In the next few posts, I’m going to document how to set up Home Assistant (HA) from scratch. We’re going to want to protect the admin UI interfaces for HA and its support services with SSL, and add authentication to services that don’t provide it themselves. We’re going to do this with Nginx Proxy Manager because it has built in support for using LetsEncrypt to obtain free SSL certificates, supports adding authentication to services that don’t do it themselves, and is overall easy to use. Before I start writing more Home Assitant articles, let’s set up a SSL proxy server to keep everything secure. ...

Some of my posts assume that the user already has ESPHome installed, so I’m documenting how to install it here so I don’t have to repeat it everywhere. ...

As part of moving from Twitter to Mastodon I decided to add comments to the blog using Fediverse posts. Fortunately, Carl Schwan showed how he does it on his blog here. Here are the exact tweaks to his post I did to get it working with the papermod theme I’m using on this blog. ...

Just got an Orange Pi 5. I couldn’t find a simple set of instructions on how to boot it off the M.2 NVMe slot, so I’m documenting it here. ...

We’re doing a kitchen & bathrooms renovation, and the construction is generating a lot of dust, to the point that I was changing the HVAC filter twice a week. I wanted to see just how much garbage is in the air, so I started looking around for air quality sensors. Naturally I wanted one that I could integrate into my Home Assistant so I could generate notifications if the air was extra filthy. ...

Released version 0.8.0 of ha-mqtt-discoverable and version 0.2.0 of ha-mqtt-discoverable-cli today. ...

I’ve been backing my homelab up with duplicacy (See Backing Up the Cluster Using Duplicacy), but I’m fed up with it returning a 0 exit code even if there’s a problem with the backup. This makes me have to do a lot of annoying rummaging through log output to be sure that a backup actually worked, so I decided to switch to restic. In this blog entry, I’m going to explain how to create a jail in TrueNAS, mount directories you want to back up into the jail, install restic, and how to use it to back up to Backblaze b2. ...

I considered a switch to the Congo theme for Hugo. The one thing I didn’t like in it was the way it handles inline backticks - it displays them, in addition to formatting the enclosed text as code. To fix it, create assets/css/custom.css with the following contents: .prose code::before { content: '' } .prose code::after { content: '' }

I’m moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Specifically, I’m @unixorn@hachyderm.io. Here are my first impressions. ...

Some tips about setting up Zigbee or Z-wave mesh networks. I’ve had a few people new to Home Assistant ask about how to best set up their mesh networks. Here’s my take on what works best. ...