Random Musings

Recently I discovered that my favorite email service (MXroute) introduced an API which has opened up a lot of fun new possibilities with the service, including letting me recreate most (if not all) of the functionality of SimpleLogin.

Yes, it’s the end of another year.

I’ve been taking some time off work to enjoy the holidays, and decided that now was a good time to take on a few interesting projects I’ve wanted to do in the good ole homelab before the end of the year.

I’ve wanted to play around with the new hot smarthome standard, known as Matter, for a while.

Thanks to a fun garage sale by a certain IronicBadger, I picked up an Intel Arc Pro A40 graphics card for a very reasonable price and decided to put it to use for transcoding.

I’ve long been interested in setting up an easy authentication system for logging into (and in some case protecting) services I self-host.

One of my absolute favorite automations I have set up is the one that sends me a notification on workdays with an image displaying a Google Map with the traffic layer turned on.

I recently finished some homelab renovations, both in hardware and in software, that I think are pretty neat.

Previously, I wrote about Minio, an S3 compatible object storage solution, as the backend for backing up my data locally using Restic.

I still intend to do a write up on my choices for cameras at the new place, but in the meantime I wanted to do a quick bit on how I mounted cameras outside.

This is going to be a quick one, but I’m unreasonably excited about it.

EDIT 11/11/2023: Chamberlain has announced they’ve intentionally broken all third party integrations that don’t pay them, claiming they are preventing “unauthorized access.”

I realize in hindsight I didn’t post much in 2022.

Short post.

This is an updated post to my previous one on BlueIris and Deepstack.

I’m a big believer in both Zwave and Zigbee.

For a while I’ve been using a trio of Eufy 30C Robovacuums to clean my house.

Long before the current spike in gas prices, I was in search of a new car.

I’ve been running OPNsense for a few months now and absolutely love it.

Introduction Let’s talk about Drone.

Combined with using Ansible, I’ve also begun using Renovate-Bot to update my infrastructure GitHub repo.

For the past 6 months or so I have slowly fallen in love with a tool called Ansible.

And now for something entirely different!

Note: See update here.

In my last post, I discussed how I was moving off of Cloudflare and also moving to Caddy.

So this post is going to be a bit different than usual.

Note: Significant hat tip here to /u/abstractbarista for this guide.

No, this is not and article on how to get your kids to want to create your home automations for you.

So for the past year, my blog has been run on the Ghost blogging platform.

Note: I don’t or recommend Eufy’s hardware anymore.

Continuing on my last post regarding the end of DarkSky, I promised I’d follow up on the other part of how I am getting weather data into HomeAssistant.

Back on April 1st, DarkSky announced that it had been purchased by Apple and would be shutting down both it’s Android app and API.

First off, I am a HUGE fan of the Mail and Packages custom component.

NOTE: See revised post here.

As I noted in one of my first posts, I have used the Wyze V2 indoor cams for almost 2 years.

So as I mentioned in my previous post about desk detection, I recently redid my office and installed some cabinets.

This is a bit of a tease since part of this project was to install individually addressable LED strips (WS2812B’s) under the cabinets I recently installed in the office and I’m waiting to write that part up until I finish a more complicated outside instal…

As mentioned in one of my first posts, I love NodeRed and use it for virtually all of my automations.

Recently I’ve begun listening to the Self-Hosted podcast.

Ohhhh ESP8266.

Introduction There’s a million different ways of handling alarms to make sure you get up in the morning.

Last week I wrote up about how to set up vacation mode for your lights easily.

Lighting definitely helps to deter burglaries when you aren’t home.

Reasons why not to rely on a cloud service for running your smart home #23487834208: yesterday Wink announced a new subscription service.

SSH (Secure Shell) is pretty much a necessity in any kind of smart home set up, particularly if you’re running Linux.

Home Assistant Cast was announced about 9 months ago (August 2019) and it’s a very nifty concept if you have a Google/Nest Home Hub.

Well now that I’ve talked about what software I run my smart home on, what about the hardware?

Maybe the first place to start is: what software am I running to control my smart home?

First blog post.