Episode 307: HomeKit Panel

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This week’s transcription is brought to you by Alectrona

James Smith:
This week’s episode of the Mac Admins Podcast is brought to you by Kandji. Did you know that you can fine tune how Kandji manages your OS updates? With Kandji, you can either select a minimum version of the operating system for basic enforcement, or you can set OS updates to be automatically enforced after they’re released. You can also specify the amount of time Kandji waits before enforcing a new update. With Kandji’s automation-focused device management platform, it’ll begin prompting users to upgrade days before the enforced deadline. There’s a lot more nuance to creating a seamless user experience with OS upgrades than we can cover in this snippet. So if you want to check that out firsthand, head on over to kandji.io/macadmins and just request access. That’s K-A-N-D-J-I.io/macadmins. Thanks to Kandji for sponsoring this episode of the Mac Admins podcast.

Tom Bridge:
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins Podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bridge. And Charles, it’s fantastic to see you. I understand you have candy-buying habits that need to be addressed here. We were talking just before we started to hit record that we should send Charles all of the gummy candy.

Charles Edge:
That’s because Charlie got upset that he couldn’t have gummies right before bed, I think. But-

Tom Bridge:
He was definitely very curious about the large jar of Jelly Bellies that I picked up at Costco today. And he was like, “Dad, what’s that all about?” And I was like, It is 9 o’clock. It is your bedtime.” But-

Marcus Ransom:
They’re ornamental, Charlie.

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Charles Edge:
It is the perfect time-

Tom Bridge:
Decorative not functional.

Charles Edge:
… to get Jelly Bellies for Marcus. Because it’s what, noon for you?

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, exactly. The sun’s across the yard so…

Tom Bridge:
You can have sugary candy?

Marcus Ransom:
So we don’t call them candy here. We call them lollies.

Charles Edge:
Oh, I thought you were going to say, “We call them lunch.”

Marcus Ransom:
That too.

Tom Bridge:
So all candy is a lolly?

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, except chocolate. That’s chocolate, so…

Tom Bridge:
Of course. But all of the candy, though, that’s a lolly?

Marcus Ransom:
That’s a lolly.

Charles Edge:
And what I was saying-

Tom Bridge:
I don’t mind.

Charles Edge:
What I was saying before we hit record is, I only buy fruity candy because I don’t like fruity candy. I’m a sucker for chocolate. And if there’s any chocolate, I will eat it all. Which is why I never buy chocolate because, you know…

Marcus Ransom:
So you wouldn’t like the New Zealand delicacy of pineapple lumps, which is pineapple, sugar, fruit, with chocolate around it, then, Charles?

Charles Edge:
Yeah, it just feels too adjacent to something healthy.

Marcus Ransom:
I don’t think it’s trying to be even remotely aligned with anything healthy, apart from emotionally healthy.

Charles Edge:
Anyways, moving on from my eating or all of our eating habits, we have a wonderful episode today, right?

Tom Bridge:
We do-

Charles Edge:
Hopefully.

Tom Bridge:
Hopefully. We’ve obviously got some really great panelists, and so they’re responsible for everything good that happens from here on out. The rest of us are just a little bit goofy because it’s daylight savings, and we all lost an hour of our lives.

Marcus Ransom:
We’re like the Hamburger Helper in the episode is what you’re saying, Tom.

Tom Bridge:
Correct.

Charles Edge:
Stroganoff.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, now, see, I like a good stroganoff. A good stroganoff is hard to beat-

Charles Edge:
Yeah, from scratch.

Tom Bridge:
Sour cream and mustard. Oh, man. Yeah, but maybe not like the Hamburger Helper version of that. We’ll get there. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to the podcast, Bob Gendler. It’s good to see you.

Bob Gendler:
Hi. Thanks.

Tom Bridge:
And welcome to the podcast, Steve Yuroff.

Steve Yuroff:
Hello. Glad to be here.

Tom Bridge:
And Tim Pearson.

Tim Pearson:
Hey, guys. How you doing?

Tom Bridge:
Fantastic. So we get to talk a little bit about the lady in the canister today. Well, in my case, the gentleman in the canister. So Charles, you want to take us through what we’re going to talk about today?

Charles Edge:
Well, I mean, HomeKit and I guess the Home app.

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Charles Edge:
There are many like it, but this is the kit, no pun intended, that Apple has vetted for automating the home. This ecosystem of products is the culmination of decades of R&D by the home automation industry made simple, or simple-ish, by Apple.
And I can say the first home automation stuff I did was X10 lighting mostly, some cameras, a lot of remote controls, Crestron. I even got complained about on MTV because one of the systems I built didn’t really work right for the people who were using it. Because those systems never seemed to work right. But they seem better now, or better-ish, I guess. I’m just going to have to say “ish” a lot.
So thank you guys for joining us. With so many new faces, we’ve gone ahead and done the introductions so we don’t have to do kind of the origin story. We’ll probably have each of you back again to do that if you haven’t already. But instead of that, maybe just, how long have you been in the Apple world? And we’ll start with Tim because you’re the first one on my Zoom.

Tim Pearson:
Golly. So I’m an Apple consultant, and I have been in the Apple world since the early ’90s. And I think I started consulting in about ’95 or ’96. Left for a while, and came back in 2008 when the big bank that I worked for went out of business. Still the largest failure, so we get that hat to wear. But anyway, that’s kind of my quick… Been in the Apple world for longer than anyone should have been.

Tom Bridge:
And Steve?

Steve Yuroff:
I started using Apple stuff in college in the ’90s, and I got my first job doing support for a franchise mattress company in the late ’90s. So doing dial-up modems in Timbuktu to keep things around running.

Tom Bridge:
Woohoo!

Charles Edge:
And how about you, Bob?

Bob Gendler:
So I bet I’m the youngest of the panel, but I feel like I might be using the Apple products the longest because my dad brought home an Apple IIGS. And then, it would be middle school, high school, I was fixing people’s computers and Mac computers and everything. And even in high school… Like, always said I wanted to be working on Apple computers or whatever, and sort of got laughed at because nobody did that then. Yeah, so I’ve basically been doing it all my life more or less, touching them in some form.

Charles Edge:
And using Apple products – and most specifically supporting Apple products – is definitely a huge piece of what we all do. But then I think we all have home automation in some way in our homes at this point. So I guess maybe let’s move to what was everyone’s first foray into home automation? And this time we’ll start with Tom.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, gosh. I’m trying to remember exactly when I started. I didn’t have the experience that you did with X10. I definitely had the experience with some Home Crestron-

Charles Edge:
Z-Wave and ZigBee?

Tom Bridge:
Oh yeah, definitely did some Z-wave stuff. I had a pair of Schlage locks that had their own Z-Wave bridge. And so that was a good way to… They had their own custom app. It was-

Charles Edge:
And you had to pay a monthly fee.

Tom Bridge:
It was not expensive, though. It was reasonably priced. It was like couple bucks a month. But it was better than having house keys. Because here’s the thing, I am absolutely positively terrible at keeping a hold of my house keys. In fact, all of my locks now and the access to the house are electronic, and they don’t have keys. Because I am that opposed to generally using keys because I lose them.
Of course, that’s all predating now the… What is it? The AirTag, which is very effective at helping me find my keys. But I was going to say that dealt with a little bit of Schlage ZigBee stuff. Also spent a little bit of time and effort for customers, because I was once also a consultant, and spent a lot of time looking at home-based Crestron system for some of the upper-level customers and-

Charles Edge:
But you guys weren’t a dealer, right? So you worked at a dealer-

Tom Bridge:
We were not a dealer, no. So we worked with the dealer that was at… The customer’s home was in Austin. And I was troubleshooting the Crestron controller with the clueless end customer, because they couldn’t reach the person because it was 10 o’clock at night on a Friday. Trying to get the Crestron controller to work and work appropriately. I developed an allergy to the Crestron system because of that.

