HomeTech.fm - Episode 587 - CEDIA 2026, Hacked Cameras, and the $80 Echo Dot

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

On this week's show: CEDIA’s first-timer list hints at where custom integration is heading next, Sonos teases a new soundbar, Control4 gets new Google Home and Google TV integrations, Wyze builds privacy right into a $40 indoor cam, Amazon raises prices on Echo, Fire TV, and Kindle gear while also handing some Fire TV users Alexa Plus for free, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!Are These First-Time CEDIA Expo Exhibitors the Next Big Thing in Custom Integration?Sonos Teases New Soundbar Ahead of September Hardware Reveal | iPhone in CanadaChowmainsoft Introduces Google Home and Google TV Integrations for Control4HomeTech HeadlinesRecessed Entry Sensor - Ubiquiti StoreMova’s latest robot vacuum solves the kitchen stool problemWi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn’t chasing speed, and home networks need itThe lens in Wyze’s new $40 indoor camera retracts for privacyHackers Compromised 14,500+ Dahua Devices Using Credential Attacks, Auth Bypasses, and P2PFCC officially decides gigabit speeds are too good for youAmazon just hiked the prices for Echo, Fire TV, and Kindle products by up to 60 percentFire TV users are getting an Alexa Plus update – for freeAqara expands H1 Matter lighting lineup with new downlights and spotlightsFrom the homeautomation community on Reddit: I reverse engineered the Litter Robot 4 to control it 100% locally via Home Assistant. Custom firmware and install guide in description!From the homeautomation community on Reddit: I reverse-engineered local Ecobee control and put it on PyPI (no cloud, no dev key, no Home Assistant)From the homeassistant community on Reddit: Samsung Family Hub Reborn: Turning a Fridge Touchscreen into a Home Assistant Dashboard 🏠🥳Video: I Finally Sorted Out My Box of Mystery USB CablesTreedix USB Cable Tester 2.4" Screen for eMarker PD3.0/3.1 ResistorKorg nanoKONTROL2 Slim-Line USB Control Surface, BlackPhoton | Bring your agents to iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and beyondHot Dog Stand – The Game

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 28th, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. My date's gone. From Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston.

And from Pickering, Ontario. I'm Gavin Kappel. And welcome to the Home Tech podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology, paperclip still. Gavin's still playing the Paperclip game. TJ, did you beat the paper clip game? You just give up? No, I gave up after we recorded the show.

Oh, okay. So, Gavin, are you still on the original one? Yeah, and, you know, I'm kind of- A week later. I'm kind of pissed off because I got to reboot my computer, but I can't or else I lose everything. I don't think you could save your progress in this. Yeah, see, that was my problem,

is that I accidentally closed the tab, and I was like, well, I lost all that progress, not doing that again. It's been a whole week. It's going to hurt what I have to forcefully reboot this computer. Hmm. You're close. You're close. Just never reboot. It's fine. Yeah, I need to reboot.

We had a bunch of people. Yeah, you don't have to reboot. come on. We had a bunch of people in the in the Slack chat posting their scores earlier. So it seems like it did take off. And Morton, I think, stayed up. He's just, poor guy, he just started a new job. I kind of feel bad.

Do you, though? And now I'm like, he's playing paper clips. The crazy thing about this game is every time you think you've gotten to something, like, like, it just, it's like, what the hell is this new thing? It just pops up on your screen, and then all of a sudden it's like, Like, what does this have to do with paper clips? Like, you're so far away from what, from making paper clips. It's like solving world cancer and exploring the universe now.

And it's just crazy how this keeps going. It's a fun one. It all comes down to just click. What's funny, I think, is you can still click make a paper clip, right? Is this still have that button up there? No, no, mine's great out now. So now it's all automatic. Oh, you're automatic.

I can't even make a big. Even if I click make a paper clip, it's like one paperclip and I have made 371 octillion. I didn't even know what an octillion was. That's not even a real number. It must be because this game has introduced numbers to me that I've never heard of before. Yeah. It just keeps going up. Numbers get very large.

What's your say right now, Seth? Mine, I don't know what the number is, but it ended with 30-something with a bunch of zeros after it. If you hover over it, it actually gives you the name. Oh, well, I've closed it I don't know a long time ago. Oh, are you done? And I'm still playing. I only do this.

You beat the game. I feel like you don't beat the game, but what do I know? Do you beat the game, actually? Eventually, yeah, you'll beat the game. Are you just telling me that? Four months later. Yeah, four months later, I'll still be playing this thing.

Gavin never did an update again. I'll have all sorts of vulnerabilities on my computer because I've never patched it. Gotta beat this game. Got to beat this game. That's funny. Well, if you, if you, I have this down in the projects area, but we'll talk about it now. If you want another click game to play, I got inspired by that, that 21 switch gang switch we talked about last week.

Oh, yeah. And I made a little game that you guys can play for, it's called the, I don't know, 21 switch game. I named it a bunch of different things and then like it just came out like, well, I'll just make it hot, hot dog stand theme behind it. and make it, you know, like red and, and yellow. It didn't go overboard so TJ could play it. Like, I think it's respectable. But the goal here is if you've got to pretend that you're the manager and you're starting your shift at this place where they installed that 21 gang thing,

when you start, you basically have to turn on the lights. And sometimes you get it in one go. Sometimes you got to flip a bunch of switches. And you never know how you're supposed to, supposed to flip the switches there. Okay, that game drove me nuts. I'm sorry. I played it maybe like four times and I closed the tab and went back to my paper clips.

The 21 switch game, it really frustrated me. Oh, man, I missed this somehow. I need to play this. Yeah. Yeah, it's in our hub. Oh, by the way, I just had to Google it. And yes, you can beat the paperclip game. You can.

I know. So it actually says, yeah. how how what yeah i'll put a link to the the hot dog stand game hot dog stand the game i did see a screenshot of this this is fantastic it it it gives you about a minute glissy overdrive it gives you about a minute to figure out how to turn the lights on uh using 21 switches and and the electrician you know is a madman that that wired it we all know that so you know some of them are three ways some of them are four ways some of them i don't know Like, you just got to figure it out.

You got to turn them off. Oh, man, this is great. This is what you do instead of editing a show. I just want to, like, I just want to point that out again. I got inspired. I did this one pretty quick. This was AI. This was AI.

Sure, sure. This was like, I'm going to give it this prompt. I'm going to give it enough to go off of. And I'm going to fall asleep and see what I'm going to wake up to in the morning. And I let it go. And it came out with mostly this. I did a bunch of them. Thanks to you, Seth.

We've lost a province worth of trees. But you got this hot dog game, though. I mean, come on. What you need trees for? Yeah. Trees are not hot dogs. There's a couple of special features on here, Easter eggs, I guess, if you will.

The image on the wall of the hot dog is definitely crooked if you didn't notice that. But then every screw I made sure had a different angle on it. Oh, my, why? I can't unsee that. Sad. I can't unsee that. Oh, my God. Yeah, so there you go.

Just made sure that, you know, there was a way to do it. I found a random function. And you know my friend, I forget who made this one. It was either Chad or Claude, one of the two. I think they both had their hands in it. But yeah, just went through and did this. So it gives you about a minute to flip things. And if you don't get it, then it tells you your jobs at risk or whatever,

and you can start over. But it goes up to like six lights. And the six lights somehow wire to the 20-some-odd switches. And it gets harder and harder. So there you go. I don't have a Reddit account. out right now. So somebody should post this in the original thread. So that way they know about it. I was going to do that. And then I went and I was looking at it and their rules are so like crazy.

And that one, I'm like, yeah, I don't like these people. It's all right. I don't, I don't care. I don't care. You know, they say any publicity is good publicity. Yeah, I suppose. I don't know. I was inspired to do that. It was a fun thing. And I was just kind of trying to tinker with some stuff and set stuff over the night. And I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. Let me just give it a long prompt and see what happens. happens. And that's what it sped out. So there we go. Let's see. Oh, yeah, Cedia is next week. Next week. Yeah, that's what they say. Gavin's going on a boat. TJ's going to Cedia. No, no, I'm not going to Cedia. No, I'm going to middle of nowhere,

Indiana. Woo. Right. Yay. I'll be at Cedia in the DMF booth if you want to come say hi. I'll be there. Come see hi. I don't, I'll be doing something. I'll be talking about our website or something. We haven't really figured out. But I, I'm supposed to get the script of what's going to happen by Thursday. So then maybe I'll know what I'm going to talk about. Yeah. Another year in Denver, correct? Another year in Denver.

