Inside the Open Home: Darren Griffin

[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome to the home citizen podcast. [SPEAKER_02]: My name's Phil, joining me as usual. [SPEAKER_02]: I've got Ruham, hating mate. [SPEAKER_02]: Good, are you? [SPEAKER_02]: Very good, thank you. [SPEAKER_02]: And today we're joined by Darren. [SPEAKER_02]: How you doing mate? [SPEAKER_03]: How'd I make it? [SPEAKER_03]: How'd you get them? [SPEAKER_02]: Good. [SPEAKER_02]: This podcast is sponsored by Home Assistant Cloud by Nabukasa.

[SPEAKER_02]: For a more monthly fee, you'll unlock powerful features like secure ephilis access to your system from anywhere, your choice of voice assistance, off-site backups, and more, all configurable in the UI with no YAML needed. [SPEAKER_02]: It also supports the development of home assistant, SP home, and other open home foundation projects. [SPEAKER_02]: Click the link in the description to learn more.

[SPEAKER_02]: We'd also like to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our executive producers, Benny and Rob. [SPEAKER_02]: You can help support the show and get early access to episodes all in an ad-free feed. [SPEAKER_02]: To support the show, check out home assistant.fm and click Patreon in the menu. [SPEAKER_02]: and a shout out to our sponsor today notion, which we'll have a few more nights for later in the episode. [SPEAKER_02]: But Darren, I want to start talking to you now.

[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for joining us today. [SPEAKER_02]: This is sort of a first episode going a bit deeper behind the open home. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to get sort of inside the open home. [SPEAKER_02]: So Darren, you work for the open home foundation. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm so what [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I am the website developer for the open-of-hand foundation.

[SPEAKER_03]: I originally started with Nabrikasa before the split, and I joined because I wanted to get in at the home assistant in working for what I was thinking, home assistant, obviously, Nabrikasa, as a work developer, because there wasn't one currently and I saw one pop-up. [SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm responsible for making sure that all websites are running well. [SPEAKER_03]: That's quite easy to do because it runs on Netify so they're kind of cut good.

[SPEAKER_03]: But, every blog you see go out, I have to publish that out. [SPEAKER_03]: Any bugs on the websites that you see, I try and fix as quickly as I can. [SPEAKER_03]: And then any new website we make for the marketing terms of products or like the community new community pages. [SPEAKER_03]: I pull those together as quickly as I can. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's what I do.

[SPEAKER_02]: Nice. [SPEAKER_02]: So there's obviously like a fair few different styles to the website like the Homies and Hazard's own style, Nebuchasa, then the corporate status is our own website. [SPEAKER_02]: Are you responsible for all of those different moving parts?

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, so, for example, like the home assistant website, the home page is like the home of like the front page of home assistant, but a lot of people, even like a lot of the community is well managed that sort of things in terms of maintaining the content, because there are a lot of passionate people that like imagine if we had a few people inside the company to do that, like,

[SPEAKER_03]: I'll have the knowledge to do all that is insane, I don't think we could do it, that's why the community is so powerful. [SPEAKER_03]: If there are bugs, I will go and fix them, but in terms of action content, there are so many more people that are passionate about that inside and outside of the community that manage that. [SPEAKER_03]: So, then sort of things I don't tend to get my feet to, tend to get too close to.

[SPEAKER_03]: All the new sites you see that are brand new, for example, in release new products like the ZWA1, ZWA2 we just recently released. [SPEAKER_03]: That gets designed by our designer, Calia, and then I work with her to kind of bring that into web and then do my bit. [SPEAKER_03]: The upper home foundation, I have kind of like full site of and all of this like the little projects as well. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I say that.

[SPEAKER_03]: ESP home, even though it's under our domain, the ESP home guys take care of that. [SPEAKER_03]: But I'm free to step in and say, okay, let's, let's, let's, you know, let's, if I wanted to see how I could go and say, let's modernize this, let's modernize that. [SPEAKER_03]: They recently converted it from an RST-based content system, coming up with the framework was to now it's Hugo. [SPEAKER_03]: So now things marked down, which is really nice, it's easier for you to add it stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff that's under my umbrella. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't always manage at all because there are people just doing it anyway, but I'm here to give my attention to things that might need to happen, for example, books or modernization. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like, next year, I want to tackle home assistant, be the actual website itself, that includes all documentation, everything to try and make it a bit more purposeful and modernised.

[SPEAKER_03]: But that's a big project. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not, [SPEAKER_03]: currently, shall we think about it? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a huge one. [SPEAKER_02]: But I do like that. [SPEAKER_02]: So you just touched on it. [SPEAKER_02]: There are like a lot of people may not realize it. [SPEAKER_02]: Home assistant is an open source project and the primary core product of home assistant and the core project is written in Python.

[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a whole bunch of other things around home assistant that if you're not a Python developer, you could potentially help out with it. [SPEAKER_02]: Like you can contribute documentation by opening a pull request on GitHub and [SPEAKER_02]: You know, right, other, you know, supporting documentation, even to contribute on the forums, right? [SPEAKER_02]: There are a whole bunch of ways that, you know, you can reach out and contribute back if you can't to development.

[SPEAKER_03]: You don't need to be a developer. [SPEAKER_03]: You don't need, like, you can be the developer. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not just Python, it's JavaScript. [SPEAKER_03]: Most of our homestayfront end is built on JavaScript or typescripts. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a good barrier or quite a good barrier for entry, for people trying to get into things. [SPEAKER_03]: But let alone that, like, you don't have to know a lot about programming, for example.

[SPEAKER_03]: But you could be, like, just contribute your knowledge, for example. [SPEAKER_03]: So you can write updates, some documentation.

[SPEAKER_03]: participate just in the forums in general like your experience with something because you never know who's googling like I've got this thing and it's broken and just just you giving your experience and you never know who will reply like I have this experience I fixed by doing this and then one day someone will stumble upon that and then it will help a lot of people out so there are so many ways people think of community like I have to contribute code and it's not it's not about that it's it's

[SPEAKER_03]: just being involved in any way, shape or form, even like translations as well like people when we do the the whole voice assistant stuff like there's a lot of people need to work on all the different various languages and certain sense and structures and yeah thank god there are people out there that are motivated enough to donate their time to maintain this stuff and it's what makes it as powerful as it is now because I wouldn't well [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's another world really.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, it's something you've been passed with, all right? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Have you guys, have you guys like, I know you're talking about translations and stuff like that? [SPEAKER_01]: Have you guys looked at doing any kind of like automated translations or like leveraging AI to do those kind of things on the website or? [SPEAKER_01]: any of that or is that, is it just too unknown? [SPEAKER_03]: I think, I, I, I, I'm sure there's a way we can do it.

[SPEAKER_03]: They, I, right, um, I'd be scared to do a our translations, because I, I love to try and re, uh, organize content and re-work things. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And sometimes, like, how, no matter how hard I try to, like, take, do a, do a task, do not modify the content. [SPEAKER_03]: It loves to re-work things, um, especially [SPEAKER_03]: enough for AI to translate this without modifying content in the new language because I wouldn't be able to understand it.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I would have to get a second opinion and then that, well, I might as well just hire someone to do that anyway. [SPEAKER_03]: We've never really had a problem, I say this, but I can't really think we've had a massive problem with translations of people [SPEAKER_03]: But that could be that it could be a better way of explaining English to make it more appropriate for other people other languages.

