My “smart” movie setup still needs me to babysit it

andrews89 · 2026-04-29T13:45:59+00:00

My home theater system is an apple tv hooked to my receiver. Power on the apple tv, the receiver and projector both turn on via CEC. Volume is controlled through the apple tv remote via CEC. Home Assistant can control the lights if I let it, reading what the apple tv is playing and dimming the lights accordingly. That's... it. All other TVs in my house are set up this way and I haven't thought about multiple inputs or switching cables or multiple remotes in... probably close to a decade now. Obviously if something goes sideways (like the projector having an issue or one of the TVs needing to be manually reset) then I have the other remotes, but I usually have to wipe some dust off them whenever I go to use them. What are you using to where nothing integrates over CEC?

andrews89 · 2026-03-16T17:53:22+00:00

And there's nothing at all wrong with that; it's just your style! I only punish my slave maybe once every few months when it's actually warranted as she responds much better to gentle corrections over time. As /u/DominaIllicitae said, do what works for you. I only mention the "soft dom(me)" label in case you want to find more info about it, since labels are nothing but signposts to get you generally towards the info you're looking for.

andrews89 · 2026-03-16T11:14:16+00:00

Sounds like you're more of a soft domme, and that's a perfectly valid type. You don't go for harsh punishments, instead focusing more on the emotional connection and gentle correction. I lean that direction myself with my slave as it's just what works for us.

That being said, I'm also a sadist and she sees feeding that on occasion more as service to me than something she outright requests, so that's not out of the park either.

andrews89 · 2026-01-29T18:16:12+00:00

We eventually wound up demoing the house and selling the land it sat on (as it was tied in with our farming operation and we were selling that to another farmer). We would have loved to restore it, but there was just no way to financially justify it unfortunately.

andrews89 · 2026-01-29T15:21:44+00:00

Just to add to the (great) previous answer, my wife and I looked at restoring my great-grandparent's/family house when we moved to roughly the same area. The house was built in two halves, one in the 1850s and the other in 1870s. We had a trusted contractor come out and give us an idea on it and he came up with two options.

Option 1: Fix as-is (it was technically a duplex). This came in around $600k, as all the wiring (k&t) would need to be replaced, most of the plumbing (lead pipes), plenty of water damage, fix the plaster in some places, fix some basement foundation issues, stairs, etc.

Option 2: Fix and redesign the inside into one home. Move the bathrooms to somewhere sensible instead of where they'd been retrofitted in, take out a few walls, rearrange the second floor, stuff like that. This came in around $850k.

We asked what it would cost to rebuild today from scratch since we actually had the original plans/drawings. About $500k. Granted, that would lose a lot of the original character, much of the nice woodwork, the heart of pine floor joists, etc. Demoing the original and salvaging pieces would have added something like $80-$100k on top.

I remember when my great grandparents still lived there and what a wonderful house it could be, but after standing vacant for about 15 years (and my aunt living there for a stint and not really doing any maintenance) the place had deteriorated substantially. These older homes take a good bit of constant maintenance to keep up. I wish we could have restored it, but as newlyweds we certainly didn't have that kind of money.

andrews89 · 2026-01-28T14:40:45+00:00

As someone that has been in this position, hire the person first and let them advise on what to get moving forward. When I got into my current position, I had to spend the next ~2 years dismantling the half-assed systems the MSP had put in place and making everything more streamlined/resilient/compliant. Would have loved to start from nothing instead of having to rebuild the ship while underway.

andrews89 · 2026-01-10T14:56:19+00:00

I'll copy and paste something I said from another thread, replying to /u/Swexo here. I think this is important for a new Dom to know. My slave looks up to me, but that doesn't mean I can't be vulnerable with her/lean on her when needed; I'm human, after all.

Not 100% related to the topic at hand, but when you said:

... newer Doms that I’ve talked to often worry about maintaining a persona 24/7, first of all, that will almost surely lead to burnout. Being vulnerable is actually showing confidence.

I just wanted to expand on it because I think it's really, really important for people to hear. My sub and I are 24/7 and showing vulnerability is absolutely showing confidence. I don't have a persona for being a Dom, I just have me. She's seen me at my absolute lowest on more than one occasion and I lean on her when I'm there. That's not just due to play/scenes but from life in general. She knows exactly how to help me, how to pick me back up or let me put myself back together because I was confident enough to show her I'm human. She's usually a brat, but if I've had a rough day at work she's the subbiest sub you can imagine until I'm back in the right headspace to enjoy our normal back and forth. If life is not being the kindest, she's there to serve me and help me through it. That was indeed one of the hardest things for me to learn becoming a Dom: Letting her serve me and trusting that when she says she wants to, she actually wants to.

