59: How You Know You're Living in the Future

00:00SPEAKER- How do those triggers feel, man?

00:01SPEAKER- Well, right now they're pretty flimsy

00:02SPEAKERbecause there's no power running to them.

00:04SPEAKERThere's no, this thing is inert.

00:06SPEAKER- Does it push back?

00:07SPEAKER- It's a null sense right now.

00:09SPEAKERIt's not sensing anything.

00:11SPEAKERYes, they totally do.

00:12SPEAKER- Like, does it push hard enough

00:15SPEAKERthat you could not physically squeeze in on that thing?

00:17SPEAKER- Oh, I don't know.

00:19SPEAKERWell, it definitely has not done that.

00:21SPEAKER- Okay.

00:21SPEAKER- None of the tech demos or like game scenarios

00:24SPEAKERthat I've encountered have been tuned in that way.

00:26SPEAKERI don't know what the actual maximum force is

00:29SPEAKERon these things.

00:30SPEAKER- You don't need, they don't give you like a Newton number.

00:32SPEAKERIt's not like this is 68 Newtons.

00:34SPEAKER- This thing should just come with a,

00:35SPEAKERlike a proper like profiling utility

00:37SPEAKERthat just lets you adjust the tension

00:39SPEAKERand play with it yourself and like mess around.

00:41SPEAKERBut that's not, that would not be a very Sony

00:43SPEAKERlike thing to do, but.

00:45SPEAKER- Is that just on the triggers or is it on the sticks too?

00:47SPEAKER- The actual resistance, the actual pushback.

00:49SPEAKERIt's just the, just the triggers, yeah.

00:51SPEAKER- Okay, interesting.

00:52SPEAKER- Yeah, the haptics on this thing are great,

00:54SPEAKERbut they are haptics.

00:55SPEAKERYou know, like you, if you have an iPhone

00:57SPEAKERor I presume most Androids these days

00:59SPEAKERhave quite good haptics on them.

01:02SPEAKERSo like that's, it's impressive,

01:03SPEAKERbut not something you haven't seen before.

01:04SPEAKERBut this trigger thing is literally like,

01:06SPEAKERI yelped out loud.

01:08SPEAKERI emitted an involuntary exclamation

01:12SPEAKERthe first time I tried one of these triggers.

01:14SPEAKERI mean, they, well, I'm limited in what I can say right now,

01:18SPEAKERbut let's say they go out of their way

01:20SPEAKERto present you some pretty extreme cases right up front.

01:23SPEAKER- Do the Xbox controllers have the same,

01:25SPEAKERthe trigger rumble that they had last time?

01:27SPEAKER- I believe it is the same, yeah.

01:28SPEAKERWhich is, it's not, it's not insubstantial,

01:30SPEAKERbut it's not like this.

01:32SPEAKER- I wonder if this is gonna give them

01:33SPEAKERfeature parity now so we see,

01:34SPEAKER'cause it feels like that trigger rumble on the Xbox One

01:36SPEAKERwas something that like Forza used

01:38SPEAKERand I don't remember seeing it anywhere else.

01:40SPEAKER- I don't, but I don't think those things

01:41SPEAKERcan exert actual tension, can they?

01:44SPEAKER- They can't, it just, but it did feel like,

01:47SPEAKERlike the canonical example of where I saw that

01:49SPEAKERwas like when you were doing like a drift

01:52SPEAKERand you need to kind of feather the gas in the brake

01:54SPEAKERin a racing game and you kind of feel

01:56SPEAKERa little bit of a, like you'd feel,

01:58SPEAKERit felt like something was happening.

01:59SPEAKERThere was no pushback though.

02:01SPEAKER- Right, I mean, these things are essentially

02:02SPEAKERcapable of locking themselves.

02:03SPEAKERLike I've talked about it on some of the

02:05SPEAKERgiant bomb content so far, but you know,

02:06SPEAKERyou know the elite controller,

02:07SPEAKERyou know how it's got that feature where you can,

02:09SPEAKERyou can reduce the throw or the kind of the size

02:11SPEAKERof the arc of the triggers to next to nothing

02:13SPEAKERfor like Call of Duty, you know,

02:14SPEAKERgames where you need to hit the trigger very quickly

02:16SPEAKERand they do that physically or mechanically

02:18SPEAKERby shoving a piece of plastic in the way of the trigger.

02:21SPEAKERThese can replicate that exact same action,

02:23SPEAKERbut just with whatever thing is going on in there

02:26SPEAKERthat makes the triggers resistive

02:28SPEAKERor maybe resistive is not the right word to use

02:30SPEAKER'cause that's also an electrical term, right, but.

02:32SPEAKER- But like you're feeling, it feels like the spring

02:35SPEAKERthat holds the trigger back is stronger.

02:37SPEAKER- It's literally, they can wherever,

02:39SPEAKERI think wherever they want in the arc of this trigger,

02:40SPEAKERthey can just make it like stop.

02:42SPEAKERI mean, and you can push your way through it.

02:43SPEAKERYou can force your way through it, but there's like a,

02:45SPEAKERthere's a literal almost like snap and release feel

02:48SPEAKERof like pushing through the tension

02:50SPEAKERand then it kind of pops that, you know, it's the,

02:53SPEAKERthe GameCube controller is the canonical example here.

02:55SPEAKER- Oh, it's kind of a detent, right?

02:57SPEAKERThe GameCube controller.

02:58SPEAKER- What's that?

02:59SPEAKER- It had a detent where you pull like partway

03:00SPEAKERand then there's a second step like on a flight station

03:03SPEAKERtrigger or something, yeah.

03:04SPEAKER- Kind of clicks at the end.

03:05SPEAKERLike they can replicate that exact feel

03:07SPEAKERexcept like mechanically with whatever they're,

03:09SPEAKERdo you have any idea what tech is behind that?

03:11SPEAKER- It's just haptic feedback stuff.

03:13SPEAKERI don't know what, I don't know how they're doing it.

03:14SPEAKERI can't wait to see the tear down.

03:15SPEAKERThis, like of all of the new console stuff,

03:18SPEAKERthe PS5 controller is the thing I am most interested in.

03:21SPEAKER- Totally, in no world did I expect to be saying

03:24SPEAKERthat the controller is the most interesting thing

03:26SPEAKERabout these, either of these consoles so far,

03:28SPEAKERbut it totally is.

03:29SPEAKERAt the same time, there is zero chance

03:31SPEAKERI will ever take this thing apart.

03:32SPEAKER- Oh no, you will, 'cause the battery will die eventually

03:34SPEAKERand you'll have to.

03:35SPEAKER- Okay, five, six years from now,

03:36SPEAKERwe will no longer be fancy and fun and new and shiny

03:39SPEAKERand then maybe fine.

03:39SPEAKERBut as of right now, working a spudger into the seam

03:44SPEAKERon this thing feels like it would probably break something.

03:46SPEAKERSo I'm not gonna-

03:47SPEAKER- Are there not screw holes on the back?

03:49SPEAKERUsually there's screw holes on the back.

03:50SPEAKER- No, there are not.

03:52SPEAKER- Oh no, they're making it harder to open.

03:54SPEAKER- There are no exposed screws that I can see on this thing.

03:57SPEAKERSo get your spudgers ready.

04:00SPEAKER(upbeat music)

04:20SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

04:33SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made at TechPod.

04:35SPEAKERI'm Will.

04:36SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.

04:37SPEAKER- I also really like that it has the PS logo buttons

04:41SPEAKERon like in the grain to make it grippy.

04:43SPEAKER- Oh, I think my eyes are not good enough to,

04:46SPEAKERI can't see that.

04:47SPEAKERIt just looks like a gritty, sandy kind of texture.

04:50SPEAKER- I guess you need like a magnifying glass to see that.

04:52SPEAKER- I guess the only other question I had

04:55SPEAKERis like the launch PS4 Dual Shocks felt kind of like,

05:00SPEAKERrickety is not the right word, but they're creaky.

05:02SPEAKERThis one, does this feel solid like the second gen ones?

05:04SPEAKER- Absolutely, hang on, let me open this drawer.

05:08SPEAKER- Brad's opening a drawer.

05:09SPEAKER- Fish out one of my Dual Shock 4s,

05:11SPEAKERwhich I have way too many of.

05:12SPEAKER- Yeah, me too.

05:13SPEAKER- This is even one of the more recent ones

05:15SPEAKERthat's got the light bar across the touch pad.

05:17SPEAKER- Those ones are, I think those are better.

05:19SPEAKER- Like, I really like those, yeah.

05:20SPEAKER- You're not wrong, they're definitely better.

05:22SPEAKERThey still could get to the point after a lot of use

05:24SPEAKERwhere they're a little bit like,

05:26SPEAKERbasically if you grip the two kind of handles

05:28SPEAKERon the Dual Shock 4 and sort of twist gently,

05:30SPEAKERyou can feel just a little-

05:31SPEAKER- It feels like you can snap it.

05:32SPEAKER- It feels like there's a little bit of creak

05:33SPEAKERin the seams of the housing, right?

05:34SPEAKERYou can just sort of like very gently flex it.

05:37SPEAKERThis thing has none of that.

05:39SPEAKER- That's good.

05:39SPEAKER- It feels like a brick, it is like-

05:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I want to feel like I could chuck that

05:43SPEAKERthrough a plate glass window

05:44SPEAKERand there'd be nothing wrong with it.

05:45SPEAKER- It is really, really just sturdy and firm

05:49SPEAKERand like, things built like a tank, man.

05:51SPEAKERIt feels pretty good.

05:53SPEAKER- I'm excited.

05:54SPEAKER- They're shipping.

05:55SPEAKERI've been, I saw work going around this week

05:57SPEAKERthat they were shipping and then sure enough,

05:58SPEAKERlike on a couple of gaming forums today,

06:00SPEAKERI saw people posting photos of like,

06:02SPEAKER"Hey, my DualSense arrived."

06:04SPEAKERSo I guess it's possible to buy them somewhere now.

06:07SPEAKER- I didn't order a PS5 and that kind of like,

06:11SPEAKERyeah, this is the first time in 10 years,

06:13SPEAKERprobably 15 years that I haven't like signed up

06:15SPEAKERfor launch consoles.

06:16SPEAKER- Not just their day one.

06:17SPEAKER- Yeah, and I kind of didn't care,

06:19SPEAKERbut now I have controller envy.

06:22SPEAKER- Yes, the FOMO is real in all situations, but-

06:26SPEAKER- I mean, realistically, all I play is Miles Morales

06:28SPEAKER'cause I'm gonna play Bugsnax on the PC and you know, anyway.

06:32SPEAKER- Miles Morales plays on the PS4.

06:34SPEAKER- All right, yeah, that's also true.

06:36SPEAKER- Not with ray tracing.

06:38SPEAKER- No, I like ray tracing a lot, it turns out.

06:40SPEAKER- I do too.

06:41SPEAKERReal quick, before I forget,

06:42SPEAKERI just throw this out there,

06:43SPEAKERepisode idea that just came to me.

06:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

06:47SPEAKER- Maybe go through the litany of console hardware failures

06:50SPEAKERwe've had over the course of our lives.

06:52SPEAKER- Oh.

06:53SPEAKER- Because I don't wanna get on a big tangent here,

06:55SPEAKERbut if I were not in this line of work,

06:57SPEAKERI am like the furthest from the have to be there

07:00SPEAKERon day one early adopter.

07:02SPEAKER- Yeah, didn't you never buy a Wii?

07:04SPEAKER- I did, I never owned a Wii.

07:07SPEAKERBut I went, I actually did a mental inventory the other day

07:10SPEAKERand I can't think of a single console

07:12SPEAKERI have ever bought on day one in my entire life.

07:15SPEAKERExcept for the Nintendo 64, I take it back,

07:16SPEAKERNintendo 64 is the only one I can think of.

07:19SPEAKER- I bought a Wii on day one,

07:21SPEAKERbut that's only 'cause Gina was like driving

07:23SPEAKERby the GameStop in Colma one day

07:25SPEAKERand saw a bunch of people lined up outside

07:27SPEAKERand was like, "Hey, what are you guys in line for?"

07:28SPEAKERAnd she was going to the FedEx office and was like,

07:30SPEAKER"Oh, this is the Wii pre-order line."

07:31SPEAKERAnd she got the last one for the Colma GameStop.

07:35SPEAKERSo we had a Wii and that was exciting

07:37SPEAKER'cause those were things were hard to find

07:39SPEAKERfor like six or eight months.

07:40SPEAKER- Well, that was an investment.

07:41SPEAKERLike if you decided you didn't like the Wii,

07:43SPEAKERyou could still flip it for easily more

07:45SPEAKERthan you paid for it.

07:46SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

07:47SPEAKERAnd then the Xbox 360, I got real close to launch.

07:50SPEAKERLike I bought it from eBay

07:51SPEAKERbecause I was so hyped about Geometry Wars.

07:54SPEAKERAnd then I put like a hundred hours into Geometry Wars.

07:56SPEAKER- Geometry Wars is a very good game.

07:58SPEAKER- A very good game.

07:59SPEAKER- But like, I just, I was so burned

08:01SPEAKERthe PlayStation and PlayStation two generations

08:04SPEAKERby console hardware failures

08:05SPEAKERthat I have never really adopted again.

08:08SPEAKER- Yeah, my PS4, I bought a PS4 for tested

08:11SPEAKERfor us to take apart at launch.

