The family room tablet learned to show what matters right now: one banner for everything that needs attention, a swipe to peek at what's hidden, and a thermostat card that also controls the attic AC and the basement heater.

I trained a small YOLOv5 model on photos from my alley camera so Home Assistant can tell my three cars apart, and so my phone can say whether the parking spot behind the house is free before I get home.

Four years after getting my XMCOSY+ string lights running locally with LocalTuya, the Node-RED flow is gone, the light speaks kelvin again, and the whole thing fits in one Home Assistant package you can drop into your own config.

Five years in, my self-hosted email archive gets cleaned up: four repos become one, Solr is replaced by Dovecot's built-in search, All Mail and Flagged folders finally work, and certificate renewals stop needing a manual restart.

The plain HTML wall tablets from part 1 learned to listen: the kids' tablets and the family room remote are now voice assistants, have a Music Assistant page, bring up the right page on their own, and update themselves after a change.

How I took a Home Assistant install with 421 automations, a few security holes and a lot of polling, put it in Git, and cleaned it up with Claude Code without breaking anything my family relies on.

The Lovelace dashboards on the wall tablets around my house were slow and kept reloading, so Claude and I replaced them with small HTML and JavaScript pages that talk to Home Assistant over one websocket. Here's what they look like and how they work.

Why I moved this blog from a WordPress container to a static Zola site, how the posts got converted straight out of the database, and what broke along the way.

A new version of the mbsync and Dovecot Docker images, now with Solr full-text search for fast IMAP searches.