A Less Obnoxious Assistant

My last rendition of my Home Assistant Configuration (which you can read about here) was left in a rather obnoxious state. My wife isn't particularly good about checking her notifications regularly, so while I was at work, I would get a notification every 10 minutes for a while, until my wife finally realized she should …

Triggered

My Home Assistant now controls my HVAC the way I want it to. I'm now super happy about how it works, but man is the code ugly. To start with, I bought a very basic, Z-Wave thermostat. It has no smarts of its own, but can be controlled via Z-Wave. This means my home automation …

Maintainable Secrets

In my last post, I got Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) working for my Home Assistant home automation server. It worked at the time, but that was for a very basic configuration of Home Assistant. As I started to set up more components that needed keys or passwords, things started to get hairy. Luckily, …

Automating The Automation

I just got Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi in my previous post. Unfortunately, trying to edit the configuration file on the device is a major pain. The good news is, with the magic of automation, we can make things more convenient. We can put our configuration in a git repository, and set up …

Home Assistant Setup On Raspberry Pi 3B+

First, download the installation image from here. Then, unzip the image. Connect the SD card you are going to put in your Raspberry Pi, and then write the image to the card. Make sure you get the write device for the of= part. dd will overwrite whatever is there, even if it is your system drive. I …

Arch in Bhyve on FreeNAS to Run Plex

It took some doing to get it working, but I think this is about as efficient a setup as I could have had. I have a server running FreeNAS for backup/storage purposes. FreeNAS has a Plex plugin, but for Plex Pass users, which I am, the FreeBSD operating system on which FreeNAS is build doesn't …

To The Helm – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I had something basic up and running: an Elm front-end talking to a Haskell back-end. The next step is to get some persistence out of the back-end. We need Haskell to talk to a database. The tutorial I was following went with a simple Sqlite interface, but I wanted …

The Arch of Progress

My home laptop is a 5(?) year old Lenovo Yoga 13. I've been running Ubuntu 17.04 on it for the last year. Lately I noticed it was running out of memory on a regular basis and then having major problems. Basically just locking up all the time. The machine only has 4Gb of RAM, and …

To The Helm – Part 1

Now that I've gotten my feet wet with both Haskell and Elm, I want to try and put them together. I'm just going to try something simple. Let's make a standard task list app. Note: You can find the code for this post here. I found a series of blog posts of somebody trying something …

Climbing That Tree

You can find the code for this post here. Now that I've got Elm installed and working, it's time to really take it for a spin. I'm going to continue on with the same tutorial I was following in the last post. They want to use an RPG tracking system for an example. I decided …