08:13SPEAKERAnd that one is still going strong.

08:15SPEAKER- Okay, all right.

08:17SPEAKER- And my Xbox ones, I like all my,

08:19SPEAKERthe only consoles I think I've ever had.

08:21SPEAKERWell, anyway, this is a good episode idea.

08:22SPEAKER- We'll get into it sometime.

08:23SPEAKERBut yeah, like I, yeah, well, yes.

08:26SPEAKER- But today we started talking about this ages ago.

08:32SPEAKERI have spent a lot of time over the last couple of months

08:35SPEAKERfinally moving everything over

08:37SPEAKERfrom a closed proprietary smart home system

08:40SPEAKERcalled SmartThings that Samsung owns now

08:42SPEAKERover to the open equivalent

08:44SPEAKERor one of the open equivalents called Home Assistant.

08:47SPEAKER- Yes.

08:48SPEAKER- It's been a journey.

08:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm sure.

08:50SPEAKERSo I also just last weekend

08:53SPEAKERhave started following in your footsteps.

08:56SPEAKERSo I thought it'd be fun to talk about it,

08:57SPEAKERbut I'm trying to look up here

08:58SPEAKERbecause if you haven't listened

09:01SPEAKERto all of the episodes of the show,

09:02SPEAKERfirst of all, why not?

09:05SPEAKERSecond of all. - I don't expect everybody

09:07SPEAKERto love everything that we do.

09:09SPEAKER- I'm just kidding.

09:10SPEAKERSecond of all, I'm looking for it here.

09:12SPEAKERWe did, so we did a home automation episode,

09:16SPEAKERgosh, last fall?

09:17SPEAKER- It was early, but it was kind of about hardware and stuff.

09:21SPEAKER- It was more, it was kind of a primer.

09:23SPEAKERIt was basically like an intro to home automation

09:25SPEAKERand sort of like here are some of the major platforms

09:28SPEAKERand standards, but we didn't get too deep

09:30SPEAKERinto any one of those things.

09:33SPEAKERSo should we talk about our paths to Home Assistant?

09:36SPEAKERLike, why did you want to get onto?

09:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so a couple of things happened earlier this year.

09:41SPEAKEROne is that Wink, which is one of the other,

09:44SPEAKERso most home automation systems you set up,

09:46SPEAKERyou have a bunch of devices

09:47SPEAKERthat are from a bunch of different manufacturers.

09:49SPEAKERAnd then there's like one hub

09:51SPEAKERthat kind of corrals all of them

09:53SPEAKERand knows how to speak to all of those.

09:55SPEAKERAnd the goal when you're buying the hub

09:56SPEAKERis to get the one that talks to all of the stuff

09:57SPEAKERthat you have and all the stuff

09:59SPEAKERthat you might want to have in the future.

10:01SPEAKERAnd then it like provides the services you need.

10:04SPEAKERSo if you want to use like voice assistants,

10:06SPEAKERyou want to connect to Alexa and Google Home

10:09SPEAKERand Siri and all that stuff.

10:11SPEAKER- Is there one hub in the commercial space

10:13SPEAKERthat actually does that,

10:13SPEAKERthat can talk to every single one of them?

10:15SPEAKERThat seems impossible because there are so many standards

10:17SPEAKERand networks to account for.

10:18SPEAKER- So SmartThings has really wide adoption.

10:21SPEAKERLike they connect to a ton of stuff over API.

10:24SPEAKERThey have partnerships with Google

10:25SPEAKERand Amazon and all that stuff.

10:26SPEAKERSo your Alexa and your Google Assistant

10:29SPEAKERand all that stuff work.

10:30SPEAKERThey don't work super well with Apple stuff

10:32SPEAKER'cause they didn't jump into the HomeKit hardware for A.

10:38SPEAKERBut there are solutions for that.

10:39SPEAKERLike the HomeKit bridge thing,

10:41SPEAKERwhich will basically let you set up a...

10:44SPEAKERIt's like a translation layer

10:46SPEAKERbetween HomeKit and SmartThings.

10:49SPEAKERIt's why I went with them,

10:50SPEAKERbut they just killed their gen one API stuff,

10:54SPEAKERtheir first rev API stuff

10:55SPEAKERand forced everybody to roll over to Samsung accounts.

10:58SPEAKERAnd because of a comedy of errors

11:00SPEAKERthat basically involved me taking over,

11:03SPEAKERsomebody signed up for a Samsung account

11:05SPEAKERwith my email address.

11:06SPEAKERAnd rather than kill that account,

11:08SPEAKERI, it doesn't matter.

11:11SPEAKERThe upshot is my Samsung account

11:12SPEAKERwas irrevocably tied to India.

11:14SPEAKERAnd the Home Assistant, the SmartThings stuff

11:17SPEAKERhas FCC type regulations.

11:22SPEAKERSo if you're in the wrong region on your Samsung account,

11:24SPEAKERcertain things won't work because they are in...

11:27SPEAKERThey use radio bands that are not available

11:29SPEAKERin the regions that you're signed up for.

11:31SPEAKER- That's a lot to deal with.

11:33SPEAKER- Yeah, so I was gonna have to reset up

11:34SPEAKERthe whole thing from scratch.

11:35SPEAKER- Just to schedule your lights to come on at a certain time.

11:38SPEAKER- I mean, look, it was, I made a mistake,

11:41SPEAKERbut also Samsung didn't help me fix the mistake.

11:43SPEAKERSo the big takeaway is that if I was gonna have to go back

11:48SPEAKERand reset up all this stuff,

11:49SPEAKERI wanted something that was more capable

11:51SPEAKERthan what I could do with SmartThings.

11:52SPEAKER- And more generalized, right?

11:54SPEAKERJust more universal for all the different brands, yes.

11:57SPEAKER- Yeah, something that I could hack my own shit into

11:59SPEAKERif I wanted to.

12:00SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

12:01SPEAKERSo I'm in a pretty similar boat,

12:02SPEAKERexcept that we were all Apple home here

12:03SPEAKERfor better or worse, mostly for worse.

12:07SPEAKERFirst of all, like you referred to the home kit hardware

12:09SPEAKERsituation as a fray, which I think is pretty apt.

12:15SPEAKERIt's a weird scene where like a ton of devices

12:17SPEAKERjust don't have support for it at all.

12:18SPEAKERMy understanding is that Apple's security requirements

12:21SPEAKERto be branded as home kit compatible

12:22SPEAKERare pretty onerous, is that right?

12:24SPEAKER- There is a hardware requirement,

12:26SPEAKERwhich adds actual cost and people,

12:29SPEAKERlike in the spaces that a lot of this stuff operates,

12:32SPEAKERif you say, hey, we have a 10 cent chip

12:34SPEAKERwe want you to add on,

12:35SPEAKERthey're gonna give you the finger and hit the door.

12:37SPEAKER- Totally, so like in a lot of device categories,

12:39SPEAKERwe just could not find what we wanted

12:41SPEAKERthat was compatible with home kit in the first place.

12:42SPEAKERThe stuff that we do have,

12:44SPEAKERI found it to be super unresponsive.

12:46SPEAKERLike it would just go dead off and on

12:48SPEAKERwhere I would have to like,

12:49SPEAKERI have to pull the dresser out or like fish under the bed

12:51SPEAKERand pull the smart plug out and plug it back in to restart it

12:53SPEAKERbecause in the home app, it just said not responding.

12:56SPEAKERAnd like could never figure out

12:57SPEAKERany rhyme or reason to that stuff.

12:58SPEAKER- Do you have an Apple, a current gen Apple TV

13:01SPEAKERthat works as the home kit hub?

13:03SPEAKER- So, no, so this was,

13:04SPEAKERthis is a kind of tertiary consequence of this whole thing,

13:06SPEAKERbut it is another nice thing about moving home assistant.

13:08SPEAKERI was using my iPad pro as the hub.

13:10SPEAKER- Oh, right, okay.

13:11SPEAKER- And as I, we'll get to this,

13:12SPEAKERbut as I have gotten onto home assistant

13:14SPEAKERand stopped using that iPad as a home hub,

13:18SPEAKERthe battery life has like quintupled.

13:20SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I'm sure.

13:21SPEAKER- It is insane.

13:22SPEAKERLike that thing would,

13:22SPEAKERthat thing would drain half its battery in like 24 hours,

13:25SPEAKERjust sitting around before.

13:26SPEAKERAnd now it's like 95% after, after a day.

13:30SPEAKER- Well, so the bad news is you still

13:31SPEAKERare probably gonna use something as a home hub,

13:33SPEAKERalthough I guess.

13:34SPEAKER- Well, so there are solutions in home assistant for that,

13:36SPEAKERwhich we'll get to.

13:37SPEAKERAnd then the other thing, not to just sit here

13:39SPEAKERand complain about Apple home all the time,

13:41SPEAKERbut we got hit by this super widespread bug

13:43SPEAKERwhere I could not invite my girlfriend to my home,

13:46SPEAKERno matter what we did.

13:47SPEAKERLike there's some weird loop on the Apple like server end

13:50SPEAKERwhere you send an invite and they accept it on their end

13:53SPEAKERand it looks like they're in,

13:54SPEAKERbut it just says invite pending on your end

13:56SPEAKERfor months at a time.

13:58SPEAKERAnd like Reddit is full of people with the same problem.

14:00SPEAKERAnd you have to like call Apple

14:01SPEAKERand play the customer service rep roulette

14:04SPEAKERor situation where like,

14:06SPEAKERif they know what you're talking about,

14:07SPEAKERthey'll escalate you to engineering and blah, blah, blah.

14:09SPEAKERAnyway.

14:10SPEAKER- Well, so also the other thing that happened this spring

14:13SPEAKERis that Wink just said,

14:15SPEAKERwhich was the other big like open third party came in

14:18SPEAKERand were like, yeah,

14:20SPEAKERif you guys want to keep using our service,

14:21SPEAKERyou got to pay five bucks a month.

14:24SPEAKER- So were they open source before?

14:25SPEAKER- They were closed source but free.

14:27SPEAKERSo you bought a piece of hardware

14:28SPEAKERand then like Phillips tried to do the same thing

14:31SPEAKERwith their early Hue hubs.

14:33SPEAKERThey killed off all their early Hue hubs

14:35SPEAKERand they didn't try to charge,

14:36SPEAKERbut they said, hey, you need to buy a new hub

14:37SPEAKERif you want to keep using your $80 light bulbs.

14:41SPEAKERSo like there's a lot going on in that space

14:43SPEAKERas things are consolidating.

14:46SPEAKERGoogle has killed two hubs.

14:47SPEAKERI think now that they've purchased like for IP purchases,

14:51SPEAKERit seems like, or for team purchases.

14:53SPEAKER- Yeah, wasn't there some big thing with Nest

14:55SPEAKERshutting down a major service not a week or two ago?

14:59SPEAKER- Closed up a lot of their APIs

15:01SPEAKERso that like just anybody can't get an API key

15:05SPEAKERand then have full right access to your house.

15:07SPEAKERThe thing that they did is a good thing.

15:08SPEAKERThey just kind of handled it poorly

15:09SPEAKERas in a true Google fashion.

15:11SPEAKER- Sure.

15:13SPEAKER- But yeah, so I looked at the different things

15:14SPEAKERthat were out there.

15:15SPEAKERWe talked about them a little bit in that last episode.

15:17SPEAKERAnd one of the big pieces of feedback that we got

15:20SPEAKERwas that people really like Home Assistant

15:22SPEAKERfrom that first home automation episode.

15:24SPEAKER- It seems like the most active community

15:26SPEAKERfrom what I've seen.

15:27SPEAKERLike there's, what are the others that, you know,

15:29SPEAKERthere's OpenHAB seems like the other big one.

15:31SPEAKER- The OpenHAB is the other biggish one.

15:32SPEAKERBut like in terms of wide hardware,

15:36SPEAKERlike what I was looking for honestly

15:37SPEAKERwere wide hardware support and good documentation

15:40SPEAKERand Home Assistant had that in all of the things

15:42SPEAKERthat I had hardware for.

15:45SPEAKERAnd like it is really apparent that they spend,

15:49SPEAKERthat somebody there is spending a lot of time

15:51SPEAKERtaking forum posts and turning them

15:53SPEAKERinto actionable documentation.

15:55SPEAKER- They have very good guides on all kinds of stuff.

15:57SPEAKERI can attest to that.

15:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it's really well done.

16:03SPEAKERI went through a whole path

16:04SPEAKERtrying to get it set up and running.

16:05SPEAKERWe don't need to go through all that necessarily,

16:07SPEAKERbut I tried putting it in a FreeNAS jail.

16:09SPEAKER- Same.

16:11SPEAKER- Since it's designed to run on Linux,

16:14SPEAKERI got it mostly working, but then like,

16:17SPEAKERit wouldn't connect to HomeKit devices

16:19SPEAKERor my Lutron certificate getter app wouldn't work

16:22SPEAKERor whatever, like there were 50 different things

16:24SPEAKERthat failed in weird ways.

16:25SPEAKERAnd finally, I was just like, fuck it,

16:26SPEAKERI'm gonna buy a $30 Raspberry Pi and put it on that

16:30SPEAKER'cause my time is worth more than making this work

16:32SPEAKERon the thing that honestly I'm probably gonna get rid of

16:35SPEAKERand change over to something else

16:36SPEAKERsometime in the next 12 months.

