For Home Assistant, I use the installation script from here, it works flawlessly:
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts
This group took over the project after the main developer passed on, they are quite easy to install and just need you to be in the Proxmox host shell (Once you install it, you will know where it is) :)
I moved my Home Assistant from Proxmox VM to a older Lenovo Laptop we had stored as we thought the charger wasn’t working. We are preparing to move so it was my job to check that laptop as well as 2 others. 2 I am not going to use and e-scrap those later this week after yanking the drives out (I don’t trust anyone with my old drives). It turned out, the charger works just fine! I just installed it early in the morning (Midnight) and so far, it seems just as responsive if maybe more than what I had on the Proxmox host so that’s a win on my end. Plus, I was able to give it the full 8gb of RAM it has instead of the 4gb I gave it in Promxox and somehow it’s showing lighter use than what I had in the VM. 2.8gb vs. 4-5gb it reported from the Home Assistant Hardware details when in the VM.
What limits do you set on yours?
What about just buying Matter Bulbs? Or supported WiFi Bulbs? I have 4 which work nicely! Aidot brand so it’s not known brand but it was good priced. I know you said they were three way switches so that may matter if you are wanting to utilize the 3 way dimmer, but with HA, it should be easy to do!
This would also be depending on which lights you want to control, as some may not be controllable such as maybe the bathroom lights. As an apartment dweller who rents, I put mostly smart lights every where I could in my home so I can control which ones come on or off on a schedule. Change colors as well to help set the mood with my floor lamps etc…
Probably the most surprising thing I discovered with Home Assistant was the amount of electricity used by our washing machine in the supplied one in our rental. I hooked up a Kuaf Energy monitoring plug (PLF12) and was able to track each cycle by measuring the power draw. Something like this:
Fill 6.00 - 7.00 W Wash 493.5 -788.5W Drain 405-450W Spin 8.0 8.84 A + 498-800W
These are my rough notes and observations, I’m planning on creating an automation to indicate on our dashboard the current state of the washer making it a tad smarter. :) Also to alert us that it’s finished!
The other one I discovered was the amount of energy the Dishwasher pulls. . It’s a complex power draw and I’ve only managed to get our dashboard to show it’s running successfully. There is a huge variance in the power draws, that sometimes, I found that if it jumped by a volt or two, it would falsely say it’s in the second rinse cycle when it’s really filling the basin. Nonetheless, it was surprising to see how much less energy I thought the were using was.
I put a 4-1 one Zooz sensor up above the hall pointing at our front door, so it captures every entry point into our upstairs apartment. When I first set it up, it was a bit unsettling to have it detect even the smallest movement, eventually some adjustments were made and it’s more refined and not so trigger happy.
The biggest metric I discovered is just how humid our place gets! As a direct result, I bought a dehumidifier which we run year round. Living in the Pacific NW makes managing humidity challenging. (You know the old jokes about it being rainy all the time, yeah…it sort of is) As a result, we have a dehumidifier which runs year round almost non-stop. Not so much in the summer months. While most people buy a humidifier for the winter, we run it more in the winter as it’s too cold to exchange the outside air with the in which can lower it down to as low as 10-15% in the summer. We learned our comfort levels to be around 45-50% instead of the 75-80% it was before we bought the dehumidifier.
We are planning on relocating sometime this year to the other end of our state which is a different climate, so it will be a new discovery period of temps and humidity for us, for this, Home Assistant will be coming along for the ride! :)
If turned off after use, as in powered off, the laser printer first must go through a warm up cycle where it needs to heat up the fuser so it can “bake” or fuse the text/image to the printed page. This is where you see a tremendous power spike, and can often overload a battery backup if you have it connected with a computer as well.
https://9to5linux.com/mozilla-firefox-134-is-out-with-support-for-touchpad-hold-gestures-on-linux
At least has some of them. I think they always grab the betas and aggregate the release notes/changes during the nightly/beta tests.
Hmmm…my system is a Dell Optiplex 990 SFF PC so about 14 years old and seems to run Youtube without issues or buffering. I have yet to see if any local media does the same. But I’m also running 16gb of RAM which is the system’s max and it’s pretty much not had any issues since giving it that much.
