TedZanzibar

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TedZanzibar ,

I've tried a few "third party" smart bulbs as it were but, expensive as they are, nothing comes close to Hue for colour accuracy and general responsiveness. As you didn't specify "cheap", Hue will always be my recommendation.

That said, if you do want "cheap" and want to avoid WiFi then the Innr bulbs are fairly decent for the price. I've got about 15 of their spotlight style bulbs and they were half the price of the Hue alternatives.

Using HA to start my work laptop

No major question here, just thought you might find this interesting. It's an example of the kind of (off-the-wall) things you can do with HA that aren't immediately obvious. When I was starting out with HA, I enjoyed reading these examples, because it gave me ideas for my own setup. And, I wrote many automations that should...

TedZanzibar ,

I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I'm making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything's ready when I move into the office.

For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that's long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.

The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.

TedZanzibar ,

Meh. I was really hoping they'd go back to the sci-fi aesthetic of 2016 but instead they've doubled down on the weird high fantasy with guns thing.

It's like they actually wanted to reboot Heretic/Hexen but they couldn't get the license for it so they've just shoehorned it into Doom instead.

TedZanzibar ,

Yeah honestly Eternal should've been a Quake reboot using the new engine rather than a Doom sequel. Everything about it felt like Quake.

TedZanzibar OP ,

Ah, that's useful thanks!

TedZanzibar OP ,

Yeah I'm running a Cloudflare tunnel for external access (which is why I need DNS based LE certs), but that's another thing that I don't really know what it's doing beyond basic reverse proxying.

I have a country-based whitelist for where my Immich instance can be accessed from but I find the Zero Trust admin backend to be massive overkill for my needs, and it doesn't help that they've recently moved everything around so none of the guides out there point to the right places anymore!

TedZanzibar OP ,

Very useful insights, thanks.

I do currently have external stuff running via a Cloudflare tunnel (which is why I need DNS based LE certs for the internal proxy) but I don't know if it's setup correctly (beyond doing basic reverse proxying) and the admin backend for it feels like massive overkill for a home setup. Plus with Immich I run into the issue of a) dire warnings about it being in active dev and potentially insecure and b) filesize limits making away-from-home backups difficult.

I could well be over thinking the whole thing.

TedZanzibar OP ,

If it was just me, or if Tailscale wasn't such an insatiable battery leech then I'd absolutely do that but the wife (and kids) acceptance factor plays a big role, and they're never going to accept having to toggle a separate service on and off to get to their photos.

Maybe I'm being overly paranoid but I work in IT and see the daily, near constant barrage of port scans and login attempts to our VPN service and it has an effect!

TedZanzibar OP ,

Hmm I must be doing something wrong then because it doesn't work for me.

TedZanzibar OP ,

Thanks for the suggestion. I spent a good hour or two trying to make Wireguard work for me last night but failed. If I set it to only apply to Immich, nothing else would have Internet access at all. Likewise if I set the peer IP range to just my LAN subnet.

After pulling my hair out for a while I gave up and uninstalled.

TedZanzibar OP ,

Yes please, I might revisit it with a fresh pair of eyes.

TedZanzibar OP ,

Thanks, I'll muse over this when I next get the chance!

TedZanzibar ,

The whole point of home automation is that it's automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.

I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I'll have to look into your setup for that!

I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.

TedZanzibar ,

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you've got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it's being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I'm missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.

TedZanzibar ,

it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

Or both!

TedZanzibar ,

My inner monologue is an asshole that literally never shuts up unless I'm asleep. If I'm not actively thinking about something and conversing with him or keeping him otherwise distracted, he's singing a snippet of the last catchy song he heard, over and over, until a new one takes its place. Sometimes it's the same song for days on end.

TedZanzibar ,

Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I'll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.

They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had 'quirks' submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.

Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It's definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.

Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don't have any Thread devices yet, of course.

TedZanzibar ,

I read that as "Voldemort" and was both confused and impressed.

How do you store your grounded coffee? ( slrpnk.net )

Hiya, just quickly wondering how people store their coffee? Mine is in a tin box I got second hand, cos I thought it looked nice. Any rules regarding storing grounded coffee? I don't store much at the time, it's just if I grind a little too much and what not. I'm assuming the general thumb rule for this is to store it in a...

TedZanzibar ,

ITT a surprising number of people who remember having these tins as kids, including me. I'll have to see if my parents still have theirs.

TedZanzibar ,

This looks neat, will definitely give it a go, cheers!

TedZanzibar ,

I just recently put in an N100 mini PC to run as a Plex server. Cost me about £160, pulls all of 6W when idle, and it doesn't break a sweat when transcoding no matter what I throw at it. As a media server I can't recommend them highly enough.

What is the name of the actor from Breaking Bad who had the A- tattoo on his arm?

I have been searching for this person’s name for years, after people have pointed out my own blood type tattoo. Mine is for medical reasons. Anyway, after having people jokingly reference the scene where Jesse says, “A minus? Why not an A plus?” I haven’t been able to find the scene online, or the actor’s name on any...

TedZanzibar ,

I've watched BB a few times but I can't say I recognise the reference. Still, if you're sure that's the line he says, try searching on yarn.co. It generates gifs from movie and TV quotes so it might help to narrow things down.

TedZanzibar ,

You've already been swayed, but keeping these devices off the Internet was my main reasoning too. Sometimes WiFi is your only option, of course, but when the choice is there I go Zigbee every time. Other factors to consider include:

  • Zigbee was designed specifically for IoT stuff. WiFi was not.
  • lower power consumption
  • self healing mesh
  • much easier/cheaper to extend the range by strategically placing bulbs or smart sockets compared to extending WiFi range
  • avoids clogging up WiFi bandwidth with IoT noise
  • there's a limit to the number of devices most WiFi routers can handle

I assume Z-wave is similar but Zigbee devices are much easier to find, at least in the UK, and - someone correct me if I'm wrong - but I believe Thread is essentially Zigbee 2.0.

TedZanzibar ,

Just to add that the low power consumption is not to be underestimated when it comes to battery powered sensors. It's not uncommon to get 1-2 years of life out of a single battery in Zigbee devices, even the ones that report their status regularly like temperature and luminance sensors.

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