Forty-six battery-powered ZigBee devices live in this house — door and window contacts, motion sensors, leak detectors, buttons. Today, for once, every single one of them was online at the same time.

That sounds trivial until you actually run battery sensors at this scale. There is almost always one flat coin cell, or one sensor that quietly dropped off the mesh after a battery change and re-joined through a weaker neighbour. The device keeps reporting „online“ right up until it doesn’t.

So this clip is half a minute of mild smugness. It won’t last.

My outdoor camera kept fighting reflections behind glass, and the mount it came with did not line up with the screw holes on my garden shed.

I designed a custom adapter in FreeCAD, 3D-printed it, and reinforced it with heat-set threaded inserts so it would not crack under the screws. It matches the shed holes exactly.

Clean mount, clear picture, no more reflections.

The model is now free to download on MakerWorld.

You automate everything. Lights, heating, the vacuum, even the coffee.

And then there is that one switch. The one you still have to get up for.

I know exactly where mine is. I have known for years. It is still not automated.

Tell me I am not the only one.

A few days ago I put my 3D print progress on my iOS lock screen and on my Apple Watch, using Home Assistant’s new Live Activities.

Today I got into my car — and there it was on CarPlay. Print progress on my dashboard, next to the navigation and the music.

I did not set that up and I did not configure anything extra. Once a Live Activity is running, CarPlay picks it up on its own.

It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that makes a smart home feel like it actually belongs to you.

I print a lot of Gridfinity bins for my drawers, which means there is almost always a job running. Checking on it used to be the same small ritual every time: unlock the phone, open the printer app, look at a number, close it again.

Now the running print sits right on my lock screen and on my watch, as a Home Assistant Live Activity. No unlock, no app. I glance at the phone and know whether a job is about to finish and whether I can queue the next one.

I did not come up with this myself. I saw it in a short from Flo and set it up the same evening.

Everyone hates the attached bottle cap. I did too, until I picked up the rubbish lying on a beach in Sri Lanka. Most of it was not bottles. It was caps.

The rule does not clean the ocean. It fixes the one moment where the cap leaves the bottle and starts travelling on its own.

Sam Altman says AI lifts everyone. Elon Musk builds it at full speed, convinced it takes humanity to the next level. Marc Andreessen literally wrote the words “AI will save the world.”

Then there’s the other camp. Geoffrey Hinton walked away from Google specifically so he could warn us. Yoshua Bengio uses the word extinction. These are not outsiders throwing stones — they built the foundations the optimists are standing on.

Same technology. Same evidence. Opposite conclusions. That’s the part I find genuinely hard, because nobody in this argument is stupid.

Where I land: firmly on the positive side, and not blind about it. I love what this technology makes possible and I use it every day in my own house. But the risks are real, and hand-waving them away is the lazy move. AI is a powerful tool — incredible when you use it deliberately, dangerous the moment you trust it blindly.

So where do you stand? Team Optimist or Team Caution? I genuinely want to know.

My daughter could already swim. She was just too scared to actually get in the pool.

So I built her a tiny dashboard of her own. Every day she swims, a little hamster on the screen grows one stage further, and she gets closer to a real savings goal she picked out herself. That is the whole system.

I know some people will say you should not reward a child for something like this. Fair enough. But she has been in that pool every single day since, and the fear is gone.

Home Assistant is not only for lights and thermostats. Sometimes it is just a really good reason for a kid to jump in the water.

I am travelling, and the house is not just sitting there idle. My automation system keeps working through its own list of improvements and fixes while I am gone.

Every day I get a short summary of what happened at home: what broke, what got repaired, what is still open. The dashboard in the video is the live view of that — tasks going in on one side, finished work coming out on the other.

The point is not that it is fully autonomous. The point is that I can be a few thousand kilometres away and still know exactly what state my home is in.

My office gets uncomfortably warm on summer afternoons, and a full air-conditioning setup was never going to be worth it for a few weeks a year.

So I went the cheap route instead: a simple fan, a smart plug, and a temperature sensor. Home Assistant switches it on once the room crosses a threshold and off again when it has cooled down. No app, no remote, no thinking about it.

It is not clever technology. It is just the boring kind of automation that quietly removes a small daily annoyance.

A while ago I stopped thinking of my home automation as a set of rules and started treating it as a small team. Several AI agents, each with its own job, working through tasks in the background.

They pick up things that need doing around the house and the workshop, work on them overnight, and leave me a summary in the morning. I decide what matters; they handle the grinding.

They run on open-source models on my own hardware, which means the work stays here rather than being shipped off to somebody else’s cloud.

