It's Christmas and I'm not at work but my bloody alarm clock automation was set up wrong so my alarm went off at 6.30am and my body wouldn't let me get back off to sleep.

So I made a coffee and sat down at my PC and went "What project am I sorting out now?" which is a typical thought when I'm out of bed before everyone else.

Today I knew my Wife wanted me to get the house tidy for Xmas so what better time to get my head around ToDo lists?

Incidentally I have just made a bed sensor so at some point I hit "Deploy" in Node Red and all my lights got brighter, which was odd because I wasn't tinkering with them, but it turned out my Wife had just gotten out of bed and that turned off the night lights.

So I've made separate ToDo lists for each of us and made specific Lovelace pages for each of them. At certain times of the day Node Red will check if there's jobs outstanding on the list and send an actionable notification if you're home. The notification has a button that will open the Lov

I have all the usual Home Assistant stuff, including a Goodnight Routine.

I also have 3 cats, one of which has only known the house with automation.

Now these cats seem to have a hierarchy, and the Top Cat sleeps in the bedroom with us. This is now the Cat that only knows automation.

So when I say "Hey Google, Goodnight" she meows, she's genuinely excited.

Now a lot of the time my Wife falls asleep on the sofa while I watch TV or game, and I have to wake her up to go to bed. It's "Goodnight" then wake up the wife.

Last night I had a brainwave. What if I can get the cat to do it? She wakes my wife up at 4am by cleaning her face already, maybe I can get her to wake her up on the sofa too.

So last night I did the usual "Hey Google, Goodnight" then started saying "Goodnight" to the cat, then softly calling my wife, "Wifey, goodnight, goodnight" until she woke up.

When she woke up the cat put her front paws on the sofa and sniffed my wife's face and meowed.

So I plan on waking the

It's been written by a self_admitted noob at integrations, but it effortlessly pulls in all data from my Sleep As Android alarm clock and even introduced me to features of the app I didn't know existed, and I've been using it for years.

By following his instructions (I skipped the watch bit) Home Assistant now know when I'm sleeping and awake.

I've been considering some kind of bed load esp board for a while but now I don't have to. I know when I fell asleep last night and even when I was snoring.

More importantly, Home Assistant knows these things and I can now have a more reliable Good Night automation that knows when I'm sleeping, even when I get kicked out of bed and have to sofa sleep.

I've been using SB for years but it's just a bit shit sometimes.

What I love about it is that it has Chromecast Bridgez meaning I can play music to my Google Home Minis.

But nowadays I have all my music in Plex and I'm using Symphonium to stream to my phone. Symphonium connects up nicely.to my Google minis, I just need something to replace my squeeze lite end points so I can send music to them from my phone.

Currently these are both running on Pis so if anyone can recommend an easy UPNP endpoint software for a pi, that would be great.

I woke up this morning at 6 am with IBS cramps. I tried to go back to bed but I'd woken fully up so by half 7 I was sat at my PC with a brew for some uninterrupted tinkering.

My espresence has been a bit finicky since ai set it up. I've been moving the nodes around to find better positions with slight improvements but nothing making it properly stable.

Well this morning was even worse than usual. I'm sat in my front room with my sensor flitting between the floor above and below me but never on the floor I'm on.

I moved the sensors again. I played with dwell time. I changed "wait until" up. I even dived into the rabbit hole of tuning the base stations by increasing rssi and absorbsion, which actually seemed to do the best at improving it.

So at this point my phone has been sitting on the desk for a few hours while I fine tune all this, when my wife comes down the stairs. Her beacon is firmly set to "frontroom" when she sits down but mine is bouncing around the house. Odd.

Then I fi

Since my air fryer notification I've bought 2 more Esp32 Dev boards from The Greal Mall of China- AliExpress. A couple days later I'd read about MMwave sensors and purchased a couple of those too.

A week later and they land a day after each other. I got home today and found 2 MMwave sensors on the kitchen table.

I had half an hour before I had to pick the kids up so I tried to wire and flash it.

The first problem was the writing. I'm 40 now but always had awesome vision, so shit like this just shows me how much it's actually deteriorated. I had to get my phone out and zoom in to work out where to plug in my wires.

I managed to plug shit in and flash the basic firmware on the board, and managed to add some basic code I'd found for my board when I searched using it's full AliExpress name.

I left with a sensor running in HA happy it was that easy. But...

I did some digging, because all I was getting in HA was an occupancy On status, no variance or info.

I found that when I just

"Hur Hur that's what a timer on your phone is for dude"

Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!

Anyway it's not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it's done.

Now I've worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.

