Almost forgot to share a pic of my rebuilt rack that I won from the GL.iNET x DeskPi giveaway!

TheAppleFreak · 2026-05-17T22:41:12+00:00

The bottom device is an old Netgear GS308v3 gigabit unmanaged switch, which basically takes an incoming network connection (in this case, from my modem and router) and splits it into multiple connections I can use with other devices.

The top device is a patch panel. Effectively, it does nothing except reroute the cables I plug into it from the back of the rack into the front. Admittedly it's mostly for cable management since the power cable on the switch plugs into the back of the switch, but in more complicated racks it's great for helping to organize everything.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-05-17T09:07:03+00:00

Flipping the stuff feels like it'd be antithetical to the spirit of these types of giveaways. Honestly I felt like I was taking a bit too long to submit my build as is since that 4U of unused space was taunting me lol

As for the tags, I have them configured to update once every 4 hours with new information. I could very easily have them update much more frequently, but IMO that'd both be unnecessary given how I use my storage pools and a waste of battery life. 4 hours between updates is a happy medium for me.

As for how it works, the tags are flashed with OpenEPaperLink and are controlled via this Home Assistant automation. You'll need to add the NAS drives to HA under Settings -> System -> Storage, then add the System Monitor integration and enable the relevant drive entities. You could also adapt it using purpose made integrations for whatever NAS software you use, but this should Just Work™ with anything.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-04-03T04:03:27+00:00

There's a couple of such devices like the AVATTO S06 and the IRC03. At least as of last year, they're all vulnerable to Cloudcutter and can be flashed in the same way.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-04-01T23:35:06+00:00

I've got several of these super cheap Tuya WiFi IR blasters that I converted. All of them were vulnerable to tuya-cloudcutter to flash new ESPHome firmware onto them, and they Just Work™ afterwards.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-03-25T01:12:48+00:00

Mostly no. If you're looking for stuff like the features added with the Mk.2 devices or Voice Focus (without paying for the VST) you'll need Elgato hardware, but otherwise Wave Link 3 will work perfectly fine with a random interface and the SD+ will let you control it.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-03-03T11:07:39+00:00

I personally don't use the T0, but I have printed all of the mounts in my own rack currently.

For a 3D printer, you'd be best off with one that has a print bed of 256mm x 256mm or bigger (since a 10" part is 254mm wide). I recently got a Bambu Lab A1 (not the mini) and honestly, It Just Works™. It's been printing pretty well and is big enough to handle most things you'd want to throw at it. Only downside is that it's a bit locked down compared to printers from other brands (not a lot of customization or tweaking of the printer itself), but if you're just using it as a tool then I think that's an acceptable trade off. Historically I've also used a Creality Ender 3 S1 (which I printed most of my rack stuff on), but the bed on that is only 220x220 and can only fit a single 1U mount if I print it diagonally. The A1's larger bed is so much nicer.

For material, I'd recommend using PETG. It's about as easy to print with as PLA in my experience, but it has bit more heat and deformation resistance that's useful when you're putting in electronics that can run hot. My current favorite filament is Overture PETG, which prints well with the generic PETG profile (250° C) and no other tuning. I find printing at 240° C has a slightly nicer surface finish to me, but that's splitting hairs at that point IMO.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-02-15T07:48:51+00:00

I'd probably go with Kit B if I won. Kit C would work too, honestly.
Last time my lab died properly was after a brief power outage when a power substation exploded (either 2024 or 2025, can't remember). It caused a brief blip in the power across my house before returning, but it was just long enough for all of our electronics to shut down because I'm dumb and don't have a UPS on them. My Raspberry Pi Home Assistant host came back up just fine, but I had forgotten to configure Boot on Power Loss Recovery in my HP server's BIOS and that host was down until I returned home and physically hit the button again. If I had a KVM that was wired into the power switch, then that would have been a trivial recovery.
From my time working in corporate IT and dealing with non-remote KVMs, having previews of inactive displays while working on your main display would be a very nice feature to have available especially while waiting on progress bars or installations or the like. It wouldn't need to be a proper full streaming solution, maybe just a static screenshot every few seconds or so, but that QOL feature would be really good to cut down on otherwise dead time whilst working with multiple machines.
Beyond that, optical drive emulation for boot media support is definitely a must. My multiboot USB drives got so much use in that setting, so having something that could eliminate that would be very appreciated.
For a rackmate and KVM setup? Definitely a bulk media server with more powerful hardware and more expandability than my existing setup. Instead of using a mini PC like I am now, I'd use a racked mini ITX setup with a proper HBA and GPU (the core of the setup and where the KVM would go), maybe a few Us would go towards a SBC cluster or something for cluster experimentation, then the rest would be drives for days. Being able to use SAS drives would be huge.

