I wanted to switch my new Home Assistant (HA) installation to write data to PostgreSQL instead of SQLite for a variety of reasons. Here’s how I did it. Here’s why I decided to switch: Resilience. If you’re running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi’s SD card, the constant churn of history updates will eventually destroy the card. The more entities you have, the faster HA will grind your SD card to failure. Writing all that to another server that is writing to a real SSD or spinning disk eliminates that problem. Convenience. I can back up the postgres database without having to stop HA. I don’t even have to run the backup on the HA server. Speed. Using a real database will speed up history display, especially once you have a large number of entities. ...

Securifi Peanut plugs have issues with zigbee2mqtt. I have several Securifi Peanut Zigbee switches. Overall, they’re nice little smart plugs and make good Zigbee routers to strengthen your Zigbee mesh, but they have one annoying issue - zigbee2mqtt doesn’t recognize them perfectly, though there’s a simple fix that I’m going to document here. ...

I wanted my Home Assistant to be able to send me alerts when Bad Things are detected like water on my basement floor. I’m an SRE, and have been using PagerDuty for years, so I decided to set up a personal PagerDuty account and connect it to my Home Assistant. ...

I signed up for the free personal edition of Autodesk Fusion 360 to get started with 3d printing, and the first time I tried to launch it on macOS, it wouldn’t let me in because it refused to create a new team for me to join. The solution ended up being to quit Fusion 360, open the Fusion Team Signup page in a browser, create a team there, then restart Fusion 360. ...

TL;DR - SMR drives can take thirteen to sixteen times as long to resilver in your ZFS raid than CMR drives. If they even succeed. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Western Digital started using SMR technology in their WD-Red drives that are marketed toward SOHO and small business raid, without any warnings about the RAID performance implications. I got lucky when I bought my last batch of Reds, they were all CMR, but it was pure luck - I bought them based on Western Digital’s reputation and because I’ve seen multiple NAS vendors recommend WD-REDs in the past. ...

I wrote two articles in sysadvent 2021 Baking Multi-Architecture Docker Images Setting up k3s in your home lab

For a variety of reasons, I needed to enable some EC2 instances to write/update a single EC2 tag, but the instaces needed to only be able to tag themselves. ...

I wanted to set up a security camera outside, but I didn’t want to be dependent on an outside cloud service - if my internet goes out, I don’t want to lose my ability to record video. Wyze cameras are nice and cheap, and you can reflash them to support RTSP in addition to streaming to the Wyze cloud. ...

I’ve got an old HP laser printer in my basement. We barely print 10 pages a month between the two of us, so we only turn it on when we’re going to print. That’s a hassle though, because inevitably we forget to shut it off sometimes and it stays on overnight or even for days, and while it has a powersave mode, the 4050N is so old that even that burns a good amount of power. Enter Home Assistant. ...

I have an old HP 4050N. For a variety of reasons, I want to have it behind a print server instead of having my laptops print directly to it. Here’s how I set that up. ...