan. I've been watching the Raptors since they first started in 95, I think it was. And Jack has been on the air for how many years. So I've been a fan of his since. I think I met him once at a Raptors game.

But he has an amazing story. He has three adopted kids and there's a whole story behind that, which is awesome. He's a great guy. And when I saw this I was like, wow. I don't think he could have picked that he wasn't better. I was just, I was dying with this. I love how Jake got roasted in it too, though.

You know? Like, it wasn't all me, but he got a little roasting in there, too. But this was awesome. I showed it to, I had to show it to like everybody. My mom saw it and she died because she's a fan of Jack, too. So she died when she saw it. And yes, it got me in trouble with the life. You know, like, yeah.

Every now and then, since I've got this, I hear it randomly playing for some reason. As a reminder, coming from somebody's phone, like, oh, look at this video. Hello. Well, I'm just glad you showed it to Rose, so we didn't have to show it to her. No, no. I even showed it to my neighbor, so you don't have to show it to him. Yeah, he died. First thing he said, I guess I got to come fix your drywall this week.

I was like, yeah. But he hasn't come fix it. There's always enabling you. It's amazing. Amazing. Well, thanks, Jake. This is really great. Jake.

I just want to say thank you, Jake. That was awesome. It had me dying. I've saved it. I almost want to put it on a video picture frame. Just always talking. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome.

Thank you very much. Yeah, that was great to see. And I guess I'm not the only one keeping up with how long that project's going to take. It'll never be done. It's going to be at least a few more weeks because I have a lot of events lined up for the next few weeks. just don't have time for it. Just get to pay somebody. Come on.

Yeah, I know. I know I bookmarked this. You said you bookmarked somebody on Facebook. You're going to reach out to him. Let me message him right now. Yeah, I'm sure. I lost the bookmarks. Of course you did.

You never even saved it to begin with. That's right. Who are you trying to lie to, Gavin? We're all friends here. We know you're never going to fix your while. I'm going to come up in a couple years and it'll still be there. Maybe for the meetup. Just had the picture hanging over the top of it.

A quick update live. Rohan said he said he is not against coming down. So it looks like you guys are doing a road trip. Nice. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Roan replied to you? Yeah, he's on Discord right now. So he already said.

So it looks like you're coming down. If you don't come down, you can't set out on us. Oh, you got to pick the day first so I can book off some time. Well, it's homeless this community day. That's what it is. Yeah, but I'm going to be coming down for the week. I mean, obviously. It's got to make it and make it worth it.

It's wild. Yeah, you've got all kinds of stuff. Oh, we can go to a Cedar Point. Nice. I think it'll be over by then. It's November. It's going to be kind of cold. You guys are Canadian.

You're used to the cold. That's what they tell. Tell me. Yeah. You lie to me? All right. Well, we do have a pig of the week, and this is probably the most insane pick of the week.

I think I've ever seen. Oh, that's great. This is on our electricians. I don't know how this isn't AI, but you know what? I'm not surprised it's not. this is a 21 gang light switch with 21 light switches and what looks to be a piece one of those you know piece together light switch game I mean I can't why thanks I hate it

why somebody in the comments made a made a joke and said actually they want to put decoro switches on there instead oh my gosh that would be the worst I mean like three of those is bad enough like can you imagine well and I just like whenever you have like more than three switches and you're trying to line up the plate and everything with it, that sucks. I can't imagine doing that with this right now. That would have taken like a whole day just to line up the plate with the switches. Jeez. This is never going, first of all, it doesn't look good now, but it's never going to look good.

And this looks like it's a commercial, it's like in a back splash of a commercial project or something like that. Oh, yeah. So it looks like it's behind a sink or a beer tap or something. Yeah, it doesn't look like on a good location, to be honest. Oh, you know what? It's a sneeze guard. That's what that looks like. At least it's not a, at least it's not like on the pit.

pillars and under the mantle and like around the corner like that one house we saw. Yes, yes. I mean, they could have done that display, but they chose not to. They chose to put it at one spot, you know? This is a centralized lighting control. What are you talking about? Somebody else commented, are you going to label that? No.

