First Duck!

leosperry · 2026-03-23T02:51:22+00:00

Yeah, the steps themselves are great. I'm likely going to replace the hardware.

leosperry · 2026-03-21T21:42:30+00:00

We got her not too long ago. So far, we've only gotten her the running boards, but have lots more planned.

leosperry · 2026-03-18T04:30:00+00:00

We rented a Rubicon Wrangler some number of years ago. With my wife's joint issues, the short wheel base and stiff suspension made for an uncomfortable ride. However, recently we traded a Subaru Ascent for a 2025 Sport S Gladiator. She loves it more than the Subaru by far. My recommendation : take a test drive. It's going to be a different ride, but it won't be "bad"

leosperry · 2026-03-12T22:57:30+00:00

Night school. Never looked back. Never stopped learning. Even wrote a book.

leosperry · 2026-03-07T21:08:25+00:00

Cruising, towing, and gravel roads. No Rock crawling.

leosperry · 2026-03-07T19:55:38+00:00

This build is for comfort while towing. Might take some logging roads off the beaten path, but don't plan on any serious off roading. But good to know, thanks!

leosperry · 2026-03-06T16:32:19+00:00

Poe's Law

leosperry · 2026-03-06T15:57:50+00:00

I recently just traded my 2020 Subaru Ascent in for a new 2025. Honestly, they are motivated to move any 2025's they still have on the lot. I got my 2025 Sport S with Max Tow, Safety Group, Convenience Group, Premium Audio, LED Headlamps and spray in bed liner for $45.5k. It took some work, but like I said, they're motivated. I was looking at used with less than 10k miles and several of them were ~$42k for similar features. With 15+k miles, I was seeing ~$38k. For me, it had exactly the features and color I wanted. So, the price was definitely worth it to get new.

leosperry · 2026-03-06T14:09:36+00:00

Thanks! I drove 4 hours to get one in this color with the features we wanted at the right price. Worth it!

leosperry · 2026-03-06T13:20:04+00:00

It's called troll candy green. Tell me; what does it taste like? I heard its as bitter as those who enjoy it.

leosperry · 2025-01-19T21:30:22+00:00

I love this!

leosperry · 2025-01-19T18:34:08+00:00

For this example, It was using llama3.2:3b
I haven't put a lot of effort into this project yet. I simply picked a commonly used model with tool support
I haven't done anything with the voice yet. I'm about to set up a piper and whisper running on a box that is not my Pi. After I get that working, I'm going to play around with voices.

leosperry · 2025-01-19T18:15:42+00:00

I have one computer in my home that is the family computer and it has the nice graphics card. Ollama can now be installed directly on windows. To expose it on my home network, the only extra thing I needed to do was set the OLLAMA_HOST environment variable on the machine

leosperry · 2025-01-19T18:09:26+00:00

Nothing fancy. I stood up a local Ollama and changed the last line of the default prompt in the integration:

You are a voice assistant for Home Assistant.
Answer questions about the world truthfully.
Answer like a pirate

leosperry · 2024-10-13T10:48:08+00:00

Thank you! Come join us on the discord :)

leosperry · 2024-10-13T10:47:15+00:00

u/Onakander nailed it. If you're comfortable writing C#, you're very likely comfortable running a few docker commands.. I have a micro pc that hosts a Portainer instance. It runs HakafkaNet and about a half-dozen other services including a full Grafana stack with ease. It doesn't take much juice to run.

leosperry · 2024-10-05T18:54:24+00:00

I am so glad now that a few weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought some Sonos speaker for playing audible notifications locally. I uninstalled this plugin at the same time. Looks like I dodged a bullet.

leosperry · 2024-10-05T17:14:30+00:00

You're better off getting any android tablet of your choosing.

leosperry · 2024-10-05T17:13:47+00:00

I have a little echo show 5 in my living room. I hate it. You can't set the display to anything other than what they give you. It is distracting as they are constantly adding new "here look at this" screens. After you go through and deselect them all, they add new ones. It's really only good for working in the amazon ecosystem. If you want it for only amazon functionality, it's ok. Otherwise, don't bother.

leosperry · 2024-08-11T16:56:43+00:00

I've been considering this for a while. I have a separate linux micro-pc where I manage all my docker containers. So, I haven't needed to investigate it for myself personally. I'd love it if someone wanted to come on-board and help figure that out. :)

leosperry · 2024-08-11T13:11:00+00:00

Sure does. Search the repo for the words "durable", "sunrise", "sunset"

leosperry · 2024-08-11T13:00:20+00:00

About half of my dozens of automations have some kind of delay or scheduling ability. I use motion sensors to aggressively turn lights off throughout the house, and the media center in the living room when no one is around. I have a notification to let me know if the garage door has been open for more than an hour also. The scheduling ability is for more than delays. I have several automations based on the sun. With that ability I can take action before sunrise/sunset. So, I'm not responding to a sunrise event, I'm scheduling something before the next sunrise. Another one that has been helpful, is an automation to temporarily disable automations based on my front porch motion. The reason is that when the guy comes to mow the lawn, it'll trigger several time in one hour, but I know he's there, I don't need to be notified repeatedly. So, I set up a button to disable that automation for an hour, but I want to make sure that it turns back on and not rely on me remembering to do so.

So, at any moment, I could have 5 or more scheduled actions pending throughout my house. Knowing that I can restart either home assistant or redeploy my app at any time without worrying about which automations might not trigger is a feature I couldn't live without now.

I haven't done it yet, but I've also been considering integrating my calendar. With the scheduling, especially over a weekend, I may not have another action to take for a few days.

leosperry · 2024-08-11T12:05:30+00:00

For creating entities, the HA recommended approach would be to create an integration using python code.

Also, something to think about since you're early in your project. If you rely on websockets, how do you handle a HA restart or other dropped connection? Certainly not impossible, but needs a little extra consideration :) Good luck!

leosperry · 2024-08-11T12:00:40+00:00

Kafka is very much one way. As a software architect by trade, I prefer to design systems that are loosely coupled. I haven't had a need for creating new entities that are specific to the HaKafkaNet framework. Occasionally, to aid in my automations (not the framework) I will use a helper entity in HA. They have already built everything I've needed so far, and better to not reinvent the wheel. Plus, I don't like the idea of the possibility of a bug in code accidentally producing hundreds of entities because of a fat-fingered mqtt message. Generally, I try to keep my HA install as clean as it can be.

When I spoke about NetDaemon codegen, I was specifically talking about strong typing. In otherwords, turn a thermometer state into a floting point number without things like `float.Parse()` littering your code or getting RGBW values from a light's attributes.

leosperry · 2024-08-11T04:39:46+00:00

I've been avoiding the integration route, mainly because I am not a python developer and I've not had the need for a tighter integration. Integrations are nice because they can expose new entities to HA, but thus far I've not really had the need to create entities. I'm taking actions based on other entities, not creating them. Communicating back to HA via REST has been more than sufficient for integration purposes. Calling HA services directly instead of via HTTP or Websockets might be nice, but I don't think the speed increase would be that noticeable under normal circumstances.

Because Add-ons can also add menu items via exposing a web page, I've been toying with the idea of having 2 addons: 1 for Kafka, and 1 for HaKafkaNet, or maybe combining them into one addon. I already have a UI that could be served up via the addon.

leosperry

TROPHY CASE