Oh boy, here we go again. Christmas season is with us one more time.
For anyone that doesn’t know me even a little: I don’t like Christmas. It is the most consumerist period of the year, everything is packed with people (even in 2020, how’s that even possible!). The only good thing is you can meet with some people even if it is a few meters away in a park freezing yourself.
Even if I’ve been a Home Assistant’s user for quite some time I have never dedicated myself to have a truly stable and dedicated service at home. I always treated it more like a pet project than anything else, but this is changing now.
I have a fair amount of Smart Devices around the house and just as you come to expect they come from different companies, protocols and sizes. Each day it passes I’m more and more concerned about my privacy and the value of the hardware I do not truly own.
With this in mind I have started the journey of self-hosting! Which to put it simply is… every device that is in my home (with a few exceptions that you’ll see later) will be controlled by this Home Assistance instance.
Checking my images it seems this month I didn’t have anything remarkable from the outside so… I just wanted to share that this month I have given myself some very nice meals and I improved the Katsu Curry recipe quite a bit. I’m not good at cooking by any means, but the relax you get from listening to music while cooking some healthy food is pretty good.
I recently bought a firewall router for home to improve our general stability (ISP provided routers kinda suck) and improve security at home. The more smart devices connected to the network the more concerned I become of this kind of stuff.
In this case my problem was very simple: I have the firewall router and the access point router. My access point router (TP-Link’s Archer C5400) exposes it’s own DHCP server over it’s own LAN segment. For my firewall router to work properly it has to recognise all devices on the network and with the access point creating it’s own LAN, everything connected via Wifi was showing up in the firewall as one device (the access point router).
I started the out of pure hype and even bought -again- a PlayStation 4 in the process, but haven’t finished it until recently due to time constraints, lack of interest and having lost the initial momentum.
I will try to to a quick review of what I feel playing it and if there’s something spoilery it will be obscured to avoid accidents; same with the pictures.
Very cool month, finally managed to have some hard earned holidays! I had the privilege of going with some friends (even some I hadn’t seen in a long time!) to an apartment near the beach, and oh boy did I need that. I came back fully charged! Apart from that, not much movement in any area.