Packing the Homelab

What we cover

• Alex drops the news: the house is under contract and the family is heading back to England in early November. So how is he going to keep up his homelab?
• Housekeeping and Home Assistant: holiday gaps ahead and Frenck’s PR to fold HACS into core as a first-party plugin.

First up, Stephen walks us through a day spent digitizing his company’s logo for an embroidery machine, where every part of the file has to be told how to stitch. He explains the fight to get a fill that looks full and still has crisp edges, how thread direction changes the way light hits a 3D-looking design, and how feeding Claude the machine’s manual helped him get this far.

Next, Alex shares some big news: after 18 months of winding down his self-hosting setup, his house is under contract and the family is heading back to England in early November. He explains how he’s using Hermes, Telegram voice notes, and an Obsidian Base to build a plain-text inventory of every box for UK customs and insurance. Geoff compares notes on Homebox, and the conversation turns to what self-hosting looks like when electricity costs double and the basement is gone.

After that, some housekeeping. The next couple of months may bring longer gaps between episodes, and confirm the show isn’t going anywhere. We also cover listener email about Geoff’s episode naming, the Silo devs merging his PR, and the JetKVM team stopping by the YouTube comments.

Finally, we turn to Home Assistant, where a pull request from Frenck would fold HACS into the core project as a first-party plugin. We talk about why so many installs already rely on HACS, what the new name implies, why the reply about the old “Store” name landed so well, and why paying community developers is sometimes the right call. We close with the unglamorous side of emigrating: batteries you can’t ship, 110V standing desks, and amplifiers.

Tags: home-assistant, hacs, moving-abroad, self-hosting, obsidian, hermes, homebox, inventory, proxmox, homelab

Links

• Home Assistant Marketplace PR - https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/183502
• HACS - https://github.com/hacs/integration
• Obsidian Bases - https://obsidian.md/help/bases
• Obsidian Headless Sync - https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-headless
• Homebox - https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox

Transcript

Stephen: so i’ve been working on digitizing graphics all day and to people that have no idea what i’m talking about if you own an embroidery machine like the viewers might be able to see if they’re looking at video where i’m pointing right now you effectively have to take a logo file and then you have to tell the machine what way to stitch out every single part of that file And I’ve been struggling all day trying to learn how to make things look really, really full and then yet really crisp on the edges. And for people that are listening, this is not going to work out very well for you. But if you have video, I’m going to attempt to make that focus. So you see the one that’s here. 00:00

Alex: Yeah. 00:43

Stephen: It doesn’t look very solid, right? 00:43

Geoff: Uh… 00:45

Stephen: So then the other option is, is that you can do like an edging. Here, 00:46

Alex: Oh, that 00:50

Stephen: if 00:50

Alex: does 00:51

Stephen: I hide 00:51

Alex: look 00:51

Stephen: my 00:51

Alex: way 00:51

Stephen: face. 00:51

Alex: better, yeah. 00:51

Stephen: Right, but it’s still broken a little bit, but like I have to iterate different versions along the way. But anyway, so in this one, it has like an edging that’s happened. And that’s to clean up the lines and whatnot. And then the fill is different. But what I’m struggling with with this particular graphic is that it’s supposed to look a little bit 3D, right? And so I have all of the threads going one way this and then one way up. And it makes a difference when the light hits this particular thread because it reflects differently. And so you’re definitely not going to be able to see this in the video, but if you move it up and down, it’ll reflect different. And if you’re walking outside in the sun, I know this sounds ridiculous, but it actually starts to look 3D because it’s reflecting on different planes of this 3D image. Um, and so I think that a lot of companies would never care about that, but because it’s my company’s logo, I care a bit more. 00:53

Alex: Yeah. 01:54

Stephen: And so I’ve been fiddling around with this all bloody day. Um, and I’ve, I’m obviously, I don’t want to burn off a million hats trying it. Right. But, um, 01:54

Alex: So what you’ve got there is like a 3D printer, but for embroidery. 02:03

Geoff: I 02:06

Stephen: a hundred percent. Yeah. 02:06

Geoff: was 02:07

Alex: Yeah. 02:07

Stephen: Now. 02:08

Geoff: just thinking that. 02:08

Stephen: it is yeah yeah for sure and i wouldn’t be able to do really any of this if it weren’t for Claude um 02:09

Alex: Yeah. 02:16

Stephen: which is really wild that Claude can do this, but I basically fed it the manual for that machine, and now it starts to understand how to thread things correctly, how to set up all of the support for the actual stitching and everything else. It’s absolutely wild what Claude can do for something that I didn’t think it would ever do. I don’t know. 02:16

Alex: So how long does embroidering a logo into a hat like that take? I’ve no idea. 02:39

Stephen: So the one that has the edging around has something like 2000 individual processes, like little pricks that it does. So we’ll call it threads. It took, I don’t know, four or five minutes at max 02:45

Alex: Minutes. 03:00

Stephen: minutes 03:01

Alex: OK. 03:01

Stephen: for that. 03:03

Alex: I don’t know why I was expecting hours, so. 03:04

Stephen: Well, the thing we have, the machine, I have it turned down to like 700, uh, like actuations a second 03:07

Alex: Oh, 03:15

Stephen: or 03:16

Alex: is 03:16

Stephen: a second, 03:16

Alex: it like a 03:16

Stephen: a minute, 03:16

Alex: CNC 03:16

Stephen: a minute. 03:17

Alex: with like feeds and speeds? 03:17

Stephen: Yeah. 03:18

Alex: You have 03:18

Stephen: It’s 03:18

Alex: to 03:19

Stephen: feeds 03:19

Alex: watch that 03:19

Stephen: and speeds, 03:19

Alex: kind of thing. 03:19

Stephen: right? 03:19

Alex: Yeah. 03:20

Stephen: Um, so it’s, it’s set at 700 per minute. It could easily do hats at like 1200. But I worry that maybe it starts to lose some of the accuracy. But it’s rated for far higher. But I don’t know. Claude said go higher. I said I’m leaving it here because it only takes a few minutes anyway. And I think I’d save maybe 20, 30 seconds. I just don’t know that I care so much. But 03:20

