Posts

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. ...

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. ...