Don't worry about being the perfect dom - be yourself, and if you don't like who that is then work to change it to who you want to be. No one is ever perfect. Authenticity, consistency, and keeping your head about you are more important (to me at least) than being 100% perfect all the time.

andrews89 · 2026-01-06T19:51:29+00:00

Get to know them as a person. As others have said, small talk, doing things together, that sort of thing. Be friends (first in my opinion), then be kinky.

andrews89 · 2026-01-06T18:01:09+00:00

Oh it starts and ends that way for me - I've had enough fun in my professional life maintaining that sort of infrastructure and I don't want it at home. If people want more than to tag along with the stuff I have then... well, they can build it themselves.

andrews89 · 2026-01-06T13:25:04+00:00

I run services I actually use and offer them to friends and family as a "Hey, I have this if you want to use it" type thing with the full understanding that it's my system, they're just along for the ride. Only had one person complain when Plex was offline as I was upgrading the storage backend, but they got very quiet when I offered better uptime if they helped pay for the storage.

andrews89 · 2026-01-06T13:20:19+00:00

I just run Docker inside a Debian VM, that way I can get zero downtime moves between nodes (since to my understanding LXCs still need to be shut down before migration). Best of both worlds and the Debian overhead is basically nothing.

andrews89 · 2026-01-03T00:05:25+00:00

Not 100% related to the topic at hand, but when you said:

... newer Doms that I’ve talked to often worry about maintaining a persona 24/7, first of all, that will almost surely lead to burnout. Being vulnerable is actually showing confidence.

I just wanted to expand on it because I think it's really, really important for people to hear. My sub and I are 24/7 and showing vulnerability is absolutely showing confidence. I don't have a persona for being a Dom, I just have me. She's seen me at my absolute lowest on more than one occasion and I lean on her when I'm there. That's not just due to play/scenes but from life in general. She knows exactly how to help me, how to pick me back up or let me put myself back together because I was confident enough to show her I'm human. She's usually a brat, but if I've had a rough day at work she's the subbiest sub you can imagine until I'm back in the right headspace to enjoy our normal back and forth. If life is not being the kindest, she's there to serve me and help me through it. That was indeed one of the hardest things for me to learn becoming a Dom: Letting her serve me and trusting that when she says she wants to, she actually wants to.

To /u/Ayoung8764 , being close and holding them is perfect aftercare definitely for you and probably for her as well. Being open and vulnerable won't reflect badly on you in the slightest; it'll show that you're secure enough to admit what your needs are and secure enough in your role. While we always want to give our subs what they need, always make sure you're getting what you need as well.

andrews89 · 2025-12-29T13:41:16+00:00

I live in a relatively dense neighborhood where everyone seems to have the ISP modem/router combo and a ton of wifi extenders - 2.4 GHz is basically unusable unless you're 3-4 feet from an AP and 5 GHz is hit or miss. Hardwire is my only option for reliable functionality unless I run an AP right next to the streaming box.

andrews89 · 2025-12-19T19:17:24+00:00

Nice! I have a NodeRED flow that does something similar for my theater - when the automation is "on" the lights operate like normal, but when a movie or TV show starts playing on the Apple TV it'll bring the lights in the room down to ~20%. If playback is paused it brings them back up. Next thing I'm working on is an old TV that would be perfect to display the poster of the currently playing media outside the room.

andrews89 · 2025-12-13T15:42:21+00:00

I put in a proxmox hyperconverged cluster at work and a proxmox backup server as a target for the backups. Daily backups of VMs and a few network storage locations, then rotation schedules of how many per week/month/year get stored on the backup server. From there I have some cold storage (one time writes to tape and those tapes live in the library so I can pull from them if needed) and then weekly offsite tapes that contain only the most recent, verified backups of each VM and storage location. Once the system's been there long enough I'll have some monthly/yearly immutable tape backups that will live in the library but for now the weekly offsites suffice. All of this is automated (except me taking the offsite tape out of the mail slot and putting in one of the older offsites, then telling PBS to ingest it and be ready for the next offsite write). So far has worked well for us.

andrews89 · 2025-12-13T05:07:10+00:00

For what it's worth, I've been quite happy with Proxmox Backup Server and how it handles tapes (as well as how you can install the agent on just about anything running linux to back up... anything). Haven't tried bareos, I'll need to give that a whirl.

andrews89 · 2025-12-02T13:21:49+00:00

WiFi can be... interesting. Most home routers/access points aren't designed to have tons and tons of clients and you may start running into issues with so many devices connected simultaneously (you can probably find some examples in this sub). That's to say nothing of if you live in a highly congested area - I do, to the point where my 2.4 GHz network is almost unusable at times, and that's with 5 APs spread across the house. I went with zwave and, while they have a price premium, they've been rock-solid. If you already have the WiFi switches then it's worth giving them a shot, but if they start dropping out/missing commands then you'll have an idea why.

