I’ve been running my own media server for many, many years in various iterations. Currently I’m trying out Emby as an alternative to Plex after being a bit underwhelmed with Jellyfin‘s Apple tvOS app options (e.g. Swiftfin and Infuse Pro ). I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it; I would prefer to go with…
Like most of the web industry, I use Git for version control, and so far I’ve mainly worked with GitHub remotes, so that’s what I’m set up for now. This post will cover how I install and configure Git to work smoothly in Windows. Disclaimer: I don’t do much web development in Windows these days,…
The next step in my Home Assistant project was to enable secure remote access to it when I’m away from home. Fortunately the documentation covers this topic. Mostly I followed the instructions on the Remote Access with TLS/SSL via Let’s Encrypt page, so I won’t repeat the detailed instructions here. However, I did want to…
At this point in my Home Assistant journey I have several devices configured, and the UI is starting to get cluttered. Home Assistant lets you organize the UI using groups and views, so I decided to take advantage of that. I want to have a few tabs (a.k.a. “views”) with my devices grouped within the…
One of the keys to enabling a smart home is to track who is home and when they come and go, also known as presence detection. Home Assistant has a few built-in methods for doing this. For now, I’m not looking for fine-grained tracking i.e. detecting the exact moment someone enters or leaves the house.…
One of my goals for creating a smart home is to keep things as “guest friendly” as possible. With that in mind I decided to go with Z-Wave switches to control the lights and fans in our common areas (kitchen, family room, etc.). These switches work just like a regular switch–perfect for guests–and they can…
For my first venture into using Home Assistant, I went with a Raspberry Pi 3 to keep costs down and because it seems very well supported by the Home Assistant community. Once the hardware was assembled, I followed the installation instructions for HASSbian, which flashes a disk image to the SD card for the Pi…