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
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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…
Read →A tiered mail classifier for cheap triage
Once all my mail was flowing through a Lambda, I wanted automatic triage — drop the obvious noise, bucket the rest, only forward the things I'll actually…
Read →manage-bde isn't broken, BitLocker just isn't installed
I had a fleet-status dashboard for some Windows boxes that pulled disk encryption state via manage-bde -status. Several rows were reporting hard errors…
Read →Echo Studio silently drops Alexa announcements over 600 characters
I have a morning briefing skill that reads me a short summary of overnight events. It worked fine on the Echo Show in the kitchen and was completely…
Read →A JARVIS-voiced morning briefing on the Echo Studio
I wanted something to talk at me when I get up — weather, todos, the date, sober days, mortgage-due reminder, homelab status. Not when an alarm fires…
Read →The arr-stack disk-full trap
The home media pipeline went quiet. Nothing new was finishing. CPU on the torrent boxes was high but throughput was zero. Time to actually look at why.
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