[SPEAKER_03]: I can't say like, I'm not always in the deep end of writing content and documentation for these things. [SPEAKER_03]: Gabriella, who works with us, she does a lot of documentation writing. [SPEAKER_03]: She does, she writes all the support articles as well. [SPEAKER_03]: She would be a better person to ask about this.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's an area I'd love to cover, but it's an area that will take a lot of maintenance to keep up to date, especially with like, okay, releasing this thing. [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we've got it in German, French, you know, how much more time will that take? [SPEAKER_03]: Can we rely on AI for this? [SPEAKER_03]: You know, one day, sure, but I'm not too sure. [SPEAKER_03]: It'd be nice to do it though.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, and I suspect that's where kind of you're going to go down, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like, it's way too unpredictable. [SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea. [SPEAKER_01]: And would you like to ask, right? [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, you know, is there something you guys know that we don't know that? [SPEAKER_03]: This is a hard world like you do. [SPEAKER_03]: We've, I think my previous company, I'll work for an agency.

[SPEAKER_03]: I also think if I could say this again, we worked for Routes. [SPEAKER_03]: So we were like, [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you've had a royalties, you know, the global report in company, and we did their corporate site, and they had a number of, and just like other clients, we had actually just guard us at them. [SPEAKER_03]: When you want to say, we want a multi-lingual site, well, like, it's all well and good, but we need someone to actually to translations, and the site,

[SPEAKER_03]: there are like so many different pieces of content what okay so what happens when you go to like the French version of the site do we show only the French stuff what about the stuff that hasn't been translated so do we show the English version of that stuff that hasn't been translated yet or do we show because then if you show the website without English stuff for the French side then you're going to have an empty website and it's going to look like the

[SPEAKER_03]: But if you look at the English one, it's full. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's, it's just homestayable. [SPEAKER_03]: If you go to the German one, for example, well, we only have like a handful of translations. [SPEAKER_03]: So like, what do we only show those ones? [SPEAKER_03]: And then the website looks empty. [SPEAKER_03]: Then we get in bad impression. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you have to either cover it or like, yeah, it's multi-lingual site stuff is, it's a really hard thing to do.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't, yeah, I'm not too sure. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, no, I can clearly see that. [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting because I didn't think I was in decisions too, it's like, okay, if I did French then am I adding English in here or whatever, so that's it. [SPEAKER_01]: That's it. [SPEAKER_03]: If you've done five articles, you've got a hundred, so do you just show the five? [SPEAKER_03]: Would you show the five plus the ninety five?

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, then people complain about, well, all of them are translated, so if you don't show them all, why they're any five, you know? [SPEAKER_01]: It's so hard, and you can't please everybody too, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's unfortunately both sides are valid. [SPEAKER_01]: Like I get the A, you did these five. [SPEAKER_01]: What did you do these other 95 or yeah, I see both sides of it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think what you would find what I think I guess what people do find out because obviously not everyone who speaks French can understand English so there are probably extensions or like Google Translate does a lot of stuff on web pages now where it translates them. [SPEAKER_03]: I think their solutions are better rather than. [SPEAKER_03]: every individual person who has a website, worries about that.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think a translation server, this is probably more appropriate. [SPEAKER_03]: It's translate from the world-own English language to their language. [SPEAKER_03]: Especially if it's like an open source crowdsource, it's like, oh this sentence doesn't work in my language. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if that exists, so I don't speak any other languages, [SPEAKER_02]: So can you tell me what is your day-to-day life like working at the Open Home Foundation?

[SPEAKER_02]: I know, you know, it's a typical 9-to-5 role to have to shift for time zones because you're all going to make first, like how does it work at the Open Home Foundation work? [SPEAKER_03]: weird. [SPEAKER_03]: It's weird working here because it doesn't feel quite like a job in a sense because it's my first job being completely flexible working and completely working. [SPEAKER_03]: My old job was not five, comes your first one. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a week blah blah blah.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is like you have to work 40 hours a week. [SPEAKER_03]: If you can make your meetings great but otherwise work whenever fits around you. [SPEAKER_03]: And my day-to-day is like going through and seeing if there are any upcoming blogs need to post out, making sure any upcoming projects are taken care of, like we've got a few things coming up that I need to make sure that

[SPEAKER_03]: I hit the deadline for and I'm always syncing with it. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't turn all that marketing team to make sure that the design is ready. [SPEAKER_03]: The content is ready and basically it's a constant making sure everything's going in the right direction. [SPEAKER_03]: So then when I get a design for a website or I need to do my bit, everything's there ready.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I can then work, go focus mode and then I get like, [SPEAKER_03]: It's quite like a relaxed role until it becomes production time, and it's like, okay, now I need to do my bit, and it's like heavy, heavy for two, three, four weeks, like making the website, or then making sure there's a point of our new documentation goes out, you know, make sure I think works. [SPEAKER_03]: And then live stream day comes along.

[SPEAKER_03]: We've got a new product, the EWA2, I've got to press the button on create all the pull requests to deploy them, something's going wrong, fix it at 11 p.m. or something. [SPEAKER_03]: It's the one day on the release day, it's like things can go wrong. [SPEAKER_03]: Touch word things have got a lot of rights since we moved to Zendesk as well doing like documentation stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: That's been really nice.

[SPEAKER_03]: But now it is weird because when you work for a UK company, UK companies don't like to trust people too much because they don't trust flexible working. [SPEAKER_03]: My old job didn't like flexible working at all. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, but to come here and say, we're a flexible working company in the handbook. [SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of gives you that some outline like outlines of like how this works.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I remember starting coming from quite a toxic previous company, um, flexible working can be dangerous. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, okay, they're going to tell us like, you know, make sure you log your hours with a, and it's like, people find it hard to stop working. [SPEAKER_03]: So, and it was like a bullet point list, and it's still there today, it's probably like 10 bullet points. [SPEAKER_03]: Make sure you have time for friends, go for extended lunches.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's like, all the reasons you should make sure you take time for that work life balance to make sure your life is way more comfortable than you're stressing a work. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's like, even though we've grown so much, like massively in the last year I've been here, that culture still exists, and it's massive, like it's, [SPEAKER_03]: I could I could come up tomorrow and say like I'm really not feeling great. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to come back tomorrow.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like you can't do that in the UK, you can't do that for companies like normal because like why why why why it's but it forces such a negative culture. [SPEAKER_03]: If you do so like that here. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like I feel like I can come back tomorrow. [SPEAKER_03]: No one's looking at my shoulder and like. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's sort of like you're being traded as an adult now, not as hard as it can be. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: It's got to stay it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like if you treat people with respect, you can, you actually can get productivity out out of people. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, and people the most productive that I have for the long time. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and you, and you want to accelerate your job because you're like, hey, everybody's so kind here. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, you're part of the mission, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's, I remember meeting them all for the first time in person when we went to our, Open Home Foundation Summit in Dublin. [SPEAKER_03]: And it was crazy. [SPEAKER_03]: Crazy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: See all these people like, [SPEAKER_03]: you just like a lot, and not calling it, they go beyond colleagues because as I was using home assistant in 2016, I knew of Paulus quite a long time ago and the various names like [SPEAKER_03]: to then like have them in the back of my mind while some do this hobby to them working with them. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like I kind of know them to meet up with them. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like am I fanboying?

