tech – chmod 644

Matter matters: implementing yet-another smart home standard

July 20, 2026 at 6:00pm by windracer

I’ve worked with a lot of different technologies and vendor ecosystems since I first started tinkering with home automation in 2011. It started with Z-Wave devices and ADT Pulse but expanded to include Google Nest, Amazon Alexa, HomeSeer, Homebridge, and Ring, with additional forays into things like HomeAssistant and Node-Red, plus a proliferation of new Z-Wave Plus and WiFi devices (I’ve never dabbled with Zigbee though).

My current system is built around HomeSeer on a HomeTroller Pi with an 800 Series Z-Wave hat, so adding new Z-Wave devices is easy. Devices that use WiFi, however, typically require using the vendor’s specific app, like Tuya, Kasa, or SmartLife, and then I have to use an additional plug-in for HomeSeer in order to be able to control them there. It gets complicated.

Matter is a new communications standard for smart home devices hoping to simplify that complicated sprawl. A Matter-enabled device will work with any Matter-enabled hub, can connect to multiple hubs at the same time, and most major vendors (like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) are adding Matter support to their devices.

Ring Battery Doorbell

July 18, 2026 at 5:26pm by windracer

It’s funny that I’ve been using Ring products since 2021 when I put in the alarm system (and then moved to all Ring cameras in 2025) but still did not have Ring’s original product: the doorbell.

I guess timing is everything … during Amazon’s Prime Days event last month I noticed our everyday normal doorbell was coming out of the wall (bad grip into some crumbling cement for the lower screw) and the light had burned out. It still worked but since Amazon had their 2nd generation Ring Battery Doorbell on sale for $50, well …

Rockin’ the Resolute Raccoon

April 26, 2026 at 10:05pm by windracer

As I write this, the Tampa Bay Lightning are down 2-1 against the Montreal Canadiens in Game 4 of the first round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Finals. Check the calendar: it’s late April and time for my bi-annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon) was released a few days ago. As usual, after running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, I kicked off the sudo do-release-upgrade which, despite this being an LTS release (and jump to the 7.x Linux kernel), only took about 22 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages (maybe part of that is due to my new Frontier fiber service). Re-applying my changes to the two affected config files (upsmon and resolved) only took a few additional minutes. I also had to make a few modifications to the .vimrc files for my mouse-based editing (like right-click paste) to work.

I’m basically copy/pasting this next bit from my Plucky upgrade in April 2025. I don’t understand why a PHP version upgrade always seems to remove the old/existing packages and not re-install all of the same newer replacements. This always breaks my WordPress and Piwigo sites (which use both PHP and MySQL). Simply installing the two missing packages (libapache2-mod-php8.5 and php8.5-mysql) with apt-get install, re-applying my changes to the .ini files, and restarting Apache resolved the problem but it’s still annoying that this doesn’t happen automatically.

(Oooh, the Lightning just tied the game with a power play goal! )

The only other post-upgrade issue I had was with phpSysInfo not being able to access some system utilities like uptime, /proc/cpuinfo, etc. It took a little back-and-forth chat with Copilot, but the AI chatbot was eventually able to direct me to the proper solution with some changes to my Apache config. Everything else seems to be stable but I’ll continue to monitor over the next few days.

Football

I didn’t really follow the NFL Draft this year since both the Browns and the Bucs didn’t have any exciting first round picks. The Bucs missed the playoffs last year but we still have Baker Mayfield. The Browns finished 5-12 and fired head coach Kevin Stefanski, so I assume 2026 will be another exercise in futility with a new coach and the continued QB drama. I did find it interesting that Ohio native Penn State quarterback Drew Allar was picked up by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the draft. I enjoyed watching him play for the Nittany Lions these past few years and now I have to root against him.

Basketball

The Cavs are back in the NBA playoffs after finishing the regular season 2nd in the Central Division and 4th in the Eastern Conference. After a strong 2-0 start in round 1 against the Toronto Raptors, they dropped both games in Canada and come home for game 5 on Wednesday with the series tied 2-2.

Baseball

Despite my big Spring Training trip last month, I typically don’t get into the early baseball season due to the overlap of the NBA and NHL playoffs. But the Rays are back in Tropicana Field this season after spending last season outdoors in the smaller Spring Training home of the New York Yankees here in Tampa. New roof, new turf, and lots of other upgrades (if you can afford them). I actually went to see the Rays and Twins yesterday and the stadium looks nice. I still dislike indoor, air conditioned baseball, but I still love baseball and it was nice to see some newness at the Trop. All of those repairs were of course contractually obligated with their lease (and probably paid for with insurance after the hurricane damage) but despite that fact the new owners still want to move across the bay to Tampa and build a new stadium for the cool cost of $2.3 billion. One month into the new season and the Rays are just over .500 and in 2nd place in the AL East, just behind, of course, the Yankees. The Guardians, meanwhile, have a win percentage just below the Rays (but still over .500) and are in 1st in the AL Central. They play the Rays in Cleveland this week.

Hockey

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the Lightning are back in the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the 9th year in a row (and the 12th time in the past 13 years). They’ve lost in the first round for the past 3 years, so everyone here is hopeful this is the year push further (and no Panthers this year!). The Bolts were on fire before the Olympic break but then had a tough run when the season resumed and then slumped slightly again near the end and just could not catch up with Buffalo. They finished 2nd in the Atlantic Division (3rd in the Eastern Conference) and now face the Montreal Canadiens in the first round.

(Another power play goal put the Bolts up 3-2 late in the 3rd and they ended up winning game, so the series is now tied 2-2 and heading back to Tampa)

Mark your calendar and meet me back here in October for Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) and fall sports!