Is it somewhere else next year, I think? I think it's like Texas or something. I don't know. I thought they were in Denver for a while. And then maybe this new company got involved and said, no, we're not doing that anymore. Denver sucks. Get out of Denver. Yeah.

Denver was better than the other places like Atlanta, Indiana, and Texas. And Texas sucks, too. Yeah. the yeah, Texas is a weird plate. Like it's next to was that deep Ellum area, I guess it's the name of it, but it's not like, uh, it's, there's nothing to do around the convention center other than like taking a cab or Uber way over there to that other area.

So it's like, well, why not just have a convention center in an area of things to do? Novel idea. Novel idea. If you build it, they'll come, Seth. I think that's what they say. I don't think so. They didn't come though. They moved further away.

Uh, oh, we've got. We got first-time exhibitors. There's a link to C-Pro, and the first-time exhibitors were the things that I read the same three that I read last week. So I'm not sure what that story is about, but we'll put a link to it in the show notes. It did have a picture of that weird little robot thing that's supposed to go around and be a companion for your home. So that'll be there. Oh, yeah, like a humanoid robot? It's a homebot one.

It's a Coco, an AI-powered companion robot for the home. Well, that's not going to be legal next year, so might as well not even visit that one. You know, that's built in America. That's true. Well, so yeah, I got that. I got it, oh, we always got to give a shout out to Chalmaine. A friend of the show, Alan Chow. He's done a lot of sponsors for the home tech, happy hour things in the past,

and I just want to give him a shout. He's got a control four driver that brings in Google audio and video devices in the Home Control 4 ecosystem where you can control them over IP. It's a Googlecast driver. So check that out. If you have Google Home, Nest speakers, Nest hubs, Chromecast audio, and other cast-compatible devices. So there you go. And let's see. And Sonos. Sonos is teasing a new sound bar ahead. So I may be able to see a new sound bar in the booth next to mine. So we'll see how that goes. That'd be cool. Last year,

they had a coffee bar in Sonos in the Sonos booth. And I'm hoping they do the same this year. That'd be nice. Because I could just walk right over and get coffee anytime I want. You'll have to see if they have the multi-amp on display. I'm sure they will. No, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, they'll have to. They'll have to. So I'm interested to see one of those in person at some point. So, yeah. See you yet next week. I don't really have anything planned. I have to work. If we're there, we'll figure out how to do some home tech happy hour or something.

We'll just go get some drinks somewhere. So how about that? And keep it low key. Let's see. With that said, we got a bunch of home tech headlines. So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. Let's do it.

All right. Ubiquity. We haven't heard from these guys in a long time. But now they've got a new recessed entry sensor for 30. It's a super link compatible device and it will monitor door open and door closed status. And it's recess. It doesn't stick on the wall. So you can drill it into the surface.

It has a three year battery life and it requires the super link gateway for, yeah, not bad. $39. I think that's what comparable to what those types of sensors. It's a pretty good price. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, recess sensors are always a little more expensive. There's a little more that goes into making them and making sure they work and everything like that. So they're always a more expensive option compared to like a normal door contact.

And I've seen like Z wave versions of the recess door. I can't remember what company had them again. But it gives it that clean look though. Yeah. You don't have something around the edge and stuff like that. So, you know, I've seen somebody make their own. They 3D printed something and they made their own as well, which was pretty cool. I made a look into that eventually for my doors because I like the clean look of it.

I wonder if they tell you not to install it in a metal door. Yeah, most of the time they say that for the recess ones. Yeah. And even like a lot of the regular door contacts, they say you need to like space it off the metal door or something like that too. I'll tell you right now, don't install it in a window. Why not? Go ahead and try. You can drill one, drill a window and find out.

Did you recess door contacts for windows? Yeah. I guess the recess part will go against the frame. Yeah, it always goes in the frame and then you put the magnets. the door. Yeah. Our frame probably isn't big enough and I'll hit brick.

Yeah. They're images. They have that the other way. Yeah, we usually have to drill out the door frame quite a bit. So it's the same with like a door lock too. A lot of times the frame itself isn't deep enough for the actual latch. So got to drill it out some more.

Yeah, they have the actual device going in the door on their videos and everything. Yeah. Yeah, on the doors, that's how I imagine it. They put it in the door and on the frame is just the, um, the little magnet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I feel like this is like, of those things too. Maybe it's like an old wives tale or something like that, but I was always taught that you want the, um, electronics to be stationary at all times. Yeah, that's what I would think.

And the magnet to be, the magnet to be the moving part. And so we always install the door contact itself on the frame and then the magnet on the door. And honestly, I don't think it makes that much of a difference. Yeah, probably fine.

It does, it does actually make a little bit of sense because then the electronics aren't moving all that much, but it's wireless. It's wireless. Yeah. Okay. cares. Everything's going to be wireless. That's right. We got Mova. They have a robot vacuum that Jennifer Pattison Tui has reviewed over on the verge. And this one has a little wax on, wax on, wax off arms on.

I don't know if you guys have seen this. Look a little picture of this guy. The title here is it solves the kitchen stool problem, which I guess I have, I don't know, my vacuum kind of sometimes goes under the kitchen stools and then sometimes says, no, I don't feel like doing that today. it'll go under one of them out of four. I don't know. Like, it just decides what it wants to do. But this one has little arms that reached down in there, and it'll mop and clean underneath the, up to seven inches away from the robot body. So there we go.

Just little arms that come out. I feel like I wouldn't want to deal with this long term. I feel like it would just break out at a certain point. And so I just move my stuff out of the way. Yeah. That's how I deal with that. It's $12.99 too. So, yeah.

If you want to pay $1,300 for this and have a little karate kid. vacuum going on there. That could buy me a new Mac Mini, Seth. No, he could not. It could finance one for a little while. It would be a good Mac Mini,

but you could buy one for $899. You can, yeah. I would say even the base model Mac Mini at that price is still pretty good. Yeah, as long as you just want to do regular old Mac Mini things, but man, the $450 price they came at

what, like two years ago? Oh, man. Who knew? Who knew? Let's see, Wi-Fi 8 is coming out. There's a story over on XTA developers. Sure. I thought this is funny.

Wi-Fi is coming out, and it's according to them, it's the first Wi-Fi upgrade that's not going to be chasing down the speeds of things. Oh, that's good. Yeah, yeah. I think we've gone fast enough in Wi-Fi. Yeah, we're just talking about this. Yeah.

Right now, at least. Right. So it's going to reach a theoretical, sorry, Wi-Fi 7 reaches a theoretical throughput of 23 gigabits per band. It's more than enough for current, internet speed. They're like, what else do we do?

And so now they're going to, uh, they're, they're going to work on having, you know, more of those spatial streams. Uh, they're, they're just going to, they're going to make the standard a little bit better. Just not, but not, not be chasing like, let's go for speed. Let's go for reliability. You know, like, let's make this work right.

So they're just going to more everything is what I hear. 25% increase in throughput and a different signal to interference and noise signal levels. Reduce latency by 25%. that's good. And then decreased Mac protocol data unit loss

by 25%. So they're, this is like, this is one of those like, we messed it all up. Now let's go fix all the bugs releases that they're going to do. So I think Wi-Fi 8,

I will probably upgrade to Wi-Fi 8 whenever it comes out. Like just to get the speed boost, but also all this extra stuff that's going to make everybody else's life better, even even my Wi-Fi 4 devices I still have laying around. You know, yeah, yeah.

Let's make this. Let's make it all work together, right? Yeah, I agree. I'm totally all for this because I think when it comes to speed, I'm at the good speed. I'm at a good speed now. Wi-Fi 7 gave you good speed. Wi-Fi 6 gave me a good speed.

Yeah, I don't even know if I'm using Wi-Fi 6 altogether, but I'm good with the speed. It's the reliability, the roaming, the devices dropping off, things like that. Even the range, if they can increase all that and make it all better, it just, it's better all around. Yeah, and the silly thing, I don't know if Wi-Fi 8. could solve this problem, like Wi-Fi itself, and it's just a vendor problem. But the fact that, like, smart home devices cannot see the 2.4 giga-hurt signal and mixed in with

the 5-gaghertz signal, like, fix that, please. I think it's a client device problem. I think so, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. But there's got to be a way that, like, it could, like, trick it or something like that. I don't know. But those are the problems we want to fix at this point, because we've been chasing speed for too long.

