This one is all about Home Assistant. Mike gives the ins and the outs, the specs and add-ins and all that it takes to get Home Assistant up and running. So regardless of if you are using a Raspberry PI, Unraid or your own home brew, we have you covered! All that and more!

Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg472

Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #472 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.

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Home Assistant

Mike’s Setup

• Running as a VM in Unraid
• You can run the Docker that is found in the Unraid App Store but it is the Core version without Hass.io so it is recommended to run it as a VM.
• There are just a few steps to get it running as a VM. Takes about 10 minutes. This video is a great guide (20) How to Install Hassio on your unRaid Server in a VM – YouTube
• Mike is using the following integrations
  • Belkin Wemo
  • Ecobee
  • Google Cast
  • HACS – Home Assistant Community Store | HACS
  • Meteorologisk
  • Mobile App – for family iPhones
  • myQ Garage Door
  • ONVIF – for compatible security cameras
  • Phillips Hue
  • Plex
  • Roku
  • SimpliSafe
  • Tp-link
• Mike is using the following Add-ons
  • Node-Red
  • Samba share
  • Visual Studio Code – to easily edit your config files
• A few of Mike’s favorite automations
  • When Mike’s phone gets within a certain radius of the house the garage door will open.
  • If the garage is open for more than 10 minutes it will send an alert to both iPhones in the house
  • Sunrise lights go off and Sunset lights come on
  • When the garage opens it turns on the hallway lights by the garage on to 50% and then turns them back off after 10 minutes.
• NFC tags
  • Home Assistant now supports NFC tags. You can get 30 for $10 and they setup right through the mobile app. Currently have one in the car to close the garage door since the opener broke a while ago and have been using the phone app ever since. Saves having to find the app and open it.
• A few of Mike’s other customizations (edits to configuration.yaml)
  • Added in access to the family nextcloud calendar so it can display on the dashboard
  • Pulled in all other non-ONVIF cameras through the “camera” entity
  • Added in the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) which also allowed me to add a custom written add-on for wyze light control
• Considerations and Pain Points
  • Wife acceptance factor is extremely high with this.
  • I do not integrate this with Alexa. I consider them two separate use cases that compliment each other. Alexa for all voice enabled actions and HomeAssistant for backend automation (combining of different ecosystems) and dashboards.
  • One type of tp-link smart switch HS220 will not get picked up by the tp-link integration. It appears a fix is coming.
  • Learning the yaml language can be tough at first but gets much easier the more you play with it.
• Future plans
  • Ordered a zigbee usb stick and a couple zigbee motion sensors from AliExpress. These will be used to trigger lights especially at night. When my son gets up to use the restroom the motion sensor in the hallway will trigger the hallway lights to turn on 25%. Same with the kitchen.
  • Add in zigbee door sensors as the SimpliSafe sensor are on too much of a delay to be useful.

Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found on gadget geek show number 472. recorded on December 10 2020.

Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all the favorite tech gadgets to find your way your reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host, Jim Collison broadcasting live from theAverageGuy.TV Studios here in a snowy or soon to be snowing. Mike, I hear we’re talking three to five maybe over the weekend.

Mike Wieger  [0:39] 
You’re the I got the advisory alert. I hadn’t heard it. And I got the weather advisory alert. I was like what it’s supposed to snow and Yeah, probably supposed to a lot of snow.

Jim Collison  [0:47] 
Well, three to five. Not that much for Nebraska. And it’s coming on a Saturday. I think Friday night it starts Friday night it rush hour. Does it mean the thing anymore? Yeah. Especially Fridays? Are people really still commuting at five o’clock

Mike Wieger  [1:02] 
rushing from my dining room table to my couch?

Jim Collison  [1:04] 
I just I don’t hate I was out. See, which which day was I out this week taste Thursday. So we’ve got that Tuesday, picking something up. And it was just as busy as it I’ve ever seen it here. So I you know, I know. There’s some states that are struggling right now. And I know there’s some states that have gone into lockdown. And curfews have been initiated and some of those things, not Nebraska. So it’s it’s alive. And well, Mike, I don’t know, we do have good mask coverage out there. But it is man, I’ve seen a lot of traffic. So we got some snow coming for the weekend. We also some show notes coming for you. And Mike has some great show notes this week. So you want to head out to https://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg472 for this one, and there’ll be some links that you’re going to want to follow as well.

Big thanks to to and Big thanks for the support that we get over at hover. So if you head out to https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover or if you think you’re interested in buying a domain, even if you bought them from some of those other crappy places, you you might want to consider next time you go to buy a domain give hover a try there, you know there, it’s just a great place to put like, easy, simple, no nonsense, they don’t try to upsell you on anything is inexpensive as any other place and you get $2 off your first domain. So head over to https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover, get $2 off that domain and then partner it with a new website for Maple Grove Partners.

Course Christian last week was on the show and talk a little bit about it. If you missed that show. It was our 10th Anniversary Show. And same I want to catch it. https://MapleGrovePartners.com plans start as little as 10 bucks. And Christian we’ll get you up and running in no time. https://MapleGrovePartners.com speaking of Christian, Big thanks to Mike. Well, Big thanks to Mike. Yeah, cuz you’re with me right now. Andrew and Christian man too much red wine, but at dinner. A big thanks to those two guys, Christian and Andrew came on and join us for the 10th anniversary show last week, Mike and went back and listen to it again. I’m gonna say it was pretty good. I just

Mike Wieger  [3:04] 
want to be a part of Yeah, you guys did a great job in a lot of different topics, stuff I don’t think we all plan to get into. But I’m having a good time.

Jim Collison  [3:10] 
No, it was fun. It was kind of a combination of a little reminiscing, a little bit of nostalgia, but some really good information kind of we talked a bunch about storage. Yep. You know, we talked about where we’re putting stuff in the cloud, how we’re using the cloud some of our home server stuff. We Andrew at the end of it, like threw this out like into the wind with like five minutes left. You said, Hey, Andrew, what are you using for home automation? He went home assistant, and then and then I didn’t I didn’t hear another word about it. And all of a sudden this weekend, you start going nuts on home assistance. So we’re going to spend most of the show talking about that. I’m just going to be honest with folks. We’ll get that here too to that in just a second. But Big thanks, Christian, Andrew, and really everyone who contributed we had some great voicemails. I got some nice notes. JOHN, john Biggs sent me a note I didn’t get a chance to read it on the show. JOHN apologize for that. But thanks for that nice note of that congratulatory, backslapping as we say, and, and appreciate, john that that note it was it was very, very nice of you, Mike, year 10. Week One, we got, like, okay, here’s

Mike Wieger  [4:18] 
the next 10 we can’t

Jim Collison  [4:19] 
rest anymore. It’s time to get down to business. As we think about it, I’m gonna be honest with you. I would first when you got into this, I was like, in Discord. I was like, damn it. Wieger like, now I’m getting like, I this is the last thing I wanted to do. But, uh, so I got my Unraid Box. We’ll talk about this too. here in a second. I got into my Unraid Box and got to set up I really enjoyed it. You went crazy. Talk about it.

Mike Wieger  [4:47] 
Yeah, well, okay. So the problem was, he mentioned something when I didn’t have a product. I was out of tech projects. I didn’t know what to do. Like I just done a new install on Ham Radio. And so I go home assistant like I I remember looking at Home assistant A long time ago and I could be remembering wrong maybe it was the setup process. Something about it just I, you know, I looked at it googled it played around and like, yeah, now I don’t really need it. But you know, really with Unraid, and how easy it is to install home assistant, either via Docker or VM. He was talking about it. And so after that show, I have seen up till 2am playing with us if it’s super easy to get installed. And then here’s what got me Jim, I fired up home assistant, it’s super easy to get installed. I fired it up. And it has on the intro of it. It’s like, Hey, we found we’re suggesting these integrations because we found these devices on your network. And for me, I didn’t realize how many different brands and how many smart items I already had in my house. Because for me, I was like, oh, and then it instantly clicks. Like because I think it’s perfectly they show you that because if you had to do all that manually, it wouldn’t really click with you. When it showed me I was doing brands. I’m like, Ah, okay, so the whole pitch on home assistant is kind of being the one hub for all of your different brands, all the different ecosystems in your house. It can bring it all together and when I saw all those, and then I said okay, yeah, add those integrations. Let’s see what you find. And it gave me like, I came up with how many devices I have in my home, but it gave me a lot of like, okay, let’s let’s start playing with this a little more. Let’s, let’s see what this has has to offer. And that was that was the hook and that’s why Yeah, for the past week, Jim I have been living breathing, playing with breaking fixing, driving my wife somewhat nuts but also making a very happy with with homelesses.

Jim Collison  [6:38] 
I love her comment you made I think it was like discord about flirting with your wife via some kind of integration.

Mike Wieger  [6:45] 
I was sending her push notifications from home assistant with little love messages. So she was getting a push alert from some apps. She didn’t even know she had her phone because I installed on her phone for didn’t tell her. It’s a whole sudden she’s getting like, hey, beautiful. How’s it going? And I might have been confusing. Luckily, I signed it your husband? Because I think she would have been a little freaked out. And how would you hear now Michael?

Jim Collison  [7:05] 
someone hacked the network. Right? Me flirty messages.

Mike Wieger  [7:08] 
Yeah. What is this home assistant app? I deleted it right away. It’s probably a it’s probably a dating app. But

Jim Collison  [7:12] 
someone’s finding my husband think we got hacked and someone’s trying to hit on me. She liked it. Oh, it’s great. Talk a little bit. It was fun. It was actually you know, the the discord group kind of lit up over the weekend, which in you know, kind of like it that way where it gets really busy. And it kind of settles down and gets busy and it settles down or it’s just not busy all the time. Because it’s hard to keep up with.

