claude

  • October 21, 2026

My Home Assistant Wall Tablets, Part 3: Alerts, Swipes and a Thermostat That Knows About the Attic

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.

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  • October 11, 2026

XMCOSY+ String Lights, Revisited: No Node-RED and One Package to Copy

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.

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  • October 11, 2026

Making an Automatic Email Backup (2026): One Repo, Better Search

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.

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  • October 10, 2026

My Home Assistant Wall Tablets, Part 2: Voice, Music and a Smarter Intercom

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.

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  • October 5, 2026

Cleaning Up Six Years of Home Assistant with Claude

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.

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  • October 4, 2026

Rewriting My Home Assistant Dashboards in Plain HTML

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.

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