mike solin's blog

Category: Homelab

From HomeKit to Homelab: Reclaiming My Smart Home

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On June 30, 2026

In Homelab, Meta, Smart Home

Last week, I presented at MacDevOps:YUL! Although it’s usually held in Vancouver (as MacDevOps:YVR), this year it took place in Montreal due to the World Cup. This was my first time visiting Montreal, and I had a fantastic time. What a great conference, as always – thank you to the team that made this happen!

In my presentation, I talked about our migration from HomeKit to Home Assistant, and covered some of the reasons why you might want to consider your own switch.

My slides are available here, and the video of my presentation can be found below:

Homelab Authentication

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On July 1, 2025

In Homelab

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?

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Managing Docker on Unraid

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On December 18, 2024

In Homelab

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.

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My Homelab Hardware Journey

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On September 1, 2024

In Homelab

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.

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