Guides for Home Assistant, HACS and self-hosting
One Day of Home Assistant Logs: 775 Errors, Seven Findings
775 errors and 5,077 warnings in one day of Home Assistant logs: five findings from that day, two from the restart after it. Three affected operation.
Latest Posts - 108
Custom Cards in Home Assistant: Mushroom and button-card
Four custom cards, one theme and self-hosted fonts turned a stock dashboard into an instrument panel. The four things that broke on the way, with the fixes.
Home Assistant Dashboard Templates You Can Copy
Two complete YAML dashboards to paste: one on built-in cards only, one with four custom cards. Including how to wire them in and how to swap the entities.
21 Releases Behind: I Rebuilt Instead of Upgrading
An instance 21 monthly releases behind. Why I chose a clean rebuild over an upgrade, what a fresh install starts with, and the screen that made it a choice.
Building a Home Assistant Dashboard From Zero
Five steps from an empty view to a finished dashboard, one screenshot each. The step that changes the most adds no new cards at all, only structure.
Where Home Assistant Runs: One Small VM, Measured
A 7 euro cloud VM running Home Assistant in Docker: memory, boot and disk measured, why not Kubernetes, and what a data-centre machine cannot do.
Home Assistant Themes: Six Installed and Compared
Six theme repos give you 74 selectable themes. Which need card-mod, why LCARS does not look like LCARS, and how HACS 2.x changed where you find them.
Auditing an Open-Source Ecosystem: 1,434 Repos
A reproducible recipe for checking whether an ecosystem is as open as it claims: the GitHub sweep, the filter matrix, and what a licence check finds.
Home Assistant Dashboards Built From Stock Cards
Two dashboards I actually use, built only from cards Home Assistant ships with — no themes, no plugins. Layout, gauge config and where the stock cards stop.
Rebuilding Home Assistant From Backup: a Timed Run
I rebuilt my Home Assistant host on a fresh VM with a stopwatch. It took about 50 minutes, and two steps were missing from every backup archive.
Backing Up Home Assistant: the Config Folder Isn't Enough
A config-only backup restores Home Assistant but not the host: VPN keys, firewall, cron and the container definition belong in the archive too.