Smart Tint switchable film

April 12, 2026 at 6:04pm by windracer

We recently completed a (year long!) construction project in the front room of our house replacing three individual double-hung impact windows with a large picture window surrounded by two casement windows (all impact, of course). This isn’t a post about the construction though (well, maybe a little) but about the cool tech we’re using on our new giant window.

Building the PiDP-1

March 6, 2026 at 9:09pm by windracer

It’s been just over a year since my last classic computer build (the PiDP-10) so it’s time to assemble Oscar Vermeulen’s latest project, the PiDP-1! I actually ordered the kit last Thanksgiving and it arrived about a week later (from Panama!) but then life got crazy: I ended up switching jobs which meant I was busy onboarding, getting benefits and such in order, and basically learning the ropes. On top of that, I lost the two weeks of winter break provided by my old employer and started with no PTO at the new place, which meant ~~very little~~ no free time over the holidays (just Christmas Day and New Year’s Day). I did manage to do a little prep work for the kit during that time, however, like purchasing another 4gb Raspberry Pi 5 with a 64gb microSD, imaging it with Debian 13 Trixie, and prepping the PiDP-1 software. Finally over the past two weeks I found some time to pull out my trusty soldering iron and get to assembling …

Lightspeed internet: making the switch to Frontier Fiber

February 26, 2026 at 8:52pm by windracer

I’ve been a RoadRunner/Brighthouse/Spectrum cable internet customer since I moved to Florida back in 2001. In 2004, I commented about Verizon FIOS possibly coming into my area but in 2013 I was still waiting. Thirteen years later, Frontier finally laid fiber in my neighborhood late last year and started offering internet service starting at $30/mo for 500Mbps. My Spectrum service was costing me $115/mo for 600Mbps so it was a no-brainer to upgrade to 1 gig fiber service at $50/mo.

Escaping the Pi-Hole for NextDNS

February 4, 2026 at 9:29pm by windracer

I’ve been running a Pi-Hole ad blocker on my home network (and a remote family network) in one way or another (local install on a RasPi, Docker container on a NAS, etc.) for over 10 years! Of course it only worked when we were at home, so my family had started noticing how cluttered their browsing experience was getting when they were out and about (and would usually complain to me). Then a recent Cox equipment change on the remote family network broke Pi-Hole’s functionality completely by not allowing changes to the default DNS at the router level. Sure I could have hard-coded the Pi-Hole IP address into to every device on the network, but instead I started investigating cloud-based DNS services and decided to give NextDNS a try.

Upgrading to Debian 13 (Trixie) on the Raspberry Pi

January 26, 2026 at 6:14pm by windracer

I’m pretty consistent with upgrading my Ubuntu Linux server twice a year, but found that I have not been as good about maintaining my Debian-based Raspberry Pis. I keep them updated, but not upgraded. So my first tech project of 2026 was to get everything current on Debian 13 Trixie.

I started with a mix of the last three releases of Raspberry Pi OS:

Debian 10 Buster: the PiDP-8 (Pi B+) and PiDP-11 (Pi 3 B+) could no longer be updated at all
Debian 11 Bullseye: the Pi 4 Bs used for OctoPrint and HomeSeer were last upgraded back in January 2024
Debian 12 Bookworm: the PiDP-10 (Pi 5) started with a fresh install when I built it back in August 2024

From what I had read, doing a clean install of Trixie (rather than a dist-upgrade) was the recommended path, so I made final full microSD card backups of each RasPi (with dd) then re-imaged each one with the current Lite build of RasPi OS using the Raspberry Pi Imager. Then, after booting up the new OS, I had to re-install, re-configure, and re-apply my software and customizations. This wasn’t a big effort for the “blinkenlights” RasPis, but Octoprint and Homeseer took some additional effort (see below). Finally, I did one more clean install of Trixie on a new Pi 5 that will be used for my PiDP-1 (once I find the time to build it!).

OctoPi

I used a nightly build image of OctoPi based on 64-bit Trixie and immediately had issues trying to SSH into the Pi. I had to hook up a monitor and keyboard so I could log in locally and then remove the IPQoS 0x00 line from /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Then I had to fix the syntax in /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg so that the reverse proxy would work for OctoPrint (I found both of these solutions in this post on the Octoprint forums).

Once I had Octoprint running I was able to restore my backup via the GUI, which also re-installed my plugins except for Octolapse. It seems like there’s an issue running this on versions of Python greater than 3.11 because distutils.msvccompiler was deprecated in 3.12 (and the Trixie image is using 3.13). I’ve posted on the issue in Github and hopefully there’ll be some sort of fix or workaround.

I also had a problem with my camera (an Arducam 5MP OV5647) not working. After a lot of research and experimentation I finally got it working by setting the resolution back to 1024 x 768 (instead of its native 2592 x 1944) via the camera_usb_options entry in /boot/firmware/octopi.txt. I’m not sure why the original resolution wouldn’t work (change in libraries?), but at least for now the camera shows video (although without Octolapse, it’s only good for a live view).

HomeSeer

For HS4, I didn’t just want to unzip my backup and hope it worked, so first I used zwolfpack’s Linux installer package (which installs HS, mono, and all the other necessary pre-requisites) to install a clean 4.2.22.86 beta release. I also took the opportunity to move the install from /usr/local/Homeseer to /opt/Homeseer). Then I unzipped my latest backup (from BLBackup) over that fresh install to re-install my plug-ins, devices, settings, events, and all the rest … and it worked (even the Z-Wave controller).

Then I had to re-install Homebridge (also under /opt) which got me a clean install with the latest v24 of node. After re-appling my fix for Z-Wave Plus and my garage door opener, I restored my backup from before the re-image and again, everything came back as expected.

So yeah, that’s six Raspberry Pis runing on Trixie now! Quite the project … and that should tide me over for a while until Forky is released in a few years. 😉