Alex: Yeah. 03:45

Stephen: maybe when I get into production of many, many hats for people, you know, those 20 seconds adds up. I don’t 03:45

Alex: Right. 03:50

Stephen: know. 03:50

Alex: Yeah, when you’re doing volume, 30 seconds times 10,000 matters, but times 20. 03:50

Stephen: Yeah, 03:56

Alex: Who 03:56

Stephen: so 03:56

Alex: cares? 03:56

Stephen: I’d 03:57

Alex: Yeah. 03:57

Stephen: prefer to not have an error happen and be able to show Claude what’s happened without the speed causing issues. 03:57

Alex: Yeah. Well, I have some news. 04:06

Geoff: Do you now? Do 04:09

Alex: Yeah. 04:10

Geoff: tell the good audience. 04:11

Alex: My household! you know the gif of like it’s happening like that’s that’s been me this week and it’s just been It’s been 18 months, you guys, since we started winding up self-hosted. And part of the logic with that was not only all the stuff we talked about in the show, but I knew that we were about to sell the house. And at that point, we were planning to do the RV road trip around America. And I just didn’t see a way that I could do podcasting for a year from a bus. I mean, I know Chris has done it for years, but I just didn’t. I didn’t see a way forward. So… Anyway, here we are 18 months after we made the decision and we’re under contract. 04:12

Geoff: Awesome. 04:58

Alex: Yeah, I can scarcely believe it. And it’s the weirdest story about how it came to be. So we decided that because my daughter was starting elementary school, kindergarten, that come July 4th, we were going to take the house off the market. because the year-round calendar that we have in this school county does sort of eight to ten week blocks on and then three weeks off. Eight to ten weeks on, three weeks off. So it’s like year-round. And we thought, right, you get a break in September, you get a break at Christmas, March and June. And those are not British school holiday times typically. So like flights to England would be cheap. Go back and see the grandparents and relatives and stuff. And it’ll be really easy. So it’s actually been working really well. But Ella’s, she’s only just finished her first track. She’s currently in what’s called track out. Like half term for the British folks listening. And so July 4th came and went. And we were so disappointed. We took the house off the market again. And we got a knock on our front door. And it was a set of grandparents. And we were like, hello, 04:59

Geoff: Hmm. 06:17

Alex: can we help you? And so we got talking and it turned out that their kids had bought a house in this neighborhood in February when the interest rates dipped below 6% for two weeks. We were off market putting in new carpet downstairs on the advice of my realtor at that point, even though I don’t think it needed it. just to try and sell the house, you know, like things that realtors suggest you do. And they said, we wanted to look at your house. Is there a reason you just took it off the market? And we were like, well, yeah, because our daughters just started kindergarten, everything I just told you. And they said well can we have a look round and I’m like okay, this is a bit weird I’m gonna show some strangers around my house, but sure what’s the worst that could happen? Anyway, that was about two months ago, and I’ve kind of stopped thinking about it We were joking my wife and I saying oh, you know the grandparents if the grandparents buy the house, but we weren’t really taking them too seriously And then I got a text on Sunday and then on Monday got an offer and in america an offer is binding pretty much like once you go yes i know you’re pulling faces with due diligence and inspections and all that but like it’s a pretty serious thing to get to the 06:18

Geoff: Yes. 07:34

Alex: offer stage like you have to put one or two percent down to deposit and 07:34

Geoff: Yes. 07:37

Alex: like you know they’ve got some skin in the game at that point 07:37

Geoff: Yes. 07:39

Alex: So anyway, we are going to be out of here by give or take early November, first week of November, 07:41

Geoff: Wow. 07:48

Alex: which is really flipping soon. I’ve been on the phone to a shipping company today who charge $5,000 to send a 20-foot shipping container from here to England. So we’re going to take a 20-foot box back with us. And I’ve been, as part of that process, trying to think about how we would do the inventory of, like, all the stuff we have for, like, UK customs. 07:50

Stephen: We 08:14

Alex: Because 08:14

Stephen: call 08:14

Alex: they 08:14

Stephen: that 08:14

Alex: have some 08:14

Stephen: an 08:14

Alex: pretty… 08:14

Stephen: inventory. 08:15

Alex: Some what? 08:16

Stephen: We call that an inventory. 08:17

Alex: inventory inventory whatever the things in boxes and I sort of was like hmm I wonder if an Obsidian base database would be would be good for this because I you know I heard about this release years ago in Obsidian never found a good use for it well Turns out it works pretty flipping well when you point Hermes and AI at this stuff. So with regards to what I’m doing for like inventorying, 08:19

Geoff: Inventorying. 08:53

Alex: inventorying. It’s another word that’s completely lost forever to my brain. My wife and I were actually trying to explain to Ella earlier, like, all the words that are different between America and England, and it’s just… 08:54

Geoff: She’s not going to understand until she gets there. 09:11

Alex: We can’t remember some of them. 09:13

Geoff: Oh! 09:15

Alex: We’ve been here long enough that we’ve assimilated some of the words, and I’m like, I can’t remember which one’s which. I know they’re different, 09:16

Geoff: Right. 09:26

Alex: but I can’t remember which one’s the British one, and I can’t give an example now either, but… 09:26

Geoff: Aeroplane and airplane. 09:30

Alex: Yeah, yeah, I mean, there’s all sorts of ones, like… 09:32

Stephen: The metal. 09:36

Alex: Yeah, aluminum, obviously. It’s spelled differently, but, you know, it’s all sorts. 09:37

Geoff: Nope. 09:42

Alex: But anyway, what I wanted was a way for my wife to be able to do the inventory. Inventory? 09:42

Geoff: First time. First time. 09:48

Alex: First one, 09:49

Geoff: First one. 09:50

Alex: inventory, 09:51

Stephen: There you go. 09:52

Alex: right, thank you, of all of the bits and bobs in our houses. We’re putting them in boxes with numbers on the outside of the box. British Customs want you to say things like 50 pieces of kitchen equipment, 09:52