Yeah, you have to label that. I'm sorry. Nope. I don't think you do. I think, I think, I think this. Yeah, just let it rip, right? You're just raw dog in life. Jesus.

I want to put one of those in. Only one switch is actually functional. All the others are just like when you flip it on, it auto turns itself off. It doesn't say, what if it just, what if they all controlled the same light? Yeah, exactly. It's like a three-way.

It's a 21-way switch. It's like, what does this switch do? Just the opposite of whatever that one is. It's just some cruel like a puzzle. You have to figure out how to turn. And it's just one load. It's all it does. They all have to be flipped in certain directions, though.

The whole store turns on. Oh, man. Well, we'll put the link to this in the show notes, but yeah, that is. That's just ridiculous. Well, I mean, I guess the customer is always right. Nope. That's not the saying.

It's not the saying at all. I want to just spell that myth. Yeah. Because they're not. Clearly, clearly did not. Because they could be wrong. Yep, yep. All right.

Well, if you have any feedback questions, ideas for the show, videos for Gavin that maybe, you know, you want to share. Or any other Pixley week, give us a shout. email address is Feedback at HomeTech.fm. Or you can head out over to hometec.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates, project updates. DJ, you got stuff in there first. What's going on?

Yeah, I got projects. I'm not traveling right now, so you know, I can do stuff. I've actually been playing a lot of video games recently. Downloaded this new game called Seed by a studio called Clang Studios. It's basically a world-building game. I really don't know how to describe it. You basically start with nothing as a person.

and then you can start little farms and mining operations and go harvest trees and stuff like that. But it's an MMO. So it's online with a bunch of other people and you live in a society and you do things to better the society. It's pretty fun game. It's not as fun as this paperclip game, you know? This paperclip game, it's pretty fun. You just click on this little make paperclip thing and that's it. This one you've got to play with other real people.

So it's got a companion app to it. so you can actually play on your phone as well. Oh, nice. Some of the stuff is limited, though. But it's pretty cool because then you can get basically the full game with it. It's been pretty fun. One of the things that they're trying to do to monetize it, which I actually don't mind.

The game itself, it's early access. I think it was like $30 for like the very basic version. But one of the things they're trying to do is make it to where you're going to have multiple characters in the game. And so you can have multiple characters and they can do different tasks and stuff like that. So they're charging. and real monies for that part. So if you want more than like two or three people, you have to pay like between $10 to $50 to add a second person.

But, wow. Yeah, it's kind of, it's an interesting game. If you haven't checked it out, it's a seed by Klang Studios. And you hear Seth's clicking in the background there. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not. Totally, totally, totally.

Definitely not. Not making paper. It's probably doing the quantum computing in the paper clip. Yep, I'm making some quantum computing. Happens. And then, uh, speaking of a little robot four, I've, uh,

I had to replace some of the parts on my litter robot for because, um, it's starting to come up on three years since I've bought it. Um, and I don't know if you guys know this, but after, uh, animals use the bathroom in the same spot for a while,

stuff kind of gets gross. Uh, even if you clean it. So there's like a little rubber liner that basically goes where the cat litter sits. And after three years, that looks pretty gross. You know, it's kind of deteriorating with all the urine and everything else that goes on in there.

I'm sure cats scratching out. it and whatever else as well. And so luckily that is a warranty item that's replaceable. Oh. And so I was able to get a free replacement globe liner from Whisker. And so I use that to replace. Or I use the warranty service to replace that liner. And it's as good as new.

It's very easy to replace. Honestly, it took me like, I think I would say like 20 to 30 minutes just because there's a lot of different screws in and everything. But they made it pretty easy to replace. So I would recommend that. I'm going through now because I think my warranty is up in like December because we bought it near Christmas time. And I'm going to go and just replace an order a bunch of replacement parts. But I have to wait 30 days in between ordering parts.