This week I've been playing with Espresence, which for anyone that doesn't know, is a program that runs on an ESP32 and tracks Bluetooth. It then has a guess where you are based upon the strength of the signal.

So a little backstory, I recently wiped out my HA server and didn't have a backup so I've started from scratch. Since I've started from scratch I've been avoiding Node Red and just using the HA automations, but I am a NR boy at heart.

Previously my bathroom light automation in NR was a massive flow of door, motion, leak sensors.

When I added espresence I decided to reinstall NR to add these new sensors into my automations, and found the Binary Sensor node, so I had a play and managed to make a Front Room Presence binary sensor.

"This is pretty good" I thought and made another for my bathroom, taking in all the sensors I used previously. But this time they triggered a binary sensor instead of the lights.

Now I have the binary sensor triggering the light automation, with ext

I've been in the HA world since the time the government placed the world under house arrest. Since then I've seen all sorts of amazing things people can do with an esp32 device.

So I'm late to the game. I always thought it may become a dangerous rabbit hole so I've just avoided it. But apparently I have 4 coming today so it's about time to ask you guys what you do.

My first project was gonna be getting some Bluetooth tracking going on around the house to get some room prescence going on.

I also read I can make some seat/bed sensors with a little wire, aluminium foil, paper and a folder-insert, that sounds like it could be fun.

I have a breadboard and a bunch of components I bought when I first got a Pi. I don't know how compatible these components are with esp32s or what the hell I can do.

I don't have a soldering iron (yet).

So basically: noob post, gimme some easy projects that don't require a lot, or wow me with your esp projects.

I saw an appreciation post for Gluetun on here in the last couple of weeks. I'd set it up before my server died and I had to reinstall everything, but then gone for the easy method when I was reinstalling.

So my easy method install had a VM as a server running Plex and Docker and a second VM with Mullvad installed running anything that needed a VPN in Docker.

Yesterday I opened up a program behind the VPN and it wasn't working again. I had to restart the VM to get it going and it annoyed me. So before work I set up Gluetun.

I had previously used this walkthrough https://youtu.be/9dJPOd0XbN8 so I went back to it, looked in the notes and found his GitHub, then his docker compose under Torrent-VPN.

I stole his initial Gluetun config and the qBittorrent part, but then went into Portainer and took all my running containers and added them to the file. I took the ports out of each compose file and added the "network mode" and "depends on Gluetun" bits from the qBittorrent part of his con

So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don't recommend it.

Silver lining is that I don't have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.

Anyway it made me realise what I'd miss if I didn't have them, because I didn't have them.

I've been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don't like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how "It's too early for you." But not this week.

I've put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I've moved to HA and still use it.

SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it's connected when I'm home but not in network when I'm away, so it can't fire the messages, which is what yo

I've got 3 HDDs connected to my Proxmox machine via usb3. They worked fine until this week. I have them mounted and passed through to OMV.

One failed on Sunday. It was fine one minute, I rebooted and Proxmox wouldn't boot...

Couldn't work out why it wouldn't boot and reflashed Proxmox, losing all my machines (I have since learned the importance of backups since I had none).

I've spent 4 days rewriting it all. Rebooted last night and it happened again, but this time I noticed that it was struggling to find one of my drives and edited them out of Fstab and got it booting again.

I've since added 2/3 drives back in by adding "nofail" to my Fstab entries but my main storage drive is now showing as 100gb instead of 1tb and won't pass through to OMV.

I've come to the conclusion that they were mounted by label and "forgot" their label, hence wouldn't boot, they're now mounted by UUID.

So has anyone got any tips on the best way to mount these things without killing my whole setup?

Also i

I thought I had a backup. I use the Gdrive add-on and it should have had a backup.

I didn't have a backup.

Turns out when I moved from a Pi to Proxmox I didn't set Gdrive add-on up properly, so it wasn't making backups every 3 days like it always has.

Then I killed Proxmox. No idea what I did to kill it, I just tried to make my NAS VM have 4gb ram all the time instead of Ballooning from 1gb, and it never booted again.

So I had to start fresh. But while I've only been playing with VMs for a couple months my HA instance has been a work of love since Lockdowns and COVID times.

And now I'm starting again.

Now go and check your backup solution.

I'm about a month in to playing at self hosting.

I'm currently trying to get a great media server solution going on. I'm trying to containerise as much as I can and have everything sharing a NAS for content.

The last few days I've been adding music to my NAS for the Music server, LMS aka Squeezebox.

I've always liked that I can use LMS with my Google Minis and anything that can run it, and I've seen software for esp32 chips...

