In addition to moving this blog to cloudflare, I decided to take advantage of enabling Cloudflare’s proxy at the DNS level for my other (non-blog) services. Basically, this makes Cloudflare act as a reverse proxy.

However, handling Firewall & Port Forwarding rules was a bit more complicated.

I’ve been struggling with Home Assistant notifications. From some searching, it seems other people are also struggling.

A lot of videos online cover basic “How to send a notification to your phone”, but I wanted a whole lot more life-cycle than that. I want to clear them. And I don’t want to have to write a thousand action conditions, either.

I sat down and spent far more time than I’d like to admit to tackling the problem. This might not fit every use-case for every person, but this was exactly the functionality I needed.

This is the first post after migrating this blog to cloudflare-pages hosted (pushed from gitlab.com). Why?

A better, more complete (with dashboard + mobile automation sync) is available in a new article: Home Assistant Notifications (with Sync in Dashboard and Mobile)

The original article is preserved below. I encourage you to use the new one, though.

I’ve recently been porting things from Samsung Smartthings to Home Assistant. Smartthings has a significantly lower learning curve, but suffered from a reliance on the cloud. While you have a local hub, any “custom” device handlers actually ran on the cloud on Samsung servers somewhere. Which means advanced functionality was often very, very slow.

A coworker graciously gave me an IBM RT3200! It’s a tenkeyless IBM keyboard with integrated trackpoint. However, I did have some issues getting scrolling working properly with a modern USB-based system running Wayland.

Like a large number of people around the world right now, my place of work has closed the doors for safety concerns. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to work from home via VPN, but I did want to keep some separation between my work and non-work environments. The full-separation route would be creating a new user profile on my local machine. This would ensure complete separation. I didn’t go this route because I don’t need to keep everything separate.

Adventures with sharing host files with a KVM VM using 9p and libvirt with SELinux.

While checking out some logs and google search analytics, I found that my post about Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines has been referenced far more than I expected it to be. I decided to take this opportitnity to fact-check and correct that article.

Fedora’s installer will happily set up an encrypted install with root-on-lvm-on-luks (/boot is still unencrypted. Secure Boot might be handy here still). This is supported and works out of the box. However, while I’m present when I reboot this machine, it is also headless (no keyboard or monitor), so typing a passphrase at boot is problematic. But no problem, you can have up-to ten key slots for a LUKS partition, right?