Sometimes you have the need to build a new Home Assistant installation and restore your old configuration. Maybe your SD card died, or you want to migrate Home Assistant to a more powerful server.  In fact, you can even do cross-platform migrations (e.g. from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Proxmox...
If you are curious about how to run Home Assistant OS (HAOS) on Proxmox (a free/open source virtualization platform), you've come to the right place. This post is a detailed guide on how to get Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a virtual machine (VM) up and running quickly on Proxmox VE...
This blog post details my lessons learned doing a fresh Home Assistant installation in early 2023. Here, I provide guidance pulled from many sources, and my own experience using Home Assistant. I've been big into the smart home for a few years using various platforms such as SmartThings, Hubitat, Apple HomeKit,...
A couple of years ago I got the Elgato Stream Deck XL. For those of you not familiar with the Stream Deck XL, it is a "macro" controller of sorts where each button is a LCD screen that you can fully customize in terms of both image and functionality. It...
Along with a few updates to my 2023 dream home office setup (see post here), I also felt it was the time to do a whole house network upgrade. This post covers my network "refresh" that is built to support multi-gig, 10Gbps, PoE and enterprise WiFi. Nothing was broken with...
Introduction I've been working at home for over 8 years, so the pandemic didn't really change a lot for me in terms of where I work. In late 2021 and early 2022 I did a major redecoration of my home office and shared a blog post about that experience. Now...
Action needed: If you are a RSS subscriber to this blog, the URL is changing. For a long time I've used Feedblitz as a feed manager, but their utility has passed. I've started an immediate transition back to the standard Wordpress RSS URL of:https://www.derekseaman.com/feedPlease update your favorite RSS reader with...
Do you own a Synology NAS with DSM 7.0 or 7.1 and run Docker containers? Would you like those containers to use a Wireguard VPN provider for increased privacy and security? If the answer is yes, then keep reading. In order to get Wireguard working for Docker containers on your Synology...
We've all been victims of spam, and the problem seems to only be getting worse. With all the data breaches happening, or companies that sell your contact information to make money, it's no wonder our inboxes are flooded with crap. But there is at least one solution that can help...
As 2023 is soon upon us, I wanted to give a shout out to what I think are the top macOS apps going into the new year. One of the reasons why I'm a fairly recent Windows to Mac convert (about 3 years ago) is the quality of the ecosystem...
I just migrated my home firewall to a Firewalla Gold Plus (4x 2.5GbE ports) and configured it to use NextDNS. For quite some time I've been running NextDNS with my old OPNsense firewall. NextDNS is a cloud based DNS service that is very security and privacy oriented. It lets you configure...
Introduction I've been a remote worker for the last 7 years, and during that time my office setup has evolved. So when COVID hit, nothing changed for me in terms of my work environment. However, what has changed for me is my at-home desk setup. Over the past few months...