proxmox

Home Assistant - Better Proxmox Monitoring with InfluxDB

In this post I will show how I used the External Metric Server feature in Proxmox to set up the best possible integration between Proxmox and Home Assistant.

paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx Push Notifications

Here is a guide on how I set up mobile push notifications to my android phone whenever a document is consumed in paperless-ngx.

home-assistant

Home Assistant: Add Camera Snapshots to Push Notifications

In this post I will share an easy way to add real-time camera snapshots to your Home Assistant push notifications. This is a great way to level up your push notifications, allowing you to actually see what is happening at the instant a notification was pushed.

laravel Featured

Laravel Development on Windows in 2022

In this post, I will show how I set up VS Code to streamline Laravel development on Windows.

software-development Featured

Vue.js Single Page Application with ASP.NET MVC 5

In this post I will share how I set up an ASP.NET MVC 5 project as a SPA using Vue.js.

software-development

Git Merge Deep Dive

I started my research by trying to reverse engineer what Visual Studio does when you merge and resolve conflicts. That lead me to explore some other tools, like Meld, and to experiment with some of the optional merge strategies within git. Here is what I found.

software-development Featured

Meld Merge on Windows and Visual Studio

I set out to standardize our tooling for diffing and merging code on our git repos so that everyone has the same experience when visualizing code differences, regardless of IDE or operating system. Ultimately I settled on Meld.

blue-iris

Fully Offline Video Doorbell for Home Assistant

Today I am sharing my setup for a fully offline video doorbell in Home Assistant. The camera, motion sensor, and doorbell are all integrated over local IP.

home-assistant

Home Assistant - Better Blue Iris Integration

In this post, I will show how I greatly improved the performance of my Blue Iris cameras in Home Assistant. Rather than using the camera component, I am using iframes to directly embed the UI3 interface into Lovelace.

Last Watch AI Update - v1.1 Released

It has been about 4 months since Last Watch AI was first introduced. I received a lot of great feedback from the community and today I am finally releasing a new major version. Full details below. Last Watch AI - Release 1.1.1 The most difficult part of this

last-watch-ai Featured

Last Watch AI - Blue Iris Walkthrough

In this post I will walk through setting up Last Watch AI to process motion events from Blue Iris. I will show how to feed motion alerts from BI into Last Watch, and how to trigger recordings in BI if certain objects are detected.

home-assistant Featured

Car Presence Sensor with Home Assistant and Last Watch AI

This guide will show how to set up a vehicle presence sensor in Home Assistant using some key new features in Last Watch. In this example, I have a camera set up on my driveway running on Blue Iris. By using two detection profiles in Last Watch, I was able

Last Watch AI - Extend Automations with Node-RED

Last Watch is a standalone application for creating if-then automations based on AI object detection. Last Watch comes with a few automations out of the box which allow you to do simple things like send a Telegram photo message if a person is detected on camera. The list of integrations

home-automation

Last Watch AI - Ubuntu Installation and Upgrade Guide

The preferred method to install Last Watch on Ubuntu is directly from the source code. Installing from source makes it much easier to upgrade in the future by just pulling the latest code and rebuilding. Alternatively, you can install using the official releases. For a full walkthrough on setting up

home-automation

Last Watch - Getting Started Guide

This guide will introduce the key concepts and features of Last Watch by walking through a very basic setup. More advanced features will also be introduced at the end of this guide. If you have not installed Last Watch yet, please refer to the setup guide. 1. Detection Profiles The

home-automation Featured

Introducing: Last Watch AI

Last Watch is an all-in-one tool for creating If-Then automations based on AI computer vision.

Last Watch AI - Setup Guide for Windows Users

This guide will walk through the entire setup of Last Watch on Windows Server 2019. These steps should also work for Windows 10. 1. Dependencies The only dependency to install first is Docker, which will act as the host for Last Watch. Install Docker Desktop on WindowsHow to install Docker

home-automation

Simple Node-RED Sub-flow to Look Up Username

Here is a quick helper for Node-RED to fetch the Home Assistant user who triggered a state change...

home-assistant

Camera Motion Event Notifications with Locally-Processed AI

In this post I will share how I set up push notifications for my home security camera by integrating Home Assistant with Blue Iris. Motion events from the camera are filtered by locally-processed computer vision so that alerts are only generated by objects such as cars or people. I will

home-automation

Home Assistant + Nginx: Unencrypted Local Traffic

In this post, I will explain some of the hidden benefits of using a reverse proxy to keep local connections to Home Assistant unencrypted. Importantly, I will explain in simple terms what a reverse proxy is, and what it is doing under the hood. Finally, I will show how I

home-automation

HASS + Proxmox: Automatic Backups to Synology NAS

This week I checked off another goal for my Home Assistant setup – automated backups! Once a week, my entire Home Assistant VM is backed up to my Synology NAS which is protected with RAID 1. This setup gives me good protection against all hardware and software failures, and it gives

home-assistant

Proxmox + Home Assistant: Host System Hardware Monitoring

This post will show how I set up CPU Temperature monitoring for Home Assistant running on a virtual machine in Proxmox. Virtualized hardware does not report temperatures, so I used a python script running on the host system to periodically send the CPU temp to Home Assistant. Last week, I

home-assistant

Fully Kiosk Rest API Integration in Home Assistant

10/25/20 Update - The isScreenOn property has been changed to screenOn in later versions of Fully Kiosk. Check your JSON output for the correct name In this post I'll show how I exposed the backlight of my crappy old Android tablet as a Light in Home Assistant using

DIY

Drawer Organizer

Here's a quick and dirty build for organizing a messy drawer. The bottom is made from a 1/4" birch panel that I had left over from another project. The sides are made from 1/4" MDF. I started by measuring the inside of the existing drawer. To make the

home-assistant

Alexa Voice Commands to Control Home Assistant

The Amazon Echo is an impressive piece of technology hamstrung by it's shallow feature set and half-assed app store. The language recognition is a very powerful tool, but it's wasted on "skills" that do simple things like reading the weather forecast or telling dad-jokes. To be fair, the newer models