Keep it simple, stupid — less is more, or as Albert Einstein didn’t actually say:

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

What he actually said, according to Quote Investigator:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

But I digress… It’s not lost on me that I sometimes end up making things more complex than they have to be. Often without it adding any value. Like entropy — slowly increasing the state of disorder.

For the past two years we, meaning all five of us, have taken a two-week road trip in the summer. Driving around our beautiful country that is Norway 🙂

First year we rented Airbnb’s — comfortable, but expensive and required a lot of planning. Then we tried tenting — cheaper, more flexible but took a lot of time to make camp.

So we bought a teardrop camper, or more precisely, a Hero Camper Ranger edition. We named it Rulle (Norwegian for Rolly) Ranger.

The keypad, or alarm panel, is an important part of a security alarm system. When I first got started building mine — I settled for a cheap and simple Zigbee keypad.

I’ve since replaced it with a better, and more advanced device. Let’s have a look…

Quick recap: I’m building a DIY security alarm using a Raspberry Pi, hardwired PIR sensors, and MQTT integration with Home Assistant.

Hello again — it seems to be close to a year since I last managed to get some words published on this blog. And almost three years since I last wrote about my Raspberry Pi security alarm project 😮

But the project is still alive and well. We use it every night and whenever we are away, and it just works 😃 Development usually happens in bulk, with very little happening in between.

In the fall of 2022 I turned off Zeta, my file server, due to the extreme price of electricity. I migrated all the data to a 3x18 TB raidz1 pool on Alpha instead.

But last year I brought it back — and used the opportunity to add some more memory, and rebuild the main storage pool 🤓

When I was trying out Netdata last year — I noticed I had lots of inbound_packets_dropped_ratio warnings, on multiple nodes.

Time to investigate 👇

I’ve looked into different video solution for this blog before — and, at the time, settled on using Coconut.co for encoding, AWS S3 for hosting, and Video.js for playing.

Bunny Stream was on the table back then, but I wanted a more hands on solution. Well — this time around I wanted a hands off solution, where the videos just work without me having to worry about it 🙂

And for that — Bunny Stream is pretty awesome, so that’s what I’m using now 👍

Getting network to the garage is a story with many chapters. I started out with Wi-Fi mesh, then CAT6 — and now, finally, fiber!

I’m using a Shelly Plus Plug S smart plug to measure the power usage of my homelab. I added it as a device in Home Assistant — and the power readings began! Kind of…

Within a few days; I noticed something strange with the graph history — there were long periods of time where the graph was completely flat. Logging into the Shelly web interface, I could see the watt reading changing — without this being reflected in Home Assistant.

As I have written before; I like the concept of blog post series. Break a large topic, or ongoing project, into multiple posts — while maintaining the chronological order.

But one key factor for a successful series implementation is the ease at which the read can navigate through the posts. And orient themselves within the series — meaning; understand where in the series they are currently reading.

My latest improvement on my series implementation is navigation buttons, for the previous and next post 👍