TrenchcoatFullOfBats

When I got started with my smart home setup, my primary concern was privacy and local control, so I went with an ethernet zigbee coordinator and zigbee bulbs, motion sensors, switches, plugs, etc. Everything runs from a micro PC running Home Assistant OS. It’s been rock solid for years, with no reliance on cloud services, and with no data leaving my house.

The only tricky bit was automating some can lights in the bathroom, but I solved that one by installing a wifi Shelly 2.5 dual channel roller shutter relay, with one channel connected to the light switch and the other to the bathroom fan. This was also the project that led to my discovery of WAGO connectors, which are vastly superior to wire nuts. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

YES. I have to keep chrome installed on at least one desktop or laptop if I want to flash firmware on ESP devices.

I wish I could play Dishonored again for the first time. So good. Have you played Prey?

I played a lot (1400+ hours) of The Long Dark up until a few years ago. I’m checking out the DLC content I missed, and it’s very good to be back. The “new” content and maps are very good.

Also, Alan Wake 2 after Control is quite enjoyable, but I think I like Control a little more. The tv ads in AW2 are very funny though, compared to the creepy puppet bits in Control.

Thank you! It was a fair amount of work, so that’s nice to hear.

Sure! Here are the cable organizers and “magazine”.

The magazine is for a gridfinity setup but I modified it to work with my printed Skadis panels, which are in turn a heavily modified version of this openscad model with a custom “wedge” mount to lock the panel tighter onto the wedges as more weight is added. My customizations aren’t shared anywhere, but if you’re interested, I’ll put them up on printables.

No drawers in the server closet, so 3D printer to the rescue:

There are dozens of us! Mine is a Dreame D9 with a custom GLaDOS voice pack that I can change by updating a CVS file.

Vikunja is great. Classic tasks, Gantt, tables and kanban - take your pick. Very stable as well, have been using it for years now.

It is my time to shine! I’ve had 3 3D printers thus far: I started with an Ender 3 Pro that I modified extensively, converting it to direct drive, 3D printed belt tensioners, cable chains, fan ducts, upgraded board with quiet drivers, and a Raspberry Pi running Klipper. All of the modifications led to a decrease in quality over time.

I also had a Qidi for a while, and it was…fine. Not great, but serviceable. Not super repairable or upgradeable, and I had to use their version of the Cura slicer, which they did not do a good job of keeping up to date.

When the Ender 3 Pro started to become unreliable, I switched to the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro, which is basically the final form of what I was trying to turn the Ender into, plus a bit extra. From the factory, it has direct drive, linear rails, runs klipper, has automatic bed leveling, filament runout detection, etc. It does NOT have wifi, but does have an ethernet port, which I prefer.

Using Fluidd is much better than Octoprint, and I’ve finally switched away from using Cura and am a convert to OrcaSlicer, which is EXCELLENT. It can send prints directly to the printer as well. It’s a great combination that I’m having a lot of fun with.

Full disclosure: I recently discovered that the version of Klipper this printer uses is out of date (2022) and does not fully comply with the klipper license, which I am NOT a fan of, but there is a very well documented way to “upgrade” to a “de-Elegood”, fully operational Klipper.

Disk space is definitely an issue, but I think I’ve got my single user instance dialed in on a 2 vcpu/4gb/30GB RAM Hetzner VPS; a cron job that runs at the first of every month deletes pictrs files over 30 days old. Currently at 74%.

A lot of bean memes died the day that job first ran.

Yeah, the tablet runs Fully Kiosk and I tried the same thing with the battery percentage thing and ran into the same issue, so I just simplified and made the automation time-based.

The tablet also likes to freeze a few times a day, so I also created an automation that toggles the smart plug power whenever HA loses connection to the tablet for more than 5 seconds, then toggles back to the original state at the start of the automation, which corrects the problem. Until the next time. But hey! It was only $60, so it’s fine.

That’s a nice setup. I am weirdly jealous of the sliding shelf. The CS350B is very nice as well.

Heat, then suction?

On a related note, I solved the battery issue with my wall mounted Fire tablet (for an HA dashboard) by connecting the power supply to a smart plug and setting up an automation to only give it the juice for about 3 hours per day, spread throughout the day

From top to bottom:

• Patch panel (with artisinal, handmade cables)
• TP-Link managed switch Shelf 1:
• PFSense 4 port firewall
• Lenovo m910q w/Proxmox (cluster node 1) running 2 VMs for docker hosting: Ubuntu for media stuff (arrs, navidrome, jellyfin, calibre, calibre-web, tubesync, syncthing) and Debian for other stuff (paperless-ngx, vikunja, vscodium, redlib, x-pipe webtop, fasten health, linkwarden, alexandrite), 1 Win 10 VM for the very few times I need to use windows, some Red Hat Academy student and instructor RHEL 9 VMs, and an OPNsense VM for testing Shelf 2:
• HP Elitedesk G5 800 SFF w/Proxmox (cluster node 2) with an Nvidia GT 730 passed through to a Debian VM used primarily as a remote desktop via ThinLinc, but also runs a few docker containers (stirling pdf, willow application server, fileflows)
• Shuttle DH110 w/Proxmox (cluster node 3) with 1 VM running Home Assistant OS with an NVME Coral TPU passed through as well as a zooz 800 long range zwave coordinator (the zigbee coordinator is ethernet and in a different room) and two LXCs with grafana and prometheus courtesy of tteck (RIP) Shelf 3:
• WIP Fractal R5 server to replace the ancient Ubuntu file server to the left (outside the rack, sitting on the box of ethernet cable) that is primarily the home of my media drives (3 12 TB Ironwolf drives) and was my first homelab server. The new box will have a Tesla p4 and RX 580 GTX, i7-8700T and 64GB RAM in addition to the drives from the old server. I’ll be converting the Ubuntu drive from the old server into an image and will use it to create a Proxmox VM on the new server, with the same drives passed through. Bottom:
• 2 Cyberpower CP1000 UPS with upgraded LiFePO4 batteries. The one on the left is only for servers and only exists to give the servers time to shut down cleanly when the power goes out. The one on the right is only for network devices (firewall, switch and the Ruckus R500 out of shot mounted higher in the closet)

The internet certainly forgets…but a Usenet service with good retention will remember for about a decade

My Gen 2 only had whispernet, which relied on the Sprint EVDO network, both of which no longer exist (the company and the network type).

FWIW, Amazon deprecated mobi files recently and epub is the new “sideload” standard. You still have to email the file to the kindle address to be able to read them, or convert to azw3.

If you’re already using Calibre, check out Calibre-Web, which essentially uses a Calibre database as the back end. The interface is so much nicer than Calibre.

Proton purchased SimpleLogin in 2022 and the creator/dev has been working there ever since. Also, you can easily create random email aliases in Vaultwarden/Bitwarden via the SimpleLogin API.

Another vote for Runbox. Been using them for almost 5 years now with no issues. They are also an employee owned co-op if that is of interest.