Charles Edge:
I think I have developed an allergy, no offense if anyone’s listening from any of these companies, but to any system that is dealer-only. So Control4, Crestron, etc. I am a hacker. I am going to hack. And if you try to tell me I can’t, then now I’m really going to…

Tom Bridge:
Yup, exactly. But I spent a lot of time doing that stuff. I kind of became comfortable with a lot of it when we started to get into the HomeKit era, because that was the point at which there was… You could really start to trust the crypto behind it. Or at least most of the crypto behind it. And that’s where it started to feel comfortable.

Charles Edge:
I still feel awkward when I see packets heading off to some country that I’ve literally never heard of, which… That’s always fun. So how about you, Tim? What was your first journey into home automation and maybe as a consultant or at home?

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, I mean, I can talk about it at home because, as a consultant over the years, a lot of stuff has come up. And we did the Crestron stuff and hated it. And always tried to get out of it as quickly as we could, which always made things worse. I think that my first real foray was probably one of those really cool remotes that was supposed to be smart that you could hand it to the babysitter or something. And I can’t remember what it was called, but-

Charles Edge:
Is that a Harmony?

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, yeah, the Harmony. Right.

Charles Edge:
Oh yeah, those were nice.

Tom Bridge:
I have one still.

Charles Edge:
Do you? What’s happening?

Tom Bridge:
I have the Harmony puck, the hub puck, that works with the app and stuff like that. And unfortunately, it’s on its last legs. And apparently, that product line is too.

Tim Pearson:
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I think that was probably my first foray into, what can we do here? Can we, say, watch a movie and have it flip to the DVD player, and set the sound right and maybe turn down the lights? Fun stuff.

Charles Edge:
Right on, yeah. How about you, Steve?

Steve Yuroff:
It would’ve been X10 stuff back under OS 9 a little bit. I remember that I played with a few light switches and a couple of the power switches. But just enough to dabble into it back in that day because it was much harder to do back then than it is now.

Charles Edge:
Oh, I tried so many weird things. I tried to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, if you remember that, to get-

Steve Yuroff:
Sure.

Charles Edge:
… like an early version of what Alexa does now. And I was method-swizzling the Wayne Dalton app because my garage door opener at the time was semi-smart, and I could plug all the Z-Wave devices into that. And then I could swizzle methods and use Python to automate things that weren’t automate-able. But it was all ugly and horrible. And how about you, Bob?

Bob Gendler:
So I can remember a MacAddict Magazine having a whole thing on automating your house with the X10 things, and that hooked me. But being a kid and my parents not wanting me to mess with all sorts of things, I never really did anything with it. I just remember reading it and having all these ideas.
And it really wasn’t until HomeKit, even later-ish HomeKit [inaudible 00:13:09] and funnily enough, buying for my girlfriend at the time, an Apple TV and some smart bulbs and starting to smarten up her house. Because I was renting, so to me it didn’t make sense to put any investment into the place.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. Because most of the Z-Wave, ZigBee, X10 light switches were switches. So you had to swap out the switch, which means you have to understand what a traveler is or get zapped. And I feel like there was a moment right around the time that the Philips Hue and the Nest came out that all of a sudden, it was like, “Oh, this is now usable – ish.”
But how about you, Marcus? We’ve never actually talked about this, I think, with you specifically.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, my first foray was actually professionally but in a different profession. So I used to design trade show stands. And Clipsal, big electrical company here in Australia owned by Schneider Electric, had a trade show stand, and it was showing off C-Bus. And the amount of time that took their technicians to try and get everything to work… Getting to the point at 3:00 AM where it’s like, “How about we actually just have some people behind the walls here who are pressing buttons?Because this is really not working ideally.”
And it’s sort of really showed me how janky, I think would be the correct technical term, a lot of that was and how much important knowledge was required to get all of this working together. And then, some of the third-party products that were trying to control with it that needed firmware updates. And this is the days before being able to just download the updates over the internet. People are trying to work out how to connect a CD drive to these automation systems, sprinkler systems, to be able to flash the firmware.
But in terms of my own stuff, TiVo was my first introduction at home. Once again, here in Australia-

Charles Edge:
That’s interesting.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah. We did not have TiVo, but there were a bunch of folks that worked out how they could modify the British Philips TiVo hardware. And there was an open source community publishing TV guides and firmware.
And this was when Harriet, our first daughter was born, where all of a sudden, we realized that the TV schedule was no longer our schedule. Somebody else was in control. And a friend gave me one of these hacked TiVos. And to be able to then watch television shows whenever we happened to be awake or alive or somebody else was asleep was a real revelation for us.
But the amount of work that was required to put in to get this going… Because we had dial-up at that stage. So it was connecting the modem to be able to download the TV guide and push that across to the TiVo, rather than this concept we have of just on-demand internet. But had IR blasters on it because you had to have a separate set-top box to connect to the…
And understanding how all of these pieces could fit together and how it could really change what we were able to do. So that was sort of my start into things, where really seeing how vendor locked-in systems were trouble for everyone. Including the vendor that was locking people in.

Charles Edge:
One thing I love about everyone’s responses here is it shows so many different perspectives. I feel like the rich and famous that I used to work with in LA had a lot of home automation. But it was mostly their massive media libraries and these big home theaters and, “Oh, I hit this button, and the screen comes down, and the blinds go down, and it automatically starts playing off of DVD number 182.”
But then, other people… Especially here in the Midwest where Steve and I live, it gets real cold. And putting that first Nest thermostat on my house three houses ago, or whatever that was now, it saved me $200 or $300 a month, which… That’s solid. And then a lot of people with the scene, the lighting control.
And these days it’s gone so down market, it’s like not only your Christmas lights or your holiday lights, whatever, but the coffee pot fires up in the morning. Not if I’m drinking good coffee, you know? On mornings where I’m going to drink good coffee, I don’t use the coffee pot. Anyways, whatever on that. So it’s a pretty massive ecosystem I think. But how would you describe the existing kind of macro ecosystem of products? And anybody can take this one.

Bob Gendler:
I try to pay attention mostly to things that are HomeKit specific because that’s what I’ve invested in. If it doesn’t have HomeKit, basically not interested. But then there’s Homebridge, maybe I’ll search that for it. I haven’t touched into home automation, but I think pretty much Homebridge covers everything that home automation has as well.
But what I find is that there’s so much of the same. How many different light bulbs and light bulb companies do you need? How many different even light switches do you need? I start to struggle, okay, what do I even want to, and what’s possible to run through HomeKit and Homebridge and all that now?
So it feels like it’s at a stuck point where, at least for me, there’s not much else for me to invest in. You were mentioning the coffee pot. I had this idea, well, I have a couple of plugs that I don’t use because I have lights. So I just put a light bulb in it. I’m not going to use a smart plug on that. So I had the idea of, all right, let’s buy a really stupid coffee pot just so that I can use the smart plug on it.

Charles Edge:
It’s almost impossible to find a coffee pot with a DIP switch, which is what you need for that, right?

Bob Gendler:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So now I’m going out of my way to get something stupider to make it smart. So I’m at a loss of what to do with certain things like that, a switch or a plug. Another one was, you were mentioning being afraid of your data being sent off to random companies. I’m sure China has a lot of it, my data, because I buy all the SwitchBot things and I think that’s a Chinese company. And so they know the temperature in my garage right now, for example, I’m sure. But so-

Marcus Ransom:
Wait until it’s a couple of degrees warmer before we invade. We can see here it’s not optimal temperature just yet.

Charles Edge:
And it kind of sucks because I use the Govee temperature and hygrometers throughout my house. There’s one in every single room and they’re $12. But when you look at the API, you’re like, wow, I’m sending you a lot of data.

Bob Gendler:
Yeah. But I guess where I was getting at, is they’re the only ones that I seem to see doing things where, instead of fully replacing my blinds, apparently I can buy something. Some little thing that’ll try to make it smarter. So they actually strangely seem to be one of the more in innovative companies. And maybe there are other companies doing that. But that’s just the one that I know of that seems affordable. So the-

Marcus Ransom:
That’s one I’m looking at the moment as well, which is interesting. And it seems like every month that I hold off on buying something, another – they’ll use the word “disruptor” – comes in that seems to do it better or differently. And involves far less physical modifications to my house to get them to work.