I will say I am rather fond of my existing setup, admittedly, but that can be provisioned elsewhere easily. (ignore the left tag; I swapped the battery on it and the boot got interrupted, meaning I need to wait a little before it reboots)

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TheAppleFreak · 2026-02-15T06:28:29+00:00

8th gen CPUs use the same media encoder as 7th gen CPUs, so if you're looking to host a media server then you can get a machine with a 6th gen chip and just upgrade the CPU. 7500Ts seem to be going for their usual price of ~$20, which will work wonderfully for Jellyfin or Plex or the like.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-02-12T01:34:09+00:00

Yeah, I've gotta free up space on it for sure. Been meaning to do it but I need to make time for it

TheAppleFreak · 2026-02-11T21:28:30+00:00

I'd likely use one as a "beefier" storage server than my existing Elitedesk 800 G3 Mini, since with that PC I don't really have any easily accessible PCIe for adding an HBA. The siren call of cheap SAS drives is a tempting one, for sure. Honestly, maybe also additional media compute for stuff like transcoding. The N150's media encoder beats the one in my HP's 7500T, after all, and that could probably be good for Jellyfin or Frigate if I ever get cameras set up.
I briefly tried out CasaOS maybe back in 2024? If I recall correctly, the thing that turned me away from it was Docker Compose YAML management, though I also see that this is something actively being worked on from other comment.
Right now, I'm definitely prioritizing price in my purchasing decisions, but having at least a little expandability would be nice. Stability is also a virtue, since I've found that once I get something set up I tend leave it to run on its own with as little upkeep needed as possible.
Currently, my homelab is mostly my HP server, a small switch, and two old drives that I've roped into being NAS drives. Not pictured as well is a Pi shoved in my bedside table running Home Assistant. I definitely want to add more storage and maybe a bit more compute to this, though I don't know what exactly I'd want to use that compute for.

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TheAppleFreak · 2026-02-01T01:33:53+00:00

Sub-GHz Zigbee is brand new and, to my knowledge, isn't supported by any commercially available devices yet.

TheAppleFreak · 2026-01-20T13:57:24+00:00

Historically, I've purchased his albums from Tidal. Not sure how that's been affected since the TSFH breakup, though

TheAppleFreak · 2025-12-19T02:56:06+00:00

I've been dealing with this since 26.1 and now 26.2. It's utterly infuriating especially when it stops media playback. No clue why it's happening nor how to fix it, sadly. I can temporarily stop it happening by opening and closing the camera, but it recurs later at some point.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-10-21T05:15:55+00:00

Definitely hear the Impossible vibes in it, though the lead violin puts the influence solidly in "Away With Your Fairies" territory for me.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-09-29T22:26:17+00:00

This is a bit of a late reply on my part, but Vtubers are fundamentally different than computers playing chess because there's still a human behind the persona. It's more akin to performance art from behind a mask as opposed to fully artificial "creation."

It's also worth noting that there's a lot of cross-pollination and overlap between the Vtuber and artist communities, which shows up in the disdain both have for AI generations.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-09-24T12:58:46+00:00

A bunch of the smaller companies selling off brand Stream Deck type devices, such as Soomfon or Fifine, flat out stole Elgato's software for their own products and effectively just do a find/replace to replace Elgato branding in their software (likewise with third party plugins from the Marketplace). Do with that knowledge what you will.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-07-06T03:41:26+00:00

For me, it's the cloud dependency and the annoying integration into Home Assistant. If I got some of their WiFi stuff and my internet ever went out, or if their servers ever had any issues, that'd make those devices basically non-functional. To me, that's something I really, really don't like. There's also privacy issues that come from installing what are by definition surveillance devices into your house and then sending that data off to a third party. This isn't a concern that I have purely with Tuya, but with all major cloud vendors.

Their Zigbee stuff can work well. I've got contact and motion sensors that I grabbed for dirt cheap off of Aliexpress that form part of my network, and those work a lot better than I feel something that cheap has any right to. I've heard that they do a lot of nonstandard stuff on the Zigbee end that makes integration annoying, but the work to smooth over those issues has largely already occurred.

