Recent content on 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. In this post I’m going to detail some of what SimpleLogin is, why you should use a service like it, and if you’re an MXroute user some cool apps to check…
Yes, it’s the end of another year. And while I could look back and reflect on the year, I’m instead looking forward to next year and some things I want to accomplish. I’m not going to necessarily call them “resolutions” as I kinda hate that idea, but I would like to keep better track of all the stuff in my house. Things like how many of a specific smart switch I have,…
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. The main one I accomplished today was migrating from MariaDB to PostgreSQL for the majority of my database backends. I’ve long been a user of MariaDB for all my database needs.…
I’ve wanted to play around with the new hot smarthome standard, known as Matter , for a while. What is Matter? Simply put it’s supposed to be an interoperable standard for all smart home devices. Big companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google are all backing the standard. The hope is to avoid the classic xkcd comic called “Standards” Personally I’m not fully bought into…
I’ve long been interested in setting up an easy authentication system for logging into (and in some case protecting) services I self-host. I looked into options like Authentik , Authelia , or Keycloak but they seemed overly complicated to me/difficult to set up. I’ve also wanted to check out passkeys , which are a relatively new form of authentication to replace passwords. They have a…
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. This post is going to be documenting some of my failures/issues in the dream of a single VM to house all my transcoding apps (Jellyfin, Handbrake, and Frigate). I wrote this post for 2 reasons. First, I wanted to document my…
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. Thankfully I have several ways I can get from home to the office, but the main way along the interstate backs up very quickly if there’s an accident or other issue. I’ve been using Google Maps for a while, but…
I recently finished some homelab renovations, both in hardware and in software, that I think are pretty neat. This post will be a quick summary of some of the bigger changes. No More Drone Continuing on my love/hate relationship with Drone , I finally hit an overwhelming sense of hate, so that’s where I"m going to start. Part of the reason why it’s been a while between posts (Ok ok,…
Previously, I wrote about Minio , an S3 compatible object storage solution, as the backend for backing up my data locally using Restic. And largely it worked great. I never had an issue where data wouldn’t be sent or anything along those lines (which ultimately is what matters here). But I had many, many issues when it came time to update. Minio Issues Admittedly, I was very infrequent with…
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. At my old house, I’d drilled/screwed into the siding/soffit but I don’t like how that leaves holes if/when you move. I was keen to find a solution that was solid without leaving lasting damage. After some searching, I found a few…
This is going to be a quick one, but I’m unreasonably excited about it. Lately I’ve noticed that image-based notifications haven’t been always going through via Telegram. Lots of errors in the logs about timed out connections, which I chalk up to the fact my internet is over a 5G router. It’s not bad, but it’s not always stable/reliable. I started to consider…
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.” As a result, HomeAssistant is going to be removing its MyQ integration in the 2023.12 release. Since this post, I’ve become aware of Ratgdo , which is an ESP based project which directly…
I realize in hindsight I didn’t post much in 2022. Well it’s 2023 now and I guess you could say I have a new year’s resolution to post more. But in reality, the reason why I didn’t post much last year was because I was moving. No, it didn’t take me all year to move. But we decided to build a new house after searching a bit and the whole build process took about 9…
Short post. Just wanted to announce that the blog now has comments thanks to Giscus . I was inspired by Alex/IronicBadger talking about it in his blog and also on the Self Hosted podcast . I always wanted a comment system but did not want to use Disqus for a variety of reasons. Alex’s lastest discovery was just icing on the cake. Anyway, Giscus uses Github Discussions to create comment…
This is an updated post to my previous one on BlueIris and Deepstack. The setup I described in that post worked for over two years. However, I am in the process of moving and was looking to streamline things. And also seeing if there was any way to improve my already functioning setup. Back 2 years ago I had searched and searched for a way to get alert images from BlueIris to HomeAssistant but…
I’m a big believer in both Zwave and Zigbee. Both have their pros and cons. Zwave in my opinion is a better technology because of the lack of interference and it propagates further/wider due to being a lower frequency. However, the devices are more expensive and there’s less overall variety. Zigbee on the other hand shares the same frequencies as Wifi (and other technologies) in the…
For a while I’ve been using a trio of Eufy 30C Robovacuums to clean my house. And they worked….fine. They were your standard bump-and-turn variety of vacuum robot, meaning no floor mapping/LIDAR or other advanced features. And like I said, they worked fine. Until they didn’t. I’ve already had to replace one under warranty and I had another die about 6 months after the…