I kept blowing past my weekly Claude usage limit — always mid-task, always by surprise. So I built myself a gauge I can’t ignore.

A small script on my dev machine reads my live Claude usage and pushes it into Home Assistant. From there, Home Assistant fans it out — including to this LED matrix (Ulanzi/Awtrix) on my desk. At a glance I see how much of the weekly limit is gone and a “pace” indicator that warns me if I’m burning through it too fast to last the week.

Home Assistant as the hub, the matrix as the dashboard. No more nasty surprises.

My running shoes wear out silently — so I made Home Assistant track their mileage for me. Every run adds the distance automatically from my phone’s step data, and a dashboard shows how much life is left before it’s time for a new pair.

My workshop went from complete chaos to something I can actually navigate, and the trick is almost boringly simple: every bin has a QR code on it.

Scan it with your phone and you immediately see what is in that bin — name, photo, quantity, category. I can also check a part out temporarily when I borrow it for a project, so I know where it went.

The bins themselves are dumb plastic boxes. The organisation lives entirely in the system behind the code.

NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran just dropped a sober warning: the next AI crash could hit harder than the dot-com bust — because this time, the infrastructure spend is debt-financed.

His three uncomfortable points:

1. It’s not pure software anymore. Every AI query costs compute. Margins stay thin, scale doesn’t bail you out.
2. Deepseek is squeezing prices. Chinese competitors pressure margins further. Growth at bad margins can destroy value.
3. Apple’s restraint looks smart. Standing back while others burn billions on hardware that may be obsolete in five years.

Full article (German): the-decoder.de

A 3D printer doesn’t just make toys and brackets. It quietly turns your workshop into something that actually makes sense.

Many tools on my wall have their own custom-printed adapter — sized for the exact handle, the exact head, the exact angle. No more generic peg hooks holding things at weird angles. No more “where did I put that”.

And the best part: I didn’t design any of them myself. Just downloaded the models from Maker World, sent them to the printer, done.

I’m not built for routine. Bin day always sneaks up — and once the truck rolls past, you’re stuck with a full bio bin for another two weeks.

So I taught the garage camera to do the remembering. The evening before pickup, it grabs a snapshot, runs it through GPT-4o vision asking “which of the four bins are visible inside?”, then cross-references with the trash pickup calendar. If today’s pickup bin is still inside, Telegram fires off the actual photo — not just a text alert. Photo proof so I can’t gaslight myself.

Setup:

• Reolink garage cam (24/7 RTSP feed)
• GPT-4o vision call with the snapshot
• Waste collection schedule integration in Home Assistant
• Telegram bot with photo attachment

Two weeks in, zero missed pickups. One genuinely satisfying “told you so” from the smart home each pickup evening.

Full write-up with code & setup: how-i-taught-my-garage-camera-to-remember-bin-day

Charity Majors just published the clearest take I’ve seen on what AI actually changes for software engineering.

Her thesis is the opposite of most takes: code production became cheap, but engineering discipline didn’t disappear. It moved upstream. Specs, validation, observability matter more now, not less.

The line that names the whole mental model: “Code stops being an asset and starts acting as a cache: a materialized view of understanding, useful while current, disposable when stale.”

Read it →

A few days into running my Bambu Lab X2D and the AMS 2 Pro suddenly stopped pulling filament. Disappointing — the printer itself had been excellent up to that point.

I contacted Bambu Lab support, sent videos and notes about what was happening. Their response: “we’ll send a replacement hub.” I pictured a brand-new unit on the way.

When the package arrived, it was a single tiny spare part. Not a hub, not a unit — just a small component.

Owning a 3D printer means being able to repair it yourself. I disassembled the AMS 2 Pro down to the section where this part sits, swapped it, and the unit is running again. Hopefully this repair lasts.

Watch the 90-second story:

Anyone else dealt with AMS 2 Pro filament-feeding issues? Drop your experience in the comments — curious how widespread this is.

— Daniel, The Smart Home Maker

The iPhone Action Button is the most under-used hardware on the phone. I rebound it to do exactly one thing: press → speak → release → my AI captures and routes whatever I just said.

The flow:

• An iOS Shortcut records audio and posts it to my n8n workflow
• Apple’s on-device dictation handles transcription — works even offline
• An LLM classifies what I said (smart-home / work / idea)
• Smart-home stuff becomes a task in Nova (my task system)
• Work stuff is sent to my work inbox
• Random ideas drop into my notebook
• Telegram pings me with the result in about 2 seconds

What this kills: the friction between having a thought and actually capturing it properly. No app to open, no typing, no category-picking. Great for joggers, drivers, parents — anyone whose hands are busy and brain is on.