Mike Wieger  [7:35] 
It is I agree. Now we have our trends almost it’s almost like we get on a topic. We have some fun. You know, people can still talk about it. But yeah, you’re right. It’s because I am part of a lot of discord servers. But I don’t check in with them often. Because there’s just so much you know, and every time you ask a question on one of those, they’re like, oh, scroll up, like three days ago, we talked about that. Yeah, that’s that’s like 1000 messages ago, dude, I

Jim Collison  [7:55] 
can’t get I can’t get through all those right? through all those messages. I think we spent some time talking about plugs to this weekend wire, you know, Wi Fi enable plugs in looking for some energy, ones that tracked energy versus ones that didn’t. So of course, universe throwing deals out there. If you want to join us in the discord group, https://theAverageGuy.tv/discord will get you there. And I’ll kind of let you in Mike, I chose I went the Unraid route. Because Because I had just reset up my Unraid Box after doing some work to it, tore it down, put all brand new drives back into and I thought I’m going to set this up again. So I plugged the USB drive in, turned it on, and it came to life. And it was like, Hey, I remember exactly where we’re at, oh, you have new drives. And so I had to I had to go through kind of the process of renaming some things and moving some stuff around and it’s fine didn’t have any data to worry about it. So that made it easier. You kind of want a different route. So the I’ll talk about the Unraid route here in a little bit. But I got

Mike Wieger  [8:51] 
Docker and we both did Unraid

Jim Collison  [8:53] 
use both Unraid. But you did it differently than I did you talk a little bit about that. Well,

Mike Wieger  [8:58] 
so when I looked into it, I actually did your route first. Jim, when I was on the show last week, Andrew mentioned it. And I just quickly went over to Unraid look because you know with you have the community app, plugin to Unraid super easy, like an app store. I typed in home assistant, I saw that it was there. And I downloaded it so that after the show I could play with it. So I wouldn’t forget. So I went back Actually, I brought up that instancing and got it running. And then I was doing a lot of YouTube videos that night. It’s like Hey, what are the first things you should do with home assistant has some recommendations. And one of them was a plugin to easily edit the config file. And they said you can only do like an ASIC Wait, I don’t have that tab. I don’t I have that tab on mine. For the research showed me that Docker version works. And you could definitely run it in Unraid from the community apps, but that gives you what’s called homocysteine core, which works it’ll do all the same stuff except for you can’t do add ons. And maybe there’s a back end way to do add ons. You don’t get the tab to add the approved add ons from home assistant. And there’s some other stuff too because you don’t really run haseo You’re running the home assistant core, which was just a little bit different. So I was I was early enough in the process that I nuked that, and I decided to go the actual VM route. Because for home assistant actually what they recommend, if you go to the home assistant website, and you say you want to get started with this, they recommend a Raspberry Pi that’s like the out of the gate, everyone should run on a Raspberry Pi. And I would say for our community, if you don’t have an always on computer, it’s the cheapest route to get home assistant up is to just go buy a Raspberry Pi for I think for like 80 bucks, you can be up and running with that small, low power consumption is the biggest thing with the Raspberry Pi that I love. So that’s the recommended route just so everyone knows. But if you have Unraid, or if you have a any sort of server that runs virtual machines, you can also spin up

Jim Collison  [10:46] 
almost, it can be super low power. I mean, if you’re gonna, sure, just an extra piece, this thing

Mike Wieger  [10:50] 
does not need much power at all.

Jim Collison  [10:52] 
You can you can install Unraid on it that that would still be my recommendation is for folks. Put it on a USB drive, install Unraid throw a driver to add it. You can you can do a really stripped down version of Unraid You don’t have to be running, parody and cash and all that. So right now, if you do but but then it makes it super easy to kind of get into as well. Can you hear it? My wife, I swear there’s a battle going on in Chad. All right, she’s, I don’t know what’s going on behind me. But she is crushing over there. Thanks. Appreciate that. Talk more about your setup.

Mike Wieger  [11:24] 
So So you went the Docker route I went and again, so I did that wiped it I went the VM route and Unraid can run VMs super easy, I found a fantastic short video that shows how to get the because the image they give you from home assistant, you actually need to convert it to a different file format to easily run. So I put the video in the show notes. It’s from YouTube, it’s five minute video, you can only have the VM running up, I would say, you know if the Docker gets installed in about 30 seconds, the VM if you watch this video, you’re up and running in about two and a half minutes. There are simply two command line and he gives you the exact command line I will preface if you’re watching his video, just make sure you edit his command. Because the version, the latest version of haseo has a different name to it. So you’ll just have to swap out like point one six, instead of like point zero or whatever. So make two changes, run those he gives them to you, you can literally copy and paste into the command line in Unraid. And you’re up and running. So five minutes, you’re up and running there with the VM. And with the VM, you do get all the add ons and everything like that. And you don’t need to throw much processing power at this. I threw one core at it and two gigs of RAM. And it is fine. I mean, it barely even hits 25% of that allocation on both. And it works really well. It’s one of the few things that you can do these days. That doesn’t take

Jim Collison  [12:46] 
right resources, right. Yeah. Okay, I get it. This is killing me. But so I got to show you let me let me add this back in. So this is this is my home assistant. And you can see right here,

Mike Wieger  [12:58] 
this just told you why she’s why she’s laughing. Yeah, she’s

Jim Collison  [13:01] 
watching something on Disney plus. So just a second. Let’s just do this. Let’s pause it. Hey, it’s Thursday night. You’re a little loud?

Mike Wieger  [13:09] 
Or is she watching the mass singer down below?

Jim Collison  [13:12] 
I don’t know. She’s watching Disney plus for sure. Okay, turn it back on for that is funny. So that that’s kind of cool. Right? Yeah. Kind of control that and, and, Oh, I thought that was for coming to throw. But But yeah, no, I’m a pretty cool to be able to just have that kind of control this kind of visibility. And I know there’s ways to do this, but it was just a great way to to show that alright, sorry, interrupted,

Mike Wieger  [13:40] 
keep going. No, that’s fine. So once you get it up and running, actually, Jim was showing exactly what I was going to talk about first was it gives you a default dashboard. And it actually it’s funny, it doesn’t let you edit this dashboard unless you say yes, I want to lose the automatic control this dashboard. So I would actually suggest just keep this main dashboard and let it maintain and be automated. You can always create other dashboards but what this one does is it pulls absolutely everything in to this dashboard and as you add more and more to home assistant this overview dashboard that it gives you gets updated and this is one thing I love about home assistant so i think you know maybe we missed the boat on talking about why you should install home assistant, right? Like what what are the benefits to installing it? A lot of us have a lady A lot of us have Google Assistant like what is the benefit? And I was gonna talk about this later but maybe it’s more important talking about it up front to me, you know, I I actually you can but I do not link a lady and home assistant. They can be linked but to me they’re they’re almost two separate ecosystems that are very complimentary to each other. For me a lady is my voice commands, right when we’re walking around the house when we’re saying certain things when we are in bed we say we tell her good night that is how I interact. I I don’t we’re not based on a time schedule this house we go to bed all different times. So I I can’t automate times, things like that I need to be able to talk and have it be when I need it. And we have a ladies all around the house. So for me, both systems have access to the same devices in the house. But I don’t, I don’t feel the need to connect the two. So for me, a lady again is voice commands. And that’s what she runs. Homa system for me is the back end automations think of things like, I know you can do this in Alexa. But you can actually do a lot more in homes like at sunrise and sunset, turn on and off certain devices, when you know, and there’s a bunch of automations. And the thing about home assistant is it can cross boundaries of ecosystems. So with a trigger, so right, your garage door goes up Turn on certain lights. With Alexa, that’s not possible with you can’t just say it doesn’t, it’s not always monitoring all of those different devices in your house, whereas home assistant is in your garage door is my cue brand, your lights are wise or Philips Hue or whatever, it doesn’t care, it knows everything about all the smart homes. So anything can trigger anything else. And anything can be a condition for anything else. So for me home assistant is number one, the back end automations that run and also it’s dashboarding. I love the dashboards, this creates number one for controlling or send on a computer. But this is perfect for an always on tablet, if you have a tablet sitting around that you just don’t use very much perfect use case to put it on the kitchen counter and run home assistant and make your own dashboard. So I made a separate dashboard just for my iPad, the screen fits perfectly. It’s super easy to make. And I put the important stuff on there. So I put our home calendar. So our family calendar I plugged in. So when you walk by, you can just see if any of us in the family have stuff going on that day, the three main cameras, I don’t need all the cameras, I need the front door in the garage to make sure the garage is closed and who’s at the front door. It’s all I care about. And then I put the temperatures of each room My wife is very addicted to seeing if the boy’s room is too cold at night. So she walks by Oh, there you go. Someone’s out the gym, someone’s breaking into your car.

Jim Collison  [16:59] 
No, that was me bringing in dinner.

Mike Wieger  [17:01] 
Okay, now it shows the last video. But so that I think those two are different. And I think that’s a reason to get into home assistant. And I will say, if you’re even just hesitant, if you have a weekend, I didn’t even consider all the possibilities of all the automations that make my life great until I got in there and had the capability to do it. And you’re like, Oh, wait, because what I didn’t know is like, okay, simply save all of my sensors are now sensors that I can use to trigger other things in other ways. So I have a security system that has door sensors on all the doors. Now I will say simply safe is very delayed with our cloud ping, because they don’t have local polling. But you get what I mean, right? Like, you will not realize what you can use for triggers of other things until you get it up and running.

