The fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat was announced and is available for preorders.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat features a new display, a new interface in the Home app, and a lot of saying it’s packed full of AI.

Having recently suffered through an AI-driven thermostat that couldn’t understand that I was on chemo, had lost all my hair, and just wanted to set and maintain a temperature above 62 in the winter, let me tell you how well the AI worked previously. Not very.

A “not smart” mode is not listed, but one can hope there will be ways to just lock the temperature and get around all the smart controls when you need to just set it and forget it and maintain. We can also hope that Google Location Services that work with the Home / Away assist will be fixed at some point and I won’t have to keep turning on the AC when Kim gets home because her phone only works 1/3rd of the time for home/away assist.

The new design looks nice, but in the end it’s a thermostat you can control based on a number of conditions and I don’t see a lot of reason to be excited.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat is available to pre-order in Silver, Black, and Gold for $279.99 in the Google Store.

Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat available for pre-orders by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Google is finally giving us another Nest Learning Thermostat. It's a long-overdue update, with the current generation now nine years old. Rumors say the 4th version of Google's smart thermostat will cost nearly $300, a price that, only a few years ago, I'd only dream of paying for a thermostat if it crooned me lullabies at night or offered a J.A.R.V.I.S-level administrative assistance.

T-Mobile used to be the people's champ of carriers, with many happily overlooking its second-rate service for its user-first policies. But as the company continues building out its 5G service very successfully, to be fair it has gotten away from its "un-carrier" roots and made some questionable decisions. This week, it signaled that its clunky T-Mobile Tuesdays rebrand was a mistake by effectively killing off the brand-new T Life app, and now the carrier's beloved perks program has found a new home.

I have a few (60) faces stored in my Nest cameras Familiar Face Detection area. It’s kind of nice to get a notification that our friends are at the door by name and have it announced “Connor is at the door” but a couple of days ago my 8yo got identified as a late 30’s bald friend of ours walking from the car to the front door, and later on was identified as her mom.

In the past I’ve gone in and cleaned out a couple of entries to clear these up. Sometimes five or six photos had slipped in to one contact. Yesterday it was over 100 photos on 45 of the 60 recognized faces, and usually was page after page of my youngest daughter. I cleared out over 250 photos of her on one contact alone.

In all cases the photos started around June of 2023, which to be honest may have been the last time I did any sort of cleanup. I cleared several thousand photos of her and one photo that was comically inaccurate of a friend being mistaken for a UPS driver who looked so much not like him I don’t know how to even start.

My oldest, who has presumably been on the cameras as much as my youngest had a couple of photos misrecognized, but I suspect over all of the ones I cleared out there were maybe 6 of her and 4500 or so of my youngest.

She had been misidentified as a 30-something black man, an 80 year old white woman, a bald man with face tattoos, her mom, her sister, me, our pest control guys, and every single friend of hers.

I start wondering if this might be an evolutionary trait she’s developed to camouflage herself from the machines.

This is not life threatening, but it is kind of nice being alerted that the someone in my yard is the person I am hoping in is my yard.

Moral? Check and see if your child is a chameleon on familiar faces. These can be found, if you use them, by opening the home app, choosing a camera, Settings, Events, Seen events, and under Familiar Face Detection choose manage.

Yesterday I discovered my kid’s face in almost every single Nest familiar face detection entry I had by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

I have a few (60) faces stored in my Nest cameras Familiar Face Detection area. It’s kind of nice to get a notification that our friends are at the door by name and have it announced “Connor is at the door” but a couple of days ago my 8yo got identified as a late 30’s bald friend of ours walking from the car to the front door, and later on was identified as her mom.

In the past I’ve gone in and cleaned out a couple of entries to clear these up. Sometimes five or six photos had slipped in to one contact. Yesterday it was over 100 photos on 45 of the 60 recognized faces, and usually was page after page of my youngest daughter. I cleared out over 250 photos of her on one contact alone.