Bob Gendler:
Yeah.

Charles Edge:
I thought about a question about that specifically. I’ll use the Philips example. When you walk out of a room, you turn off the light switch instinctively. And then the Philips Hues can’t turn it back on, right? It’s off. There’s no electrical-

Bob Gendler:
Unless you replace the switch with a smart switch.

Charles Edge:
Unless you replace the switch with a smart switch. And I have done that throughout my house. But I don’t think everybody who would listen to, or would try to go about all this, would feel comfortable cutting a breaker and replacing the switch.
And then there are so many rooms in my house that have three-way switches with only one switch in the room. And you’re like, “I don’t know where that other wire goes, and I don’t want to.”

Bob Gendler:
A funny story, to cut you off. When we moved into this house, they had moved a switch and apparently they turned it into a three-way because they never actually moved it. They left the other one behind the wall somewhere. So when I installed this smart switch, initially it didn’t work. And then an electrician was like, “Well, if you swap these two things, it may work then,” which it did. But yeah, I was very proud of myself because I’m not one to do that kind of stuff.

Charles Edge:
And swapping a bulb is super easy. But if you swap a switch and you put a bulb, maybe an LED bulb in a socket, then it’s the lowest common denominator of the entire route to that bulb. So the fixture might also need to be swapped around, or the bulb will start blinking on you randomly and stuff like that. So yeah, it’s like surgery. You’re like, “Ah, what do I do here?” But-

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Charles Edge:
So Steve, how do you feel about the existing kind of ecosystem of products, if you don’t mind?

Steve Yuroff:
I think a lot of where Bob was going is that sometimes it’s just overwhelming to look at the entire ecosystem. If you just go and say, “I want to do this,” and find out there’s 14 vendors of various levels of trustworthiness, who really truly knows how much you should be buying into any of them?
I think it’s probably a level up to, if you’re sticking in the HomeKit world, I think there is a bit of an endorsement. We’ve met the Apple standard, and I’m going that way more. I’m not exclusively HomeKit in what I do with my home automation. I do Homebridge and I got Home Assistant also running in Docker for some of the other stuff. So I’ve not stuck totally with HomeKit things. But a lot of things, you just look at all the different things that there’s nearly infinite amount of things that you can do in the home automation space. But sometimes question, “Do I want to bring these vendors into my world?”
Eufy was one that I had a lot of trust in as a name, and then kind of found out where they’re not doing what they claim to with their video. So I still have their doorbell and their cameras because they’re pointed outside. But I’m never going to stick any camera that points to the inside of my house anywhere, unless if I store it only directly internally in my own storage. Because I’ll point them outside where it’s the outside of my house. Anybody who walks by my house can see that. What am I expecting? But I won’t put a camera on the inside.

Tom Bridge:
So we bought a Simpli-Safe security system and it came with a camera. But the thing I liked about that camera is that it has a hardware shutter. And so-

Steve Yuroff:
That’s pretty functional.

Tom Bridge:
Which is pretty functional. And essentially while the security system is disarmed, the hardware shutter is closed. And so I really liked that combination of privacy and security. And so when it sets to away, the shutter opens and it becomes an internal alarm system. And I am okay with that if I am going to be out of town for a longer period. But day to day, that camera is not plugged in. Because it just seems like a choice one could make, and maybe I’m not going to make that choice.

Tim Pearson:
And that has a HomeKit integration now too, right? The-

Tom Bridge:
Not that I’ve seen.

Tim Pearson:
Oh, okay. Because I thought I was seeing that it does now. We had that in our previous home and we liked it. I mean, we didn’t have the HomeKit part, but we liked the SimpliSafe. I loved the shutter, was a big thing because we were putting a camera in the middle of our living room. And I was like, “I don’t know about this.” But yeah, that’s interesting.
Like a lot of people I think, we moved in 2020.

Speaker X:
Me too.

Tim Pearson:
Right, yeah? And we made the decision then that it was going to be a HomeKit world and nothing else was going to come in. And so we left our Alexas behind and we left other stuff. Which worked out fine for about the first two or three weeks.
And then it turned out that the garage doors that had been installed were not HomeKit compatible. And so we don’t hold the hard line that we had held originally, like, “This will all be HomeKit.” But we also made the decision that anything, if there’s a smart option for it, we were going to buy it and try it.
And I think that’s one of those perks of being a consultant is that it’s a business expense because I got to have a customer somewhere who’s going to need to try this. So we’ve tried a lot of the different things and I think we’ve forgotten them all. I tried to redo some switches here. And I don’t have the, what is it? The neutral wire?

Charles Edge:
Yeah. Oh, the [inaudible 00:29:32]

Tim Pearson:
Which, it’s a brand new home. And I thought you had to have that. And anyway… so- [inaudible 00:29:40]

Tom Bridge:
You may want to have a very blunt conversation with your builder.

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, it’s a little frightening. We have so 49 Hue bulbs throughout the house. So basically every bulb is smart. And everyone just knows you don’t touch the light switches or dad gets upset.

Steve Yuroff:
So how do you find that works if you have guests who come over to your house, and think that maybe a switch left works like a switch?

Tim Pearson:
I think that we have our light automation well enough that people don’t mess with them. And we do have overnight guests often. Or not often-

Steve Yuroff:
That’s what I’m thinking about.

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, we live far enough away where if you’re going to come visit, you’re probably going to spend the night. And I think that in their bedroom, they’ll flip the switch and then they’ll get up in the morning and flip the switch again. But everywhere else it just kind of works. And it’s all pretty seamless as far as lighting on and off in a room. And you guys saw where my lights flipped off in here because my office’s occupancy, the lights are controlled. The occupancy after five o’clock. And so I was waving, “Come on back.”

Marcus Ransom:
See overrides is also not just about guests. It can also be not every member of the family is as into the ecosystem or the idea of an ecosystem as you are as well. And that’s something where I played around with some lights and found exactly that problem. Where it really depends on if someone has gone and turned a light switch off, and that someone may actually be me just forgetting that I’ve gone and automated everything. And that muscle memory of hitting the light switch and seeing things that can have that override.
Or the fact when the lady in the can doesn’t actually listen to us or gets confused with, I don’t know, our accent or localization or everything. And after 12 attempts to get her to turn the air conditioning on, going and grabbing the remote.
And so I use a Sensibo for controlling the air conditioning here. And one of the things I really like about that is, it’s also looking for signals from the remote control and trying as best as it can to register those. So it can actually tell if the unit has been turned on manually and then adjusting itself. And it’s interesting to see that that works, mostly. Which seems to be the high bar for all of this automation.

Charles Edge:
I mean the working mostly thing is really interesting to say out loud. Because so one of my hacks to automating all the things is, I only buy them on Amazon and I look at the return policy real quick. Because if I haven’t heard of the vendor, half the stuff’s junk.
And the HVAC is really interesting because… My wiring harness, I had to use ecobee. It was the only one in this house. The previous two houses had Nest. But in this house, ecobee was the only one with the right wiring panel that would work with my HVAC system. And so I bought the Amazon branded one just because I was curious how it worked. I bought another Nest, I bought the Honeywell one because I know the guy who wrote the firmware for it. And I ended up sending all of them back except for the ecobee with $0 worth of pain for myself personally.
Maybe a couple trips to Kohl’s, to drop them off or whatever. But that wasn’t too big a deal. And I do the same thing with almost everything. I just try to make sure I test it out. And sometimes my pile of shame will get so big that I don’t have enough time to test it out before the return period expires. But I do try to buy it all on Amazon. And then with the return policy, make sure I can send it back with no problem. But just out of curiosity, my pile of shame can get pretty big. Do you guys have a pile of shame where you’re like, “Ah, yeah, I never got around to that or I did get around to it. It didn’t really work. I didn’t bother to return it”? I

Tom Bridge:
I have a whole set of LIFX bulbs that are coming up on the end of their… The original set of bulbs that I bought from their, what was it, they did like a Kickstarter back in the day? This is a long time ago. But those four bulbs are going strong.
I bought the next round of bulbs from them and they have just been utter trash. And so right now I just treat them as light bulbs. They still do that job well. But all of the WiFi connectivity, all of the connecting to everything else, that has just been a royal garbage fire. And so as soon as those fail and fail completely, they’ll be off to the electronics recycling.

