Home Bytes is a new site by Alan Collinson about do-it-yourself home automation, and its first issue only announces that the site is still being set up. The substantive issues describe his homelab hardware changes, including moving from a thin client to a Raspberry Pi 4 for energy savings and using Docker tooling such as IOTstack.
Website: https://www.ac-developments.co.uk/
Detailed first-person field notes on running a homelab, covering self-hosted NetBird upgrades and backups, Docker network segmentation, and Home Assistant energy cost modelling. Readers get concrete configurations, scripts, and the reasoning behind each decision.
Personal essays and guides from the Home Assistant lead on smart home automation, open source maintenance and building reliable software. Readers get practical explanations of Home Assistant features alongside reflections on how open source practices change as projects scale.
Hands-on technical posts about home lab and smart home problems, such as a custom OPNsense plugin for wildcard FQDN aliases and Home Assistant integrations for Eufy cameras and a Marstek battery. Each issue walks through the problem, the diagnosis and the working solution in first-person detail.
A personal newsletter documenting a self-hosted home energy setup, including a Python heating planner, a solar and battery charge planner, and motorbike trip writeups. Issues share measured data, charts and honest caveats about what the systems do and don't prove, along with notes on maintaining them with Claude Code.
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