Blue Monday – Is this really a thing?

The short answer is…No! The concept of Blue Monday arose out of a press release from British travel company, Sky Travel in 2005. The press release cited the work of psychologist, Dr. Cliff Arnall, who supposedly constructed a “formula” that accurately predicted that the third Monday in January was the most depressing day of the year. The “formula”… Read More »

Ontario Energy Monitoring with Home Assistant and Shelly EM

I have implemented many home automation projects at my house over the years for lighting, security, and climate control using Home Assistant, however, when the Energy Dashboard was added to Home Assistant Core 2021.8, I knew this integration would be the next logical step. After a few Google and Reddit searches, I decided on Shelly EM for the… Read More »

DNS over HTTPS and PiHole on Raspberry Pi

Since deploying PiHole on my home network a few months ago, I have found that the network response on my devices seem to be faster (probably due to the PiHole cache). I was also very pleased to find that approximately 16% of my DNS queries are blocked according to my configured block lists. Next step in the evolution… Read More »

Home Assistant containers running in Docker on Ubuntu Linux.

Home Assistant installation documentation is geared primarily towards Raspberry Pi hardware. However, for my use case, I chose to setup on Docker since I already had Docker running on my Ubuntu Linux ‘home server‘ which hosts containers for all of my other services such as UniFi, Plex, MotionEye, etc. A good starting point for getting started with HA… Read More »

Problematic Smartphone Use – cellphone addiction, FOMO. Is it a ‘thing’?

Since the beginning of mainstream television, there have been many studies on the pathological effects of excessive television on the developing brain. The ‘popular’ consensus being that excessive television turns our kids into mindless zombies by numbing their minds and promoting a lethargic lifestyle. Likewise, smartphones have made their way into our daily lives in such an intrinsic… Read More »