The local smart-home path moved from typed Hermes commands to real voice control, using a Pixel Tablet, Home Assistant Assist, Whisper, Piper, Android wake word detection, and Z-Wave lights on the ThinkCentre.
A routine homelab hygiene pass turned into a full infrastructure cleanup: Proxmox reboot validation, Uptime Kuma repair, Home Assistant Wake-on-LAN, router reservations, stale device cleanup, and one stubborn BIOS-shaped mystery.
The local router prototype became useful when Hermes turned off a real Z-Wave light through Home Assistant, after USB passthrough, Z-Wave JS setup, entity mapping, and one stale MCP endpoint got fixed.
Turning a local AI policy-layer plan into a static router prototype, with FastAPI, Proxmox LXC, local DNS rewrites, Uptime Kuma monitoring, Spark DeepSeek, and 5090 Granite fallback routing.
Episode 4 gives an agent real write access to Uptime Kuma, retires the last manually-copied secret files, test-builds Proxmox Backup Server in Docker (catching a build that silently deleted the very package it installed), and catches a Wake-on-LAN plan that was about to fail for a reason nobody had checked yet.
Episode 3 installs HACS and an MCP server entirely over SSH, chases a phantom outage down to a single stuck config value, and wires nine Uptime Kuma checks with Discord alerts, then fixes a cron bug and a false-alarm habit before publishing.
Episode 2 of the SmartThings-to-Proxmox series: hardening the ThinkCentre, wiring up Tailscale so a Coder Agent can SSH in and administer it directly, standing up the Home Assistant OS VM, Uptime Kuma, and AdGuard Home, and ending on a single page load that quietly fired 53 blocked ad-tech requests.
Kicking off a series on replacing a Samsung SmartThings hub with a self-hosted Home Assistant box. Episode 1: picking the hardware, fighting a Lenovo BIOS setting hidden behind a decoy, and the increasingly absurd path to actually getting an OS onto the machine when there wasn’t a single working USB drive anywhere in reach.