mike solin's blog

Tag: HomeKit

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:

Adaptive Lighting via Home Assistant

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On January 18, 2026

In Smart Home

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!

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Smart Home, Part Two

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On March 20, 2021

In Smart Home

It’s been just over a year since my last post about smart home stuff, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff we’ve changed since then. Here we go!

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