Throttling doorbell notifications to the ones that matter
I rolled out face-recognition notifications on my front-door doorbell and got spammed with hundreds of pushes in a few hours. I killed the cron, audited…
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Door unlock on iPhone SOS when Apple won't expose the event
I wanted my front door to unlock automatically when my iPhone or Watch triggered Emergency SOS or Fall Detection. The catch is that Apple does not expose…
Read →Ring IR mode breaks face-distance thresholds
I have a small face-identification pipeline running against snapshots from my doorbell. It uses a fixed distance threshold to decide whether a face…
Read →qBittorrent's auto-remove racing arr imports
Symptoms looked like the same old
Read →Hyper Backup stuck in a scan loop over live LXC subvolumes
My Synology Hyper Backup job to Google Drive kept restarting and never finishing. It would run for hours, get most of the way through the scan, then bail…
Read →A $25 bed occupancy sensor for Home Assistant
I wanted Home Assistant to know whether the bed was occupied, and by whom, so it could drive lighting, HVAC setbacks, and a few
Read →Backfilling Signal history that the server doesn't have
I wanted my homelab assistant to have access to my Signal history the same way it has my iMessage and email. Signal's whole point is that the server…
Read →Shipping an iOS build headlessly over SSH
I wanted to build and install my iOS app from a remote agent session — no Xcode window open, nobody at the Mac. xcodebuild over SSH refused to codesign…
Read →Route files were losing the immutable bit
I set chattr +i on my backend's main.py after a sync bug kept silently overwriting it. Months later, the iOS app started losing connectivity on a…
Read →OneDrive sync was reverting my backend edits
Every few days my backend would lose a recent fix. The change would work, restart the service, work for hours, then vanish. Git showed the old code back…
Read →Spoken morning briefing on an Echo, without writing a skill
I wanted a JARVIS-style morning briefing — calendar, weather, finances, todos, the day's notable anniversaries — spoken out loud on the Echo Studio in…
Read →Face recognition on the front door with an active-learning loop
I wanted my front door doorbell to do something more interesting than
Read →Editing Home Assistant OS config without the SSH add-on
I deployed Home Assistant OS as a VM on Proxmox so I could try a Wi-Fi smart lock. HA proxied through nginx returned HTTP 400 on every request. The fix…
Read →Downsampling the way out of a CNN out-of-memory loop
Doorbell camera snapshots come in at 1536x1536. I wanted to run them through a CNN face detector to label visitors. The detector kept getting OOM-killed…
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