Anyway just ripping the 13050 tracks off my old iPod was a slog, and because I can't seem to get more than 4mbps transfer rates it's taken a couple days just to smb transfer the music to the NAS.

Now I passed a Tb HDD through to Open Media Vault so I thought I'd just learn to mount a network share to my Ubuntu container running the Squeezebox server using the same method, Fstab.

TWO DAYS I've been trying to mount in fstab and all I'm hitting is kernel errors or syntax errors. 2 days... It's time to give up.

So I've turned off the PC to get in the bath, an

I'm using Heimdall to easily access my self hosted stuff ATM. I would like for my family to use them too if they're so inclined, but there's no way they will be able to remember the IP addresses, I know I can't!

Is it a DNS I'm looking for? If so, I'm already hosting a couple of instances of Adguard, can I just set it so that Plex is 192.xxx.x.47 and snapdrop is 192.xxx.x.53 and use that to resolve the request so my 13 year old can just type Plex into his browser and find it?

Or do I need something like Caddy or Nginx or something in between?

Thanks for any advice.

I'm a noob to all this, and love this server. I've recently set up Proxmox and Portainer, got Home Assistant transferred onto my new computer and set up an Arr stack on Windows VM.

I kept adding storage to that stack until it was talking half my internal storage so I bought a usb3 cable and hooked up an old 1tb HDD I had lying around.

I decided I wanted NAS storage with the HDD. I had already set up OMV but it was being a bit funny. Whenever I logged in to it I had no options, so I couldn't add the HDD to it.

So I did some looking around and found TrueNAS. Installed it and started fiddling. Jesus it's hard work to just add an SMB share from it!

After literally hours of tinkering I still was no closer so I gave up and went for a bath.

In the bath it occurred to me that maybe I was logging in to OMV wrong. I fired up the browser on my phone in the bath and instead of logging in with my name, I tried "admin" and lo and behold there is all the options I couldn't see before.

5 minute

I'm new to Proxmox and have had Openwrt on an AP router for a while, but still am not all that good at it.

I followed a YouTube video yesterday to set up Openwrt as a Proxmox device. The idea being that I can patch all my containers through it and have a single IP address and many ports associated with it on my home lan.

But I'm also trying to get Mullvad VPN installed on it. When I've followed the instructions to install Mullvad I can no longer ping the outside world. If there's any pointers to getting that going I'd be grateful. I followed the instructions on their website.

Questions: if I get Mullvad working is there a way for me to route some containers through that and others through my own IP, or do I need 2 openwrt containers to get this? I noticed that during the setup I removed the WAN from the LAN and just left Mullvad as an exit route, so I assume I would need a second LAN with the WAN for me to be able to route via it. If that is the case, can I route some through one LA

I've recently migrated from a raspberry pi 4b to a dell Optiplex running Proxmox and I'm having a lot of fun with it.

One of the services I have running is Raspotify, which allowed me to plug my pi into a speaker and run Spotify through it.

I had a quick go passing the audio jack through to my HA VM and it just stopped working completely. Only after removing the pass-through did it work again.

So if anyone has managed it, what do? Do I use SPICE as a driver or none? Which device is it?

Thanks

I don't have a motion sensor in my bedroom, I didn't want lights going on when my Wife is sleeping.

I do have an old phone in a dock next to the bed though. It has Wall Panel and Home Assistant apps on it, and I'm using it as a bedside clock with smarts.

Wall panel has a feature where the screen turns on when the camera detects motion. I decided that since it only does this when I wave at my clock, I may as well put it to use. So I looked at the HA app sensors and found the phones activity.

I've then made my most out of the way light in the bedroom trigger when the screen is on.

During the day it then trips back off when my rudimentary Wasp In a Box automation works out the bedroom is empty (it adds a number when my Hallway motion is tripped and takes one away when it's tripped again, also uses other motion sensors to work out whether we are entering or leaving the room). At night it waits 5 minutes then turns off.

So now when I enter the room during the day and it's dark (HA app

So long story short, Google Nest thermostat just disconnects from HA every once in a while. It used to be when I did a reboot I'd get a notification in HA telling me an integration needs setting up again, always Nest and Google Calendar.

But now it seems to disconnect and not tell me. I realise when it's fucking freezing and my heating hasn't kicked on (I control it with HA rather than Nest because I get better results.)

So what I've done is have Node Red reload the integration every 4 hours, because when I manually do this it'll come up that the integration needs reconfiguring.

So now all I need is to be notified when the integration needs reconfiguring. A Google just brings me up threads on how to send a notification. I can do this already, I just want a notification when I get a notification...

See, the problem is that it's called "Notifications" in HA.