Protecting Home Assistant with Cloudflare Access and mTLS on Android

There are many different ways to set up Home Assistant so that it is accessible when you're away from home, which have various pros and cons, but I had some extra requirements beyond just securing it with HTTPS/TLS which I haven't found any articles about (in bold): Does not…

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Normalising podcast volumes on macOS

A very quick write-up of a solution I've found to a quite specific problem. I hope it's of use to somebody (or even just me in the future). Problem: some podcasts that I like to listen to vary considerably in volume throughout, which means I have to keep adjusting the…

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Migrating Home Assistant from sqlite3 to MySQL 8.0

This post quickly documents some notes around my process of migrating Home Assistant's sqlite3 database to a containerised MySQL database. I run all of my home server infrastructure in Docker containers as I like the isolation and distribution model that they provide. The default sqlite3 database used by Home Assistant…

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Making a bootable Windows 10 installer USB stick on OS X

Trying to create a Windows 10 USB stick installer using an official Microsoft ISO on Mac OS X 10.11.6 seems to be hard work. tl;dr: Using Rufus inside a Windows XP VM works I happened to have one lying around, and passing the USB stick device through…

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Initial experiments with ReSpeaker

Last year I backed a Kickstarter project called ReSpeaker, which is a (Linux-based) hardware module designed to make it as easy as possible to add speech recognition to projects. The main selling point for me is that a "far-field" microphone array is available for it, which allows far better isolation…

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