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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Not sure if you’re still researching, but I really like the Bluetooth ones.

    For the Pi4, I use a little USB Bluetooth adapter from pluggable ($13-ish) on a 10-ft USB extension cable to get the module away from other things. I think the pi has Bluetooth built in? But I never got it working. But generic little Bluetooth USB things are perfect. With the USB extension cable I have great whole-house coverage (small house though)

    Then for the sensors, I get a 3pk SwitchBot IP65 indoor/outdoor hygrometer.

    They’re on sale on Amazon right now for $25-ish for 3, so it’s a pretty good deal.

    As far as placement, I have some outside - they’re fine. I try to place them where they’re not getting totally hosed by rain or snow - under a tree or in the greenhouse or under my garage eaves sheltered from direct sunlight and rain.

    They are very low power consumption (2x AAA batteries included) and I’ve had some running over a year and they still have more than 50% battery. (The battery level does report to home assistant)

    They show up on home assistant immediately after powering up - no apps or anything needed. Just adopt them and set their location in the home assistant settings.















  • I have a single spreadsheet with fairly simple formulas for calculating monthly expenses based on average recurring bills vs. (after tax) salary income.

    I can see generally what my “discretionary” balance should be and that gets spent on food, stuff, etc.

    Things that are recurring: Mortgage, Utilities (take annual average if you can), services, savings, etc.

    Use savings like any other bill - a certain amount must be paid/deposited every month. Use automatic balance transfers from checking->savings on payday to facilitate.

    I don’t try to get too fancy with it and heavily leverage automatic bill pay for making sure I can’t forget anything.

    Check all your accounts regularly. For me that’s a weekend task to do with my morning coffee. Check account balances, make sure credit accounts are addressed as needed, review investments if applicable, but don’t freak out about them.

    I’m partial to treating investments as long term gambles that are NOT something I’m relying on for retirement. It’s just something else to slowly build up over the long run that might be something that can help later or pass on.



  • Greetings!

    Not really self hosting a lot right now, but I’ve been spending a lot of time reengineering my network and fixing some things. Recently retired my loud and power-hungry pfsense server, replacing it with a Mikrotik rb5009, so setting that up has been a steep learning curve.

    Most things are running on my Synology DS920+, except for a few raspberry pis.

    • Jellyfin (docker)
    • Kavita (docker)
    • Home Assistant (pi4)
    • Paperless-ngx (docker)
    • PiHole (pi zero) currently broken
    • Unifi controller (docker)
    • Grafana (home assistant)
    • InfluxDB (docker)
    • LibreNMS (VM)