My IOT Transition From Amazon To Apple

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Even before I bought my Apple HomePod Minis I had been planning to dismantle my Internet of things network based on my Amazon echo plus hub. I decided a year or two earlier to build my iot network using an Amazon base. In the states I had smartthings. The version I had did not work in the UK. I tried to revive my Smarthings network first and then learned it was destined for the landfill. I refuse to use Google as my home hub for previously discussed privacy concerns. At the time my Apple TV 4 could be used as a HomeKit hub. The challenge was there were not that many devices compatible. And many of them were expensive.

Flash forward to the fall of 2020 Apple had come along way. It feels like there are more devices compatible still with Amazon or Google. That’s fine since there is a decent enough variety of devices compatible with Apple HomeKit. Since I had the Apple TV already and I own an iPad I did not need to buy any hub per se. All I needed to do was start buying devices.

I had spent some money on Amazon compatible devices previously. That was annoying that I would have to start over. On the plus side I only bought two smart plugs to turn on the lamp in the living room and in the office. Originally they were bought for when we were on holiday to set timers for the lights. I also bought a Ring doorbell as well as a Ring camera for our back garden. They were compatible with the Amazon set up and we’re not compatible with HomeKit. I was prepared to live with the Ring cameras not working with HomeKit until I found HomeBridge. It is a piece of software that at first ran on a Raspberry Pi I had and later simply on a docker container on a Pi I had. It bridges many devices to work with HomeKit. The integration was pretty slick and it solved my “Ring” problem. I at first augmented my Ring camera’s with Eufy camera’s using apple’s secure HomeKit video. That way I did not have video on Ring’s servers but still used the Doorbell as well a smart doorbell for real time feeds.

I simply replaced the smart plugs. The ones I had originally were also not that smart. For some reason they only worked on an older Wi-Fi technology. There was also no way to change the Wi-Fi name. That meant when I changed my Wi-Fi network name and upgraded I had to maintain an old configuration just for those smart devices. It wasn’t very secure and I was glad to be able to dismantle that.

I started my HomeKit network by purchasing the Phillips hue hub and bulb. I also bought two smart plugs to replace the old plugs I had. Since I started writing this post almost two years ago (yes another post I started and never published) I have grown my HomeKit network significantly more than I had with my Amazon based one.

The Story of My Blog Turning 20

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This blog turns 20 years old today. I have tried to think of something else I’ve been doing consistently like this blog for a longer time. Other then working in technology I’m really not coming up with anything.

2003 does feel like multiple worlds away when thinking about it. I would not have predicted keeping up this habit on and off for 20 years. Who knew that this novel at the time concept of publicly writing about what you’re thinking that Gus showed me would endear for so long.

I know I go through bouts of not publishing and then writing more content than I can publish however it’s always been something that I enjoy doing. Let’s see if I make another 20 years.

W Sisters Short on The Dentist

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The other night (well really 3 years ago since I wrote this and never posted it) I was walking past our living room.  I heard the girls playing so I peeked in to see what they were doing. T was lying on the couch with a lamp pointed directed at her face. A is hovering over her holding the 13th doctor’s sonic screwdriver saying now let’s get the tooth out.

I cannot make this stuff up.  They continue to be my entertainment budget.

The Story of Grogu’s Precious

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Grogu has found sheer joy in taking the plush candles from our stuffed Hanukkah menorah. It took us a while to realise he was hoarding the candles like his precious. We would take one or two away from him, only to find him having stolen them back.

We keep our Christmas and Hanukkah decorations in two waterproof storage containers. Even just looking for the menorah to take a picture of it for this blog, the moment I opened one of the containers Grogu appeared and then was halfway in the container looking for it.

As of this writing two of the candles are still missing and presumed hiding under our refrigerator. In a related story I think under our refrigerator is his nemesis. He plays with things and the skirt across the floor under our refrigerator. He will then spend many minutes trying to get at whatever is under there.

11 Year Anniversary

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Our Wedding Cake Topper

Flowers, check. Wedding anniversary gift, check. Baby sitter and fancy dinner reservations, well that is Tuesday but check. Still on some level it has not set in that I am married to such an amazing women for what according to the calendar is now 11 years.

Side note Grogu got onto our mantel and knocked over the glass dome that was protecting the cake topper. M’s head is not sepeat4ed from the dolls body. Sadly this is the only good photo we have of that awsome wedding cake topper that M had made via Etsy.

Who Needs Free Boxes?

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Someone at work asked if our cat has found the sheer joy of an empty amazon box. My reply was who needs boxes. He loves empty bags.

Grogu hung out in that bag for several hours. I have video of him trying to get back into it. Very entertaining.

