We have an old-fashioned doorbell that ran off a 12V AC transformer. This page details how we changed our doorbell. The doorbell was frankly too loud; Ian tried muffling it a few times, though our cats still panicked, so I ended up disconnecting the bell. We have home deliveries, so Read more
Please feel free to contact us. Please note we will include your I.P. Address in any form sent: Your I.P. address – Ian has a keen interest in the following and more: We aim to respond to Contact forms with 48 hours We use and recommend – Those who attempt Read more
Pages Home Assistant & batteries for ZigBee battery-powered devices As energy costs rise – Home Assistant – Better home temperature control Doorbell now working via Home Assistant Sandra & Ian’s Home Assistant SwitchBot IP65 BlueTooth – Our chosen device for temperature sensing Switching from fixed-contract Internet, telephone, and TV providers Read more
Pi-Hole – Pi-hole is a Linux network-level advertisement and Internet tracker blocking application which acts as a DNS sinkhole and optionally a DHCP server, intended for use on a private network. The designers created it for low-power embedded devices with network capability, such as the Raspberry Pi, but can install Read more
The two images below are a view of a British online newspaper without Pi-Hole and then Pi-Hole active to demonstrate the reduction in internet traffic you will experience if you implement Pi-Hole. By reducing what your internet connection has to download, you are, in effect, speeding up the downloading of Read more
In 2017, we purchased a Synology DS716+II along with two Seagate IronWolf 8 TB hard drives, which we set up in the NAS as mirrored drives using RAID 1. Our plan was to store all our FLAC music, movies, photos, and more on it. We also installed the Plex Media Read more
This page is under construction On our “Replacing PLEX Media Server“ page, we partially explain why we wanted to move from PLEX as our own local streaming source. Another factor in our decision was that, at some point, our Synology DS716+II could suffer a hardware failure or not have the Read more