Geoff: Oh 10:03

Alex: like 10:03

Geoff: jeez. 10:03

Alex: 50 pieces of kitchen utensils or something. They don’t want like 12 forks, 12 knives, 12 spoons, whatever. They want broad strokes. But even that’s still quite the undertaking for an entire house. And so I was like, there’s got to be a way we can put something in front of this And the obvious interface for me and my wife is Telegram. We use that every day and have done for years to talk to each other. And so I set up my Hermes bot, which we’ll come on to. I’ve created technical debt and a problem for future Alex literally today because I’m stupid. But this thing basically creates a Hermes, an Obsidian base, which is a database, like a table, acts like a spreadsheet. And it puts in things like box ID, the category of the thing, like is it kitchenware, is it tools, is it electronics. It then prompts me if I’ve forgotten to include the value because we need to, for the box, buy insurance. It costs 2.6% of the cost of the 10:06

Geoff: Mmm. 11:06

Alex: total amount we want to insure. So I don’t want to, like, put a $100,000 price tag on it unless there’s, like, 100 grand’s worth of stuff in there. You know what I mean? So it does things like, you know, the next available box number is number seven. And you haven’t given us a price for how much all of this stuff is worth. You know, just stuff like that. And it’s absolutely fantastic. And I’ve got Obsidian Headless Sync running inside the same virtual machine as Hermes. Hermes can then have a separate profile and a separate Telegram bot for just me and my wife as a group and we can do voice memos so whilst we’re juggling kid dog drink big box going down the stairs whatever we can just talk as a voice memo or a Telegram voice note or whatever and it figures it out you’ll be like right box seven i’ve just added three plates whatever and it’ll go and figure it out 11:07

Geoff: Interesting. 12:02

Alex: it’s amazing yeah 12:02

Geoff: I was going 12:04

Alex: just 12:05

Geoff: to say, 12:06

Alex: really 12:06

Geoff: I’ve been trying to do something similar because I just kind of want to inventory stuff in my house. Not because I’m moving, but just because I’ve been interested in inventory. Again, I want to know what hard drives do I have? What graphics cards do I have still available? How many spoons do I have? Things like that. And so I’ve been looking at Homebox. and using Homebox for doing that and there is like people have written like an AI thing where you can like take a picture and it’ll kind of process and figure out roughly what it is and let you categorize it that way but i gotta say Alex this is pretty clever with the whole Hermes and like tracking with the saying what box number you’re on all that because you know Homebox can do like a label that you can put on it that’s a QR code so you can scan it and pull up all that information but 12:06

Alex: don’t know if you need that 12:53

Geoff: no 12:55

Alex: because that presupposes you’re physically at the box itself 12:55

Geoff: Correct. 12:58

Alex: which i’m i may not be it may be in the middle of the ocean and so what i wanted really was a database of plain text that i owned with no proprietary wrapper around it yes i’m using the ai as like a front end right now but i want to be able to say to it which boxes have Lego sets in them for example and it will tell me box 12, box 13, have these Lego sets, and those boxes, you know, one of the fields I’ve added is the black and yellow Home Depot totes, you know, the big 12:58

Geoff: Yeah. 13:29

Alex: 27-gallon guys, or it’s a cardboard Amazon box, or it’s an old box from, like, children’s snacks or stuff like that. A description of the physical box is just as useful as what’s inside it because one of the things we found in the spring when we put everything into storage for a little while to try and make the house feel more empty to try and sell it was you go to a storage unit and you’re like, it’s in one of these boxes marked Alex desk, but I don’t know which of the four Alex desk boxes it’s in. Well, now, I mean, it’s not going to be perfect. I’m not going to say, where is the 2TB 980 Pro NVMe SSD? Maybe I’ll go to that level of detail. I don’t know. But just being able to have a dynamic query in plain language that I can use, that my wife doesn’t have to learn some proper query language. I’m telling you guys, it’s great. But… I’ve created a problem for future Alex by putting this on Hermes, of course, because that’s running in my basement here, which is soon to not be my basement, isn’t it? 13:29

Geoff: That is a small, small problem to figure out. 14:32

Alex: Yeah. 14:35

Stephen: It’s on Proxmox 14:35

Geoff: What 14:36

Stephen: though, right? 14:36

Geoff: are you going to do? 14:37

Alex: Yeah, it’s running on Proxmox, Stephen, you’re right. So I’m thinking I might just replicate the virtual machine to a certain friend of mine’s data center room up in Canada and let it run there for the next two or three months whilst I figure out… I don’t even know where I’m going to live in England, you guys. We’re going to land with, well, my mother-in-law, Catherine’s mum, and… From there, I was somewhere near Norwich. And then from there, literally, I mean, I work remotely. Unraid is cool with me moving to England. So, I mean, literally, we could live anywhere from the Outer Hebrides to Cornwall to East Anglia. I mean, it’s bonkers. So I don’t know what we’re going to do. But, 14:38

Geoff: Future 15:24

Alex: yeah, in the 15:24

Geoff: Alex 15:25

Alex: short 15:25

Geoff: problem. 15:25

Alex: term, in the short term, I’ve sort of figured out that self-hosting without a home… It’s going to be kind of tricky 15:25

Geoff: Yeah, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how I would self-host with that. I mean, yes, the easy answer is just go for a virtual private server. You know, if you’ve got friends who’ve got data set. Yeah, he’s pointing to himself. Friends who’ve got data centers, you can just move it there. But there still is that. Having it locally… I’m not one of those people who say to self-host, everything has to be local. There are some things that just make sense to run in a VPS or somewhere not your house. But that being said, Home Assistant not in your home gets really weird because, again, it picks up on things from being on your LAN and being able to detect it and having Zigbee and Z-Wave all remote locally. You really can’t run things like Home Assistant locally. in a virtual private server. 15:34

Alex: I don’t know what I’m going to do with some of the smart stuff that’s in this house. There isn’t much, to be fair, that’s left. Because before the big Badgers garage sale last summer where, Geoff, you came 16:21