Like, it's already, it's already too fast. Like, I cannot even get the speeds at my house. Well, I'm off for this. Wi-Fi 8 sounds like it's going to be a good release and probably would be the first one. If you have like an old Wi-Fi 5 or 4, you know, router later on, you haven't upgraded to 6 or 7. Just wait because 8 will be around and it'll be so much better for all these things. Yeah, they're also talking about seamless roaming for transitioning from one axis point to another. There you go. All that stuff there, all the stuff that's like just been a pain, it looks like they're going to address or they want to address with this release.

I don't even know if I'm using Wi-Fi 6 right now. Maybe my phone is, but I don't think I have many devices. I only put my computer and my phones on the Wi-Fi 6 and everything else I put down to 5 and 4. Like everything in the house, IOT, everything that's not hardwired to Ethernet uses Wi-Fi 4. The only thing that's on the fast Internet is two phones and two computers. That's it. And then everything else is either hardwired or at garbage Wi-

Great when Unify releases their Wi-Fi 8 stuff. Yeah. Well, they release two of our versions, so make sure you get the second version. Don't go for the first one. The first one is always awful, so. Okay. You get really hot, though. If you need something to keep your cup warm.

That's true. Like, yeah, their devices get really warm. So I hope with Wi-Fi 8, they are able to control temperature, at least. That'd be funny. It's funny. It's funny to post on, like, the ubiquity Facebook groups and the Reddit, It's the subredits all the time. It's like, this device feels really hot.

Is this normal? And it's like, oh, it's your first ubiquity device. That's cute. Welcome. All right, Wise has announced a new indoor pantizzle camera. And its standout feature here is a physical privacy lens that the lens actually tilts down. It retracts into the body so it can't see into the room. So we were talking about this last week with the issues we were having with, well, I was having with my pet feeder and talking about having cameras in the house to make sure the cat did get fed while we were out.

And what I do to mitigate, TJ, you use like outlets and you just physically turn the devices off to make sure they're off when you are home. Would this appeal to you, those little camera that just makes its lens go away? Yeah, honestly, this is, I like this idea.

And for $40, that's a good idea to me. I'm using at my office, I'm using an Akara, I don't know, one of their cat cameras, you know, that we've talked about previously on the show. And that feature is the same. on their cameras that when you turn it on privacy mode, the actual lens shifts down.

And so it's not physically present at all. And so I like that idea because, like I said, I just don't want to, I want to know that my cameras cannot see anything. And for software, like a software power off or something like that, I just don't fully trust. Yeah.

As long as the lens is facing you, yeah, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also the perception of other people, you know, to in the house or whatever.

It's like they, they can see that it doesn't have a lens and maybe it makes them more comfortable with that. So I can, I can definitely see the appeal of this. Well, it's indoor only. Unlike the older Cam Pan version 3, had IP 65,

and in low light, the frame rate drops down from 20 frames to 15. So maybe not as good as the bigger brother of the Cam Pan V4, which also records in 4K. This one's basic. I think that'll do the good job inside. inside if this is what you need and you want you want any privacy i think wise like most of there's stuff you have to unlock with like a payment or something like that yeah for like the the people detection and stuff like that yeah but you still get uh micro sd recording 24 7 so okay

at least you still get that feature but yeah if you want any of the the actual smart detection stuff you do have to pay for it okay well it's probably worth it yeah and honestly it's like it is one of the better more economical camera systems too so yeah it is worth a shot and honestly another thought I had about the privacy lens thing, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to add that to cameras. You know, if it's already PTZ and everything, you're basically just creating a way for it to recess into the camera.

So it does make sense that it's only indoor rated, but this seems like an easy thing that most cameras could add to it if they already are PTZ. Yep, yep. Well, speaking of cameras, hackers have hacked into 14,500 or more DaHua devices. according to the hacker news here. They have basically

the cybersecurity researchers at hunt.io of disclosed details of a campaign that they say have compromised more than 14,000 DeHua devices between June 17th and July 22nd of this year using credential attacks, two authentication bypass laws, and peer-to-peer,

which is P-to-P relay technique. So interesting. that that's a lot of cameras. Holy cow, that's a lot of cameras. Yeah, this isn't surprising, especially if they're accounting for, you know, like the white label cameras

and stuff like that because there's tons of these third-party cameras out there that are Daha cameras. And they, is that how we say it now? I don't know how you say it. Honestly,

every time that I've talked to somebody about this, they say it a different way. So it's kind of like Schleg, you know? I was just about to say that. I heard somebody talking about it today and they're like,

Schlogger, I'm like, what are they talking? Oh, they're talking about the lock. Somebody the other day said Schleggy, and I was like, I don't think that one's right. But who knows how you actually say these? But yeah, there's all kinds of these white label cameras and stuff that you can buy on Amazon.

And it's not surprising that this stuff happens because I can tell you right now, when I bought a, I think it was a hike vision or Hick Vision, depending on where you are in the world, camera. And it was a white label camera under a different brand. And I couldn't even set the password to anything that was like a common. complex password. Like I couldn't use like special characters and numbers and stuff like that. Like it was like I could only use the most basic password. And so when you think about that and you think about people's ability to create passwords and everything, yeah, this is going to happen. And it's not a surprise. No, no. And it wasn't too long ago we were talking about, you know, what are they using this stuff for?

It's a botnets. And I think this is mostly botnets. We were talking about the, what's it called, the Android TV things. that you pick up from Amazon, right? I guess they're using that for relays, like VPN relays into the house. And they're doing all sorts of stuff, like hacking attempts. This happens because, like, at an IT level, you're like, well, we don't have any customers in Russia,

so basically let's just block all of Russia's domains. Like, any traffic coming from there, we just block. Well, if you buy a $100 Android TV thing that's infected with whatever this VPN thing is. Or your Samsung or LGTV has an app installed that has this VPN on it. They're just coming in through your TV and now they have your IP address,

which is in America or North America, and they attack you that way. So it's like they're already getting in. So I found out about that little hack kind of after we talked about it. And I'm like, oh, that makes total sense. That's why they're doing this. Yeah, yeah.

I think these cameras are pretty powerful processors. I wonder if they couldn't do that just on one of these cameras. I bet they could. I need somebody to make a botnet of these and make it an AI thing. Add AI. AI botnet. Yeah, might as well.

You can go it like Skynet or something. Yeah. You might as well like distribute the AI processing across millions of computers. That's what I'm saying. You know, let's put it to good use. Like when you're not using your botnet, just have it look for a cure for cancer. Why not? I was going to suggest the same thing.

Why isn't that, you know, why aren't people doing that? You know, I had cameras and solve cancer. To that, you know. Let's see. next on the list and why we list of why we can't have nice things on the list here.

Let's see. FCC has officially decided that gigabit speeds are just too good for you. The a couple of years ago, the goal for the United States was to get to gigabit.

They were going to define high speed internet in the United States is gigabit download and 500 megabit upload speeds. I think everybody agreed. Yeah, that's probably the bare minimum of what we should we should call like high speed internet you know since everybody else in the world has like gigabit just thrown at them for free and here in the

us we're like yeah no that's that's just too fast comcast was actually arguing that americans don't need that um back in back in 2013 so uh no no i guess comcast has won the argument here um because they're they're going they're going to they're going to raise it the definition right now is 25 megabits down, three up. Now they're going to go up to, hold on to guys, 100 down, 20 up. So that's where we are. That's like 20 years ago.

Like seriously. Like, if I had that internet connection, I feel so bad for people. It's so, it's so ridiculous. It's the United States for you. Yeah, Brendan Carr's a dummy.

And it's the t-shirt you had. It is. And it's true, still. Like, I feel we're at the point of, let's get everybody. the gigabit and let's just rule out the internet connection as, you know, an issue. So we don't have to worry about our internet speeds anymore. Gigabets good enough.

Like, you can handle many streams you could do. It's never going to be your issue. You'll have issues maybe on your Wi-Fi or your internal network. But let's just rule out, you know, that your when is not the issue. Well, not in America. We can't have Gigabit. It's just too fast. Yeah.

That's not going to be the minimum, which it is. literally everywhere else in the world. Think of all the dank memes that people are missing out on because they can't, they can't get gigabit internet. Exactly. How much of AI tokens they could spend if they had faster internet? That's what I'm saying. I mean, think of all the money.