So I'm going to be just ordering parts until the end of the year, I guess. I have a similar not, well, not, I have a repair issue to do on a, on our robot vacuum. I think the little water pump inside is bad. It's gone bad. So I've got to take it apart. and maybe replace it. It just doesn't seem to, you know, skied out water while it's riding around anymore.

That's not good. You definitely need it to skied out water. Yeah. It doesn't, it mobs partial the floor and it starts getting dry, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the things you've got to do. This fascinates me that your cats will, I don't know, my cat, he gets in his litter box and just like plays.

I don't know what he does in there, but he's all over that thing. And I'm wondering, like, if he was not compatible with these litter robot things. Because there's no way he's going to pee in one spot. Oh, yeah. See, that's the problem is our cats. Just like they face, they put their butt towards the entrance. And so like peas in between like the crevices and stuff like that, which is super convenient to clean up.

Yeah. So it's pretty great, though. I don't think I would want to not have one. But if they keep putting AI in it, I don't know if I'll buy another one. Yeah, you can't train a cat how to use a litter box, unfortunately. Yeah. So. And then the other stuff I've been working on is some more AI stuff.

I've been trying to figure out what AI means for my business. Oh. Because, you know, I, like, I want to use AI for stuff. But my problem is I don't want to use AI in, like, a customer-facing application. Like, for example, I don't want my customers ever talk to an AI, like, person on my phone or something like that, right? Because for me, that just kind of defeats the whole purpose of me being a company, right? Because, like, I exist because I offer good customer service and all this stuff that people need. and I just don't want people to call and get an AI agent.

So, like, that kind of stuff is weird to me. But, you know, I've been getting some clients actually find me through chatGBT. I've had, like, five people in the past six months that are like, hey, actually, I found you through chat jbt. I just asked them to, like, where I find, like, a low voltage or, like, a network installer or something. Right. And it comes back with your information. But what's weird is that, like, even if I type it into Google, you don't come up.

And so chat jvvt is just going out there and getting all this information and the comment back and saying, hey, you know, based on whatever criteria, this guy is the best one. It doesn't really matter what anything else is. And so I was like, you know, so I should probably use that to my advantage. And so I was like, hey, you know, go out and analyze my website and, like, tell me what I need in order to, like, come up on, like, chat GBT more often and stuff. And so it came up with some suggestions, you know, making some blog posts and stuff, which I'm probably not going to do because those would have to be AI generated.

That's easy to make it with AI. Yeah, I don't want to do that, though. That's the point. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm, like, I'm coming up with different ways. Like, it's suggested a bunch of stuff I can, like, add or edit to my website, and so I'm going to do that. But also, this is, like, my weird slow time of the year.

And so one of the things I'm working on now is figuring out Google Ads using AI, because I'm not smart enough to know all the ins and outs of, like, Google Ads and stuff like that. And I don't have enough money to hire somebody to do it for me either. Because, I don't know if you've ever been a business, it's very expensive to run Google Ads. especially if you want to pay somebody to run Google ads for you. And so a lot of the times when I talk to a marketing agency, they want you to spend several thousand dollars a month. Oh, of course, yeah.

Before you even, like, before you even see a return in like six to nine months. You know, you're serious. Yeah, and I'm like, I'm a small business. I don't have, you know, like $2,000 for nine months to spend. That's a lot of money on Google ads and stuff like that. And so I told, you know, I told the AI agent, I was like, you know, go out and I have $750. I want you to figure out, you know, look at my website, look at my Google reviews and stuff, and figure out what I should make advertisements for.

And so went out and looked at it and was like, hey, you know, you should make advertisers based on, like, Wi-Fi installation and stuff. And then here's all the keywords you should use. Here's all the keywords you should reject. And I was like, I mean, that's great. But honestly, I don't know how to implement any of this, you know? Yeah. That's the part that I struggle with. It's like, cool.

You gave me all this information. But like, honestly, I don't even know, like, where to put that at. And so I was like, I need you, like, explain it like a, on five and tell me where exactly to implement all this stuff. And so it's giving me a list of details. I think I can tie it in with like an API and have it do it itself. I don't trust that because if it's going to be attached to my bank account or something, let us spend some money.