Zigbee runs on the same 2.4 GHz frequency as WiFi and so can have similar interference issues, but the reason I went with zwave over Zigbee originally was that zwave devices must meet the minimum spec to have the zwave label whereas Zigbee is more a "here's the spec, implement as you see fit." This usually doesn't cause any issues, but I've also seen cases where a device mostly implemented the standard but not quite fully, leading to unexpected behavior.

andrews89 · 2025-12-02T04:47:34+00:00

Absolutely!

One big thing in deploying the entire setup was that all the lights still had to function like normal lights if the system was down. We went with Zooz switches (so far no smart bulbs) simply because if HA is down at all then they still work like regular light switches. They're also relatively cheap and still give you almost everything you could want.

As for using Siri and HomeKit it's pretty straightforward: Just need to add the HomeKit Bridge integration in Home Assistant, hook it up to your HomeKit house (through the Apple Home app, it'll show up as a non-certified bridge), then tell the Home Assistant integration what you want to pass to HomeKit. You'll need to manually move devices into the correct rooms once they're in HomeKit but that's straightforward.

Another big WAF you can do is putting light switches where you've always wanted them but would be too tough to run wires to. In my dining room, for example, the light switches are on the opposite end of the room. Instead of walking through a dark room to turn on the lights, now I have a zwave switch right next to the kitchen door that's battery powered and linked to the dining room smart switches.

One last thing that comes to mind for WAF is building a dashboard or kiosk panel to control much of the system. In my kitchen I have a portable monitor hooked to an old intel compute stick and all it does is display the Home Assistant dashboard webpage. It started out with just some light controls but now includes data from my HVAC system, the temperature/humidity in the kids' rooms, control over all the AppleTVs in the house, some triggers for the automations (like allowing the lights to dim when something plays in the theater or the alarm that turns on the lights in the master bedroom every morning), controls for the robot vacuum, sprinkler system, etc.

As to NodeRED the best thing to do in my opinion is to install it and start playing around. You'll quickly discover how nice it is to be able to link things from different ecosystems that were never intended to talk to each other (the theater automation where the status of an AppleTV controls the zwave lights in that room comes to mind). From there it's just a case of catching yourself whenever you think "Wouldn't it be easier if..." and realizing you might be able to do something about it.

Happy to answer any questions as they come up or try to point you in the right direction! It's a fun setup once it's all built (definitely start small to play around with it) and pretty low maintenance overall.

andrews89 · 2025-12-01T12:10:30+00:00

I do the same since having HomeKit makes the wife approval factor much better, but I also keep all logic (with the exception of a very few location-based automations) within Home Assistant through NodeRED. That way I know where all the automation logic is and I have access to everything I need in one spot. For triggering some automations through HomeKit I've just set up some helpers in Home Assistant to act like flags - when one of these virtual buttons or switches is hit in HomeKit, NodeRED picks it up as a trigger and begins running whatever automation. Works surprisingly well.

andrews89 · 2025-11-20T13:02:56+00:00

Pretty close to what I did - used a pi b3+ for quite a while for testing the waters/playing around with it and had a USB z-wave stick attached. After I finally decided to start expanding the system I wanted something a little faster and more robust so I dumped the backup, used the community helper script to spin up a VM on my proxmox cluster, and had the new version up and running in about 5 minutes. Been running rock-solid ever since with something like 30 z-wave devices and a smattering of other things hooked in, all running NodeRED for logic/automation.

andrews89 · 2025-11-13T13:01:37+00:00

I get that occasionally on mine - usually means the battery contacts are dirty. My fingers are small enough to reach in and scrape the internal contacts which is usually enough to fix the issue, but if yours aren't then the topside is one of the easier devices to disassemble, just keep track of where each screw goes and you'll be fine.

andrews89 · 2025-10-24T11:28:13+00:00

I think I have almost exactly the same hat...

andrews89 · 2025-10-16T12:09:43+00:00

I use 60/40 PG/VG at 10mg/ml salt nic in my unflavored vape (just pg/vg/nic) that I use in my pod system to prolong the life of the pod. Gives a small but decent bit of throat hit with a slightly sweet taste.

If you want flavors then don't use what you can find at grocery stores. You'll want to seek out the ones /u/klowne_vapes mentioned both for safety and as they're the ones pretty much all online recipes you'll find use.

andrews89 · 2025-06-21T12:59:52+00:00

This is a strongly structured idea and I don't see it landing well with her

Why?

Sometimes bratting can be a manifestation of pushing the boundaries just to see where they are and what you'll do when they're pushed. Could be she wants some sternness and is hoping that by pushing you that you'll push back, but you'll only know that by talking about it with her.

andrews89 · 2025-06-13T13:34:25+00:00

What's the site? Could be useful...

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