In all cases the photos started around June of 2023, which to be honest may have been the last time I did any sort of cleanup. I cleared several thousand photos of her and one photo that was comically inaccurate of a friend being mistaken for a UPS driver who looked so much not like him I don’t know how to even start.

My oldest, who has presumably been on the cameras as much as my youngest had a couple of photos misrecognized, but I suspect over all of the ones I cleared out there were maybe 6 of her and 4500 or so of my youngest.

She had been misidentified as a 30-something black man, an 80 year old white woman, a bald man with face tattoos, her mom, her sister, me, our pest control guys, and every single friend of hers.

I start wondering if this might be an evolutionary trait she’s developed to camouflage herself from the machines.

This is not life threatening, but it is kind of nice being alerted that the someone in my yard is the person I am hoping in is my yard.

Moral? Check and see if your child is a chameleon on familiar faces. These can be found, if you use them, by opening the home app, choosing a camera, Settings, Events, Seen events, and under Familiar Face Detection choose manage.

Yesterday I discovered my kid’s face in almost every single Nest familiar face detection entry I had by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

I have a few (60) faces stored in my Nest cameras Familiar Face Detection area. It’s kind of nice to get a notification that our friends are at the door by name and have it announced “Connor is at the door” but a couple of days ago my 8yo got identified as a late 30’s bald friend of ours walking from the car to the front door, and later on was identified as her mom.

In the past I’ve gone in and cleaned out a couple of entries to clear these up. Sometimes five or six photos had slipped in to one contact. Yesterday it was over 100 photos on 45 of the 60 recognized faces, and usually was page after page of my youngest daughter. I cleared out over 250 photos of her on one contact alone.

In all cases the photos started around June of 2023, which to be honest may have been the last time I did any sort of cleanup. I cleared several thousand photos of her and one photo that was comically inaccurate of a friend being mistaken for a UPS driver who looked so much not like him I don’t know how to even start.

My oldest, who has presumably been on the cameras as much as my youngest had a couple of photos misrecognized, but I suspect over all of the ones I cleared out there were maybe 6 of her and 4500 or so of my youngest.

She had been misidentified as a 30-something black man, an 80 year old white woman, a bald man with face tattoos, her mom, her sister, me, our pest control guys, and every single friend of hers.

I start wondering if this might be an evolutionary trait she’s developed to camouflage herself from the machines.

This is not life threatening, but it is kind of nice being alerted that the someone in my yard is the person I am hoping in is my yard.

Moral? Check and see if your child is a chameleon on familiar faces. These can be found, if you use them, by opening the home app, choosing a camera, Settings, Events, Seen events, and under Familiar Face Detection choose manage.

Yesterday I discovered my kid’s face in almost every single Nest familiar face detection entry I had by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

I got an unexpected credit from Google for my two nightblind Nest Cam IQs. They were well out of warranty and I suspect that someone decided that being as I have a blog with ten of readers perhaps extending an olive branch would be a nice thing to do. It was. I’m not sure if I mentioned it in the previous article but these cameras are expected to live 5-8 years and mine lived 5 years and 3 months (for one) and probably right under 5 years for the second one. They lived as expected and I suspect started their night vision issues when we had temperatures near or below zero for a few days.

The credit, along with my credit from some Pixel purchase and discount for being a Google One subscriber ended up getting me their three pack bundle of the battery camera I’ve never been particularly fond of. I’m mostly not fond of it because attempting to export video clips is just a pain in the butt and handing things over to the police or a neighbor it’s easier if I just capture my screen and then post it on YouTube for them.

They didn’t have to extend the olive branch. I’ve dedicated quite a bit of my time to reviewing (unfavorably) their Nest WiFi and subsequent customer service interactions where I was told that the most generic and standard internet connection was in fact very strange and I needed to put my fiber modem, or work network, into a different mode. (Psst. I review Wi-Fi here as well as other stuff, I know what I’m doing. It wasn’t a complex network.)