We're leaving on the table. People can't use AI. Let's see. We got another, well, we got good things here. We've got good things here from Amazon. Well, no, we got one bad and one good thing. So hold on. What is going on?

Yeah, Amazon just hiked all the prices. They just quietly raised all the prices on pretty much all of the its devices. Echo, Fire TV, Kendall products, all of them went up like 60%. So the Echo Dot fifth generation, it was $49, now $79. So that's a 60%, 60%. The Fire TV stick 4K Max, Gavin loves this thing. $59. $59. Wait, I've moved on from that. Oh, you've moved on from that. Oh, you've used to Roku. Okay. I found the Amazon stuff just too much ads. Oh, that's right. You were switching off Amazon, went to Roku, and that's okay, yeah, okay, sorry about that. Echo Spot, $79.

It's gone up $30 to $109. Jeez. Yep. Let's see. There's a whole list of these things. We'll put a list in the show. I don't see anything else here. Let's see.

Oh, the Echo Show 15, $2.99 now it's $3.49. So not bad on that one. But, yeah, some of these other ones, other ones got pretty high. Anyway, prices are going on. Other news, prices are going up. What a surprise. That's a story. Oh, man, that sucks.

Yeah. Got those steel tariffs coming in. Thanks, Canada. Oh, wait. Yeah, come on. How do you like that Lake America, Gavin? You know what? It will only be on your maps.

The funny part is you can call it whatever. Whatever you want to call it, it will be only right in your part of the world. The rest of the world is going to keep it Lake Ontario. We are your part of the world. Soon we'll be. You guys are southern Canada are going to call it whatever you want. We're going to make you the 12th prop. The 13th.

Oh, okay. Yeah, good luck with that. We are out of bombs, though. It's probably a pretty good time to attack. Yeah, yeah. While you guys are looking one way, we'll invade you from another direction. Oh, man.

All right, well, good news from Amazon, though. Amazon's rolling out Alexa Plus to eligible fire TV users in the U.S. for free. This is something new. This is something good for free. According to the Ambient includes Amazon's Ember Smart TV,

Fire TV, Cube, fire TV stick, and the high-sense Panasonic TV. with Alexa Plus built in. And that's a notable change because Amazon previously kept the Alexa Plus on Fire TV behind either a prime membership or a separate subscription. So you're getting nice for free. That's that's free.

That's AI for free is good AI, I think. I don't know if you could say it's free. They just raise the price of the things. Well, I mean, you're paying more money and then you're going to get Alexa Plus. And the other sad part is you're more likely going to get way more ads and stuff like that too, you know, to fund all. all this. And eventually,

you know. That's what the plus is, Gavin. Well, when they come out with the, the Alexa plus max, you're going to have to pay the subscription to get, you know, the extra features and stuff. Oh. They'll get you eventually. Like, they're good at roping you in with something cheap and free and then you get addicted to it.

And then all of a sudden there's a new subscription. I've noticed, I'm not noticing that. I'm not noticing that. Like, that's the thing. But, like, I'm seeing that happen, like, in real time with all this AI stuff. they're just like, right now, Anthropic is like, hey, you got 50% more token usage this week, you know, use it up. Go for it. And I'm boy, did I go for it. But I'm waiting for tomorrow around so I get going back again. But yeah, like all of them are doing these little like promo

things. They're just trying to rope you in. I'm noticing like little changes in the program. The program's working better, better and better. But like, they're really trying to get you into their ecosystems and bring you in. Chad GPD is like putting, uh, like I saw like health data. They want you to send over your health data to them and like, man, they're just, they're just trying to get you addicted and they want you in the door. Um, but what I, what I find funny is like, all this stuff that they're doing, you can do, you can do locally if you pay enough money for your hardware that you can find the hardware. You can do it locally, but like, they're really, they're really going to flip that switch one of these days. And people are going to be like,

well, I'm stuck on this. I can't get off, you know? It's like, it's like, it's like, having the blue bubbles on your on your iPhones like I can't get off that blue bubble I got to stay there you've a green bubble now oh not a friend anymore so uh anyway um yeah that's happening and we got some matter news here we got akara um expanding its h1 lighting line in china to a new full color down lights with spotlights uh it's the same dual stack approach that we saw over on the light switch controller zygdi by default with the option to switch over to matter over thread so and we'll matter over thread device here. It's a built-in 12-watt ceiling fixtures for the 75-millimeter cut-out and then a recessed downlight and adjustable spotlight versions, plus 2436 and 60-degree beam angle

options. So quite a few options there. This is all in China, though, but maybe it'll come over here. It's a car. And if not, you can buy it on Alley Express. Exactly. And it will eventually make its way, so just give it time. Wow, they go from 1800K, which is basically red, up to 12, thousand K. That's insane. I don't even know what 12,000 K looks like. I know the 5,000 K, but I've never seen 12,000. It's going to be a bright blue color, I'm assuming. Wow. But they are saying that it reads RA97 for color rendering. So that's near, you actually get some good color off of these things, if that's to be believed. Interesting. To see what these look like when we get them over here one of these days. All right, I think

that wraps up the home tech headlines. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 587. All right, nothing in the mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week from courtesy of TJ surfing on Reddit. You're welcome. Oh, my gosh. This is one of those things you can't unsee. What happens if you have an old new tone in your house?

And this may not even be a new tone. This is a new tone. No, no, this is the M&S. I installed these before. So I know what this is. It's the M&S intercom system in your house. And you want to have ubiquity, what are those ubiquity chimes, the Wall Mountain Chimes installed? Well, you can just drill a hole in them and install the chime right there.

And it looks as good as you think it does. Which is not good at all, just so you know. This looks awful. My favorite part of this, aside from the one that's just been straight up drilled into the front cover. At least it kind of looks centered, you know? It's close. Yeah. It's centered where the speaker was, I think.

Yeah, that's good enough, you know? Good enough. The other one, he mounted behind the speaker grill. And so there's no cut out. But I guess maybe he had more depth or something to work with there. But my favorite part here is the way that it's strapped on and it's using some zip ties. And there's some like little, he probably drilled. It looks like he drilled a holes in the zip size and then used that to basically compress the back of the unified chime

against the back of the speaker grill. So it, you know, it's there. It works. It's not good. Don't do this. This is like, I think, honestly,

I think we need a new section of the show that's DIY, like D-I-W-H-Y. Don't do this one. Because, because, no, we should not do this.

D-I-don't. Right. I don't do, this is, no. So what does this do? This is basically just, it doesn't do intercom anymore,

clearly. I mean, that you know, maybe it does. The Unified thing doesn't have a microphone in. It's just a speaker, right?

No, it's just a speaker. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is honestly, like I understand what you're doing because like patching drywall sucks. As we know, Gavin.

Anyway, this is awful. Don't do this. Just put it like above it, you know? I don't like this. This hurts. Not a preve-a-te. It's also two colors because the M&S is like 20 years old. And so it's like, yeah, beige.

Ugh. Yeah, I hate it. And if you do this, don't do this. Like TJ said, just. It's put it above. Anywhere else. Just take the thing out of the wall and pass the drywall. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, we'll get, we'll get, you know, if you need support, we know how to get the Toronto's Raptors guy to call you up and say, you know, give you motivation support. So, man, I just, I just, this is ugly. But, you know, to each the wrong. It's not my health. Do you have to disclose this when you sell your house? I don't think this is going to end up in your No this is the thing that people see When they're walking around your house

And they're like, oh man, what else is this guy do? Yeah, I was thinking about that If I ever sell my house, the fact that we cut out the old doorbell I'd have to cut it back in and get rid of Yeah, just leave it Just leave it Well then I got to leave them PEOE and everything Or else their doorbell doesn't work

When you want that old PEOA switch for Gavin Get rid of it, come on I mean, here what happens is people move And they take like the TV off the wall for example, but they don't leave the arms. And so they leave the bracket. The bracket, yeah. You can't do anything with the bracket.

So you can do whatever you want when you move out, Kevin. Yep, yep. There we go. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Two weeks in a row, TJ, serving us interesting things off Reddit. Thanks. You are welcome. If you have any feedback, questions, ideas, or the show, or picks of the weeks,

give us a shout or email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Or you can head on over to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right, project updates. Well, first we got a couple of things from the Home Assistant News from the community, really. A couple of people are doing like get off the cloud projects here. Someone, this is also on Reddit, I think Gavin, you posted this one. Someone reverse engineered Litter Robot 4, and they're just doing it 100% locally over through Home Assistant. So they got custom firmware and an install guide.

