Daily Battles: Make Google Mesh WiFi and Google Home (Mini) Work Together

Google Mesh WiFi is a great solution for homes that have bad or spotty WiFi signals. You can get as many nodes as you want and then put them in different parts of your home. They mesh together and provide good quality WiFi coverage throughout your home.

You can also use the Google WiFi app (only available on your smart phones) to manage WiFi connections to all your devices and schedule when they can have WiFi access or filter unsafe, inappropriate contents for your children.

It supports typical router functionalities such as port forwarding, static IP, prioritized streaming, and more. However, it doesn't log what websites your WiFi devices are visiting.

Google Home series of devices (Google Home, Google Home Max, Google Home Mini, Google Hub) are voice assistant devices similar to Amazon Echo series. You can ask them to look up information such as knowledge facts, weather, traffic, news, or control smart home devices with your voice (by the way, Vivint products such as thermostat, locks, lights, etc., are all compatible with Google Home). But most people use them mainly for music and alarm/timer. My kids like to use them to check their homework.

Since I have both Amazon and Google voice assistants, I only have 3 Google Home devices.

Both Google products are useful. But when I got my Google Mesh WiFi and tried to get my Google Home devices connected to my Google Mesh WiFi, it became a disaster.

Google Mesh WiFi supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi signals. One "nice" feature of Google Mesh WiFi is that for both frequencies, the WiFi network you create will only have one name. This eliminates the confusion when you try to add devices to your home WiFi network because there is only one network to connect to. However, this also created big problem when connecting Google Home devices, because there was no way to specify if you want to connect a device to the 2.4GHz network or the 5GHz network. After I successfully connected my main Google Home to my Google Mesh WiFi, installing Google Home mini turned disastrous. Following the app flow to install mini would get stuck and no error message is given on why it would get stuck.

The funniest part was that when I called Google Home support line, the support staff actually told me that Google Home devices are not compatible with Google Mesh WiFi! Come on Google, you can't even make your own products work together?

Of course, that customer service representative just didn't know what he was talking about, and the knowledge base he used to search for solutions didn't return a viable solution. There is actually a way to get them working together!

The core problem with the set up is really that all the Google Home devices need to be on the same WiFi frequency. Of course, I wish Google would have either:

1. enabled Google Mesh WiFi to take care of this, or

2. allowed me to specify which WiFi frequency to use when connecting Google Home mini to my WiFi network, or

3. at least returned informative error messages on the limitation.

After hours spent troubleshooting to identify this problem, I finally found the solution: you can force all your Google Home devices to connect only to the 2.4GHz WiFi network.

The benefit of 5GHz WiFi is that you can get higher throughput, meaning you can transfer data much faster. However, the benefit of 2.4GHz WiFi is that the WiFi signal can travel much further. Typical range for 2.4GHz WiFi signal is 150 feet (46m) indoor and 300 feet (92m) outdoor. The range for 5GHz is only one third of that. So in order to make sure you only connect to the 2.4GHz WiFi network, you just have to make sure you are far away from your router (or your Google Mesh WiFi nodes).

So there I was, outside my home a long distance away from my router with a long extension cord on a code rainy night way past midnight, using my smart phone to make sure I could only connect to my 2.4GHz WiFi and not my 5GHz WiFi, and then one after another, installing my Google Home series devices. But at least I proved the Google Home CSR was wrong! Google Mesh WiFi and Google Home devices DO WORK TOGETHER!

Well, once I got them working, they worked pretty well since, and I never had to reconfigure them again. So if you were also struggling to get them working together, now you know how.

Best luck with all your daily battles!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How to get rid of unwanted items in your Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you probably noticed recently that a lot of extra events just start to pop up in your calendar, such as hotels you reserved and flights you booked, meeting invitation you received, or worse, notifications on the prize money you just won with bogus phishing links embedded such as this one below:

So what is going on?

