The Internet-of-Things sucks. But I like having data and control over parts of the house. So here's the devices I use for that as I'm often asked what ones I use.

I started monitoring my energy usage last year out of curiosity, but with how prices have risen this year, it feels less like a "this would be fun to know" situation and more of a "where are we using energy that we shouldn't be" situation now.

I use Signal as my message app of choice. From the WhatsApp days of past, I kinda liked the weird-and-quirky icon backgrounds they had. No idea what's on them, but it was visually pleasing.

I got bored, so I made some backgrounds, originally with 4 colour ways and 4 opacities of the icons. All in 2160x3840 resolution.

I run 2 copies of AdGuard Home for ad-blocking on my local network. I didn't want to have to duplicate settings across the 2 instances I run.

I discovered adguardhome-sync which allows settings to be synchronised to replica instances. Neat!

But I hit a problem with the instance I had running as a Home Assistant Addon.

Well well well, what do we have here?