Geoff: I did. 16:31

Alex: down actually. 16:31

Geoff: I did. 16:32

Alex: Crazy, crazy day where we sold over, I think it was like over 10 grand’s worth of stuff 16:33

Geoff: More 16:37

Alex: in a 16:38

Geoff: than 16:38

Alex: single 16:38

Geoff: that. 16:38

Alex: day. It 16:38

Geoff: More than that. 16:38

Alex: was pretty bonkers. I still look for stuff. I’m like, I know somewhere I have this thing. Have I lost it or did I sell it? Because my friend Sam came and ran the checkout before. I mean, I didn’t ask you to volunteer. It was very kind of him to do that. But, I mean, there was a lot of stuff went that day that maybe in hindsight shouldn’t have gone. Yeah. 16:40

Geoff: It was a lot of just, yeah, I’m going to take this and that and 17 other things. 17:03

Alex: Yeah. But, you know, it’s created an issue for me because the smart blinds in this house won’t fit British windows. So there’s no point in me taking the IKEA Tradfri blinds. And I just don’t see any point in taking them, even though they were expensive. 17:08

Geoff: Oh, they were not that expensive compared. Unfortunately, IKEA no longer makes them. 17:25

Alex: Well, but anyway, there’s Zigbee blinds. So in order for them to be smart, there needs to be a Zigbee controller. And in this house, that means a Home Assistant needs to be powering the Zigbee controller. But the grandparents that are buying the house, I mean, I don’t think they’ll give them a monkeys. 17:31

Geoff: No. 17:51

Alex: Do you? 17:51

Stephen: No, 17:52

Alex: I 17:52

Stephen: that 17:53

Alex: mean, 17:53

Stephen: stuff’s coming down for sure. There’s no way. 17:53

Alex: Yeah, I mean, she saw the smart blinds come down at sunset the other night, because we invited them over for, smoked some ribs and did some stuff in the Traeger at the weekend. Maybe that’s what sealed the deal in the end, was my ribs were just so good, you know. Yeah. I just don’t know I’ve got a few Eco-Bee’s in here all the Shelly I took all the Shelly’s out so there’s no Shelly’s in the switch boxes anymore There’s there’s literally nothing else smart in here apart from you know the fiber optic cabling in the walls and I mean a lot of stuff staying anyway I’m not bringing that with me of course, but What do I do with the blinds? Do I replace them? 17:55

Stephen: No, I think realistically you just leave them up and then they’re going to put whatever they want there. 18:33

Geoff: Yeah. 18:37

Alex: I don’t have the original remote buttons for the IKEA blinds anymore 18:37

Stephen: Well, then they just don’t work. I mean, like, unless your contract specifically says fully functional automatic blinds. 18:40

Alex: no i mean the i actually almost almost didn’t put a stipulate because this is just a for sale by owner situation now because we’re out of contract with our realtor i almost didn’t put a stipulation in there saying that the security camera system wasn’t conveying 18:48

Geoff: Yep. Yep. 19:07

Alex: so i almost lost several thousand in Ubiquiti cameras that would have been a real pisser Thankfully, my good friend Hermes saved me on that one from doing a contract review. But that was close. So thankfully, I put a stipulation in saying no networking switches convey, no power supplies, you know, all that kind of stuff. But 19:08

Geoff: Can I put on my lawyer hat here? 19:31

Alex: yeah, go on. 19:33

Stephen: Mm-hmm. 19:34

Geoff: anything that’s easily removable that’s not in the walls is considered oh what’s the blanking now on the word on the loop word i’m thinking of but is not considered actual part of the house like when i sold my house 19:34

Alex: with 19:47

Geoff: this 19:47

Alex: the exception of security systems, for some reason, unless you stipulate them. I think that language probably means things like the Brinks alarm systems, 19:47

Geoff: yeah 19:57

Alex: you know, the… 19:57

Geoff: it’s more thinking the hard the actual hardwired systems 19:58

Alex: Yeah, but 20:02

Geoff: uh 20:03

Alex: technically speaking, 20:03

Geoff: Yeah. 20:04

Alex: you could argue that an NVR and its associated cameras are a hardwired security system, if you were being picky, couldn’t you? 20:04

Geoff: You could try whether it’s worth it or not as a whole other can of worms. 20:14

Alex: Right. Well, anyway, I managed to catch that, thankfully. So they’re not getting my cameras, even though I love these guys for buying my house. But I like those cameras a lot and they were expensive. So I’d really rather not rebuy them again. I don’t even know if my British house will be able to run Ethernet or anything like that because, you know, the construction is totally different. Everything is totally different, like electric prices. I was looking at the amount I pay per unit here is about 10 to 12 cents per kilowatt hour. 20:19

Geoff: Yeah, sounds 20:51

Alex: It’s 20:51

Geoff: about. 20:51

Alex: pretty much double, maybe plus a little bit more in England. which means that one watt costs you somewhere in the region of two pounds per year to run 24 7 give or take so a single hard drive at five watts it adds up pretty quickly 20:52

Geoff: Yeah, 21:11

Alex: you know 21:11

Geoff: that would. 21:12Alex: so i’m looking at my ZFS server in the basement with 10 spinners in it going that’s 600 pounds a year just for 10 hard drives, like that’s just nutty. I think in time we’ll build a house and in time that house will have solar and we will go as far as off grid as we realistically can, feasibly can with this, you know, grand design style like passive house that we want to build, net zero house we want to build. But in the short term, I don’t fancy chucking a couple of thousand pounds a year at the electric company just to spin hard drives and run a couple of servers that, frankly, I could run on a Lenovo Mini or something like that. So it’s got me looking at everything, not just the actual servers, but the actual physical size of them. The chips that go in them, I’m going to have to absolutely maximize the sleep states of everything. I’m going to become one of those guys that chases every last watt. I can see it already. Yeah, it’s going to be a thing, you guys. 21:13

Geoff: We’ll be 22:20

Stephen: Or 22:20

Geoff: there 22:20

Stephen: you 22:20

Geoff: for the YouTube and we’ll be there for the YouTube and the blog posts about it. 22:21

