Dashboards can get quite complicated and funnily enough TV remotes are not all the same. With a small userbase (it is by far not the most requested feature) it will be hard to maintain such a feature without just fulfilling a one-user-usecase.

ZHA works just as well. You just need to use the remote to pair Hue devices either way.

I am not sure how two synced HA instances (if that’s even possible) would help. You would need to allow your IoT devices to be accessible by the Home Assistant instance you want to use with your personal devices. If that seems like a risk to you, then why not run HA in the DMZ alltogether?

This is bad advice. Do not listen to this guy.

Paperless-AI is fantastic. I had 750 untagged documents (all my physical mail since 2017). Paperless-AI processed all of them using a local Ollama installation, tagged them, created correspondants and a title for each document. So much work I didn’t have to do… 😍

Google Reader was such a great webapp. This and Google Listen are the two Google apps I miss the most.

I recently switched a bunch of nginx configs to the opnsense Caddy plugin. It is easy to configure, but in my opinion it lacks the ability to change settings beyond the basics. It isn’t helpful either that the plugin developer fails to recognize any other use case than the basics. It disqualifies the plugin for everyone with a little bit more complex setups.

I have recently setup my paperless-ngx instance and have uploaded all my scanned documents. Now I have to tag all that stuff which seems like a lot of work. So I’m looking into paperless-ai… 🧞

.rocks just rocks…

The easiest thing: We use a motion sensor to automatically turn on the light for the stairs. You wouldn’t need Home Assistant for that, but with a little more configuration you can adjust the light levels and colour temperature based on the time of day (not as disturbing at night). We have two rooms which have problems with humidity in one a fan is automatically turned on (basic) in the other a dehumidifier is triggered based on the outside and inside temperature because there are large windows which are producing a lot of condensation otherwise. Now the really specific stuff: My daughter has Diabetes and we need to manage her blood glucose levels. There are alarms but ideally you would act before they are triggered. So we hooked her blood glucose levels to a light in our bedroom which turns on if her levels are getting out of bounds at night. That way she isn’t woken by the alarm, but by one of us and can go back to sleep much quicker.

That’s easily Home Assistant. It got me into the whole home automation stuff and I have gradually included more and more parts into it - including some health related stuff. It really makes my family’s life easier and helps us organizing it.

Would you mind sharing links?

That’s the way to do it. The problem is that the request originates from the browser of you website visitor. You need to open a path for them to you media server. Nginx and it’s reverse proxy functionality is exactly what you need for that.

There are lots of cheap Zigbee (multi) buttons available. If you want something a little bit fancier I can 100% recommend Home Buttons. You can either build it yourself (3D printed enclosure, custom PCB) or buy one already built for you. They each fancy an e-ink display you can configure with Material Design Icons (or even custom text in case of the bigger one). They integrate into Home Assistant via MQTT and can be fully used for any automation you would like. You can even change the 4 or 6 button labels using Home Assistant.

https://docs.home-buttons.com/

I totally understand your concerns. We just don’t have such cold winters here in Germany. And I also understand your point more (also after having read your other comments). If the insulin vial in question is a spare it will most likely not being noticed if it freezes until it is needed.

In theory you could use the Bluetooth sensors of the companion app which can be used to detect BLE beacons. But that would require a special Bluetooth device that activates once a threshold temperature has been detected. Maybe such things exist (I’m thinking of (food) supply chain monitoring), but I am not aware of any.

I know this is technically not an answer to your question, but as a fellow T1 diabetic (for 20+ years) and dad to diabetic child (currently 2½ years old): Is this something that regularly happens to you? I don’t know where you live, but in over 20 years of being a T1 diabetic I never had a vial of regular insulin go bad. I don’t have to worry about the cost of insulin as my insurance would without any questions replace any medications gone bad for me, but I understand that this is a luxury not everyone shares.

There are products (but I have to assume you are aware of this) that can help you with the temperature safe transport of insulin for everyday use (basically insulated pouches with an integrated cooling pad). That may be something you can look into if this is something you need to worry about.

I hope it’s not just a coincidence. I would love to see Home Assistant as a smart speaker platform progress.

Then he shouldn’t have asked a question if he isn’t open for answers. If an answer is obviously wrong or dismissive of some important detail I would understand it. But if the complaint is It’s not a one-click-fix or I don’t understand what you’re talking about then that’s the best way of not learning anything and not solving the problem.

On Android you have to disable the use of Private DNS (or something like that) in the WiFi settings. If this is enabled it will not use your WiFi’s broadcast DNS, but a predefined one. The reasoning behind this (you can believe this or not) is so that on public WiFis your DNS queries cannot be tracked or manipulated by setting up a local DNS.

I can imagine there is something similar for iOS.

If this only affects some apps then they have decided to hardcore their DNS servers. The only thing you can do now is to identify these and block the calls, but this may also break other stuff if the servers are not only used to resolve ad URLs.

There are a few buttons around the house. For my wife (and kids to play with) the most important ones are the ones controlling the light in the bedroom. There is a motion sensor covering the door and wardrobe area which can be muted with a button (e.g. if the kids have snuck into our bed and we don’t want to wake them or if either one of us goes to bed later). We use mostly the IKEA Zigbee buttons.

We also have a great device called Home Buttons in our kitchen. It uses MQTT and has a fantastic battery life (using a 18650 rechargeable battery). It has an e-ink display and six buttons. I programmed it to display several things (you can use one MDI icon and a short text to display for each button) for everyday use, like switching some lights, displaying temperature and humidity and controlling the climate in our conservatory. You have to press a button for it to update (to save battery - even though it easily lasts months).

The main touch point though is the app. I built three dashboards:

• A general overview that dynamically changed based on events and time of day.
• A floor plan which holds every light, sensor and switch in it.
• A blood glucose dashboard as both one of my daughters as well as myself have diabetes. As I use the same insulin pump as my daughter I cannot use the pump’s app to follow her data as I need the app for myself. So for me this is quite important. My wife uses the pump’s app in follower mode for our daughter.

But I also made Home Assistant send notifications to our smartphones for several events (dishwasher, washing machine, too hot / cold in the conservatory, low blood glucose levels, kids turning on the TV in the morning). Some of them offer to respond with an action others are just reminders that something needs to be done.

My wife appreciates especially the notifications I think because you don’t have to think about some things as they pop up when action is due and we both can more easily share the workload as she gets notified as well when I started the dishwasher without me needing to tell her. (This may sound like we’re not speaking to each other, but we’re just not saying things like I just started the dishwasher can you empty it later.)