Jim Collison  [17:47] 
It’s going to be cloud integrated. So you’re gonna if you have on something’s

Mike Wieger  [17:51] 
Yeah,

Jim Collison  [17:52] 
if you have a service, and it’s connected to the cloud like ring, right? And depending on what’s happening in the cloud at that point. So yeah, person dependencies. Mike, it does. It’s a lot like the hubitat. So and so I had some questions early on, like, Hey, you know, home assistant or habitat? Well, it kind of depends on what kind of what you want to do. I mean, definitely habitat has got that Developer feel like if you write code, and you like doing that now hubitat, it’s kind of easy to, but I found a lot more I was doing a lot more code stuff, you got into editing, YAML files, and some of those other kinds of things that you don’t have to know, I think it’s helpful. But I found a home assistant a lot easier just to set up in the one night, a two hour, I connected everything. And Holy crap, this was actually really, really easy. And then to make the integrations, to be fair to both Amazon and Google, they are making strides in this area to make those integrations happen on their apps. So if you log into that to the a lady app on your phone, or on the Google Home, I guess I shouldn’t say that g word either. I guess I have to say hey, g word to make that actually work. But they’re making some strides. When I go into the the Google Home app. And, and add devices. There’s a lot there. And there’s a lot on the ad side too. But this really gets everything he does. It’s pretty incredible.

Mike Wieger  [19:21] 
It gets everything and it also you know, for me, I’m not my note. a benefit for me is all land, right? No need for cloud. No need in a minute. Our security does a benefit to me, it’s not my main priority. But if it is your top priority, and you want to get I have this on order, I’m really excited. If you are trying to get like a ZigBee stick, plug it into your home system box and then have a bunch of ZigBee devices around. You’ve never touched the internet and everything could be local for you if you wanted to. And a lot of this stuff. The great part about it running home assistant is it is local. So a lady in Google will always go to the cloud. One to respond to what you just said. And so that’s a little bit of lag. Whereas, you know, for me tip, for example, TP link, I am a huge fan now of TP link products, because their integration with home assistant is local polling. And you can look at every integration and see what it does. Is it pulling from the cloud every time? Or is it locally able to do all the commands, and TP link right now is all local. And so I actually went out this weekend, and I ordered a ton of the TP link wall switches. Right? I know, Jim, we were talking about you with a common without a common wire, it’s a little bit more difficult. But I do have the common wire in my home. So I put a bunch of those in. For example, in my kitchen, I have a nine overhead can lights, well, I’m not going to pay $20 a bulb and put in smart bulbs for all nine, but I replaced in Amazon had them on sale a 13 bucks, that TP link switch. And now that entire kitchen is smart and able to be done with home assistance. So you know, putting up in talking about the ZigBee sensors, I got a ZigBee motion sensor for the kitchen too. So if you walk in there, and if it’s Pat, if the sun is below the horizon is my automation, then it’s going to turn those kitchen lights up just to like 25% or 10%. So when you walk in late night snack, you know the kitchen is automatically comes up a little bit and then after no activity, they turn back off, never have to worry about anything. And it works really well. But so talking about just to give you guys a sense of the integrations so for me when I first turned on homelessness, and here are the ones that I came up with that are built into home assistant like the integrations already there. Belkin WeMo these are the ones that are in my homes. These are what I’m using Belkin WeMo eco be Google Cast, which is if you have any of the Google Home devices, hacks, which is the one I talked to the home assistant community store that was an add in I added I don’t even know how to say when Meteor Allah gisc is the built in weather and sun integration that gives you a mobile app for the iPhone and Android, which is actually really cool. It pulls a bunch of sensors, you can do triggers on Hey, did I plug my phone in. So if you go to plug your phone in during a certain hour, you could tell it to trigger something. So at night, if you know you always like hey, what if I plug in my phone between 8pm and 1am know that I’m probably going to bed and trigger the going to bed automation. So it pulled a lot of stuff from the phone. I think those are

Jim Collison  [22:18] 
showing up here. For me.

Mike Wieger  [22:21] 
It’s like they might be

Jim Collison  [22:22] 
okay and tell you which ones right now it’s just too small for me to see that far away. The other thing that pandemics does is really messed up my vision, like I desperately need to get my eyes checked. So because I’m having trouble with it with the small print over there, but ya know, the the iPhone integration was pretty cool.

Mike Wieger  [22:38] 
And it doesn’t drain the battery, I was really worried about draining the battery. I will say if you want full feature from that, make sure you turn your location services to always that sounds like it’s gonna always be pulling draining your battery it doesn’t it does a pretty smart job on it. My cue for my garage door, O n vi f four compatible lnbf security cameras if you’re into IP security cameras, you know what that is? Philips Hue Plex Roku, simply safe and TP link. So all those integrations were just ready for me to go. Meaning and an integration with home assistant means it’s one click right it’s Yes, that’s the brand I’m using it finds them on the network and you’re good to go. Home assistant though, you can add a bunch more and because they have like their generic settings. So like for cameras, I have a bunch of cameras that aren’t onb. If a homeless person has a camera module, you just have to do a little bit more in the configuration file. If you go to the configuration file, say I have a camera. Here’s the IP address. Here’s the stream URL, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Put that it’s not just one click, but it has the ability to pull that in. Jim, for you on integration to define any that I didn’t list, anything you’re using.

Jim Collison  [23:45] 
Take a look as we jump in there. And I think let’s take a look at those. It actually is. Yeah, well, those that’s a TV that’s my son’s TV. Yeah, it’s out there. And so I didn’t I did not connect it I could have. He was like, hey, go to the TV and put this code in. By now. I’m not gonna mess with it right now. Google Cast, home assistant, iOS. This is actually this was cool. This just happened yesterday. So it connects to the printer. It’s got that internet printer protocol, kind of that that that you can see. And yeah, you can get this on the app. This works on the app too. But if I go to the overview here, it shows me how much ink is left in my printer. And so when I looked at it the other day and I was like holy cow, the black ink standard 20% I just put a brand new one in there. Well, Sarah has been home, working from home and been printing she needs to print her job. And she just rolled through one of our one of our cartridges, which is basically I mean it’s printer is more expensive than like uranium. So it so she rolled through it so I had to I was like well can you make it the rest of the day? She’s like it would be helpful if I had one. So I had to run down to Walmart and pick up a new one. But this was really helpful. What happened and I don’t know what in Integration did this. But a lady also let me know that my printer ink was getting low.

Mike Wieger  [25:08] 
Oh, interesting.

Jim Collison  [25:09] 
And I don’t, I was like, ooh, where did I? Where did I enable that? I’m pretty sure. I only enabled it here in there. Did

Mike Wieger  [25:17] 
she give you an option to order it cuz that gene? Yeah, well, I was gonna say, automation I would make is, hey, if I leave the house because it knows where your phone is, if I leave the house, and my ink is below 10%, send me a notification saying, hey, while you’re out grabbing, so like I would have that set up as an automatic, big automation. And then you know, it would do it every time. So we did the first time, but it would be a reminder every time I left the how’s it go? I’m already out. Let’s stop and grab that ink. It’s below 10%. Yeah, well, that’s something you can do super easy and home assistant,

Jim Collison  [25:46] 
kind of you can kind of see it. Kevin makes a good point on this. He says the majority of my switches, devices and sensors are z wave and ZigBee. Seems like there’s lots of questions around compatibility between z wave and ZigBee sticks. And home assistant, Kevin, I would set like, if you haven’t set this up yet, I give it a try before because like, there’s so much different IoT stuff out there? Well,

Mike Wieger  [26:10] 
yeah. And they’ve added an integration to make it super easy for ZigBee and z wave. So the integration actually is super simple. You get you plug in the stick, run. And I’ll let you know how this goes. I actually suggest here’s some words of advice. I found a YouTube video of a guy who was He’s like, I want to try out ZigBee. So he found the same stuff on Amazon on AliExpress. And you have to wait like two months, probably I word it we’ll see when it comes in the $40 USB stick for ZigBee, three bucks, le Express. And then I got some sensors for $6 on AliExpress that were $20 on Amazon sells the same exact ones. And you know, all of my stuff lives on a segregated subnet, it doesn’t have access to internet. So like, why not? You know, why not put it on there. But I grabbed those. But you know, you can grab the full price ones too. But the setup is super easy. There’s an integration, you say ZigBee or z wave? And it reckon then you tell it what USB devices the stick. And then it’ll you just, you know, find it it’ll search and find those devices in your home. Pretty cool. Now I don’t compatibility maybe true. You might want to Google like if you’re just getting into this, like what is the best stick for home assistant? I know works pretty well right now.

Jim Collison  [27:27] 
Mike the hubitat dashboard. Let me bring that up really quick. Just since we’re talking about it. I’m not, you know, not that much different. Like, I didn’t realize this, I was looking home assistant as I go, this looks familiar. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I was going in so it’s like, oh, you know, I had unplugged as having some network issues with the ring cams. And so I was unplugging things in the house just to see what was causing the problem. Like you running around looking for interference.

Mike Wieger  [27:52] 
Yes. Radio,

Jim Collison  [27:54] 
doing something very similar. And so I had unplugged the hubitat device and had not plugged it back in. It’s like Oh, that’s right, I unplug that thing. So I plugged it back in fire back up. It’s interesting. You know, this is the look for hubitat. So if you’re listening to audio, sorry, bear with us just for a minute. And then when you look over, you know, square boxes, buttons, sliders, those kinds of things I do I give actually a home assistant a better grade, I give it you know, a 95 or I would give hubitat maybe an 85. Just because habitat is kindness. Barton in some of its Look, I mean still has sliders is still has colors, you can turn things on and off this way as well. But But almost just it just looks better. Like some of the integrations with the, with the, you know, the audio, like I just turned on behind me here what I call the tag back screen, which is it just plays a four hour video of the album art for the show about on this TV right here. And it kind of brings that forward. That’s kind of cool. On hubitat. It would just be square box with a little play. Yeah.