Come on. I don't want it to drain my bank account. So it's come up with some instructions. I'm going to follow tomorrow and see what happens in regards to my Google ads. So maybe I'll have to, maybe I'll have that to talk about next week. But that's the kind of stuff I'm trying to use AI for in the business because it's not customer-facing, but it'll help make my life easier. Very nice. Very nice.

I'm not, I haven't started, I assume that Google has those APIs and those MCP things that kind of tell it how to interact with its advertising backend stuff that you could program an LM, or an LOMC could handle for you, right? Yeah. But I haven't looked into that.

And as much as I know about developing with Google, it's just kind of a pain about to do anyway. So, yeah. Yeah, and it's definitely like, you can do stuff with AI and the API and stuff like that. So one of the other projects I was working on with AI is, let's see if I can get this website to load. It's called what's up Reynoldsburg.com.

And this is, I was like, you know, it would be nice. There's all these calendars for the town that I live in called Reynoldsburg. And they're all like different community calendars. So it's, you know, it's the city. It's the parks department, it's the schools. It's like all these other organizations who have all their own individual calendars. and it'd be nice if I just had one place that I could go and look at all these calendars without having to like click back and forth to different websites.

And so I said, hey, you know, go out and find me every single calendar, like public calendar you can find in the city of Reynoldsburg. And it came back and I was like, all right, I found, you know, six or eight of them all together. You know, it's for the city. It's for the school. It's like the fire department, all this stuff. And I was like, cool, go ahead and add those to a Google account. And so I made a Google account just for this. And I was like, go ahead and create calendars for the different events.

And so it created the calendars for the different organizations. And then I was like, all right, cool. Now that we got that, go ahead and make this website. And so after many tweaking and fine-tuning, it eventually came up with this website. What's Up, Reynoldsburg, where you can go and select different calendars. You can jump to specific days. It'll go different weeks. So I can see all the calendars all in one place.

I can't spell with Reynolds, pro evidently. Here, I'll send it to you. Oh, that'd be nice. There you go. It's using a couple of different services. Honestly, I don't even know anything about website creation,

so this is 100% vibe-coded. But it told me specifically what services to use and how to set them up because I don't know how to do any of this stuff. And to be honest, this is the kind of stuff that, like, deserves to be vibe-coded. It's like stuff that, like, nobody takes seriously, but it's useful.

You know, like, this doesn't take anybody personal information or doing anything. It's literally just displaying calendars that are already public information. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's got advertising on this then, right? Well, I mean, we might get there at some point. So. What if I want a special calendar event on here?

Who can I pay? Oh, you can submit an event, Seth. I've even added that up there. Hmm. It gave me a subscribe button so people can subscribe to future events. And I was like, and I was like, hey, you know, I'm not really going to do anything with a subscribe thing right now. Can you, like, put a disclaimer on there?

And so if you click on it, it says, the newsletter sign up is in beta. We're testing our weekly event updates for Reynoldsburg. Would you like to be an early subscriber? And I was like, I would never know how to do that pop-up. Mm-hmm. Right? I'm never going to figure out how to do this.

Oh, yeah. If I use square space or something like this, like this is going to be a complicated thing to set up. So this is a good, good use case for AI where it's just taken information. It's making the easily searchable, which is what AI is good at. Where did you host this? Is it interesting? This is all, I couldn't even tell you, to be honest.

That's probably a problem at some point, I would assume. That's funny. We need to invite his AI agent to talk to him. Oh, you put it on Cloudflare, I see. So, okay. That's sure. Oh, yeah, I think it's Cloudflare. And then there's like a service that, um, the only thing that sucks is that because I'm

not paying for the service that like whenever somebody goes to access it, if somebody hasn't access it recently has to like spin up the service or something. Yeah, a little worker. But that doesn't take very long. No. If you, if you, a few hundred milliseconds at the most. Yeah. And I don't pay anybody to host this website at the moment.

