TL;DR — mattertimectl is a tiny, single-binary Matter controller that keeps device clocks correct. It joins an existing Matter fabric as an extra administrator and pushes the time through the standard Time Synchronization cluster, on any ecosystem, with no Home Assistant or extra hub required. The problem: complex inconsistency The IKEA ALPSTUGA air-quality monitor is actually mainly a little desk…
src code - README Intro The problem My front door has no window or peephole so when the doorbell rings I have to pull out my phone and open the Unifi Protect app. Unifi sells a wall display for this, the Unifi Access Intercom Viewer at $199, but it's built for the Unifi Access ecosystem and won't display generic Protect cameras or doorbells like the Doorbell Lite I have. A partial fix:…
I like to use Claude Code in my terminal Ghostty alongside Emacs. Claude can already read and edit files directly, and Emacs auto-reverts when it does. But Claude doesn't know my buffer state like which file I have open, which line im at, and what I have highlighted. claude-code-context ( github ) does just that. How It Works The package runs an idle timer that writes your current buffer…
The Problem My front door doesn't have a peephole so when someone rings the doorbell, you can't see who it is without pulling out your phone and looking at the doorbell app. Unifi makes a doorbell viewer device, the Unifi Access Intercom Viewer for $199. It's a PoE wall display for viewing Protect cameras and intercoms but it's designed for the Unifi Access ecosystem and…
My original mini rack build had most devices on 2.5Gbps but had a few gaps like the gateway, the cluster switch, and the access points were still gigabit. My mini rack v2 fills those gaps. Network The UCG-Fiber anchors the rack with a 10G WAN port (my modem and WAN are only 2.5Gb), a built-in 4-port 2.5GbE switch, and 1TB NVMe for Protect camera recording. Both switches are USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE…
Motivation With the emergence of the 10 inch network rack, Jeff Geerling organized a community around the concept of mini-racks . I moved my homelab to a mini rack in early 2024 and the new community was a great excuse for me to document and publish my latest homelab/mini rack setup. The following is a re-post of my mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com mini-rack submission . This mini rack serves two…
My family and I moved into a home built in 1895 and thankfully a lot of the original hardware and woodwork had been retained. Unfortunately, one of the bedroom door latches was missing its internals. After disassembling, cleaning up, and investigating the mortise latch, including another that had all its parts, "B.L.W." branding on the mortise casing lead to Branford Lock Works, a lock company…
Ubiquiti wireless access points are configured via a web app called Unifi Controller which can be self hosted. Unfortunately, Unifi Controller relies on some pretty outdated packages, making them hard to find and maintain alongside modern Linux distributions versions. Adding to the complexity, the packages required are old enough that Arm64 packaging was not yet commonplace. The official Unifi…
From Raspberry Pi to ESP32 In 2018 I wired a Raspberry Pi Zero W into my 1970s apartment intercom to make it Siri-controllable. The Pi ran HAP-NodeJS, which worked, but always felt like overkill: a full Linux computer, an npm dependency tree, and Node.js runtime just to toggle a relay and sample an ADC pin. When Espressif released their ESP32 HAP SDK — a native C implementation of the HomeKit…
Communities need associative hosting . Following Freenode's well documented collapse , we were motivated to set up haskell.social , an experimental web, matrix, and pleroma set of services to give the haskell-adjacent community an alternative to centralized services like Meetup, Slack/IRC/Discord, and Twitter, etc. Federation enables people to bring their own identities and connect…
This was my first homelab. I later rebuilt it into a Mini Rack , then upgraded it in Mini Rack v2 . Motivation I became more interested in personal privacy after my Roku started spying on what we were watching outside the Roku itself, our mesh WiFi router switched to a subscription model for "AI" and "cloud" features, and our smart home switches required access to "the cloud" just to turn on…
I wanted to host my code without a lot of extra infrastructure, apps, and metadata to operate and maintain. I just wanted a simple way to share my repos. Contributors can easily send patches via email without a whole new login and user system. I saw hg.prosody.im and was inspired by it's simplicity. Given the overwhelming popularity of Git and full-service solutions like GitLab, there are…
After wiring a Raspberry Pi Zero W into my 1970s apartment intercom to make it Siri-controllable, I needed a way to mount the Pi inside the panel. My first solution was a small piece of wood screwed into some unused screw terminals. It was nonconductive, quick, and easy enough to start with. But cutting a precise piece to fit in a few millimeters of clearance, inside an apartment with no workshop,…
Apple HomeKit with Raspberry Pi I made my 1970s (?) apartment intercom system Siri controlled and internet accessible with a Raspberry Pi and Pimoroni Automation pHAT . The full project code is available on a src repo . The Problem My apartment building lobby door lock is controlled by an intercom panel in my unit. To unlock the door, the switch completes a circuit to an electromagnet in the…