Charles Edge:
I just by cheap LED bulbs and have swapped out all the switches.

Tom Bridge:
I need to swap out the switches still. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, I worked with the physical plant at my high school. And the first year I worked in a cabinet maker’s shop. And you can’t see me, I’m holding up, I still have all 10 fingers. But the summer I worked with the electricians, I learned to fear electricity from good reason. And so swapping out switches has never been my forte.

Marcus Ransom:
At least here in Australia, you’re not allowed to do that. Anything that touches hardwired electrical here, you are just not supposed to for good reason that-

Charles Edge:
If they made that a law in the States, there’d be riots.

Marcus Ransom:
Next thing they’ll come for our guns.

Charles Edge:
We want to stick forks in the switch if we want to, dang it.

Marcus Ransom:
That’ll be the next amendment to the constitution, the right to electrocute yourself.

Bob Gendler:
[inaudible 00:35:44] second amendment.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. AT&T or Ma Bell didn’t allow people to put their own stuff. But they got broken up over all that. Not over that specifically, but-

Marcus Ransom:
I’ve always taken the approach of, it’s a little bit like software-defined networking, where you separate the data and the control plane with automation. Where I’m in the market for some new HVAC here as well and I want to choose HVAC that does that job well.
It’s quiet, it’s efficient, it actually looks decent on my wall. And then finds something else that can do the automation of it. Rather than then being limited to, all right, well here’s the two HVACs that I can use because they integrate with HomeKit and they may not actually be good at that. And in six months time it may turn out that they weren’t that good at it after all.

Charles Edge:
So I want to challenge that for two seconds. You can put a sensor where your HVAC controller was, and your HVAC controller can just get screwed to your HVAC system. With the modern way that we do it, all you care about in that spot is either a humidity and/or temperature sensor, right?

Marcus Ransom:
Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s more against where you see now split system air conditioners, that have WiFi built into them and they claim that they can integrate. And then when you actually look at what they can integrate with, it was like, well, when this advertising was written 18 months ago, this may have been the universally-declared standard. But it turns out it’s not. And it’s that sort of thing. Something that you can attach a controller to, to automate. So that if you want to get a better controller, you can change that without having to rip out the HVAC system.

Charles Edge:
Because the controllers are like 150, 200 bucks for the most part, they’re not that bad. And ecobee actually did a software update this weekend, and the screen looks completely different than it did on Friday. I’m like, “What is this?” [inaudible 00:37:58].

Marcus Ransom:
Maybe they can talk to the folks at Apple about elegant software update processes then, perhaps.

Bob Gendler:
Ooh.

Charles Edge:
Well, it looks better [inaudible 00:38:09] and it just happened without my… Yeah. Anyways, so it nudged me in terms of, hey, I’m just going to install this right this second. But there were no files to save, so it’s okay to do that.

Marcus Ransom:
It didn’t boot to recovery or anything like that.

Bob Gendler:
It used Nudge, actually, is that?

Speaker X:
It’s still cold in here.

Charles Edge:
So I do feel like we could talk about various ecosystems like Google, Alexa, Apple Home for hours. And we might actually do an episode on that at some point for anyone who’s looking at those other systems. But this one’s about HomeKit. So to bring a little focus, let’s start with what everyone thinks works well in their home. And for this one, we’ll start with Tim, because I’m hoping you’ll talk about refrigerators. Because I might or might not be in the market for one.

Tim Pearson:
I will talk about my refrigerator. So I will say, it doesn’t link up to HomeKit, but I love my refrigerator. We have a GE Smart Fridge and it’s got a Keurig on it, and it has an app. So we can set when we know what time we’re getting up in the morning. Generally my wife gets up and then I’m up 30 minutes after her. So there is hot water ready to go. You push the button and here comes your coffee.
Now I know it’s not the fancy coffee, but it’s fantastic. And I drink four or five iced teas a day that I make through that coffee pot. And so to be able to sit at my desk and hit the button and say, get up to temperature and make your coffee. It’s amazing. So I love it.

Charles Edge:
By the time you walk over there, it’s ready.

Tim Pearson:
It’s ready to go. Yeah, it’s fantastic. And interestingly, they have safety features that are built into the device. So if you’ve pushed the button to heat, you can’t use the ice maker. But if you use the app and turn on the heat with the app, you can walk over and load up your cup with ice ahead of time while it’s still going. So-

Charles Edge:
Fancy.

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite purchases in the last two years.

Charles Edge:
My car has a Auto-Start function. And the only problem with that is, what you said made me think of Logic in software design. And so the parking ramp that I used to park in, my car would be tilted just enough so that the gas would go to one side of the tank. So I would always park on the other side. So it was pointed the other direction. Because if it registered at less than half a tank or a quarter tank, I can’t remember, it wouldn’t start. It was smart enough to know like, oh, I need more gas, otherwise I might run long enough and you won’t have whatever. But yeah-

Marcus Ransom:
There was a reason they had to put that function in there, wasn’t there? Something happened to someone at some stage.

Steve Yuroff:
There was a lawyer somewhere.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, a lawyer somewhere. Exactly. Steve, you nailed it. So with that, Steve, do you have a shout-out for any awesome thing that you have in your home that you love?

Steve Yuroff:
You guys were talking about doing your lighting automations through bulbs, but then the risk of somebody turning them off. I have zero smart bulbs in my house. I replaced many switches with Lutron Casedas, which by the way, don’t need a neutral in them. My house doesn’t have neutrals. And you can put both the Casedas and the Diva lines. The Divas are the new ones. They look nicer. I think the original Casedas have four buttons, which are fine. And these are a paddle switch with a toggle on them for dimming.
For controlling lights that way, I think that’s just the way to go because family can come to visit, my in-laws come to visit or whatever. Nobody needs to learn how to behave differently in Steve’s house to deal with the lights because they’re smart and weird. They just press the button and get lights. And they work like lights and they talk too. Siri will control them. Alexa – I still have one in the house – she’ll control them. My Home Assistant automations will run them. So that’s a product that I love, and I think they’ve just done a great job with.

Charles Edge:
And they have blinds. Do you have any of those?

Steve Yuroff:
They do. I would like to have blinds. You’re now hitting on a household disagreement topic about the installation of blinds.

Charles Edge:
The smart blinds, I guess there’s like a ULACS or something like that that you can get them for slightly less expensive. But the Caseda ones, they’re probably going to run you a grand per window. So it’s not cheap.

Steve Yuroff:
Well, that might inspire me to be more on her side if that’s the case. Because I don’t know if it’s worth that much to me.

Charles Edge:
Long term, I don’t know what the energy savings are from having it. Because you wake up, you have to whatever. But I think the ULACS ones might be about half the cost. And they are IR-driven, but with a controller that can hook up to Alexa. But not a controller – that I’m aware of -that can hook to HomeKit.

Steve Yuroff:
Not [inaudible 00:43:27] so they’re not a HomeKit thing. Bummer.

Charles Edge:
Yup. So how about you, Bob?