I will be going three more cameras into the Google ecosystem. My night blind cameras still work perfectly fine for basic daytime use and I think I’m going to bring them to the office inside and create some grand and terrible experiment utilizing the known faces feature.

While it’s true I would not purchase their new cameras with the current software, I’m pretty much locked into the Google Ecosystem from the other cameras and as such this was a pretty cool thing on Google’s part to do.

So yeah, thanks Google. I mean it.

On to the creepy stuff however… and it may be just me as I suspect there’s a database of bloggers who have received Google’s sweet deep kiss and complained loudly about it (free stuff,) they contacted me on my personal email. There are ways to find it on Pocketables, but still a bit unexpected. My Nest Cams IQ that failed however were not free stuff, they were me wanting to play in the Nest playground since I really did love the thermostat.

I don’t have exact stats, but in the five years I’ve had the cameras I’ve been contacted by the police three times for events that went on at the apartment buildings across the street, recorded a shootout between idiots at a car dealership 500 feet from my kid’s bedroom.

recorded idiots shooting at a parked car who were actually caught by the police because the police were in a parking lot filling out paperwork 200 feet away, recorded my youngest attempting to run into traffic (she claims she didn’t, I’ve got video,) caught a cat vandal (below)

Watched as FedEx destroyed my lawn and left $500 of packages in the middle of the yard in the rain, watched as an army of slugs made a mass migration across my front yard to the neighbors, and caught video of a crazy man leaving a threatening note in the neighbor’s mailbox.

I’ve had video of people probably checking out whether they thought they could steal packages without being caught, mailbox thieves, missing animals, etc.

The Nest Cam IQs really served their purpose, and the rest of the Nest family of cameras has served to keep my kids honest, figure out what jacket they lost at school, and check in on the cats from time to time. The doorbell, well that’s been kind of a disappointment but that’s a different story.

I’m glad I’ve had them. I am going to miss the Nest Cam IQs software (Nest app)… hopefully they’ll get the Google Home app/webpage up to the level that the Nest app was six years ago… I can hope that it’s not another Google abandoned project.

And finally, while I made a joke about being in an abusive relationship with Google, if you’re in an abusive relationship be it with a corporate monopoly or a terrible partner, seek help and get out. Life is too freaking precious to let something as valuable as you are be abused.

Maybe this time Google won’t beat me… they’ve changed, Donnie… they swear they’ve changed! by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Whether your Google Nest Thermostat is new or you recently changed your network settings, you must connect your smart thermostat to Wi-Fi to take advantage of its wireless features. It isn't hard to connect Nest smart home devices to your network with help from your phone. The easy setup is one of the reasons Google's Nest Thermostat made it onto our list of the best smart home devices.

I got an unexpected credit from Google for my two nightblind Nest Cam IQs. They were well out of warranty and I suspect that someone decided that being as I have a blog with ten of readers perhaps extending an olive branch would be a nice thing to do. It was. I’m not sure if I mentioned it in the previous article but these cameras are expected to live 5-8 years and mine lived 5 years and 3 months (for one) and probably right under 5 years for the second one. They lived as expected and I suspect started their night vision issues when we had temperatures near or below zero for a few days.

The credit, along with my credit from some Pixel purchase and discount for being a Google One subscriber ended up getting me their three pack bundle of the battery camera I’ve never been particularly fond of. I’m mostly not fond of it because attempting to export video clips is just a pain in the butt and handing things over to the police or a neighbor it’s easier if I just capture my screen and then post it on YouTube for them.

They didn’t have to extend the olive branch. I’ve dedicated quite a bit of my time to reviewing (unfavorably) their Nest WiFi and subsequent customer service interactions where I was told that the most generic and standard internet connection was in fact very strange and I needed to put my fiber modem, or work network, into a different mode. (Psst. I review Wi-Fi here as well as other stuff, I know what I’m doing. It wasn’t a complex network.)

I will be going three more cameras into the Google ecosystem. My night blind cameras still work perfectly fine for basic daytime use and I think I’m going to bring them to the office inside and create some grand and terrible experiment utilizing the known faces feature.

