Smart Home

Podcast

Email, Atmos, and LiDAR...Oh My! — Mac Geek Gab 907

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

You know what happens when your two favorite geeks get together, don’t you? Geeky talk about all kinds of things AND answers to all your questions. Listen as Dave and John help solve your email filtering issues, your Atmos setup, your house-cleaning needs, and more… all while ensuring everyone listening learns at least five new things. Press play…and enjoy this final episode of 2021!

Podcast

Opening All The Doors – Mac Geek Gab 904

John F. Braun & Dave Hamilton · · Add Comment

A big part of keeping your computer running is troubleshooting the *right* things, and that’s not always easy to discern. It often requires opening all the wrong doors before you find the right one to pass through en route to your solution. Listen today as Dave and John share some troubleshooting tips about Dolby Atmos, AirPods, Notifications, Backing up iCloud Drive, the Terminal, and more. Of course, your two favorite geeks also share your (and their!) Quick Tips, Cool Stuff Found, and more. Press play and enjoy learning five new things together!

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Roomba Delivers On Its Promise to End Pet Poo Disasters

Jeff Butts · · 2 Comments

We’ve seen the videos, those tragic tales of robot vacuum cleaners leaving a trail of puppy poop behind. For all of their AI technology, they simply don’t recognize one fact. Some messes just won’t vacuum up neatly. Your robotic cleaning device ends up doing more harm than good. Roomba maker iRobot says they’ve nipped the problem in the bud. A writer at Daily Paws put this to the test. In her testing, the latest Roomba j7+ really does have the digital smarts to avoid pet messes.

I came home late from work one night to see that my elderly Chihuahua had missed the wee pad by a good bit and left her own dollop of poop on my kitchen floor. I had scheduled the Roomba for a run that was set to begin in a few minutes, so instead of cleaning up the accident myself, I decided to see what the j7+ would do.

It expertly avoided my pup’s poop. I was absolutely in awe. Once again, after the clean, the iRobot app asked me if this was a temporary obstacle, and I confirmed.

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New 'BotenaGo' Targets Routers and Smart Home Devices in Devastating Attack

Andrew Orr · · 2 Comments

AT&T Alien Labs discovered malware it dubs BotenaGo. It affects millions of routers and Internet of Things devices found with smart homes. The “devastating” part comes from the fact that it uses over 30 separate exploits due to insecure devices.

The BotenaGo malware starts by initializing global infection counters that will be printed to the screen, informing the hacker about total successful infections. It then looks for the ‘dlrs’ folder in which to load shell scripts files. A loaded script will be concatenated as ‘echo -ne %s >> ‘. If the ‘dlrs’ folder is missing, the malware will stop and exit at this point. For the last and most important preparation, the malware calls the function ‘scannerInitExploits’, which initiates the malware attack surface by mapping all offensive functions with its relevant string that represent the targeted system.

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Could Apple Make Major Smart Home Moves in 2022?

Charlotte Henry · · 3 Comments

As we go hurtling towards the holiday season, it’s always exciting to look at what might come next. Dan Moren has written a very astute take at what Apple might do in 2022 for Macworld. His look at the moves the company could make in the smart home market is particularly interesting.

Apple’s had a challenging couple years in the home space. It’s discontinued its full-size HomePod in favor of the smaller HomePod mini, and while it’s ramped up support for the upcoming Matter initiative that aims to interconnect smart home devices across manufacturers, that really won’t kick off in earnest until next year. But word of a “homeOS” project reared its head once again this week, after a mention in an Apple job posting. The term had cropped up earlier this year, ahead of the Worldwide Developers Conference, but nothing more was heard of it until now. It could suggest a more in-depth investment in smart home tech for Apple, and, combined with a recent hire to oversee HomePod software might mean the company is reinvigorating development in that area.