I have covered Home Assistant (HA) content a number of times in previous posts, and am I a strong advocate for this project. The home automation scene is a wash with consumer offerings, but no single silicone valley big hitter has managed to provide a fully interoperable solution; most certainly not an affordable one. Ultimately, everyone has there own idea of how home automation should work. Home Assistant doesn’t solve the problem of standards dilution, but it offers an extremely robust way to tie the wide variety of standards and products together. ...

MetaAI have just introduced Llama 3 to the world and the open source community is already putting it through its paces and pushing to find the limits of what it can produce. One fantastic tool which has made self hosted LLMs that rival paid services like ChatGPT and Claude possible is LM Studio. With version 0.2.20 they bough about support for llama 3 along with a GGUF quantized 8 billion parameter version of the model. ...

As I write this, my computer’s Nvidia RTX GPU is busy converting watts into fictional images of robots and given the current cost of electricity, I am asking myself if the results it is producing are worth the resources required to produce them. In the article I hope to demonstrate how I am using AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui and Mikubill/sd-webui-controlnet to generate some borderline “art”. If you are looking to skip ahead to certain section, you can jump ahead using the table of contents above. ...

In previous posts, I’ve explained how to use Tailscale’s MagicDNS and HTTPS certificate feature to generate a TLS cert for your Home Assistant install: Homeassistant Enable MagicDNS and HTTPS Certificates in Tailscale. That setup required you to reformat the TLS cert and copy it to the Home Assistant container… it wouldn’t be to much of a task to automate those actions, but fortunately there is now a superior method of applying and renewing a Tailscale cert for HASS (and many other self-hosted services). Let us dig in to that… ...

Docker Compose is a powerful tool that allows developers to define and manage multi-container applications. In this blog post, we will explore a Docker Compose file for developing Python applications. Specifically, we will analyze the following Docker Compose file: version: '3' services: mypthontool: image: python:3.9 volumes: - ./:/app/ tty: true Now all that is left to do is bring the container online with docker compose up -d and access the bash terminal in the container to run our code in a repeatable environment using docker exec -it <container name> /bin/bash. ...

Introduction to Running PostgreSQL in a Docker Container using Docker Compose In this blog post, we will explore how to run PostgreSQL in a Docker container using Docker Compose. We will also break down and explain the init-user-db.sh script that is executed at startup to initialize the PostgreSQL tables. Running PostgreSQL in a Docker container provides several benefits, including ease of deployment, portability, and isolation. So let’s dive in and understand the process! ...

Updated October 2026: I re-tested this on 8 October 2026 against the current rhasspy/wyoming-piper image and corrected three things I got wrong in 2023. Piper is text-to-speech, not speech recognition. Port 10200 isn’t a web interface. And voices are now named like en_GB-alba-medium. The compose file also no longer needs a version line. The Home Assistant steps are unchanged from the original and I haven’t re-run them on a current release. ...

Updated October 2026: I re-tested this on 8 October 2026 against the current rhasspy/wyoming-whisper image. The compose file no longer needs a version line, the default model is now small-int8 instead of medium-int8, and there’s a table of measured model speeds, a test script and a troubleshooting section. The Home Assistant steps come from my original post. I haven’t re-run them on a current Home Assistant release. Wyoming Whisper is the speech-to-text half of a fully local Home Assistant voice assistant. It wraps faster-whisper, a fast implementation of OpenAI’s Whisper models, and Home Assistant talks to it over the Wyoming protocol. The text-to-speech half is Wyoming Piper. ...

Tailscale is a virtual private network (VPN) service that allows secure remote access to resources across different networks. It offers a feature called MagicDNS that enables you to access your resources using a domain name instead of an IP address. Additionally, you can use HTTPS certificates to encrypt traffic between clients and servers, ensuring secure communication. In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to enable MagicDNS and HTTPS certificates in Tailscale and how to add a TLS certificate to Home Assistant using Tailscale. The most practical benifit for using Home Assistant within a Tailscale network is that it removes the requirement for network port forwarding and exposing services publicly, whilst still allowing your devices to access it from outside your local network. This blog post aims to give you the starting stes required to setup MagicDNS and HTTPS certificates in Tailscale, create a certificate on your home server and install that certificate in a Home Assistant docker container. ...

Note: Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and discontinued the free ESXi hypervisor tier. The steps in this article remain technically valid for licensed VMware vSphere. If you’re running a home lab, Proxmox VE is a capable free alternative worth considering. ESXi is a powerful hypervisor that allows for the virtualization of multiple operating systems on a single physical machine. However, there are times when you may need to pass through a physical device, such as an NVMe drive, to a virtual machine. In this blog post, we will explore the steps required to pass through an NVMe drive to an ESXi virtual machine. ...