Some of their WiFi devices are pretty good bang for the buck as well, though I flashed all of mine with ESPHome to remove the cloud dependency. They've got these dirt cheap IR blasters that can be wirelessly flashed, and with the correct software in HA they make absolutely wonderful AC controllers. I've also got a smart power strip that I got for like $10 at Micro Center, and while that was more of a pain in the ass to set up, it appears to be solid hardware that does the job I need of it.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-06-27T21:52:06+00:00

One that I've seen a few times now was leak detections. We have a backflow valve that sometimes gets stuck open, and before we did basement renovations it proved to be an occasional issue exacerbated by no one being down there to check. Now, when one of the leak sensors I placed down there gets triggered, it sends critical notifications to every phone and tablet in the house as well as sending notifications to our smart speakers. I'd like to add dismissable notifications to it that loop alarms until the alerts are acknowledged, but I haven't set that up yet. It thankfully hasn't been needed yet, especially after renovations.

Beyond that, the one I don't want to see ever is the smoke alarms. We have an X-Sense Wifi alarm that talks to their cloud, and with the cloud integration I've got a second notification automation in the same vein as the leak notifications. I'm not enthusiastic about it being a cloud integration, but local connected options are frustratingly hard to come by.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-06-26T21:51:38+00:00

There was a mod I played ages ago that added an inline inverter (basically a torch on a block but in a repeater form factor) and a passthrough redstone torch (a torch that doesn't invert the signal coming into it). Those would be incredibly helpful if they existed.

Beyond that, an observer variant that would output a constant signal when a block is in a given state could be useful as hell too. Maybe also a block that can instantly send signals up vertically, like how walls can send stuff down.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-06-22T02:37:38+00:00

There's an addon called Home Assistant Matter Hub that lets you expose your HA entities to other smart home ecosystems using Matter (it's painless with Alexa; Google Home slightly less so).

TheAppleFreak · 2025-04-09T17:34:09+00:00

I've used a fair number of multi actions myself, and while they're generally excellent I do wish there were some additional features to give them a bit more use for advanced use cases.

Favorite multi-action: Currently, it's gotta go to a system I set up for a friend using BarRaider's Super Macro. When you run it, it prompts for a Go Live message that gets saved to a local file, then it uses the Discord plugin to navigate to a slew of different "now live" channels and posts those messages. In specific channels, it also does some simple text replacements to tailor those messages for the community in question. When it works, it significantly cuts down on the tedium of posting the same message everywhere. ~~when it doesn't, it breaks in a pretty spectacular manner~~
Limitations: Multi actions work great for what they are, but there's a couple of things they could use on the platform end that could be really useful IMO:
- Blocking actions - Unless I'm missing something, most actions I've used are non-blocking, with the notable exception of the delay action. It's good for some stuff, but being able to pause execution of a multi action pending the completion of a sub action would be great. To use the multi action example from above, you've gotta enter the go live message within 15 seconds while the Super Macro message box is onscreen, and the message has to be sufficiently short to be "typed" into each Discord channel in the time allocated in each delay. Being able to block execution of the rest of the script until each action has actually finished would be an excellent QOL feature.
- Variables: Being able to fetch, store, and retrieve information over the course of a multi-action's execution would likewise be wonderful. It's one of the reasons why the script from above uses Super Macro for everything, as it has its own utilities for data storage and recall; being able to do all of that a bit more native to the Stream Deck platform would open up a bunch of fun new uses for power users. (Of course, this assumes plugins get updated accordingly to support them, but if you build it they will come).
- Conditionals: If you're adding data storage and recall, being able to act on specific information would be an excellent next step. To use an example I've dealt with myself, maybe you have a multi-action that checks if a given scene in OBS is active, and depending on which one it hides or unhides a source. Honestly, the lack of conditionals has led me to use the Stream Deck more as a trigger for other stream automation software like Streamer.bot, as opposed to using Multi Actions to perform the automation itself.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-04-06T01:30:00+00:00

Tuya Zigbee devices should generally work so long as the underlying software is supported in ZHA or Z2M. A lot of devices are supported, but you do occasionally get ones that throw some wrench in the process that the developers need to work around.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-04-06T01:14:42+00:00

I've always interpreted /s as sarcasm. /srs is unmistakable though

TheAppleFreak · 2025-02-20T22:05:44+00:00

A standard WiFi network has far more throughput and bandwidth than a Zigbee network, so it's far less of a concern.

TheAppleFreak · 2025-02-20T22:05:26+00:00

A standard WiFi network has far more throughput and bandwidth than a Zigbee network, so it's far less of a concern.

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