Mike Wieger  [29:08] 
So that kind of reminds me of like, if one of us was trying to just throw together some HTML to get to show up on the screen. Oh, sweet. We got to work and good. Was it’s a little more refined with home assistant.

Jim Collison  [29:20] 
Well, okay, I don’t we’ve had the guys from hubitat on the program. And I don’t want to, I want to smash it because it’s good. Like, there’s a lot of great code. Oh, yeah, the

Mike Wieger  [29:29] 
service is great. Just like the dashboard. I’m just showing like the view of it. The service is still fantastic.

Jim Collison  [29:35] 
It’s pretty Spartan. But Ana, it looks if you’re on a tablet, you want to set that up as a tablet and have put, you know, touch sensitive. That’s kind of what they’ve set it up for and it works in that environment. But yeah, it didn’t try hubitat when we were talking about it, you definitely got to try an instance of home assistant like it’s free. You don’t need much hardware. Yeah, it’s really easy to set up. It’s kind of and setting up the devices in hubitat. Going through the various integrations. Now, it’s been a couple months since I’ve done an integration. But it was some kind of complicated steps. And I felt like I needed to be a developer, you know, the way it was laid out. It was like a bunch of Google Developers who made it, you’re kind of like, right? Where do I gotta go? And what do I got to do with with home assistant a little bit easier, you know, a little more intuitive. I thought, a little more average guy, just to be honest,

Mike Wieger  [30:27] 
right. And that’s what I’m trying to wonder is like, hubitat feels like it’s almost like back in the day of Android versus iPhone, where iPhone looked really pretty great user interface. But if you really want to nerd out and geek out, you went to Android. And it might be some of the same stuff. I don’t know, Holmes’s it might have that capability to where you can really nerd out geek out and get really dirty. hubitat kind of seemed like it had that capability. But if you want to roll up your sleeves, and have some fun, you can do that in habitat.

Jim Collison  [30:55] 
Even more nerdy on hubitat? That’s right,

Mike Wieger  [30:57] 
exactly. So might be that might be like the power user really want to get in and mess with stuff.

Jim Collison  [31:03] 
Right on. One of the things one of the integrations we didn’t talk about you don’t have that I do is the bitdefender. Box. Oh, yeah. After a little bit about this on in the discord group as well, these boxes up here, I’ve got kind of throughput. And, you know, I’m getting a bunch of sensors off that box. That To be honest, I don’t even get any app, like I don’t, I don’t get in the app, what I’m getting here on home assistant, that was one of the things I’m like I it’s like, Hey, we found a bitdefender box. And I was like, okay, go in there find it and and then it brings back all these sensors of what it’s doing. So I need to dig into it a little bit. And I kind of want to learn how to make these sensors look a little bit better. That’s kind of one of the thing there, just these round circles up here that’s got numbers in them. So I can kind of see, let me see if I can find one here, I’ve got a bunch of weather stuff that’s kind of nuts in there. But now I’m going to be able to find it Oh, it’s down, it’s right down here. So I can click those open. And there’s kind of the bitdefender send, which is not available anywhere, right? their app, not on their website, you can’t find that anywhere. So I’ve kind of found a new for the bitdefender box, I’ve kind of found a new way to monitor it.

Mike Wieger  [32:19] 
Well, that’s what I found too is like even with like simply say, for example, like all the information you get from those sensors, is actually usable. And like the open close the glass brake, the all that stuff can just trigger a bunch of different things, you can open up the door. Same thing with eco B, right, if you know, let’s say you had a fan in your room, and you wanted to turn that fan on, instead of turn the Holy Spirit on, we said hey, it gets hot in here in the summer, just turn the ceiling fan on. Right, that’s what you can do with like, if you have eco be powered with home assistant, is that one temperature sensor from eco B can now trigger, you know something else in your home like a ceiling fan, right, which is something I’ll probably definitely do in the summertime is setup that automation, why not, I don’t need to run the whole air conditioning system. I have fans in the main areas I’m in, let’s turn on those on first. And then if it and then you can even go even further with the automation of turn that on, run it for 15 minutes, if the temperature is still not XYZ, after 15 minutes, then kick the AC on. So you can start to get really advanced with those automations. So you know talking about some of the automation that I want to give you guys some examples of things that I’ve done just a few of them. So if you don’t my favorites is so when I had to replace my garage door, a few months ago, the gerhold Garage Door broke the the gear on it actually totally went out. And it was funny that I replaced it with a smart garage door. It’s really all that was available. And a good thing I did because now I have with home assistant. So I I replaced the garage door, it only came with one garage door opener. So I put that in my wife’s car. Another one was like 40 bucks. I’m like I am not spending this is a smart garage, or I’ll just use the app every time. It’s super annoying to open up your phone, find the app, hit the button every time you come home and leave instead of just tapping a button. So what I did was, you know, I obviously it knows where your home is and you have your phone with you. So you set a certain radius around your house, every time I cross that barrier and come home it opens up my garage door. And I tell you I have got it dialed in to like the garage door is just getting open enough as I’m pulling through. It’s not open too early. Now I don’t have to wait for the garage. And so I set that up. And then on the reverse side of that I have an NFC tag because now it supports NFC tags. I stuck that to my visor. And so when I did not want to do an automation for closing the garage door. Now obviously the garage doors are gonna close if a sensors being blocked. But what if I like parked a car right there, the sensors clean. I did not want automation for closing. So what I did was just put an NFC tag so I tapped my phone when I leave. And it does on iOS. You do have to it pops up and you have to click it. But then but then it’s done. I don’t have to search for an app. I don’t do any of that. That’s what closes my garage door. So that’s a really good one for me. If the garage door is open for more than 10 minutes, it sends a push notification My wife and I, saying, hey, the garage door was open for more than 10 minutes, just so we know like, sometimes on purpose, sometimes it’s not. I went to hockey. This is this is where that wife acceptance factor really comes in, went to hockey. And she goes, did you leave the garage door open just to test your new automation? I’m like, No, why? And she goes, cuz I got an alert, and then I wouldn’t closed it, it was actually opening like, perfect. That’s exactly why hooked up because it was open, neither of us knew it was open. And then you wouldn’t closed it, it would switch worked really well. Um, sunrise and sunset certain lights come on, go off. That’s you know, it’s not too complicated. You can do that in Alexa too. Sorry, a lady stop listening. You can do that in a lady as well. But I like that you can do offsets with it, you can trigger a lot of different things with it. So I have certain lights come on, when the garage doors opened for us, the hallway lights if after sunset. So that’s the other thing I love about there’s conditions to the stuff too. So yeah, so when the garage comes up, if the sun is below the horizon is how it kind of works in home assistant, then the hallway lights by the garage come up to just 50%. And then after 10 minutes, they turn back off. So it’s just that you’re you’re coming in with groceries at night, you’re coming in with something you come in because we do not our hallway does not close to where we come into the garage door. So those garage door lights come up a little bit. And then 10 minutes later, they’ll turn off. It also turns on my living room. But I have that leave living room on because I assume if we’re coming into the house, we’re usually in our living room for a decent amount of time, we can turn those off manually, or with our good night routine through a lady that we run every single night. She turns those off for us. I’m not too worried.

Jim Collison  [36:34] 
So that turns those on. And you could also or, or this is what I how I would set it up is to flashlight. So if the garage door is open after sunset, yeah, flashlight. You know, for me, it might be this light that’s right here. And it was just flash. And I’d be like, Okay, oh, I left the garage door open, I need to go out there and get that, you know, I need to get that close. So that’s could be another integration. Just a reminder, if you have colored Hue lights, you could say turn you know, turn the colors red. So that I know I’ve left the garage door up and I listen, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left the garage door open. Yeah, same here. really fortunate. Never have anything stolen out of it. But those kinds of alerts, I think it’d be helpful like, you know, I have the same routine, I get up from the computer, I go up into the kitchen, take my evening meds and you know, get ready to go to bed. Well turn the kitchen lights red. You know, at this point, I’d be like, hey, idiot, garage door still open? Yeah, there’s some things there too. And just kind of think about those notifications. Right?

Mike Wieger  [37:37] 
Yeah. And there’s a there’s, you know, there’s a bunch of different ways that you can go about that, you know, the the one that just came to mind as you were talking is, why didn’t I set that to every time I armed the security system in home mode, if the garage doors open, close it, because that’s another easy way to do it for me like because it pulls in simply say, hey, every time I put this into home mode, just check if the garage doors open. And if it is close it

Jim Collison  [37:59] 
on as a proximity sensor for me that says if I leave this range, now I can do things, right, do these kinds of things. And it could be one of those where it checks and says, Now you don’t you don’t like the idea of an automatic closing garage door without you being there. But it could be one of those kinds of things to say, if I’m outside of the range, go ahead and automatically close it,

Mike Wieger  [38:20] 
because and you can even add on to that if both of us are out of range. Because right What if one’s home and you’re not but hey, if we’re both out you There shouldn’t be any reason that garage door should be open. So as a condition say, hey, if Sarah is also out, then close it, and then do a reverse if Sara leaves the premises. And I’m also gone close the garage door

Jim Collison  [38:40] 
and turn on my garage cam, film it for a minute. And send me that video. Right? Because you want to validate right? Yeah, like did it shut? Did something get in the way what’s what’s going on with it, I have a I haven’t seen moto garage cam cam on for a minute record and then go watch that video.

