When you build a room inside the room...?

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational home automation! Also there was a blizzard.

Adminisk8or

01/23/2023

Talk about a week of big accomplishments.

First of all, I finally finished something I'd been trying in my spare moments for a week or three, and got a portable router that also utilizes my home-hosted VPN setup. The funny part is, I was trying very much to utilize my Raspberry pi to accomplish the task, and git rid of a little TP-Link one I had bought over a year or two ago; but in a twist of events, I managed to flash OpenWRT onto that TP-Link, and the Pi ended up being far too difficult of a nightmare for drivers. And what's more, I got to put it to the test this week, as I had to travel a good ways out of town for work.

I spent two days by myself driving some lonely roads in Idaho to solve some little issues here and there with some of our more remote clients. The work might be a fairly boring topic to most, which makes it lucky that there's more to talk about than that. If you've ever driven Idaho's non-freeway roads in the winter, particularly during or after snowfall, you will know just how interesting it is to drive. For some roads, four-wheel drive is not a recommendation, it's an absolute must. It gets reeeally dicey, sometimes. But besides having to take some of the ground carefully, there was that moment I was making about a 60-70 mile trip back to my stay, and found myself in the middle of an incredible blizzard.

To begin with, the road was fairly snowed over and packed down, so that was one thing, but the combination of snow and fog/clouds were billowing to and fro in such a fast, sporadic and dashing fashion, it wasn't just hard to see, it was hard to actually FOCUS. I kid you not, there were times I found turning off my headlights and leaving only my fog lights on helped- keep in mind, this was a blizzard. And how bad was it? The blizzard began at about the time I turned south onto a certain highway section, and ahead of me, I saw some red things that I figured looked like tail lights, sort of. It took about probably 3 or 4 miles of following these vague objects before I could really be certain it was a vehicle I was following. It took me almost the entire stretch of blizzard-clad highway (about 16 miles), when the vehicle turned, to realize it was a double-truck semi. I think my favorite moment was when I was following the lights, not certain if we were actually traveling on a road or if we had veered off into a field and didn't even know it- and suddenly the lights disappeared. It took about 3 second of confusion before I suddenly saw them come back into view, and my stomach almost turned upside down as I realized I was now going down a small but somewhat sudden hill. I had a nice dinner after that drive to calm my nerves.

I didn't even mention my near-death encounter that I experienced before I had even traveled about 15 minutes away from home, as I almost rolled my vehicle at 80 MPH because I hit a patch of slippery snow on the freeway- that was certainly an experience. But I think my most proud accomplishment this week was Home Assistant. Shameless plug moment- if you haven't heard of Home Assistant, and you are as into the idea of privacy, control and power as I am when it comes to networking, OH BOY are you missing out! Most people are familiar with Google Home or Apple Homekit in one way or another, and this is like those, but you don't have to sell your soul to the company store just to use the services. There is something just so empowering about being able to control all of my devices locally from my LAN without an internet connection. But my bragging goes a little beyond that. I finally figured out setting up SSL and port forwarding for it, and I am just in heaven. I have my own home-hosted password manager now, a much better interface for my cameras, easy ability to toggle PoE switches on my network equipment, access to statistics and info on my Minecraft server, and so much more! With how many different things you can do with home assistant, it actually throws me back to that good old era of innovation, where the question asked more often was "what can technology do?!" rather than "but is this really that helpful?" or "how can we market off this?" or "put in ads, ads, ads!". It honestly reminds me of when MP3 players were getting a little more fancy, and you could start to play VIDEOS and even little GAMES on them! Obviously, this is a much more different thing, but still, I look at all the integrations and such, and I am just about as giddy as a schoolboy with how much freedom there is, there.

And THAT, my friends, is the power of the open source community. If you feel like you fall into the sandbox of people who feel like avoiding learning more about technology because of how much there is to learn, don't let it scare you! That's exactly what companies like Microsoft, Google and so many others want; in their eyes, the more you say "well, I guess I just don't understand it", the more moolah they rake in from your ignorance. So no, don't be as crazy as me and spend days in, days out building a home network with separate VLANs, open-source home automation, a dozen servers and remote access on the go, because that's just nuts. Start by saying, well, maybe I understand a little bit about how wi-fi works... I wonder what the science behind it is? Or, I've heard of acronyms like DNS, IP and DHCP- but what do they mean- or better yet, how does a basic IPv4 address and network work to begin with?

I guess my point is, if you feel "technologically challenged" as I've heard it said, just learn a small thing here and there- and you'd be surprised the difference it makes! With the way things are going in the digital world, I am a huge believer that people can't afford to make themselves sacrificial sheep to these companies that promote ignorance and giving a man a fish rather than teaching him ("A little sign-in here, a touch of wi-fi there", anyone? With all do respect, go blow one, Microsoft!)

But that's enough of that rant for this week. Until next time, see ya!