Hi I’m Dan! 👋

This post has been updated to use the latest and greatest from Home Assistant. There are no more categories and things are MUCH more streamlined! In this post I will cover how I use actionable notifications within Home Assistant. Using push notifications with the Home Assistant iOS App you can setup some really cool triggers within the system. Below is a list of the technology used at the time of writing: Home Assistant - Version 2024.1.4 Apple iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Apple iOS 17.3 I have two actionable notifications that get used most often: ...

I recently purchased an Apple HomePod Mini off of eBay to add to the ever expanding setup at our home. We already have 6 or so scattered around so adding another should not have been an issue. But, as with all things tech, sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. I plugged in the Mini and it powered up fine and my phone discovered it. I began the setup process and then things went sideways. I got to the “setting up"screen and it just stayed there for as long as I would leave it, even overnight! I checked everything. I made sure I had network connectivity, made sure it was getting a DHCP address, made sure no filtering was catching anything…on and on with the typical troubleshooting for network issues. Still, nothing seemed to solve the issue. I performed multiple resets of the HomePod to no positive result. ...

When I had my Tesla Model Y I had it hooked up to TeslaFi. There were a lot of stats in there and I wanted to expose some of that data in Home Assistant for easy consumption. I also wanted to utilize the TeslaFi API to allow me to turn on the climate controls in my Tesla using Home Assistant and any voice control devices that I may be utilizing (Siri in my case). I wanted to capture my config in case it helps someone else. ...

I have been seeing a lot of buzz about Wireguard. I had considered setting up a server at home for external access just for fun, but all of the examples I saw used NAT behind the Wireguard box and I wanted to route entire subnets without NATing. After I finally took some time and realized that Wireguard was just an interface and I would just be leveraging some iptables it all came together rather quickly. ...

…the method to my madness! As a life long technology practitioner I am often asked what training I did to gain my PMP in 2017. While I “only studied for 3 weeks” before taking the exam, I had a lot of experience that really made that possible. I thought I would write all of my notes here so I have an easy point of reference and maybe it will help someone on their journey. ...