Mike Wieger  [38:58] 
Exactly. And I so I think to Joe ski talked about earlier, I do have the wife alert. So whenever my wife leaves, because the thing in home assistant I didn’t know you could do you can set multiple zones that are like geo fences. So I put one around my work office, I put one around Hannah’s work office. So now our location which shows up in the dashboard, it either is home away if it doesn’t know where we are, or if we enter one of those zones. It says at Hannah’s work at Mike’s work. So when she leaves Hannah’s work, it sends me a push notification say hey has left work, mainly because that gives me a good idea of like because I work from home. I know she’s gonna go pick up the kids I know about how long it can take her to get home and if I’m responsible for dinner that night, gives me enough time to to get that going. So a lot of cool things you can do with those sort of automations and the NFC tag thing is a new thing. I didn’t know this was new. We got into this at a good time, Jim because NFC tags First of all, they’re super cheap, you can get like 30 of these little tags for 10 bucks off Amazon. So and any of them work. They all are configurable. from your smartphone, iOS or Android, so you just, you know, you get a bag of these things, you tag it in home assistant, you give it a name. And then in home assistant, you say what is when I scan this tag? What do you want to do? So the possibilities are endless with that, I saw a guy on YouTube, you know, he has one stuck to the frame of his door of his office. So when he tags as he walks into his office, he goes, I didn’t want a motion sensor. So when people when anyone walks in it does my start my office routine, because when I walked in the morning, I started turn on the lights, though I want it turns on my music that I like to listen to when I play turns on certain monitors because they’re on smart switches like it just his room configures to his morning routine, because he tagged that NFC chip, which he goes is just you could always do that by emotion, but I want to be me. Like, I’m going to tag that tag. And it’s going to do something based on me. So NFC tags have kind of a different use case. And if you get really creative, I hadn’t even thought about the aspect of Well, yeah, I would trigger this in one way with a motion sensor. But that means it’s going to do that same thing. And when anyone walks in that room compared to I’m here for a purpose, let me tag this. So there have been a lot of people who have wherever they charge their phone, they sit down, just having an NFC tag sitting right there. So they set their phone on a charge, it triggers that tag, they press it, and it does whatever automation, you know, they need that to do, which is really cool.

Jim Collison  [41:19] 
I like a switch,

Mike Wieger  [41:20] 
right? It’s exactly like a switch. Yeah. But anywhere. If for activities are Yeah, that can trigger a ton of just random automation that you can think of whatever you want.

Jim Collison  [41:28] 
Oh, no, I hadn’t read the NFC part. before the show. We have the NFC tags coming home this weekend,

Mike Wieger  [41:35] 
you should because there are a ton of fun. I mean, that’s so I use, like I said I use it in my car. So I tap it and I use it for open. And I I’ve kind of been struggling to think of other use cases. Because I I’ve been trying to think of things that I do that maybe Hannah doesn’t. But they’ve been starting to come to me. So I have a bag of 30 of these things I got from Amazon, and they’re just waiting for automations to be assigned to them.

Jim Collison  [41:55] 
Right? Why not? Yeah. Um, other other Okay, so I’d said a second ago about habitat, some ability to do some customizations, maybe more developer focused maybe a little bit more for the advanced user, I kind of made it sound like home assistant is for the average guy. But you can make configuration changes to this thing, right, you can get it, update the update the code, right talk a little bit about that

Mike Wieger  [42:21] 
you can. So one of the benefits of having the haseo version, which is the if you’re running Unraid, or anything, if you run on the VM, you’re going to get the haseo, you’re going to get the supervisors when it’s called. And you can add an add ons. So when we talk about configuration, you can really get deep. Now, what you’re first going to need to do that is something called Visual Studio. So when you get this add on, it allows you to edit the config file just straight from the web browser, you’re already in home assistant, let’s just have a plug in there to certain tab, and you can go and edit the config file, the config file has I mean, when you really get into home assistant, you’ll learn all it can do but it really tells the whole system what to pull in. So if it doesn’t happen through an integration, it needs to be done the config file. So for example, all the cameras that I told you about earlier that are not o n vi f cameras, they’re just random cameras with random rtsp streams, those you need to use, like the generic camera tag, tell it the IP address, and it’s all on YAML. So it’s a yamo file editing, you’re putting that in and the documentation is fantastic. By the way, they’ve that’s what I load the whole system project is they’ve done a great job of documentation, you can find it on their official site, you know, they give examples of Hey, if I’m setting up a camera this way, this is how I would set it, which I love examples because going to help me learn how to how to work in YAML. I never worked with the ML files before, it was my first time and I actually really enjoy it, it’s actually worked out really well. But Visual Studio allows you to do that. It’s a great little add on. But when you start to get past that, so obviously that allows you to get into configuration. And you’re going to start referencing the configuration file once you get really deep with this stuff. But some of the other fun stuff you can do. Obviously, I talked about, you know, homothetic community store earlier, that doesn’t come with any version of hawza no matter how you install it. And that requires a little bit of editing to the base file system of the host. And but the great part about it is there’s an add on called Samba share, and it makes that portion shareable to your network. Now, I would always encourage you if this is on your main home network, maybe just enable it when you need it, disable it when you don’t. But I enabled it. That’s how you get the home homes as a community store. I keep that for some reason hacks, like doesn’t stick in my head, but it’s called hacks h ACS. So if you’re a home assistant user and you haven’t heard of hacks, h ACS dot XYZ, it’s also in the show notes head there. The installation process is very well documented. It gives you access to add ons that were written by the community, which are really cool for example, wise, cameras, lights, switches, those are not supported by an integration for home assistant and Some community member went out found the API for wise and wrote an add on for home assistant. And when you add that in, and then you add two lines, which is just your username and password, or the configuration file, you add those two lines in, you then have access to wise bulbs. I have a bunch of lightbulbs in my basement that I bought a long time ago. And I was like, Oh, I wasn’t able to use them before. And now I am. So different things like that are really good. So I would, I would definitely recommend getting hacks installed. So you can do stuff like that. And then know to read is like a whole nother rabbit hole gym that I have not pulled, I have no I installed it, I haven’t ready. But I know for me, that is gonna be like another 2am night because it’s such a big rabbit hole. Node red is essentially a very in depth, completely customizable, automation flow system. So if you think of visual flow of like data and how it travels from node to node, that is node red. And okay, the data is going to start at some device, it’s going to go into a switch was going to change, you know, it’s going to send it either here or here. Depending on when I said that I need to change that data into a different format for a different trigger. Like it’s very technical, but you literally the sky’s the limit on automations, when you start to play around with node red, the built in automation, I will say in homeless is really good. The graphical interface is really easy to understand. There’s been only two or three times because when you’re in the one at home assistant, they have the graphical interface, which is 99% of time great for what you’re doing. You can switch in edit it in a file format, like a text format, which helps a little bit if you’re getting a little bit nerdy on things with some code. But and then node red is even like a step beyond that. So like you have the graphical interface of home assistant for automations, which is like good for most things, then you say okay, that’s not exactly doing what I want. Let’s switch to the text format of that, which is good. Then node red is like, dude, you want to get into some stuff, you can get some stuff with Code Red, so I haven’t installed again, that’s another benefit. There’s two ways of doing it. Jim, I think you installed it a different way. I went through the add ons store and added node read it puts it because essentially, the host system when you run the VM, it runs its own Docker service within it. So all those add ons are essentially Dockers within your haseo install. But you can install all of these things externally. And Jim, I think you did node red externally in a Docker and Unraid. Yeah, correct. Yeah. Right. And pretty easy to integrate between the two. Crazy Yeah, now

Jim Collison  [47:30] 
I didn’t. I’m about as far as you are a node. Yeah. Like I just installed it and did a few checks just to kind of I was like, Okay, this is gonna be some work. But yeah, my installing Unraid is different than yours to Dockers. So well a Docker for for the core. And then I had Code Red installed. At one point, I changed some drives and lost everything and had to start over. But that was okay, because I learned some new things in the process of getting that done. And then I saw it via Docker looks identical. So very, very little difference. Yeah. If you want to, if you want. It’s kind of like the Visio. of the of the home automation world. I was like, have you ever used Microsoft Visio?

Mike Wieger  [48:12] 
And exactly what it’s like,

Jim Collison  [48:14] 
I don’t like it. Yeah, yep. Except more helpful. Right. Visio is not that helpful. From that standpoint, Mike, one of the things I want to say and he won’t want anything else you want in that in that area you want to cover before we kind of move on to some just additional considerations. Yeah,

Mike Wieger  [48:30] 
yeah, additional stuff.

Jim Collison  [48:31] 
Let me let me say it kind of in response to a little bit in the chat room, we’ve talked about a bunch of different things here. With all the digital with all this systems, you know, Google and Amazon’s and a little bit of home kit with Siri. We didn’t mention that. But we could hubitat home assistant, you don’t have to choose one. Like No, it’s an A that I don’t hear us as being like, you got to shift everything to home assistant. Each one of them has their strengths. And I do not all of them can do everything. Yep. And I think there’s even some times like I’m pretty sure somehow through Alexa up the elite that got this printer integration thing working. I’m not even sure how I did it myself for it to alert me that the the printer ink was low. For some people don’t like that. They really want one thing like cuz To be honest, it’s hard to track all these things. Yeah, let’s go offline. And you’re like, Okay, do I check the app that came with the lights? Do I check? Is it something and hubitat? Is it something in in home assistant? Do I need to check with homekit do I need right? That gets a little annoying. But you can pick whatever you want on this. Like you don’t have a war. You can have them all. I plan my hubitat stick it on the wall. I plan to keep that there’s some things I use it for this home assistance. Cool. I’m going to try it out and give it some things Digging what comes in the the ad app on my iPhone, there’s some cool things there. Google’s doing some great stuff in their app. So continue to use them all don’t hear us like, Oh, yeah, shift everything. Use the right tool for the right job. So

