Last year, Belkin ended support for their Wemo home automation devices. As I explained last year, these could be added natively to Apple HomeKit so they could still work. This post explains how to revive your dead Wemo devices using PyWeMo, long after Belkin's service has been turned off! © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : Rescue Your Belkin Wemo with Home Assistant
This morning, Belkin announced that they are pulling the plug on their Wemo home automation ecosystem and shutting down the app, cloud, and devices as of January 31, 2026. This is seriously bad news for those of us who bought Wemo smart switches and other devices, since they will cease to function on that date. But there is hope: Most Wemo devices can be connected to Apple's HomeKit before the…
The JetKVM is an excellent little device, and a real steal at $69. It's wonderfully useful right out of the box and the planned software updates ought to make it even better. If you're like me and have a few critical PCs without integrated out-of-band management (like HPE iLO or Supermicro IPMI) this little device is a lifesaver. And it even offers a few tricks those expensive enterprise solutions…
I've been using Home Assistant to show system metrics. This blog post shows how to monitor Linux servers over MQTT using Home Assistant dashboards. © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : How to Monitor Linux Server Stats in Home Assistant
Maybe I'm a caveman or a fool, but I don't love Docker volumes. By moving data to a host filesystem I can manage the data more easily using standard software, and can modify it more easily if needed. The little trick of using tar to pipe data out of a Docker volume allowed me to do this with applications like Postgres, Redis, and MySQL, not to mention WordPress. I hope this helps you get your data…
I worked primarily from home for over a decade, and though I now have an office with a few employees, many of the challenges remain the same. Key among these is power, or lack thereof, and the havoc it can wreak. I recently set about upgrading from my old consumer UPS approach to a real always-on power solution for the home, and thought my blog readers would like to follow along! © Stephen Foskett…
If you're a real hacker, you're interested in all sorts of tech, from computers and the internet to radio to airplanes. The intersection of all of these interests is ADS-B, the protocol used by aircraft to share data like position and speed. Widespread availability of cheap software-defined radio (SDR) receivers and cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi makes it easy for anyone to join a global…
YouTube is essentially the only game in town when it comes to Internet video, with a critical mass of viewers and tight integration with Google search. Back in 2020, Google enabled ads on all YouTube videos, even for publishers who had previously opted out. It is possible to disable ads in videos on your channel, but there are some serious limits. This post explains how to disable ads on your…
With the current turmoil at Twitter, many people are turning to the federated social media network built around Mastodon as their new social outlet. Once I started posting there, a few old friends asked me to share my #SymLink, #PackRat, and #GoodRead links on Mastodon, since they enjoyed reading the contents. Since my posting process is entirely automated using Zapier, I automated posting to…
ZeroTier is an incredibly useful tool to enable true access from anywhere to any networked resource. Although TrueNAS has removed ZeroTier support, the FreeBSD package is easy to install and seems to work fine! The only issue is that it doesn't persist across reboots without some major risky work. © Stephen Foskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat : How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12