I run Home Assistant operating system on a Raspberry Pi for my home automation. The built-in backup integration creates backup files in the backups folder in the root of the default folder. This is fine, but what happens if you experience an hardware failure and need to restore your Home Assistant configuration from a backup file? There are… Read More »
The notion of “Blue Monday,” denoting the purportedly most depressing day of the year, has captivated the public imagination since its emergence in 2005. Attributed to a formula developed by psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall3 and disseminated through a press release by the British travel company Sky Travel, the concept has intrigued skeptics and proponents alike. The formula integrates… Read More »
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 »
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 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 »