16:38SPEAKER- I feel like my time with FreeNAS/FreeNAS

16:41SPEAKERis growing ever shorter.

16:43SPEAKER- Look, I love my Plex server and the ecosystem around that,

16:48SPEAKERbut I have absolutely no loyalty to FreeNAS at this point.

16:53SPEAKERAnyway, different topic another day.

16:56SPEAKER- Yes, so you're on a Pi 3, is that right?

16:58SPEAKER- I tried a Pi 1 'cause I had one laying around,

17:00SPEAKERthat wasn't gonna, that dog would not hunt.

17:03SPEAKER- Yes.

17:04SPEAKER- The Raspberry Pi 3 Rev B that I got was fine.

17:09SPEAKERThey recommend a four, I think you're fine with a three.

17:11SPEAKERIt seems like the upgrade is pretty seamless

17:14SPEAKERif you wanna move, just like you can just move the card

17:17SPEAKERover maybe and it'll continue working.

17:21SPEAKERIf you're gonna do Zigbee and Z-Wave devices,

17:23SPEAKERso these are devices that use a specific radio,

17:26SPEAKERthen you need to get a dongle that supports those.

17:30SPEAKERThere's like a handful of things

17:31SPEAKERthat are supported on a list.

17:33SPEAKERI went with the Go Control CECOMINOD016164HUSBZB-1.

17:43SPEAKER- Really rolls off the tongue.

17:44SPEAKER- It really does roll off the tongue,

17:46SPEAKERbut it's a Z-Wave slash Zigbee device.

17:49SPEAKERHome assistant sees it just fine

17:50SPEAKERon the Raspberry Pi install and it works,

17:54SPEAKERlike I'm looking at it right now, it works great.

17:56SPEAKERThere's a little blue light on it.

17:59SPEAKERAnd then you need, so installing the OS

18:03SPEAKERis a lot like other Raspberry Pi projects.

18:06SPEAKERYou don't have to install Raspbian

18:07SPEAKERor Raspberry Pi OS or anything like that.

18:09SPEAKERThere's a, it's called Has OS install

18:13SPEAKERthat basically has the Raspberry Pi,

18:15SPEAKERthe Raspbian image pre-configured.

18:17SPEAKERAnd you just burn that with balina etcher

18:19SPEAKERand jam the SD card in and you're good to go.

18:22SPEAKERAnd then it walks you through the install.

18:24SPEAKERLike you've probably done the install process

18:25SPEAKERmore recently than I have.

18:26SPEAKER- Well, so I did it differently because of course I did.

18:30SPEAKER- Of course.

18:30SPEAKER- Well, so I use this as an excuse

18:32SPEAKERto get a Raspberry Pi 4 finally,

18:34SPEAKERwhich I had been putting off

18:35SPEAKERuntil I had an actual project to do with it.

18:38SPEAKERI've got a one and a two.

18:40SPEAKERI've got nut running on the one

18:42SPEAKERand a Pi hole running on the two, but so I got the,

18:47SPEAKERactually I convinced myself to get the Pi

18:49SPEAKERfor a eight gigabyte model because I want to do

18:54SPEAKERother stuff with it.

18:55SPEAKERLike that's kind of the whole thing

18:56SPEAKERwith having this free NAS machine.

18:57SPEAKERIt's free BSD based and you can't do any

18:59SPEAKERof the fun Linux stuff you want without like 8,000 headaches.

19:03SPEAKERSo I just wanted a nice little multipurpose Linux machine

19:06SPEAKERsitting around that I could tinker with

19:07SPEAKERand learn Linux better.

19:09SPEAKER- See, this is why you need that Proxmox install on the NAS.

19:11SPEAKER- Yeah, something about virtualizing

19:14SPEAKERstill just doesn't sit right with me, man.

19:16SPEAKERLike I just want to run stuff on the bare metal.

19:18SPEAKERIt's just call me old fashioned.

19:19SPEAKERI don't know.

19:20SPEAKER- You're old fashioned.

19:21SPEAKER- OS is inside of other OS is just, it doesn't,

19:24SPEAKERit feels icky.

19:25SPEAKER- Look, man, the whole world runs on virtualized OS.

19:30SPEAKER- I know, but the whole world doesn't run

19:32SPEAKERon my five-year-old gaming PC.

19:34SPEAKER- That's true, that's true.

19:36SPEAKER- I kind of squeeze every ounce of performance

19:37SPEAKERout of that thing.

19:38SPEAKERAnyway, the point is I wanted to,

19:40SPEAKERI actually put Ubuntu on Ubuntu server on that Pi 4

19:44SPEAKERinstead of a Raspbian or I don't,

19:46SPEAKERwhy did they change the name to Raspberry Pi OS?

19:48SPEAKER- There were-

19:49SPEAKER- Raspbian is such a better and easier name.

19:52SPEAKERWait, really?

19:54SPEAKERDid somebody in the Debian community get mad

19:56SPEAKERthat it sounded too similar or something?

19:57SPEAKER- No, I think it was because they didn't want

20:00SPEAKERRaspberry Pi distributing images using the Raspbian name.

20:05SPEAKERSo that's why, there was a post.

20:07SPEAKERJust, this is why we need that spinoff podcast, Scene Drama.

20:10SPEAKER- Scene Drama.

20:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:14SPEAKER- God, what were we talking about?

20:15SPEAKEROh, so I put Ubuntu server on there,

20:17SPEAKERwhich seems pretty nice now as far as Linux distros

20:21SPEAKERthat are not Raspbian for a Pi.

20:23SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah, it's fine.

20:24SPEAKER- Anyway, you're not wrong.

20:25SPEAKERLike the Home Assistant people have tons of fantastic guides

20:29SPEAKERand they have a guide on there for,

20:30SPEAKERif you're familiar with Python somewhat,

20:32SPEAKERyou could set up a virtual environment

20:33SPEAKERand install Home Assistant into that,

20:35SPEAKERwhich is a nice encapsulated way to run it

20:37SPEAKERand still have access to the base system.

20:39SPEAKER- So when I did that,

20:41SPEAKERso that's how I did it on the FreeNAS jail.

20:45SPEAKERAnd when I did that, a lot of stuff,

20:46SPEAKERlike some of the things that are really good features,

20:49SPEAKERlike the Home Assistant Community Store,

20:52SPEAKERwhich is like basically they have different silos

20:55SPEAKERof integrations for hardware.

20:56SPEAKERAnd like one is like the main branch stuff

20:59SPEAKERthat's in the main GitHub.

21:01SPEAKERAnd then the other, there's another one

21:03SPEAKERthat is things that the community has developed

21:06SPEAKERthat they make easy to install through this HACS

21:09SPEAKERthing that a different team works on,

21:12SPEAKERbut isn't necessarily vouched for by the core team.

21:16SPEAKERAnd I could never get that to work on the Python install.

21:20SPEAKER- Okay, so I'm glad you did it the mainstream way then,

21:22SPEAKERbecause yes, there are some things I missed.

21:24SPEAKERIn fact, the way I did it,

21:25SPEAKERthey actually refer to that as like Home Assistant Core,

21:27SPEAKERI think. - Yeah, yeah.

21:29SPEAKER- So there's that store,

21:31SPEAKERis that separate from the supervisor?

21:34SPEAKER- The supervisor,

21:35SPEAKER'cause there's several features that come

21:37SPEAKERthat I could not get working on FreeNAS.

21:40SPEAKEROne was the file editor, the built-in terminal,

21:43SPEAKERlike there's a lot of quality of life stuff,

21:45SPEAKERbut the community store was the big thing.

21:47SPEAKER'Cause if you don't have the community store

21:48SPEAKERthen to install community add-ons,

21:50SPEAKERyou end up having to like curl into GitHub

21:53SPEAKERand run script installation scripts off GitHub,

21:56SPEAKERwhich is fine right up until the moment

21:58SPEAKERthat you need to update something.

22:00SPEAKER- Dude, I was resisting the urge to talk about the case

22:02SPEAKERI got for that Py4.

22:03SPEAKER- Oh, what'd you get?

22:04SPEAKER- I got the Argon One, which you should look up.

22:06SPEAKERIt's just this fucking huge, solid hunk of aluminum.

22:10SPEAKER- Okay.

22:10SPEAKER- Comes with a daughterboard on it

22:11SPEAKERthat routes all the ports around to the back.

22:13SPEAKER- Oh, I like that.

22:14SPEAKER- It's got a fan controller on it.

22:15SPEAKERAnd the way you install the fan controller software

22:17SPEAKERis to literally curl a .sh, a shell script on their server

22:22SPEAKERand pipe it straight into your shell.

22:25SPEAKER- Also you become part of their botnet

22:27SPEAKERand they always read the script.

22:29SPEAKER- I actually read the entire script

22:30SPEAKERjust to see what was going on in there.

22:32SPEAKERAnd it's pretty benign.

22:33SPEAKER- Your Raspberry Pi is probably not mining Bitcoin,

22:35SPEAKERthen congratulations.

22:36SPEAKER- I was very excited about the whole thing.

22:38SPEAKERBut yeah, there are features that you get

22:40SPEAKERby going the pre-inaged kind of full install route

22:43SPEAKERthat I don't have.

22:44SPEAKERSo what is the supervisor?

22:45SPEAKERDo you know?

22:46SPEAKER- So the supervisor is the thing that controls,

22:50SPEAKERlike it is the thing that controls home assistant overall.

22:56SPEAKERSo there's the OS.

22:57SPEAKER- Yes.

22:58SPEAKER- And then there's the program home assistant running.

22:59SPEAKERAnd then there's a bunch of components inside home assistant.

23:02SPEAKERAnd this is one of the things

23:04SPEAKERthat you learn the hard way doing this.

23:05SPEAKERBut like, if you make a change to say a script

23:08SPEAKERor an automation or something like that,

23:10SPEAKERunlike every sane piece of software I've ever used,

23:13SPEAKERhome assistant doesn't, when you mash save,

23:16SPEAKERreload those scripts for everything.

23:18SPEAKERIt does that once you finish doing,

23:20SPEAKERlike you have to do it manually

23:21SPEAKERor you have to restart the server.

23:23SPEAKER- Yes, I have heard of that.

23:24SPEAKERYou're right.

23:25SPEAKER- So the supervisor gives you access to the add-on store,

23:29SPEAKERwhich is like a middle,

23:30SPEAKERsomewhere between the community store

23:33SPEAKERand the main core tools.

23:37SPEAKERIt gives you the ability to reboot the machine.

23:39SPEAKERIt lets you see like how much RAM you're using,

23:42SPEAKERchange your host name and IP address,

23:44SPEAKERlike OS kind of stuff, right?

23:47SPEAKERIt lets you choose whether you're on the stable channel

23:49SPEAKERor the beta channel.

23:50SPEAKERAnd it gives you log access to like system logs,

23:53SPEAKERnot home assistant logs.

23:54SPEAKER- That does sound pretty useful.

23:55SPEAKERI've gotten pretty used to just restarting the whole service

23:58SPEAKERevery time I make a change, which works.

24:01SPEAKER- So you can do that, you can restart the individual bits

24:03SPEAKERin server controls and configuration.

24:05SPEAKER- Okay, it's a complicated piece of software.

24:09SPEAKERIt is not the most user-friendly thing

24:10SPEAKERI have ever encountered.

24:11SPEAKER- It is, and there's like a lot of stuff

24:13SPEAKERthat happens in multiple places

24:14SPEAKERand sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't.

24:17SPEAKERIf you are going to go this path

24:19SPEAKERand you're used to using smart things,

24:21SPEAKERlike A, you're gonna wanna do a really gradual transition

24:24SPEAKERand get one, like understand how something works on a room

24:27SPEAKERwhere your home automation shit being bad

24:29SPEAKERisn't going to annoy everybody else in your house.

24:32SPEAKERSo like I've been working in my office

24:34SPEAKERfor the last two months until I had a pretty good grasp

24:36SPEAKERon everything and then moved everything over.

24:39SPEAKERBut the thing I will say is the documentation

24:42SPEAKERgenerally is good and if the documentation isn't,

24:44SPEAKERthen there's a form thread and the forums,

24:48SPEAKERespecially on the GitHub

24:49SPEAKERand the home assistant community forums

24:51SPEAKERare both pretty non-toxic as far as open source.

24:55SPEAKERLike if you're used to FreeNAS forums,

24:57SPEAKERthese are gonna be really friendly and lively

24:59SPEAKERas long as you're not a jackass.

25:01SPEAKER- Yes, absolutely.

25:03SPEAKERSo there are, I just wanna rattle off some terms here.

25:06SPEAKER- Yeah, hit me.

25:07SPEAKER- Just to give people kind of an idea

25:09SPEAKERof the scope of this thing.

25:10SPEAKERWhen you load it up for the first time,

25:12SPEAKERthere are devices, entities, integrations,

25:17SPEAKERautomations, scripts, scenes, areas, zones.

25:24SPEAKERHave I missed any?

25:25SPEAKER- No, there's a bunch more.

25:26SPEAKERThere's people, there's users.

25:28SPEAKER- Why are there people and users, Brad?

25:30SPEAKER- Why are there areas and zones?

25:32SPEAKER- Well, so users.

25:33SPEAKER- I mean, I know the answer to that question,

25:35SPEAKERbut that's the thing though.