Bob Gendler:
So I actually have zero actual automations going because I stopped trusting them. They got annoying. So I have Smart Lock and we initially tried with, when everybody leaves the house or comes to the house. But then because of the AirTags and because of different devices being left at home, it would think that somebody’s still home. And so now it doesn’t lock the door. Just a whole bunch of weird things like that where it just kind of got annoying.
Going back to my coffee pot thing. That’s what I wanted to use a dumb coffee pot for was, so you could actually more be like, “Hey, lady in the can, make my coffee.” So that way it would be super fresh as soon as we’re actually out of the bedroom into the kitchen in the morning.
Yeah, I have the ecobees. I guess that’s automation. We usually set it for being in between. Not 72 degrees or whatever, we hover between these degrees. So I guess that’s as automated as we get. And that’s probably our most reliable thing is the ecobees. The house we moved into a year ago, a year and some change actually, already had ecobees installed. One of them went bad so I ended up with the premium ecobee I replaced it with, which actually has Siri in itself. I’ve sent text messages from my ecobee.

Charles Edge:
I have not done that.

Tom Bridge:
Nice.

Charles Edge:
Oh, challenge accepted. I can say

Bob Gendler:
You’ve got to cover up all your other devices and whisper into it.

Steve Yuroff:
Yeah. because everything starts listening.

Charles Edge:
Having sold a home that had a few dozen smart devices, I took a bunch out and brought them to the new house. But there’s a whole thing. Your ring doorbell, you have to approve for it to move to the next person’s account. So I don’t know if this is true for you, Marcus, outside of the US. But in the US when you sell a home, you’re really not supposed to talk to the people that bought it.

Marcus Ransom:
Oh, absolutely.

Charles Edge:
Your communications are going through the real estate agents. So they’re like, “Hey, can you go click a button?” And then…

Marcus Ransom:
My solar is exactly that system here and this is appalling. The fact that they’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s $500 for you to transfer the solar into our name.” And it was one of those things where it had-

Charles Edge:
Oh, ouch.

Marcus Ransom:
18 months left on the warranty, which has now expired. And it was just post the sale, a great relationship with the owner where he is like, “All right, here’s the password just change the email address to yours so I can get all of the metrics from it,” and everything like that. But it’s this idea of charging people to move from one person to another and they’re like, “Oh, it requires a whole bunch of stuff in the back end.”

Charles Edge:
Yeah, that’s the first I’ve heard of that.

Steve Yuroff:
That’s garbage.

Marcus Ransom:
James, prepare yourself with a beep here, but bullshit.

Charles Edge:
But do you have anything automated that you like, Marcus?

Marcus Ransom:
The Sensibo for me has been awesome. Not automated as such, no. The pool cleaning system is something that I’m looking into. How to turn that from an awful analog switch into something that I can automate for different seasons and everything. But it really just changes everything. Home watering is also the next one where we’ve got this beautiful temperate Japanese garden in the front of our house and we don’t live in Japan, so it requires an awful lot of water for the maples and everything to stay not dead.
And so those sorts of things more set-and-forget that are things that aren’t integrating with humans as such. But I’m having a bad experience at the moment with our Eve camera, where I really wanted a video to be stored in iCloud because I’ve got a far greater trust with that than any of the manufacturers storing and having access to the video.
And the decision we made as a family was this is never going to record if there are people at home. And that’s great because family sharing allows you to work out where people are, like interacting with most of Apple’s frameworks that they build. Doesn’t quite work as well as it says on the box.
And so finding, we’re having to go and manually turn it on when we leave the house, which then doesn’t give us the automation. Where if something is moving in our house while we’re away, that’s when I want it to work. And so that’s the real challenge for me is, without exposing all of our personal data to something that I don’t trust, getting these automations to work seems to be a little hard. So I look forward to being able to automate things when it works.

Charles Edge:
Some developers actually – you specifically mention mentioning sprinkler systems made me think of this. Some developers have discussed the not-working type of issue as being a thing. And some of these technologies like Bluetooth are incredibly difficult to develop against, I think, on the Apple platform as a Swift developer.
So my path with sprinklers was I asked my sprinkler guy who comes by once a year to bleed my sprinklers because it gets real cold in Minnesota and they freeze. So I asked my sprinkler guy, “What smart sprinkler system do you like?” Because I figured he’s the one who comes by every year, he should know.
And he was like, “Oh, get the Rachio. They sell them at Costco, they’re like less than 200 bucks.” So got the Rachio, he installed it. I think he only charged me like 50 bucks to install this thing, which I felt kind of guilty about. So I went smart sprinklers for 250 bucks all in, to replace my old sprinkler system. And then less than a month later, Rachio dropped HomeKit support-

Speaker X:
Oh.

Charles Edge:
Like, your faces.

Steve Yuroff:
That sucks.

Charles Edge:
And what’s funny is, I called over and I talked to support and I was like, “Look, I’m a developer, can I just talk to your guy? Like the one who does that?” And the specific error he was mentioning, I get with some code I’m working on. And I’ve built this whole framework to try to correct and auto-survive the connection. And so I was like, “I’ll send you my code.” And he was like, “Nah, we’re not going back to HomeKit.” But I have to say I really like the Rachio system. They have a nice cute app. It looks pretty in my garage. It just doesn’t work with HomeKit anymore. So-

Marcus Ransom:
The challenge I have with my home sprinkler is the – well we call it a tap, you’ll probably call it a faucet – is like right on the front of our house. And the WiFi’s not so great out there. And trying to actually get the sprinkler system and realizing, “Okay, I’m going to need to stick a HomePod Mini somewhere to be able to get the matter pointing out there,” and those sorts of things.

Tom Bridge:
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Charles Edge:
So Tom, I don’t know, maybe you have those tile things in front of your face, right?

Tom Bridge:
What?

Charles Edge:
That make it, the little hexagon things that make the light-

Tom Bridge:
Oh, right. Yes, I do. I have Nanoleafs. I have a set of Nanoleaf panels in my office, and then I have a set of the wood-toned ones in the bedroom and in my wife’s office. And I’ve been pretty happy with the Nanoleafs overall. They’re a solid panel, good controls, all sorts of automation options that are out there. I mean, I’m not doing a ton of automation right now, because all of the things that I’ve wanted to try to automate have required…
There’s a particular part of the Underwriter’s Laboratory code for appliances that basically say when if you’re plugged in and you turn it on, you need to make sure that you’re not going to do any harm. And so for example, the thing that I want more than anything is, we’re just leaving winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. But what I really want is essentially something that on days when it is below 40 degrees outside – 40 Fahrenheit, not Celsius – when it is cold outside, I want the electric mattress pad to turn on about an hour before I go to bed.

Charles Edge:
Now those usually are dip switches, so that’s super easy. Just throwing this out there.

Tom Bridge:
Okay. So when we started to look around for those things, the feature is not, or at least I have not fully disabled or fully taken apart the thing. But – who is it? Hamilton, I believe – now has a version that supports this.

Charles Edge:
That’s who makes the smart coffee.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah. And so they are supporting this, but do they have it in California King? They do not. So I’m waiting for next year when they get all the materials together. And they can sell it in Cal King and then I can-

Tim Pearson:
But you can have like two-thirds of the mattress warm.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, yeah, right.

Charles Edge:
Tiff, you don’t need warm, it’s good.

Tom Bridge:
No, that’s who I am building this for.

Charles Edge:
But if they have the toggle switch… The cheap ones usually have a toggle switch and the expensive ones usually have a little press switch that kicks on an LED that then keeps you up all night. But the toggle switch, that’s the one that you can put in-

Tom Bridge:
I have a fancy controller version. And so it’s got a thing that’s about a little bigger than a deck of cards. Because it has adjustable zones and temperatures.

Charles Edge:
Fancy, fancy.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, super fancy. And so I’ve not gone down that rabbit hole yet. Currently, we have a bunch of outsourced lighting effects that are time-based. And all of those times are based on the sunset time and all of those things. That works out pretty well. And so those automations work out great.
And of course I have nothing but love for my Nest thermostat, which is now on its second residence. And I think I bought it in like 2009. So I’ve had it forever. Love to death though, that particular integration. But I think that overall, I have not found the automation story yet that I need to solve it this way.