If Cake Is A Delivery Mechanism For Frosting…

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Cake Frosting

I always maintained that the Weinstein‘s motto was cake is a delivery mechanism for frosting. If I hold that to be true, then this does not compute. We were out the other day and A was slicing frosting off her cake. She insisted that there was in her words too much of it.

I don’t understand. How can there be too much of it? I just wonder where I went wrong as a parent.

The Story of Plex Back on my DiskStation

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My Intel NUC i5 inexplicably died in late February 2022. I am not sure if it was the main board or the power supply. I got a new power supply on eBay and that did not fix the issue so it was an internal component. I was not sure if the computer is fried or it’s an easy fix. So after procrastinating a bunch I just gave up on it. It was likely a lot of effort to fix or just toast anyway.

Until I can either replace or fix the NUC I needed somewhere to run my Plex Media Server. As luck would have it I already had an instance of Plex running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It couldn’t transcode but it worked ok. It was not a real replacement for the NUC.

Instead I installed Plex (again) on my Synology Diskstation. I hadn’t run Plex on my Diskstation in years. The main reason was both my backup software Resilio & Plex running on my Synologu DS422+ at the same time would crash it with out of memory errors. After some testing I was not able to replicate the failed state with both software now. I am not sure what I am doing differently or if one or both apps improved memory management. I was able to get them to coexist. For now that means my Plex lived on my diskstation.

Then in October my Synology Diskstation DS412+ had a power failure. The array was degraded. The Diskstation was over 10 years old by then. I made the decision to upgrade to a new Diskstation DS920+. I also upgraded drives to give myself approximately 35tb vs the 10 I had previously. Luckily the array was degraded on the DS412+ however not totally destroyed. I was able to mount 3 of the 4 original drives in the new Diskstation and then over a few weeks one by one replace and expand the array with the new bigger drives.

I have been running on the new Diskstation for a few months now with no issue. The Dikstation with all the apps I use only averages 25% CPU, and with 8 gig RAM only on average is using about 1/3 of that. I can go bigger on the RAM if I want to so I have some room to grow. The hardware transcoding on the DS920+ is why I chose that NAS over others. I have not been disappointed so far. The only annoyance was less than a week after I bought the DS920+ the DS923+ came out. I had waited so long to buy a new one in the first place hoping the new model would come out only to finally get one after giving up on the 22 models then have a new one come out straight away. A small consolation is the reviews of the new device are mixed so I may have been lucky to get the old one.

5 Years and a Day

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Luggage Cart Full of Luggage

Yesterday I forgot to write. 5 years and a day ago we arrived in the UK. We did a day flight so we stayed in a hotel and aimed to start settling in.

5 years ago today we collected the keys to the house we were letting. Then went to IKEA for beds and other essentials since our container would take another month and 2 days to arrive.

As i write this about the same time 5 years ago we were battling our boiler since it wasn’t actually heating. Luckily we had a hotel room for an extra night so fled the cold back there to fix the boiler the next day.

Today was a bit easier than 5 years ago. I took T to the cinema while A went to a birthday party. It was a nice holiday day off.

Hard to believe that was a half a decade ago. I would write more however I need to go study for my life in the UK test!

Goodbye Twitter and More…

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It would be easy for me to say I’m leaving Twitter because of the new owner. The reality is that is just background noise and just nonsensical to me. I have talked about leaving social media for a while. I’ve deleted my Facebook account and recreated it at least once. A few years ago I wrote how I didn’t really post on Twitter. I previously used Twitter to get real time information during a few weather related incidents. And also during a bomb scare in Times Square. That at the time had some value to me and was why partly why I kept it. The other reason i kept Twitter around was I would automatically send blog post links to Twitter when I posted on WordPress. The intention was to radiate to friends when i posted.

In recent years I have not used Twitter for any real time searches for anything. I could do searches like that without an account anyway. I simply get no value out of the service. The shenanigans going with the platform now might have reminded me of that fact.

The final trigger was that when I looked at the analytics on my blog for all the referrals I get to my blog from Twitter I noticed that this year I got a whopping 13. That number throws out any notion that keeping Twitter is helping to direct friends and family to my blog posts. With that revelation on top of generally not getting any joy or value out of the service it made no sense to keep it.

It is not just Twitter that i have closed accounts for. I previously wrote about using Redding for several sub reddits that were useful to me. Compared to Twitter I did find value in Reddit. Then I read you could run or use a front end to Reddit that does not require you to logon to their website. That way i can read (its all i do) sub-reddits without an account anonymously. Having an account was just a way for Reddit to collect data on me. Now i use my own URL to query the groups i want to search Reddit with and the site has no analytics on me.

The same thing I do with Reddit i do a similar thing with YouTube. No Google account tracking for me thank you.

Both the Reddit & YouTube front ends i use are my own instances i have on a VPS. I have a new one for Twitter also however i do not know if i will use it as much as i do with the Reddit and YouTube ones.