25:36SPEAKERIt's like you read all these terms

25:37SPEAKERand a lot of them sound relatively synonymous

25:39SPEAKERand that's what I mean about this

25:40SPEAKERnot being the most intuitive thing

25:42SPEAKERis it's not always obvious like,

25:43SPEAKERwhat is the difference between a device and an entity?

25:46SPEAKERHow does an area distinct from a zone, that kind of thing.

25:49SPEAKER- Well, so I think this isn't like a straight how-to

25:53SPEAKER'cause your setup is gonna be different than my setup

25:55SPEAKERand the listener's setup is gonna be different

25:56SPEAKERthan either of our setups.

25:57SPEAKERBut there is a lot of stuff

25:59SPEAKERthat I'm sure I found out the hard way

26:01SPEAKERand you're probably in the process of finding out right now.

26:04SPEAKERAnd I think we can go through some of this stuff

26:06SPEAKERand it will help people understand this better.

26:09SPEAKER- Actually, but before we get to that,

26:10SPEAKERlike I don't wanna sound too critical of this thing

26:12SPEAKER'cause it seems pretty fantastic

26:14SPEAKERwhen you get your head around it.

26:15SPEAKER- It's amazing, like it is so good.

26:17SPEAKER- But the thing I wanna say in its favor

26:19SPEAKERis that so I installed it, I got it up and running,

26:21SPEAKERI went to the web interface

26:22SPEAKERand once I found my way to integrations,

26:25SPEAKERwhich turns out to be the kind of base level like,

26:27SPEAKERhere's how you get your Samsung stuff in,

26:29SPEAKERhere's how you get your Apple stuff,

26:31SPEAKERyour Google stuff, your Zigbee stuff,

26:33SPEAKERit's like the basic service layer.

26:35SPEAKERWhen I went there for the first time,

26:36SPEAKERit had found like everything on my network.

26:38SPEAKERSo that including things I didn't know could be automated,

26:41SPEAKERlike my Roku, my Sonos, my little bootleg iTunes music server

26:46SPEAKERthat I run on my NAS.

26:47SPEAKERLike it found a bunch of things that I didn't even think

26:50SPEAKERcould be integrated into our kind of home automation

26:52SPEAKERecosystem, like it's pretty impressive

26:54SPEAKERat auto detecting all that stuff.

26:56SPEAKER- So the thing I will say is that right now,

26:59SPEAKERbut part of this is confusing

27:00SPEAKER'cause they're kind of in a transition period right now.

27:04SPEAKEREarly in the development of the software

27:06SPEAKERin order to add new integrations,

27:08SPEAKERso an integration is like the interface

27:10SPEAKERbetween Home Assistant and any other device, right?

27:14SPEAKER- A good example is we have a bunch

27:16SPEAKERof the TP-Link Casa smart plugs

27:19SPEAKER'cause they're pretty cheap

27:20SPEAKERand my girlfriend got a couple from work for free.

27:23SPEAKERSo we just have a lot of them.

27:24SPEAKERAnd so like adding the TP-Link Casa integration

27:27SPEAKERis what you do to get all of those into Home Assistant.

27:29SPEAKERLike that's an example.

27:30SPEAKERIt's like a brand is associated

27:33SPEAKERwith an integration essentially.

27:34SPEAKER- And like, just to be clear,

27:35SPEAKERlike it detected my printer.

27:39SPEAKERIt knew that I have some IPP compatible printers.

27:42SPEAKERIt added weather, it added my Lutron stuff,

27:45SPEAKERit added Logitech Harmony hubs.

27:47SPEAKERAll of this stuff just got detected automatically.

27:49SPEAKERYou can add stuff manually

27:50SPEAKERthat it doesn't detect automatically.

27:54SPEAKERBut like it's pretty,

27:55SPEAKERthat like that whole process was really straightforward

27:57SPEAKERand that's kind of the beginning place.

28:00SPEAKERNow in the old days,

28:01SPEAKERthere wasn't a web UI for setting this stuff up.

28:04SPEAKERYou just added, you like edited a YAML file.

28:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and a lot of the documentation you'll find out there

28:10SPEAKERis still very much based on editing YAML files.

28:12SPEAKER- Well, and some of the integrations

28:14SPEAKERlike to add Alexa and Google support manually,

28:17SPEAKERGoogle Assistant support manually,

28:18SPEAKERyou have to do YAML files.

28:21SPEAKERYou have to edit the YAML file.

28:22SPEAKER- There's not, it's not like writing Python code

28:26SPEAKERor even scripting.

28:26SPEAKERYAML stands for yet another markup language.

28:28SPEAKERSo it's kind of like HTML.

28:31SPEAKER- I think it, hang on, isn't it recursive?

28:33SPEAKERI think it's YAML ain't a markup language.

28:36SPEAKER- Oh, maybe it might be a YAML markup language.

28:38SPEAKER- Yes, that's what it is.

28:39SPEAKER- Shit.

28:40SPEAKERAnyway, so the upshot is the language is really easy

28:45SPEAKERto understand just by looking at it.

28:46SPEAKERLike it's just like a series of nested tags

28:49SPEAKERand you can kind of put things in and out

28:51SPEAKERand it's not hard.

28:52SPEAKER- I think it's more straightforward than JSON

28:54SPEAKERfrom what I've seen.

28:55SPEAKER- It is way easier than JSON.

28:57SPEAKERIt is probably easier even than HTML

28:59SPEAKERother than the fact that people are in HTML

29:01SPEAKERin middle school.

29:02SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:03SPEAKER- The, but most of the stuff that you're gonna use

29:06SPEAKERprobably now and going forward will hopefully

29:09SPEAKERhave like the web-based integration.

29:11SPEAKER'Cause that's a little bit easier to manage.

29:13SPEAKER- Yes, a little bit, but like I should point out

29:16SPEAKERwhen you add devices, there's still a lot of like names

29:18SPEAKERwith a lot of underscores in them

29:20SPEAKERand like kind of very technical terminology applied to a lot

29:22SPEAKERof stuff.

29:23SPEAKERLike it's not, it is no like it is no Apple home

29:25SPEAKERor something like that.

29:26SPEAKERLike it's not that user-friendly.

29:27SPEAKER- So what you're trading when you go with Home Assistant

29:30SPEAKERover Apple home or smart things or something like that

29:32SPEAKERis a lot more pain on the setup that you do presumably

29:35SPEAKERone time and then never fucks with again

29:38SPEAKERfor the ability to do much, much, much, much,

29:42SPEAKERmuch more complicated automations

29:46SPEAKERwith a wider variety of devices and APIs.

29:50SPEAKERSo like there's a fair amount, like for example,

29:52SPEAKERto set up the Lutron switches that I have

29:54SPEAKERbecause my house has two wires.

29:56SPEAKERSo Lutron cassette switches will smart switches will work

29:59SPEAKERwith two wire houses with the no neutral.

30:02SPEAKERAnd in order to set those up, you have to have a hub

30:04SPEAKERbut you have to get an API key.

30:06SPEAKERAnd the only way to get an API key is by logging

30:07SPEAKERinto the specific website with a preformed header.

30:10SPEAKERSo you basically install an add-on to Home Assistant

30:14SPEAKERthat generates the API key, and then you copy that API key

30:18SPEAKERand put it in the YAML file.

30:19SPEAKERAnd then it just shows up and starts working magically.

30:21SPEAKERLike you don't have to do anything else.

30:23SPEAKER- That is both very cool to me.

30:24SPEAKERAnd also it sounds like a giant pain in the ass.

30:26SPEAKERAlso, can I derail you for a second?

30:28SPEAKER- It's a pain in the ass one time.

30:29SPEAKERLike that's like all this stuff we're talking about so far

30:32SPEAKERis single use hassle for long-term comfort.

30:36SPEAKER- I have to derail.

30:37SPEAKERWhat is this two wire house business?

30:40SPEAKERThat's some homeowner thing that everybody

30:41SPEAKERwho owns a house knows about.

30:43SPEAKER- If you have a house that was built after like 19,

30:46SPEAKERsomewhere in between the 70s and 90s,

30:48SPEAKERdepending on where you are and what code is,

30:50SPEAKERthere's three wires going to every light switch.

30:53SPEAKERThere's a hot, a ground, and then a neutral wire.

30:58SPEAKERThe neutral wire basically lets it shut off excess energy.

31:01SPEAKERSo if you have like a dimmer

31:02SPEAKERand you don't need all the electricity going to the lights,

31:05SPEAKERsome of it goes down the neutral.

31:06SPEAKERAnd I don't know what happens to it at that point,

31:08SPEAKERmagic happens.

31:08SPEAKER- Neither do they either.

31:10SPEAKER- If you have an old house like I do,

31:11SPEAKERyou have two wires coming into everything.

31:13SPEAKERAnd there's an assumption that somewhere

31:15SPEAKERbetween those two wires is going to be a thing

31:18SPEAKERthat turns on or off and that's what makes the light work.

31:20SPEAKERAnd if you want to have smart dimmers

31:23SPEAKERon non-incandescent bulbs,

31:25SPEAKERyou have to have somewhere for that extra energy to go,

31:28SPEAKERexcept Lutron has figured some shit out and patented it.

31:31SPEAKERSo they're the only ones that have it that works.

31:33SPEAKER- I see.

31:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

31:36SPEAKEROr maybe they're the only ones that have bothered to do it.

31:38SPEAKERThe upshot is if you have a two wire house

31:41SPEAKERuntil the Lutron cassette of stuff came out,

31:42SPEAKERyou were probably better off getting smart bulbs

31:44SPEAKERrather than trying to find smart switches that would work.

31:48SPEAKERAnyway.

31:48SPEAKEROkay, so we talked about integrations.

31:51SPEAKERDevices and entities.

31:52SPEAKEREntities are each like physical device.

31:56SPEAKER- Wait, really?

31:57SPEAKERI thought that was devices.

31:58SPEAKER- No, no, no.

31:59SPEAKER- All right, this is educational for me too.

32:01SPEAKER- An entity is a container.

32:02SPEAKER- Okay.

32:03SPEAKER- Sorry, other way around.

32:04SPEAKERYou're right, you're right.

32:05SPEAKER- Oh, it is, okay.

32:06SPEAKER- Devices are the container

32:06SPEAKERand each device can have multiple entities attached to it.

32:09SPEAKER- Okay, yes.

32:10SPEAKER- So for example.

32:11SPEAKER- Yes, we were not kidding.

32:12SPEAKERThis stuff is really hard to keep track of.

32:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:14SPEAKERFor example, if you have a smart plug,

32:17SPEAKERoften they will tell you how much energy is being used

32:19SPEAKERin any given moment.

32:21SPEAKERSo a smart plug device might have an on/off entity

32:27SPEAKERthat controls whether that switch is getting power or not.

32:29SPEAKERAnother entity for how much power,

32:32SPEAKERif it's like a dimmable switch.

32:33SPEAKERAnd a third for how much power it's actually consuming

32:36SPEAKERat any given moment.

32:37SPEAKER- Okay, this is starting to make sense.

32:39SPEAKER- Yeah, so let's see another example.

32:42SPEAKERLike I have an Aeon Labs motion sensor in the living room

32:45SPEAKERthat also measures temperature, humidity, luminosity,

32:49SPEAKERand I think noise, maybe one other thing.

32:52SPEAKER- You know what?

32:52SPEAKER- And each of those is entities under that one device.

32:55SPEAKER- Yes, so the actual most extreme example,

32:57SPEAKERI don't know if you've,

32:58SPEAKERhave you paired any mobile devices with this thing?

33:00SPEAKER- Oh yeah, your phone goes...

33:02SPEAKER- I'm sitting here,

33:02SPEAKERmy iPhone 8 has roughly a dozen different entities

33:06SPEAKERassociated with it.

33:07SPEAKERSo like battery state, connection type, distance,

33:11SPEAKERfloors ascended, floors descended,

33:14SPEAKERa geo-coded location, activity, battery,

33:17SPEAKERdid I say battery level?

33:18SPEAKER- No, but it's in there too, yeah.

33:20SPEAKER- Battery level, average active pace,

33:22SPEAKERlike all of those things are broken out

33:24SPEAKERas separate things that Home Assistant tracks.

33:26SPEAKERAnd presumably I assume you could tie automations

33:28SPEAKERand like scripting stuff to any one

33:31SPEAKERor multiple of those things.

33:32SPEAKERLike that's where the magic,

33:35SPEAKERand I haven't dug into this stuff really at all.

33:36SPEAKERI know you have a little bit,

33:37SPEAKERbut that's where the potential for magic

33:40SPEAKERseems to be with this thing is like the ways

33:42SPEAKERthat you can mix and match data from different devices

33:44SPEAKERto come up with like these ridiculous automation scenarios

33:47SPEAKERbased on like eight bajillion criteria

33:49SPEAKERseems like pretty awesome.

33:50SPEAKER- So I have a weather station that Tina and my daughter

33:53SPEAKERgot me a few years ago for Christmas.

33:56SPEAKERAnd when I connected that thing in,

33:58SPEAKERit popped like 65 different things.

34:01SPEAKER'Cause not only does it give me like the temperature,

34:03SPEAKERthe carbon dioxide, the humidity, the noise level,

34:06SPEAKERthe barometric pressure,

34:07SPEAKERit also gives like how the battery state for the devices

34:12SPEAKERand like whether when they last connected to the radio

34:15SPEAKERand whether they can be pinged right now.

34:17SPEAKERAnd like, it's pretty ridiculous.