Alex: Yeah, yeah. 22:25

Stephen: just figure out what is absolutely necessary bandwidth-wise to have running local and then just run the rest on colo self-hosted. 22:27

Alex: Yeah, the trouble with your colo for me in England, though, is it’s just going to be the latency 22:38

Stephen: Yeah, but that’s what I mean. Right. 22:43

Alex: and 22:45

Stephen: So 22:45

Alex: the throughput. 22:45

Stephen: like, I’m certain that if you needed to store a whole bunch of word documents, for example, I don’t know that that latency matters a whole lot. 22:45

Alex: True. 22:54

Stephen: Right. And I suppose the same would go for like your image backup. Like you could do a certain backup, but then you could like push the secondary off somewhere else, like not, not local to you, but it doesn’t really matter timely. Right. Like it could happen 22:55

Alex: Yeah. 23:12

Stephen: overnight and it doesn’t matter. 23:12

Geoff: Yeah. 23:13

Alex: It is funny, isn’t it, how these things that you just kind of, you know, I’ve architected my systems for the last eight years around electricity basically being free. It’s not, but it’s not far off. I mean, like eight to 10 to 12 cents a kilowatt hours. I just don’t think about it. You know, I mean, I’m running the air conditioning units for hours and hours on end every day in the summer. that hurts i noticed that because it’s a 3000 watt load per system but 300 watts in my basement yeah i’m not worried about it but like maybe in england i will be so then you’ve got the physical space constraints of course so you know i don’t have i probably won’t have a basement I’ll probably have a media console under the TV that is my server rack moving forward. Behind me, I’ve got two flipping 19-inch server racks that I built, like DIY things. One holds my amplifier and my desk stuff, and this holds all of the stuff for YouTube videos and things like that. What am I going to do for a studio? I won’t have a beautiful attic like this to record in going forward. It’s going to be… Every facet of my life is going to change dramatically over the next… two three months and then probably spend years chasing perfection again but um i am looking forward to being completely 100 debt free though that’s that’s a pretty nice carrot at the end for us 23:14

Geoff: That will be I’m a little bit jealous. 24:40

Alex: i mean who knows what’s going to happen with the economy and elections and ai and I don’t know. I don’t know about you guys, but it doesn’t feel like the most settled time in our lives right now. And I don’t mean to bring things down, but, you know, it’s just… 24:44

Geoff: So you’re getting the hell out of Dodge. 25:06

Alex: yeah i mean it’s not politically motivated it’s really just trying to be close to the family 25:09

Geoff: Yeah. 25:13

Alex: really was is the main driving factors honestly uh like i asked i asked ella earlier like what are you most excited about and she said oh going to stay with auntie for weekend sleepovers and 25:13

Geoff: Hmm. 25:23

Alex: stuff you know so that’s why we’re doing it really uh there’s a little bit of nostalgia in there like i’m looking forward to some of my favorite foods again that i had as a kid and Yeah, it’s going to be good, I think. Maybe. I hope. 25:23

Geoff: It’s going to be something, Alex. I think 25:41

Alex: It’s 25:44

Geoff: that 25:44

Alex: going 25:44

Geoff: is… 25:44

Alex: to be something. Yes, correct. Very, very correct. Yeah, 25:44

Geoff: And I 25:48

Alex: it’s 25:48

Geoff: do 25:48

Alex: going 25:48

Geoff: think 25:48

Alex: to 25:48

Geoff: we 25:48

Alex: be 25:48

Geoff: need 25:48

Alex: something. 25:48

Geoff: to… Anyone listening, know the podcast is not going to end because of this. Alex might go away for a little bit, but 25:48

Alex: Yeah. 25:56

Geoff: Stephen, Adam, and I will figure out something. We’ll keep recording. Don’t panic. 25:56

Alex: Yeah. 26:01

Geoff: Don’t panic. 26:02

Alex: Well, a little bit of housekeeping around that. Let’s talk about that right now. Because we are going to be out of here in five weeks as we record. So I’ve probably got one more episode in this space. And then through November and December for me, all bets are off. I have literally no idea where we’re going to be. So I can’t commit to anything. But as Geoff just said, I think these guys will keep the show going just fine. However, there will be some holiday gaps with things like Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays coming up. And, you know, we’re not doing this as a full time endeavor, any of us. So we always put this around work commitments. And that’s why Adam’s not here today is because he’s been traveling for the last couple of weeks. And so, you know, just keep an eye on the RSS feed. The show’s 26:04

Geoff: Yeah. 26:48

Alex: not going anywhere, but just over the next couple of months, there might be some two to four week gaps 26:48

Geoff: Yeah. 26:56

Alex: longer than usual. There’s nothing to panic about. It’s just what it’s going to be for the next little bit. 26:56

Geoff: And maybe, you know, maybe we do some shorter bits. We don’t do a full 30, 45 minute podcast. Maybe we just come on and do like, there’s one really cool topic we want to talk about. We talk about it for 10, 15 minutes and that’s the episode. 27:02

Stephen: We’ll call it Geoff’s Corner. 27:16

Geoff: We’ll call it the lawyer hat corner, I think. Yes. Yeah. 27:17

Alex: Oh, my goodness. Well, before we do that, let’s just say thank you to our patrons. You guys really do make this show possible. And I am delighted to report we are actually patron positive at the moment for the running costs of the show. we’re actually doing okay i mean you know we’re not never none of us are going to retire on it but you know we’re not paying for the editor out of our own pocket and that’s thanks to you and everybody that supports the show a big thank you of course to badnet mask Maurico who is our terabyte level supporter this month if you want to sign up and support the show you can do so over at bitflip.show support you can find all the different patron tiers that are over there and we generally speaking publish behind the scenes content extra stuff you know I put some in the post show a couple of episodes ago just for you to get an idea of the kind of stuff we talk about in those post shows and behind the scenes production type stuff so If you want to support the show like I say you can get a bit flip dot show slash support to find out more You can get in touch with us at contact at bit flip dot show as well send us an email Let us know what you’re up to what you’re thinking somebody in the email inbox this week Geoff mocked you for 27:20