And then someone else also, they reverse engineered for local EcoB control. and basically, you know, have a Python script here. So what you could do is use that, I guess, and integrate it with Home Assistant through MQTT. But what they did was it's not really reverse engineering. They're making a HomeKit bridge and pairing it with this thing. And then that's rebroadcasting over to Ecobee. So, yeah, a good workaround for local control,

your Ecobee thermoset doesn't rely on their, Ecobee's famous servers that die a lot. A lot. A lot. Yeah. A lot. I wrote, that's a funny story, I wrote that driver for Control 4 a long time ago

and I babyed that thing along but like we weren't, we weren't that like, we weren't very large, like how many, you know, we sold or whatever. And then Control 4 was like,

hey, we want to buy your driver and they came and bought the driver. And then they released it to all their dealers, you know, it's free. There's no licensing or anything with it. And like EcoE's servers just tanked.

Just absolutely. Like their servers were horrible. They would serve like, when they would fail, they would fail and they would return just like an HTML page. It was just like the worst, the worst thing ever. So yeah. Yeah, I remember talking the engineer that ended up having to work on the driver after I did. And he was like, oh, I hate to. Anyway, yeah,

EcoB. But they should just have just a local control. Like, it just should be like you could be directly to Home Assistant, however that happens. I don't know. Yeah. And the other problem, I think you mentioned it in the Reddit post was, you know, when you're adding, you buy a new one, you're adding it to your home assistant. You need to get developers. key, but they're not as easy to get anymore, and that's one of the problems. Like, so this is kind of just a workaround for that and then keeps it local. Some things don't work on certain models, but he lays it all out there, but I like seeing stuff like this.

Yeah, I, I went to, after I read this, I was like, oh, I, every day I see, not every day, but like every time I go to the home assistant thing, it says, oh, ECOB is in your house. you should integrate it. And I'm like, okay, I'll finally do that. And it was like, oh, you need the developer key. And I was like, okay, so I'll go make one. There was one there. And I put it in with the username and password and it didn't work.

It failed. I'm like, oh, man, maybe it's bad. So I'm trying to make a new one, Gavin. And it didn't, it was like, the server was just like we're crashing and stuff. It's like, no, we can't do that. But I ended up figuring out like, oh, I just need the developer key, paste that in, hit pair, and it works fine. But yeah, man, that's crazy that they don't really. they don't have developer keys anymore?

Because it said once you delete it, it's gone. Like, you can't get it back. I don't know. I haven't read too much on Ecobee these days. You're muted, Gavin. You know why? Because I meant to ask Seth, should I accept a reject?

No, my paperclips game. It says start over again in a new universe or eliminate value drift permanently. You got to eliminate it, man. Go to war. Eliminate the value drift? Yeah, do it. All right.

Reject. But anyways, yeah, the echo be something I don't mess with often. And if I ever get to the point where, you know, I had to reset it and I can't connect it back, I'm just going to get rid of it at that point, you know. It worked well for now, but there's some alternatives out there that we'll do better.

Yeah, I'm ready to move off the thing. So, yeah, I still have a couple of integrations that do work with it exclusively, including the flare vents that I have. But they have other integrations with the thermostat's too, so yeah, maybe time to move on. You guys have seen my adventures with messing with an Android touch, large Android touchscreen device.

That's been a fun device. Yeah, this guy, it looks like he bought the Samsung hub fridge door or something. I don't know. He's going to touch it into, he's going to turn it into a touchscreen. Yeah. So he wants to turn this into a 21-inch touchscreen for home assistant. So I guess we'll have to follow his. journey because it looks like he wants to really pull this apart.

He did get it cranked up on YouTube on it, it looks like. So it kind of works. He says, once the screens is finished, the screen will become a proper home assistant control panel for my home with features such as home control, a couple of different devices, temperature monitoring, et cetera. So he's starting from zero here. Yeah, I mean, you can probably get them for pretty cheap if you can find one,

so. Or even free, so. So is he just using the screen or is he putting it back in a fridge? I think he's just using the screen. It'd be cool if you put it back in the fridge. No, the fridge broke because it's a Samsung. Oh, that's true. Exactly. So a useful thing out of it.

Which I'm going to bring up in my project section, but I totally feel his pain, yeah. Yeah, he has figured out that it uses a Rock 4C plus to drive the original Samsung display through HTML. So he can use the screen. Very cool. All right. Well, we got a bunch of projects today on the, on the blog. Gavin, you're up first. What's going on, man? Hold on. Six more clicks. This guy. I beat the game. Nice. What a loser. It only took you a week.

Combat programming. Ooh, sound. Yeah, you get the little music. Oh, old games. 2017. All right. Time for some projects. First off, I finally beat the paper clips game. So there is an ending to it. So if you're, you know. So Seth wasn't lying. He wasn't lying. I got to the end of it. Um, you. You. you know, and it's really like, it's weird, but like it keeps you hooks. So I have to admit, it was a week's worth. I can reboot my computer now. I'm good. Now, wait, we're on the show, Gavin.

Don't reboot yet. Oh, not now, not now. But, all right. So other than that, it's been a very interesting week. So, you know, I put sensors all over the house, you know. And it's always been with the wife. Why are you putting that sensor? Why do you have that sensor, you know?

And I've always been in the situation, you know, in case, in case, in case. Well, this week, two things happened that censors saved us, which was very interesting. So my droplet, which monitors water flow in our house, alerted me that, you know, there was an unusual flow right when I was about to leave the house. And interestingly enough, went back inside and one of the taps was left running. So I was like, brilliant. So, you know, I showed the white notification. I was like, see, that's why I have these things, you know. That could have been disastrous.

Who knows if it would have overflown, backed up? Who knows? Right? So it saved us there. But not just that. I have sensors in our fridge that monitor the temperatures and stuff. And if they drop or go too high or something like that, I get notifications. Well, on the weekend, that happened too.

And discovered that my Samsung fridge was a piece of crap was struggling to cool down the fridge. So I had to do some maintenance and, you know, like troubleshooting and stuff. And I got it back all working. But the fact that the sensor alerted me. It saved us from, you know, who knows, food getting spoiled. If I left it, who knows, did pay attention to it or didn't know. But it saved us there too because we had certain things in the freezer, ice and stuff. If they had all melted, then you would have had water all over the floor and it would have been a bigger problem.

So don't be afraid to throw extra sensors around your house because they'll pay off when they save you from something like this. Like, I have to admit, I've had a few incidents like our, washing machine was leaking once. And it picked us up, it picked it up and notified me, hey, there's water here. And we went and looked and lo and lo and behold, the washing machine was leaking and just turned it off and cleaned up the water. And we saved the day. It could have been much worse. So, yeah, I had a, I had a client that just moved into a new house, like literally last year. And we sold them like, I think two or three water leak sensors. And they put them, I think, around like the hot water heater and a couple other places. And they

already had a water leak and the sensors notified them and they were so happy and they're like, all right, we're going to add them literally everywhere now. And I was like, you should. I mean, they're like a one-time cost. You don't have to worry about it. And then like you don't have to worry about water damage them. Yeah, I've been, so I had a bunch of the car sensors and the problem with them is when you added them to Zygby, uh, other Zygby, um, controllers, they would always drop off as we found like the temperature sensors. The older ones would always drop off. Not reliable. Yeah. So eventually. I got the Akara hub that then exposes them to home assistant.

So I brought them all out of the graveyard. And I had like an excess amount. So I started throwing them around the house behind toilets. You know, one kind of leak in my bathroom. My tap was leaking at one point. I picked it up. So I throw all the excess ones all over the house. You can never have too many because when it does pick up something,

uh, it saves you a lot more money than you really spent, right? Because some of the water leaks could cost you a lot of money. Mm-hmm. Another thing I picked up this week, I saw this on a YouTube channel, Alex on his YouTube channel, K-T-Z-S-Systems. And I just thought this was great and I had to get one and play with it myself. But it's a USB cable tester, right? It's by a company called T-R-E-E-D-I-X.