34:21SPEAKERAnyway, so, okay, so that's devices and entities.

34:24SPEAKERWhen you set these up, you can choose to name them.

34:27SPEAKERIt is very important that you give them names

34:28SPEAKERthat you're going to be able to tell what they are.

34:31SPEAKER'Cause sometimes it's really hard to tell what's what.

34:33SPEAKERIt's also super important that you give everything

34:35SPEAKERa distinct name and you want to do all of that

34:37SPEAKERbefore you start making any automations.

34:41SPEAKERBecause the automations are just flat text files

34:43SPEAKERthat the thing generates.

34:45SPEAKERSo if you change the name of an entity or device

34:47SPEAKERafter you've created automations,

34:49SPEAKERyou're going to have to go back into those automations

34:51SPEAKERand manually change the names

34:53SPEAKERto match the names that you changed it to.

34:55SPEAKER- That really hurts.

34:56SPEAKER- Yeah.

34:59SPEAKERSo areas and zones, this is an easy one.

35:02SPEAKERAn area is a room in your house.

35:05SPEAKERA zone is any place else in the world

35:07SPEAKERthat you're interested in something happening

35:09SPEAKERwhen a person from your house goes into or out of.

35:12SPEAKERSo for example, if you wanted to have

35:15SPEAKERsome automation happen at your house

35:17SPEAKERwhen you reach the office at home at work,

35:21SPEAKERimagine a time when we left the house.

35:23SPEAKER- Okay, sure.

35:25SPEAKER- Or if I wanted to have something happen

35:26SPEAKERwhen my daughter gets to school,

35:28SPEAKERlike if my daughter gets on the bus in the morning,

35:30SPEAKERI want to get a notification when she arrives at school,

35:33SPEAKERI can trigger that using zones.

35:35SPEAKER- That is extremely cool and also kind of terrifying.

35:38SPEAKER- I mean, look,

35:45SPEAKERso Jean and I have shared locations

35:47SPEAKERwith each other for years now.

35:49SPEAKERIt is incredibly useful for me, or for her,

35:52SPEAKERshe's like, hey, can you stop at the grocery store

35:55SPEAKERto know when I'm in the car

35:56SPEAKERand not have to call me and be like,

35:59SPEAKERhey, are you in the car?

36:00SPEAKERI need you to stop and get some hot dogs

36:01SPEAKERor whatever on the way home from work.

36:02SPEAKER- I'm sure like parenting is such a kind of

36:06SPEAKERseat of your pants situation,

36:07SPEAKERthat privacy is a secondary concern

36:09SPEAKERto just getting things done.

36:11SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yeah, I guess.

36:15SPEAKERI mean, look, I don't,

36:17SPEAKEReverybody's relationships are different.

36:18SPEAKER- Oh totally, yeah.

36:19SPEAKER- Like, yeah, we're not doing,

36:21SPEAKERanyway, that's a whole different conversation.

36:24SPEAKERBut the upshot on this is that I want to

36:26SPEAKERmake the Weasley clock from Harry Potter.

36:30SPEAKERThe Weasleys have this clock

36:32SPEAKERwhere they're like, there's a hand for each kid,

36:34SPEAKEReach person in the family,

36:35SPEAKERand they point toward work and school and home

36:38SPEAKERand mortal peril.

36:39SPEAKERAnd you could totally do that using zones.

36:43SPEAKER- Man, that's cool.

36:44SPEAKER- Right, it's such a stupid thing.

36:47SPEAKERBut I was even thinking about just doing an LCD screen

36:50SPEAKERwith the letter LCD screens, like a train terminal,

36:54SPEAKERthe kind of thing that just pops up and is like,

36:57SPEAKERokay, Will is sitting in the office,

37:00SPEAKEREdith is at school,

37:03SPEAKERKiddo is mortal peril, right?

37:06SPEAKER- So this is the actual reason

37:08SPEAKERI really wanted to do this episode.

37:09SPEAKERLike all I've done with Home Assistant so far

37:11SPEAKERis just replicate the functionality

37:12SPEAKERthat should have worked in Apple Home and did not.

37:14SPEAKER- Oh right, well that's where you should start.

37:16SPEAKERThat's the kickoff point.

37:17SPEAKER- But you've started doing some actual creative stuff

37:20SPEAKERand like, I really just wanted to like hear some cool ideas.

37:22SPEAKERCan I say the one that you told me about

37:24SPEAKERthat I thought was super cool or should we save that?

37:26SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna talk about automations and scripts

37:28SPEAKERand scenes next so we can just go right do it.

37:30SPEAKER- Okay.

37:31SPEAKER- So, okay, so automation scripts and scenes

37:34SPEAKERkind of all work together.

37:37SPEAKERA scene, and just to be clear,

37:39SPEAKERthe automations are what differentiate Home Assistant

37:42SPEAKERfrom SmartThings and Wink and HomeKit

37:45SPEAKERand all the other stuff.

37:46SPEAKERYou can do like, you can have scripts that call each other

37:50SPEAKERand do all sorts of weird business

37:52SPEAKERand like they can talk back and forth.

37:54SPEAKERYou can't really share variables between scripts

37:55SPEAKERand stuff like that.

37:56SPEAKERAt least not without delving into Python.

38:00SPEAKERBut also you can write Python scripts for this.

38:02SPEAKERIf you're a Python person, you wanna get into that.

38:05SPEAKERYou can do that.

38:06SPEAKERBut so automations make things happen

38:10SPEAKERbased on something else happening.

38:12SPEAKERSo you can set a trigger.

38:14SPEAKERFor example, there's motion on the motion sensor

38:17SPEAKERin my office, right?

38:19SPEAKEROh, I should turn the lights on in the office.

38:20SPEAKERThat's an automation.

38:22SPEAKERYou can also connect it to APIs and trigger those actions

38:27SPEAKERbased on external APIs.

38:30SPEAKERSo for example, I have mine hooked up to my Google Calendar

38:34SPEAKERand my Twitch API.

38:36SPEAKERSo when Home Assistant sees that my Twitch stream is live,

38:40SPEAKERit's like, oh, he's probably in his office.

38:41SPEAKERI should turn the lights up to stream settings.

38:43SPEAKER- That's ridiculous.

38:45SPEAKERThat's so cool. - When I have a meeting,

38:46SPEAKERwhen there's a busy status on my calendar,

38:48SPEAKERit's like, oh, I should turn the lights on

38:50SPEAKERso that his Zoom call is properly live.

38:52SPEAKER- That is so damn cool.

38:54SPEAKERYou know what?

38:55SPEAKERActually, I think it detected my Elgato key light,

38:57SPEAKERI wanna say.

38:58SPEAKER- Yeah, you can do that.

38:59SPEAKERThat one fires.

38:59SPEAKERYou can do this.

39:01SPEAKER- Tell that fucking bright ass light to come on in my face

39:04SPEAKERevery time it's time to stream.

39:05SPEAKER- Well, it's tricky for you

39:06SPEAKER'cause you share a channel with a bunch of other people.

39:08SPEAKERSo what happens is when Abby fires up the giant bomb account,

39:11SPEAKERyour lights are gonna be on full blast,

39:12SPEAKERwhich maybe is not desired.

39:14SPEAKER- There's probably a way for it to monitor processes

39:17SPEAKERrunning on the machine and look for-

39:19SPEAKER- 100%.

39:20SPEAKER- Like straight up p-grep it or something.

39:22SPEAKERLook for a specific process to appear

39:25SPEAKERand then do it or whatever.

39:26SPEAKER- You can 100% trigger that.

39:28SPEAKER- So setting up, I'm sorry,

39:29SPEAKERI was just gonna mention real quick.

39:30SPEAKERSo like setting up automations is when I first had,

39:32SPEAKERit was when I had my first like kind of little magical moment

39:35SPEAKERwith this thing of like,

39:35SPEAKERoh, the potential of this is far greater

39:37SPEAKERthan the commercial solutions I've been using

39:40SPEAKERbecause I was setting all the automations up

39:41SPEAKERto just have lights come on at certain times.

39:43SPEAKERThat's what we did with home.

39:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:45SPEAKER- And when I was setting up, we have a little,

39:47SPEAKERit's an orange LED light bulb in the bedroom

39:50SPEAKERin one of the lamps, which is just a nice evening,

39:52SPEAKERkind of nighttime light.

39:53SPEAKER- Yeah, warm.

39:54SPEAKER- That we have come on in the evening

39:55SPEAKERjust to keep that room illuminated.

39:58SPEAKERAnd throughout the year,

39:59SPEAKERI would ride that automation in Apple Home

40:01SPEAKERand like update it every two, three months

40:03SPEAKERas the length of days changed.

40:05SPEAKERI was going to punch a time

40:06SPEAKERinto the automation and home assistant.

40:08SPEAKERAnd one of the options was just sunset

40:11SPEAKERor sunset with an offset.

40:13SPEAKERIt's like 15 minutes before sunset or after sunset.

40:16SPEAKERAnd I was like, oh my God,

40:17SPEAKERlike this is going to be awesome.

40:18SPEAKER- Brad, here's a fun one.

40:21SPEAKERHome, my house, the west facing exposure for my house

40:26SPEAKERhas a mountain on the south side of it.

40:28SPEAKERSo the sun, that means the sun goes down an hour earlier

40:32SPEAKERin the winter time than it does in the summer.

40:34SPEAKER- Sure.

40:35SPEAKER- So you can just set it to like an angle

40:37SPEAKERabove or below the horizon.

40:38SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I saw that.

40:39SPEAKERI saw that, literally.

40:40SPEAKER- Like you can go ham with this.

40:41SPEAKER- That's the, that's not the...

40:43SPEAKER- It's the sun disintegration.

40:44SPEAKER- What does the, no, no, no, the term for...

40:46SPEAKER- Azimuth is something different, right?

40:49SPEAKER- Azimuth is the angle, I think.

40:50SPEAKERI can't remember.

40:51SPEAKERWe're going to get this wrong.

40:52SPEAKER- Yeah, that's why I'm afraid to mention it.

40:54SPEAKER'Cause I started looking that stuff up

40:55SPEAKERafter I saw this in home assistant.

40:56SPEAKERAnd I don't know that I should do that.

40:59SPEAKERHere I am on the NOAA solar position calculator now,

41:01SPEAKERwhich is maybe beyond me.

41:04SPEAKER- Look, you're going to have to fire this up in Kerbal

41:06SPEAKERto get a real understanding.

41:07SPEAKER- Totally.

41:08SPEAKERBut like I should, I should mention like, yeah,

41:09SPEAKERthe reason it knows sunset

41:10SPEAKERis because it's pulling in weather data.

41:11SPEAKERSo you could probably say like, hey, turn on the lights

41:14SPEAKERor turn on whatever you have access to

41:16SPEAKERwhen it's raining outside, you know,

41:17SPEAKERor when it's below 50 degrees outside or in the house or...

41:21SPEAKER- You can absolutely do that.

41:23SPEAKERAnd you can also do like normal home automation stuff.

41:26SPEAKERLike when I opened my back door, any of my exterior doors,

41:30SPEAKERthe outside lights that are next to those turn on, right?

41:35SPEAKERWhen somebody walks up to the front doorbell,

41:36SPEAKERwhich has a motion sensor,

41:38SPEAKERit turns on the front porch light.

41:40SPEAKERSo like when the pizza guy comes,

41:41SPEAKERhe's not standing out there in the dark.

41:43SPEAKERAll of that stuff is really convenient.

41:46SPEAKERBut like really it's the thing that is broader here

41:49SPEAKERis the ability to do things

41:51SPEAKERlike hook up to your Google calendar

41:52SPEAKERand things like that, which is smart things.

41:53SPEAKERA, I wouldn't give Samsung that access to data,

41:56SPEAKERbut because it's running on a machine

41:57SPEAKERthat's inside my house and I'm the only one in charge of,

42:01SPEAKERI feel okay about it.

42:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I enjoyed when in the very first page

42:05SPEAKERof the initial setup of this thing, they emphasize like,

42:07SPEAKERhey, none of your data will be shared outside of the server.

42:09SPEAKERLike this is, privacy is a major concern here.

42:13SPEAKERIt's got just real quick on it,

42:15SPEAKERlike in that vein of trying to do,

42:16SPEAKERif you're really a DIY type

42:19SPEAKERand you're concerned about privacy and data

42:20SPEAKERand stuff like that,

42:22SPEAKERit's even got like an FFmpeg integration

42:24SPEAKERthat can handle webcams like security cameras.

42:28SPEAKERLike I've seen people talking about like,

42:30SPEAKERyou can use like cheap raspberry pies

42:32SPEAKERand dumb webcams as security cameras

42:35SPEAKERthat feed into this thing and stuff like that.

42:37SPEAKER- Well, you can also buy what are called IP cams

42:39SPEAKERthat don't connect to a cloud service.

42:41SPEAKERThat then you just point those IPs at the things.

42:43SPEAKERI don't know how that would run on the raspberry pies.

42:46SPEAKER- Okay.

42:47SPEAKER- And also like you do wanna minimize the rights

42:50SPEAKERthat you do to SD cards.

42:51SPEAKERIt's a good idea to buy compatible SD cards

42:54SPEAKER'cause they're set up for more rights,

42:56SPEAKERbut like you don't wanna have logs on for this

42:57SPEAKER'cause you'll burn out your SD card fast.

