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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

    My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

    It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)












  • xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

    I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

    IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

    Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

    The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).




  • Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

    What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

    Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.


  • I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

    Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)