Category: Self Hosting

Fully Local Universal Remote Control with Home Assistant

Background

I have had a Logitech Harmony remote solution for almost 10 years. In my opinion, it is a very nice product. It integrates nicely into Home Assistant, and so, while it didn’t behave as intuitively as I wanted out of the box, Home Assistant automations were able to modify its behavior so that it largely performed seamlessly in the way that I wanted.

Unfortunately, as with many other quality products, Logitech decided to discontinue the Harmony line of products.

Luckily, Logitech has learned from its previous mistake when it discontinued the Harmony Link years earlier. At the time, … Read the rest

Making an Automatic Email Backup – Part 2

UPDATE: PART 3 has instructions for email backup using pre-made docker images based on this post and Part 1.

<— Part 1

Summary so far

Ok, so if you have gone through Part 1 already, you have Mbsync set up to sync all emails from your remote IMAP server and then Dovecot set up to host those emails on a local SMTP server, but without SSL.

That may be enough for many, but we can take things a step further. In this part, we will add self-signed SSL certificates for Dovecot, and we will install Roundcube. Roundcube is an … Read the rest

Making an Automatic Email Backup – Part 1

UPDATE: PART 3 has instructions for email backup using pre-made docker images based on this post and Part 2.

Intro

In the world of self-hosting, creating a personal email server always seemed like the Holy Grail of personal privacy. Unfortunately, with all the work that would go into maintaining it, and the high probability of failure when operated by someone as inexperienced as myself, it has never seemed like a viable option for me. However, I have wanted a system for some time whereby I can automatically backup my email in a standard format which could potentially be served to … Read the rest

The Birth of a Smart Home

When the first Google Home came out in 2016, I briefly thought about buying it, but decided I had no use for it. Shortly after, my brother-in-law bought me two Chinese Tuya White-label smart plugs from Amazon. I plugged a couple of lamps into them and was hooked. Google home followed shortly after. At the time, we were renting and so my ability to “smartify” our home was limited. I replaced many light bulbs with Sengled bulbs, changed out smoke detectors for Nest, but that was pretty much it.

In 2019 we bought our first home. I knew from the … Read the rest