Long before the current spike in gas prices, I was in search of a new car. Generally I try to drive cars until they die, but the Mrs.’s car was approaching 150,000 miles and 10 years old so we figured it was time for a new one. She really wants a truck for her next car, which we don’t need currently (and she wants an electric too!) so we figured we’d wait. That put me in search…
I’ve been running OPNsense for a few months now and absolutely love it. It can do basically everything I want/need and does it with a relatively easy to understand interface (with some exceptions). It also has a good API. I talked more about OPNsense in a previous post so I’m not going to revisit a discussion again of OPNsense itself. But in this post, we’re going to talk about…
Introduction Let’s talk about Drone. No, not this kind of drone This kind of Drone ! The Continuous Integration kind. The one that helps you with automatically doing all kinds of fun coding things. Basically, Drone is a self-hosted alternative to something like GitHub Actions or Jenkins or Travis CI . Basically, if there’s something with your code that you want to run automatically…
Combined with using Ansible , I’ve also begun using Renovate-Bot to update my infrastructure GitHub repo. My main use case is to update the tags on my Docker containers. I’ll be honest and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Renovate-Bot can do. But having tried various means of notifying and updating me of updated docker containers and I’ve found Renovate-Bot to be…
For the past 6 months or so I have slowly fallen in love with a tool called Ansible . In fact, pretty much every computer in my possession is controlled and managed by Ansible. I wanted to do a writeup on my usecases/setup for Ansible, which also will lead to another post shortly on using something called Renovate-Bot to help upkeep some of my code. Together my setup has pretty much become…
And now for something entirely different! While I’m not the biggest gamer, I do appreciate playing games from time to time, both retro games and more modern games. I’m very very excited to be picking up a SteamDeck and am lucky enough to be getting one in December. I also have a computer hooked up to my TV and my desktop RetroArch The dominant program in the retrogaming space is…
Note: See update here . I no longer use or recommend Minio with Restic. There’s a better option! Having a good backup strategy has always been important to avoid data loss but is now even more important in this day and age of constant ransomware stories in the news. Despite your best efforts to avoid clicking anything, all it takes is one slipup or mistake and your data can be lost.…
In my last post, I discussed how I was moving off of Cloudflare and also moving to Caddy. After about a month of completing that switchover, I’m sticking to it. Still have a few issues with the way Caddy does things but overall it works. In this post I want to discuss my Caddy setup, particular how I am not directly exposing my homelab/server to the internet but instead am routing all the…
So this post is going to be a bit different than usual. No tutorial or guide, more of a discussion of some changes I’ve made on the backend to host this blog and some of my other self-hosted services. Recently I’ve started using Ansible to deploy all my servers (you can see my setup here ). I didn’t convert my Linode VPS instance to Ansible because I didn’t want to screw up…
Note: Significant hat tip here to /u/abstractbarista for this guide . Most of the steps below come from their guide. The main differences being 1) little bit improved layout/format (subjective) and 2) I figured out how to do a call to just wake a single device. Introduction WakeOnLAN is one of those things that you love to hate. When it works, it’s magical. When it doesn’t it’s…
No, this is not and article on how to get your kids to want to create your home automations for you. Sorry. But I’ve been meaning for a long time to document some of the home automations things I do to make life easier with a baby/toddler. Hope you find these helpful and perhaps give you some ideas of your own! As inspiration, a popular baby item is the Hatch Baby Rest , which is a sound…
So for the past year, my blog has been run on the Ghost blogging platform. And I really liked it. It was simple, it worked, and I liked the look. Why change you might ask? Well…first I have a problem where I constantly find myself wanting to tinker, even if there’s a perfectly working thing. It can always be better right? Also, Ghost just released a major update (v4) which indicates,…
Note: I don’t or recommend Eufy’s hardware anymore. I think Amcrest or Reolink are more compelling options that actually have working RTSP (even over WiFi) for just a bit more money. Also, if you still want to use Eufy, you don’t need to use ioBroker anymore. See this GitHub repo for more info. As I think should be obvious, I’m very big on HomeAssistant. It’s a great…
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. I’ve always been interested in having my own personal weather station to get hyper-accurate local weather conditions, namely temperature and wind speed. I was always off put by the need for one of those monitor stations because it…
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. The API will continue to function “through the end of 2021,” but there are no new signups permitted. This is extremely disappointing as DarkSky had a fantastic API and very generous limits for free use (1k a day, so you could easily pull updates every…
First off, I am a HUGE fan of the Mail and Packages custom component. Major hat tip to @moralmonkey and @firstof9 for all their work getting this running and improving it constantly. Especially @firstof9. Whenever I find a bug/something isn’t working right he’s incredibly responsive and works hard to fix it. I find it incredibly handy to know when packages and mail might arrive that…