This is actually the results of Google AI trying to be smart and convenient for you by scanning your emails and then automatically adding items to your calendar. However, Google messed up by allowing spam invitations sent to your to also show up in your Google Calendar even though your Gmail correctly classified it as spam and shoved it into the spam folder.

On the other hand, it might be convenient for some people to have their travel itinerary automatically inserted into their calendars based on email confirmation they receive, some people might not want that at all! And guess what, I am one of them!!

My wife works as a travel agent, and she sometimes forwards me emails containing hotel reservations and flight info so I can track the credit card charges. Google AI just automatically assumed that I was traveling and then spammed the heck out of my calendar with all these events I have no interest tracking. And it would have been better if I got an email asking me if I want to opt into such "smart" service. But nope, Google just decided to make that the default.

Whining aside, how can you turn these things off and get life back to normal? Let me show you:

Go to Google Calendar and then click the gear icon to get into settings. Then uncheck "Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar" under Events from Gmail.

Next go to Event settings and change the selection under Automatically add invitations to "Yes, but don't send event notification unless I have responded".

That should disable the evil Google AI from trying to determine your calendar for you!

Moving on to my next battles!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Volume Control Stops Working in Windows 10 After Windows Update

Before I begin, I must say that this is working! Writing and venting about all these daily battles I endure is actually making me feel happier!! Of course, I hope all you readers out there also felt happier too, whether because now you know how to fight your battles, or simply because you felt your life is better after witnessing my struggles. 😜

Since I was on the topic of windows update breaking things for me in my previous post, let me describe another battle I had to fight, again because of Terrible Windows Updates! This event actually happened a while back. But because of the amount of time I had to spend fixing it, it for sure will linger in my mind for an extended time.

As I mentioned before, one of the many existences of Philip, my virtual smart home butler, is on this super old Windows 10 desktop machine that my boss, ehh, I mean my wife, threw away over 10 years ago. I connected a BlueTooth receiver to this box and then hooked up my whole home speaker system to the receiver. This way Philip has a way to speak to everyone no matter where he/she is in the house. Through this set up, Philip can also manage tasks such as music playing, greeting the King (only the King, not the Queen or anyone else) when he comes home, announcements on visitors/lurkers/intruders detected etc., and mundane things such as telling the young masters to practice piano, do homework, clean room, go to bed, yada yada yada. So on that day when Philip started yelling at everybody on top of his lung throughout the day, I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

When everyone is unhappy with Philip, guess what, Lanny has to troubleshoot right away. Philip controls the volume of his voice through Window's built in volume mixer as shown below. The BlueTooth receiver shows up as a headphone in the volume mixer, and when volume of the System Sounds changes, the volume of the headphone also changes at the same time. However, that no longer behaved the same way. Even though the volume slider of the headphone moves together with the system sounds slider, the volume did not change and remained maximum.

Restarting windows didn't help. Restarting the BlueTooth receiver was useless. Deleting the BlueTooth device and reconnect didn't make a difference.

Since I am one of the first few to notice this problem (it is pretty hard to ignore everyone yelling at you, Philip, the Queen, the young masters), there wasn't much resources online on how to resolve the problem. After hours of troubleshooting, I finally nailed the culprit. YES, AGAIN, IT IS WINDOWS UPDATE BREAKING THINGS THAT USED TO WORK JUST FINE.

What I had to do to resolve the issue was to uninstall the automatically installed Windows Update, disable Windows Auto Update, and then search for an older version of the BlueTooth driver to replace the one on my computer.

Of course, many, many people's ears also suffered and complained and begged for help such as here and here and here.

In case you are still suffering from this problem and your ears are still hurting everyday, the best solution is:

1.    Open Windows Registry (regedit.exe).
2.    Jump to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Bluetooth\Audio\AVRCP\CT
3.    Create REG_DWORD DisableAbsoluteVolume and set its value to 1.
4.    Restart Windows.

Just another daily battle I had to fight, and another interesting episode of living with Philip, my virtual smart home butler, together with a few non-voluntary human test subjects...

Ciao!

