Upgrading to Bullseye on the Raspberry Pi 4

My two Raspberry Pi 4 Bs (in my HomeTroller Pi and OctoPi) were both running Debian 10 (Buster). I like to be current (as evidenced by my bi-annual Ubuntu upgrades) and realized I’d been lax on the RasPis, both of which were two releases behind. Debian 12 (Bookworm) seemed a little too new, so based on some …

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Upgrading the HomeSeer/HomeTroller hardware

My 1st gen HomeSeer HomeTroller Pi was built on a Raspberry Pi 3 B with 1gb of RAM. While this was fine back when I bought it and was just starting my home security and automation re-design and foray into using HS4, recently I’d been having issues with performance and out-of-memory conditions. In 2021 when …

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Changing registrars: goodbye Google (Squarespace), hello, Cloudflare!

Last summer, Google announced that it would be shutting down its Google Domains service and selling it to Squarespace. I had a few domains (like this one) registered through Google that I had transferred from DynDNS (which is now owned by Oracle!) back in 2016 and was just going to let the transfer happen and …

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Synology DiskStation DS720+

During my recent switch from LastPass to Vaultwarden I was planning on using Docker but then discovered my old (2014) Synology NAS didn’t have the CPU architecture to support it. I was already in the middle of one big winter break project, why not add another? Time for a NAS upgrade! My DS214 started out …

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Goodbye LastPass, hello Vault(Bit)warden

Unless you’re not interested in tech news or have been under a rock for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard about the latest LastPass breach debacle. Two days before Christmas, every LastPass customer like myself received an e-mail informing us that, in a nutshell, back in August 2022 an unauthorized third-party had acquired LastPass …

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Node-Red (with Ring and HomeSeer)

“Even with my tendency to tinker, adding yet another system on top of Homebridge seemed like too much to me.” – me, two months ago Yeah, I said that back in late May (in reference to Scrypted) after getting Homebridge set up and integrated with my HomeSeer home automation system. But here I am, two …

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Kia EV6 GT-Line

Back in March when we replaced my Highlander with the RAV4 Prime, we figured that would buy us (literally) some time for the Ford Mustang Mach-E we had on order to arrive before the late summer/early fall when we would again require two vehicles. But as the weeks passed it became apparent that the Mach-E …

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Homebridge (and HomeSeer)

A few weeks ago while browsing the Homeseer forums (which have been inundated with Insteon users lately, after the sudden shutdown of the service), I came across a thread about integrating Homeseer with Apple’s HomeKit using Homebridge. Everything in my home automation setup has been working fine, but I’m always looking for new ways to …

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