These posts are preserved from the original site. Some commands and products are historical; read them as an archive, not current instructions.
An automation is not finished when it works on the happy path. It is finished when the underlying service is unavailable, a device misses an event, or somebody uses the physical switch instead of the dashboard and the result is still unsurprising. That is the standard I use with Home Assistant and Lutron switches. The […]
Pi-hole is usually introduced as an ad blocker. In my network it is more useful to think of it as a local DNS service with a filtering feature attached. Names are part of the network Once local services, Home Assistant, containers, and remote access all have names, DNS becomes part of the operating system of […]
My first home-automation experiments were built around X10. It was inexpensive, understandable, and just unreliable enough to teach me a lot about signal paths, device state, and the difference between a command being sent and a device actually doing what was expected. The current system is Lutron switches integrated with Home Assistant. The change was […]