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Thoughts of a Digital Hobo

Using Actionable Notifications in Home Assistant

This post has been updated to use the latest and greatest from Home Assistant. There are no more categories and things are MUCH more streamlined! In this post I will cover how I use actionable notifications within Home Assistant. Using push notifications with the Home Assistant iOS App you can setup some really cool triggers within the system. Below is a list of the technology used at the time of writing:...

January 20, 2024 · 3 min · Dan C Williams

HomePod Mini Stuck in Setting Up

I recently purchased an Apple HomePod Mini off of eBay to add to the ever expanding setup at our home. We already have 6 or so scattered around so adding another should not have been an issue. But, as with all things tech, sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. I plugged in the Mini and it powered up fine and my phone discovered it. I began the setup process and then things went sideways....

December 5, 2021 · 3 min · Dan C Williams

Monitoring TeslaFi in Home Assistant

When I had my Tesla Model Y I had it hooked up to TeslaFi. There were a lot of stats in there and I wanted to expose some of that data in Home Assistant for easy consumption. I also wanted to utilize the TeslaFi API to allow me to turn on the climate controls in my Tesla using Home Assistant and any voice control devices that I may be utilizing (Siri in my case)....

July 27, 2021 · 4 min · Dan C Williams

Building a Wireguard Router...Easier Than I Thought!

I have been seeing a lot of buzz about Wireguard. I had considered setting up a server at home for external access just for fun, but all of the examples I saw used NAT behind the Wireguard box and I wanted to route entire subnets without NATing. After I finally took some time and realized that Wireguard was just an interface and I would just be leveraging some iptables it all came together rather quickly....

October 12, 2019 · 5 min · Dan C Williams

The road to my PMP

…the method to my madness! As a life long technology practitioner I am often asked what training I did to gain my PMP in 2017. While I “only studied for 3 weeks” before taking the exam, I had a lot of experience that really made that possible. I thought I would write all of my notes here so I have an easy point of reference and maybe it will help someone on their journey....

September 5, 2019 · 2 min · Dan C Williams