43:00SPEAKER- And certainly, yeah, if you were funneling footage

43:02SPEAKERto something, you would wanna save it to an external drive.

43:05SPEAKER- Yeah, this is a hard drive situation.

43:07SPEAKEROkay, so automations, they make things happen

43:10SPEAKERbased on something else happening,

43:11SPEAKERbased on a trigger.

43:12SPEAKERA scene is just a collection of devices

43:15SPEAKERin a specific state.

43:17SPEAKERSo if you think about,

43:19SPEAKERso basically if you're setting up an automation

43:20SPEAKERand you want the lights to be in like nighttime mode

43:24SPEAKERwhen three different things happen,

43:26SPEAKERyou can set up three automations

43:27SPEAKERand you can go in and manually select all of those items

43:29SPEAKERthat you wanna be that way,

43:31SPEAKERor you can make a scene that is the way you want

43:34SPEAKERthose lights to be when any of those three things happens

43:36SPEAKERand then make three automations that just say,

43:37SPEAKER"Hey, call this scene when this happens."

43:39SPEAKER- That's exactly right.

43:40SPEAKERSo like, for example, I've got an LED light strip

43:42SPEAKERon the back of my desk, just kind of illuminates the wall.

43:45SPEAKER- Yeah, backsplash, it's nice.

43:46SPEAKER- Totally, and like, I want that to come on in the morning

43:48SPEAKERat like a nice, very low brightness, like a nice orange,

43:51SPEAKERyou know, something to wake up to.

43:53SPEAKERSo yes, I made a scene that was like light strip

43:56SPEAKERon brightness 5%, orange, whatever hex code

44:00SPEAKERfor the orange color, whatever, you know what I mean?

44:02SPEAKERAnd like you said, yes, then you can trigger that

44:04SPEAKERat any time, you can just say activate the scene

44:06SPEAKERinstead of activating this device.

44:08SPEAKERAnd you can set that up for different colors

44:09SPEAKERor different states.

44:12SPEAKER- So now, but what if you wanted to make

44:15SPEAKERthat light change color temperature throughout the day

44:18SPEAKERor like, and go from like orange to blue

44:22SPEAKERand then back to orange, right?

44:24SPEAKER- Yes.

44:25SPEAKER- So you would, instead of calling that scene,

44:27SPEAKERyou would call a script, which is basically an automation

44:30SPEAKERthat happens independent of a trigger.

44:32SPEAKERYou don't need it, it's triggered by something else,

44:34SPEAKEReither manually by like a voice assistant call

44:37SPEAKERor by another automation.

44:40SPEAKERAnd so you would say, okay, over the next 10 hours,

44:44SPEAKERchange this from this hex to this hex to this hex.

44:47SPEAKER- With like a five minute increment

44:49SPEAKERor something like that, or interval rather?

44:50SPEAKER- Yeah, like you'd have to do a little bit of math

44:53SPEAKERprobably to figure it out.

44:55SPEAKERBut yeah, and that's how that like,

44:57SPEAKERbasically that's how that would work.

44:58SPEAKERSo things that I use, so for example,

45:03SPEAKERto go back one step, for scenes,

45:04SPEAKERI have a scene for my office when it's empty,

45:06SPEAKERI have a scene for my office when I'm working

45:09SPEAKERand I want it to be kind of dim,

45:10SPEAKERwhich is what it's on right now.

45:12SPEAKERAnd then I have a scene for like eye blasting bright,

45:15SPEAKERI'm shooting video in here.

45:18SPEAKERI have a scene for dusk,

45:22SPEAKERwhen it starts to get dark outside,

45:23SPEAKERI have a scene for after my daughter goes to bed,

45:25SPEAKERI have a scene for late night, like after 10 o'clock,

45:28SPEAKERand then I have a scene, two different scenes for bedtime,

45:31SPEAKERfor like turning off all the lights in the house

45:33SPEAKERand turning off all the lights in my master bedroom.

45:35SPEAKERSo that like, if Gina and I go to bed in different orders,

45:38SPEAKERit works for either of us, no matter,

45:39SPEAKERno matter whether I'm in bed reading a book

45:42SPEAKERand want the light on, or she's in the living room

45:45SPEAKERand wants the lights on out there

45:46SPEAKERwhile I'm in bed and want the light off.

45:48SPEAKER- So how do you write scripts?

45:49SPEAKERDo you have to write them from scratch?

45:50SPEAKERLike, is it a straight up text editor or just like go?

45:53SPEAKERLike I assume that's not,

45:54SPEAKERthey don't really hold your hand for those, I assume.

45:56SPEAKER- So you can do that if you want.

45:57SPEAKERThere's the script builder right now

45:59SPEAKERis one of the things I think is in pretty active development.

46:02SPEAKERAnd you can, I'm going to it right now

46:07SPEAKERso I can see what it looks like.

46:07SPEAKERThe last time I looked at it,

46:08SPEAKERit looked like a JV version of the automation builder,

46:11SPEAKERwhich is what it is.

46:12SPEAKERIt's basically like the same as the automation creator.

46:15SPEAKERIf you get to a point where you can't do what you want to do

46:18SPEAKERwith the creator, with the creator tool,

46:21SPEAKERyou can just write straight code.

46:22SPEAKER- And what are you writing there?

46:23SPEAKERThat's my real question, is it some-

46:25SPEAKER- It's YAML, or I think you can call Python scripts as well.

46:28SPEAKER- Okay, okay.

46:31SPEAKERSo things I use scripts for,

46:33SPEAKERlike another way to think of scripts

46:35SPEAKERare they're like scenes, but with logic.

46:37SPEAKERSo for example, I'll fire up,

46:40SPEAKERI have a script that when I want to lay in bed

46:43SPEAKERand watch some Star Trek, The Next Generation,

46:44SPEAKERbut I'm afraid I won't fall asleep

46:45SPEAKERand don't want the TV going until three o'clock

46:46SPEAKERin the morning, I say, okay, Google,

46:50SPEAKERturn off the TV in a bit.

46:51SPEAKERAnd it starts a script that runs for 30 minutes

46:55SPEAKERand kills the TV at that point, after 30 minutes.

46:59SPEAKERAnd that uses a Roku integration,

47:01SPEAKERso it was really straightforward and simple.

47:03SPEAKER- I can only help you with the first request.

47:06SPEAKER- Go away, Google.

47:11SPEAKERMy bad.

47:12SPEAKER- It's starting to detect a downside

47:13SPEAKERto all of this room automation.

47:17SPEAKERI really hope that's picking up on your recording.

47:19SPEAKER- So, and then the last thing,

47:23SPEAKERthe last big thing is the Lovelace dashboards,

47:25SPEAKERthe Lovelace dashboards.

47:26SPEAKERAnd that's the thing that you see on that overview page,

47:28SPEAKERit's the first thing it shows you when you connect,

47:30SPEAKERI think, after you've set it up.

47:32SPEAKERAnd the default one is controlled by the computer

47:35SPEAKERand basically has everything on it.

47:38SPEAKERSo you kind of want to leave that one alone.

47:41SPEAKERYou don't, generally speaking,

47:43SPEAKERyou don't probably want to start customizing these

47:45SPEAKERuntil you're pretty sure you have all of the devices

47:48SPEAKERyou're going to want to put on,

47:50SPEAKERat least in the first, like with what you have right now,

47:54SPEAKERbecause once you customize a dashboard,

47:58SPEAKERyou, it doesn't automatically add new stuff to it anymore.

48:02SPEAKERSo, but like I have a dashboard for Gina

48:05SPEAKERthat's just like the rooms and the lights and the speakers

48:08SPEAKERand the washer and dryer.

48:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

48:10SPEAKERAnd there are mobile apps we should point out.

48:12SPEAKERThere are iOS and Android apps that basically,

48:15SPEAKERthey basically just replicate the web interface

48:17SPEAKERas far as I can tell.

48:18SPEAKER- Well, no, they also do, they also do presence.

48:20SPEAKERSo they'll connect you to zone.

48:22SPEAKERLike you can get the zone information,

48:25SPEAKERlike where your phone is,

48:27SPEAKEReither through the Home Assistant app

48:29SPEAKERor through Apple's iCloud implementation.

48:32SPEAKERI find the iCloud app implementation

48:34SPEAKERto be really fucking annoying if you have two factor on

48:36SPEAKERfor your iOS, for your iCloud account.

48:39SPEAKERSo I disabled it and turned it off entirely.

48:42SPEAKER- Right.

48:42SPEAKER- And I only do the Home Assistant configuration now.

48:47SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, as far as the onscreen interface,

48:49SPEAKERit basically is the web interface.

48:50SPEAKERSo any, what I mean is any custom-

48:52SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the same thing.

48:53SPEAKERYou see the same thing.

48:54SPEAKER- Any customization you do on dashboards

48:55SPEAKERon the web interface will show up in the apps as well.

48:57SPEAKER- That's right, and I think in the app,

48:58SPEAKERyou can say which dashboard you wanna see by default too.

49:01SPEAKER- Oh, cool.

49:01SPEAKER- Which is nice.

49:03SPEAKERSo there's stuff you should know.

49:04SPEAKERLike this is the stuff that is important.

49:06SPEAKERWe talked about reloading.

49:07SPEAKERAnytime you write a new script or add a new automation

49:09SPEAKERor add a new scene or change an area,

49:13SPEAKERchange a zone, change a person, change a user,

49:15SPEAKERany of that stuff, you gotta reload the appropriate part.

49:18SPEAKERAnd if you don't know which part to reload,

49:20SPEAKERjust restart the Home Assistant application,

49:24SPEAKERwhich is in configuration, server controls, restart.

49:28SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:29SPEAKER- Simple.

49:30SPEAKER- It's not that slow.

49:32SPEAKERIf you're on a reasonably fast Pi,

49:33SPEAKERit only takes a few seconds for me.

49:35SPEAKER- Well, so if you reboot the Pi, it takes a long time.

49:38SPEAKERIf you restart the server, it just takes a minute.

49:40SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I mean.

49:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:43SPEAKERIf you're gonna do this and you want it to work

49:45SPEAKERwhen you're on your phone away from the house,

49:47SPEAKERyou need to have dynamic DNS set up.

49:50SPEAKERThere's a add-on in supervisor that is called duck DNS

49:56SPEAKERthat will do that.

49:57SPEAKERIt'll generate a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

49:59SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.

50:00SPEAKER- The whole thing.

50:01SPEAKER- I didn't know they bring all that stuff in there.

50:02SPEAKERThat's great.

50:02SPEAKER- Yeah, it's fabulous.

50:03SPEAKERAnd it took like, that took like 20 minutes to set up.

50:06SPEAKERIt was really easy.

50:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so essentially you would forward ports

50:08SPEAKERor a port probably to-

50:10SPEAKER- You forward one port.

50:12SPEAKER- To the machine that it's running on.

50:13SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, and you've got a domain

50:14SPEAKERyou can access externally.

50:15SPEAKEROr like if you've got a VPN set up like I do,

50:18SPEAKERyou can just VPN and get that way as well.

50:21SPEAKER- The benefit of doing the dynamic DNS versus the VPN

50:24SPEAKERis that anytime the VPN isn't active,

50:27SPEAKERyou won't get notifications.

50:28SPEAKERBut if you do the DNS, the dynamic DNS thing, you will.

50:31SPEAKER- Sure.

50:33SPEAKER- The voice assistant integrations are challenging.

50:36SPEAKERSo there's two iOS integrations for Apple users.

50:39SPEAKEROne is the iCloud one I said before,

50:43SPEAKERwhich is bad if you use two factor.

50:45SPEAKERThe other is HomeKit,

50:46SPEAKERwhich it'll detect if you have iOS devices on your network.

50:51SPEAKERThe HomeKit one is great.

50:52SPEAKERIt gives you Siri support on your devices.

50:54SPEAKERYou'll have to go in and manually configure.

50:56SPEAKERAnd this is one of the places that,

50:58SPEAKERif you have a lot of devices especially,

51:00SPEAKERyou can go into the configuration YAML

51:02SPEAKERand limit the devices,

51:04SPEAKERthe types of devices that are exposed to any integration.

51:08SPEAKERSo for example, like I don't need to show

51:10SPEAKERall my Google speakers to Siri, to HomeKit.

51:14SPEAKERSo you can just say, okay, I only want these,

51:17SPEAKERthese specific categories of devices.

51:19SPEAKERI want automations and scripts and switches and sensors,

51:23SPEAKERbut I don't want, since I'm not doing any logic in HomeKit,

51:26SPEAKERI don't have motion sensors or anything like that

51:28SPEAKERshowing up in HomeKit.

51:30SPEAKER- Sure.

51:31SPEAKER- In order for you to use it with Siri,

51:33SPEAKERit has to be exposed to the HomeKit integration

51:35SPEAKERin the configuration.yaml.

51:38SPEAKERThe other voice assistant integrations,

51:41SPEAKERif you wanna do them, are a hassle.

51:43SPEAKERYou have to set up developer accounts for Amazon and Google.

51:47SPEAKER- Yikes.

51:48SPEAKER- You have to create some like private apps

51:49SPEAKERand there's, the documentation was really good.

51:51SPEAKERAnd if you follow it exactly, it worked.

51:54SPEAKERI've done it twice now.