It's all free. So I think I pay like name cheap or something. But our entire website runs the same exactly way. So I love it. Yeah. Yeah. See, like this is like I've always wanted to do website projects and stuff. But like I'm not going to become a web designer.

And all the stuff I want to do is silly stuff like this. Yep. Like it's not something that like I'm going to ever make money from or like a lot of people are ever going to use. Like maybe a couple dozen people are going to use this website like in a month. Yeah. No, it works. It works.

So this is what I'm finding, like, the whole vibe coding thing, it's actually really useful for, is that if there's a project that you wanted to get done or just something like a way your computer doesn't work and you wish it worked, man, this is what, it's really empowering people to go out and do stuff like this. And, I mean, there's no, like, risk on this one for, like, data loss or anything like that. You're literally just making a dashboard of calendars and making it, you know, public or whatever. The only cost it would have is basically the domain name associated with it. And, you know, even that, like, you can be cost optimized and all that stuff.

So it's good. I like, DJ. And I set it up through Hermes. And so I was like, Hermes, you know, I want you to create a specific bot that its literal job is just to go out and update the calendar. And so go out, update the calendar, you know, analyze everything and just make sure that's always up to date. And so that part's always taken care of. So it should be, you know, self-sufficient. Yeah.

We'll find out in the long term, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, see how it works in a while. It reminds me, I have to move this over to Cloud Fair because it's on ADPS right now. Is the Ariguana's falling. Oh, yeah. That one up. That would be coming up soon.

Yeah, it looks like we're all good. It's 73 in Reynoldsburg and 59 in Pickering. So, wow. Wow, it's cold there. So chilly. What's 59 in Celsius? I can tell you, hold on. This has got AI powered conversions here.

15 for you, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a nice brisk night. It's 32 here. It's so cold. It's open the windows and enjoy the breeze night. It's 32 here and 23 where T.J. is. You got too much crime to open your windows at night.

I got too much humidity. You open up to the night. All right. Well, that's pretty cool. Gavin, you got anything? What's going on? Oh, well, we had, as I mentioned, we had some family over here this weekend. It's been a bit these next few weeks.

going to be crazy, but we had a little pool incident happen on the weekend, and, you know, I don't want to get into it, but basically it may be start thinking about how I can, you know, about water testing, automatic water testing. Oh, yeah, sure. So I've been looking around at devices that will test my pool water for me, you know, and I'm looking at to, you know, I guess you want to know how much chlorine, you know, what the chlorine levels are at, or the alkalinity levels or the pH levels or things like that, right? And we pour back on you and then you know what chemicals you got to add.

I've seen a number of devices, but they're all like US only like devices. Like they're not available in Canada. So I can't get them. So this is a call out to the community. And I'm not looking for one of those expensive, you know, the whole Hayward set up where, you know, it's like $10,000 and they have the full. I just want something I can throw in the pool, let it float around. and report and it, you know, reports into home assistant, hopefully and stuff like that, right? So call out to the community.

If you know anything that's available in Canada, you know, that's a very important point. Geez, all kinds of restrictions can't be $10,000 has to be available in Canada. I mean, anything else you want to add in there? No, no, no. That's pretty much, you know. Home assistant integration would be a bonus, you know, like, you know, point me in that direction. Send me a note. Let me know if you know of something, you know, something I could just throw in there and it starts

reporting my levels and, you know, we'll go from there. What did the, what was the eco-wit? What did that one do? That wasn't like chlorine and stuff, right? No, that one was just temperature, I think. I think it was water quality, but I don't think it was- Like nitrates and stuff like that. I don't think it was-

Yeah, that was- I don't know how well that would hold up in chlorinated water, and it's pretty corrosive. Yeah, yeah. I saw some really nice ones available in the States, you know, where there were some that it was built into the skimmer cover. And then it hung down from there. And it was a really nice, clean setup.

The only problem was, again, it's not available in Canada because I guess they have to send you certain cartridges every now and then to renew and they don't ship to Canada. And I've seen a couple others. Same story. It's like I think Finwale was another one that's a startup. It doesn't ship to Canada. So I can't get anything up here. So for now I have to take my water, take it down to the pool store. they analyze it, they tell me everything I need to add, and I just do that.