Mike Wieger  [50:15] 
yeah, I hope sometimes my, you know, me, everyone knows me guys, you’ve known me for a few years, I get excited about something I want to talk about, I get I get invested in it. And certain things just for some reason, hit a chord with me and in homeless isn’t did. The only the other thing about home assistant. And this would this would apply to hubitat, as well, that I liked is I always think of things in terms of my mom and dad. And here’s why my mom takes privacy pretty seriously. No smart devices in the house, no listening devices, you know, and not that it’s like, Don’t bring those things in my home. She’s like, why she was I’m good, right? Like, I’m good doing things a manual way. Not a big hurt to me. You know, so anything’s listening. And then my dad, on the other hand, is like really itching to get some automation. And so what I told him was home assistant, or hubitat. In the standpoint, I’m using home assistant, I said, Dad, you could get some stuff up and running completely locally, no voice ties, no nothing. And you would have no cloud, you know, listening devices. Now, you might have like a TP link that reaches out to the cloud, you could turn that off because of local polling as well. I said you could do a whole home automation on the land. And that was habitats big draw. And you know, so with either of those systems, if if security is something that’s really, really important to you, it’s even more of a reason, check these two things out, because you can set up now, Jim and I are both integrated devices that all have cloud access, you don’t have to even go ZigBee z wave, and nothing ever hits the Internet, and you’ll be fine. And then you don’t even expose homelessness, or how bad tat to the outside world don’t even poke a hole through your firewall or don’t do a reverse proxy like I’m doing. And you really don’t I mean, nothing is completely locked down and local to you. So that was another thing that got me intrigued was thinking, Okay, for my dad, for someone who has a spouse who really doesn’t want that kind of stuff, what what can I what would be mom approved in my world for my mom and dad. And so this was actually pretty interesting. I was like this, this could be the solution for you to add. And, and we started talking about some of the possibilities and how you really could have, you could have this. And this is also another plug to the podcast. We’ve someone recommended it in this chat. I’ve been addicted ever since self hosted a great podcast, and they have a good Discord. One of the guys on the self hosted podcast lives in an RV. And sometimes he doesn’t have internet connectivity. So what he loves about the system, the way he set it up, is he can be off grid and everything still works perfectly. It doesn’t need the cloud to access the way he has set it up his home automations his heaters in the RV, and he lives in this thing full time. All still works. So it’s just another cool way of having. Whereas you know, if you go a lady or or Google which are great, that’s not true with those. You don’t have internet, those aren’t working.

Jim Collison  [52:51] 
Yeah. And you can create conflicting rules on those. So you have to be careful, like you can set up like, when the sun comes up, turn this on. And on another one, you can say when the sun comes up, turn it off. And now you have like you have conflicting, you know, stuff going on. So I get all that like you got to kind of manage your own things so to speak for me it well then the apps there are the own individual apps have a lot of this capability that TP link, which is casa. The Casa app is pretty powerful now. And you know, I set these things up over the years, I came back to the Casa app after not looking at it for like a year. And I was like, Oh crap, like they really added some, they got there. They got their act together in this app, somewhere in the year in the last year, they release something that was actually pretty useful, you know, and you’re like, and it’s like, Well, okay, so now I’ve got the app, I have the digital assistance. I’ve got hubitat I’ve got a Dhow home assistant, I could have home kit involved in this thing as well. Oh,

Mike Wieger  [53:54] 
I’m so glad you mentioned homekit. So the other really cool thing about this is if you’re a home kit, user home kit, and home assistant, work extremely well together. And this is the cool part. So if you link home kit and home assistant, they mirror each other. So everything now there was accessible and home assistant is now available in homekit. And vice versa. So there are things that are homekit compatible that aren’t in like, you know, homes that can have access to but now that you married those two, they are which is really cool, because you know everything in iOS, especially all the automations that are super easy to set up in home kit that could be a little bit more complicated home assistant. Well, they’re going to mirror each other. So now those two are going to talk. And if you have a home pod, it’s really a very secure way of running all this because you have a home pod talking to Siri, then all of that works because your home kit and home assistant are talking and the funny part is homekit works the best with home assistant compared to a lady or Google ad and Google are very complicated to get working together. They don’t all sync nothing works homekit Home assistant and just work. It’s like they were made to be married to each other. So if you do have homekit even better to just try home assistant because it might give you a little more functionality than you had before.

Jim Collison  [55:13] 
Any resource difference between the Docker and the VM

Mike Wieger  [55:16] 
that you know, not that I know of, like I said, I ran both. I ran that Docker for what only run the Docker for a few hours, but I didn’t notice any. So on a system like Unraid, the way it works is, you know, in less that VM is utilizing 100% of the CPUs you allocated to it, and I allocated one core, then it lets other doctors use that CPU until the VM needs it. So just to let you guys know, on my system, right now, with my VM, again, I have one core. And that’s one core of an i 737 70. really old CPU, two gigs of RAM. It’s using point 3% of that core, it’s using 18% of the two gigs of RAM. And the supervisor on top of that is running 1% of that CPU core 5.7% of the RAM. And I’m only using 13.3 gig 13.3% of the 20 gigs of storage I gave it so it’s using like nothing. Now if your hypervisor just totally blocks out those CPU cores, it might be a waste. So I could see it being an argument of, well, if you run as a VM in a system that just totally locks those cores out for those VMs it’s assigned to, then yeah, you could be wasting a whole entire core on some that doesn’t even need a whole core it needs like a fraction of that core. So just depends with Unraid. There is no difference between running as a VM and a Docker.

Jim Collison  [56:36] 
Okay, yeah, well,

Mike Wieger  [56:36] 
that performance was my question.

Jim Collison  [56:39] 
I have a core i three 530, as I say on there, so the five is probably more

Mike Wieger  [56:44] 
powerful than my 737 70 we should do a CPU benchmark.

Jim Collison  [56:47] 
It’s not very sad, very powerful. And I’m running. You know, the the overall CPU load, this is everything, you know, somewhere between two and 15%. So it’s pretty, pretty light load on this. And pretty cool. Oh, hey, let me let me just, I’m not going to change the subject. But before I forget, I was watching Unraid videos this weekend, because of you.

Mike Wieger  [57:10] 
I give you fun stuff to work on.

Jim Collison  [57:12] 
And, and I just got it. I was like, you know, I seen the Space Invader videos. Nice guy. Yes. A couple years old, but they’re still very, very applicable. Yep, set up an Unraid Box for the first time. He’s got a three part series on all the apps that you needed to kind of be in there. And they’re all applicable to today. So even though they were made in 2016, they all work today. But I went down the rabbit trail, and I found a video by another guy who was talking about setting up. What was they trying to set up something else? Oh, lane cache? Oh, yeah. So I was I was watching some videos just to familiarize myself on that. He’s showing the Unraid website. Guess who’s on the front page?

Mike Wieger  [57:57] 
Is that you and me was that during that time? That’s the right. The picture of us because, you

Jim Collison  [58:03] 
know, we made the front page with Unraid for a while. I mean, they put us I think we were up there for a couple months. Yeah. And, and so I was like, yeah, this video had 70 80,000 views, you know, something like that. Maybe more. And that’s like, sweet and he it was up. It was almost up the whole video. Like it was like, it’s you. You can’t you could just see the bottom of me. I think all of Tony and all of you on that. It’s like, Oh, how nice like we made somebody else’s video. Yeah, I thought pretty cool. That is cool.

Mike Wieger  [58:36] 
We have got to get him back on.

Jim Collison  [58:38] 
Yeah. Yeah, I’ll reach out to him. I think we’ll let the release come out. And some I think they’re in bed,

Mike Wieger  [58:44] 
yet they are need to go stable. it’s needed. 35. Okay, wow.

Jim Collison  [58:50] 
Yeah, well, that’s kind of the reason I reset it my Unraid Box. It’s, I felt, okay. Don’t nobody tell him this. But I felt like, I can’t have him back on the show and be like, well, I turn the box off. You know, I was like, Okay, I need to get back into this. And then of course, it was perfect timing because you got me hooked on this, this home assistant. And then I remembered like, I’ve been pinging up against the, the, you know, my bandwidth cap. And I’m like, well, maybe I should install that that land cache and kind of help with the nine computers I have in here doing updates. We had another update yesterday. Come through or Tuesday.

Mike Wieger  [59:26] 
Have you tracked if it’s working by the way, like it’s, it’s Yeah, go

Jim Collison  [59:29] 
in there. Yeah, go in there. You can tell from this. Some of this other kinds of things. But yeah, so it’s good. It gets kind of good to have Unraid back up and running again. And, and I only have, you know, 100 gig so it’s not that big of a box. But it’s it’s been kind of good to have it up and running again.

Mike Wieger  [59:50] 
What’s funny to me is that we still haven’t obviously, we haven’t committed to enough because it’s not your main home server yet. And it I’m just like, I’m shocked you You always talk about how easy it is how great it is like, so why is it not yet Jim? Home server,

Jim Collison  [1:00:06] 
or a data box? This is drop dead simple. True, I

Mike Wieger  [1:00:10] 
forget, that’s what you’re using. And you’re right that is a it’s a really good box to use a really great box.

