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”\nPersonally I’m not fully bought into the Matter standard as I think it has a long way to go and it needs more features/support more device types, though ...| Random Musings
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
How to get in touch Hello, my name is FuzzyMistborn and I have a technology addiction. And I may have fallen down the self-hosting and home automation rabbit holes along the way… I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer or with a phone in my hand. I may be busy and not always able to respond, but if you have questions I’ll do my best to help! Here are the best places to reach me on the interwebs: Reddit: FuzzyMistborn Discord: @FuzzyMistborn Github: FuzzyMistborn Want to say ...| Random Musings
If you like what I do or what I’ve written and you want to say “Thanks!”, here are the best ways.\nReferrals If you click the below links and sign up, you get a benefit and so do I.\nLinode - Current offer is a $100 credit for 60 days (subject to change!) Donations If you want to give to me directly I’m not going to say no! Here’s the best ways to do so:\n| 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
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 couldn’t figured out a way.| Random Musings
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 2.4ghz band so interference can be an issue.| Random Musings
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 warranty ended. I thought about replacing it with another Eufy but given that I’ve gone through two in less than two...| Random Musings
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 of a new car for myself. I’ve loved my Hyundai Ioniq hybrid for years. Sure it’s no muscle car but it gets...| Random Musings
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 being able to remote turn on and off firewall rules…from HomeAssistant! I try to minimize my firewall rules ...| Random Musings
Introduction Let’s talk about Drone. No, not this kind of drone No not the flying 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 after some action is taken, then CI is for you.| Random Musings
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 the best. Below are the solutions I’ve tried and the pros/cons of each. Updating Docker Containers Watchtower The...| Random Musings
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 self-maintaining. Though admittedly that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to make improvement/tweaks. ...| Random Musings
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 RetroArch which utilizes the libretro API. RetroArch has tons of “cores”, or emulators, which can emulate p...| Random Musings
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.| Random Musings
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 how I had things. But as I detailed below, I wanted to switch my DNS servers for my domains off Cloudflare. I wan...| Random Musings
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 beyond frustrating. My biggest annoyance is with my network setup, I have multiple VLANs/subnets, and WOL doesn...| Random Musings
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 machine, night light, and time-to-rise/ok-to-wake clock all built into one.| Random Musings
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, at least to me, they’re taking the platform in a different direction from just being a blog platform. Sp...| Random Musings
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 piece of software and does many many many things well.| Random Musings
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 restricted where and how I could see the data. Pretty, but not great for HomeAssistant uses! Instead I wanted...| Random Musings
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 10-15 minutes without issue). It also was super accurate. Once the API goes away, it will be sorely missed a...| Random Musings
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 day so it’s nice to have HomeAssistant track it for me. I won’t go into details of how to set up the co...| Random Musings
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, bugs flying by the camera at night, etc.| Random Musings
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 firmware has gone no where. I still saw tons of drops/disconnects while recording and the picture qua...| Random Musings
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 pathway lights that only worked half the time and just looked eh so decided to install some LED stri...| Random Musings
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 didn’t want the LEDs on all the time unless I was sitting at my desk I needed to figure out a way to detect wh...| Random Musings
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 difficult to do in HomeAssistant. In this post I’m going to go through how to install it, install some basic p...| Random Musings
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 herehere and here. For the record he does also really like ZFS, but his write up of MergerFS and SnapRAID intrigued me for 2 reasons: The ability to increase the size of the data array easily after you’ve already created it. The ability to...| Random Musings
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 busy.| Random Musings
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 good solution for me is using SleepAsAndroid tied to my Garmin watch so when my alarm goes off it first vibr...| Random Musings
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 home for an extended period of time, which usually coincides with me being on vacation/away from home. Thanks to H...| Random Musings
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 that’s both wasteful and not very effective against convincing burglars that you’re actually home. There’s ob...| Random Musings
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. So if you don’t pay your device turns into a useless paperweight. Nice new paperweights I’m not going to p...| Random Musings
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 to make sure it’s protected. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time on the standard practices to secu...| Random Musings
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.| Random Musings
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 sensors.| Random Musings
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 are still a lot of growing pains as it’s not 1.0 yet, which means lots of breaking changes between updates and ...| Random Musings
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, some things about general Linux, more things about smart homes….| Random Musings
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 traffic through a VPS.| Random Musings