And I just want to eliminate that trip. Something to automatically do it for me, and then, you know, I can balance my own waters. There were a couple of things that existed that were like they would float in the water years ago. But I don't know of anything. There's got to be something commercial that'll do it, though. Like, they get you going to hook up. Yeah, of course. I mean.

Yeah, $10,000. I want something, one, I can buy it and get it in Canada. It's not $10,000. I want something affordable. This guy's a Tesla. Come on. That's like 10 Sonos Arc Ultra headphones. I can't even say it.

Sonos Ace Ultra headphones. Yeah. So, you know, if anyone, again, if anyone in the community knows of anything, shoot me a message. Well, you're coming to America here soon, so you can always grab some while you're here. Well, it's not necessarily just grabbing the device, but they usually have to send you refill like cartridges or something or replacement cartridges. And that's where you get into trouble. So I'd have to keep visiting you every, you know, a couple times.

Oh, yeah, definitely don't want that in my bed. Yeah, exactly. There you go. I take that back. But if we do Home Assistant Community Day once a year, I mean, yeah, road trip. We'll see. Yeah.

But that wraps it up. I mean, we've talked about everything else throughout the show that I've been, you know, working on and stuff going on in the hub. So, Seth? Yeah, well, last week when Gavin was talking about, you know, some things, that he was up to. He did make mention of some odd user accounts that we had show up on our Mastodon server.

It turns out they were definitely spam bots. Surprise. Yeah, surprise. The threat was real. And I kind of, we had a report. Somebody reported some account, you know, that can happen from time to time. And I went and looked at it. I'm like, oh, it's some kind of weird, like, pro-Russia propaganda.

a thing. I'm like, yeah, all right. Let's, uh, let's see what we can do to get rid of this. And I'm like, wait a minute, how did they get on here? Because it's, it's not like, I went and looked at the, their account and it said, invited by this other account. I'm like, what, what the heck? How do you invite? And it turns out that Macedon had this setting that I was mostly unaware of, um, that was like, yeah, if you have a, um, if you have, if you have a, um, like, uh, you're invited. And we have this process that Gavin mostly took part of, and I would occasionally take part of, where if you apply on the server and you say, Gavin's cool, Gavin would approve you. But if you come in, you know, saying something about, you know, nothing we don't care about,

I guess, you know, you would get rejected, right? And that served well for a while until this little fall or whatever popped up. And we're like, came out of nowhere for me, really. I wasn't really sure of kind of like what caused this at first, but then I went reading somebody's website, and they pointed me to the weird location, like in the user settings and role settings that this was set at. So I was able to turn that off,

and then go ahead and get like a, go ahead and start figuring out what they're up to. And I was looking at our stats and our server stats where like you've got like 500 new users and like the server is super active. I'm like, the server is usually sleepy. Like, this makes no sense whatsoever. So, yeah, I was like, you know what?

I'm going to fight a bot with a bot. And I went over to my friend Claude. And I'm like, hey, SSH into this server here. I want you to connect to the Macedon API or just get right into the database or whatever. I don't care. And let's root these guys. guys out and see, you know, if we can get rid of them. And it went to, it went to task. It found over,

I think, 270 accounts that were basically, uh, and it like triangulated where they came from, who invited them, like, got down to like the root level of the account that, that, that was approved. And honestly, like, at first glance, it was one of those like, yeah, I could see, like, that could go either way, right? Um, we, we, we, we had it like set up where it was like, you read the thing and if it makes like if the sentence makes sense or you know and they're kind of talking about technology I guess we we could approve them um but in this case there was a bunch more a couple more things I guess we should have been looking at to moderate things a little bit better and I was kind of like looking around uh this all this stuff all comes in what waves right so like

if somebody's have if I'm having a problem then a bunch of other servers are having a problem so I went and looked and see what other Mastodon people were doing and I found one that was having problems with similar bots that were disseminating this way. And there was a repository they set up that kind of like outlined how to ban things. And I was like, hey, friend Claude, let's do this. And it just went to town and made like this, I don't know, kind of like, it suggested a bunch of things that we could use. And then basically if there's like two or three tests that.

that it will perform. One is, one, I guess, if, if, if the IP address that you're coming from is a registered or a known tour exit node, which is like, tour is like the,

uh, the secret internet or something behind the internet. So you get all the good stuff on the internet. Yeah, I guess so. Well, if you're coming from that, you're not getting any, uh, home tech.

