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

Create a FREE public endpoint for self-hosted services using Oracle Cloud and OPNsense

Introduction

As many of you (the people who would be interested enough to read this post), I have a number of self hosted services which have become integral to my everyday life. For the most part, I use a wireguard (split) tunnel to access these services remotely from my phone or laptop. However, there are some services, like Nextcloud, for which I prefer public access so that I can access them from any computer. Up till now, I have opened port 443 on my router and forwarded incoming traffic to an instance of Nginx Proxy Manager. This has been working … 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