Geoff: I knew it was coming! I knew it was coming! 28:36

Alex: Somebody mocked you for your episode naming schema, which was thoroughly deserved as far as I was concerned 28:40

Geoff: Oh, 28:46

Alex: and 28:46

Stephen: Yeah. 28:46

Geoff: I fully expected to be mocked, and mocked I was, so thank you for putting me in my place. I will say the Silo devs did merge my PR, so Silo is now working for me. But the Silo devs also mocked me for my naming convention and said, you’re 28:46

Alex: Good. 29:04

Geoff: absolutely wrong. This is not the way you should be doing it. But we can fix the regex to make it work for you. 29:04

Alex: yeah and don’t forget you can find the show also on youtube as well we’ll put a link to that in the show notes here but um the show is also on youtube in fact we got a comment from the JetKVM devs last time which really really boosted my spirits it was just such a nice thing to see you know we had the Silo devs in the discord and we had the JetKVM guys commenting on the youtube video you 29:11

Geoff: Yeah. 29:35

Alex: know it’s like 29:35

Geoff: Because they actually were watching. They actually… 29:35

Alex: This world that we are in, this home lab world, this self-hosting world, it’s full of minor celebrities. And to me, the JetKVM guys, the Silo devs, the Jellyfin devs, these guys are all celebrities to me. And so for those folks to come into our little part of the internet and say hi, it’s just the coolest thing in the world, isn’t it? 29:38

Stephen: It was so unexpected, really. I looked at the comments and I was like, I’m sorry, what’s that username? 30:01

Alex: Yeah, 30:06

Stephen: Really? It 30:06

Alex: I know. 30:07

Geoff: I 30:07

Alex: Yeah. 30:07

Geoff: was not, I was like, again, I just say that we, we joked the last episode. We’re like, you guys think the JetKVM guys were watching? And they’re the comment. If you guys don’t see it was, yeah, we were watching. 30:07

Alex: Yeah, 30:17

Stephen: was 30:18

Alex: that’s 30:18

Stephen: wild. 30:18

Alex: why they put a full size HDMI port on the new mini, which, by the way, I’m getting in for review. So if you’re watching JetKVM, you might want to send it to England, not to this house, 30:18

Stephen: Or 30:30

Geoff: I would 30:30

Stephen: just 30:30

Alex: because 30:30

Stephen: send 30:30

Geoff: love 30:30

Stephen: it to 30:30

Geoff: to 30:30

Stephen: Canada. 30:30

Geoff: have one. 30:30

Stephen: It’s 30:31

Geoff: I 30:31

Stephen: fine. 30:31

Geoff: would love 30:31

Stephen: Just 30:32

Geoff: to have 30:32

Stephen: send 30:32

Geoff: one 30:32

Stephen: it here. 30:32

Geoff: too. 30:32

Stephen: I’ll send him all the B roll that’s necessary. I’ll tell him how it was. I’ll tell him how lovely it was on the network and how quickly it loaded and he’ll make a nice review for you. 30:33

Alex: How very altruistic of you, Stephen. Thank you for your service. 30:43

Geoff: I mean, you could hook it up to Steven’s server and Steven’s server could be the. 30:47

Stephen: Oh, 30:51

Geoff: Oh, there we go. There we go. 30:52

Alex: Ooh, not a bad plan, actually. Well, I think that’ll do it for the housekeeping for today. Now, coming back to Home Assistant a little bit, they were looking at adding, well, let’s wind it back. Home Assistant OS is the main supported platform for Home Assistant these days. So anyway, Home Assistant OS basically is a virtual machine, or it’s an operating system that you can run as a virtual machine or on a Raspberry Pi or whatever. that runs its own kernel and has an app store not you’re allowed to call it that because Apple probably have a patent on it but it’s it has an official kind of like add-ons or plugins or integration section 30:53

Geoff: They called it apps now, I think is what they… 31:33

Alex: right yes they do they changed it and it annoyed me it tripped me up in a Tailscale video that I was making a few weeks ago Anyway, the antidote to installing stuff like sideloading, if that’s even a thing in the Home Assistant world, basically running things that aren’t part of that official app ecosystem, there you go, that’s how you get around it, was to use something called HACS, Home Assistant Community Store. And the announcement this week, Geoff, is that they’re kind of adding a marketplace integration as a first-party thing. 31:35

Geoff: Sort of. So there is a pull request by Frank that is, I think, in draft form at the moment. And what he is coding slash proposing is… taking HACS and basically making it official. So if you look at the PR, and there’ll be a link in the show notes, 32:08

Alex: Yeah. 32:30

Geoff: basically he’s saying that if you’re running HACS right now, what it’s going to do is it will merge, it’ll migrate everything over for you whenever this gets merged and whenever it gets in the next Home Assistant release, wherever it’s in. And it basically would become, HACS basically would become part of Home Assistant. And I think that’s pretty nifty because I think HACS is great because HACS is kind of that it fills the niche of. So you have the add ons that are the things like MQTT or Node-RED or things that you can run in Docker containers separately that, you know, I spin up different things. I don’t run the operating system. I run Docker. So I have to spin up all these different containers to have different bits that go into Home Assistant. HACS is useful for like extra. You need an extra theme. You need an extra card that’s not available in Home Assistant. You need to upgrade. You need some third party plugin that’s not available in the core repo. And I run tons of things from HACS. 32:31

Alex: There’s all sorts of stuff in there. You look like looking at UI enhancements, extra plugins for things like Xiaomi cloud that you could never really ship as part of the Home Assistant product or project proper because of licensing issues and all sorts of other proprietary stuff. What it basically is, is a way for anybody to throw a Git repo together with a specific manifest that then lets you install it into Home Assistant with one click. really nice and it’s been around for a long time so I’m actually really pleased to see them kind of take this I don’t want to say seriously because that sounds like they haven’t taken it seriously to date but like bringing it into the main project proper like admitting that this is a way that people want to use their software and building around it not just hoping it doesn’t garner you know success or anything 33:37