I’m not 100% sure on the KDE release cycle, as I understood, the KDE update was full of bug fixes today to the 6.2.4 from 6.2.3, and the Fedora team integrated it in their releases quickly so this might have been a faster than usual release. I’m thinking when KDE fully releases their new OS to replace Neon, I may try that one, it’s also supposed to be immutable which would be the chef’s kiss for me. :)
When I started first using Tasker back in around 2013 or so, I was mesmerized but what you could do with it. This was because at the time, too, I was rooted, so it really changed the possibilities with modes and so forth with Tasker. For example, NFC unlocking the phone when you tapped it to a NFC tag while the screen was OFF. That was killed by Google in Android 5 but before then, it was awesome! Tap on the tag and your phone would perform whatever task you told it do. Over the years, Google and other Android makers have slowly added different functions that Tasker was doing before them.
Since Tasker was taken over by the current Dev, it’s make many leaps and bounds over what it could before and simpler now. My tasks are:
Turn volume up ALL THE WAY for specific contacts and then back to the before volumes after the call. I have an older mother which hopefully live longer than 10 more years, but closing in on 80 years young, she’s going to get more fragile with her age so, my sister who lives near her, can call me in any issues pop up. (I live about 5 hours away). So, it’s essential to know when she’s calling me. On the same theme, when she texts me, I have it announce via TTS that she sent me a text. It’s also handy for when my wife calls me!
The phone restores the volume from silent when unplugged from the power charger in the morning ONLY after 7AM. I work from home and awake around 4:30am daily and around 7 is a good time to return sounds in the home. But, it is also conditional, so if on the weekend, I don’t wake up until 8am), it won’t turn sound on until I unplug it. (NOTE: The tasks to raise volume for the callers will override this mode which is good!)
The phone also turns the volume off at 9pm nightly since there’s no reason to have it make noise after then, all are home and pretty much it’s peaceful time.
The phone also sends a signal to my August Lock to send the unlock command when it put it my back pocket by reading a NFC Tag which contains a webhook to call Home Assistant to give the unlock instruction to the door lock.
When certain apps I define are open, it keeps the screen on all the time. I use this all the time when I’m at the store and running a calculator so it’s always up. A few other apps as well, but not too many.
A few others such as toggling the Private DNS server on my phone (I use dns.adguard-dns.com) on the phone to block advertisements and sometimes it doesn’t work so having a widget to toggle that off and on is super nice instead of navigating to it in settings.
I used to use Wiregaurd (Now on Tailscale), but before then, I had a task which would auto connect me to the Wireguard tunnel on my home network immediately disconnected from my WiFi, this ensured that I was always 100% on my home network. Tailscale does the same thing (If you set it to be always connected to your tunnel) , but I’ve been playing with that for a bit over a year and have pretty much settled there for now. My wireguard Tasker Profile for anyone interested:
Before the lock down of Covid, I used to have a profile which I still keep on which would trigger if I was NEAR a SSID for my work to silence my phone and restore the volume if I was away from it (or if I’m connected to my car’s stereo bluetooth if near the SSID). This worked flawlessly and never worried about stupid app notifications during work which would be frowned on. I occasionally go to the office and forget sometimes it’s triggered. :)
One that I’ve worked on for the last years, so sparingly was making a Google Voice robot which would see which contact you called and then send the calls through Google Voice instead of my phone dialer. I’ve made it work but not all the time, so never have trusted it. (I only give my cell number to my family and very trusted friends, everyone else gets my Google Voice number).
My Voice Robot project which is stale as I’ve had been busy with health issues off and on and life events otherwise:
Overall, your imagination is the limiting factor for what you can do with Tasker, the dev has also made it so you can take 100% control over the phone by making Tasker the device owner which bypasses the need for root. I haven’t done it with my Pixel, but on the Samsung I had, it worked, but broke a work app so I disabled it (Requires a factory reset to enable and also disable it).