51:55SPEAKERIt worked both times really easily,

51:57SPEAKERbut it is, it was time consuming

51:59SPEAKERand you have to have dynamic DNS

52:01SPEAKER'cause the apps that you create in Amazon

52:06SPEAKERand Google's cloud respectively

52:07SPEAKERhave to be able to talk to your device.

52:09SPEAKER- Sure.

52:09SPEAKER- So like, and also the Google one,

52:13SPEAKERit seems like maybe you have to log into that console

52:15SPEAKERevery 60 days.

52:16SPEAKERThat's unclear to me 'cause I, anyway, it's not great.

52:20SPEAKERYou can also pay the developers of Home Assistant

52:23SPEAKERfive bucks a month

52:25SPEAKER'cause they provide Home Assistant cloud for that,

52:27SPEAKERwhich also supports the project as a whole.

52:29SPEAKERSo if you don't wanna fool with that, you don't have to.

52:31SPEAKERYou just, you're gonna go from, you know,

52:33SPEAKERyou're paying somebody and the data is

52:35SPEAKERthen leaving your house a little bit.

52:37SPEAKER- That's cool.

52:39SPEAKER- There's some stuff that's still janky.

52:41SPEAKERLike I can't get Sonos to play a Spotify playlist

52:45SPEAKERno matter what I do.

52:46SPEAKER- Sure.

52:47SPEAKER- Like I can do local playlists.

52:48SPEAKERI can do like all sorts of other playlists,

52:51SPEAKERbut no Spotify.

52:53SPEAKER- That's, you know, that's open source projects.

52:55SPEAKERThat's to be expected.

52:56SPEAKERSomething's always going to be a little bit off.

52:59SPEAKER- That's true. That is true.

53:00SPEAKER- I have a couple of iDevices plugs

53:02SPEAKERthat I could not get added under their integration

53:04SPEAKERuntil I did a couple of factory resets on them

53:07SPEAKERand had to add them back through home again first.

53:08SPEAKERAnd then they finally,

53:10SPEAKERthey were just throwing a generic error

53:11SPEAKERthat I could not figure out until I did.

53:14SPEAKER- Like the figuring out where to find the errors

53:16SPEAKERis one of the big challenges of this.

53:18SPEAKER'Cause there's like a lot of different logs.

53:19SPEAKERAnd like, if you're using Z-Wave and Zigbee devices,

53:23SPEAKERthen those logs are in a different place

53:25SPEAKERthan like the normal home assistant logs.

53:30SPEAKERLike it's a lot.

53:31SPEAKER- Either the error in the web UI on those,

53:33SPEAKERI think quite literally included the language

53:35SPEAKERalong the lines of we don't know what happened.

53:37SPEAKERAnd then I looked at the console on the Pi

53:39SPEAKERand there was a much more detailed error message

53:41SPEAKERthat actually implied some information there.

53:44SPEAKER- Yeah, especially when you're setting this up,

53:46SPEAKERit's really helpful to go ahead and set up SSH,

53:49SPEAKERwhich I think you can do in the add-on store

53:52SPEAKERin the supervisor.

53:53SPEAKER- Okay.

53:54SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a terminal in SSH client

53:56SPEAKERthat puts a terminal plugin on your like left menu bar,

54:00SPEAKERbut also lets you SSH into the device.

54:02SPEAKERLike it lets you set up the stuff to SSH into the device,

54:04SPEAKERwhich is really handy.

54:06SPEAKER- As with most things of this nature,

54:07SPEAKERlike some baseline Unix slash Linux experience

54:11SPEAKERis very helpful.

54:12SPEAKER- If you...

54:15SPEAKER- It's not required, but like it can come in handy

54:17SPEAKERwhen you're trying to troubleshoot and stuff like that.

54:19SPEAKER- If something goes real wrong, yeah.

54:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:21SPEAKER- One of the other nice things about the supervisor plugin

54:24SPEAKERis it lets you create snapshots of configs

54:27SPEAKERwhen things are working well.

54:28SPEAKER- Oh, okay, that's good to know.

54:30SPEAKERI was gonna ask even separate from the supervisor,

54:32SPEAKERis there just an easy way to export your config

54:34SPEAKERjust to be safe?

54:35SPEAKERLike is there a single YAML you can pull out of there

54:38SPEAKERand just back it up?

54:38SPEAKER- No, there's a bunch of YAMLs, I was afraid of that.

54:41SPEAKER- I don't know.

54:42SPEAKERLike in the old days when it was just YAML files,

54:45SPEAKERyes, you could just copy the YAML files

54:46SPEAKERand it would just know what to do.

54:48SPEAKERNow, I don't know what happens to all that.

54:50SPEAKERThat's one of the, it's on my,

54:53SPEAKERI've got to figure this out

54:54SPEAKERbefore something goes wrong with this thing list.

54:59SPEAKER- That's probably pretty easy to Google.

55:00SPEAKERI'm surely somebody in their community

55:01SPEAKERhas addressed that in a guide or something.

55:03SPEAKER- I would hope so, but there's a lot of setup

55:06SPEAKERto have to do again if something were to go wrong

55:08SPEAKERif your SD card died or something like that.

55:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna make sure

55:12SPEAKERthat this is really well backed up

55:15SPEAKERafter I get everything working the way I want it.

55:17SPEAKER- Or you could do the same thing I do with my other pies

55:19SPEAKERand just image that SD card and back that up.

55:21SPEAKER- That's true.

55:23SPEAKERThere's, okay, so there's a few things to know

55:25SPEAKERas you're transitioning that I learned the hard way.

55:29SPEAKEROne is that before you disconnect your old hub,

55:32SPEAKERif you're using Z-Wave devices especially,

55:35SPEAKERuse the Z-Wave exclude feature on the old hub,

55:38SPEAKERwhich will make the new Z-Wave,

55:39SPEAKERthe Z-Wave devices much easier to pair with the new devices.

55:43SPEAKERIt's really important if you're using Z-Wave secure

55:46SPEAKERor whatever their encrypted thing is,

55:48SPEAKER'cause they don't, you might end up with an orphan device

55:52SPEAKERthat you can't unpair if you don't do the exclusion first.

55:55SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a bunch of little gotchas like that,

55:57SPEAKERlike those iDevices plugs I mentioned.

55:58SPEAKERThere's no way to add those to your Wi-Fi

56:00SPEAKERwithout adding them in home.

56:01SPEAKERThat's the only way that you can tell it

56:03SPEAKERwhat the SSID and password is so far.

56:05SPEAKERSo you have to add those to home.

56:07SPEAKERYou have to, like I literally didn't even have a home anymore

56:09SPEAKER'cause I had deleted it

56:10SPEAKER'cause I was getting off that platform

56:11SPEAKERand I had to go make a new one

56:13SPEAKERand add those back through that app

56:15SPEAKERjust to get them on my Wi-Fi.

56:16SPEAKERAnd then you have to remove them from home

56:17SPEAKERand then Home Assistant can see them, blah, blah, blah.

56:20SPEAKERLike depending on your devices,

56:21SPEAKERthere may be some hoops you're gonna have to jump through

56:23SPEAKERand some things to take note of.

56:25SPEAKER- One of the things I'm gonna add to this list

56:27SPEAKERof best practices is don't turn off the,

56:30SPEAKERdon't kill the old hub

56:32SPEAKERuntil you have the new thing working.

56:34SPEAKER- Yes.

56:35SPEAKER- 'Cause A, stuff like that happens

56:38SPEAKERwhere you have to have the old hub

56:39SPEAKERto disassociate the old devices

56:40SPEAKERor set them up with a new account.

56:43SPEAKERBut B, it's also really convenient

56:45SPEAKERto look at timings on automations and stuff like that

56:48SPEAKERon the old one before you move everything off.

56:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:53SPEAKER- I said this before, but start with one room.

56:55SPEAKERThat'll be easy and use that to learn all the weirdness

56:58SPEAKERabout how the automations work and the scripts.

57:01SPEAKERAnd like when you want an automation,

57:02SPEAKERwhen you want a scene, when you want a script,

57:03SPEAKERall that stuff.

57:06SPEAKERRemember that if you, oh, right.

57:12SPEAKERSo the devices that use Zigbee and Z-Wave

57:14SPEAKERand communicate directly with the old hub

57:17SPEAKERwill stop working with the old hub when you move them off.

57:20SPEAKERBut devices that use APIs to connect like Philips Hue

57:23SPEAKERand the Lutron stuff and Sonos and all of these other ones

57:27SPEAKERwill continue working with both hubs

57:29SPEAKERso it can make troubleshooting automation problems

57:32SPEAKERreally weird.

57:33SPEAKER'Cause like they're fighting with each other

57:35SPEAKERfor control over the devices.

57:39SPEAKER- That leads me to something quick I wanted to touch on.

57:41SPEAKERAnd this is only relevant for some people

57:43SPEAKERif you're coming from Apple home like I was.

57:45SPEAKERBut so this thing accomplished my goal

57:47SPEAKERof just make all our damn devices work

57:49SPEAKERon one platform consistently and make it so that we,

57:51SPEAKERboth me and my girlfriend can access them, blah, blah, blah.

57:54SPEAKERAnd don't kill my iPad battery, right?

57:55SPEAKERLike that's all I cared about.

57:56SPEAKERBut there is a, is it, I think it's the HomeKit bridge

58:00SPEAKERis the one I'm thinking of here.

58:01SPEAKER'Cause there's also, I believe HomeKit controller

58:04SPEAKERis how you add HomeKit devices to Home Assistant.

58:07SPEAKERHomeKit bridge then exposes all those devices

58:11SPEAKERyou've added to Home Assistant back to the home app on iOS.

58:15SPEAKERDoes that make sense?

58:16SPEAKER- So you shouldn't need,

58:20SPEAKERoh yeah, you might need the HomeKit.

58:22SPEAKERSo I don't have any HomeKit, pure HomeKit devices.

58:24SPEAKERSo I haven't had to use the first one of those.

58:26SPEAKER- We've got a decent number of those.

58:27SPEAKERBut the point is using that HomeKit bridge

58:31SPEAKERadds all those devices back into the home app,

58:33SPEAKERwhich makes them show up in like control center

58:35SPEAKERas nice little shortcuts just to toggle stuff on and off.

58:37SPEAKERSo it's a nice way to like replicate that user experience

58:40SPEAKERfor my girlfriend and not make her deal

58:42SPEAKERwith the Home Assistant app.

58:43SPEAKER- So I was gonna say the neat thing about,

58:45SPEAKERthe neat thing about the way this works is

58:47SPEAKERonce you get everything set up right,

58:49SPEAKERyou can control exactly what gets exposed

58:51SPEAKERback on that HomeKit bridge using the YAML file.

58:54SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:55SPEAKER- And you can even like go all the way down.

58:58SPEAKERSo like with smart things,

59:00SPEAKERI was never able to get the same automations

59:02SPEAKERworking on Google.

59:04SPEAKERSo like if I wanted to make my daughter's bedroom

59:07SPEAKERget into time for her to go to sleep mode,

59:09SPEAKERI had to do that on Alexa.

59:10SPEAKERBut like going to bed was on Google

59:12SPEAKERbecause there's an Alexa near her bedroom

59:15SPEAKERand there's a Google in our bedroom.

59:16SPEAKER- Right.

59:17SPEAKER- So now I have the same automations

59:19SPEAKERgoing to all the same places

59:21SPEAKERand the same trigger phrases are on everything.

59:23SPEAKERAnd it means that it's much, much simpler

59:25SPEAKERto insert more straightforward to use now.

59:27SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

59:30SPEAKER- You get the same benefit that you're talking about

59:32SPEAKERwith the Google, with the Apple Home stuff,

59:34SPEAKERwith the Google Home, sorry, Google Assistant integration,

59:39SPEAKERif you set that up or use the Home Assistant Cloud.

59:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I would assume that exists

59:43SPEAKERfor probably most of the major platforms

59:45SPEAKERthat you can essentially kind of re-expose all this stuff

59:47SPEAKERback out to those interfaces.

59:49SPEAKER- It depends.

59:50SPEAKERBut yeah, like for example, you can do things

59:53SPEAKERlike I have an automation set up now

59:56SPEAKERthat talks to our LG washers

59:59SPEAKERthat when the laundry is done,

1:00:01SPEAKERit says on the Alexa in the living room

1:00:04SPEAKERand the Google speaker in the dining room,

1:00:07SPEAKER"Hey, the laundry's done."

1:00:09SPEAKERRight, and it can, like you can flash the lights

1:00:11SPEAKERand do all sorts of stupid stuff.

1:00:12SPEAKER- God, that's cool.

1:00:12SPEAKERSo that reminds me, the last thing I wanted to mention

1:00:14SPEAKERis that we didn't actually talk about your projects

1:00:16SPEAKERthat had wowed me so much.

1:00:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it ended up being really annoying

1:00:20SPEAKERso I turned it off.

1:00:21SPEAKER- Okay then, maybe nevermind.

1:00:23SPEAKERAnd then this is very much a Northern California thing

1:00:26SPEAKERright now.

1:00:27SPEAKER- I think it's the entire West, I think we can say.

1:00:28SPEAKERMaybe even like Eastern Australia too probably is impacted.

1:00:33SPEAKER- Increasingly more and more of the globe

1:00:34SPEAKERis dealing with air quality issues

1:00:36SPEAKERand raging wildfires.

1:00:38SPEAKERSure, yeah, pollution, it's all over the place.

1:00:40SPEAKERIt's just gonna be more...