Stephen: I wonder if they have statistics about how many installs are just running that anyway. 34:27

Alex: yeah 34:31

Geoff: I’m 34:31

Stephen: You 34:32

Geoff: sure 34:32

Stephen: know 34:32

Geoff: they 34:32

Stephen: what 34:32

Alex: they 34:32

Geoff: probably 34:32

Alex: must 34:32

Stephen: I 34:32

Geoff: do. Yep. 34:33

Stephen: mean? Because I can’t imagine not using it at this point. 34:35

Alex: No. 34:38

Stephen: I have set up multiple installs of Home Assistant over time and every single one of them just instantly gets that installed because I just need things out of it. And so if a huge portion of your user base is running it anyway, why not just allow it to be a normal 34:39

Alex: Why 34:57

Stephen: thing. 34:57

Alex: not? Absolutely. 34:57

Geoff: No, I think the interesting, I found this from a Reddit post in the Home Assistant subreddit. And the interesting, the kind of controversy is Frank right now is calling it a marketplace. And people are like, but you’re not buying things. To me, it kind of gets into that whole image Are you buying a license? And I’m like, I really don’t care what you call it. Because frankly, there are some stuff in HACS where I pay for it. I send some shekels to the dev because of the stuff that they, you know, like my robotic mower that I use. There is an amazing dev who is constantly, you know, improving things. He’s got to in with the developers of the actual product. Like, you know, he actually talks to them. So that way he knows when things are going to break and he can fix stuff. I absolutely have thrown money. I’m like, this is incredible that he does this and he fixes things. And it’s amazing. So call it marketplace. I really don’t care. I mean, I don’t know what you guys think. 34:59

Alex: Yeah, well, Frank, as always, is delightfully spicy in the comments. His dry wit comes shining through like a beacon, as usual. Someone says here, it’s cool that HACS is now less of a hack. Very good. I see what you did there. Well done. And it is now an official component of Home Assistant. it’s not so cool that marketplace implies now purchasing add-ons for money i would choose a different name to which frank replies and 35:56

Geoff: He’s 36:30

Alex: i’ve 36:30

Geoff: absolutely 36:30

Alex: got to give him 36:30

Geoff: right. 36:30

Alex: props for this it like it just destroys them in one line of you mean like store as it was named before didn’t imply that you would purchase things and it’s like you know if you can come up with better names someone replied with add-ons i’m like guys that might already be taken but Like community add-ons or community plugins or… 36:30

Stephen: But it’s true, right? Because the Apple App Store, it’s called an App Store, but you can get free things out of it. 36:52

Geoff: Yeah. 36:57

Alex: Yeah. 36:58

Geoff: No, again, I don’t think I don’t can view marketplace. I mean, Facebook marketplace, one of the best marketplaces. There is a, you know, buy nothing, buy stuff for free. You don’t have to spend money on marketplace for things to be listed there. 36:58

Alex: One of the best marketplaces. I’m not sure that’s an accusation I would levy at Facebook marketplace. It might be one of the most frequented. 37:13

Geoff: I mean, one of the best as the best example. 37:22

Alex: I know what you meant. I’m just giving you 37:24

Stephen: Mm-mm-mm-mm. 37:25

Alex: a hard 37:25

Geoff: Yeah, 37:25

Alex: time. 37:25

Geoff: please. Please. 37:25

Alex: I just hate Facebook marketplace. Actually, people in England, it’s been eight years. I’ve been out the loop a little bit. Can you message me and tell me, like, it used to be Gumtree when I left. what is it now is it offer up is it ebay is probably not ebay but like what’s what is it now like i’d love to know please and um oh this the shipping company i’ll talk to you about the 20-foot box uh i don’t know how this came about but he said to me unprompted if you make a video about your um shipping experience we’ll give you a discount and i’m like Okay, pretty sure I could do that for you. I don’t know if that’s something he says to everybody. 37:28

Geoff: I was going to say, 38:12

Alex: It must 38:13

Geoff: did 38:14

Alex: be. 38:14

Geoff: he do any homework on you at all, or…? 38:14

Alex: It must be something he says to everybody. But it’s a small family-run company. So it’s not like a big shipping agency or anything. Just based out of Cullompton near Exeter in Devon, which is actually I used to live just down the road. I used to cycle through Coulompton on. Anyway, long story short. So yeah, I’ll be trying to make a video about the entire process of what it’s like to ship something from here to there and you know so keep keep an eye on my youtube i’ll i probably won’t be uploading very much for the next two or three months for obvious reasons but um god dudes we’re going finally sorry to bring it back to that that’s literally how my my thought cycles are this week is like i’m just in the middle of a normal meeting or a normal conversation and then my brain goes you’re leaving 38:18

Geoff: Or the, crap, I haven’t thought about this and now I need to start thinking about this. Nice. 39:09

Alex: Yeah, well that happened to me about selling things like my 3D printer, which is actually going to Maurico, our terabyte patron, who’s going to buy that off me. But I’ve got a ton of stuff, you guys. I don’t think I need to have another garage sale like I had last year, but I’ve got like a 70-inch OLED TV, I’ve got an AVR, I’ve got a ton of furniture, probably a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of right now, so… Maybe we’ll hold some kind of informal. Yeah, 39:13

Geoff: Am I driving down to South Carolina again? Or North Carolina again? 39:43

Alex: I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, Adam’s threatening to come over from where he lives in Tennessee. So maybe we could align the stars and 39:47

Geoff: Maybe. Maybe. 39:57

Alex: yeah, 39:58

Geoff: Ah. 39:58

Alex: we’ll 39:59

Stephen: Do 39:59

Alex: see. 39:59

Stephen: you run into a bunch of stuff that you just can’t take because the power plugs are different? Like, 39:59

Alex: Yeah, well, UPS is the obvious one. 40:03

Stephen: hmm. 40:06

Alex: Yeah. I can’t ship batteries. So that’s actually a real pain. I can’t put them in the shipping container. 40:07