Listen to one of Philip's favorite radio stations on Pandora:

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Task Scheduler Error - The specified account name is not valid

Microsoft Windows systems have a built in utility called Task Scheduler that can be actually quite handy when you need to schedule things to run on a fixed schedule with some flexibility in conditions. It is probably used more by system admins on the Windows Server family of products to schedule maintenance work or kick off certain routine jobs.

I use Task Scheduler mainly for scheduling routine work for Philip Jane, my home-brewed Smart Home Assistant, such as reminding my kids that they are going to be late for school, or it is time to go to bed. By the way, the name Philip comes from the book The Outcast by Maoni and Jane comes from the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, both I highly recommend. I used to write my own scheduler, until one day I realized that I could just use this existing utility and save myself a bunch of work. So I incorporated this as part of the Philip Jane microservice ecosystem. It has been working great for many years, until this morning.

School season has just started, so I was turning some expired tasks back on, so Philip Jane can dutifully provide friendly reminders to my kids (so I don't have to). As I was saving the changes, I got an error message saying The specified account name is not valid.

Mind you that the system has been working for years and I had never ran into this problem. As an expert in Windows system (I used to make a living as a system admin), I sincerely rebooted the physical machine (one of Philip's many existences) that hosted Philip's scheduler functionalities, hoping that would resolve the problem, which it didn't. Now the research began. Sure enough, I am not the only one who suffered.

Turned out once again (and again and again and again), the culprit is a recent Windows Update. The update now requires local user name to explicitly include the server name. Even though I am not running a Windows server, the same restriction applies to all Windows 10 systems that had the latest update. So instead of using Lanny as the login name, now I have to explicitly use Philip\Lanny as the login name.

If this is what Microsoft wants, then why still default to the local user name when task scheduler prompts for a login is beyond me. But at least this allowed me to proceed.

Here's a discussion of the exact problem on TechNet, under Windows Server 2019 support. TechNet is the big knowledge repo for all Microsoft related support docs.

TechNet Discussion

But I want to go back to the real culprit again. This is a Windows 10 update forced upon me by Microsoft. And every time when I install Windows Update, I am always under the fear that something used to work will break. That is just not a great user experience. But hey, I am not the only one complaining, and I don't think complaining works when it comes to Microsoft.

For those of you that also ran into this problem, hope this blog post helps!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Google Hangouts Sending Messages To Yourself

Google Hangouts (used to be called Google Talk) is a free chat app provided by Google that supports WiFi calls, video conferencing in addition to the basic text messaging capabilities. It is the main way of communication between my teenage daughter and me when she is at school and I am at work, because I am a GOOD parent and held my ground firm and still refuse to give her a smart phone (which makes her kind of unique in her social groups).

Recently, whenever I send her a Google Hangout message, I would also get the notification on my phone for that message I just sent her. And this is becoming really annoying!!

Searched online but couldn't find much useful info. Then it just dawned on me. In my recent troubleshooting with Google Home setup, I had to add my daughter's Google account to my Google Home set up in order to properly grant permissions for different users. Could this be the problem?

By the way, if you don't already know, Google Home is a Google-made smart speaker/voice assistant like Amazon's Echo, which can be used to control smart home devices, translate, perform knowledge look up, play music, and used as a timer.

Upon removing my daughter's Google Account from within the Google Home app, sure enough, the notification stopped when I messaged her once gain in Google Hangouts app. Mystery solved! The underline problem is that Google Hangouts and Google Home apps both use the Android underneath Google Account(s) set up to determine what's the proper action to take. But since Google is NOTORIOUS for one project group not caring about another project group's work, end users ended up having a bad experience and had to troubleshoot by themselves.

This reminds me of the fight I had with Google Home Mini not working with Google Mesh WiFi, and the fight I had with Google Home multiple account/owner issues earlier. But those would be the contents of another Daily Battles blog post.

Happy Fighting!

Video of the Day:

This video of Kangaroos Hopping in Snow somehow 
is really bringing peace to my mind!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com