NOTE : See revised post here . Below is being left for posterity, but is not longer what I would recommend. As I previously mentioned, I recently ditched my Wyze cams and moved over to Eufy cams for indoor. I also decided to buy some outdoor cams to mount and watch my front door and driveway in real time. However, I got tired of getting lots of false alerts due to trees/bushes moving in the wind,…
As I noted in one of my first posts , I have used the Wyze V2 indoor cams for almost 2 years. I started off with the cameras flashed to the custom Dafang-Hacks firmware which worked OK. I was using Blue Iris as my NVR and I saw a lot of disconnects/breaks in the recording. Eventually Wyze released a custom firmware version that supported RTSP. However, after more than a year development on the…
So as I mentioned in my previous post about desk detection, I recently redid my office and installed some cabinets. The lighting was OK but I really wanted some extra light (and at times, pizazz!) and had seen a lot of people talking about individually addressable LEDs. So I decided to start off with a small project and see how it went. I also was tired of dealing with my outside solar-powered…
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 install. But I still think it’s useful to discuss how I’m detecting whether I am at my desk to turn on the LEDs or not. Since I…
As mentioned in one of my first posts , I love NodeRed and use it for virtually all of my automations. It’s a visual automation editor that I find much easier to use than the YAML-based automation system in HomeAssistant. If you’re a visual person like me (and even if you aren’t) you may find NodeRed simpler to use. I also much prefer the easy debugging my automations that was…
Recently I’ve begun listening to the Self-Hosted podcast . One of the hosts, Alex, is a huge fan of MergerFS . He’s written about it a few times as the “Perfect Media Server” solution. You can here him talk about it here or read one of his write ups here here and here . For the record he does also really like ZFS, but his write up of MergerFS and SnapRAID intrigued me for 2…
Ohhhh ESP8266. How I have grown to love thee. For a long time I was resistant to using them because I didn’t know how to solder and it just seemed to complicated to me. But I stumbled across a project (linked below) to create bed detection for super cheap and I was intrigued enough to give it shot. Being stuck at home thanks to COVID-19 also helped me want to find some projects to keep me…
Introduction There’s a million different ways of handling alarms to make sure you get up in the morning. Some people turn on the radio. Others need the lights to turn on bright. Still others need literal klaxons blaring in their ears. For me none of those options will work because usually I’m getting up early before my spouse to go for a run. So anything loud won’t work. A pretty…
Last week I wrote up about how to set up vacation mode for your lights easily . This week we’re going to complete the loop a bit and automate turning on vacation mode. Note this setup requires an Ecobee thermostat . It’s a popular thermostat so this may be of some use to folks. I like the Ecobee vacation mode because it allows me to set up a permanent hold whenever I’m not at…
Lighting definitely helps to deter burglaries when you aren’t home. I’m old enough to remember having to pull out those plug in timers to turn a lamp on/off on a timer whenever my family would go on vacation. But the issue there is that 1) it was a fixed time and 2) only a few lights in the house were able to do this. The other option was to leave lights on all the time, but…
Reasons why not to rely on a cloud service for running your smart home #23487834208: yesterday Wink announced a new subscription service. This subscription takes effect in just 7 days and will be required in order to “access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API, and [operate] your automations.” Or….you know, the entire point of a smart home hub.…
SSH (Secure Shell) is pretty much a necessity in any kind of smart home set up, particularly if you’re running Linux. It’s the main way that you connect to your computer (presuming its not your main desktop but some kind of server/Raspberry Pi/NUC/other computer). Because SSH is so crucial, it’s also a potential vector for hackers to gain access to your system so you really need…
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. Essentially it allows you to cast a Lovelace page to your Hub and you can use the touch screen to interact with the page, just like a tablet. There are a lot of possible use cases, from a security camera monitor to light/room controls and even media controls.…
Well now that I’ve talked about what software I run my smart home on, what about the hardware? Let’s dig in. ( Note : All links here do NOT contain any kind of affiliate link. They’re just direct links to the product) Thermostat I only have a single zone in my house so I went for an Ecobee 3. At the time I made my purchase, it was unique in that it had the ability to use remote…
Maybe the first place to start is: what software am I running to control my smart home? Surprisingly, a lot. HomeAssistant First, and most importantly, is Home-Assistant , or HASS. HASS is…incredible. HASS can literally integrate with thousand of devices and services (1,500+ as of writing this) and it’s continually increasing. Not to say that HASS is perfect (it’s not). There…
First blog post. Wheeeeeee. I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll use this for. But I wanted to start trying to document some of the smart home/tech things I’m doing so I can 1) maybe help someone else out who is having a similar problem and 2) make a resource for myself in case I have to rebuild everything (really hoping that never happens!). So expect some things about smart homes,…