I had a Netgear Orbi router and satellites running my home network, but things were becoming unstable. Constant dropouts, a router that thought the WAN port was down and required multiple reboots a day, it just wasn't cutting it anymore.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and go for the UniFi setup I'd been considering for a while.

Here's my initial impressions.

I'm moving from macOS to Windows for my work computer, while I use Windows personally with my gaming systems and have used Windows for years, on an average day I was using macOS more than Windows. There are things I wanted to improve about my Windows experience.

Not only this, but I've also recently built a new desktop gaming PC and have also installed a lot of this software on there too!

Having snagged a 3080 Ti for MSRP recently, I ended up building a new system completely, rather than just upgrading the GPU from my old system. It wasn't bad, but I felt I could be pushing the GPU further then the 1st generation Ryzen 7 1800X that I was running before.

I found some decent sales on both new and open-box hardware around the Black Friday / Cyber Monday period and took advantage of them!

Since Home Assistant announced energy monitoring was being added, I've been super interested in what sort of data I could get out of my energy system. We have nothing fancy here. Just fairly standard dual-fuel (electricity and gas) system provided by the grid with a smart meter. No solar panels or batteries or returning power to the grid. My provider (E.ON Next) don't make that data easily accessible (or at least, they didn't when I looked).

So, I searched around and found Hildebrand and their Glow meter. Which was out of stock. Boo.

I signed up for stock alerts for the product and started wondering if I could write a bot to log in to my account on the E.ON website, then scrape the data and push it back into Home Assistant in the meantime.

But then I got an email...

I've recently started using some Tasmota plugs for power monitoring using Home Assistant, in setting them up I found (and was shown) some useful commands!