[SPEAKER_03]: Am I just like to see them? [SPEAKER_03]: Like I remember I remember having the core polis when I was getting off the job and polis want to speak to me before I got off of the job. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like [SPEAKER_03]: I've got to talk to myself a bit. [SPEAKER_03]: I've got to speak to Paula, since it'd be professional, like, you know, like, I'm coming for a job, not a meet-up, it's not a community thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's probably over there now.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: This is a proper professional goal, right? [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, it was a proper, like, surreal moment to work for something something you've had such a fond. [SPEAKER_03]: Something you love so much, I guess, to work for that company. [SPEAKER_02]: And I guess, like, yeah, you're going from hanging out on discord and, you know, talking, you know, hacking this, I'm hacking that.

[SPEAKER_03]: and watching all the release notes and watching all the live streams and then to then be in internal calls of them and hang out with them in person and talk about like the future of how we want to do things like being part of that mission as well as incredible. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, they're it's quite nice actually. [SPEAKER_03]: There are a few things like key decisions you make. [SPEAKER_03]: Like I've said something that might shape the way this happens in the future.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like I'm responsible for this now. [SPEAKER_03]: Like that's a cool thing to have. [SPEAKER_03]: hopefully. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so yeah, it's it's nice, especially if, you know, the company you admire has such a nice culture, it makes them so much easier to work for. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I'll for sure. [SPEAKER_02]: But what you say is your vision or your understanding of the open home, like where would you like to see the open home mission go to next?

[SPEAKER_03]: These people in front of like, okay, so we're doing this [SPEAKER_03]: homocystent more the barrier for entry lower.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're working on improving our onboarding experience which want to make the you know for consumers people can go and grab a Google home or they can go grab even for example other Freddie made like solutions and like start their home automation journey I think the problem at the moment it's homocystent still quite techy [SPEAKER_03]: Um, if I try to get my parents into this, like, I can't guarantee there aren't going to be like there's some quirks or Zigbee or something like that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's just a protocol. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just saying that's just a protocol. [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes Zigbee can be Zigbee. [SPEAKER_03]: But like, I think trying to get it in front of [SPEAKER_03]: other people to say like, for example, my parents, my dad, my dad has a Google home around the house to be found. [SPEAKER_03]: I put them in because I was a Google home fanboy when I was a bit younger. [SPEAKER_03]: But he's like, oh, guess what I can do?

[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, okay, G, turn on these lights. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm like cool. [SPEAKER_03]: Can I see these smart switches you've got? [SPEAKER_03]: And they were like, Chinese [SPEAKER_03]: whatever. [SPEAKER_03]: I was like, you know, they take like five seconds to turn on because they're like contacting us over in China, right? [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, I don't care. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, they turn the lights on. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, there are two people.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's two different mindsets and people don't really understand that although these are just switches.

[SPEAKER_03]: when you then change it to a camera like then okay people don't usually go to ring for example for a doorbell camera or something but like I need a cheap internal camera to watch my new puppy for example like [SPEAKER_03]: So my dad might go and go on Amazon, find the first one that has a fake home assistant badge on it, that's then this cloud-based Chinese camera that probably, you know.

[SPEAKER_03]: But then again, would he still feel comfortable knowing that [SPEAKER_03]: that could be one vulnerable, or even be recorded with that sentence, you know, you just don't know, but people just don't care about their privacy. [SPEAKER_03]: That's the biggest shock that, yeah, is, I just think it, I don't understand. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's funny because it's, I've had the same conversation with my parents, but somehow they accidentally picked for their cameras.

[SPEAKER_01]: They accidentally picked like local ones. [SPEAKER_01]: And that was completely per chance. [SPEAKER_01]: But my parents still do have to your point a couple of ring cameras and a couple of those kind of things around the house. [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, the mindset is always [SPEAKER_01]: who wants to, who wants to do this to us, it's like, we're not like, in a heads of state, we're not like actors and actresses or whatever, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: We're just a couple of random average people living our lives, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, well, it's not about that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's, uh, there are a lot of people that do do that kind of stuff and, and, you know, open it up for whatever, but it comes down to, you know, just a mindset, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And, [SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, maybe it's just working in a space.

[SPEAKER_01]: It just makes us a lot more jaded because we see a lot more, but I like the optimistic view. [SPEAKER_01]: I like the, you know, the pragmatism almost if you want, but I don't think it's, I completely agree with your dear and I think I think that's, it's like, hey, it's not, it's not about this. [SPEAKER_01]: It's about like, there's a lot more than this, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's all about. [SPEAKER_03]: give you all of privacy.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's about like how many other people have bought this product and their privacy like and then what if there's a date of reach what if [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you've had a discord thing going on recently, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Like, people sending, just go and got hacked recently. [SPEAKER_03]: They send us got hacked, like the hacker actually has, because he contacted a popular YouTube discord kind of guy who likes this discord, he just loads of coverage.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the hackers spoke to him recently, like directly reached out to him and said like, discord aren't doing anything about this, but they don't realise that on their support thing they've got like, [SPEAKER_03]: because people who are 13, 14, have to prove their age and send stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, pictures are like, you don't realize how much information's on there. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's not about, oh, I haven't put things on, there's no support.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, there are people out there have, like, [SPEAKER_03]: under sixteenths, their pictures are there or there's a loads of government ideas on there. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not about you. [SPEAKER_03]: It's about like, what could be the problem if all of this was hacked or like released or had a vulnerability? [SPEAKER_03]: Like, trying to think of a bigger picture here because it's like you're the individual and it's really not, you're not a target.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's more of like the collective is the problem. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I also look at it as to your point about like ID speaking on servers and stuff like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, okay, well, if that gets breached, you know, I'm thinking doomsay scenario here. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, what happens? [SPEAKER_01]: And this is what I thought it meant too. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, what happens when somebody goes out and takes a mortgage under your name?

[SPEAKER_01]: That you're now on the hook for a million bucks. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's, it's, you know, it's all fun and games until something serious like that happens. [SPEAKER_01]: And then you're, that's it. [SPEAKER_01]: That's your, that's your retirement. [SPEAKER_01]: That's your, like, your dad, right? [SPEAKER_03]: And it's, uh, I mean, hi, I was like, like, an easy, really, like, oh.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just innovating the problem more like a whole thing in the UK now with a cracking down on like a dot content with verifying your ID. [SPEAKER_03]: You have to upload your ID to like look at even like some posts on Reddit like the the team but like [SPEAKER_03]: There are these providers that have popped out. [SPEAKER_03]: I've never heard of this before.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've never heard okay, the UK is enforcing this thing where you have to pre-arrage to look at more or like mature content online, cool, fine. [SPEAKER_03]: But when you go to there, you get the pop-up saying need to pre-vide, but I've heard of these these three companies that seem to be de facto like, I've never heard of them before, but like we all trust them to give melodies.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like [SPEAKER_03]: It just takes one guy at these companies to accept some sort of ransom to let them access their account. [SPEAKER_03]: This is how Discord got hacked by the paid a support agent at Discord $500 to get access to his end-esk. [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, okay, five hundred dollars. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and the ransom, I believe, ransom that the hacker gave to the Discord was five million.