Tim Pearson:
I did a new one to one today that I’m excited to try to see how it actually works. But I’m older, I go to the restroom in the middle of the night a little more often maybe than I used to. And so I now have a bulb that after midnight it will only come on 10% in the… What do we call that in the commode room? Whatever we call that.

Tom Bridge:
Oh yeah, the bathroom light.

Tim Pearson:
Right, right. So if I get up, there’s an occupancy sensor. Or a motion detector says, “Oh yeah, somebody’s here. So flip on this light 10%. And then once there’s no more motion, then we’re going to turn it, or after two minutes we’re going to turn it off.” So I’m excited to see how this works and makes my life better. Mostly just from the like, do I get back to sleep quicker? That’s the big question.

Charles Edge:
Because you don’t have too much light.

Tim Pearson:
You don’t have all the light.

Charles Edge:
Because if you have a hundred percent light, you’re…

Tim Pearson:
Right.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. You’re activated. Your neurons are like, “blah.”

Tim Pearson:
Right. And I’ve walked into the wall enough times trying not to turn on the light.

Charles Edge:
Me too.

Tim Pearson:
So it’s like, how are we going to do this? So I’m excited. Technology may save my life with that one somehow. I don’t know, we’ll see. I’m excited to try it.

Charles Edge:
So speaking of activation, one of the biggest hassles with all of this is, sometimes onboarding devices. Once it’s in, it just seems to run, not a lot of… Whatever. But how do you all feel about the onboarding experience for new devices? I feel like most of them are, here’s your QR code, take a picture. How’s that work? Or what are your feelings about this?

Tom Bridge:
I feel like there are two classes of devices. There’s the kind where it just works and there’s the kind that I wish to throw in the trash. And unfortunately my Nanoleafs that I actually like now that they have been set up, are fine for this, but they have been utter trash to get connected initially.
Because it’s got the little QR code on the back and you scan the QR code and that’s supposed to do a Bluetooth thing. And that’s supposed to create network availability and all of those things. It never seems to work. So I don’t know if I just have bad firmware or what the story is. But for example, I bought a secondary controller. So I just bought the little controller bit. It plugs into power and then connects to other lights. But I can’t get it to join my home network for love or money. And it’s just so frustrating.

Tim Pearson:
Well, and especially because we’re tech people, that makes it worse. That’s like 10 times worse. Your significant other’s just laughing at you like, “Come on, don’t you…?”

Tom Bridge:
100%.

Tim Pearson:
“And how is this going to work for me if you can’t do it?”

Charles Edge:
[inaudible 00:59:11] listens to you or-

Tim Pearson:
And Bob, we were talking about the Level Locks the other day a little bit. And when I first got my Level Lock, I didn’t realize that you had to use the app and calibrate it. And so we were like a month in, and all of a sudden we were getting all kinds of HomeKit notifications. Because our lock was unlocking locking, unlocking locking, unlocking locking.
And there was no discernible reason. We couldn’t figure it out. And so I reached out to their support and they’re like, “Oh yeah, you just have to calibrate it.” So I had to read the manual? I was a little stunned by that one. But those are great. For us, it’s been a change of life because my wife obsesses about whether or not the doors are locked at night.

Bob Gendler:
Same.

Tim Pearson:
And to be able to ask, right? So-

Bob Gendler:
I forgot, that is an automation I do have that 10:00 PM hit and I just heard it lock.

Charles Edge:
That’s right [inaudible 01:00:16].

Tim Pearson:
Ours hits at 10:00 and 11:00 and 12:00 and 01:00. But also, to be in bed and just ask. Instead of me having to get up and go pretend like I walked there and checked all the doors, is a big deal.

Steve Yuroff:
I too have learned to put multiple lock schedules on. Because the teen will, if he eventually does take the recycling out, he was asked two hours ago, the probability that the door got re-locked on his way back in is quite low, unfortunately. My problem is that I have double doors instead of a long shim. They’re off by just the slightest amount, that most of the time I sadly hear my lock just trying to insert, but failing. Just that sad sound of the August lock going, “Eh, I can’t.”

Charles Edge:
And that’ll burn out the motor and-

Steve Yuroff:
Yeah it’s not good for it, I know.

Charles Edge:
I don’t feel like smart locks in the Midwest are a thing yet. I’m just going to [inaudible 01:01:13] too cold [inaudible 01:01:13].

Steve Yuroff:
I’m trying but I know it’s just a couple millimeters off. It’s just a little push and it slides in. But it needs the little push.

Charles Edge:
When your temperature goes from -30 to -100, I don’t know what that is in Celsius, it actually hurts my head to think about it. Sorry.

Tom Bridge:
It’s like -30 to -40.

Marcus Ransom:
Still a lot.

Charles Edge:
But the wood changes. Period.

Marcus Ransom:
And metal. When you’re talking about those kind of differences, even steel is going to change shape.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I have to say in our office we have all-metal doors and they are smart-ish, but in a very 1980s way. So we have FOBS, but it’s literally the same chip as a 1984 Mac has in it that drives the system. But even those jam sometimes where you’re like, “I can’t believe that commercial doors are busted.”
So locks are one of the things. I think the voice control… So the onboarding experience is definitely a huge piece of this. And I think more from the admin perspective. That’s either awesome or a nightmare. And if you’re a consultant, I can’t imagine trying to do fixed fee bidding, as an example, for doing a smart home. You’re like, “Well, I don’t know man.” But… Go ahead.

Bob Gendler:
Oh, I was going to say, you were mentioning about talking to the developers and onboarding. And all this rung a bell. In our old house I bought the bridge so that the Chamberlain could work over the WiFi for the myQ. Because they were like, “Yeah, HomeKit. Yep, yep, yep. We integrate great with HomeKit.” It doesn’t integrate great at all. It is awful. It would work one or two times and then stop communicating. And I remember being on the phone with their support. And they’re like, “Well, can you do a full reset of HomeKit or something?” Like all these things and-

Charles Edge:
A full reset of HomeKit. Wait [inaudible 01:03:36]

Bob Gendler:
Yeah, they didn’t even know. They’re just trying to do like-

Charles Edge:
Take your Apple TV 4K outside and smash it with a baseball bat. Buy a new one.

Bob Gendler:
While on the phone I found that Homebridge had a plug-in. Got it working with that and told the guy, “Hey, somebody’s hack seems to work better than your app does. So pass that on to anybody else who calls in now.” Yeah, that was the worst experience.

Charles Edge:
The thing I love about the myQ is the integration with Amazon. Like, “Oh, we can drop your packages off in your garage. Please don’t run over them when you pull into your garage when you come home from work. But we can put the packages in your garage.” And the other thing I love about them is they’re what, $20, if you buy them at the right time on Amazon. They’ll have little flash sales and you can get them super cheap. This is probably one of the cheapest devices you can put in your home that we’ll discuss. Including some of the light bulbs.
But then I do find that maybe once a year they become untrained to the code. So I have to go up and on the garage door opener, hit the little red button to make it issue the new code. And then, do you guys know what I’m talking about or am I…?

Bob Gendler:
The ones I have now are actually WiFi connected. But I had to put a WiFi access point in the garage because it had such a crappy thing. As well as it needed to be a 2.4 only gigahertz network.

Charles Edge:
Oh, I’ve had that a couple of times.

Bob Gendler:
So crappy network in the garage.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. That’s one of the things that I really don’t like about the Google ecosystem, is a lot of the devices try to talk to the next closest Google device rather than straight to your WiFi. And then they will just not work. It’s the most frustrating.
In general I love the Google devices, but the onboarding experience can be a little less than awesome when you have a couple of older devices and some newer devices and they’re all trying to talk to each other. The thing that triggered me to think about that, Bob, was the 2.4 only. The fix tends to be, oh, I put that on 2.4 only, now it all works. And then I can re-enable all my other networks. Disaster.

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, we run a 2.4 network just for all of the IoT stuff. But speaking of onboarding, you have to make sure when you’re onboarding devices, that you’ve got your phone on the 2.4 network, otherwise it’s going to jump to your others.