1:00:41SPEAKERAnyway, you tied a, I don't know what kind of light bulb

1:00:44SPEAKERit was, but one of the LED types that can change colors

1:00:46SPEAKERinto the air quality index data feed.

1:00:50SPEAKER- There was a script that somebody wrote.

1:00:52SPEAKERI sent you the link to it earlier, but let me...

1:00:55SPEAKERWe'll pop it in the show notes.

1:00:57SPEAKERThere's a script that somebody wrote that basically,

1:01:01SPEAKERsome guy named Ben, basically lets you sync

1:01:05SPEAKERthe air quality color index.

1:01:07SPEAKERSo like green is good, yellow is okay, orange is bad,

1:01:11SPEAKERred is don't go outside.

1:01:13SPEAKERPurple is just hazmat suit.

1:01:16SPEAKER- Right, like I hope you have a bunny suit

1:01:19SPEAKERto an RGB light in home assistant.

1:01:21SPEAKERAnd I did that while the fires were bad here

1:01:23SPEAKER'cause it was kind of nice to know

1:01:24SPEAKERif I also put a mask on.

1:01:26SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause we were checking that thing

1:01:28SPEAKERa dozen times a day. - A dozen times a day

1:01:29SPEAKERsometimes, yeah. - Usually, yeah, totally.

1:01:31SPEAKERSo just being able to glance at a light

1:01:33SPEAKERand see what color it is and know how the air is outside

1:01:35SPEAKERis pretty cool.

1:01:36SPEAKER- I ended up turning it off 'cause like when it's green,

1:01:38SPEAKERlike green, A, the hue bulbs that I was using

1:01:42SPEAKERdon't do green particularly well.

1:01:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:01:44SPEAKER- So you couldn't kind of tell if it was green or yellow,

1:01:48SPEAKERbut B, we stopped needing it.

1:01:51SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, so it was just green, green most of the time

1:01:55SPEAKERat that point.

1:01:56SPEAKERBut it is a good little example

1:01:57SPEAKERof some of the cool creative ideas

1:01:58SPEAKERyou can do with this thing.

1:02:00SPEAKER- Like, I mean, we said this before,

1:02:02SPEAKERwe talked about home automation stuff.

1:02:04SPEAKERIt's not something anybody needs.

1:02:06SPEAKERI mean-- - I was kind of having,

1:02:07SPEAKERI had that idea several times during this conversation.

1:02:10SPEAKERI mean, that's not true.

1:02:12SPEAKERWhen my daughter was very young and we were walking,

1:02:15SPEAKERlike you're constantly carrying a child,

1:02:18SPEAKERbeing able to have lights come on in a room

1:02:21SPEAKERwithout having to touch anything,

1:02:22SPEAKERit was often very valid, 'cause you have one hand at best.

1:02:26SPEAKERIf you have disabilities, I can definitely see the benefit

1:02:30SPEAKERof being able to do a lot of this stuff by saying things

1:02:32SPEAKERrather than having to hit something.

1:02:35SPEAKER- By and large, it's a convenience thing, not a necessity,

1:02:38SPEAKERbut like having that little orange lamp in our bedroom

1:02:41SPEAKERcome on, tracked with the sunset every day of the year

1:02:44SPEAKERand never have to touch that again

1:02:45SPEAKERis pretty nice little convenience.

1:02:47SPEAKER- It's fun and it's convenient.

1:02:49SPEAKERAnd the funny thing is, like I started out doing this

1:02:52SPEAKERand the transition with Gina was from,

1:02:57SPEAKERthis thing is annoying, it never works,

1:02:59SPEAKERto when we added the voice assistance, she was like,

1:03:01SPEAKERoh, okay, this is kind of useful, I get it,

1:03:03SPEAKERto when things just started happening

1:03:04SPEAKERwithout having to think about them.

1:03:05SPEAKERWhen you go, like when we go visit my parents

1:03:08SPEAKERand they just have light switches,

1:03:10SPEAKERA, my daughter was really excited

1:03:12SPEAKER'cause she'd never really gotten to use

1:03:13SPEAKERa light switch before,

1:03:15SPEAKERbut B, it feels archaic to walk into a room

1:03:19SPEAKERand not have the lights be like what you want,

1:03:23SPEAKERdo what you want them to do.

1:03:25SPEAKER- That's how you know you're living in the future.

1:03:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so, but it's still, it's a hobby thing,

1:03:30SPEAKERit's not something that you actually have to do.

1:03:32SPEAKER- It is a fun tinkery project

1:03:34SPEAKERif you're into that kind of thing.

1:03:35SPEAKER- And I think my total spend,

1:03:38SPEAKERso it would have been 50 or 100 bucks

1:03:40SPEAKERto buy a new SmartThings hub.

1:03:42SPEAKERI paid 30 bucks for the Raspberry Pi

1:03:44SPEAKERand I think 40 bucks for the dongle.

1:03:46SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, you can do it on the cheap.

1:03:48SPEAKER- So it's like a little bit more,

1:03:49SPEAKERbut I'm not paying a monthly fee,

1:03:50SPEAKERso I figure it's probably okay.

1:03:52SPEAKER- Yes.

1:03:53SPEAKER- And if you have questions,

1:03:54SPEAKERI guess post them in the Discord.

1:03:57SPEAKERYeah, that's it, that's what I got.

1:03:59SPEAKER- Do we need a home automation channel?

1:04:02SPEAKER- I mean, we kind of, I mean, let's see where this takes us.

1:04:06SPEAKER- Yeah, we're adding channels at a pretty good clip,

1:04:09SPEAKERthere's probably two or three.

1:04:10SPEAKER- We're adding people at a pretty good clip too, so.

1:04:11SPEAKER- That's fair, there's probably two or three places

1:04:13SPEAKERthat that would sit already, but.

1:04:15SPEAKER- Okay, I feel like it lives often

1:04:18SPEAKERin just network things or Linux talk, no keeps shaming.

1:04:22SPEAKER- Yes.

1:04:24SPEAKER- But speaking of the Discord,

1:04:25SPEAKERif you would like to get access

1:04:27SPEAKERto the fabulous TechPod Discord,

1:04:29SPEAKERfull of brilliant people like you

1:04:32SPEAKERand the other 1300 people in there,

1:04:35SPEAKER1280 people in there.

1:04:37SPEAKER- Yes.

1:04:38SPEAKER- We would love to have you,

1:04:39SPEAKERyou can do that by going to patreon.com/techpod,

1:04:43SPEAKERthat's patreon.com/techpod,

1:04:47SPEAKERand it's two bucks a month to get access to the Discord,

1:04:49SPEAKERwhich A, helps support the podcast,

1:04:52SPEAKERand B, ensures that the people that join the Discord

1:04:57SPEAKERare, you know, they're not rapscallions.

1:05:02SPEAKER- No.

1:05:02SPEAKER- It's a very lovely community.

1:05:03SPEAKER- There's so much great stuff on there.

1:05:05SPEAKERThe other day, there was an amazing moment

1:05:07SPEAKERwhere a very delightful Canadian member of the Discord

1:05:11SPEAKERwas telling everyone about his internet trashcan.

1:05:13SPEAKER- What?

1:05:14SPEAKERI missed this.

1:05:15SPEAKER- You should really scroll back and find

1:05:16SPEAKERthat internet trashcan conversation.

1:05:19SPEAKER- What, hold on, you got a key.

1:05:21SPEAKER- I don't want to, well, I don't want to spoil it,

1:05:23SPEAKERbut it's a classic looking metal trashcan

1:05:26SPEAKERthat actually houses some Raspberry Pis

1:05:28SPEAKERand a lot of other cool sensor type stuff

1:05:30SPEAKERdoing all kinds of things.

1:05:31SPEAKER- That sounds awesome.

1:05:32SPEAKER- And it's a pretty ambitious project

1:05:34SPEAKERthat you should look at, it's pretty neat.

1:05:37SPEAKER- I've had extended conversations

1:05:39SPEAKERabout low latency monitors and Peekers Advantage.

1:05:44SPEAKERWe talk about Hades in the Hades Appreciation

1:05:46SPEAKERslash gaming channel.

1:05:48SPEAKER- Yes, and there continue to be a lot of people in there

1:05:51SPEAKERthat work in very advanced high-tech fields

1:05:53SPEAKERthat have a lot of very specific and high level knowledge

1:05:57SPEAKERabout things that is super fun to talk to.

1:06:00SPEAKER- I would like to talk to some of them on the show.

1:06:02SPEAKERI feel like that may be weird,

1:06:03SPEAKERbut I think we're going to do it anyway.

1:06:06SPEAKERSo yeah, if you want to join,

1:06:08SPEAKERyou can do that at patreon.com/techpod.

1:06:11SPEAKERIf you sign up for a few bucks a month more than that,

1:06:13SPEAKERthen you get access to the Patreon exclusive episode,

1:06:15SPEAKERwhich comes out once a month and we have to record

1:06:17SPEAKERsometime in the next couple of days, I guess.

1:06:19SPEAKERI think this month we're going to talk about

1:06:21SPEAKERthe Stephen King short story, "The Jaunt."

1:06:23SPEAKERTalk about when you read "The Jaunt"

1:06:25SPEAKERand told me you read "The Jaunt,"

1:06:26SPEAKERI've almost wanted to record that podcast, right?

1:06:28SPEAKER- I wish we had now.

1:06:29SPEAKERThat would have been really smart.

1:06:31SPEAKER- Well, it was fresh in your mind, but.

1:06:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I can read it.

1:06:33SPEAKERIt's short, I'll read it again.

1:06:34SPEAKER- Yes.

1:06:37SPEAKER- But yeah, that's it.

1:06:38SPEAKERAnd as always, we need to support our patrons.

1:06:40SPEAKERWe need to thank our patrons,

1:06:41SPEAKERthe people who make the show possible.

1:06:42SPEAKERSo thanks to all 1200, it's 1,235 patrons,

1:06:47SPEAKERbut a very special thanks

1:06:49SPEAKERto our executive producer level patrons,

1:06:51SPEAKERAndrew Cotton, David Allen, and Jacob Chapel,

1:06:54SPEAKERas well as, since it's the end of the month,

1:06:56SPEAKERthanks to our associate producer level patrons,

1:07:00SPEAKERArthur Gies, Ben Golme, Dan Brockman, Dave Ullian,

1:07:04SPEAKERGraham Banks, Jacob W., Chad Rita, Terry Cox,

1:07:09SPEAKERThe Bunny Fiend.

1:07:10SPEAKER- The Bunny Fiend.

1:07:12SPEAKER- And Thomas Shea, thank you all so much.

1:07:13SPEAKERThanks for supporting the show.

1:07:14SPEAKER- Thank you to everybody who supports us, for sure.

1:07:16SPEAKERI just thought, what's the number 12?

1:07:18SPEAKERI'm going to have to sit here and say thank you.

1:07:19SPEAKER- 1,235 right now.

1:07:21SPEAKER- All right, here we go.

1:07:22SPEAKERThank you.

1:07:23SPEAKERThank you.

1:07:24SPEAKERThank you.

1:07:24SPEAKERThank you.

1:07:25SPEAKERThank you.

1:07:26SPEAKERI don't have enough fingers.

1:07:27SPEAKER- Just so you got it, you got like 1,230 to go.

1:07:31SPEAKER- A lot of engineers around here,

1:07:32SPEAKERjust thank you to asterisk 1,235.

1:07:34SPEAKER- Okay, I feel like that was a cheat.

1:07:36SPEAKERWell, the next month's patron episode

1:07:38SPEAKERis Brad going down the list

1:07:39SPEAKERand thanking every single patron by name.

1:07:41SPEAKER- If I just write a little shell script to...

1:07:45SPEAKER- We can export the CSV.

1:07:46SPEAKER- Yes, parse whatever some data out of, yes.

1:07:48SPEAKER- I do have that voice generator.

1:07:50SPEAKER- Oh boy.

1:07:51SPEAKER- So yeah, that's it.

1:07:52SPEAKERIf you'd like to support the show again,

1:07:55SPEAKERit's patreon.com/techpod.

1:07:58SPEAKERMy favorite part of the day is when I have a moment

1:08:01SPEAKERand can dip in.

1:08:02SPEAKERAnd usually I just pick a random channel

1:08:04SPEAKERand see what people are talking about.

1:08:05SPEAKERAnd it's always something fascinating.

1:08:07SPEAKERLike there's a keyboard channel.

1:08:09SPEAKERWe got just general maker stuff.

1:08:12SPEAKERThe food channel is, if you need recipe ideas, man,

1:08:15SPEAKERget in that food channel.

1:08:17SPEAKER- Yes.

1:08:18SPEAKER- It's very good.

1:08:19SPEAKER- If you wanna talk about work.

1:08:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:21SPEAKER- People requested a work and career stuff kind of channel.

1:08:24SPEAKERAnd now we have it.

1:08:26SPEAKER- There you go.

1:08:27SPEAKERIt's all in there.

1:08:28SPEAKERAnd we would love to see you wonderful people

1:08:30SPEAKERin there as well.

1:08:31SPEAKERI guess that's it for us this week, Brad.

1:08:33SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:08:33SPEAKERThanks everybody for listening.

1:08:34SPEAKER- We'll see you all next week

1:08:37SPEAKERon another episode of the TechPod.

1:08:39SPEAKERBye.

1:08:39SPEAKER(upbeat music)

1:08:48SPEAKER(upbeat music)