While it’s true I would not purchase their new cameras with the current software, I’m pretty much locked into the Google Ecosystem from the other cameras and as such this was a pretty cool thing on Google’s part to do.

So yeah, thanks Google. I mean it.

On to the creepy stuff however… and it may be just me as I suspect there’s a database of bloggers who have received Google’s sweet deep kiss and complained loudly about it (free stuff,) they contacted me on my personal email. There are ways to find it on Pocketables, but still a bit unexpected. My Nest Cams IQ that failed however were not free stuff, they were me wanting to play in the Nest playground since I really did love the thermostat.

I don’t have exact stats, but in the five years I’ve had the cameras I’ve been contacted by the police three times for events that went on at the apartment buildings across the street, recorded a shootout between idiots at a car dealership 500 feet from my kid’s bedroom.

recorded idiots shooting at a parked car who were actually caught by the police because the police were in a parking lot filling out paperwork 200 feet away, recorded my youngest attempting to run into traffic (she claims she didn’t, I’ve got video,) caught a cat vandal (below)

Watched as FedEx destroyed my lawn and left $500 of packages in the middle of the yard in the rain, watched as an army of slugs made a mass migration across my front yard to the neighbors, and caught video of a crazy man leaving a threatening note in the neighbor’s mailbox.

I’ve had video of people probably checking out whether they thought they could steal packages without being caught, mailbox thieves, missing animals, etc.

The Nest Cam IQs really served their purpose, and the rest of the Nest family of cameras has served to keep my kids honest, figure out what jacket they lost at school, and check in on the cats from time to time. The doorbell, well that’s been kind of a disappointment but that’s a different story.

I’m glad I’ve had them. I am going to miss the Nest Cam IQs software (Nest app)… hopefully they’ll get the Google Home app/webpage up to the level that the Nest app was six years ago… I can hope that it’s not another Google abandoned project.

And finally, while I made a joke about being in an abusive relationship with Google, if you’re in an abusive relationship be it with a corporate monopoly or a terrible partner, seek help and get out. Life is too freaking precious to let something as valuable as you are be abused.

Maybe this time Google won’t beat me… they’ve changed, Donnie… they swear they’ve changed! by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

I got an unexpected credit from Google for my two nightblind Nest Cam IQs. They were well out of warranty and I suspect that someone decided that being as I have a blog with ten of readers perhaps extending an olive branch would be a nice thing to do. It was. I’m not sure if I mentioned it in the previous article but these cameras are expected to live 5-8 years and mine lived 5 years and 3 months (for one) and probably right under 5 years for the second one. They lived as expected and I suspect started their night vision issues when we had temperatures near or below zero for a few days.

The credit, along with my credit from some Pixel purchase and discount for being a Google One subscriber ended up getting me their three pack bundle of the battery camera I’ve never been particularly fond of. I’m mostly not fond of it because attempting to export video clips is just a pain in the butt and handing things over to the police or a neighbor it’s easier if I just capture my screen and then post it on YouTube for them.

They didn’t have to extend the olive branch. I’ve dedicated quite a bit of my time to reviewing (unfavorably) their Nest WiFi and subsequent customer service interactions where I was told that the most generic and standard internet connection was in fact very strange and I needed to put my fiber modem, or work network, into a different mode. (Psst. I review Wi-Fi here as well as other stuff, I know what I’m doing. It wasn’t a complex network.)

I will be going three more cameras into the Google ecosystem. My night blind cameras still work perfectly fine for basic daytime use and I think I’m going to bring them to the office inside and create some grand and terrible experiment utilizing the known faces feature.

While it’s true I would not purchase their new cameras with the current software, I’m pretty much locked into the Google Ecosystem from the other cameras and as such this was a pretty cool thing on Google’s part to do.

So yeah, thanks Google. I mean it.