Bob Gendler:
And I stopped doing all that. All because, yeah… And then the HomePod has to be somehow on that network. But it wants to be on what your phone is on and just… Yeah, forget it.

Charles Edge:
Yep. At home and the office, I have a dedicated IoT network. That is what those things live on. Because I literally don’t trust half the devices on them to be on the same network as my daily driver laptop.

Bob Gendler:
Now what about HomeKit Secure and that stuff? Because that’s supposed to put little firewalls between all your devices.

Tim Pearson:
Okay, but does it? How many devices are actually-

Bob Gendler:
From Apple?

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I did just replace my Apple TV in the last few weeks with a 4K so that I could test some of this. And I haven’t gotten into the deeper packet inspection to see what’s actually flowing where.

Bob Gendler:
So I had to turn it off, because I ran into something where the TV, which is a Vizio TV, and it’s the lowest model that supports HomeKit and Apple TV stuff. I forget exactly now. But basically there was some communication issue, because they cut themselves off and they’re all their own little things.

Charles Edge:
This is actually a great place to ask. So I’ve struggled with some of the options on the Apple TV 4K, like adding speakers. Is that something you might want to share your experiences with?

Bob Gendler:
Sure. I replaced our Apple TV a couple months ago just for that purpose. Because we have, in the ceiling, recessed lighting everywhere. And so I actually bought off of Etsy two things that you can then screw your HomePod Minis into them. So now I have two HomePod Minis up in the ceiling. They stick out a little bit.

Charles Edge:
[inaudible 01:08:47] I’m searching on Etsy right now. Keep going, sorry.

Bob Gendler:
So then I bought the new Apple TV. So now I have the FiOS TV sound coming out of the Apple TVs. Because of ARC, or eARC or whatever it is.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, that’s right, because it does eARC now. And I was going to say-

Bob Gendler:
You I think you have to get the wire. That then also gives you what is the special – not matter, what is that thing called?

Tom Bridge:
Thread.

Bob Gendler:
Thread networking. Yes.

Tom Bridge:
We just did this in our basement. And so we just redid our basement and we used an old display, an old monitor down there as the TV. Because it’s not a very big space and you don’t need a very big TV. And I was like, “I got this display just hanging out over here.” And then I realized, “Oh, this is just a display. It is not like a television with speakers.” And so have put in a stereo pair of HomePod Minis down there as the speakers for the basement.

Charles Edge:
And how was that experience? Setting up.

Tom Bridge:
Amazing. That was honestly the simplest thing that we’ve ever done down there. You pull them out of the box, you set them up. It’s got a proximity sensor, right? So you’re doing the Bluetooth proximity thing with your phone to get it to join your network. But I think the whole thing took five minutes.
It asks you, “Hey, do you want to make this the sound source for your TV?” And then it is. When you set up the second one, it’s like, “Hey, I see there’s another one in the basement. Do you want me to make this stereo pair?” And then they do. There was some period of time where they were both oscillating their lights. And I’m sure were putting out tones that I couldn’t hear, to measure the acoustic space. But then we turned that on. Oh my God. Tremendous. Just really good sound.

Bob Gendler:
Do you find… For us at least, whenever the whole thing turns on, let’s say in the morning to watch the Today show, the volume’s at zero. So every time I have to be, turn up the volume to 55% or something.

Tom Bridge:
I have not noticed that. Because Charlie has been the one down in the basement most often, and he will go down there if he does. But he turns it on with the remote. And then I guess if the volume [inaudible 01:11:03].

Bob Gendler:
And the only remote then that also controls the volume is the Apple TV remote, which-

Tom Bridge:
Correct.

Bob Gendler:
Is kind of-

Charles Edge:
That’s important for me.

Bob Gendler:
Now I have the find remote to change the channel. Now I have to find either an iPhone-

Steve Yuroff:
Different remote for a different task.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I cut the cord on the FiOS stuff. So I just use the Apple TV remote. Sorry, Marcus, go ahead.

Marcus Ransom:
That’s where I want to get to is just using the Apple TV remote. When I had my old Sony television, it was great where you’d hit the Apple TV remote, it would turn the receiver on, it would switch to the Apple TV, it would turn the television on, you could use the remote for everything. And we did everything through the Apple TV.
But then moved into the new place that came with this ancient yet fabulous 65-inch Samsung Plasma. And of course uses Samsung’s interpretation of that. And so it will all turn on with the Apple TV remote, but it won’t turn things off. So digging around for all of these other remotes. But I’ve discovered a really weird thing that I cannot get to the bottom of. Where every now and then if I turn on everything with Apple TV remote, the HomePod Mini starts playing music that doesn’t seem to adhere to any algorithm from anybody in the family listening to music.

Charles Edge:
Is it the first alphabetical song that was ever?

Marcus Ransom:
No. It’s like just weird-ass suggestions for genres of music we are not the slightest bit interested in. So gangster rap starts coming out of the house or something like that. So like the kids have gone to bed, let’s go and watch some television and… [inaudible 01:12:54] Some people are busting caps in our eyes.

Bob Gendler:
AI is really good, man. There’s the problem.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, and it’s weird because it’s not the Apple TV that’s playing the music, it’s the HomePod Mini that’s playing it. And so it’s weird.

Charles Edge:
There are weird things that I see happen. For me, it’s mostly the very earliest letter, alpha numeric, will autoplay on certain things randomly. In the Apple ecosystems, specifically.

Tom Bridge:
Here at the Mac Admins podcast, we want to say a special thank you to all of our Patreon backers. The following people are to be recognized for their incredible generosity. Stu Bacca, Thank you. Adam Selby. Thank you. Nate Walk. Thank you. Michael Tsai. Thank you. Rick Goodie. Thank you. Mike Boylan. You know it, thank you. Melvin Vives. Thank you. Bill Stikes. Thank you. Anush Dorville. Thank you. Jeffrey Compton, M. Marsh, Stu McDonald, Hamlin Crewson, Adam Berg. Thank you. AJ Petrepka. Thank you. James Tracy, Tim Perfitt of Twocanoes. Thank you. Nate Sinal, Will O’Neill, Seb Nash, the folks at Command Control Power, Steven Weinstein, Chet Schwarthout, Daniel McLaughlin, Justin Holt, Bill Smith and Weldon Dodd. Thank you all so much and remember that you can back us if you just all head out and down to patreon.com/macadmpodcast. Thanks everybody.
Well, I can’t believe it. An hour and 15 minutes in, we haven’t even hit halfway-

Charles Edge:
It’ll mix down [inaudible 01:14:35].

Tom Bridge:
It’ll mix down to 50 minutes. No problem. I mean there’s definitely been some Sorry, James in there. But I think we’d love to have you back on for another round to get through some of the rest of this. Because I think this is a rich topic for folks to understand, because there’s a lot going on in here.

Charles Edge:
We didn’t touch on half the things we planned on talking about. Like shortcut integration, in-app versus QR codes, how we all feel about Siri voice control, Native functionality with… Anyways, I do think a second episode here is warranted. And it’s applicable to work and home if you’re in the Apple ecosystem.

Tom Bridge:
Yep, that’s right. So before I let you go, I do have one bonus question. If you could do home automation for anything in your life, doesn’t matter about those Laboratory rules, doesn’t matter about anything like that.

Charles Edge:
The laws of physics don’t matter?

Tom Bridge:
Oh, totally. 100%. You can essentially say, “Hey look, I want to automate this thing that requires WiFi to work across 10 miles or something.”

Charles Edge:
So physics-ish.

Tom Bridge:
Physics-ish. But I was going to say, “What’s one thing that you would love to be able to automate in your home?”

Tim Pearson:
So when we moved in 2020, we moved to a small town. And our small town got really small with Covid. Which had already been happening, but it got smaller and smaller. And we have a five-year-old who, his daycare closed permanently in September. And he wasn’t five yet, so he is still a preschooler. And the nearest spot we can get him into is 20 miles away and it’s a 30-minute drive. So if I could automate any of it, I would automate somebody to come and pick him up, take him to school.

