• 82 Posts
  • 580 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • For years there were opinion pieces in publications about how much better renting is than buying. Financial experts made the case that the expense of purchasing and maintenance weren’t worth any benefits of ownership, especially in the long term. After dealing with big rent increases, insane landlords, and apartments being shown while I was living in them I wasn’t convinced. When adding in the relative stability in the of costs of ownership I always thought those experts were full of crap.

    Turns out none of those articles took sudden increases in property values and rent into account. Trying to rent an apartment for someone on a moderate fixed income in my area has become damn near impossible. Rents have gone up ~60% in 5 years far exceeding the COL increases most people see from retirement income or even the raises they may be getting from their employers if they’re working.

    Buying a home was one of the best financial decisions I’ve ever made.




  • A Dell 3140 laptop. With HA and a number of other apps it loafs along at about 5% CPU. When Frigate is enabled it jumps up to 14% or so while drawing between 6 and 12 watts. The battery prevents power blinks in our area from being a problem, unlike my Pi4 that crashed and didn’t recover when I was hundreds of miles away. The battery lasts hours when the power fails and the keyboard and display are convenient.

    For those concerned about the battery, it’s firmware limited to a 70% charge so it will last years. Current Li-Ion batteries have about a 1 in a million chance of fire. A car parked in your garage is hundreds of times more of a risk.

    It’s been excellent and I’d buy it again.



  • Try testing TLP in battery mode even if you’re not using a laptop. You can configure all kinds of things to your liking with it.

    I tried it out a few years ago and none of my server apps showed any noticeable decrease in performance with it running, but my power monitoring plug did show a reduction in power consumption. I ended up leaving it enabled all the time.


  • So - can I just open it up, and rely on long, complex passeords? Or is that a complete no-go?

    Install Fail2Ban on a free cloud VM and watch it for a couple of days. Seeing the never-ending intrusion attempts from around the world was a real eye-opener. There is no way I’d expose HA (or anything else except Wireguard) to the Internet. (Open WG ports appear closed unless they receive the correct key.)

    In your situation I’d just pay for Home Assistant Cloud. It’s not expensive and will do exactly what you want to do.

    For a zero cost solution I use Tasker to automatically enable a Wireguard tunnel whenever we’re not on home wifi. It allows direct access to everything on our local lan, and as a bonus prevents our wireless carrier from monitoring our Internet activities. A combination of the OpenWRT Ubus integration and a BLE integration (using inexpensive Shelly switch modules) detect when we’re home with 100% accuracy.






  • I set up KeepassKC with Syncthing temporarily years ago while looking for other options. To my surprise it’s worked so well there’s been no reason to change to anything else.

    The database file is always backed up to multiple devices. With Syncthing file versioning turned on older backups are available if that file gets corrupted, but in 8+ years I’ve never had to use one of those older backups.

    Initially I was using Syncthing discovery servers which allowed syncing from anywhere, but I’ve since moved away from that. Now everything is run locally and I use Wireguard to connect to my home network when I’m away.

    I’d get that old Pi running with a cheap SSD, set up Wireguard (or just use the Syncthing discovery servers), put it on a shelf and forget about it. It’ll probably run for years with minimal attention.