Home Automation
124 episodes
#6486: Why Voice Satellites Need Integrated Audio
Separating a voice satellite's microphone from its speaker eliminates hardware echo cancellation, making seamless follow-up questions impossible.
#6399: Smart Home Emergency Buttons and Mental Labor
Android phones in Doze mode quiet notifications on a desk unless sent at high priority, but hammering the channel trips Firebase throttling.
#6167: Streaming Browser Cookies to a Headless Server
Daniel wants his logged-in browser on the home server. Chrome bolted the front door — so what's left?
#6166: Turning a Drifted Server Into a Rebuildable Playbook
Your server grew for years. Now you want a recipe that can rebuild it from scratch. Here's the honest path from drift to playbook.
#6128: Where the Screws Go: Internal KVM Mounting
PiKVM, NanoKVM, JetKVM, and BliKVM all promise remote rescue — but wiring one inside your case is a different problem entirely.
#5918: Splitting One Camera's Audio for a Baby Monitor
One IP camera, two jobs: an open audio line for the nursery and Frigate's cry detection. Here's how go2rtc and Icecast fit together.
#5834: Dead Man's Switches: Alerts vs. Final Notices
Same mechanism, opposite goals: hardware that fires in two seconds when you fall, and services that wait sixty days to confirm you're gone.
#5814: Who Remembers Where You Left Off?
mpv remembers. MPRIS, GstPlay, and Media3 don't. There's no standard for playback history.
#5754: Your Home Rack's Power Problem, Solved
Data centers look immaculate, your rack looks like a raccoon got into a cable box. Here's what actually transfers from pro PDUs to home.
#5735: The Breaker Protects the Wire, Not You
How service size, load calculations, and the 80% rule actually determine what your outlets can deliver.
#5664: Rack Dreams: Getting Display and USB Across the Room
Display over fiber is the easy part. USB is where it gets annoying — and the single-UPS dream doesn't quite close.
#5637: Lux Sensors for Home Assistant: The Feedback Loop Nobody Warns You About
Lux sensors sound simple until the lights you turn on trip the sensor that turned them on. Here's the full chain, from Aqara T1 to Matter's missing...
#5523: Where Does the Coding Agent Actually Live?
The agent process is moving off your laptop. Local appliance, SaaS workspace, or your own VPS — three answers, no consensus.
#5522: Building a Podcast Backup Appliance
One listener wants a single-purpose box that pulls every episode to local storage he controls. Turns out the software exists — the packaging doesn't.
#5521: Old Laptops as Home Servers: A Field Guide
That dead-battery laptop in your drawer can still serve. Here's the whole playbook — headless Linux, thermals, and the battery question nobody agre...
#5457: Pigeon Alerts on a Repurposed i5: Frigate Without the TPU
Daniel wants a pigeon notification, not a custom model. Frigate already ships with bird detection — the real work is masks, zones, and filters.
#5328: A Shabbat Radio That Can't Be Paused
A soundproof box that plays podcasts continuously — no pause, no skip, no volume. Just open the lid and listen.
#5282: Wi-Fi IoT Without the Cloud Lock-In
Wi-Fi IoT ships locked to vendor clouds by default. Here's what it takes to break out — and where Wi-Fi is actually the right tool.
#5235: Wiring Smart Patio Lights Through Home Assistant
Picking a Zigbee RGB controller is the easy part — sizing the power supply and keeping mains water out is where patio lighting projects live or die.
#5232: Zello, PTT Buttons, and the Kitchen Intercom Question
Why your Bluetooth speaker ignores Zello's push-to-talk — and what to buy instead for a hands-full, phone-off fallback.
#5078: When Shopping Lists Outgrow the Grocery Store
Why grocery list apps fail when you need drywall anchors, and what actually works for multi-store household shopping.
#5054: Hardware Clubs for Grownups: Finding Your People
Software is solitary. Hardware is social. Here's how to find or build a space where adults and teens build together.
#5033: The Greatest Dumbest Home Assistant Automations
Doorbell goal horns, toilet dashboards, and a lamp that dims on guests. The ten most gloriously unnecessary smart home automations, ranked.
#5031: Circadian Lighting: Sunset vs. Your Body Clock
Is your smart home's "red light before bed" actually synced to your biology? We dig into chronobiology, latitude, and lighting design.