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 lot of potential and I needed something to motivate me to start the transition. I’ve seen a lot of mention...| Random Musings
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).\nI wrote this post for 2 reasons. First, I wanted to document my failures for the USB Coral TPU passthrough in case someone searching for answers comes across m...| Random Musings
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.\nI’ve been using Google Maps for a while, but this solution should work for any traffic map you can find that allows you to set the lat/long/zoom by U...| Random Musings
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, I’ve also just been super busy) is that my automated build setup for deploying this blog to my VPS has b...| Random Musings
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 my updates (anywhere from 6 months to a year).| Random Musings
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 ideas, including siding clips and aluminum strip slotted under the eaves.| Random Musings
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 alternatives like Gotify (which I already use, except not for images) or even something Matrix.| Random Musings
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 integrates with the garage opener and in effect emulates being a MyQ/Security 2.0 device. I bought one and have had it installe...| Random Musings
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 months start to finish.| Random Musings
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 threads on posts.| Random Musings