Tom Bridge:
And you can’t just use Uber, right? You can’t put a five-year-old-

Tim Pearson:
Oh no, there’s no Uber here [inaudible 01:16:42].

Bob Gendler:
Tesla’s got you covered. Tesla Autodrive.

Tim Pearson:
But yeah, that would be my automation. Give me an extra hour in my morning. Because I think the key to all the automations is what gives you the thing you don’t want to do, and what gives you extra time. I don’t want to flip a switch, I don’t want to walk across the room, whatever. So that’d be mine.

Charles Edge:
I’m going to borrow and steal part of yours. So I have two teens and a seven-month-old in the house. And there’s a lot of driving of teens. They constantly want to hang out with friends and they don’t have cars yet. Early teens. So if there was an Uber for teens, because Uber you can’t use for under 18, I think. But yeah, as service to cart them around. I don’t mind the seven-month-old. She needs to go where she needs to go, when she needs to go, and that’s a thing. But yeah, because they’re ignoring you anyways. And so to feel a little less used-

Tim Pearson:
Yeah, even at five they ignore you.

Charles Edge:
It would add a lot to my day. Oh yeah. Well, at five, I remember very well at five it was when you go to pick them up, they’re angry because they haven’t eaten since lunch. And they’re like, “Aah”. And you’re like, “Here have some puffed corn.” And they’re like, “Life is so good, dad.”

Tim Pearson:
They are that Snickers commercial.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, they’re so coin-operated in a way at that age.

Tim Pearson:
So true. I miss that. Anyways, so Marcus tried to pass it to Steve next. So Steve,

Steve Yuroff:
Kind of the same thing that Tim referenced. Automating things you don’t want to do. And I was thinking that if I could have a snowblower that just figured out that yeah, it snowed last night, it’s got a job to do. Or it’s going to keep on snowing [inaudible 01:18:48].
And it was the heavy stuff too, that’s nearly water, nearly standing water.

Tom Bridge:
That’s the worst, then the snowblower doesn’t do anything.

Steve Yuroff:
Yeah. And I don’t have a snowblower and I have an unnecessarily long amount of driveway. It’s a stupidly long driveway. So there’s just way too many square feet of driveway out there to deal with. So I would love to hand that job off to a snowblower that could just do that thing for me.

Speaker X:
An automated snowblower.

Marcus Ransom:
Subfloor heating [inaudible 01:19:18].

Steve Yuroff:
I was thinking about that. I was actually thinking that thought while I was out there, that that exists. The underground heating channels that just bring it back from deep in. I’m like, how much would that cost to rip up the whole driveway and put that under?

Charles Edge:
Oh, 40 grand.

Bob Gendler:
We had our driveway redone and I asked all about that because… And it came more down to, you need to get the electrical probably redone in the house and that’s where the big expense is.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I did do below the tile. I did smart. Well, it’s not smart. It is connected to a smart thing. But I did do that for some of the bathrooms in the house when I re-tiled.

Steve Yuroff:
Nice.

Charles Edge:
And I have to say, I don’t think it was worth it at all. Almost. I mean, it wasn’t that much money, it was more the pain in the butt. When you’re putting subfloor into tile, it’s kind of annoying to have non-level objects underneath it. But anyway, sorry.

Steve Yuroff:
Does it take too long to transfer the heat to the tiles to make it worthwhile?

Charles Edge:
That is the issue for me because with travertine or any thicker tile, you really have to tell it enough time ahead of time to kick on, for it to matter. Yeah. Very astute observations.

Steve Yuroff:
But it’s a good selling feature though.

Charles Edge:
Oh, this is a super important thing. When you go to sell a house, the smart things are not a value add at all. It’s owning a pool in your home. Yes, they don’t care. It doesn’t add value because of whatever reason. But mostly probably because it’ll be out of date six months before you sold the house.

Steve Yuroff:
You have to replace it.

Tim Pearson:
We had to replace Nest. Yeah, we had to replace a couple of our Nest smoke detectors because they had hit the ten year or seven year…

Speaker X:
[inaudible 01:21:35] seven year. Yeah.

Tim Pearson:
I’m still coming to grips with things like that. Like that has a lifetime now? Now we have to-

Charles Edge:
Yeah, it turns out reagents, chemical reagents are a thing.

Tim Pearson:
Who’d have thunk it?

Marcus Ransom:
Yep. So what about you, Bob?

Bob Gendler:
So mine is completely different. So I work out in my garage a lot. And what I want to build is a robot that just loads the weights for me because that is so tiring. And the biggest pain in the butt is just loading the plates on the bar itself. I like lifting it once it’s on there, but man, just getting them on and off, and re-racking them is tiring and annoying and just takes so much time.

Charles Edge:
That’s actually super programmatically easy

Bob Gendler:
Yes and no, but…

Charles Edge:
If it’s in the right place,

Bob Gendler:
Right. That’s the problem. If it’s always in the right, same place.

Tom Bridge:
That’s a tough one. How about you, Marcus?

Marcus Ransom:
Well, for me of course, it’s automating the things you don’t want to do. So when it’s late at night and we can hear Alfie is causing some trouble with the neighborhood cats or the possums, and if we don’t go and intervene, it’s going to go on for hours. Say, something that can go and fetch the cat that doesn’t bleed [inaudible 01:23:05].

Charles Edge:
A magnetic collar.

Marcus Ransom:
I don’t think the collar would work. It would need to be some kind of-

Charles Edge:
Drone.

Marcus Ransom:
Hydropower drone copter that would go-

Charles Edge:
A nuclear-powered drone.

Marcus Ransom:
So that’d be it for me. What about you, Tom?

Tom Bridge:
For me, so I live on a busy street and it’s not a wide street, but it’s busy. And the thing that I want is I want full speed capture with license plate recognition for the street in front of my house. I want that so bad because I want to spot patterns, right? Because the city is not terribly great in DC at slowing vehicles down. We’re good at sending you tickets, but if you live in Maryland or Virginia, we might have just sent you a letter. It doesn’t actually come with any teeth.
And so part of me wants to figure out, all right, cool, give me at least the data that I can take to the city that says, “All right, they are in fact doing 45 up this 25 mile an hour street and y’all need to do something about it before somebody gets killed. Probably me. And that would be amazing. But I have not figured out a good plug-in for the Nest camera system that will calculate the distances, and figure out if the car going down the hill is too fast.

Charles Edge:
One of my fraternity brothers became a cop. And that was a requirement to do his job, to be able to calculate mentally real quick, how many seconds. Anyways, that’s a skill. It shouldn’t be hard for a computer…

Tom Bridge:
I agree.

Charles Edge:
…Like it is for a human. But yes.

Tom Bridge:
But I got to figure out the automation that goes with all of that. But that’ll be my old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud kind of automation there.

Charles Edge:
Well, so we’ll schedule this again for a month or two-ish from now. But Tom, do you want to take us through that weird outro thing you do? That’s awesome, that you do so well.

Tom Bridge:
Yes. So thank you all so much for joining us this week. We’ll have links to all of you in the show notes. So please, if you’ve got a Twitter account, a Mastodon account, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, something like that, that you’d like us to promote, we would be delighted to do so.
We have some amazing sponsors this week that is our friends at Kandji and Kolide and dataJAR. And they have all done some great work by helping us talk about all of these things together, which is fantastic. And thank you everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Charles Edge:
See you next time.

Marcus Ransom:
See you later.

Bob Gendler:
Toodeloodles.

Tim Pearson:
Bye.

Steve Yuroff:
See you. Thank you.

James Smith:
The Mac Admins Podcast is a production of Mac Admins Podcast, LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge. Our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Codega the first time he opened GarageBand. Sponsorship for the Mac Admins Podcast is provided by the macadmins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac Admins in a free Slack instance, visit macadmins.org. And also by Technolutionary, LLC. Technically, we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast.macadmins.org. Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.