I’m a bit of a home automation hobbyist. I bought my first few Philips Hue lights before anyone knew what Hue was, and I wrote one of the first couple hundred Amazon Alexa integrations (they even gave me a t-shirt for it!)

My house isn’t as jammed with sensors and self-made IoT devices as some of the folks I’ve seen on YouTube, but I do run Home Assistant and appreciate the occasional well-designed automation. Almost all of the wall switches in my house are “smart” and “does it connect to Home Assistant” is now a question I ask about every new connected device I consider buying.

Recently I had a couple “problems” (we home automation nerds tend to see “minor inconveniences” as “major solvable problems”) and decided to solve them with Shelly relays. This is that story.

We have solar panels on the house, and their energy production is managed by an Enphase Envoy microinverter system. I love data, so I wanted to build my own dashboard of energy consumption and production, which took me down a rabbit hole of dealing with Enphase’s shitty API.

Since then, I discovered that the Envoy system does, in fact, serve its energy data locally, so this is my brief explanation of how I moved over to that approach instead.

As astute readers are aware, I’ve been on a host my own stuff kick for some time now. I brought my music local with Navidrome, I moved my remaining websites off of that-shape-named-service into static sites that I host myself, and I just moved from Samsung SmartThings to Home Assistant for all my home automation stuff.

A recent household budget discussion wandered into the territory of replacing our Spotify family plan, and my wife’s position on it revealed what I think is one of the crucial points about hosting your own systems: owning your stuff.

This is absolutely an Emacs apologist blog, and I’m writing this post in Emacs right now. But I started at a new job recently and most of us use Visual Studio Code, and I know that’s considered a slur in many free software circles, but I’m here to tell you, “It’s OK.”

Loyal readers of the blog know that I’m a really big fan of MyNoise, the ultimate immersive soundscape tool created and maintained by the one and only Dr. Ir. Stéphane Pigeon. I use it when music gets too “demanding” or is creating a mood that distracts me from what I’m doing.

There have been some changes on MyNoise, and I created a few new unique soundscapes, and I want to share it all with you!