EarMaster

Also: mains powered devices (lightbulbs, smart plugs, zigbee repeaters) will all act as a repeater in your mesh. Depending on your home it might help to add in a few of them. But keep in mind that this will not magically make your existing devices use them. When setting up your network always pair your permanent powered devices first so they can act as endpoints for your battery powered ones.

For the power state monitoring I can recommend this blueprint, which does everything for you (and maybe even more): https://github.com/leofabri/hassio_appliance-status-monitor

You can now use templates and still maintain the visual editor for the rest of the component. Very nice!

I think what he means is that if your backup is triggered from your main server and your main server is compromised the backups can also be attacked immediately. If the backup is requested from the backup machine you will at least have the time between the attack and the next backup to prevent the attack from reaching your backup machines.

For me it was KitchenOwl. It’s shopping list works and looks similar to Bring, which we had used before and made the transition for my wife easier.

If you don’t plan on supporting this for at least a few years I would say no.

If you don’t expect to have a decent local userbase I would say no (local in the sense of a common interest, e.g. it might be useful to host an instance for all members of even a small company if you expect a decent amount of posts).

If it’s just you and your family (let’s be honest: it’s just you) I would say no.

The fediverse can federate, but if everyone is using their own server it’s just a fancy peer to peer network.

I also think it may be the browser not using the DNS provided by the router. This is often called Safe Browsing or Secure DNS in browser settings.

I don’t know if Home Assistant is so niche. Everyone who does some form of smart home comes to the point where there are several manufacturers forcing you to use their own app. If you’re lucky you can use something like Google Home or Siri to have a unified control interface, but these are usually very basic. You can try to stick to one system for as long as possible, but sooner or later that will fail. A system like Home Assistant is the inevitable solution to these problems and it is a very good thing that HA exists as a strong and open software to solve this problem.

I have an Intel NUC (3rd gen I think) which runs Proxmox, which runs several VMs including Home Assistant on HAOS. The only thing I did was upgrade the RAM as the VMs eat this quickly…

Other services I run on this small box are AdGuard, Paperless-ngx, KitchenOwl, tt-rss and two Nightscout instances.

While almost everyone here seems to hate AI (maybe for the wrong reason, but who am I to judge) I like to have AI as it is able to provide answers a simple search engine cannot.

What I don’t see is hosting something like this myself. The managing of source and indexing them would take too much of my, my server’s and the web servers to be indexed energy (maybe I am wrong).

There are already good solutions (OpenWebUI with Ollama) that can be tweaked to almost do what you’re describing and the AI models get better every month, so I don’t think a custom AI search engine could keep up with it.

The two on left are like: I don’t like flies! I only like plain noodles - with Ketchup!

For a general guide on how to make ssh more secure I stick to https://www.sshaudit.com/

You can check your config and they also provide step by step guides for several distros…

Absolutely. While I love fully automated solutions there is also stuff that needs an user interface more complex than just a button. I love how much easier it has become to create personalized dashboards that even can adjust themselves based on the situation.

I use INWX (based in Germany). Prices are consistently low (not always the cheapest, but fair). The web UI is a bit rusty, but it works perfectly and you can manage everything there.

That show is equal parts content and advertising. That is a bit too much for me…

Dashboards can get quite complicated and funnily enough TV remotes are not all the same. With a small userbase (it is by far not the most requested feature) it will be hard to maintain such a feature without just fulfilling a one-user-usecase.

ZHA works just as well. You just need to use the remote to pair Hue devices either way.

I am not sure how two synced HA instances (if that’s even possible) would help. You would need to allow your IoT devices to be accessible by the Home Assistant instance you want to use with your personal devices. If that seems like a risk to you, then why not run HA in the DMZ alltogether?

This is bad advice. Do not listen to this guy.

Paperless-AI is fantastic. I had 750 untagged documents (all my physical mail since 2017). Paperless-AI processed all of them using a local Ollama installation, tagged them, created correspondants and a title for each document. So much work I didn’t have to do… 😍