What? T-R-E-E-D-I-X. I knew you were going to give you a hard time about that name. I don't know. I know. When he says it, he has an English accent. When he says it, it doesn't sound as bad as when I see it. Yeah, it sounds awful when you're.

say it, but I'll take your word for it. Yeah, yeah. So it's a USB cable tester from a company called Tree Dix. You can pick it up by, um, off Amazon. You don't have to say that, you don't have to say the name anymore. What, tree Dix? Yeah. Yeah.

How many? You know, tree. Dicks. But, um, it's, it's like 50 US dollars. Probably like 90 Canadian, but this thing is cool. So basically you plug in, it runs off a battery or you can use, uh, USB, uh, a USB power and you plug in both ends of the USB cable into it and it analyzes a cable and it tells you the things like does it do power, does it do data, you know, how much power it does, you know,

what's the data speed it does, etc., etc., right? All about the cable. USB cables I've discovered have become so complicated and it's so annoying that when I pull out some cables to try and flash something and it doesn't work, you find out it's a data cable and you got to grab one, but you don't know these things. So I had a whole bag full of cables. I just started pulling them out. And very shockingly, I found most of my cables were like a lot of cables were power only cables, right? Which was really weird because I guess those are the cables you get with your various devices. They don't need to transfer data. So they just, they cheap out. Yeah, they cheap out for the few cents or whatever they save. So a lot of those cables, then I'm going to start labeling as power only. But even

the more shocking thing is a lot of the ones that did USB data as well, they were only USB 2, even though they were USB C cables and stuff like that. A lot of them just do USB 2 are very low speeds, very low data power

transfer, and I was kind of shocked like very few of my cables were, and these are expensive cables I was testing too. I had some expensive ones. Same thing. Very few of my cables actually had were USB 3 speeds and can do good power.

So I'm going to go through, use this little device, check on all my cables. I'll probably just start labeling them. It's just, you know, it's a headache, right? Trying to find a data cable, for example. So now I can label them and know which ones I can use. So I just thought I'd share this, probably hopefully get somebody to spend some money. Once again, it's called T-R-E-E-D-I-X, you know.

That's a good idea, minus the name. because I've always wondered what my cables are capable of. Yeah. But I've just never bought anything to test them out with. Yeah, it's really cool because I have probably like a lot of people listening have like a box of USB cables out there. And you need one, you just go in the box, you pull it, not thinking that, you know, like it may not transfer data. And then you try and do something and you realize it's not working. You think it's a bad cable and you pull out another cable.

But no, this actually tells you the capabilities of the cable. And some cables even have a chip in it that will communicate, with the device and tell you what its capabilities are. So it's really cool to see the data that kicks out. So I highly recommend it if you want to clean up all your USB cables. And we'll include a link to the YouTube channel. He explains everything in that YouTube video. And finally, after getting a big push from our friend Jake with a video from Jack Armstrong,

the drywall's fixed. Whoa. I'd like to know. He's done it. It's been fixed, you know, like. About time, geez. Well, to be fair, I don't. I didn't do anything to be fair.

I mean, we all knew that was going to happen. Yeah. So, so I was just scrolling through Facebook. I saw an ad for a local guy that does small repairs and stuff like this. And I was like, I just reached out to him. And I was like, hey, I have. Here's a few pictures of why I need you to fix. There's some trim.

I have the trim. I have the paint, you know. Here's the holes. And he said, I'll come by tomorrow and look at it. And he looked at it and he goes, I'll just do it now while I'm here. And it took him like an hour or so of work. And he painted. he fixed it all up and he painted it.

And the wife came home and it was like nothing ever happened there. She's like, looks like TJ was never in this house. And I'm like, exactly. You know, she was so happy to have it fixed. I was so happy that I don't have to hear about it again. It's a skill.

I have to admit, because I was watching him like, do all the drywall stuff. And I'm like, man, like he makes it look so easy. You know, he just puts a little skim, does a little sin, you know, he has all the tools and everything. And I'm trying to pick up, like, how he does it. And I still don't think I would be able to do it.

But he did so fast, so quick. And it came out awesome. He even painted it and everything for me. Wow. So it's, it's all done. It was two years then that took year? No, no. It was like, what was it, 100 days that I got that?

Wasn't that video for the 100 day celebration? Yeah, so it was like 105 or 110 then? Yeah. It wasn't really bothering me too much, but I guess it bothered her so much. She was bothering other people. It bothered me. It bothered everyone more than it bothered me. Especially because it was unnecessary, but whatever.

I even showed him the Jack Armstrong video. It's great. I had to explain the backstory to him. He even asked me, he says, what's this cable? What's the reason for all these holes? I said, oh, I had a buddy here. He was running some P.O.E. And he's like, I don't know what that is.

I'm sorry. He's like, everything's wireless. Yeah, he's like, my. brother would know what you're talking about. But the funny part is, is he sat there and listened to me explain all this technical stuff for like five minutes. And then at the end of it, he's like, I don't know what any of that is. He's like, here's your bill. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, you could have stopped me at the beginning because it is like, I just heard P-O-E and switches. I have no idea what you're talking about. But, uh, that's funny. It's fixed. We can stop on. Maybe I could get a congratulation video or

something. Wow. Now you want extra stuff just because you did it? Should I start suggesting people that I can send me? I don't think that's how it works, Gavin. Jeez. Well, I have three more projects that got added to the list that I need to get fixed, but that's when I get back. That's when you just hire people. I think I'm going to actually.

Now you know the secret because you never do projects. He actually, she doesn't listen to this, but he actually gave me a tip. He says, you know, next time you do this, just call me, I'll do it during the day, have it all done, and then you tell her you did it. There you go. I was like, yeah, that was a missed opportunity. right there. So I'm going to get one of the other projects done and then say I did it.

He's like, I'll come during the day and just get it done for you so you can get a little credit. There you go. So it's done. We're all happy. My list just got longer, but at least one thing that's hot. Well, it's always good when you fix the mistakes you made, you know? I, well, it's an important lesson to learn. You know what I mean?

Okay, I'll let you get away with that one. Even though you cut one hole too many that didn't need to be cut. Oh. But, you know, I was good with that, you know. After I saw how easy it was to fix it, I started thinking about other places I wanted to run some wire and cut some holes. I was like, I'll just hire this guy to come fixing. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's easy.

Once you get over the cutting holes aspect of it, like, you could do anything you want. Yeah, because I was like, hey, if I run some USB cables up here, I can have those blinds, POE blinds put in or something like that, you know. The world is your oyster. He could just come and fix all the holes, you know. By the time I've done, like, you can't even lead against my wall. be so many holes in it. It'll just cave in if you try and lead through it. But it's done. Very nice. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'd like to thank everybody out there who's stuck with me through this whole project. Stut me. I know, P-O-E doorbells and P-O-E siren and, you know,

you know, TJ, I just one thing I was thankful for, I was like, thank God the siren I was centered on that mirror, you know, because when I put the mirror, I was like, please let me centered, because if it's off-centered, it's going to drive her nuts. It was also. centered or good. Nice. I don't even plan that, so. I know. You're welcome. That's why I was praying for it after I put the mirror back. I was like, please let this be centered.

That's too good. Oh, man. Those are minor details, you know. I know, I know. But it's all done. So that's the end of my project. I'll find something else. I'll delay for another hundred days a week and bet on that one. Seth, what do you've been up to? Oh, man. A couple of things. I made some, well, what I thought were improvements to the note server, but it evidently lost the date on the show.

for some reason, part of the script. Just that crazy AI. Yeah, crazy AI. I don't know. I'll have to go back and find out what I did with that. One of the things I did do is, if you see down in our project sections, I've been adding our projects as we talk about them because it's always pain in the butt to go find them and reattach.

Now we have the DTF wall. Like, I've got to keep up with them. So when we talk about them, I'm going to drag them over here and put them in. And then if we talk about starting a new project, like, you know, TJ always does. I can have a little project thing at the top. I can add, I can add new projects in that way. And reach over there and grab our project. We can always, always reference them too.

So I got this, I got side bets coming. So, yeah, it's all happening. Maybe the date will come back too. I don't know if you noticed the last couple weeks, been having some audio issues. My microphone was just coming in way too hot. And I was trying to figure out why that was happening. And it's kind of nice.