[SPEAKER_03]: But $500 is all it took for that guy to give you my password. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, mate, you'd have to pay me a lot more than that. [SPEAKER_03]: And even then, I would even think, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Although it's $500, I thought you were going to say like $500 grand. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, okay, that's a good start. [SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no. [SPEAKER_03]: $500 is just hand over these own passwords. [SPEAKER_03]: Then do like a dump of all those endless stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then, yeah, like stupid, stupid easy. [SPEAKER_03]: Really, human is the humans of the weakest point of security. [SPEAKER_03]: And so like all these companies that are collecting ideas now, like, there must be millions of passports and driver licenses going around now. [SPEAKER_03]: It's a bit worrying how much data is flowing about. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's like pastkeys, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: The pastkeys and paying what on your phone, it needs to be that you have, and the UK are pushing this as well, actually. [SPEAKER_03]: They're trying to do digital IDs, so on-device IDs. [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that is better than uploading your ID. [SPEAKER_03]: So you have, like, [SPEAKER_03]: you verify your ID on your phone and then your phone has like an encrypted handshake or it can then tell websites.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, this person is, you know, it's just an exchange of, yes, no. [SPEAKER_03]: Just like pastkeys, like it's, you have to use your phone at your pastkeys or use your phone to pay with. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not actually exchanging numbers or data. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just saying, this person is fine. [SPEAKER_03]: Let them through rather than, here's a photo of my ID, which someone could copy and forge, like it's, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's funny signatures are still used today right and it's like signatures are just like it's me writing my name But yeah, it's unlike if I if I broke my arm and tried to make signature and it was all wrong like I still me I just had a broken arm so like [SPEAKER_03]: what if someone else did it and said that was me with a broken out like who the hell's like that? [SPEAKER_01]: It's for the longest time because I've always thought signature is sort of stupidest thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just started, I just started like doing random things. [SPEAKER_01]: I think one point I drew like like a smiley face. [SPEAKER_01]: I've drawn a cat. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And it goes to every time. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, see, like, I do not approve this transaction. [SPEAKER_03]: That should be a suggestion. [SPEAKER_03]: I do not [SPEAKER_01]: Just draw a line, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just a whole thing I don't go through because it is the worst form of authentication that I've ever seen in my life. [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I'm sure it's used for like, something back in the day, but yeah, now yes, silly. [SPEAKER_01]: Who out of credit card company is sitting there being like, oh, there's a dollar 75 transaction. [SPEAKER_01]: Let me compare this signature on file.

[SPEAKER_01]: No one's doing that. [SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, no, no. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, actually, so that's, yeah, completely shot myself in a fit with this, actually. [SPEAKER_03]: I was just telling Phil before we started here. [SPEAKER_03]: I bought a new car from Japan. [SPEAKER_03]: Got an import from Japan to three and a half months. [SPEAKER_03]: The way I found this guy was online, I could refuse, so I trusted him. [SPEAKER_03]: And so he deals on WhatsApp, solely.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he said, oh, what specs you want? [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, you know, once we had the car sort, I paid for it. [SPEAKER_03]: So one thing, I paid around him guy, like 13 grand for the car, like, I've definitely checked him out. [SPEAKER_03]: I've checked his, you know, his government, like tax violence is, he's fine. [SPEAKER_03]: He's definitely fine.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, okay, so when we register the car, I'm gonna register under your name when the MOT passes, like, cool. [SPEAKER_03]: Can you please send me your driver's license and passport, I'm like, that's weird. [SPEAKER_03]: And I don't like doing that. [SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, is there any other way if you can do it? [SPEAKER_03]: And I think I send it to him, but I sent me else in the end, something more secure as I can delete it afterwards.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, don't like the idea if we're setting a picture of my on WhatsApp, just floating there, like it's just a bit weird. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, but that's how most things happen. [SPEAKER_03]: People don't really think of like, what happens if this gets out, you know?

[SPEAKER_03]: And then I'm sure like he's also uploaded your idea to somewhere else right and then what's that system as soon as I like got the car Oh like a few days that I got out in the post and it was from the DBLA that you know the you have an in body for cars and you can Attached was this sheet saying oh your car registered.

[SPEAKER_03]: I flipped over and there was like a scan like my scan of my passport on my driver's license like Just there's like oh well, I guess you know you use if it's something like you're now.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is floating in the post somewhere like if that letter got stolen they could probably like [SPEAKER_03]: have my car taken away because I've got my passport, my license, the registration of in, like, that piece of paper, it's probably, you can probably do a bit of damage with this piece of paper. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't understand. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, that is, that is your vehicle. [SPEAKER_01]: That might be, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: We've gotten so far off task. [SPEAKER_01]: But I'll finish. [SPEAKER_01]: There's, there's, there's an article floating out there from, I think it's from the New Yorker. [SPEAKER_01]: and they talk about I want to say it's Estonia that they have just basically done everything. [SPEAKER_01]: Like everything your entire identity is on the blockchain. [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you control it. [SPEAKER_01]: And you've got like this little like card you go to the hospital and it's on there and you own your data. [SPEAKER_01]: You own everything. [SPEAKER_01]: What's the social collapse? [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's encrypted, but I don't know, I'm assuming there's some kind of password to Yeah, for sure. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: De-crypt it.

[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, like so, you know, if you're, if you're, you know, in an ambulance, they can, you control what data they see. [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, that kind of thing, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like your doctors, they can write to it, but then one, you can see what they've written. [SPEAKER_01]: And two is you can control who sees that data. [SPEAKER_01]: All right. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, you got pulled over. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, they don't need to see your medical records.

[SPEAKER_01]: They can just see your driving records, right? [SPEAKER_01]: That's an example, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's, uh, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um um, um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um um [SPEAKER_01]: It's a cool concept.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the implications of it and stuff like that, but please don't send me conspiracy theories. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's like the blockchain is about rapism. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like with all the critters, games, but like, but this is an actual application of blockchain. [SPEAKER_01]: It which I thought was a very, very ended. [SPEAKER_01]: This has been out for a while. [SPEAKER_01]: I think I read this article.

[SPEAKER_01]: like eight years ago, six years ago, something like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not brand new or anything like that. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's kind of a kind of cool. [SPEAKER_01]: Apprentice with the case. [SPEAKER_01]: What I think of this? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to read up about this, because this is interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: I want to say it's a stonia, but yeah, it is, yeah.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Perfect. [SPEAKER_01]: So speaking of the smartest house, Darren, let's talk about your smart home here.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, what, uh, I know you've mentioned you've been using, uh, homicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicic

[SPEAKER_03]: um yeah it was super unstable every update broke everything yeah i i had like a few google homes and i bought for lips you bulb so i can mess around with them and i was when i was living still of my parents um yeah it was super early really super early i don't know why i got into it to be honest i think because i don't know really

[SPEAKER_03]: If any I knew what I would have become, I would have come, you know, I'll be working for the project itself, it's wild really, ten years ago, and then when I moved out, I did quite a lot of tinkering, like

[SPEAKER_03]: I made the smart home was like completely user unfriendly, you know, like replacing like taping us, we don't use a switch because if you press the switch after 9 on the Sunday on the first Monday, after the first Monday of the month, you know, it's like super reliable and I learnt a lot of us tinkering and then this house, because we moved again to this house my second house.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've tried to, you know, as everyone, I think tries to do, make the smart home as invisible as possible, but also as user friendly as possible. [SPEAKER_03]: So, dimmer switches still act like the more dimmer switch is, and everything's just a convenience rather than a complete replacement of like functionality. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I strive to do anyway. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's cool.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's funny because anytime we have anybody on the podcast that that's used it for this long, it's like, you know, it's like, okay, you've you've been through the, you've been through the cloud of right [SPEAKER_01]: You know, anytime you have to do an update, and I absolutely hated doing the updates through there and some things, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And so I the second container moved out. [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, yep, I came out.

