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. ...

Sending notifications from Home Assistant via Twilio SMS I got a post published at work about How to Receive Alerts from Home Assistant with Twilio SMS, so I won’t replicate it here. TL;DR - It is super easy to send SMS messages via Twilio SMS with curl. Update: I wrote another article, Use PagerDuty with Home Assistant this time for using PagerDuty which allows automatically de-duping notifications.

Biden won! Awesome! The fight isn’t over though. Time to donate to the Georgia Runoff Senate Elections. I’ve set up identical fundraisers, this time for all the different Star Trek Series. Donate to your favorite series link and we’ll see which series has the most fan support. TOS - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-tos TNG - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-tng DS9 - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-ds9 Enterprise - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-enterprise Voyager - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-voyager Discovery - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-discovery Lower Decks - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-lowerdecks Picard - https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-picard

Adding the Plex integration to Home Assistant is pretty straightforward with the exception of finding your Plex token. Find Your Plex token: Sign into your Plex.tv account Browse to one of the media files (TV episode, movie) on your connected server. You’ll need a Plex pass for this. Select Get info Click View XML Ignore the XML. Look in the URL to the XML page - you’ll see Plex-Token\=XYZZY. That’s the token you’ll need. Set up the Plex Home Assistant Integration Once you have the token, ...

Before anyone complains about me getting political on what was mainly a tch site, remember that not being political is a luxury that only people not getting screwed by the current political landscape can afford. In no particular order, the attempts to roll back rights for LGBTQ+ citizens, the assaults on womens’ rights, the handling of the COVID-19 crisis, packing the Supreme Court with a hypocritical last second Justice, putting kids in cages, the ongoing destruction of the political norms that have existed for decades, the ignoring scientific facts, etc, etc all have focused my efforts on supporting one party. ...

I’ve got a mix of architectures in my basement cluster - some Odroid HC2s that are arm7, some Raspberry Pi 4s that are arm64, and am soon going to add an Intel node as well. It’s more hassle than it’s worth to have to specify different images for the different architectures. I already build my own copies of images, so I decided to start building all my images as multiarchitecture images. ...