Like, it's not, it was definitely something physical. I have a weird, I have an odd setup, let's just say that. But it was definitely something weird, and the recording was actually clipping, so it just wasn't sounding good and everything. So I took some time, like a few hours to go and reset that and just go step by step along the entire long signal chain of things

and yet everything set correctly. And I used a little bit of AI for it for not what you would think. But I'm like, the last place that the audio lands, for this, for the show and for recording or whatever, is Google Chrome, right? I don't know what Google Chrome is getting. What feed is getting in there? So I made it make me a little HTML page

that has like an audio meter on it and everything. And, you know, so I could see if it was clipping there. And I loaded that up on my screen as I was going through all these things in testing, just one thing at a time. And I was able to figure out where things were getting just too hot coming in too hot. It wasn't actually that.

It was something else that was, that was overdriving the hardware that I have. And it wasn't really indicating any way, shape, or form that it was being overdridden. But, you know, that's what was happening. So I found it, and I fixed it. And now hopefully audio sounds better. I don't know. I've had a rough couple of months, I think,

with audio. But, yeah, we've got that going. And I'll post a little, I don't know if I can post the page for that, for the audio thing. But maybe I'll put it up somewhere where we can look at it. But while I was doing that, I was like, you know what? I had this little volume. control thing here.

And I can I start? I don't know where it went. Let me come back. Oh, that's really cool. I have had a surface, like, this is a corg nanocontrol 2. I've had this for like years. It's a USB MIDI controller. Essentially is all it is.

It's got a bunch of MIDI buttons on it. I'm like, I want this to control my audio. And I've had a way to do that in software for a long time. I just don't want to run this software thing every time I want to use my microphone. I have this MTF mixer over here that I was like, it's a Yamaha mixer. It's got an IP, like, it's got an IP thing. Like, I should be able to press a button and mute the stupid thing through this, through this panel here. And I started, I kicked that code off.

Like, I was like, let's make a Macintosh application, Mr. Claude. And I went to town. And it made a MIDI to MTX bridge. Controls, it's got two-way, so I have feedback on my mute and I can turn it on and off. And you would never even know that I, you know, I did that, but unless I hit the mute right when I'm talking like I just did. But it's really convenient to have physical buttons that you can reach over and press and actually have something react in real time and talk in real time.

I've got a few more things I want to hook up to that. And I'll probably push that out onto the old GitHub's there where there's anybody else that wants it or whatever. Maybe I'll make a little installer for it or something that they can install it with. But it's useful for me. It works exactly the way I wanted to. And that's what I find that this AI stuff is really, like, no one in the world will need this. But me and maybe like one other person. But you know what?

I burned down an entire forest and now I have it. And so like the water's all gone. But you know what? I've got the ability to control everything from right here at my desk, which is really nice. I've been wanting to do that for a long time. And I think I was talking to you guys about this. I were talking to you, Gavin. You're like, I have no idea what this will you.

Like, you know what? Nobody should know what this means or what this is doing. But you know what? I could have found like 10 programs that got me from the Corg USB MIDI thing to controlling the MTX, right? I could have done that. I could have gotten that done today. But it would have been like this Rube Goldberg of like automation and all this stuff like in 8N server. I don't know what else. Like it would have been like a Docker running here and there. I don't have that at all now. there is a single program that runs in the like the little bar at the top right it runs there i've got full configuration over it i've got every setting that i want for my exact needs that that's really powerful and that's what that's what this little the little vibe code thing can do i i think that's kind of where we're heading like i'm able to operate an application and in program an application on my computer that completely changes um well it doesn't it does change it changes it does something exactly the way i want to do wanted to do, man, that would have taken a full year or something for me to figure out in the last, I got to learn swift, you know? I don't want to learn swift. I don't care about it. But I do want to, I do want to have this audio control work on my desktop. And I don't want to have to have like

three open source projects running in a Docker to do it. And so, yeah, that all said, I'm really, really happy with this in the way it came out. It's a cool little piece. And I'll probably push this out on the GitHub too so that somebody else doesn't have to burn down a forest or whatever to to make it happen. I say that, like, we talk about how much the data centers,

water they use, but you know what? We got a lot more golf courses in Florida. They use a whole lot of water, too. Get rid of the golf courses for AI. There you go. Anywhere there's a golf course,

put an AI data center. That's right. Done. Well, I don't agree with that, but I do agree with, like, this is what I like about AI.

You can write these programs that do exactly what you want to do, solves your exact, exact problem. Like, I don't care about other people. I want to solve my own problem. Like, I did something recently where I had it write a whole Docker container program that would create automatic playlists in my Spotify for me. So I can create my own, um, I can make it. Like, I just want the latest releases from only the artists I follow and make it 200 and all sorts of things. And, uh, it works pretty well. What it spits out, it's crazy. And then anytime I want to make a,

feature change or something like that, I just tell it what I do it. Off it goes. And then I tell it to sync it up to my local Git repository and commit the changes. And also it does it all for me. Right. And the documentation, which I'm sure everybody loves writing documentation and stuff, but I don't even read the documentation. The documentation is for the AI to know what it's doing. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Not even for me. So, yeah, it's great. No, mine has my, my AI workflow that I have, it literally writes out all the documentation. It writes out the like the scope document for itself and then it takes that scope document breaks it down into a series of tasks and then another a other ais in charge of executing like and dividing

all those tasks up against like the other aIs that are supposed to be around for you know agents is like it's like a whole little it's a little factory inside of there a little AI agents that come out to do their little job and then you know it gets to the end there's another guy comes along he's like hey i got to test all this he'll test oh this didn't this i here's some corrections Let me click these corrections back over. And so, yeah, it takes a while, but you know what? It finishes. And I've got an application now.

Way faster than I would ever have to do this. Like it writes like three different languages that I'm like, I don't, I could eventually do it, but it's going to take me weeks and months to get to this point, right? Yeah. I hear the programmers complaining about this and, you know, talking about like, oh, you know, we're going to have all this slop and everything to go back and fix. but I don't know. If you know what a good program is,

you could smell that stuff out. Like, you can get rid of the slop. You can change things how you want it to be. You can go in there and tinker and fix the settings to be the way they need to be. I know there's going to be a lot of junk written, but, you know, and it'll have to be fixed for sure. But, you know, that can come in time.

The AI stuff can fix it pretty quickly. And one of the things I've been thinking about, too, because there's a lot of pushback from developers, that AI developers are not as good as human developers, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, no, no, no, no, 100% the opposite. Well, the AI is better. The AI is a thousand percent better than any human developer at this point. Yeah, but they're saying it's kicking out slop code and stuff like that.

Well, why is the AI also finding so many vulnerabilities in the code generated by humans too, right? The AI may be sticking out slop code, but developers have been kicking out slop code for years, too. That's how I feel. Yeah, I'm sorry. I work with developers, and they do a subpar job. I'm sorry. And the AI does a better job. And if you're not a developer, if you're not using these AI, like, who's writing code and like not allowing AI to touch it these days?

That person's not doing their job. Yeah. I'm sorry. The AI needs to come in. You want to make a framework. You want to go in. You want to tinker with stuff fine. but if you're not allowing the AI to go in and like just double check yourself like come on it's

like not using a calculator and trying to do like long division or something you're going to make a mistake and when you do it's your fault for not using the tools available to you and I don't know I I I'm so tired of hearing the whole slop argument anytime you hear anybody saying that it's it's right in slop code they don't know what the heck they're talking about they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. You can put them in the column of, I'm going to keep the show clean. They don't know what, frankly, they're talking about.

And you can never listen to that person again. If they know what they're doing, they can get the AI to write very good code, production ready code. And yeah, there may be a couple little bugs and things that you have to go and fix. You may need to get into the weeds and figure out, like, make sure that the architecture's right.

But if you did your job right, as a developer, the AI does its job right. There's no argument with that. And it can write the base of it in a week, not even a day or two, right? It can write the base of it in an hour. Yeah, and you can review it if you want, but it'll probably spit out so many lines

that you don't even know what you're looking at or you don't even know, you know, like it's, I don't know, like as a developer, I would want to use this as a tool, even if I don't want it to write end to end. I would at least be using AI as a tool to write certain functions better than I, you don't have to think

But it will pick out, like, you can write some little function and it will do all the edge testing for you of that function where, you know, I wouldn't have to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. You used to, right now, today, you still have to have some domain knowledge of what it's doing and why it's doing it. Yeah. And because it will, you know, convince itself that you need to go down this rabbit hole that you don't need to go down. And if you don't know what it's doing or the programs or the architecture of how it's going together and you. you don't really tightly control that and kind of like tie its hands like, no, we're doing it this way. This is how we do it. It will try to get away from you. But with the right process in place,

that doesn't happen at all. Well, even when I'm working with it, I have conversations with it sometimes. I say, why do you do it this way? Why not this way? Wouldn't this be better a way to do it? And sometimes it agrees. And a lot of times it explains to me why it chose the way it did and why it's faster or more efficient than what I was thinking. I'm like, okay, that's cool, right? Like, you can still work with it and understand it if you don't, you know, like, you don't have to take it fully on, but at least, you know, use it as a tool. Yeah. Well, I think at this point, like anyone who is trying to develop things these days and not taking it full on is not doing their job as a developer. I'm sorry.