[SPEAKER_01]: I moved to the containers because I was, uh, I just despised that whole process. [SPEAKER_01]: And then if you had an issue, you had to post on Gitter. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, which, uh, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: I, I think it was a kind of discord, but uh, Gitter was far worse. [SPEAKER_01]: Why is this going to come out? [SPEAKER_01]: kind of, no, when did discord come out? [SPEAKER_01]: Not that long.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's been a while, but it discord went through a couple of iterations, and then I think once Missy came in, it kind of she kind of cleaned it up and like, okay, let's put proper categories around stuff and whatever.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because get her, I remember it's like, it's just it was just a giant chat room at the time, I don't know if it's changed at all, but uh, I think it was just you guys, or at least for the [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of it like there's no like channels or rooms or anything or there's channels, but it's like you're in the home assistant channel All right, it's basically it's all right.

[SPEAKER_01]: I get repy Okay, nice Yeah, but you can you exactly it actually ties to you signing with your GitHub account and like stuff like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It ties to GitHub but it [SPEAKER_01]: Again, there's no idea of different rooms within there and it's like that. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, if you have a question about the podcast or you have a question about Z-wave or you have a question about whatever you're asking in there and it's just a lot of stuff, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, and hopefully someone caught that you ask a question. [SPEAKER_01]: But that there's all these people be like, hey, I never got my question here. [SPEAKER_01]: Thirds of love. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's like doubly contributing to the [SPEAKER_01]: Crazy amount of yeah, yeah, so so for those of you that are that are like Well, this comes again. [SPEAKER_01]: It transmits come out here. [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I'm way like this like now we've got like Ortsmakes backup.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we've got backup to four updates. [SPEAKER_03]: Ortsmakes updates. [SPEAKER_03]: We've got like Did you can update sick be devices found where through home at this moment. [SPEAKER_03]: It's just like [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's super smooth, now like, before it was a, it was a, it was a messy, but like you had to go through this, those, those, those times to get to where we are now, like if we didn't have all this problems with it, being, we wouldn't have made what it is now.

[SPEAKER_03]: And well, you had to start somewhere too, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's this assessment to how like passionate people are, especially in the community to get these things working. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, but yeah, it's complete state 101. [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, wouldn't completely begin to say. [SPEAKER_01]: It's, yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I was going to say, how are you finding it in your smart home now, Darren, like with with all the stuff you're doing?

[SPEAKER_01]: I know you said you moved at some point to this to the second home. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: I use a green more to show people like, oh, this is the green.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I use it as like a, yeah, physical, like those runs fine, I, and I have a server behind me, which is behind the 3D friends, which runs like frigate and stuff, frigate has been like a massive game changer in terms of like how I, because before before frigate, I was using, [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it. [SPEAKER_03]: OK, yeah, so mind it, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Is that right? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: That was a nice, terrible.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, reliability was terrible. [SPEAKER_03]: I couldn't get it working at all reliably. [SPEAKER_03]: Then I moved to running Blue Iris in a VM. [SPEAKER_03]: That was better. [SPEAKER_03]: And then, yeah, figure is like, what controls some of my observations now, because it has the coral TPU, so I've got a camera in the garage, and as soon as I'm walking the garage, it turns as it could be like on if there's a person in that place.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's how I control my light in the garage, like I don't have to do the light switches on the other side of the garage. [SPEAKER_03]: You go in the door, have to walk over to get the light switch, but if you stand there, like if the door opens, there's a motion set. [SPEAKER_03]: There's a door sensor, if you open the door, the light always comes on after sunset.

[SPEAKER_03]: And as long as there's some of the room, but like, we'll stay on, and then when the door is closed and so we're in there, we'll turn it off after a few seconds. [SPEAKER_03]: So there's no motion sensors. [SPEAKER_03]: It's all this like the local person's detection. [SPEAKER_02]: Let's say that's one of the cool features of the real-en cameras too. [SPEAKER_02]: Like now they've got the AI on board the cameras.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: You can have a binary sensor exposed from a doorbell or from a camera, and it will go into home and be like, yes, there is a person in this picture right now. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the only problem I've got with the realint one of, but the AK1 picked up a few months ago. [SPEAKER_03]: It's in, freegap, but I don't think freegap can handle the AK streams, I have to downscale it.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just being, I'm just

[SPEAKER_03]: quite stinging. [SPEAKER_03]: I think maybe it's the word. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't like using it on, but like my philosophy is that I buy a camera for how the lens looks and how the camera looks, but I always feed a ton of all the features and feed it into frigate.

[SPEAKER_03]: So then frigate does all the work, but I might have to start like using it to get the onboard real-in stuff going because for example, frigate can [SPEAKER_03]: And so there's a car that drive and it has this license plate. [SPEAKER_03]: And that'd be really cool because it could say if I'm home, then it might do something. [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: But we, it's a real linker, our work system is a partner.

[SPEAKER_03]: I remember Robert testing or Robert Tesla, the doorbells, and he tested all the real stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: And all stuff that gets exposed in time is incredible. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's so good. [SPEAKER_03]: The integration with him is, it's, it's, yeah, real link is like. [SPEAKER_03]: to go to, I'd say, in my opinion, to get a camera.

[SPEAKER_03]: Usually, if I'm doing like a small camera, like a small, I only have one indoor camera now, because if I puppy, we always turn it to camera off when there's people in the house there. [SPEAKER_03]: But when we're not here, we use like the Y's ones, and then I flash it with custom phone way, because Y's had a circumstance, a few years ago. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, they locked out our TSP, and they didn't like a button.

[SPEAKER_03]: They locked that out as well, but it's really easy to flash them. [SPEAKER_03]: You can put a thing here on the more defying, I think, is another project, [SPEAKER_03]: I like them because they're quite reliable and they look quite good, especially in low light. [SPEAKER_02]: Do you worry about using frigate as having that as a single point of failure, though? [SPEAKER_03]: Like it does fail.

[SPEAKER_03]: frigate is is [SPEAKER_03]: It does something because it looks like my cameras are reliable, but then if I watch the RTSP stream of the camera directly, it's stable as hell, but I could be because I'm running on like an old server or something, so I'm not going to say too much about it because I think it is my server can't keep up. [SPEAKER_03]: It's running like a maxed out really old server in the VM.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to get one of those mini forums, mini forums, MSO one I think, but soon to run it on, so I see what you're saying, I need to end the VR the other day, so you need to store it somewhere, I'm interested to hear what alternatives are already, so you guys record it on camera or how, yeah, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, and so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've got a few of the real link 4K cameras and the doorbell, so I've

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think, except for the doorbell, I don't know if the doorbell might have put one in there, but the cameras have an SD card slot on device. [SPEAKER_02]: So they just record events to the SD card. [SPEAKER_02]: And then for 24-7 recording, actually at the moment, [SPEAKER_02]: I have a unified gateway that has, like, the unified protect app running and then it can record to take the streams of the really camera stream to the protect app.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because it can get third party now, I think, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Because, yeah, yeah, because it's how the cameras fire out to ESP. [SPEAKER_02]: And then if you could get like a re-link NVR, or I could pop it into like, I've got a Synology NAS, that's got some kind of surveillance station, okay, just my NAS storage for that. [SPEAKER_02]: but I'm trying to shut down my nest at night because it's, you know, a power hog.

