The digital, paperless future is coming closer and closer. When I was looking to go digital I ran into one major problem: automatic upload to Nextcloud. The automatic upload from your scanner makes digital copies of your documents available everywhere Read more…
Unifi hardware is great for an enthusiast network but can get quite expensive. Fortunately there is a pretty cheap way of extending a Unifi network. The small flex mini switch gives you most of the advantages of the Unifi platform Read more…
With smart light bulbs pretty much any existing ceiling lamp can become a smart ceiling lamp in minutes. Here is how to make a ceiling lamp smart – standalone or as part of a bigger smart light system with Home Read more…
A smart home server is the heart of your setup. It needs to be running well to power everything else. Monitoring Raspberry Pis, my favorite low power server, is easy to set up and helps you to detect errors early Read more…
Hosting your own services is pretty simple with Docker. Making services available everywhere via the web can be tricky. A reverse proxy is a flexible and safe solution for this problem – and Traefik is a reverse proxy build to Read more…
Grafana is an awesome tool to visualize your smart home data. It gets even better if you create a dynamic dashboard though. Change the datasource for a set of diagrams with one click – easy, show all values of a Read more…
To host services on your own server you need a simple way of running them. A great combination here is Docker and docker-compose for running your services. After some initial setup this combination is very simple to use, easy to Read more…
Having backups of your servers data is essential. But what if somethings goes wrong with the backup process? An automated backup check can be an incredibly important tool. I wrote a small script to check for new backups on my Read more…
Home Assistant helpers can greatly improve automations and make more complex ones possible. Normal automations can be very powerful but they miss one feature that is sometimes needed for more complex interactions: variable storage. Fortunately there is another feature – Read more…
A printer is part of most households. Integrating a printer with Home Assistant is the next step to get some cool automations and nice graphs. I recently had to buy a new printer and will describe here how to add Read more…