Even the big companies are forcing them to use the AI to develop for their Windows is using AI now to help them develop things for Windows, right? they absolutely should. I mean, Windows is such a huge code base. It's kind of hard to say, but anything that you're adding in, it needs to be, it needs to run through at least a check, you know? Like, I'm glad you have the skills that, you know, probably won't matter in a couple of years. But you need to be running a check on your work. Like, it's, it's crazy. You know, people were really good at doing math without calculators before calculators. Like slide rules, you don't see those anymore, right? There's a reason. Computers are placed all of them. of that. So I don't know. It is, it is, the developers, I know that six months ago,

um, we're like, yeah, I, you know, I, I'm, I'm, I'm just using it to ask questions. I ask a question how to do something and it's, now they're just like, I see it. I see it. It's, you just type it in and it spits it up and it's doing really good code now. It's, it's a, it's a game changer. And that, again, this was six months ago, right? Let's see, this August. Yeah, yeah, six months ago, they were hesitant. Now they're seeing how good the models are coming out and how good a code and products are purchasing out. There's still problems.

There's still edge cases, but that stuff gets worked out over time. You can't rely on that, you know, sitting there complaining about stuff for that long. So I don't know. I'm having fun with it again, especially now as we have these tokens. I think the hammer's going to come down soon. So we've got to get these projects done. And I picked up the old Hermes. I dusted them off.

You know, picked Henry back up. I found, I don't know you guys. Have you guys done the photon thing with the Hermes? Have you seen that? No, I haven't seen that.

No. So I was kind of moaning about Mattermalist, right? Because I was like, eh, it's all right, you know, but it's mattermalist. And it's kind of like, it's your generic open source product.

Well, photon is like some kind of like, I message integration. So it shows up right on the phone. Henry's got a phone number now and I can text him and you can see him type in and everything because it's cool. That's cool. Yeah.

I was like, wow, it's a free account. I set one up for myself and I set one up that's linked to my wife's profile for her dot that she wants to talk to. And I was like, just text dot. And then the little slash command's all working there so you can actually switch back and forth

between different projects or sessions that you have open. I hadn't seen that happen. And something I noticed on the, TJ, you were talking about the GUI, the desktop application the other day. And I was like, you know what? I got to check that out because it sounds interesting, right?

And so I downloaded and installed it and it's just like, I don't really care what happens. Just override everything. Well, it didn't override everything. It found all the configuration files and brought everything in. So there we go. It's working great. And the little desktop thing,

in the bottom right hand corner, it has like, I updated this morning. And, yeah, it says I'm now 184 commits behind the main channel so I can still do updates. It's like, I updated twice today and I'm still 184 commits behind. So whatever, I mean, this thing is just like constantly being updated. It's kind of wild to see. So that's a vibe coding for you.

You get the updates. It's awesome. I just love where we are right now with it. And it's come a long way in the last six months. Like, what it can do now is like so, I'm looking forward to see where we are, like, end of the year, beginning of next year. We'll be crazy. Yeah, I didn't use the gooey thing because I got, I was so jaded by, I think OpenClaw had some kind of web page or something that you go to. And it sucked. But the, this one, the Hermes one, it seems to work well.

So I have that running on the computer just, you know, to open it up and run on the computer. all the settings in there match up and you can actually go and edit the settings and they work amazing. I don't know why OpenClock couldn't figure that out, but whatever. Yeah, it works really well. So thanks for tipping me.

And there's little pets you can add. So I added Homestar Runner and he's on my, he's just hanging out watching things happen, I guess. Pets on what? On the application, there's a little pet. You can just drag them around. I'm going to have to bug you about that. You know, like I get to a certain point.

I know. I can figure it out. I got to figure that out. It's just in the in the menus. I'll put it in a picture. He's just chilling right there. You can move him around. He got in the way of the text earlier, but yeah.

What the heck? In open code? No, no, no, no. It's not open code. This is the Hermes app. Oh, download the app. Yeah, I know. I have like 12 Hermes bots.

Oh, well, that's, yeah, you set it up that way. Yeah. Don't do what Gavin does. Well, yeah, I know you can set up one container. now with Hermes in it and then have like the 12 agents running that one container. Yes. And then the app will just connect to that one container.

You can manage them all that way, I think. But I'm stuck in my old way someone. So one day I'll have more time and then I'll be able to reevaluate my setup. Oh, I think I figured out why Henry doesn't work. Hermes overrooted his soul. So I have to go back and fix that. I see it here now. I have

I have his thing. It's like, you're a Hermes agent. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And he never refers to himself as Henry. I call him Henry and he's like yeah, whatever, my name's Hermes. So, I'll have to fix that. Anyway, at least with this visual editor, you can actually see what's wrong rather than editing all those JSON and YAML file.

Garbage. Anyway, Hermes seems to be working out well, so today. See how I feel bad tomorrow. TJ, are we covered what you done? Have you done anything? You got a big pile of dirt in your front lawn.

No projects for me. Yeah, I'm moving mulch, so. Yeah, tons of mulch. That's like ongoing for you, though. Like, yeah, I hope I'm done pretty much this year, but we'll find out. Time will tell. Well, at least with the bulk mulch, you know, like this. Next year, you'll have to put down more mulch. Yeah, and then after that more mulch, I thought so too, and then every year I had to put down more mulch.

Nah, this is just the walkways, though. Oh, okay. Yeah, so a little different, but yeah, I've just been doing that, and that's pretty much it. There's a lot of walkway. You got a mountain there, TJ. Do you know that? Yeah, I didn't really want that much. You don't get too.

You don't get to request how much you want. You just put a request in and they just show up. That's awesome. It's a grab bag, you know? And he also didn't space it off or he spaced it off of the fence too much. And so I cannot park in my driveway right now. I saw that. Which I do not like have my van parked on the street.

Oh, no, that's no good. It's not good at all. So now I'm even, now even more of a rush to move the mulch. So I can actually park in the driveway again. All right. Well, hopefully you get that, that taking care. I have a thing on the, what's it called, the projects area for ongoing projects that are just like always there. So maybe I should just put your mulch mountain as well.

Maltch Mountain. Yeah, T.J.'s Maltch Mountain. I don't even have to like AI the picture. Like the picture you have is just like unbelievable. That's crazy. I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to thank everyone for listening to the show, but I want to send a big special thanks out for those who are able to support the show. through our patron page.

If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to Hombect.fm slash support and learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar month. Any pledge over five books gets you a big shoutout here on the show, but every single pledge will give you to an invite

to our private slash chat, the hub, where you and other patrons the show can get in there and look at awful pictures that T.J posts in there and compare... You're welcome. Compare scores.

Gavin, you've got to post your score in the hub. Finally won. I close the time. You're rebooting. It's too late. Like, I close the tab, but the score is exactly the same as yours. Yeah, I think that's all you can get.

Yeah, it's at the, you know, I was scrolling. So, yeah, the 30, I don't even know what to say the number or how to save the number. But, you know, Morton, I guess he got to 29, and I felt like he didn't truly finish. I don't think he finished. No, because he's not 29. You got to get to that 30. You got to click those last few paper clips in. It gives you the credits and all sorts of things.

he's not even close to the clicking the like he can't click an octillion paper clips there's more to do to it so I think he missed out on a few things maybe or you know and no one Martin if he closed that tab he's opening it up after he listens to the show they're gonna finish the game gotta start it again you're not done until you hit 30 septa opta billion whatever it is lots of paperclips lots of the heat death of the universe All right. Well, if you can't support the show financially, we totally understand, just appreciate a five-star review or positive rating the podcast app.

Your Choice, that's going to wrap up this week on HomeTech. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will speak to you next week. Until next time. Take care.