I had mentioned last November that my family was considering a switch from Spotify to Apple Music. Soon afterwards, we did it. It took some planning, but here’s how we accomplished that – making Apple Music an even better experience than Spotify was for us.
Intro
As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re using Phillips Hue and Home Assistant for most of our lighting. The Phillips Hue bridge is connected to Home Assistant, and I’m using the HomeKit Bridge integration to add the lights to Apple’s Home app – the bridge is not connected directly to HomeKit. This has been incredibly stable, however, it comes with a downside: we’re unable to use Apple’s adaptive lighting functionality.
Home Assistant, however, has its own integration for Adaptive Lighting. The documentation can be confusing, however, and it took me over six months to get it working the way I wanted to. Hopefully this post saves someone else some time!
Taking a page out of Apple’s book, I realized I’m going to be writing about this regularly, so the naming will reflect that from now on. If you’d like some historical context, please see my previous posts on the subject. If you’d like to see all of the data on a spreadsheet, I recently updated Mike and Joyce’s Smart Home Inventory.
We recently completed a major home renovation, which gave us the chance to rethink everything. For context, we added an addition, completely rebuilt the kitchen, and modernized the existing footprint of the house.
Once you have more than a few Docker containers running in your homelab, you’ll notice some applications have implemented their own authentication, requiring you to keep those credentials organized (hopefully in a password manager like 1Password). However, some applications don’t support authentication at all. What do you do? How do you make it less annoying to access your stuff?
In my last blog post, I detailed how I built myself a beefy file and application server. In this post, I wanted to share how I organize and run Docker containers on Unraid.
The Beginning
Even before I called it a “homelab,” I found uses for home servers – mostly to replace multiple external USB hard drives. Although I grew up with Mac desktops, I became a laptop user in high school. Imagine being able to access my data from anywhere using my PowerBook G4! Or even better, being able to have tasks running without tying up my main computer. I bought a used Power Mac G3 tower (I later upgraded it to a G4 tower), removed the optical and Zip drives, then added ATA/IDE expansion cards and additional hard drive bays. That worked well for a few years. As a repair technician, I even used this method to build NetBoot and DeployStudio servers at work.
I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I wrote about this! Things have settled down a bit, so I figured I’d post another follow-up.
Alright, back to the technical stuff. Well, sort of.
Something that’s been new to me is working remotely for a company where many of my coworkers are in different time zones. Although I was fully remote at SJU for the last few years of my time there, everyone I worked with started and ended their day at around the same time. That doesn’t happen when you’re working for a global company! To have a work / life balance these days, I need to be mindful of my own schedule. Here’s how I’ve used technology to help me do that.
July 2024: I’m updating this post without making a new one, just to keep things simple. Below each section, I’ve added some additional tips that I’ve learned since originally publishing this blog post.