[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, I, you know, I'm realistically like, do I need the 24-7 recording? [SPEAKER_02]: Probably not like the events in the AI detection on the camera is pretty decent. [SPEAKER_03]: So, do you think the events will pick up everything? [SPEAKER_03]: Like, especially at night time, you can't really rely on events, especially if it's like, animal person or car protection, maybe you're person.

[SPEAKER_03]: But like, sometimes this thing's to happen, like, for example, [SPEAKER_03]: You might, something might happen at night that won't get picked up by an event, but you can, you can definitely see a cat there or something, you can definitely see something's going on, but like in the event, you can pick it up because it's like almost noise, um, yep, uh, I run, I run four cameras in frigate 24 seven recording, I think I get like a week's worth on each. [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, yep.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like I've certainly had like situations where I've seen like an animal on on camera, like that camera has been detected. [SPEAKER_02]: and then it will go to a different camera as point of view, but the camera might have detected the animal there. [SPEAKER_02]: Like I think I've had a fox walk through a yard, right? [SPEAKER_02]: And it picked it up on one camera and then not on another camera. [SPEAKER_02]: But the people detection has been great.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I've now got that hooked up. [SPEAKER_03]: Because you can do, you could actually do classification there, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so the really camera data is people, motion and animal and vehicle as well.

[SPEAKER_02]: So you can see vehicles moving across, it comes in a driveway, you can get a happen event in the home system, it doesn't entity expose that, you know, vehicle detected, goes true, and then you can trigger it like a snapshot from home, if you want to do. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I did have one and this might be just because of the figure models aren't quite tuned. [SPEAKER_03]: But like I do have a lot of false positives.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just say like percentage of like person, but like a lot of false positives like my dog's in the garden, but it's like, oh, it's a cat.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, it was not because I want to have like if there's a dog in the garden, then keep the outside lights on, because it's probably doing some business, you know, but then like [SPEAKER_01]: I've heard that the paid models, apparently, again, I don't use frigate, but I've heard that they have paid models and those models are actually way more accurate, like with like a percentage of like margin of like way more.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Now here's something I'm happy to talk about, and that's Notion. [SPEAKER_02]: Preparing for interviews for these episodes used to mean hours of digging through emails, discord messages, calendars, and notes. [SPEAKER_02]: Now our Notion agent gathers all that info for me, organises the Intramar Notion episode template, and even suggests potential interview questions. [SPEAKER_02]: It's read up my time to focus on these conversations.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And you're actually using it to... [SPEAKER_03]: you know, work with as a motion sensor, as a as a smarter motion sensor, a presence detector, because I, what I do, I have a, I have an NS panel pro here, and what it does, the front camera, if it sees a personal car, it will send a command to the NS panel pro to wake up,

[SPEAKER_03]: And then my dashboard for this has a, uh, like, uh, the entity for the camera. [SPEAKER_03]: And it will show that the last detected object on that.

[SPEAKER_03]: So basically, if the postperson comes or there's an animal, I think it's any object if it detects any object in the classification in the model, like dog cat, human car, it will then turn this on and before they even get out of their vehicle, like I know the postperson's hit the postman is here or postman is here and I can go and [SPEAKER_03]: like it's like a doorbell pretty much without any, it just comes on it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I look down on it, oh, it's the postman on the crap the door, like it's super cool. [SPEAKER_03]: That's my favorite thing of all in this house. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like I'm working with desk, it's something that the door, and that you know, no doorbell, no dog spark. [SPEAKER_03]: It's like, if you walk past my door, like pass the road within about half a second of you, [SPEAKER_03]: being there, I can order to be on my way. [SPEAKER_03]: It's instantaneous.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty cool. [SPEAKER_03]: Pretty rapid. [SPEAKER_03]: It's really, it's my favorite thing I have by far in this house. [SPEAKER_01]: Apart from like accent lighting and stuff, but how are you triggering the NS panel to you that? [SPEAKER_01]: Like is it just through your home assistant that you're just being hey, wake up? [SPEAKER_03]: This is Android. [SPEAKER_03]: So there's an app that someone made that you can still which is like the NSPolar Hacks.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it basically exposes a bunch of sensors over MQTT. [SPEAKER_03]: And basically, in home assistant, I can say like, wake the screen, I can, and the reason why it's on my desk and not the walls, because I don't like the performance of this NSPolar Pro. [SPEAKER_03]: It's not good enough to like use. [SPEAKER_03]: If only up there and do did it, it will hang on something and it will freeze.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm saving myself a conversation with the wife to say, you know, why it's not going right. [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm waiting for another android-based display so I can use native home assistant for it has more memory and stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, so forget, so it got to home assistant, when it detects an object, home assistant has the sensor, when the sensor changes, it wakes this up and then by the time it's woken up, home assistant's already shown the card for like the last detected entity or object in that camera. [SPEAKER_03]: It's really cool. [SPEAKER_03]: I really, yeah, it saves like having a doorbell and the dogs react to the doorbell or something is noxons.

[SPEAKER_03]: I can open the door before they get to it, so there's no knocking, like it's, yeah, it's nice. [SPEAKER_03]: I used to have it as an application from a phone, but then at night time you get loads of false positives and you just get like, if I used to go crazy, but now having this in front of me, it's nice. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm definitely doing more things with this around the house, I think. [SPEAKER_03]: What sort of ideas did you get to do around the house?

[SPEAKER_03]: I do want to have like more, I mean, I spend most of my time here, but like, you can do on Android TVs, you can like send like the little card in the bottom right, like the almost like a picture picture, but you can send like a little notification and maybe that might be quite cool to say that someone there.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thing is that like, [SPEAKER_03]: I need to make it so it's very limited because it will do it like it's a person and then it's moved and it will send every time that the update happens so it might spam but like things like that so if my wife's watching the TV she can see someone coming up I want this installed so like if you're waiting for like [SPEAKER_03]: like to take out like a Chinese takeaway to come.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we can put the camera on this and just like look at this and sort of like peering through the curtains like it looks a bit weird while I looking upstairs through the top window. [SPEAKER_03]: Like yeah, so things like that. [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to make just want to make whole experience of living in a house more convenient for everyone subtly.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's the whole [SPEAKER_03]: It's the like, that's the premise of running a smart home, like, subtly making like, we have a a tiny pantry downstairs and I put like instantly, like, main main shelving for it, then put any de-strips underneath the shelving, put like a sickby contact sensor, open door, likes come on, done, like. [SPEAKER_03]: when it's not working, you get complaints like, why is it so working?

[SPEAKER_03]: Is that, well, you get really realising, still, but now it's not there, like, it's pretty good. [SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty good. [SPEAKER_03]: And we have like, um, lights along the stairs, like, you can't see them, but they come on if there's motion on the landing or whether the stairs, it will turn those, okay, the cell lights on, so it's like, if you're getting up to go to the toilet or we're going to go downstairs and it's dark, you always have like a, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: thing, but on the, because how the lights are, you can segment the LEDs so you can make each step a different color. [SPEAKER_03]: So sometimes you can like the Christmas theme or you can do like rainbow or something, we have a power cup recently and the defaults on rainbow, so each step is like red, green, yellow, blue. [SPEAKER_03]: So, it's like some sort of musical staircase, I guess, that way. [SPEAKER_03]: That's awesome.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I've got someone who's a kitchen countered unit, to go around, but I broke those, I'm going to fix them. [SPEAKER_03]: I think I accidentally snapped off one of the copper contacts on the LED strip, and I... Yeah, anyway, that's a future-me problem. [SPEAKER_02]: Future-jahren problem, I like that. [SPEAKER_02]: So what technology stack are you running around the house? [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you said that you, when you first started, it was making the house more complicated.

