I have been experimenting and researching how to approach my Home Assistant deployment to ensure I will have a reliable install, low maintenance and room to expand. There were a few questions I needed to answer before I could go forward with my migration. Was my hardware detection script portable …

I have been running Home Assistant for several years now. I have migrated from a lowly raspberry pi 1 B+ to a laptop with a Python virtual environment. Next I upgraded that laptop to an SSD and switched to running the docker container, before I set up my docker-compose.yaml …

Recently I have helped take over leadership of the Virginia Tech Web Developers Group. We are an informal bunch who come together and share knowledge about our craft and trade, in the hopes that we can all become better at web development. This will also have the benefit of promoting …

So a few weeks ago my brother lost his credit card and had it canceled. He also never updated our wireless account to auto withdraw from the new credit card. Because of this I found myself in a situation where I needed to rely only on WIFI for calling and …

I recently switched to Linode for a basic VPS (512 MB RAM, 20 GB storage). I wanted to be able to install absolutely what ever version of what ever software I wanted. Since I have become very familiar with Arch Linux (I run it on all of my home computers …

LVM and Luks encryption can be a simple and effective combination to keeping your data safe. However, encryption tends to complicate things a bit when it comes to data recovery and system repair. In order to repair a grub install, most people can just use a live "rescue" Linux CD …

Today I got an email from a mailing list I am currently subscribed to and someone pointed out that a new version of Skype for Linux was released. The last release of Skype for Linux (2.0.x) was indeed plagued with bugs, refused to let me (or any one …