On to the creepy stuff however… and it may be just me as I suspect there’s a database of bloggers who have received Google’s sweet deep kiss and complained loudly about it (free stuff,) they contacted me on my personal email. There are ways to find it on Pocketables, but still a bit unexpected. My Nest Cams IQ that failed however were not free stuff, they were me wanting to play in the Nest playground since I really did love the thermostat.

I don’t have exact stats, but in the five years I’ve had the cameras I’ve been contacted by the police three times for events that went on at the apartment buildings across the street, recorded a shootout between idiots at a car dealership 500 feet from my kid’s bedroom.

recorded idiots shooting at a parked car who were actually caught by the police because the police were in a parking lot filling out paperwork 200 feet away, recorded my youngest attempting to run into traffic (she claims she didn’t, I’ve got video,) caught a cat vandal (below)

Watched as FedEx destroyed my lawn and left $500 of packages in the middle of the yard in the rain, watched as an army of slugs made a mass migration across my front yard to the neighbors, and caught video of a crazy man leaving a threatening note in the neighbor’s mailbox.

I’ve had video of people probably checking out whether they thought they could steal packages without being caught, mailbox thieves, missing animals, etc.

The Nest Cam IQs really served their purpose, and the rest of the Nest family of cameras has served to keep my kids honest, figure out what jacket they lost at school, and check in on the cats from time to time. The doorbell, well that’s been kind of a disappointment but that’s a different story.

I’m glad I’ve had them. I am going to miss the Nest Cam IQs software (Nest app)… hopefully they’ll get the Google Home app/webpage up to the level that the Nest app was six years ago… I can hope that it’s not another Google abandoned project.

And finally, while I made a joke about being in an abusive relationship with Google, if you’re in an abusive relationship be it with a corporate monopoly or a terrible partner, seek help and get out. Life is too freaking precious to let something as valuable as you are be abused.

Maybe this time Google won’t beat me… they’ve changed, Donnie… they swear they’ve changed! by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Update: March 6, 2024 (2:16 PM ET): A Google spokesperson has reached out to Android Authority with the following statement confirming Fitbit Premium and Nest Aware as benefits for subscribers in the UK:

Google One Premium plans already offer amazing value, with 2TB of cloud storage, family sharing, premium features in Meet and Calendar, and more benefits that help members get the most out of Google. Fitbit Premium & Nest Aware are currently available with Google One Premium plans in the UK. We don’t have anything else to announce.

Enlarge / The indoor/outdoor, battery-powered (or wired) Google Nest Cam with battery.

Google's "Nest Aware" camera subscription is going through another round of price increases. This time it's for international users. There's no big announcement or anything, just a smattering of email screenshots from various countries on the Nest subreddit. 9to5Google was nice enough to hunt down a pile of the announcements.

Nest Aware is a monthly subscription fee for Google's Nest cameras. Nest cameras exclusively store all their video in the cloud, and without the subscription, you aren't allowed to record video 24/7. There are two sets of subscriptions to keep track of: the current generation subscription for modern cameras and the "first generation Nest Aware" subscription for older cameras. To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, in the US, the current free tier only gets you three hours of "event" video—meaning video triggered by motion detection. Even the basic $8-a-month subscription doesn't get you 24/7 recording—that's still only 30 days of event video. The "Nest Aware Plus" subscription, at $15 a month in the US, gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording.

The "first-generation" Nest Aware subscription, which is tied to earlier cameras and isn't available for new customers anymore, is doubling in price in Canada. The basic tier of five days of 24/7 video is going from a yearly fee of CA$50 to CA$110 (the first-generation sub has 24/7 video on every tier). Ten days of video is jumping from CA$80 to CA$160, and 30 days is going from CA$110 to CA$220. These are the prices for a single camera; the first-generation subscription will have additional charges for additional cameras. The current Nest Aware subscription for modern cameras is getting jumps that look similar to the US, with Nest Aware Plus, the mid-tier, going from CA$16 to CA $20 per month, and presumably similar raises across the board.

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