[SPEAKER_02]: Have you tried to consolidate some technology to make it better to improve the user experience around the house? [SPEAKER_03]: Use experience, yes. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, we don't use like, like, Rohan was saying before, like, he does a button, like, 10 is podcast stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't have a button, and that will like turn off like keylights and stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: um but like like in double press it to turn off the ones behind me um but now I have the Minimia wave one that's like if I'm in the room these lights are on because these aren't usually keylights the keylights usually accept lights for the room um to kind of help by strain on monitors and stuff at nighttime uh but in my house I want a smart lock

[SPEAKER_03]: And in the UK, when you close all doors in the UK and most of the doors in the UK, you have to lift the handle up to engage the locks in the door, and then you can turn the key. [SPEAKER_03]: So you have to do that. [SPEAKER_03]: You can't turn the key before you lift the handle up.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's not like you close the door and you do it because it also tightens the door against the seal and then it engages the camera you call it like the locks along all the side of the door and then also the lock that goes across the key.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, one of the only ones you can get was a Yale Connectors L1 and so you can soon just lift the handle up the lock rotates. [SPEAKER_03]: with the motor. [SPEAKER_03]: That was Z-Wave. [SPEAKER_03]: If you can get a Z-Wave module for that, and I remember I'll hit this before I knew how to use the Z-Wave. [SPEAKER_03]: My office was like on one side of the house. [SPEAKER_03]: And the lock was on the other side of the house.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, oh, I could just wear it with a stick. [SPEAKER_03]: Puck the stick directly into my server, no extension cable, nothing unexpected it to be all hunky door in. [SPEAKER_03]: I was like, this sucks. [SPEAKER_03]: And it was horrible. [SPEAKER_03]: And I remember we went out for a journey one day. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, you know, the lock should be holding the door is unlocked. [SPEAKER_03]: Do we lift the handle up? [SPEAKER_03]: And it was like, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we went as we drove half now back. [SPEAKER_03]: Door was obviously locked. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's just a misreport in the state because it did that, you know, it just didn't, you know, and then at the time, this was in like 2018-19, like I found it really hard to find a lot of information about how to do Zigbee correctly. [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, what are these things called routers and stuff?

[SPEAKER_03]: And people don't understand like, okay, if you're collecting a Zigbee, [SPEAKER_03]: coordinate, I like your stick, connect it to your home citizens or whatever you're using with an extension cable, then have like a light in each room, even if you're not using it, keep it on and use it as a Zippy router so it can navigate its way back around the house. [SPEAKER_03]: That's that's information I didn't have.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so I dropped Z, where I didn't have a smart lock in this house because it was a bit inconvenient, especially if going a holiday has to tell parents in laws, how to use a lot, give them a tutorial, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't that convenient to honest, there are the locks now people in the UK that work very work they. [SPEAKER_03]: they use like new key ones and another couple of other ones. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know how they're using it because I have to lift my handle up.

[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe they have it in conjunction with that, I'm not too sure. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I dropped that, so most stack now is Zigbee and Wi-Fi. [SPEAKER_03]: So I run ubiquity to APs and the rich downstairs, the dream machine, non-pro, like the gym machine, pill, shaped one, and then I'll use Zigbee. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's pretty much all I use. [SPEAKER_03]: The only problem I have is Zigbee is like, I have an IKEA blind that runs Zigbee.

[SPEAKER_03]: which seem to be discontinued as soon as I bought it, but it's quite unreliable and you need to have it really close to it or use their like repeater. [SPEAKER_03]: Scarly doesn't work, I have to press the button on it, it's quite annoying. [SPEAKER_03]: But what it works is when you have to press the button on things, like if you get off it, it's clear. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's all the way up top.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and like, when it works, it opens up at like half past seven in the morning and it closes its sunset and it's really reliable. [SPEAKER_03]: And so it stops working, you know, I've spent a good few days like, [SPEAKER_03]: I should not hold full days, but I mean like... [SPEAKER_03]: I'll pair it, then it pairs and I put it in your back in the automation and it doesn't work. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, why I always forget the sequence to reset it and after you leave it.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm going to switch to like maybe third reality blinds now. [SPEAKER_03]: We've seen Jerry on a few occasions and he's always got just a line of his backpack and he's like demonstrated. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, we saw him in Berlin for [SPEAKER_03]: Man, I was like, go get your backpack, I'm like, he's just came with the backpack four months later.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, that's a blind, but like. [SPEAKER_01]: What? [SPEAKER_01]: He did the same thing. [SPEAKER_01]: He did the same thing to us at CES this year where he's like, Hey guys, like, we want to see my blind and like literally like pulls it out of his backpack and I was like, what is happening? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm never seeing that. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was on a live stream or something, wasn't he? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there was one last stream. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, one of the places. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think so. [SPEAKER_03]: Come and go. [SPEAKER_03]: There's early. [SPEAKER_03]: It was early this year. [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, um, that's the stack I used to be in Wi-Fi. [SPEAKER_03]: Don't I mean Z-Wave is more of a U.S. market. [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, Z-Wave is more of a European market.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't really have any plans to change it. [SPEAKER_03]: I've got no performance from any devices that run Wi-Fi like my ESP devices. [SPEAKER_03]: I have around the house. [SPEAKER_03]: I have the Apollo. [SPEAKER_03]: I have the Apollo. [SPEAKER_03]: R2, I think it is, but I use the other thing smart home, yes, everything presents one, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And that's just reliable as hell, and really, really fast.

[SPEAKER_03]: The one I like about the Apollo one actually is that if you have it on it, it tells you if it's a target is currently found if it's moving towards you or moving away from you or for its stationary. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, that's just a calculation. [SPEAKER_03]: That's the, like, I'm sure Lewis who get that work in his, but that's just, that's just a calculation like working if the objects currently moving closer or further away.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you can add that to any of them, but like, don't know why I'd use it, but it was cool. [SPEAKER_03]: It was there. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's I've seen a lot of automations around like, hey, depending on if I'm walking this way, then turn on the lights that are ahead of me or if I'm walking. [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's a really cool idea. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, or turn off the lights behind it. [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever that looks like, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm moving away, you can kind of do that like sequential light. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, definitely if you have like addressful ideas, that would be pretty cool. [SPEAKER_01]: address or just just even like on like in like a hallway or something like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like when you have more than one light, you can just say it can turn on the first light in the second light, the third light and then turn off the first light in the second light.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can kind of do that like follow, I don't know if you want to call that, but something like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a couple of cool use cases that you could totally use that with.