Right. So, yeah, sorry. How am I going to get my drugs now, Seth? I don't know. I was buying them through our Mastodon server.

Massid on server, right? To all those Russian bots. That's what it was great. Yeah, so that's one of them. The next one is if you use a throwaway email domain, like a random, like one of those email randomizer, so that won't get you in. If you see that,

and then there's a couple other, I think there's a service that I haven't hopped up yet. They'll actually test to see if the email is real. So if it comes from like Gmail or something or a real domain, I think there's some kind of like test that it can do somehow. So I'm going to try that. It's free up into like, I don't know, 50,000 people or something.

like that. And it's kind of like set up to fight these bot farms and this, this exact kind of thing, right? So, so yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to see how this works. It's hooked up into our Slack chat now. So when somebody does apply, it kind of, right now, it's posting everybody. And TJ has seen these come through and Gavin has two. Like, I think there's what, like two or three today. They kind of recommends, you know, like, hey, here's the flags. that we're throwing up, and it recommends an action that you take, and you can reject or approve right there in Slack. You don't have to leave Slack.

You don't have to go to the MasterDon interface or anything like that. So it's kind of nice. And that's my Slack bot that I'm building out. I'm going to try and do some more with that, where we can, like, submit, like, you know, somebody posts a story inside the hub or something. We can add that to the show notes directly from there. So there's a couple of things I'd like to do with it.

in the future, and this is kind of like a little, the starting, I guess, of it. But it's cool to, like, made a Slackbot that will, like, do, what's it called? Like, two-way interactions. So there's, like, little buttons on there. And then, like, you can hit Reject or Approve,

and then the message will update based on what action you took and, you know, what the server says. So, yeah, um, fun little project. All, all done by my friend Claude, uh, with, you know, my assistant. Uh, but, uh, it,

I was out of town this weekend, so it didn't. It didn't take much. Like, I kicked it off. And then I walked away and forgot about it for a couple days. And I got back this morning. I was like, oh, it's always the problem. It's like, what's the state of this? And it's like, yeah, I just need to deploy.

You didn't say deploy this thing. So I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, go do it. And then everything started working. So, yeah, happy about that. And now we hopefully won't have these spam accounts coming in. In a couple of, you see how this works. there's a flag that I can throw that will be like

don't, just basically if you fail these two two or more of these tests, then you're automatically banned and they won't even notify us anymore. It just reject the account outright, so that'll be nice. It was pretty impressive. When I saw it pop up in our Slack channel and, you know, with the easy to press buttons,

I was like, yes, finally. Yeah. Yeah, it's so much easier than having to on a little website, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So, nice job. Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, like I said, this is something I've always wanted to do kind of, like, um, uh, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to,

have, ever had time to do it. And now I can just say, hey, make this, like, um, make this feature on and you know here's here's where all the things are that you need to to get to to understand like how to interact with slack and then uh it it just goes down and does it I don't have to worry about it so this is great it really is like I said empowering and it's like freeze up a lot of time to do other stuff too so yay vibe code all the things exactly exactly well I think that's going to wrap up this week we want to thank everyone for listening to the show but want to send a big special thanks for those who are able to support the show financially through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over at hometech.com

slash support and learn how you can become our patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge will each you an invite over to our private SlackChat the Hub where you can see videos for Gavin posted, and you know, well ahead of time. And I mean, again, that was great. So thanks, Jake. If you can't support financially totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up this week in HomeTech. Everyone, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week.

Till next time, take care.