Geoff: Oh, so 40:13

Alex: So 40:14

Geoff: even 40:14

Alex: things 40:14

Geoff: small 40:14

Alex: like 40:14

Geoff: things you can’t put in. 40:14

Alex: I mean, who’s checking? 40:17

Geoff: Fair. 40:19

Alex: But just from a safety perspective, I don’t want to put a lithium-ion battery in the middle of all of my worldly possessions 40:19

Geoff: Right. 40:25

Alex: in the middle of the ocean where nobody’s going to be able to put the fire out. So it’s in my own interest to pay attention. But it extends to things like power tool batteries. I’m going to have to take them out of the container and put them into my luggage. and take them on the plane or put them in a box and mail them across the ocean. 40:25

Geoff: I don’t think you can take the batteries with you on the plane. 40:48

Alex: As long as they’re under the FAA’s like 100 watt hour limit, you should be okay 40:53

Geoff: Okay. 40:58

Alex: because they’re sealed, right? They’re not just bare cells, you know, they’re like DeWalt power tool batteries. 40:58

Geoff: Okay. 41:04

Alex: I mean, you 41:04

Geoff: Okay. 41:04

Alex: know. Yeah, so there’s a bunch of stuff like that that, you know, we’ve got a couple of relatives coming out. I might just send them back with a couple of batteries each. It sounds ridiculous, but 41:04

Geoff: It does. 41:17

Alex: these are all the little things that when you’re emigrating, you just don’t think about. And then you start reading the rules and regulations of what can and can’t go into a boat and into a shipping container on a boat. And it’s just at least this time I’ve got a credit score on the other end. Because when I came this way, I literally got off the plane with two suitcases and a backpack and that was it. no credit score no friends really in town no relatives to fall back on nothing i was like on my own in a strange town in fact my wife was even back in england because her green card hadn’t come through yet i was literally 41:18

Alex: by myself and at least now we’ve got family to at the other end of the tunnel you know so it’s um It’s gonna be very different proposition except now I’ve got eight years of worth of living in a giant American houses worth of crap to It’s a flipping 41:53

Geoff: I, 42:10

Alex: go through but 42:10

Geoff: I feel your pain on that. When we moved, I thought there’s like, 42:11

Alex: Yeah 42:14

Geoff: I’m like, yeah, we moved from a decently large house to a larger house, but we filled up two of those, like, you know, large 18 foot U-Hauls, you know, full of stuff and brought it over here. And we still couldn’t fit everything. 42:14

Alex: Yeah, 42:26

Geoff: And I have bought more stuff. 42:26

Alex: that’s how it goes 42:28

Geoff: So I’m like, if I move, I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get out of here. 42:30Alex: Yeah. Well, there is a number of things in this world, like how do they put tube trains in the ground? Literally, I think there’s a couple of tube lines in London where the trains, maybe this isn’t true, I’m trying to think of like the Waterloo and City line maybe, where like the trains are just in the ground and they fix them in the ground and they don’t get them out or anything like that for service or whatever. That can’t possibly be true. There must be a way to service 42:34

Geoff: yeah 43:00

Alex: those trains, but… yeah i don’t know um then then you got to do the calculus like i’ve got a couple of standing desks up here well they’re really nice standing desks um but the motors run on 110 43:00

Geoff: oh no 43:15

Alex: do i get an inverter for some of the really nice things i think i might 43:16

Geoff: Steven’s 43:21

Alex: you know 43:22

Geoff: shaking 43:22

Alex: like 43:22

Geoff: his head Steven why are you 43:22

Alex: i 43:23

Geoff: shaking 43:23

Alex: i see 43:23

Geoff: your head 43:24

Alex: i 43:24

Stephen: I’m shaking 43:24

Alex: see him 43:24

Stephen: my head because all the inverters I know, they have these annoying tiny little fans and they run and it pisses me off. 43:25

Alex: But how often do I raise and lower my desk? A couple of times a day. I can flick a switch. I can have a Home Assistant automation, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I think it’s doable. But these are all the little decisions that add up. 43:32

Geoff: you 43:46

Alex: Like a lot of the stuff I’ve bought over the last year, 18 months, whatever, I’ve had in the back of my mind that we might eventually, if we get lucky, sell the house. So like I bought a new soldering iron six months ago that was dual voltage. Like it has a switching power supply. You know, like all of the computers are fine. All of the screens are fine. The TV isn’t. The TV, the OLED, is 110 volt. It’s also got a North American tuner in it, which is no good for like BBC and all that kind of stuff. So I may as well sell that here, unfortunately. 43:46

Stephen: You should get an LG. I hear they’re good. 44:17

Alex: Amplifiers is a good one. Actually, this one behind me over here, this is a Musical Fidelity M3i amplifier that powers the Kefs behind me. And when we came from England to here, I rewired it so that it would, like, I took out one of the, what’s it called, the 44:22

Stephen: Leads? 44:42

Alex: transformer taps, I think is the correct terminology. I’m probably wrong, but… 44:42

Geoff: Sounds right. 44:47

Alex: Essentially, it made it run at 110 volts. And it’s been running fine for eight years, so obviously I did OK. But when I go back the other way, I’m going to have to open it up and go inside and reconnect the cable I disconnected. Just tons and tons and tons of really small little decisions and then you’ve got to figure out well what do we need after we’ve closed and we’re still living in the Airbnb in Raleigh how do we sell the cars when do we sell the cars because obviously we still need to get around for the last week or two like dudes it’s just there’s a i’m having fun don’t get me wrong this is this is what i want it’s a good problem to have but there’s just a lot to think about you know 44:48

Stephen: It just dawned on me, your child’s going to be able to go to Hogwarts. 45:29

Geoff: yeah 45:32

Stephen: I mean, she has to get an owl yet, right? But… 45:36

Geoff: all 45:40

Alex: End the episode there. That’s perfect. 45:41

Geoff: right 45:42

Alex: I’m not even kidding. That’s it. We’re done. 45:46

Stephen: Yep. 45:47