Only use this for test purpose. If you really like Synology DSM and want to use it private or for business you should buy a Synology NAS and pay for the hardware and software. So, I’m still having my Xpenology setup running. This is for testing purpose only before updating…
How to easily save electricity with Home Assistant
In these times when everything is increasing in price, especially electricity, I took up the challenge to see how much we could save without us feeling a decrease in what we can do when we are at home. I started looking into all our devices being in standby mode in…
Get Synology Photos Face Recognition working without GPU
After my previous post on having Synology DSM installed as a VM on VMWare Exsi, I wanted to test Synology Photos. I therefore imported around 6000 pictures to see how it worked. After the upload my People section in the Albums area didn’t work and never found any faces. This…
Run Synology DSM as a VM on VMWare ESXi with your own hardware
Only use this for test purpose. If you really like Synology DSM and want to use it private or for business you should buy a Synology NAS and pay for the hardware and software. My reasons to test the Synology DSM 7.x on my own hardware was because of the…
Setting a default theme in Home Assistant for all users
Sometimes I come across some nice themes for Home Assistant, and when I have used them myself for a period of time, I like to push them to all users in our Home Assistant. Default each user can change the theme in their user settings, and there is no general…
Securing your Home Assistant with automatic backups to the cloud
I’ve invested tons of hours in our Home Assistant installation, so it would be a disaster to loose all the work if something goes wrong. Home Assistant has backup functionality build in. It can take full backups and snapshots, but it stores the backup files on the local machine running…
Get Home Assistant talking through Sonos speaker using Googles Text-To-Speech service
In our house we have different automations that use our Sonos speakers to say something. For example if Aurora (our daughter) opens her window, the speaker in the kitchen tells us. Our alarm also warns us if any intrusion is registred at night when we are sleeping. To do this…
Why have a Smart Home?
This is one of the most common questions to me around our smart home. Why have it? Well, the easy answer would be: Because we can! The choice to have a smart home actually evolved along the way. It started as a small thing, and just grew and grew. I’m…
Nextcloud behind Nginx proxy
I’m using Nextcloud to share and backup my private files. Nextcloud is software that works like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive etc., but in this case I host the Nextcloud service and the files on my private server. I made a general installation on a Debian VM. I host other…
Implementing house mode in your Home Assistant
One of the first things I did when starting up with Home Assistant was to create a solution for different house modes. Basically I wanted to be able to put the house in different modes, and these modes should be a huge part of how we automate our house. For…