[SPEAKER_03]: Try to find a reason to like put this above a ceiling, have it like in the middle of a room [SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying to find like a reason to do it, but I'm not found a reason yet, but I might try and because I've got the cable running down the side on my, uh, I pay board, but I, uh, it's kind of thing because it can go through walls because if I, if I say,

[SPEAKER_03]: This room to my left is like the on the sweet shower for the bedroom, and that room behind me is like the wardrobe area. [SPEAKER_03]: If I'm in that room, while that room, these lights will be on like if you walk far enough in during the zone and it's easy to shorten the zone, but like this could definitely just sit up on the ceiling because it does penetrate through walls and stuff. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because it's just plasterboard, like, or, yeah, so.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, well, yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: Draw a lot of the exact same issue, right? [SPEAKER_02]: But I've even had a random two-year ZEGB M-M-Wave sensor. [SPEAKER_02]: And it can somehow go through the brick of my face, like it's in the garage, go through the brick of my house, into our dining room, and then whatever, the brick, as there's enough of a buffer, like that's enough of a buffer.

[SPEAKER_02]: I can just have that detect when we're sitting [SPEAKER_02]: outside into a house through the brick wall and then okay that's where our dining room is like that's where our dining table is that can be you know always seeing the dining table or not that's pretty impressive. [SPEAKER_02]: That's pretty impressive. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like they're through the brick.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I can probably just take a shower just from this room, like, or if I'm just in there, like, I can create a zone for it, because in the vicinity of it, so like, I don't know, again, it's weird to think you've got a sense of your resume to just take the five out of a shower in a completely different room, like, it's weird to say, like,

[SPEAKER_03]: I've put a sense of in this room to take different having a shower, I'm like, it's quite, it kind of ruins your thinking part and about how that could work a bit because it's in a completely different room, but it's also, it's also cool, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Because one of the things that it's, I, I have always condone is putting sensors in bathrooms.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and that's because of like, there's some level of uneasiness that that people have of like, haven't even actually got a camera. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: If he's like, even if it's like, uh, you know, like an aisle sensor like, hmm, exactly. [SPEAKER_01]: Ocean sensor or something like that, right? [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, in your head, you know that's a motion sensor, like a PIR. [SPEAKER_01]: But, but the story is about Airbnb's and stuff, like, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I'd rather have it subtly outside, and then do it that way, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like at that point, at least that's nice, and it's not invasive at all, and that kind of thing, and it's like I can still presence wise. [SPEAKER_01]: I could still turn on the lights or fan or whatever when someone's in the washroom, and then [SPEAKER_01]: daily.

[SPEAKER_03]: If they made more powerful versions of these, that like, you could almost map out your floor plan with one of them. [SPEAKER_03]: You could create like, who's in this room, how many people in this room, like, automations. [SPEAKER_03]: So as I can do three rooms just from one sensor, I could do, if I put lights in that bathroom, I could control it with this thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is like, it's, wow, to think that you have one sensor that can, which can report state in three rooms, I haven't really thought [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it works really well looking at open plan about set up, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Like, like, like, uh, reads the room. [SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Small, uh, but like, he has a really open plan kitchen dining and living room. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Smart.

[SPEAKER_03]: I could imagine that. [SPEAKER_03]: Sort of himself where you think you. [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, I could imagine that works really well. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned before, Darren, that you can never remember the sequence of, you know, repair and like pairing up the archive line. [SPEAKER_02]: I have a little hack that I use. [SPEAKER_02]: I have a similar issue with my blinds, which is semi-smartlet believes the brand.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I put the instruction manual into Google LM. [SPEAKER_02]: And then whenever I need to find out what key secret combination I need to press, I just ask the LN, what is the combination to pair it with Zippy, right? [SPEAKER_03]: You could take it one set further to say, like, if the blind becomes unavailable, it's sends you, like, by the way, he blind screwed up his, here's what you need to do. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely right.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think read the video recently, like, he has a light. [SPEAKER_03]: I think it was a gov light, one that stands up or something like that. [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, sometimes for some reason, it just goes unavailable. [SPEAKER_03]: So he puts a smart switch on it, and it becomes unavailable, the swatch that sounds off and on. [SPEAKER_03]: which we start the light, but that's a really hacky, but very clever solution. [SPEAKER_01]: But like, you know what it is?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I really, really, really want to go V. I really do. [SPEAKER_01]: But it's like, it is so unreliable for certain things, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, [SPEAKER_03]: I have the same kind of like I'll go to sometimes like even though I've got an access point under my feet These lights are sometimes just a loop like like I can see on the unit file they're connected to that access point like What and I was thinking I keep thinking like I'm gonna take my part and like put an ESP home on it But I can't be asked because

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I had to I had to return my old god of lights just because it was I could use it through home assistant ironically, but not through that through their own app. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's just weird, but like the gov lights that got gov lights behind kind of if you can go through watching on YouTube.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the leaves there, but it's and I've got one beside me here to one of those stand up stick ones and they're currently not on because I [SPEAKER_01]: couldn't tell you why, but they probably need a kick and you know, whatever, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, and there's a bunch of hacks, repos for GoV and stuff like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they're all pretty decent, but they're all like, I don't know, they're not, they're not, it's not, it's not the repo, it's not [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, I have so many like, for example, even ESP home devices are pretty state like they're pretty stable. [SPEAKER_03]: Obviously you have to make, well, they are just pretty stable.

[SPEAKER_03]: Even even the, um, everything presents one, that's, if you see how much day that sends, like, it sends so much data, it's reliable, like, but on-of-like, can't be reliable, like, yeah, it must be, a garden must be doing something [SPEAKER_03]: First, negotiate with something before it becomes about, I don't know, they worked now, but I'm telling you, I'm going to get a knife to them and make the ESP home at some point. [SPEAKER_01]: And that would be awesome.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, drop this in, like, put it in here and then bounce of, uh, smoke, I've got it. [SPEAKER_03]: I think my ultimate plan is to have an ESP 32 in every room and vehicle to do something like that. [SPEAKER_03]: When I got that car, I wanted to make an OLED clock for the car. [SPEAKER_03]: It was also reported like the RPM speed, everything you don't have on a dash. [SPEAKER_03]: So I started to think really, it's behind my, I got it working, but like I have like this.

[SPEAKER_03]: a mess of a project board of like all the bits that it worked. [SPEAKER_03]: Click and book this in. [SPEAKER_03]: There's a little display. [SPEAKER_03]: It shows me the RPMs of the car from the OPD pool. [SPEAKER_03]: Like a love ESP home. [SPEAKER_03]: It's been great. [SPEAKER_03]: And I know Keith and Jesse will love me saying that. [SPEAKER_03]: But like ESP home is fantastic for like alone. [SPEAKER_03]: That barrier of entry. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely. [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's not a scary, as you think. [SPEAKER_03]: Plant sensors and [SPEAKER_03]: Like, like, like, if you don't want to mess around with WLD, yes, behind, like, so many people do out there, you could easily copy and pay someone's thing and just hook them up. [SPEAKER_01]: But, top, yeah, the screws get up and it's, yeah, it's great, it's us. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, Darren, thank you so much for talking to us today. [SPEAKER_02]: It's always cool.

[SPEAKER_02]: So every time you look at a open home foundation website or the home website, you can thank Darren. [SPEAKER_02]: He's one of the many network hustle open home foundation people talking web behind scenes. [SPEAKER_02]: It was great to finally meet you. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you very much. [SPEAKER_02]: If you want to share your home's isn't journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at feedback at haspodcast.io. [SPEAKER_02]: That's HASSpodcast.io.

[SPEAKER_01]: The home assistant podcast is hosted by Phil Hawthorne and myself, Rohan Keremandi. [SPEAKER_01]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haspodcast.io.