Jim Collison  [1:00:15] 
I just can’t write. If I was gonna, if I was a small business tech guy, and I was getting CO, like, they wanted to set up the kind of basic file storage and backup and those kinds of things. Nope, hands down. Hands down. The easiest thing, the easiest thing to administrate the easiest thing to upgrade. The easiest thing to hooked up backblaze like it is dry. Just drop dead simple. Yeah, I forgot that was your main box. Really cool technology to or stuff you don’t use, you know, because it’s basically like a terabyte of cash is what I have. Now, that’s not totally true. It’s like 800 gig. And I have two and a half three terabytes of storage that I use. So I can keep it local. I don’t need it all local, most of it is Home Gadget Geeks Episode 298. Like I don’t need 298 to be available to me. It’s somewhere local, I need right down from backblaze. But But I don’t I don’t need it here. So that’s I’m gonna I’m kind of in a special case, because I’ve got that Morrow data box, I back up the morrow data box though to the Drobo. So that gets a backup copy of it. And I think if I run if I run this in Unraid long enough, I may start sending backup copies there too. So might as well. Now we’ll see. Right now there’s not an update, not enough storage there. So with 800 gig, it’s just not enough. But great land cache. It’s going to be a great home automation device. allows me to monkey around with the drives. Yep. So yeah, no, it’s a super cool mic. Any other considerations on home assistant? Anything else we missed? Oh,

Mike Wieger  [1:01:55] 
man. Um, I mean, just know, though, like, anytime you get into one of these, there’s always gonna be things that break or don’t work, for example, it one of my TP link smart switches, and it’s a known issue and they’re working it out. Hopefully, we have a fixed to the integration. Everything works great with TP link. My eight my Hs 220, which is the dimmable wall switch can’t be discovered by the integration. I think there are some ways you can do it manually. There seems some things you can edit, but all the things I was reading, they’re trying to get it just built into the integration. So I said, You know what, I don’t, I can wait. It works. It still works great with a lady works great with Google. So I’m still fine. I’m glad I put it in. But you know, there’s gonna be little things that just drive you absolutely nuts. And there’s going to be a lot of the configuration stuff. You know, we talked about it being a clean UI. And it really is and getting up and running is good. When you start to get deeper, you’re going to break things a lot like my automations there. One of them took me forever because it would not fire. Turns out you know, it’s because simply save is a cloud polling. And they don’t allow a lot of polls so it does it like every 30 seconds. So I would say open the door and turn the living room lights. That’s how I tried to do it the first time was instead of my garage door, it was simply safe. And I would open it doesn’t like why isn’t this working? And it would try it and I it took me forever to figure out it was just because when you look in home assistant, I would go then I’ll go to the computer by then it had been past 30 seconds as I go, yeah, it executed or whatever or something was breaking. So just be patient, you know it the confusing part to me was it looks really polished. And it is, but there’s still a lot behind the scenes to do and things that you know might break. And they update all the time. And you know, there are things that will work fine. And also one day your integration just your automation will work. And but it but it makes it kind of fun. But don’t expect this don’t expect it to be like a home kit, an A lady, a Google where you know those products, they work pretty well. Right? Like when they work they work and they’re pretty polished. It’s not what you’re gonna get. Yeah, there might be a random update and all sudden when your automation doesn’t work.

Jim Collison  [1:04:04] 
I set it up in an hour. Like Yeah, I had everything up and running and and like oh, and then you know, I had to push the button for my Philips you found it found all the TP link devices just right off the bat, which made me worry a little bit like maybe those things are too open. Now they’re on the network. Okay, to be fair, it’s all on the network. It’s all on the local LAN.

Mike Wieger  [1:04:27] 
So well actually that was finding with TP link in the UK. So then in the UK TP link issued a new firmware and they actually closed down port, I think it was 999 or maybe 9000 199. One of those ports. They had open for that kind of stuff and they actually closed it because someone I found a vulnerability was in the whole home assistant community out in Europe freaked out because then it wasn’t local polling anymore. And it broke that connection wasn’t working. And TP link didn’t realize how many people utilize that. Like Home assistant things like third party apps that actually are authentic that people like. And so they’re now in freakout mode. Currently, they have a beta firmware version that if you go to their forums, and you message them and you give them their MAC address, they will send that device via the cloud, a beta firmware that opens back up the board. This is all in the UK. I found this out. I thought that was the reason my Hs 220 wasn’t working. So I ping them in it. And they said, actually, you’re in the US. That’s only a UK issue. So you you should be fine. I was like,

Jim Collison  [1:05:34] 
Oh, okay. Yeah, there’s still those, those little, those little things, you’re going to find one thing you bought, that’s not going to integrate. It’s gonna drive you crazy. Yeah, I Mike, I just standardized on a set of plugs. from, you know, TP link. Yeah. Right.

Mike Wieger  [1:05:51] 
They’re great.

Jim Collison  [1:05:52] 
They are great plugs, and I threw the other ones out. I mean, I you literally just smash them, because I don’t want to, I don’t be tempted to use them again. It’s not because I’m trying to protect myself, although it’s probably a smart idea to, but just smash them because I don’t use them again, because they’re panic. You know, I always think, oh, I’ll just put it in this corner. Nobody will ever use it, it’d be a great thing. And then, you know, causes all kinds of problems on the network. Mm hmm. You know, I mentioned last week my the TP link. No, the D link cameras that we’ve been using, are causing tons of Wi Fi interference interference on my network, right. And we’re causing the ring cameras to go so I took those down and took them off all week, because they’re still sitting right here. All week. I’ve been like, maybe I’ll buy another wireless router. Right? You start coming up with excuses, right? Yeah. Boy, could they’re just sitting there I could be using them. You know, maybe I’ll no a no clap. I fight for shed and then I you know, Australia, like, you come up with all kinds of stupid things. Although that’s actually a really good idea, just to be honest. And, you know, a tunnel, I’ll send a, I’ll send a signal from the house out to the shed, and we’ll receive it and then I’ll have a separate VLAN out there. That’s crazy. Don’t do that, Jim. So good. A good thing. I think when we’re replacing some of these, if you have a really old gear, it’s probably time to upgrade it, just to be honest. Like, you know, if you had an old switch, I got switches for $7. Don’t buy them now. Don’t buy right now. Like it’s Christmas time. No, they’re probably not gonna find the deal. The deals, January might be a whole different story. And that may be the time to actually replace things. You go the switch route, I go the I go the plug route, we get to the same you know, in a lot of cases, we get to the same result, we just do it different ways. Because the way my home is set up, I

Mike Wieger  [1:07:45] 
Oh, I have a ton of those plugs to like I just repurpose them because I have them for all the RFI devices. We talked about that I have mold for the Christmas tree and all the Christmas thing I have six or seven of those plugs. And then three of the switches those switches By the way, right now if you go on Amazon are on sale for a single pole TP link smart switch 13 bucks.

Jim Collison  [1:08:06] 
Not bad. Yeah. And the plugs that I bought, I bought a three pack for 21 bucks. Now that they’re not available right now, but they are the seven bucks each. It’s a pretty good way to get into the plug there. They are dropped dead simple to set up. I just it made my heart leap a little bit when I plugged them in and the phone found it and I was like three things in the app and it was ready.

Mike Wieger  [1:08:31] 
And then they finish open home assistant everywhere.

Jim Collison  [1:08:34] 
The next day I talked to the lady. She was like, Hey, I found some new things. Do you want to put them in? Yeah, as they do. Thank you. So you know a lot a lot of great automation to two things I haven’t been able to get work and both of them are go V and I don’t think they’re going to work. I looked into the home assistant integration. I’ve got the govi pivot, which is a 360 degree pivot camera that that I haven’t currently have in the garage. And it’s it’s a Wi Fi it’s Wi Fi enabled but not rtsp and gobies got some really no no that’s not a goby. That’s a shoot. Now that’s escaping me. Not not working. I they’re gonna do some digging on that guy. I’d really love the guy of the go V for for the for the candles. But I keep that to keep down here. So I have a govi hemostat down there. Oh, yeah.

Mike Wieger  [1:09:32] 
Can you pull that into home assistant?

Jim Collison  [1:09:34] 
Oh, not that I figured I still need to figure it out. Didn’t I looked at it no native integration for it. Because Yeah, that’d be great. Right? Now, today. You know, today I have today I have it set up on a this is a seven inch fire tablet. And it’s kind of just a dedicated coffee monitor. It’s it’s on my Yeah, cuz it Just a terrible tablet. These are,

Mike Wieger  [1:10:02] 
that could be a great dashboard for home assistant.

Jim Collison  [1:10:04] 
All right. Now that these things are slower than anything, they’re just awful no memory in them. They’re just terrible. But they make great monitors for apps, and that kind of stuff. The other the other thing is the the I grill, you know, put this on their kit, carry it up. But if it makes a great monitor for the outro I, by the way, I put the meter thermistor, the temperature probes on my Christmas list. So I’m kind of hoping Santa brings me some Wi Fi enabled temperature probes. Right now those have both the meter right under are they called? meter meter? Yep. meter. And they the the ones I asked for the ones that have the probe both inside and outside. So you put it in and it measures the ambient temperature around the meat. And the meat temperature. It’s great. Oh, heaven.

Mike Wieger  [1:10:55] 
Yeah. And I just found Jim govi. You can get it in if you had the config file.

Jim Collison  [1:11:00] 
Well, okay, so maybe that’s my chore this weekend is because I didn’t I wanted to set it up completely standard To start with, like,

Mike Wieger  [1:11:09] 
when you might, like I said, it’s all in the App Data folder, huge prizes, go and edit the animal. Oh, you.

Jim Collison  [1:11:15] 
But then you’re like, Oh, yeah, you could do this and that you say words that don’t make any sense? And I’m like, No, you’re like, easy. And then I hear is want want want want want to hear? Do you

Mike Wieger  [1:11:26] 
have the ability to once I wanna see where this is that

Jim Collison  [1:11:30] 
we do this? But it is, in my mind. It’s customization as opposed to kind of standard out of the box average guy stuff. Yeah. Ryan says he has some goofy smart bulbs, I had to go Be smart, bold that I had to just destroy it because it just was not doing what I wanted to do. They have intermittent connection issues. This one had intermittent lighting issues. So it would not. I bought it that to have a motion sensor just in the bottom of it. It wasn’t smart. It didn’t work very well. So I bought two one worked great. The other didn’t work very well. So I just tossed it. And that’s what I put that I put that you know that three, that fan that led fan that’s looks that’s like, yeah, I put that I put that out there. I still have to buy the adapter. I’m kind of waiting until I can find an adapter. That’s not a Chinese company that I’ve never heard of before. So I’m kind of waiting, like I’m waiting for you or somebody else

Mike Wieger  [1:12:27] 
to put on. If I go black, it’s because I bought all those sensors from AliExpress. And my whole network got hacked and everything.