I prefer the WYSIWYG get with Joplin and mostly because I’m stuck in my ways!! LOL
Nothing really wrong with it though, it’s just not for me. :)
To add to this, I have tried Obsidian notes which is super highly recommended by many. I also have tried self hosting Bookstack for logging my notes etc… But every time I tried it, nothing ever matched what I could do with Joplin which was exactly as what other said, rock solid and I have yet to run into any device which can’t handle the client. I will say that the launch time on the one on my machine (Arch Linux) is a bit slow, but after it’s launched, it’s very easy to bring up and use as needed. :)
I have a Pixel 8a from Verizon, as someone else here said, they sometimes have crazy deals. This was a free one (through bill credits) for us. It was right after Google released that version and before 9. I quickly discovered that even with Google’s beta program which you can FREELY USE and all it requires you to do is connect your phone via usb through the web and it patches your phone via Google’s site to install it. I’m a beta testing type of person, so I was all in, until I discovered there was no way no how because of the bootloader.
Then, on top of that the, GraphineOS is not able to be installed with it locked as well. I haven’t approached Verizon about unlocking the bootloader. I’ve heard some success stories on XDA I think it was about people getting theirs unlocked through them. (Probably if you get a tech who’s in a good mood helps).
I did, but it’s a home machine, personal use. So, it didn’t matter for me, but for family…that was another story! :) I just pulled the main boot drive, put a different one and installed it and went through the process. Then went back to the Proxmox drive after.
I’m in the same boat, I tried Incus or rather LXD a couple months back and gave up after a little while due to pressing business needing the Proxmox machine up again.
I have two main requirements which I have for my server:
It must support Home Assistant OS as a VM and a USB Dongle (Zwave) I found this as a possible solution for LXD systems: https://seanblanchfield.com/2023/05/home-assistant-os-in-lxd
It must support NFS exports so I can share my storage and data drives. I’m pretty sure since it’s on Debian, I can install Cockpit and it’s sharing plugin for this.
I think the thing which scared me off at the time too was the lack of GUI which I think I may have missed. This may be a solution: https://blog.simos.info/how-to-install-and-setup-the-incus-web-ui/
I was just thinking about Incus the other day so this might be a good time to look into it more!
Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)
I use Gotify I self host it and it uses an app on my Android, super easy to set up and use. I tie in Home Assistant and a few other setups with it and it runs great.
I deal with an issue with Firefox where it causes my Home Assistant dashboard become non responsive if the tab is not the primary one always on screen. I think it’s something with the forced snoozing of tabs. I’ve tried other Firefox based browsers and face the same problem. So this leaves me with… Chromium based browsers. As a Linux user, it’s either Firefox or Chromium based. With that said, I have not had the issue with the Chromium base, but because it’s mostly consumed by Google, I reject it mostly.
I did find that Zen was very nice to look at, and they do have an opinionated way of setting up the tabs (I don’t care about the vertical tabs). They also seem to be wanting to roll out their own extension store? In the form of “Zen Mods” but are also cross compatible with Firefox Extensions so that’s good I guess. I use a rolling release (Arch) OS, so I do see a lot of updates to Zen, the devs seem to be really working on it. For now - I’m on Firefox dealing with the unusual Home Assistant thing. I’ve used Firefox since it was before version 1 so I’m a bit stuck in my ways. :)
I really wish that there was another browser engine there which I could use which supports the Adblocking and Bitwarden (My most important extensions). It’s a bit disappointing to see that Edge, and all other browsers have adopted the Chromium base. I am hoping that with the latest judgement and order against Google to sell off the Chrome browser, sticks and if so, that the new owner(s) will strip it of some of the garbage which has been forced on the code base. (Manifest v3 comes to mind). The only Chromium based one I tolerate on my system right now is Ungoogled Chrome and Vivaldi, who has said that they are resisting the Manifest V3 as much as they can and have a somewhat decent adblocking built in using their end. Even though I have DNS level adblocking, Ublock Origin fills the gap with some of the ads which gets past my end.
You just have to turn it off. It’s an accessibility feature if you don’t want it:
https://github.com/ArabCoders/watchstate
I use this one for my Emby server and it keeps track of what we watch, and so far so good. I made it our Trakt.tv replacement and have no complaints so far.