Jim Collison  [1:12:36] 
Like he never even existed. Yeah, he’s completely gone.

All the podcasts I have done them with somebody, it’s not you though. They’ll have disappeared, replaced all that all that video. How great would that be? Anything else for a wrap it?

Mike Wieger  [1:12:51] 
No, I mean, it this will be something we you know, will always this is obviously I’ve only had a scene for a week. So Jim. So if we find cool stuff, we’ll give you guys updates, obviously, but we want to give you one show it really diving deep of you know, just giving you an option. But I think it’s just important echo Jim said earlier, right? Like we’ve done an episode with hubitat, we don’t have a home assistant, we love a lady, I have a million ala devices, like play around all of them, use all of them, we’re always gonna, you know, give you the pros and cons. But it’s never meant that one’s better or worse than the others.

Jim Collison  [1:13:22] 
Hey, you probably didn’t know this Windows has a ring app. That’s actually pretty good. Now it hasn’t been updated in like four years. But it does what it’s supposed to do. Like maybe it’s better that it hasn’t been updated. Like they wrote it haven’t broken, wrote it, it works. You can go in, you know, so I just set the app up on a screen. And it’s showing me every time I get a new picture, you know, and I have them refreshing about every 30 minutes or whatever that whatever that is. And so when I get an alert on my watch that there’s a new ring notification, I just go over and click on it because this replace sighthound for me, click on it and it immediately just goes to the live view, which is exactly what I tried to do on the phone. Doesn’t it doesn’t know the ring the bell has to ring app is actually really helpful except for that. Like, by the time you hear something. You pick up your phone, you get the voice or you get the face ID. You find the ring, you go find the notification, click on it. It’s there. It’s gone. They’re long gone. Like it doesn’t make any sense. They’ve rang the doorbell and knitted a sweater in the time. You get to them right on the phone. This now I don’t have a mic setup. So I couldn’t but if I did, I could use the Windows app click through. I’m there within five seconds. I’m on video and audio and they can hear me. I don’t have a mic setup, but they could. So that’s one of those weird things. You’re like, Oh my god, this is a Windows Store app hasn’t been updated since 2016. And it’s actually good. You’re like okay, that’s interesting. anticipated that happening. But I think that goes, we’re just in that space where you know, it’s good in some spots and not good in others. And the ecosystems have not necessarily come together. It’s good for us that they don’t. And so because it gives us some stuff to talk about, right. So, you know, Mike, to what you said, continue to experiment, I’m sure. We’re gonna hear a lot about home assistant and other things coming up. Because we’re, this is now fueled the fire for more of those conversations. So for sure,

Mike Wieger  [1:15:33] 
and as an example of maybe an automation that I need to alter, Hannah must have just gone to bed and told a lady at night because everything just went dark here. It’s a little scary, because they’re the only lights I have on it right in front of me. Someone could be right next, I wouldn’t know right now. Because all the lights just went black in my basement. screwed into the wand.

Jim Collison  [1:15:48] 
Do you guys still use the wand? No. Well,

Mike Wieger  [1:15:50] 
we know we had that in one area. But this is just in the bedroom.

Jim Collison  [1:15:55] 
My battery died on the wind and we never set it back up again. It just hasn’t been needed. Because I literally have coverage everywhere. Now.

Mike Wieger  [1:16:03] 
It’s in my garage is where it’s at.

Jim Collison  [1:16:05] 
I bought the what’s the small ones called that.

Mike Wieger  [1:16:09] 
That’s what I need for the garage. They need that so I can get rid of the

Jim Collison  [1:16:11] 
locks in the garage flex in the team room. There’s a show five in the living room, there’s a show five in the kitchen. There’s one that we have the original in our bedroom. I’ve got the one of the other ones in the other bedroom, that it’s covered.

Mike Wieger  [1:16:26] 
I mean, it’s it’s super unfortunate that Amazon and Google gotten that feud A while ago. And they got rid of the YouTube app. Because I was such a I was a fire TV user. I don’t know how many fire TVs I have in the story are probably five that I did I pull it all out because I got so mad. Because all I do is watch YouTube, and now with YouTube TV. But it was perfect because I had an A lady in a room and it knew which Fire TV was in that room. And you didn’t have to tell it what to play it on. You just said a lady open Hulu and play the show. And it was like boop. And it just showed up. I missed that so much. I think my wife does too. But I don’t know if YouTube’s back on amazon fire. If it is. I think you get it through the browser.

Jim Collison  [1:17:08] 
Yeah, see, you can open the browser and I’ll take any.

Mike Wieger  [1:17:10] 
How are you having a media device? They can’t play YouTube? Like?

Jim Collison  [1:17:14] 
Yeah, Ryan says he recommends the rapid ring app fast. Okay,

Mike Wieger  [1:17:19] 
on mobile or on PC? Brian? I would think so too.

Jim Collison  [1:17:25] 
Well, a couple reminders before we go on if you support the show, and I always appreciate those

Mike Wieger  [1:17:30] 
that they both recommended it right the same time.

Jim Collison  [1:17:33] 
I stopped guys, if you if you want to support the show, other than just come out listening to it. And that’s actually all I ask just you know, come out, listen to us, or download us. Whatever you do appreciate you guys. You can do that https://theAverageGuy.tv/Patreon. Next week, Ryan and Bob from thing computers.org are going to be here we’re going to talk about builds. So Mike CPU and GPU markets right now. Not so yes. So we’re gonna get the lowdown those are two guys that are in that space a lot. And Ryan is working. You know, we did some cooling. We did a cooling segment, the last time he was on. He was showing some things on the show last night that were just around cooling that were just ridiculous. Like it’s like, wow. So those guys are coming on here next week. I think that’s the third. No, it’s the 17th. And we’d love to have you come out and join that conversation. If you’re thinking about doing a build in the next month or two. That many guys do that anymore. But if you’re thinking about it, come out and join us. Even if you’re not thinking about it come out Join us next week. Bob Ryan coming on. If you want to join Mike mentioned the discord channel quite a bit if you want to join us there https://theAverageGuy.tv/Discord. Do you want to leave a message for us? I think this is working again. Home Gadget Geeks comm Mike. See if you can go to Home Gadget Geeks comm right now on talking. And there’s a microphone button in the bottom right hand corner. For some reason when I needed it the most. I think that’s because a whole bunch of people went there to try to leave messages on pages. I was agent since over on the right hand side down on the bottom. There’s a little microphone, click it 32nd voicemail. You had a question you want to leave us some feedback. You got a comment? I might even take a good Baba booey if somebody was on a movie, right so head over to the Home Gadget Geeks calm and leave that voicemail we’ll play him here on the show and the better I maybe the crazier the but I shouldn’t say that. Leave us normal messages.

Mike Wieger  [1:19:26] 
I want the crazy ones you can see you can put those into they’ll just come straight to me. Love Debbie comments. You

Jim Collison  [1:19:31] 
heard one show last week we can do it works pretty well. When Jim pushes the right buttons. Okay. You can contact the show via email Jim at the average guy.tv find me on Twitter at j Carlson at Wieger tech for that guy across from me. If you want to join the Facebook group, it’s https://theAverageGuy.tv/Facebook super easy to remember. Don’t forget the TheAverageGuy.TV powered both web and media hosting by Maple Grove Partners get secure reliable high speed hosting and that you from from somebody you know and trust. https://MapleGrovePartners.com. If you need a domain, you can support the show. By heading out to https://theAverageGuy.tv/hover, Mike I do these ads. And then like, during while I’m doing them, nobody ever uses them. And I always think this was stupid. Then as soon as I stopped doing them, everybody starts using them. It’s the weirdest thing I’m getting. I’ve been getting a bunch of Otter subscription, you know, because I talked about Otter on the show. I know, three months ago, yeah, you know, and lately, every week, I’ve been getting a free 100 hours of Otter because somebody signed up using your link. I was like, that was three months ago. kind of crazy. So

Mike Wieger  [1:20:37] 
tell me when to use a gym all use it when you’re not talking about okay. I mean, you’re the boss. You don’t tell me when to use things.

Jim Collison  [1:20:45] 
And so we appreciate you guys doing that as well during the holidays. If you’re struggling to eat, of course, if you’re struggling to figure out what you’re going to eat, like life changing, life changing. Hello, I must have been a while since you’ve talked about hellofresh I also just to see what you got all kinds of codes contact me Jim@TheAverageGuy.TV want to try it free for a week. I don’t even think that’s the deal anymore. I think they like I think the New Deal is like to get like $120 off but it has to be spread out over like six weeks or eight weeks or something. And or I have just a $40 plan $40 off any of the plans we make 20 over here at the show. So either way, whatever you want to do if you want to if you want to give it a try. hellofresh just send me an email Jim@theAverageGuy.tv I’ll send you a code. We are live every Thursday. 8pm Central nine Eastern here https://theAverageGuy.tv/live. Thanks for joining us live time for everybody. Brian and Andrew. Joe. Ken was out there a little bit earlier Dave was out there. In fact, Dave said great nerdy episode very it was kind of nerdy kind of nice to get back to some nerdery Yeah. Other than that jackassery that we did last week. Live Thursday nights 8pm Central 90s chronometer, https://theAverageGuy.tv/live. Thanks for joining us stay around for a little bit of post show. With that, we’ll say goodbye everybody

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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